Where are Wind Power Operation and Maintenance Market Opportunities in China?

Famous Danish wind energy consulting body MAKE recently released report Global Wind Turbine O&M 2016, whose main topic covers the global operation and maintenance (O&M)market opportunities, availability guarantees, service strategies of leading asset owners, and pricing and terms of O&M contracts. Recently, one of the report authors, senior consultant from United States team of MAKE, Aaron Barr, accepted an interview and talked about his view on the development status and prospect forecast of wind power market in China.

The following is part of the interview content.

Question: How about the current development of wind power operation and maintenance market in China? Are there any new development trends in the market?

Aaron Barr: In the past ten years, Three-Northern Regions in china, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang have increased a large number of wind power capacity, naturally formed the economy scale of the wind turbine operation and maintenance market. But these wind farms are in remote areas, causing great challenges for the supply of spare parts, use of crane and technical personnel services. Service life of most wind turbines are now five years more than required service life, reliability problems have appeared, which are related to the design defects and manufacturing problems left in the early rapid development period of domestic supply chain. Under this market background, main wind turbine owners are gradually developing self operation team to meet the operation and maintenance requirements of the wind farm in remote area, at the same time, may also take this opportunity to provide maintenance services for other owners of the wind farm in the region, following the business model of the leading wind power owners in the United states.

Development scale scope of large-scale wind power in China is one of the best in the global, scale and efficiency naturally provides development opportunities for the establishment of self wind turbine operation and maintenance team. Many of the large wind power plant owners have started to build its own business operation and maintenance team, control the operation cost and the accumulation of its own wind turbine operation experience. In addition, China's five major power generation groups recently signed a joint agreement to plan cooperative management of spare parts. The agreement covers 4 types of wind turbines, which means that the five major power generation group intends to carry out cooperation in wind turbine operation and maintenance, expand power generation and technical services in order to achieve scale efficiency. MAKE is expected to small owners of wind power in China market will follow. In addition, the third party independent operation and maintenance services team also gives the whole market to bring large competitive pressure.

TICO wind turbine crane will have a precious opportunity to develop.

Through Aaron Barr’s analysis we can found that there will be a significant change in Chinese wind turbine O&M market, more and more wind turbine owners and wind power companies have already begun to establish their own wind turbine O&M team, or are going to do it, which not only means that scale efficiency of these owners are gradually formed, but also forces owners to have to seek more technology and methods to reduce operation and maintenance costs.

The traditional mobile crane used in wind turbine maintenance is more suitable for large components replacement, like generator, gear box, and so on, which are rarely need to be replaced or maintained. TICO wind turbine crane is a new type crane specially used in wind turbine maintenance, it has the advantages of automatic climbing, electric hydraulic drive, flexible operation, rapid maintenance, stable performance, which can replace the traditional wind turbine maintenance equipment with high price ---- large crawler crane. Thus, we believe that our wind turbine crane will play a more and more role in the wind turbine maintenance, and have a precious opportunity to develop.

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