INTEGRAL COST-EFFICIENT SYSTEM FOR WIND TURBINE TOWERS

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One of the main wind market trends is to increase the height of wind towers, the power of generators and the blades size in order to take full advantage of available wind resources and thus improve the LCOE. However, such increase has led to a number of limitations, both technical and economic, in the installation of towers over 120 m, and in the transportation of blades of over 60m length. This result in a bottleneck that paralyses this market trend. NABRAWIND TECHNOLOGIES, S.L has developed an integrated solution to cover those two of the most critical needs demanded from the wind market: NABRAWIND has developed NABRALIFT®, a brand-new innovative steel frame tower, reliable and with a competitive cost system that combined with the patented self-erecting system enables assembling, nacelle included, without any limitation in height and with complete independence from auxiliary cranes, thanks to a new lifting concept system based on hydraulic lifting mechanism which allows the system to operate from the ground. Related to blades: NABRAWIND has developed a reliable and durable segmented blade solution, NABRAJOINT®, this technology permits assembling two or more parts of wind blades allowing them to be transported separately and assembled on site. The adoption of the NABRAJOINT® system and modular blades will allow transporting blades over 75m. The overall objective is the validation and demonstration of the functionality and reliability of NABRALIFT® and NABRAJOINT® in real working conditions (164m tower to be built in Navarra, Spain, with Acciona as promoter and 4.5MW WTG from NORDEX) and the introduction of both systems in the main global reference markets of wind power energy (Europe, US and China).