Wind Energy Takes off in China

The wind is free and almost limitless in this huge, coal-dependent country, but harnessing its power for energy is more expensive

When glimpsed from afar, the huge wind turbines look impossibly silent. Eleven machines, with 34-meter-long rotor blades, have been erected on the fringe of a large recreational park in Shanghai’s Nanhui district, about 34 kilometers from the international airport in Pudong.

Each of the General Electric-made units can generate 1.5 megawatts (MW) of power an hour. Standing 65m above ground, these giants dwarf the Shanghai Wind Power Museum. It was built to commemorate the facility that surrounds it, one of the city’s first wind farms.

Inside the museum you are treated to a short video presentation detailing the imminent disasters facing the world unless renewable energy is embraced. Wind power, naturally, is presented as an ideal choice. The World Bank was suitably convinced by such arguments, investing US$13 million in the Nanhui project, which was set up in 2006.

Wind energy is China’s renewable-energy poster-child. The country has wind to spare along its coast and arid western and northeastern regions. It also has the world’s fifth-largest amount of installed wind power capacity.

“China is working very hard to reduce its dependence on coal,” said Richard Spencer of the World Bank, who worked on the Nanhui project. “And it looks to nuclear, hydro and wind, particularly, to replace coal. Wind is very important.”

Wind energy produces a kilowatt-hour of electricity at about twice the cost of a coal-fired power plant, according to one analyst’s estimate. By comparison, the same output from a photovoltaic cell is about five times more expensive.

Growing pains

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the agency effectively responsible for national energy policy, recently doubled China’s installed wind capacity target to 10GW by 2010. Chinese wind turbine manufacturers are reporting booming business, and wind farms are mushrooming across the country.

But the industry appears to be facing growing pains. The wind farm/grid operator relationship is beset by technical and policy problems, which are an obstacle to getting wind farms online and adding to the electricity supply. As a result, only 4GW of China’s 6GW installed capacity actually finds its way into the power grid.

A major reason for the gap is the industry’s rapid recent expansion, triggered by the enactment of the Renewable Energy Law in 2005, which mandated grid companies to buy renewable energy. Installed wind power capacity that year was about 1.3GW. New installed capacity increased exponentially in the next two years, leaving China with 3.3GW of total installed capacity at the end of 2007.

While remote, windy areas are the ideal location for wind farms, these regions are often poorly served by transmission lines. This creates a mismatch between the grid’s reach and the wind-farm studded landscape of northern and western China, to the chagrin of developers.

“We do meet some technical problems in connecting to the grid in some of our projects,” said Xie Chang Jun, general manager of Longyuan Electric Power Group Corp, China’s largest wind power developer. “We feel integrating wind power to the grid is critical for the commercial development of large-scale wind energy [in China].”

Problems abound even if transmission lines are available. Because China’s grid was designed to work with coal-fired plants, which produce a steady stream of power, it has trouble accepting the intermittent power produced by wind farms.

“[Wind energy] is coming like shockwaves,” said Frank Haugwitz, a renewable energy researcher in Beijing. “Sometimes it is less, sometimes more. This makes it difficult for the grid to absorb.”

The smart way

What’s needed are “smart grids,” a collection of technologies and standards that would allow grids to allocate intermittent power effectively. For example, these grids would manage supply based on hourly power-generation forecasts from wind farms, said Caitlin Pollock, an analyst at Emerging Energy Research in Washington DC.