Big Bets on a Better Future
China's megabases matter and real climate realism
The life of a writer mostly involves sitting in a room, staring off into the distance and depressing our fingers about a half inch at a time in a very precise order. And then deleting most of what we write. Repeat. From time to time, we get excited enough about a chunk of it that we want to share it with others. When we do, sometimes that interest is reciprocated. What had been a soliloquy becomes a conversation, and the ideas are delivered into the world.
As dedicated ChinaLab readers will know, I’m working on a book related to China’s climate journey. As part of my journey to create that book, I’m writing here and elsewhere to highlight pieces of information that the discourse is overlooking or dismissing. Today, two different essays that I’ve written this spring came out within hours of each other, both at publications I’ve long enjoyed.
The Wire China published my essay on China’s energy megabases: “The Looming Power of China’s Energy Megabases.” And Heatmap News published my critique of the Council on Foreign Relations climate realism initiative : “The Real Problem With ‘Climate Realism’.”
These are both, ultimately, good news stories in a world that so often is lacking in them. China’s megabases are huge projects that, while economically complicated and far from perfect (why is there coal?!!), are enabling China’s transformation into an electrostate (great FT report today). For the book, they represent one of the examples of China building big in ways that synergize. The climate realism essay is mostly critique, but I do turn to talk about what real opportunities are out there for climate realism and appropriate roles for the US. For the book, this previews the conclusion — addressing the so what question of how do we (the implicit non-China audience) participate in a transition that is going to be be led by China.
I’ll talk about both essays below, but you should click the links and read them.
Megabases
In sports commentary, there’s a premium on fine-grained analysis of the strategies of different teams, what kinds of schemes were used and why, what the thinking was behind them, the gamesmanship of it all. In the NBA, discussions can get so baroque that you have fans fighting over managerial decisions governed by details of the luxury tax rules and collective bargain agreement And then there’s another style of discourse (often used by players talking trash in the game) that just says “Scoreboard.” Analysts and coaches will sometimes have little left to utter other than “they just kept hitting shots.” But enough about my Indiana Pacers.
In the clean energy transition, there’s obviously a lot to be learned by detailed analyses of the pricing of renewables and intricacies of the policies that govern interconnection queues, but there’s also a sense in which the game is about clean electricity and deploying and generating more of it is the score. And China’s energy megabases are racking up the points. The visuals are great with solar. When built at a scale and against a contrasting background (like desert sand), the before and after images pop. They also allow for the possibility of branding because it’s 2025 and still inside of capitalism. Three Gorges Group (yes, the solar company is Three Gorges and yes that’s the world’s biggest dam and the world of Chinese conglomerates is a mess) took the trade that the name recognition from etching its name out of a blue ocean of panels would more than compensate for the small percentage loss in solar generation from doing so.
Wind, on the other hand, is harder to see in satellite imagery. A fact that energy people will know but is perhaps unfamiliar to others and helps explain why it makes sense to pair solar and wind together is that they have some contrasting generation profiles. That is, the sun — stop me if you’ve heard this — goes down at night and so solar generation flatlines. Wind, on the other hand and perhaps less obviously, tends to produce more generation at night, though this varies by location and season. So if you are building transmission infrastructure to take power from the desert to load centers on the Chinese coast, those lines will get more use with fewer batteries (more in a bit) if there’s a wind component. Of course, neither sun nor wind is truly “firm” power, and so the dirty secret of the megabases is that they are not truly “clean” but include new large coal plants. The Kubuqi Desert Ordos Central-North Renewable Energy Base (鄂尔多斯中北部新能源基地) that is the base I profile has planned 8 GW of solar, 4 GW of wind, and 4 GW of coal. Given that China’s coal fleet only operates about half the time, this is a weird, wasteful investment. Sadly, the information about the project seems to point to their already being offtakes (though I suppose it could be hopecasting by the firms):
The supporting coal-fired power project is planned to build 4 1 million kilowatt indirect air-cooled high-efficiency ultra-supercritical coal-fired power generation units, with an annual utilization of about 4,300 hours and an annual grid-connected electricity of about 16.5 billion kilowatt-hours. It is planned that all units will be connected to the grid for power generation in 2028.
This is not what coal should be transitioning to in the Chinese power mix. Coal should increasingly shift to the kind of “peaker plant” model to add power when high demand can’t be met by clean sources or when clean variable power is low.
The only storage discussed in the plans, sadly and again weirdly, is molten salts: “A 2X300 megawatt high-temperature molten salt energy storage system will be built on site simultaneously.” There’s also discussion of 200 MW solar thermal facility. But no batteries. It’ll get there, but apparently not yet. There are all manner of experiments with V2G — vehicle to grid — in China, so the idea of figuring out the pricing of stationary batteries in the land of the battery kings just makes too much sense to ignore.
But in the end, this is a good thing. Chinese firms have built massive capacity to turn sand into clean electricity. They should run those factories, and everyone that can should deploy as much solar as possible as soon as possible to mitigate climate change. China’s energy megabases are a huge part of that reality.
They also matter symbolically as a testament to China’s ability to build and innovate. In this sense, they are a picture of Abundance, for better and worse. But that book merely whiffs on China, just spending a few pages at the end noting that China is a real place that has lots of operating factories and ample housing. It isn’t wrong, just thin. The real mischaracterization of China happens in the Climate Realism Initiative.
Real Climate Realism
As I said on bluesky, the dual reality of Trump and climate crisis breaks people’s brains. And this can be seen in the CFR Climate Realism Initiative. Launched just about a month ago, this is clearly an attempt by CFR and its funders to find some way to frame climate action for a MAGA crowd. The idea is messy and wrong, and in so is hard to write about. Jillian Goodman did a great job editing the piece for Heatmap and so please do read it. Catherine Fraser also had a critique of the initiative here.
The essay relies on a DC blob notion of China as an enemy to do the heavy lifting. It argues China’s emissions are like missiles exploding in the US, and we need to get them to stop. The supposed lever to move China in this direction is tariffs, but Trump’s powder on that score is not dry.1 The initiative flounders because it wants to (1) lead the world and (2) not do anything at all about American emissions. It’s an absolute impossibility that America the petrostate is going to lead the world on climate if we … don’t do anything to mitigate climate change ourselves.
There’s a lot going on in the essay, but these might be the best lines:
The initiatives proposed in the Climate Realism launch are the initiatives of giving up. Investing in resilience and adaptation is needed in any scenario, but tying this spending on adaptation to Trumpian notions of protecting our borders reeks of discredited lifeboat ethics, which only cares to save ourselves and leaves others to suffer for our sins. And while supporting next-generation technologies is an appropriate piece of the policy puzzle, they should be like the broccoli at a steakhouse: off to the side and mostly superfluous compared with the meat and potatoes of deployment and mitigation to decarbonize today.
Again, I hope that solid state batteries are great and work. The NYT just profiled Factorial Energy, and I certainly hope that those plucky Cornell grads (from China) can make it work with their partner, a small German auto start-up, Mercedes-Benz. But even that gauzy profile suggested 2028 at the earliest to see it in any kind of commerical lineup. QuantumScape, another US solid state battery company, does not even name its “prospective launch partner” and expects to lose over $250 million in 2025. Whereas BYD and CATL are making batteries for cars that people want to buy today and have done so for years already.
The US should try to bring in world leaders in EV and battery manufacturing to America, even if those firms happen to be Chinese. Joint venture agreements and others that lead to tech transfer will happen and the kind of innovation that happens by building at scale amidst competition will take place.
Jonas Nahm and I wrote about how the US should try to figure out its part to play in a world where China’s clean tech is winning the future last month in Foreign Policy. I expanded on that idea in my original draft for Heatmap.
An alternative vision is possible. The American economy is services based. We grow as many crops as ever and make lots of stuff in factories, but what overwhelmingly employs Americans is providing services to our fellow humans (including those beyond our borders: entertaining Brazilians and South Koreans and Nigerians with A Minecraft Movie, etc). For all of the fantasies of a white guy with a hard hat and a return to the 1950s, being rich enough to have a service based economy is a good thing. Americans and American firms will inevitably make some of the hardware components of the energy transition, but the opportunities that play to our strengths are mostly on the software side.
What does the software and financing future lead to? More to come on that in future posts.
Also, I want to add a caveat to the dismissive note that I gave on the rare earth ban. While the actual amount of stuff and money is very very small, if firms (and perhaps governments) don’t stockpile and aren’t careful, then they could get caught flatfooted if China completely bans exports. The major concern is if supplies fall to zero then major processes that require tiny amounts of rare earths (like Yttria and turbine construction) could be completely halted with serious fallout. Thanks to Alex Turnbull for opening my eyes to this possibility.
In the end, figuring out where China is headed matters because it’s the centerpiece of the climate crisis. It is the emitter and the principal source of solutions. But that doesn’t mean that we’re all spectators to some drama that’s happening elsewhere. Everyone needs to do our part and fulfill our roles to mitigate and adapt as best we can.
Writing can be lonely, but it’s great to know that there are people out there interested in where we go from here, and how we do it together.
You can kind of imagine the tempting Pentagon-related joke that I’ve edited out.
Sorry to read that climate “realists” want to address climate change by leveraging on animus towards China. So unprincipled.