China

China National Petroleum Corp, is the latest Chinese oil company to announce plans to invest billions of yuan to upgrade its fuel quality after air pollution in the Chinese capital Beijing hit hazardous levels on 20 days in January.

China has issued environmental protection guidelines for the country’s companies to follow when investing overseas, calling on them to pay more attention to pollution and its impact on local communities.

China's inexorable demand for energy has seen it sign a slew of multi-billion deals in the past in the past week or so, reflecting the new complexities of the international energy market. They add to new calculations by analysts that China is set to produce enough crude oil outside its borders to rival OPEC members such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. In a recent interview with the Financial Times International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol said last year's USD35 billion foreign energy company buying spree by Chinese companies will produce the equivalent of Kuwait's output by 2015.

Goldwind Science & Technology, China’s leading wind turbine manufacturer, has reported a 75 percent drop in its profits. Although China is the world’s biggest installer of wind turbines, demand has decreased.

China has been the dominant producer of solar PV components for several years, with domestic manufacturers rapidly expanding capacity and pursuing economies of scale, aided in no small part by government assistance at the provincial (driven by local job creation goals) and national (supporting a key industry sector) levels. Germany, on the other hand, has seen its production base dwindling over the past few years, while remaining the largest single-country end-market in the world. But this changed at the end of 2012 when China passed it. According to research in the upcoming NPD Solarbuzz Marketbuzz report, this trend is now set to continue for many years.