Vestas to lay off 450 workers across its Colorado factories

Vestas Blades America is consolidating its Colorado operations and cutting a total of 450 positions across its factories in the state because of lower market demand.

The company, a subsidiary of Vestas Winds Systems, said Wednesday that it will shut down the construction of wind turbine blades at its plant in Brighton to consolidate the production at its plant in Windsor. Altogether, 280 jobs will be eliminated in Brighton.

Vestas said in a statement that it also will cut a total of about 170 jobs at the Pueblo Towers factory and the Brighton nacelles factory.

“Out of the 450 colleagues, Vestas expects to offer new roles in other parts of the business to approximately 150 impacted colleagues,” the company said.

The Brighton Blades plant will house the company’s North American headquarters for its global tooling business, now at six smaller sites. In November, Vestas announced that it was laying off 185 workers in Brighton.

Tommy Rahbek Nielsen, Vestas’ chief operating officer, said the U.S. wind energy industry has grown tremendously in recent years.

“With a larger fleet under service and lower demand in the near term, we are therefore consolidating our setup in Colorado to ensure we can cater to our service business’ needs and are structured in the right way to ramp up efficiently once wind turbine demand requires us to,” Nielsen said.

Vestas, based in Denmark, employs more than 29,000 people globally, 4,500 of whom are in the U.S.