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The landmark 750 billion-euro ($890 billion) pandemic-recovery aid will encourage Spain to invest more in clean energy. That could galvanize the company\u2019s recent pivot into sea-based power projects, said Managing Director Javier Herrador del Rio. With demand flagging for its military vessels, Navantia has branched into building the massive foundations for wind turbines that can stretch out of the water as high as a 50-story office building.<\/p>\n
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The comment underscores how companies across the EU are gearing up to take part in the bloc\u2019s biggest-ever stimulus package. Europe\u2019s leaders have said they want countries to spend a significant portion of the funds on making the regional economy more carbon-neutral. Navantia\u2019s green projects might become a test case for the program.<\/p>\n
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Spain and Italy are poised to be among the largest recipients of the funds and both countries are hashing out details of how to spend the money. The fiscal jolt is an opportunity for the Spanish administration to start investing in offshore wind farms in the northern Galicia and Basque regions and in southern Andalusia, Herrador del Rio said.<\/p>\n
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Naval shipbuilding \u201cis highly cyclical and even more so during such volatile times like we\u2019re living through now \u2013 when we exit one crisis and then fall into another,\u201d the managing director of Navantia\u2019s Bay of Cadiz Shipyard said in an interview. Rocky economic times limited Spain\u2019s ability to invest in new ships and forced state-owned Navantia into more manufacturing areas. Offshore wind became a strategic priority in 2018, he said.<\/p>\n
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The firm\u2019s fortunes have ebbed since the 1980s, when demand was high for made-in-Europe warships and oil tankers and the company employed about 40,000. While staff has since dropped to about one-tenth of that, it was still able to take on Saudi Arabia\u2019s 2018 order of five corvettes for its navy, one of Navantia\u2019s few major shipbuilding contracts in recent years.<\/p>\n
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While Spain was a global pioneer in solar and wind projects, the offshore wind-park industry is still quite young. Contracts Navantia has signed in the sector don\u2019t generate nearly as much revenue as building submarines and aircraft carriers.<\/p>\n
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Overall, companies globally are operating about 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, said Imogen Brown, an analyst at BloombergNEF, an energy-research firm. That\u2019s a fraction of the 611 gigawatts of land-based wind projects, based on data through 2019, she said.<\/p>\n
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Most of the turbines are in the North Sea, off the coasts of the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. The strong winds and comparatively shallow seabed have allowed major players such as Denmark\u2019s Bladt Industries and the Netherlands\u2019 Sif Group to anchor what are known as \u201cbottom-fixed\u201d turbines to the ocean floor.<\/p>\n
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Navantia has received commissions for 10 projects since 2014, including orders to manufacture several dozen bottom-fixed turbines for Iberdrola\u2019s 500-megawatt offshore wind farm in Brittany.<\/p>\n
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The Mediterranean Sea that borders much of Spain has relatively deep waters. That has pushed Navantia and other manufacturers, including Italian shipbuilder Saipem SpA, to shift their focus to floating wind turbines. But the technology is still incipient and there\u2019s not a standardized design, Brown said.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s only demonstration projects that have been commissioned so far,\u201d she said. \u201cWe think bottom-fixed wind turbines will still be the driver in the market pre-2030.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Europe\u2019s increased funding for clean-energy projects will help to bolster investments in technologies to improve floating projects, Herrador del Rio said at the company\u2019s Puerto Real shipyard near the Strait of Gibraltar, the strategic entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. That funding will eventually lead to building more wind farms off the Spanish coasts and in the Mediterranean Sea.<\/p>\n
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\u201cSooner or later it will become a reality,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m convinced.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2020 Bloomberg L.P.<\/em><\/p>\n gCaptain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The landmark 750 billion-euro ($890 billion) pandemic-recovery aid will encourage Spain to invest more in clean energy. That could galvanize the company\u2019s recent pivot into sea-based power projects, said Managing Director Javier Herrador del Rio. With demand flagging for its military vessels, Navantia has branched into building the massive foundations for wind turbines that can …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[3485,1498,2284,1099,1021,1596,2218,5127,1872],"class_list":["post-20003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-world","tag-aid","tag-eyes","tag-pivot","tag-power","tag-shipyard","tag-spain","tag-turbines","tag-warships","tag-wind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/14821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}