October is Solar Energy Month here in California. I hope many of you were able to kick-start the solar celebrations with us during San Diego’s fifth annual Solar Energy Week. It was a great example of the mission driven work CCSE does best – bringing homeowners and business owners together with energy experts, industry representatives and policymakers to spur innovation and drive the adoption of solar technologies. The future is bright for solar in San Diego, California, the U.S. and around the world.
Prior to our Solar Energy Week, I visited a booming solar marketplace in China when I participated in a San Diego World Trade Center clean-tech trade mission. Fueled by tremendous government support and low-cost labor, the Chinese solar manufacturing sector has been growing steadily, and their leading PV manufacturer, Suntech, recently set a world record for panel efficiency and is now vying with Arizona’s First Solar to be the global manufacturing leader in PV. While China is making great progress in renewable and solar energy, they are still building, on average, a new coal-fired power plant every week in efforts to keep up with increasing electricity demands. As a result, China is now the world’s leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions and subsequent global climate change, followed closely by the United States.
Demand for solar PV is still not as strong in China or the U.S. as it is in Europe, but after conversations with solar energy manufacturers in China and from all that I’m reading, even considering the global economic conditions, I believe that demand in both markets will surpass Europe in the next few years and that the development and growth of both solar markets are closely tied. Already, more than two-thirds of all installed solar water heating systems in the world are installed in China. Learning from each other and developing areas of cooperation between the US and China, solar markets can lead to economic benefits for both countries – in PV manufacturing, concentrated solar power and solar water heating.
We need a strong global solar marketplace to achieve a clean energy future for all nations and to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The important perspective on all this is that China and the U.S. can achieve more working together to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than they can working separately.
A McKinsey Quarterly report issued last month concludes that only collaboration between the U.S. and China will create an environment where clean-energy technologies can thrive. The report states unequivocally:
Unless the two work together to provide the scale, standards and technology transfer necessary to make a handful of promising but expensive new, clean-energy technologies successful, momentum to curb global warming could stall and neither country will maximize its gains in terms of green jobs, new companies and energy security.
Clean-energy solutions are critical for reducing the greenhouse gases produced not only by these two high-emitting nations, but also by countries worldwide. It is incredibly important that avenues to joint solar success be pursued and that nations and industries cooperate for the common environmental good, which brings me back to San Diego’s Solar Energy Week and California’s Solar Energy Month and all the news we have for you this October. Every day is solar energy day here at CCSE, and we invite you to continue working with us to transform our energy use for a sustainable future here and around the world.
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