Where, when and how much wind is available? A provincial-scale wind resource assessment for China

Gang He and Daniel M. Kammen

Energy Policy, 2014, vol. 74, issue C, 116-122

Abstract: China׳s wind installed capacity has grown at a remarkable rate, over 80% annually average growth since 2005, reaching 91.5GW of capacity by end of 2013, accounting for over 27% of global capacity. This rapid growth has been the result of a domestic manufacturing base and favorable national policies. Further evolution will be greatly aided with a detailed wind resource assessment that incorporates spatial and temporal variability across China. We utilized 200 representative locations for which 10 years of hourly wind speed data exist to develop provincial capacity factors from 2001 to 2010, and to build analytic wind speed profiles. From these data and analysis we find that China׳s annual wind generation could reach 2000TWh to 3500TWh. Nationally this would correspond to an average capacity factor of 0.18. The diurnal and seasonal variation shows spring and winter has better wind resources than in the summer and fall. A highly interconnected and coordinated power system is needed to effectively exploit this large but variable resource. A full economic assessment of exploitable wind resources demands a larger, systems-level analysis of China's energy options, for which this work is a core requirement.

Keywords: Wind resources assessment; Spatial and temporal variation; China; High resolution; Wind (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (62)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421514004078
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:74:y:2014:i:c:p:116-122

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2014.07.003

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().