The first commercial spiral-welded 89-meter wind turbine tower has begun operation, built by GE Renewable Energy and wind turbine producer Keystone Tower Systems.

Spiral welding is when the steel used to make the tower is curled into a cylinder; essentially, these towers are built from meters-wide steel plates. The technique requires only one machine to construct a tower section, and it can produce towers up to twice as tall and 10 times faster than conventional towers.

The manufacturing process uses coil steel – flat-rolled steel that’s been coiled up into a roll or coil shape and allows tapered towers with variable wall thickness to be manufactured from constant width sheets of steel.

The manufacturing equipment completes the joining, rolling, fit-up, welding, and severing of a tower section – and that results in the continuous production of steel tower shells:

Keystone says it can make the lightest, lowest-cost, and most structurally optimized towers in the wind turbine industry.

Keystone is also developing mobile factories capable of building taller towers directly at wind sites.

Production is now being ramped up of spiral-welded towers, with additional deliveries targeted for the first quarter of 2023. They’ll make more towers for the GE 2.8-127 turbine, and they can be used interchangeably with GE’s conventional 89-meter-tall tower. The spiral tower has received a component certification from TÜV NORD for a 40-year lifetime.

See a video about the process here.

https://youtu.be/ufu8f1PWYzE

Building towers 10x faster, cheaper and onsite should mean a much-increased onshore wind turbine installation capacity, speeding the transition to renewable energy.