By
Jannik Wind Gotthardsen
Business Unit Director
5 minute read
For every country a wind turbine OEM wants to sell their product, there is a unique grid requirements challenge. If you sell your machine to, let’s say, Australia and Ireland, you will have to make sure that the equipment can deal with the peculiarities of grid compliance. In Australia, they require a plant to reconnect automatically after a grid fault, several times in a row, instead of tripping to protect itself. And in Ireland, they ask for the same persistence. But, with a different startup sequence entirely.
None of this is arbitrary. A grid running on nuclear power, one balanced by hydro, and one carrying a growing share of wind and solar each need different things from the assets connected to them. For an OEM selling a handful of products into dozens of markets, the control functions built for one market rarely fit the next.
As a consequence, every market turns into its own piece of advanced engineering work: a function must be built, modelled, verified, and certified before the product can be sold there. And that is only for products expected to ship in the future. Requirements can also be forced upon an installed base retrospectively, as it happened in the US as late as in 2024. Engineering resources that could be invested in to developing entirely new systems or even the next platform, goes into keeping old ones compliant or versioning the current.
And this is a problem. Not only because it costs a lot of money, but also because the people who can do this job are hard to find. They sit at the intersection of grid engineering and software, and have deep industry expertise.
Partnering up with externals to work on control systems is obviously sensitive. Control system IP is the brains of the wind turbine, and there are real competitive advantages within. As many other components are now outsourced to suppliers, control system IP is often where the true innovation happens.
Advanced control strategies can cut structural loads and material cost on an asset without changing a single part. No wonder OEMs are protective around it, as they should be.
But guarding the core does not mean doing everything in-house. Building the functions a market demands, representing them in an electrical model, and getting that model certified is defined, repeatable work, that does not require opening up beyond what is reasonable. That work can be owned by a specialist partner while the proprietary control strategy itself never leaves the OEM’s hands.
Handled this way, opening a new market for a product line or retrofitting a larger installed base does not have to become a massive bottleneck on the in-house engineering specialists.
The relevance of finding a partner who can alleviate the OEMs from some of the grid requirement burdens is rapidly growing. This is simply because control systems will keep multiplying in complexity, as more markets tighten their codes for their increasingly complex networks.
Creadis has done this market-by-market adaptation work across grid codes on both sides of the Atlantic, turning each market’s requirements into a certified control function without the OEM’s core control strategy ever leaving its hands. We apply that experience to help OEMs transitioning this work from open-ended engineering risk into a scoped piece of work with a project plan and a defined set of outcomes. The payoff shows up directly in the numbers behind market entry: engineering capacity stays on the platforms that grow revenue, and opening the next market stops depending on which specialists happen to still be on the roster.
Background data: NERC, PRC-029-1 (adopted 8 October 2024, filed with FERC 4 November 2024); ENTSO-E, Phase II Technical Report on Grid Forming Requirements, November 2025.
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why the bar keeps moving
Grid codes are tightening on both sides of the Atlantic at once. In the US, NERC’s PRC-029-1 extends ride-through requirements to inverter-based resources already in operation, with a 2026 compliance deadline. In Europe, ENTSO-E is folding a mandatory grid-forming capability into its next Requirements for Generators code for new storage and renewable plants above 1 MW. Each region moves on its own timeline, so an OEM’s control systems need maintaining for as long as the assets stay in service, not just at launch.
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