Experts said a lack of coordination among China's provinces and regions is an important reason why wind farms in North China and Northwest China have been sitting idle. One expert said the economic loss from the idle capacity amounts to 18.3 billion yuan ($2.82 billion) in 2015 alone. There is a lot of room for wind power to grow in China as the country continues to adopt more sources of renewable energy.
Thousands of wind turbines at a large number of wind farms in North China and Northwest China are sitting idle, wasting tens of billions of yuan, according to an account by the National Energy Administration (NEA), China Central Television (CCTV) reported on April 6.
At the same time, some provinces are ramping up efforts to build coal-fired plants.
The situation is a result of a lack of coordinated development, experts said. However, wind power, a form of "new energy," still has a good future in China, as the country continues to improve its energy mix in the fight against global warming.
Under the direction of power authorities, the wind farms in several of China's wind-rich provinces have been generating less electricity than they are capable of, according to the CCTV.
In Northwest China's Gansu Province, wind farms saw the loss of 39 percent of wind power that it could have harnessed in 2015, according to CCTV. The figure was 18 percent in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and 32 percent in both Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Northeast China's Jilin Province.
Competing interests
The situation is so severe that the NEA issued a circular on March 17 asking provincial authorities in areas facing a power supply glut to suspend or delay approvals for new power bases, including those for new energy.
The reason is complex why many wind farms haven't been able to take full advantage of their designed capacity.
The underutilization has resulted from the NEA's inadequate planning and delayed approval for the construction of long-distance electricity transmission network, said Li Qionghui, a senior expert at the State Grid Energy Research Institute, in an interview with CCTV.
The State-owned State Grid Corp of China (SGCC), the world's largest utility by users, operates much of China's power grid. In 2009, SGCC submitted a plan to create a "transmission route" from Gansu's wind farms and other renewable energy sources to power-hungry Hunan Province in Central China, according to a statement the company sent to the Global Times on Monday.
However, authorities did not approve the plan until 2015, causing the construction of the transmission network to fall behind the building of the energy base by two to three years.
For its part, the NEA said it would be best if the electricity generated by wind farms was consumed locally, according to the CCTV report.
The matter is further complicated by the preference of energy-hungry provinces for local coal-fired power plants.
Since December 2014, Central China's Hubei Province and East China's Jiangxi Province have approved 10 coal-fired plants with an installed capacity of 15,300 megawatts.
To put that number in perspective, the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei has 22,500 megawatts of installed capacity, the most of any single power station in the world.
Hubei has planned several coal-fired plants because a major railway line specifically designed to transport coal runs right through it, Xu Yang, a provincial economic planning official, told CCTV. Those power plants will greatly reduce the need for electricity produced elsewhere.
