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Mukwonago company finds its place in the wind turbine industry

Journal Sentinel |Thomas Content|June 20, 2014
WisconsinUSAGeneral

Gearboxes can fail in their first three to five years if there was a design flaw, or within six to 10 years from general wear and tear. Each year a growing segment of the wind turbine market ages and gets closer to gearbox failures, Neumiller said. ..."We're seeing the wear-related failures now and our customers' failure rates are increasing rapidly."


After two years in operation, a Mukwonago wind turbine service company is outgrowing its factory and is planning to expand.

The company, privately held Gearbox Express, has grown to 17 employees and that could reach 25 by year-end, said chief executive Bruce Neumiller.

In addition, the company is planning to break ground this fall on a new headquarters plant in Mukwonago that would be more than twice the size of its current plant.

Gearbox Express was formed to remanufacture wind energy gearboxes, and have them ready for utilities to install when their wind turbine gearboxes wear out or fail.

With many wind turbines seeing failure rates accelerate, demand is good for Gearbox Express, which last month announced a three-year agreement …

... more [truncated due to possible copyright]

After two years in operation, a Mukwonago wind turbine service company is outgrowing its factory and is planning to expand.

The company, privately held Gearbox Express, has grown to 17 employees and that could reach 25 by year-end, said chief executive Bruce Neumiller.

In addition, the company is planning to break ground this fall on a new headquarters plant in Mukwonago that would be more than twice the size of its current plant.

Gearbox Express was formed to remanufacture wind energy gearboxes, and have them ready for utilities to install when their wind turbine gearboxes wear out or fail.

With many wind turbines seeing failure rates accelerate, demand is good for Gearbox Express, which last month announced a three-year agreement with Xcel Energy Corp. of Minneapolis to replace failing gearboxes at Xcel's turbines across the country.

Most of Xcel's wind power is generated from 201 turbines in Minnesota but it also has wind farms in Colorado. Xcel owns Eau Claire-based Northern States Power Co., a utility serving western Wisconsin.

The agreement also puts Gearbox Express in position to replace gearboxes on another group of nearly 200 turbines Xcel plans to install in Minnesota and North Dakota next year.

The Xcel contract comes on top of work Gearbox Express is already doing for Des Moines-based MidAmerican Energy and Portland, Ore.-based PacifiCorp., utilities that are owned by investor Warren Buffett, said Neumiller.

Gearbox Express has also worked on projects in Wisconsin, rebuilding gearboxes for turbines owned by We Energies at its Montfort wind farm in Iowa County. The wind farm was originally built in 2001 by a subsidiary of Enron Corp. We Energies bought the wind project in 2012.

Market research firm Lucintel is forecasting that the wind turbine servicing market could be worth more than $14 billion by 2018. Driving the demand is the need to service or replace key components including gearboxes, Lucintel said in a report last year.

Gearboxes can fail in their first three to five years if there was a design flaw, or within six to 10 years from general wear and tear. Each year a growing segment of the wind turbine market ages and gets closer to gearbox failures, Neumiller said.

One key Gearbox Express customer had 15 gearboxes fail during all of 2013, but has already seen 25 failures so far this year, he said.

"We're seeing the wear-related failures now and our customers' failure rates are increasing rapidly," Neumiller said.

The company is remanufacturing four to five gearboxes a month and hopes to be remaking eight a month early next year.

Having so many orders led the company to reassess its space needs and resulted in the decision to move to a bigger facility.

"We have to grow the business with our customers, so we have the ability to keep up with our big customers," Neumiller said. "That's been a pretty strong realization to us recently, that if we can't grow the business to keep up with our customers, we're going to have a big problem."

Earlier this year, Mukwonago approved up to $10 million in industrial revenue bonds, which Gearbox could tap as it works to become the first tenant in the community's new industrial park.

Neumiller said the company hasn't decided yet whether it will use the industrial bonds for its project, and added that the $10 million approved by the village would include not only the cost of the building but new equipment that would be needed to help Gearbox Express expand production.

Gearbox Express hopes to break ground this fall and move in by late next year. The company is initially targeting a roughly 80,000-square-foot building, but Neumiller said the property would have room to expand to 200,000 square feet.

The company's original business plan to open in Mukwonago was supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Wisconsin State Energy Program as well as Investors Bank and angel investors.


Source:http://www.jsonline.com/busin…

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