Essay by Eric Worrall
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen have announced a joint agreement to break China’s dominance of solar and wind manufacture.
Breaking from China’s clean energy dominance ‘imperative’, US and Australia say after new climate tech deal
New agreement to fast-track climate solutions signed as countries underscore need for diversified supply chains
Adam Morton Climate and environment editor
@adamlmorton Tue 12 Jul 2022 18.58 AEST…
In a joint press conference in Sydney, the US energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, and the Australian climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, announced a “net zero technology acceleration partnership”, including an initial focus on long-duration energy storage and digitising power grids.
They said the agreement was motivated in part by the need for a clean energy and critical mineral supply chain that did not depend as much on China, which is responsible for about 80% of solar energy technology manufacturing. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), it is expected to reach 95% by 2025.
Granholm compared the risk of relying on China for clean technology to the west’s over-dependence on Russian fossil fuels – a mistake that sparked a global energy crisis after it invaded Ukraine.
“I worry that China has big-footed a lot of the technology and supply chains that could make us vulnerable if we don’t develop our own supply chains,” she said. “From an energy security point of view, it is imperative that nations that share the same values develop our own supply chains, not just for the climate, but for our energy security.
“We’ve seen what happens when we rely too much on one entity for our source of fuel, and we don’t want that to happen – so to diversify those energy sources and to link up with partners is part of our energy security.”
Bowen agreed. “It’s good for our own economies and it’s good for our national security to have supply chains among ourselves, but also amongst friends and allies,” he said.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/12/breaking-from-chinas-clean-energy-dominance-imperative-us-and-australia-say-after-new-climate-tech-deal
It is no mystery why China dominates intermittent solar and wind manufacturing.
Solar and wind manufacturing is energy intensive. Chinese energy is cheaper than Western energy, because China burns coal for energy.
The USA and Australia can make all the agreements they want to “break China’s dominance”, but so long as nobody addresses the underlying problem, so long as China can outcompete US and Australian energy intensive manufacturers because of lower Chinese energy costs, those agreements are not worth the paper they are written on.
Vowing to “break China’s dominance” is foolish bravado from fatuous officials with careers in foolishness who’ve never done anything useful in their lives.
“Those agreements” are not intended to make Western “clean” energy (government cronies) competitive, they are intended to funnel even more money from the productive economy to their parasite friends. They’ve never cared before that their products can’t compete with cheap energy, slave labor and polluting mines, and they aren’t about to start now.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
seeing as chinas going to drop bans on aussie coal to grab more thats funny!
we have one aluminium smelter in Vic Alcoa and its battling to stay in biz due to power outages ruining melts and repairs for that etc govt subsidies to bribe them not to shut n go to china or elsewhere. and the greentards moaning the local roos are having aluminium toxicity from eating the local grass near it
shoot the roos or fence em out ffs!
while we have a decent amount of Bauxite setting up enough plant to make process etc is pie in sky without govt support and the greentards wont allow that let alone more mines etc wont even bother with the silica and silver and the rest issues. dont like china having a monopoly? STOP supporting and buying pv and wrecking our grids at the same time
win win all round;-)
please remember that Chris Bowen is a goose. In the last Labor government Bowen was the Immigration Minister and on his watch welcomed 50000 boat arrivals and counted at least 1280 drownings in the attempt. He was tthe shadow treasurer who dreampt up several proposals to attack the self funded retirees and famously said just before the election “if you don’t like our policies don’t vote for us”. So they didn’t and Labor lost the unloseable election. If Bowen is promoting anything run a million miles because it will fail. He said recently that nuclear energy was too expensive just before he advocated firming the grid with 7500 big batteries that should keep us going for a few hours during a week long wind drought. He is pig ignorant. Sorry, pigs are smart. Bowen is just dumb.