Overall review of China's wind power industry: Status quo, existing problems and perspective for future development

Abstract

With policy encouragement and capital investments, China's wind power has been enjoying a tremendous development for years. China has now become a global leader in terms of wind power capacity, with a total of 52.58 gigawatts of wind power connected to power grid. However, the overwhelming majority of accumulated and added installment is now embarrassing China's wind power by grid connectivity and power curtailment problems. In this paper, we provide a systematical review of China's wind power industry in the past six years, analyze the existing problems behind the remarkable statistics, examine the underlying causes for the problems, propose method for China's future wind power development. In order to have a profound understanding for the problems of China's wind power, we give a deeper look into three typical overcapacity regions. On that basis, we suggest that government should develop distributed wind power in the east, rather than continue constructing wind farms in the “three-N region”.