GE Renewable Energy has called off plans to build a plant to manufacture offshore wind-turbine blades in Teesside, northeast England, with a spokesman confirming that its subsidiary LM Wind Power had not secured enough orders to justify the project.
The new plant announced in March 2021 was to be producing 107-m turbine blades by 2023, anticipating new energy projects in the North Sea following a $118 million U.K. government pledge to develop “wind ports” in the northeast as part of its economic development and carbon neutral plans. At its peak, the plant would have employed 750, GE Renewable Energy said last year.
The value of GE’s capital investment was not reported.
LM Wind Power is a specialty manufacturer of wind-turbine blades that GE acquired for $1.65 billion in 2017. It has other manufacturing plants in Denmark, Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Poland, Spain, and the U.S. (Grand Forks, N.D., and Little Rock, Ark.)
The power-generating core for GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X offshore wind turbines are produced at a plant in Saint-Nazaire, France, but the blades were to be manufactured closer to the intended installation – the wind farms installed or planned in the North Sea. Among these is the $3.98-billion Dogger Bank C wind farm, the third development phase for the world’s largest offshore wind farm with 3.6 GW of power generation capability.
The 14- / 13- / 12-MW Haliade-X units stand 260-m high and have a 220-meter rotor. GE calls the Hailade-X “the most powerful offshore wind turbine in operation today.”
