Zigzagging across fields, within sight of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it downtown of Hermleigh, Texas, the Pyron Wind Farm is typical of America’s wind power fleet: efficient, high-tech, and Texas-sized. Owned and operated by the utility RWE, this forest of 166 electron-pumping wind turbines southeast of Lubbock towers 400 feet above the properties of 70 different owners and can supply the equivalent electricity needed to power 53,000 homes simultaneously. It even boasts a state-of-the-art battery storage facility that stores the power for when demand spikes.
Pyron started spinning in 2009, which means that a few years ago the turbines were beginning to show their age. It’s a common situation across the U.S., which saw wind power ramp up dramatically in the past two and a half decades, from 2.4 gigawatts (GW) in 2000 to 150 GW in 2024, according to the U.S. government. Wind produced more than 10% of the country’s power in 2023, making it the largest source of renewable electricity.
After decades of modest growth, electricity demands around the world have started to soar. Today’s existing infrastructure is aging, and building new takes time. Fortunately, GE Vernova has a way to address both challenges. It’s called Repower.
by Type (Scheduled Maintenance, Unscheduled Maintenance), Location type (Onshore, Offshore), Turbine Connectivity (Grid-connected, Standalone), and Region
Download free sample pages“What Repower does is it allows turbines to keep running longer, with the latest and greatest technology,” says Uzair Memon, chief commercial officer for services at GE Vernova’s Onshore Wind business. “It’s one of the fastest ways to put more electrons on the grid while using the infrastructure that is already in place.”
More than a decade ago, GE Vernova, then part of General Electric, spotted a problem on the horizon. The tens of thousands of turbines spinning across the U.S. would soon be reaching replacement age en masse. The company realized that the high-wire act of replacing the equipment on top of an existing turbine tower, as tricky as it is, could be faster, easier, and more cost-effective than decommissioning existing turbines and starting anew.
The result is the Repower program, which replaces aging equipment — from the enormous turbine blades to complex electromechanical equipment like gearboxes, rotors, and generators — with minimal interruption of service.
“We’re doing this more efficiently by taking turbines that are aging and refreshing to the latest technology,” says Matt Lynch, general manager of Repower at GE Vernova. “We’re not designing a new, unknown machine or rotor for each Repower application. It’s critical to build on the efficiencies of a repeatable known technology and product installation at scale; we’re improving quality and reliability for the customer because of known performance through our workhorse products.”
Pyron exemplifies how Repower works and why utilities like RWE are flocking to it. Completed in 2024, the repowering of Pyron involved swapping out 166 older GE Vernova turbines with the company’s popular line of 1.6-megawatt (MW) units, utilizing the most installed wind turbine in the U.S. over the past five years. The move is predicted to add up to 20 years of life to Pyron and to minimize impact on local infrastructure by reusing existing towers, foundations, grid connections, roads, and other site elements, notes Memon.
The Power of Repowering
Pyron is just one of many Repower projects GE Vernova has executed or is planning, although it is among the biggest to date. Altogether, GE Vernova received orders to repower wind turbines representing 1 GW of capacity in 2024. To fulfill those obligations, GE Vernova is leaning into its existing U.S. manufacturing capacity. In Pensacola, Florida, where workers assemble the massive machine heads that house the gears and generators that translate a turbine’s rotation into flowing electrons, the company has invested $70 million since 2023, part of an overall plan to invest nearly $600 million in U.S. manufacturing that CEO Scott Strazik announced in January.
“As the United States works to meet the electricity demand growth that is now predicted to grow 50 percent over the next 20 years, Repower projects like these help U.S. workers in U.S. factories take advantage of what we already have, where we already have it,” says Lynch.
Replacing a wide variety of aging turbine components with components from workhorse products that are already manufactured and validated at scale is another way Repower can cut costs, limit downtime, and extend the life of turbines for customers and utilities, says Kellan Dickens, product general manager for Repower and megawatt-constrained wind turbines at GE Vernova. And one of the key advantages of using the workhorse 2.8-MW product is that it offers a massively improved duty cycle when operating at 1.9 MW on the repowered unit, providing more robustness. That doesn’t mean, however, that all repowering projects look alike. Overhauls can range from replacing a turbine’s drivetrain and rotor to swapping out everything but the tower, including the machine head, hub, and blades, he adds. No matter the technology solutions, Repower principles are consistent: increased production, improved reliability, extended life, and lower O&M costs.
For that, GE Vernova has developed a method of separating a turbine from its tower and installing the new one in as little as a day.
“We can efficiently remove the entire machine head and rotor,” says Dickens. Workers make an “incision” in the tower before a 600-ton-capacity crane lifts the entire turbine top off. A three-meter adapter section is installed, and then the new equipment is placed atop it.
“It’s amazing to see this in the field — all happening at the height of a 20-story building, but with speed and simplicity,” says Dickens.
The new turbine equipment typically arrives on specialized trucks, some with 13 axles and a bevy of escort vehicles, driving in from various points in GE Vernova’s supply chain, including Pensacola and another remanufacturing site in Amarillo, Texas.
Meeting the Needs of Every Site
While repowering an entire wind farm remains popular with customers, sometimes a single turbine warrants an overhaul. For that, GE Vernova unleashes its factory in Amarillo. Instead of pumping out the big, new workhorse turbines at scale, this older Texas factory was refurbished a few years ago to be a nimble producer of many different products, from older models to its next-generation iterations, says Kiersten Gregory, Onshore Wind parts fulfillment leader.
“At Amarillo, we have the ability to build six different configurations within the same day,” says Gregory. “We can be building five different types of drivetrains from our older fleet one day and for our brand-new fleet the next.” That allows GE Vernova to produce specific components from a vast back catalog and spanning a variety of turbine models.
“Repower is a life extension solution in many ways,” Gregory reflects. “Just as we’re giving new life to these wind farms, we’re extending the life of our facilities as well. We’re investing in a new manufacturing opportunity while unlocking a set of technical skills for our team in the heart of wind country. There is real energy to support for the rest of the services we offer, right here from the Amarillo facility.”
“It’s a story about sustainability,” says Memon. “Repower improves electricity production and the reliability of existing turbines. It extends the life of the asset and it reduces costs to operate. This keeps jobs in the community for longer and creates opportunities for technicians to expand and develop their careers on new technology at the same site. In more ways than one, Repower enables a circular economy.”
