News Releases 2023
Mar. 03, 2023
Optimization of Power Cable Technology Promises Reduced Wind Power Plant Construction Costs
JGC Holdings Corporation (Chairman and CEO: Masayuki Sato) announces that its domestic EPC business company, JGC Corporation (President and CEO: Shoji Yamada, hereinafter "JGC"), has established power cable optimization design technology that will contribute to reducing the construction cost of wind power plants.
The following is a brief description of the new technology.
1. Challenges Surrounding Wind Power Generation
The Sixth Basic Energy Plan, released in October 2021, calls for renewable energy to become the main source of electric power generation. Against this backdrop, plans to construct both onshore and offshore wind power plants are currently gaining momentum in Japan, and one of the challenges for their introduction is the reduction of power plant construction costs.
Wind power plant facilities consist of wind turbine generators, substations for voltage transformation, and a switchyard for grid interconnection. The types of power cables connecting these facilities vary depending on the number of wind turbines and the locations of substations and interconnection points, but in the case of a large-scale offshore wind farm with a generation capacity of more than 0.5 GW, the cost of power cables is several tens of billions of yen. In order to reduce the overall cost of wind power plants, how to reduce the cost of power cables is one of the most important issues to be considered.
3. Optimization by Dynamic Rating
In the current design approach, the power cable size is selected based on the installation environment, current, voltage, and cable specifications to ensure that the power cable size will not be a bottleneck even if the wind turbine generator is outputting 100% continuously.However, in wind power generation, where generator output fluctuates according to wind conditions, the output is only at 100% for limited periods of time. In support of JGC, DNV(Netherlands), which has experience in power cable optimization for - amongst others - wind power generation worldwide, has been studying the optimization of power cable sizes for windfarms in Japan since April 2021.
These studies have resulted in an optimal design philosophy that minimizes the required cable size by applying dynamic rating, which simulates wind conditions and generator output in detail. Specifically, it has been confirmed that the application of this philosophy can be expected to bring about a reduction of about 10% in power cable cost for onshore and offshore wind farms in Japan, depending on the windfarm location.
JGC Corporation will contribute to the accelerated introduction of wind power generation in Japan by demonstrating its advanced technological capabilities as an engineering company, including its power cable optimization design technology based on dynamic rating, to the construction plans for onshore and offshore wind power plants, which are expected to accelerate in the future.