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China's big wind

Sara Wolcott | Tuesday 30th June 2009

In case you haven't noticed, China is getting into wind. They just announced a $140bn (84bn) wind farm building programme. That's seven giant wind farms providing approximately eight per cent of the country's expected total power capacity of 1,500GW in 2020 across several provinces.

Here's the tricky part - is this going to be paid for by Overseas Development Assistance or as part of China's own internal massive Chinese Stimulus package? Financially, one could argue that it would make more sense to have it as part of the Stimulus package. Internationally, they want to have Climate Funds for Mitigation - which will probably be difficult to get, since it will be difficult to argue that these wind stations are 'additional'.

Besides being good for the environment (though one should not loose track that China continues to put up new coal plants), it also highlights a signficant new challenge. China is generally considered and identifies as a developing country with the 'usual' growing pains (such as increased environmental degradation and increased inequality). But China is also 'beating' the US and other developed nations- especially in wind. For example, they are creating offshore windfarms before the United States is. And their Green Stimulus package rivals many of developed world's Stimulus packages. Plus they own much of the United States and essentially finance it's huge military budget. So is does this 'Asian Tiger' still count as a developing country? Maybe we need to change our definition of 'development'.
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