China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World

Indeed, the greatest beneficiaries of China’s renewables revolution may, in fact, be consumers, both inside and outside of China. In sun-blessed Australia, where rooftop solar panels sit atop nearly a third of all households, the country’s energy minister, Chris Bowen, proposed a “solar sharer program” to offer three hours of free electricity on sunny days. Solar and battery systems have allowed Hawaii to close its final coal power plant, and such systems are similarly helping other islands like Jamaica to reduce their need for imported fossil fuels.

One country—one leader, especially—is trying to buck this trend. Donald Trump hates many people and things, but wind turbines and solar panels seem to hold a special place of contempt in his heart. His administration has attempted to cancel major offshore and onshore wind projects, along with plans for Esmerelda 7, a solar megabase slotted for the Nevada desert that would have been worthy of Western China. Trump and his energy secretary, Chris Wright, often speak of American energy dominance, but they are crippling American firms’ ability to deploy and build the cheapest sources of electricity in the history of this planet, in favor of a combination of long-in-the-tooth arguments about fossil inevitability and long-shot bets on small modular nuclear reactors and, yes, fusion.

Even among billionaires who don’t share Trump’s belief that climate change is a hoax, this latter affinity for far-out, breakthrough technologies has long been a hallmark of American climate investment and philanthropy. This attitude is epitomized by Bill Gates, who once dismissed existing green technologies like solar and wind power as “cute.” Instead, 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. (Recently, just as it was becoming clear that the transition to renewables was spiraling from success to success, Gates wrote a memo saying he was pulling back from climate funding altogether.)

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. It could still be held back or slowed down. Yes, it is the result of the conscious choices made by people, firms, and governments, many of the most critical ones made in China. But it is happening now, and faster than our systems—electricity grids, industrial sectors, labor, geopolitics, and more—are ready for.

And it’s a good thing, too, because there is another force powered by the sun’s fusion that is also arriving at a force and scale that we are not prepared for: climate change. When the Category 5 Hurricane Melissa tore through Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic in late October, killing more than 90 and leaving tens of thousands homeless, most government investments in protecting people from the storm were not up to the challenge. What did provide some refuge were rooftop solar panels, which kept the lights on when the sun rose the next morning. A global energy system undergirds modern life. Through all the chaos, that system is getting a major upgrade.

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