The News
The world’s largest offshore solar farm is being connected to the grid.
The 3,000-acre installation, five miles off the coast of northeastern China’s Shandong province, is fixed to the seabed and, when operating at full capacity, can generate a gigawatt of electricity, enough to power about a million homes.
Offshore solar, which sidesteps the energy source’s land-use demands, is gathering pace — Taiwan inaugurated what it said was the world’s largest plant just last week.
And the price of solar in general is falling faster than other renewables, notably wind: Our World in Data estimated that between 2010 and 2019, the cost of wind energy per megawatt-hour fell 70%, while solar fell 90%.