China: Man Who Led Coal Plant Seeks Atonement

In Drive for Wind Power, Man Who Led Coal Plant Seeks Atonement Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times

Min Deqing, who delayed pollution controls at his coal plant in Lanzhou, is promoting clean energy. “I feel regretful, and sorry for the people,” he says.

By KEITH BRADSHER Published: July 2, 2009

DUNHUANG, China — A guilty conscience turned Min Deqing into northwestern China’s unlikely prophet of wind and solar energy.  

For more than three decades, Mr. Min worked at the main coal-fired power plant in Lanzhou, the capital of impoverished Gansu province. After an education interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, he started in 1973 as a laborer maintaining the turbines and pushed himself up the ranks to operations director by 1996, partly by inventing new industrial techniques that caught on elsewhere in the Chinese power and steel industries.

Shortly after he assumed the top job, officials from the local environmental protection bureau came to him and asked that he install modern pollution-control equipment to help improve the city’s soot-filled air. Mr. Min had just finished three years as head of the power plant’s auditing department and knew just how bad the pollution was, he said.

But he stalled for three years before finally installing the equipment, because it was costly and he did not want to dent the plant’s profit margins. The state-owned operation was being run mainly for the benefit of its 2,800 workers, and he wanted to spend money on the workers, whom he had known his entire adult life, rather than on filters to remove soot and smog-causing gases.

“I wanted to be responsible to my own workers, and we needed money for a new dormitory and a new kindergarten,” Mr. Min said over a dinner of lamb kebabs and a traditional chicken stew at a street cafe here in the northwestern corner of Gansu. “Now I feel regretful, and sorry for the people of Lanzhou.”

He promptly bought a digital wind gauge at his own expense for $360 and began crisscrossing the province’s wind-swept plateaus to assess their potential for wind farms. (He wore out three wind gauges, all bought with his own money, and is now on his fourth.)

But he documented that Gansu had some of the strongest, most reliable winds in all of China, and found the location near Dunhuang where Beijing officials have now decided to build one of the world’s largest wind farms.