In order to achieve the goal of carbon emission reduction, photovoltaic construction has made great strides in development. Under the ever-increasing demand for photovoltaic installations and the contradictions of limited land and consumption, continuous exploration of new photovoltaic application scenarios has become the common voice of management departments and industry companies, and it has become inevitable to extend from land to deep sea.

According to estimates, the coastline of mainland China is 18,000 kilometers long, and the sea area where offshore photovoltaics can be installed is about 710,000 square kilometers. According to estimates at a ratio of 1/1000, the installed capacity of offshore photovoltaics can exceed 70GW.

In June 2022, the competitive configuration results of the first batch of fixed-pile offshore photovoltaic projects in Shandong Province were released. 10 projects with a total installed capacity of 11.25 million kilowatts were "lost" to 19 companies, officially launching the "first shot" of large-scale development of offshore photovoltaics across the country. .

According to policy requirements, 11.25 million kilowatts of offshore photovoltaic projects will be started and connected to the grid in succession from 2022 to 2024. Among them, in 2023, the construction scale will be 4.7 million kilowatts, and the grid-connected scale will be 3.85 million kilowatts, both of which are the highest in three years.

Of course, as a pioneering move, the difficulty of developing offshore photovoltaics is not the same as that of traditional onshore projects. Lu Guocheng, a senior engineer at the General Institute of Hydropower and Water Conservancy Planning and Design, once pointed out in a public speech that there are challenges in various stages of offshore photovoltaic projects, such as early-stage procedures, project construction, and later-stage operation and maintenance management. Only in the early stage of formalities, the sea permit approval cycle is long. Due to the large scale of the project occupying the sea, it needs to be reported to the Ministry of Natural Resources for approval; some project sites involve fish farmers with confirmed rights, and coordination is difficult; The project construction cost brought by energy storage and other equipment is relatively high.

A critical year for offshore PV

The progress of the first 10 projects in Shandong was tracked. Up to now, 9 projects have successively launched relevant bidding, but most of them are in the early stage of survey and design, military impact assessment consultation, feasibility study preparation, sea area use demonstration and environmental impact assessment.

The two major projects at the HG32 and HG30 sites are making rapid progress. Among them, the main investors of the HG32 project are Shandong Development Investment Group, State Power Investment Corporation and the National Energy Group Consortium.

At present, Qingdao Qianhai Marine Engineering Research Institute Co., Ltd. has won the bid for the sea area use demonstration and environmental impact assessment technical consulting services of the HG32 site project. The photovoltaic modules of the demonstration project adopt 700Wp (210) N-type heterojunction, 670Wp (210) N-type topcon, and 570Wp (182) P-type PERC modules, and three module companies, Huasheng New Energy, Trina, and JA Solar, won the bid; Jiangsu Guoqiang Xingsheng won the bid for the fixed photovoltaic support; Shandong Huayang New Energy won the bid for the inverter and environmental monitoring equipment, and Jianhua Building Materials (Laiyang) Co., Ltd. won the bid for the pre-supported pipe pile.

The HG30 site project is developed by China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group. According to the disclosure, the construction scale of the project is 539.3024MWp, the AC side capacity is 400MW, the photovoltaic field area uses 700Wp modules, and a total of 121 photovoltaic sub-arrays are arranged. 16 circuits of 35kV collector lines are connected to land area 220kV step-up stations. The project was fully launched at the end of last year, and it is planned to connect to the grid at full capacity for power generation in December 2023. The currently published calibration content includes the optical power prediction system in the production test phase, grounding transformer and substation equipment, dynamic reactive power compensation complete set of equipment, 252kV gas-insulated closed combined electrical equipment (GIS), 220kV main transformer and neutral point grounding complete set.

It is not difficult to see from the local tenders that the first batch of large-scale offshore photovoltaic projects in the country has a lot of bidding procedures, and the procurement of core equipment is more inclined to high-efficiency equipment. It is still waiting for upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain to work together to overcome difficulties, and will continue to track the progress of the project situation and typical project cases. Editor/Xu Shengpeng