Q11Wind and Solar Energy Systems

History of Wind Power and Indian & Global Statistics

Wind power has been harnessed by humans for millennia, beginning with simple windmills used for grain grinding and water pumping in ancient Persia, China, and the Middle East, and later widely adopted across medieval Europe (particularly the Netherlands) for drainage and milling applications. The modern era of wind power for electricity generation began in the late 19th century with early experimental wind turbines, but large-scale commercial wind power development did not accelerate significantly until the 1970s oil crisis, which motivated renewed interest in renewable and domestically-available energy sources across the United States and parts of Europe, particularly Denmark and Germany, which subsequently became early global leaders in wind turbine manufacturing and deployment.

Since the 1990s, global installed wind capacity has grown from only a few gigawatts to several hundred gigawatts today, driven by continuous improvements in turbine size, efficiency, and cost, supportive government policy (feed-in tariffs, renewable purchase obligations, tax incentives), and growing climate-change-driven demand for low-carbon electricity generation. China and the United States currently lead the world in total installed wind capacity, followed by Germany, India, and Spain, with offshore wind development also accelerating rapidly in Europe and increasingly in China in recent years.

India's wind power development began in the 1980s and has grown to make India one of the world's top wind power markets by installed capacity, with major wind resource concentration in the states of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, benefiting from favorable monsoon and coastal wind patterns. India's wind sector has been supported by policies including accelerated depreciation benefits, generation-based incentives, and more recently competitive auction-based procurement (replacing earlier feed-in-tariff mechanisms), alongside the government's broader target of substantially expanding total renewable energy capacity (combining wind and solar) as part of India's climate commitments and energy security strategy, with wind power expected to remain a significant contributor to India's electricity generation mix alongside the more rapidly growing solar sector in the coming decades.