Colorado took another step toward building its role as a renewable-energy hub Thursday when Vestas Wind Systems revealed plans to open the world’s largest wind-turbine-tower factory in the state.
The nearly $250 million facility would be fully operational in mid-2010 and employ about 400 people by the end of that year, the Danish wind-energy firm said in a financial report posted on its website Thursday.
Vestas did not disclose where it plans to build the tower factory. The company did not return voice-mail and e-mail messages.
Vestas opened a turbine-blade manufacturing plant in Windsor in March, its first U.S. factory. It quickly expanded its original plans for Windsor and decided to employ up to 650 people there.
For the tower factory, “Vestas has looked at a number of different alternatives around the state,” said Don Elliman, Colorado Office of Economic Development executive director. “We’ve been in discussions with Vestas about a broad range of issues with some modest incentives for their entire activity in the state. It’s not clear what portion of any of those could be applied to the tower manufacturing.”
Vestas will use the plant to increase in-house production of towers and expects it to process about 900 towers a year. The company said it decided to build the tower factory in Colorado “in spite of the uncertainty” over an extension of a production-tax credit.
It said the investment in a tower facility underlines its “belief in a robust U.S. growth market” and is expected to help persuade more European suppliers to come to the United States and work with Vestas.
Suppliers for blade manufacturing have already started making plans to locate near the Windsor facility, Elliman said.
Windsor Town Manager Kelly Arnold said he could not discuss the Vestas tower factory but that the Vestas blade plant draws its employees from a broad swath of northern Colorado.
“It’s just a good sign that Colorado is being chosen for things like this — like wind energy, which is one of the most rapidly growing sources of energy in the world,” said Craig Cox, executive director of the Interwest Energy Alliance, based in Conifer.
Gov. Bill Ritter has been vocal about his interest in attracting renewable-energy research and manufacturing operations to the state.
This month Beaumont, Texas-based Dragon Wind said it plans to open a plant in Lamar that will build 262-foot wind-turbine towers. Additionally, ConocoPhillips plans to build a research facility in Louisville that will focus on biofuels and other energy research.
“This definitely helps create the cluster effect in Colorado,” Cox said. “Vestas is one of the biggest names in wind, and certainly other supplier companies will want to locate closer to the market and closer to other manufacturing companies like Vestas.”
Kelly Yamanouchi: 303-954-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com
