The original contract called for AMSC to ship core electrical components for Sinovel’s 1.5 MW wind turbines beginning in January 2009 through the end of December 2011. Under the amended contract AMSC will increase its core electrical component shipments to Sinovel in calendar year 2009 and 2010, and will complete all shipments by the end of April 2011.

The contract now includes a greater number of AMSC’s wind turbine optimised PowerModule PM3000W power converters, increasing the value of the wind turbine component contract by approximately US$20 million to more than US$470m.

“Sinovel has ascended to the top of China’s rapidly growing wind industry and continues to increase its market share and backlog,” said Greg Yurek, founder and chief executive officer of AMSC. “This acceleration of shipments to Sinovel was necessitated by recent wind turbine orders received by them for new large-scale wind farms in China. We anticipate that Sinovel will continue to grow rapidly throughout the next decade, which we expect will give rise to new orders for our core electrical components for 2011 and beyond.”

At the end of calendar year 2008, China had an installed wind power capacity of approximately 12 GW. In a recently released report, the Chinese Wind Energy Association cited ‘conservative’ wind power capacity target for 2020 was 108 GW and its ‘positive’ target for 2020 was 132 GW. According to a forecast by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), China will surpass the United States to become the largest growth market for wind power generating capacity in 2009.