Clean power for conservation, safeguarding a paradise for birds

"What kind of bird is this? It's so beautiful!" On the afternoon of Oct 7, in the science museum of Xuanmen Bay National Wetland Park in Yuhuan, Taizhou, Zhejiang province, "junior observer" Zhao Jiayi pointed at a flock of birds on the monitoring screen and asked the museum docent.

Over the National Day holiday, more and more children were getting close to nature. As Zhejiang province's first coastal national wetland park, Xuanmen Bay is also one of the "Top Ten Birdwatching Destinations", where visitors can spot rare star species such as the black-faced spoonbill, the black stork, and the Chinese egret.

"Birdwatching used to have a barrier to entry," said Wu Meiye, a docent at the science museum. Xuanmen Bay National Wetland Park covers more than 31 square kilometers, with over 90 percent of the park being wetland, and takes in a complex mix of freshwater lakes, tidal flats, and shallow seas. The birds live and roost in remote corners that people can hardly reach.

Now an effort to weave green energy into ecological conservation is quietly changing this migratory habitat. Since the State Grid Green Ark Program was launched here in 2023, a microgrid system covering the core protection zone has gradually taken shape. Monitoring devices scattered across the wetland were too remote for the main grid to reach and lacked reliable conventional power, so ecological monitoring in these outlying areas was frequently cut short by outages. That is now changing. A clean, steady supply of green power is driving the digital upgrade of biodiversity conservation.

On the large remote-monitoring screen in the wetland science museum, live footage of bird activity comes through clearly and smoothly: Chinese egrets building nests and raising chicks among the pond cypresses, black-faced spoonbills feeding at leisure on the shallows. The daily lives of these rare birds can now be recorded around the clock.

"Rare birds going from 'rare guests' to 'regular visitors' is the most direct endorsement of the wetland's ecological quality," said Lyu Hua, head of science education at Xuanmen Bay Wetland. Running on a steady supply of green power, the intelligent monitoring platform now produces accurate counts of bird numbers and habitat ranges. "Manual patrols used to be slow and labor-intensive. Now we can follow the migration of rare birds from the monitoring room, which makes conservation far better targeted."

Work on the Green Ark Program at Xuanmen Bay keeps moving forward. Together with the wetland park management committee, the local State Grid power supply company has drawn up a five-year plan for the program. More wind-solar-storage microgrids will be installed and a big-data atlas of wetland birds developed, bringing together data on species distribution, migration routes, and population dynamics to provide digital support for wetland management and biodiversity research.

From the wind-solar-storage units running quietly one after another, to the streams of monitoring data that keep flowing back without interruption, and to a bird list that keeps growing — the Green Ark Program is using clean electricity as its brush to paint a picture of grid development and ecological conservation thriving together against the clear waters and blue skies of Xuanmen Bay.