As well as offering an enormous benefit to the global environment, the offshore wind industry faces huge challenges from the local environment in the shape of extremely tough operating conditions. Olaf Borgwardt of novatic talks to us about how his company is helping protect the future of wind power.
PES: Welcome to PES. Would you like
to introduce the company and explain
a little about how you serve the
wind industry?
Olaf Borgwardt: Thank you for your invitation, it’s a big pleasure. novatic is an international operating group of companies that produces in five different locations (four in Europe / one in Asia). The group exports to more than 50 countries around the globe. Our product portfolio comprises protective-, construction- (wind industry), industrial-, automotive- and decorative-coatings.
Since 2003 we have been active in the development and production of special wind industry products and systems. As a medium sized group of companies we always have to be innovative to sustain our position on the world market.
Our R&D department is led by innovative engineers. With six patents obtained in the last decade, we have proved to be one of the most innovative companies in the field of wind energy. The reason for our success in this business field is simple: in both, technology and development, we are up to three years ahead of the industry.
Currently, we are working intensively on Ultra High Solid Systems, emission- and solvent-free systems as well as advanced waterborne coatings. Especially in Europe, the cost pressure is high in all respects – on the supplier´s side, on the production side, etc. Therefore we offer systems which are cut overall costs by up to 20-30 %.
PES: How does your coating solution differ to the more traditional methods of protection against corrosion?
OB: The key to our success is that our R&D department has always been responsible for all our business fields. Therefore we have an active technology transfer between the different application fields. For example, knowing how the reaction procedure of Isocyanate works in an automotive coating and using this know-how for our wind power coatings – this is a real synergy effect.
On the other hand, we also adopt products to high efficiency, high durability while we are considering customer requirements, not only in the area of coating systems itself, but also regarding the whole production process up to the end customer.
This is probably the fundamental difference between us and our competitors.
