The U.S. should capitalize on China’s formidable experience to put its own domestic solar power sector on a more “economically sensible” path, researchers from Stanford University said in a new report.

The March 21–released report, “The New Solar System,” which was funded by a research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), offers a number of recommendations for putting U.S. solar policy on an economically sustainable tangent, which, the authors say, requires acknowledging and learning from China’s approach.

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“The Chinese are not only leading the world in terms of the manufacturing of solar equipment, but they are also the largest deployer of solar energy,” said Dan Reicher, executive director of Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center, which is a joint research center involving Stanford Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “And they are getting increasingly competitive in the research and development area, which the U.S. has historically been dominating. With a new federal administration and a new Congress, this is the time to be thinking about what we want the U.S. role in solar industry to look like five, 10 years from now,” added Reicher, who co-authored the report.