Chart of the Week: Two Superpowers, Two Energy Futures

This week, instead of a single chart, I’m sharing two charts that come from a New York Times analysis I bookmarked months ago. After yesterday’s discussion about power becoming a real constraint on AI, they feel too relevant not to share.

Because these two charts reveal both a philosophical and structural difference between the world’s two superpowers. They show that China and the United States are building entirely different energy systems, at massive scale, at the same time.

And when you put the charts next to each other, the divide is striking.

You don’t see two variations of the same strategy. You’re looking at two competing visions for how the global economy gets powered over the next several decades.

Two Vastly Different Approaches to Energy

Let’s start with clean energy, where China has a massive lead.

In lithium-ion batteries alone, Chinese companies exported about $65 billion worth of product in 2023. The United States exported about $3 billion. Solar panels show an even wider gap, with China exporting around $40 billion, compared with about $69 million from the U.S.

Electric vehicles tell a similar story. China shipped about $38 billion worth of EVs into global markets last year, with large volumes heading to Europe and Asia. The U.S. exported about $12 billion, most of it staying close to home in the Americas.

This imbalance didn’t happen overnight.

China has spent the past two decades building manufacturing capacity, subsidizing scale, automating factories, securing raw materials and investing heavily in research. Today, it dominates global production of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs and many of the core components that make them possible.

China holds nearly 700,000 clean-energy patents, more than half of the world’s total, and installs more wind and solar capacity in a single year than the rest of the world combined.

And as we’ve noted before, all this Chinese clean-energy technology is flowing into Europe, across Asia, and deep into emerging markets like Brazil, South Africa, Pakistan and Indonesia.

These are countries where electricity demand is growing fastest and where new grids, factories and transportation systems are still being built.

In this way, China is embedding itself into how other countries power their economies.

Now take a look at the second chart.

This is where the United States dominates, and the numbers are just as lopsided.

In crude oil, the U.S. exported about $117 billion globally in 2023. China barely shows up, at around $844 million.

Natural gas exports tell the same story, with about $42 billion from the U.S. versus roughly $3 billion from China.

Coal exports lean heavily toward the U.S. as well.

America remains the world’s energy superpower when it comes to fossil fuels, and the current administration is leaning into that advantage aggressively by expanding drilling, accelerating pipelines and pushing allies to buy more American oil and gas as part of broader economic and security negotiations.

And when you put these charts together, they tell two contrasting stories.

China is positioning itself as the global supplier of green technologies, while the U.S. is positioning itself as the supplier of the fuels that still power most of the world today.

This strategy makes sense in the short run because roughly 80% of global energy demand is still met by fossil fuels, and oil and gas will remain essential for years.

But the economics of renewables keep improving.

According to the International Energy Agency, solar and wind are on track to become the two largest sources of electricity by the mid-2030s, and fossil fuels are expected to fall below 60% of global energy supply by mid-century.

That’s why I keep coming back to these charts.

Because energy drives manufacturing, transportation, data centers, industrial automation and economic growth itself.

Whoever controls the dominant energy technologies influences where factories get built, how supply chains form and which countries gain long-term leverage.

China understands this. That’s why it’s building battery plants in Hungary, EV factories in Brazil, solar projects in Indonesia and nuclear plants in Pakistan. It’s why Chinese firms have announced about $168 billion in foreign clean-energy investments since 2023 alone.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is extracting economic and geopolitical value from its oil and gas abundance, stabilizing markets and giving allies alternatives to unstable suppliers.

But this doesn’t have to end with a single winner.

Here’s My Take

These charts show two different paths.

U.S. fossil-fuel exports are helping keep the lights on and economies functioning during a volatile transition. And cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries are already helping large economies decarbonize faster than expected.

One path is rooted in today’s energy system, the other in tomorrow’s.

The encouraging part is that technology keeps pushing energy toward abundance, not scarcity.

And abundance has a way of creating opportunities.

The U.S. still has time to shape how these opportunities play out.

Regards,

Ian KingChief Strategist, Banyan Hill Publishing

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