20 Jul 2020 GE’S TURBINE BLADE FACTORY IN İZMİR INVIGORATES HISTORIC TOWN BERGAMA
Growing up in Bergama, a town of 200,000 people in the western hills of Türkiye, history is all around you. Some 2,400 years ago, when the place was known as Pergamum, Alexander the Great swept the city upon his conquests, gifting to Cleopatra its legendary library. Later, when the Romans took over, its enlightened past led Pliny the Elder to call it “the most famous and magnificent city of the Asia Minor.” Bergama’s bounty of historical sites has been drawing in throngs of tourists for years. But for much of that time a lack of options beyond the tourist trade meant that when the young people of Bergama looked to the future, they looked elsewhere.
That outlook changed in 2017, when LM Wind Power, a division of GE Renewable Energy, opened a wind turbine blade manufacturing facility here, says Bora Hodo, an engineer at the plant and a Bergama native. The factory produces wind turbine blades for domestic use and export, employing more than 480 people currently, with an expansion underway that will boost the workforce by two-thirds. “LM Wind Power gives us hope for our young people because, in the past, they didn’t think about getting a good education, they didn’t have any career plans,” Hodo says. “Now they are thinking about careers, they want to be engineers.” Most of the workers are Bergama natives, he adds. More than a quarter of the workforce are women.
In his youth, Hodo followed much of the same path as many other Bergama kids. The son of schoolteachers, he took part-time jobs as a tour guide, in part to improve his command of English. For college, he left for İzmir, a city of 4 million people 50 miles southwest, and studied engineering. Later, working in İstanbul, Hodo planned on returning to Izmir when he learned of LM Wind Power’s plans to open a plant in Bergama. He signed on as quickly as he could, and in the early planning stages worked out of a local hotel, recruiting employees.
Top image: Bora Hodo, an engineer at the wind turbine blade manufacturing facility and a Bergama, Türkiye, native, sees how the LM Wind Power factory has changed the outlook for the younger people in his town. “Now they are thinking about careers, they want to be engineers.” Above: The LM Wind Power facility produces wind turbine blades for domestic use and export, employing more than 480 people currently, with an expansion underway that will boost the workforce by two-thirds. Image credits: LM Wind Power/GE Renewable Energy
The Bergama plant was the first location LM Wind Power opened after GE Renewable Energy acquired the company in 2017. Worldwide, about 1 in 5 turbine blades — more than 215,000 — have been made by LM Wind Power. They have the corresponding capacity to generate about 102 gigawatts (GW), slightly more than the U.K.’s entire generating capacity.
Renewable energy has been a priority of the Turkish government since 2014. To date, the Turkish government has invested more than $11 billion in the sector, according to a news report by the state-run Anadolu Agency.