China Connects 16-Megawatt Tension-Leg Floating Wind Turbine to Offshore Grid

China has connected the Haiyou Anlan, a 16-megawatt tension-leg platform floating wind turbine, to the grid at the Lufeng oilfield in the Pearl River Mouth Basin. Located roughly 200 kilometers southeast of Shenzhen, the unit represents China's first tension-leg floating wind platform and the world's deepest and largest-capacity installation of its specific design type, according to People's Daily. Built to generate an estimated 54 million kilowatt-hours annually for offshore operations, the milestone signals Beijing's technological push into deeper offshore waters as nearshore sites become congested.

The commissioning marks an important engineering shift for China's offshore energy sector from shallow-water fixed-bottom turbines to deep-water tension-leg platforms. As the world's deepest-water, farthest-offshore, and largest single-capacity tension-leg wind turbine installation, it provides an engineering blueprint for decarbonizing offshore oil and gas production while validating a design intended to exploit rich deep-sea wind reserves at scale.

China has officially commissioned the Haiyou Anlan, the world's first 16-megawatt tension-leg platform floating wind turbine, connecting it to the power grid of the Lufeng oilfield in the Pearl River Mouth Basin, People's Daily reported. Located approximately 200 kilometers southeast of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, the facility directly supplies electricity to offshore oilfield operations. State media described the project as China's first tension-leg floating wind platform, as well as the world's deepest, farthest offshore, and largest single-capacity installation of its type. Traditional offshore wind installations rely heavily on fixed foundations driven into the seabed, an approach that becomes economically impractical as projects push into waters deeper than 60 meters due to surging steel requirements and installation costs, project director Yu Yingping told People's Daily. Floating structures provide an alternative, with tension-leg platforms representing one of the sector's primary design pathways. The Haiyou Anlan uses a triangular floating hull with side lengths of roughly 100 meters. The buoyant upper structure pushes upward while nine vertically tensioned steel cables—or tension legs—pull downward against seabed anchors, fixing the platform securely in place. According to Yu, the tension-leg architecture offers high stability, lower steel consumption per megawatt, and a smaller marine footprint compared to conventional designs, minimizing interference with traditional marine activities. Engineers faced major technical hurdles in deploying the system, which had no prior operational precedent in China. Reaching an overall height equivalent to nearly 110 stories and weighing 7,800 metric tons, the platform must endure frequent typhoons and complex ocean currents while subjecting its mooring tendons to persistent mechanical strain. Project engineer Feng Dong credited close collaboration between state-owned enterprises and private manufacturing suppliers with overcoming design and fabrication bottlenecks, noting that multiple core components represent world-first engineering applications. Equipped with a typhoon-resistant 16-megawatt turbine, the unit features a swept area of 5.3万 square meters, roughly equal to 7.5 standard soccer pitches. Operating estimates suggest it will produce 54 million kilowatt-hours of clean electricity annually, matching the yearly consumption of roughly 70,000 residents while saving 15,000 cubic meters of fuel oil and avoiding 35,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report. Deep-sea wind resources evaluated by China's National Climate Center represent the primary growth frontier for the country's offshore wind industry. The national 15th Five-Year Plan targets building large-scale offshore wind bases across the Bohai, Yellow, East China, and South China Seas, aiming to bring cumulative grid-connected offshore wind capacity past 100 gigawatts.