National champion | Doosan raises South Korean offshore wind flagship to rival foreign turbines

South Korea unveiled its national flagship wind turbine as Doosan Heavy Industries installed a prototype of the 8MW offshore model that it hopes will equip giant projects planned off the nation’s coasts.

Doosan Heavy installed the machine at the Korea Wind Power Demonstration Center in South Jeolla Province ahead of commissioning, international certification and “final preparations for commercialisation” to be completed in June this year.

The company has since 2018 been working as part of a team led by the Korea Institute of Energy Technology to develop a larger home-grown turbine option, with the South Korean government determined that its efforts to deploy 12GW of offshore wind by 2030 will not be completely dominated by foreign machines.

Doosan Heavy said the direct-drive turbine and its 100-metre blades are optimised for South Korean conditions, able to deliver 30% capacity factors at average wind speeds of 6.5 m/s.

“We have been working on developing a model that is specially designed to suit the conditions of the Korean wind environment, a typhoon-prone region that has an average wind speed that is comparatively lower than Europe,” said Hongook Park, CEO of Doosan Heavy’s Power Services Business Group.

“By working together with the local wind power companies, we plan to increase the local manufacturing of parts, which is currently in the 70% range or higher, to an even higher percentage and will seek to contribute to promotion of the domestic wind power ecosystem.”

The company has already lined up deals to equip projects with its 5.5MW turbine and hopes the larger machine will give it more firepower to compete both at home and abroad.

At that stage it was talking about launching a 6MW turbine by 2015 and building a factory in Scotland.