Jackie Siebens
It’s producing nearly a terawatt of new clean energy capacity every year — the equivalent of more than 300 large power plants worth of generation, according to The Economist. That pace has made it a new kind of energy superpower: one that manufactures, builds, and exports clean electricity on a planetary scale. And because that scale has driven prices so low, the rest of the world is now buying from Beijing. Even if the current US government is less supportive of renewables or decarbonization, global demand is undeniable: emerging markets are hungry for cheap renewables, with countries from Pakistan to Brazil rapidly importing Chinese solar and wind equipment to meet rising electricity needs.
There’s no catching up to that. We’re not going to out-subsidize, out-manufacture, or out-coordinate China on solar panels, inverters, or transmission wire. The truth is we didn’t really try to compete until we had already lost—the United States innovated and invented but failed to build the environment needed to rapidly manufacture and scale its own technologies, ceding the market to China.
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