Offshore wind power is facing challenges

As an important content of strategic emerging industries and a technical commanding point for the development of wind power industry, China's offshore wind power is currently at a critical stage of demonstration projects to scale development. It needs to break through bottlenecks such as planning and layout, pricing policies, and transmission and distribution network construction. This is the latest information from the "2013 Shanghai International Offshore Wind Power and Wind Power Industry Chain Conference & Exhibition" that was concluded in Shanghai.

Accelerate preparations for coastal provinces

On February 16 this year, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "Decision on Revising the Relevant Articles of the Industrial Structure Adjustment Guidance Catalogue (2011 Version)". Among them, "Offshore Wind Turbine Technology Development and Equipment Manufacturing" was added as an encouragement project.

According to the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan” for wind power development, China will promote the development of offshore wind power on a large scale, based on preliminary results obtained from offshore wind demonstration projects. It will focus on the development and construction of offshore wind power in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Hebei, and Shandong, and accelerate the planning and construction of offshore wind power in coastal areas such as Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan and Liaoning.

According to Yi Yuechun, deputy chief engineer of the China National Hydroelectric and Water Conservancy Planning and Design Institute, China's development and construction of offshore wind power has many favorable factors, including abundant offshore wind power resources, close to the load center, strong power absorption capacity, and offshore wind power generation cost. Constantly reduce and so on.

According to Yi Yuechun, China is actively developing technical preparations, preparatory work and demonstration projects for offshore wind power development, timely and steadily expanding the scale of offshore wind power construction, and promoting the development of offshore wind power technology and equipment manufacturing industry through concession bidding projects and pilot demonstration projects. The upgrade will lay a good foundation for the large-scale development and construction of offshore wind power.

At present, the preliminary work of 17 offshore wind power projects nationwide has been approved by the National Energy Administration, with a total installed capacity of 3.95 million kilowatts, mainly distributed in Hebei, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Fujian, Guangdong, and Zhejiang provinces. There are also 28 projects that are striving for the National Energy Administration to agree to carry out preliminary work with a total installed capacity of 8.5 million kilowatts.

It is difficult to achieve the goals of the "Twelfth Five-year Plan

Although there is no doubt about the development prospects of the offshore wind power industry, the actual situation is not optimistic.

According to Shi Pengfei, deputy director of the Wind Energy Professional Committee of the China Renewable Energy Society, although the offshore wind ionization load center is near, the technical threshold and cost are relatively high, and the investment cost is currently more than twice that of onshore wind power. The ongoing development of distributed photovoltaic generation costs is another new challenge for offshore wind power. “If the on-grid tariff of offshore wind power cannot be lower than the 'market red line', it will be difficult to develop on a large scale.”

Yi Yuechun believes that it is urgent for China to clearly define the tariff policy for offshore wind power. The cost of offshore wind power development is high and risks are high. At present, no reasonable offshore wind power pricing policy has been formed in China. Because of the tightening of investment, major energy investment groups are faced with difficulties in continuing large-scale investment in the face of offshore wind projects with poor returns or uncertainties, which has led to slow progress in the early phase of many offshore wind projects.

In addition to the issue of electricity prices, the unified management coordination of offshore wind power construction in China needs to be strengthened. Yi Yuechun said that the development of offshore wind power involves multiple fields, and various departments have different understandings of the development of offshore wind power, and the relevant functional departments in various localities have implemented different management standards, thereby prolonging the work cycle of offshore wind power projects.

It is understood that the current period of offshore demonstration and approval of offshore wind power projects, the passage of marine environmental assessments, and navigational safety verification generally takes more than two years.

Yi Yuechun believes that the evaluation of offshore wind energy resources in China has not yet been carried out systematically. Marine hydrological surveys and submarine geological surveys are also weak. These basic working conditions are arduous and have a long period. The slow progress of construction will inevitably affect the construction of offshore wind power projects. Smooth progress. “Even if the current 3.95-million-kw offshore wind power project that the country has approved for its previous work will be completed by 2015, it will be very difficult to achieve the goal of building a 5-million-kilowatt offshore wind power in the 12th Five-Year Plan period,” said Yi Yuechun.

An important part of the new energy strategy

According to Li Junfeng, chairman of the National Center for Climate Change Strategic Research and International Cooperation, offshore wind power is an important part of China's new energy strategy and plays an important role in the implementation of energy conservation and emission reduction plans and the development of strategic emerging industries. The "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" is a crucial period for China to lay the foundation for offshore wind power. China should build a batch of offshore wind power projects to strive for the gradual maturity of the technology, the gradual standardization of management, and the gradual implementation of policies to lay the foundation for the sound development of offshore wind power in the future.

In 2007, China's first offshore wind turbine was put into operation on the Bohai Offshore Wind Power Demonstration Project and entered into an independent oil grid.

In June 2010, China's first large offshore wind farm Shanghai Donghai Bridge's 102,000-kilowatt offshore wind demonstration project was successfully connected to the grid. In September of that year, the first batch of offshore wind power concession projects in China was organized by the National Energy Administration to complete the tender and four offshore concession bidding projects were completed in Jiangsu Binhai, Sheyang, Dongtai and Dafeng with a total scale of 1 million kilowatts.

In June 2011, the Longyuan Jiangsu Rudong 150,000-kilowatt offshore (intertidal zone) demonstration wind farm started construction, which opened the prelude to large-scale development and construction of offshore (inter-tidal) wind farms in China.

As of the end of 2012, China has built a total of about 390,000 kilowatts of offshore wind power projects, which is the largest installed capacity of offshore wind power except the UK and Denmark.

Yi Yuechun believes that although the threshold and cost of offshore wind power technologies are still relatively high, they have higher efficiency in power generation efficiency and are of great value for development as a whole.

According to the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan", by 2015, China's offshore wind power capacity is expected to reach 5 million kilowatts. By 2020, offshore wind power will have an installed capacity of 30 million kilowatts. This means that China plans to surpass Europe's development in the previous 20 years with a minimum of five years between the "Twelve Five Years".