Speed up! A new track for wind power has been opened

Since the parity, the development of wind power has presented a new theme almost every year, promoting the development of the industry to a high-quality path. If 2020 is the year of guaranteed delivery on the eve of parity, then the important theme of 2021 is to stabilize electricity prices; Subsequently, with technological innovation and the accumulation of the industrial chain, the whole industry will enter a stage of ambitious collaborative cost reduction in 2022.

Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Third Energy Revolution are in the ascendant. In the context of the global energy transition and China's dual carbon goals, the increasingly close cross-integration of the two revolutions has given birth to an important window period for technological innovation. It can be said that in 2023 and beyond, digitalization and intelligence will become one of the major themes of renewable energy development represented by wind power, and "intelligent manufacturing" will also become a key step to narrow the gap between China's wind power industry and international advanced manufacturing and promote the quality and efficiency of the industry.

Wind power and "intelligent" manufacturing

At present, China's manufacturing industry has fully shifted from large-scale growth to quality improvement, and the energy industry has also shifted from extensive development to green and efficient transformation.

Fundamentally speaking, the application level of energy equipment is directly subject to the advanced level of industrial manufacturing. Under the industry consensus that "large-capacity, lightweight, and highly reliable" wind turbines have become the main means of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, the past 2022 has become a year of intensive breakthroughs in China's wind power technology. In the past year, domestic wind turbine companies have successively launched 7-11MW onshore wind turbines and 16MW-18MW ultra-large offshore wind turbines; The blades have also repeatedly broken the original record - 99-meter to 100-meter onshore wind turbine blades and 123-meter offshore blades have been rolled off the production line.

Larger units and longer blades put forward higher requirements for the safe and stable operation of the whole machine, but it is obvious that the disadvantages of the traditional labor-intensive manufacturing mode in terms of quality efficiency and uncontrollable standards no longer meet the extreme demand of the current industry for the reliability of high-end wind power equipment. Especially in the era of low profits after parity, the reduction of the cost of wind power is extremely dependent on technological innovation and the reduction of operation and maintenance costsWind power equipmentQuality safety and production efficiency have become inevitable for the high-quality development of the industry.

Moreover, the state is also urging the transformation and upgrading of the energy equipment manufacturing industry at the policy level. The "14th Five-Year Plan" for the modern energy system puts forward clear requirements for "improving the modernization level of the energy industry chain": "accelerate the integrated development of information technology and the energy industry, and promote the digital upgrading of the energy industry", "carry out the intelligent upgrading of equipment, facilities and technological processes in the fields of power plants and power grids, and improve the flexible perception and efficient production and operation capabilities of the energy system."”.

Combined with the requirements of the "14th Five-Year Plan" for the development of intelligent manufacturing to the depth of the industry, the path of China's wind power manufacturing to achieve industrial upgrading relying on digitalization and intelligence has been very clear.

The digital factory is on the ground

On March 22, the world's longest 104-meter onshore wind turbine blade rolled off the assembly line, and the Sany Shaoshan blade factory, known as the "super factory", carried this record-breaking blade.

The reason why it is called a "super factory", Peng Xu, deputy general manager and chief digital officer of Sany Renewable Energy, pointed out that this is because Sany Renewable Energy adopts a large number of digital, intelligent and automated equipment and technologies in the factory, and on this basis, it has independently developed the "digital meta platform" of the factory's intelligent manufacturing system, which realizes the digital intelligence IoT between the virtual factory and the real factory through digital twin technology, and the intelligent supervision of all production factors of "man-machine-material-method-environment-quality", and implements whole-process control of all process links that affect product quality. Greatly improve the product quality and production efficiency of wind turbine blades.

For example, in the "molding" stage of blade manufacturing, traditional factories still use a large number of manual laying of fiberglass cloth, which is inefficient and labor-intensive, and it is difficult to ensure the operation standard and product quality in all aspects. In response to the above shortcomings, Sany has made many breakthrough changes in key operation scenarios such as layup, mold clamping, glue pouring, and component prefabrication:

The use of "trailing edge UD prefabrication" process not only greatly improves the UD production efficiency and shortens the construction period, but also reduces the failure rate of UD laying in the mold to close to 0%.

The industry's first "resin centralized infusion system" realizes a high degree of automation in the whole process of resin material intake, storage and use, and the perfusion efficiency is simultaneously increased by 25%.

In the "post-treatment process" stage, Sany has also developed a series of automated operating systems for key links such as blade grinding, painting, blade root stud installation, and finished product transfer:

The "grinding robot" is used to improve the efficiency of large-scale grinding, and CNC end milling is developed for the grinding of the blade root part to ensure the consistency of the grinding process and improve the grinding efficiency.

Sany also attaches great importance to the details of "clamping seam grinding", independently develops the "flash cutting system", and changes the operation mode of manual grinding; The "Stud Bolt Automatic Equipment Robot" was developed to ensure that the standard of bolt torque for blade and hub installation is consistent.

These automated facilities applied to the key links of blade manufacturing replace the uncertainty of manual operation, greatly improve the stability of the quality of Sany blades, and the manufacturing efficiency of the Shaoshan blade factory.

"In the Shaoshan plant, all the exploration and application of Sany digital technology are promoted around the five operational indicators of 'quality, cost, efficiency, safety, and employee morale (QCDSM)'," said Liao Xudong, deputy general manager of Sany Renewable Energy and general manager of the blade company, "Through digital and intelligent upgrading, the current factory efficiency has been increased by 20% compared with traditional factories, and the efficient production process has shortened the average construction period of a single blade above 100 meters from more than 40 hours to about 30 hours."

Not only the improvement of efficiency, Peng Xu pointed out that through a large number of practices, Sany has found that the control of product production, quality and business indicators based on intelligent manufacturing has brought great improvement and optimization to improve the high reliability of wind power and even post-operation and maintenance, which is also the reason why Sany spares no effort to invest in intelligent manufacturing.

Walking into Sany Shaoshan Digital Blade Factory, the plant is bright and environmentally friendly, due to a large number of automation equipment put into operation, employees have also realized the identity transformation from traditional operators to skilled workers, changing people's stereotype of "difficult production conditions, poor working environment, large quality fluctuations, low degree of automation, and labor-intensive industry" in the blade industry.

At present, Sany Renewable Energy Shaoshan Blade Factory has 11 sets of molds, with a planned annual output of 3,000 wind power blades, with a blade length of 84-112 meters, and product delivery can cover Hunan, Hubei, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Gansu and other provinces and regions, providing regional, technical and production capacity support for Sany to radiate the markets in Central China and South China.

New track accelerates

In the past two years, the excessive involution of the wind power industry, especially the fierce competition in the price of the whole machine, has challenged the psychological bottom line of every practitioner, and the key bottom line has been repeatedly broken, even to the extent that the whole industry has to advocate a "benign appeal".

In fact, the short-term rise brought about by the price game can only be a bitter medicine for long-term development, and wind power needs to find new growth poles to support the development of the industry to a higher level. As a member of the high-end manufacturing industry, relying on digitalization and intelligence to carry out the digital upgrading of the whole life link, and driving the cost reduction with technological innovation, will be the next breakthrough direction of wind power.

Peng Xu said that under the guidance of digital intelligence, Sany's future goal is to reduce the cost of electricity in the Sanbei region from 0.1 yuan/kWh to 0.08 yuan/kWh in 6-8 years. The heritage of Sany Group, which has strong intelligent manufacturing genes, as well as Sany Renewable Energy's strong product research and development strength, and its own smart wind power systems such as "intelligent manufacturing", "intelligent supply chain", and "smart wind farm", are reliable guarantees to support its realization of the above goals.

Sany Renewable Energy is the first machine manufacturer in China's wind power industry to win the honor of "Intelligent Manufacturing Benchmarking Enterprise". In fact, most of the domestic wind turbine leaders have realized and are willing to invest in digitalization to improve the reliability of wind turbines, but compared with projects with obvious input-output ratios, digitalization requires long-term higher investment but cannot realize short-term economic value, which requires the leadership's foresight and courage to "spend a lot of money".

It is believed that under the digital development of the energy industry, wind power can adjust the status quo of involution, take high-end manufacturing to promote industrial upgrading as an opportunity, and usher in a new track of "hurricane" with digitalization as a breakthrough.