China adds 19.3 GW of wind in 2016, curtailment rates keep climbing

Wind turbine. Author: Susanne Nilsson. License: Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Jan 27 (Renewables Now) - China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) said Thursday the country's cumulative installed wind power capacity at end-2016 has reached 149 GW after it added the “healthy” 19.3 GW last year.

Last-year wind deployment was most active in five regions:

Location	2016 wind additions
Yunnan	3.25 GW
Hebei	1.66 GW
Jiangsu	1.49 GW
Inner Mongolia	1.32 GW
Ningxia	1.2 GW

Wind farms now have a 9% share in the Asian country’s power capacity, according to NEA’s calculations. China fed 241 TWh of wind power to the grid in the 12 months through December, equal to 4% of its entire electricity generation.

In the meantime, the wind power curtailment issue continued to worsen as the record-high 49.7 TWh of the total wind output were wasted. This is way above the 32.3 TWh that was left unused in 2015. Average utilisation hours in 2016 grew by 14 to 1,742.

The northwestern province of Gansu ranked first in terms of unused wind capacity, leaving roughly 43% idled in 2016. Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Jilin province followed with "spilled wind" rates of 38% and 30%, respectively.

China’s newest official 2015-2020 energy plan envisages having at least 210 GW of wind power in operation by the end of the decade.

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