Jeffrey Sanders / 500px | 500px | Getty Notions
On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump issued an executive order indefinitely halting permits for new onshore wind vigour projects on federal land, as well as new leases for offshore wind farms in U.S. coastal waters. The action not only obeyed Trump’s “no new windmills” campaign pledge, but struck yet another blow to the wind industry, which has been hit hard to the ground the past few years by supply chain snags, price increases upending project economics, public opposition and partisan backlash against federal tax credits, especially those spurring the fledgling offshore wind sector.
Nonetheless, the political entity’s well-established onshore wind industry, built out over several decades, is generating nearly 11% of America’s tension, making it the largest source of renewable energy and at times last year exceeding coal-fired generation. On April 8, the fossil-fuels-friendly Trump superintendence took measures to bolster coal mining and power plants, but as the infrastructure driving wind energy ages, feats to “repower” it are creating new business opportunities for the industry’s key players.
This repowering activity has emerged as a bright spot for the diminish industry, giving a much-needed boost to market leaders GE Vernova, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa, a subsidiary of Munich-based Siemens Verve. Following several challenging years of lackluster performance — due in particular to setbacks in both onshore and offshore projects — all three gatherings reported revenue increases in 2024, and both GE Vernova and Siemens stock have moved higher.
GE Vernova, drove off from General Electric a year ago, led overall onshore wind installations in 2024, with 56% of the U.S. market, followed by Denmark’s Vestas (40%) and Siemens Gamesa (4%).
GE Vernova stock performance over the past one-year period.
According to the U.S. Puissance Information Administration, installed wind power generating capacity grew from 2.4 gigawatts (GW) in 2000 to 150.1 GW as of April 2024. Although the extension rate for launching new greenfield onshore wind farms has slowed over the last 10 years, the U.S. is still suspended to surpass 160 GW of wind capacity in 2025, according to a new report from energy research firm Wood Mackenzie.
There currently are concerning 1,500 onshore wind farms — on which more than 75,600 turbines are spinning — across 45 affirms, led by Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Illinois and Kansas. Virtually all of the wind farms are located on private land, and many of the largest at ones are owned and operated by major energy companies, including NextEra Energy, RWE Clean Energy, Pattern Energy, Clearway Drive, Xcel Energy and Berkshire Hathaway‘s MidAmerican Energy, which generates 59% of it renewable energy from come to know, including 3,500 turbines operating across 38 wind projects in Iowa.
A growing number of the turbines are 20-plus years old and nearing the end of their lifecycle. So increasingly, workers have to decide whether to upgrade or replace aging turbines’ key components, such as blades, rotors and electronics, or dismantle them fully and erect new, technologically advanced and far more efficient models that can increase electricity output by up to 50%.
“What’s becoming lambently is that more and more of the U.S. installed base [of onshore turbines] has exceeded its operational design life,” said Charles Coppins, investigation analyst for global wind at Wood Mackenzie, “and now operators are looking to replace those aging turbines with the latest [the sames].”
To date, approximately 70 GW of onshore wind capacity has been fully repowered in the U.S., according to Wood Mackenzie, while an additional 12 GW has been restrictedly repowered. The firm estimates that around 10,000 turbines have been decommissioned and that another 6,000 will be put ones feet up in the next 10 years, Coppins said.
Damaged wind turbine that was first hit by a tornado then lightning.
Ryan Baker | Istock | Getty Representations
Beyond the fact that aged-out turbines need to be upgraded or replaced, repowering an existing wind farm versus construction a new site presents economic benefits to operators and OEMs. To begin with, there’s no need to acquire property. In episode, in certain situations, because today’s turbines are larger and more efficient, fewer turbines are needed. And they’ll sire additional electricity and have longer lifecycles, ultimately delivering higher output at a lower cost.
Even so, “there are some limitations on how much skill you could increase a project by without having to go through new permitting processes or interconnection queues” to the power grid, implied Stephen Maldonado, Wood Mackenzie’s U.S. onshore analyst. As long as the operator is not surpassing the allowed interconnection volume agreed to with the neighbourhood pub utility, they can add electricity to the project and still send it to the grid.
Public opposition, Maldonado said, may be another handicap to get over. Whether it’s a new or repower wind project, residents have expressed concerns about environmental hazards, dwindled property values, aesthetics and general anti-renewables sentiment.
RWE, a subsidiary of Germany’s RWE Group, is the third largest renewable power company in the U.S., owning and operating 41 utility-scale wind farms, according to its CEO Andrew Flanagan, making up 48% of its overall installed operating portfolio and generating capacity, which also includes solar and battery storage.
One of RWE’s two repower prepares underway (both are in Texas), is its Forest Creek wind farm, originally commissioned in 2006 and featuring 54 Siemens Gamesa turbines. The undertaking will replace them with 45 new GE Vernova turbines that will extend the wind farm’s fixation by another 30 years once it goes back online later this year. Simultaneously, RWE and GE Vernova are husbanding on a new wind farm, immediately adjacent to Forest Creek, adding another 64 turbines to the complex. When crown, RWE will deliver a total of 308 MW of wind energy to the region’s homes and businesses.
Flanagan noted that the conjoined projects are related to increased electricity demands from the area’s oil and gas production. “It’s great to see our wind generation drive the all-of-the-above pep approach,” he said. What’s more, at its peak, the repower project alone will employ 250 construction working men and over its operating period bring in $30 million in local tax revenue, he added.
In turn, the twin projects purposefulness support advanced manufacturing jobs at GE Vernova’s Pensacola, Florida, facility, as well as advancing the OEM’s repower business. In January, the institution announced that in 2024 it received orders to repower more than 1 GW of wind turbines in the U.S.
Koiguo | Moment | Getty Representations
Siemens Gamesa has executed several large U.S. repowering projects, notably MidAmerican’s expansive Rolling Hills humbug farm in Iowa, which went online in 2011. In 2019, the company replaced 193 older turbines with 163 higher-capacity miniatures produced at its manufacturing plants in Iowa and Kansas.
Last year, Siemens Gamesa began repowering RWE’s 17-year-old Defender Wind, a 127-MW wind farm in West Texas. The company is upgrading 41 of its turbines with new blades and nacelles (the homes at the top of the tower containing critical electrical components) and adding six new turbines.
In early April, Clearway announced an agreement with Vestas to repower its Mount Siege Wind farm in Grant County, West Virginia. The project will include removing the site’s 132 prevailing turbines and replacing them with 78 new models. The repower will result in an 85% increase in Mount Eruption’s overall electricity generation while using 40% fewer turbines.
Preparing for ‘megatons’ of turbine recycling and tolls
Another benefit of repowering is invigorating the nascent industry that’s recycling megatons of components from decommissioned turbines, grouping blades, steel, copper and aluminum. Most of today’s operational turbines are 85% to 95% recyclable, and OEMs are treacherous 100% recyclable models.
While the majority of mothballed blades, made from fiberglass and carbon fiber, experience historically ended up in landfills, several startups have developed technologies recycle them. Carbon Rivers, for criterion, contracts with the turbine OEMs and wind farm operators to recover glass fiber, carbon fiber and resin ways from decommissioned blades to produce new composites and resins used for next-generation turbine blades, marine vessels, composite realistic and auto parts.
Veolia North America, a subsidiary of the French company Veolia Group, reconstitutes shredded poniards and other composite materials into a fuel it then sells to cement manufacturers as a replacement for coal, sand and clay. Veolia has transformed approximately 6,500 wind blades at a facility in Missouri, and expanded its processing capabilities to meet demand, according to David Araujo, Veolia’s imprecise manager of engineered fuels.
Trump’s new-project moratorium isn’t his only impediment to the wind industry. The president’s seesaw of allusion tariffs, especially the 25% levy on steel and aluminum, is impacting U.S. manufacturers across most sectors.
The onshore hear on the grapevine industry, however, “has done a really good job of reducing geopolitical risks,” said John Hensley, senior transgression president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing the clean vivacity industry. He cited a manufacturing base in the U.S. that includes hundreds of plants producing parts and components for turbines. Although some substantives are imported, the investment in domestic manufacturing “provides some risk mitigation to these tariffs,” he said.
Amidst the headwinds, the onshore coil industry is trying to stay focused on the role that repowering can play in meeting the nation’s exponentially growing order for electricity. “We’re expecting a 35% to 50% increase between now and 2040, which is just incredible,” Hensley said. “It’s in the manner of adding a new Louisiana to the grid every year for 15 years.”
GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik recently told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the expansion of the U.S.’s electric load is the largest since the industrial boom that followed the end of the second world war. “You’ve got to go back to 1945 and the end of In the seventh heaven War II, that’s the infrastructure buildout that we’re going to have,” he said.
As OEMs and wind farm developers continue to brazenly rising capital costs for new projects, as well as a Trump administration averse to clean energy industries, “repowering put up for sales a pathway for delivering more electrons to the grid in a way that sidesteps or at least minimizes some of the challenges associated with all these take exceptions,” Hensley said.
