Noel King

Oil, coal, gas, and of course, a bunch of renewables.

And China has been thinking about its huge energy consumption for a long time because it knows that if somebody wants to attack it, it can just shut down all this fossil fuel that it imports from different places, including, of course, the Strait of Hormuz.

And one of the ways it has been dealing with that is trying to make energy at home.

It has a bunch of coal, so it depends on coal.

But what else does it have?

Well, it has a lot of sun and a lot of wind.

And so it's been building up the industry to make solar panels and wind turbines, and of course, then to store that renewable energy in batteries, and of course, use it in electric cars for the last 20 years.

And today, it is the world's largest manufacturer of all these technologies,

And now the rest of the world, which has not been planning as clearly as the Chinese have been planning, have looked at what the Chinese have done and they want more of it.

And the world sees now clean energy as an energy security option, just as it used to see fossil fuels as the energy security option.

Okay, so you said that China has been preparing for a moment like this for a long time, which means China's renewable energy sector has been a booming.

What was it like before the war?

What was going on?

I don't know, six months ago, a year ago?

China has been the world's largest manufacturer of almost all clean energy technologies.

Solar panels, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries, electric cars, and even electrolysers, which turn renewable energy into hydrogen.

Now, before the war, the thing that China was probably having the biggest capacity to produce is solar panels.

Panels stretch as far as the eye can see.

Two years ago, this was just a desert.

We've since installed six million solar panels, two million of them in the space of less than six months.