Significance Of Constructing Comprehensive Energy Bases In Northwest China And Its Potential Environmental Impacts

The development of energy utilization technology and the progress of social civilization significantly improve human’s life. However, overdevelopment and excessive use of global resources has led to its depletion and environmental pollution during the process of industrialization. The substitution of clean energy for fossil fuels to move toward a low carbon development path characterized by a gradual transition is a world development orientation. With the continuous development of wind power, solar power, ultra-high voltage transmission, energy storage technologies, President Xi Jinping proposed to build global energy Interconnection. The substitution of clean energy for fossil fuels based on a global energy interconnection in energy development and the substitution of electricity for coal and oil are in full swing. Construction and interconnection of large-scale clean energy bases carried out gradually.Global energy interconnection is the grandest engineering projection of human so far. The construction not only needs plenty of manpower material and financial resources, but also has important impacts on the ecological environment. Analysis and evaluation of potential impacts for global interconnection is urgent needed.This paper mainly discusses the strategic significance of building large renewable energy bases in northwest China over the background of global energy interconnection, studies large PV station’s impacts on local environment. The main research work and results are as follows.Firstly, this paper puts forward the idea of building northwest large-scale clean energy bases as one of the global energy interconnection core bases on the basis of summarizing wind energy, solar energy resources distribution in northwest China and wind power, solar power generation technology, current situation of the development of grid technology and energy storage technology. This paper then discusses influences of the bases constructing for the world’s energy center changing and for supporting the Asian Super Grid construction process.Secondly, soil water balance is the key factor affecting the ecological status in northwest China, large-scale deployment of photovoltaic will influence soil moisture evaporation. This paper takes the ground temperature as critical variable, building thermodynamic model and developing procedures then systematically analyzing the impact on soil evaporation after laying PV panels in desert. Results show that large-scale lay of PV panels will decrease local surface temperature, weak evaporation and help soil retain water.Finally, this paper uses CFD software Airpak to establish model of PV plant influencing surface wind speed and makes computational analysis. The results show that the laying of PV panels will significantly lower the surface wind speed. Large-scale solar power plants will help reduce surface wind speed, thereby reducing the extent of soil erosion which is conducive to plant growth, alleviating desertification trend ultimately improving the environment.This work is preliminary results while time is limiting, more detailed study is follow up.