General Electric Co (IW500/6) plans to pay $1.65 billion to buy a Danish manufacturer of rotor blades, bringing in-house it’s largest supplier of those components, thereby signaling the industrial giant’s intention to expand its footprint in the non-carbon-based energy sector. It emphasized in its announcement that wind-power projects represented approximately 17.5% of all new electricity capacity additions in 2015.
LM Wind Power develops and manufactures blades and services, and provides logistics for wind-power installations; it holds 190 patents and has 13 manufacturing plants in eight countries, and claims to have produced more than 185,000 blades (approximately 77 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity) since 1978.
The manufacturing plants are in Denmark, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Poland, Spain, and the U.S. (Grand Forks, ND, and Little Rock, AR.)
“Increasingly, wind turbine innovation is driven by system design, materials science, and analytics,” according to Jérôme Pécresse, president and CEO of GE Renewable Energy the operating unit that will take over LM Wind Power. He predicted the “deep pipeline of technical innovations” made possible by the combination would reduce the cost of electricity, and help “sustain growth in the wind power industry.”
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