Over the past few years, China’s solar industry has entered a period of intense upheaval. Price wars and margin compression have forced industry leaders—including Jinko Solar, Trina Solar, and JA Solar—to report significant losses. These firms, along with LONGi Green Energy and Tongwei—the industry’s top five—slashed their workforce by over 30 p...

Resource adequacy of the power sector is coming under increasing stress globally due to rising electricity demand, extreme weather, and growth of variable renewable energy (VRE). Institutionally, many power sectors are transitioning from traditional central planning to some degree of market liberalization, with varied regulatory approaches to en...

Nuclear reactors are often modeled as inflexible baseload generators with fixed downtimes and restrictive ramping limits. In practice, however, operational flexibility for a reactor is coupled with its fuel-cycle. A critical physics constraint arises from xenon poisoning, in which the buildup of the neutron absorbing xenon following a power ramp...

Indonesia Captive Report A system-wide analysis of how Indonesia’s industrial parks can decarbonize captive coal generation through on-site renewables, storage, and strategic grid connections aligned with national climate commitments. Vietnam Policy Brief This policy brief evaluates how Viet Nam can meet its 2030 JETP targets and move toward ...

These takeaways represent significant points made during the discussion at the ”Workshop on Low-Carbon Transitions in Chinese SOEs” held at UC San Diego on June 6-7, 2025. They are not consensus observations. Link to Publication Recommended citation: 21st Century China Center & Power Transformation Lab. (2025). Workshop on Low-Carbon Tran...

Chinese technology firms—bolstered by decades of state-backed industrial policy—have become dominant global players in key clean tech sectors. Concurrently, the United States is at a pivotal moment in clean energy investment and policy, with significant public funding and regulatory efforts aimed at reshoring supply chains and advancing domestic...

On May 9-10, 2025, the workshop convened leading scholars, policy experts and practitioners to examine how the intensifying geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China is reshaping opportunities and barriers for collaboration on climate mitigation, technology deployment and supply chain resilience. The workshop consisted of presentations in...

Acute temporal impacts and subnational limitations can hinder a country’s decarbonization pathway, despite national planning efforts. China, as the world’s largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter, has announced an ambitious climate policy goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, which will require an unprecedented scale-up of low-carbon energy ...

Indonesia is attempting to transition its energy system from coal while ensuring reliable and affordable electricity. The international community, for example the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) and bilateral Memorandum of Understandings (MOU), have offered financial and technical support for Indonesia’s clean energy transition, but in...

To meet global climate targets, countries aim to triple renewable energy capacity and rapidly deploy other low-carbon technologies by 2030. We assess the critical mineral demand required to meet these goals using a bottom-up, scenario-based approach and examine how mineral bottlenecks affect sub-technology choices. Our analysis yields three key ...

Over the past two decades, both China and India have ramped up policy efforts to establish themselves in the growing global trade in goods related to the production and consumption of clean energy (CE). China’s initiatives have led to positions in the markets for solar, wind, rare earth minerals, and electric vehicles (EVs) that range from stron...

China’s power sector is both the world’s largest emitter and the largest source of clean-energy growth, making it essential to global climate efforts. This means it will be a key part of China’s next nationally determined contribution (NDC) – its climate pledge under the Paris Agreement for 2035 – which all countries are expected to publish by ...

Characterizing the morphology of lithium (Li) is crucial for developing long-lasting lithium metal batteries. It is well established that more uniform Li deposition correlates with better cell performance. Li morphology is often characterized through qualitative analysis of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images; however, there are no widely ...

As countries are releasing their 2035 nationally determined contributions (NDCs), we examine the renewable deployment requirements for China to meet its climate targets. We develop a power system model with high spatial and temporal resolutions to make optimal capacity expansion decisions for China’s power sector through 2035. We find that 2,350...

Effective climate policy requires coordination among political jurisdictions with large differences in institutional make-up and interest group structures. We model the effects of realistic coordination barriers and policy heterogeneity on optimal low-carbon electricity pathways in the western United States using a capacity expansion model with ...

Findings: Close integration of global clean energy technology has benefited U.S. consumers and clean energy deployment. Estimated cost savings from China’s participation in the global solar sector are in the range $20-$30 billion over 2008-2020. Manufacturing incentives through policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, not tariffs, have...