CHINA NEW ENERGY PROPHET

Atonement in a Drive for Wind Power
Keith Bradsher, July 2, 2009 (NY Times)

"A guilty conscience turned Min Deqing into northwestern China’s unlikely prophet of wind and solar energy…Mr. Min worked [from 1973] at the main coal-fired power plant in Lanzhou, the capital of impoverished Gansu province…[He] pushed himself up the ranks [from laborer] to operations director by 1996, partly by inventing new industrial techniques that caught on elsewhere in the Chinese power and steel industries.

"Shortly after he assumed the top job, officials from the local environmental protection bureau came to him and asked that he install modern pollution-control equipment to help improve the city’s soot-filled air…[He] knew just how bad the pollution was…But he stalled for three years before finally installing the equipment, because it was costly and he did not want to dent the plant’s profit margins. The state-owned operation was being run mainly for the benefit of its 2,800 workers, and he wanted to spend money on the workers, whom he had known his entire adult life, rather than on filters to remove soot and smog-causing gases…"

Mr. Min and...(pic from the NY Times - click to enlarge)

"…[W]hen he turned 55 in 2000 and was automatically forced to step aside from the plant’s leadership…He promptly bought a digital wind gauge at his own expense for $360 and began crisscrossing the province’s wind-swept plateaus to assess their potential for wind farms. (He wore out three wind gauges, all bought with his own money, and is now on his fourth.)…[He] documented that Gansu had some of the strongest, most reliable winds in all of China, and found the location near Dunhuang where Beijing officials have now decided to build one of the world’s largest wind farms.

"Mr. Min, a slender man who wears only the black cotton pants and simple buttoned shirts of a Chinese laborer, began proselytizing about wind and solar energy — first to Gansu officials and then to power officials across the country. He had spent three decades building connections in the Chinese power industry and he began calling his contacts, meeting them and attending conferences to lobby for renewable energy. It did not hurt that his father had been a successful power engineer in Mr. Min’s hometown of Wuhan, while his older brother helped build the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam."

...what Min hath wrought. (click to enlarge)

"…[M]ost are still skeptical…But pressure on the power industry to embrace new energy technologies is clearly increasing…[T]he Asian Development Bank…bankrolled early feasibility studies and renewable energy projects in Gansu in 2002 and 2003, long before Beijing officials forced state-owned power companies to become interested in renewable energy by setting mandatory targets for them in 2007…

"Mr. Min is an example of a phenomenon that is common in China but little studied by academics: the semiretired official who becomes a policy activist while staying behind the scenes. Having never spoken to the Chinese or foreign media before, he agreed to be interviewed in the belief that Gansu’s renewable energy industry would benefit from more attention…[He] wants to keep going at least until China completes its first 100-megawatt solar power plant — a contract for the construction of one was signed on June 16…"