8. China's Electricity Sector
8. China’s Electricity Sector Powering growth, keeping the lights on and prices down Stephen Wilson, Yufeng Yang and Jane Kuang1 Introduction and historical context Electricity is essential for both human and national development. China’s leaders—many of them engineers—have long understood this. Indeed, improved and increased electricity supply were integral to at least two of the ‘four modernisations’ in Deng Xiaoping’s landmark closing speech at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Congress on 18 August 1977. At the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, China had just 1.85 GW of installed electricity generation capacity and a population of more than 540 million (Jowett 1984). To put this in context, 1.85 GW is less than 2,000 MW—the capacity of a typical modern large coal-fired or nuclear power plant with two units. By 1982, China’s installed power generation capacity had reached 50 GW for a population that passed the 1 billion mark in that census year (Jowlett 1984), about 800 million of whom lived in rural areas with limited or no access to electricity (Peng and Pan 2006, citing the in-depth chapter on China in IEA 2002). By 1990, according to UN data, installed generation capacity had reached 138 GW, and according to the World Bank, more than 94 per cent of the population had access to electricity. In 2011, China’s installed generation capacity passed the 1,000 GW mark, and has since overtaken the United States to become the largest power system in the world.
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