ABSTRACT
As in many other countries, the electric power sector is vital in order for China to run its modern economy, with fossil fuels providing the bulk of the energy needed to generate electricity. Now, with growing concerns about climate change and power shortage, hydropower and nuclear power, despite being more environmentally controversial than other renewables like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, have been perceived by China as clean alternatives to conventional fossil fuels in a low-carbon-electricity scenario. With a historical lag in the country’s nuclear and hydro power sectors, China has been formulating the world’s most ambitious policies with enormous investment in place to foster the aggressive construction of new hydropower and nuclear plants, in addition to its impressive input in such established renewable energies as wind and solar power. Compared with other democracies, the authoritarian one-party regime in China faces much less resistance from civil society when pushing forward those hydropower and nuclear mammoths that may pose potentially serious threats to the local ecology. To meet its voracious electricity demand that increases in step with the breakneck economic growth of about 10 percent per annum, China does not really have many environmentally sound and safe choices in such a carbon-constrained era if both the hydro and nuclear options are excluded. After decades of cost-benefit calculations and argumentation, the Chinese government has made the decision to ignore most of the objections and carry on the hydropower and nuclear power renaissance that it believes will provide a good low-carbon solution to the urgent bottleneck problem in power supply.
