Milestone: 8,000th Chinese-Designed & Built Wind Main Bearings Produced

On May 19, General Secretary Xi Jinping made a special trip to Luoyang during his inspection in Henan to visit Luoyang Bearing Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Luoyang Bearing) to learn about the company's accelerated development of advanced manufacturing. When communicating with Luoyang Bearing employees, the General Secretary pointed out: "We insist on developing real industries. From buying matches, soap, iron, etc. in the past, to becoming the world's largest manufacturing country with the most complete industrial categories, this road is right." Among them, the wind power main bearings inspected by the General Secretary are the best practices of Luoyang Bearing and Envision Energy to break the "bottleneck" link in the wind power industry.

Recently, Envision Energy and Luoyang Bearing have officially launched the 8,000th domestically developed and self-made wind power main bearing, adding a "hard core" footnote to the "largest manufacturing country". This is a milestone achievement for the domestic wind turbine main bearings to achieve full autonomy and control. Behind this major breakthrough is the struggle of a world-leading wind power giant and a long-standing meritorious old factory to work together and sincerely cooperate to ensure national energy security and support wind power "Made in China".

Envision and Luoyang Bearing have been working closely together since 2018, starting the localization process of wind turbine main bearings. Today, the localization rate of wind turbine main bearings in China has exceeded 60%, and Envision has exceeded 80% internally - more than 7,200 self-developed wind turbine main bearings have been put into operation for more than six years with "zero failure", a performance that even top international brands have not been able to achieve. Lou Yimin, senior vice president, chief product officer, and president of wind turbine and equipment product platform of Envision Energy, said frankly: "All wind turbines that Envision sells internationally have 100% domestically produced main bearings, and all of them come from cooperation with Luoyang Bearing. It is estimated that by 2025, the newly installed capacity of domestic wind power will reach 120GW, and by 2030 it will reach 200GW. Behind the numbers, the strong support of the Chinese manufacturing industry represented by Luoyang Bearing is indispensable for the domestic and even global wind power industry chain."

In the next two to three years, Envision will cooperate more deeply with Luoyang Bearing to build a world-class specialized and new enterprise, realize 100% localization of wind power main bearings, and comprehensively promote the Chinese wind power industry to complete the "last mile" of independent control.

Forge "diamond drills" to break the "bottleneck"

Just as matches and iron are to people's livelihood, bearings are like basic "joints" to industry; with the growing proportion of wind and solar energy in China, if the important "joints" of wind turbines always rely on others, how can we talk about energy security?

Therefore, unlike most companies that implement a balanced model of partial localization, Lou Yimin emphasized: At the beginning of its establishment, Envision took "independent control" as an important strategic goal to implement. Envision wants to forge the "diamond drill" of domestic wind power main bearings, so as to break the "bottleneck" of bearings. This breakthrough is not only a technological breakthrough of a single component, but also a reconstruction of the value of China's wind turbine manufacturing industry as a whole. And all of this began with the cooperation between Envision and Luoyang Bearing in 2018.

Luoyang Bearing Group is the cradle of the national bearing industry born in the "First Five-Year Plan" period of New China. It has a glorious history of more than 70 years and is a comprehensive factory that produces a variety of bearings. The cooperation with Envision has opened up new opportunities for this meritorious old factory to move towards specialization and innovation, and has also brought about earth-shaking changes.

To this day, Yu Haibo, general manager of Luoyang Bearing Group, still remembers the great impact Luoyang Bearing experienced and the difficulty of rectification at the beginning of the cooperation between the two parties. At that time, Luoyang Bearing had more than 300 rectification items listed by Envision during the on-site audit due to problems such as backward hardware, lack of detection, and talent gap in the production of wind power main bearings. Subsequently, Wang Xinying, chairman of Luoyang Bearing Group, personally led the Envision cooperation project team. The two sides took "breaking the bottleneck" as the goal, and broke through more than 300 rectification items one by one, starting the all-round attack of "people, technology, and system".

From conveying design requirements, manufacturing process requirements and factory inspection systems, to establishing a special wind power main bearing production line according to Envision standards, and then to Envision quality experts guiding the construction of a complete quality system... After 6 years of running-in, pain and close cooperation, Luoyang Bearing has transformed from a "comprehensive factory" to a "specialized, refined and new" benchmark, realizing the coordinated evolution of the industrial chain. At present, the wind power business of Luoyang Bearing has accounted for nearly 40% of the overall revenue, becoming the sector with the largest weight, and has driven the technological upgrade of upstream supporting enterprises such as steel and testing equipment, forming a collaborative ecology of "complete machine definition demand + component landing innovation".

At the same time, Envision and Luoyang Bearing have jointly broken the "neck-stuck" dilemma of "6 months-3 years delivery cycle" of foreign brands, using their own "diamond drill" to undertake more and higher-quality "porcelain work", shortening the R&D cycle to half a year. Today, in Envision's product series, domestic main bearings have almost completely replaced foreign brands. Huang Hu, general manager of Envision Energy's wind turbine product line, said frankly: "Facts have proved that domestic main bearings are stable and reliable in the actual operation of wind farms, and are far superior to overseas brands in terms of failure rate, operation and maintenance convenience, and service response speed."

Breaking the "black box dilemma" and defining "Chinese standards"

The cooperation between Envision and Luoyang Axle stems from the two-way rush from the high degree of fit in development needs to "value synchronization". The cooperation between the two parties also coincides with the development trajectory of China's wind power industry of "introduction-digestion-surpassing".

In the early days of Envision, China's wind power industry was still in its infancy, and foreign brands almost dominated the world. At that time, foreign-funded wind turbines relied on their technology monopoly to extend the delivery cycle to a very long time - starting from half a year and up to 3 years to deliver. And bearings, as key components, are the core of delivery. According to media reports at the time, when Chinese wind power manufacturers flew to Europe in the rush to install in 2020, it took 10-20 months to get bearings, and the warranty period was very short. After the transportation, installation and hoisting of the main bearings, some projects were just connected to the grid or even before they were connected to the grid, and the warranty period was greatly reduced.

What is even more unbearable for Chinese manufacturers is the "black box" of foreign brands - they are completely closed to the Chinese side in terms of design and quality, and cannot ensure the safety and high reliability of wind turbine operation during use.

On the other hand, as the wind power industry enters the "large-scale no man's land", the pace of foreign brands' research and development begins to lag behind. For example, the iteration of 3-4MW bearings is slow and customization is refused, making it difficult to meet the higher standard requirements of Chinese OEMs than those in Europe.

A series of "bottlenecks" made Vision realize that it must have independent research and development of key components to achieve stable, reliable and efficient delivery. In this context, Vision turned to Luoyang Bearing to jointly develop its own "diamond drill". As the only old-fashioned manufacturing company in the country with a national key laboratory for bearings, Luoyang Bearing's "bearing manufacturing background" is a natural complement to Vision's "whole machine system understanding and component self-development capabilities".

A deeper fit comes from the resonance of the values of "revitalizing Made in China" between the two parties. Luoyang Bearing's "shaft strength" of "daring to bite the hard bones" and Vision's determination to break the "black box" hit it off. The two sides quickly broke through professional barriers and achieved in-depth exchanges, and the relationship between customers and suppliers was quickly upgraded to a "community of technology and ideas".

In response to the "black box" monopoly of foreign brands, Envision adopted a model of deep involvement in the entire process, from raw material entry inspection to heat treatment process monitoring. The two parties transformed every detail of the fan's bearing requirements into high-starting point design and production standards, and established a strict quality monitoring system to improve product performance and quality from the source - from the customization of steel purity to the closed-loop verification of Luoyang axis component testing and Envision Jiangyin Test Center's five-degree-of-freedom bending moment loading test bench system testing. The two parties broke the "black box" with "data + standards", and the record of zero failure of 7,200 main bearings in operation was born.

Based on this, the two parties began to try to redefine the "Chinese standard" of wind turbines with Envision's quality culture and a series of customized standards established accordingly. This standard runs through the entire chain of "demand definition-design research and development-manufacturing verification": for the complex working conditions of wind turbines, Envision converts all operating pressures such as the full working load of the wind turbine, the fluctuation of bending moment and speed, the lubrication conditions of the bearings, and operation and maintenance into reliable design and manufacturing requirements for the main bearings, and outputs them to Luoyang Bearing. Relying on 70 years of manufacturing experience, Luoyang Bearing converts the requirements into process solutions that can be mass-produced efficiently without compromise.

This new standard can achieve the coordination of "whole machine penetration components", so that the main bearing is no longer an "independent part", but a "smart unit" deeply coupled with the wind turbine system-Envision can reduce friction work based on internal parameters such as clearance and shaping, and use digital twin technology to monitor the operating state of the bearing and warn of faults. Today, the key indicators of domestic wind power main bearings such as "fatigue life" and "precision stability" have reached the international leading level.

At the same time, compared with the limited warranty period of imported brands, the two parties jointly established "full life cycle monitoring". In 2019, the first main bearing sample was put into operation in a complex mountain wind farm. Five years later, Envision took the initiative to remove it from the shelf for inspection. The internal wear was 30% lower than that of imported brands, breaking the cognitive inertia of "domestic products are unreliable" with empirical evidence.

Anchored on "autonomy and controllability", join hands in going global

Facing the leap from the "14th Five-Year Plan" to the "15th Five-Year Plan" of the wind power industry, the future "Yuanluo Bearing" has outlined a clear development blueprint: adopting a dual-wheel drive model to race for the new track of "large-scale and internationalized" wind turbines.

Wang Xinying said that in the future, Luozhou Bearing will make every effort to build a world-class specialized and new enterprise, increase technological innovation, increase investment in scientific research, lay out new tracks, and build three intelligent production lines for offshore wind power bearings, high-speed railway bearings and new energy vehicle bearings in 2025. In the field of wind power bearings, Luoyang Bearing will further deepen reforms, continue to promote industrial upgrading, and strive to adapt to the needs of international development in terms of product adaptability, talent building capabilities and organizational structure capabilities. "With the help of Envision's unreserved, frank and open support, Luoyang Bearing has come all the way to where it is today. In the future, Luoyang Bearing will continue to work closely with Envision, actively respond to the national call, polish the background of wind power's 'new quality productivity', and deepen the large-scale and international track. I often tell the team that a lone walker is fast, and a group walker is far. Everyone must walk together to go far, especially in terms of internationalization, and must unite more closely."

In terms of technical breakthroughs, the two sides will focus on the adaptation of offshore wind power to extreme working conditions in the future, jointly develop salt spray corrosion-resistant materials and intelligent sensor integrated bearings, and aim to increase the design life of the main bearing from 20 years to 30 years; at the same time, promote the construction of a "data factory", use digital means to optimize process stability, and solve the problem of "large-scale mass production consistency".

In terms of market expansion, the collaboration between LUO Bearing and Envision has spawned the cross-border competitiveness of "bearings + wind power". In the future, it will extend to large megawatts, offshore wind power, and internationalization, build a digital factory, and upgrade from a "wind power bearing expert" to a "global precision manufacturing benchmark". LUO Bearing plans to reach a wind power business scale of 15 billion yuan in 2030. Through the dual-wheel drive of "Envision's global layout + LUO Bearing's manufacturing capabilities", it will promote domestic bearings to international markets such as Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia.

With the gradual increase in actual combat performance of Chinese manufacturing such as "zero failure of 7,200 main bearings", the situation of "imported brand dependence" of domestic customers is also being reversed. In fact, the cooperation between Envision and LUO Bearing is not only a win-win situation for the two companies, but also a vivid epitome of China's high-end manufacturing industry "breaking barriers with collaboration and winning the future with innovation". With the advancement of the commitment to "achieve 100% localization of wind turbine main bearings in 2-3 years", they are using the confidence of "zero failure" to accelerate the "last mile" of independent and controllable Chinese wind power industry, and write a new footnote for the further development of "Made in China" and global breakthrough.