“Never seen a wind farm in China:” Trump invents a new affliction – wind turbine blindness

Stand aside, wind turbine syndrome, Donald Trump has invented an entirely new affliction caused by a pathological dislike of renewable energy: wind turbine blindness.

The shocking new condition revealed itself on Friday, when the US president declared from the White House balcony that he had “never seen a wind farm in China.”

In a rambling Independence Day address, Trump backed in his newly passed “big beautiful bill” – effectively ending credits for wind, solar and EVs in the US – with some good old fashioned bullshit on energy.

“China is right now building 68 coal power generating plants, and we’re putting up wind,” he said making a whirly gesture with his finger in the air.

“Wind. It doesn’t work, I will tell ya, aside from ruining our fields and our valleys and killing all the birds, and having very, being very weak and expensive. All made in China.

“You know I noticed something, that, with all the windmills that China sends us – where we waste our money, because it’s the most expensive energy – I see that, you know, they make about 95 per cent of ’em, the wind turbines, I have never seen a wind farm in China! Why is that? Somebody check that out.”

Happily, plenty of people have obliged. But for good measure, Renew Economy has checked it out too and found that China has, well, one or two wind farms.

In fact, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, of the 109 gigawatts (GW) of new onshore wind generation capacity installed worldwide in 2024, China added 79.3 GW, representing around 60 per cent of global additions for the year.

This took China’s total installed capacity of onshore wind to more than 520 GW – a good deal more than the US, at a total of 154 GW.

What’s more, China’s state grid is forecasting that year-on-year growth of onshore wind generation capacity in China will jump by a stunning 77 per cent in 2025, adding a total of 140GW – an all time global record, by far.

And in case Trump’s team wants to claim he was talking about offshore wind, which he also hates, China has a lot of that, too: forecasts expect the country to have accumulated a total of 54 GW of installed offshore wind capacity by the end of this year.

The jaw-dropping China data is shared here on LinkedIn by Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

“It’s been clear that clean (and dirty) power capacity additions numbers would be buoyed by the end of the five-year plan period, when a lot of projects race to complete. But I have not seen anyone predict anything this big,” Myllyuvirta says.

“On the dirty side, the State Grid predicts 127 GW of thermal power added. Some of this will be gas but the majority, probably 90-100 GW is coal. So coal power additions are also picking up sharply,” he notes.

“The key point remains that as long as clean power generation keeps growing faster than electricity demand, increases in coal and gas fired capacity will result in falling utilisation, not increased emissions.”

Just to really drive the point home, China is also home to the world’s biggest onshore wind farm, the 20 GW Jiuquan Wind Power Base or Gansu Wind Farm, which is being built on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert in northern China.

Pretty hard to miss.

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