KEY POINTS:
Beijing this week registered pollution one level below hazardous, closing highways.
Desert winds drive the turbines in the vast wind farm on the outskirts of Urumqi, dusty capital of the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, and daytrippers travel from the city to photograph the sight in the barren
wilderness.
Down the road, white-domed houses in a village populated by Central Asian Uighurs use solar power to provide their energy needs.
In the province of Gansu, officials plan to build the world's largest solar-power station, part of efforts to ease China's dependence on coal to fuel the booming economy.
In fast-moving, sophisticated Shanghai, China's biggest city and its financial hub, hundreds of thousands of householders are using solar panels to heat water.
Meanwhile, in the capital Beijing, plans are well advanced to use renewable energy for a big chunk of the city's power needs by the time it hosts what China is billing as the first "green" Olympics in 2008. Beijing intends to build a "solar street" where buildings and streetlights will run entirely on energy from the sun. To be green is to be hip in China these days, and even the Government is taking note.
But is this the same China, infamous for its dirty rivers and poisoned skies? Nearly all of the world's most polluted cities are in China.
Green China as a concept seems ridiculous, particularly when you look at other headlines coming out of China. Strong economic growth led to a major increase in the discharge of major pollutants in the first half of this year.
Beijing's air pollution became so bad this week it reached "hazardous" levels on a government air-quality index. The city was blanketed in heavy fog, visibility was cut to a few hundred metres, around 80 flights were delayed and some motorways were closed. Between July to September, one out of every three days was classified as polluted in Beijing and 15 other major cities.
Increasingly, in the world's factory, 70 per cent of China's energy needs are met by coal, and every 10 days another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China, adding to the country's environmental woes. Meanwhile, China is the world's second-largest consumer of oil, behind the United States.
But China is on a drive to boost renewable energies and cut pollution - for sound financial and political reasons. Oil is too expensive and the Government wants alternative energies to reduce China's dependence on it.
People in the highly polluted cities often complain that their children have nowhere to go to escape the bad air, and they are worried about what all this will mean for their future.
Farmers have rioted and held demonstrations over pollution damaging their crops, making environmental hazards a potential source of political instability, something the ruling Communist Party refuses to tolerate.
China's top environmental watchdog, the State Environment Protection Administration (SEPA), said pollution cost China £34 billion ($97 billion) in 2004, around 3 per cent of the GDP that year.
In true pragmatic style, Chinese leaders introduced laws this year that set a goal of doubling the use of alternative sources of energy. By 2020, 15 per cent of China's energy needs will be met from renewable sources, with the amount of green power produced rising to 10 gigawatts by 2010 and 30 gigawatts by 2020.
"I'm very optimistic about the outlook for renewable energy here. In China, introducing renewables is good industrial development strategy, it's not part of the climate change argument," says Dr Eric Martinot, a research fellow with the US-based Worldwatch Institute and a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University.
China invested £3.3 billion in renewable energy last year, making it one of the biggest investors in renewables in the world, and Martinot believes the spending was based on sound reasoning. "In other countries it's a question of 'a' or 'b', but here people say 'Let's develop everything - 'a' and 'b' and 'c', we need it all'," he says. "Local air pollution is playing a big factor in driving many of these arguments, as ordinary people don't accept this kind of pollution."
There are 30 million solar households in China, which account for nearly 60 per cent of global solar capacity. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao says solar power is central to his government's efforts to cut the use of fossil fuels by 20 per cent over the next five years.
Industry leaders all over the world are watching what is happening in China. The scale of the country makes it prime testing ground for new technologies - if something works in a country of 1.3 billion people, it is likely to be viable the world over.
The Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association (CREIA) was set up in 2000 to promote the industrialisation of the use of green energy in China.
"Using renewable energy can promote economic development in an environment-friendly way, which would be the key method to balance China's economic development and its environment protection," says CREIA secretary-general Li Junfeng.
China still has vast coal reserves, but officials are examining the potential of renewable energy to resolve a potential bottleneck to faster economic growth.
Experts say the challenges facing China's environment require a multi-faceted response - wind power in particular is especially suitable for remote, economically underdeveloped regions in China, such as Xinjiang and other barren provinces such as Inner Mongolia.
Meanwhile, CREIA is developing solar energy and biomass energy in several other provinces including Hebei and Jiangsu.
Local government in Dunhuang in Gansu province said they would build the world's biggest solar plant there, a 100-megawatt project costing £400 million.
Dunhuang has 3362 hours of sunshine every year, making it a prime spot for solar energy development. The world's biggest solar plant is at Arnstein near Wuerzburg in southern Germany, with a 12-megawatt capacity.
Beijing is also examining the potential of ethanol and biodiesel. China produced 1 billion litres of ethanol last year - a small proportion of global production (which hit 33 billion litres) but one that is growing.
China is also getting help from some significant global players in realising its green goals, including the World Bank and corporations like General Electric.
Big British companies such as BP are also getting involved - the Tsinghua-BP Clean Energy Research and Education Centre was launched by Tony Blair three years ago and receives more than £500,000 a year from BP.
Its aim is to develop practical clean energy technologies and advise the China's National Development and Reform Commission on the use of clean energy.
"As the 2008 Beijing Olympics approaches, we are also conducting several related projects, such as the sustainable urban energy system," said the centre's director, Jiang Ning.
With less than two years to go, Beijing is working hard to meet its pledge to make the 2008 Games a "green Olympics" and provide a platform for China to show itself as a modern, progressive country.
The goal is that by 2008, up to 90 per cent of the city's street lamps will use solar power, which will also heat 90 per cent of the water used for bathing, according to Tian Maijiu, deputy director of the Standing Committee of Beijing Municipal People's Congress.
Wind power will generate 20 per cent of the electricity for the Olympic venues, and the city will provide direct investment or interest-free loans to key projects. Solar power, biomass and wind power development will be the three main projects in Beijing's rural ecological park, and the city is also planning to build a series of large recycling projects that will include refuse incineration and processing plants and a disposal centre for dangerous waste.
The World Bank will work with China to promote sustainable development, looking at how to manage scarce resources and optimise energy use.
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