Deal Watch: Vestas expands Portland presence

Vestas expands orders and Portland presence

Until early December, the biggest news coming from Vestas Wind Systems, a Denmark-based windmill company with its North American headquarters in Portland, was that Washington state’s largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, had placed an order for 22 of its wind turbine generators.

Announced in November, the deal will add nearly $100 million worth of windmills to the 127 already online at PSE’s Wild Horse Wind and Solar Facility east of Ellensburg. When all 149 are up and running in late 2009, the windmills will be able to produce enough electricity to power some 70,000 homes.

But that order, one of Vestas’ smaller sales in the U.S. in 2008, was quickly blown to the side when the company announced it would be building a new headquarters for Vestas Americas in Portland, with a tentative completion date of late 2011.

Vestas revealed its plans Dec. 1 for a $250 million, nearly 600,000-square-foot, LEED platinum-certified headquarters (the location was undisclosed). Along with the new facility, which would consolidate several different operations now spread across the city, Vestas’ expansion plans would add 850 new white-collar jobs. The company currently employs about 350 of its 1,200 North American workers in Portland.

But while the company has created a name for itself in the Rose City and helped strengthen its reputation as a green giant, Vestas isn’t expanding in Portland entirely out of the goodness of its heart. City and state leaders have been working tirelessly on a package of incentives worth an estimated $30 million to entice the turbine manufacturer to deepen its roots in Oregon, first planted here in 2002.

Among the city’s proposed offerings is a $10 million loan, forgivable if Vestas follows through on its investment plans and promise of creating 850 jobs, and a $1 million break on systems development charges. And at the state level, Gov. Ted Kulongoski included a $15 million enticement for Vestas in his 2009-11 budget, which will drift onto lawmakers’ desks in the upcoming legislative session.                                             

JON BELL