The Wall Street Journal published an article today, “World’s Top Polluter Emerges as Green-Technology Leader,” reporting on how China is leading the world in carbon capture and storage, wind, and solar technology, achieving rapid economies of scale and lowering prices.  As reporter Shai Oster notes, this is being driven in large part by the Chinese government:

Mr. Xu is part of a broader effort by China to introduce green technology to the world’s fastest-growing industrial economy — a mission so ambitious it could eventually reshape the business, just as China has done for everything from construction cranes to computers…

China’s vast market and economies of scale are bringing down the cost of solar and wind energy, as well as other environmentally friendly technologies such as electric car batteries. That could help address a major impediment to wide adoption of such technologies: They need heavy subsidies to be economical.

The so-called China price — the combination of cheap labor and capital that rewrote the rulebook on manufacturing — is spreading to green technology. “The China price will move into the renewable-energy space, specifically for energy that relies on capital-intensive projects,” says Jonathan Woetzel, a director in McKinsey & Co.’s China office…

China’s government is backing the trend. It wants to replicate the success of the special economic zones that transformed cities such as Shenzhen from a fishing village near Hong Kong into one of the biggest manufacturing export centers in the world. Set up when China began its economic reforms in the 1980s, the zones were designed to attract foreign investment into light manufacturing to kick-start exports. They became engines of China’s economic boom.

Regulators will announce several low carbon centers next year that will have preferential policies to promote low carbon manufacturing and exports.

China is moving quickly to dominate the global wind and solar industry, and the government is considering a plan to increase solar power capacity targets five or ten-fold to achieve double the current global capacity by 2020:

In 2004, foreign firms owned 80% of China’s wind-turbine market, according to energy consulting firm IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Now, Chinese companies own three-quarters of the country’s market, thanks to companies which make turbines a third cheaper than European competitors.

Chinese wind-turbine makers are starting to export. In October, Shenyang Power Group struck a deal to supply 240 turbines to one of the largest wind-farm projects in the U.S., a 36,000-acre development in Texas.

China already has a 30% share of the global market for photovoltaic solar panels used to generate electricity. Solar-power panel makers, including Suntech Power Holdings Co., Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar Ltd., export most of their product to Europe and the U.S., contributing to a 30% drop in world solar-power prices.

Chinese competition is forcing rivals to shift production. U.S. Evergreen Solar Inc. said it will move its assembly line from Massachusetts to China. General Electric Co. said it will shut a facility in Delaware. BP PLC’s solar unit said this spring it would stop output in Maryland and rely on Chinese suppliers instead…

Softening prices created an opportunity for Chinese regulators. Officials are now talking about raising solar power capacity targets five- or tenfold, so that by 2020 China could have more than double current global solar-power capacity.

Read the full article here, and see our recent report “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant” for more information and implications for U.S. federal policy.