General Electric recently informed that it will land some of its most efficient wind turbines in Turkey – the 1.5-MW ones, about 100 of them, from a manufacturing facility in Salzbergen, Germany. You might be wondering why Turkey in particular and not some other European state, but it makes perfect sense to start a project in a country that scores 48,000 megawatts of wind power potential.
The project – Tayakadin – was started by Fina Enerji in Istanbul and is looking forward to ensuring that 14,000 Turkish households get the right amount of electricity. The country wants to install 20,000 MW by the year 2023, but so far the Tayakadin project stands for only 50 out of the country’s total amount of 1,800 MW.
However, Stephan Ritter, general manager of GE’s Renewable Energy business in Europe, holds great hopes for this new initiative, since “GE’s 1.6-100 technology builds on the broad experience of our 1.5 and 2.5 megawatt series”. Furthermore, the turbine’s robust structure seems to fit the bill perfectly, since its “100-meter rotor diameter and 80-meter hub height” ensures the highest capacity of the class 3 sites.
The Turkish project is just the first step in a worldwide introduction of 1,500 such models in the next two years. The initiative is being emulated by the Chinese wind energy company Longyuan who has chosen Canada as its it-location. In the end, if a network of high-capacity wind turbines is established all over the world, we can only ask “how soon is that?”
[via Cleantechnica]
