China will be the world leader in power plant purchases during the 2010-20 period. It will spend more than $1 trillion to expand its generating capacity. This is the latest McIlvaine forecast based on data appearing in four McIlvaine online reports. The largest expenditure will be for new coal-fired power plants.
Chinese New Power Plant Construction 2010-2020
Over 300 coal projects are in the planning stage. It is estimated that 75 percent of them will be constructed prior to 2020. This results in 300,000 MW of new capacity. A large number of nuclear plants are in the planning stages but only 43 percent are likely to be operating by 2020. This will create an additional 60,000 MW of base load capacity.
Any nuclear project not already in the planning stage will not be operating in 2020. However, there will be a number of new coal plants which are not yet planned but can be built prior to 2020. There will be many wind and solar projects which are not yet planned which will be operating before the end of the decade.
Oil and gas will represent a small portion of new generating capacity. There is a very ambitious wind program with estimates of new capacity as high as 190,000 MW. If 53 percent of this ambitious goal is reached by 2020, it will add 100,000 MW. However, the utilization rate is less than half that of a coal plant. So the contribution to total electricity generation in kWh is going to be only one-sixth of that supplied by the new coal plants.
There are some very large solar projects in the planning stage. However, the total amount of projected new capacity is small compared to the total new demand.
China's ability to manufacture power plant equipment has expanded significantly. China is becoming a technical leader in wind power. It is building ultra-super critical coal-fired boilers with mostly Chinese built components. Many Chinese component suppliers are now meeting the requirements of the nuclear industry. Much of the cost of new capacity is the construction which is all local. The end result is that revenues for offshore suppliers will be about 15 percent of the total expenditures.
