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The purpose of the tool, named the Clean Industrial Capabilities Explorer, is to help policymakers “X-ray your country’s existing industrial base to identify what are your genuine strengths,” Tim Sahay, co-director of the lab, told me. The model, he explained, can identify “which core capabilities in your underlying industrial know-how are weak. That is like a diagnosis of what you should get into.”
The model calculates competitiveness across 10 clean energy technologies: solar, wind, batteries, electrolyzers, heat pumps, permanent magnets, nuclear, biofuels, geothermal, and transmission. That analysis ultimately surfaced five “core capabilities” that are most predictive of a country’s relative strength in each technology area: electronics, industrial materials, machinery, chemicals, and metals. Strength in geothermal, for example, is highly correlated with a machinery-focused industrial base, since building a geothermal plant requires expertise in making drilling rigs, heat exchangers, and steam turbines.
This “X-ray” of national capabilities not only confirms the dominance of leading Asian and European manufacturing economies, it also surfaces a group of lesser-known nations that appear well-positioned to become major future producers and exporters of key clean technologies. These so-called “future stars” include a handful of Central European countries — Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland — plus the Southeast Asian economies of Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. In Africa, Ethiopia emerges as the most promising economy.
Courtesy of Johns Hopkins Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab
Take Hungary as an example — its core competencies are machinery, electronics, and chemicals, making the country highly competitive when it comes to producing components for batteries, biofuels, and the machinery critical for geothermal power plants. The U.S., by comparison, excels at nuclear, electrolyzers, biofuel, and geothermal.
Many of the European future stars appear to benefit from their proximity to Germany, long an industrial stronghold in the region. “Poland, for example, received a huge amount of German FDI in the late 90s, early 2000s,” Sahay told me, explaining that countries in this region built up strength in their chemicals and metals sectors under the influence of the Soviet Union. Germany then set up these countries as key suppliers for its various industries, from autos to chemicals.
Of the 10 countries identified as rising stars, all of them received Chinese investment sometime in the past 10 years, Sahay said. “What we are seeing is decisions that have been made over the last couple of decades are bearing fruit in the 2020s,” he said, explaining that all of the countries on the list “were identified as places for potential investment by the world’s leading industrial firms in the 2000s or 2010s.”
This has led Bentley Allan, a political science professor and co-director of the policy lab, to think that China is likely doing some modeling of its own to determine where to direct its investments. Whatever the country is working with, it’s arriving at essentially the same conclusions regarding which nations show strong industrial potential, and are thus attractive targets for investment. “China isn’t the only one who can benefit from that strategy, but they’re the only ones being strategic about it at the moment,” Allan told me.
Allan’s hope is that the tool will democratize the knowledge that’s helped China dominate the global clean tech economy. “No one’s produced a global tool that enables not just China to invest strategically, but enables the U.S. to invest strategically, enables the UK to invest strategically in the developing world,” he explained. That’s critical when figuring out how to build an industrial base that can weather geopolitical tensions that might necessitate, say, a shift away from Chinese imports or Russian gas.
While it might not be particularly surprising that a country’s existing industrial capabilities strongly correlate with its potential industrial capabilities, the reality is that in many cases, getting a clear view of a country’s actual core competencies is not so straightforward. That’s because, as Allan told me, economists simply haven’t made widely available tools like this before. “They’ve made other tools for managing the macroeconomic environment, because for 60 years we basically thought that that was the only lever worth pulling,” he said.
Due to that opacity around industrial strength, model was able to yield some findings that the researchers found genuinely surprising. For example, not only did the tool show that countries such as the Philippines and Malaysia have stronger manufacturing bases than Allan would have guessed, it ranked Italy higher than Germany in overall competitiveness, showing solid potential in the nuclear, transmission, heat pump, electrolyzer, and geothermal industries.
That illustrates another complication the model solves for — namely that the countries with the most potential aren’t always the ones pursuing the most robust or intentional green industrial strategies. Both Italy and Japan, for instance, are well-positioned to benefit from a more explicit, structured focus on climate tech manufacturing, Allan told me.
Industrial strength will likely not be achieved through broad economic policies such as tariffs, subsidies, or grant programs, however, according to the model. Say for example that a country wants to deepen its expertise in solar manufacturing. “The things that you might want to invest in are things like precision machinery to produce the cutters that actually are used to cut the polysilicon into wafers,” Allan told me. “It’s more about making targeted investments in your industrial base in order to produce highly competitive niches as a way to then make you more competitive in that final product.”
This approach prevents countries from simply serving as final assemblers of battery packs or solar panels or other green products — a stage that provides low value-add, as countries aren’t able to capture the benefits of domestic research and development, engineering expertise, or intellectual property. Pinpointing strategic niches also helps countries avoid wasting their money in buzzy industries where they’re simply not competitive.
“The industrial policy race is very much hype-driven. It’s very much driven by, oh my god, we need a hydrogen strategy, and, oh my god, we need a lithium strategy,” Sahay told me. “But that’s not necessarily going to be what your country is going to be good at.” By pointing countries towards the industries and links in the supply chain where they actually could excel, Sahay and Allan can demonstrate they stand to benefit from the clean energy transition at large.
Or to put it more broadly, when done correctly, “industrial policy is climate policy, in the sense that when you advance industry generally, you are actually advancing the climate,” Allan told me. “And climate policy is industrial policy, because when you are trying to advance the climate, you advance the industrial base.”
The administration claimed the rollback would save Americans $109 billion over five years and shave $1,000 off the average cost of a new car. But as Rob noted in August, the administration’s fight against tailpipe emissions could actually end up raising the price of gasoline.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright pitched tapping into backup generators at data centers, hospitals, and factories to augment the supply of power on the grid. Speaking at the North American Gas Forum on Tuesday, Wright said the generators — most of which run on diesel, natural gas, or fuels such as propane — could contribute roughly 35 gigawatts of electricity. “We have 35 gigawatts of backup generators that are sitting there today, and you can’t turn them on. That’s just nuts. Emissions rules or whatever … people, come on,” Wright said, according to E&E News. “If we just turn those generators on for a few hours a year, we’ve expanded the capacity of our grid by 35 gigawatts. That’s massive.”
In a post on X, Aaron Bryant, an energy markets analyst at the law firm White & Case, called the proposal “shortsighted at best,” since the generators expose load growth to some measure of commodity risk and “unworkable at worst” because zoning ordinances, air pollution, and noise restrictions may prohibit use of the generators.
The National Petroleum Council, an advisory panel at the Energy Department, submitted its recommendations Wednesday for how to reform federal permitting rules. Among the proposals was an endorsement of an idea to bar federal agencies from yanking already-granted permits. Democrats in Congress put forward the concept to prevent the Trump administration from reversing approvals for offshore turbines and other renewable projects targeted by the White House.
The proposal marks a significant step within the executive branch, given that Trump himself is “the biggest wild card in permitting reform,” as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last month. But legislation is moving in Congress. In the House, the SPEED Act overwhelmingly won a committee vote last month. Now Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican, has introduced a new bill in the Senate with its own House version.
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Following a summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in October, Beijing agreed to overhaul its licensing regime for approving exports of rare earths to allow for streamlined permits to sell the metals overseas. At least three Chinese manufacturers of rare earth magnets have now secured new licenses to speed up exports to some customers, Reuters reported. It’s a sign of easing tensions between Washington and Beijing, offering some reprieve from the Chinese export restrictions that threatened to choke off the U.S. supply of key metals. But it’s still tenuous. China could ratchet up restrictions again, and the U.S. is still looking to increase domestic production of critical minerals to counter the leverage the People’s Republic wields through its near monopoly on the metals.
If there’s one thing Tim Latimer, the chief executive of the next-generation geothermal company Fervo Energy, wants to see in any permitting reform, it’s measures to making building new transmission lines easier. “The biggest threat to American global competitiveness, and it does not matter if your priorities are climate change, affordability, the AI race, national security or all of the above, is our country’s complete inability to build and upgrade transmission at any meaningful scale,” Latimer wrote in a post on X. Fervo is working on building the nation’s first full-scale next-generation geothermal plant in Utah, and running new transmission lines out to remote parts of the desert where it’s often best to drill for hot rocks is costly.
Fervo isn’t the only geothermal company making news. On Thursday morning, Zanskar, a geothermal startup that uses modern prospecting methods to find new conventional resources, announced that it had made the biggest “blind” discovery in the U.S. in more than 30 years. A “blind” find is a geothermal system that shows no visible signs of what’s below the surface, such as vents or geysers. While companies such as Fervo aim to use fracking technology to create reservoirs in hot rocks located where there aren’t underground aquatic formations to tap into, Zanskar is betting that using artificial intelligence to locate new conventional resources can result in faster, cheaper geothermal plants than next-generation technology can yield.
Here’s a little exclusive for you to end on: I got a copy of a letter signed by dozens of pro-nuclear advocates calling on New York state and local officials to kickstart an effort to rebuild the Indian Point nuclear plant just north of New York City. Describing the “forced premature closure” of the plant as “a major setback for New York,” the letter said the plant could be restored, noting that rising demand for clean, firm electricity has spurred utilities in Michigan, Iowa, and Pennsylvania to embark on historic restarts of decommissioned reactors. “Recommissioning Indian Point would stabilize electricity prices and deliver one of the fastest and largest returns of clean power available anywhere in the country,” the letter reads.
