Clean Energy Promotes Changes in Production and Lifestyle in Rural China

“The solar cooker can be used for convenience. It takes ten minutes to burn a pot of water, and it can also cook potato soup and steamed rice.” Gao Yingjie said.

Under the temperature of minus ten degrees, Gao Yingjie’s home in the village of Chengou Village, Pengyang County, Ningxia Province, saw the jug on the solar cooker steaming.

The solar cooker, the “big pot” that gathers sunlight to collect heat, has been widely promoted in the central and southern regions of Ningxia including Pengyang County.

Li Zhonglu, director of the energy station of the Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Bureau of Pengyang County, told reporters that a solar cooker could save half a ton of coal per household per year, at least three to four hundred yuan. Since 2006, the local government has used the national project funds to implement a solar cooker demonstration and extension project, which has installed free-range solar cookers for farmers in the county.

After talking about the benefits of the solar cooker, Gao Yingjie took the reporter to visit her kitchen. The rural kitchen in front of us is clean and bright, with tiled benches and biogas stoves replacing traditional earth stoves and firewood.

All these changes have come from a 10-m2 methane tank. Gao Yingjie said that the biogas digester in her house was built in 2007. Now that biogas from human and animal excreta and some garbage can be used to meet the daily cooking needs, the province does not need to buy coal money, and the kitchen is no longer “smoke-filled”.

It is estimated that a 10-m2 biogas digester will produce about 385 cubic meters of biogas per year, which can replace 1 ton of coal and produce 10 to 15 cubic meters of biogas annually. The fermented biogas fertilizer is also more effective than ordinary farmyard fertilizers. .

Up to now, Ningxia has built 240,000 household biogas households, accounting for 24.5% of the total rural households. “At the same time as the construction of the biogas digester, the kitchen will be changed, toilets will be changed, and the laps will be reformed. Therefore, while the biogas has solved the rural energy problem, it also realizes a virtuous circle of breeding industry,” said Li Zhonglu.

In order to increase the utilization rate of resources and actively use new energy resources, since 2003, the state has successively explored ways of using rural new energy and developed rural cleanliness by implementing small-scale public welfare facilities, rural energy projects, rural methane national debt projects, and consolidating projects for returning farmland to forests. energy.

According to the data, since the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan” period, the central government has invested 21.2 billion yuan in rural biogas construction. The country has built more than 40 million biogas households, accounting for more than 30% of the country's suitable rural households.

Han Fei, station leader of Ningxia Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Department of Energy, said that the function of rural energy development in China has expanded from a single life style to a life production type. Solar stoves, rural methane, and solar water heaters have not only optimized the energy consumption structure in rural areas, but also effectively reduced energy consumption. Indiscriminate cutting and protection of the ecology.

According to "China's Energy Policy (2012)"***, China will strengthen the construction of rural energy infrastructure and vigorously develop rural renewable energy, and strive to build 200 green energy demonstration counties and 1,000 solar energy demonstration villages by 2015.