In balmy Cancun, at a U.N. conference on climate change, China and the U.S. remain the elephants-in-the-room of all discussions. Both are more focused on the commercial potential of climate-related technology than on any environmental goals that could impair economic growth. Such a focus should sell better in Washington, but it’s an area where the U.S. is lagging, and China’s lead is growing.
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, speaking at the National Press Club earlier last week called China’s mounting successes in clean energy a “Sputnik moment” for the U.S.
In 1957, a refrigerator-sized sphere transmitting a steady radio signal was lofted into orbit by the Soviet Union, sparking a generation of U.S. technical and scientific discovery. But it took decades for satellite technology to become a commercial market.
Now, in clean technologies, China is racing into well-established, fast-growing markets U.S. players are eyeing hungrily. Chu named the most vulnerable areas, where the U.S. must innovate quickly, or risk falling behind.
- Renewable energy, such as solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and windmills. China is the world’s largest solar panel maker.
- Advanced electric grid power technologies, such as high voltage transmission lines. Some 1,300 miles of the most advanced wires have been installed in China.
- Next-generation power plants. China has 30 new nuclear plants under construction and is building “gasification” coal plants capable of carbon capture and storage.
- High-efficiency cars, from hybrids to battery powered. Beijing has an official goal of producing 5 million such vehicles in the next nine years.
- High-speed rail. China’s Shanghai-Beijing rail link, analogous to New York City to Chicago, takes four hours, city center to city center. In the U.S., Amtrak can take you from the Big Apple to the Windy City in about 19 hours, if the trains are on time.
- Supercomputing. Last month China’s Tianhe-1A, developed by a Chinese defense entity, became the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Chu also identified a couple of world-class research projects, backed by three year DOE grants, that are on track deliver advanced products to American industries:
- Revolutionary electric vehicle batteries, an attempt to create energy storage for a vehicle that can go 500 miles on a single charge.
- Converting sunlight into usable fuel, aimed at upgrading the process by which plant cells convert sunlight into energy, to make liquid fuels, similar to gasoline.
As the debate over cleantech policy has grown increasingly partisan, its potential to jumpstart innovation and economic growth has been lost. Chu’s a powerful, nontechnical reminder of the imperative of stoking basic R&D funding, and why clean tech is such a good target for that spending right now.
Fiscally, the difference between Sputnik then and cleantech now, however, are glaring: in the late 50s, the cumulative federal deficit was around 45% of GDP, vs more than 75% today. At the time of Sputnik, the U.S. had a decade or more of solid economic growth ahead, driven largely by the maturation and globalization of WWII-era manufacturing industries, from consumer packaged goods to automobiles.
Today, those industries are either withered or face more global competition, domestic growth drivers are fewer, and R&D is harder to fund from the spare change in the federal coffers.
Still, clean technology is possibly the best, any maybe one of the few, bets where the U.S. has a strong existing technical advantage that can lead to long-term economic growth.
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