Wellsville, Ohio could be the site of the first large-scale coal-to-liquids plant in the U.S.Photo: Billy Delfs for OnEarth

Cross-posted from OnEarth.

Driving his black Chevy pickup to the top of the bluff where Baard Energy wants to build the first large-scale plant in the United States that would turn coal into liquid fuels, Rick Williams points a thick index finger at the vacant homes and empty store fronts that make up his Ohio River Valley town and reminisces about what used to be.

The son of an ironworker, Williams, 56, spent much of his adult life as a union laborer, often in the local steel mills and power plants fueled by nearby coal mines. The work wasn’t hard to come by. For much of the 20th century, Wellsville, Ohio, was a small but active town of about 8,000 residents, most of them connected to one or more union locals.

But now most of the steel mills are closed, the union jobs are fading, and the town is going with them. Wellsville’s population is half what it was 40 years ago. Only 65 students graduated from the local high school this year, and all but a handful will likely leave in search of jobs. The overgrown riverfront parcels where thousands of people once made a good living have been scraped clear of factories and equipment. Of the 2,000 homes here, nearly 400 are vacant, according to federal census figures.

Williams now serves as the town’s zoning administrator, without a whole lot to do. The city issued only one permit for a new home in the last four years, he says as his Chevy crests the bluff. “This used to be a pretty lively place. There was a lot of work and a lot of things to do. Now there’s nothing here.”

So it’s not hard to understand why Williams and many of his neighbors welcomed the idea of a $6 billion coal-to-liquids plant that would create 4,000 construction jobs and require 500 people to operate. According to Baard Energy, the small West Coast energy developer behind it, at peak production the plant would transform 25,500 tons of coal a day into 53,000 barrels of aviation and diesel fuel.

But it would also be a major new source of greenhouse gases and other pollutants in a region that already suffers from significant public health problems due to air pollution. Environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club are fighting to block Baard’s plans through legal challenges to government air and water quality permits.

Rick Williams, Wellsville’s zoning administrator, says his town needs jobs despite the environmental risk of the coal-to-liquid plant.Photo: Billy Delfs for OnEarthWilliams and his neighbors realize the Baard plant would bring more air and water pollution to a region that’s just finally starting to get clean. The Ohio River — once so contaminated and full of sediment that only catfish and carp survived — now provides local fishermen with a regular catch of bass, bluegills, and muskie. One morning in early March, Williams says, he spent 20 minutes watching a bald eagle devour a fish as it floated past on an ice flow. “Never saw a bald eagle around here until five years ago,” he says. “The river was a lot dirtier than it is now.”

Still, given the choice, William says that he and the rest of Wellsville would prefer the jobs. “It’s too bad the working man has to choose work over the environment.”

Massive expansion of the fossil fuel era

Across America, the energy industry is taking advantage of economic desperation in towns like Wellsville and driving to develop hard-to-reach reserves of fossil fuels, while clean energy — with its own promise of job creation and a transition to a new, renewable form of production — struggles to make up ground against powerful, entrenched interests.

Though scientists raise growing alarms about climate change, and high gas prices serve as a daily reminder of just how strung out on oil this country is, the energy industry is flexing its muscles in government and the financial sector, winning permits and billions in cash to perpetuate the age of fossil fuels. The result is one of the grandest industrial expansions in recent decades, much of it at the center of the continent.

North American, Asian, and European companies are prepared to spend $15 billion annually to turn tar sands into oil in northern Canada; $7 billion annually to drill shale oil wells on the northern Great Plains; $30 billion to build a pipeline network for transporting tar-sands oil, shale oil, and natural gas through the center of the continent to the Texas Gulf Coast (an effort opposed by NRDC and many other environmental groups); and $22.6 billion to expand and modernize refineries in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Gulf of Mexico. A Canadian developer wants to open new tar-sands mines in Utah, and as of 2010, North Dakota had become the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the nation — quickly heading to No. 2 behind Texas.

These new sources of fuel are more difficult and dangerous to extract and transport than conventional crude, and they carry greater risks of air pollution, groundwater contamination, and greenhouse-gas emissions than ever before. The cleaner and safer alternatives — renewable and energy efficiency — face an overwhelming disadvantage when it comes to investment capital, consumer familiarity, and government support and subsidies. And Big Energy isn’t about to give up that advantage — no matter how many oil company commercials with windmills you see on the nightly news.

In addition, although national public opinion polls show broad support for renewable development, individual projects often have a tough time getting built, as clean energy remains unfamiliar and controversial in many communities. Hundreds of local environmental and civic groups in at least 35 states are fighting to block large-scale wind, solar, biomass, and smart grid projects because of worries about scale, safety, or damage to their views and landscapes. Working under a National Science Foundation grant, for example, Roopali Phadke, an associate professor at Macalester College in Minneapolis, has identified 200 opposition groups working to block big wind projects in 30 states.

A shift to renewable sources of electricity and electric or hybrid vehicles represents “a revolution in energy production,” Phadke says. “There is an assumption that everyone has been on board. They aren’t.”

Advantage: Fossil fuels. (Like they needed one.)

Making dirty fuel from dirty coal

Like many Rust Belt towns, Wellsville used to depend on now-defunct factories for jobs.Photo: Billy Delfs for OnEarthThere was a time, in the 1980s and ’90s, when sociologists and economists tended to regard the Ohio River Valley and its shrunken towns as cultural anomalies, part of a national economic sacrifice zone, the result of the transition away from a t
raditional manufacturing base toward service jobs, the retail sector, and high-tech innovation.

But as the years pass, a lot more of America is starting to look like Rick Williams’ home of Wellsville — a place that has nothing going on and seems to be going nowhere. So when a venture like Baard Energy rolls into town, offering to put people to work and to put the town on the map again, it’s hard not to look at the upside.

“It seems like a real good idea,” Williams says. “We’ve got the coal. We’ve got the people. We could really use the jobs.”

That’s the overwhelming consensus in the region, says Tracy Drake, the 59-year-old chief executive of the Columbiana County Port Authority, which would oversee coal shipments by barge to the plant. “This is a region that’s used to industry. We’ve seen how existing industries have cleaned themselves up.”

Based in Vancouver, Wash., Baard is a mid-sized builder of natural gas-fired utilities, biofuels refineries, and other energy projects. If built, its Wellsville coal-to-liquids facility would likely be the first of its kind in the United States, although China already has four.

But despite popular support in Wellsville, Baard has been struggling since 2006 to secure the land, financial backing, and government subsidies needed for the plant. Last fall, the company’s chief executive, John Baardson, announced that Florida-based investors were ready to finance the first phases of the facility’s development. He said construction would commence in the spring of 2011. So far, it hasn’t. (Baard did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this article.)

Shannon Fisk, an NRDC attorney based in Chicago who is leading the lawsuit against Baard, doubts the facility will ever be built, based on the company’s difficulty securing money and the economic and environmental case he’s building against the project. “Liquid coal is the wrong way to go,” Fisk says. “It is massively expensive and could not move forward without taxpayer subsidies. Those resources should go to developing truly clean alternatives, not to developing dirty coal.”

In partnership with the Sierra Club, Fisk has unleashed state and federal actions to block the Baard plant. In September 2008, the environmental groups argued to Ohio’s Environmental Review Appeals Commission that the Ohio Environmental Protection Administration had not set strict enough limits on air and water pollution from the plant when it issued permits earlier that year. A ruling is pending.

The groups are also taking legal action to set stronger limits on carbon dioxide emissions from the plant and to protect surrounding wetlands. Fisk says the plant would produce more than 12 million tons of carbon dioxide annually from the process of turning coal into fuel; the fuel itself would produce an additional 14-plus million tons as it is burned in planes and vehicles. In other words, liquid fuel made from coal is twice as bad for global warming as regular petroleum.

Perhaps the most important effect of Fisk’s legal campaign is that in March 2009 it blew apart Baard’s bid to secure a multi-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. That setback nearly killed the Baard proposal outright. Fisk’s research found that the Baard project was in serious financial trouble in the months following the Department of Energy decision.

The company, according to court records dug out by Fisk, took 18 months to pay the $80,000 fee for Ohio air and water permits, and paid only after the state threatened to pursue the debt with a collection agency. Twice, law firms hired by the company were not paid and withdrew representation, Fisk said. And a consulting company sued Baard for not paying fees associated with preparing the state permit applications and, according to court documents, won a $225,000 default judgment.

“Even if coal-to-liquids was a good idea,” said Fisk, “I am not sure I would want a company with this track record doing a $6 billion plant. There isn’t anything about this plant or the company that inspires confidence.”

If not liquid coal, how about gas?

Coal-to-liquids plants emit far more carbon dioxide than traditional fossil fuel-burning plants.Photo: Billy Delfs for OnEarthStill, it’s not clear whether the Baard proposal represents the last flicker of a dying idea or the opening foray into a potentially huge American coal-conversion industry. Periodically over the past 30 years, proposals to build coal-to-liquids plants in the United States have flourished and vanished, following the rise and fall of oil prices. In 2007, for example, as oil prices climbed, the Department of Energy was monitoring 17 proposals for coal-to-liquids plants in 10 states.

The Baard proposal and a coal-to-liquids development in West Virginia are the last still breathing. The others have been cancelled or indefinitely delayed because developers have been unable to raise the billions needed in private capital.

That, too, is a symptom of America’s new wariness. In effect, the country is so nervous about its future, so focused on the perceived risks — health, environmental, financial — of pursuing new paths in energy production that it’s basically just pursuing what it knows best: coal, gas, and oil.

As Rick Williams and his Wellsville neighbors know all too well, just holding your place in a whirlwind of change is about the worst place to be. No one has proposed big projects to harness wind or solar energy in the Wellsville region, Williams notes. But natural gas companies have begun nosing around, signing leases in preparation of drilling deep shale gas wells.

“You know anything about that?” he asks. “Will it affect our water?”

In a place with few options, even the riskiest ones can seem promising.

Last week, the Apollo Alliance and the BlueGreen Alliance, two of the most important national nonprofits supporting clean energy development and good jobs, announced that as of July 1, they would merge. The much larger Minneapolis-based BlueGreen Alliance, a five-year-old collaboration of big green groups and unions, will become the parent of San Francisco-based Apollo, which was founded in 2003 and gained its renown for being the first organization to understand that the transition to an economy primarily fueled by something other than oil and coal could produce a flurry of useful results — jobs, climate action, energy security, and industrial innovation.

The merger is good for both organizations. It consolidates Apollo’s strong policy work with its parent’s considerable networking strength in states and in Washington, D.C. It also reflects the need for one big progressive voice touting the benefits of clean energy in an era, hopefully temporary, in which national interest and public investment in solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable and non-fossil alternatives is in treacherous decline.

That’s because the right — heavily financed by Big Oil, gas, coal, and utilities — loathes what it calls government intrusion in the market, and sees no justification for curbing carbon emissions because it is convinced climate change is a scientific hoax. At the grassroots, it’s no better. Civic coalitions that defy conventional description — joining left, right, and centrist activists — have formed hundreds of campaigns in more than 35 states that are devoted to killing renewable energy projects they regard as just too damn big.

China, meanwhile, has no such problem. By the end of the decade, China will produce over 700 gigawatts of electricity from wind, hydro, nuclear, and solar. If that kind of development occurred in the U.S., it would amount to roughly 65 to 70 percent of our projected electrical generating capacity in 2020. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have developed in China’s clean energy and non-fossil fuel sectors.

Meanwhile the United States is busier than it’s been in decades perpetuating the domestic fossil fuel economy. Big Oil last year spent $100 billion accelerating a hydrocarbon boom at the center of the continent. Canadian tar sands have become the largest single source of oil imports to America. An extensive new oil and gas transport and processing infrastructure is under construction from Alberta, Canada through the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain West, Great Lakes states, and on to the Gulf Coast. It includes new pipelines, as well as modernized and expanded refineries. Hundreds of the nation’s heavy onshore drill rigs are tapping oil and natural gas in the northern Great Plains in shale formations nearly two miles deep. North Dakota looks to be on the way to supplanting Texas as the No. 1 oil producer among the states.

I know a little bit more about the BlueGreen-Apollo merger than your average bear because I worked at Apollo for 16 months in 2008 and 2009, as communications director, when the “clean energy, good jobs” attained a rare salience in policy circles and electoral politics. The email message announcing the merger, sent on Thursday by Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides, reminded me of those heady days and especially one morning meeting in Denver that synthesized the movement’s influence at the time.

Photo: Keith SchneiderIt was the second day of the Democratic National Convention and a select group of America’s senior labor and environmental leaders met for an hour with T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil billionaire who’d announced a month earlier his interest in investing a good portion of his fortune in wind power. I attended the meeting for the Apollo Alliance and documented some of the participants in the picture to the right — (right to left) Rich Trumka, now president of the AFL-CIO, Leo Gerard, head of the United Steelworkers, Carl Pope, then the executive director of the Sierra Club, and Bracken Hendricks of the Center For American Progress.

T. Boone Pickens.Photo: Keith SchneiderWhen T. Boone Pickens articulates much the same thing as the leader of the Sierra Club, never mind a major party presidential nominee, that’s a conversation you don’t forget. Quite a few of the people who’d helped tee up the United States for what looked to be a momentous transition were gathered at that table. Bracken Hendricks, an author and capable strategist, was the founding executive director of the Apollo Alliance. Carl Pope and Leo Gerard were Apollo board members and in 2006 founded the BlueGreen Alliance, a joining of the Sierra Club and the Steelworkers. Rich Trumka, who once headed the United Mineworkers Union, was talking jobs in the same breath he mentioned wind and solar energy.

Emily Dickinson once called hope “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” In 2008 and 2009, clean energy looked to be an idea set to soar. Barack Obama campaigned on “clean energy, good jobs” and won the nomination and presidency. Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus bill in February 2009 that contained $100 billion or so for renewable energy, energy efficiency, transit, and other clean energy initiatives. The House, in June 2009, beat back a fierce assault from the fossil fuel industry and passed a comprehensive energy bill that was the first time a chamber of Congress set mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. Clean energy and climate action were prominent ideas in global economic and diplomatic meetings, including the Pittsburgh G20 conference in September 2009, and the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.

In the 18 months since the Copenhagen climate summit, the clean energy and climate action messages have been in eclipse. Foundations and advocacy organizations are searching for new tools to revive the public’s interest. Jeff Nesbit, the former director of the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at the National Science Foundation, just accepted the executive director’s post at Climate Nexus, a New York-based climate and clean energy communications group formed by a consortium of big philanthropies. The newly merged BlueGreen Alliance has a big job ahead of it, too. We wish them well.

Pondering whether “safe” means what he thought it meant.Photo: The White House

You’ll recall that on March 31, 2010, President Obama announced the government would open much of the Atlantic coastline and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration, deeming the benefits to the economy and security higher than the risks. Three weeks later, the Deepwater Horizon exploded, releasing a torrent of oil into the Gulf.

Then in January, the president called for tripling public financing for new nuclear power plants in the State of the Union, and in public statements before and afterwards cited Japan’s long record as evidence that nuclear-generated electricity was safe. Seven weeks later, after being struck by an earthquake and tsunami, Japan’s 4,696 megawatt Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is completely destroyed and leaking life-threatening levels of radiation.

The Telegraph is reporting Japan was warned about the vulnerability of its nuclear plants and that “an official from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in December 2008 that safety rules were out of date and strong earthquakes would pose a ‘serious problem’ for nuclear power stations,” in Japan.

The Fukushima plant, by the way, is the 27th largest power generating installation in the world, the 12th largest nuclear station globally, and the second largest nuclear plant in Japan. It’s also one of the oldest nuclear plants in Japan.

As of the end of 2009, according to the China Renewable Energy Industries Association, more than 10,000 utility-scale wind turbines had been installed nationwide. And in 2010, according to figures released last month by the China Industry Energy Conservation and Clean Production Association, China spent approximately $US 45.55 billion on 378 big wind power projects, including roughly 8,000 new wind turbines that were installed last year. Wind generating capacity in China has reached more than 42 GW — the most of any country, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.

The industry is growing so fast, in fact, that China’s two national transmission companies are not keeping pace. About a quarter of the generating capacity is not connected to the grid.

Photo © Toby Smith/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

In the last three years, more than 5,000 wind turbines have been built in the desert of northern Gansu Province.

That’s not the case in northern Gansu, where brand new, high-voltage power lines and towers — gleaming silver in the bright sun — march along the mountain ridges and across the desert.

The sector grew steadily — albeit slowly — for nearly a decade, said executives here in Jiuquan. But, in the earliest years of the new century, wind power began to spin with economic authority.

Last year, China said it was spending $US 590 billion over the next decade to expand and modernize its electrical transmission system, including $US 75 billion in the first five years for high-voltage power lines — like those being constructed through Gansu.

Even in Gansu’s bitter cold winter, powerline workers trudge through the big wind farms, connecting turbines to the substations and 750-kilovolt transmission lines that carry power to the rest of the country.

In 2009, China launched a program to build the nation’s first big solar power projects, which produced two 10-MW photovoltaic power installations in Dunhuang, at Gansu’s far northern end. More than a dozen other solar energy projects — totaling 280 MW — will be completed this year.

Two of these, generating 50 MW each, will be installed in the Dunhuang solar energy production zone. The China Ministry of Science and Technology projects that there will be 20 GW of solar generating capacity nationwide in 2020; 30 percent will be installed in Dunhuang.

In 2010, China produced 3.15 billion metric tons of coal, according to government figures, most of it to produce electricity. Of the 962 GW of generating capacity in China, and the 4.19 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity that was produced last year, 80 percent was powered by coal. China’s coal mining, processing, and electrical generating industries consumed over 112 billion cubic meters (30 trillion gallons) of water annually, which is nearly 20 percent of all national water consumption, according to the China Ministry of Water Resources.

Total electrical generating capacity is expected to double in China by the end of the decade, reaching 1,900 GW. The magnitude of the increase is astonishing. In 2020, nine years from now, government officials and energy industry executives project adding as much electrical generating capacity as exists today in the United States. More than half of this increase, 500 GW, according to various government and academic projections, will come from coal.

Coal production and use could grow to 4 billion metric tons per year by 2020, which is 30 percent more than last year, according to analysts at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

That means even more water will be consumed. The China Ministry of Water Resources estimates that annual water use will increase from 591 billion cubic meters in 2010 to as much as 630 billion cubic meters in 2020. The largest share of that increase — 15 billion cubic meters (4 trillion gallons) a year — is due to the increase in coal mining and processing, along with cooling coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, China is slowly getting drier.

The overall supply of water available in China’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers has fallen 13 percent since 2000, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Chinese climate scientists and hydrologists say this trend — which has reduced the nation’s total water supply by 350 billion cubic meters (93 trillion gallons) a year — will continue as a result of climate change, which is disrupting patterns of snowfall and rain.

The searing conditions, coupled with China’s insistence on developing at a scale and speed never seen previously, are yielding a decisive environmental and economic choke point with global implications. The driest northern and western regions — Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Xinjiang — are precisely where the vast new reserves of coal that China says it needs for modernization are located.

For the time being, most of those new reserves can’t be tapped because there is not enough water. Northern China’s rainless weather, moreover, appears to be getting worse. Beijing and other northern and western cities are currently enduring the driest winter in 60 years.

In 2010, China produced 3.15 billion metric tons of coal, according to government figures, most of it to produce electricity. Of the 962 GW of generating capacity in China, and the 4.19 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity that was produced last year, 80 percent was powered by coal. China’s coal mining, processing, and electrical generating industries consumed over 112 billion cubic meters (30 trillion gallons) of water annually, which is nearly 20 percent of all national water consumption, according to the China Ministry of Water Resources.

Total electrical generating capacity is expected to double in China by the end of the decade, reaching 1,900 GW. The magnitude of the increase is astonishing. In 2020, nine years from now, government officials and energy industry executives project adding as much electrical generating capacity as exists today in the United States. More than half of this increase, 500 GW, according to various government and academic projections, will come from coal.

Coal production and use could grow to 4 billion metric tons per year by 2020, which is 30 percent more than last year, according to analysts at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

That means even more water will be consumed. The China Ministry of Water Resources estimates that annual water use will increase from 591 billion cubic meters in 2010 to as much as 630 billion cubic meters in 2020. The largest share of that increase — 15 billion cubic meters (4 trillion gallons) a year — is due to the increase in coal mining and processing, along with cooling coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, China is slowly getting drier.

The overall supply of water available in China’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers has fallen 13 percent since 2000, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Chinese climate scientists and hydrologists say this trend — which has reduced the nation’s total water supply by 350 billion cubic meters (93 trillion gallons) a year — will continue as a result of climate change, which is disrupting patterns of snowfall and rain.

The searing conditions, coupled with China’s insistence on developing at a scale and speed never seen previously, are yielding a decisive environmental and economic choke point with global implications. The driest northern and western regions — Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Xinjiang — are precisely where the vast new reserves of coal that China says it needs for modernization are located.

For the time being, most of those new reserves can’t be tapped because there is not enough water. Northern China’s rainless weather, moreover, appears to be getting worse. Beijing and other northern and western cities are currently enduring the driest winter in 60 years.

JIUQUAN, China — Business for wind and solar energy components has been so brisk in Gansu Province — a bone-bleaching sweep of gusty desert and sun-washed mountains in China’s northern region — that the New Energy Equipment Manufacturing Industry base, which employs 20,000 people, is a 24/7 operation.

Just two years old, the expansive industrial manufacturing zone — located outside this ancient Silk Road city of 1 million — turns out turbines, blades, towers, controllers, software, and dozens of other components for a provincial wind industry already producing more than 5,000 megawatts per year.

Photo © Toby Smith/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

Over 5,000 wind turbines have been installed in northern Gansu Province. Already boasting an online capacity of 5,500 MW, the region’s wind-generating capacity will grow to 12,000 MW by 2015.

Chen Xiao Yan, a 25-year-old assistant in the New Energy Industry office, said Sinovel, Goldwind, Dongfang, Sinomatech, and 21 other clean energy manufacturers have established plants at the base. Two of those developers also produce equipment for Gansu’s expanding solar photovoltaic industry, which at the end of this year will generate 120 megawatts of electricity.

Within three years, 10 additional manufacturers will build plants in the base, increasing the workforce to 50,000 employees, Chen said in an interview with Circle of Blue.

“It’s what we do here,” she said with a shrug. “We produce energy.”

Northern Gansu is doing that and considerably more. This region of dust and industrial innovation — about as far west from Beijing as Montana is from New York — has very quickly become a booster stage for China’s rocket ride to the top of the global water-sipping clean energy heap. Prompted by a national decision in 2005 to diversify the nation’s energy production portfolio, and to do so with the goal of reducing water consumption and climate-changing carbon emissions, Gansu and its desert neighbors are pursuing clean energy development with a ferocity unrivaled now in the world.

Along with northern Gansu, there are six other wind energy bases and eight other solar power bases being built in China — most of them in the desert regions of northern and western China. China also has a burst of seawater-cooled nuclear power plants under construction along its eastern coast.

China’s National Energy Administration projects that, over the next decade, generating capacity from wind, solar, and nuclear power will more than quadruple, from 53 gigawatts in 2010 to 230 gigawatts in 2020. The other big non-carbon electrical producer is hydropower, which is expected by the government to grow to 400 GW of capacity by 2020, up from 213.4 GW last year. (For reference, one gigawatt, or GW, is equal to 1,000 megawatts, or the generating capacity of a big nuclear- or coal-fired power plant.)

Wind energy now accounts for 42GW, or 16 percent of the nation’s non-carbon electrical generating capacity. China’s energy officials projected last year that wind energy generating capacity will rise to 150 GW by 2020, though many wind industry executives predict the number will reach more than 200 GW.

Solar generating capacity is expected to jump from less than one GW in 2010 to 20 GW by 2020. Nuclear power is projected to increase from 11 GW to 60 GW in the next decade.

Yet China’s demand for electricity is rising so quickly that the massive investment in new generating technologies will not make nearly as large of a dent in production — or in freshwater conservation — as many people might expect. Simply put: wind, solar, and nuclear power will climb to around 13 percent of the 1,900 GW of generating capacity expected by 2020, according to government data. That’s up from the nearly six percent of the 940 GW of generating capacity today.

The new wind, solar, and seawater-cooled nuclear plants will replace roughly 100 big coal-fired generating stations, which equates to a savings of 3.5 billion cubic meters (nearly one trillion gallons) of water annually, according to academic and government estimates. The clean energy stations also will eliminate around 750 million metric tons of climate-changing emissions annually.

But China’s national water use — 591 billion cubic meters in 2010 — is anticipated to grow by 40 billion cubic meters a year by the end of the decade. And the increase in water consumption, a good portion of which is spurred by new coal production, is occurring in a nation that is steadily getting drier.

Put another way, the $US 738 billion that government authorities promised last year to spend on non-fossil fuel power generation over the next decade will jump start China’s clean energy economic transition. The enormous solar and wind-related manufacturing plants across China already employ tens of thousands of people. They are irrefutable evidence of the capacity of clean energy to spur job growth. They also are a signal to the United States and other nations that China is prepared to dominate wind, solar, nuclear, and other cleaner sources of power that global energy economists predict will eventually generate trillions of dollars in revenue each year.

But clean energy development will not solve the commanding threat to China’s modernization — the confrontation between rising energy demand and declining reserves of fresh water. Over the next decade, and likely well beyond that, the water savings from solar, wind, and seawater-cooled nuclear power will not be nearly enough to loosen the noose that water scarcity is steadily tightening around China’s coal production and combustion sector, and its national economy.

“There may be an ultimate day of reckoning approaching,” said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow and China specialist at the Peterson Institute in Washington D.C. “But there are a lot of intermediate steps China is prepared to take and already is taking to hold it off as long as possible.”

No Turning Back

Chinese development officials insist they have no intention of backing away from the country’s rapid modernization or from using every available energy-producing option to fuel that growth. A powerful transition is occurring in China, much of it focused on attracting new pioneers to the dry northern and western provinces. The strategy appears to be working.

Photo © Toby Smith/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

The New Energy Equipment Manufacturing Industry base, a collection of state-of-the-art manufacturing plants, is the largest non-carbon energy manufacturing center in the world, say Chinese energy officials. Click image to enlarge.

The modern cities under construction in Gansu Province, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Ningxia, and Jilin are supported by new factories turning out steel, aluminum, vehicles, appliances, wind turbines, mining equipment, and hundreds of other products intended to supply China’s rapidly expanding domestic markets. High-rise apartments are under construction in clumps of 30-story concrete towers in every major city. Streets and highways are jammed with late-model and expensive cars. Restaurants are full day and night. Long lines form at checkout counters in Western-style grocery superstores.

The provincial economies of northern and western China are growing at a faster rate than the national gross domestic product, which reached 10.3 percent in 2010, according to the latest government figures. The new regional growth has been spurred, in part, by clean energy production and manufacturing, which China recognized was a good fit for the windy, sunny, and dry geography.

A province with 25 million residents and about the same geographical size as Sweden, Gansu has managed energy production and water scarcity for decades.

Oil was discovered around Yumen in the 1930s, and a sizable production and refining industry thrived for over half a century. One of the historical highlights of Gansu’s energy industry is that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, a trained geologist and China’s second most powerful political figure, spent the early part of his technical and government career from 1968 to 1982 managing Gansu’s mineral and water resources.

Photo © Toby Smith/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

China is developing massive solar resources in the Gobi Desert of northern Gansu Province. 20 MW is already online. Generating capacity is expected to grow to 12,000 MW by 2025. Click image to enlarge.

In 1996, provincial officials began to experiment with replacing northern Gansu’s oil sector with wind. They installed four 300-kilowatt wind turbines at the Yumen Jieyuan Wind Power Plant. Cities in Xinjiang, to the west of Gansu, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, east of Gansu, also joined Gansu as the first provinces to experiment with utility-scale clean energy generation.

The sector grew steadily — albeit slowly — for nearly a decade, said executives here in Jiuquan. But, in the earliest years of the new century, wind power began to spin with economic authority.

Prompted by internal concern for the conflict between water scarcity and rising energy demand and the goal of developing new industries that could employ millions, China enacted the world’s most aggressive renewable energy law in 2005. China’s National Development and Reform Commission declared that, by 2020, 15 percent of the country’s energy would be produced by wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower — up from 7 percent at the time.

Since then — and mindful of the external diplomatic pressure surrounding China’s soaring climate-changing emissions — a host of other new policies and publicly financed incentives have been enacted to promote clean power that uses less water.

In 2007, China established a new “water intensity” requirement that calls for industry and agriculture to cut the amount of water they use per unit of gross domestic product by 20 percent. In 2009, that target was increased to 60 percent.

The government also mandated that taxpayers share in the cost of developing renewable power with a small fee on their utility bills. Electric utilities are required to buy power from renewable energy producers, which were provided with low-interest loans from the government. China also protected its manufacturers, requiring that at least 70 percent of all wind turbine components must be manufactured in the country. Five of the 15 largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world, as a result, are now Chinese.

Similar incentives were enacted for the solar industry.

The public incentives, combined with China’s determination to both diversify its power sector and develop new job-producing industries, have pushed the country to the front of the global renewable energy industry.

Energy and Water Vectors Cross in Gansu
One of the places that has served as a testing site for the new era of water-sipping clean-energy production is the northern deserts of Gansu, where evidence of China’s big play in clean energy development is in plain view. The New Energy Equipment Manufacturing Industry base — a collection of state-of-the-art clean-tech manufacturing plants — is the largest noncarbon-energy manufacturing center in the world, said Chinese energy officials in Jiuquan.

The base sits at the southern end of a region of wind farms that stretch for miles and encompass more than 5,000 wind turbines. There are also two solar photovoltaic power plants, which are the first in a 25-square-kilometer sun power zone outside Dunhuang that will have the generating capacity of 12 GW by 2025.

Gansu, in other words, hosts one of the largest clean energy zones on Earth. The investment in wind power alone will soon reach nearly $US 18 billion, according to provincial figures. The goal is to install enough capacity to generate 20 GW of wind-powered electricity by 2020, according to Wu Shengxue, deputy head of the Jiuquan Municipal Development and Reform Commission.

In Dunhuang, an art and tourist center near the border with Xinjiang, Ren Tao — a 42-year-old engineer who’s an expert in water supply and energy production and is the general manager of SDIC’s 10-MW solar photovoltaic demonstration plant — described the new solar installation. The year-old, $US 18 million plant is the first utility-scale solar plant connected to China’s transmission grid. It sits at the center of the sunniest region in China and operates more than 3,000 hours a year.

Across the road, a second 10-MW solar photovoltaic plant — built by CGNPC Solar Energy Development Company — began operations late in 2010.

“My challenge,” said Ren, “is to prove that we can produce a lot of energy from the sun at low cost. Green energy is the only option we have to develop this country in a way that reduces pollution, reduces water use, and develops Chinese society.”

Huang Xiao, another of the young professionals managing Gansu’s clean energy industry, is similarly committed. The 25-year-old woman is the executive of general affairs at Sinomatech Wind Power Blade Company, which operates a 40,000-square-meter (430,000-square-feet) plant, employs 1,000 people in Jiuquan, and last year turned out 2,400 wind blades.

Outside her office window, more than a hundred 40-meter white blades, marked by bright red slashes at the tips, are neatly lined up in a staging area, ready to be shipped. There are two other companies in the New Energy Equipment Manufacturing Industry base that produce comparable numbers of blades for Gansu’s wind sector. With three blades installed for every turbine, Gansu’s three wind blade companies are producing 7,200 blades annually, which are enough to install 2,400 industrial-scale turbines per year.

Even in frosty December, the highway leading from the manufacturing base to some of largest wind farms on the planet is a steady trail of diesel trucks carrying blades, turbines, and white-painted steel towers. The newly constructed four-lane expressway runs right through the wind power zone, where thousands of white, Chinese-made turbines stand in some of the country’s strongest and steadiest mainland winds.

Roughly 5,500 turbines have been installed in Gansu Province and thousands more are planned. Energy developers have built new dormitories in the desert for the 15 to 20 workers required to manage and maintain individual wind farms, which typically have 500 turbines.

By 2015, the miles of turbines and wind farms concentrated around Yumen, a small desert city in northern Gansu, will produce 10 GW to 12 GW of generating capacity, said Shi Pengfei, vice president of the China Wind Energy Association. China’s other big wind regions — Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Hebei, and offshore in Jiangsu — also are developing rapidly.

“This all makes a lot of sense for China,” said Qiao Yu, a 30-year-old senior engineer who oversees the China National Offshore Oil Company’s wind farm near Yemen. “We can not always rely on oil and gas and coal. The climate here is changing and our water supply is going down. Nothing can last forever. We must get involved in new energy. Chinese people and the government realize how important this is.”

Photo © Toby Smith/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

Sinomatech Wind Power Blade Company, which operates a 40,000-square-meter (430,000-square-feet) plant that employs 1,000 people in Jiuquan turned out 2,400 turbine blades last year.

——

Originally published at Circle of Blue. Map and graphic by Mark Townsend, Megan Capinegro, Katelin Carter, and Chelsea May, undergraduate students at Ball State University, with contribution by Aubrey Ann Parker, a Traverse City-based data analyst and news desk editor for Circle of Blue.

Afterwards the big crowd, composed principally of local residents, many of whom I have known for years, heard from Ray Franz, the newly-elected Republican state House Representative from this region, and from Elizabeth Wheatley, an assistant professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University in Allendale.

The film and the post-screening remarks by Franz and Wheatley also were unrelentingly critical. Franz announced his intention to campaign for dismantling the state energy tax credits, state renewable energy standards, and other public investments and policies that attracted Duke Energy to consider building 112 utility-scale wind turbines in our beautiful and gusty corner of the country. He essentially said such measures were a waste and an overreach by government to influence free markets. Wheatley described attending the first-ever international symposium on the health effects of wind power, held in Ontario in October. She reported, based on anecdotal evidence she collected, that low-level sound waves from wind turbines could cause spontaneous abortions in farm animals.

I’ll be writing about the fate of Duke Energy’s $330 million proposed clean energy investment in future postings. For background, Glenn Puit of the Michigan Land Use Institute just posted a first-rate assessment of the project and the issues. Jim Dulzo, the Institute’s managing editor, is readying an online report for Sunday that is meant to clarify some of the science related to wind turbines and health effects.

More significant to me is what that January 16 event illustrates about the condition of our community, and in a larger sense,  our country. Stripped to its core, the meaning of that event is this: We’re afraid of the wind.

I’ve spent a career documenting in precise detail the consequences, unintended and otherwise, of technology scaled up and applied across industrial sectors. In March, 1979 I covered the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, watching as General Public Utilities engineers vented radioactive gases to prevent a hydrogen-fueled explosion that could have torn the top off the melted reactor’s containment vessel.

Ten years later I was in Valdez, Alaska, reporting on a drunken Exxon captain who’d been asleep when the bottom of his tanker was ripped open on a reef that every sea captain on Earth knew was there and had been studiously able to avoid. The rest of that assignment, and two more to Alaska, focused on the aquatic effects of crude oil in cold maritime environments, and the cultural fracturings all that oil prompted in Cordova and the other fishing villages of Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

A decade after that I took clear note of the changes in northern Michigan’s snow sports industry as a result of warming temperature. And a decade after that reported on the 12-year drought in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, the nation’s pimary food-growing region, where entire farm sectors were being put out of business by the most visible example of the effects of climate change in any industrial nation.

In between all of this my pen, notebook, now laptop computer and IPhone, traversed the various risk-benefit, economic, scientific, and political experts, the grassroots activist offices, corporate suites, and major media newsrooms that form the basic geography of vigorous dispute in the U.S. I’ve explored in too many published words to remember, as well as broadcast interviews and public speeches the gathered facts about the toxicity of farm chemicals, the wisdom of introducing genetically-engineered organisms into the environment, the safety of burying radioactive wastes in underground dumps in New Mexico and Nevada, the hazards of nuclear weapons production and disposal, the cost and risks of incinerating dioxin-contaminated wastes, just to name a few.

The decades of the late 20th century and the earliest years of the 21st that formed the heart of my career were largely defined by the central idea of American environmentalism. The industrial world was a danger to air, water, land, wild creatures and people. But sound law, effective regulation, civic activism, and strong reporting could be applied to substantially reduce the risk. America, in short, showed itself capable of mitigating harm, cleaning up pollution, and preserving the wild places that supported the nation’s natural diversity. I have lived for 20 years in northwest Michigan, a place that proved the effectiveness and value of these ideas.

I just never thought we’d be afraid of the wind.

More than three years ago my work shifted to a new path fostered by the understanding that climate change, national security risks, and the nation’s crying need for innovation to spark job growth represented a remarkable opportunity for environmentalism. One of the most important solutions for the warming planet, oil-related wars, and new jobs was pursuing clean energy development here at home. Nature offered an answer in unlimited quantities of energy from the sun, the wind, the earth (geothermal), and from converting plants to fuel. Applying our intelligence to harvest these sources, including producing cars that didn’t need oil-based fuels, represented a much safer way of conducting our affairs.

The basic construct of a transition to new energy sources seems sound. By no means, though, are Americans convinced about the benefits or the risks. As I noted in an earlier post this week, Republicans are suspicious of the science of climate change and ideologically opposed to public investment in clean energy. Grassroots activists are resisting construction of clean energy projects of scale all over the country and especially here in Michigan. Most everybody else is hardly paying attention, driven instead by concerns about job security, falling incomes, the price of gasoline, their liberal neighbors, their conservative neighbors, China, terrorism, you name it.

Boiled down, the country is expressing its fear of the future. Fear is the dominant American emotion of our time. Fear could halt a major clean energy investment in my home county and has already done so in many others across the country.

How is it that a nation so fearless that it put a man on the moon, built an interstate highway system, protected civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights, made industrial workers the highest paid on Earth, instituted an environmental protection program that grew the economy eight-fold, strengthened its great universities, and elected a black president has become immobilized? How is it that we’ve become afraid of the wind?

Is Obama’s style of American exceptionalism on its last legs?

Both ideas, of course, fit neatly into the necessary big box of ideas that can generate the innovation, imagination, inspiration, and transition-era job growth that rebuilds the American economy, and especially the “be all you can be” contract with its people.

But neither is likely to happen. To achieve either goal will take a sharp shift in the political geography on the right and the left, as well as much larger public investments in innovation and financing than the country has been willing to make to date. In an era of fierce and fast-paced transition prompted by the new markets of the 21st century, Americans have expressed time and again their resistance to doing anything more than staying firmly in place. I’ve begun to call our predicament the “amber alert” because we’re so determined to wrap our personal gains and communities in amber.

Republican governors in the Midwest, for instance, want to give back the federal high-speed rail construction money made available last year, and are governing against the clean energy investments that have helped turn solar, wind components, and lithium-ion battery manufacturing into the fastest growing new industrial sectors in Ohio and Michigan.

Let’s quickly evaluate the 80 percent electrical generation goal. To achieve 80 percent clean energy generation essentially means replacing at least 500 gigawatts of conventional coal-fired generation with cleaner alternatives. In essence, the U.S. would have to nearly completely rebuild its electrical generating infrastructure, which last year had about 940 gigawatts of electricial generating capacity. By 2035, according to Department of Energy projections, electrical generating demand in the U.S. could grow to 1,200 gigawatts. Today, less than a quarter of electrical generating capacity is supplied by nuclear power, hydro, wind, and geothermal in the U.S — roughly 225 gigawatts.

To date, the nation has indicated no proclivity to launch a crash program for clean energy investment. The $100 billion provided in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, now threatened by the Republican House majority, is merely a down payment. In fact, the largest energy investment in the nation is being made to drill, mine, process, and transport the unconventional oil and gas reserves being tapped in the middle part of the country.

Moreover, while the right discounts the science of climate change and expresses skepticism about the costs of clean energy subsidies, the grassroots left is digging in to fight clean energy projects of scale. Opposition campaigns are occurring in at least 35 states and focus on every available alternative — wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and nuclear. Here in Benzie and Manistee counties where I live in northern Michigan, a $330 million proposal by Duke Energy to build 112 wind turbines is the focus of a fear-based opposition campaign that includes scientifically unfounded assertions that the turbine blades generate dangerous sound waves that can cause farm animals to spontaneously abort.

The country that is responding to the new energy market opportunities of the 21st century is China, which commands nearly all of those very same markets. I just returned from a long reporting trip to China for Circle of Blue, the first-rate independent news organization that covers the freshwater crisis. I serve there as senior editor. I visited the largest clean energy industrial park in the world in Gansu Province, as well as some of the largest steel plants, solar farms, and coal mines.

China has set a goal to drive their clean energy diversification program for electrical production — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, IGGC — from 200 gigawatts currently to over 630 gigawatts by 2020. The breakdown by 2020 looks like this: wind (150 gigawatts), solar (20 gigawatts), nuclear (60 gigawatts), hydro (400 gigawatts).

Still, because of China’s rapidly growing demand for energy — total energy consumption has tripled since 1995, reaching over 100 quadrillion BTUs this year from 35 quads 15 years ago — coal will still be responsible for more than 70 percent of total electrical supply, a little less than it is today.

All that energy supports the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, cement, energy, cars, residential construction, nuclear and coal-fired power plant construction, hydro dam construction, highways, high-speed rail, and a dozen other critical products of modern society. China’s transportation infrastructure has surpassed the United States, as have its grade school students, now the best in the world.

Americans note that China’s political economy is founded on a system that has no veto power. The country acts on what it decides regardless of public opinion. But you have to wonder whether there are facets of that system that are more fit for the time. China also produced 70 million new jobs in the last decade and the incomes of 400 million people are rising, in contrast to diminishing job numbers and steadily declining incomes in the U.S.

President Obama set out worthy goals last night to light at least a spark of national motivation to fix America. But moving forward on any idea of real significance is so difficult he declined to lay out even the most modest specific steps. You wonder whether a quarter century from now a U.S. president will still be able to say, “And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.”

Related:

• Obama’s State of the Union energy proposals are … thrilling? bipartisan? misleading?
• Obama’s energy gambit: a call for less coal
• David Roberts on why Obama was wrong not to mention climate change in his State of the Union