Sweeping the Podium

The wind industry was built in Denmark and Germany, and in 2024 it changed hands. The world added a record 117 gigawatts of new wind capacity, and China accounted for 79.8 of them, 68.2%, more than two-thirds of the entire planet’s build.^[3] China now also holds close to half of all cumulative wind capacity on earth.

The manufacturing tables tell a sharper story. For the first time, the four largest turbine suppliers in the world, Goldwind, Envision, Mingyang and Windey, are all Chinese, and ten of the top fifteen are.^[1] Vestas, the Danish firm that effectively invented the modern turbine, slipped to fifth after a 13% fall in installations. Goldwind alone installed more than 20 gigawatts.^[2]

The home-market engine

The dominance is powered from home. Chinese domestic demand topped 80 gigawatts, more than 60% of everything connected worldwide, while installations outside China fell below 40 gigawatts, the weakest since the pandemic.^[2] That is the crucial caveat: China’s turbine champions are, so far, overwhelmingly domestic. Of the capacity the leading Chinese makers installed abroad, almost all came from just two firms, and more than half of it stayed within Asia.^[1] Global rank, national footprint.

The firms that invented the wind turbine now watch four Chinese makers stand where they used to. The podium is swept.

The technology lead is real at the frontier. In October 2024 Dongfang Electric rolled out a 26-megawatt offshore turbine, the largest in the world, its rotor spanning more than 310 metres — a third larger than the record it had set only months before.^[4] It is a demonstration unit rather than a serial product, and offshore additions globally actually dipped in 2024, so the headline machine runs ahead of the market it will eventually serve.

Why we track this

Wind now rhymes with solar and batteries: Chinese manufacturers command volume, cost and increasingly the technological frontier, while the Western incumbents defend shrinking ground. But the export caveat makes wind a distinct case. China’s turbine dominance is still largely a home-market phenomenon, gated abroad by financing, grid-integration trust, security politics and servicing networks that take years to build. The investable question is not whether Chinese turbines are competitive (they plainly are) but how far, and how fast, that domestic supremacy converts into export share against real non-tariff friction. The podium is swept at home; the away fixtures are still to play.