China is a world leader in wind power generation, with the largest installed capacity of any nation and continued rapid growth in new wind facilities. With its large land mass and long coastline, China has exceptional wind power resources. It is estimated China has about 2,380 gigawatts (GW) of exploitable capacity on land and 200 GW on the sea. In 2015, China added 30.5 GW of wind power generation capacity to reach a total capacity of 145.1 GW and generated 186.3 TWh of electricity, representing 3.3% of total national electricity consumption. Both China’s installed capacity and new capacity in 2015 are the largest in the world by a wide margin, with the next largest market, the United States, adding 8.6 GW in 2015 and having an installed capacity of 74.4 GW.

Due to a substantially higher capacity factor, the United States remains, by a slight margin, the world leader when ranked by production, having generated 190.9 TWh of electricity in 2015. China is forecast to have 250 GW of wind capacity by 2020 as part of the government’s pledge to produce 15 percent of all electricity from renewable resource in this year.[8] As of end 2015 the countries when ranked by total installations were: 1.China, 2. USA. 3. Germany 4. India. 5. Spain and 6. United Kingdom. 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. However, in practice, the use of wind energy in China has not always kept up with the remarkable construction of wind power capacity in the country.