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Wind Power's New Leaders
Inside a record year, dominated by one country more than ever before.
Philip Saparov
September 13, 2026
In partnership with
Greetings, forward-looking reader of where the world's power is coming from!
Wind energy just had its biggest year ever, by a wide margin — and the story behind that record isn't really about the world catching up. It's about one country pulling so far ahead that it's now reshaping what "global" wind growth even means.
So where is wind energy actually taking off fastest, and who's really driving the boom?
Let's dive in.
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The world added more wind power in 2025 than in any previous year — and one country accounted for the overwhelming majority of it.
🇨🇳 China installed 130 gigawatts of new wind capacity in 2025 alone — more than the next dozen countries combined.
🇮🇳 India followed at 6.3 gigawatts, narrowly ahead of the 🇺🇸 United States at 6.27 gigawatts.
🇩🇪 Germany, 🇻🇳 Vietnam, and 🇧🇷 Brazil rounded out the top six, each adding between 2.2 and 4.6 gigawatts.
China's single-year total is so large that it alone exceeds the entire cumulative wind capacity most countries on Earth have built up over decades.
💡 Worth noting: China's 2025 installations represented a 49% increase over its own already-record 2024 total — the country isn't just leading, it's accelerating.
New installations are one measure. Total accumulated capacity — everything ever built and still operating — tells the longer story.
🇨🇳 China leads by an enormous margin, with more than 691 gigawatts of cumulative wind capacity installed.
🇺🇸 The United States ranks a distant second at 160 gigawatts — meaning China now has more than four times America's total wind fleet.
🇩🇪 Germany follows at roughly 73 gigawatts, and 🇮🇳 India at 54.5 gigawatts.
China's total didn't exist at any meaningful scale as recently as the mid-2000s — the country has built its entire commanding lead within roughly two decades.
🔎 Worth sitting with: China alone now accounts for close to half of all the wind power capacity ever built anywhere on Earth.
Perhaps the clearest way to see China's growing dominance is watching its share of the annual global market climb, year after year.
📈 In 2022, China accounted for 58% of all new wind capacity installed worldwide.
📈 That share rose to 65% in 2023, then 72% in 2024, and reached 77% in 2025.
In just three years, China's share of the entire global wind market climbed by nearly 20 percentage points — an extraordinary consolidation for an industry once spread far more evenly across North America, Europe, and Asia.
🔮 A prediction worth holding onto: industry analysts now describe global wind growth and Chinese wind growth as nearly the same story — and expect that overlap to deepen further before any other market meaningfully closes the gap.
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Zoom out to the entire planet, and wind power's growth curve looks less like a steady climb and more like an accelerating one.
📈 Global wind capacity first crossed the symbolic 1-terawatt threshold in 2023.
📈 By the end of 2025, that figure had already reached 1,299 gigawatts — nearly 1.3 terawatts, just two years later.
📈 Industry forecasters now project the world will surpass 2 terawatts of installed wind capacity by 2029 — meaning the second terawatt is expected to arrive roughly twice as fast as the first.
That accelerating pace reflects both falling technology costs and the sheer scale of China's build-out, which alone is expected to drive the majority of new capacity through the rest of the decade.
Behind every gigawatt installed sits an actual manufacturer building the turbines — and this list is now almost entirely Chinese.
🏭 Goldwind led global turbine suppliers in 2025, installing 29.3 gigawatts worth of turbines worldwide.
🏭 Envision Energy followed at 20.9 gigawatts, and 🏭 Mingyang at 18.9 gigawatts.
🏭 Windey and 🏭 Sany rounded out the top five, at 18.4 and 13.5 gigawatts respectively.
Every single one of the world's five largest wind turbine manufacturers by 2025 installation volume was a Chinese company — a level of manufacturing concentration that mirrors the installation numbers driving it.
💡 Worth noting: Chinese manufacturers aren't just supplying their home market anymore — many have begun building factories abroad and actively courting international buyers, a genuine shift toward global market expansion.
Wind power comes in two fundamentally different forms, and 2025's growth was overwhelmingly concentrated in just one of them.
🌾 Onshore wind accounted for 155.3 gigawatts of new capacity in 2025, up 42% from the year before.
🌊 Offshore wind added just 9.3 gigawatts over the same period, up a more modest 16%.
That means onshore installations outpaced offshore by nearly 17 to 1 — offshore wind remains a genuinely important long-term technology, but 2025's record year was built almost entirely on land.
🔎 Worth remembering: offshore wind auctions in both the US and Europe faced real setbacks in 2025, including project cancellations and failed auction rounds — a headwind that onshore wind, particularly in China, simply didn't encounter at the same scale.
To close, it's worth looking past raw volume entirely and asking a different question: where is wind growing fastest, relative to where it started?
🇻🇳 Vietnam posted a 50.8% growth rate in 2025 — the single fastest expansion of any wind market on Earth that year.
🇨🇳 China, despite its overwhelming scale, posted a comparatively modest 23.2% growth rate.
The global average growth rate across the entire industry sat at just 14.3% — meaning Vietnam grew more than three times faster than the world as a whole.
🔮 Worth remembering: industry analysts specifically flagged Vietnam, alongside Chile, as the two markets showing genuine breakout momentum in 2025 — proof that even amid China's overwhelming scale, smaller markets are still capable of the fastest relative growth on the planet.
Wind energy in 2026 is really about one country's build-out becoming so large that it now defines the shape of the entire global market.
China leads on volume, leads on cumulative capacity, leads on manufacturing, and keeps expanding its share of all three every single year.
But underneath that dominant headline, smaller, faster-moving markets like Vietnam are quietly proving that the fastest growth in the room doesn't always belong to the biggest player in it.
Stay informed, stay curious, and keep watching where the next turbine goes up.
Warm regards,
Shane Fulmer
Founder, WorldPopulationReview.com
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