CRI听力: China Gears up Construction of Wind Power Plants

Anchor: China has decided to make wind a major power source in a bid to develop renewable clean energy. Officials say the country will see its wind power capacity in 2010 more than doubled from last year's levels.

Tu Yun reports.

Burqin is a county with a population of 70,000 in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It has a folk saying that goes "one wind for a year, blowing from spring to winter". (www.hXen.com)
An abundance of wind power is the reason why Zhou Laiguo's company built their power plant here.

"The first phase of the project we've built is a power generator set composed of 66 wind mills. These mills can generate a total of 49 and half thousand kilowatts of electricity every hour.
The power generation of the plant is equal to four percent of the county's total electricity demands."

Like Zhou Laiguo's company, seven other firms engaged in wind power generation have settled in Burqin over the past few years.

Xinjiang is not the only region actively promoting wind power in China.

According to the national energy bureau, there are more than 10 thousand wind power generator sets in over 20 provinces and autonomous regions in the country.

Shi Lishan is a senior official with the bureau.

"By the end of last year, China's total installed wind power capacity hit 12 million kilowatts, ranking it fourth in the world. The capacity has increased several folds over the past three years. If the momentum continues, the capacity may reach 30 million kilowatts by the end of next year."

It's estimated that China's potential installed capacity for wind power generation stands at 1 billion kilowatts.

The country would only need 60 percent of that figure to meet all its electricity needs.

The government has made plans to build over ten wind power generation bases in the northern provinces of Hebei, Liaoning and Jilin and in the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Each base is capable of generating over one million kilowatts of electricity per hour.

Tu Yun, CRI news.