North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is to increase its electricity transmission capacity to Beijing to over 1.5 million kilowatts by 2005.

The effort is not only to ease the short supply of electricity Beijing has, but also improve the city's environment.

"We hope the clean energy from Inner Mongolia will bring us a bluer sky," said a Beijing official at a recent meeting of the two areas' officials.

To help realize the aim, two power plants are now under construction in the region.

The region started transmitting electricity to Beijing as early as 1990, and the figure in the past decade has increased from 600 million kilowatt-hours to today's 6.8 billion kilowatt-hours, accounting for one-fifth of the city's consumption of electricity.

To improve the condition of the environment, Beijing Municipal government has invested over 20 billion yuan (about US$2.4 billion) in the past two years to deal with industrial pollution, emissions, dust and coal fume pollution.

Liu Qi, mayor of Beijing, said, "To protect the city's environment, we have no intention of building any thermal power plants in the future."

Therefore, neighboring Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and the Shanxi Province will be the strong support for the capital's electricity supply. Today, about 60 percent of Beijing's electricity is from other provinces.

Ranked second in the country in coal resources, or over 200 billion tons, the region has been striving to change coal into electricity. So far, the region's power grid capacity has been about 4.8 million kilowatts, generating annually more than 20 billion kilowatt-hours.

It also has the largest wind power capacity, or an estimated 100 billion kilowatts. The region has built five wind power plants with loans from Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and Spain by 2000, generating 500 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.

A group of ecologists and energy specialists are now doing research on the possibility of wind power transmission into Beijing. The results are so far encouraging.

(People's Daily 01/31/01)