Key Takeaways
- The US wind farm repowering market is thriving, with GE Vernova securing over 1 gigawatt of orders for nacelles and drivetrains scheduled for completion from 2024 to 2027.
- Repowering can enhance a wind farm’s capacity by tripling output while reducing the number of turbines by about 25%.
- While repowering projects face complex planning and approvals, they provide substantial benefits such as increased energy production, exemplified by a Wyoming project that reduced its turbines from 68 to 13, increasing output by 60%.
The repowering of existing onshore wind farms – the refurbishment of a project to extend its life and increase its capacity – has become big business in the US, with GE Vernova reporting it notched up more than 1 gigawatt of orders to repower nacelles and drivetrains over the course of 2024.
The US-based General Electric spin-off company said late last week that the combined 1 GW of repowering orders were placed to be completed between 2024 and 2027 and will use nacelles and drive trains manufactured at the company’s Pensacola facility in Florida.
Repowering is when old wind turbines – sometimes only certain parts of them – are replaced with new ones, as opposed to decommissioning which is when a site is returned to its previous state and use.
According to European data, repowering can, on average, triple a site’s capacity while reducing the number of turbines by a quarter. Australian research last year found about 1,700 MW of aging wind generation could be repowered to deliver 6000 MW, using just a third of the turbines.
In Australia, the repowering business is in its infancy. An application to repower the Woolnorth wind farm in Tasmania joined the queue for federal environmental assessment last August, setting in motion what stands to be a first for the industry.
In the US, however, repowering has become big business – offering the wind industry there a reassuring flow of new projects to coincide with the return of the famously anti-wind president Donald Trump.
While repowering projects still have to go through complex panning and approvals processes, they offer a compelling outcome, often vastly reducing the number of old turbines while also increasing a project’s output.
A US example cited in CleanTechnica cut the number of vintage 1990’s-era turbines at a Wyoming wind farm down from 68 to just 13, while increasing total output by 60%.
“As the United States works to meet the doubling of projected demand for more energy, repower projects like these help US workers in US factories take advantage of what we already have, where we already have it,” said Matt Lynch, general manager of the repower segment at GE Vernova, in a statement last week.
“Employees in our Pensacola facility and at the locations of partners across the supply chain are working to help us get the most out of our valuable energy assets already in the ground.”
