Interesting story Will, thanks for posting.
I think it comes down to the ability to maintain a political power hierarchy.
A government or corporate entity wishing to control a population (rather than just serving), has to keep the population dependent on it for their fundamental energy (At least the 150 or so Joules per second that we each need to metabolise 24/7 to live).
The nature of solar, the only mathematically positive energy source, hence the one we need to switch to, is that it is distributed. So it can only be had in a decentralised way, that we might identify as domestic and community based.
Like this, everyone dumping their excess into valuable hydrogen which is then passed onto transportation and "big industry", to top up their centralised community power needs, energy supply has to move away from being grid based, to a new kind of publicly sourced energy ecology.
The theoretical energy availability to a population powered like this would dwarf anything centralised seen previously, there seems little to limit what a population powered like this could do. But they would no longer controllable by a government wishing to control, like the government of China obviously does, and presumably intends to do, forever as long as they exist. The government of China are the Elites of China maintaining political power in this way.
This has to be the real reason they are so reluctant to move away from extracted energy sources most suited to concentrated grid supply.
The solar farms in China are most likely not publicly owned, they are most likely owned by the government, who then distribute all energy "For free", like Cuba, but actually the hidden cost to people is they remain under the iron fist of the government, doing everything they are told to do because they have no choice to do otherwise.
We should realise this was probably the real reason proof of work (Bitcoin) miners were ejected from China. I've explained why those miners were probably all solar powered in the "Bitcoin Kardashev Hinge" story.
The solar farms they would have had to leave behind have to have been grabbed by the government, who would justify that by identifying unpaid taxes.
So China is powered by a mixture of Mathematically positive and negative energy sources just like everywhere else currently, and they are finding that just like every other government, the energy sources that give them maximum ability to control are the extracted sources, because those yield the highest concentrations of energy they might use for their centralised power maintenance infrastructure, like police force, armed forces, and etc.
This is the real reason they are hooked to mathematically negative energy, it seems to me.
That actually doesn't look much different from the dilemma also faced by Western Governments.
How can they move to mathematically positive energy, whilst maintaining their grip on control of their / our respective populations?
I would suggest a classic full on democratic/market response might be required, to force the hand of China and others like it, controlling their populations by force.
The US could lead in this by demonstrating the unstoppable economic force that would become quickly available, by unleashing the full power of mathematically positive energy (only solar!). It could do this by issuing the solar indexed stimulus already owed to the US public for historical creation of economic product by domestic and community solar.
That money would then be used to rapidly scale domestic and community solar to 100%+.
The high availability of nearly free hydrogen fuel then for all things would force oil prices negative (again), very quickly, removing the power of China, Russia, and anywhere else depending on sales of fossil fuels for income.
They would have no choice but to follow suit.
That would be the energy problem fixed once and for all, I think.
From that point on, all activity of humanity would be winding down temperature by creation, for the first time in its history.
By that we will have moved to being another form of photosynthetic life, like plants, forever sustainable and adding value it Earth instead of subtracting from it.
I think this is inevitable one way or another.
The only question is, when will the elites thinking they need to control, realise that they don't at all, In fact if they just stand back and let us do our thing, they would find themselves in more wealth than they ever had before, along with actually everyone else.