Hong Kong  - A drug rehabilitation centre is to become the first location in Hong Kong powered solely by wind and solar power, a media report said Thursday.

About 10 million Hong Kong dollars (1.28 million US dollars) is to be spent on the project at the Dawn Island drug treatment and rehabilitation centre near Sai Kung in the eastern New Territories, the South China Morning Post reported.

Utility company CLP Power is to initially install 100 solar panels this year to generate 20 kilowatts of electricity that would provide enough power to support existing facilities, including a chapel, kitchen and plant nursery.

A further 800 solar panels, generating 160 kilowatts of power, together with two 6-kilowatt wind turbines, are to be installed by 2011 to provide enough power for new facilities, including hostels and a visitors centre.

The facility, which has about 50 patients and 17 staff, is now powered by three diesel generators that suffer frequent breakdowns. To change that, it applied for a power supply in 1999.

But Paul Poon, power systems director at CLP Power, said submarine cables and overhead lines would not be practical for the island.

"Using an overhead line would damage the sea view," he told the newspaper. "Using submarine cable would damage coral in the sea."

He said the solar panels and wind turbines could reduce energy costs by about 20 per cent, compared with using submarine cables.

Poon said he believed the Dawn Island scheme could pioneer similar projects on Hong Kong's other outlying islands where there are small communities.

Mamre Lilian Yeh, general secretary of Operation Dawn, which runs the centre, said the generators "often break down. We stop using the electricity up to four times a day, and food in the refrigerator often rots. It was troublesome. But from now on, I do not have to worry about the reliability of the electricity."

CLP Power is studying plans to build a wind farm that could generate about 200 megawatts of power by 2012 in Hong Kong's south-eastern waters that would be the territory's first large-scale wind farm. (dpa)