Dancing With Giants by Mitchell A. Silk & Seth Tan

Author:Mitchell A. Silk & Seth Tan [Silk, Mitchell A. & Tan, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Winding Up

The first trip I made to China was to a location called 관庫 (direct English translation could be “Wrapped Head”). From there, I would visit many potential wind sites in Inner Mongolia. The higher wind energy sites (or Class 1 wind sites) in China were mostly in remote high-altitude locations like Inner Mongolia and the government tried to facilitate thousands of megawatts of wind power development by earmarking “wind bases.”

On this first trip, I drove for more than half an hour and all I saw were wind power projects as far as the eye could see. However, not every one of them was generating power. As Inner Mongolia was relatively far away from the larger electricity demand centers like Shandong and Beijing, strong long-distance transmission lines were needed but not yet built. Many of the wind projects were actually completed but had no way of delivering power. Those that were connected to the local grid faced a level of curtailment (i.e., not 100% of the electricity generated could be taken by the grid) as the local transmission grid was not built to take on so much intermittent electricity. As wind was not consistently blowing through the day and would vary from season to season, there were only certain times wind power was generated. The huge wind bases meant that when wind power was generated, the local grid had to suddenly take on large amounts of electricity.

There were also individual project issues. At the time there were no hard requirements on who could develop wind power projects so some developers turned out to be very ill-equipped. One sponsor I met used to be a Chinese calligrapher with some family wealth. Another sponsor used to own a coal mine and thought—given that he could be a financial sponsor of a coal mine—he could also be one for a wind power project. The reality was that he could not.

Unlike coal mining, which had an established industry standard and a huge ecosystem of service providers, the wind industry was then too nascent and had neither. In the end, the projects of the Chinese calligrapher and the coal mine investor fared worse than the adjacent wind power projects. In an almost funny situation, the staff of the calligrapher tried to convince me that wind data taken from a weather station that was 25 km away from the proposed site could be used as the primary data for assessing the site. I had no choice but to refuse to consider this project as the assessment for the project would likely be inaccurate.

After I saw a few of these, I decided to focus on wind sites closer to the electricity demand centers and, more important, smaller sites, so curtailment was less of an issue. But visiting these faraway sites in Inner Mongolia was an eye opener as to the overall state of the industry at that time.

Do you know?

Compared to conventional power which can generate electricity over 90% of a year given stable fuel supply, renewables like wind only generate around one-third of a year.

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