Focus on Arts and Ecology

Hebei Province, that encircles Beijing, will pilot a host of projects that use solar power for heating, reported Hebei Daily. The province is a major production centre of steel and cement and the epicentre of China’s air pollution crisis.
 
Each city will select one village to be entirely or mostly heated by solar power, with the infrastructure to be put in place by end of September 2018. Depending on the performance of these trials, a decision will then be made about whether solar power is a practical, scalable source of heating. The authorities also stressed that affordability will be a priority in the conversion from coal to solar power. Hebei, among other provinces, experienced dramatic shortage and price hikes of natural gas last winter, due to an ill-prepared campaign to abolish coal burning.