China Beats US to Offshore Wind Development

China's first large-scale offshore wind turbine has been installed in the East China Sea, the People's Daily and the Shangahi Daily are reporting.

The 300-foot, 400-ton turbine is one of 34 that will be installed at the Shanghai Donghai Bridge Offshore Wind Farm Project and is expected to be operational by May 2010.

When that project starts up, China will join a small club of European countries with working offshore wind farms -- Denmark, Ireland, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.

The U.S., whose offshore wind potential exceeds its entire electricity demand, has none -- though 2,000 megawatts of projects have been proposed, and their development appears likely under the Obama administration.

China's first commercial-scale offshore turbines will sit eight miles off the Shanghai shore and have a total installed capacity of 100 megawatts. (Note: In 2007, the China National Offshore Oil Corp started operation of China's first, small-scale "model" offshore wind plant, with a generating capacity of 1.5 megawatts.)

The turbines will generate 260 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually -- enough to power 100,000 homes.

But not for cheap. At about $337 million, the Shanghai project costs twice as much as an onshore plant with the same capacity.

Globally, those high construction costs have been a barrier to development of offshore wind, particularly in the fastest-growing wind markets of the U.S. and China, where wind on land is plentiful and turbine construction is cheap, relatively speaking.

But the offshore resource is too energy advantageous to ignore. Coastal gusts are stronger and steadier than land ones, with great potential to generate higher volumes of electricity. Another plus? The most promising offshore wind is often near population centers, greatly reducing transmission costs.

On the Shanghai Donghai Bridge investment, People's Daily adds:

"...although the wind farm requires a high one-time cost, it will basically not consume any energy after completion, realizing clean power generation. The generators have a designed life expectancy of 25 years. Considering their total service life, their costs are relatively low."

As part of its fiscal stimulus, China announced a $30 billion, four-year green recovery program, in large part to bolster its national wind output. How much of that will go to expanding offshore wind? If common sense prevails, a lot.

The resource has the potential to provide up to 750,000 megawatts of electricity for the power-starved nation. That's more than its total installed electricity generating capacity today, which hit a record 713,000 megawatts at the end of 2007.

"China has the largest wind resources in the world and three-quarters of them are offshore," Barbara Finamore, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Beijing office, told  Scientific American.

China's onshore wind resource has been growing at a breakneck pace, with installed capacity doubling each year for the past four years. In 2009, a repeat performance is expected, even as the country's GDP is being halved.

That puts the nation on track to overtake Germany and Spain as the world’s number two in wind power installations by 2010, the Global Wind Energy Council predicts.

It's also on target to dominate global production of wind power turbines, and it is cornering the market for gearboxes and blades.