“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”
“the reality that China’s renewable energy revolution is one of the biggest stories in the world”
“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”
“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”
“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”
“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”
“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”
“Manufacturing capacity to produce solar ingots, wafers, and panels exceeds demand, sparking profit-killing price wars as firms try to keep their market share”
“rapid technological innovation keeps forcing firms to invest in expansion with the latest and greatest designs, lest they get left behind by their competitors”
“negative prices for electricity have also become common in Germany, thanks to Chinese panels”
“millions of Pakistanis installed solar panels to free themselves from the grid. The country imported so many Chinese solar panels that the grid as a whole began to fall into what is called a death spiral. Customers started opting out, leaving the grid to charge ever higher prices, which led even more people to flee, and so on”
“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”
“By 2024, nearly half of all cars sold in China had plugs. Internal combustion automakers in China are suffering or shuttering. And the reverberations are perhaps even stronger abroad. China shifted from an also-ran to the world’s dominant auto exporter over the past five years, displacing Japan, South Korea, and Germany”
“It shipped more than 5.5 million cars overseas in 2024. Other countries have begun to panic that their own auto sectors could be eviscerated by the competition of cheaper, cleaner vehicles from China. The United States has effectively banned imports from China, while Europe has imposed serious tariffs”
“Gates has always preferred a lordly, capital-intensive variety of decarbonization, plowing dollars into sci-fi technologies that remain in a perpetual state of being just five years away—not the rapid, messy approach involving solar panels sprouting on every rooftop and recalibrating electricity pricing schemes”
“Mao Zedong famously declared that a revolution is not a dinner party. It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. The green tech revolution—whose violence is principally financial, a withering assault on the value of fossil firms’ assets—is not a dinner party. Nor is it inevitable.”
“But it is happening now, and faster than our systems—electricity grids, industrial sectors, labor, geopolitics, and more—are ready for”