 | Draft article not currently submitted for review.
This is a draft Articles for creation (AfC) submission. It is not currently pending review. While there are no deadlines, abandoned drafts may be deleted after six months. To edit or make changes to this draft, simply click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. To be accepted, a draft should:
It is strongly discouraged to write about either yourself or your business or employer. If you do so, you must declare it. Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
Last edited by JaredMcKenzie (talk | contribs) 4 months ago. (Update) |
Europe or China is potentially the world's first emerging electrostate. Rees is a crucial strategic factor but monopoly comes not from mining it but processing it.
China has an abundance of Ree, notably Inner Mongolia that is comparatively a lot less densely populated but cited to hold over 80% of the country's reserves.
Motives for abandoning the petrostate model and moving towards becoming an electrostate, does not only include environmental reasons but also for strategic energy independence, to avoid importing fossil fuels.[1]
Solar
editSolar is commonly cited as a major pathway to becoming an electrostate, where large-scale deployment of solar can support electricity generation for transport, industry and residential use, while reducing reliance on fossil fuels including oil and natural gas.
Solar power however presents challenges to an electrostate model as it is dependant on daylight and weather conditions, and requires complementary technologies, such as energy storage. Countries following an electrostate pathway that is heavily based on solar, typically integrates it with large-scale battery storage, pumped hydro, or long-distance power transmission to support the grid. Despite prices of solar panels have dropped significantly in recent years, major limitation for many countries to adopt large scale solar deployment have been due to its land-use requirement, and related factors. Utility-scale solar farms require substantial surface area, which can be difficult to allocate in densely populated or highly urbanised areas. As a result, large-scale solar installations are often located in rural areas or at a significant distance from major population centres, which may require additional infrastructure, such as upgrading of the grid to rural accommodate high-voltage transmission lines, in order to deliver electricity to major population centres.
China is currently the largest producer and installer of solar power capacity, where a significant portion of its utility-scale solar generation is heavily concentrated in its more sparsely populated, solar-rich western regions, with electricity transmitted to eastern major population centres via ultra-high-voltage electricity transmission networks. Globally, China produces 98% of solar wafers, 92% of solar cells and 85% of panels globally, and accounted for more than 55% of global installed capacity in the first half of 2025.[2][3]
Supply chain
editA defining characteristic of an electrostate is its strategic pursuit of electrifying its own economy and supporting the global energy transition. In order to achieve this, it ideally requires secure and reliable control over critical mineral and energy supply chains. These notably include;
Rare earths
edit
Rare earths are crucial for establishing an electrostate. China is currently the only country to have built and maintain end-to-end control over their rare earth supply chain at scale. As the world's largest consumer of rare earths, and with the expansion of its domestic EV industry and building of renewables sector, China has achieved economies of scale in rare earth production.[4]
Between 1950s to 1980s, Mountain Pass, in United States had dominated the world's rare earths industry and produced 90% of global needs, primarily in light rare earth elements. However a waste spill at Mountain Pass in 2002 led to the closure of the mine, and increased competition from China had prevented it's reopening at that time.[5]
Since the 1990s, China has become the world's largest producer of rare earths. The country's mining is largely concentrated in two hubs including Inner Mongolia, and Ganzhou in Jiangxi; the latter being particularly rich in heavy rare earth elements.[6] Due to toxic waste from the mining, these areas have also incurred massive environmental costs that lead to cancers and lasting and costly damages to impacted water and soil. This led to Chinese authorities tightening environment regulations by 2016 and requiring companies to upgrade their technologies and engage in more costly and less environmentally harmful mining and extraction processes.[7][8]
Over the past decades, the country filed the global majority of rare earth related patents with approximately 25,000 between 1950 to October 2018. Chinese engineers had mastered industrial scale solvent extraction and effectively controls the separation and refining equipment market. Because the industry's processing sector is complex and time-consuming to develop, competitors have struggled to reverse-engineer Chinese technologies or create entirely new ones.[9][10][11][12]
Geologically, the global bottleneck is in HREEs.[13][14] While countries like Australia, United States and Canada have an abundance of light rare earths, economically viable HREEs ars limited. In contrast, China's ionic clay deposits allow for relatively simple and low-cost extraction processes. This is both significantly easier and cheaper than dealing with the hard rock HREE deposits found in places like Strange Lake in Canada, and Norra Kärr in Sweden, which requires more complex and harsher processes that requires stronger solvents.[15] Consequently, the majority of global HREEs are sourced from China.[16]
Overall, geological factors, intellectual capital, comparatively less stringent environmental regulations, and strategic state planning, have ultimately enabled China to secure self sufficiency in rare earths without reliance on external supply chains. This control over rare earths has been a significant factor in paving the pathway for China to become the world's first electrostate, giving it significant leverage over other countries that depends on their rare earth resources.[17][18]
..
Factors; However Ree is destructive to environment. The Chinese regime have prioritised national REE security over environmental costs to Baotou City in inner Mongolia for decades. USA and Europe have comparatively stronger environmental regulations which hinders progress. Trump admin eyes Greenland for rare earths however mining there is not currently feasible or economically viable for several major reasons.
1. Harsh environment - located in mainly Arctic tundra and ice sheets. Low temperatures means mining ops can only be sustained for a fraction of the year and faces major weather costs.
2. Lack of infrastructure - there's almost no roads, railway, Power grid, industrial ports so it also needs major upfront costs to build from scratch. Which reduce economic profit margins.
3. Geological and technical barriers - the rare earths that Greenland has are often within complex rock types like eudialyte, which is much more difficult and expensive to process. There is no well established, cost effective method of those rocks.
4. Not profitable and takes too long - even if deposits did exist, experts say it would take decades to develop a working mine that actually produces materials, and even then it might not be profitable.
5. Environmental laws - Greenland has strong environmental laws which makes it difficult to overhaul. The concerns about pollution, radioactive materials often associated with rare earth ores and their impact on tourism and ecosystems, will undoubtedly be an issue.
Nonetheless EU doesn't need to mine it. They just need to process it and can import from China and other countries. Currently China dominates and perfected the technology to mine Rees, despite it originated in the US.
.
A national goal for climate change - electrify everything
Nation leading global energy transition by dominating supply chains for clean energy techs, like batteries, solar, EVs, and critical minerals
Term - basically replacing the old "petrostate" model.
Sources (SIGCOV)
https://theconversation.com/goodbye-petrostates-hello-electrostates-how-the-clean-energy-shift-is-reshaping-the-world-order-264267
https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74282
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/10/electrotech-geopolitics-energy-security/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/china-energy-solar-electric-vehicle-climate-9.7005003
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/energy-world/the-eu-in-a-petrostates-and-electrostates-world
https://www.ft.com/content/5cbdcbd0-60ce-46ec-9582-f5ebf8d02825
https://www.ft.com/content/013e8a27-ade5-48ed-8f2e-ffbf70cc508c
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/26/china-is-the-worlds-first-electrostate/
https://qz.com/china-electrostate-solar-panels
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/11/27/analysis/cop30-clean-energy-fossil-fuels-canada
References
edit- ↑ "China's green energy boom could spell the end of the fossil fuel age". ABC News. 2025-08-12. Retrieved 2026-02-02.
- ↑ "'A bullet train for power': China's ultra-high-voltage electricity grid". www.bbc.com. 2024-11-15. Retrieved 2026-02-02.
- ↑ "Global solar installations surge 64% in first half of 2025". Ember. Retrieved 2026-02-02.
- ↑ "Why the West Can't Escape China's Rare Earth Dominance – Yet". thediplomat.com. Retrieved 2026-01-16.
- ↑ Campbell, Charlie. "Why It's So Hard to Challenge China's Rare Earths Dominance". TIME. Archived from the original on 2025-06-18. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ "China's rare earths El Dorado gives it a strategic edge". The Straits Times. 2025-12-21. ISSN 0585-3923. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ "China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining". Yale E360. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ "How Australia can avoid China's rare earth pollution crisis". ABC News. 2025-11-15. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ "China's Rare Earth Innovation Surge in 2025: Patents and Breakthroughs Across Sectors Downstream". Rare earth exchanges. 2026-01-05. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ "Trump Wants Rare Earths. But Challenging China's Dominance Will Take More Than Tariffs". Time. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ "China's Rare Earth Patent Strategy Reshaping Global Technology Competition". Discovery Alert. 2026-01-05. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ Seth, Nayan (2024-08-29). "Mine the Tech Gap: Why China's Rare Earth Dominance Persists". New Security Beat. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ Vella, Heidi (2026-01-13). "Will the US' onshoring strategy remove China's chokehold on REEs?". Mining Technology. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ Sydney, University of Technology. "Why the west can't escape China's rare earth dominance – yet". www.uts.edu.au. Retrieved 2026-01-21.
- ↑ Sydney, University of Technology. "Why the west can't escape China's rare earth dominance – yet". www.uts.edu.au. Retrieved 2026-01-16.
- ↑ Borst, Anouk M.; Smith, Martin P.; Finch, Adrian A.; Estrade, Guillaume; Villanova-de-Benavent, Cristina; Nason, Peter; Marquis, Eva; Horsburgh, Nicola J.; Goodenough, Kathryn M.; Xu, Cheng; Kynický, Jindřich; Geraki, Kalotina (2020-09-01). "Adsorption of rare earth elements in regolith-hosted clay deposits". Nature Communications. 11 (1): 4386. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-17801-5. ISSN 2041-1723.
- ↑ Park, Sulgiye; Tracy, Cameron L.; Ewing, Rodney C. (2023-08-01). "Reimagining US rare earth production: Domestic failures and the decline of US rare earth production dominance – Lessons learned and recommendations". Resources Policy. 85: 104022. doi:10.1016/j.resourpol.2023.104022. ISSN 0301-4207.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link) - ↑ "The future of China's "electro-state"". asialink.unimelb.edu.au. Retrieved 2026-01-21.