From GE to Siemens, the wind energy industry hopes billions in losses are about to end
MOUNT STORM, WEST VIRGINIA – AUGUST 22: Turbines from the Mount Storm Wind Farm stand in the distance behind the Dominion Mount Storm power station August 22, 2022 in Mount Storm, West Virginia. The wind farm includes 132 2-megawatt Gamesa G80 wind turbines along 12 miles of the Allegheny Front. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images News | Getty Images
It’s been a tough couple of years for the U.S. wind energy industry. Despite mounting pressure to combat climate change by transitioning to renewable sources, a confluence of factors disrupted supply chains and upended the economics of project financing. Rising inflation and interest rates, the war in Ukraine, and reduced tax incentives have plagued wind turbine manufacturers and developers of both land-based and offshore wind projects.
Nonetheless, today there’s an air of optimism within the industry, driven in large part by billions of dollars in new tax credits and subsidies toward clean energy investments included in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Although 2023 is expected to remain sluggish, GE Renewable Energy, Siemens Energy and Vestas Wind Systems, the leading makers of wind turbines — outside of China, which has built the world’s largest wind energy infrastructure — and their suppliers are banking on growth over the next decade, particularly in the nascent offshore wind niche.
“The wind energy market is stuck in this very strange paradox right now,” said Aaron Barr, an industry analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “We have the best long-term climate policy certainty ever, across all the largest markets, but we’re struggling through a period where the whole industry, particularly the supply chain, has been hit by issues that have culminated in destroying profit margins and running many of the top OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and their component vendors into negative profitability territory.”
Barr pointed to turbines that were sold to project developers back in the 2020-21 timeframe, when OEMs’ capital expenditures and pricing had been steadily declining. Then, over the last two years, as it came time to deliver the turbines, “the costs of raw materials, specialized logistics and labor skyrocketed through the roof, which has left those OEMs holding the bag on profitability,” Barr said.
And it’s a hefty bag. Last November, Siemens Gamesa (since absorbed into Siemens Energy) reported a net loss of more than $943.48 million for its fiscal year that ended September 30. In a November interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe,” CEO Christian Bruch said there were “challenges in wind,” especially when it came to supply chains.
In January, three months after GE announced it was laying off 20% of its U.S. onshore wind workforce, GE Renewable Energy posted a loss of $2.24 billion for 2022, compared to a decline of $795 million the previous year. Even so, CEO Larry Culp expressed a sanguine tone when speaking with analysts. “While the demand drop due to the [production tax credit] lapse significantly impacted our renewables results in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act is a real game-changer for us and the industry going forward,” he said.
In early February, Vestas reported a 369% drop in operating profit for 2022, which it attributed to geopolitical uncertainty, high inflation and supply chain constraints. The turbine manufacturer recorded a EBIT loss of more than $1.2 billion last year, compared to about a $456 million gain in 2021.
The wind market’s paradox was further revealed in recent quarterly numbers from the American Clean Power Association, which represents companies in the U.S. renewables industry. The fourth quarter of 2022 was the year’s best, as wind, solar and battery storage sectors installed 9.6 gigawatts (GW) of utility-scale clean energy capacity, enough to power two million homes. And yet, it was the lowest fourth quarter since 2019.
For all of 2022, the industry installed 25.1 GW of renewables capacity, according to the ACP, marking a $35-billion capital investment — but that marked a 16% decline from the record year in 2021 and a 12% decline from 2020. Focusing solely on wind energy, there was a similar good news-bad news conundrum. Land-based wind ended 2022 with its strongest quarter, commissioning 4 GW of new projects. Even so, the ACP said, the total of 8.5 GW installed for the full year reflected a 37% year-over-year drop, mostly due to the declining value of the production tax credit, which expired for new projects at the end of 2021.
The IRA, however, reestablishes the PTC and offers other attractive incentives to the wind industry, and in total, it is estimated that the IRA will drive investment of nearly $369 billion in clean energy and climate priorities, according to the ACP. In an update released Monday morning, the trade group says that’s already taking place, in the form of more than $150 billion in capital investment for utility-scale clean energy projects and manufacturing facilities in the past nine months, more than was invested in total between 2017 and 2021. Since August, the new report noted, 48 renewable energy facilities have been launched, expanded or reopened, including 10 wind manufacturing facilities.
Wind manufacturing in the U.S. coming back
There are nearly 72,000 utility-scale wind turbines installed in the U.S., almost every one of them land-based, generating about 140 GW of energy or about 9% of the nation’s electricity. Many of them are produced by an increasingly complex domestic wind energy supply chain, steadily built up since the early 1980s, centered around turbine towers, blades and nacelles (housing atop towers that contain drivetrains), plus the myriad components required to assemble each one.
The industry’s supply chain disruptions resulted in reduced demand for new land-based turbine orders, forcing manufacturers to ramp down their operations, said Patrick Gilman, program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office. Yet those doldrums appear to be subsiding.
“Now that the IRA has passed and we have long-term policy certainty for basically the next decade, OEMs are either reopening or spinning back up mothballed factories, announcing new facilities and otherwise expanding production,” Gilman said, referring to the nation’s fairly mature land-based supply chain. Indeed, in early February, Siemens announced plans to reopen two turbine component factories that it had mothballed last year, adding that the IRA had sparked a pick up in demand.
Comparatively, the U.S. offshore wind industry is just ramping up after years of delays in permitting, environmental approvals and power purchasing agreements with utilities that buy wind energy. To help catapult the sector, in March 2021, the Biden administration set a goal of deploying 30 GW of offshore wind energy by 2030.
To date, there are only seven operational offshore wind turbines in the U.S., five off the coast of Block Island in Rhode Island and two off Virginia Beach, a Dominion Energy project that ultimately will feature 176 turbines. By comparison, elsewhere worldwide there were 246 offshore wind farms in operation at the end of last year — 134 in Asia and 112 in Europe — translating to 54.9 GW of energy spun from thousands of turbines, according to World Forum Offshore Wind.
The Orsted Block Island Wind Farm in this aerial photograph taken above the water off Block Island, Rhode Island.
Eric Thayer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
There is currently one offshore wind farm under construction in the U.S., Vineyard Wind 1, 35 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. The project is jointly owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Iberdrola, through a subsidiary of Avangrid Renewables, and GE will supply 62 Haliade-X turbines. With an estimated price tag of $3.5 billion, Vineyard Wind will begin generating power late this year, and when completed in 2024 will annually produce 800 MW of electricity. In the meantime, there are 17 other offshore wind projects on the East Coast in various stages of development.
GE’s turbines for Vineyard Wind, along with most of the project’s major components, are being exported from production facilities in Europe. Yet if that and other offshore wind farms are to meet the White House’s 2030 goal, it will require the rapid build-out of a U.S.-based manufacturing supply chain and at least $22.4 billion in investments between now and then, according to a report published in January by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Business Network for Offshore Wind and other partners.
The supply chain would include building 34 new manufacturing facilities, including specialized ports and vessels. If individual states and companies leverage their existing manufacturing capabilities in sectors such as land-based wind energy, oil and gas, and shipbuilding, the report said, this effort would generate significant workforce and economic benefits throughout the country, not just in coastal locations.
In anticipation of the East Coast offshore projects gaining momentum, Vestas, Siemens and GE each recently announced plans to build new turbine component factories in New York and New Jersey, though contingent upon securing orders and receiving state and federal funding. And as the prospects of building wind farms in deep waters off Maine, New Hampshire, Gulf Coast states, California and Oregon — in which conventional fixed-bottom offshore turbines are not feasible — the federal government is coordinating with OEMs to develop floating offshore turbines.
Last fall, the Biden administration initiated the Floating Offshore Wind Shot, which seeks to reduce the cost of this emerging innovation by more than 70% and deploy 15 GW by 2035. “We see floating offshore wind as one of the clean energy technologies with the most upside potential for deployment in the coming decades,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm at a related summit in February.
By and large, the U.S. wind energy industry is in good shape, if the short-term economic issues can be overcome. “It just has to get over this speed bump, most of which is driven by supply chain issues,” said Wood Mackenzie’s Barr. “If all the players involved can make it through the end of this year, we think the future is bright for the industry.”
The stakes are high. “To be crystal clear,” Bruch told CNBC back in November, “energy transition without wind energy does not work.”
The Honda Ruckus has earned cult status thanks to its minimalist styling, exposed frame, and seemingly endless customizability. The scooter, also known in international markets as the Honda Zoomer, has spent years being seen as a blank canvas for scooter tuners, urban commuters, and anyone who just wanted something simple, small, and kind of weird to zip around town. A few years ago, Honda finally answered the call for an updated version by announcing and producing the “Zoomer e:”, which was an electric version of the Honda Ruckus. So where is it?
When Honda launched the all-electric version of the Ruckus, the Zoomer e:, back in 2023, many fans hoped it was only a matter of time before we saw it quietly glide onto U.S. streets.
But two years later, there’s still no sign of a stateside release, and no indication that Honda plans to change that anytime soon.
The Zoomer e: was first introduced in China in early 2023 alongside two other retro-inspired electrics: the Cub e: and Dax e:.
The Zoomer e: keeps the stripped-down, industrial look of the classic gas-powered Ruckus, but swaps the 49cc engine for a 400W rear hub motor and a 48V 24Ah battery (around 1.15 kWh).
It was originally given a top speed of a mere 25 km/h (15.5 mph) to keep it street legal as an electric bicycle in its first market of China, where it also came with functional but stubby pedals so riders could pretend it was actually pedalable.
The first version of the electric scooter claimed a range of up to 80–90 km (50–56 miles) from its removable lithium-ion battery, depending on conditions.
We’ve since seen the performance bumped up to 40 km/h (25 mph) top speeds when the scooter was introduced into the Philippines market, where the local L1B classification allowed for higher speeds. It’s fairly obvious that the performance can be software-tweaked by Honda depending on the market, though likely to a limit. To achieve speeds much higher than 25 mph, a motor and controller swap may be required, though neither would be complicated.
In other words, the electric Ruckus’ debut revealed an ultra-lightweight, street-legal runabout designed for countries with expansive low-speed e-bike laws. But in the U.S., these types of quasi-e-bikes that are actually scooters are few and far between. The same performance can be had from a $1,000 electric bicycle, and in fact, Class 3 e-bikes in the US can go nearly twice as fast as the original electric Ruckus.
So Honda obviously hasn’t been in a rush to bring its low-spec version of the bike to the US market, where it would be a slower and heavier competitor to the wide range of cheap imported electric bicycles. However, its iconic design and cultural legacy have kept enthusiasm up for riders who have managed to privately import their own models. One Redditor appears to have imported two Honda Zoomer e: models in parts to assemble in the US, while someone else posted a YouTube video of his completely assembled Honda Dax e: model that was launched along the Zoomer e:.
Despite clear consumer interest and a growing market for low-speed electric vehicles, as well as Honda’s own proven interest in growing its electric scooter market, the company hasn’t made any moves to release the Zoomer e: in the US. That’s not surprising since America still lacks a robust electric scooter culture (or even a gasoline scooter culture, for that matter), and anything motorcycle-shaped that doesn’t hit 30+ mph tends to get passed over by mainstream buyers.
But perhaps that could change one day. Technically, bringing the Zoomer e: to the US wouldn’t be a monumental task for Honda. The U.S. is a self-certify country, meaning Honda could design a version that meets federal vehicle safety standards, beef up the motor and controller for higher speeds, and sell it as either a Class 2/3 e-bike, or perhaps more appropriately, as a low-speed motorcycle with a top speed in the 35-45 mph range (55-70 km/h).
With the rise of micromobility, electrification, and growing frustration with car-centric cities, now might actually be the perfect time for a reborn electric Ruckus to hit US roads. But until Honda decides to take that step, American riders will have to keep dreaming – or start importing.
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BMW Motorrad’s futuristic electric scooter just got its first real refresh since beginning production in 2021. The BMW CE 04, already one of the most capable and stylish electric maxi-scooters on the market, now gets a set of upgraded trim options, new aesthetic touches, and a more robust list of features that aim to make this urban commuter even more appealing to riders looking for serious electric performance on two wheels.
The BMW CE 04 has always stood out for its sci-fi styling and high-performance drivetrain. It’s built on a mid-mounted liquid-cooled motor that puts out 31 kW (42 hp) and 62 Nm of torque. That’s enough to rocket the scooter from 0 to 50 km/h (31 mph) in just 2.6 seconds – quite fast for anything with a step-through frame.
The top speed is electronically limited to 120 km/h (75 mph), making it perfectly capable for city riding and fast enough to hold its own on highway stretches. Range is rated at 130 km (81 miles) on the WMTC cycle, thanks to the 8.9 kWh battery pack tucked low in the frame.
But while the core performance hasn’t changed, BMW’s 2025 update focuses on refining the package and giving riders more options to tailor the scooter to their taste. The new CE 04 is available in three trims: Basic, Avantgarde, and Exclusive.
The Basic trim keeps things clean and classic with a Lightwhite paint scheme and a clear windshield. It’s subtle, sleek, and very much in line with the CE 04’s clean-lined aesthetic. The Avantgarde model adds a splash of color with a Gravity Blue main body and bright São Paulo Yellow accents, along with a dark windshield and a laser-engraved rim. The top-shelf Exclusive trim is where things get fancy, with a premium Spacesilver metallic paint job, upgraded wind protection, heated grips, a luxury embroidered seat, and its own unique engraved rim treatment.
There are also a few new tech upgrades baked into the options list. Riders can now spec a 6.9 kW quick charger that reduces the 0–80% charge time to just 45 minutes (down from nearly 4 hours with the standard 2.3 kW onboard charger). Tire pressure monitoring, a center stand, and BMW’s “Headlight Pro” adaptive lighting system are also available as add-ons, along with an emergency eCall system and Dynamic Traction Control.
BMW has kept the core riding components in place: a steel-tube chassis, 15-inch wheels, Bosch ABS (with optional ABS Pro), and the impressive 10.25” TFT display with integrated navigation and smartphone connectivity. The under-seat storage still swallows a full-face helmet, and the long, low frame design means the scooter looks like something out of Blade Runner but rides like a luxury commuter.
With these updates, BMW seems to be further cementing the CE 04’s role at the high end of the electric scooter market. It’s not cheap, starting around €12,000 in Europe and around US $12,500 in the US, with prices going up from there depending on configuration. However, the maxi-scooter delivers real motorcycle-grade performance in a package that’s easier to live with for daily riders.
Electrek’s Take
I believe that the CE 04’s biggest strength has always been that it’s not trying to be a toy or a gimmick. It’s a real vehicle. Sure, it’s futuristic and funky looking, but it delivers on its promises. And in a market that’s still surprisingly sparse when it comes to premium electric scooters, BMW has had the lane mostly to itself. That may not last forever, though. LiveWire, Harley-Davidson’s electric spin-off brand, has teased plans for a maxi-scooter-style urban electric vehicle in the coming years, but as of now, it remains something of an undefined future plan.
Meanwhile, BMW is delivering not just a concept bike but a mature, well-equipped, and ready-to-ride electric scooter that keeps improving. For riders who want something faster and more capable than a Class 3 e-bike but aren’t ready to jump to a full-size electric motorcycle, the CE 04 hits a sweet spot. It delivers the performance and capability of a commuter e-motorcycle, yet with the approachability of a scooter. And with these new trims and upgrades, it’s doing it with even more style.
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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.
Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!
I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!
Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.
To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.
Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!
Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.
The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.
The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!
I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.
That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.
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