Maine Approves 800 MW Wind Farm, Ming Yang Lobbies UK

Allen covers Clearway's 800 MW wind farm in Maine, the state's largest ever, along with Suzlon's $1.2 billion project in India and Masdar's growing battery pipeline in the UK. Then Mingyang lobbies the UK's new Prime Minister to reverse its ban from British waters.

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Up in Maine this week... they picked a spot for a wind farm. Eight hundred megawatts. The biggest the state has ever seen. Hold that thought. Halfway around the world... India broke ground on something even bigger. And in between... a Chinese company knocked on Britain's door. Again.

Start in Aroostook County, Maine. The woods up there grow timber... and wind. The Maine Public Utilities Commission chose Clearway Energy to build eight hundred megawatts of turbines on commercial timberland in the rural north. Avangrid will string the power line to connect those turbines to the New England grid. Commission Chair Phil Bartlett says the project will save Maine ratepayers at least three hundred and eighty-seven million dollars. Two-point-four billion in economic output. Thousands of construction jobs. Six hundred megawatts stay in Maine. The rest goes to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. Five states... one wind farm... one forest.

Now fly east across the Atlantic. In Rochdale, England... Abu Dhabi's Masdar just flipped the switch on its second battery storage plant in Britain. Thirty-five megawatts. Seventy megawatt-hours. Enough to power thirty-five thousand homes a day. And it responds to grid swings in milliseconds. This is part of Masdar's one-billion-pound pipeline of battery projects across the UK. Three gigawatt-hours planned. One of the largest storage buildouts in the country. Wind needs a partner. Batteries are volunteering.

Now south... to India. Suzlon just broke ground on thirteen hundred and twenty-five megawatts of wind in Ananthapuramu, Andhra Pradesh. The investment... about one-point-two billion dollars. Sixteen hundred new jobs. Suzlon already has a blade factory in the region. Capacity... twelve hundred and sixty megawatts a year. And the company is training twelve thousand young people, including three thousand women, in green energy skills. India's wind sector just crossed fifty-eight gigawatts. It was twenty-one gigawatts in twenty fourteen.

And staying in India... Saudi Arabia's Alfanar Group just put one hundred million dollars into its Indian turbine subsidiary Senvion. Thirty-four million released this month. The rest in weeks. Senvion builds one-point-five gigawatts of turbines a year. Saudi money. Indian manufacturing. Global ambition.

Now... one more item. And this one has an edge. Ming Yang... the Chinese turbine maker banned from British waters on national security grounds... wants back in. The company had plans for a one-point-five-billion-pound factory in Inverness, Scotland. Fifteen hundred direct jobs. Eight thousand in the supply chain. Labour ministers shut it down in March. The Ministry of Defence worried about spying. European rivals complained about Chinese state subsidies. Now Ming Yang is lobbying the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to reverse the ban. The company says it can deliver "growth in every postcode." That phrase... is Burnham's own. A government spokesman says there are no plans to review the decision.

So what does this week tell us? Supply chains are going local. Saudi capital into Indian turbine factories. Maine insisting on new transmission before new generation. Britain locking the door on Chinese hardware while Abu Dhabi builds its battery network. The message is clear. Countries want wind power. But they want to own the pieces.

Watch for this. Permitting... not technology... is the bottleneck now