Could A Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructure Be Asia's Answer To Climate Change?
Stewart Taggart
October 26, 2009
The system would distribute electricity from solar, geothermal, wind and wave energy from Australia to China. Natural gas and hydro would fill the gaps. The vision is big. So is climate change.
In Europe, the DESERTEC Industrial Initiative proposes that a series of concentrating solar power plants in North Africa could power the region and export surplus electricity to Europe.
Could a similar network be be built in Asia? If it were, the benefits would be huge.
It would create energy market efficiencies through expanded cross-border energy trade. It would create an innovation-spurring, robust, flexible, adaptable infrastructure. It would increase energy security.
At present, dirty fossil fuels meet most of Asia's electricity needs.
Outside of China, renewable energy development lags. National electricity grids aren't inter-connected. Carbon costs aren't applied. Vision is lacking.
But if economic and technological rationalisation is applied, Asia could end up with networked electricity and natural gas backbone that would serve the region into the 22nd Century.
The plan involves connecting Asia through a 6,000-8,000 kilometer electricity and natural gas transmission system stretching from southern Australia to Japan and South Korea.
Australian surplus concentrating solar power, geothermal, wind and wave energy, along with natural gas, would flow northward to Indonesia. There, it would be joined by Indonesia's surplus natural gas, geothermal and hydro power.
The combined energy supplies, joined by Malaysian hydro, southeast Asian biomass and Mekong wind, would then be transmitted to China, Japan and South Korea through a 'non-discriminatory, common-carrier' infrastructure operated like a toll road.
Further north, China's Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang provinces could contribute solar and wind energy. In the East Asian Sea, networked offshore wind farms and wave and tide machines would contribute more energy. Regional natural gas and hydro energy supplies would 'load balance' the entire system in a hemispheric network managed as an highly-efficient whole.
Competitively accessible, non-discriminatory, low-emission energy generated and delivered through a regionally-interconnected, Pan-Asian energy infrastructure represents a market-based solution to climate change.
It would increase cross border trade. It would generate better investment price signals. It would encourage constructive multilateralism. It would deepen electrification in Asia's poorest areas, raising economic growth rates. It would create an flexible, adaptable infrastructure.
It would serve the region well.
Multilateral organisations ranging from the Asian Development Bank to the Asia-Pacific Energy Research Center argue that increased Asian cross-border energy trade generats large net present value. Both advocate deeper interconnection of Asia's energy economy, and the ADB has gone so far as to recommend creation of a Pan-Asian Infrastructure Fund.
At the recent East Asian summit in Thailand, Japan and Australia all advanced new ideas on Pan-Asian economic and security cooperation. China and the US both want to participate.
With aging infrastructure, huge energy needs, the threat of climate change and global geopolitical power re-alignments creating new potential risks for conflict in Asia, now is the ideal time to bind the region -- the world's 21st Century economic engine -- to a 'common watering hole.'
History may judge the effort as the Asian equivalent of the 'European Coal and Steel Community' that set the stage in the 1950s for a half-century of wealth-building, peaceful pan-European political and economic integration.
To learn more, please read "A Pan-Asian Energy Infrastructure" at http://www.desertec-asia.com