The investment follows a recent £800,000 grant from the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) Environmental Transformation Fund.
While preserving all the advantages which direct drive technology has over gear-boxes for use in offshore wind turbines, NGenTec says it has created a solution that is up to 50% lighter compared to existing direct drive generators.
This could lead to lower costs for the construction of offshore direct drive wind turbines.
NGenTec’s generator arrangement is said to eliminate the undesirable magnetic forces between the moving and stationary parts, minimising the possibility of failure and reducing wind turbine downtime.
The funding will allow NGenTec to prove its generator technology at a 6 MW scale in order to deliver the product to the global wind energy market in 2012.
Specifically NGenTec intends to design, build and test a 1 MW wind turbine generator that could be stacked along the shaft of a wind turbine to produce a 6 MW generator. NGenTec believes its generator technology is scalable to 6 MW and beyond without the limitations of conventional generator technology.
Derek Shepherd, Chairman of NGenTec says: “We are delighted to have secured this investment from SET and SCF. It is a major step forward. Along with the existing financial support from DECC we are now in a position to prove our novel generator technology. This means we can move towards manufacturing our generators and taking them to market, where we are already finding a very receptive audience.”
