China needs to develop clean energy

    At present three kinds of main energies are used by man, namely crude oil, natural gas and coal. Statistic from international energy organization shows that these three kinds of energies’ reserve all over the world left for the man’s deploitation in years are respectively 40, 50, and 240 only. These numbers are shocking by sight. In China, along with massive consuming and using of oil, natural gas and coal, atmosphere quality of many cities are quiet poor, and severely threatens the development of these cities as well as the healthy of the people. What is more serious is that there is only 139 billion tons of standard coal remains in reserves for exploitation, which, by the exploitation speed of that in year 2003, 1.667 billion tons/year, will run out in 83 years. Oil resource in China is not sufficient, nor does the natural resource. China has already been the world’s second biggest country in oil importation.That is why China needs clean energies to substitute the above mentioned three kinds of traditional energy, and rapidly reduce their consuming year by year, for environment protection and city atmosphere improvement has now become major subjects that mean a lot for sustainable development of the society. Being a safety and clean energy, nuclear power, wind power, and hydropower are widely accepted by many countries of the world. Meanwhile, clean energies that under exploiting including solar energy, hydrogen energy, geothermal energy, and wave energy, those will definitely be exploited and used in priority in the future.

    As for hydropower, it is now widely used throughout the world thanks to its advantages such as renewable, low cost, and ecologically clean. China is rich in water resource, the world first on total reserves----378 million kW exploitable, which take 16.7% of the total exploitable energies of the world. By the end of year 2003, the installed capacity of hydropower in China reached 92.17 million kW, which is 24% of the total installed capacity of power generation, and is 15% of the total generated energy. It is expected that by year 2020 the installed capacity will up to 270 million kW.

    When it refers to wind energy, China has improved power generation capacity class and efficiency of single set, and has built sets group of certain scale, that is wind power plant. At present, wind power plants have already been built and under building mainly distribute in Xinjiang，Inner Mongolia, and coastal areas. Equipments are generally foreign supplied or assembled with imported technique and parts. Thus it is not difficult for us to see that China still has difference with other countries on technique and other aspects.

    On solar energy, Chinese government planed and implemented “Brightness program”. It is planed that by the year of 2010, power supply of 23 million people living in remote areas will be fulfilled by the means of photovoltaic technique. With speed development of photovoltaic technique and its application materials of the world in nowadays, the cost of solar energy power generation will be largely reduced, which provided possibility for China’s extensive exploitation of solar resource. In aspect of Hydrogen energy, EU will input 2 billions of EUR for research of technique for hydrogen energy exploitation in future 5 years. MITI in Japan hopes that by 2010, 50 thousand cars driven by hydrogen would run on Japanese road, and up to 2 million cars by 2020. China, supported by Global Environment Fund and the UN, started “Demonstration Project for Fuel Cell Bus Commercialization in China” to spread the application of fuel cells in to the public traffic of Chinese cities. Biomass, which is solar energy stored by plants on the earth during the plants’ photosynthesis, would probably become one of the main new energies of the 21st century. It is estimated that the energy stored by plants on the earth each year equals to 10 times of main fuel consumed by the whole world, and its using as energy hardly reaches 1% of the total quantity. By biomass transforming technique, biomass energy can be effectively used to produce all kinds of clean fuel, and apply them as substitute for coal, oil, and natural gas to be fuel for power generation. It would be a very promising power generating mode, for it can not only reduce environment pollution, but also would increase the income of farmers.