Huaneng Renewables Corp., a clean energy unit of China’s largest generator China Huaneng Group Corp., has seen its earnings for the first half of 2013 more than double, year-on-year, thanks to a boom in wind power sales.
A filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange revealed that net income had risen to 646.1 million yuan ($105.5 million) from 246.2 million yuan a year earlier, while sales surged 58.5 per cent to 2.87 billion yuan.
The company has greatly benefited from Chinese authorities’ decision to slow development of new wind capacity to ease grid congestion and allow projects to operate at closer to their installed capacity.
“With the power curtailment situation improved in certain regions, the Company achieved a substantial increase in power generation and utilization hours,” Huaneng Renewables said in the statement.
New wind-park permits for projects in the Jilin, Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang provinces, where grids are overloaded, have been denied by the National Energy Administration.
China will still add 13 GW of wind power this year, around 6 per cent less than last year, according to analyst estimates.
China Longyuan Power Group Corp., China’s biggest wind-farm developer, profit from the first half of 2013 totalled about 1.46 billion yuan, a negligible 0.3 per cent year-on-year rise, while wind generation overall rose 32 per cent to 11.1 billion kWh.