China has attracted global recognition for its record-breaking development of solar energy, but this renewable energy revolution is no flawlessly executed program. The situation’s chaos is often glossed over in mainstream characterizations of China’s solar transformation, explains Dr. Jeremy Wallace, but it is exemplified in Pakistan by the displacement of Chinese-funded gas plants by Chinese-made solar panels. Solar has swept through existing grid systems, challenging traditional technical and economic notions of how a country should manage its energy systems. As China spirals between boons and repercussions, the rest of the world must contend with the fact that China’s solar revolution is very much a revolution, happening now, and happening rapidly. Everything is going to change.
Jeremy L. Wallace is the A. Doak Barnett Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), previously holding the position of Professor of Government at Cornell University. He serves as an editor at Good Authority and writes the China Lab newsletter. With research interests spanning China, climate change, cities, and statistics, he has authored two books, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China and Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China.
Isobel Li: Earlier this year, WIRED published your article titled China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World. Could you give an overview of your work?
Jeremy Wallace: The general story is that China is either portrayed as a villain or a hero for the climate story. China is by far the world’s leading polluter, most of its electricity to this day comes from coal, and China continues to build new coal power plants. If you focus solely on that, then you have this narrative of China as the villain. Sometimes you see the United States or other countries say that they’re not going to act on climate because China’s not going to act, and why should they sacrifice when China’s polluting?
The other narrative that I think is increasingly dominant today is the reality that China dominates in these clean, renewable technologies that are generally seen as the key to climate decarbonization, most prolifically the solar industry. China’s buildout of solar is what I talked about as spiraling from success to success and that’s a really fascinating story. The basic analysis is that China, despite building all these coal plants, burned less coal in 2025 than it did in 2024, and that’s because of all the renewable generation that came online. Electricity demand grew about 5% last year, and even with that growth in demand, clean generation was able to match it. We’re beginning to think we’re at the peak of China’s emissions.
The reality is that China is somewhere in between these two contrasting narratives. China is a complex place with lots of players. It is still the world’s largest emitter and probably will be for decades to come. And yet it is also the source of a green tech revolution that is making global decarbonization possible.
IL: On the note of spiraling from success to success, I’d love to hear more about the process of China coming to dominate in solar.
JW: Some people think origin stories are boring; others want to know how we got to this present moment. I think in the policy space, people care about the origin story for three reasons. One is history, and the other two points are can we recreate this, and is the way they got there fair?
You can think about the solar industry in particular— other sectors are a little bit different, EVs and batteries are a little bit different— as having four different stages. First, pre-2009, before the global financial crisis, you have some individual firms trying to start businesses building solar panels in China, mostly to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor and export and sell to Germany and Spain and other countries that are subsidizing solar. That’s not a Chinese state project in any way, other than local governments in China supporting any new business that wants to locate in their area.
The second stage is the global financial crisis, 2009 to 2015. The European markets somewhat disappear. Countries realize they can’t subsidize solar as much as they had hoped to, in part because so much was built and they weren’t expecting that to happen. For the local producers of solar panels in China, they’re faced with their key market disappearing. So they push local governments and finally the central government to expand local feed-in tariffs so China can help deploy local solar production, and this helps local producers survive and continue to expand during this time.
After 2015, China’s central government is beginning to realize that its subsidies, just like the Europeans realized before, are maybe too generous. It can’t afford to subsidize solar to this extent— and it doesn’t need to, as solar companies are producing panels so cheaply. From 2015 to about last year, you saw this winding down of central level subsidies.
Last year— the fourth stage and current moment— you have what looks like a final ratcheting down of subsidies, particularly for price supports for deployed solar panels in the grid, which previously dictated that solar would get the same price that coal would get for generated electricity. So you saw this huge run up where everybody was trying to get access to that attractive pricing in May of 2025. Then you see nobody built anything in June because they had all rushed to get that better price. The concern was, is this just the end? Is this new pricing regime going to lead to a complete collapse of solar deployment in China or not?
Despite these initial concerns, basically we’ve seen a return to something close to normal in the last three months of last year. We saw deployments over twenty gigawatts a month, which is an amazing pace. If that pace continues, then China would hit most of its targets.
IL: Given these external pressures, would you characterize the domestic response as having any intentional strategy or were they just trying to invest in local business wherever possible?
JW: I think it was more the latter. Solar was not a project that the Chinese central government was always wanting to be in charge of. To this day, solar is still a very small percentage of total electricity generation in the country. Every time you deploy a solar panel, it doesn’t work for most of the day, so even though China deployed over 300 gigawatts of solar panels last year, you have to divide that number by five or six in order to think about how much generation you’re actually going to get. It’s close to the equivalent of sixty nuclear power plants instead of 300 nuclear power plants, because we think of nuclear plants as about one gigawatt. However, China’s not building anywhere close to fifty nuclear power plants. So the idea that China can produce that much electricity is very significant. At the same time, solar generation was only around 10% of China’s electricity generation in 2025. To say something is world-changing when it’s at some level marginal is just looking at the trends and reading them forward. That’s where everyone is so excited about the solar industry in China and what it’s changing in domestic and global markets.
IL: It’s insightful to see that China can be less reliant on coal despite continuing to invest in it, especially given the fossil fuel reliance of the United States. Despite differences in political systems, how can the U.S. or other liberal democracies learn from China’s process of overcoming barriers to renewable energy?
JW: Authoritarianism does not eliminate politics. That’s a major piece of argumentation that I make, that we can’t assume that politics somehow goes away because there aren’t regular elections. Xi Jinping doesn’t sit in Beijing and everything he does just happens. There’s a whole world of other political figures, of companies, of workers, of interests that are being navigated at various points in time. And Xi Jinping as an individual is probably not particularly aware of most of the facts about solar that I just laid out. So we have to remember that politics does exist in other places.
In terms of what lessons the United States or other liberal democratic states could learn, I think the first and most important lesson is that decarbonization is going to require a lot of building and a lot of change. The energy transition is not a transition that is going to be clean and simple and out of sight, out of mind. It will change so much about the way that we live, especially if we’re serious about deep decarbonization, which probably means living in denser communities, which means building more housing, which means shifting where people live and work and the amount they drive.
It may even change what we eat, and food gets very political very quickly. The basic idea of the book Feed the People is that the first level is persuasion— changing people’s expectations that the status quo is fine, we just need to change away from fossil fuels. What a decarbonized world means in reality is that we need to change our lives and the built environment will look different. There will be more wind turbines and solar panels. We will not be driving as much, even if it’s all EVs, because of all the steel and energy involved in car transportation. We need to have more walkable communities.
So that’s the other lesson, the policy lesson, about what we need. What are the industries that the United States really needs? What are the different components and skills that the United States or other states could bring to the global project of decarbonization? Because China is the world’s largest emitter, producing about 30% of emissions while the United States emits only about 10%. Even if the United States did everything right domestically, it doesn’t solve the problem. Solutions have to be global. We have to think about ways in which the U.S. can help solve global problems, probably leaning into things the U.S. is good at, which are financing and software.
Financing is one of the major problems when we have solar panels to the extent that we do out there in the world, and the Chinese system is facing this problem right now where no one’s making a lot of money with all these solar panels. This was the crux of the WIRED piece— solar is a huge mess that might be saving the world. Part of that huge mess is that inside of capitalism, businesses only make sense or feel stable if they’re making profits. Right now, nobody’s making a lot of profits, even as society is doing well and consumers are benefiting. And that’s a complicated situation. We can try to figure out pricing schemes— what is socially desirable, what is a reasonable return for solar manufacturers, for solar farms, for the overall electricity grid to be built out efficiently while also decarbonizing as quickly as possible. We build our grid for peak demand. No one tells you to not turn on a light because everyone else is also using their lights; everything just cycles on when they cycle on. But if we can shift the time when air conditioners start or when cars recharge away from those moments of peak load, then we can reduce it without building huge amounts of extra infrastructure. There are huge amounts of savings that can be made there. But how can we do that in a way that is not politically frustrating to people? How can you make this a consumer experience that people are happy with?
These are some of the technological pieces on the finance side and software side, which is all to say, importing or making solar panels in the United States is not a major thing that needs to be done. Solar panels are not like oil— once you buy a solar panel, you’re not dependent on a flow of solar panels coming every day in the way that you are with oil. As we are seeing in the Middle East crisis right now, the flow of oil gets caught and all of a sudden the world seems to fall apart. But renewables are not like that. A solar panel can produce electricity for 25+ years. They don’t need more parts from China. When people talk about the US being dependent on Chinese solar panels, it’s very different from being dependent on Qatari or Russian natural gas, so this notion of equivalence is mistaken.
Ultimately, what are the key industries that the United States does need to think about and securitize? I think the world of drones and the world of batteries makes more sense to think about as a key national security interest. Amidst a war going on in the Middle East right now, making those technologies at home feels like something that is probably necessary. So when I think about the need to build industries for the future in the United States, I don’t think about solar panels, I think about these other sectors.
IL: Returning to the topic of coal, I was curious if China’s expansion of coal is necessary given solar energy expansion. If there are coal producers paying to produce, does expansion really make sense?
JW: To explain the technical concept of ramp rates with an example of grilling outside, my dad loves charcoal grills but I’m impatient. With a gas grill, you turn it on and it goes full heat right away, whereas with the charcoal grill, my dad has to go out 20 minutes beforehand to light the coals and that takes a while to heat up. It’s a slower ramp to full power, and that difference is why it’s really hard to turn some systems off and on. A battery can go off or on very quickly. A coal power plant, or let alone a nuclear power plant, does not cycle on and off in that way. For that reason, you have a lot of facilities in China— especially coal-based ones— that just keep running. Even though it may not be productive to run when there’s enough solar and wind, facilities know that the sun is going to set. They don’t want to shut the plant down then turn it back on.
The other interesting problem is that in China, there are combined heat and power plants where local heating systems are based on coal power generation. So in the winter when you need the heat, even if you don’t need the electricity, these power plants need to run.
It’s another way in which something that makes sense economically— to efficiently use the resources that you have— ends up being a little bit problematic in a world where you have the free gifts of clean electricity from solar and wind and so on. Figuring out how to navigate all these technical pieces involves a lot of deep political work.
IL: On the international scale with Chinese solar deployment, you wrote about Germany experiencing negative electricity prices and Pakistan’s “death spiral” of people abandoning the grid in favor of their own solar panels. I’m curious how other countries are trying to respond or prevent these situations from happening.
JW: We have to think about situations as connected to consumers and producers. The people in Pakistan were dealing with an unreliable electricity grid that didn’t provide. There were blackouts and all these other problems. So they got fed up with the situation, decided to put up solar panels and now batteries on their own facilities— whether that’s a small factory or an individual household— and that’s a good thing for the consumers. They’re happy with the decision they made. The problem is for the grid, and interestingly it’s an example of the way in which the solar revolution is not all planned by China because the big facilities in Pakistan that are losing money now are also Chinese-funded, so Chinese-made solar panels are displacing Chinese-funded gas plants. The situation is hard because not everyone can put solar panels on their roof. Grids in general are very good technologies, and there are ways to incorporate solar that work better for everyone, but Pakistan has not figured that out yet.
As for the German situation, a negative price is the grid is paying you to figure out how to use electricity. You as an individual probably are not thinking well, I should really run the toaster right now unless you actually wanted to toast something. But if you as an industrial player could heat up something more at a given period of time, or shift around your usage in various ways in response to price signals, then maybe that could shift the structure of demand along the lines of what I was talking about with software— it’s not just getting people used to changing when they turn on their A/C, but it could also be industrial players shifting around their production technologies or having things that act like batteries for energy charge up when things are cheap and then use it later. For instance, a lot of factories need heat to melt things or to put things together. If you can save the electricity at a given moment as heat, you could use that heat at some other point in time. There are all kinds of interesting technologies that I think will come along that try to manage this reality that we’re going to have, where we’ll have ample energy at some periods of time and then other moments we won’t have as much.
I think that the other way to decarbonization is just using less, like degrowth. While there is some attractiveness to that from a social point of view, I do think that it is not politically tenable to tell people who are used to having lattes in the morning that they need to go back to not having that. People are used to the comforts that they have, and asking people to give them up is often very, very difficult.
That’s how I see the international implications of what China is doing. It’s about how we incorporate these technologies in ways that make sense for our societies.
IL: How might China’s renewable energy deployments and clean technology leadership fit into the bigger picture of its international climate responsibilities?
JW: China updated its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) last fall and since the United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement, China is obviously doing more than the United States. That being said, if we are giving China this mantle of climate leadership globally, I was very disappointed by the NDC as part of the process to decarbonize globally. China was very unambitious with its target, and I think that’s very disappointing. Politically, domestically, I think the government is worried. It is hard to shut things down, democracy or non-democracy. This is part of politics. The government has not yet figured out how to wind down the coal sector, and I don’t think they’re particularly in a rush to do so, which is a shame because I think they could move even faster and decarbonize and learn lessons that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere much faster than they than they are.
The slow policy push to further deploy domestically is at some level an opportunity. There’s more space for American or German or other firms in other parts of the world to take advantage of the fact that the Chinese government is not pushing even harder in these spaces.
IL: Do you think that China’s government has the potential to demonstrate an intrinsic motivation to act faster?
JW: Countries tend to do things that make political and economic sense, not because of vibes or feelings. China is moving slower, not because it’s mean or evil. It’s because it’s politically difficult. It is hard to tell communities that are based on coal economics to shut down.
We live in a world where states and companies do what makes sense for them. Right now, we are in a world where the cheap technology is Chinese-made solar, and I don’t think the fact that it is now cheaper for China to use clean electricity than coal makes it less morally good. People often like the idea of virtue signaling, but we shouldn’t attack China as morally inferior because they’re not doing this out of moral righteousness. That they’re doing solar energy out of economic and political calculus is not somehow worse.