Europe’s Wind Turbine Industry Faces Ruin at Hands of Coal-Powered Chinese, Experts Warn
Europe’s wind turbine industry faces ruin because the Chinese are using coal and state subsidies to massively undercut the European market, making turbines for a third of the cost, experts have warned. The Telegraph has the story.
British waters could be flooded with cheap Chinese wind turbines in the future because the cost of Beijing building the machines has plummeted so fast, a new study has warned.
Offshore turbines can now be built in China for roughly a third of the price of those produced by companies such as Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems or Siemens Gamesa, which are major suppliers to Britain, the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies (OIES) said.
This means British offshore wind farms may be forced to embrace Chinese-made machines instead of European models because they are cheaper.
Michal Meiden, the institute’s head of China energy research, said Beijing had achieved an “astonishing” reduction in the cost of turbines, reducing them from $1,200 (£915) per kilowatt in 2019 to less than $420 today.
In Europe, by contrast, turbine prices were last year still above $1,000 per kilowatt – a figure that would make a mockery of Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s pledge to start manufacturing turbines in the UK.
“In Europe there is a concern that if these cost advantages stem from state subsidies, short-term gains would be undermined by longer-term ruin for the European industry,” Meiden said. …
John Constable, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Austin in Texas, said China’s wind turbines were cheap because the factories producing them are powered by burning coal.
He said: “China’s energy supply is 87% fossil fuel, and over 60% is low-cost coal, so it is not surprising that they can make wind turbines more cheaply than European manufacturers
“In Europe the electricity supply is now dominated by renewables, making costs so high that overall consumption is dropping like a stone.”
Worth reading in full.
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Its not just cheap coal, oil and gas energy cost, there are economies of scale.too. And savings from H&S production short-cuts. I see the workers laying up fibreglass mat on the LH blade half are protected by what looks to be N95 or lower grade faces masks. OK they probbaly keep most of the haze of fibres in the air from being breathed in but do nothing for the styrene fumes and catalyst / accelerator from the layup resin. At least this looks like a covered production unit; last time I saw smaller blades being moulded, it was 2012 in a huge outside yard in Pudong with a steady drizzle denaturing the bond strength,.
Given a few more years Net Zero will be at an end. Once the subsidies stop and contracted, inflated wholesale prices are no more, these wind power companies will go into receivership, there will be plenty of second-hand turbines/solar that nobody wants never mind new ones.
Already contracts to build new wind installations are not being taken up, here and particularly in the US.
The same has happened with BEVs – nobody wants them, manufacturers in Europe and the US have stopped making them, cancelled plans for new production facilities. Hybrids may have a future, other variants not.
China is belting out cheap BEVs, solar panels, wind turbines because it is a command economy with no transactional pricing system, so uses more and more resources to provide employment. This was exactly the same in USSR and ComEcon Countries – everyone had a job making stuff irrespective of whether the stuff was being bought. China will inevitable collapse its economy – like the USSR.
Articles about China leading the world in “clean” energy and flooding the World with cheap products for the Net Zero lunacy do not provide a proper analysis from an economic and market perspective.
Our, ie UK economy will be collapsed before China’s. Once our private industries have been destroyed the need for fake renewables will be largely irrelevant but Milliband will be rewarded for a job well done.
Arguably it has collapsed already, we are just sitting among the rubble.
You may be right.
Reality is a very hard enemy to defeat. Net Zero will soon hit the canvas.
Like this
At least they have a referee.
By then the phony planet saver Miliband will be over working at the UN as some “Special Envoy” having left behind the country he destroyed with that self styled smug look on his puss, and our promise of lower energy bills a distant joke.
The potential collapse of renewables businesses needs policies to ensure funds are retained within the jurisdiction to pay for decommissioning and clean up.
Good point. Nuclear industry has to make provision for decommissioning, so does our oil/gas industry (what’s left of it) with respect to decomissioning oil rigs. This is why the latter get tax discounts on profits, in recognition of the capital that will later be spent on decomissioning.
But “renewables” can do no wrong… they are in an exempt class for everything, planning permission, destroying the environment and wildlife and quality of people’s lives, etc no other business activity would get away with it.
Private the profits (harvesting the subsidies) and socialise the loses… decommissioning etc, through bust operating companies and ‘investment’ vehicles
Presumably part of the cost savings they are achieving is from raping the world of the precious virgin balsa wood in Ecuador that is meant to be part of the protected ecology. Oh well, the green shysters have destroyed a few thousand trees for their annual jamboree so why should they care about balsa destruction.
Excellent news.
The answer is not (and never was) blowin’ in the wind.
We appear to have three choices:
1) Buy European-made wind turbines at three times the cost, and feel virtuous about keeping the European industry going;
2) Buy Chinese-made ones and save a bit of money on the route to “Net Zero”;
3) Just Stop Wind, invest some of the money in getting domestic oil and gas extraction going again, do away with the need to overburden energy purchasers with green levies, thus helping British firms to compete internationally again and making households better off.
I know which one I’d choose.
I expect the answer will be to subsidise European production
Most likely – let’s subsidise the production of the devices used by private companies, to harvest subsidies, in a market only enabled by subsidy, to protect ‘green jobs’ – or in other words, paying people to make ineffective and inefficient things…in an less efficient way than others… God help us eh
What a disaster, these awful things cannot be recycled. Full of dangerous toxins, they lie in huge piles in fields, rotting away and polluting groundwater.
Millions of tons of concrete and steel left in the ground for hundreds of years.
Unreliable, expensive, and a blot on the landscape, they are a massive killer of birds and raptors. In the sea, they cause havoc for whales and dolphins.
The energy they do produce from time to time is hugely expensive.
A modern day insanity, to add to the list.
By now only the insane, or shysters on the make, are believers….take yr pick, as to what anyone is promoting the damn things.
The turbine blades are also made from oil derived products as well as balsa wood. Like everything to do with ‘saving the environment’ it all ends up hugely destructive to the environment (bats, birds, insects, landscapes etc.) AND our economy.
Below is a table showing energy consumption by source. As a proportion China is similar to the larger economies with the exception of Brazil and Germany. Renewables are not a key part of the Chinese economy and they can afford to make such luxuries, especially if there are willing mugs to pay for them.
So, the 20 year turbine/blade life will now become… ‘maybe’ 15 year life. We just know there will be compromises made = shorter product life.
Ever seen pics of the concrete/metal foundations of these short lived monsters? Be shocked.
Oh, about the disposal of these short lived (containing some rainforest dodgy sourced balsa wood in the blades) also made with non recyclable materials. Cut them up and bury.
I suppose if the shit really hits the fan, we can at least cut the blades up and burn them for heat and energy… all that wood and epoxy, bet it would burn well (don’t ask about the smoke off it though…)
Why are people surprised that China can make something cheaper than us? Have we not been buying cheap stuff from China for decades? Isn’t “MADE IN CHINA” something we are used to seeing when we turn a toaster or a Coffee Cup upside down? So why would it be any different with wind turbines? But just look at the hypocrisy from government and media who harp on about “Green Jobs”. They have no problem importing coal and gas and leaving our own in the ground but when it comes to renewables they try to claim they are creating GREEN JOBS. ——But actually energy creation is about producing ENERGY, not JOBS, and it seems our ideologically addicted politicians can do neither.
It is not as though the Wind Turbine Industry is the only industry to be hampered by high fuel costs: it’s that it is so ironic.
My recent comment here was neither profane or abusive – very far from it. It is my POV and as such as an opinion falls squarely in the Freedom of Speech bucket. So I am rather amazed to see that it appears to have been censored. Having supported the DS from the get-go this is certainly a surprise.