Italian cabling giant Prymian has reeled in the contract to wire China’s first 10MW offshore wind turbine, a designed developed by Dongfang Electric unveiled in September, in at China Three Gorges’ Xinghua Bay wind farm in the waters off Fujian province.

Cables for the turbine, a direct-drive design that will fly a 185-metre-diameter rotor and generate some GWh a year in 10-metre-per-second winds, will be manufactured in Prysmian’s plant in Tianjin.

“We are very proud to take part in the increasingly strategic transformation of the wind power industry,” stated Francesco Fanciulli, Prysmian’s business energy unit senior vice president.

Full commercialisation of the Dongfang Electric 10MW turbine “may still need some one to two years” depending on the result of the outcome of the first deployment, a manager at the OEM told Recharge previously.

Dongfang Electric hopes the new ultralarge model will give it a fighting chance in the Chinese offshore wind sector, where it built no new capacity last year. The firm only won its first “large-scale” offshore order in May 2018, to supply 12 typhoon-proof 5MW turbines to China Three Gorges ’ Xinghua Bay Phase 2 development.

The first full-scale project in the frame to use the 10MW model, the Changle Outer Sea Area C project off Fujian province, stalled in December after developer Funeng Haixia, a business unit of local government-backed Fuijan Energy, scrapped a 80MW lead-off tender for the 498MW development.

China has around 6GW of offshore wind installed but is trying to build and grid-connect a further 41GW by the end of 2021.