The use of wind power to generate electricity has grown rapidly in recent years. Taiwan's excellent wind resources offer a great deal of room to grow the domestic wind power industry. The photo shows a Taipower wind farm located near the Gaomei Wetlands. (Jimmy Lin)

Wind power is currently the most mature of the renewable energy technologies. It's also the most price-competitive with fossil fuels. "Clean and cheap," it is the world's fastest-growing green-energy industry.

But wind power is subject to several constraints, including the weather. Taiwan has excellent wind resources and is well situated for wind farms. Why then is wind generating just 1% of our power? Do we have the capacity to develop much more than that?

The large wind turbines on the west coast of Taiwan are an arresting sight, standing on towers that rise some 70 meters above the ground. They have become a common sight as well. As of 2010, there were nearly 200 such turbines around Taiwan with a collective installed capacity of about 300 megawatts, or about 1% of Taiwan's total power generating capacity. But estimates from the Industrial Technology Research Institute and Germany's In-fra-Vest Wind Power Group suggest that Taiwan has room to grow its wind power generation by at least 10-16 times.

In addition to its onshore capacity, Taiwan has the potential for wind farms offshore. Some 18 firms involved in wind farm development, turbine component manufacture, and maritime construction contracting, firms that include China Steel Machinery, Tatung, and Formosa Heavy Industries, have formed the Taiwan Offshore Wind Alliance in preparation for entering this trillion-NT-dollar market.