Despite plans to double its capacity by 2030, the United Kingdom, which now leads the world in offshore wind installations, will soon lose its title to China.
The analyst firm FTI Consulting expects China’s cumulative offshore capacity to pull ahead of the UK after 2021.
That year, China is expected to have almost 10.9 gigawatts (GW) of cumulative capacity, compared to less than 10.4GW in the UK.
China has been catching up with the UK since 2017, when Chinese offshore wind installations breached the 1.0GW mark.
From 2019 onward, FTI Consulting expects China to install 2.0GW a year, rising to 4.0GW annually by 2025.
By contrast, the UK is not expected to reach 2.0GW a year until 2024.
China’s advancement comes as the UK completed a number of prominent projects in 2018, including the world’s largest operational offshore wind farm, Walney Extension, which clocks in at 659 megawatts (MW), plus the 573MW Race Bank and 400MW Rampion plants.
Pointing to the scale of China’s ambitions, this month Jiangsu Province in eastern China was reported to have approved 24 offshore wind projects with a total capacity of 6.7GW, all due to come online before the end of 2020.
The US$18 billion investment is part of a plan called “Three Gorges on Sea” that aims to develop 10GW of offshore wind in Jiangsu, reports said.
The Jiangsu projects approved this month are nearly six times as much as the 1.2GW of offshore wind power that China installed nationally in 2017, based on figures from the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).
They also represent more than twice as much capacity as the whole country had installed offshore at the end of 2017, which GWEC put at almost 2.8GW.
Jiangsu leads offshore wind development in China, installing half of all new projects in 2017, with further capacity being split between the Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Hebei Fitch SolutionsProvinces.
In the coming years, China is set not only to dominate offshore wind, but also to become the largest market in the world for wind generally, according to a forecast from Fitch Solutions released last November.
China will account for more than 45 per cent of the 465 gigawatts of capacity additions Fitch Solutions forecasts for the wind sector between the end of 2017 and 2027.
“The country has already emerged as one of the fastest expanding offshore wind markets in the world,” said Fitch Solutions.
“We note that China has a national growth target of 5.0GW by 2020, but the cumulative 2020 provincial-level targets in Jiangsu (3500MW), Fujian (2000MW) and Guangdong (2000MW) already exceed the national target.”
As China races ahead of the already rapidly growing UK market to lead in offshore wind, other countries will find it hard to keep up, said Søren Lassen, an offshore wind analyst at Wood Mackenzie.
“Today Germany is a close second to the UK in Europe, but we expect the UK to extend its lead over Germany over the coming 10 years,” he said.
“While we do not expect other markets to overtake the UK or China, the future build-out of offshore wind will be more dispersed as established markets are picking up the pace and new markets emerge both inside and outside Europe.”
