Re: Chinese Billionaire Is Existentially Morally Excellent
- From: jalegris@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 9 Dec 2006 06:41:18 -0800
Robert Cohen wrote:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/opinion/06friedman.html?hp
Op-Ed Columnist
China's Sunshine Boys
E-MailPrint Save By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 6, 2006
So here's a little news quiz: Guess who's the seventh-richest man
in China today, with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.43
billion?
Answer: Shi Zhengrong. Now guess what he does. Real estate? No.
Banking? No. Manufacturing for Wal-Mart? No. Construction? No.
Mr. Shi is China's leading maker of silicon photovoltaic solar cells,
which convert sunlight into electricity. Yes, the seventh-richest man
in China is a green entrepreneur! It should only happen in America.
Mr. Shi thinks, as I do, that renewable clean power - wind, solar,
bio-fuels - is going to be the growth industry of the 21st century,
and he wants to make sure that China and his company, Suntech Power
Holdings, are the leaders. Only 43 years old and full of energy
himself, Mr. Shi hopes to do for solar energy what China did for tennis
shoes: drive down the cost so that millions of people who could not
afford solar photovoltaic panels will be able to do so.
As an environmentalist, I wish him well. As an American, I worry that
if we don't start doing everything we can to develop our own clean
power, we're going to miss out on the green industrial revolution.
Today, most of our hybrid cars are imported from Japan. Tomorrow, if
Mr. Shi has his way, most of our solar panels will come from China.
What Mr. Shi understands is that China is going to have to go green.
Its rivers and air are becoming so polluted it has no choice. In fact,
as he and I spoke in his 66th-floor office in Shanghai, the air was so
dirty you could barely make out the skyscrapers down the street.
America, alas, still seems to think it has a choice in going green. So
while China will be compelled to move into this industry, U.S.
companies may or may not, depending on whether states, or Washington,
require power providers to generate energy from renewables.
For years our brain-dead Congress thought it was helping our power
companies and manufacturers by not imposing tough energy-efficiency
standards on them. In fact, it was just helping some of them commit
suicide. Congress's idiotic decision not to impose higher mileage
standards on U.S. carmakers helped Detroit miss the market and almost
go bankrupt. China already has higher mileage standards for its autos
than we do.
"People at all levels in China have become more aware of this
environment issue and alternative energy," said Mr. Shi. "Five
years ago when I started the company people said: 'Why do we need
solar? We have a surplus of coal-powered electricity.' Now it is
different; now people realize that solar has a bright future. But it is
still too expensive."
Mr. Shi founded Suntech in Wuxi, China, near Shanghai, after earning a
Ph.D. in engineering in Australia in 1992. As The Wall Street Journal
put it in a recent profile, Suntech combines "first world technology
and developing world prices" - so effectively it has become one of
the world's four top solar manufacturers, along with Sharp and
Kyocera of Japan and BP.
The key, Mr. Shi explained to me, is that he uses more low-cost Chinese
labor, rather than high-tech machines, to make his solar modules and
handle the fragile silicon, and he takes advantage of the subsidies
offered by different Chinese provinces dying for him to open a Suntech
factory in their region.
Roughly 90 percent of his business today is abroad. But as he brings
the price down, the China market will open up, and he expects to use
that to gain much greater scale and drive the price of his solar
modules down further.
"If we have a market here, we feel confident we will be a cost
leader," he says. "Now we are at around $4 per watt. In 10 years
time, I'm pretty sure we will be below $2 per watt," which would
make solar competitive and scalable.
Thanks to Suntech's success, "now there is a rush of [Chinese]
business people entering this sector, even though we still don't have
a market here," added Mr. Shi. "Many government people now say,
'This is an industry!' " To help, the Chinese government just
passed a law mandating that China get 10 percent of its energy from
renewables, like solar, by 2020.
China is setting high standards for renewables, but is still weak on
enforcement. America is better at enforcement, but still weak on
setting high standards. We need to get our act together, because
eventually China will bring its enforcement in line with its
regulations - or it won't breathe. And when that happens, China's
emerging green power entrepreneurs could clean our clock in the clean
power business.
Oh, well, you can always buy a share. Suntech is already listed on the
New York Stock Exchange.
This article deserves a wider audience. Copyrights notwithstanding.
--
Joe Legris
.
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