The world war on renewables is on. China. India.
And the United States - along with Denmark and
others - are out to battle for supremacy in what
will be the next turn in the industrial revolution.
China is on its way to dominating the global wind
generation business after a strong early assist
through the adoption of policies that favored
Chinese wind turbine manufacturers - and probably
violated international trade rules. In the process,
the New York Times reported this week, Chinese
companies now control half the global $45 billion
annual wind turbine market.
Now the combat is shifting to solar.
The Wall Street Journal this week, in its story,
"India's Solar Scene Vexes U.S.," reported that
President Obama and U.S. companies want India to
rollback trade restrictions that "threaten to cut
out American companies as India embarks on a major
rollout of solar power."
India will spend tens of billions of dollars to
deploy 20,000 megawatts of solar generation by 2022,
among the boldest of such efforts in the world, the
Journal reported.
China and India are following a path set decades ago
by Japan, when it launched a massive wave of
industrial exports while restricted foreign access
to its own markets.
I recently visited Japan with the
Solar Electric Power Association to study how
Japan, like other nations, is now trying to steer
its young but growing solar power industry to rapid
growth. Julia Hamm, association president, will be
discussing the role of government support in
the global solar sweepstakes at the
EnergyBiz Leadership Forum in Washington Feb. 27
- March 1.
"Japan once was number one in production of PV,"
said Koichi Sakuta, director of the international
affairs department of Japan's National Institute of
Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. "We'd
like to come back to that position."
Solar power is one potential bright spot in an
otherwise struggling Japanese economy. "The Japanese
economic situation is very severe," said Shoji
Watanabe, director of the new and renewable energy
division of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and
Industry. "This is an area for growth."
Ambitious growth. The Japanese government one year
ago embraced plans to deploy 28,000 megawatts of
solar generation by 2020 and 53,000 megawatts by
2030. That would be equivalent to about half of the
100,000 megawatts of electricity generated today by
all 104 nuclear power plants in the United States.
Japan and the United States are both in the early
stages of deploying solar power. In the United
States, 433 megawatts of solar were deployed last
year, bringing the total to 1,640 megawatts. In
Japan, 479 megawatts were installed last year,
lifting the total to 2,630 megawatts, according to
SEPA.
Japan removed its solar panel subsidies three years
ago. Its current approach is to incentivize
consumers and businesses to deploy solar, with the
payback to come from sales of surplus power back to
the grid at a premium price covered by all energy
users in Japan.
Japan's intent is to nurture its solar manufacturing
capabilities. At a time when China is pouring its
competitively priced solar products into global
markets, Japan has managed to make sure that upward
of 90 percent of the solar panels being deployed
domestically are made in Japan. Last year, China and
Taiwan produced 49 percent of solar cells in the
world, compared with Japan's 14 percent and North
America's 6 percent, according to the Japan
Photovoltaic Energy Association's industry figures.
Sharp is one of the country's manufacturers gearing
up for the country's push into solar. In gleaming,
highly automated new facilities on Osaka's harbor
front, it has built a new PV facility next to a
factory making LCD television panels. Initially, the
solar effort has been designed to produce 480
megawatts a year of thin-film solar panels. Plans
call for ramping up production to 1,000 megawatts
annually.
Hiroshi Okamoto, manager of Tokyo Electric Power's
smart grid strategy group, indicated that all the
policies to promote solar in Japan are not in place.
"The cost recovery for utilities deploying PV will
have to be determined by new systems in the future,"
he said.
Meanwhile, in sundry locations, through a variety of
efforts, solar deployments increase.
Sekisui, a leading supplier of manufactured housing,
produces 10,000 homes a year at its eight Japanese
factories. And 78 percent of them are erected with
solar panels on their rooftops, according to a
company executive. The addition of the solar
equipment adds about 9 percent to the cost of the
homes.
Japan is hard at work researching ways to innovate
on solar technology to reduce costs so that the
technology will become more competitive. And it is
preparing for the day when its power grid, already
one of the most robustly reliant in the world, can
stitch together a vast deployment of solar and other
renewables.
China and India are doing the same. The United
States, some say, is missing in action. Sharon A.
Staz general manager and treasurer of Kennebunk
Light & Power District in Maine, was part of the
group of American utility experts to visit Japan
with SEPA.
"In Japan, at least government has said we've got a
goal for solar," she said. "We don't have that in
the United States, and I think that is very
problematic. It makes a lot of us flounder instead
of having clear direction."
Copyright © 1996-2010 by
CyberTech,
Inc.
All rights reserved.
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