China moves to ban all urban coal plants
Having banned the burning of coal from its city centres, China now moves to eliminate the activity from all suburbs as the fight against air pollution intensifies
Having banned the burning of coal from its city centres, China is now aiming to eliminate the activity from all suburbs as the fight against air pollution intensifies, according to the National Energy Administration (NEA).
China’s Clean Coal Action Plan 2015-2020 states that centralised heating and power systems will be required to shift to using renewable energy and natural gas as power sources.
A ban on the sale and burning of low quality coal in the worst effected regions surrounding cities will also come into effect.
Last year Beijing out ruled the burning of coal across 6 central urban districts from 2020, with government subsidies available for the switch to more sustainable fuels.
Around 600,000 industrial boilers are fueled in coal by China, indicating the scale of the air pollution challenge.
With annual consumption at 3.7 billion tonnes a year, coal accounts for 66 per cent of the country’s energy demand.
An earlier plan released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology indicated that China aims to cut this consumption by some 160 million tones by 2020 in a bid to tackle both climate change worries and a domestic air pollution disaster.