Eye of Modok

Chinese legislators have suggested setting up a new ministry to control energy use after failing to meet energy consumption goals for 2006. Although they aimed to reduce energy consumption per 10,000 yuan of GDP by 4% in 2006, they only managed to reduce it by 1.23% to 1.21 tons of coal equivalent in 2006. That they managed to reduce it even that much is impressive, as energy conservation awareness is still appallingly low - not surprising when you consider that it isn’t that much better in most of the developed world, and the economy is still going on all guns.

China still has a long way to go to match the energy consumption, along with the accompanying emissions, of the US, but the NDRC is committed to curbing energy use and aggressively pursuing the addition of renewables into the energy mix. However, since the elimination of the Ministry of Energy in 1993 the NDRC alone has managed the energy sector, and Wang Weicheng, a deputy to the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, has suggested that the energy supervision department is woefully understaffed for the task. Wang pointed out that in the US, the Department of Energy employs a staff of over 10,000.

China’s total energy consumption in 2006 included 2.37 billion tons of coal, up 9.6 percent year for the year; 320 million tons of crude oil, up 7.1 percent; 55.6 billion cubic meters of natural gas, up 19.9 percent; 416.7 billion kilowatt-hours of hydropower, up 5 percent; and 54.3 billion kilowatt-hours of nuclear power, up 2.4 percent.