How quickly can the offshore-turbine supply chain expand?

Question

To date, there were until recently just a few players in the manufacture of multi-megawatt scale offshore-wind turbines, though with the entrance of new Chinese manufacturers, that's been expanding quickly.

How quickly can the supply of offshore wind turbines expand? If a company wanted to a whole new manufacturing chain for blades, nacelles, tower, etc, let's say for 500 MW per year manufacturing capacity, how long would that take, including planning and construction of the manufacturing plant?

(source: ZZ2; CC-BY-SA; wikipedia)

Answer 1

Pretty open ended question. I would suggest that you look at historical examples.

Most recently: Look at present suppliers, and see how long it took them to go from venture capital to production capable. When doing this ignore companies based on a major innovation, as that takes longer. Look at ones that implement more or less standard technology.

Another measure is to look at the maximum growth rate of such companies. If the number of players is increasing, it indicates that the present companies cannot meet the demand.

A third measure, harder to interpret is to look at similar expansions for other energy linked industries. Say the expansion of steam use in the Industrial revolution.