Gamesa has developed an in-house technology to adapt existing wind farms to the regulations in the face of voltage dips.
Gamesa is continuing to move forward in the wager it has placed on technology as an essential competitive value and as a driving force for its progress with a new development that enables adaptation to regulations in the face voltage dips.
Gamesa WindFact®, a product that was designed and developed in-house, is a cutting-edge solution allowing for compliance with Operating Procedure 12.3 (Procedimiento de Operación 12.3) for existing wind farms which could not justify technical compliance with this regulation up to now. This procedure sets forth the requirements that Spanish wind farms have to meet for the purpose of ensuring security of supply in the face of voltage dips. The solution can also be validly adapted for wind farms subject to other countries' grid codes.
Gamesa WindFact® is installed at a substation level, making the retrofitting or modifying of existing wind turbines is unnecessary. Similarly, its start-up and maintenance are performed without affecting the wind farm's production, its availability levels and the wind turbines' warranty conditions remain intact.
Gamesa WindFact® can be adapted to wind energy facilities equipped with older wind turbines, such as those equipped with squirrel-cage wind turbines and other technologies. Gamesa is thus providing a response to significant demand among existing wind farms, as the new development can be applied to Gamesa wind turbines as well as to other existing commercial models. Throughout 2009, the company supplied Gamesa Windfact equipment totaling 700 MW in power to several of the main Spanish wind energy developers.
This new solution provides the significant advantage of protecting the wind turbines' mechanical equipment during voltage recovery after the dip, which leads to a reduction in the efforts dedicated to the wind turbines.
Due to its applications, its medium voltage connections and its unitary power, which reaches 50 MW, Gamesa WindFact can be considered as a cutting-edge FACT device and a milestone in power electronics.
By means of this new development, Gamesa makes it possible to offer an efficient integrated response to its customers’ need of obtaining a greater return on their investment on the one hand and, on the other, an outstanding solution that ensures more stable supplies as well as better integration of wind energy into the grid in keeping with grid operators' requirements.