BEIJING — China announced new regulations to increase the use of renewable energy such as wind and hydropower by forcing electricity grid operators to prioritize their use, in an effort by the world’s top greenhouse-gas emitter to reduce its reliance on coal.
The new measures were passed Saturday by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, as an amendment to the 2006 renewable energy law, the state-run Xinhua news agency said. The amendment will force powerful state-owned electric grid companies, which are responsible for distributing electricity from power plants, to buy all the electricity generated from renewable sources even when it is more expensive and more complicated to use than electricity from coal-fired plants.
The new legislation “contributes to the global fight on climate change,” said Wang Zhongying, director of the renewable energy center under a think tank affiliated with China’s National Development and Reform Commission, according to Xinhua.
Coal currently accounts for 70% of China’s total energy use. China wants to increase use of renewable-energy sources to 15% of its total by 2020, up from 9% last year. The goal is related to a separate target announced by top leader Hu Jintao last month ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit to reduce China’s carbon emissions relative to economic output by 40% to 45% from 2005 levels by 2020. The absolute levels of emissions will continue to grow, however, as China’s economy expands.
The government’s efforts have encouraged a boom in renewable-energy development in China that has added more generation capacity than China’s electricity grid has been using. That has left between a quarter and a third of China’s wind farms stranded.
Other countries that are promoting renewable energy have similar laws in place. Still, China faces difficulties implementing it. China’s electricity grid operators need to develop a smarter network to handle how to dispatch electricity generated by wind or solar energy, which fluctuates widely depending on weather patterns, with demand for power, which swings in different cycles.
The new rules come as China continues to trade barbs over its role at the Copenhagen summit, which ended Dec. 18 with an accord that was widely labeled a disappointment. Some foreign officials, including Britain’s climate-change secretary Ed Miliband, have charged that Beijing’s intransigence was responsible for the meeting’s failure to reach a global commitment to significantly reduce emissions.
China has fired back, with state media running articles trumpeting the contributions of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who attended the summit. Chinese consular officials in the U.S., reflecting the Chinese government’s increasingly assertive public relations tactics, last week forwarded some of that coverage to U.S. journalists.
The Xinhua article they forwarded portrays Mr. Wen as a hero at Copenhagen, struggling to protect the interests of poor nations and shocked by the rudeness of others toward China as he tried to reach a last-minute consensus.
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