The pulse of clean trade.
World trade in the ten manufactured clean-technology supply chains stood at $2.55 trillion in 2024, up from $1.42 trillion in 2005. But the engine has two speeds: 6.3 percent a year to 2014, then a stall. Since 2014, clean-trade value has grown 0.3 percent a year, and nine of the ten chains sit below their peak year. Transmission is the only chain at an all-time high. Falling prices, not falling volumes, explain part of the flat line.
Four views answer one question.
Is each chain growing or shrinking, which segments of it are moving, and who ships and buys it? Click any chain chip, chart line, or table row to focus all four panels. Panel 01 covers 2005–2024, and so do panels 03 and 04 in chain view; the segments panel, the Downstream view of panels 03 and 04, and all bilateral pivots run 2012–2024 on the Lab’s deduplicated taxonomy. Every panel downloads its data as CSV and copies as an image.
Ten chains, twenty years
Where the value sits
Who ships it
Who buys it
Values are nominal trade values in US dollars, mirrored across reporters (BACI), on the manufactured value chain only: raw-material trade is excluded from every panel. Shares are shares of world trade in the selected chain. Click a country line or table row to pivot every panel to that economy: exports when clicked among the exporters, imports among the importers. Click again, use the ✕, or press Esc to return to the world view. The Downstream toggle in panel 02 re-scopes both flow panels to downstream products only (final goods, 2012–2024, Lab taxonomy), for world rankings and bilateral pivots alike. Rankings in every mode show the top 10 economies of the current selection. *Taiwan reports as “Other Asia, nes” in BACI.
Who is up, who is down.
The same data as a ledger: values, shares, and growth, with a sparkline drawing each row’s path. Switch between countries and chains, exports and imports. With a chain selected, the second mode disaggregates its downstream into HS6 products; with an economy pinned, it becomes that economy’s ledger.
The flat line hides three shifts.
Total clean-trade value has barely moved since 2014. Underneath it, the geography of the clean industrial base reorganized.
China became the supply pole.
China is the top exporter in nine of the ten chains and raised its world export share in nine of the ten across both decades: heat pumps 11 to 26 percent, batteries 5 to 24 percent, solar 5 to 24 percent. Its export share understates its production share; much of what China makes, China installs.
America became the demand pole.
The United States is the top importer in nine of the ten chains, and its import share rose in nine of the ten over the last decade, reaching 14 percent of world wind imports and 15 percent of transmission imports. China's import share fell in most chains as it substituted domestic supply.
The risers are joining the chains.
Mexico, India, and Vietnam gained share on both sides of the ledger, exporting more and importing more, the signature of countries entering supply chains rather than just buying from them. Indonesia rose fastest after China in batteries, on the strength of nickel processing.
Flat value is not flat volume.
Solar trade peaked in dollars in 2011 and sits at 71 percent of that peak, over a period when the world installed more solar every single year. Module prices fell more than 80 percent. For deflating technologies, the flat line records cheaper goods, not fewer of them.
Read the numbers with care.
Every figure on this page traces to one generated table built from the CVCE unilateral trade data. These are the caveats that matter before quoting any of it.
- Values are nominal. No price deflation is applied. Where technology prices collapsed, solar modules and lithium-ion cells above all, dollar trade understates volume growth.
- Manufactured basis. The Raw Material stage of each chain is excluded from every panel, pending CVCE’s input-output recompute. Capability here means manufacturing, not extraction.
- Dual-use inflation. Wind, heat pumps, geothermal, and electrolyzer component baskets sweep in generic bearings, motors, pumps, and HVAC codes at full weight. Treat those chains’ levels as upper bounds; batteries is the cleanest of the ten baskets.
- Two lenses share the page. Panel 01, and panels 03 and 04 in chain view, use the CVCE value-chain baskets, 2005–2024. The segments panel, the Downstream view of panels 03 and 04, and all bilateral pivots use the Lab’s deduplicated diversification taxonomy on a single HS12 nomenclature, 2012–2024: each product sits in one chain, and electric vehicles count as battery-chain downstream. Plug-in hybrids are excluded because they share codes with conventional cars.
- Nuclear’s apparent top exporter is an artifact. Indonesia’s lead comes from ferronickel mapped into the nuclear chain at full weight, not from reactor exports.
- Trade is not production. Export shares miss what is made and installed at home; China’s solar export share of 24 percent coexists with a production share near 80 percent.
- Taiwan reports as “Other Asia, nes” in the underlying BACI data and is labeled Taiwan here.
- Exports equal imports by construction. The source mirrors and harmonizes both sides (FOB), so world totals can be quoted from either.