BAKU, Azerbaijan, Nov.7
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
US and China will become important contributors to offshore wind capacity over the coming decade, Trend reports with reference to Fitch Solutions Macro Research (a unit of Fitch Group).
The company believes that in general, offshore wind will play an increasingly important role in the global wind power sector expansion over the coming decade, as the project pipeline strengthens in markets outside of Western Europe - the current bastion for the technology.
“The UK currently dominates the offshore wind project pipeline, but we expect markets such as the United States and China to become increasingly important contributors to offshore wind capacity growth over the coming decade,” reads a report released by Fitch Solutions.
“We expect offshore wind power to play an increasingly important role in a number markets over the coming decade, as cost deflation makes the technology increasingly accessible to developed and emerging markets. This leads us to expect the offshore wind to gain prominence in the global wind power project pipeline collated in our Key Projects Database (KPD). To date offshore wind power has been mostly restricted to markets that have been able to shoulder the substantial cost of deploying the relatively nascent technology, with markets such as the United Kingdom and Germany driving capacity offtake.”
However, in line with growing economies of scale and technological innovation - including rapidly increasing offshore wind turbine sizes - the technology has become increasingly cost-competitive in a number of new markets over the past five years, enabling the sector to expand outside of Western Europe, according to the company.
“We do highlight that the sector remains nascent compared to onshore wind power, with more than 540GW of onshore wind capacity being installed by end-2018 compared to about 23GW of offshore wind. This ratio of onshore versus offshore development will shift over the coming decade as offshore wind capacity is deployed in substantial volume in the United States and in Asia, while the UK and Germany continue to develop more offshore wind in the North Sea and Baltic Sea.”
As such, offshore wind power makes up 40 percent of projects in the pre-construction phase in the company’s KPD - through a total of 6 4 GW - highlighting the sectors' growing importance vis-à-vis onshore wind globally.
"That said, we do highlight that growth in the onshore wind power sector to a much greater degree is supported by small-scale distributed projects that we do not collate in our KPD. Furthermore, the lead time for onshore wind projects often is much quicker than offshore wind, meaning projects go from planning to commissioning at a much faster rate and that the onshore pipeline is refreshed more frequently. This means that onshore wind will remain the overall driver of wind power sector capacity over our forecast period, despite growing offshore wind investment,” reads the report.
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