Renewable energy: China's domestic and global power surge

2010 has been a year in which the most significant renewable energy developments in China resulted not from new legislation or policies, but from the cumulative, self-reinforcing and accelerating economic and technological effects of previous legislation and policies. These effects include newly visible market shares and influence of Chinese participants in domestic and global markets.

    China's growing demand for energy appeared, about half a decade ago, not only to threaten rapid depletion of domestic and global supplies of non-renewable energy sources, but also to foreshadow (in clouds of coal-generated smoke) an even more rapid choking off of public health, agriculture and economic growth in China, in its neighbors and (through carbon emissions and climate change) in the entire world. But less than six years after the PRC Renewable Energy Law (中华人民共和国可再生能源法) created a legislative framework for renewable energy promotion, China has fundamentally changed its domestic trends, and now is substantially influencing global trends, towards increased usage of renewable energy. While filling in its legislative framework with a series of national and local legal, tax and financial regulations and policies during the intervening years, China has hosted and orchestrated substantial installation of renewable energy generating products and, more importantly, enormous investments in factories to manufacture them. These factories represent a large and growing constituency for increasing domestic and international installation of renewable energy generating products, and for increasing China's role not only in their manufacture, but also in related services.

Laws and policies