Mitsubishi put £100m into UK wind project

Mitsubishi Power Systems

The UK's wind energy industry received a major boost from a somewhat unexpected source this morning after Japan's Mitsubishi Power Systems, one of the world's leading turbine manufacturers, announced plans to invest up to GBP£100m in a new wind turbine R&D project.

This is just the latest in a string of developments that are helping the UK achieve its goal of becoming a green manufacturing hub.

The GBP£100 million being spent on building a new factory in the north-east comes as Germany-based Siemens acquired a stake of UK tidal energy firm Marine Current Turbines. This is in addition to the announcement that FCC, an environmental services, infrastructure and energy group based in Spain, said it planned to spend another GBP£100m building wind turbines on some of the dozens of waste recycling plants it controlled in Britain through a local subsidiary.

Clipper Windpower of the United States have also made a similar investment to that of Mitsubishi's.

Global leader in renewables

All of this, insists UK Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Lord Mandelson gives the country a real opportunity of become a global leader in renewables.

"No country makes offshore wind turbines of the size we are talking about today on a commercial scale," he explained.

"We are creating the largest market in the world for offshore wind and we intend to build and support the industry."

The government, which will provide a GBP£30m grant to support the project, said that the move made the UK a "strong contender" to become a manufacturing base for Mitsubishi's wind turbine arm, potentially creating up to 1,500 jobs in the future.

"Mitsubishi's investment in wind turbine R&D and the creation of 200 highly skilled jobs is great news for our future plans in low carbon, high technology industries," added Lord Mandelson.

The "new North Sea oil"

Senior executives at Mitsubishi also signalled that, alongside the new research centre, the firm's Ship Building division is investigating entering the offshore wind turbine installation, operation and maintenance vessel market.

Industry insiders said that the latest deal is further evidence of growing confidence in the sector ahead of the new wave of so-called phase-three offshore wind projects.

British Wind Energy Association chief executive Maria McCaffery said the recent flurry of investment in the UK's offshore wind sector underlined growing confidence across the industry.

There is even talk of offshore wind becoming the "new North Sea oil"."

The need for this kind of industry move was underlined by Sam Laidlaw, chief executive of Centrica, who said that it could spend up to £7.5bn by 2020 on wind operations, but stressed the economic conditions would have to be favourable.

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Daniel Jones

Daniel is a Politics and Philosophy graduate from Cardiff University where he also worked as a section editor on the award winning student newspaper. After university he joined an IT support company where he was a B2B online writer. He loves anything to do with sport and joined GDS in July 2009.

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