Australia's expertise in developing renewable energy is good enough for the Chinese but sadly the Australian government can't see the wisdom of encouraging renewable energy here....
Australian
Friday 13/10/2006, Page: 8
A DELEGATION of experts on renewable energy will leave for China next week to present their credentials in the hope of striking deals to help it develop alternative sources of power.
Environment Minister Ian Campbell will lead the 60-person delegation, which he believes will create "phenomenal" opportunities for Australian businesses and bolster Australia's international action to address climate change.
Population growth and industrialisation are driving demand for new energy in China, and it is already the world's secondlargest greenhouse gas emitter. China, home to one-fifth of the world's population, will spend about $20 billion on energy generation in the next 15 years, and energy consumption will have doubled in the five years to 2007.
The country plans to increase renewable energy to 15 per cent of total energy by 2020.
We know that the world is going to demand roughly twice the amount of energy it is consuming now in the next 35 to 40 years, and a very large proportion of that growth will come from China," Senator Campbell said yesterday.
"If that energy around the globe is not supplied with substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions, we have potentially an environmental and economic catastrophe on our hands.
"So we have to grow the energy demand but cap the greenhouse gases and try and get them coming down." Chinese ambassador to Australia Fu Ying said China had for the first time listed a target for reduced energy consumption.
We will be very interested in opportunities for co-operation with Australia, which is strong both in research and practice in this field," Ms Fu said. She said countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development had achieved industrialisation over more than 200 years, bringing high living standards to about 500 million people.
The energy consumption required to bring industrialisation to China's 1.3 billion people would require "tremendous" energy consumption and China did not have the luxury to use the same greenhouse-gas-hungry powergeneration techniques.
"With this in mind, we lay a very strong emphasis on cooperation with countries such as Australia," Ms Fu said.
By 2010, China expects to increase wind energy production capacity by 37 per cent, biomass capacity by 16 per cent and hydro by 9 per cent but it lacks the expertise and components to meet those goals.
Opportunities for Australia include investment in home solar hot water supply systems, the manufacture of solar cells, wind turbine and component manufacture, and wind farm development.
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