Hinesburg, VT, U.S.—Renewable NRG Systems (RNRG) announced today the sale of twenty of its 80m XHD TallTowers™ to high profile developers and consultants to support their power performance testing (PPT) activities. This departure from the traditional use of lattice towers for PPT purposes represents a notable strategy change by key players in the wind sector.
“Companies are beginning to use our tubular-style 80M XHD TallTower instead of the usual lattice towers for power curve verification purposes due to its advantageous price and availability. This was unheard of in the wind industry even just a year ago. Unlike lattice towers, the 80m XHD can be redeployed to other sites after the IEC test is completed. What’s more, site assessment and decommissioning costs are significantly lower. They are faster to set up and easier to decommission. Once developers grasped the extent of the benefits offered by tilt-ups, opportunities naturally began to present themselves,” commented Greg Erdmann, VP of global sales at RNRG.
Lattice towers can be climbed instead of tilted down, which reduces the cost for sensor maintenance. However, PPT campaigns are relatively short in duration, making sensor maintenance needs less likely. Additionally, lattice towers are more expensive to purchase, transport, install, and decommission, and they present the added liability of requiring people to climb the towers. These towers also come with longer delivery times, and they need significantly more time to be installed and to qualify the site.
“In an era when significantly more turbines are being tested on a per project basis, the value of temporary tilt-up towers has really come to light. Our tilt-up towers fit the requirements of temporary PPT, and once a test has been completed, they can be moved to other sites which allows more tests to be supported within constrained budgets. Thanks to our 80m XHD TallTowers, we are facilitating more PPT activity, which helps to establish more accurate baseline performance and ultimately results in better project outcomes,” concluded Erdmann.