CBC News reports that in 2025, China's combined wind and solar capacity exceeded coal for the first time. In almost every part of the country, building a new wind or solar farm is now cheaper than continuing to operate an existing coal plant. It is a shift that took decades to set up and happened faster than most analysts expected.
Le Chang, founder of Envision, the world's second-largest wind turbine manufacturer, describes the transition as something closer to a civilizational change than a business opportunity. His company's flagship project is in China's Gobi Desert, where an AI-managed system integrates wind power with on-site green hydrogen production. Industries in the area can plug directly into the off-grid clean energy source, and excess hydrogen gets shipped via pipeline to provide low-cost fuel elsewhere. It is designed to be replicable anywhere the wind blows consistently enough.
Chang has been in discussions with Canadian leaders about bringing that model to Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney, following a visit to Beijing, said Canada plans to double its energy grid over the next 15 years and that this creates significant opportunities for partnerships with Chinese investors and developers. Chang confirmed discussions with potential Canadian partners are underway, noting that remote location is not an obstacle as long as wind resources are adequate.
The appeal to Canada is real: vast remote regions with strong wind resources, a need to rapidly expand clean energy capacity, and a partner offering proven technology at competitive cost. But the concern is equally real. Adopting Chinese-built, AI-managed grid infrastructure means more than buying hardware. Ontario Premier Doug Ford put it plainly, describing the prospect as giving a geopolitical rival what amounts to an operating system for Canada's power supply. The question of how to verify that control and data gathered by that system would not be exploited has not been answered satisfactorily, according to critics.
Le Chang's response is that Envision would work transparently with local partners and regulators. The company framed it as a technology transfer analogous to how printing technology spread knowledge access centuries ago, reducing the cost of something that was previously available only to the privileged. The comparison is pointed, if a little convenient.
The report also notes the contradiction at the center of China's energy story: while the country is building more wind farms than the rest of the world combined, it is also still approving new coal plants. Greenpeace China describes Beijing's current approach as running on two parallel tracks, with renewable expansion on one and coal security on the other. For potential partners like Canada, that duality is part of the calculus.