Increasing China’s Wind Power Production

Dabancheng wind farm in China’s Xinjiang province (Source: Bob Sacha/Corbis, via Dailytech.com)

Wind power, as we’ve written before, has great potential as an alternative energy source, although there are certain issues to take into account. China is installing the most new wind turbines per year, but has yet to produce the most wind-generated electricity given barriers by the coal industry. Prachi Patel reports for Conservation Magazine:

China is the world’s top wind energy installer. The country’s wind installations have a capacity of generating 145 Gigawatts, twice that of the United States and about a third of the world’s total wind power. Yet the country produces less wind electricity than the US. Last month, researchers from Harvard University and Tsinghua University argued in the journal Nature Energy that this underperformance is due to deliberate favoring of coal over wind by grid operators, delays in connecting new wind farms to the…