Who builds the machines of net zero — and who pays?

It is the chain of mines, refineries, materials plants, component factories and installers that turns minerals into the machines of a low-carbon energy system: solar modules, wind turbines, battery cells and electric vehicles, electrolysers, heat pumps, and the grid transformers, cables and storage that connect them. Each machine has its own chain — polysilicon to wafer to cell to module for solar; cathode and anode powders to cells to packs for batteries; rare-earth magnets, steel and glass fibre to nacelles and blades for wind — but they share the same upstream minerals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper, rare earths, silicon) and, increasingly, the same manufacturing geography: China holds roughly 85% of solar and over 80% of battery-cell capacity, and around 60% of wind-turbine and electrolyser manufacturing (IEA).

Mostly China. The IEA puts China at around 85% of global solar supply-chain manufacturing capacity — 95% or more for wafers and over 80% for modules — at over 80% of battery-cell production in 2025 (85% of cathode and more than 90% of anode material), at 60% of wind-turbine production capacity and around 60% of electrolyser manufacturing. Chinese companies also took about 70% of the world's wind-turbine orders in 2025 (Wood Mackenzie), and CATL and BYD alone supplied 55% of EV batteries (SNE Research). Europe's strongholds are wind (19% of turbine capacity), grid equipment — Prysmian, Nexans, NKT, Siemens Energy, Hitachi Energy — and heat pumps (20%); the United States is rebuilding solar-module capacity (First Solar ~14 GW, Qcells, T1 Energy) behind tariffs and the 45X manufacturing credit.

About $2.2 trillion a year. The IEA's World Energy Investment 2026 expects total energy investment to reach $3.4 trillion in 2026, of which $2.2 trillion goes to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emission fuels, efficiency and electrification — almost twice the $1.2 trillion flowing to oil, gas and coal. Solar alone attracts about $365 billion (roughly $1 billion a day), grids $550 billion and battery storage more than $100 billion. China accounts for almost a third of the clean total; the United States saw $34.8 billion of announced clean-energy projects cancelled in 2025 after federal tax credits were cut (E2).

There is no single figure, because the money sits in a stack of instruments. The largest is the €650 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility (2021–2026), 42% of which — roughly €270 billion — went to climate measures. Cohesion policy (€392 billion for 2021–27) must direct 30% of its regional fund and 37% of its Cohesion Fund to climate objectives. The carbon market feeds three dedicated funds: the Innovation Fund (about €40 billion expected over 2020–2030, some €17 billion awarded so far), the Modernisation Fund (over €57 billion expected by 2030 for 13 lower-income member states, €23.2 billion disbursed) and, from 2026, the Social Climate Fund (€86.7 billion to 2032 including national co-financing). Add the €19.3 billion Just Transition Fund, Horizon Europe's roughly €15 billion climate-energy-mobility cluster, the Connecting Europe Facility's €5.8 billion for energy and €5.4 billion under LIFE — plus the European Investment Bank, which signed €57 billion of green financing in 2025 alone, and the €38.8 billion (2024) to €43 billion (2025) a year of ETS auction revenue that member states must spend on climate.

The EU's main grant programme for first-of-a-kind clean-technology projects, financed not from the budget but from the sale of emissions allowances under the EU carbon market — which makes its size move with the carbon price (roughly €40 billion expected for 2020–2030). It runs annual competitive calls: €1.1 billion (2020), €1.8 billion (2021), €3.6 billion (2022), €4.2 billion signed for 77 projects (2023) and €2.7 billion for 54 projects (2024), plus dedicated pots — €852 million for six battery-cell factories in 2025 and the European Hydrogen Bank auctions, which have awarded €720 million, €992 million and €1.09 billion in fixed premiums to renewable-hydrogen producers since 2024. The 2025 call (€2.9 billion, with €1 billion ring-fenced for cleantech manufacturing) drew 358 applications and reports in late 2026. Since February 2025 the Innovation Fund is also the seed of the €100 billion Industrial Decarbonisation Bank, and the Commission proposes to fold it into the European Competitiveness Fund from 2028.

A €19.3 billion fund (2021–2027, €10.9 billion of it from NextGenerationEU) that pays for retraining, diversification, land rehabilitation and clean-energy projects in the roughly 100 coal, lignite, peat, oil-shale and carbon-intensive territories most exposed to the climate transition — from Silesia and Bełchatów in Poland to Western Macedonia, the Jiu Valley, Ida-Viru, Asturias, Lusatia and Sulcis. Poland (€3.85 billion), Germany (€2.5 billion), Romania (€2.1 billion), Czechia (€1.6 billion) and Bulgaria (€1.2 billion) are the biggest recipients. It is the first pillar of the Just Transition Mechanism, alongside an InvestEU scheme and a public-sector loan facility. Its weakness is speed: by March 2025 only €735 million had actually been paid out, and analysts fear the 2028–34 budget proposal, which merges it into national plans, will dilute it further.

Northvolt raised about $15 billion to become Europe's battery champion and filed for bankruptcy in Sweden on 12 March 2025 after years of production problems at its Skellefteå plant, a lost BMW contract and a market in which Chinese cells cost a fraction of European ones — BloombergNEF's 2025 survey put average pack prices at $108/kWh and LFP packs at $81. Its Swedish assets were bought by California's Lyten, which completed the deal in February 2026, is restarting Skellefteå with first shipments due in the second half of 2026 and plans to open the Heide site in Germany in 2028. The wider lesson is being learned across the continent: ACC cancelled its German and Italian plants in February 2026 while ramping Billy-Berclau, Volkswagen's PowerCo only started Salzgitter in December 2025 and pushed Valencia to mid-2027, and Europe's gigafactory pipeline shrank 8% between 2023 and 2026 — the only major region to lose capacity. The plants actually being built in Europe today are increasingly Chinese- or Korean-owned: CATL in Debrecen, BYD in Szeged, LG in Wrocław, Samsung SDI and SK On in Hungary.

On hardware, yes. The EU imports the overwhelming majority of its solar modules, around 80% of its new PV systems use Chinese inverters (Huawei alone accounts for 115 GW), Chinese companies dominate the battery cells going into European cars, and China refines 60–90% of the lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earths behind them. The dependence has become a security question: in 2025 undocumented communication devices were found in Chinese inverters, China restricted rare-earth exports to European carmakers and turbine makers, and in 2026 the UK blocked a £1.5 billion Mingyang turbine factory. The EU's answers are the Net-Zero Industry Act's 40% domestic-manufacturing benchmark for 2030, the Industrial Accelerator Act's 'Made in Europe' rules proposed in March 2026, the Commission's May 2026 guidance denying EU funds to projects using high-risk-supplier inverters, and a price-undertaking deal that replaced most EV tariffs in 2026. Where Europe is not dependent is wind, grids and heat pumps — the machines its own companies still lead.

That's exactly what we do. We produce commissioned deep-dive reports on the green transition and the strategic minerals behind it, covering angles such as mine-to-megawatt supply-chain mapping for a given technology, EU funding and state-aid tracking (Innovation Fund, Hydrogen Bank, RRF, Just Transition Fund, IPCEIs) by country or sector, manufacturing-concentration and import-dependence analysis, gigafactory and offtake pipelines, and the security exposure of grid hardware. Every report is source-cited — charts, maps and citations included — and built on the same open, verified data behind this dashboard. Email hello@mineral.watch with a short note on what you need and we'll come back with a scoped proposal.