Rotating above a strip of land at the mouth of the port of Rotterdam is a wind turbine so large that it is difficult to photograph. The rotating diameter of its rotor is greater than two football fields from end to end. Subsequent models will be taller than any building on the continent of Western Europe.
Packed with sensors that collect data on wind speed, electricity production and component voltages, the giant rotary machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When mounted on arrays, wind machines have the potential to supply cities, supplanting coal or natural gas plants that emit emissions and form the backbone of many electrical systems today.
GE has not yet installed one of these machines in ocean water. As a relatively new player in the offshore wind business, the company faces doubts about how quickly and efficiently it can increase production to build and install hundreds of turbines.
But the giant turbines have already caught the attention of the sector. A senior executive at the world’s leading wind farm developer called it “a leap from the latest technology”. And an analyst said the machine’s size and advance sales “shook the industry.”
The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest ever in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment manufacturers, developers and investors.
GE machines will have a generation capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single will be able to produce 13 megawatts of energy, enough to light up a city with about 12,000 homes.
The turbine is capable of producing as much thrust as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet, according to GE, will be deployed at sea, where developers have learned that they can plant larger and more numerous turbines than on land to capture stronger and more breezes. trustworthy.
The race to build bigger turbines was faster than many industry figures predicted. GE’s Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first offshore machines installed off the coast of Denmark in 1991.
In the coming years, customers are likely to demand even bigger machines, say industry executives. On the other hand, they predict that, just as commercial airplanes peaked with the Airbus A380, the turbines will reach a point where a 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 at Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, a leading offshore turbine manufacturer.
Although offshore turbines now represent only about 5% of the generation capacity of the wind industry in general, this part of the business has taken on its own identity and is expected to grow more rapidly in the coming years than onshore wind energy.
Offshore technology has consolidated in northern Europe over the past three decades and is now spreading to the east coast of the United States and Asia, including Taiwan, China and South Korea. The expensive projects, which cost billions of dollars, and that are possible at sea, are attracting large investors, including oil companies like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, who want to rapidly increase their green energy offerings. Capital investment in offshore wind energy has more than tripled in the past decade to $ 26 billion, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based forecasting group.
GE began making inroads in wind power in 2002, when it bought Enron’s onshore turbine business – a successful unit in a company destroyed in a spectacular accounting scandal – in 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.
Still, GE bosses realized that to become a leader in the most challenging marine environment, they needed to be bold. They went on to more than double the size of their existing offshore machine, which came to GE through the acquisition of Alstom France’s energy business in 2015. The idea was to gain leadership in key competitors like Siemens Gamesa and Vestas Wind Systems, a Turbine manufacturer based in Denmark.
A larger turbine produces more electricity and therefore more revenue than a smaller machine. The size also helps to reduce the costs of building and maintaining a wind farm, because fewer turbines are needed to produce a certain amount of energy.
These qualities create a powerful incentive for developers to choose the largest machine available to assist in their efforts to win the auctions of offshore power supply offers that many countries have adopted. These auctions vary in format, but developers compete to supply power over several years for the lowest price.
“What they are looking for is a turbine that will allow 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.”
Among the first customers is Orsted, a Danish company that is the world’s largest developer of offshore wind farms. She 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 surprised everyone when they launched that machine,” said David Hardy, chief executive of Orsted’s offshore business in North America.
As a major turbine buyer, Orsted wants to help “establish this new platform and create some volume for GE” in order to promote competition and innovation, said Mr. Hardy.
The GE turbine is selling better than its competitors might expect, analysts say.
On December 1, GE reached another preliminary agreement to supply turbines for Vineyard Wind, a large wind farm off Massachusetts, and has business to supply 276 turbines for what is likely to be the largest wind farm in the world at Dogger Bank, near Britain.
These deals, with their respective maintenance contracts, could add up to $ 13 billion, estimates Shashi Barla, principal wind analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a market research firm.
The waves made by the GE machine led Siemens Gamesa to announce a series of competing turbines. Vestas, which until recently had the industry’s largest machine in its stable, is also expected to reveal a new entry soon.
“We don’t move like the first, and of course we have to deal with that today,” said Henrik Andersen, Vestas’ chief executive.
To make its move, GE had to start “practically from scratch,” said Schellings. The business unit called GE Renewable Energy is spending about $ 400 million on design, hiring engineers and retrofitting plants in St. Nazaire and Cherbourg, France.
To make a blade of such extraordinary length that it does not bend under its own weight, GE called designers from LM Wind Power, a blade manufacturer in Denmark that the company bought in 2016 for $ 1.7 billion. Among its innovations: a material that combines carbon fiber and light, yet strong and flexible glass fiber.
GE still has to figure out how to manufacture a large number of machines efficiently, initially at plants in France and possibly later in Britain and the United States. With a reduced offshore history, GE also needs to show that it can reliably install and maintain large machines at sea, using specialized ships and dealing with adverse weather conditions.
“GE has to prove a lot to asset owners so they can purchase GE turbines,” said Barla.
Bringing bigger machines was easier and cheaper for Siemens Gamesa, GE’s main rival, which is already building a prototype for a new and more powerful machine at its offshore complex in Brande, on the Jutland peninsula, Denmark. The secret: the company’s increasingly new models have not strayed too far from an old model.
“The fundamentals of the machine and how it works remain the same,” said Rasmussen, the unit’s chief technology officer, leading to a “slightly better starting point” than GE’s.
There seems to be a lot of room for competition. John Lavelle, the chief executive of GE’s offshore business, said that the outlook for the market “gets bigger every year”.