Investment in Urumqi's thermal power industries appears to be hotting up, as authorities invited experts in renewable energy industries to discuss investment opportunities on Oct 22.

The delegation, from Zhejiang province, Beijing and Wuhan, flocked to the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region to discuss ways of installing non-polluting energy generating projects that capitalize on the region's geography and weather conditions.

Xinjiang's environmental protection association introduced that ultralow discharge technology allows thermal power units to be remolded, reducing smoke emissions enough to meet the natural gas generator emission standard. At the end of 2014 China's installed power-generating capacity exceeded 1.3 billion kilowatts. Thermal power generation, the main source of air pollution, surpassed 900 million kilowatts.

Unhealthy air conditions and a raised environmental awareness among people have prompted the necessity of such technology to trim harmful smoke discharge.

Urumqi has made many achievements in its emission reduction path.

For example, the State Grid Xinjiang Electric Power Co penned agreement with Xinjiang's power generation enterprises in 2015 to take over their four billion kilowatts generation plan and trimmed over 3,000 tons of sulfur dioxide emissions and 1.5 million tons carbon dioxide discharges.

But remolding thermal power generating unit requires of massive money and new technology.

"Over 100 million yuan is needed to remold only one thermal power generation unit which poses great pressure to companies. Xinjiang longs for the creation of new technology to realize its emission reduction target at lower cost," said Zhang Juhuang, vice chairman of the environmental protection association.

Edited by Jake Hooson