Andreas Kipker, CEO of Jupiter Bach, discusses their dominance in wind turbine nacelle and spinner cover manufacturing and major U.S. expansion plans, including a new 20,000-square-foot facility in Pensacola and two decades of partnership with GE Vernova.

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Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. And today we have an exceptional guest who brings deep insight from one of the wind industry's most important manufacturing sectors. Andreas Kipker is the CEO of Jupiter Bach, the world's largest supplier of nacelle and spinner covers for wind turbines.

Andreas joins us at an exciting time for Jupiter Bach the company just celebrated a remarkable 20 year partnership with GE Vernova and broke ground on a 20, 000 square foot expansion of their Pensacola, Florida facility.

And today under Andreas's leadership, Jupiter Bach operates state of the art manufacturing facilities across Europe, Asia, and North America. The company's focus goes beyond just manufacturing. They're driving innovation in composite materials and. Engineering to help reduce the levelized cost of energy for wind power.

Andreas, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.

Andreas Kipker: Thank you very much. Pleased to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

Allen Hall: Well, Jupiter Bach is the world's largest supplier of nacelles and spinner covers. Could you give us just a sense of what your global footprint looks like?

Andreas Kipker: Absolutely. Happy to do that.

Yeah, so, um, In the global market, we consider ourselves leaders. We have, um, we have factories. We have four main manufacturing facilities one in China two in Europe, then Poland and Lithuania, and then one in Sonia, Florida. Um, and then adding to that's where we do our composites. And then, and in addition to that, we have we have a number of assembly sites that are.

closer to servicing this Nacelle manufacturing plants assembly plants of our customers. So they're spread. Somewhat in the same regions, but but closer to customers.

Allen Hall: Well, you just recently celebrated 20 years with G. E. Vernova, which is remarkable. And you're also expanding a facility down in Florida to another 20, 000 square feet.

What is your footprint right now in Florida alone?

Andreas Kipker: I'm a little bit in doubt, actually, the exact number. We're around 100, 000 square foot in in, in, in Florida today of, um, of. on the roof. And then it's a process that takes a bit of outdoors storage at outdoor space as well. So, the site itself is significantly bigger.

You will know this from blade manufacturing plants as well, that the parts are quite big. So it takes a little bit of storage around. But yeah, we're super excited to have to have longstanding relationship with with several of our customers, but G we just we just reached this milestone.

Um, um, so yeah, proud of that.

Joel Saxum: I think it's important to to talk about nacelles here, right? Like when you see, when you say when we're in the wind world, where Alan and I touch most of the time, everybody in the large manufacturing space, you hear about gearbox manufacturers, bearing manufacturers,