The distribution and development of wind resources in China

Since 21st Century, wind energy has become the world's fastest growing energy due to its characteristics of safety, cleanness and abundance as the demand for energy has doubled. This paper firstly explicitly introduces the distribution of China's wind energy resources and the features of wind resources in major provinces and cities of China. Then, the development current status of China's wind power is analyzed. The results indicate that China's wind energy resources have large reserves with wide distribution and huge development potential and in a rapid development. Since 2009, the yearly newly installed capacity and the cumulative installed capacity of China's wind power have been taking the first place in the world ranking for consecutively 5 years. Although wind power industry maintains high growth, the growth of cumulative wind power capacity is at a slow pace in China. Meanwhile, annual installed wind power capacity is in a negative annual growth due to the impact of the economic crisis. The proportion of different models of annual wind turbines in China shows that the trend of future development is towards large capacity wind turbines.