Blue sky thinking is priority for premier
Print Edition
PREMIER Li Keqiang pledged yesterday to make the country’s smoggy skies blue again and “work faster” to address pollution caused by the burning of coal for heat and electricity.
In a report to China’s top legislature, Li said “people are desperately hoping for” faster progress to improve air quality. “We will make our skies blue again,” he declared to almost 3,000 delegates in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
The government intended over the next year to step up work to upgrade coal-fired power plants to achieve ultra-low emissions and energy conservation, and prioritize the integration of renewable energy sources into the electricity grid, he said.
Integration problems have arisen because China has added wind and solar power at a faster rate than the grid has expanded. That capacity is then wasted when grid operators choose to use traditional energy sources, including coal, over renewables.
Despite China’s lingering dependence on coal plants, its consumption of the energy source fell in 2016 for a third year in a row. Coal now makes up 62 percent of China’s total energy consumption mix.
Building on publicly available real-time and hourly readings from coal plants and other factories, Li said: “All key sources of industrial pollution will be placed under round-the-clock online monitoring.”
Li added the government would ramp up efforts to deal with vehicle emissions by working faster to take old vehicles off the roads and encourage the use of clean-energy cars.
Environmental laws and regulations would be strictly enforced and officials who failed to do so would be held “fully accountable,” he said.
Li said that this year sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions — gases produced by burning fossil fuels that can cause respiratory problems — would both be cut by 3 percent, and the density of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 would fall “markedly” in key areas.
Official data showed an improvement in China’s air quality since 2013, when the government brought out its air pollution action plan. However, cities including Beijing still regularly register levels of pollution several times higher than the recommended safe limit.
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