Excerpt, 3-page article
It was a scene familiar to many a Western labor activist: manufacturing workers in a developed country protesting in vain the outsourcing of their jobs overseas. Earlier this month, workers barricaded themselves in Vestas Wind Systems' wind turbine blade factory on Britain's Isle of Wight to try to convince the company not to shut down the plant, dismiss 425 workers and move production to another country.
The only unusual part of the story was that the outsourcing location was not a Third World country. The blade manufacturing jobs were headed toward the United States. The global wind power industry sees it as its most lucrative future market.
After an early lead in wind power generation, the United States was completely overtaken by Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, when countries such as Denmark, Germany and Spain subsidized the industry and helped it survive some very lean years. Now, those investments have paid off. Denmark's Vestas, which started making turbines in 1979 and has since increased its efficiency by 100 times, is now the world's largest producer of wind turbines.
Spain's Gamesa and Germany's Siemens are also big players in the industry. But the pace of onshore turbine installation in northern Europe has tapered off lately and the offshore sector is still in its infancy, plagued by technical and financial difficulties, so companies like Vestas are looking for continued growth elsewhere. With the Obama administration promising big investments in green energy, wind turbine producers see the United States as the key to the industry's future.
"The worst decision you can ever take as a CEO is to lay off people," said Ditlev Engel, Vestas' CEO, in an interview broadcast on BBC. "However, we have been producing turbines in northern Europe and shipping them all over the world. We are now ramping up all over the world to make the products there, and therefore, unfortunately, we cannot see how the market here close by can justify maintaining the present production. We are certain our U.S. initiatives will benefit Vestas for years to come. This is the best long-term view we've had on the U.S. market."
Vestas is rapidly expanding its production base in the United States, where it says it has created more than 1,200 skilled jobs. The company expects that number to climb to more than 4,000 by the end of 2010, if President Obama's Recovery and Reinvestment Plan is carried out. Vestas believes that the Obama-led push to more renewables will stimulate demand and re-establish the United States as the world's largest market for wind turbines. It hopes Congress will pass a national renewable energy standard that will stabilize the U.S. market in the long run.
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