The wind power industry has been under pressure during this year as expected. Still, it now looks like the largest markets of China and the US are moving forward. This brings higher hopes for 2014, which should materialize into orders already this year.
At The Switch, we have enhanced our strategy. We are concentrating even more to bring value to our customers. Our employees have analyzed and discussed how they can promote greater customer value in their work.
Combined heat and power (CHP) systems are very popular in high-rise buildings as well as industrial sites and other facilities where they produce heat and power at a reasonable cost. CHP systems can save as much as 40% energy compared with traditional ways of producing electricity and heat separately.
How can you save even more? And simultaneously increase the reliability and safety of onsite energy production and grid interconnection? There are a couple of rather easy ways to improve overall efficiency.
What do wind turbines and summer cottages have in common? They are quite similar. Perhaps not in numbers, but from a technology point of view. Some are equipped with features only considered necessary for survival; others have ultra-modern technical solutions that even enable remote access to monitoring equipment by mobile phone. Both in cottages and turbines, features requested in the 90s may not live up to our needs today.
In many ways, there isn’t much new in renewable energy. Renewable energy, of course, is new in the sense of what it means. The energy source renews itself and its availability is as such plentiful. Yet, both wind and hydro energy have been captured for hundreds of years, for example, in sailboats, windmills, hydro powered mills, saws and other equipment. Solar was harvested in greenhouses and for heating long before there were photovoltaic panels.
Soaring fuel prices and global overcapacity are forcing the marine industry to rethink conventional power configurations. Ship owners are struggling to turn a profit. The time has come for advanced technologies that can revolutionize the way ships generate and use energy.
The Switch’s permanent magnet technology has been proven in the harsh environments of the wind industry. Now, we’re making this technology available to marine to offer unmatched power density, energy efficiency, design flexibility and operational reliability.
The debate still continues about which drive train is the best for a wind turbine. In 2011, 42.3 GW of wind generators were delivered; PMG’s share was 6.5 GW, which gives it a 15% market share. This is already a significant accomplishment. So we can say that PMG is a standard option and no longer just a technology trial.
Although wind industry growth has slowed down to an annual average of 3.8%, MAKE consulting estimates for the next five years that PMGs will keep growing faster than the average market growth rate.
Hurricane Sandy was the most destructive tropical cyclone of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season, as well as the second-costliest hurricane in US history, making landfall on October 29. The storm caused massive electrical grid damages in New Jersey, New York and many New England areas, causing power outages for businesses, industrial sites, medical centers, and countless homes.
It showed just how helpless we are when this kind of natural disaster happens in our own backyard. As a result, building management now aims to ensure that buildings do not lose electrical power during such a disaster because of a missing emergency power generation system.
As we move forward in these unpredictable times, we’ve been sharpening our strategy to offer our customers even more value so they can succeed at what they do best.
Having the world’s largest permanent magnet generator and full-power converter product range, we can offer customers predictable time-to-market with this latest, advanced technology. We’ve streamlined our processes to shorten the lead times in customer projects to give them the edge to come out with the bestsellers of the future.
Between 2009 – 2011, we were spoiled by a “green race” that started as a sprint. There was an urgent need to bring Asian nations—especially China—into line with the rest of the world to use cleaner and more efficient energy sources.
Suddenly in 2012, it’s turned into something of a marathon, with companies and financial institutions involved in the market, which has been slowed by regulatory and political climates that have evolved in the face of new economic realities.
After many wild years in the wind power business, clearer targets are now being set. Most of the players have realized that instead of having the most sophisticated turbine, the more important goals are to reach a levelized cost of energy and higher amount of annual energy produced.
The industry standard has been to use totally enclosed (IP54) generators in the turbines, mainly to avoid the risk of corrosion in its different forms and also to improve the lifetime of the components. Offshore turbines face additional challenges from the sea environment in which the components in both offshore and near-shore turbines are exposed to salt water.
Back in 2008 when The Switch delivered its first inverter for a photovoltaic (PV) solar application, it was built like power converters have been for many decades. Variable speed drives for industrial applications, excitation systems – and more recently, power converters for renewable energy applications such as wind – have always had a logical indoor installation location.
Permanent magnet (PM) technology has some clear benefits also for marine applications. Since fuel prices have gone up by 30% in only 2 years and freight rates have remained at about the same level for the past 10 years, energy savings has become hot topic in shipbuilding.