BOXING, China - By next autumn, a muddy construction site in a rural part of eastern China will give way to a small power plant that burns cornstalks and cotton stalks to generate electricity for nearby villages and steam for a neighboring industrial complex.
The plant would be ready sooner, but only four companies in China make the specialized precision boilers that the biomass plant requires. And all those companies are hampered by backed-up orders and delivery delays. Similar problems bedevil the wind turbine industry in China.
The same big utility company building the green plant in Boxing, CLP, has just opened a coal-fired plant in southernmost China. On schedule and built for half what it would cost in the West, that plant will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity - compared with 6 megawatts from the Boxing biomass plant. CLP is so impressed that it is bidding to build coal-fired plants in India with Chinese technology.
For more information see today's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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