Wind turbines and the way of the future...

A recent article from Renewable Energy World International Magazine holds more bad news for the gear manufacturing industry. As we discussed in our previous blog post "Some Turbulence for Gear Manufacturers", a few major players in the wind energy market are beginning to shy away from using gearboxes in their turbine offerings. This recent article confirms that as wind turbines are built larger for more output and efficiency, the reliability of gearboxes is continuing to come into question.

In their article "Wind Turbine Gearbox Reality: The Impact of Rotor Support", Jordi Puigcorbe and Alexis de-Beaumont explain that:

One of the biggest concerns remaining in the wind industry is the reliability of the gearbox. 'With our current wind turbine fleet currently going out of warranty period, we estimate that we are carrying a potential risk on gearboxes of about US$300 million. Failures are still relatively rare these days because our fleet is recent, but we expect this will change dramatically as our wind turbines approach their 5–7 years of operation. Our concern is such that we are even considering acquiring a company with gearbox servicing capabilities.'

The article goes on to say that an average gearbox will last seven to eleven years, while the wind turbines themselves have a life-expectancy of roughly twenty years. The reason gearboxes have such a large reputation for failure in wind turbines is because of the difficulty in properly assessing the amount of force that the gears and bearings will be able to tolerate. Many companies have decided to switch over to direct drive in order to reduce the number of moving parts that are exposed to the elements in order to increase resistance to wear.

While this seems like all bad news for gear manufacturing companies, there is a silver lining. Many major corporations that deal in wind turbine-based renewable energy will be hiring more engineers to perform maintenance on these gearboxes. In addition, there are several opportunities for engineers to design and implement new gearbox technologies before RE companies make direct drive the new standard for wind turbines.