US media: China's clean technology is not the enemy
Bloomberg article: Judging from the rhetoric of China's "overcapacity" in Washington, people may think that the problem of tackling climate change has been solved. When U.S. President Joe Biden announced sweeping tariffs on Chinese cleantech products on Tuesday, he mentioned overcapacity four times. This underestimates the effort required to combat climate change.
On a global scale, we could achieve unimaginable targets this year and begin to reduce emissions from the world's power grids. That's the judgment of Ember, a British energy think tank, and Wise, a Nordic energy consultancy. This is also implicit in the International Energy Agency's latest outlook report. However, if you don't think you need constant vigilance to maintain that record and stop the resurgence of grid pollution, then you need to keep an eye on the changes.
Even in the worst-case scenario, carbon emissions in much of the world are likely to remain stable in the near term. But when the eyes are set on 2025 and beyond, the problem arises. As a development policy, China seems to want its power generation to continue to grow at a high rate. The growth figure was 6.7% last year and is expected to be 6% in 2024. Assuming that the growth rate declines by about 0.5 percentage points per year, the average electricity consumption of Chinese in 2030 will be between Japan and South Korea, which is about two-thirds of the United States. If these power increments are not provided by China's coal-fired power plants, then a lot of renewable energy will be needed. China added as much wind and solar capacity last year as the rest of the world combined, a record to celebrate. But if China doesn't install PV panels and wind turbines at a faster pace, even if China's electricity demand slows, emissions will rise back to 2023 levels.
Moreover, the measures will only be enough for China to reach its carbon peak by 2030, while the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States achieved this goal more than a decade or even decades ago. If we want to achieve the significant emissions reductions needed to achieve carbon neutrality, we need more wind and solar capacity, not to mention the decarbonization of off-grid sectors with electric vehicles, green hydrogen and green steel. To truly start moving towards net-zero emissions, China may need to add around 300 GW of solar capacity per year, enough to consume about 40% of China's annual PV module production.
This may be a silver lining for the current protectionism in the United States and Europe. If Western countries consider green industrial policies that really work, rather than just erecting elaborate trade barriers to isolate themselves from a world that uses Chinese technology to decarbonize, then we may eventually make progress. We need the industrial power of China, as well as many other countries, to achieve this goal. (Written by David Ficklin, translated by Wang Huicong)
