A subsidiary of the family-owned AUMA-Group, with headquarters in Müllheim, Germany, GFC (GFC AntriebsSysteme GmbH) is a world leader when it comes to drive solutions.
We spoke to Peter Heise about the company’s illustrious past, its exciting present and
its very promising future.
PES: Welcome to PES. Would you like to introduce your company and explain a little about how you serve the solar/PV sector?
Peter Heise: Our company was founded in 1896 by Professor Hermann Arthur Pekrun at Coswig, near Dresden, Germany. Back then, he was teaching drive systems at the Technical University Dresden, where he reinvented the globoid worm drive and started to industrialise a proper manufacturing process for those kind of gears at his own factory.
Since then, the company has grown and we have developed our know-how in designing and manufacturing/measuring the toothing for worm drives. In 1992, we joined the AUMA-Group, which is a market leader for actuator drives with international local representatives in over 100 countries worldwide. And since then, we have taken our business further afield into global territories. In the last few years, GFC has opened solar and PV subdivisions in China and India, where we predict there will be considerable demand in the near future.
In 2004, we began to research and develop specialised slewing gears for solar applications as an adaption of our existing steering / slewing gears. It was around this time that we started our cooperation with BSOI, who qualified our products at their Rotem test field. In fact, since then we have continuously delivered more than 80,000 drive units for BSOI projects while maintaining a close working relationship with the German scientific community.
Furthermore, GFC is a member of the R&D association FVA, and with Kraftanlagen München (KAM) and Deutsches Forschungs-zentrum für Luftwund Raumfahrttechnik (DLR) we run a R&D-project at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. This centre specialises in research for new solutions for the CSP-sector.
PES: Just how competitive is your corner of the market? Would it be fair to say that it’s an area that’s set to grow still further?
PH: Anybody who has visited growing economies such as India or China will be aware of the environmental problems that come together with the urgent demand for resources, energy and electrical power. In fact, it was not so long ago – at around the time of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ – when Germany was facing the same kind of environmental problems, particularly at the Rhein- and Ruhr-industrial zones.
In Germany, we could reduce these problems with green technology and green energy, and therefore we think that the same is true in China and India and all other growing economies. There will be a strong demand for green energy – so we think it will be of course a growing market.
