In the search for new energy, China rides the wind: "China has made big investments in petroleum production in countries as far-flung as Sudan and Venezuela. But at home, where petroleum is growing scarce and overdependence on coal chokes the air of major cities - and killed 6,009 miners last year - the Chinese government is moving just as aggressively to develop alternative energy supplies..
 
By 2020, starting from a minuscule base that it has established only recently, China expects to supply 10 percent of its needs from so-called renewable energy sources, including wind, solar energy and small hydroelectric dams. .. So far, wind power is making the most impressive strides ..

"We have huge goals for wind power development," said Wang Zhongying, director of China's Center for Renewable Energy Development. "By 2010, we plan to reach 4,000 megawatts, and by 2020 we expect to reach 20,000 megawatts, or 20 gigawatts." If anything, Wang said, these targets are too conservative, and may be easily surpassed.  The biggest limitations, he said, were not in China's wind-power potential, or in its generating technology, but rather in the country's antiquated power grid ..

The outcome has been a real boom among suppliers of wind power equipment. "We're expecting the sector to grow 50 to 75 percent a year between now and 2020," said Jens Olsen, the chief representative of Vestas, a Danish turbine manufacturer that is the leading equipment supplier in China."

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