China’s wind-energy industry has been troubled by years-long shortages of parts and contradictory regulatory policies.

From the IHT comes this article on China’s “green energy gap”:

By next autumn, a muddy construction site here in a rural part of eastern China will give way to a small power plant that burns corn stalks and cotton stalks to generate electricity for nearby villages and steam for a neighboring industrial complex.

The plant would be ready sooner, but only four companies in China make the specialized precision boilers that the biomass plant requires. And all those companies are plagued by backed-up orders and delivery delays. Similar problems bedevil the wind turbine industry in China.

While the Chinese government has set goals for increasing the use of a long list of alternative energies — including wind, biomass, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear — they all face obstacles, from bureaucracy to bottlenecks in manufacturing. CLP’s differing energy choices are a case study in how one company grapples with the need to provide electricity to hundreds of millions of impoverished Asians even as it is under a self-imposed goal of trying to limit emissions of global warming gases.

When I traveled through western China in 2003, I was amazed at all the stationary power windmills and the broken parts I saw standing across miles and miles of desert. At the time I wondered if perhaps the windmills were just undergoing repairs, but this article tells a different story. Face it—as long as coal is dirt cheap, the incentive to go for expensive, renewable energy is just not there. And that’s a fact that the world will have to live with for a long time to come.

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