The National Energy Administration (NEA) of China has started a new risk alerting system to avoid further investments in wind power capacity in regions where insufficient transmission infrastructures waste power generation.
The NEA will publish results of its three tier warning system (green, orange and red) on a yearly basis and will not include offshore wind power generation. Red alerts will be applied for regions where average wind power generation operation hours fell below the minimum requirements of the previous year and to regions with transmission curtailments higher than 20% of the previous year; regions with red alerts will not receive approvals to build any new capacity.
China's wind capacities have been soaring since 2004 (670 MW), reaching 133 GW in 2015 and 136 GW at the end of May 2016 (+32% growth in the first five months of 2016, compared to the same period of 2015). However, transmission capacities have lagged behind generation capacity additions and on average 26% of total wind power generation in China is wasted due to limited grid connectivity; this share reaches 33% in the Ningxia and Heilongjiang provinces, and almost 50% in the Jilin, Gansu and Xinjiang provinces.