China’s clean-energy revolution will reshape markets and politics

THE scale of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp. By the end of last year, the country had installed 887 gigawatts of solar-power capacity – close to double Europe’s and America’s combined total. The 22 million tonnes of steel used to build new wind turbines and solar panels in 2024 would have been enough to build a Golden Gate Bridge on every working day of every week that year. China generated 1,826 terawatt-hours of wind and solar electricity in 2024, five times more than the energy contained in all 600 of its nuclear weapons.

In the context of the cold war, the distinctive measure of a “superpower” was the combination of a continental span and a world-threatening nuclear arsenal. The coming-together of China’s enormous manufacturing capacity and its ravenous appetite for copious, cheap, domestically produced electricity deserves to be seen in a similar world-changing light. They have made China a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale.

As a consequence, China is reshaping the world’s energy outlook, its geopolitics and its capacity to limit the catastrophic effects of climate change. The main reason countries have yet to decarbonise their economies is because they lack the means to do so. And that is what China is fixing. It is providing ever greater amounts of clean-energy capacity to the world at prices which are cheaper than any alternative, including coal and natural gas.