Former World Bank Energy Specialist on China’s Renewable Energy Development

Dr. Eric Martinot, former senior energy and environment specialist at the World Bank and now visiting scholar at Tsinghua-BP Clean Energy Research and Education Center, talked to Interfax about his research findings regarding China’s renewable energy development on the sidelines of a forum held in Shanghai last week.

Martinot believes that China will have no problem achieving its targets for different forms of renewable energy, such as hydro, wind, biomass, solar power and bio-fuel. However, Martinot’s concerns remain regarding biomass because of insufficient raw materials, solar power because of its high costs and bio-fuel because of its technology and the wide dispersion of raw materials.
He further suggested that the Chinese government should set higher power tariffs for renewable energy, which would mean larger profits, in order to attract more players to the market.

China aims to have renewables account for 10% of the country’s primary energy consumption by 2010 and 16% by 2020. Hydropower generation capacity will reach 180 gigawatts a year by 2010 and 300 GW by 2020, compared with 115 GW in 2005. Regarding wind power, the government aims for an annual generation capacity of 5 GW by 2010 and 30 GW by 2020, as compared to its 2005 figure of 1.3 GW. Biomass power will also grow almost three-fold to reach 5.5 GW in 2010 from 2 GW in 2005, and 15 times as much by 2020, to 30 GW. Solar photovoltaics power generation capacity was 0.07 GW in 2005, but the figure is expected to hit 0.3 GW in 2010 and 1.8 GW in 2020.

In the meantime, the country will produce 2 million tonnes of ethanol a year by 2010 and 10 million tonnes by 2020, significantly larger when compared to 2005’s 0.8 million tonnes. Bio-diesel output will grow four times compared to 2005 to 0.2 million tonnes in 2010, and 40 times annually by 2020, to 2 million tonnes.

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