Winds of change picking up pace

Weekend Australian
Saturday 3/4/2010 Page: 4

SIX companies are going head on in a global competition sparked by climate change fears in which Australia offers a small, but valued playing field. The name of the game is wind farming, which has emerged from the past decade with a large ramp-up in equipment production despite the effect of the global financial crisis. The six leading companies are Denmark's Vestas, the US's General Electric, Spain's Gamesa, India's Suzlon and two companies based in Germany, Enercon and Siemens.

All are prizewinners and any of them can grab the biggest share of a market that is worth more than $US60 billion ($65.5bn) a year and is set to double by 2014 and again by about 2020. Australia has more than $20bn worth of skin in this competition, according to the latest government estimates of investment plans.

However, these developments are intended to be spread over 10 years. On present estimates, wind power could account for 10% of total global electricity output in 2020. Well out in front of the manufacturers' race today is Vestas, with more than 33,000 units installed in 63 companies, solidly ahead of GE, the next largest. Vestas claims it installs a wind turbine somewhere in the world every four hours.

Industry attention, however, is on Siemens, which claims it passed Suzlon into fifth spot last year data is still being gathered across the world and says it aims to be third among wind turbine makers in 2012. Already the German engineering giant, a leader in other energy manufacturing sectors, has claimed first place in delivery of offshore turbines, the new growth area for the industry, and is building wind equipment factories in the US and China. It also plans to erect plants in India.

China is the fastest growing market for the wind turbine manufacturers; it has jumped to fourth place in installed wind farm capacity behind the US, Germany and Spain, increasing development tenfold in four years. India, meanwhile, has moved to fifth place on the global wind development table. Still well behind these countries, Brazil, with a strong wind resource and 196 million people needing electricity, is tipped to become another big developer of the technology this decade.

Vestas is a substantial investor in wind factories in China, but its main target in the past few years is the US, where it has spent $US1bn on building factories. While ahead of Vestas in the US, where it has 40% of the market, GE is highly active in China, Europe and India. Spain's Gamesa, with a strong home base, is also hard at work pursuing market share in China and India.

Enercon, which is active in Australia, made headlines last year when it erected 6MW turbines at a wind farm in Belgium, the most powerful generating units by far in the industry. The company has strong footholds in North America and India as well as plants in Brazil, Sweden, Portugal and Turkey. The big six do not have the market to themselves. They are being strongly pursued by Sinovel, the Chinese manufacturer, which has had a meteoric entry to the field in the past decade, carried along by the growth of its domestic market and a burgeoning R&D facility.