How Green Are Chinese Green Goods, Really?

The case for coal-powered solar panels

This is the second post in a series from Britain Remade’s Policy Researcher Michael Hill looking at China’s role in decarbonising Britain. You can read the first post here.

A common claim in Net Zero debates is that Chinese “green” goods aren’t as green as they look. The argument goes like this: China still generates 58% of its electricity from coal, compared with 0% in the UK, so wind turbines, solar panels, or electric vehicles (EVs) made there must carry a heavier carbon footprint.

But in reality the gap between Chinese and Western produced goods is small. And compared to burning fossil fuels the emissions are minuscule.

Turbines of Steel

At first glance, you’d expect wind turbines made in China to have a heavier carbon footprint than those built in Europe. After all, China’s factories are powered by a grid still dominated by coal, while Europe’s electricity is far cleaner.

But the biggest source of emissions in a turbine isn’t the factory floor, it’s the steel. Turbines are essentially towers of steel, and for offshore projects, the vast underwater foundations mean even more of it. Over 50% of offshore wind’s emissions come from steel. Steel production is carbon-intensive almost everywhere, because most of it still comes from blast furnaces fired with coal. That flattens the gap between Chinese and European turbines. Switching to cleaner “electric arc” steel would cut emissions but very little wind turbine steel is made this way at present.

Nor are European turbines really 100% European. Many of their parts, from electronics to rare earth magnets, come from Chinese suppliers. That means a big slice of the emissions is baked in regardless of where the final assembly takes place.

Making direct comparisons is tricky. Few Chinese-made turbines actually end up in Europe, so the numbers we do have often come from studies of turbines built and deployed in China. One Chinese manufacturer, Goldwind, has published figures for onshore turbines showing 7.25 kgCO₂ per megawatt hour. That’s almost identical to a Siemens Gamesa turbine in Europe at 7.11 kg. The latest Vestas figure for one of their offshore turbines at 7.0 kg.

A broader study from Beijing Normal University put Chinese onshore wind turbines between 5.8 and 16.7 kgCO₂/mWh, and offshore between 13.3 and 29.5. At the lower end, they match Europe; at the higher, they exceed it. The caveat is that these data are for turbines deployed in China.

Chinese turbines may emit slightly more, but the gap is modest.

Carbon prices are a good way of thinking through the impacts. In recent months the UK carbon price has hovered around £55 a tonne (high by historic standards). The average UK household uses 2.7 megawatt hours of electricity a year, 32% of which came from wind in the last year. In terms of extra carbon taxes then using the highest emitting Chinese wind turbines compared to the lowest emitting European one would add just under 11kg of carbon to the average household’s carbon footprint. The carbon price of that is just £0.59.

Why Chinese solar is a bit dirtier

For solar, the story is different. Here, emissions hinge heavily on electricity use during manufacturing. Producing purified silicon and wafers is extremely energy-intensive, so is assembling modules. Because so much of this work is concentrated in China, with its coal-heavy grid, Chinese panels carry higher embodied emissions than those made elsewhere.

A Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems report backs this up: Chinese panels consistently have the highest embodied emissions. To make these figures meaningful for the UK, we can model panels assuming:

• 30-year lifespan

• 1% annual degradation

• UK average load factor of 10.5%

The results show Chinese solar is indeed dirtier than European-made equivalents with the cleanest Chinese panel assessed emitting 25% more than the dirtiest European one.

Switching the 6.6% of solar from the cleanest European panels to the dirtiest Chinese panels would emit an extra 2.8kg of CO2 being emitted per year per household, with a carbon price of £0.16.

Electric Vehicles: Coal vs Battery Chemistry

EVs add another layer of complexity. Their manufacturing is carbon-intensive, especially the battery. That does increase embodied emissions for Chinese-made EVs because of the coal-based grid.

But battery chemistry pulls in the other direction. Chinese manufacturers are more likely to use lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries, which avoid the nickel and cobalt mining impacts of the nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries common in Western models. LFPs are less carbon-intensive to produce.

When similar vehicles are compared side by side, the differences mostly cancel out. Data from Green NCAP even suggests Chinese EVs can be slightly greener overall.

In summary then, Chinese solar panels have a noticeably higher carbon footprint than western equivalents but solar is such a small share of our grid that doesn’t really matter in the UK, their wind turbines are slightly higher emissions though the difference is small and their EVs might actually be slightly greener than their European equivalents.

Green goods vs Fossil Fuels

However, the real contrast isn’t between Chinese and European green goods, it’s between green goods and their fossil fuel equivalents. The finer points of Chinese vs. European manufacturing start to look trivial once you zoom out. Even the most carbon-intensive Chinese solar panel, around 33.5 kgCO₂/MWh, has less than one-tenth the emissions of a typical gas power plant. Wind is cleaner still.

Fossil fuels vary too: North Sea gas has far lower emissions than imported LNG, where the emissions from production can be four times worse. But averages aside, the marginal unit of gas in the UK increasingly comes from LNG, making the comparison even starker.

Against that backdrop, debating the origins of “green goods” risks missing the point. The real story is that even the ‘dirtiest’ renewables of any kind are at least an order of magnitude cleaner than fossil fuels.

The logic is similar, if less stark, with EVs. Yes, making an EV emits more upfront than making an ICE vehicle. But in the UK, with an already relatively clean grid (~124 gCO₂/kWh), that “carbon debt” is repaid after 30,000–50,000 kilometres. That’s about 3-5 years driving for the average car in Britain. Over a car’s lifetime, emissions are roughly halved compared to petrol or diesel. And if the UK grid goes zero-carbon, the payback point falls even faster. The graphs below show the emissions of EV vs ICE cars of a similar style available in the UK. The natural life span of a petrol car and of an EV battery are similar. However, this may be unfair to EVs as batteries can be replaced and usually the rest of the car is in good working order, whereas (as anyone who has tried to keep an old ICE car going will know) by the end of their lives many parts of an ICE vehicle are failing simultaneously.

The East is Red Green

The claim that Chinese green goods aren’t truly green contains some truth, especially for solar panels. But the differences are smaller than often suggested, and in the case of EVs, sometimes non-existent. Compared to fossil fuels, however, all green technologies look exceptionally clean.

In short: if you want to cut emissions, it matters far less where your wind turbine, solar panel, or EV was built, and far more that you build and deploy them at all.