Columnist

Geordie duo boosting Siemens wind energy in the Baltic

A father and son combination from Newcastle upon Tyne is helping usher in a new era of energy production in the Baltic Sea.

Vaughan Gingell, 52, and 21-year-old son Callum are part of a team installing wind turbines there, bringing clean and affordable wind power to Europe.

‘The Old Man’, as Vaughan is affectionately known, and Callum are part of Siemens’ Sea Installer team and, during August 2012 and April 2013, they helped install 52 wind turbines in the Kattegat, just off Denmark.

Siemens are pursuing environmental and economic benefit from the notorious weather changes and wind shifts encountered in that part of the world, ‘capturing nature’s energy to power the planet’.

Callum bemoans the hardships inherent in a job at sea, but wouldn’t have it any other way.

He says: “Your face freezes up; your hands are absolutely freezing. If you’re waiting in the tower for so long, it can get to you a bit!”

Gingell senior chips in: “If you’re frightened of heights, it’s definitely not the job for you!”

But they love working together at the power plant, both enjoy the job, and see satisfaction in the completion of the Anholt project, one of the many offshore wind projects Siemens are involved with as the worldwide demand for energy soars.

Wind energy is, without question, one of the main sources of energy in the future, says Michael Liebreich, CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“The dogs can be let off the leash offshore. You can go higher, you can go longer, you can go faster.”

A new six megawatt turbine, coupled with a 154 metre rotor and 75 metre long lightweight blades, have been developed in Denmark and are helping Siemens set new standards for offshore wind turbines.

Construction and maintenance costs are up to three times more expensive offshore than onshore, but more frequent and powerful winds and a lesser aesthetic impact make the extra cost worth bearing.

Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology officer of Siemens Wind Power, said: “For big offshore wind farms far from shore, the robustness is really the key thing because there are many days when you can’t get out there, and the turbine needs to run always.”

To garner this robustness, Siemens have attempted to build the turbine ‘as simply as possible’, by bolting the wind turbine rotor directly to a large, slow-running generator that generates power without the need for a gearbox.

This is part of an attempt to increase the validity of offshore wind farms on a large scale.

The 111-turbine Anholt wind farm off Denmark, in which Siemens is a partner, was inaugurated earlier this year and cost £1.15 billion. Anholt can produce 400 megawatts, enough power to cover 4% of Danish electricity requirements.

Liebreich exhorts the development of such wind farms as recourse to dwindling resources elsewhere, as it is “proven, and can be produced cheaply enough to feed the grid.”

In February this year, Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of generating electricity from new wind farms is cheaper than from new coal or gas plants.

The fact that the energy is clean and renewable is another feather in Siemens’ cap.

Siemens Wind Power is the oldest wind turbine manufacturer in the world - commencing production in 1980 - and employ around 8,000 people in the industry worldwide.

Each wind turbine can produce enough power for around 3,500 houses. The blades are driven by a central hub connected to a main shaft that rotates, speeding up the blades that power a generator, which produces power that can be exported from an underwater substation straight into the main power grid.

Stiesdal, Siemens’ chief technology officer, says their overall target is to make politicians take notice by lowering the cost and the emission of greenhouse gases compared to alternative power sources, to a point where they say “how can we afford not to get involved?”

Stiesdal has worked for Siemens for 25 years and got into wind energy after the price of oil shot up and he built his own turbine to power his father’s farm in Odense, Denmark.

A quarter of a century on, Vaughan and Callum are to continue to reap the rewards from this new era of energy production.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by BeOn .