Offshore wind had a great year in 2021, with over 21 gigawatts installed. if you read CleanTechnica you may have heard of several offshore wind installations in the North Sea, but the offshore action was in China, where 17 gigawatts (GW) of new offshore wind energy was installed last year. That’s about 80% of the global total.
There’s a reason for that. According to canary mediaIn 2014, China introduced a feed-in tariff of 850 yuan ($134) for every megawatt hour supplied to the grid by offshore wind farms. That incentive expired on January 1, 2022, so there was a frenzy to install new offshore wind turbines before the closing date. China now has 26 GW of offshore wind installed, the most of any country and nearly half the world’s cumulative capacity.
In 2007, China installed its first offshore turbine, a single 1.5 megawatt machine, on an oil platform in the northeastern Bohai Sea. Three years later, the country commissioned its first commercial offshore project. This year, the country’s total installations are expected to fall by several gigawatts as the feed-in tariff has expired, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in its latest wind report, while installations in the UK and Taiwan are expected to increase. Despite the expiry of the feed-in tariff, China is expected to add more offshore wind energy annually than any other country until at least 2035, the last year covered in the Bloomberg forecast.
By comparison, the United States plans to add just 6 GW of offshore wind power by 2029, a rather tepid target compared to what other countries are doing. According to the US Energy Information Administrationmost of which along the east coast of the USwhere the ocean depths are shallower than along the west coast.
Offshore wind is attractive because the winds are more constant at sea than closer to the coast. That’s good for calculating how profitable a project will be, because developers can more accurately predict the performance of those turbines. On the other hand, transmission lines have to be longer, which costs more money, and the maintenance costs far out at sea can also be higher.
Critics like to criticize China for its firm embrace of thermal generation, largely through the burning of coal, but that country invests more money in renewable energy than other countries, just as it leads the world in electric vehicle production. Looking to the future, the emphasis on clean energy should help it maintain its competitive advantage as one of the world’s major industrial powers.
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