I’ve been tracking the ascent of Chinese wind manufacturers up the leaderboard for years, so the assertion that China wasn’t on the podium was perplexing. My first hypothesis was that it was based on revenue, as western manufacturers are much more costly than their Chinese counterparts. That’s due to China’s.
A more appropriate Olympics analogy is 2023 deployments. What’s the order of firms by GW of capacity installed in 2023?That’s a slightly different picture, isn’t it. You’ll note the massive turquoise bars of Chinese domestic deployment. The ones that combined vastly outstrip the rest of the world combined. While Vestas, GE and Siemens have a lot more deployment in Europe and the Americas — for now —, China has vastly more deployments in total.
By podium ranking, China has the gold and silver locked up. By total GW installed in 2023 — the equivalent of total medal haul at the Olympics — China is far out in front. By percentage of market share — perhaps the equivalent of most viral clips — China is far out in front. If wind energy is the Olympics, China is emperor of the sport, and the former leader, Denmark, is liable to be kicked off the podium entirely in the next year or two.
It’s part and parcel of GE’s failure of engineering and quality. Jack Welch took an American engineering giant, stripped it of engineers, rammed in finance types, gamed quarterly results with financialization — pro tip: if you see the term financialization, read it as cooking the books — and destroyed the firm. It’s off the New York Stock Exchange now, split into three splinters of its former redwood scale, and it had been on the market as GE since the 1890s.
“The quarter-on-quarter growth of GDP in 2023 and in the first and the second quarters of 2024 are 1.8 percent, 0.8 percent, 1.5 percent, 1.2 percent, and 0.7 percent respectively.The West would love to have this kind of failure. Slowing as their infrastructure and city-building boom draws to an end, yes, but far from failing.