Salzgitter has announced its subsidiary Enercon, a wind turbine manufacturer, and engineering company SMB Schönebecker Maschinenbau, part of TM Group, will cooperate to produce wind towers with lower-emission steels.
Enercon is a subsidiary of Salzgitter’s plate making unit, Ilsenburger Grobblech.
The steel tower components from the cooperation will be used in early 2025 on an E-138 EP3 wind turbine as part of the Diepholzer Bruch wind farm project in Lower Saxony, Germany. This will make it one of the first onshore wind turbines in Europe – and the first in Germany – to feature a tower made from lower-emissions steel, Salzgitter notes in a statement sent to Kallanish.
Wind turbines with a hybrid tower concept are made completely of steel, the company notes. The bottom is composed of pre-edged steel plates, and the top of conical steel sections. This type of tower offers advantages both for installation and transport, particularly in view of increasing tower heights with even larger tower base diameters, Salzgitter highlights.
In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the production of heavy plates, Ilsenburger Grobblech is using physically CO2-reduced slab from sister company Peiner Träger and another European partner company. The feedstock is produced entirely from scrap in an electric arc furnace.
Christian Koehl Germany
