SIEMENS

Slowly, the service lift clatters its way up the inside of a steel tower. Then, at an altitude of 70 meters, it suddenly stops. With his helmet drawn down, safety harness lashed on securely, and a tool belt strapped around his waist, 32-year-old mechanical engineer Alper Kalaycı climbs a final ten meters on a narrow ladder. He reaches a “safe harbor” – a room approximately four meters wide by seven meters long. “This is the heart of our nacelle,” says Kalaycı, who maintained machinery on cargo ships before switching to wind power.

The nacelle in which Kalaycı works for Siemens Service in Turkey isn’t really all that different from his previous workplace. You only realize that you’re in a wind turbine when you look out the hatch. The tower is located, along with twelve others just like it, roughly 1,600 meters above sea level in the middle of the central Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey. Known as the Dağpazarı Wind Farm, the installation, which is surrounded by Lebanon Cedars and historical ruins, has an output of 39 MW (megawatts) and produces some 129 GWh (gigawatt-hours) of electricity per year – enough to supply almost 40,000 average European households with power. The farm’s Siemens turbines, which now belong to the Turkish industrial and financial group Sabancı Holding EnerjiSA-Eon Power, went online in May 2012. Since then, a Siemens service team has provided the complex with expert maintenance. This is by no means Siemens’ first wind park in Turkey. Back in 2009, EnerjiSA hired Siemens to build a wind park in northwest Turkey. “In that project, we installed wind turbines with an output of 2.3 MW each, and a total output of 90 GWh of energy per year,” says Kalaycı.

In the nacelle, Kalaycı has plenty of room to work and has good access to key elements of the installation, such as the gearless permanent-magnet generator. The latter is situated between the machine frame and the hub, to which the rotor blades are attached. Using a permanent magnet, the generator converts any movement of the rotor directly into electrical energy without requiring any electrical power for excitation

Promoting Local Sources of Energy. Turkey’s amended Renewable Energy Law, which took effect in early 2011, has led to a boom in wind power throughout the country. This is because the feed-in tariffs for renewable energies have been fixed for ten years. “Today, approximately 44 percent of the power supplied in Turkey is generated from natural gas, and 98 percent of that is imported,” says Sinan Bubik, Head of Wind Power in Turkey. “Not only is that expensive, it makes the country extremely dependent. Especially if you consider that electricity consumption in June 2012 alone increased by 8.1 percent year-on-year.”

To improve matters, the government would like to boost the share of energy generated from local sources. Renewable energies are playing a major role in this respect. “In 2008, our installed wind energy systems had a capacity of about 360 MW; in 2010, that figure had risen to 1,329 MW, and today it’s approximately 2,170 MW,” says Bubik.

For the sake of comparison, the World Wind Energy Association reports that in 2012, Germany had capacity of over 30,000 MW of installed wind power. “If, in Turkey’s case, we add the wind farms that have been under construction since March 2012, we’d come to a capacity of approximately 3,500 MW. The law has brought some measure of security to our business,” says Bubik.

If individual parts of the wind turbines are manufactured locally, then the purchase price gets an extra markup for the first five years after the system goes online. For example, there’s a base price of 7.3 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, plus an extra 0.8 cents for the blades, 1.0 cent for the generator and control electronics, 0.6 cents for the turbine tower, and an 1.3 U.S. cents/kWh for mechanical parts of the rotor and nacelle units. “For the towers of our wind turbines, for example, we work together very closely with a local producer,” says Bubik. “That means that for our system, the operator gets approximately 7.9 U.S. cents/kWh.” Turkey’s goal is to increase its wind energy output to 20,000 MW by 2023 – right on time for the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the Republic of Turkey. That would represent 30 percent of the country’s energy mix. The best regions in this regard are along the northern coast of the Aegean, the Marmara region, the western Black Sea coast, and the southern part of Mersin-Hatay Province. “That’s over 7,000 kilometers of coastal area,” says Bubik. “With very favorable conditions for onshore systems. So we’re very optimistic as we look to the future.”

And the country is on track to achieving its ambitious goals. Approximately 500 kilometers west of Dağpazarı, Siemens is working on what will be one of the largest wind farms in Turkey. There, at an altitude of almost 2,000 meters, work is well underway on the installation of the wind farm ordered by Güriş Holding, which will have a total capacity of 50 MW.

“A year ago, there wasn’t even a path up there; it seemed like a place that time forgot,” recalls Judit Szasz, project manager at Siemens. “We therefore wouldn’t even have been able to drive a crane up there, let alone the parts of a turbine.”

But within a year, the operator created an access road. Today, although the road is still very narrow for trucks, Szasz points out that “We’re already assembling the first of the 22 turbines. When the systems go online in 2013, we’ll service them for another five years from here.”

Technicians from Siemens, mechanics, and the customer all have their offices next to each other in this out-of-the way location. “Being near one another like this is important, because it allows us to discuss things face-to-face and make decisions more quickly,” says Szasz. This is indispensable, especially considering the bad weather in the mountains. “On days like today, when the wind practically shoots little pebbles at our faces, and the fog makes it impossible to see anything, work is on hold. But we wait for the right moment – maybe it’ll come.” If it doesn’t, though, the assembly of a turbine, which normally takes 1.5 days, can take weeks.

Naturally, alongside the electricity generators themselves, rotor blades are one of the most important parts of any wind park. And the ones being installed at the Balabanlı onshore wind park near Istanbul are very special indeed. “These blade are four meters longer than the ones installed at Dağpazarı; that represents an eight percent higher energy output per year,” says Mahir Tosun, a technical expert at Siemens Wind Power.

Known as Aeroelastic Tailored Blades (ATBs), the new blades operate analogously to a car’s suspension, which cushions shocks and thereby extends vehicle service life Ordered in October 2012 by Borusan EnBW Enerji, a joint venture of German utility company EnBW and the Turkish Borusan Holding, Balabanlı is slated to enter service in late 2014. “At that time the installation’s 22 wind turbines will generate approximately 149 GWh of electricity per year for about 43,000 households,” says Tosun.

Searching for the Right Mix. “But wind alone won’t do it for Turkey,” says Bubik. Wind power may have great potential, but only 12.5 GW could currently be used because of limitations imposed by the existing grid. “We need substantial investments in transmission lines and transformer stations,” says Bubik.

The Turkish vision for 2023 therefore also includes geothermal power plants with a capacity of 600 MW and solar plants supplying 3,000 MW. Hydroelectric power, which currently accounts for 14,700 MW and represents almost one-fourth of the total energy mix, will continue to play a major role. “Plans are being made for about 500 hydropower plants with 21,000 MW by 2023,” says Bubik. “In addition to that, the government would like to promote coal and nuclear power.” The objective is to build coal-fired power plants with a capacity of 18,500 MW, which is an increase of 50 percent, and to add 10,000 MW of nuclear power capacity.

Meanwhile, back in Dağpazarı, Kalaycı isn’t thinking about all these numbers as he goes about his work. Wearing his gear, he climbs onto the roof of the nacelle, takes a deep breath, and looks out dreamily at the distant mountains: “I’ve grown very fond of these giants,” he says. “The nacelle is very much like the cabin of a ship. However, there’s one important difference. Up here, there’s no risk of getting seasick.”