BY KEITH
BRADSHER - The New York
Times
TIANJIN, China (January 31, 2010) -- China
vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United
States last year to become the world's largest maker of wind
turbines and is poised to expand even further this year.
China has also leapfrogged the West in
the past two years to emerge as the world's largest manufacturer of
solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build
nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power
plants.
These efforts to dominate the global
manufacture of renewable energy technologies raise the prospect
that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the
Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other
gear manufactured in China.
"Most of the energy equipment will carry a brass plate,
'Made in China,'" said K.K. Chan, chief executive of Nature
Elements Capital, a private equity fund in Beijing that focuses on
renewable energy.
President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech last
week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind
other countries, especially China, on energy. "I do not accept a
future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond
our borders, and I know you don't either," he told Congress.
The United States and other countries are offering incentives to
develop their own renewable energy industries, and Obama called for
redoubling American efforts. Yet many Western and Chinese
executives expect China to prevail in the energy-technology
race.
Multinational corporations are responding to the rapid growth of
China's market by building big, state-of-the-art factories in
China. Vestas of Denmark has just erected the world's biggest wind
turbine manufacturing complex in northeastern China and transferred
the technology to build the latest electronic controls and
generators.
"You have to move fast with the market," said Jens Tommerup, the
president of Vestas China. "Nobody has ever seen such fast
development in a wind market."
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