Is China Winning the Energy Transition Too?

As the U.S. digs an ever-deeper grid reliability hole for itself as we fumble the energy transition, it’s worth asking is there another approach? The China playbook, which has given them a strategic global advantage in so many areas, may once again be years ahead of the rest of the world. 

While much has been made at COP 28 over national pledges to triple renewable energy installations by the close of the decade, there’s only one country on pace to actually do it—China. And they’re doing it while keeping the lights on.

By contrast, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has shaped a U.S. energy policy centered on tearing down the generating capacity we have far faster than we’re building anything to replace it. China has chosen a very different course.

China’s strategy puts energy security and reliability first. China is building renewable and nuclear generating capacity at an incredible scale while also strengthening its fossil fuel generating capacity – namely its coal fleet – to provide a rock-solid bridge to the future. President Xi Jinping calls the strategy “building the new before discarding the old.”

China’s strategy was birthed from its own challenges meeting soaring electricity demand as well as Europe’s energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While Europe is now out of the worst of its crisis, the impact, with gas and electricity prices still eye-wateringly high, continues to ripple across the continent with deindustrialization of energy-intensive industries a biting reality.

Beijing has also surely taken note of eroding U.S. grid reliability and the alarming emergence of rolling blackouts as a regular threat during summer and winter months in much of the country. Understandably, it is unwilling to make the same mistakes and sleepwalk into the energy insecurity that Western policymakers are trying to rebrand as climate leadership.

Rather, China is building the energy transition bridge and grid reliability backstop American consumers, grid operators and reliability regulators increasingly recognize is missing here. To put a finer point on it, America’s reliability bridge – our once impressive dispatchable fuel diversity – is being disassembled when we need it most to fill the yawning gaps inherent with renewable intermittency and to meet an emerging surge in electricity demand.

Taking the Lead

While China has been criticized for its focus on energy security and its embrace of coal to solidify it, China’s build the new before discarding the old strategy appears to be working. No country is producing and connecting more solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear power plants, batteries and electric vehicles.

To put China’s abundance agenda into perspective, China is on track to double its wind and solar power capacity by the end of 2025, potentially adding 371 GW 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 on track to add 200 GW of new coal capacity by 2030. For comparison, that’s more new capacity than the entire existing U.S. coal fleet.  

China doesn’t see this renewable surge and coal investment as in conflict. Rather, Beijing sees these investments as complementary, a supersized energy system essential to making the energy transition a success.

As the world’s industrial behemoth, China’s share of global electricity consumption is currently forecast to rise to a new record of one-third by 2025, up from one-quarter a decade ago. If China is able to meet that demand, dominate the manufacturing of the energy technologies of tomorrow, solidify its own energy security and reduce emissions – as global experts believe may begin to happen as soon as this year – criticism of “China’s energy model” will be increasingly hollow.

While U.S. grid reliability experts are sounding the alarm that retirements of existing dispatchable resources are going far too fast and that we’re careening into a disorderly energy transition, Beijing is delivering just the opposite.

Is there something to learn from this philosophical split? If we’re capable of any humility, the answer should be a resounding yes. The U.S. does not have to sacrifice the reliability of our electricity supply while building our energy future. Until the grid and generating capacity of tomorrow exists outside of rhetorical ambition, let’s focus on building the future before we discard the essential resources we have today.