China's Contradiction: World's Biggest Clean Energy Producer And Biggest Polluter? | Insight

China has ambitions to be a global technology leader in this two-part special I travel across the country to understand how it is leading in two key areas: artificial intelligence. China has a great economy of scale. The case for AI technology users is huge and renewable

energy

in this episode I explore China's amazing

clean

energy

industry. is on track to have more than doubled Europe's solar and wind capacity by 20125. China's determination to move towards Nero is the strongest in the

world

, but history is full of

contradiction

s because China is also the

world

's most polluting coal . Coal-fired power plants remain the lowest-cost energy option in China today.

What is the true picture of China's Green Revolution? Should we worry about its dominance? I started my journey here on the edge of the GOI Desert in China. I am in the city of Tun Hang, one of the oldest cities in western China, about 2200 km from Beijing. I see this lonely wall behind me. This is human. An important landmark in Kwang City. It was built more than 2,000 years ago through it. Merchants. Today I carried the precious Jade along the Silk Road, this lonely wall is all that remains of the human Guan bearing silent testimony to its past glories now, if only the walls could speak, what stories will it tell me this lonely wall in the middle of the GOI desert, but isn't it?

To say that the best days of tun hang are behind us. In fact, I've come to this ancient city to see something so modern and cutting-edge that it seems straight out of a science fiction movie. Wow, seeing it up close is much more massive than I imagined. I am standing in front of the Dun Hang Molten Salt Solar Thermal Power Plant, also known as the Super Mirror Power Plant. It can generate 100 megaw of electricity, making it the largest of its kind in China. It extends far into the horizon and the light bouncing off the mirrors is almost blinding, it's really reflective, to tell me how it works is Leo Fug, general manager of the plant. operated by Shang Beijing resource saving company under a government plan to reduce the cost of electricity, construction took only 2 years, from 2016 to 2018, is located on about 7.8 square kilometers in the arid GOI desert, With more than a thousand soccer fields, the desert landscape is ideal. plant location no shortage of direct sunlight and very little cloud cover only about 21 days of rain yes oh so this solar thermal power plant is emblematic of

china

's investment in going green in 2012 energy investments

clean

amounted to about 65 billion dollars.

Ten years later, in the United States, this figure skyrocketed to $550 billion. China is now home to around 4,300 wind farms, either in operation or under construction, last year generating 1 and a half times the wind power of all of Europe, the second largest wind generation market. As for the solar well, in April 2023, China's solar energy production reached 430 gaw, making it the largest solar energy

producer

in the world, it is triple that of the United States and number two with 142 Gaw. At the beginning of my journey, I had met Dr. Majin in Beijing. Dr. Ma was the chief economist of the Chinese Central Bank, the People's Bank of China or PBOC, where he helped draft China's first green finance policy framework.

Today he is the president of the Institute of Finance and Sustainability. I wanted to understand why China decided to invest so much in Renewable Energy 10 years ago, we had a big fight over air pollution and if you were here in 2013, you would probably have to wear masks, not because of Co, because of socks and KN, the PM 2.5 . I proposed that we needed to establish a green zone. Financial system within China so we can deal with the air pollution problem, why? Because dealing with pollution requires a lot of money. About 4 trillion R&B is needed every year, not only air pollution but all kinds of pollution problems, including air pollution, water pollution, land pollution.

So from the government's perspective, because they generate environmental and climate benefits, these are externalities that the government should care about. The private sector has its limitation in forecasting and if you do not help them, they do not grow, they will probably die in the first moment. In a couple of years you can't spend enough money, so help them in the first few years to gain competitiveness to expand the market and reduce costs. I think in all of these areas we have success stories in terms of helping them a little bit on renewable energy. We helped them a little bit with electric vehicles, we helped them a little bit with batteries and now they don't need subsidies anymore because they are profitable enough, but in the beginning clean energy was practically unknown to Chinese consumers.

The demand had to come from somewhere else. When we look at the history of solar panel production in China, it is very interesting to note that in the beginning there was no domestic market, it was mainly European demand that triggered China's investment in the entire renewable energy sector and due to the lower cost in China, with labor cost and opix cost, they could become profitable quickly and raise funds for rapid factory expansion. ANS are the undisputed world champion today, around 80% of all solar cells made in the world are made in China, so While Dr. M's initial goal was to reduce air pollution, the Green energy push in China was motivated by both economic and environmental reasons.

The political system in China still puts economic growth before everything else, including the environment, so this Green Energy Revolution serves this very well. The purpose of growing the economy is correct and it also creates millions of jobs, so it is a win-win for everyone. Additionally, people are reaping the economic rewards of the clean energy transition by having a solar plant on their doorstep, electricity generated by the Shang Dun weapon. The Hang solar plant is sold to locals at 1.15 yan per kilowatt. Additionally, companies running solar plants are helping local villagers install private solar panels. I met uu, whose family owns a cotton and sheep farm in Un nyang district, they recently installed solar panels. the roof of The Farmhouse the electricity generator is connected to the grid while the family can use the energy for free the electric companies install the solar panels on the roofs of the houses while giving them rental income for the use of the roofs and what is the cost After the installation of solar panels, there are around 50 families in this farming village, not all the farmhouses have installed solar panels at this time, but there are more who are warming up to the idea of ​​doing so, but Something strange is happening in China, even when impressive buildings are being built. clean energy projects such as the Tunang solar plant.

More coal plants are also being built than ever. Why I traveled across China to understand the country's green energy revolution. In Beijing I met with Professor Heri Chang, one of China's leading experts on energy transition. with me how the country got the rural population to support clean technology, as this is part of the poverty alleviation solar energy program announced in 2014, homeowners rent their roofs and land to solar companies, in turn, the electricity generated It is sold to the network at a profit. shared with homeowners China's National Energy Administration says around 400 million people will benefit from poverty-relieving solar energy program by 2020.

Increased solar capacity by 26 gaw, much more than the initial 10 gaw . Objective following the teacher's example. I wanted to see one of those projects. for me and I headed to the province of Sean and I'm heading to a town called and I can already see signs of the transition to clean energy that is happening here and this is where I found a solar cooperative. Madam Lee, 78, lives in Yunman Young Village, retired. now, but earns income from adopting solar panels on its rooftop, but despite the success of such programs, China's clean energy story has a glaring

contradiction

: China may produce the cleanest energy, but it is also the largest

polluter

of the world;

It is responsible for about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions largely because of this last year, about 60% of China's electricity is generated by coal and China is building more coal plants than any other country. Last year it approved the equivalent of two new coal plants a week. remain the lowest cost energy option in China today, it wants to grow the economy by several percent each year, so if its energy system is dominated by coal and continues to increase, its emissions will grow. China has huge coal reserves that it doesn't want. To import energy from other countries, it wants to use as much local coal as possible.

The right local resources and that's where coal is so attractive. China has no good heating alternative besides a coal-fired plant because clean energy generation is mostly intermittent. Continuous sunlight or continuous wind is necessary to generate sufficient supply. If you build one more power plant, using solar or wind power, you almost have to build a separate Co power plant to stabilize the power supply. Power plants in many areas of China are simply a necessity, it is difficult to replace them for these reasons, coal reached record levels this year and is expected to continue growing until 2026, economic growth dominates everything, all thought and the environment occupy the second place.

Right, China is still too focused on itself and therefore I don't think it is ready to serve as a global model in the field of sustainability. The rate of coal expansion was so alarming that the Chinese government gave itself a rare rebuke in 2021. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment's inspection team criticized the national administration for failing to control the coal boom despite that the Chinese are optimistic about reducing carbon emissions. We have the largest manufacturing industry in the world and we produce for the rest of the world. uh, you know, the energy composition from now on depends largely on coal and therefore it is a situation in transition, and China's determination to move towards naso is stronger in the world because from the moment in that China reached carbon penetration, which is, I guess. a little before 2030 until the time when China reaches carbon neutrality, that is, 2060, it is only 30 years, while in Europe it takes 60 years, because they were urinating, I guess you know, 20 years ago and they will reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

How quickly China can wean itself off coal will depend on one thing: cost, and to see how China can achieve this cost: production. Next I will travel to the heart of one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the world. China is the undisputed leader in solar energy. China's strategy. It is now trying to occupy the largest possible share of the global market and one strategy it has adopted is to expand the economy of scale. There were various estimates on how much China had spent on this revolution, usually the figure would be in the range between 100 billion and 2,200 billion, but that is a fairly limited estimate.

We also have to consider cheap loans from the banking sector and sometimes free subsidies from all levels of government, considering that the figure could be several times higher. the amount I mentioned from Tunang, the westernmost Chinese city on the ancient Silk Road, I am heading to Canan in central China, the ancient capital and starting point of the ancient trade route, according to the National Energy Laboratory Renewable based in the United States, six of every The world's top seven solar manufacturers are Chinese and here inan ranks fourth on this list. Longi green energy technology with revenue of 129 billion Rening P or about 17 billion US.

Listed manufacturer exporting to 150 countries in 2022? Longi added another feather to his cap the company set a record for silicon cell efficiency measures how much energy from the sun is converted into electricity by solar cells it was the first time a Chinese company has taken the title higher cell efficiency means the panel can produce more electricity Bringing Down the cost per vat in other parts of Canan I met with Tony Sier, a renewable energy campaigner with the government firmly behind the green push Tony has seen money flowing into the sector, people see that there is a very positive or more confirmed political commitment on this, so uh, this, I think encouraged investors to join thisgame in the last 3 years, we have more than 20, 10 billion investment funds established especially for this carbon neutrality.

Management Tony is the founder and director of Blu Tech clean air Alliance or BCAA in China. is a non-governmental organization that helps identify and incubate promising clean energy startups from around the world. BCAA is working with startups in several cutting-edge clean energy fields, including carbon capture and nuclear fusion. China now leads the world in terms of the number of investigations. Articles published in clean technology The country's privileged position has also given the industry a certain prestige that suddenly creates a situation in which China offers internationally attractive salaries and working conditions, such as research funds, to anyone in the planet in a sense and of course there are many Let's clean up China researchers who left China to do their PhD and training and many of them are now returning to China to work on this Green and Green Energy Revolution, the latest unicorns in China they are mostly along the new energy supply chain and if you look at last year's figure. 35 companies are considered emerging unicorns and are included in the Forbes ranking.

Most of them are in the battery industry and many of those companies have received state funding. However, betting on clean energy has risks. In the US, for example, there are fears that the transition to clean energy will eliminate jobs in the fossil fuel industry. This also worried the Chinese at first. We had a lot of debate 10 years ago. A view that if you go too green, you're not helping with rising poverty because a lot of the polluting companies are creating jobs well and you close them down, then they'll lose jobs. The process of carbon neutrality should create more jobs, for example, you.

To install, you know, rooftop solar, you need a lot of people and so we were actually saying that building retrofit is a big creator of new jobs in the next 30 to 40 years because every building is will become zero for a long time, for example, it hires around 60,000 people, many of these jobs did not exist before the Green Revolution, although the picture is more nuanced, it is not true that everyone in the dirty industry, that is, the industries that were more or less involved in fossil fuels, can easily transition to green industries: there are some estimates from Chinese universities so far, only about 1% of workers who used to work in dirty jobs have successfully transitioned to a green work, most workers have to transition to other less skilled jobs. or other types of dirty jobs, it is a question of how to move people from the sector that is losing jobs to the sector where you need work and that friction needs to be addressed to some extent by the government to provide training and retraining, and also companies and However, the financial sector should play a role at a macro level China's commitment to green has paid off only in the first half of 2023 China exported 114 gaw of solar panel capacity on track to eclipse the record of 2022, which is equivalent to the installed solar capacity of the All of us in 113, but this dominance has worried some countries since 2012.

Europe and the US began to implement an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy program against China, as a result, there are more measures restrictive measures against China's exports and US-China trade. The war escalated last August when President Joe Biden banned the export of advanced chips to China. The EU also plans to ban Chinese solar panels, claiming they were made with forced sang labor. Then, earlier this year, Beijing responded and announced that it is considering a ban. In key solar technologies, China controls 75% of the manufacturing process for assembling solar cells and modules, as well as 85% of solar cell production. China also dominates 97% of solar wafer production and 79% of polysilicon production, according to an international study. 2022 energy agency report could affect solar supply chain when it comes to competition between China and the US, technological decoupling in the high-tech sector is quite real, there is real competition over who will be the owner or leader. transformative technology in the future, so now China feels it has to show its strength and if you do that to me, I do this to you, but I really hope it doesn't lead to this, there would be no winners in such a green environment.

There is more when former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. China broke off climate talks amid protests, but this July US climate envoy John Kerry visited Beijing, a long-awaited trip to restart climate negotiations. John Car's visit to Beijing is certainly a gesture to demonstrate that the United States is willing to continue communication and collaboration with China on the climate change front, but in terms of the details of the plan, it is somewhat lacking, it remains being a positive sign for China because that door is not completely closed and uh uh, since climate change is one of the few common goals between China and us and also, most of the green technology is actually helping consumers in Instead of helping the defense, why not collaborate and a few months later another?

Breakthrough at the Apec meeting in November, Presidents Biden and Cing Ping attempted to repair their fractured relationship. The two leaders agreed to renew the decades-old science and technology agreement, allowing for R&D cooperation between the two superpowers, a move Tony welcomes internationally, I believe. Now climate change is universal, it is everywhere, we cannot find a place where we can have common ground. I think it is really a failure of this human civilization in China, as with many things the push for green energy revolution is shot down by the central government, but what do common people think about this?

I've been traveling around China to learn about the country's monumental ecological leap and on my last day I went to the Park View Green fouy shopping center in Beijing, but it's not for the last minute. shopping you see this shopping center as its name indicates it is green the open space here it does not have air conditioning it is natural air only in the commercial space there is actually air can you explain to me how that works for proper regulation? The other point I noticed is that there is a lot of natural light here, so that's part of its design.

Yes, original for the Park View green complex. It is the first environmentally sustainable building in Beijing. When it was built in 2010, it was designed to reduce energy consumption by 40% compared to average standards at the time, saving 5,000 tonnes. of carbon each year eventually and now, when it comes to new buildings and construction projects, China has implemented strict guidelines and considerations, for example, it is mandatory for all new buildings constructed from 2022 to install solar systems. Carbon emissions from new buildings must be 40%. below 2016 standards, meaning no more than 7kg of carbon per square meter. The push forward is real for much of the government, a local government, this is part of their evaluation when it comes to economic achievements, so they have spent a huge amount of money to pressure companies to adopt clean label and also to reduce the use of coal and other polluting technologies.

Currently, the mild weather outside keeps the mall's ambient temperature at a comfortable 22°, but just before we came, China, the country, experienced one of the hottest summers ever recorded and parts of it were inundated by disastrous floods. Many experts believe that these erratic weather patterns are related to our changing climate and according to a European Investment Bank survey, 73% of Chinese believe that climate change is a major threat to society compared to 47% and 39% of their European and American counterparts, so the impetus for China's green push is both political and economic. Political leaders are well aware that pollution in large cities or in some regions can cause dissatisfaction. and even mass protests, so I think they like this idea of ​​driving the green energy revolution and therefore also fighting local pollution in China, so the journey started with air pollution, but the approach has been gradually changing over the last 10 years.

We are currently seeing a new initiative in carbon-intensive sectors to decarbonize, such as in the steel sector, cement, petrochemicals, paper, textiles, in all these areas they require many technologies. I spent 2 weeks traveling around China to understand the country's green energy revolution, which are conditions and concerns, but in talking to different people here I found consensus in one area: virtually everyone I have met, young and old, is aware of the climate change. Hello, a feeling that I found when I met with a group of students from the University of Tingua, how important the issue of climate is. change for you because climate change is something that is taught in schools in China, what do you do in your daily life to reduce carbon emissions?

Well, our climate future is inexorably linked to China, it is the world's largest

producer

of clean energy and its largest emitter of greenhouse gases and regardless of whether its reasons are political, economic or environmental, China will remain the dominant force in energy renewables and, while I understand the concerns about the China Monopoly, if we ultimately take away the policy, it can only be a net positive if there is more clean energy production for all of Humanity