China Fuels Energy Innovation
Rebuffed in U.S., Entrepreneurs Get Chinese Backing for Clean-Power Technologies
By BRIAN SPEGELE
BEIJING—Will Latta, the founder of clean-energy company LP Amina Inc., says he tried last year to interest U.S. power utilities in testing a new technology that reduces pollution from burning coal.
Rebuffed, he took his invention to the coal-belt city of Fengtai in eastern China, where he found a partner eager to install the multimillion-dollar technology.
"In the U.S. there's a resistance to demonstrate new technology," says Mr. Latta, a 42-year-old Miami native who founded LP Amina in 2007. "They don't like to be the first."
U.S. politicians, with some encouragement from the White House, are gearing up to confront China over what they say are unfair government subsidies to its clean-energy industry that make it impossible for some U.S. companies to compete. The saga of U.S. solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC, which got a federal $535 million loan guarantee but filed for bankruptcy saying its prices were undercut by Chinese rivals, has crystallized the issue.
Mr. Latta's story underscores how U.S. companies can gain from China's commitment to clean energy and challenges the notion that technological advances by one of the countries comes at the other's expense. Start-ups aren't the only companies getting a boost from China, so have energy giants like Duke Energy Corp.
China leads the world in investment in clean-energy infrastructure, and few nations embrace potential breakthrough inventions with such zeal. That combination allows commercial development of innovations that otherwise might never make it out of labs in the West.
"A wide array of technologically complex technologies will be viable that wouldn't be viable otherwise," says David Victor, director of the University of California at San Diego's Laboratory on International Law and Regulation.
The Obama administration trumpets that calculation as it promotes growing U.S.-China clean-tech cooperation in the face of unease from Congress. LP Amina is among the companies set to benefit from the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, which was created in 2009 to jointly fund clean-energy development.
Last year Mr. Latta tried to create a pilot demonstration for a new piece of technology that reduces the size of coal particles during power generation. The invention is meant to improve coal-processing efficiencies in power plants and has shown promise in cutting nitric-oxide and nitrogen-dioxide emissions, which contribute to ozone-layer depletion and can harm a person's lungs. But he says several U.S. utilities turned him away, unwilling to invest the about $10 million it costs to retrofit a typical power plant.
Early this year, Mr. Latta found a partner in Zhejiang Energy Group, which installed his invention at one of its power plants in Fengtai. Zhejiang Energy didn't respond to a request for comment.
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