GE Renewable Energy’s highly anticipated Haliade-X 12MW offshore wind turbine has moved closer to market-readiness with components being shipped from its factories in Cherbourg and Saint-Nazaire, France, and from one its subcontractors in Spain.
The first nacelle and one of the Haliade-X’s 107-metre blades are en route to the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult technology development centre in the UK for high-speed testing, and tower sections arrived from Seville-based GRI at the site in the Port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, where GE is building a fully assembled prototype.
The US OEM is spending close to $400m developing the Haliade-X, which is designed to generate 67GWh of power a year using a 220-metre-diameter rotor turning a direct-drive and permanent-magnet-generator transmission system.
By GE’s calculations a 750MW wind farm made up of 12MW Haliade-Xs would be able to power one million European homes.
Serial production of the machine is set to start in 2021.
