Coal news and updates

The 16th of October marks the start of heating season in northern China. Traditionally that means firing up coal boilers and pumping excess heat from big coal-fired electric plants to residences and businesses. This year, another heat source will join the mix: wind power. District heating systems across northern China are preparing to use small injections of heat from electric boilers that will be soaking up power generated from the region’s robust overnight winter winds.

 

Wind-to-heat demonstration projects, including installations in Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, and Xinjiang, will offset only a little coal. But their real raison d’être is to demonstrate a strategic sink for northern China’s massive wind farms, whose output is increasingly being crowded out of the electric power market by coal-fired turbines and has nowhere else to go.

 

China’s selective shutdowns of wind power hit record levels last year, and the country is likely to smash those records in 2016. Curtailment of wind farms squandered 15 percent of China’s wind energy potential in 2015, and those losses surged to 21 percent during the first half of 2016, according to China’s National Energy Administration (NEA). Solar farms also face rising curtailment; 10 percent of their output went unused last year.

Experts say wind-to-heat and other technical solutions are ready to reverse China’s curtailment trend, but Beijing and regional governments have yet to implement the policy changes required to support them—policies that would significantly hurt coal-fired generators. “Curtailment has not been solved yet,” says Ranping Song, a China energy expert with the World Resources Institute (WRI), in Washington, D.C.

 

Leaders in Beijing have committed to cap coal consumption and promote renewable energy as a way to clean up smog-choked cities and cut carbon emissions. They have vowed to push ­nonfossil sources up from today’s 12 percent share of China’s energy mix to 15 percent by 2020. Song says that in order to meet those goals, China must continue installing wind and solar power at its world-leading pace and “make sure that generation from the installed capacity gets consumed.”

 

But here’s the rub: Construction of coal-fired power plants continues, expanding King Coal’s capacity by 7.8 percent last year. As the growth of China’s power demand slows—edging up just 0.5 percent last year—generators must jockey for access to the power grid.

SOurce: Spectrum