Hot, Cheap, and Out of Control

The green tech revolution is canonically chaotic good

Besides my father’s unending loyalty to Consumer Reports, I didn’t grow up with a lot of magazines. Going through old boxes of my things that my parents lovingly assembled, there’s some evidence of cringe — a letter from the Democratic Leadership Council, somehow; a copy or two of The New Republic. But for at least a few years in high school, we subscribed to WIRED. I remember the matte feeling of the covers, whizbang ideas breathlessly presented. My internet life then was essentially non-existent. Dial-up shared on a fax line for father’s business. A truly different era.

This is all to say that I hope you can forgive the nostalgia that seeps in then as I share with you my newest essay, published online at WIRED.com as part of their China Issue.

China’s Renewable Energy Revolution Is a Huge Mess That Might Save the World

Here’s the hook:

There’s a particular kind of sci-fi nerd who equates fusion tech with utopia. If we could only harness the engine of the stars, it would uncork near limitless energy and neatly sweep away a whole mess of humanity’s problems. But how would that work exactly? What would the transition look like?

You don’t have to wonder. It’s happening now. Solar panels and wind turbines capture the fusion of the sun and convert it to electricity. And at the scale and pace that China is producing them, plenty of things stand to be swept away—including, quite possibly, the once seemingly intractable problems of energy poverty and fossil-fuel dependence. In 2024, the total installed electricity capacity of the planet—every coal, gas, hydro, and nuclear plant and all of the renewables—was about 10 terawatts. The Chinese solar supply chain can now pump out 1 terawatt of panels every year.

“Ok, ok,” you might say. “That’s fine, Jeremy. Glad you got WIRED to publish it,” as you stifle a yawn. “Didn’t Bill McKibben already get a whole book out about solar taking over last year?” But here’s the twist:

But chroniclers of this green tech revolution almost always understate its chaos. At this point, it is far less a tightly managed, top-down creation of state subsidies than a runaway train of competition. The resulting, onrushing utopia is anything but neat. It is a panorama of coal communities decimated, price wars sweeping across one market after another, and electrical grids destabilizing as they become more central to the energy system. And absolutely no one—least of all some monolithic “China” at the control switch—knows how to deal with its repercussions.

By the end, I’m putting knifes into Bill Gates and Donald Trump, reminding you that it isn’t just Chinese solar firms that are operating without profits but world-leading EV maker BYD, and of course the grid death spiral in Pakistan that readers here will be familiar with as Chinese solar firms destroy the economics of Chinese-funded gas plants. And did I go for it? You bet I did:

Mao Zedong famously declared that a revolution is not a dinner party. It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. The green tech revolution—whose violence is principally financial, a withering assault on the value of fossil firms’ assets—is not a dinner party. Nor is it inevitable. It could still be held back or slowed down. Yes, it is the result of the conscious choices made by people, firms, and governments, many of the most critical ones made in China. But it is happening now, and faster than our systems—electricity grids, industrial sectors, labor, geopolitics, and more—are ready for.

Go read the whole thing.

Sausage Making

The writing of this piece was quick. An editor at WIRED reached out to me worried that the China package that they’d put together was missing something important without an angle on the energy revolution (Zeyi Yang’s piece on the global nature of the battery sector is great with a nice set of infographics). Yet he wanted to make sure that it had a unique angle — not something that everyone else was already saying. As I talked with him on the phone on a chilly fall evening outside my daughter’s choir practice, I could hear the yawns as I talked about the speed and scale of the solar boom. It was the twist: “China” isn’t doing this; there isn’t some grand plan that the mandarins in Zhongnanhai worked out a decade ago in calligraphy hanging on the wall; it’s much more chaotic than we think. Then over the breeze, in an extended pause, I heard this meme. Let’s go. His favorite line was the idea of “spiraling from success to success.”

leaning forward meme

The writing itself came together quickly. It had to as the package needed to be assembled for the print issue, and I came into the process at the end. Deadlines work, my friends. Two issues: first, the editor thought that I leaned too heavily on the links to make the argument at various spots. And since the piece would be in print and people can’t just tap their finger on the dead tree of the magazine and see what I’m referring to, I had to rewrite a bit. Second, I was reminded to knock off on the jargon since most WIRED readers aren’t exactly China or energy nerds (unlike all of you). After that it was deemed “very clean” by a top editor.

What I have never experienced before, though, was Condé Nast fact checking. While the online piece has some links, it doesn’t have as many as I might like. I supplied a very linked up version for the fact checkers, who still came in with a lot of comments. Most just required an extra link or two to convince them that I wasn’t making shit up, they definitely caught something that was announced in 2025 that I misremembered as happening at the end of 2024. A skirmish about how to characterize Trump’s attacks on the US wind industry [“crushed” vs. “attempted to cancel”] was probably the most dramatic bit. I never really intended for my winking transition from Trump to Gates via their Jeffrey Epstein connection to be included. I did, however, really want to give Jigar Shah credit for his rant against Gates but apparently that got cut in the editing too.

The title of this post is what I’ve been told is what will be on the print version. Inked and glued in a physical magazine like the ones that I used to hold thirty years ago. I’m very fond of it, and think it could be taken up by a new generation of climate activists as we expand our imaginations of what the world looks like through and on the other side of this chaotic revolution. Onward.