Beijing to close last of its major coal power plants

BEIJING — Pollution averaged more than twice China’s national standard last year in Beijing, which will close the last of its four major coal-fired power plants next year.

The capital city will shut down China Huaneng Group Corp’s 845-megawatt power plant next year, after closing plants owned by Guohua Electric Power and Beijing Energy Investment Holding last week, said a statement on the website of the city’s economic planning agency. A fourth major power plant, owned by China Datang Corp, was shut last year.

The facilities will be replaced by four gas-fired stations with the capacity to supply 2.6 times more electricity than the coal plants.

Once complete, Beijing’s power and central heating will be entirely generated by clean energy, said the Municipal Commission of Development and Reform.

The closures are part of a broader trend in China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter. Facing pressure at home and abroad, policymakers are racing to address the environmental damage seen as a by-product of breakneck economic growth.

Beijing plans to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million tonnes by 2017 from the 2012 level to slash the concentration of pollutants.

Global sports may also play a role in the city’s decision. If Beijing wins the right to hold the 2022 Winter Olympics, the event will be both frugal and free from the city’s notorious smog, Beijing’s Mayor was quoted as saying in a state-run newspaper yesterday.

While Beijing made strenuous efforts to clean up its air in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics, it still suffers from smog, so bad on occasion that it has forced the airport to shut and enveloped everything with a thick, choking haze.

“We are prepared to reduce the use of coal, alleviate pollution caused by traffic, extend the use of new energy vehicles and ask more polluting plants to move out of Beijing,” Mayor Wang Anshun said, reported the official China Daily. “We promise the air quality will meet World Health Organization standards by the start of winter in 2022.”

Average levels of hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 stood at 85.9 microgrammes per cubic metre last year, down 4 per cent from the previous year, but still far higher than the national air quality standard of 35 microgrammes.

Shutting all major coal power plants in the city, equivalent to reducing annual coal use by 9.2 million tonnes, is estimated to cut carbon emissions of about 30 million tonnes, said Mr Tian Miao, a Beijing-based analyst at North Square Blue Oak, a London-based research company with a focus on China.

“Most pollutants come from burning coal, so the closure will have a clear impact on reducing emissions,” Mr Tian said. “The replacement with natural gas will be much cleaner with less pollution, though with a littlehigher cost.”

Nationally, China had plans to close more than 2,000 smaller coal mines from 2013 to this year, Mr Song Yuanming, vice-chief of the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety, said at a news conference last July.

Coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and the leading source of carbon dioxide emissions. In the 10 years to 2013, coal demand globally grew by more than 50 per cent, meeting almost half of the increase in the world’s total primary energy needs, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual energy outlook report last year. China was the principal source of the surge, the IEA said.

Closing coal-fired power plants is seen as a critical step in addressing pollution in China, which gets about 64 per cent of the primary energy it uses from the fossil fuel. AGENCIES