Muehlhan’s Endiprev Acquisition, Energy Capital’s $4.4B Fund, FiberLine’s Production Shift

Muehlhan Wind Service acquires a controlling interest in Portugal's
Endiprev to create a global front runner in wind installation and
maintenance services. Energy Capital Partners raises over $4.4
billion for its latest fund focused on power generation,
renewables, and decarbonization infrastructure. FiberLine
Composites is moving all production from Denmark to India over
competition from Chinese manufacturers, while also working on
domesticating some production in the U.S. to take advantage of tax
credits. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update
on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored
by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting -
https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech -
www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech,
and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro,
and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum, and
this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by your
friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that
generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at
IntelStor. com. Danish company Muehlhan Wind Service has acquired a
controlling interest in Endiprev, a Portugal based company
specializing in commissioning and electrical work for the wind
industry. This acquisition aims to create a global front runner in
wind installation and maintenance services. Endiprev will continue
to operate under its existing brand with current executive
management team remaining in place. Muehlhan has expanded
significantly over the past seven years and has acquired several
companies in the last 18 months. And Phil, this seems to be the
trend in any sort of repair, maintenance company is to acquire,
acquire, acquire. Philip Totaro: At this point, yes, Allen. And
it's interesting because we've talked over the past, six to 12
months about Any number of different deals where companies have
either kind of merged together an EPC contracting capability with
maintenance services or maintenance providers getting together in
some cases, maintenance providers acquiring supply chain, smaller,
tier three or four supply chain companies as well. So, I mean, this
is, it's starting to get serious. We've talked on the show before
about, the increased need for maintenance services, quality of
maintenance services, et cetera. And this puts Muehlhan and, and
Endiprev in in a really great position globally. Joel Saxum: Yeah.
So if you aren't familiar with kind of what this business model
looks like as it expands is Endiprev being a basically front end
commissioning services company, they do a lot of build outs. They
do electrical work of these things. Muehlhan has been Classically a
more of a maintenance company. So now what you do is you come in on
the front end of a project, you help build it or you build it as
the EPC is the front runner there. And then when that project
switches over to commissioning, which normally you would walk away.
Now you just back your other players in there and you've already
got built in work for the maintenance and operation side of things.
So it's a great tie up and you're going to start to see a lot more
of these as well. Allen Hall: Energy Capital Partners, an investor
in power transition, electrification, and decarbonization
infrastructure assets, has raised over 4. 4 billion for its fifth
flagship equity strategy, ECP5, or better called Fund 5. The fund
exceeds its initial target by 10 percent and also raised an
additional 2. 3 billion in co investment capital. Fund 5 will
continue Energy Capital Partners investment strategy of
transforming companies in power generation, renewable and storage
assets, and critical sustainability and decarbonization
infrastructure. Phil, where are these billions of dollars coming
from? Philip Totaro: Well, they're, they're able to raise money for
investments in infrastructure from other funds, pension funds, et
cetera, where everybody, Has a general sense that, power generation
in general and renewables in particular is in a market they want to
be able to get into. They're seeing the quality of their terms they
can get. It hasn't been, fantastic compared to oil and gas, but
it's getting better now. In in recent times, it's it's certainly
not quite dirt cheap as it used to be. But just keep in mind too
for ECP specifically they own a chunk of companies like TerraGen
here in North America, which has, 1. 7 gigawatts of wind and are
pretty significant pipeline. So, they're getting ready as, as we've
talked about before on the show as well with a lot of other
companies they're getting ready to deploy. More capital in building
out a pipeline that is going to dramatically change the face of
power generation in North America and throughout the rest of the
world. Joel Saxum: Speaking here, of course, with Phil from Intel
store, they have all of this data on performance of assets, right?
So what we've seen and what is the truth out there in the world is
there is a lot of way to make these wind farms more efficient. So
there's a Quite a few people I've been talking to in the investment
space, and now I don't know if this is ECP's strategy with this
fund, but there is a space where a lot of people are buying assets
they're going to run them for two to five years improve the
performance of them, and then sell them again. So there is this
trade trade or buy in basically refurbish get the performance up on
these things and then, and then sell at a higher level. So that's
happening as well. Some of this capital will be repurposed for
that. Allen Hall: 120 Danish jobs are in jeopardy as FiberLine
Composites is moving all production from Denmark to India. The move
will occur over the next 12 months, with only 40 to 50 employees in
administrative and strategic positions remaining in Denmark.
FiberLine, which produces components for wind turbine blades, has
faced uncertainty due to a lack of orders in idle machines. Swiss
company Gerrit bought the shares of FiberLine Composites over the
last two years. The closure of production is attributed to fierce
competition from state owned Chinese manufacturers. and rising
interest rates. Phil, how does FiberLine and Gurrit Get this
company up and running again because the wind industry needs fiber
line. Philip Totaro: Absolutely. So two things that they're doing.
One, as you just mentioned, they're relocating some of their
production capacity to India, which is actually, from a lot of
Things that I've been hearing lately, just as competitive as on
cost, for instance, as China, but without the, any kind of import
duties. Although don't expect that to last forever. The other thing
that they're doing is they're taking advantage of the IRA money,
specifically the, the 45 X manufactured tax credits for
domesticating production of some of the subcomponents of blades in
the United States. They're working on supposedly a super secret
project with the Colorado Economic Development Corporation although
Colorado has a funny way of not keeping things a very good secret
so we, we have indications that FiberLine's been trying to
domesticate some of their production capacity over here so that
basically they're going in to to markets where there's more of an
opportunity, either through subsidies in the U. S. or through low
cost of production, like in India, where they're going to be better
able to cost effectively compete. Keep in mind as well, they were
seeing quite a bit of orders for Nordex Aciona turbines, which it's
our understanding has been also either reallocated for production
through India or down in Spain. And so it looks like a lot of the
Danish manufacturing capacity has just unfortunately dried up. Joel
Saxum: Well, what's happening here is what the EU has been fighting
for fighting against, and has feared for quite a few years now, and
they've been very vocal about it in the last year about needing to
make some changes within the wind industry to keep jobs in the EU
to keep that local supply chain moving. And Either they didn't make
the moves fast enough or whatever moves were made or in the
pipeline are not going to be enough financially to save FiberLine
from having to move their production elsewhere. So, moving it to
India, I mean, a lot of blades, a lot of components are already
getting built there so the world is no stranger to Indian labor and
Indian suppliers in the value chain. It's just a fact of life when
your employees cost too much or it's too hard to maintain that
facility, you got to move it elsewhere.