Inside China's Energy Machine

A Cathedral for Hydropower

 

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Water runs through five miles (eight kilometers) of rock tunnels from the Jiulong River to reach this turbine hall built more than four miles into the mountainside. Lined with bedrock, this underground powerhouse in Jiang'an, Sichuan, holds a trio of 110-megawatt turbines for generating hydroelectricity.

Constructed, managed, and operated by CLP Group, the project began commercial operations in late 2011. The energy feeds into Sichuan Province's power grid.

Landlocked Sichuan, which is 1,600 kilometers from the coast and surrounded by mountains, is one of China's leading agricultural regions and also is a major center for hydroelectricity.

Today, China has the largest installed hydro capacity of any country in the world, according to the International Energy Agency, with most hydro stations found here, in the country's central and southern regions.

The image illustrates well the access Smith gained in his effort to document China's energy complex. Over two years of effort to win the trust of the developers, he interviewed directors at many of the sites and toured and photographed freely inside the facilities, even when they were under construction.

Smith has been mapping his photographic projects with the help of an Innovation in Storytelling grant from National Geographic. His work across China covered 11 provinces. 

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A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

Seeking Higher Quality Coal

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images 

China's about-face, in 2009, from net exporter of coal to net importer was "one of the most dramatic realignments" the global coal market has ever seen, according to coal and carbon market researchers at Stanford University.

This photo shows workers unloading high-quality coal from Indonesia at a custom-built mineral jetty in Fangchen Gang, Guangxi. Indonesian steam coal (the type of coal used for steam power generation), shipped into southern Chinese ports, currently offers a cheaper alternative to domestic Chinese coal transported over land, Stanford researcher Bart Lucarelli wrote in his 2010 paper, "The History and Future of Indonesia's Coal Industry."

The lower price of coal shipped by sea, not a shortfall of Chinese coal, Lucarelli wrote, caused China to look to Indonesia for fuel. And China, as an export market, "burst onto the Indonesian coal supply scene almost overnight."

The coal being unloaded in this photo will fuel a supercritical power station. Supercritical boiler systems can deliver thermodynamic efficiency around 41 percent, compared to 37 percent for subcritical systems and 48 percent for more advanced "ultra-supercritical" systems, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.


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A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

A Plant to Wash Coal

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

A facility in Inner Mongolia's Ordos processes coal for burning in supercritical power stations, which require better quality coal to maintain high temperature and pressures for an overall more efficient system than conventional subcritical coal plants.

But the coal needs to be washed first, and water consumption and pollution are problems in a nation where 300 million rural residents lack access to safe drinking water, according to the United Nations Development Program.

Energy and water are tightly intertwined. Coal-fired power plants rely on steam to turn their turbines. In general, efficiency increases as the temperature and pressure used to create steam in a boiler increases. In a supercritical boiler system, first developed in the 1950s in the United States, the water is not boiled. Rather, very high temperatures and pressures are used to decrease the density of liquid water until it becomes a vapor (steam).

But there is a constant trade-off between improving efficiency and conserving water. Some measures that cut power plant consumption, such as dry cooling, require more energy.  China's 12th Five-Year Plan, announced last year, called for water consumption per unit of value-added industrial output to be cut 30 percent, while energy consumption per unit of GDP is to be cut 16 percent.

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A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

Biomass to Refine Fossil Fuel

 Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Flues reach to the sky at an oil and gas refinery in Boxing, Shandong Province. A portion of the facility's energy needs is supplied by thermal energy from a neighboring biomass power plant .

Completed in 2010, the 15-megawatt biomass plant uses agricultural waste products—cotton stalks, mostly—to generate electricity for local paper mills, chemical plants, and the power grid. Although carbon is released by biomass feedstocks when burned, the government considers them carbon-neutral, because the fuel is renewable.

Hong Kong-based power company CLP Group, majority owner of the facility, noted in a December 2010 report to investors that the Chinese government has offered tariff subsidies and tax incentives "to lure investment in biomass power stations." Yet, according to CLP, "Ensuring the quality, quantity and fair pricing of feedstock deliveries is a daily challenge. The commercial viability of this project is thus fragile, even with tariff support."

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A Rare Look Inside China's Energy Machine

 Mining An Enormous Reserve

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

Trucks haul coal from an open cast mine located in Ordos, in the mountains of Inner Mongolia, the top coal-producing region in China.

Smith recalls his initial "sheer disbelief" at the scale of the energy complex he set out to photograph. "The myriad infrastructure, mines, railways, highways, and construction that was being installed or enlarged dominated the landscapes I visited," he says. After he began to understand the work ethic, pride, and engineering expertise his Chinese hosts brought to the enterprise, he gained a deeper understanding.

"Rather than question the figures, or the strict and rapid construction deadlines, it became more natural for me to remind myself that I was deep within China," he says. "Direct comparisons to the Western speed or scale of implementation feel quite futile now."

Sometimes, though, China has struggled to keep up with the pace of its own energy development. In 2010, when an epic traffic jam sprawled across 75 miles (120 kilometers) of Inner Mongolia's northeastern roadways, as many as 10,000 trucks transporting coal from this sparsely populated region to power plants in the rest of China became stuck in the gridlock.

And there have been conflicts between the new energy vanguard and the nomadic herders who once dominated the region. Hundreds of ethnic Mongolians, who now make up only 21 percent of the population in their traditional homeland, joined protests last spring following the death of a herder who had attempted to block the path of a coal truck driven by a Han Chinese man. Convicted of hitting the herder and dragging him for more than 325 feet feet (100 meters) with his truck, the driver was executed in August.


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Cities Bet They Can Curb Traffic With Games of Chance

 Josie Garthwaite, For National Geographic News

The largest lottery jackpot in history inspired Americans to spend $1.5 billion for a slim chance at riches. Transportation experts are wagering that this fervor for small gambles can be put to use solving a big urban problem: traffic congestion.

Two experimental transportation projects under way in 2012 in Singapore and Silicon Valley aim to improve commutes through gaming.

Thousands of commuters so far have decided it's worth the effort to change their routines for a shot at $50 or $100.

Photograph by Munshi Ahmed, Bloomberg/Getty Images


Singapore's Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system charges motorists for road use during peak hours, but disincentive programs have limitations. New schemes that offer drivers cash for adjusting their schedules may help cities win the fight against untenable traffic conditions.

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Powering The Future: Electricity

The early days of electric power are long behind us, but the principles remain the same: spin a wheel, add a magnet, and you can create an electricity machine -- a generator.

World’s Worst Power Outages

India, 2012

Photograph by Channi Anand, AP

A girl prepares food by candlelight in Jammu, India, on August 1, 2012. India's massive power failures on July 30 and 31 were unprecedented in size and left 670 million people without electricity across the nation's north and east.

Before power was restored on August 1, about half of all residents of India—nearly 10 percent of the entire world's population—were left in the dark by a cascade of collapsing regional systems. The outage's exact cause may be debatable, but the ultimate source of trouble was predictable: India's power structure is often unable to meet peak power demands. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called for a $400 billion investment to help increase the capacity and reliability of India's power grid, but the country's efforts to build "ultra-mega" coal plants have hit economic snags, while its effort to build the world's largest nuclear power plant faces protests and delays.

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World’s Worst Power Outages

Northeastern U.S. and Canada, 1965

Photograph by Bob Gomel, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

A full moon created an eerie skyline silhouette after New York City went dark during the blackout of November 1965. In a world that's increasingly dependent on constant power, massive electrical outages are a common concern and may strike systems across the globe.

Major power disturbances can be triggered by storms, heat waves, solar flares, and many other sources, but all have roots in the mechanical and human vulnerabilities of the power grids themselves. "Power delivery systems have a lot of parts, wires, transformers and other components all nicely tied together—which means there are a lot of things that can go wrong," explained Clark Gellings of the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. "Pieces break down and people make errors. A system is designed to tolerate a certain amount of disruption but past a certain point, it's simply gone too far and it falls apart."

The "great Northeast blackout," which began when a power surge near Ontario set off a chain of failures across New York State and beyond, covered 80,000 square miles. "Within four minutes the line of darkness had plunged across Massachusetts all the way to Boston," reported The New York Times on the day of the outage. "It was like a pattern of falling dominoes-darkness sped southward through Connecticut, northward into Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Canada."

—Brian Handwerk


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