Last year we had our very first group of Energy, Resources and Environment (ERE) Masters students graduate from HNC, and it was certainly a very distinguished group. This year we similarly had a really great group of students, shown in the picture below.

China has paid a lot of attention to ‘greening’ its financial sector over recent years, and Ms. Yang Sha (on the left in the picture) and Ms. Chen Yunjie (on the right) wrote theses addressing China’s new green bond and green credit policies, respectively. Although China issues more green bonds than anywhere else in the world, none of these are municipal bonds – and Ms. Yang’s thesis addressed how China might bring itself into alignment with other countries in doing so. Ms. Chen examined how banks evaluated companies when making credit and loan decisions, and the manner in which the government’s ‘green credit’ policies face real-world implementation obstacles within Jiangsu Province.

HNC 2017 Scholars

Ms. Tan Yanqiu (center, next to me) wrote her thesis about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with battery storage systems used within the power sector – a topic which is becoming important as utilities adopt wind and solar renewable energy technologies, and one which she shows to play an increasingly significant role as those systems decarbonize. Other faculty members judged her thesis to be an “outstanding” one, and she has received a coveted position in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — and will begin that work in Beijing later this summer.

A number of other students not pictured also deserve mention. Ms. Liu Chang received her Masters degree with a thesis addressing the potential role of third-party auditors in China’s upcoming national carbon market. We work our HNC Masters students very, very hard — I remember the painful corrections & revisions on my own Masters thesis; now imagine doing that same work in a foreign language! — & I suspect Ms. Liu was already off celebrating when the picture above was taken. But she will no doubt do very well in her future career. Similarly, Mr. Dai Lei graduated last year (off-cycle) with a thesis addressing the levelized cost of electricity for Chinese photovoltaic installations. He presciently found that certain regional feed-in tariffs were considerably above the costs of delivery, given the rapid decline in PV module costs – and the government adjusted those rates downward shortly thereafter.

Finally, Jiwoon Choi joined me for a UNEP-UNIDO meeting about green industry in early May, and did a write-up about it for our HNC blog. Jiwoon will be spending this summer as an intern with my good friends and colleagues at UN ESCAP in Bangkok, and she’ll then head to SAIS Washington to finish up her ERE Masters program there.