Spanish company opens wind facility in Wisconsin

The new facility will also provide better access to North American markets for Indar Maquinas Hidraulicas (Indar MH), an Ingeteam company that designs and manufactures large submersible pumps.

Spain-based Ingeteam, manufacturer of  electrical and electronic equipment, has completed a $15 million facility in Milwaukee to manufacture equipment for renewable energy projects.

Construction of the 100,000-square-ft production facility and office complex began in April 2010 and reached completion in December last year. The company expects to employ about 275 workers by 2015. This will be Ingeteam’s first manufacturing facility in the United States.

When completed, the plant will focus primarily on the renewable energy industry, producing Indar wind power generators and Ingeteam converters, as well as solar power inverters for the North American market.

“After carefully analyzing our company’s needs, we selected Milwaukee for our new production facility because the city is conveniently located for distribution of our products and has a solid industrial base from which Ingeteam can source materials,” says Ander Gandiaga, Ingeteam’s corporate director for international development. “Milwaukee also has a labor pool experienced in electrical manufacturing. In addition, the area boasts prestigious universities with some of the highest-ranked engineering departments in the country that offer specific courses in renewable energy, which will be very useful when it comes to finding specialized staff,” says Aitor Sotes, chief executive officer of Ingeteam Inc., Ingeteam’s subsidiary in the United States.

Ingeteam already has an office in suburban Milwaukee that has provided operations management and maintenance services for United States wind turbine farms since 2008. In addition, Ingeteam has a sales office in Santa Clara, Calif., that supplies the market for solar inverters.

The Milwaukee plant will produce generators and converters for 1.5 to 5-MW wind turbines, and solar power inverters that range from 2.5-kW units for residential use up to 500-kW units for utility-scale installations. Later, the company plans to add a facility for system testing. In addition, the new plant is expected to produce motors, generators and converters for the other markets in which the company is active – railway, marine, combined heat and power generation, hydraulic equipment and the iron and steel industry.

Ingeteam www.ingeteam.com