China has far outpaced the United States in clean energy spending, manufacturing, and innovation. And now, thanks to cheap and abundant Chinese solar panels and wind turbines, a growing number of emerging economies are joining the ranks of nations outpacing the United States in the clean energy transition.
“To China’s delight,” writes the Conversation, “the US has simply stopped competing to be the world’s clean energy powerhouse.” While the Trump administration has reversed policies incentivizing clean energy manufacturing in the United States, China has barrelled ahead with its own ambitious programs.
The 13.6 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion) that China spent on clean energy manufacturing and development over the past year was roughly equivalent to the entire world’s spending on fossil fuels over the same period, rivalling the size of Saudi Arabia’s entire economy. As a result, China now produces 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines, 80 percent of its solar panels, and one in five lithium-ion batteries.
“While Trump repeats the tired mantra of ‘drill, baby, drill’, China is building factories, cornering the market for critical minerals such as lithium and nickel, and locking in export partners,” states the Conversation in a recent column. And those export partners are only too delighted to take advantage of Chinese trade, especially in the context of U.S.-imposed tariffs.
As a result, a growing number of developing countries including Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya, and Namibia “are now outpacing the U.S. in the shift to renewable energy” according to a recent report from Yale Environment 360. Nearly two-thirds of emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America now have a higher proportion of solar integration in their energy mixes than the United States. “Since 2018, Kenya, Yemen, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania have imported an amount of Chinese solar equal to roughly half the capacity of their entire power grid,” the report goes on to detail.
The affordability and accessibility of Chinese-made clean energy infrastructure makes solar and wind adoption a no-brainer for emerging economies. A new analysis from Ember shows that 91 percent of new solar and wind projects are even cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel plants when fuel cost is taken into account. The result is a win-win for China, its trading partners, and global decarbonization goals.
“China’s investment in the electro-technology revolution is creating choices for every other country, unlocking a clean, more affordable and secure energy future and opening the door to a new diplomacy, moving beyond the geopolitics of oil and gas,” writes Ember. “Most profoundly, China is showing that a highly electrified energy system centred on wind and solar generation is entirely compatible with a modern, growing, highly industrialised economy.”
China’s massive manufacturing capacity and well-established trade relations with emerging economies around the globe have placed it at the helm of global energy trade and at the vanguard of the clean energy transition. The question is whether the West will re-enter the competition, or let Beijing continue to run away with it.
So far, the latter seems more likely. Indeed, many experts view the Trump administration’s policy strategy as one big gift to China. Gutting American clean energy expansion and innovation capacities has been a boon to China’s market share, while global tariffs have only incentivized countries to pivot to increase their trade with China.
“China doesn’t need to do anything to win,” Samantha Custer, director of policy analysis at AidData, a research group at William & Mary, told the Washington Post earlier this year. China has long worked to “sow seeds of doubt that the U.S. is not a reliable economic and security partner, and unfortunately, people are now seeing the U.S. reinforce those doubts,” she added.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com