The world faces a textbook climate contradiction: the planet desperately needs cheap, clean energy, but when someone manages to produce it on a massive scale, Western powers put up barricades. We are witnessing a pattern identical to the one that has already shaken the electric car industry. China leads the most competitive green technology, the West fears it and slows it down with tariffs, and, ultimately, the climate ends up paying the bill for this blockade.
The figures speak for themselves. According to the latest data published by Wood Mackenzieglobal order intake for wind turbines reached 215 gigawatts (GW) in 2025. This is the second highest figure in recorded history. And the big winners of this milestone were not going to be anyone else.
Yes, we are talking about China. While total global volume saw a slight decline of 8% in 2025 – driven by a strategic pause in the Chinese domestic market – the international expansion of Chinese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) has been relentless. The global consulting firm details that orders from these companies outside their borders skyrocketed by 66% year-on-year, tripling the volumes of 2023.
The dominance is almost absolute: eight of last year’s top ten global manufacturers are Chinese, with Goldwind, Envision and Windey crowning the list. But this industrial power cannot be understood without the colossal infrastructure that supports it. China has carried out an engineering feat unprecedented: in 2025 alone, the Asian giant added 542.7 GW of capacity to its electricity grid. In less than half a decade, Beijing has built more energy infrastructure than the United States has deployed in its entire history.
From imitation to innovation. The narrative that China only competes by price gouging has expired. The country has made a qualitative leap towards cutting-edge innovation. In these last months we have collected in Xataka the milestones of the Asian country in terms of the construction of large wind turbines in the middle of the sea.
This certifies the end of the Western monopoly in emerging markets. While European manufacturers such as Vestas or Nordex maintain leadership in their natural territory, they are losing ground globally to Asian offers with high technical specifications and low costs. For Beijing it is not just about ecology; It is a national security strategy to guarantee the supply of intensive industries, such as Artificial Intelligence, and free ourselves from dependence on imported fossil fuels.
This is how they conquer the Global South. Faced with a domestic market that is beginning to mature, the Asian giants have set their eyes on the Middle East, India and Latin America. Finlay Clark, principal analyst of Wood Mackenzie, gives the key to this expansion: Chinese manufacturers are making waves thanks to the rapid deployment of giant platforms of more than 10 MW.
These megaturbines allow developers to minimize costs on gigawatt-scale projects. The result is devastating: in 2025, Chinese companies will capture the 95% of regional capacity in the Middle East and Africa. The symbol of this surprise was planted in Saudi Arabia, where the Goldwind company achieved a historic order of 3.1 GW to supply two sites. Furthermore, in its ambition to dominate deep waters—where wind potential is multiplying—China is already manufacturing fully domestic all the key components of its floating platforms.
An imminent train wreck. Geopolitics has fully entered the spreadsheet of energy promoters. Wood Mackenzie warns that the policy It is making acquisitions drastically more expensive and complicated. Barriers such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the expansion of US tariffs costs are skyrocketing import of steel and heavy components.
The market is facing critical tension. On the one hand, regulatory pressure pushes costs up; On the other hand, the profitability of the projects requires increasingly cheaper turbines. Despite this panorama, there are reasons for optimism in the Old Continent: although the intake of offshore wind orders fell by 17% in 2025 due to the restructuring of European tenders, analysts They predict a strong rebound by 2026, boosted by new grant schemes such as the UK’s round 7 auctions.
The Western Counterattack. However, China’s apparent invulnerability has cracks. As we detail in Xataka, Beijing suffers from a silent but critical dependence on Western technology. The Chinese wind industry has the muscle to assemble like a beast, but it lacks the “brain”: it needs to import 100% of the logic modules that control the turbines in real time and 70% of the transistor modules for the electrical grid.
However, the real obstacle for the West, experts warn, is no longer just capital, but “human bottleneck”: Decades of offshoring have emptied the United States and Europe of engineers and specialized industrial labor.
Condemned to understand each other. The energy transition has ceased to be an environmental mission and has become a total geopolitical battlefield. China dominates scale, speed and execution, while the West still holds the keys to critical technological innovation and capital markets.
The great irony is that this trade war of tariffs and blockades risks slowing down decarbonization at the most critical time for the planet. At the end of the day, the interdependence between both blocks is their greatest weakness, but also the only guarantee that, sooner or later, they are condemned to understand each other.
Image | Land Rover Our Planet (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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