Wind Power Factory Watch

August 16, 2007: DMI Industries announces that it is "looking for a few hundred good people" for its Tulsa, Okla., wind tower manufacturing plant.

July 18, 2007: Danish wind turbine blade manufacturer LM Glasfiber announces that it will open a manufacturing plant in Little Rock, Ark. that will employ more than 1,000 people.

May 2, 2007: U.S. wind turbine tower maker DMI Industries announces that it will open a tower manufacturing plant near Tulsa, Okla., that will have half a million square feet of production space and ultimately employ up to 450.

April 25, 2007: Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Acciona says it will open a turbine plant in West Branch, Iowa. The $23-million, 18,000-square-meter facility is expected to employ 109.

March 20, 2007: Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas announces plans to locate a blade manufacturing plant in the northern Colorado community of Windsor. The plant is expected to begin production in early 2008, to be capable of producing 1,200 blades a year, and to employ 400 people.

Wind power is shaping up to be a major engine of economic development in the 21st century, as America turns to clean energy sources to meet the twin challenges of global warming and steadily increasing electricity demand.

Regards,
Tom

Wind Power Factory Watch: DMI Hires for Tulsa

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DMI INDUSTRIES FINALIZES TULSA PLANT ACQUISITION
Wind Tower Manufacturer Begins Hiring, Plans to Take On Up To 450 People

West Fargo, N.D. (Aug. 16, 2007) – DMI Industries is looking for a few hundred good people.

The West Fargo, N.D.-based wind tower manufacturer is opening a plant at 15300 Tiger Switch Road in Tulsa, Okla. and expects to eventually employ up to 450 people there. The company needs at least 200 employees to get started, and is holding a job fair at the Renaissance Hotel on Tuesday, August 21 to begin filling positions.

“We’re extremely pleased to be in Tulsa, a community with a reputation for good, hard-working and dedicated people,” said DMI President Lars Møller. “We need a strong team to build state-of-the-art wind towers, to begin having a positive impact on the local and regional economies, and to continue improving service and lowering costs for our customers.”

DMI began modernizing its Tulsa facility immediately after acquisition, and it is expected to be operational in early 2008. In addition to the positive impacts of construction and trade jobs for the plant’s renovation, the plant will provide substantial ongoing direct and indirect economic impacts in the Tulsa region. When it is economically feasible, DMI also will engage local and regional suppliers to meet the plant’s day-to-day operational needs.

“DMI’s selection of Tulsa to expand its wind tower manufacturing is another great addition to our list of diverse industries,” said Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor. “DMI is well-positioned in its marketplace with a prominent customer base, especially as regions across the nation expand efforts to increase utilization of ‘green’ energy sources.”

DMI plans to hire the vast majority of employees locally, including welders, painters and steel plate rollers, as well as general management, supervisory, human resources and administrative personnel. Tulsa employees will be trained on site and in the company’s West Fargo and Fort Erie facilities.

In addition to the city, Møller credited the Tulsa Metro Chamber, the Rogers County Industrial Development Authority and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce with convincing DMI to locate in the Tulsa area.

“Today’s announcement takes another prime property off of the available list in Tulsa,” said Mike Neal, Chamber president and CEO. “It also is another example of the Chamber’s efforts to recruit progressive, high-quality jobs to the metro region. The economic impact of approximately 450 jobs with DMI will support an additional 540 indirect jobs in the metro region and generate a total economic impact of $157 million in goods and services.”

The Tulsa plant will feature half a million square feet of production space. With it and the company’s two existing plants, in West Fargo and Fort Erie, Ontario, DMI’s annual combined tower production will support more than 3,000 MW of installed wind project capacity, based on today’s tower and turbine technologies and designs.

The Oklahoma facility is the second new plant acquisition for DMI in two years. The company acquired its Fort Erie facility in 2005 and it became fully operational in May 2006. It currently employs 540 people in Fort Erie and West Fargo.

DMI, an operating company of Otter Tail Corporation, is a heavy steel wind tower manufacturer. The company also has capabilities to produce equipment for a wide variety of industries, including agricultural processing; ethanol production; oil and gas extraction, processing and refining; and water and waste water processing. For more information, visit www.windtowers.com or www.dmiindustries.com.

Otter Tail Corporation has interests in diversified operations that include an electric utility, plastics, manufacturing, health services, food ingredient processing, transportation and construction. Otter Tail Corporation stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol OTTR. The latest investor and corporate information is available at www.ottertail.com. Corporate offices are located in Fergus Falls, Minn., and Fargo, N.D.

Forward-looking Statements

Except for historical information, all other information provided in this presentation consists of “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These “forward-looking statements” are subject to risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, anticipated, or implied. The most significant of these risks and uncertainties are discussed or identified in Otter Tail Corporation’s public filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Otter Tail Corporation undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements.

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Jobs in Renewable Energy

Ned Sullivan provides some basic, but strategic, thoughts on "green collar" careers in a recent commentary on The Daily Green. He's right--one of the great unreported news stories about renewable energy is the difficulty wind companies are having in finding qualified people. For more information on finding employment in this booming industry, try the American Wind Energy Association's Careers in Wind Job Board.

Regards,
Tom

Wind Power Factory Watch

July 18, 2007: Danish wind turbine blade manufacturer LM Glasfiber announces that it will open a manufacturing plant in Little Rock, Ark. that will employ more than 1,000 people.

May 2, 2007: U.S. wind turbine tower maker DMI Industries announces that it will open a tower manufacturing plant near Tulsa, Okla., that will have half a million square feet of production space and ultimately employ up to 450.

April 25, 2007: Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Acciona says it will open a turbine plant in West Branch, Iowa. The $23-million, 18,000-square-meter facility is expected to employ 109.

March 20, 2007: Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas announces plans to locate a blade manufacturing plant in the northern Colorado community of Windsor. The plant is expected to begin production in early 2008, to be capable of producing 1,200 blades a year, and to employ 400 people.

Wind power is shaping up to be a major engine of economic development in the 21st century, as America turns to clean energy sources to meet the twin challenges of global warming and steadily increasing electricity demand.

Regards,
Tom

Guest Blog: Wind Power: A Shot in the Arm for Manufacturing

Sometimes overlooked is that wind energy is not only clean and renewable, it creates jobs as well.
By Elizabeth Salerno
Policy Analyst
(From the American Wind Energy Association publication Windletter, March 2007)

Across the U.S, rural towns and cities have lost economic ground from the decline of once-reliable and flourishing industries such as railroad and steel. Many of those towns and cities, though, are now seizing an opportunity to make a comeback.

As the wind industry grows at a rate of nearly 30% per year, the manufacturing and services that provide the foundation of the wind industry have to keep up. From Pennsylvania to Washington, from North Dakota to Louisiana, manufacturing facilities, each of which employ hundreds of workers, are popping up—all because of the demand for wind.

On-the-ground evidence

Although wind energy’s potential contribution to the nation’s energy needs remains huge, it still provides less than 1% of the nation’s electricity. Here’s the upside of that story, though: in spite of its relatively small share of the current energy mix, wind power is already proving to be a powerful catalyst for job creation in the U.S. Better yet, those jobs are usually in manufacturing, a sector often lamented these days for departing the country in search of foreign lands, where labor costs are lower. Wind is countering a trend in this sector, which lost over 2.5 million jobs between 2001 and 2004. Here are just a few examples of how wind has made an economic difference—and take note that these examples can be found all over the country, even in economically hard-hit regions once known for being bustling manufacturing hubs.

Clinton, Ill., was a thriving railroad town at the turn of the 20th century. Today, both the farming and manufacturing sectors underpin the town’s economic stability, and wind energy is doing its part. Trinity Industries, Inc., a manufacturer of tubular wind towers, this year is expanding and renovating its facility in Clinton. Pouring an additional $15 million into the plant, Trinity expects to add 140 new full-time jobs to what will become one of the largest tubular wind tower production facilities in North America.

Fairless Hill, Pa., is the former home of a 2,500-acre U.S. Steel site that once employed as many as 7,000 workers. Employment at the plant started declining in 1982, and steady downsizing followed through the years until only 100 employees were left in 2001. Then in 2006, Spanish company Gamesa Corp. started planting roots in Fairless Hill, building three brand-new facilities on 20 acres of the old U.S. Steel site. The facilities will produce wind towers and blades, and assemble nacelles as well. Putting over $34 million into the plant, Gamesa will employ over 300 workers there. That’s in addition to the 230 jobs Gamesa already provides at its facility in Cambria County in the western part of the state and its North American headquarters in Philadelphia.

Now jump to Grand Forks, N.D., a town devastated by a flood in 1997. Refusing to bow to defeat, the town put in place mechanisms to stimulate economic development, restore the tax base, and rehabilitate its way of life. A wind energy industry company was one that answered the town’s call. In 1998, blade manufacturer LM Glasfiber teamed up as a business partner with the town and has brought over 500 jobs to the town, adding nearly 100 in 2006 and 2007 alone. In 2006, Forbes magazine ranked Grand Forks 28th in the nation for “Best Small Metros in Business & Career.”

In Fort Madison, Iowa, meanwhile, a former Wabash National Corp. facility that once produced trucks until being shut down in 2001 is now being converted by German company Siemens Corp. into a wind blade manufacturing plant. The facility will eventually employ 200 people and will produce 150-foot blades for Siemens’ 2.3-MW wind turbines. With 500 jobs lost as a result of the Wabash plant closing, in addition to the thousands of jobs lost in southeast Iowa due to factory closings across the board, it should have been no surprise that job fairs held last December at two local high schools drew some 2,600 people, all of whom were hoping to land one of those 200 coveted, well-paying jobs at the new blade facility.

While the production of towers and blades obviously provides new jobs and economic growth, the wind energy industry extends far beyond those products. The industry also needs the nuts and bolts to hold together the ladders that go inside the steel towers, which support the nacelles, which house the gearboxes and generators—which in turn need bearings, metal shafts, brake discs, and pumps. Moreover, the large components that make up a wind turbine must be transported to the wind sites by trucking services that can accommodate oversized products; assembled on-site by skilled workers; and finally connected to the grid by electrical engineers.

Training a growing workforce

As the need for manufacturing and construction services expands to accommodate the rapidly growing wind industry, the need for skilled workers is also expanding. Educational institutions are increasingly seeing opportunities to meet that need.
In Cleveland, Wis., Lakeshore Technical College provides a two-year electrical apprenticeship with courses for students interested in wind systems. Lakeshore even provides a course in renewable energy interconnection, allowing students to understand the electrical equipment used in renewable energy systems and the application of the National Electric Code to these systems.

And for students wishing to continue their education in wind, St. Francis University in Pennsylvania is getting ready to offer a graduate business degree in renewable energy with a concentration in wind power, tentatively beginning in the fall. The program will include courses focusing on finance, marketing, environmental science, and project management, and will also have an internship requirement. Finally, with St. Francis developing its own wind farm (scheduled for completion this summer), students will gain hands-on experience working with wind turbines.

Meanwhile, individual wind energy facilities must train workers to keep up with demand. Suzlon Rotor Corp. broke ground in late 2006 on a facility in Pipestone, Minn.; to train employees needed for the plant, which will produce blades and generator cones, the company contributed funds to nearby Minnesota West Community and Technical College. The plant is expected to employ over 300 people.

Will America lose out on this opportunity?

The wind industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, and with the demand and need for domestic, clean and available energy sources only increasing, there are no signs of its slowing. The industry has already brought new facilities and thousands of jobs to help meet the needs of installing 2,000-3,000 MW of wind per year in the U.S., making wind the second largest energy source for new electric generation capacity.

The U.S., however, is not the only country that can build wind turbines. Demand for wind energy is growing around the globe. The U.S. installed the most megawatts in 2006 with 2,434 MW, but Germany, India, Spain, and China installed over 1,300 MW each—and over 7,000 MW in total—creating serious global demand for wind turbines. The U.S. already imports most of its turbines from Europe. India and China can build them cost effectively and, with growing demand in those countries, they may play a big role in production in the future. Competition for this attractive industry will be stiff.

In the wind industry, it is cost-effective for suppliers to set up shop near customers, largely because of the transportation costs that go with shipping the giant components. If the U.S. adopted a stable long-term policy to signal the nation’s need for clean and domestic renewable energy, U.S. wind industry manufacturing growth could be catapulted to a whole new level. A long-term extension of the production tax credit, a national renewable portfolio standard, enactment of a federal climate change policy, and Congressional leadership on expanding the transmission grid would each augment the economic and job growth we are already seeing today. And there are numbers to back this up: an analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists reported that over 300,000 American jobs could be created by a 20% renewable portfolio standard by 2020.

Just as wind’s energy potential has barely been tapped, we have only just begun to see wind’s potential to create economic benefits.

Copyright 2007 - American Wind Energy Association. May be freely re-transmitted electronically, for non-commercial purposes only, provided this notice is included. All other rights reserved.