Woodward: Genset paralleling, breaker and turbine controls for power generation

Overview

Woodward traces its origin to 1870, when Amos Woodward began making governors for waterwheels in Rockford, Illinois, according to the company's own history. It was incorporated in 1902 as Woodward Governor Company, had its headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado by the time of its 2007 annual report, and filed under the name Woodward, Inc. from January 2011, according to its EDGAR record. It now makes controls for aircraft engines, gas and steam turbines and reciprocating engines and reports in two segments, Aerospace and Industrial, as the fiscal 2025 annual report sets out.

The controls a generator or switchgear engineer meets come mainly from Stuttgart. Woodward bought Leonhard-Reglerbau, a Stuttgart maker of control, protection and monitoring equipment for power generation with about 100 staff, in March 2002 and made it the centre of its power management business, as Power Engineering reported. Woodward GmbH at Handwerkstrasse 29 in Stuttgart is the address on the easYgen manuals, and its ISO 9001 certificate covers the engineering of electronic monitoring and control equipment for power generation. The easYgen-3000XT platform developed there runs from single-set control to networks of 32 paralleled gensets and, with group controllers, fleets of up to 496 sets.

What sets Woodward apart from specialist genset-controller makers is the rest of its industrial business: fuel valves, actuators, ignition and injection systems and turbine controls for the same engines and turbines its controllers manage. Its largest industrial customers are engine and turbine makers, Rolls-Royce, Caterpillar and GE Vernova in fiscal 2025. The protection relay and wind converter businesses it added with SEG in 2006 were sold in 2020, so a Woodward power system today is controllers and engine-side equipment rather than switchgear protection relays.

Offering

Genset controllers

The easYgen-3000XT family is the current range, and Woodward describes it on the product page as a drop-in replacement for the earlier easYgen-3000 series. Its Power Management Application Guide (June 2026) sets out three tiers. The easYgen-3100XT (no display) and 3200XT synchronise the generator and mains breakers and protect generator, engine and mains, with two CAN ports, RS-485 and one Ethernet port for Modbus TCP. The easYgen-3400XT/3500XT-P1 adds generator group breaker control, run-up synchronisation, LS-6XT and group controller support, direct 690 VAC sensing and a built-in voltage regulator, with three Ethernet and three CAN ports. The P2 package, aimed at CHP and cogeneration, adds a second I/O board, three-phase busbar sensing and phase rotation checks. LT versions of the 3500XT run down to -40 °C, and from software release 2.17 every catalogue package can run as a cold, warm or hot redundant pair. The earlier easYgen-2000 series (2200, 2300 and 2500) remains documented for installed sites, and the distributor MSHS Pacific Power Group lists easYgen-600/800 and 1600/1800 units for single standby or prime sets.

Breaker, group and transfer controls

The LS-5 and LS-6XT are synchronisers with mains decoupling for one or two breakers, from a synch-check relay to multi-feed power management with bus-tie and group breakers. The GC-3400XT-P1 group controller manages up to 16 groups of 31 easYgen units. The DTSC-200A controls automatic transfer switches, with closed transition under 100 ms, and the MFR-300 is a multifunction relay and measuring transducer. DSLC-2XT and MSLC-2XT load controls replace the older DSLC-2 and MSLC-2 in the same footprint.

Battery, HMI and software

easYi controls a battery or other inverter-based source alongside gensets, with island and grid-parallel modes, spinning reserve, solar curtailment and black start. easYview panels in 7, 10 and 15 inch sizes visualise a plant, and easYsim builds cloud digital twins for training and commissioning. The accessories page lists ToolKit, whose basic licence is free, and mapper tools for custom Modbus tables.

Engine, turbine and aerospace products

The Industrial segment also sells the MicroNet XT turbine and engine control platform, gas metering valves, large-engine control modules and, since its 2018 acquisition of L'Orange, Woodward L'Orange fuel injection. Aerospace, the larger segment, makes fuel pumps, metering units, actuators, valves and nozzles for aircraft. Industrial products are sold to OEMs, through independent distributors and authorised system integrators, and directly to end users.

Technology

Interfaces and protocols

The easYgen-3400XT/3500XT product specification (37583, revision E, July 2021) lists up to nine communication ports: three Ethernet, three CAN (CANopen and SAE J1939), RS-485, USB and an interface expansion slot. Each Ethernet port is a Modbus TCP slave and the RS-485 port a Modbus RTU slave, and both accept remote set points for speed, frequency, voltage, power, reactive power and power factor. Load sharing runs over CAN, Ethernet or hot-redundant Ethernet and CAN pairs. The controller has a Modbus master for third-party devices, takes time from SNTP and reads named J1939 engine ECUs from Scania, MTU, Volvo, Deutz, MAN, SISU, Cummins and Woodward. Profibus is available through the ESEPRO gateway, and ToolKit connects over USB, Ethernet or CAN.

Data protocols and register maps

The Modbus register layout depends on the selected data protocol. Woodward's support article on protocols 5003, 5010 and 5016 explains that 5003 dates from 2006, 5010 from 2009 and is the default for backward compatibility, and 5016 adds the XT values; parameter 3184 selects it, and 5016 is recommended where every unit is an XT. The easYgen-3500XT-P1 manual starts visualisation data at Modicon address 450001, read with function 0x03 in blocks of 1 to 128 registers, and keeps control and configuration writes in a separate range. On the older easYgen-2000 series, Modbus RTU is on the RS-485 port of the 2500 P1, and the RJ-45 socket is a configuration port, not Ethernet.

Measurement and protection

The 3400XT/3500XT measures generator voltage directly up to 690 VAC with Class 0.5 voltage and current accuracy and Class 1 power, with 1 A or 5 A current inputs. Protection covers synch check, under and over voltage and frequency, reverse and reduced power, unbalanced load, time and instantaneous overcurrent, voltage-restrained overcurrent, ground fault, pole slip, mains phase shift and ROCOF.

Security

The 3500XT manual warns that the Ethernet ports also carry Woodward Servlink and load-share traffic and advises against connecting the controller to the internet without routing and firewalls. Woodward's Cybersecurity Support Portal publishes product security manuals, including the easYgen-3000XT Series Genset Control Security Manual (B35244, October 2025), and takes vulnerability reports through support tickets. No IEC 62443 product certificate for the easYgen range was found in public sources.

Approvals

The specification lists UL and cUL to UL 61010 and UL 6200, CSA, VDE-AR-N 4105 and 4110, EAC and CE, with Lloyd's Register and ABS type approval. A Woodward support article points German grid connections to the component certificates in the ZEREZ register, searched by easYgen part number.

Customers

Engine and turbine makers

Woodward's controllers and components are mostly sold to the companies that build engines, turbines and generator sets. The fiscal 2025 annual report names Rolls-Royce PLC, Caterpillar Inc. and GE Vernova as the customers that each took 10% or more of Industrial segment sales in fiscal 2025; in fiscal 2024 they were Weichai Power and Rolls-Royce. The five largest customers across both segments accounted for about 36% of consolidated sales. The same report names Caterpillar, Cummins, GE Vernova, Rolls-Royce Power Systems, Wärtsilä and Weichai Power as OEM customers that can also make similar products in-house.

The relationship with GE Vernova runs both ways. In March 2025 Woodward completed the sale of its heavy-duty gas turbine combustion parts product line in Greenville, South Carolina, which it had agreed to sell to GE Vernova in November 2024. The Woodward homepage shows the logos of RTX, Baker Hughes, Caterpillar, Boeing, MTU, Airbus, Wärtsilä, Safran, Cummins, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Weichai Power, CFM and GE as customers.

Power management projects

Woodward publishes few named end-user projects for its genset controls. Its Power Management Application Guide describes an executed medium-voltage data centre project in which easYgen-3500XT controllers work with an LS-6XT at each breaker, delivered by a genset packager acting as system integrator and supplying the low and medium-voltage switchgear. It also shows group controllers balancing three heavy fuel oil power plants and links case studies for a cruise ship shore connection on LS-612XT-P2 controllers, redundant easYgen control at an electronics plant and a microgrid. Data centres, hospitals and marine dynamic-positioning vessels are the applications the guide names for its redundant control panels.

Markets

Industrial end markets

The Industrial segment reports three markets. In fiscal 2025, according to the annual report, power generation brought in $489 million (up from $444 million), transportation $507 million and oil and gas $258 million, for segment sales of $1.25 billion. Transportation fell with lower demand for natural gas trucks in China, while power generation grew on demand from data centres and process industries, particularly in North America, the Middle East and Asia, and the company expected that demand to continue as electrification, renewable integration and data centre loads raise electricity use.

The trend held into fiscal 2026. The third-quarter results show power generation sales of $145 million in the quarter to June 2026, up 19%, and $403 million for the first nine months, up 11%, with Industrial segment margin rising to 22.1% in the quarter. Woodward has a dedicated data centre page that groups easYgen-3000XT, LS-5 and LS-6XT, easYi, the DTSC-200A, gas valves and turbine controls for backup and on-site power.

Footprint and channels

Besides the Fort Collins campus, the Industrial segment's principal facilities are in Aken, Glatten, Stuttgart and Wolfratshausen in Germany, Krakow in Poland and Suzhou and Tianjin in China. About 30% of employees work outside the United States, mostly in Germany, Poland and China. The easYgen specification lists regional sales and technical support lines for North and Central America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, China, India and ASEAN and Oceania. Industrial products reach buyers through OEMs, independent distributors such as MSHS Pacific Power Group, authorised system integrators and direct sales.

Company

Ownership and results

Woodward, Inc. is incorporated in Delaware and listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market as WWD, with its world headquarters at 1081 Woodward Way, Fort Collins. Its fiscal 2025 annual report, for the year to 30 September 2025, records net sales of $3,567 million, up 7.3%, of which Aerospace was $2,313 million and Industrial $1,254 million, net earnings of $442 million and research and development spending of $148 million, 4.1% of sales. It employed about 10,200 full-time staff on 31 October 2025. The company called fiscal 2025 a record year in its results announcement.

Leadership

Charles (Chip) Blankenship became chief executive, president and chair on 9 May 2022, succeeding Thomas Gendron, who had led the company for 17 years, according to the succession announcement. William Lacey is chief financial officer. Randy Hobbs, formerly of General Electric, is executive vice president and president of the Industrial segment.

Portfolio changes in power generation

After buying Leonhard-Reglerbau in 2002, Woodward acquired Schaltanlagen-Elektronik-Geräte (SEG) of Kempen on 31 October 2006, adding protection and control systems for power distribution and wind turbine inverters; SEG had $60 million of sales in 2005, and the 2007 annual report placed it in the Electrical Power Systems segment formed in that year's reorganisation. In fiscal 2020 the board decided to sell the renewable power systems business, the protective relay business and related businesses in Germany, Poland and Bulgaria, which had about $88 million of sales in fiscal 2019; the 2020 annual report records the sale to affiliates of AURELIUS for $23.4 million, completed on 30 April 2020, and BizWest reported 410 staff in Kempen and Krakow moving with it. The relay business now trades as SEG Electronics, which HEUKING confirms AURELIUS bought from Woodward and which Arteche agreed to acquire in June 2026. The easYgen and LS businesses stayed with Woodward. In 2026 Woodward announced it would leave its Santa Clarita aerospace site by December 2027, an Aerospace change that does not affect the power generation range.