Aug 24 2010
American Superconductor Corporation (NASDAQ: AMSC), a global power technologies company, today announced that it has received an initial order for 17 wind turbine electrical control systems from Inox Wind Limited (IWL), part of India’s Inox Group of Companies.
The electrical control systems will be deployed in 2 megawatt (MW) doubly-fed induction wind turbines licensed from AMSC’s wholly-owned AMSC Windtec™ subsidiary under a contract announced in May 2009. The license provides Inox with the right to manufacture and sell the wind turbines globally. Inox recently erected and commissioned its first 2 MW wind turbine and has already begun volume production.
“India has tremendous power demands and serious carbon emission and pollution issues, all of which are now being addressed through the deployment of renewable energy technologies, particularly wind turbines, that produce substantial amounts of electricity with zero-emissions,” said Devansh Jain, Director of Inox Wind Limited. “We intend to be a market leader in the high-growth wind power market in India and to eventually become an exporter of wind turbines to other parts of the world. With our first wind turbine now commissioned and our manufacturing plants operational, we are on track to begin full-scale production later this year.”
According to a report issued in June 2010 by industry research firm Emerging Energy Research (EER), India had nearly 11,000 MW of wind power installed at the end of 2009, making it the world’s fifth largest wind power market. EER expects that India will more than double its installed capacity to nearly 24,000 MW by the end of 2015 and will triple its installed base to more than 34,000 MW by the end of 2020. According to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), the global wind power installed base is expected to more than double from 158,505 MW in 2009 to more than 347,000 MW by the end of 2013.
“Inox has formed a dynamic renewable energy business and has quickly expanded its offerings to include highly efficient and reliable multi-megawatt wind turbines,” said AMSC founder and Chief Executive Officer Greg Yurek. “We expect Inox will be a significant player in the Indian wind market in the years ahead and that it will be able to participate aggressively in the global wind market.”
With a presence across India, the $2 billion Inox Group has a diverse line of businesses and employs approximately 5,000 people. IWL was incorporated in 2009 to cater to global markets for wind energy products and associated services. IWL is a fully integrated player in the wind energy market with manufacturing facilities in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) and Una (Himachal Pradesh) India. In addition to its wind turbine manufacturing operations, the Inox group owns and operates several wind farms in India.
AMSC’s wind turbine power electronics and control systems include the company's proprietary PowerModule™ power converters, pitch and yaw converters, SCADA systems and integrated control systems. They enable reliable, high-performance wind turbine operation by controlling power flows, regulating voltage, monitoring system performance, controlling the pitch of wind turbine blades and the yaw of the turbines to maximize efficiency.