Nov/Dec 2009

In the early days of the North-American wind industry, California’s Altamont Pass was a hotbed of wind-farm development. As the towers were erected, and then began to age and fail, turbine maintenance emerged as a promising growth market. Jørn Larsen was one of the first to recognize that opportunity and capitalize on its potential.

“There was basically no thought given to O&M back then, but once these early turbines began to break down Jørn and his partners started refurbishing them for the owners,” according to David Luck, director of business development at enXco Service Corp. “And that’s how the company got its start.”

Widely recognized as a forerunner to this increasingly critical sector of the wind industry—especially as the market matures, and older turbines require upkeep to extend service life—enXco Service Corp. is now part of the EDF Energies Nouvelles family of companies, with sister entities devoted to greenfield development and asset management. Despite their shared provenance, however, they are completely separate companies.

As for the services offered by enXco Service Corp., they are vast, both in terms of range as well as reach. “We provide the full scale of O&M services,” Luck says, “and we’re involved in a significant portion of the wind-farm projects currently operating in the United States, with others located in Canada.”

The company’s scope of capabilities includes both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, parts procurement and inventory control, 24-hour remote monitoring and fault reset, and comprehensive reporting. Monitoring activities are conducted at its NERC-compliant operations control center, or OCC, which currently watches over nearly 3,000 turbines across the country, every hour of the day, every day of the week. This is a healthy portion of the more than 5,200 turbines it has under contract. “We’ve been told that it’s the finest facility of its kind in the country,” Luck says, “and we’re constantly updating operations with all the latest available technologies.”

While it will subcontract certain services such as snow removal and some blade repair—“although we do handle that ourselves in some areas,” Luck says—the vast majority of its activities are conducted by dedicated enXco Service employees. “One of the hallmarks of this company is our internal training program, which has equipped more than 300 of our wind technicians with the knowledge and skills they need to provide the level of service our customers have come to expect from us.”

Having enjoyed a front-row seat to the development of the U.S. wind industry from the very beginning, enXco Service utilizes that information in ways that provide maximum benefit to its customers. “Our file cabinet of experience is very deep, and we’re able to share that knowledge with our customers in helping them compile accurate information when approaching a new project. If someone is responding to an RFP from a utility company, for instance, we can help them develop a very accurate picture of the maintenance costs involved. And we’ve also found that our involvement in a project can be very helpful when a group of developers is seeking financing, since we definitely have the reputation and weight to back up our claims.

“We’re interested in developing long-term relationships,” Luck says, “so we’re always glad to get involved in the earliest stages of a project, especially if we can help make it a reality.”

For more information:

To learn more call (503) 913-6212, e-mail davel@enxco.com, or go to www.enxco.com.

In 1904 a Swedish engineer by the name of Oscar Kjellberg produced a coated electrode that substantially improved the quality of weld metal. This game-changing development was the foundation of Elektriska Svetsnings-Aktiebolaget, now known as ESAB, one of the world’s largest producers of welding consumables and equipment.

“This was just about as revolutionary as you can get,” according to Richard Hadley, president of ESAB Group Canada, Inc., and general manager of ESAB Welding Automation North America. “Just think of the difference it made in building ships and other steel structures, which had relied heavily on riveting in the past.”

Not only was Kjellberg an extraordinary inventor, he was quite an astute businessman as well, licensing this newly-developed technology to companies around the world—many of which it eventually acquired. Such was the case in the United States, where ESAB’s purchase and consolidation of companies such as Alloy Rods and L-Tec to the establishment of its offices there in the late eighties. As a European-based company, however, its entry into the wind-energy market came much earlier.

“During the oil embargo of the mid-seventies, many European countries realized they simply had to decrease their reliance on oil, so that was really the genesis of wind generation there,” Hadley says. “The first turbines were supported by metal-lattice structures, but as they grew heavier the industry moved to tubular towers, and that’s our specialty. So as the wind industry grew, our tower-building technology grew along with it, and we’ve also been able to serve as a conduit in carrying that information from Europe to North America.”

One longstanding relationship that provides an example of how ESAB collaborates successfully with its customers involves Denmark-based Vestas, the world’s leading supplier of windpower solutions. “In the past we’ve worked closely with Vestas to develop special filler metals to withstand cold temperature service as well as special multiwire high-deposition welding machinery and delivery systems,” he says. “More recently we’ve been heavily involved in the Vestas wind-tower manufacturing facility now being completed in Colorado, which will be the largest in the world. We’ve been working to meet their requirements nearly since the beginning of this project, and we currently have up to 30 ESAB employees working there to complete the installation and assist with startup.”

Perhaps the most astounding piece of equipment developed for this facility is a column and boom that extends the welding head up to 12.5 meters, allowing the head to reach multiple weld seams, and thus increasing efficiency. On a conventional machine the one piece boom extends its full length out the back of the machine during retraction, consuming precious floor space. Working with Vestas, ESAB developed a telescopic boom that retracts into itself without reaching back into the space behind the machine base. “This is a product that didn’t exist previously, but they trusted us enough to place the order, and we delivered,” Hadley says. “It’s probably the largest apparatus of its kind in the world, and I believe it will be a resounding success.”

In addition to providing its expertise on cutting-edge projects such as this, ESAB also helps existing facilities to operate more efficiently, suggesting advanced welding processes, handling systems, and many other means of streamlining productivity in an increasingly competitive market. “Everybody wants to be faster and stronger, leaner and meaner, but how you achieve that is different for every company,” Hadley says. “We’re here to take that into consideration, and to tailor a solution to meet our customer’s individual needs.”

For more information:

call (800) ESAB-123 (372-2123) or go to www.esabna.com.

Just as a confident person is said to have deep inner resources, Hayward Baker —a premier global geotechnical construction firm—can claim the same, with thousands of experienced professionals linked together by the company’s intranet, providing a platform for sharing perspectives to the benefit of its many clients.

“It really is an amazing resource,” according to James D. Hussin, a company director. “I can send out a query concerning a project we’re working on here in the States, and within minutes I’ll receive input from my colleagues around the world who have experienced similar challenges. That’s just one of the benefits we enjoy as a member of the Keller Group.”

Launched in 1946 as a small utility construction company in California by the company’s namesake, it was his son, Wallace Hayward Baker, who led its growth to international prominence. “After earning his doctorate in geotechnical engineering from Northwestern University, he went to work for an engineering company in Spain that introduced him to ground treatment,” Hussin explains. “He then brought what he’d learned back to the company his father had founded, branching out into the tunneling industry and working on projects such as the metro tunnels in Washington, D.C. He was really the one responsible for establishing our identity as the premier specialty geotechnical foundation company.”

Among the services it offers are foundation support and rehabilitation, settlement control, structural support, site improvement, soil and slope stabilization, underpinning, excavation shoring, earth retention, seismic stabilization, and ground water control.

By the time the wind industry began to surface in the United States, Hayward Baker was so widely acknowledged as the expert in foundation systems that its entry into the market was basically an organic process. “Geotechnical engineers working on wind projects began contacting us to provide input on the reports they were preparing, and we’ve always been more than willing to share our knowledge and expertise,” Hussin says. “So we’d consider load factors and soil conditions and help them arrive at the most efficient and economical solution, which is our goal in working with our wind customers to this day.”

Quite often those customers are wind-farm owners, or the engineers they’ve hired, who are seeking approaches to foundation design that will bolster the project’s economic feasibility. “Building a safe and reliable foundation economically is very important to the owners,” he says, “and they need to be certain it’s going to perform properly before proceeding with development of the project. The years of experience we bring to the table, along with our work on wind projects around the world, allows them to do so with confidence.”

Having spent some 25 years with the company, beginning as a design engineer and eventually working his way up to chief engineer, Hussin now operates at the corporate level, meeting with wind-farm owners, engineers, and contractors throughout North America to answer questions, ascertain their needs, and make sure they are being met. “Having been involved with every aspect of our business, I understand our services extremely well and share that knowledge with our customers, especially on projects that are a little more challenging or out of the ordinary,” he says. “We see the U.S. wind industry as a very large growth market, and we’re in a position to support that growth by offering our creative, problem-solving skills and foundation construction resources to wind-industry professionals.”

With its roots in the American construction industry, bolstered by its affiliation with the international Keller Group, Hayward Baker steers its clients toward success in a singular way. “Our culture of sharing information internally makes for a very synergistic group,” Hussin says, “and it results in major benefits for our customers.”

For more information:
Visit www.haywardbaker.com.