All actors dream to get an Oscar one day, while industrial designers hope to win the Hermes Award.
The international technology prize of the Hanover Fair is awarded every year against the
background of the world’s largest industrial exhibition. This year, the EUR 100,000-prize went to
Voith Turbo: an independent jury selected the Voith WinDrive as the winner. Over the last five
years, the Hermes Award has developed into the most coveted international “Oscar for Engineers,”
so that the jury had to evaluate over 70 products and nominate five companies for the final. This is
where Voith Turbo came out on top.
The utilization of regenerative energy is continuously increasing. For power grid operation, the
variable rotor speed of wind turbines has to be converted into a constant generator speed. With the
WinDrive, Voith Turbo Wind is the first company to realize the highly dynamic variable transmission
in the driveline of a wind turbine without using frequency inverters. “This year’s award-winning
innovation ensures that there is a fresh wind blowing on the rapidly increasing wind energy market,”
this is how Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wahlstätter explained the jury’s motivation to Dr. Andreas Basteck,
Executive Vice President of Voith Turbo Wind, when he handed over the prize.
In her laudatory speech, Germany’s Federal Minister for Education and Research, Dr. Annette
Schavan, underlined: “The project comes at the right time and covers the right topic. It is
interdisciplinary and highly innovative, while its operation is easy to understand. It aims at a growth market and can already be seen in practical operation. It thus ideally embodies all of the objectives formulated by the high-tech strategy aims of the Federal Government.