LONDON, April 4 (UPI) -- Denmark's Vestas, the world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines, unveiled its new offshore turbine, aimed at meeting increased demand from offshore farms planned in Northern European waters.
The 7-megawatt device has a rotor diameter of 190 yards and is designed to reliably produce power in even the roughest North Sea conditions, Vestas said. The company unveiled the new turbine at a news conference last week in London. Danish utility Dong has signed a letter of intent to test the new turbine, the companies said in a statement.
A prototype will be ready next year but serial production won't start until 2015, Vestas said. That might be just in time to outfit the many large offshore wind farms planned off the British coastlines.
"Seeing the positive indications from governments worldwide and especially from the UK, to increase the utilization of wind energy is indeed very promising," Vestas Chief Executive Officer Ditlev Engel said in a statement. "We look forward to this new turbine doing its part in making these political targets a reality."
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Vestas said it expects to serve mainly the European markets with the new turbine but added it was ready to sell it to other parts of the world if demand requires.
The turbine's design has surprised observers. Competitor Siemens from Germany for its new 6MW offshore turbine, to be built at a factory in Britain starting in 2014, chose to go with a direct-drive machine.
Direct-drive machines have only half the number of parts of a geared machine, thus requiring less maintenance. This is key in the difficult offshore sector, where repair ships sometimes can't reach turbines for weeks due to bad weather.
Vestas chose a geared solution, citing the higher costs and insecurities related to direct-drive turbines.
Finn Strom Madsen, the head of Vestas' technology research and development department, said his engineers tested both technologies when developing the new turbine.
"It soon became clear that if we wanted to meet the customers' expectations about lowest possible cost of energy and high business case certainty we needed a perfect combination of innovation and proven technology and so the choice could only be to go for a medium-speed drive-train solution," Madsen said in a statement. "Offshore wind customers do not want new and untested solutions. They want reliability and business case certainty."
Vestas employs around 21,000 people and has nearly 40,000 wind turbines installed all over the world.
