This post is from Nat Green, a second year law student at VLS and a joint research project (JRP) student for 2011-2012 with the US-China Partnership for Environmental Law. The JRP students recently traveled to China to meet their research partners and further their projects. These posts will share the students’ experiences on the research trip and provide an update on progress with the projects.
This past December I visited China for the first time in four years. I won’t try to explain what it meant for me to see the place again, but I can say that I was reasonably prepared for the changes I saw. I’ve spent much of my adult life tracking China’s changes. I first visited China in 1999, and stayed for a year. I then began graduate work in modern Chinese history. In the two years leading up to the Beijing Olympics, I found myself in Beijing working on assignment as a sports journalist and sometime freelance writer, with a dose of civic development research on the side. Given the chance to explore Beijing again just a few months ago, I saw much that was altered, but still the place was familiar enough. Economic and industrial growth, accompanied by new social currents; I felt I recognized the patterns. However, this time, in December 2011, I arrived as a Joint Research Project fellow at the VLS US-China Partnership for Environmental Law, and I found that this let me engage with those patterns in a way that was not previously available to me.
My experiences while living and working in China strongly informed my decision to pursue a career in environmental law and policy. For the Chinese and foreign journalists and academics I worked with, the environmental consequences of China’s growth formed a topic of growing concern. A concern for China’s natural environment and associated public health issues hung in the background of any given story, be it a straight-forward account of growing industrial production or be it an analysis of the growing income disparity between rural and urban areas. At some point, I decided that I wanted to engage with the processes of change in China more directly, and I guessed that the environmental question would offer the most comprehensive avenue.
Students involved in the VLS US-China Partnership have the opportunity to work with directly with counterparts in China to develop an environmental research project with real and immediate policy implications, all the more so because of the growing importance of environmental issues in China’s policy discourse. There’s a great deal to navigate in the process, but looking back so far I’m amazed by how far we’ve come.
In September 2011 I made contact with my research partner, Pan Qing, and we began to work together over email and the ever-reliable Skype. We began with a simple premise: we would research China’s renewable energy development in light of recently published production targets set in the Twelfth Five Year Plan. Pan Qing is a doctoral candidate at Renmin University in Beijing, specializing in China’s renewable energy policy, and as such offers an indispensable perspective. Over the first two months or so, we refined our topic to cover the development of large-scale wind-generated electricity. We came to this topic gradually, and almost in real time as new materials became available and the scope of the central government’s plans for wind power became more clear.
China is currently the world’s leading energy consumer, and the world’s foremost producer of greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook predicts that, given the continuation of current trends, China’s overall energy consumption will account for 30% of global growth in energy demand between 2009 and 2035. Faced with this prospect and wary of the threats posed by pollution and global climate change, central government planners hope to greatly reduce the carbon intensity of China’s energy-producing industries. Electricity production accounts for most of China’s energy consumption, and as a result wind-generated electricity now plays a major role in low-carbon energy policy.
Wind-generation capacity in China has grown rapidly over the past decade or so, from an estimated 28 MW in 1996 to 42 GW, or ten times that amount, in 2010. Policy makers project that this trend will continue, and even increase. The Twelfth Five Year Plan calls for an increase in share of non-fossil energy in the total national energy mix from its current level of 8.3% to 11.4% by 2015, with wind-generated electricity playing a major role. Looking further ahead, the IEA’s China Wind Energy Roadmap 2050, jointly published with China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), provides for new 20 GW of wind capacity to be installed every year between 2020 and 2030, by this time accounting for some 15% of all installed power capacity. Currently, both state-owned and private companies are developing massive wind farms in Inner Mongolia and in Gansu province.
When I arrived in Beijing in December, Pan Qing and I had two days to conduct interviews with wind energy experts around Beijing and to prepare to present on our research at Renmin University Law School. Over the previous few months our focus was China’s Renewable Energy Law (REL), which creates a feed-in tariff regime intended to foster the growth of renewable energy industries. A feed-in tariff system provides incentives for renewable electricity developers by providing a guarantee that they can sell electricity to their local electrical grid at a set rate for a set length of time, and thus ensure a return on their investments. Following this model, the REL regime requires that grid companies purchase all wind-generated electricity in their regions at set rates that vary by region, and that they provide grid-connection services. However, this program faces considerable obstacles, not the least of which is inconsistent enforcement of the REL itself.
Over the very busy two days before our presentation, Pan Qing and I first interviewed administrators at a major state-owned wind power development company, and then interviewed regulators at SERC, a state organ responsible for regulating China’s electrical infrastructure and pricing systems. Our brief fieldwork produced a significant shift in the perspective we brought to our research. Our informants explained that, yes, the REL feed-in tariff was an important driver of wind power development. However, they also explained that the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), pursuant to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, played a similarly strong role in encouraging the spread of wind power by drawing indirect investment from more developed countries. We learned that we had picked an exciting moment for our research, in that the CDM board had recently voted to end funding for China’s wind power projects, judging that internal policies such as the REL should be sufficient for continued growth.
Pan Qing and I thus learned that our research could be further narrowed to a simple question: what drives the growth of wind-generated electricity in China? This question opens discussions on the role of the CDM program, the strengths and weaknesses of the REL, and the vital role played at all times by changing technologies. Once we stumbled across this question, sometime between 2 and 3 in the morning, I think (fortunately, Renmin boasts a couple of nice all-night cafes), our presentation developed smoothly. Despite the general fatigue, I think Pan Qing and I really enjoyed presenting on our material, and we garnered much- needed and useful feedback from her advisor and other scholars.
Following our presentations, Pan Qing and I dined with our fellow Joint Research Program participants, and then generally went our separate ways. I stayed in Beijing for about a week, visiting old friends and colleagues, and meeting once more with Pan Qing to set out a rough plan for the Spring semester. I told many people about my project, and the responses were interesting. In general, I encountered a widespread interest both in China’s environmental challenges and in the efforts being made to answer them. I found many of my old contacts to be surprisingly well-informed as the technologies involved in building China’s wind farms, and enthusiastic as the great scale of the effort. It was a nice way to finish my trip. The challenges to making China’s low-carbon energy policy function in the long term are significant, but I found an optimism and deliberate application to the effort of it, and I’m excited to see what happens next.
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