SHANGHAI Electric Group is banking on the rising power of wind to blow it to No. 1 in China's offshore wind market.

"Our aim is to be No. 1 in China's offshore wind turbine market," Jin Xiaolong, head of Shanghai Electric's wind unit, said yesterday during the Offshore Wind China 2013 conference in Shanghai.

Shanghai Electric aims to grab a 30 percent of China's offshore wind market, a sector set to boom in coming years.

The company, China's largest power equipment maker, has formed two wind equipment joint ventures with German conglomerate Siemens, a leading player in the wind industry, to better compete with rivals.

While China has become the world's largest wind market, the offshore sector had a relatively slow start mainly because of high costs of developing wind farms offshore and the lack of an on-grid tariff that could ensure investment return.

China's installed offshore wind capacity stood at 389.6 megawatts at the end of 2012, the third-largest after the UK and Denmark. But that's less than 10 percent of China's target of having 5,000MW offshore by 2015.

But China is "unlikely" to meet the 5,000MW target and instead may have 2,500-3,000MW by then, Jin said. He added that development is set to rise as the government is likely to unveil preferential tariff for offshore wind power soon.

Shanghai Electric has won an order for turbines for the second phase of the Donghai Bridge Wind Farm off Shanghai. The construction of the second phase will start in the second half of this year.