China is the world leader in wind power generation, with the largest installed capacity of any nation and continued rapid growth in new wind facilities. With its large land mass and long coastline, China has exceptional wind power resources: it is estimated China has about 2,380 gigawatts (GW) of exploitable capacity on land and 200GW on the sea. Wind power remained China's third-largest source of electricity at the end of 2021, accounting for 7.5% of total power generation.
In 2020, China added 71.6 GW of wind power generation capacity to reach a total capacity of 281GW. 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.
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. 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. China has identified wind power as a key growth component of the country's economy. Experts say that China can achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 and peak emissions before 2030.
In 2021, China was responsible for almost 70% of new wind installed capacity while United States accounted at 14% and Brazil at 7%.
As of 2022, China is the world's largest wind power equipment manufacturing base. 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. 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. 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.
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.
Installed capacity
Between 2006 and 2009, China's wind power grew particularly quickly, with capacity doubling every year for four years in a row.
History
In 2005, the standing committee of the National People's Congress passed a law that requires Chinese power grid enterprises to purchase all the electricity produced by the renewable energy sector.
Chinese developers unveiled the world's first permanent Maglev wind turbine at the Wind Power Asia Exhibition 2006 held in Beijing. The Zhongke Hengyuan Energy Technology company invested CN¥400 million in building the base for the maglev wind turbine generators, in which construction began in November 2007. Zhongke Hengyuan expects a yearly revenue of CN¥1.6 billion from the generators.
In 2006 the Shanghai Power Company purchased 64.485 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of green energy (primarily from wind farms), yet the amount of renewable energy which was subscribed by customers from Shanghai Power Company was only 23% of that total. In 2006 there were just 6,482 households in Shanghai that subscribed to renewable energy in part because the cost of wind power is 0.53 Yuan/kWh higher than power produced from coal plants; in 2007 total output of wind farms in Shanghai will total 100 GWh, which is sufficient to power 120,000 households. Though there were 22 entities that purchased renewable energy in Shanghai, though with the exception of 1/3 of that total being state owned enterprises, the remainder was foreign invested enterprises. Shanghai's city government did not purchase any renewable energy. Of the top ten power customers in Shanghai, only Bao Steel purchased renewable energy; in 2006 Bao Steel entered into an agreement to purchase 1.2 GWh over three years.