According to a study published in journal Nature Energy reports that with current developments in its energy portfolio, China could be set to generate more than a quarter of its electricity demand through renewable sources.
Most of the boost in renewables in China so far has come (and will continue to come) from drastic increases in the country’s wind energy capacity which has already been increasing to the point that, as one of the report’s co-authors, MIT professor Valerie Karplus, said: “China is now the world’s wind energy leader by a fairly large margin.”
China currently has around 145 gigawatts worth of wind power capacity installed, although it is not all connected to the country’s grid yet. This exceeds the total amount of wind capacity in the whole of Europe, as well as in the USA.
“Rapid expansion of wind”, the report claims, “underpins China’s pledge in the 2015 global climate talks in Paris to increase the share of non-fossil sources in national primary energy use to 20% by 2030.”
Karplus argues that: “with more extensive reforms leading China to transition to spot market and allowing electricity providers to reflect the marginal costs of wind generation, China’s clean energy potential could be further increased.”
The transition for China from being the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases to a green trailblazer will not be a straightforward one, the report argues, due to the very coal-heavy grid that the country is currently working with.
The report begins: “Expanding the use of wind energy for electricity generation forms an integral part of China’s efforts to address degraded air quality and climate change. However, the integration of wind energy into China’s coal-heavy electricity system presents significant challenges owing to wind’s variability and the grid’s system-wide inflexibilities.”
According to the model developed in the report, with the right structural changes, and the right placing of wind farms, the authors “estimate a potential production of 2.9 petawatt hours per year in 2030”. This, they say, “represents 26% of total projected electricity demand in the country.” However, “it is only 10% of the total estimated physical potential of wind resources in the country.”
The coal-heavy nature of China’s power generation is not to be understated though. The country expanded their generational capacity by 152% over the past ten years, but more than 70% of this new capacity is made up of coal-fired power plants.
Balancing the energy mix will require some policy changes, but also careful physical positioning of new wind power generators in order to make them effective in actually working with the existing grid.
As Karplus points out: “Wind that is built in distant, resource-rich areas benefits from more favorable physical properties but suffers from existing constraints on the operation of the power system.”
Da Zhang, another author of the report, explained that China is currently in the process of trying to balance climate commitments with feasibility.
He said: “Renewable energy plays a central role in China’s efforts to address climate change and local air quality.
“China plans to substantially increase the amount of wind electricity capacity in the future, but its utilization — and ultimately its contribution to these environmental goals — depends on whether or not integration challenges can be solved.”
