Analysis and Countermeasures of Wind Power Accommodation by Aluminum Electrolysis Pot-Lines in China
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INTRODUCTION
Wind power is a renewable and clean intermittent energy that has expanded rapidly in China, especially in North China, Northeast China, and Northwest China, as shown in Figure 1. The Chinese wind industry was amazing in 2015, installing no less than 30.8 GW of new capacity, more than the whole industry installed in 2008, and China surpassed the EU in total installations, ending the year with 145 GW in total.[1] However, there exists the very severe problem that the wind curtailment rate is very large, with a mean value of 15 pct and a maximum of 39 pct,[1] as shown in Figure 2. At the same time, the development of the aluminum electrolysis industry has also been very rapid. China’s primary aluminum production has ranked first in the world for many years. According to statistics from the
HONGLIANG ZHANG, LING RAN, and JIE LI are with the School of Metallurgy and Environment, Central South University, Changsha 410083, Hunan, China. Contact e-mail: [email protected] GUIXIONG HE is with the China Electric Power Research Institute, Beijing 100192, Haidian, China. ZHENYU WANG is with the NARI (Wuhan) Electrical Equipment and Engineering Efficiency Evaluation Center, Wuhan 430074, China. Manuscript submitted June 20, 2016.
METALLURGICAL AND MATERIALS TRANSACTIONS B
International Aluminum Institute, the total primary aluminum production of China in 2015 was 31672 thousand metric tons, approximately 58.59 pct of the total global output.[2] Due to the high electric energy consumption of the aluminum reduction process, the total consumed energy was 437.8 billion kWh in 2015, which occupied nearly 8.0 pct of the country’s total electric energy consumption.[3] The heavy dependence of the aluminum electrolysis industry on electricity resources in China is a serious situation, which means that the power price has become the key factor for determining the profit and loss of the plant. In addition, the power price in China is high (0.3 to 0.6 Yuan/kWh on average), and aluminum electrolysis consumes large amounts of electric power, which results in a considerable proportion (40 to 50 pct) of its production costs attributable to electric power. Driven by these factors, newly built aluminum electrolysis plants are moving to the north and west,[4] such as Gansu province, Qinghai province, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions, where coal resources are so abundant that they could build self-generated power plants to reduce electricity costs. Figure 3 presents the geographic distribution of the primary aluminum production of China in 2015. It is not difficult to see that the geographical distribution of the two industries basically coincide with each other. In other words, can they be bonded together by
Fig. 1—Geographic distribution of wind power generation of China in 2015.
the State Grid? This paper demonstrates that the answer is positive. This proposal involves the so-called accommodation of wind power by aluminum reduction pot-lines and could maximize the advantages of the two industries. Howeve
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