China has made a big deal of the massive numbers with respect to new offshore wind farm capacity installed last year. It is very rare however to get information about how much these wind farms produce, but a recent announcement gives a glimpse:
China's first gigawatt-scale wind project surpasses 1 billion kilowatt-hours
The total power generation of China's first gigawatt-scale offshore wind farm has surpassed one billion kilowatt-hours (kWh). The Shapa project was first connected to the grid at full capacity on December 25, 2021, with a total installed capacity of 2 million kilowatts. Since then, it has produced more than 1 billion kWh of clean electricity, enough to supply 500,000 families and greatly reduce coal usage.
If you count backwards to the date of full capacity, just over 3 months ago, you get a capacity factor of 22% or less, which seems extremely low - and frankly, quite useless when compared to the capacity factors of most onshore wind farms.
The very first Chinese offshore wind farm gave a glimpse of similar numbers several years ago, when it published a press release about its first 100 million kWh, which amounted to a capacity factor of 18% of so over the period since installation (I can’t find the links now, it’s very old, but it struck me as notable, and this week’s parallel press release reminded me that nothing seems to have changed).
I know the wind resource is not as good as in the North Sea or other favorable sites, but one has to ask the question: why bother?
One of many reasons I ignore Chinese offshore wind
Density of population in the areas where the electricity is needed can be an answer. They can build gigawatts of cheap onshore wind in Inner Mongolia but despite the biggest "supergrid" in the world, it will be extremely costly to bring it to Shenzhen or Canton. Much more than close offshore wind with low-ish performance.
Another remark is that teething issues are not uncommon even for our North Sea wind farms, so drawing conclusions on the offshore wind rationale of the most populous country in the world after 3 months in operation may be a bit premature.
Finally, when I worked there 15 years ago, they were launching one new commercial scale coal-fired plant every 3 days in the country because of the growth in energy demand, so their answer (when discussing maxi-hydro at the time) was that it was not one source of energy or another, but rather that anything else than coal that can be built should be built.