MingYang Completes China's First Floating Offshore Wind Platform

Turbine manufacturer MingYang Smart Energy has launched the first floating offshore wind tower ever built in China. The unit has been fully assembled at the company's factory in Yangjiang, Guangzhou, a small port city about 130 miles southwest of Hong Kong.  

Movement control technology has a significant role in the development of viable offshore floating wind systems, MingYang said - particularly in environments subjected to typhoons and extreme weather, like the South China Sea. Like all of the company's designs, the new floating turbine is built to be highly typhoon-resistant. 

"The MySE5.5MW floating turbine is a great example of what we can achieve by combining our existing offshore expertise to shape the integrated fully coupled time-domain simulation and modelling of [the] turbine-floater-mooring system," the company said in a statement. 

The first prototype will be towed out and installed at the China Three Gorges Yangxi Shapa III offshore wind farm as a technology demonstrator for testing. It will operate alongside 31 of Yangjiang's 6.5 megawatt bottom-fixed offshore wind turbines. 

As of the end of 2020, Chinese utilities have built out about six gigawatts of offshore wind capacity - about 95 percent of the total in all of Asia, according to Rystad Energy. Local manufacturers like MingYang control the majority of the supply chain for Chinese offshore wind developments, the consultancy said.