The price of wind turbines has bottomed out for a long time, and the future depends on how to go large-scale

According to the accumulated data of Wind Power World, since 2024, the price of onshore wind power hosts (excluding towers) has maintained a steady and rising trend, basically standing at around 1,500 yuan/kW.

From January to February, around the Spring Festival, the number of wind power tenders in China was not too large, and it continued the trend of the previous year and rose slightly. In March, the bidding price of onshore wind power in China began to stretch upwards by about 140 yuan/kW, reaching about 1,500 yuan/kW. By the first 15 days of May, the average winning bid price of onshore wind turbines rose to 1,520 yuan/kW, an increase of about 160 yuan/kW compared with 1,350 yuan/kW in January.

However, it is worth noting that two large-scale centralized procurement and base projects are not included in the price statistics, including 12 wind power projects with a total capacity of 2.39 million kilowatts, such as Huaneng Arong Qilingdong Phase II, which opened in early May, and the 1.5 million kilowatt wind storage base project of Inner Mongolia Energy Urad Zhongqi of PowerChina, which announced the winning bid results on May 11. According to the previous bidding situation of Huaneng and Mengneng, the winning bid price of the above two centralized procurement and base projects may be significantly lower than the average market price, and because of its huge size, it is likely that the average winning bid price of the onshore host in May will be pulled down.

According to the data accumulated by Wind Power World, it can be found that the average price of onshore wind turbines has gradually recovered to the level of January 2023. In other words, from January 2023 to the present, the average price of onshore wind turbines in China is basically only a small swing within 200 yuan/kW.

Comparing the monthly price trend of onshore wind power after parity (starting in January 2020), we can basically draw a conclusion that the three years from January 2020 to January 2023 are the most obvious stage of the decline in the price of onshore wind turbines in China, from 4,000 yuan/kW to about 1,500 yuan/kW. By January 2023, the price of onshore wind turbines has bottomed out, and the market has entered a stage of stable development.

Recently, there have been winning bids of less than 1,000 yuan/kW, and basically all of them use units of more than 10MW, and they are large base projects, which does not mean that the prices of all projects are so low.

We know that the first 10 MW onshore wind turbines appeared at the end of 2022, and it has been a year and a half now. Due to the slightly narrow market positioning, coupled with the expansion ratio of old unit expansion and renovation projects is generally 1:2, 5 MW wind turbines can fully meet the existing needs of this market, so from the current proportion of onshore wind turbines above 10 MW in the market, its popularity is far less than the mainstream wind turbines from 3 MW to 5 MW to 8 MW.

Unless developers significantly increase the number of bids for large-capacity units in the future, the price of onshore wind power hosts in China will remain in a range of little fluctuation under the existing market structure.