Clean Energy Keeps Growing In China

As the US pulls back its clean energy investments, China is doubling down

Earlier this year, the US installed its 250th GW of solar generation capacity. It took the country two decades to reach that point.

In the first 6 months of this year alone, China installed a similar amount of solar capacity.

In addition to being a world leader in solar, China also has the world’s largest coal fleet, which continues to grow in size. But the country’s investments in solar and wind have allowed Chinese utilities to run those coal plants less frequently.

For more than a decade, clean energy’s share of total electricity generation has been rising. Here’s a chart from Kyle Chan’s excellent vibe-coded dashboard using Ember data showing that trend:

China is also doubling down on electric vehicles. The country has been making investments in the sector for more than a decade now. Those investments have helped China become not just the largest EV producer in the world, but the largest producer of all vehicles.

In 2025, while Elon Musk was gutting investments in US foreign aid through DOGE that would have saved millions of lives, Wang Chuanfu—the CEO of China’s top EV maker, BYD—was quietly opening factories and showrooms in countries around the world. Musk’s embrace of far-right politics and Nazi parties in Europe alienated millions of customers and destroyed what was once one of the world’s best brands.

Tesla’s sales fell 9% in 2025, while BYD’s grew 28%. By year’s end, BYD had outsold Tesla by over 600,000 electric vehicles, becoming the world’s top EV maker.

China, and the companies that operate in the country, are far from perfect. Even if the country were a model global actor, it would be difficult to recreate the country’s engineering-led culture in America.

Still, there are lessons that America and other countries should pay attention to. For me, one of the main lessons in the Chinese clean energy story is that industrial policy can work, but only if committed to over decades.

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I wrote a much longer story about the history of China’s EV industry and industrial policy here. It focuses on the battery manufacturer CATL, but it’s a good history of the entire EV sector.

To learn more about China’s clean energy industrial policy, I recommend Henry Sanderson’s Volt Rush. My favorite book on China, in general, is Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition.