Stories of High-Quality Development | PV panels and tiles help south China island achieve zero-carbon status

Narrator: Chen Ruizhong, Head of the On-site Power Supply Assurance Working Group for the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference

A forum with 1,000 participants generates carbon emissions from conference screens, guest room air conditioners and restaurant kitchens. How can all of it be brought to zero?

At China's first national-level zero-carbon demonstration zone, located on Dongyu Island in Boao town, Qionghai city, south China's Hainan Province, we have built green energy into every brick and tile you see. By balancing what goes out against what comes in, we achieve carbon balance.

Transportation is a key part of green energy use. From the moment guests set foot on the island, they have already stepped onto a green route.

On Dongyu Island, the streetlights along the main footpaths, roads and plazas have all been upgraded with smart technology. Drivers on the roads around the island will see 66 of them, each generating its own solar power and dimming automatically to save electricity. At the car park, the canopies above are covered with solar panels, and 204 flexible EV chargers are in place to keep the island's new energy vehicles charged with green power.

But scattered solar panels alone are not enough to guarantee supply. A few kilometers away is an agrivoltaic power station. Solar panels sit on top of the greenhouses, with Chinese medicinal herbs and tropical fruits and vegetables growing underneath. It supplies fresh produce and sends nearly 28 million kWh of green electricity to the island each year, so we never run short of food or power.

If solar power taps nature to expand supply, electrification and recycling rely on human effort to curb demand. Everywhere you look, the main buildings carry integrated high-insulation photovoltaic roofing. The shuttle buses running around the island and the ferries crossing the water have all given up fossil fuels for electric power. Even the kitchen stoves have switched from coal to electricity.

We are expanding supply on one side and curbing demand on the other. We generate green electricity and use ecological carbon sinks to offset emissions. Adding up the year's totals, we not only reach net-zero carbon emissions but go beyond, into negative emissions.

Words alone don't count. The data tells the real story.

According to Fu Youyang, who is in charge of CHN Energy Hainan Boao PV Power Station, a five-day event with over 1,000 attendees concluded here on Aug. 3. The park's smart energy management platform for the zero-carbon island showed cumulative power generation of 16.803 million kilowatt-hours for the year to date. Consumption since the beginning of this year has been about 10 million kWh. A simple calculation shows that all energy consumption in the park is fully covered by self-produced green power. During the event, there was even surplus electricity transmitted to the power grid.

Measured data show that in 2025, the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions of buildings and municipal infrastructure in the demonstration zone decreased by 99.9 percent compared with the 2019 baseline value, indicating that the zone has officially moved from "near-zero carbon" to "zero carbon." It has fully entered a new stage of normalized zero-carbon operations.

Starting from Boao, we hope more low-carbon ways of using energy will move from showcase projects to everyday practice, bringing green momentum to more urban renewal efforts and contributing Chinese solutions to global sustainable development.