German business daily Handelsblatt carried a report on Sept. 17 that Siemens Energy’s wind power division, Siemens Gamesa, which is one of the largest worldwide producers of wind turbines for offshore farms, had stopped selling and accepting orders for them. Siemens Energy “denied” the report in a statement to a website called Recharge, saying “Our absolute priority is to revise [fix] the affected systems in existing customer projects.”
But this denial sounded a lot like an admission. These Siemens-produced wind turbines have been breaking down, or having system parts fail, very early in their operating lifetimes, causing Siemens Gamesa to take write-downs and losses and its stock to plunge over the past two months.
