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China taking huge strides in renewable energy
By siliconindia
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Monday, 14 December 2009, 18:50 IST
Beijing: During the last few years, China has taken "huge strides forward" in renewable energy, as UK energy and climate Secretary Ed Miliband put it, according to the British daily Financial Times(FT). This certainly lends some confidence to China's representatives at the ongoing Copenhagen climate summit, though their country is one of the world's largest emitters of carbon dioxide, reports Xinhua.
In the last six years, China jumped to become the world's largest producer of solar energy panels, or solar photovoltaic (PV). Last year, China manufactured over 2,000 megawatts of solar PVs, accounting for more than 30 percent of global production. But in 2003, China's share was merely one percent. At the end of last year, China also had more than 130 million square meters of solar water heaters, accounting for 76 percent of the world's total.
China's installed wind power capacity too has jumped to 12,170 MWs at the end of 2008, from 470 MWs at the end of 2002. Its annual wind turbine manufacturing capacity soared to 10,000 MWs from less than 100 MWs in 2003. Its once-unknown automaker BYD is now the world's second-biggest producer of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, backed by U.S. billionaire Investor Warren Buffett.
According to Huang Min, President of Himin Solar Energy, the world's largest maker of solar water heaters, it is the strong desire to develop, and the business sensitivity that has been driving Chinese to quickly seize low-carbon business opportunities. "Certainly I have the desire, and I want to develop (and get rich). I don't think we are inferior to foreigners," he told Xinhua.
Last year, his company sold three million square meters of solar panels, more than double of the U.S., according to Himin Solar Energy. Huang has insisted that his success does not have much to do with Chinese policies since the government offered no preferential measures for the sales of solar water heaters.
In the wind energy sector, things seem to be different. Both Secretary General of the Global Wind Energy Council Steve Sawyer and Vice-President of the China Wind Energy Association Shi Pengfei, saw the government's encouragement as the main driver behind the expansion of wind energy.
"Certainly the main driver has been government policy and clear signals it has sent to the market, and I'm sure the spirit of Chinese entrepreneurs has also contributed to the rate of growth," Sawyer told Xinhua via email.
Shi said that, while the government's policies has been the main driver for wind energy expansion, the market also played a major role in helping foster a strong manufacturing industry of wind turbines. China's push for more wind power has helped create huge market demand for wind turbines. As a result, manufacturers propped up and investment flocked into the sector.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has his own assessment on expansion of China's clean energy. He said on Nov. 30 in South Carolina that China was spending nine billion U.S. dollars a month on clean energy and it had passed the United States and Europe in high-tech manufacturing.
The UK think-tank Chatham House, in a report released this September, suggested that China lagged far behind developed countries regarding energy innovations and advanced technologies. The report, involving nine months of research across the technologies and over 30 sub-sectors, made analysis of 57,000 patents and the market adoption rates of energy technologies. Emerging economies such as Brazil, China and India had no companies or organizations in the top 10 positions in any of the sectors and sub-sectors analyzed, it said.
It served to explain why China has repeatedly asked industrialized countries to transfer their clean-energy technologies. Shi Pengfei said that many Chinese wind turbine producers, which had never designed and produced a complete wind turbine, bought production licenses from overseas firms and jumped straight to making turbines. Without the process on basic research and technological accumulation, Chinese manufacturers had been criticized for producing low-quality wind turbines, he said.
