2
China will spend $75B annually on clean-energy technologies
Assembly workers stack layers of photovoltaic cells at the Hope Solar factory in Beijing.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
Assembly workers stack layers of photovoltaic cells at the Hope Solar factory in Beijing.
TEXT OF STORY
Bob Moon: Imagine a stack of $1 million -- and then multiply that 75,000 times. That's how much the Chinese government reportedly plans to spend every year on clean-energy technologies. Chinese state media are reporting the $75 billion will be used to boost wind, nuclear, solar, and carbon storage. Our China Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz reports.
Rob Schmitz: China's proposed clean-energy budget is three times as large as the entire budget of the U.S. Department of Energy. The environment's going to need all the help it can get to contend with thousands of these:
[Sound of a train]
A train carrying coal winds through a mine tunnel in Shaanxi province. To keep up with the country's exploding economic growth, China builds, on average, one new coal-fired power plant a week.
Deborah Seligsohn: What China is doing, which is good, is they're building the most efficient power plants in the world.
Deborah Seligsohn is head of the China Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute:
Seligsohn: The next challenge for China will be whether they choose to take some of the carbon dioxide that is emitted from those power plants and start storing it underground.
China has a handful of pilot programs that are doing just that. And with this new funding, observers say China will be well positioned to eventually sell its carbon-storage technology. It's been quite a successful formula for China; it's done quite well exporting solar panels and wind turbines to the U.S.
In Shanghai, I'm Rob Schmitz for Marketplace.
"What China is doing, which is good, is they're building the most efficient power plants in the world."
This is completely wrong. China is building cheap plants, that have very poor energy efficiency, are vastly overmanned and operate 70% of the time US plant operate in a year. They have frequent outages and have extremely poor environmental end fixes and no metering. So there is no real accountability at the plant level for energy efficiency or emissions. Want a US equivilent? How about the NY OTB with millions of people or a massive DMV from hell. China is not building a new coal-fired power plant every week. They have suspended their build program but may continue the program at the end of the year. That is an interruption of 18 months. Clean energy success? The price of continuous solar power is 2 RMB (0.37 USD kwh). For coal the price is 0.30 RMB. What kind of success is that? According to a New York Times article most Chinese wind power isn't connected to the grid and is operating on average 5% of the time. Be careful what you read from "energy experts" in think tanks most of which don't really know power plants and get their information second hand from information controllers. You have to know what to look for at a power plant to really know how to evaluate it. China is a 30 foot country. From 30 feet everything looks great. Once you get into the details you see the problems.
