China's Multi-Billion Dollar Renewable Energy Program Set for Launch Soon

March 7th, 2010 by Zachary Shahan

China is reportedly planning to produce 15% of its electricity from low-carbon technology by 2020, and to reduce it’s carbon intensity by 40-45% from the 2005 level.

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Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, told the government-owned newspaper China Daily this last week that a national program consisting of billions of dollars of investment in wind, solar and nuclear power would be launched sometime soon.

Zhang said that this program will stimulate fast and dramatic action in the renewable energy sector over the next five years.

“Power projects take a long time to get up and running, and we are basically allowed five years to complete them although it is a 10-year programme,” he told the paper. “Otherwise, the facilities cannot be put into use by 2020.”

Beyond this major plus for renewable energy and renewable energy investors in China, China’s top legislature — the National People’s Congress — also recently changed its renewable energy law to require that power grid companies buy 100% of the electricity produced from renewable energy generators.

A key to making use of these renewable energy sources is a smarter grid, of course. Noticing the great advancement of renewable energy and smart grids in China, IBM just recently announced the opening of a new $40 million “Energy & Utilities Solutions Lab” in Beijing.

Brad Gammons, vice president of IBM’s Global Energy & Utilities Industry, said that their interest in the Chinese market is due to that fact that China is “pursuing smart grids as aggressively or more aggressively than any other country in the world right now.”

As I’ve discussed previously on CleanTechnica, Obama is aware that “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy,” but he is not the sole person in charge of bringing the US to the top (he needs some help from the media and Congress, at least) and China seems to be off to a quick lead with some very big plans for the coming years.

via BusinessGreen, China Daily & Reuters

Image Credit: J. YANG via flickr under a CC license









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