Beijing's Windy Bet

摘要

As he drives along a two-lane highway skirting the Gobi Desert, Hubert Beaumont sees nothing but wind. The road in this part of China's Gansu province runs completely flat - a monotonous route past grey rocks, a few shrubs and some 100 sleek turbines towering over the empty terrain. "I can't think of anything else you'd want to do here except wind energy," says Beaumont, a Beijing-based wind specialist at Ecofys, a green-energy consulting firm. Indeed, the region is pegged to become the core of a 'mega wind-power base', a massive collection of wind farms with 5 gigawatts of capacity by 2010. Even considering that wind turbines generally produce only about a quarter of their advertised capacity, these would still generate enough juice to satisfy about a million energy-guzzling US homes. It will be the biggest wind-power development in the world.