Nordex starts the year with an increase in new business

At the start of 2004 customers from the Netherlands, Japan and Ireland have ordered a total of 21 turbines with a combined capacity of 38 MW from Nordex. Together, the three projects are worth approx. EUR 28 mn. "This means that our order intake is developing better than expected and that we have followed on from our success in new business in the fourth quarter. Above all internationally, we see clear signals that business, which has been difficult of late, is beginning to stabilize", says Carsten Pedersen, COO Sales and Marketing at Nordex AG.

The largest project has been ordered by Siemens Nederland N.V. Nordex is to supply and install nine large Nordex N80/2500 kW turbines for the "Hartel III" wind farm. The special feature of this project: first of all ten smaller turbines with a capacity of 500 kW each, which produced clean energy at this location in the past, have to be dismantled. Siemens Nederland N.V. is responsible for the turnkey realisation of the farm in the industrial port of "Europoort" near Rotterdam. This involves mainly the grid connection, substation, foundations and road construction. The final customers for the park are the Dutch utility Eneco Milieu B.V. and the developer Hartel B.V.

In addition to supplying the turbines, Nordex will also be responsible for servicing the machines in the first five years of operation. The advantage for Nordex: as early as 2002, the company also installed nine N80s and stationed a local service team in the grounds of a neighbouring BP and Chevron Texaco refinery.

The two orders from Japan and Ireland were for a total of twelve machines of the Nordex N60/1300 kW series. Nordex will be delivering eight of these turbines f.o.b. Hamburg to its Japanese partner IHI (Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries) in May 2004. The construction of the towers, installation of the turbines and local work will be done by IHI. The site of the "Muregoaka" wind farm is a 500 metre-high mountain ridge near Kogashima in southern Japan. The partner companies have already installed 20 machines of the same type in this region, which have proved successful in practical operation. In autumn last year the machines withstood the severest typhoon for 30 years without suffering any damage.

Highly dependable operation under extreme conditions was also one of the key reasons for the order from the Republic of Ireland. In April 2004, Nordex is to install four N60s for Greenoge Windfarm Ltd. at their site in the south-east, near Carlow. At an altitude of 430 meters, the wind speed at this location promises high yields and means that the requirements to be fulfilled by the technology are correspondingly high. For this project Nordex is also responsible for the foundations, the civil and electrical infrastructure and the on-site substation building. Nordex will also assume responsibility for the operation and maintenance of the windfarm in the first five years of production. This will be the second windfarm to be built by Nordex in Ireland and marks another important reference project. In 2003, Nordex successfully connected Irelands´ largest windfarm to the grid – the project “King´s Mountain” in Co. Sligo.