Is China planning not just the world’s biggest wind farm-but also the cheapest? Xinhua news service reported yesterday that China will break ground this month on the ‘Three Gorges of Wind Power in the northwest part of the country. The wind farm will start out big, with plans for 5 gigawatts in 2010, before growing truly gigantic, with plans for 20 gigawatts in 2020. Context: T. Boone Pickens’ massive but stalled Texas wind farm aims for 4 gigawatts. And there’s more: China has another half-dozen mammoth wind farms in the works, each on a similar scale. According to Xinhua, the project’s total cost will exceed $17.6 billion. What’s less clear is whether that refers to the 20 gigawatts on the drawing board, or the 40 gigawatts that could theoretically be installed. Either way, when you crunch the numbers, China’s new clean-energy poster child looks stunningly cheap: less than $1 million per megawatt. That’s three times cheaper than Mr. Pickens’ proposed U.S. wind farm. Why’s that? Well, the cost of a wind farm is largely determined by the cost of the wind turbines. Chinese-made machines are cheaper than those made by European and U.S. rivals. And these […]