The headline only works at all because they're pretending that China is an emerging market. That's incorrect, China has already emerged, and is already suffering from all the typical post boom hangovers including rapidly slowing growth and vast amounts of debt. It'd be like pretending that Japan was still an emerging market in 1992.
Remove China from the emerging market list, and the premise of the story unravels entirely.
Further, the projections in the story include China in the emerging market category to 2040. Comeon, that's a joke.
The article itself differentiates OECD vs Non-OECD. The point is Non-OECD countries are going big on Solar because at the consumer level they have the most to gain. There are parts of India which are not electrified because the electricity distribution is state owned and is always loss making. So there are not that many investments into distribution. Solar really helps with distributed generation as well as is not that location specific. A village can have its own solar farm and does not need the transmission lines from outside etc. Solar + Battery tech will improve lives of millions of people around the world and especially in the Non-OECD countries.
A better title would be "Non-OECD countries begin to outspend OECD countries in clean-energy investment" rather than "Poor outspend Rich." China may be relatively poor in terms of GDP/capita ($6,800 vs $53,000 in US) but its nonsensical to refer to it as a poor country in terms of overall GDP and volume of economic activity.
Here is the real story:
China has wasted no time in directing billions of dollars into its clean energy sector. Currently, the
country is the world’s leading investor in renewables. In 2014, China increased its investment to
US$89.5 billion, up 32% from the previous year. This was nearly 73% more than the US, the next
largest investor. [1]
You're about 10 years ahead of yourself on your China prediction. Also, it's critical to remember metrics like GDP per capita. China still has a very long way to go.
This is the classic "disruption" model. The incumbent nations have the $$'s to invest in infrastructure but in turn become dependent on that way of thinking. Emerging nations don't have the same legacy so can adopt very modern solutions. Solutions which also tend to be much cheaper and scale better. The developing world is further ahead in areas like solar, mobile phone (network), mobile payments etc. It's exciting to see them actually get some advantage from their otherwise disadvantageous position.
The real issue is US's electricity usage is declining. Replacing a working coal power plant with a wind farm is very different from building a wind farm instead of a coal power plant. That said, power plants only last so long, and existing capacity the trend is very different than this article suggests.
US:
2010 Coal Power Prod: 1,994,000 GWh
2012 Coal Power Prod: 1,643,000 GWh
China:
2010 Coal Power Prod: 3,273,000 GWh
2012 Coal Power Prod: 3,785,000 GWh
Remove China from the emerging market list, and the premise of the story unravels entirely.
Further, the projections in the story include China in the emerging market category to 2040. Comeon, that's a joke.