Analysis & Opinion
China overtakes USA in wind
China overtook the USA for volumes of new installations and manufacturing of wind turbines for the first time in 2009, according to a report by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).
The world’s wind power capacity grew by 37.5GW to 157.9GW during the year, with a third (13GW) of these additions made in China, which doubled its capacity in the period.
"China is putting strong efforts into developing the country’s tremendous wind resource. Given the current growth rates, it can be expected that the even the unofficial target of 150GW will be met well ahead of 2020," said Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.
The global wind market for turbine installations in 2009 was worth about €45bn, and the Council estimates that around half a million people are now employed by the wind industry around the world.
"The continued rapid growth of wind power, despite the financial crisis and economic downturn, is testament to the inherent attractiveness of the technology, which is clean, reliable and quick to install,” said Steve Sawyer, GWEC’s secretary general.
The main markets driving this growth continue to be Asia, Europe and North America, each of which installed more than 10GW of new wind capacity in 2009.
Newly added capacity of 1,270MW in India and some smaller additions in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan make Asia the biggest regional market for wind energy in 2009, with a total of more than 14GW of new capacity.
Europe, which has traditionally been the world’s largest market for wind energy development, continued to see strong growth, with 10.5GW of installations, led by Spain (2.5GW) and Germany (1.9GW). Italy, France and the UK all added more than 1GW of new wind capacity each.
“It is a remarkable result in a difficult year,” said Christian Kjaer, chief executive of the European Wind Energy Association.
The US continues to have a comfortable lead in terms of total installed capacity. The US wind energy market installed nearly 10GW in 2009, increasing the country’s installed capacity by 39 per cent and bringing the total capacity to 35GW, still ahead of China's 25GW.
In early 2009, some US analysts had foreseen a drop in wind power development of as much as 50 per cent, but the implementation of the US Recovery Act with its strong focus on wind energy development in the summer reversed this trend.
But analysts expect China to overtake the US in terms of total installed capacity in the next few years.
"If this isn’t the ‘case-closed’ evidence that America must have a stable renewable energy policy and hard targets in order to create jobs and revitalise our economy, I don’t know what is," said American Wind Energy Association chief executive Denise Bode.
By Tom Young
Source: BusinessGreen.com
