China Rapidly Becoming Both a Green Energy Leader and Climate Champion

Things tend to happen much faster in China than Western propaganda assumes, with much of the latter being shown to be utter nonsense within a matter of years. For example, around 2010 Western media was full of derogatory stories about how China’s drive for high speed rail was “failing”. Like this one from Euronews referring to China’s “scandal plagued rail system”.

Only a decade later, China had more high speed rail miles than the rest of the world combined - and the network is very safe.

With China now connecting South East Asia with a massive rail network that is changing lives for the good; for example in Laos.

And even in Hungary and Serbia, with the Budapest / Belgrade high speed rail line to be completed in 2025.

Electricity driven high speed rail tends to displace short-haul flights, which are already limited in China due to the relatively small air space given to domestic commercial flights. It also tends to displace long car journeys of the type Americans do, especially when combined with China’s extensive network of subways and light railways. The result is that the Chinese have much less “range-anxiety” than North Americans, and even Europeans.

With electrified high-speed rail, normal rail, light railways and subways, and electrified buses the remaining part of the Chinese over land transport system requiring electrification was the light vehicle and commercial heavy vehicle sectors. Trucks require a lot of energy and are harder to electrify, but within a decade China has become the world leader by far in electric light vehicles, with such vehicles recently topping 50% of sales and still growing at 30% per year. Within a few years close to 100% of light vehicles will be electric, together with an increasing share of commercial delivery vehicles, and inroads are being made with respect to the heavier commercial vehicles.

The only question then becomes “how is that electricity generated?”. Historically, China’s electricity generating sector has been extremely coal dependent, producing quite massive amounts of carbon emissions and massive air pollution that the Western media was more than happy to publicize. Some in the West saw this issue as one that could be exploited to reduce the legitimacy of the Chinese Party-state in the eyes of Chinese citizens.

Now of course the UK, as with other industrializing countries, had many decades or even a century of absolutely horrendous air pollution with clear skies only really happening from the 1970s onwards, driven by such exposes as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. London had the famous “pea soupers” well into the post-WW2 period.

The Chinese Party-state responded very rapidly to the air pollution issue in the 2010s, with a massive effort to place scrubbers on coal-fired power stations and move some of them away from major cities, and move electricity generation, space heating, cooking and industrial concerns away from coal to natural gas and electricity, while greatly increasing anti-pollution measures for light vehicles. The result was a 42% drop in air pollution over 10 years as reported below, with further drops in recent years resulting in a 61% drop.

There are still issues with air quality on China, but the population have seen the huge and ongoing improvements, which are now being aided by the ongoing replacement of internal combustion engined (ICE) light vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs). The only way to reduce carbon emissions in China though was to greatly increase the share of non-carbon electricity sources in China, a challenge to which China has responded with an “every means necessary” approach while maintaining 5% rates of economic growth.

China has already exploited much of its opportunities for hydropower, producing 13% of China’s electricity in 2023 but with very limited room to grow. It has become the world leader, by far, in the generation of electricity from solar and wind; in 2023 these two sources provided 16% of China’s electricity (above the global average of 13%) and represented 37% of global wind and solar electricity generation. In 2023, the total share of clean energy in Chinese electricity production (including nuclear etc.) was 35%. That meant that 65% was still generated by fossil fuels. With the ongoing rapid growth in renewables starting to outstrip the rapid increases in electricity generation (5.9% in 2023), China’s greenhouse gas emissions are set to fall slightly in 2024.

This reduction will accelerate year after year, with forecasts of at least a doubling of Chinese wind and solar electricity generation by 2030, but China has a history of significantly overshooting such forecasts. From the Guardian:

The amount of wind and solar power under construction in China is now nearly twice as much as the rest of the world combined, a report has found.

Research published on Thursday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), an NGO, found that China has 180 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale solar power under construction and 159GW of wind power. That brings the total of wind and solar power under construction to 339GW, well ahead of the 40GW under construction in the US.

The researchers only looked at solar farms with a capacity of 20MW or more, which feed directly into the grid. That means that the total volume of solar power in China could be much higher, as small scale solar farms account for about 40% of China’s solar capacity.

China is installing two thirds of all the solar and wind capacity in the world, and is on track to reach 1,310GW of such capacity by the end of 2024 which is far ahead of the 2030 plan for 1,200GW of such capacity. The growth in installed capacity will be around 25% in 2024, after a 39% increase in 2023. At current rates of growth, China will have doubled its wind and solar capacity in the three years of 2023, 2024 and 2025. Even assuming a slowly reducing rate of growth in wind and solar installed capacity a further more than doubling of that capacity can be expected by 2030. China is also leading in the installation of grid-scale batteries and the high-voltage electricity lines needed to transport electricity over long distances.

The power grid equipment sector is also set to boom as state-owned utility firms boost their spending to meet the country’s rising electricity demand and Beijing’s call to better incorporate renewable energy generation capacity into the power system, according to reports from Citi and Daiwa Capital last month.

Together with the lesser amounts of additional hydro-electric, nuclear, biomass etc. electricity generation capacity, and the rapid transformation of its light vehicle fleet through EVs and increasingly strict emission regulations, China could transform itself into a climate change mitigation global leader by 2030. In addition, it would dominate the green industries of electrified transport, solar, wind, biomass, batteries, and renewable energy grid infrastructure. It has even taken a global lead in safe nuclear energy with a molten salt thorium reactor; with thorium not being usable for nuclear weapons and the reactor being meltdown proof. The reactor can also be used to burn nuclear waste from other nuclear reactors. And China has also now become a leader in nuclear fusion research.

From far behind the West to 15 years ahead of the US within a decade and a half, reminds one of high speed rail doesn’t it? Or many other industrial sectors, possibly semiconductors within a decade or less. This will intensify the move of scientific research leadership of the world to China and away from the West, with China already in the lead as shown by the latest Nature Index (the global standard for such analyses).

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (China) is ranked first, Harvard (US) second, Chinese institutions in third, fourth and fifth places, Max Planck (Germany) sixth, Chinese institutions in seventh, eighth and ninth places, French National Centre for Scientific Research (France) tenth, Chinese eleventh and twelfth, Hermholtz Association of German Research Centres (Germany) thirteenth, Fudan University (China) fourteenth, MIT and Stanford (US) fifteenth and sixteenth, Sichuan (China) seventeenth, Oxford (UK) eighteenth, Tokyo (Japan) nineteenth, and National Institutes for Health (US) twentieth. China has 11 out of the top 20 institutions, 3 for the US, 2 for Germany, 1 for France, 1 for the UK, 1 for Japan. China also possesses 7 out of the next 20. This will only get worse as time passes, with China continuing to heavily fund and expand it scientific research centres, and with a student population much more skewed toward STEM than Western student populations. In addition, Western research centres heavily rely upon Chinese post-grads and professors who are being lured to China while being treated badly in the West.

What will the West do when China is seen as the leading nation in the mitigation of climate change, and utterly dominant in all of the related technologies? Also becoming rapidly independent of oil and gas which is not supplied domestically or by its allies (Russia and Iran) and good friends (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan etc.) within the EurAsian continent. Western fever dreams of an energy blockade of China will be rendered delusional, if they have not already been. And increasingly independent of Western microprocessor technology. China may then be seen by the world as the US was in the post-WW2 period, a shining light of technology and rising living standards; how long will Western propagandists be able to keep this truth away from their own citizens? The Western oligarch and courtier complaints about “over-capacity” are simply a smokescreen behind which to hide this new reality.