Iberdrola and Deutsche Windtechnik launched their first partnership in 2020: What benefits do you see in working with an ISP?
The contract model for O&M services at the Iberdrola Group has become a market reference. We are constantly looking to optimize our O&M, ensuring that our assets’ availability stays at approximately 97%. We are completely committed to continuous improvement (e.g., repowering, lifetime extensions, etc.) and we adapt to the models which are best suited to each of our plants. This ranges from full-service maintenance to basics where the majority of the service is in-house. The model choice in each project depends on the wind turbine technology or the features of each farm (location, size, availability…).
Our first collaboration with Deutsche Windtechnik was the full-risk O&M contract for our wind farms in the UK. One of Deutsche Windtechnik’s greatest strengths is its flexibility to adapt to our standards and tailor its solutions to the customer’s needs. As a result of the good work and subsequent awards, Iberdrola acknowledged the company’s efforts at our Supplier of the Year Awards: Deutsche Windtechnik was awarded the prize for Internationalisation category in 2022.
What differentiates this long-term partnership between Iberdrola and Deutsche Windtechnik from others in your point of view?
Deutsche Windtechnik is a company with over 2,100 employees operating almost 8,000 wind turbines with a 100% success rate in the Iberdrola Group’s contracts. Communication between both companies has always been fluid: Deutsche Windtechnik listens carefully to us and always provides solutions to match our needs. It is a leading supplier. The company is an example of an originally smaller ISP that strove to grow and face new technological challenges head-on.
The natural growth between Iberdrola and Deutsche Windtechnik could take the form of the O&M services contract in a new wind turbine technology as well as the expansion of Deutsche Windtechnik in new geographies where Iberdrola operates.
Iberdrola is investing a record of €47 billion in the energy transition internationally and is set to develop new partnerships in different countries as a result. What is the difference between working with a local supplier and working with a globally operating company?
Iberdrola’s network of suppliers comprises more than 19,000 companies based all around the world. In terms of its geographic location and economic activity, it operates an atomized and heterogeneous structure, which always takes the local requirements and territorial scope into account. This allows us to meet the priorities of our Procurement department, including securing the supply chain, competitiveness, and the efficiency of our processes as well as to strive for a sustainable supplier framework at all times.
Regarding the terms local and global, we feel more comfortable with the concept “glocal”, where each supplier adds value basedon the type of contract. On the one hand, we work with small family businesses as suppliers for flagship projects such as the Tâmega pumped hydro project in Portugal, our natural giga battery. These local suppliers have provided solutions and grown at the same pace as us. On the other hand, we also have suppliers at the opposite end of the spectrum: these are multinational suppliers with great technological capacity that play a strategic role in achieving the Group’s business plans and objectives.
Regardless of their size and geographical location of the businesses, all of our suppliers are key to the success of the Iberdrola Group’s procurement model. Therefore, we stand for long-term relationships with our suppliers since they are essential for the development of our investment plans.
Iberdrola is one of the largest wind power producers based on the stock market, but the company is also playing an active role in solar power and hydropower. What is the importance of wind power within your green energy mix?
We are very close to reaching an installed capacity of 40 GW in renewables. Approximately half of this power (20 GW) comes from onshore wind. This fact helped to mitigate the impact of the drought in 2022, when hydraulic generation fell dramatically. Our photovoltaic generation keeps growing, surpassing 4 GW, and offshore wind is increasing, too. Meanwhile, we are pushing for storage technologies (such as hydroelectric pumping and batteries) to contribute to the reliability and availability of the grid.
As shown in the figure "Installed Capacity Reaches 40,000 MW", we believe that a high-quality, sustainable, reliable and profitable energy transition is guided by diversity in the energy mix. The Group’s strategic plan and project investments in the following years will be based on this principle.
