On-Site Power

Rolls-Royce giving MTU Mankato generator plant $13.9M upgrade
Rolls-Royce giving MTU Mankato generator plant $13.9M upgrade

Parent company Rolls-Royce is investing $13.9 million into expanding its MTU power generation manufacturing facility in Mankato, Minnesota.

The company announced earlier that it has added a new research and development building and will expand the manufacturing site in multiple phases. The investment will expand plant capacity by about 25 percent.

MTU, which Rolls Royce acquired several years ago, produces generator sets at its Mankato plant. The facility achieved a record year for production last year, according to the company.

“Our MTU plant in Mankato has played a decisive role in our encouraging growth in the Americas,” said Andreas Schell, CEO of Rolls-Royce Power Systems. “We intend to continue on this successful course by working hard to emerge from the crisis stronger than before. More consistently than before, we are pursuing our strategy of evolving from an engine manufacturer to a provider of sustainable solutions. . .Mankato will thus become an even more important part of our worldwide production network in the future.”

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The main portion of the Mankato expansion will be the addition of 28,000-sq-ft to the facility’s existing assembly hall, allowing for additional assembly lines, enhanced product testing capabilities and the creation of 20 new manufacturing positions.

Along with the facility expansion and new R&D development building, the overall project investment includes the addition of upgraded production test cells and the remodeling of the facility’s front office administration area. The new R&D center, which is fully operational this month, will include a dedicated test cell to meet customer-testing requirements for products going into data center applications.

The three production test cells in the main facility will be upgraded to meet these same criteria for testing production units. The front office renovation was completed in December 2019 and included the addition of 21 new workstations.

The first phase of the assembly hall expansion is set to be complete in February 2021, with the final phase targeted for completion in September 2021.

(Rod Walton is content director for Power Engineering and the POWERGEN+ online series. He can be reached at 918-831-9177 and rod.walton@clarionevents.com).