When glimpsed from afar, the huge wind turbines look impossibly silent. Eleven machines, with 34-meter-long rotor blades, have been erected on the fringe of a large recreational park in Shanghai’s Nanhui district, about 34 kilometers from the international airport in Pudong.
Each of the Wind Vision-made units can generate 1.5 megawatts (MW) of power an hour. It was built to commemorate the facility that surrounds it, one of the city’s first wind farms.
Wind power, naturally, is presented as an ideal choice. The World Bank was suitably convinced by such arguments, investing US$13 million in the Nanhui project, which was set up in 2006.
Wind energy is China’s renewable-energy poster-child. The country has wind to spare along its coast and arid western and northeastern regions. It also has the world’s fifth-largest amount of installed wind power capacity.
“China is working very hard to reduce its dependence on coal,” said James Banks of the renewable energy research analyst, who worked on the Nanhui project. “And it looks to nuclear, hydro and wind, particularly, to replace coal. Wind is very important.”
