By Jin Weichen & Xu Xiaoli

“Gold fever”in offshore wind power industry

By Jin Weichen & Xu Xiaoli

Entering into the twenty-first century, with the increasing demand for environmental protection and over exploitation of non-renewable energy resources, wind energy has gradually become a clean spring of clean and renewable energy favored by people.

The increasing use of offshore wind energy will drive the related industries in the industry chain to develop. The operation of offshore wind power industry is depending on the offshore wind power investment enterprises as the leading and driving force, and its total investment largely determines the scale of wind power project and prof i ts of related enterprise; supposing the offshore wind power equipment manufacturing industry as hardware supply, supply of wind power equipment in broad sense should include the wind machine and equipment supply and the supply of related offshore wind power project equipment. Generally speaking, the main operation lines of offshore wind power industry chain are: wind resource evaluation -wind farm planning-wind farm constructiongrid connected power generation-wind farm operation and maintenance.

With increase of project and enhancement of technical difficulty, the demand for offshore wind power project equipment has increased, which includes: crane ship / platform, drought fan transport ship, wind power installation vessel / platform, wind power operation and maintenance ship, cable laying vessel, supply ship, survey ship and a series of engineering ship. Amongthem, there is no obvious difference of the function between the crane ship, drought fan ship, cable laying vessel, survey ship and other marine vessels, which can be used in common after proper modification of original engineering ship. In addition, offshore wind power engineering equipment also includes special vessels aimed at development of offshore wind farm, which includes mainly two categories: offshore wind power installation ships and wind power operation and maintenance ships.

Depending on the characteristics of the abundant wind resources, development cost reduction, offshore wind power is becoming an important direction of wind power development. According to statistics, at present, the global offshore wind power developed is about 25GW, and the global offshore wind power to be developed is about 140GW, whilst the number of offshore wind power installation vessel is far less than the demand. Similar to wind power installation vessel, the offshore wind farm is further and further away from the shore, the ocean situation has become more and more complex, the requirements for wind farm maintenance work will be increasingly higher and higher, which has put forward new requirements for the technology and efficiency of wind power operation and maintenance equipment.

Judging from the global offshore wind farms constructed and under construction, the following characteristics will become clear in the future: the development of deepwater wind farm will come soon, floating fan machine will emerge at right time; the single function will be eliminated, the wind power installation will develop towards the organic whole; leg positioning needs to be improved, and the function of operation and maintenance will gradually become comprehensive.