By Mary Yee, contributor
Imagine going on a hike in the woods and suddenly coming upon a live dinosaur in a clearing. The botanical equivalent of this improbable event occurred in a remote corner of central China in 1941. In the village of Modaoxi in Hubei province, forester Gan Duo came upon a large tree he was unable to identify. Because the tree had already shed its leaves by that time of the year, Gan asked a local school principal to collect branches and seeds the following season. Whether those collections were ever made is not clear, but the principal, Yang Lung Tsing, became interested in the tree.
In 1943, Yang met up with a former classmate who had come to central China to survey the forests and asked him, Professor Zhan Wang of the Agricultural College in Beijing, to help identify the unusual tree. Zhan agreed to have a look and found that the tree resembled the Chinese swamp cypress. However, its leaves and cones were clearly not the same as the well-known cypress.
People's Daily, Dec. 12, 2017
The world’s largest floating photovoltaic power station has been put into use in eastern China’s Anhui province on Dec. 10, thepaper.cn reported.
The innovative project was constructed by China Three Gorges Corporation (CTGC) with a total investment of 1 billion RMB. Built on unused water in a mining area, the power station has an installed capacity of 150 MW.
This project commenced in July 2017 and is expected to be fully connected to the national grid in May 2018. By then, a total of 150 million kWh of clean electricity will be generated each year. The project will help cut 53,000 tons of coal consumption and 199,500 tons of carbon dioxide emission annually.
Compared with traditional solar power plants on land, the floating station will help save land resources, reduce water evaporation, and prevent algae from growing. In addition, the water is also able to cool down the cables and modules, thus improving efficiency.
However, present land systems are not compatible with floating ones. China is now focused on establishing a practical system for the maintenance of the new solar power plant.