Feasibility study of China’s offshore wind target by 2020

Lixuan Hong and Bernd Möller

Energy, 2012, vol. 48, issue 1, 268-277

Abstract: China has an ambitious target of developing 30GW offshore wind energy by 2020. A spatially continuous resource economic and tropical cyclone risk model is built using Geographic Information System (GIS) to evaluate the feasibility of the target from both national and provincial level. The influence of spatial constraints and tropical cyclone risk on offshore wind potential and its associated marginal levelised production costs are identified by cost–supply curves derived from the model. It is concluded that spatial constraints and tropical cyclone risk increase the marginal levelised production costs for achieving the national target by 7 €/MWh and 34 €/MWh respectively. The implications of technological progress are further investigated, which suggests the marginal levelised production costs will be in the range of 77–87 €/MWh as better tropical cyclone-resistant turbines are developed. Comparing this figure with actual winning bids from current public tender procedure, it implies that only 40–70% of the national target can be achieved even under aggressive progresses of turbine technologies in the near future. A stable provincial based feed-in-tariff system for offshore wind energy and long-term policies contributing for technological learning need to be launched in order to make the ambitious plan into reality.

Keywords: Offshore wind target; Feasibility; GIS; China; 2020 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544212002071
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:energy:v:48:y:2012:i:1:p:268-277

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2012.03.016

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

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