The West needs China for clean energy. It will pay a price to break free

London CNN —

The United States and Europe are racing to narrow China’s commanding lead in clean energy technologies, throwing subsidies at local manufacturers and hiking tariffs on Chinese imports in a strikingly protectionist turn.

China’s dominance in clean energy supply chains presents a conundrum for governments trying to green their economies and meet fast-approaching climate targets while protecting entire industries and thousands of jobs from a flood of cheap imports.

Without China’s electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, reducing planet-heating pollution could take longer and ultimately increase costs for businesses and consumers.

But the West needs to avoid repeating Europe’s mistake of becoming overdependent on a single supplier — Russia — for cheap gas and wants the economic rewards that come from developing its own technologies of the future.

“We saw the playbook for how China came to dominate the solar panel industry… granting massive subsidies for domestic suppliers, while… closing the domestic market to foreign businesses,” the European Union’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said in April as she announced a probe into Chinese wind turbine makers. “The result is that nowadays less than 3% of the solar panels installed in the EU are produced in Europe.”

“We can’t afford to see what happened on solar panels happening again on electric vehicles, wind, or essential chips,” she added.

An employee works on a wind turbine tower at a factory in Lianyungang, China, in October 2023.

Rising global competition in green technologies is increasing tensions between China — the world’s biggest manufacturer — and its major trading partners. The US and the EU have adopted a tough