Hi, it's Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday. China has the world's biggest wind farm, 7,000 turbines. It's no secret. You can see them from space. So why last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos? Did President Trump find it necessary to lie about China's huge wind production?

China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven't been able to find any wind farms in

China. Did you ever think of that? It's a good way of looking at. They're smart. China's very

smart. They make them, they sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid

people that buy them, but they don't use them themselves. They put up a couple of big wind

farms, but they don't use them. They just put them up to show people what they could look like.

They don't spin. They don't do anything. How much of that is actually true? Here to talk more about it is my guest, Jeremy Wallace,

Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

He's written a new article about China's solar and wind for Wired Magazine called China's Renewable Energy Revolution is a huge mess that

might save the world. Dr. Welles, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me.

Let's get right into this. Doesn't China have the world's largest wind farm? I mean,

don't they spin and make electricity? They do spin and make electricity.

China has by far the most wind installed around the world, about as much as the rest of the world combined.

The idea that China is only making them and not using them is completely wrong.

There is, as ever, a tiny grain of truth behind the kind of piece that Trump is making, which is that

you often do have curtailment when you have renewable energy, because sometimes the wind is

spinning turbines more than the actual demand for electricity out there in the system. In the end, remember,

we always have to have electricity, the amount of supply and demand has to match perfectly every

second or else everything gets kind of our machinery, our computers, the phone I'm talking with,

everything would be fried. So we have to control the system so it matches completely. And so

sometimes what that means is that you have too much, too much supply, too much free electricity generated by the wind. And so that doesn't always work. In renewable world, we talk about this is curtailment. But it's really, it's just part of the system. It's not a problem and not fake. Isn't that a good problem to have?

It's a good problem to have. It means you don't have to turn on other sources of power,

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