630 Megawatts of wind Energy!!! Siemens, the German power systems giant, trains new employees and gives refresher courses on how to work safely on modern windmills that can rise 90 meters, or about 300 feet, and weigh more than 100 tons. On a hot August day, employees wearing hard hats and protective clothing were squeezing in and out of the multi-ton module, practicing evacuating injured colleagues using pulleys and harnesses. The training center, which pushes through around 2,500 people a year, is fully booked these days because Siemens is staffing up as it fills orders for building and operating offshore and onshore wind farms. The center, which now has eight trainers, plans to add an additional one this year and next year. “We have to keep hiring,” said Ralph Knödler, a trainer, because the wind business is getting “bigger and bigger.” Although onshore wind is a larger business, offshore is growing faster, and the contracts often come with long-term maintenance deals, creating a need to recruit new service workers from the ranks of landlubbers. The turbines are formidably expensive and tricky to install and maintain, but countries blessed with ample sea breezes, like Britain and Germany, are coming to view them as a major part of their efforts to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say contribute to climate change. “If you want to do wind on a big scale with power plants based on wind, you need to go offshore,” said Michael Hannibal, chief of Siemens’s offshore wind business. “Power plants” are the important words here. Wind farms are no longer engineering experiments or small pilot schemes. They have grown very large, to the point where they are of the same scale as gas- or coal-fired power stations. The world’s largest wind facility, called the London Array, which uses Siemens equipment and cost almost $3 billion, was recently inaugurated off Britain’s east coast. With 630 megawatts of capacity, it is comparable to or bigger than conventional generators. Far larger projects, like one called East Anglia, which might be more than 10 times the size of the London Array, are under discussion for off the British coast. Siemens figures there are about 3.3 gigawatts of offshore wind power connected to the grid in Europe. That is similar in size to a large contemporary nuclear power station. The company also expects the global market to grow 20 percent a year for
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 18:31:50 +0000
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