Inner Mongolia forges green power

The Inner Mongolia autonomous region is leveraging its abundant wind and solar power potential to revolutionize its energy landscape, transforming itself into a hub for clean, sustainable power generation, the region's officials said on Friday.

Wang Lixia, the autonomous region's chairwoman, said the region's wind and solar energy resources are the most and second-most abundant in the country, respectively, and these rich resources provide a solid foundation and significant advantage for its development.

Inner Mongolia prioritizes maintaining national energy security, a major task entrusted to the region by the central leadership, supplying electricity at the highest levels nationwide, she said.

Last year, the region supplied 306 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to outside the region, equivalent to the annual output of three Three Gorges Dam, she added.

"This year, we have integrated sand prevention and control with new energy development, combining sand control, wind power and photovoltaic equipment," Wang said, adding that the goal is to protect the environment, generate green power and increase people's incomes.

Huang Zhiqiang, executive vice-chairman of Inner Mongolia, said the region accounts for more than half of the nation's exploitable wind resources and over one-fifth of solar resources.

The region's rich coal reserves and large-scale thermal power units provide stable and reliable support for the large-scale, high-proportion use of new energy, Huang said, adding that the large power grid allows for low transmission costs.

In the pursuit of green development, he said, Inner Mongolia plans to take the lead in the country to establish a new energy-dominated supply system and a new power system.

By 2025, the scale of installed capacity of new energy, which has already exceeded 100 million kilowatts, will surpass that of thermal power. By 2030, new energy power generation will exceed thermal power generation, according to him.

To enhance green power transmission, the region is constructing six 10-million-kilowatt wind and photovoltaic power bases to supply clean energy to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the Yangtze River Delta, he said.

Huang said that to boost employment, Inner Mongolia is planning to build six large-scale wind and photovoltaic bases in deserts and arid areas, each with an investment exceeding 80 billion yuan ($11 billion), thereby creating thousands of jobs.

"We adhere to full industrial chain development, focusing on both new energy development and equipment manufacturing," he said, adding that the region is creating four 100-billion-yuan industrial clusters for wind power, photovoltaics, hydrogen energy and energy storage.

"Inner Mongolia has great potential and numerous opportunities in the new energy sector, and we hope to share the benefits of new energy development with everyone," Huang added.