Electric vehicles charge at a charging station in the Boao zero-carbon demonstration zone in Hainan on March 26, 2025. [Photo/VCG]

A forum with 1,000 participants generates carbon emissions from conference screens, guest room air conditioners and restaurant kitchens. How can all of it be brought to zero?

According to Chen Ruizhong, head of the on-site power supply assurance working group for the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference, China's first national-level zero-carbon demonstration zone, located on Dongyu Island in Boao town, Qionghai city, South China's Hainan province, has built green energy into every brick and tile. By balancing what goes out against what comes in, the zone achieves carbon balance.

Transportation is a key part of green energy use. From the moment guests set foot on the island, they have already stepped onto a green route.

On Dongyu Island, the streetlights along the main footpaths, roads and plazas have all been upgraded with smart technology. Drivers on the roads around the island will see 66 of them, each generating its own solar power and dimming automatically to save electricity. At the car park, the canopies above are covered with solar panels, and 204 flexible EV chargers are in place to keep the island's new energy vehicles charged with green power.

But scattered solar panels alone are not enough to guarantee supply. A few kilometers away is an agrivoltaic power station. Solar panels sit on top of the greenhouses, with Chinese medicinal herbs and tropical fruits and vegetables growing underneath. It supplies fresh produce and sends nearly 28 million kWh of green electricity to the island each year, so the zone never runs short of food or power.

If solar power taps nature to expand supply, electrification and recycling rely on human effort to curb demand. Across the island, the main buildings carry integrated high-insulation photovoltaic roofing. The shuttle buses running around the island and the ferries crossing the water have all given up fossil fuels for electric power. Even the kitchen stoves have switched from coal to electricity.

The zone expands supply on one side and curbs demand on the other. It generates green electricity and uses ecological carbon sinks to offset emissions. Adding up the year's totals, it not only reaches net-zero carbon emissions but goes beyond, into negative emissions.

Words alone don't count. The data tell the real story.

According to Fu Youyang, who is in charge of CHN Energy Hainan Boao PV Power Station, a five-day event with over 1,000 attendees concluded on the island on Aug 3. The park's smart energy management platform for the zero-carbon island showed cumulative power generation of 16.803 million kilowatt-hours for the year to date. Consumption since the beginning of this year has been about 10 million kWh. A simple calculation shows that all energy consumption in the park is fully covered by self-produced green power. During the event, there was even surplus electricity transmitted to the power grid.

Measured data show that in 2025, the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions of buildings and municipal infrastructure in the demonstration zone decreased by 99.9 percent compared with the 2019 baseline value, indicating that the zone has officially moved from "near-zero carbon" to "zero carbon". It has fully entered a new stage of normalized zero-carbon operations.

Starting from Boao, Chen expressed the hope that more low-carbon ways of using energy will move from showcase projects to everyday practice, bringing green momentum to more urban renewal efforts and contributing Chinese solutions to global sustainable development.