The International Energy Agency (IEA) called on Monday for China to revamp its electric power industry, noting that waste and inefficiency contributed to the need for the country to add new, mostly coal-fired, power plants every two years -- equal to the entire electricity generation capacity of France or Canada.
In a report issued at its headquarters in Paris, the IEA was especially critical of China's decision to limit increases in electricity prices, saying that this prompted Chinese consumers and industries to use considerably more energy than they needed.
Faced with an overheating economy in 2004, the Chinese government decided to allow few price increases for power companies even though global energy prices were rising.
Beijing officials have largely followed that policy ever since, including a slight increase on June 30, even as world oil prices have soared past US$70 a barrel and coal and natural gas prices have also climbed.
"Energy efficiency is not good in China because prices are too low," the IEA's executive director, Claude Mandil, said.
The report also urged China to set minimum efficiency standards for coal-fired power plants and to enforce air pollution standards more rigorously for these power plants.
Coal fuels two-thirds of China's electricity production, and China is now the world's second-largest electricity consumer, trailing only the US.
China's heavy reliance on coal has prompted particular concern because the burning of coal releases more carbon dioxide, relative to the electricity produced, than oil, natural gas, nuclear power, or renewable energy sources like wind power.
Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to global warming.
Improving efficiency and reducing waste will allow China to somewhat slow its growth in emissions of carbon dioxide and toxic air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, by making it possible for China to burn less coal, said Jonathan Sinton, the energy agency's senior China specialist.
China's coal consumption and carbon dioxide emissions would still double by 2030 even with power plant efficiency gains and less waste, but would triple without these changes, the IEA study estimated.
Chinese power companies are looking for ways to improve efficiency while reducing pollution, said Liu Deyou, chief engineer at the Beijing SPC Environment Protection Tech Engineering Co, the sulfur-filter manufacturing arm of one of the five big, state-owned electric utilities.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS