How China is powering the Winter Olympics in Beijing

China is marketing the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing as the first “green” Olympic games, including the first to operate entirely on renewable energy.

In a new Carbon Brief analysis, it is showed that China’s leadership’s goal to highlight clean energy growth and make it a part of the country’s worldwide image, although essential in and of itself, is backed up by genuine advances on the ground, carbonbrief.org writes

Zhangjiakou, a mountain city in China’s Hebei province that is hosting the games’ skiing activities, has renewable energy capacity that exceeds that of most nations around the globe — as well as a pioneering “Zhangjiakou Green Electric Grid” created to carry electricity from the city to neighboring Beijing.

Furthermore, the pilot renewable power system is a scale model of a much bigger plan that the Chinese government is carrying out statewide, with the goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2060 and peaking CO2 emissions by 2030.

According to the organizers, the venues will demand around 400 gigawatt hours (GWh) of power from the start of preparations in mid-2019 until the completion of the games. This is about equivalent to the yearly power usage of 180,000 Chinese families.

Wind and solar power installed capacity in China will exceed 600 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2021, with both technologies surpassing the 300GW milestone last year. In 2021, China produced a total of 2,480 terawatt hours (TWh) of renewable energy, including hydropower. As a result, China’s abundant renewable energy capacity can easily meet the Olympics’ electrical use.

The government, however, has utilized the games to pioneer a dedicated renewable power system, rather than merely buying green energy on paper via the market process.

The government is employing the cross-regional “green power trading” system, which enables major customers to purchase renewable energy produced anywhere in the nation, to meet the declared 100 percent renewable electricity objective. The games have been prioritized in the trading platform, with venues able to purchase sustainable energy at a lesser cost.

The renewable power trade for the games is managed by the State Grid Beijing Company. This energy is mostly generated by 11 wind and solar power producing firms in Zhangjiakou. The organizers claim to have acquired 171GWh of “green” power – wind and solar – by October 30th, 2021, and 237GWh by the end of 2021. These figures suggest that the total power consumption at the Olympic venues will be roughly 160GWh.

The building of the Zhangbei renewable energy flexible direct current (DC) system has been hastened by the winter Olympic events. The Beijing 2022 Olympics depend on this freshly constructed infrastructure in Zhangjiakou City, a $2 billion project inaugurated in June 2020 to distribute wind and solar electricity, including pumped hydro storage to moderate production changes.