SHENZHEN, CHINA – MARCH 09: View of high commercial and residential buildings on March 9, 2016 in Shenzhen, China. General economic slowdown continues in China while the property price and stock bubble faces risk. (Photo by Zhong Zhi/Getty Images)
Zhong Zhi | Getty Images News | Getty Images
A lead China official called for tighter secrecy in the energy sector to protect national interests against hostile foreign forces, echoing a broader crackdown impacting the country’s investment landscape.
“It is necessary to increase propaganda around ensuring confidentiality, give full play to the traditions of confidentiality in nuclear, petroleum and other energy industries, organize and hold various activities, actively foster a culture of protecting secrets and extreme discretion,” Zhang Jianhua, the director of China’s National Energy Administration, said in comments published on the agency’s website on Wednesday translated by CNBC.
Zhang urged the steps — which include preventing the leaks of key technologies in the energy sector — while citing the priority of national interests in the face of a “hostile” international landscape.
“The energy transition has some contradictions and difficulties — these very often are the focus of foreign hostile forces that want to steal and attack. They are fixed on our country’s energy sector, have increased collection of all kinds of data and information, in order to distort and slander China’s energy strategic planning, transformation, development, and other work, and interfere and influence our hard-won secure and stabile environment,” he said, without disclosing the names or nature of these forces.
China’s influential status as the world’s largest energy consumer has proven a double-edged blade. Zhang warns one must be “soberly aware” that his country depends on foreign oil and natural gas for up to 70% and more than 40% of its requirements, respectively. He reiterated Beijing’s oft-stated aims to increase self-sufficiency in energy — a target that analysts at Goldman Sachs in March believed China is on track to reach by 2060, if it continues its renewable investments and advances in wind turbines, solar panels and hydrogen as planned.
In turn, global suppliers depend on China’s active fossil fuel purchases and were struck — especially in the oil sector — by Beijing’s slower-than-anticipated economic revival, following the removal of spartan Covid-19 restrictions since the start of the year.
China’s high consumption has also bolstered its carbon dioxide emissions, Zhang says, against the backdrop of Beijing’s pledge to decarbonize by 2060.
“The task of promoting carbon peak carbon neutrality is arduous,” he warned.
Security vulnerability
National security has been a focal pillar of the Beijing administration since President Xi Jinping stepped into power. Critically, China in April passed a sweeping revision to its espionage law that prohibits the transfer of any information related to national security, broadens the definition of spying and gives expanded powers to authorities carrying out espionage investigations.
The crackdown and its potential for abuse and arbitrary enforcement have raised concerns in the investing community.
“Beijing views inadequate government control of information within China and its outbound flow as a national security risk,” the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center said in a note in June.
“These laws provide the PRC government with expanded legal grounds for accessing and controlling data held by U.S. firms in China. U.S. companies and individuals in China could also face penalties for traditional business activities that Beijing deems acts of espionage or for actions that Beijing believes assist foreign sanctions against China. The laws may also compel locally-employed PRC nationals of U.S. firms to assist in PRC intelligence efforts.”
Beijing and the U.S. have sustained an intensifying diplomatic and trade rivalry that culminated in Washington’s accusations of espionage in February, after a Chinese high-altitude balloon floated over the United States. The White House has pursued a strategy of de-risking and diminishing its commercial dependencies on China, with President Joe Biden last week signing an executive order to regulate U.S. investments that support China’s development of sensitive technologies.
Washington on Wednesday once more signaled concerns over Beijing’s political opacity.
“As we’ve said many times before, there have also been transparency issues, as we know, when it comes to — when it comes to the PRC and on the economic data, specifically,” U.S. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a press briefing.
U.S. President Donald Trump holds up an executive order after signing it during an indoor inauguration parade at Capital One Arena on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th president of the United States.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Renewable energy giants appear relatively sanguine about U.S. President Donald Trump‘s anti-wind policies, describing the process of replacing fossil fuels with electrically powered products as “absolutely unstoppable.”
In a standalone executive order, which had been widely expected, the president temporarily suspended new or renewed leases for offshore and onshore wind projects and halted the leasing of wind power projects on the outer continental shelf.
“We are not going to do the wind thing. Big ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood,” Trump told his supporters at the Capital One Area in Washington on Monday. He previously described wind turbines as an economic and environmental “disaster.”
The measures formed part of a much broader energy offensive designed to “unleash” already booming oil and gas production. This included declaring a national energy emergency, promoting fossil fuel drilling in Alaska and signing an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the landmark Paris Agreement.
Joe Kaeser, chairman of the supervisory board of Siemens Energy, one of the world’s biggest renewables players, seemed unfazed by Trump’s sweeping energy agenda. In fact, Kaeser considered the policies a “slight plus” for the German energy technology group.
Shares of Siemens Energy jumped more than 8% on Wednesday morning, hitting a new 52-week high.
“We need to see what’s behind all the executive orders and the policies. So far, I believe there are many areas where actually Siemens Energy benefits a lot,” Kaeser told CNBC’s Dan Murphy at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday.
There will be uncertainty for low-carbon energy sectors, such as onshore and offshore wind, Kaeser said, before adding that Trump’s measures were unlikely to directly impact Siemens Energy. That’s partly because roughly 80% of the firm’s wind market is in Europe, Kaeser said.
“So, I believe that doesn’t move the needle. I’m much more worried about the European economies and how they deal with a very powerful nation, with a very powerful concept. We may or may not like it, because it’s got some nationalistic type of things, but if we look at it from the view of the American people, we better get something going,” Kaeser said.
Beyond onshore and offshore wind, Kaeser said Siemens Energy was well positioned to capitalize from a “booming” electrification market.
“Think about the data centers, artificial intelligence, we have waiting times now on large gas turbines. Actually, customers are coming and saying, hey can I make a reservation and I’ll pay you for a reservation? Just think about that. It hasn’t happened for a long time,” Kaeser said.
“I believe the electrification age has just begun. Whether that’s gas turbines or wind or solar or something else, we’ve got everything, and the customers decide in the end. And one thing I believe one should not underestimate, the White House is not buying much [but] the customer does,” he added.
‘Very, very optimistic’
Spanish renewable energy giant Iberdrola was similarly bullish about the road to full electrification, describing the transition away from fossil fuels as “absolutely unstoppable.”
“We are seeing that probably we are in the best moment for electrification,” Ignacio Galán, executive chairman of Iberdrola, told CNBC at WEF on Tuesday.
Galán cited soaring global demand for electrically powered data centers, low-emission vehicles as well as cooling and heating applications.
A logo on the nacelle of a wind turbine at the Martin de la Jara wind farm, operated by Iberdrola SA, in the Martin de la Jara district of Sevilla, Spain, on Friday, April 21, 2023.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“All of those things require more electricity 24 hours a day. Our business in the United States is mostly in this area, which is networks … and the regulation depends on the state authority, so I think that is not really affected at all,” Galán said.
“Depending on the legislation, we will make more or less investment in another part of our business,” he added, referring to Trump’s energy policy.
“We are very, very optimistic about the United States and the future,” Galán said.
Wind power woes
Shares of some European wind power giants fell shortly after Trump took aim at wind power plans.
Denmark’s Orsted, which recently announced a roughly $1.7 billion impairment charge on U.S. projects, dipped 4.4% on Wednesday morning, extending steep losses from the previous session.
The rapidly growing offshore wind sector has endured a torrid time in recent years, hampered by rising costs, supply chain disruption and higher interest rates.
Windmills pictured during a press moment of Orsted, on Tuesday 06 August 2024, on the transportation of goods with Heavy Lift Cargo Drones to the offshore wind turbines in the Borssele 1 and 2 wind farm in Zeeland, Netherlands.
Nicolas Maeterlinck | Afp | Getty Images
Artem Abramov, head of new energies research at Rystad Energy, said Trump’s energy agenda essentially means the likelihood of any new offshore developments in the U.S. has fallen to zero — at least for now.
“The US currently has around 2.4 gigawatts (GW) of advanced-stage offshore wind developments that have reached final investment decision and are under construction, which are unlikely to be impacted by the order,” Abramov said in a research note published Tuesday.
“Moderate risk amid the unfavorable investment climate is present for 10.5 GW of projects which secured necessary permits but have not reached investment decisions,” Abramov said.
“The remaining 25 GW of early-stage projects are unlikely to see any progress under the current administration,” he added.
— CNBC’s Spencer Kimball contributed to this report.
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The Stripe logo on a smartphone with U.S. dollar banknotes in the background.
Budrul Chukrut | SOPA Images | LightRocket via Getty Images
Stripe cut 300 jobs, representing about 3.5% of its workforce, mostly in product, engineering and operations, CNBC has confirmed.
The payments company, valued at about $70 billion in the private markets, still expects to increase headcount by 10,000 by the end of the year, which would be a 17% increase, and is “not slowing down hiring,” according to a memo to staff from Chief People Office Rob McIntosh. Business Insider reported earlier on the cuts and the memo.
A Stripe spokesperson also confirmed to CNBC that a cartoon image of a duck with text that read, “US-Non-California Duck,” was accidentally attached as a PDF to emails sent to some of the employees who were laid off. Some of the emails mistakenly provided affected employees with an incorrect termination date, the spokesperson said.
McIntosh sent a follow-up email to staffers apologizing for the “notification error” and “any confusion it caused.”
“Corrected and full notifications have since been sent to all impacted Stripes,” he wrote.
In 2022, Stripe cut roughly 1,100 jobs, or 14% of its workers, downsizing alongside most of the tech industry, as soaring inflation and rising interest rates forced companies to focus on profits over growth. The Information reported that Stripe had a few dozen layoffs in its recruiting department in 2023.
Stripe’s valuation sank from a peak of $95 billion in 2021 to $50 billion in 2023, before reportedly rebounding to $70 billion last year as part of a secondary share sale. The company ranked third on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
In October, Stripe agreed to pay $1.1 billion for crypto startup Bridge Network, whose technology is focused on making it easy for businesses to transact using digital currencies.
Brothers Patrick and John Collison, who founded Stripe in 2010, have intentionally steered clear of the public markets and have given no indication that an offering is on the near-term horizon. Total payment volume at the company surpassed $1 trillion in 2023.