Blown away: How China is making Trump’s war on wind almost irrelevant

Xi Jinping is the world’s most important man at the moment. Certainly when the subject is renewable energy.

DNV’s latest Energy Transition Outlook is just another indicator that the general secretary of China’s communist party is the one to admire. Not for his politics, but for the country’s results when it comes to the installation of new, renewable energy production.

I could go on. While China’s political system and the country’s human rights record are terrible, they do know how to build wind and solar farms.

“Chinese exports propel the transition”

So much so that DNV now rates the war on wind in the US as of little relevance in the bigger scheme of things.

Sure, Donald Trump is using legal and probably some illegal tactics to stop the wind industry. That causes huge problems for Orsted, Equinor and a host of other companies who thought the USA were a modern, politically stable country where investments should be safe and sound.

“Policy reversals in the US will have only a marginal impact on the global energy transition”, is the first highlight in the DNV report. And the researchers note: “Chinese cleantech exports continue to propel the transition in the rest of the world”. Apart from Europe, “most countries are embracing competitive Chinese technologies”.

There is no doubt that China isn’t playing by anyone else’s rules. Their turbines are clearly subsidised, which is an important reason they are winning tenders all over the world, bar in Western Europe and North America.

For the climate, that doesn’t matter. China’s way is yielding results, as opposed to Trump’s oil-obsessed efforts. And while the renewable industry desperately needs a fair fight, first and foremost, the world needs much more renewable energy.

Subsidies has played a part

Subsidies have been a very important factor in the massive growth of renewable production so far. Europe has tried to move away from that, with only some success. In many European countries, it’s becoming harder to increase production due to market limitations and political opposition. So, the European suppliers have also had fewer opportunities to scale and reduce construction costs.

DNV points out how learning curves are limited by market separations. And size matters. We see that in lots of markets, not just renewables. However, security matters as well. This is now an essential argument for any European or North American supplier, when they fight non-Western competitors.

DNV calls this “dilemmas, including varying degrees of willingness to import cheap Chinese technologies”.

But it’s not only a “dilemma”. It’s the major challenge. More important day by day, as China moves ahead while Trump fumbles.