China will upgrade its coal-fired power plants to reduce the discharge of pollutants by 60 per cent before 2020, top officials said Wednesday.
China will upgrade its coal-fired power plants to reduce the discharge of pollutants by 60 per cent before 2020, top officials said Wednesday.
The move will save around 100 million tonnes of raw coal and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 180 million tonnes annually, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the State Council as saying.
By 2020 China will have shut down plants that do not meet the energy-saving standard, according to a statement from the council. China intends to reduce coal’s share of its total energy needs to below 65 per cent by 2017, Xinhua said.
A plan agreed in 2013 pledged to increase clean energy supply and reduce coal consumption, a major source of the air pollution which gripped swathes of northern China earlier this week.
In Paris, Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said she had not seen the announcement, but linked it to expectations that China's coal use would peak by the end of the decade.
“I can only assume they are talking about the same thing,” she said. Researchers at Chinese government-backed think-tanks said in November that coal consumption by power stations in China would probably peak by 2020.
