A Squad of environmental scientists from Harvard University and Tsinghua University has established the tremendous potential for wind-generated electrical energy in China. By utilizing voluminous metrological information and integrating the Chinese government’s energy bidding and fiscal limitations for rendering wind power, the researchers approximate that wind exclusively has the potentiality to satisfy China’s electrical energy requirements projected for 2030.  Read more about China Wind Power Market Potential

Although wind-generated energy accounts for only 0.4 percent of China’s total present-day electrical energy provision, the nation is quickly turning into the world’s fastest developing marketplace for wind generation, chasing after only the United States., Germany, and Spain in terms of established capabilities of existent wind energy facilities. The change over from coal and other fossil fuels to greener wind-based energy could also extenuate CO2 emissions, thereby bringing down contamination.

Evolution of renewable energy in China, particularly wind, encountered a significant encouragement with enactment of the Renewable Energy Law in 2005; the law allows for encouraging tax position for alternate energy investment funds. The Chinese government also accomplished a grant bidding procedure to ensure a fair return for large wind projects.

“To ascertain the viability of wind-based energy for China we based a location-based economical framework, integrating the bidding process, and calculated the energy cost based on geography,” said co-author Xi Lu, a graduate student in McElroy’s group at SEAS. “Using the same model we also evaluated the total potentials for wind energy that could be realized at a certain cost level.”  Specifically, the scientists utilized meteorologic information from the Goddard Earth Observing Data Assimilation System (GEOS) at NASA. Further, they presumed the wind energy would be brought forth from a set of land-based 1.5-megawatt turbines functioning over non-forested, unfrozen, rural regions with an incline of no more than 20 percent.

The analysis showed that a network of wind turbines functioning at as little as 20 percent of their rated capacity could allow for possibly as much as 24.7 petawatt-hours of electricity yearly, or more than seven times China’s present-day uptake. The scientists also ascertained that wind energy exclusively, at around 7.6 U.S. Cents per kilowatt-hour, could accommodate the country’s total requirement for electrical energy projected for 2030.

By contrast, to cope with the magnified requirement for electrical energy during the next 20 years utilizing fossil fuel-based energy resources, China would have to build coal-fired power plants that could bring forth the equal of 800 gigawatts of electricity, resulting in a potential increase of 3.5 gigatons of CO2 per year. The use of cleaner wind energy could both meet future demands and, even if only utilized to supplement surviving energy resources, significantly bring down carbon emissions.