Page 103 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

80 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

mind, a number of communities sought to become sustainable over the last
three decades.
Integrated “agile” (flexible) strategies applied to infrastructures are needed
for creating and implementing “on-site” power systems in all urban areas that
often contain systems in common with small rural systems (Clark and
Bradshaw, 2004). The difference in scale and size of central power plants (the
utility size for thousands of customers) with on-site or distributed power can be
seen in the economic costs to produce and sell energy. Historically the larger
systems could produce power and sell it for far less than the local power
generated locally for buildings. Those economic factors have changed in the last
decade (Li and Clark, 2009). Now on-site power particularly from renewable
energy power (e.g., solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass) has become far more
competitive and is often better for the environment. Large-scale wind farms and
solar-concentrated systems are costly and lose efficiency due to transmission of
power over long distances (Martinot and Droege, 2011).

Developing World Leaders in Energy Development and
Sustainable Technologies
Some of the major benefits of The GIR are job creation, entrepreneurship, and
new business ventures (Clark and Cooke, 2011). Considerable evidence of
these benefits (Next 10, 2011) can be seen in the European Union, especially
Germany and Spain (Rifkin, 2004). Many studies in the United States have
documented how the shift to renewable energy requires basic labor skills and
also a more educated workforce, but one that is also locally based and where
businesses stay for the long term. This is a typical business model for almost
any kind of business and is what has motivated EU universities to create
“science parks,” which take the intellectual capital from a local university and
build new business across nearby to the campus (Clark, 2003a,b).
Asia’s shift to renewable energy will require extensive retraining. Consider
the case of wind power generation in China. In the early 1990s, Vestas saw
Asia and China as the new emerging big market. Vestas agreed to China’s
“social capitalist” business model (Clark and Li, 2004; Clark and Jensen,
2002), where the central government sets a national plan, provides financing,
and gives companies direction for business projects over 5-year time frames,
which are then repeated and updated. Business plans are critical to any
company, especially when set and followed by national governments.
A major part of the Chinese economic model required that foreign busi-
nesses be colocated in China with at least a 50% Chinese ownership. This
meant that in the late 20th and early 21stcenturies, the Chinese government
owned companies or were the majority owners of the new spin-off
government-owned ventures, established international companies, or started
businesses in China. Additionally, China required that the “profits” or money
made by the new ventures be kept in China for reinvestments.