Beijing-based clean energy investors are enlisting foreign and local interest, as financiers show increasing faith in China's ability to meet tough goals to clean up its coal-based economy.
The China Environment Fund, for example, has just tapped foreign investors to top up its clean energy fund to $250 million. It counts Beijing's Tsinghua University, famous for its engineers, as a significant shareholder.
China is in the spotlight for its much dirtier, coal-based power generation, with the country poised to overtake the United States as the world's number-one emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
High carbon-emitting coal still accounts for more than 70 percent of the country's power.
...A clutch of Chinese companies have recently burst into the global solar power industry. Founded in 2001 and listed in 2005, Suntech now counts itself as a top-three solar cell maker, and its founder, Shi Zhengrong, is a billionaire, according to Forbes.
..."What it's taken the world to do in the past 20 years, China will do in the next 10," said James Pennay, from the Beijing office of wind project developers IW Power.
