North China Electric Power University (NCEUP) was founded in 1958 in Bejing, China’s capital city. It was previously known as Bejing Electric Power College and came under auspices of the national power department. It transferred to the Ministry of Education in 2003 and is managed by the ministry and the University Council, formed of the State Grid Corporation of China and six national power companies.
It is a Project 211 university, meaning that it has been chosen by the government to be one of a small group of standard-raising universities.
While its main campus is still in Beijing, covering an area of 1,600 acres, it NCEPU has a branch campus in Baoding, 150km south west of the capital.
The university caters for 20,000 undergraduates across 59 programmes over 11 schools including: electrical and electronic engineering; energy power and mechanical engineering; control and computer engineering; economics and management; environmental science and engineering; renewable energy; nuclear science and engineering; mathematics and physics; humanities and social sciences; foreign languages, and School of Marxism.
There are 7,000 graduate students across 58 master's degrees, including engineering; business administration and public administration. Meanwhile, NCEPU has a "Double First Class Discipline" status in energy and power science and engineering, and two national key disciplines in power system and automation, with thermal power engineering and engineering and environment/ecology in the top 1 per cent of the Environment Sustainability Institutes globally. There are five centres for post-doctoral studies and seven first-level disciplines at PhD.
As part of its involvement in a national innovation system, NCEPU has progressed research into new energy power generation, ultra-high voltage, smart grid, efficient clean coal-fired generation technology, and nuclear power technology. The university has also established three national scientific innovation platforms, one state-level international science and technology cooperation base, six discipline innovation bases for higher education and 28 provincial scientific innovation platforms and research bases. It has also created around 80 research agreements with domestic and overseas energy and power businesses.
NCEPU founded an International Education Institute (IEI) in 2001 to develop international collaboration. The main function of IEI is to admit international students, provide Chinese and English language learning services, and collaborate with UK, American, Canadian, French, and Australian partner universities in joint undergraduate programmes and credit transfer programmes, under which NCEPU students will study both in NCEPU and corresponding partner universities abroad. So far, 500 international students have been enrolled. Recent partnerships include a joint undergraduate programme in electrical engineering with the University of Manchester and the University of Strathclyde in the UK, an articulation program of accounting and finance with University of Queensland in Australia, and an articulation programme of nuclear engineering and technology with INP in France.
Among student facilities at NCEPU are a large Network Information Centre, a hospital, a gymnasium and a sports ground.
NCEPU alumni include many senior officials of large power industry businesses and among members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and winners of the National Scientific Achievement Award.