Mingyang, China's largest private wind turbine manufacturer, is roiling the global offshore wind market by announcing plans to develop the world's largest floating wind turbine. While competitors in the United States and Europe struggle with rising expense and policy rollbacks, China's offshore wind power is emerging as the "center of the energy transition," backed by technology and price competitiveness.
On the 22nd local time, Bloomberg News said Mingyang unveiled a 50-megawatt (MW) floating wind turbine the previous day at an industry conference in Beijing. A floating wind turbine is anchored rather than fixed by driving pillars into the seabed. Because the turbine floats on the surface, it can be installed in deeper, more distant waters than fixed-bottom types, improving generation efficiency.
The floating wind turbine unveiled by Mingyang is nearly twice the size of the largest model currently in commercial operation. Featuring a "double-ended structure" with rotors (blades) mounted on both sides to maximize efficiency, the facility is slated for mass production starting next year. According to Chair Zhang Chuanwei, it will be produced at a Guangdong plant, with Phase 1 output at 50 units per year and, upon Phase 2 expansion, up to 150 units. The target price is under 10,000 yuan per kilowatt (kW) (about 2 million won). That is one-fifth of Europe's current level and one-third of China's average.
For now, the global offshore wind market is being held back by policy. In particular, the United States is seeing project cancellations and delays amid former President Donald Trump's stance of curbing the renewable energy industry. In July, Trump called wind power "a scam that kills birds and whales" and said he would not allow wind turbines to be built in the United States.
On top of that, high interest rates and rising raw material prices have not eased, prolonging the slump. According to BloombergNEF data, there were no new orders for offshore wind turbines in other parts of the world over the past two quarters. Ørsted of Denmark, once the global No. 1, also announced in early this month a 25% reduction of its total workforce.
China, by contrast, is the only country to have reached its 2030 target for wind and solar installations in 2024, six years early. Mingyang and other major Chinese wind turbine manufacturers are urging the government to expand new offshore wind installations by 15 gigawatts (GW) annually and are pushing a strategy to more than double production capacity by 2030. Considering that the United Kingdom, the world's second-largest market, has about 15 GW of total offshore wind capacity, the scale is overwhelming. BloombergNEF expects China to install three out of every four new offshore wind turbines worldwide this year.
However, the political risk is significant. As the West tightens its guard against China, Chinese-made turbines are becoming harder for wind power corporations in the United States and Europe to choose. In fact, while Mingyang is aggressively expanding overseas markets, including investing about 1.5 billion pounds (about 2.87 trillion won) in Scotland in the United Kingdom, an offshore wind project in Germany that chose Chinese turbines earlier this year faced criticism and had its contract canceled.
On this, Bloomberg said, "The global energy transition cannot happen without offshore wind, and it is only a matter of time before Western countries readopt this technology," adding, "Chinese corporations are waiting for that moment and preparing to seize the market."