By Jason Deign in Barcelona

Let’s get one thing straight about Spain’s Azimut initiative to build a 15MW offshore turbine: it will not result in a 15MW turbine.

“This is a project assigned to the Cenit national support programme, which finances research: it doesn’t allow us to finance a complete turbine,” says Mauro Villanueva Monzón, technology development director at Gamesa, which is leading the 11 companies involved in Azimut.

Carlos Lozano, head of research and development at Iberdrola’s renewable energy division, one of the project partners, candidly adds that the project includes three competing turbine makers, “so it’s unlikely they would develop a machine together.”

Instead, Azimut is about carrying out basic research into the technology elements each project partner would need to develop in order to work with offshore wind farms providing up to 15MW per turbine.

And it is not just about the turbines. Hence the inclusion of companies such as Iberdrola and Acciona Windpower, which will be studying issues such as how to get the energy back to shore and how to install and maintain such massive wind farms.

“It’s not about having a turbine ready to go at the end of the project,” says Eduard Sala de Vedruna, research director of Europe Wind Energy Advisory at IHS Emerging Energy Research. “It’s about investigating the viability of different project elements.”

Largest Turbine

Mapping out the groundwork in this way makes a lot of sense given Azimut’s ambitions. The largest turbine built so far, the Enercon E-126, delivers less than half the energy planned by Azimut, and on land-based, not offshore, locations.

Improvements to the Enercon turbine should take it up to 7.5MW, and at least four manufacturers (AMSC Windtec, Clipper, Sway Turbine and Wind Power) are currently studying 10MW offshore machines. “But 15MW is a conceptual leap,” Sala de Vedruna says. 

Villanueva says: “We chose 15MW because it is sufficiently far away from today’s reality to make it very ambitious. We are going to study new types of machines. In offshore, the paradigm could and should change.”

He lists bi-pole and leeward-positioned rotors as possible elements for investigation.

Naturally, too, the project will need to come up with ways of minimising the turbine’s total head mass, with Villanueva hinting that Gamesa will focus research on vertical-axis configurations potentially similar to Wind Power’s 10MW Aerogenerator X design. 

He also does not expect the six-month-old, four-year project to start yielding results until 2012 or 2013, which would mean the first commercial turbine designs might not emerge from manufacturers until 2015 or 2016.

Business Model

“I think Spanish manufacturers have taken a cautious approach to offshore,” he says. “We wanted to see how the business model was going to be configured and as manufacturers did not want to do things the market was not interested in.

“Now it is clear us manufacturers have to bet on our machines.”

Villanueva acknowledges that the Spanish government, which has pulled support for its domestic wind energy market, is at least helping companies make that bet. 

Almost half of the EUR€25 million assigned to the project will come from the Ministry of Science and Innovation’s national strategic technical investigation consortia (Consorcios Estratégicos Nacionales en Investigación Técnica, abbreviated to Cenit, in Spanish) programme.

The rest is coming from the Azimut’s 11 private-sector partners: Gamesa, Alstom Wind, Acciona Windpower, Iberdrola Renovables, Acciona Energía, Técnicas Reunidas, Ingeteam, Ingeciber, Imatia, Tecnitest Ingenieros and DIgSILENT Ibérica; 22 research centres are also involved.

And while government euros have meant Azimut is required to have an all-Spanish team, Sala de Vedruna does not think that will harm its chances in the least. “The level of the players is impressive,” he says. “And it seems like an intelligent way of going about the project.

Integrated Approach

“Joint initiatives like this are nothing new. But what is new is the way of doing it, having a global vision. Normally projects are limited to the foundation and the turbine but this goes much further.”

Iberdrola’s Carlos Lozano agrees that an integrated approach is the best way to tackle the large-scale offshore projects that will characterise European wind energy in the coming decades.

“We are betting heavily on offshore,” he says. “Anyone who wants to stay in the wind energy business has to get their feet wet. And the tendency is towards ever-bigger turbines to reduce the cost of energy. 

“But if on land the costs of installation and maintenance go up with larger turbines, at sea they rocket. Any effort towards helping us develop these bigger machines more easily will help us.”

There is no doubt Azimut could go a long way towards providing that help, to the point that the aims of the project may no longer seem so grandiose when it finishes in 2013. “Back in the 90s a 2MW turbine was unthinkable,” Lozano remembers.

“And for the last six years we’ve been making them almost as standard.”

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