The Olympian, industry-building drive in the international wind sector that has led to a scaling up of turbines to current 15MW-plus models could be undercut as cost-pressured manufacturers find they can’t “capture enough value to reinvest back” into technology development for the future, the CTO of Danish OEM Vestas has warned.
Anders Nielsen believes after a decade of unprecedented market growth that turbine-makers need now to “focus on optimising existing product platforms to be able to speed-up and scale-up offshore wind efficiently”, but developers sticking to a “project-view” level strategy are damaging development of a supply chain on the verge of explosive expansion globally.
