Governors Wind Energy Coalition
Behind the Rise of U.S. Solar Power, a Mountain of Chinese Coal Source: By Matthew Dalton, Wall Street Journal • Posted: Monday, August 2, 2021
Reliance on coal-fired electricity to produce solar panels raises concerns in the West
Solar panel installations are surging in the U.S. and Europe as Western countries seek to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.
But the West faces a conundrum as it installs panels on small rooftops and in sprawling desert arrays: Most of them are produced with energy from carbon-dioxide-belching, coal-burning plants in China.
Concerns are mounting in the U.S. and Europe that the solar industry’s reliance on Chinese coal will create a big increase in emissions in the coming years as manufacturers rapidly scale up production of solar panels to meet demand. That would make the solar industry one of the world’s most prolific polluters, analysts say, undermining some of the emissions reductions ac
Xi’s next target in tech crackdown is China’s vast reams of data
By unleashing the data market’s value and potential, the Chinese president is positioning
the nation to become a leader in transforming the world economy
By Colum Murphy / Bloomberg
With Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) targeting China’s massive tech giants, the big question now is how he would get them to share key data as part of a sweeping plan to transform the world’s second-biggest economy.
Until recently, China’s megafirms, such as Jack Ma’s (馬雲) Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd, have operated in a similar way to US counterparts Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc, harnessing user data to refine an expanding array of digital services. Since more data lead to better products, the tech platforms often become natural monopolies giving them enormous wealth and power that also opens the door for abuses.
Governors Wind Energy Coalition
Secrecy and Abuse Claims Haunt China’s Solar Factories in Xinjiang Source: By Dan Murtaugh in Singapore, Colum Murphy and James Mayger in Xinjiang, China, and Brian Eckhouse in Los Angeles, Bloomberg • Posted: Thursday, April 15, 2021
The world’s green power surge depends on polysilicon made in China’s remote Northwest. No one really knows what’s going on inside the facilities.
In the wilderness of the Gobi Desert sit two factories that churn out vast quantities of polysilicon, the raw material in billions of solar panels all over the world. It’s a four-hour drive from Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region at the center of China’s crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. The only structures that rise up among miles of rolling snow-covered fields are the chimneys of coal-fired power plants, belching white smoke.