This calendar year, Siemens won six contracts for offshore wind farms with a total capacity of about 1.4 gigawatts (GW) – enough to supply clean electricity to more than 1.4 million homes.
The latest success was the award of the Amrumbank West project in the North Sea, for Amrumbank West GmbH, a subsidiary of E.ON AG. Siemens has brought in two additional orders each from Germany and the UK. It also got its first offshore wind project in China – an entry into one of the world’s most promising markets for the use of offshore wind power.
“Our successes in 2011 highlight our leadership in the offshore energy business, the fastest-growing market segment in wind power,” said Felix Ferlemann, CEO of the Wind Power Division at Siemens Energy. “Our new gearless wind turbine, with a capacity of six megawatts, means that we are very well equipped for large offshore projects, especially in Germany and the UK. We assume that our machine will become the industry standard.”
Within just five years, about 20 percent of the entire wind power market is expected to be supplied by offshore wind farms. In Europe alone, Siemens expects offshore wind energy to reach an installed capacity of more than 80 GW by 2030 – equivalent to something more than half the capacity of the entire fleet of renewable and conventional power plants currently installed in Germany.
In 2011, in addition to the Amrumbank West job in Germany, Siemens was also awarded the Borkum Riffgrund and Meerwind Süd / Ost projects. In Great Britain, the company will be building the West of Duddon Sands and Teesside offshore wind power plants. The first order from China, for a 50-megawatt project, has given Siemens a breakthrough into the offshore wind power market there. Offshore wind power is gaining momentum in the USA as well: here Siemens is a preferred supplier for the Cape Wind and Block Island projects.
Siemens will install a total of 80 wind turbines, each with a capacity of 3.6 megawatts, for the Amrumbank West offshore wind farm between the islands of Helgoland and Amrum in the North Sea. It will also commission them and provide maintenance, initially for five years. The island of Helgoland will act as the service base.
Siemens and Shanghai Electric just recently announced the formation of two joint ventures for the Chinese wind power market. China is now the world’s largest market for wind power. The country has immense potential for the use of wind power both onshore and offshore, especially along the southeast coast.
Besides further internationalization, Siemens is also counting on new products like the gearless 6-megawatt wind turbine. As production and logistics industrialize further, the cost of electricity generated from the wind will continue to go down. For example, turbine nacelles are being produced on an up-to-date production line, and automated rotor blade production will be the next step. With the investment in A2Sea, a company specialized in services to install wind turbines offshore, Siemens is continuing to further industrialize offshore logistics. Optimized ships will help shorten wind turbine installation times, and thus reduce the cost of offshore wind power still further.
Siemens can already look back on 20 years of experience in offshore wind power. The company has installed a total of more than 700 wind turbines in European waters, with a total capacity of more than 2 GW. Siemens currently has orders on hand for more than 1,100 offshore turbines, with a total capacity of more than 4 GW.
Wind turbines are part of Siemens’ Environmental Portfolio. In fiscal 2011, revenue from the Portfolio totaled about €30 billion, making Siemens one of the world’s largest suppliers of ecofriendly technologies. In the same period, Siemens’ products and solutions enabled customers to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 320 million tons, an amount equal to the total annual CO2 emissions of Berlin, Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, New York, Singapore and Tokyo.
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Offshore WIND staff, December 16, 2011; Image: siemens