Turning on land at the mouth of the port of Rotterdam is a wind turbine so large that it is difficult to photograph it. The rotating diameter of its rotor is longer than two football fields side by side. Future models will be taller than any building in the continental portion of Western Europe.
Equipped with sensors that collect data on wind speed, electricity production and pressure on its components, the giant rotary machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant marine wind turbines planned by General Electric (GE). When assembled in sets, wind turbines have the potential to power entire cities, replacing vomiting plants with coal or natural gas emissions that form the backbone of many electrical systems in the world. current events.
GE has the pending task of installing one of these machines in ocean waters. As a relatively new company in the offshore wind business, GE faces questions about the speed and efficiency with which it can increase production to build and install hundreds of turbines.
But giant turbines have already caught the attention of the industry. A senior executive at the world’s leading wind farm developer described them as “a leap forward in the latest technology”. One analyst claimed the machine size and anticipated sales had “shaken the industry”.
The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the larger ones already in commercial service. Therefore, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment manufacturers, developers and investors.
GE machines will have a power generation capability that was almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to generate 13 megawatts of energy, enough to illuminate a city of approximately 12,000 homes.
The turbine is capable of producing as much propulsion as the four engines of a Boeing 747 aircraft, according to GE, and will be deployed at sea, where developers have found that they can plant more turbines larger than on land to capture stronger winds. and reliable.
The race to build larger turbines has accelerated much faster than many industry figures predicted. GE’s Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first marine machines installed in Denmark in 1991.
In the coming years, customers are likely to order even larger machines, industry executives say. On the other hand, they also predict that, just as commercial aircraft reached their peak with the Airbus A380, turbines will reach a point where a larger size will no longer make economic sense.
“We will also reach a peak; we just don’t know where it is yet,” said Morten Pilgaard Rasmussen, chief technology officer of the offshore wind unit at Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, the leading manufacturer of marine turbines.
Although offshore turbines currently account for only about five percent of the power generation capacity of the wind industry in general, this part of the commercial activity has acquired its own identity and is expected. which will grow faster than onshore wind energy in the coming years.
GE began venturing into wind power in 2002, when it acquired Enron’s ground turbine business – a successful unit of a company that collapsed in a spectacular accounting scandal – in a bankruptcy auction. It was a minor force in the maritime industry when its executives decided to venture deep into it about four years ago. They saw a growing market with only a couple of serious Western competitors.
Still, GE leaders understood that in order to become a leading company in this most challenging marine environment, they had to be bold. They also proceeded to double the size of their existing marine machines, which had reached GE through the acquisition of the energy sector by the French company Alstom in 2015. The idea was to gain an advantage over key competitors such as Siemens Gamesa and Vestas Wind Systems, the turbine manufacturer based in Denmark.
A larger turbine produces more electricity and therefore higher revenue than a smaller machine. The size also helps reduce the construction and maintenance costs of a wind farm because fewer turbines are required to produce a certain amount of energy.
These qualities generate a powerful incentive for developers to opt for the largest machines available to assist them in their efforts to win tenders for offshore power supply agreements that many countries have adopted. These tenders vary in format, but basically developers compete to provide power for several years for the lowest price.
“What they’re looking for is a turbine that will allow them to win these tenders,” said Vincent Schellings, who has led the design and production of GE’s turbine. “This is where turbine size plays a very important role.”
Among the first customers is Orsted, the Danish company that is the largest creator of offshore wind farms in the world. He has a preliminary agreement to buy about 90 of the Haliade-X machines for a project called Ocean Wind off Atlantic City, New Jersey.
GE’s turbine is selling better than its competitors might have expected, analysts say.
On December 1, GE reached another preliminary agreement to provide turbines to Vineyard Wind, a huge wind farm off Massachusetts, and has contracts to supply 276 turbines to what is probably the world’s largest wind farm at Dogger Bank. , in the United Kingdom.
These agreements, along with the accompanying maintenance contracts, could add up to $ 13 billion, estimates Shashi Barla, chief wind energy analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a market research firm.
GE has yet to decipher how to manufacture a large number of machines efficiently, initially at plants in France and perhaps later in the UK and US. With a limited maritime history, GE must also demonstrate that it can reliably install and maintain large machines at sea, using specialized vessels and dealing with adverse weather conditions.
“GE has a lot to prove to asset owners for them to acquire GE turbines,” Barla said.
Making larger machines has been a simpler and cheaper task for Siemens Gamesa, GE’s main rival, which is already building a prototype for a new, more powerful machine at its marine complex in Brande, on the Jutland peninsula. in Denmark. The secret: the company’s new and larger models have not distanced themselves much from a format that is ten years old.
“The fundamentals of the machine and how it works remain the same,” said Rasmussen, the unit’s chief technology officer, 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, executive director of GE’s maritime industry, said the market outlook is “increasing every year”.