What can the U.S. learn from China in managing the energy transition? More than you might think.
 
China is charting its own course that is a clear rejection of the West’s emissions reduction first, grid reliability last approach.
 
China has watched Europe’s energy crisis, along with our unfolding grid reliability crisis, and seen enough of the challenges of managing intermittent power to know that underinvesting in a bridge to the future is a recipe for disaster.
 
As Bloomberg observed last year, “China’s strategy is designed to avoid the pitfalls that have hobbled parts of the U.S. and Europe, which stopped investing in fossil fuel production and infrastructure before renewables were ready to take over. That’s led to an over-reliance on imports in some places, and in others a dependence on grids that can fall prey to the unreliability of sunshine and wind.”
 
President Xi Jinping laid out how China’s energy transition would differ from the West by following “the principle of building the new before discarding the old.”
 
It’s an eloquently simple and obvious approach, yet it’s one that seems frustratingly out of reach here. Our grid reliability experts have warned that the U.S. is failing to properly manage the energy transition, with no mistake larger than the speed at which we’re taking apart dispatchable fossil fuel generation – namely the nation’s coal fleet – before we have reliable replacement capacity and its enabling infrastructure in place.
 
Mark Christie, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told Congress earlier this summer, the U.S. electric power system is headed for “potentially catastrophic consequences” as dispatchable generating resources are retiring “far too quickly.” He added, the problem is “not the addition of intermittent resources such as wind and solar, but the far too rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas.”
 
Jim Robb, the president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, made much the same warning, saying, “we must manage the pace of the transformation in an orderly way, which is currently not happening.” 
 
China refuses to fall into the same trap. Beijing is instead fully leaning into an abundance agenda, seeing no conflict with both leading the world in the deployment of renewable energy and rapidly expanding – not just maintaining – the world’s largest coal fleet.
 
China is on track to double its wind and solar power capacity by the end of 2025, potentially adding 371 gigawatts of wind and 379 GW of large-scale solar power capacity over the next two years. According to one analysis, that would lead the country to generate one-fifth of the world’s wind power — and three times the solar power of the United States. Last year, China added more wind and solar power than the rest of the world combined.
 
China is also adding 370 GW of new coal capacity. For comparison, the entire existing U.S. coal fleet, which meets 20% of power demand, is 200 GW and falling, facing intense pressure from the Biden administration’s regulatory agenda.
 
China seems to recognize that despite the labelling of this energy moment as one of transition, it’s perhaps more aptly defined as a period of remarkable energy addition.  Urbanization, the explosion of big data and accelerating electrification of transportation, of heating and industry are all driving soaring electricity demand growth that requires more of everything. Meeting the demand challenge while also trying to integrate extraordinary amounts of intermittent power is, to put it mildly, an immense challenge. Beijing – to its credit – is determined to provide as much runway, as much buffer, as possible to stick the landing. The Biden administration, on the other hand, is actively destroying what battered runway we still have.
 
America doesn’t have to follow Europe’s policy missteps and undermine both our energy security and energy affordability. We should know better and we can do better. There are other ways to get to our energy future. China and its imminently reasonable approach of building the new before discarding the old is case in point.