China Needs A 'Game Changing' Renewable Energy Technology

By Louis Schwartz, China Strategies
January 23, 2013 

 

Despite all the evident progress in China in fostering renewable energy, energy conservation and other sustainability initiatives, there still is a 60-70% chance that the smart phones or tablets we use were manufactured in China using electricity generated from a coal-fired power plant.

Six years ago, we first began writing about the Chinese renewable energy sector forRenewable Energy World.  In the interim, China Strategies has chronicled the growth of sustainability in China and commented extensively on the inevitable ups and downs of what has become a herculean effort by the Chinese. 

We have reported on the policies, international politics, industries, foreign trade and investment opportunities, triumphs and failures and other developments that have propelled China into the vanguard of renewable energy deployment worldwide. China watchers should not be surprised by the speed with which China has embraced renewable energy development; this impatient “making-up-for-lost-time” pattern has been repeated in countless industries throughout China since Deng Xiaoping first launched “Reform and Opening Up” in the late 1970s.  To take wind power as an example, from a negligible base in 2007 (about 4 GW), China’s capacity to generate power from wind is now the world’s second largest (about 60 GW, though some isn’t grid connected).  At the current pace of installations (about 15-20 GW/year) China likely will have more than 200 GW of installed wind capacity by 2020.

It is tempting to compare the alacrity with which the Chinese leadership has put in place public policy and capital to steer China’s economy onto a path of increasing sustainability, with the sluggishness of other nations in this regard.  Ironically, the United States’ economy is much better positioned to implement the aggressive renewable energy policies that China has pursued over the past six years and would have shown very impressive results and even greater restraint in carbon dioxide emissions had similar policies been put in place.