China explores use of foreign expertise to speed up deep-sea wind power development
- Chinese firms can avoid the mistakes made by European companies by forming partnerships, says Ben Backwell, CEO of Global Wind Energy Council
- China on course to become the world’s largest offshore wind power market in next four years
China is poised to overtake Germany and the UK as the world’s largest offshore wind power producer by 2022, but it needs foreign know-how to cut costs and boost competitiveness, according to the head of Global Wind Energy Council.
“We think the best way for China to achieve that is to have foreign participation to enable the transfer of best practices in the European market,” said chief executive Ben Backwell in an interview.
Cost reduction is crucial to the nascent industry segment’s growth because from January 1, all large-scale wind farm development rights allocation in China will be subject to power price competitive bidding, with power price commanding a 40 per cent weighting in a developer’s competitiveness assessment. This will effectively end subsidies to developers via higher guaranteed power prices that have been in place for a decade.
Backwell said Chinese developers could learn from their European peers, especially in the more technologically challenging deep water areas and avoid the “steep learning curve and mistakes” they made along the way.
The council is backed by 1,500 equipment manufacturers, project developers, parts suppliers, financiers, power distributors and research members from over 80 nations.