China’s Green Energy Boom

For decades, the world has run on oil. Then this year, the war on Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, and a fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade stopped.

The result was a scramble to buy solar panels from China. In March alone it shipped 68 gigawatts abroad, nearly three times all the solar Britain has ever installed.

Its own firms barely make a profit, and now they’re building factories across the Global South. Is this the end of the oil age, and of the American one?

Tim Sahay co-directs the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins and co-writes The Polycrisis with Kate Mackenzie. He tells Richard Hames how China became the world’s dominant electrostate, why its clean-tech firms are fleeing a price war at home, and what the Belt and Road 2.0 means for the rest of the world.

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