Moving from wood to coal to wind

Xinhua

From wood to coal to wind, a collection of pictures and models recounting the evolution of energy sources were on display at an exhibition area spanning 36,000 square meters in Taiyuan, capital of northern China’s Shanxi Province.

The exhibition marked the opening of the 2019 Taiyuan Energy Low Carbon Development Forum in China’s coal-rich province on Tuesday, which attracted many participants from 22 countries and regions including the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany.

Themed “Energy revolution, International cooperation,” the three-day forum is expected to gather global strength to work toward international energy cooperation and global climate governance.

Bohuslav Sobotka, former prime minister of the Czech Republic, praised China for taking joint responsibility for global climate governance and for its tremendous efforts to implement greenhouse gas emission reduction plans.

“It is also right for China to gradually restrict coal mining. It is laudable as well that China’s employment in green energy has reached 43 percent,” said Sobotka.

China has committed to reducing the carbon intensity of its economy by 60 to 65 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels and increasing non-fossil fuel energy to 20 percent of its primary energy consumption by the same date.

As of 2017, China’s carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP has decreased by 46 percent compared with 2005, according to Xie Zhenhua, China’s special representative for climate change affairs. China has also cut 810 million tons of outdated coal capacity in the past five years.

In the city of Datong, hundreds of thousands of black photovoltaic panels spread across the top of mountains. Known as China’s “capital of coal,” the city is now making a transition toward renewable energy development.

In 2016, Datong established the world’s first panda-shaped photovoltaic power station consisting of 170,000 photovoltaic panels. With an installed capacity of 100 megawatts, it is expected to generate 1.8 billion kwh of solar-powered electricity in 25 years, reducing 1.34 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Datong’s move is an epitome of China’s efforts to push forward clean energy development.

“China continued to lead the global clean energy development last year, adding over 20 gigawatts of wind power and more than 40 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic power,” said Liu Zhenmin, UN under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs. China’s increasing environmentally friendly development is not only reshaping its energy structure.

Zhang Zhongzhong, a villager from Zhaojiazhuang village in the city of Huozhou, said there is no longer smoke and dust in his tofu workshop after he replaced his decades-old coal stove with a gas-fuel stove.

Zhang is among the 58 tofu workshops in the city that have replaced coal-burning stoves with gas-burners, each receiving 20,000 yuan (US$2,800) of subsidies from the local government.

“A stove will burn several tons of coal a month. Although the cost of gas is a little bit higher, the workshop is cleaner,” Zhang said.