Monday 20 April 2009


CHINA'S WIND-POWER BOOM TO OUTPACE NUCLEAR BY 2020

Rujun Shen and Tom Miles

Reuters UK, April 20, 2009

BEIJING, April 20 (Reuters) - China will have 100 gigawatts of wind-power capacity by 2020, a senior energy official said on Monday, more than three times the 30 GW target the government laid down in an energy strategy drawn up just 18 months ago.

"Installed wind-power capacity is expected to reach 100 million kilowatts in 2020. That will be eight times more than in 2008," Fang Junshi, head of the coal department of the National Energy Administration, told a Coaltrans conference in Beijing. "The annual growth rate will be about 20 percent."

Fang's remarks confirm what industry experts have long maintained -- wind power has the potential to take a much bigger share of China's power mix than the government had planned.

China, the world's second-largest energy user, has around 12 GW of wind-power capacity and has already said it wants to raise that to around 20 GW by next year, suggesting it was on course to smash the 2020 target, which was set in 2007.

That means wind is set to be a bigger source of power than nuclear, despite a construction boom in nuclear power plants, and far bigger than solar, which is expected to hit 1.8 GW by 2020, according to the 2007 plan.

(...) [artículo aquí]

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