Vestas UK chief says Britain must speed up windfarm construction

Rob Sauven, managing director of Vestas Technology UK, says turbine manufacturers are at disadvantage compared with those in China and Spain
Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 August 2009 14.25 BST
Wind turbine manufacturing will not return to the Isle of Wight before 2015 because the UK is not building windfarms quickly enough to justify it, according to a senior Vestas executive.
Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, the executive, from a UK division of the Danish-based turbine manufacturer, pointed out that other countries, such as China and Spain, require windfarms built there to use locally made components. Had such rules existed in the UK, Vestas's Isle of Wight factory – the only turbine plant in England – would have been saved from closure.
Workers were evicted from the factory today after a protest sit-in. The decision by Vestas to close its factory on the island, with the loss of more than 600 jobs, has become symbolic of the UK's failure to develop a renewable energy industry, despite the government's much-vaunted low-carbon industrial strategy.
Vestas has said it could restart manufacturing there in the future depending on how many windfarms are built in the UK. But Rob Sauven, managing director of Vestas Technology UK, said that this was unlikely to happen before 2015.
He explained that to be economically viable, a factory making components for windfarms typically needs to have annual orders for 1 gigawatt's worth of wind capacity, enough to supply 1m homes when the wind is blowing. If Vestas had a quarter of the market to supply wind turbines in Britain, the country would need to be adding 4GW of wind capacity every year to justify the company having a manufacturing base here.
But the UK has installed fewer windfarms than most other European countries, and is not expected to be building enough until 2015 at the earliest. Last year, just 0.5GW of capacity was built.
"In the UK, the industry is expecting to add 3GW a year by 2015. That is enough to be a very interesting marketplace, as long as it continues beyond 2020," Sauven said. "But the UK market is not currently mature enough."
The Isle of Wight factory, at Newport, had been making blades for the US market. As recently as last year, Vestas had planned to switch to manufacturing for the British market. But the credit crunch, which has delayed sustainable energy projects globally, and continuing problems in getting planning permission for windfarms in the UK, scuppered the plan.
Sauven also said that UK turbine manufacturers were at a disadvantage compared with those in countries that insist that their windfarms use locally made components. In China, for example, at least 80% of components used must be made locally. In Spain and Portugal, windfarm developers must show how many jobs they will create by sourcing supplies locally in order to get planning approval for their projects.
"There is a strong political will in most countries to favour local manufacturers," he said. "There may be global fair trade laws but China gets away with it."
A few windfarm developers in the UK have offered to source their turbines domestically in an unsuccessful attempt to secure planning approval. The Guardian has learnt that, two years ago, the German turbine manufacturer REpower offered to build a factory in Scotland to supply a proposed wind project in the hope that this would win round the planning authorities.
But they took no account of the offer and REpower dropped its plan when it became clear that the developers could not guarantee the work for the factory until they received planning approval. If REpower had waited until it had secured planning permission for the windfarms before it began building the turbine factory, permission would have lapsed before it had had time to supply the turbines.
Gordon Edge, director of economics and markets at the British Wind Energy Association, said that the UK's planning regime – and the fact that most land proposed for onshore windfarms is privately, not municipally, owned (unlike sites in Portugal and Spain) – made it difficult to make the creation of jobs locally a factor in giving a project the go-ahead.
The Crown Estate, the government body that is drawing up the licences for huge offshore wind projects, has dismissed pleas from the industry to require developers to use domestically made components.
Despite the closure of the Isle of Wight factory, Sauven is optimistic about the future and is overseeing Vestas's investment in a new £50m research and development centre on the island. The company has outgrown its present R&D centre, which employs 110 people. At least 50 more engineers will be hired for the new facility, which will be built by 2011 and has received a £6m government grant to find ways of lowering the cost of producing offshore wind energy.
Sauven said that the Newport factory would still be used to "stress-test" turbines developed at the new R&D centre. The tests put turbines through the equivalent of 20 years of the strain they would typically undergo in operation.
However, the relatively small scale of the centre is in stark contrast to the grand ambitions of Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, who last month announced plans to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Britain from the transition to a low-carbon economy.