ZF is a global technology company supplying gear systems for vehicles and industrial technology. ZF Wind Power designs modular gearbox platforms and produces complete powertrains for wind turbines. Sivakumar Jayapal, Chief Service Officer at ZF Wind Power, talks with Windpower Engineering & Development about its new interactive service Thrive. Below is an excerpt of ZF’s…
Time for offshore wind policy makers to expand their view on “keeping it local”
By Sloan Freeman, Director of Hydrospatial Solutions at Geodynamics, an NV5 company In April 2023, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed the Promoting Offshore Wind Energy Resources (POWER) Act, enacting the state’s new 8.5-GW offshore wind target while highlighting the local workforce development and domestic supply chain features of the bill. This was just the latest…
Emerging trend: Wind turbines paired with energy storage
By Ivan Mednikov and Ivor Shaw, Stantec With recent pro-renewables legislation passing in both the United States and Canada that encourage energy storage adoption, the North American wind industry enters a new era. This intermittent energy resource can now more easily be supplemented by energy storage to provide a dispatchable electricity solution. This makes wind…
What can the U.S. offshore wind market learn from Europe?
By Andy Malpas, U.S. Offshore Wind Market Director, Kent The United States is in the midst of a clean energy revolution with offshore wind emerging as a pivotal source of renewable power. With an abundance of coastal winds, the United States could soon stand at the forefront of offshore wind production. The global offshore wind…
Case study: Yaw misalignment savings from simple SCADA data
Case study by Bitbloom This case study looks at getting more from existing turbine operation data. Cubico Sustainable Investments is one of the world’s largest privately-owned renewable energy companies with a portfolio of more than 6 GW across 12 countries. The company, which is backed by the resources of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and PSP Investments,…
Global lightning data now integrated into Vaisala’s Helideck Monitoring System
Vaisala announced today the integration of lightning data from Vaisala’s Global Lightning Dataset GLD360 — part of its Xweather suite of weather and environmental data services — into its Helideck Monitoring System. Built to meet the demands of challenging offshore environments, Vaisala’s Helideck Monitoring System now utilizes reliable and accurate thunderstorm and lightning information from GLD360,…
AI: Wind energy’s paragon and net-zero’s protagonist
By Rob Budny, VP of Renewables, SparkCognition The Russian invasion of Ukraine exposed the starkest challenges of fossil fuel dependence on a global level. The volatility of record-high power and fuel prices rocked economies and consumers while global CO2 emissions soared to a historic high and put the goals of the Paris Agreement at risk.…
Cranes cost 50% of wind turbine maintenance expenses. Here’s how to reduce that
By Gerrit van Doornik, President of Wind Solutions, Clean Energy Services Ever since its invention to lift water for irrigation 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the crane has been essential for lifting and moving heavy loads. The Roman empire added treadwheels so a single person could lift thousands of pounds. The first hydraulic-powered crane dates…
Selecting the right remote operations partner for your wind portfolio
By Amy Komatsuzaki, VP of remote operations, IHI Power Services Corp. Wind power generation represents a growing segment of wind power globally and in the United States. From 2000 to 2021, the amount of wind power generated in the United States grew from 5.59 terawatt hours to 379.77 terawatt hours. The renewed emphasis on green…
Competence is just as important when building the offshore wind workforce
By Wayne Mulhall, Managing Director at James Fisher Renewables The news is awash with positive stories about offshore wind; technical surveys have commenced for Finland’s latest 2.1-GW project, Australia’s state of Victoria has released its Offshore Wind Implementation Statement setting out steps to install 9 GW by 2040, while the Chinese city of Chaozhou plans…
Three reasons why digitalization of wind farms is reshaping green energy
By Dominique Verhulst, Global Head of Utilities, Nokia When Hurricane Ian hit Florida in September, it was the 15th climate disaster in the United States in 2022 that individually caused billion-dollar damage. Similar evidence of climate change is everywhere. More than 33 million people were impacted by floods in Pakistan this year, and an ozone…
Can we power offshore support vessels with renewable energy?
By Wei Huang, Ph.D., director and global offshore market sector lead of offshore support vessels, ABS Demand for the offshore support vessel (OSV) services is growing. In 2020, the market reached $13.78 billion, despite the economic chaos and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2028, demand for OSV services is set to expand by…
Floating wind: A global opportunity or an endless dawn?
By Mark Goalen, director of offshore engineering, Houlder Scaling renewable energy capacity is critical to the global energy transition and the decarbonization of difficult-to-abate industries. While it is widely recognized that offshore wind can play a key role in increasing this renewable energy capacity, many people do not appreciate that for this ambition to become…
Wind energy operators must address these 5 areas to exploit the full value of monitoring
By Evgenia Golysheva, VP of strategy and operations, ONYX Insight Most operators in the wind industry rely on some form of condition monitoring system (CMS) to preserve the operational longevity and high performance of their assets. And it seems to be doing the trick — the implementation of such systems in wind energy has been…
One good turn deserves another – setting the standard for wind energy maintenance
By Conor Wilkinson, EMEA Commercial Brand Manager, ExxonMobil Fuels & Lubricants Energy security and sustainability are headline topics – soaring gas and electricity prices and growing concerns about climate change have guaranteed that. Part of the answer is an increased focus on wind power; as a result, it is significantly growing in importance as part…
Plugging offshore wind power into our energy grid
By Ralph Kurth, Senior Principal, Energy; and John Crowther, Senior Principal, Environmental Services; Stantec With President Joe Biden setting a 30-GW offshore wind goal by 2030 for the United States, the industry is ready to take off. This massive development is a very ambitious goal that will require detailed engineering and planning. One thing that…
How lidar powers wind energy in offshore environments
By Matthieu Boquet, head of market and offering, wind energy, Vaisala Government organizations around the globe are increasingly implementing policies and programs aimed at increasing the number of wind turbines and the amount of power generated from wind energy. To meet this demand, there is continued innovations in the design, development, performance testing, operations and…
How engineering simulation software can increase offshore wind adoption
By Guillaume Lechaton, Sales Director for Wind and New Energies, Akselos Offshore wind is going from strength to strength. 2021 was a record year for the industry, with almost 21 GW of capacity added globally, up from 6.1 GW in 2020. Total offshore wind capacity is now at 57 GW and is expected to reach…
The prioritization of innovation over process is hampering manufacturing
By James Montgomery, VP of Solutions, Andea A deep disconnect between R&D and manufacturing is jeopardizing efforts to increase speed to market and achieve economies of scale for complex new technologies while harming safety and sustainability standards. The hand-off from product design and development to production creates significant risks as engineers prep the shopfloor to…
Improving offshore weather forecasting with machine learning
By Intissar Keghouche, DELFI lead, StormGeo “All models are wrong, but some are useful,” the statistician George Box wrote in 1976. This familiar aphorism sheds light on the fact that models cannot capture the complexities of the real world. Whether we use models to study financial market mechanisms, predict optimal healthcare strategies or, for any…