URUMQI, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- China's wind power story is often told in terms of scale. Less examined is how that scale is being organized. In the country's far northwest, a region once known for relentless gales is turning wind from a raw resource into an integrated industrial system.
As one of China's most wind-rich regions, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is no longer merely a resource hinterland exporting electricity to the rest of the country. Today, its wind is valued for how it has been harnessed, through planning, capital and infrastructure, into a production base that extends well beyond power generation.
The numbers explain why Xinjiang matters. Its technically exploitable wind resources are estimated at 780 million kilowatts, about 17 percent of China's total, ranking second nationwide. By the end of 2025, installed wind-power capacity in the region had reached 30 million kilowatts. Across China, grid-connected wind capacity has now surpassed 600 million kilowatts, keeping the country the world's largest wind-power market for a 15th consecutive year.
What sets Xinjiang apart is not scale alone, but how that scale is being structured. The region is steadily assembling a wind-power cluster spanning research, equipment manufacturing, grid integration, and long-distance transmission, pushing it up the value chain and embedding it more deeply in China's energy economy.
The roots of the industrial chain can be traced to Dabancheng, on the outskirts of the regional capital Urumqi, often dubbed "China's Wind Valley."
Ringed by mountains on three sides, the area acts as a natural wind corridor, channelling air currents through narrow passes. It records more than 200 days a year of force-six winds or stronger. Annual wind-energy reserves are estimated at roughly 25 billion kilowatt-hours, with a theoretical installed capacity of about 15 million kilowatts.
Xinjiang's engagement with wind power began early. Experiments in generation started in the mid-1980s. In 1986, the region imported its first turbine from Denmark. Two years later, Dabancheng completed China's earliest large-scale pilot wind project.
China's wind industry began in Xinjiang. From a single imported turbine, Dabancheng has grown into a concentration of 59 wind farms, with more than 6.6 million kilowatts of installed capacity and over 1,000 turbines spread across the valley. The site charts China's wind industry as it moved from experiment to system.
Since 2010, development has gathered pace. Across Xinjiang's 10 major wind zones from Hami in the east to Tacheng near the northwestern border, large-scale projects and generation bases have been rolled out in quick succession. The build-out of "Xinjiang electricity transmission" corridors has pushed renewable power eastwards, easing local absorption constraints and tying wind-rich deserts to far-off centers of demand.
Generation alone does not guarantee stability, particularly in a system where supply and demand peak in opposite seasons. Xinjiang's wind is inherently variable and seasonal -- output rises in spring and autumn, while electricity demand peaks in winter and summer. To bridge that mismatch, developers have increasingly turned to wind-storage integration.
In Hami's Shisanjianfang wind zone, where winds above force eight blow on more than 200 days a year, a million-kilowatt project now couples turbines with large-scale electrochemical storage, shifting wind power from a fluctuating resource into a more controllable one.
The project is equipped with 150 low-temperature wind turbines, each rated at 6.7 megawatts, and a storage system with 300,000 kilowatts of power capacity and 1.2 million kilowatt-hours of energy. "More than 400 storage units act like a giant power bank," said Pan Jindong, the project manager. "Excess electricity is stored during periods of low demand and released during peaks."
According to Pan, the "giant power bank" is powered by a smart control system that automatically manages charging and discharging. A single charge-discharge cycle can deliver 1.2 million kilowatt-hours, roughly the daily output of a 50,000-kilowatt wind farm, enough to meet the daily electricity needs of about 800,000 three-person households. With only 20 people required for operations and maintenance, the project's per-kilowatt operating cost is about 0.01 yuan.
Yet solving variability did not, by itself, answer a larger question: whether Xinjiang's wind boom could anchor industry, rather than simply feed the grid.
Manufacturing followed the turbines, and increasingly, it followed them home. Xinjiang's wind-power equipment localization rate now exceeds 90 percent, with turbine output ranking first nationwide.
In Mori Kazakh Autonomous County of Changji, a manufacturing base operated by Dongfang Electric has, since breaking ground in 2022, built an annual capacity of 6 million kilowatts for main units and 4 million kilowatts for blades. The project has created more than 1,000 local jobs, helping to anchor an industrial corridor that links construction, generation, storage, transmission, consumption and manufacturing, binding wind power not just to the grid, but to the regional economy.
In 2024, Mori completed Xinjiang's first county-level renewable-energy base with a capacity exceeding 10 million kilowatts. By 2025, cumulative grid-connected capacity had passed 20 million kilowatts, with output across the full new-energy industrial chain surpassing 10 billion yuan (about 1.4 billion U.S. dollars), as upstream and downstream firms clustered around renewable energy projects.
Similar patterns can be found elsewhere in the region. Hami now hosts Xinjiang's largest and most complete wind-equipment manufacturing base, with an annual capacity of 22 million kilowatts for whole turbines, 1,320 sets of blades, and 400,000 tonnes of towers.
In Tacheng, near the border with Kazakhstan, a full production chain from blade manufacturing to tower fabrication and final assembly has taken shape within the city's pilot zone for development and opening up. When Sany Renewable Energy first established its wind-equipment plant there, the site was still the Gobi Desert, recalled Asghar Ahgen, an administrative officer at the facility. The factory now has an annual production capacity of 600 wind-turbine blades, supplying both domestic projects and exports to Kazakhstan.
According to local officials, the wind-equipment manufacturing chain in Tacheng's pilot zone has largely taken shape.
As transmission capacity has expanded, so has Xinjiang's role as an energy exporter. In 2025, the region sent 141.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to other parts of China, an increase of 11.5 percent year on year. Renewable sources, including wind, accounted for 44.4 billion kilowatt-hours, or 31.41 percent of the total.
In 2020, the share stood at 21 percent. Today, nearly one out of every three kilowatt-hours of electricity sent out of Xinjiang comes from renewable sources, marking a shift not just in volume, but in the composition of power flowing east.
The abundance of low-cost green power is drawing in a different class of industry. Computing power centers, among the most electricity-intensive of businesses, have begun to cluster in wind-rich places such as Yiwu County and Tacheng. In June 2025, computing capacity generated in Yiwu was successfully connected to southwest China's Chongqing Municipality. Thanks to the county's abundant wind and solar resources, data firms can cut electricity costs by more than 40 percent compared with other provincial-level regions.
From turbine workshops to energy-storage stations and, increasingly, to data centers, Xinjiang's wind is no longer merely a natural endowment. It is becoming industrial logic, reshaping a remote frontier into a working node of China's energy and manufacturing system.
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