Looking After Largest Fuhrländer Wind Farm in Germany

The manufacturer-independent service company seebaWIND Service GmbH (Germany) has taken over the maintenance of the largest single-site Fuhrländer wind farm in Germany. The 20 wind energy plants, Fuhrländer MD-77 with 85-meter hub height, are located in the municipality of Märkisch Linden (in the state of Brandenburg) and have a total power output of 30 megawatts. seebaWIND Service will monitor the plants over the long-term, maintain as well as take technical steps to optimise the plants.

From its modern remote monitoring centre in Osnabruck, seebaWIND Service monitors the Märkisch Linden wind farm 24 hours every day of the week. Specialists react in real-time to alarm reports and rectify malfunctions at an early stage. Moreover, for more extensive maintenance on location, three service teams in the region are ready and can reach the wind farm quickly. This way seebaWIND is able to guarantee a technical availability of 97 per cent. “Since the seebaWIND Team can rectify malfunctions so quickly, we hope to have stable operation with very little downtime”, says Albin Rost-Grashorn from swb Crea GmbH, which operates the wind farm along with EWE ERNEUERBARE ENERGIEN GmbH. “With seebaWIND we want to continue on our path toward cost-conscious, demand-oriented maintenance”, adds Ewald Heyen, asset manager at EWE.

By taking additional technical steps, the operators would like also to increase the yield of the 20 Fuhrländer plants for the long term. Therefore, the technicians of seebaWIND Service will first analyse the yields from the wind farm, built in 2008 and 2009 in Märkisch Linden. Then they will plan the technical optimisation. “We are still looking at the plants in order to define the exact steps we will take and to coordinate them with the customer”, explains seebaWIND managing director Severin Mielimonka. “Most likely we’ll start by optimising both the pitch controller, which turns the rotor blade pitch into or out of the wind, as well as the main bearing lubrication.”