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China warns too many power plants are being built
By Peter Harmsen
AFP
BEIJING
Petroleumworld.com 06 08 06China said Thursday it is battling a proliferation of new power plants that are being built without permission and threaten to upset plans for a more environmentally friendly energy mix.
"A number of power stations built against regulations still need to be dealt with, which is very difficult," Zhang Guobao, the deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, told a briefing in Beijing.
Local authorities have been moving ahead with new power plant construction to meet a serious electricity shortage in recent years.
"Stimulated by the severe strain on the power supply in the past few years, there is still a strong impetus to construct more power stations in various regions," Zhang said.
Since the central government does not have much control over the projects, it also does not get to decide how they fit into the power mix the planning agencies are steering towards.
"The absence of orderly construction will lead to the deterioration of China's power mix," Zhang said.
The vast majority of China's power needs come from coal and to a lesser extent oil, both of which have had dire consequences for the nation's environment.
Environment officials in Beijing this week listed coal power plants as one of the top three causes of the city's major air pollution problem.
China is trying to adjust its power mix, hoping that "clean power" will make up at least 35 percent of the entire supply in 2010.
By clean power, China refers to hydro, nuclear, gas, clean coal and renewable energy.
Somewhat in line with the drive for clean power, China's plan for the coming five years is to generally prefer large-scale power generation units to small ones, and prioritize coal-fired power units over oil-fired ones, Zhang said.
Power outages, which seriously impacted China's economic performance earlier this decade, have been less of a problem so far in 2006 and the issue could be entirely solved by year-end, according to Zhang.
"Power supply and demand will strike a general balance for the latter part of this year," he said. "This will reverse the power shortage we've seen since June 2002."
From January to April, brownouts and blackouts were down 2.3 percent from the same period last year, he said.
China first reported failures to meet power demand in 2000 and the situation deteriorated steadily. In recent years, roughly three quarters of the nation's provinces and regions have suffered outages.
Many major power plants had run low on coal supplies due to bottlenecks in the industry's over-burdened transport networks and soaring demand stemming from the country's rapid economic growth.
On the supply side, the situation is now gradually being relieved, with a total installed capacity of 750 gigawatts by 2010, up from 500 gigawatts late last year, earlier reports said.
On the demand side, power consumption is expected to rise by less than seven percent annually over the next five years, down from annual increases of at least 10 percent during the past five years, the reports said.
However, these are official targets that may fall apart once they collide with the realities of China's relentless economic growth.
In the first four months of 2006, power demand increased by 12.3 percent from the same period in 2005, according to data provided by Zhang Thursday.
AFP 08 0800 GMT 06 06
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