Name: Is China's renewables revolution moving fast enough? - The Climate Question, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2026-03-19T12:52:14.000Z
Duration: 22 min 49 s
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China now has such economic leverage over the world with control over renewables.

It is now the undisputed power when it comes to renewables.

And I think China loves that idea of being the dominant leader.

If you travel across China today, you'll see a country undergoing one of the biggest energy transformations in history.

The boom in wind and solar power is unprecedented in scale and speed.

But at the same time, China is still building coal powered plants, the dirtiest type of energy there is on a massive scale.

It's also producing around a third of the planet's greenhouse gases.

Can the world's biggest polluter change in time to avoid the worst effects of climate change?

That's our climate question from the BBC World Service with Greer Jackson and Jordan Dunbar.

Laura Bicker is the BBC's China correspondent.

In the midst of winter, We've had freezing temperatures over the last few weeks.

And you've done some great reporting, haven't you?

Well, we've traveled right from north, south across China because one of the things I really wanted to look at is how China's renewable revolution is looking on the ground.

And I'd seen some of it for myself in my previous travels, but

I really wasn't prepared for just how much China's landscapes changed.

There's one point in the train journey as we were heading north where you saw the tracks of the train just winding through.

And each single carriage of the train was filled with coal.

And in the background you had the space smokestacks of the old coal plant.

And then on the hillsides on the ridges, you've got these huge wind turbines turning away and then these miles of solar panels.

And that's just in one province, that's just in Inner Mongolia.

And then as you head south in Yunnan, as you cycle along the side of the Red river.

And by the way, it is deep red because of the color of the clay.

You see these kind of panels and they almost look like scales on the hill, the hillside so steep.

And these panels are placed right on the edge.

But I think as I've traveled right across from north to south, one of the things I found is that not everyone is embracing this dramatic shift.

Back in Inner Mongolia, when I was up in the north, I was speaking to the farmers who look after their flocks of sheep.

They farm these sheep for their cashmere and merino wool.

And they were telling me, I mean, honestly, they were laughing at me because I was freezing.

And they're turning their collars up as this icy blast comes from the north.

And they're saying to me, no, we see the climate changing.

We believe that this part of the world is getting warmer and wetter.

So when we looked at China's figures for this area, and

indeed, the temperature has increased there by 2 Celsius, according to China's meteorological figures, and

scientists have shown that it does work to an extent, that these solar panels are managing to hold back the advance of the desert.

Overgrazing in this area has caused real problems.

It's caused the advance of these sand dunes and what they're able to do because the solar panels actually offer some shade, the grasslands grow underneath the panels.

And actually they're managing to put the flock of sheep within the solar panels themselves.

So you've got these sheep and goats munching away in the middle of this solar installation.

And from the air, when you fly the drone overhead, they've put.

Many of them have been put in kind of, what shall I say, shapes.

This one is shaped like a horse to show the stealth and the speed of China's transition.

Further down south in Yunnan, we went to someone who used to grow tea, green tea, and

And there his crop has been ripped out in place of these panels, the place.

So basically, he rented the land from the tea company, the tea company has now rented it to the energy company.

Now, obviously, we asked both for comment and they declined, but this was.

A farmer believes he's losing out on a living.

He doesn't understand why there's a need for those panels there.

So there are very dissenting views on both sides.

Laura, once again, this is a mega project in China you're talking about.

We've talked about megadams in another episode.

This is a complete physical transformation of the landscape.

How have the Chinese government been able to do this when so many other countries struggle with a fraction of.

This is a grand plan right from the start.

So way back in 2012, when President Xi came to power, he pushed what he called new productive forces.

Back then it was your T shirts, your electronics, your TVs.

What China has done since then is move to port.

As I said, President Xi calls his three productive forces.

So these are batteries, electric batteries, electric vehicles and solar panels.

So what they've done is they've put state subsidies, offered loans to many companies, and

in return, what's happened is manufacturing has scaled up and I mean, we are talking huge levels of production.

Now that in itself has caused a problem because you've got basically a crisis of overcapacity.

And I think some figures from Reuters in the last year have shown that around 60% of jobs have been lost in these solar panel industries.

Now, I do not see that China will stop producing solar panels.

But what I would say is that their overproduction, their overcapacity is now going elsewhere.

Emerging economies across Southeast Asia, across Africa, they have made solar panels a cheap alternative.

And that's why we've seen so much of this scale right across China.

And especially within the last few years, since 2023, we're looking at a massive scale.

Considering, you know, if, look, way back at 2010, they hardly had a solar installation across the country.

Now they've installed more solar panels across the country than any other part of the world combined.

In fact, I think one analyst gave me the figure in May last year, they were installing 100 solar panels a second.

Can you imagine what that looks like right across the country?