WI ND POWER

BY RALF BUTSCHER
WITH A FAINT RATTLING SOUND, the ele-
vator makes its way up the steel shaft
inside the giant tower and comes to a
gentle halt. Climb a few more meters up
a ladder and through a hatchway, and
you nd yourself in a large room which
looks like a carefully tidied workshop.
Yet a glance out the window is enough to
remind you that you are actually inside
the nacelle of a huge wind turbine,
some 90 meters above the ground. This
enormous tower is just one of the ma-
ny winged giants that loom over the
grassland and drainage ditches directly
behind the dike in Hvsre, a small mu-
nicipality in the north-west of Denmark.
Since May 2011, engineers from Sie-
mens Wind Power have been working
here, within sight of the Danish North
Sea coast, to test the prototype of a new
wind turbine the SWT-6.0-120. The
name indicates a power rating of 6 mega-
watts and a rotor diameter of 120 meters,
a category of turbine which is currently
the pinnacle of technology for converting
wind into electricity.
The test site in this rural idyll illus-
trates how researchers and engineers are
preparing for the future of energy supply.
These huge rotating blades are ultimately
destined for offshore wind power plants,
out on the open sea where the condi-
tions are excellent for harvesting wind
energy. Offshore winds blow more con-
sistently and, on average, more strongly
than on land, which means they can
be used to generate considerably more
electricity each year from the power of
the wind. Wind turbines in near-offshore
areas are capable of supplying some 40
to 50 percent more electricity than tur-
bines in good land-based coastal areas.
THE BOOM BEGAN 10 YEARS AGO
The wind energy boom got underway in
Germany around a decade ago. Fuelled
by the German Renewable Energy Act,
which guaranteed a high minimum feed-
in tariff for renewable electricity sources
when it came into force in April 2000,
the number of wind turbines skyrocket-
ed, especially in windy areas such as
north and east Germany and on high-
land peaks. Germany gradually took on
a pioneering role in generating energy
through wind power, and in 2002 it
overtook hydroelectric power to become
Dynamic growth: The use of wind power
has picked up huge momentum world-
wide. Giant blades such as those on this
six-megawatt turbine will be spinning
above offshore waters
in the future.
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In the future, more and more electricity will be produced by offshore wind power
plants. This will call for wind turbines that are particularly robust and efcient.
the most important renewable energy
source in Germanys energy supply
network. Today, some six percent of
the countrys electricity is generated by
wind power. Between 1999 and 2011,
the total installed capacity of Germanys
wind turbines climbed from ve to 30
gigawatts and the German Wind Ener-
gy Association predicts that this latter
gure will double again by 2020.
This growth in the wind turbine sector
will increasingly take place at sea. By
2030, the German federal government
plans to have offshore wind farms in the
North and Baltic seas supplying up to 25
gigawatts of power, and the Hamburg-
based Federal Maritime and Hydrogra-
phic Agency has already set aside large
areas out at sea for this purpose. More
than two dozen planning applications
for offshore wind power plants a total
of some 8 gigawatts of installed capacity
have already been approved, and se-
veral wind power plants are under con-
struction. In April 2010, the rst German
offshore wind power plant came online
some 45 kilometers off the North Sea
island of Borkum. Known as alpha ven-
tus, it is primarily intended as a test
facility. The rst commercial offshore
wind power plant went into operation
in the Baltic Sea in May 2012. The 21
Winged
Trial run in the
factory yard:
Testing out tur-
bines at Siemens
Wind Power in the
Danish town of
Brande.
Room with a
view: On top of
the nacelle of
a six-megawatt
prototype, some
90 meters above
the ground.
Giants
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WI ND POWER
Danish waters in 1991. Since then, how-
ever, it is the UK that has become the
worlds leading market for offshore wind
development thanks to the frequent low-
pressure fronts that offer such good wind
production off its coasts. It already has
more than a dozen offshore wind pow-
er plant hooked up to its national grid,
including Walney, the worlds biggest
offshore wind farm, which was put into
operation in the Irish Sea in February
2012. The farm consists of 102 Siemens-
made turbines capable of producing up
to 370 megawatts of power.
British plans for developing offshore
wind power are signicantly more am-
bitious than those of their German coun-
terparts. Some wind farms off the UKs
wind turbines supplied by Siemens for
the EnBW Baltic 1 wind farm generate
up to 185 gigawatt-hours of electricity
a year, enough to supply some 50,000
households.
Denmark took to the seas considerably
earlier than Germany. Bonus Energy, a
company that has been part of Siemens
since 2004, built the worlds rst off-
shore wind power plant, Vindeby, in
A service technician checks
external equipment on a giant
wind turbine at a test site on
Denmarks North Sea coast.
Landing site for maintenance personnel:
A spacious platform on top of the nacelle
allows service technicians to be lowered
onto the wind turbine from a helicopter.
This makes it easier to access offshore
wind farms far out at sea.
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coast will be built on a truly extraordi-
nary scale. One example is the London
Array already under construction in
the outer reaches of the Thames estuary
which will have an installed capacity
of one gigawatt (1000 megawatts) when
the nal stage is completed. The initial
stage of 175 wind turbines is scheduled
to come on line by the end of 2012.
A wind farm with an energy output
of up to 4.2 gigawatts is already being
planned for the Irish Sea, while an even
bigger wind farm of 9 gigawatts has
been given the go-ahead on the Dogger
Bank in the North Sea. The next round
of offshore projects, Round 3, has seen
approval granted for an additional 32
gigawatts of new capacity. The aim is
to cover a quarter of the UKs total elec-
tricity needs using offshore wind power
by 2020. In Germany, progress has been
markedly slower.
One important caveat is that harnes-
sing wind power is far more challenging
out at sea than on land. Swells and salt
water gnaw away at the towers unless
specic steps have been taken to protect
them. Constructing the wind turbines
and anchoring them to the ocean oor
require extraordinary technical and lo-
gistical skills, especially if the founda-
tions are more than 100 kilometers away
from the coast and are submerged in 40
meters of water the situation facing
most of the offshore wind farms being
planned in Germany. Maintaining the
turbines is a costly and sometimes dan-
gerous process, with wind and waves
making access difcult. Storms and
heavy rain often make it impossible for
the service engineers to reach the tur-
bines at all.
DEMAND FOR NEW CONCEPTS
Researchers and developers for example
the team led by Henrik Stiesdal, Chief
Technology Ofcer (CTO) of Siemens
Wind Power, in the Danish town of Brande
(see p.24. The whirlwind) are there-
fore seeking new concepts and feats of
engineering to create wind turbines that
are highly robust and reliable and easy
to install. Above all, they are aiming to
boost performance based on the funda-
mental precept that the more power a
wind turbine can produce, the greater its
efciency in other words, the greater
its ability to pull energy out of the wind.
Maximizing energy output is a crucial
consideration, especially when building
offshore wind power plants.
However, greater capacity inevitably
means larger dimensions, and the cur-
rent agships of the wind turbine sector
are already enormous. The six-megawatt
giant off Hvsre, for example, features
a tower more than 90 meters high which
is equipped with three blades covering
a diameter of some 120 meters. The tips
of these extraordinarily long blades can
reach speeds of up to 300 kilometers an
hour in strong winds. By mid of 2012,
the six-megawatt class will include a
second machine featuring a new rotor
with a diameter of 154 meters.
Over the last 30 years, there has been a tremendous increase in both the installed
capacity and size of wind turbines. In the future, offshore wind farms could feature
wind turbines with 200-meter rotor diameters that are capable of generating 20 me-
gawatts of power.
TREMENDOUS GROWTH
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SIEMENS_2012_Innen1-23.indd 19 31.07.12 10:32
WI ND POWER
Wind strength varies across Europe, but it blows especially
hard over the North Sea and off the coast of Scotland. The
wind power densities are mean values and do not take topo-
graphy into account.
WIND IS CAPRICIOUS
In the past, Siemens has primarily
used turbines from the 2.3 and 3.6-mega-
watt categories for offshore wind farms,
but, in the future, the plan is to use power-
houses such as the six-megawatt co-
lossus to capture energy from offshore
wind. Prototype testing at the Danish
test site on the North Sea coast is going
well, and the new wind turbines have
also demonstrated their efciency in an
accelerated life testing program carried
out at the Siemens Wind Power site in
Brande. These tests apply a dynamic
load to individual components such
as the blades in order to simulate the
forces they will be exposed to during 20
years of operation. By the end of 2013,
Siemens hopes to have installed a pre-
series version of the six-megawatt wind
turbine at various sites in Denmark,
Germany, Great Britain and the Nether-
lands. Series production is scheduled to
begin in 2014. The giant machines will
be assembled at a port site and then
transported by ship to their offshore
destination.
In the future, wind farm operators
will be able to choose between different
variants of this Herculean construction
of steel and concrete. The largest version
will have a rotor diameter of 154 meters,
making it bigger than any wind turbine
ever built before. Yet despite their enor-
mous size, these wind turbines are as-
tonishingly lightweight. The combination
of the tower head and rotor blades of
the Hvsre prototype weighs in at just
350 tons. The nacelle weighs 200 tons
only marginally more than the weight
of a nacelle in a wind turbine offering
half as much energy output.
SAME WEIGHT, GREATER CAPACITY
Signicantly more power with a minimal
increase in weight: Thats the solution
Siemens Wind Power CTO Stiesdal is
focusing on to take the technology to
the next level. The ingenious Dane often
refers to the cubic law of wind power in
this context: Doubling the rotor size of
a wind turbine quadruples the energy
yield and results in an eightfold incre-
ase in weight. Our job is to overcome
that law, says Stiesdal. The six-mega-
watt wind turbine marks the rst occa-
sion that Siemens developers have suc-
ceeded in breaking this rule primarily
thanks to the use of direct drive tech-
nology. Instead of using complex, heavy
gearboxes to convert the rotation of the
blades into faster revolutions to drive an
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electrical generator the method em-
ployed in most current wind turbines
the Siemens direct drive technology uses
a magnet generator to generate electrical
power directly from the mechanical rota-
tion of the blades. This gearless solution
reduces the number of moving parts in
a turbine by almost 50 percent, resulting
in considerable weight savings and lower
construction costs.
One handy knock-on effect of gearless
wind turbines is that they require less
frequent maintenance thanks to the
smaller number of wear parts just one
example of a trend towards making wind
turbine technology simpler.
The machine room of the SWT-6.0
is considerably more spacious without
the bulky gearbox that would normally
take up so much room, so it feels very
different to the oppressively cramped
interior of the nacelles used in older
wind turbines. On the rare occasions
that maintenance or repairs are re-
quired, the service technicians can use
this extra space to work and sleep in. The
turbine also features a platform on top
of the nacelle which provides helicop-
ter access for maintenance personnel,
thereby avoiding long and arduous boat
journeys and the risky climb from the
boat to the base of the tower.
The direct drive concept paves the
way for even bigger and more powerful
wind turbines. In fact, Siemens engineers
are already working on wind turbines
that will be capable of producing up to
10 megawatts of electricity. We expect
them to be commercially viable sometime
after 2015, says Stiesdal. Experts even
consider 20-megawatt wind turbines
to be feasible. As part of the European
project UpWind, researchers from vari-
ous companies, universities and public
institutions from all over Europe devel-
oped the technological basis for very
large wind turbines of the future. These
could have a rotor diameter of 200 meters
or more.
However, sheer size is not the only
consideration. Developers also have a
whole series of technical innovations
up their sleeves which are designed
to increase the energy output of wind
turbines. For example, the blades on
more recent models are equipped with
a device known as a winglet, a kind
of mini-spoiler which is positioned on
the wing tips to avoid the problem of
tip vortices.
A similar purpose is served by small
slits in the blades and saw-shaped
grooves on the edges of the blades. In
2013, we also plan to test initial proto-
types of wind turbines with scimitar
blades, says Stiesdal. Modeled on the
oriental weapon of the same name,
these blades are aerodynamically opti-
mized to exhibit the least possible air
resistance when they rotate.
In the future, new materials will help
to reduce weight and enhance turbine
efciency. For example, lightweight yet
extremely durable carbon ber com-
posites will replace the berglass mats
that are typically used to produce rotor
blades, while aluminum and plastic
will replace the steel in the nacelles. At
the same time, extensive automation
of turbine operation and maintenance
could help reduce costs. All new wind
turbines produced by Siemens over the
last ten years come with a Condition
Monitoring System which monitors the
functions and status of the turbine and
sounds the alarm as soon as there is any
risk of something going wrong. In the
future, an interactive controller should
make it possible to control the wind tur-
bine systems from land.
PLUNGING ELECTRICITY COSTS
Ultimately, all these developments are
aimed at reducing the cost of genera-
ting energy from wind power to a level
comparable to conventional gas and
coal-red power plants. Currently, one
kilowatt-hour of electricity from a coal-
red or nuclear power station costs
between four and ve eurocents on the
European Energy Exchange. Michael
Weinhold, Chief Technology Ofcer at
Siemens Energy in Erlangen, reckons that
A door at the base of the steel tower
provides access to an elevator which
can take service technicians up to the
nacelle in a matter of minutes.
A majestic sight: A giant wind
turbine towers over fields
and grassland in north-west
Denmark on the North Sea
coast.
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WI ND POWER
The countries that border the North Sea and the Baltic Sea have big plans to generate electricity in offshore wind farms. The first offshore
wind farm went into operation off the south-east coast of Denmark in 1991. Today, Germany and Great Britain are leading the way in
the development of offshore wind turbines. Sweden, Spain, Norway and France are also planning numerous wind farms out at sea.
WIND POWER HEADS OFFSHORE
electricity generated by wind turbines at
good land-based sites could be available
at approximately the same price in just
a few years time. In the case of offshore
wind farms, it could take slightly longer
to achieve a price level that can compete
with electricity from conventional power
plants. Yet Weinhold is condent that by
2020 even offshore wind power should
be capable of producing electricity at a
competitive cost.
In the meantime largely thanks to
government subsidies the use of wind
power is expanding in leaps and bounds,
not only in Europe, but also in Asia and
North America. Over the last few years,
China has become the worlds biggest
market for wind power, representing al-
most a quarter of total global installed
capacity in 2010 with its more than 42
gigawatts of wind turbine installations.
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FLOATING TURBINES
Many parts of the world have long coastlines with lots of wind, but
are still not suitable for building offshore wind power plants. In many
such areas, the sea oor drops off so steeply that the water gets too
deep just a few kilometers out for example, off Norway, Japan, and
the West Coast of the USA. One solution is oating wind turbines,
whose towers are not set rmly on the sea oor in the usual way, but
anchored to it by long steel cables. One technical concept for such
oating systems has been developed by the Norwegian oil and gas
conglomerate Statoil, working jointly with Siemens.
A rst full scale prototype of the Hywind has been undergoing
a trial run since the fall of 2009, about 20 kilometers offshore from
the coast near the southern Norwegian city of Stavanger. The unit
comprises a tower that rises 65 meters to the hub, supporting a
Siemens wind turbine with a capacity of 2.3 megawatts. As a counter-
weight to the gondola, the tower, and the three rotor blades, a steel
cylinder lles with ballast of water and extends almost 100 meters
below the waters surface. Three steel mooring lines hold the turbine
rmly in place in 200 meters of water. To keep the system stable in the
swell, the engineers included a stabilizer system: sensors measure
the water movement and an electronic control calibrates the oating
turbine so that it always remains stable even in high seas. Stabilizing
the unit is the biggest technical challenge in Hywind, says Kristin
Aamondt, a Project Manager at Statoil Wind Energy in Stavanger.
The trial run of more than two years was almost trouble-free, and
quite promising. The turbine ran almost without downtime, and
supplied signicantly more electricity than the Statoil experts had
expected. In 2011, Hywind produced over 10 GW hours of electricity
energy, or the equivalent to power over 600 Norwegian homes.
Statoil is assessing locations for developing a small pilot park of 3-5
turbines which would test the next phase of the concept, .equipped
with higher-power turbines. From depths of about 30 meters on out,
its most likely going to be cheaper to build a oating turbine than
one standing on the sea oor, Aamondt says. Floating wind turbines
are technically feasible out to depths of about 700 meters which
will make it possible to tap vast additional potential from the power
of the wind over the sea.
The USA is the second biggest market,
with Germany in third place. In 2010,
almost every second gigawatt of new
capacity was installed in Chinese wind
farms.
Currently, most new wind turbines
are still being built on land, but offshore
wind farms are also gradually picking up
momentum in many parts of the world,
including China. Current plans envisage
the installation of wind turbines with a
total capacity of 30 gigawatts in Chinas
coastal waters by 2020.
In contrast, Germanys wind farms in
the North and Baltic Seas are progres-
sing slower than hoped. This is partly
due to the cost, which is higher than in
countries such as Denmark and Great
Britain because the offshore locations
are further from the coast. A further
obstacle is the sluggish pace at which
transmission lines are being installed
to bring the electricity to land and
transport it to the main centers of con-
sumption (see p. 35, Arteries for green
power).
Offshore wind farms can only be con-
nected to the grid by installing current
collectors at sea and laying cables, some
of which may be several hundred kilo-
meters long. Wind turbine manufactur-
ers such as Siemens are braving harsh
environments to carry out pioneering
work in this eld. They plan to install
high-tech wind turbines far out at sea
in some cases more than 100 kilometers
from the coast which are designed to
generate power for decades under the
most severe weather conditions. I
20 turbines, 40 megawatts of installed capacity: When
the Middelgrunden wind farm went into operation off the
coast of Copenhagen in the year 2000, it was the largest
offshore wind farm in the world. More recent projects are
on a far bigger scale.
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