A wind turbine so large that it is difficult to photograph rotates above a strip of ground at the mouth of the Rotterdam harbor. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than the American football fields are to the end. Later models will be longer than any building on the continent of Western Europe.
The giant swing machine in the Netherlands is packed with sensors that collect data on wind speed, electricity output and voltage on its components, and is a test model for a new range of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When put together, wind turbines can power cities, replacing the emission-emitting coal or natural gas-fired plants that today form the backbone of many electrical systems.
GE needs to install another of these machines in seawater. As a relative newcomer to the offshore wind industry, the company has questions about how quickly and efficiently it can scale up production to build and install hundreds of turbines.
But already the giant turbines have made heads turn in the industry. A top executive at the world’s leading developer of wind farms calls it a bit of a leap across the latest technology. ‘ And an analyst said the size and pre-sales of the machine ‘shook’ the industry.
The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that is about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it changes the business calculations of manufacturers, developers and investors of wind equipment.
The GE machines have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one can turn off 13 megawatts of power, enough to light a city with about 12,000 homes.
The turbine can provide just as much propulsion as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet, according to GE deployed at sea, where developers have learned that they can plant larger and more numerous turbines than on land to catch stronger winds. and more reliable.
The race to build larger turbines has moved faster than many operating figures provided. GE’s Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first foreign machines installed outside Denmark in 1991.
In the coming year, customers are likely to demand even larger machines, say industry executives. On the other hand, they predict that, just as commercial aircraft have peaked with the Airbus A380, turbines will reach a point where larger size no longer makes economic sense.
‘We will also reach a plateau; we just do not know where it is yet, ”said Morten Pilgaard Rasmussen, chief technology officer of the offshore wind unit of Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, the leading manufacturer of offshore turbines.
Although turbines abroad now make up only about 5 percent of the generation capacity of the overall wind industry, this part of the business has acquired its own identity and is expected to grow faster than wind on land in the coming years.
Foreign technology has taken hold 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. The billions of dollars in large-scale projects that are possible at sea are attracting large investors, including oil companies such as BP and Royal Dutch Shell, who want to rapidly improve their supply of green energy. According to the International Energy Agency, the forecasting group in Paris, foreign investment in foreign wind has more than tripled to $ 26 billion in the past decade.
GE began tracking wind power in 2002 when it bought Enron’s land-based turbine business – a successful unit in a company that was embroiled in a spectacular accounting scandal – at a bankruptcy auction. It was a marginal force in the foreign industry when its executives decided about four years ago to try to crack it. They see a growing market with only a few serious Western competitors.
Yet GE’s bosses thought they had to be brave to become a leader in the more challenging marine environment. They became more than double the size of their existing foreign machine, which came to GE in 2015 through the acquisition of the French Alstom power company. The idea was to gain an edge 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 machine. Size also helps reduce the cost of building and maintaining a wind farm because fewer turbines are needed to deliver a given amount of power.
These features create a powerful incentive for developers to opt for the largest machine available for their efforts to win the foreign power supply auctions that are going on in many countries. These auctions vary in format, but developers compete to deliver power for the lowest price over a number of years.
“What they are looking for is a turbine that will enable them to win these auctions,” 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.”
Early customers include Orsted, a Danish company that is the world’s largest developer of wind farms abroad. It has a preliminary agreement to buy about 90 of the Haliade X machines for a project called Ocean Wind off Atlantic City, NJ
“I think they were all surprised when they came out with the machine,” said David Hardy, chief executive of Orsted’s foreign affairs in North America.
As a major buyer of turbines, Orsted wants to help establish this new platform and create some volume for GE to promote competition and innovation, Mr. Hardy said.
The GE turbine is selling better than its competitors expected, analysts say.
On December 1, GE reached another preliminary agreement to supply turbines for Vineyard Wind, a large wind farm outside Massachusetts, and it has offers to supply 276 turbines to what is likely to be the world’s largest wind farm at Dogger Bank outside Britain. .
These deals, with accompanying maintenance contracts, could amount to $ 13 billion, estimates Shashi Barla, chief wind analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a market research firm.
The waves made by the GE engine pushed Siemens Gamesa to announce a range of competing turbines. Vestas, which until recently had the industry’s largest machine in its stable, is also expected to launch a new entry soon.
“We did not move as the first one, and that, of course, needs to be addressed today,” said Henrik Andersen, CEO of Vestas.
Schellings said GE had to start from scratch a bit to take the chance. The business unit called GE Renewable Energy spends about $ 400 million on design, hires engineers and rebuilds in St. Louis. Nazaire and Cherbourg in France.
To make a blade of such extraordinary length that does not deviate from its own weight, GE appealed to designers at LM Wind Power, a blade manufacturer in Denmark that bought the company in 2016 for $ 1.7 billion. bought. Some of their innovations: a material that combines carbon fiber and glass fiber that is light and yet strong and flexible.
GE still needs to figure out how to produce large numbers of the machines efficiently, initially at the plants in France and possibly later also in Britain and the United States. With a slim foreign record, GE must also show that it can reliably install and maintain the large machines at sea, using specialized ships and dealing with difficult weather.
“GE needs a lot of proof to asset owners to purchase GE turbines,” he said. Barla said.
Bringing larger machines forward was easier and cheaper for Siemens Gamesa, GE’s main competitor, which is already building a prototype for a new and more powerful machine at its foreign complex in Brande on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark. The secret: the company’s ever-growing new models have not strayed far from a decade-old pattern.
“The basic principles of the machine and how it works remain the same,” he said. Rasmussen, the unit’s chief technology officer, said that led to a ‘starting point that was a little better’ than that of GE.
There seems to be enough room for competition. John Lavelle, CEO of GE’s foreign affairs, said that the outlook for the market is growing every year.