U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up his efforts against the U.S. clean energy sector this week by taking aim at a giant wind farm, a move that experts warn will only widen the already glaring gap between Washington and Beijing in the race for the key energy industries of the future.
Trump’s decision to abruptly stop construction at Revolution Wind—a nearly completed giant wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island—is the latest in an avalanche of moves meant to gut the U.S. wind and solar industry and dismantle renewable energy projects championed by his predecessor. The United States is the world’s biggest oil producer and exporter of natural gas, and the Trump administration has wholly embraced those fossil fuels in its bid to achieve what it has called “American energy dominance.”
“The Biden administration put climate at the center of its energy policy and took a very transition-forward stance,” said Kevin Book, the managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a consultancy. “The Trump administration is largely running the playbook in reverse.”
Trump’s energy playbook also stands in sharp contrast to that of China, which is the world’s biggest consumer of coal as well as its biggest carbon emitter. Yet Beijing has also poured immense resources into manufacturing renewable and clean energy technologies over the course of decades, allowing it to now command the global market for these cutting-edge systems.
While Washington turns its back on renewable energy, Beijing has only been racing full-speed ahead—driving a widening technological gap that threatens to leave the United States on the back foot in key energy sectors in the years to come, energy and industrial policy experts said.
“The current administration has decided that they want to give up on the renewables race that China is leading, even though most of the technologies were invented here [in the United States],” said Joshua Busby, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who worked at the Defense Department under the Biden administration.
“On some level, it’s giving up on the future, because these are going to be keystone industries that will be foundational for economic wealth of countries around the world,” Busby said.
By the numbers, Beijing’s dominance in the renewable and clean energy technology sectors is gaping. Today, China commands more than 80 percent of global solar panel supply chains and has invested more than $50 billion in new photovoltaic supply capacity—or 10 times as much as Europe, according to the International Energy Agency. (Photovoltaic cells—also known as solar cells—are made of semiconductor material and use sunlight to generate electricity.) In 2023, China accounted for some 65 percent of global wind capacity, according to Wood Mackenzie.
Beijing also dominates the global market for batteries, which underpin electric vehicles (EVs) and thousands of military systems, including lasers and unmanned submersibles. China produces more than three-quarters of batteries sold globally, according to the International Energy Agency, and the country has also produced more than 70 percent of all EV batteries ever manufactured.
“At this point in time, the Chinese side has established a significant and irreversible lead vis-à-vis their U.S. competitors,” for important low-carbon technologies such as solar, wind, and batteries, said Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“The gap between the two countries will only be widened based on Trump’s policies,” Li added.
In recent years, China has scaled up its global exports of batteries, solar panels, and other clean energy technologies as overproduction issues have resulted in lower prices and pushed desperate Chinese firms to seek new buyers abroad.
That’s especially true for energy-hungry emerging market economies, many of which are still scrambling to meet surging power demand. In 2024, emerging markets were the destination of 43 percent of China’s clean tech exports, nearly double their market share in 2022, according to BloombergNEF.
Take Pakistan, which has been one of the biggest new markets for cheap Chinese solar panels and is now undergoing a solar boom. In 2024, the country more than doubled its solar panel imports from Beijing in just one year.
In Africa, where more than 600 million people still need electricity access, China’s solar exports have also dramatically increased in recent years. Between July 2024 and July 2025, African imports of Chinese solar panels surged by 60 percent, according to an analysis by Ember, an energy tracking group. The biggest customers were South Africa and Nigeria, according to Ember.
Beijing’s global ambitions have also seen Chinese companies set up shop outside of the country’s borders. Chinese manufacturers are now building, or have already built, electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Hungary, Indonesia, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey.
“At the end of the day, this will then be part of the story of China’s global expansion—its economic integration with some parts of the world,” Li said.
Those markets aren’t always eager to accept China’s clean tech exports. One of the clearest examples is Europe, which has railed against an influx of cheap, Chinese-built electric vehicles in recent years and ultimately struck back with its own tariffs and an anti-subsidy investigation to shield domestic automakers. A flood of cheap Chinese EVs in Brazil, too, has sparked considerable local backlash.
“Fair competition is good. What we don’t like is when China floods our market with massively subsidized electric cars. And we have to tackle this, we have to protect our industry,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen declared last year.
The Trump administration, for its part, appears determined to make sure that other countries “drill, baby, drill” just as much as it plans to, largely by wielding the threat of tariffs and other economic pressures. Trump’s recent trade deal with the European Union, for example, included the bloc’s commitment to buy $750 billion in U.S. oil and gas in exchange for lowered tariffs.
Trump has aggressively attempted to rally other countries to his cause, recently declaring in a cabinet meeting that governments are “destroying themselves” with wind energy and saying that he “hope[s] they get back to fossil fuels.” In another instance, top Trump officials vowed earlier in August to retaliate against any countries that backed a global agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions in international shipping.
But for many countries, renewable energy sources may already be firmly in their energy mix.
“From a purely competitive standpoint … it’s not clear that the U.S. can really prevent the rest of the world [from] becoming much more dependent on renewables and EVs and batteries,” said Ilaria Mazzocco, an expert in industrial policy and Chinese climate policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The risks are that the U.S. misses out on some of the technologies of the future,” Mazzocco said, later adding: “It’s difficult to see how the U.S. might get back into the game in some of these technologies.”
The post Trump Cedes the Clean Energy Lead to China appeared first on Foreign Policy.
