Shanghai has great potential for the development of wind power-generated electricity, scientists who took part in the Shanghai 2003 international forum on environmental protection and new energy sources said.  

According to monitoring in the last five years, the annual wind velocity 50 meters above the ground in the city’s eastern seaboard reaches 6.7 meters per second. The effective wind power density per square meters comes to 329 watts and the accumulated time of the annual effective wind power amounts to over 7300 hours that may be calculated into a full load operation of 2000 hours.

The exploitable wind power is mainly concentrated in the city’s Nanwei, Chongming, Changxing and Hengsha islands and the northern shore of the Hangzhou Bay. The potential designed capacity of generators may be over 480,000 kw. By 2015, the wind power in the current tidal flats may all be tapped with a potential reserve of 3 million kw if calculated with a generator of 6000 kw per square kilometers. If half of it is tapped, it will amount to 1.5 million kw, equivalent to the amount of wind-power generated electricity by Germany in 1996, and will generate electricity 3 billion kw/hour a year. It will become a world-class wind power utility site.

Scientists said that it will produce tremendous environmental effects. If Shanghai installs such sets of generators with a designed capacity of 100,000 kw, it will save 66,000 tons coal and 21.12 million yuan a year and cut emission of carbon dioxide by 14,000 tons, sulfur dioxide by 1300 tons and ashes by 1,750 tons a year, if calculated with an annual electricity output of 200 million kw/hour and each kw/hour consumes 330 g of coal.

(www.cenews.com.cn October 20, 2003)