EnBW to Hire PNE Wind for More Turbine Replacements This Year, Chief Says

EnBW Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg AG is planning to hire wind turbine manager PNE Wind AG to help replace more of its oldest machines this year after the two companies completed a similar upgrading project in Germany.

“We are very interested in doing more repowering,” Stefan Thiele, head of EnBW’s renewable energy division, said in an interview in Berlin today. The German utility has “a few more projects in the pipeline” with PNE to upgrade older and smaller turbines by year-end, he said without giving more details.

Turbine owners in Germany, Denmark and other countries that began building wind farms a decade ago or longer are looking at repowering their machines as a way to get more electricity from their investments. Units installed at the beginning of the wind boom had typically less than 1-megawatt capacity, compared with machines five times larger in use today.

PNE Wind today completed the replacement of turbines at EnBW’s Goerike wind farm in northeastern Germany, increasing the total annual power output to 24 million kilowatt hours, enough for 4,000 households, from 1.5 million kilowatt hours.

“The number of repowering projects is set to rapidly increase in the future,” said PNE Wind Chief Executive Officer Martin Billhardt said in an e-mailed statement.

EnBW and RWE AG’s Innogy renewable energy division said restrictions in Germany on erecting taller towers and bigger turbines is holding back repowering projects in the world’s third-largest wind power market. RWE has about 500 megawatts of onshore wind installed in Europe and will look into repowering opportunities, said Martin Skiba, director of the company’s offshore wind unit, in an interview in Berlin today.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy van Loon in Berlin at jvanloon@bloomberg.net.

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