Flying blades nearly as long as the Saturn V space rocket and with enough horsepower under the hood to single-handedly supply electricity to 18,000 homes, the world’s biggest wind turbine, Siemens Gamesa’s long-promised ‘1X’ machine, has been launched, propelling the German-Spanish company back to top of the offshore OEM league table and creating a strong updraft for the industry’s chances of building projects at merchant market prices by 2024.

The SG14.0-222DD, a 14MW platform engineered to be digitally up-tuned to 15MW, will feature a record-setting 222-metre-diameter rotor sweeping an area of 39,000m³ to turn a hulking direct-drive transmission system and permanent magnet generator (PMG) promising a 25% higher annual energy production (AEP) than its forerunner, the 11MW SG11.0-200DD.

“Offshore [wind] has become mainstream. It is so obvious in so many countries – many of which are super-serious. There are tenders every month around the world, not just Europe. We are ‘getting real’. The markets all confirm what [power production potential] we have been able to unlock with [turbine] technology,” said Siemens Gamesa’s offshore business CEO, Andreas Nauen, speaking with Recharge before today’s unveiling.

“And we are only here because we have made the turbines bigger and better and brought down the LCOE [levelised cost of energy]. Without this, all this global offshore [wind] business wouldn’t be there – it goes hand in hand.

“For us and the industry, [the SG14.0-222DD] is another step forward.”

The turbine – which over the years has grown to have a near-mythic status in offshore wind circles, with the ‘X’ in its name leaving open tantalising speculations about its final rating – is a giant leap forward in terms of power output on the industry’s other top-tier, 10MW-plus models, from western OEMs GE and MHI Vestas and China’s Dongfang Electric and Ming Yang Smart Energy.

This gargantuan scale of machine is needed if the industry is going to successfully gear up this decade into building gigawatt-scale wind farms that have the production levels to meet the economic thresholds called for by zero-subsidy projects in the pipeline around the world, being led by the Netherlands and Germany.

“Go back to the German zero-subsidy auctions in 2017 and everyone thought it was crazy, it would never work,” said Nauen. “And now auctions are in many countries, in some cases the [LCOE] price is not even a criterion anymore.

“[The 14MW model] is a technology that is the evolution step [from the OEM’s 4-11MW] that gets us here.”

Revolutionary as the turbine design is, it is “evolutionary” engineering that led to this point, Nauen underlines, with the 14MW only the latest “extension” of the direct-drive model that started life as a 3MW.

The offshore wind markets all confirm what power production we have been able to unlock with turbine technology

“It is not a dramatically, radically new turbine, it is an evolution. But it is 3MW more [than the 11MW], and that feels ‘small’ oddly, but it's one-and-half times the size of the turbine we made ten years ago – that is a huge chunk more AEP.”

Siemens Gamesa’s head of offshore technology Morten Pilgaard Rasmussen tells Recharge: “When we made the jump some years ago to the 6MW [model], we had the discussion as to whether we should make a large jump to a model that would more than double that power [output].

“And we decided the best way to get there was to embark on a more evolutionary approach where we maintained the turbine topology – the 14MW has some technology improvement [on the 6MW] but the topology is exactly the same. We believed this affords us huge advantages to mature our supply chain and improve [the turbine], and so further raise efficiency and lower costs.”

Record-setting blades

The blades for the SG14.0-222DD stretch 108-metres from root to tip – just eclipsing by a single metre the previous record-holder, LM Wind Power’s LM 107.0 P. Made of fused overlays of carbon and fiberglass, the standard-setting B108 design, which is based on the revered Siemens Gamesa IntegralBlade technology, is laid up and cast in a single mould. The OEM is planning to retool fabrication halls “in all international regions” for manufacturing capacity.

“Even though it is a full 11 metres longer [than the blades for the 11MW machine], we have effectively reused that solution [the SG11.0-200’s carbon-fiber design],” said Rasmussen. “So, things that are new on the [B108] are the smaller, incremental things you always do to optimise the aerodynamic performance of the blade. And it means we have a concept that can be ramped for [manufacture of] hundreds of turbines in a very short time-frame.”

The newly unveiled turbine features a lightweight 500-tonne nacelle, with only “slight reinforcements” to the design used for the 11MW model made to accommodate the heftier torque levels that the giant rotor will drive through the transmission system and into the PMG.

Siemens Gamesa’s Power Boost system will be able to digitally juice-up production from the SG14.0-222DD by an extra megawatt, but Rasmussen emphasises the OEM would use its “ambitious” portfolio of technology development projects to engineer further step-ups in output before the turbine is put in the show-window.

“By the time we launch this turbine in 2024, we will doubtless have found ways of improving this rating. We may not know what it is yet, control software, [blade] add-ons, new magnets [for the PMG], but we will find it.”

The prototype of the 14MW model is slated to be erected in autumn 2021 at Denmark’s national wind power testing centre in Osterild, in concert with a parallel programme of extensive in-factory component and system trials. Siemens Gamesa is aiming for a type certificate, which clears a technology for market, in 2023, “or hopefully a little earlier”, says Rasmussen.

No orders have yet been announced for the new machine, but Nauen notes Siemens Gamesa is in “serious talks with several developers” for a first outing for the OEM’s new top-of-the-line turbine model.

Wind

Birth of a titan: world's biggest wind turbine launched by Siemens Gamesa