Clean energy giant Goldwind leads China’s global sector push

China has rushed forward lately because the world’s forerunner in wind power, propelled by explosive native demand as Beijing aggressively pursues strategic and environmental targets.

Goldwind—the nation’s sector champion—is ready to publish monetary outcomes for final yr on Friday, providing a window into how its home operations and abroad enlargement efforts are faring.

AFP appears to be like at how Goldwind and its Chinese language friends turned the nation into the indeniable world superpower in wind:

Current gusts

China has been a significant participant in world put in wind capability for the reason that late 2000s however it is just up to now few years that it has surged to the highest.

Corporations from mainland China accounted for six of the highest seven turbine producers worldwide final yr, in keeping with a report this month by BloombergNEF.

Goldwind held the highest spot, adopted by three extra Chinese language corporations—the primary time European and US corporations all ranked under third.

The nation’s world wind power format is lopsided, nevertheless, with the vast majority of its corporations’ progress pushed by home demand.

“The marketplace for wind turbines exterior of China remains to be fairly diversified,” Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst on the Heart for Analysis on Vitality and Clear Air (CREA), instructed AFP.

The scenario “can stay that way if countries concerned about excessive reliance on China create the conditions for the non-Chinese suppliers to expand capacity,” he added.

Overcapacity considerations

China’s wind power growth has fueled fears in Western nations {that a} flood of low cost imports will undercut native gamers, together with Denmark’s Vestas and GE Vernova of the USA.

A report in January by the Group for Financial Cooperation and Improvement (OECD) confirmed Chinese language wind turbine producers have for many years obtained considerably increased ranges of state subsidies than member nations.

Western critics argue that the in depth help from Beijing to spur on the home wind business have led to an unfair benefit.

The European Union final April stated it will examine subsidies obtained by Chinese language corporations that exported generators to the continent.

“We cannot allow China’s overcapacity issues to distort Europe’s established market for wind energy,” stated Phil Cole, Director of Industrial Affairs at WindEurope, a Brussels-based business group, in response to the current OECD report.

“Without European manufacturing and a strong European supply chain, we lose our ability to produce the equipment we need—and ultimately our energy and national security,” stated Cole.

Gold rush

Goldwind’s origin lies within the huge, arid stretches of western China, the place within the Eighties an organization named Xinjiang Wind Vitality constructed its first turbine farm.

Engineer-turned-entrepreneur Wu Gang quickly joined, serving to remodel the fledgling agency right into a pioneer in China’s wind power sector, establishing Goldwind in 1998.

“Goldwind was there from the beginning,” stated Andrew Garrad, co-founder of Garrad Hassan, a British engineering consultancy that had early engagement with China’s wind business.

“The West was looking at China as an impoverished place in need of help,” Garrad instructed AFP.

“It wasn’t, then, an industrial power to be reckoned with.”

Garrad, whose firm as soon as bought expertise to a number of Chinese language wind energy startups together with Goldwind, remembers Wu paying him a go to in Bristol in the course of the early Nineteen Nineties to speak enterprise.

The 2 spent three days negotiating a software program sale for round £10,000—a sum “which, for both of us at the time, was worth having,” recalled Garrad.

“He didn’t have any money at all, and so he was staying at the youth hostel, sharing a room with five other people,” he stated.

Wu’s agency would go on to strike gold, rising on this century as a world chief in wind turbine expertise and put in capability.

World future?

Lately, as China’s wind market matures, state subsidies are lower and the economic system faces downward stress, Goldwind has more and more been wanting abroad.

In 2023, the agency dropped “Xinjiang” from its official title.

The transfer was interpreted as an try and disassociate from the troubled area, the place Beijing is accused of large-scale human rights abuses.

It was additionally seen as adopting a extra outward-facing and worldwide id.

China’s wind energy producers are making some headway abroad, notably in rising and growing nations, stated Myllyvirta of the CREA.

That is notably true “after Western manufacturers were hit by supply chain disruptions and major input prices due to COVID and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” he added.

Rising markets affiliated with Beijing’s “Belt and Road” growth push appear to supply Chinese language gamers one of the best likelihood at abroad progress, Endri Lico, analyst at Wooden Mackenzie, instructed AFP.

“Chinese strength comes from scale… and strategic control over domestic supply chains and raw material resources,” stated Lico.

Western markets stay strongholds for native gamers, nevertheless, “due to entrenched positions, energy security concerns and protectionist policies,” he added.

© 2025 AFP