AWEA - With Strong Funding Support, Nordic Windpower Focuses on Community Wind Space

Recent news coming from Nordic Windpower has shown the relatively new turbine maker on a steady course toward becoming an established industry player and also underscores how economic stimulus investments can create jobs along the wind energy supply chain.

Last summer the company announced it had received a conditional commitment for a $16 million loan guarantee offer from the U.S. Department of Energy under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Then, just last week the company announced it has raised $38 million in a new financing round led by Khosla Ventures.

The additional funds will support plans for the company, which has now sold 19 turbines, to double its staff of 30 this year. One interesting aspect of the funding, however, is that some of it will also go not only toward tooling its Pocatello, Idaho plant but will also be funneled down to its suppliers in order to help them enhance their facilities.

Meanwhile, on January 8 another two of the company’s 1-MW turbines made their way to what CEO Tom Carbone called “a true blue community wind project, in our mind.” The turbines will produce electricity for city of Union City, Ind., and its school system, helping to offset electricity costs.

“A large majority of the component parts are U.S. sourced,” said Carbone, adding that “it’s our ambition” to further develop its U.S. supply chain.

The location of Nordic’s plant even has meaning from a supply chain manufacturing perspective. Indicative of wind power’s ability to be a link between twentieth-century manufacturing and a high-tech, new-energy economy, the facility resides in a World War II-era industrial park where guns used on battleships were manufactured during the war.

For now, with its rather uniquely sized 1-MW turbine, the company is focused on the community-wind segment of the industry as well as what Carbone calls “distribution utility wind”—that is, projects located inside distribution systems so that they don’t require transmission interconnection.

But the company has aspirations to reach beyond this niche segment of the industry. The newly acquired funds, in addition to being tagged for growing the company with more staff and equipment, also will be used for enhancing existing technologies and even developing new ones. Nordic is working on a 2.5-3.0-MW turbine for the larger utility-scale space.