UPDATE - Enercon rules out tech failure in remote turbine ops, says there is no risk

German wind turbine manufacturer Enercon GmbH on Tuesday confirmed there is limited impact on the remote monitoring and control of 5,800 of its turbines in Central Europe, but reassured there is no risk to the units and stressed that the issue was not caused by a technical failure on the company's side.

The announcement was made following an in-depth examination of the issue, launched after "a massive disruption of the satellite link in Europe" affected turbines with a combined output of 11 GW on Thursday.

Enercon explained that the remote monitoring and control of the turbines is currently possible only to a limited extent but they are operating in automatic mode, producing green electricity without any risk.

"The disruption solely impairs the communication channel between Service and the wind energy converters. This means the wind energy converter cannot be reset remotely in the event of a fault. Instead, a Service team has to perform the reset directly at the wind energy converter," the company stated, adding that grid operators still have unrestricted access to the turbines to control their behaviour in the power grid.

Enercon has informed the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) about the incident as wind turbines are considered critical infrastructure.

The wind turbine maker assured that it is working together with satellite providers to solve the problem and restore remote control as soon as possible.

The reason for the satellite disruption is not clear but the outage of communication services coincided with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The issue has affected about 30,000 satellite terminals across Europe which are used by various industries.

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