Siemens Gamesa looked at failure rates at its wind farm and found it had much bigger problems than it thought – and they could take years to fix.
Major wind turbine problems at Siemens Gamesa
Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA – one of the largest wind turbine manufacturers in the world – is the wind power unit of Siemens Energy AG.
Siemens Energy announced last night and today that following a review of the company’s ‘wind turbine component failure rates’ it has discovered much larger problems than it had anticipated. .
Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt told reporters today:
The result of the current exam will be much worse than I thought possible.
The quality problems go well beyond what was previously known, especially in the onshore.
We address the subject but it takes time and it has a cost.
While this should be clear to everyone, I would like to re-emphasize how bitter this is for all of us.
The company’s Spanish division found that its onshore wind turbines had worse than expected quality defects. The company will have to repair defects in the rotor blades and bearings, ranging from component failures to small cracks. Eickholt also cited issues with “legacy turbines,” without going into detail.
As for the scale of the problem, Reuters noted today that Siemens Gamesa had “issues affecting up to 15-30% of the more than 132 gigawatts of turbines globally.” Its total wind capacity is equivalent to approximately 132 nuclear power plants.
Following the bad news, the German-Spanish wind giant dropped its full-year profit forecast – these are a company’s best estimates to shareholders of its future profits – and it warned last night that costs extra to remedy its problems could be more than $1.1 billion. As a result, Siemens Energy shares fell more than 37% in Frankfurt today.
Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said on a call with analysts that he “would use the fact that we will soon own 100% of Siemens Gamesa to drive this change so that it becomes a reliable contributor to Siemens’ results. energy”.
Electrek’s Grasp
I’m more interested in the deployment and generation of clean energy than the bottom line of the company – but of course I know you need the money for the deployment, so I hope Bruch is right. .
The world needs this wind power giant to get back on its feet as soon as possible because demand for its products is overwhelming and we cannot afford to lose even 15% of wind turbine supply. .
There are many government and private wind projects that have signed on to use Siemens Gamesa turbines, and this major setback will really throw a wrench in the works.
I’ve covered many Siemens Gamesa wind turbine achievements (see below), and I’m very disappointed to hear this news. I sincerely hope that they can reverse the situation as soon as possible.
Bruch also said he is “still convinced that the energy transition can only be managed with the help of wind energy”. We at Electrek could not agree more.
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