Wind power: Technology, industry and industrial chain

Continuous cost reduction is a key factor for wind power to move away from policy subsidies to parity, according to IRENA data, benefiting from the scale effect of parts and installation and maintenance costs fell, in 2020 onshore wind has become the world's lowest cost renewable energy.

2. Development of wind power industry

The development history of China's wind power industry has been accompanied by several fluctuations in subsidies and power grid absorption capacity.

Before 2010, under the continuous promotion of the policy, the wind power industry grew rapidly. In 2010, the newly installed capacity reached 18.9GW, an increase of 37.1% year-on-year, reaching the peak of the first stage. However, wind farms were mostly built in the three northern regions, far away from the southeast coastal areas with large power consumption. In addition, the supporting energy storage and UHV were not perfect at that time, so there was a serious phenomenon of wind abandonment, and the wind farm was built with money, but it was useless. So the policy is certainly tightened, since the construction is not put into use, it is not encouraged to build, after the decline in new installed capacity, the abandonment rate has improved, coupled with the factor of the decline in the cost of fans, the installed capacity has begun to rise again.

With subsidies and wind abandonment, the development of China's wind power industry shows the characteristics of cyclical fluctuations: subsidies to stimulate the outbreak of installed capacity - insufficient consumption capacity - policy restrictions on installed capacity - consumption improvement - recovery of new installed capacity - subsidy decline - grab installation outbreak. Until the complete withdrawal of onshore wind power subsidies in 2021, China's onshore wind power has achieved parity online, and wind power investment has gradually entered the stage of market-oriented development.

Although onshore wind power has come out, offshore wind power is still moving forward on the road to cost reduction, although in 2022 offshore wind power subsidies are also completely withdrawn, but local subsidies began to take over, Guangdong, Shandong and other places introduced local subsidy policies to support the development of offshore wind power industry.

Compared with onshore wind power, offshore wind power has significant natural advantages. First of all, the wind speed at sea is generally large, and the wind speed is stable, and the fan utilization rate is high; Secondly, we mentioned above that under the trend of large-scale fan, the longer the blades are, the higher the tower barrel is, the more difficult it is to transport land transportation, and the sea transportation restrictions are less, so the single capacity of offshore wind power should be larger; Finally, offshore wind power is close to the southeastern coastal power areas, which is easy to consume energy. There is also an ecological factor that cannot be quantified, the ecological problem of wind power generation is that it may disturb birds, and the row of fans on the land may accidentally injure birds. Some countries in Europe take this problem seriously, reducing the installed amount of wind power, but offshore wind power can alleviate the impact on birds.

However, due to the complex environment at sea, maintenance costs and other restrictions, unit design needs to consider salt spray corrosion, wave load, typhoons and other constraints, installation and maintenance costs are higher than on land, but also consider the impact of shipping, military management, the current global offshore wind power development is still in its infancy. But the more the initial stage represents the greater the potential, the key is to be able to develop, do not be cool in the initial stage, anyway, we are still very optimistic about the development prospects of offshore wind power.

According to GWEC forecast, the next five years (2022-2026) global wind power installed capacity of 557GW, a compound annual growth rate of 6.6%. Among them, the growth rate of offshore wind power was 28.12%, accounting for less than 10% of the new installed capacity of wind power increased to 24%, if you only look at offshore wind power, it is a high-growth industry worthy of attention.

China's wind power industry started later than Europe, in terms of cost, especially technology is not dominant, overall, China's wind power manufacturing enterprises mainly from the domestic market, foreign market share is very limited, overseas market demand is mainly met by European wind power manufacturers. Therefore, the demand of China's wind power market is more worthy of attention than the global demand, and the forecast figures are of course a little false, we look at a relatively realistic policy.

On March 1, 2022, China's coastal areas offshore wind power planning and support policies have been introduced, the "14th Five-Year Plan" period of major provinces offshore wind power installed capacity reached 73.45GW, about 8 times the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, China's offshore wind power installed capacity accounted for half of the world, the growth rate is expected to be higher.