Beijing will close the last of its four major coal-fired power plants, China Huaneng Group Corp?s 845 MW plant in 2016 to bring down the pollution level. Plants owned by Guohua Electric Power Corp and Beijing Energy Investment Holding Co were closed in March 2015. A fourth major power plant, owned by China Datang Corp, was shut in 2014. The plants will be replaced by four gas-fired stations with the capacity to supply 2.6 times more electricity than the coal plants.
The closures are part of a broader trend in China, which is the world?s largest CO2 emitter. Beijing plans to cut its coal consumption by 13 mt/yr by 2017 from the 2012 level in a bid to slash pollutants. Shutting all the major coal power plants in the city, reducing coal use by 9.2 mt/yr, is estimated to cut CO2 emissions by 30 mt/yr according to analysts. Closing coal-fired power plants is seen as a critical step in addressing pollution in China, which gets about 64 per cent of its primary energy from coal.