Generator Manufacturing: Dynamos to ABB Robots

Generator manufacturing is having an unusual year. In September 2026 Generac disclosed a long-term agreement to supply up to $8 billion of backup generators for Amazon's data centers. Amazon's deliveries are expected to total $2.4 billion in 2027 and 2028, and the company is expanding its Wisconsin plants to build them. This post traces how generators were made, from Werner von Siemens and the hand-wound coils of the early twentieth century to standby units for homes and server halls. It then looks at where robots do the welding, handling and winding today, and where ABB's arms could fit.

Rows of backup generators at a data center, the kind of equipment behind Generac's Amazon deal. Photo: Rsparks3 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

From dynamos to hand-wound stators

The modern generator starts with Werner von Siemens. In 1866 he found that a machine could excite itself, starting from the faint magnetism left in its own iron and building up current without permanent magnets. He reported the principle to the Berlin Academy of Sciences in January 1867. Other inventors, including Charles Wheatstone, were working on the same idea at the same time. Siemens and Halske went on to build dynamos, some of them driven by steam engines, and the factory work of cutting iron cores and winding copper coils began. The sums were small compared with today's orders, but the process was the same: wire around iron, turned by an engine.

A Siemens and Halske direct current generator coupled to a steam engine at the Technisches Museum Wien. Photo: Technisches Museum Wien via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Making a generator meant making coils, and for a long time that was handwork. A photograph taken in 1942 at Wilson Dam in Alabama shows a worker winding bars into a generator stator for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The coil bars had to be laid, insulated and tied by hand, and the frames and bracing around them were welded by hand as well. The skill sat in the winder's fingers, which made it hard to describe to a machine.

A worker winds bars into a generator stator for the Tennessee Valley Authority at Wilson Dam, Alabama, 1942. Photo: Alfred T. Palmer / Office of War Information via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Generac shows how small generators found a market. Robert Kern founded the company in 1959, and it began with portable generators sold through Sears, Roebuck under the Craftsman name. In 1989 it introduced its first gaseous-fueled automatic home standby system, a generator that starts itself when the grid fails. The company is based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and its products now run from 800 watts up to 9 megawatts. The idea moved a power station component into a household product, and each sale added another enclosure, engine and alternator to build.

A Generac SB-375 commercial standby generator on its fuel base in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Photo: Dwight Burdette / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Robots on the generator line today

The Amazon agreement is why generator factories are in the news. Generac expects about $2.4 billion of deliveries to Amazon in 2027 and 2028, and an Amazon subsidiary received a warrant to buy nearly 1.7 million Generac shares at about $200 each. The company says it has expanded in Oshkosh, built a plant in Beaver Dam and is bringing a new plant in Sussex into production this year. Commercial and industrial sales rose 29 percent in the second quarter, and Generac reported a $1.6 billion data center backlog.

Large diesel generators in a yard beside a data center under construction. Photo: Lapalmauz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A large standby generator is built from a steel enclosure, a base frame, an engine, an alternator and a stack of wiring. Each part has a robot-friendly job. Welding long seams on frames and fuel tanks is repetitive and needs consistent bead quality. Moving heavy sheet and stator cores calls for a strong arm. One used-equipment listing for a rotor and stator welding line, built for electric motors rather than generators, describes an ABB IRB 6700 handling sheet and an IRB 7600 handling stator cores. I found no source tying ABB to Generac itself.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

ABB's arc welding robots are the natural fit for frames and enclosures. An IRB 6700 reaches large parts, and a positioner turns the work so the torch stays at a good angle. For smaller batches, a GoFa CRB 15000 with the Cobot Arc Welding Package can be taught by guiding the torch by hand, as shown in ABB's Easy Teach Device demos. The cell programs are usually built and checked first in RobotStudio, which saves time on a heavy part. Our post on robot welding from job shops to garages covers that workflow.

An ABB arc welding robot with a positioner that turns heavy parts. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What comes next for generator makers

Winding remains the hard part. In 2018 Erik Hultman and Mats Leijon described what they called the first fully automated robot cell for winding cable onto stators, aimed at medium and large electric machines. Their prototype was adapted to a stator for the Uppsala University wave energy converter. They found it flexible and potentially cheaper than manual winding, but wrote that more work was needed on reliability, because the cable can kink during assembly. That kinking problem is where force sensing and careful path planning have to improve.

Stator winding being installed in a large generator at a power station. Photo: Astronomyinertia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For factories, the open problems are skills, flexibility and speed. A plant that ramps up for data center orders needs more welded and assembled units in the same floor space, and a robot cell lets existing staff supervise more work. Programming each new enclosure variant by hand is slow, so offline tools and easier teaching matter. Our overview of ABB robot use cases shows how arms with OmniCore controllers handle changes in product mix without rebuilding the cell. The same logic applies to winding, once the cable handling is reliable.

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

For homes, the generator itself will change less than the factory. Households still want a unit that starts by itself and sits quietly beside the house, so cost and safety matter more than novelty. Robots can lower cost by making welds and assemblies more consistent, and SafeMove lets people work near an arm when a task still needs hands. The $8 billion figure is a ceiling, not a firm order, so how many generators are really built beyond the first $2.4 billion will decide how much automation the new plants justify.

A Generac commercial generator with a tank on top, shown close up. Photo: Raysonho / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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