Published : 2025-05-07
On May 7, 1997, the "China Brightness Project" (中國光明工程) entered the implementation stage, with the goal of bringing "brightness" to 8 million electricity-starved poor people within five years.
The "China Brightness Project" is a project formulated by the Chinese government in response to the initiative proposed at the 1996 World Solar Summit held in Zimbabwe, which aimed to promote the "Brightness Project" in unelectrified regions worldwide.
According to official statistics in 1997, China at the time had 76.56 million people without electricity, 16 unelectrified counties, and 29,783 unelectrified villages.
These populations and regions were far from the power grid, with small and dispersed loads that could not be supplied by extending the grid, thus becoming a major obstacle to China's economic development.
Hence, the implementation of the "China Brightness Project" hopes to develop and utilise new energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and to provide energy to areas far from the power grid through various new power generation methods, thereby improving the impoverished and backward conditions in these areas.
According to personnel from the State Planning Commission of China (now the National Development and Reform Commission), China has abundant wind and solar resources.
The total developable amount of wind energy is 253 million kilowatts, and areas with annual sunshine hours exceeding 2,000 hours account for two-thirds of the country's land area.
At the same time, through independent development and the introduction of technology, China has been able to provide a variety of supporting wind power generation equipment, laying a technical foundation for the implementation of the "China Brightness Project."
The "China Brightness Project" chose wind power generation as the breakthrough point, with the goal at the time to use wind power generation to supply electricity to 23 million people in wind-rich but electricity-starved areas by 2010.
The goal of the first phase was to complete the construction of wind power systems for 2,000 villages without electricity and 100 microwave communication stations within five years, with a total installed capacity of 400,000 to 600,000 kilowatts, sufficient to bring "brightness" to one-tenth of China's electricity-starved population, which is about eight million people.
