Siemens Gamesa is to close two blade facilities in Spain and will present a collective dismissal agreement to 266 employees employed at the sites.
The turbine maker is closing its Somozas blade factory, in La Coruna, affecting up to 215 employees and a second facility in Cuenca, which carries out blade repairs, affecting up to 51 employees.
Negotiations with the local workers council are intended to start in the coming days, in accordance with applicable rules and regulations, Siemens Gamesa said.
The closure of the Somozas factory is a result of a lack of orders for the SG 2.X-114 model produced at the plant, and because it would be unable to competitively produce larger blade models demanded by the market, stated Siemens Gamesa, which also cited site and logistic constraints.
Specifically, the company has no confirmed orders for this blade model in Spain in 2021 and there are no plans to have any projects with this turbine in the future, as demand has ceased in Spain.
Siemens Gamesa said the Cuenca facility’s activity, which is reduced to blade repair, is not sustainable due to site constraints for larger blades and lack of competitiveness, plus a growing trend to replace rather than repair blades.
The company’s decision is in line with ongoing activities aimed at “improving competitiveness, in particular in the onshore wind business, and delivering long-term sustainable profitability”.
The company said it will “do its best to support employees and minimise the effect of the dismissals”.
The Cuenca plant, which is exclusively focused on the repair of blades, is no longer sustainable in an extremely competitive repair market as well as a growing trend to replace rather than repair blades. In addition, Cuenca is not sustainable in the long-term as center for larger blades repair due to site constraints.
Siemens Gamesa onshore CEO Lars Krogsgaard (pictured) said: “We urgently need to return to the path of profitability and the only way to do it is by applying measures such as these, and those ones already carried out in our onshore business in the last year and a half.
“We have analysed all the options, but concluded there is no alternative. These are tough measures, but necessary to put the company back on track and guarantee its sustainability and the employment of the more than 24,000 employees of Siemens Gamesa, around 4400 of them in Spain.”
He added: “We will do our best during the negotiations with the unions to support our colleagues through this transition and minimise the impact the decision has on our employees.”
A fifth of the company’s total workforce is based in Spain and it is one of the two markets (along with Denmark) with the most employees.
Siemens Gamesa said it is the largest employer in the Spanish wind market and leader with above 50% of market share, while its global engineering centre for the development and validation of onshore wind technologies is based in Navarre, where the company’s largest R&D centre is located.
The manufacturer also has nine factories for nacelles, gearboxes and electrical components with more than 1200 employees, across different provinces in Spain, responsible for around half of the global serial production of the new Siemens Gamesa 5.X turbine.