From July 15 to May 15 of 2018, I was at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. While there, I worked in conjunction with students in Hangzhou to research renewable energy policies that could be used to benefit China’s environment. Below is a photo of me with some of the friends that I made and my fellow student from the University of Tennessee (in the red shirt on the far left, Christine Garcia) overlooking West Lake.

While in China, I got to tour the Great Wall in Beijing, see the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, visit the Bund in Shanghai, and spend time in my favorite city in the country, Hangzhou. The trip was incredible, and I learned a lot about Chinese culture and research.

The one of the most significant differences between the United States and China lies in the population. China is an incredibly large country with a huge population, and that fact affects every aspect of infrastructure. Buildings are full, public attractions are packed, buses are dense, streets are busy. Below are three pictures from China, a pagoda near Hangzhou, a typical street corner in Shanghai, and a view from the top of a mountain in Hangzhou, which demonstrate the some of the crowding and the spacing of the cities.

To house so many people, Chinese infrastructure was built creatively, working not outwards into wider buildings but upwards into the sky. The buildings also tend to be very close together and set up in blocks for efficient use of the land. The two pictures below, taken from a skyscraper, show sections of Shanghai that demonstrate Chinese infrastructure.

The country has been working to remedy the overpopulation issue through the one-child policy, which has only allowed Chinese families one child. Thankfully, this policy was recently repealed because it caused a great number of ethical problems in the country. However, the issues with overpopulation have remained. The overpopulation has caused intense pollution, drained the country of resources, and decreased the standard of living per household.

One of the main issues that China has been facing is an energy crisis. The country has been attempting to address environmental issues, but with needing to provide for so many people, all strides towards a cleaner China have been undermined.

As a part of the NAE Grand Challenge Scholars Program, I chose to focus on how solving their challenges could benefit China. In making solar energy economical, engineers would be alleviating this issue in China because clean energy would be more competitive on the market. As such, clean energy would be a more viable option for companies and households, which could improve the state of the environment in China and make the cost of living lower, raising the standard of living.

While I was in China, I studied the policies needed to encourage renewable energy implementation by analyzing the policies instigated in Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, comparing which policies worked and how they were implemented. At Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, I worked for two months with graduate and doctoral students analyzing which policies would be effective in incentivizing renewable energy uses in China, focusing a large section of my study on solar energy. The policy deemed most effective is a feed-in tariff, which provides a small compensation for companies on a per-unit-of-clean-energy-used basis. Although FITs were the most effective, other policies were analyzed, and the research will continue through this semester.

In bettering solar energy, engineers will be bettering the Chinese environment and improving their standard of living.