Powering the Future
Chinese energy giant adds more clean energy to its sails
The city of Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China looks like a pastoral paradise with boundless lush green prairies lying under a brilliant azure sky, peacefully grazing herds, and melodies flying in the air as the herdsmen play the morin khuur, the traditional horsehead fiddle.
Soon the landscape will have a modern addition. With the world’s largest onshore wind power project breaking ground in the city on September 26, Ulanqab, also called the land of wind power, will get more green power. The city is the main passage for the freezing high-pressure winds from Siberia and cyclones from Mongolia to enter the Chinese mainland.
“The project will generate 20 TWH of wind power every year, to be transmitted to the Beijing-tianjin-hebei region. It will replace the consumption of 6 million tons of standard coal equivalent, thereby reducing 16 million tons of greenhouse gas emission,” Liu Mingsheng, Chairman of Nei Mongol Energy Co. under the State Power Investment Corp. (SPIC), one of the top five power generation companies in China, said.
Nei Mongol Energy is developing the project that will cover an area of 2,072 square km and is expected to see investment of around 40 billion yuan ($ 5.64 billion).
The project is not taking clean power subsidies from the government. The power it generates will be sold at the same price as thermal power, Liu said. He estimated roughly 48 billion yuan ($6.76 billion) of subsidies will be saved in two decades of operation.
With climate change posing an increasingly greater threat to the survival of humankind, switching to clean energy has got a new urgency. “We will promote a revolution in energy production and consumption, and build an energy sector that is clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said in his report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October 2017.
SPIC’S total installed power capacity is 144.87 GW, over 50 percent of which is clean energy. Of the actual power it generates, 43.18 percent is from nonfossil sources, the company said at a press conference in July. It has a 10-percent lead in both capacity and production of clean power.
The future trend
According to the World Energy Outlook 2018 released by the International Energy Agency, renewable and nuclear power accounted for 36 percent of gross generation. The report predicted that in 2050, clean energy will make up over 70 percent of primary energy consumption and its installed capacity would be over 80 percent of the world’s total.
In China, the per-capita coal reserve is 70 percent of the global average level, while natural gas and petroleum account for just one fifteenth. According to SPIC Chairman Qian Zhimin, given China’s energy resources, clean energy undoubtedly represents the future trend.
“China has abundant clean energy resources,” Qian said in his speech at the Annual Conference of Nationwide Corporate Culture held in August. Five places alone—inner Mongolia, Xinjiang Uygur and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions and Gansu and Qinghai provinces—have exploitable wind and solar power capacity that could total 397 PWH, or nearly 4,700 times the power generated by the Three Gorges Hydropower Station. The national power demand will be fully met if a 60th of the reserves is developed, Qian said.
Prior to the Ulanqab wind power project, SPIC has built several large new-energy industrial bases, such as the world’s largest solar power station in Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai in northwest China, and offshore power proj
ects in Jiangsu Province in east China and Guangdong Province in south China.
As of now, the company has registered 16.46 GW of solar power capacity and 16.57 GW of wind power capacity, ranking first and third in the world, respectively. Besides that, it is rolling out a nuclear power blueprint in the coastal regions of Shandong Province in east China and Guangdong, with a combined capacity of over 10 GW.
At a conference in May, Qian talked of the importance of innovation as the main engine driving corporate development, pointing out that progress has been made in major science and technology projects and new and intelligent energy.
SPIC boasts of several innovations. Its proprietary nuclear reactor CAP1400 has 85 percent of its parts made in China. It has also achieved breakthroughs in the research and development of heavy-duty gas turbines.
In 2022, when visitors come to watch the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, they will be transported from one venue to another by Spic-developed hydrogen buses that use hydrogen fuel cells for power.
Talking about the direction the energy sector is taking, Qian said the future energy system would be a network of information, communication, control and protection devices. It would be capable of producing, transmitting, utilizing, storing and converting primary and secondary energy and the Internet of Energy would be its platform.
Belt and Road forays
As the demand for power rises in other countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese enterprises are seizing investment opportunities. SPIC has seen its business expand into over 45 countries, such as Brazil and Malta, with total installed capacity surpassing 5 GW. Over 60 percent of it is clean energy.
In August 2018, an 80-MW wind power station was completed in Punta Sierra, Chile. It’s the first power station constructed by SPIC and the largest of its kind in the South American country. The power it generates meets the needs of 130,000 households and reduces 157,000 tons of carbon emissions.
In August, a thermal power project with two 660-MW plants began commercial operation in Hub, an industrial city in
Pakistan’s Balochistan Province. Developed by SPIC, the project has earmarked part of the nearly $2-billion investment to treat emissions from the plants and ensure conformation with environmental protection standards.
It’s one of the major energy projects under the China- Pakistan Economic Corridor initiative, and will fulfill the power demand of millions of Pakistani families, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Geng Shuang said.
Densely populated but economically lagging behind, Pakistan has the second highest school dropout rate. Jobs and vocational training facilities are low compared with the global average.
While developing the project, SPIC has generated jobs for the local people and provided training opportunities. Till date, over 60 percent of the staff are Pakistanis and the ratio is expected to reach 80 percent in the next five years, according to the manager of the project.
The Chinese Government issued a white paper on food security on October 14, titled Food Security in China, detailing the efforts to enhance food security and expand international cooperation in the area.
Despite a weak agricultural foundation and extreme poverty, the Communist Party of China’s unremitting campaign over the past 70 years has made China basically selfsufficient in food supply, the document said.
Following the principle of basic food self-sufficiency based on domestic grain production, China is protecting its farmland and implementing a strategy of sustainable farmland use and innovative application of agricultural technology to increase farmland productivity.
Through supply-side structural reform and institutional innovation, grain productivity has been raised, grain circulation modernized and the food supply structure improved. The grain industry has been steadily developed, the white paper said.
Data from the National Bureau of
Statistics showed that between 1949 and 2018, China’s total grain output rose by nearly five times from 113 million tons to 658 million tons, while the per-capita output more than doubled from 209 kg to 472 kg.
“Looking to the future, China has the conditions, capabilities and confidence to enhance food security relying on its own efforts,” the white paper said.
However, it added that in the medium to long term, China’s grain production and demand will remain closely aligned, which means efforts to ensure food security must not slacken.
The world today is still facing severe food security challenges, with over 800 million people suffering from hunger and food trade disrupted by protectionism and unilateralism.
In view of these challenges, China will follow its own path and implement its national strategies for food security and rural vitalization through sustainable farmland use and agricultural technology innovation to increase farmland productivity. The aim is to advance from being a large grain producer to a food industry power, ensuring the security of its “rice bowl”.
By 2022, 66.67 million hectares of high-quality farmland will be developed, and by 2035, the grain planting area will be kept generally steady. The management of emergency grain reserves will be improved and a modern grain market system will be built.
Upholding its “red line of absolute food security and zero risk to farmers from low grain prices”, China will adapt to World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, reform its grain purchase, storage systems and pricing mechanisms to give full play to the decisive role of the market in allocating grain resources, which will enable the government play its role better.
The assistance to other developing countries will continue within the framework of South-south cooperation to the best of China’s ability. China will also promote the sound development of the global food industry.
Efforts are on to achieve the goals set in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.”
China will enhance grain trade cooperation with other countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative to establish a new international platform for grain cooperation and facilitate free and orderly flow of agricultural resources and deep integration of their markets.
Efforts will be made to support grain enterprises in “going global” and bringing in imports to make rational use of both domestic and international markets and resources.
China will explore new modes of international food cooperation and conduct multifaceted and advanced cooperation with other countries.
“Observing WTO rules, China will do all it can to make the international food supply more secure, stable and rational in order to better safeguard the food security of our world,” the white paper said.