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Ballard’s vision highlights the large scale of China’s urban renewal program. In its latest five-year development plan, the Chinese government identifies energy savings and new-energy vehicles as industries targeted for growth.

Part of the reason, Asia experts say, is that China is planning an intensive urbanization drive — increasing the urban population in the country from 55 per cent last year to 60 per cent by 2020. Without including sustainable measures, creating such large “super urban clusters” would be impossible.

“That’s 100 million people resettling in the next five years to large urban centres,” said Yves Tiberghien, director of UBC’s Institute of Asian Research.

“You could see that, in Beijing in the 90s, they were going largely with cars, so they built all those massive ring-road highways. But since about 2005, the focus has really gone to subways massively; in Beijing, they are adding a new line almost every year. They are trying to do this type of thinking across all aspects of urban life.”

Guy McAree, director of investor relations at Ballard, has said the company is well aware of this shift. The $17-million deal announced last year to provide 300 fuel-cell buses to the Foshan-Yunfu area is a reflection of the company’s pivot to meet what they see as market with enormous growth potential.

“The Chinese are seeing tremendous growth in their urban population, so they have very large cities that are getting even larger,” McAree said. “They have problems with pollution, as we all know. So they are looking ways to start addressing that in a significant, high-impact kind of way.”