GEV Wind Power to present its cost-saving developments in turbine blade maintenance at EWEA 2015

GEV’s innovative Habitat represents a major milestone in the maintenance of remote wind turbines, enabling engineers to complete essential works in a weather-protected environment. Whilst the simultaneous launch of a camera-based blade inspection service and GEV’s own cloud based resource planning tool will help to further reduce operating costs.

The Habitat is expected to save the wind energy sector between three and five lost days in each maintenance season. It will also allow for work to continue beyond the standard May-October cycle, potentially returning a minimum of 1-2% increase in annual energy production.

Working collaboratively with Technology Partner Cornis, GEV is already offering clients the Panoblade Inspection System that rapidly captures images of an entire turbine blade surface.  

Projects Director Alastair Gadney comments: “We recognised the cost effective and simple advantages of utilising the remote blade inspection system. With only one operator required to inspect up to five onshore turbines per day or three offshore turbines, this system will offer exceptional savings in both time and money.”

To further drive down operating costs within the industry, GEV Wind Power has launched its own Blade ERP a tablet device that captures real-time activity to enable efficient data capture, reporting and invoicing.

Alastair added: “The fundamental advantage of the GEV Blade ERP is that it provides near real-time reporting on each maintenance job, thereby boosting efficiency and minimising errors generated during the manual processing of reports and invoices.  Together with our Blade Habitat and remote blade inspection our aim is to continually bring innovation into the wind industry to play our part in driving down the cost of energy. ”

GEV Wind Power is also the first contractor to be trained by BASF with the BASF RELEST® leading edge protection system. Wind turbine rotor blades are vulnerable to extreme erosion from the effects of wind, rain, snow, sand and UV radiation. RELEST Wind LEP is a protective two-part paint technology offering four times higher resistance than conventional solutions.

He continues: “Being part of the solution to this emerging issue was important to GEV and in the BASF RELEST we identified an effective market ready product.  Erosion is going to become more and more important to wind farm operators and here again GEV Wind Power is at the very front of O&M providers. ”

Located at stand C3-B52, visitors to the EWEA Offshore conference will have the opportunity to meet with GEV’s managing director David Fletcher and Alastair Gadney who will be on hand to address sector specific questions and discuss GEV’s innovations that are set to revolutionise the next generation of wind turbines.

Alastair concluded: “At GEV Wind Power, we endeavour to bring increased value within the supply chain.  EWEA Offshore 2015 provides us with a perfect opportunity to meet with suppliers, manufacturers and developers to showcase our time and cost-saving innovations.”

The show is the largest offshore wind energy conference and will bring together leading players from more than 50 countries, attracting more than 6,600 participants.