American Superconductor Corp, which recently extended by 30 months its parts supply contract with Sinovel, has now expanded its strategic partnership with the company to include additional wind turbine designs for both the onshore and offshore markets. Under the new agreement, Sinovel and AMSC’s wholly-owned AMSC Windtec subsidiary will design and jointly develop a range of advanced, multi-megawatt-scale wind turbines that Sinovel plans to market and sell worldwide. Sinovel expects to begin volume production of these units by the end of 2012 and, as part of the agreement, will purchase core electrical components from AMSC for these new machines.

Sinovel is China’s largest wind turbine manufacturer and now ranks as the world’s third largest wind turbine manufacturer based on its market share in 2009, according to industry research firms MAKE Consulting and BTM Consult. In 2009, Sinovel shipped approximately 2400 of its 1.5 MW wind turbines (branded the SL1500) and approximately 100 of it 3 MW wind turbines, branded SL3000.

“Since its founding in 2004, Sinovel has proven to be China’s dominant wind turbine manufacturer while also quickly rising in the global rankings,” said Sinovel chairman and president Han Junliang. “Our next objective is to become the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world. This will be accomplished by our ability to offer a wide array of highly reliable, high-efficiency wind turbines for the global onshore and offshore markets.”

AMSC Windtec and Sinovel first formed their relationship in 2005. Since that time, AMSC has provided core electrical components for Sinovel’s 1.5 MW wind turbines as well as engineering support services and power electronics for the 3 MW and 5 MW wind turbines that have been co-developed by Sinovel and AMSC Windtec. Sinovel began shipping 3 MW wind turbines for the onshore and offshore markets in 2009.

•The world’s wind power capacity grew by 31 percent in 2009 with the addition of 37.5 gigawatts (GW), bringing total global installations up to 157.9 GW, according to the Global Wind Energy Council’s (GWEC) Global Wind 2009 Report. A third of these additions were made in China, making it the world’s largest market in 2009