Global Work Party 10/10/10: Building a Green China
Posted October 10, 2010 in Greening China, Solving Global Warming
As part of the 10/10/10 Global Work Party designed to celebrate climate solutions, NRDC is getting back to work on building a green China after a week at the Tianjin climate negotiations. I am excited to announce that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has just awarded NRDC and a consortium of partners, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, $12.5 million to work on green buildings in China over the next five years. Our consortium will match DOE’s contribution, bringing the total U.S. investment to at least $25 million. Chinese counterparts will contribute an additional $25 million (see DOE’s announcement here).
This consortium will develop technologies for low-energy residential and commercial buildings, as well as work on commercialization of these technologies, development of associated policies and research on how human behavior affects building energy use. The consortium is part of the new U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center that was announced by President Obama and President Hu Jintao during President Obama’s trip to China last November.
Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs David Sandalow said that this new partnership will “help to save energy and cut costs in buildings in both the United States and China.” It will also “create new export opportunities for American companies, ensure that the United States remains at the forefront of technology innovation and help to reduce carbon pollution.”
Energy efficiency is the cheapest, fastest, cleanest, and most reliable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in any country, and DOE’s commitment to buildings is a substantial new investment in an area where NRDC has worked for many years. Our work on China’s first internationally certified green building, for example – the Agenda 21 building in Beijing – won China’s first Green Building Innovation award. We also helped develop China’s first national building energy code and, more recently, a national green building labeling system. Thus, I am particularly excited by our newly expanded opportunity to help China and the U.S. work together to promote sustainable urban development through building energy efficiency.
China’s Building Sector Has Enormous Energy and Climate Savings Potential
In recent years, China has made significant progress on building energy efficiency, yet buildings still consume one-quarter of the country’s total energy, and this fraction continues to grow with China’s urban population. Already, China’s buildings consume more energy than the country’s three largest heavy industries—iron, steel, and cement—combined. When you consider that these materials feed China’s urbanization, the energy footprint of the buildings sector is enormous.
During the Tianjin climate conference, I participated on a panel about strategies to reduce China’s emissions from coal, and spoke about the enormous potential energy savings and carbon emission reductions from greening China’s buildings. (See my presentation here). More details can be found in the report we coauthored with the Boston Consulting Group, From Gray to Green: How Energy Efficient Buildings Can Make China’s Rapid Urbanization Sustainable.
Our analysis found that even a modest increase in building energy efficiency could save China 170 billion kWh and reduce its CO2 emissions by 170 million metric tons a year by 2015. These savings—achievable by reducing energy use by 50 percent in five percent of existing buildings and 60 percent of new ones—are equivalent to stopping construction of 50 large (500-megawatt) coal-fired power plants, installing 30,000 new wind turbines, or filling 4,000 Tian’anmen Squares with rainforest.
New Funding Will Help NRDC Expand Its Current Efforts and Achieve More Results
Over the next five years, with support from DOE and the Energy Foundation, NRDC and our consortium partners will expand our efforts to help China accelerate its green buildings effort. This investment could not come at a better time. In the next two decades, half of the world’s new buildings will be built in China. By focusing on building efficiency, we have the opportunity to ensure that this new development enhances rather than detracts from the global effort to tackle climate change, and moves the ball forward in the international negotiations taking place now and in the future.
This post was coauthored with Bruce Ho.
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Comments
Jim Bullis, Miastrada Company — Oct 11 2010 03:58 PM
We are teaching China? You are kidding of course.
Perhaps we should go to school first, and listen to them.
How could anyone object if CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) could actually work at a reasonable cost? There is little chance of this of course, and this has been stated by the EPA when they said that capturing a ton of CO2, forget about sequestering cost, would cost up to $95 per ton of that CO2. By violating the ‘reasonable’ criterion, they acknowledged this would not work. Of course, they did not conclude that, rather they attempted to foist off the fact that capturing a ton of CO2 corresponds to only 12/44 ton of actual carbon, so the effective cost for using coal is far more than $95 per ton of coal. Failure to put it in these terms suggests an attempt by the EPA to obfuscate the meaning of their study; barring that, it might mean that they do not realize that a ton of ‘carbon’ is different from a ton of ‘CO2’.
But we all agree that sequestering would be sweet. How might we do that in a way that would not clobber the US economy? I would even give up pointing out the fallacy of the EV.
Apparently China is up on this. At: http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/23/are-chinese-emissions-pledges-a-game-changer-for-senate-action-president-hu-un-speech/ Joe Romm offers a quote from China President Hu:
——quote starts:
Third, we will energetically increase forest carbon … we will endeavor to increase forest coverage by 40 million hectares and forest stock volume by 1.3 billion cubic meters by 2020 from the 2005 levels.
quote ends——-
Now the magnitudes of forest mass needed to balance their coal burning system is much larger than Pres. Hu would accomplish on his stated plan, but it is far closer to the needed scale than anything involving renewables. But they did build the largest dam in the world, so forest establishment could well be within reach, using water from that system.
But if we were listening, we might realize that a North American water redistribution project could enable massive forests in the Western Deserts of the USA which would sequester CO2, where the amount of standing wood mass would balance a ton of coal used, on a roughly ton for ton basis.
This would be ‘carbon’ sequestration that worked, and it would be a net economic benefit for our country, not a clobbering load that could lead us further into our current depression.
Something really new, huh?
We might not be able to enjoy complaining about the evil coal companies if we set a public policy that made coal into a non-problem. Well, maybe we could give up that pass-time.
Oh yes, the project to establish and manage the standing forests here considered, would be an opportunity to offer large scale employment to Americans. And the work done would be to establish a permanent infrastructure that would produce value from which to repay the investment in work in the beginning phases.
Now we should remind ourselves that Chinese are capable of developing markets for their products. While the brilliant engineers there might be willing to listen to lectures from environmentalists about energy, which of course is subject matter that environmentalists find a little challenging, they might be really thinking about how they will sell solar panels and windmills to our confused governments.
Robert Price — Oct 14 2010 10:21 AM
Great to see some significant funding behind this very worthwhile initiative! Having been fortunate enough to attend the ribbon-cutting for the Agenda 21 Building as a USDOE official (now a consultant), I look forward to seeing what NRDC and its partners accomplish in this exciting new effort.