Increasing the scale of renewable integration is a key component of China’s decarbonization strategy. While the immediate challenge is to reduce renewable curtailment and increase its penetration, mitigating climate change in the long term will require a transition from an electricity system dominated by coal to one that consists primarily of renewables. This chapter summarizes the current governance structure and policies for renewable energy development and integration in China. It identifies two key considerations for China to transition towards large-scale penetration of renewables: geographic mismatch between renewable resources and demand centers, and concerns associated with integrating high penetration of intermittent renewable energy resources. Responding to these considerations, this chapter discusses four foundational elements that China needs to put in place in the near term to plan for the longer-term transition: flexible conventional generators, an appropriately large and more integrated transmission network, storage technology development, and demand-side flexibility/responsiveness.

Improvements in wind technology and reductions in cost mean that wind energy is now one of the most important sources of new electricity generation. This chapter looks at the history, physics and technological improvements leading to current wind turbine technology. Longer turbine blades and taller hub heights have played a key role in improving wind turbine performance. It also covers the development process required to build a wind farm including monitoring, energy assessment and financing aspects. A summary of pricing of recent wind energy projects from around the world demonstrates the economic competitiveness of the technology. We consider Denmark, and how it deals with the variability of obtaining more than 30% of its electricity from wind. Finally, it is demonstrated that a modest increase in wind installations to 72 gigawatts per year could see the world obtaining about 20% of electricity from wind power by 2040.