What the reaction to our Dependence report tells us about Europe's real choices

Deployment of renewable energy funded by NGEU. ©Raigo Pajula/European Union, 2025

Loom’s new research on the risks of European nations depending so heavily on China for clean tech has made quite a splash over the last few days.

Yesterday the EU’s climate chief, Wopke Hoekstra, spoke out on the issue and admitted, “We’ve been too naïve for too long.”

Our report was downloaded thousands of times, prompted coverage in the Guardian and the FT, and even sparked a formal response from China’s Foreign Ministry.

But it also provoked many fascinating conversations and thoughtful messages from people in governments, energy firms and the climate community — revealing where the debate is heading next, and the strategic choices that follow.

Here are the 10 main responses I’ve heard, and some personal reflections about each of these arguments.

1. “Fossil fuel risks are worse, and you’re handing ammo to the fossil lobby.”

The report isn’t arguing against the transition. It will continue. The question is about pace, cost, and whether it’s built to last. We seek to de-risk and future-proof the transition, not delay it.

The clean-tech dependency debate has had almost no public airing until now. The little airtime it has received, has been narrowly focused on cyber risk or component risks. This report first and foremost is about laying out the full spectrum of risks to spark a debate based on that. Tellingly, most critics of our report’s headlines haven’t challenged its substance. Refusing to engage with real risks won’t make them disappear.

If climate advocates accept the premise that the choice is “Chinese dependency or fossil fuels”, they concede the argument. The real task is demonstrating that the transition can be resilient, and that security challenges can be properly managed. Low-carbon energy systems should be more secure than fossil fuels — but only if we design them that way from the start.

Avoiding the wider debate about the risks, the choices and the trade-offs between them, plays straight into the hands of those who would keep us hooked on fossil fuels. Many political leaders fear the switch will deepen dependency on China, and national sovereignty is front of mind. There is nothing fossil fuel interests would like more than to present total dependence on China as an implicit and inevitable cost of the transition.

This is precisely the trap Professor Anatole Boute fell into in his FT letter, suggesting the authors “might as well have argued that it is in Europe’s strategic interest to delay the energy transition” to placate US demands for expensive LNG. A transition that swaps one strategic vulnerability for another isn’t resilient. Pretending the only options are Chinese dependency or American LNG is just wrong.

After three winters of extortionate gas bills, and with supply disruption now too, leaders and corporations are in no doubt about the costs and risks of dependency on expensive oil and gas imports. Investors are piling record sums into clean tech in Europe. Demand for heat pumps, batteries, solar, wind and EVs is spiking. I just returned from a gathering of global business leaders in Salzburg where many described procuring renewable power as a commercial no-brainer — cutting costs and meeting rising AI-driven demand.

Europe’s political leaders have understood the same. Starmer has repeatedly said he sees clean energy as the way to escape “the rollercoaster of international fossil fuel markets“. Von der Leyen put it plainly: “As our energy dependence on fossil fuels goes down, our security goes up.” Macron made the same case in December 2025, writing that France is “choosing a decarbonised and sovereign energy system — essential for both national independence and climate protection“.

2. “Singling out China is Sinophobic — dependency is a universal problem”

The report warned against dependence on China, and it was not an argument against all Chinese low-carbon technology. Nor did it propose full de-coupling from China. But if you’re talking about clean energy technologies on the subject of energy sovereignty this is a China conversation by definition. Naming that isn’t ideological — it’s just arithmetic.

The same framework of reducing chokepoints applies to any concentrated dependency, including towards the US. Yes, we should also worry about the growing dependency on a small number of tech titans, and about the levels of reliance building up for US LNG and refined fuels. But pretending the China concentration is just one risk among many when it comes to low-carbon tech obscures the scale of the asymmetry.

3. “You raise problems but offer no solutions.”

This research was always intended to open a conversation, not close one. The solutions are where we go next, and that work is already underway. But it is also necessary to first frame the risks because to our knowledge, that has not been done in a comprehensive manner. More significantly, governments are not thinking about this in the round, and neither is Brussels. Diagnosing a problem clearly is the precondition for engaging people in serious solutions, and our follow-up work is coming.

While the shape of the response is already visible, it will not be the same in every country. It clearly includes a combination of de-risk, diversify, and localise where it makes sense. Further discussion is required on conditions on joint ventures that could require technology transfer and local jobs. The point is that they should bring genuine domestic economic benefit. Protect industrial sectors where Europe still has leadership and needs to guarantee national capabilities. Deploy targeted technical fixes for the most acute cyber exposures, like when it comes to inverters and software systems.

None of this means Europe should turn its back on all Chinese technology, but the world today is dramatically different from the world a decade ago and Europe cannot afford to de-industrialise further. European nations also aren’t starting from zero: there’s world-leading expertise and industrial capacity here to make real strides.

Diversification is possible too: Switzerland can produce inverters, India can scale solar panels, Vietnam can build wind towers, Korea can deliver batteries, Japan can supply key grid components, and there’s an opportunity to strike deals with middle and emerging powers like Australia, Canada, Brazil, Zambia and Mozambique over raw materials.

The question isn’t whether alternative sources of supply exist — it’s whether European governments are prepared to pursue them and make those deals attractive to partners.

4. “You’re overstating the risks — this is hawkishness dressed up as analysis.”

If you think we’ve overstated a specific risk, we’d genuinely like to understand why. The report sets out a range of issues with different probabilities and impacts — economic coercion, cyber vulnerabilities, defence supply chain exposure — and we’d welcome a serious debate about any of them. We scrutinised our risk assessment matrix through a challenge session that involved many experts, including those who hail from neither a security nor China background. We adjusted some of the analysis as a result. But this is exactly the conversation Europe needs to have.

What we’d push back on is the idea that the risks are simply invented. We live in a more fragmented, conflict-prone world — kinetic and cyber — and supply chain weaponisation is no longer theoretical. China has already restricted advanced tech sales to Asian and European buyers, backed Russia extensively in Ukraine, been fingered for hybrid attacks, and used export controls on critical minerals as a geopolitical instrument.

On cyber specifically: the risks are real, but we don’t think they’re the main point. The deeper concern is economic coercion — the leverage that comes from concentrated dependency, and the absence of alternatives if that leverage is applied.

In his new book, Elemental, Arthur Snell documents how a Chinese disinformation network called Dragonbridge organised opposition campaigns to US rare earth processing facilities that would have enabled America to reduce its own dependency. That’s the shape of the threat: not necessarily dramatic, but structural and persistent.

The dependency stakes are also material for defence supply chains: Western soldiers carry an average of 7 batteries — 10kg — for a 3-day mission. Batteries are essential for next-generation directed-energy weapons, which require massive instantaneous bursts of electricity that traditional generators cannot provide. These aren’t abstract concerns.

Loom’s research draws on interviews with national security and energy industry insiders, many of whom think the risks are understated, not overstated. And policymakers are already acting as if they agree. The UK and Germany are blocking Chinese wind firms on national security grounds. Days after our report dropped, the European Commission formalised guidance (effective 1 May 2026) blocking EU funds from any solar, wind or battery storage project using inverters from “high-risk” suppliers — explicitly China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The European Investment Bank alone funded around 20% of EU solar deployment in 2025. This is not a symbolic measure.

The hawkish position now is pretending nothing is happening.

Port of Rotterdam employee checks container on tablet. ©Danny Cornelissen

5. “The EU’s new ‘Made in Europe’ plans will handle these problems — China’s angry response proves it.”

China’s reaction tells you the direction of travel matters, but the price exception thresholds and procurement content rules in their proposals are a first step, not a finished architecture. It is not at all clear that Brussels knows what it is trying to solve.

In recent months Loom has hosted discussions with leaders from European battery and auto makers in Sweden, Germany, Spain and the UK. Few expect these policies as currently drafted to be a gamechanger. As one put it, “The EU is consistently inconsistent.” Many business leaders are now publicly scathing about the whole situation.

In the meantime, even as battery demand skyrockets around Europe and EU leaders keep saying they see green industries as an engine of growth, more than a dozen European battery firms went bust in the last year alone. The latest declared bankruptcy happened just this week, despite having backing from Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. Even as wind energy demand grows worldwide, European manufacturers are also increasingly reliant on their home market to just survive.

Without more action, especially at the national level, the EU’s plans won’t change the big picture.

6. “Deep dependence creates mutual interdependence and better relations.”

My good friend Baroness Bryony Worthington argued that the differences between an electrotech-based energy system and a fossil-fuel-based one are “the whole argument”: clean tech requires a once-in-a-decade purchase rather than continuous dependency, the core products don’t run out, components are largely recyclable, and China is actively transferring tooling and knowhow to other countries — something Saudi, Russia and the US cannot do with oil and gas.

The thrust of the argument is right — and it’s exactly why Europe should want this kit deployed at scale. But China is in fact highly selective about what technology it will share, and the dependency challenges arise elsewhere. The hardware may be one-off, but inverter firmware, software updates, spare parts, replacement cells, battery management systems and processed critical mineral inputs are not.

A grid-scale battery, a fleet of inverters or a connected EV is a piece of live infrastructure with an ongoing relationship to its manufacturer, not a sealed appliance you buy once and forget. The chokepoint risk lives in that ongoing relationship, in the manufacturing concentration that means there being few if any places to turn if it’s disrupted, and in the cyber surface that the EU has just acted on by moving to ban EU funds for Chinese inverters.

The recyclability point is genuine and important — closing the loop on critical minerals is a real part of the answer to reducing dependency. But it does not yet hold in practice at a meaningful scale because the investment and industrial capacity to get there still needs to be built. In the meantime, the dependency is live. The knowhow-transfer point cuts both ways — it is genuine where it happens, but it is also conditional, selective, and has been used as leverage.

China has shown willingness to weaponise dependencies (rare earths, gallium, germanium, graphite export controls) when it suits Beijing’s strategic interests. Bry is right that motivations matter, but a strategy that relies on the continued goodwill of a single supplier, or on the strength of contractual arrangements and economic interdependence is a bet. It has already turned out to be wrong more than once.

The conclusion is straightforward: Europe should embrace electrotech aggressively and manage the concentration risk that comes with it. Those aren’t competing propositions. Bryony’s argument is the strongest case for the first half. It’s not an argument against the second.

7. “Europe can’t compete — just enjoy the cheap kit.”

This concedes the industrial base, the jobs and the strategic autonomy in one move, in exchange for short-term price advantage. But Europe still leads in wind and has real cards to play in autos and batteries; writing those off would be a political choice, not an inevitability.

“Cheap” only holds if supply is reliable. A dependency that can be throttled, conditioned or cyber-compromised is not actually cheap once you price these risks. Moreover, cheap EVs are great but for European workers who are unemployed, they won’t be able to afford even these.

8. “Industrial policy will slow the transition and hurt affordability.”

The five principles Loom has promoted as a framework for thinking about these problems — economic strength, sovereignty, affordability, resilience, national security — must be pursued together, not pitted one against another.

Yes, diversification, de-risking and localisation could raise the cost of some technologies in the short term – but a transition built on a single chokepoint supplier is neither resilient nor, in the long run, affordable.

9. “China’s behaviour is a reaction to Trump — deepen ties, don’t weaken them.”

Beijing’s active support for Russia in Ukraine, and its restrictions on advanced tech sales to Asian and European buyers, predate Trump’s second term. The gallium and germanium controls were widely read as retaliation for semiconductor export restrictions — but that’s precisely the point: China has demonstrated willingness to weaponise clean-tech supply chains as a geopolitical instrument, whatever the provocation. That pattern doesn’t become safer because it has a cause.

The risk of a reaction from the US identified in the report is real and is itself an argument for greater autonomy for European countries — but that means hedging exposure to both unreliable partners, not swapping one for another.

10. “You should have worried about this 15 years ago.”

Probably true — and some did. But the world was very different back then, and the right response to a problem that’s grown for fifteen years isn’t another fifteen years of silence. It’s starting now.