China to evaluate officials on energy efficiency
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-02-23 13:21

China, faced with a growing shortage of energy as the economy gallops forward, is looking to add energy conservation as a criterion of officials' performance reviews, a planning official said on Thursday.

The initiative would help shift local and central government officials' attention away from a single-minded focus on economic growth, Yu Cong, director of the National Development and Reform Commission's Energy Efficiency Centre, told a business gathering.

"Environmental protection indicators have been inserted into the system for official evaluation, but now we want to add energy efficiency as one of those indicators," said Yu, whose institute is involved in the initiative.

Yu said China's domestic production of energy from conventional sources is likely to peak around 2020. But its energy demand will probably surpass 3.6 billion tonnes of coal equivalent (tce) by 2020 and continue to rise after that, underlining the necessity of improving efficiency.

The government is taking a number of measures to conserve energy and help achieve its target of reducing the amount of energy used per unit of GDP by 20 percent by 2020, Yu said.

China consumes over four times more energy to generate a unit of gross domestic product than the average Group of Seven developed countries, according to the Asian Development Bank.

Energy efficiency figures are a key goal of the country's new five-year plan, set to be approved by the legislature in March.

As well as scoring officials on conservation, the government would focus this year on energy savings at 1,000 big industrial users that consume 180,000 tce per year or more.

It was also carrying out ten key energy conservation projects, including green lighting and residential heating.

Yu confirmed that Beijing would start this year to reform the pricing system for natural resource products, but declined to comment on when or how electricity prices might be overhauled.

She said China would pick an "appropriate" time to introduce a long-awaited tax on fuels such as diesel and gasoline.