[The paper highlighted today is a ‘preprint’ which means it’s still rough around the edges. Take a look here, Ultra-High-Voltage Lines and Grid Productivity if you wish but I think I’ve got the main points below.]
The researcher, Shoi Ming Shoi Ming from the Nanjing University believes this study may be a first in terms of trying to assess the impact of China’s build out since 2009 of an ‘Ultra-High-Voltage’ (UHV) grid system (UHV is defined as transmission of DC current at 800KV or AC at 1,000KV).
For a quick primer on the benefits of UHV systems you can detour here, Benefits of high voltage power transmission, but the main benefit is lighter wires and less power loss over long distance and thus greater efficiency.
There have been studies on other aspects of gains China has harvested from the likes of high speed rail, better ports, roads, airports and etcetera, but this is the first to try and fix a bead on the benefits of a better grid.
The main points are:
- Since 2009 China has built 15 UHV AC circuits and 19 UHV DC circuits. The plan is to have a network of 30k kilometers in time.
- The volume of power being sent through these new corridors has in many cases been disappointing.
- The benefits though have been manifest. Where grid enterprises are connected to UHV lines a 1.07% gain in total factor productivity is observed.
From a little rummaging around I discovered from work in the U.S. these circuits are expensive to build which is why the U.S. has many but they’re mostly short range and a very small portion of the overall system.
Reading between the lines this looks like classic China ‘build-it-and-they’ll-come’ infrastructure development; and the experience of China in the last 40+-years has been ‘they’ do seem eventually to always come.
Happy Sunday.