Vestas Wind Systems A/S and Siemens AG may end up with underused U.S. factories as cheap natural gas and a lack of federal support reduce wind turbine deliveries this year by as much as 50 percent.

By Christopher Martin

(Bloomberg) Vestas, the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, is spending $1 billion to expand annual production capacity in Colorado to 3,000 megawatts and hire 2,000 workers to sell and build turbines. Siemens plans to
open a parts factory in Kansas this year, and already manufactures blades in Iowa.

They’re betting that the U.S. will pass a law that requires utilities in every state to buy electricity from renewable resources. State support helped new wind farms match natural gas plant additions over the past two years even as gas prices sank 59 percent. Absent a federal mandate, wind turbine factories, touted as job creators by President Barack Obama, may sit idle.

“We see challenges ahead,” Martha Wyrsch, president of Vestas Americas, said in Dallas this week at the annual conference sponsored by the American Wind Energy Association, a Washington-based lobbying group. “Installations are down for this year.”

At stake are investments in factories that produce steel towers, fiberglass blades and turbines spread throughout the U.S. and employing more than 85,000 workers in the world’s largest market for wind energy.

Siemens, the third-biggest supplier to the U.S., said utilities are won’t sign long-term power purchase agreements, or PPAs, because of a decline in electricity demand and because natural gas plants appear to be a cheaper means of generating power, based on current prices for the fuel.

“We’ve taken a leap of faith,” Siemens Wind Power Chief
Executive Officer Jens-Peter Saul said at the conference. “There’s a lack of PPA’s available in this market.”

… the rest of the story