Vestas Refurbished Turbines
A complete solution to deploy refurbished wind turbines
While modern wind turbines are increasingly becoming a favourable choice for most customers, there can still be challenges involved in their establishment for certain customers. These challenges can arise in scenarios such as:
- Asset owners wanting to build smaller scale wind farms
- Customers located in remote locations outside the electrical grid
- Asset owners of ageing wind assets looking to upgrade their turbines
These scenarios can present various difficulties, including:
- Inadequate transportation and grid infrastructure.
- Challenging site access in mountainous, desert, or rural areas.
- Limited availability of cranes.
- Restrictions on tip or hub height.
- Decreased financing options and nonbankable power purchase agreements (PPAs).
Vestas has designed a solution that meets these challenges by using turbines that have been refurbished to a technically new condition. This solution offers highly reliable Vestas turbines at a lower investment than that required by a new turbine. Backed by Vestas warranty and service offerings, you can maximize your profits and increase the certainty of your wind power investment.
Refurbished turbines at a glance
Contact us to learn more
Vestas Refurbished Turbines offers a complete solution including supply of refurbished turbines, transportation to the site and installation.
Write to ageingfleet@vestas.com or contact your local Vestas Sales & Service office to discover more.
Availability of Vestas Refurbished Turbines
Benefits that enable a better business case
- Cost-Effective Solution: Vestas Refurbished Turbines offer a significantly reduced initial investment compared to traditional new turbine sales, while maintaining a strong LCOE
- Transportation Cost Reduction: Refurbished turbines of legacy models provide further cost reduction as transportation and installation are cheaper due to optimized transportation concepts (e.g. containerized transport solutions).
- Easy and Inexpensive Maintenance: Maintenance is performed using standard tools and equipment in the installation and servicing industries, resulting in easy and cost-effective maintenance.
- Seamless Global Transport: Vestas turbines are designed for fast and easy transport by truck, barge, and rail to virtually any site in the world.
- Accessibility to Remote Areas: Innovative solutions like nested towers and compact blade transportation enable convenient transportation of turbines to remote areas or sites with challenging access.
- Minimal Crane Requirements: The compact size of Vestas' sub-MW turbines reduces the need for extensive crane usage during installation, minimizing additional infrastructure requirements, if any, or expensive crane mobilization.
- Dependable and Productive Technology: Vestas turbines are among the most widespread globally, with key components rigorously tested in the field and across thousands of existing installations.
- Spare Parts Availability: The geographical reach and number of turbines ensure an abundance of readily available spare parts in the market.
- Resilient and Proven Design: Vestas' refurbished turbine solution offers a variety of tried and tested technology from Vestas' current and legacy platforms, with a robust and proven design that ensures longevity.
- Refurbished to Technically New Condition: The turbines goes through a meticulous refurbishment process and rigorous performance testing to ensure their durability and performance.
- Warranty and Service Contracts: Vestas offers comparable warranty as on new turbines and service contracts for up to 20 years depending on platform*, to meet your specific business case requirements.
* service agreement is subject to a separate agreement and depending on WTG type and site conditions.
Refurbished to original, or better condition
Vestas Refurbished Turbine solution offers a variety of refurbished turbine technology from both Vestas' current and legacy platforms. These platforms have been extensively tested and proven resilient over decades of operational lifetime. The robust and reliable design ensures that key components of a turbine often have many years of serviceable life remaining even as they approach their 20-year end-of-design life.
Each turbine sold under the Vestas Refurbished Turbine Solution undergoes a rigorous refurbishment process, certified by DNV and performed by Vestas technicians in our global repair facilities. This process restores components to their original, or better, working condition and appearance. We offer flexible refurbishment plans tailored to each customer's business case, taking into consideration the expected lifetime of the turbines.
The refurbishment process
A comprehensive refurbishment is undertaken on every part of the turbine, ranging from the rethreading of bolt inserts to large and complex tasks, such as the refurbishment of blades and electrical cabinets.
The refurbished components are then used to rebuild the turbine, which is painted to give it a fresh look - so it doesn’t just perform like new, but looks the part too. The final step of the refurbishment process is a simulated testing where the turbine is put through a series of tests to ensure that it performs like new.
Click on the image to learn more about the refurbishment process on the different parts of the turbine.
Fact-based sustainability performance
Using refurbished turbines results in a significant reduction of the turbine’s carbon footprint. By refurbishing it is possible to reuse up to 95% of the material of a component compared to a new item, and on average 75% of all material is reused during the refurbishment process.
In fact, a refurbished component at Vestas saves, on average, 60% of CO2 emissions compared to a new part, when reverse logistics are taken into account – that’s the cost of bringing the item from the turbine to the factory for repairs. By refurbishing components, we can more than halve CO2 emissions and significantly improve the reuse of materials, thereby contributing substantially to improve a wind project’s sustainability performance.
Use cases of refurbished turbines
Refurbished turbines is available for new projects where Vestas can offer a complete solution including the supply of refurbished turbines, transportation to the site, installation and servicing. Our siting and engineering offerings for Vestas Refurbished Turbine Solution are equivalent to those for traditional new turbine sales. We provide comprehensive services, including wind and site studies, turbine selection, project design, wind farm installation, monitoring, remote troubleshooting, and servicing throughout the turbine's service life. Vestas also assists customers in obtaining necessary permissions to ensure compliance with siting regulations and grid code requirements.
Benefits:
- Comprehensive EPC solution
- Lower CAPEX than new turbine investment
- Proven technology
As more of the world’s installed fleet approach end-of-design-life, wind farm owners are faced with a choice of how to manage their ageing fleet assets. To support this decision-making process, Vestas has created an after-sale solution based on the installation of a preowned and refurbished legacy Vestas’ nacelle and rotor on an existing turbine tower. This solution revitalizes a business case by delivering a higher energy production, while reducing re-investment costs by reusing the existing tower and balance of the plant (grid connection and supporting infrastructure).
Benefits:
- Increased Annual Energy Production
- Low CAPEX re-investment
- Extended lifetime
Our Refurbished Turbines solution can be integrated with other energy sources in a hybrid solution to fully or partly offset the fossil fuel dependency. Vestas can together with out partners support our customers on project development, design, configuration, and engineering of the complete hybrid energy power plant. The solution can be integrated with existing equipment and infrastructure (e.g., diesel generator, photovoltaics panel, electrical lines etc.) and includes fully refurbished wind turbines and energy storage & grid management systems as applicable to complete the system.
Benefits:
- Adaptability to site & environment conditions (in remote locations such as mines, desserts, island etc.)
- Less uncertainties due to multiple energy sources
- Increased plant capacity factor
- Reduced balancing needs when compared to a single energy source
Common questions
Every turbine will be assessed on former and future operational stresses on installed equipment and structures to evaluate a residual life time at the new location and its operational condition (e.g. wind regime). Vestas predominantly purchases used turbines that have been serviced by Vestas and which have been operating in moderate conditions. Thus a residual life time can be assessed to 15+ years.
Common markets are main land Europe (e.g. Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Austria) as well as the USA due to the ongoing decommissionings in these markets. Vestas focuses on purchasing turbines which have been serviced by our own technician. In addition we prefer turbines from moderate wind regimes as these turbines have only experienced low stresses and there have a high residual life time.
Yes, all turbines will be upgraded to our latest software solutions to fit local requirements. In addition we are applying our operational experience and learnings of servicing and operating turbines throughout the last 20-30 years. Such learnings are implemented into the refurbishment process and its flexible repair categorizations to significantly reduce service efforts during the turbines’ second life.
Vestas can utilize its own tools to assess wind conditions and calculate a fit to site conditions based on generic data. We do not need 12 months of met mast data.
Vestas has partnerships to transport, install & commission refurbished turbines. Such partners can be utilized on behalf of the customer to avoid a permanent establishment of Vestas in the new country. Such solution also applies to services, whereas we can either suggest partners or train customer personnel to service the turbines.
Distance from Vestas’ service hub to turbine location have a significant effect on service costs. In remote locations (e.g. mine sites, island, etc.) we suggest a split of services: annual & biannual service as well as remote operations support to be covered under an AOM2000. Customer’s technicians can be trained to perform minor repairs and Vestas can be called in on transactional services for major repairs (as need be).
We would be delighted to welcome you at our refurbishment factory in Denmark and Italy. Get in contact with us to learn more.