From Coal to Compute: China’s Grid Meets the AI Boom with David Fishman

David Fishman is a Principal at The Lantau Group who advises on energy development, infrastructure, and electricity markets across East Asia, with a focus on China. His expertise spans power-sector policy and economics, grid development, project bankability, and transaction support, backed by regulatory and economic intelligence across China’s solar, wind, coal, nuclear, hydro, transmission, and power markets. He has led work on policy forecasting and tariffs, renewable-asset due diligence, China business matchmaking, and green-power procurement for multinationals.

In our conversation, David unpacks how China’s decades-long planning underpins its energy transition and how renewables, storage, and grid build-out are looking to be able to meet AI-era compute demand. We also touch on China’s East Data West Compute and how it leveraged strong geographical planning, as well as discuss the cultural and commercial reasons behind the global retail adoption of solar energy.

For me, the most interesting point he brought up is that electricity used to be bound to scarce resources, but as the saying goes, the sun shines, wind blows, and water flows everywhere. Access to reliable power will become more evenly distributed, which can raise living standards in places left out of prior industrial revolutions - and Chinese technology is driving that change.

In today’s world, there’s no shortage of information. Knowledge is abundant, perspectives are everywhere. But true insight doesn’t come from access alone—it comes from differentiated understanding. It’s the ability to piece together scattered signals, cut through the noise and clutter, and form a clear, original perspective on a situation, a trend, a business, or a person. That’s what makes understanding powerful.

Every episode, I bring in a guest with a unique point of view on a critical matter, phenomenon, or business trend—someone who can help us see things differently.

For more information on the podcast series, see here.

Chapters

Introduction to China’s Energy Landscape

The Evolution of China’s Energy Demand

Nuclear Energy: Pros and Cons

Data Centers and Electricity Consumption

Main Drivers of China’s Growing Electricity Demand

Challenges of Renewable Energy for Data Centers

Geographical Dynamics of Energy Supply in China

Infrastructure Challenges in Southeast Asia

Commercial Reasons for Renewable Energy Adoption

China’s 2030 Renewable Energy Goals and Beyond

The Transition to an Electricity Civilization

Transcript generated by AI

Grace Shao (00:00)

David, welcome to Differentiated Understanding. Thank you so much for joining us today. I have been following a lot of your work on X and LinkedIn and you’re such a prolific writer yourself. And thank you so much for dissecting the industry, but really also breaking down the jargon on energy-related industry policies. So today I think we’re going to cover quite a broad range of topics, but really starting off from the high-level China energy planning, how it came about, and why their leaders are right now.

How that plays into right now, obviously, the energy competition within the AI boom, and then the companies that are backing these developments and growth, whether it’s like PV or solar. But yes.

Thank you so much. So to start off with, why don’t we start with your work and what you do at Lantau Group?

David Fishman (00:44)

Yeah, so I’m, I’m a principal, I’m a principal consultant at the Lantau group. We’re an energy economics consultancy. We’re focused on the commercial and economic aspects of the business of electricity or energy broadly around the region. And in China, I’m focused entirely on the business of electricity. That could mean either working with generators, right, producers of electricity, or those who invest in generation projects.

It could mean working with the markets, the grid, either the physical infrastructure of the grid or the commercial or virtual infrastructure of power markets that help connect power generators to power buyers. And then the ultimate user of the electricity, the end user, which could be a large producer of physical goods or IT infrastructure like data centers. Anyone who has a lot of exposure to electricity as a buyer or seller would be somebody that we work with in our business.

Grace Shao (01:40)

Perfect, so you are the perfect person to go to help us understand China’s energy buildup then. We always hear about China being the biggest emitter, But then at the same time, they’re now the leaders in renewable energy generation. How did that really come about? What’s the kind of dynamic there now?

David Fishman (01:56)

it’s all driven by the need for electricity consumption demand, which has been rising incredibly rapidly at the same pace as the Chinese economy, right, electricity or energy consumption really closely correlated with GDP growth. So as long as your, your economy is doing more things, it starts needing more energy as well. And we went from a period where, you know, the the pace of the growth was even outpacing the ability of energy sector players to meet.

that need. They were not able to build enough electricity infrastructure. They were not able to find enough primary energy sources to meet the growing demand. We’re talking about the 90s, the 2000s. And then in the last 20 years or so, we swung around more towards being in a position of relative abundance on the energy side, where it’s possible to have more energy than the economy is currently calling for. And that’s where we got to where we are now. We built up a huge energy

electricity generation base that was primarily powered by what at the time was the best option, which was coal. Coal-fired power became the backbone of the entire Chinese electricity grid. And because China is huge, whatever is the leading share of something in China becomes just massive in the world. It becomes massive overall. The renewables didn’t really come on the scene until about 2011, 2012 is when the first really strong installation capacity subsidy programs were put into place to really encourage generators to build wind and solar farms and started ramping up the scale of the industry overall. But at that point you already had tons and tons of coal fired generation that was, you know, the backbone of the entire fleet. And that wasn’t going to go away so quickly. So over the last 10 years, we can add tons and tons of wind and solar, but it doesn’t, you know, it only stems the growth of coal. It hasn’t really even started taking away from the total generation of coal fired power. So that’s how you end up having, you know, the largest coal generation sector in the world, the most emissions in the world, and the largest renewable sector in the world all at the same time.

Grace Shao (04:01)

But how did China become so dominant in solar and all the renewable manufacturing? was like scale, was it cheaper capital, cheaper labor, policy support? How do we understand this? Because right now we’re seeing that the US is talking about transitioning to a more, you know, green energy, but like economy.

David Fishman (04:18)

Yeah, well, mean, every to have an industry that is somewhat speculative, relies on new emergent or unproven technology. And in 2011, China didn’t necessarily set out to say, we’re going to go all in on wind and solar, and we’re going to count on this becoming world beating in the next 10 to 15 years. At the time, it was just, you know, we’ve built up a lot of production capacity or a decent amount of production capacity for for solar panels and wind turbines, and we’ve been exporting them.

And now we would like to start installing some of them domestically. But it’s not going to be so competitive or so profitable if we do it right now. So let’s make sure there are very comfortable, good incentives in place so that anybody who builds a wind or a solar farm will be guaranteed a good rate of return on their expenditures. So you start out by saying state support. We need to offer state support to incentivize certain type…

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