alt Hacker NewsDenmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
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Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.