Dec 19 - Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.V.

China, already a world leader in the widespread use of solar water heaters, is starting to push hard into harnessing wind energy.

As air pollution chokes much of the country and soaring crude oil prices bite into state finances, authorities are sharply raising their targets for the use of renewable energy, particularly from wind farms.

Last month, authorities gave a massive kick-start to wind energy by raising the target for the overall share of renewable energy in the nation's power mix to 15 percent by 2020, up from 10 percent.

A significant chunk of that will come from wind farms. And as Chinese firms move in a big way to produce cheap wind turbines to satisfy domestic demand, they're forcing turbine prices down in other countries.

"With the development of wind turbine technology in China, the price is already falling worldwide. The price has come down about 20 percent," said Deng Yuanchang, deputy director of the Wind Resource Research Center at Sun Yat-sen University in this southern Guangdong Province city along the Pearl River Delta.

About 43 wind farms now dot the Chinese countryside, producing less than 1 gigawatt of power and providing only 0.17 percent of China's energy needs. But new targets call for obtaining 6 gigawatts of power from wind energy by 2010, and 30 gigawatts by 2020, a boost that would leapfrog China to nearly twice the level of the installed capacity of the current world leader, Germany.

Experts see Guangdong province, which surrounds the southern city of Guangzhou (formerly Canton) as a good proving ground. Guangdong has high energy prices, frequent blackouts and 83 million people.

"The wind conditions are very similar to those of Germany, and you know that Germany is the biggest wind market in the world," said Yang Ailun, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace, the worldwide environmental advocacy group.

While some energy analysts dismiss China's renewable energy goals as wishful thinking, others don't discount China's ambitions.

"There are big companies that want to invest in wind farms," said Arthouros Zervos, the president of the European Renewable Energy Council, a trade group.

Once the government establishes nationwide rates at which wind energy can be sold, within the next few months, investment could pour in and progress could be made quickly.

"It's not like nuclear power, where from the time you make a decision to the point you have a plant, it can take five years. A wind farm takes one year," Zervos said.

"Wind energy is very capital intensive at the beginning," added Yang. "About 70 percent of the cost of the wind farm is purchase of the turbines."

As soon as rates are set for wind-generated energy, investors will move in to build wind farms and even possibly set some up offshore, she said.