Sales at Siemens Wind Power alone have increased by around 40 percent each year since 2004, when Siemens acquired Bonus, a Danish manufacturer. At that time, Bonus was building approximately 200 wind turbines per year and posting annual sales of €300 million. Today, Siemens builds some 2,000 turbines each year and generates sales of €5 billion. The order volume currently stands at €11 billion. The industry has entered a consolidation phase and needs to increase productivity and reduce costs.
This also applies to the production of wind power plant nacelles, which account for roughly 60 percent of manufacturing costs. The remainder is more or less equally divided between the tower and the rotor blades.
All in all, Siemens Wind Power is relying on modularization and reduced complexity to reduce costs. For instance, its new three-megawatt and six-megawatt turbines forego the usual combination of a gearbox and asynchronous generator. Instead, they use a directly driven synchronous generator equipped with permanent magnets and a corresponding conversion-to-grid frequency. This gearless direct drive concept eliminates 50 percent of the components normally used in such systems and reduces the unit’s weight by 30 percent.
