Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa unveiled major plans for maintaining its leading position in the Chinese wind market as competition and demand increases.
Chairman Jorge Calvet unveiled Gamesa’s strategy “to cement its position as one of the top five players” in the world’s largest wind market, which is expected to account for between 800MW and 1GW of its turbine sales — more than 30% of Gamesa’s total — in 2011. China represented 15% of the company’s sales last year.
Gamesa will invest €90m ($116.8m) through 2012, a major increase from the €42m it had invested through 2009, “to meet rising demand from the wind energy industry in the Asian country and to address local production needs, in the medium term, for its new G9X-2.0 MW, G10X-4.5 MW and offshore turbine systems”.
Calvet says Gamesa has begun construction of its sixth Chinese factory, at a site in Inner Mongolia. The plant will assemble nacelles for the G8X-2MW turbine, which the company expects to be a major seller as China becomes more concerned about space availability. The unit already accounted for 36% of Gamesa’s sales in China through the first six months of the year.
With operations planned for 2011, the Inner Mongolia factory is to have an annual capacity of 500MW.
It’s the second Chinese G8X-2MW factory to begin construction in four months and follows the company’s four other manufacturing centres making blades, nacelles, generators and assembling gearboxes in Tianjin.
In total, the company expects to have production capacity of 1.5GW a year in China when the new factories are complete.
The company will fill its own project development pipeline with those turbines. It has close to 3.2GW of projects in various phases in China, a portfolio that has increased substantially this summer on the backs of new strategic agreements for 1.3GW of projects with Guangdong Nuclear Wind and Datang Renewable Power, using both the new 2MW machine and the G5X-850kW turbine. Gamesa has sold more than 2,000 units of the smaller machine in China.
