When we caught up with Peter Heise of GFC (GFC AntriebsSysteme GmbH) in the last issue, the talk was mostly about the company’s wider commercial opportunities and solutions. Today, our conversation turns to the technical excellence that the company is known for…
PES: Welcome back to PES. For the benefit of new readers, would you like to introduce the company and explain a little about how you serve the CSP industry?
Peter Heise: GFC has specialised in worm gear manufacturing since 1896. We focus on five market segments:
• Actuator drives
• Worm gear sets
• Escalator drives
• High precision tracking drives for CSP applications
• Slewing drives for construction, forest and farming machinery
But we also use our longstanding traditional knowledge for developing customised drives on demand, especially for difficult environmental and special technical conditions as for example offshore and harbour applications.
For CSP industry we developed highly precise and long lasting maintenance free worm gears for tracking systems of heliostats at power tower plants.
PES: How much importance does the company as a whole place on your renewables business?
PH: Drive systems for CSP applications are one of the five market segments that GFC focuses on. This shows the importance we put at the renewable business. And for this market segment we preserve significant resources for R&D to keep us up to date.
PES: And how has business been since we last spoke?
PH: The gears we delivered to projects for Chevron (Caolinga, California) and IVANPAH have been running successfully for several years. Our customer for both projects, Bright Source Energy, is satisfied.
New projects face some challenges in terms of the current price situation in the oil market, technical issues as storage and (hard to believe) environmental discussions – especially in the US.
Nevertheless, we have had many requests for first samples. Our customers test equipment and principles with these drives. So we feel that there is something going on at that market.
