China's wind power to see steady growth

BEIJING -- China's newly-installed wind power capacity will see growth of 15 to 18 gigawatts this year, after the country became the world's leading wind power producer in 2011, a report said Tuesday.

A report on China's wind power outlook, jointly released by the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association, the Global Wind Energy Council and Greenpeace, forecast that China's wind power sector will maintain the steady growth momentum seen last year.

China installed 17.63 GW of new wind power capacity in 2011, accounting for 43 percent of the world's total, according to the report.

The nation remained the world's largest wind power producer with an accumulated capacity of 62.36 GW by 2011, representing 26.2 percent of the world's total wind power capacity, the report said.

By the end of 2011, 47.84 GW of wind power capacity, or 76.71 percent of China's total capacity, was connected to its power grid, an improvement from 69.9 percent in 2010, the report shows.

China plans to realize an accumulated on-grid wind power capacity of more than 100 GW by 2015 and 200 GW by 2020, according to a national plan on renewable energy development released by the National Energy Administration.