TITANS CONTEND FOR OCEAN WIND

Siemens Drops Gears in Offshore Wind Battle With Vestas
Todd White and John Buckley, May 26, 2011 (Bloomberg News via SF Chronicle)

"Siemens AG is betting it can sell an unproven wind turbine that uses rare-earth metals from China to cement its lead over Vestas Wind Systems A/S in an offshore power market that's forecast to be worth $50 billion by 2020.

"Germany's largest engineering company is developing a machine with fewer moving parts to be used at sea, saying the design offers simpler maintenance and improved reliability. Denmark's Vestas, the world's biggest supplier for land-based wind farms, is sticking with its existing technology."

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"With winter gales exceeding 90 miles (145 kilometers) an hour and waves topping 15 feet at prime sites in the North Sea, the thousands of turbines planned must be rugged enough to avoid a maintenance disaster that could sour the offshore fortunes of either supplier… Siemens's "direct-drive" design eliminates gears that are a major cause of outages in current turbines, the novelty may be its main drawback, analysts said…

"The windmills, whose blades sweep an area bigger than a football field, are competing as the centerpiece of offshore renewable-energy spending that the U.K. Carbon Trust said may grow to 33 billion pounds ($53 billion) by 2020, about eight times its 2010 level. Britain is the world's largest offshore market, with more than 1.3 gigawatts of the total installed base of about 3 gigawatts at the end of 2010."

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"…[Denmark’s] Vestas is offering a traditional turbine design that employs gearboxes to convert the slow rotation of blades into faster revolutions to drive an electrical generator. That approach may attract financing more easily…Siemens's machine is gearless, with the blades linked to a generator's rotor so they spin at the same pace. To generate power from a slower rotation, the device needs a larger diameter and more magnets made from rare-earth metals. Tests on a 6-megawatt prototype will start this year…

"…[T]he Vestas approach at sea is…more proven and financeable…Siemens does offer for sale two geared turbines for offshore wind: a 2.3-megawatt model and a 3.6- megawatt device…Germany's Enercon GmbH is the only company to succeed with a direct-drive turbine so far and has installed them only on land…Vestas and Siemens dominate offshore projects: Of 2,935 megawatts of installed sea-based wind capacity in Europe at the end of last year, 1,385 megawatts were from Vestas while Siemens had 1,346 megawatts…It's from around 2015 that the European market will really take off, as up to 32 gigawatts projects from the U.K.'s third round of licensing begin to be built…"