Obama, Hu Jintao have clean energy opportunity

Among the many difficult issues Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao will confront when they meet this week stands one possible bright spot: collaboration on clean energy technology. It represents a critical, urgent need, an enormous market opportunity for both nations and an area of potential common interest - if we can just avoid being our own worst enemies.

The United States and China are the largest consumers of energy in the world, users of coal and emitters of CO2. If our two great countries cannot cooperate in the development, testing and commercialization of clean energy technology, both will suffer all the inconvenient and potentially catastrophic effects of climate change.

However, the really inconvenient truth is that most of our possible solutions to this global crisis are between untested and insufficient. We have only a short time to get on with the three required fixes: massive efficiency gains, ending deforestation and deploying new energy technology.

Both the United States and China can act unilaterally on efficiency, and they have. In 2007, China passed one of the world's toughest energy efficiency laws, which included factories, power plants, cars and buildings.

The United States adopted new automobile efficiency standards, deployed important efficiency technologies (like LEDs and compact fluorescent bulbs) and made much progress in land use and deforestation. So, unilateral action is possible, even desirable, and the costs are relatively modest. The progress on forests in both Cancun and Copenhagen, embraced by both China and the United States, show how we can collaborate when there is the will.

Alas, as other tensions mount in the U.S.-China relationship, cooperation on clean energy technology suffers.

The technical problems are tough enough. Essentially, we haven't scaled up any major clean energy technologies (besides nuclear) needed to begin solving this problem. And since the harsh mathematics of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere don't give us much time or room to learn or experiment, we'll have to build the plan as we fly it.

But collaboration with China gives us the chance to cut our learning time and costs in half. It also gives both of us access to each other's markets and will well position both countries to advance on the rest of the world market. This is not a zero-sum game - it involves both science and economics, and the countries together can win at both.

In the United States, one-time stimulus expenditures drive roughly $80 billion of new projects in solar, wind, clean-coal, nuclear and smart-grid projects across the majority of states. China is investing $440 billion in clean energy projects this decade plus $9 billion per month in clean-tech research and development.

Every one of these projects is an opportunity to learn together about scale-up. This is the biggest challenge in clean energy - how to deploy 500,000 megawatts of clean power. But before banks invest, cities say yes and public utilities commissions agree to rate hikes, we need to see these technologies expand to the 500 megawatt scale, the only clear path toward cost reduction.

One new such effort is the relatively small-scale joint U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, a five-year, $150 million private-public partnership embracing such topics as energy-efficient buildings and vehicles and clean coal with carbon capture and sequestration. This effort is anchored in flagship U.S. companies (GE, Dow, GM) and more than $12 billion worth of projects. One can only hope that the scope and budget of the center is expanded by Congress, not cut back.

Other efforts involve business-to-business partnerships, and many new clean-tech announcements in solar, wind, smart grid, clean coal, nuclear and power storage will be made at the presidential summit, are expected to exceed a $20 billion investment by U.S. and Chinese companies, and will lead to more than 20,000 U.S. jobs.

To deal with these energy and climate challenges this decade, both countries will need leadership of an extraordinary new and courageous kind and institutional partnerships based on trust and a deep understanding of each other's needs and capabilities, the likes of which we are as yet unacquainted.

Obama's meeting with Hu offers a tantalizing opportunity. The unprecedented drive by both nations to meet their own undeniable national needs and manage the challenges of a shared future can be tackled head-on in harmony. The question is: Will it?

Dr. S. Julio Friedmann is director of the Carbon Management Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the technical program director for the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center on Clean Coal and Carbon Capture and Sequestration. Orville Schell is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S. China Relations, Asia Society. Send your feedback to us through our online form at SFGate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1.

This article appeared on page G - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle