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A production line for solar panels in Suqian, Jiangsu Province, China (Xu Changliang/VCG via Getty Images)
From solar panels to batteries, the industrial spine of decarbonisation runs through factories the West does not control.
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China built the energy transition while democracies debatedChina built the energy transition while democracies debated
For all the grand declarations about a global energy transition, the real story has been written not in climate summits but in the quiet, deliberate choices made by the world’s major powers. As Adrian Monck, former managing director at the World Economic Forum, recently summarised: “Europe chose regulation; China chose manufacturing; the US chose extraction.”
The outcomes, unsurprisingly, are far from equal.
Europe spent two decades perfecting the rulebook, including emissions trading schemes, renewable quotas and green taxonomies. Brussels built the world’s most elaborate framework for climate governance. It became the moral centre of global decarbonisation. But in the process, it allowed its industrial base to wither. European solar manufacturing once held more than 40% of the global market. By 2023 that figure had collapsed to roughly 2% as production migrated to Asia, led by China.
For 20 years, the US has excelled in innovation, with solar, batteries, advanced reactors and the shale boom all tracing back to American labs. What it neglected was industrialisation. The US created the technologies of the transition while China built the factories.
But for all the rhetoric about “reshoring”, the US remains predominantly upstream. It mines lithium, refines some critical minerals and produces a portion of global polysilicon, but on a scale dwarfed by China, which controls roughly 93% of that capacity. The world’s richest nation is digging the inputs for factories it does not own.
Democracies need a credible alternative with proven gigawatt-scale experience.
While Western governments debated carbon prices and regulatory frameworks, Beijing built the entire industrial stack. It did not attempt to optimise one part of the supply chain; it built the whole chain. China subsidised upstream materials, poured capital into wafer and cell production, locked in refining capacity, scaled module assembly, and offered cheap electricity in key regions.
Only in the first half of 2025, China installed 256 gigawatts of new solar capacity, more than twice as much as the rest of the world combined. In batteries, China produces around 70% of the world’s lithium-ion cells.
This is not an advantage – it is architecture. China built the industrial spine of the energy transition, and the world will spend the coming decade negotiating its dependence on that spine.
This is why the West’s climate ambitions increasingly collide with its geopolitical anxieties. Europe can legislate its way to net zero, but it cannot meet those targets without Chinese hardware. America can subsidise clean technology at a historic scale, but its roll-out still depends on imported components from the very country it seeks to counterbalance. The transition is universal in rhetoric but profoundly concentrated in execution.
And several close allies, from resource-rich nations to advanced economies, have similarly locked themselves into roles that fall well short of their strategic potential.
Australia – a trusted democracy, a critical minerals powerhouse and a stable US ally holding almost one third of the world’s identified uranium resources – still plays an almost entirely upstream role, digging and shipping while banning nuclear power, enrichment and fuel fabrication at home. The result is an irony: Australia hosts a Pentagon-backed gallium refinery (part of the new US-Australia critical minerals agreements) but won’t build a reactor. Australia exports rare earths but makes no magnets. It helps the US reduce reliance on China while relying on Chinese-made technologies itself. These are political choices, not technical limits.
The Bugey nuclear power plant in Saint-Vulbas, France (Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)
Luckily, some democracies have shown what a sovereign energy strategy looks like. France, led by the nuclear fleet of electric utility company Électricité de France (EDF), has already done what many countries are still only talking about. It generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, delivering some of the lowest-carbon and most affordable electricity in the OECD. The results speak for themselves: in 2024 France exported 103 TWh of electricity (a 48% increase) while Germany, having shut down its reactors, faced higher prices, higher emissions and growing dependence on imports.
EDF’s model is not speculative, theoretical or aspirational. It is operating at a national scale, every day, powering industry, stabilising grids, and delivering clean energy at a fraction of the carbon intensity of its neighbours.
At the same time, EDF must play a larger international role, because as China and Russia expand their nuclear exports, democracies need a credible alternative with proven gigawatt-scale experience. France is one of the few nations that has already done it at scale.
Meanwhile, China continues to demonstrate energy pragmatism: building solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and coal simultaneously to maximise reliability and industrial advantage. It is not ideological about energy; it is strategic. The question is whether democracies are willing to be strategic, too.
This should be a wake-up call for the democratic world. If China is already the workshop of the transition, and if Europe and the US remain focused on regulation and extraction, then allies such as Australia, Canada, Japan and South Korea must expand the industrial footprint of the free world. Western economies do not need more suppliers of raw minerals; they need democracies capable of manufacturing, processing, building fuel cycles and deploying sovereign clean energy.
Until then, we must live with the uncomfortable truth that the energy transition already has a frontrunner, and it is not a democracy. China built the factories, the scale and the supply chains. Europe wrote the rules. America wrote the subsidies. Allies like Australia supplied the rocks. If democracies want to change that story, they have to build.
The energy transition is not yet won. But it will be won by those who build, not those who merely buy.
About the author
Cristina Talacko
Cristina Talacko is an Australian business leader and energy-policy commentator.
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