There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.

 

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Power ⚡︎ Moves

There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.

 

Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security.

 

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

By David Gelles in New York; Somini Sengupta in Brasília and in Tirunelveli, India; Keith Bradsher in Beijing; and Brad Plumer in Washington. June 30, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china-clean-energy-power.html

 

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.

 

At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.

 

The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.

 

The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which have powered cars and factories, warmed homes and fueled empires for more than a century. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American “energy dominance” that eliminates dependence on foreign countries, particularly rival powers like China.

 

China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines. China, unlike the United States, doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own relative to its huge population. So it is eager to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.

 

The dangers for China of relying on politically unstable regions for energy were underscored recently when Israel attacked Iran, which sells practically all its oil exports to China.

 

While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.

 

China’s biggest automaker, its biggest battery maker and its biggest electronics company have each introduced systems that can recharge electric cars in just five minutes, all but erasing one of the most annoying hassles of E.V.s, the long charging times. China has nearly 700,000 clean energy patents, more than half of the world's total. Beijing’s rise as a clean power behemoth is altering economies and shifting alliances in emerging countries as far afield as Pakistan and Brazil.

 

The country is also taking steps that could make it hard for other countries, particularly the United States, to catch up. In April, Beijing restricted the export of powerful “rare earth” magnets, a business China dominates, unless they’re already inside fully assembled products like electric vehicles or wind turbines. While China recently started issuing some export licenses for the magnets, the moves signal that the world may face a choice: Buy China’s green energy technology, or do without.

 

China has also begun to dominate nuclear power, a highly technical field once indisputably led by the United States. China not only has 31 reactors under construction, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined, but has announced advances in next-generation nuclear technologies and also in fusion, the long-promised source of all-but-limitless clean energy that has bedeviled science for years.

 

“China is huge,” said Praveer Sinha, chief executive of Tata Power, an Indian conglomerate that makes solar panels in a high-tech factory near the southern tip of the country but relies almost entirely on Chinese-made silicon to make those panels. “Huge means huge. No one in the world can compete with that.”

 

While China is dominating clean energy industries, from patented technologies to essential raw materials, the Trump administration is using the formidable clout of the world’s biggest economy to keep American oil and gas flowing.

 

In a full reversal from the Biden administration’s effort to pivot the American economy away from fossil fuels, the Trump White House is opening up public lands and federal waters for new drilling, fast-tracking permits for pipelines and pressuring other countries to buy American fuels as a way of avoiding tariffs.

 

Washington is essentially pursuing a strong-arm energy strategy, both at home and abroad with allies and friends. It’s premised on the idea that the modern world is already designed around these fuels, and the United States has them in abundance, so exporting them benefits the American economy even if solar energy is cleaner and often cheaper.

 

The competition between the United States and China to sell the world their wares has serious consequences for the health of the planet.

 

Burning fossil fuels for more than 200 years has helped create the modern world while delivering great prosperity to developed countries such as the United States, which ranks historically as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it has also led to what scientists now say is a growing crisis. The carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of oil, gas and coal acts as a heat-trapping blanket, leading to rapid global warming.

 

Cheap Chinese-made solar, batteries and E.V.s have made the pivot to cleaner technologies possible for many large economies including Brazil, South Africa and even India, a regional rival to Beijing. That affordability is crucial for bringing down global emissions.

 

The scientific consensus is that warming, if unchecked, will continue to cause increasingly severe droughts and storms, potentially alter ocean currents and global weather patterns, disrupt food production, deepen a biodiversity crisis and inundate some of the world’s biggest cities as sea levels rise, among other risks.

 

The Trump administration has dismissed those concerns. The United States energy secretary, Chris Wright, a former natural gas executive, has described climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world.”

 

Asked about the diverging energy pathways of China and the United States, Ben Dietderich, a Department of Energy spokesman, said, “The United States is blessed with an abundant supply of energy resources and the Trump administration is committed to fully utilizing them to meet the growing energy needs of the American people.” Past efforts to encourage cleaner energy like solar or wind, he said, “harmed America’s energy security.”

 

Amanda Eversole, executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for fossil fuel companies, said her organization monitored Chinese advances and that she was downplaying their strategic threat. “We continue to keep a very close eye on what the Chinese are doing, because we believe it’s in our national security interests and our economic interest to continue to dominate from an American energy perspective,” she said.

 

The White House declined to comment on energy strategy and China’s advances.

 

Most of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. Yet as countries try to address the perils of climate change, they’ve been steadily adopting cleaner alternatives. By 2035, solar and wind power are expected to become the two largest sources of electricity production, surpassing coal and natural gas, according to the International Energy Agency.

 

As the cost of renewables keeps falling, the U.S. strategy may leave China poised to capitalize on the world’s growing appetite for not only cleaner but cheaper power.

 

“The U.S. will champion a fossil fuel economy, and China will become the leader of the low-carbon economy,” said Li Shuo, who heads the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The question for the U.S. now is, where do you go from here?”

 

How America Lost Its Lead

The United States had every opportunity to lead the world in renewables. In fact, it once did.

 

Americans created the first practical silicon photovoltaic cells in the 1950s and the first rechargeable lithium-metal batteries in the 1970s. The world’s first wind farm was built in New Hampshire nearly 50 years ago. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House in 1979.

 

But with oil, gas and coal in abundant supply, and the fossil-fuel industry funding efforts to downplay climate concerns, America’s commitment to promoting clean energy investment has ebbed and flowed, sometimes dramatically.

 

 

President Jimmy Carter at an event on the White House roof in 1979 after the solar panels behind him were installed there.. Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

For example, in 2009, the Obama administration began offering loan guarantees to emerging energy technologies. Tesla got $456 million, a loan that proved crucial to its later success.

 

Then there was Solyndra.

 

A maker of solar cells, Solyndra received a federal guarantee for loans totaling $528 million, then went out of business, leaving taxpayers on the hook. More than a decade has passed, yet critics of American efforts to promote clean energy still cite Solyndra as evidence of the folly of renewables.

 

Chinese officials have been mystified by the Solyndra fixation.

 

“You are a little bit worried by Solyndra? Very small companies, why are you worried?” Li Junfeng, a key architect of China’s wind and solar policies, said in a 2017 interview. Beijing had a bigger appetite for taking risks, which meant sometimes failing, but also sometimes reaping bigger payoffs.

 

China’s goal of dominating clean energy technology wasn’t about climate change. It was born in a moment of strategic self-awareness two decades ago, when the country’s leaders looked to the future and understood that controlling energy production was vital to national security.

 

In 2003, Wen Jiabao became China’s premier, the country’s second-highest position. A rare-earths geologist, Mr. Wen saw energy policy as both a business opportunity and geopolitical necessity.

 

China had become dependent on imported oil. It felt vulnerable to upheavals in the Middle East and to the control of shipping lanes by the United States and India, two sometimes hostile powers.

 

Air pollution in China was terrible, killing people and creating a global embarrassment with images of cities smothered in gray. And the economy still relied on relatively unskilled manufacturing. Mr. Wen saw in energy a chance to solve both problems by making China an energy innovator.

 

“Instead of making flip-flops, they’d make clean tech,” said Jennifer Turner, director of the China environment program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

 

Mr. Wen’s government essentially wrote a blank check.

 

China provided hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to wind, solar and electric car manufacturers while protecting its markets from foreign competitors. It established a global near-monopoly over many key raw materials, such as cobalt for batteries.

 

Low-cost electricity from heavily polluting coal plants allowed the country to run aluminum smelters and polysilicon factories more cheaply than anywhere else. Critics have also accused China of using forced labor in places like Xinjiang to drive down costs, though China denies this.

 

At the same time, China has invested in research and a skilled workforce. These moves offered Chinese clean energy companies a level of sustained support that was nonexistent in the United States.

 

“It’s hard to get China to commit to a long-term goal,” said Jian Pan, co-chairman of CATL, the world’s largest maker of batteries for electric vehicles and electric grids. “But when we commit, we really want to get it done, and all aspects of society — government, policy, private sector, engineering, everybody — work hard toward the same goal under a coordinated effort.”

 

China’s efforts paid off.

Little more than a decade ago, CATL was a start-up created to buy a Japanese electronics company’s nascent electric-car battery division. Today, from its headquarters, which are shaped like an enormous battery, it operates a global network of mines, chemical processors and factories. Its founder is one of the wealthiest people in the world.

 

Over that same short stretch of time, China came to dominate even clean energy industries the United States had once led. In 2008 the United States produced nearly half of the world’s polysilicon, a crucial material for solar panels. Today, China produces more than 90 percent. China’s auto industry is now widely seen as the most innovative in the world, besting the Japanese, the Germans and the Americans.

 

To slash manufacturing costs, China has automated its factories, installing more robots each year from 2021 through 2023 than the rest of the world combined, and seven times as many as the United States.

 

Eric Luo, vice-president of LONGi Green Energy Technology, a Chinese solar panel maker, said that a practice known as “cluster manufacturing” had proved beneficial. “There are places where, within a three- to four-hour drive, you can have everything,” he said. The components, the manufacturer, the skilled workforce, everything. “There’s nowhere else globally where you can have all that innovation clustered together.”

 

Clustering also imparts huge benefits in the car battery business. Robin Zeng, CATL’s founder, said in an interview last summer that it costs six times as much to build a battery factory in the United States as in China, and that was before the Trump administration set out to weaken the financial incentives to build such plants in the United States.

 

Beyond its domination of manufacturing and technology, China has also gone on an epic clean-energy building spree.

 

Last June, the Urumqi solar farm, the largest in the world, came online in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China. It is capable of generating more power than some small countries need to run their entire economies.

 

It’s hardly an anomaly. The other 10 largest solar facilities in the world are also in China, and even bigger ones are planned. The Chinese automaker BYD is currently building not one but two electric vehicle factories that will each produce twice as many cars as the largest car factory in the world, a Volkswagen plant in Germany.

 

The United States was slow to see the full picture. Only toward the end of the Obama administration and during the first Trump administration did many Washington policymakers realize they had surrendered so much of the clean energy race to China.

 

“The U.S. was asleep,” said Michael Carr, a former staff member at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee who is now executive director of Solar Energy Manufacturers for America, a trade group. “You can invent the greatest tech in the world, but if you don’t know how to manufacture it, it won’t matter.”

 

Of course, the United States could reverse course. A future administration could aggressively swing once again to clean energy research and investment.

 

But it will have lost precious time. Investments made years ago by China are paying off now, and Beijing is continuing to pour money into developing its domestic energy industry and exporting those goods to the world.

 

Beijing’s ‘Soft Power’ Ambitions

Among China’s biggest green-energy customers is a petrostate, Saudi Arabia. On desert land renowned for its boundless oil reserves, Chinese companies are building one of the world’s largest battery-storage projects alongside solar farms.

 

Around the world, Beijing is using its clean energy clout to build or expand political and economic relationships.

 

Both the United States and China not only see energy independence as essential at home, but understand that supplying other countries with energy is a vital way to project power. And yet, their approaches couldn’t be more different.

 

Today, China’s dominance of so many clean energy industries is enabling it to expand its sphere of influence by selling and financing energy technology around the world. These relationships allow China to forge multidecade financial, cultural and even military ties at a moment of shifting geopolitical alliances.

 

The projects read like a world atlas. Beijing is working on deals to supply nuclear reactors to countries like Turkey that once did business mainly with the United States and Europe. In Pakistan, China is already building what will be the country’s largest nuclear plant.

 

Chinese firms are building wind turbines in Brazil and electric vehicles in Indonesia. In northern Kenya, Chinese developers have erected Africa’s biggest wind farm. And across the continent, in countries rich with minerals needed for clean energy technologies, such as Zambia, Chinese financing for all sorts of projects has left some governments deeply in debt to Chinese banks.

 

Since 2023, Chinese companies have announced $168 billion in foreign investments in clean energy manufacturing, generation and transmission, according to Climate Energy Finance, a research group.

 

“They are dominating these markets,” said Dr. Turner of the Woodrow Wilson Center. “And market dominance can be a form of soft power.”

 

The Trump administration is taking a different road. By dismantling a vast network of foreign aid programs, it has abandoned America’s longstanding strategy for projecting soft power.

 

In its place it is taking a more transactional approach with other countries. In Saudi Arabia, for example, while the Chinese are building a battery project there, the United States recently agreed to a major arms sale, and an American company agreed to set up rare-earth mining, processing and magnet manufacturing. And it is moving aggressively to sell other countries more fossil fuels.

 

Mr. Trump, who last year accepted more than $75 million in campaign donations from oil and gas executives, promised to “drill, baby, drill” and deliver an era of “energy dominance.” In his first few months he has tried to clear the way for more exports and to nudge foreign governments to buy more American gas.

 

Ukraine, for example, is desperate to maintain military supplies from the United States and has signaled it would buy more American gas. It’s another example of the administration’s aggressive approach, even with friends.

 

America gets “geopolitical leverage from oil and gas,” said Varun Sivaram, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who helped write clean energy policy for the Biden administration. “The energy transition is actually very bad for the United States,” he said, “because we cede geopolitical and economic ground to a rival in China.”

 

What Will the World Buy?

The future is being defined one deal at a time. The United States is pressing South Korea and Japan to buy more Alaskan natural gas and invest in a huge, longshot pipeline project there. China has been demanding that the European Union allow electric cars from China into its large market, although that could cause widespread job losses in Europe’s own car industry.

 

There is unlikely to be an immediate winner in this global race. The world is only becoming more energy-hungry, stoking an appetite for both solar panels and oil, nuclear and natural gas.

 

That may work well both for Beijing and for Washington in the short term. The United States still has many customers for its enormous stores of oil, gas and coal. Roughly 80 percent of global energy needs are still met by fossil fuels.

 

But that proportion is widely expected to decline. The International Energy Agency forecasts that by midcentury, oil, gas and coal will fall below 60 percent of global energy needs.

 

And China is positioned to pick up the extra business.

 

“When the federal government of the United States decides to go out of the race, it doesn’t stop the race,” said Rafael Dubeux, a senior official in Brazil’s Finance Ministry. “Other countries keep moving.”