China’s deployment of renewable energy technologies is spectacular and globally dominant, but is not its primary focus.

Beijing is deliberately building on the potential of these technologies to underpin a fundamental change in its economy, one that will see it become a leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, become the first major industrial electrostate and open the way to greater global influence.

China clearly leads the global transition to renewable energy generation. Yet low-cost low-emission electricity is just the support for a paradigm shift in the functioning of economies. China’s command of the technologies enabling this broader change is also world-leading, and enables its continued dominance in global manufacturing.

Despite the now entrenched importance of digital systems for managing a developed economy, the energy for nearly all economic activities (excluding agriculture) largely continues to rely on a paradigm that is over 2½ centuries old. With the emergence of the steam engine, the preferred means of energy production became consuming matter and harnessing it to produce power by thermo-mechanical means.

The continuing evolution of such heat engines has driven the pace of economic development. Yet this energy can only be utilised in the act of creation and, whether internal or external combustion, reciprocating or turbine, heat engines seldom achieve 50% efficiency, with most of their energy consumption producing no useful power, being expelled as low-grade waste heat into the environment.

The “matter” that heat engines now consume is primarily energy-dense fossil fuels that have complex and extended production pathways. These produce greenhouse emissions and lose energy at each stage of the process, lowering the aggregate economic efficiency of industrialised countries.

The fossil energy industry now accounts for more than 10% of global economic activity, but about two thirds of this activity (~7% of global GDP) produces no economic benefit and measurable environmental disbenefits.

Heat engines require comparatively high mass to absorb their potentially destructive forces and are accompanied by the twin resistances of entropy and friction. Throughout the progress of industrialisation, these dynamics have elevated the importance of precision mechanical engineering in the development and sustainability of power systems.

Yet mechanical failure persists as a potential for heat-engine failure and a barrier to improved performance. Hence the poor serviceability of Australia’s aging coal thermal electricity plants and the destructive failure of Queensland’s Callide C plant in 2021.

Now, in a transformative paradigm shift, devices are being constructed to harvest energy from the environment to be used for, or stored for later, conversion to power through electrical means. As they consume no matter, their marginal cost of electrical generation tends to zero, so they are efficient at any scale or in any arrangement and can provide energy from individual to grid-sized applications.

Machines to utilise this electricity are comparatively lighter and more compact than heat engines, do not need complex compensatory mechanisms and generate minimal waste heat. China has shown that renewable energy is significantly cheaper and faster to construct than thermal energy systems (including coal-fired and nuclear generation), and is now the preferred way of electrifying an economy.

When the future is based upon digitisation progressing from automation to augmented intelligence, generative artificial intelligence, high-speed communications and adaptive networking, the demand for electrical energy will increase exponentially. There is far more expansion required to become an electrostate than just replacing existing high-emission electricity generation with low-emission generation.

Estimates are that global electricity generation will need to increase by two to three-fold by 2050 to achieve emissions targets and meet the demands of new technologies such as AI. Countries that can produce low-emission electricity at the rate required and for the lowest costs will be best placed to benefit from this 4th industrial revolution.

Heat engines changed 19th century society because they enabled transport of people and goods to become manageable and predictable. Travel ceased to be an epic of adventure and became a matter of timetables.

For the renewable energy transformation, societal change has already formed around the development of personal electronic devices, powered by lithium-ion batteries that provide sustained energy beyond the point and time of its creation. Improving performance, capacity and independence of battery-stored energy now allows commercial, military, social and recreational activities to be performed anywhere, at any time – devaluing approaches based on structure, location or hierarchy.

Battery-electric propulsion systems enable significant recovery of vehicle kinetic and potential energy, and have measurably lower maintenance requirements and costs than equivalent heat engine systems.

All of these benefits should yield improvements in productivity from lower input costs and extended integration, providing the basis for sustained future industrial growth. It is not surprising that the Chinese renewable energy sector now contributes 10% of GDP and is becoming a leading factor in China’s GDP growth.

That China has achieved this level of performance is not an accident. In 2012, Premier Li Keqiang initiated moves to begin the Fourth Industrial Revolution in China with the aim “to be among the leaders”. This was followed in 2015 by the “ Made in China 2025” program, with the dual objectives of freeing China from reliance on foreign high-technology components and to increase the technological sophistication of the country’s manufacturing sector.

During the decade China became the world’s leading producer in all the main areas of renewable energy. It is acknowledged as a world leader (or close behind) over a range of 10 technologies, spanning advanced computing to aerospace, most central to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Eighty-six percent of the 260 advanced industrial and scientific goals set for MIC25 had been achieved by early 2025, with more expected this year.

China’s telecommunications run on 5.5G technology at 10 times the speed of the 5G networks still to be completed in many countries. It has tens of thousands of kilometres of high-speed rail and one can, in actuality, take a very fast train to Shangri-La (in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture).

China started its industrial transformation on the basis that it would be primarily powered by energy from nuclear fission. In just over a decade, it determined that this was not achievable. Instead, renewable energy (primarily solar and wind energy, complemented by battery storage) will provide the power needed to enable and sustain China’s developing industrial revolution.

With lower costs for low-emission energy production at unprecedented scale, China’s renewable energy will enable it to retain and strengthen its dominance in global manufacturing, and will power its expanding role in global affairs.