It was a bad week for those who live in Beijing and have to breathe the Chinese capital's air. On Tuesday, a thick grey carpet of pollution – euphemistically described by the government here as “fog” – settled over the southern edge of the city, sending residents scrambling for filter masks and forcing the closing of a major highway as visibility dropped to just a few opaque metres.
The following day, flights in and out of the capital were delayed for hours as another toxic shroud descended over the main airport.
Days like these are all too ordinary in Beijing, one of the most polluted cities in the country that leads the world in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But the city of Baoding, an hour's journey by high-speed rail south of the capital, stands as proof that China's government does indeed grasp the scale of its problem and aims to change its carbon-intensive ways.
The same blanket of smog hung this week over this city of 600,000 people that a few years ago was just another smoke-belching stop in heavily industrialized Hebei province. Its coal-powered factories produced automobiles, machinery and textiles. A nearby lake became so polluted that its fish began dying by the thousands.
After the lake debacle, city officials came to a pair of critical and far-sighted realizations. The first was that cleaning up after an environmental disaster was prohibitively expensive. The second was that there was money to be made, lots of it, in green energy.
Mayor Yu Qun closed hundreds of factories that he held responsible for polluting the lake. By 2003, the city's application to establish a green-energy research and manufacturing centre was approved by the central government.
Six years later, Baoding has become China's “Electricity Valley.” It stands at the centre of a green-energy push that may hold the key to this country's – and arguably, the world's – efforts to combat climate change.
Consciously modelled on California's Silicon Valley, the industrial park outside Baoding produces solar panels for export across Europe and the United States, as well as wind turbines that fill vast power-generating fields in China's interior.
Many of the city's street and traffic-control lights are solar-powered, as are some neighbourhoods, collectively saving about 230,000 kilowatt-hours of energy a year. According to one measure, Baoding recently became the world's first “carbon-positive” city, meaning the emission reductions created by the technologies produced here now exceed the city's own carbon emissions.
On top of all that, the green shift has created thousands of high-tech, decent-paying jobs in Baoding, which has the highest growth rate of any city in Hebei province. “Baoding gives other Chinese cities another example of how to create GDP growth and jobs. It says that instead of dirty, labour-intensive industries, there is another option,” said Yang Fuqiang, director of the climate program at the Beijing office of the World Wildlife Fund.
It's a model other cities in China hope to replicate. By applying some of the same advantages that have made China the world's factory in other industries – economies of scale and cheap labour – Baoding-based companies such as Yingli Group and Baoding Tianwei have rapidly made themselves into global players in the solar- and wind-energy markets. As it throws its enormous weight into becoming a green-energy giant, China could leave Europe and North America far behind.
China already makes one-third of all solar cells produced worldwide, six times the amount made in the United States. The country is on pace to build 100 gigawatts worth of wind turbines in the next decade, an effort that would single-handedly double the global wind-power capacity.
