When Beijing shut its last coal-fired power station this month, state media trumpeted the smog-plagued city as China’s first to have all its power plants fuelled by clean energy. But the claim, energy experts suggest, is largely “greenwashing” because most of Beijing’s electricity is imported from equally dirty plants outside the capital.
The closure of the Huaneng Beijing Thermal Power Plant, which overlooks a swath of rusting warehouses, vehicle repair shops and a tangle of brick houses rented by migrant workers, was the final step in a multiyear plan for Beijing to shut its four remaining coal-fired plants and replace them with ones using natural gas, which produce about half the emissions.
“As an ordinary labourer, I do not pay much attention to things like air and the environment,” says Feng Huawei, a construction worker who has lived near the base of the plant for four years. “But I think overall closing the plant is quite a good thing. It means less obvious pollution.”