In the mountains above the southwestern Chinese town of Dali, dozens of new wind turbines dot the landscape — a symbol of the country’s sky-high ambitions for clean, green energy.
At an altitude of 3,000m, Dali Zhemoshan is the highest wind farm in China, where renewable energy has become a priority for a government keen to reduce its carbon emissions and which has taken full advantage of the global trade in carbon credits.
“Wind resources in Yunnan province are not the best in the country,” says Zhai Cheng, a project manager at the farm for the Chinese group Sinohydro.
PHOTO: AFP
“But at altitude, it becomes more interesting,” he adds, gesturing at the line of 48m-high turbines.
China, which relies on coal for more than 70 percent of its energy, is the world’s largest emitter of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. But it has set a target of generating 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources — mainly wind and water — by 2020.
In Yunnan, the wind turbines — which operate at full tilt between October and April — are there to boost the region’s enormous hydroelectric power resources when productivity falls during the winter months.
“China is redoubling its efforts, with the 2020 target for wind power generation rising from 30 to 100 gigawatts,” Zhai said.
The rapid boom in wind farming in China — where installed capacity doubled last year for the fourth year running to sit at 12.2 gigawatts — places it behind only the US, Germany and Spain.
“In terms of the scale and the pace of the build-up of the Chinese wind industry, it’s without parallel anywhere in the world ever,” said Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council.
“They went from very little installed capacity and almost no industry five years ago to the point where they will be the number one market in the world this year” in terms of new capacity, he said.
“At the current rate, they will be the number one in the world in cumulative capacity by the end of 2011, early 2012,” Sawyer said.
As well as major wind farms in the north of China, such as those in Gansu Province, smaller projects — like the one in Dali — are multiplying, almost always relying on the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
The CDM, which was created as part of the Kyoto Protocol, allows industrialized countries to fulfill part of their greenhouse gas reduction commitments by investing in clean energy technology in developing countries.
With a generating capacity of 30.75 megawatts, the 41 turbines in Dali produce the same amount of energy as that created by burning of 20,000 tonnes of coal — thereby preventing the emission of 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
The carbon credits produced by the Dali pilot project, funded with a 30 million euro (US$45 million) loan from the French Development Agency, will be purchased by Dutch bank Rabobank, Zhai said.
Those credits should amount to between 7 percent and 8 percent of annual income, he said, predicting that the project should pay for itself in 10 to 15 years.
“The wind industry in China and India is one of the biggest success stories of the CDM,” Sawyer said.
“The Chinese example is a very good example: the only way you can make use of the market mechanism is if you have very clear and effective policies and measures to support the industry at the same time,” he said.
The challenge for China now, he said, was one of quality.
“They have had this rapid build-up and now they have to focus on the quality rather than just the quantity. Grid extension and connection is one issue, the performance of the turbines themselves is another,” he said.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to