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This morning a senior representative of the International Energy Agency posted something on LinkedIn that set off my statistics radar.

I’ve been following the rise of Chinese wind manufacturers up the rankings for years, so the claim that China wasn’t on the podium was baffling. My initial hypothesis was that it was based on revenue, as Western manufacturers are much more expensive than their Chinese counterparts. This is due to China’s purchasing power parity and the benefits of Wright’s Law. Essentially, their domestic supply chains are 40% cheaper than the West, and their huge domestic and export markets mean that they typically build more of everything than Western manufacturers, so they’ve doubled production and cut costs more.

However, when I looked closer, the statistics game that was being played was historical. This is a poor basis for an Olympic podium metaphor. It’s like taking the average of all the 100-meter times of the sprinters of the past decade and declaring a winner based on the result. That’s not how the Olympics work.

To be clear, I suspect I may be right about the income ratios, but that is not what the IEA representative was saying. This is one of those Western things where often the best possible period for the West that is also the worst possible period for China is used as a basis for comparison. For example, many in the West like to point to China’s current emissions and pretend that historical emissions are not important.

Look at the combined emissions of Europe and the United States. More than half of all greenhouse gas emissions have historically come from those sources. China’s current emissions are the largest, but that’s only recently. And to make the point, China is peaking in emissions this year. With its massive deployment of low-carbon generation, transmission and storage, and its massive electrification of transportation, heat and industry — it’s far and away the best in the world in both categories — and the end of its massive infrastructure and urban development spree, it will see emissions fall rapidly in the coming years, while North America in particular continues merrily on a high-emissions path.

A more fitting analogy for the Olympics is the stakes in 2023. What is the ranking of companies based on GW of installed capacity in 2023?

That’s a slightly different picture, isn’t it? You’ll notice the huge turquoise bars of Chinese domestic deployment. The combined deployment dwarfs the rest of the world combined. While Vestas, GE and Siemens have much more deployment in Europe and America — for now — China has much more deployment in total.

If you had to award a gold, silver and bronze medal for 2023, it would be China, China and Denmark, not Denmark, Spain/Germany, United States, as the IEA representative claimed. The Olympics are not judged by the total scores of all international sporting competitions, but by what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.

Another way to look at it is market share. These are the top 10 companies this year by capacity, looking back to 2017 when Siemens and Gamesa got married. Even then, China’s wind deployment was very high, but their companies weren’t in the top three. Does it seem like the podium is made up of only people of European descent? With such a significant drop in global market share, does it still seem like they’re in the top tier?

Perhaps it is very different in terms of absolute GW of deployed capacity?

That doesn’t look good either. From 2020 to 2023 — note that I sampled 2017, 2020, and 2023, so the curves aren’t perfect — Western companies were relatively flat in terms of total GW of capacity delivered, while Chinese companies grew significantly. It’s also worth noting that while the sample is 10 companies, that’s six Chinese companies versus four Western companies, and that India’s Suzlon, which has 20 GW of installed capacity so far, is excluded from the bottom of the graph, but is growing.

In terms of podium finish, China has already bagged gold and silver. In terms of total installed GW in 2023 — the equivalent of the entire Olympic medal haul — China is far ahead. In terms of percentage market share — perhaps the equivalent of most viral clips — China is far ahead. If wind is the Olympics, China is the emperor of the sport, and its former leader, Denmark, will likely be booted off the podium altogether within a year or two.

That’s why the IEA leader’s opinion this morning raised my eyebrows. I made a comment about it on LinkedIn. Someone tried to say that China’s domestic market doesn’t count because China doesn’t allow Western companies to sell into the country. Western companies can’t compete in China. They’re just too expensive. China produces turbines of equal or greater quality and size for 40% less cost.

The West is a walled garden of tariffs and chauvinism, which raise costs and likely the economy. reducing the overall quality of wind energy deployed in the West.

Siemens Gamesa has experienced significant quality issues in recent years, particularly with its onshore wind turbines. The company has reported issues with component failures and production errors, which have led to significant financial losses and project delays. These issues have prompted a comprehensive review of its production processes and intensified efforts to improve product reliability.

Although it’s a bit of a storm in a teacup, the failure of a GE blade at the Vineyard 1 offshore wind farm off the US Northeast Coast didn’t surprise me at all. It’s a wildly exaggerated effort by affluent coastal holidaymakers to avoid having their views of Europe blocked by wind turbines towering above the crests of the waves. But it’s not the only one. A turbine at the Dogger Bank offshore wind farm in the North Sea and several onshore wind turbines in Germany and Sweden have also failed in recent years.

It’s part and parcel of GE’s engineering and quality failures. Jack Welch took an American engineering giant, emptied it of engineers, rammed in financial types, manipulated quarterly earnings with financialization — pro tip: when you see the term financialization, read it as falsifying the books — and destroyed the company. It’s now delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, split into three slivers of its former redwood shell, and has been trading as GE since the 1890s.

I have been told by Europeans and Americans in earnest a few times over the years that Chinese wind turbines simply do not meet the same quality standards as Western ones. I hear chauvinism, not reality. I hear denial and fear, not acceptance and fixing things. Of course, it’s not just wind power. The litany of “they’re just making copies” and “their PhDs aren’t as good as our PhDs” and “their patents are really low quality” is a constant refrain as Western companies and policymakers try to cope with the inversion of the way the world “should” be.

The West’s denial of China’s clean tech boom coincides with this headline in CarbonBrief:

China’s CO2 emissions down 1% in Q2 2024, first quarterly decline since Covid-19

Yes, Chinese emissions have peaked, six years ahead of schedule, and are falling. Of course, many in the West are claiming that this is because their economy is collapsing.

“The quarter-on-quarter GDP growth in 2023 and in the first and second quarters of 2024 will be 1.8 percent, 0.8 percent, 1.5 percent, 1.2 percent and 0.7 percent respectively.“Yes, these results from China are absolutely an indication of collapse and failure (note: that is sarcasm, just to avoid Poe’s law).

The West would love to have this kind of failure. Slow down as their infrastructure and city building boom comes to an end, yes, but certainly not fail. There is a list of headlines, several per year since 2000, floating around the Internet, compiled by The Economist, the Wall Street Journal and other respected Western media, claiming that China is about to fail. There is even someone who makes that claim every two to three years and gets invited on talk shows to explain it as if he hasn’t been wrong every time since the late 1990s and has the credibility of a particularly slick used car salesman.

China has decoupled its growth from emissions. It is putting in far more wind, solar, water, storage and transmission than the rest of the world combined. It has more electrified transport than the rest of the world combined. It has more electrified industry than the rest of the world. It is continuing to do this at a tremendous pace. China’s emissions will fall, while the West’s are declining only slowly. But those historical numbers for cumulative carbon emissions will not be taken off the West’s scorecard.

Contrary to the IEA representative’s strange opinion on wind energy, China is at the top of the leaderboard in climate action at almost every event. The chauvinism and protectionism of the West is slowing down their climate action because they refuse to take advantage of China’s long-term industrial policy to lower the price of most cleantech categories.