“Close and, most importantly, intelligent partnerships with our suppliers are crucial if we are to make wind-produced electricity more inexpensive,” said Jürgen Zeschky, Chief Executive Officer of Nordex SE, speaking at the turbine producer’s first global Supplier Day. Around 100 international partners from 18 countries came to Hamburg on 6 September to share ideas on the strategic challenges and the best ways of working together.

The core goal was the joint development of technical solutions. Explains Jürgen Zeschky: “Looking forward, we will have to integrate our partners far more tightly into product development in order to achieve optimum costs without sacrificing quality.” Other matters on the agenda included delivery reliability and quality. To underscore this, Nordex presented awards to its top suppliers in the three categories - “Best Partner”, “Service” and “Innovation”.

The “Best Partner” award went to tower supplier Win&P, Korea, for its short and on-schedule delivery periods. The award winner in the “Service” category was Nanjing High Speed Gear, China. The world’s largest producer of transmissions for wind turbines, it was praised for its extremely short service response times. Nordex presented the “Innovation” award to Phoenix Contact, Germany, in recognition of the fact that this supplier of control system components had materially helped to ensure that Nordex was one of the first to be able to adjust its turbines to meet the more stringent grid rule requirements.