Tag Archives: Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA

Wind Turbine Behemoth Plans for Hydrogen Future

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offshore wind turbine

By William Mathis and Laura Millan Lombrana (Bloomberg) — Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA has one eye on the future where its wind turbines could play a key role in creating hydrogen.

The company, which earlier this year launched the world’s biggest wind turbine, plans to start a pilot project in Denmark to test how its machines could power production of the fuel seen as key to eliminating carbon emissions from transportation and heavy industries. The European Union has big plans for the clean-burning gas and the bloc placed it at the centre of its Green Deal earlier this year.

The pilot project is under construction near Siemens Gamesa’s Danish headquarters in Brande, western Denmark, Chief Executive Officer Andreas Nauen said in an interview on Thursday. It will include a 3-megawatt wind turbine that will power a 400-kilowatt electrolyzer, a machine that separates the hydrogen atoms in water from oxygen atoms, “We will be for the first time combining the two technologies,” said Nauen, who took over as CEO in June after leading the company’s offshore division. “It is not to produce hydrogen in big quantities, but to test the combination of both.”

It could be a compelling model. Danish utility Orsted A/S is already exploring a number of hydrogen projects for its wind farms and Royal Dutch Shell Plc plans to produce the gas from a park it’s going to build off the Dutch coast. Making and selling hydrogen could provide a new source of revenue for wind projects that would offset the risk in the sometimes volatile electricity market.

BNEF projections of the cost of producing green hydrogen, when compared with hydrogen derived from natural gas.
No one before has used wind power alone, without a grid connection, to produce hydrogen, Nauen said. It’s a project that will provide insight that could be crucial to scaling up the technology too much larger turbines and wind farms both on land and at sea.

Earlier this year, Siemens Gamesa announced plans to build a 14-megawatt offshore turbine with a rotor diameter of 222 meters (728 feet), a few meters larger than the previous record.

The company expects to conduct testing at the hydrogen pilot from October to December and then start hydrogen production in January. A Danish hydrogen fuel company called Everfuel will distribute the gas for vehicles including taxis and buses to use in Copenhagen.

European governments aim to spend billions of dollars to help nurture domestic industries to produce hydrogen. The funding could help scale production and bring down costs.

Offshore Experience

Siemens Gamesa is currently at a similar stage with hydrogen as it was a few years ago with offshore wind, Nauen said.

The executive has worked in offshore wind for more than a decade and has seen how the industry went from being a niche market using turbines designed for land use into a multi-billion-dollar industry with tailor-made machines the size of skyscrapers. Hydrogen could follow a similar trajectory if companies figure out an economical way to produce it. If it takes off, hydrogen will change the whole energy landscape, he said.

“I could imagine maybe it goes a little faster now, but it’s way too early,” Nauen said. “All the money that you currently see coming into this business is about making sure the technology works.”

The company has a team working on hydrogen that’s spread across all of Siemens Gamesa’s divisions. In the future, the company could sell wind farm developers hydrogen equipment along with its turbines, Nauen said. But he doesn’t expect any large-scale wind-hydrogen project until around 2025.

© 2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Battle Over World’s Biggest Wind Turbine Is Heating Up

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Haliade-X 12 MW wind turbines
An illustration of GE’s Haliade-X 12 MW wind turbine. Image courtesy GE

By William Mathis (Bloomberg) — Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA, the Spanish wind turbine manufacturer, is to build what will be the world’s biggest windmill, by the thinnest of margins.

The 14-megawatt machine with a rotor diameter of 222 meters (728 feet) will be just two meters bigger than General Electric Co’s own massive turbine. It’s another sign that size matters when it comes to the rapidly growing market for green power from offshore wind farms.

Since GE debuted its own 12-megawatt Haliade-X turbine in March 2018, the machine has racked up numerous orders, including for the world’s biggest offshore wind farm that will be built off the coast of England, and cut into the business that’s been dominated by Siemens Gamesa and to a lesser extent by MHI Vestas Offshore Wind A/S.

The Siemens Gamesa turbine, which the company’s calling SG 14-222 DD, will be ready for a prototype in 2021 and commercially available in 2024. With the new machine cutting off GE’s claim on the world’s biggest windmill, Siemens Gamesa will be well-positioned to solidify its position as the market leader.

“My ambition and the ambition of Siemens Gamesa is to stay above 50% of world market share,” Andreas Nauen, chief executive officer of Siemens Gamesa’s offshore business, said by phone. “That requires winning at least half of all projects in the world, winning more than everyone else together.”

The company is already in advanced talks with a number of potential customers for the first orders of the new machine, with announcements expected later this year, Nauen said.

Competition among manufacturers is intense because each wind farm is so large and there are relatively few of them compared to wind farms on land. For developers competing to win government contracts to build the wind parks, the turbine they choose is one of the most important decisions.

The new turbine from Siemens Gamesa will increase annual energy production by 25% compared to their largest machine today, the company said.

Still, while the new Siemens Gamesa turbine will be slightly bigger than GE’s machine, whether or not it’s ultimately the most powerful is still unknown because adjustments can be made to turbines to enhance their output.

Siemens Gamesa said it’ll be able to make its new turbine have a capacity of 15 megawatts with something it calls a Power Boost feature. While GE’s Haliade-X is marketed as having a 12-megawatt capacity, the platform could be easily adjusted to have a 14-megawatt capacity or even more, according to BloombergNEF wind analyst Tom Harries.

While turbines have grown rapidly in recent years, it’s not clear how much bigger they will get. Technically, it would be easy to scale-up further, but the supply chain wouldn’t be able to keep up, said Jeppe Funk Kirkegaard, head of structural blade design for offshore at Siemens Gamesa. There’s also the issue of having enough vessels big enough to install the giant machines.