Colorado’s diverse energy portfolio has played a significant role in making our state’s economy one of the fastest growing in the country. The wind energy sector in particular has helped grow the economy in Windsor and Weld County. Our office has led the fight in Congress to extend the wind production tax credit (PTC) to help manufacturing companies like Vestas that employ thousands of hardworking Coloradans. These are local, brick and mortar jobs at companies up and down the supply chain across Colorado. In addition to supporting Colorado energy jobs, the PTC is also helping ensure our state continues to lead the way in developing renewable energy technologies.

We worked to include a five-year extension of the wind PTC in the year-end bill Congress passed in December. That provision expanded the two-year extension we had secured during consideration of the bill in the Senate Finance Committee. We need to continue to work together to ensure Colorado’s diverse energy portfolio has the support it needs to thrive and provide greater energy security for our state and the country.

Check out the story below to learn more about Colorado’s renewable energy industry and the role it has played in recharging Colorado’s economy:

Greeley Tribune: Vestas' growth places Windsor on the map for clean energy industry
By Sharon Dunn
January 9, 2016

WINDSOR ­— Hans Jespersen marches through the Windsor wind turbine blade factory with authority as he dodges moving equipment, people and obstacles with the agility of a trained athlete.

He’s used to being a tour guide. As vice president and plant manager for Vestas, he is often called upon to bring dignitaries through the Windsor manufacturing plant as a hallmark of the renewable energy industry. His pace fast and concern for workers on high alert, Jespersen greets someone new with seemingly every stride. He traverses this factory — a round trip that spans a mile — at least twice a day.

“Of course, I’m an engineer, and I like to be on the floor and see what’s going on,” said Jespersen, a native of western Denmark who lives in Windsor. “We really try to emphasize: Get out on the floor, that’s where we create the value.

“It’s important to me. I have been in manufacturing my whole adult life, so the contact with people on the floor, that is what matters most to me.”

He came to Windsor in 2007 to open Vestas’ first manufacturing plant in the United States for the Denmark-based company. It has since become an anchor in town and in Weld County in many ways. Recent hiring at the company, as an example, has given displaced oilfield and construction workers a place to land on their feet.

Jespersen’s pace as he tours the facility is fast for a reason. Production has been moving at an almost breakneck speed for the past two years, as they work to fill multiple orders with a never-ending task of finding workers and training them to build blades that weigh 7 tons each.

In fact, Vestas has just come off one its best years yet — globally and locally — and certainly the best in the past five years; 2016 looks to see a similar trend.

“We barely hung in there in 2015,” Jespersen said of his factory’s ability to keep up with demand. “But we made it.”

For the first time since 2010 — when it produced enough turbines to generate 8,673 megawatts of electricity — the worldwide company surpassed 8 gigawatts in wind turbine orders this last year. That’s enough to power more than 5.6 million homes and is equal to about two coal-fired power plants.

In North America, the company’s order intake has never been better, and many credit the continued wind production tax credit in the United States for that success. In 2015, the company kicked out 2,868-megawatt-churning turbines, most, if not all, produced in the company’s Colorado plants. That’s a stark comparison to 2009 — a year after the plant opened — when there wasn’t one order for wind turbines in the United States.

“In many cases, we were sending blades right out from the plant (to the customer),” Jespersen said of last year’s production. “We’d like to have a little bit of a buffer inventory, but for a big part of 2015, I didn’t have that luxury.”

The Windsor blade factory produced its first blade in February 2008 and officially opened a month later. Two years later, Vestas opened a second blade factory and a nacelle factory in Brighton, and in that time also opened a tower factory in Pueblo.

In eight production lines, the Vestas plant today builds 49- and 54-meter blades for what they call their 2-megawatt platforms, filling orders throughout North America. The company’s Brighton plant is building blades for the company’s 2- and 3-megawatt models.

“But turbines, they seem to grow bigger so you never know when we’ll be asked to build” the bigger blades, Jespersen said.

The Windsor plant is now going through its fourth expansion. This latest, which extends parts of the factory to produce longer blades, will add 100,000 square feet to its footprint for a total of 650,000 square feet. That houses 1,300 workers in rotating shifts who run the plant 24/7.

“In many cases, the concrete was hardly dry before we had to make an expansion, and that is still the story for us in manufacturing,” Jespersen said. “More or less, we have been building here constantly.”

The expansion should be done now, but the construction schedule is slightly behind. He promises it will be done fairly soon. But, if the Windsor plant is charged with building bigger blades in the future, expect to see still more expansion, Jespersen said.

With orders soaring in the past few years, and the need to quickly ramp up its workforce, Jespersen said it’s been tough. Some shifts have been on mandatory overtime for months.

“We’ve had to work for it,” he said with some mild exasperation of finding the skilled manpower needed to build highly technical blades. “We don’t have much manufacturing here, but we have hired a lot from the construction industry. People come from all over. There are people who have never seen factories from the inside.”

Vestas’ presence in Windsor kick-started the industry in Weld, which is mostly known as an agriculture powerhouse. Economic development officials credit Vestas and its vendor companies for growing Weld’s manufacturing footprint.

“As they have come in, it actually has spurred more manufacturers to come here, especially on the supply chain side and also on the larger- scale companies, who are looking at doing big projects,” said Richard Werner, president and CEO of Upstate Colorado Economic Development in Greeley. “Leprino (a cheese factory in Greeley) says, ‘Wow there are operations in the county that are hiring hundreds and hundreds of people, and we can do that too.’ It provides another layer of confidence in the manufacturing sector.

“What’s really to the point, the resurgence of Vestas over the past couple of years has been fantastic. They’re expanding; you can’t drive by the Windsor plant without seeing them add on to something.”

Stacy Johnson, economic development director for the town of Windsor, agreed: “Vestas put not only Windsor but the state of Colorado on the map for clean energy, but globally, it put a big bullseye on Windsor (and the Great Western Industrial Park). They were huge in spurring growth in that park.”

While 2014 and ’15 ran at a feverish pace, 2016 probably won’t slow down much, as workers try to keep pace with orders made last year. Mandatory overtime should come to an end in January as the company is more fully staffed.

“We constantly have to look for improvements,” Jespersen said. “And not at the expense of wearing out our staff. It’s the old term, ‘work smarter, not harder.’

“It takes a lot of skill sets in building blades, to get all these many people to be precise in what they do,” Jespersen said. “The distance between success and failure can often be not that big. 2016 will be about perfection and getting up to the surface again.”