Big Offshore Wind News Come from LORC

Tomorrow, Torben Lorentzen will be joining LORC as its new CEO. He leaves the post as Head of Research and Development at FORCE Technology.

At LORC, Torben Lorentzen will head the continuous build-up of the LORC test centres with a main focus on large components, foundations for offshore wind turbines and HALT testing of wind turbine nacelles.

Torben Lorentzen replaces Ove Poulsen who decided to retire. Ove Poulsen served as CEO since February 2012 after a lifelong career in the education and research sectors. Among his many important posts have been those of Director of the Danish Ministry of Research, Director of the Centre for Microelectronics at the Technical University of Denmark and Rector at the Aarhus School of Engineering.

Siemens Wind Power CTO Henrik Stiesdal took all by surprise when he used the 10 September LORC conference on Advanced Nacelle Testing to reveal main data for the next offshore turbine from Siemens Wind Power: 10 MW and a rotor diameter of 210 meters.

The 10 MW turbine will produce in five days what the first 30 kW turbine did in 35 years, it said on one of Stiesdal’s presentation slides. And it underlined very well the theme of the day: the need for advanced and realistic testing in an industry where development of technology takes place at a very high pace.

Andrew Garrad, co-founder of Garrad Hassan, which is now part of DNV GL, presented a somewhat similar message to more than 100 participants at the LORC conference: the industry has been going through a range of experiments and is only now maturing with a growing need for advanced testing of its products.

Some of LORC’s main contractors in the establishment of the nacelle testing centre presented their work and challenges during the construction phase. And Larry Edson, the inventor of the quantitative methods of CALT (Calibrated Accelerated Life Testing) and a specialist in reliability demonstration, HALT and HASS, shared his lifelong experience working with accelerated test methods for fast product development by underlining the need for minimizing unreliability through testing.

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Press release, September 30, 2014; Image: LORC