The Timken Company, a global industrial leader in engineered bearings and power transmission products, has helped power growth for solar energy customers over the last three years.
Timken entered the solar energy market with the acquisition of Cone Drive in 2018. Under Timken, Cone Drive has continued to build momentum with the world’s leading solar energy original equipment manufacturers and, as a result, has tripled its solar revenue in the past three years, outpacing underlying market growth by a significant margin.
In 2020, the company generated more than $100 million in solar energy revenue. As demand for solar energy continues to increase, Timken expects double digit revenue growth in the sector over the next three to five years.
Cone Drive’s high-precision drives provide tracking and positioning capabilities for both photovoltaic and concentrated solar power applications. These engineered products improve stability and enable systems to handle higher torque loads with lower backlash and anti-back driving capabilities – strong attributes for solar applications.
All Cone Drive facilities are ISO-certified and its solar products are manufactured with robust quality controls.
Since 2018, Timken has played a role in more than one third of the world’s utility scale solar projects, such as the Al Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai, where the power tower installation utilizes Cone Drive’s precision solar tracking technology. The solar park will have capacity to generate 600 MW of clean energy using CSP technology and an additional 2,200 MW from PV technology. Earlier this year, China-based solar tracker OEM Arctech Solar awarded Cone Drive a multi-million dollar contract to provide a custom engineered slewing drive system for PowerChina’s Jiangxi Electric power project. It is reportedly the largest drive project of its kind in the world.
Timken has invested heavily in research and development and has built strong manufacturing, engineering, and testing capabilities in both the U.S. and China to reinforce its leadership position in solar energy. The company is also making targeted investments to increase production capacity, broaden its product range and improve productivity for precision drives used in the solar energy industry. In 2020, renewable energy, which consists of wind and solar, became Timken’s single-largest end-market sector, representing 12 percent of total company sales.