Siemens Gamesa, the largest employer in the Spanish wind market, has decided to close its Spanish Somozas (La Coruña) and Cuenca plants and will present a collective dismissal agreement for up to 266 employees (215 in Somozas and 51 in Cuenca).
“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,” says Lars Krogsgaard, CEO of onshore at Siemens Gamesa. “We have analyzed 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 4,400 of them in Spain.”
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 its inability to competitively produce larger-blade models demanded by the market. The company has no confirmed orders for the 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.
The Spanish market, like the global market in general, now demands larger turbines that the Somozas plant cannot produce competitively because its costs are higher than those of other factories, the company says. In addition, in the case of Siemens Gamesa’s larger turbines, which will see significant demand in the coming years, it would be impossible to produce them at the Somozas plant because of site’s logistic constraints.
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 a center for larger blade repair, due to site constraints.
