China Leading Global Race to Make Clean EnergyChina vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the
world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.
China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the
world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
These efforts to dominate the global manufacture of renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.
China’s biggest advantage may be its domestic demand for electricity, rising 15 percent a year.
To meet demand in the coming decade, according to statistics from the International Energy Agency,China will need to add nearly nine times as much electricity generation capacity as the United States will.
So while Americans are used to thinking of themselves as having the world’s largest market in many industries, China’s market for power equipment dwarfs that of the United States, even though the American market is more mature. That means Chinese producers enjoy enormous efficiencies from large-scale production.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/business/energy-environment/31renew.html?ref=global-home