The west has had decades to watch and realise that renewables are the shit. Capitalism has failed to respond to that because oil barons were too strong and the failure of renewables to easily all be owned by one rich guy.
producing 90% of all solar panels, over 70% of all lithium batteries and 65% of all wind turbines.
This will effectively make China the essential lynchpin for world energy generation for decades to come (if it couldn’t be classified as such already).
Western capitalism completely shat the bed on the whole energy transition.
saying that there has even been a western energy transition is overly generous
Watching Westerners tie themselves into pretzels to attribute the acceleration of solar installation to anything other than the fact that China massively dropped the price of new panels would be hilarious if it weren’t so enraging.
We’ll see. Industrial states can turn quickly when they’ve got an economic incentive to do so. A big part of US O&G still hinges on uninterrupted access to the Mid Eastern oil fields, and that whole region is destabilizing rapidly.
The pricing in O&G is deeply unstable and the industry is vulnerable to sudden fluctuations (remember the -$43/bbl oil during COVID) that fuck up all the supply chains and cause huge layoffs. Renewable electricity is significantly more reliable, more regional, and increasingly profitable.
China isn’t adopting Nuclear/Renewables because the CCP have hearts of gold. These are legitimately better tools for long term regional stability. Westerners will learn this lesson the hard way, but the states that learn it first and fastest are going to see the largest economic windfalls.
I don’t think its a coincidence that Texas continues to trailblaze on wind and solar, despite having a political class ideologically opposed to it.
