Published: January 08, 2009 11:39 pm      

Gamesa: Bigger role for Ebensburg plant

EBENSBURG — As the Spanish wind energy company Gamesa prepares to make new and bigger wind turbines, its Philadelphia plant will downsize while Ebensburg expands.

About 180 of 700 workers at its Fairless Hills plant in Bucks County will be laid off, but some work will move to its plant at the Cambria County Industrial Park near Ebensburg.

“We are getting ready to produce our next generation of wind turbines, and they will be bigger than the models we first produced,” said Gamesa spokesman Michael Peck.

“The new blade of the new models will be too big to make at the Fairless Hills facility, but the $50 million Ebensburg plant is easier to expand and the structure itself is designed to accommodate manufacture of the larger ones,” he said.

Peck said the plan is to use the Fairless Hills facility to manufacture the piece of the turbine that sits on top of the base, while Ebensburg will manufacture the larger bases.

“The company considers its Ebensburg facility one of the finest in the world,” he said.

“Everyone’s moving to bigger turbines. We’ve been making the G-80 model at Fairless Hills since we landed there in 2006. That has a light blade. We’re moving to models that require a lot bigger (workspace),” Peck said.

Gamesa is stopping work on towers it builds in Fairless Hills and is negotiating for another company to take over that work.

The transition also means Gamesa may add additional jobs at the Fairless Hills location, and Peck said state financial support will not be affected.

“We believe that this is a complicated industrial transformation. We have to cross-train and retrain people,” he said.

“The economy right now isn’t running at 100 million miles an hour, but we’ll be investing both in Fairless and Ebensburg, and we do anticipate that we’ll be creating employment as we do this.”