GLOBAL POWERHOUSE
China is only too ready to assume climate leadership from the U.S.,
BEIJING— China’s ambitions to dominate new energy technologies are unfolding at the site of an abandoned coal mine about 500 kilometres northwest of Shanghai.
There, in Anhui province, Sungrow Power Supply Co. has built the world’s largest floating solar farm with 166,000 panels on a lake created when a nearby mine collapsed. While not an entirely unique idea — similar facilities are working in Japan, the U.K. and Israel — the project’s scale represents a step forward for China in shaping the future of energy.
President Xi Jinping’s government drew attention to those efforts this week at a meeting of energy ministers from around the world. With plans to spend $360 billion (U.S.) on renewable energy by 2020, China is seeking to appear as a global leader on the environment, marking a contrast with U.S. President Donald Trump’s rebuke of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
“The Chinese are really investing in the research and development side of innovation,” said Helen Clarkson, chief executive officer of The Climate Group, a nongovernmental organization that works to promote clean energy technologies and policy.
While Trump has said repeatedly he wants to stimulate fossil fuels and especially coal, China is funding a series of groundbreaking projects that generate power without pollution. Whether with massive floating solar farms such as the one in Anhui, sprawling wind farms or ambitious plans to develop geothermal reserves, the world’s most-populous nation is asserting itself as a powerhouse of clean-energy technology.
In the northwestern province of Qinghai, Huanghe Hydropower Development Co. is planning a demonstration project to integrate power from hydroelectric dams with wind turbines and solar cells. Similarly, the Guoshen Group, a power plant operator, intends to build a project that will combine wind, solar and thermal power with energy storage in the northern region of Inner Mongolia.
Meanwhile, construction has begun on China’s first large-scale effort to trap and store carbon dioxide emissions. The Yanchang Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage Project, Asia’s first commercial carbon capture plant, is set to begin operating in 2018.
“Everybody has to become more sophisticated about their investment strategy,” said Sophie Lu, head of China research at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Now it’s all about innovation, either in new technology or in a new application or a new business model.”
China’s efforts pit it against the U.S., which insists it can remain a hotbed of innovation in energy even though the president is slashing funds for startups in the industry and pulling out of the 2015 Paris accord. On his trip to Asia to represent Trump, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry spoke forcefully of America’s efforts to spur energy technology while also challenging China to take leadership on the issue.
“There is a lot of innovation out there, and it is gonna come, not all of the ways, but a lot of it will come from the United States,” Perry told reporters in Tokyo. “Somehow or another, because we don’t belong to this little club, you can’t be innovative and drive technology and affect the climate. I just don’t buy it.”
The stakes are high for both nations. The clean-energy business employed 9.8 million people last year, up 1.1 per cent from 2015, led by an expansion in solar photovoltaics, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s annual report. Green jobs may reach 24 million worldwide in 2030 as more countries work to combat climate change, Irena said. “China is a real driver in the money they invest in the diligence of their innovation,” California Governor Jerry Brown told Bloomberg this week. “I want California to partner with China in that endeavour. Otherwise we won’t achieve our climate goals.”
In Anhui, Sungrow’s 40-megawatt solar farm in a district of Huainan city called Panji features panels fixed to floats on the surface of a lake that formed after the ground surrounding an old coal mine collapsed.
By the end of September, Sungrow will complete more than 150 megawatts of new floating capacity in Huainan, said Hu Bing, an executive at Sungrow, the world’s second-biggest photovoltaic inverter maker.
To be fair, China’s energy innovations still have some way to go to catch up to the country’s aspirations.
While China has 37 working nuclear reactors, none have been built without expertise from abroad.
Meanwhile, the U.S. plans to keep its competitive edge “the same way we have historically,” Perry said in Tokyo. “It’s called innovation and technology.”