Britain’s rush to net zero fuelled China’s energy dominance

Walkers ambling along the Saxon Shore Way can’t miss the Cleve Hill solar farm. Standing on the north Kent coast, near Faversham, its hundreds of thousands of panels stretch as far as the eye can see, covering the equivalent of 500 football pitches. The 370-megawatt scheme is the biggest of its kind in Britain , generating enough power for some 100,000 homes on sunny days. It is one of a number of mega-projects springing up as part of the push towards net zero, with Quinbrook, the developer, saying it supports “growth, jobs and cheaper power for UK households”.

However, another trend that Cleve Hill typifies is less remarked upon by its owners: the spread of Chinese technology through Britain’s power system. According to planning documents and photographs, the project’s 550,000 panels were produced in China, by Trina Solar, along with its battery systems and solar inverters (made by CATL and Huawei, respectively). This is not unusual. China has a vice-like grip on global supply chains, producing almost 90pc of panels and controlling even bigger shares of mid-level manufacturing.

But according to critics, the scheme underlines how Britain’s rush towards clean power risks giving Beijing critical leverage over the UK energy system, because China provides masses of cheap solar panels, minerals, batteries and electric vehicles needed to power it. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by the companies involved at Cleve Hill. But some experts are concerned that Chinese suppliers – beholden to Beijing at home – could build “back doors” into software running on energy projects, or hide components that are excluded from equipment schematics.

Perhaps just as worryingly, others fear it will leave Britain exposed to diplomatic and trade policy coercion, as UK jobs and infrastructure increasingly depend on Chinese goodwill. Labour ministers say their clean power plan – to produce almost all the UK’s electricity with green energy by 2030 – will break Britain’s addiction to gas produced by “petrostates and dictators”, and insulate us from price shocks that have followed recent crises in Ukraine and Iran.

They have claimed it is possible to be vigilant about the risks posed by China, while using its cheap goods to deliver cheaper power. The question within Whitehall and other European capitals is: can we safely harness Chinese green technology – or are we naively trading our fossil-fuel dependency for a different vice altogether? “The excessive amount of electricity you can create from the sun and the wind will be transformative for our economies, our lifestyles, everything,” says Caspar Hobhouse, an analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies.

“But if you’re buying it from China, you have to be aware you are surrendering a lot of your grid and capabilities to someone who then has control over how this works. “You have to understand that there are two sides to this coin.” Green technologies Britain and China took fundamentally different approaches to net zero from the start. This country pledged emissions cuts under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, then passed the Climate Change Act 2008, introducing legally binding carbon budgets.

In 2019, the UK became the first country to enshrine a 2050 net zero target in law, compelling every arm of the state to work towards that goal. Britain also developed policies and subsidies to encourage demand for renewable electricity. The Renewable Obligation, launched in 2002, handed generous top-up payments to wind and solar farms for the electricity they generated, funded by levies on consumer bills. A feed-in tariff came after in 2010, paying households and businesses for rooftop solar power.

Contracts for difference, launched four years later, then offered renewable schemes guaranteed power prices. Yet what was conspicuously absent, despite Britain’s position at the vanguard of the transition, was any accompanying plan to boost manufacturing of green technologies. It has been largely foreign companies, such as Denmark’s Vestas and Germany’s Siemens Gamesa, that have built the 12,000 wind turbines erected in the past two decades.

A 2023 government report found that the UK’s share of capital spending on projects “rarely” exceeded 25pc. UK Steel separately found that “almost none” of the steel used in British wind farms was domestically produced. By some measures, the green energy rollout has still been a success – our carbon emissions have fallen by around 50pc since 1990 and a study for the Confederation of British Industry last year found net zero supports more than one million jobs.

But this has coincided with a halving of manufacturing’s share of national output, so it has arguably come with significant costs as well. Beijing’s Communist government, by contrast, has taken a command-and-control approach to the green transition, with a heavy focus on production and abundant, cheap energy. China was outside the World Trade Organisation and classed as a developing country when Kyoto was agreed. And while the UK has pledged to cut emissions by 81pc on 1990 levels by 2035, China has only promised a 7pc-10pc reduction from an undefined peak by then (and net zero by 2060).

This is because, experts say, China’s primary reason for adopting clean energy is not to cut carbon emissions but to insulate itself from geopolitical pressure. Reliance on imported energy In 2003, Hu Jintao, China’s then president, warned of the “Malacca dilemma”: the dependence on a shipping corridor that Beijing could not control. About two thirds of China’s trade passes through the South-East Asian strait, including oil and gas from the Gulf, while US naval vessels ply the same waters.

Beijing has responded by seeking to reduce its reliance on imported energy. From this strategic concern, China’s green energy revolution was born, says Sam Geall, an expert on Chinese energy at Chatham House, a think tank. “Most of what China’s done can be explained in terms of its own national self-interest, rather than in terms of what has happened at the UN,” he says. China viewed renewable energy as a means of reducing its reliance on chokepoints, such as Hormuz and Malacca, and volatile prices set by cartels and conflict.

By adopting electrified technologies, such as electric vehicles (EVs), it could become less dependent on supplies of foreign fuels. “It was always quite geostrategic, and always had quite a hard edge,” Geall says. After widespread power shortages in the early 2000s, Beijing also sought both greater efficiency and more generating capacity. A 2005 renewable energy law gave provincial governments incentives to go green, unlocking investment in utility-scale wind power.

“For the first time, it was at utility scale. And it was about energy security,” says Philip Andrews-Speed, of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Then in 2006, China became the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and pressure grew to join the West’s bandwagon. Beijing still resisted challenging climate goals, arguing that a developing economy should not shoulder too much of the burden. But in 2011, renewable energy and transport electrification became major parts of the Communist Party’s five-year plan, unleashing even more state support.

So far, so planned. But from this point, Beijing was also fortunate. ‘A happy coincidence’ Europe was also embracing the green revolution. Beijing saw an export opportunity, and backed its own manufacturers. And the Europeans regarded Chinese raw materials and finished products as a much cheaper way to meet their targets. “There are a number of critical minerals where there is refining and processing and industries across the world,” Geall says.

“But many countries then just said, ‘Actually, we’ll just let China handle that.’” China’s growing dominance of these supply chains was “a happy coincidence, and benign neglect on the part of other countries that allowed it to happen”. Jane Nakano, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, agrees. “I don’t think it was necessarily any nefarious strategy. There was an opportunity that the Chinese enterprises could seize on, capitalise on.”

But after Donald Trump became US president in 2016, Beijing increasingly saw control of supply chains as imperative. Its “Made in China” strategy focused on winning the race for technological supremacy, accelerating the development of wind, solar, battery storage and electric vehicles. China has since become the world’s largest builder of renewable energy. While Britain hopes to have up to 126 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity by 2030, China is building more than 400 GW a year, according to the International Energy Agency.

Wind and solar now generate almost a quarter of its electricity. This demand has created large domestic industries, with Chinese companies accounting for about 78pc of wind turbines built worldwide. Yet China also continues to consume vast quantities of coal, unlike Britain, which has closed its coal plants and taxes gas generation. Chinese coal consumption hit 4,953 million tonnes in 2024, and the “dirty” fuel still provides 54pc of China’s electricity, although its share is shrinking.

Meanwhile, the electrification of transport is gathering pace. EVs now make up two-thirds of new car sales in China and one-quarter of new truck sales. On the world stage, China is also converting green energy into diplomatic clout. As Western aid and climate finance budgets shrink, it has started to present itself as an ally to poorer, developing countries, offering them cheap finance and technology while accusing the West of hypocrisy, Oxford’s Geall says.

This is good business, too. Chinese net zero tech and EV exports to South East Asia have surged as countries, such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia, seek to reduce their dependence on Gulf oil and gas. China’s clean energy industry generated $2.1tn (£1.6tn) in economic output in 2025, according to the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, equivalent to 11.4pc of its GDP and driving one-third of its economic growth.

But its dominance now poses major problems for European governments, as the spread of Chinese technology starts to erode the market shares of Western firms. Solar sunset The demise of Germany’s solar industry offers the starkest case of how China can obliterate the competition. Europe’s biggest economy commanded 21pc of global solar panel manufacturing in 2007, supporting 111,000 jobs. But after China poured tens of billions of state-backed financing into solar, panel prices plunged and the centre of gravity shifted.

Saxony-Anhalt-based Q-Cells, once the world’s largest solar cell producer, collapsed in 2012. Other German companies soon followed. Today, China controls 93pc of polysilicon manufacturing, 97pc of wafers, 92pc of cells and 86pc of panels, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. It also controls 80pc to 90pc of the market for solar production tools. The lesson here is that once an industrial ecosystem has been lost to China it is extremely difficult to rebuild, argues Sander Tordoir, the chief economist at the Centre for European Reform.

And Europe can no longer assume it can simply import low-value components while retaining the high-value production items for itself, he adds, pointing to the way that China has gone on to control both solar panel manufacturing and production of the machines used to make them. “European governments have to think very carefully about ecosystem effects,” he adds. China has been able to build “massive industrial capabilities in the lower rungs of clean tech”, he says, before moving into the “higher rungs of the value chain”.

This has also been the case in EVs, he adds, where China started off producing low-value car parts and batteries – and now dominates the sector. In Germany again, cut-throat competition from Chinese rivals, such as BYD, is forcing the once-invincible Volkswagen to cut tens of thousands of jobs and close factories to become more competitive. This time around, the EU has been more defensive and put tariffs on Chinese EVs to mitigate the flood of imports.

Across green industries, Tordoir says, time is running out to protect domestic industries. He is in favour of policies such as the “Made in Europe” framework, which will funnel subsidies towards European carmakers, while requiring 70pc or more of components to be sourced on the Continent. Even stricter rules have been imposed in America, where the use of Chinese “connected vehicle” components –