Energy policy experts in the United States lauded China's role in scaling low-carbon energy technologies and urged collaboration with China to meet the goal of the Paris Agreement.
John Helveston with George Washington University and Jonas Nahm with Johns Hopkins University published an opinion article on Thursday in the journal Science, noting that China has emerged as the global leader in the mass production of low-carbon energy technologies (LCETs).
The low-carbon tech required to meet climate targets has become increasingly cost-competitive with fossil fuel sources, in part because of China's investments in manufacturing, according to Helveston and Nahm.
They also expressed their concerns that unsettled trade relations between China and the United States may delay the commercialization of LCETs, thereby risking missing the narrow remaining window to reduce global emissions.
Since the 1980s, the United States has increasingly developed into an ecosystem of smaller, entrepreneurial firms focused on the generation of new ideas, so many U.S. startups stand to benefit from collaborating with Chinese partners to access the manufacturing capabilities to turn their innovations into mass-produced, commercially-viable products, they said.
The authors cited the example of Innovalight, a Silicon Valley startup, which was able to commercialize its core technology, a silicon ink, only after a Chinese solar manufacturer invested a year into jointly testing the technology under mass production conditions that were only available in China.
"It is unrealistic to expect that another nation will be able to rival China's capabilities in LCET scale-up in the time frame needed to limit climate change to below two Celsius degrees," according to the article.
Also, in a global marketplace such as energy technology, it is unlikely that the entire value chain for a complex, manufactured product would lie entirely within national boundaries, said the experts.
The United States is a leader in low-carbon energy technology innovation, and China is the largest LCET investor with innovative capabilities in manufacturing and scale-up. A successful collaboration allows Chinese manufacturers to gain technological know-how and its U.S. partners to gain the manufacturing and scale-up solutions, they argued.
To sum up, Helveston and Nahm suggested that building on the advanced mass manufacturing capabilities of Chinese LCET firms was the most promising path toward rapid global decarbonization.
Editor:Cherie
