China’s energy future still runs on old technology

FROM the way some talk about it, China sounds like a vision of a zero-carbon future: A clean utopia churning out millions of electric vehicles (EVs) and billions of solar panels, connected by bullet trains, high-voltage power lines and sparkling metro systems, powered by an endless expanse of photovoltaic farms and wind turbines.

That portrait – of a solarpunk electrostate as rooted in the future of energy as the petrostates of the Gulf are wedded to the past – is not entirely wrong.

China’s clean energy industry justifies most of the superlatives you could throw at it. But there is still a troubling amount of 19th-century technology propping up this 21st-century reverie.