Beijing to Shut All Major Coal Power Plants to Cut Pollution

To answer one of your questions, the US EPA's standard is 12 ug/m^3 averaged annually, and at most 35 in any 24-hour period[1]; the EU's is 25 annually.[2]

[1] http://www.epa.gov/pm/2012/decfsimp.pdf

[2] http://ec.europa.eu/environment/air/quality/standards.htm

> it's hard to know whether this is really a big deal or just a normal retirement of older power plants for newer, cleaner alternatives.

Why isn't retirement of older power plants for newer, cleaner alternatives a big deal? If it's a lot of power plants and they're a lot cleaner, that's an impact.

85 is the average, it routinely goes above 300 and is above 170 right now; in winter we can get to 600, 700, even 800; going outside is painful in thst case. If the 2.5PM rating gets over 100 in the states, it is a huge scandal.

Coal is used for heating in winter, all heating plants are owned by the city. That is why the air gets immediately cleaner when the heating goes off (last week or so). It's complicated.

Why don't you research those answers yourself if they're of paramount importance to you?

>Beijing plans to cut annual coal consumption by 13 million metric tons

China uses over 50% of all world coal production (and produces nearly half itself, on top of importing an amount roughly equal to 40% of American production).

Of the ~7800 million metric tons produced, China used about ~4000 million metric tons of coal between power and steel industry.

Unsure of source quality (but then again, original article is based on numbers from unnamed/anonymous PRC Party Official, so this source is probably just as good/bad): http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/

As of last year about 12,000 mines - they are trying to close smaller mines which are often illegal and have high death rates. However, they are still expanding capacity [2] - so the closure of mines isn't a good proxy to production of coal.

Putting the 13 million metric tons cut into context - China produced 3 billion and change from 2010-2014 [2]. So, while it might be important for Beijing and may signal a change of stance (?), from a China usage perspective it isn't a big difference, by itself.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023046263045795090...

[2] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/669c44d2-a780-11e4-8e78-00144feab7...

"I really wish that articles like this would give more context for all the numbers that inevitably get thrown around. > China Huaneng Group Corp.’s 845-megawatt power plant What percent of the city's electricity is that?"

Humanity uses about 17 terawatts of generated power (electricity plus transportation plus …), about 15 from fossil fuels, of which coal generates more GHG that all but the dirtiest oil and the leakiest NG facilities. That plant is probably used about 80% of the time, so it represents about 675/17,000,000 of humanity's power use and something like twice that much of our GHG generation.

We think we can generate about 500GT CO2e of GHG net before reaching 3°C warming (but that involves a lot of guesses), which is a level that seems civilization-destablizing to many observers (wild, but necessary guesses). Coal creates about 1kg per kWh, so convert from 675MW … 60sec60min24h365d675,000kW = 21,286,800,000,000 kg/yr, or ~21GT/yr, or 4% of that budget.

I'm guessing they just took the figures from the Chinese press release and turned it into an article. Lazy journalism at its best.

There's a nice quote from Randall Munroe on context with numbers that I think applies perfectly here.

> A good rule of thumb might be, “If I added a zero to this number, would the sentence containing it mean something different to me?” If the answer is “no,” maybe the number has no business being in the sentence in the first place.

8,450-megawatt power plant. 130 million metric tons. 850.9 micrograms per cubic meter. Etc... They're still just groups of symbols to me.

This is from Bloomberg Business's Energy section not USA Today, this article is written for people who are familiar with the energy market and the units of megawatts and million metric tons of coal.

You would be complaining if every article written for a technical audience had to take a paragraph and explain how many songs or movies X TB could hold.

from wikipedia[1] it looks like 845MW represents about 9% of Beijing's total power generating capacity.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_in...

An artist impression of how the city will look like in terms of smog in 5, 10 and 20 years from now would also be nice.

To frame this a little bit, think of news articles as a git repository. You don't necessarily want to wait until you have every piece of code finished to push it. There is benefit to getting some information out, even if it isn't all the information. As you said, research takes time. Already since the story was published it has an update:

    (Updates to add coal’s contributions to the U.S.’s electricity mix in 10th paragraph.)

Harder to research facts and connections can get added over time, like commits in a repository to make the story more complete. It's the difference between operating a business news wire and a magazine.

845MW is a typical coal power plant unit size for a large plant. A plant can contain multiple units; the biggest coal fired plant is in Taiwan, with 10 units totaling about 5GW. Most big power plant units today are in the 500MW - 1GW size. Smaller, and you need too many with a lot of duplicate equipment; bigger, and the turbines become too massive.

It took the US about 10 years after the Clean Air Act to clean up air pollution in major industrial cities. London once had air quality problems comparable to Beijing. Pittsburgh and Cleveland were almost as bad. China has the advantage that the technology is known and most of their cars already have good emission controls. The current situation in China coal plants seems to be that most of them have electrostatic precipitators to remove the big particles, but not bag houses (giant buildings full of filters) to remove the small particles. Then there's NOx and SO2 removal. The pollution control facilities for a big coal plant are bigger than the power production facilities.

Here's an overview from Power Magazine on the subject.[1]

[1] http://www.powermag.com/chinas-war-on-air-pollution/?printmo...

A similar journalistic annoyance is that when articles want to say something is expensive, there are only two values.

"X costs millions."

or

"Y costs billions."

You've got a strong argument to say "the reporter should do a little bit more work to put these numbers in context" but the reporter has an equally strong argument for "This is a news wire, not a journal. I just report today's news as succinctly as possible, it's the readers responsibility to read further and put this stuff in context if that's really important". As a side note though, I like the Economist because they tend to do what you're talking about - put things in context.

I have to agree with you on context, especially for technical and energy-issues stories. And yes, journalists are exceptionally lacking and poor in this regard.

That said, there are tools out there which help. There's an immense wealth of information available online -- we can look up the population of Beijing (20 million, via Wikipedia), the International Energy Agency and other sources have various energy statistics.

A favorite tool of mine is gnu 'units', a commandline calculator that many people associate with simple transformations from feet to meters. But that misses out on its key capabilities -- it's really an advanced units-aware calculator with a large number of built-in values. I just found earlier today that this includes paper sizes:

    $ units 'A4paper'
            Definition: 210 mm 297 mm = 0.06237 m^2

It's also extensible -- I've added 'hiroshima' as an energy unit. Given the context of the current discussion, that in tons of coal equivalent:

    $ units '1 hiroshima' 'toncoal'
    	* 1942.6672
    	/ 0.0005147562

For more discussion, features, and use:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1x9u0f/gnu_uni...

Getting back to your question, how does one 845 MW plan compare with Beijing's energy usage?

    You have: 845MW / 20 million
    You want: watt
            * 42.25
            / 0.023668639

... I presume China's power supply exceeds 42 watts per capita (though I happen to know from context that third-world nations are at roughly this level). Wikipedia again tells us that the national average is 458 watts/person, which probably includes less-developed rural areas. So it's likely that the shuttered power plant is at best 1/10 Beijing's power supply, quite possibly less than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

That said, yes, poor and sloppy contextualization on the part of Bloomberg and Feifei Shen.

Yes, we all saw how well this worked at Chernobyl. Single party rule - no ifs, ands, buts or coconuts.

There's no subsitute for democracy and people holding their governments accountable.

China is working on breeder and other reactors they are at the forfront of nuclear power technology... they have 24 in operation and another 25 being built... http://world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F...

Imagine the effect that would have on Australia.

Not just the country. All major coal power plants, period.

Well, the city itself is pretty significant on its own. Approx 20 million, ranked as 3rd largest in the world (of course depending on how you enumerate the area/region/or suburbs, subregions, etc.)

It's still pretty significant.

I think the poster below who points to Australia might be referring to the idea that the City of Beijing has approx the same population as the entire country of Australia.

For others curious like me, Google translates "一刀切" as "one size fits all".

Many of those plants are decades old, and poorly managed. But they're also ran by state owned companies which means there's no market incentive towards efficiency and a huge amount of politics regarding what you do. I worked almost 10 years ago for a European company doing district heating in China. In a smaller city in the north of China, they were able to replace the 19 existing coal plants with a single one.

from the article "The facilities will be replaced by four gas-fired stations with capacity to supply 2.6 times more electricity than the coal plants."

Until 1983: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station

Edit: I don't understand the downvotes; my point is that the last coal-fired powerstation in London was closed a lot more recently than people might think.

The coal in China was killing around 300,000 people per year directly.

The deadly particles in London are now mostly invisible. If you live in London you'll die 20 years earlier. Great city, but I'm glad I'm not there any more. I used to hate having a nose full of black coming out of the northern line. London is rated as having the worst air pollution in Europe. They say about 50,000 people die per year in the UK because of bad air quality.

There's still some coal stations near cities in the UK though... even one near London. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Existing_UK_coal-fired_...

It's run like a meritocracy, not like a popularity contest. The corporations are not in control there, the people are.

Why would it be in a corporation's best interest to reduce pollution levels below that of the west, or any further than nevessary?

I agree that the top down control structure means that change can come fast, but I don't see how it means the change would go beyond the minimum.

Environmental cleanup is something desired more for people's quality of life, so it seems that long-term improvement would be more likely with democratic pressure than too-down command and control.

Personally I think the pollution in China is one of the biggest finger-pointing games in history.

The main reason for the pollution in China, and Asia in general, is, above all things, consumer demand. In other words, it's us as a world population, taking up consumerism so fast, from wasting energy at home to rampant manufacturing of useless consumer products (for the whole world, which demands them!) at under-market prices, to meat production, to added to a a local increase in car-centric culture in China built on an unsustainable fuel source. While all this was fine for the USA to some degree, which, mind you, is driven on 39% coal and 67% fossil fuels, this model of energy production simply does not scale and that's why it's failing in Asia. Every time you take a car over public transit in Beijing, every time you leave an electronic device or light on, you are contributing to the pollution problem. Which is, unfortunately, pretty much everyone nowadays.

As much finger pointing happens at the Chinese government, in my opinion the true solution lies with scientists and engineers, not politicians. We need to completely re-visit even the most basic aspects of how we design cities, how we achieve mobility, how we live, work, and everything else, from the ground up. This is the first time the world has had 7 billion people, so history will not teach us how to cope with high population densities. Some kind of game-changing, modernized thinking on the most basic levels of civilization needs to happen.

This isn't to say the government is completely absolved of fault. However, their job isn't to "fix" the pollution issue -- what do you expect them to do? Cut everyone's electricity? Force everyone to use only Tesla cars overnight? Cut all manufacturing exports to USA? Doing any of these would fix a good chunk of the pollution issue, but will cause quite a lot of upheaval and unrest. Rather, their job and focus should be in empowering those scientists and entrepreneurs with funding, space, tools, and freedom to come up with fixes that are sustainable in both environmental and business senses of the word.

> the country does have the advantage of being run like a corporation

This thinking has been used to "justify" many totalitarian regimes and is almost universally wrong (trans on time, etc). It turns out that establishing property rights, workers rights, class mobility, democratic institutions where people can rightfully petition their government, etc gets results. For example, in the West we had things like the EPA and other agencies so we didn't have this problem. Why does your ultra-efficient Chinese "corporation" not have these things yet? They're literally decades late and this small token act (Just shutting down plants literally in the city limits) looks more like the corrupt face-saving moves that define the Chinese communist party.

Not to mention, that a lot of top-down decrees in China look good on paper, but end up being implemented by corrupt local governments. Yes, its impressive the CCP can say "Built a city here by next year," but its done with massive building code violations, cheap concrete, and scary safety and pollution violations. A lot of these cities are falling apart only a few years after being built or are just one moderate earthquake away from disaster.

The government isn't really that efficient or centralized. The top bosses in Beijing say X, and that gets filtered down and translated through 10-20 Confucian layers of beaurcracy, at the bottom, the emperor is far away, as they say. And corruption...if everyone breaks the law, you are at a disadvantage if you don't also, and will simply go out business. China will have to improve their governance significantly if eg have any chance of cleanup the air. Xi jinping is treating corruption and pollution as two sides of the same coin at least.

LA in the 70s is nowhere near as bad as hebei/Beijing is today. Maybe London in the early 50s....it's hard to say.

I don't know how you concluded top-down management is effective from this piece.

The decision was clearly driven by public pressure, and efficiency of execution is still to be seen.

> have the advantage of being run like a corporation, and when they decide to clean it up, they will do it very quickly

You've never worked for a large corporation, have you?

Right. Those are totally equivalent.

Every year they also tell us how they are getting rid of coal, or how they got rid of it already wishing the city. Every single year, it is the same story, actually.

Who cares about counterfeiting, I just want clean air.

Growth requires citizens not dying of air pollution. I don't really see this as putting something before growth.

Perhaps the costs of China's new power alternatives are outweighing the costs of coal and pollution control?