Mills ride wind in pursuit of clean energy ............................................................
thestandard.com.hk
With a steady wind blowing from the north, Yang Xuhua looks out at his wind turbines on the rolling plains of Zhangbei county and waxes optimistic over China's potential for clean energy.
Robert Saiget
Monday, June 05, 2006
With a steady wind blowing from the north, Yang Xuhua looks out at his wind turbines on the rolling plains of Zhangbei county and waxes optimistic over China's potential for clean energy.
"The blades on the windmill over there will be 77 meters long, the biggest in China," said Yang, deputy general manager of the Zhangbei Guotou Wind Power Plant in Hebei province.
"We have abundant wind energy potential, if we can tap this in a big way it will reduce a lot of the bad pollution that comes from coal burning."
After repeated trips to Europe and the United States to inspect the latest wind technology, Yang speaks with the enthusiasm of an environmentalist who is riding the wave of the next big thing.
"More and more people in China are becoming convinced that we must make use of our wind resources because it is cheap to exploit, clean, renewable, abundant and does not cause global warming," Yang said.
"The problem for China right now is that we don't have the equipment to realize our goals."
According to studies, the nation has the potential to tap more than one million megawatts of wind power resources, of which 250,000 MW are land-based and the rest could be tapped in offshore wind farms.
Yet China only had 760 MW of installed wind power from 43 wind farms at the end of 2004, a fraction of 1 percent of total national electricity production.
Heavily polluting coal continues to account for over 70 percent of the nation's energy, a figure largely seen as simply unsustainable for a nation that is already one of the world's most environmentally degraded.
Amid such environmental woes, plants such as Yang's are being seen as vital green energy pioneers.
Zhangbei Guotou began installing its first batch of 30 General Electric wind turbines last year and will install another 60 built by Spain's Energia Hidroelectrica de Navarra in 2007.
By then the wind farm will have 144 MW of installed capacity.
The power will be pumped into the northern China grid, some of which will be used to help realize Beijing's pledge to use 20 percent renewable energy at the 2008 Olympic Games, Yang said.
Zhangjiakou prefecture, in which Yang's plant is located, is planning to have up to 1,000 wind turbines installed by 2010 on a series of new wind farms. The prefecture has already invested 1.5 billion yuan (HK$1.45 billion) in wind farms, with another 2.2 billion yuan's worth of construction under way.
The National Development and Reform Commission last year unveiled a plan to install 30,000 MW of wind power in China by 2020, a 33 percent increase over previously stated goals.
China's first target is 5,000 MW of wind power by 2010, with plans for a series of offshore 1,000 MW plants that will each require up to 500 state-of-the- art, two MW wind turbines. One of the main hurdles in developing the resource is Chinese regulations requiring a 70 percent local content in imported wind generators, although foreign investors are increasingly coming into the market.
GE of the United States last week signed an agreement to invest US$50 million (HK$390 million) in renewable energy research in China to supplement existing production facilities already making wind turbine components here.
So far GE has contracts amounting to 700 MW of wind energy in China, said Jeffrey Immelt, GE's chief executive officer, in Beijing.
In June last year, Spain's ENH agreed to a US$31 million joint venture plant to build wind turbines in Nantong. A month later Denmark's Vestas Group set up a US$30 million plant in Tianjin to manufacture wind-turbine blades for its newest two MW turbines while a plan for a turbine factory is in the works.
Yet China's wind-power pioneers say this is not nearly enough.
"The problem for the growth in wind industry in China is that we cannot buy turbines fast enough," said Liu Yuan, head of the energy division of Zhangjiakou's economic planning commission that oversees Zhangbei county.
Another factor hampering wind power's growth in China is at present it costs slightly more than coal.
Yet Zhangjiakou prefecture again offers another glimpse of what the future could hold for China if a comprehensive green power strategy was pursued with vigor.
With strict regulations on cleaning coal and extracting sulfur from the fossil fuel in place due to its proximity to Beijing, the cost of wind power is already nearly equal to that of the cost of coal- fired electricity, Liu said. |
