Vestas' win over rival Siemens in securing the landmark 2GW turbine order for Iowa's Wind XI project earlier this year boiled down to one factor, a MidAmerican Energy official tells Recharge: cost.
Iowa's MidAmerican, a rate-regulated utility owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, has been a hugely important customer of Siemens in recent years, building several gigawatts of new wind capacity using equipment made at Siemens' wind factories in Fort Madison, Iowa and Hutchinson, Kansas.
But
