It has been a banner week for GE Renewable Energy, which was crowned world’s biggest wind turbine OEM by analyst group BloombergNEF after commissioning 13.5GW in 2020, pipping China’s Goldwind by just 500MW and supplanting long-time number-one Vestas, which came third.
GE was aided by its supremacy in its booming domestic US onshore market, where its turbines accounted for more than half of the 16.5GW added last year, said Bloomberg NEF. In an update to the US industrial giant’s investors, renewables CEO Jérôme Pécresse said the group will now focus on boosting efficiencies and margins for wind on land, and look for more international growth.
But it is in offshore wind that the sense of excitement around GE Renewable Energy is most electric, as the group moves towards first installations of its giant Haliade-X turbine that has built up a 5.7GW pipeline of orders, including the 3.6GW Dogger Bank, the world’s largest offshore wind project under construction in the UK.
Offshore wind as a whole is “booming”, said Pécresse, as he said GE has a “clear path” to $3bn of revenues from the sectoras soon as 2024.
Offshore wind was the focus of GE Renewable Energy’s other big moment of the week when it unveiled plans for an LM Wind Power blade plant in Teesside, northeast England, to supply the Haliade-X’s at Dogger Bank and projects further afield.
The factory will add to a fast-growing industrial base for offshore wind in the region – Siemens Gamesa already has a major plant at nearby Hull – and boost the feelgood factor around UK offshore wind, which is gearing up to deliver jobs as well as renewable powerto the British economy.
Floating solar is rapidly staking a claim alongside floating wind as the next big frontier for renewable energy expansion.
The potential for placing PV panels on lakes, reservoirs and sheltered coastal regions could even drive the technology to greater deployment levels that floating wind, sector pioneer Børge Bjørneklett told Recharge.
As CEO of floating solar specialist Ocean Sun, Bjørneklett’s enthusiasm is unsurprising, but he’s far from the only one to see the technology as a big contributor to the energy transition.
German utility giant RWE made its own first foray into the sector this weekwhen it unveiled plans to build a 6MW plant on a Dutch lake, hailing the addition of a “new, promising technology” to its renewables arsenal.
Floating PV is also on the agenda under a new link-up between Masdar, the Abu Dhabi renewables group, and Malaysian oil group Petronas, as the two unveiled plans to explore a range of renewable energy opportunities in Asia, where pressure on land availability and large areas of inland or sheltered water, has resulted in long-held views of it being a massive opportunity for floating solar growth.
Recharge is always pleased to welcome the biggest names in renewables and the energy transition as guest contributors, and they don’t come much bigger than Henrik Andersen, CEO of wind giant Vestas.
Andersen’s views on the priorities and challenges ahead for the global clean energy shift, brought into sharper focus by recent events in the Texas power market, make compelling reading in an exclusive article.
If the Texas crisis and its fallout teach us anything, Andersen argues, it’s that the era of extreme weather events is already with us, and that in itself has huge implications for how we plan renewable energy and network deployments.
