The green transition will stop due to lack of cost-efficient manufacturing capacity.

The global push towards a greener future through the transition to sustainable energy sources faces a significant obstacle: the lack of cost-efficient manufacturing capacity.
While the importance of renewable energy technologies is widely recognized, the ability to scale up production and make it economically viable remains a challenge.

The Nordic countries and Europe are expected to build offshore wind turbines providing more than 500 GW of energy in the next years. This will require large investment and build-up of heavy steel manufacturing sites to meet the demand and the production frequency required. Europe has been dependent of Asian production capacity, but in a massive scale-up of Offshore Wind it is not feasible nor sustainable to produce and transport heavy steel units around the world.

Thus, European steel manufacturers needs to become competitive not only to face the Asian steel production dominance, but also to contribute to the cost reduction of green energy. To do so, Digitalization, data-driven production and robotization is a necessity to enhance productivity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

Goodtech is now setting up the new fully atomized and robotized steel production facility at Aker Verdal using digitalization as a driving factor. This will, at completion, enable Aker to deliver cost-efficient sub-structures for offshore wind on an industrialized scale not seen in this industry before. By utilizing automation, robotics and AGV’s in all areas of steel manufacturing higher precision, faster, more accurate and increased production can be achieved.