Japan’s offshore wind market, though currently expected by analysts to account for a very small percentage of the burgeoning wider Asia Pacific play, is emerging on a “very favourable” time-line for rapid expansion, according to Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE) offshore wind chief executive Andreas Nauen.

For the German-Spanish OEM, the long-promised potential for a build-out of conventional bottom-fixed offshore wind projects off Japan, which the island nation’s industry advocacy body, the Japanese Wind Power Association, puts at 10GW by 2030, he said, hinges on the “art” of choosing the projects that will come good in the near-term.

“Luckily, [the various Asian offshore wind markets] are coming at a slightly different time-scale – Taiwan, for example started two years ago and you see the various projects coming into being now. And with Japan it is going to be similar. There is so much opportunity coming here,” said Nauen, speaking to Recharge exclusively at the Asia Offshore Wind Day conference organised by the Asia Wind Energy Assocation.

“The ‘art’ will be knowing which of [the upcoming projects off Japan] are most likely to succeed.”

Nauen, who speaks of “admiration” for the approach taken by the Taiwanese government in catalysing its offshore wind market, despite “some of the bumps in the road they have seen” in detailing plans to drive forward installation of 5.5GW by 2025, nonetheless pointed to the Japanese the culture of “reliability” in government and industry as underpinning the country’s prospects.

“Government and industry [are] so reliable – if the Japanese say they will do something, they will do it – and now that they have [passed legislation to provide a legal framework for general use of the nation's maritime regions] it will move ahead very quickly and more importantly – drawing an ascending line in the air with his hand – steadily.”

“If you want to build an industry – and we have seen it in Germany – ‘up and down’ doesn’t work well; in Japan, [by contrast you have a market that is now] open for international developers and OEMs, like us, [and so] does [work] — openness, no local content requirements and so on” help create market stability, he said.

After a slow start, Japan – which currently only has 65MW of installed offshore wind capacity – is looking to make up for lost time, with its parliament, the Diet, late last year passing the long-awaited Offshore Wind General Waters Act, which, Nauen says, comes at just the right time.

“If we see global offshore wind being at a tipping point [in its industrial development] then Japan is an early tipping point – and I find this very exciting.”

“Thanks to existing set-ups we have in different markets in the Asia Pacific region, we have experience to build upon and get started on offshore [in Japan].”

One of the main reasons Japan can now scale-up its ambitions in offshore wind is the rise of ultra-large turbines, such as the 10MW-plus models being developed by OEMs MHI Vestas, GE, Senvion and SGRE, which unveiled its SG 10.0-193 recently, exclusively to Recharge.

In a fillip for the Japanese sector, global offshore wind pace-setter Orsted recently signed a memorandum understanding with national utility the Tokyo Electric Power Company to work jointly on “large-scale” offshore wind projects, starting with the Choshi project off the east coast of the island.

Copenhagen-headquartered developer Orsted believes some 7-8GW of bottom-fixed offshore wind could be built off Japan by the end of the next decade.

Beyond the conventional offshore build-out off Japan, the longer-term prize will be the development of its deeper water wind resource with commercial-scale floating projects, two of which are already under way spearheaded by France’s Ideol.

“We see our task as helping develop the [different floating wind power platform] technologies,” says Nauen, pointing to concepts such as the spar design used on Norwegian energy giant Equinor's Hywind 1 off Norway and Hywind Scotland array off Scotland, and the TetraSpar, brainchild of industry pioneer Henrik Stiesdal now being progressed with Shell and Innogy, all of which uses SGRE turbines.

“We can help to prove [a platform concept] works - that can be our contribution as an OEM and all the knowledge we have.”

Analyst group WoodMackenzie forecasts cumulative offshore wind capacity in Asia Pacific as a whole growing to 45GW by 2030, up from just over 2GW in 2017, led by China (31GW) and Taiwan (8.7GW), with the remainder built off South Korea, India and Japan.

Wind

Japan offshore market conditions 'very favourable': SGRE chief