At the recently concluded 2018 China Electric Power Development Planning Forum, Xie Changjun, former deputy general manager of China Guodian Corporation, conducted an in-depth analysis and outlook on the future development trends of renewable energy in China.

The Chinese government has proposed that the proportion of non-hydropower renewable energy in the electricity consumption of the whole society should reach 9% in 2020. In 2017, wind power and photovoltaic power generation accounted for only 6.5% of the total power generation, and there is still considerable progress to achieve the goal. space. Relevant plans show that from 2016 to 2020, more than 79 million kilowatts of new wind power were put into production in my country, which will reach 210 million kilowatts in 2020, including about 5 million kilowatts of offshore wind power; more than 68 million kilowatts of solar power were newly put into production, and it will reach 1.1 by 2020. More than 100 million kilowatts.

It can be seen from this that in the future, the national policy of restricting coal power and supporting the development of renewable energy will not change; the total amount of hydropower resources is restricted, development costs continue to rise, and future growth space is limited; nuclear power construction is restricted by the overall social atmosphere, and development There are uncertainties; biomass, tidal, geothermal and other power generation forms have a small development scale due to various reasons such as resources, costs, and technical limitations. Taking into account various factors, wind power and photovoltaics will be the main force in future low-carbon development and energy transformation. military.

Wind power development pays more attention to the synchronization of scale and efficiency

In the past few years, the power rationing situation has intensified due to various reasons such as overcapacity of electricity and the mismatch between the development speed of power supply and power grid, which has become the biggest bottleneck hindering the healthy development of renewable energy in China. In 2017, the country abandoned 55 billion kWh of water, 41.9 billion kWh of wind, and 7.3 billion kWh of light, totaling more than 100 billion kWh.

Faced with the problem of power rationing, wind power investors have become more rational, slowed down their progress, and begun to shift from focusing on development scale and speed to focusing on development quality and efficiency. In 2017, 15 GW of new wind power grid-connected capacity was added, a new low in the past five years. It is expected that in the next three years, China's wind power market will maintain rational scale growth, with an average of about 15 to 18 GW of onshore wind power added every year and about 1 GW of offshore wind power added every year, taking into account both incremental scale and stock benefits.

The wind power and photovoltaic consumption environment will be greatly improved

The National Energy Administration proposed that the wind and light curtailment rates in the "Three North" regions should be controlled within 5% in 2020, and that there should be basically no power curtailment in other areas. The State Grid held a press conference in January 2017 and clearly stated that it would strive to effectively alleviate the contradiction between wind and light abandonment from 2017 to 2018, and fundamentally solve the problem of new energy consumption by 2020, and control the wind and light abandonment rate within 5%, and Proposed 20 specific measures to promote the consumption of new energy.

Photovoltaics will take the lead in achieving grid parity

Thanks to the continuous advancement of equipment manufacturing technology, the cost of photovoltaic projects has dropped by 90% in the past 10 years. Photovoltaic electricity prices are also declining year by year. Since this year, centralized photovoltaics have dropped to 0.50-0.70 yuan/kWh, while distributed photovoltaics have dropped to 0.32 yuan/kWh. In March this year, the lowest winning electricity price for the eight projects in the third batch of photovoltaic front-runner bases only differed from the local benchmark electricity price for desulfurization coal-fired power by 3.6 to 12.5 cents/kWh. Compared with photovoltaics, the cost of wind power development is not declining as fast, and wind power will go through a relatively slow process to achieve grid parity.

Offshore wind power begins to enter the stage of large-scale development

In the next 2 to 3 years, China will usher in a period of great development of offshore wind power, and the development process will be significantly accelerated.

At present, many coastal provinces have announced their “13th Five-Year Plan” offshore wind power development plans. Among them, Jiangsu Province plans to start construction of 3.5 GW of offshore wind power by 2020; Fujian Province plans to start construction of 13.3 GW of offshore wind power and put into operation 2 GW in 2020; Guangdong Province plans to start construction of 12 GW of offshore wind power by 2020 and put into operation 2 GW above. By the end of 2020, China's offshore wind power installed capacity is expected to exceed 5 GW.

In the future, the main battlefield for offshore wind power will expand from the offshore intertidal zone within 10 kilometers to the offshore waters of 30 to 40 kilometers; from the Jiangsu coast to Fujian, Zhejiang, Hainan, Shandong, Hebei and other coastal provinces. In the future, offshore wind power projects will transform from small-scale tests and demonstrations of 50 to 150MW to large-scale contiguous development of more than 300MW. At present, 2.5-4MW wind turbines are the main models of offshore wind turbines; the new units in the next three years will still be mainly 4-5MW; after 2020, the technology of 5-6MW units will gradually mature and become the main models; 8MW and above Prototype testing of models has begun; 4MW units will still retain a certain market space. Large-diameter single-pipe piles will remain the mainstream construction technology for intertidal and offshore wind power; after 2025, China will begin to gradually explore deep-sea wind power development, and floating foundations will be the focus of research. Technological progress will bring room for reduction in offshore wind power construction costs; the current unit kilowatt cost of China's offshore wind power is between 16,000 and 20,000 yuan, which is far lower than the 3,000 to 4,000 euros of European offshore projects (contract 21,900 to 29,200 yuan).

Wind turbine technology progress will open up a broader market space

In the next five years, with the technological upgrading of the wind turbine manufacturing industry, the mainstream models of onshore wind power will be more efficient wind turbines of 2 to 3 MW and above. It has become an inevitable trend for wind turbines to develop from small and medium capacity to large and intelligent. In plain areas with low wind speed and high shear, by raising the tower height (from 80 meters to 120 meters or even 140 meters), the wind speed can be increased by 0.5 to 0.8 m/s, using China's advanced 3MW-class, 140-meter large blade model , the annual average utilization hours can be increased from 2,000 hours to more than 2,500 hours, and technological dividends will bring broader development space to the wind power industry.

Replacing old ones with new ones will create new opportunities in the wind power market

European wind power operators generally start to consider upgrading the original equipment and transforming the original equipment about 15 years after the wind farm is put into operation. The nearly 3 GW of wind power projects put into operation in China in the early stage will reach or be close to their life cycle in 2020; the more than 40 GW of wind power projects put into operation before the end of 2010 will gradually usher in a replacement peak period in the five years after 2020, and the market space is very broad. . As the technology of large-capacity and high-efficiency units continues to advance, the newly transformed units will become more profitable and will become a new profit growth point for wind power operators in the future.

At the same time, it will also give birth to a third-party operation and maintenance market, and professional operation and maintenance companies will usher in important business opportunities.

Paying attention to environmental protection, the focus of wind power development will return to the "Three North" regions

At present, the "Three North" regions with severe power shortages will usher in a more rational and healthy development environment as the power market gradually improves. More than ten cross-regional UHV transmission projects planned and constructed by the power grid have been intensively put into operation in recent years, providing technical conditions for cross-regional wind power consumption. After the quota system is officially implemented, cross-regional power transmission will become the main way to consume wind power in the "Three North" regions. By 2020, the situation of wind curtailment and power curtailment will be greatly improved. Large blade unit technology will break the traditional IEC wind farm classification standards and improve the unit load through optimized control strategies. Large blade units can also be applied in the "Three North" high wind speed areas, and the economic benefits of wind power projects will be even more impressive. It is foreseeable that from 2020 to 2025, with the improvement of land resources, environmental protection, and the improvement of the power shortage environment in the north, China's main battlefield for wind power development will return to the "Three North" regions from the central, eastern and southern regions.

In the central, eastern and southern regions of China with good vegetation coverage, some wind farms did not pay attention to soil and water conservation and vegetation restoration, causing a certain degree of ecological damage. The environmental problems brought about by wind power development have attracted great attention from government departments, and some provinces have suspended the development of wind power because of this. In the future, the central government will have stricter requirements for ecological and environmental protection of projects. At the same time, the administrative review and approval of completed environmental protection acceptance will be changed to the project legal entity's own acceptance and social supervision. The owner will bear greater environmental risks and legal responsibilities. In order to reduce their own development risks, developers will also pay more attention to project environmental protection and vegetation restoration to achieve coordinated growth of corporate and environmental benefits.