Coping with large-scale wind power development for China's grids

As more and more large-scale wind farms will emerge in China, many technical problems that will arise in the process of developing wind power need to be carefully treated for grids. Unlike the practices in Europe and the U.S., in view of China's basic national conditions in terms of energy resources and the load distribution, China's large-scale wind power development (LSWD) will take the mode of long-distance and large-capacity transmission. Therefore, how to cope with new challenges is the most urgent problem faced with China. In the paper, three options for grids to cope with LSWD have been analyzed. The first option is concerning wind power forecast that will contribute to LSWD in various time scales with different functions. Wind power forecasts contribute to the operations and planning of power systems in such aspects as reducing congestions and losing, appropriately devising operation planning and unit commitments and providing information for merchant power plant operators to make their own bidding strategies and so on. The second one is to construct UHV grids that are the key to China's LSWD in the context of China's basic conditions in terms of energy resources and load distribution. Due to the limited accommodating capabilities of the local grids where large wind farms exist, most of the wind power has to be delivered to a wide area or even remote load centers. Ultra-high voltage grids are the only choice to take the onus with their excellent properties in power transmission. The third one is to turn the grids into the smart ones at all-level voltages and by applying such advanced technologies as VSC-HVDC for wind farm integration. The relevant progress and current research conditions are also analyzed in the paper. A strong and smart grid is a sound platform for LSWD. Anyway; China's sustainability would not be realized without the coordinated development of wind power and grids.