Wind energy: Mingyang’s entry into the 20 MW era boosts China’s entire supply chain

The race to the world’s longest offshore turbine is now led by Mingyang Smart Energy. But the Chinese company emphasizes, above all, its success in producing the main components locally and having involved the country’s most advanced resin and carbon fibre producers.

During the APAC Wind Energy Summit 2024 held in November 2024 in Incheon, Korea, Mingyang’s co-president and CTO Zhang Qiying emphasized the importance of a regional supply chain cooperation for offshore wind power development in Asia-Pacific. He underlined “Mingyang’s role as a market and technology leader, particularly in overcoming environmental challenges such as typhoons”.

Based in Zhongshan, in the Chinese southern province of Guangdong, the private company Mingyang has been developing large-scale, deep-sea floating, and typhoon-resistant wind turbines for 10 years, which resulted in two significant achievements. In August 2024, OceanX, presented as the world’s largest single-capacity floating wind turbine platform, was officially launched in Guangzhou, China. With a total capacity of 16.6 MW, OceanX features a dual-turbine ‘V’ shaped platform developed to optimize wind capture and efficiency. Designed for deep water applications, it can be used in a wide range of sea areas around the world with water depths of more than 35 metres.

At the same time, Mingyang hoisted its MySE18.X-20MW wind turbine, boasting a maximum power of 20 MW, a wind wheel diameter that can cover 260-292 metres, and a maximum swept area of 67 square metres, which is equivalent to the size of nine football fields (see Focus 1).

Weight control

Rapid upscaling of wind turbines also concerns other Chinese companies including Goldwind, Windey, DEC, CSSC Haizhuang, SeWind, CRRC and United Power. In the Global Wind Report 2024, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) argues that “exciting as it may sound, the rapid upscaling of wind turbines is not a straightforward, efficient pathway to more cost-effective energy. A technology ‘race’ to develop new turbines is not only an expensive investment for R&D, but is also a risk to a sustainable supply chain. OEMs set the industry pace with their turbine designs, directly impacting the rest of the supply chain which needs to quickly adapt and follow suit.”

On that matter, the carbon fibre fabric used in the MySE18.X-20MW turbine is exclusively supplied by China’s Hengshen, “which highlights the company’s competitiveness and influence in the field of carbon fibre wind power”, according to the company. Also innovative in the production of composite structural parts for aircraft, Hengshen has five 1,000-ton carbon fibre production lines with an annual production capacity of 5,000 tons of carbon fibre.

The previous MySE16MW was delivered in 2023 by Zhuzhou Times New Materials, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned rolling stock manufacturer CRRC. With a length of 111.5 metres and a blade root circle of 4.8 metres, the blade is huge and difficult to produce. Times New Materials explained that “overweight is the biggest obstacle for huge-size blades. In order to ‘control weight’, the project team led the production team to rack their brains so as to avoid missing any ‘slimming’ details. Finally, by adjusting dozens of processes such as material type, material consumption, and overlapping methods, the weight was successfully reduced by about 1 ton, and finally met the customer’s requirements.”

Shanghai Petrochemical, which produces 48K large-ttow special carbon fibre materials for wind power applications, states that “to manufacture large-scale wind turbine blades, it is necessary to meet the blades’ mechanical performance requirements such as lightweight, high strength, and high rigidity. Traditional glass fibre materials reach the performance limit when the blade length exceeds 120 metres, while carbon fibre materials have successfully surpassed this limit.”

Towards recycling

The company announced having developed “the longest onshore blade in the world” at the request of Sany Renewable Energy, a Sany Group division whose main business is the provision of wind energy solutions. This 131 metre-long onshore wind turbine blade uses an all-carbon pultruded main beam. By optimizing the combination of single and double webs in the main beam area, the rigidity and stability of this ultra-long blade are effectively improved. The blade’s mechanical properties highlight the significant advantages of large-tow special carbon fibre materials for wind power as they help solve weight reduction and performance improvement issues for large-scale wind power blades, and application prospects are very broad, according to Shanghai Petrochemical.

Wells Epoxy, a Shanghai-based major producer of epoxy resin series products listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since November 2023, claims to be one of Mingyang’s main long-term resin suppliers. And in 2023, Taiwan-based Swancor cooperated with Mingyang to launch a large-scale blade using its EzCiclo recyclable thermosetting resin in Inner Mongolia. The blade features a composite material that combines a recyclable epoxy pultruded plate and a recyclable sandwich core, utilizing Swancor’s EzCiclo recyclable thermosetting resin infusion moulding technology. The trial production of this first large-scale blade from Mingyang is a major milestone for both parties to jointly promote a circular economy and find recyclable solutions.

Chronology of Mingyang’s offshore wind turbine blades

2015: MySE 3.0MW, an offshore model used in the first offshore wind power project in Guangdong province

2017: MySE5.5-7.0MW, a typhoon-resistant wind power platform with the largest rotor diameter

2019: MySE8-10MW, a single-machine capacity semi-direct drive typhoon-resistant offshore model

2022: MySE12MW

2023: MySE16MW

2024: MySE18.X-20MW

This text is an excerpt from an article commissioned by JEC Group