The 13th World Wind Energy Conference was held on April 10th in Shanhai City, China, the world’s largest wind power market. As wind power has been growing rapidly in the nation, excessive capacity and insufficient grid-connection are urgent problems for China to deal with.
A statistical data shows the growth of wind power grid-connection, increasing from 500MW in 2003 to 7.7GW in 2013. The actual wind power installation in 2013 was as high as 9GW. The rapid growth during simply one decade leads China to top the world’s wind turbine installation. Meanwhile, wind power marks the third place of China’s electricity resources, following thermal and hydropower generation.
The prosperity helps investors become stronger than before. However, it also created a negative competition between wind turbine makers and caused the downturn of related stocks. Nowadays, only about 30 wind turbine manufacturers survive from the industrial reconstruction and market elimination, which have soften the problem.
However, not only the excessive capacity that remains an unsolved problem, the grid development is another issue to be tackled because wind projects couldn’t start operating without connected grids. The grid development in China has been falling behind wind farm projects for almost the full decade, this also cause high rates of abandoned electricity – 14.5%, 17.1% and 10.7% respectively in 2011, 2012 and 2013, representing a huge waste of wind power.
At the 13th World Wind Energy Conference, experts therefore introduced solutions for these problems. The solutions included to increase local demands to wind power, to establish wind power demonstration projects, to build region-crossing power channels, to transmit wind power from the West to power plants in the East and to encourage distributed projects.
“The Chinese government is planning 12 region-crossing channels to transmit electricity,” revealed Wu Xing-Xiong (吳新雄), the head of China’s National Energy Administration and deputy of National Development and Reform Commission. Additionally, Yi Yue-Chun (易躍春), the deputy managing director of a wind power center, explained that around 60% of the fourth phase of China’s previous wind plan are located in more developed southern and mid-eastern regions of the nation to supply wind power.