Fewer Chinese wind turbines left idle or wasted amid power grid upgrades

Fewer of the mainland's wind turbines are idle after hurdles in connecting power supplies to the grid were lowered, aiding operators such as China Longyuan Power.

The annual rate of the country's idled wind capacity might fall to 12 per cent this year from 17 per cent last year, said Guo Yanheng, the deputy director of the National Renewable Energy Engineering Information Management Centre. Ten per cent of mainland wind power capacity was sitting unused in the first half of the year, two percentage points lower than a year ago, according to the centre's data.

Idled capacity has dogged wind farm operators after a rush to build turbines in the windiest areas of the country surpassed the grid's ability to absorb and transmit the power. This year may be the first since 2010 that the rate of idled turbines has declined, according to the centre.

"The entire industry is a little bit more mature than it was three or four years ago, with wind operators actually considering not just wind speed and availability of land, but transmission capacity when they start to build," Michael Parker, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Sanford C Bernstein, said last week. "There's opportunity for a much larger portfolio of wind in China."

The rate of curtailment, the term used to describe when wind farms produce at less than their generation capacity, may decline to the low single-digit percentage level in 2015 as transmission capacity improves, Parker said.

"That places the Chinese wind sector fully in the same kind of utilisation range as the rest of the world," he added.