The GE1.5 wind turbine was a large part of my early career in reliability engineering. In the mid-2000s, GE took advantage of their strong domestic onshore wind market and was able to meet demand at a time when Clipper and Siemens Wind Power were struggling to ramp up production. Both Clipper (2.5MW) and SWT (2.3) had bigger turbines but there was no arguing with the price and order fulfillment speed of the GE1.5. They were hugely successful and over 26,000 WTGs were installed of the “one-five” and it’s variants, mostly in the USA. It was one of my first climbs and still has a special place in my heart.
Miles of highway and turbines. The USA is a truly stunning country to drive and work in wind
Major Component Challenges
Working in gearbox reliability in 2014 for a company with a US field services team these 1.5s kept me busy and the many miles I covered in Texas, Illinois and California drove home the magnitude of the GE’s success of and the scale of responsibility carried by its owners to keep these machines turning. Lubricant wept from blade bearings, grease oozed from yaw decks. Blade bolts rattled in the hub like bricks in a washing machine and teeth missing from IMS stages; my first few years in US O&M was all an education in mass consumption, welfare and managing a populace rather than caring for the individual . A Texan tech told me, with a straight face, that their gearbox CMS was driving through the wind farm with the window down to listen out for missing teeth (his smile told me he was an expert on the matter). Main bearings could often be seen over 50 degrees C and blade cracks were not uncommon. Theres actual CMS available to better manage all of these failure types for all of these turbines. But establishing a business case was often a struggle and owners of these turbines were firefighting failures on a large scale.
Operating without gearbox CMS
Ain’t worth fixin’
With power prices in unregulated markets hitting lows of 14-$17/MWh, at that time, these machines would only be making $350 dollars a day when it was windy or sunny and that’s when the power price wasn’t going negative due to renewables. The business case for a repair never mind CMS or the $25k for new gearbox was a non-starter. If a turbine fell in the field I wouldn’t have been surprised if it didn’t make the toolbox talk in the morning . This was juxtaposed to UK offshore O&M at the time, where no expense was too great to get the turbine back up and running. Flying a replacement relay by helicopter to waiting technicians was not unheard of. It was a pleasure to drive through these American wind farms, sometimes for twenty minutes through Sweetwater, TX on the I-20, and meeting with the hardworking folks that kept them running but I didn’t sell much in the way of consultancy or CMS hardware. Given budget constraints on repairing broken turbines, selling CMS for better planning of failures was a non-starter.
Spares and Service
The US wind market has always had a strong can-do attitude when it comes to in-house maintenance. There’s a dogged resourcefulness and their domestic supply chain always rose to meet the challenge of repair, supply, training, logistics or whatever was needed. The size of the GE1.5 population meant that the market size always justified the R&D and you only have to look at the amount of manufacturers that offer aftermarket products for slip rings, gearboxes and any other consumable. This has improved quality and also driven down the cost of spares, repairs and services. Capitalism at it’s finest.
Data Access and pitch schedule
Access to the Bachmann controller and any CMS behind it has always been a challenge. You can of course pay to play with what you already own but alternatively there is some very cost effective controller retrofits now that afford owners access to all of the data, reducing reliance on GE, legacy modules and improve AEP and technician quality of life in the process. The electric pitch control system could be quite clunky and unreliable for both the ESS and non-ESS versions but there are also options for pitch upgrades for the masochistic.
The old GE controller
A controller upgrade is cheaper than you think
Repowering vs Life Extension
The Production Tax Credit (PTC) in the US was available for the first 10 years of operation of onshore wind in the US. Then in 2017, a change in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) law allowed you to reset the timer on your wind farm tax credits if you repowered your wind farm if 80% of the property was deemed new. This allowed new turbines onto existing sites with potentially new towers, new nacelles, new controllers or brand new wind turbines . A lot of operators took advantage of this and a lot of GE turbines that had only been producing for 10 years were torn down and replaced. Where did they go and how much for a second hand one? Sure, in those 10 years of operation, any turbine would have been driven harder than a stolen airport hire car but you’d like to think there was still some life left in it. Are they getting scrapped, buried, recycled? As someone who struggles with waste, these turbines are being taken before their time whilst here in the UK/EU our second hand turbine market is taking off and life extension for this class of turbine seems to be preferred over repowering. Being limited on tip height, grid connection and country roads the 6MW monsters in production these days aren’t designed for the quaint English countryside with hills that would barely hide a Land Rover. Siemens Gamesa have announced that they are relaunching the 2.3 and I would guess that it is for this reason. Either that or after a few albums of mixed success they are going back to their roots. Germany are repowering after 15 years which means that there will be WTGs/organ donors available for those GE machines still turning in Ireland and Spain, You would expect that these decommissioned machines will pump fresh spares and nacelles into the legacy market. Wind turbine models tell me that you can buy a 2001 GE1.5 from Germany for 95k EUR which seems reasonable money, but I don’t think my wife would let me have it in the garden . But compared to Vestas or Enercon in the 2MW class which seem to be dominating the second hand market, this is cheap. You may not have the same level of service or spares access but there’s no denying the CAPEX value for money.
Is the sun setting on the GE1.5?
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