How China Is Driving Down Electricity Costs With Renewables

China is reshaping its energy economy with renewables like wind and solar—and flooding the world with affordable solar technology.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:33Ira Flatow?

  Hi, it's Ira Flatow, and this is Science Friday. China has the world's biggest wind farm, 7,000 turbines. It's no secret you can see them from space. So why, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, did President Trump find it necessary to lie about China's huge wind production?

• 0:54Speaker 02

  China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven't been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that? That's a good way of looking at it. They're smart. China's very smart. They make them, they sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them, but they don't use them themselves. They put up a couple of big wind farms, but they don't use them. They just put them up to show people what they could look like. They don't spin, they don't do anything.

• 1:23Ira Flatow?

  How much of that is actually true? Here to talk more about it is my guest, Jeremy Wallace, professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. He's written a new article about China's solar and wind for Wired magazine called "China's Renewable Energy Revolution Is A Huge Mess That Might Save The World." Dr. Wallace, welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:49Ira Flatow?

  Let's get right into this. Doesn't China have the world's largest wind farm? I mean, don't they spin and make electricity?

• 1:55Speaker 03

  They do spin and make electricity. China has by far the most wind installed around the world, about as much as the rest of the world combined. The idea that China is only making them and not using them is completely wrong. There is, as ever, a tiny grain of truth behind...

• 2:15Speaker 03

  The kind of piece that Trump is making, which is that you often do have curtailment when you have renewable energy, because sometimes the wind is spinning turbines more than the actual demand for electricity out there in the system. In the end, remember, we always have to have electricity, the amount of supply and demand has to match perfectly every second, or else everything gets kind of our machinery, our computers, the phone I'm talking with, everything would be fried. So we have to control the system so it matches completely. And so sometimes what that means is that you have too much, too much supply, too much free electricity generated by the wind. And so that doesn't always work. In renewable world, we talk about this as curtailment, but it's, it's

• 3:00Speaker 03

  really, it's just part of the system. It's not a, not a problem and not fake.

• 3:04Ira Flatow?

  Isn't that a good problem to have?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  It's a good problem to have. It means you don't have to turn on other sources of power. And increasingly, it's something that you can use to charge batteries.

• 3:15Ira Flatow?

  And China is making lots of batteries too, aren't they?

• 3:18Speaker 03

  They are. China is producing and now also deploying more of these technologies than anyone else.

• 3:26Ira Flatow?

  And let's talk about solar, because solar is very big in China too. Don't they have the world's biggest solar production?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Yes. So solar is growing even more rapidly than wind. And to take a step back, when we think about the, because the numbers are going to be a bit confusing for, if you don't have a graph to look at or a table. So if we think about the amount of electricity capacity, the generating capacity of a system, obviously, it's not always on all the time, as we already said. And if you need to match supply and demand every moment, but if we measure the amount that the system could generate, the US has about 1,300 gigawatts of electricity generating capacity around the country. China has about three times that, 3,700 gigawatts. And that's everything. That's coal and nuclear and hydro, along with

• 4:17Speaker 03

  all the solar and wind. China is by far the largest producer of these technologies, but it is also by far the largest deployer of these technologies. China, for the past couple of years, has been putting up about as much solar and wind as the rest of the world combined. So it makes a lot of these, it exports them to other parts of the world. But the main audience, the main demand for Chinese-made solar and wind is domestically at home. And China last year deployed about 350 gigawatts of solar power, which is, if you kind of do the numbers, about a quarter of our US total generating capacity.

• 4:56Ira Flatow?

  Hmm. And China exports a lot of its technology like solar panels. It's the world's biggest exporter, correct?

• 5:05Speaker 03

  It is, it is, it is. It is powering this green tech revolution that is happening and it is exporting huge amounts of them. It makes, last year it made about 600 gigawatts of solar panels and installed about 350 at home and sent the rest to every place on the planet other than the United States. The United States doesn't buy a lot of Chinese solar panels anymore.

• 5:32Ira Flatow?

  So who's buying them?

• 5:34Speaker 03

  It's a great question. They are going in almost every direction to companies, to individuals, to big kind of power grid facilities around the world. The think tank Ember has a great resource that looks at Chinese solar exports around the world. On a monthly basis, you can see where the ships are headed to and some of the fascinating trends there. I'll limit myself to three. One is the African countries are kind of just in the past year and a half really seeing a spike in solar imports from China. And it's quite exciting because of the problems of energy poverty that those countries, that

• 6:18Speaker 03

  many of those countries have experienced for a long time. A second is India, which is doing something really fascinating. It is importing lots of completed solar panels from China, but it's also increasingly importing kind of components of those solar panels. So the cells and wafers that kind of get finally assembled up into a panel. And it's doing that because it's trying to build out its own solar production facility. And it's, but it's doing that not by kind of doing it all domestically, but by importing the components and tools from China. And then the third one is a country like Pakistan where they are buying so much solar panels that it is completely remaking the electricity system of that country.

• 7:03Ira Flatow?

  So solar panels are so cheap that making solar electricity is cheaper than any other form, right?

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Yes, the, the, I mean, the reason why everyone's so excited about solar is that it is now the cheapest source of electricity in the history of the world. And because of this, people want to buy them, and because of that, a lot of people want to make them. And so it's really, uh, it's really a great story. It is, it is complicated and it's a huge mess, as I said in the Wired piece, because it is remaking a lot of the things that we thought we knew about electricity systems, about how like the energy system works.

• 7:43Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, I, I saw a quote of yours that said in Europe, Chinese-made photovoltaic panels are so cheap that cost less than fencing materials.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Yes, it is, it is. And so you're seeing people go to Home Depot equivalents or something and buy solar panel material and put it up as a vertical fence. Now, hopefully those are plugged in and actually used doing something. A, a pattern that you are really seeing in, especially in Germany, is something called balcony solar. Well, where you'll get this cheap, um, small set of panels, you can hang it on your balcony, plug it into your outlet in your building, and it will just power most of, um, your usage in, inside of your home.

• 8:27Ira Flatow?

  I mean, I mean, if, if China's not exporting them to the United States, if I want to put up solar panels, where are my panels coming from?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  So the United States does do a lot of its own production. Um, the major, the, the biggest producer in the US is called First Solar, which makes its own kind of thin film solar panels that are for, for rooftop applications that has been relatively successful. But most solar panels, um, around the world are, are these polysilicon types that are a little bit different, and that's what China dominates in. Um, the solar panels that we make in the United States or that we buy, that you can buy in the United States are often, if they're not made here, they're made in Southeast Asia or India or, um, in other parts of the world.

• 9:10Ira Flatow?

  We know that China was a huge producer of fossil fuels. Has it changed tack now? Is it going electric instead of fossil?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  That question is perfectly phrased, and I want to really dive into the the words you use there. Is it going electric rather than fossil? In the United States, electricity is about twenty percent of our energy system, right? When you fill up your car with gasoline, that's not an electricity, but it is energy. So if you think about all the things that we do, heating our homes, driving our cars, flying planes, that is not electricity. That's eighty percent of the energy use in the United States. China has reduced that to seventy percent, and now does almost a third of its energy system is electricity based. That being said, China's electricity is still about half coal.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  And so it is still by far the world's largest producer of coal. It's by far the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide and and greenhouse gases generally. But it is electrifying, and it is also, and like that coal percentage is going down. Over time, as it builds more and more solar and more and more wind, the percentage is going down. And last year, it seems like we maybe are now at a peak of its total usage going down. So you can think, well, the share of usage is important because it shows the trajectory about where things are going. But if the actual total amount of coal goes up and up every year, it's hard to to claim that as a win.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  But in fact, last year, we saw so much solar, so much wind being installed. And even though China had lots of new demand for electricity with air conditioning and data centers and everything else, they actually burned less coal last year than they have in previous years.

• 11:04Ira Flatow?

  So what are you watching for this year as far as renewables in China?

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Twenty twenty five was a really fascinating year. And there was this moment in the beginning of the year in in May, when we saw this incredible spike of solar deployment around the country, where we saw ninety gigawatts, three gigawatts every day. That's a three nuclear power plants every day of solar panels going in. And part of the reason why that spike happened was because the country is trying to address the kind of like the rapid influx of these materials, which is wreaking havoc on the grid in some ways, but also just in the prices of what's going on inside of their electricity system.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  They are not sure, they wanted to to to adjust the pricing. And so everyone was trying to get in on the old deal before the new deal came into effect. And so what I'm worried about or interested in in 2026 is where we will see things going forward because the the arrangements for prices for solar and wind electricity in China today are not as generous as they were a year ago. So are we going to see a real retrenchment, a real slowdown, or are we going to see kind of a continual continual development, even with slightly less generous terms?

• 12:26Ira Flatow?

  Well, Jeremy, we'll we'll watch it along with you. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 12:33Ira Flatow?

  Jeremy Wallace, professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. You can find his article on China's renewables in the latest issue of Wired magazine. This episode was produced by Annette Heist. Thanks for listening, and please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. We'll see you soon.