Ministry of Environmental Protection officials questioned hydropower dams saying it was more serious than thermal pollution

Abstract: Experts say that water pollution does not only come from the reduction of the self-purification capacity of water bodies, but also that the reservoir itself produces biogas pollution due to biological rot. In some tropical countries, similar hydropower pollution emissions are no less than thermal power plants. Recently, Ling Jiang, deputy director of the Department of Pollution Prevention and Control of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, made such a statement at the “China Water Pollution Control Strategy and Policy Innovation Seminar”. Environmental officials directly questioned hydroelectric dams, which was quite rare in the past.

On September 10, 2009, at the Xiaowan Power Station in Yunnan, workers installed the largest generator set of blades. As the power station was put into production, the hydropower development in the Minjiang River took a new step.

Hydropower "clean energy" controversy

“The hydropower may be more serious than the pollution caused by thermal power.” On December 22nd, 2010, Ling Jiang, Deputy Director of the Department of Pollution Prevention and Control of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, made the “China Water Pollution Control Strategy and Policy Innovation Seminar”. Such a position. Environmental officials directly challenge hydropower dams, which were quite rare in the past.

However, this view was soon met with the "counter-question" of water experts. On the next day, Zhang Boting, the deputy secretary-general of the China Water Conservancy and Power Engineering Society, published an article entitled “Environmental Officials Should Understand Scientific Logic and Basic Logic”, arguing that “this environmental official has no new ideas, but rather repeats some falsehoods. Environmental pollution defiles hydropower lies."

“The '12th Five-Year Plan' proposes to give priority to the development of hydropower. The current reporting target is much higher than I predicted.” Zhang Boting revealed in an interview with the Times Weekly reporter that in the plan submitted by the Ministry of Water Resources, the target of conventional hydropower starts has been From 63 million kilowatts to 83 million kilowatts, the target for the start of pumped storage power stations has also been raised from 50 million kilowatts to 80 million kilowatts, and by the end of 2010, China’s hydropower installed capacity could only reach 207 million kilowatts.

If the above goals are finally recognized, China’s hydropower will start intensively in the disputed areas in the southwest, and the most important reason it is based on is also environmental protection – reducing carbon emissions.

There is no doubt that the hydropower dispute will continue and its future is not yet clear; and the only certainty is that both its supporters and opponents hope to persuade the other side through “environmental protection” and grasp in the debate. Live the right to speak.

Hydropower is not "clean"?

Ling Jiang revealed at the meeting on the same day that the Ministry of Environmental Protection had recently dealt with the water pollution caused by hydropower development in a water area. As a result, it was discovered that due to slowing water flow and eutrophication, the waters “had a long history of growing cabbage and aquatic ecosystems. damage". He further elaborated that hydropower development has also brought about problems such as the migration of immigrants and the loss of water and soil caused by geological damage. The losses are enormous.

In fact, the debate over whether hydropower construction destroys the environment has continued for many years. Since the 1980s, the construction of hydropower dams in the world has begun to slow down. By 1998, the World Commission on Dams published a report on “Dam and Development” after two years of concentrated investigations, and proposed that damage to the environment by dams is unacceptable. . This report later became the consensus of many environmentalists.

“Under the influence of similar views, the construction of hydropower in these years has been very passive, and it is often at a disadvantage in propaganda.” Zhang Boting acknowledged that the report had brought a very negative impact on hydropower, but he also believed that the negative role of hydropower was reversed. Exaggerated, strong anti-dam public opinion, making the "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" in the hydropower project, eventually completed only 1/3. The water conservancy department's new target of 163 million kilowatts is more to make up for the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan”.

"Reducing water quality in reservoirs is by no means the reservoir itself contaminates the water body. Instead, the reservoir requires more water than rivers." Zhang Boting believes that since pollution comes from the shore of sewage, it should not simply be thought that the construction of hydropower has caused river pollution. On the contrary, it has been able to form a "forced" mechanism to strictly control the discharge of pollutants in the river basin and improve water quality. "Because, wherever a reservoir has been built, people no longer want to use the river as a sewer to discharge sewage. ”

But such reasons are not convinced by environmentalists.

“The so-called force-reversing mechanism is sometimes ridiculous. For example, the Yangtze River Three Gorges have accumulated a large amount of small gravel. The reservoir sand removal system cannot be washed away and will gradually accumulate in the reservoir. To maintain the capacity and reduce siltation, the solution is Only one dam can be built upstream, and the last level and the first level are built up until all the rivers are cut off and all the reservoirs are built. This kind of downstream mechanism forces the upper reaches of the reservoir to be constructed, and ultimately it cannot solve the problem.” Yu Xiaogang, environmental protection expert and director of the Yunnan Research Center for Popular Watershed Management, said that although the hydropower industry has declared that China’s hydropower technology is very mature, siltation is one of the major problems that hydropower cannot solve.

“Water pollution does not only come from the reduction of self-purification capacity of water bodies, but also causes biogas pollution due to biological decay. In some tropical countries, similar hydropower emissions are no less than thermal power plants.” Yu Xiaogang added further: The pollution of dams caused by damaging environment is various, not only the water quality of the reservoir area, but also the hydropower has caused great damage to the biodiversity of the reservoir area and the wetland environment in the downstream, and because the residents of the reservoir area have been resettled, they have to The destruction of forests on the mountain and the opening of new fields will cause serious soil erosion problems.

Zhang Boting also admitted that the proportion of resettlement funds in the current cost of hydropower development is increasing, accounting for almost half of the total investment. However, according to Yu Xiaogang, such huge resettlement costs can only solve the immigration problem of residents whose houses and fields are in the reservoir area, and residents of houses outside the reservoir area can only be “backed” by resettlement. Surviving and destroying the environment are inevitable.

Water pollution, biogas emissions, ecological diversity crisis, disappearance of wetlands, siltation, earthquake threats and other ensuing environmental issues seem to be enough to push hydropower out of the ranks of clean energy.

Dispute

“The actions of all departments to strive for a greater right to speak on hydropower projects can be understood. As a hydropower expert, I hope that hydropower can be better utilized instead of being demonized.” Zhang Boting told this reporter, but He stressed, "But no matter what, I can finally speak in science."

All along, China's decision-makers have been very cautious about treating hydropower. As early as 2008, when the country proposed 4 trillion yuan revitalization plan, the first batch of investments in the power industry approved investment of more than one hundred billion yuan, of which 95.5 billion yuan for Guangdong Yangjiang Nuclear Power Project and Zhejiang Qinshan nuclear power plant expansion project. In addition, the state has invested 4 billion yuan in fiscal funds to support the improvement of rural power grids and the transformation of urban power grids, while hydropower has not been included.

On the opening day of the Second Session of the Eleventh National People's Congress in 2009, Premier Wen Jiabao’s government work report proposed to actively develop clean energy such as nuclear power, wind power, and solar power, which did not address “hydropower”. Later on at the suggestion of the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government to the representative of the National People's Congress, such as the Pakistani government, the revised government work report stated that it was adjusted to "actively develop clean energy such as nuclear power, hydropower, wind power, and solar power."

Since then, our country’s hydropower projects have gradually warmed up. Since the second half of this year, dam projects represented by the opening of the Jinsha River and Ludira have been successively approved by the EIA, and these two projects were strongly halted by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in June 2009. The reason given by the Ministry of Environmental Protection at that time was that the two projects that belonged to Huaneng and Huadian Group had been arbitrarily intercepted by major rivers without undergoing environmental impact assessment and “have a greater impact on the ecology of the middle reaches of the Jinsha River”.

The restart of these two projects meant that the original stop action of the Ministry of Environmental Protection was reversed by itself. At the same time, the Jinanqiao hydropower station, which was also suspended for many years due to “unpaid construction”, was also officially approved by the National Development and Reform Commission. Hydropower projects have turned from “violation” to “legal” one after another.

The reporter was informed that the above restart project is part of the “One Reservoir and Eight Levels” program for hydropower development in the middle reaches of the Jinsha River. According to Gao Yingmeng, general manager of Jinsha River Middle-East Hydropower Development Co., Ltd., the construction of the Liyuan and Guanyinyan project in the middle class was started. Procedures are working hard. This means that hydropower development in the middle reaches of the Jinsha River has been fully lifted.

The NDRC has also clearly expressed its support for large-scale hydropower projects.

In August this year, Zhang Guobao, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission and director of the National Energy Administration, told the media that China promises that 9% of non-fossil fuels will account for 15% of primary energy in 2020, and 9% depend on hydropower, which is much higher than 4% of nuclear energy. Of the 400 million kilowatts of water resources available, 380 million kilowatts must be developed.

“The strategic status of hydropower should be highlighted in long-term plans for energy.” Zhang Guobao said at the time. In the "Proposal for the 12th Five-Year Plan for the Formulation of the National Economy and Social Development of the CPC Central Committee," the term "positive development" is explicitly used for hydropower.

To achieve this goal, large-scale hydropower projects seem inevitable.

According to Zhang Boting's analysis, during the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan” period, the vast majority of hydropower projects will be launched in the Southwest. On the other hand, it is the fragile ecology and frequent geological disasters in the southwest that make almost every large-scale hydropower station launch a huge opposition.

“In the past, we built dams in the best geological conditions, but now we can only construct dams in the southwest mountains where the geological conditions are the worst and the earthquake risk is the greatest.” Yu Xiaogang also emphasized that despite the fact that the water conservancy department has sufficient power. Influencing the decision, but "if they use the loopholes, they will eventually crash."

Carbon pressure exerts pressure on hydropower

“The reason why environmental officials have such remarks about hydropower is mainly related to their assessment indicators. In the past, the Ministry of Environmental Protection was concerned only with the emission of toxic gases such as sulfur dioxide and did not include carbon dioxide emissions into environmental protection indicators. Carbon emission indicators, I believe they will also support the vigorous development of hydropower." Zhang Boting said.

Zhang believes that the amount of electricity generated by hydropower is not comparable to current solar and wind power. "Frankly speaking, when the project was stopped for the Jinsha River, the amount of electricity lost was equivalent to the solar and wind energy projects in recent years. Under the pressure of reducing emissions, there is no other cheap energy that can replace hydropower."

“We not only need to address the issue of energy hardware supply, but also pay more attention to the supply of software based on energy policies and management.” Yu Xiaogang, for example, said that in solar communities in countries such as Germany and the United States, residents are encouraged to install solar energy at home. Power generation equipment, and give financial support, can use the power to sell on the grid. “But in our country, it is possible to allow residents to sell their own electricity to the supply side. In the aspect of power supply policy, the state has not made many adjustments for the protection of the ecological environment and the interests of residents, and it is more for the interests of hydropower companies. There are huge gaps in software construction."

“Actually, energy should be supplied in many ways. It should not be recognized by the state. We concentrate on the development of hydropower or nuclear power. All other solutions are marginalized. This causes us to constantly sacrifice our ecology in exchange for energy.” Yu Xiao Just said.

“Under the pressure of carbon emissions, there is no easy way to find energy supplies. This is the reason for the increase of hydropower projects. However, it should be noted that China’s environmental issues are complex and highly integrated, with the exception of climate change. There are other problems, plus the fragility of geology and ecology in the southwest region, which must not be taken lightly.We need concrete analysis of specific issues, and we must fully consider the pros and cons and the opinions of all parties concerned and make cool and objective trade-offs before we can Visionary decision-making.” Zheng Yisheng, a researcher at the Center for Environment and Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has long paid attention to hydropower issues, told the newspaper that the more time the decision-making encounters pressure and difficulties, the more it should strictly adhere to existing laws and procedures, including public participation. Etc., to make decisions based on the opinions of various parties. "In this regard, we have already learned a lot."

Zheng Yisheng also believes that energy policy is the most important part of climate policy, not that climate policy is equivalent to energy policy. A more comprehensive policy (including the integration of policies on environment, energy, other resources, economy, society, culture, etc.) to a profound transformation of sustainable growth is our fundamental way out.

For example, Zheng Yisheng said, “The problem of water resources is a fatal problem for China. It is not just a matter of energy. It cannot be just to cure a disease, and other diseases are not pretended to be.

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