Bright prospect for Sino-U.S. cooperation on clean energy

People's Daily Online had an exclusive interview with deputy secretary of energy of the USA Daniel Poneman on Oct 24, 2009. In the interview Mr. Poneman shared his views about clean energy and China-U.S. cooperation in this regard.

Below is the full text of the interview.

Reporter: Dear audience today our distinguished guest coming here to speak with us is Mr. Daniel Poneman. He is the deputy secretary of energy of the USA and comes here to address the concerns of our audience from all across China on clean energy. Welcome Mr. Poneman, welcome to People's Daily, welcome to our forum.


Daniel Poneman, deputy secretary of energy of the USA
Poneman: I’m happy to be here.

Reporter: The first China-U.S. strategic forum for clean energy political cooperation has just concluded in Beijing. Would you please sum up some highlights for this forum, for example what is the mission for this forum? And what main issues are being discussed? What consensus has been reached by both sides?

Poneman: I did not attend the forums, so I don’t know about the specific results. But I do know about the mission. They are very committed to finding ways in which our two countries can work together with very practical steps in mind to find clean energy technologies that we can use to build that low carbon future we both need across the wide range of areas of renewable energies and bio-mass in electrical vehicles and many besides.

Reporter: Clean energy remains very alien to many Chinese people, would you like to give a brief introduction and what is included in clean energy?

Poneman: Well basically, clean energy is any energy that does not produce pollutants and therefore wind power, solar, bio-mass, nuclear energy do not produce carbon... so any thing that can help us build that energy future that we need without putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, that’s what we mean when we say clean energy

Reporter: In today's world energy crisis and environmental crisis coexist the development of clean energy is widely accepted as a solution to both of these crisis, as the most developed nation how well does the U.S. do in developing clean energy and are there any difficulties facing the U.S. so far?

Poneman: We have enormous difficulties because remember we built our whole economy at a time in which nobody thought about clean energy, of course the industrial revolution began in the 1800s and at that time people had no awareness of, and would just build large greenhouse gas emitting factories and smoke stacks and did not pay attention because it was not really a source of concern. Now we have to make up for lost time and really make big investments in ways to move past that era, so do we have challenges? Yes. The good news is, we have a broad recognition in the American people that we need to do this, we have a president who understands it and we're blessed to have a secretary of energy, I know you know our Secretary Mr. Steven Chu who's a Nobel Laureate in Physics and very smart man and has many creative ideas. So we are now investing very heavily in this and the Congress of the United States passed the American Recovery and Re-investment Act which will support 80 billion dollars in clean energy investments. Through these investments, again across the wide spectrum of wind, solar and bio-mass and smart grid, we hope to move our country in the right direction.

Reporter: How did you promote clean energy? I mean the concept, for example to provide public education on clean energy…

Poneman: Education is actually a very important part of our mission at the Department of Energy and we think it's very important at all levels. We think it's very important with our students even in the lower grades and at high school, and we certainly support through graduate fellowships getting more to have the training so that they can make scientific contributions to this sphere. Clean energy is something that actually is taking some root in the popular culture, people now I think have an easier time thinking about clean energy when they don't just think of it as some abstract notion related to climate change a hundred years off, but they think of real investments today in things like electrical vehicles, wind mills, solar voltaic cells these are concrete things we can all look at and we can understand what that means.

Reporter: But compared with traditional and conventional energies, do you think clean energy is more costly? And how to keep the balance between being environmentally friendly and gaining economic benefits?

Poneman: Well, as you said a little bit earlier energy and the environment are closely linked. At one time I heard Secretary Steven Chu said "I'm for energy efficiency because I'm cheap." Everybody wants to save money and it turns out there are many many things we can do that aren't expensive ways to promote clean energy, but actually will save your money. For example if you put double paned windows in your house, if you put insulation in your attic your going to be saving hundreds of dollars in electricity bills every year, that's not expensive, that's cheap. What it means is you have to think ahead, make a modest investment, it might cost you a little bit more in the first month but when you look over a year or over 5 years you're going to be saving money. Now that's not to say that many clean energy technologies do not require large investment, but I think if we think about this in terms of the return on those investments, in the long run it's not expensive, in fact it's a way not only to save our economy but to save our planet.

Reporter: Clean energy could cover a wide variety of issues, what do you think the priority is for China-U.S. cooperation on clean energy? And what potential could be tapped from this cooperation?

Poneman: Well, I think we could tap enormous potential. We have been, as you know in active discussion for quite a while with China on a wide array of clean energy technologies. We’ve just had here the electrical vehicles forum; we talked about when Secretary Chu was here in July, setting up a clean energy research center the we will work on together; we have talked a lot about building efficiency, you know at least in the U.S. 40% of our greenhouse gases come from buildings, and if we just improve insulation and take some measures of that character we can do a lot to save energy and as I said to save money. Obviously both of our countries rely extensively on coal power generation, and so I think that’s also a fruitful area for cooperation that we can work on carbon capture and sequestration.

Reporter: Science and technological flare plays a very integral part in the exploitation and utilization of clean energy, in what way do you think China and U.S. should cooperate to enhance their science and technological cooperation in terms of developing clean energy, and how are things going so far? And what progress can we expect?

Poneman: I think it's very promising. You know, after normalization of China-U.S. relations 30 years ago the very first agreement signed was an agreement on cooperation in science and technology, and it's been a fruitful area ever since. Our National Academy of Science has dealt with your Chinese Academy of Science, and we have a constant exchange of people back and forth. This morning I was at Tsinghua University, there were American and Chinese researchers there, and you know the good thing about this; we all win. Because this is one planet we share, and what's good for China in terms of saving the planet is good for the U.S. and vice versa, so I think that prospects for Chinese-U.S. scientific cooperation have never been brighter.

Reporter: China possesses a very huge market for clean energy, what steps will the U.S. take to encourage your local enterprises to invest in China?

Poneman: Oh, we don't need to take steps because our companies are very interested by themselves in investing in China. What do we do as a government? We do things that governments should do, that means we try to promote a clear investment climate where there's stability of regulations, clear contract sanctity, rule of law, market transparency, protection of intellectual property rights, these are the things governments should do, that is to say we should not substitute government action for private sector action, but we should, as governments, do things to ensure that the situation permits private companies to invest with confidence that their investments will be respected and that they can get returns from the investments that they make.

Reporter: In less than a month, President Obama will come here to kick off his first China visit. Is there any likelihood that he will sign some agreements on clean energy and what impact will his China visit bring about?

Poneman: As I mentioned a few minutes ago, the U.S. and China have a robust and very rich array of energy technologies and clean energy initiatives that we've been talking about, they've been working hard on many of these already in the areas that we've discussed, our 2 presidents talked just this week; President Hu talked to President Obama and they talked about climate change and they talked about the summit, so I would expect that clean energy and climate change will be a very important item for the 2 of them to discuss and I’m sure they are going to make progress on our shared objectives.

Check the Chinese version of the interview here