page_title: Electricity sector in China
section_title: Wind power
hierarchical_section_title: Electricity sector in China / Sources / Wind power
caption_attribution_description: Wind farm in Xinjiang viewed from the Lanxin railway.
context_page_description: China's electric power industry is the world's largest electricity producer, passing the United States in 2011 after rapid growth since the early 1990s.
  Most of the electricity in China comes from coal, which accounted for 66% of the electricity generation mix in 2016. Coal-fired electricity production declined from 2013 to 2016 coinciding with a major boom in renewable energy, and a decline in GDP growth. China's coal powered generating capacity is expected to increase to 1300 gigawatt by 2020, from 960 GW in 2016, despite official plans to limit that growth to 1100 GW.
  China has two wide area synchronous grids, the State Grid and the China Southern Power Grid.
  The northern power grids were synchronized in 2005.
  Since 2011 all Chinese provinces are interconnected.
  The two grids are joined by HVDC back-to-back connections.
  China has abundant energy with the world's third-largest coal reserves and massive hydroelectric resources.
  There is however a geographical mismatch between the location of the coal fields in the north-east and north, hydropower in the south-west, and the fast-growing industrial load centers of the east and south.
context_section_description: With its large land mass and long coastline, China has exceptional wind resources: it is estimated China has about 2,380 GW of exploitable capacity on land and 200 GW on the sea. At the end of 2014, there was 114 GW of electricity generating capacity installed in China, more than the total nameplate capacity of China's nuclear power stations, (although capacity of wind power is not on par with capacity of nuclear power) and over the year 115,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of wind electricity had been provided to the grid. In 2011, China's plan was to have 100 GW of wind power capacity by the end of 2015, with an annual wind generation of 190 terawatt-hours (TWh).
  China has identified wind power as a key growth component of the country's economy; researchers from Harvard and Tsinghua University have found that China could meet all of their electricity demands from wind power through 2030.
caption: Wind farm in Xinjiang, China
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