Theoretical Limitations
While China has set strong and ambitious goals for offshore wind generation, the lack of financial incentives has stalled the growth of the industry. The industry requires significant capital and technical resources, and in order to mobilize the factors, developers must have confidence in the long-term support from the government or offshore wind will remain unnecessarily expensive (Carbon Trust, 2014).Such can be seen from the study from World Resources Institute, where government commitment through support policies are in relation to a steady growth of the industries (2012). This correlates with China’s onshore wind development industry, where steady growth has been supported by feed-in-tariffs, low-interest rate project financing, research/industry clusters, and public awareness and support for wind power, though this has yet to be extended into the offshore industry (Carbon Trust, 2014).
Fig. 1 China’s Renewable Energy Law Influence on Offshore Wind Power
Therefore, in response to the lack of incentives, the government has established a basic offshore wind power policy system based on the Renewable Energy Law (Fig. 1) (Carbon Trust, 2014). However, the system is still expected to evolve over time to provide a comprehensive regulatory support for the industry (Carbon Trust).
Although China has significant potential for offshore wind resources, based on onshore wind experiences, transmitting the electricity to key-demand areas have extremely costly and inefficient due to major issues with grid connectivity (Carbon Trust, 2014). Therefore, another barrier will be the connection of offshore wind farms to the mainland grid. Given China’s lack of experience, particularly beyond near-shore farms, large improvements need to happen to cope with the expected growth of offshore wind farms (Carbon Trust, 2014; Hong & Moller, 2011). In addition to the barrier of grid connection, due to the intermittency and instability of wind power, grid-connected wind power can have certain impacts on the grid and reduce the quality of the electricity (Chen, 2011). Therefore, many have suggested the use of non-grid-connected wind power generation as an alternative. Based on Gu Weigong, the dean of Macro-Economy Research Institute in Jiangsu, this could be directly applied to industries such as seawater desalination, and could consequently support the government’s hopes of achieving seawater desalination based on the Seminar of Seawater Desalination and China’s Coastal Economic Development Strategy in the 12th Five-Year Plan and the Achievement Assessment Meeting of Seawater Desalination by Non-grid-connected Wind Power (Chen, 2011).
While the major barrier is connecting the offshore wind farms to the mainland grid, according to Carbon Trust, because the scale of offshore growth and level of grid connection required for the bases, there has been no precedent of this scenario in anywhere in the world. Therefore, it also presents an opportunity for China to take the lead in the industry (2011).
Technical Limitations
While China is still in the initial phase of building wind farms, there are currently two wind farms in China, the Longyuan Rudong Intertidal, and Donghai Bridge. However, our project does not take into account of the current planning or existing offshore wind farms.
We were initially planning to incorporate the optimal distance from shore for establishing potential wind farms as 10 to 20km based on the minimum visibility from shore (Carbon Trust, 2014) where distances diminishing from 10km would have gradually less potential for building the wind farms until the maximum distance of 40km. However, we were unable to implement this due to the limitations of the Fuzzy Linear Transformation Tools that only works within the minimum and maximum values, and not within any specific limit. Therefore, any location that is within 10km would be seen as the optimal location for wind turbines, while the distance between 10 to 40km will linearly decrease as potential areas for wind farms. This result is not what we intended since we did not want the distances within 10km to be in the optimal position, and given that we were unable to find any sources that China has placed on the importance of distance from shore for establishing wind farms, we decided to treat the distance of 10-40km from equally and set the distances to one group, therefore each location that meets this criterion of sea depth would become a potential area.
Another limit would be that the factors chosen for the Weighted Multi-Criteria Evaluation were subjective. Similar to the issue mentioned in the above paragraph, there was no official importance set on criteria evaluation from the Government of China, and given the differences found between our Sensitivity Analysis, we stress the importance of determining a more detailed set of factors that are less broad (based on the general requirements for wind turbines) and more geographic specific to increase the feasibility of our analysis.