Türkiye just turned on a 1,200-blade-per-year wind factory designed to fill YEKA tenders at home and ship surplus to Europe.
The Nordex Group on May 22 started production at its new rotor blade plant in Menemen, in the Izmir Free Trade Zone, covering 130,000 sqm of land with a 90,000 sqm production hall. At full capacity, four shifts will turn out up to 1,200 rotor blades per year and employ around 1,200 people. The plant is built around blades for the Nordex N163 and N175, the company’s latest onshore turbine platforms designed for medium to strong wind conditions. Initial output is earmarked for YEKA-4 and YEKA-5 wind farms inside Türkiye, with surplus capacity reserved for European projects. Nordex has been in Türkiye since 2009 and has held market leadership since 2017 with about 34 percent share.
Why it matters
My read: a blade plant sized for domestic YEKA rounds, with an export tail into Europe, is how a functioning wind manufacturing hub comes together. Domestic tenders fill the first years. Exports carry the plant through the slow ones.
What it means for MENA
For MENA governments running their own wind localisation plans, we see Menemen as the closest live benchmark for what a finished wind manufacturing hub looks like, including an export tail into Europe. For procurement teams in Riyadh, Cairo and Muscat, that export tail is the part worth studying. My read is that its unit economics decide whether a MENA wind factory survives the first slow tender year.
