Anniversary Newsletter Edition #3: “Thinking big – Size matters”

With the Anniversary Newsletter Edition #3, today we look back on a decade that would become formative for today’s industry – the exciting ’90s.

“Thinking big” and “size matters” were the driving forces in the wind industry in the ‘90s – and Nordex was no exception. The wind industry was starting to boom – and for the growing number of employees at Nordex, there was little time to take a breather: turbine manufacturing and technological development gained momentum, with capacity and dimensions increasing rapidly. In that decade, the company expanded to Germany, which today is home to the Nordex Group’s main offices. It established a new, larger production facility, which remains a key pillar of the Nordex Group’s global production footprint. With Nordex as a frontrunner, the industry entered the era of MW turbines. Just shortly after reaching that milestone, Nordex’ ambitious engineers developed a turbine that more than doubled their output. A turbine to look up to – as you will read below.

In 1994, the Denmark-based Nordex started its first nacelle production outside of Denmark, in the town of Rerik by the Baltic Sea in Germany. The “crossing” into Germany took place nine years after the company had been established. Just five years later, the plant in Rerik was no longer big enough. With full order books, Nordex sought a new location to continue growing. While the port cities in Western Germany proved too inflexible, Rostock offered very promising conditions. In 1999, Nordex began its nacelle assembly at the former diesel engine factory (DMR) in Rostock and expanded its production area more than twentyfold. Just thinking big.

When looking at the turbine development in those years, already in 1995 Nordex entered the 1-MW class with the world’s first series-produced MW turbine, the N52, manufactured in Germany. But this was not the only development in the ‘90s, when “size matters” was the driving force.

At the end of the decade, at the 1999 Husum wind fair, Nordex once again unveiled the world’s most powerful wind turbine of that time – a 2.5-MW turbine – a first multi-megawatt machine: the N80/2500. The Generation Alpha was born.

“When we started developing the N80 with a nominal output of 2.5 MW in 1998, we raised the bar very high early on. At the time, such a turbine size was unheard of. The largest turbines on the market had a maximum nominal output of only 1.5 MW”, recalls Michael Franke, then employee number 13 at Nordex and today Vice President Global Engineering at the Nordex Group. “However, we wanted to enter the multi-megawatt class with a new generation of turbines and were miles ahead of our competitors. But we also faced challenges, which had to be mastered first.”

One year after launching the N80/2500 in 1999, the prototype was connected to the grid in Grevenbroich near Neuss, Germany. The celebration marking this milestone was attended by the then German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

The N80 was the first system of the Generation Alpha. It laid the foundation for the evolutionary development process of Nordex turbines in the multi-megawatt range – which led to Generation Beta, Generation Gamma, Generation Delta and today’s Delta4000.

“After the stall-controlled turbines of the early ‘90s, such as the N43 or N60, the N80 was our first turbine type with a rotor blade pitch system. The concept of the drivetrain, featuring the double-fed induction generator combined with a partial converter system, which was implemented for the first time in a turbine ‘Made by Nordex’, has since formed the foundation of all subsequent Nordex turbine generations,” says Helmut Resing-Wörmer, who was responsible for the measurement and validation of the first N80 turbine at the time and is now Head of Test and Prototype Global Engineering at the Nordex Group.

Over the following years, Nordex wind turbines underwent an evolution in technology and design, making them reliable and highly efficient generators of electricity. A visible demonstration of this is their vast increase in scale, growing in height from around 30 meters hub height up to 179 meters and more today. Time did not stand still, and neither did the innovation or our ideas. The pace of development first peaked in the ’90s, but “larger, higher, more” remained the mantra in the years that followed.