It’s already difficult to conceptualize the scale of wind turbines themselves. It can be even harder to wrap your head around how much energy they can supply. Just one gigawatt is enough energy to power between 750,000 to a million US homes.¹ Here in the United States, our largest wind farm is the Alta Wind Energy Center in Kern County, California, which has been able to produce 1.5GW.²

That’s impressive, but even the Alta facility is dwarfed by the Gansu Wind Farm in China: a 20 GW colossus and the biggest wind farm in the world.

Gansu also happens to be one of China’s poorer, more remote provinces. So how did it become home to the world’s biggest wind farm? Can we replicate this achievement elsewhere? And most importantly, why is a wind farm large enough to power an entire country sitting mostly idle?

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Gansu: What We Know

So, where is the Gansu wind farm and how did it get so big? Well, if you know your Chinese geography, then it’s located in the province of the same name. And if you don’t know your Chinese geography then it’s right here.

The individual wind farms that comprise it are all along here, on the edge of the Gobi desert.

If you remember our video on the Kubuqi Renewables Base, China’s other desert-based green energy mega-project, then you might be feeling a twinge of deja vu right now, and you’re not wrong. Both projects are in China’s far west and northwest because deserts like the Gobi are hot, sunny, and windy. That makes them great for generating a reliable amount of solar and wind energy.
Projects like this also require a lot of square footage. In Gansu’s case, we’re talking approximately 70,000 acres.³ Conveniently, the desert tends not to be the most in-demand real-estate, meaning you can acquire a lot of the needed space for a relatively cheap price. It’s a win-win.

Another commonality between Gansu and Kubuqi is their decentralized nature. In both cases, we’re not talking about a single green energy generation facility, but several large ones all connected into the same network. Though Kuqubi was a little more spread out, Gansu is mainly located outside of Yumen City and Jiuquan. This is why it’s sometimes called the Jiuquan wind power base.⁴

So, Gansu and Kubuqi have a lot in common, but Gansu has an additional challenge: its GDP is one of the lowest in China.⁵⁶ So how did one of the poorest provinces get the biggest wind farm?⁷ A lot of it has to do with that Gobi-adjacent location. China wants to be a renewable energy leader, and like we said a moment ago, Gansu is a great location to build a massive wind farm.

The project was commissioned in 2008 as part of an even earlier push by the Chinese government to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and increase its use of renewable energy.³⁴ China was, and still is, the number one emitter of CO2.⁸ To put things into perspective, the U.S. happens to be second in line in terms of pollution, but China’s estimated population as of 2024 is 280% higher than that of the States…⁹ So y’know, glass houses, stones. In any case, the sheer amount of air pollution China was contending with was causing significant health issues,¹⁰ so China was (and again, still is) eager to buff up their green energy portfolio.

This sort of thing takes a lot of capital, and funding for Gansu came from a variety of sources. Of course, the Chinese government provided significant financial support for the project, including subsidies and loans. Notably, an arm of the World Bank contributed $150 million to the project.¹¹ The European Investment Bank also provided a loan of €40 million (or about $43.6 million) for the construction of a transmission line to connect the wind farm to the Chinese electricity grid.³ Put a pin in that “transmission line” thing. Well, don’t put a pin in an electric cable. But that detail will be important later.

Anyway, construction on the farm proper didn’t actually begin until 2009,⁴ but it progressed relatively swiftly, with the project’s first phase being completed in November of 2010. At this stage, Gansu comprised over 3,500 wind turbines, whereas the average wind farm in the United States has about 50.¹²
By that point, it also had an installed capacity of approximately 5,160 MW. Just two years later, the total installed capacity rose to approximately 6,000 MW. That was roughly equivalent to the United Kingdom’s entire wind power capacity at that time.⁴

As of 2021, the farm has been fully realized. The Gansu wind farm now boasts over 7,000 wind turbines spread across various wind farms, covering approximately 39,000 square kilometers of land.¹³ That’s farther than Sun Wukong can travel in a single somersault.¹⁴ Anyone know how I unlock that ability in Black Myth…?

Anyway, for Americans, that’s roughly 426,500 football fields. And for Europeans, that’s bigger than one standard Belgium.¹⁵ And the turbines’ combined capacity now exceeds 20 gigawatts, enough to power your time traveling car 16 times over.

Basically, it’s a massive achievement, and a cornerstone of China’s renewable energy infrastructure.¹⁶ I’ll let this quote from Jiuquan’s Communist Party secretary Wu Yangdong speak for itself:

“We finally made it — we turned the lifeless Gobi into an unlimited chamber of treasure. We are building a Three Gorges dam on wasteland.”¹³

To help coordinate the many individual wind farms that make up the megaproject Gansu features an integrated wind power coordinated control system. This is a smart monitoring system,⁴ and it’s very cool, but not unique to Gansu. We’ve seen similar ideas implemented on smaller-scale projects like B2U’s energy storage facility in the States, and other companies like Siemens¹⁷ and Emerson¹⁸ offer similar systems. However, the stakes are a little higher here in Gansu. You see, for most of its life the wind farm was been producing too much energy for the local grid.¹⁹ In 2012, the smart management of the coordinated control center allowed the Gansu complex to generate and “ship off” an extra GW hour per day, and made the system more stable overall. Yet, as late as 2015 up to 39% of Gansu’s wind capacity was wasted.²⁰

Which begs the question: why was Gansu facing curtailment issues?

Challenges

The Gansu wind farm is an achievement — there’s no argument about that. However, it faced many challenges. Some of these problems are specific to Gansu, but others might sound familiar if you recall the Kubuqi video.

Power generated by Gansu in 2012 was being purchased for 0.54 yuan (or $0.075 in today’s money) per kWh. That doesn’t sound like an issue until you consider that the power from nearby coal-fired power plants clocked in at 0.3 yuan (just $0.042) per kWh.⁴ This means that the wind power just isn’t competitively viable compared to coal.

It also doesn’t help that northwestern China mines a lot of coal, and Gansu in particular is known for its rich coal reserves.²¹ Again, this is a poor province, so the local government and industries have a strong financial incentive to keep on keeping on with coal. Coal in general is a significant economic driver in China, and thus the coal industry has been able to throw around their political weight. Furthermore, the coal industry is also a major employer in the region, so pivoting to wind from coal means less coal mining jobs, which is understandably unpopular on a local level.¹⁹

To make matters more awkward, there’s just not a lot of tech, manufacturing, or other big, energy-hungry industries currently located in the Gansu province. So while the wind farm is very successful at generating electricity, it was a little too successful at first. Without enough local demand, that energy was going to waste, creating the previously mentioned curtailment issues and opening up the puzzle box of transmission issues.

According to the South China Morning Post:

“In 2016, nearly half of the electricity produced by the province’s 9 GW worth of wind turbines was discarded because there was no use for it. The same year, Beijing issued a strict ban on further investments for the Gansu wind farm, and many local businesses built on the wind industry went bankrupt or had to move elsewhere.”¹³

These issues with Gansu really serve to underscore why I get so excited about energy storage on this channel. With some energy storage, they might be able to efficiently soak up that energy for later, or maybe even store it and move it elsewhere. The Chinese government is of course aware of this, and China is the world leader in energy storage,²² so that and some transmission lines have really helped Gansu live up to its potential.

Speaking of, recall that Gansu is located in the deserts to the northwest of China. Unfortunately, most of China’s industry and population centers are located in the eastern parts of the country. For context, the total population of the Gansu province just barely surpasses the population of the city of Shanghai.²³²⁴ Of the major Chinese cities, Beijing is arguably the closest in distance, and that’s still about 950 miles (or 1,529 km) away as the Google maps flies.

The great distance isn’t the only challenge when it comes to moving that energy eastward, either. Western Gansu is a desert, and central China has a lot of mountain ranges like the Qilian Mountains,²⁵ which likely added additional difficulty to building and maintaining the transmission lines. Where’s the Monkey King when you need him?

Another problem with long power lines is that it’s hard to move the energy across long distances without losing too much during transit. So the province is in the process of building several high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines to send more than 30 percent of the wind energy to over 20 provinces.¹³

While this is a solution, it’s not necessarily an elegant one. These top-of-the-line transmission lines weren’t cheap to build nor are they cheap to maintain. Plus, some power is lost in transit, and over such a great distance this can really add up. All together, transmission is a major factor in the cost of delivering wind power.²⁶ Of course, transmitting some of that green energy to where it needs to go is still a much better solution than letting it go to waste or using energy from fossil fuels.

Because it’s so difficult to get the power to the companies, Gansu has also invited the companies to come to the power. Huawei in particular was name-dropped as a company that had been invited to build large data centers near the farm.¹³ And this makes sense at first blush. After all, desert real estate is cheap, and there’s plenty of room in Gansu for big tech. But the challenges of Gansu persist. The province is very remote. On top of this, the harshness of the desert environment makes developing projects difficult. So it’s just not very appealing for those big tech companies to set up shop there.

On the other hand, Gansu Governor Ren Zhenhe told the South China Morning Post that his region is being “overwhelmed” by the number of companies seeking wind power deals.¹³ I haven’t been able to corroborate any such deals, but it’s possible that they’re either just not public yet, or haven’t crossed over to the English-speaking side of the internet.

The biggest challenge for Gansu might be yet to come, though. Offshore wind farms closer to population centers in coastal China are continuing to grow, both in farm size and individual turbine size.¹³ We’ve even covered some of these giants on this channel. Will demand ever rise up to meet Gansu’s productivity with those closer, bigger wind farms popping up? That’s the big question.

Lessons

Despite these (sometimes literal) mountains of challenges, let me remind you that the Gansu wind farm is a success story. in 2020, the ban on wind energy investment in Gansu was lifted.¹³ And by 2021, despite Covid-related hiccups, the efficiency of the farm’s renewable energy rose to 95%.¹³

China hasn’t stopped constructing renewable energy sources and the power lines that get them to where they need to go.²⁷ Fossil fuels now make up less than half of China’s total installed generation capacity. That’s pretty stunning when you consider that just a decade ago, fossil fuels made up two-thirds of their capacity.²⁸ Heck, earlier this year they started construction on another transmission project linking Gansu to Zhejiang province on the east coast.²⁹

The Gansu wind farm (and its accompanying cutting edge power lines) are exactly the type of green energy megaproject I’d like to see replicated here in the United States and elsewhere around the world. The project has of course not been without its flaws, but I think we can learn from the triumphs and troubles of this megaproject.

The key takeaways are that project developers need to make sure that either the demand for so much energy is already there…easy… or that the infrastructure to get the power where it needs to go grows along with the power plant. Less easy. Untangling the wants, needs and hopes of local communities with greater goals is always going to be kind of tricky… but I’ll be posting an in-depth exploration of the topic myself in the near future, so stay tuned.

Ultimately, I hope China doesn’t let these speed-bumps hinder the very impressive green energy momentum they’re accruing. And I hope the rest of us can take the lessons learned from Gansu and apply them to our own wind energy projects. If we’re going to hit our 2030 or even 2060 climate goals, there’s not a lot of time to waste.