China's Clean Tech Revolution

China’s role in negotiations at Copenhagen have been the focus of heavy scrutiny ever since world leaders reached an agreement to “take note of” climate change.  But the negative press being leveled against China does not take note of or appreciate the full range of initiatives currently being advanced by Chinese policy makers.  The renewable energy sector is the fastest growing industry in the world, and with its extensive investments in clean technology, China is likely to become tomorrow’s renewable energy leviathan.

In 1986, says Evan Osnos for The New Yorker, four of China’s top weapons scientists warned then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping that decades of relentless focus on militarization during the Cultural Revolution had severely hindered the country’s civilian scientific establishment.  Unless China joins the world’s xin jishu geming, the “new technological revolution,” they advised that the world would leave China behind.

What followed was massive investment in labs, universities and enterprises, in a wide range of projects.  In 2001, Chinese officials focused on one program in particular: energy technology.  By 2006, China had redoubled its commitment to new energy technology by boosting funding for research, setting targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams and other renewable sources of energy.

“China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place,” says Osnos.

Writing for the Beijing Review, Li Yuzhu says that Chinese officials have had to rethink the Five-Year (2006-2010) Plan of Development of Renewable Energy issued in 2007 by the Chinese government due to overachievement.  Under the 2007 plan, China wanted to achieve a wind power capacity of 30 gigawatts and a solar power capacity of 1.8 gigawatts by 2020.  Electricity generated by renewable energy was to meet more than 15 percent of the country’s total need by 2020, and 30 percent of higher by 2040.

Shi Pengfei, Vice Director of the Chinese Wind Energy Association, said that the new plan, titled the Alternative Energy Revitalization Plan, increased the wind capacity target to between 100 gigawatts to 150 gigawatts. Funding for this aggressive move is remarkable: the new stimulus package could possibly contain in excess of $460 billion (US) through 2020, focused on wind and solar as well as other renewable energy sources.

At the end of 2008, China’s wind power capacity had already surpassed 12 gigawatts, leading Shi Lishan, the Deputy Chief of the Alternative and Renewable Energy Department of the State Energy Administration, to concede that the reason for the massive boost in wind power capacity is that China is likely to reach the earlier wind power capacity target of 30 gigawatts as early as 2010, ten years ahead of the plan that was adopted less than two years ago.

Friend or Foe?

A renewed China with a heavy focus on renewable energy is going to have far reaching consequences for everyone involved in the global clean technology industry. North America and Europe have traditionally been the leaders in the clean technology research and development fields. But the future of the clean technology industry’s power distribution is beginning to shift extensively from West to East.

Writing for the Technology Review, an independent media outlet published by MIT, Kevin Bullis cites a report by The Climate Group, a London based nonprofit which supports clean technology development, highlighting some critical factors that are putting China ahead of the U.S. in terms of developing a clean technology industry as well as clean technology infrastructure.  China, says the report, plans to produce half a million electric vehicles in 2011, produces 30 percent of the world’s solar panels and is the world’s fourth-largest generator of wind power. Bullis also reports that China’s economic stimulus package invested $221 billion in technology for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. In contrast, the U.S. invested about half that amount in such technology through the U.S. economic stimulus package enacted earlier this year.

China’s investment in the clean technology sector is tremendous, said Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC): “They have a national renewable energy standard, a national efficiency standard, and China will build more of everything – more coal, more nuclear, more renewable – and they’ll invest in more efficiency than any other single country in the world.”

Shuang Ying = “Win Win”

There is a growing consensus among policy observers that no matter what positive steps forward are able to be made within the U.S. toward developing more coherent and effective clean technology strategies, China will no doubt be the future of renewable energy leadership.

While interest in clean technology in the U.S. remains overwhelmingly hindered by lobbyists and those who fund them (see, for example, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s fight to free her state of clean air), China’s growing interest in, and support of, clean technology is attracting an ever-increasing amount of foreign investment.

The Obama Administration has gotten over the Chinaphobia that ran rampant throughout the Bush Administration, says Louis Shwartz and Ryan Hodum for RenewableEnergyWorld.com.  Instead of fearing the rise of China as a competitive superpower, the Obama Administration is working to realize the opportunities for cooperation in the development of a new energy future, and paving a way for a sustainable and productive bilateral relationship.

The strategic partnerships in the Sino-U.S. bilateral relationship are highlighted by three emerging factors. First, strengthening the EcoPartnerships Initiative, which enables sub-national cooperation in sectors such as plug-in electric vehicles, Smart Grid development and other sustainability business models; second, the announcement of the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, which will “facilitate joint research and development on clean energy by teams of scientists and engineers from the U.S. and China, as well as serve as a clearinghouse to help researchers in each country,” with a focus on energy efficiency in buildings, carbon capture and storage and electric vehicles; and third, the U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program, initiated by the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, which is meant to accelerate the deployment of clean energy projects in China through public-private partnerships, while advancing U.S. and Chinese commercial interests.

At the 20^th U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade, the Chinese government announced that it would drop a domestic content requirement mandating that 70% of the components of wind power equipment were to be produced within China. The domestic content rule was the policy driver for major growth in China’s wind energy manufacturing industry.  By removing the domestic content rule, the Chinese government is undoubtedly showing a great interest in continuing to strengthen the Sino-U.S. clean technology partnership, even if it means slowing their own wind energy component manufacturing industry.

This development is good news for international wind energy equipment manufacturers throughout the globe, and American firms in particular. “If this is the leading edge of a more expansive access to the Chinese clean-tech market,” writes Shwartz and Hodum, “the desire of the Chinese to have more robust technology transfer from the U.S. is likely also to become a reality. Together those steps will accelerate the restructuring of the way that the United States and China produce and consume energy.”

Good News All Around

China's clean technology revolution should come as a pleasant surprise to anyone who considers rising seas, shrinking polar ice caps, and disappearing forests a bad thing for the Earth and its inhabitants. The developing relationship between China and the U.S. should be understood as an equally positive step forward in terms of securing a healthy future for the global environment.

The U.S. and China emit around 50% of the world's greenhouse gases.  In light of this fact, after Copenhagen officials from either country have engaged in too much finger pointing and not enough mirror viewing for my taste. Therefore, strengthening a positive relationship between the two superpowers is good news for everyone invovled, which happens to be every person in the world.

Written by Christopher Campbell

Images Courtesy of Creative Commons

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