Clean energy lights up the green economy

At the border of Sichuan and Yunnan, a river runs by. The concrete has been poured into the last warehouse of the underground powerhouse on the left bank of Baihetan Hydropower Station, the largest hydropower project under construction in the world. On the shore of the Yellow Sea, the blades whirl. The first fan of Jiangsu Binhai South H3 offshore wind Power Project of the State Power Investment Corporation has been successfully connected to the grid. After it is put into operation this year, the annual power generation will reach 900 million KWH. North of the desert, the sun continues to shine, Inner Mongolia Dalat banner photovoltaic power generation base into pieces of the "blue plate plate" orderly arrangement, plate power generation, plate planting, has become the people rich "pot pot"......  Clean energy, including renewable energy such as water, wind, solar and biomass energy, is the main force driving low-carbon energy development. How is the development of clean energy in recent years? What kind of development space will be ushered in? The reporter conducted an interview.

The competitiveness of clean energy has steadily increased

 It is predicted that in the 14th Five-Year Plan period, with technological progress, onshore wind power and photovoltaic power generation will reach full parity. Into the Longji Leye solar cell factory located in Xi 'an, Shaanxi Province, high standard clean workshop, a piece of silver monocrystalline silicon sheet 166 mm side length, thickness of only 170 microns, through the velvet, diffusion, etching, coating and other processes, into the ink blue solar cell sheet. "The workshop basically uses automated equipment, and employees only need to be responsible for simple loading and unloading, which greatly improves the efficiency, such as screen printing. In the past, the annual output of a line was only 25,000 pieces, but now it can reach 150,000 pieces or more." Li Zhenguo, president of Longi Shares, said the average conversion efficiency of the battery mass production of the project is more than 23%, leading the industry. Li Zhenguo was deeply impressed by the cost reduction brought by technological progress in the photovoltaic industry in recent years: "Compared with 10 years ago, the silicon wafer has dropped from about 100 yuan to about 3 yuan per piece; Pv modules have been reduced from more than 30 yuan per watt to about 1.7 yuan. At the same time, the conversion efficiency of photovoltaic cells is increasing, which significantly improves the economy of development and utilization." Technological advances and cost reductions have made clean energy generation more competitive and more accessible. "The central and eastern parts of the country have been dominated by low-wind energy resources. Seven or eight years ago, the industry generally believed that the average wind speed should be at least 6 meters per second before the development conditions, so the country mainly built wind farms in the three northern regions. In recent years, the impeller diameter increases, the sweep area per kilowatt increases, the application of high tower barrel technology and other technical improvements, so that plain areas, low wind speed areas also have the development conditions." Qin Haiyan, secretary-general of the wind energy Committee of the Chinese Renewable Energy Society, said that under the current technological level, the central and eastern China's wind energy resources have reached nearly 1 billion kilowatts, but only 11 percent of them have been developed so far, with huge potential. "Low wind speed plains generally have a high wind gradient, and the wind speed increases quickly as the altitude increases. By increasing the height of the tower and the length of the blades, the fan can obtain more wind resources." Tian Qingjun, senior vice president of Vision Energy, cited the example of a wind farm in Tangyin County, Henan province, where a 120-meter-high fan can increase wind speed by 0.4 to 0.6 meters per second, and a 150-meter-high fan can increase wind speed by another 0.4 to 0.6 meters per second, reducing the life-cycle electricity price to less than 0.3 yuan per kilowatt-hour. It is lower than the benchmark feed-in price of coal-fired power generation in Henan Province. According to the estimates of relevant research institutions, in the 14th Five-Year Plan period, as technology advances, onshore wind power and photovoltaic power generation will reach full parity (without state subsidies), and low prices will be achieved in some areas. In 2025, the on-grid tariff for onshore wind power is expected to drop to 0.23 yuan to 0.4 yuan per KWH, and for photovoltaic power generation to 0.2 yuan to 0.38 yuan per KWH. At the same time, the industrialization of clean energy equipment has also been accelerated in recent years. Take photovoltaic as an example. In 2019, China's global production capacity of polysilicon, silicon wafers, cells and modules rose to 69%, 93.7%, 77.7% and 69.2%. Each link has more than 5 enterprises ranked in the world's top 10, industrialization technology in the world's advanced level, frontier technology also began to accelerate the layout. Not only that, "photovoltaic + hydrogen production", "photovoltaic + new energy vehicles", "photovoltaic + buildings" and so on, the application of photovoltaic in various fields has gradually expanded.

The scale of development leads the world

 China has expanded its scale and optimized its layout, and now ranks first in the world in installed renewable energy and power generation. "When photovoltaic panels are installed on the roof, the electricity generated can be used by oneself, and the rest is sold to the power grid, which can bring in 500 or 600 yuan a month!" Uncle Liu in Yiyuan County, Shandong Province, a few years ago was a registered poor family, now with the photovoltaic power generation "sunshine passbook", life is getting better and better. Promoting the sustainable and sound development of clean energy will not only boost the development of related industries and poverty alleviation, but also help protect the clear water and blue sky and promote energy transformation. In July, the country's first self-developed 10-megawatt offshore wind turbine was connected to the grid in Fuqing, Fujian province. The offshore wind turbine has the largest single capacity in Asia and the second largest in the world. Its hub center is about 115 meters above sea level and its wind turbine sweep area is equivalent to 3.7 standard football fields. According to reports, at an annual average wind speed of 10 meters per second, a single unit can deliver clean electricity to meet the power needs of 20,000 families of three every year, reducing coal consumption by 12,800 tons and carbon dioxide emissions by 33,500 tons. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, China has witnessed sustained and rapid development of clean energy and entered a new stage of replacement of a higher proportion of incremental energy and regional stock, which has played an important role in building a clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient energy system. The scale of development continues to expand. From 2016 to 2019, the installed capacity of renewable energy power generation increased by an average annual rate of about 12%, among which the newly added capacity accounted for more than 50% of the country's newly added power capacity, leading the newly added capacity of fossil energy. Renewable energy has gradually become the main body of newly added power generation. By the end of August this year, China had installed 360 million kW of hydropower, 220 million kW of wind power, 220 million kW of photovoltaic power and 25.75 million kW of biomass energy, ranking first in the world. Over the past years, China has become the world's largest investor in renewable energy, ranking first in the installed capacity and power generation of renewable energy. The layout of development has been continuously improved. For one thing, regional distribution is much wider. In the second quarter of this year, the eastern and southern regions of China added 2.37 million kw of wind power connected to the grid, accounting for 55.4% of the country. Clean energy is expected to be better developed in regions with good power consumption conditions. On the other hand, a pattern of centralized and distributed development has gradually taken shape. Compared with traditional centralized power generation, distributed power generation has the advantages of low power loss, low transmission costs, and less land and space resource occupation. Taking photovoltaic power generation as an example, as of the end of June, distributed photovoltaic accounted for 31.1% of the total installed PV capacity in China, up 1.5 percentage points year-on-year. The level of utilization continues to improve. In 2019, renewable energy generated 2.04 trillion KWH of electricity, accounting for 27.9 percent of total electricity generation, up from 25.7 percent in 2016. From January to August this year, the utilization rate of effective water energy reached 96.8 percent, that of wind power 96.6 percent, and that of photovoltaic power 98.2 percent.

We will promote high-quality development of clean energy

 We should further improve industrial policies, institutions and mechanisms that adapt to the diversified and market-oriented development of clean energy. China has announced that it will take stronger policies and measures to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, with the goal of peaking carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. "Renewable energy has become a major tool in the fight against climate change. In order to achieve the goal of peaking carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality, renewable energy will be the majority of our energy growth in the future." Tao Ye, deputy director of the Renewable Energy Development Center of the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission. So, how can we effectively increase the proportion of renewable energy and achieve high-quality development of clean energy? In the interview, many enterprises and experts called for further improvement of industrial policies, institutions and mechanisms to adapt to the diversified and market-oriented development of clean energy. -- Breaking the "barriers" to clean energy consumption. "It only takes a few seconds for the hydropower station to respond to changes in photovoltaic power generation, and the adjusted total power generation is in line with the dispatching power generation plan, so there is no longer any concern about the stability of photovoltaic power generation." In Qinghai Longyangxia water-light complementary photovoltaic power station, the National Power Investment Yellow River Company staff said that they through the self-developed system control software real-time adjustment, effectively solve the problem of photovoltaic power consumption. For a long time, wind power and photovoltaic power generation have been affected by natural conditions, with great volatility and intermittenity, coupled with the mismatch between resources and demand distribution, bringing some obstacles to the consumption of renewable energy power connected to the grid. The new energy Department of the National Energy Administration said that the next step is to establish and improve the new generation of power system, improve the system adjustment ability, at the same time to improve and implement the guarantee mechanism, strengthen the evaluation and assessment, and promote all kinds of market players to develop and use renewable energy with greater efforts. -- We will continue to reduce non-technology costs. "In some areas with good lighting conditions, in terms of technical power generation cost alone, photovoltaic power generation has been able to achieve less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour, the reason why it is still more than 20 cents, 30 cents, mainly non-technical costs accounted for a higher proportion." Li Zhenguo believes that although the technological cost of clean energy continues to fall, there is still room for further reduction of non-technological costs such as land, taxation and financing, and additional technological costs such as auxiliary services and energy storage. The new energy department of the National Energy Administration said it will promote the improvement of the relevant fiscal and tax pricing system, reduce land, tax, financing and other non-technical costs. -- Strengthening industrial and policy coordination. "At present, there are still deficiencies in some clean energy equipment and technologies. We should strengthen efforts to strengthen the main bearings and core components of the control system of wind turbines, and strengthen efforts to adapt to high-head and large-capacity hydropower units in high-altitude areas." Tao suggested breaking resource constraints through technological innovation, speeding up research and demonstration of key technologies, exploring commercialization routes and actively creating a new industrial ecology around advanced photovoltaic, offshore wind power, energy storage and hydrogen energy.

"With the rapid development of renewable energy, the development of hydropower further upstream, the ecological environment is relatively weak; The focus of wind power and photovoltaic power generation development is expanding to central and eastern regions and southern regions. Due to the impact of ecological protection and territorial space, it is more difficult to implement projects." Tao Ye believes that relevant departments should strengthen policy coordination to realize the coordinated development of renewable energy, natural resources and ecological environment, and gather a strong force for energy transformation.

Reprinted from: People's Daily