Excellent essay on the critical importance of cheap electricity in the digital world and China’s lead in this area. As a country with little domestic fossil fuels, they have no legacy industry to support and with massive investments in renewables, EV’s etc have created the first “electro state”. Decades of these investments have now paid off, allowing them to leapfrog the rest of the industrialized world. This is very clear in cities like Shenzhen.

“As we accelerate into an all-electric, all-digital age, this fundamental link is re-emerging, but with a new unit of account. The 21st-century economy, defined by automated industry, robotic, electric transport, and now power-hungry artificial intelligence, runs on a single, non-negotiable input: electricity. In this new paradigm, the real base currency, the ultimate representation of productive capacity, is the kilowatt-hour (kWh)”

https://electrek.co/2025/11/21/electricity-is-about-to-become-the-new-base-currency-and-china-figured-it-out/

Electricity is about to become the new base currency and China figured it out
byu/Epicurus-fan inenergy



by Epicurus-fan

8 comments

  1. China’s outward going foreign direct investment in green energy since 2022 [is comparable to the post WWII Marshall Plan, with appropriate adjustment for inflation](https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/china-s-marshall-plan-is-to-go-green-with-solar-ev-battery-investments-125091000271_1.html) The Marshall Plan rebuilt Western Europe as an ally and market for American goods. *And we barely notice that China is doing it.*

    I think that the fundamental premise of the article is correct, that electrotech is the basis of the twenty- first century economy, as oil was in the twentieth. The dominant military and economic structures are all built around the master resource of oil, reducing its importance is a way to quietly shift the geopolitical order without causing harm or making enemies. People who buy renewable generation equipment from China are dependent on them for maintenance parts, but they don’t depend on China to deliver tankers of sunlight, the way that oil buyers do. But on the other hand, the military and financial structures of the twentieth century slowly lose relevance.

  3. I don’t think the analogy works. Electricity prices are highly flexible and location dependent. A currency is meant to be a stable unit of exchange. I suppose the intention was to state that the US dollar is a petroleum economy currency and the Chinese Yuan is a renewable economy currency but this really is far too much of an oversimplifcation of global finance. Energy policy, while important and even fundamental, is merely one aspect of the economy. Calling a form of energy a currency doesn’t seem to have any real-world purpose.

    I understand how someone would mistakenly think that there is a direct unit relationship between power and money, but it’s much more subtle than that. Money is a debt marker. The role of debt in society is a very complex one with an extremely tangled history that unravels the deeper you look into it. It’s not just a conversion from energy to money as if they were comparable units. No, money is clearly a marker of debt. You can’t convert that to units of kilowatts.

    If the point was that China is moving forward on renewables and the US is resisting, then I would be on board but this thing about energy being a form of currency. . . eh, no I don’t see the utility of this metaphor.

  4. Once everything is automated, once every task, every job, from physical with robots to intellectual with AI, is automated, everything will be priced in energy

    It won’t make sense to value one person’s time above another’s because they have more experience or because they are in shorter supply, those thighs will just not exist in a completely automated economy

    You know what will? Electricity, energy, we will measure stuff in it, an apple will cost exactly as much as it took to produce it, plus a margin for the producer

    Prices will be set in Joules (Gj and Mj for most stuff) and if there is an UBI, that’s the price unit we will be paid in

    Sure, this is in the far future, but it will eventually come, and electricity will be the default commodity everything will be measured against

  5. I’ll point out China is STILL building tons and tons of coal fired plants. Their pause in the rise of emissions is due to the recession in China.

  8. About to become? Hasn’t it already been that way since ice transportation took over in the 1910s? Or even earlier when coal burning was dominant?

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