>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
>> Welcome everyone I'm Tomoko Steen
at Science Technology and Business Division.
Today's event is as you mentioned sponsored by the Asian Division here
and also French Society and also Science
and Technology and Business Division.
It's a wonderful corporation with the Asian Division
and we usually have much more dry room.
This is a very beautiful room we can have the speaker in.
So today's speaker, Professor Joanna Lewis is the associate professor
at Georgetown's Science Technology Society.
Oh no no. Science and Technology and International Affairs
at the Georgetown University's Foreign Service Institute.
Its official name is Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service
and her research focus is energy, environment, innovation in China.
Some people say that green energy in China is oxymoron,
but it's not actually [laughter] true.
With Dr. Lewis advising you know the China is going
to be leading the green energy in the world [assumed spelling]
and also Dr. Lewis is leading [inaudible] project and it's kind
of hard to understand the project name.
International Partnerships and Technological Leapfrogging
in China's Clean Energy Sectors and it's Leapfrogging so she is going
to explain to you more about this.
And also her book, recent book, Green Innovation in China received
in 2014 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award
by the International Studies Association for best book
for that year in environmental studies.
I think you all should read it
and also she was National Academy's Committee
on the US China Corporation on Electricity from Renewables.
So this National Academy has many the committees and produce monograph
and if you're interested you I can actually point to you the monograph.
She has advised domestic
and international agencies including domestic one is UNIDO and USAID.
So she was advisory board to ACORE also and the US-China Program.
So she has Ph.D. from the Berkeley and also M.A. from Berkeley
and I know some of you actually Berkeley graduate
and before further do please join me the welcoming Professor Lewis.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you very much.
Thank you all for coming this afternoon and I'm very appreciative
of the invitation to speak with you today
so thank you very much for having me.
Today the title of my talk is China's Rule
in Global Clean Energy Technology Development
and so I thought I would speak a bit
about what is happening generally both internationally
and domestically in China as it relates to clean energy.
Particularly how this is influencing the international discussion
on climate change and the climate change negotiations
in the United Nations.
I want to start by mentioning the recent bilateral deal
between China and the United States.
You may remember last November the Presidents came together
for a summit and announced what I think many of us
in this field thought was really a ground breaking deal
between the two countries,
in that both countries just simultaneously announced the actions
that they were going to do to address climate change and I think
that this is an extremely important not just for what's happening
in both countries domestically, which I'll talk about,
but particularly for the upcoming climate talks
that we'll be taking place in Paris at the end of this year.
Whereas you may know countries are trying
to reach a new global agreement on climate change following
on the Kyoto Protocol and then negotiations since then.
So the key elements of this announcement
which were particularly notable the United States of course agreed
to take on an economy-wide target to reduce its emissions 26
to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025 and to try
to do this actually the more aggressive end.
China also for the first time announced that it would try
to achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around the year 2030
and to try to peak early as well as announced a goal
to increase the share of non-fossil fuels
in primary energy to 20 percent by 2030.
This includes renewable energy as well as nuclear power
and so this announcement was really done with the intention of trying
to really motivate other countries as well
in the international climate talks.
So China's goals from last November have now been enshrined
in its pledge that it has submitted to the United Nations in advance
of Paris and so this includes the targets I mentioned as well
as a new what we call carbon intensity target as well.
So I think these are quite significant
because of course this is the first time
that China has actually mentioned its emissions would peak.
If you study China energy data, which I'm sure many
of you are familiar with the statistics, for many years it looked
like China's emissions both its energy consumption
and its greenhouse gas emissions would essentially grow exponentially
for the coming decades.
And so all the modeling projections coming out of China
and the United States and other places essentially just showed an
upwards slope.
It's really just been in the last few years where we've realized
that that's not actually the case because domestic energy trends,
which I'll talk a bit about today.
And so I think that you know the real question is,
which I want to focus on which these are really the topic of my research,
how can China transition to a lower carbon economy?
And to do that of course it does take clean energy technology.
So a lot of my work actually looks
at how China has acquired clean energy technology.
Where is that technology coming from
and whether China is contributing to green innovation?
I'll just talk about this briefly today, but that was the topic
of my last book and then finally I want to end with a bit of discussion
about how the United States and China are cooperating.
And could continue to cooperate on clean energy and why
that I think that's important.
So I mentioned that in the target when China announced a peak year
for the first time, when we see this is a study that was done both
by researchers at GNY [assumed spelling] and MIT here
which shows a very similar peak projection for China
and I show you this to point out that essentially
if China's total carbon emissions are at a peak
in the year 2030 you would essentially have to scale
up clean energy extremely substantially.
If you can see here on the chart the yellow bar, the green bar,
the purple bar this is wind, solar, hydropower,
natural gas all are going to have to be scaled up dramatically
and then you see down here on the bottom the dark blue is coal.
And you see coal essentially leveling off
and then declining quite rapidly between now and the year 2050.
Again this is not something that you know many people thought would be
possible for China.
China still gets about 2/3 of its primary energy from coal
and about 80 percent of electricity.
So you know as you mentioned earlier clean energy
in China you know many people say, China's not doing clean energy,
but this is you know really about where China's is going.
Right and where it will have to go if it's going
to actually achieve this emissions peak.
This is the chart just showing you where China's energy has come
from over the last few decades and again as you can see coal is just
by far the largest share, but I think what has really driven a lot
of these this changes
in diversifying China's energy supply is the desire
to become more efficient and how energy is consumed.
China actually between 1980 and 2000 approximately was able
to quadruple its economy while only doubling energy demand
and this is actually extremely impressive no other country has been
able to achieve that rate of improvement.
And so that's the declining line you see sort of after 1980 here
on this chart, but if you look at this little like blip in the chart
where in the early 2000's you actually had energy use growing
faster than economic growth for the first time
in several decades in China.
This actually caught the attention of the leadership
because this essentially means
that their overall economy was becoming less efficient.
This also had to do with a resurgence of heavy industry
and as you know China is trying to move away from heavy industry,
manufacturing, cement, iron,
steel to more higher value added industries
that essentially take less energy
to produce the same unit of economic growth.
This is better for them overall from an energy security perspective
and this is better for the environment
from an emissions perspective.
And then of course there are many other advantages
to reducing coal use.
In China one of course for those of you who spent time
in China you know well is air pollution.
Local air pollution is a current,
like a very big concern not just for human health.
It's one of the leading causes of early mortality in the country,
but also you know there are concerns about sort
of the public becoming less satisfied with the current quality
of the air and this could lead to stability issues which of course are
of top concern for the government.
This is actually a paper my student did that looked at on days
when the PM2.5, the particulate levels are very high,
people are [inaudible] essentially complaining and talking about it
and people are very very aware of air pollution levels in their day
to day, their day to day activities in China.
So I want to move to talk now what's happening in clean energy there.
So globally I think it's important to point
out clean energy is actually now
about a $300 billion dollar a year industry.
We used to think of clean energy as this sort of little niche sector
with a little bit of money going into it here and there.
There's more money on an annual basis now going
into so-called clean energy than there is dirty energy.
Just because when we look at new capacity that's being built,
new power plants in the United States for example,
almost all the new power plants we're building here are either
natural gas which are fossil plants, but cleaner than coal
and then wind power, solar power.
In most years we're actually wind
and solar power growth rates are much faster than they are in gas
and we have not built a new coal plant here in a while.
We have not built new nuclear plant either in a while.
China has played a very big role in this investment
and in fact wind energy in China where a lot
of my research is focused is represents the single largest
investment in any clean energy technology that any country
around the world has made in the last decade.
So that's really it's quite substantial just the amount
of investment that has gone
into growing the wind power sector in China.
So while I showed you in the early charts
that coal is still a huge share of energy in China,
coal is not going away tomorrow right, and I don't mean to imply
that it is, but again if you look at what's going in annually in terms
of new plants we see this real shift that's taking place
in the last few years.
Where if you go back you know about ten years ago, China was putting
in 80 almost 100 new gigawatts of coal plants a year.
That's you know roughly you heard the figures,
that's like two new plants a week essentially, large coal plants,
but those numbers have really slowed down quite a bit.
And so China is building much fewer coal plants.
There's actually been a lot of media reporting in the last few days,
they may put a moratorium on new coal plants.
They already have done this in some
of the most polluted parts of eastern China.
So when you look at you know there's still a need
for growing electricity supply and so what's being built?
Still hydropower, but also wind power, solar power,
nuclear power playing increasingly important role
and I haven't updated this yet for last year,
but you would see this trend continuing and even increasing.
So I think it was 2013 was the first year China actually installed more
non-fossil capacity than fossil capacity in a single year.
So that's a real shift.
So I mentioned wind power has been a real success story in China.
This is showing you the growth that we've seen just in wind energy
over the last decade or so and you can see that you know
for a while the United States and China were sort of neck and neck.
China has now installed far more wind turbines
than the United States.
Although if you actually look at electricity production coming
from these wind turbines there is some concern
that they're operating less efficiently than they could be.
Mostly due to constraints on the electric grid which I'll talk
about in a moment and you also I should mention there's many
companies globally which is what my book looks at that in China,
which are now manufacturing state
of the art wind power technologies selling this technology in China
and exporting it around the world as well.
Solar has also been in more recent years,
a really big success story in China.
China installed more solar power last year than you know the rest
of the world sort of installed that year
and there soon will have more solar
than you know the United States many other countries combined.
It's really quite dramatic the growth we're seeing there.
Part of this is due to the fact that China has built
up a very successful manufacturing industry in solar technology
and so these costs of the technology have come down very dramatically.
Cost of solar I believe it's
about a 60 percent cost reduction in the last five years.
So suddenly when solar was much too expensive is what China many
countries believed a few years ago.
It's now cost competitive with most
of the other technologies they would be looking at.
Particularly if you look
at externality cost as well like pollution.
So there's very aggressive targets to expand all these technologies.
I won't go through them in detail.
This is showing you different scenarios for how China might scale
up different low carbon energy technologies in the coming years
and they're you know really quite aggressive scenarios
that people are looking at.
This is one study that I participated
in which was done jointly with The Energy Research Institute
of the National Development Reform Commission in China along
with several international experts and funded by the Energy Foundation
to look at you know what could a very high penetration scenario
of renewable energy look like for China in 2050?
Essentially what would be the maximum scenario?
This is more of a visioning study.
This isn't necessarily what will happen right?
This is you know if China did the best they could do you know,
went sort of changed all models,
went beyond all projections you know.
What could they do that could actually be realistic?
And they actually showed that China could get
to 60 percent non-fossil sources in total energy and 80 percent
of its electricity generation by 2050.
So remember right now that they're at 80 percent coal
so this would be a very dramatic transformation
and it wouldn't be easy.
This is a chart just showing you what this would actually look
like on the ground so you can see again coal takes this very steep
decline in order to allow the other sources to scale up.
You see huge increases in solar.
Both solar electricity as well as solar for heating, geothermal
and other types of renewable energy.
And this is what you know essentially the trajectory
for how wind and solar would have to be scaled extremely rapidly
over the next couple of decades.
I think it's important to think
about where would this go in China right?
So for many of you are very familiar with the geography of the countries.
So actually it's a Inner Mongolia is where most
of the wind power is being developed in China.
If you've been there you know there's a lot of sort
of flat grasslands, plains, a lot of wind
and it's been an extremely good place
for wind development particularly the eastern part
of inner Mongolia is connected to the same electric grid as Beijing.
So this is actually is useful for helping feed the power demand
of eastern China and northeastern China.
But you can see that if you really wanted to get
to this really you know high scenario of wind.
You've got to put wind turbines everywhere
and this is a problem right because there's not a lot
of just empty land that's not being used for other things.
You can do sort of dual use agriculture
and wind with solar as well.
This is the possibility, but you can see them essentially if you're going
to put wind particularly throughout the northern part of the country
to some extent in the southern part
and you know lesser extent in the west.
You would need to essentially move this electricity
to where the demand is.
You can see the same thing for solar.
Solar's actually a bigger issue because the best solar resources
in China are in the far western part
of the country particularly Xinjiang,
Tibet and you know it you can imagine how challenging it would be
if you sort of put a lot of solar farms out there,
then you move that electricity
to Shanghai this is a you know very complex transmission
and very inefficient transmission process.
And this again this is talking about solar
that would far exceed the power demand even the you know what
already exist in those provinces.
Even under a scenario without economic development would continue
and these provinces would grow substantially
in the next couple of decades.
So you would need to essentially put
in significant transmission capacity.
This is power lines right?
You'd have to build extensive infrastructure you know
around the country.
This is costly.
This is something China is doing, starting to do,
but it's bigger than this.
It's also thinking about how our markets power sector reform is a big
issue right now in China.
How you think about pricing these technologies.
How you incentivize the current large power companies.
Which are all still state owned very powerful companies.
The grid companies very very powerful company in China sacred.
You know they are not as excited about this vision I should I say
of the future because it implies a you know very different model
from what they're used to and quite a few costs.
And you know it is a very different type of power grid
when you're integrating as we call it, intermittent resources right?
The sun is not always shining.
The wind's not always blowing so you have to actually think
about how you keep the lights on given this these sort
of new resources and there are ways which we can talk
about if you're interested.
And then finally on this scenario you know of course if you switch
to this you know very cleaner vision
of clean energy you get very dramatic rejections
in air pollutants right.
Sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide
so this would be overall beneficial for health.
One other thing that's happening which could be quite important
in China for incentivizing this transition is the introduction
of a so-called cap and trades system for carbon dioxide.
So you know for many years here in the United States just
about a block away there've been very active debates
about whether the United States should put a cap on its emissions
and then develop an emissions trading system
where by companies would trade by permits,
trade permits the most efficient way possible.
The United States actually helped to pioneer this model
for sulfur dioxide control.
In the northeast it was extremely successful.
This is you know for people
who study environmental policy this is believed to be one
of the most effective, most cost effective
and environmentally effective environmental regulations we've ever
done here and so the ideas that this could apply to carbon.
We're not actually doing
that in this country although a couple states are looking at this.
California and a few others, but China has announced they're going
to do a national program starting in 2017
and right now they have seven pilots
which are underway essentially experimenting
with this and how it might work.
There are policies and I won't go into this for time and detail,
but you know throughout the different government ministries
and agencies in China which support clean energy from a variety of ways
so the Ministry of Science and Technology is supporting research
and development in many of the new technologies
which will be important.
Other agencies like the National Development and Reform Commission,
National Energy Commission helps support large demonstration
projects, support subsidies to promote these technologies
and these are you know spread throughout the economy.
When you look at innovation coming out of China,
this is just showing you US patent applications in clean energy.
So this is an imperfect measure I would say off the bat of innovation,
particularly in China because this is the US view not the China view.
You can look at these data for the US for China as well
from the State Intellectual Property Office, but this is coming
out of the US Patent Office.
You see that even in the United States Chinese innovation,
Chinese patenting activities are already starting to show up here
in terms of you know very active inventors filing
in the United States for inventions in clean energy particularly
in areas like clean coal, carbon capture technologies.
These are all areas where China
if they're not leading now they may be leading in five, ten years.
So I want to end with just a bit of a discussion about cooperation.
I think there's a lot of reasons why it makes sense for countries
around the world to cooperate with China on clean energy.
Essentially if you know we have a lot of things going
on politically related to clean energy.
There's trade tensions.
There's disputes right now
in the World Trade Organizations surround Chinese solar panels
as you may know.
I think if you have a more cooperative perspective
that can help to ease these broader political and trade tensions,
but from a more technical side if you're actually collaborating
on R&D there's actually things that the US does do better.
There's things China does better.
There's things Germany does better in terms of having expertise.
Having ability to bring things to scale quickly and so if you're sort
of bringing together the best of the scientific and technical bodies
of these different countries you can actually speed the rate
of innovation.
Bring down the cost more quickly if you can deal with this sort
of the framework for how you do this and one
of those sticking points does tend to be intellectual property rights.
So if I invent something you know collaboratively with you
and we're both from different countries how do we share the output
of those innovations.
Sounds simple often it's not right
and you know governments get involved in this.
Governments you know are a part of the R&D process.
Private companies are increasingly important in the clean energy space,
but governments can play an important role in helping
to facilitate these partnerships making sure everyone feels
comfortable with the playing field
and then scientists can do their job right.
So I want to mention one model of this
that I think is working extremely well.
This is something called the US China Clean Energy Research Center
the CRC.
This is something that was established back in November of 2009
when President Obama first entered office and back when Secretary Chu
of the then Secretary of Energy was then the Secretary
of Energy this is you know a project that he felt strongly about.
It was the first initiative to set up collaborative R&D in clean energy
between the US and China on a scale of this nature.
This is a huge endeavor.
There are up into the first phase of the project had about you know
over 80 projects happening simultaneously in the US and China.
This brings together researchers from multiple universities,
multiple national laboratories, private companies all working side
by side on a variety of clean energy technologies focusing on coal,
efficient buildings and efficient vehicle technology.
And what's also quite novel about this is that anyone who decided
to join this agreement, so all the labs and governments and companies
that are part of this signed and intellectual property agreement
that said you know anything that comes
out of this will be shared equally among all the researchers whether
they're from the United States or China.
So this has been a really interesting model and one
that I'm watching closely.
The bilateral relationship has really I think picked
up steam in the last few months.
Last month in mid-September there was a Climate Leaders' Summit,
a US-China Climate Leaders' Summit
in Los Angeles you may have heard about.
This was actually the first time where a lot of mayors and governors
and cities from both countries got involved and took
on specific pledges related to climate change.
And again the idea here is that it's great to have the presidents
from sign off on these high level plans and goals, but at the end
of the day it's one thing for Beijing to take
on a huge target it's another thing for you know the mayor
of Guangzhou [assumed spelling] to say that we're going
to do this you know here in our city.
We're going to implement this
and this is what it's going to look like right.
So this is the type of thing that was being discussed at this meeting
and then of course we have the state visit just a few weeks ago
where President Shi was here in Washington.
And you saw some important things come out of this.
This was sort of the last time the presidents were meeting officially
before the Climate Negotiations in Paris.
Although they'll be meeting informally
in the G-20 and a few other place.
A few things came out of this.
First of all was this public announcement
about the trading system
which I mentioned earlier this was the first time you actually had the
president of China say that this is where China was going to do and so
that was a pretty big deal.
China also announced in the context of its broader power Sector Reforms
that they're going to do something called green power dispatch.
This essentially gives priority when you're operating the grid,
as I mentioned earlier, where if you know instead
of dispatching a cold plant first, if it's available,
if you have wind power or solar power also ready to be fed
into the grid and power the city
that you actually you do those first.
So you sort of use all the clean energy first
and only use the dirtier energy as a backup source.
So again this is something they're been experimenting with
and will be interesting to see if they can do this on a large scale.
A bunch of other things announced.
Heavy duty vehicle emissions is if you again if you've been
in China this is trucks, this very polluting source of emissions
and so something they're going to start regulating.
On the international side you know, sticking points for Paris
where essentially if China and United States can come
to some agreement, I think we have hope for broader agreement
because these are really quite quite difficult political issues.
One is just around what we call transparency, transparency in data
and measurement is actually a very complicated issue
and one that's very important if you're going
to start making these pledges people want
to know how do we know you're meeting them?
How do we know what your emissions actually look like?
Financing is extremely important
so we have created something internationally called the Green
Climate Fund.
This is based in Korea.
It includes pledges made by countries from all
over the world primarily industrialized countries.
Although China has made a somewhat surprising announcement
to many people that it would fund essentially the same dollar amount
as the United States.
It essentially met the United States on a dollar for dollar basis,
but it put that money into the China South South Climate
Cooperation Fund.
So this is a fund that China has helped establish
to help support other developing countries in transitioning
to low carbon technology, but that's quite significant this is the
largest you know dollar amount that China has announced
that it would put in to this type of support.
And then finally there's also a really interesting discussion
happening in the International Export Financing Community
about ending financing for coal plants around the world.
So this is something that OPEC here
in the United States has stopped doing.
This is something that you know particularly is China is becoming
increasingly active in the NAIB the New Asian Infrastructure Bank.
Many are wondering is this going
to help build coal plants around the road.
I support Chinese Coal Technology
or will it help export Chinese Wind Technology Solar Technology right.
So this will be I think very interesting to watch.
So what does this all mean for Paris next month?
So for those of you who'll be watching this meeting
that starts November 30th.
You'll be you know this will be quite interesting.
They'll be many heads of state there.
I was at a meeting last week with Secretary Kerry
where he said he planned to be on the ground for the entire two weeks
of the meeting if necessary to make sure it goes well.
Which is not normal.
So I think that shows the significance that the US government
and other governments are placing on this.
I think it's really helpful that we've seen this evolution
in bilateral in the bilateral relationship between China
and the United States on climate change, on clean energy
because that wasn't the case just a few years ago and I think
that this you know we're much more aligned politically in terms
of where both countries are going in seeing this a priority issue
for for domestic implementation not just
for the international community.
We've had all these new agreements signed
and I should say you know the United States has been signing agreements
with all kinds of countries around the world.
They've signed new agreements with India, with Mexico, with Brazil.
China has signed many agreements with other important countries
in the negotiations so I think both countries are playing an important
role in trying to bring others along.
In this agreement and you know you see things showing
up in these bilateral agreements
that for a long time were just really difficult issues
in the negotiations.
Things like intellectual property as I mentioned
and you know we've seen the bilateral announcements lead
to what countries are pledging directly in the UN.
So you know this is I think a really important Segway from bilateral
to multilateral and you know all
in all I think this just sets a much better working environment heading
into the climate negotiations in Paris.
And makes us really much better poised
for some sort of successful outcome.
We can talk about what that would look like if you're interested,
but I you know I think for those of you who remember Copenhagen
and the outcome of that meeting.
We're in a very different place now both
in the international negotiations, but particularly
in the US-China relationship which I do think is quite determine
of the potential success of the meeting.
So I will stop there and I'd be happy
to take any questions thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Question, please repeat your question.
>> Okay, sure yes.
As since yes sir.
>> Could you give me a little deeper assessment
of the the US-China cooperation when it comes
to clean coal technology program?
What did you do see anything commercial coming
out of the agreement?
>> Thank you.
So the question was could you speak a bit
about clean coal technology cooperation
between China and the United States.
This has been a big topic of cooperation
because you know both countries still rely on coal
for the majority of their energy.
However you know if you think about climate change
and how you can continue to burn coal and deal
with climate change the main technological solution we've come
up with is something called carbon capture and sequestration.
So the idea here for those of you who aren't familiar is
that you essentially capture the carbon either before you burn the
coal, after you burn the coal, you take it,
you sequester it probably underground in geologic formations.
We technically know how to do this, but it's very expensive and also
if you're running a coal plant
and you're also running the carbon capture equipment you potentially
have a 1/3 essentially you know a 30 plus percent energy penalty
so you're actually burn more coal to get the same amount of electricity
if you're also capturing the carbon.
I hope I explained that clearly.
Anyway that's been a big focus of cooperation
between the two countries,
but I think it has been much slower than many people hoped.
Mostly because of the cost and the sort
of technical challenges which I mentioned.
You know there's a lot of technical interest in this,
but not a lot of political interest and it's very expensive
to build the first few demonstration demonstration plants.
We have a plant here in the United States
that where this technology's being demonstrated in conjunction
with enhanced oil recovery.
So if you can actually use the carbon carbon dioxide
to help enhance the way that which you're extracting oil
from the ground it makes it more cost effective.
So this is something China's doing too.
Quan-Hong [assumed spelling] has a plant called Green Jen [assumed
spelling] which is in is one of the places
where this is being demonstrated in China as well.
Although again this is a gasification plant
that hasn't moved along as quickly
on the carbon capture side as many had hoped.
So I think this is still an area that's going to be it's going
to you know be a focus, a cooperation.
The last presidential summit had some new announcements of projects
that they're going to do in this area,
but I actually think it's been sort of the biggest challenge in terms
of technical cooperation.
In the back yes.
>> Have lower crude oil prices incentivized or [inaudible] more
in a sense getting clean energy?
>> Great question.
So the question was have lower crude oil prices,
how's that affected clean energy development?
You know it's I would say there's a lot of concern
that low oil prices would essentially mean why should we
invest in clean energy right
because if oil prices are high we look for alternatives.
If oil prices are low we just sort of stick with status quo.
Couple problems I think though with that assumption you know one is
that in the United States particularly most
of our oil is going to transportation right.
It's going to gasoline petroleum.
Most of our wind/solar et cetera for electricity right
and we don't have a lot of electric cars yet in the United States
so these don't tend to actually be overlapping sort of substitutes yet.
In China it's a little bit blurrier,
but because they are actually starting
to do electric vehicles more quickly.
But again you know I think this is less of an issue
for clean energy in the power sector.
It could change and I think the biggest thing that's had an impact
is not so much oil prices, although it's linked,
is non-conventional gas expiration oil and gas.
So particularly the shale gas right we to hear about here
in the United States which has really revolutionized the US Energy
System and you know the fact that we have cheap abundant natural gas
in a way we did not five years ago.
I think that is what is potentially affecting investment in renewables.
I think because you have a lot states in the US
that have pretty aggressive renewable portfolio standards
that mandate you actually do a certain share of renewables.
We've still seen pretty aggressive growth
in wind and solar for example.
And China has not had the same success
in domestic shale gas exploration as the United States,
although on paper their reserves are potentially much larger
than those of the United States.
So down the line if those get developed
that could I think you know be a really interesting,
but China right now uses a tiny amount
of natural gas in their energy system.
They need more and so for China this wouldn't necessarily be what we call
like a bridge fuel in the US,
but this could be a really important really important source of energy
for the industrial sector for power for a variety of uses
that would substitute coal.
Thank you.
Ah yes.
>> Thank you for [inaudible].
I have a question [inaudible] in the age of ambition,
he commented China does everything in the fever fashion.
So in your expert opinion how long those new policies [inaudible]
in research and development in energy
and clean energy [inaudible] sustainable.
Can they be reversed after another [inaudible]?
I'm just curious.
>> Yeah great question.
So the question was you know are the policies we're seeing are these sort
of short term policies if I have it right, fevers you know trends
and will they go away in a few years with the next the next big thing?
You know I think that we've actually seen that this point about 10
to 15 years of sustained focus on clean energy investment in China
from the research and development side and from the deployment side.
China started really encouraging when power development in 2002-2003.
So it's been more than 10 years since they put
in place the first aggressive policies
and those haven't changed substantially
if anything they've gotten stronger.
And I think that you know there of course will be shifts you know
as things evolve, but you know I think the air pollution problem is
worse now than it was then.
The I think they've they understand now
that they can play extremely important role globally
in manufacturing these technologies and be a real competitor
that this is a source of local economic development.
It's not just an environmental policy.
It's an economic policy.
So I think there's just a lot
of reasons why continued clean energy support is actually it's sort
of aligns with the broader priorities of the government
which are much bigger than sort of just an you know passing interest
in environmental protection or in clean energy specifically.
So I don't think it's going anywhere and you know
if anything they'll be new technologies, they'll be new focus,
but I see that staying quite central and maybe getting larger.
Yeah.
>> [inaudible] clean air effort
and development how long do you think the [inaudible]
of people can view and see actually clean air in the cities?
>> Yeah so the question is so how long till the air is clean?
When will we see results?
Well you know it's interesting you know air pollution is quite
complicated right.
If you reduce one pollutant you're not you may increase something else
because there's very interesting atmospheric chemistry happening
right and we're actually seeing right now that if you look
at the data from 2015 to date everything is lower than last year
and the year before so pollution is down this year.
If you've been in China this year you may have felt this.
I was in China in June and I actually had ten blue sky days
in a row which was quite amazing, but that's not a trend right.
Just because I see blue sky days that's
that doesn't say oh all the policies are working.
This is a trend because again these things go up and down.
They go up and down because of the way this depends
on broader weather conditions right.
There's a lot of factors here.
So we won't know I think for a few more years how well these policies
are working, but you know if if China really does get serious
about restricting the building of new coal plants.
Of affecting vehicle emissions in cities the issues tends
to be vehicle related pollution because at this point a lot
of the factories and power plants have been moved outside the city.
So depends where you are with the causes,
but you know they're controlling it in sort of all the right places
and then the question is just how long will it take
for the implementation to lead to results.
No. Ah yeah.
>> I have [inaudible] new question because of putting so much money
in research, how have space solar research,
I was very interested [inaudible] space program
which doesn't have any programs that leading down to the [inaudible]
and also Korea and Japan [inaudible]
and also [inaudible] clean energy [inaudible] to the hydro
for the environmental issue [inaudible].
>> Yeah so the question is about sort of you know other models
of clean energy space solar and the environmental impacts
of wind power and things like this?
Yes so these are all I think issues which are sort
of just well actually I can't really speak to the space solar one.
I'd be interested to learn from you more about that.
I don't follow that as closely, but in terms of the sighting of wind
and sort of concerns
about environmental impact I think you know this is something
that there needs to be much more focus on.
At the moment the wind the wind development tends to be far
from populations but that won't last
if you do the you know the visions I showed you right
of the very aggressive wind development.
You know in this country the real challenge
to wind development has been offshore development
so you know there's a lot of potential here in.
As I mentioned earlier if you want
to build wind power you ideally put it near near the load,
near the people right where the demand is.
In the US that's essentially the eastern coastline.
We don't really have empty space to put huge wind farms
so you don't see very many around here, but you know off
of Massachusetts, off of New Jersey they're looking
at doing these offshore projects,
but as you may know not a single one has been built
yet in the United States because they've been tied
up in you know political approval procedures,
public you know public opposition to the projects.
People don't want to look at them essentially and you want
to make sure it's not going
to affect the ocean environment, affect marine shipping.
Things like that.
China actually has very aggressive targets
for offshore wind you know partly
because they have some coastline that's not being used recreationally
as much, is more industrial.
But it it is still challenging.
It's more expensive to do it that way and so I think that's
where you've actually seen the biggest opposition and sort
of the slowest the slowest progress.
Yeah in the back.
>> You talk about these long term emissions production agreements
between nations.
What is your understanding with the monitoring mechanisms will be
and what do you foresee that being one of the main topics in discussion
in Paris and kind of what?
Well I'll leave it at that.
>> Yeah great questions
so the question is what will the monitoring mechanisms be
for the emissions targets
that countries are are putting forward in advance of Paris.
This is actually going to be yeah a large topic of discussion.
It has been already for a few years, but the model we're in now leading
up to Paris is that countries are coming forward
with what we call INDC's.
These are their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions
so what does that mean?
It basically means every countries sort of makes up what they are going
to do and they pledge that to the UN,
but that they can do it in any metrics.
Any you know they can say we're going to do renewable energy target
or we're going to reduce carbon emissions on an intensity basis
or we're going to reduce our growth rate in emissions off of a baseline
which we've determined is a future counterfactual of what you know
and so I don't want to get too technical right, but essentially
if someone agrees to reduce their emissions 40 percent from business
as usual by 2030, what was business as usual and how do we know
if they achieve that or not and how do we calculate this
if their metrics are different from another countries?
So you know long story short I think the issue
of measurement is extremely important issue,
but it's a very political issue because countries are sensitive
to essentially having everyone else inspect their emissions data.
You know if you remember back in 2007 it was it was reported
by an international organization
that China's emissions had surpassed those of the US,
the next largest emitter and we're now the largest in the world.
This was back in 2007.
That happened many years before even the US Department of Energy sort
of expected that would happen.
But the first response from the Chinese government was no that's
not accurate.
Like that that didn't happen right and because honestly
like everyone was still trying to figure
out what what was the right number.
Like that you know what are the measurements and it's very hard
to get very accurate data on this.
I think one of the most important things that could come
out of China's National Cap and Trade Program, I referred to,
would be a robust national measurement system for carbon data
for greenhouse gasses, because if you're going
to start allocating permits in trading in allowances
of carbon you need to have a really good idea
of what's the total amount of allowances?
Who's emitting what?
Are you hitting your target?
Are you below your target?
How many permits do you have to buy to meet your target right?
So this has to be verified very carefully.
So that they're going to have to put that system in place for that policy
to work and that would have great spillover effects
for the climate negotiations, but it's not just China.
This is an issue in all countries.
You know particularly countries
that are still developing a robust statistical and measuring system.
Ah yeah.
>> I'm curious to hear your thoughts a little more of your thoughts
on how aggressive China's target center.
Specifically their areas that you think you're surprised
in how aggressive [inaudible] or were there other areas
where you didn't think they were aggressive enough?
>> So the question is to can I comment
on how aggressive China's targets are
and which ones are maybe more aggressive than others?
And where I was surprised?
That's a great question.
You know I think that I do think China's targets are aggressive
and I I think that so there is sort of three big energy related targets.
Which are in the the current pledge for Paris.
One is the peak year.
One is the non-fossil target and one is the carbon intensity target.
You know in discussing ambition all you can do is sort of look at these
as Ike [assumed spelling] said business as usual trends
and projections and say is what they're agreeing to maybe more
or less robust than what would have happened in the absence
of a target right and so that's the only way you can really assess how
how ambitious it is.
So if you look at the peak year I mean as I said it
for a long time no one actually believed a peak year was
in the cards anytime soon and so the fact
that the government publically said no we are going to peak
by 2030 maybe earlier, that's a big deal.
One issue though at that target is they haven't said
where they're going to peak.
So if you imagine a peak you can peak here,
you can peak here [laughter] and in terms of the global climate system
and total sort of atmospheric emissions it really matters right
where China peaks.
So that is sort of yet to be determined and
and will be very important.
A low peak would obviously be be preferable
from a climate perspective.
The non-fossil energy target is is I think quite aggressive.
You know there are I showed you a scenario
of a much more aggressive vision of of the future,
but that's a very very very ambitious
and maybe not politically realistic or economic realistic,
or technically you will be technically challenging I'll put it
that way.
So you could get there, but it is a really different vision
of the power system going forward.
So I think you know the target China report is within the range
of of a sort of more more politically realistic studies
and then the carbon intensity target again if you look.
I did a calculation just looking what the US Department
of Energy had projected for China's carbon intensity
and their target is more aggressive than that for example so.
I'll leave it at that.
Yep.
>> Is anybody doing anything search in the [inaudible]
so they say money you know like for heating
or air conditioning and things like that?
>> Yeah so the question was is there any research being done
on how you can save energy in the design of buildings and homes?
Yes this is a huge issue in China as you know China's building a lot
of new buildings, commercial and residential and so
when I mention the US-China Clean Energy Research Center buildings is
one of the three pillars of that.
And there's been a lot of really interesting inventions
and policy sort of models coming out of that.
So China is now putting in place pretty aggressive building standards
for new buildings and you know there's different ways you can do
you know more efficient materials.
One of the projects that came out of the CRC it was sort
of a simple technology, but really quite innovative.
It's a white roof technology.
So it's essentially a roof coating that makes your roof more reflective
and makes the entire building cooler.
And that's an example of something that Dao [phonetic] and some
of the other companies involved had and some
of the researchers involved had come up with
and they're demonstrating I believe that technology and a bunch
of other technologies in China.
China's been doing you know a lot of these sort
of demonstration buildings to show state
of the art energy efficiency technologies as well
as then implementing them more broadly on more general buildings.
So again I think it's it's really a question of enforcement making sure
for all the new buildings going in that they are sort
of the greenest most energy saving technology possible
because there's really no reason for them not to at this point.
It's really you save money for the the builders.
It's an incentive issue.
You know if you're living in an apartment building
that you didn't build you don't care if it's efficient
if you're not paying the heating and you know, but it's so it
with buildings it tends to be you need incentivize the actual builders
to actually put the standards in place so then that gets passed
on to the end users of the building down the line.
>> Please join me to thank Dr. Lewis.
It was wonderful talk.
>> [applause] Thank you.
Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
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