AR-News: (France) China's hunger for electricity takes toll on environment

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

BEIJING For all the hoopla about China's booming economy, its manufacturing 
muscle and its potential to become a great power, the world's most populous 
country is struggling to keep the lights on. And the sporadic blackouts that 
plagued much of China last year are raising complicated questions for the 
Communist Party and for the rest of the world: 
.
How and where will China get the energy it needs to maintain its economic 
growth? And how much will the environment suffer for it? 
.
"It's one of the hottest issues facing the international energy industry," 
said Scott Roberts, chief representative in the Beijing office of Cambridge 
Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm based in Massachusetts. "The growth 
has been explosive, and I think it has caught many people in China and 
elsewhere off guard." 
.
China's emergence has already roiled commodities markets as the country has 
become a voracious consumer of energy and raw materials. 
.
Last year, its oil imports rose nearly one-third. It also built so many new 
cars, factories, airports and high-rise buildings that it passed the United 
States to become the world's biggest steel importer, according to the Iron and 
Steel Statistics Bureau, a British-based information clearinghouse for the steel 
industry. 
.
Electricity consumption jumped by 15 percent. Domestic coal production rose 
by 100 million tons - and still there were shortages. 
.
Yet China's appetite today is modest compared with what is estimated for the 
future; the country's energy needs are expected to more than double by 2020. 
This prospect has the Communist Party reportedly rolling out plans for at least 
100 new power plants, including nuclear, hydropower and coal-fired ones. It 
has also raised concerns that efforts to improve China's polluted environment 
will be muted by the demand for power. 
.
Plans call for at least 20 nuclear plants to be built by 2020. Hydropower 
projects, regarded by many Chinese officials as a clean power source, are 
threatening to disrupt the ecological balance along many important rivers that flow 
out of the high Tibetan plateau. 
.
Accounting for almost 70 percent of China's power supply, coal is a primary 
source of greenhouse gases, and experts say that by 2020 China could pass the 
United States as the world's biggest source of carbon monoxide. The fact that 
this is happening is perhaps not surprising because America is an economic, if 
not a political, model for China. 
.
"The fundamental problem is that China is following the path of the United 
States, and probably the world cannot afford a second United States," said Zhang 
Jianyu, program manager for the Beijing office of Environmental Defense, a 
U.S.-based advocacy group. 
.
In an address this month before the annual meeting of the National People's 
Congress, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao captured the competing pressures of the 
economy when he cited environmental protection and called for building a 
"conservation-minded society" while also exhorting the country to develop more energy 
sources. 
.
"We must speed up the development of large coal mines, important 
power-generating facilities and power grids, the exploration and exploitation of petroleum 
and other important resources," he said. 
.
Zhang said China's environmental degradation was already being measured in 
economic losses. He said state officials estimated that acid rain caused about 
$13 billion in damage annually, while air pollution reduces the annual gross 
domestic product by about 3 percent. 
.
China is also often inefficient in its energy use. Roberts, the Cambridge 
Energy consultant, said that the worst Chinese industries wasted 70 percent more 
energy than their counterparts in the United States. He also noted that 
China's electricity consumption grew 15 percent last year and 10.4 percent in 2002 - 
a spike in demand that he said was equal to the total power consumption of 
Brazil. "They are adding a middle-sized country every two years in terms of 
energy consumption," he said. 
.
This helps explain why energy security is an increasingly important issue for 
Chinese leaders, particularly regarding oil. China began importing oil in the 
early 1990s, partly because its own supplies were leveling out but also 
because of rising demand. Now the U.S. invasion of Iraq has shown a nation 
dependent on Middle East oil how vulnerable it could become. 
.
An analysis of China's energy situation made in December by Deutsche Bank 
said that in response to the Iraq war, China had begun building storage 
facilities to create a strategic oil reserve. The report also said the country was 
aggressively pursuing oil deals around the world, from neighboring Kazakhstan and 
Russia to fields as far away as South America and Canada. 
.
For now, power officials are warning that another spate of blackouts is 
likely. Last year, nearly two-thirds of the provinces and autonomous regions of 
China experienced varying degrees of blackouts. This year, officials say, could 
be as bad or maybe worse. 
.
The New York Times 
BEIJING For all the hoopla about China's booming economy, its manufacturing 
muscle and its potential to become a great power, the world's most populous 
country is struggling to keep the lights on. And the sporadic blackouts that 
plagued much of China last year are raising complicated questions for the 
Communist Party and for the rest of the world: 
.
How and where will China get the energy it needs to maintain its economic 
growth? And how much will the environment suffer for it? 
.
"It's one of the hottest issues facing the international energy industry," 
said Scott Roberts, chief representative in the Beijing office of Cambridge 
Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm based in Massachusetts. "The growth 
has been explosive, and I think it has caught many people in China and 
elsewhere off guard." 
.
China's emergence has already roiled commodities markets as the country has 
become a voracious consumer of energy and raw materials.




full story:

http://www.iht.com/articles/510167.htm 
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