Siemens Gamesa announced its largest 14MW offshore wind turbine in the world last week, and commented subsequently on its production and installation in Taiwan. The company announced the latest schedule today, and the planning disclosed that the 14MW wind turbines will be installed at the Taichung assembly plant in 2024 before the establishment at the Hailong 300MW wind farm in 2025.
The latest SG14-222DD direct drive wind turbine of Siemens Gamesa contains an installed capacity of approximately 14MW, measures at 222m in diameter, and is roughly 247m in height, which is even taller than the 244m Shin Kong Life Tower. The SG14-222DD has a swept area of 39000m², equaling about 5.5 football fields, and the power elevation technology is able to increase the installed capacity to 15MW, with a power generation volume that satisfies 20K rice cookers in estimation.
Also known as gearless wind generators, direct drive wind turbines are exempted from gear box components required for traditional gear wind turbines, where the simplified internal components and parts of wind turbines are able to increase stability and reduce failure rate, for which the concept can be applied when manufacturing wind turbines in the future that contain larger installed capacity.
Siemens Gamesa will be producing direct drive wind turbines at the Taichung assembly plants. As commented by Niels Steenberg, Chairman of Siemens Gamesa Offshore for Asia-Pacific, Taichung will become the center of advance installation, services, and manufacturing of wind turbine components and parts for Siemens Gamesa, and service locations will also be expanded in Budai of Chiayi later on to correspond to the wind farm services in the city.
The Taichung wind turbine assembly plant will be further invested with two times the size expansion and more employees if the industrial relevance of the Hailong 2 300MW wind farm, co-invested by Northland Power (NPI) and Yushan Energy, is approved, and the number of employees in Taiwan is expected to increase from the existing 119 to 500. Furthermore, as the production capacity for a single plant is roughly 2GW, Siemens Gamesa will be focusing on the exports of the latest wind turbine technology to other Asia-Pacific markets in the future by utilizing Taiwan as a development center.
The largest SG14-222DD wind turbine will also be manufactured in Taiwan, and has been confirmed for the adoption in the Hailong 2 wind farm. The prototype for the 14MW wind turbines will be completed in 2021, with production commencing in 2024 in Germany. As commented by Steenberg, the Taichung plant will begin production after 4-5 months in order to catch up to the grid construction time of Hailong 2.
As the dimension for the previous wind farm that was located near the flight path has been reduced by 40%, the Hailong 2 wind farm has decided to adopt wind turbines that are bigger in capacity of 14MW, which eliminates the installation of 28 wind turbines, alleviating the impact on the environment at the same time.
(Cover photo source: Siemens Gamesa)