The Goerlitz Innovation Campus
A manufacturing plant reinvents itself: The Siemens Energy turbine manufacturing location in Goerlitz, Germany is evolving into a cooperation platform for decarbonization, digitalization and new manufacturing technologies.Green. Energy. Network.
Innovation forms our future.
The Siemens Energy turbine manufacturing plant in Goerlitz, Germany looks back on a long history marked by continuous change. Since 1906, the story of this production location has been shaped by technical innovations, changing product portfolios, changes in owners driven by the course of history, and the transformation of markets. Yet, one thing has always remained constant: Energy.
Ever since its founding, this industrial production site has been delivering products and solutions for generating electric power and heat. And, in future, energy conversion and storage will continue to be the most important driver of the Görlitz Innovation Campus.
Going forward, the Görlitz Innovation Campus will be a cooperation platform conceived as an ecosystem of new structures and innovative concepts devoted to fields of research and development that seek answers for ensuring our future energy supply.
Our Innovation Campus is the place to be – with targeted empowerment and networking we are able to connect people, ideas and various experience of universities, research institutes and businesses to answer the questions of the energy transition and provide climate protection solutions.
The WAAM Lab Goerlitz
Our step to flexibility and competitiveness
WAAM (Wire arc additive manufacturing) is part of our digitalization- and technology- strategy inmanufacturing. Aim of this technology decision:
- prove cost advantages by minimizing material removal volume enabling design for WAAM
- prove lead-time advantages in comparison to order specific material sourcing
- do industrialization of WAAM technology and implement industrial manufacturing processes
To reach these targets we‘ve bundled knowhow and resources with partners like
- Gefertec
- TU Ilmenau
- CEP
Furthermore we‘re constantly looking for new partners & development opportunities. Out of these topics we‘re happy to offer bachelor or master theses or opportunities for internships as well.
Our partners at site
We cordially welcome the first companies, who meanwhile have settled at the Innovation campus in Görlitz. Learn more about our partners here.
Creating a future full of opportunities
Siemens’ turbine manufacturing plant in Görlitz, Germany has long played a vital part in the city’s industrial history, as it continues to do so today. This factory has been undergoing continuous technical transformation ever since it was founded over 100 years ago, always adapting to market dynamics and thereby developing into a strong and future-focused production site.
After the innovation campus has started networking, the campus begins to take shape. The first start-ups move in. Among them eco-softfibre, and MetaliQ are settling at the Görlitz location to research and produce. Also the Fraunhofer Hydrogen Lab is established and will start operation in 2022.
The signs all point to the future – the strength to innovate, the spirit of research, and the will to continuously improve and further develop are the driving forces behind a major, highly ambitious undertaking:
the Fraunhofer Society, the Free State of Saxony, and Siemens AG sign a memorandum of understanding to transform Siemens’ manufacturing plant in Görlitz into an Innovation Campus.
The President and CEO of Siemens AG, Joe Kaeser, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visit and tour the site.
The new Enhanced Platform Design combines proven standards of industrial steam turbines with new technology. These design modifications make it possible with the same, unaltered set of resources to improve turbine performance and expand the scope of unit applications.
These new industrial steam turbines an be operated under main steam pressures of up to 165 bar in combination with main steam temperatures of up to 565 degrees Celsius.
Siemens’ Görlitz Manufacturing Plant delivers its 2,000th steam turbine – an 8-MW back-pressure turbine-generator set, i.e. a relatively small industrial steam turbine paired with an electrical generator – to a sugar factory in Turkey.
The company location Turbinenwerk Görlitz (TuG) is incorporated into Siemens AG in 1992. The location employees a workforce numbering some 1,100 at the time. The plant completes production of its first Siemens steam turbine one year later, a unit of the 1-5 MW G-series modular system.
Direct contact between the company Görlitzer Maschinenbau (GMB) and the Industrial Turbines unit of Siemens KWU in Erlangen, Germany is first established in 1984, before Germany’s reunification.
In 1990, following German reunification, Siemens reprivatizes the company as the German limited liability entity “GMB GmbH”. The management of GMB and Siemens KWU Erlangen announce their intent to merge in a memorandum of understanding.
The company Siemens Turbinenbau GmbH was then consequentially founded in 1991.
In 1970, the Kombinat Kraftwerksanlagenbau (KKAB) – a combine state-owned business conglomerate formed under East German socialist law – is established with headquarters in East Berlin. Creation of this business group brings significant investments aimed at increasing the location’s ability to export products. The new, modern turbine blade manufacturing capacity improves productivity as well.
One area of focus of the combine is to develop its own products. The location’s facilities include its own data center and electric power systems for manufacturing special tools.
In 1952 the plant completes its first new steam turbine since the end of the Second World War. The turbine is constructed in the new EKM design intended for power plant applications.
In 1953, the company is renamed the “Energie- und Kraftmaschinenbau Görlitzer Maschinenbau VEB”, or EKM GMB VEB for short.
After the complete dismantling and removal of the factory’s machinery in 1945, the state-run “Volkseigener Betrieb Görlitzer Maschinenbau (GMB)” is founded in 1947, which continues to operate in this business form until 1990.
1935 sees the delivers of the 3,500th steam turbine. The total electrical generating capacity of all steam turbines manufactured in Görlitz (the number rose in the 1960s to 3,632 units) is 1,165 MW. Today, just nine of Siemens’ SST-600-series steam turbines can equal this output.
Sales of WUMAG steam turbines rose in the 1930s to over 20 units per year.
Three companies – Görlitzer Maschinenbauanstalt und Eisengiesserei AG, Görlitzer Waggonbau AG, and Cottbuser Maschinenbauanstalt und Eisengiesserei AG – merge to form Waggon- und Maschinenbau AG Görlitz, or WUMAG for short.
WUMAG focuses on building new and larger steam turbines suitable for application in complex thermal configurations.
Steam turbines delivering a maximum power output of 7,000 horsepower (hp) were not up the task of meeting 20th-century demand for electricity. The Görlitzer Maschinenbausanstalt (GMA) decided in 1903 to begin manufacturing steam turbines.
The first 700-hp steam turbine that GMA constructed is delivered in 1906 to the utility company Elektrizitätswerke Liegnitz in what at that time was Germany’s Lower Silesia region, today in southwestern Poland.
From 1910 onward, the company develops its own designs geared for use in power plants and industrial processes. In 1912 the plant completes and delivers its first compressor-drive turbine. The company also supplies its first steam turbine to an overseas customer, in Argentina.
The company Görlitzer Maschinenbau-Anstalt und Eisengiesserei (GMA) acquires a 176,300-m² piece of land on the southern edge of the city. Efforts to move all workshops and offices from the original riverbank location on the Lusatian Neisse River into the factory at the new site are completed by 1886.
Wilhelm Steininger establishes a workshop for fabricating textile machinery on what today is Görlitz’s Jakob-Böhme-Strasse on the bank of the Lusatian Neisse River.
The machinery factory delivers its first steam engine in 1858.
