power - Clash on power stations puts environment on the agenda

The already widely reported efforts by the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) to halt the construction of illegal power stations in January is developing into an bureaucratic internal warfare of a huge scale. While 22 of the 30 larger projects have been stopped, according to a release of the news agency AFP, projects of the powerful Three Gorges Dam has bluntly ignored the order.
"The builder had been told to stop construction of the US $5 billion Xiluodu Dam in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River because it lacked environmental assessment reports," AFP reports. Officially SEPA can only fine the company US$ 24,000, pocket money compared to the capital at stake.
When the projects would not have been stopped, they would have increased China's current power generating capacity thirty times. Foreign firms in the industry have left China last year, as they saw no way they could make money anymore. The ongoing clash might also put the environment as a more serious issue on the political agenda and make the previously rare powerless SEPA a more serious institution.