Northwestern China's Gansu Province is expected to be the country's largest wind power generation base in 10 years' time, analysts said on Friday.

Gansu's wind power resources lie along a 1,000-kilometer ancient "silk road", with vast desert beside it for further use. There's no typhoon in the area and the lowest temperature is above minus 29 Celsius degrees, which is good for building and working wind power generation facilities, according to the wind and solar power resource evaluation center affiliated to the Gansu Provincial Meteorological Bureau.

Lanzhou-Xinjiang railway and No. 312 national highway cross the province and large-scale grids are scattered across the province, which provides easy access to the transportation of the facilities and transmission of the wind power, the center said.

The bureau's latest evaluation showed that the province has a total wind power reserve of 237 million kw, which accounts for 7.3 percent of the country's total.

There are seven wind power generation stations with a total installed capacity of 500,000 kw in Gansu. The Changma Wind Power Generation Station in the province with a planned installed capacity of 5 million kw is under construction.

China made remarkable progress in wind power development in 2007 and the industry will expect further regulatory boost in the coming years.

China Electricity Council, an industry association, said the wind power sector generated electricity of 5.6 billion kilowatt hours last year, a growth of 95.2 percent over the previous year. The growth rate was 22 percentage points higher than the previous year.

(Xinhua News Agency February 9, 2008)