{"id":3356,"date":"2015-03-16T12:33:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T12:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=3356"},"modified":"2015-03-16T12:33:20","modified_gmt":"2015-03-16T12:33:20","slug":"chinas-wind-farms-produce-more-energy-than-americas-nuclear-plants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/chinas-wind-farms-produce-more-energy-than-americas-nuclear-plants\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s wind farms produce more energy than America\u2019s nuclear plants"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Here\u2019s how powerful – literally – wind can be<\/span>\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
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\"wind-china_1024\"<\/a>China loves nuclear power. It\u2019s currently building more nuclear reactors than any other country on Earth,\u00a0with plans to triple its nuclear power production<\/span><\/a>\u00a0by 2020. But at the same time, it\u2019s getting 100 percent behind the potential of wind power, expanding its capacity to harvest it at an even speedier rate than nuclear.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Just last year, the total amount of energy harvested from China\u2019s wind farms went up an impressive\u00a016 percent from the previous year,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and was enough to power 110 million homes. That\u2019s pretty incredible. Compared directly to their nuclear power output, the 115 gigawatts of wind power produced by China in 2014 dwarfed the 20,000 megawatts (a gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts) from its nuclear sector,\u00a0as Richard Macauley points out at Quartz<\/span><\/a>, and is more than the total output of power from all of the nuclear plants in the US.<\/span><\/p>\n

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And it’s not just about the environment,\u00a0says Macauley<\/span><\/a>. China\u2019s identified wind power as the most practical form of energy for them, as they struggle to produce enough water for their nuclear plants, and after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, they\u2019re not putting any of those plants on earthquake-prone land. It makes so much sense for China that the Earth Policy Institute reports that its wind power goal is to have 200 gigawatts connected to the grid by 2020.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

J. Matthew Roney at the Earth Policy Institute\u00a0describes the situation:<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

“China is building the world\u2019s largest ultra-high-voltage transmission system, which is connecting remote, wind-rich northern and western provinces to the more populous central and eastern ones. At the same time, the government is providing incentives for wind farm development in less-windy areas nearer to population centres. Advances in wind power technology can allow greater capture of energy in spots without the strongest wind resources.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Not to be outdone though, the US Department of Energy has announced,\u00a0via its newly published\u00a0Wind Vision<\/em>\u00a0report,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that it\u2019s economically viable for the the amount of energy produced by its wind farms to more than double over the next five years, increasing from providing 4.5 percent of the national energy requirements to 10 percent by 2020. They predict this will increase to 20 percent by 2030, and to 35 percent by 2050. This means,\u00a0says Brian Merchant at Motherboard<\/span><\/a>, the US could be running on over one-third wind power in less than 40 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Researchers have shown<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that there is enough wind to meet the entire world\u2019s energy needs seven times over with the next 20 years. It\u2019s pretty exciting that two of the world\u2019s most powerful nations are starting to pay attention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sources: ScienceAlert<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s how powerful – literally – wind can be\u00a0 China loves nuclear power. It\u2019s currently building more nuclear reactors than any other country on Earth,\u00a0with plans to triple its nuclear power production\u00a0by 2020. But at the same time, it\u2019s getting 100 percent behind the potential of wind power, expanding its capacity to harvest it at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-techbiz"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",1008,415,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024-300x123.jpg",300,123,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",750,309,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",750,309,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",1008,415,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",1008,415,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",1008,415,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",870,358,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",600,247,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",600,247,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",760,313,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",550,226,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",95,39,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",640,263,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",96,40,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/wind-china_1024.jpg",150,62,false]},"author_info":{"info":["RevoScience"]},"category_info":"Tech<\/a>","tag_info":"Tech","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}