Major Wind Turbine to Begin Operation

A wind farm in Northwest China's Gansu province, Nov 3, 2020. [Photo/IC]

The country's largest onshore wind turbine has finished hoisting on Friday and is expected to begin operation by the year-end, said its operator State Power Investment Corp.

The unit two of Gansu Jingtai Hongshan wind power project, one of nation's largest onshore wind turbines located in Northwest Gansu province, completed hoisting on Friday. With an installed capacity of 50 megawatts, the project will produce 125 million kilowatt-hours of power annually and help reduce carbon dioxide emissions of 124,000 tons yearly, the company said.

This is also in response to the government's recent plan to further optimize its energy mix by building massive wind and solar power facilities in the country's Gobi and other desert areas, it said.

China has been working on a massive renewable energy project, with the first phase comprising 100 GW of wind and solar in the desert having recently launched operations.

An analyst said to develop renewable energy that features solar, wind and hydropower is the route that China must take to achieve carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.

"To make sure the non-fossil fuel represent 25 percent of China's total energy consumption mix by the end of 2030, China should further step up the development of clean energy," said Luo Zuoxian, head of intelligence and research at the Sinopec Economics and Development Research Institute.

"Provincial-level regions with abundant solar and wind resources, such as Gansu, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and Xinjiang, should take the lead in developing clean energy in China."

It's also necessary to develop energy storage while stepping up the advance of new energy, said Yang Yusheng from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The proportion of clean energy still accounts for a small percentage of the country's total power output, and there has already been curtailment, Yang said during a carbon emission peak and carbon neutrality forum in Yantai, Shandong province.

To prevent wasting energy, Yang suggests the government further develop electrochemical energy storage and pumped storage to enable the large scale application of renewable energy.

The government said on Sunday it aims to lift non-fossil energy consumption to over 80 percent of the whole by 2060. By 2030, China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product will have dropped by more than 65 percent, compared with the 2005 level. The share of nonfossil energy consumption will have reached around 25 percent, with the total installed capacity of wind power and solar power reaching over 1,200 gigawatts.

Many State-owned companies have been laying out plans to develop clean energy. China Southern Power Grid said on Sunday the company will come up with 21 million kilowatts of pumped storage hydropower in the next 10 years. It will also start construction of 15 million kilowatt-hours of pumped storage hydropower to be operational by 2035, the company said.