Jul 14 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Laura Snider Daily Camera, Boulder, Colo.


A wind turbine manufacturer with sales offices in Boulder has been ordered to pay its former Canadian employees the back wages they're owed, according to Prince Edward Island's labor department.

Entegrity Wind Systems, which operates two manufacturing plants in Canada, laid off 35 employees in June, the majority of its workers, according to a report by Canada's CBC news on Friday. Employees complained to the government that they had not been paid since mid-May.

The wind turbine manufacturer, which employed about 20 people in Boulder before the recent downsizing, was surprised by the sudden pullout of existing orders for their 50-kW wind turbines, which are larger than a typical residential system but smaller than commercial-scale turbines.

"It happened fairly quickly and some large customers who had gone part of the way into purchases of numbers of machines scaled back their purchases," Malcolm Lodge, chief technical officer, told the Canadian press Friday. "We had thought we would ride it through. We've now had to downsize the company a bit."

Officials from Entegrity Wind Systems could not be reached for comment by the Camera on Monday.

Since the end of 2008, layoffs have racked the wind energy industry as frozen credit markets and a lack of investors has shrunk or delayed plans for wind farms across the globe. In April, Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, which last year opened a blade manufacturing plant in Windsor, laid off nearly 2,000 employees in Europe citing a slowdown in orders.

Between November and January, a slew of wind turbine manufacturers shed employees in the states, according to the Associated Press, including 90 from California-based Clipper Windpower; 150 from North Dakota-based DMI Industries; 54 from Tennessee-based Aerisyn LLC and 131 Texas-based Trinity Industries.

The Dutch company LM Glasfiber, which manufactures blades in the United States, announced 80 additional layoffs last month after already cutting 150 American jobs in January and shutting its plant in Little Rock, Arkansas. And Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens announced last week that he will scrap his plans to build the world's largest wind farm in the panhandle of Texas, choosing instead to build three or four smaller projects.

If wind turbine manufacturers can hang on, business is expected to pick up as the economy recovers, according to a study released last month by Emerging Energy Research, which tracks the renewable energy industry. The study found that the rate of new wind energy being added to the grid has dropped 24 percent below 2008, but the authors also predict that the market will rebound in 2010 and make more large gains in 2011.

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