Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Asia Pushes Hard for Clean Energy

Turbines in China are expected to produce nearly two and a half times the entire power generating capacity of Britain by 2020, but many wind farms are too far from areas that need the energy most.Credit...Carlos Barria/Reuters

LONDON — Even as China’s economy begins to cool, its hunger for energy is still climbing.

So also is its capacity to generate power from multiple sources, ranging from coal and nuclear to wind, solar and hydroelectric.

Those trends look similar across Asia, where soaring energy needs are outpacing the expansion of climate-friendly renewable power.

More than $250 billion a year is expected to be poured into the construction of renewable energy production in Asia, representing two-thirds of the region’s total power investment, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, an analysis and consulting firm. By 2030, the firm projects that carbon-free sources will provide a third of the region’s electricity, with solar the biggest contributor.

Yet the use of fossil fuels like coal and oil is growing too, meaning Asia’s emissions of climate-warming gases are also on an upward trend.

“It is a story about growth,” said Justin Wu, lead Asia analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Asia, he said, “is going to add a lot more power of all kinds.”

China is the region’s energy behemoth, accounting for almost half of global coal use while also leading the world in its installation of solar, wind and other renewable technologies.

Its political leaders take clean energy seriously, and they are driving a huge expansion, with China’s wind turbines alone expected to produce nearly two and a half times the entire power generating capacity of Britain by 2020, said Xin Li, a fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

That commitment was reflected in the landmark climate deal announced during President Obama’s visit this month. President Xi Jinping promised China would get 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil fuel sources by 2030, and said its carbon emissions would peak by that year. Experts say China was probably on track toward those goals anyway, but making them explicit is significant, and may help jolt international negotiations.

Last year, for the first time, the amount of newly completed zero-carbon-emission energy sources in China exceeded the new coal capacity that was built, said Michal Meidan, an associate fellow at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London.

Mr. Wu, of Bloomberg New Energy, said, “I’ve heard people say a new coal plant gets built every week” in China. “That’s probably still true. But for every coal plant that’s built, a lot more solar and wind are built as well, and a lot of old coal plants are probably shutting down, the less efficient ones.”

Yet, even if it is gradually declining as a percentage of the energy mix, coal use in China remains huge, and annual usage is likely to keep growing for two decades, said Linda Doman, a senior international energy analyst at the United States Energy Information Administration. The agency’s projections do not take the U.S.-China announcement into account, but indicated in any case that China’s steepest coal and carbon increases would come before 2030.

Coal accounted for 69 percent of China’s energy use in 2010. That share is projected to fall to 55 percent in 2040, but it is still expected to be five times bigger than the total for renewable energy, Ms. Doman said. She noted, though, that the agency’s projections do not include small-scale renewable sources unconnected to the grid, a category that is significant in some places.

Image
Last year, for the first time, the number of newly completed zero-carbon-emission energy sources in China exceeded the new coal capacity that was built. But analysts note that the scale of coal use in China and other Asian nations remains vast and continues to grow.Credit...Sheng Li/Reuters

“We’re still talking about 800 million tons of coal; that’s a lot of coal capacity,” said Ms. Meidan, of Chatham House. “All over the world, people have invested in mines, assuming that China will continue to consume coal.”

Oil use is also increasing, by about 2.5 percent a year, Ms. Doman said.

The cooling of the Chinese economy, from double to single digit growth, and a shift in consumption away from energy-intensive sectors like infrastructure and manufacturing for exports, have slowed the growth of its hunger for coal. Beijing worries, too, about the security of its energy supplies. While China is a big coal producer, it still imports a great deal. The same is true in gas and oil.

These and other factors are driving China’s renewables push. But China’s push for more renewable energy has not always been smooth.

Politicians have sometimes responded to pollution worries by moving sooty coal-fired plants away from big cities rather than replacing them with cleaner energy. Poor planning and inadequate transmission lines, meanwhile, have left many large wind and solar farms without the connections necessary to send the energy they generate to the places where it is most needed.

“I am not really sure if these different plans are coordinated or consistent or even coherent,” and a lot of power ends up unused, Mr. Li said.

Officials are addressing the issue, and the amount of wasted power has begun to decline, Mr. Li said. But, “I still haven’t seen anything like the European countries are doing, making some projections of which area needs how much electricity and what sort of links can be built between regions,” he said.

In India, energy is high on the agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government hopes to improve the country’s patchy provision of electricity and expand access for the 300 million people who lack power. That is likely to cost $750 billion in the coming decade, Mr. Wu said. Coal provides the overwhelming majority of India’s energy.

Mr. Modi campaigned in part on his track record of overhauling the electricity sector in Gujarat State, and pushing a big expansion of solar power. He has begun opening coal mining to private firms, but experts say other plans remain unclear.

One thing that is clear, though, is that inadequate infrastructure is a serious obstacle to any improvement in energy supply, said Vandana Hari, editorial director for Asia at Platts, the energy analysis firm.

Problems “range from poor port facilities to poor inland transportation, so even if coal ends up at a port, it takes a long time, goes through very inefficient systems to be transported all the way to where it is to be consumed,” Ms. Hari said. The same is true for natural gas, she added. “India could be consuming much more gas, but it simply doesn’t have a good network of gas pipelines.”

Japan, meanwhile, is struggling with different problems. Before the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, it relied on nuclear for a quarter of its electricity. But safety worries have closed all its atomic plants, and as a result, Japan has ramped up its use of coal and natural gas. Even if old nuclear plants are reopened, “they’re never going to go back to the level of nuclear they had before,” Mr. Wu said.

In Southeast Asia, energy demand is increasing, but the construction of renewable sources is slower than in China.

Outside China, India, Japan and South Korea, renewable power capacity in Asia is expanding about 5 percent a year, Ms. Doman said. But it starts from such a low base that by 2040, clean sources will provide only about 3 percent of the region’s electricity, she said.

And across Asia, for all the investment in renewable resources, carbon emissions are sure to keep on rising, driven by population growth and an expanding middle class. For both China and India, according to projections by the United States Energy Information Administration, annual emissions are expected to reach twice their 2009 levels by 2040.

A version of this article appears in print on   of the National edition with the headline: Asia Pushes Hard for Clean Energy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT