The European energy transition may be in full flow, but how European is it, really? Although a record 47% of the EU’s energy came from renewables in 2024, and EU countries now invest ten times as much in renewable energy as they do in oil and gas, the picks and shovels behind this green gold rush mostly come from elsewhere.
All of which begs the question, can—and should—Europe use the once-in-a-generation opportunity presented by decarbonization to reboot its own renewables supply chain, creating green jobs and sustainable wealth for the future? Or does the sheer scale of the challenge demand the capacity, availability and rock-bottom prices that only established Chinese suppliers can provide?
The market speaks
In purely economic terms, the answer is probably the latter, says Daniel Grosvenor, energy and resources specialist at consultants Deloitte in London: “What Europe really needs most of all is cheap, abundant and reliable energy. The broader economy will thrive more from that than from building its own renewable energy supply chain.”
Developing local capacity would almost certainly cost more and result in a slower rollout than relying on established providers, Grosvenor adds.
Even further along the green product pipeline, in sectors where European manufacturers still dominate, competition is heating up. Take the EV market—9.5% of EVs sold in Europe are now Chinese brands such as MG, BYD and Polestar. That doesn’t sound so much until you factor in the impressive rate of growth; the equivalent figure in 2019 was less than 1%.
That growth is usually ascribed to keen (and state-supported) pricing. Even after import tariffs—which are manufacturer-specific and based on the subsidies received by each firm from the Chinese government—Chinese EVs can still be significantly cheaper than European rivals.
In the U.K., where no additional tariffs are charged, China’s BYD, which sold its first electric car in Europe as recently as 2021, shifted 11,271 EVs in September, 880% more than the same month last year. Car rental firm Sixt has also signed a deal to be running 100,000 BYD EVs across Europe by 2028.
“What Europe really needs most of all is cheap, abundant and reliable energy. The broader economy will thrive more from that than from building its own renewable energy supply chain.”Daniel Grosvenor, energy and resources specialist at Deloitte
But it’s not just a question of cost. The quality and range of models on offer is now also at least as good, says Jan-Henrik Rauhut, global head of mobility at German industrial giant Siemens. “The Asian manufacturers coming to market do a really good job. They are spot on from a quality and technology point of view. I already see them on the same level as European [manufacturers] in that regard,” he adds.
Siemens is investing €650 million ($754 million) in decarbonizing its business, which includes electrifying its 43,000 strong global vehicle fleet by 2030. So far, 28% of these are battery-powered EVs worldwide, but that hit 94% of new vehicle orders in Germany.
European manufacturers still have the edge in terms of their service networks, Rauhut says, but Chinese brands are an increasingly attractive fleet proposition. “Right now we still have a stronger focus on European brands [because of their service networks] but in two or three years there’s a possibility the market dynamics might shift.”
The security question
Economics is not the only factor in Europe’s dilemma over whether to rely on Chinese green tech. Political questions, particularly around security of supply, also have a big part to play. Europe has been busily weaning itself off imported Russian gas since supplies were weaponized by Vladimir Putin in 2022, installing record amounts of domestic renewable capacity in its place.
But with so much of that renewable generating technology also imported from a single country, there is a risk that one strategic geopolitical vulnerability is simply replaced with another.
“If we are dependent on one country for much of our energy supply chain, as we were on Russia for gas, are we happy with that?” asks Grosvenor. “Particularly when it comes to critical components [like solar panels and wind turbines], I think we are seeing many European countries think about security of supply in a much broader context.”
“Right now we still have a stronger focus on European brands [because of their service networks] but in two or three years there’s a possibility the market dynamics might shift.”Jan-Henrik Rauhut, global head of mobility at Siemens
Even if the political will is growing to buy European, the sheer level of Chinese subsidies makes it hard to implement. An OECD report published in February found that between 2006 and 2023 wind turbine manufacturers in China received government subsidies and other support (including below-market credit) of around 2.5% and 4.5%, compared with well below 1% for EU companies.
The same report also found that the cost of materials required to manufacture a turbine is 40% higher in Europe than in China.
Consequently, Chinese-made turbines can be 30% or more cheaper than European equivalents, while Chinese firms also offer inducements such as deferred payment terms which even the largest European firms struggle to match.
“I’m very much a fan of competition, but it has to be on equal terms,” the outgoing CTO of Vestas, Anders Nielsen, said on the subject of Chinese competition in a recent podcast. “But if someone can run a loss for years and years and be subsidized for it, that is not a level playing field, it’s someone buying the market.”
The European Commission appears to have some sympathy with this view, and is currently conducting an investigation into Chinese wind turbine pricing.
Green shoots
So much for the bad news. But could the prospects for European companies looking to compete with China on more commercial terms actually be better than they appear? The market for solar PVs–in which Europe was once a leader—has been dominated in recent years more thoroughly by cheap Chinese imports than any other renewable sector.
But while Europe cannot compete on price, it may soon be able to win on new technology, says David Ward, CEO of U.K.-based solar scale-up Oxford PV. “All the Chinese manufacturers are losing money, so we have reached the bottom of the prices that are possible. The only way to improve energy cost now is to make [the solar panels] more efficient.”
That’s where his firm comes in. Oxford PV’s tandem panels are the most efficient solar PV modules in the world, thanks to next-generation technology, which adds a thin layer of perovskite (a novel semiconductor) on top of the traditional silicon. The result is a module capable of converting 26.9% of the sunlight it captures into electricity, nearly 2% better than the best of conventional rivals currently coming out of China. Production for pilot customers is already underway at Oxford PV’s factory in Brandenburg, Germany.
The firm’s ultimate goal is to license the technology as well as making it. The panels will be more expensive to buy, Ward admits, but their superior efficiency means that lifetime energy costs—the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) as it is known in the business—will be around 10% lower than conventional alternatives.
Such intellectual property advantages could give Europe just the kind of edge needed to redress the balance, concludes Ward. “People have tried to reignite [solar panel] manufacturing in Europe before, but they have always struggled because there hasn’t been a differentiator. You need the IP set in this technology to be able to compete with China”.
AI lab GoogleDeepMind announced a major new partnership with the U.K. government Wednesday, pledging to accelerate breakthroughs in materials science and clean energy, including nuclear fusion, as well as conducting joint research on the societal impacts of AI and on ways to make AI decision-making more interpretable and safer.
As part of the partnership, Google DeepMind said it would open its first automated research laboratory in the U.K. in 2026. That lab will focus on discovering advanced materials including superconductors that can carry electricity with zero resistance. The facility will be fully integrated with Google’s Gemini AI models. Gemini will serve as a kind of scientific brain for the lab, which will also use robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, significantly accelerating the timeline for transformative discoveries.
The company will also work with the U.K. government and other U.K.-based scientists on trying to make breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, potentially paving the way for cheaper, cleaner energy. Fusion reactions should produce abundant power while producing little to no nuclear waste, but such reactions have proved to be very difficult to sustain or scale up.
Additionally, Google DeepMind is expanding its research alliance with the government-run U.K. AI Security Institute to explore methods for discovering how large language models and other complex neural network-based AI models arrive at decisions. The partnership will also involve joint research into the societal impacts of AI, such as the effect AI deployment is likely to have on the labor market and the impact increased use of AI chatbots may have on mental health.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement that the partnership would “make sure we harness developments in AI for public good so that everyone feels the benefits.”
“That means using AI to tackle everyday challenges like cutting energy bills thanks to cheaper, greener energy and making our public services more efficient so that taxpayers’ money is spent on what matters most to people,” Starmer said.
Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis said in a statement that AI has “incredible potential to drive a new era of scientific discovery and improve everyday life.”
As part of the partnership, British scientists will receive priority access to Google DeepMind’s advanced AI tools, including AlphaGenome for DNA sequencing; AlphaEvolve for designing algorithms; DeepMind’s WeatherNext weather forecasting models; and its new AI co-scientist, a multi-agent system that acts as a virtual research collaborator.
DeepMind was founded in London in 2010 and is still headquartered there; it was acquired by Google in 2014.
Gemini’s U.K. footprint expands
The collaboration also includes potential development of AI systems for education and government services. Google DeepMind will explore creating a version of Gemini tailored to England’s national curriculum to help teachers reduce administrative workloads. A pilot program in Northern Ireland showed that Gemini helped save teachers an average of 10 hours per week, according to the U.K. government.
For public services, the U.K. government’s AI Incubator team is trialing Extract, a Gemini-powered tool that converts old planning documents into digital data in 40 seconds, compared to the current two-hour process.
The expanded research partnership with the U.K. AI Security Institute will focus on three areas, the government and DeepMind said: developing techniques to monitor AI systems’ so-called “chain of thought”—the reasoning steps an AI model takes to arrive at an answer; studying the social and emotional impacts of AI systems; and exploring how AI will affect employment.
U.K. AISI currently tests the safety of frontier AI models, including those from Google DeepMind and a number of other AI labs, under voluntary agreements. But the new research collaboration could potentially raise concerns about whether the U.K. AISI will remain objective in its testing of its now-partner’s models.
In response to a question on this from Fortune, William Isaac, principal scientist and director of responsibility at Google DeepMind, did not directly address the issue of how the partnership might affect the U.K. AISI’s objectivity. But he said the new research agreement puts in place “a separate kind of relationship from other points of interaction.” He also said the new partnership was focused on “question on the horizon” rather than present models, and that the researchers would publish the results of their work for anyone to review.
Isaac said there is no financial or commercial exchange as part of the research partnership, with both sides contributing people and research resources.
“We’re excited to announce that we’re going to be deepening our partnership with the U.K. AISI to really focus on exploring, really the frontier research questions that we believe are going to be important for ensuring that we have safe and responsible development,” he said.
He said the partnership will produce publicly accessible research focused on foundational questions—such as how AI impacts jobs or how talking to chatbots effects mental health—rather than policy-specific recommendations, though the findings could influence how businesses and policymakers think about AI and how to regulate it.
“We want the research to be meaningful and provide insights,” Isaac said.
Isaac described the U.K. AISI as “the crown jewel of all of the safety institutes” globally and said deepening the partnership “sends a really strong signal” about the importance of engaging responsibly as AI systems become more widely adopted.
The partnership also includes expanded collaboration on AI-enhanced approaches to cybersecurity. This will include the U.K. government exploring the sue of tools like Big Sleep, an AI agent developed by Google that autonomously hunts for previously unknown “Zero Day” cybersecurity exploits, and CodeMender, another AI agent that can search for and then automatically patch security vulnerabilities in open source software.
British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall is visiting San Francisco this week to further the U.K.-U.S. Tech Prosperity Deal, which was agreed to during U.S. President Trump’s state visit to the U.K. in September. In November alone, the British government said the pact helped secure more than $32.4 billion of private investment committed to the U.K tech sector.
The Google-U.K. partnership builds on a £5 billion ($6.7 billion) investment commitment from Google made earlier this year to support U.K. AI infrastructure and research, and to help modernize government IT systems.
The British government also said collaboration supports its AI Opportunities Action Plan and its £137 million AI for Science Strategy, which aims to position the UK as a global leader in AI-driven research.
Democrat Eric Gisler claimed an upset victory Tuesday in a special election in a historically Republican Georgia state House district.
Gisler said he was the winner of the contest, in which he was leading Republican Mack “Dutch” Guest by about 200 votes out of more than 11,000 in final unofficial returns.
Robert Sinners, a spokesperson with the secretary of state’s office, said there could be a few provisional ballots left before the tally is finalized.
“I think we had the right message for the time,” Gisler told The Associated Press in a phone interview. He credited his win to Democratic enthusiasm but also said some Republicans were looking for a change.
“A lot of what I would call traditional conservatives held their nose and voted Republican last year on the promise of low prices and whatever else they were selling,” Gisler said. “But they hadn’t received that.”
Guest did not immediately respond to a text message seeking comment late Tuesday.
Democrats have seen a number of electoral successes in 2025 as the party’s voters have been eager to express dissatisfaction with Republican President Donald Trump.
In Georgia in November, they romped to two blowouts in statewide special elections for the Public Service Commission, unseating two incumbent Republicans in campaigns driven by discontent over rising electricity costs.
Nationwide, Democrats won governor’s races by broad margins in Virginia and New Jersey. On Tuesday a Democrat defeated a Trump-endorsed Republican in the officially nonpartisan race for Miami mayor, becoming the first from his party to win the post in nearly 30 years.
Democrats have also performed strongly in some races they lost, such as a Tennessee U.S. House race last week and a Georgia state Senate race in September.
Republicans remain firmly in control of the Georgia House, but their majority is likely fall to 99-81 when lawmakers return in January. Also Tuesday, voters in a second, heavily Republican district in Atlanta’s northwest suburbs sent Republican Bill Fincher and Democrat Scott Sanders to a Jan. 6 runoff to fill a vacancy created when Rep. Mandi Ballinger died.
The GOP majority is down from 119 Republicans in 2015. It would be the first time the GOP holds fewer than 100 seats in the lower chamber since 2005, when they won control for the first time since Reconstruction.
The race between Gisler and Guest in House District 121 in the Athens area northeast of Atlanta was held to replace Republican Marcus Wiedower, who was in the seat since 2018 but resigned in the middle of this term to focus on business interests.
Most of the district is in Oconee County, a Republican suburb of Athens, reaching into heavily Democratic Athens-Clarke County. Republicans gerrymandered Athens-Clarke to include one strongly Democratic district, parceling out the rest of the county into three seats intended to be Republican.
Gisler ran against Wiedower in 2024, losing 61% to 39%. This year was Guest’s first time running for office.
A Democrat briefly won control of the district in a 2017 special election but lost to Wiedower in 2018.
Gisler, a 49-year-old Watkinsville resident, works for an insurance technology company and owns a gourmet olive oil store. He campaigned on improving health care, increasing affordability and reinvesting Georgia’s surplus funds
Guest is the president of a trucking company and touted his community ties, promising to improve public safety and cut taxes. He was endorsed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, an Athens native, and raised far more in campaign contributions than Gisler.
If Rivian’s sales are any indication, owning an electric vehicle isn’t such a partisan issue, despite President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of mandates, incentives, and targets for EVs.
At the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said it’s a misconception that electrification is politicized, explaining that most customers buy a product based on how it fits their needs, not their ideology. The questions car buyers ask, he said, are the same whether they’re purchasing one with an internal-combustion engine or a battery: “Is it exciting? Are you attracted to the product? Does it draw you in? Does the brand positioning resonate with you? Do the features answer needs that you have?”
Buyers of Rivian’s R1 electric SUV are split roughly 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, Scaringe told Fortune’s Andrew Nusca. “I think that’s extraordinarily powerful news for us to recognize—that this isn’t just left-leaning buyers,” he added. “These are people that are saying, ‘I like the idea of this product, I’m excited about it.’ And this is thousands and thousands of customers. This is statistically relevant information.”
Buying an EV was once an indication of left-leaning politics, but the politics got scrambled after Tesla CEO Elon Musk became the top Republican donor and a close adviser to Trump. That drew some new customers to Tesla, and turned off a lot of progressive EV buyers, with many existing owners putting bumper stickers on their Teslas explaining that they bought their cars before Musk’s hard-right turn. Trump and Musk later had a stunning public feud, in part over the administration’s elimination of EV and solar tax credits.
But Scaringe said he started Rivian with a long-term view, independent of any policy framework or political trends. He also insisted that if Americans have more EV choices, sales would follow. Right now, Tesla dominates a key corner of the market, namely EVs in the $50,000 price range. Rivian’s forthcoming R2 mid-size SUV will represent a new choice in that market, with a starting price of $45,000 versus the R1’s $70,000.
Ten years from now, Scaringe said he hopes—and believes—that EV adoption in the U.S. will be meaningfully higher than it is today across the board, explaining that the main constraint isn’t on the demand side. Instead, it’s on the supply side, which suffers from “a shocking lack of choice,” especially compared to Europe and China, he added. EV options in the U.S. are limited by the fact that Chinese brands are shut out of the market.
More choices for U.S. EV buyers would presumably create more competition for Rivian—and indeed, the flood of low-priced Chinese EVs in other auto markets has created a backlash, with countries such as Canada imposing steep tariffs on them. But Scaringe appears to view more competition as positive for the market overall.
“I do think that the existence of choice will help drive more penetration, and it actually creates a unique opportunity in the United States,” he said.
Politics8 years ago