In the era of parity, the three major trends of China's wind power development

Subsidies will inevitably put forward higher requirements for wind power enterprises, improve efficiency will be the main theme of the "parity era", and "iteration" will become the core keyword of the industry.

Based on this, we believe that the future development of wind power will continue three iterative directions: product iteration, technology iteration, and model iteration.

02 Product iteration: big generation small

Cost is the core indicator of the energy industry, so reducing cost and increasing efficiency is the core direction of wind power development.

The energy efficiency improvement of wind power mainly depends on the large-scale of fans. Although the cost of large fans is high, the power generation is high, which can significantly spread the cost of fan power generation. At present, the wind power industry's most cutting-edge fan enterprises have launched 6-7MW large fans, and wind turbines are developing in the direction of "large capacity".

The large-scale development of China's wind power industry should be calculated from 2008, when China's wind power industry technology is not mature, resulting in early units with small power, poor quality, low cost performance, and even a lot of micro-fans under 1MW.

Looking back in history, before 2012, China's new wind turbines were almost all under 2MW, until 2016, more than 2.5MW units began to gradually become popular.

The installation of wind turbines is not complete, but also needs to pay long-term maintenance costs. Early immature technology led to poor unit performance and high maintenance costs, so small fans are not cost-effective. Many operating companies found that the small fans installed at the beginning could not even earn back the maintenance and operation costs, so they simply suspended maintenance and abandoned them into "orphan units".

And those who are "lucky" to operate the unit actually have many problems, such as equipment aging, wind sheet fracture, speed down the tower and so on. Even some units have difficulties in maintenance, early imported technology is immature, and the general rate of parts is low, which leads to a lot of manpower and material resources for maintenance.

Despite the technical defects, but the early wind turbine is not useless, early layout to help enterprises grab the excellent tuyere point, in the wind power technology more mature today, those excellent tuyere point is expected to be replaced into a larger unit, providing new increments.

According to the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, the cumulative transformation and decommissioning capacity of wind turbines in the country will exceed 60 million kilowatts in 2021-2030. Among them, 20 million kilowatts will be completed by 2025, and units below 1.5MW will be the main objects of retirement or transformation.

With the laying of the power grid and the promotion of the "large generation of small" units, China's wind power industry is expected to enter the golden period of double increase in operating time and installed capacity, and wind power operation efficiency may be significantly improved.

"Replacing small with large" is a comprehensive product iteration of China's wind power industry, mainly for the upgrading of backward units. Under this trend, in addition to the wind turbine manufacturing enterprises will benefit, the early layout of wind farm operators are also expected to profit. Such as Longyuan Power, Datang New energy, Huaneng International, Guodian Power and so on.

Large-scale wind turbines will become the core direction of product iteration in the wind power industry.

03 Technology iteration: semi-direct drive is the future direction

In just 12 years, China's wind power industry has evolved from high costs to an era of parity. It can be said that the development of China's wind power industry is extremely rapid, and it is also a few industries that can have international competitiveness.

By category, the wind power industry is divided into onshore wind and offshore wind.

Looking at the development trend of the industry, the current onshore wind power technology has been extremely mature, the technical threshold is very low, the competition is fierce, and it is about to enter the era of parity. In contrast, the offshore wind power market has a large potential, with a small area, high wind speed, large electricity, and high economic benefits. Due to special geographical environmental factors, offshore wind turbines have certain technical threshold requirements for wind turbines, and are expected to become the focus of global wind turbine manufacturing enterprises in the future.

From a technical point of view, there are three types of wind turbines: doubly-fed, direct drive and semi-direct drive. Among them, doubly-fed and direct drive are the mature mainstream routes, while semi-direct drive is the direction of future wind power technology iteration.

In terms of structure, the biggest difference between doublefed technology and direct drive technology is whether the "gear box" is connected.