The Green Rush Is On In China
by Louisa Lim, NPR.org
A new gold rush in China is actually a green rush — an urgent drive to develop green technologies. One group of Western companies, the Cleantech Initiative, suggests China’s market for renewable energy could eventually be worth as much as $500 billion to $1 trillion a year.
Now, Obama administration officials are warning that the U.S. could risk losing the race in green technologies.
“The future of sustainable energy is here.” The words are emblazoned on a wall at the world’s largest nongovernmental solar research center. It was built by an American company, Applied Materials, in the central Chinese city of Xian.
The cost of solar panels has dropped dramatically — 30 percent in the past year alone. One major reason is the “China price,” or the competitive advantages offered by Chinese manufacturing, with its cheap labor and economies of scale. China is now the world’s biggest producer of photovoltaic solar panels, making about 40 percent of all panels, according to the China Daily, mostly for export.
At Applied Materials’ $250 million research center in Xian, Elizabeth Mayo, a process engineer from Santa Clara, Calif., is working with local staff testing solar panels in the Sunfab panel reliability test lab. This simulates extreme weather conditions, and the company boasts that it is the world’s only laboratory capable of testing 61-square-feet solar panels.
Mayo is impressed by the facilities in Xian. “We don’t have facilities like this in the U.S. We don’t have anything of this magnitude,” Mayo says.
Catrina Ren, an enthusiastic English-speaking engineer, beams while showing a visitor another facility at the research center: vast empty hangars waiting for new pilot lines for crystalline silicon, and thin film solar technology to be installed. “I’m very proud I have chance to work here,” she says. “This is most advantaged tech center in world. I graduated from university only two years ago. I’m very proud.”
And Applied Materials is no doubt overjoyed to have Catrina and her former classmates on staff. Costs in China are much cheaper than in the U.S. An engineering graduate in Xian earns one-tenth of her American counterparts.
And the biggest draw is the eternal lure of China’s fabled market. Gang Zhou, general manager of Applied Materials Xian facility, says the company has decided to put its money where its customer base is.
“China is No. 1 producer of solar panels. That’s where our market is. The China new R&D center, that’s where we validate a lot of R&D work that is being carried out in U.S. and in Europe,” he says.
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India Joins China in Plans to Increase Solar Power
By Natalie Obiko Pearson, Bloomberg.com
India is targeting generation of 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022, joining China as the two Asian nations that resist emission caps draft plans to boost renewable energy before next month’s global climate change talks.
India, Asia’s third-biggest energy consumer, is set to unveil its national solar energy plan “in about a week,” Minister for New and Renewable Energy Farooq Abdullah said in Mumbai today.
China and India have opposed legally binding caps as industrialized nations seek commitments for programs that will curb the output of gases blamed for global warming. The two fastest-growing major economies balk at emission targets because their energy usage is projected to rise as more people are lifted out of poverty.
“It’s not a big challenge in terms of technology or engineering,” said Shirish Garud of the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. “The major challenge will be in mobilizing the financing.”
Solar capacity costs anywhere from 160 million rupees to 200 million rupees per megawatt to install, Garud said. Abdullah didn’t give details of spending, saying only that the amount would be “huge.”
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh plans to discuss India’s solar plan at talks with U.S. President Barack Obama, Abdullah said. Obama will host Singh at the first state dinner of his presidency on Nov. 24.
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First Solar and China to Partner on Gigantic Solar Power Plant
By Yael Borofsky, CleanTechnica.com
On Tuesday, the announcement that U.S.-based First Solar and the Chinese government will partner to build a 2GW photovoltaic (PV) power plant Ordos New Energy Demonstration Zone in China, sent shockwaves of excitement through the solar and clean energy communities.
The memorandum of understanding, which both companies signed on Tuesday, sets the stage for the construction of the world’s largest PV power plant to be completed by 2019.
According to the New York Times the plant is part of a planned 11,950-megawatt renewable-energy park slated for this region of Mongolia, that “would generate enough electricity to power about three million Chinese homes.”
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Asian Nations Could Outpace U.S. in Developing Clean Energy
American Markets’ Slump Feeds Worry
By Steven Mufson, Washington Post Staff Writer, washingtonpost.com
President Obama has often described his push to fund “clean” energy technology as key to America’s drive for international competitiveness as well as a way to combat climate change.
“There’s no longer a question about whether the jobs and the industries of the 21st century will be centered around clean, renewable energy,” he said on June 25. “The only question is: Which country will create these jobs and these industries? And I want that answer to be the United States of America.”
But the leaders of India, South Korea, China and Japan may have different answers. Those Asian nations are pouring money into renewable energy industries, funding research and development and setting ambitious targets for renewable energy use. These plans could outpace the programs in Obama’s economic stimulus package or in the House climate bill sponsored by Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).
“If the Waxman-Markey climate bill is the United States’ entry into the clean energy race, we’ll be left in the dust by Asia’s clean-tech tigers,” said Jesse Jenkins, director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland, Calif.-based think tank that favors massive government spending to address global warming.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke are visiting China this week to discuss cooperation on energy efficiency, renewable energy and climate change. But even though developing nations refused to agree to an international ceiling for greenhouse gases last week, China and other Asian nations are already devoting more attention to cutting their use of traditional fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal.
South Korea recently said it plans to invest about 2 percent of its GDP annually in environment-related and renewable energy industries over the next five years, for a total of $84.5 billion. The government said it would try to boost South Korea’s international market share of “green technology” products to 8 percent by expanding research and development spending and strengthening industries such as those that produce light-emitting diodes, solar batteries and hybrid cars.
China and India are kick-starting their solar industries. India aims to install 20 gigawatts of solar power by 2020, more than three times as much as the photovoltaic solar power installed by the entire world last year, the industry’s best year ever. And China’s new stimulus plan raises the nation’s 2020 target for solar power from 1.8 gigawatts to 20 gigawatts. (A gigawatt is about what a new nuclear power plant might generate.)
“China is trying to catch up in a global race to find alternatives to fossil fuels,” the official China Daily said in an article last week.
“A lot of people underestimate how focused China is on becoming a global leader in clean technology,” said Brian Fan, senior director of research at the Cleantech Group, a market research firm. China now provides a $3-a-watt subsidy upfront for solar projects, he said, enough to cover about half the capital cost. Fan said it is “the most generous subsidy in the world” for solar power.
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Los Angeles, China’s Jiangsu province sign MOU on solar energy cooperation
From news.xinhuanet.com
The City of Los Angeles and China’s Jiangsu Province signed here on Friday a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on solar energy cooperation, the first of its kind between the United States and China.
Under the MOU, Los Angeles municipal government and Jiangsu provincial government agreed to help strengthen bilateral cooperation in the solar energy sector, including expertise exchange, respective market access and dialogue on business expansion.
Fei Shaoyun, deputy director general of the Department of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation of Jiangsu Provincial Government, and David Freeman, deputy mayor of Los Angeles, signed the agreement on behalf of their respective governments, which have both laid out aggressive renewable energy development strategies and supporting policies.
The Los Angeles-Jiangsu MOU was signed days after U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu visited China on a mission to boost bilateral cooperation on clean energy between the two countries.
Los Angeles is the first U.S. city that has an ambitious clean energy plan, under which the city is expected to have 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in more than 10 years, with 1,280 megawatts supplied by solar energy, according to Freeman.
Meanwhile, Jiangsu Province has become a world-renowned solar energy production and innovation base, with more than 500 solar energy equipment manufacturers, and its annual solar energy product exports are at more than 6.5 billion U.S. dollars, said officials from Jiangsu.
The province is also the first in China to introduce a clean energy stimulus plan, encouraging the use of solar energy, they noted.
With the objective of expanding cooperation between photovoltaic companies in Jiangsu and their U.S. counterparts, a one-day conference titled “U.S.-Jiangsu China Solar Business Summit 2009″ was held Friday in Los Angeles, gathering more than 200 government officials, businessmen and solar energy researchers.
