Inside The World's Cleanest Power Plant - In China | Coming Clean About Green | CNA Insider

China is notorious for its air pollution, but it also boasts the world’s cleanest, most efficient power plant in Shanghai. And it does so by burning the dirtiest of all fossil fuels – coal. Can one really turn coal ‘clean’?

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About the series:
Our planet is in trouble. Ice caps are melting, islands are drowning, and our weather is out of whack.

But there also appears to be many ways to save it. From cycling to recycling, ditching plastic to embracing electric. In our fight against climate change, we have produced more innovative solutions than ever.

But how much can they help?

Follow host Alex Yue as he travels across Asia to uncover the reality of green solutions - from sustainable fishing in Thailand, to clean coal in China.

[arunsar]

3:01 I hope people know that is not a Chimney, it's a cooling tower and the "smoke" coming out of it, is steam(pure water), not smoke from burning coal.

[Sacto]

There are three major pollutants you need to remove from burning coal: particulates, heavy metals and oxides of sulfur. Removing them can be quite expensive, hence the reason why in the USA, many power plants use low-sulfur content coal from Wyoming's Powder River basin.

[pdd]

"Clean coal" involves scrubbing SO2. NO2, and dust out of the exhaust. But it doesn't mean CO2 emissions are reduced from my understanding. That requires carbon capture and sequestration. That is expensive.

[gerardjacquesvanwyk]

Misleading title about a coal plant. Nuclear energy is the cleanest power generation method

[mikykanazawa]

No explanation of how tech worked at all..

[TomBray-LowCarbonLifestyle]

I think this is really very misleading. Prof Feng talks about capturing the nitrogen dioxide, sulphur and dust... but there is no evidence of CO2 capture in his explanation. The claim that this is a clean power station is even more disputed when you talk about publicity at the end.

Let's keep fossil fuels like coal where they belong, in the ground, or in a museum!

[ahnafkhan]

Long live China -- best country -- love from Pakistan.

[loudnessjr]

So it works. Tell me how clean the process of making batteries to store renewable energy

[icekk]

2:09, the caption should read every one cubic meter, not every meter. Professor describes the concentration of particles in a volume, not a length.

[ericalexander]

Very well made video. Just stay away from the American sitcom phrases. They cheapen the information, and insult your intelligence.

[nomoredamnnamestouse]

Currently the best #1 US coal plant is not even same league in energy efficiency versus the the top 100 coal plants in China. MAGA amirite?

[mauriciomarquez]

The problem with Green energy, is that it is increasing the unemployment and poberty rates in a worldwide scale. You can run a photovoltaic plant of thousands of hectares with a handfull of people. I have experienced it personally, hundreds of colleagues (engineers, technicians, cleaning staff, administrative, logistics, etc.) losing their jobs due to the closure of thermal plants... it is a true and sad reality, and the city, which is small, is slowly dying economically.

I would love to find a middle ground between having clean energy and generating a sufficient number of jobs, but at the moment, clean energy does not provide even 5% of the jobs in a thermal power plant.

[Peizxcv]

The cleanest energy is nuclear because the environmental impact is the smallest of all energy sources.

[ge]

Didn't explain clean coal technology, just says uses clean coal and uses Environmental friendly filter. Well every power plant uses filters like Electrostatic precipitator. Wish you explained more how they cut down pollution to 20mg. And cooling tower does not produce pollution, its just vapor.

[pakistandotcom]

Love ❤️ & respect from Pakistan 🇵🇰🇨🇳

[rainliu]

I could see more days with blue sky and white clouds in recent two years to be honest in Shanghai and Even Beijing ! You guys agree ?

[abhinavsharma]

China is a power in asia China is not a comparison in any other Asian country

[revanthkrishna]

You never spilled the beans in the video. What is clean coal and how do you clean it?

[daviddavis]

Basiclly the agreement they signed allow them to continue to increase emissions until 2030.

[RobertAdoniasCostaGomes]

there's one big problem with this video at 3:10 ... you cannot power anything by burning coal without producing carbon dioxide, because that's the end result of burning elemental carbon, which is the main source of energy in coal...

they probably remove nitrogen and sulphur compounds from the coal, though, to make it cleaner... and possibly have measures to improve combustion in order to reduce carbon monoxide formation... which is good, since these are harmful pollutants to human health.. but they cannot make a good claim in terms of global warming gases reduction (maybe nitrous oxide which might have some incidental formation - and it is not even cited in the video - but the amounts should be very minimal when compared to carbon dioxide)

the only way to not produce carbon dioxide is to not burn the coal - you could use an ultra complicated system during (not before) the generation of energy to trap the CO2 in some sort of inorganic salt (like CaCO3), which would require water to come in to the equation too and further mess this up, but it would not be remove during pre-treatment as stated here