(Bloomberg) — General Electric Co. agreed to supply 346
megawatts of wind turbines worth as much as 1.3 billion reais
($491 million) to the Brazilian renewable-energy developer Casa
dos Ventos.
The order was confirmed yesterday by a GE press official,
who didn’t want to be identified because of company policies.
Casa dos Ventos will use 216 megawatts of equipment at the
Sao Clemente park in Pernambuco state and another 130 megawatts
for the Tiangua project in Ceara state, according to Lucas
Araripe, the developer’s new-business director. Work on the
Tiangua project is expected to begin in the first half of the
year, Araripe said in a Jan. 9 interview in Sao Paulo.
Casa dos Ventos is negotiating another deal with turbine
suppliers for about 350 megawatts of turbines worth as much as
1.5 billion reais, Araripe said. Casa dos Ventos is the biggest
wind developer in Latin America, according to Bloomberg New
Energy Finance. It has more than 1 gigawatt of wind farms under
construction or in operation, and has sold 3.5 gigawatts of
projects to other companies.
GE’s turbine factory in Brazil is reaching maximum capacity
with the orders, according to Reinaldo Garcia, GE’s chief
executive officer for Latin America. The wind segment was the
fastest growing among GE’s business units in 2014, he said last
month.
Brazil has about 6 gigawatts of installed wind-power
capacity, according to the industry trade group known as
Abeeolica. That will grow to more than 22 gigawatts in the next
decade, said the country’s energy research agency, known as EPE.
Impsa Deal
Casa dos Ventos bought the Tiangua project from Industrias
Metalurgicas Pescarmona SA, the Argentina-based equipment
supplier whose Brazilian wind-power unit filed for bankruptcy
protection last year. That purchase came four years after the
developer sold it to Impsa, as the company is known.
The Tiangua project has a deadline to start operating by
February 2016. The Ventos de Sao Clemente project is set to
start operating by January 2017.
The Sao Paulo-based developer is seeking financing for the
GE purchase from Brazil’s BNDES development bank. About 80
percent of the project may be financed through BNDES loans and
tax-exempt bonds.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Vanessa Dezem in Sao Paulo at
vdezem@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Reed Landberg at
landberg@bloomberg.net
Jessica Brice, Will Wade