China to lead world wind power generation

Beijing—China is expected to become one of the leaders in the wind energy market and play an increasing role in altering its polluting ways and combating climate change, industry experts said.
The strong winds that blow through China’s northern plains could be harnessed to help reduce the nation’s carbon-dioxide emissions and help lead the fight against pollution, they said. “With greater policy support to wind energy, China could become one of the top three wind energy markets in the world by 2020,” Li Junfeng, an alternative energy expert, told reporters in Shanghai.
Li’s comments came with the Paris-based International Energy Agency set to distribute Thursday a major review of China’s energy needs. China is the globe’s second largest consumer of fossil fuels after the United States. According to a Dutch environmental study released in June this year, it has also quickly caught up with the United States as the world’s biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.
But China is also quietly emerging as a global force in renewable energy technology, and nowhere is this more evident than in the nation’s burgeoning wind market. China, which ranked 10th two years ago in terms of annual installed wind mills, now is number five after the United States, Germany, India and Spain, with rapid industry growth expected to catapult it to second spot by 2008.
Although the Chinese regulatory environment has often not favoured the development of wind power, the Asian giant still managed to add this year 1,300 megawatts of wind power, an amount equal to that of two average size nuclear power stations. “Two years ago people thought (wind power) was a joke,” Li said.
“Nobody thought it possible to reach a target of 30 million kilowatts of wind power by 2020,” he added, noting that if the government had lent greater support 20 years ago, wind power could already be a major component of its energy mix.—Xinhua