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Spain’s Gamesa, one of the world’s top wind turbine manufacturers, said Tuesday it will triple its total investment in China by 2012 to meet rising demand for clean energy in the Asian country.
The company has invested a total of 42 million euros (54 million dollars) on facilities in China and plans to invest over 90 million euros between 2010-12, bringing its cumulative investment in the country to over 130 million euros, it said in a statement.
Gamesa forecasts China will account for over 30 percent of total sales compared to 15 percent last year.
“One of Gamesa’s goals is to cement its position as one of the top five players in the Chinese wind energy industry,” Gamesa chairman Jorge Calvet said in the statement.
China wants renewable energy like wind to meet 15 percent of its energy needs by 2020, double its share in 2005, as it seeks to rein in emissions that have made its cities among the smoggiest on Earth.
The country, the world’s most populous, nearly doubled its wind energy capacity last year with the rollout of 13.7 Gigawatts of wind assets, making it the largest wind power market in the world, according to Gamesa.
The company also said it had broken ground on its sixth manufacturing centre in China, a factory in the province of Inner Mongolia, one of the country’s leading hubs for wind power development.
It has another factory under development in Jilin province in northwest China and four manufacturing centre in the province of Tianjin, which is home to the company’s largest manufacturing base outside of Spain.
When the factories in Jilin and Inner Mongolia come online, Gamesa will have a production capacity in China of 1,500 MW per year.
Gamesa has 30 manufacturing facilities in Europe, the United States, China and India and an international workforce of more than 6,300 people.
Shares in Gamesa soared 4.62 percent to 5.44 euros in late morning trading, the biggest rise of the stocks in the benchmark Ibex-35 index of most traded shares which fell 0.35 percent.