ECC’s wind turbine blade plant is designed to produce blades up to 65 m in length, positioning it to deliver blades for large-diameter onshore and offshore turbines.
Under the agreement between the City of Wisconsin Rapids and ECC, the City has agreed to sell a 39 acre area of land and a 54 acre area of land in the Rapids East Commerce Center to ECC for US$500/acre for the development of a wind blade production facility and associated logistics centre. The deal provides for at least $7.5 million in development incentives from the City, including site improvements, job creation cash credits, and additional cash payments.
“The process of working with the City and other parties produced a final plan that is dramatically better than the one with which we started,” says Jamie Mancl, ECC’s founder and President. “For example, our final requirements for land and investment by the City reflects newly-emerging market trends in wind – a greater emphasis on development of offshore wind farms, and the longer wind blades required by those farms; a stronger need for more flexible logistics strategies, including the use of unit trains for shipping finished blades for installation; heightened sensitivity to the environmental impact of blade production; and a substantially higher degree of automation required for future blade production. As we worked through these and other refinements, our vision for our WindFiber™ Campus, and the more than 600 high-paid, permanent jobs it will create, took final shape.”
ECC operates a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin Rapids to manufacture composite structures, vessels and processing systems for a range of ‘clean-tech’ applications, including wind energy system components, flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) equipment for power plants, and infrastructure for managing waste water and drinking water.