China's Potent Wind Potential

Forecasters see no need for new coal and nuclear power plants.

China has doubled its installed wind power capacity every year for the past five, and is on pace this year to supplant the United States as the world’s largest market for new installations. But researchers from Harvard University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University suggest that the Chinese wind power industry has hardly begun to tap its potential. According to their meteorological and financial modeling, reported in the journal Science last week, there is enough strong wind in China to profitably satisfy all of the country’s electricity demand until at least 2030.
Harvard-Tsinghua project leader Michael McElroy and colleagues quantified China’s wind energy potential by first modeling the availability of wind. To do this, they chopped the Chinese map into parcels 3,335 square kilometers each and used five years of recent meteorological data to generate a wind profile for each parcel. Next, they added industry-standard 1.5-megawatt wind turbines across each parcel (excluding unfriendly terrain such as steep hills, forests, and urban areas) in the model and estimated each parcel’s energy output. Finally, they calculated the cost of the energy that could be produced as a function of the cost of installing the turbines.

The modeling reveals extensive regions, concentrated in northern and western China, where much energy can be generated at costs similar to the government-set energy rates earned by established wind farms, which range from 0.38 to 0.55 Chinese yuan (6 cents to 8 cents) per kilowatt-hour (kwh). For example, the model predicts that wind-farm operators could profitably generate 6.96 trillion kwh of wind energy — more than double China’s annual power consumption of 3.4 trillion kwh and comparable to the projected total demand by 2030 — at a contract price of 0.516 Chinese yuan (7.5 cents) per kwh.

Technology Review