The headquarters of China Power Investment Corp in Beijing. The company will invest some 70 billion yuan in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region over the next five years. [Photo / China Daily]

BEIJING - China Power Investment Corp (CPIC), a State-owned energy company that is one of the country's five major power generating groups, will invest more than 70 billion yuan ($11 billion) in its power, coal and coal chemistry sectors in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region over the next five years.

CPIC said that by the start of 2013, it aims to ensure that 60 percent of these energy resources are used locally and that clean energy production accounts for 40 percent of the total output.

The company will invest 6.5 billion yuan by the end of 2011 and maintain annual investment at more than 10 billion yuan beginning in 2012.

The first phase of a wind power facility with 49.5 megawatts (mW) of installed capacity in Maytas town, Emin county in Xinjiang will start operating in October.

"The wind power project has four planned phases. The company must wait for local government approval for the next three phases", which will only come after the first phase is running successfully, said Tong Xinqiang, senior official of China Power Investment Corp Xinjiang Energy Co Ltd, a subsidiary of CPIC.

The government will increase investment in Xinjiang dramatically in the next five years to support local development and improve living standards, a senior government official said on Saturday.

"Thirty-one major State-owned enterprises plan to invest a total of 996.1 billion yuan in the region," said Wang Yong, head of State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. That level would be double that of the 2006-2010 period, he said.

China will build seven wind power farms with installed capacity of more than 10 million kilowatts each by the end of 2020, said Jing Xiaoping, senior researcher at the Center for Global New Energy Strategy Studies at Peking University. Three will be in Hami, Jing said, accounting for 8 percent of China's total capacity. "The plan illustrates the importance of Xinjiang's role in the new energy sector in the country's overall power development," she said.

CPIC also plans to begin work on two coal gasification projects this year, which are to have an annual production capacity of 2 billion cubic meters after starting up in 2014.

Tong said that Siemens AG, the German engineering conglomerate, has signed a contract with CPIC to provide equipment for the gas projects, which will be delivered in Xinjiang next year.

Although the company has plans for many power development projects in Xinjiang, some experts warned that power companies should not develop new energy projects too quickly in the region.

"Solar energy resources are abundant in Xinjiang, but the construction conditions in the region are not as favorable as in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region", where the ground is more stable, said Hu Xuehao, deputy chief engineer at the China Electric Power Research Institute.