By staff reporter Yu Dawei

Wind power is poised to play a larger role in China’s energy future.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planner, has scaled up the country’s wind energy goal to 10 million kilowatts in total capacity by 2010.

That’s twice the target for electricity generated by wind set by NDRC in a previous plan released just last August. The goal was revised upward in response to a surge in wind power installations.

The number of wind farms in China has jumped by one-third since last summer, rapidly achieving what NDRC initially expected to take another three years, according to Li Junfeng, deputy director of NDRC’s energy institute, who spoke with Caijing in February.

NDRC’s latest capacity goals for other forms of renewable energy remain unchanged. These targets for 2010 include 190 million kilowatts from hydroelectric facilities, 5.5 million kilowatts from biomass sources including 2 million tons of non-food ethanol, and 300,000 kilowatts from solar power derived from 150 square kilometers of solar panels.

The plan said the planned expansion of renewable energy would reduce the nation’s annual emissions of nitrous oxide by 1.5 million tons, dust by 2 million tons and carbon dioxide by 600 million tons. This shift to renewables also would save about 1.5 billion cubic meters of water and 150 million mu (10 million hectares) of forest every year, NDRC said.

If these goals are met, the increased combination of renewable energy sources would provide 10 percent of the nation’s entire energy needs within two years, replacing demand for about 300 million tons of standard coal.

Deutsche Bank research has predicted that China will increase the capacity of the wind power farms by 30 percent annually -- the fastest growth rate for wind energy in the world. NDRC’s 2007 Wind Power Development Report said China attracted 9 percent of global wind power investment in 2006.

Last year, more new facilities were added than in all previous years combined, helping China climb to sixth place from 10th in the world in terms of wind power capacity.

Despite the robust statistics, however, government planners are concerned about underlying challenges for wind power’s healthy development. Zhou Fengqi, a senior advisor at the NDRC energy institute, told Caijing that the industry has been hampered by unreasonably low prices for generated power, which he said is a result of a competitive bidding process.

In February, a Caijing report cited the dangers of irrational investments in wind power that ignore the need for profitability.

The latest NDRC plan, which was released March 18, calls for building five, major bases for wind power in the provinces of Hebei, Gansu and Jilin, as well as the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and the eastern province of Jiangsu. Each would have a capacity of more than 1 million kilowatts.