Renewable electricity sources vital for China

Despite its smog-shrouded cities, or perhaps because of them, China generates more electricity from renewable sources than any other country - 42,000MW.

That is nearly five times as much New Zealand's entire electricity generating capacity in all forms.

In addition, 30 million Chinese households, nearly 10 per cent of the total, have solar hot water systems, says Dr Eric Martinot, an American expert in renewables now at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

That's 80 million square metres of collectors.

And the target is to increase that to 300 million sq m by 2020.

Martinot, in Wellington for an energy conference yesterday, said China also manufactured 200MW of solar photovoltaic cells last year, more than the United States, though almost all of that was for export.

China's target is to have 60,000MW or 10 per cent of its electric power capacity from renewables by 2010. It aims to provide 10 per cent of its primary energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Given its size and economic growth rates, it is the other 90 per cent, overwhelmingly derived from burning fossil fuels, that concerns climate scientists.

But Martinot said climate change did not figure much in China's thinking.

"China's response, basically, to people who tell it it should be worried about climate change and developing technologies like carbon capture and storage is that it has improved the efficiency of its energy use so much during the past 20 years that, if it had not, it would be using three times as much energy today as it does."

That improvement in energy efficiency and energy use per unit of GDP was an amazing success story and China was planning do it again over the next 20 years.

The Chinese were investing in "clean coal" technology like gasifying coal before using it for electricity generation in order to increase the proportion of the energy content of the coal tuned into electricity to 50 per cent from 35 per cent now.

"But they are not doing it from a climate change perspective so much as a way to use their coal reserves more efficiently and reduce local air pollution."