Giant desert power plants would pump cheap clean energy into China's manufacturing heartland, raising the country's living standards and bolstering China's competitiveness in high-tech races like artificial intelligence (AI), according to Chinese scientists.
Solar panels at the Ningxia Tengger Desert New Energy Base, one of the renewable energy bases in northwest China. Photo: AFP
Endless clean energy from the desert
Northwest China includes the three provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai and the two autonomous regions of Ningxia and Xinjiang. Spanning over 3 million square kilometers, it is an area larger than India and has long been considered one of the least developed and poorest regions in China.
The long distance from the ocean and harsh terrain characterized by vast deserts such as the Gobi and Taklimakan have resulted in the region's sparse population.
Yet the region is rich in natural resources, including oil, coal and abundant green energy, providing 60% of China’s solar power and a third of its wind power.
According to estimates by scientists and engineers leading the energy revolution, the installed capacity in northwest China is nearly 500 GW. When combined with the vast Gobi Desert region in nearby Inner Mongolia, the figure reaches 600 GW.
By comparison, all US power plants combined will have produced about 1,100 GW by the end of 2022, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Remarkably, more than half of these power plants in northwest China are powered by natural sources: wind and solar power. Despite the unpredictability of nature, these green power plants still achieve an average utilization rate of over 95%.
According to scientists, to date, no other large regional power grid has seamlessly integrated such a significant amount of renewable energy while maintaining high utilization rates throughout the year.
Long-term and potential strategy
As early as the 1980s, scientist Qian Xuesen, who helped found NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and later nurtured China’s space program, envisioned harnessing the vast wind and solar resources of the Gobi Desert to power the country. At the time, technological limitations kept the idea a pipe dream.
But now, “the northwest grid has brought the first stage of this new type of power system to life,” wrote professor Ma Xiaowei and his team from the Northwest Branch of the China Power Grid Corporation and Xi’an Jiaotong University in a paper published last month in the Chinese academic journal Power System and Clean Energy.
The region's installed renewable energy capacity has reached 230 GW, half of which is transmitted via 10 ultra-high voltage direct current transmission lines to the densely populated eastern coastal provinces.
In their paper, Ma and his colleagues said these power lines stretch thousands of kilometers, crossing nearly the width of China, making the northwest grid “the largest and most powerful regional power grid in the world.”
For decades, the European Union (EU) has used its economic might, large population and environmental lobbying groups to lead the transition to green energy and combat climate change. Global giants such as Siemens in Germany and Schneider Electric in France have driven technological advances and expertise in this area.
But after careful comparison, Ma's team found that China's northwest grid even surpassed the EU in core renewable energy usage indicators, reaching world-leading levels.
Solar panels cover the desert. Photo: Reuters
Challenges and barriers
If all the deserts on Earth were covered with solar panels and wind turbines, the electricity generated would far exceed current human needs. But this vision seems unrealistic because of technical hurdles, such as the difficulty of transmitting large amounts of electricity over long distances. Traditional power grids also cannot handle the dramatic fluctuations of renewable energy.
Faced with this challenge, Chinese engineers have tried a few things and learned some hard lessons. In 2014, a wind turbine caused a power surge that traveled 400 kilometers, devastating another wind farm, according to Ma’s article.
China’s explosive growth in renewable energy in recent years has compounded these issues. Changes in sunlight and weather can cause power generation fluctuations of up to 50 gigawatts in a single day on China’s northwestern grid—a figure equivalent to the combined capacity of all the nuclear reactors operating in France.
To address this challenge, China has built the world's most advanced high-voltage long-distance direct current transmission lines, which effectively reduce power loss during long-distance transmission.
Scientists and engineers in China have also used AI to predict power generation capacity up to 10 days in advance by analyzing large amounts of sensor data. “Under stable weather conditions, the prediction accuracy is very high,” Ma’s team wrote.
Coal-fired power plants once served as the main stabilizing force in China’s power grid, but in the northwest they have been dwarfed by the rapid growth of solar and wind power. To compensate, the Chinese government has built hydropower stations on the upper reaches of the Yellow River, which serve as a backbone for energy regulation and storage.
According to Ma's team, these reservoirs not only irrigate arid areas but also cut nearly 20 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) in grid regulation costs, bringing huge economic and ecological benefits.
Another core technology is achieving complementarity among renewable energies. This requires a robust, reliable information sensing and control system. Ma's team says that nearly half of renewable energy generation facilities have joined this mutually supportive system.
US-China clean energy race
Energy supply will be a key factor in the upcoming competition between China and the US, after the race in artificial intelligence, according to a Beijing-based AI entrepreneur. In order to prevent China's AI advancement, the US has banned the sale of advanced AI chips to this country of one billion people.
“The advantage of advanced chips lies mainly in slightly lower power consumption. But as China’s power supply increases, Chinese companies can use less advanced chips to achieve similar AI training results,” said the unnamed entrepreneur, adding that the increase in electricity costs is negligible compared to the overall investment in the AI race.
Before the pandemic, China had twice the power generation capacity of the United States. Now it has nearly tripled. Electricity prices in the United States are set to rise 20% from 2021 to 2023 due to inflation, while those in China have remained stable. In some renewable-rich areas, Chinese companies are getting even bigger discounts.
The Chinese government is stepping up plans to build data centers and AI servers in its energy-rich western regions, aiming to boost the global competitiveness of domestic tech giants like Huawei.
Hoai Phuong (according to SCMP)
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