France's Theolia has just bought out Natenco GmbH, a major private European wind energy developer and operator, which is based in Germany.

The deal for Theolia is thought to be that;

Theolia and Natenco offer complementary business models. Theolia’s model focuses on development, construction, and operation of wind parks for its own account. Natenco undertakes similar activities but principally for third parties.

Plus, Nantenco has a healthy looking set of accounts.

Meanwhile, France has a target of 13,500 MW of wind turbines by 2010. Massive growth then, considering they only had 390 MW at the beginning of 2005. I'm not all that sure that this is achievable. So it's quite shrewd for Theolia to diversify out of France, just in case the opportunities aren't quite what the optimists say they are.

Suzlon Energy has just closed a deal through it's Danish unit in Brazil.

The contract is for 225 megawatts of wind turbines with a Brazilian firm, SIIF Energies do Brasil (SIIF) to be supplied in first quarter of FY07.

I like the globalisation backdrop to this . . . an Indian wind turbine manufacturer, selling through it's Danish subisidiary to Brazil. Brazil is like India because it has had such massive unrealised potential for so long. For both countries, this potential is only now starting to shine through.

Nordex has signed a framework agreement for the supply of 30 wind turbines from the Nordex N90 series.

These are 2.3 and 2.5 MW models. A few years ago, it was assumed that wind turbines would continually grow in size. By now - wind turbines were only meant to be 5 MW and maybe even bigger. This clearly hasn't happened. There is still no mass production of giant 5 MW plus turbines. Most wind farm developers are sticking to tried and tested 2 - 3 megawatt models.

The world's largest commercially available model is a 5 MW made by RePower Systems AG.

Iberdrola, Spain’s second-largest power company will direct a third of investment into wind-power projects through 2009, chairman Ignacio Sanchez Galan told investors at a meeting yesterday in Madrid. Reading between the figures, this amounts to potentially as much as EUR 4 Billion.

Using our advfn data, you will see that the stock is up over 50% on 12 months ago. So it's worth noting that JP Morgan are now calling it a take-profits stock.

Fact: Germany has 18,400 MW of windpower and is finding it very hard to expand onshore. They've got two problems;

i) the subsidy is too high - raising the overall cost of wind to the end consumer
ii) it is not a windy country - load factors are in the teens - most investors wouldn't touch anything below 25%
iii) offshore is still in its infancy and much more expensive

So where to go next?

The answer it seems is Poland.

Interested companies that are listed AEI stocks include the Spanish stock Gamesa.

Europe's wind boom is changing location from West to East. Other than Poland, I also think that there's plenty of scope for going somewhere like Albania or Ukraine, where planning permission I suspect would be a lot less hard to come by.