General Electric China and The New Yorker’s “863 Program” Article
We were thinking about Evan Osno’s fascinating New Yorker piece about China’s clean energy project – the so-called 863 Program – when we stumbled upon this press release from General Electric touting its growth in China.
GE’s revenue from its Ecomagination cleantech products and services grew 50 percent, to $656 million, in the first three quarters of 2009 compared with the same period last year.
The company also announced that it had inked 30 deals with various government entities, state-owned businesses and universities, a sign that the growth will continue,
But one part of the press release in particular, about a joint venture between GE Energy and Shenhua Group Corp., points to a key takeaway from The New Yorker piece: China has the will to pursue the projects that the United States has shied away from. The 863 Program, named for a March 1986 memo from concerned Chinese scientists to then-leader Deng Xia0ping, has seen billions of dollars pumped into labs, universities and industries — particularly clean energy.
Osnos writes about the proposed FutureGen coal-fired, near-zero emisssion plant that was slated to be built in Illinois and then mothballed by the Bush administration.
A Democratic investigation concluded:
FutureGen appears to have been nothing more than a public-relations ploy for Bush Administration officials to make it appear to the public and the world that the United states was doing something to address global warming.
Now, an American company is going full-speed ahead on a similar project in China.
The GE/Shenhua venture will combine GE’s coal gasification and clean power generation technology with Shenhua’s expertise in building coal gasification and coal-fired power plants, according to the GE’s release.
The project aims to improve cost and performance of commercial-scale gasification and integrated gasification combine cycle (IGCC) processes.
The FutureGen project has gotten new life from the Obama administration, but the general point still that Osnos is trying to make still obtains.
He illustrates that point through Kevin Czinger, the CEO of Miles Electric Vehicles, which is building its batteries at the Tianjin Lishen Battery Joint-Stock Company.
Czinger tells Osnos that
Only his American engineers, he said, had the garage innovation culture to spend ‘eighteen hours a day for two years to develop a new technology.’ But only in China had he discovered ‘the will to spend on infrastructure, and to do it at high speed.’
