



BEIJING—China has opened a challenging chapter in its pollution battle, installing electric heaters in village homes near Beijing to cut winter coal-burning, but stoking discontent about rising power bills.





The campaign is part of a bid by Communist Party leaders to clean the air in the city as urban dwellers grow frustrated by noxious smog that peaks in winter.





China’s pollution crisis reflects decades of unrestrained industrialization. While lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, the boom also fouled China’s air, water and soil. The sprawling capital and its surrounding regions, home to more than 100 million people, is ground zero in the government’s three-year-old “war on pollution.”

China’s government has on occasion closed factories and pulled cars off the road to limit pollution. Now it is trying to cut coal-burning by households, another contributor to Beijing’s smog. That means installing new equipment in million of village homes across the region and ensuring it is used.





Reducing emissions from heating would be among the most effective ways to limit winter smog besides cleaning up industry, according to academics who study the problem. Coal-burning by households is particularly dirty because it often happens without the emissions filtering required in power plants.

Home heating is a sensitive issue in China, highlighting the gap between the capital’s urban middle class and the rural poor. Many Beijing apartment dwellers complain building-controlled temperatures are too warm while residents on its outskirts bundle up in thick layers in their homes—and are now being asked to shoulder new burdens.

Cities and towns as far as 100 miles from Beijing have promised to establish “no-coal zones.” In Dongzhi West village, officials recently installed an electric heating system in Gao Hongfei’s courtyard home, 40 miles north of downtown Beijing. The system heats water to send to radiators in Ms. Gao’s home.





At first, Ms. Gao—fearful over pollution’s effect on her 12-year-old son—welcomed the heating system. Yet she kept her family’s coal-burning stove as a backup and declined a $115 offer to dismantle its “kang” bed—a centuries-old feature of rural homes, with a platform warmed underneath by the exhaust of a wood fire.





But Ms. Gao, whose husband earns about $500 a month at an auto plant, soon noticed a downside. “Electric heating has become our family’s biggest expense,” Ms. Gao said. She said she may seek a job to help pay the bill.

Despite electricity subsidies for residential consumers, villagers interviewed about their state-supplied heaters said their overall costs had risen substantially. Several said it costs around $300 to heat their homes for the winter, compared with about $200 with coal.





Officials in Ms. Gao’s district, Miyun, said they have converted more than 12,000 homes to electric heating since 2015 and aim to eliminate most coal-burning by 2020.





The Miyun government said it was offering new subsidies to help homeowners contain heating costs, but that some of them have been delayed. It said it was taking a “gradual” approach to eliminating coal.

Beijing’s antipollution campaign has begun to have some effect, with smog levels declining by more than 25% compared with 2014 by one measure, according to the U.S. Embassy. Still, in late December and early January, Beijing’s levels of PM2.5—fine particles that damage human health by penetrating the lungs and blood stream—hovered at more than 10 times the World Health Organization’s recommended limit. Many schools closed and companies permitted employees to stay home from work.





The effort to clean the skies gained new urgency after officials pledged to clean up Beijing’s air in time to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.







For 73-year-old Yang Jinhua, the 500 yuan ($73) monthly electric bill she now pays to heat her home is more than the 300 yuan she pays in rent. She used to gather wood to heat her home, but stopped, fearing government pollution inspectors.





Whether burning coal and wood around Beijing remains legal is fuzzy; enforcement varies by village.

The government has enlisted the help of researchers from Tsinghua University to look into new systems that burn less electricity. The researchers are running tests in dozens of homes with new heaters that require much less electricity to run, though such technology hasn’t been widely deployed.

“The government has different options” for electric-heating technology, said Yang Xudong, a Tsinghua professor advising the government. “It’s not a simple question or a simple solution.”





There is also the challenge of ensuring villagers use the electric heaters and abandon coal.

For Ms. Gao, the villager, old habits die hard. Even after officials installed her heater last year, she continued heating one room of her home by a coal stove. She also loads up on kindling wood to feed a fire that warms the kang bed, where her son insists on sleeping with his parents. The new electric heater, he says, leaves his bedroom too cold.

kulio_forever: (reddit)

How in the fuck does it cost 500 kuai to heat an apartment? Something's fucky

ChinaBounder:

Anyone eligible to switch over from a kang bed and coal burning heater isn't living in an apartment.





McBarret:

bad insulation, and people keeping the door open. I'm not kidding, you have the entire family at my wife's parent home complaining about the cold while wearing snow jacket inside the house, and everybody leaves the front door opened. for "fresh air" or something. every single water radiator or electric heating device working at 100%.





kulio_forever:

Also different heating types have different feelings, so a coal heat might feel better than the shitty inefficient forced air units they gave them





mrminutehand:

There's what others have said about leaving windows open and bad overall insulation, but also asshole landlords who charge more for electricity bills and depend on their residents not challenging them.





This happens basically everywhere in the cities I've lived in now, it's mostly with the apartments that are divided into smaller rooms and apartments by the landlord. Each is given their own electricity meter, and since the landlord pays the bills all in one for the whole unit, the landlord decides how much to take from each resident, and it's usually double the city standard. The cost of the entire unit pushes a lot of the bill into upper tier charges, which is why landlords try to overcharge.

For example, in my city it costs Y0.4 per unit up to 100 units, Y0.6 for 100-200, and Y0.8 for all above 200. Using an electric space heater very often during winter costs me about Y180 per month for my 65m2 apartment.



Landlords who take bills from residents where I live charge a minimum of Y1 per unit flat, up to Y2 per unit for some special assholes. Imagine that - if I let my landlord do that, I'd end up paying nearly Y400 just for my small place.

As for why people accept it? Unfortunately all the neighbours I know are defeatist and just take it. This hugely fucks over new graduates who can only afford single rooms and small apartments, who move in and realise the electricity and water bills probably add up to more than the rent itself.

I don't put up with that hustle and each time I've managed to make the landlord back down. Agencies have tried really hard to hide it after I've specifically told them I will not accept landlords controlling the bills, then get surprised when I cancel the deal after they spring it on me.





Smirth:

Once you have been in China for a while you really do understand why they were so eager to murder all the landlords....





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