Wind industry still vulnerable to ‘bad batches’ of components – Vestas CEO

The Danish firm set aside €171 million in warranty provisions in the second quarter of 2023; a figure 39% higher than a year ago and which takes up a larger proportion of revenue – 5%, compared with 3.7% in Q2 2022.

However, the figure pales in comparison with the €1.6 billion that rival manufacturer Siemens Gamesa set aside for turbine failures in its most recent quarter, as the European giant has come under scrutiny over technical faults in its onshore wind fleet.

Vestas had experienced “major cases” of turbine failures in recent years, Andersen admitted. This included having to take 150 units of its V150 model out of operation after detecting faults in the onshore wind turbines in early 2021.

But Andersen insisted that the turbine maker has improved its practices since then.

“Has it been painful for investors to go through some of the cases we have spoken [about] since the major cases we had in 2019, 2020 and 2021? Yes, it has,” he said.

“Have we learned something from it? Yes, we have.

“Do we have a different goal for a firewall against components coming in and for our testing regime? Yes, we [do].

“But does that exclude [the possibility] that components can come that [are part of] a bad batch or something like that? That will always happen, and we have to get used to that. 

“That’s what you will see in other mature industries where they also from time to time have components that either fail contrary to the testing environment.”