China’s wind power market has the strongest growth potential of all countries globally, driven by aggressive government policies, according to Datamonitor.
In a new report* the independent business analyst states that China is the driving force behind global wind power and has the potential to become much more reliant on the renewable energy.
Alex Desbarres, Datamonitor analyst and author of the report, said: “Over the past five years China has continually outperformed expectations in the global wind power market. Its increasing power requirements, growing dependency on energy imports and elevated green house gas emission levels makes wind power a viable and sustainable complement to China’s existing energy mix.
“The Chinese government is committing the equivalent of three per cent of its GDP to stimulus spending, while introducing a wide range of policies to technically and financially support wind power generation.
“As a result we expect the country to continue to grow its wind capacity aggressively and to hold its position as the world’s largest market in terms of new capacity additions.”
Wind power generation in China has increased 20 fold from 2005 to 2009 and is expected to reach 20GW annually by 2014. In 2009 the country added more capacity than any other country in the world, more than doubling its capabilities from 12.0GW in 2008 to 25.8GW, moving ahead of Germany to become the world’s second largest wind market behind the US.
China’s cumulative installed wind power capacity is expected to grow by a factor of 10 from 2009 to 2010, according to the Chinese Wind Energy Association, reaching a total capacity of 248GW, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23 per cent. This makes for an aggressive forecast scenario in which China will add on average more than 20GW of new wind capacity every year.
Mr Desbarres added: “China’s wind resources are vast but the potential to exploit them is undoubtedly being driven by aggressive government policies which aim to diversify China’s electricity supply, support the growth of the domestic renewable energy industry and boost levels of investment in infrastructures.”