About Extreme Wind Services
Extreme Wind Services has two partners; these are Tony Rowell who thought of and developed the wind turbine service platform and Glynn Bradshaw for his investment and marketing experience. Tony Rowell has a communications background working on optical fibre communications throughout Europe. After working in the optical fibre industry, one of his contracts was to install and test optical fibres on a wind farm in Northern Ireland. After a brief discussion Tony decided that they would like to get into the wind industry and ideas started flowing. After a few long years of thought and design ideas he met Glynn Bradshaw who liked the concept and decided to join him. Ironically, the first demonstration of their invention was on the wind farm that they had installed the optical fibre and spoke about the wind industry those years before, this was pure coincidence.
Objective
The objective of Extreme Wind Services is to provide a full range of services to compliment the Wind Turbine market. Services include the inspection, cleaning, analysis, repair and ongoing general maintenance of Wind Turbine blades in-situ across the UK, Ireland and the rest of Europe.
Why?
With over 150,000 operational blades in Europe alone we think that there is an ideal opportunity to expand on our services allowing Extreme Wind Services to grow in an ever growing sector of the renewable energy market.
The lifespan of a wind turbine blade is considered to be 15 years, we believe that with a maintenance programme the blade’s proposed lifespan can be achieved and surpassed therefore avoiding any unnecessary capital expenditure.
The Extreme Wind Service Platform enables us to inspect with the combined use of video and still images, clean and polish the wind turbine blades and with the use of specialised non destructive testing equipment (when required) test and analyse areas of the blade which may be in need of repair. The repair if necessary will then be carried out from the service platform. The washing and polishing of blades can improve the power output of a wind turbine and improve the condition of the blade’s external surface. A planned maintenance schedule to include the cleaning, polishing, video scanning and testing will help prolong the lifetime of wind turbine blades which in turn increases operational efficiency and the continued generation of power.
Wind Turbine Market Place
The global market of installed wind power has risen again through 2010. Europe is our main target for work, beginning with the UK and Ireland and then the rest of Europe. The worldwide total number of turbines is in excess of 115,000 turbines and the total number of turbines in Europe alone is in excess of 51,000.
In total there are over 150,000 blades that need servicing in Europe and over 340,000 blades worldwide.