Vestas lands order for Australian wind project

Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems A/S, which has plants in Windsor and Brighton, said Thursday it had received a 19.8-megawatt turbine order for a wind project in Australia.

The announcement came two days after Vestas – which said last month it would add 400 jobs at its blade-manufacturing plant in Windsor – confirmed that it received a 78-megawatt turbine order for a wind project in Minnesota.

Vestas spokeswoman Piper Baron told BizWest that blades, nacelles and towers for the projects would be produced by Vestas’ Colorado facilities. Its plants in Brighton and Windsor manufacture the turbine blades, while nacelles are assembled in Windsor and towers in Pueblo.

The order announced Thursday is for six units of the company’s V117-3.3 MW turbine for the Coonooer Bridge Wind Farm project in the state of Victoria in southeastern Australia, according to a media statement. Vestas said the contract includes delivery, installation and commissioning of the wind turbines, as well as a long-term service agreement.

The order cane from a consortium headed by Windlab and Eurus Energy. The installation, scheduled for completion by next March, will produce enough energy to power 14,000 homes.

The Coonooer Bridge project is Vestas’ second major wind farm in Victoria; it also built the 430-megawatt Macarthur project there.

The announcement comes amid a political debate in Australia in which Vestas officials there have played a part.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s conservative government wants to limit or end the country’s Renewable Energy Target, which calls for 45 terrawatt hours of energy to be sourced from renewable sources by 2020. One terawatt-hour is equal to a sustained power of approximately 114 megawatts for a period of one year.

Although Abbott’s party doesn’t have enough strength in Parliament to end the RET, analysts say its stance against the standard has discouraged development of wind power in Australia. Around 380 megawatts of wind generation are expected to be installed this year, compared with 567 megawatts in 2014, and investment in all large-scale renewable energy in Australia fell by 88 percent from the previous year’s total.

In prepared statements, officials of Vestas Australia said they believed a 33,500-gigawatts-per-hour target in 2020 represents a reasonable and necessary compromise to unlock investment and protect jobs.

“Political uncertainty has stopped Australia reaching that potential, and this is now threatening Australia’s competitiveness as the rest of the world moves ahead with renewables,” said Danny Nielsen, managing director of Vestas Australia, in a media statement earlier this month. “Bipartisan political support must be urgently restored to create the long-term business certainty required to protect jobs and allow major renewable energy investments to proceed.”

The American order from Sempra U.S. Gas & Power that was announced Tuesday is for 39 units of Vestas’ V110-2.0 MW turbine, to be deployed in the Black Oak Getty wind farm in Stearns County, Minn.

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