China's Emergence as a Superpower (2015 onwards)

[Firn]

The greatest economic story of the last four decades has been Chinese growth, which has enabled hundreds of millions to escape poverty and to embrace new opportunities. The huge benefits however came with clear costs, of which the air pollution is the most widely known.*

The strategic implications of China's hunger for ressources have been discussed earlier so I want to focus in the next posts on the great Chinese push in renewable energy, electric transport and related factors. Combined it wil reduce or at least dampen some energy imports, although it will hardly change the fact that China needs vast volumes of trade with the rest of the world, especially the west.

Installed Wind capacity has become big but transmission is still problematic:

“China is a vast land, and here in Xinjiang, we’re very far away from the rest of the country,” Zhu said. “We need transmission to send this electricity thousands of miles away.”

Zhu points to the south, where Goldwind has just built nearly a hundred top-of-the-line turbines. The fierce wind blows through them, too, but their blades aren’t turning. Goldwind is waiting for China’s electrical grid to catch up.

The government’s building five ultra-high transmission lines in Xinjiang to send this energy to the places that need it, but it will take time. “A huge transmission line takes three to five years to build, but a wind farm only takes a year to build, said former Goldwind CEO Yu Wuming.

And that’s why, said Goldwind’s Zhu Xinxiang, 40 percent of the electricity generated by Dabancheng in the past year went nowhere. The energy could have powered a million homes, preventing air pollution and reducing China’s carbon footprint, but there weren’t transmission lines in place to carry it all

China has invested more then any country in HVDC lines but there is still much work to be done.



China has vastly expended it's wind capacity and is currently likely World leader however the grid problems will hold energy production greatly back which is a big problem from ROI to pollution.

All in all wind generation greatly profits from the technological developments of the last years and the sparsely populated interior regions should increasingly provide the densly populated coastal East with electricity.



Higher gross capacity will in the long run lessen the storage problem and should push prices down.

The two graphics come from the excellent blog of Ramez Naam.


*It is important to point out that heavy industries and heating with coal had a devastating impact on Chinese cities already fifty years ago, think early late 19th century Europe.