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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is visiting China this week, and she seems to be making climate change a key issue on her trip. While in Beijing, she talked about how although the Chinese people are certainly entitled to improve their standard of living, the issue of greenhouse gas emissions must be addressed.
It’s no secret, of course, that China has been building coal-fired power plants at a blistering pace (two per week) to provide electricity to its rapidly growing middle class. The argument in defense of this has traditionally been: Yes, China is emitting lots of greenhouse gases, but it’s still less than the US when you consider emissions per capita. Plus, the US used coal to develop quickly, so why shouldn’t China?
Secretary Clinton responded by saying that, first of all, China’s per-capita emissions have now exceeded the US. Secondly, climate change doesn’t care about per-capita anything – it’s about the total amount of emissions, period. And lastly: True, the US developed using coal, but that was a mistake. Please don’t repeat our mistake.
The subtle finger-pointing was put aside, however, when Secretary Clinton took a tour of Beijing’s new Taiyanggong Thermal Power Plant. This CHCP (combined-heating-cooling-and-power plant) uses natural gas to drive the turbine, part of the waste heat for municipal heating and the rest of the waste heat for cooling (via absorption coolers). This power plant does not emit the particulates found in coal exhaust, emits less CO2, and is far more efficient. It’s a poster child for the next generation of Chinese power production.
But let’s be realistic for a second. It’s not going to be easy to replace the two weekly coal plants with two of these things. This plant was paid for in part by the UN Clean Development Mechanism, a fund that helps pay for clean energy projects in the “developing world”. This was great for publicity, but what we really need is either some favorable economics (maybe these plants would pay for themselves over time if there were a carbon tax/cap), or a serious government initiative to bring coal to a halt.
Via Treehugger
Image via Reuters
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written by Loosely_coupled, February 23, 2009
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written by Andy Simpson, February 23, 2009
China's per-capita emissions are under 1/4 of those of the USA and a fair amount of the related energy is used to make goods for the USA.
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Unfortunately, neither China or the US has an emissions policy that makes sense. We tax income and use the money to pay polluters to stop. We "grandfather" old plants (in the US ones that were supposed to have been decommissioned), and let them pollute at no cost. How about making polluters pay a cost, then give it to the people (who end up paying for the electricity, etc.)? It's silly to do it the other way around.
I don't really see that this new gas cogeneration plant needs to rely on a subsidy-- we need a reference on that claim. I read the project report at http://cdm.unfccc.int/Projects...2/iProcess
and see that the cost of this plant is lower than the baseline coal plant, but electricity generated is more. Levelized cost (excluding cogenerated heat sales) is 4.4 US-cents/kWh and the baseline coal plant would be 3.3 c/kWh. The project give an unfavorable return on investment 6%, compared to 10% with emissions credits (the coal baseline is 8%). It looks like the credit is ~$5/tonne-CO2. Note the price of electricity is still pretty low.