China Stops Building Wind Turbines Because Most Of The Energy Is Wasted
4:00 PM 03/29/2016
Wind turbines used to generate electricity are seen at a wind farm
in Guazhou, 950km (590 miles) northwest of Lanzhou, Gansu Province
September 15, 2013. China is pumping investment into wind power, which
is more cost-competitive than solar energy and partly able to compete
with coal and gas. China is the world's biggest producer of CO2
emissions, but is also the world's leading generator of renewable
electricity. Environmental issues will be under the spotlight during a
working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
will meet in Stockholm from September 23-26. Picture taken September 15,
2013. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
∧
The
Chinese government isn’t building any new wind turbines because most of
the new electricity created was wasted, causing serious damage to the
country’s electrical grid.
The government stopped approving new wind power projects in the country’s windiest regions earlier this month, according to a China’s National Energy Administration statement. These regions previously installed nearly 71 gigawatts of wind turbines, more than the rest of China combined. A single gigawatt of electricity is enough to power 700,000 homes. Government statistics show that 33.9 billion kilowatt-hours of wind-power, or about 15 percent of all Chinese wind power, was wasted in 2015 alone.
“Even though China will not approve new projects, the scale of
existing wind power installations is huge, leaving the grid struggling
to cope with it,” Xie Guohui, an analyst at a Chinese think tank, told the environmental blog InsideClimate News Monday. “In the best-case scenario, this policy will help China’s wind power curtailment maintain the same level as it was last year.”
The amount of electricity generated by a wind turbine is very intermittent and doesn’t coincide with the times of day when power is most needed. This poses an enormous safety challenge to grid operators and makes power grids vastly more fragile.
The government stopped approving new wind power projects in the country’s windiest regions earlier this month, according to a China’s National Energy Administration statement. These regions previously installed nearly 71 gigawatts of wind turbines, more than the rest of China combined. A single gigawatt of electricity is enough to power 700,000 homes. Government statistics show that 33.9 billion kilowatt-hours of wind-power, or about 15 percent of all Chinese wind power, was wasted in 2015 alone.
The amount of electricity generated by a wind turbine is very intermittent and doesn’t coincide with the times of day when power is most needed. This poses an enormous safety challenge to grid operators and makes power grids vastly more fragile.
