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Author: Source: Published time: April 19, 2011
As to such problems as difficulty in grid connection and operational safety in the rapid development of wind power, Shi Lishan, deputy chief of the Division of New Energy and Renewable Energy, said on April 15 that the grid connection and operations of wind power has become a central issue in wind power development in China. Its solution lies in government administration, wind farm operations, wind power equipment performance, and grid dispatching.
As he said in the conference on the issuance of the State Grid White Book on Wind Power Development Promotion, as far as government administration is concerned, planning and implementation must be coordinated; it is necessary to enhance the regulatory role of the national wind power plan and ensure the effective integration of the national plan with the local ones; a mechanism of synchronous planning and production must be established for wind power projects and grid support projects.
Since the 11th Five-Year Plan period, the installed capacity of wind power in China has doubled in consecutive years; currently the complete installed capacity of wind power amounts to 4,000kWh, 3,000 of which is already connected to grids. While more than 1,000kWh of wind power is not yet connected to grids, some wind power turbines connected to grids can generate power and fail to feed the power into the grids; other problems include wind farm construction being faster than support facilities and messy local plans.
As Shi admitted, refusal of wind power connection to grids gets increasingly serious. Worse, wind power development faces other challenges: The enterprises have not yet mastered the core technology for wind turbine making and wind farm control; coordination between wind power development plans and the power system is inadequate; an operations management system suitable for wind power is not yet available; knowledge of wind power is limited; attitude toward wind power is a simple and rude “yes” or “no”.
Shi believed that the grid plays an important role in promoting wind power development. “The characteristics of wind energy resources and the power market in China decide that the massive development of wind power must take the approach ‘building large bases and integrating wind power with the major grid.’ A large grid can take advantage of the complementariness of wind power in various regions and smooth out the output fluctuation in wind power.”
He required that grid enterprises should take measures to improve their ability to absorb wind power, speed up cross-province grid construction, expand the scope of wind power absorption, improve the intelligence of the grid, realize wind power-friendly access and a coordination mechanism, and promote the construction of peak shaving facilities such as pumped storage power stations to improve the peak-shaving ability of grids.
On February 24, wind turbines were separated from the grid on a massive scale at Jiuquan Wind Power Base in Gansu. It was the accident where wind power had the most serious impact on the grid, exposing the safety problem with wind power farm construction, wind power turbine making, and so on. As such, Shi required that wind power construction and management enterprises should improve their ability of wind power farm operations management, especially the ability of wind farm prediction management. On the other hand, wind turbine makers should further improve equipment performance, making their wind turbines capable of resisting fluctuations in the wind power system.
