'China needs to cut energy reliance on coal'
Power and coal shortages in China should serve as a wake-up call for the country to increase power production from nuclear and wind plants, and reduce its reliance on coal-fired generators, a leading energy official said.
By Agencies |
BEIJING: Power and coal shortages in China should serve as a wake-up call for the country to increase power production from nuclear and wind plants, and reduce its reliance on coal-fired generators, a leading energy official said.
Power plants in many parts of the country were running short of coal due to soaring prices for the black hydrocarbon and transport bottlenecks, while persistent snow and ice storms had disrupted power transmission. Only a "fragile balance" had been reached in the thermal coal market despite huge coal output, Zhang Guobao, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, said on Monday.
Eighty four per cent of China's power output came from coal-fired plants in 2007, which also churned out more than half of the country's sulphur dioxide emission. China would face resource, environment and transport restrictions if it continued to boost coal production, so it urgently needed to increase nuclear and wind power capacity, Zhang said.
He added that thanks to supportive measures, China's wind power generating capacity had jumped to 6.05 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2007 from 2.67 GW at the end of 2006. However, the capacity ranked only the fifth largest in the world and was dwarfed by Germany's 20.62 GW. China has much richer wind power resources than Germany and could develop wind farms on a larger scale, he said.
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