MegaWhat – 05/02/2026
On February 25, Aeris Energy will inaugurate its training center in Houston, United States. The goal is to expand workforce training for the wind turbine operation and maintenance (O&M) market through the company’s service arm, Aeris Services.
Operating in the US since 2018, the company currently hires experienced professionals and offers its own training. With the dedicated center and more structure, Aeris hopes to improve the training of its employees in the country. The training center occupies an area of 600 m² and received investments of US$ 100,000.
With this, Aeris intends to overcome what it considers the main obstacle to its growth in the US. “What was holding back our growth here in the United States was precisely this issue of labor. There is a bottleneck in skilled labor for blade repair. We understood that the only way to solve this would be to have a dedicated training center,” explains Aeris Services Vice President Cássio Penna.
By overcoming this bottleneck, the company projects that its service operations in the United States will grow in the coming years. According to Penna, the US wind market has “more than five times” the installed capacity of the Brazilian market. In addition, it is a more mature market with older wind farms, which increases the demand for maintenance services.
In Brazil, Aeris Service’s largest customers are turbine manufacturers such as GE, Vestas, Nordex, and Siemens Gamesa. There is also a more widespread demand from wind farm owners, who hire Aeris directly to maintain their blades.
“There is a shortage of skilled labor in blade repair. So, I think we are very well positioned in a very demanding market and ready to capture this demand,” says Penna.
For him, Aeris already has an important competitive advantage in the O&M market for wind blades, which is the fact that it also manufactures the equipment at its factory in Ceará.
“During manufacturing, you get to know the blades structurally. We have already produced more than a dozen blade models in Brazil, so we have structural and repair knowledge,” he says. According to him, engineering and quality professionals who were once part of the manufacturing teams are now on the service team.
Reduction in manufacturing and focus on services.
Investment in services also helps to balance the reduction in blade orders, given the slowdown in the Brazilian market and uncertainties in the United States since President Donald Trump’s administration began suspending incentives for renewable energy.
In 2023, already feeling the impact of the reduction in orders, Aeris underwent a restructuring that established a greater focus on services and maintenance, with an eye on the aging of existing wind farms.
In 2021, the company announced that it was studying the implementation of a factory in the United States. According to Penna, the plan has not been abandoned, but Aeris hopes to have more predictability in the country’s wind market.
One of the main points is the continuation of incentives for local equipment manufacturing. “Today there is [an incentive for local production], but we don’t know for how long,” says Penna. Another important issue is having more predictability about wind demand in the country, says the executive.