The Global Wind Industry goes Pear Shaped

Transcription

1 The Global Wind Industry goes Pear Shaped Jim Platts October 2012 GE stops the rush In the early 2000 s all the wing turbine companies were vying with each other to develop bigger and bigger wind turbines. In 2002 GE bought the wind turbine assets of the collapsed Enron and changed the game. They focused on it as a business. In a market growing at over 25% p.a., they realised that the answer was more not bigger. They cancelled their development of bigger machines and focused on re engineering their 1.5MW wind turbine into a reliable workhorse for mass production. 1

2 Platform Technology In 2002 wind turbine companies were just beginning to produce wind turbines of about 1.5MW, for instance with two different sized blades available from the blade manufacturer LM creating 70m or 77m diameter rotors. It was registered that, because of transportation problems, onshore wind turbines could not get much bigger. The effort began to focus on developing technology platforms of about 2MW, for the next decade. The Vestas Platform Because of technology improvements in components, sizes have been able to increase. For instance blades have got longer without getting broader. In 2003 Vestas introduced the V80 80m diameter and 2MW. Now (2012) the family includes the V90, the V100 and the V112, and this last is 3MW. Some 10,000 turbines have been produced and Vestas will guarantee 98% reliability. They installed 5.4GW in

3 Technology development and choice of location give high availability. A 150m diameter 6MW wind turbine can give over 60% capacity factor at northern North Sea sites of over 10m/s mean wind speeds, with over 97% availability. Bigger rotor In moderate winds you want all the energy capture you can get. (UK nuclear power had 59.2% availability in 2010 and has never been higher than 80.1% in 1998.) Higher wind speed 3

4 Market growth After growing at over 25% p.a. for decades, the wind energy industry is suffering from the global downturn and only growing slowly. It build 37GW in 2009, 39.4GW in 2010, 41.7GW in 2011 and it will be about 43GW in Almost all of this is onshore. Offshore remains a small, unstable and difficult market, with quite different drivers in it. Chinese whispers Nothing is as it appears in China. You always need to understand the details. At the end of 2011 China had installed 62.4GW but only 45GW was connected to the grid (WPM Sept 2012, p14). Major wind farms have been sited by vested interests in relatively low wind speed areas. There are no Chinese wind turbines with years of operating experience, no reliability data and word of mouth is that reliability is low. 4

5 Chinese whispers 2 In the rest of the world, for a decade now, wind turbines have been required to have what is called fault ride through control within their control system, to help maintain grid stability in the case of a grid fault occurring. No Chinese machines have this. It has only this year (2012) become a Chinese Government requirement that it is fitted. Chinese whispers 3 In 2009 Shandong province had about 1GW wind energy installed on the system in wind farms of MW size. The grid systems engineers had no idea how wind turbines worked and never looked at weather forecasts and from their point of view these machines were a nightmare, making the grid almost uncontrollable. They asked the wind farm operators and they didn t know how wind turbines worked either and also never looked at weather forecasts. Asked if they could get wind turbine performance data from the SCADA system on the wind farm, they said they did not know how to interrogate the SCADA system. (Dayang Yu, personal communication) My own experience of a Chinese SCADA system on a large wind farm in Inner Mongolia in 2009 was that it was unbelievably crude, recorded things in an uncorrelated way and was almost useless. You could not even plot a power curve for a machine from it. 5

6 Poor geographical and temporal planning Apart from being in some cases 100 s of km from significant load centres, wind farms in Inner Mongolia have a 24hr generation pattern that involves low electricity output in the mornings, when there is a high load requirement, and a high electricity output through the night when there is a low load requirement. Almost everything else on the Chinese system is coal fired and very inefficient to flex to match this. Some of the overnight output from the wind turbines cannot be used and is simply lost. 6

7 There s a hole in my bucket Above everything else, Chinese wind turbines have been sold on name plate capacity, adding the problem of small rotors attached to large generators (thus giving low capacity factors) to the poor siting and low reliability, and so figures for delivered energy are very poor. (WPM July 2012, p33) A drop in orders has reduced all Chinese wind turbine companies activities, with the large companies (Goldwind, Sinovel) selling subsidiaries and laying off staff and facing over 50% profit decline, and others facing extinction. Dongfang Electric, which installed 1,800 turbines in its best year and 949 in 2011, sold 25 in the first quarter of (WPM August 2012, p33) 7

8 And in mine, too. Vestas has been mismanaged for some considerable time, is internally disorganised, is not making money, is shedding staff, replaced all its directors bar its CEO earlier this year and is considered a possible target for a takeover. In America, low cost gas has hit the electricity market, with gas futures as low as $2.27/MMBtu reducing wholesale electricity to $39/MWh in December 2011 versus $89 in the first quarter of Volatility of gas prices is still maintaining the wind turbine market, but something like a $6/MMBtu gas price is needed for wind to compete head to head. (WPM May 2012, p15) Offshore headache Even if Northern Europe does manage to develop the 150GW of offshore wind energy that the EU hopes to see by 2030, this is 8GW a year a market for not more than 2 players. It is very costly to develop a wind turbine platform design for a large (6 7MW m diameter) machine and prove its reliability and then invest in all the factories to manufacture and assemble the components and all the offshore equipment to install them. There is no stability of forward market to make this risk investment worthwhile. 8

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10 Offshore players Offshore, you also have to build the grid. And the tower, foundations and installation become a large part of the story too. The wind turbine itself is a major development investment but is now less than 50% of the total story. Established wind turbine companies are realising that this market is not for them. Clipper and GE have pulled out, as has Korean company Doosan. German company Bard is closing its factory. Vestas has pulled back and is saying it will only develop a 7MW machine if it has a a partner, but has been talking to Mitsubishi (who could do the electricity grid side) for months with no outcome so far. Gamesa is hovering, as is the French company Areva. Only Siemens is actively playing and they are placing work in long established centres in Denmark. Lifetimes and Capacity Factors We are shutting down power plant that had 40 year lives and replacing it with wind turbine systems with 20 year lives. This is crazy. In particular, offshore, the grid, and the towers and foundations, approach 2/3 the cost. These need to have 40 year lives at least. The capacity factors of the wind turbines determines the capacity factor of all the downstream systems investment. It needs to be as high as possible over