The city of Beijing's Economic Technological Development Area, or E-town, in the Daxing district, now has China's only gas station depending entirely on solar power to generate electricity for daily use.

Sun Peng, manager of the PetroChina gas station, said, "We use solar energy for power supply and a ground source heat pump system for heat," then added that the electricity generated is enough for the work and other uses, and has zero emissions.

Solar panels on the roof[Photo/bda.gov.cn]

The solar power system uses 804 solar panels on the roof to produce the electricity which is transmitted to a power grid, allowing the gas station to save 380,000 yuan ($61,000) in costs in three years of operation, from February 2012, compared with other gas stations of the same size.

The gas station also has the ground source heat pump system, an LED energy-saving device, and an oil vapor collecting system to make it a green, clean, low-carbon gas station, which benefits the environment as well, since cutting 1 kWh of electricity is the same as 400 g of standard coal, 9 g of sulfur dioxide, 1,040 g of carbon dioxide,4 g of nitride, and 6.8 g of smoke.

E-town is one of the first national solar-photovoltaic power-generation demonstration areas and the only one in Beijing. Its photovoltaic projects have 33 megawatt of installed capacity and generate nearly 28 million kWh of electricity annually.