The World’s Largest Wind Farm has a Tiny Problem

It’s already difficult to conceptualize the  scale of wind turbines themselves. It can be even harder to wrap your head around how much  energy they can supply. Just one gigawatt is enough energy to power between 750,000 to a  million US homes.

Here in the United States, our largest wind farm is the Alta  Wind Energy Center in Kern County, California, which has been  able to produce about 1. 5GW. That’s impressive, but even the Alta  facility is dwarfed by the Gansu Wind Farm in China: a 20 GW colossus and  the biggest wind farm in the world.

Gansu also happens to be one of China’s poorer,  more remote provinces. So how did it become home to the world’s biggest wind farm? Can we replicate  this achievement elsewhere?

And most importantly, why is a wind farm large enough to power  an entire country sitting mostly idle? I’m Matt Ferrell … welcome to Undecided. This video is brought to you by  Surfshark, but more on that later.

So, where is the Gansu wind farm  and how did it get so big? Well, if you know your Chinese geography, then it's  located in the province of the same name. And if you don’t know your Chinese geography  then it's right here.

The individual wind farms that comprise it are all along  here, on the edge of the Gobi desert. If you remember our video on the Kubuqi Renewables  Base, China’s other desert-based green energy mega-project, then you might be feeling a twinge  of deja vu right now, and you’re not wrong. Both projects are in China’s far west and northwest  because deserts like the Gobi are hot, sunny, and windy.

That makes them great for generating  a reliable amount of solar and wind energy. Projects like this also require a lot  of square footage. In Gansu’s case, we’re talking approximately  70,000 acres.

Conveniently, the desert tends not to be the  most in-demand real-estate, meaning you can acquire a lot of space for  a relatively cheap price. It's a win-win. Another commonality between Gansu and Kubuqi  is their decentralized nature.

In both cases, we’re not talking about a single green energy  generation facility, but several large ones all connected into the same network. Though Kuqubi was  a little more spread out, Gansu is mainly located outside of Yumen City and Jiuquan. This is why  it’s sometimes called the Jiuquan wind power base.

So, Gansu and Kubuqi have a lot in common, but  Gansu has an additional challenge: its GDP is one of the lowest in China. So how did one of the  poorest provinces get the biggest wind farm? A lot of it has to do with that Gobi-adjacent location. 

China wants to be a renewable energy leader, and like we said a moment ago, Gansu is a  great location to build a massive wind farm. The project was commissioned in 2008 as part of  an earlier Chinese push by the Chinese government to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and  increase its use of renewable energy. China was, and still is, the number one emitter of CO2.

To  put things into perspective, the U. S. happens to be second in line in terms of pollution,  but China’s estimated population as of 2024 is 280% higher than that of the United States…  So y’know, glass houses, stones.

In any case, the sheer amount of air pollution China was  contending with was causing significant health issues, so China was (and again, still is)  eager to buff up their green energy portfolio. This sort of thing takes a lot of capital, and  funding for Gansu came from a variety of sources. Of course, the Chinese government provided  significant financial support for the project, including subsidies and loans.

Notably, an arm  of the World Bank contributed $150 million to the project. The European Investment Bank  also provided a loan of €40 million (or about $43. 6 million) for the construction  of a transmission line to connect the wind farm to the Chinese electricity grid.

Put a  pin in that “transmission line” thing. Well, don’t put a pin in an electric cable.  But that detail will be important later.

Anyway, construction on the farm proper  didn’t actually begin until 2009, but it progressed relatively swiftly, with  the project's first phase being completed in November of 2010. At this stage, Gansu comprised  over 3,500 wind turbines, whereas the average wind farm in the United States has about 50. By that point, it also had an installed capacity of about 5,160 MW.

Just two years later, the total  installed capacity rose to approximately 6,000 MW. That was roughly equivalent to the United  Kingdom's entire wind power capacity at that time. As of 2021, the farm has been fully  realized.

The Gansu wind farm now boasts over 7,000 wind turbines  spread across various wind farms, covering approximately 39,000  square kilometers of land. For Americans, that’s roughly 426,500  football fields. And for Europeans, that’s bigger than one standard Belgium. 

And the turbines’ combined capacity now exceeds 20 gigawatts, enough to power  your time traveling car 16 times over. Basically, it’s a massive achievement, and a cornerstone of China’s renewable  energy infrastructure. I’ll let this quote from Jiuquan’s Communist Party  secretary Wu Yangdong speak for itself: > “We finally made it — we turned the  lifeless Gobi into an unlimited chamber of treasure.

We are building a  Three Gorges dam on wasteland. ” To help coordinate the many individual wind farms  that make up the megaproject, Gansu features an integrated wind power coordinated control  system. This is a smart monitoring system, and it's very cool, but not unique to Gansu.

We’ve  seen similar ideas implemented on smaller-scale projects like B2U’s energy storage facility in  the States, and other companies like Siemens and Emerson offer similar systems. However, the  stakes are a little higher here in Gansu. You see, for most of its life the wind farm was producing  too much energy for the local grid.

In 2012, the smart management of the coordinated  control center allowed the Gansu complex to generate and “ship off” an extra GW  hour per day, and made the system more stable overall. Yet, as of 2015 up to  39% of Gansu’s wind capacity was wasted. Which begs the question: why was  Gansu facing curtailment issues?

Before getting into that, there’s one thing you  really don’t want to restrict … and that’s what you have access to when you’re traveling. By  the time this video is out I’ll be back from my trip to Vancouver, where I used today’s sponsor,  Surfshark, in my hotel room to make it look like my IP address was back here in the US to stream  some TV shows. I’ve been using Surfshark for what feels like forever and get so much use out of  it.

Surfshark is a fast, easy to use VPN full of incredible features that you can install on  an unlimited number of devices with one account. But … that’s not all. Even shopping services will  sometimes gate prices based on your location, so you can change your location to make sure you’re  getting the best deal.

They also have add-ons to their VPN service to unlock things like Surfshark  Alert, which will let you know if your email or personal details, like passwords, have been leaked  online in a data breach. Right now they’re running a special deal … use my code UNDECIDED to get  up to 4 additional months for free. SurfShark offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there’s  no risk to try it out for yourself.

I’ve been using Surfshark for years and love it. Link is  in the description below. Thanks to Surfshark and to all of you for supporting the channel. 

So, why was Gansu facing curtailment issues? The Gansu wind farm is an achievement —  there’s no argument about that. However, it faced many challenges.

Some of  these problems are specific to Gansu, but others might sound familiar  if you recall the Kubuqi video. Power generated by Gansu in 2012 was  being purchased for 0. 54 yuan (or $0.

075 in today’s money) per kWh. That doesn’t  sound like an issue until you consider that the power from nearby coal-fired power  plants clocked in at 0. 3 yuan (just $0.

042) per kWh. This means that the wind power just  isn’t competitively viable compared to coal. It also doesn’t help that northwestern China  mines a lot of coal, and Gansu in particular is known for its rich coal reserves.

Again, this  is a poor province, so the local government and industries have a strong financial incentive to  keep on keeping on with coal. Coal in general is a significant economic driver in China, and so the  coal industry has been able to throw around it's political weight. Also, the coal industry is a  major employer in the region, so pivoting to wind from coal means less coal mining jobs, which  is understandably unpopular on a local level.

To make matters more awkward, there’s just not  a lot of tech, manufacturing, or other big, energy-hungry industries currently located in  the Gansu province. So while the wind farm is very successful at generating electricity,  it was a little too successful at first. Without enough local demand, that energy  was going to waste, creating the previously mentioned curtailment issues and opening  up the puzzle box of transmission issues.

According to the South China Morning Post: “In 2016, nearly half of the electricity produced by the province’s 9 GW worth of wind  turbines was discarded because there was no use for it. The same year, Beijing issued a strict ban  on further investments for the Gansu wind farm, and many local businesses built on the wind  industry went bankrupt or had to move elsewhere. ” These issues with Gansu really serve to underscore  why I get so excited about energy storage on this channel.

With some energy storage, they might be  able to efficiently soak up that energy for later, or maybe even store it and move it  elsewhere. The Chinese government is of course aware of this, and China  is the world leader in energy storage, so that and some transmission lines have  really helped Gansu live up to its potential. Speaking of, recall that Gansu is located in the  deserts to the northwest of China.

Unfortunately, most of China’s industry and population centers  are located in the eastern parts of the country. For context, the total population of the Gansu  province just barely surpasses the population of the city of Shanghai. Of the major Chinese cities,  Beijing is arguably the closest in distance, and that’s still about 950 miles (or  1,529 km) away as the Google maps flies.

The great distance isn’t the only challenge  when it comes to moving that energy eastward, either. Western Gansu is a desert, and  central China has a lot of mountain ranges like the Qilian Mountains, which likely  added additional difficulty to building and maintaining the transmission lines.  Where’s the Monkey King when you need him?

Another problem with long power lines is  that it's hard to move the energy across long distances without losing too much  during transit. So the province is in the process of building several high-voltage  direct current (HVDC) transmission lines to send more than 30 percent of the  wind energy to cover 20 provinces. While this is a solution, it's not necessarily an  elegant one.

These top-of-the-line transmission lines weren’t cheap to build nor are they cheap  to maintain. Plus, some power is lost in transit, and over such a great distance this  can really add up. All together, transmission is a major factor in the  cost of delivering wind power.

Of course, transmitting some of that green energy  to where it needs to go is still a much better solution than letting it go to  waste or using energy from fossil fuels. Because it’s so difficult to get the power to the  companies, Gansu has also invited the companies to come to the power. Huawei in particular was  name-dropped as a company that had been invited to build large data centers near the farm.

And  this makes sense at first blush. After all, desert real estate is cheap, and there’s  plenty of room in Gansu for big tech. But the challenges of Gansu persist.

The  province is very remote. On top of this, the harshness of the desert environment  makes developing projects difficult. So it's just not very appealing for those  big tech companies to set up shop there.

On the other hand, Gansu Governor Ren Zhenhe  told the South China Morning Post that his region is being “overwhelmed” by the number of  companies seeking wind power deals. I haven't been able to corroborate any such deals,  but it's possible that they’re either just not public yet, or haven’t crossed over to  the English-speaking side of the internet. The biggest challenge for Gansu might be yet  to come, though.

Offshore wind farms closer to population centers in coastal China are continuing  to grow, both in farm size and individual turbine size. We've covered some of these giants on this  channel before. Will demand ever rise up to meet Gansu’s productivity with those closer, bigger  wind farms popping up?

That’s the big question. Despite these (sometimes  literal) mountains of challenges, let me remind you that the Gansu wind  farm is a success story. in 2020, the ban on wind energy investment  in Gansu was lifted.

And by 2021, despite Covid-related hiccups, the efficiency  of the farm’s renewable energy rose to 95%. China hasn’t stopped constructing renewable  energy sources and the power lines that get them to where they need to go. Fossil fuels now  make up less than half of China’s total installed generation capacity.

That’s pretty stunning  when you consider that just a decade ago, fossil fuels made up two-thirds of their  capacity. Heck, earlier this year they started construction on another transmission project like Gansu in Zhejiang province on the east coast. The Gansu wind farm (and its cutting  edge power lines) are exactly the type of green energy megaproject I’d like to  see replicated here in the United States and elsewhere around the world.

The project  has of course not been without its flaws, but I think we can learn from the  triumphs and troubles of this megaproject. The key takeaways are that project developers  need to make sure that either the demand for so much energy is already there…easy… or that  the infrastructure to get the power where it needs to go grows along with the power  plant. Less easy.

Untangling the wants, needs and hopes of local communities with greater  goals is always going to be kind of tricky… but I’ll be posting an in-depth exploration of the  topic myself in the near future, so stay tuned. Ultimately, I hope China doesn’t let these  speed bumps hinder the very impressive green energy momentum they’re accruing. And I  hope the rest of us can take the lessons learned from Gansu and apply them to  our own wind energy projects.

If we’re going to hit our 2030 or even 2060 climate  goals, there’s not a lot of time to waste. But what do you think? Do you  think other countries, like the US, can and should replicate the success of what  China is doing?

Jump into the comments and let me know and be sure to listen to my follow  up podcast Still TBD where we’ll keep this conversation going. Thanks as always to  my patrons for your continued support and a big welcome to new producer,  Sandy. I’ll see you in the next one.