#renewables
...the race may already be over | Fortune
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-infrastructure/
This is the thing I hear over and over.
Derek Sivers said that when he went to China in 2010, travel was a bit hard compared to Japan or Taiwan. That was my experience some years earlier.
He said last year, he repeated the trip and going to China is like stepping into the future. Everything seems like it is better, sleeker, smoother, faster, quieter than in Japan or Taiwan or the US.
In particular, the cities that were so polluted and noisy are now relatively clean and quiet with almost all EVs.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/690823/china-annual-pm25-particle-levels-beijing/
Currently Beijing
https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map?zoomLevel=6&lat=39.941674&lng=116.462153
is just a little worse than the US Midwest
https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map?zoomLevel=6&lat=39.941674&lng=116.462153
BTW... this article is sort of a "Doh!" moment.
A cranky friend complained that in the US we don't make anything anymore except cloud computing... I argued that saying that in 2025 is like saying in 1925 that we don't make anything anymore except electricity, but electricity is what drove industry.
I didn't understand when I made that quip that because we didn't make enough electricity (or at least we don't have the ability to deliver it where it's needed) we can't make enough compute which is now what drives industry.
I think of myself as more informed on these issues than the average person, but apparently I am still not able to understand the scale of the need until an article like this points it out.
@upliftingnews.bsky.social‬
In April this year, China installed more solar power than Australia has in all its history. In one month.
China is rapidly becoming the world's first electro state, and is already home to half of the world's solar, half of the world's wind power and half of the world's electric cars.
>> electro state
I was thinking that this should be a sort of Sputnik moment, but with no actual Chinese electric car flying over Iowa, there just isn't a lot of attention.
Then this morning I was listening to this pod and they specifically started talking about "Sputnik on a slow burn."
https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/020bfa10-9a7f-0137-4053-0acc26574db2/744c892a-118f-436b-9647-cdd16827215e
Unfortunately, the transcript is only for premium members which, fortunately I am because years ago I donated $10 for premium and have been grandfathered into the $40/year plan... sorry RC
It's a long pod, but Noah Smith is one of the people I look to for good economic analysis (I used to say non-partisan, but as of Trump II, he has said he just doesn't feel he can be non-partisan and do good economic analysis).
It covers a lot of things, but I think the main gist is this:
1. There is a new industrial economy that's built four key technologies that matured in the 1990s:
- batteries that were good enough
- power electronics that was good enough
- compute that was good enough
- electromagnetics, especially motors, that was good enough
"Good enough" meaning that you could store, control, and harness electrical energy in useful ways so that you could think about something like a Tesla: an electric car with insane acceleration. It even becomes possible to think of replacing hydraulics with electric actuators.
This new stack meant that you had batteries that could release a lot of energy quickly, motors that could handle that pulse, power electronics that could direct that pulse, and compute that could determine how to use it at this exact moment. That allowed envisioning things that simply couldn't happen, for example, with diesel and hydraulics, because though hydraulics allow you to apply an unbelievable force (thus they are still unchallenged in heavy equipment), they can't do it quickly and with precise control.
2. All of this is necessary for true automation because it is just hard to automate big hydraulic systems. They liken it to the shift from a factory where every work station had to be connected to a waterwheel through a series of belts, drives, and gears, to one where every work station was electric. In other words, before electric factories, if one worker wanted to work, then entire factory works had to be up and spinning, but with an electrified factory, you ran one tool at one work station.
But even so, today, if you want to run one oven in one house, you have to have an entire power plant spin up to meet that need. The above technologies are changing that and, because of the four technologies, you can also automate a lot of that.
"Electricity is the only form of energy that can be controlled by software"
3. The anti-growth agenda in the US caught on in the 1970s and basically became law about 10 years before these technologies showed promise. So the belief was that the built environment was basically built and so we're done. In San Francisco, where it has long been impossible to build, the large SF industrial section lies dormant because you can't get projects approved and, even if you could, you can't get factory workers to move there because of housing costs and if you proposed employee housing, there would be protesters on the street trying to "protect the character of the neighborhood."
So in the US we end up with the designers and the factory workers living in different states, making the flow of information difficult.
4. The engineering in China is just better as a result. The engineers don't work at one company with one VR system, they work for a big fab that designs and builds VR headsets for 10 brands. They just iterate a lot more and with more variation, tighter feedback loops.
--
I almost forgot one of the key insights
5. The electric stack is a true stack, a platform, a general-purpose set of tools. Related to 4, China has a lot of engineers who master the stack and that stack extends from cheap consumer goods to the most advanced avionics or automation systems. The obvious example is drone warfare in Ukraine, but as a general rule the cross-over between a small radio-controlled toy car, a passenger car and a military tank that existed in the ICE era exists now, but much more so because the electric stack can do more things than the ICE stack. For example, none of us ever owned an ICE circular saw.
Other points...
- People think of fossil fuels as having high energy density relative to batteries, but that is only true if you are looking JUST at storage. When you include the machinery needed to use that fuel, equations change. This is fundamentally why the last high-tech wars fought in the combustion period (Iraq, Afghanistan) didn't make extensive use of drones, but the first war of the electric era (Ukraine) did.
The other example he gave, the one that made him stand up and take notice, was during the Portland protests when Trump sent federal forces to tear gas the protesters and they broke out small, battery leaf blowers and blew the tear gas back at the federal agents. That would have been much harder to organize and do with ICE leaf blowers.
- A lot of China's advantage rests on the government subsidizing things. The article at the head of this thread noted that China typically runs 50% to 100% excess capacity in the grid, which means reliable and cheap electricity is a given.
- like everyone I have read or heard who has been to China in the last year, Sam says that it is like stepping into the future. People like JD Vance who have either never visited China or haven't visited since before Covid just have absolutely no idea what it's like there. He said touring a Chinese factory is like being Japanese when Commodore Perry's fleet pulled in the Japanese realized that a new world order had arrived.
- the whole "we must decarbonize to save the climate" discussion is outdated. In his opinion, we are going to decarbonize for simple economic and strategic reasons.
Thanks. In a competitive world, the above is kinda depressing from the US perspective.
>we are going to decarbonize for simple economic and strategic reasons.
Somewhere around here, I commented that we capitalists won't shift platforms until it's cheaper. Since renewables are now generally cheaper, I agree.