capacity for casting wind compo- nents, but after orders began drying up, it had to delay start-up of the new plant. “The business went into the tank
for domestic [wind production]. Ap- proximately 80% of the economic stimulus package that was designed to spur renewable energy has gone to offshore companies,” said David Neil, the company’s president, referring to a February report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Developers installed a record
amount of wind capacity in the states in 2009, but U.S. metalcasters saw orders for wind components drop to almost nothing. According to Furman, the turbines
installed in 2009 were ordered two years prior, so the inventory for the new capacity was already produced. But the Investigative Reporting
Workshop found several cases of wind farm developers in the U.S. receiving turbines, blades and other components imported from Europe and Asia the same year. The report also discovered that of the $2.2 billion of stimulus grants awarded to renewable energy companies, $1.7 billion went to for- eign wind power companies and $500 million went to domestic companies. (Table 1 shows the major manufactur- ers that installed wind turbines in the U.S. in 2009.) Furman argued the stimulus
grant helped companies like his—a Spanish firm with a North American division—stay afloat during 2009 and encouraged them to invest in American ventures. “We would have had a lot of tur-
In 2009, the U.S. installed a record 10,000 MW of wind power capacity, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
Table 2. Top 10 Nations Adding New Wind Power Capacity in 2009 Country China U.S.
Spain
Germany India Italy
France U.K.
Canada Portugal
World Total
34.7 26.5 6.6 5.1 3.4 3
2.9 2.9 2.5 1.8
New Capacity (MW) % of Global Growth Cumulative capacity (MW) 13,000 9,922 2,459 1,917 1,271 1,114 1,088 1,077 950 673
25,104 35,159 19,149 25,777 10,926 4,850 4,492 4,051 3,319 3,535
37,466
bines to store and people to lay off,” Furman said. “When the grant program occurred, we changed our plans for the next couple of years and reallocated
100 157,899
capital to the U.S. We are installing more capacity in the U.S. for the next few years.” Wind turbine production kept going
up, but the total number of jobs in the industry remained stagnant from 2008 to 2009, according to AWEA. The num- ber of manufacturing jobs went down. Metalcasters felt the pinch. “Our customers just had such a
glut of inventory they had to work through,” Bushman said. “We became a little busier in the fourth quarter [of 2009], busier still in the first quarter of 2010 and expect things to continue to pick up through the balance of the year, but we are at least a full step
Wind power developers are showing in- creasing interest in setting up wind farms offshore. These turbines are much larger than those found on land.
May/June 2010 Metal Casting Design anD PurChasing 41
Photo courtesy of REpower.
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