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China Is Winning Global Race To Make Clean Energy
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world's largest maker of wind turbines, has leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels, and is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants. These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China."
These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China."
You missed the most important point in the source article:
and is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
These aren't "renewable" technologies, nor do they need to be. What they are, though, are the only realistic way of producing enough energy to power our society going forward.
The new generation of nuclear reactors is completely safe, and disposing of the waste products is a completely solvable problem.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
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Maybe not. China has all the money to invest in research, and they're copying the "brain drain" that made the US pre-eminent in research by making a very cushy life for people that head to China to perform research.
What could so very easily happen is that China leverages its huge resources, targets them at research into energy, and gets "first past the post" on fusion. Then patents it. As the US has been very into all its legalities and IP agreements on a worldwide basis, it'd find that the only way to obtain Fusion would be to contract the Chinese companies to do the work. Or license it at a huge fee.
I'm an American and a few years ago, I went to Vietnam to visit with family (someone married Vietnamese in the family). While I was there, I saw something really interesting in terms of a cultural bias. The Vietnamese have a very strong tendency to favor cooperation over competition. That's the duopoly. The last I heard, their economy was growing at 8% a year.
The Japanese also demonstrated this with their desire to build one of the fastest, if not *the* fastest internet infrastructures in the world. The goal became a matter of national pride more than how a few executives could figure out how to line their pockets and still deliver lousy service while derailing every other effort to improve matters for consumers.
The Vietnamese and the Japanese are essentially descendants of the Chinese so they would share the same cultural value of favoring cooperation over competition. They have demonstrated this value over and over again with their resilience through wars, economic strife and growing pains.
In America, the profit motive seems to have priority over all other concerns in business. The profit motive overrules the desire to cooperate hands down, every time, at the firm level, and often within the firm. This behavior stems primarily from the desire to avoid shareholder lawsuits over share value in publicly held companies. Another motivating factor, in my opinion, is that executives who have so much money that they never have to work again start to see economics as a game of monopoly. Instead of being satisfied, they strive to get more and more. The result is that there is less and less for the rest of us to earn. Which brings "the rest of us" to the point that we can't even buy the stuff we make here, and we're getting to the point where we can't even buy the stuff "the captains of industry" want us to import from China.
Competition is not a sin. It's a part of life. But competition taken to it's logical conclusion is the decline of America. Until we get it that we're a team together and that there are bigger problems to solve than how to dominate a market, we're going to face a serious decline in our standard of living relative to other nations.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Our hatred of these projects is a recent thing too. The Hoover Dam wasn't met with this kind of derision. The Apollo Program wasn't met with this kind of derision (not until its last years, when the Norquist cancer started to metastasize).
As for China --- it's an autocratic capitalist systems. Of course autocracies are more efficient than democracies. The problem is that they tend not to stay that way. Give China a generation or two, and assuming it doesn't transition to democracy in the meantime, we'll see a set of weak, ineffectual leaders who feel entitled to use their positions for personal gain.
Actually, mechanical failure has been the biggest problem with wind turbines. The only thing that has solved that problem is a high degree of specialty precision engineering and precision manufacturing.
I'll not be buying any wind turbines from China soon, thanks very much.
That's not exactly the whole story.
The alarm the NYT is trying to raise (I think) is that we're paying China to manufacture the few big "clean energy" installations we're making. It's not that they won't buy from us in the future, it's that we're not even buying from us right now. Just like computer parts *could* be built anywhere, but we end up buying from Taiwan, Korea and Japan, we end up buying energy equipment (right now) from China, Spain and Germany.
When we spend $100 million on a new wind farm, why does $80 million of that go overseas for high-tech design and manufacturing? It's stupid.
When we spend $100 million on a new wind farm, why does $80 million of that go overseas for high-tech design and manufacturing?
Because US subsidies go into things like bio-ethanol and fossil fuels so there's nothing left to incentivize alternative energy?
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