It is convenient to accuse Beijing of dumping in green technologies. The truth is more cruel.
China's dominance in green technologies is often, if not always, presented as the result of a state policy carefully crafted at the top of the state, relegating Europe and the United States to league B. The two giants of the 20th century economy would be the victims of a systematic policy of dumping and massive subsidization orchestrated by Beijing's red capitalists.
This widespread view blinds us. The reality is much more prosaic. It is the inconsistencies of European and American policies that are at the origin of the spectacular boom of green industries in China. The West simply did not believe in the potential of photovoltaic (PV) solar. Once the mistake was proven, it was already too late.
David Fickling, an editorial writer at Bloomberg, one of the major American news agencies, recounts how the United States developed the photovoltaic industry from an almost monopoly in the supply of silicon coming from computer chip production, before abandoning it at the end of the 1990s and giving up any industrial ambition in the early 2000s. The situation was comparable in Europe: states supported, then stopped their efforts in solar development, even preferring to transfer strategic equipment to China where a nascent industry was looking for outlets. Americans and Europeans then made a lot of money in China, including by exporting PV-grade silicon!
A decade later, it is Chinese industrialists who, grouped into large companies, are masters of the game and impose prices so low that the European and American PV industry will go bankrupt. The imposition of exorbitant tariffs by Washington and Brussels will change nothing. On the contrary. The tariff war accelerated the price decline and stimulated the Chinese domestic market!
In less than a decade, China crushed all its competitors and today controls 90% of PV cell production, installing at home the equivalent of what the rest of the world buys in one year!
The Chinese solar giants were not planned by Beijing; they were born from the will of small Chinese entrepreneurs or old factories seeking to diversify, from companies with access to abundant hydroelectric power and finding no other customers. Did they benefit from subsidies and advantages to develop? "Yes," answers David Fickling, but these supports are entirely comparable to those received by the giants of European and American industry; they are even lower in many of the cases analyzed!
No, the big difference lies in the perseverance of Chinese producers and the stability of government policies in favor of green technologies, deemed strategic by the capitalocommunist power of Beijing.
The author draws this conclusion: if China has become the world's solar power, it is because it believed in it when others still doubted this form of energy. "It is a tragic failure of vision and ambition. A century ago, in Detroit, American automobile entrepreneurs created an industry that irreversibly transformed cities, countries and economies. This time, it is Chinese innovators who are changing the world."
To such an extent that one can say today that solar energy will, thanks to China, be the planet's primary source of electricity by the turn of the 2030s. A simple calculation shows that the solar cells installed in the world by Chinese producers will, in the long run, produce five times more useful energy than the oil reserves of the American giant ExxonMobil!
Will we repeat the errors of the past decades by delaying investment in green energies? The risk has never been so great at a time when everyone is trying to save and renounce commitments. The tragic fate of the American and European automotive industry should nevertheless alert us. That industry did everything to delay the transition to electric propulsion. Today, it is so far behind that it risks disappearing.
The decisions that states will make in the coming months will be decisive for those who invest in low-carbon technologies. The latest reports on the state of the energy transition in the world clearly show that the objectives of the Paris Agreement (tripling investments in renewable energies, in particular) are about to be met (they are two-thirds met in 2024) but risk not being met if we slow down the pace.
Europe and the United States, even if they lost the industrial battle in the first wave of green energy, still have a chance to recover by investing in science and maintaining conditions favorable to investment. Four new waves are foreseeable: storage, so-called smart grids, hydrogen and CO2 capture. These four areas require proactive and consistent policies. China has perfectly understood this by integrating them into its five-year plans.
What about in Bern? Everything shows that we are ready to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s to 2000. Is there not a proposal to cut energy research and to penalize those who installed solar systems, for lack of having anticipated in time the modernization of the grids and planned decentralized storage?
This column also appeared in 24 Heures and Tribune de Genève.
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