Rob Armstrong

Got to hand it to them.

So like China, I think I'm right in saying accounts for like a third of the spending in the entire world on green energy.

Like it's become an absolute superpower in green energy.

Give us a sense of the scale of this thing.

Like how quickly is it rolling this out?

So the solar panels that are not sitting in a massive warehouse somewhere in central China, where are they going?

Because it's interesting, right, that the whole world is kind of beholden to Saudi Arabia because it produces an awful lot of oil.

If you assume for now that China is the Saudi Arabia of green energy, does that give China long term a different sort of geopolitical impact?

You know, I gather like there are parts of Pakistan, for example, that are just getting carpeted in this Chinese solar tech and that must bring with it a certain diplomatic kind of, you know, relationship and a certain geopolitical power or am I over-interpreting?

It must be all over Australia, surely.

One thing you've got a lot of is sunshine.

Or should we have quotas, you know, take maybe 50% from China and then buy the other 50% from somewhere else?

It's a very tricky one for Europe, as you say, because the German car industry is such an important part of German manufacturing and German industrial base.

But, for example, as part of this series, one of the things I was reading was there's effectively an abandoned dishwasher factory in Spain.

This podcast loves dishwashers, as you may know.

And it closed...

And it closed and that led to the loss of hundreds of jobs.

And along comes a Chinese battery company called Hithium, which might take over this facility.

And it's pushed there in part because Trump has stepped back from a lot of the kind of green energy initiatives that were started under Joe Biden.

So all of a sudden, the US is not such a favourite place to do business anymore.