State-owned enterprises dominate China’s wind energy projects

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) controlled a sweeping majority of investment and construction in wind power projects last year, accounting for about 81 percent of the sector’s installed capacity, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Wednesday.

As of the end of 2012, some 1,300 companies had invested in or built wind power development projects, of which 1,000 were controlled by SOEs, according to NEA data.

The China Guodian Corp. was the most aggressive in developing wind power, with an aggregate of 13 million kilowatts of on-grid installed generative capacity, followed by the China Huaneng Group and China Datang Corp., which had 8.34 million kilowatts and 7.71 million kilowatts of capacity, respectively.

Other major state-owned players included the China Huadian Corp., Shenhua Group, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding and China Power Investment Corp.

A total of 1,445 wind power farms were built by the end of last year, while 62.66 million kilowatts of installed capacity was connected to the state grid by the end of 2012, according to NEA.

China’s wind power generation jumped 41 percent from a year earlier to reach 100.8 billion kilowatt-hours in 2012, accounting for about 2 percent of the total amount of electricity sent through the national power grid, according to NEA data.