Episode Details

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda break down the TPI Composites bankruptcy fallout. Vestas is acquiring TPI’s Mexico and India operations while a UAE company picks up the Turkish factories. That leaves GE in a tough spot with no clear path to blade manufacturing. Plus the crew discusses blade scarcity, FSA availability floors, and whether a new blade manufacturer could emerge.

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Allen Hall: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’ve got Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxum in Texas. And Rosemary Barnes is back from her long Vacation in Australia and TPI. Composites is big in the news this week, everybody, because they’re in bankruptcy hearings and they are selling off parts of the business.

Vestas is, at least according to News Reports positioned to acquire. A couple of the LLCs down in Mexico. So there’s uh, two of them, TPI in Mexico, five LLC, and TPI in Mexico, six LLC. There are other LLCs, of course involved with this down in Mexico. So they’re buying, not sure exactly what the assets are, but probably a couple of the factories in which their blades were being manufactured in.

Uh, this. Is occurring because Vestas stepped in. They were trying to have an auction and Vestas stepped forward and just ended up buying these two LLCs. [00:01:00] Other things that are happening here, Joel, is that, uh, TPI evidently sold their Turkish division. Do you recall to who they sold? That, uh, part of the 

Joel Saxum: business too, two companies involved in that, that were TPI Turkey, uh, and that was bought by a company called XCS composites.

Uh, and they are out of the United Arab Emirates, so I believe they’re either going to be Abu Dhabi or Dubai based. Uh, but they took over the tube wind blade manufacturing plants in Isme, uh, also a field service and inspection repair business. And around 2,700 employees, uh, from the Turkish operation. So that happened just, just after, I mean, it was a couple weeks after the bankruptcy claim, uh, went through here in August, uh, in the States.

So it went August bankruptcy for TPI, September, all the Turkish operations were bought and now we’ve got Vestas swooping in and uh, taking a bunch of the Mexican operations. 

Allen Hall: Right. And [00:02:00] Vestas is also taking TPI composites India. Which is a part of the business that is not in bankruptcy, uh, that’s a, a separate business, a separate, basically LLC incorporation Over in India, the Vestus is going to acquire, so they’re gonna acquire three separate things in this transaction.

The