A city in China is planning an offshore wind farm so big that it could power all of Norway

The city of Chaozhou, in China’s Guangdong province, is going to build an offshore wind farm so large that it is expected to provide more power than all of Norway’s power plants combined.

The city intends to start work on the 43.3-gigawatt (GW) offshore wind farm before 2025, according to the city’s five-year plan, which is published online. The plan does not disclose how much the offshore wind farm is expected to cost.

The city of Chaozhou will build the wind farm between 47 and 115 miles (75 and 185 km) off the city’s coast, on the Taiwan Strait.

“The area has unique topographical features that mean wind will be strong enough to run the turbines 3,800 to 4,300 hours a year, or 43% to 49% of the time, an unusually high utilization rate,” Bloomberg wrote.

On October 17, Electrek reported that a 13.6-megawatt offshore wind turbine with a record-breaking rotor diameter of 252 meters (827 feet) debuted in China ahead of the country’s 20th Party Congress in Beijing.

Wow – China just built more offshore wind capacity, in 2021 alone, than the rest of the world had managed in the last 5yrs put together Its 26GW now accounts for half of the world's 54GW total Also, it added twice as much in 2021 as IEA had forecast in…December 2021 pic.twitter.com/yFpctkI1Zd — Simon Evans (@DrSimEvans) January 25, 2022

China connected more offshore wind generation capacity in 2021 – 17 GW – than every other country in the world installed in the last five years.

So China is going big, but it’s also going slow. It still has a net zero by 2060 target. President Xi Jinping said in his opening address at the Congress on October 16:

We will work actively and prudently toward the goals of reaching peak carbon emissions and carbon neutrality. Based on China’s energy and resource endowments, we will advance initiatives to reach peak carbon emissions in a well-planned and phased way, in line with the principle of getting the new before discarding the old.

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