BEIJING — U.S. leaders want China’s clean energy boom to drive technology exports and are sending a sales mission to Beijing this week. But Beijing wants to create its own suppliers of wind, solar and other equipment and is limiting access to its market, setting up a new trade clash with Washington and Europe.
China passed the United States last year as the biggest clean power market, stoking hopes for Western sales of wind turbines, solar cells and other gear. But U.S. and European companies find that while Beijing welcomes foreign technology, it wants manufacturing done here and know-how shared with local partners. In the wind industry, foreign suppliers with factories in China say they are shut out of major projects.
“China is very keen on being able to depend on themselves,” said Frank Haugwitz, a renewable energy consultant in Beijing.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Washington’s former governor, says clean energy sales to China can help fulfill President Barack Obama’s pledge to double U.S. exports over the next five years and create 2 million jobs. Locke is leading a group of 24 American suppliers to Beijing and Shanghai this week to drum up business.
“There is an incredible opportunity for companies all around the world to help China meet its energy goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, becoming more energy efficient,” Locke said in Hong Kong over the weekend at the start of the trade mission.
“China, given the incredible challenges that it has, should be, in my view, taking the best technology from wherever — whether it’s China, the United States, Europe, Japan or anywhere else,” he said. “Of course, we believe that in many areas, the United States is the world’s leader in some of this technology.”
But Chinese leaders want clean energy to be one of a series of emerging industries with their companies playing a leading global role. They are using regulations to ensure the bulk of Chinese sales go to local producers.
“There is a clash there that I think is going to become more and more prominent unless both sides come to some agreement,” said Jim McGregor of APCO Worldwide Inc., a consulting firm, and a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
The biggest impact of China’s industrial curbs has been in wind. Beijing has declared it a strategic industry and wants to build local turbine producers such as Goldwind Science &Technology Ltd. and Sinovel Wind Co. into global players. Chinese companies also get grants and tax breaks to develop solar, biomass, fuel cell and other technology.
The foreign share of China’s wind turbine market plunged from 70 percent in 2005 to 12 percent last year, according to the European Union Chamber of Commerce’s Renewable Energy Working Group. The chamber complains that Chinese authorities help local companies by basing purchases on upfront prices and ignoring a project’s lifetime cost, where more durable foreign equipment wins.
Beijing has aggressive plans to promote renewable energy to curb pollution and reliance on imported oil and gas, which communist leaders see as a strategic weakness.
A 2005 government plan called for at least 15 percent of China’s power to come from wind, solar and hydropower by 2020.
“China is emerging as the world’s clean energy powerhouse,” said the Pew report.
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