Land constraints shape China’s wind power potential and improve development efficiency

Terawatt-scale expansion of wind power facilitates China’s latest climate pledge. But the land-extensive nature of wind power, combined with increasingly stringent land protection policies, results in growing energy-land conflicts. Here, we construct a plant-level land-use dataset based on 15,116 wind turbines from representative wind farms nationwide. The land-use information is then combined with a wind resource assessment model and an integrated assessment model to quantify the pronounced spatial mismatch among wind resources, land availability, and projected energy demand. Our results indicate that China’s land-constrained wind power potential ranges from 7.62 to 14.06 terawatts. Although wind power development would require only 6.98% of China’s total land area, the aggregate results mask strong provincial disparities. The scenario analysis shows that stricter land-use policies reduce developable land, but they can lower generation-based land-use intensity in many provinces, suggesting that well-designed land policies can help reconcile wind power development with ecological and farmland protection. China’s land-constrained wind power potential is 7.62−14.06 terawatts, and stricter land policies can reduce energy-land conflicts while protecting farmland and ecosystems, according to turbine-level land-use data integrated with wind resource and assessment modeling.