On Nov. 1, 2018, the State Grid Beijing Electric Power Company announced that the city's transformation project "coal to electricity" has been completed, and the goal of "zero coal" has been reached in the plain area of Beijing. The journey from "guaranteed coal supply" to "zero coal" demonstrates Beijing's determination and effort in reform and innovation for environmental improvement.
According to an official from the Beijing Municipal Ecological Environment Bureau, the proportion of coal consumption decreased from 54.37 percent in 2000 to 5.65 percent in 2017, and the amount of coal consumption decreased from 30.69 million tons (the record high) in 2005 to less than 5 million tons in 2017. Meanwhile, high-quality energy supplies such as electricity and natural gas now account for more than 94 percent of the city's power consumption. The annual average PM 2.5 concentration is decreasing significantly, resulting from a series of effective measures, with measures reducing coal consumption contributing 40 percent.
Jia Ping, 60, lives in a 31-square-meter cabin in Dongsi Residential Community. For nearly 30 years, heating has been a big headache for him in the winter. In 2003, the "coal to electricity" transformation project launched on his street, and Jia and his neighbors switched to electric heaters. Later in 2016, the project did more work to upgrade his heating supply. Today, houses in the community are warm in the winter supported by cleaner and cheaper energy. Local residents are subsidized for electricity equipment purchases and electricity costs during peak hours.
In 2013, 22.4 percent of the PM 2.5 pollutants came from coal burning. The clean energy project has helped to significantly reduce coal consumption.
According to the official from the Municipal Ecological Environment Bureau, the "Beijing Air Pollution Prevention Regulations" was put into effect on March 1, 2014, followed by another act to ban the combustion of highly polluting fuels in key areas including six urban districts, the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, 10 new districts in the suburbs, and other development zones at or above city-level.
Beijing has implemented the strictest measures in China in order to reduce coal consumption. It issued strict standards on air pollutant emission by gas turbines and boilers, and established and tightened the restrictions on coal burning, products and pollutant emission.
Meanwhile, the city also established both reward and penalty systems through a "coal to clean energy" incentive policy and a tiered tax policy towards pollutant emission. For plants that exceed the pollutant emission limit, the tax per unit of emission is doubled.
While the city's total energy consumption grew, the proportion of coal consumption continued to decline.
Significant results can be found in the reduction of the annual average PM 2.5 concentration, from 89 micrograms per cubic meter in 2013 to 58 micrograms per cubic meter in 2017, a decrease of 34.8 percent.
By 2017, coal burning was only responsible for 3 percent of the source of PM 2.5 particles, and the concentration of sulfur dioxide also dropped to 8 micrograms per cubic meter. This was the first time that the number came down to single digit and close to the number in some developed cities overseas.
However, while coal-fired pollution grew smaller, another type of pollution source became more serious. The city's newly released PM 2.5 source analysis shows that vehicle emission is now the biggest source of PM 2.5 particles, accounting for 45 percent of the total.
Beijing has implemented a series of measures on the control and management of vehicles, petrol and roads, and formed a collaborative working mode in which the traffic police department is in charge of penalty, and the ecology and environment department is in charge of inspection and monitoring. It also started a "closed-ring management" of vehicles exceeding the emission limit.
The traffic police authorities are stationed at key intersections and roads going into Beijing to stop vehicles for inspection conducted by officers from the ecology and environment department. Vehicles that do not meet emission standards are fined by law. By the end of this November, 302,300 vehicles have been fined for excessive emission, 5.2 times the number in 2017. The officers also inspected 118,400 vehicles in parking lots for heavy vehicles and fined 5,700 vehicles.
The "closed-ring management" usually puts vehicles exceeding the emission limit on a blacklist. The owners are required to send their vehicles for maintenance and repair. For vehicles that still cannot meet the standards in the re-examination, they will be denied access to Beijing. Since the implementation of the measure on April 20, around 140,000 vehicles have been blacklisted through November. Four enterprises that own the largest number of vehicles exceeding the emission limit have been disqualified from consideration for the "green freight enterprise" title.
