Renewable energy curtailment is a critical issue in China, impeding the country’s transition to clean energy and its ability to meet its climate goals. This paper analyzes the impacts of more flexible coal-fired power generation and improved power dispatch towards reducing wind power curtailment. A unit commitment model for power dispatch is used to conduct the analysis, with different scenarios demonstrating the relative impacts of more flexible coal-fired generation and improved power dispatch. Overall, while we find both options are effective in reducing wind power curtailment, we find that improved power dispatch is more effective: (1) the effect of ramping down coal-fired generators to reduce wind power curtailment lessens as the minimum output of coal-fired generation is decreased; and (2) as a result, at higher wind capacity levels, wind curtailment is much more significantly reduced with improved power dispatch than with decreased minimum output of coal-fired generation.
Key policy insights
China should emphasize both coal power flexibility and dispatch in its policies to minimize renewable power curtailment and promote clean energy transition.
China should accelerate the process of implementing spot market and marginal cost-based economic dispatch, while making incremental improvements to the existing equal share dispatch in places not ready for spot market.
A key step in improving of dispatch is incorporating renewable power forecasts into the unit commitment process and updating the daily unit commitment based on the latest forecast result.
China should expand the coal power flexibility retrofit programme and promote the further development of the ancillary service market to encourage more flexibility from coal-fired generation.
The change in the zonal sea surface temperature gradient (ZSSTG) across the equatorial Pacific plays an important role in the global climate system. However, there has not yet been a consensual conclusion about the changing ZSSTG at either a short-term (from 20 to 90 years) or a long-term time scale (longer than 90 years) in the literature. In this study, the uncertainty of the trend in ZSSTG for different sub-periods since 1881 was examined using four interpolated datasets and four un-interpolated datasets. It was found that the trend in ZSSTG on the short-term time scale could be significantly influenced by internal variability such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. On the long-term time scale, the sign of the ZSSTG trend depends on the dataset used. In particular, it was not possible to draw a uniform conclusion about the secular trends in ZSSTG in recent history, given the high sensitivity of the ZSSTG trends to the period, dataset, and regions used to calculate the trends. Our results imply that it may not be possible to detect the response of ZSSTG to global warming until a longer data record becomes available in the future. 相似文献