© Siemens Gamesa

Cooling for wind turbines

A new wind farm was built in Russia in the summer of 2021. To ensure that green elec­tricity is also supplied to house­holds, a trans­former from Rosen­er­go­trans in the wind turbine brings the energy to the right voltage. High up, it keeps a cool head thanks to centrifugal blowers from ebm-papst. They can with­stand the salt spray from the nearby coast.


Dear Readers,

this appli­ca­tion has already been imple­mented in 2021.

The devel­op­ment in the Ukraine-Russia conflict is highly worrying. We condemn the belligerent actions of the Russian govern­ment and decided last week to suspend deliv­eries to Russia and Ukraine until further notice.

We employ nine people in our Ukrainian sales company in Kiev. We are in close contact with them and are moni­toring the situ­a­tion. Some of them are outside Kiev or are fleeing.

Our thoughts are with them now.


The new wind turbines bring renew­able energy to house­holds. The country’s wind poten­tial is the largest in the world: According to experts, it is esti­mated at 16,500 TWh per year. In compar­ison, the figure for Germany is only 2,800 TWh. By 2024, 4.5% of elec­tricity in Russia is expected to come from alter­na­tive energy sources. In 2019, however, the total capacity of all wind turbines in the country was only about 20 MW – eight per thou­sand of the total power gener­a­tion capacity. Invest­ments worth billions are expected to create three new wind farms with a total capacity of nearly 400 MW by 2024 – enough to power around one million people.

Trans­former in constant use

The wind farms are also the first renew­able plants in Russia for energy company Enel Group. This is also Siemens Gamesa’s (a wind power plant manu­fac­turer) first project on Russian soil. Despite the premiere, every­thing went smoothly: the first of the three planned wind farms, with a total of 26 wind turbines and an output of 90 MW, was connected to the grid in the Azov district of the Rostow region in as early as June 2021. The 26 turbines generate around 320 GWh per year, which prevents 260,000 tons of CO2 emis­sions every year. Each indi­vidual wind turbine is 84 meters high, has a power of 3.5 MW, and has 66-meter-long rotor blades.

26 turbines generate around 320 GWh per year, which prevents 260,000 tons of CO2 emis­sions every year.

They are spread out on the seashore across an area of 133 hectares. To ensure that the energy gener­ated passes through power leads to house­holds, a trans­former increases the voltage of the power gener­ated from 0.69 kV to 35 kV to reduce losses when it is being trans­ported through the power grids. To allow contin­uous use of the trans­former, its manu­fac­turer Rosen­er­go­trans needed new blowers at the begin­ning of the project in 2019 – as quickly as possible. They had to dissi­pate the excess heat from the trans­former gener­ated during this process.

No chance for salt

“We already knew that ebm-papst was a quick, reli­able partner from other projects involving cooling oil trans­formers,” explains Irina Beres­neva, Tech­nical Project Manager at Rosen­er­go­trans. “That’s why we used them for this project involving dry-type trans­formers too.” However, the chal­lenge was that the turbines are exposed to heavy salt spray on the coast. There was no stan­dard product avail­able at short notice from ebm-papst that would work for this. The alter­na­tive option was to develop a new blower type with increased protec­tion against salt spray in the same amount of time. “In coop­er­a­tion with our Spanish colleagues from ebm-papst Ibérica, we were able to supply initial samples to the Siemens Gamesa produc­tion site in Madrid for tests just two months later,” said Ekate­rina Zyan­terekova, Project Manager at ebm-papst Ural, located in Yekatar­in­burg. “This allowed them to carry out the neces­sary aero­dy­namic tests quickly.”

Reli­able cooling

The blowers passed the tests. As a newly devel­oped fully cast version, salt spray could not harm them: they were fully protected. Series delivery began half a year later. “We were fully satis­fied with the tech­nical solu­tion we chose – the ebm-papst blower – in terms of the required cooling capacity,” said Irina Beres­neva. “ebm-papst provided us with fast and reli­able support and were the only ones that proposed a solu­tion to our diffi­cult task, which completely satis­fied us.” Now, six centrifugal blowers cool one trans­former in each of the 26 wind turbines in Azov. They are so effi­cient that they have increased the power output of the trans­former by 12 percent: another green advan­tage.

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