Date: Dec.19 2017
Today’s fieldtrip is all about the clean energy. In Seattle, I was always bombed with news about Chinese unprecedented project on wind and solar power plant. According to Professor Lu, China built integrated wind power that has installed capacity of 210 Gigawatt(GW). And the overall renewable energy excluding hydroelectricity has an installed capacity of 330.3 GW. President Xi has addressed the importance of promoting an “ecological developing” which largely involved with renewable energy replacing the high carbon fossil fuel power plants. Both the wind and solar power plants are located in Hebei Province where is 70 km away from Beijing city, however, they are generating green energy for households living in Beijing.
Today’s fieldtrip is all about the clean energy. In Seattle, I was always bombed with news about Chinese unprecedented project on wind and solar power plant. According to Professor Lu, China built integrated wind power that has installed capacity of 210 Gigawatt(GW). And the overall renewable energy excluding hydroelectricity has an installed capacity of 330.3 GW. President Xi has addressed the importance of promoting an “ecological developing” which largely involved with renewable energy replacing the high carbon fossil fuel power plants. Both the wind and solar power plants are located in Hebei Province where is 70 km away from Beijing city, however, they are generating green energy for households living in Beijing.
The Monitor computers of the wind farm.
The view of wind turbine from the eco-tourism park.
Beijing Lumingshan Guanting Wind Power station
is owned by Jingneng Group which is a state-owned enterprise that is managing
the investment for Beijing public electricity and energy efficient development.
This wind farm has a total installed capacity of 186 Megawatt (MW) from more
than 100 wind turbines. The largest turbine is 93-meter-long in diameter, and
77 meters tall. All the parts on a wind turbine is movable except the tower to
rotate to receive better windward direction. The life cycle of a wind turbine
is about 20 years, especially the magnetic steel inside the electronic motor.
It weighs 48 tons and it is very difficult to replace. Hebei or Beijing is not
the most ideal location for wind farm due to the unstable and insufficient wind
speed. They only receive 5 meters per second of wind speed in Beijing comparing
with the 9 meters per second in Xin Jiang Province. Another challenge of wind
turbine development is its expensive cost that equivalent to 4000 RMB per unit
KW, therefore, each wind turbine costs about 6 million RMB to build.
The solar plant is built in 2013 in Yanqing.
After finishing the delicious fish hot pot
for lunch, we visited the Yanqing photovoltaic power station. They are a
sub-company of Jingneng Group as well. The solar plant contains 6444 large
solar panels and each of them has 20 unit solar panels. The maximum electricity
capacity is 32 MW, however, due to winter, the power plant only receives 17.95
MW. The solar panel matrix is built on a dry river bed. This was one of the last
large scale solar power station in Beijing following by the stricter
environmental and urban planning regulations. However, there are only two solar
power stations in Beijing which produce not even a significant amount of
electricity used in households. Chinese government are subsidizing the price
for solar energy sold to the national grid to compete with the thermal power
plants that has higher Return on investment.
Today’s fieldtrip also puts forward a
solution to promote renewable energy used by every household, which is the
distributed solar system. The Chinese government is trying to promote this
small scale renewable energy system now, because it can encourage the household
to use the electricity they generate from solar panel and they can sell the excessive
to the grid. That’s probably the future of solar energy instead of large scale
solar plant that occupies hundreds of thousands acres farmland.
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