China races past others in renewable energy

[Manu Sharma]

This one is truly mind blowing. 

One and a half years ago China had announced it would generate 30 GW from wind by 2020. Last week, the govt pledged to achieve 100 GW by the same date!

This dwarfs India's ambitious 20 GW / 2020 solar mission target by a wide margin. We are now really being left behind. 

The article below explains the socio-economic conditions that are causing this leap: 

_________________

Is China really going green?
Camels still plod the arid plains outside the ancient Silk Road city of Urumqi, their heads bowed into the gritty winds that funnel down the through the valleys of China's Tian Shan, or 'celestial' mountains.
 
By Peter Foster in Urumqi 
Last Updated: 11:06PM BST 03 May 2009
Dabancheng windfarm outside Urumqi in the Western Chinese province of Xinjiang.
But today the same winds that struck fear into the traders of the Silk Road, swallowing whole caravans in blinding storms of dust, are being used to power plans for a new, green revolution for China's energy-hungry economy.
At Dabancheng, a few miles outside the city, great forests of windmills stretch to the horizon, their blades beating out a lazy rhythm that belies the sudden urgency with which China's rulers are now investing in renewable energy.
 
The speed with which China is now ramping up its commitment to alternative energies has caught even the most optimistic analysts by surprise, with new green edicts being issued from Beijing on an almost weekly basis.
Last week officials pledged to generate 100 gigawatts of electricity from wind power by 2020, more than tripling the original target of 30GW laid down in a national energy strategy published just 18 months ago.
"The pace of change is unimaginable from just three or four years ago," shouts Yan Weijiang, a director of the Xinjiang Wind Energy Company over the roar of the wind. "If you had talked to me in 2003 or 2004 I would not have believed this was possible."
Mr Yan, who started his career working in coal-fired electricity generation with the state giant PetroChina, said the introduction of a Renewable Energy Law in 2006 offering state subsidies for wind power had been the initial "game-changer" after years of slow growth.
Public attitudes in China towards the environment have also started to change. In the wind-fields of Dabancheng the first 13 windmills, bought from Denmark and erected in 1989, are now used primarily as a tourist attraction.
On the dusty road into Urumqi Chinese families stop to have their pictures taken in front of giant white propellers, and some newly married couples even come to the wind farms for their official wedding photographs.
"They're beautiful and they are also a sign of China's great progress and development," said Tang Qinghui, a tourist who had stopped to picture his wife and child with the turbines, "these windmills show a commitment to a new, cleaner future for our country."
Nuclear, solar and hydroelectricity are also being lined up for massive new investment through China's £400bn stimulus package, with 2020 targets for nuclear power raised from 40 gigawatts to 60 gigawatts, with some officials even talking of aiming for 70GW.
Investment is also being poured into China's electricity grid to enable more renewable sources to be connected, while planners say they want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 50 per cent by 2020.
After years in which China put economic growth before almost all environmental considerations, analysts now see a step-change in attitudes from the central government backed by hard cash and the raw political muscle of China's command economy.
"The old belief that China could follow the model of Western industrial nations by making a mess today and paying for the clean-up tomorrow now appears to be dead," said Yang Ailun, director of Greenpeace's climate and energy campaign in China.
"China's leaders now realise that for long-term growth to be sustainable they will have to both reduce power usage by finding greater efficiencies and boost the amount of renewable energy entering the national grid."
The desire to take a greener path is not confined to China's all-powerful government.
Activists say there is growing grass-roots support for change among the Chinese public, spurred by a growing realisation that ordinary people are paying a heavy price for China's old "dirty" development model.
Information is filtering into the wider public consciousness, as recently when the China Daily newspaper published research from the government's National Population and Family estimating that 10 per cent of birth defects in China were caused by pollution – or one million deformed babies every year.
"The public is now waking up to these problems," says Ma Jun, an environmental activist who runs a website naming and shaming companies and provincial governments that allow pollution, "and public pressure will be one of the most important drivers of change".
In Beijing he cites the efforts to clean up the air pollution ahead of last year's Olympic Games as just one example of how the Chinese public's mindset is rapidly changing.
After the games there were several popular campaigns by residents who had enjoyed clean air for the first time in a decade to keep polluting factories closed and retain traffic restrictions.
"People had come to accept that it was impossible to have blue skies over Beijing, but during the Olympics they suddenly saw that wasn't true. Now they don't want to go back to the old polluted ways," said Mr Ma.
Elsewhere in Beijing the government has installed solar panels to power street lights and, along the rooftops of the city's remaining courtyard houses can be seen the winding pipes of solar water heaters, yet further evidence of change.
The sheer size and speed of China's new green investment has provoked some soul-searching in America, the world's second largest polluter after China, where a series of reports have highlighted the discrepancies in spending.
According to a report by the Centre for American Progress, in 2009 and 2010 China will now spend more than six times America's green stimulus spending as a percentage of their respective economies – or £8.6m an hour.
However for all the headline-grabbing targets, sceptics argue that China best efforts will still not be enough to make a meaningful dent in absolute emissions.
Even if China achieves its target of 15 per cent renewable energy by 2020, projections show that energy demand will double in the same period leaving China still more than 70 per cent reliant on dirty coal-fired power stations.
Sceptics also point out that since China's provincial leaders are still assessed on the basis of economic rather than environmental criteria, leaving little incentive for them to embrace the new green orders of central government.
However, many international climate change analysts see new reasons for optimism. A report by the independent lobbyists The Climate Group says it believes that China could now achieve a "second, green miracle" to match the "economic miracle" of the last 20 years.
The key will be the power of China's government to force through green measures and absorb the financial losses of early investment in green technologies – wind power is currently twice as expensive as coal power – in a way that Western governments cannot.
The "litmus test", the report says, will be how soon after 2020 China can start to reduce absolute emissions and hit the global target of emitting two tons of CO2 per capita by 2050 – compared with 5.1 tons in China today, 8.6 tons in Europe and 19.4 tons in the US.
It will be a massive challenge, but this week further optimism was generated by reports that China's was, for the first time, actively considering setting emissions targets ahead of negotiations for a successor to the Kyoto treaty in Copenhagen later this year.
Although decisions have not been taken, analysts saw the reports as yet further evidence that China, after years of arguing that the West should clean up its own act before it took steps of its own, was preparing to take an unprecedented lead at Copenhagen.
"The fact that the country's leadership is now putting a focus on climate change... gives us great hope that China could achieve a second miracle 30 years from now by moving to a low carbon economy," wrote Steve Howard, CEO of The Climate Group.
"But this time, we believe that China will no longer be a developing country following where others have led, but a pioneer leading the way."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5258622/Is-China-really-going-green.html

[Biogas guy]

Manu,

On May 5, 1:38 am, Manu Sharma <orangeh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This one is truly mind blowing.
> One and a half years ago China had announced it would generate 30 GW from wind by 2020.
> Last week, the govt pledged to achieve 100 GW by the same date!
>
> This dwarfs India's ambitious 20 GW / 2020 solar mission target by a wide margin. We are now
> really being left behind.
>

> The article below explains the socio-economic conditions that are causing this leap: [...]
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5258622/Is-China...

This is excellent news, and thanks for posting it.

While the article may attempt to explain the socio-economic conditions
that _cause_ China to want to take this leap, it does not explain the
conditions that _allow_ China to establish these goals with any
confidence.

China is the world's last major communist government (whatever that
means at the beginning of the 21st century), but as well and more
pertinently, and perhaps surprisingly, it is probably the world's
largest capitalist enterprise. The last time I was in China I was
negotiating a contract with a Chinese company, and it became clear not
only that the CEO of this company did not have the authority to
conclude the agreement, but that this was likewise true of most
companies of any size in China. The reason? These companies are either
majority owned by the government, or the government has a significant
minority position. The CEO I was sitting across from, as it turned
out, needed to ask someone in a government ministry somewhere before
he could say "yes".

This broad ownership by the government results in significant
revenues, allowing the Chinese government to be the lender of record
of trillions of dollars for the US, and to take such decisions as are
needed to undertake the goals the article you referenced reports.

India, by contrast, is a country with a democracy not noted for unity,
making it far more challenging for it to respond to dispassionate
warnings about global warming, nor is the government of India nearly
as well funded as the Chinese government. Can you feature India
loaning millions, tens of crores, let alone trillions to the US?


d.
--
David William House
"The Complete Biogas Handbook" www.completebiogas.com

"Make no search for water. But find thirst,
And water from the very ground will burst."
(Rumi, a Persian mystic poet, quoted in Delight of Hearts, p. 77)

http://bahai.us/

[Manu Sharma]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:37 PM, Biogas guy <david....@gmail.com> wrote:

This broad ownership by the government results in significant

revenues, allowing the Chinese government to [...] take such decisions 

as are needed to undertake the goals the article you referenced reports.

David, 

There's no mistaking that China has a lot of hard cash available at hand to invest in emission reduction goals. But having said that, it's also true that...

A. India's task is relatively easier as our annual per capita emissions are less than half of China -- around 1.5 tons vs. over 4 tons for China. So we have to achieve less emission avoidance* (explained below) compared to China. 

This makes it all the more important that the government realises this today and adopts a path of sustainable growth rather than waking up tomorrow when our emissions would have increased several times and it'd be much more difficult to reduce. 

* Emission avoidance is a more appropriate term than emission reductions in case of developing countries like India and China who, unlike the developed world, are not expected to make absolute reductions under the UNFCCC framework. China's emissions for example have increased 150% over 1990 and set to grow rapidly even further. U.S, on the other hand has seen its emissions grow 17% over the same period. 

So, in other words, developing countries need to avoid emission (from the 2005 projected growth baseline) while developed countries need to reduce emissions in (from 1990 level baseline).

B. Lack of cash isn't stopping India to take serious actions that will lead to lower emissions. We just aren't as serious about it as China clearly is. We really haven't woken up to the size and scale of the challenge. The govt. is still in denial of the severity of this issue and continues to question the science behind it.

China, on the other hand seems to have grasped the huge challenge it faces ahead. We will not make any progress until we are honest about what faces us. 

   
So, yes, while one can argue that China has a lot of hard cash available for its renewable budget, it's also has a relatively harder task ahead. But we aren't even trying. There's really no excuse for that. 

Thanks,

Manu

[Manu Sharma]

The true scale of China's commitment towards renewable energy is now being revealed. 

Excerpt from a news report in The Guardian :

... reports in the domestic media and from foreign diplomats suggest between 1.4 trillion (US$200 bn) and 4.5 trillion yuan (US$600bn) will be invested over the next ten years in nuclear power plants, solar and wind farms, hydroelectric dams, "green transport", "clean coal" and super efficient electric grids.

The consequences will be staggering. If the bigger figure proves correct, China will be spending the equivalent of its 2009 military budget on "new energy" for each of the next ten years.

Even the smaller figure would mean that China, which represents just 6 per cent of the global economy, would exceed the amount the entire world invested on new power generating capacity last year, including fossil fuels.

Complete article available here.

Thanks,
Manu

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Manu Sharma <orang...@gmail.com> wrote:

This one is truly mind blowing. 

One and a half years ago China had announced it would generate 30 GW from wind by 2020. Last week, the govt pledged to achieve 100 GW by the same date!

This dwarfs India's ambitious 20 GW / 2020 solar mission target by a wide margin. We are now really being left behind. 

The article below explains the socio-economic conditions that are causing this leap: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/5258622/Is-China-really-going-green.html