General Electric Co. (GE) agreed to supply 346 megawatts of wind turbines worth as much as 1.3 billion reais ($491 million) to the Brazilian renewable-energy developer Casa dos Ventos.

The order was confirmed yesterday by a GE press official, who didn’t want to be identified because of company policies.

Casa dos Ventos will use 216 megawatts of equipment at the Sao Clemente park in Pernambuco state and another 130 megawatts for the Tiangua project in Ceara state, according to Lucas Araripe, the developer’s new-business director. Work on the Tiangua project is expected to begin in the first half of the year, Araripe said in a Jan. 9 interview in Sao Paulo.

Casa dos Ventos is negotiating another deal with turbine suppliers for about 350 megawatts of turbines worth as much as 1.5 billion reais, Araripe said. Casa dos Ventos is the biggest wind developer in Latin America, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. It has more than 1 gigawatt of wind farms under construction or in operation, and has sold 3.5 gigawatts of projects to other companies.

GE’s turbine factory in Brazil is reaching maximum capacity with the orders, according to Reinaldo Garcia, GE’s chief executive officer for Latin America. The wind segment was the fastest growing among GE’s business units in 2014, he said last month.

Brazil has about 6 gigawatts of installed wind-power capacity, according to the industry trade group known as Abeeolica. That will grow to more than 22 gigawatts in the next decade, said the country’s energy research agency, known as EPE.

Impsa Deal

Casa dos Ventos bought the Tiangua project from Industrias Metalurgicas Pescarmona SA, the Argentina-based equipment supplier whose Brazilian wind-power unit filed for bankruptcy protection last year. That purchase came four years after the developer sold it to Impsa, as the company is known.

The Tiangua project has a deadline to start operating by February 2016. The Ventos de Sao Clemente project is set to start operating by January 2017.

The Sao Paulo-based developer is seeking financing for the GE purchase from Brazil’s BNDES development bank. About 80 percent of the project may be financed through BNDES loans and tax-exempt bonds.