The mainland is gearing up to spend hundreds of billions of yuan in the next few years to upgrade its extensive power distribution network.
The investment is intended to improve energy efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Zhao Yuejin , a senior engineer at the National Institute of Standardisation, said in Beijing yesterday the power grid's efficiency would increase by 20 per cent when the upgrade was finished.
'We can save 70 billion kilowatt-hours in two decades, and that's equivalent to saving 32 million tonnes of coal, or scrapping 69 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 3.9 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide from the air,' he said. 'The government will subsidise it.'
Zhao is a key author of a new standard for the mainland's transformers, to be launched in July.
A transformer is a device that transfers electric energy from one circuit to another with a change in voltage, current, or other electrical characteristic. Zhao said more than 3 per cent of the electricity generated on the mainland was 'burned' in transformers, accounting for 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the power grid's total energy losses.