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The contract to supply Meridian’s West Wind project with turbines was Siemen’s first wind farm deal in Australasia. According to the head of Siemen’s global ‘renewable energy’ division, Dr Rene Umlauft, the deal is not the last in this region and the German company is already in discussions with Meridian to supply turbines for a second wind farm in the Waikato and has tendered for an Aussie off-shore project planned in Tasmania.
“It’s a very nice windy place for us,” he says in reference to West Wind’s near 50 percent capacity factor and the country’s overall vantage for further wind power development. The next Kiwi wind project for Siemens is Meridian’s Te Uku project in partnership with community trust owned Waikato Energy and featuring 30 turbines. The project is being constructed on private land on the Wharauroa Plateau, about 30 kilometres west of Hamilton, and south-east and inland of Raglan, and will have the capacity to generate 64.4 megawatts, or enough power to provide the average annual needs of around 30,000 homes. Umlauft is chief executive of a new division of Siemens that was set up in January 2008. He says wind makes up 50 percent of division’s interest (Siemens currently commands just seven percent of the global wind turbine market share, but is a market leader in off-shore turbine technology). With over 5500 staff, Umlauft was put in charge of expanding business in both wind and solar thermal technical (based on its steam engines), and new technology in areas such as photovoltaic and geothermal. The most popular wind turbine the company makes is its standard 2.3MW and Siemens monitors over 2000 of them online from a base in Germany. The largest turbine is a 3.6MW giant design that is mostly used in off-shore farms. Siemens has been experimenting with a gearless turbine and has been running a 3.6MW prototype in Europe since the beginning of the year. As the gearing mechanism suffers the most wear, this will be a big step for wind turbine maintenance. “There have been no technical issues and it is running better than expected,” says Umlauft. The gearless turbine will go into production next year, he adds, in a 3MW series. A trend in Europe where available wind farm land is a premium is to replace earlier, 25 year plus, turbines with larger ones. This has created a new second market for wind turbines of between 100MW and 150MW.
Smart maintenanceSiemens has developed a cost effective electronic maintenance technology specifically for China’s future and massive wind farms. China plans to increase its wind energy capacity ten-fold to 100GW within the next decade. The cost of deploying a repair crane alone for major repairs to a wind turbine is expensive and since the early days of wind energy maintenance has been a huge challenge, involving skilled engineers to monitor and interpret data from vibration and motion sensors. Siemens says it has now found a solution right next to the parts that are subject to the most wear - the motor of the pitch system which controls the angle of the rotor blades. Highly sensitive sensors measure the electric voltages flowing into the motors – if the pitch systems moves differently than designed, then the currents will also show different patters. These measurements are very precise and detect wear and tear much sooner than the old with expensive motion sensors. Siemens says it has an agreement with Goldwind, a major Chinese turbine manufacturer, for a trial project with the new technology this year. While being developed for the Chinese energy industry it won’t be long before the system is employed on a large scale in other markets, says the company.
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Umlauft was in New Zealand for the opening of the first string of 11 turbines at West Wind at the beginning of the winter.