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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