China's Offshore Wind Milestone: What the US Grid Is Missing

In August 2026, China's Three Gorges New Energy reported that the Jiangsu Rudong 800-megawatt offshore wind project had crossed 10 billion kilowatt-hours in cumulative generation since reaching full capacity in 2021.^[1] The milestone is real, but the buried story is the machine that made it work: an offshore flexible DC converter station, Asia's first, that transforms the wind farm's alternating current into high-voltage direct current for submarine transmission to shore.^[6]

Why that matters to your grid: the converter station reduced transmission losses by roughly 1.2 percentage points against conventional AC transmission, saving 735 million yuan (about $102 million USD) in costs over the project life.^[1] For context, that is the difference between 92 percent and 94 percent of power reaching land intact. Over 62 miles of submarine cable, the compounding effect is real money. The 10 billion kWh of generation is equivalent to annual consumption for about 4 million households,^[1] and the project has prevented approximately 7.4 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.^[1]

The US offshore wind fleet faces the opposite problem. Offshore projects in federal waters have no approved transmission spine; the National Environmental Policy Act and coastal state coordination drag permitting to five or more years, and transmission upgrades to shore are site-by-site cost-recovery, meaning wind developers and ratepayers bear the full tab for DC converters, submarine cables, and onshore reinforcement. There is no cost-sharing mechanism, no federal transmission siting authority, and no equivalent to China's state-backed Three Gorges Corporation that can amortize transmission across a portfolio. Result: the US has roughly 42 gigawatts of offshore wind in development queues but fewer than 3 gigawatts operational, with more projects stalled in transmission permitting than in generation approval.^[2]

The Rudong project's flexible DC technology is not proprietary; the underlying converter design is mature, deployed in similar form by ABB and Siemens in European offshore wind and in grid interconnections. The barrier in the US is institutional, not technical. Flexible DC converters cost roughly $200,000 to $300,000 per megawatt in bulk; for an 800 MW farm, that is a $160 million to $240 million capital expense, currently borne by the developer and passed to ratepayers in capacity payments or to federal taxpayers via investment tax credits. China spreads that cost across the national grid and treats transmission as a state responsibility; the US treats it as a merchant-dev risk.

The choice is visible in deployment speed. China has installed multiple offshore flexible DC projects in the past five years; the US is still in pre-construction environmental review for its first dedicated offshore transmission corridor (the Sunrise Wind cable, a 132-mile AC line to New York, with a timeline pushing into 2029). Rudong's 10 billion kWh annual generation is now routine; US offshore projects are still fighting to exist at all.