Several places in China have been upgrading their transportation facilities, so as to promote the industry's green and low-carbon development.
Two months ago, central China's Hubei Province put its first expressway for hydrogen-powered vehicles into operation.
Mr. Wu, who has been working in logistics for over 20 years, has become one of drivers for the first 30 hydrogen-powered trucks in Hubei.
"It's quite comfortable sitting in a hydrogen-powered truck, which won't cause air pollution and runs with little noise. With just ten minutes' refueling, the tank will be full and can support a 300-kilometer run," Wu said.
Over the past two months, this expressway has handled more than 350 freight vehicles, with the daily volume of goods transported reaching 450 tons.
Comparing with the transport efficiency of fuel trucks on national and provincial highways, that of hydrogen-powered trucks on the expressways has increased by around 30 percent.
In Yantai City of east China's Shandong Province, the local transportation department is going to replace the power batteries of its new energy buses, since the battery life of those buses has significantly reduced after they have been in operation for seven years.
"A new 10.5-meter pure electric bus costs about 1.04 million yuan (about 144,000 U.S. dollars). However, if we only change its power battery, it only costs 130,000 to 150,000 yuan. Therefore, changing power batteries will greatly reduce the company's input," said Wang Xuewei, deputy Party chief of the Yantai Public Transportation Group.
After upgrading, the charging speed of those buses will increase by 33 percent.
"This year, we will transform 259 old pure electric buses to invigorate transport capacity. A total of 65 renewal projects involving ports and public transit will be pushed forward, to boost the green, low-carbon and circular development of the transport industry," said Sun Chengjun, deputy director of the Yantai Transportation Bureau.
China upgrades transportation facilities to boost green development
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
