Winds of change: New Zealand China Council and New Zealand Wind Energy Association visit to China, June 2025

One core goal of the New Zealand China Council is to spearhead innovative initiatives that foster cooperation and bring benefits for the New Zealand-China relationship.

In that spirit, on 22-27 June we partnered with the New Zealand Wind Energy Association to travel with a group of wind energy professionals to China, for an intensive week visiting Chinese turbine and equipment manufacturers, sector bodies and New Zealand diplomatic offices and companies.

Why did we visit China?

The main purpose of the visit was to make new connections and introductions between the New Zealand and China wind energy sectors, to catalyse future contact and collaboration.  Some companies in our sector have explored links already, but the visit served to broaden and deepen them.

As background context, the New Zealand and China governments have voiced a shared intention to cooperate on responses to climate change.  The latest arrangement confirming this cooperation between governments was signed during Prime Minister Luxon’s visit to China in the week before our own mission.  Our Council visit was a way to explore concrete steps to flesh out collaboration in practical ways.

Both countries are strongly focused on developing wind energy.  Onshore wind energy now represents 12.1% of the New Zealand grid’s total installed capacity (1.3GW of 10.4GW total national grid), supplied by 21 operational wind farms.  But the sector’s ambition is much larger.  To achieve its growth targets, New Zealand must build at least five times more wind farm capacity in the next 25 years than it did in the last 25.  Legislation for offshore wind energy is being introduced this year, to complement a pipeline of onshore wind farms under development.

Meanwhile, over the last 20 years China has steadily developed the world’s largest and most competitive renewable energy industry.  Given its huge size China is still the world’s largest carbon emitter in total volume terms, if not per capita.  But at the same time, in 2024 it installed more wind turbines (and solar panels) than the rest of the world combined.  According to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), China installed 80GW of new wind energy capacity last year, bringing China’s cumulative installed capacity to over 520GW, representing almost 50% of the global total.

This energy evolution has driven the global emergence of China’s top wind turbine manufacturers.  The GWEC says Chinese manufacturers (OEMs) held the top 4 places, 6^th and 7^th in a ranking of the world’s top 10 largest turbine suppliers in 2024 (62.5GW of a total of 81.5GW for the top 10).  This dominance is spurring technological innovation, quality improvement, and experience in a range of climatic conditions including ‘Class 1’ high wind zones similar to New Zealand’s.

At the same time, securing supply from New Zealand’s traditional European turbine OEMs has become very difficult, as they respond to rapidly increasing regional global demand.  It is a no-brainer for our sector to explore other options.

What did we see?

In total we visited or had other contact with seven Chinese wind energy OEMs.

We saw innovation:  ever larger turbines, including offshore models close to or taller than Auckland’s Sky Tower; pilot floating offshore windfarms; comprehensive servicing and maintenance arrangements; and advanced supporting industries including battery energy storage systems (BESS) and Light Detection and Radar (LiDAR).

We saw global expansion:  Although most Chinese wind turbines are installed locally, manfacturers are now supplying turbines to wind farms across the world from Latin America to the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and Europe.  The larger OEMs are now responding to demand by establishing manufacturing bases in some of these areas, to be closer to the market. China also supplies parts and equipment to other international OEMs – it is estimated that up to 70% of a European wind turbine could consist of Chinese components.

We saw value:  According to the Chinese Wind Energy Association the comparative price of onshore and offshore turbines has declined by around 60% from 2019 to 2024.

We also saw genuine interest to partner with New Zealand.  Despite the relatively small size of New Zealand’s wind energy sector, OEMs are willing to consider even small orders, to benefit New Zealand’s renewable energy drive and enhance their own credentials as genuine global suppliers.  A number of Chinese OEMs already have representatives in New Zealand or in Australia covering the New Zealand market, demonstrating their commitment to future business.

Some observations

The New Zealand Wind Energy Association will draw its own conclusions from this visit.  Here are three from our Council’s perspective:

• New Zealand and China have signed several agreements to work together to develop responses to climate change. Cooperation on wind energy could be one way to supplement dialogue with practical actions.
• China is doubling down on a long-term green energy transition. Its companies can now produce wind turbines for the world in a way that no other country can.  China portrays this as its contribution to global as well as local decarbonisation.
• New Zealand will naturally need to complete careful due diligence on all new suppliers of wind energy equipment, from any country. But it is in our national interests for this to be objective and sophisticated – blanket concerns about all China wind energy technology for example is over-simplistic, and could hamper New Zealand’s pursuit of agreed renewable energy transition goals if securing supply from traditional partners remains challenging.

Our thanks to the New Zealand Wind Energy Association and its participating member companies for an extremely busy but very valuable week of work in China.  The New Zealand China Council looks forward to supporting the sector’s engagement with Chinese partners in future.