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Xinhua News Agency, Nanchang, April 30 (Reporter Wu) Mr. Greenwood, Vice President of the Asian Development Bank, who visited China for the first time recently, personally turned on the biogas stove in the kitchen of an ordinary farmer, and a blue flame immediately rose on the stove. Greenwood saw the same scene in several farmers who continued to visit.
Greenwood saw the fourth leap of life energy in the vast rural areas of China in the first few years of the new century.
Before 1980s, the vast rural areas of China, like those of other countries in the world, experienced a long period of firewood burning. During this period, farmers in China built large pots and stoves, and burned firewood to boil water, cook and warm themselves in winter, which caused serious vegetation destruction and environmental pollution.
After 1980, through the implementation of the land contract responsibility system and the establishment of township enterprises, the grain output and economic income of farmers in China have been significantly improved, and the utilization of rural domestic energy has quietly changed. Coal gradually replaced firewood, and farmers' stoves became colder and were replaced by various coal stoves.
The widespread use of coal in rural areas has made it possible to close hillsides to facilitate afforestation, and the forest coverage rate in China has increased year by year. But another problem that comes with it is that the phenomenon of indiscriminate mining and excavation in small coal mines around the country tends to be serious.
Since 1998, the Chinese government has invested hundreds of billions of yuan to carry out rural power grid reconstruction projects throughout the country. The rural electricity price has dropped from 2-3 yuan per kWh in the past to about 0.7 yuan now, and the utilization of rural domestic energy has entered the electrical age. At present, the penetration rate of lighting electricity in rural areas of China has reached more than 95%, and various household appliances have begun to enter rural families with middle income and above in large numbers.
In this century, with the increasingly prominent problem of energy shortage in the world, China, with a large population and rapid economic growth, put forward its own countermeasures-developing circular economy, and the fourth leap of rural domestic energy began.
In recent years, the plan to promote clean, cheap and recyclable ecological energy-biogas in rural areas has been supported by governments at all levels in China and many international organizations including the Asian Development Bank.
In addition to guiding farmers to build biogas projects by self-financing, the China Municipal Government has also won a low-interest loan of 70 million US dollars from the Asian Development Bank in the form of government guarantee since 2003, and promoted the "China Rural Energy Ecological Construction Project" among farmers in central and western provinces such as Henan, Hubei, Shanxi, Jiangxi and Guizhou. At present, this construction project has achieved initial results in some areas.
Taking Jiangxi Province as an example, the energy ecological construction project planned and constructed in the first phase of the province covers 6 100 farmers in 74 villages, and each household will build 8- 10 cubic meter biogas digesters. The total investment of the first phase project in the province is10.80 billion yuan, of which the ADB loan is 9.92 million US dollars. Statistics show that after the implementation of the project, the annual living fuel expenditure is saved by 16 1000 yuan, the average income of farmers is increased by more than 1000 yuan, the agricultural waste pollution is reduced by 23,000 tons every year, and the vegetation coverage rate is increased by 10%.
In Jing 'an County visited by Greenwood, there are more than 4,000 non-project farmers around the project area, and they spontaneously request to carry out energy ecological construction with reference to this model. Before leaving Jiangxi, Greenwood promised China that the loan provided by ADB in the second phase of "China Rural Energy Ecological Construction Project" would be doubled in amount and promoted in time.