The World’s Largest Wind Farm has a Tiny Problem

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Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:55 - The Gansu Wind Farm
06:53 - Gansu's Curtailment Issues
08:46 - How Energy Storage Can Help
10:48 - Challenges & Takeaway

[adddude]

The "50% of installed capacity is renewable" is a metric to make reports look good.

"Produced electricity" is closer to the truth.

"Produced and used electricity" is where it paints the real picture.

[MrIslandman]

It's not a win-win, it's a wind-wind!

[hubertbaumer]

39000 Squarekilometers for 7000 turbines??? Belgium?
An average area of more than 5.5 km² for a single turbine?
I think someone has to do the maths again.

[DomyTheMad]

"the surface area of one belgium"
<stares at the country i was born in>
b r o

[lindsaydempsey]

I'd just like to say that a desert is not a wasteland, it's just a different kind of ecosystem.

[caldodge]

Peak power output is not average power output, let alone minimum power output. Repeatedly stating only the peak output is misleading.

[_anyone]

I just BaiDu. According to the Chinese reports: High Voltage DC cables was connected, and a gigantic energy storages were installed, so GanSu get green light to run full speed on it wind and solar energy in 2020.

"Starting from 2021, we will introduce full industrial chain projects with investments of over 10 billion yuan, such as Baofeng Silicon Materials, Huantai All-vanadium Liquid Flow Energy Storage, and Zhihui Green Coal Chemical." -- translated by Google

BTW, I just checked 2023 figures, wind power is still larger than solar in China. But it seems solar will soon surpass winds.

[firstlast-tydi]

"Gansu's green energy is now 95% efficient" What does that even mean?

[ThatSoddingGamer]

Bit of a classic catch-22. The places that would most benefit from wind and solar farms tend to be heavily populated, leading to high land prices (and concerns about aesthetic and side effects), which makes building these green energy farms much less appealing, and the places without those concerns tend to be too unpopulated to make the benefit practical.

[chi-jenyang]

The siting of a long-distance (~1000km) transmission line takes about 3 months in China. In US, it takes 10 to 20 years. That is why such large projects are not possible in the US.

[khuo]

Good effort with those Chinese geography names. Gansu is my home province and I had no idea they also have the biggest windfarm in the world, though to be fair, I have been gone almost thirty years.

[PeterSedesse]

The other part this wasn't mentioned is that the water supply and availability wouldn't support any type of large increase in population. you can't just move 100, 000s of thousands of tech workers into the desert. You would have water and food issues.

[erikkovacs]

A 1.5GW nuclear reactor takes up less than an acre. The reactor vessel is only 20 feet across.

[pathfollower]

10 miles by 11 miles of basically wasteland, isn't actually a lot of land. In a country the size of China, it's about 3 ten thousandths of one percent of the country. It would be better if it worked, though.
I am confused by the conflicting sizes mentioned. First, figure of 70000 acres is about 10 miles by 11 miles. But the later a figure of 139000 Square kilometers is then given. Thats like 125 x 120 miles. 50 times bigger? So now Im just confused.

[veggieboyultimate]

I think the phrase, “no pain, no gain” can be applied here

[rustyheyman]

I firmly believe Chinese renewables is about energy independence and not environmental concerns as its primary purpose.

[a]

I love how much innovation is going on in green energy

[wam]

People who go on about energy storage being the answer must not be good with math. There has never been a storage scheme that is sufficiently practical and affordable to be the answer to an energy scheme at a national or global level. One physicist on YT calculated sufficient batteries would take 300 years to build if enough material was available...which it isn't. And the emissions from that build project would dwarf current global emissions.

[kirkjohnson]

That 70, 000 acre number must be missing a couple digits. 70, 000 acres is only a 10.5 mile x 10.5 mile area and that would be a small windfarm. Seven million acres would be 105 mi x 105 mi and that would actually be a large wind farm.

[stevenhanly]

One thing I noticed about the big wind farm and the big solar panel farm is that it would be fairly easy to build both on the same plot of land. Wind turbines don't make large shadows, and while wind farms aren't always sited in the sunniest areas, there seems to be plenty of overlap where both could be combined. But I don't see that, and I'm curious as to why. Southern California have both types of energy farms, but they aren't co-sited. So to me, that seems like a waste. There is a lot of land around the wind farms that could benefit from solar panels. Obviously, lack of space isn't a problem in the Gobi desert, but real estate in the US is expensive. So optimizing the energy generation per acre seems like it might be a good idea. (Although I really liked the way that western Germany does wind power: they just plop the turbines down all across the countryside, instead of bunching them up on wind farms.)