According to Beijing-based Legal Evening Post on September 16, the municipal environmental protection bureau’s Atmospheric Environment Division (AED) said 80 percent of heating boilers in the capital have been converted from burning coal to less polluting energy sources.
It added that about 3,000 boilers, each using 20 or less tons per hour, remained in use this winter.
Beijing District Heating Group (BDHG), which provides heating services for most of the city, was quoted as saying that three of its four plants have finished conversions of boilers from coal to natural gas for this winter.
Cheng Ying, AED vice director, said the number of coal-burning boilers will continue to decrease in future.
Pollutants produced by them pose a severe threat to the air quality, said Cheng, but since the 1990s they began to be converted to cleaner energy sources such as natural gas, electricity and geothermal power. All heating systems of communities built after 2000 have used these sources.
BDHG said ten coal-burning boilers are needed to heat 6 million square meters, but only six converted to use natural gas can heat the same area.
Another change has been the increasing adoption of boilers for each household, enabling residents to control their own indoor temperatures and energy consumption. Most residences are still heated with building boilers that are switched on and off centrally.
Mr. Zhang lives in the “Xinjing Jiayuan” community in Chongwen District, in which individual boilers have been installed in each flat. “I kept the temperature in my home at a level at which we didn’t feel cold wearing a sweater last winter, and seven cubic meters of natural gas was consumed each day on average. It’s convenient as well as saving money.”
According to a technician from the Beijing Huitong Yongli Technology Development Company, which is in charge of the repair and maintenance of household boilers, they require 12 cubic meters of gas each day to keep an 80-square-meter area at 20 degrees Celsius.
(China.org.cn by Zhang Tingting, September 23, 2005)
