National Grid Research Lab and train
Today in the morning we visited the Research Institute of the National Grid of China. It’s the largest electricity company in the world providing all the transmission and scheduling for China’s electricity consumers and producers.
These days much of China’s power generation is located in the North East and North West of China whereas most of the current load is located in the East eg the Beijing Shanghai corridor.
So enormous amounts of transmission are required to move the power East to west. To give an idea in the current 5 year plan China will build over 100 GW of UHVDC cable in the next 5 years, It’s total spending in that time will be $US574 bn a 40% increase on the previous 5 years.
Like everywhere else in the world there is no electrification without more transmission.
Again like other countries though more and more people are thinking about bringing the load to the generation. It’s impossible to shift existing load but for data centres devoted to AI there is no real reason why they shouldn’t be built near the wind and solar farms that will power them.
In Australia places like New England dont want new investment of any kind or so it seems to me. But that’s another story.
We also saw an excellent demonstration of the dedicated weather service that National Grid uses to forecast wind,solar and weather events. This includes direct satellite downloads and AI. At lunch in the canteen I talked with Wang Shu the person in charge of the system and who demonstrated it and mentioned that I’d interviewed Roberta Boscaola from the World Meterological Association for the podcast and Wang said Roberta was a friend of hers. Nowhere does it seem more like a small world than when you talk about weather and climate.
In the afternoon we caught a train to a city complex of about 10 million people half way between Beijing and Shanghai. It’s the first time I’ve been business class on a train. Very comfortable then a lovely dinner at a restaurant on the lake. The Marriott we are staying at is very modern.
Not many useful photos
