French ports for wind manufacturing
Alstom’s new Haliade 150-6MW wind turbine. Photo: Alstom
Engineering giant Alstom has revealed further details of its ambitions for offshore wind turbine manufacturing in France.
It has announced plans to establish component production and assembly facilities at Saint-Nazaire and Cherbourg, with the potential cost savings of basing turbine production close to suitable port facilities.
Alstom’s proposals involve manufacture of its 6MW, direct drive, permanent magnet generator turbine, currently at the prototype phase, with a pre-series planned for 2013 and series production commencing in 2014. Described as ‘robust, simple and efficient’, the turbine will have the longest blades in the world at 73.5m. Facilities are planned at Saint-Nazaire for the manufacturing of nacelles and generators, while in partnership with LM Wind Power, production of the blades will be based at Cherbourg, along with the establishment of a tower manufacturing facility, set up by Alstom’s supplier yet to be selected. Announcements of other investments, including assembly and service facilities are expected later.
There are similarities between Alstom’s plans and those of Vestas, which currently has a port option agreement with Sheerness (UK) for manufacture of its 7MW dedicated offshore turbine. Both are dependent, in differing ways, on actually receiving orders. For Alstom, the scale of their project will depend on the result of their joint response, along with EDF Energies Nouvelles, to the French government’s first call for tenders, earlier in 2011, for the development of offshore windfarms in French waters. Currently around 20 projects are at the early planning stage in French waters, with a handful of consent applications now submitted, and five development zones identified.
As reported previously (MJ October 2011), the Port of Normandy Authority has published its comprehensive proposals to develop both Cherbourg and Caen-Ouistreham with the offshore wind and marine energy markets in mind.
In the Loire Estuary in the Bay of Biscay, Nantes Saint-Nazaire Port Authority (Port Atlantique) has similar aspirations to Cherbourg towards the marine renewable energy sector, having also prepared a submission in relation to the national request for proposals concerning offshore windfarms. In 2009, the port’s supervisory board published its Major Seaport Authority’s strategic plan looking forward to 2020 and, as with many ports today, a priority is the provision of intermodal logistics facilities. They are also embracing the challenges and opportunities presented by marine renewables, particularly the proposed Atlantic seaboard offshore windfarms, with the creation of an eco-technology park dedicated to marine renewables at the Le Carnet site, to be integrated with scheduled developments at the Montoir de Bretagne and Saint-Nazaire facilities. The Le Carnet site is on the south side of the Loire Estuary, around 20km upriver from Saint-Nazaire itself, and covers 300ha of land reserves, of which 100ha is available for the creation of an eco-technology park.
By Peter Barker
Images for this article - click to enlarge
Unless otherwise stated, all images copyright © Mercator Media 2012. This does not exclude the owner's assertion of copyright over the material.
