Land, Not Wind, Sets the Ceiling for China's Wind Power

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences put China's wind power potential at 7.62 to 14.06 terawatts once the land a build-out would occupy is taken into account. The range comes from a study published Sept. 21 that rests on a land-use dataset assembled from 15,116 wind turbines at representative wind farms around the country. It is a potential calculated under the study's scenarios, not a forecast of what will be built.

Writing in Communications Earth & Environment, Lu Zhang, Pu Wang and colleagues say they combined that dataset with a model of the country's wind resource and an integrated assessment model, which projects future energy demand. The combination measures how poorly three things line up geographically: where the wind blows hardest, where land is available for building, and where the electricity will be needed.

The team reports that developing wind power on that scale would take 6.98% of China's total land area, and that the national figure hides wide differences between provinces.

In those scenarios, stricter land protection shrinks the area available for wind farms while also lowering the amount of land used per unit of electricity generated in many provinces. The authors read that as a sign that land rules can be designed to sit alongside protection for ecosystems and farmland.

The paper is open access. The journal has posted the accepted version ahead of the final edited one, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China funded the work.