China pays its highly skilled wind turbine assembly workers an average of $4100 per year per worker……..compare this to the starting salary of $45,000 per worker at the Vestas new wind turbine plants in Colorado…………

APWR and anything else Chinese and green energy is going to go UP over time, the low cost advantage almost guarantees future success ………..

Also, China has a lot less developed energy market than the U.S., which gives it enormous room for growing its renewable energy industry.

China furthermore has the killer advantage of extremely cheap labor, relative to the U.S. Some Chinese wind-turbine workers make $4,100 a year. That isn’t a typo.

A key passage from the NYT:

China’s top leaders are intensely focused on energy policy: on Wednesday, the government announced the creation of a National Energy Commission composed of cabinet ministers as a “superministry” led by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao himself.
Regulators have set mandates for power generation companies to use more renewable energy. Generous subsidies for consumers to install their own solar panels or solar water heaters have produced flurries of activity on rooftops across China.
China’s biggest advantage may be its domestic demand for electricity, rising 15 percent a year. To meet demand in the coming decade, according to statistics from the International Energy Agency, China will need to add nearly nine times as much electricity generation capacity as the United States will.
So while Americans are used to thinking of themselves as having the world’s largest market in many industries, China’s market for power equipment dwarfs that of the United States, even though the American market is more mature. That means Chinese producers enjoy enormous efficiencies from large-scale production.
In the United States, power companies frequently face a choice between buying renewable energy equipment or continuing to operate fossil-fuel-fired power plants that have already been built and paid for. In China, power companies have to buy lots of new equipment anyway, and alternative energy, particularly wind and nuclear, is increasingly priced competitively.
Interest rates as low as 2 percent for bank loans — the result of a savings rate of 40 percent and a government policy of steering loans to renewable energy — have also made a big difference.
As in many other industries, China’s low labor costs are an advantage in energy. Although Chinese wages have risen sharply in the last five years, Vestas still pays assembly line workers here only $4,100 a year.
Again, what kind of approach can U.S. policymakers come up with that would even come close to moving the needle away from all these Chinese advantages and at the very least level the playing field for U.S. green energy manufacturers? It’s hard to imagine how you get there from here.

categories: Energy