Seasons Greetings from Gaia-Wind

December 23, 2010

First things first… Season’s Greetings to all our friends and those we have yet to make!

2010 has been the most amazing year for us at Gaia-Wind: at the beginning of the year we were feeling good; we were consolidating our place in the UK small wind market and were starting to make an impact overseas.

During the year we notched up a formidable number of successes. Here are just one or two:

• Early in the year we reached a manufacturing milestone with the completion of the 100th world leading, Gaia-Wind 133-11kW turbine at our plant in Randers in Denmark.

• We successfully completed the initial Factory Production Control (FPC) certification audit under the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC’s) new Micro-generation Certification Scheme (MCS). I was particularly pleased at the comments of Mr. Chris Jarvis, Principal Auditor, from The British Approvals Board (BABT) of the TüV SÜD Group, who said: “Gaia-Wind has a professional organization with a very professional approach to the manufacture of a good product.”

• Gaia-Wind then teamed up with Glasgow University to carry out research on small scale wind turbines. This found that crucially, larger blades were more efficient at generating electricity in lower wind speeds. This is important because while the giant wind farms are mostly sited on hillsides and coasts with little population – smaller wind turbines – serving farms and businesses, are in more populated areas with less wind.

• We announced in November that we are moving to a new, state of the art plant in central Glasgow where our aim over the next few years is to produce 2000 turbines per year. I doing this we will be creating and sustaining over 50 jobs.

• I was also pretty pleased to see a Gaia-wind turbine feature in a major BBC documentary on energy, with our end users clearly very happy with their decision. Click here for a link and forward to 52 minutes.

• We were also named Most Promising Emerging Business at the 10^th Anniversary Hillington Innovation Awards held at Hillington Park Innovation Centre in Glasgow. Gaia-wind was selected on their strong research and planning to grow the business both nationally and internationally. 

So now, as we look forward to 2011 we are excited and confident that we can match and even better those achievements. We will notch our 300th  turbine “on the ground” early in the new year; we will a fit out our new plant and recruit new highly qualified members of the Gaia-Wind Team to support a massive and speedy increase in sales and production. While we are doing this we will be expanding into overseas markets where we are already making progress, with Gaia-Wind turbines being purchased in Italy, Denmark and the US. And we will continue to play our part in the renewables debate and to help ensure that small wind has a role to play going forward.

Have a Happy and Prosperous New Year

Johnnie Andringa