China's Wind Power Plans Turn On Coal

[phantom power]

So far, wind energy makes up just 0.4 percent of China's electricity supply. However, Beijing is building the world's biggest wind power project, although paradoxically, adding wind power in China also means adding new polluting coal-fired power stations.

The blades of a 20-story wind turbine slicing and chopping through the air are the only noise out here in China's western Gansu province. More than 100 Chinese-made turbines dot the bleak landscape. They call this the "Three Gorges on the Land," drawing parallels to China's gigantic hydroelectric project.

...

Nature is unpredictable: Sometimes there is no wind; other times, it's so strong the turbines have to be shut down. Because China's transmission power grid can't cope with the intermittent nature of wind, the government is adding back-up coal-fired power plants along with wind power to level out those peaks and troughs.

In Jiuquan, new coal-fired power plants with 13.6 million kilowatts of installed capacity — the same amount of energy generated by Chile in 2009 — will be added by 2020. The need to add baseload coal-fired power plants has the effect of reducing the clean benefits of wind power.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121244275


Locals build a road to the Jiuquan wind farm in 23-degree Fahrenheit weather. They say they love the wind farms for the estimated 6,000 jobs a year they bring.

[joshcryer]

1. Why all the unrecs? This is the rhetoric.

Coal has been stated as necessary by the Wind Power Association head, and China is using wind as a reason to legitimize their coal, even if in the end a lot of their wind isn't even connected to the grid.

[kristopher]

4. So China is doing this head fake because...

the reason you state is that China needs to make an excuse for building of coal plants and somehow the building wind turbines provides them with cover, right?

Implicit by the remark about the wind not being connected to the grid is the idea they aren't really interested in the power the turbines provide.

Is that an accurate summary of what you meant to communicate?

My understanding of command and control economies suggests to me that the story of the unconnected wind farms probably involves the inevitably poor micromanagement of large scale projects that is part of such central control. Central decision-making has advantages and drawbacks, it can get these projects moving quickly but there are inevitably a lot of incidents like this that add up to gross inefficiency. Distributed decision-making on the other hand is good at accomplishing the goals smoothly but has trouble making radical change to the established order.

That is one reason most reasonable people gravitate to a system where government establishes large scale goals through sound policy and leaves the micromanagement to people who have skin in the game if money and time are wasted.


BTW, the reason I unrec'd the post was because it is a calibrated hit piece on wind. Note the use of the negative buzz words in the opening, "The blades of a 20-story wind turbine slicing and chopping through the air".

One of the favorite memes of the Republican campaign against wind is to play on the poor siting and design of Altamont Pass where they succeeded in exploiting the mistakes by labeling the resulting raptor mortality as a huge drawback of wind. That is the anti-wind campaign that saw the introduction of the term Cuisinarts of the Sky.

The use of that wording was not a chance occurrence.

The fact is that large scale development of wind is endorsed by the Audubon Society with the caveat that appropriate environmental procedures and technologies are employed to mitigate the impact on wildlife.

[joshcryer]

5. The rhetoric doesn't come from me, it's the head of the Chinese Wind Power Association.

They said that they need to build coal to take up for wind, but we know that that isn't true, and that indeed, coal makes for a piss poor load balancing provider. Indeed, there was a whole 100+ post thread about it here on these forums.

[kristopher]

6. That isn't their policy position as I've heard it.

They are proceeding on ALL fronts in energy development. They have money and resources and especially since they are energy hungry, the idea that they are using wind as an excuse for coal is absurd.

They have no hesitation about thumbing their nose at the world when it comes to doing what they think is best; so it is a bizarre theory you are proposing.

[joshcryer]

7. They're the ones saying they need to build coal for wind.

BTW, no projections put their wind even coming close to their coal before 2050.

[XemaSab]

2. Looks like Bakersfield

:P

[rollingrock]

3. The purpose of wind power is to reduce reliance on fossil fuels

not replace it completely, which is impossible in most cases. that's just common sense. the wind doesn't blow 24 hours a day. any reductions in the use of coal that can be achieved is always a good thing for the environment.