The Huaneng Group in China is planning to build the biggest wind farm that the country has seen, with a total of 200 turbines over 100 square-kilometres in Fuxin city. Although the report claims that this will help reduce carbon dioxide emission by 750,000 tonnes and sulphur dioxide by 4,000 tonnes a year, China is still the world’s second largest energy user with 80% of that being created by coal. Although it’s a step in the right direction, China still has a lot of catching up to do.
The farm is set to produce 600 million kilowatt hours of electricity and around $57 million of revenue each year, but given that last year China’s wind power amounted for less than 0.6 percent of the country’s energy production, this wind farm is unlikely to make a significant dent in their overall coal usage.
But looking to the future, China recently doubled its target for wind energy consumption by 2010 from 5 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity to 10 gigawatts. So don’t be surprised if China’s wind farms start popping up all over the place in the next few years.
Photo credit to: fieldsbh at Flickr.
