The zero-carbon demonstration zone in Boao, Hainan Province, on February 24. The seaside town has been the host of the Boao Forum for Asia annual conference since 2001 (XINHUA)

Tulip-shaped wind turbines quietly pirouetting in the ocean breeze, new-energy vehicles shuttling between venues glazed with solar reflective roofs, lush green gardens juxtaposed with photovoltaic power stations—these scenes belong not to some fictional city set far into the future, but a zero-carbon demonstration zone that is under construction in Boao, a seaside resort in China's southern island province of Hainan. With 16 projects already completed and other projects underway, the zone offers a sneak peek of what the future may look like.

"The quest for sustainability at once constitutes part of the uncertainties and confusions we are now facing and anchors us in a sense of purpose," Danilo Türk, former President of Slovenia and President of Club de Madrid, a nonprofit forum for former heads of state, said at a panel discussion themed New Energy, New Infrastructure, New Industry during this year's Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) annual conference, which took place in Boao from March 28 to 31 to offer the world an Asian vision for shared prosperity. Amid great conflicts in a world that is in constant flux, the commitment to building a sustainable future provides a thin thread of hope.

An uphill climb

In September 2020, China proposed its objectives to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.

Like all other countries, China has its own cross to bear. On the one hand, the country leans heavily on fossil fuels, which are poised to one day be exhausted. On the other, demand for power is rapidly rising.

"Coal is the most widely available fossil fuel resource in China and it takes time for the country to restructure its energy portfolio," Zhao Chenxin, Vice Minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, said at the BFA annual conference. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, coal accounted for 67 percent of the country's total energy production in 2021. Renewables, including wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power, accounted for only 20.3 percent of total energy produced.

Meanwhile, China's advancement in the field of artificial intelligence and other digital technologies has generated a rising demand for energy-intensive computing power, Liu Yunjie, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said, adding these technologies, often associated with words such as "virtual" and "immaterial," do in fact burn a lot of energy. In 2021, the country's data centers consumed a gargantuan 216.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and released 135 million tons of greenhouse gases.

Faced with all these challenges, China has been actively exploring solutions to address the imbalance between energy supply and demand. And a way out is through collaboration with other countries.

In tandem

Despite their many wonderful advantages, wind and solar resources are intermittent, highly unpredictable, and therefore unable to satisfy the need for a reliable, secure electricity supply. And that is where energy storage—the capture of energy for use at a later time—comes into play.

In Rudong County of coastal Jiangsu Province, a team of Chinese engineers and their foreign counterparts are working on the country's first commercial gravity-based energy storage project. With a storage capacity of 100 megawatt-hours, the project is jointly developed by Swiss company Energy Vault, China Tianying (CNTY), an international environmental management corporation, and Atlas Renewable, CNTY's Houston-based branch.

Comprised of the lifting and lowering of 35-ton composite blocks over a 33-story tower, the project uses the force of gravity to generate power as these giant blocks descend.

As of now, pumped hydropower, which uses the lowering of water instead of concrete blocks to discharge electricity, has been the dominant form of energy storage in China. Despite their large capacities, these hydroelectric storage facilities are expensive and potentially harmful to aquatic life.

Gravity-based energy storage, on the other hand, does not depend on any specific location or weather condition for production and can last for a long time. "A final advantage is gravity, which is not an idea. Gravity is, in a sense, the law," Robert Piconi, CEO of Energy Vault, told Beijing Review.

Of course, gravity-based energy storage has its own shortcomings: The construction work may be too large and the manufacturing of concrete blocks generates a lot of greenhouse gases. However, for Piconi, the project demonstrates how China is committed to working with other parties in advancing the common cause of decarbonization.

"Change will be a constant noise in the background. What I found is that China has been resilient in the face of all the noise," Piconi said. "I see the fortitude, the willingness to cooperate and the courage of the Chinese people to achieve a goal."

A source of growth

"Fossil fuels are a one-time inheritance endowed by nature," Sun Xiaoliang, Executive Deputy Director and Secretary General of the ESCO Committee of China Energy Conservation Association, told Beijing Review. "Renewables are just the opposite. These cleaner forms of energy can possibly be harnessed by anyone. They are, in fact, heavily based on manufacturing, which is what China is good at." Sun's organization was established in 2003 to cultivate and lead the development of the nation's energy service industry.

Though a latecomer, China is catching up with advanced countries in building its own set of green facilities, which used to be largely imported due to their extremely high requirements for precision and durability. Decades-long process of painstaking research has profoundly reshaped the landscape of China's energy industry, which has seen a continuous rise of homemade equipment.

In north China, a bevy of domestically designed wind and solar farms have mushroomed along a desert belt that stretches from Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the east to Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the west. The once-barren areas have now turned into a bustling hub for clean energy.

The burgeoning of green facilities has also expanded from the vast inland to the country's coastal front. In 2021, Mingyang Smart Energy, a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer, installed the country's first domestically designed floating wind farm off the coast of Yangjiang in Guangdong Province. Fast forward two years and a spate of floating wind farms have been planted along the shores of Shandong, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian provinces.

The innovation, however, has not stopped with the expansion in scale. "We plan to build an aquafarm under the floating platforms," Zhang Chuanwei, CEO and Chairman of the company, said at this year's BFA annual conference. The submerged parts of the floating structures can act as artificial reefs, providing a new habitat for marine life and a new way to integrate marine industries.

"We still face loads of unsolved technological issues, but that also creates space for growth," Sun said.

While placing great emphasis on building self-reliance, China has always been willing to share its technologies and capacities to build and scale things quickly with the rest of the world. Examples include a 1,000-megawatt (MW) solar farm in Pakistan, a cascade hydropower plant on the Kayan River in Indonesia, a 2,400-MW clean coal power complex in the United Arab Emirates and an 800-MW solar power plant in Qatar that supplied the FIFA World Cup 2022 soccer tournament with clean energy.

"China is leading the way in a lot of ways amid great global pressure, which the country is meeting as a positive challenge," Neil Bush, founder and Chairman of the Houston-based George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations, told Beijing Review. "At the same time, I hope we become more of a collaborative humanity as opposed to building walls and being afraid of sharing technology." 

(Print edition title: A Green Powerhouse) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

Comments to pengjiawei@cicgamericas.com