GE supplying turbines to Europe's largest wind farm

Czech utility company CEZ has announced that it has selected GE as the main supplier of turbines for a wind farm which the backers claim is the largest project of its kind in Europe.

In a statement issues this week, CEZ said that it had signed a new contract with GE for the purchase of 101 2.5MW turbines for its site in Cogealac - one of the two adjacent sites of the Romanian wind farm which the backers claim will have a combined capacity of 600MW.

Situated in the Dobrogea province of Romania, around 117km from the Black Sea, the Cogealac site, together with another in Fantanele which GE is also supplying turbines to, will represent around 30 per cent of the renewable market in the country.

The Fantanele site should be completed in early 2010, while Cogealac is expected for 2011. CEZ Group said its total investment in the project will be around € 1.1 billion.

Despite the size of the wind farm, Good Energies, one of the backers of the project, told BusinessGreen last year that there has been little resistance from the local community.

"It is a large facility but then the site is simply huge," said director of Good Energies, Andrew Lee. "It's in quite an empty part of the country and will be enormously beneficial to the local population, in terms of the rents farmers are getting for use of their land."

The 139 GE units being supplied to Fantanele and the 101 for Cogealac are all 2.5xl turbines with a 100m hub height and 100m rotor diameter and represent what the US engineering giant claims is its "most advanced wind turbine technology in terms of efficiency, reliability and grid connection capabilities".

GE launched the GE Energy 2.5xl last October and claimed that it has been developed specifically for the European market. The turbines are built at the company's facility in Salzbergen, Germany, close to the Dutch border.

"The 2.5xl is the next workhorse product specifically designed for the environment in Europe. There is less land available so you want to make most efficient use of it – so it's a bigger turbine," said GE Energy's global sales leader for wind energy, Mete Maltepe at the time.

According to CEZ, GE is building a service station close to the wind farm to ease maintenance of the turbines at the Fantanele and Cogealac sites.

GE acquired elements of its wind business in a bankruptcy sale following the collapse of US energy giant Enron in 2002.