Day three of Peter’s travels in China starts in Chongqing, before heading to Beijing for the main ‘Prosperity’ event.
We had another excellent meeting in Chongqing with CSIC Haizhuang. CSIC is another large state-owned heavy manufacturing company, which started as a shipbuilding company and has now diversified into many other sectors.
In wind, they are one of China’s largest producers for the home market. They have a delivery schedule this year of 1,200 turbine nacelles, which will create an output of some 2.5GW. CSIC have strong international aspirations, making progress with investments and sales in countries outside their home market. This month they will deliver a batch of 2.5MW turbines for Sweden.
CSIC is very interested in the offshore markets in China and Europe. They originally designed and developed a 5MW turbine with a rotor of 127m and a prototype unit was installed offshore in 2012. After a successful deployment, they realised that the turbine could be optimised with the installation of a larger rotor to maximise yield. As a consequence, the turbine design was modified to introduce a rotor of 151m and a prototype of this new turbine was installed in offshore in 2014.
CSIC believe that their turbine technology is well suited to the European market and is now actively considering deployment of another single, or batch, of 5MW turbines at a demonstration site in Europe. They feel that this is a necessary step to increase the visibility of Chinese turbines in Europe, prior to deployment in larger projects.
Again, we’ve identified more excellent opportunities to develop areas of collaboration between ORE Catapult and CSIC as they look to expand their operations into Europe.
Now heading off to Beijing for the main ‘Prosperity’ event……………………