China plans to invest in renewable energy $ 361 billion

Source: REUTERS / Aly Song

The Chinese government now has many plans for developing its own space program and creating a program for assessing the reliability of citizens , as well as for the energy sector. Thus, by 2020, the country plans to invest about $ 361 billion in alternative energy (renewable energy). Thus, the government plans to gradually move away from "dirty" energy sources such as coal, solar energy, wind energy and other sources.

According to representatives of the National Energy Administration of China (National Energy Administration, NEA), the move to "clean" energy will create an additional 13 million jobs in the energy sector. The project is embedded in a five-year plan that is already being implemented.

By the way, to the renewable energy sources, Chinese officials add radioactive elements. That is, they will build not only wind power, hydroelectric power plants and solar farms, but also nuclear power plants. All of these energy sources together will provide up to 50% of the electricity that the country will consume by 2020. Details of the distribution of funds in various directions yet, and Chinese officials are unlikely to soon reveal these details.
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Despite the fact that the active development of the energy sector has helped the country's economy to expand almost exponentially, now the Chinese authorities are sounding the alarm - many regions are very polluted. In the same Beijing, for example, the so-called red danger level was already announced several times, since the level of air pollution in this city was many times higher than the permissible values.

The State Council of the People’s Republic of China last month announced that the generation of electricity from solar energy should be increased fivefold over the next five years. This means that more than 1,000 solar farms can be built in the country. The development of the "solar" direction in China is constantly increasing. So, last year, this country became the largest supplier of solar energy in the world. In many ways, this contributes to the overall cheaper construction of solar power stations - components are gradually getting cheaper, which allows the country to create more and more solar farms.

“The government may even try to surpass the plans set by himself, since now this sector has a tendency to reduce the cost of construction,” said Steven Han, one of the experts who participated in evaluating the plans of the country's government. Each year, about $ 72 billion will be allocated for the implementation of the overall plan.

By the way, Chinese scientists are now engaged in the development of such an energy source as thermonuclear fusion. At the beginning of last year, the Chinese were able to heat the plasma to a temperature of about 50 million degrees, and kept the plasma in a stable state for 102 seconds. To achieve the current record, Chinese scientists "worked day and night," the scientists said in an official statement. And this is indeed an achievement, because until now no one has ever kept a plasma in a stable state for more than 20 seconds. The Chinese, according to them, were able to solve a number of scientific and engineering problems, including controlling the position of the magnet, as well as trapping high-energy particles that “ran away” from the magnetic donut, the field that holds the plasma.



As for nuclear power plants, specialists from China are going to convert their thermal power plants into nuclear power plants. Information about the project was voiced by Professor Zhen Zhu (Zhang Zuoyi) at a conference on energy. The scientist said that China will gradually abandon the burning of coal, removing old equipment from thermal power plants and replacing it with new. NPPs will be equipped with high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors (HTGRs). Not all coal-fired power plants will be modernized, but only those that are capable of working with very hot water vapor. Only they can withstand the temperatures characteristic of high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors.

Specialists from China decided to use a specific kind of reactors in which nuclear fuel is placed in micro-fuel pellets that are embedded in areas the size of a baseball. The outer layer here are graphite and ceramics, acting as a moderator of neurons. Hundreds of such balloons are placed in a tank where helium is launched. The gas absorbs the heat that the balls emit and redirects the heat to the coolant. His role is played by water. High-temperature heated water vapor is fed to a turbine, which, while rotating, generates electricity.

The problem of reactors of this type is only in their high cost. The electricity generated by them is 1.5 times more expensive than solar energy and 4 times more expensive than the energy produced at the thermal power plants with natural gas. But in China, according to the developers, there is an opportunity to massively produce such reactors and fuel “balls”, so the cost of energy can be much lower.

According to economists, China began to reduce the production and use of coal. There are several reasons for the current state of affairs: a slowdown in economic growth, a certain decline in the coal industry and a general trend towards a decrease in dependence on hard coal. Now China is on the first place in the world for the consumption of this resource.