One of the world’s biggest wind turbine makers can’t seem to make a profit. On the contrary, Siemens Gamesa is looking for a €15 billion bailout from the German government because of input price inflation for its turbines, which use a lot of steel in the pylons and blades and rare earths in the generators; and a fundamentally tricky business model in which the manufacturer never reaps the gains from the fact that when the wind blows the marginal cost of extra energy is zero. Those gains flow to the operator – as long as it has secured a healthy wholesale price guarantee in advance. Siemens Gamesa, as Lex noted in the FT last week, is just an engineering company at perennial risk of cost overruns. Its then-boss, Andreas Nauen, warned two years ago that intense competition and regulatory pressure to bring down the cost of wind power had ended up making it “too cheap”. Note to Berlin: it could still save the world.