At midnight on June 24, Qinghai successfully achieved 7 days, 168 hours of fully clean energy power supply across the province. Experts pointed out that this long-duration, uninterrupted '7 Days of Green Power' initiative on the 'Roof of the World' Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is also a first in China, serving as a good demonstration for promoting the development of clean energy and revealing the huge potential for clean transformation of China's energy structure.
According to statistics from the dispatching and control center of Qinghai Provincial Electric Power Company, during the fully clean energy power supply period, the maximum load on Qinghai's power grid was 7.36 million kilowatts, and the province's total electricity consumption reached 1.178 billion kilowatt-hours, equivalent to reducing coal consumption by 535,000 tons and cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 964,000 tons.
Han Ti, deputy general manager of Qinghai Provincial Electric Power Company, introduced that the clean energy power supply this time mainly relied on three types of energy: hydropower, photovoltaic, and wind power. Any shortfall was supplemented by purchasing new energy electricity from outside, leveraging the advantages of the large power grid in optimizing resource allocation, ensuring that the proportion of such purchases was not less than 20%.
Han Ti said that during the '7 Days of Green Power' period, hydropower supplied 852 million kilowatt-hours, accounting for 72.3% of total electricity consumption; new energy supplied 326 million kilowatt-hours, accounting for 27.7%.
Internationally, the only precedent was Portugal's power grid, which achieved 107 hours of electricity supply entirely from renewable energy from May 7 to 11, 2016. In comparison, Qinghai's power grid's fully clean energy supply this time features a longer supply duration, a higher proportion of photovoltaic power, and greater difficulty in supply.
It is reported that during the '7 Days of Green Power' period, the Yellow River Company provided over 60% of the clean energy generation, with photovoltaic accounting for about 40% of that.
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is an important ecological barrier for China. Qinghai is the source of the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Lancang River, with abundant hydropower resources and unique solar energy resources, making it an important national regional energy relay base.
Since the '12th Five-Year Plan', Qinghai's photovoltaic power generation has grown steadily at an average rate of 1 million kilowatts per year, with an average annual growth rate of 58%. As of the end of May this year, the total installed capacity of Qinghai's power grid was 23.45 million kilowatts, of which renewable energy installations including hydropower, photovoltaic, and wind power reached 19.43 million kilowatts, accounting for 82.8% of the province's total installed power capacity.
Previously, in its nationally determined contributions submitted to the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, China proposed to peak carbon dioxide emissions around 2030 and strive to achieve it as early as possible, to lower carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 60% to 65% by 2030 compared to 2005, and to increase the share of non-fossil energy in primary energy consumption to about 20%.
According to the '13th Five-Year Plan for Energy Development in Qinghai Province', by 2020, the installed capacity of new energy in Qinghai will reach 35 million kilowatts, and it will be able to transmit 110 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity to the central and eastern regions each year, equivalent to replacing about 50 million tons of raw coal, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 90 million tons, sulfur dioxide by 180,000 tons, nitrogen oxides by 240,000 tons, and soot by 30,000 tons.
