Monster Wind Turbine Shakes Industry

Whirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam harbor is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning circle of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the continent of Western Europe.

Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speed, power generation and stresses on its components, the Dutch Giant Whirlpool is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled into networks, wind turbines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-emitting coal or natural gas plants that today form the backbone of many power systems.

GE has yet to install any of these machines in seawater. As a newcomer to the offshore wind industry, the company faces questions about how quickly and efficiently it can increase its production to build and install hundreds of turbines.

But giant turbines have already turned heads in the industry. A senior executive at the world’s largest wind farm developer called it a “small leap from the latest technology.” And an analyst said the size of the machine and anticipated sales had “shaken the industry.”

The prototype is the first in a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the larger ones already in commercial service. As such, it changes the business calculations of manufacturers, developers and investors of wind equipment.

GE machines will have a production capacity that would have been almost unimaginable ten years ago. One can produce 13 megawatts of electricity, enough to light a city of about 12,000 homes.

The turbine is capable of producing as much thrust that all four engines in a Boeing 747, according to GE, will be deployed at sea, where developers have learned they can install larger and more turbines than on land to capture stronger breezes. and more reliable.

The race to build bigger turbines has gone faster than many industry figures had anticipated. GE’s Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first offshore machines installed off Denmark in 1991.

In the years to come, customers are likely to demand even larger machines, according to industry executives. On the other hand, they predict that just as commercial airliners reached their peak with the Airbus A380, turbines will reach a point where larger size will no longer make economic sense.

“We will also reach a plateau; we just don’t know where it is yet, ”said Morten Pilgaard Rasmussen, chief technology officer for the offshore wind unit at Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, the leading manufacturer of offshore turbines.

Although offshore turbines currently represent only around 5% of the production capacity of the entire wind industry, this part of the business has taken on a distinct identity and is expected to grow faster in the years to come than onshore wind power.

Offshore technology has taken root in Northern Europe over the past three decades and is now spreading to the east coast of the United States as well as Asia, including Taiwan, China and South Korea. Large-scale projects that cost billions of dollars and are possible at sea are attracting big investors, including oil companies like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, who want to quickly improve their green energy offerings. Capital investment in offshore wind has more than tripled over the past decade to reach $ 26 billion, according to the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based forecasting group.

GE began making inroads in wind power in 2002 when it bought the onshore wind business of Enron – a successful unit in a company that was the victim of a spectacular accounting scandal – during a bankruptcy auction. It was a marginal force in the offshore industry when its executives decided to try to break it about four years ago. They saw a growing market with only a few serious western competitors.

Yet GE bosses believed that in order to become a leader in the harsher marine environment, they had to be bold. They proceeded to more than double the size of their existing offshore machine, which came to GE through the acquisition of Alstom’s electrical business in France in 2015. The idea was to take a lead over competitors key players like Siemens Gamesa and Vestas Wind Systems, the Danish-based turbine manufacturer.

A larger turbine produces more electricity and therefore more income than a smaller machine. Size also helps reduce the cost of building and maintaining a wind farm, as fewer turbines are needed to produce a given amount of energy.

These qualities create a powerful incentive for developers to go for the largest machine available to help them in their efforts to win the auction for the offshore power supply agreements that many countries have adopted. These auctions vary in format, but developers compete with each other to provide power for a number of years at the lowest price.

“What they’re looking for is a turbine that allows them to win this auction,” said Vincent Schellings, who led the design and production of the GE turbine. “This is where the size of the turbine plays a very important role.”

Among the first customers is Orsted, a Danish company which is the largest developer of offshore wind farms in the world. He has a preliminary agreement to purchase around 90 of the Haliade-X machines for a project called Ocean Wind off Atlantic City, NJ.

“I think they surprised everyone when they took this machine out,” said David Hardy, general manager of Orsted’s offshore activities in North America.

As a large buyer of turbines, Orsted wants to help “establish this new platform and create volume for GE” to promote competition and innovation, said Mr. Hardy.

The GE turbine is selling better than its competitors might have predicted, analysts said.

On December 1, GE reached another preliminary deal to supply turbines to Vineyard Wind, a large wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, and made deals to supply 276 turbines to what will likely be the world’s largest wind farm in Dogger Bank off the coast of Great Britain.

These deals, along with maintenance contracts, could total $ 13 billion, estimates Shashi Barla, senior wind analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a market research firm.

The waves made by the GE machine prompted Siemens Gamesa to announce a series of competing turbines. Vestas, which until recently owned the industry’s largest machine in its stable, is also set to unveil a new entry soon.

“We didn’t move as first, and of course we have to deal with it today,” said Henrik Andersen, CEO of Vestas.

To succeed, GE had to start “from near zero”, said Schellings. The business unit called GE Renewable Energy spends around $ 400 million on designing, recruiting engineers and retooling factories in Saint-Nazaire and Cherbourg in France.

To make a blade of such extraordinary length that does not warp under its own weight, GE enlisted the help of designers from LM Wind Power, a blade maker in Denmark that the company purchased in 2016 for $ 1.7 billion. dollars. Among their innovations: a material combining carbon fiber and fiberglass that is both light but strong and flexible.

GE has yet to find a way to efficiently manufacture large numbers of machines, first in factories in France and, possibly later, in Britain and the United States. With limited experience at sea, GE must also show that it can reliably install and maintain large machinery at sea, using specialist vessels and coping with inclement weather.

“GE has to prove a lot to asset owners to get GE turbines,” Barla said.

Bringing out bigger machines has been easier and cheaper for Siemens Gamesa, GE’s main rival, which is already building a prototype for a new, more powerful machine at its offshore complex in Brande, on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. The secret: The company’s ever-larger new models haven’t strayed far from a ten-year-old model.

“The fundamentals of the machine and how it works remain the same,” said Mr. Rasmussen, chief technology officer for the unit, leading to a “starting point that was a little better” than GE’s.

There seems to be a lot of room for competition. John Lavelle, managing director of GE’s offshore business, said the market outlook “grows bigger every year.”