President Donald Trump launched his latest broadside against wind power Wednesday, telling the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that even China does not use its own wind turbines to generate electricity.
In reality, China not only uses the turbines it builds there, it’s by far the world’s biggest producer of electricity from wind — ahead of the U.S., the No. 2 producer.
“China makes almost all the windmills and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China. Do you ever think of that?” Trump told the audience of global leaders. “China’s very smart. They make them, they sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them. But they don’t use them themselves.”
China installed 561 gigawatts of wind power electricity by the end of 2024, easily the largest amount in the world, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. Those turbines produced an estimated 10 percent of China’s electricity that year.
