ENERCON expands EP5 tower portfolio with new HST towers

ENERCON is developing additional and taller hybrid steel towers (HST) for the current EP5 turbine types. With the additional steel tower variants, the tower portfolio will be expanded to cover the expected demand against the background of increasing customer demand and to be able to offer towers with high hub heights worldwide and deliver them as early as 2026.

Until now, ENERCON customers planning EP5 turbines with high hub heights have only been able to choose hybrid towers with a combination of concrete and steel segments. ‘In order to be able to deliver for our customers in the coming years and to prevent the onshore expansion, which has finally gained momentum, from stalling again due to limited capacities, we are expanding the tower portfolio for the EP5 with an additional technology,’ says Maria-Josefa Brand, Tower Product Manager at ENERCON Product Management. ‘This step puts tower production on a broader footing and reliably secures our volume for the coming years.’

The HST tower is a hybrid steel tower technology (Hybrid Steel Tower) developed by ENERCON. It combines segments of the Modular Steel Tower (MST) consisting of folded steel plates bolted together for the tower base with segments of a tubular steel tower (ST), which are placed on the lower MST segments.

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The HST technology has already proven itself in practice and is also available for new tower variants with high hub heights at short notice. It also offers advantages for international markets: the components are easy to transport and use simple installation concepts, and production can be localised without major effort – for example in countries with local content requirements.

‘With the new HST towers, we will also be able to offer EP5 customers in international markets tower variants with high hub heights in the future,’ says Timo Müller, EP5 Platform Manager at ENERCON Product Management. ‘Due to the transport restrictions for HT towers, high hub heights were previously reserved for our customers in Germany.’ As a first step, ENERCON is offering the new tower variants ‘HST 162m’ for the E-175 EP5 E1/E2, ‘HST 175m’ for the E-175 EP5 E2 and ‘HST 166m’ for the E-160 EP5 E3. ENERCON is focussing on minimising the effort required for any changes to approvals for customers during the launch in Germany and is well prepared.

In the medium/long term, there could be further advantages in terms of sustainability properties if HST towers can be manufactured from CO_²-reduced steel or even CO_²-neutral steel. Thanks to the technology and the stable material value due to the price of steel, HST towers offer customers significant cost advantages when it comes to subsequent dismantling or repowering.

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