Daniel McGahn
Analyst · Oppenheimer
Thanks, John. I'd like to provide a quick update on our move. The new location for our headquarters in U.S. manufacturing operations is just a few miles away from our current location. We remain right on target with our move time line. We believe that the Jackson Road facility can be a fort of additional liquidity to the business. We have begun the process to explore our options in more detail. However, our primary focus is on our customers and employees. We are working to ensure no disruption to our grid tech operations.
Updating you on our Wind business. The expansion of our offshore wind business with a global brand like Doosan allows us to participate in the South Korean and global offshore wind market. This is very good news for our business. This may help to create further revenue diversity within our Wind business. Doosan acquired the prototype, design and rights to manufacture itself the 5.5-megawatt wind turbine for the domestic and global markets. The 5.5-megawatt system has been operating for nearly 3 years in Jeju Island and, in turn, earned a reputation for its resiliency and safety. In 2016, during typhoon Chaba, the turbine withstood the fourth most powerful typhoon on record to hit Korea, with winds reaching 124 miles per hour. Doosan is the engineering procurement contractor and wind turbine supplier of the first phase of Korea's Southwestern Offshore Wind Project, a 2,500-megawatt project being developed by state-owned company, Korean Offshore Wind Power. Doosan will supply to the project's first phase a phase of 60 megawatts expected to come online by 2019. According to GlobalData, the South Korean offshore wind market capacity is forecasted to grow to over 6,000 megawatts by 2030. We are diversifying our wind customer base. We look forward to producing and supplying Doosan with our 5.5-megawatt as well as our 3-megawatt ECS for offshore applications. The 5.5-megawatt ECS is expected to be manufactured out of our facility in Romania. There are 2 things on the wind side that I'd like you to take away from this call. The first is our new agreement with Doosan, which expands our wind opportunity, particularly for offshore wind, initially in South Korea. Second, we believe the wind market in India is improving. And we see Inox winning in this new environment. The Indian wind market is seeing an increase in the number of national wind auctions planned in the coming months. Our customer Inox is commencing production on orders they were awarded in the first national auction in February. This fiscal year, Inox Wind announced 550 megawatts of new wind turbine orders won from the first and second national wind auctions held in India. This is very good news for us. The Indian government is expecting as many as 3 additional national auctions for 1,500 megawatts each this fiscal year. India also anticipates state auctions to begin this quarter, specifically, what's anticipated to be a 500 megawatt auction in the state of Gujarat and a 250 megawatts auction in Rajasthan and a soon-to-be-released tender document coming from Andhra Pradesh. We see Inox' winning auctions at a higher rate than previously reached. We are seeing signs of a recovery and continued to be optimistic about the Indian wind market. We do expect Inox to move to higher levels of turbine production in the second half of the fiscal year, which is expected to result in sequentially higher ECS shipments in the third quarter and robust shipments in the fourth quarter as well. We are diversifying our wind business through customer and market diversification.
We are diversifying our overall revenue by growth through our Grid business. And as you know, D-VAR is a large contributor to our Grid business. I mentioned that we anticipate stronger second half revenues from our Grid tech business unit driven by D-VAR shipments in the third and fourth quarters. In fact, we anticipate that third quarter revenues could be the strongest that D-VAR has seen in years. We continue to see strength in our D-VAR business from the renewable and industrial sectors. Our D-VAR product targets the power transmission grid. In January, we announced a new product targeted to electric utilities for the distribution grid. Our new VVO platform is designed to bring back order and rhythm to the growing disarray within distribution networks. VVO represents 15 years of experience in volt/VAR innovation on the transmission network, now formatted to stabilize modern distribution networks. This new solution is specifically designed to mitigate power quality issues from increased distributed generation capacity. Distributed generation, or DG, is electricity generated within the distribution system itself as opposed to the stream of electricity generated from centralized power plants. However, DG is not what the grid was built for. Originally designed in the earlier 20th century, the grid brought electricity to consumers by means of low distant generation through long transmission lines and finally, to end users via a distribution network. 21st century energy generation has required a system built for one-way delivery to become a bidirectional one. As the penetration of DG increases, the problems caused by it are also increasing and are, in some cases, causing utilities to limit the amount of DG that can be installed on their distribution grid. Photovoltaic, or PV, generate inherently irregular and unpredictable output wildly across even one area of the distribution grid. Because a large percentage of DG is from PV as well as the proliferation of electric vehicles, grid operation becomes laden with power quality issues for which established equipment simply cannot respond quickly, effectively or often enough. And we expect these problems will increase in the future. Penetration levels of PV generation are expected to continue to grow in North America and increase problems for utilities. As a result of the green movement, electric vehicles are becoming ubiquitous. According to a new report from Navigant Research, the North American electric vehicle market has grown by nearly 10x since 2011. Sales of electric vehicles in North America are expected to grow by nearly 50% in 2017 compared to 2016. Nations around the world confirm policy changes toward renewable energy targets as high as 20% by 2030. DG is estimated to rise globally to 165 gigawatts of power by 2023, with the predominant increase coming from solar.
VVO is a unique purpose-built device that is designed to integrate effortlessly into the distribution system with the appropriate capabilities and size. The compact size of VVO makes it optimal for installation on electric poles. Fast-acting power electronic-based devices with no moving parts, such as VVO, can address and solve many of these problems. A core value of AMSC is to listen and learn. VVO was the result of listening and learning from the marketplace and designing a cost-effective solution to a growing problem in our distribution grid.
Enabling utilities to stabilize and increase resilience of the evolving modern distribution grid is part of our mission at AMSC. Our sales team at AMSC has been working very closely with utilities and solar developers in the U.S. We are seeing interest in VVO from investor-owned utilities, cooperative public utilities as well as municipal utilities. These utilities are located in different geographic locations, including rural and urban locations. We expect to build a backlog of commercial VVO orders in fiscal 2017. We believe our VVO offering doubles the addressable market for our voltage management solutions. We anticipate VVO could be an important component to the long-term growth of our grid business.
Today, we are working with more than a dozen and a half utilities and identifying new REG projects to increase the resiliency of urban distribution grids. Utilities have expressed interest and are performing deployment studies of our REG solution. I believe we've made a breakthrough in our communications with ComEd. We've had close dialogue of ComEd this quarter. We are working with the utility to be in the best position to move the project forward. We are listening attentively to the needs of the utility, and we are learning to communicate more clearly.
The second quarter of fiscal 2017 showed improvement over the first quarter. As anticipated, we expect shipments to Inox to increase in the second half of the year. We are focused on continuing to grow our grid business. AMSC's focus on system-level solutions, targeting specific Navy vessel platforms, is paying off. Now that our SPS is designed into the San Antonio class of amphibious assault ships, our work continues to expand our reach to other platforms. But we're not stopping at ship protection systems, our goal is to support the Navy's plan to electrify the naval fleet. Our strategy of creating value beyond the wire is getting the attention of our target markets. ECS, D-VAR, REG and SPS are our systems. This is the new AMSC we've been building. Speaking of the building, I want to remind you that we've begun exploring options for our Jackson Road facility. I look forward to reporting back to you at the completion of our third fiscal quarter. Nicole, we'd like to open up the line to questions.