Global Wind Power

Behind the dots

A record year, and three bottlenecks

2025 was wind's biggest year on record: 165 GW installed, up 40 percent^[2]. But more than 120 GW of it was China, much of it a rush to connect before a June 2025 pricing reform; strip China out and the growth story is far slower^[2]. The constraint on the rest is not turbines or sites, it is three quieter bottlenecks.

First, the grid queue. US interconnection queues held about 2.3 TW of generation and storage at the end of 2024, but only 13 percent of the requests filed in 2000–2019 ever reached operation, and the median wait has doubled to over four years; wind's share of the queue is falling, squeezed by solar, storage and returning gas^[3]. Second, curtailment where the grid lags the build: Great Britain curtailed over 10 TWh of mostly Scottish wind in 2025, a constraint bill above £1.4 billion once replacement gas south of the bottleneck is counted^[4], and Germany's congestion management cost about €3.1 billion, with 9.4 TWh of renewables curtailed (wind still the largest volume, though it was solar curtailment that nearly doubled)^[5].

Third, the supply chain has split in two. Chinese manufacturers took the top six global OEM slots in 2025 for the first time, Goldwind alone installing nearly three times Vestas' volume^[6]. The Western industry has restructured rather than collapsed: Vestas is solidly profitable again, Siemens Gamesa targets break-even in 2026 after multi-billion losses, GE Vernova's wind arm is still in the red^[6,7]. The state has repriced accordingly: the UK's offshore auction drew zero bids in 2023 at the old price cap, then cleared 3.4 GW in 2024 and 8.4 GW in the round settled in early 2026 at successively higher strike prices^[8,9].

◐ inferred The map's density is therefore not the constraint. Where wind grows next is set by transmission build-out and queue reform, and by what price the buyer of last resort, usually the state, is willing to underwrite.