The United States "New York Times" May 10 article, the original title: China's nuclear power and hydropower lags I reported on weekends that Chinese officials are worried about the country's growing energy consumption and continued declining energy efficiency. I also noticed the interesting point: China significantly increased the use of coal, oil, and wind energy in the first quarter of this year, but nuclear power and hydro power generation have apparently lagged behind – despite various reasons.
In the first quarter of this year, China’s nuclear power generation capacity only increased by 6% over the same period of last year, despite China leading the world in the construction of new nuclear power plants. Even if China's engineering team worked tirelessly around the clock, the bureaucratic obstacles were rapidly cleared and the construction of nuclear power plants took at least five years. Therefore, in the eyes of experts who study China's energy issues, it will take many years for nuclear power to achieve significant growth in energy.
China is expanding its nuclear power generation capacity and is preparing to increase its nuclear power generation from 9 billion watts at the end of last year to at least 70 billion watts by 2020. However, the country’s overall electricity demand is growing so fast that it is even more difficult to predict what the total electricity generation will be at that time, or to calculate the share of nuclear power.
In the first quarter of this year, China’s demand for electricity soared, but it was impossible to count on hydropower because the drought in southern China limited the power output of the dam. With the increase of precipitation in many provinces and even causing flooding in some areas, serious droughts have been alleviated to a large extent (except Yunnan). However, data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China shows the impact of the drought. Hydroelectric power generation fell by 1.4% in January from the previous year, fell 13.6% in February when drought was particularly severe, and fell by 1.5% in March. The electricity generated by hydroelectric dams is usually about 1/10 of that of national power.