Energy Submission

Too many in Washington seem resigned to China’s electro-dominance. It’s a terrible mistake.

As the House Republicans passed their and President Trump’s budget bill last month, some wanted to preserve — or at least have an orderly phase out of — various clean energy tax credits. The message they received, according to Politico: “When it comes to winning on clean energy, Trump just isn’t interested.”

Right now, renewables and batteries comprise more than 80% of the energy coming onto the world’s power grids, including in the US. They’re more than 90% of what’s been installed in Texas recently.

And electricity is at the center of China’s efforts to overtake the U.S. economy.

Yet Trump and the House leadership appear apathetic in their approach to this vital race with China; they seem to have given up. They talk about winning the AI race, but they are knee-capping the only power source that can, in the short and medium terms, deliver the massive amounts of electricity that AI and modern economies need.

They apparently think the U.S. can lead on oil and gas, coal, and nuclear power but not on solar, wind, electric vehicles, and batteries — the very sources that are shaping the future.

No one is building coal plants in America, no matter how badly President Trump or anyone else wants them to.

New nuclear power will take until 2032, at least, to enter the market, and longer to scale up.

And supply chain issues mean there will be a shortage of gas turbines for the next half-decade, and likely much longer.

Energy dominance is only possible with clean energy.

Yet Politico cites a former Trump Administration Energy Department official on clean energy: “To all appearances, it is not a battlefield that they care about.”

That’s not energy dominance. It’s the opposite: it’s energy submission. It will hand growth fueled by new energy innovation to China and hobble the American economy.

It also will drive U.S. power bills through the roof, which will hasten a change of power in Washington — making these policies that much more confounding. Regardless, such unpredictable, unstable policymaking is terrible for businesses and economic growth — economic growth we desperately need to get out of the debt crisis we’re in.

Senators need to change the House bill to work to preserve or gradually phase out the clean energy tax cuts as if our country’s economic prospects depend on it. Because they almost certainly do.

An “Electrostate”

The Financial Times recently dubbed China the “world’s first electrostate.” It’s a remarkable phrase, and the implications for power and control in the 21st century are massive.

The United States was brought to its knees by petrostates in the 1970s. Gas lines and a stagnant economy defined that decade. Middle-Eastern countries kicked off the energy crisis in 1973; it took more than a decade for a president to be re-elected.

China is building the same capability with electricity. The way things are going, if a country — or a company — wants more power, they’ll need to go through China.

More than 80% of the world’s solar panels and batteries are manufactured in China.

The country dominates supplies of critical minerals and is rapidly gaining in electric vehicles. This year, China will sell more than 10 million EVs domestically, making a majority of vehicle sales in one of the world’s biggest markets; Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico all import more than 60% of their EVs from China.

From the FT:

China is on its way to becoming the world’s first “electrostate”, with a growing share of its energy coming from electricity and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies. It offers China a strategic buffer from trade decoupling and rising geopolitical tensions with the US.

The country is not only rapidly advancing towards self-sufficiency in energy from secure domestic sources, but also wields vast power over the markets for the resources and materials that underpin technologies of the future. (emphasis added)

Dominance Starts with Competitiveness

The U.S. has started to turn the tide. Clean energy manufacturing here doubled over the last three years.

We now actually supply ourselves with about 70% of the batteries used in domestically manufactured electric vehicles. We could continue these investments and compete globally with China.

This is why the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPs and Science Act were so important, no matter what party you belong to: they helped the United States start to build stuff.

Our manufacturing sector grew significantly after the bills passed. Texas has seen massive amounts of solar and battery manufacturing — but not nearly as much as Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.

By maintaining clean energy incentives in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) Act of 2025, Republicans could, if they choose, take credit for catalyzing America’s manufacturing renaissance and economic growth.

In a podcast recorded the day after the U.S. House voted for the budget bill (and against energy dominance, against economic competitiveness, and for higher power bills), All-In host David Friedberg said, “This generation's Manhattan and Apollo project is energy production scaling in the United States.”

That’s 1,000% right. So was his co-host, Chamath Palihapitiya, who noted that energy production scaling necessarily requires a whole lot of wind, solar, and storage. It also requires more geothermal, nuclear, and gas peakers, too, but those all take much longer to build, and we’re running out of time.

Whatever dream you have of the future probably requires massive amounts of power. Without renewables and storage, it will never be a reality.

Thinking in Terawatts

Americans simply aren't thinking big enough.

But China is.

Just a few weeks before Friedberg called for a Manhattan project to scale energy production, he hosted Doug Burgum, chair of Trump's National Energy Dominance Council.

Friedberg told Secretary Burgum that by 2040, China’s energy generation capacity is projected to grow from three terawatts to eight.

In the United States, projections have us going, maybe, from one to two terawatts:

Secretary Burgum said that’s what “keeps him up at night.”

But Burgum also claimed that China built 95 gigawatts of coal in 2024 — in fact, China started construction on 95 gigawatts and completed less than a third of that. And it’s a tiny fraction of the generation that they intend to ride to energy dominance.

To that point, Burgum failed to note that China completed 277 gigawatts of solar and 80 gigawatts of wind in 2024 alone.

That’s energy dominance. And that’s what should keep Burgum up at night.

That massive renewables growth added nearly half a terawatt of electricity — over 400 gigawatts — to China’s power grids last year. The country will likely exceed that in 2025.

By contrast, the U.S. installed a little over 60 gigawatts in 2024.

The United States’ entire installed capacity is about 1,300 gigawatts. So China is on pace to install an entire United States-worth of power in less than three years, and then do it again in the next three.

How is the Administration going to keep up? Here’s what Burgum told Friedberg:

“Between now, 2025, and 2030, a lot of it's going to come back to LNG because that’s the fastest thing we can get online for more electricity generation is LNG power plants.”

This is a direct quote. And it’s terrifying.

There’s no such thing as an LNG power plant.

Liquefying natural gas consumes massive amounts of electricity. The only reason to do it is to send it somewhere else. And that’s what the oil and gas industry is doing: sending liquefied gas overseas.

But there’s no world — no math — where a national LNG buildout does a damn thing to help power our electric grids to compete and win with China.

Only Burgum’s urgency was partially reassuring.

It seems like Burgum and the Administration want to compete with China, which is great. And he says he wants to do it by putting power on the grid as quickly as possible, which is also great.

But we’re not going to do that with “LNG power plants.”

The answer is obvious to anyone paying attention to global electricity markets: the fastest way to get electricity online is through solar power and battery storage — and there’s not a close second.

The Only Thing Missing is Power

If you don’t want to invest in renewables and batteries for energy dominance or national security, then you should want to do it for fiscal solvency and economic prosperity.

The biggest thing about the One Big Beautiful Bill might be the debt it adds to the nation’s balance sheet. Plentiful, cheap electricity — and the economic growth it powers — would make a huge difference. Here’s Friedberg again:

“If I saw us adding a terawatt of electricity production capacity per year in the U.S., I would shut the fuck up about the debt.”

Why? Because we could power new industries and generate massive amounts of wealth and tax base. Friedberg added, “The technology is here today. The only thing that's missing is the power.”

Yet building even a tenth of a terawatt requires a massive amount of solar, wind, and storage. Nobody’s building anywhere near that much gas power. GE Vernova, the largest manufacturer of gas turbines, is ramping up to make 20 gigawatts, or one-fiftieth of a terawatt, per year worth of gas turbines by 2027 — for the entire world.

By smashing renewables, the House’s budget bill would result in far less electricity just at the time we need a lot more — and because of the legislatively imposed scarcity, electricity, which we need to power every innovation that could help us grow, would be far more expensive.

The Senate needs to take us off the ledge the House put us on.

More than that, our country needs to stop pretending that some electrons are red and some are blue. Clean energy is now, simply, energy. It is the dominant energy.

Ceding this ground to China is not energy dominance.

It’s energy surrender.

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