China’s Green Energy Takeover: The Clean Power Race Reshaping the World

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: China is pushing further into renewable energy, in part by pushing further out to sea and by pushing the boundaries of wind technology. Roughly 70 kilometers off the coast of Guangdong in the South China Sea, reached via a rather rough two-and-a-half-hour speedboat ride. I think I'm getting wet. Sprouts a seemingly endless forest of towering wind turbines, including the Chinzhou 4 wind farm, owned and operated by Mingyong Smart Energy. [00:00:30] Speaker 2: Far from the coast of Guangdong, in the waters of the South China Sea, China is building a new kind of power. Not oil, not coal, wind. Towering turbines now rise from the ocean, turning the sea into one of the world's most important frontiers for clean energy. [00:00:48] Speaker 1: Its 52 100-meter-tall turbines, at full tilt in stiffer open-sea winds, provide a combined 500 megawatts of energy-generating capacity. [00:00:59] Speaker 3: With war in the Middle East roiling global oil markets and severe overcapacity hindering solar, China is, well, leading into wind. [00:01:09] Speaker 1: Bloomberg NEF says China is installing nearly three out of every four of the world's new offshore turbines, as it builds up its energy resilience through renewables, like hydro, solar, and wind power. [00:01:21] Speaker 4: Well, first of all, people who switch over are getting the benefit right away. But coming back to the point about the fossil fuel industry and our debt to them, there's an old saying that came from the king of Saudi Arabia years ago. The Stone Age didn't end because of a shortage of stones. It ended because something better came along. Something better has come along now to replace fossil fuels, which are dirty and polluting and threatening humanity's future. The cheapest electricity in the history of the world is solar energy. Second cheapest is wind energy. And now batteries, the only thing that's come down in price faster than solar is utility-scale batteries, doubling every single... If you look at all of the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year, I often ask people, what percentage of it was renewable? And people say, you know, they're looking for a high number. Say maybe 30 percent, 35 percent. Correct answer is 93 percent, because it is taking over the electricity generation industry. [00:02:22] Speaker 2: And in this new renewable era, one country is moving faster than anyone else. [00:02:28] Speaker 5: China is in a class by itself, with as much renewables built in the first six months of this year is pretty much like everyone else combined. But it's probably a little more surprising to look at who's in second and third place on that list. So, you know, India is in second place globally for the first six months of this year, with 24 gigawatts of newly built solar panels. That's up by nearly half from last year. And then just behind that is the United States at 21 gigawatts, even with the dramatic turnabout under President Trump. [00:02:57] Speaker 6: So, to your question of whether we are more similar to China or to the U.S., I think we have a path that we're following that is our own. China, I think, is in a different league, as you said. You know, they're big in manufacturing, big in capacity addition, and so on. We are just about overtaking now the U.S. in terms of capacity addition. And I think that lead is going to widen with the stuff that is going on here and with the push that we are seeing in India. So I would say that we'll be adding about 50 to 60 gigawatts a year of renewables for the next four or five years. And then we'll probably step the pace up to a much larger amount. [00:03:30] Speaker 1: But there are concerns, in particular with solar, that China is building too much capacity. In a sluggish economy, it's cheaper to rely on coal, which still fuels more than half of China's power production. China is racing ahead in clean energy, but its transition is still unfinished. [00:03:59] Speaker 2: The country is building the future while still depending on the past. [00:04:03] Speaker 7: China is diversifying, right? They're investing a lot in renewables. They're doing a lot in clean tech. You could argue they've gone ahead of the United States in that space. And we are paying catch up to China. [00:04:13] Speaker 1: It's a race, though. President Trump has no intention of even participating in. [00:04:18] Speaker 8: They ruin the environment. They kill the birds. They kill the whales. China makes all the windmills. The only problem is they don't have wind farms. They sell them to the suckers over in Europe. [00:04:28] Speaker 1: Europe is no doubt a big focus of Mingyang's, with his chairman telling Bloomberg he's considering building a wind turbine factory in Spain after the U.K. blocked its plans for a $2 billion facility in Scotland, with the U.K. citing risks to national security. [00:04:45] Speaker 9: We find it very surprising that the British government dealt with a purely commercial matter in a politicized manner. This is not only unfair to Mingyang, but also undermines the confidence of Chinese companies in entering the British market. [00:04:57] Speaker 1: China, in its newly adopted five-year plan, is targeting to double offshore wind capacity by the end of this decade, aided by technology like this, a double-headed turbine offshore. It's the largest floating turbine in the world, allowing China to go further offshore and into deeper ocean. This could be Mingyang's calling card to overseas clients, seeking alternative energy sources. The floating Ocean X, towed into place and tethered to the South China seabed. Open sea testing was completed just this month, with pledged energy capacity nearly double that of the largest existing design. [00:05:39] Speaker 10: This is primarily about economics. If we put a larger capacity on a single floating platform, the cost can then be reduced. [00:05:47] Speaker 1: It's a towering reminder that China is securing its dominance of yet another clean energy industry, as the median Chinese turbine price, while increasing, is still about 45% lower than western turbines outside China, pricing power to potentially undercut the competition amid a worldwide energy shock. [00:06:08] Speaker 2: But China's clean energy ambition does not stop at sea. Far from the coast, high near the edge of the Himalayas, another project is taking shape, one that could dwarf almost anything the world has seen before. [00:06:22] Speaker 11: But on the edge of the Himalayas, China is planning something even more ambitious. [00:06:27] Speaker 12: This is the project of the century, the most impressive power generation system ever envisioned. [00:06:36] Speaker 11: It's the hydropower equivalent of a mission to Mars. But to build it, China must tunnel through mountains that are still rising in one of the most earthquake-prone places on the planet. And that's not all. What happens here could affect hundreds of millions of lives downstream in neighbouring India and Bangladesh, risking new tensions over water. The engineering is unprecedented. So are the stakes. [00:07:14] Speaker 13: There is like this stark beauty. It was called the roof of the world because it's the highest part of the world. [00:07:22] Speaker 11: From the glacial melt here, the Yalung-Sangpo River flows over a thousand kilometres east along the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, before performing what many consider a geological miracle at a location known as the Great Bend, right where the plateau meets the Himalayas. [00:07:40] Speaker 13: It does this mad turn, so it stops flowing east and does a big hook and starts coming back and flowing west. [00:07:48] Speaker 14: It's about a 180-degree bend where the river drops about 2,000 metres in elevation in just a 50-kilometre period. Then the river leaves China, goes into India, and there it's known as the Brahmaputra. And then it empties out in the Bay of Bengal. [00:08:04] Speaker 2: In China's clean energy story, scale is everything. But the larger the project, the larger the consequences. [00:08:15] Speaker 11: But it's back at the Great Bend in Medog County, Tibet, where construction of the Yasha or Lower Yalung hydropower project officially began in July 2025. It's a place so remote, a road only reached it in 2013. [00:08:33] Speaker 14: The gorge of the Great Bend is the biggest canyon in the world. It's literally three times deeper and a little bit longer than the Grand Canyon in Arizona. [00:08:40] Speaker 11: It's this natural drop, the world's deepest and deepest, that also gives the plateau its greatest hydropower potential. Those following the project say China's ambition is not just to tap this power, but to utterly dominate it. [00:09:00] Speaker 15: The energy generation from this project will break records in many different dimensions. It will be by far the world's largest individual source of energy, 60 gigawatts of installed capacity. [00:09:13] Speaker 14: The Chinese government has said that this will generate about 300 billion kilowatt hours a year. That's more than the UK uses an entire year. It's also about three times more than the three-quarters generates. [00:09:25] Speaker 11: With little known officially about the project, including the construction timeline, analysts outside China have had to rely on social media, state television, and satellite images to piece together its design. [00:09:40] Speaker 12: Not so long ago, an article was published in Nature, one of the premier peer-reviewed academic journals, that roughly describes the project as a diversion project. [00:09:51] Speaker 11: Unlike a traditional walled dam, observers believe this one would be made up of a series of hydropower stations along the river. Theories vary, but some outside experts suggest there would be one upstream dam with a large reservoir to regulate the water flow. This would be followed by a second smaller dam at the top of the gorge, where water would be diverted from the Great Bend through the mountains via a number of underground tunnels and turbines, before potentially entering another smaller re-regulation dam at the bottom of the gorge. This could stabilize the flow before the river continues downstream into India. [00:10:29] Speaker 15: This will be quite an engineering feat, after all, you're literally reconstructing a whole river underground. The volume of water that will be diverted here will be similar to the discharge of a medium-sized river such as like the Rhine in Europe. [00:10:47] Speaker 11: It's a concept already tested further upstream at the Jinping dams, where engineers diverted the river through the mountains. [00:10:55] Speaker 15: But what is really novel about this project is just like its sheer scale where like many engineers will probably not believe that building such a project in such a remote location would be even possible. [00:11:08] Speaker 14: The government announced the project would cost 1.2 trillion yuan. That's about 167 billion US dollars. And that compares to the Three Gorges when it was built, completed back in the 2000s. It ended up at a cost of about 37 billion dollars. So this is four or five times as much as that. [00:11:26] Speaker 11: But experts say for China, this project is not just about generating power. It's a core tenet of its national economic strategy. [00:11:36] Speaker 14: China is an engineering state. And one of the things that, you know, having an engineering society in China has done is that it's a government that likes to build its way out of problems. [00:11:46] Speaker 11: It's a project that promises an economic jolt for sectors like construction, cement and steel. [00:11:54] Speaker 14: When the project was announced, it rippled through the economy. Companies like Power Construction Corp of China, China Engineering Corp, Huaxin Cement, their share prices all surged. [00:12:04] Speaker 16: But at another level, the dam will also enable China to produce more renewable energy and help that green transition. [00:12:14] Speaker 2: For China, the dam promises power, growth and energy security. But building clean energy at this scale means taking on risks almost as vast as the project itself. [00:12:23] Speaker 11: With a target of net zero emissions by 2060, China said the project could cut 300 million tons of carbon emissions a year by replacing fossil fuel power. It's also about energy security, generating more power domestically as demand surges for energy-hungry tech. But building this record-shattering megaproject in one of the most remote and geologically unstable regions on Earth tests the boundaries of modern engineering. [00:12:55] Speaker 13: In order to build a dam like this, you're dealing with intense energies and intense altitudes. Landslides, freezing, malfunctioning equipment, people falling off the side of mountains. They are building this massive project on a site where six tectonic plates connect up. [00:13:18] Speaker 11: That makes this one of the world's most earthquake-prone regions. In fact, in 1950, a magnitude 8.6 earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded in human history, occurred in the area. [00:13:31] Speaker 13: For the last 40 years, China has developed the best hydropower engineers in the world by far. They're not magicians and they can't stop tectonic plates and they can't stop earthquakes. So that's a massive danger. And even if the earthquake doesn't happen, these type of projects tend to have slow disasters happen within them. So they seep plastic and concrete into the surrounding environment. And that changes the entire environment of that place slowly over time. [00:14:07] Speaker 11: The international campaign for Tibet also warns that dam projects frequently displace thousands from ancestral lands and sever traditional livelihoods with little consultation or support. The Three Gorges project, which required the forcible relocation of 1.3 million people from a much more heavily populated region, submerged large sections of the river valley, damaging habitats for many endemic species. [00:14:34] Speaker 17: China has done this before. The promise is clean power. The question is who carries the cost? The river, the land, or the people living downstream? [00:14:44] Speaker 11: Over the last two decades, China's 12 dams along the Mekong have reshaped the river, and the lives that depend on it downstream. [00:14:59] Speaker 12: The Mekong runs about 4,500 kilometers from the Tibetan Plateau in China, through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. This river is the lifeblood of people for those countries. Tens of millions of people rely on natural resources that come right out of the river. China doesn't share information on its dam building with the downstream countries of the Mekong. It doesn't let the countries know the designs of the dams, how they're going to be operated when ground breaks, when the reservoirs start to fill, let alone how they're operating in real time. [00:15:39] Speaker 11: Those who study the river say this has left communities in the dark, and unable to rely on the river's seasonal floods and droughts. [00:15:47] Speaker 12: The Mekong is mighty because of its seasonal flood pulse. And this flood pulse drives the Mekong's fishery, it drives the agricultural production. What dams do is reduce the peak. At times they can reduce the peak downstream by 20%, 2,000 kilometers away. [00:16:09] Speaker 11: But in areas closer to the dam, like here in northern Thailand, those fluctuations are felt even more acutely. In the dry season, the pattern reverses. Water released for hydropower can push the river levels three times higher than normal. As a result, environmentalists say the ecology of the river has been disrupted, and the reproductive cycles of the fish and birds are pended. What were once thriving fishing villages are now diminished. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. [00:16:44] Speaker 18: The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a very small part of the river. The Mekong is a small part of the river. The Mekong is a small part of the river. [00:16:58] Speaker 12: People there have been suffering for years. They lose their livestock. They lose their equipment. They lose their gardens and farms. When these sudden pulses of water come through. [00:17:25] Speaker 2: For countries downstream, the concern is not only what China is building now. It is what has already happened before. [00:17:34] Speaker 11: It's the same lack of data and transparency that has fueled concern downstream from the lower Yalong hydropower project in India and Bangladesh. While India's Brahmaputra river is fed by other tributaries too, experts say nearly 40% of its fertile sediment comes from the Yalong Sangpo's Gorge, sustaining millions of lives and livelihoods. [00:17:59] Speaker 14: Both countries have come to China and said that they want more information about it. They want to know what the downstream effects are going to be. And they're wanting more than anything else, assurances that the downstream flow of the river that turns into the Brahmaputra will not be too impacted by this hydropower project. [00:18:16] Speaker 11: The border here has long been disputed. And reports suggest officials in New Delhi fear Beijing could weaponize the water, controlling it for political leverage. [00:18:26] Speaker 14: "The Chinese government's counter to concerns from India, Bangladesh and others has been that the same amount of river coming out of the canyon now will be coming out of it after it's done. And there won't be huge retention dance that could allow them to hold back water in the case of some sort of geopolitical conflict in the future." [00:18:45] Speaker 19: "The Chinese have built the Yalu-Zong-Bukjang's water production, through a serious scientific theory, it will not affect the environment of the underwater world, it will not affect the water and water resources." [00:19:02] Speaker 11: But still, tensions remain. India is countering China with the construction of its own mega dam on the upper Siang, 90 kilometers below the border, even as it faces local resistance and environmental scrutiny. [00:19:20] Speaker 13: "Without knowledge exchange and cooperation across that border, then it's really easy to play on people's fears." [00:19:26] Speaker 15: "And what I think it's really important is that these decisions are made on like quantifiable, open and like objective data that enable us international scientists, but also importantly, like people whose livelihoods are at stake in that river basin actually have a say. The objective of this discussion here is not to like vilify China or to basically put this project into a bad line. And indeed it would have a major impact and major benefit for China's targets to become more carbon neutral, which would have major implications for the global climate." [00:20:03] Speaker 14: "If China can pull this off, then it's a statement to the rest of the world to say like, we're reshaping rivers, we're creating clean energy, we're providing our economy and companies with infinite clean energy that it can use to build the economy of the future." [00:20:17] Speaker 2: "But China's clean energy power is not only measured in dams, turbines or rivers, it is also moving through cities in the vehicles, batteries and supply chains that are electrifying daily life." [00:20:27] Speaker 20: "Transports a major source of emissions, but one bus company is trying to foster change. Golden Arrow transports over 240,000 commuters daily across the city. It's in the process of replacing 10% of its 1,100-strong fleet with electric models, made by China's BYD." [00:20:47] Speaker 21: "We're buying something like 25 million meters of diesel every single year, so we needed to look at what was possible." [00:20:54] Speaker 20: "Bloomberg NEF estimates that e-buses globally will save the equivalent of almost 2 million barrels of oil demand per week." [00:21:02] Speaker 10: "Electric buses are playing a really important role in reducing emissions. We can see is that about a quarter of a million barrels of oil demand per day are being displaced by electric buses around the world. That's initially been led out of China, but we're now seeing rapid uptake in places like Africa and other parts of the world. And then the second area is around improving urban air quality through things like reducing NOx emissions, nitrogen oxide emissions, and particulate emissions." [00:21:24] Speaker 20: "BYD buses are found in over 300 cities worldwide." [00:21:28] Speaker 21: "By purchasing 120 buses, we are literally reducing our carbon output by 10%, which is significant, and obviously hoping to make our air healthier, reduce our carbon emissions." [00:21:39] Speaker 20: "These buses are shipped fully assembled from Asia to Cape Town. But that's something President Cyril Ramaphosa wants to change. South Africa will soon offer 150% tax break for local EV production. The hope is that companies like BYD will start manufacturing their vehicles locally, lowering costs for buyers and creating jobs." "Globally, electric bus sales fell 27% in 2023, as Chinese sales and incentives in the U.S. slowed. While the market may get a boost from Europe as buses there transition to zero emissions in the years ahead, the real growth is expected to come from the developing world. And hopes for the environment will ride on expectations there will be more bus companies in Africa fueling a greener expansion." [00:22:31] Speaker 2: "But every electric bus, every electric car, and every clean grid depends on something less visible: batteries. And the battery race is where China's clean energy dominance becomes even harder to ignore." [00:22:45] Speaker 22: Electric vehicles represent one of the most advanced technologies to combat global warming. Transportation makes up about a quarter of global carbon emissions, and consumer vehicles are about 9% of that. But to reach net zero impact, the energy intensive process of mining and processing battery minerals has to clean up its act too. One way to chip away at that problem is to mine less, or reuse or recycle EV batteries instead. [00:23:13] Speaker 23: "How do we take these batteries that have been produced, whether it's in a cell phone or a car, and recover as much of those materials as we possibly can? Nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese, aluminum, and copper. These minerals can be reused thousands and thousands of times. There's a lot of effort, time, energy, and money that's required to extract these materials out of the ground. The last thing we want to do is put them back in the ground and have to dig them up again 10 years from now." [00:23:40] Speaker 22: But recycling batteries comes with its own unique set of challenges. First, there have to be enough old batteries in need of recycling. Electric vehicle sales in the US are looking wobbly, so it could take longer than expected for recyclers to gain scale and become profitable. Then, there's the actual collection and transportation of batteries. Each battery is packed with energy, so moving them around while they're in various stages of degradation creates a safety hurdle both companies and public officials are working to solve. So, how are recyclers navigating the bumpy road toward a sustainable EV future? This is how a battery is recycled. [00:24:19] Speaker 23: "Some batteries come in in pallets like this, boxes and boxes and boxes of batteries. Some come in drums, EV battery packs, they come in pallets. Every type of battery, shape, size, chemistry, we get all that." [00:24:38] Speaker 22: Serba Solutions is one of a handful of startups trying to build a battery recycling industry in the US. It's not exactly a brand new company. It started out as a family-owned waste collection business 30 years ago. And then, more recently, in 2021, it strung together a few acquisitions to form the battery recycling company it is today. [00:24:57] Speaker 24: As we come down our facility through the center aisle, we do a small format battery recycling sorting, whether that is going to be a retailer, a municipality, or something from a corporate at your business if you recycle your batteries at work. [00:25:09] Speaker 23: So, that's one aspect of it. The other is, obviously, electric vehicles. And you look at the gigafactories that are being built in North America. They're going to produce a lot of scrap material that needs to be collected and the materials need to be recovered from those. But then, also, the electric vehicles coming off the roads. So, this is an EV battery pack. This is the steel structure of the battery. These devices here, that's actually the lithium-ion battery cells. He'll take these modules and put these modules here on a pallet. These modules, then, we'll send them to Lancaster, Ohio, where we'll process the batteries, turn that into something called a black mass, and then, eventually, extract the lithium nickel, cobalt, and manganese out of the battery. So, we'll recover 95% of the metals that are in this battery, and then purify them again, and send them back to a cathode producer to make a new cathode that goes into a new battery. [00:25:59] Speaker 2: Recycling could help close the loop. But for now, the clean energy boom still depends on digging minerals out of the ground. And that is where the green transition becomes much more complicated. [00:26:15] Speaker 25: This island was once covered in forest. Now, it's being transformed into a global hub for nickel, a metal crucial for making electric vehicle batteries. The Indonesian island of Sulawesi feeds the world's largest battery makers, who power virtually every major seller of EVs. And that's coming at a major cost. Indonesia's nickel industry shows no signs of slowing down. It continues to attract tens of thousands of workers from across the country, [00:26:52] Speaker 26: even if the jobs could kill them. 13 people have died, and dozens more are injured after an explosion at a nickel plant in Indonesia. [00:27:01] Speaker 23: The Ministry of Manpower has sent a special team to investigate the cause of the explosion. [00:27:06] Speaker 25: People in Sulawesi say they are risking their lives and health to make a living. So what is the real cost? [00:27:14] Speaker 27: If you want to make electric cars that can go a long way on a single charge, batteries with a high nickel content are a very good way to do it. If you want to make electric cars that can go a long way to do it, Indonesia has these enormous nickel reserves. That's not new. What has changed in the last 10 or so years is a number of advances in the technology for processing nickel. And that created really a gold rush. [00:27:44] Speaker 28: Chinese companies saw an opportunity in Indonesia, which also has cheap labor and energy. So they started building nickel facilities across the country. [00:27:56] Speaker 27: This is a place that occupies a land area that is about 10 times larger than Central Park in New York. It looks like this incredibly large industrial facility was just dropped down in the middle of what was really jungle and rice paddies even 15 or 20 years ago. [00:28:25] Speaker 25: As a result, Morawale's economy has been booming. It's grown by nearly 600% between 2015 and 2022. [00:28:52] Speaker 27: Now there are big drawbacks. There is air pollution. Cheap power in Indonesia comes from coal. These are very dirty facilities. When we are talking about a metal that is being used for electric vehicles, which are supposed to help us deal with climate change to make transportation greener, producing one of the key inputs with coal is problematic. [00:29:24] Speaker 25: Around the island, trash is piling up and signs of pollution are everywhere. On top of the environmental damage and concerns around health, there's an issue over unsafe working condition. On Christmas Eve of 2023, a fire broke out at a smelter for stainless steel located in Imit. The blaze killed 21 men and injured many more. Workers we spoke to said injuries on the job are common because of the lack of safety gear. They asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. [00:30:09] Speaker 28: There have been similar incidents in other facilities. About four hours drive up the coast from Imit is a smelting facility called Gun Buster Nickel Industry. In December 2022, two Gun Buster workers were trapped in the cab of a crane when coal dust [00:30:34] Speaker 25: caught fire beneath them. They burned to death. One of the workers was 20-year-old Imidid Difri Hari Jonathan. [00:30:50] Speaker 27: The parents and sister actually told me they hadn't spent it because they felt, and this is what the father said, and this really stuck with me, the money is like Jonathan's body. How could I spend it? [00:31:07] Speaker 25: After the accident that killed Jonathan, workers at Gun Buster staged protests. They turned violent, claiming two more lives. This is a video of a clash at Gun Buster taken by one of the workers. The unrest led Indonesia's human rights regulator to launch an investigation. The report found, quote, "unsafe working conditions, lack of protection for workers' health and welfare, and disregard for corporate responsibilities." [00:31:42] Speaker 27: People who live in the surrounding community, they don't feel they have any choice, because there aren't a lot of jobs in rural Sulawesi, so this is what you do. Under Shokowi, the president who is leaving office this year, the government has been very enthusiastically in favor of what they call downstreaming, meaning bringing this processing onshore, forcing companies to do value-added activities in Indonesia. The government, while they've acknowledged some of these criticisms, have mostly stuck to the policy, and that includes the incoming president, Prabowo Subianto. We have seen this enormous expansion of the Indonesian nickel industry over the last five, ten years. There is now a huge amount of nickel in the world. As a result, prices have come down, and this has created a crisis, actually, in all of the nickel-producing countries that are not Indonesia. [00:33:01] Speaker 29: They said, "Indonesia, we make the dirty mines." I'm asking, what is the definition of the dirty mine, of the clean mine, of premium nickel? [00:33:11] Speaker 27: This is being a big economic success story, despite the environmental and human costs, and certainly decision-makers in Jakarta don't intend to wind back their promotion of this industry anytime soon. Forecasts from Bloomberg NEF suggest that at the current rate things are going, Indonesia could account for something like two-thirds of global nickel supply by the end of this decade. It's a really vivid example of how transactions that we think of as being fairly mundane, you know, buying a car or something thousands of people do around the world every day, really do have effects on real people in real places, potentially very far away. [00:33:51] Speaker 2: The clean energy transition is real, but it is not weightless. It depends on minerals, [00:33:56] Speaker 22: workers, factories, and places that often remain far from view. While EVs catching fire have captured the public's attention, a study carried out by the Highway Lost Data Institute found that EVs are no more fire-prone than gas-powered cars. The caveat there is the dataset is still small, because there aren't as many EVs on the road yet. But fire experts say storing and transporting batteries on a ship, a truck, or in a recycling center is much more dangerous, because having hundreds of batteries close together creates the opportunity for a fire to spread if one cell fails. While the industry has identified best practices, there's no uniform enforceable standard yet that recycling companies have to adhere to. It's kind of up to them. [00:34:39] Speaker 23: So there's a design of a package that is being used by one OEM where their battery sits in that pack. There's a case that goes over the top of it, and then they ship them that way in the back of a trailer. There's other devices where they totally enclose the battery pack. So every OEM has a little bit different type of packaging design, and we work with them on different requirements. They have to help build their packaging. Typically batteries that are in drums are either defective, damaged, or recalled. And we put them in drums because we want to make sure that if there's a thermal event because they've been damaged, that it's contained. And typically they're packaged with a material in there called vermiculite, which if there is some sort of thermal event, the material around that will just basically melt around the battery and extinguish whatever's in there. [00:35:21] Speaker 22: Sustainability is one incentive. The other is geopolitical. China dominates the transition to electric with its battery makers supplying some 80% of cells worldwide. Now, U.S. policymakers on both sides of the political aisle are taking steps to decrease dependence on Asia's largest economy. [00:35:41] Speaker 23: The Inflation Reduction Act has been a game changer for the United States. It definitely has catalyzed the investment in the North American landscape. Obviously, China's got a probably a 10-year head start on a lot of us. But now you have the U.S. which has created these incentives now for manufacturers and for companies to build out these assets in North America and ensure that we do have a sustainable supply chain, something that we can domestically source these materials and domestically build batteries for our transportation system and for our vehicles. And then if you layer on the recycling aspect, all we're doing is continuing to reduce that dependence of where we have to source those materials. So, if we have the materials in-country now and they're driving around on roads, we have the opportunity to be able to collect those materials and reuse them over and over again. [00:36:25] Speaker 2: Recycling may reduce the need to mine more. But the larger question remains: who will control the technology's materials and factories behind the clean energy age? [00:36:35] Speaker 6: Look, let's be clear, Aaron. Right now, nobody can compete with China on solar equipment. I think it's just impossible. They have a level of scale. They have a level of ancillary components, R&D, that they've just brought the cost down to a massive level. Obviously, they have a lot of overcapacity as well. And they also have a policy where if any country wants to set up manufacturing capacity, you know, it's very easy for them to go in and sell at prices where domestic industry will not get developed. And so, if you ask me honestly, I would say the cost of making modules and sales in India is higher, more expensive than it would be if you were to import it from China. But then that would lead to a total dependence on China for equipment. Right? And today, India imports about $200 billion worth of fossil fuels every year. We don't want to have that dependence on China now shifting from the fossil fuel countries to China for other energy imports. And so, I think India has taken the strategic view that we want to do it ourselves. Energy security is very important. And I think a lot of countries think that we now. And so, that's why we're making solar equipment now in India. So, look, we'd love to look at exports as well because we have sufficient capacity now. But as I said, it's hard to compete with the Chinese. So, we can only compete in markets which do not want to import only from China and are looking for some diversification beyond China. And I think, look, from an overall world clean energy dependence standpoint, that's not a bad thing. Well, look, first of all, I think that the world needs climate leadership. Clearly, the US is not providing that. I think the European Union has to step in to some extent. They haven't yet come out of their NDCs. It will probably happen in October. So, we'll have to wait and see how ambitious they want to be about it. We don't have a lot of fossil fuels. And so, therefore, we have to make sure that we find energy from other sources. And given the whole issue of energy security, energy affordability, there's no better solution than renewables. And I think these countries understand that. And so, irrespective of the targets that we set, you also have to look at the actions that are happening in these countries. [00:38:37] Speaker 2: China is building the clean energy future at a scale no country can match. But that future is not simple. It runs through oceans, rivers, cities, batteries, and mines. Clean energy is already replacing the old world of fossil fuels. Now, the real question is whether the new world can be cleaner, [00:38:55] Speaker 30: fairer and less dependent than the one it leaves behind.