Abstract
Following a decade of unprecedented investment, China now has the world’s largest installed base of wind power capacity. Yet, despite siting most wind farms in the wind-rich Northern and Western provinces, electricity generation from Chinese wind farms has not reached the performance benchmarks of the United States and many other advanced economies. This has resulted in lower environmental, economic, and health benefits than anticipated. We develop a framework to explain the performance of the Chinese and US wind sectors, accounting for a comprehensive set of driving factors. We apply this framework to a novel dataset of virtually all wind farms installed in China and the United States through the end of 2013. We first estimate the wind sector’s technical potential using a methodology that produces consistent estimates for both countries. We compare this potential to actual performance and find that Chinese wind farms generated electricity at 37%–45% of their annual technical potential during 2006–2013 compared to 54%–61% in the United States. Our findings underscore that the larger gap between actual performance and technical potential in China compared to the United States is significantly driven by delays in grid connection (14% of the gap) and curtailment due to constraints in grid management (10% of the gap), two challenges of China’s wind power expansion covered extensively in the literature. However, our findings show that China’s underperformance is also driven by suboptimal turbine model selection (31% of the gap), wind farm siting (23% of the gap), and turbine hub heights (6% of the gap)—factors that have received less attention in the literature and, crucially, are locked-in for the lifetime of wind farms. This suggests that besides addressing grid connection delays and curtailment, China will also need policy measures to address turbine siting and technology choices to achieve its national goals and increase utilization up to US levels.
Highlights
Expanding low-carbon power generation in China is a key national priority to reduce the adverse health effects of coal use (Zhang et al 2012) and mitigate global climate change (IPCC 2015)
A recent paper estimates the impact of three key drivers of the shortfall in China, but does not examine how these factors compare to farm siting, hub height, and operational efficiency, factors that we find contribute nearly 40% of the average annual difference between technical potential and actual generation (Lu et al 2016)
Turbine model selection is the largest cumulative gap in both countries; a reduction of 9.1 percentage points of capacity factor can be attributed to suboptimal turbine model selection in China whereas this figure is 10.8 percentage points in the United States. (As we discuss and in SM.6., an analysis of the gaps by year, as opposed to cumulatively, shows that a greater fraction of the US turbine model gap is attributable to the US fleet being older.) Siting plays an important role in both countries, but is a more important driver in China (6.9 percentage points of capacity factor lost in China compared to 4.6 percentage points in the United States)
Summary
Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Keywords: wind power, China, renewable energy, climate change mitigation, renewable integration
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