GE Vernova (GEV) released its quarterly results. The company has three business segments. Power orders grew 30% (gas and hydro). Electrification also increased but Wind orders were down 44%. Both onshore and offshore wind were down.
DB2
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This is no surprise. They have strong competitors in wind from Europe and probably from China. The industry has been losing money from long lead contracts with inadequate inflation protection. Many projects delayed or cancelled. And new contracts with strong inflation escalators not so attractive.
Power has always been an anchor around GE profits. Makes you think coal fired power plants were very profitable but gas fired plants less so. Veranova promotes all the need for new power capacity as a growth opportunity, but we know electrical machinery etc is very competitive.
You might be better off to invest in copper.
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Wind PPAs have become particularly popular with tech companies looking for clean energy to power data centers overnight, according to LevelTen Energy. But they also face “fairly structural headwinds that have fundamentally raised the cost of building new wind facilities,” Reay said.
Wind projects face the same interconnection delays and permitting challenges that solar projects have experienced, but wind developers must also contend with the dwindling availability of land suitable for new projects, Reay said.
Most of the best plots have already been developed, and so new projects must consider sites that require more extensive infrastructure upgrades and have lower capacity factors, he said.
Wind projects have also been particularly hard hit by inflation, and developers have reported to LevelTen that they have experienced a sudden spike in insurance premiums as a result of more severe weather events, Reay said. Outside severe weather events, average U.S. wind speeds appear to be declining in key wind energy producing regions…
DB2
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Don’t forget the recent failures of GE Veranova’s largest wind turbines. Will they be able to reengineer and improve reliability? Or will they restrict production to smaller less productive models?
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Not that it matters, on board my sailboat solar panels were a delight, they just worked. The wind turbine was noisy, flaky, and even life threatening. If I had to do it again the only wind power i would use are sails and the self steering gear. The battery powered autopilot was expensive and kept on breaking down.
Conclusion, KISS! Keep it simple, Stupid!
Vertical axis wind turbines might be the alternative, if they can generate sufficient power.
The Captain
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Depends upon how much power is needed.
At least for offshore wind it is advantageous to have each turbine as large as practical because of the siting costs.
DB2
Some vertical designs, like the Darrieus, are not self starting. They need either buckets, or a starter motor, to get them spinning. Eons ago, in the old “Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge” TV series, there was a windmill competition. One team built a Darrieus. The winds on the day of testing were very light and intermittent. The team with the Darrieus had to repeatedly wind a rope around the spinny part of the mast (substitute word due to censors), and heave, to spin the windmill up again, after the wind had died for a minute.
Steve