China will invest 580 billion yuan in power construction in 2009, which will apparently accelerate the development of new energy construction including nuclear power and wind power, said Zhang Guobao, head of China's National Energy Administration on National Energy Working Conference Tuesday.
According to the energy development plan, this year, China will kick off the construction of three nuclear power stations in Zhejiang Sanmen, Shandong Haiyang and Guangdong Taishan with newly approved construction scale amounting to 8.4 million kilowatts, Xinhua reported.
Meanwhile, China will spend 10 years to build several 10-million-kilowatt wind power stations in Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Jiangsu provinces.
The construction of coal-electricity bases will also speed up in 2009.
China will start the construction of the coal and electricity integrative base in Xilin Gol League in Inner Mongolia and the coal-electricity base in Shanxi province, so as to form a transmission capacity of 3 million kilowatts to Liaoning province and 4 million kilowatts to Shandong province.
Zhang Guobao pointed out that China should take fully advantage of declining power demand to step up to shut down small thermal power plants, coalmines and refineries with high energy-consumption and backward technology, and accelerate construction of large energy infrastructure and major energy projects.
At the same time, the mid- and long-term development plan for nuclear power will also be adjusted, and Chinese government will make greater investment in the reconstruction of power grids in rural and urban areas to achieve the coordinating development of power grid and power supply.
In 2009, China will launch pre-stage study for the Twelfth Five-Year Program (2011-2015) on energy construction and extensively collect opinions in the second half of 2009.
Actually, China's power industry has made great progress in recent years. The installed capacity has increased 100 million kilowatts annually and reached 792 million kilowatts at the end of 2008, ranking the second after the U.S.
However, there are still a lot of problems existing in China's power development. The power oversupply in some provinces of China has already been very obvious despite the sharp slide in thermal power generation in 2008, but a number of illegal power projects are going to go into operation, which would aggravate the sluggishness of domestic power enterprises.
Hydropower, wind power and power grids also face a lot of new problems and difficulties.
Zhang Guobao noted that power enterprises would face continuous large losses on declining power demand and slowing word economy, but it is also a good opportunity for China to optimise the development of power industry.