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Gavekal Technologies: New Energy
The Deployment Challenge For Cheap Solar
AJ Cortese
31 Aug 2026
For most of the past two decades, the solar story was about making the panel cheaper. China has solved that problem. Thanks to massive excess capacity, Chinese producers are not making much money. With equipment now a commodity, the economic value of solar will mainly come from its installation. The broadest local benefits are likely to come in countries that can figure out how to scale up distributed solar generation at homes and businesses.
Gavekal Technologies: New Energy
China Wind Power’s Global Challenge
AJ Cortese
17 Aug 2026
Chinese wind turbine makers are champions at home but much less visible abroad than their peers in solar, EVs and batteries. A big factor is that the project economics of wind power are unique. Nonetheless, Chinese wind firms are increasingly looking abroad, and are set to do well in price-sensitive emerging markets.
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The Tech Truce Starts To Fray
In May, presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping promised a new era of “constructive strategic stability.” What we have seen since then is a simmering tension, as the US has tried to restrict Chinese tech imports through a series of measures by a new actor, the Federal Communications Commission. China finally responded in early August with a calibrated set of its own restrictions, designed to respond to the US but not to escalate.
China’s Export Engine Meets Europe’s Carbon Rules
Europe’s desire to limit imports of carbon-intensive goods is leading to changes in industrial China. Beijing has launched a set of zero-carbon industrial parks that will tightly link factories with renewable energy sources, helping them cut their carbon footprint and comply with new EU regulations that will tax carbon-intensive steel and aluminum imports and bar entry to batteries that fail to meet carbon limits.
What Just Happened, Kimi?
The US tech world spent much of the past 10 days freaking out over the latest high-performance Chinese AI model release, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. This once again conjured the specter of cheap open-weight Chinese models blowing up the revenue engines for their more costly American competitors. Shortly afterwards, Chinese open models went from villain to hero, as the US-based developer community Hugging Face used a Chinese model to fend off a rogue cyber attack by an OpenAI model.
EVs’ Year Of Living Dangerously
China’s passenger car market is having a terrible 2026, and electric vehicles for once are no exception. Prices and margins are under pressure. Yet despite all that, the market is not consolidating—quite the opposite. What makes it all possible is exports, which now account for a third of Chinese EV makers’ unit sales. The question is how long international markets will be willing to absorb the rising tide of Chinese imports.
Five Questions On China Biotech
Investors have cooled on China’s biotechnology sector, after a spectacular run-up in Hong Kong biotech stocks in early 2025. This is a needed correction: China’s biotech companies are technologically strong, but commercially immature. Also in today’s China Tech Brief: drones and EVs.
The New Energy System Takes Shape
China’s latest five-year plan for energy disappointed many analysts because of its unambitious targets for scaling back fossil fuel use. This misses the point. The plan is important because for the first time, Beijing is formally committing to an energy system based mainly on non-fossil fuels, with traditional coal, oil and gas as backup stabilizers. Achieving this goal will take another couple of decades, but policymakers are already starting to look beyond brute additions of renewables capacity to the efficiency measures that will be required for success.