China seems to be winning on clean energy....

Today's post: Wednesday, 12-15-2010

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both. Kuwaiti scientists recently predicted peak oil in 2014 – just a bit over 3 years from now.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Today’s post: China seems to be winning on clean energy

In last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday, December 12, 2010), the Bottom Line column by Andrew S. Ross was titled:

“China has national plan for getting greener.”

He reported in part on the conference "Scaling Green Finance in China and the U.S.," put on by the Asia Society at PG&E's headquarters in San Francisco the previous Wednesday.

Main points:

China’s government has a national plan to increase clean energy in several ways. But the government of the United States does not yet have such a clear and focused plan.

One speaker said that China is beginning to outdo the United States on renewables, in harnessing wind and solar , particularly in solar panel production.

Ross reports the idea from this conference that unless the United States begins carbon pricing, with a carbon tax or cap-and-trade (which California is about to try), it will keep falling farther behind on clean energy.

The good news is that many US CEO’s are willing to compete and will likely do more when carbon pricing does show up.

For more clean energy China already has a 5 year plan to generate 15% of China's electricity come from renewable sources by 2020 and will directly invest $1.5 trillion in making this happen. They also plan to build more third- and fourth-generation nuclear power plants.

And, as of last month, China has an "Energy Efficiency Resource Standard" which will go into effect nationwide in January.

It will require China's electricity industry to both reduce energy and set up programs for factories, other businesses and homes to become more energy efficient.

Energy efficiency saves money and reduces emissions. It also allows economic growth with far less need for new electricity generation. It’s also potentially far faster to put into place than building more renewable energy sources of electricity and other energy.

As Elton Sherwin explains in his superb but mistitled book, Addicted to Energy, this can be done with massive and positive effects throughout the US economy. Further this can be done using already available and developed technology. His book literally lists dozens of ways policies by the US government and state governments can cause these ways to increase efficiency to be put into use.

For three reasons, I think his work will be used soon.

1. Since we need to increase economic growth while using less fossil fuels, particularly oil, and removing CO2 and air pollution where fossil fuels are still used, electricity from burning carbon based fossil fuels will inevitably get more expensive even without new government charges on carbon use. And, those are likely too at some point.

2. If China does do an effective job of this, far more pressure will be brought on governments at all levels in the United States to keep up.

3. His work will be used because energy efficiency literally saves money for the end user and because that market will drive new businesses and old businesses to produce more and more products that work and which are much more energy efficient.

The bad news for China is that it depends far too heavily on coal and oil and has the most polluted cities in the world as they have not yet begun to adequately capture air pollutants where these are burned to generate electricity.

Their planned and expected economic growth will make changing this on such a large scale quite challenging.

This heavy and massive use of fossil fuels also is beginning to generate the most CO2 released in the world, let alone if they add more yet.

The good news, as we posted last week about Skyonic, is that there is now a way to remove most of the pollutants and CO2 from burning fossil fuels in one step.

But whether or not China, which has been doing things on the cheap to gain market share with lower production prices will do this pollution and CO2 removal on their own or respond well to world wide pressure and do so is not yet clear.

The United States and China are world’s two biggest energy users and greenhouse gas releasers in the world

So it’s at least possible that if the United States uses this technology and others to stop releasing most of their air pollution and CO2 from fossil fuel use and begins to use less fossil fuels, that example and the products and services developed by companies that do this in the United States may cause China to do the same.

Based on their hard work to minimize the air pollution for the last Olympics, China showed that they are not that happy with having their cities covered with bad air pollution either. So I’m moderately optimistic they will do this eventually.

The ideal would be:

For the United States to do as well or better than China on building more much renewable electricity generation and to use far less oil and somewhat less coal plus doing as well or better than China at increasing our energy efficiency in every part of our economy;

&

For China to begin to do dramatically more to remove air pollutants and CO 2 from plants that burn oil or coal throughout China.

This certainly will not happen as fast as we need for it to. But I do think it has a good shot at happening eventually.