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.

There’s a particular kind of sci-fi nerd who equates fusion tech with utopia. If we could only harness the engine of the stars, it would uncork near limitless energy and neatly sweep away a whole mess of humanity’s problems. But how would that work exactly? What would the transition look like?
You don’t have to wonder. It’s happening now. Solar panels and wind turbines capture the fusion of the sun and convert it to electricity. And at the scale and pace that China is producing them, plenty of things stand to be swept away—including, quite possibly, the once seemingly intractable problems of energy poverty and fossil-fuel dependence. 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.
In China itself, vast energy megabases combining solar and wind stretch for miles in the country’s western deserts and Tibetan highlands, each producing the power of multiple nuclear plants and connecting to population centers in the country’s east via ultrahigh-voltage power lines. At the smaller end of the scale, panels have sprouted on rooftops all over the more populated eastern half of the country, thanks to policies that standardize the process and paperwork required to install and tie them into the grid. Huge factories, urban apartment buildings, and humble village homes are plastered with panels. In Europe, Chinese-made photovoltaic panels are so cheap that they cost less than fencing materials. Globally, the glut of solar has lowered the average cost of generating electricity to 4 cents a kilowatt hour—perhaps the cheapest form of energy ever.

https://archive.is/20260305231230/https://www.wired.com/story/china-renewable-energy-revolution/#selection-947.0-969.864

SKORZENY: refeeuje to k segmentu predtim v tom samem videu:

Wind and solar reaching 30% in the EU is the visible numerator of a fraction whose denominator is shrinking. Industrial demand is leaving Europe which makes the renewable share look better while the economy gets worse. The energy transition did add renewables, but it also shut down nuclear, replacing zero-carbon base load with intermittency, severed Russian gas, replacing cheap pipeline gas with expensive LNG, and layered on carbon taxes and grid surcharge charges that made the total system cost uncompetitive.

Europe is running a real-time experiment in whether an advanced industrial economy can maintain its productive capacity at today's superorganism throughput level while fundamentally restructuring its energy system. And so far the answer is not without enormous economic pain and possibly not at all.

TADEAS: nate hagens ad cinske stagnujici emise TADEAS


China's CO2 emissions were flat or slightly down, down 3/10ths of 1% in 2025. And again, every news outlet is framing this chart as proof the green transition is working. That's looking at the chart, but let's look at the system. Chinese coal production hit an all-time record of 4.8 billion tons in 2025, up 1.2%. Coal power capacity additions hit their highest level in a decade. New coal project proposals surged to a record 1.6 gigawatt and China still consumes nearly 40% more coal than the rest of the world combined.


So where did the emission savings come from?

Cement production collapsed close to 10% due to the real estate contraction. Building materials, metals, and steel all down. So the emissions decline isn't clean energy replacing dirty energy in a growing economy. It's partly a construction sector in freefall masking continued and growing coal dependence and the chemical sector which is coal to chemicals grew their emissions 12%.

This is the EU renewable story again just from the other direction. The metric and the graphics in the news — flat emissions — looks like progress. But the system — record coal, collapsing cement on a real estate crisis — tells us something very different

climax

https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2825%2900391-4

Point of no return: a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say | Climate crisis | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of-no-return-hothouse-earth-global-heating-climate-tipping-points

Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.

At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, “the economy and society will cease to function as we know it”, scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery.

The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed.

It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

“Crossing even some of the thresholds could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said Wolf. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.

‘The trend is irreversible’: has Romania shattered the link between economic growth and high emissions? | Romania | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/is-romania-blueprint-economic-growth-low-emissions

Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million PV panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.

The sun-lit plots of silicone and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.

“The trend is irreversible,” said Liviu Gavrila, vice-president of the Romanian Wind Energy Association and manager at Enery, which is building the solar farm. “But we need to play it smart.”

Few would consider Romania a climate leader but on one metric it has found the holy grail of the energy transition. The country has decoupled economic growth from pollution faster than anywhere else in Europe, and perhaps even the world. Its net greenhouse gas emissions intensity fell by 88% between 1990 and 2023, the latest data shows, meaning each dollar’s worth of economic activity heats the planet almost 10 times less than it did before. Emissions have plunged by 75%.

"Climate hushing"—the quiet trend undermining global climate action
https://www.talkingclimate.ca/p/climate-hushingthe-quiet-trend-undermining?

As political winds have shifted in the United States and elsewhere over the past year, “climate hushing” has become a real thing: and that’s bad news. “When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island writes here. “In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.”

Unfortunately, climate hushing is going global. This year, when world leaders spoke at the World Economic Forum’s meeting in January, nearly every single one of them avoided the topic—even Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. Why is this? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” sustainable business professor Anjali Chaudhry writes.

The only major leader to break the silence was Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, who used his speech to press for collaborative climate action. ”We invite enterprises from all over the world to embrace the opportunities from the green and low-carbon transition, and work closely with China in such areas as green infrastructure, green energy, green minerals and green finance,” he said.

The organization We Don’t Have Time hosted an alternative WEF speech, held on a pile of snow and featuring several of my colleagues and leading systems thinkers, including Dr. Johan Rockström, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman, who said,

“We know what needs to be done [about climate change]. It is not a failure of resources. Global capital has never been more abundant. It is a failure of collaboration and collective action. A failure of governments to align around shared interests rather than narrow advantage; of businesses to act as system-shapers rather than short-term competitors; and of leaders across sectors to share risk, and act in service of a common good.”

How Ukraine Is Turning to Renewables to Keep Heat and Lights On
Russia continues to bomb Ukraine’s fossil-fueled power plants, leaving much of the nation shivering during a brutal winter. But Ukraine’s new emphasis on developing decentralized power — from solar panels to wind turbines — is advancing an unexpected green energy transition.
How Ukraine Is Turning to Renewables to Keep Heat and Lights On - Yale E360
https://e360.yale.edu/features/ukraine-war-renewable-energy

More and More and More
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

A radical new history of energy and humanity's insatiable need for resources that will change the way we talk about climate change

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue.

The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.

This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

More and More and More - Jean-Baptiste Fressoz | Knihy z Martinusu
https://www.martinus.sk/3010425-more-and-more-and-more/2686021

Compromises, voluntary measures and no mention of fossil fuels: key points from Cop30 deal | Cop30 | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/22/roadmaps-adaptations-and-transitions-what-climate-measures-were-agreed-at-cop30

The roadmap for the transition away from fossil fuels was blocked from the formal Cop30 decision and the Brazilian presidency announced the plan would proceed outside the UN process. It will be merged with a plan backed by Colombia and about 90 other countries, with a summit set for April. This “coalition of the willing” could push progress forward.

The Cop30 president, André Corrêa do Lago, said the plan to develop the roadmap had the support of President Lula and would involve high-level dialogues over the next year, led by science and involving governments, industry and civil society. Once complete, he said they would report back to Cop.

“Those governments committed to tackling the climate crisis at its source are uniting to move forward outside the UN, under the leadership of Colombia and Pacific Island states, to phase out fossil fuels rapidly, equitably, and in line with 1.5C,” said Nikki Reisch, at the Center for International Environmental Law. “The international conference next April is the first stop on the path to a livable future.”

China doesn’t want to lead alone on climate policies, senior adviser warns | Cop30 | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/19/china-doesnt-want-to-take-lead-on-climate-policies-alone-senior-adviser-warns

In an exclusive interview, Wang said theChinese president, Xi Jinping, was committed to the energy transition for the long haul despite resistance from some industrial sectors. He explained that China’s priority in Belém was to help the Brazilian presidency achieve a successful climate conference, and to show the benefits of multilateral decision-making. On Tuesday, the first draft of a possible agreement was published at the Cop30 summit, reviving the hotly contested plan to transition away from fossil fuels.

China is the planet’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide from burning of coal, oil and gas, but it is now also a world leader in the production, installation and export of wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars.

He said China wanted to “speed up and scale up its efforts to provide more global public goods” despite serious geopolitical and economic tensions and unilateral barriers to trade, including tariffs. The country’s emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months.

He estimated China’s per capita power consumption would continue to grow from 7,000 kilowatt hours in 2024 to “well over 10,000, maybe 12,000” – but there would be a steady move away from fossil fuels to wind and solar, as well as green hydrogen, green ammonia and electric vehicles. Along with a new power grid system, he said the country was in the midst of a “comprehensive green transition of social economic development”.

As in many countries, Wang suggested there was some resistance to change, but the president had sent a clear signal about the direction of travel. “Even in China, we have a lot of industrial conflict ... but the central government, including President Xi, is very clear to us that we must, in the next five years’ time, speed up the new power system.”

In the absence of the US, China’s role is even more crucial than usual to the success or failure of Cop30, where the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has urged his negotiators to lay the foundations for an exit ramp out of the fossil fuel era.

The Paris Climate Accord, while facing political slowdowns in parts of the Global North, remains relevant due to practical momentum elsewhere. As high-income nations delay their net-zero timelines, the production side of the energy transition continues.

China’s role in that process is increasingly functional rather than diplomatic. The cost reductions driven by its supply chain are allowing for real emissions reductions in places where policy has stalled.

Renewable adoption is no longer dependent on long-term funding commitments. It is being supported by falling prices and market demand.

China’s Clean Energy Surge Reshapes Global Access
https://www.globalbrandsmagazine.com/china-renewable-energy-global-shift/

The green transition has a surprising new home
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/08/21/the-green-transition-has-a-surprising-new-home

The green transition has a surprising new home

Forget about northern Europeans, with their coalition governments and love of cycling

Picture a country where renewables are being rapidly rolled out and electric-vehicle sales are surging, and you will probably have in mind somewhere smug and northern European; a place with tall people, coalition governments and a yen for cycling holidays. Or perhaps the first thing that pops into your head is the sheer scale of China, which manufactures the bulk of such equipment and last year contributed more than half of the global increase in solar and wind installation.Think again. For a wave of Chinese-made electric vehicles is flooding new markets. In the past year sales of evs have more than tripled in Turkey, where Togg, a local brand, is also popular—they now account for 27% of all cars sold, making the country the fourth-largest European market. Last year more than 70% of cars imported into Nepal were electric. Some 60% of new cars sold in Ethiopia were battery-powered, after the state banned sales of internal-combustion-engine vehicles altogether. ev sales have doubled in Vietnam over the past year owing, in part, to VinFast, a local carmaker. Two- and three-wheelers are surging in popularity, too. The International Energy Agency (iea), a forecaster, reckons that across developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America ev sales rose by 60% in 2024.

It is a similar story with renewables. In the first six months of the year, Pakistan generated 25% of its electricity from solar power—not far below the 32% managed by California, a clean-energy pioneer. The country’s battery imports are booming as well. Indeed, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think-tank, estimates that on current trends battery storage will cover 26% of Pakistan’s peak-electricity demand by 2030. Meanwhile, over the past year Morocco has increased its wind generation by 50%, becoming the country with the ninth most. India has seen four months of decline in coal-power generation, aided by an increase of 14% in renewable generation.Lust for powerAlthough the principles of international climate diplomacy suggest that poorer countries, being less responsible for climate change, have less duty to go green, many face strong economic incentives to do so anyway. Most countries in the global south are energy importers, and therefore must use scarce foreign currency to buy oil and gas. China and India have coal reserves that play an important role in their economies and power generation, but neither has significant oil or gas reserves. For its part, Ethiopia’s ban on internal-combustion engines was not a green measure—it was designed to cut spending on fossil fuels and save foreign currency.

Moreover, across emerging markets, Chinese-made evs are now about as cheap as traditional vehicles. In some places, they are even cheaper. The iea reckons that last year the average Chinese ev sold for around $30,000 in Thailand, compared with $34,000 for the typical petrol-engine car. At the bottom end of the market, old-fashioned vehicles still have an advantage, but only a relatively modest one. Government policies have also made a difference. In Turkey purchasers of evs typically paid a tax of only 10%, compared with one of between 45% and 220% for petrol-powered vehicles. The recent surge in part reflected car-buyers getting ahead of a reduction in the generosity of the policy.

Clean technology generally requires more upfront investment than fossil-fuel tech, even if it has lower lifetime costs. This has historically held it back in places where the cost of capital is high. The iea has calculated that the typical cost of capital for a solar project in India, for instance, is 11%, compared with around half that in rich countries. But the Rocky Mountain Institute, an American pressure group, now estimates that, owing to falling prices, many clean technologies have reached “capex parity”, where initial costs are the same as fossil fuels on a per-unit basis. As a consequence, they have become more attractive in large parts of the world.Tariffs have been helpful, too. As America and the eu attempt to shut out Chinese evs, they are finding their way to other markets—at even cheaper prices. For the most part, emerging markets lack legacy manufacturers that will lobby their governments to keep out Chinese imports. Yet this relatively free trade is at risk as protectionism begins to spread. Until recently Brazil allowed evs into its economy tariff-free; now it is gradually raising import taxes to 35% by 2026. India’s imports of finished solar panels have stagnated as the country seeks to build its own supply chain. Nigeria is considering banning solar-panel imports altogether in an effort to support domestic manufacturers.

Governments are at least also creating loopholes that allow Chinese imports to continue so long as the companies in question commit to local production. Brazil has carved out an exemption for byd, a carmaker, while it establishes a factory in the country. Indonesia has reduced value-added tax on evs from 11% to 1% for vehicles that meet a 40% local-content requirement; foreign manufacturers, meanwhile, can bring in equipment duty-free so long as they promise to increase domestic production by 2026 and provide a guarantee for the forgone tariffs if they do not follow through. Such policies are far from perfect—but they are better than the alternative. Well-heeled northern Europeans have something to learn. ■