With a steady wind blowing from the north, Yang Xuhua (
"The blades on the windmill over there will be 77m long, the biggest in China," said Yang, deputy general manager of the Zhangbei Guotou Wind Power Plant in Hebei Province.
"We have abundant wind energy potential, if we can tap this in a big way it will reduce a lot of the bad pollution that comes from coal burning," he said.
PHOTO AFP
After repeated trips to Europe and the US to inspect the latest wind technology, Yang speaks with the enthusiasm of an environmentalist who is riding the wave of the next big thing.
"More and more people in China are becoming convinced that we must make use of our wind resources because it is cheap to exploit, clean, renewable, abundant and does not cause global warming," Yang said.
"The problem for China right now is that we don't have the equipment to realize our goals," he said.
According to Chinese studies, the nation has the potential to tap over 1 million megawatts of wind power resources, of which 250,000 megawatts are land based and the rest could be tapped in offshore wind farms.
Yet China only had 760 megawatts of installed wind power from 43 wind farms at the end of 2004, a fraction of 1 percent of total national electricity production.
Heavily polluting coal continues to account for over 70 percent of the nation's energy, a figure largely seen as simply unsustainable for a nation that is already one of the world's most environmentally degraded.
Amid such environmental woes, plants such as Yang's are being seen as vital green energy pioneers.
Zhangbei Guotou Wind Power Plant began installing its first batch of 30 General Electric wind turbines last year and will install another 60 built by the Spanish company Energia Hidroelectrica de Navarra, SA (ENH) next year.
By then the wind farm, which sits about 200km northwest of Beijing, will have 144 megawatts of installed capacity.
The power will be pumped into the northern China grid, some of which will be used to help realize Beijing's pledge to use 20 percent renewable energy at the 2008 Olympic Games, Yang said.
Zhangjiakou prefecture, in which Yang's plant is located, is planning to have up to 1,000 wind turbines installed by 2010 on a series of new wind farms.
The prefecture has already invested 1.5 billion yuan (US$187 million) in wind farms, with another 2.2 billion yuan's worth of construction under way, according to local officials.
The National Development and Reform Commission last year unveiled a plan to install 30,000 megawatts of wind power in China by 2020, a 33 percent increase over previously stated goals. China's first target is 5,000 megawatts of wind power by 2010, with plans for a series of off-shore 1,000 megawatt plants that will each require up to 500 state-of-the-art, two megawatt wind turbines.
One of the main hurdles in developing the resource is Chinese regulations requiring a 70 percent local content in imported wind generators, although foreign investors are increasingly coming into the market.
General Electric last week signed an agreement to invest US$50 million in renewable energy research in China to supplement existing production facilities already making wind turbine components here.
Last Juner, Spain's ENH agreed to a US$31 million joint venture plant to build wind turbines in Nantong. A month later the Vestas Group of Denmark set up a US$30 million plant in Tianjin to manufacture wind turbine blades for its newest two megawatt turbines while a plan for a turbine factory is in the works.
Yet China's wind power pioneers say this is not nearly enough.
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