A battery of ideas to tackle China's grid-curtailment issue

Inspecting a new power line in Zhejiang province

In a Beijing industrial park, Chinese manufacturer Goldwind is testing four kinds of batteries that can store the power produced by the 2.5MW turbine and 500kW of solar panels installed on its campus.

The micro-grid project is in its early days, but the young engineers in charge say they are already making savings by switching to stored energy during the daytime, when electricity sold by the municipal grid hits peak prices.

The results are promising for all of China’s wind companies.

Energy storage could be one of the solutions to the biggest obstacle facing expansion of the country’s wind industry — grid curtailment.

Curtailment — when a grid operator orders a wind farm to shut down turbines — has hit extreme levels in recent years,…

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