CHINESE WIND: New research indicates China could someday get all of its power from the wind, but Chinese wind farms, like Huitengxile pictured here in Inner Mongolia, have experienced a host of challenges. Image: COURTESY OF THE CHINESE WIND ENERGY ASSOCIATION
After just four years of rapid development, China has the world's fourth largest wind power capacity: more than 12 gigawatts. However, the power of the breeze has become available so fast that the nation is struggling to make use of it.
For instance, the Jiuquan wind power base in Gansu Province—better known as "Three Gorges on Land"—is expected to supply 10 gigawatts of electricity when it reaches peak capacity in 2020. The wind farm, under construction in the Gansu Corridor—a narrow natural passage cutting through the Gobi Desert, Qilian Mountains and the Alashan Plateau—is just one of seven such giant complexes approved by the Chinese government.
In conjunction with other wind farms in China, Jiuquan might be able to meet the country's entire electricity demand by 2030, according to a September 11 study in Science. In fact, a $900-billion network of wind power plants built over the next 20 years and covering 500,000 square kilometers could provide nearly 25 petawatt-hours of electricity, seven times greater than the nation's current consumption, the researchers estimate.
China seems determined to arrive at that future, installing 6.25 gigawatts of turbines in 2008 alone and aiming for 100 gigawatts by 2020. "The wind has just taken off here," says Li Junfeng, deputy director of the Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the government ministry charged with economic development. But "new wind projects only accounted for 7 percent of the entire new power-producing capacity added in China last year, compared to 42 percent in the U.S. and 43 percent in Europe." And wind power currently accounts for just 0.4 percent of China's generating capacity as a whole.
The larger, looming challenges currently facing China's wind farms include serious problems in connecting grids with larger networks, low-quality turbines, and wind farms that have been poorly sited. And another consequence of all these factors is that the current boom has yet to bring a profit to many wind farms.
Chinese wind power generation capacity, it is estimated, could reach 20 gigawatts by the end of 2009, according to the Chinese Wind Energy Association (CWEA), up from 12.15 gigawatts at the end of 2008. By comparison, globally, there were 120.6 gigawatts of operating wind power capacity at the end of 2008; Europe accounted for 66 gigawatts and the U.S. accounted for 25 gigawatts of the total, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) in Brussels.
Chinese wind farms, however, "in general have difficulties in operation or even lose money," according to a government State Electricity Regulatory Commission report, which came out in July. For starters, so far, there is less wind power actually being generated than previously estimated by CWEA. The report notes that China's wind power generation capacity in 2008 should actually have been calculated as 8.94 instead of 12.15 gigawatts because some turbines were installed but not used, thanks to government mandates that set as a target the quantity of turbines rather than the amount of electricity they can generate.
In any case, China's wind farms currently struggle to connect with grids, creating power delivery problems. For instance, many of the farms are located in less developed northern and western provinces, such as Gansu, where patchy grids cannot manage the fluctuations in electricity production inherent in wind power.