Wind turbines are seen at Thanet Offshore Wind Farm off the Kent coast in southern England September

23, 2010. German engineering services company Siemens, Spanish wind power developer Gamesa and Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas said on Thursday they planned to build wind turbine factories and research centres in strategic coastal towns. Siemens signed an initial contract to build a new factory at the port of Hull, while Gamesa's factory would be based in Dundee and a research facility would open in Glasgow. But their investments depend on securing a share of the 60 million pound budget that the government has earmarked for adapting ports to growing demand for renewable energy infrastructure, the companies said. Siemens said in October it was planning on opening its UK offshore wind factory in time for 2014, investing around 80 million pounds. Gamesa plans to invest 150 million euros into Britain's UK offshore wind power industry through 2014. At the beginning of December, Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced it would spend up to 100 million pounds over five years on an offshore wind turbine research and development centre based in Edinburgh The chief executive of Swedish utility Vattenfall said on Wednesday that the company was planning on opening a new UK headquarters office in London.

The utility expects to invest billions of pounds until 2015 into Britain's wind industry, which it described on Thursday at the Nordic-Baltic summit held in London as its "number one priority" in the area of renewable energy Britain aims to build 32 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity -equivalent to 32 large nuclear power reactors -- to meet legally binding renewable energy targets. Statistics released by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) showed on Wednesday that Britain had moved to the world's leading position in installed offshore wind capacity at 1,341 megawatts (MW), followed by Denmark and the Netherlands.