From Generating Cost to Environmental Impact: Comparing Wind Power with Thermal Power

Abstract

As the fast development of China’s economy, the power generation has increased rapidly to support the economic growth. In China, thermal power, as a traditional power generation, consumes more fossil energy and brings great damage on environment. As for wind power, a clean and renewable power generation, uses wind energy and is beneficial to environment. In order to describe the differences between these two generations in detail, this paper compared the thermal power with the wind power from the generating total cost to the environmental impact in a quantitative way. And the scenario analysis was adopted for predicting the energy conservation and the emission reduction by wind power. The results show that: (1) Coal is still the dominant input for energy consumption in China and the installed capacity of thermal power takes 65% to total installed capacity. As for the wind power, wind energy only has a share of 5.89% to the total energy consumption and the installed capacity of wind power contributes 8% on total installed capacity. (2) The total cost of thermal power is higher than that of wind power, with 0.47 yuan/KWh. (3) Comparing with the thermal power, the wind power save 238.87 million tons of coal equivalent in total. In addition, the wind power reduces 668.54 million tons of CO2 emissions, 1.73 million tons of SO2 emissions, 1.8 million tons of NOx emissions and 0.3 million tons of smoke emissions during 2008 to 2015. (4) The coal conservation and the emission reduction by wind power are much greater in high economic growth rate scenario.