China now has a chance to alter its pollution situation by leading the usage of wind power globally, after long time critics over the environmental destruction, inside experts of energy and environment industry said earlier this week.
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"With greater policy support to wind energy, China could become one of the top three wind energy markets in the world by 2020," Li Junfeng, an alternative energy expert, told reporters in Shanghai.
Li's comments came with the Paris-based International energy Agency set to distribute Thursday a major review of China's voracious energy needs.
China is already the globe's second largest consumer of fossil fuels after the United States.
According to a Dutch environmental study released in June this year, it has also quickly caught up with the United States as the world's biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming.
But China is also quietly emerging as a global force in renewable energy technology, and nowhere is this more evident than in the nation's burgeoning wind market.
China, which ranked 10th two years ago in terms of annual installed wind mills, now is number five after the United States, Germany, India and Spain, with rapid industry growth expected to catapult it to second spot by 2008.
Although the Chinese regulatory environment has often not favoured the development of wind power, the Asian giant still managed to add this year 1,300 megawatts of wind power, an amount equal to that of two average size nuclear power stations.
"Two years ago people thought (wind power) was a joke," Li said.
