Green Hops: Emissions Exchanges, Nuke Dreams, Siemens
More on the Green Olympics. Just one more day to the 
opening ceremonies! In our last post, we examined some of the stopgap measures that Beijing embarked on to deliver on its Green Olympics promises. Louis Schwartz, one of my favorite commentators on China’s clean tech scene, provides some juicy details of the kinds of renewable energy systems being deployed in the Olympic venues. He ends his article with a thought which must be on every green observer’s mind:
As is so often the case in China, the Summer Olympics in Beijing present two contradictory views of China’s environmental and energy stewardship. Will China’s future development realize the promise of the enlightened environmental and energy infrastructure now on display at the Olympic venues or will the Olympic Village turn out to have been just a Potemkin Village? Stay tuned.
Environmental exchanges launched. Shanghai and Beijing plan to launch exchanges that will facilitate the trade of emission credits, once regulatory approvals are granted. China Environmental Law Blog provides a good breakdown on what the respective exchanges hope to achieve.
Receiving less media attention are Changsha’s (of Hunan province) efforts to engage in emissions trading. Reuters reports that Changsha has drawn up a plan to assign credits for “dust, carbon dioxide and chemical oxygen demand (COD)” with the view of facilitating the trade of those credits “as early as next year.”
Emission exchange-hopefuls such as Tianjin, Hong Kong and Singapore seem to have been beaten to the punch, but perhaps there will be room for everyone.
New energy body starts work. The newly approved China National Energy Administration (NEAR) has begun operations. Ominously, one of the NEA’s first pronouncements was to project that nuclear power will constitute 5% of China’s total power generating capacity by 2020, one percentage point more than was originally projected by a 2007 national nuclear energy plan.
Siemens sees green in China. Siemens, the German industrial conglomerate, expects more than 50% of its growth in China to come from the environmental sector. “More than half of our 1 billion euro mid-term investment in China until 2010 will go into energy-saving and environmentally friendly technologies and solutions,” said Richard Hausmann, president and CEO of Siemens China, to China Daily. And why not? GE’s doing it.
Siemens Energy will deliver the first two of five coal gasifiers to Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group Co. Ltd. (SNCG), a subsidiary of Shenhua Group, China’s largest coal supplier. The coal gasifiers, each with a thermal capacity of 500MW, are destined for the Ningxia coal-to-polypropylene (NCPP) plant in Ningxia Province in northwest China. As Green Car Congress explains:
In the gasification process hard coal, lignite and other substances such as biomass, petcoke and refinery residues will be converted to syngas, and environmental pollutants such as sulfur and carbon dioxide subsequently removed. The syngas can then be used for power generation in integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants or as a raw material in the chemical industry, for example in the production of synthetic fuels.
Click here for a power point presentation on Siemen’s coal gasification technhologies.
New EE rule for fixed-asset projects. Such projects by Siemens should have no problems meeting a new regulation proposed by the government to condition the approval of fixed-asset projects by meeting specific energy efficiency criteria. The new regulation is drafted in line with China’s Energy Conservation Law, which took effect on April 1 and has received good coverage by China Environmental Law Blog.
August 10th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I think one of the reasons for the increased push for nukes from the National Energy Administration (or Bureau: they don’t seem to have settled on the appropriate translation yet) is that its new head, Zhang Guobao, had nuclear power under his jursidiction in one of his Vice Ministrial roles at the NDRC.
August 17th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Further to the nukes question. There was a lot of discussion 2-3 years ago about the “pioneering” technology behind soft pebble bed technologies that had been “perfected” here.
Supposedly cheaper, more efficient, and easier to knock up (in the construction sense), the chatter seems to have died as German and US firms are given huge contracts.
Any insight on this?
r
http://www.china-crossroads.com