earticle

영어

China, faced with an exponential growth of domestic energy consumption today, has strived to facilitate the use of renewable energies across the country as a national project to diversify energy sources. The project has been so far successful and China is now witnessing a remarkable surge of the use of renewable energies across multiple sectors. A crucial part for this success has been played by successive legislation encouraging the use of renewable energies, but in the process some disagreement on several key issues was observed among government departments and stakeholders involved. This paper examines the legislation process of 'Renewable Energy Law' before turning to the continuing controversy over whether the Law includes hydro power, and to the issue of interest conflicts among the ministries surrounding renewable energy policy. The final decision on the matter of whether water power is subject to the Law is now referred to the State Council. Renewable energy policy is officially supposed to be controlled by the National Energy Commission, but the National Development and Reform Commission, as a higher authority supervising it, exerts a great influence on its policy making and implementation.
Deprived of much autonomy under this bureaucratic hierarchy, the National Energy Commission has little ability to create and carry out sustainable energy policy. This is especially so given the fact that the National Development Reform Commission by its very nature is more concerned with economic growth than environmental protection. With the use of renewable energy expected to grow continuously into the future, this is highly likely to pose a long-term threat to the administration system, and thus active efforts should be made to ensure that the roles are clearly defined and properly distributed among government bureaucracies.