Construction of a wind power station with an installed capacity of 200,000 kilowatts began on Wednesday in Dongtai, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province.

The 1.7 billion yuan (212.5 million U.S. dollars) project is designed to generate 400 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. The first phase project of the wind power station, with an installed capacity of 50,000 kilowatts, is scheduled to go into operation in the first half of next year.

The state-owned Guohua Energy Investment Corp., which is in charge of the Dongtai wind power project, plans to build wind power projects with a combined capacity of one million kilowatts in the next ten to 15 years.

China boasts rich wind power resources, with potential energy reserves standing at one billion kilowatts.

China has built 44 wind power stations with a combined installed capacity of 1.26 million kilowatts, the tenth largest in the world and the third in Asia.

China aims to increase its installed capacity of wind power projects to five million kilowatts by the end of 2010.

Source: Xinhua