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| Wind power is rolling in, where is the stamina? |
| Release time:2022-12-27 11:37:00| Viewed： |
Wind power is rolling in, where is the stamina?
In 2021, when China's wind power market expands significantly, Siemens Gomesa, a wind turbine manufacturer with a global market share second only to Vestas and Goldwind Technology, announced that it would suspend the sales of onshore wind turbines in the Chinese market.
Joris Mazille, then CEO of the Asia Pacific Service Department of the company, explained that the price of raw materials had risen, and the price of wind turbines in the international market was rising. However, the Chinese market showed a special performance. The manufacturing cost of wind turbines had risen, but the price of the whole machine had fallen all the way, and the market price was fierce. The bidding price of onshore wind turbines could be as low as 1800 yuan/kilowatt (excluding towers), which was quite painful for wind turbine manufacturers.
This year, the bidding price of onshore wind turbines continues to decline. In the list of procurement candidates released by SDIC Power on October 14, the bid winning prices of the top three candidates including towers were 1901 yuan/kW, 2004 yuan/kW and 1879.4 yuan/kW respectively. On October 25, among the three project bidding information released by China Resources Power, the bid winning prices of two 150MW projects including towers were 1860 yuan/kilowatt. Among the bid winning candidates announced by the State Power Investment Corporation, the bid winning price of some projects has been as low as 1427 yuan/kilowatt.
The broad demand space, years of industry accumulation, sufficient capacity supply and active capital market together shape the current high intensity competition in the domestic wind power field. International giants can not adapt to the intensity of competition and exit in a gloomy way. On the one hand, it can be seen as the evidence of the rise of China's wind power industry, and on the other hand, it also brings a core problem to the follow-up development of China's wind power industry - where the wind power industry's stamina will come from if such low prices continue to roll in endlessly.
Special Chinese wind power market Of course, a standard answer to this question is to promote the further development of the industry through high-quality competition. The broad demand space formed under the policy support provides the basic conditions for the transformation of China's wind power industry from large to strong.
After the "3060" goal was put forward, the introduction of the programmatic document strengthened the top-level design and outlined a clear roadmap for the development of clean energy: by 2025, the proportion of non fossil energy will increase by 20%, and by 2030, it will increase to 25%. As one of the clean energy with strong economy, China's wind power industry has also welcomed the rapid growth of market demand, and all provinces are rapidly releasing their own wind power plans..
Among them, the orderly construction of the three north bases, a project, including wind power and photovoltaic, can reach 10 million kilowatts; Offshore wind power in the southeast coast is also vigorously promoted. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, during the "Fourteenth Five Year Plan" period, the cumulative installed capacity of offshore wind power in China will reach 46.8 GW, and the new installed capacity will reach 37.8 GW; The distributed wind power development model in the central and eastern regions has also been steadily implemented in Hebei, Jiangsu, Shandong and other provinces.
At the same time, the stability of this demand space has also attracted a large amount of capital and resources into the wind power industry, making China's wind power industry have more capital advantages than international giants. In an interview with the Financial Times, Jochen Eickholt, CEO of Siemens Gomesa, called for a quota system for wind turbines produced in Europe to deal with cheaper and cheaper wind turbines from China. He also pointed out that the innovation capital of wind turbine manufacturers from China is 10 times more than that of European manufacturers in some cases.
However, the uniqueness of the Chinese market also brings a lot of hidden worries for the high-quality development of the industry. In 2021, six of the top ten wind turbine manufacturers in the global market share will be Chinese enterprises; Among the top five, there are two Chinese enterprises. At the same time, in 2021, the total installed capacity of Chinese wind turbine manufacturers in China will be 55.6 GW, the total amount of wind turbines exported to overseas will be only 3.3 GW, and the total cumulative export will be only 9.6 GW.
This means that most of the huge capacity of China's wind turbine industry needs to be consumed by the domestic market. The domestic market has the largest demand growth in the world, as well as the largest fan manufacturer in the global market. In the fierce competitive environment, it is easier for Chinese wind turbine manufacturers to exchange low prices for more market share and squeeze the survival space of competitors. As a result, the price of wind turbines has declined year after year.
At the same time, in the current general environment, the development of real estate and other industries is slowing down, capital needs to find new value-added space, and local governments need new industrial momentum. The two will eventually hit it off in emerging industries such as wind power. Capital supports enterprises to invest in production capacity and expand the market; Local governments replace industries with their resources to achieve local economic growth. This will also lead to the imbalance of supply and demand in the fan field, and the supply will continue to grow. However, the ceiling of the domestic market is limited. If high-quality growth cannot be achieved, it will only sink deeper and deeper in the inner volume.
Excessive inner volume conceals hidden worries
Moderate intra industry volume can stimulate competition and drive the development of the entire industry. In 2003, when China's wind power industry was just starting, the country introduced a wind power concession policy. Through competitive bidding, the development and management rights of the project were handed over to the lowest quoted enterprise, which helped reduce the cost of wind power and make the high wind power price close to the price of coal power at the beginning. Driven by this policy, the competition in the wind turbine field has made a big step towards marketization, and at one time more than 70 wind turbine manufacturers have appeared in China.
And when the industry is out of control, it will also lay a huge hidden worry for the entire industry. Sinovel Wind Power, founded in 2006, enjoyed the first golden dividend of wind power development in China. Relying on the advantage of low prices, Sinovel Wind Power has repeatedly won the national franchise projects to exchange market share with unprofitable prices. In the end, Sinovel Wind Power was exposed to have product quality problems and financial fraud problems in the project due to its excessive pursuit of low prices, thus suffering a heavy blow and falling rapidly at the top of the industry.
When the wind power market ushers in another development cycle, the tide of national subsidies has receded, and the major policies are tending to be stable. In the long run, China's wind power industry has come to a time when it needs to weigh the expansion of market territory against the profitability of a single project. This is not a decision that a single company can make, but it needs more policy support from the national level to promote the industry from large-scale to high-quality development.
Judging from the current situation, it is very difficult to form such a consensus. The continuous occurrence of the lowest bid winning can explain the problem.
First of all, in terms of new energy power investment, the state has put forward great development requirements, but the funds that can be invested are limited, and they often hope to use a certain amount of investment to build more projects, which makes the weight of price factors in bidding increased. At the same time, local governments responsible for specific implementation often put forward some performance requirements for project developers, which will also be transferred to disguised support for winning the bid at the lowest price through bidding.
Secondly, at the developer level, state-owned enterprise developers who occupy an absolute market share have relatively high requirements for their return on investment, and the bid inviter and the project party are not unified. After the vision of "3060" was put forward, more attention has been paid to the wind power business that was originally at the edge of state-owned enterprises. It may be that the projects that originally only needed bidding from secondary companies need to be intensively purchased through the group. Group procurement only focuses on the construction price and does not take too much account of the full cycle cost.
Thirdly, at the implementation level, the investor is unwilling to bear the responsibility, and pays more attention to commitment than evaluation in the bidding process, which also provides convenient conditions for winning the bid at the lowest price. On the one hand, the current bidding mode encourages winning the bid at the lowest price, is responsible for the audit department, and selects the bidder with high price. The project leader may need to write more than ten reports to explain the situation to the group. On the other hand, the cumbersome approval procedures and bidding procedures before listing on the European market are part of the cost, and in the domestic market, they are often simplified into a light promise of responsibility afterwards to shirk responsibility.
The promotion of industry rules and the neglect of reliability by policy standards have led both bidders and tenderers to focus too much on the price level, while ignoring that wind power is a long-term project that needs to operate for 20-25 years. The overall profitability of the project should be measured from the perspective of the full cycle from construction to operation and maintenance. Some units with high price may be connected to the grid two days after the completion of the project, while some units with the lowest price may need half a month to debug and connect to the grid. These differences in the later stage are not reflected in most bid evaluation rules.
More importantly, winning the bid at the lowest price is likely to lead to another major quality problem, and the investor and the wind turbine manufacturer will argue with each other in terms of quality assurance, operation and maintenance. The original offshore blade of 184 impeller still weighs 367 tons after using carbon fiber materials. Now some manufacturers have reduced the weight of this 90 meter blade to 20 tons to reduce costs. This year, there were many accidents in the wind power industry for complex reasons, but the lowest bid winning rule is to blame.
Where does the development potential come from
Under the current situation of low prices, it is difficult for China's wind power industry to answer the question "Where does the development potential come from?". Excessive pursuit of scale growth is actually a future development dividend in the overdraft industry. The consequences of excessive pursuit of the lowest bid are often "starving peers", "killing ourselves" and "killing Party A". For wind turbine manufacturers, 2000 yuan/kW is usually the break even point. International giants have voluntarily exited when the price is less than 3000 yuan/kilowatt. At present, the price of 1000 yuan/kilowatt is difficult to provide a healthy hematopoietic capacity for the wind power industry.
Zhang Lei, a senior person in the wind power industry (this is a pseudonym), pointed out that at present, many enterprises have not figured out what to do after gaining market share by not making money or even losing money. Different from the classic Internet free entrance+toll model, wind turbine manufacturers may not continue to get orders for operation and maintenance business after the wind power project has passed the five-year warranty period. In the long run, when capital starts to withdraw from the wind power industry, it will lead to the loss of enterprises without healthy hematopoietic capacity.
After the policy influence is weakened, the construction speed and stability of the power grid are becoming important factors in forming a new round of industry reshuffle cycle. "There will be some risks in the process of connecting wind power to the power grid on a scale under construction. If some personnel safety accidents occur frequently, some problems need to be solved, which may affect the development of wind power and cause industry fluctuations, which may lead to another round of industry reshuffle," Zhang Lei said.
In case of quality problems, whether they can bear the pressure is also a risk point that the current wind turbine manufacturers need to have a clear understanding. The investment in a wind power project is often billions. Once several contracted projects have quality problems, a single wind turbine manufacturer cannot bear such consequences with the funds raised from the capital market. Because the unqualified blades led to quality problems in batch production, AVIC Huiteng had to reorganize its blades and withdraw from the blade production field.
Of course, this question is very easy to answer orally: improve efficiency through innovation, and seek new growth points in the offshore and overseas incremental markets. However, the hidden danger of low prices is killing the innovation ability of China's wind power industry and restricting the further expansion of the offshore and overseas markets. When the losses caused by the low price roll in occur on a large scale, it is also the time for Chinese wind turbine manufacturers to significantly reduce R&D expenses and labor costs.
If the price of the wind turbine is stable at 2500 yuan/kw, the wind turbine manufacturer will be able to obtain good profits and have funds to continue to invest in research and development. The profit of wind turbine manufacturing enterprises will also affect the pattern of the entire industry. The current situation is that wind turbine manufacturers are pursuing low prices, forcing upstream parts suppliers to reduce prices and reduce costs. Under this kind of squeezing, the large profits of the industry are taken away by raw material suppliers and project parties, while the links with the highest technical content have not been matched by high added value and increased R&D investment.
In the field of offshore wind power, there is still a technical gap between domestic wind turbine manufacturers and international giants. However, under the banner of entering offshore wind power, some hidden dangers are being buried. A person familiar with the matter said that offshore wind power is more risky, but now some wind turbine manufacturers do not even have a technical prototype, so they can win the bid by promise. Once quality problems occur or efficiency is lower than expected, international giants may be given a chance to re-enter the Chinese wind power market.
Accordingly, if the particularity of the Chinese market cannot be changed in the short term, entering the international market like PV will be a feasible option for Chinese wind power manufacturers to balance their earnings. However, it may take longer for Chinese fans to obtain the certification of foreign testing institutions than foreign fan manufacturers. Foreign testing institutions still have some doubts about the quality and reliability of China's wind turbines. If large-scale quality problems occur in domestic wind power projects at this time, such doubts may become a gap between Chinese wind turbine manufacturers and the international market.
As Zhang Lei said, the big market environment will not change fundamentally, forming a unified value based on high-quality development, and achieving cost reduction and efficiency increase through technological innovation will be an empty talk. The central and state-owned enterprises that have the right to speak in the industry have not translated the emphasis on wind turbine technology, wind turbine quality and reliability into specific bidding rules. The dynamic balance between technical considerations and cost considerations cannot be achieved, resulting in the lack of respect for technology in the entire wind power market.
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