Wind-to-heat demonstration projects, including installations in Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, and Xinjiang, will offset only a little coal. But their real raison d’être is to demonstrate a strategic sink for northern China’s massive wind farms, whose output is increasingly being crowded out of the electric power market by coal-fired turbines and has nowhere else to go.
China’s selective shutdowns of wind power hit record levels last year, and the country is likely to smash those records in 2016. Curtailment of wind farms squandered 15 percent of China’s wind energy potential in 2015, and those losses surged to 21 percent during the first half of 2016, according to China’s National Energy Administration (NEA). Solar farms also face rising curtailment; 10 percent of their output went unused last year.
Experts say wind-to-heat and other technical solutions are ready to reverse China’s curtailment trend, but Beijing and regional governments have yet to implement the policy changes required to support them—policies that would significantly hurt coal-fired generators. “Curtailment has not been solved yet,” says Ranping Song, a China energy expert with the World Resources Institute (WRI), in Washington, D.C.
Leaders in Beijing have committed to cap coal consumption and promote renewable energy as a way to clean up smog-choked cities and cut carbon emissions. They have vowed to push nonfossil sources up from today’s 12 percent share of China’s energy mix to 15 percent by 2020. Song says that in order to meet those goals, China must continue installing wind and solar power at its world-leading pace and “make sure that generation from the installed capacity gets consumed.”
But here’s the rub: Construction of coal-fired power plants continues, expanding King Coal’s capacity by 7.8 percent last year. As the growth of China’s power demand slows—edging up just 0.5 percent last year—generators must jockey for access to the power grid.
The tussle is especially fierce across northern China, where the nation’s biggest wind farms butt heads with combined heat-and-power (CHP) plants, which deliver roughly two-fifths of the region’s space heating. The coal-fired CHP plants must run in the winter, just when northern winds are blowing strongest. Curtailment in Inner Mongolia—China’s leading wind power region—doubled to 18 percent in 2015 and leapt to 30 percent through June 2016.
Some relief is en route from ultrahigh-voltage transmission projects that are designed to export northern power to pollution-choked eastern cities. However, it remains to be seen how quickly demand for the power delivered by the lines will materialize, especially for the wind power, which peaks at night. The Lantau Group, a Hong Kong–based consultancy tracking China’s transmission program, concluded recently that renewables curtailment “probably will get worse before getting better.”
A more certain curtailment remedy is the electric boiler, according to Ning Zhang, a power systems expert at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. In 2015 Zhang and colleagues studied Inner Mongolia’s western grid, where the territorial government anticipates a doubling of wind power capacity in the next five years. They projected that electric boilers drawing surplus wind power would be an economic slam dunk.
Zhang determined that electric boilers drawing 6.19 gigawatts could provide 30 percent of the projected 2020 heat demand; that would offset enough coal consumption to save consumers US $5.2 billion over the boilers’ operating lives. That is a large payback on the equipment’s $1.4 billion installation cost. Additional health and productivity benefits would accrue from reductions in air pollution.
Read more at Wind Battles Coal for Access to China’s Grid
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