This story, man.
Definitely worth your time, I’ve only excerpted here.
By now, major headlines have begun to catch on to the reality that China’s renewable energy revolution is one of the biggest stories in the world, while Donald Trump’s anti-renewable vision of American energy dominance is a backward sideshow by comparison. 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. 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” at the control switch—knows how to deal with its repercussions.
IN THE UNITED States, 2024 was a record-breaking year for solar. Across the entire country, those 12 months saw some 50 gigawatts of new solar capacity added. (Solar projects are typically measured by their power output, not their square footage.)
Now consider some different numbers, for scale and contrast. In China, the first three months of 2025 alone saw 60 gigawatts of new solar capacity added to the national grid. Then April packed in 45 more gigawatts. Finally, May added an eye-watering 92 gigawatts of new capacity, or 3 gigawatts every day.
The reason for this brain-warping mad dash of solar development? At the start of 2025—in an attempt to rein in the renewables sector—Beijing announced that it would discontinue a long-standing policy that had effectively propped up renewable energy prices, pegging them to that 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. So the all-out solar installation frenzy was simply a mass attempt to get in under the old terms.
After May, sure enough, new solar deployments plummeted. The ensuing four months each added just 10 gigawatts of new solar on average, half of the prior year’s pace—but that’s still considerably faster than America at its peak.
In China, one problem with all this burgeoning, majestic new solar is that it’s completely overwhelming the national electrical grid, technically and economically. 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 over-supply 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 the aforementioned 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.
What’s more, Chinese solar manufacturers—who, if you’ll remember, might just be saving the world—are not even making money for their troubles. They’re struggling to survive a gauntlet of competition. At the root of the solar supply chain are makers of polysilicon, the purified silicon substrate base of panels. Oversupply of this product has caused prices and profits to collapse. The Chinese government has tried to get supply under control by pushing the strongest polysilicon firms to form a cartel and squeeze out lesser players who refuse to exit the market. But so far, this seems to be a long shot.
IF ONLY THERE was more electrical storage—technology that holds solar power generated during the day and releases it in the evening—then a lot of the issues that torture China’s renewables market would be resolved. Solar panels would become more valuable to the grid, their generation wouldn’t have to be curtailed, and the producers would be able to sell more of their products at better prices. Of course, China has come to dominate this fast-growing sector as well: It is by far the world’s largest battery maker. But China’s electrical system hasn’t figured out the rules and pricing to push battery capacity onto the grid fast enough to keep up. And besides, the vast majority of the batteries that China is churning out do not end up in grid storage. They’re revolutionizing another increasingly Chinese-dominated green industry that is going fast, cheap, and out of control: automobiles.
With generation and transmission build-out in hand, the focus must shift to grid management (smart control tech). While not trivial, the problems are fairly straightforward to characterize and address with dedicated engineering. First, at the national level there must be a standardized interface for all power sources attached to the grid, and power plants that do not yet meet that standard have to adapt the defined protocols. Once there is a common interface standard for power fluctuation detection, signalling, etc., private companies can compete to make the tech components that plug into those standards. (This is analogous to but just at a much grosser scale than the tech standards that gave us defined DVD formats, network connections, database interfaces, USB connectors, etc. I worked inside and didn’t need a hardhat, steel-toed shoes and heavily insulated rubber gloves when working on early networked computers decades ago. 😉)
This has to be fake news, doesn’t it? Look at the picture for proof.
After all, no less an authority than President Trump himself has stated that China doesn’t use wind energy. 🙂