All parts of China connected to electricity

China has realized universal power access by  connecting the last remote group of 39,800 people  to the national grid.

The lights came on Wednesday night  in Gomang and Changjiang villages in Qinghai province, the last group nationwide without modern lighting.

The 9,614 households are at an average altitude of more than 4,000 meters in the remote hinterland of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, said Shi Xueqian, Communist Party chief of Qinghai Power Company.

The company spent 2.1 billion yuan (324 million U.S. dollars) and more than 5,000 workers were involved in the operation.

“This means Qinghai has provided power access to its whole population and China has fulfilled its goal of providing electricity to all people without power set out in the 12th five-year plan,” said Tan Rongchun, a senior official of the National Energy Administration (NEA).

At the end of 2012, China had 2.73 million people without electricity,mainly in Xinjiang, Sichuan, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu and Inner Mongolia. Qinghai had about 470,000 people without power.

After a three-year action plan of the NEA, the 39,800 people in Qinghai became the last without power.

According to the United nations, worldwide, about 1.2 billion people have no access to electricity and the development benefits it brings, and 1 billion more have access only to unreliable electricity networks.

Nearly 3 billion people rely on traditional biomass (such as wood and charcoal) for cooking and heating