Mingyang completes OceanX assembly and transports it to its final location | REVE News of the wind sector in Spain and in the world

Mingyang has successfully transported its innovative double-rotor floating platform, OceanX, to its final location. The platform, which boasts a total capacity of 16.6 MW (2 x 8.3 MW), was towed to its final site, 700 kilometers away (approximately a 72-hour journey) off the southeast coast of China. It has been installed at the existing Qingzhou IV Offshore Wind Farm.

To celebrate this milestone, a significant amount of content in the form of photos and videos has circulated online, which I’ve decided to compile here.

Mingyang’s president, Qiying Zhang, has been quite active on LinkedIn lately, sharing posts with brief insights about the prototype, often with very concise captions (more like tweets). He has shared photos of the transportation (1 and 2), videos of the platform at its final location (1 and 2), and images of marine life around the platform.

However, the best quality videos and images can be found on YouTube. The video I’ve linked below shows numerous details of the platform’s assembly, from the concrete segments that make up the floater to the installation of the nacelles and rotors (incidentally, the rotors were assembled as a complete unit). It also includes footage of the launch and part of its transport, with an impressive underwater tunnel as a backdrop.

Mingyang has also released a video with more of a marketing approach, but it’s still quite cool. It has very few views (24 at the time of writing this), so you can feel special if you watch it .

One very important technical detail I overlooked is that OceanX is a platform that operates downwind, meaning that the wind hits the back of the nacelle rather than the side facing the hub.

This allows the entire structure to rotate around its anchoring point, enabling it to passively align with the wind direction, like a vane. As you can imagine, the nacelles don’t have a yaw system. This is the same solution proposed by X1 Wind in their PivotBuoy platform.

For those more curious, I’m also including a link to the Aerodyn Engineering catalog, the inventors of this concept, which describes many technical aspects of the structure.

The catalog also includes comparisons with other platform types (page 23), LCOE comparisons for different locations (page 27), and even technical data for a hypothetical 20 MW platform (2 x 10 MW). It’s worth taking a look.

Personally, I find this prototype fascinating, and I’m glad someone is willing to invest in such ventures.

The reality is that there’s still a long way to go before this platform can become a commercial reality, but having a full-scale prototype is always a crucial step, and that step has now been taken.

Whatever the outcome, it’s undeniable that this is an exceptional engineering piece.