I've always found it amusing that the primary driver for solar innovation stems from China's goal ending its civil war with Taiwan. Any conflict with Taiwan would involve the US, which would blockade the Straits of Malacca and halt Chinese oil imports, putting on enough economic pressure to drive the war to a halt after several months. Any attempt to reclaim Taiwan would end in failure.
This was a P0 national security issue, So China hyper-invested into alternative energy technologies, subsidizing and overproducing solar technologies at a loss, while investing in electric transportation and moving away from fossil fuels. It's paying off. Over the past 25 years, this strategy is proving to be very successful and by the end of this decade, the Malacca weakness will be overcome.
As a result, the rest of the world gets to enjoy cheap solar energy and cheap EVs.
The fact China had a huge smog problem, with hundreds of millions of people choking on coal emissions like it was 19th century London, also had something to do with it.
And Shenzen as an example would be an absolute hellhole if they hadn't mandated all electric vehicles, from tuktuks, motorbikes (must be electric) and taxis. This would have impacted ability to engage in the rapid economic growth seen there.
Any alignment between China and Europe will be short lived. China is more technologically advanced than Europe, it doesn't need anything from Europe. Europe has little to offer China other than being a market to export Chinese goods, and political sway to hamper the Americans. The relationship has no mutual self-interest, it's one sided, and is bound to fall apart. China's undemocratic political system and mercantilist behavior are not reconcilable issues. These issues will compound over time to a breaking point. To counter the persistent trade deficit with China, Europe will need to impose a tariff on Chinese imports, otherwise its industry will be overrun by Chinese manufacturing and millions of jobs will be lost. This is already happening. Or Europe can accept China as the senior partner in the relationship, which it won't, due to pride and the European ideal that all countries are equal on the world stage.
These are not solvable issues, the EU and China are not aligned at a fundamental level.
In contrast, EU/Russia and EU/US relationships actually make more sense, because both partners have mutual self-interest to maintain a relationship.
> In contrast, EU/Russia and EU/US relationships actually make more sense, because both partners have mutual self-interest to maintain a relationship.
Would love to know how you can defend the claim that the EU and China are fundamentally not aligned, unlike the EU Russia and EU US.
Russia is at war with a country that wants to join the EU. The US almost invaded EU territory at the start of this year and threatened to leave NATO. China and the EU have done nothing but sign trade agreements throughout all that time
To be fair, up until 2022 and 2025 respectively, the common understanding was that EU/US and even EU/Russian relationships were beneficial for all parties involved.
Then both relationships were unnecessarily and unilaterally broken, and China profited from that.
People here like to dump on the EU, but I' argue that considering they were betrayed by two of their most important strategic partners within a span of four years, they're still holding up quite well.
Russia has cheap energy and abundant natural resources, but lacks industrial capacity. Europe needs both, and has decent industry. There is mutually beneficial trade.
The US has the world's strongest military. The US offers Europe military protection in exchange for military access and political sway to maintain its position as the global hegemon. In exchange, Europe gets to export its goods to the US, backs up the US on the world stage, and Europe profits from a trade surplus. It's win-win.
A Europe-China deal has neither of these. China does not have abundant natural resources to export. And China will never provide military protection to Europe. And China does not need anything from Europe. The best Europe can offer is market access, to buy Chinese overproduced manufacturing, but that will decimate Europe's industry. Europe doesn't have an equivalent good that China needs, so it will run a trade deficit, which is a losing trade in the long term. It's win-lose: China wins, Europe loses. A relationship with China will never provide the same level of benefits as Europe's relationships with the US or Russia.
Any idea of Europe replacing its relationships with a new one with China is a short sighted knee-jerk reaction.
I agree that Europe has things that Russia needs and vice versa, and that China does not need as much from Europe. This would be the basis of great trade relationships if Russia were not also trying to fragment Europe. We can't think purely in capitalistic terms when there are non capitalistic motives.
China, long term, may be a less needy trade partner, but they are not trying to destabilize Europe.
It's far more short-sighted to go into business with someone who's trying to burn your house down, rather than try and trade with the rich guy down the street who might not give you the best deal
China does not need the European market, China's economy is practically fully sufficient. Chinese consumers mostly buy domestically produced products. European imports are mostly luxury goods (optional) or manufacturing machines (not for consumers). If you go to a hypermarket in China, you will be hard pressed to find European products for sale.
In contrast, if you go shopping at a European hypermarket, >50% of the items sold are imported from China. Europe heavily relies on China for its domestic consumption. Without cheap Chinese goods, costs would go up, and European quality of life would decline.
We can see the relationship is imbalanced with statistics, because Europe runs a €350 billion annual trade deficit with China.
And the world's largest market of wealthy consumers is the US, not Europe.
How will Europe fund its €350 billion annual trade deficit with China? A decade ago, the trade deficit was half as much. This amount is increasing every year. With the impending collapse of European ICE auto manufacturing, and replacement with Chinese EVs, this amount will increase even faster. What will Europe give China in exchange?
Europe pays for its trade deficit by transferring wealth from Europe to China. It amassed this wealth through centuries of colonialism. The deal you are proposing makes Europe poorer, and China richer. Every year, compounding. Europe loses, China wins.
And pretending that China will face "economic collapse" if it doesn't export its goods to Europe is delusional. Chinese exports to Europe are only 3.0% of Chinese GDP, practically nothing. China does not need Europe.
This naive view does not account for the Trumpian trade wars killing the other viable export market, for the need for geopolitical support for Taiwanese reunification or any number of other factors.
The thing about international trade is that it doesn't need to balance out on a country to country level. Europe can support a deficit with China by maintaining a surplus with the rest of the world. There's a reason they just built the worlds largest free trade zone centered around themselves. Profits made from India to Mercosur, Canada to South Korea can all be spent somewhere.
There's no "China wins" or "Europe loses". Trade is not zero-sum. Trade is interdependence and the customer is always right.
> This naive view does not account for the Trumpian trade wars killing the other viable export market, for the need for geopolitical support for Taiwanese reunification or any number of other factors.
This is unclear and poorly written. What you are referring to here?
The core issue with Europe and China is they are fundamentally unequal trading partners. China does not need to buy European goods. In fact, for whatever China does import from Europe, it is aggressively pursing its own domestic alternatives, so that it doesn't have to buy from Europe. COMAC replaces Airbus. SMIC replaces ASML. AECC replaces Rolls Royce jet engines. Dozens of domestic alternatives are replacing European precision manufacturing. German auto manufacturing is replaced by Chinese EVs.
In a few years, what will Europe have left to export to China, to keep a balance of trade and stop wealth from flowing to China?
>Europe can support a deficit with China by maintaining a surplus with the rest of the world.
Easy to say, but how will Europe achieve this? Who will Europe export to? Europe enjoys a €200 billion trade surplus with the US; but given the deteriorating relationship with the US, it's not likely to gain here. The developing world is rapidly buying more from China, because their goods are cheap, numerous, and adequate quality.
Practically everything Europe can export, China can produce at a lower cost and equivalent quality. Where is the competitive advantage?
Wealth doesn't flow from Europe to China. One form of wealth flows in exchange for wealth in the form of goods of equal value. That's how trade works.
And again, Europe will be vital to China once China finally makes the move to reunify with Taiwan. China will find itself completely isolated from the only other market of comparable wealth and size to Europe.
All this to say: China needs consumers more than Europe needs producers. The balance of power is entirely in Europe's favour.
You keep focusing on production, but the demand side is what drives economies. Any fool can produce. Without a buyer, that is just a waste of resources, however.
I think you're over thinking things. China has traded with Europe for many centuries and it will continue. If we have some tariffs then so what? The Chinese buy a lot of European high end fashion - Gucci, Prada, Rolex etc. In the UK a lot come to study.
The technology thing is complicated. Europe still makes quite a lot of high end stuff like Airbus, Rolls Royce jet engines, Mercs, German/Swiss machine tooling, F1 cars etc. But the Chinese are cheaper for normal gizmos.
Solar scaling this fast looks to be less about the green against fossile but to be more about changing the cost structure of energy => fossil fuels are strongly marginal-cost, solar is capex heavy with almost zero marginal cost so that change alone has big impacts for how energy comes into the inflation
Double whammy, we could say? This is a lesson for any positive change: ethics only brings you so far, but find the economical way to do it and the change will work by itself.
Finding the economical way to do it costs a lot of money. The economies of scale that solar needed to reach before it became the low cost option were built on enormous subsidies from Germany, China and others.
Then let's also add the state-owned coal/fossil companies kept artificially afloat, producers tax expenditures, publicly funded rail transport or handling infrastructure or water systems, subsidized coal electricity prices... then indeed we can discuss apples to apples.
can't help but wonder if the aggregate of the solar PV subsidies made in the last 25 years are higher or lower than the aggregate of energy price subsidies made when the Ukraine and/or Iran wars made fossil fuel prices spike...
True, but ethics got us to the point where solar was economical. It's never just been about ethics, it's been about getting it to this point where it's cheaper.
My guess. Total energy consumption in 2024 was x. Total energy consumption in 2025 was x + y. For example, solar PV was installed and led to increased electricity consumption. Or more oil was extracted and used to drive cars around more.
They broke down y into all these different energy sources and made a pie chart. So roughly 25% of y was solar PV.
I'm still confused by this chart. Nuclear is shown to be a bit more than half the addition of wind power but if you look at the bar chart for electricity, it's suddenly only a small fraction. How does that fit together?
Isn't it still flawed? If a coal plant gets switched off, that needs to be replaced but this graph excludes it. Unless you do it properly rata, but then the graph is essentially showing all generating capacity that's been added?
The parent used the example of 2024s usage being X and 2025s being x+y.
So this shows us what y is.
But the precise mix that supplied X no longer exists, due to closures, so something must have back filled that x. So is that pro rata from these figures?
Yes I understand this isn't strictly capacity, but in practical terms, wind turbines and solar panels have been installed to allow this increase.
I have it down as a normal exponential tech growth thing. Silicon solar was invented in the US and would have got big without the Chinese although they have sped it along rather.
That "prediction" is from 2016 and is ex-post-facto. China began investing tens of billions into solar in 2009, and quadrupled down in 2013 when it began pouring hundreds of billions in.
It's easy to "predict" the future years after gigantic sums of money are invested into making something happen.
Trump doesn't get credit for the rest of the world doing the obvious thing and moving towards basically free energy that is good for the environment and frees us from dependence on despots.
I've always found it amusing that the primary driver for solar innovation stems from China's goal ending its civil war with Taiwan. Any conflict with Taiwan would involve the US, which would blockade the Straits of Malacca and halt Chinese oil imports, putting on enough economic pressure to drive the war to a halt after several months. Any attempt to reclaim Taiwan would end in failure.
This was a P0 national security issue, So China hyper-invested into alternative energy technologies, subsidizing and overproducing solar technologies at a loss, while investing in electric transportation and moving away from fossil fuels. It's paying off. Over the past 25 years, this strategy is proving to be very successful and by the end of this decade, the Malacca weakness will be overcome.
As a result, the rest of the world gets to enjoy cheap solar energy and cheap EVs.
The fact China had a huge smog problem, with hundreds of millions of people choking on coal emissions like it was 19th century London, also had something to do with it.
And Shenzen as an example would be an absolute hellhole if they hadn't mandated all electric vehicles, from tuktuks, motorbikes (must be electric) and taxis. This would have impacted ability to engage in the rapid economic growth seen there.
It also sets up a Chinese-European green energy based alignment of interests to counter the toxic fossil Russo-American axis.
Any alignment between China and Europe will be short lived. China is more technologically advanced than Europe, it doesn't need anything from Europe. Europe has little to offer China other than being a market to export Chinese goods, and political sway to hamper the Americans. The relationship has no mutual self-interest, it's one sided, and is bound to fall apart. China's undemocratic political system and mercantilist behavior are not reconcilable issues. These issues will compound over time to a breaking point. To counter the persistent trade deficit with China, Europe will need to impose a tariff on Chinese imports, otherwise its industry will be overrun by Chinese manufacturing and millions of jobs will be lost. This is already happening. Or Europe can accept China as the senior partner in the relationship, which it won't, due to pride and the European ideal that all countries are equal on the world stage.
These are not solvable issues, the EU and China are not aligned at a fundamental level.
In contrast, EU/Russia and EU/US relationships actually make more sense, because both partners have mutual self-interest to maintain a relationship.
> In contrast, EU/Russia and EU/US relationships actually make more sense, because both partners have mutual self-interest to maintain a relationship.
Would love to know how you can defend the claim that the EU and China are fundamentally not aligned, unlike the EU Russia and EU US.
Russia is at war with a country that wants to join the EU. The US almost invaded EU territory at the start of this year and threatened to leave NATO. China and the EU have done nothing but sign trade agreements throughout all that time
To be fair, up until 2022 and 2025 respectively, the common understanding was that EU/US and even EU/Russian relationships were beneficial for all parties involved.
Then both relationships were unnecessarily and unilaterally broken, and China profited from that.
People here like to dump on the EU, but I' argue that considering they were betrayed by two of their most important strategic partners within a span of four years, they're still holding up quite well.
Russia has cheap energy and abundant natural resources, but lacks industrial capacity. Europe needs both, and has decent industry. There is mutually beneficial trade.
The US has the world's strongest military. The US offers Europe military protection in exchange for military access and political sway to maintain its position as the global hegemon. In exchange, Europe gets to export its goods to the US, backs up the US on the world stage, and Europe profits from a trade surplus. It's win-win.
A Europe-China deal has neither of these. China does not have abundant natural resources to export. And China will never provide military protection to Europe. And China does not need anything from Europe. The best Europe can offer is market access, to buy Chinese overproduced manufacturing, but that will decimate Europe's industry. Europe doesn't have an equivalent good that China needs, so it will run a trade deficit, which is a losing trade in the long term. It's win-lose: China wins, Europe loses. A relationship with China will never provide the same level of benefits as Europe's relationships with the US or Russia.
Any idea of Europe replacing its relationships with a new one with China is a short sighted knee-jerk reaction.
I agree that Europe has things that Russia needs and vice versa, and that China does not need as much from Europe. This would be the basis of great trade relationships if Russia were not also trying to fragment Europe. We can't think purely in capitalistic terms when there are non capitalistic motives.
China, long term, may be a less needy trade partner, but they are not trying to destabilize Europe.
It's far more short-sighted to go into business with someone who's trying to burn your house down, rather than try and trade with the rich guy down the street who might not give you the best deal
Europe doesn't offer anything for China except customers, which is pretty much the only thing China wants from the world.
> Europe has little to offer China other than being a market to export Chinese goods
So nothing except the world's largest market of wealthy consumers, the very thing the Chinese economy needs.
Seems like you're underplaying the European hand here...
China does not need the European market, China's economy is practically fully sufficient. Chinese consumers mostly buy domestically produced products. European imports are mostly luxury goods (optional) or manufacturing machines (not for consumers). If you go to a hypermarket in China, you will be hard pressed to find European products for sale.
In contrast, if you go shopping at a European hypermarket, >50% of the items sold are imported from China. Europe heavily relies on China for its domestic consumption. Without cheap Chinese goods, costs would go up, and European quality of life would decline.
We can see the relationship is imbalanced with statistics, because Europe runs a €350 billion annual trade deficit with China.
And the world's largest market of wealthy consumers is the US, not Europe.
China has a huge problem with overproduction. It doesn't need imports, it needs somewhere to export to or their whole economy collapses.
That trade deficit is precisely what China needs and what Europe brings to the table.
Europe has about twice the population of the US.
How will Europe fund its €350 billion annual trade deficit with China? A decade ago, the trade deficit was half as much. This amount is increasing every year. With the impending collapse of European ICE auto manufacturing, and replacement with Chinese EVs, this amount will increase even faster. What will Europe give China in exchange?
Europe pays for its trade deficit by transferring wealth from Europe to China. It amassed this wealth through centuries of colonialism. The deal you are proposing makes Europe poorer, and China richer. Every year, compounding. Europe loses, China wins.
And pretending that China will face "economic collapse" if it doesn't export its goods to Europe is delusional. Chinese exports to Europe are only 3.0% of Chinese GDP, practically nothing. China does not need Europe.
This naive view does not account for the Trumpian trade wars killing the other viable export market, for the need for geopolitical support for Taiwanese reunification or any number of other factors.
The thing about international trade is that it doesn't need to balance out on a country to country level. Europe can support a deficit with China by maintaining a surplus with the rest of the world. There's a reason they just built the worlds largest free trade zone centered around themselves. Profits made from India to Mercosur, Canada to South Korea can all be spent somewhere.
There's no "China wins" or "Europe loses". Trade is not zero-sum. Trade is interdependence and the customer is always right.
> This naive view does not account for the Trumpian trade wars killing the other viable export market, for the need for geopolitical support for Taiwanese reunification or any number of other factors.
This is unclear and poorly written. What you are referring to here?
The core issue with Europe and China is they are fundamentally unequal trading partners. China does not need to buy European goods. In fact, for whatever China does import from Europe, it is aggressively pursing its own domestic alternatives, so that it doesn't have to buy from Europe. COMAC replaces Airbus. SMIC replaces ASML. AECC replaces Rolls Royce jet engines. Dozens of domestic alternatives are replacing European precision manufacturing. German auto manufacturing is replaced by Chinese EVs.
In a few years, what will Europe have left to export to China, to keep a balance of trade and stop wealth from flowing to China?
>Europe can support a deficit with China by maintaining a surplus with the rest of the world.
Easy to say, but how will Europe achieve this? Who will Europe export to? Europe enjoys a €200 billion trade surplus with the US; but given the deteriorating relationship with the US, it's not likely to gain here. The developing world is rapidly buying more from China, because their goods are cheap, numerous, and adequate quality.
Practically everything Europe can export, China can produce at a lower cost and equivalent quality. Where is the competitive advantage?
There is no easy way out.
Wealth doesn't flow from Europe to China. One form of wealth flows in exchange for wealth in the form of goods of equal value. That's how trade works.
And again, Europe will be vital to China once China finally makes the move to reunify with Taiwan. China will find itself completely isolated from the only other market of comparable wealth and size to Europe.
China already has a huge underconsumption crisis. If you have an Economist subscription, I would recommend listening to this Episode of Drum Tower for more context: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/29/chinas-consume...
All this to say: China needs consumers more than Europe needs producers. The balance of power is entirely in Europe's favour.
You keep focusing on production, but the demand side is what drives economies. Any fool can produce. Without a buyer, that is just a waste of resources, however.
I think you're over thinking things. China has traded with Europe for many centuries and it will continue. If we have some tariffs then so what? The Chinese buy a lot of European high end fashion - Gucci, Prada, Rolex etc. In the UK a lot come to study.
The technology thing is complicated. Europe still makes quite a lot of high end stuff like Airbus, Rolls Royce jet engines, Mercs, German/Swiss machine tooling, F1 cars etc. But the Chinese are cheaper for normal gizmos.
Solar scaling this fast looks to be less about the green against fossile but to be more about changing the cost structure of energy => fossil fuels are strongly marginal-cost, solar is capex heavy with almost zero marginal cost so that change alone has big impacts for how energy comes into the inflation
Double whammy, we could say? This is a lesson for any positive change: ethics only brings you so far, but find the economical way to do it and the change will work by itself.
Finding the economical way to do it costs a lot of money. The economies of scale that solar needed to reach before it became the low cost option were built on enormous subsidies from Germany, China and others.
Then let's also add the state-owned coal/fossil companies kept artificially afloat, producers tax expenditures, publicly funded rail transport or handling infrastructure or water systems, subsidized coal electricity prices... then indeed we can discuss apples to apples.
Add in the cost of all the wars in the Middle East as well.
can't help but wonder if the aggregate of the solar PV subsidies made in the last 25 years are higher or lower than the aggregate of energy price subsidies made when the Ukraine and/or Iran wars made fossil fuel prices spike...
Anyone got verifiable references?
True, but ethics got us to the point where solar was economical. It's never just been about ethics, it's been about getting it to this point where it's cheaper.
Only in an environment where we continue to let a handful greedy people at the top control everything for the other 8B of us...
Big pie chart is labelled "The share of each source that was used to meet changes in energy demand vs. 2024". What does that mean?
My guess. Total energy consumption in 2024 was x. Total energy consumption in 2025 was x + y. For example, solar PV was installed and led to increased electricity consumption. Or more oil was extracted and used to drive cars around more.
They broke down y into all these different energy sources and made a pie chart. So roughly 25% of y was solar PV.
I'm still confused by this chart. Nuclear is shown to be a bit more than half the addition of wind power but if you look at the bar chart for electricity, it's suddenly only a small fraction. How does that fit together?
This chart is ultra-processed data. It's a one-year delta. That's the problem. The usual presentation for this data looks like this.[1]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65445
Isn't it still flawed? If a coal plant gets switched off, that needs to be replaced but this graph excludes it. Unless you do it properly rata, but then the graph is essentially showing all generating capacity that's been added?
This isn't capacity.
The parent used the example of 2024s usage being X and 2025s being x+y.
So this shows us what y is.
But the precise mix that supplied X no longer exists, due to closures, so something must have back filled that x. So is that pro rata from these figures?
Yes I understand this isn't strictly capacity, but in practical terms, wind turbines and solar panels have been installed to allow this increase.
Correct.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831272
> Overall, solar generated over 2,700 terawatt-hours last year,
Terawatt-hours per year is a ridiculous unit — it contains three different units of time embedded in it (seconds, hours, and years)
2700 TWh/yr = 309 GW
(Which happens to be about 37 W per person, or less than the average output of a 1 m² solar panel)
It's all thanks to President Trump's efforts, unfortunately.
No, this is a result of a concerted effort by the Chinese decades in the making.
I have it down as a normal exponential tech growth thing. Silicon solar was invented in the US and would have got big without the Chinese although they have sped it along rather.
It's been fairly close to Kurzweil's doubling every couple of years prediction https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/futurist-ray-k... and exponential growth could keep on for ages before we hit Kardashev 2.
That "prediction" is from 2016 and is ex-post-facto. China began investing tens of billions into solar in 2009, and quadrupled down in 2013 when it began pouring hundreds of billions in.
It's easy to "predict" the future years after gigantic sums of money are invested into making something happen.
Trump doesn't get credit for the rest of the world doing the obvious thing and moving towards basically free energy that is good for the environment and frees us from dependence on despots.