More than three years after Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to stop building new coal projects abroad, the country’s Belt and Road Initiative is increasingly driven by renewables.
Last year, renewable technologies eclipsed fossil fuels — once the core of Beijing’s overseas developments — in all the power projects completed under the BRI, according to analysts at Wood Mackenzie. Of the record-breaking 24 gigawatts (GW) of power capacity installed by Chinese companies in 2024, 52% of them used solar, wind, and hydro power.
More broadly, China’s total energy-related engagement under the BRI, from resource extraction to electricity transmission and distribution, were its “greenest” in 2024, the Shanghai-based Green Finance and Development Center (GFDC) reported: Chinese companies’ investments and construction contracts in solar, wind, and biomass energy projects last year reached their highest value in absolute terms, or $11.8 billion, since the BRI began more than a decade ago.
Commenting on her Substack blog Semafor, Xiaoying You noted that:
“It would be easy to frame this trajectory geopolitically: China’s dominance over the hardware needed for the global energy transition gives it an advantage over the US, even as Washington pulls back on its trade and climate commitments under President Donald Trump. Indeed, renewables’ growing importance in the BRI could help Beijing mitigate the uncertainty and risks brought by Trump’s aggressive trade policy.”
“Yet its core is more prosaic: Chinese companies’ global footprints reflect the industrial landscape inside China. As the “new three” — solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles — have become a growth engine, those sectors also received the most attention under the BRI. An assessment by the New York-based Rhodium Group found that automotives, basic materials, and energy collectively accounted for an unprecedented 77% of Chinese companies’ foreign direct investment in 2024.”
The BRI could also offer a glimpse at the future and pace of the energy transition in major developing economies.
The BRI’s top five markets — Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia — could see “substantial growth” in wind and solar projects over the next decade, according to Wood Mackenzie analysts. Saudi Arabia is set to have the greatest demand, with 41 GW of solar and 13 GW of wind power currently planned.
The expansion of renewables in the developing world is spurred by increasingly cheap solar as a result of rapid technological innovation — led by China, Alex Whitworth, head of Asia-Pacific power and renewables research at Wood Mackenzie, said.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has changed substantially since Xi first announced it in 2013, and its aims, to a large degree, depend on who you ask.
Chinese officials characterize the program — which now has more than 150 partner countries — as a push to revive the ancient Silk Road trading network by building infrastructure to connect Asia, Europe, and Africa. Some, mainly Western, critics say it is a play for Chinese influence in developing nations and in some cases a strategy to lock countries into China’s sphere of influence by loading them with debt, a claim that is widely disputed, including by many other Western analysts.
The changing nature of the BRI reflects a wider shift in China’s trade: The country’s exports and their destinations are “much more diversified” compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, said Marc Gronwald, an economist at the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. In 2000, the country’s main trading partners were mostly richer economies, but in 2022, nations like Vietnam, Malaysia, and India joined that group, he said.
Chinese manufacturers have mostly shipped clean-tech products abroad as commodities rather than as part of a wider project, according to Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst of the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In comparison, their role in foreign coal plants comprises financing, engineering, and operation of the facilities. But that has been changing since 2023, when Beijing instructed the BRI to shift away from mega infrastructure projects to “small but beautiful” ones, such as solar plants in Africa.
Myllyvirta’s analysis found that developing countries drove 70% of the growth in China’s exports of solar, wind turbines, and electric cars between 2021 and 2024, with Brazil being the largest market over the period.
Chinese manufacturers have increased building factories overseas, too — a push that will make the country’s renewable exports “more resilient,” said Myllyvirta.
“If there is an EV factory in Brazil or a solar factory in Vietnam employing local workforce, paying local taxes… then their policy makers will think twice before doing something that would completely jeopardize the business,” he said.
Source: Semafor, Mar 20, 2025. https://www.semafor.com/…/chinas-foreign-infrastructure…
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