Get Your Politicians on board

After Outcry, 2 Companies Shift Their Turbine Plans

KATE GALBRAITH
Published: November 17, 2009
Two companies that encountered political anger for their plans to use Chinese-built turbines on a wind farm in West Texas have announced plans to build a new turbine factory — in the United States.

» The U.S. Renewable Energy Group, an investment firm, and A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Chinese turbine maker, said in a statement on Tuesday that they had signed an agreement to build “a new production and assembly plant in the United States that will supply highly advanced wind energy turbines to renewable energy projects throughout North and South America.”

Two weeks earlier, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, had publicly opposed the use of stimulus money to aid the companies’ planned $1.5 billion wind farm in West Texas, because its 240 turbines would be made in China by A-Power.

John S. Lin, the director and chief operating officer of A-Power, said in an e-mail message that the proposed American plant, costing about $50 million, would not make the turbines for the West Texas wind farm. The company has yet to pick a location for the new plant.

Ed Cunningham, a managing director of the U.S. Renewable Energy Group, said that even the controversial Texas wind farm had always planned to source about 86 percent of its components, measured by weight, from the United States, including the towers and blades. Only the nacelles would come from China, he said. Nacelles are high-value components containing the gearbox at the heart of a wind turbine.

“The biggest parts of the turbine are all wholly made in the U.S.,” Mr. Cunningham said of the Texas project. As for the new plant, it will assemble nacelles for turbines in the United States, he said.

According to the announcement, the plant would employ about 1,000 American workers, in addition to creating construction jobs.

A-Power has a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Renewable Energy Group to find a location for the plant, Mr. Lin said, and construction will begin next year.

Mr. Schumer welcomed the announcement.

“This is exactly what stimulus funding ought to do: create and strengthen green manufacturing jobs in America, even if it slightly slows renewable energy production as we play catch-up to countries like China,” he said in an e-mail statement. “We still maintain no stimulus money should be used to manufacture wind turbines in China.”