Hong Kong’s CLP Holdings Ltd (中電控股) is looking offshore to help meet a growing need for renewable energy, as limited land supply in the territory poses a challenge to building clean-power capacity.
CLP, one of Hong Kong’s two main electricity generators, said it is revisiting offshore wind technology, and might submit proposals for an offshore wind farm to the local government for their next five-year development plan starting 2023.
Hong Kong, a territory with sky-high land prices, has already set a goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. To do so it will have to eliminate fossil fuels, which account for 75 percent of its power generation, with nuclear and renewables mostly imported from China making up the rest.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“When you look at land being quite a valuable and a scarce resource. That leads you to think, well, what about the water?” CLP chief executive officer Richard Lancaster said in a media briefing last week. “It is much more economic now to build offshore wind than it was 10 years ago.”
CLP had in 2010 proposed to build an offshore wind farm in southeastern Hong Kong waters, but the costs were too high at the time, Lancaster said.
The average offshore wind project cost about US$134 per megawatt-hour that year, according to BloombergNEF data. That has fallen to about US$89 this year.
It is also easier to develop such a project near Hong Kong now, as an offshore building boom in Taiwan, China and South Korea means there are more ships in the region that specialize in erecting the towering turbines.
“We are continuing to consider the project’s feasibility with new turbines which are more effective at the relatively modest wind speeds seen in Hong Kong waters,” CLP said in a statement.
Solar power would be a relatively smaller part of the energy mix in Hong Kong, while nuclear, hydrogen and battery storage would all play a role, Lancaster said.
CLP has not ruled out making investments in China, and has been exploring renewable energy projects in Vietnam, he said.
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