Wind power in China

Wind farm in Xinjiang, China

China is the world leader in wind power generation, with the largest installed capacity of any nation^[1] and continued rapid growth in new wind facilities.^[2] With its large land mass and long coastline, China has exceptional wind power resources:^[3] Wind power remained China's third-largest source of electricity at the end of 2021, accounting for 7.5% of total power generation.^[4]

In 2020, China added 71.6 GW of wind power generation capacity to reach a total capacity of 281GW.^[5] Both China's installed capacity and new capacity in 2020 are the largest in the world by a wide margin, with the next largest market, the United States, adding 14 GW in 2020 and having an installed capacity of 118 GW.^[6]

China is forecast to have 1200 GW of combined wind and solar capacity by 2030 as part of the government's pledge to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 25% by that year.^[7] In late 2020, the Chinese government set out a road map for total installed capacity of wind and solar to be 1,200 gigawatts by 2030.^[8] China has identified wind power as a key growth component of the country's economy.^[9] Experts say that China can achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 and peak emissions before 2030.^[10]

In 2021, China was responsible for almost 70% of new wind installed capacity while United States accounted at 14% and Brazil at 7%.^[11]

As of 2022, China is the world's largest wind power equipment manufacturing base.^[12] The largest domestic wind turbine manufacturer in China is Goldwind from Xinjiang province. Established in 1998, Goldwind aggressively developed new technology and expanded its market share, though this then decreased from 35% in 2006 to 19% in 2012.^[13] In 2019, Goldwind was one of the first partners to sign up for a wind-to-hydrogen project in northeast China, in the hopes of putting China's currently unused wind generation potential to good use and turn stranded wind power into a cheap energy source for hydrogen production.^[14] The China Longyuan Electric Power Group Corp., another subsidiary of China Guodian Corporation, was an early pioneer in wind farm operation; at one point it operated 40% of the wind farms in China.^[15]

According to a 2020 forecast by Fitch Solutions, wind generation is expected to reach approximately 1,000TWh in China by 2028 compared to previous forecasts of 870TWh, due to reduced project cost made feasible by upgrades in the efficiency of technology.^[16]