For almost the past two decades, China has been the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Not only does it have half the world’s coal-fired power stations, it’s still approving plans for more. China’s emissions also come from its huge production of cement and steel; its emissions from petrochemicals are rising. It has also been responsible for carbon emissions elsewhere in the world, financing the construction of coal-fired power stations from Pakistan to Indonesia, Serbia and Bangladesh.
But at this month’s Cop30, the UN climate summit in Belém, China is able to flaunt another – somewhat contradictory – title: it is also the world’s biggest user of renewable energy.
In the first six months of this year, the country added new solar panels and wind turbines on a scale that would power around three-quarters of the UK’s energy needs. China’s solar, batteries and EV industries expanded three times faster than the country’s overall economy in 2024 and contributed $1.9tn to China’s GDP, the equivalent of Australia’s entire economic output in a year.
‘It’s no longer a story about emissions reduction. It’s about economic prosperity’
Li Shuo, China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute
“China has rewritten the narrative on climate action,” said Li Shuo, who worked for Greenpeace in Beijing and now leads the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC. “It's no longer a story about emissions reductions, it’s now an economic prosperity story.”
This dramatic change has not just transformed China, it is reshaping the energy transition beyond its borders. Last year China produced most of the world’s solar panels and wind turbines, half the world’s heat pumps, more than two-thirds of the world’s EVs and refined seven out of 10 of the critical minerals required to make them.
While most countries still rely on fossil fuels for the bulk of their energy needs, China is transforming the ways people all over the world consume energy. “China’s green energy solutions are cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives in almost any country in the world,” said Mathias Larsen at the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute.
“Almost every rooftop in every major city in Pakistan now has a Chinese solar panel on it,” said Haneea Isaad from the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in Pakistan. After the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coal and gas became unaffordable for people, she said. Average earners were spending a third of their salaries on energy bills. Now a payment of three months’ salary for a solar kit and installation gives free solar power for the foreseeable future.
Rural areas have been connected to the rest of the world for the first time. Families blast air-conditioners through longer, hotter summers, some even sell excess back to the grid. Businesses, factories, fishing boats and farms are all being transformed.
The uptake in solar has been so dramatic that the Sahiwal coal-fired power station, which was installed as recently as 2017, is now almost obsolete. In some months its usage is zero.
It was financed by China as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (which no longer supports fossil fuel projects). Isaad is looking into how Pakistan can recoup the $1bn it owes China for a fleet of coal-fired power stations, by trading some of the emissions it may – thanks to Chinese solar – now never need to use.
China’s success in advancing renewable energy hasn’t been driven by altruism – it has been developing renewables for its own economic and energy security concerns. The country’s main fossil fuel resource is coal and its reserves are likely to last for only another 40 years. While geopolitical tensions mean that China doesn’t want to rely on oil and gas imports, Beijing is looking for self-sufficiency.
In 2015, Xi Jinping announced the goal to reach net zero by 2060. By 2018 he’d written the building of an “ecological civilisation” into China’s constitution, and policy plans. This language asserted green growth as a project conceived of and run by China, rather than one imposed by international pressure.
A villager walks over burning charcoal in a traditional ritual at Shuangfeng village in Jinhua
In a centrally planned economy, the direction-setting from the top gave confidence to investors. Entrepreneurs flew with it. Electric vehicle startups emerged out of China’s tech sector and were inflected from the start with a spirit of innovation. The iPhone used to be the most desirable product for a young person in China. Now it’s the EV. Chinese EVs are PlayStation compatible and have interior design quirks such as strummable guitar strings inside passenger doors. BYD beat Volkswagen to become the biggest selling car brand inside China in 2023, and now outsells Tesla in Europe. Its success is nudging leading automakers to compete with their own electric models.
“In the past, the story was that we need to sacrifice for climate change, we need to drive a worse car, or one that's more expensive,” Larsen said. China has changed that.
China’s renewable energy success appears to have resolved the ultimate conundrum of the climate crisis: how to pursue growth, without making too many compromises, while curbing a rise in emissions. This year, remarkably, China’s emissions have plateaued, five years before its own target, partly because of the success of its renewable energy, including the adoption of EVs by Chinese drivers. Some analysts urge caution, though: part of the story is the decline in emissions from cement and steel making as the property sector experiences a contraction.
For some countries, China’s solution comes with its own conundrums: what is the political cost of decarbonisation, if it means relying on China for the technology?
Nigeria, for example, has shown concern about a flood of Chinese solar imports. Nigeria hopes for international investment in its own domestic solar production and to compete with Chinese solar panels.
Meanwhile, as China’s vice-premier, Ding Xuexiang, is asking the world to remove trade barriers on green tech, China’s lead in renewable energy makes the EU anxious. “In recent years we have all witnessed what happens when a single country gains control over the supply of a critical product or technology,” Ursula von der Leyen , president of the European Commission, said in a speech to the European Parliament last month. “At any moment, those dependencies can be turned into instruments of pressure… Europe must control the technologies that will shape our future.”
For Chinese green tech business leaders, European suspicions make the continent look like a geopolitically risky partner. Now they are shifting towards “asset light” investments rather than opening factories in Europe. The recent seizure by the Netherlands of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned chipmaker, has accelerated this “pivot away”, Li Shuo said.
So can China’s dominance of renewables inspire Europe to deepen its support of Europe’s own green energy sectors, and invest in renewables in the “global south”? China’s global green tech boom is expanding beyond its exports. Since 2022, green energy firms have been investing in building production facilities for renewable energy solutions around the world.
Mathias Larsen, in partnership with the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, calculates that these investments, the majority in the global south, amount to around $225bn. It’s a sum even larger than the US Marshall plan spending in Europe after the war, Larsen said.
Some Chinese green tech factories overseas will bring Chinese production closer to the lithium and cobalt reserves it needs. Many are still under construction, but will sell solar panels, wind turbines, EVs and batteries to markets in their host countries. This will give developing countries even cheaper opportunities to “leapfrog” fossil fuels and grow their economies using renewable energy.
China has yet to phase out coal – policymakers haven’t ruled out a rebound in emissions. And conservative factions in China still argue that if the US isn’t stepping up internationally, why should China? But Li Shuo believes this could change in the next 10 years.
First, China’s public are feeling the impact of increasing climate events. In July a flood killed more than 40 people in an area near Beijing that is usually parched. And people are talking about the climate crisis more on social media. The Chinese solar-lunar calendar usually brings spring and mid-autumn festivals in time with season changes. Not this year. After the hottest summer on record, autumn barely came. In October the hashtag “What happened to autumn?” was trending. A video went viral of baby swallows shivering on a step in north-east China. Without autumn, they’d missed their window to fly south. They flapped their wings but were too cold to lift off.
Li Shuo thinks China will realise that taking an international leadership role on accelerating the climate agenda is aligned to their economic interests. “China’s government will over time come out of their cocoon and become that butterfly to drive global climate action,” he said.
Photographs by Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images, AFP, Getty