Words: Petri Aho, Senior Vice President, Service Sales EMEA & APAC.
This year Moventas launched a new suite of services called Extra Life. Extra Life suites incorporate gearbox services for the most popular, aging fleets, namely GE, Siemens and kilowatt class turbines. By removing known failure modes and replacing them with core Moventas technologies, gearbox lifetime can be extended considerably.
Alongside developing the wind industry’s most advanced new gearbox technology, we also wanted to focus on older, existing fleets. With 35 years of experience in wind gearboxes and another 40+ in industrial power transmission, this was fairly easy. All we needed to do was put all the knowledge of gearbox behaviour and typical failures, into service packages for the most popular fleets in Europe and in the US. Extra Life services cover replacements, factory service, plug & play accessories, up-tower services, spares and inspections.
Ageing gearboxes can be improved
One of the reasons we think the Extra Life concept is great, apart from that there is clear customer demand, is the fact that sustaining existing machinery for as long as we can is, well, sustainable. That’s the kind of industry we want to promote.
Unless the turbine itself is decommissioned for some other reason, at least a gearbox should never be scrapped because of typical, well-known failures that can a) be easily avoided entirely with proper condition management and b) fixed and replaced with more modern technology, even up-tower.
