More Wind Power than Nuclear Power in Chinese Electricity?

Who would have thought it? Those historic purveyors of smoke, carbon, pollution and all things anti-environment may have cleaned up their act so much that the majority of their electricity is now from wind power. Wind power is reported to have overtaken nuclear energy as a source of electricity in China. The world’s most populous country has been building nuclear reactors at a pace, but they also have been establishing wind farms.

Two years ago the country had 10,200 megawatts of installed atomic energy capacity and this was forecast to grow almost fourfold to 40,000 MW by 2015 and perhaps to 100,000 MW by 2020. But then came Fukushima. That Japanese nuclear accident slowed things down across in China. The Chinese government suspended approvals of new reactors for 18 months and embarked on a review of the safety both of those under construction and of those already in operation. Consequently, only four reactors were connected to the grid over the past two years, increasing China’s nuclear capacity by 2,600MW to just 12,800 MW. The government now considers 70,000MW as a more realistic target for 2020.

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What about wind energy? 18,000 MW of wind power was added to the grid over the last two years and in the same period that is nearly seven times as much as nuclear! While precise figures are hard to come by, it is estimated that there is now 75,600MW of wind energy capacity on China with eighty percent of it already connected to the grid. While the amount of electricity produced by nuclear energy has increased by 10 percent a year over the last seven years, says the report, the amount generated by the wind has soared by a staggering 80 percent annually. As a result, it says, about two percent more power came from the wind as from the atom last year.

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However, there are now so many wind farms that even more proliferation may actually slow down the wind and cause farms to be less productive.  Spacing out farms and new wind turbine designs help, but the inescapable conclusions is that just as too many cooks spoil the broth, then too many turbines will kill the wind!