Corn, millet and ... rooftop solar? Farm family’s newest crop shows China’s solar ascendancy



China is the runaway leader in supplying the world with the hardware to gather solar power. Shandong Province is taking an early lead in the country’s solar energy development. But the country’s grid is getting more than it can use in some places. Experts say China must quickly adapt to oversupply to remain leading in the global solar race. (AP Video: Olivia Zhang, Tian Macleod Ji, Ng Han Guan)

BY HUIZHONG WU AND HAN GUAN NG
Updated 9:09 PM EDT, May 20, 2024

JINAN, China (AP) — Shi Mei and her husband earn a decent enough living by growing corn and millet on their small farm in eastern China’s Shandong province. In 2021, they diversified by investing in solar energy — signing a contract to mount some 40 panels on their roof to feed energy to the grid.

Now, the couple get paid for every watt of electricity they generate, harvesting the equivalent of $10,000 per year that Shi can track through an app on her phone.

“When the sun comes out, you make money,” Shi said.

The Shi family is on the leading edge of a solar boom in China, which has long dominated global solar manufacturing but didn’t always install a lot of it at home. That’s changing as the government focuses on the urgency of cutting its worst-in-the-world greenhouse gas emissions at the same time it grows its green economy. China wants one-fifth of its power to come from renewables by 2025, and it’s offered a wide range of subsidies to local governments and businesses.

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