Building resilient power grids from integrated risk governance perspective: A lesson learned from china's 2008 Ice-Snow Storm disaster

In the past three decades, the electric energy industry made great contribution to support rapid social and economic development in China, and meanwhile has been grown at the highest rate in the human history owing to the economic reform. In its new national development plan, more investment has been put into installation of both electricity generating capacity and transmitting capacity in order to meet fast growing demand of electric energy. However, energy resources, both fossil fuel and renewable types, and energy consumption and load centers in China are not evenly distributed in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Moreover, dominated by coal as its primary energy source, the whole eastern China is now entering an environmental crisis in which pollutants emitted by coal power plants contribute a large part. To balance the regional differences in energy sources and energy consumption while meeting the steadily increasing demands for electric energy for the whole country, in addition to increase electric generating capacity, building large-scale, long-distance ultra high voltage power grids is the top priority for next five years.