Greener Games

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics opened last week with a ceremony that impressed the world. A large structural form in the shape of a snowflake housed the cauldron for the Olympic Flame. Powered with hydrogen, the cauldron produces carbon emissions that are only one-5000th of the traditional cauldrons. As such, the lighting of the Olympic Flame also signaled the low-carbon focus of this international sports event.

China is one of the world's leading forces in terms of low-carbon policies, actions and innovations. In 2020, the country announced its goals of peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060. And it has already made significant progress toward them. By the end of 2021, the country's cumulative installed capacity of renewable energy exceeded 1 billion kilowatts, nearly half of total global installed capacity, and double the amount of its clean power in 2015. In the transportation sector, the number of battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and fuel-cell vehicles reached 7.84 million by the end of 2021, making China the biggest new energy vehicle market in the world. The carbon emissions intensity of China's heavy industry in 2019 decreased by 48 percent from 2005 levels, exceeding the 40 to 45 percent decrease target.

In the context of this progress, the Beijing Winter Olympics are no exception. But as the biggest and most eye-catching international sports event, the application of green technology and adoption of low-emissions practices for the Games will have a strong demonstrative effect.

Sustainability is actually not a new concept for Olympic Games. The London 2012 Olympics created the first certifiable international Sustainability Management System standard. The Tokyo Olympics held last year also managed to leverage innovative technologies to reduce the carbon emissions of the event. However, Winter Games are a completely different challenge, because ice and snow sports have a higher demand for energy. The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics are implementing a series of proactive measures with innovative technologies in electricity, buildings, transportation, and more to reduce the Games' carbon footprint.

The first objective was to power the games with renewable energy. Zhangjiakou, a co-host city of the Games, is a national demonstration zone for renewable energy. It currently produces more than 2,000 megawatts of renewable electricity. An advanced flexible direct current (VSC HVDC) transmission line connecting Zhangjiakou and Beijing is now in operation, allowing the wind and solar power in Zhangjiakou to be delivered to all venues across the three competition zones. The new transmission line, which has the highest voltage level and the largest transmission capacity among all VSC HVDC projects around the world, adopts several globally leading technologies.

The green power market, launched in September 2021 nationwide, will further guarantee all Olympic venues' energy demand is met by renewables via green power transactions. These measures ensure that the Games are the first Olympics in history to use renewable energy for 100 percent of the electricity demand for the Games.

China is also maximizing the use of existing venues and making full use of the venues from the Beijing 2008 Games, leveraging the latest renovation technologies. The 2008 Olympic venues have been used over the years for concerts and daily sports, and will now be used again for the Winter Olympics, many of them having undergone green retrofits. Meanwhile, all of the newly built venues have been certified as three-star green buildings. China also developed a new Evaluation Standard for Green Snow Sports Venues, which fills the gap in the relevant domestic and international standards.

Producing ice for the Games consumes a lot of energy. But for the first time in the history of the Winter Olympics, a carbon dioxide trans-critical direct refrigeration technology－currently the cleanest cooling technology to produce ice－is being used in four ice-sport venues. It not only lessens the damage to the ozone layer caused by traditional refrigerants, but also uses much less energy than current refrigeration systems. Applying this technology can save 30 percent of the energy that traditional refrigeration approaches consume.

Getting around during the Olympics is also an environmental concern. The transportation for these games will rely mostly on clean-energy-powered vehicles, including a total of 816 hydrogen-fueled vehicles and 370 electric vehicles. The country has installed the infrastructure to support these vehicles, including hydrogen fueling stations, electric vehicle charging stations, and more. China also carried out research and development projects for key technologies in the entire supply chain of hydrogen to support the Olympics, which has further helped to promote the development of domestic hydrogen technologies.

Noteworthily, to make all these measures sustainable, the opportunity of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics has been strategically leveraged to help downtown Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou on their paths to sustainability. The renewable electricity infrastructure constructed in the three areas will effectively function to reshape the local energy mix after the Games, laying a solid foundation for the low-carbon transition of the three places. The low-carbon venues and transportation will also be used to drive the development of low-carbon sports tourism in the Zhangjiakou area.

As a typical, complicated, highly visible international event, the preparation experiences for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics have demonstrated that low-carbon development concepts and policies can be well implemented into large-scale events with strategic and comprehensive planning and the application of innovative technologies. It also provides perspectives in terms of leveraging a single event to drive low carbon development at the local district level, which can be further scaled up to be part of national endeavor to realize carbon neutrality. It can be expected that with more and more events and districts being powered by renewables, a zero-carbon world can be attained.

Li Ting is a managing director and chief representative of the RMI China. Li Dan is a communications manager at the RMI China. The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.