Pandemic slows wind energy
Firm’s pains emblematic of how coronavirus has disrupted supply chains
Even as businesses around the world shut down this spring, executives at EDF Renewables were hopeful they would finish installing 99 wind turbines in southern Nebraska before a year-end deadline. Then, in early April, the pandemic dealt a blow to the company.
A manager at a factory that was building the giant cylinders on which the turbines sit had died of the coronavirus, shutting down the plant and delaying EDF’s work by five weeks. That and other setbacks — including construction workers at the site in Nebraska contracting the virus — have hampered EDF’s efforts to finish the $374 million project by the end of the year. A prolonged delay could increase costs, threatening the project’s financial viability.
The company’s struggles are emblematic of how the pandemic has disrupted global supply chains and imperiled tens of billions of dollars of investments and millions of jobs, with retail stores and oil and gas companies among those hit hardest. But EDF’s challenges show how the pandemic has walloped even thriving industries like renewable energy.
The American Wind Energy Association estimates that the pandemic could threaten a total of $35 billion in investment and about 35,000 jobs this year. The losses could grow if the coronavirus continues to disrupt the economy well into next year.
On March 13, EDF was preparing the site to receive three dozen blades that harness the wind.
These are some of the first components the company had expected to arrive in Milligan, Nebraska, less than an hour southwest of Lincoln.
But three days before the blades were scheduled to ar rived, Dwynne Igau, an EDF planning and construction manager in charge of the project, received worrying news: one of her workers had taken ill. Igau called off the delivery and ordered about 30% of her crew into quarantine.
According to EDF, at least three workers tested positive for the virus this year. Several people who worked as contractors and equipment suppliers have also gotten sick.
“We didn’t really think it would spread that much and that fast,” said Gilles Gaudreault, a transport and logistics manager who also oversees the project.
The blades that were delayed in mid-March were on their way from China and sat for days at a railway yard in central Nebraska. But that delay was hardly the last of Igau’s problems.
Another set of blades, from India, were delayed when the government there closed a factory because of an outbreak.
The plant eventually reopened, but the shutdown had a lasting impact, and the last seven of those blades arrived last week at a Houston port.
But it wasn’t just the cylinders that Igau had to worry about. She was also having trouble securing blades for her turbines.
Supplies of balsa wood, a major component of wind turbine blades, became scarce this spring because about 95% of it comes from Ecuador, which was overwhelmed by the pandemic.
At one point, so many people were dying there that bodies wrapped in plastic bags lay in the streets.
With just over two months left in the year, the first five turbines started spinning last week, giving EDF some hope that it will meet its deadline. But the number of coronavirus cases are on the rise across the country, and flu season is beginning, leaving executives uncertain.
“Every day something could happen on site that means our entire team could go into quarantine,” Igau said. “I don’t know how we will finish by the end of the year.”