A total of 46 new wind turbines were installed at offshore locations in China during 2012, with most destined for inter-tidal projects close to shore.
Of last year's 127MW in new offshore capacity, 113MW – or 89% - focused on inter-tidal wind farms, according to data released by the Chinese Wind Energy Association (CWEA).
CWEA has tracked the turbine models installed by developers in 2012. They were:
- one United Power 3MW turbine installed by Guodian at Binhai offshore wind farm in Shandong province
- one United Power 6MW turbine also installed by Guodian, at Weifang pilot wind farm, Shandong
- one XEMC 5MW turbine installed by Fujian Investment & Development at Fuqing, Fujian province
- two CSIC Haizhuang 5MW turbines installed by Longyuan Power at the inter-tidal project in Rudong, Jiangsu
- Longyuan Power also installed 20 Goldwind 2.5MW turbines at the 150MW Rudong inter-tidal demonstration project, followed by a further 20 Goldwind 2.5MW turbines. The latter formed an extension to the Rudong project.
- Yangtze New Energies Development installed one Goldwind 3MW turbine at an inter-tidal pilot project in Xiangshui, Jiangsu.
As previously reported, China had an offshore wind capacity of 389.6MW at the end of 2012. The majority of this capacity – 261.5MW – is inter-tidal. Recently, China appears to have retreated from planning further inter-tidal projects in favour of offshore wind farms of 300MW+ further from shore.
Last year, China ranked third in the world for new offshore installations, behind the UK and Belgium. To date, the top three providers of turbines for China's offshore wind fleet have been Sinovel (56 units) , Goldwind (44) and Siemens (21). Seven other manufacturers have a much smaller number of offshore turbines installed.
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