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With a blade diameter measuring more than two football fields, GE Renewables’ Haliade-X turbines are already the largest and most powerful in the world, capable of producing up to 14 MW of energy. The ability to 3D print the concrete base of the turbine on-site for direct transport to the final offshore location will allow even larger systems to be built and deployed.
This approach should allow the production of much taller wind turbines as turbine producers will not be hampered by transportation limitations.–today, the width of the base cannot exceed 4.5 meters for transport reasons, which limits the height of the turbine. By increasing the height, the energy production per turbine can also be considerably increased: for example, a 5 MW turbine measuring 80 meters generates around 15.1 GWh per year. The same 160-meter turbine would generate 20.2 GWh per year, an increase of 33%. How this scale is expected to get even bigger, with new turbines reaching heights of 260 meters and even more.
The first prototype of the Heliade X turbine became operational in the port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a little over a year ago. It became the first wind turbine to produce 288 megawatt hours of energy in 24 hours. This may have been enough to supply 30,000 households in this region.
The new Haliade-X offshore turbine includes a capacity of 14 MW, 13 MW or 12 MW, a rotor of 220 meters, a blade of 107 meters and digital capacities. It is not only the most powerful wind turbine in the world, but it also has a capacity factor of 60-64% higher than industry standards. The capacity factor compares the amount of energy produced versus the maximum that could have been produced in continuous operation at full power for a specific period of time. Each additional point of the capacity factor represents approximately $ 7 million in revenue for the wind turbine owner over the life of a wind farm.
In October, the machine, which is also the most powerful offshore wind turbine currently in operation, produced 312 megawatt hours of energy in a single 24-hour period. GE Renewable Energy engineers spent the last year collecting data on the Rotterdam prototype in order to obtain a full “type certificate” for the machine – verification by an independent body, DNV GL, that the new turbine will operate. in a manner that is safe, reliable and in accordance with design specifications. DNV GL has awarded this certification to the Haliade-X 12 MW offshore.
“This is a key milestone for us as it gives our customers the opportunity to obtain financing when purchasing Haliade-X,” said Vincent Schellings, who leads turbine development for GE. Renewable Energy. “Our continued goal is to provide them with the technology they need to drive the global growth of offshore wind as it becomes an increasingly affordable and reliable source of renewable energy.” It’s a good deal: the International Energy Agency has predicted that cumulative investments in offshore wind will reach $ 1 trillion by 2040.
Type certification came shortly after a component of the turbine – its 107-meter-long blade, which exceeds the length of a football field – received its own component certification. The Haliade-X 12 MW’s certification process involved separate testing of its blades, at facilities in the US and UK, and testing involving the prototype in Rotterdam.
GE designed the Haliade-X to generate 12 megawatts, but tests in Rotterdam revealed that it could exceed its original targets, to the tune of 13 megawatts. The new type certification specifically concerns 12 MW; Testing of the 13 MW Rotterdam prototype is underway, with separate certification expected in the first half of 2021.
The next step after this important step? Installation. GE Renewable Energy has signed the first contract for Haliade-X 13 MW, agreeing to supply 190 machines to Dogger Bank A and Dogger Bank B, the first two phases of what is expected to be the world’s largest offshore wind farm, located at the North Sea, about 130 kilometers off the English Yorkshire coast. Scheduled for completion in 2026, the farm is expected to be capable of generating 3.6 gigawatts of electrical power – enough to power 4.5 million UK homes.
The challenges associated with producing larger wind turbines do not end at the basics. Blades over 100 meters long must also be produced as a single piece – they cannot be assembled from multiple sections – and the strength of fiberglass reinforced plastics reaches its physical limits to withstand forces of wind more and more important.
Today the blades are produced using extremely expensive advanced molds which are not only extremely large but must also be very complex to allow efficient cooling and hardening of the fiberglass reinforced blade. In the future, large-format composite 3D printing technologies could enable more profitable production of these blade molds and – perhaps even direct production of carbon fiber reinforced blades over 100 meters in length. Obviously, these capabilities are not available today, but companies like Ingersoll and Themrwood have demonstrated that there is no inherent limit to the size of large format composite 3D printing systems.
In 2018, the Office of Wind Energy Technologies and the Office of Advanced Manufacturing of the U.S. Department of Energy partnered with another large-format composite 3D printing company, Cincinnati Inc, to apply additive manufacturing to the production of large molds for wind turbine blades.
3D printing was seen as a very attractive option for large products such as wind turbine blades, which are labor intensive, mostly done by hand by depositing large amounts of composite material, which makes the molds themselves. even quite expensive and quick to manufacture.
In the wind industry, using additive manufacturing to directly produce custom blades from CAD could also mean turn-optimized wind turbine blades in a wind farm. This means that the blades of each turbine could one day be optimized for the different locations, wind and turbulence patterns at each location on the farm and on each different farm. Additive manufacturing is the technology that makes all of this possible at a lower price and with shorter lead times.
It won’t happen anytime soon, so don’t hold your breath. AM always has significant limitations in terms of density and quality of the final material, process repeatability and costs. Not to mention that the technologies to produce objects of this size as a single component have not yet been developed. However, if turbines get bigger and bigger (and they will be), their production processes will necessarily have to include 3D printing.
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