Returning a field to the mouth of the port of Rotterdam is such a large wind turbine that it is difficult to photograph it. The rotation diameter of its rotor is longer than two football fields next to each other. Future models will be taller than any building in mainland Western Europe.
Equipped with sensors that collect data on wind speed, electricity production and pressure on its components, the giant spinning machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric (GE, for its acronym in English). When assembled into assemblies, wind turbines have the potential to power entire cities, replacing coal or natural gas installations that form the backbone of many of today’s electrical systems.
GE is tasked with installing one of these cars in the ocean. As a relatively new company in the offshore wind industry, GE is facing questions about how quickly and efficiently it can increase production to build and install hundreds of turbines.
But huge turbines have already attracted attention in the industry. An executive director at the world’s largest wind farm developer called them “a leap from the latest technology.” An analyst claimed that the size of the car and the anticipated sales “shook the industry”.
The prototype is the first of a generation of new cars that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. Therefore, it changes the business calculations of wind equipment manufacturers, developers and investors.
GE cars will have an energy-generating capability that was almost unimaginable a decade ago. One will be able to generate 13 megawatts of energy, enough to light a city with about 12,000 homes.
The turbine is capable of producing as much propulsion as the four engines in a Boeing 747 aircraft, according to GE, and will be deployed at sea, where developers have discovered that they can plant more turbines larger than on land to capture winds. stronger. and trustworthy.
The race to build larger turbines accelerated much faster than many industry figures anticipated. 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 demand even larger cars, say industry executives. On the other hand, they also predict that, just as commercial aircraft have reached their peak with the Airbus A380, turbines will reach a point where larger dimensions will no longer make economic sense.
“We will also reach a peak; we just don’t know where it is, ”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 account for only about five percent of the electricity generation capacity of the global wind industry, this part of the business has taken on an identity of its own and is expected to grow faster than wind energy. in the coming years.
GE began its foray into wind energy 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 bid. It was a minor force in the maritime industry when its directors decided to make a deep dive about four years ago. They saw a growing market, with only a few serious Western competitors.
However, GE leaders understood that in order to become a leading company in this more challenging marine environment, they must be bold. They did more than double the size of their existing marine cars, which had reached GE through the acquisition of the energy sector of 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 Danish turbine manufacturer.
A larger turbine produces more electricity and therefore more revenue than a smaller car. The size also helps reduce the cost of building and maintaining a wind farm, as fewer turbines are needed to produce a certain amount of energy.
These qualities create a strong incentive for developers to opt for the largest available cars to help them in their efforts to win bids for offshore energy transactions that many countries have adopted. These offers vary in format, but in practice developers compete to provide energy for several years at the lowest price.
“What they’re looking for is a turbine that will allow them to win these tenders,” said Vincent Schellings, who led the design and production of GE turbines. “The size of the turbine plays a very important role here.”
Among the first customers is Orsted, the Danish company that is the largest creator of offshore wind farms in the world. It has a preliminary agreement to purchase approximately 90 Haliade-X cars for a project called Ocean Wind off Atlantic City, NJ.
The GE turbine sells better than its competitors probably expected, analysts say.
On Dec. 1, GE reached another preliminary agreement to supply turbines to Vineyard Wind, a huge wind farm off Massachusetts, and has contracts to supply 276 turbines to what is arguably the world’s largest wind farm. from Dogger Bank in the United Kingdom.
These transactions, along with the accompanying maintenance contracts, could amount to up to $ 13 billion, estimates Shashi Barla, chief wind energy analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a market research firm.
GE has not yet learned how to produce a large number of machines efficiently, initially at plants in France and perhaps later in the United Kingdom and the United States. With a limited maritime history, GE must also demonstrate that it can reliably install and maintain large machines at sea, using specialized vessels and facing adverse weather conditions.
“GE has a lot to prove to asset owners to buy GE turbines,” Barla said.
Building bigger cars was easier and cheaper for Siemens Gamesa, GE’s main rival, which is already building a prototype for a new, more powerful car at its Brande maritime complex on the Danish Jutland peninsula. The secret: the company’s ever-growing new models haven’t strayed too far from a ten-year-old format.
“The fundamentals of the machine and its operation remain the same,” said Rasmussen, the unit’s chief technology officer, leading to a “slightly better starting point” than GE.
There seems to be a lot of room for competition. John Lavelle, executive director of GE’s marine industry, said the market outlook is “growing every year”.