Operations
Vestas has installed over 41,000 wind turbines for a capacity of just under 40 GW in 63 countries on five continents. The company employs more than 22,000 people globally, and has built production facilities in more than 12 countries, among them China, Spain and the United States.
In China, Vestas employs 2,600 people.
The company's North American headquarters was relocated in 2002 from Palm Springs, California to Portland, Oregon. On 1 December 2008 Vestas announced plans to expand its North American headquarters in Portland through construction of a 600,000-square-foot (56,000 m2) new building, but this plan was mothballed in 2009 due to the economic recession, and in August 2010 the company announced a revised plan, scaled back in size, to expand its Portland headquarters by renovating an existing-but-vacant 172,000 sq ft (16,000 m2) building. At that time, Vestas employed about 400 in Portland and committed to add at least 100 more employees there within five years; the new building will have space for up to 600 workers. The company moved its Portland offices to the new headquarters building, a renovated historic building, in May 2012.
Vestas employs a further 750 persons at a blade manufacturing facility in Windsor, Colorado, and plans to add 1400 jobs at a new blade and nacelle assembly facility that is under construction near Brighton, Colorado, and up to 125 engineers at a 47,675 sq ft (4,429.2 m2) product development site in Louisville, Colorado. Vestas also operates a tower facility in Pueblo, Colorado. Vestas said it decided to build its North American production facilities in Colorado because of the state’s central location, extensive transportation infrastructure and rail system, existing manufacturing base, and skilled workforce. Vestas wind turbine blades are made from high strength, light weight carbon fiber supplied by Zoltek Companies Inc. in St. Louis, MO.
In January 2012, the company threatened to fire 1,600 out of 3,000 U.S. workers if the U.S. doesn’t renew the 2.2 cents-per-kilowatt-hour Production Tax Credit, scheduled to expire at the end of 2012.
On 13 August 2012, an estimated 90 workers were laid off from the Pueblo facility. Six long colored lines, leading to an exit, had been placed on the floor. Those laid off were given one of six different colored papers, and then instructed to follow the colored line that matched the colored paper they had been given.
Read more about this topic: Vestas
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)