Solar Power Brings a Brighter, Greener Future

By Target Language Translation Services | Updated: 2021-7-22 16:00

Energy drives economic development and helps improve people's lives, but extracting fossil fuels and generating electricity also cause environmental pollution. So China has pledged that its carbon dioxide emissions will peak before 2030 and it will achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. This is a difficult pledge to fulfill, especially because the national campaign to eradicate poverty achieved initial success only last year after decades of efforts. So China needs to take stricter and more effective measures to reduce the use of fossil fuels while promoting clean energy such as hydropower, and wind, solar and nuclear power.

Official data show that by 2019, clean energy accounted for 23.4 percent of the total energy consumption, up 8.9 percentage points from 2012.

For instance, the development of the solar photovoltaic industry over the past two decades provided China with increasing amount of clean energy and, as expected, greatly reduced its carbon emissions. What was unexpected, however, is the way it helped China control desertification and reduce poverty.

When China decided to promote the solar PV industry 20 years ago, one of the most important questions was where to build bases for the solar panels.

Despite its 9.6 million square kilometers of land area, China has always faced a shortage of cultivable land－it has been feeding nearly 20 percent of the world's population with just 7 percent of the cultivable land. So farmlands couldn't be turned into solar panel bases. Mountain slopes was also out of the question given that China was spending billions of yuan every year to plant trees to improve the environment.

So the authorities decided to set up solar PV panel bases in deserts. It was then that an entrepreneur from Kubuqi, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, visited the planners and offered to provide space for such a base in the desert. The entrepreneur and his company, Yili Group, had spent billions of yuan and many years in fighting desertification.

Now in Kubuqi, the base covers nearly 7,000 hectares and has an annual generating capacity of 900 million kilowatthours.

Apart from helping generate electricity, the panels performed another miracle. In many years since the setting up of the base, plants and grass began to grow between and under the panels. To prevent the grass from growing too tall, the managers raised flocks of ducks, which fed on certain types of grasses. And soon after the generators began producing electricity, Yili Group announced the desert area covered by the panels had turned green.

The Kubuqi model has since been introduced in other Gobi areas.

While large-scale solar PV bases have been built in deserts and other remote areas, usable spaces in villages, too, have caught the authority's attention.

Also, the central government and the power companies combined solar energy development with the national poverty alleviation campaign. As many as 1.7 million poor families in more than 30,000 villages have benefited from this arrangement. After decades of efforts, China succeeded in eradicating absolute poverty at the end of last year.

China is giving incentives to encourage solar power generation. It also encourages market competition, so as to accelerate the development of relevant technologies and reduce costs. And as the solar power industry grows in size, its cost has been reducing.

This article is reprinted from China Daily.

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