Will the price of onshore wind power be a good medicine to save the industry's profits?

Mingyang Intelligence (601615.SH) said at the performance presentation meeting on September 18 that the decline in revenue and net profit in the first half of this year was mainly due to the decline in offshore wind power delivery and the proportion of shipments. Next, it will continue to improve the level of research and development and speed up offshore wind power shipments to ensure its gross profit margin.

Sany Heavy Energy, which officially entered the field of offshore wind power this year, also proposed that the gross profit margin of offshore wind power projects is expected to be higher than that of onshore.

At present, the head wind power machine manufacturers have laid out offshore wind power. Behind this is the prospect of offshore wind power development certainty is clear enough. The 14th Five-Year Plan for Renewable Energy Development proposes to optimize the layout of offshore wind power and carry out far-reaching offshore wind power planning.

"At present, our forecast for offshore wind power grid-connected capacity is still considerable." Sun Wenxuan, general manager of Ruixuan Consulting, told Shell Financial reporters that the grid-connected capacity of offshore wind power is expected to reach 8.7GW in 2023, and 9.6GW and 10.6GW respectively in the next two years. The overall scale is still large.

onshore wind price competition , head manufacturers gather in offshore wind

"The show will begin." Chen Weiguo, vice president of Sany Heavy Energy (688349.SH) Research Institute, quoted data from the General Institute of Water Regulation in March this year, saying that China's offshore wind power theory can be developed by 4.5 billion kilowatts, and the medium-term technology can be developed by 0.3 billion kilowatts. Up to now, the cumulative development is only 30 million kilowatts, and there is a lot of room for development in the future. Therefore, the development of offshore wind power should adhere to long-term doctrine.

Sun Wenxuan told Shell Finance reporter that the overall unit price of offshore wind power projects is still higher than that of onshore wind power. In the context of fierce price competition in the past few years, companies that only engage in onshore wind power will face greater pressure, and some companies choose to expand overseas or offshore business to make up for gross profit margins. At present, the top ten domestic wind turbine manufacturers have released offshore wind power product pedigree.

This includes the rapid rise of Sany Heavy Energy in the 2020 rush. The company released 9MW offshore wind turbines at the end of March this year, which means that Sany can officially enter the field of offshore wind power. According to the company's introduction, its first offshore wind turbine is designed for the sea area north of the Yangtze River. The impeller has a diameter of 230 meters and a sweeping area of more than 40000 square meters, which is equivalent to 6 standard football fields. At full power, one rotation of the impeller can generate 20 degrees of electricity.

Although in the current business plan of Sany, the priority of offshore wind power is lower than that of onshore and overseas, the company also pointed out that the gross profit margin of offshore projects is expected to be higher than that of onshore.

"at sea, according to the different conditions of offshore and offshore, a series of models will be launched, and has begun to gradually participate in the bidding of offshore wind power projects." Li Qiang, chief engineer of Sany Heavy Energy (688349.SH), said at the performance presentation meeting at the end of August that the company has set up an offshore marketing team. At present, it is mainly located in coastal provinces north of the Yangtze River, and is negotiating with many coastal provinces such as Shandong, Hebei, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Guangdong, etc., and strive to achieve a breakthrough in orders as soon as possible. In the future, we will gain a competitive advantage through a differentiated strategy, and will reduce the cost of electricity through our own cost advantage to create value for customers.

shell financial reporters learned that as of the end of June 2023, trinity can order 16.31GW in hand, all of which are land orders.

sun wenxuan told reporters that according to its understanding, trinity was able to participate in the centralized bidding for the 16GW offshore wind turbine framework of the state power investment in August this year, and the quotation was quite competitive. "it should be said that the group level attaches enough importance to offshore wind power and very much hopes to get the order for sea wind".

another wind turbine manufacturer Yunda (300772.SZ), which has accelerated its market share in recent years, will start the development of offshore wind turbines in 2021 and win the first offshore wind power project in August 2022-Guodian Zhejiang Ningbo Xiangshan No.1 (Phase II) 500000 kW Sea Wind Project.

Yunda Co., Ltd. has set the strategic policy of offshore wind power as "based on Zhejiang and distributed throughout the country", and has successively invested in the construction of offshore wind power assembly bases in Taiping Bay, Dalian and Dongtou, Wenzhou. Yunda's 2023 semi-annual report shows that during the reporting period, the company acquired the 250MW offshore wind power project in Zhuanghe, Dalian City, Liaoning Province. The company's first batch of "sea breeze" series 9MW units have been installed, and the main design work of 15MW sea breeze units has been completed.

prospect determination, large-scale trend

"In the first half of 2023, the construction of offshore wind power projects will accelerate significantly, and the trend of a new round of competition and allocation in various provinces and the development of state-managed sea areas will be clear, ushering in new opportunities for offshore wind power development." Yunda shares said in the semi-annual report.

From a policy perspective, the outlook for offshore wind power is clear enough.

According to data from the National Energy Administration, in the first half of this year, the new grid-connected capacity of offshore wind power nationwide was 1.1 million kilowatts. As of the end of June 2023, the cumulative installed capacity of offshore wind power nationwide reached 31.46 million kilowatts.

The "14th Five-Year Plan for Renewable Energy Development" proposes to optimize the layout of offshore wind power, carry out far-reaching offshore wind power planning, promote large-scale offshore development and deep-sea demonstration development, and focus on the construction of five offshore wind power base clusters in Shandong Peninsula, Yangtze River Delta, Southern Fujian, Eastern Guangdong and Beibu Gulf.

According to the Global Wind Energy Council GWEC analysis, global offshore wind capacity additions are expected to more than quadruple by 2027, reaching 35.5GW by 2022. Between 2023 and 2027, the global installed capacity of offshore wind power will be close to 130GW, and the compound annual growth rate of offshore wind power in the next five years can reach 14.5.

The trend of large-scale wind turbines is also sweeping the field of offshore wind power.

in January this year, mingyang intelligence released MySE18.X-28X, the world's largest offshore wind turbine with 18 megawatts, which can generate 80 million degrees of electricity throughout the year. On the same day, Mingyang Intelligence in Shanwei Guangdong East Floating Marine Energy Intelligent Building Base offline the world's largest MySE16.X-260 floating offshore wind turbine.

In July this year, the world's first 16 MW super-capacity offshore wind turbine jointly developed by Three Gorges Group and Goldwind Technology was successfully connected to the grid in Fujian offshore wind farm. The unit can generate more than 66 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per 34.2 kW of rotation, which is said to meet the daily electricity consumption of 36000 families of three for a year.

Larger impellers and higher towers of wind turbines are continuing to drive down the cost of wind power. Yunda shares proposed that the offer for offshore wind turbines in November 2022 was down nearly 50% from 2020. In 2022, the main models of land wind bidding will be concentrated at about 6MW, and the largest onshore models for large base projects will reach 8.XMW, with the longest impeller diameter exceeding 200m. In 2022, 12 new offshore wind turbines will be announced to be rolled off the production line, gradually forming large-capacity echelon sequences such as 10MW, 16MW and 18MW platforms.

But the ever-changing iteration speed also leads to thinking about how the industry can develop safely and healthily.

The State Grid Energy Research Institute has previously written an article on the key issues of China's offshore wind power development during the "14th Five-Year Plan". China's offshore wind power started relatively late, and commercial operation of offshore wind farms was mostly after 2015. In the initial stage of operation, quality problems occurred frequently. In the past two years, the new large-capacity units have been put into operation intensively, and the reliability still needs time to test. If quality problems occur during large-scale and rapid development, they will face great losses.