China Huaneng has announced the full commissioning of Asia’s largest offshore wind farm, the 302MW Rudong Baxianjiao project.
Rudong Baxianjiao, sited off the coast of Rudong, Jiangsu province, is the first offshore wind project built by China Huaneng, the world’s largest developer of power projects by capacity.
The wind farm is equipped with two offshore substations and 70 turbines.
Of those CSIC Haizhuang supplied 20 turbines of 5MW each, while Envision and Shanghai Electric provided 12 and 38 turbines, of 4.2 MW and 4MW, respectively.
The wind farm is billed as the first offshore project to deploy locally-developed Chinese 5MW turbines on a large scale.
Construction kicked off at April 2016 and completed in September this year, followed by a 124-hour test run before the project entered into full operation
The investment cost of the project is estimated at 5.3bn yuan ($800m). The project has already been granted the 0.85 yuan/kWh ($0.13/kWh) standard offshore wind feed-in tariff, plus a 0.01 yuan/kWh subsidy by Jiangsu government earlier this year.
By completing the Rudong project, Huaneng has made a major step forward in the offshore wind market. By the end of 2016 the company owned the second biggest wind power portfolio in China of 17.8GW, which accounted roughly 10% of China’s total wind capacity, according to data from the China Wind Energy Association.
Separately, Huaneng’s peer State Power Investment Corp (SPIC) is constructing Binhai North Offshore project. Totaling 400MW, the project will overtake Rudong project’s position as Asia’s biggest offshore wind farm once it kicks off full commercial operation, which is scheduled for August 2018.
