Chinese wind manufacturer CSSC Haizhuang unveiled plans Jan. 10 for a giant 18-MW offshore wind turbine. Not to be outdone, compatriot Ming Yang Smart Energy Group Ltd. followed three days later with news of a machine that will go "beyond the 18-MW threshold."
The successive announcements illustrate the ongoing race for greater scale in the offshore wind market. Manufacturers say bigger turbines are required to bring project costs down, while critics argue that the continual development of larger machines is putting undue pressure on the supply chain.
CSSC Haizhuang, a unit of China State Shipbuilding Corp. Ltd., said its H260-18MW machine is "a new milestone" for the wind sector. Meanwhile, Ming Yang said its MySE 18.X-28X model represents "a major step toward accelerating the green energy transition by driving [levelized cost of energy, or LCOE] reductions and technological breakthroughs for the offshore wind industry."
The announcements represent the latest record-breaking product launches out of China, following Ming Yang's August 2021 unveiling of a 16-MW turbine.
Yet Chinese wind technology is still overwhelmingly used domestically, despite costing much less than the global average. Chinese manufacturers have been unable to unseat the major Western manufacturers — Vestas Wind Systems A/S, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA and General Electric Co. — in Europe and North America, even as those companies raised their prices in recent quarters in the face of inflationary pressures and supply chain logjams.
The Western manufacturers continue to struggle with profitability, and their difficulties will persist unless they reduce the pace at which larger turbines are announced and developed, according to Lars Bondo Krogsgaard, who until late 2022 was onshore CEO at Siemens Gamesa.
Turbine-makers have shot themselves in the foot twice over, Krogsgaard said in a recent LinkedIn post — first, by loading more development costs onto their already struggling businesses, and second, by pursuing larger machines over selling more units of existing turbines in the search for volume.
"The expensive race for rapid and steep LCOE improvements through bigger and bigger machines in which manufacturers are currently engaged is neither financially sustainable, nor necessary considering the higher cost of alternative power generation sources and the surging demand for clean energy," Krogsgaard said. "Manufacturers should show some guts and step away from the nonsensical race to the bottom, and they should insist that products must have longer shelf-lives to drive meaningful unit numbers."
Vestas recently produced first power from its new 15-MW V236 machine at a testing facility in Denmark and has already garnered 8 GW worth of orders for the turbine. Siemens Gamesa's largest offering is a 14-MW machine that can be boosted to up to 15 MW, while GE has a prototype of its 14-MW Haliade-X turbine in operation.
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