Siemens expands cooperation with wind safety provider OffTECBase

Keeping up with the latest standards can be vital to ensuring safety when work is being performed on wind turbines. OffTECBase, a safety and technology training course provider in Enge-Sande, Schleswig-Holstein, has worked closely with Siemens’ Wind Power and Renewables Division since 2010. Now the two companies want to take their collaboration to a new level. To be able to offer practical training courses, OffTEC ordered two of the latest Siemens SWT-3.6-130 direct-drive wind turbine systems, to be installed in the wind farm close to the training site. The principle is to work together to develop the content of future training courses and to train technicians using real wind technology.

Greater sharing benefits both companies: OffTEC benefits from Siemens’ leading role in introducing industrial safety standards throughout the industry. In turn, the company can have a good proportion of its assembly and service technicians trained using the latest systems at OffTEC. The two new wind turbines round out a fleet of systems comprising all the key Siemens models. The two SWT-3.6-130 units are expected to be in place by the summer of 2017.

“We are very pleased that our long-standing cooperation on projects with Siemens is moving to a new level,” says Andreas Rauschelbach, CTO of OffTEC. “Now we can expand our training modules and offer real, state-of-the-art wind technology.” His colleague Klaus Loesmann, OffTEC’s commercial manager, adds: “Working as a state-of-the-art technician in the wind industry requires maximum industrial safety. That’s why we’re rigorously expanding our basic principle of holding all our training sessions for offshore and onshore technicians at a single location and under real-life conditions. Extending our training field to include the latest generation of plant therefore represents an important step for us.”

“We’ve been working successfully with OffTEC since 2010 in implementing the best-possible standards of industrial safety at wind turbines and training our employees,” says Markus Tacke, CEO of Siemens’ Wind Power and Renewables Division. “The training sessions add an important element to our activities in northern Germany: the locations in Lower Saxony, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein represent not only the latest in wind turbine technology, but also leading safety standards for maintenance on land and at sea.”

Image: Safety and technology cooperation – left to right: OffTEC’s managers Klaus Loesmann, Andreas Rauschelbach and Marten Jensen, signing the agreement with Markus Tacke, CEO of Siemens’ Wind Power and Renewables Division, and marketing experts Dominic Voss and Eileen Jörs. Photo courtesy of Siemens AG