The wind power industry chain has entered the operation and maintenance period

   With the gradual expansion of installed capacity, wind power from the front end to the back end is ushering in a new incremental space: the operation and maintenance sector.

     Operation and maintenance: an important part of the quality of wind power assets

    At present, wind power has become the third largest power source after thermal power and hydropower. According to the latest data released by China power union, China's accumulated wind power grid connection capacity has reached 180 million kilowatts. In terms of new installed capacity, 12.61 million kilowatts of wind power were added to the grid in the first nine months of 2018. According to the 13th five-year plan for wind power development released by the national energy administration, by the end of 2020, China will have installed more than 210 million kilowatts of wind power, accounting for about 6 percent of the country's total power generation.

    When an industry develops to a certain scale or stage, the post-service market will be the new driving force for industrial development. The post-wind power market covers many aspects, such as the monitoring of the operation state of wind power units, the intelligent management of wind power plants, the maintenance of components, spare parts management, and the decommissioning and reconstruction of units. Just like the wind power quality assurance capacity has a considerable scale, the initial estimate is 100GW. If the unit capacity is 1.5mw, it is equivalent to nearly 70,000 typhoon units. How to maintain and increase the value of the huge wind power assets has become a new problem for the project owners.

    The operation and maintenance ability of the wind power post-market has thus become an important part in determining the quality of wind power assets. The operating life of the fan is 20 to 25 years. After 15 years of operation, its economy will be greatly reduced. As in the wind power project development process, the fan in a reasonable operating time to play the best performance, become a measure of wind field operation success or failure of one of the key factors. While the fan itself should have excellent quality, its life cycle operation and maintenance is more critical.

    Based on the annual utilization hours of 2000 hours and the operation and maintenance cost of 0.05 yuan per KWH, the total wind power operation and maintenance market will reach 25.2 billion yuan in the next three years. From the perspective of regional distribution, the target market of operation and maintenance is still mainly concentrated in the "three north" regions at present and even in the future.

    Operation and maintenance: efficient and flexible third-party wind power operation and maintenance

    In order to accelerate the arrival of wind power parity online era, in September 2017, the national energy administration issued the "notice on the announcement of wind power parity online demonstration projects", and launched the first batch of 13 wind power parity online demonstration projects with a total scale of 707,000 kw.

    According to the policy requirements, the on-grid electricity price of these demonstration projects will be implemented according to the local benchmark on-grid electricity price for coal and electricity. The generated electricity will not be issued with green power certificate and will be consumed within the scope of the local power grid.

    This means that in the affordable online demonstration project, wind power will form the same platform with thermal power competition strength. Affordable Internet access also means that these demonstration projects no longer need state subsidies.

The price reduction caused by the wind power parity online may cause pressure on the whole machine business. While seeking for price reduction, the pressure on the fan operation and maintenance cost will increase, which will also be a big obstacle to the development of wind power operation and maintenance. The only way out is safe, reliable and low-cost operation of the fan, and the key is to maximize the life of parts and early warning and diagnosis.

    Most of the market's developers and machine builders are state-owned. Although state-owned enterprises are 'big and complete', they are always limited by the total amount of wages, the total number of employees and the enterprise mechanism, and cannot be broken through. On the contrary, the efficiency of wind power operation and maintenance service in the third city is very high.

    The operation and maintenance of third-party wind power has the advantage of flexibly mobilizing human resources and technology. For example, there are problems in supplier communication, spare parts reserve, quality control and problem tracking for nearly ten types of fans equipped with one wind field equipment. In view of these problems, most of the whole machine business is often struggling to cope with, mainly relying on a large service team to deal with. Third-party wind power operation and maintenance undoubtedly have incomparable advantages in this respect.