Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
China’s solar and wind programs began in the mid-2000s and wind energy initially experienced much greater deployment. However, solar capacity deployments exceeded wind energy in both 2017 and 2018. This is part of the reason that solar deployments were on track to double China’s 2020 target for solar. Wind energy was only expected to hit one hundred and twenty five percent of the national target. Nuclear has been lagging set targets by a substantial amount and no one expects those targets to be reached. In 2019, there was a clear indication that China would meet substantially higher targets for wind and solar. At the same time China downgraded their expectations for nuclear installations. The new nuclear estimates were more accurate.
The rated capacity of a power generating source is one thing but it does not matter as much as actual recorded power generation. It turns out that wind energy in China as underperformed. A letter in the journal Environmental Research by European and North American researchers in 2018 assessed this situation.
“Our findings underscore that the larger gap between actual performance and technical potential in China compared to the United States is significantly driven by delays in grid connection (14% of the gap) and curtailment due to constraints in grid management (10% of the gap), two challenges of China’s wind power expansion covered extensively in the literature. However, our findings show that China’s underperformance is also driven by suboptimal turbine model selection (31% of the gap), wind farm siting (23% of the gap), and turbine hub heights (6% of the gap)—factors that have received less attention in the literature and, crucially, are locked-in for the lifetime of wind farms.”
Some of the capacity factor issues would be difficult to change while other might be ameliorated. Overall, the Chinese wind energy real capacity is well below that of the U.S. fleet of wind generators. Solar is less susceptible to some of the problems that impeded wind energy generation. China’s nuclear fleet has done much better in its ability to connect to the grid. Since the reactors are new, they are not being taken offline for substantial maintenance yet. The average capacity factor for the nuclear fleet of ninety one percent is used.
Even adjusted for the poor capacity factor’s wind experienced and the global capacity factor for nuclear, there was no year when the nuclear fleet added more actual generation than wind energy. With respect to solar versus nuclear power generation, on once in the past five years was more annual power generation added by the nuclear program than the solar program. The Chinese wind and solar deployment programs were started well over a decade after the beginning of the nuclear program. The first nuclear reactor was connected to the Chinese national power grid in 1994.
China has made a major commitment to nuclear power and there has been mention in Chinese press of plans to deploy hundreds of new nuclear reactors in the next decade. It is doubtful that this will come to pass.
Please read Part 3 next