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.
In China itself, vast energy megabases combining solar and wind stretch for miles in the country’s western deserts and Tibetan highlands, each producing the power of multiple nuclear plants and connecting to population centers in the country’s east via ultrahigh-voltage power lines. At the smaller end of the scale, panels have sprouted on rooftops all over the more populated eastern half of the country, thanks to policies that standardize the process and paperwork required to install and tie them into the grid. Huge factories, urban apartment buildings, and humble village homes are plastered with panels. In Europe, Chinese-made photovoltaic panels are so cheap that they cost less than fencing materials. Globally, the glut of solar has lowered the average cost of generating electricity to 4 cents a kilowatt hour—perhaps the cheapest form of energy ever.
By now, major headlines have begun to catch on to the reality that China’s renewable energy revolution is one of the biggest stories in the world, while Donald Trump’s anti-renewable vision of American energy dominance is a backward sideshow by comparison. 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.
In the United States, 2024 was a record-breaking year for solar. Across the entire country, those 12 months saw some 50 gigawatts of new solar capacity added. (Solar projects are typically measured by their power output, not their square footage.)
Now consider some different numbers, for scale and contrast. In China, the first three months of 2025 alone saw 60 gigawatts of new solar capacity added to the national grid. Then April packed in 45 more gigawatts. Finally, May added an eye-watering 92 gigawatts of new capacity, or 3 gigawatts every day.
The reason for this brain-warping mad dash of solar development? At the start of 2025—in an attempt to rein in the renewables sector—Beijing announced that it would discontinue a long-standing policy that had effectively propped up renewable energy prices, pegging them to that of the “baseline” coal power in each province. Any solar capacity that went in after May 2025, Beijing declared, would no longer get this deal. So the all-out solar installation frenzy was simply a mass attempt to get in under the old terms.
After May, sure enough, new solar deployments plummeted. The ensuing four months each added just 10 gigawatts of new solar on average, half of the prior year’s pace—but that’s still considerably faster than America at its peak.
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