Siemens Gamesa calls for quotas on EU-made wind turbines
Manufacturer urges action to protect region’s sector against cheaper Chinese imports
The head of one of Europe’s largest wind turbine manufacturers has called for a quota on the amount of EU-produced turbines installed in the region, as the sector seeks to compete with cheaper Chinese imports and the bloc pushes for energy security.
Siemens Gamesa’s chief executive Jochen Eickholt told the Financial Times that if Europe was serious about its energy independence and the role of wind power, turbines should be considered as critical and strategically important infrastructure, with measures introduced to support the industry.
“If our product is critical to the infrastructure of our countries . . . then certainly, not for 100 per cent of the installations but certainly for a certain portion of the installations [in Europe], you need to have things in your own hands,” said Eickholt.
“That means there needs to be an element of knowing how to operate these things and manufacturing these things,” he said, adding that even if certain geopolitical tensions or supply chain disruptions happened, Europe would “perhaps not have the cheapest answer, but would have an answer”.
European wind turbine manufacturers have been struggling financially, cutting jobs and closing factories, even as the EU, under the RePowerEU plan, aims to lift the share of renewable energy from 32 per cent of total production to 45 per cent by 2030. WindEurope, the industry body, reckons wind energy capacity will reach 510GW, from 190GW now.
Siemens Gamesa, the third-largest maker last year by newly installed turbines, suffered a loss of €1.2bn in the nine months ended in June, 233 per cent more than the loss suffered in the same period a year earlier. It recently announced it was slashing 2,900 jobs, or 10 per cent of its global workforce.
The rising cost of key materials such as steel and copper as well as supply chain disruptions have all weighed on the European sector.
Manufacturers have also come under increasing pressure from Chinese rivals boosted by rapid wind adoption in their home country and that often offer much lower prices. Top Chinese manufacturers accounted for 53.5 per cent of new global turbine installations last year, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, up from 36.6 per cent in 2018.
Eickholt said there was “definitely a risk” that the wind turbine industry would come to look like the solar panel industry, where Chinese manufacturers dominate the market and the supply chain, a situation on which the International Energy Agency warned in its July report.
“You have to see that we are meeting Chinese competition across the global markets and also increasingly in Europe,” the chief executive said, adding that Chinese manufacturers often received “additional support, typically from national or regional sources”, and that their innovation spending was in some cases 10 times higher than the Europeans.
“At the end of the day, we feel that there is an imbalanced battle, or at least we do not have the same level of opportunities here,” Eickholt said. “We are asking for a level playing field.”