The Chinese Renewable Energy Revolution Affects The Whole World

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Jeremy Wallace is a professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of the “China Lab” newsletter. His story for Wired published on January 28, 2026, begins with this headline: “China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World.”

“A global onslaught of cheap Chinese green power is upending everything in its path. No one is ready for its repercussions,” Wallace says.

“At the scale and pace that China is producing [solar panels and wind turbines], plenty of things stand to be swept away — including the seemingly intractable problems of energy poverty and fossil fuel dependence,” he adds. “In 2024, the total installed electricity capacity of the planet — every coal, gas, hydro, and nuclear plant and all of the renewables — was about 10 terawatts. The Chinese solar supply chain can now pump out 1 terawatt of panels every year” [emphasis added].

Globally, the glut of solar has lowered the average cost of generating electricity to 4 cents a kilowatt-hour, which may be the cheapest form of energy in the history of humanity, Wallace claims.

The world is beginning to notice the tidal wave of renewable energy made possible by China. “But chroniclers of this green tech revolution almost always understate its chaos. At this point, it is far less a tightly managed, top-down creation of state subsidies than a runaway train of competition. The resulting, onrushing utopia is anything but neat,” Wallace writes.

“It is a panorama of coal communities decimated, price wars sweeping across one market after another, and electrical grids destabilizing as they become more central to the energy system. And absolutely no one — least of all some monolithic ‘China’ — knows how to deal with its repercussions.”

Policies Not Subsidies

People always accuse China of granting massive subsidies to renewable energy and electric car companies, but that is not quite accurate. What China does is create government policies that reward companies for pursuing national goals, but the policies can shift dramatically once those goals are achieved.

In January of last year, China announced it would discontinue a policy that had effectively propped up renewable energy prices by pegging them to the price of the baseline coal power in each province. Any solar capacity that went in after May 2025, Beijing declared, would no longer get this deal.

What happened next was completely predictable. In the first three months of 2025, 60 gigawatts of new solar capacity were added to the national grid. In April, 45 more gigawatts were installed. Then in May, an eye popping 92 gigawatts were added — an average of three gigawatts every day. To put that in perspective, a typical nuclear power plant produces about one gigawatt of electricity. After May, new solar deployments plummeted. In the last four months of the year, just 10 gigawatts of new solar were added per month.

Wallace explains what the effect of all this renewable energy has on grid operators in terms that are easily understood by those of us who are not energy industry experts.

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“For electricity markets to work, grid managers must constantly balance supply and demand — but the former can’t always be throttled back when it exceeds the latter. Nuclear power plants can’t just be switched on and off whenever solar power floods the grid. And some Chinese coal plants provide heat to communities through steam, so they need to run even if the electricity they generate is superfluous.

“One perverse result of all this energetic oversupply is that a lot of solar power simply gets wasted, or “curtailed,” to make way for dirty forms of energy that are harder to turn off. Another is that the inherently intermittent power of renewables simply makes it more challenging for managers to keep the grid stable.

“In August 2024, in China’s far western region of Xinjiang — where the renewables build-out is at its most grandiose — poorly handled voltage fluctuations from solar and wind caused a regional blackout and even threatened the national electrical system, according to the South China Morning Post.

“As challenging as the glut is to manage at the technical level, its economics are even more vexing. As Econ 101 teaches, prices go down when supply rises faster than demand. But in most markets, there’s an end point to this process: free.

“Electricity markets are different. Some power generating entities (like coal and nuclear plants) are so loath to ramp down their production that they offer to pay for the privilege of continuing to generate power. This, combined with the absolute imperative to keep the grid balanced, can create negative prices, which have become common in China’s heavily populated Shandong Province.

“It’s an untenable situation, but energy-hungry industrial firms are happy to milk it. Decades ago, the metals giant Weiqiao Aluminum left the Shandong grid in favor of running its own captive coal fleet to power its smelters. This past year it plugged back into the grid to take advantage of cheaper rates coming from green tech.”

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Wallace Joins Mark Jacobson On KQED

Recently, Wallace took part in a program on KQED, the famed public radio station in San Francisco. Joining him was Mark Z. Jacobson, a CleanTechnica contributor and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Jacobson told host Alexis Madrigal, “China has built more electricity capacity from wind, water, and solar than all the nuclear reactors ever built in human history — combined.”

He added, “At their current pace, if China electrifies transportation, buildings, and industry and continues deploying renewables, they could reach 100 percent renewable energy across all sectors by about 2051. The US, meanwhile, would reach that point roughly 100 years later — around 2148 [emphasis added].

“China accounts for about 35 percent of global energy use and emissions, so their transition really matters. And they’re exporting almost as much renewable capacity as they’re installing domestically, which is helping the rest of the world transition too.

“The bad news is that some countries — including the US — are moving slowly. But there are bright spots. South Dakota produced about 120 percent of its electricity demand last year from wind, hydro, and solar. There are now a dozen states producing between 50 and 120 percent of their electricity demand from renewables in the power sector alone.

“That said, we still need to transition transportation, buildings, and industry — not just electricity — and that’s where we have a long way to go.”

Green Energy In Red States

Madrigal pointed out that many of those US states are in thrall to the Republican Party, which seems counter-intuitive. Jacobson replied that “Iowa, a deeply red state, produces almost 80 percent of its electricity from wind. Montana has a huge share of renewables. Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas are rapidly expanding their renewable capacity as well. The Great Plains are basically the Saudi Arabia of wind. There’s enormous potential to export that power across the country.

“We also have massive offshore wind potential on both coasts, though that’s being stifled right now. And beyond wind and solar, the U.S. has geothermal energy, particularly enhanced geothermal systems … which provide constant, baseload power similar to nuclear, but without the risks. You drill deep — three to eight kilometers — where temperatures are high enough to generate steam. It’s now a commercial technology, deployable quickly, with far fewer safety concerns. It can replace nuclear entirely. It’s faster, cheaper, safer, and uses very little land.” What’s not to love?

“If you want to solve climate change, air pollution, and energy security, you have to deploy clean energy quickly,” Jacobson added. “Wind, solar, and batteries excel at that. Enhanced geothermal does too — without the meltdown risk, weapons proliferation risk, radioactive waste, or uranium mining hazards of nuclear power.”

Chairman Mao On Revolutions

Wallace ends his Wired article with a reference to Mao Zedong, the brutal Chinese leader who subjected his people to a punishing Cultural Revolution. “A revolution is not a dinner party. It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another,” Mao said.

The green tech revolution is definitely not a dinner party, Wallace says, but rather a withering assault on the value of the assets of fossil fuel companies. “It is the result of the conscious choices made by people, firms, and governments, many of the most critical ones made in China. But it is happening now, and faster than our systems — electricity grids, industrial sectors, labor, geopolitics, and more — are ready for.

“And it’s a good thing, too, because there is another force powered by the sun’s fusion that is also arriving at a force and scale that we are not prepared for — climate change. A global energy system undergirds modern life. Through all the chaos, that system is getting a major upgrade,” thanks to an influx of renewable energy, he says.

Unstoppable

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” Shakespeare wrote. The same can be said of the renewable energy revolution. The world is on the cusp of transitioning away from the pollution and expense of using fossil fuels and nuclear to generate electricity.

It is unfortunate that the US is working overtime to slow that transition down, but its intransigence just makes its government look venial, petty, and stupid. Meanwhile, the larger world is laughing at the US and working overtime to leverage the benefits of renewables.

At the beginning of the nuclear power era, visionaries talked about electricity becoming too cheap to meter. That didn’t quite happen, as the cost of nuclear power plants rose into the stratosphere, but today renewables are close to making that prospect a reality. At this point, even The Mouth That Roared cannot derail the renewable energy revolution.