(People's Daily Online, Sept 29, 2006) Southeast China's Fujian yesterday announced it has finished a project to supply electricity to every household in the province, making it the sixth province to achieve the goal.

As bright lights penetrated the dark night on Beishuang Island, Ningde, at midnight on Wednesday, the province put an end to an era.

People living on the island bid farewell to the days when they had to rely on candles.

"This historic moment will be forever remembered in the province's development history," said Li Weidong, general manager of Fujian Electric Power Company Limited, which launched the project.

For various reasons, Fujian Province had 190 villages that had no electricity until recently.

The villages, which have more than 4,000 households and nearly 16,000 people, are mainly located in remote mountainous area and on small offshore islets.

Beishuang Island, which is far from the mainland, used to rely on a 200 kilowatts diesel engine to provide 5 hours of electricity a day.

Watching TV was an unthinkable luxury for the 540 households on the island.

It took nearly 80,000 people more than five month to complete the project to bring electricity to the island and other areas, Li said.

"Despite the continual harassment of typhoons, mountain floods and landslides, we finally completed the whole project one year ahead of schedule," Li said.

Typhoon Saomai, which hit the province on August 10, devastated much of an unfinished electricity project in Ningde, taking thousands of people to repair it, Li said.

Four cable lines with a total length of 47 kilometres lay under the seabed the most difficult part of the whole Beishuang project in order to supply the island with electricity.

Xiao Shijie, deputy general manager of the company, said the whole project to supply electricity to remote areas in the province cost more than 100 million yuan (US$12.5 million), almost 25,000 yuan (US$3,125) per household.

"We certainly will not profit from the project," he said. "The electricity fees we will collect won't balance the cost of the equipment.

"We are doing this for the welfare of the people."

The project in Fujian is part of a national project organised by the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) that will this year cost 8.6 billion yuan (US$1.07 billion).

This will bring light to 1.8 million people in rural areas this year.

It is estimated that the country still has about 30 million people without electricity.

source:People's Daily Online