A labourer cleans the solar panels on a roof of a building in Taiyuan,Shanxi province December 1,2009. VCP (Photo by Jie Zhao/Corbis via Getty Images) Solar investments eclipsed all other forms of electricity generation in 2017 as China's green boom accelerated. Investors worldwide plowed a record $161 billion into solar energy last year, more than half the investment in all renewables apart from large hydroelectric projects, according to a report jointly published by the United Nations and Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Total investment in renewables rose 2 percent to $280 billion.