The institutional logic of wind energy integration: What can China learn from the United States to reduce wind curtailment?

Abstract

To date, China has the world's largest wind power generation capacity, followed by the United States. Yet, China's utilization of this installed capacity trails that of the United States by a huge gap. This paper seeks to explain this gap by focusing on the role of institutions. First, it analyzes the institutions that either facilitate or impede wind integration in the two countries. Next, it synthesizes these institutions into coherent institutional logics for China and the United States. Then, it corroborates the institutional analysis with empirical evidence from China and the United States. Finally, it compares the two countries and summarizes what China can learn from the United States to reduce wind curtailment. Overall, this paper finds that China's dominant institutional logic of wind integration is state centrism and it is complemented by partial decentralization and liberalization – a system that is more conducive to capacity addition than capacity utilization. By contrast, the United States' dominant institutional logic of wind integration is market competition but a competing logic also exists which is regulatory interventionism – a system that aligns capacity addition and utilization better but engenders greater policy uncertainty. Because the two countries have distinct institutional logics that generate different root causes for wind curtailment, this paper argues that simply transplanting solutions from the United States to China will not work. What China can learn from the United States is to make incremental improvements to address the frictions between its dominant and complementary institutional logics.