China aims to peak carbon emissions from its industry by 2030, according to its new five-year plan for greening industry.
The plan’s quantitative targets include energy consumption per unit of value added by large industrial enterprises falling by more than 10%, with carbon emissions per unit falling by over 17%. The same targets for the last five-year plan period (2021-2025) were 13.5% and 18% respectively.
“Currently, energy consumption in China’s industrial sector accounts for about two-thirds of the total, and carbon emissions account for about 70%,” stated an industry ministry official to Securities Times. These figures most likely include both emissions at industrial facilities and at power stations that feed electricity to them.
According to an official explainer, the new plan broadens its framing from the green development of industry itself to the industry’s role in “supporting the comprehensive green transition of economic and social development”. It positions the sector as a supplier of green equipment and products to drive decarbonisation in energy, transport, buildings and consumption among other areas.
It also debuts the concept of “zero-carbon factories” in a five-year plan, setting a target of 500 to be developed and constructed. The previous plan only mentioned “green factories”. This is in accordance with a policy on constructing national-level zero-carbon factories issued earlier this month.
Besides zero-carbon factories, a number of zero-carbon computing facilities are also set to be built in regions with abundant renewable energy resources, “to establish a replicable and scalable development model”.
The plan aims to increase the share of production value from green factories in total manufacturing output from 30% in 2025 to 45% by 2030. This share will “become a key indicator for measuring green industrial development in the foreseeable future,” Liu Wenqiang, a senior official at China Center for Information Industry Development, told Xinhua.
In terms of industrial electrification, the plan stresses the adoption of green energy, promoting the development of green microgrids, encouraging enterprises and industrial parks to use direct green-power supply.
This echoes a similar point on local green power consumption set in the recently released five-year plan for China’s new power system, where direct green-power supply and smart microgrids will be built to support computing facilities, industrial parks, buildings, energy-intensive enterprises and others.
Read Dialogue Earth’s previous analysis on China’s zero-carbon industrial parks going global.