China’s highest-altitude heating engineering project will come into use by October of this year in Nagqu Township of Tibet Autonomous Region, according to the ongoing "two sessions" of Tibet.

The project will fundamentally solve the heating problems for 200 thousand local residents.

Nagqu Township is on a plateau with extreme cold temperatures in the Northern part of Tibet, it is a major town in the area. The average altitude in Nagqu is more than 4,500 meters, with an annual average temperature of one to two degrees Celsius, and lows at 30 degrees below zero Celsius.

Li Hongwei, Tibetan NPC member and director of the Nagqu Development and Reform Commission said that in 2013, Nagqu Township implemented the “three projects,” fixing problems of water drainage, waste water disposal, and centralized heating with a total investment of 1.153 billion yuan (185.97 million US dollars). Currently more than 70 percent of the centralized heating project is complete, with some neighborhoods already conducting a test run.

Dzong, a senior citizen at Nagqu Retirement Home, commented, “My health suffers when it gets cold. We won’t be cold next winter.”

Because the average altitude in Tibet is at more than 4,000 meters, with sharp differences between day and night, residents at high altitudes often have heating issues in the winter, and a lot of people resort to burning cow dung for heat.

According to the Tibet Housing and Construction Department, the government is trying to implement heating engineering projects for high-altitude areas in phases.

As of now, Tibet has finished heating projects for the city of Lhasa, and began building closed-galleries for schools in the extremely cold and high-altitude area of Sengye Tsangpo Township in Ngari.