China Breaks Record for New Wind Power Capacity, Just Before Subsidies Expire
China installed a record 71.67 million kilowatts of new wind power capacity in 2020, according to official figures, more than half of it in December, as developers rushed to get projects up and running before a subsidy program expired.
Some 47.05 million kilowatts of new wind power capacity went online in December, nearly double the 24.62 million kilowatts installed in the first 11 months of the year, according to data released by the National Energy Administration (NEA) on Wednesday.
For the entire year, wind farm developers installed three times as much capacity as they did in 2019. “That is a shocking number,” a manager at a state-owned power group told Caixin, referring to the annual figure, which some in the industry had expected to be around 40 million kilowatts.