With the interest in wind energy on the rise, foundation suppliers are hard pressed to meet the developers’ demands in terms of design, delivery and installation. PES brings you the PEIKKO view from the North, where investment in new turbines is paying off and energy from wind is ever increasing.
Wind the most profitable way of producing energy
Wind has always been clean, but now it’s also economical. According to the American Wind Energy Association, ‘wind prices are extremely competitive right now, offering lower costs than other possible resources’, while Bloomberg New Energy Finance has noted that ‘onshore wind is fully competitive against gas and coal’.
This has created a wind energy boom with some 30,000 new turbines built every year to add to a tally of around 500,000 wind power plants in use around the world.
A quantum leap of turbine technology
The wind is in the middle of a similar technology leap that revolutionised the cell phone performance and use a decade ago. We have seen a significant increase in the turbine size and power generation figures.
‘If you take the situation three years ago as a baseline and give that an index of 100, we are now at 250,’ Kari Tuominen, Business Director of Peikko’s wind turbine foundation business, described the leap.
This has led to a decrease in cost per
kWh produced.
‘It also means that many foundation suppliers are struggling to come up with economical solutions that can support ever increasing mast and turbine sizes. That’s where we at Peikko have the upper hand,’ said Tuominen.
Forerunner in foundation technology
Having been at the forefront of turbine foundation development since 2012, Peikko has been able to make the same leap in foundation technology.
‘Seeing the rise of wind energy early enough, we invested heavily in creating a foundation that is easy and fast to install. With our industrial scale experience on concrete connections, we were able to come up with a gravity foundation that ticked all the boxes, also the economical,’ Tuominen pointed out.
The investment for the first generation, gravity foundation was up to 1.5 M euros, so the people at Peikko were taking wind very seriously indeed.
