23.4 million kW

Capacity of Qinghai province’s power grid as of May. About 82.8 percent came from hydro, solar and wind sources.

Home to the source of China’s major rivers, including the Yellow, Yangtze and Lancang, Qinghai has strong hydropower and solar supplies and is home to 5.8 million people.

By May, the Qinghai power grid had an installed capacity of 23.4 million kilowatts, about 82.8 percent coming from hydro, solar and wind sources.

“Qinghai has an organic industry chain of power generation. It also has diverse transmission paths to send power to other regions. Qinghai is more competitive than other regions in the development of green energy,” said Jin Yong, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

During the 12th FiveYear Plan period (2011-15), China’s energy consumption per unit of GDP dropped by 18.2 percent, said Ren Shuben, head of environment resources at the National Development and Reform Commission.

“Now is a good time to give a strong push to green energy and the recycling economy to change energy consumption and achieve high-efficiency energy use,” he said.

Lu said Qinghai needs to tackle problems of instability in green energy and develop a smart grid where hydropower, solar, wind and power-storage facilities can function together organically.

According to the provincial 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), Qinghai will expand its solar and wind capacity to 35 million kilowatts by 2020 and supply 110 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year annually to central and eastern parts of China, without burning 50 million metric tons of coal.

Xu Lianbin didn’t do anything special on Monday, the anniversary of his daughter’s death.

Instead, he visited a construction site in Linyi, Shandong province, looking for a job.

“Our family is in debt, and I have to work. Life must go on,” said the father, who is in his 50s.

His life was disrupted in August last year, when his 18-year-old daughter, Xu Yuyu, died of cardiac arrest after being cheated out of 9,900 yuan ($1,490) the family had saved for her college tuition.

The young woman’s name quickly hit Chinese media, and