In Spain, the government’s ‘green’ energy incentives are attracting foreign investment, and China is on the prowl.
Taking their part in the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, Spain has been floating incentives for investment in renewable energy, incentives that offer 100% amortisation when the solar or wind project replaces fossil fuel energy sources. These are part of the Spanish government’s push to energise the Plan Nacional Integral de Energía y Clima (national integral climate and energy plan), by expanding wind and solar panel infrastructure.
Now, Chinese wind turbine giant Goldwin smells blood in the water. As Carlos Perona pointed out, the EU model for the green transition demands that “the development, production, and distribution of relevant technologies be carried out by entities with large economies of scale,” and that’s precisely what’s happening in Spain. There are ready-to-build projects in the offing—rights to the energy grid, building permits—for which investment companies have already prepared, for the purpose of selling those paper projects to companies like Goldwin.
The Spanish newspaper Invertia reports that giant Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology, commonly known as Goldwind, has landed in Spain looking for investment opportunities in the renewable project market. In mid-July a delegation from the company toured Spain.
“There is a pretty sweet market in Spain to buy wind assets ‘ready to build,’ the pipeline of positive environmental authorizations already stands at 12 GW, but more are coming, with requests for up to 20 GW over the next two years,” explain sources from the Spanish wind sector to Invertia.
Goldwind is a turbine manufacturer. Building in a region to market their product makes good economic sense, but manufacturing on European soil sweetens the deal. It kills two birds with one stone. It enriches China’s economy, while depressing Spain’s.
On the one hand, EU projections for the green transition makes the purchase of Chinese technology necessary. “EU plans, like the industrial Green Deal, seek to strengthen the EU’s industrial base for clean technologies, so it would make sense for Goldwind not only to want to buy wind farms, or to seek to sell its machines in Europe, but could even produce them here,” the same sources added.
On the other hand, companies in Spain will be squeezed out, forced to take a back seat to others, in this case, Chinese drivers of the green transition. The wind sector expert continued that the trend is “very worrying because the moment they buy projects, they will want to put their own windmills in them, which will reduce the market share of European wind manufacturers, such as the Danish company Vestas, the German Siemens Gamesa or Hispanic-German Nordex, just to mention the most important ones.”
Paradoxically, Goldwind was born in 1989 thanks to a $3.2 million grant (€2.8 million) awarded by the Danish Government, which was used to build China’s first wind farm.
Goldwind has since become the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines thanks to its huge local market, Invertia reports. The company supplied 12.7 GW worth of projects last year, almost 90% of which were installed in China. And just a few months ago, it managed to exceed 100 GW of global installed capacity, equivalent to 11% of the world’s installed wind energy capacity.
It would be the second wind turbine company to enter the Spanish market. The hydroelectric company China Three Gorges already has a presence in Spain and a particularly strong market share in Portugal.
For Spain—and soon other European countries will have to face a similar dilemma—where do “save the planet” mandates end, and the demise of national sovereignty begin? It’s becoming clear that net-zero policies are bolstering China’s coffers, while accomplishing little of the planet-saving goals the EU has set to meet, a scenario illustrated by the solar panel industry in Spain.
According to the investigative organisation Environmental Progress, China has amassed market concentration in the solar panel production sector over the last ten years, overtaking the sector once dominated by Germany, the U.S., and Japan.
The consequences of this shift are rarely spoken about. The inversion from Western control over their market to Eastern is inconvenient, and shady. Researchers who have bothered to investigate the carbon ‘footprint’ of Chinese manufactured solar panels would be hard pressed to defend their implementation in the West, since China has made its way to the top of the market by relying on cheap coal and cheap labour, work conducted under conditions that would not be allowed in a European country due to human rights violations and net-zero policies. The world’s largest database on the impact of renewables on the environment—Ecoinvent—records no data from China, although China currently makes up 40% of the photovoltaic market and is anticipated to grow its share.
The consequences have been not only economic, but human and environmental. The EU’s drive toward net-zero is undergirded by false data. In fact, the ‘carbon footprint’ of Chinese solar panels is likely 3-4 times greater than estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which relies on reports from the incomplete data-set put out by Ecoinvent. IPCC estimates, according to Environmental Progress’s report,
solar PV is 48 gCO2/kWh. But, as we’ll see below, a new investigation started by Italian researcher, Enrico Mariutti, suggests that the number is closer to between 170 and 250 gCO2/kWh, depending on the energy mix used to power PV production. If this estimate is accurate, solar would not compare favourably with natural gas, which is around 50 gCO2/kWh with carbon capture, and 400 to 500 without.
Enrico Mariutti stands among several thousands of experts aware of the great fraud being perpetrated in the name of science. Dr. John F. Clauser, leading physicist and Nobel prize winner, was recently deplatformed by the IMF for his scepticism: “The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.”
The EU’s green policies are far from innocent.
In its rush to “go green,” Spain looks likely to have sold its financial footing alongside property rights, and in so doing, has compromised its integrity and perhaps even its sovereignty. As Perona warned, “there is a real danger that this will function to increase inequality, as an expansive monetary policy nourishes generous funding streams which channel capital into established (often non-European) partners.”
