China nomads on energy's cutting edge

She favors dramas and news programs in Uighur and her native Kazakh language, but after TV opened new worlds, she switched her children from the local Kazakh school to that of the Han Chinese. Her children will be educated in the language of China's ethnic majority.

"From TV I learned [Mandarin] Chinese is very important to the future, to getting jobs," says Sitkan, her voice becoming insistent. "I hope they go to college. I don't want them to be nomads; it's too hard."

Solar energy plays a significant role in Beijing's renewables strategy, and the government will continue to electrify remote areas, with portable solar programs already launched in Yunnan and Qinghai provinces. It also plans to develop solar-powered water heaters, intended to replace 97 million tons of carbon dioxide output by 2020, according to Douglas Ogden, director of the China Sustainable Energy Program.

Mr. Ogden, who consults for Beijing on energy strategy, says China's 15 percent renewables goal is laudable. But he wonders whether the government's methods are appropriate.

More than a third of the pledge will be met by small dams in environmentally-sensitive regions of the country. Further, he says, China has neglected the easy payoff of updating antiquated power plants and ancient boilers.

"All of the industries, they're using old 1950s Soviet-era stuff," Ogden says. "They waste 12 times the amount of coal that would be burned with modern technology."

Even so, as China charges forward, global corporations have come calling with hopes of cashing in on the quest to "decarbonize" energy. The US State Department estimates China's market for energy equipment, technology, and services at $1 trillion over the next 20 years. At least $250 billion of that investment will require foreign goods and services.

While Shell Solar won China's initial rural electrification contract, the company plans to sell off the photovoltaic business partly because it was losing money, says Timothy O'Leary, a Shell spokesman. The company will then focus on a next-generation solar technology: thin-film copper indium diselenide.

As one petroleum company gets out, another moves in. In December, BP announced a joint venture with Xinjiang-based SunOasis Co. to develop photovoltaics in China. Plans call for annual production capacity of 100 megawatts by 2010.

Back in Sorbastow, up a mountainous dirt road about 6 miles away from Sitkan's winter cabin, two newlyweds have high hopes for their unborn child. Kowante and Sandokash Rahmat got their solar panel in November as a wedding present from their parents.

"Marriage and the solar [power] system is double happiness for me," says Kowante as he picks up a dombra – a Kazakh guitar – to strum out an old folk song. Sandokash taps her foot to the music.

Their first purchase following the wedding was a cassette player, loaded with Kazakh pop tunes. Their child might have a television, too, and if all goes well at the mutton market in the coming years, a computer.

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