And why it matters in an era of great-power rivalry

The sun is rising in the East. The wind is blowing from that direction too. And it will change the balance of world power.

The fact is that the world’s energy future will be dominated by solar and wind power. They won’t necessarily rule completely: Nuclear power may (and should) have a role, and we’re a long way from completely weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. But a combination of rapidly falling costs for renewables, rapidly rising demand for electricity, and big obstacles to meeting that demand by burning stuff — more on that later — make renewable dominance inevitable.

And China will dominate that energy future. It’s arguable that this didn’t have to happen, and Europe may be able to keep some role in wind power. But under Donald Trump, America has taken itself out of the game, and even if sanity eventually returns to U.S. energy policy (and U.S. politics in general), by then we will almost surely be too far behind to catch up.

Last week I wrote about the demand side: consumption of renewable energy. On that front Europe still leads by some measures, China by others, while America is a distant third by any metric. Today I’ll tie up some loose ends from that discussion, then turn to the supply side: production of the equipment that harvests energy from sun and wind. At this point China completely dominates the solar power industry. Europe still produces a lot of wind turbines, but China produces almost everything else wind-related.

Should we care? Economic success generally depends more on making effective use of new technology than on producing the gadgets themselves. But we live in a world of geopolitical competition among great powers, and it will matter a lot if one of those powers has an effective monopoly on producing crucial goods. We’ve already seen China deploy its dominance of rare earths to great effect in its trade conflict with America. It would be foolish to ignore the implications of its likely dominance of renewable energy.

Beyond the paywall I’ll address the following:

1. Further detail on growth in renewable energy

2. Why renewables will dominate energy growth

3. Why China dominates production

4. The future of great power competition