Make renewable energy affordable to increase use

Relevant central departments have made clear China's long-term objective in the renewable energy sector and provided feasible ways of achieving it.

According to a document they released recently, the goal is for the national renewable energy consumption to reach the equivalent of more than 1.1 billion tons of standard coal by 2025, and exceed the equivalent of 1.5 billion tons of standard coal by 2030, to provide a strong support for realizing the carbon peaking target.

Which is a challenging task, considering the need to both ensure economic development as also transition to renewable energy. To solve that problem, the document advocates multiple kinds of renewable energies to replace coal as a source of power. The document says the use of bio-diesel, bio-aviation fuel, bio-methane, green hydrogen, ammonia alcohol and other new energies will be increased to lower the percentage of coal in the total energy mix.

The key is to form a commercially sustainable mode that people will be drawn to. According to data from the China Automobile Dealers Association, from July to September, new energy vehicles accounted for more than half of the total sales of automobiles domestically, exceeding the sales of traditional gasoline vehicles. What helped is the setting up of 8.59 million charging piles nationwide by the end of 2023, as well as the relatively low price of electricity.

That's also where the other kinds of new energies can make progress. A good example is bio-methane, which is produced from organic waste in an environmentally-friendly way but at a rather high cost. If more support can be rendered toward their technological progress to lower costs, bio-methane can be popularized in a much more efficient way.

Bio-diesel, green hydrogen, ammonia alcohol and other environmentally-friendly fuels cost considerably more than coal. The key to making their large-scale use feasible lies in lowering their costs so that it becomes sustainable commercially. And that should be a new direction in the field of research.