Remember U.S. infrastructure? Something maybe about how bridges across America have been cracking and sometimes collapsing—or how our energy grid is an antiquated mess? Perhaps something about how the Biden administration passed a $891 billion spending package largely devoted to modernizing all the crumbling hardware undergirding the U.S. economy, making it safer, fortified against extreme weather, and less of a contributor of greenhouse gases?
Well, sorry to say, the party’s over. In a sign of just how hostile the Trump administration has been toward its predecessor’s investment in a more sustainable and green economy, Chinese firms have scuttled an estimated $2.8 billion in planned U.S. energy projects over the past year. According to new research by analysts with the Rhodium Group, more than half of China’s proposed plans for clean-energy tech projects across the United States since 2022 have been either paused, delayed, or outright abandoned.
“The policy environment is getting more restrictive,” as one former senior counselor to the Biden era’s Department of Commerce, Margaret Jackson, told Bloomberg.
Jackson, now a senior associate at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies, suspects that this inhospitable climate for green tech investing is unlikely to change even in the not uncommon scenario where Trump’s whims pivot in response to flattery.
“I’m not sure that below him there’s a lot of appetite to create space for more Chinese investment,” Jackson said.
Not quite a solar-powered sunset
Rhodium’s analysts reported that all three of the world’s leading regions for clean tech manufacturing, China, the U.S., and Europe, have pulled back on their commitments over the course of Trump’s first year back in office—but China’s behavior was unique.
State intervention had once catapulted China’s domestic clean energy, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturing sectors five-fold from $37 billion in 2018 to a very sizable $189 billion in 2023, creating major market dominance in some areas (like solar) but also an overcapacity problem.
Nevertheless, even with a lower investment total and a flight from U.S. soil, China’s future plans for solar manufacturing infrastructure remain impressively monumental. Rhodium estimates that the nation has about 485 gigawatts of solar cell production capacity currently under construction domestically—or enough to power about 425 million additional Chinese homes a year—plus another 1.3 terawatts (1300 gigawatts) of solar capacity announced but not yet put in motion. If all goes as planned, China will literally still be doubling its solar power output, according to Rhodium.
“The new policy focus on solar manufacturing and the EV supply chain is likely to emphasize maintaining China’s leading position and closing remaining technological gaps and overseas dependencies,” as the group’s report, published Wednesday, concluded.
China’s U.S. solar sell-off
The economic data reflects some more stark anecdotal news documenting how China-based firms have pulled up their solar stakes in communities across America. This month, for example, Chinese solar manufacturing giant JinkoSolar sold off 75.1% of its ownership stake in its U.S. subsidiary to a private equity firm, which will now run JinkoSolar’s 2-gigawatt (GW) solar panel production facility in Jacksonville, Florida.
China’s Trina Solar similarly pawned off a majority stake in its solar manufacturing facility to an American firm, T1 Energy, shortly after Trump won the White House in 2024. And Beijing-headquartered JA Solar also sold its own 2GW solar assembly plant in Arizona to Corning last July.
Much of this skittishness ties directly to legal headaches from the Trump administration’s new Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) restrictions, introduced last year in that “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which places limits on the amount of Chinese ownership permitted for U.S. energy projects.
While industry analysts told Reuters that most Chinese manufacturers are clearly keeping low-level financial toeholds in their U.S. factories, the clear consequence is more price hikes and less clean energy across America for the foreseeable future as FEOC restrictions slow plans down.
As Aaron Halimi, CEO of the San Francisco-based utility developer Renewable Properties, explained it to Reuters, “This is undoubtedly going to continue to increase the cost of power in the United States.”
