{"id":44610,"date":"2014-07-14T12:11:53","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T11:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=44610"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:33:40","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:33:40","slug":"inside-yingli-the-giant-chinese-solar-company-sponsoring-the-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/07\/inside-yingli-the-giant-chinese-solar-company-sponsoring-the-world-cup\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Yingli, the Giant Chinese Solar Company Sponsoring the World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’ve seen its logos on the sidelines. Now get a peek inside the company trying to transform the world. <\/em><\/p>\n

It takes about\u00a0two hours by car from the Chinese capital Beijing\u00a0to get to the\u00a0smog-blanketed city of\u00a0Baoding. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s nothing much to speak of,\u00a0typical of the Northeast’s expanse of industrial wastelands, threaded together by super-highways.<\/p>\n

So we were surprised to find that Baoding\u2014where air pollution registers at hazardous levels<\/a> for more than a quarter of the year\u2014was also home to the sprawling campus of the world’s top solar panel manufacturer, Yingli. We had landed, it seemed, in the very epicenter of China’s clean tech revolution.\u00a0After weeks of negotiations, my colleague Jaeah Lee and I were finally granted access to film this exclusive footage at Yingli’s\u00a0headquarters in the fall of 2013. What awaited inside blew our socks off: acres of high-tech solar wizardry attended to by an impressive fleet of skilled workers, and an understandably boastful management.<\/p>\n

In the video above, we take you behind-the-scenes of Yingli, and put a face to the name you’ve been seeing in the background of World Cup games: In\u00a02010,\u00a0Yingli became the first renewable energy company, and the first Chinese company, to partner with the tournament.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=w7q9rV6LViI<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

James West is senior producer for the Climate Desk<\/a> and a contributing producer for Mother Jones. He wrote Beijing Blur<\/a> (Penguin 2008), and produced award-winning TV<\/a> in his native Australia. He’s been to Kyrgyzstan, and also invited himself to Thanksgiving dinner<\/a> after wrongly receiving invites for years from the mysterious Tran family.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jaeah Lee is the associate interactive producer at Mother Jones. Email her at jlee[at]motherjones.com.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 motherjones.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ve seen its logos on the sidelines. Now get a peek inside the company trying to transform the world. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}