The Green Leap Forward 绿跃进

The Green Leap Forward looks back at 2008 and selects its “Top Five” stories.
Sort of.

A new year is upon us!  But what a year 2008 was!  Winter storms, the Sichuan earthquakes, the Beijing Olympics and the global financial crisis.  A common thread?  “Green,” says this China Daily article, which provides a pretty good summary of all the green policy milestones of the past year in China, including the 11th Five-Year Plan goals, upgrading of the State Environmental Protection Administration to Ministry status, plastic bag ban, Walmart’s China green supply chain initiative, and increased civil society participation in environmental issues.

So its that time of the year where blogs and other websites publish their Continue Reading »

Tags: Best of 2008, China, energy, environment

Energy Price Reforms

NDRC announced that it would be removing price caps on coal from next year in a move towards a more market-driven price mechanism.  This move comes at an opportune time when coal prices have dropped by 30 to 40% since the summer, but GLF points out an earlier post (see finding #4) on a recent MIT coal report that suggests the upstream coal industry has already moved towards a de facto market price system.  Although the NDRC move “is a step in the right direction,” Huang Shengchu, president of Beijing-based China Coal Information Institute says in this interview that government macro-control is still needed to protect the rights of various coal stakeholdres in their contractual dealings with each other, accerlarate industry consolidation of the many small and inefficient mines and to set up a coal price index.

Separately, the proposed auto fuel price reform kicked in earlier than expected.  So it turns out that the answer to our confusion (see earlier post) of how the government proposed to hike up taxes and keep fuel prices even was that they would adjust the base fuel price downward, predicated on Continue Reading »

Tags: agriculture, automotive, Beijing, BP, BYD Auto, capital and finance, China, circular economy, cleaner coal, coal, electric vehicles, environment, fuel tax, Gansu, gas, green credit, green hops, green insurance, green whirlwinds, Guangdong, Guangxi, Himin Solar, Hubei, nuclear, oil, plug-in hybrids, policy, pollution, price controls, recycling, renewable energy, scrap, solar, Taiwan, venture capital, wind, Xinjiang, Zhejiang

GLF has been traveling and getting a little caught up on side projects, but let’s play some catchup.  Let’s pick things up with two specific appointments by President-elect Obama which have implications for U.S.-China energy relations–one being the 1997 Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Steve Chu of Lawrence Berkeley Labs (LBL) as the new Secretary of Energy, and the other being Dr. John Holdren, physicist and energy technology policy professor at Harvard and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center (whom yours truly had the pleasure of meeting in the copy room as a policy intern there way back in 2003) as the White House science & technology adviser.

Besides being a director of LBL, Dr. Chu (pictured right) is also a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at Continue Reading »

Tags: automotives, BYD Auto, China, energy, environment, innovation, John Holdren, nuclear, Obama, policy, solar, Steve Chu, Strategic Economic Dialogue, U.S.

The auto industry is front and center of the current financial-energy tsunami.  Detroit is in big trouble, and in need of a life-line.  Chinese automakers are faring better (and some have them tipped to be Detroit’s white knights), but the shakeout  in China has played itself out in petroleum price reforms.

On Friday (Dec 5), the NDRC announced further proposals for energy price reform in the petroleum sector that would come into effect January 1 by indirectly linking domestic fuel prices to international crude oil prices as well as substantially increasing fuel taxes.  The NDRC curiously maintains that the moves will not impact prices at the pump (see FAQ by NDRC, in Chinese only), however, the feeling is that more details to the proposal needs to be released for this claim to be assessed.  Ostensibly, the fuel tax hike will be offset by the recent pullback in crude oil prices, resulting in minimal increases in pump prices in the near term.

The Proposal

In order to align retail fuel prices, Continue Reading »

Tags: automotive, China, energy, environment, fuel tax, NDRC, policy, transportation

A reader of our recent Watergy post pointed out to me that in China, other than for making steel, coal used in China (including those used for power) is seldom washed clean of its ash content before combustion.  A recent op-ed in China Daily by Dr. Chuck Wells, Chief Technologist of OSIsoft, Inc., provides great insight on the value of washing coal at the mouth of coal mines prior to transporting it to power stations as a simple “cleaner coal” strategy.

What is coal washing?

From the BBC:

Coal washing involves grinding the coal into smaller pieces and passing it through a process called gravity separation.  One technique involves feeding the coal into barrels containing a fluid that has a density which causes the coal to float, while unwanted material sinks and is removed from the fuel mix. The coal is then pulverised and prepared for burning.

On the benefits of washed coal, Dr. Wells says: Continue Reading »

Tags: China, cleaner coal, coal, coal washing, energy, enery-water nexus, environment, transportation, watergy

It was 366 days ago (yes 2008 was a leap year, and what a Green Leap year it has been!) that this blog was born.  But as Cityweekend Beijing (ignore the misleading picture in the link though, that’s not me!) says in its green issue last wee:

To call the green roundup on Green Leap Forward ‘blogging’ is to ignore the depth and seriousness of Julian’s reporting, which borders more on market research and policy analysis.

Over the past 62 blog posts, the first year of this blog has centered a lot on clean tech market news, mixed in with the occasional company profile, review of energy and climate change policy developments, as well as a lot of reflections on various energy Continue Reading »

Tags: China, energy, environment, Happy Birthday

We’ve gone more than a month without a “Green Hops” update…what a crime!  We atone for that oversight here…

Climate Change and International Cooperation

A “high level” summit in Beijing on international technology transfer and climate change held on November 7 and 8 provided a preview of the international climate change negotiations that have kicked off in Poznan, Poland today.  A blogger’s review of the Beijing summit can be found at China Green Space (the young author of which is a personal friend and has been getting some recognition lately).  Basically, it is more of the same–China wants free capital and free technology from developed countries.  This is the same position as what can be found in the recently released China Climate Change White Paper, which Continue Reading »

Tags: automobiles, automotive, ChangAn, China, China National BlueStar, energy, environment, Equator Principles, green credit, green hops, hydropower, Industrial Bank, Ministry of Environmental Protection, Pear River Tower, Poznan, public health, SAIC, technology transfer, Toray Industries, transportation, water

You didn’t think The Green Leap Forward would go on to celebrate its first birthday (next week, folks!  December 2nd!) without commenting on the recently announced RMB 4 trillion (US$586 billion) pump-priming package did you?

Of course not.

The basics of the package is that a total of RMB 4 trillion will be spent by the central government, local governments and state-owned enterprises in ten major areas, mostly infrastructure related.  It is not clear to what extent part of the package is simply a repackaging of already existing budgets or expenditure plans in order to provide a psychological lift to the sagging stock markets.  The more important question to readers of this blog, however, is to what extent the package addresses China’s environmental and energy (E&E) needs? Continue Reading »

Tags: 4 trillion yuan, capital and finance, China, economic stimulus plan, environment, pump priming, renewable energy, smart grid, transportation, urban planning, wind

China is not going to solve its energy problem if it does not solve is water problem (see previous post on “China’s Water Torture“).  It is as simple as that.

The fact is, the exploitation of just about every energy resource (including renewables, but especially fossil fuel) requires water.  Conversely, the purification of water for drinking requires energy, and some purification methods, such as desalination, require a lot of it.

Click to enlarge.  Source: “Energy Demands on Water Resources” a December 2006 report by the Sandia National Labs to the U.S. Congress on the interdependency of water and energy that remains the definitive report on the topic.

In energy resource and water scarce China, the energy-water nexus, or watergy, is a twin threat. Power production in China has to compete with agriculture, industries, and environmental flows for an already scarce resource.  China relies heavily on coal for electricity, is pushing hydro power and nuclear as major alternative sources of energy.  Coal-to-liquids (CTL or coal liquefaction) has also been cited as a way to reduce China’s dependence on oil imports.  According to the Pacific Institute, there have been Continue Reading »

Tags: biofuels, China, coal, coal liquefaction, coal-to-liquids, energy-water nexus, environment, hydro, nuclear, oil, policy, water, watergy

Yesterday, The Green Leap Forward took to the road to Tianjin again, this time as part of a US-delegation organized by the US-China Green Energy Council (UCGEC) exploring the green tech potential of Tianjin.  One of the stops was a visit the site of the proposed Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city.   Not much more to report from our previous post, but we got some cool visuals.  Upon arrival, we were quickly ushered into an enclosed building,  only to be shown poster exhibits that is basically a rehash of the master plan already available on their website.  The saving grace was a large model of the city that we took some pictures of: Continue Reading »

Tags: China, eco-cities, environment, Tianjin, urban planning, US-China Green Energy Council, wasteland