Siemens Power Generation announced August 17 that it has selected Fort Madison, Iowa, for its U.S. wind turbine blade manufacturing site. The manufacturing facility will be established in an existing 20,000-square-meter building complex on more than 50 hectares in Lee County, which is located in the southeastern area of the state. The facility is expected to employ an estimated 250 people. This new manufacturing facility in Fort Madison will allow Siemens to better meet the strong U.S. demand for wind power generators in the future.
“This will be Siemens’ first blade factory in the U.S. and will further expand the capacities of our worldwide manufacturing network,” said Randy Zwirn, president and CEO of Siemens Power Generation, Inc. and member of the PG Group Executive Management. “Since the initial acquisition of Bonus Energy A/S in 2004, we expanded our existing blade plant in Aalborg / Denmark, opened an additional factory in Denmark, and now this is another important step in our strategy to build our presence in the wind energy business, and serve growing markets. By expanding our wind power manufacturing capacity in the U.S., we will substantially increase our ability to competitively serve this important market, which is projected to triple by the year 2020."
The Fort Madison facility will be upgraded and expanded in order to more suitably meet the needs of the company’s wind turbine business. The first blades to be manufactured at the Fort Madison facility will be for the company’s 2.3-MW wind turbines. Series production of rotor blades for wind turbines is scheduled to start in Fort Madison in the first half of 2007.
Due to the site’s close proximity to water, rail and road transportation options, and its central location in the United States it is ideal for wind turbine blade manufacturing, with the massive size of the blades and the transportation logistics involved.
With the U.S. Department of Energy’s goal of obtaining six percent of U.S. electricity from wind by 2020 and the growing public demand for clean energy, it is expected that wind energy will contribute an increasing amount of the nation’s energy supply.
The Power Generation Group (PG), a unit of Siemens AG, is one of the premier entities in the international power generation sector.
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