Only three or four wind turbine manufacturers will survive in the Brazilian market in the long term, Gamesa’s Edgard Corrochano tells Recharge.
“With a 2GW-a-year market, the most logical thing would be for three to four — most likely three — manufacturers to stay in the market, and we will be one of them,” he says. To make the grade, he believes “you need decent volumes, and we have that, along with maybe two more”.
Gamesa has won big in Brazilian power tenders over the past few years. Corrochano, the company’s director for the Southern Cone region, says it did “pretty well” in the wind reserve auction last month.
He will not confirm the amount of megawatts the company won, citing confidentiality agreements. But Recharge has learned that companies that registered to use Gamesa turbines won at least 462MW in the latest tender — significantly more than any other manufacturer in Brazil — from Enel, Casa dos Ventos, CER and Chesf/Sequóia.
Gamesa had already won more than 600MW from previous tenders between 2009 and 2011. Corrochano says it is also confident of adding more volume in the A-5 auction in December.
To meet the new orders and to comply with more stringent local-content requirements set by national development bank BNDES, Gamesa is significantly expanding its factory in Bahia state. Corrochano will not reveal by how much this will increase the plant’s present nameplate capacity of 200-300MW per year.
However, he does say Gamesa is one of “the most advanced” manufacturers in terms of fulfilling the new BNDES requirements.....
Although Corrochano admits that it is hard to predict how market consolidation will play out, he estimates that “by 2015, a lot will happen”.
He says the August tender has shown more realistic prices, at an average of about R$110 ($42) per MWh. “You can see that when there is a decent level of power demand, the price comes up.”
Along with other industry players, he calculates that turbine prices have increased by 20-25% because of the stricter local-content requirements. ... However, on the positive side, by producing more components locally, the industry is less exposed to exchange-rate fluctuations.
All in all, Corrochano says last month’s reserve auction, where 1.5GW was tendered, and the decision to include wind in the A-5 tender will “bring the market to the 2GW level needed to sustain the industry”, and things “continue to go in the right direction” in terms of energy policy.
http://www.rechargenews.com/wind/americas/article1337040.ece