Turbines, Terawatts, Tenacity: The Problem with Chinese Wind Energy
Once derided as one of the dirtiest economies in the world, China's recent wave of green policies has been nothing short of revolutionary. Within the past three decades, China has bounded from one of the world’s lowest producers of renewable energy to a global leader, with a third of global green energy harvested in China. In 2022, for example, China installed roughly as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined, then doubled their additional solar in 2023. Additionally, fossil fuels comprise less than half of China’s total installed energy generation capacity, a marked decline from a decade ago when it accounted for two-thirds.
Central to China’s burgeoning renewable energy sector is its wind farms. China is the world’s largest onshore and offshore wind energy market in terms of both generation and capacity and is a major global player in the development of new, ultra-efficient wind turbines. Leveraging its status as the world’s third-largest country, China has greatly increased its wind production in its rural regions as well as in offshore wind farms along its vast coastline. As a result, China has led the world in new wind power additions every year for the past decade.
Beijing’s meteoric rise to the top of the global aeolian economy, however, has not been without controversy and staggering inefficiency. Although the Chinese wind energy industry is undeniably the world’s largest, its full capacity is hamstrung by an inadequate power grid that will not be capable of fully transporting harvested energy to areas of high demand until Beijing addresses the associated logistical issues.
In order to assess the inefficiencies of the Chinese wind energy sector, it is imperative to first understand the factors that led to China’s rapid expansion into—and eventual domination of—the global wind power economy. By 2006, following a period of strong economic development in the decades after the Cold War, China achieved the unwelcome status of the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Beijing feared the adverse diplomatic ramifications of such a title, especially in the developing world, which was both hit by climate change the hardest and was the locus of some of China’s most important international allegiances.
Domestic problems regarding climate change were slowly mounting, too: Beijing faced growing popular unrest as people began to feel the unfavorable effects of climate change and a national pollution crisis in its ultra-industrialized urban centers. To conquer these emerging challenges, Beijing began to prioritize renewable energy in its five-year-plans, expanding grid access to rural communities and planning the installation of wind farms and other renewable energy facilities.
China’s political structure was undeniably conducive to such a rapid turnaround. Unlike the United States, a partisan democracy where political gridlock often stymies the implementation of environmental policies, Beijing has been able to profit on its comparative lack of political division to fast-track the adoption of green technologies. Furthermore, a grand majority of Chinese energy companies are controlled by the government as “State-Owned Enterprises” (SOEs), which not only account for two-thirds of Chinese wind energy production but also issue billions of RMB in green bonds, engaging in a “green finance” strategy to incentivize sustainable economic and technological development. Energy-harvesting arms of the central government, such SOEs are free from the shackles of private interest and profiteering and exist at Beijing’s every whim, allowing for streamlined decision making and unwavering consistency with governmental aims.
But this rapid rise in Chinese wind capacity is not without its drawbacks, both political and logistical. Chinese policies have endangered diplomatic ties with the West and also struggle to adequately provide for its increasingly demanding urban centers. China has been found to have engaged in numerous instances of technological espionage, with the government, not private companies, taking international blame. For example, in 2012, American Superconductor Corp (ASMC), a computer systems supplier to wind turbines, had its source code hacked by Chinese intelligence and its contracts with Chinese suppliers were terminated shortly thereafter. Although SOEs are free from many woes associated with private businesses, they are also beholden to political motives, governmental corruption, and lack the innovation in research and development that would come from a privately-owned firm in a free market economy.
China’s wind energy sector is also logistically challenging. Although the rollout of China’s wind energy sector has been strong, the use of the generated wind energy has severely lagged behind supply, signaling issues in the national power grid and its ability to transport energy from rural wind farms into urban centers. This challenge is a phenomenon called curtailment, where wind farms produce more electricity than the grid can handle, leading to wasted energy. This is partly due to the concentration of wind farms in remote, sparsely populated areas (like Inner Mongolia) far from China’s major cities and Special Economic Zones. T
o make matters worse, much of the carbon saved by using wind energy is offset by the emissions required to manufacture the wind farms. Ironically, the immense success of the Chinese steel sector—which relies heavily on coal and thus causes much of China’s high emissions—is the main enabler of China’s rapid wind energy growth.
To combat these inefficiencies, Beijing must rely on the strengths that propelled China to renewable energy prominence in the first place. With decisive, well-planned governmental policies designed to broaden and ameliorate its power grid, China can begin to start fully reaping the benefits of its robust wind energy harvest. China can reduce curtailment by investing further in ultra-high-voltage (UHV) transmission lines to carry electricity from wind-rich regions to demand-heavy coastal cities. Additionally, integrating energy storage solutions, such as batteries or pumped storage hydropower, could store excess energy and release it during peak demand periods. Although it is unlikely, the Chinese government could also consider privatization of certain SOEs to foster healthy economic competition and an accompanying rise in innovation.
Despite cultivating a robust wind energy sector, China is not immune to key logistical challenges that prevent it from truly beginning to lower emissions. Plagued by widespread curtailment due to an inefficient energy grid which cannot adequately transport the energy supplied to it, China needlessly continues to burn coal instead of addressing the root causes of its transport inefficiencies. Until it remedies these logistical problems through a strong set of policies designed to revamp its power grid, Beijing will continue to squander its potential to be the leader in global wind energy.
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