Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/rser Analysis and recommendations for onshore wind power policies in China Lingyue Li a,b , Xiaoqing Ren c , Yanli Yang a , Peidong Zhang d, ⁎ , Xiao Chen a, ⁎ a Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao 266101, China b School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China c College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin 210093, China d College of Environment and Safety Engineering, Qingdao University of Science & Technology, Qingdao 266042, China ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Wind power Energy policy China ABSTRACT Recently China's wind power industry is challenged by many problems such as wind power integration and wind curtailment, which seriously hinders the development of onshore wind power. Since China's policy has a direct and significant influence on wind power industry, it is vital to analyze and evaluate published policies. This paper explores in detail 134 China's onshore wind power policies from 2005 to 2015 so as to provide analytical support for future formulation and implementation of wind power policy. Based on policy summary from equipment manufacturing industry, wind farms and power grid industry, this paper evaluates the policies from the perspective of overall plan, support policy and policy implementation using fitting method, game theory and empirical analysis. The results indicate that China's wind policy is gradually becoming perfected, for example, there are more reasonable objectives and improved support policies. However, many problems remain to be solved, like unreasonable planning, imperfect support policies, immature trading systems and uncoordinated actions among interest related parties. Furthermore, combined with international experiences, suggestions on improving China's wind power policy are proposed from seven aspects. 1. Introduction With the increasing severity of global environmental and energetic problems, new energy and renewable energy development have re- ceived more and more attention [1]. Due to the advantages of abundant resources, relatively mature technologies, relatively low cost and non- pollution, the use of wind power has become a main trend of countries around the world [2]. By the end of 2016, the global cumulative installed wind capacity is 486.7 GW [3], which brings wind power to the fourth-largest source of electricity after thermal power, nuclear power, and hydropower. Meanwhile, wind power technology has been improved significantly [4,5], and the cost of wind power has been declining gradually. Such rapid development of global wind power industry is inseparable from the policy support of all countries. The United States, Denmark, Spain, Germany and other countries have issued series of policies to promote the development of wind power [6], such as fixed price, investment subsidies, tariff incentives, tax exemp- tion, domestic rate requirements, export assistance programs, research and development (R & D) support, green electricity, renewable energy quota system, concession policy and certification policy. China has issued numbers of wind power policies to support the development of wind power industry, which has made great progress in wind power industry. By the end of 2016, the total cumulative installed capacity of wind power in China has achieved 168.7 GW, which accounts for 34.7% of global installed capacity and ranks first around the world [3]. However, although wind policy in China has achieved installed capacity growth, technical level improvement, wind power cost reduction and development of other aspects, there are still exist other problems like wind power integration and wind curtailment [7]. Furthermore, many problems are worth studying, for example, how policies affect behaviors of subjects in wind power industry, what is the variation trend of policies, whether these policies are reasonable and which aspects still need to be improved. Recently, many articles about Chinese wind power are published every year and many of these studies involve policy. However, most of the studies concentrate on wind power's status, only regarded policy as an aspect of reasons for wind power development and did not carry out a detailed and comprehensive analysis. In this sense, the researches about analysis and evaluation of the overall policy for the whole industry chain are still relatively few. These researches include the comparison of wind power policy at home and abroad [8–12] and the analysis and evaluation on the analysis of published wind power http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.06.114 Received 13 December 2016; Received in revised form 26 June 2017; Accepted 26 June 2017 ⁎ Corresponding authors. E-mail addresses: eeesc@163.com (P. Zhang), chenxiao@qibebt.ac.cn (X. Chen). Abbreviations: R & D, research and development; NDRC, National Development and Reform Commission; MIIT, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; NEA, National Energy Administration; MOST, Ministry of Science and Technology; VAT, value-added tax; CECRE, Renewable Energy Power Control Center Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 82 (2018) 156–167 1364-0321/ © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. MARK