When we ask our AI how it all went wrong, this will be the answer. We chose 19th century technology in a 21st century world.
An empty, 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse north of Denver was supposed to be an emblem of cutting-edge manufacturing. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis heralded a California company’s plan to build a battery factory on-site as a push to “power the future.”
But an already weakening growth outlook for electric vehicles deteriorated as President Trump’s tax bill wound its way through Congress. Amprius Technologiesdidn’t wait for the legislation to pass and pulled out of Colorado earlier this year.
The technical know-how for such work is “still developing in the U.S.,” Amprius Chief Executive Kang Sun said. “Meanwhile, other countries have spent years building mature, cost-efficient battery industries, giving them a significant head start.”
Three of the four manufacturers Amprius contracts to pump out its batteries for drones, bikes and maybe one day cars are in China.
The company’s U-turn underscores a new reality: America has given up its effort to challenge China in the renewable-energy industries that increasingly power the global economy.
As Trump doubles down on fossil fuels, the U.S. and China are offering competing visions for the future of energy, representing the next dimension in the showdown between two superpowers vying for global influence and artificial intelligence supremacy.
The U.S. renewables retreat goes far beyond the tax bill that is winding down more than $400 billion in estimated subsidies. Federal agencies have tightened rules for new development. The Trump administration recently terminated a multibillion-dollar loan guarantee for a Midwest transmission line, halted a near-complete wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island and canceled $3.7 billion of funding for technologies that could reduce industrial emissions.
The whiplash has hit investment. Companies in the second quarter canceled more green-manufacturing projects than they announced for the first time on record, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rhodium Group. Clean-electricity investment plunged 51% from a quarter earlier. The advocacy group E2 tallied $22 billion of electric-vehicle, battery, solar, wind and other renewables projects that were delayed or canceled in the first half.
Trump, meanwhile, is browbeating trading partners in Europe and Asia to buy U.S. oil and gas to stave off higher tariffs. But Chinese technology poses a long-term threat.
The rapid pace of EV adoption in China and elsewhere casts a long shadow over oil demand. Natural gas will be burned for decades, but increasingly competitive solar panels and batteries might sap how much of it the world will need.
China installed 277 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in the first seven months of the year, quadruple the utility-scale additions federal analysts in the U.S. project across all power sources for 2025. That could give China a big advantage in the power-hungry AI race.
Chinese companies have also stepped up manufacturing capacity of batteries and solar modules, pumping out exports. Their global market share for those technologies has swelled to 75% or higher, according to BloombergNEF.
Countries across the world “are going to be even more reliant on Chinese technology to power their economies, to make the cars they drive,” said Wally Adeyemo, who was deputy Treasury secretary under President Joe Biden. “It creates real chokepoints for China.”
By 2023, a solar module produced in China was 65% cheaper than one made in the U.S., according to the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. CATL said it spent more than $2.6 billion on research and development last year alone, with a staff of more than 20,000 people.
Caroline Wang, an analyst with the Australian think tank Climate Energy Finance, said the resulting renewables buildout has recently left China’s world-leading coal fleet running at less than half capacity.
“They are just leading the world by an absolutely mind-boggling margin,” Wang said.
I have just finished reading the book “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang. His very high level comparison of China vs. USA is this: China is a country of engineers (all 24 people in the China’s politburo hold engineering degrees; Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer) whereas the USA is a lawyerly society that blocks a lot of projects. If you want to learn more but do not want to read the book, just search for “Dan Wang” on YouTube.com
I haven’t read Wang’s book, but the write-up on Amazon suggests a large portion of the book argues against the evils of communism – which, fine, I hate authoritarian regimes more than most, but if his whole point is that America has a lawyer culture and China has an engineer culture, and that alone explains the vast differences between the countries on China’s dominance on renewables, his own biases might be blocking the obvious – which is that, as evil as communism is, it can also plan economic policy in advance for decades, subsidize that policy far beyond what a capitalist system is inclined to do, direct it citizenry to support it (https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250723170027701), and stably enact that policy without sudden changes.
Whereas, in the U.S., policy can’t extend past 4 years on average, and often flips 180 degrees every 4-8 years. We actively discourage nationally coordinated long-term planning – calling it ‘socialist’ and other terms.
The CCP moved to secure the raw materials for renewables, centrally planned a coordinated energy policy well into the future, subsidized those goals massively directly to its companies, and directed its citizenry to support it. That’s why China is dominating the field.
On engineering itself, since the 1990 Immigration Act, we’ve been plugging in the gaps of qualified engineers to our companies by essentially importing them from other countries. The current administration is doing everything it can to reverse that, while also simultaneously attacking our own universities and educational system, and the effects of this will last far into the future.