Wind turbine maker Vestas has won a £6m grant from the UK goverment to help it build a research-and-development facility on the Isle of Wight.
The Department for Energy and Climate Change is awarding Vestas more than £3m as part of the Environmental Transformation Fund (ETF) scheme. This amount is being matched by the South East England Development Agency.
Vestas is the first company to receive a grant from the ETF scheme. The company submitted its bid earlier this year for a research-and-development facility to focus on developing wind energy products for the global market.
The centre will safeguard 100 jobs and create a further 150 jobs on the island in the short term and may offer jobs to some workers from Vestas's closing manufacturing plant.
Jim Brathwaite CBE, SEEDA chairman, said: 'We are very conscious of the difficulties faced by the current manufacturing plant and have been working hard to identify job opportunities for those facing redundancy at Vestas and have had a good degree of success: some 100 jobs look secure so far with many more job opportunities still being identified, albeit a proportion are likely to be off the island.'
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Note to Evil Villain/Dave 2020. Thatcher was PM for _11_ years, from 1979 to 1990 so no one under the age of 34 was even born when she left office....