As the year opened new opportunities for the wind power industry, our flexible business approach gives you the best way to move ahead.
Visit us at China Wind Power 2013 in Hall E, stand EC10, and learn how to better compete:
• Lower risks and gain more value.
• Enhance your core competences.
• Develop a responsive supply chain.
• Move from fixed costs to controlled overhead with measurable operations.
Wind turbine manufacturers, owners and operators are seeking the ideal drive train configuration to increase annual energy production, minimize total life cycle costs and fulfill the strictest grid code requirements.
The Switch Drive™ is a fully optimized permanent magnet generator and full-power converter package, enabling high reliability, better overall efficiency and fault ride-through capability.
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.
The Switch received orders for key wind power components from PROKON of Germany. Together with repeat agreements from China, the total order value The Switch received during June is over EUR 100 million, resulting in the largest order backlog in the company’s history.
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.
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.
The Switch, a Finland-based supplier of permanent magnet generator and full-power converter packages, announced today that its first 5 MW high-speed drive trains installed in the field in China for CSIC Haizhuang Windpower Equipment Co., Ltd, a Chinese wind power equipment manufacturer, are now successfully operating.
The 2012 Global Top 10 award reflects The Switch’s cleantech success and market position as a key component supplier to the wind power company in the $163.1 billion global cleantech industry. It also indicates that The Switch’s unique innovations are making a positive contribution to the green economy.
With a focus on harvesting the greatest amount of energy from wind power, it is easy to jump to conclusions that turbine manufacturers are turning to permanent magnet generators as their best response to better annual energy production. Yet, is that all that stands behind the selection of this technology?
