Moventas Americas rolls out breakthrough up-tower planetary repairs for GE fleet

Moventas is now offering new up-tower gearbox repair capabilities for its GE wind customers in North America.

Moventas has announce new patent-pending up-tower repair capabilities that promise to save wind-farm owners significant downtime and expense. Effective immediately, all failed ‘low-speed’ planetary stage gears and bearings in most GE 1.5-MW wind turbines can be repaired up-tower at a price that is a fraction of changing out the gearbox.

The new repair process has been demonstrated already on the leading gearboxes in the GE 1.5-MW turbines. In each repair, customers can opt for longer life components by upgrading the boxes up-tower from thru hardened ring wheels and old bearing design to state-of-the-art case carburized ring wheels and integrated planet wheel bearings. With these new repairs, gearboxes, which would otherwise run to catastrophic failure up-tower, have options for life extension.

The GE 1.5-MW fleet is aging, and these gearboxes are failing at a high rate in the planetary stage. Before today, the solution required expensive cranes and full gearbox swap out. “We always tried to go deeper into the gearbox up-tower and offer up-tower repair solutions that save customers the most money. These repairs are going to be popular with owners who want to avoid expensive cranes and their associated delays,” said James Macik, who leads the product development of all new up-tower repairs for Moventas Americas.

With this new repair capability, Moventas expands its up-tower repair capability and simultaneously adds workshop repair capability in its new mid-western regional repair facility in St. Paul Minnesota. The St. Paul facility is Moventas’ fourth in North America (others are in Oregon, Texas, and Ontario) and each enables Moventas to be located directly in the major wind energy corridors to provide fast, economical and local service directly to the wind farms.

“Once again, Moventas is proving we are the most innovative company in drivetrain repair and the wind farm owner’s best ally for reducing their cost of electricity,” commented Steve Casey, Head of Moventas Americas Operations.