Solar photovoltaic modules on a hillside in a village in Chuzhou

China’s Bold Energy Vision

Apr 2, 2018 Jeffrey D. Sachs

China’s proposed Global Energy Interconnection – based on renewables, ultra-high-voltage transmission, and an AI-powered smart grid – represents the boldest global initiative by any government to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement. It is a strategy fit for the scale of the most important challenge the world faces today.

BEIJING – The boldest plan to achieve the targets set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement comes from China. The Paris accord commits the world’s governments to keeping global warming to well below 2º Celsius (3.6º Fahrenheit) relative to the pre-industrial level. This can be accomplished mainly by shifting the world’s primary energy sources from carbon-based fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) to zero-carbon, renewable (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, ocean, biomass), and nuclear energy by the year 2050. China’s Global Energy Interconnection (GEI) offers a breathtaking vision of how to achieve this energy transformation.

Few governments appreciate the scale of this transformation. Climate scientists speak of the “carbon budget” – the total amount of carbon dioxide that humanity can emit in the coming years while still keeping global warming to under 2º. Current estimates put the mid-point estimate of the world’s carbon budget at around 600 billion tons. Humanity currently emits around 40 billion tons of CO₂ per year, implying that the world has only until mid-century or even sooner to phase out fossil fuels and move entirely to zero-emission sources of primary energy.

Here’s what needs to be done. Today’s electricity is largely generated by burning coal and natural gas; these thermal power plants need to be phased out and replaced by electricity generated by solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and other non-carbon sources. Today’s buildings are heated mostly by boilers, radiators, and furnaces fueled by heating oil and natural gas; these need to be replaced by buildings heated by electricity. Today’s vehicles run on petroleum products; these need to be replaced by electric vehicles.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs

Writing for PS since 1995
305 Commentaries

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy, and most recently, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.

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Burak Guler May 23, 2018

As identified by Prof. Sachs, this is a bold vision to be undertaken. However, there is a way of achieving this grand vision is by employing a recently developed Regional Energy Hub Framework s a standardized energy policy tool enables countries to keep all options open while identifying common interest assets such as interconnectors to enable trading while reaching the Paris targets regionally rather than nationally. We have developed this framework and more could be found here: https://wise.uwaterloo.ca/news1/newsupdates/wise_study_a_regional_energy_hub_for_a_global_transition_to_a_low_ca
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Joseph Zorzin Apr 12, 2018

I find it amazing that few people object to paving over landscapes for solar "farms" as shown at the top of this article as if they can't grasp the ecological damage that ensues. Solar belongs on buildings, not the landscape.
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Alex Aslanidis Apr 10, 2018

I just can't believe what I'm reading in this piece of paid propaganda, oops, sorry, I meant article.

China, the country that is still plagued by heavy smog in it's major cities, is praised to death as an Eden of green energy incentives. What?

Solar and wind are somehow suggested as viable alternatives, even though they still can't provide base-load power. What?

Nuclear is also suggested as an alternative, but somehow the storage of radioactive waste isn't considered a problem, and it's like Fukushima never happened. What?

Heating and vehicles should switch to electricity, as if electricity is somehow generated in a vacuum, and not primarily generated by coal, gas and nuclear. What?

Also, has anybody thought whether the capacity even exists for the production of so much electricity? And who's gonna invest in it? The mercantilists or the deficit-spenders?

What? What? What? What?

This article is a joke.
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Godfree Roberts Apr 6, 2018

As it reaches the end of it industrialization dash, China is again becoming an environmental model: it installs more than half the world’s new solar and wind capacity each year and nuclear, wind, solar and hydropower now generate thirty percent of its electricity. In total, it invests more in clean energy each year than America and Europe combined and is increasing that investment annually, by eight percent, through 2030.

China has been quietly reducing its energy intensity for decades: between 1980-2010, while the economy grew eighteen-fold, energy consumption grew fivefold–a seventy percent decline. The government plans a further fifteen percent reduction by 2020 and the country will reach its Paris Climate Agreement goal–reducing emissions intensity by seventy percent below its 2005 levels–long before the promised 2030 date and progress in reducing particulate emissions is equally heartening.

Of 120 major urban areas, none was ever among the world’s most polluting cities and ninety percent reached their PM2.5 or PM10 reduction targets and fourteen cut PM2.5 concentrations twenty percent in 2017 alone. Beijing shut down its last coal-burning power plants that year and announced a switchover date to all-electric transportation. The mayor promised that, by 2020, fifty-six percent of days will have good air quality, PM2.5 density will one-third lower than in 2015 and, by 2030, clean energy will provide ninety percent of the city’s needs. The industrially intensive Pearl River Delta became the first key region reach the EPA’s target for US air quality and the campaign is being replicated across the country’s industrial belt and the New York Times notes that China’s winning war on air pollution promises extraordinary life expectancy gains.
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Jacki Rawn Apr 3, 2018

I must say that this is bullshit, not only not realistic, but fundamentally not necessary. Right, the renewable distribution is not geographically average, but it is over-stated the situation to link the global grid lines together. Please don't think such a redicilous agency can represent the China.
- Vince Zhou Apr 10, 2018
  
  I would like to say you are too arbitrary to post commont like this. It seem like the Global Energy Interconnection GEIDCO proposed is a great future for all our mainkind including you. Nowadays we are short of fossil resource and clean energy is the only way to achieve sustainable development. What we should do is transmit power from clean resource center to load center.
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- Jacki Rawn Apr 3, 2018
  
  I must say that this is bs, not only not realistic, but fundamentally not necessary. Right, the renewable distribution is not geographically average, but it is over-stated the situation to link the global grid lines together. Please don't think such a redicilous agency can represent the China.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
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John Landrum Apr 3, 2018

According to the World Energy Council in 2015 oil, natural gas and coal accounted for 86% of the world's energy. Not much has changed statistically since then. British Petroleum forecasts that by 2035 oil, natural gas and coal will account for 78% of the world's energy. To hope, pray or forecast that fossil fuels will be eliminated at any time in the 21st Century is ridiculous and totally unrealistic. China has a pollution problem caused by coal fired electrical plants that operate without any scrubbers whatsoever, so their priority is to clean China's air first, and that is long overdue. Fossil fuels are here to stay and necessary to provide fuels to run the transportation industry, feedstock for the chemical industry and to generate electricity for business and families worldwide. Do not expect the elimination of fossil fuels at any time in the future - it is not feasible under any rational scenario. Mr. Sachs seems lost in world that cannot accept reality. His statement, "The world has enough zero-carbon energy sources to power the entire global economy – indeed to power a global economy much larger than today’s", is not even close to the truth and it will not be true in his or his grandchildren's lifetime.
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Just Berkhout Apr 3, 2018

>> (35.6º Fahrenheit)
please correct to "(3.6º Fahrenheit)"
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Godfree Roberts Apr 2, 2018

Many thanks for this! I'm a China-watcher and thought I was on top of positive China news but somehow–probably quite innocently–our media failed to report this.
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