Green Energy

Addressing a crowd outside the White House on Friday (4 July), the US president said: “China’s right now building 68 coal-generating plants, and we’re putting up wind … It does not work, aside from ruining our fields and our valleys and killing all the birds, being very weak and very expensive – all made in China.”

Commenting on “all the windmills that China sends us”, he then went on to claim: “I have never seen a wind farm in China. Why is that?”

Well, the reality is that they are there, because the country is described as the “global renewable energy leader” due to it hosting “nearly half of the world’s total operating wind and solar capacity” – per a 2023 report from the non-profit research organisation, Global Energy Monitor.

The same report notes at the time of its publication in June that year, the combined onshore and offshore wind capacity of China had doubled from what it was in 2017, surpassing 310 gigawatts.

And according to the energy think tank Ember, China accounted for more than half of the global increase in both wind and solar power last year.