Wind

Does Europe need Chinese-owned wind turbine factories to hit its green power targets?

Analysts, executives and wind groups tell Recharge that ambitious 2030 targets point to rapidly rising demand in coming years – but are split over whether Chinese-owned plants would help

A worker at a Chinese wind turbine factory.
A worker at a Chinese wind turbine factory.Photo: Getty/VCG via Getty Images
European Editor, Recharge

With some developers openly planning to use Chinese wind turbines in EU offshore projects and China's OEMs making no secret of their ambitions to enter new markets on land and sea, alarm bells are ringing across European manufacturers.

Their greatest fear is being hammered in their home market by far-eastern rivals just like their solar manufacturing peers were a decade earlier, which in great part succumbed to Chinese competition backed by cheap state financing and dumping-level prices.

The prospect of importing turbines from China has already raised tricky questions over subsidies and possible defensive action by the EU. The second option, and one that is increasingly being raised, concerns Chinese OEMs coming to Europe and directly putting up a manufacturing base there.

But does Europe even need wind turbine factories from Chinese manufacturers?

“Yes, to meet the ambitious targets we have in place in Europe,” Shashi Barla, a global wind industry expert, told Recharge.

“The supply chain manufacturing capacity must be expanded significantly. Many of the Western suppliers are hesitant to invest due to the poor profitability in the sector in the past five years.

“Without a clear policy signal and after a return on investments, these companies will not invest in supply chain expansion. In these challenging times, there is an excellent possibility for Chinese OEMs to step up and invest in the supply chain capacity.”

Sydbank chief analyst Jacob Pedersen also said that Western OEMs have lost huge amounts of money in the past four to five years, “so their ability to scale up and build many new production facilities in the next few years is not great. A rush of new orders would help – but the market is moving slowly.”

Holger Matthiesen, project director at asset manager Luxcara – which has named Mingyang as preferred supplier to its 270MW Waterkant wind project in the German North Sea – at the recent WindEnergy Hamburg conference said the industry in Europe will “face challenges in the peak years” as markets across the continent race to hit targets around the end of the decade.

“Without China, in supply and sub-supply, it would be very difficult to meet the build-out targets in Europe.”

Chinese in Scotland? 'Why not?'

Some state actors also seem to think Chinese OEMs are needed to complement the offer of their Western peers, particularly in offshore wind.

The Scottish Offshore Wind Energy Council (SOWEC) in April named a wind turbine facility by Mingyang on a shortlist of ‘priority’ projects to support Scotland’s offshore wind growth.
That the Chinese OEM will actually go through with those plans became more likely in October, when UK developer Cerulean Winds said it was aiming towards a preferred supplier agreement by the end of the current year with Mingyang for three Scottish floating wind sites that could have a combined capacity of up to 6GW, with part of that capacity planned to be installed as early as 2028.

Cerulean Winds representative Andrew Barrie at the recent Floating Offshore Wind conference and exhibition in Aberdeen said his company sees little prospect of deliverability from traditional Western OEMs on this timescale.

Also, UK lawmaker Bill Esterson, who will chair the country’s future parliamentary energy security and net zero committee, when asked about the prospect of a Mingyang factory, said, "In principle, why not?"

"You can't just shut China out in the long run. In principle, Chinese investment is as good as any," he told Recharge from the sidelines of the event in Aberdeen.

Mingyang and Sany consider factories

Mingyang also signed a front-end engineering design (FEED) agreement over Renexia’s Med Wind project, which aims to deploy the Chinese group’s 18.8MW turbines 80km off the coast of Sicily for an over 2.8GW floating wind farm, and has earlier said it plans to produce the machines for it in Italy.
The plan enjoys the backing of the country’s ministry of economic development, and German certifier TÜV Nord will certify the MySE18.X-260 turbine to verify whether it meets “the demanding international standards and guidelines.”

Neither Luxcara’s German project, nor Renexia’s massive floating plan off Sicily have moved towards a final investment decision, so a large question mark still hangs over Mingyang’s factory plans.

Sany, another Chinese OEM, last year told Recharge the company is searching for a site for an onshore wind turbine manufacturing plant in Europe with a 1GW production capacity in Germany, Spain or Turkey.
“In three years, [the European wind industry] can no longer meet all the market demand,” Sany’s then managing director for Europe, Haijun Deng, then told Recharge.

“So, they need a new supplier to join them. … I think Sany will be involved. We are very much interested and we are ready to join this supplier group.”

Sany this year repeated that Europe needs Chinese wind turbines, but didn’t want to give any update on its European factory plans.

Europe’s wind energy expansion targets indeed are very ambitious, but slow permitting and red tape in some countries will mean that only part of the envisaged volume will actually be built (in time).

Industry lobby WindEurope expects the EU alone to build 15GW of new wind capacity this year, and 22GW per year on average through 2030. That would give the EU 350GW of installed wind energy capacity by 2030 – 296GW onshore and 54GW offshore.

“That’s short of the 425GW the EU wants. It may take a couple more years, but we will get there. The key is to get to a new plateau where the EU is building 30GW of new wind every year in the 2030s,” WindEurope chief policy officer Pierre Tardieu told Recharge.

By contrast on the production side, by the end of next year, Europe will be able to manufacture 9.5GW of offshore and 22.5GW of onshore wind turbines a year.

Europe’s wind energy supply chain is now building several new factories and expanding existing ones, WindEurope points out, with at least €10bn currently being invested - for everything from wind turbines to foundations, cables and grid equipment.

EU manufacturing 'not the bottleneck'

"European manufacturing is not the bottleneck here,” Tardieu said when asked whether factories by Chinese OEMs are required.

But he added: “Other challenges are preventing the wind energy market from reaching its full potential and Europe from delivering the volumes needed to reach the 2030 targets.

“The EU needs to urgently speed up and streamline permitting. It needs to ramp up the demand for renewable electricity by boosting direct electrification of transport, heating and industry. And it needs to deliver on the EU Grids Action Plan, notably on expanding and optimising electricity grids and on resolving the massive grid connection queues across Europe.”

VDMA Power Systems, a group representing German wind turbine manufacturers, also thinks current production capacities in Europe are sufficient for demand.

“The manufacturers and suppliers of wind turbines in Europe can and will continue to deliver,” the group’s managing director Dennis Rendschmidt said.

“Even if demand increases, capacities can be adjusted.”

But Rendschmidt also pointed to a gap between targets set by politicians and what will actually be built.

“A prerequisite for investments in sustainable industrial growth is a reliable market: goals must become projects that are realised in particular through effective award and revenue mechanisms and through hurdle-free framework conditions.

“Additional suppliers will therefore not be necessary on the European market in the future in order to achieve the expansion targets set by politicians.”

A new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on energy technology perspectives, however, states that "announced manufacturing capacity expansions [in the EU], taking into account committed and preliminary projects, are not sufficient to meet growth in demand" in different scenarios the agency has assumed, "resulting in a need to import more wind components."

The IEA estimates that by 2030, EU offshore manufacturing capacity will reach just 11GW for nacelles and 7GW for blades. The agency reckons, however, that thanks to the sustainability and resilience non-price criteria enshrined in EU's new industrial strategy, domestic manufacturing is projected to continue to grow roughly in parallel with demand.

No firm commitment by Western OEMs

Vestas’ vice president for offshore sales Peter Kaergard Jensen told a WindEnergy Hamburg panel that the OEM is quite capable of scaling to meet demand, especially in offshore wind with its relatively longer project lead times. However, to do that he said the supply chain needs stability, visibility and “viable volume” that allows it to plan investments.

“We think we have a sustainable supply chain in Europe and we are extending it.”

But when it comes to concrete plans for further production quality, neither Vestas, nor rival Siemens Gamesa, make any firm commitments.

Vestas chief operating officer Tommy Rahbek Nielsen told Recharge in January 2024 that his company was “ready to push the button” on a Scottish offshore wind factory – but only once orders firm. The OEM had earlier also announced it would build an offshore wind blade factory and a nacelle assembly plant in Poland to meet rising European demand.
GE Vernova – theoretically the third Western offshore wind OEM – at the moment seems to be downsizing rather than increasing its European manufacturing footprint.

Onshore models don’t work offshore

Marc Hamer, one of the founders of Hamburg-based consulting firm Greentech Partners, makes a clear distinction between onshore and offshore.

“For onshore, Europe does not need factories from Chinese wind OEMs to achieve the targets,” he told Recharge but noted that the supply chains of western OEMs are already largely Chinese, a fact manufacturers such as Nordex have confirmed in the past.

“In European nacelle factories, components from China are only assembled, which represents the smallest part of the added value. Today, the blades also mostly come from China and are brought directly to the project site.”

Local content requirements (such as those already in place in Turkey) could shift the supply chain towards Europe, but this has nothing to do with limited capacity, he added.

“The situation is different for offshore. Here, European capacities are limited.”

Also, projects at sea are large and the “onshore supply chain model’ of shipping cheap Chinese product for assembly in Europe may not work in offshore as transport costs for larger offshore components from China to Europe may erase other cost advantages, Hamer reckoned.

For Chinese turbine manufacturers to have any chance of ever breaking into the European market, setting up factories in Europe will need to be part of that process, Laura Fecova, Senior Associate and Regional Lead Americas at Aegir Insights, told Recharge.

And to meet Europe’s ambitious targets, massive investments into supply chain development are required not just for turbines but also foundations or vessels, so new factories are needed, she said.

“However, that does not mean that those factories would necessarily need to be developed by Chinese wind turbine manufacturers,” Fecova said.

“Costs for development and manufacturing in China are lower, this is a well-known advantage, but one that won’t be enjoyed when manufacturing shifts to Europe and likely a factor that will be reflected in the price for Chinese turbines produced in Europe."

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Published 4 November 2024, 05:49Updated 4 November 2024, 07:29
EuropeWindEuropeVDMA Power SystemsVestasGE Vernova