The U.S. and China are fierce competitors — except on wind power, where it’s the opposite.
President Donald Trump loathes wind energy and has made it his clean energy punching bag. He’s said offshore wind is for losers and called countries that install the towering turbines stupid. He opined, wrongly, that China doesn’t use the wind technologies it makes.
China, for its part, has embraced green energy, and is deploying it at a race car pace.
Energy is not expected to be a major part of Trump’s two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping that starts Thursday in Beijing — but his administration is still eager to draw a policy contrast between the two countries.
“For years, President Trump has been clear: hard-earned taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be wasted on unreliable and costly wind farms that simultaneously pose serious threats to our national security,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email, responding to a request for comment on China’s wind energy policies. “Instead, we should be strengthening and expanding our infrastructure that produces reliable, affordable, and secure energy like natural gas plants.”
Here are five things to know about how the world’s two largest economies — and energy producers — are approaching wind power.
China is the world’s largest producer and user of wind tech
It installed 117 gigawatts of wind power in 2025, or roughly the equivalent of 56 Hoover Dams. The U.S. built a fraction of that: 5.8GW.
China accounted for 73 percent of global wind installations in 2025. And the price of turbines keeps falling.
“There’s huge innovation that’s happening within wind turbines,” said Dave Jones, co-founder of the U.K. think tank Ember. “What China has done to batteries and solar they’re now doing to wind and that will also help, in time, a big part of their export story.”
It’s not a recent phenomenon. China has had the world’s largest wind industry for a decade. The U.S., while a distant second, has also installed a sizable amount of wind power.
Then, Trump returned to the White House and moved to halt major wind projects. Last year, India edged out the U.S. for the second spot. Germany is expected to take that position within a decade.
The U.S. is going in the opposite direction
Trump administration officials have said countries that commit to green energy makes them “subservient” to China. The president has attacked those nations for falling prey to pressure by environmentalists, who he says promote the myth of climate change.
“The more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing,” Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year.
He hasn’t succeeded in fully halting wind development in the U.S. Three offshore wind projects have inched forward after they sued the administration for blocking construction. But Trump’s moves have injected a level of uncertainty that makes investors skittish.
The Defense Department has sat on national security reviews needed to move around 160 U.S. wind projects forward, an industry trade group said last week.
“While China has made accelerating clean energy in general a key strategic pillar over the last five years and beyond that as well, over the last 12 months in particular the U.S. has done the exact opposite,” said Oliver Metcalfe, a wind analyst at BloombergNEF.
China is looking for new wind markets
Orders for Chinese turbines have risen over the last few years for projects in the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America.
“It certainly means from a technological perspective, and increasingly from a market dominance perspective, China has a massive lead over the U.S. in the wind industry,” Metcalfe said. “With the scale and the cheap prices that Chinese manufacturers can offer, we’re now seeing large projects in markets like Uzbekistan, for example, that had never built wind before.”
The U.S. and Europe also have major wind companies, including GE Vernova and Siemens.
That has led some countries to protect their industries from Chinese competitors.
Earlier this year, the British government blocked a Chinese company from building a $2 billion wind turbine factory in Scotland, citing national security concerns.
The U.S. wants to sell more oil and gas, not wind
While China is the world’s biggest source of wind power, the U.S. produces the most oil and natural gas.
That juxtaposition is in the spotlight due to the Iran war. Many countries are doubling down on clean energy as the price of fossil fuels rises.
But others are grasping for American energy as crude supplies drop due to the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Buy oil from the United States,” Trump told the world in early April. Since then, the U.S. has seen fuel exports reach a record high, even as the average price of gasoline in the U.S. has topped $4.50 a gallon.
Fears of fuel shortages and rising prices at the pump have led countries in Asia and elsewhere to enact conservation measures. Leaders in South Korea to the Philippines are working to accelerate the transition to clean energy.
That often means looking to China.
Both could be winning strategies
Clean energy is on the upswing, but so are fossil fuels.
Rising energy demand due in part to data centers and socioeconomic factors is increasing the appetite for many kinds of power.
Last year marked the first time in two decades that clean energy and fossil fuels both hit record consumption levels globally, according to the Energy Institute, a London-based group that tracks energy statistics.
“Countries looking to increase their domestic energy resources have an interest in electrification, and China’s a big electrification technology provider,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy.
On the other hand, he said, countries might be wary about creating a new dependence on imported technology.
“Every importing country is asking one question after the Iran war, which is, ‘How do we make sure this never happens again?’” said Book. “And that can both create opportunities and headwinds for a range of different technologies.”
