“With great fanfare, First Solar signed a preliminary agreement with China last fall to build the world’s largest solar-power plant in the Mongolian desert. The deal was hailed as the first major example of the United States and China cooperating on a big-ticket energy project, and the largest foray by a U.S. company into Asia’s fast-growing alternative- energy market…. Nearly a year later, the deal has not been completed and there is growing skepticism as to whether it will happen.
Chinese competitors in the solar business have complained openly about the U.S. company, First Solar, getting such a lucrative contract. A planned June 1 date to break ground has been missed. Government officials from the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, where the plant would be built, say they plan to open the project to competitive bidding.
Many solar-industry insiders now say the deal, outlined in a “memorandum of understanding,” was mainly a showpiece for Chinese officials to demonstrate support for one of Obama’s signature initiatives, strategic energy cooperation.
What happened to the Mongolian solar farm project reads like a cautionary tale on the pitfalls facing U.S. firms trying to enter the Chinese market, particularly in a sector such as alternative energy, which has many indigenous competitors.”
The Washington Post has the full story.
On that topic, Dallas Kachan pointed to the following:
- IPOs: According to data we collected at the Cleantech Group, in 2009 (the last full year for which data was available as of this writing), China accounted for almost three quarters of all cleantech IPO proceeds worldwide, well ahead of the U.S., which had only 26%; and to date in 2010, the top three cleantech IPOs of the year have all been Chinese companies
- M&As: The top region for cleantech M&A activity in 2009 was Asia (35% of total), followed by Europe (31%) and North America (26%), according to our same research above
- Solar: 7 of the 10 largest solar manufacturers in the world by production volume are now Asian, #2 being China’s Suntech Power, which in 2009 surpassed even Japan’s Sharp, the longtime leader. This according to a roundup by respected photovoltaic trade pub Photon International (subscribers only; order the back issue here.)
- REEs: China holds a monopoly on rare earth elements (REEs), critical raw materials for wind turbines and electric motors such as those used in electric vehicles like the Tesla and hybrids like the Prius. It controls 97 percent of commercially available rare earth element supplies, and has recently begun to reduce the amount it exports (at Cleantech Group, we produced the authoritative report on the subject, précis here.)
- Stimulus: The amount of stimulus funding China has allocated to clean technologies, including water, waste and other non-energy cleantech infrastructure, is 4 times that of the U.S. (221 billion vs. ~60 billion)
- R&D: There’s been a doubling of private R&D in China in recent years; China could soon surpass the U.S. in R&D spending, according to Lund University in Sweden
- Speed: China is making decisions quickly, and isn’t encumbered by democratic process. This January, China announced intentions to build a 2 GW B concentrating solar thermal plant. In the words of Bill Gross of eSolar (by way of Tom Friedman), the company whose technology was selected, “in less time than it took the U.S. DOE to do stage 1 of an application review for a 92 MW project in New Mexico, China approved, signed and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project.”
- Nukes: If you don’t already consider nuclear a clean energy technology, you should. China is expecting to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020, and is already hard at work on half of them; the rest of the world combined might build 15
- Investment: A recent report by Breakthrough Institute called Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant claims China, South Korea and Japan have already collectively passed the United States in the production of virtually all clean energy technologies, and over the next few years, these countries will be expected to out-invest the United States.
