From black coal to green power
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Xinhua, October 5, 2011
Some nightmares don't fade with time. Liu Jianjun, a truck driver from Hebei Province, still drives apprehensively on the Beijing-Tibet highway - hoping to never again endure the hellacious, unprecedented traffic jam that occurred on July 17, where Liu found himself ensnarled with 20,000 other vehicles in Zhuozi county, Inner Mongolia. In 40 hours - nearly two days - Liu' s truck crawled only 100 kilometers.
The majority of the trucks trapped in the extreme gridlock were there for the same reason - to transport coal.
Coal has tipped the scales of the Chinese economy and in turn raised the living standards for millions. Coal accounts for about 70 percent of China's energy mix, 30 percentage points higher than the world average.
Such heavy reliance on coal to boost the economy has led to serious pollution and ecological damage, severely hampering China's sustainable development.
MORE NON-FOSSIL ENERGIES
As a way out, China has resolved to develop non-fossil renewable energies over the next five years. It plans to increase consumption of non-fossil energies by 210 million tonnes of coal equivalent during the 2011-2015 period. This will make the total non-fossil energy consumption reach 470 million tonnes of coal equivalent by 2015, 11.5 percent of the total energy consumption in China, says Xu Dingming, counselor on the State Council.
The target includes, of coal equivalent, 280 million tonnes hydropower, 90 million tonnes nuclear power, and 100 million tonnes of other renewable energies, such as wind power, solar power, and biomass energy.
Xu says China is planning to increase hydropower installed capacity to 260 million kilowatts by the end of 2015. Thus China's annual hydropower output will reach 910 billion kilowatt hours by 2015. To this end, China will construct eight 10-million-kilowatt hydropower bases in west China.
But hydropower projects are double-edged swords, imperiling local ecological environments in the course of generating clean energy.
Yao Cucheng, a 42-year-old farmer, has a long face these days. Yao has been devoted to artificial propagation of Schizothorax prenanti, an endangered species of fish, in Shennongjia, Hubei province, for six years.
Yao has managed to raise 100,000 fish in a pond by directing water, algae and aquatic organisms from the Guchong River in the forest zone. He plans to expand the stock of fish to 500,000 next year.
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