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Blade firm chooses Mass.
| Division: | Investments in Clean Technology | |
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| Type: | Coverage | |
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Blade firm chooses Mass. Thursday, August 26, 2010 By Alex Kuffner Providence Journal Staff Writer
At a board meeting of the state Economic Development Corporation, he referred — not for the first or last time in public — to TPI Composites, the national manufacturer of wind-turbine blades that was founded in Warren, telling those in the room that day that he was trying to persuade the company to open a factory in the Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown.
“If we get moving, we could be building the blades here,” he said.
At a news conference Wednesday, TPI Composites announced that it will indeed open a state-of-the-art blade manufacturing facility in Southern New England. But it will not be in Rhode Island. Instead, the company’s new 69,000-square-foot factory will be located across the state line in Fall River.
“It’s a good sign for Fall River,” Mayor William A. Flanagan told a small crowd outside the building under renovation overlooking the Taunton River. “It’s a great sign for Massachusetts.”
But it’s somewhat of a disappointment to Rhode Island, where TPI was founded in 1968 as a maker of composite sailboats before moving into the wind-turbine business in recent years, supplying companies such as GE Energy and Mitsubishi Power Systems.
Before making their decision, TPI executives did talk to officials from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation about the Quonset Business Park, the 3,160-acre property that is seen as a potential hub for companies in the renewable-energy sector. Deepwater Wind has an agreement to lease 117 acres in the park, where the New Jersey-based developer plans to stage two wind farms that would be built in waters off the Rhode Island coast. Cape Wind, the 130-turbine offshore wind farm planned in Massachusetts, is also considering using Quonset for storage and assembly.
TPI President and CEO Steve Lockard said Wednesday that his company was attracted by Quonset’s waterfront location — turbine blades are growing so large that it’s easiest to ship them by barge — however, Fall River offered something the Rhode Island business park couldn’t: proximity to the company’s existing research and development facility in Warren.
The site of the new factory on Water Street in Fall River is only 10 miles from the Warren location. The Quonset Business Park, on the other hand, is more than 30 miles away.
“The main reason we decided to locate here was the proximity to our existing work force,” Lockard said.
TPI’s Fall River and Warren facilities will work closely together. The Warren office works on new blade designs and will build molds for the composite blades that will be produced in Fall River. Those blades, which will each measure 164 feet or more in length and weigh 20,000 pounds, will be built on a prototype basis. They will then be shipped to a wind-blade testing facility that is under construction in the Charlestown section of Boston to see whether they need modifications. The blades will only be put into mass production near the sites of proposed wind farms, because of the high cost of transporting them over long distances, said Ed DaSilva, TPI vice president and general manager of the Warren office. That was why, in 2008, the company transformed a former Maytag factory in Newton, Iowa, into a facility that builds turbine blades for land-based wind farms in the Midwest. The company, which has 2,500 employees, also operates factories in Ohio, Mexico and China.
If Deepwater’s projects or Cape Wind go forward, the company could further expand operations in the region. The Fall River factory will open early next year. It will initially be staffed by 30 people, but Lockard said that number could increase tenfold depending on the growth of the offshore wind industry on the East Coast and beyond. “We believe if we get this right, the whole world will be our customer,” Massachusetts Governor Patrick said of TPI’s move and the promise of the green-tech sector in his state.
The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center will award TPI a $250,000 grant that is contingent on the company maintaining a 30-member work force at the factory. Although the grant played into the company’s choice, it was not the deciding factor. Lockard said Rhode Island offered a similar incentive.
Keith Stokes, executive director of the Rhode Island EDC, said in a statement that TPI’s announcement is good news for the region as a whole.
“TPI’s expansion to Fall River demonstrates the continuing growth in the green sector within the compact Southeastern New England economy, which shares borders, work force and commercial assets,” he said. “As the green industry grows in this regional economy, additional companies are more likely to expand and relocate to Rhode Island.”
Lockard emphasized that the Fall River facility will not replace the Warren office. The company recently extended its lease in Warren, taking it to 2020. He said Fall River also will not take jobs away from Warren, where the work force recently expanded to 100 employees.
And, he said, there’s still a chance that TPI could open another facility in Rhode Island. “It’s always possible,” Lockard said. http://www.projo.com/news/content/TPI_FALL_RIVER_08-26-10_H0JM0VD_v15.246069c.html# |
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