Great story about the market working to help clean up the aftermath of China’s incredibly fast growth, which has caused, as it once did in our country, vast environmental pollution.
The great advantage China has is the access to technology developed in our country, much in California’s Silicon Valley.
ECONOMY VS. ENVIRONMENT — DAY 2 OF 2
China: A clean-tech gold rush? Valley sees big market
By John Boudreau
Mercury News
Article Launched: 06/18/2007 01:29:56 AM PDT
ZHANGJIAGANG - Sam Huang has found a new land of opportunity for Silicon Valley - in the shadow of a giant smoke stack in the Yangtze River Delta.
Dressed in a black designer suit, with a Treo attached to his ear, the executive with San Jose-based Echelon, whose smart-building technology is usually associated with gleaming high-rises, paid a recent visit to a new client: China's third-largest steel mill. The plant is trying to go green by using Echelon's products to reduce the energy consumed to forge steel and iron to feed China's around-the-clock construction craze.
Less energy used means fewer tons of coal burned to produce electricity. At the Jiangsu Shagang Group, a vast complex located 100 miles west of Shanghai, that saving could be as much as 65,000 tons a year. It is a tiny step for cleaner technology - and clean air - in a nation that is building coal-fired power plants at an assembly-line speed of one a week.
Silicon Valley companies, which first looked to China to manufacture PCs and iPods, now see potential profit in its environmental meltdown.
They see opportunities to sell a vast range of clean-tech products and services. Those include water filtration systems; green building technologies that reduce energy use; processes to convert waste into biofuels; better wind turbines; solar power technology; "smart" street lights; and even software for energy companies to help manage operations more efficiently.
"Every market is big in China," Huang said.
`Next 24 months': Clean tech expects flood of funding
Gary Rieschel, a veteran valley venture capitalist who relocated to Shanghai, sees a "tidal swell" of interest in the China energy and clean-tech market from abroad. "The wave will occur some time in the next 24 months," he predicted. "Silicon Valley has a huge play here."
Already, venture capitalists are increasing their clean-tech bets in China, from $7 million in 2004 to $222 million last year, according to VentureOne and Ernst & Young. In that same period, venture funding for clean-tech deals in the United States soared from $522 million to $884 million.
Chinese government officials and environmentalists say the only hope to head off environmental catastrophe is through the kind of technology Silicon Valley offers. China's air, water and land are so polluted that environmental hazards kill hundreds of thousands of its people each year. And China's pollution problems are spilling over onto other countries. Dirty air traced back to China can be found in California's skies, and could become a major source of pollution.
Cleaning up China's environment "will require good technological assistance and sheer political commitment," said Hal Harvey, environment program director at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, which funds projects in China.
