FAR EAST Ӏ REGIONAL REPORT


j nations – not least the UK. When Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth opened the world’s first nuclear power plant at Calder Hall (since known as Sellafield) in 1956 it was hailed as ‘the dawn of the atomic age’. Nearby Workington, Cumbria, became the first town in the world to receive heat, light and power from atomic energy. The plant was originally built with the aid of a Wolffkran WK 150 luffing boom tower crane. In 2014 the cost of decommissioning was estimated at a staggering £70 billion. By November 2020 those costs had near doubled to £132 billion. Most recently the UK Government’s website describes Sellafield ‘as a large and complex site that ranks as one of Europe’s largest industrial complexes managing more radio-active waste in one place than any other nuclear facility in the world’. Regarding the global picture,


Global Energy Monitor estimates that worldwide there are some 10,000 retired, operating or planned coal-fired power plants. The vast majority of these were built by mobile and crawler cranes and during their operating lives have been serviced, updated and repaired by cranes. Today the electricity sector accounts for over 50% of total CO2 emissions from existing assets with 40% coming from coal-fired power plants alone. The next largest carbon-emitting sector is heavy industry - steel, cement, chemicals, etc, - which account for approx. 30% of total emissions. Advanced economies tend to have much older power plants than emerging and developing countries where over the past decade or two investment has been much stronger in the likes of China, India, etc. In India while power generated


by fossil-fuel plants still continues to rise, the government has ambitious long-term plans to grow solar-powered electricity output.


32 CRANES TODAY


Today solar in the sub-continent provides less than one-sixth of the power generated by ‘king coal’ but it is planned for this to draw level by 2029.


MIXED MESSAGES? The decision by Beijing’s President Xi Jinping not to attend COP 26 was called ‘a big mistake’ by US President Joe Biden. However, despite all the rhetoric and scepticism, there’s no disguising the fact that in some cases these climate-related decisions will have or are already having significant impact on the lives of millions, indeed billions, of people. Back in January China’s energy


XCMG opened its Jakarta,


Indonesia, branch in 2017


regulator suspended 130 coal-fired power plants that were underway in thirteen provinces. Their installed capacity was over 120 GW and followed an earlier announcement that China planned to increase solar and wind capacity by 130 GW. To put this in context, China was already ‘leading’ the world in building new coal-fired plants, building more than three-times as much new coal-powered capacity as all of the rest of the world combined in 2020. According to the think-tank ‘Carbon Tracker’ together with India, Indonesia,


Vietnam and Japan, China accounted for over 80% of the coal power stations across the world. Still China had established itself as a renewable energy leader accounting for more than 50% of the world’s growth in renewable energy in 2020 as well as leading in electric vehicles, batteries and solar power. In addition, China’s carbon dioxide emissions growth slowed in Q2 2021. Against this ‘optimistic’


backdrop, it came as something of a shock when in August, China announced it was now planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces. It was estimated that this would add 1.5% to China’s current annual emissions. Commenting on this, the lead analyst at the Helsinki-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), Lauri Myllyvirta, said ‘I think it’s clear that there’s already a shift from the runaway expansion of all kinds of industry and construction we’ve seen in the past year and a bit of trying to act to at least moderate the pace’.


PRICE INCREASES Indeed. As George Magnus, a research associate at the Oxford University China Centre, said


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