Suzlon Brand Guidelines: A Textile Firm’s Turbines, REpower & Pune’s One Earth

A power bill that turned into a business.

Suzlon grew out of a power problem. English Wikipedia, citing Nirmalya Kumar’s 2009 book India’s Global Powerhouses, says Tulsi Tanti, a Gujarati businessman, was running a small textile company whose biggest cost after raw materials was electricity, which was both erratic and rising in price. He commissioned two wind turbines to secure power for the mill, found that wind energy was a better business than textiles, and founded Suzlon Energy in 1995. English Wikipedia lists Girish Tanti as a co-founder and the group’s vice chairman.

The early steps were small and local. Wikipedia says Suzlon set up its first manufacturing facility at Diu, on India’s west coast, and in 1996 commissioned its first customer turbine for Indian Petrochemicals Corporation at Dhank in Gujarat. Its technology partner for those first projects was the German firm Südwind. In 2000 an order from Tata Finance led Suzlon to set up what Wikipedia calls India’s first 1-megawatt unit, at Supa in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district, and in 2001 Tanti sold the textile business to become chairman of Suzlon Group.

Suzlon also changed how turbines were paid for in India. Wikipedia describes a model in which customers put up a quarter of the capital and Suzlon arranged loans for the rest; Indian banks were hesitant at first, but by 2008 many were financing wind projects for Suzlon’s clients. The company went public in 2005: its shares were listed on the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange on 19 October 2005, according to the IPO tracker Chittorgarh.

Blades in Daman, gearboxes in Belgium, turbines in Hamburg.

The listing came in the middle of fast expansion. In 2002 Suzlon produced the S60 rotor blade at its blade unit in Daman, which Wikipedia describes as the first wind turbine blade made in India. In 2003 it won its first order abroad, from DanMar, for 24 turbines in southwestern Minnesota, and opened an office in Beijing. In June 2007 it signed a contract with Edison Mission Energy of the United States for 150 turbines, and from 2006 its subsidiary Suzlon Rotor Corporation had been making blades in Pipestone, Minnesota.

Two acquisitions took the company into Europe. In 2006 Suzlon agreed to buy Hansen Transmissions, the Belgian maker of wind turbine gearboxes, and in 2007 it bought a controlling stake in the German turbine maker REpower Systems, later renamed Senvion, English Wikipedia says. Both were later sold as debt rose. Suzlon began selling down Hansen in 2009 as part of a debt restructuring programme and sold its last stake to ZF Friedrichshafen in October 2011. In the same month it took full control of REpower by buying out the remaining minority shareholders, and in January 2015 it announced the sale of Senvion to the private equity firm Centerbridge Partners.

At home the company built up a large fleet. Wikipedia says Suzlon had installed more than 17,000 megawatts of wind capacity in 18 countries by 2015, had fifteen manufacturing facilities in 2016, and passed 10,000 megawatts installed in India in January 2017. The wind parks it lists include sites in Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, Kutch in Gujarat, Sakri and Satara in Maharashtra, and the Eastern Ghats in Tamil Nadu. In May 2024, Wikipedia adds, Suzlon won orders from Juniper Green Energy for 402 megawatts of projects at Fatehgarh in Rajasthan, using 134 turbines of 3 megawatts each.

How wind makers present themselves.

Wind turbine makers sell machines that few people ever see up close, so the pictures they publish do much of the work of a brand. The most familiar image is the finished turbine: a white tower and three blades on a ridge, across farmland or in a line out at sea, often shot at dawn or against a clear sky. Onshore and offshore are presented as two different worlds, one of fields and hills, the other of open water and service vessels.

The second set of images is about scale and movement. Makers like to show a single blade strapped to a long trailer on a country road, or rows of blades, towers and nacelles waiting on the quay of a port before being loaded onto ships. Port hubs and installation vessels have become a picture in their own right as offshore wind has grown.

Inside the factory, the pictures turn to process: nacelles lined up in high, bright halls, generators and hubs on assembly stands, and blade moulds the length of the building, with workers in overalls and helmets for scale. Service teams make up the last familiar scene, technicians clipped on at the top of a nacelle with the landscape far below, or descending a blade on ropes.

Behind the images is a heavy industry with a small number of large makers. BloombergNEF reported that 169 gigawatts of wind capacity were added worldwide in 2025, about 95 per cent of it onshore, and that Chinese makers took the top six places in its supplier ranking for the first time. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its turbines, blades and towers are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A restructuring, a new 3 MW series and One Earth.

The debt did not go away with the asset sales. CleanTechnica reported in April 2020 that Suzlon had converted part of its foreign currency convertible bonds into equity in December 2018 but had defaulted on payments on the remaining bonds, and that it had struggled after India moved from feed-in tariffs to competitive auctions for wind power. That month a group of banks led by the State Bank of India approved a plan to restructure Suzlon’s debt, and its bondholders agreed to changes to the outstanding bonds.

The restructuring was completed in the summer. Mercom India reported on 3 July 2020 that Suzlon had finished restructuring its debt with the unanimous approval of its secured lenders, with the remaining term debt repayable over ten years from 1 July 2020; the trade journal Power Line reported the same completion a day earlier. Suzlon remains listed in India.

Its current product line is built around a larger machine. In November 2023 Renewable Watch reported that the S144 3 MW series, expandable to 3.15 megawatts, had been added to the Indian government’s Revised List of Models and Manufacturers. The first prototype stands at Gondal in Gujarat on a hybrid lattice and tubular tower with a hub height of 160 metres, the magazine said, and the model had moved into serial manufacturing. The company’s base is One Earth, its global headquarters in Hadapsar, Pune, which English Wikipedia lists among the works of the architect Christopher Charles Benninger.

For a design guide, Suzlon shows how an Indian maker built a brand from local factories, overseas acquisitions and a long recovery. Compare Senvion, the German maker Suzlon owned for eight years, and Inox Wind, another Indian turbine maker. For this guide we use a Deccan blue, a monsoon green and a laterite red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Suzlon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.