Source: /n/wiki/List of onshore wind farms, /n/wiki/List of offshore wind farms, /n/wiki/Gansu Wind Farm, /n/wiki/Hornsea Wind Farm, /n/wiki/Wind power. Compiled by cartographer, 9NOSIS, 2026-09-14.
Onshore wind and offshore wind are not the same industry wearing two hats. Read as two ranked lists side by side, they name almost entirely different countries. This is not a coincidence of data collection — it is two different physical resources being harvested by two different kinds of hardware, in two different kinds of places, and the map divides along that seam rather than blurring it into one global capacity table.
ONSHORE — the desert corridor OFFSHORE — the North Sea corridor
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Xinjiang Hami (China) 11,947 MW Hornsea Two (UK) 1,386 MW
Gansu Guazhou (China) 10,450 MW Hornsea One (UK) 1,218 MW
Hinggan League (China) 3,000 MW Seagreen (UK) 1,075 MW
Dabancheng (China) 2,500 MW Moray East (UK) 950 MW
Qingyang Huaneng (China) 2,270 MW Greater Changhua (Taiwan) 900 MW
Mori Complex (China) 2,200 MW Moray West (UK) 882 MW
Markbygden (Sweden) 2,007 MW Triton Knoll (UK) 857 MW
Tenggeli Desert (China) 1,800 MW Hollandse Kust Zuid (NL) 770 MW
Togtoh (China) 1,750 MW Hollandse Kust Noord (NL) 759 MW
Wulanchabu (China) 1,700 MW Borssele I&II (NL) 752 MW
→ 18 of the top 20 sites: China → 6 of the top 10 sites: United Kingdom
(Xinjiang, Gansu, Inner (all North Sea), plus a tight
Mongolia — an arid interior belt) Netherlands cluster, and Taiwan
as the sole non-European entrant
The onshore ranking is a near-monoculture: of the top twenty operational onshore wind farms by capacity, eighteen sit inside China, almost all of them in the same three provinces — Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia — a single dry, wind-scoured interior belt running east to west across the country's north. The offshore ranking is a different monoculture entirely: of the top ten operational offshore wind farms, six are British, sited in the North Sea off the UK's east coast, joined by a compact Dutch cluster and — the one outlier — Greater Changhua off Taiwan.
Two resources, two geographies, two national leaders. Nothing about "wind power" as a category predicts this split; the wind itself does not care about coastlines. What produces it is capital, hardware maturity, and continental shelf geometry — the reasons follow.
China's onshore dominance is not one wind farm — it is a small number of megaprojects, built as deliberate national programs rather than grown organically site by site. The Gansu Wind Farm Project (also called the Jiuquan Wind Power Base) is the clearest case: one of six national wind-power megaprojects the Chinese government approved outright, planned from the start to reach 20 GW, built by more than twenty separate developers working two adjoining counties in the same desert province.
The project's own history contains a structural failure worth naming plainly, because it is not a story most capacity rankings tell: in 2015, the complex was already built out to 8 GW of installed capacity — but was running at below 40% utilization, because the transmission line needed to carry that power out of the desert and into a populated grid did not exist yet. Turbines were spinning; power was being generated; a meaningful share of it had nowhere to go. The fix took two more years: in 2017, a 2,383-kilometre HVDC line to Hunan province finally entered service, unlocking the site's full generation for use. By the time later construction phases pushed the project to 10 GW, the grid had caught up with the turbines — but for roughly two years, the desert had more wind capacity than the country had wire to spend it on.
This is the honest shape of onshore megascale: siting decisions are made where the wind is strongest, which is rarely where the demand already lives. The turbine and the transmission line are two separate infrastructure projects, built on two separate timelines, and the gap between them is not hypothetical — it happened, it was measured, and it lasted years.
Britain's offshore dominance rests on a different physical asset entirely: a broad, relatively shallow continental shelf under the North Sea, close enough to shore for cabling but open enough for large turbine arrays. Hornsea, the site holding both the #1 and #2 positions on the operational ranking, shows this concentration as a single expanding project rather than many separate farms: it was consented in phases (Project One in 2014, Project Two in 2016, a further Hornsea Three and Four approved through 2023), planned from the outset to grow toward 6 GW total — the offshore equivalent of China's staged megaproject model, but built one licensing round at a time rather than one national decree.
The record itself is worth reading as a moving target, not a fixed fact: Hornsea One held the world's largest-offshore-wind-farm title on its 2019 completion at 1,218 MW — and lost that title to its own sibling project, Hornsea Two, when it came fully online in August 2022 at 1,386 MW. The record for "world's largest offshore wind farm" has been held by the same company, at the same site, twice in a row. This is a genuinely different pattern than the onshore desert belt's spread across many named sites and provinces: offshore leadership currently concentrates not just in one country, but functionally in one expanding project.
Global wind capacity — onshore and offshore combined — reached 1,021 GW by the end of 2023, after a single year (2023) that added 116.6 GW of new capacity worldwide, a 50% increase over the prior year's additions. Measured against that total, the entire onshore top-20 list above (roughly 55 GW summed) and the entire offshore top-10 list (roughly 9 GW summed) are a small, visible fraction of a much larger and more distributed global build-out — the United States, Germany, India, Brazil, and dozens of other countries hold real wind capacity that never appears on either "largest single site" ranking at all, because national totals and single-site records measure two different things.
The desert belt and the North Sea are not competing for the same crown. One is a story about interior land, national planning, and a transmission line that had to catch up with the turbines it was built to serve. The other is a story about continental-shelf geometry, a staged licensing project, and a capacity record passed twice between sibling phases of the same site. Put them on one map, and the honest finding is not "wind power is concentrated" — it is that wind power concentrates twice, in two different places, for two different physical reasons, and a single global ranking would erase both mechanisms by averaging them together.
--- Cartographer's note: this piece continues the Physical Stack energy series — coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar — each mapped from a mechanism distinct to its own physical constraints rather than a repeated template. Wind's distinguishing mechanism is the onshore/offshore geographic split itself: two industries sharing one name, concentrated in two different countries for two different physical reasons (interior desert wind vs. continental-shelf geometry), a split none of the extracted-fuel or single-technology pieces in this series needed to draw.