April 4, 2019
BAVARIAN RHAPSODY
The king of Spain, Felipe VI, breezed into the city of Bilbao this week to pay a visit to the annual confab WindEurope, where he and other attendees expressed a sunny outlook about the future of renewable energy. Faced with the “very alarming” prospect of climate change, the king said in a keynote, Europe is rising to the challenge with a wind sector, in particular, that’s “transforming” the continent. Leading that transformation? GE Renewable Energy. In addition to being selected as the technology provider for the Phoenix onshore wind project in Aragon, Spain — where it’ll install 91 onshore turbines across 10 new wind parks — the company announced this week at WindEurope that it’s received the first order for the Cypress, GE’s largest onshore wind turbine. Having planted a prototype of the Cypress earlier this year in Holland, GE has now promised three of the towering machines to the German wind farm operator Prowind. Installed in the forests of Bavaria, each will be capable of powering 5,000 European homes.
Wind through the trees: The Cypress is comparable in height to a midsize New York City skyscraper, but a lot easier to transport — one of its key innovations. GE engineers designed the machine’s 77-meter blades to be segmented; they can be transported in pieces and assembled on-site, easing installation of a turbine, for instance, on a rugged hilltop where it can best capture the wind. Put together, the Cypress’ diameter spans 158 meters, more than twice the length of a Boeing 747. Prowind will install its three 4.8-megawatt machines in a forest near the town of Elfershausen, about 100 miles east of Frankfurt. Johannes Busmann, Prowind’s founder, owner and CEO, said, “The Cypress platform is a great fit for the unique characteristics of the Elfershausen project, thanks to the flexibility it offers in the transportation and the installation of its components and blades.”
Read more here about how the Cypress is taking root in Germany.
GREEK WINDS ARE NO MYTH
Greece’s powerful winds have long held a place in the national psyche, from Aeolus — the lord of the winds — to Zephyr, the god of the gentle westerly wind. Just because the breeze is plentiful, though, doesn’t mean it’s easy to harness, and Greece’s mountainous geography has long presented a challenge to wind farmers, who’ve favored relatively small projects on hillsides and mountaintops. GE’s first wind farm in Greece, then, is blowing onto the scene with fanfare: The company just completed a multilevel installation at Fokida, owned by Nostira Renewable Energy, that comprises a dozen turbines starting at sea level and installed as high as 1,000 meters. The Fokida wind farm is the first of three GE is constructing for Nostira that, by year’s end, should place the developer among the top eight wind producers in the country.
Have turbine, will travel: All that wind power will help Greece as it races toward ambitious renewable energy goals set by the European Union. The country is already on target to exceed the EU mandate for members to generate 18% of their energy from renewables by 2020, and is now casting its eye toward a bold plan to double that by 2030. As far as that goal is concerned, the country has got the wind at its back: This year alone, Greece could install up to 400 megawatts of wind energy, with Fokida supplying a chunk of that. GE expects to start selling the massive Cypress turbine in the country soon, too. It was designed to be hauled up steep and winding mountain roads, after all, and to take its place at the top among the legends of wind.
Read more here about how huge turbines make their way up the mountain — and will help Europe achieve its climate goals.
KEEPING AN EYE ON THE SKY
For most people, the wind is invisible — but not for the GE engineers in Barcelona whose job it is to monitor more than 2,000 wind turbines in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Greece. They watch the wind from a high-tech remote operations center, or ROC, housed in a former cutlery factory near the Mediterranean. Pedestrians passing by the ROC can peek in to see a ticker that provides updates on the total power output of the fleet being monitored, the number of European households it can support and the estimated amount of carbon dioxide saved. But in the secure area of the facility, software gathers and tracks millions of data points from the turbines, allowing human as well as artificial intelligence to constantly fine-tune operations. “The software is the first line of defense against operational problems,” said GE Renewable Energy’s Jose Miguel Garate.
GE will ROC you: The Barcelona location is the fourth of GE Renewable Energy’s ROCs, with others in New York, Germany and India that together keep an eye on more than 15,000 onshore and offshore wind turbines, as well as solar and energy storage assets around the world. Collectively they've been able to increase the productivity of the energy assets they monitor by 20% and create greater efficiencies over the long term. “This ROC isn’t just a nice way to show customers how their fleet is performing,” Garate said. “We’ll keep improving the algorithms that are behind these screens so that they can maximize their wind power generation and minimize their costs.”
The ROC is also standing by to monitor the Cypress turbine when it joins European grids later this year. Learn more here.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“This platform allows us to interchange critical components to maximize power output for wind developers from the available land and the wind resource it has.”
— Sheri Hickok, product development manager for GE Renewable Energy’s Onshore Wind
Quote: GE Reports. Image:GE Renewable Energy.
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