Moventas has announced 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 1.5MW 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 1.5MW turbines. In each repair, customers can opt for longer life components by upgrading the boxes up-tower from thru hardened ring wheels and decade 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 uptower have options for life extension.

The GE 1.5MW 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 uptower and offer uptower 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 uptower 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.