Marand joins Vestas at Geelong wind turbine hub

MARAND Precision Engineering has seen the way the winds are blowing and has signed onto be part of Vestas’ wind turbine manufacturing facility at the former Ford factory in Geelong.

Announced by the state government last year, the Vestas Renewable Energy Hub (VREH) will build turbines for the 180 megawatt (MW) Berrybank Wind Farm and the 336MW Dundonnell Wind Farm.

Premier Daniel Andrews and Minister for Energy Lily D’Ambrosio visited the former Ford factory last week to launch the partnership between Marand and Vestas on the VREH.

The hub, which will occupy about 3,000 square metres of the factory, will directly employ about 20 people, train at least 20 wind turbine technicians per year (in association with Federation University) and work with Carbon Nexus on the next generation of carbon fibre for wind turbines.

The Berrybank and Dundonnell projects were supported by the state government’s Victorian Renewable Energy Project’s reverse auction.

Mr Andrews said VREH would see wind turbines manufactured in Victoria for the first time in a decade.

“Manufacturing has always been a big part of Geelong’s story, and we’re very proud to know that we’re playing our part as a significant element of this region’s future.”

Marand is already based at the factory, working on projects including the Joint Strike Fighter, and chief executive officer Rohan Stocker said wind turbines were “future-orientated business” for the company.

“The type of work that will be done here is very similar to work Marand has been doing for a long time.”

Vestas country head for Australia and New Zealand Peter Cowling said the new recruits from Marand would travel to Denmark for training.

He said lack of certainty in energy policy had prevented a facility such as VREH from being built.

“We actually tried, 10 years ago – we built a blade factory down in Portland, and soon after that, federal policy ended and we had to see off that workforce.

“The nice thing about this is that we’ve got enough certainty to get this amount of manufacturing going, and we’re very hopeful that if there’s future rounds of the auction, we’ll be able to expand that and expand the skills base.”