Gamesa Strikes Major Wind Turbine Deal in Finland

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) - Spanish energy major, Gamesa Corporation S.A. (MCE:GAM) (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) has secured a 285-megawatt (MW) wind turbine framework agreement with Finnish joint venture TuuliWatti Oy (Helsinki, Finland).

The contract is for 57 of Gamesa's G128 and G132 5 MW turbines to be supplied in 2015 and 2016 for numerous onshore windfarms currently under development. TuuliWatti Oy is a wind energy joint venture between Finnish energy company, St1 Oy and the national retail cooperative, S-Group. Gamesa has also been contracted to provide the operations and maintenance (O&M) services for 10 years. The 5 MW turbines, which are specifically designed to withstand colder climates, will be the most powerful installed in the Finnish market, Gamesa claimed.

This is the second major sale to TuuliWattiin less than a year. The company has already been contracted to supply 135 MW of various turbines. It includes orders for 18 MW of its 4.5 MW turbines to the Simo windfarm; 54 MW and 32 MW of the 4.5 MW turbines for the Pori and Tornio facilities, respectively, both of which are already under construction. Three 5 MW turbines will be shipped to a windfarm in Salo, southern Finland, next year.

"The 5 MW platform, one of the most powerful in the onshore segment, evolves from the 4.5 MW platform and caters to the most complex wind farm developments in terms of competitiveness and cost of energy," said Ricardo Chocarro, Gamesa's CEO for Europe and RoW.

Gamesa has been aggressively targeting the Scandinavian market in the past year, with footholds in Sweden and Finland. The company believes that the growth prospects for the Finnish market in the coming years are among the highest in Europe. In March 2011, Finland passed a favourable feed-in tariff (FiT) regime, designed to enable the country to reach its target of 2,500 MW of installed wind energy capacity by 2020. Today, installed capacity in Finland currently stands at just 200 MW.

The new TuuliWatti deal comes just weeks after Gamesa deployed Spain's first offshore wind turbine off coast of the Canary Islands. The G128-5.0 MW prototype has a rotor with a diameter of 128 meters and a total height of 154 meters. In testing it has been successfully operated at full capacity, sending more than 1 gigawatt hour (GWh) of power to the grid and will be capable of generating enough power for 7,500 homes on the islands each year. For additional information, see October 29, 2013, article - Spain Erects First Offshore Wind Turbine .

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