China Focus: China edging closer to universal power access

Living with very little electricity in a village in the plateau region of Tibet, Cering Lhamo spends most of her winter nights bored and shivering in temperatures around 15 degrees Celsius below zero.

The volunteer kindergarten teacher has to make do with less than two hours of electricity at night, power which comes from a solar panel generator in Xide Village, Burang County, 3,900 meters above the sea level.

Some 136 years after Edison invented the electric bulb and brought mankind into the electric age, there are still more than 200,000 people without access to power in China, the second-largest economy in the world.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang vowed to give these people access to power when making his government work report on Thursday.

"Power is the most important infrastructure in China's remote areas," said Tubdankezhub, an economics professor from the University of Tibet and also a national political advisor between 2002 and 2012.

There would be no development without power supply. Ensuring universal access to power will be a great boost for ethnic areas to catch up with the rest of country in fulfilling the government's target of building a well-off society by 2020, Tubdankezhub said.

Most of the population without access to power live in remote and mountainous areas with poor transportation, making them expensive to connect to the grid, said Ma Jinglin, deputy head of the Tibet regional reform and planning commission.

Tibet's government is promoting distribution of solar power generation systems, which can be portable and practical for herdsmen to use. As Tibet has abundant water resources, small-scale hydropower stations have also been established to generate power at village levels, according to Ma.

The neighboring Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which covers a sixth of the country's territory, is in a similar situation to Tibet. Since 2013, eight energy companies have been building photovoltaic power generation stations in remote areas and distributing household PV power generation systems for free, benefiting 201,000 farmers and herdsmen.

When moving to the winter pastures at Bayanbulak Grassland in October with hundreds of cattle, Xialai brought with him solar power panels for the first time in his life.

"Thanks to the panels, we have light at night and can watch DVD films," said his wife. "The most important thing is that our cellphones can be recharged."

Yang Jianrong, a village head in Ninglang County in southwest China's Yunnan Province, still remembers the days of holding meetings under moonlight or around a bonfire.

"It was not romantic at all," said Yang.

Yang's Labo Village was connected to the power grid at the end of 2012, making it among the last batch of villages to be connected with power in the province.

Yang plans to encourage villagers to grow cash crops and develop processing businesses made possible by the stable power supply.

The area still has power limitations, however. There are a dozen households without access to power as they live too far from the seat of the village and it was too expensive for power companies to build transmission lines for them as they are too scattered, Yang said.

Five of the 17 sub-divisions of the village still have no roads, he added.

But Yang said the government work report has given him some confidence.

Premier Li said in his report that the government will ensure 200,000 km of rural roads are built or upgraded this year and will reduce the rural population living in poverty by more than 10 million.

Encouraged by the premier's words, Cering Lhamo is now more resolute about dedicating herself to the 17 kids in the kindergarten.

"With electricity, I can prepare my class under the light and show movies to the kid with my computer," she said. "I can even warm myself with an electric blanket." Endi