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The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia's Environmental Emergency Page 16 (31 of 321)
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E N E R GY
extraordinary competition among these companies that led to a rapid
decline in prices for solar and wind power. This price discounting was unin-
tended—and completely at odds with China’s notionally planned economy.
It was wasteful, creating large losses that will be borne by ordinary Chinese,
who as taxpayers ultimately pay most of the bill for the mistakes of their
government and banks. This saga, in short, is not a textbook case of success
but a tale of state planning—some of it successful and some not—coupled
with the extraordinary, even reckless, ambitions of contemporary China’s
first generation of entrepreneurs. Unwittingly, however, the China model
of a semiplanned industrial policy, buttressed by unnaturally low costs, has
succeeded in making renewable energy cost-competitive far more quickly
than even the most optimistic analysts would have imagined at the begin-
ning of the 2000s, benefiting not only China but also the world.
