Global Wind Turbine Gearbox Market 2016-2020

Friday 2 December 2016, Amsterdam

The report, now available on ASDReports, recognizes the following companies as the key players in the global wind turbine gearbox market: China High Speed Transmission, Gamesa Energy Transmission, Moventas, Winergy, and ZF Friedrichshafen

Other Prominent Vendors in the market are: Brevini Power Transmission, Chongqing Gearbox, Eickhoff, ISHIBASHI Manufacturing, RENK, and ZOLLERN

Commenting on the report, an analyst said: “Wind turbine producers and manufacturers are paying a lot of attention to the proactive and preventive maintenance rather than reactive maintenance. Gearboxes are installed with probes, sensors, and filters to monitor the properties of gear oil, such as temperature, viscosity, contamination, and thickness. Condition monitoring plans are primarily functional for offshore turbines as the total cost of reactive maintenance is high when compared with preventive maintenance.”

According to the report, the gearbox, being a crucial component of a wind turbine, needs to have high reliability. This has not been the case in the past. Increased R&D in gearbox wind technology is mainly focused on solving the reliability issue. The major focus areas of R&D include improvement in gearbox design, quality control at every step of the manufacturing process, and improvement in quality testing procedures and standards. Increased focus on R&D is expected to boost the gearbox system reliability and increase its lifespan. This will boost overall market growth in the future.

Further, the report states that the replacement cost can vary in the range of $216,000 to $540,000 based on the turbine size and the wind farm’s location. This causes an increase in the overall costs of the wind power plant, creating a big growth bottleneck for the industry. The other major problem arising out of gearbox failure is the rise in downtime by two or three times, which is significantly high when compared with any other wind turbine component failure. As the cost of the gearbox is relatively high, managing the finances required for replacing and maintaining the inventory of the gearbox is a challenging task for manufacturers. This problem is mainly noticeable among small-sized wind turbines used earlier.

The study was conducted using an objective combination of primary and secondary information including inputs from key participants in the industry. The report contains a comprehensive market and vendor landscape in addition to a SWOT analysis of the key vendors.