Thank you for downloading the more or less podcast.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.

I'm Charlotte McDonald.

Today, it's the time of year for our annual tradition. It's our numbers of the year.

We're going to be joined by a few friends of the program whose wise stats minds help us work stuff out through the year.

But today, they're going to grab the mic and tell us the numbers that we need to know.

The numbers that tell us something interesting about the year gone by or just

something interesting in general. So party hats on. Let's get cracking.

I'm Hannah Ritchie. I'm a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and I'm deputy editor of the online web

application Our World and Data. My number of the year is 420. So that's the number of

TerraWattwattwattwours, which is a unit of energy output of low carbon

electricity that China has added in 2023.

For those of you not well versed in power output metrics, a terawatt hour is a very large amount of energy.

Technically, it's a trillion watts running steadily for an hour.

In journalistic, cliche speak, we're not talking a number of washing machines here, but a country full of them.

The amount of solar and wind that China has added this year would be enough to match the electricity generation of the UK or would be enough to power France.

And that's just one year of additions.

To repeat, in China, in 2023, enough wind and solar farms came online to replace the UK's entire power

generation system, gas, coal and nuclear power stations. wind farms, solar, the whole shebang.

It's a very, very big number.

However, despite all this shiny new capacity,

the actual demand for electricity in China is growing even faster, which

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