If it were up to me, I would hand the entire “green energy” enterprise to China with a polite bow, wish them joy of it, and then—most importantly—cut every subsidy in the West. Not just the ones that show up in tidy budget lines where politicians can point and preen. I mean the whole cathedral of hidden indulgences. The direct payments. The indirect favors. The regulatory distortions. The accounting sleight of hand. All of it.
Because the farce begins with selective blindness.
We obsess over the visible subsidies—the press-release kind. The billions appropriated in the name of virtue. The ribbon cuttings. The heroic language about transformation and transition and planetary salvation. But we conveniently forget to count the systemic cost of unreliability. We pretend that intermittent power is simply “there,” as if electricity were poetry and not physics.
Flickering energy—wind that may or may not blow, sunlight that reliably disappears every evening—must be balanced. Grids are not mood rings. They cannot function on vibes. Every megawatt that arrives unpredictably must be shadowed by a dependable counterpart standing ready in the wings. Gas turbines idling. Coal plants throttled but not retired. Nuclear units absorbing the insult of ramping when they were designed to hum steadily.
In other words: every watt of unreliable capacity demands a ghost twin in the reliable system.
You build it twice.
Twice the generation. Twice the capital. Twice the maintenance logic. And yet the green installation is never charged for the backup it parasitically requires. Those costs are not itemized on the glossy project brochure. They are quietly folded into grid fees, network expansion charges, balancing costs, and an alphabet soup of levies that land on the consumer’s bill like bureaucratic confetti.
The public sees a wind turbine. They do not see the gas turbine sweating behind the curtain.
Remove those hidden cross-subsidies. Strip the system down to honest accounting. Let every kilowatt-hour carry the full burden of the infrastructure it requires to exist without blacking out a city. Then we shall observe, calmly and without hysteria, how many new projects materialize.
I suspect the silence would be instructive.
Because the economics, once disinfected, would look less like a revolution and more like a transfer mechanism.
Which brings us back to China.
Beijing builds at scale not because it is intoxicated by Western climate sermons but because it has identified a market of eager, subsidy-fueled buyers. Western governments mandate installations. Western ratepayers foot the bill. Chinese manufacturers ship turbines, panels, batteries—hardware polished in the rhetoric of salvation and priced at levels that assume political compulsion rather than voluntary demand.
It is a splendid cash-flow arrangement.
Factories in Guangdong hum. Containers depart. Western utilities comply. Consumers pay. The narrative remains noble. The margins remain healthy.
If I were running industrial strategy in Beijing, I would be perfectly content with this arrangement. You manufacture the equipment. Someone else manufactures the demand. It is the geopolitical equivalent of selling shovels during a gold rush—except here, the rush is legislated.
Now imagine the opposite scenario.
Imagine Western governments withdraw the scaffolding. No direct subsidies. No feed-in tariffs. No priority grid access. No socialization of balancing costs. No regulatory mandates compelling utilities to procure intermittent supply regardless of price.
What happens to the order books?
Look at the production capacity that has been built up. The factories. The supply chains. The financing structures. Entire provinces tuned to output solar modules and wind components at staggering scale. If the Western market hiccups—if it even pauses—those production lines do not gently idle. They convulse.
The casualties would not be metaphorical.
Excess capacity in heavy industry is not a philosophical inconvenience. It is layoffs. It is debt. It is local governments with revenue shortfalls. It is political friction in a system that prizes stability above all else.
Nervousness, under such conditions, is rational.
And when you are nervous about demand, you do what every rational merchant has done since the dawn of markets: you stimulate it. You nurture it. You inflame it. You ensure that your customers feel morally compelled to keep buying.
If Western audiences can be kept in a state of perpetual climate panic, then procurement budgets remain politically untouchable. Questioning the cost structure becomes heresy. Auditing grid fees becomes denialism. Demanding full-cost accounting becomes treason against the planet.
It is not ideology. It is sales.
Strip away the sermon, and you find a balance sheet.
The problem arises when we refuse to price those constraints honestly.
Intermittency is not a rounding error. It is a structural characteristic. It dictates system architecture. It requires redundancy. Redundancy costs money. When that money is hidden, the apparent competitiveness is artificial.
So yes, if it were my decision, I would liberalize the entire affair in the most ruthless way possible. No safety net. No hidden transfer payments. No accounting tricks.
Let renewables compete naked in the market against gas, coal, nuclear, hydro—each bearing its true system costs.
If they win under those conditions, excellent. They deserve their place. If they do not, then at least the outcome reflects reality rather than regulatory choreography.
And if that means that the center of gravity for green manufacturing remains in China, so be it. Industrial policy is not a morality play. It is a calculation.
But let us not pretend that today’s arrangement is a spontaneous triumph of superior economics. It is a politically engineered demand funnel, lubricated by subsidies both visible and invisible, and sustained by a narrative that discourages arithmetic.
Once you begin to do the arithmetic, the glamour fades.
Remove the subsidies. Remove the ghost copies. Remove the accounting fog.
Then watch.