In a wonderful example of national co-operation several provinces near Beijing are going all out to help ensure blue skies for the host city of next summer’s Olympic Games.

The local governments of Hebei, Shandong and Shanxi provinces, Tianjin Municipality and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have worked out measures to improve air quality for the Olympic Games.

The provincial government of coal-rich Shanxi published its measures last week, ordering that all desulfurization projects at major coal-fired power plants be completed before July 1 next year.

Businesses in heavily-polluting industries — power, iron and steel, chemical and concrete — will have to cut production or even close if they fail to meet the emission standards during the games. In addition, all vehicles traveling to Beijing from Shanxi must comply with Europe II emission standards from July 25 to Sept. 20, 2008.

Similar moves will also be taken in Shandong, which discharged 1.96 million tons of sulfur dioxide last year, the most among the mainland’s 31 provincial-level regions.

The Laicheng Power Plant of Huadian Power in Shandong’s Laiwu City began a desulfurization project on two 300,000-kw generation units in late October with an investment of RMB140 million (US$18.9 million). Originally, the project was scheduled for completion in 2009.

Environmental authorities in Hebei, which surrounds Beijing and Tianjin, have pledged to spend about RMB21 billion on anti-pollution projects and environmental monitoring stations.
Source: People’s Daily Online

Beijing’s contingency plans to battle pollution for the 2008 Olympics are based on extensive scientific study and will prove effective in providing clean air for the Games, a senior adviser to the organisers said.

Dr Sarah Liao, a scientist and former minister in the Hong Kong government, is also convinced the environmental commitments she helped draw up for the host city bid in 2001 will result in a lasting legacy for the whole of China.

Dr Liao said, ‘It’s not just something you pull out of your hat. This list was constructed through very extensive scientific study, they have asked Tsinghua and Peking Universities to model on various meteorological scenarios.

‘They have gone through an extensive study. They are getting the data from the trials and going back to validate the models. We will fulfill our original bid commitment, namely to meet Chinese and pre-2005 World Health Organisation standards on air quality.’

Beijing has invested RMB120 billion ($16.22 billion) in environmental programs and Paolo Revellino, author of a United Nations Environmental Program report, has said he thought the work Beijing had done in bridging the gap to developed nations was ‘astounding’.

Dr Sarah Liao said, ‘In a nutshell there has been great improvement in air, water, waste, ozone depleting substances and the greening of Beijing. They have set things in track that will never turn back.’

Aspects that pleased Dr Liao most were that Beijing had leapfrogged to much higher standards in areas such as vehicle emissions and that environmental considerations now had to be taken into account in any new projects in the city. This will be part of the legacy of the Games.
Source: Guardian

Beijing has set up new automatic weather stations (AWS) around local sports venues, in order to provide accurate weather forecasts for the 2008 Olympic Games, the Beijing News has reported.

Currently, the city has 176 AWSs, one for every five square kilometers in urban areas and one for every 10 or 15 sq km in the suburbs.

A spokesman for the municipal meteorological bureau said the bureau plans to build up to 15 AWSs for Olympic sites, of which 12 have been completed. The completed stations are in major Olympic venues like Olympic National Park, Shunyi Olympic Aquatic Park, Chaoyang Park, Xiannongtan Stadium, Fengtai Sport Center, Beijing Country Equestrian Park, and the Tennis Center of Olympic National Park.

He said, ‘AWSs in Olympic sites have to meet special requirements such as the ability to measure visibility and total radiation and ultra-violet ray radiation. That is in addition to measuring temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, wind direction, wind force and precipitation.

‘These AWSs will collect meteorological information at the Olympic venues on a large scale and help local meteorological offices to provide more accurate and timely weather forecasts.’

Weather information will, in part, be processed through a newly purchased IBM System p575 supercomputer, seen in our picture. The System p575 is expected to provide ten times the computational power of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau’s current weather forecasting system.
Source: China Daily

Australia was in plenty time for it Olympic Games. Hardly any last minute panic. Athens was different. They were still painting the night before the opening ceremony.

Beijing is different again The Summer Olympics will start at 8 p.m. on Aug. 8 next year. And Beijing is ready. Very ready.

Throughout Beijing, countdown clocks are planted in well-trafficked areas, serving as up-to-the-second counters. They are hardly needed. Yes there are some cranes around and some construction workers but by the felicitous 8/8/08, a sparkling, freshly painted, neon-glowing Beijing will be unveiled to the world.

In Beijing, officials say they hope to have construction finished on the venues by the end of this year, and before August, they plan to run 44 test events to ensure that each venue is prepared for the Games. D Day should have been so well planned.
Wang Hui, executive deputy director of communications for the Beijing Organizing Committee, said, ‘It actually shows our attitude. We’re being very meticulous in terms of preparing for the Games.’ Meticulous. The very word.

For Beijing, for China, next summer’s Olympics is about so much more than sports. It’s being billed as a coming-out party, announcing China on the modern-day world stage. (Two years after that will be Expo 10, Shanghai and it will be a case of who put on the best show. A semi-friendly rivalry.)

In Athen before the Games many Greens were already exhausted by the effort. Wang Hui said, ‘I also witnessed a similar attitude prevailing in Torino. Everybody was pretty exhausted once the Games began. It’s quite different for China. We’ve been dreaming and expecting these games, anticipating it for over a hundred years.’

Since they learned in 2001 that Beijing won the bid to host the Games, the Olympics have been woven into the everyday life of just about every single local resident. English is being taught to every grade-school student. Throughout China, textbooks have been passed out in schools and everyone is learning about the spirit, the history and the ideology of the Olympic movement. It will be fantastic.
Source: Baltimore Sun

Senior government official Li Zhonghai, senior official with the China Association for Standardization and member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) said that solar power will be widely applied during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. He said about 90% of all the hot water used in the Olympic village will be solar heated and 80 to 90% of street lights around the Olympic venues will also be solar powered.

About 40 million Chinese households, or 150 million Chinese people, now use solar energy in their daily lives.

According to the People’s Daily, China is the world’s biggest user of solar water heating. According to the newspaper following the implementation of the Renewable Energy Law in 2006, China’s solar heating market is valued at tens of billions of renminbi and has provided hundreds of thousand jobs.
Source: Beijing Review