The country consumes about a quarter

of the world's energy supply,

35% more than the U.S. annually.

Its energy needs have more than tripled since the year 2000.

That consumption has helped to fuel astonishing growth,

but it's come at a cost.

China is the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter.

There is no way to tackle climate change

unless China reduces its emissions to net zero.

The country's reliance on fossil fuels is also a hindrance

to its own growth and the wellbeing of its citizens.

China is not energy secure.

It has a massive import bill for things like oil and gas.

It has a longstanding pollution problem,

and it is also prone to outages

that severely hamper industry.

All this has led the world's biggest polluter

to take steps towards a radical transformation.

President Xi Jinping outlined his plans

to make China carbon neutral by 2060.

COVID 19 reminds us that humankind

should launch green revolution

and move faster to create a green way of development.

China's high level goals are that within this decade

it's going to peak its carbon emissions.

And then it's going to go to net zero by 2060.

So that gives it approximately 40 years

to do something that no country has achieved,

let alone something like the size of China.

As the world starts to turn away from fossil fuels,

China is positioning itself as the king of clean energy,

not only transforming its own energy system

but also building a supply chain that could leave the world

uncomfortably dependent on China for its energy needs.

China has really expanded its grip.

So it's the processing, it's the manufacturing,

it's all the way down to your EVs and your battery packs.

How the West deals with that,

they're going to have to be a bit creative.

What China plans to accomplish

by 2030 could determine the shape

of the global energy system of the future.

At the end of the last century, China was on the cusp

of an economic revolution.

In 1990, its GDP was only 6% that of the US,

and its energy use was only 34%.

But the economic reforms of the '80s and '90s

started the process of privatizing industry,

and opening up to trade with the rest of the world.

By the time it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001

China was well on its way to becoming the world's factory

with booming energy needs to match.

The history of it is really dramatic.

I think just the condensation,

really China is doing industrial revolution

a hundred years after that,

all of that in a very concentrated period of time.

So what we saw is obviously dramatic change in terms

of energy consumption, and there were power crunches

in the early years, really the system was still

trying to cope. Dramatic addition of coal fired plants

in particular to deal with that.

From a climate perspective, the position was,

well, you had your turn, now it's our turn.

When you were growing, you as the West,

there was no question of what carbon was doing.

You did whatever you wanted, now it's our turn.

That really changed in 2008, 2009.

And that coincides with an awareness of air pollution.

In Beijing, which is facing another smoggy day.

Some environmentalists say it is the worst air on record.

Beijing was famously the most polluted city

in the world for almost a decade.

It also became very clear to its leadership that

that kind of growth will be unsustainable,

not just from a fact of putting out lot of emissions,

but from a fact that much of the fossil fuel consumption,

for example oil and natural gas will have to be imported.

And that's something China wanted to walk away from.

So starting about 2010, China committed to increase

its deployment of renewables.

China, like many other places in the world, was faced

with initially very non-competitive on a cost basis

economics for solar projects, for wind projects

and being able to subsidize the manufacture

of the key components,

ensuring the power that they sell has an attractive rate.

All of these things, China has done very, very well.

You push the market into existence

and then you're able to pull back

with some of the policy mandates

because now it just makes good economic sense.

China's investments in renewables helped drive

astonishing price drops across the industry

leading to record levels of new wind and solar installations

all over the world in recent years.

Last year, wind and solar generated more than 10%

of the world's electricity.

Still renewables only make up a tiny fraction

of China's energy mix today.

China is overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels

at the moment.

And within that if you look at power generation,

it's overwhelmingly coal, roughly 60%.

Wind, biomass, solar remain a much, much smaller fraction.

There was pressure building up on China

for quite a few years that China needs to do more

to cut emissions.

And that finally sort of came together in 2015

at the Paris Agreement when China agreed to sign it

alongside the US and pretty much

every country on the planet.

That bit of diplomacy was crucial to take China

to the next stage, which is when in 2020, it declared

that it will set a net zero goal.

And in a way it was a coup for China

because it set that goal even before

the US could have done so.

China's decarbonization plan ramps up gradually

with fossil fuel emissions increasing

for a few years before peaking in 2030.

From there they've given themselves another three decades

to get to net zero, with 80% of energy

coming from carbon free sources by 2060.

Getting there will be a massive undertaking,

and it starts with renewable megaprojects

on a scale seen nowhere else on Earth.

So late in 2021, we took a reporting trip to Qinghai

in western China.

It's quite wind swept.

It's a very sunny part of the world.

Very low population density.

We went to a facility that was spread out

over 600 square kilometers, about the size of Singapore.

In that facility, they have a hydro dam,

they've got a massive solar buildup,

and they're adding wind installations as well.

When all of that is up and running,

it's going to be producing nearly 20 gigawatts of energy.

It's enough to cover the power needs

at any given time for Israel, for example.

By 2030 China plans to up to 1.2 terawatts

of wind and solar capacity, enough to meet

all of the US' electricity needs today.

But it's not enough just to generate that power.

Getting the power where it needs to go

is a mega project in itself.

In order to ship all that electricity,

China has basically built this huge network

of ultra high voltage power lines.

And they're designed to get all of this energy

from the west to where it's needed

in the population and industrial centers of the east.

Power lines might seem like a mundane piece

of infrastructure, but they're actually a crucial piece

of the decarbonization puzzle.

A conventional AC power cable loses a lot of electricity

over the course of hundreds of miles.

Hence the need for these specialized direct current lines.

What they do is they reduce the wastage that may happen

on the way to transport this electricity.

There are only two countries in the world where

these cables are operating, China and Brazil.

Brazil has two of those cables, China has 25.

By far and away, China is absolutely the leader on this.

And the amount of money that you're talking about,

I mean, it's hundreds of billions of dollars

that they're going to be spending on this in coming decades.

As China goes towards a net zero goal,

its leadership has recognized that there is no way

China can meet those goals

without having what's called firm clean power.

The idea of firm clean power is that you're able

to generate carbon free electricity when you want it,

rather than relying on when the sun shines

or the wind blows.

Nuclear power satisfies those conditions quite well.

In most countries, the nuclear industry is struggling,

facing huge upfront costs, regulatory hurdles

and negative public opinion.

Still it is a carbon free source of reliable power,

and many environmental advocates see it as a key

to the green transition - as does China's leadership.

China plans to build 150 new reactors in the next 15 years

which is more than what the entire world has built

in the last 35 years.

Nuclear isn't seen as controversial in China,

or at least we don't know if it is.

It's not clear whether China's own population

supports it or opposes it

because they're not allowed to protest

and show their opposition to a certain technology.

That still leaves the difficult economics of nuclear,

the high upfront cost of building new reactors.

Here too, China may have unique advantages.

One thing that we all know China really excels at doing

is building huge infrastructure quickly.

After decades of building bridges and skyscrapers,

and high speed rail, and ultra high voltage lines,

like every super massive industrial project

that China has built, that know-how goes into also building

nuclear power plants.

When you build projects consistently on schedule

and on budget, you actually get to realize the benefits

that were imagined back when the project was being planned

like stable, low cost electricity

at a certain rate, at a certain production cost.

China's efforts to decarbonize are likely

to have many positive effects on its domestic energy supply.

But that's not the only reason China has gone all-in

on clean energy.

China certainly wants to meet a net zero goal,

but it also wants to be a country that is making

a lot of money exporting the technologies

that will clean up the energy system globally.

China is incredibly important when we think about

the supply chain for green technology in general,

the green economy, whether that's solar panels, or turbines,

or the elements that you need to process

along the way, incredibly significant.

China basically accounts for something

like 75% of the world's supply chain for solar.

Anything that you're going to do in the States or in Europe,

I mean, at some point Chinese companies

will have been involved in this.

That dependence on China has lately been

a source of strain.

Last year, COVID related production issues in China

caused the price of of solar panels to rise

for the first time in decades.

And some companies have pledged

to take their business elsewhere

due to reports of human rights abuses

in the majority Uyghur province of Xinjiang

which produces most of the world's polysilicon,

a key material in the manufacturing of solar panels.

Obviously there have been accusations in the west

that the Uyghurs are subject to forced labor.

The industry and the Chinese government have denied this.

Some in the west are also concerned

about China's dominance over the materials

needed to make lithium iron batteries.

Cobalt, for example, is a scarce mineral produced mainly

in the Democratic Republic of Congo

where China has bought up most of the supply.