Breakthrough

Written by Breakthrough Generation fellow Zach Arnold

Over at the Environment and Energy blog, Bradford Plumer points the way to a great Guardian article on the Chinese wind boom. Wind installation there has been surpassing projections for some time, blowing through 6 GW earlier this year, and by year’s end China should lead the world in capacity. By 2010, one wind farm will add 3.8 GW - i.e., one third of total current US capacity - in its first phase of expansion. In other words, T. Boone Pickens has nothing on Chinese entrepreneurs (does anyone?).

As far as I can tell, there are three key reasons behind this massive expansion:

1) Wind is already at least somewhat economically competitive with coal, even in China. Plumer thinks it could be at parity by 2015, in fact.

2) Strong government deployment incentives, infrastructure development, and deployment-friendly regulation have driven expansion. Worldwatch has a nice roundup of the steps the national government has taken in this regard.

3) Wind development seems to fit in the mold of what China excels in these days - building huge things really fast. In this capacity, building wind turbines is very different from other climate-friendly projects, like efficiency retrofits (which would be particularly helpful in China’s landscape of shoddy buildings and dirty coal plants). The latter fixes rely on government intervention, enforcement, and oversight, which, as Plumer notes in a New Republic article, are basically pipe dreams when it comes to China: “The central government has essentially lost the ability to control its provinces and regulate its markets.” (Fun fact: Despite clean water laws, 77% of Chinese sewage is left untreated. Something to keep in mind next time you’re bathing in Beijing…)

However, building huge things - in this case, wind turbines - really fast can only do so much. The wind rush has created a booming new domestic industry, churning out turbines and capturing more and more market share from established Western producers, and has added a big chunk of renewable production to the Chinese grid - a success story in the works, if there ever was one. Sadly, though, this success is occurring amidst a larger crisis. China’s factories and upwardly mobile population need a lot more energy than even the most feverish expansion of wind power can satisfy, and even as turbines spring up from Xinjiang to Jiangsu, two coal plants are going online each week.

Optimistic estimates indicate that wind could supply 10% of Chinese electricity by 2020 - nothing to sniff at, but nowhere near the sort of displacement of coal that’s needed to make a dent in emissions. Wind seems well on its way to ubiquity; but how can we lay the groundwork for a boom in solar, wind, geothermal, efficiency, cogeneration, and more? Considering that China’s not about to cap CO2 (let alone enforce such a cap) and we don’t have much control over Beijing’s subsidy structures, there’s really only one option - bring more price-competitive clean technologies into the global marketplace (surprise!), and put policies in place to facilitate their diffusion into China and elsewhere. So even as we debate caps on our own emissions, we Western activists would do well to keep the China price in mind.