Contractor Awarded for New Wind Turbine Components Plant in Kansas

Gray Construction Company (Lexington, Kentucky) was selected to provide general construction services for a $30 million to $50 million grassroot wind turbine components manufacturing plant for Siemens AG (Munich, Germany) in Hutchinson, Kansas.

According to Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, TX), groundbreaking occurred in September for a 300,000 sq ft to 330,000 sq ft building to be built on a 108 acre site in the Salt City Business Park. The building will include an 80,000 sq ft nacelle service facility. The main building will be divided among one large building and two smaller ancillary buildings. The plant will manufacture wind turbine nacelles ? the large, RV-sized structures on the top of the towers that contain the generators, gears, and electrical systems. The plant also will manufacture hubs for wind turbines, which are the parts to which the blades connect.

The new facility will allow Siemens to meet stronger demand for wind turbine production in North America. Construction is anticipated to begin before the end of the year, with building construction ending by the early summer of 2010. Overall production startup is planned by the fall of 2010. Approximately 400 jobs will be created.

Gray Construction Company was among four general construction bidders for the new manufacturing plant. The others were Ryan Companies (Davenport, IA), Paul Hemmer Companies (Fort Mitchell, KY), and The Austin Company (Cleveland, OH).

Siemens AG, founded in 1847 in Berlin, Prussia, is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Siemens is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, with operations in the industry, energy and health care sectors. As of 2008, they consisted of 480,000 employees, with revenues of more than $110 billion. They are considered to be the world's leading supplier of products, solutions and services for the generation, transmission and distribution of power, as well as for the extraction, conversion and transport of oil and gas.