Huaneng Connects China's Deepest Offshore Wind Farm to the Grid as 504 MW Shandong Peninsula North L Pushes Fixed-Bottom Limits to 56 Meters
China Huaneng Group fully energized the 504 MW Shandong Peninsula North L offshore wind farm on April 7, 2026, installing 42 twelve-megawatt turbines on jacket foundations in 52 to 56 meters of water — the deepest fixed-bottom offshore wind project ever built in China.
Overview
China Huaneng Group has fully energized the 504 MW Shandong Peninsula North L offshore wind farm, the deepest commercial offshore wind installation ever built in China. Full-power grid delivery began on April 7, 2026, according to Maritime Executive, and the project is expected to generate roughly 1.7 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, displacing about 500,000 tonnes of standard coal annually, per CGTN.
The milestone extends the limits of fixed-bottom offshore wind in Chinese waters and narrows the global gap with Scotland’s Seagreen wind farm, which remains the deepest fixed-bottom installation worldwide at 58.7 meters, as reported by Maritime Executive.
What We Know
Site and capacity. Shandong Peninsula North L sits approximately 70 kilometers off the northeast coast of Shandong Province in the Yellow Sea. The site has water depths of 52 to 56 meters, according to OffshoreWind.biz. The project comprises 42 turbines rated at 12 MW each, for a total installed capacity of 504 MW.
Foundations. Each turbine sits on a four-legged jacket foundation reaching a maximum height of 83.9 meters — the tallest jacket structure of its kind deployed in China to date, per OffshoreWind.biz.
Installation innovations. Huaneng applied a high-precision positioning system based on China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System to drive the foundation piles, achieving what the developer describes as millimeter-level placement accuracy. Combined with intelligent assisted-sinking technology, the system reduced pile-driving time per foundation from 48 hours to 29 hours, as detailed by OffshoreWind.biz.
Subsea cabling. For the project’s 95.6 kilometers of submarine cable, the developer used a combined technology of drones and artificial magnetic fields to lay the subsea cable, according to OffshoreWind.biz. The 95.6-kilometer cable distance is also confirmed by Maritime Executive.
Output and emissions. China Huaneng Group expects annual generation of approximately 1.7 TWh and an annual displacement of about 500,000 tonnes of standard coal equivalent, per Windtech International.
Why It Matters
Fixed-bottom offshore wind has historically been confined to depths below roughly 50 meters; deeper sites have been viewed as the domain of floating turbines, which carry significantly higher costs and limited commercial deployments to date. By demonstrating that 12 MW turbines can be installed economically on jacket foundations in 56 meters of water, Huaneng pushes the upper boundary of what fixed-bottom technology can address — a regime that overlaps with sites previously considered candidates for floating designs.
The Shandong Peninsula North L project also sits within a broader Chinese offshore wind buildout that delivered 6.6 GW of new offshore commissioning in 2025 — about 72 percent of the 9.2 GW added globally that year — according to the Global Wind Energy Council. The country accounts for the majority of installed offshore wind capacity worldwide.
The project is part of a continuing pattern of Chinese state-led infrastructure delivery in clean energy, following recent grid-scale milestones such as China’s first commercial supercritical CO₂ power generator and the first megawatt-class hydrogen turboprop flight earlier this month.
What We Don’t Know
The public announcements do not name the turbine manufacturer or specify hub height and rotor diameter for the 12 MW machines. China has multiple domestic suppliers in the 12 MW class — including Mingyang, Goldwind, Dongfang, and CSSC Haizhuang — but Huaneng’s release and the secondary coverage reviewed do not confirm which of them supplied the units installed at Shandong Peninsula North L.
Also unclear are the project’s full capital cost, the levelized cost of energy at this depth, and the share of output contracted under fixed offtake versus dispatched into China’s evolving electricity spot markets. Those figures will determine whether the deeper-water economics generalize beyond demonstration projects to a broader Chinese pipeline of 50-plus-meter sites.
Context
The commissioning lands during a period of intensive deep-water and floating offshore wind activity. Scotland’s Seagreen, online since 2023, retains the global record for deepest fixed-bottom installation at 58.7 meters. Beyond fixed-bottom designs, several floating offshore wind projects in Norway, the United Kingdom, and France operate in deeper water but at much smaller scale, typically under 100 MW.
For Huaneng, Shandong Peninsula North L extends the company’s offshore wind portfolio along China’s eastern seaboard. The combination of 12 MW turbines, jacket foundations beyond 50 meters, and BeiDou-guided installation establishes a template the company and other Chinese developers can replicate at additional Yellow Sea and East China Sea sites where shallow-water acreage is increasingly built out.