Vestas to Build a New Tower Plant in Colorado

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I’ve written before about Vestas, a Danish wind turbine manufacturer that built a blade facility in Windsor, CO about 10 miles from where I live. I was out flying around the other day and took an aerial photo of the plant and found that they had more than 70 blades on their property. I was impressed because they hadn’t even broken ground at this time last year and they are already up and producing blades. They had started out with a planned capacity of 1200 blades per year, but announced a 50% expansion while the plant was still under construction. They feel as if the U.S. will continue forward with wind development, despite our government’s reluctance to commit to a long-term strategy when it comes to renewable energy.

The amount of energy that this blade plant produces annually will generate enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes. I computed this by de-rating the 600 sets of blades to 1/3 of their 2 MW nameplate capacity. This is similar to the amount of power generated annually from a conventional coal-fired power plant.

I subscribe to a Google Alert for news on Vestas, and on Friday morning I found out that Vestas will be building a new facility in Colorado to manufacture steel towers for their turbines. The facility will employ 400 people and be capable of producing 900 towers per year. They didn’t specify a location, but according to the Northern Colorado Business Report, it appears that several communities in Northern Colorado are under consideration.

3 thoughts on “Vestas to Build a New Tower Plant in Colorado

  1. That’s great news!

    How high do you fly when you do sightseeing?

    I wonder if the workers at Vestas ever wonder what the backwards flying airplane that buzzes them every once in a while is…

  2. I haven't heard where the tower plant will go. It was disappointment to hear that the Vestas R&D facility will go to Houston instead of Colorado. That was announced on Monday.

    Pueblo was supposed to be in the running for the blade plant but lost out to Windsor. Pueblo has a struggling steel plant, so I don’t know if that will work for or against it as a candidate for making steel towers.

    Dave Packard was born and grew up in Pueblo and when it came time to find a place in Colorado to locate the first HP plant outside of California, he decided that Loveland looked like a better location than Pueblo.

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