NPR’s All Things Considered aired a report today on China’s efforts to dominate the clean-tech industry called “In China, The Green Rush is On“:
Here are some key parts of the transcript:
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.
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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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Meanwhile, American green technology companies are flocking to China: First Solar is building the world’s largest solar plant in Inner Mongolia, while Duke Energy is sharing solar, clean coal and smart-grid technology.
Officials in the Obama administration are beginning to sound worried.
“The longer we in the United States wait, the farther ahead China will be, and it will be harder for us to catch up,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke warned recently. “If we don’t get our act together, we’re going to be watching the capital, the businesses and the good-paying jobs end up someplace else. And 10 to 15 years from now, we’re going to be saying, ‘How did Shanghai become the Silicon Valley of clean energy?’”
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While it is still early days in China for the solar energy industry — there is no feed-in tariff or government subsidy for buying solar power — Beijing recently announced it would be spending $3 billion on its Golden Sun initiative.
The program will cover half the cost of installation and power transmission costs for 275 new solar power stations. The plan is designed to boost the bottom lines of Chinese solar power manufacturers, while also reaching the ambitious target of producing 2 gigawatts of installed solar capacity by 2011.
Shi Jun, for one, believes China will take the world’s No. 1 spot for installed solar capacity in just three years.
American companies are ahead technologically, he admits, but they face other disadvantages.
“In the States, they have many good technologies,” says Shi Jun. “President Obama has some policies, but until now I cannot see the real impact on companies. Also, I think the cost is a really big problem for the USA factories.”
He is delighted by China’s new target of increasing energy efficiency by at least 40 percent by the year 2020. He estimates that China will need 10 million tons of polysilicon to make enough solar cells to hit that target, 600 times its current output.
His goal is that his company, Propower, will produce half of China’s polysilicon within 10 years.
Multiply that ambition by all of China’s green technology entrepreneurs — and bear in mind that solar energy is just third on China’s clean-tech list, after nuclear and wind power. That’s the magnitude of the challenges ahead for China’s competitors.
Read the full transcript here, and check out our recent report on this topic, “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate Clean Energy Race by Out-Investing the United States.”
