The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen covers Energy Capital Partners buying TPI’s blade factories, GE Vernova’s $1.7 billion rescue of LM Wind Power, offshore wind cutting oil burn during a heat wave, Scotland’s Caledonia approval, and 19 states suing the Pentagon over stalled wind reviews. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. A few months ago, we told you about a Houston bankruptcy court carving up TPI Composites. Well, that story just got a whole lot bigger. On July sixth, TPI walked out of Chapter Eleven. Zero debt. New owners. A private equity firm called Energy Capital Partners picked up TPI’s blade factories in Iowa and Juarez, Mexico for about twenty million dollars. Twenty million, against more than a billion dollars in liabilities. ECP did not stumble into wind blades. They bought Calpine back in twenty eighteen, inherited seventy-seven power plants, and became GE’s biggest private gas turbine customer in the Western Hemisphere. That relationship, forged in gas turbine halls, is what brought them to composite factories. GE Vernova signed a five-year supply deal requiring it to send blade orders to ECP’s factories. GE is ECP’s partner, its customer, and was even the backup buyer if the deal fell through. So TPI lives on, leaner, debt-free, with locked-in demand from one of the biggest turbine makers on earth. But now, the other side of that coin. While ECP picked up two blade factories for twenty million dollars, GE Vernova recently pumped one-point-seven billion dollars into its own blade company, LM Wind Power. LM’s equity had fallen to negative 575 million euros. Revenue dropped ninety-six percent in one year, from 2.1 billion Danish kroner down to just ninety-three million. The Danish workforce, cut to about twenty-five people. LM Wind Power has lost money every single year since GE bought it in twenty seventeen. Nine straight years of red ink. So think about that. Two American blade factories now serve GE Vernova’s onshore business. One in Grand Forks, North Dakota, owned by GE, inside a division losing four hundred million dollars a year. The other in Newton, Iowa, owned by ECP, zero debt, five-year supply deal. The independent contract blade business that TPI Composites built is gone. Vestas took the India and Mexico plants in-house. GE’s supply is locked to ECP. The OEMs and their financial partners now own the factories directly. And that is a new era for wind manufacturing. Now, let us talk about what those blades are doing once they are spinning. Earlier this month, a brutal heat wave hit the eastern United States. Air conditioners running full blast. Grid operators scrambling to keep up. And off the coast of New England, two offshore wind farms stepped up. Vineyard Wind, eight hundred and six megawatts off Massachusetts. Revolution Wind, seven hundred and four megawatts near Rhode Island. Together they pushed hundreds of megawatts into the grid right when people needed it most. And here is the number that matters. Oil-fired power plants met about ten percent of peak demand on July second this year. Last summer, at the height of a similar heat wave, oil plants covered nearly fifteen percent. That is more than a gigawatt less oil burned. The projects that survived lawsuits, survived construction shutdowns, survived lease freezes, are now keeping the lights on in New England. Across the Atlantic, Scotland just approved two massive offshore wind farms. The Caledonia North and South projects in the Moray Firth, up to one hundred and forty turbines spread across one hundred and sixty-five square miles. Enough power for two million homes. Ocean Wind is leading the development with a commitment of about 1.7 billion pounds. And here is what makes this project different. Caledonia South will mix fixed-bottom and floating turbines, up to thirty-nine floaters. That blend of proven and next-generation technology on a single project is something to watch. Back in the United States, nineteen state attorneys general are suing the Department of Defense. The reason, wind project reviews. Federal law says any wind turbine taller than two hundred feet must go through a Defense Department check, to make sure it does not interfere with military radar or flight paths. Last August, the Pentagon stopped reviewing those projects. No explanation. No timeline for starting again. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown is leading the coalition, joined by attorneys general from eighteen other states including California, New York, and New Jersey. They want a court to force the Defense Department to start doing its job again. And finally, a story from the sea floor. Down in southern New England, lobster populations have been falling for decades. Back in nineteen ninety-eight, there were about fifty million lobsters in those waters. By twenty twenty-two, fewer than ten million. But something else is moving in. Jonah crabs. Fishermen used to throw them back. Now they are hauling them in by the thousands, selling them as a cheaper option to lobster. And researchers at the University of Rhode Island are finding that offshore wind foundations are acting like artificial reefs. Algae grows first, then barnacles and mussels, then fish and crabs follow. The question scientists are working to answer is whether these structures create new marine life, or just pull it in from the surrounding ocean. Either way, the turbines are not just making electricity. They are making habitat. Now, here is what to watch. This Wednesday, July twenty-second, GE Vernova reports second quarter earnings. And the numbers we just talked about will be in the room. One-point-seven billion dollars pumped into LM Wind Power, a blade company that has lost money nine years straight. Twenty million dollars to let ECP walk away with two factories and a five-year supply deal. GE Vernova is guiding for four hundred million dollars in wind segment losses this year. Meanwhile, its Power and Electrification divisions are printing money, nearly five billion dollars in free cash flow last quarter alone. So the question on that earnings call is simple. If you are spending eighty times more to keep your in-house blade maker alive than a private equity firm paid to buy your contract supplier, how long do you keep doing both? Watch for what GE Vernova says about LM Wind Power’s future, about North American onshore blade strategy, and about whether that 1.7 billion dollar injection was a rescue, or a goodbye. The answer could reshape who makes blades in this industry for the next decade. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 19th of July, twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind and Loren Walton of NSK on main bearing failures, why the industry is pulling DLC coatings, and the material changes replacing them. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Cory and Loren, welcome back to the podcast. Cory Mittleider: Thanks for having us. Allen Hall: So we’ve got two bearing experts in one location, and this is the point where we start asking all of our bearing questions. Cory, you’re with Malloy Wind, and we’ve had you on the podcast two or three different times. Loren’s with NSK — we’ve had Loren on at least once before. Loren Walton: Once, yes. Allen Hall: Yeah, and that was good. Loren Walton: I appreciate that. It was fun. Allen Hall: There are a lot of bearing issues happening in the States at the moment, but also globally. Whatever happens in the States, you can pretty much find in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, South America, Brazil — everywhere. We’re hearing a lot about main bearings, and there’s a variety of things that I think you two know from being on the inside that we on the outside haven’t heard yet. I want to get some of those stories out and understand what’s going on, because operators are trying to keep their assets running, and bearings are a big issue. Let’s talk main bearings. What are you seeing in the field right now? What kinds of problems are happening? Cory Mittleider: It seems like operators are coming to us and asking us to supply bearings that no longer have DLC. That’s a bit of a phenomenon lately. For a little over a decade we spent our time supplying bearings with DLC on the rollers to address problems found fifteen years ago. Allen Hall: DLC is diamond-like coating. Cory Mittleider: Correct. Allen Hall: Which is a really hard specialty coating applied to the bearing surfaces to provide hardness and durability — or it’s supposed to provide durability. Cory Mittleider: That’s a good point. It’s a coating that’s one to two microns thick — one to two thousandths of a millimeter — and a very hard material. The big feature was that it’s a dissimilar material to the steel. So when we break through the mixed and boundary lubrication regimes and those asperities touch each other, that dissimilar material prevents the welding and tearing that leads to the peeling damage we saw fifteen years ago. That peeling damage eventually turned into spalling, cracking, and other failures. So it made a lot of sense at the time to turn to something like this to mitigate the peeling. Allen Hall: So the peeling damage was one of those issues where you basically had some sliding happening. In my electrical world, and from looking at these on the ground, you see things moving relative to one another instead of rolling relative to one another. Loren Walton: It’s more of a welding and shearing of the contacts. I used a finger analogy last time: think of your asperities as fingers — one set is the roller, one set is the outer raceway. They weld under high load and high pressure, then they shear, leaving behind debris. That’s what creates the beginning of the peeling damage, and then it continues to create more debris, and the bearing starts to basically eat itself alive. Allen Hall: The start of that process, though — is that a lack of lubrication, or a finish or hardness issue on the bearing? Loren Walton: I love that question, because this is the crux of the whole thing, and I think it’s the part that gets missed. People immediately want to throw the whole thing out and start over with something different. Fundamentally, when we fixed the surface issue by adding the coating, the problems pretty much went away. We went from one-to-five years of life to ten-plus years, depending on the application — without changing the construction, the bearing type, or the contact angle. Just by adding the coating, we increased life significantly. The root of what you’re asking is that the bearing would operate better if it had the proper amount of separation. It’s not a fatigue issue and it’s not a loading issue. At its heart, the bearing isn’t able to create that separation. There isn’t enough speed, and there isn’t enough of a gap created by the lubricant. Allen Hall: So ideally you have this almost molecular-scale film of lubricant between the two surfaces. If it isn’t designed properly, or you have an issue, that lubricant gets squeezed out of the space, and at that point you have trouble. That’s some of what I’m hearing on main bearings — especially when turbines have been curtailed and aren’t turning. Is that partly just the fact that there’s so much load? Cory Mittleider: I think that’s a fundamental difficulty of the main shaft bearing. You’ve got extremely variable loads, from full load to idle, and a wide range of operating conditions — from northern North Dakota in the winter to Texas in the heat this week. High load, heavy load, incredibly slow speed, and even slower if it’s idling. It’s hard to reliably build that film. It’s not necessarily that there isn’t enough lubrication; it’s that the film isn’t building properly where it needs to be to separate the metal and the rolling elements. Allen Hall: So the diamond-like coating was meant to solve that welding problem — you put the coated bearing in, and it worked okay until more recently, when all of a sudden we started having other issues. To me those aren’t related to the coating itself, but to other things happening up in the nacelle. Loren Walton: If we recall some of your previous episodes, you were on the forefront of understanding and talking about DLC starting to become an accelerant to failure. I know you talked about it with Cory. Those episodes have aged very well. A lot of people now are recognizing what we were saying years ago and changing their strategy toward removing DLC — whether on bearings for newer turbines, typically two megawatts and greater, or in some cases going backwards and removing DLC as they do additional replacements, and looking for another solution, because there’s potential for additional issues you weren’t expecting by adding the coating. Allen Hall: The coating is non-conductive, which is part of the issue, because you wouldn’t think bearings are conducting electricity. But as turbines got some of these uptower and downtower converters and inverters connected to the generator, we started seeing current levels — according to Motor Doc, where people like Howard Penrose have gone out and measured currents in the nacelles — of well over a hundred amps running through ground straps and the like, into bearings. That’s a lot of current. If you’re shoving that into a bearing that has DLC on it, you’re going to break it down and create these really hard steel bits stuck inside the bearing, which wear it like pouring sand inside a bearing. That’s what eventually happens, and it has nothing to do with the bearing. It has more to do with the electrical and control systems we stuck up top and didn’t pay much attention to, but probably should have. We created an electrical situation, and now all the upkeep comes to people like you to deal with. You haven’t seen a lot of work to eliminate it, although there are a couple of good attempts happening. The reality is: okay, we have to have a bearing, and I’ve got this current going around from the nacelle. How do I put those together in a way that removes the DLC? Cory Mittleider: That’s what we’ve spent the last ten-plus years on. As a bearing supplier, we can’t change the whole system. We have to do the best we can to accommodate what’s happening in your system. We would absolutely encourage you, if you can identify and remove the electricity, please do that. Allen Hall: They should. And there are a lot of people who do. Cory Mittleider: There’s a pursuit of that, absolutely. But the turbine still needs to run. Loren Walton: We work very closely with an owner-operator that did a lot of that work. To your point from before, it does sound like, from what they’ve investigated, the current has been there for a while. It’s been there in different models and different turbines. Maybe the way it presented, or its impact, wasn’t to the same extent as what we’re seeing now. That’s where I’d say there’s more to it than just the current. I think I said last time it’s not just a smoking gun. The bearing is sitting in front of a firing squad. You put it all together and now we’re in a tough position. But to Cory’s point, we get brought the application, we get brought the environment, and we get told, “Here, make it work.” Allen Hall: And you don’t actually see everything that’s happened. You get all the mechanical loads, but they don’t tell you, “Hey, we’re running a hundred amps through this nacelle.” Loren Walton: No, I don’t remember hearing that. Cory Mittleider: No, that’s not usually disclosed. Allen Hall: No one’s ever said that. So that’s a real troubling thing happening in the industry — we’re assigning blame to mechanical components when really it’s an electrical mistake. When you dig into it, what you find is that currents have been running up top for years, but what’s changed now is that with more focus on emissions from inverters, they’ve pushed things into higher frequencies. Higher frequency bands are harder to ground out and get rid of. When things were in the kilohertz range, we could partly ground them and they’d go away. Now we’re working at ten kilohertz and up, and that energy distributes into a lot of places, including the bearings, where it wasn’t before. That’s really hard to deal with. Some electrical designer sitting in a remote location, probably in Germany, designs the circuit, and now you bearing gurus have to go fix it. Cory Mittleider: And that system’s probably well optimized for that particular package. Allen Hall: For that particular package, right. It meets all the requirements and does everything they wanted — except for the effect on the bearings. Loren Walton: You solve one problem and move it to another. That’s ultimately how it works. Allen Hall: If you’re an electrical engineer, you’d never have thought you were destroying the bearings. The industry has moved quite quickly, though. Everybody started noticing this problem with DLC. They went out to check and figure out what the problem was, and, more importantly, to find a solution. Those solutions are unique, because the reason DLC went on in the first place was to extend lifetime. So if you’re taking the DLC out of the equation, can you still get to those lifetime numbers without it? Loren Walton: Yeah, and that’s where our message has been that adjusting the material will get you the difference you’re looking for. I want to be very clear: I’m not saying DLC as a solution is bad. When it was applied in the right space — turbines with a lighter duty — it worked great. But once you add in additional factors, it becomes an accelerant to failure at certain points. So it definitely still has its place. But once you move away from DLC, you’re going to be right back where you started — regardless of construction — with the life that was always aided by DLC. Once you’ve removed it, you have to know for sure you’re not going right back to the peeling layers and the spalling you were seeing. From what we’ve investigated, the material changes are where you get that. Having a harder surface combats it, and having a better way to combat any additional debris introduced into the system helps. Allen Hall: And reducing the possibility of generating that debris. Loren Walton: Correct. Allen Hall: So what does that mean in terms of bearing design — different alloys, different heat treats, different coatings? Loren Walton: The first two, not the third. From the recipe of the steel, adjusting some of the alloying elements, there’s a lot you can do. A lot of people think of engineering mostly through the mechanics of it, but one part of mechanical engineering that doesn’t get talked about is material science. That’s the part we dive into extremely deeply, and it gives you the biggest bang for your buck when you’re moving away from a coating as your — I don’t want to call it a crutch, but as the thing helping you get by — toward changing the bearing from the inside so it lasts better once the coating is gone. Cory Mittleider: I like describing it as being baked into the cake. It’s not a nice thing added afterward like a coating that’s one to two microns thick. It is the bearing. Allen Hall: It’s hard to think about steel and a lot of the metals used in the bearing industry as unique chemistries, but they are. There are a lot of varieties of steel, just like there are a lot of varieties of copper or aluminum. Loren Walton: Yes. Allen Hall: You’d think steel is just steel — we make cars out of it, airplanes, whatever. Loren Walton: I was talking to someone who’s more into gears, and even when I spoke of a carbon-nitride version of a bearing versus a carbon-nitride version of a gear, it’s not exactly the same. For all intents and purposes it’s easier for everyone to consider it as steel — one word, means the same thing. But once you get into how much chromium is in it, how much molybdenum, how much manganese — Allen Hall: It comes down to that, and it can be very small percentages of the total. Loren Walton: It can make a huge difference. And then you get into the heat treat — your time, your soaking, what you do for quenching. It all matters, and everyone does it differently, so you get different results. Allen Hall: That’s the kicker. You see a lot of discussions where it’s just, “Oh, it’s been heat treated.” As an electrical engineer I used to see it that way too. But there’s heat treatment and there’s heat treatment. It depends on what you’re doing and what the result needs to be, because you’re changing the whole crystalline structure of the steel. The way you do it and the way you quench it all matters. It’s not one size fits all. Loren Walton: That’s the part that gets glossed over so quickly, because everyone’s eyes go to what they can see. You change an angle here or there, or the bearing type, and you can see that. It’s different when you don’t have X-ray vision to tell you where all the alloying elements are and in what percentages, and then whether you carburized it, through-hardened it, or carbonitrided it. There’s so much to it that I can see people’s heads start to spin. That’s where we say there are a lot of experts out here — you two are among them, and there are others. Engage in conversations. Ask questions. Allen Hall: That’s a great call to action — “Cory, help me understand what’s going on.” There’s a variety of bearings out there. Loren’s with NSK, a great bearing company with tremendous history. Those are a couple you can trust. But operators can feel inundated by the guy down the street trying to sell them a bearing, and you don’t know if that’s the right solution for your two-million-dollar wind turbine. Cory Mittleider: These are critical infrastructure assets. Let’s make sure we understand what we’re doing and why. To Loren’s point, you can open three boxes and they all look the same, but what’s inside is what really matters. Allen Hall: It’s a tremendously difficult business. With as many main bearings getting swapped out today, over the last couple of years there have been a lot of decisions made on the fly — some correct, some really wrong. Loren Walton: I’d hesitate to say wrong, because I think people are doing the best they can. It’s not because they’re not trying. Allen Hall: It’s because they don’t have the knowledge in front of them, or maybe they haven’t made the call to Malloy or NSK yet to get the ground truth. Loren Walton: What you mentioned a second ago is pivotal. There’s been enough selling that we’ve kind of gotten away from the engineering. People hear “sales engineer” and they cut off at “sales.” If we can get back to the engineering, a lot more people will improve their assets. And it doesn’t have to be just listening to Cory and me — poll the audience. There are a lot of us out here. Everybody has a different background; we all know a little about this or a lot about that. Take the opportunity to learn. I’d liken it to your personal life: you wouldn’t buy a new vehicle or a stereo system without doing your own research. You wouldn’t just listen to the salesperson and buy the first thing you see. It’s the same here. If you’re making decisions without engaging at least the top three to five people in this space, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Allen Hall: And that’s what happens a lot, because people get pushed. There’s a timeline, especially now with the repower situation — “I’ve got to put something on now.” Cory Mittleider: Right. And new platforms — the next-generation three, four, five, six megawatt platforms, and offshore — are having their first failures. We need to learn from it. That’s where we’ve worked with operators to participate in the teardown and collect the sample. We get clues, we mark it up, and we do a lot of the investigation — metallurgy, metrology, raceway traces — to inform us on what the problem is on that specific platform. Allen Hall: As we get to these bigger turbines, some data is coming back on O&M costs relative to a one or two megawatt machine, and it doesn’t scale linearly. It goes almost exponentially, because everything is more expensive. Replacing a bearing on a six megawatt machine is a much more expensive ordeal than on a two megawatt machine. What should we be paying attention to and monitoring more closely on these larger machines? The new shiny turbine is great, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to monitor and maintain it. Loren Walton: I’d start with verifying all your original fits and clearances. We’ve had cases with a four-point mount main shaft — two main bearings — where one side wasn’t installed properly from the beginning, so it didn’t actually float. It’s supposed to be a fixed side and a floating side; now you’ve got one side that’s not floating, and you get overload. So make sure you’re set from the start. A lot of machines now come already outfitted with instrumentation — vibration monitoring, oil monitoring, different ways to start trending from the beginning. Back when we got started, that wasn’t the case. You got your new turbine and in a lot of cases it had nothing on it — you were flying blind. Now that it’s there, use it. Cory Mittleider: That’s a good point. Specifically to bearings, something earlier versions didn’t have, and newer ones mostly do, is auto-lubers. Allen Hall: I see more of those lately. Cory Mittleider: That’s great from a lubrication-delivery and reliability point of view, but it’s its own little machine. We’ve heard of cases where the auto-luber failed, or ran when it shouldn’t have, or for whatever reason had very large output. So you need regular assessment of the entire system, including uptower. Allen Hall: You’ve got to monitor everything that’s uptower. Cory Mittleider: It’s its own little machine. It requires its own maintenance. If you’re relying on it, you’ve got to check it. Allen Hall: As we move into these larger machines and see more of them deployed, what are the useful things you should be doing in that first year to make sure your bearing is working optimally? Is it just checking vibration levels? Is it getting uptower and doing a quick sweep to confirm the grease isn’t oozing out where it shouldn’t be? Is it that simple? Loren Walton: Having a regular maintenance interval definitely helps. Even getting grease sampling to understand your baseline levels after the first six months and the first year. In a lot of cases the turbines are under a couple-year warranty, so maybe you don’t have as much access. But as much as you can, getting a baseline is huge, because you’re going to want to compare later. You’ll want to say, “Okay, I took this grease sample — what does it mean? Does it normally run that high or not?” Same for vibration, getting the trending. For main bearings in general, more grease is better than less, because you can never quite get it all out when you’re regreasing. So a lot of that first year or two is about getting a good baseline so you know what you’re actually expecting, and what it means when you take a reading in year two or three. Allen Hall: What does a grease sample look like in terms of the response you get back? I take a sample, send it to a lab, and it comes back with — what? Is it “good or bad,” or a bunch of chemical numbers about composition and dirt? I’ve never seen one. Cory Mittleider: It’s a matrix. You can request different versions, but probably ten or fifteen different elements they give you numbers on, in parts per million. Iron and brass will be up there. Allen Hall: So if you see something floating in the grease — Cory Mittleider: Silicon, phosphorus, water. Allen Hall: Water would not be great. Cory Mittleider: No. Allen Hall: So those reports come back, and I assume there’s more knowledge needed to interpret the results. What do you do? Loren Walton: We have some guidelines we share with our partners and customers. If you see a certain amount of parts per million of copper, ferrous material, or the like, we can say, “That’s worth monitoring for a while,” or “You should probably purge it, try to get it out, and see if it stabilizes.” We get those questions and respond in kind. There’s definitely help available. If we work together, we typically have a lot more success. A lot of people right now feel like they’re trying to work in their own silos, and you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to be the subject-matter expert for lubricants, gears, bearings, and everything else. You can reach out to experts who can help, and hopefully that frees up your time to assess and work on other things. Allen Hall: The turbines are so complex today. It used to be you could have one person on site who knew most of what was going wrong, because they’d made thousands of these things — there was a legacy. When you get to six megawatt machines, where you don’t have a lot of history, particularly in the United States, there’s really no one to ask. You’d better find somebody who knows what they’re talking about. Cory Mittleider: And the operators are responsible for multiple systems — six or seven or eight systems they’re looking at. We can help with bearings; we’re niche and focused on that. If we can take that off your plate, now instead of six systems you’ve got five to worry about. Allen Hall: That’s key. There are experts out there, and one thing the podcast is trying to do is give those experts a chance to talk so you know who to ask. Your phones should be ringing right about now, because it’s repower time, and it’s main-bearing repair and replace time, pitch-bearing repair and replace time. There’s a lot of bearing activity going on. I always say call Malloy Wind if you need somebody who really knows their stuff, the technology, and what’s going on internally. How do people get ahold of you two if they have questions? What’s the easiest way? Loren Walton: I try to be at most of the industry events. We usually hold a booth. And my email, my phone number — I’m on LinkedIn, so reach out there. After our last discussion I had a few folks reach out, actually mostly from other countries. It was interesting; we heard about a few issues before they even hit the US. Some folks were having problems with the larger turbines, and we were able to get our teams in Brazil and Spain involved right away. Then once it started cropping up in the US, I could say, “Yeah, I already solved that.” We can put my email in the show notes. Allen Hall: We’ll put it in the show notes for sure. And Cory, how do people get ahold of you? Cory Mittleider: I’m pretty active at the events — ACP, and the Drivetrain Reliability Collaborative is another one we had a couple of months ago. Email, phone, and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I’ve had similar experiences to Loren, getting contacted from other countries across the globe. It’s fun to investigate problems and share results in the technical articles on our website, and have people send me a picture of an article I wrote and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this.” Allen Hall: Your articles are great. Check out malloywind.com — just Google it and it’ll come right to the top. If you have bearing questions or something you’ve seen, that website is a great first place to get some answers. It’s very helpful. Well, Loren and Cory, I love having you on the podcast. We need to have you on more, because there’s a lot going on in the bearing world. Loren Walton: There are things we didn’t even touch on today. Allen Hall: You’re always welcome back. Loren Walton: Awesome. Appreciate it. Allen Hall: Thank you.

Rosemary previews Pardalote’s new hands-on blade repair course. EverWind’s Ocean Lake, Canada’s largest wind project, will feed a green hydrogen and ammonia plant in Nova Scotia rather than the grid. Plus BP’s exit from an offshore project in Japan, and the wake-effect lawsuit pitting SSE, Equinor, and Vårgrønn against RWE’s Dogger Bank South. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes is back this week.  Rosemary, you’ve been to a number of training courses over the last couple of weeks. The first off was GWO. What was your experience at GWO training?  Rosemary1: It was the fourth or maybe even fifth time that I’ve done it. Um, I did it a few times in Denmark and then, uh, this is the second time doing it in Australia. also, this was my first time doing first aid in Australia. Last time they did GWO here, but my first aid was still valid from Europe, so I, I didn’t redo it. And it’s like so much about [00:01:00] snakes and spiders and jellyfish But a good, good rule of thumb, not 100% accurate, but good rule of thumb, if it is something from the ocean that stung you, then you put something warm on it, and if it’s something from the land that stung or bit you, then something cold on it, Allen Hall 2025: well, how often do you usually take GWO training? Rosemary1: You gotta do it every two years to be valid. I don’t do it every two years because, um, if you do it every two years, like within two years, then you can do the refresher course. So that’s three days instead of four However, um, because I don’t climb constantly, like often it will be six months or more in between climbs, I’ll just do it before I know that I’ve got a climb. all the other people except for one were technicians who, you know, have been working for a while. So they’re also doing the full course, not the refresher. So they get a little bit more practice than I do. But, um, it’s just not often enough. Y-you know, like every time I go it’s like I, I really feel the need to have the refresher, um, because I’m just not fully on top of it. ‘Cause it’s [00:02:00] not just that you need to know what to do. You need to be able to… Like if you need to use it, you’re gonna be freaking out, you know? This is the worst thing that’s probably ever happened in your life, and now you’ve gotta remember all your training. It’s like you want it to be actually second nature to some extent. So yeah, first day is manual handling, which is v- you know, very– That one’s very easy and I would be happy to never do that again. Like I will always remember that. Um, then you got fire, um, fire safety awareness, and that one’s just fun ’cause you just get to, um, light fires and put stuff out then first aid, which I definitely always want a refresher on. The CPR dummies at this place, they had lights, um, and it lit up green if you were doing it right, and I haven’t used a dummy that was so advanced before, so that was quite good. I realized I wasn’t pressing hard enough. and then yeah, last two days is working at heights training, which is the most intense ’cause you got your harness on all day and, um, you know, climbing up and down and rescuing people. this was Rite Training in Goulburn, and, um, the [00:03:00] instructor’s name was Claire. highly recommend doing that one. Allen Hall 2025: Is that a general requirement in Australia that you have GWO before you can climb? Rosemary1: Like, yeah, they will sometimes, um, let you climb if you are babysat by people. I would not recommend other engineers, like if you’ve never climbed a wind turbine before, like I would really not recommend that you just go up with a team and haven’t done the training because you do need to be able to use a ladder safely and, um, you can, y- you can easily, like even inside the nacelle, you could easily hurt yourself really badly if you’re used to working in an office, uh, you’re upping your danger level by, you know, like many, many, many times by going up a turbine and it’s just something that you gotta take seriously. Allen Hall 2025: How busy are the courses in Australia? Are a lot of technicians trying to get in and get trained?  Rosemary1: No, it’s people that have a job that are getting trained. But there were heaps of techs in this course. There were maybe eight or so, which is also part of the reason why it took a really long time. Allen Hall 2025: So [00:04:00] this week, as we record, y- you’re presenting a blade repair course for engineers and technicians. a completely new area that you’re, uh, going into in terms of offering advice and expertise that it’s really hard to find on the planet. It’s probably a, a, a busy or, or requested course, I would imagine, in Australia, where you just don’t have access to a lot of the manufacturers. Rosemary2: it’s a, it’s a course for just for engineers or technical type people, um, but including hands-on stuff. So the way that I I forced this to come into being was just the last five years. I, um, you know, I started working a lot on wind turbine blade repairs and, um, people would ask me, you know, “Have these repairs been done right?” And the thing is that the only repairs that I had anything to do with when I was working at LM were weirdo ones, right? [00:05:00] Where the normal, like a technician couldn’t, couldn’t handle it. It was outside of, um, yeah, their, their standard, uh, kind of repairs that they can do for whatever reason. and now in the work that we do at Part Load, it’s primarily normal repairs, and I just didn’t know exactly what technicians know. You know, how do they, how do they know whether they can repair it or not? What do they know before they go up there? When are they calling the engineer? Um, all that sort of stuff, like the normal stuff. eventually it became less about me learning, ’cause like I said, I kind of picked up most of it. Um, but now I’ve got staff that I’m training up to be, uh, you know, composites engineers and to work with these kinds of issues. There’s a lot of repetitive tasks involved in what we do when we, like, assess the condition of a wind farm. A lot of what we do is look main- manually looking through photos and thing- if things are classified right or not. I [00:06:00] Found this guy from Direct Wind Services, Jurij Eska. He’s a blade engineer. He’s worked in Europe and then come back to Australia, so a little bit like me. And, um, I just worked with him on a few projects and I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well, this guy, uh, he really gets it.” And I asked him, “How do you, how do you train your technicians? What course do they do? Maybe I can do that course.” And he said, “Oh, we train them ourselves.” And so then I asked him to put this course together. So where we started off the course yesterday, that was, um, uh, an indoor session where I was talking through how are blades designed, uh, certified, tested, manufactured, um, what kinds of manufacturing defects can you see and what do they do about them in the factory? ‘Cause you know that they’re doing a lot of repairs in the factory already before you ever see a, a brand new blade. and then the next three days we’re going to be working on, um, yeah, grinding and [00:07:00] infusions and a bit of a, a bit of theory about, um, composite repairs.  Allen Hall 2025: What do you feel like are those key skill sets that engineers should know how to do, maybe not as well as a, a professional technician that does it a lot, but at least at a beginner’s level should be able to complete them before they start repairing blades on their own and giving advice about how to repair blades? What, what are those key items? Rosemary2: part of it is that I want them to be able to understand what is a bad damage and what’s not a bad damage cause you look a lot at images from the outside, but it’s really about what’s on the inside and how deep it goes is the real thing. So, um, it’ll be about learning, you know, developing some judgment about, um, how bad it can be and how bad it can look on the outside. We’re not gonna be looking at so many real damages ’cause like obviously we’re just dealing with pieces that are in the, um, in the, uh, workshop and Yuri has [00:08:00] made some samples for us, um, purposely made them badly so that we’ve got some, you know, damage to find. Allen Hall 2025: Are you addressing carbon fiber at all? Rosemary2: Uh, I actually haven’t asked about that. I don’t think so. Carbon fiber is, um, is a real pain to work with because it’s conductive. Like, even grinding it makes a bit of a hazardous work environment. We did talk a little bit about the different materials yesterday and, um, about pultrusions. And actually, it turns out Yuri used to work somewhere where they, uh, manufactured pultrusions, and I had always, I was always under the impression that a pultrusion is, you know, like, perfectly s- perfectly straight. That’s the point. And he’s like, “No way.” No way. There’s waviness in the pultrusions  Allen Hall 2025: And on March 3rd through 5th at WOMA 2027, Rosie, you’re gonna give part of this course as part of WOMA, right? Rosemary2: Little, little mini course. We’ll have to decide what, what makes sense to include, ’cause it was… Yeah, I went through really a, a fair [00:09:00]bit about blades yesterday, you know, like why they are shaped the way that they are. So we had to talk about aerodynamics and, um, why they’re made of composite. So we had to talk about, you know, like composite materials, like how, how they, how they work So I don’t know if, uh, people wanna write in comments that m- we should, we should do some sort of, um, poll beforehand to see what are the topics that are most interesting to people, ’cause I think we’ll have a half day, right? So we’ll need to be, we’ll need to be focused. Allen Hall 2025: the description of repairs and what repairs should look like could be tremendously valuable. Everybody who has seen a repair always wonders, “Was that repair done right?” And s- and if you can have some general tools to know, like, “Uh, maybe there’s something not quite right here,” or, “That looks like a solid repair,” that would be a tremendous help to the industry, p- particularly for asset managers Rosemary2: Yeah. And you know what I think is even more useful than being able to pick out when it’s wrong is to be able to know when it’s right. You can– Y-you know, like it is so– [00:10:00] It’s such a relief. Like it takes such a mental load off you when you’re just like, “Yeah, that’s all, that’s all good. That’s normal. Okay, I know that that– I knew that that would happen, so this is not a surprise.” ‘ know, once you know you can make that judgment, you can do it very quickly and focus your attention where it should be, so you don’t need to stress for an hour over every repair. You’re just like, “Yeah. Good, good, good, good, good.” And then, “Mm, please explain why you have chosen to not, not repair this, but just put a Band-Aid over it.” that’s the goal of this training is to get everybody, y-you know, technical people, not people who wanna ever be a blade repair technician. They’ve got their own training that covers what they need to know. But this one is just, yeah, getting people like asset managers or my employees to learn what they need to know about composites, given that they have already got a strong engineering education. So, um, you know, they know a lot of the stuff, but just need to know the composite-specific stuff and wind turbine blade-specific stuff I will run this course again, by the [00:11:00] way, ’cause there was a lot of people who wanted to do it I couldn’t fit in. So it’ll happen at least once. I’ll keep on running it until everybody that wants to do it has, has done it. But, um, yeah, feel free to get in touch  Allen Hall 2025: So if you wanna attend Rosie’s short blade course at WOMA 2027, just visit woma2027.com and register today ​ Allen Hall 2025: [00:12:00] Well, over in Canada, they just approved a, really a wind farm big enough to power a small city, and almost none of the electricity is going to the grid, which is a very interesting aspect to some of the things that are happening in Canada at the minute. So up in Nova Scotia, uh, they’ve conditionally approved the Ocean Lake Wind Project. This’d be the largest wind farm in the province’s history. Up to 158 turbines will rise, uh, generating as much as 1.2 gigawatts of power. But this power is not headed to households in Canada. Nearly all of it will be feeding Everwind Fuels’ green hydrogen and ammonia plant at Point Tupper, where clean electrons will become a fuel that can be shipped across the ocean to Europe. And Matthew, there’s been a lot of [00:13:00] projects like this in Europe that have stopped more recently, particularly in northern Europe and up in Scandinavia, uh, on the hydrogen side. Or at least they’ve slowed them down. Canada seems to be going into that breach maybe to fill that void. And is there a marketplace for this to occur up in Canada?  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think it’s very interesting. Um, you know, like you say, a number of canceled projects, and in Australia there’s been numerous canceled projects. So I like, um, the analogy or use of the term hopium rather than hydrogen, um, where, um, everyone’s hoping hydrogen will be the answer. Um, although, you know, what I, what I’ve read and understood is that, um, you know, the commercials just don’t really stack up and, um, yeah. So in terms of South Australia anyway, um, there was some major, um, hydrogen, uh, development planned with, um, you know, it, it never stacked up. So, you know, it sounds like a great [00:14:00] idea, um, but I’m not sure that the commercials will ever stack up unless you’ve got that guaranteed offtake for the, for the ammonium Allen Hall 2025: Yolanda, what kind of uphill battle is this to get this wind farm up and running knowing that it’s one customer and that commercial market is a little shaky at the minute? Yolanda Padron: what we saw, they have a lot of ca- caveats, right? So they’ve, they need to secure the customers before they start building and before they do anything, um, behind the meter. But it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s a pretty big wind farm, and it’s pretty far up north. But I mean, we, we talked to someone in, in northern US today who was having icing issues. So I mean, of course we know Canada is no, no stranger to that, if they do make it work, I think it’d be really, really exciting to, to have sort of one technology power another, um, instead of just what we’ve been hearing a lot of the potential data centers and, and just wind po- [00:15:00] powering data centers. Matthew Stead: Why not data centers? You know, seriously, like you said, Yolanda. why not go something that does have commercial demand? Yolanda Padron: we’ve talked a lot about the potential of da- data centers, right? And we’ve talked a lot about people wanting to do them. Um, but there’s also a lot of talk of potentially doing data centers up in space and a lot of talk of maybe what if we do it offshore or, you know. And so I think there’s a lot of what ifs with data centers. Of course, there’s a lot of what if with this, but just from a technology standpoint, I think this is really intriguing to have something that’s, that’s a little bit even more out there than what we’ve heard so far Allen Hall 2025: Is it a build it and they will come type of s- situation here that hydrogen and ammonia may be the, the first offtake, but realistically, if that doesn’t work out, they can still connect to the grid and feed Canada, feed the Northeast of the United States or something else Matthew Stead: Also, um, like Japan has [00:16:00] also expressed strong demand for, um, ammonia, and so, you know, they- they’re on the East Coast, aren’t they? So, you know, shipping it from East Coast to Japan is not gonna be so, so easy. I stick by what I said before. It’s hopium. it’s not a plan Allen Hall 2025: I just saw an article today talking about Airbus continuing on with a hydrogen aircraft, and I think they were gonna work with a Japanese firm to work on that together. Six months ago I thought that died, but maybe it’s still in the offering. Maybe there’s an offtake for hydrogen. B- besides the, you know, replacement for some of the, uh, more unpleasant gases that are used in steel production and in some other industry things, maybe part of this is airplane fuel. Which ammonia is one of those offerings also, right? The, there’s been a number of efforts to turn ammonia fuel into essentially jet fuel. They configure the engines to burn ammonia, which is a possibility. It does seem remote though, [00:17:00] honestly. There doesn’t seem to be a huge pull for hydrogen, and there’s not a, a major market for ammonia at at least at the moment. So I don’t know. It, it’s… When you’re talking about gigawatts of capacity you’re gonna build, you, you hopefully have an offtake  for it  Yolanda Padron: if they designed it for it being not connected to the grid, right, it just is kind of like a behind the meter thing, and then could they later retrofit it into there? Like, how would all that permitting and everything  Allen Hall 2025: I–  well, that’s a great question. I– There are a number of, uh, connections between the United States and Canada at the moment. guess is that when they place this wind farm, they have that alternate route lined up, just like any wind farm in here in the States, that you’ll find them real close to high-voltage transmission lines. Generally, those are the easy ones because transmission lines cost money and take time for permitting. I’m not sure Canada has those kind of restrictions, right? But Nova Scotia is not the easiest place in the world to do heavy construction work, just the [00:18:00] nature of Nova Scotia. It will be fascinating to see how they progress with this, but it’s something to keep an eye on because a lot of other projects like this have slowed down Matthew Stead: Do you remember when some of the OEMs were talking about, um, putting electrolyzers on their offshore wind turbines? So the, the theory, the theory was you’ve got offshore wind turbine, you don’t connect it to the grid standalone, um, and you generate hydrogen or, uh, possibly ammonia on the actual wind turbine. And then every now and then you just decant it, you know, drive up with a boat, you know, plug in the hose, and then suck out the hydrogen or ammonia. So, um, yeah, once again, all of those have gone quiet, haven’t  they?  Allen Hall 2025: speaking of Japan, a global oil giant is walking away from the Japanese offshore wind project, uh, but the project’s not dying. BP has told its Japanese partners it intends to withdraw from a wind farm planned off Yamagata Prefecture, uh, apparently worried about [00:19:00] profitability. The 450-megawatt project sits, uh, just off the coast, and it is led by trading house Marubeni, which says it will press ahead without BP. Kansai Electric and Tokyo Gas remain on board also. So BP’s exit follows really a, a brutal year for Japan, where Mitsubishi has, and some others, have pulled out of, uh, at least three projects so far, uh, over rising construction costs, and I think a lot of that’s tied to inflation. Uh, the ambition’s still there for, uh, for a number of companies, but it’s just getting harder and harder to do projects in Japan. Is this just the nature of the economy in Japan at the moment, or is this more about Japanese policy on the offtake,  Matthew Stead: I, I’m not really deep into the details but, you know, it just appears to me like a blip. I mean, there, I think there’s a lot of commitment in Japan to, you know, carry [00:20:00] out their offshore developments and I, I think this is probably more just a blip, um, and a little, you know, internal corporate, you know, argument rather than a sustained issue on offtake agreements and so forth Allen Hall 2025: Well, Yolanda, how hard is it to keep partners on a wind development in general? Are there a lot of moving pieces there until the turbines hit the water or hit the  earth?  there’s  Yolanda Padron: I think a lot of moving pieces, but not, uh, I haven’t seen a lot of changes once it’s been publicly announced and everything’s, you know, everything’s been signed and everything. Um, I do think this is really interesting. I know we’ve talked a lot about, about having, about the idea of like sometimes people think wind’s really expensive, and the way that we’re gonna make wind work is just making it cheaper for everybody and just optimizing it as much as possible, um, and, and just being, having the turbines be as resilient as possible, right? And I think such a strong player just backing out maybe [00:21:00] will incentivize some of the people in Japan to sort of try to see how they can optimize it a little bit more. I’m really excited to see it. I don’t know. It’d be… I think it’d be a nice it  Allen Hall 2025: Isn’t the bonus to offshore wind the price stability? Although the price may be higher today than you may be happy to pay, the stability of that price is a huge leverage point when you compare it to things like oil and gas or natural gas, um, in particular, which are highly volatile, that for electricity, at least you have this fairly steady source at a fixed price that you can plan out 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, maybe even 30 years. And as batteries become more prevalent on the grid, that the math even gets better over the years. Isn’t that the bonus? And, and if [00:22:00] everybody can focus on the long-term effects to the economy is where all the action will be? Matthew Stead: Yeah, I mean, when I first, um, started looking into wind, you know, 10 plus years ago, I, I won- wondered why. Why would you build offshore with all that expense? And then, you know, it became clear to me just around the, um, you know, the diversity, you know, the, the fact that you might get more wind at times that you don’t get onshore wind, and the fact that it’s more consistent. Um, yeah, and, you know, so those… I- it’s really a trade-off, isn’t it? Between the capital costs and the, um, more reliable, more consistent, um, offshore wind. So I think, you know, I, I was convinced at the start, I thought it was crazy, but then obviously it’s, it’s a, it’s a… it makes sense Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I agree. And I think, uh, depending on where you’re having your offshore wind farm, you run into things that you maybe haven’t run into before, right? I know onshore we run into a lot of things in the [00:23:00]US and Australia that we, you know, the, the turbines just maybe weren’t designed for, or there wasn’t a lot of research being done because it was being done in Europe and, and the conditions are really different. Um, and just the same way, you know, the sea is different in different places. There’s different depths. There are diff- different things that you need to worry about. but yeah, I, I completely agree that there’s a lot more generation, um, offshore. It’s, it’s bigger turbines. Um, there can be bigger, larger costs. You know, if you need to do a blade replacement or something, it, it can get, again, really expensive really quickly. But, but it’s, it’s a trade-off for sure. Allen Hall 2025: We’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we wanna talk about a place where wind is being fought over versus projects slowing down ​ [00:24:00] over in the UK, there’s a big fight about offshore wind, and not just about where wind turbines will be planted, but more about how they will affect other wind turbines. So RWE is defending the UK government’s approval of its three-gigawatt Dogger Bank South project, which won its consent order, uh, basically a month and a half ago. Uh, but the developers next door are taking that approval to court. Equinor, SSE, Vårgrön own the neighboring 3.6-gigawatt Dogger Bank wind farm, and they have filed for j-judicial review. Their argument is technical, but the price tag is not. They say wake effects, where one wind farm steals the wind from another due to turbulence, could cut their output and cost them between €500 million and [00:25:00] €669 million over the life of their project. That’s a lot of money, Matthew. A half a million euros is not something to ignore. It looks like this is headed to some judicial court or maybe arbitration. Wake effects, which are actually not that well understood from what I can tell at the moment, there’s a lot of discussion and argument about, uh, how real are they or, or what effect they can have on power output. Uh, there’s a lot of money at stake, and the location of some of these wind farms is pretty close to one  another  Matthew Stead: you know, we always, always talk about, you know, AEP loss and, you know, the, the challenge is actually measuring it. And, um, you know, I’ve heard different numbers, but, you know, plus or minus half a percent of AEP loss, um, appears to me from what– in discussions, you know, the, the limit of what you can actually ever measure on a good day. Um, I just wonder, I mean, while those numbers, you know, €500, um, [00:26:00] million is a, is a big number, um, but what is that as a percentage of the overall output of that, of that facility? Um, I, I don’t know the answer, but, you know, if, if it’s, you know, half a percent, I think you’d be struggling to, um, struggling to justify that, that wake effect loss. I mean, you know, going back to what you said, Allen, you know, there are wake effects of some sort, but it’s a question of how much. I mean, that-that’s why aircraft don’t take off, um, too closely, isn’t it? Because there’s wake effects. Um, so it’s definitely a given, definitely a given. Um, but, you know, how much of an impact it truly is. Um, and I mean, there’s always other variables, you know, variables in the weather, you know, wind patterns, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, and how much do this– does this actually compare to those other, other variables?  Allen Hall 2025: Yolanda, how would you even mitigate wake turbulence on an adjacent wind farm? Are there ways to do that today?  Yolanda Padron: I think the, the aerodynamics, Allen, would [00:27:00] be a lot more in your court than, than in mine. Matthew does have a really good point. I mean, what are we… With the UK wanting to ramp up offshore as much as they want to ramp up, right? They’re not going to just cancel a large project, and they need to… I mean, it’s not, uh, there’s a finite amount of space, right? So what, I mean, what, what are you, what are you gonna do? It’s like, it’s what, like, what happens in onshore where you, you really hope maybe that you don’t get a wind farm that’s really, really close by. Um, but you might also want to plan for it. I mean, I know of sites that have le- that lease a little bit of extra land so that way no one else can lease it, or that they can, they can use that to, to travel between turbines. Um, and it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s kind of… Isn’t it kind of just part of it, part of the trade? Allen Hall 2025: it has to be, right, at some point. [00:28:00] The question in my mind about all this is how much wake is there? Is it directly impacting the adjacent wind farm? Is there– are there things that can be done to minimize that wake turbulence? I think the answer is yes, but as wind turbine blade designers, I haven’t seen the same level of wake reduction that we have seen more recently in aerospace. It’s complicated to do some of these things on a wind turbine blade. You’re mass-producing. You’re making a blade a day or a blade in a day-and-a-half timeframe. Are you gonna design this really aerodynamic tip to go on to reduce the wake on a particular wind farm? Probably not, right? So it’s, it’s– is it worth doing that versus the, the cost it would be? So it’s gonna cost 500 million euros in loss to an adjacent wind farm. Do you put that 500 million into the design effort and the molds and [00:29:00]everything else to make these blades different? Uh, it’s a tight trade-off, right? It– from the engineering side. It may be better settled in the courts, honestly. Just it may be cheaper to do it that way. Matthew Stead: Uh, I, I was gonna go down a different avenue. I mean, obviously there’s always curtailment. There’s always curtailment due to grid congestion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, maintenance. I mean, if they, if they just– when wind is coming from a certain direction, they could just de-rate and, uh, just not absorb as much energy, um, out of the wind when the wind is coming from that sector. And so that would be a way of, um, not modifying the turbine, just de-rating it under a certain wind condition. I mean, the same thing occurs with noise curtailment all the time. Um, so there’s, there’s noise modes. There could be a, a wake loss mode. We should trademark that Allen Hall 2025: Well, you know who’s gonna make money out of this no matter what? The  lawyers.  ​ Allen Hall 2025: [00:30:00] Well, in this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, there are a number of great articles, and you can download the entire magazine and all those great articles at peswind.com. There’s a nice little article from Enerpac Tool Group, and if you’re not familiar with them, they make a, a number of tools that are handy in the wind industry. Uh, and, you know, routine torque checks is kind of a pain, right? And the problem with a lot of those checks is that you have to haul around a heavy hydraulic pump to do it. And so if you’ve ever been to a trade show and seen some of these [00:31:00] pumps, it is a pain. And if you h- have to move around, especially on a w- wind site a lot, you really don’t wanna have a heavy pump that maybe is made for something, uh, more robust. Uh, and you need something that’s portable. That’s what you really need, right? So the Enerpac Tool Group has really created this, uh, LU series they call. Which is a lightweight, portable, hydraulic pump, which is for intermittent work, which is what happens on most wind sites. It’s intermittent. Uh, so the product line director, Angie Wallace, uh, talks about this and says technician feedback has shaped this new tool, uh, from multiple carrying handles and an upward-facing gauge. And that is a big thumbs up from me. When you put the gauge on the side of the tool where you can’t see it, such a problem. It’s like they’ve never used it. Well, obviously, the Enerpac has been talking to technicians, and they put the gauge where the technician can actually see it. Uh, and it’s designed to go through towers and, and tight [00:32:00] spaces. Uh, so this is made specifically for offshore conditions. It’s ruggedized, and it’s a great tool. And a lot of times, Matthew, when you s- see the technicians about and some of the tools they carry, you’re like, man, that is not a good tool for this. That is, that is too much to be hauling around, particularly uptower. It’s nice that we can see some tools that are designed job Matthew Stead: I, I’m completely convinced. I, I don’t have much to say. Um, I mean, my, my day job is, um, you know, designing products and working out what products we’re going to, to work on, and, you know, the customer is the main voice you should listen to, um, at least in the first step. So always listen to the customer first, and I think from what you’ve described, customer first, and then develop the product to suit the application. Yeah, so yeah, I’m convinced  Allen Hall 2025: Yolanda, you’ve seen Interpack on sites, haven’t you? It does seem like I run across them once in a while at some of the US sites  Yolanda Padron: Every once [00:33:00] in a while. I do gotta say I love the idea of when, like, actual, like, boots on the ground people’s feedback is taken into consideration for, for anything really. And so this is, this just makes me really happy because I think a lot of times, like, as engineers, like, we love the idea of just, oh, I’m gonna do this really cool fancy thing, and then it’s just it- no one can use it, or a very specialized person has to be able to use it. And so actually doing, you know, modifying a product so that it, it makes sense for the people using it, and I know we’ve, we’ve all talked about it a lot internally and, and we continue to work towards making it easier and easier on, on the people actually installing the product. Like, this is, this is really exciting. Allen Hall 2025: So if you need a lightweight pump for tightening some bolts uptower, particularly if you’re offshore, take a look at this Enerpac line of LU lightweight series tools. It’s well worth it. And at that same time, you should check out PES Wind magazine. Just go to [00:34:00] peswind.com That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out directly to Rosemary, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. for yolonda, Matthew, and Rosemary, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.  ​

Allen covers Poland connecting its first offshore wind farm, Ocean Winds reaching full power in the Mediterranean, Stiesdal’s floating wind cost breakthrough, Vestas expanding in Australia and Japan, a federal permitting freeze stalling 250 US projects, and India passing 50% clean power. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday, everyone. A coal-dependent nation just plugged into offshore wind for the very first time. Poland’s power grid received electricity this past week from its first offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea. It’s called Baltic Power, a joint venture between Poland’s Orlen and Canada’s Northland Power. It began sending electricity from its 76 turbines to shore — about a 1.4-gigawatt site, enough to power more than 1.5 million Polish homes. And this is more than just one wind farm. Poland is shifting its entire energy map. For decades, the center of electricity generation sat in the coal-rich south. Now it’s moving to northern Poland, to the coast. The country plans six gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Equinor and Ørsted are both set to build along that Polish shoreline, and that’s good news. A new 530-million-złoty substation — about $140 million — is part of a plan to build nearly 5,000 kilometers of high-voltage lines to carry the power to southern Poland. Coal still supplies more than half of Poland’s electricity, but that number is about to change. And now down to the south of France. Ocean Winds, the offshore wind company created by EDP Renewables and Engie, just reached full power at a floating wind farm in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s three 10-megawatt turbines sitting on semi-submersible floaters 16 kilometers off the coast. It’s a pilot project, but the lessons are real: 99% of the suppliers are European, 85% French, and it proves that floating offshore wind can work in deep Mediterranean waters. Now we’ll stay with floating wind for a moment. Danish company Stiesdal Offshore says it has cracked the cost code, and this is important. The company modeled what it would take to build a full-scale floating wind farm — one gigawatt from a single port in a single installation season, loading out one turbine per week. And the cost? Less than one million euros per megawatt. That is on par with the jacket foundations used for fixed-bottom turbines in deeper water. About 80% of the world’s oceans are roughly too deep for conventional foundations. And if those numbers hold — one million per megawatt — floating wind just got a whole lot more investable. Meanwhile, Danish Vestas is making moves on two continents. In Australia, the Danish giant bought a 272-megawatt project in Tasmania from Ark Energy. It’s called the St. Patrick’s Plains Wind Farm, and once built it would be the biggest wind project site in the state. Vestas now has more than 13 gigawatts of wind projects in its Australian pipeline. So the model is clear: buy early-stage projects, bring in investors and offtakers, then supply the turbines to build the farm. The turbine supplier is turning into a wind developer. And over in Japan, Vestas secured backing from the Japanese government to build a wind turbine assembly factory. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has committed support for the facility. Vestas already has about two gigawatts of turbines installed in Japan, including machines at the country’s largest operational offshore wind farm. A factory on Japanese soil puts Vestas closer to an offshore market that is just getting started. Now we turn back to the United States. In Minnesota, four wind energy projects are stuck in limbo. The Department of War has stopped completing national security reviews for proposed wind farms. Those reviews used to be routine. A new report says more than 250 wind projects are stalled nationwide because of it. In Minnesota alone, the four frozen projects represent over one gigawatt — that is more output than the state’s twin nuclear reactors at the Prairie Island Power Plant. So at stake is $1.6 billion in direct investment, about 5,600 jobs, and more than $168 million in economic impact. Nine clean energy groups have sued the War Department to break the logjam. And over in Ohio, the state senate passed a bill that could block many new wind farms and solar farms. The bill says power sources must be available at least 50% of the time, and wind and solar on their own rarely hit that number. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce opposes the bill, and so does the grid operator. But the bill has passed the Senate and now heads to the House. And what a mess Ohio is creating for itself. And finally, in India, for the second time ever, clean energy met more than 50% of the country’s electricity demand. It happened on July 6th. And in the first half of 2026, India installed nearly 29 gigawatts of new solar and wind combined. The country now has about 288 gigawatts of renewable capacity. A nation of 1.4 billion people just crossed the halfway mark on clean power. It’s pretty good — and they’ve done it twice now. So here’s what to watch. The industry’s next chapter is not just about who builds the most megawatts. It’s about who controls the choke points: ports, permits, foundations, factory floors. The companies and countries solving those problems are the ones that will lead. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 13th of July, 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Dan Fesenmeyer, Managing Partner at WindQuest Advisors, joins to discuss the repowering rush and the FAA permitting stall, rising O&M costs on larger turbines, tariff pass-throughs, and AI data center demand. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Dan, welcome back to the podcast.  Dan Fesenmeyer: It’s great to be here. Great to see you again.  Allen Hall: There is so much happening in your particular area. Your name pops up quite a bit within Weather Guard because, uh, we’re dealing with a lot of operators and- A number of times we’ll ask them, “Have you read your turbine supply agreement?” “No.” “Have you read your full service agreement?” “No.” “Well, maybe you should do that.” And then we say, “Have you talked to Dan? You should call Dan, ’cause he can help you understand what you have signed.” Mm-hmm. “Oh, that’s probably a good idea.” So now that you’re here, WindQuest Advisors, of course, obviously is your company. Mm-hmm. And you’re talking to a number of operators. The, the big hurdle at the minute, the nearest short-term hurdle, is repowering. There’s just a lot of [00:01:00] repowering efforts going on- Mm-hmm … trying to get turbines in, start a project. There’s a July 4th deadline and an end of the year deadline. There’s a couple deadlines after that. What are you seeing right now from operators i- in terms of repowering? What’s the effort happening?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, there was a ton of effort to start physical work. That window’s obviously closing-  Allen Hall: Yes …  Dan Fesenmeyer: very quickly, but it’s still open. Uh, and then once you’re past that window, my understanding is if you get your repower completed by the end of ’27, you didn’t really need to have started physical work. But I think most folks, start physical work is kind of the insurance piece of it-  Allen Hall: Sure …  Dan Fesenmeyer: if things take longer. Uh, another thing that’s popped up is obviously FAA and other permitting.  Allen Hall: On the permitting side, from the federal’s, uh, standpoint, is that stopped? Or, or are projects able to continue putting turbines in the ground, or what’s the status? Dan Fesenmeyer: My- From what I’ve seen, I think on the opening session here at [00:02:00] ACP, it was said, they said that there’s, like, 130 projects that are-  Allen Hall: At least …  Dan Fesenmeyer: caught. Yes. And I’m, I’m involved with some of them, and I have a fairly small shop, and there’s just no FAA variances or permits or- They’re not issuing- … mitigation studies. Everything seems to have stopped.  Allen Hall: So they’re not even reviewing the documentation that’s been submitted by the operators at all?  Dan Fesenmeyer: That’s what it seems, yes. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Is that legal? Uh, uh, usually those federal requirements have a timeline which they’re able to review those permits and get them approved or disapproved them. You’re s- Right … I think what I’m hearing is, what you’re saying is they’re not even looking at them.  Dan Fesenmeyer: That’s correct. That’s what I’ve heard and seen.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Yeah.  Allen Hall: So what is an operator to do then? How does this, how do they meet some of these deadlines if they can’t get the permit?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, I mean, it stalled a lot of projects ’cause of the associated risk with it. Although I’ve seen some, uh, you know, some repower folks think, “Well, you know, I’m just repair- repowering like for like, or I’m not changing much.” [00:03:00] But if your, if your rotor’s changing or pad location’s changing, you need to update those permits.  Allen Hall: So the, the groups and the operators that are repowering the existing turbines are putting basically the same turbine in the same hole. Dan Fesenmeyer: Well,  Allen Hall: I- Would that be okay?  Dan Fesenmeyer: I would say originally- The initial push on repower was kind of your larger rotors- Sure … new drivetrain, et cetera. Yes. The market seemed to shift more towards, “Hey, let’s do smaller upgrades, component exchanges.”  Allen Hall: Okay.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Getting more towards the minimal investment, so to speak.  Allen Hall: The 80% investment portion. Dan Fesenmeyer: Yes.  Allen Hall: Right.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. And less about, you know, a big new machine head, for example.  Allen Hall: Well, if that gets you through and gets you the, the, uh, tax credit started back up again, which is the whole point- Right … there would be a reason to do that.  Dan Fesenmeyer: That’s right.  Allen Hall: Is there a marketplace then for those components if you’re gonna repower a GE 1.5 machine, which there’s a lot of them- Mm-hmm in the United States? Are you seeing a big emphasis to go get a new gearbox, [00:04:00] to upgrade the blades- Yeah, and, and- … kind of  Dan Fesenmeyer: thing? Or just do maybe a drivetrain and s- Okay … and leave the rotor or, or-  Allen Hall: So do a gearbox and-  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Gear or just full drivetrain- Or generator … or yeah, s- things like that. And, um- Wow people are comfortable doing it, and then it’s e- it’s easier, obviously.  Allen Hall: Sure. It’s faster.  Dan Fesenmeyer: And faster, and you don’t necessarily have to touch permits or, yeah.  Allen Hall: And is part of that repowering, I know one of the questions- Mm-hmm … that’s been bandied about quite a bit is, do I have to buy a, a new generator or a new gearbox, or is a refurbished gearbox enough to check the box in terms of upgrading or putting 80% of the value back into the turbine to qualify for those tax credits? Dan Fesenmeyer: I’m not a tax expert, but I’ve seen people do both.  Allen Hall: Okay. Well, that’ll tell you.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Yeah.  Allen Hall: They’ve obviously talked to- Right … tax advisors about that.  Dan Fesenmeyer: It’s, it’s their level of risk and whether they have outside tax money or whether- … they’re kind of balance sheet or taking it themselves. It’s, it’s- Yeah … more of a risk profile that [00:05:00] everybody’s different on. Allen Hall: Okay. So that has changed the landscape quite a bit. So now it’s, once this window of opportunity passes by, we’re into brave new world. Mm-hmm. And operating turbines now not really 10 years, operating till end of life, which could be 20, 25 years. Have operators started thinking about that and starting to address some of the, the, especially the contracts around that? Are they starting to rethink contracts? Are they starting to approach full service agreements differently? Is, is the marketplace changing in the US?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it, it, depending what you have and what you’re doing, whether you have an existing agreement or you need a new one, and whether it’s a renewal or if you’re doing, let’s say, a drivetrain or new machine head, then there’s usually a service contract that’s going to come with it- Sure ’cause it’s essentially a new machine. Largely a new machine. Largely,  Allen Hall: yeah.  Dan Fesenmeyer: But in the case of a gearbox, right, you’re probably out of your longterm O&M agreement anyway, and, uh, whether you’re… And you probably [00:06:00] have, you don’t have the unplanned coverage anymore. Right. So it’s really, you’re on, you’re kind of on your own risk. Allen Hall: Okay, so that’s the repower scenario. Mm-hmm. What’s happening new turbine-wise? It seems like the, a lot of the operators are choosing six megawatt, seven megawatt, eight megawatt machines tends to be the, the, the band of opportunity for a lot of operators. What are they working on right now in terms of, uh, TSAs, full service agreements? What are you seeing out on the landscape US-wise?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, I think, um, the TSAs haven’t changed much.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Dan Fesenmeyer: But the- The, the scope and the risk has changed a bit, and the, the OEMs are, you know, holding their cards closer, and it’s hard to get to certain terms that– harder than it used to be.  Allen Hall: So let’s, let’s talk about that for a minute because, uh, there’s been some recent reports speaking to the O&M costs for larger machines. And so the, the goal was if I went from a [00:07:00] two-megawatt machine to a six-megawatt machine, my O&M cost may be 3x because of the size of the turbine, but ideally they drop. That, uh, the same amount of effort into a larger, m- newer machine, uh, so, uh, my spend wouldn’t go up that much. In, in some places on the planet that I’ve seen feedback about that is that the O&M costs are not 3x, they’re 5x. So the, the cost to operate the turbine, the six and eight megawatt machines, is higher than it would be proportionally to a two-megawatt machine. I think operators are just trying to start to figure that out. Are the OEMs already knowledgeable of that fact and are s- trying- I, in, in- … to phrase the conversation I  Dan Fesenmeyer: mean, in the pricing that you get from the OEMs for the full scope agreements, that’s largely in there already.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Dan Fesenmeyer: And I always tell people look at it on a dollar per kWh or dollar per megawatt hour- Ah … basis versus a dollar per turbine, and you- Sure … you’ll see a different number.  Allen Hall: Different calculation done. Dan Fesenmeyer: Right. But [00:08:00] these, these larger machines, they need larger cranes. They need tall– Yeah, they have taller towers, so a different crane setup, and these components become very, very large. So- Everything gets harder … everything gets d- more difficult. In a basic sense, it’s still oil and gearbox and, you know, tho- tho- Right that kind of basic service. But when you get into major components and more major maintenance items, then it’s bigger, it can be harder.  Allen Hall: So what does a operator think about that now that they have a little bit of experience? Obviously SunZia, which is a huge project, three and a half gigawatts, uh, a l- several hun- like around 900 turbines, all of them bigger turbines. It’s a r- for, uh, really the first real taste in America of larger turbines. What are the operators thinking about that, and how are they thinking about what sizes to go with in the future? Or, or, or do they not really have a choice? Like, GE offers six, Vestas offers six, Siemens will offer a six or a seven, [00:09:00] so those are your choices. They’re– You’re not able to get a two megawatt machine anymore.  Dan Fesenmeyer: I mean, I think, uh, it really comes down to your, your site. Okay. And the larger machines are generally better when you have land constraints or, uh, y- your, your wind resource varies very differently. Think of a ridgeline, and you only have a certain number of pads. But generally, it’s kind of a pad constraint to push you to the larger, and then your smaller, “smaller,” four and four to four and a half- … megawatt machines, those are still kind of the workhorses of, of the US, in my opinion. Their NCS better, they’re e- they’re lower cost, but you need more pads. So it’s always that trade-off of pads versus space, spacing, uh, and in the end, you just want to get the most AEP out of that site. Allen Hall: In terms of marketplace, are you seeing prices generally rise dollars per megawatt on [00:10:00] new turbines? ‘Cause the, at least the market indication is that, uh, some of the OEMs have- Real strength in the marketplace today. This is an, an OEM-strong market. They can set- Mm-hmm … prices now. There’s fewer players. China has been eliminated from a lot of lo- locales. Mm. So they don’t have the competition. That allows them to raise prices. Are you starting to see that flow down in some of the contracts, that, hey, the prices are going up? But, but i- inflation has been a big part of that, too. Well,  Dan Fesenmeyer: yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s… And tariffs, right? The, uh, that, that’s the most interesting one right now, and you have to kind of peel apart what’s my pre-tariff price versus my post, and then what’s the exposure if these tariffs change? And-  Allen Hall: Is that in the contracts now? Are they able to write contracts that tie them to what the tariffs could be, so your final price really depends on what the tariffs are today or tomorrow?  Dan Fesenmeyer: It’s generally… Well, things have changed and, and things are always fluid, but, [00:11:00] but most recently it’s, “Well, here’s what the tariffs are today,” and when we either bring in the component or when the OEM’s actually paying that tariff, it’s kind of a pass-through  Allen Hall: in essence. So they’re just handing you the, the bill for the tariff- Yeah … in a sense.  Dan Fesenmeyer: I mean, that- that’s it. And then you can maybe negotiate and do some things around that to share risk a little bit. Mm-hmm. But the basic premise is, you know, there’s transparency on here’s the countries and the tariff rates. If these change, that’s on the buyer. Allen Hall: So the OEMs are trying to address that in, in some form w- by moving production into the United States. Vestas has a large blade facility in Colorado. They’ve been expanding that over the last several months. They’ve been hiring quite a bit. Uh, GE with LM up in North Dakota and TPI, and all the discussions around TPI at the minute is to really bolster their supply chain. Uh, they’re trying to get away from the tariffs as much as they can. Are, [00:12:00] are you… You think you’re still gonna see more of that where a Siemens, a GE, a Vestas are gonna be investing more in the United States to avoid that tariff, or is it just impossible?  Dan Fesenmeyer: I, I mean, I think you… What they’ve done, I… It seems to me, I’m not obviously an expert on that, but it- they’ve moved things where they can And to capture- Mm you know, where you already have capacity. But starting, yeah, building a new plant somewhere, I’m not sure how wise that is in the environment that we’re in.  Allen Hall: Yeah, you saw a lot of plants that were proposed two, three years ago that have, were never built. It does seem like existing plants that were on site that were closed got reopened. Kansas, Iowa- Mm-hmm … some of those plants got- Mm-hmm … started over again, which is easier to do, which makes a lot of sense. So they’re going after the, the easiest things first still. We’re in that phase of we’re not gonna put a lot of money into the United States however. We’re gonna utilize what we have and maybe grow what we have. Dan Fesenmeyer: Right. Or, or similarly, you can move from, if you have more of a… All these supply [00:13:00] chains are global at this point.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Dan Fesenmeyer: But if you happen to have a factory in a country with a lower tariff and versus one that’s higher, maybe you move that. You’re not bringing it over to the US, but you’re moving from, let’s say, India to the UK. Allen Hall: Sure. So, so- Okay, so there, there’s a lot of sh- card shuffling going on- Yeah … to avoid tariffs.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah, and unfortunately then the tariffs change and- … perhaps you have to change back. And, and the other one, uh, that’s out there, obviously the Supreme Court had their ruling on tariffs, so folks are waiting for a Section 232, which is  Allen Hall: still- Untouchable, in a sense? Uh-  Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, it- people are just waiting for what, what will Section 232 be. And it’s been looming for months now.  Allen Hall: Over a year.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yes. So, and, you know, we’re waiting, I guess.  Allen Hall: Is the feeling about that in the industry, uh… I’ll, well, I’ll use a couple of good examples, I think, which, uh, offshore wind being a real stress point United States, and a lot of [00:14:00] the administration’s work to limit offshore development got stopped in the courts. So anything that was sort of building turbines, putting, had ships out, putting- Mm … uh, monopiles in, they never got stopped. They were delayed a couple of weeks, but they were never really stopped, and it feels like from the outside looking in, is that the courts are not gonna allow some of these, uh, movements by the administration to take effect. Is the industry in the United States seeing the tariffs and some of the more extreme things that are happening as temporary or, or are they being a little more cautious, saying, “Yes, offshore wind has won a, a number of lawsuits”? But we may not. And th- with the Department of War and 232 and all those events that are happening, what is the outcome there, and w- how are operators thinking about that? Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, I think we’re in a, in a market where if you have a project that can get built within this window-  Allen Hall: Yeah …  Dan Fesenmeyer: and [00:15:00] you’ve safe har- Like, those projects- And you’re, you’re just in … are desperately moving forward.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Then- ‘ Allen Hall: Cause the trend has been, if you can get it in the ground, they’re gonna let it be developed. They haven’t been able- Right … to stop anything halfway through. Well,  Dan Fesenmeyer: other, like, the FA is a good example of it-  Allen Hall: Sure …  Dan Fesenmeyer: being stopped. But- Yeah … if you have a project that’s being built, you’re moving forward, and then projects that are outside the window, it’s more of a greenfield development view of, of life. And seems like some folks are selling p- assets, some folks are buying- A  Allen Hall: lot of that …  Dan Fesenmeyer: development assets.  Allen Hall: Let’s go down that pathway for a minute because I did think- Yeah … that’s a very interesting piece to what’s happening in the United States at the minute. There’s a lot of transactions, big dollar transactions happening for wind- Mm-hmm on buying, selling portfolios, not just farms. It used to be farms. Right. We’ll sell a farm. Yeah. It was. We’ll swap farms, that kind of thing. Now it’s like, uh, would you like our whole portfolio, wind, solar, battery?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: Is that playing into a lot of the decisions that are [00:16:00]happening on the ground right now, that a, a developer or an operator that has assets is saying, this is a prime time to sell. There’s a l- I have my tax credits already locked in. We’re golden here- Mm-hmm … for several years. The value is never gonna get higher. I need to get out. I- is that the marketplace today, is-  Dan Fesenmeyer: I think for some. I mean- Yeah … everybody’s got different, uh, motivations, whether they wanna get into wind, get out of wind, greenfield versus repower. Uh, it, it’s, it’s really their view of the world and their risk profile moving forward, and whether this is a short-term play, long-term. Do we wanna get out of wind? Some people are essentially doing that. Uh, it’s, it’s across the board.  Allen Hall: How’s AI data centers playing into this? What are you hearing?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Oh, I mean, that’s what everybody talks about, AI and data centers, and the demand for power is there. And- The [00:17:00] issue that, that a lot of us see is wind and solar and battery can all help with that.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Dan Fesenmeyer: And if you want a gas turbine, that’s great, but my former colleagues at GE are gonna tell you it’s 2030- Yes … or later to get one, so what do you do between now and then? And you’re seeing prices go up, which makes these wind farms look pretty good. Power profile’s nice. Yes. Uh, but you still have hurdles to get, like the FAA, US Fish and Wildlife, all these other hurdles to, you know, that are slowing down wind and solar for that matter too.  Allen Hall: Solar’s been slowed down for sure.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Does that change, though, with the demand for power in AI data centers? And it does seem to be a priority in the United States to, to win this AI race. Mm-hmm. Does that loosen some of the reins on renewables to let them go, like just look the other way for a while, while they put a new solar field or wind farm in?  Dan Fesenmeyer: It stands to reason that will happen. Haven’t really seen [00:18:00] it, unfortunately. But I wo- But I think it will, right? I mean, it, it, it, it almost has to at some point.  Allen Hall: There’s a lot of pressure on Washington DC to let data centers start being developed and, and go.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: But a- as you pointed out, gas turbines are hard to get, and they can’t scale up at the rate at which the demand is. Right. So your alternative is something really simple, quick and efficient, which would be wind and solar and a little bit of battery. Yeah. I- is that change in the thinking of operators and how they’re thinking about their assets, one, and two, what they’re thinking about in the future? Or are they trying to hook up with an- a- I mean- a Google, a Facebook, a- Yeah, I  Dan Fesenmeyer: mean, the offtake’s- … SpaceX … there, and that’s generally, you know, it used to be utility PPAs. Then it turned- Right. … into hedge things and C&I. Yeah. And now it’s more, you have this, the data center offtake.  Allen Hall: Is the data center offtake, thinking about it from a, a financial standpoint, which they’re probably not being tied to the grid. At [00:19:00] least a lot of these, or at least the talk is right now, is the not being connected to the grid to be sort of standalone, feeding a data center, and maybe a piece of fiber optic coming out of the data center. But that’s essentially it. Maybe some backup power on the grid just in case things go horribly wrong, but standalone power for data centers does make sense. It would, it would seem to lessen the requirements on wind and solar in terms of interacting with the federal government or the, the power company in a sense. Does that make wind and solar a little more viable because it’s not connected to the grid?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, I mean, it will be connected to the grid because when the wind stops blowing, the utility will usually, you know, or, and the sun stops sh- shining- Sure uh, the utility will kind of provide that power. That w- Or the gas turbines that they have would- Gas turbine will kick  Allen Hall: in, right.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yes. Yeah. But, but generally speaking, you’re never truly off the grid, but it does speed things up with interconnection and, and, you know, your T&D [00:20:00] line is much shorter.  Allen Hall: Right.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Or not, you know- Much much, much shorter. Yeah. Depending where the, the resource is and versus the plant or the, the data center.  Allen Hall: So what are the things that we don’t know in the industry that you’re in touch with that we should know? ‘Cause there, there must be a lot happening behind the scenes that we don’t hear out in public or in the common spaces of some of these conferences that are happening behind the scenes. What is, what is the status right now? What do you think the status is of wind?  Dan Fesenmeyer: I mean, it’s, I, I, I’m a big sailor, and sometimes the wind’s blowing hard- … you’re going fast, and sometimes you sail into what we call a hole- Yeah … and it’s just dead quiet. We’re not quite there yet, but, um, it, it’s kind of we’re going through a bit of a lull right now. And I think, I think what people don’t realize is the multiple roadblocks that the industry’s facing. In the past, we’ve had PTCs lapse, and the question is when and if it [00:21:00] will be renewed. Yeah. Now you have other roadblocks, you know, whether it’s, again, FAA, Fish and Wildlife, permitting, different localities. Some… And this goes back to the data center. A lot of local, you know, communities don’t want a data center.  Allen Hall: Right. There’s a lot of-  Dan Fesenmeyer: Right? And they’re like, “Well, wait a minute. My power prices as a citizen are gonna go up- True … because of it.”  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s true. We’ve already seen it.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Yeah. So, so there’s a lot of just new barriers that have come up. Allen Hall: Okay. That-  Dan Fesenmeyer: But wind developers are an extremely resilient bunch, and-  Allen Hall: This isn’t the first rodeo-  Dan Fesenmeyer: Right …  Allen Hall: where they’ve had these issues pop up- Yeah … and PTCs stop and other world forces affect the industry. What’s the outlook over the next three to five years, do you think? Different administration in a couple years, maybe different outlook, more demand on… for power, AI data centers. Is- it just gonna [00:22:00] overwhelm any resistance to wind and solar and battery?  Dan Fesenmeyer: I mean, it, it, that’s kind of a crystal ball, but I think if these data centers start getting built out like people think they will, there’ll be demand for power. And, now we’re talking basic economics, Supply, demand. People need power, then power plants will get built and, whether it’s gas, wind, solar-  Allen Hall: All of the above  Dan Fesenmeyer: All of the above, right? And, and I think it will ultimately follow that. I think the, administration will let you know if there’s not enough power or power gets too expensive, something has to break and fill that gap  Allen Hall: because- So let the economics play out a little bit. Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah, right? Yeah. ‘Cause we’re, we’re voters, right? And- Sure … and, um, people vote often with their pocketbooks.  Allen Hall: And wind and solar are cheap sources of energy, and they’re gonna come to the top of the list almost every time.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I agree with you. Uh, it’s good to see you again. We saw you a few months [00:23:00] ago at WOMA in Australia, and that was wonderful. And I tell a lot of the operators we talk to, “You better be talking to Dan and WindQuest Advisors because you really need to understand what your contracts say and the contract you’re signing, and you need to have a better sense of what’s happening, a little more broader speak in the United States and elsewhere- Mm-hmm and they should be talking to you.” So how do they call or how do they contact WindQuest Advisors to get started?  Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, www.windquestadvisors.com or reach out to Allen and his team. You’re on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn as well- … both personally and my firm. And, um, ask a friend ’cause I have a, we have- … big networks that everybody… You know, it’s, it’s a small community here. It  Allen Hall: is.  Dan Fesenmeyer: Right?  Allen Hall: It is.  Dan Fesenmeyer: And, and people bounce around different firms and, but people stay connected, so, um, that’s a great way to find each other as well.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Great to see you, Dan. Likewise. Thank you. Thanks for being on the podcast. And yeah, we’ll hopefully see you in Australia in a couple months. Dan Fesenmeyer: Looking forward to  [00:24:00] it.

GE Vernova pumps $1 billion into LM Wind Power, and KKR buys EDF’s US and Canada renewables arm. Plus CIP sweeps South Korea’s offshore auction and the CME plans wind derivatives across three continents. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now, your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Matthew Stead and Yolanda Padron. Rosemary is at GWO training this week. And we have an announcement about Wind Energy O&M Australia 2027. Matthew, you wanna give all the details?  Matthew Stead: Drum roll Um, very pleased to announce that WOMA 2027 will be at the East Pullman Hotel in Melbourne’s east, uh, not the other one, and, uh, 3rd to 5th of March. Um, the first two days will be two days of wind O&M, uh, conferences, [00:01:00] uh, and then the Friday will be a half-day, uh, training session. More information to come.  Allen Hall: Well, she’s not here, so we can probably just announce it, that Rosemary will be giving a terrific four-hour-long seminar on blades and blade repair, so you sign up now. Matthew, where do you go if you wanna just check out what’s happening at WOMA  Matthew Stead: 2027? Uh, well, actually, it’s woma2027.com.  Allen Hall: Uh, over at GE Vernova and LM Wind Power, there’s been a whole bunch of turmoil over the last couple of years if you haven’t been paying attention. Well, GE Vernova just injected about a billion dollars into that company. So although LM recently has shown very little in terms of revenue, it definitely had needed some capital injection in, uh, at least according to the Danish press, the number of employees at the Danish site is about 20 to 30. So it’s really a fraction of what it once was. But [00:02:00] it does seem like GE is paying off all its existing debt and then giving it a little bit of a cash infusion to keep it rolling. The question really is, is what is GE Vernova gonna do with that business now? Are they planning on keeping it? Are they trying to get s- to get it back to health where they can service the other, uh, OEMs that they manufacture blades for? Or is there a larger action that will happen in the near future? What do we think?  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I’m really confused by this one. I mean, a cash injection just so that you’re not bankrupt on paper is, um, that’s just playing with money as far as I’m concerned. Or I’m not sure if it’s a US term, but, you know, shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. It doesn’t– Does it change anything? Allen Hall: Well, uh, th- they made no announcements about closing facilities. The LM blade facility in North Dakota still appears to be making blades. There’s the TPI factories, which are going through a transition r- right now, appear to be making GE [00:03:00] blades. I, I assume Gaspé up in Canada is still making blades, at least that’s the story. If GE’s gonna rely upon LM to make blades, they’re gonna need to keep them open. Is, is this more of just keeping the factories open with a skeleton engineering crew and possibly moving the blade design group into the States? Is that– Or India or, or somewhere?  Yolanda Padron: And they’re still selling, right? They’re still selling blades. It seems like they’re still planning on manufacturing blades. Do we think that maybe- They’re just trying to avoid that whole TPI bankruptcy deal to not have to kind of scrap for parts?  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think TPI has been producing parts at high quantity, and some of the Things I’ve heard from the industry folk is that TPI is really busy in producing quality blades, and it’s like the bankruptcy transaction is not happening, which is great to hear because the [00:04:00]industry needs blades, and there’s a lot of repowering going on in the United States and a lot of activity in general, so they need blades. But does LM continue to be a part of that?  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I mean, presumably the TPI, um, whole story only makes LM more important, you know, more important to have, uh, an additional manufacturer and, you know, providing, you know, options for the OEMs.  Allen Hall: It does seem like, though, the GE offshore, GE Vernova offshore is not a thing. Although I’ve heard a couple of rumors that, yeah, GE Vernova is offering some products for offshore, it doesn’t seem like their heart is in it. I can see that happening. So are they just trying to focus on onshore business, and that’s it for the time being? Just let it play out and, uh, wait until the elections in 2028? I know that’s gonna get me blocked on YouTube, but that, that does feel like what’s happening at the moment.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I reckon it looks completely like that.  Yolanda Padron: I mean, it also looks like they’re [00:05:00] just kind of trying to play everything a little bit more safe, right? So they are scaling up, but not as fast as they used to, so scaling the blade sizes. And then they’re– it seems like they’re, they’re having their FSAs cut quite a bit shorter than they used to, right? So are they maybe just trying to focus on, like, cash up front and just trying to play it safe until they can get their, their footing right again?  Allen Hall: Or is it focus on key customers? I could see GE Vernova actually doing that, that they have a history with certain operators worldwide, and they’re just gonna focus on producing and delivering for those customers. Because you don’t see a lot of announced orders for GE turbines. Vestas is announcing things practically every week. Nordex is doing something similar. Siemens once in a while. But what you really don’t hear anything from in any quantity at [00:06:00] all at the moment is from GE Vernova. When a company needs cash badly enough, even the crown jewels go on the block. And EDF, the French state-owned utility, has to fund the upkeep of 57 aging nuclear reactors and build six new ones, so it is selling. EDF has agreed to hand its US and Canada renewables business, EDF Power Solutions, to the private equity firm KKR. The business runs 5.6 gigawatts of renewable assets across the two countries. Late last year, EDF’s chief executive floated selling anywhere from half to all of the unit in a deal that could be, well, it’s reported to be about $4.2 billion. That’s the latest news I’ve heard. This is a big transaction. KKR is Canadian, right? And is a massive investment firm Uh, which I, I don’t think have a lot of wind at the moment. Uh, what is the [00:07:00] KKR play here?  Matthew Stead: I, I love this because this is, uh… So obviously I’m Australian, and Macquarie is a big Australian. So, um, Macquarie own a whole lot of wind farm, a whole lot of wind infrastructure. So I just see this as a wonderful g- you know, fight between KKR and Macquarie. And so KKR has a whole lot of, um, they o- they’ve got some, you know, stake in Australian wind farms. They’ve got some work, you know, through Europe with wind farms. So I, I, I think this is a good thing, just a bit more global competition and a bit more global growth. And I think it’s all coming from the data centers and, you know, the future increase in growth of, um, demand.  Allen Hall: Yolanda, EDF’s wind fleet is a variety of turbines, right? They have some GE, some Siemens. Anything else in their portfolio?  Yolanda Padron: I think they have a bit of Vestas there too, right? Is it something that we were saying? It’s– I think this is really interesting. Um, I know that there’s not– I mean, of course EDF is the latest, but there’s some [00:08:00] operators that seem to be, um, consolidating into a bit more of those just higher private equity firms, and it’s– Do we think that maybe this is the way that the US is going to lean towards? I know we talked a lot about leaning towards funding the data centers and maybe a bit more the behind the meter things. Uh, but do we think that maybe that’s the future of the US? There’s a couple of companies that kind of just own all the major infrastructures and then- A  Allen Hall: couple Canadian companies.  Yolanda Padron: And what does it mean for, like, asset management and stuff, like, that’s really, really different from what they’re seeing in their desks in New York and stuff, and just the larger financial models versus what’s happening on the ground, and how will they connect everything? Allen Hall: It’s a great question.  Matthew Stead: NextEra and Dominion, you know, things are only getting bigger. Scale’s, scale’s coming.  Allen Hall: Yeah. I wonder how much, uh, this transaction will have to go through regulators in the US, uh, because it scares me when you have a, a– such a [00:09:00] large foreign national company. There’s actually two involved in here, right? So you, you have a, a French company and a Canadian company trying to transact on, in the United States on a lot of assets. Uh, it probably won’t be that quick if there’s any oversight at all. I, I’m guessing that we’ll hear noise about it. So we’re, we’ll have to keep listening to all the news sources about it and, and telling our valued listeners what’s going on. Because there’s, uh, we know a whole bunch of people that work at EDF and like, love those people and are really concerned about what the future holds for them. I, at least it sounds like upfront that KKR is just gonna continue with operations, but I know, uh, uh, it’s a turbulent time, and if you work there, you, you hopefully things continue the way they’re, they’re supposed to because One of the things about EDF historically has been is that they’re really talented people, that they have hired well over time and that they know what they’re doing. And every time we, Weather Guard and [00:10:00] Yolanda and I’m sure Matthew have dealt with EDF quite a bit They are on top of what they’re operating. They know how their assets work, and they know how to manage them, and so you’d hate to lose those people in a transaction like this. It would decrease the value of the assets, I would say. Very interesting transaction.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. But, I mean, what if the counter, what if, um, this is all part of a, a growth strategy? You know, a growth strategy with wind, solar, and battery, you know, providing more power. So it might actually be an opportunity. So, you know, opportunity to do more and some more exciting work across all three disciplines. Allen Hall: Definitely so. Uh, but it’s a little early. The ink hasn’t dried yet on the contract. So while offshore market pulls back in general, in a lot of places like the United States, another one is racing ahead. In, in South Korea’s latest offshore wind auction, one name walked away with the lion’s share, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, CIP. The Danish fund [00:11:00] secured more than one gigawatt of the 1.8 gigawatts on offer, including the single largest project and the only floating wind winner. And the appetite was record-breaking. They had a whole bunch of developers trying to bid on this. You had about 3.7 gigawatts being bid in, more than twice of the capacity available. So for a country that only began competitive offshore bidding in 2022, that’s a few short years ago, that market is coming of age. This is a huge announcement by CIP, right? That, uh, they have bid into the system. They’re, they’re winning, and they’re bringing Siemens Gamesa to the table, which we haven’t heard a lot of Siemens Gamesa’s turbines being selected, but this is a massive order and really gonna help secure at least some portion of, of the Siemens Gamesa business. Matthew, you’re closer to it. In, in South Korea, are you seeing the South Korean industry being built within [00:12:00] the country, or are you seeing, uh, partnerships with surrounding countries like Japan? ‘Cause it doesn’t seem like when– and I’ve looked at some of the South Korea, uh, efforts. It does seem like they’re trying to stand up their own offshore built-in country plan. Is, is that the goal? You think Siemens is gonna end up building a, a factory in, in South Korea for some of these projects?  Matthew Stead: Maybe a couple of things. First of all, I have to apologize. I think, uh, we were talking the other week, and I, I, I sort of implied that floating offshore wind was dead, and I think we copped a bit of flack from that. But, uh, anyway, wrong, wrong on, uh,  Allen Hall: floating offshore is dead.  Matthew Stead: Um, but um, you know, I’ve had a fair bit of interaction with, uh, South Korean, um, you know, Philippines, Japan, obviously. I think they’re all trying to get their industries up, but I, I don’t think they’ve got the scale So, you know, I think they, they really need like the Siemens Gamesas, the Vestas’s, um, to come in and, and partner with them. I just don’t think they’ve got the scale, you know, the, the [00:13:00] installed fleet, the industry to really promote it. And, you know, to get the economies of scale, they’re gonna have to pull in the big existing incumbents. So, you know, good on CIP for, for pulling this off.  Allen Hall: In terms of South Korea industry, I think steel is one of their strongest, uh, industries at the moment, and obviously shipbuilding. Those are the, that go hand in hand, so to speak. There’s a lot of steel in wind turbines, and particularly in floating offshore wind turbines. It would seem ripe for South Korea to get into that marketplace.  Matthew Stead: I’m not sure the intellectual property is in steel tubes. Um, I, I guess what I’m trying to say is the intellectual property is in the turbine nacelle and the blades and, um, you know, I, you know, correct what I said that, you know, obviously the steel and the steel manufacturing in South Korea is, is pretty amazing. Um, but yeah, they’re clarifying what I said before.  Allen Hall: So is this gonna turn into the leading floating project in the world? You know, Greenvolt’s gonna happen in the [00:14:00] UK. There’s some talk of things up in Scandinavia. But in terms of speed, will this be one of the leading candidates in t- in getting things in the water just because of the capability of South Korea to, to build at scale? I  Matthew Stead: think it’s really exciting. Yeah, I, I’m, I’m gonna watch very closely.  Allen Hall: I think this is gonna be amazing. I really do.  Yolanda Padron: I was gonna say, could you imagine, like, a, a turbine and a blade where everything is just perfectly manufactured or close to perfectly manufactured? I g- I went to one farm last week, and there were… I mean, it was in the States, and there were so many patches on new blades. I was just talking to the people in operations like, “What’s, what’s going on here?” You know? Uh, so it’s just really… I don’t know. This is exciting.  Matthew Stead: Do you think, um, they’ll build a blade factory, Yolanda? Do you think they’ll actually take on the blades? Yolanda Padron: I don’t know. Uh, I, I mean, it’d, it’d be great for them, I think, right? It’s a new area of business that they’re diving [00:15:00] into.  Allen Hall: If they don’t have to build the building at the port, I think Siemens would be willing to erect something near the shoreline. And in Korea, there’s a lot of major industry right on the shoreline. It would be relatively easy, I think. You know, ev- it sounds easy now because you’re not actually doing it. But in terms of, you know, building a blade factory on the coastline of United States versus doing it in South Korea, South Korea’s gonna be way easier to do that and at scale quickly. That, that one seems like a win-win. I d- if there’s any place on the planet that could do it quick besides the UK or, you know, Denmark, someone like Netherlands, someplace like that, Germany, it’s gonna be South Korea.  Matthew Stead: Maybe that’s a bet, you know. So prove me wrong again. My money at the moment is that Nacelles blades won’t be coming from South Korea. Allen Hall: Well, if they don’t come from South Korea, they’re gonna be on a South Korea-built ship. We’ll be bringing th- those [00:16:00] blades in country. That’s what will happen. So wind is getting its own set of financial instruments, which sounds weird, right? Wind is wind. It’s in a very legacy style industry. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is planning to launch wind derivatives across three continents, which are contracts that are tied to the grid in Texas, the markets in the UK and Germany, and just the Victoria state in Australia. So today, most weather hedging happens through one-off over-the-counter deals that are sort of hard to trade and thin on liquidity, so it’s not a commodity you can pass around. A standardized exchange-listed contract changes all that. A utility or a wind farm owner could lock in a hedge in about 15 minutes. The contracts would settle against independent data that models how much power the wind should have produced in a given place, likely supplied by [00:17:00] the Finnish firm, drum roll, Vaisala. Plans are not final, but they could go live within months. So they’re hedging on the wind. Does this sound like a smart move, or w- what are some of the consequences of this? Matthew Stead: I think it goes back to that volatility. W- when there’s volatility, people can make money. Um, you know, and a side note, that’s where, that’s where offshore wind comes in because it’s much more predictable. Um, you don’t get the same lulls with offshore wind. Yeah. So I, I, I love all these, these creative ways of, um, generating, generating demand, financial demand. Allen Hall: It can be played though, right? I mean, that’s one of the things about wind, ’cause each turbine is its own separate little power plant that all connect to a substation, so if you have bought a hedge and the substation goes kaput for 24 hours, you could lose your shirt. It does seem kind of risky, depending on what the scale is here. If you’re doing all of Texas or all of [00:18:00] Victoria, maybe that makes a little more sense, but yikes. That’s gonna be a rough market.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, the market’s already open, right? Like, you can bid day ahead, um, instead of just real-time prices. But so this, this would be really interesting for owners, right? To be able to track that a lot better than just that gut feeling, which obviously I know people working in trading aren’t just going off of their gut feeling. I know it’s a very, very intense thing. Nobody go against me, please. This is very intense, and it’s better– They do a better job than I could ever do. They do great, 10 out of 10. But this– I think this is really interesting for those of us especially who maybe aren’t super in tune with what, uh, all goes into it. So being able to have something that helps you plan it a bit more for, you know, people like you mentioned earlier, the people that have their home batteries in Australia and are just working on the market itself and maybe [00:19:00] not– don’t have those 10, 20 years of experience of, of actually working on the market. So this is, this is exciting.  Allen Hall: Does that explain all the weather sources and the weather companies when we go to a wind, a larger wind or solar event that there does seem to be a lot of people offering weather insights? Is that what that’s about, is they can hedge? If you have a slightly better weather model, that would give you an advantage in this kind, kind– really kind of market? Is that the, the goal of all those weather firms?  Matthew Stead: Uh, absolutely. And, you know, we’re, we’re part of that because, um, ice, ice, um, you know, reduces power output, and ice forecasting and weather forecasting is, uh, really important in, you know, the Nordics, where you don’t want to be promising certain power and find you can’t deliver ’cause everything’s iced up. So, you know, we, we do work with forecasting companies to improve the, [00:20:00] uh, the quality, and it does have a mer-material difference on, on the financial markets.  Allen Hall: So is that something that we can all get paid for? by these weather companies and these, uh, forecast companies if we provide insights on lightning, so to speak, and icing, uh, is that a revenue chain for at least one of us? Matthew Stead: Absolutely.  Allen Hall: Maybe I like this more and more. I was, I was very hesitant of this exchange, thinking like, “Oh man, not a, not another highly leveraged situation with energy. That doesn’t sound smart.” But, yeah, if we can make a small fortune, Matthew, I think we should do it.  Matthew Stead: Fun fact, there was a flight from, um, yeah, from London to Australia the other week, um, and it’s a direct flight, you know, so 17 hours, and, uh, there was a change in the weather. So there was a change in the weather, and that aircraft didn’t have enough fuel to fly to Perth anymore, so it had to land in the outback of Australia.  Allen Hall: No. Did that happen?  Matthew Stead: Yep, because there was a [00:21:00] change in the weather.  Allen Hall: Are there just, like, kangaroos lined up in a runway shape to get the airplane on the ground? Or how do they– Is there a runway out in the outback that would accommodate a large… That’s a large airplane that’s making a London to Australia trip. Triple 7380? It  Matthew Stead: was a Dreamliner. Um, but, um, it, yeah, it landed in Kalgoorlie. So Kalgoorlie’s a mining town. Yeah, they’ve got, they’ve got big stuff in Kalgoorlie. Allen Hall: In this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, in which there is a whole bunch of great articles, a interesting article about grease. Grease not the country, although I would love to go visit Greece. Grease the lubricant that’s in all our bearings and keeps the world moving at any one particular time. Uh, Sh-Shell was talking about doing a lot of research on grease, and when poor lubrication, uh, happens, it’s one of the leading causes of bearing failure. And so when you see a bearing all tore up, usually the first indication is, is there’s something wrong with the grease. Uh, [00:22:00] so Sh-Shell and bearing maker SKF and the University of, uh, Twente joined forces to answer a deceptively simple question: How do you predict when grease inside a bearing will let go? Well, their answer comes down to film thickness. The microscopic layers of grease that keeps the steel from grinding on each other is the magic variable. The work won a major tribology award and is already feeding into, uh, some of the tools that operators use to schedule relubrication before a bearing fails. And It all comes down to lubrication. That’s the lifetime of a wind turbine. There’s so many pieces that are rotating and are heavily loaded with really complicated bearing surfaces. If you don’t have the grease right, it’s just not gonna work. And what’s happening at Shell is one of those pieces, and we’re [00:23:00] learning so much more. And as we, uh, evolve in the technology and become smarter about the molecules we use and how we use them, uh, this is gonna have a big impact. And I know, Yolanda, you’ve been up to– Well, you’ve been to a couple of wind farms recently. Do you s- see– still see huge grease problems that I usually see when I’m on site? Matthew Stead: Mm-hmm.  Yolanda Padron: I didn’t think that was an issue that was gonna go away anytime soon. But it’s good to know that, that there’s something being done about it that’s more revolutionary than just paying someone to clean the turbine every once in a while.  Allen Hall: And the contaminants that get into the greases are a huge problem, particularly where there’s any sort of sand, dust that climbs in. So keeping those joints clear and those rolling surfaces clear is a major effort. And knowing when to relubricate. And, and Matthew, you guys see pitch bearings and all kinds of problems up on blades that are lubricated that have run out of their lifetime early. It does seem like the first thing you see on particularly pitch bearings [00:24:00] is grease on the side of the turbine from them. Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think that’s– uh, there’s even a special code that the, the visual drone inspection companies have. They’ve got codes for, um, grease and so, yeah, exactly, that’s an early flag. But also dust. You know, sometimes dust from the inserts and from the bolts. Yeah. So it’s, yeah, interesting topic.  Allen Hall: Well, I, I think it’s one of the key pieces to keeping the turbines running. And I know if you travel a lot around wind turbines, the, the grease is the thing that the technicians always talk about, and there’s so many different tools to go out and look at these things. But lubrication, we gotta get to it. And, and Shell, and SKF, and a number of others are, are working at it to make, hopefully, our lives a little bit easier. So if you wanna go check out this article by Shell, go visit peswind.com and download a copy today. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on [00:25:00] LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. So for Yolanda, and Matthew, and an absent Rosie, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Allen covers a storm that damaged ENGIE’s South Dakota wind farm, Sumitomo exiting two Belgian offshore farms, Envision’s loss in Denmark, and Continental building its own wind farm. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday everyone. Sometimes … Mother Nature reminds the wind industry who is really in charge. Late last month … hurricane-force winds ripped through Hyde County, South Dakota … tearing into the Triple H Wind Farm operated by French energy giant Engie. One hundred and thirty-one miles per hour … as strong as a Category Four hurricane. More than twenty of the site’s ninety-two turbines … damaged. The two-hundred-fifty-megawatt complex is out of service … and turbine supplier GE Vernova is on-site now … assessing the wreckage. No injuries … but the governor declared a state of emergency. The machines that harvest the wind … taken down by the wind itself. Now … while one wind farm goes dark in the American plains … ownership is reshuffling across the North Sea. Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation has exited two Belgian offshore wind farms … selling its stakes to joint venture partner Jera Nex BP. That is the partnership between oil major BP and Japan’s largest power generator Jera. Jera Nex BP now has full ownership of the two-hundred-nineteen-megawatt Northwester 2 … and has raised its stake in the one-hundred-sixty-five-megawatt Nobelwind to eighty percent. Both farms operate out of Ostend, Belgium … and have been generating power since 2017 and 2020. Sumitomo walks away … Jera Nex BP doubles down. Meanwhile … in Denmark … China’s Envision Group is seeing red for the first time in fifteen years. The company’s global innovation center in Silkeborg … a strategic research hub for wind turbine components and advanced manufacturing … posted a loss of just under one-point-three million Danish kroner. That is a swing of more than one hundred fifteen percent from last year’s profit. The culprit is not the technology … it is the currency. The U.S. dollar fell nearly twelve percent against the Danish krone in 2025 … and Envision’s books took the hit. Revenue also dropped eighteen percent … but management says the underlying operations remained stable. The machines still work … the math just changed. And speaking of money flowing into wind … a Turkish energy company just tapped an unusual source. Aksa Enerji … the largest publicly listed independent power producer in Turkiye … has secured one hundred twenty-four million dollars in financing backed by China’s export credit agency Sinosure. The money will fund a one-hundred-megawatt wind-plus-storage project in the southern province of Mersin. This is the first renewable energy project in Turkiye to receive a license as a storage-integrated facility. Aksa now operates power plants across seven countries … with more than three gigawatts of total capacity. Chinese capital … backing Turkish wind … with battery storage baked in from day one. Now … here is a story that might surprise you. Continental … the German tyre maker … yes … the tyre company … is building its own wind farm. Three Nordex turbines … each standing two hundred sixty-seven meters tall … right next to its tyre factory in Korbach, Germany. When they are online … those turbines and the factory’s existing solar panels will cover two-thirds of the plant’s electricity demand. Fifty-five gigawatt-hours a year … powering rubber mixing and extrusion lines … directly from the wind. Continental calls it a model for its production sites worldwide. Cheaper power … more predictable costs … and less exposure to volatile energy markets. The wind industry just gained a tyre company as a customer … and a competitor for electrons. And finally … south of the border. Mexico has eight gigawatts of wind power installed today … more than thirty-three hundred turbines across sixteen states. But the next chapter is already being written. The government plans to add nearly seven gigawatts of new wind capacity this term … part of a broader push for thirty-two gigawatts of new generation overall. More than two gigawatts of wind projects are pending allocation right now … and the industry estimates this next wave could mobilize four to five billion dollars in investment … building thirteen to fourteen new wind farms before the decade is out. The final decisions come in October. Here is what stands out this week. The wind industry is no longer just selling kilowatt-hours to utilities … it is selling energy independence directly to manufacturers … and that changes the customer base entirely. At the same time … capital for new wind projects is coming from places it never came from before … export credit agencies … cross-border joint ventures … and government allocation programs with billions on the line. The money is there … but so are the risks … currency swings … extreme weather … and the constant reshuffling of who owns what. For wind energy professionals … the takeaway is simple … the industry is growing … but the business model around it is getting more complex by the quarter. The turbines keep turning. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 5th of July 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Nicholas Gaudern, CTO at PowerCurve, joins to discuss India AEP gains, DragonScale VGs, and Silent Edge noise reduction. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Nicholas, welcome back to the podcast.  Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Great to be back.  Allen Hall: So there’s a lot going on at Power Curve, and I saw some news online about Power Curve in India.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.  Allen Hall: Which is a new development.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, so we’ve been working in India for, for some years now, and we have, uh, more than 100 turbines out there with our equipment on, primarily vortex generators so far. And what we’re seeing in India is some of the highest AEP gains we’ve ever recorded with our vortex generators And I think a lot of this is being driven by the fact that in certain parts of India, there’s some very unique, uh, environmental conditions, climatic conditions, and there’s parts of the year, like the dry season up in [00:01:00] the north of India, where you’re getting this very sticky dirt accumulating on the blades. And it’s really quite dramatic when you see the photographs, but that means that the blades are actually starting to, to stall, have flow separation on them.  Allen Hall: I’ve seen pictures of that. Yeah. I was really shocked at the time, uh, ’cause I didn’t know it was just kind of a black, gooey- Yeah … kind of tar-like substance- Yeah, yeah on the blades, and, uh, it, it was only on there a limited time. As soon as the monsoons come through and the rains hit, it would wash, eventually wash it off. Yes. But while it’s there, you could see the airflow over the blade surfaces. You, you could definitely see separation happening really early on those blades. Dramatic.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, absolutely, and I think the, um… Like you say, it’s not all year. No. But it doesn’t have to be all year to have a huge impact on, on how many, you know, megawatt hours you’re getting out the other end. So there’s a few months of the year where this problem is particularly severe, maybe sort of December through to February, something like that. And what we’re finding is that when you see, uh, the power curves for these [00:02:00] turbines, some of them aren’t even hitting rated power. They’re not able to hit rated power because there’s so much flow separation on the blades.  Allen Hall: Wow.  Nicholas Gaudern: And that, I mean, just imagine that. You’ve got a two megawatt turbine, for example. Maybe it doesn’t cast- get past 1.5 megawatts for this, uh, time of the year. I mean, that’s crazy.  Allen Hall: Does the turbine try to adjust itself when that happens? Because the pictures I s- have seen indicates, like, the turbine is pitching the blades to, ’cause it knows- It can- …  Nicholas Gaudern: what the wind  Allen Hall: speed is- I mean, yeah … and it knows what it should be putting out, and it’s not putting that out. Nicholas Gaudern: It’s very turbine specific, kind of controller logic specific, but what we see is even the turbines that try to do something, they’re very limited in how much pitch authority they have from the controller. They might be able to just do a little bit, a degree. Okay. Two degrees. You know, very, very small pitch adjustments. And when you have this kind of dirt on the leading edges, a degree of pitch ain’t gonna save you really. Um- N-  Allen Hall: no. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. And it’s not gonna get that power back. No, no.  Nicholas Gaudern: No.  Allen Hall: But does it add extra load onto the blade structurally over [00:03:00] time when you do that?  Nicholas Gaudern: In terms of the pitching, or-  Allen Hall: Yeah, in terms of the pitching, where you’re trying to be more aggressive on the angle of attack to get the power out of the turbine. Potentially. And the winds are still pretty strong, you just, the blades are inefficient.  Nicholas Gaudern: I think it’s one of those things where there’s, there’s so many interconnected items with the dirt and the controller and the structure. It’s actually pretty difficult, I think, to say with confidence how much life impact you would have from that. But what I would say is the more that you might end up trying to pitch, if that’s what’s going on on some machines, that obviously puts wear on the pitch bearings themselves. But yeah, I think at the moment we’re kind of at the beginning of really trying to understand how some of these turbines do deal with this phenomenon. But what we’re trying to do is get to a point where the turbine doesn’t really have to deal with it. Because if you fix the problem at the source, which is stop the flow separating, then the controller doesn’t really have to, to worry. It doesn’t have to try to, to fix it itself.  Allen Hall: Yeah. That makes a lot more sense. Just the number of images I’ve seen over the last couple years from India-  Nicholas Gaudern: [00:04:00] Yep …  Allen Hall: you realize how difficult it is to operate a wind turbine there.  Nicholas Gaudern: So even when we, um, have this issue for a few months that we’re resolving with the VGs, we can still be seeing over the whole year more than 5% increases in annual energy production. Because those months are really important. Um ‘ Allen Hall: Cause that’s when they need the  Nicholas Gaudern: power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. For sure. And this is primarily coming from the vortex generators towards the tips of the blades. So that’s where you’re having this, uh, heavy contamination issue, and that’s where all the power would be produced. So kind of the outer third of a blade is 50, maybe 60% of the power production of a turbine, maybe closer to 50. So that means that if you have a problem out there, it’s, it’s a big problem in terms of your annual energy production. So-  Allen Hall: Right …  Nicholas Gaudern: the VGs are, what they’re doing is they are, they’re injecting energy back into the flow. Allen Hall: Redirecting the flow, in a  Nicholas Gaudern: sense. So, so basically you have all this contamination on the leading edge. It’s generating more turbulence. The flow isn’t able to retain, uh, remain attached [00:05:00] across the entire chord length. So the VGs are putting energy back into the flow and allowing it to remain attached all the way to, uh, to the trailing edge. Allen Hall: So even with the blades are dirty-  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes …  Allen Hall: you get that power out- Exactly … put, that you really desire or-  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah …  Allen Hall: are paying for. Yeah. You, you paid a lot of money for that turbine- Yeah, exactly … you need to get the power out of it.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And-  Nicholas Gaudern: So of course, you know, that suggests that if you had a, a super clean blade, you went and pressure washed it, uh, you would get, uh, an increase in power as well, and that’s true. You, you- That’s true … you will do. But that’s a one-time thing. Um, so- And  Allen Hall: it’s expensive to do- Yeah … and time-consuming.  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. Maybe a few days later, the dirt’s back. So- Sure … you know, it’s not really a sustainable thing for you to be going out washing these blades the whole time. And washing the blades may not be great for the surface of the blade either. So, you know, a VG is just sat there the whole time. It doesn’t matter if it’s dirt, bugs, erosion, frost, it’ll recover those losses that, that you’re seeing.  Allen Hall: Do the VG installations in a situation like that, [00:06:00] the actual location differ because of the contaminants that are present and the kind of, uh, leading edge effects that you’re seeing? Do you design it for that environment? Or- Yeah … is every- Oh, you do. So- Yeah, we  Nicholas Gaudern: do. I mean, typ- typically our, our VG arrays are turbine model specific. But in India, we’re finding we’re actually having to be more site specific as well. Oh,  Allen Hall: wow.  Nicholas Gaudern: Because some of this contamination is so severe, we’ve seen that we need to design the VG layout a little bit differently to make sure that we’re giving enough, uh, energy recovery potential when you have these really severe, uh, situations. Allen Hall: Are you using the AeroVista tool to do that? How do you, how do you quantify the contamination that’s happened on the leading edge at a particular moment or roughly on scale a- and then try to model that? That just seems like a difficult computation.  Nicholas Gaudern: It is. And, um, you know, we’re, we’re getting better all the time. AeroVista is definitely part of that. So AeroVista’s primary function really is to look at, um- [00:07:00] AEP losses due to structural damages, things like erosion. But actually, erosion behaves very similar to dirt when it comes to, like- It, right … aerodynamic behavior. Yeah. So we can actually use kind of the AeroVista engine to help us understand what is the loss from different levels of contamination. So we can add contamination levels into AeroVista, as well as, uh, erosion. And we can start to look at, well, what happens if the blade looks like this? What if it looks like this? And then this gets combined with our computational fluid dynamics, our CFD models that we’re running, three-dimensional, two-dimensional. We sometimes do some aeroelastic modeling as well. So we basically have a big toolbox, and like with any engineering problem, it’s about picking the best tool for the job. So we just go in, and we have all these great tools, and we, we put them together in a workflow that allows us to design the, the best solution for each site that we look at. Allen Hall: And it’s not India-specific in terms of leading-edge contamination. No. I’ve seen pictures from the US, Brazil, um, [00:08:00] Australia, a number of places where there’s just bugs. Yeah. Right? Those, especially in places where there’s large bugs- Yes. … you kind of get this splatter effect going on. Yeah. And you can have a really contaminated blade surface. In the US, in the middle of the US, you’ll have grasshopper season, and-  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, absolutely …  Allen Hall: tho- those grasshoppers are big, and they splatter. And they leave a disaster. We’ve seen  Nicholas Gaudern: that in, uh, in the Midwest, for sure. Oh, yeah. Some really, really severe contamination from bugs.  Allen Hall: And you, you don’t think about, as an engineer or a site supervisor, that- All right. This sort of, uh, grasshopper season that happens is affecting my AEP, but 100% it is. And that stuff is gooey, so if you ever drive through the Midwest in the summertime- … you run through, uh, any kind of insect swarm and try to get it off your vehicle. Yeah. It takes some scrubbing.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. It re- it really does. And imagine when you’ve gotta go up there for, like, 100-meter diameter rotor.  Allen Hall: Right. ‘ Nicholas Gaudern: Cause that’s quite a challenge. So I think, yeah, they have all these challenges, uh, in terms of environmental conditions, and a lot of people consider aerodynamic [00:09:00] behavior blades quite binary. Either the blade is clean or the blade is dir- Or it’s dirty or it’s dirty. Right. But it’s this entire spectrum. It’s everything in between, and I think that is kind of a little bit of a different way of thinking about the problem. And then it makes the argument around why to put VGs there kind of, uh, easy to, to answer, because the blade is never really truly clean. Allen Hall: No. I… Unless it’s right after a rainstorm- Yeah … I rarely see clean blades. Okay, so the … If VGs are going on, are you using the DragonScale VGs to solve some of the India problems, some of the contamination problems?  Nicholas Gaudern: So DragonScale’s not in India yet. That’s something that we’re looking at. So we, um, we got all the tooling finished for DragonScale some months ago now, and we’re shipping DragonScale kits. Uh- Oh, wow. Okay … not, not to India yet, but they are out in, in the field, and we’re gonna be having some more out just in the next couple of weeks, actually, which is quite exciting. We’re doing our first project, um, in Canada.  Allen Hall: Oh.  Nicholas Gaudern: So we’re starting to kinda come across the, the pond with the VGs now, [00:10:00] with the DragonScale VGs. Allen Hall: So the DragonScales, uh, uh, uh, thank you for bringing a, a sample here today, but the, the DragonScales are really interesting in terms of just the way the airfoil shapes are and how they’re s- kinda stacked and layered- Yeah … and there’s different depths to them, heights to them, to get the flow back where you want it to. Yeah. And it, I guess it depends on where you are on the blade. If you’re near the root, they’re gonna look something like this. Exactly. Yep. If you’re getting near the tip, they’re  Nicholas Gaudern: much  Allen Hall: smaller- Yeah, we have some smaller ones. Yep … scale, scale of this. So- This then, the Dragon Scales do require a little bit of computational knowledge of what’s going on- Yep with the blade. And as you say, they- You just can’t willy-nilly stick  Nicholas Gaudern: them on … they’re, they’re quite different. You know, they’re quite different from a standard triangle of VG.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: And, you know, there’s lots of ways that you can create a vortex aerodynamically. And triangles- Sure … create a vortex, sure, but they, they really create one through a process of separation. Yeah. You have a flow hitting this, this plate that’s angled to the flow. It’s rolling over the top, and it’s tripping into a, into a vortex. But that’s quite a draggy way [00:11:00] of- It is … creating a vortex. Yes. Um, so VGs work. We’ve seen that. You know, we have more than 2,000 turbines now with VGs, so we, we know they work. Yeah. But Dragon Scale, the whole idea is not that we … This is still a VG. It’s still creating a vortex. Sure. But it’s doing it in a much more efficient manner, so we get the same lift recovery benefits, lift boosting benefits, but at a much lower drag. So we have a better drag ratio. ‘Cause it’s the drag, right? Allen Hall: It’s the drag. The little triangular-  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah …  Allen Hall: vortex generators are draggy.  Nicholas Gaudern: So anything you stick on a blade, it, it has a drag. It has a parasitic drag component. Um, they have a huge benefit that outweighs that. That’s why we put them on.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: But of course, you can always do better. And I think here we really try to take inspiration from, from lots of the aerodynamic developments we’ve seen over the past decades in aviation and motorsport and, and these other disciplines. Allen Hall: Right. I always say these look like a Formula One  Nicholas Gaudern: add-on. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. A bigger blade. Or maybe some front slats of a aircraft or some, uh, gas turbine cascading elements- Oh, sure.  Allen Hall: Yeah …  Nicholas Gaudern: these  Allen Hall: kind of things. Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Gas turbine people would easily recognize this. Yeah, [00:12:00] I  Nicholas Gaudern: think so.  Allen Hall: Uh, so the, the Dragon Scales then in terms of, uh, the location of them on the blade, would it differ than the triangular VGs in terms of generic location? A, a  Nicholas Gaudern: little bit, but broadly it’s the same because- Okay … you know, ultimately the fundamental physics of what we’re trying to do hasn’t changed.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Nicholas Gaudern: Um, so we’re kind of, we’re addressing the same areas of the blade. But the Dragon Scale gives us a bit more flexibility. We can have these three fin versions that create a very powerful vortex, so we find those down in the root, ’cause that’s where we just want as much lift as possible. Right.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, but out at the tip we actually have a two fin variant. Oh. Because there we’re, we’re more focused on L over D. We wanna maximize our lift-to-drag ratio.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Nicholas Gaudern: Because that’s where the drag really hurts you, out towards the tip.  Allen Hall: So are they in a strip form then? Yes. Very similar to the triangular VGs? Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. So the, the smaller ones on the strip, just because they’re only, like, five millimeters high.  Allen Hall: Yeah. They wanna  Nicholas Gaudern: see more- So otherwise it’s, it’s kind of watchmaking if they’re individual- … little pieces, uh, going down on the blade. O-  Allen Hall: okay. Yeah. Well, that’s fascinating. All right. Uh, I wanna talk about [00:13:00] Silent Edge before I, I lose you today. The Silent Edge product has been out in the field- Mm-hmm … and there has been some noise testing done, which I always think is very interesting because I’ve- Yeah … I’ve watched videos from, mostly from DTU, explaining how they do this, where they got the microphones around. And like- Yes … wow, that’s a really complicated test to go pull off. But you just got through a series of these-  Nicholas Gaudern: We did …  Allen Hall: noise tests with Silent Edge. And you have the results back.  Nicholas Gaudern: We do, yeah. I mean, it was a really exciting, um, test program, and we were partnered together with, uh, Statkraft, who very kindly lent us a few of their wind turbines up in Sweden. Uh, and we are working with the Danish Technical University, DTU Wind, to help with the measurements and actually figure out what’s going out on the turbine. So this was a project that we were, um, able to secure some funding from, from the Danish, uh, EUDP. So that’s the Energi [00:14:00] Teknologisk Udviklings- og Demonstrationsprogram.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Nothing to do with the EU. It’s a very, it’s a Danish thing. Danish, yeah. But there is EU in the name. Right. Um, so they supported this project with Statkraft and DTU, and what we found is that when we put a Silent Edge on a, uh, it was like a two, two and a half megawatt machine, it had no serrations before. Okay.  Allen Hall: So we measured- So just a out of the factory blade.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly, and it was in good condition. It had had a recent repair campaign, so the blade was in, in good shape. And then what we did, uh, or what DTU did, is they went out and they measured the noise of this turbine according to the IEC standard. So there’s an IEC standard on how you should measure noise and what microphones to use and how to post-process it, and then we installed the Silent Edge serrations. And firstly, before we’d even done any measurements, we had people out at site, and they, they live out there. They’re the technicians. They see these- Okay turbines every day, and they went, “What, what have you, what have you done to, to this turbine?” Because it sounded so different. It sounded much [00:15:00]quieter. The, the quality of the sound was very different, and they just, they just stepped out the car and went, “Wow.” “This is, this is really impressive.” Um-  Allen Hall: So what, give me a description of what the sound is. I know generally, when you come with a standard blade, it has that kind of shoop, shoop-  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly … shoop. It basically just really brings down that perceived loudness of the sound, so it’s just a m- it’s a much quieter sound, and we’re also taking out quite a lot of low frequency component.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Nicholas Gaudern: That’s what- These serrations are really targeting the lower frequencies, so kind of around the kilohertz and, and under. Allen Hall: Mm.  Nicholas Gaudern: That’s where these things are really starting to bring down the, um, the decibels.  Allen Hall: This- So, okay. So Silent Edge is, uh, sort of a unique design, or is a unique design i- in terms of the- What you see on the typical trailing edge, which are a bunch of triangles or dino tails, right? Yes, dino tails. Yes,  Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. Allen Hall: Dino tails is, was the generic term for years, and they looked like dino tails, so, so it’s a good description- Yeah … of them. But these more, look more like a cathedral in  Nicholas Gaudern: a sense. Yeah, these, these are quite different though. So we have kind of this iron-shaped, uh, tooth fundamentally, [00:16:00] but we have three different tooth sizes, uh, and they’re asymmetric. Allen Hall: Mm.  Nicholas Gaudern: And I would love to come here and tell you that we know exactly how this works. Um, but I can’t unfortunately, and, and that’s just how it is sometimes with engineering. We cannot simulate this in the detail required to really understand exactly why each geometric feature does what it does. And if someone claims they can do that, then, then I may be a bit suspicious. Or, or I’d really like to talk to them, one of the two. Um, but that means that to develop this kind of product successfully, you have to go to the wind tunnel. Okay. Because the simulation is so demanding. So we go to the wind tunnel. We spent a lot of time in the Paul Ricard wind tunnel at DTU, so we can measure aerodynamics and acoustics at the same time And we went with lots of components and 3D prints, and we iterated through design paths, and we came up with this, I think it’s a really wonderful shape we’ve ended up with. And it was proven out in the field because the final result was we reduced the overall sound [00:17:00] pressure level of the turbine by five decibels. And that is- Whoa … that is huge.  Allen Hall: That’s a lot.  Nicholas Gaudern: So in terms of, like, perceived, uh, loudness of the sound, that’s like a 30% reduction. So this is why the, the technicians who st- stepped out the car heard such a difference, because it’s a massive reduction in, in what the turbine produces. So  Allen Hall: you’re lowering the decibels coming off the, the trailing edge. Yeah. But also moving around the frequencies so it’s a little less-  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, so a lot of that- … uh- That… So the- …  Allen Hall: noticeable  Nicholas Gaudern: also … the five decibels, that’s, that’s this OASP, or we call it overall sound pressure level. This is an integration of all of the reductions we see across the frequency spectrum. Oh,  Allen Hall: okay.  Nicholas Gaudern: All right. So we’re getting more reduction at lower frequencies. Right. Good. There’s also some high frequencies. But the lower frequencies matter more. So what we do when we’re doing acoustic measurement is we A-weight, we, we weight the, the noise because it relates to how the human ear perceives sound. Allen Hall: Sure.  Nicholas Gaudern: So it matters more to you, the one [00:18:00] kilohertz frequency than the 20 kilz- kilohertz frequency.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Can’t hear  Nicholas Gaudern: 20 kilohertz. E- exactly. So that’s right at the upper end. So we weight the results, and this is part of the ICE standard, to understand how the human ear perceives the sound.  Allen Hall: Oh, wow. Okay.  Nicholas Gaudern: Um, and this is where we get our, our five decibels  Allen Hall: from. So this, this was really an iterative process then- Yeah … in the DT laboratory. Yeah. Ooh, wow. I didn’t realize that. Mm-mm. I, I figured you had gotten relatively close by computational methods and then- We- … honed it a little bit …  Nicholas Gaudern: we, we come sort of computate… We do a lot of computation around the angle of the serrations, because the angle of the serration is really critical for, uh, lift generation and loads. Allen Hall: So when you’re speaking of angle, you’re talking about- E-  Nicholas Gaudern: exactly … this angle back here at the- You can see that angle there. Okay.  Allen Hall: Yeah,  Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. Because you don’t want to put a serration on a turbine and add 20% to the lift of the blade. Right. No. Because-  Allen Hall: That’s not- …  Nicholas Gaudern: lift means loads. Yeah.  Allen Hall: You know? Right. You’re adding load. Nicholas Gaudern: So you have to be very careful about how you design these products to make sure that you’re not gonna add extra load to the turbine. And, and on the flip side, you also don’t wanna reduce lift significantly, which then [00:19:00] there’ll be less power produced. So it’s a bit of a balancing act, and this is where the computation comes in. We do a lot of CFD on these to make sure that we’re, we’re handling the loads correctly.  Allen Hall: And how important is the material choice- Yeah … in terms of the noise quieting? Is there a little bit to it about, well, one, durability. Yeah. You, you want to put them on once and leave them forever, so there’s a lot of interactions between the air and these parts that are gonna flex and bend, and you got- I think there’s, you know- 20 years of  Nicholas Gaudern: doing  Allen Hall: that …  Nicholas Gaudern: the, you’ve, you’ve s- you’ve hit the, hit the nail on the head there. The durability is critical. Yeah. It doesn’t matter if you put these products on the blade, and they perform beautifully for six months and then fall off or, or snap or whatever.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: So no, we, we make these products out of the same material as our VGs, and this is a material, uh, it’s an ASA, uh, plastic. And we’ve had these out in the, in the field for a long time now, so we know- It’s- … this, this is great.  Allen Hall: It’s ex- it’s kind of a flexible material.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, there’s  Allen Hall: a little b- It’s stiff but flexible.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. There’s a bit of give in there- Yeah … uh, which is important, but it’s very impact-resistant. Uh, it doesn’t really suffer much in terms of [00:20:00] UV aging, which is obviously critical- Oh, wow. Yeah … when you’re, when you’re- Very critical, yes … out in the field. Yes. So yeah, we’re, um, we’re really happy with the material choice because we know from all our other campaigns with VGs that they last. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sun, rain, ice, snow. These products can survive out in the field for 20 years. Allen Hall: That’s one of the things I’ve noticed, uh, looking at a lot o- of blade photos with OEM trailing edge serrations. That the little triangles on the back edges break off.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And I think- There’s  Allen Hall: a lot of them. I was shocked on  Nicholas Gaudern: some sites. One thing you have to be very careful as well is, is lifting and handling as well. Oh. So, you know, sometimes if these products are installed in the factory, then how do you safely transport that blade and lift that blade?  Allen Hall: You really can’t.  Nicholas Gaudern: So in some ways it’d be better if you put them on at site, but obviously I, I know that’s not always possible. No. So we’re typically acting, um, as, you know, a retrofit. Mm-hmm. So in that sense we, we minimize a lot of that risk of the, the transport and handling that the OEMs may have to deal with.  Allen Hall: So [00:21:00] what’s next for Power Curve? What’s h- happening this summer?  Nicholas Gaudern: So we’re gonna be really pushing to get Silent Edge and Dragon Scale out in the field more. Yeah. Um, Dragon Scale is, is really exciting, and we’re gonna get our, our first, uh, turbines in different countries equipped with these products. And Silent Edge, uh, we’re currently putting some of the finishing touches on the, um, the tooling, the injection molding tooling. So the part we have in front of us, this is actually one that we had in the wind tunnel. So this one here is a 3D print. A very nice 3D print. Oh, yeah, it’s- Uh, it’s had vapor smoothing on it, so the surface- It is really smooth is, is super nice. And you can put these out in the field. So the, the trial with Statkraft was actually with 3D-printed components. If you wanna do a trial for a few months, it’s very possible to do it with 3D prints. Oh. And I, I think they’d actually last way, way longer than that, but, you know, the test was designed to put them on, measure them, take them off again. Yeah. And that’s what we did.  Allen Hall: Offshore.  Nicholas Gaudern: Mm.  Allen Hall: Uh, uh, w- we’ve had some people write into the podcast talking about offshore wind turbines. And in the States, offshore wind turbines are [00:22:00] usually 10, 15, 20 miles from the shore, but that’s not always the case. Over in Japan and some other areas, the turbines are pretty close to shore. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, def- They’re  Allen Hall: almost-  Nicholas Gaudern: They’re definitely near-shore …  Allen Hall: they’re almost- Yeah. Yeah, yeah … onshore turbines, but because they’re offshore, they get really big, right? So y- you can build a really big offshore turbine. And some of the comments we have received is, “Hey, these turbines are noisy.”  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And, you know, the, the water surface can do some weird things-  Allen Hall: Well, that’s what I wanted to know acoustically. Okay. Yeah. That’s what I wanted to know- Yeah. Yeah … because if you have trees and hills that kind of block the noise- Yeah … that’s easy. But if you have a turbine and you live on the, essentially the beach- Yep … or real close to the shore- Yeah … that turbine is right there. In some cases in Japan, it’s not very far. Yeah. You can see it.  Nicholas Gaudern: Particularly on a still day, you know, when you have a very flat water surface, that can mean that sound is able to propagate a little bit further than maybe it otherwise would.  Allen Hall: So is there a, a real need then to pay attention to the acoustics and noise- Yeah … coming off of offshore wind turbines? Nicholas Gaudern: [00:23:00] I think, uh, c- certainly the near-shore, the things you’re describing now. Yeah. Offshore’s an interesting question because I think often, if I think about the UK and, and Denmark, they are quite offshore, and I think in that, in that sense, the noise is much less of a, a concern. And I think it may be more driven by regulatory r- requirements- Mm-hmm than actual, you know, neighbor complaints perhaps. So noise is interesting because people put serrations on for different reasons. Yeah. Some put them on because there’s a regulation. Yeah. Uh, some put them on because they want to be shown to being a good neighbor, you know, doing the best they can to reduce noise- We should  Allen Hall: try to- Nicholas Gaudern: which we should absolutely be doing …  Allen Hall: do that every time we can.  Nicholas Gaudern: And some are doing it because they have curtailment on their turbines.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Nicholas Gaudern: So in order to meet a regulation perhaps, they have to basically turn down the turbine, and it means that it spins slower. And if it spins slower, the noise is lower, sure. But the power output is also lower. And what we found is that on some turbines that are in noise modes, they’re losing 3, 4, 5% AEP- Ooh. Ouch … [00:24:00]every year because they’re having to turn down the turbine to meet a regulation or to, to satisfy, you know, uh, neighbor relationships. But just imagine what that means for finances if you put a serration on. You can turn the turbine up again, which you’re now addressing the noise at the source, so you don’t actually have to stop it spinning slower. You’re actually killing the noise where it’s being generated.  Allen Hall: So there’s a big financial incentive- Yes … to look at trailing edge and try to quiet them as much as you can, particularly onshore. I think that case has- Yeah … been well made over time. I’m always shocked that a lot of operators that, uh, even in the US Midwest, and we s- we drive around quite a bit in the Midwest, there’s a lot of turbines that are near homes.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah,  Allen Hall: absolutely. Y- you know, there’s one or two or three homes. This isn’t like there’s a suburb right there, but there are homes out there, and, and they would like to have enjoyment of their property. Yeah, of course. And if you can knock down the noise a little bit, it would make it  Nicholas Gaudern: a much more pleasant place. Well, if you take, you know, if you take 30-plus percent off the perceived loudness, that’s, you know-  Allen Hall: Oh, that’s very noticeable … that’s gonna, that’s gonna make a difference. Yeah, you’ll get a thank you letter- Yeah for [00:25:00] sure. So that’s exciting. The- Yeah … all this is exciting. It- It’s  Nicholas Gaudern: gonna be, it’s gonna be a really great summer, I think, to get more of these components out in the field.  Allen Hall: So if, uh, an operator or an asset manager wants to get ahold of Power Curve, understand what Silent Edge is, and how to get it installed or put some dragon scales on this season, how do they do that? Nicholas Gaudern: So you can check out our website, uh, powercurve.dk. That has all of our contact details on. Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, as well. I’m often around these, uh- … events that we find- Yeah … uh, in different countries. So no, look, look us up, reach out by email, phone, whatever, and we’d be very happy to talk to you. Allen Hall: Or reach out to the India office.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes, that’s something that we’re hoping to have up and running, uh- So  Allen Hall: if you’re  Nicholas Gaudern: in India- …  Allen Hall: later this year. Yeah. Reach out. Yeah, that, that’s gonna be an exciting advancement. Yeah. Great. For  Nicholas Gaudern: sure.  Allen Hall: Nicholas, it’s great to have you on the podcast again.  Nicholas Gaudern: Nice talking to you, [00:26:00] Allen.

Japan and the UK sign a $12 billion floating wind deal for 5.9 GW, Muehlhan buys Coverwind Solutions in Spain, and US grid reform stalls as MISO, PJM, and SPP fast-track fossil resources over wind. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, just back from Japan, in Matthew’s stead. Yolanda Padron is on special assignment. Well, Rosemary, what happened in Japan? You, you spent a, a week touring the country and looking at, uh, some energy projects. What did you learn?  Rosemary Barnes: I was there for just five, five nights. I went over for an, um, an, a systems engineering conference by INCOSE. I was doing a keynote presentation there, and also spoke to some of their… They’ve got this program, an international programming for, like, upcoming leaders. Um, and yeah, it was funny, the topic that I chose for [00:01:00] that was how you can combine an online presence with a serious professional career. Uh, ’cause, you know, like, a lot of the advice that you see about building an online presence is, like, totally compat- incompatible with being taken seriously in a, uh, you know, in a, a job like engineering. So that was pretty fun. And then on the last day, I was able to arrange a tour of a community. Like, we went to this village near Fukushima, and they, a- after the Fukushima, uh, or the earthquake that led to the Fukushima, uh, shutdown, that town, some power lines came down, and that, that village was without power for three months. So in response to that, they’re like, “Community power for the win.” At this place, like, there was literally steam coming out of the ground just, you know, randomly. It’s an onsen town, so you know, like, it’s, um, it’s built around tourism for these hot baths. And so they put in a couple of geothermal power plants, small ones, and, um, also some hydropower. But the reason why I wanted to go there was ’cause, you know, ge- [00:02:00]geothermal is such an obvious solution for Japan, for the energy, but they only have… .3% of their electricity is generated by geothermal currently. And, um, the main reason is that the onsen community in Japan is really opposed to it. They’ve lobbied against it because they’re worried that, um, you know, the onsen community needs heat to come out, hot water to come out of the ground, and geothermal takes hot water out of the ground, so they’re just worried that they’re incompatible. Um, now I think the science says that that’s not really true, that the, there isn’t, they’re not the same resource and that one doesn’t affect the other. The wastewater from the geothermal is not really wastewater. It’s just water that is not as hot as it was when it came up. Um, that goes down then into the onsen because it’s a good temperature. And then some of the even cooler water, about 21, 23 degrees, they’re using that to raise shrimp.  Allen Hall: Well, just speaking of Japan, uh, the Japanese Prime Minister was just in the UK and a [00:03:00] big deal was signed between Japan and United Kingdom, £9 billion worth, which is about 12 billion US dollars, uh, to work together on 5.9 gigawatts of floating wind capacity in the UK, uh, across three different projects. W- And the goal is to get some Japanese partners working with, uh, the UK companies involved with it to suss out how to do offshore wind. And as we all know, Japan is gonna, is headed there right now and is going to need a little bit of a primer on how to do it. And, and, well, they should because, uh, there’s been some really successful efforts in the UK and up north, Northern Europe. Uh, so the, the goal of this is to, to get these projects underway and, and Japan’s committing all this money, which, uh, sure, it’s a nice boost to the UK at the moment. It gets a little turbulent over there if you’ve been watching the news. Rosemary [00:04:00] Tying back to your experience in Japan recently, is there a big push internally? Do you see that internally in Japan for offshore wind and even offshore floating wind in Japan, or are they really prepping for it in country?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’d say I went over there thinking that Japan was, like, oddly not bothered about wind energy of any flavor. Um, ’cause, you know, like onshore wind, they’ve got problems because the good ri- wind resource is right on the ridges, and they’re getting just hammered by lightning, and they’ve got some, like, really interesting responses to how they think that they should manage that, that in my opinion are just gonna kill… Like, you would never bother to have an onshore wind farm if these, um, regulations go ahead. So offshore they have got, um, a bit of a, an, a fixed bottom resource, and they’ve had several auction rounds geared towards that, but they’re, um, they haven’t gone well. I think that, like, people have promised… It, it’s a similar story to elsewhere in the world. Uh, people have, like, bid, like, [00:05:00] bid down to quite low prices and then not been able to deliver and pulled out. Mitsubishi just recently paid some, uh, some huge penalty for not going ahead with a, a project. There isn’t actually that much fixed bottom potential, um, for Japan. So, um, if they wanna have a significant amount of wind energy in their grid, which they should, because they’re, like, honestly it is probably the best or one of the couple of best options to provide big chunks of their electricity supply, then it needs to be floating. Um, and the government is actually pushing on that. I thought they weren’t doing too much, but I did talk to someone from this group, Flora. It is a group that is, um, that, that is trying to form partnerships with other countries, but also with manufacturers to try and set the framework up so that it can, like, l- lay the groundwork for commercialization to happen without being prescriptive. Flora is in there [00:06:00] to try and, you know, get the pieces in place to be able to allow, um, you know, uh, innovation and competition to happen much, much faster.  Allen Hall: What’s the most complicated piece technically that needs to be solved before Japan can really move forward? Is it the money piece? I mean, um, um, I said technically, but I feel like there’s always this money aspect to it, which is important, but on the technology side, i- is it, is there any technology that remains to be solved or is it just the will to do it? Rosemary Barnes: Basically in any engineering question, the answer is money, like, when you come down to it. So, like, it’s almost boring to say, yeah, it’s, it’s money. Floating offshore wind- Too hard, too niche for most people to consider it a mainstream thing, but it’s the legitimate, like, good contender for Japan. And you know what? That presents opportunity. It can actually be good to have to do something hard. Um, and Japan has the opportunity to be the [00:07:00] country where, you know, it’s the country where floating wind makes the most sense, so they can be the ones, if they’re smart about it, they can be the ones where the smart technologies evolve. There will at least be little niche things that they develop that will go on to succeed, and Japan really needs some new big manufacturing industry to… Like, their car industry is obviously, um, has been so important, the automotive manufacturing, and it’s declining now relative to China. Um, so I am also hopeful that they can, you know, build that up a bit more, but I don’t think that they’re going to, you know, topple China, so they are looking for new industries that will be the new… Yeah, do for them what the auto industry did from, yeah, from the ’70s onwards. Actually, you know, like, you can tie it back in a nice loop back to the oil crisis in the ’70s because that’s when the world was like, “Oh, actually small, efficient cars are, are quite a smart idea.” And Japan had those because it was so [00:08:00] constrained in terms of, you know, the oil that it could bring in was expensive. Not having their own fossil resources, they learned to conserve it, and then that turned out to be, you know, a big advantage for them.  Allen Hall: Using the 1970s gas price crisis and the movement towards Japanese cars in the United States, I mean, timing is everything. And Japan was in, uh, Honda in particular, was in the United States. I think Toyota was too, if I remember correctly. And when gas prices went through the roof, uh, yeah, they were very efficient cars, and not the most reliable at the moment, but obviously they’ve changed quite a bit and s- they are, particularly Honda and Toyota, are probably two of the more reliable blan- brands you can buy in the States today. So things change, right? You’re just getting your foot in the door. But that, that break point is, is coming pretty soon, I would say, in, in terms of timing. I- is it the right time for Japan to move into floating offshore? It’s gonna be within the next couple of years, don’t you think, Rosie?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah, def- [00:09:00] definitely. Um, and yeah, I mean, I, it, it, it does frustrate me that any money is being spent on, um, hydrogen and ammonia imports. I, I would just rather that they just, just, just do the LNG until you figure out alternatives.  Allen Hall: That makes more sense.  Rosemary Barnes: Gas is better than… You know, like ammonia, for example, they’re locking in these coal power plants for additional years, making investments, um, you know, thinking that this is gonna be part of their future. They’re gonna end up burning coal, y- you know? At least gas is flexible enough to support renewables, and so it can, you know, like speed the rollout of, of wind. And they do have a fair bit of solar too in Japan. Floating solar, actually. They invented that there, and have actually got quite, quite a lot of it. Allen Hall: Gas is gonna be the answer short term. I think in the relationship between the United States and Japan has always been pretty solid since after World War II, that the United States would be willing partners to help Japan stand up any [00:10:00] technology, probably except for wind, which is just bizarre.  Rosemary Barnes: One of your maybe, um, unexpected legacies in Japan was, I say you, I mean the USA, they’ve got, um, not just the, like, silly American power plug design where you’ve got, like, the parallel pins that just fall out, so they’ve got that. But they also have 110 volts. Like, where else in the world is, is, thinks that’s a good idea? I had, um, my little travel steamer I’d taken over there, hairdryer, useless. Absolutely useless.  Allen Hall: That’s all you  Matthew Stead: need.  Rosemary Barnes: I blame you personally, Allen. I hold you personally responsible for my wrinkled clothing. Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive [00:11:00] test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions Well, the wind service sector is consolidating as we’ve all watched over the last year or two, and Mjolner Wind Service is one of the most aggressive buyers in the field. Uh, the Danish company has signed to acquire Cover Wind Solutions of Spain, including Cover Sun Solutions and Cover Renewable, with the deal expected to close by the end of June. This is Mjolner’s 11th acquisition since 2023. Now, Cover Wind fills a geographic gap for Mjolner. Uh, they are [00:12:00] involved in Spain and France and, uh, already involved in covering the Nordics a little bit and Central Europe. So there’s a, a big play here, and, and decommissioning is really the, the story underneath of th- all this is on the decommissioning side. Uh, Mjolner views turbine end-of-life services as an important future growth area, and obviously it is. Particularly in Spain, there’s been a lot of turbines that will be, uh, brought down and new turbines put up in the next 10 years, and Cover Wind gives Mjolner that ability. And as we all know, Mjolner just recently acquired our Canadian friends, AC883. So yeah, they have been on quite the spin recently, and that’s not even Yeah, sl- a sliver of what’s happening on the consolidation effort, uh, we didn’t talk about last week, but we, we should have, which was Fairwind acquiring Rope Partner in the States. And Rope Partner is a [00:13:00] longtime blade repair company and has been seen for years, as long as I can remember honestly, as the go-to blade experts on complex repairs. The, the, the most trained up, most, uh, technicians. On the technician side, they’re, they, they, they always had the highest trained people to what I remember, and also they would ta- tackle some of the most complex blade problems, and now they’re part of Fairwind. So there is movement, Matthew. A, a lot more than I thought there would be, because after COVID, a lot of companies just disappeared, but now it does seem like they’re being acquired, which is a, a good result, I guess. Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think there’s a strong opportunity, and, uh, and maybe the first point is that actually doing an M&A successfully is actually really hard. Um, I, I’ve personally been through two, uh, two M&As, um, and it is, it is really hard to get an M&A right. And so I think, you know, [00:14:00] these companies are showing that, um, you learn, you can do better, and, you know, it, it, it is hard. So congratulations for them for achieving that. Um, but the second part I think is also, you know, the industry maturing, uh, gaining scale is also, you know, necessary and, you know, driving, you know, but– and these people should be able to drive their, you know, better margins and so forth through, through scale. So, you know, I, I think, um, I think we had a bit of quick chat about it previously, but, um, this is, you know, a really good thing.  Allen Hall: Does it change the way we think about, uh, independent service providers?  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think it’s gonna continue. I mean, this is not the end of it. Um, you know, in– even in what we do, there’s been various, you know, mergers and acquisitions in, in our space or, and investments, you know, cross-investments. So I, I just see this continuing. You know, like SkySpecs, um, you know, growing their, their CMS, um, business and their financial arm. Um, this is just gonna continue.  Allen Hall: [00:15:00] Is it more activity, uh, related to the availability of AI? It’s– It does seem like that’s playing into some of the decisions that are being made on the mergers and acquisition in renewables, is you start to see more discussion of, hey, we’re going to, uh, apply new techniques, machine learning. A lot of times you’ll see that, particularly in Europe, and then here in the States it’s almost all AI, where they’re- In order to have a, a very successful AI venture, you need to bring in the brainpower to feed that AI. And it does seem like there’s a lot of, of senior companies getting grabbed that could be part of a larger artificial intelligence play. Matthew Stead: You remind me of the, um, the dotcom boom and bust. I don’t know. I’m, I’m a little bit more skeptical, um, on the value actions on the, on the AI side of things.  Allen Hall: Really?  Matthew Stead: It certainly… It’s a massive, um, massive, um, transformation for the industry, and you know, I mean, what I, what, what we can all do is, is massive. [00:16:00] But, um, my former employer, a consulting business, bought a AI company for a billion dollars, and I, I, I just can’t see the value. So, um, anyway, I’m, I’m a bit skeptical about valuations and AI, and, um, I’m not as bullish as many people are.  Allen Hall: Really? Uh, because it does seem like more recently, the shift has been from the number of engineers you have in your company times a million dollars a head, that’s the way it was, uh, not that long ago. And now it does turn into how many senior people you have, that’s the multiplier. Because they’re trying to take that knowledge and all that data resource that you have, like at a, a rope partner where they’ve prepared really complex problems for years. That data set is amazing if you could get your fingers on it. Matthew Stead: Uh, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I completely agree with you, but I just think it’s being oversold and overcooked and overbaked.  Allen Hall: I see it as growing instead of it declining. I don’t think it’s cooling off. I think we’re just at the precipice of [00:17:00] it. As we get better at using some of these AI tools, if we’re gonna build data centers in space, ’cause that’s gonna be the, the linchpin to all this, is if it gets to data centers in space, then we can leverage massive data sets and learn something from them and get better. Matthew Stead: I love change, but, um, I, I think that’s ri- ridiculous, to be honest. Um, I know we’ve spoken about it a number of times, but data centers in space just seems stupid to me. But, but yeah, going back to your original point, Alan, um, yeah, we, we can definitely do better with you know, more insights around our data and getting more out of our data. I mean, data is the new oil. You know, we’ve been saying that for the last 10 years. Um, yeah, I’m, I’m full, I’m fully on board with that, but I’m just a little bit of a, a little bit of a negative Nancy on, um, some of these overhype  Allen Hall: The line to connect a new wind project to the U.S. grid has been one of the industry’s most stubborn bottlenecks. And a new report from Advanced Energy [00:18:00] United drafted by Grid Strategies and the Brattle Group finds that seven major U.S. grid operators have made progress, at least some, on generator interconnection reform since FERC Order 2023 took effect. So that was the order that said we need to fix this interconnect queue problem. There are just too many people in line and we need to give some ranking to them. But progress on paper has not yet translated into projects moving through the queue faster. And a newer problem is emerging. Fast track interconnection policies at MISO, PJM, and SPP are directing limited system headroom towards, drum roll, utility-affiliated and fossil-heavy resources at the expense of independent clean energy developers. So the game is being rigged a little bit at the moment where they want to push forward [00:19:00] gas and other fossil fuel type generation in front of solar and wind, which are less costly and quicker to get up and running. This can’t last long, right? E- eventually the people living in, uh, MISO, PJM, and SPP are gonna have a little bit of a revolt on how power prices are gonna bump up accordingly. Matthew Stead: There’s been numerous other attempts to stifle wind, um, and those numerous other attempts, uh, tend to be overwritten and, uh, ruled out and thrown out in courts. And, um, it, it just seems like this is, well, if that didn’t work, we’ll, we’ll try something else.  Allen Hall: It’s a delay tactic.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, exactly. Then becomes another one. Well, you know, just wait for that one to be thrown out.  Allen Hall: I don’t know who said the famous saying, time is money, but time is money, and if you can [00:20:00] delay a project from happening, it costs money to sit on the sidelines and you’re, you’re paying interest on a loan or your investors are getting upset because they’re not seeing the returns. So the easy game in most situations like this is just to drive the schedule to the right, even if it’s by a couple of months. It’s expensive.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. If there’s two things I wish I didn’t know about, the first one is telecommunications and how rubbish it is. I just wish I didn’t, wish I didn’t know about telecommunications and the need for cellular and satellite and blah, blah, blah. I wish I didn’t know about that. The other one I wish I didn’t know about, because I wish it wasn’t a problem, was just grid connections and grid and networks.  Allen Hall: How bad it is.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Rosie, if you can jump in, but you know, the New South Wales-South Australian Interconnector Grid, um, is just being energized now. I don’t know if it’s one or two years late. Um- And they’re trying to recover a billion dollars from the general [00:21:00] public  Rosemary Barnes: Is it only a billion? I thought it, when I looked at the stats, um, it was like near tripling of the, of the project cost  Matthew Stead: My understanding is the government screwed it up or the, uh, the, the operator screwed it up in terms of the transmission lines, and then want, wants to claim it back from the general public ’cause they, they screwed up. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s a weird thing ’cause you, you know, it’s like, I think it’s like this everywhere in the world that the, yeah, transmission companies or network companies, they get a regulated rate of return on their, on their project, so they invest. But then it’s like what’s that rate of return for? It’s not money for nothing, right? It’s for them, you know, like taking on some risk and y- you know, some sorts of things are, are built into that. Um, but it’s kind of like if you, you get that amount approved and then you stuff up your project management so it drags out and takes a lot of money, then you’re also gonna be compensated additionally for having done a bad job with your project [00:22:00] management. The kinds of delays are not unforeseeable. You know, like I’ve been a project manager in my past. You don’t just make your best case scenario and then kind of just assume that that’s, um, how much it will cost and not, y- you know, not come up with, um, contingency plans for if, uh, if predictable things happen. It’s not, there’s no like black swan events in here. It’s just, um, you know, things that happen every now and then. And it is one of those like key principles of like delivering on big projects, um, that Ben Slibbert, you know, in that, that book, um, How Big Things Get Done, he goes over and over and over again that you need to keep your project as short as possible ’cause the longer it is, the more like surprises you’ll have along the way and it will cost more. And I just don’t think that they, like they need to go read that book and then do a better job with their project planning and scenarios.  Allen Hall: You know who’s read that book clearly is, I, I’ll bring up the name, I know it’s gonna cause controversy, [00:23:00] Elon.  Rosemary Barnes: I knew you were gonna say that.  Allen Hall: Well, you know why I say that? Because there was an interview with him and I was skimming through some nonsense and then this little interview popped up, and he was talking about how quickly they need to get things rolling. And it’s like one year you’re getting s- first year you’re getting started, second year you’re just growing like crazy, and third year is infinity. And the only way that makes sense is that you’re just pouring every resource on this problem to shorten the schedule That’s it  Rosemary Barnes: You, you do. You have, you have to do the, the, you know, the parts of your project where surprises are gonna happen. Like you can… There are surprises and you know, don’t know what they, they are gonna be. However, you can guarantee that there will be surprises. Like you, you know going into a years-long project that several things are gonna happen that are, you know, gonna surprise you. And so you can plan for that. And the best planning that you can do is to make sure that once you start actually, you, you know, you’re gonna spend time in planning to, um, get it right, but once you actually start [00:24:00] the phase of your project where delays cost money, then you, you just plan as, do everything you can to keep that as short as possible, and it will be, it’ll be cheaper. Even if it sounds more expensive, oh, we’ve gotta, you know, pay crews overtime to, you know, do a night shift or something like that, um, you know, you need to consider, consider that because the, there will be delays and they cost. And it’s just, like at this point, maybe 100 years ago you could get away with being surprised by that, but y- you know, like project management has come far enough now that we know, we know this. It’s just basics.  Allen Hall: But infrastructure projects are tough because they don’t see the revenue on the backside that much sooner. It’s sort of a very flat 3% growth industry Unlike a lot of other things  Rosemary Barnes: But that’s it, like just to contain costs, you have to have a small project.  Allen Hall: They will, but they’ve always historically gotten paid for those overruns and continue to make their 3%. If there was some sort… Back to Matthew’s point, if there was some sort of, uh, [00:25:00] disincentive to be late, they would hurry, maybe even spend a little bit of their own money, but there would have to be some massive upside, which is the problem, right? They can’t have a massive upside.  Rosemary Barnes: But that’s why I’m s- I’m saying that the situation where costs blow out and they still get… Like, they get… They make more money by having done a bad job because it costs more. You know, like that is not, it’s not okay.  Allen Hall: Is it more money or just paying the bills that they had when they were building the thing?  Rosemary Barnes: It depends how much we let them get away with, but their preference is to make, just be, “Oh, we could never have known that there would be a flood.” It’s like, okay, yeah, like, was it like a 1 in 50 years flood or something? So yeah, on average, that particular event wasn’t gonna happen, but there’s probably, you know, like 20 different categories of 1 in 50 year things that could have happened, and if your project lasts for five years, you’re gonna have a few of those. You just are. You know? It’s not, it’s not bad luck. It’s just like, just normal statistical variation [00:26:00] that y- Yeah, so I, I, I really think it’s important to, um, to not just say, “Oh. Oh, poor you,” ’cause it’s, it always sounds like a sob story. “Oh, a flood. Who could have known?”  Allen Hall: Who could have known it rains?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, I, I don’t know. Like, I often talk about how people don’t know what, um, engineers do, and we don’t get enough res- respect for, for what we do, and people don’t get it. But I think project managers is, if anything, worse. People don’t respect project management as a, um, a, I don’t know, is it a profession? But, you know, as an ex- ex- field of expertise and don’t, don’t know how much of a difference it makes to have a good one, and also that it is not that hard to be a good project manager. You just have to actually do it.  Matthew Stead: Can I make a suggestion that actually is the reverse of Darwin theory? We’ve got to come up with a name, but you know, the dumber you are, the more money you make. Also, for the record, um, Elon does have a lot of, um, philosophies and approaches which I do support. The efficiency, automating things after you’ve done them manually, only [00:27:00] doing the bare minimum, you know, all those sorts of things, doing things fast. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there’s a lot, a lot of good product development and engineering that you can learn from Elon, and you do not have to take the, like, weird personal stuff along with it. You are able to pick and choose which aspects you, you learn from.  Allen Hall: But it does take a specific kind of person to weather that storm. If you wanna play in that sandbox, y- you better be ready because it’ll be hard and fast and not very forgiving. So you just have to know that going in, which can be great, and it can be a great experience, uh, for a lot of engineers, but it isn’t for everyone. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an [00:28:00]industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind.com today. In this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, which you can download at peswind.com, there’s an article from TGS 4C about vessel traffic around offshore wind farms. And this is kind of interesting bec- because they looked at some major wind farms off the coast of the UK, Dogger Bank B, Dogger Bank C, and Sofia. Uh, and obviously there’s a lot of marine traffic around those, but you don’t really realize the scale and how, uh, it affects the, the traffic on the water. The– When they had looked at these three wind farms, they realized, uh, they had about 860, uh, transits in 2021 around that area, and that went to more than 20,000 by [00:29:00] 2025. So the amount of economic and commercial activity that was happening around those wind farms exploded. And when you have that many ships in the water, it does change the nature of that area and also how other ships transit through the area, around that area. Uh, it’s an interesting piece because if you look at where those wind farms are, Matthew, th- that’s kind of a narrow stretch in there where there is a lot of ship traffic already. So y- you create this, uh, artificial barrier for some of the ship traffic, and you’re trying to understand how that is affecting the flow in and out. But I think the, the bigger piece is you can tell how well a development is progressing on offshore wind by looking at the ships and who’s where and when. Matthew Stead: I think this is interesting topic. Um, I, I– To be honest, I don’t completely get it. Can you explain it to me?  Allen Hall: If I’m an investor in these projects, if I’m the government, if [00:30:00] I’m the, uh, the power company that’s gonna handle the power coming off these sites, I really need to know how it’s going. And the way that I look at it in the States when I look at offshore projects here, ’cause we could do something very similar, who’s out on, on the ocean? Where are they? What tower are they at? How many towers are running? You can kinda tell that. Are they, are they just doing surveys or are they laying cable? Or is there something more active happening? And where are the ships from? Are they installation vessels? Are they driving monopiles? What’s going on out in the water? It does give you a really good sense where they are in the project. Kind of back to Rosemary’s point on, on managing big projects, you– schedule is everything You can tell. You can really tell.  Matthew Stead: Thinking about it a different way. So it’s a bit more like shadow monitoring. So it’s just a way of, it’s a way of independently monitoring and checking progress, making sure that there’s transparency as to what’s going on. Allen Hall: I think there’s a lot of [00:31:00] value in that data set. And as, uh, more operators start to use that data set and more companies start to use that data set globally, uh, they’re gonna be doing offshore projects, I think, differently in, in terms of efficiency. They- they’re learning as they go.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Isn’t that one of the classical, um, sort of mathematical problems about how to optimize, uh, courier deliveries? We’ve gotta talk about quantum computing at some point too, so.  Allen Hall: We probably should. But for right now, I need everybody to go to peswind.com and download this quarter’s magazine. A lot of good articles in there, and it’s a great free download. Tons to learn. Go to peswind.com. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover this [00:32:00] show. For Matthew and Rosemary, I am Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers SunZia coming online as America’s largest wind farm, Ørsted’s stance on Chinese turbines, a record floating platform leaving China, Canada’s first offshore wind bidders, and a centuries-old North Sea shipwreck. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. America just switched on the biggest wind farm it has ever built. Out in New Mexico … a vast field of spinning turbines called SunZia. Enough power for more than a million homes across the Southwest. It is a landmark. It may be the last landmark for some time. After this year … forecasters expect annual onshore wind additions to fall … all the way to twenty thirty. The tax credits that powered the boom … expire this year. Add tariffs … supply troubles … local opposition … and a federal permitting freeze. One developer put it plainly. Capital investments … frozen. Solar is cheaper now. Batteries are faster. And the wind industry did not see the breadth of the campaign against it. So the biggest American wind farm ever … arrives just as the road ahead narrows. Now … cross the Atlantic to Denmark. Ørsted … the offshore giant half-owned by the Danish state … is being asked a hard question. Will it buy Chinese wind turbines? Its chief executive will not say no. Right now … he says … it is not expected. But they are keeping an eye on it. Analysts call that a wake-up call. Because the Chinese builders offer lower cost … faster delivery … and bigger rotors. And if a European champion turns east for turbines … that is a signal Europe is losing its edge. Not everyone is buying it. Britain has banned Chinese turbines from its offshore projects. The competitiveness fight … is just beginning. Now set to sail from southern China. The world’s largest tension-leg floating wind platform. Sixteen megawatts. More than three hundred meters tall … and nearly eight thousand tons. It left port headed for the deep sea. And its power will run straight to an offshore oil field … clean wind … feeding fossil-fuel production. China connected more than three-quarters of the world’s new offshore wind last year. As the shallow sites fill up … the industry moves into deeper water. And the deep water … is where floating wind grows up. Across the Pacific … a brand-new frontier is opening. Canada cleared the first bidders for its very first offshore wind farms. Off the coast of Nova Scotia … seven qualified players … from nine countries. The province dreams big. A megaproject called Wind West … forty gigawatts … far more than the region could ever use itself. The first phase alone … an estimated sixty billion dollars. Enough surplus power to supply a quarter of all Canada’s demand. The formal call for bids comes later this year. And finally … a story that comes up from the seabed. While surveying the site of a future wind farm in the North Sea … Ørsted found something far older than any turbine. Three lead ingots … resting beside the bones of a wooden shipwreck. Late sixteen-hundreds … maybe early seventeen-hundreds. A Dutch vessel … likely bound for home … lost on the run from England to the Netherlands. Seventy kilograms each … mined, it seems, in the very English hills they will now return to. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 28th of June 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

James Timmins, VP of Engineering at Everpoint Services, joins to discuss how recycled wind turbine blades become BladeBlok, a drilling fluid additive for oil, gas, and geothermal wells. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. There has been a lot of activity at EverPoint Services. So I wanna back up first because if you’re not familiar with EverPoint Services, they are a recycler f- for renewable projects.  James Timmins: So we’re a, a renewable energy service company that specializes in, um, decommissioning and remediation services for, uh, wind and solar assets. Allen Hall: So when a solar farm gets hit by hail and the panels are broken, EverPoint comes up and cleans up that mess to, to allow the repair to happen.  James Timmins: Correct, yes.  Allen Hall: And on the wind turbine side, you’re t- decommissioning wind turbines, but you’re also taking the [00:01:00] blades.  James Timmins: Yes. So it’s our responsibility to haul off the damaged, I guess, the scrap. And, um, obviously there’s a very healthy market for scrap steel that you find in the tower base- Yes … but the fiberglass is a little less straightforward when it comes to disposal and/or recycling.  Allen Hall: So typically with the fiberglass blades or any composite that’s, that’s being recycled, th- there’s really two techniques that are being implemented right now. Uh, well, really three. Let’s go over three of ’em. One of ’em is you can just bury them. They’re c- essentially construction materials, so you can bury them. Not ideal, but it has happened in the past. The second is they grind up the, the blades and use ’em in, uh, c- the cement-making process, where they’re burning some of the things that are combustible there and using it for fuel, but also the fiber can help with the cement. Does, does that sound right? Correct. And, and then the third one I’ve seen is just as a reinforcement product. [00:02:00] So it’s, uh, they chop up the fiber in different lengths, they clean it up, and you can u- use it as an additive to different products. Yes. And, and that generally has been the marketplace in the blade recycling area for- Going on 20 years now probably Yes Until now. And that’s where Everpoint has really changed the game because you’re thinking about blade recycling a completely different way.  James Timmins: Correct. So my background is oil and gas. I was a drilling engineer, uh, for major oil companies, so it was my job to plan, execute, and oversee drilling operations. So I worked kind of all over the world, and this project started as an icebreaker at a friend’s birthday. I had never met Tyler Goodell before. I- Wait,  Allen Hall: wait, wait. So you’re at a birthday party-  James Timmins: Yes …  Allen Hall: and your kids are having fun. They’re eating cake. Oh,  James Timmins: we were at a dive bar, so we- Oh, okay … yeah, watching a band, uh- … sitting over a bucket of Lone Stars and yeah.  Allen Hall: Okay. That’s the [00:03:00] best place for new ideas to occur clearly. So you’re, you’re, you’re at a birthday event, you’re hanging out, and what happens?  James Timmins: He asked me what, what I would do with tens of thousands of tons of scrap fiberglass.  Allen Hall: And you get asked that every day, or is it- No. Okay.  James Timmins: And I thought it was a weird question, and I kinda put it in the back of my mind. And about 15 minutes later I was like, “Well, I have an idea that we could, uh- Put at least some of that to work. Allen Hall: And what was that idea?  James Timmins: The idea was that we could grind it to a specific particle size distribution and use it as a fluid loss additive in oil, gas, and geothermal drilling operations.  Allen Hall: Okay. That’s a unique application.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: So I think we need to walk into what happens when we’re drilling an oil well or any sort of well, I suppose. Uh, there’s unique things that happen that require specialty fluids or specially …  James Timmins: Uh, specialty additives you could say. Additives.  Allen Hall: Yes. [00:04:00] So- Okay. That’s a, that’s a good way to describe it. All right. So, uh, I’m drilling a well. I’m in Texas. I’m an oil tycoon. I wanna drill this well. What am I doing?  James Timmins: So you have what’s called drilling mud, which is pumped down the drill string through the bit. Um, helps cool the bit, um, power down hole tools, and sweep the cuttings out, which is the- Okay … drilled up rock.  Allen Hall: Yep.  James Timmins: So there’s a, a hydrostatic pressure that the fluid column exerts on the formation. And if that fluid column exerts more pressure than the formation can stand, it splits open like a fracture. Allen Hall: Okay.  James Timmins: In this case, an accidental fracture. Or you could have just a porous formation of, uh, low pressure. And so you have this pressure imbalance from the wellbore where the fluid wants to flow to the area of low pressure. And, uh, this mud is $300 or $400 a barrel. And if you’re- Whoa … losing 100 barrels an hour, the costs add up really quick. Can’t drill ahead. Um, it’s what’s called non-productive time. [00:05:00] So you’re spending 80 or $100,000 a day for all this equipment to be out there, and you’re not drilling ahead, so.  Allen Hall: Okay. So as the, the drill bit goes down into the formation, you’re hitting rock. You hit a crack in a rock, or you create a crack in a rock. All your drilling mud, and it’s not really mud, right? No, it’s- It’s, it’s a special compound-  James Timmins: Yes … that we call mud. Very,  Allen Hall: uh,  James Timmins: yeah, it’s drilling fluid, I guess, is the technical term. Okay . But, um- I’ve  Allen Hall: heard mud used universally.  James Timmins: It kinda looks like chocolate milk most of the time.  Allen Hall: There you go. Yeah. Okay. So it’s an expensive fluid. You’re pushing it down in, but then you get a, a crack or a formation that you run into, and all that precious fluid goes running off somewhere else. Yep. So which it doesn’t allow you to cool the bit, which basically stops all drilling.  James Timmins: Correct.  Allen Hall: Okay, that’s a big problem.  James Timmins: And in worst case scenario, the fluid column falls and the pressure on the formation falls, and then the well starts flowing and you have a well control problem, so. Allen Hall: So now you got a big problem.  James Timmins: Yep. [00:06:00] Allen Hall: All right. So now you have fluid coming back at you that you’re not ready for.  James Timmins: Correct, yeah.  Allen Hall: Okay, that seems like quite the mess.  James Timmins: Yeah, so it’s actually one of the… You know, in some parts of the world, one of the top drivers of non-productive time and cost. So it’s a, kind of a problem as old as the oil field itself, but… Allen Hall: Okay, c- ’cause at the end of the day, you would like to have a specific hole tapped at a specific location pulling-  James Timmins: Yes …  Allen Hall: hopefully petroleum products from that area or whatever you’re going for. It’s could, could be gas- Yeah … uh, off of that site, but you have to have some constraints about it, right? Right. You d- d- to control everything. Okay. So n- that sets the problem. All right. We’re gonna run to this, uh, area where we’ve, we’ve cracked the found- the, the rock or there’s porous rock and we’re pumping this, a really expensive fluid down it and we would like to stop that from happening. How does that end up involving wind turbine blade recycling? James Timmins: So we grind this material to a specific size and you mix it at a certain [00:07:00] concentration. Could be two pounds per barrel of mud or 80, uh, depending on the severity of the losses. But, um, this mixture is pumped down into the formation and this, um, kind of acts like a… Technical term is bridging. So this, these fibers from the recycled turbine blades cannot fit through all of the pore spaces. Sure. And gradually they be- begin to accumulate on the wall of the, the wellbore. So they- Okay … uh, eventually it’s kinda like a clogged sink with… You know, you get enough- So you get enough hair in the sink … chopped vegetables. Yeah. Yeah. It, it eventually will stop flowing.  Allen Hall: Oh, well, who hasn’t experienced that? So it’s, it’s… So you, you wanna put things down into this hole that prevent the fluid from running off. Recycled blades seems like a very viable option just because it’s in an inert substance, it’s pretty durable.  James Timmins: It is.  Allen Hall: It’s tough. It can handle high temperatures [00:08:00] and it now can be pumped.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: Wow. All right. So that’s a, that’s a remarkable idea. But ideas and products, there’s usually a long distance between those two.  James Timmins: Correct, yes.  Allen Hall: So from initial concept to where you are today, walk through what you had to go do to make this into a real product.  James Timmins: Uh, so we… I basically have- was familiar with these types of products in the past, but at the level I was at, I was not getting into the granular detail-  Allen Hall: Sure James Timmins: of the qualification of the product, of the spec of the product. So, um, I kind of had to do a lot of research reading technical papers online about product development for this particular type of product. So, um, I started with a, basically in my garage, um, a geologist sieve. Okay. I got a sample of shredded fiberglass, which I think was, was like five-inch shred. So I [00:09:00] bought a blender from Target, not knowing what else to use, and I stuffed it down in, with a crescent wrench and blended it up and broke the blender and eventually got enough usable material to, uh, start testing it in a lab. And so-  Allen Hall: Oh …  James Timmins: there are third-party labs that do these kind of tests, and they’re all industry standard, um, prescribed methods, so they’re called mud checks and, uh, what’s called a pore plugging apparatus, which is like a, either a ceramic disc that’s simulates a formation and it’s porous, it’s got a certain permeability, or you have what’s called a slotted liner, which is a stainless steel plate with two-millimeter slots on it. And you put the mixture in, and you pressurize it, and if it stops it, then you know it works. So- So  Allen Hall: you’re plugging a hole- Yeah … in a laboratory,  James Timmins: basically. Exactly, and it’s under high temperature and pressure, so it’s designed to simulate kinda downhole conditions. But-  Allen Hall: [00:10:00] Wow. Yeah Okay, so- Got a  James Timmins: little into the weeds,  Allen Hall: but So you’re, no, you’re in your garage, you chop up some material, you go, “All right, let’s go check this out.” You, you get a, a- an independent laboratory to try it, and they say it works.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: And then it’s, then you’re off to the races now because- Well, that’s what I thought … you opened Pandora’s box  James Timmins: Yeah … a  Allen Hall: little  James Timmins: bit. So I was not expecting how much, how rigorous the t- the qualification would be on the industry side as well. Right. Sure. Yeah So, um, that was kind of the starting line for, uh, product qualification, but, um, I had a very coarse particle size, thinking that would be adequate because I was not familiar with what’s actually used.  Allen Hall: What the ingredients are, yeah.  James Timmins: Right. So, um, I was kinda shopping it around to friends, and they’re like, “It’s a niche product where it is right now. It needs to be finer.” So that’s kind of been the process is, okay, it needs to be [00:11:00] this particle size D50, which is 50th percentile mean particle size, basically. And so then the question is how do we get there? And- Right … so- Grinding composites  Allen Hall: can be difficult because- It is … they’re tough, and they’re, as you have learned with the, the- The- blender experiment  James Timmins: Right … chopping them is not easy. Right. Very abrasive, uh, very high tensile strength. It’s basically designed not to be cut or not to be torn. Um-  Allen Hall: Right. That’s why we love it …  James Timmins: not to be, not to ever degrade in weather. So it has been an ongoing Kind of research project to find out what’s the best equipment for this, uh, can we do this at, you know, a reasonable cost? ‘Cause it’s not gonna be as cheap as grinding up or, you know, picking up sawdust from a sawmill or- Right … or chopping up cedar trees or whatever. So- Which  Allen Hall: are generally soft and easy to, to chop and-  James Timmins: Right. And not nearly as abrasive and so- Right … we [00:12:00] have identified, um, a process that we think is economical, and we’ve demonstrated it in, you know, kind of a small commercial run. But, uh, you know, it’s kind of going back and forth to consumers and them saying, “We want this product size,” and then me going back and forth to our partners saying, “Can we do this? Can we do a lot of it? Can we do it-”  Allen Hall: Right. The quantity’s gonna  James Timmins: be big. Right. Exactly. So, you know, talking to equipment manufacturers, they’ll all tell you that their product, their, their machine can handle this material. And they’re usually all right, but, you know- Can they  Allen Hall: handle the quantity?  James Timmins: Exactly. Without- They can do it for a month, or, you know, six months, and then it’s, well, do we have to overhaul the whole machine now ’cause this- That’s it … yeah.  Allen Hall: It’s, those composites are rough on blades.  James Timmins: Yep.  Allen Hall: So you’ve, you’ve broken through that barrier. You obviously have figured out a way to, to chop the material down or grind the material down into the right particle size. So [00:13:00] now you have a material that is, one, clean, is using existing blades right off the turbines, being ground down, and is a, a product that will be consumed by industry in large quantities. James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: So all these blades that have, that were gonna be recycled anyway because of the age of the turbine now have a home-  James Timmins: Yes …  Allen Hall: in the oil and gas industry, which is sort of ironic, right? Right. The renewable industry is taking over oil and gas. At the same time, we’re supporting it in a way, but, uh, the product is called what? James Timmins: BladeBlock.  Allen Hall: BladeBlock. Okay. Great name. So BladeBlock is then, is a product that’s, it comes in a, in a bag, or is it a cylinder? Is it a truckload?  James Timmins: Comes in whatever the customer wants it to come in.  Allen Hall: Okay.  James Timmins: So 50-pound sacks, uh, super sacks, or bulk trucks.  Allen Hall: So it must have a really unique, uh, application i- in terms of, I have a big problem where I can’t use off-the-shelf expensive mud. I need to f- fill this hole relatively quickly. [00:14:00] I’m just gonna go grab some BladeBlock and solve this problem right now.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: And, and it… So that changes the industry quite a bit. So places that you may have had trouble drilling wells in, you can now drill wells.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. So what has been the response from the industry? James Timmins: Uh, they love it. Um- I bet … they love the idea. They, they kind of giggle at the irony of- … you know, oil and gas solving a renewable problem. Um, and-  Allen Hall: And a renewable problem solving an oil and gas problem.  James Timmins: Right. We are selling on the performance and the cost of the product, but there is also a sustainability and circular economy, you know, aspect as well that is marketable, and there’s still an appetite on both the operator side and the oil field service side for that. Allen Hall: This is not a… We’re in Texas at the moment, but this is not a Texas, Oklahoma, N- uh, New Mexico kind of problem. You’re actually fixing problems globally with BladeBlock.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: So the product is, [00:15:00] although made in the United States, can be shipped anywhere I would assume. Yep. So, uh, y- are you getting any requests outside of the United States for it? James Timmins: We have talked to overseas partners, I guess, kind of industry leaders overseas, and there is definitely some interest. Um, we are also talking to, uh, service companies domestically headquartered who have operations internationally who have expressed interest in, uh, using it overseas. But, I mean, right now, you know, we’re close enough to the ship channel that we can ship it wherever they want it. That’s amazing.  Allen Hall: And it’s a patented product also,  James Timmins: right? Yes. So- We are in the… I guess, we’ve received our notice of allowance, and we’re in the final stages of issuance, so.  Allen Hall: So you have a, a patented, US patented, or is it, is it a world patent? Are you, you going outside the United States- Uh, we will … on patent? James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: Wow. All right. So you have eventually a somewhat global patent, so to speak. That’s not how it works, but it… that’s essentially [00:16:00] what you’ll have, uh, for BladeBlock to solve problems globally. Would, would that also involve, like, offshore wells too? Yes. Do they have the same problem? So I’m thinking of Texas ’cause we’re here, but offshore of the coast of Norway where they’re drilling wells, or in the North Sea or-  James Timmins: Persian Gulf. Yeah …  Allen Hall: Persian Gulf, sure, that they can use BladeBlock to solve some of their problems- Yes … which they couldn’t have solved today.  James Timmins: Yeah.  Allen Hall: So d- have they abandoned wells because of this problem?  James Timmins: Yes. Um, especially in certain formations you have what are called vugs, which are basically just large limestone caves that have been-  Allen Hall: Limestone  James Timmins: is tough. Yeah … so you can put a whole car down there if you want- … and, uh, still not fill it in. So, um, you know, this product, it basically is practically inexhaustible from you know, it’s… We’re kind of only limited by how much we can manufacture on- How much you can  Allen Hall: process …  James Timmins: right. So, um- It’s kind of a good problem to have for us, but  Allen Hall: [00:17:00] Yes. It changes the whole dynamic of blade recycling, because the blade recycling effort up to this point has been the operator or the OEM pays the recycler to grind the blades, and then they have to find a way to source out that material. But the, basically everybody’s trying to reuse the material because it, it does have value. How do we best reuse this, right? This is what the recycling efforts are on the recyclable blade, uh, resin systems that are happening. But you’re just taking the existing blades that weren’t meant to be recycled and recycling now in a product that has a lot of value.  James Timmins: Correct, yes. So obviously the biggest challenge everyone faces is the economics of it. And you-  Allen Hall: You know how many people have been working on that problem? Literally thousands of people have been working that problem, and you guys figured it out at a birthday event.  James Timmins: Yeah, uh- … totally out of left field. Um, it, it just, it’s one of those things that sticks in the back of your head, and you think about it for 10 minutes, and you’re like, “Oh, uh, why-” But  Allen Hall: I have [00:18:00] a, I have a solution. Like, we can use it here. Yeah, which, you know, most people, that would never have occurred to.  James Timmins: Right. And it’s kind of a technical rabbit hole, like the drilling fluid is- It is … it’s, it’s, so it’s not a whole lot of people out there thinking about lost circulation material- … uh, on a daily basis. Um, but that was, you know… The problem with so many of these applications is you’re competing with, in some cases, literal dirt and sand. We pay f- five cents a pound for sand or concrete filler, fly ash, whatever, and it’s like, well, you’re never gonna process it that cheap, or you’re never gonna way to, to be able to economically process it that cheaply, so. Allen Hall: Sure, but there’s unique applications where those things don’t work.  James Timmins: Right.  Allen Hall: And you can now make an unprofitable drill hole profitable.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: That’s a game changer. So this is remarkable, and I, I know you guys have been working on this for a couple of years, and it’s, EverPoint has always been, [00:19:00] and we’ve talked to EverPoint for a couple of years now on the podcast of, when we talk to recyclers, we don’t act- we actually have talked to a number of recyclers, but we don’t have them on the podcast because it’s, seems like the amount of material coming into their facility and the amount of material going out are not the same. Correct. They’re landfilling them or whatever’s going on, which is, it, it to me is trouble, right?  James Timmins: Right.  Allen Hall: You, your, EverPoint has always been, “We are actually gonna do what we say we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take the solar panels, we’re gonna recycle, we’re gonna…” You’ll be able to follow it. Correct, yeah. Which is one of the technologies that EverPoint brought, is you could follow your recycling product all the way from the site to where it finally ended up at. That was remarkable. That was an industry-changing, uh, idea, and I appreciate that EverPoint was doing that. Now, you’re actually turning it into a viable product called Blade Block. Game changer. Now, our podcast is probably not heard by a lot of oil and gas folk, but the, you know, the word does spread and we [00:20:00] have almost two million YouTube subscribers at this point. How do people get ahold of you to purchase BladeBlock? Do they go onto your website? Are they-  James Timmins: Yeah. I mean, LinkedIn, website.  Allen Hall: Okay. However.  James Timmins: Yeah.  Allen Hall: So- And, and what’s your website address?  James Timmins: It’s everpointservices.com.  Allen Hall: Okay. And you’re based in Texas?  James Timmins: We are. Houston.  Allen Hall: In Houston, right. So the, everybody that is interested in having improved oil and gas drilling mud, uh, can use BladeBlock now, and it’s a viable product that’s being offered, it’s patented, it’s gonna ship globally. It’s the right time and it’s the right way to recycle your blades. So if you have a, a wind turbine farm that’s being decommissioned, there’s a lot of repowering happening right now, uh, there should be a lot of, of blade material available to make BladeBlock with. So congratulations. That’s remarkable. James Timmins: Thank you so much.  Allen Hall: James, so thank you so much for being on the podcast. Of course. It was great to meet you.  James Timmins: Nice to meet you as  [00:21:00] well.

Fraunhofer studies uptower carbon blade repairs, Vineyard Wind’s fight with GE Vernova deepens, the UK backs offshore innovation, and a 26-year Horns Rev study tracks how birds adapt to turbines. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape.  Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead. Fraunhofer has published peer-reviewed feasibility research in wind energy science. And Rosemary, I don’t know if you read wind energy science, but there’s a lot of good information there about wind turbines and mechanical aspects. Not much on the electrical side, but a lot about mechanical. Uh, in, in, in wind energy science, uh, they had a discussion or an article about repairing damaged pultruded CFRP spar cap planks while the blade stays on the turbine. Using finite element analysis on a 81.6-meter [00:01:00] blade from a seven-megawatt offshore turbine, the researchers found that a shear web window cut out as short as one meter drops buckling resistance from 20.7 times critical load to four times critical load, a reduction of over 80%. The fix? Temporary external clamping frames with a pre-tensioned span-wise rod to carry gravity loads, combined with internal push rod assemblies and external stringers profiles to restore buckling resistance, all installed and removed uptower. Wow. I know we’ve discussed the carbon pultrusion repair situation and how critical that is or h- how difficult it is. I didn’t realize it was that difficult, Rosemary, that if you actually try to replace a one-meter section of a carbon pultrusion, you’re re- reducing the, the, what, the, the buckling resistance by 80%? [00:02:00] Holy moly.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think that’s even 100% pultrusion specific, right? They’re talking about cutting a, a window in the shear web. Allen Hall: Yes.  Rosemary Barnes: So that could be for any kind of repair you might have to do that, including if you need to repair, like sometimes you need to repair the, the shear web. Um, and even though, like, they’re not doing a lot of heavy lifting, um, that’s kind of a structural pun, um, they’re still super important. If they’re not there, then you’re gonna have big problems pretty immediately. The way that it works with repairs is that there’s certain kinds of damage that you know that you can just do uptower. The technicians know they can do it. They don’t need to call an engineer. The engineer doesn’t call- need to call the expert engineer. But when you need to do something a bit unusual, like a whole meter of web removed, then you’re gonna need to get an engineer to, um, dial in the, y- the, to rerun the design codes basically, um, but with this weak structure now to see is this okay and is it okay, you know, uh, [00:03:00] obviously a turbine that is just, um, idle or it’s not even idle, it’s just fixed in place while they’re repairing it, that has different loads on it to one that’s operating. So, you know, they’ll run that and make sure that it’s safe, um, before they do the repair. So what I really like about Fraunhofer is that they in some ways, like- Maybe it’s not cutting-edge science or engineering because they are largely repeating what is already well known in industry. But the problem is that industry doesn’t tell everybody else. And so it is, like, such a vital role to then go and illustrate, um, to everybody else what, what’s happening in industry. And they, they are… Like, there is this problem with wind energy where academia and industry are not, um, talking too much, and a lot of the academic stuff just doesn’t relate at all to what’s happening in the industry. But Fraunhofer do, like, 90, 90% of the time seem to get it at pretty right.  Allen Hall: When a carbon protrusion is [00:04:00] used, that really localizes where the load is versus in, in some of the more fiberglass designs that I’ve seen, the shell is actually taking some of the load. It’s not all in the shear web, so to speak. So doesn’t that sort of focus the loads into one location a little bit more when you move to carbon? Isn’t that the point?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the carbon fiber is, is a lot, lot, lot stiffer than, um, fiberglass, and it’s, it’s a lot stronger. So yeah, you are designing… I, I mean, always the spar caps have been the main load carriers, the, um, you know, the main laminate, the bit between the shear webs or over the shear webs. Um, but it’s, yeah, it probably is, um uh, e- exacerbated or the increased effect when you add carbon fiber. But the, the thing about carbon fiber is it’s so susceptible to small damages or small deviations, so like a tiny little bit of fiber waviness, like if your fibers aren’t perfectly straight, then you can easily get a, a crack. And [00:05:00] carbon fiber can also be a lot less forgiving than fiberglass. It is not uncommon that it will just break, and you didn’t even know there was anything wrong. So that damage intolerance is what led to people moving away from carbon fiber fabric and into pultrusions, because they’re made with perfectly straight fibers. Um, but it, it raises some, uh, problems of its own because y- yeah, like how do you repair that? You can’t, um, you can’t get the fibers as straight again unless you repair a whole plank, um, because like they look like, like two-by-fours or something. You know, like they look like little fence palings, basically. Black, black fence palings. Um, and so yeah, you, you’d have to repair, replace a whole one, and then you’ve got like a big chunk of structure that’s missing there, so that’s pretty hard to do uptower. I, I don’t know anybody that does those uptower, actually. Um, m- maybe they can now with this reinforcement method, but I would still not enjoy being in a blade that was missing a, a [00:06:00] pultrusion and up in the air. Allen Hall: The offshore versus onshore equation, it, it would make more sense onshore to actually drop the blade, I assume. Offshore adds difficulty, but it sounds like with all the rigging a- and assembly that you would have to do offshore, it, it probably is gonna be close in terms of total cost to do an uptower repair versus a downtower repair I would think. It, it– Wouldn’t you think it’d be roughly right?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, like in, in offshore, there’s always more motivation to do complicated, um, expe-expensive uh, things that will save you from having to do something even more expensive, like bringing, um, a whole blade back. Uh, yeah, going out, getting the vessel with the crane, bringing the blade down, and taking it in is just incredibly expensive. So you can spend a lot of time faffing around reinforcing a blade uptower before you, um, you know, would come out behind. But you know what? While we’re on topic of carbon pultrusions, I think it, like it, um, it’s almost bypassing the, the biggest risk with them ’cause [00:07:00] what I see is the– Like it’s one thing when you know you’ve got damage that you need to repair, but far more common, I think, is that you don’t even know that you’ve got damage. It’s very hard to, to see what’s going on in there. Um, I mean, people aren’t just going up periodically and doing ultrasounds, ul-ultrasound scans of their entire blade. But even if they were, it’s still not that easy to find all of the, the little damages in, in pultrusions. So, um, yeah, that’s something… ‘Cause it’s not such an old technology. It’s been around for, I, I don’t know, like not even 10 years these have been, being used consistently, probably more like five, um, that there’s been a lot of them out there. And I just, yeah, I, uh, maybe I’m overreacting because all I see is broken blades in my career, but, um, you know, I am a little bit worried that we’re gonna start to see as, you know, fatigue builds up, that we might start to see some more like sudden breakages in these blades. Allen Hall: If Fraunhofer’s working on it, there must be a reason for the [00:08:00] analysis and all the engineering time that they spent on it, that it’s a concern. I don’t know how you would do it offshore, honestly, because of all the wind loads. That you would have this damaged blade, and yes, you would have all the engineering calculations, but I would just see the safety people being very concerned about it. Because if it does go free, you have a couple of people up there minimum, and who knows what’s below.  Rosemary Barnes: But even the amount of time in between knowing that you have to, um, replace a pultrusion and actually getting up there to do it, like I’d be surprised that it didn’t break in that, in that time because it is such a big, a big, a big thing. Um, so yeah. Uh, but super interesting work and I do, I, I do really, really appreciate that the Fraunhofer exists to, you know, do this sort of stuff and, um, give us the information w-we need to get a better understanding. Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are [00:09:00]difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit CICNDT.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions UK government has deployed 15 million pounds, uh, which is about $20 million, uh, through Innovate UK in a coordinated push to move offshore wind technology from prototype stage into commercial supply chains. The package has three components: a 10 million [00:10:00] pound offshore wind innovation program, open competition for high potential businesses, a five million pound wind innovation hub to align industry, government, and research, and a 12 million pound effort for phase one of a large structures innovation center on the Isle of Wight, with Vestas already signed as its first industry partner for sustainable blade development. So the, the large structure innovation center is a composite center which is gonna be doing some advanced technology work on blade design. And I think there’s no better place to do that at the moment than in the UK. But it does open the door to a number of UK firms, and even outside the UK firms, to get involved in the UK offshore and somewhat on the onshore side. This has massive potential, I think, within the UK and outside the UK, Matthew.  Matthew Stead: I, I know from my own firsthand experience that, um, uh, actually getting into the wind space is, like, really [00:11:00] hard. So for this sort of, um, incubator and support around, um, you know, setting up businesses, I, I think this is a really, really good thing for the UK government to be doing. Um, ’cause, yeah, how do, how do you build up a future industry if you, if you don’t have the new businesses coming through? So I, I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a great thing that the UK government’s doing. And yeah, and how do you get small companies working with the larger OEMs? How do you get the innovation? Yeah, it’s, yeah, I think that’s probably, you know, got five gold stars for the UK government.  Allen Hall: What are the areas that they should be focused on over the next couple of years? Obviously, blades is, is a massive one. I’m sure Vestas is gonna be deeply involved with that. Are there some other areas in technologies that the UK should be orienting its supply chains towards? Matthew Stead: I’m personally 100% biased towards blades ’cause w- we know that, you know, um, if we look at the failures and we look at the failure rate, you know, where is the greatest growth in failure rates? It’s blades. Um, [00:12:00]you know, why, why are we still having failures? Why haven’t we learned? You know, where is the knowledge exchange? Um, so I- I’m biased, but I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s needed in, in the blade space. Yeah, as what, you know, Rosie and you were talking about before, um, you know, knowing more about, um, what’s going on, how it can be repaired, how it can be dealt with, I think is super, super critical.  Allen Hall: Well, Vineyard Wind has its 62 turbines in the water south of Martha’s Vineyard, but the project is delivering only partial power while GE Vernova works through its outstanding repairs. Now, the financial pressure is breaking into public view on two fronts. Boston landlord BP Hancock LLC is suing Vineyard Offshore, uh, the Avangrid and BP joint venture, for nearly $1.2 million in back rent at its John Hancock Tower offices. Uh, separately, GE Vernova wants out of its turbine supply contract, claiming Vineyard Wind owes [00:13:00] it over $300 million. Vineyard Wind fires back that it is actually owed more than 800 million from GE Vernova, so that, that saga will continue for a while. But it is a little odd that the rent is not being paid by Vineyard Wind at, at, in the John Hancock Tower. And if you’re familiar… That’s downtown Boston. If you’re familiar with downtown Boston, that, the John Hancock Tower is one of those iconic buildings you see in pretty much every downtown photo of Boston. There must be a lot happening at the moment at Vineyard that they’re not able to pay the rent, or they’re trying to shuffle some money around or, or seek more financing. Sounds like they’re in a refinancing phase, honestly. Yeah,  Yolanda Padron: I know that at, at times there’s– it’s really common for, for an asset manager to think, you know, “Oh, we have X amount of money,” and then all of a sudden you– it’s all of the, the additional [00:14:00] repairs or the additional operational costs stack up to a bit more than they thought they were gonna have, and then maybe they don’t even have enough money to go do trash removal or anything. And that happens, and it’s more often than, than we’d like to admit. Um, but this is on a bigger scale, right? Like, this is a project that we’ve talked a lot about, everyone’s talked a lot about, and it has a lot of eyes on it. And so for it to, to be so behind on rent on such an iconic place and such an important place and such an important part of the country, backed by a very important company, it’s really, it’s really interesting to, to think about kind of what they’re thinking. ‘Cause in, in my mind, right, like, if I was the people backing them, I would think, “Okay, well, the f- first thing’s first, like, let’s not give them any additional reason to hate us right now.” Right? Or like, you know, the public opinion is really big on these kind of things. Um, so I, I don’t, I don’t know what the, what [00:15:00] the exact plan is here. Allen Hall: Well, I wonder if this is part of the, the negotiation with GE Vernova, that, uh, the, the payments and the, the power which leads to payments, uh, hasn’t been at it- its desired output from Vineyard Wind and is this an effort to, uh, shore up their legal case with GE Vernova to say, “Hey, look, uh, Avangrid’s not gonna throw a bunch of money in, even for rent. This project needs to stand on its own two feet, and it can, but GE Vernova needs to be involved with it and get the turbines up and running to the level at which they were contracted to do”? Is this part of that play? ‘Cause it just feels like it. You know Avon Grid has the money to pay the rent. That’s not even a question. It’s, but it’s why they are not doing it is probably the bigger question at the moment. Is, is it just all legal maneuvering at the minute?  Matthew Stead: I, I wonder if it’s a bit like, uh, you get the utility billing, you get the [00:16:00] electricity billing, you put it in the, the drawer over there, and then you forget about it, and then you forget to pay it, and-  Allen Hall: It’s a million dollars Matthew Stead: $1 million out of, uh, 600 or whatever billions, you know? Maybe it was, maybe it was just a simple oversight.  Allen Hall: It could totally be oversight, but it’s, it seems like with the amount of attention that Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova are, are getting, and they are literally within a stone’s throw of one another, they can s- I’m– You could probably see the GE Vernova building from the John Hancock Tower, that, uh, you, you think that some of this would get settled, but it’s not. It’s still going on. It’s, it’s crazy. It– With, and with Avon Grid and BP still being involved with it somewhat, uh, there’s something happening behind the scenes that has not poked its head up yet. It’s coming, though. This is all coming to a head pretty quickly. The– Massachusetts needs Vineyard Wind to run. They really do, and it’s, it is a little surprising at [00:17:00] times that the state of Massachusetts is standing on the sidelines in this.  Matthew Stead: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the  Allen Hall: Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind.com today. In this quarter’s PES Wind, there’s a lot of good articles in there. If you don’t have a copy, you can go to peswind.com and download one. A interesting article from Safe Lifting, which is a European-based lifting company that does basically bespoke engineering on lifts, and they’ve been making a push that’s saying that the next wave of projects depends on bigger [00:18:00] turbines, of course, which means bigger lifts, but they need to have some standardization to them. Uh, things like spreader beams and rigging systems that are pre-built and pre-validated, uh, just reduce the overall engineering time it takes to do these lifts. Uh, and rental equipment models are a lot lower cost than buying OEM-specific or site-specific lift equipment, trying to keep the capital costs down. That’s one of the big pushes in the wind industry is lowering the overall cost of installation. It does make sense, but it– as we were talking off-air a minute ago, a lot of lifts for basically the same kind of turbine are different. The, the connection points are different. There’s a lot of engineering that goes on there, and as the turbine sizes reach 15 megawatts plus, and the cells are massive, blades are massive.[00:19:00] But it does seem like in a lot of other aspects of wind, there is some standardization, an IEC spec or some sort of overall guidance document for the industry that like, let’s put the lift points here, here, here, and here and lift with the right equipment. And Matthew, we just haven’t done it in lifting, even in smaller turbines, same thing. Matthew Stead: Oh, it’s crazy. Um, I was, I was thinking about it, and, you know, my, my suggestion would be that, you know, when I buy 100 turbines, I should get, um, a blade lifting kit. It’s like when you buy a car, you, you get a, you get a kit to change the tire, don’t you? So I would’ve thought it would be just fundamental. Um, but, but, but we know that the wind industry is not always logical. Um, so what is, what might be considered normal in a car is not normal for a wind turbine. Um, but yeah, uh, you know, this sounds like a perfect way of going to have more of a sort of standardized and, you know, not, not wait for the OEMs, but actually lead this and, and [00:20:00] drive this standardization. So yeah, thumbs up from me. Yolanda Padron: I think this is really cool. Uh, I really hope that if we can standardize the way that we do that, we can make sure that the teams are trained in, like, the standard ways of, of lifting. I know that, um, I’ve, I’ve seen a few cases where someone didn’t know, there hadn’t- been exposed to a particular blade type and they were in char- you know, in charge of, of lifting it to, to, to do a blade replacement and then, um, they accidentally ended up damaging the blade and so you had this bad crack that they kind of painted over because it was a little bit embarrassing for them at the time. And then, you know, a year later it’s like, well, okay, well, maybe next time ask someone, um, if you if you don’t know the, the exact lifting protocols or, or if you mess up, you know, let someone know. Um, but, but [00:21:00] yeah, the, you know, a lot of these, these smaller and, and larger structural cracks that, that come from, from lifting errors would be avoided if everybody was doing the same thing or the same two iterations of Of lifting standards, which is really exciting  Matthew Stead: Y- y- if you’ve got a wind farm, y- y- you’re guaranteed you’re gonna have to drop a blade at some point, aren’t you? Allen Hall: And a gearbox  Matthew Stead: and a generator It’s, it’s pretty much a given. So like, like I said before, I reckon it should just be part of the standard kit that you buy, is you, you, you buy a substation, but you also buy a lifting, a lifting kit as well.  Allen Hall: It’s one of the more, uh, dangerous parts of wind is lifting, clearly, and we’ve seen that over time. And, uh, having standardized equipment, back to Yolanda’s point, does make a lot of sense because if you’re out there doing this quite often and you have different rigging for every different OEM, you can get crosswise, and things happen. And if we had some standardization there, that would make a tremendous [00:22:00] amount of sense. That’s why, uh, Safe Lifting wrote this article on PES Wind. So if, if you wanna read this article, just visit peswind.com. When engineers plan an offshore wind farm, they try to account for everything, including seabirds. And at the Horns Rev wind farm in the Danish North Sea, the layout was meant to leave birds a clear way through, but the birds had, uh, ideas of their own. After 26 years of patient monitoring, researchers found that the turbines did not simply chase wildlife away. Instead, they reshuffled the entire neighborhood in the sky, turning some species into avoiders and others into opportunists. So this has been a big discussion in the wind industry for a long time, particularly for offshore wind projects, of what to do with the birds. And the early assumption was that, hey, let’s just give them a pathway where they can fly [00:23:00] through, and birds have made up their minds. Some are taking that path. Others are avoiding it because of the change in the which, uh, species are hanging out where. This is a remarkable outcome, and it’s been going on long enough that there’s, uh, some statistical relevance to it now. Do we need to get some bird psychologists involved in these offshore projects on how we think of how birds behave? Because I think to the engineering community, you know, like, you, you put a road there for you to fly through, bird, and then you decide not to. This is at a different level than engineering. Yolanda Padron: I think it’s great to do as much as you can do, right? It’s amazing that they did all of this work. It is kind of funny. I mean, it’s, it’s sad. I’ve… I’m, I’m gonna get into trouble on LinkedIn or something by someone. I, I mean, it’s, it’s sad, of course, if, if birds get hit, right? But it’s, it’s, we can’t control everything. You [00:24:00] know, as much planning that went into this, it’s And what’s the next step here?  Matthew Stead: Well, first of all, 26 years? Is that correct? Yeah, 26 years. I mean, m- I, my- the thought that came to mind is that sometimes engineers don’t understand the natural environment. Sorry, just, just take that as a, as a observation. But, you know, I- it just reminds me of when, um, when civil engineers lay out paths and pavement, you know, they put a path in, but then people walk around it. People do whatever they wanna do. And so, you know, I, I don’t think we can actually design out some of these things because we just will never understand the bird, we’ll never understand the human. Um, so yeah, I think put a little bit of effort in. I think going back to what Yolanda said, just put a, a bit of effort in. But yeah, actually, there are some things in this world we can’t control.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I mean, [00:25:00] there’s, there’s of course endangered species. There’s of course, you know, a lot of, a lot of monitoring companies out there that do a really good job. Depending on what you need and depending on, you know… You can tailor your site needs around w- what’s gonna happen, right? Or, you know, if you know that you’re in the migratory pattern of a particular species- There’s, I know there’s a lot of very smart people hard at work to make sure that your site is tailored to fit what needs to, what needs to happen there. And it’s great. I think it’s a great, it’s great to know, you know, that, that people in this industry care about birds. I know I once had to go through extra check at TSA because the, the person there said, you know, “Oh, you work in wind? Save the birds.” And then he sent me through this, like, a lot, because he, he thought I was killing birds every day. Um, so I mean, you know, [00:26:00] we’re not killing birds out here, and it’s great, and it’s lovely to see all the hard work that goes into this. But it, but it also, it’s, it’s important to note that the plans aren’t gonna be 100% foolproof, and that’s okay. You can just try your best.  Allen Hall: What’s the one bird you would assume as an engineer would not care if the wind turbines were there or not? The bird you see absolutely everywhere around the sea. Matthew Stead: Seagull.  Allen Hall: Seagull. They do not care. They love wind turbines. They’ll use them as perches. I’m sure that, uh, yeah, a lot of, uh, technicians had to deal with seagulls, uh, hanging around the wind turbines. That has to be a thing. So it just depends on the species, for sure. Which is unique, right? E- every species has its own separate personality and things that it likes to do. Uh, so in some of the wind turbines, I’m sure the seagulls are probably an annoyance, but they’re gonna let them be. And s- and some other species just don’t wanna be around the wind turbines, so even if you put a pathway through them, they’re just not gonna be [00:27:00] there. That’s an interesting finding.  Matthew Stead: It’s like onshore as well. I mean, cows and sheep love to stand in the shade of a wind turbine, so they like to hang around. They scratch themselves on the, on the, the stair. You know, they, they rub themselves on the bolt covers. You know, they try and eat stuff. Goats, goats are particularly bad.  Allen Hall: Goats are really aggressive on wind farms for finding wires. Absolutely. An- anything to eat.  Yolanda Padron: Raccoons.  Allen Hall: Yes. Raccoons.  Yolanda Padron: Snakes.  Allen Hall: The snakes do hide out in the shade. That is one thing you gotta be careful about is, uh, especially in Texas, of kicking over a rock and finding a snake, so make a lot of noise when you’re walking in Texas. That’s the plan. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime: Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found some value in today’s conversation, [00:28:00] please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. So for Rosie, Yolanda, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and I’ll see you here next week on the Uptime: Wind Energy podcast.

Allen covers Invenergy returning four offshore wind leases for $765 million, a Block Island study finding turbines became reefs, RES’s Smart Pilot drone inspections, RWE’s three new French wind farms, and a $12 billion Japan-UK floating wind compact. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. There is a deal being made in Washington today … and the ocean is watching. Invenergy, the largest privately held power developer in North America, has agreed to hand back four offshore wind leases to the federal government. The price tag … seven hundred sixty-five million dollars. Those leases covered waters off New York, the Gulf of Maine, and Morro Bay off central California. One of those projects … Leading Light Wind … a two-point-four gigawatt development in the New York Bight … had already been canceled last November due to economic and regulatory pressure. The remaining three lease areas represented another four-point-eight gigawatts of potential capacity. All of it … gone. In exchange, Invenergy will redirect that capital into natural gas plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri … and into geothermal projects across the Western United States. This is now the eighth offshore wind lease the Trump administration has bought out. Total cost to the federal government across all eight deals … more than two-point-five billion dollars. Seven state attorneys general are already suing over an earlier buyout with another developer, arguing the administration lacks legal authority to use federal funds this way. Invenergy is already pivoting toward geothermal. Just last week, the company acquired a five thousand-acre geothermal parcel in New Mexico through a federal lease sale. That brings its total federal geothermal footprint to forty-five parcels … one hundred forty-four thousand acres … across five western states. While Invenergy’s offshore leases are being canceled … the ocean beneath those kinds of projects may be quietly thriving. Scientists have spent seven years studying the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island … America’s first offshore wind installation. They tracked nearly a million marine animals across seventy-one species. What they expected to find was damage. What they found instead … was astounding. Black sea bass abandoned their old wandering patterns and began clustering around the turbine foundations to feed. Blue mussels colonized the steel pylons. Macroalgae spread across the submerged surfaces. Cod, lobster, and reef fish moved into the rock piled around the bases. The turbines became reefs. Accidental … but unmistakable. Researchers at the University of St. Andrews strapped GPS trackers to harbor seals expecting them to flee offshore wind farms. Instead … the seals swam straight lines through the turbine rows … stopping to forage at each foundation … like a delivery driver working a route. One seal traced the turbine layout so precisely that researchers said you could have mapped every foundation from that single animal’s trail alone. Researchers are finding a sobering conclusion: whether a turbine helps the ocean or hurts it depends almost entirely on how old it is … and where it stands. New foundations going in … disruptive. Old foundations with fifteen years of growth on them … something closer to a reef. The science is finally precise enough to say which is which. The seals figured it out years ago. They just went where the food was … in very straight lines. Meanwhile, on dry land … RES, the global renewable energy company, has launched a new tool called Smart Pilot that automates wind turbine blade inspections using drones. RES says it will take twenty-five percent less time. And it runs on standard DJI consumer drone hardware … no proprietary equipment required. RES currently supports approximately forty-five gigawatts of installed renewable capacity worldwide. And over in France … RWE has officially opened three new wind farms in northern France. Combined capacity: sixty-eight-point-eight megawatts. Together, they will power approximately thirty-eight thousand French households with electricity from the wind. The projects took a decade from development to inauguration. The turbines are spinning now. And over in the UK, Japan and the United Kingdom have signed an Offshore Wind Compact committing Japan to facilitate up to nine billion British pounds … roughly twelve billion dollars … in investment for five-point-nine gigawatts of floating offshore wind in British waters. Three projects underpin the deal. Ossian … three-point-six gigawatts … Green Volt … five hundred sixty megawatts … and Erebus … a one hundred megawatt demonstration project planned for the Celtic Sea. The United Kingdom called it a long-term structural measure. Not a reaction to the moment. But a bet on the future. There are many roadblocks ahead for offshore and onshore wind. That is clear. Invenergy turning over their offshore leases feels more like financial leveraging than an internal philosophy shift. At some point in the relatively near future Invenergy can probably buy back those leases at a fraction of the cost. Because wind energy — along with solar energy — is only getting cheaper. And economics eventually wins. And the worry about sea life due to offshore turbines — that worry seems misplaced. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 22nd of June 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Giovan Scialdone, president of 3S Lift Americas, joins to discuss 30,000 Climb Auto System installs and a new lift-mounted rescue stretcher. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Gio, welcome back to the program.  Gio Scialdone: Hey, thanks, Allen.  Allen Hall: So a lot’s happened over the past year since we last spoke with you at 3S Lift. Yeah. And there’s all kinds of new technology and improvements and the- The expansion of the Climb Auto system in the United States is remarkable. Yeah. How many systems do you have installed in North America? Gio Scialdone: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, it’s, it’s… The, the pride that we take in, in those numbers are, are serious. We, we feel, uh, a great responsibility to help technicians, to help our customers operate more, uh, more efficiently. We have 30,000 installed.  Allen Hall: Wow.  Gio Scialdone: So yeah, last year was a busy year. We installed close to 8,000, uh, in North America, so a bit in Canada as well. Um, [00:01:00] yeah, it’s… And, you know, before we get into some more numbers too, a funny story for you, a Massachusetts native- Right … or lived in Massachusetts- Long time … for a period of time. Uh, Hoosac Wind Farm, you know the Hoosac Wind Farm. Oh, yeah, yeah,  Allen Hall: I can see it out my front door.  Gio Scialdone: This is what’s great about this industry and being at this conference. Um, I ran into… At, at one point in time working for GE a long time ago, I was a site construction manager for Hoosac. I ran into my EHS safety manager, who I haven’t seen in 14 years-  Allen Hall: Wow …  Gio Scialdone: uh, who now works for another prominent, uh, company, uh, in the industry, and, uh, she remembered the name of my dog that- Really? I used to take to the site as a- Oh,  Allen Hall: wow.  Gio Scialdone: So, uh, you know, it’s good to be here, see you, and see, see, you know, lots of former colleagues, so,  Allen Hall: you know. Well, it’s a small world in wind.  Gio Scialdone: It’s a very small world. And, you know, we’re, we’re a company that, um, you know, again, we, we, we have a unique product, and there, there are some other companies that are, um, also coming out with a product quite similar, and we, [00:02:00] we appreciate that competition. Sure. In fact, I think, you know, we spend a lot of our time trying to, uh, sell our customers on the value that the ClimbAuto system is a need and not a nice to have, and I think having some competition with a similar ladder access product further, uh, maybe pushes that point to, to, to be true. So, um, you know, it’s good to be here and see some expansion in, in our little, uh, you know, ladder lift space. Allen Hall: Well, I think it shows the work that 3S has done to demonstrate the value of that system. I remember several years ago, I think when I first talked to you, there wasn’t a lot of adoption, and you were… And the operators were thinking, “Do I really need this?” But the reality was that the technicians loved it. They improved performance. They had technicians using those towers and wanted to work on those specific towers. Yeah. And, and then, uh, just kind of the flood happened. It, it was everybody was testing the [00:03:00] waters. You were basically installing test systems- Yeah … or sort of sample system to try it. Yeah. Everybody loved it, and then boom, you’re up to 30,000 units.  Gio Scialdone: I, I think, I think a part of that too to add on is you, you have to have a quality product.  Allen Hall: Oh, sure. It has to work. For, for… It has to work. Right.  Gio Scialdone: That’s the most important thing. Yeah. Um- The th- the, the, the value and the function in theory makes sense to lots of people, but does it work and is it reliable? And I think having been here nine years and, and, you know, the first three years we only had 500 units installed. Yeah. So it’s really the last three or four years that have expanded our, our installation base. And I think a lot of that is, you know, thank, you know, we’ve got a great team behind it. You know, we’ve got 70 technicians, and we’ve got a sales team, and an engineering team, and, um, you know, a project management team. So we, we’ve, we’ve staffed up as, as you need to. But the product we’ve, we, we really believe has, um, you know, been our best [00:04:00] salesperson. You know, it takes some service. That’s one thing I wanted to, to let you know, too. You know, in the early days, we- a lot of our customers were servicing our lifts. Sure. Right, yeah. And we still, um, uh, promote that if they would like to. Uh, annual inspection, you know, 30 minutes a year, um, that kind of pre-use inspection of one or two minutes before you ride it is- Sure … is, is, uh- Yeah, yeah … required. But now we’ve got a team of 20 to 25 technicians who their only job is to go around and, and service these lifts. So- Wow … we’re proud now that, you know, the oldest lifts are nine years. Oh, wow. And they’re still working very, very well as designed. You know, no, no major correctives, no motor replacements. So, you know, stand behind the product and, and, you know, service it, and servicing our customers is really what we’re, we’re proud to, to, to show. Allen Hall: Well, that was always the hard part early on. Um, my recollection was I could install this system, and yes, I could help my technicians, but am I fixing it, replacing it? The, the, the quality was the question mark at the moment.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: [00:05:00] But you’ve really hammered that, and I think 3S has done a good job of mainta- maintenance and inspections and just delivering a quality product. That’s why I think you’ve seen the growth as rapidly as you have, and the price point’s right, too.  Gio Scialdone: The price point has to be right. I think, you know, um, we’ve– we, we are offering some additional, let’s call them, like, support services. So we’ve got an online store where you can come and buy spare parts. You can buy every spare part that you need on our online store. Allen Hall: Nice.  Gio Scialdone: You know, accessories are required, fall arresters and battery kits and things like that, that even if you’re an ISP or, or a third party, uh, not the owner per se, you, you need that, that, that equipment. In addition to the online store, we- we, last year we launched, uh, an online training academy. So what’s… You know, it’s a very simple system to use. We’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Used it.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Gio Scialdone: Um, but we need to make sure as an industry and as a company that we take responsibility to make sure as, as best we can that every [00:06:00]person that uses this uses it appropriately and has the intelligence and the knowledge and skills to, um, troubleshoot basic things or perform safety evacuation features. So we’ve got an online training, um, uh, academy that we launched last year, and that’s been going well too. So more information we feel is better, uh, for our customers, for our technicians. Sure. You know. Um, so that’s been fantastic to see a lot more activity and customer… Again, a really small, you know, $200 per, per training course, and the certificate’s good for two years. You know, um, a robust course for an hour or two. It’s worth it.  Allen Hall: Well, it’s a reasonable price for an excellent product. Yeah. And that’s been the key for a long time. Yeah. Opening up the ability to get spare parts online, that’s huge. I know when you talk to operators, what’s the pain point? I have to call somebody- Yeah somewhere far away to try to get a part. Sure. It’s gonna take six months to get it.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Getting it online is the way- Yeah … that they wanna do it. [00:07:00] So it’s a lot of smart moves to be the support part of, of that system.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah. We’ve come… I’m, I’m smiling because in Chicago, uh, maybe seven years ago, our, our first spill- spare parts process was- uh, my office had a closet that I housed all the spare parts.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Gio Scialdone: You know? And, and when I needed to ship out something, I put it in a box and gave it to the, to, like, the building secretary, you know? That’s how it worked. And now we’re, we’re a little more sophisticated than that. We’ve- Y- you got a  Allen Hall: massive organization  Gio Scialdone: behind it We’ve got a 40,000 square foot warehouse that we’re, we’re really proud of, and a great team behind it to perform the logistics and track everything and… You know. So yeah, we’ve, we’ve come a long way, and our customers are helping us try to get better as well, you know. There’s still, there’s still a long way to go. Our objective as a company is to eliminate climbing, Alan. And it- And, and, and you know, I think there’s not much pushback, frankly.  Allen Hall: Not today. Right? Three years ago, a lot of pushback.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah. Yeah. I think, um… And what I mean, too, is, like, I think- From a, uh, a [00:08:00] value perspective, there’s no pushback. There’s still a budget perspective. Sure. And I think the challenges we’re finding still are if you’re at a wind farm and you have blade issues or, or, or drive train issues, uh, you might need to spend your dollars there before you spend them on a lift, and we, we, we understand and respect that. And so we’re working together with customers to try to come up with creative commercial solutions, be it, uh, you know, deferred payment models or multi-year, look at that as a, a capital cost plus some operational cost. Smart. Defer some of that capital, um, to, to sort of reduce that first year burden, right? Allen Hall: Yeah. So- That’s the  Gio Scialdone: scary  Allen Hall: part, right? They, they… The lump sum- It’s a big budget item. Yeah … is always an item, and they, especially in today’s world where we got gearbox and blade issues, they don’t want to spend on something that’s not directly there because it’s the, that’s what- Yeah … produces power.  Gio Scialdone: Right. Allen Hall: But technicians working on the turbines also produce power. That’s a great point.  Gio Scialdone: And  Allen Hall: you, and you need them, they go up and down- Yeah. That’s a good point … and sometimes you need them to go up and down a lot. Yeah. And if you don’t [00:09:00] wanna wear out those technicians, the, the lift is the way, the climb model system is the way to go. Right. It just makes… In today’s world, not having it, you’re the odd one out because most sites have some, if not all the turbines with the climb model system.  Gio Scialdone: There’s a, a… It reminded me of a, I talked to a customer today who said, you know, lots of these sites are clustered with phases. Uh, this particular customer retrofitted, uh, one of the two phases at their site. They’re split, let’s call it 50 turbines each or so, um, maybe two years ago, and then their struggle is they haven’t yet got the budget to do the second phase. Now, it’s the same group of  Allen Hall: technicians-  Gio Scialdone: Yeah … that work on both phases. So she, she explained to me that every morning when they go in and they kinda see which, which turbine they’re going to, there’s a, there’s a few of them going, “Yeah.” And there’s a couple other ones that are like, “Ah,” you know? Yeah. So there’s a real like… And I th- and I believe, you know, while that’s kind of a, an anecdotal kind of funny story, there’s, there’s, there’s real objective measures that you [00:10:00] can look at to say that it is, it is- correlated, hard to prove causation, but likely that those technicians who are climbing are gonna be less efficient at the same task than those who are not climbing, right? Yeah. And, and the customer knows that. And so, um, you know, we’ve gotten to that point as an industry that we’re, again, we’re not arguing the, the value too much anymore. That’s good. It’s more about finding the solution for the right, at the right time. Pre-repower, do we do it pro- post-repower? You know, those questions are being asked. Um, you know, it makes more sense potentially, if you will repower in a year, to put that in that budget. Um, so we’re seeing lots of that activity, especially as the lead up to this July 4th, uh, sa- uh, start a construction repower- Right … cliff.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Are, are you getting a lot of inquiries about that? Like, we wanna book a contract, try to get before that July date? Gio Scialdone: Yeah, look, one of the interesting things is, you know, to qualify for the PTC by [00:11:00] July 4th, you need to start construction.  Allen Hall: That’s right.  Gio Scialdone: Um, or, and you can do that in a couple different ways, right? Right. And we are having customers who are using our lifts as a start of physical work on site.  Allen Hall: Oh,  Gio Scialdone: that’s so smart. So they’re installing lifts- To start that process and show a continuous effort on site. It’s on-site work. Yes, it is. Uh, we have, you know, pri- uh, PWA, prevailing wage apprentice- Right … qualified- Sure … technicians in our program, if that’s something that’s required- Yeah … which a lot of times it is- It is nowadays on these, a lot of these sites. So, um, yeah, we’re offering both of those things to customers. It is an interpretation. There are some customers who aren’t, um, but, but there are, there are those that, that do see the lift as a great tool for them to start that, that clock.  Allen Hall: Right. So- Because the parts are there, you’re ready to go. You can get them- Yeah … installed and- Yeah … unlike other components of a wind turbine- That might  Gio Scialdone: have longer lead time …  Allen Hall: that will have longer lead times. Right. If you’re doing main bearings or something of that sort- Right … it’s gonna be several months before you get those assets on site and can [00:12:00] start working them. Gio Scialdone: Yeah. And you’ve got three months until July 4th,  Allen Hall: right? Right. You gotta go.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah, you gotta go.  Allen Hall: Right. And that- You gotta go … I think that’s, that’s the key to all this. Yeah. Boy, that, that’s genius. I’m, I’m glad that people- … are thinking outside the box.  Gio Scialdone: We are too. Our customers are creative.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Gio Scialdone: And that’s good. We’re happy to support that, at times.  Allen Hall: So there’s, there’s some new technology at 3S in- involving evacuation and- Yeah … you know, the, one of the most, uh, critical pieces of being a technician is working safe, but occasionally things happen. Mm-hmm. And there’s a lot of ways to get technicians from the nacelle downtower. Some of them involve tossing them over side and roping them down, which can be kind of extreme, honestly. Mm-hmm. And a, a lot of technicians do get hurt in not necessarily life-threatening ways- Right … but in ways where it makes it really hard to kind of get them up and down- Safely, yeah … the, the tower safely, right. So 3S has been thinking about this for a while, and now you have a, a new product.  Gio Scialdone: We do. We have a rescue stretcher, uh, which has been in development for about a year or [00:13:00] so. We’ve tested it in the field. Um, yeah, the, the climb onto system with all its functions, uh, has not been a rescue system. Right. Right? Um, so what, what we’ve been doing is if, if there is an incident in the tower, you’re utilizing a, a, a, one of the many rescue devices that are in the industry. Sure. Now, w- with the stretcher, uh, this is a, a device that attaches to the ClimbAuto System and uses the ClimbAuto System to safely bring the person down. Um, it can be installed by, with one, uh, rescuer. So one person can fix this to the rail. It has pulley, uh, systems to bring the person up onto and attached to the ClimbAuto System, and then send down. Now, so then you’re, you’re, you’re immobilized, right? So we secure your head, your feet, your body. Um, and to your point earlier, yes, it’s in, in the event that an injury occurs [00:14:00] and you have, let’s call it some time, 10 to 15 minutes of setup time, ’cause that’s what it will take- Sure then this is a great product. And the idea would be, you know, one per truck, similar to a rescue device. Um, you know, and then, you know, you can, can get it up and down the tower pretty easily. It’s, it’s light. It, the package is like a, it’s like a tent bag. It folds up into, like, a bag of a tent, if you picture that. Um, it maybe weighs, like, 15 pounds. It’s quite light. Oh, that’s good. Yep, yep. You know, ’cause there’s no long rope, right? So there’s no, like, hundred-meter rope that you need, which is the, the heavy stuff. Right. Um, and, you know, so you’re using the lift. So the, the weight of the, the system, the stretcher itself, is quite light. So we’re excited. We’ve got a few customers that have demoed it. And, uh, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re looking to continue to improve the, the, the, the features that we offer. Well,  Allen Hall: yeah. If, if there’s 30,000 ClimbAuto Systems out there- Mm … there should be these rescue kits along in the trucks- Yeah … because you just don’t know. Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Right? And guys get hurt.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: They [00:15:00] dislocate their shoulders. They’re dislocating their knees. Yeah. It, it’s a hard task. It is. Uh, you used to climb and do that job. It is. You know that- It is … there’s, there’s things that happen uptower that it makes it hard to get down.  Gio Scialdone: You know, I remember doing some training w- where a lot, I mean, we all have, at some point, maybe done some rescue training and, you know, if you’re in a traditional uh, auto descent or sort of rescue device, you may be banging against the tower wall or the ladder- Yep potentially causing further injury. The benefit of this system is, is that, you know, you’re stable on the lift as you go down. Um, so yeah, it’s a little, um… We, we feel is gonna be helpful f- for the sites that have, for sure, climb auto systems, and again- … it’ll take some training.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Gio Scialdone: Right? Sure. It’ll take some training to, to… Just like any, any rescue device will take. Um, but we, we see some value in the future that, again, it’s adding… It’s another tool, uh, for customers- Yeah … to consider to keep their people safer.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Gio Scialdone: You know? So.  Allen Hall: I, I, I- Yeah. I see a lot more operators now being very proactive about safety.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And if I can have a simple tool- Yeah that [00:16:00] makes life easier just in case, ’cause things happen, and you wanna be ready for it, something in, in the back of the truck makes infinite sense and is a, a smart way to handle it. Because the thing about tower heights today, we’re above 100 meters on a lot of towers.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And that’s a long way to get lifted down. Speaker: That’s  Gio Scialdone: true. Yeah. That’s a, it’s a… And, and, you know, and if you’re in a condition, a wind condition where it-  Allen Hall: Which is where these  Gio Scialdone: turbines  Allen Hall: are,  Gio Scialdone: yeah … towers sway, yeah. Then, then it’s- It’s- … even harder and need multiple people. You know, so again, in these remote areas where more and more turbines are being located as new construction, m- way more remote, uh, y- your, your, the next team of two technicians may be a, an hour away. Probably, yes. Right? Worst case, it could be an hour away. Yeah. Oh,  Allen Hall: yeah.  Gio Scialdone: And so as a team of two, you know, to be able to rescue you and safely bring you down, it could be critical. It could be critical. It  Allen Hall: will be.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah. Yeah, because there’s not gonna be a third or fourth person to come assist us  Allen Hall: for an hour,  Gio Scialdone: you know? So yeah, it’s an exciting… You know, [00:17:00] we, we’re, we’re trying to do, you know, uh, add-ons to the product to, uh, you know… We, we’ve modified some things over the years. We’ve got a new battery kit style, uh, to improve functionality. Clip-on battery as opposed to a plug-in. Um, you know, we’ve added a lot of different safety features over the years, like, um, uh, simultaneous handle switches. Right, yeah. So, you know, we’re, we’re trying to avoid, uh, a misuse of, of, uh, one hand at a time or no hands. Um, so there’s, there’s lots of features that we have, uh, added and also are able to, when we go service these t- towers- Bring the add-on at no cost if we’re performing the service for the customer. So we’re gonna upgrade your software, so to speak- Sure to the newest and latest, greatest software, um, so that, you know, you can be safer than, than you were maybe a few years ago.  Allen Hall: Oh, yeah. But that’s why you buy a 3S Climboto system. Ouch. Is because you know that those upgrades are coming. Yeah. And they’re- Yeah. You guys are not sitting still. You don’t have- No you hadn’t device- No … [00:18:00] created a device 10 years ago and haven’t changed it. Yeah. It’s evolved every single year- It has … that I’ve talked to you. Yeah. And every single year it’s safer, more reliable- Yeah … does more features, and the technicians love it.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Absolutely love it.  Gio Scialdone: I credit our, you know, our company is, is… This is our, this is our, uh, our passion, right? So, like, we’ve, we’ve been in this business for, for 20-plus years. In the US, we’ve been in it for nine and, you know, we’re not, we’re, we’re not going anywhere. No. You know, notwithstanding, um, uh, any, any, any political issues, we’re gonna ride through, so, so is everybody here, you know? Sure. Yeah. We’re, we’re, we’re in this and, you know, our mindset is, again, to eliminate climbing and, and do the best we can to keep people safer and have turbines run more efficiently.  Allen Hall: So if you’re an operator or a wind farm asset manager or site supervisor- Yeah … at a, at a wind farm and you don’t have the Climboto system yet Who do you call? Where do you go to get started?  Gio Scialdone: Yeah, you can, you can definitely get us on the [00:19:00]website. You know, there’s a Get Info button that still goes directly to me if you’re gonna say, “Hey, can I get a quote on this?” So, you know, we’ve got five salespeople. Uh, you can certainly ask your management team because there’s a l- strong likelihood that we’ve been in touch with them. We, we visit sites. You know, we visited 200 sites last year. So our… We’re out. We, we… You know, if, uh, if we haven’t visited you, let us know. But, um, you know, yeah, you can definitely reach us on, on the web or, uh, you know, we’ve got a phone number as well on there, so.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s easy to reach out. Yeah. Just look up 3S Lift. Climb Model System’s another quick way, and if you Google that you’ll get to the 3S Lift website, and you can find all the cool features, and, and the new devices, and you can find your parts and everything you want right there. It’s, it’s amazing the growth and, and the, and the, uh, adoption of that system. It’s, it’s great to hear. It’s one of those things that when it’s a real success story. Yeah. And I, I know you’re, you’re really close to it of course.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah, I know.  Allen Hall: Yeah. But from the outside looking in, it’s [00:20:00] amazing.  Gio Scialdone: We’re proud of  Allen Hall: the team. 500 turbines to 3,000, that’s a lot.  Gio Scialdone: It is. We’re proud of the team. I’m, I’m grateful to the customer base that, that have seen this, this value, you know, and recognize it. Um, and you know, not only for the soft sell, that it helps people and the morale, and, you know, there is a, a, a, a harder to measure injury improvement factor.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Gio Scialdone: Um, but, but there’s absolutely some objective measures. We have sites that before the lifts were installed were at 95% availability, and now they’re at 96.2. Now, correlation and causation aren’t the same thing, but we, we believe, and we means the industry I think at this point, especially to see competitors come in, I think that further, uh, drives home the idea that this is the right thing to do, to stop climbing and, and help your t- technicians be more efficient, effective. So yeah, we’re, we’re proud of it and, um, you know, we’re looking forward to being here for another nine years.  Allen Hall: Absolutely. Yeah. Gio, so good to see you. Congratulations on everything. Thanks, Allen. And yeah, [00:21:00] good luck this year. I know you’re gonna have a l- a lot more growth, so- Thanks … congratulations. Gio Scialdone: Appreciate the time.

A federal court restores the 5% safe harbor for wind tax credits, Norway’s parliament pauses the 35 billion krone Utsira Nord floating wind program, and the crew digs into Australia’s battery boom and the looming blade technician shortage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Uptime324 Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to this edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m Allen Hall here with Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and Yolanda Padron. And our week starts off in the courtroom. And if you’ve been watching the news lately, there’s a pretty substantial IRS case involving large-scale wind and solar having to do with the, uh, production tax credit and, uh, investment tax credit at the same time on the safe harbor, 5% safe harbor rule. Uh, a federal judge handed the wind industry and solar industry a pretty substantial legal win that could reshape how the [00:01:00] projects qualify for tax credits. So a judge up in, uh, the District of Columbia vacated IRS Notice 2025-42. So if you remember that, uh, from a- about a year or so ago, uh, f- it found that the, that notice was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. The notice, which was issued following a July 2025 executive order, had eliminated the 5% safe harbor for wind projects, uh, a provision developers have relied on since about 2013 to establish construction start dates without breaking ground. The court found the IRS failed to justify removing it, ignored industry comments, which I had read, and I agree with that, and gave no reason for treating wind differently f- than other clean energy technologies. So That his executive order came down and said, “Hey, we don’t like wind. [00:02:00] IRS, write a rule and make it hard for wind to get installed in the United States.” And so they dutifully did it, but a court is throwing it out. This has some pretty significant implications because if you hadn’t broken ground before this ruling, I think the– what was happening was be- if you hadn’t broken ground by July 4th, your project wouldn’t qualify for some tax credits. But now, if you have 5% safe harbor, you still are in the game, at least for now. Now, Wanda, that’s gonna make a big difference to asset managers and developers, won’t it?  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, it’s really exciting. I think it opens up the, the playing field for, for some of these projects that might be a little bit behind schedule. Um, of course, a lot of teams had to change their plans and their pipeline when, um, you know, the big, beautiful bill passed and, I mean, it’s– of course, it adds a little bit of additional volatility, right, to, to wind and, and solar in the US, but it’s exciting to see at least things for, [00:03:00] for those of us that are in the wind and solar side, the, it’s a little, little bit of, of hope there. Allen Hall: And Matthew, uh, even in terms of opening up o-o-operations and, uh, getting contracts signed, this should make a big difference in sort of opening the floodgates a little bit. Although there is a short timeframe. We’re, we’re recording on, what, what is today? June 10th. So you have, in theory, less than 30 days before the July 4th deadline, but hopefully this stays. You think there’s a chance this just gets completely, uh, wiped out, the executive order and the IRS notice and- It’s back to what we remember for the, for the last, ooh, 12, 13 years?  Matthew Stead: Uh, yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m hopeful, and I, I agree with Yolanda. I think you, you said it really well. Um, I think this is a, a glimmer of hope in, um, a sometimes gloomy, um, environment. So I think that’s great. In terms of going back to where it was, um, I mean, I guess my observation has been that, [00:04:00] you know, things in the US were a bit, um, distorted. You know, distorted through the, the PTC, um, and the whole repowering thing after 10 years is quite a distortion. So I think, um, you’re not necessarily going back to the good old days, um, might be the way, what will happen. Allen Hall: I think there is a lot of people actively trying to dig holes at the moment, and I, I’m sure they’re gonna continue to do that. Yolanda, do you th- you think anybody’s gonna stop and kinda say, “Oh, we have the 5% rule. We’re, we’re good”? Do you think, or you think they’re gonna still go ahead and really start construction and then just keep things continually moving on site? Yolanda Padron: I don’t think they, they can really stop, right? Because you, you don’t know if, if anything strange happens. A lot of people didn’t think the, a lot of the provisions in the big beautiful bill were gonna, were gonna see the light of day, and they did. Um, but it does, I really hope it brings at least a little bit of breathing room for some people. I know it’s, it must be… I mean, I have some friends in development, and they’re, they’re q- a little [00:05:00] bit stressed right now just with everything going on. Um, so, so I really hope for them at least they, you know, if, if they’re a little bit behind schedule, then it, it’ll be, it’ll still be fine.  Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC-NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC-NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions[00:06:00] Norway’s Storting has voted to pause the 35 billion Norwegian krone support program for floating offshore wind at Utsira Nord. The Conservative Party secured a parliamentary majority for the external quality assurance review, a socioeconomic analysis, and a technology development assessment, all before the Storting will authorize any commitments. Equinor and Vårgrønn, along with EDF and Deepwind Offshore, each hold allocated 500-megawatt areas and were preparing to compete for that subsidy. Equinor says the project will continue for now. I think everybody is saying that at the moment. But, uh, Equinor cannot rule out consequences as framework uncertainty compounds in the already challenging nature of floating offshore wind development. So Utsira Nord is a massive project. So it’s, it’s about three and a half billion US dollars [00:07:00] to go do this. We had Mads Furuseth and Anders Naslund about a year or so ago, maybe a little bit longer, talking about the project and how big it was and how important it was that Norway did this for floating offshore wind. But with this, uh, recent change in the parliament of Norway, it does seem like they’re slowly going to try to kill it by putting in a number of, uh, reviews, which is how bureaucracies tend to kill things. Is put it under six, seven, eight reviews, different committees. They all take time to get together. They have to put out a report. It could be two, three years from now. At that point, the world has completely changed, and everybody’s moved on. Does that seem like the outcome here at the moment?  Matthew Stead: Yes.  Allen Hall: In my mind, there’s really two big areas for floating offshore, which UK, right? That there, there’s some massive projects there, Green Volt being one of them, and then there was Sue & Nord. So between the two, I feel like the, the UK one was going to [00:08:00] happen. The question whether the world was gonna move towards floating offshore wind was gonna happen up in Norway. If Norway decided to do it and could get it developed, and it has the capability to do it because, because they have that skill set, uh, right there in Norway. If they could do it in Norway, everybody in the world would learn from it and figure out how to do it. Does this really set back floating offshore wind globally?  Matthew Stead: Yeah. I mean, going back to what I said before, and I, I’ll defer to Rosie on this as well, but, um, when I was at, at Blades Europe, um, one of the, one of my long-term contacts, um, y- was in floating wind, um, and had, um, left the industry. He basically said i- in his view that the offshore wind industry was slowly, um, in decline or slowly dying. Um, so I’m just wondering if this is just evolution of viability of offshore wind.  Rosemary Barnes: Is offshore wind in decline? I think if you look globally, it’s, it’s not in decline. I, I haven’t looked in, in depth at the figures just based on what, you know, [00:09:00] headlines I’ve seen and podcasts I’ve heard, but I think that globally it’s still on the rise. It’s just that- It’s only in Europe that things are really moving with speed, right? Like, people were expecting heaps of growth in the US and now no- nobody expects that. Floating offshore wind, it’s… I th- I still think it’s too early to say. There are plenty of countries that don’t have any good energy options besides, um, floating offshore wind, like Japan. What their energy transition looks like is gonna depend a lot on their culture and what people think, ’cause, like, if you go through, like, the engineering solutions that Japan could have, the ones that make the most sense from an engineering point of view are not popular at all, are not politically viable. Like, Japan could easily have a subsea cable connecting it with, um, with China, for example, or Korea, but I don’t think anybody, anybody thinks that that will ever happen because, you know, politically it’s, it’s very far from being possible. What else could they have? Geothermal. They’ve got heaps of [00:10:00]geothermal resources, like really good traditional geothermal resources, but my understanding is that it’s super unpopular because their onsen, um, community doesn’t want it. Uh, my understanding is that they’re worried that if you put geothermal, um, if you exploit geothermal resources, then the onsens will not be hot anymore, and again, my limited research understanding is that it’s not true. It’s different resources. The two aren’t connected in any way. Um, and yeah, there’s actually a community geothermal, um, facility near Fukushima. I’m trying really hard to get over there, but I’m, I’ve got a roadblock at the moment because, uh, n- no one there speaks English, so I need to find somebody to, to come with me and, you know, I’ll have one, one day to try and get there on the fast train and back to Tokyo in, in a single day. So it’s, it’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m gonna try. But anyway, so yeah, what have we… We’ve ruled out, like, subsea cables, ruled out geothermal. Floating wind is good.  Allen Hall: Well, speaking of Fukushima, [00:11:00] there’s been a more recent push in Japan to start up some of the nuclear facilities. So after the tsunami, was that 2012, 2014 when that happened? It was a while ago. Uh, when the tsunami happened and h- had that, uh, nuclear accident, they, they s- shut down all the nuclear facilities in Japan, but it does seem like they’re trying to restart some of them And, and maybe it’s just the demand for energy and, and they’re trying to weigh that off with offshore wind or floating offshore wind. At what point, you know, which one do you choose? It has to be driven by cost and availability.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And so Fukushima, I just looked it up, it was 2011. Um, and yeah, so I mean, I think it is very fair that they had a reaction to that and they wanted to put the handbrake on nuclear at that time, or they did more than put the handbrake on, they did like a handbrake turn. Allen Hall: They shut it down.  Rosemary Barnes: So, and it, you know, it’s gradually ramping up. I think that their target for nuclear now is to, to regain, um, 20% of their electricity from [00:12:00] nuclear by 2040, something like that. It was 30% prior to that incident. Um, so that will be part of it, but it’s not, um, it’s not all of it. And then even if you think of, uh, okay, so forget climate change, just, you know, we want, Japan just wants energy and they don’t care about climate change, you know, ’cause that, that, that could be true. What are their ch- choices for that? They import a whole bunch of… They, they import nearly all their energy. Everything that’s not nuclear basically is, is imported. Um, coal, but a lot of LNG, and, you know, that is not exactly an appealing prospect at the moment either. It’s not secure. Prices are very volatile. We’ve had, like, two fossil fuel shocks in the last, what, like four years or something like that, and how many more, how many more are we g- are we going to have? You know, like energy security is important, totally separate from climate change issues. So I don’t think we need to rely on Japan, like, you know, [00:13:00] steadfastly staying the course because their, their existing o- opportunities are not, are not great for fossil fuels either. Allen Hall: I don’t know what country’s gonna stay the course right now, really. Maybe the UK?  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I think it’s- Countries that have other reasons for going to renewables are the ones that are gonna stay the, stay the course. Um, and there are plenty of examples of countries where it just, it is by far the easiest, cheapest, fastest option to get more electricity. Um, you know, like all of Africa, for example, is, is facing that as a, uh, a better development path than trying to build big, um, fossil fuel power plants. But even that, you know, like in India, they’re making a huge transition, Pakistan, not to mention Australia, where now batteries are having more of an impact on electricity prices than gas is. So our electricity prices now finally are dropping, um, this year for the first time because of how many batteries have come on and are now, you [00:14:00]know… Like they’ve just flattened. The evening price peak used to be on average about, like, I think $400 or something dollars a megawatt hour, and now it’s like 100. In one year we had that, we had that change, yeah, just from the amount of batteries that have come on in the last year or two.  Allen Hall: Why does that make such a big difference in the price of electricity, the battery aspect?  Rosemary Barnes: Because, so the way that Australia… Australia’s electricity market is pretty similar to Texas, so if you understand that, then you can probably understand Australia’s. But, you know, at any five-minute interval, people, like, they know how much demand there’s going to be, and then people are bidding in how much they would supply electricity for in that five minutes, in real time as well. It’s not like day ahead or anything like that in Australia. The, like, last one they need is what everybody gets paid. So, like, solar power is gonna bid in at, like, you know, practically zero, um, or maybe negative prices actually if they’ve got power purchase agreements in place. And then, you know, wind a little bit more, and then coal, uh, you know, a, a bit [00:15:00] more than that, and then gas, the open cycle gas turbines, the peakers, they’re very expensive. They’re bidding in at 400, $400 a megawatt hour. If there’s enough batteries that that gas doesn’t need to bid in, then all of a sudden we don’t have the gas price that everybody has to pay. We have the battery price that everyone has to pay, and that is very, very cheap and will become cheaper as there’s more of them in the, in the system. So it’s like a threshold event. You, you know, um, even if you’re using only a tiny bit of gas, if you need any gas at all, even like, you know, one megawatt of gas, everybody gets paid the gas price. If you just get a little bit more battery in and you don’t need it anymore, bam, the price just falls. So that’s what we… We’ve passed that threshold now.  Allen Hall: Isn’t that where the UK is trying to get, is to get past that threshold where renewables are that last addition to the grid and kick off peaker plants and some expensive other- fuel sources. That’s I, I [00:16:00] think where everybody’s gone because they have the same system where the, the last one in is what sets the price for everybody. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. The UK’s a little bit different because one, they’re connected to Europe, and two, they’ve got nuclear, so they do have that kind of base load.  Allen Hall: Let’s go down the rabbit hole just for a second. So if the peaker plants don’t come on, that means that the battery electricity supplying the grid is pretty low in price. It seems like they are losing money on their investment in the battery That they were hoping the price would be higher. Because if the peaker plants are still going on, that would be a $400 price and they’re gonna come in at, like, 350, so that would make sense. It, it helps pay off the battery investment. But if they’re dropping the price down from 400 to 100, it would seem like the battery investment may not be a, a wise decision.  Rosemary Barnes: For sure they’re making less money, but it was– they were making crazy profits for the first little, the first few, few years of, you know, grid-scale batteries. And even [00:17:00] home batteries, people were making a l- a lot of money off that, and it was crazy. Like, I’m on some, um, some Reddit subreddits about, uh, you know, people with home batteries and-  Allen Hall: Slash battery?  Rosemary Barnes: Matt probably is too. Matt’s a Beta G enthusiast, so I’m sure that he is just as excited as me. But anyway, so on one of these subreddits, you know, people used to talk about, “Oh, I made 100 bucks last night,” um, or, or whatever, you know, just a household. And now all the posts are complaining about there’s been no price spikes all year. You know, I thought that I was gonna make heaps of money off my battery, but people are really change- changing how they think of it. And now it’s like… And l- like I want– used to want to do this. I don’t have solar panels yet ’cause we need a new roof, and I’ve been waiting a few years to, one, live in a house that I own, and then two, get a freaking new roof. Um, and I thought I’m gonna just, like, cover it in solar panels, get a huge battery, and I’m gonna be an energy trader in my free time and make heaps of money, and now that is [00:18:00] not the strategy anymore. The strategy is to just reduce your bills to the m- the minimum that you can. Um, that’s basically, that’s basically it. So you are right that some of this arbitrage is, um, the opportunity’s over, and that it will be less, um, exciting for, uh, opportunity for people to put more, more batteries in.  Matthew Stead: Just to add to that, through the middle of the day quite often there’s, uh, negative pricing. So if you’ve got a battery, you’re being paid to charge through the middle of the day. So that actually takes away some of the pain from having a lower, a lower price, um, during the peak.  Rosemary Barnes: But the thing about negative prices is that you need coal power plants for them to be… Like, the only reason we have such pervasive negative prices is not because solar plants have PPAs that are, you know, make it worthwhile for them to generate even when the price is slightly negative. The real thing is that coal power plants don’t want to turn down below, I don’t know, yeah, like 20, 30% during the middle of the day. They have to be on if they want to make money in the evening, and that means that they bid in at, like, [00:19:00] negative 50, um, so that people– so that they can stay running. And that’s where the bulk of our negative prices come from. So As coal power plants close, those negative prices will go away. Um, and when they close, we should get some better evening price spikes again. So, you know, like nothing ever stays the same for long, which is why it is such a fascinating hobby to have, being interested in the electricity market, because it’s never the same from one year to another. You’ll never understand it, ’cause it’s never, it never stays the same long enough to really get your head around it.  Allen Hall: You need other hobbies. You really do.  Matthew Stead: A friend of mine works in trading, and, uh, he said, “As long as there’s volatility, there will be progress.” So much like what Rosie was saying is the more volatile it is, the more opportunity there is for people to come in, um, and change it. Allen Hall: I just don’t know how the battery thing plays out once that threshold is reached. When you have more batteries on the system and you knock down the price that [00:20:00] much, I think battery sales, industrial batteries really slow down because they’re all looking for that quick ROI And they’re not gonna get it. Rosemary Barnes: You have to wait for all of the coal to close before you would find out what’s the right amount of batteries to have in the, in the grid.  Allen Hall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, I totally agree there, yeah.  Yolanda Padron: You’d still get, like in extreme weather events and stuff, you’d still get a big price spike, right, for all these batteries. Allen Hall: Back to Matt’s point, more volatility.  Rosemary Barnes: If you want the market to respond, you need to give enough incentive to invest in assets so you’ll have enough when it’s needed. And because it’s really infrequent, then it has to be a super high price to, um, bring on enough investment. And will this system… The system has worked absolutely, you know, pretty well in Aus- Australia at least. Will it continue into the future with more variable prices and renewables? I, I don’t know, and the government is starting to do some things like, uh, you know, like a lot of [00:21:00] electricity markets have, um, not just energy markets but also capacity markets where you will pay a battery or a gas plant something to be on standby basically, um, so that if there is, um, if there’s a shortfall then they, then they have to respond. So in Western Australia they have that, but across the east of Australia th- they currently do not, do not have that. It’s energy only.  Allen Hall: Really? How do you not have capacity payments?  Rosemary Barnes: The majority of their profits are made in just a few hours a year when there are those price spikes, so that’s, that’s h- part of their business case. Allen Hall: I mean, there, there is arbitrage happening on the electricity grid. That’s not the best place to be arbitraging things because you will have players that won’t provide electricity just to drive up the price.  Rosemary Barnes: Uh, and it happens in Australia too, but, um, you know, because batteries are such a distributed resource, it, it will become harder and harder to do that when, you know, the, um, the ownership of these batteries is, you know, households as well as, um, yeah, as well as [00:22:00] big companies. Matthew Stead: So offshore wind, I was talking to an OEM a, a little while ago and, uh, talking about blade repairs for offshore wind, you know, floating, floating wind. Um, so specifically floating wind. The OEM was extremely concerned about floating wind, um, because it makes it very, very, very hard to change blades. So the story was that if you’ve got an offshore floating platform, you’re basically gonna have to tow the wind turbine back to port to change a, a blade. Rosemary Barnes: They see that as a, as a pro, not a con though. Yeah. That, that’s because it’s very hard to… Like, it’s not only floating offshore wind where it’s very hard to remove a, a blade out at sea, like fixed bottom offshore wind, that’s incredibly expensive to remove a blade. So floating is like, well, you can just tow it back to shore and then you can do it all in the port. I, I, you’re looking skeptical, Matt, and I’m also skeptical about how it actually plays out. I know that, um, what was it? The, [00:23:00] the one- An EOL project off the coast of Scotland. I can’t remember what it’s called now. Like what, the first big one, the big wind farm, a floating offshore wind farm  Allen Hall: HiWind Scotland  Rosemary Barnes: They had a, a problem. I don’t know if it was a serial issue or also, like it’s the first big wind farm, and there might have been like some operating condition they weren’t aware of that caused some problems. They had to tow back everything to port, and they stayed there for months and months. So like maybe, maybe close to a year or over a year, I’m not sure. It was a really long time. And so, um, yeah. But then, you know, like what’s the alternative? If that had happened out at sea, it would’ve been more expensive. If, it still would’ve been shut down, not doing anything, and you would’ve had like helicopters out there every single day bringing teams and, um, you know, huge vessels with cranes and yeah. So like it’s, maintenance at sea is never good.  Allen Hall: But the whole point of the HiWind project was to get some of these problems figured out, and one of them was just towing it back to port and [00:24:00] doing major repairs or component exchanges make sense. I think it’s a, it’s a lesson well learned, and we’ve moved on. I guess the question is, does offshore, floating offshore in particular, have much of a future if Norway’s not willing to do it?  Matthew Stead: I think it’s a good comparison with, um, data centers in space.  Rosemary Barnes: You know where else they’re planning to put data centers? Not just space and offshore, also like, um, underwater ones, like on the deep ocean floor, um, on the moon somewhat. Like there’s an actual company that is apparently developing a, a data center on the moon  Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t [00:25:00] miss out. Visit peswind.com today. Well, in this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, there are a number of great articles, and if you haven’t downloaded your copy, you should do that at peswind.com. There’s a good article from Global Blade Services USA, and it’s talking about the technician problem and how it’s not gonna, it solve itself, obviously. But Global Blade Service is putting some numbers to it. And Rosemary, this is really directed at you. Blades represent roughly 20% of the total, total turbine capital cost and are the leading driver of unplanned downtime.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, 40% of O&M.  Allen Hall: Right, and 75% of all blade repairs are already handled outside OEM warranty. That number seems really high, but maybe after the warranty expires?  Rosemary Barnes: Do you say 30% of, of repairs are repaired under warranty? That’s, uh, unexpectedly high from my point of view. [00:26:00] But, you know, how would I know? No one’s getting in touch with me if, you know, they’ve got a problem with their blades and it just got fixed under warranty. Then they’re not paying a consultant to come sort it out. I only, I’m, I’m only there when the warranty is nearly up or it’s already over.  Allen Hall: So they, they’re saying that the, the ratio’s even gonna grow more towards out of warranty repairs. But the problem is having technicians. And the deeper problem is developing all those technicians in time as that need grows. Uh, reaching full structural repair competency takes a rope access technician eight to 10 years. A basket technician is five to seven, and a factory technician is four to five years, meaning the workforce, uh, the industry needs for the next decade has to start training now. I, I think we’re seeing this in full force. I- the issue is keeping good people in the industry as it fluctuates up and [00:27:00] down all the time and is very seasonal. Because there are really good rope technicians out there who know what they are doing, and it does take a, a minimum of three years to be competent. And then to be that lead person, it takes four or five solid. And to be, uh, the, the relied-upon person, especially for some of the more complicated repairs, it’s gonna be six, seven, eight years before you’re there. It’s just an exposure thing. Are we in a technician crisis?  Rosemary Barnes: Crisis is maybe a little bit inflammatory, but, uh, we’re in a technician challenge  Matthew Stead: But it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty basic topic, Allen, isn’t it? Like, um, you know, there’s more and more wind turbines, there have to be more and more technicians. It takes time to train. So, you know, it’s, it’s just, it’s pretty much basic maths and, um, you know, it’s like te- you know, tradies to build houses. Um, you know, unless you’ve got the tradies, you can’t build houses in a cheap way. Yolanda Padron: Part of the issue is that, you know, say there’s [00:28:00] 10 technicians that are available in the area, right? Then you … maybe they work under two different companies, and then one company goes bankrupt, so then they all work with the same company. Another company pops up, or someone gets kicked off site from the OEM side, and then a month later they’re back with the third party. And then it’s just really difficult to keep track of kind of who’s still there and who’s not, because some people have the certifications and maybe they’re not really, really great at what they do, or other people have a lot of training and a lot of experience, and it’s just difficult to track exactly, you know, where they are now. I know that the, the strategy here oftentimes is you’ll find one person that you like and you kind of follow him around, or follow them around whatever company they’re, they’re with at the moment, and then just use that company.  Matthew Stead: The other point I was going to make is that there’s also the seasonality, isn’t there? So you know, if you’ve got a great, a great technician, when it’s cold, they can’t earn cash from [00:29:00] repairing blades.  Rosemary Barnes: Aren’t they hired as, like, seasonal workers in America and they just don’t get paid for part of the year? That’s not how it’s done here. I mean, I guess we don’t have the climate where you have to, like, totally shut down, so they’re not, like, sitting around getting paid for nothing. But, like, that’s a really unim- unappealing feature of the of the, um, field, isn’t it? If you’re deciding what you wanna, what kinda job you wanna do, you want one where you can get paid for 12 months out of the year, not just, I don’t know, like eight or whatever it is.  Matthew Stead: I know there’s been a lot of discussion between, like, Australian US repair companies of, like, shipping technicians down here during the Northern Hemisphere winter and vice versa, and it gives, you know, chance of exploring the world. But, you know, if you’ve got kids and family, you’re not gonna necessarily wanna do that either.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s such a tiring job, though. I don’t… Like, there’s, um, I think it’s fine if people do it for, like, a hard 10 years and then, um, yeah, move on to… Because you obviously learn a lot as a technician, so y- you know, like, there’s a lot of office jobs that you would be really good at [00:30:00] because you had that physical experience. But yeah, like, I, I do think that there’s heaps of young people that are traveling the world being wind turbine technicians.  Yolanda Padron: At least in Texas, I know a lot of rural areas where they don’t necessarily have a lot of opportunities to get higher education, and so going to be a technician is a good route for them to then go into a larger part of the industry, um, to, to kinda get a head start there. Um, and they get a lot of really valuable skills, and oftentimes, like you said, Rosie, they’ll, they’ll get picked up by, um, by the owners or the OEMs or someone, um, because of their experience there. But it, but it is quite a bit of, of hard work and, and physical, physical labor. I climbed one tower and I was sore for two weeks, so really, really not my cup of tea. Rosemary Barnes: I’m always, like, so excited to, to be climbing towers ’cause I only do it, like, you know, sometimes no times in a year, sometimes twice a year. Um, yeah, so, like, I’m really excited to go climb, and it’s really cool the first day, and then the second day it’s like, “Oh, this harness is [00:31:00] so heavy. Am I really putting this on again? Oh my God.” Yeah, so it’s, uh, it’s ob- obviously you get used to it if you, um, if you do climb a lot. The last, uh, last site that I was at, a lot of the technicians were just climbing the ladders so that they wouldn’t have to, you know, go to the gym afterwards. So there’s a lift there, but they use the ladder because then they get their cardio for the day. So, you know, they’ve obviously got some surplus energy.  Allen Hall: I think it is kind of a myth outside the US, uh, uh, seasonal workers, uh, at least in Europe, I haven’t seen a lot of seasonal workers. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist, of course. But in the United States, there’s a lot of seasonal workers from construction and all kinds of other industries. People figure it out And it, it’s a lot more common than I think y- being an engineer you think it is, but there are a lot of seasonal workers. So being a, a wind technician is not a bad job.  Rosemary Barnes: I guess they’re just getting [00:32:00] paid extra for the time that they’re working and they just know they’re used to budgeting to cover the few months off. Allen Hall: They have a winter job. They’ll, they have employment. They already have it lined up where when it gets cold outside, they have someplace else to go. Back into construction for a few months. They’re maybe driving a truck or doing other things that, that bring in income. They have it pretty well figured out. When– At least the technicians I’ve talked to seem to have a, a plan about it, and they’re not sitting by the television for six months. That’s not what’s happening. It, that there’s a lot of employment opportunities here in the States, and so they, they’re pretty nimble. So if you haven’t read this article or a number of our other great articles in PES Wind, you should go to peswind.com right now and download a copy today. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. [00:33:00] For Yolanda, Rosemary, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Allen covers Siemens Gamesa’s warning that Europe is 40 GW short on offshore wind, Shell’s plan to sell its offshore wind farms, Maine’s multi-state bidding round, and Egypt’s grid financing deal. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The wind industry got a warning this week… and it came from the top. Siemens Gamesa, the world's largest maker of offshore wind turbines, says governments in Europe may be running out of time. The company's chief executive sounded the alarm Thursday. Europe is currently forty gigawatts short of its one-hundred-and-twenty gigawatt offshore target for twenty thirty. Sixteen gigawatts of projects in Germany alone are at risk of delay, tangled up in lengthy permitting and grid connection backlogs. The plants are running full today. But without new orders soon, factories could go dark for contracts starting in twenty twenty-eight. “It is not yet an existential threat,” said Siemens Gamesa chief Vinod Philip, “but it could become one.” He stopped short of predicting shutdowns. But he said the company would likely have to downsize resources if governments fail to act quickly. Europe's offshore supply chain has already committed fourteen billion euros to meet the twenty thirty targets. That is roughly sixteen billion dollars… with no guarantee the orders will follow. Meanwhile… one of the world's biggest oil companies is quietly walking away from wind. Shell is preparing to sell its offshore wind farms in a deal that could fetch more than one billion dollars. The company has hired advisers to run the process, which could launch before the year is out, with a sale expected sometime in twenty twenty-seven. Shell once dreamed of becoming the world's largest electricity producer. That vision died when its current chief executive took over in early twenty twenty-three and shifted the focus back to fossil fuels and shareholder returns. Since then, Shell has been unwinding its green power portfolio piece by piece. It sold its European onshore renewables arm. It sold Indian renewable company Sprng Energy, which it had bought just years earlier for one-point-five-five billion dollars. And it walked away from planned offshore wind farms in Scotland. When this latest sale closes, Shell will have little wind left in its portfolio. But where one door closes… another opens. Up in the northernmost corner of Maine, a region that has sat on one of the best wind resources in the country for years, a long-awaited breakthrough may finally be at hand. The Maine Public Utilities Commission is closing its latest round of bidding for wind and solar generation in Aroostook County, plus the new transmission lines needed to move that power south to the rest of New England. The target: at least twelve hundred megawatts. Enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Maine is not going it alone this time. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont are sharing the cost of the new transmission infrastructure. The previous attempt in twenty twenty-one fell apart. Costs rose. Deals could not be finalized. Landowners fought the proposed one-hundred-forty-mile power line. This time, officials say things are different. The multi-state partnership changes the math. And northern Maine's wind resource has not gone anywhere. Dozens of energy companies have signed up to compete, from local developers to major multinationals. If everything goes to plan, the best-case scenario puts new turbines spinning in the twenty thirties. And half a world away… Egypt is making a major investment to keep pace with its own renewable ambitions. The Egyptian prime minister this week witnessed the signing of a financing agreement worth sixty billion Egyptian pounds, earmarked for the national electricity transmission network. That money will go toward upgrading the grid so it can absorb the solar and wind power Egypt plans to add in the coming years. The target: forty-five percent of national electricity from renewable sources by twenty twenty-eight. The electricity minister said modernizing the grid is a “continuous and evolving process,” and that implementation timelines are being compressed to meet that twenty twenty-eight deadline. The wind is shifting. The question is… who moves with it. And that's the state of the wind industry for the 15th of June 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

David King from Gulf Wind Technology returns to discuss serial uptower blade repairs, passive load shedding, and data-driven testing. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall : David, welcome back to the program.  David King: Yeah, I’m so glad to be here. A lot’s happened since the last time I was on, so, uh, this is gonna be great.  Allen Hall : It’s been about a year. Mm-hmm. And last year we were at OM&S in Nashville, and you were talking about root fusion, and this is the insert fix uptower for the blade inserts, right? So we’re having a lot of blade bolt issues, and the inserts are starting to pull out or become loose, and the blades are moving around. A lot of our operators in the States are trying to solve that problem, and they don’t wanna remove the blades and bring anything down tower. They would like to fix it uptower. That’s where your solution came in. How’s that going?  David King: Yeah, so I mean, it, it’s really been a five-year journey for us. I mean, we’ve been doing this- I remember that, yeah … for a [00:01:00] very long time. You know, it started like any process does, with a problem statement. Sure. And we’ve been working through from problem statement, you know, going through process development, going through structural development, going through pilots. Uh, we did a, a huge pilot deployments about three years ago, where those were being monitored. Um, we’re now in a position where we’re in serial deployment, and that’s what’s really exciting. You know, we’re doing about 200 blades a year, uh, of, of serial deployment. We’ve, we’ve done that now, uh, we’re going into our second year of that. Nice. So we’re extremely excited by that. That comes with its own sets of challenges as you scale up. How do you maintain quality? We even touched a little bit on a few of these things last year. Um, but yeah, we’re really excited to be doing that. Uh, we’re trying to keep it, you know, again, process-driven. How do you simplify a process that allows you to scale up appropriately, train people appropriately? A- a- and that’s what we’re really excited about this year, is being able to bring this, uh, so that we’re not, um, you know, basically supply constrained, ’cause there is a lot of demand for this, and still able to maintain a very high level of, of quality as we, [00:02:00] we scale up. Allen Hall : Yeah, and that’s the key to all sort of repairs in the wind industry. You like to do it once and be done with the life of the turbine. Now, so you’re going uptower. You’re drilling some holes up along the blade, injecting those with a resin system, curing it, basically reinforcing what is already there That all makes sense to me. Engineering-wise, that makes sense to me. But a- again, it goes back to the technicians and the training and the deployment of it. Are you starting to train technicians, bring them in, show them how to use the, use the machines and, and get them out in the field so they are ready to go? It, it… ‘Cause it seems like you’re at that threshold now. David King: No, absolutely. So we, we believe in people first, right? Yeah. People at the end of the day make things happen. And so, you know, the best ways to do that is give people the right tools to be successful, and where that comes from is training. That’s a huge part of it. We have a, a certified training program that we run. Uh, it started out as an internal program we were running. It basically has five levels to it. Uh, we’ve now extended that to, uh, enabling, uh, you know, basically [00:03:00] preferred partners to be able to take part in that training, uh, to be able to utilize modular kits, pumps and equipment, to be able to, you know, go out and meet that demand that’s out there, but do so in a way that’s, uh, controlled. Yeah. And so really that comes back to that certified training program. And really, you know, level one is about a lot of your basic safety, procedural base type, uh, you know, making sure people are competent, uh, they’re not gonna get themselves hurt. Right. They’ve got the right personality traits about focus, uh, you know, detail focus and things like that. Yeah. Uh, level two to that program is, is really about, um, basically getting people to a stage in which they can be a, uh, team member. Uh, they’re able to be on a team and contribute to that team in an effective manner, be in the field.  Allen Hall : That’s really important. A lot of-  David King: Absolutely …  Allen Hall : companies miss that aspect of being a team member instead of an individual. Yeah, you have to work with other people. Yeah. It’s, it’s critical.  David King: It’s massively important. Personalities clash. You’ve got to be able to work through that sort of thing. And so that level one to level two is really kind of taking your green horn hat off and putting, “Okay, I, I, I can be on this team and I’m, I’m a, a contributing [00:04:00] member.” And then at level three, that’s your team leads. Those are people that are leading teams. They’re leaders. They’re up and coming. They’ve got a career path, career trajectory. Level four is our mentors. That’s the people that are going out there and that are basically qualified to now actually mentor other people in the field. Allen Hall : Yeah.  David King: And then your level five is train the trainer. How do you grow more trainers so that you’re not constrained on that training factor? And that, that’s kind of how we, we typically run training.  Allen Hall : Uh, and Gulf Wind has the ability to do that. I mean, I’ve been to your facilities, they’re impressive, and that’s one of the limitations for a lot of companies. They don’t have the facilities to train people, and they don’t have the resources you do. That opens up a lot of opportunities. Obviously, you’re in the composite repair business. You have crews out fixing wind turbine blades. Some of the more complex ones is what I hear. I mean, I hear it secondarily, but I assume that’s what’s happening. What are, are the areas that you get called in on to do composite repairs?  David King: We, we really do anything that stops somebody else. Okay. So we wanna be there when there’s a problem where you’re like, “I don’t know where to go next. Uh, this is a big [00:05:00] problem. We’re unsure. Maybe there’s a new technology at play. Maybe it’s, uh, a carbon spar cap. Maybe it’s something, uh…” You know, obviously the root stuff that’s very complicated. Sure. And, uh, it’s just gonna require a little bit more engineering. It’s gonna require a little bit more rigor, and that- that’s where we say, look, we, we can, whether it means testing something, verifying something, training somebody on a process, developing a process- Yeah or just doing something complicated, that’s where we excel.  Allen Hall : Well, that- that’s what I hear from the road is, uh, Gulf Winds here and I think, “Uh-oh. You must have a really serious problem because you’re calling in the experts to do the, the difficult things.” Carbon pultrusions, carbon fabric in, in blades today is such a massive problem because it’s not, it’s not fiberglass. It’s just a lot more to deal with, and some of the loading issues we’re finding and, boy, it’s just all over the place. They need Gulf Winds Technology to, to come on site to give them a hand. Now, a- as part of the growth of the business, and you guys have been growing. Every year I, I see they’re just… it’s just a little bit bigger, a little more [00:06:00] people. I walked on LinkedIn and hiring some engineers and some people to work over the summertime. That’s all great. What’s the structure look like now? How are you trying to organize yourself as a business?  David King: Yeah, so we really break down into three different structures. We have our service division, and that’s, um, putting people out there to solve problems in the field. As simple as it gets, right? It’s like you’ve got a problem, we’ve got the right people with the right solutions, and they’re gonna go deliver, uh, a result. Um, and then we’ve got an engineering division. That’s about developing problems. It also has a lot to do with IP. You know, things like root fusion, that’s a pat- protected technology. Sure. All of our technology, we do a lot of investments in, in, you know, patent protection and IP work, and so that sits inside that engineering division. Uh, it’s how we, we have the smarts of the company kinda sat in there. Uh, it also is what allows us to really get into some of these, uh, kinda juicy problem statements that are a little bit prickly maybe. Uh, and we love getting into those and solving them. Yeah. And then the third and final thing is the composite side of things, and that’s the, the manufacturing. That’s that 30,000 square [00:07:00] foot composite manufacturing facility where we wanna be the best in vacuum infusion. We wanna be the best in prepreg, the best in pultrusions, complex assemblies, and be trying to de- uh, just deliver really high-quality composites to the industry. Allen Hall : Yeah, and you have the equipment to do a lot of testing. And I think a, a lot of operators don’t realize what you have And the knowledge that’s sitting there, when I run into operators across the country that have complicated issues, particularly if they have carbon, I mean, oh my gosh, you, you need to be calling experts here. And if they have issues they haven’t really sussed out, they don’t know, they don’t understand the engineering that went into that blade, they need to be talking to you guys about Why is this blade designed the way it is? How should I approach this? Do I need to be turning my turbines off until I figure out a solution? A lot of times there’s not a lot of resources there because the, the designs are more complex than ever. But on the, on the same hand, I would say they’re not doing a lot of testing of their own materials. [00:08:00] David King: Yeah, and there’s a huge space for that. And which is crazy. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s, it’s, uh, it’s definitely a gap. It is. And we see it as a gap that needs to be filled. Yes. And so that’s where, you know, we, we say you’ve gotta give the engineers the tools to be successful. Sure. And so what are those tools? You know, that could be anything from what does an aerodynamicist need? They might need a metrology scanner. Right. So we do 70 million plus point scans of full blades. We’ve done now a full blade scan and, uh, I think we did it in about an hour, which was a, a new record of how quickly you could get 70 million points on a blade. Wow. And then that allowed- Uptower  Allen Hall : or  David King: downtower? It was downtower. Okay. Okay. It was outside in the field, but it was downtower. Okay. It’s still impressive. So that was a little, little, little bit easier than uptower. Sure. Maybe that’s next. Um- Yeah. But, um, no, and then so what can you do with that? Well, then you can go, uh, really analyze, you know, the performance of that blade. Maybe you can go do something in a wind tunnel with it. So coming back to that toolkit- Yep … an aerodynamicist needs a wind tunnel. We have aerodynamicists, so we have a wind tunnel. Then going on to, like, a structural engineer. What does a structural engineer need? Well, they need their FE tools. They need some good first principle approaches to, to structures. But they also need test equipment. Right. They need to be [00:09:00] able to develop and characterize materials both in static and fatigue. And so we’ve made a lot of investment in those sort of test equipment, uh, so that we can, we can put numbers to things. You know, I think the wind industry needs more data. Less speculation and more data-driven decisions, and the, where that starts is really building up that test base. And we, we believe in this thing called the testing pyramid, and what it is is, like, you’ve gotta characterize the material. That’s where you’re gonna have thousands of samples. Right. That’s your tensile, double lap shear testing, all the basics. Then you do your subcomponents. Add some geometry into that, that- Add some shape. Exactly. Maybe that’s hundreds of samples. And then you’re gonna go on top of that to, like, your full component. And look, we don’t have a blade test stand yet, but- Right … that’s kind of that, that space. And then the final top of that pyramid is go do it in the field, get results- Run it … and then run that back into your design cycles. And I think the more we can do that as an industry, the more successful we’re gonna be as an industry.  Allen Hall : Yeah, and I think a lot of operators don’t think they have to participate in that, and they’re sadly mistaken. And the fact that the industry has grown as fast as it has means [00:10:00] there’s some holes in some of the engineering that maybe they didn’t consider the, the site assessment properly or they didn’t understand some of the manufacturing variability. Now you own this product, you’re gonna have to do some of the homework that maybe the OEM should have done. It’s your site. You own it. And a lot of times I think, uh, as an owner/operator, they don’t realize there’s resources. Like, okay, well maybe do some mechanical testing. Maybe the repairs I had last summer aren’t working out the way that I think. Maybe I need to look at some materials  David King: and see if- And we want you to own your data. Well, that’s exactly it, right? That’s really what it comes down to is like you wanna own the data, know your blades, know your products, whether it’s, you know… I know you’re very, uh, you know, uh, specialized in lighting, really know your stuff. Everybody’s gotta take that same approach. Know your stuff- You need to know it … or go find the experts that know it- Right … and work with them. Yeah.  Allen Hall : Well, at, at this point in the industry’s growth, you realize who’s all percolated towards the top, right? You, you, you see the companies like Goldwind that have the expertise in-house and, and have established themselves as a [00:11:00] knowledge center, as a resource for the US and globally, and there’s only a couple of those spread around the world in that- We as an industry need to be utilizing you more to help us solve problems. Because if I don’t tell Gulf Wind what’s going on, Gulf Wind can’t help come to a solution.  David King: And we find that really, like, just the more you know, you start finding all sorts of new opportunities. Yeah. ‘Cause we almost learn what you don’t know, in a way. You kind of realize that, like, there’s so much more out there. Yeah. And that’s where it gets really exciting. That’s where it’s like you can get these novel solutions, people who take creative approaches. Um, and, and I really think that’s what’s gonna take this industry forward, especially now when, you know, there are some headwinds for wind. And all that means is we’ve gotta get sharper, and we’ve gotta be, uh, more agile. And I think it’s actually almost times like this that create some of the best, uh, behaviors in an industry to, uh, take it forward into the future really.  Allen Hall : Yeah. Wind’s not gonna go anywhere, but it’s being stressed a little bit. And in those stress points, we need to take the time to reflect and to make the industry [00:12:00] stronger. But in order to do that, we need to be relying upon the sources that we have. There are global sources. There are so many resources to touch into. I think you guys are, are doing amazing things. Obviously, being down in your facility, seeing the wind tunnel, just blown away by that. Seeing the mechanical testing, seeing the, the 3D printing of air foils and all that work you’re doing, plus the ability to scan blades, do large scale studies. I remember one was on CMS at the time, thinking, “All right. Somebody’s, somebody’s actually doing the right thing. There’s a study happening so we can understand what’s happening in CMS.” Like, those things need to happen as an industry to grow.  David King: Oh, absolutely. And I know you and I were at WOMA- Yes … quite recently. Yeah. And we heard about that LEP study. Yes. And what a prime example- … of people going out there, getting real life data. Yes. And then, uh, making it accessible so that people can make smart decisions, and again, drive the cost of energy down and make wind successful. It’s, it’s amazing.  Allen Hall : It, uh- Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But the transfer of knowledge is the key, right? And you guys are involved [00:13:00] in looking at some, what LEP will do to improve a blade, but also what leading edge damage will do to erode performance. Those are some of the things that a lot of operators don’t understand. Like, is that blade being in that damaged form even affecting my AEP? It depends on the turbine, I think, a lot of times. But you better be asking the question at least. Talk to somebody who knows.  David King: Yeah. ‘Cause it, it’s really interesting. I mean, you know, I think it so much drives back to that business case for the operator, and they all have their own approaches. And, and really- Yeah you know, most people are repairing LEP when it becomes structural. That’s the- That’s right … that’s the predominant approach. And, you know, I understand that approach very… You know, I, I get it from an operator’s point of view. Um, but yeah, there’s definitely, uh, other things you could do to try and make a, a data-based business decision. Um- Sure.  Allen Hall : Sure. Now, what are some of the cool new things that Gulf Wind is working on, that you haven’t announced to the world yet, but you’d like to announce? I know you’ve been working on things. I’ve seen all the white papers being published. There’s some things- Back behind the scenes, what’s new?  David King: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, you take something like Roof [00:14:00] Fusion, right? Right. Which is a long process to develop. So we, knowing that everything that, uh, you have as an idea is gonna take almost maybe three, four, five years to actually bring to market- Sure … we’re always starting on this constant cycle of development. Right. And so the things- You know  Allen Hall : it’s gonna be five years. David King: Exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, I mean, it’s like the patents on this stuff take three, four, five years to work out. Yeah. And so it- it’s a very important part of the entire process. Yeah. But to, to answer your question, we do have some exciting things both in the aero side, uh, side of the world. Uh, we have been doing a lot of development work around, uh, basically, uh, passive load shedding, so the ability for a turbine, or actually any structure, to be able to react to the wind in a passive manner. Uh, so you don’t need any sort of mechanicals. You don’t need anything, uh, that’s going to break in the field, and the structure itself is able to actually react to the load that’s coming onto it and change its aerodynamic, uh, profile and change its load that it’s experiencing. So you get these… Uh, that’s a very interesting new technology. Yes. Uh, it’s something that we’ve been working on for about three or four years now. It’s now, uh, [00:15:00] getting demonstrated, uh, which we’re very excited about. Uh, we also have some technologies, uh, around new connection types between metal and composites. So this is, uh, something that’s, uh, probably got a lot of, um, application in aerospace, but I think it’s also gonna find its way into wind. And this is just a new way of really trying to fix some of the problematic joints that we’ve been dealing with now for the last few years, but looking forward, not looking backward. Yeah. Right. Sure. Not being retroactive. Right. But how do we do that next generation of roof pushing design, for example? And we’ve got a really exciting method for that, that, uh, is been tested now. We have test results for it, and they look extremely good. Uh, we also are making some major CapEx investments this year into- Sure … new manufacturing equipment. So we have, um, some… I, I would say some, some pretty advanced, um, automation we’re trying to bring to composite manufacturing- Okay … around pre-preg carbon fibers and things like that, which is gonna be very, very exciting I think. Uh, I hope it finds its way into the wind industry. It’ll probably start in other industries. Sure. Maybe kind of this, uh, [00:16:00] subsea, you know, and, uh, and air, uh, space first- Sure … you know, around UAVs, ROVs- Sure … that sort of thing. But I think it’s also gonna have applications in wind, and we’re really, really excited about that. Well,  Allen Hall : that’s good because it, it does seem like wind is downstream of a lot of aerospace things ’cause it does, definitely costs money to develop those, and aerospace is a place where that can happen. However- If you work out all the kinks and you solve all the manufacturing issues, it is directly applicable to wind. David King: And it’s massive volume. The beautiful thing about wind is that the volume, when you get something right and you do it right, you get to deploy technology. Yeah. Yes. You, you get to take it off the shelf- Right … and put it in the world and make it happen, which is, there’s nothing more exciting as an engineer. Allen Hall : Well, I mean, in, in terms of blade manufacturing, how many times have we talked about automating that so we have less things like wrinkles and some ply issues, overlaps, those kind of things where automation would help, but we just haven’t really refined it enough to i- implement it at a large scale in a blade factory. David King: Exactly. And it’s always usually too bespoke, you know? It is. It’s like you solve the problem for the, the 40-meter blade, and now- Right … there’s a [00:17:00] 45-meter blade, and we need all new CapEx. Right. And then it doesn’t, uh, doesn’t scale well.  Allen Hall : That doesn’t scale at all. No. Right. So that’s why they haven’t done it, is because they know the next generation of blade is coming. It’s another 10 meters longer, and that’s not gonna fit in this building, and doesn’t make sense- We’re in trouble … to buy the equipment.  David King: Yeah, exactly.  Allen Hall : Right. So it, it, it’s a- Yeah … it’s a constant evolving industry. Now, I, I had looked at your load shedding patent application or patent. Maybe it came out as a patent. David King: Yep.  Allen Hall : Mm-hmm. Okay. I wanna understand that a little bit since I’m here talking to you now. The load shedding piece was because, uh, you’re in Louisiana, that’s where hurricanes- Come up … every once in a while, if people haven’t read the papers. But the load shedding technology makes sense because now you can deploy wind turbines in places that you otherwise may not do it because of the risk of typhoons, hurricanes, even tornadoes on some level, some odd wind situations. You wanna explain what that technology is? Yeah.  David King: Really what it’s doing is it’s trying to decouple the, uh, turbine’s ability to protect itself from its requirement to maintain power and maintain [00:18:00] control. So if you have something that relies on electrical hydraulics or anything like that- Yeah … it’s gonna be extremely susceptible to failing, uh, when- Yes there’s a grid outage or when you have a battery that fails or, you know, most airplanes require, like, dual redundancy or triple- Triple … triple redundancy because of that very reason, and we just can’t afford to do that in wind. No. And so the innovation then that gets required is you have to have something that’s passive, something where the structure itself has been designed in a way where the laminate is designed in a way where it’s going to not react progressively like a linear fashion as you apply load, right? It keeps bending and bending and bending. Right, right, right. But it’s gonna have quite a sudden reaction to a very particular load case. And so that’s what we’ve been able to do is-  Allen Hall : Okay …  David King: basically construct that laminate in a way where when it, the right load is applied, in this case, that’s the, the hurricane load or the extreme load- Right we can shed that load, uh, completely by the structure simply reacting to the load, and that’s very exciting for wind. It has a lot of other applications ’cause- Sure it does … basically allowing you to hinge composites. We now can- Right … with [00:19:00] composites almost in an origami fashion, hinge them any way we want, which is really, really exciting. Nice. And we’re excited to bring that now to other areas besides just wind and, and wind will be a key one as well.  Allen Hall : Sure it will. Yeah. Wow, okay. That’s cool. I mean, that’s why I follow Gulf Wind Technology on LinkedIn to see all the cool things that are coming out because, uh, if, if you’re thinking about- What’s new, what’s next. There’s probably three or four places, honestly, in the world that I rely upon, DTE being one, Fraunhofer being another, and then Gulf Wind Technology. Like, okay, let’s… So they tram for it here. I… Let’s, let’s see what’s going on this week. That’s amazing. And I, I know that as you guys get more experience out in the field and people will start to recognize the name, it’s just only gonna grow to something even bigger. So that, that’s fantastic. I know you, you spend a lot of time making  David King: this business go. We’re de- definitely very excited about it. Yeah. But with, with growth comes, you know, a, a discipline. Right. You have to be very disciplined. Yes. And so that’s something, you know, we’ve gotta be very focused on. Yeah. That’s where things like that certified training program are important. Yes. It’s where [00:20:00] how we patent things is very important. Yes. How we, uh, you know, kind of set up company structure is very important. So I know we touched on a few of those subjects today. Yeah. But those are really just about trying to be able to maintain quality as we grow. A- and that’s really important to our customers, it’s important to us, and it’s how we maintain the brand. Allen Hall : We gotta get back down to Louisiana. I’m really curious to see what’s happening inside the buildings and see where you’re at, because, uh, I know there’s great things happening there. And I really appreciate the time. Thank you for coming over to Australia. I thought your, your talks and your, your presentation and being on panels in Australia was really insightful to a lot of Australians, because you’re just bringing a different viewpoint into that marketplace. And, and that’s what Gulf Wind does. So I, I appreciate all that effort. And, uh, yeah, we should connect up this summer. Come down and check out what’s going on.  David King: Absolutely. If you’re willing to brave the heat- Oh, no. … you are always welcome. And our aim is that every time you come to that factory, hopefully it’s like a, a whole new world. We wanna surprise you with something new, because, uh, that’s the only way we can demonstrate progress.  Allen Hall : Oh, that’s a deal.  David King: So.  Allen Hall : Okay, great. Well, thank you,  David King: Dave. Great to see [00:21:00] you. Thanks  Allen Hall : for being on the  David King: podcast. Thank you very much.

American Clean Power’s Q1 report shows the weakest quarter since 2023, China plugs an undersea data center into offshore wind, and thermal imaging spots hidden blade damage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now your hosts Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And three out of the four of us, everyone except Rosie, went to Houston this past week. Matthew, you were on the floor. Yolanda, you were on the floor this week. What did you think? Matthew Stead: I think there was a few sort of common themes that I picked up. One, the obvious one which keeps coming up every time is insurance and lightning, and insurance, and all those sort of things. probably the other point that I observed was really strong supply chain. they had everyone, all the people, e- even people, building boxes. And [00:01:00] so they had boxes, transportation, cranes, really strong, supply chain. also really strong on the batteries, like the CATL batteries, et cetera, et cetera, and solar. I think that seems to be getting a bit more, a bit more, mature and more obvious. obviously blades, lots of people talk to us about blades, maybe ’cause we talk about blades. But, lightning root issues, blade bolts, those sorts of things, leading edge erosion, robotic repair, et cetera, et cetera. a bit about, add-ons like PowerCurve, were fairly visible, so that was good. but there was a lot of secret meetings in rooms away from the actual event. so that was one observation. and the other observation was perhaps not so many operators that actually [00:02:00] work on a day-to-day basis. That was my subjective impression  Rosemary Barnes: Speaking of secret meetings in rooms, what were you guys doing around the time of ACP?  Matthew Stead: So the Australian American Chamber of Commerce organized a special event, with two Australian companies to launch a new product, which monitors lightning and then transmits the results using satellite communications. So it was very open, but invitation only, Rose.  Rosemary Barnes: I, actually, I- the comments, ’cause people are always, after our first go organizing wind O&M event in Australia, I would hear about it from people who didn’t, just chatting at, on, different wind farm sites. They didn’t know I was involved, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, there’s a secret event now.” And it’s we did our very best to publicize this, the most that we could. It was not intended to be secret. So yeah, I’m just wondering if, people are gonna think the same if [00:03:00] they, they missed out on, your event. But how was it re- received? Do, we need more events in the US?  Matthew Stead: Yes, absolutely. And I, I don’t have my pin on here, but, yeah, I do have a pin from the Australian American Chamber of Commerce Texas division,  Rosemary Barnes: How was the event for you, Yolanda?  Yolanda Padron: It was good. It was good. the showroom was the, or the exhibit floor was a little bit em- more empty than I thought it would be, but it was good. It was good to, to see people, to catch up with everybody. There were some really good chats happening everywhere. and I got … I don’t know about you guys, but I saw a lot more people not from the US that wanted to come in and understand the market better than I did other years, which was nice to see. Matthew Stead: Was there any new technology on the floor this year? I thought there was a new robot company, but it was actually solar cleaning.  Yolanda Padron: I saw some rebranding from some companies, moving from former ties to [00:04:00] OEMs just m- moving into their own little companies and stuff. in a very interesting, PR move, a, an insurance company was raffling a motorcycle, which was really, funny for us to see. Allen Hall: Not very safe, is it?  Yolanda Padron: Was  Rosemary Barnes: it at least an l- an electric  Yolanda Padron: motorbike?  Allen Hall: Rosemary, you’re in America.  Yolanda Padron: I don’t know very much about bikes, but it was big and scary for me. did I put my name in there? Yes. We’ll see how that turns out, but  Rosemary Barnes: I’m always trying to win Lego sets at, events and, try to sweet talk the, the stall managers or s- stall minders into “Oh, if somebody wins and they don’t show up, could I have it?” yeah, so far unsuccessfully. Although I do have, actually you can see I’ve, I’ve got a Le- a L- Lego, in inverted commas, not Lego TM, wind turbine that we’ve just started making. So that’s a, [00:05:00] or a tower for a… that we have created. I have succeeded in getting some sort of Lego for my podcast background. Allen Hall: Are you gonna buy the Sagrada Família Lego set that just appeared?  Rosemary Barnes: I haven’t. I’m not like the hugest Lego fan. I wouldn’t call myself an, what is it? AF- AFOL, adult fan of Lego? Is that what, There’s a, there’s an acronym. I’m not one. None of us are apparently.  Allen Hall: Oh, I don’t know. I think we’ll buy that one. Allen, does it take 200 years to make? Probably. I think there’s around 10,000 pieces. that’s what I re- recall. It, there’s a lot of pieces. It’s built in sections. I watched had a little discussion about it. It is really complex, but we may purchase one and put it in the lobby of our shop because that cathedral is protected by strike tape, some of the ornamental features at the top. So we’ll, probably build one, but it’ll, it will take a year [00:06:00] Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions Let’s talk about American Clean Power’s, first quarter 2026 market report. So the American Clean Power Association’s first quarter 2026 market report shows United States developers brought 6.4 gigawatts [00:07:00] of new clean power online in Q1, but overall capacity was down 17% year over year, the weakest quarter since 2023. Onshore wind took the hardest hit with less than 500 megawatts installed, the slowest pace since about 2018. the Department of Defense delayed approximately, 165 projects totaling 30 gigawatts and $54 billion of investment. Ken Young, the CEO of Apex Clean Energy, put it plainly, quote, “This DoD thing is real. They found a button to hit, and we got punched in the face.” Unquote. Developers won a preliminary injunction in Massachusetts federal court, but the Interior Department has pledged to appeal in regards to offshore wind. Is this gonna be a permanent setback, Matthew? You think this is gonna continue on, or will this eventually get wrapped up and wind will be back on track? Matthew Stead: If I wanted cheap power, I would be building wind, [00:08:00]battery, and solar. So I think, if people want cheap power, it, will definitely come back. That’s my view.  Allen Hall: Yolanda, you see some of the development. You’re close to it in Austin, Texas. What are you seeing on the ground there? I think there’s repowering going on, but is there much in terms of new development? Yolanda Padron: There’s repowering. I think new development slowed down a little bit than this time last year, but it’s still going on, both for wind, solar, and battery, which is good. on the ground level in some of these very rural towns, this is a very important source of income for a lot of those people, regardless of political affiliation. so it’s important for some of these people to get these on their, in their land.  Allen Hall: Does American Clean Power have a plan to try to address this situation? Are there any lawsuits in place or any legal action on the docket?  Yolanda Padron: Not that I know of. I, know there was a, there was that lawsuit end of last year, for offshore.[00:09:00] but from American Clean Power itself, I don’t know of anything off the top of my head. Do you guys know?  Allen Hall: I haven’t seen much of a roadmap from American Clean Power on this particular issue on the onshore wind. I haven’t seen much e-except but for a couple of summary pieces explaining what is happening on the ground, but n-no action to push back. And maybe there’s some lobbying going on with Congress people and, senators, but you think we would hear about some of it. I haven’t heard anything, and I’m watching pretty close. it is a little confounding because it does seem like this could be broken with one court case. Maybe not. Maybe it’s more difficult than that. Yolanda Padron: I don’t know. There’s always a lot of, yeah, there’s always a lot of lobbying going on by, not just by American Clean Power, but by a lot of these larger owners, right? A lot of them have some sort of office in DC and people coming in and out and going to meetings [00:10:00] with everybody, So I don’t know. I’m also very curious to see what goes behind the scenes for that political side of things.  Allen Hall: just as a quick aside, one of the discussions I was having during the week was about AI data centers and the push for power. If gas turbines aren’t available for a couple of years and they’re gonna… the administration’s gonna push back on renewables, AI data centers are gonna have a hard time getting the power they need. I know the administration wants them to, be powered by natural gas, but that’s not possible right now. I don’t see how this ends easily. Rosemary Barnes: It seems like e- everybody’s looking into any single way that you can power a data center. There are people making serious plans to do it. There’s obviously, we’ve talked about space-based data centers before. then there was a podcast I listened to this week. Allen, you actually suggested it to me, but it’s one that comes up for me anyway, Catalyst podcast about, [00:11:00] data centers on ships. It, actually isn’t just purely about data centers on ships. It’s about, this company, and they have a ship that’s designed to fairly passively capture energy from waves of a ship out on the o- open ocean. They’ve actually designed the shape of the hull so that it is, will actually capture energy. They choose the location of their factories very carefully, put it in the ocean where there’s already enough energy, and it just, phew, off it goes, just powers itself off to the, I think it was somewhere in the South Pacific, where there’s nice big fetches of, of water and power whatever, including data centers. But I think each ship was about a megawatt or something like that, so you’ll need a lot of them. And then wasn’t there one that you were, you wanted to bring up today, Allen, an, underwater data center?  Allen Hall: The one that I think you’re talking about is Penthalassa, which has recently come out of the dark mode, and they have been working on this, in at least a couple of years from far as I can tell, [00:12:00] trying to develop data centers that… using a, system driven by not necessarily the waves. It’s not the waves, Rosemary. I think it’s more to do with the pressure, of the ocean. It’s, something to that effect, which is really interesting. but, China has, like in many things, working offshore and trying to get data centers up and running. they’ve commissioned the first undersea data center powered directly by offshore wind. The Shanghai Lingang project, built by a subsidiary of China Communications Construction, CCC, began operations off Shanghai’s eastern coast in May. Planned capacity is 24 megawatts, and the core design transmits offshore wind power directly to submerged data modules via subsea photoelectric composite cables. I’m not sure what that is, but I’ll have to dig into that deeper. And by bypassing grid routing entirely. Seawater obviously will serve as the cooling medium [00:13:00] through circulating pipes in the heat exchangers, reducing electricity consumption by about 20%. one of the local v- university professors estimates that this kind of data center model could save about 50 billion kilowatt hours annually across China’s data center fleet, equivaling, equivalent to not burning 15 million metric tons of coal per year, and that would be nice. Is there a future in offshore data centers that use the ocean to cool themselves and Plug ’em into wind turbines offshore, just get the electricity straight from the wind. Does this have growth futures,  Matthew Stead: particularly in China? I love it. I think it’s absolutely fantastic, and it just means you don’t have to send them into space, because that’s a silly idea. The other point, do you remember a couple of years ago they were going to build, hydrogen electrolyzers, offshore n- next to wind turbines? So all they do is [00:14:00] just scrap the electrolyzer and then put in the data center. It’s just perfect.  Rosemary Barnes: But that’s what this, ship one that I was, I listened to the podcast of, that’s their, thing. It’s just power for whatever. whatever, obviously it has to be something that’s capable of, operating on a ship environment. You’re not gonna be doing probably precision manufacturing or anything out there. But, apparently failure rates for, data center stuff is not… They’re not expecting it to be higher. Higher in some types of failures will be higher, and some will be lower, but, they think that overall it’s so much, so much cheaper. But yeah, they did also talk about doing, yeah, I don’t know, hydrogen. Is anybody, is anyone still talking about hydrogen anymore? I feel like we’re finally, not n- not doing that.  Allen Hall: Rosie, I think you killed it. I’ve seen more news reports about it, where they’re not proceeding and there’s been some funding challenges, and those things are happening. Like any new technology, it’s, hard. The beginning is hard.  Rosemary Barnes: But, you know that, already hyd- making [00:15:00]hydrogen the way that we make it today is something like 2% of the world’s, emissions. So it’s okay, we do need heaps of clean hydrogen for that 2%. So I’m definitely not against, some hydrogen projects happening, ’cause we’ve gotta… That’s the, same size as y- you know, nearly as much as aviation, for example. so not insignificant.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, someone actually came up to us and s- I had a bit of a discussion about that, Rosie. We’ve got a bit of information to share with you about that-  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, yeah …  Matthew Stead: that will dispute some of your claims. we’ll share that with you  Rosemary Barnes: offline. They’re not my claims. I’m merely reporting what people who are working on it say. But I, was saying to Allen, ’cause we had a big chat offline about contrails and how challenging it is to just alter an aircraft’s path to reduce them, I need to, Engineering with Rosie video on this and get an expert on and ask them all of Allen’s very informed questions. maybe I’ll get you on as a co- co-interviewer. I’m actually keen on viewer input, listener input. we’ve got a, Pardalote actually has a training course [00:16:00]coming up. I’ve been trying to organize this training so that I and my employees can learn more about blade repairs. So we have a course coming up, organizing it in collaboration with Direct Wind Services. We’ve got a great, blade repair guy who’s gonna be taking the course- It’s gonna start out with an optional day that I’ll be running about blade design, manufacturing, certification, those sorts of things. And then three days on blade repair. So we’ll go through the theory, also, hands-on stuff. So we’ll be doing grinding, we’ll be doing layups, infusions, all that sort of thing for three days in Ballarat. but the extra cool part is that I’m gonna be using this opportunity to make a video about wind turbine blade repairs, ’cause, one, I’ve been si- trying, I’ve wanted to make a video on this ever since I started my YouTube channel, six years ago. So this is the opportunity that I can take to, talk about what kinds of repairs are actually done. I think people will be really surprised to see, even in, when they’re brand new out of the factory, they still gotta do, dozens of repairs on a [00:17:00] blade before it’s ready to go out. And people will also probably be surprised at, the extent of, repair that you can do and get a blade back up to its original design intent. So I would ask, anyone listening to this that has questions about those sorts of topics, let me know, and I’ll try my best to include that in the video. ‘Cause I think it’s a topic that’s not, super well understood.  Matthew Stead: Can I come along as well?  Rosemary Barnes: Nice, nice segue into me advertising. So this is our first one. We’ve got, we’ve got a few spots. I think that they’re gonna very easily fill, but we are planning to run them periodically. So yeah, you can get in touch and, let me know. yeah. Anybody. You, Matt, I’ll send you over the, the information.  Yolanda Padron: That’s a really good idea, Rosie, ’cause I feel like a lot of people, you either have, a really robust, understanding of blades and a really good background on it, or you’re starting fresh. And when you’re starting fresh, it’s really difficult to know what exactly you’re [00:18:00] doing. Or you know in theory, not until you go into the nitty-gritty or until you watch Rosie’s videos, do you then get a better understanding of everything that’s going on.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s, a fascinating topic. obviously that’s what I spend 90, 90%-plus of my time working on. yeah. Blade damage and blade repairs. But there’s so much, there’s so much information that would be better off if it was shared, if everybody, knew a bit more about what, what was possible, what was normal, what’s best practice. Then I think that the, O&M for blades would go a lot more smoothly. Allen Hall: We had Matt Sagala on the podcast this past week, and one of the items he was talking about, some of the basic fundamentals of repairs, the little checkpoints that need to be in place when you’re looking at a repair, and the photographs that come in a repair report and some of the details, how they get skipped. And there should be more emphasis on some of the basics, and making sure that the photos show the different layers that have been ground, where each of the plies are. [00:19:00] Something simple like that, which in a lot of good blade reports. You don’t necessarily see in all of them and Rosie, if you’re training people up and showing them what the fundamentals are, that’d be really helpful in getting that information out where you can access- where it’s accessible, like on YouTube. Rosemary Barnes: I’m always giving that, that feedback back, “Can you please at least show, an image of what it looked like before you started repairing?” Nobody ever does that, and it’s y- we have the inspection, the drone image, but, you don’t have… you had, you were right there. You had the opportunity to take the , photo from every, angle, because you wanna be able to recognize what does this damage look like the next time that we see it. What’s it gonna look like in a drone image? And, yeah, be able to… sometimes you get in there and you think that you’re just gonna be repairing a couple of layers, and it turns out to a huge, thing. like I’ve seen repair , repairs come in that, hundreds of thousands or more, to do just one repair that was totally unexpected by the person who was paying the bill.[00:20:00] the more information that you take about that repair, then the more possible it is for engineers like me to be able to, a- at least predict, okay, you’ve, you’re likely to have a big repair here, and plan for it.  Allen Hall: Trying to find someone doing blade repair correctly on YouTube is hard to find. It really is. I s- you see people with grinders and things, and yeah, they’re working hard and they’re doing a job. But someone to actually walk through from beginning to end, and made it, and explained it as they did it, would be helpful to the industry. Tremendously helpful.  Yolanda Padron: Just to make sure that your budget’s right, for the year. if you’re on the owner’s side, and then you think, “Oh, okay. Sure. this AI-based drone inspection told me that I need to tackle all of these, and I know that these are gonna cost me, I don’t know, X amount of dollars,” you can, take a, human pass through those images and make sure that, your expectations and your reality is, closer, just by [00:21:00] looking at Rosie’s videos. So that’ll be, really exciting.  Allen Hall: Rosemary, how do people join in on your blade repair fun?  Rosemary Barnes: for, first of all, get in touch if you wanna do the course, especially in Australia. we could definitely organize one. In, the US coming up, piggyback off a- another event or somewhere else. But also get in touch with me at pardaloteconsulting.com, and you can, yeah, send me a message through the contact form and let me know that you’re interested. Maybe spell pardalote,  Yolanda Padron: though, for people.  Rosemary Barnes: Pardaloteconsulting.com. P-A-R-D-A-L-O-T-E and then consulting.  Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality [00:22:00] content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind.com today. in this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, which you can get at peswind.com, there’s an article from Minerva Energy, ABJ Renewables, and Concept X where they have developed a product called WindView, which is an advanced inspection system using high-res optical capture with thermographic analysis for a full subsurface, inspection from rotor to tip. the system detects defects as small as three to four millimeters, which is quite small, and a- analyzes the blade structures up to about 15 centimeters, which is quite deep, so that it does seem like a pretty useful inspection tool. as we all know, just the generic, visual drone inspection can give you an idea of what’s happening on the surface, but a lot of the structural issues are deeper [00:23:00]inside the blade, so thermal inspection combined with optical inspection can give insights into some places that otherwise go unseen. And Rosemary, as a blade expert, and Yolanda too, there’s a lot that happens inside of blades, and having a- an additional tool to inspect blades and to get more understanding of what’s happening underneath the paint service could be really useful.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’m always trying to recommend th- this. I haven’t got any clients that have actually used thermal imaging, to look for damages, but especially in, areas where you suspect that there are r- some repairs that haven’t been done correctly or you’re looking for early signs of a serial defect. Y- like one of the weird things with the full service agreement, actually it’s probably true with, yeah, any kind of turbine sale, is there’s this serial defect liability period, and you’ve got to hit usually, a crazy high, stupid high number, like 20%, 30% of all your blades have to have the [00:24:00] same damage within it might be a two or three-year period, not, very long. It’s better when it’s more like 20% in five years. That’s, enough time to actually catch things. But so one of the things that you’ve got to do is like you really want to catch things early in order to be able to, y- make a claim on that. And so this is one of the tools that people would have to catch things earlier, like it’s not yet visible, with a crack on the surface that– Or even, like even small cracks on the surface will fly under the radar as well because, they won’t be flagged in the inspection reports. So if you’ve got a few of something that’s looks like it might be the same, it, and you’re still within your defect, your serial defect liability period, it’s definitely worth doing something, the, some kind of NDT, and this, is one of the good options it’s actually worth spending a whole lot of money to, to try and get that in because, like the numbers are, millions and millions of dollars, maybe tens, maybe hundreds, depending on, the extent of the problem. So yeah, it’s always good [00:25:00] to be well aware of what your deadlines are and what tools are available, and this is one of the good ones.  Allen Hall: Yolanda, you think it’ll open up access to carbon pultrusion inspections on blades without actually cracking the blade open?  Yolanda Padron: Hopefully, yeah. in, internal inspections you can only go so far, right? And Rosie, you have a lot more experience with this in action than I do. but yeah, so I, I think it’d be really interesting to see just what, what people can get done without actually happing- having to go and carving everything out, and without having to already start a s- a, a repair that maybe you don’t have the budget to do. Allen Hall: If its speed is fast enough, I- thermal imaging can be slow at times, but from what I’ve seen, the, cameras have really improved over the last couple of years. If they have this down where you could really inspect blades quickly, it would be a tremendous help to have insights into [00:26:00] depth of damage, especially with c- I think carbon pultrusions are the one that we just don’t have a lot of oversight with, and it’s very difficult to inspect. And so if you could actually see damage to the pultrusion ahead of time, that would be a, major advantage. I, can’t imagine the insurance companies wouldn’t love this system. S-  Matthew Stead: it’s interesting. Yeah, I’ve got a question. GE Vernova has a patent around some of this, technology. They’ve had it obviously for many years. But, I know one of the challenges with the GE Vernova approach was that through the day, if you’ve got ambient temperatures, it was a bit hard to pick up, the actual damage. So at least for the GE, solution, it had to be done at dusk or, when the sun wasn’t out. So I don’t know the answer to that, but is that one of the technical challenges around, when it can actually be taken? Do you need to take it when the sun’s not out?  Allen Hall: Yeah, I wonder that too I’ve– The way I’ve seen it is they try to catch it at sunrise or sunset where there’s [00:27:00] a thermal gradient on the blade. However, the thermal imaging cameras is, are, cameras are so much better than they used to be. it may be possible to just do it during the daytime. Rosemary Barnes: I think the different companies are approaching it in different ways and, I’m sure that some of them can do it, like especially under direct sunlight, then that can be actually a really good way to get some, some heating. And then g- it relies– Mostly it’s relying on the fact that different materials heat up at different rates. So as long as you’ve got some sort of change in, in temperature happening, then you should be able to see. Yeah, like obviously if there’s a big, crack or a delamination, there’s some air there that’s gonna heat up differently than the composite around it.  Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Yeah.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think also like when cracks propagate, they are actually generating some heat at that site and you, can catch that too. But, I’m, actually not on top of it enough to know how much it’s one or the other. I think it’s mostly about, when a blade heats up, air will heat up differently to, to composite and you’ll be able to see it. that’s my limited [00:28:00] understanding anyway. Something worth more of a deep dive. I’m actually looking forward to some, hopefully some clients getting over the line to, doing some more of the, taking advantage of some of the NDT tests that are, available because it can just help you do such a better job of, management and huge risk redus- reductions too.  Allen Hall: So if you haven’t seen this quarter’s PES Wind, you can download it now at peswind.com. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosie, Yolanda, and Matthew, I am Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:29:00] podcast.

Allen covers GE Vernova ordered to stay on Vineyard Wind, TotalEnergies filing for France’s largest renewable project, Spain’s repowering grants, and Dajin’s Hong Kong stock debut. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday. Wind energy made news this week from Boston courtrooms… to the coast of Normandy … to the stock exchange floors of Hong Kong. Let us start in Massachusetts. A Boston judge has once again told GE VERNOVA it cannot walk away from VINEYARD WIND. To understand why GE VERNOVA wants out… you have to look at the money. VINEYARD WIND owes GE VERNOVA three hundred and sixty million dollars on a one-point-two-billion-dollar turbine supply contract. VINEYARD WIND is withholding that payment. GE VERNOVA says it has the contractual right to walk when it is not paid. In February, they sent VINEYARD WIND a termination notice. VINEYARD WIND sued. In April, Judge PETER KRUPP issued an injunction ordering GE to stay. GE VERNOVA came back and asked the judge to reconsider. Vernova pointed to statements from state officials and VINEYARD WIND’s own parent company describing the eight-hundred-and-six-megawatt project as essentially complete. If the project is done, GE argued, there is no harm in letting us leave. Judge KRUPP did not buy it. Here is why this matters so much to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. VINEYARD WIND is the largest offshore wind project in New England. It is owned jointly by Spain’s IBERDROLA and Denmark’s COPENHAGEN INFRASTRUCTURE PARTNERS. It began initial operations just this past February… after the developer won a separate court fight to keep federal construction permits intact. Sixty-two turbines. A four-point-five-billion-dollar investment. The anchor project for offshore wind in the entire region. The judge found that GE VERNOVA’s proprietary expertise is still needed to bring those turbines to full operational capacity. Pull GE’s more than two hundred employees and subcontractors off the job… and the project’s financing structure could collapse. Massachusetts Governor MAURA HEALEY has weighed in publicly. The state has too much riding on this project to let it unravel in court. GE VERNOVA still has its appeal of the April injunction pending. But for now… the turbines keep turning. Now let us cross the Atlantic. Off the coast of Normandy, France… TOTALENERGIES has filed for government authorization of a massive offshore wind farm called CENTRE MANCHE ENERGIES. This will be France’s largest renewable energy project… ever. One-point-five gigawatts of offshore wind. Located more than forty kilometers off the Normandy coast. Four-point-five billion euros in investment. Up to twenty-five hundred construction jobs over three years. Once running, the wind farm will generate roughly six terawatt-hours of clean electricity per year… enough to power more than one million French homes. TOTALENERGIES was awarded this project by the French government eight months ago. Filing for authorization is the next milestone on the path to construction. Meanwhile… across the Pyrenees in Spain… The Spanish government has awarded grants for eighty wind repowering projects totaling two-point-four gigawatts of capacity. With Nearly four hundred and sixty million euros in subsidies. The goal: replace older turbines with more efficient technology by twenty-thirty. The names on the award list read like a who’s who of European wind energy. IBERDROLA… STATKRAFT… EDP… ENEL GREEN POWER… NATURGY… RWE … and others. IBERDROLA alone picked up four hundred megawatts of new capacity. And this repowering wave is not just replacing old machines. Some projects are swapping out turbines that were once the industry standard… one-point-five and two-megawatt machines… for the far more powerful equipment available today. The industry is not just building forward. It is rebuilding smarter. And finally… a story from the other side of the world. A Chinese manufacturer of offshore wind foundations and towers called DAJIN HEAVY INDUSTRY made its debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this past Friday. The share sale raised up to eight hundred and forty-seven million dollars. DAJIN claims a notable distinction: it says it ranked as Europe’s largest offshore wind foundation supplier by monopile sales value in the first half of twenty twenty-five. The company plans to use more than half the proceeds to expand its deep-sea wind power services… and one-fifth to build an assembly facility in Europe. As we know wind energy is continues to push forward. On every front. And that is the state of the wind industry for the eighth of June, twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Alejandro Cabrera Muñoz, co-founder and CEO of Green Eagle Solutions, returns to discuss automating 70 GW of renewable assets and why operators are self-operating their fleets. Reach out to sales@greeneaglesolutions.com to learn more! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Alejandro, welcome back to the program.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Thank you so much, Allen. It’s a pleasure to be here.  Allen Hall: Well, so last time we talked, you had so much happening at Green Eagle, and it is, uh, amazing to watch the progress there. You’ve been around for quite a while now. You started, what, in 2011 working on SCADA systems. Uh, uh, there’s been a lot of evolution since then. Walk me through, like, the process where you thought, “Hey, there’s a business here.”  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Of course. Uh, we actually started officially back in 2012. It’s been a, quite a, of a long journey to, to get here. Uh, yeah, we started, uh, back, back then. We say it’s a whole new world, right? If we look backwards, like, almost 15 years. Makes me, makes me feel, like, extremely [00:01:00] old. Uh, but ne- nevertheless, um, yeah, back then we were trying to, to cover, like, a lot of issues that were based on OEM SCADAs, which by the way, we still are dealing with. But, but that, that was starting point. It was, um- It was, uh, based on understanding that the, the renewable energy industry is so complex. Every wind farm, every solar plant has different issues, different systems. Even, even the same models from the same manufacturer sometimes have complete different systems, which complicates everything. So it was very exciting to, to start our careers in a, in an industry where nothing is standard and where everyone is looking for something that is standard. So that’s, that’s where we fit in. Um, yeah, and in these years, we, we started basically creating the f- the foundations, uh, uh, on top of, uh, SCADA systems. [00:02:00] But as soon as we had that, those foundations, we realized that this sector is not gonna evolve, uh, it’s gonna cope up with the complexity, uh, of the technical complexity, market volatility, regulatory compliance. That’s not gonna be solved by just having more SCADAs. So we created a layer of automation in place, which is basically what we’ve been, um, evolving in the last 10 years now, um, with the, with the mindset and with the goal that every wind turbine should be running autonomously without having to have people behind it, uh, supervising and taking control of it. Allen Hall: Yeah, and that’s a great founding idea, but that has grown from an idea to you’re automating, what, 40 gigawatts of renewable assets right now?  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Oh, we’re actually now connected to over 70 gigawatts.  Allen Hall: That’s amazing. Alejandro, that’s incredible.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: And all of them are different.  Allen Hall: Sure. So that, that’s a combination– 70 gigawatts is a combination of wind and solar and anything else? Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Yes. [00:03:00] Well, actually, one of the, one of the main, um, needs that we try to cover from day one is to be able to connect to all, um, asset classes. So we understand that, um, the challenge of operating a large portfolio for our customers, um, can only be solved if we have the ability to connect to all type of asset classes. So we can have to connect to wind turbines, inverters, trackers, substations, um, energy meters, you name it. You– we have to connect to every single asset class, um, because what’s important is how you manage that data on top of that and how you react on the anomalies.  Allen Hall: Right. Because I think a lot of operators are now considering taking your model, the Green Eagle model of s-self-operating, but they need that help, they need that insight into the operation of a solar farm or a wind farm or, or any of those assets, renewable assets, ensure those inverter-driven assets. You’re, you’re seeing– I, I think we’re seeing the same thing, which is a lot of operators decide to [00:04:00] leave full service agreements globally, and what do you think is driving that now? Uh, is it a financial decision? Is it a performance decision, or is it both?  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: I think there are many factors, but I think the main driver is the financial aspects of it. I think when you, when you delegate the operations to a third-party, uh, entity They are gonna optimize their services to whatever service level agreement or availability they are committed to. And for that reason, you’re never gonna get– effectively, you’re never gonna get the extra mile. You’re never gonna get any extra from there. Um, and that’s okay when the market is– has great conditions and everything w- is going well. But we are seeing how in the last years we have, uh, a lot of market volatility, negative pricing. Everything is becoming more and more complex, so many projects are actually under stake financially. And I think that’s, um, that’s pressuring everyone to look for opportunities to squeeze their assets a little bit more or a little bit better, I would say.[00:05:00] Um, and part of that is to take operations in-house so you at least you have the opportunity to, to do, um, a better job, uh, let’s say.  Allen Hall: Yeah, and part of what we’re seeing is, at least in the United States and, and globally now, I think it’s, there’s more action globally than there has been on mergers and acquisitions. So an operator that has historically had a particular OEM in wind, you know, say it’s Vestas or Siemens or GE, whoever, Nordex, it could be any of them. Uh, when they acquire another competitor or another farm, they’re bringing in a f- a wind turbine they probably don’t know much about. And, and that’s a huge problem. And, and there’s not a lot of resources for them to grab hold of. Uh, that’s one of the marketplaces you’re trying to fill right now, right?  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Of course. Uh, as I mentioned before, if something describes our sector is that nothing is standard, despite everyone is seeking standardization of everything, right? Uh, but nothing is standard for, [00:06:00] for– and that, that’s the reality. So the first thing when, when you have a portfolio and you are incorporating new assets into it, you need, um, a solution that is able to connect to all type of assets, right? Um, w-we call our solution a three-in-one solution because first of all, it acts as a second level SCADA, so you can connect everything there, uh, everything there, and you have access to all the data across all your assets. Then we have the SCADA automation layer, and then we have the data analysis layer on top of that. Okay. But let’s focus on the operations, which was, uh, your question, right? So you have a new bunch of assets. Sometimes you don’t have any documentation whatsoever, but these are Gamesas, Nordex, a bunch of them from different years. Um, the first thing that we provide is a second level SCADA, so you can connect to all of those. But We have, uh, something that we believe is very unique. So what we provide to our [00:07:00] customers is ability to automate all these assets autonomously. And what that gives you, it’s, um, set of data that can be analyzed, and we can learn from what’s working, what’s not working, beyond what the manufacturer’s gonna tell you to do, right? So we have thousands of General Electric turbines connected to our software, for instance. Um, we know what works, what doesn’t works, uh, what are the faults that can be resetted remotely, what are the ones that are not, what is the success ratio of those resets, ’cause that’s a metric that nobody else has unless you have automation in place. Uh, but we can actually understand, is it working? Is it not working? Is it creating fatigue for no reason to these turbines? So what– we have all this, this, uh, un- this knowledge and this, um, knowhow, uh, for all these models. Um- I believe one of the main, um, value that we provide to our customers is, is not only the, the solution itself, but it’s also the [00:08:00] ability to be somehow prescriptive. It’s, it’s not that we’re gonna know more about how to operate the assets than our customers, but, uh, we have a sense of what’s the benchmark, right? So I, I– And that benchmark is very, very useful for them as well.  Allen Hall: So th- that’s part of getting to scale, and 70 gigawatts is a, a lot of scale, where you have seen a number of turbines in different places operating in different environments and performing at different levels. That’s unique, right? That gives you insight into really what’s happening to a turbine or a solar asset globally and also locally. For a lot of operators that just happen to acquire or, or, or take on a- an older wind farm, uh, they tend to get stuck, right? They, they, they, they don’t tend to be able to, to find their way through those little nuances. That’s a huge financial impact to them eventually, right?  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: It is. And I, and I believe that for many years this was something that in a way got, um– [00:09:00] didn’t get a lot of visibility. I think people were not fully aware of how much revenue, how much production they were losing just because they were not operating their assets at the best capacity. Um, now we have the data to prove what, what better can look like. W- uh, we have data to prove that if you follow the OEM’s, uh, protocols, you may be creating fatigue for no reason. Um, and there are improv- there are ways to improve that thing. So I think it’s, um– We are, we are opening the door for a new, complete new way to operate your, your portfolio and get more benefit from it. Allen Hall: I think that’s a very interesting aspect of the sort of the structural aspects of how a, a wind turbine performs, and a lot of that is driven by software. And you, you realize if you’re paying close attention to the OEMs that some of the software updates are not necessarily performance enhancements. They’re more of protecting the turbine because they realize they may have a problem. So it may be a slight derate, it may be a, a different sort of power curve that happens. [00:10:00] But a lot of operators don’t really sense that that is happening up close because they’re not into the details of that. That’s where Green Eagle separates itself. You are into all those details. And do you have a lot of operators just reach out for help immediately saying, “Hey, I have this Siemens Gamesa or Gamesa wind farm,” think about an older wind farm, a Gamesa wind farm Help. Just please help. Uh, whatever you can do, just show us you can do it. Do you, do you start to run a little test campaign on that site, or do you, or do you go pull back from the 70 gigawatts and 15 years of history to, to show this is what you can do with that particular asset to, to get them involved in a thinking about the problem a little bit differently? Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Well, I wish, I wish it was that way. Um, but what, what– It, it was that transparent, but what happens is that we’re working with the largest, uh, some of the largest utilities and IPPs in the world. So what happens is that they, they will never come to us saying, [00:11:00] “We don’t know how to operate this turbine,” or, “We don’t have enough information.” Um, the way they ask for it is like, “Are you compatible with this?” And, “Do you know… Do you have some protocols? Do you know the standard protocols to run these turbines?” Um, and that’s the way we, we start the conversation, and then they, uh, they, they get confident that we can actually help them with that. We only know about how, how much or how little they know about a specific model once we start working with them. And it’s not all or nothing. I- Ev-Even the largest manufacturer, e-even the largest utilities, their portfolio is constantly evolving. They’re incorporating new sites almost every month. So there’s always one site that they don’t, they don’t have expertise in the, in the house, so it’s, it’s normal. Like, basically not many people have expertise in some of the models from old Nordex or Gamesas or you name it. It, it’s impossible basically to have to understand all models in the world. So I think we [00:12:00] have the, the data, the benchmarks, and experience, and on top of that, the of course, the, the tools, so you can actually operate better those, those assets.  Allen Hall: So the name of your system is called ARSOS, A-R-S-O-S, and for anybody listening to this podcast, you can just Google it, and it’s gonna take you to Green Eagle. What is that product? How would, how would you define or describe that product?  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Well, ARSOS is a suite. Um, what– The way I like to think about it is a, is a three-in-one solution, right? So it’s first of all, it acts, it, it, it fits in between the SCADA world and the REMs, uh, the REMs, uh, solutions. Okay? And they’re complete different worlds even though you see dashboards and they look the same thing. But SCADAs must be, um, must be able to be installed on premises. They require OT enterprise cybersecurity level. They can be, they should be installed on air-gapped infrastructure, so no access to internet whatsoever. [00:13:00]Um, and that they tend to be extremely complex to configure and, and, uh, adapt to every, uh, every different site. So that’s one world. Um, on the other hand, we have the, the REM solutions that are like more like a SaaS platform, like a Power- it could be Power BI, it could be like the, the normal use cases that you need it. You need something, some tools to create the reports at the end of the month to understand the performance of your assets, right? So you have these two, two worlds. So what we are proposing here is a solution that has been built for the past 15 years, but it fits right in the middle. So it covers Almost everything that you need from a SCADA and second level SCADA solution. It puts automation in place, and then it also gives you all the data so you can consume it in the best way, uh, possible, which by the way, now with, uh, artificial intelligence, it’s incredible what you can do with it. So this is basically what we have built, um, right [00:14:00] now. And the main differentiation here is that since we are in the middle, we are trying to solve all this complexity from a SCADA world with a product that is already pre-configured. So you can basically connect to your sites in a completely easy way, um, doing clicks and not a lot of complexity because it’s already pre-made for your needs. Um, because of that, the time to market is extremely much, uh, faster compared to a SCADA solution, so you can have a solution in thing, in hours and not in months. It’s, it’s not a project anymore, right? Which is, which it sounds like normal when you, when you talk about applications, it sounds like a normal thing to do, that you have a, a system running in hours or minutes. But when you’re talking about SCADAs, that’s like sci- uh, sci-fiction, right? Um, that’s what we’re bringing to, into, onto the table. It’s, it’s, uh, something that you can connect to all your assets in a seamless way, painless, and, uh, and, uh, off the [00:15:00] shelf.  Allen Hall: Well, that’s a very interesting way of framing, uh, the product because, uh, you do see both ends of the spectrum here, where y- there’s a number of companies that are offering a c- completely SaaS product, which is a very pretty dashboard, and it still relies on a human to watch this dashboard and, and to make sense of it, and it provides some insight. And then you get to the other side, which is almost a completely mechanical system, where it’s just SCADA data and, and you’re just picking up data for datas, uh, to have, basically. So you, you f- you sort of find that middle ground. The, the, the amount of software and technology that it’s in that space, though, must be huge, and what is the effect of AI bring to you? Does that help you more with just on the, on the, on the model side or just the, the statistical analysis of all the data that you have access to now?  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Let me make a, um, clarification. Because since, uh, we are, we are providing automation [00:16:00] in a world that is mission critical, right? So there’s no, a lot of, there’s no room for creativity or probabilistic approach. It all has to be the deterministic, right? Uh, so when we talk about automation, we’ve always been focused on deterministic automation, so rule-based, uh, automation, and that’s what we have implemented on top of the level of the SCADAs, right? So that’s, that’s the part where you know how to deal with an asset. You have the protocols. You want to understand how they work, but you want to have certainty of what happens if the turbine is on fault and the fault is related to the gearbox temperature and so on. So you wanna make sure that there’s a reset automatically executed only if the temperature of the gearbox is under X threshold. So this very deterministic approach. Uh, but we have, uh, something, um, very unique when we go on the, on the other side, when we go on the side of the REMs. Because we not only have the data of, of the assets, we [00:17:00] not only have statuses, performance, availability, uh, production. We also have the data of how these assets, assets have been operated, right? So we know how much fatigue they have received, how they’ve been operated, um, have they received curtailments or not? How many curtailments? What were the reasons? So we can actually have a 360, uh, degree of all the data, including all the control, not only how they’re performing, but also how we are operating those assets. And we believe that this is very unique because only if you have all these 360 data, then you can actually enhance what you have on top of that. And that is where AI come, comes in, right? So AI, AI is great in, um, helping our customers in doing root cause analysis, um, dealing with anomalies are not well, um, uh, procedure. Uh, there’s no course of action that is clear, that you don’t know. It’s, they’re not like too [00:18:00] frequent to, to have one. Uh, mixing different type of data. Like I mentioned before, you have, uh, market data, you have curtailments, you have, uh, commands to stop or start a turbine. You have a lot of information there, and you can put all together. Uh, also along with the CMMS information. Um- Lastly, they get– they can pull that together to do whatever they need, right? Uh, they can build with AI. You, you can now do your own dashboards. You can create your own APMs if you wanted to. Um, and I like to think about it, like, with these new tools that you can create disposable dashboards. And, uh, the concept is that it doesn’t matter how many different dashboards you have in an APM, but tomorrow you have a, a specific case. And I think it’s amazing that now with AI and the right, uh, data structure, you can now create a dashboard, and maybe it’s just for one use case, you know? And you just build it today, look at the data. You have [00:19:00] a, um, a case study, and that’s it. May– you never use it that again. The trick for being able to, to, to create this ecosystem where you analyze the data in a completely different way is that we have been working on how to structure the data so the AI is gonna be able to understand the data itself. So once that, that layer is structured in the right way, then you can actually create your own APMs or your own dashboards as you need to.  Allen Hall: That’s fascinating. So instead of just thinking of a turbine or a, a solar field as a asset where you’re trying to maximize performance necessarily, you’re looking at it from the marketplace, the, the, uh, the shutdowns, all the, the things that are contr- overriding the performance and trying to optimize performance in this market environment, which may be very turbulent, and I think for a lot of wind operators is very turbulent, uh, at, at the minute just [00:20:00] because of the nature of the electricity grid. So you’re, you’re then thinking about Having an AI tool to help you do investigative work on the particulars, not just the global data set of how this turbine globally operates, but the specifics, that’s fascinating because that allows you then to treat each turbine as its own separate power plant, in a sense, but also to, to think about lifetime issues and how to maintain that piece of equipment in a much more efficient way. That’s remarkable.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: And you have the– With AI, you also have the capabilities to automate all these type of analysis. So once you have a specific, uh, case to be analyzed, then you can automate that case to be analyzed in a daily basis, in a weekly basis. But that’s, uh, that, that’s, uh, that’s, uh, the world that we are moving to. Allen Hall: So a lot of what’s happening at Green Eagle at the moment is being automated and, and making it easy for, for customers to get [00:21:00]onboarded to the RSO system. What does that look like today? Uh, how do, how do I get onboarded? I have an asset of I got 1,000 turbines and a couple of solar fields. What does it look like to get me started in the RSO system with Green Eagle? Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Well, if you’re using our cloud, it’s, it’s gonna be a process of If you have a, a portfolio of 500 gigawatts, you can connect to our, to our cloud in a matter of like one month to two months So that’s something that you can do by yourself. So, um, you can create the assets, you can create the connectivity. The connectivity is done through IP filtering or VPN tunnels. All that is from the, from the dashboards, from, from the cloud. Um, then you can, based on the model directory, you can choose which is the, the assets that you want to connect to and through what channels, whether you have Modbus, OPC, and so on. Um, but that’s a- as complex as, as it gets. Really? It’s n- it’s not easy either, because [00:22:00] you need to understand what is a Modbus, what is a OPC, but that’s what it is. It, it’s not a matter of, like, installing something on site and doing tons of, uh, complex, uh, um, configurations. You don’t need, uh, SCADA engineers to be, like, building these dashboards tailor-made for your sites and, and all that is, is something from the past in o- in our opinion. Allen Hall: So you’re not on the telephone, or you’re not on a, a online chat with the Green Eagle team, because it’s, it’s, it’s– you’ve, you’ve done enough capacity now that you’ve automated this.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: You don’t have to.  Allen Hall: That’s amazing, because I think that’s the first worry for any operator that is gonna make that leap saying, “Hey, I need a little bit of help with this wind farm or this solar site,” is that, “Oh, I gotta be on the phone. I gotta– There’s a lot of im- of onboarding that has to happen,” and you’ve eliminated that.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Well, first, w- I, I totally understand this hesitation. Um, many of our customers are living in, in the, in the SCADA world, right? Uh, and which w- it was probably once a pain [00:23:00] to be configured to begin with, and I think half the sector is traumatized by these processes. So I, I tot- I totally understand that that pain is, is still there, right? I understand that. But what we’re trying to do is to, to move forward and say like, “Yeah, that, that’s gone. That was the past. Now we have a different way to do it.” And if you have, uh, either new assets that you need to connect or you even consider, like, moving to something more modern, something with more capabilities, something that comes with automation in place, uh, well, we have a solution that is painless. Allen Hall: Can I discuss, or can we go back and forth about the, the use of inverter-based resources, the solar and the wind sites, in terms of the, the move from grid following to grid forming and stabilizing the grid? I think there’s gonna be a lot of changes in the way that we operate these assets over the next year. Mostly, uh, I see action in the United States from the Iberian blackout about a year ago. They’re changing the thought process of how they want to run the grid so that the wind [00:24:00] and solar can keep the grid operating. Is– Are you involved in, are you involved in that aspect of how you operate those assets and how those inverters perform and, and configuring them to, to do more of the, of the grid forming and keeping the grid stable? Alejandro Cabrera Muños: I believe, to be honest, this is more related to power plant controllers and hybrid plants. So we have, we have made several projects with, um- With a mix, uh, of, uh, wind, solar, um, and storage. And wh- but what we’re doing here, uh, to be completely honest, we are not involved in the power plant controllers. Uh, we believe that that’s an electrical device and has, uh, uh, particularities that are out of us- our scope. But what we do is to, again, we connect to all asset classes, right? So we also w- connect to the PPCs, and we can monitor the PPC, the performance of the PPC, and we integrate that into everything else, right? So [00:25:00] that’s, for us, that’s another asset that we are connecting to, and that it make– it completes the view of, um, of sites that are now, like, almost like mini portfolios at, at the same place, right? ‘Cause you have, uh, different technologies, service stations. You have so many things that you need to orchestrate as well. So we’re, we’re w- moving into, into that area as well, uh, f- with the same concepts.  Allen Hall: B- so in a, in a sense, you’re able to monitor the health or status of the grid. Because you’re connected to so many of these assets, you have a pretty good understanding of how the grid is doing at any particular moment then. Alejandro Cabrera Muños: That’s right, yeah, especially in, in Spain, of course, ’cause we’re connected to, um, over 25 gigawatts at the, uh, at, in Spain, so.  Allen Hall: Alejandro, that’s amazing.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Over 25 gigawatts at the, uh, at, in Spain. So, so that’s s- it’s almost a third of the, of the installed capacity in Spain.  Allen Hall: Is there a movement in Spain to, to use technology like yours [00:26:00] to better monitor, regulate, control the, uh, wind and solar assets so- such that they stay engaged when, when the, the grid starts to, to vary a little bit? Has anybody asked you to, to be involved with that? Because it seems like you’re the right– you’re in the right place at the right time.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: The challenge of all these grid codes, uh, in, in most of cases is just that There are tons of curtailments that are coming from many different reasons, technical restrictions, market, uh, dispatch, um, other type of compliance. Um, the, the first challenge is to just execute on them, right? So they’re coming, you need to apply on the, on the sites. Um, that was the first, the first phase. But now that we have so many gigawatts connected, and that we’re also participating in balance mechanis- balance mechanisms and ancillary services, what we are seeing is that depending on how your assets perform and how quickly they are in regulating, um, you are gonna [00:27:00] have penalties or more, uh, profitability in the participation of the markets. So that’s, that’s extremely important as well ’cause it’s, it’s quite difficult to, to measure. But we have all the– Since everything is automated, you can always track, and you can statistically understand which of the sites are performing better or worse, in what cases, and therefore you have opportunities to improve the regulation and get more revenue from it. Allen Hall: Okay. So Green Eagle then is, because of the scale that it has at the minute, can look at the grid and is involved in, in the, the grid requirements, so to speak, of, of, uh, curtailments and what assets are operating when, and also the voltage control aspects and frequency control, which is the other part of it. You, because you’re, because you have so many assets in Spain and globally, you, it’s amazing the number of assets you have. You, you then can actually, one, see health of the grid, two, [00:28:00] provide insights to operators on what that looks like. I mean, real time you could, you can do that. And then are, are, are the regulators then coming to, to you asking advice on how these assets should perform? Because it does seem like you would be a tremendous resource on how the grid is actually doing on a larger scale from a renewables standpoint.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Yeah. Well, fortunately, the, the regulator has its own also, uh, system, so it’s, uh, redundant, right? So as far as we, we are working to, to have, uh, the best system in the world, but, but it will be a lot of, uh, responsibility for us to just have the whole grid depending on us. That would be a lot of weight. Uh, but in a, in a way, in, in a, in a way, it already depends on us, uh, effectively. So, so the pressure is, is there. We have, we have talked to them, um, since we have so many customers, um, in the, in the– at this level, uh, we have to be very quick in implementing new grid codes and new [00:29:00] regulatory, uh, compliance issues and, and so on. So that’s, that’s, um… It’s a challenge, but at the same time, it’s, it’s very exciting that we are always ahead in, in this regard.  Allen Hall: Right. If, if I was an operator and I had Green Eagle as one of my, uh, helpers in a sense, uh, assistants in a sense, that helps with the, the grid code i-in terms of, one, understanding it, and two, being able to implement the changes that are coming down all the time. You have a resource there that understands it from a larger perspective because you see it from multiple operators in multiple places trying to do the same thing. That’s a huge advantage instead of you trying to na-navigate or try to understand all those grid code changes and why they’re happening and what it means to you and how do you operate your assets. So you can provide a little bit of guidance there for the operators.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Of, of course. Um, uh, the main, the main value proposition that we can have here for anyone that wants to participate or be part of the Spanish market is that we already have all this figured out. So if you wanna start from the scratch [00:30:00] with, uh, with a SCADA, industrial SCADA, well, let’s, let’s go with, let’s go with that. You’re gonna be probably traumatized in the future, right? Uh, but with us you have an off-the-shelf product that is already compliance. It, uh, h- we have already set, uh, the system certified by the TSO in Spain. So we have already gone through this process so many times, and it’s off the shelf, so you don’t have to worry about any of this. And on top of that, you have the Peace of mind that if tomorrow there’s gonna be a, a, a new change in the, in the, in a new grid code, well, which most likely is gonna happen, um, soon, uh, we have to, we have to do it. Because we have already, uh, a lot of customers that, that, that need it. So for us, it’s actually also, uh, strategic to, to be ahead and be fast in implementing these grid codes. Allen Hall: That’s amazing. That’s such a huge resource for Spain and the rest of the world. Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, I, I know people who are listening to this podcast right now are thinking, “Okay, I haven’t heard of Green [00:31:00]Eagle, but now I’m interested, and I need to f- find out more.” How do they contact you? Where do they go first? What’s the best first step?  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Well, they can connect, uh, directly to me through LinkedIn, or they can just write to sales@greeneaglesolutions.com.  Allen Hall: Great, yeah, and Alejandro’s available on LinkedIn, so you can f- find him there. And we’ll put his contact information in the show notes to, so you have quick access. Alejandro, you gotta come back more often because the, the things that you’re doing with Green Eagle are amazing, and, uh, the, the scale is incredible. Congratulations on that. Uh, and, and I, I, I need you to come back and tell us what the next generation looks like because I know when you guys get ahold of AI and start thinking through some of these real challenging problems, Green Eagle will have solutions. So you’re welcome back anytime.  Alejandro Cabrera Muños: Super exciting to come back, uh, when you invite me. Thank you so [00:32:00] much.

Ørsted closes its European offshore sale to CIP and weighs a $1 billion exit from the US market. Plus MingYang commissions a 20 MW offshore turbine, and ZF’s plain bearings log 36 GW with no measurable wear. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host for today, Allen Hall, along with Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and Yolanda Padron. If you’re going to be in Houston for Clean Power 2026, mark Wednesday, June 3rd on your calendar. The Australian American Chamber of Commerce, Texas is hosting an invitation-only panel and networking reception with cocktails from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at the Houston Club, and I’ll be moderating. We’re bringing together Australian and US wind energy experts to compare notes on how two markets handle O&M, lightning risks, blade inspections, remote monitoring, and where operational gaps [00:01:00] are. The evening also marks the North American commercial launch of EOLOGIX-PING’s satellite-based lightning monitoring system, developed with Adelaide-based satellite IoT company, Myriota. So in joining me on the panel, our own Matt Stead, co-founder of EOLOGIX-PING, and Mark Norman, VP of Edge Solutions at Myriota, and Weather Guard’s Yolanda Padron. EOLOGIX-PING and Myriota have systems already deployed in Japan and Australia, and a little bit in the US here at Weather Guard, and they’re stepping into the North American market at American Clean Power with this advanced lightning monitoring product. So you’ll want to be there and see this new product introduced. It is an invitation-only event, so if you’re at Clean Power and want to be in the room, reach out to us on LinkedIn so we can get you on the list. Orsted finished selling off its European offshore wind business to Copenhagen [00:02:00]Infrastructure Partners, better known as CIP or as it’s a-affectionately called CIP. Now, Bloomberg reports the Danish company is exploring a sale of its US portfolio also, which includes a whole bunch of wind. It’s a decent amount of solar and battery storage in a deal that could bring more than about a billion dollars. Uh, the business generated more than one-fifth of Orsted’s total operating income just last year. Uh, meanwhile, uh, more than 50 US organizers are urging RWE CEO, Markus Kroeker, not to hand back over $1 billion in US offshore wind leases as part of a reported deal with the Trump administration. Uh, so the, the pattern is clear, everybody. European developers are being pushed towards the exit in the American market. The Ørsted situation’s been going on several months now. I, I think it’s pretty much common [00:03:00] knowledge, I would assume at this point. W- we’ve known for months, and I th- think a lot of people we’ve talked to have been saying Ørsted is prepping for a sale. The question is who? And the, the RWE getting rid of their offshore leases in the United States would be a little bit of a odd move. However, a billion dollars back in your bank account is probably a smart move today. So are the, the Germans and the Danish leaving America?  Yolanda Padron: Ørsted’s still keeping their offshore in the US, right?  Allen Hall: Yeah, I don’t know if they’ll be able to sell it off. They own it 100% at this point, right? All the partners have pulled out But I wonder if that’s on the auction block also. That it could be  Matthew Stead: So why? Why are they, why are they selling? I mean, there has to be a reason. I mean, do they have better use for the money elsewhere, or do they just have lost faith in the, the USA?  Allen Hall: It could be a combination of both, right? Both can be true at the same time. I do think the cash flow is an issue [00:04:00] for renewable energy companies at the minute, so if they can get some money back into the coffers and to get ready for the next big run of development, they probably should do it now. But things, especially it does seem a little bit on the slow side on the re- renewable development, except in the UK where it’s going crazy.  Do you think then that they’re looking for American people to sell it to?  Allen Hall: Or Canadian. If Ørsted sells their onshore business, uh, to CIP, it still remains in Danish hands, so it wouldn’t necessarily be a, uh, removal of the Danes from America, not, not quite. Matthew Stead: Yeah. I’m just a bit confused why, you know, why, you know, why would it, um, attract a good price at the moment? So I would’ve thought, you know, if it was me, I would’ve take the long-term view and just hang onto it.  Allen Hall: Well, the, the tax credit’s already built into those businesses, right? I, I at least that’s what I would assume, that the, the tax credits are still [00:05:00] available on a number of the Ørsted sites. They’re not that old. A lot of the wind sites are not that old, so you could gain that tax advantage. It may make sense. It may be a, a Berkshire Hathaway or somebody like that may, may jump into the mix.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and maybe because there’s not so much opportunity for new developments at the moment, that might be maybe it’s appealing for that reason, that there’s, yeah, not, not so many wind opportunities around, and companies want wind in their portfolios, so. Allen Hall: Or data centers like we just saw with NextEra and Dominion. The, the drive for, for data centers, uh, is pushing the, the power demand, and if you could buy wind, solar, and battery all together, most of it kind of co-located, you could put some data centers in Texas ’cause a vast majority of that Ørsted fleet is in a place where you could plant a data center right next to it. Maybe that’s, maybe that’s the thought. Uh, if they saw NextEra and Dominion join hands, maybe there’s another partnership in the mix. That would be really interesting. Maybe it’s Elon. Maybe [00:06:00] SpaceX or, uh, Tesla could just buy Ørsted’s onshore wind business. That would be a- amazing.  Matthew Stead: I thought they were going into space. Why would they be bothering with the Earth?  Allen Hall: You gotta power the rockets before you launch them, right? You get so-  Matthew Stead: gotta get some power from somewhere. Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC-NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC-NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions[00:07:00] China has commissioned what is being called the world’s largest offshore wind turbine. It’s a 20-megawatt machine built by MingYang Smart Energy, installed off the coast of China in the South China Sea. The structure stands about 240 meters tall with blades around 128 meters long. That’s a pretty good-sized blade. And it’s rated to survive gusts up to 80 meters per second. But the real story is what researchers are watching after the turbine starts up. Early reports say that the rotor that is massively big will create measurable changes in local air currents and temperature distribution. At this scale, offshore wind creating a physical footprint that scientists want to measure and We have seen this effect here at Weather Guard Lightning Tech, watching storms go through the big wind farms [00:08:00] in the United States. So you can actually see storm behaviors change because of the quantity of turbines, and the turbines are getting to be high enough with the hub heights approaching 100 meters. But nothing as big as a 20 megawatt machine out on the ocean. It’s mixing the t- the, the air quite a bit, changing the temperature. Uh, is this something that climatologists are looking at, Rosemary, or, or, or watching closely, particularly with the, uh, fish life and sea life around the wind turbines?  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. My thing with MingYang is that they’re always, like, you only ever hear about them ’cause they’re announcing the biggest something, right? Um, that’s like the extent of it. It’s not like you hear about, oh, there’s a wind farm near you and it’s gonna have MingYang turbines in it. You never hear that. You only hear about they’ve got the biggest, and now next year they’ve got the new biggest, the biggest, the biggest, the biggest. And, uh, it’s like I know that they do actually make some, like, a lot of turbines. I think they’re in the, we mentioned last week, they’re in the top five manufacturers, um, mostly or maybe [00:09:00] pretty much entirely for the Chinese market. Um, so it’s not like I think they don’t make anything. But I do think it’s quite easy to announce the biggest something. This announcement is also like, yeah, okay, but is it real? Like it’s the, it’s a big, it’s a really big turbine. It’s going pretty high, but like offshore, um, there are, I think, onshore turbines being announced that are gonna go as high or higher because, you know, onshore, um, turbines have much taller towers than, than offshore. So I actually don’t think that it probably is a record for the tallest, like, tip that’s scraping. This is a thing that’s always happened, and sure, that’s interesting to have a look at and see if it has any local impact. It’s not like it’s, it’s not creating energy, right? It’s not gonna warm up, um, the, the planet. I mean, it’s, yeah, taking energy out of the, the air and then converting it to electricity. Um, so overall you’re gonna end up with the same amount of, of energy. But yeah, could be interesting to study, study what’s happening specifically.  Matthew Stead: I think it’s a so what question. You know, so what? I mean, I can sneeze and [00:10:00] I’d change the local environment, but who cares if I sneeze and change the local environment? You know, the, you know, the weather is inherently turbulent and, you know- There’s mixing and there’s all sorts of stuff naturally occurring. Yeah, my question is, so what?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting in terms of, like, wakes of wind turbines and, you know, there’s, uh, people are researching that more because it’s not well enough understood, I think, for some of the really big offshore wind regions where there’s heaps of different wind farms and, you know, like, you’re gonna wanna know if you’ve got a win- an existing wind farm or you’re planning one, and then they sell, um, rights to build one immediately upstream of you, then, you know, you’re gonna wanna understand how, how all that local atmospheric stuff is, is happening exactly. Um, but yeah, like, it’s not, it’s not quite new and it’s not, yeah, like you said, it’s not unique to wind turbines. Um, so yeah, it is, like, slightly interesting, I would say. 5 out of 10 interesting.  Allen Hall: How much time should we spend on contrails? [00:11:00] Because we spent a good 20 minutes before we started this podcast talking about contrails, which is a one or maybe a negative one on the scale of should I follow this? Rosemary Barnes: How interesting is the fact that air travel is contributing to climate change? How interesting is that on a scale of one to 10?  Allen Hall: Zero.  Matthew Stead: Eight.  Allen Hall: It’s like the, it’s like the cow argument, right?  Rosemary Barnes: Allen doesn’t care about climate change. That’s okay.  Allen Hall: You asked me to put it on a ranking of where it is in importance. It’s, it’s nowhere near m- even a five.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So Yves said zero. Matt said eight. What about you, Yolanda? How, how interesting is the fact that air travel impacts climate change?  Yolanda Padron: I think it’s, like, a six.  Rosemary Barnes: Six. Okay. And so did you know that, um, airplanes are 2.5% of the world’s emissions, um, come from air, air travel? And did you know that I think it’s [00:12:00] 4% of the world’s warming comes from air travel? Of the warming, two-thirds of the warming that is caused by air travel or airplanes, uh, could be freight as well, it’s not to do with CO2. So some of that is, you know, like other, um, gases like NOx is a pretty potent greenhouse gas. Contrails are the biggest single component, the single biggest factor causing warming from, um, from air travel. And it’s not, it’s not necessary. You know, every airplane doesn’t create contrails in every trip. It’s, it’s a small number. Like, it’s a pretty small number of trips that are making contrails, and if we can better understand how like, what are the factors that lead to a contrail being formed or not, then we can avoid them and, you know, get rid of a, a percent or two of the world’s global warming. I think that’s just really huge.  Matthew Stead: What would you do about it, Rosie?  Rosemary Barnes: There’s a couple of solutions I know that other people are working on that sound very interesting to me. So the first is that if you change the fuel, like, [00:13:00] um, to sustainable aviation fuel, like a, a biofuel, some of those that have been tested also produce less contrails. I don’t know the exact reason why. Would be interesting to find out. That’s one thing. But secondly, um, if you can get good data about, like, very local atmospheric conditions and, you know, let the world’s airplane fleet can communicate with each other and some AI processing in real time, you can make small changes to your flight path to avoid making contrails, and yeah, you get, um, a small increase in, in f- fuel burn, I guess, from deviating from the most efficient route, but a big, big inc- um, decrease in contrails. Uh, so I think both of those are really promising solutions.  Allen Hall: It’s not that easy It isn’t like every airplane’s out there changing its altitude to keep away from creating contrails. There’s whole systems, thousands of people working at any one moment to keep airplanes up in the air. So it, it’s not something you just willy-nilly say, [00:14:00] “AI can adjust my altitude or my flight plan to deviate so I can prevent contrails.” It’s not that easy. It’s actually a huge undertaking, and it may end up burning more fuel.  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I mean, it’s an incredibly complex system to keep airplanes up and not colliding. Um, I believe it’s not centrally planned. It’s not like you’re not logging your whole flight path any- anymore. I, I listened to a podcast about this the other day, and in the past you used to log your entire flight plan and not deviate from it, but now it, it’s done a bit on the fly. So I’m sure that there are already hundreds or thousands of factors that an aircraft computer is taking into account, um, when it’s figuring out exactly where it’s gonna go, and this would be another bit of complexity. I don’t, I don’t think it’s easy, otherwise we’d already be doing it. But I think it’s, it’s promising. And I think it’s easier than making hydrogen airplanes, for example. I think it’s easier than electrifying airplanes. And the fact of it is that even if you do [00:15:00] have sustainable aviation fuel, if it’s still making contrails, it’s still causing warming. So if you wanna actually s- solve, uh, you know, heating from flying, then you have to, you have to tackle the contrail part of the problem. It’s the biggest, it’s the biggest chunk on its own, bigger than CO2.  Matthew Stead: So did we get here by talking about possible contrails from wind turbines? Is that what we were talking about?  Rosemary Barnes: No. It was because Allen was saying before that we were gonna go off the rails, and he’s like, “Oh, you know what? In no time we’ll be talking about contrails,” like using it as an example of a tinfoil hat-wearing person. And I’m like, “Actually, that is a tinfoil hat that I do like to wear,” the contrails one. Um, not because I think the government is controlling me, uh, with with, you know, targeted hor- hormone or chemical releases via contrails, but because of the global warming potential.  Matthew Stead: Could a, a really tall wind turbine create contrails? What, what’s the physics behind that?  Allen Hall: [00:16:00] It’s just, um, water, right? So you’re just condensing water and shoving it out the back. When you’re burning hydrocarbons, it’s one of the byproducts, right? It’s like in, when, in an internal combustion engine, you see water dripping out the tailpipe. It’s this very similar kind of thing. Uh, so how much water comes out is dependent upon somewhat the fuel, as Rosie’s pointed out, so you can slightly change it, but a lot of it has to do with the temperature, altitude, pressure moisture content of the air, all those different factors play into it. So you’d have to have, in order to go look at it, you’d have to have a bunch of sensors on the airplane, which, which the aircraft may have some of them, but probably not enough to determine if they’re creating contrails besides looking out the window to see what’s coming out on the backside of the engine. Matthew Stead: A wind turbine could not create contrails. The pressure differential and the, the vapor pressure-  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s not enough to, you’re, you’re not, you’re not changing temperatures enough, [00:17:00] right? So you, you basically have to change the dew point. That’s the way I would think about it. You have to change the dew point somehow, which I guess you could do maybe by a degree or so locally, you may be able to, to change it, and maybe you could. Um, well, we have seen tip vortices, right? So tip vortices, you have seen these contrails off the, the tips of, of, of aircraft wings.  Rosemary Barnes: But are they durable? You know, ’cause like, yeah, you see tip vortices off, yeah, off wing, wingtips, off wind turbine tips as well. But I don’t think they stay in the air after, you know, they, um, you can see them, and then they dissipate usually. Allen Hall: Yeah, it, it depends. You’ll see it when aircraft land quite a bit. Depends on what the temperature, humidity is at that particular moment, but th- those will, those will hang around a little bit  Rosemary Barnes: But I mean, certainly you can, you can, um, cause droplets to freeze from a wind turbine being there. That’s how they get iced up, is that their… Or either their water was super cooled to begin with and it just needs a, a surface to latch onto so that the crystal can, [00:18:00] um, form or also, yeah, like, I mean, in the aerodynamics there is that point between where the air goes over and under and you, um, sta- stagnation or-  Allen Hall: Stagnation point?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So you can, um, you, you could get some freezing there. Allen Hall: You can create cold zones.  Rosemary Barnes: I, as far as I know, all that stuff is just causing ice to build up on the blade. I don’t think that it’s, um… Yeah. And anyway, even if it did, like even if you did affect the, um, you know, have some ice particles forming in the, um, the wake then it’s just going to, or I don’t know, get hit the next time the, the, the blade goes through or, yeah, fa- fall out I would think ’cause it’s quite close to the ground  Allen Hall: but- Just to tie into what Rosemary’s saying, although I think wasting time on contrails is not worth the effort, I do think meteorologists do not do enough work on big changes that are happening to the planet in regards to, like, renewable energy is one of them, like wind turbines. I [00:19:00] haven’t seen a lot of work done about are wind turbines changing the temperature locally or not. I mean, they- I’ve seen some top level things, solar panels, but the same thing could be seen about shipping.  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I mean shipping, shipping was, shipping was, um, cooling the planet until we, um, brought in restrictions on how much, um, sulfur emissions that you could, you could make. But can I use this to actually plug a, um, a, a pro- a collaborative project that we’re about to start where actually, uh, this is quite specific to Australia, to Queensland and Northern New South Wales. We’ve got a study, uh, collaborative study from a bunch of wind farms in that area and getting some academic researchers involved to look at how, like very detailed how lightning is in that region. And one of the questions that we’re gonna look at is what, h- how has the, um, the presence of wind farms, like when wind farms are built, how has that affected the local lightning, um, area? [00:20:00] So we’re gonna be able to answer, uh, you know, like to what extent have these wind farms caused increases in In lightning  Allen Hall: Or decreases  Rosemary Barnes: Or decreases. I’d, I, oof, yeah. I, I’d be surprised if it was decreases, and I will say, like, yeah, that area of Queensland, northern New South Wales, um, you know, they get kind of tropical storms, um, heaps and heaps of lightning, you know, hundreds hundreds of, um, strikes in a single storm sometimes, you know, and, you know, in one wind farm. But even if you think, like, uh, down in Victoria, New South Wales and Victoria, where you look at a lightning map and there should be very little lightning there, there are certain sites that are actually having huge problems with lightning, like way more strikes than you would expect based on the map, and I think that partly that’s also ’cause it just varies locally. But the other thing is, like, a l- a lot more of really damaging strikes. It is something that’s the world needs to do more of, is looking into, like, really local lightning, understanding how the wind farm is interacting with the lightning, causing lightning, how it differs from place to place. [00:21:00] I’m really hoping that, yeah, this, this one study that we’re working on now, and anyone who has a wind farm in that area, Queensland, northern New South Wales, if you wanna be involved, get in touch. The more people involved, the cheaper it is. But I think that that’s definitely something that can improve how lightning protection systems are, are designed, if we just know, like, what’s, what’s happening. ‘Cause there aren’t great links between OEMs doing the design and people in the field experiencing damage. Like, they don’t talk. Even when it’s the same company, you know, if it’s Vestas or GE that designed the turbine and is now servicing the turbines, they, they don’t necessarily talk to each other as much as, um, would be ideal.  Allen Hall: Using the EOLOGIX-PING lightning sensors, we just completed a study over a five-year period, uh, just about that subject. Rosemary Barnes: Where, where did you do that?  Allen Hall: In the States.  Rosemary Barnes: And will you be publishing the results and sending a, a letter to Vestas and GE and Siemens and whoever else and send them a letter, “Attention lightning expert”? [00:22:00] Matthew Stead: We’re probably just gonna put it on the website.  Rosemary Barnes: But is there even a, a, a conference, a, a conference for wind turbines and lightning? Con- considering it’s, like, one of the number one O&M things, like we’re-  Matthew Stead: There’s one in Melbourne next year in February.  Rosemary Barnes: I wasn’t attempting to, um, set the stage for, uh, this is why everyone has to come to our event. I mean, it, it, it’s so strange to me that there isn’t just, you know, like, a big conference every year. I mean, it could be every two years where all of the univ- like there’s heaps of people researching it, heaps of people working on designing on it, heaps of people working on operating it, repairing it when it doesn’t work, and, um-  Allen Hall: I think they’re looking at it from a very, uh, local scale And looking at a turbine taking a lightning strike and the things you can do to reduce damage or what the, the physics are locally, ’cause we don’t understand all that much about lightning, honestly. However, on a, on a larger scale, which is what the effort we’re working on right now, is that we’re looking at several states that are right in the thunderstorm alley and where [00:23:00] there’s a lot of wind turbines, thousands and thousands of wind turbines. What you see is, uh, a real change in the, in the weather patterns and in lightning, but it depends on the time of year. And having the EOLOGIX-PING lightning sensors on gives us a better sense of the number of strikes that are occurring, where they’re occurring on the wind farms. Uh, o- otherwise, all the other services that you could use wouldn’t be nearly as accurate. A lot of false positives.  Rosemary Barnes: But I wanna say, like, I think you’re so right that lightning it- it’s very local, like, and s- lightning behaves differently depending where you are. It dep- dep- behaves differently or it affects your turbine differently depending on what kind of LPS you’ve got. But the problem is that it’s not like there’s, um, you know, a catalog of LPSs and you’re like, “This one suits the lightning in Japan, and this one suits the lightning in Queensland.” It’s one– Y- if you want a GE turbine, this is the, it comes with a certain type of LPS, and the same with, with Vestas and, you know, ev- every other manufacturer. And they’ve all, I’m sure, got types of lightning that [00:24:00] they are better or worse suited to, but the information is, is certainly not out there for someone who’s choosing a turbine, and I don’t think that it’s actually properly understood by, by anyone. Because, like, who’s measuring all of the characteristics that you would need to know to design the LPS better? Almost no one. Most of the people doing that in the world are probably, yeah, on this podcast today. Um, but it’s, uh… And, and when they are being measured, is it being communicated back to every OEM so they can know? Like, of course it’s, it’s not.  Allen Hall: I’ll give you a good example because it happened over the past week or two. Looking at a wind turbine blade that had some damage to it, and the question was, was it caused by lightning? That was the question. And that’s a really good question. So I thought, “Oh, this will be easy,” because there’s gonna be a plethora of- lightning test data reports talking about testing of this particular kind of aluminum mesh on fiberglass surfaces, and [00:25:00] there really is not much. I was shocked by it. So I always think like if, if I can’t put my fingers on it readily, then what is a blade engineer or a site supervisor or someone who owns an asset’s gonna do?  Rosemary Barnes: I saw a presentation at Wind Europe last year or whenever I went, when I met with, with you both, probably both of you there, um, uh, that Polytech did where they had done some fatigue testing, um, of copper mesh and its lightning, um, protecting capabilities. And they did f- they, so they, you know, put some mesh into, um, fatigue testing, I, I think, or they, they damaged it a bit with a bit fatigue, some micro cracks and stuff. And they just did find that it heated up a lot after that. Um, you know, after it was a bit damaged, they were getting like real hot spots. And so then you’re gonna start to see laminate damage, um, in the, the area underneath that. So yeah, I, I think that more, more, like it’s a, it’s a good step that we’re now thinking [00:26:00] of, you know, protecting better than what we used to do with just, you know, one receptor in the, the tip and a cable, especially, you know, throw in carbon fiber and you, you know, make a second electrically conductive path and have flashover and stuff. It’s really great that, you know, we’ve evolved beyond that design, but it’s not finished yet. Like th- all those designs are new. There’s a lot of them out there. It sound like everyone’s like, “Oh, it’s, you know, we don’t have to worry if it’s got mesh over the whole blade.” It’s like, okay, maybe you don’t have to worry. Maybe, maybe you do. We, we kind of have to, have to keep on monitoring those for a few years and sharing the information.  Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit [00:27:00] peswind.com today. In the current issue of PES Wind Magazine, there are a number of great articles. If you haven’t received your copy, you should just go to peswind.com and where you can read it and download a copy. Well, uh, this issue has an article from ZF and talking about gearboxes. And as we all know, inside every gearbox there are bearings and surfaces. Those tend to be the weak links when things break. And for decades, the industry has used roller bearings and, uh, the same kind basically you find in other machines. Uh, they work, but they do wear out. And how many times have you seen bearings, roller bearings wear out inside of gearboxes? Quite a bit. So– And they, they, they break down, they go offline. It’s, it’s a big problem. But ZF Wind Power says it has cracked the code with its hydrodynamic plain bearings. The company has already installed 36 gigawatts of gearboxes [00:28:00] using this technology, and they say field inspections show no measurable wear. Uh, the next generation, uh, which is a single film design, is heading to production in 2027. So ZF uses a different technique to keep their gearboxes running for a long time, which is, uh, it’s a simple device mechanically, but it is quite complicated in the way you have to design materials. Uh, basically plain bearings are what’s used in, in internal combustion engine around camshafts and things of that sort. But designing those and making sure you have the right materials is the trick, Matthew, and you’ve been around cars for quite a while. It’s, it’s the right approach if you can make it work, and it looks like ZF has done a really good job of making these, uh, bearing services work.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, it sounds like a, a perfect, uh, innovation. I, I heard about this the first time, I think it was a couple of years ago. And, and like you said, Allen, um, you know, cars for the [00:29:00] last 100 years or so have, have been using journal bearings. I probably need to fact check that one. It may not be 100 years yet, but definitely cars from a long time ago have been using these, um, these bearings. Um, I, I think, uh, one question is, though, around condition monitoring. You know, how do you actually monitor the condition of the, the s- the surfaces? Um, you know, with a traditional roller bearing, you can use, you know, vibration techniques. I’m not aware of as many condition monitoring techniques for, for the journal bearings. Um, perhaps, um, obviously the oil, oil particle and, you know, checking the oil quality, et cetera, et cetera. But, um, that might be where the gap might occur. But You know, if they’re lasting, if they’re not degrading, um, there’s no moving parts, um, yeah, great  Allen Hall: The issue is lubrication, right? Because you’ve got basically two well-designed flat metal surfaces that you have to provide lubrication to, and those two surfaces are moving relative to one another. The lubrication [00:30:00] matters ’cause you’re literally riding on a very, very thin layer of lubricant. So making sure the lubricant gets in there, that it’s, it’s clean, and it’s always available, uh, is the trick. That’s why in today’s world, a lot of internal combustion engines can go several hundred thousand miles in a vehicle because the lubrication systems have gotten so much better over the last 50, 60 years. And ZF is probably using something very similar, where the, the technology has gotten better and the metallurg- the metallurgy has gotten way better, and control of that. Because the, the bearing surface really matters, and there’s two pieces to it, right? You got this rotating– To simplify it, you got a rotating shaft, and then you have this bearing surface that that shaft sits on. The, the rotating shaft is gonna be made out of something relatively hard, where the bearing surface is gonna be made out of a mixture of metals that is a little bit soft. So if anything goes wrong, that bearing surface, that little race right there, uh, will wear, [00:31:00] and you can replace it. But if kept lubricated and cleaned and proper, that will run dang near forever, as ZF has proven. Matthew Stead: I think it’s the starting load. I think it’s when it’s at stationary and then starts. So I’m getting that initial lubrication. From my understanding, that’s where the, where the challenge lies. And, you know, obviously in a combustion engine in a vehicle, it’s starting and stopping all the time. So, um, but I just wonder, are the loads higher? Um, how does that occur in a, in a actual, um, gearbox on a, a turbine?  Allen Hall: Right. It’s not like a main, uh, shaft bearing, right? The– It’s, it’s in a gearbox. You have a lot of planetary gears and a lot of rotating com- pieces there But the, I think the trick is, one, understanding what’s happening load-wise, and hydrodynamic bearings can have some issues if things are twisting in weird ways. So a gearbox is probably the right place to do this technique because of it’s a [00:32:00] controlled environment necessarily.  Matthew Stead: Alignment.  Allen Hall: Yeah. So you can, you can control how the, the loads are carried internally to it, which would make it last a lot longer. S- because roller bearings and, and all of the complexities around that, uh, we’ve seen those fail so many times inside of wind turbines because it’s hard to control everything about that. Al- although they, they can be extremely durable, I would say ZF is onto something in, in terms of delivering a gearbox that can actually run longer using, uh, good engineering. That’s what it is. It’s just really good engineering. So if you haven’t seen this issue of PES Wind, you should download it today. Go to peswind.com. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn. And don’t forget to subscribe so you [00:33:00] never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. So for Rosie, Yolanda, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Allen covers how private equity firm Energy Capital Partners ended up owning wind blade factories, TPI Composites’ bankruptcy, and the decades-long GE Vernova relationship behind the rescue. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Speaker: Happy Monday, everyone. Well, there is a company most people have never heard of quietly positioning itself at the very center of America’s energy future. Its name is Energy Capital Partners. It’s a private equity firm headquartered up in Summit, New Jersey. But to understand how ECP ended up owning wind blade factories, you have to start with gas turbines and a power company called Calpine. See, back in 2001, Calpine placed one of the most audacious turbine orders ever recorded, 203 GE gas turbines. enough to power 50,000 megawatts of base load generation. GE did [00:01:00] not just sell Calpine turbines. The two companies co-developed power plants together. GE co-owned facilities. Calpine held options to buy them back. It was a less a vendor relationship and more of a marriage. In 2018, Energy Capital Partners bought Calpine, All 77 power plants, 26,000 megawatts of generation capacity, and every long-term GE service agreement that came with it. And for the next seven years, ECP was GE’s single most consequential private sector gas turbine customer in the Western Hemisphere. That relationship, built on decades of iron and service contracts, would soon reach far beyond gas. Because on the other side of the energy world, a very different kind of company was falling apart, and that was TPI Composites. For years, the world’s largest independent maker of wind turbine blades. [00:02:00] facilities in Iowa, in Mexico, in India, and in Turkey. More than 9,600 employees worldwide. But the cracks were forming long before anyone said bankruptcy. First came the debt. TPI had borrowed heavily from Oaktree Capital Management and by the time the end arrived, the company owed Oaktree $476 million, secured against substantially all of its assets. Then came the customers. Nordex walked away from its Matamoros facility, shutting it down at the end of the second quarter of 2024. Then came customs. US Customs and Border Protection launched a review of TPI’s Mexico facilities under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. TPI maintained its supply chain had no connection to forced labor, but the law did not care about confidence. Cared about proof, and while TPI worked to prove its innocence, a substantial portion of its Mexico-made blades could not cross the border into [00:03:00] the United States. The backlog told the story in numbers. At the end of 2024, there were $237 million in orders. One year later, $114 million in orders, cut nearly in half. On August 11th of last year, TPI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, delisted from NASDAQ about eight days later. Now, when a company heads into bankruptcy, the first thing it has to solve is a very human problem. How do you keep the people who know how to run the place from walking out the door? Well, TPI’s board had an answer. Two months before the bankruptcy filing, the compensation committee approved retention bonuses for key executives, paid in cash within 30 days. The CEO, $1,225,000. The CFO, $518,000. The COO, [00:04:00] $487,000. And of course, the general counsel, $435,000. But there was one condition, you had to stay through restructuring. If you left early, you had to give it all back. Well, they stayed, at least most of them have. In the months that followed, TPI sold off its Turkish operations. Vestas moved quickly, claiming the India and Matamoros plants for roughly $24 million. And then the phone rang in Summit, New Jersey. GE Vernova needed its blade supply secured. It had a decades-long relationship with the firm on the other end of that call, a relationship forged not in composite factories, but in gas turbine halls. Through a newly formed entity called ECP Blade Holdings, Energy Capital Partners is acquiring TPI’s remaining North American assets , plants up in Newton, Iowa, down in Juarez, Mexico, for about $20 [00:05:00] million. The management team that had guided TPI through its darkest chapter came with it. And embedded in the transaction was a five-year supply agreement requiring GE Vernova to direct a defined share of its blade procurement exclusively to ECP-operated facilities. Well, if this deal had fallen apart, GE Vernova itself was contractually bound as a backup buyer, obligated to step in and at least purchase the Iowa plant for $21 million. GE Vernova was simultaneously ECP’s partner, its customer , and in this case, its buyer of last resort. Two companies, one relationship stretching back about 25 years through gas turbine orders, power plant co-ownership, long-term service contracts, and now wind blade factories rescued from bankruptcy court. A company laid low by debt, customs blockades, and lost contracts, its people paid to [00:06:00] stay, its factory sold for pennies on the dollar, and now rising again under new ownership to supply the very turbines powering America’s AI-driven energy future And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 1st of June 2026. Have a great week

Pete Andrews from EchoBolt joins to discuss ultrasonic bolt inspection, the Bolt Wave device, and blade stud defect detection. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It’s a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it’s, yeah, really nice to be here.  Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah. Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who’s Pete? Give me Pete’s phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we’re here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00] You’re a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it’s a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today’s world.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we’re a uk, um, SME, there’s a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe. Yeah. But increasingly we’ve done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then. Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they’re static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it’s a real big efficiency boost for wind operators.  Joel Saxum: Well, you’re doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we’re gonna do all of this. It’s like, let’s work on the ones that actually need to be worked on. Let’s do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we’re looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems. So I know that you guys said you’re, you’re focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It’s you’re transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces. Like there’s so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, as as you said, that there’s really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on. The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts,  Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely.  Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people. If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor. So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don’t have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you’d have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there’s something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving. By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology  Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is. And I’m watching this go on. I’m like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we’re tighten 10% this year, and they’ll come back and see how it’s going. That’s a little insane, right, because you’re just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we’re wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago. You don’t need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I’ll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it’s shrunk, that probably means it’s not tensioned properly. That’s a huge advantage because you can’t physically see it. And I know I’ve seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that’s where equitable comes in because you’re actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big. Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that’s been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we’re based on a non-destructive testing technique. It’s an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it’s crack detection, people have time, they can be, it’s a very precision measurement. People have to be trained in the wind industry. We’re trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It’s a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn’t delivered on the, on the speed that’s needed to be efficient in wind. And that’s where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we’ve, that we’ve developed over the last. 18 months, let’s say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It’s through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it’s a bit like using the camera app on your phone. You know, you’re just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened. They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it’s sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They’re bolted joints.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right? Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn’t, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you’re in. Use are short of technicians. But we’re seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well. Right. You don’t need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. ’cause there’s a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that’s a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course. Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you’re getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that’s looking at it and you don’t have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things. They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that’s the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you’re making it happen.  Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it’s a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware. Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn’t really something we could put in the hands of a customer.  Joel Saxum: Yeah.  Pete Andrews: Which meant Ebot scale was limited to what our own team could go and do, and regionally as well. You know, so we’re UK based. Probably 60% of our customers are uk, but now we have this Northern Europe offshore wind is obviously on our doorstep, but then increasingly we’ve done more and more in North America, so we’ve probably been to five or six sites now in North America and expect that to be a growth market because we can, we can now ship the devices over there, give some virtual training help. Uh, [00:10:00] people set themselves up and then that opens up that market, you know, so it’s been a real change in strategy for us, but has allowed us to have far more impact than we otherwise would just try to be a pure service.  Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the big problem in the states of a minute, which are the root bushing or inserts that are loose in some blades. When you lose that pushing, you also lose the tension on the bolt that can be measured. Is that something you’re getting involved with quite a bit now because of just trying to determine how many bolts are affected and, and where we are on the safety scale of can we run this turbine or not? Is that something that EE bolt’s been looking into? Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I’d say there’s sort of two halves of what we do. There’s the, there’s the bulk wholesale monitoring of. Typically static connections to eliminate this routine retitling where it’s not needed typically, typically. But then we have these edge cases of certain [00:11:00] connections and certain platforms that have known bolt integrity problems, and we are working with clients to really, um, manage those integrity risks. Blade stud is an absolute classic, you know, sort of, I think almost every turbine OEM on some, if not all of their platforms has got. Embedded risk into their blades, pitch bearing connections. Um, so yeah, exactly as you said, our customers are using the technology for two things really. One is to ensure the bolts have been tightened to the preload that was specified or the target window. And quite often we find there is an opportunity to increase the preload and therefore increase the resistance to fatigue failure. So. You know, particularly on older sites where the bolts perhaps not in the condition they were on day one. Well, they definitely won’t be. Um, when people have gone and retti them, they haven’t got back to where they, they should be.[00:12:00] So we can prove that and increase a bit of that resilience, but then also start to look for the segments around the joint where, um, the bolt might start loosening or failures are occurring, and find areas where they can really hone in. And actively manage risk. And that sort of leads to what we’ve decided to do for the next year, particularly with Blade Stud in mind, is evolve this technology. So whilst it’s also measuring the elongation, we will do a defect scan at the same time. So you’ll monitor your blade stu, um, connection and we’re hoping that we can set the device to flag to you there and then. We believe this bulk has got a defect while you’re here, get it changed out before it fails and, and all the knock on problems, um, from there. Joel Saxum: So what you’re just pointing to there is a, is a workflow, right? So to me that is typical [00:13:00] of some of the amazing, innovative companies in the UK that I’ve run into throughout my career. And that is, you’re a group of SMEs, you know, bolted connections. That’s what you do, right? But then you’re like, hey. If there’s a tool, we could make a tool that would make our lives a bit easier, then it’s like, well, we could make the entire industry’s lives a little bit easier as well. So let’s iterate on that. And now you’re able to send these kits around the world to look at these things. Hey, you have a problem with this specific model. We can help you with this because we know the failure mode and we know how to look for it. Let’s do that for you. Also here, you’re doing bolt bulk measurements. We got that for you. But it all kind of flows back to the fact that Echo Bolt is a team. A bolted connection, SMEs that are making tools and being able to also provide consulting if need be. Yeah. Right. Um, to, to an entire industry. And I think that, um, this is my take on it, right? Wind is stop number one. I think you guys are gonna do a fantastic year, but there’s a lot of, uh, opportunity out there in bolted [00:14:00] connections as well. Allen Hall: A tremendous amount blade bolts being broken from defects in the crystalline structure. What appears to be a more. Rapidly developing issue across fleets that I’ve seen. I went to a farm this summer and the number of blade bolts that were there on the table that were broken on the conference room table was And the whiteboard office. Yeah. Yeah. This one,  Joel Saxum: this one.  Allen Hall: Your hard head is not gonna protect you from this one. It’s, it’s, it was this, um, I couldn’t imagine the amount of time they were spending hunting these things down. And of course, the only way they were finding ’em was they were broken. You like to catch ’em before they break because it becomes  Joel Saxum: a safety risk. Just not too long ago we saw an insurance case where there’s an RCA going on and it is pointing at an entire tower came down. Right. And it is pointing at a mid, mid tower section bolted connection. How often do you guys run into those problems? Or are you contacted by insurance companies or anything like that to, to take a peek at those? Pete Andrews: We haven’t done anything directly for insurance [00:15:00]companies, but we have been engaged by. Engineering consultancies that are doing RCA type activities. Okay. Um, things like at the end of defect liability periods mm-hmm. A customer has, has seen, they’ve had a lot of, uh, issues from an OEM, maybe an OE EM has offered a modification or an upgrade, assessing whether that upgrade is actually solved the problem or not. We’ve got involved in, um, but the tower. Issue specifically. It’s actually very rare we find, um, problems with tower connections, but where we do is often where they haven’t achieved good flange flatness, ah, during installation or the bolts have been, let’s say, left out in the elements for a period and lubrication has been, has deteriorated before the bolt’s been installed. So there are cases out there, but what I would say is. [00:16:00] To think about your whole life cycle, so ensure the bolt’s installed correctly and we can help with that with a QA to say, yes, this torque or tightening method has got you to the load that you want. Do some through life monitoring, but often if you install it correctly, it will it’s operational life. You will have very little concern. But then in the UK market, we’re increasingly getting involved again at the end of life, right? Life extension where life extension turbines are 20, 25 years old. How does an operator make a decision to carry on running without replacing all bots? Um, and that’s where increasingly we being asked to use the technologist just to say, actually the joint is fine. The bolts have run in a good, um, operational envelope. Run them on. Don’t replace a hundred percent of them like you might have been recommended to from your, um, yeah. Turbine supplier side. [00:17:00] Allen Hall: So Pete, if someone’s doing a repower where they’re basically putting a new one in the cell on an existing tower, they’re making a lot of assumptions about all the bolts from the ground up that they’re gonna be okay. And I know we’re talking about that. We’re in a lot of installations where. If the turbine has gone through a repowered or two. So now those bolts are 20 years old. Yeah. And trying to get ’em to  Joel Saxum: 30 35. 35  Allen Hall: 40. Yeah. I don’t know what they’re doing. By those bolted connections. Are they just like replacing the bolts? Are they hitting ’em with a hammer again? Is that the, yeah,  Pete Andrews: I mean, they might replace ’em, but you’ve got a problem with the foundation bolts. ’cause they’re obviously often anchor bolts set into concrete, so you have to reuse them and. With the projects, both in wind and in process power industry with the chimney stacks to try and ascertain whether foundation bolts that are set into concrete are still suitable for operations. So look for corrosion losses, look for [00:18:00] defects. Um, so yeah, they’re all things that need thinking about before you just make the snap decision to repower. But I think  Joel Saxum: a lot of that, uh, going back to a couple minutes ago, you were talking about at the commissioning phase, making sure that you have proper qa, QC of how these things were installed day one, and then making sure that before commissioning of a turbine, they’re checked. I think that’s really important. We’re starting to see that in the blade world now too, where we’ve been talking about it for a long time, and now when you talk to operators, they’re like, we’re getting inspections done on the blades before they’re hung. Or at the factory before they’re hung. After they’re hung. Like they want a good foundation baseline. Are you seeing that in the bolted connection world too?  Pete Andrews: Yes. Sort of. It’s just emerging for us. What we’ve found is, so most of our customers are in the operational phase ’cause they are the ones feeling the pain. Yeah. Of the routine retitling work. When they do major components, they sometimes engage us to come and say, can you check [00:19:00] before and after the blade was removed? What was it? Before we took it off from a a bolt load perspective, what is it afterwards? Can you then recheck after 500 hours When we retalk it? And what we’ve seen there often is the initial install hasn’t got them to where they needed to be and they’ve had to go and do the break in maintenance or the 500 hour REIT to get the bolts to the right load. So one of the questions that we have is whether. Some of the defects are actually being initiated very early on in that initial running in period and whether if, if actually you’d taken the time at, at the point of assembly to make sure you were correct, whether that avoids some of the knock on integrity concerns. So yeah, it’s interesting area.  Allen Hall: Well, bolts are what hold wind turbines together and you better know you have the right. Tension and [00:20:00] torque on your bolts to get to the lifetime of the wind turbine and to, and to check it once in a while. And I know there’s a lot of operators I can think of right now in the United States that are sort of doing that job somewhat. I I think they have missed out on opportunities to save a lot of money and to call it echo bolt. How do people get ahold of you? Because that’s one thing I run into all the time. Like, Hey, hey, you gotta talk to Ebol, call Ebol. How do they get ahold of you?  Pete Andrews: So the easiest ways are via our website. Which is echo bolt.com. Um, LinkedIn, you’ll find us at Echo Bolt on LinkedIn. Reach out. Our email would be info@cobolt.com. So any of those route and you’ll, uh, reach me and the team and more than happy to speak to you about any of your faulting concerns or problems. We are, uh, yeah, we’re passionate about your problems.  Allen Hall: Pete, thank you so much for being on this podcast. I, it is great to actually see you in person and see the bolt wave technology. It’s really [00:21:00] impressive. So anybody out there that needs bolt tensioning to checking tools, you need to get ahold of Pete at Echo Bolt and get started today. Thank you Pete. Thanks guys. It’s great to be here.

NextEra’s $67B all-stock Dominion deal targets data center alley. Plus China’s top five each outpace Vestas, and 80% of Swedish wind producers ran at a loss. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now, your hosts Speaker 6: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with three other people, Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and, uh, Yolanda Padron down in Texas. Uh, we’re all getting ready to go to American Clean Power in Houston, Texas, where it will be practically 150 degrees and 99% humidity, and we’re all looking forward to those warm, wet days that we will spend It is very similar to New Orleans. New Orleans was also very warm and very humid. So there’s a trend going on here with American Clean Power, although we were up in Minneapolis not too long ago, uh, but I guess we were in Phoenix too, so we gotta find a middle ground, everybody. Can we go someplace like– [00:01:00] Rosemary says we should always go to the Maldives, Tahiti. I got a lot of requests from Tahiti from people. We never go there. We never go to Hawaii.  Rosemary Barnes: I’ve suggested Hawaii so many times, and I’ve been told that Americans are not gonna be given permission from their manager to go to Hawaii.  Speaker 6: It’s kinda like Las Vegas.  Rosemary Barnes: Maybe one day we’ll make it to San Diego or something and get, um, beach adjacent facility And if your presentation is too boring, then everyone will be at the beach. So that will be how we ensure quality control of the speakers, which is a big problem at these events now, right? Like you can’t, um, there’s– It’s more like the norm is fairly boring sales pitches rather than informative discussion.  Speaker 6: We used to have OMNS, when I say we, I mean the wind community used to have OMNS out in San Diego in Coronado at the Del Coronado is, I think that’s the hotel name. And the one time that I went, I think I’ve been [00:02:00] there, I would say one time, uh, everybody was outside on the, at the beach, basically on the patio. So they’re holding all these talks and discussions, and it’s… I’m looking around, it’s like me and five other people. Everybody else is out there next to the water. So they had a problem with that. So I guess what they figured, either make it really cold or make it really hot, so it forces everybody into the climate-controlled conditions of, uh, the, uh, auditorium to watch the speakers. Maybe that’s the, the plan. All right. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about what happened with NextEra and Dominion because there’s going to be a huge merger. So if you thought utility business was boring, it’s not anymore. NextEra announced a sixty-seven billion dollar all-stock deal to acquire Dominion Energy, a move that would create the largest regulated electricity utility in the world by market cap. Uh, [00:03:00] the combined company would serve about ten million customers accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, where I’m based, and South Carolina with one hundred and ten gigawatts of generation across renewables, nuclear, and natural gas. Uh, but the real driver here is data centers, of course. Dominion sits in the heart of Virginia’s data center alley, where it has connected more than four hundred and fifty data centers, and NextEra is building thirty data center hubs through its NextEra Energy Resources subsidiary and has partnered with Google Cloud on paired generation campuses. So together, they would control about a hundred and thirty gigawatts of large load pipeline. And the question is whether the regulators will let it happen. And I think that’s, having watched some of the news articles over the last several days, uh, the news broke pretty much Sunday morning or late Saturday night that this was happening and [00:04:00] The first thing that came to mind, are the regulators going to let it happen? And the concern is going to be, and you can well imagine how this plays out, they’re going to drag Dominion and NextEra up to Washington, D.C. and berate them about how electricity rates cannot increase due to data centers. And if they don’t swear to that, then this merger won’t happen. That’s my interpretation of what’s about to happen. It may not, but how does this play out? How does everybody else on the team at Uptime see this play out?  Matthew Stead: Seems like a good idea to me. So more economies, more geographic diversity, more opportunity for renewables.  Yolanda Padron: I can’t speak to Dominion, um, but being relatively close to the NextEra engineering team, they, they really know their stuff, right? So I think it’s something that should kind of give us a, a sense of relief here that it, [00:05:00] it’s a big team, but it’s a really smart and competent team taking over a big undertaking.  Speaker 6: You would like to see renewables and data centers work together. This would be the perfect match of the two, right? The, the largest renewable owner management company, along with the biggest data center, uh, region. Connecting those two would make infinite sense, but in the, our political environment today in the United States, that may be the reason to oppose it.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, why would it be a bad idea?  Speaker 6: Windmills, Matthew. Windmills. Windmills are bad. Can’t even call them wind turbines anymore. They’re windmills.  Rosemary Barnes: I used to mock people for saying windmill instead of wind turbine, but then when I moved to Denmark, um, you know, who, you know, have a firm, firm ownership of modern wind energy, or at least did back 10, 20 years ago They say windmill when they speak English. Um, the Danish word for it is vindmølle, um, which means windmill. [00:06:00]And so I can’t… I couldn’t maintain that, that energy because like, am I gonna, am I gonna mock these, you know, like everybody at that company knew more about wind energy than I did. Am I gonna mock them for not, not knowing the difference between a windmill and a wind turbine? No. So yeah, that’s, that’s something that I, I don’t do anymore.  Matthew Stead: That is really valuable to know, um, Rosie. I must admit, I did not know that, and I would mock people saying w- windmill, so thank you for setting me straight.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there are plenty of, um, plenty of people who don’t know the difference between a windmill and a wind turbine and think, “Oh, why you only got three blades with so much air between them? You know, you’re gonna… Y- if you would just put twice as many blades, you’d get twice as many energy. Everybody who works in wind energy is just an obs- obvious complete and utter idiot.” Um, so there’s that kind of person, but then there’s also the industry. Another fun fact that they call the blades wings. Uh, um, yeah, in Danish they call them blade wings, which they are. [00:07:00] Speaker 6: In Spanish, isn’t it shovels? ‘Cause when I always translate those, uh, Spanish questions over to English, it always comes out shovel. At least early on, y- the early versions of Google Translate would translate it to shovel. Like, what are they talking about shovel on a wind turbine? That doesn’t make any sense.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, like a shovel or a stick or like a, what you row with.  Speaker 6: Oh, like an oar. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Okay. Thank you, Yolanda.  Matthew Stead: I think it’s really interesting that, um- We don’t have much material on NextEra, Dominion. Um, yeah, we just don’t think it’s a good– We all think it’s a good idea. There’s no controversy here.  Speaker 6: Oh, there’ll be controversy. Don’t worry about that. There’s always controversy. Welcome to America.  Matthew Stead: But among the four of us-  Speaker 6: We all think it’s great.  Rosemary Barnes: Well, it’s, um, I mean, some of the interesting facts that I read was that they’ve got 130 gigawatts of load, um, that they’re bringing to the table, and 51 gigawatts of that is contracted data centers. So that’s, that’s interesting. [00:08:00] And I think large amounts of new data centers on the grid are controversial because in– if you’re not very, very careful about how you integrate them, then you can end up just making electricity more expensive for everybody in the area that doesn’t necessarily get, you know, profit sharing from the data center. So, um, I think that, uh, like, you know, the wind ind- in the wind industry, we’ve obviously been through and are still in the phase of where social license, um, community acceptance is one of the most important things, maybe the most important thing when you’re developing a new project. And I think that we’re just at the start of that realization for data centers as well. Companies that are building the, the data centers, they need to do more than what’s required of them because otherwise they have big risks of project delays. It’s millions of dollars delay, um, for the delay for, um, yeah, for every, every day that, um, a data center is held up. And so how can you afford to risk annoying anybody? [00:09:00] You know, you just wanna be like the just, just perfect, um, addition to the community so that everybody is just happy and, and lets the project proceed. So, yeah, I thought– think that that’s, that’s quite an interesting aspect that I think I’m gonna s- we’re gonna see changing as, you know, all these planned data centers become real data centers. There’s a real risk that everybody hates data centers soon as much as they, um, hated wind tur- um, wind farms for a while.  Yolanda Padron: For the consumer, aren’t there, like, I don’t know if they’re in Virginia, but aren’t there price caps too for the market? When you’re– When it comes to how expensive the megawatt hour is? Speaker 6: Not necessarily. Re- remember that AEP in Ohio, uh, was requiring data centers to buy electricity at a certain amount. Because they both basically committed not to raise prices for electricity to the local communities, and that would be really hard to do. And okay, great, if, if they can pull it off, awesome. But there’s already a lot of [00:10:00] pushback about it, and it hasn’t even gotten to the point of being real yet, so it’s only gonna get worse. I see. And all the data centers are gonna be up in space no matter what. Everybody’s talking about building data centers on the ground. There’s no shot that that’s gonna happen. I’m just telling you, ’cause they can’t do it. They don’t– They can’t build gas turbines fast enough. There’s just limitations there, and transformers and everything else. It’s gonna be in space. It’s so much easier.  Yolanda Padron: And all the approvals you have to get and everything.  Speaker 6: It will be easier to do it in space In space, you don’t have neighbors. Matthew Stead: I said it before, it’s just crazy. The key issue around data centers is it’s actually the transmission rather than generation. I mean, you know, at least in Australia, and correct me if I’m wrong, Rosie, but you know, less than half the price in Australia is generation. The other half is sort of retail and transmission and this and that. And so actually, you know, the generation cost shouldn’t really increase. It’s really the transmission and the, the poles and the wires, which are the problem. And [00:11:00] you know, to your point, Rosie, social, social license for poles and wires.  Rosemary Barnes: I’m actually really surprised at Allen, ’cause normally, Allen and I have this, um, you know, we’ve played out this scenario probably 50 or 100 times over the, over the years with emerging technologies, and it’s always me that’s like, “You know what? I think, uh, I think there’s something to this one.” Um, and Allen always poo-poos it, and in this case, Allen’s, Allen’s excited. I, I’m on Allen’s– So I also, I also think space data centers is, is a thing that’s more likely to happen than not, at least to some extent. Um, so yeah, but I think, Matt, you’ve got the more mainstream opinion. Speaker 6: The voice of the common man. I  Yolanda Padron: think for all of our listeners out there, this is the first time Rosie and Allen agree on anything, so round of applause team.  Speaker 6: It won’t last long, Yolande.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s not true because, you know, nine out of 10 new technologies I also think are stupid. Um, so Allen and I agree on the bulk of them, but then of that one in 10, you know, nine out of 10 of those I, I [00:12:00] like and Allen doesn’t, so this is the, you know, the one-tenth of the one-tenth, so. Speaker 6: I don’t like gas turbines. Can we all agree we don’t like gas turbines? It’s– That would be insane to scale.  Rosemary Barnes: You know what? I, I don’t have a particular problem with gas, gas turbines. I don’t want a lot of new gas turbines. Um, I guess that that’s– We can all agree on, on that. I don’t think the– I think we have most of the gas turbines that we need, or at least, um, will in the next couple of years. And, um, yeah, I do think that their existence supports faster electrification, um, and faster growth of wind and solar. So I’m definitely not someone that wants to see all gas turbines turned off tomorrow.  Speaker 6: No, I don’t, I don’t want to turn them off. I’m  Matthew Stead: just saying you can’t get to scale. Speaker 6: Delamination and bond line failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become [00:13:00] expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So  Matthew Stead: visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you  Speaker 6: millions. Well, for the first time, five Chinese turbine manufacturers have all individually outpaced Danish wind giant Vestas in annual installations. Goldwind topped the global list with twenty-nine point seven gigawatts installed in twenty twenty-five. Behind them, Envision put up twenty-one point eight, Windy nineteen point eight, Mingyang at eighteen point six, and Sany at fifteen point one gigawatts. Vestas came in [00:14:00] sixth at twelve point nine gigawatts. The Chinese dominance was fueled by an enormous domestic market that has accounted for about ninety-four percent of those five manufacturers’ sales. Uh, but exports are obviously growing out of China too. The five captured nearly sixty percent of the hundred and seventy-eight gigawatts installed globally in twenty twenty-five, a year that saw the world market grow forty percent over twenty twenty-four. So Vestas still holds the crown for cumulative installations at two hundred and one gigawatts, but the gap in annual volume is now almost impossible to ignore. So Vestas has a lot of competition over in China. The, the amount of, uh, gigawatts coming out of the largest manufacturers in China is quite impressive, almost, well, more than double than what, uh, Vestas is doing, and Vestas is doing a pretty brisk business. What are, what are the outcomes of this, everyone? Is, can this be sustained in China [00:15:00] for very much longer? Can they continue to, to create at, at that rate?  Rosemary Barnes: Yes. Okay, move, move on to the next segment  Speaker 6: Well, that’s a, that’s a huge amount of gigawatts coming out of China. And if 94% of it’s staying in China, eventually you run out of China to put wind turbines in. Rosemary Barnes: They– I mean, we’re a long way from running out of places in China to put wind turbines in, because China is gigantic. A lot of it is not that populated. They’ve got a lot of offshore area still. But I just think it’s gonna follow the same playbook as, as solar probably, where you see, you know, early on heaps of domestic market, which is totally rock solid because it’s not relying on people to see a positive business case in doing it. You know, like it’s really… You know, targets are, are really mandated and people make sure that they are met. Um, and then the incentives are also different as well. Like my understanding is that [00:16:00] there’s a lot of incentives about installation of megawatts, um, and then, you know, the, the operation is like, we’ll figure that out as we go. The volume, the number of manufacturers that are there, they’ve got, you know, like such a great supply chain all there in the same area, so you can move fast and like I, I don’t see anything can get in the way of, you know, continuing to pump out these turbines at that speed. It’ll keep going until, you know, the government basically decides we’ve got, uh, enough wind energy now and then puts the, the brakes on it. And, you know, that’s what we’ve just been through in solar recently. China is, um… You know, they’ve just– they’ve got a big economy and they’ve just got like rock solid resolve to follow through on, on things that they commit to. Um, whether we can, you know, argue about whether it’s a smart strategy or not, but you know that they will follow it, they will execute on, on it. I don’t think anyone would, would say that they won’t. So I think, [00:17:00]can it continue forever? No. But do I think it can continue for another 10 years? Yes. And is that long enough to cause massive problems for any other manufacturer? I think also yes.  Matthew Stead: Hey, Rosie, can I ask you a question? You know, obviously there was some cable was proposed, you know, between Australia and Singapore. Do you see China going in that direction? You know, putting rather than pipes with gas in it, um, pipes with electrons? Uh,  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t see China– I’m actually working on a video at the moment about a global sub-sea grid, and I just interviewed, um, uh, Xlinks, you know, that was originally a project from Morocco to the UK, and then the other one, which is super cool, um, we might have an argument about the plausibility of it, is NATO L, which is just in like early development stages. It’s going to connect the UK to Canada. Um, and yeah, so that’s, um, a few thousand kilometers long. The ocean depth is maximum [00:18:00] three, I think, kilometers, maybe even a tiny bit more than that, um, which is like right on the edge of what is possible. N-none of those projects really actually rely on big technological improvements. Um, they’re possible with today’s technologies. Um, but I don’t see China doing so much of that. I think that one thing that might actually stop that is that, um, when you have big interconnectors like that, I think the engineering part is not the hard, the hard part. I think that the, it’s the politics. I do see them exporting their, um, you know, they’ve got really good ultra high voltage DC technology, but the transmission lines, they have exported a little bit. There’s some projects in Brazil that are Chinese made. There’s one in India. I don’t actually know if that is Chinese made, but you know, like I could really imagine them also rolling out projects in Africa, for example. Um, but beyond that sort of thing, I, I wouldn’t tip China as the country to, you know, develop a global [00:19:00] sub-sea grid. Speaker 6: Do you think the low solar prices have hurt the wind manufacturers in China a little bit? Obviously, there’s a lot of solar panels that are able to be shipped immediately, which is what’s happening right now. But turbines, not so much. It’s a little harder to do. But you, you would think that a lot of these countries and communities would be putting in wind But solar is so cheap right now that, that is what is winning at the moment, and it must be hurting the Chinese wind manufacturers, you would think. Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think they’re really in a competition with each other, um, at the moment. In Australia, I think yes. I think that, um, the, like, roaring success of solar and especially batteries is, um, making wind less appealing to develop. But globally, I think that it’s, you know, it’s a race between, um, fossil fuels and renewables. It’s a race between energy security and continued reliance on, you know, countries that [00:20:00] you don’t really want to rely on for fossil fuels. I think that those are the, the much bigger, um, competition at the moment. It’s a bit short-sighted because, yeah, wind and solar is really easy for the, the part of the, uh, energy transition that we’re doing now, and, uh, if you just don’t build any wind until you reach the limit of solar and batteries, then you’ll find yourself quite far behind. So that’s what we’re really struggling with in Australia and finding, like, what is the right level of government, um, support because people… You know, like in an electricity market like Australia, you’re not supposed to rely on governments, you know, planning out the system and deciding what thing to build, and I think that that has been a real strength of the Australian market that it has, you know, the government has got out of the way. It is hard to see, um, us getting to where we need to go in a orderly fashion without some planning for this, like, lumpy middle part of the energy transition. I don’t know. What do you think, Matt? Is that how you see it in Australia as well?  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think there’s a place [00:21:00] for everything, and, you know, wind, solar, battery is a perfect match and the right places for the right thing. Rosemary Barnes: It’s really hard because, you know, like, when you look at the system as a whole, you know, like you plan out what, what full energy system is cheaper and better, you know. Is it the, you know, the current fossil fuel system and all of the, you know, annual maintenance and, um, improvements like, um, extensions that need to go along with that to support, you know, things like data centers and population growth, or is it the fully renewable system? And, you know, if you look at the end state, then I don’t think that many studies or maybe any studies come to the conclusion that anything other than renewables is the, the cheaper, better system. But it’s just, it doesn’t mean that every step along the way is cheaper, and so you end up with this, yeah, like this hump in the middle that you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta get over if you wanna get from one to the other, and it’s, um, it’s complicated. Speaker 6: I just listened to a podcast about this half an hour ago, uh, and it [00:22:00] was very contentious. And I won’t get into the details of it, but it was just one or the other. We wanna have all petroleum-based, coal-based generation in the UK, or we want zero emissions. They never got into anywhere in the middle, which is where it’s going to have to be. So why don’t we talk about that? I– It doesn’t… The political atmosphere of the UK is, is a little unstable, as we’ve all read in the newspapers and seen online. Uh, but it, but it’s just causing the both sides to go to extremes. And on the renewable side, some of the arguments that are being made were so outlandish that I could hardly continue to listen to it. Same thing on the gas and coal side. Like, what are we gonna do? The UK is really in a pinch. They’re gonna have to do something, and it all– as Rosemary’s pointed out, doing nothing is real ex- it’s gonna be tremendously expensive too. So there’s, there’s gonna have to be a, a reckoning somehow, but it, it’s all tied to the [00:23:00] economy at the moment. Like most things that happen in a country, decisions are made about what’s happening right now, not what’s gonna happen five years from now.  Yolanda Padron: Right. And to your point, like countries need to protect themselves, right? Like what are you gonna do, bank on world peace?  Speaker 6: That’s a bad bet historically.  Matthew Stead: But, um, how many, how many of those charts have you seen in the last one to years where you’ve got the, the fossil fuel, say the coal generation versus renewable generation? How many of those, um, charts have crossed over in the last few years where, you know, renewables generation is, is higher than coal generation? It’s just, it’s happening all over the world. It’s just happening, and you look at the graphs, it’s just happening.  Speaker 6: It’s less expensive, so that’s why they’re doing it. The decision’s made with the dollar. You know, the financing and the bankers and insurance are all gonna drive that, and it’s not gonna be the decision you, the homeowner, are gonna have a lot of influence on. It’s all gonna be done at a higher level, and it’s gonna be whatever’s cheaper and whatever’s available. Back to Rosemary’s point, [00:24:00] solar is cheap and available, people are gonna do it. Wind is cheap and available, they’re gonna choose it no matter who’s in office, right? I… Yeah, that’s the engineer talking, not the politician.  Matthew Stead: Battery, wind, and solar is only gonna get cheaper. Is, um, is, uh, gas turbines and coal gonna get cheaper? Speaker 6: They can’t. In order to get the efficiency up where they need to, it’s gonna be super expensive, which is what we’re at today. That’s why gas turbines are s- you can’t mass produce them, and that’s why they cost so much money. It’s a great business if you sell a couple a year. You can’t sell thousands of them. There’s just not a way to do that. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss [00:25:00] out. Visit peswind.com today. Over in Sweden, they built all the wind farms, and here at Weather Guard we’ve talked to a number of operators over in Sweden, so has EOLOGIX-PING, uh, and the– So but the wind farms and the customers haven’t really showed up, and researchers in Sweden have analyzed two hundred and forty-four Swedish wind power producers owning more than about thirty-seven hundred turbines covering eighty-five percent of the country’s total wind generation. So it’s a pretty large study. They found that eighty percent were effectively operating at a loss in twenty twenty-four. The total sector losses reached six point three billion Swedish kronor, uh, about six hundred and twenty million euros. The sector’s profit margins fell to a negative fifty-one percent. That’s right, negative fifty-one percent. Uh, and here’s the real paradox. Although wind production actually [00:26:00] rose from thirty-four point two to forty point six terawatt-hours, revenues fell for the first time in at least six years. Uh, the more they produced, the less they earned. And the real culprit is overcapacity. So they have so many turbines up in northern Sweden, uh, that it’s driving the energy prices down, much like Australia. Uh, and the missing link is obviously transmission because it is big demand to the south. It’s just getting the power there. Vattenfall alone lost eight hundred and seventy million euros in its wind business in twenty twenty-four, and one of its subsidiaries curtailed seventeen percent of the potential production because of, uh, shutting the turbines down was less expensive than selling into negative prices, which would make sense. So the price has gotten so low in Sweden that it’s better just to turn the turbine off and, and eat the loss than to generate power at a, at a negative price. This is a common theme [00:27:00] as wind has grown, and solar for the same matter, is that when you have so much of it, the price of electricity will drop. And until you can get that power out to other areas that has high demand It becomes a losing proposition. How does this play out? Will the– Now will countries finally take transmission seriously and start to even out the grid? Is that where we’re going?  Yolanda Padron: I mean, I hope so. The idea of curtailing potential energy isn’t something new, right? It happens here in Texas all the time. It happens in a lot of places all the time, um, just to, to not overflow the grid. And it makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense too much, at least to me, that in the same country you have parts of it where you have an electricity surplus and negative pricing, and other parts of it where you just, you don’t have enough energy for the whole, uh, region, right? So, uh, I really hope they take it a bit more seriously than they, than they currently are.  Matthew Stead: Uh, I think the interesting thing about Sweden is [00:28:00]that they’ve got a lot of hydro as well, and so those two things tie together. Um, you know, much like Australia, we’re building the, like the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, um, hydro scheme, and, um, maybe that’s part of the missing puzzle is the actual, the storage element. So if they had more pumped hydro, you know, they could, um, perhaps store that excess energy and then, then reuse it. But, you know, unless there’s no pipes from the north to the south, you know, that’s not gonna help anyone.  Speaker 6: Hydro is expensive. The more recent news articles I’ve seen about pumped hydro is it’s way less expensive to put in wind or put in solar or put in some batteries than to do pumped hydro projects. It’s complicated. It’s a lot of construction, obviously, and, uh, the pumps and the equipment are not cheap. So, uh, yeah, so although if you do have hydro and it’s currently running, you would leave that alone, but I think some of the newer pumped hydro projects probably won’t happen. Even if they’re on the– have [00:29:00] been planned and, and even started, I think they’re really reevaluating that it’s probably cheaper to do batteries. Matthew Stead: In Australia, in Snowy 2.0, I think the original budget was, was it 3 billion? And now it’s up to 12 to 15 billion.  Rosemary Barnes: Anybody that was working on that would’ve known that the price was very likely to blow out because that particular project has a really long tunnel. The two reservoirs that, like the reservoirs were existing, so you think, okay, that’s good, you save money. But the expensive part of pumped hydro is the tunneling and then, and it’s a very long tunnel. Um, and it’s just so super predictable that when you have a super long tunnel, you one, increase the cost a lot, but two, increase the risk of a massive cost blowout. So I think it’s not a good predictor of, of projects as some other ones that are, that are happening. I think the biggest problem with hydro is that, um, the project lives are so long, like 100 years e- easily, [00:30:00] but that doesn’t mean anything in today’s dollars, y- you know? So it’s like no one can, no company is gonna assign any value to the electricity they’re gonna generate in 100 years time, you know? So it’s, um, it, it’s really hard for it to stack up to, as a project today unless it’s a government doing it. Matthew Stead: But I mean, once Snowy 2.0 is done, it will still be reasonably cost-effective as a long-term storage source.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. If it had been made on time, then I think it would’ve, it would’ve been a real enabler for the energy transition for getting heaps of wind and solar. But it wasn’t done on time, and we barely we- storage isn’t our problem right now. We have actually got lots of, of storage. That’s not what’s stopping people from building projects. So, um, I think it is a bit of a shame.  Speaker 6: Back to your point, Rosemary, how old hydro is in terms of electricity generation. I, I went to go look up when Niagara River, Niagara Falls in, in the States first [00:31:00] started producing power, 1895. That’s how long we’ve been using water power in the States to create electricity. Hoover Dam, which also does something very similar, is in the 1930s, 1935, ’36, around that timeframe. So it’s almost been 100 years there too, 90 years. Yeah. It’s, it’s amazing. So you don’t plan for those, those pieces of, uh, infrastructure to run that long, but they do. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. And if today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosie, Yolanda, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:32:00] podcast.

Allen covers Suzlon hitting 2 GW in a single Indian state, Nabrawind’s crane-free turbine install in Namibia, Antora’s South Dakota thermal battery, Australia’s $17 billion grid expansion, and Shimizu recycling old turbine blades into steel. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! GOOD MORNING. The wind industry is not just getting bigger. It is getting smarter. And today … we have the proof. Let us start in India. SUZLON GROUP just crossed a milestone. Two gigawatts of wind orders … in a single Indian state. The latest deal … sixty-five turbines at three megawatts each for a company called SUNSURE ENERGY. SUNSURE is not a utility. It is an independent power producer building round-the-clock clean energy for data centers … electric vehicles … and heavy industry. Wind paired with solar and battery storage. Power that does not stop when the sun goes down. SUZLON is already building six hundred and sixty-four megawatts of additional commercial and industrial projects in the same region. And SUNSURE … backed by PARTNERS GROUP of Switzerland … has seven gigawatts in development across India with a target of ten gigawatts by two thousand thirty. That is not government-led. That is private capital chasing wind. Now … across the ocean to Africa. A Spanish company called NABRAWIND [NAH-brah-wind] just solved a problem that has plagued remote wind farms for years. How do you install a turbine when you cannot get a crane to the site? Their answer is a system called SKYLIFT. No heavy-lift cranes. None. A self-erecting tower combined with a blade installation tool they call the BLADERUNNER. They just put up a GOLDWIND six-megawatt turbine at a wind farm in NAMIBIA. And here is the part that changes the math. Traditional crane installation needs calm air. Six to eight meters per second. Maximum. NABRAWIND’s system works in fifteen meters per second sustained … with gusts up to twenty. That site blows hard. All the time. Which is exactly why they chose it. When complete … seven turbines … two hundred and thirty gigawatt-hours a year. About six percent of NAMIBIA’s entire electricity demand. NABRAWIND was acquired by Australia’s FORTESCUE last year as part of its industrial decarbonization push. So India is stacking private-sector wind orders. Africa is installing turbines without cranes. And in SOUTH DAKOTA … they are storing the wind itself. A California startup called ANTORA ENERGY just built a five-gigawatt-hour thermal battery at an ethanol plant in BIG STONE CITY. More than two hundred solid carbon blocks. When the wind blows at night and nobody needs the power … the blocks absorb cheap electricity and heat up. When the plant needs energy … the blocks release heat or generate electricity through special cells that capture light from superheated material. Think of it as a giant toaster oven battery. Full power expected by October. The plant’s president put it simply. Nobody has got a switch for the wind. It blows when it wants to blow. Now … down under. The AUSTRALIAN government just announced the biggest single expansion of its electricity grid. Nineteen renewable energy projects. Seven-point-eight gigawatts of generation. Seven-point-nine gigawatt-hours of battery storage. Seventeen billion dollars in private investment. Nineteen thousand construction jobs. Power for four million homes. Among the largest … RWE’s [arr-vay’s] THEODORE wind farm in QUEENSLAND. One-point-one gigawatts. Up to one hundred and seventy turbines. Three billion Australian dollars. RWE … the same company building offshore wind in England and Denmark … is now building onshore in AUSTRALIA. And the AUSTRALIAN government is not stopping. They just opened the next round of tenders. Another five gigawatts. Finally … JAPAN. Major contractor SHIMIZU [shee-MEE-zoo] CORPORATION has developed a way to recycle old wind turbine blades. Not into park benches. Not into landfill. Into steel. The blades are cut and crushed into a material that goes into electric furnaces to adjust the carbon content of steel … making it harder and stronger. JAPAN expects to replace one hundred to two hundred turbines a year by the two thousand thirties. That is two to three thousand tonnes of blade waste. Annually. SHIMIZU has built about twenty percent of the wind power facilities in JAPAN. They see this technology as a way to grow their entire wind energy business. So … let us step back. India stacks two gigawatts of private-sector wind orders. Africa installs turbines in gale-force winds … without a crane. South Dakota stores surplus wind in superheated carbon blocks. Australia backs nineteen projects with seventeen billion dollars. And Japan turns old blades into stronger steel. From the factory floor to the scrap yard … from the wind farm to the furnace … the industry is solving problems at every stage of a turbine’s life. And that's the state of the wind industry for the 25th of May 2026. Join us for the UPTIME WIND ENERGY PODCAST tomorrow.

Howard Penrose of MotorDoc joins to discuss current signature analysis, uptower circulating currents wrecking main bearings, and full drivetrain scans in minutes. Reach out at info@motordoc.com or on LinkedIn. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Howard Penrose: [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Howard, welcome back to the program.  Howard Penrose: Hey, thanks for having me.  Allen Hall: It’s about time everybody realizes what motorDoc can do. There’s so much technology, and I’ve been watching- Yeah … your Chaos and Caffeine podcast on Saturday morning, which are full of really, really good information about the motorDoc as a company, all the things you’re doing out in the field, and how you’re solving real-world problems, not imaginary ones- Yeah real-world problems. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and  Howard Penrose: whatever annoys me that week. Exactly. And, and whatever great coffee I’m trying out. Yes. Except for a few. We’ve had the ReliaSquatch down our- Yes … um, a couple of times. Uh, yeah, no, I, I enjoy it, and we gotta get you on there sometime. I don’t do- I, it- … a lot of interviews other than an AI character we put in. Allen Hall: It’s a very interesting show because you’re [00:01:00] getting a little bit of comedy and humor and s- Yeah … and a, and a coffee review, which is very helpful because I’ve tried some of the coffees that you have reviewed, that you’ve given the thumbs up to. But if you’re operating wind turbines and you’re trying to understand what’s happening on the drivetrain side, on the generator, everything out to the blades even, main bearings, gearboxes- Yeah all those rotating heavy, expensive parts, there’s a lot of ways to diagnose them-  Howard Penrose: Yes …  Allen Hall: that are sort of like we can look at a gear, we can look at a joint, we can look at roller bearings, whatever, but motorDoc has a way to quickly diagnose all of that chain in about- Yeah … 15 seconds.  Howard Penrose: Well, a little longer than 15 sec- more like a minute. A minute, okay. It feels like paint drying. But- Uh, in any case, yeah. Uh, uh, and, and what’s kind of funny is, um, back in the ’90s, uh, EPRI actually accidentally steered the technology away from its [00:02:00] core purpose, which was in 1985, um, NAVSEA, the US Navy, had done research on using current signature analysis for looking at pumps, fans, and compressors, the bearings, the belts, the components, all the rotating components using the motor as the sensor. Not too much different than we are now. I mean, mind you, we got better resolution now, we’ve got, uh, more powerful– I mean, I look at my data from the ’90s, and now it’s completely different. Um, and then Oak Ridge National Lab, same thing, bearings and gears in motor-operated valves. So in 2003, we were the first ones to apply electrical and current signature analysis to some wind turbines in the Mojave Desert. Wow. Yeah. So, um, nobody had tried it before. Everybody said it couldn’t be done. And, uh, that was a bad thing to say to me because- … it meant I was gonna get it [00:03:00] done. Right. At that time, um, we were looking at bearing issues and some blatant conditions with the, um, with the, uh, generator using a technology called Altest, ’cause I was with Altest at the time. And, uh, I had taken an EMPath software and blended it with a, a power analyzer, and they still have that tool to this day. I was using that technology all the way through 2015. 2016, I should say. And then- And then switched over to the pure EMPath, which was more of an engineering tool. And then more recently, in 2022, uh, made the decision to ha- to take all the work we’d done on over 6,000 turbines, uh, looking at how we were looking at the data and what we were doing on the industrial side, and took a, uh, created a current signature analyzer that would do one phase of current to analyze the entire powertrain. Allen Hall: So when you tell [00:04:00] operators you can do this magic, I think a lotta times they gotta go, “ Howard Penrose: What?” Oh, yeah, yeah. They don’t understand it because they’re used to vibration- Right … which is a point analysis system. Right.  Allen Hall: Vibration at this- Yeah … particular location. Yeah. One spot- Even if it’s- … or a couple  Howard Penrose: spots triax, they’re reading through material, up through a transducer. Hopefully, they put it above the bearing and not in the middle of the machine like everybody is now, because everybody’s trying to sell a sensor. Right. True. They’re not selling a- they’re not selling accuracy. They’re just selling sensors. Right. So, um- Yeah … you know, uh, I, I’ll, I’ll even talk about one of the companies here. We’ve got Onyx here, and they do it right. I mean, they’ve been doing it right pretty well because we’ve been doing some of the same towers they’re on, and we can match the data they’re getting. Oh, good. Right? Yeah. Uh, so but they get it in multiple spots, and there’s areas they can’t quite reach, so we’ll detect those areas as well. So it’s a good melding of two technologies.  Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Sure,  Howard Penrose: sure. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you have electrical signature and you have vibration, but in [00:05:00] cases if you don’t have vibration, we’re a direct replacement.  Allen Hall: Because the generator- I  Howard Penrose: dare say that.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Whichever–  Howard Penrose: I dare say that, um, with- Well, the  Allen Hall: generator is acting as the sensor. Howard Penrose: The air gap. The air gap in the generator s- specifically, yes. Yeah. Generator, motor, transformer. Right.  Allen Hall: Yeah. So any of those- Mm-hmm … you can clamp onto, look at the current that’s on there. Everything that’s happening on the drivetrain, in the gearbox, out on the rotor- Yep … main bearings, all of that creates vibration. Creates a torque. T- a, a torque. Yeah. Yes, more exactly a torque. Yeah. And that’s seen in the generator, in the current coming out of the generator. Yes. So those signals, although minute, are still there. Yes. So if you clamp onto that current coming out of the generator, you’ll see the typical AC sine wave sitting there. But on top of that- Is all the information about how that drivetrain is doing  Howard Penrose: Absolutely, and everything else. Anything electrical comes through [00:06:00] that. So what you do is just like vibration, you do a spectral analysis. So every component has a frequency associated with it, just like vibration. It’s, as a matter of fact, I, I keep having to try to explain to people electrical and current signature analysis is no different than vibration analysis. It’s the same concept. We use the same tools. The signature looks just a little different. It’s a little noisier, um, but you need that noise in order to see everything. But we have a time waveform, and instead of, um, inches per second or millimeters per second, whatever, you know, uh, velocity, acceleration, and displacement, uh, what we end up with is decibels is the optimal method. You can look at straight voltage signatures at those points or, or current signatures, but the values are so small that you have to look at it from a logarithmic standpoint. Right. There are some benefits to it versus vibration, and there’s some things that aren’t as good as vibration. [00:07:00] So, you know, we, we do… You have to… Any technology is gonna have their strengths and weaknesses. Sure. So we will see everything all at once. Load doesn’t matter. Right. Speed doesn’t matter. It’s… Only reason speed matters is the location of the frequencies. Uh, so the higher the resolution, meaning the longer you take data, the less chance you have on a lightly lo- loaded machine of blending the peaks together. Right. Um, on the flip side, if I have two bearings turning at the exact same speed, I couldn’t tell you which one it is. Because they’re the same. Right.  Allen Hall: And the mechanical features of that bearing is w- what creates the signal that you’re measuring. Exactly. So if a bearing has five rollers versus 10, just imaginary thing. Yeah, yeah. Five rollers versus 10 has a different electrical signature, so you can determine, like, that bearing, that 10 roller bearing- Yes … has the problem, the five is fine. Yes. Yeah. That’s the magic, and I think people don’t translate the mechanical world into the electrical world. That that’s what’s [00:08:00]happening. They,  Howard Penrose: they don’t because, because what’s happening is they named it wrong.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Howard Penrose: A majority of our users are mechanical folks. Sure. Our vibration analysts and stuff like, ’cause they know how to look at the signatures. Right. Everybody tries to force it on their electrical people, and electrical people go, “We don’t know what this is.” Yeah. And it’s, it’s, it’s a matter of that training and, and, you know, in the electrical world, you’re not taught to look at that. Right. Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Mechanical world, you’re taught to look at that. So our intern, we were trying to bring in electrical engineering interns and found out that just wasn’t working. So last year, I brought in my first, uh, intern that’s, you know, he’s been with us now since I brought him in. Okay. Uh, and, uh, Amar, and, uh, you know, he’s helped us develop our vi- uh, vibration software to go along with it. Guess what? It’s the same thing. It’s the exact same sy- system Um, but we just take in a vibration signal instead. But he picked up on it immediately as a [00:09:00] third-year college student. I can take somebody with a decade as an electrical engineer with a PhD and they can’t figure it out.  Allen Hall: Well, because you’re, you’re taking real- Because it’s different. Yeah. It’s r- well, it’s real-world components-  Howard Penrose: Yeah …  Allen Hall: creating electrical signals. That’s hard- Well, you have- … to process for a lot of people. Yeah,  Howard Penrose: yeah. It’s  Allen Hall: just not  Howard Penrose: something that we do every day. But that’s… If they, i- if we sa- i- i- if you’re looking at vibration and you start looking at the sensor, it gets complicated too, ’cause guess what? It’s an electrical signal. Right. It’s, it is technically electrical signature now. It’s converting a  Allen Hall: mechanical signal- Right … into an electrical signal, which is what’s happening in the generator anyway. Yeah.  Howard Penrose: Whether it’s a piezoelectric cell that’s generating a small signal- Yeah … on top of a small waveform that you then take out, you demodulate, uh, or it’s, uh… So you take that carrier frequency out, or it’s a MEMS sensor, which is the same thing. You know, the, it just sees some slower s- It, it does more of a digital output. So you, you, you know, you have those, or you [00:10:00] have this, which just basically uses a component of the machine to, to, as its own sensor. There is one other difference between them, too, and, uh, I find this very useful when I’m going out troubleshooting something that other people can’t figure out, uh, ’cause we use all the technologies. So in this case, it would be, uh, the structural movement. Okay? So, so say I have a generator and there’s something wrong with the structure, and the whole machine is vibrating. So y- well, if I put a transducer on it, they might think that’s vibration or something else. We don’t see it. Right. We only see directly exactly what’s happening with the machine. Sure. So a lot of times when we go in to troubleshoot something that people have done vibration on and everything else, it’s been pro- a, a problem for them for years. We walk in, and all of a sudden we’re identifying whether it’s the machine or it’s something else right off the bat. Then we can take a look at the vibration data and [00:11:00] say, “Okay, it wasn’t the bearing or the bearing, um, structure. It was, you know, the mounting.” Right. It wasn’t  Allen Hall: fastened  Howard Penrose: down properly. Yeah,  Allen Hall: yeah. Right.  Howard Penrose: Go tighten that bolt. Right, exactly.  Allen Hall: Well, I mean, that’s the cheap answer. Yeah. I’d rather tighten a bolt than rip apart a motor or a generator- And, and- … every day …  Howard Penrose: and that’s the whole point. Now, there are other strengths that go with it. So for instance, on the powertrain of a wind turbine, I can tell you if you’ve lubricated the bearings correctly. Wow. Because part of what we do is we do take those electrical signatures, and we convert those over to watts. Watts is an energy conversion. Sure. So you see that as heat or some type of loss. So whatever, whatever’s being lost there is not being sent to the customer. To the outside. Right. Making money. So, um, if I’m taking a look at, say, a main bearing, I might see watts or kilowatts of losses. So you’re gonna have some ’cause you have friction, right? But when we see it increase on, say, a roller, [00:12:00] or the rollers, or, or the cage, that’s usually an indicator that I have a lubrication issue. Or if we only see it on the outer race, that means that they didn’t clear out all the old grease when they were lubricating it, ’cause the rollers then have to ride across it- Right … ’cause it dries up.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Howard Penrose: Uh, and will carry contaminants. So if you see that, you go up, clean it up, you’ll extend the life of the bearing. Absolutely you will. Without having to do a lot of work. So, uh, we, we look at our technology as more so early in the, in the stage of a condition. I don’t wanna call it failure, ’cause it’s not a failure. It’s something that’s mitigable. And I made that word up. You can mitigate it. Meaning you can go up and correct it and extend the life of that component. Sure. Uh, in gearboxes we’ll see problems with, um… Well, the, the one we’re talking about here a fair amount is all the circulating currents going on uptower. We did that research. The current signature analyzer we have is a direct result of doing wind turbine [00:13:00] research just on circulating currents uptower, ’cause we conferred everything over to, to sound at 48 kilohertz. And so that gives me a 24-kilohertz signal. That high-frequency stuff, which we’re researching in CGRE, and IEEE, and IEC, is called supra harmonics, which I– we talked about that before. Yes, we have. Yeah. And, uh, so when you start seeing that in the, in, in the current that’s circulating uptower because the ground that goes from the top of the tower down is for- DC lightning protection. And lightning protection, yeah. It’s not meant for, um- Not for  Allen Hall: high frequency- Yeah …  Howard Penrose: currents. Yeah. Uh, we, when we measured it, when we mapped out dozens of towers of all different manufacturers, we found that the impedance about halfway down the tower is where it ends. Sure. The, the resistance. And then the increased, uh, the high-frequency noise turns any of your shaft brushes into resistors. And at about 15 kilohertz, no current is [00:14:00]passing through them. It’s all passing the bearing, which becomes more conductive the higher the frequency. So with 60% of main bearings failing due to electrical currents, it’s actually currents that are circulating uptower. It’s not static. There is some static up there, but it’s not static. It’s coming from the controls, the, the generator, and everything else. Inverters,  Allen Hall: converters.  Howard Penrose: And we’ve seen up to 150 amps passing through a, through a bearing.  Allen Hall: So I– We run across a lot of operators who have been replacing main bearings, and they don’t know the reason why. Yeah. And I always say, “Well, call Howard at MotorDoc because I would almost bet you you have the f- high frequency running around uptower in the nacelle- And the next main bearing you put in there is gonna go the same way as the- Yeah … first one you put in there. Until you cut off that circulating current and then the cell, you’re just gonna continue with the problem. Then you haven’t eliminated the problem, you’re just fixing the result of that problem. Yes. But it takes- Yeah, you’re, you’re- How, [00:15:00] how, well, how long- You’re replacing  Howard Penrose: a fuse.  Allen Hall: Right, you’re replacing a fuse. Yeah. How long does it take you to s- to determine- An expensive fuse. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, ’cause you’re taking the rotor down. Yeah. Well, how, how fast can you determine if you have harmonics uptower that are gonna be causing you problems? 120 seconds.  Howard Penrose: Okay.  Allen Hall: So that’s the thing. I think a lot of- I mean,  Howard Penrose: that’s of the actual data collection time. So you clamp on uptower, uh, and then you can… Well, the way we have it set up now, you just tell it you wanna collect data every five s- uh, five minutes, and then you go downtower, let it collect its data, go back up, grab it. Um, it’s like… It’s huge. It’s this size. So, um, and then you connect- It plugs into a laptop. Yeah. Plug it into a laptop or any type of tablet. Um, it, it’s Windows now. I’m trying to get away from Windows. We’re gonna have Linux systems, uh, as well. Uh, and then you use that to, um, just collect that data, and then you press another button. Now it pops up, and it tells you if you’re in danger or not, [00:16:00] the amount of current passing through the bearing, and the frequencies all the way out.  Allen Hall: So the ideal is you’re gonna have this kit with you in the truck. Yeah. And as you see these problems pop up, you’re gonna clamp on uptower. Yep. You’re gonna measure these circulating currents, and you’re gonna know immediately if you have another mechanical issue, a, a lubrication issue- Oh, yeah. It’ll look at- … some kind of alignment issue, or- You’ll get all  Howard Penrose: of this information at once. So you- Right … if you go on the power side. So certain turbines, like anything that has the transformer downtower, you don’t have to climb. Right. GE. I mean, I don’t climb. So, uh, uh, you know, th- and that was part of the, the concept behind when we started down this path because I’ve been in the wind industry since 1997. So one of the things I always saw was, and, and we talked about even, you know, here when it was called AWEA, and we were talking always on the health and safety side about wearing out the technicians. Um, so we discovered that, you know, what was it? Almost 60% of the [00:17:00] turbines you didn’t have to climb. Right. Oh, yeah. And even the ones you do, you go up, you set it up, and it’ll tell you where you need to focus. The other thing in the powertrain, let alone the generator, when we do a sweep of a site– Now, if we do a straight electrical signature analysis, I’d term that one as a technician’s tool. Sure. That’s more of an engineer’s tool. Uh, a lot more data, a lot harder to set up. But even though I’m saying harder to set up, it’s still pretty easy. It’s still minutes. Right. Yeah. Most technicians will collect data with, like, a couple hours worth of training. Yeah. You g- You basically gather that data, and if you’re getting a site, so we’ll go out– I love going out in the field. So we’ll go out in the field, especially if it’s a tower we don’t have to climb I’ll knock out, uh, well, let’s just say I’ll, I’ll, I’ll name one. Say a GE 1.6. I’ll knock out one of those every eight to 11 minutes, depending on how you get to the tower.  Allen Hall: So that’s a full diagnosis of drivetrain- Yeah … plus anything odd happening- Yep with circulating currents and all that [00:18:00] can- Oh, no, no. Circulating- Or just- … current, that’s a- That’s a separate thing at tower … separate study that- Okay … you have to do that uptower. But anything, anything drivetrain-wise, you can be in and out- Yeah … in a couple of minutes. Yep. Okay. So there’s a lot of operators that have end-of-warranties coming up, right? Yes. There’s been a lot of developments, so they’re kind of running into the end-of-warranty, and they don’t know the health status of their drivetrain. Same thing for a lot of operators that are in- Yep … full service agreements, and they’re questioning whether they’re getting their money’s worth or not. Yes. I always say, “Call Howard at Motordoc. You guys can have a whole site survey done maybe in a couple of days, and you will know all the problems that are on site for the lowest price ever”. Yeah. It’s crazy how fast you can do it and how accurate it is. I talk to operators that use your system, so I hear you. Yeah. Your podcast, listen to your podcast, I’m calling your customers to find out what they say, and they love it. Oh, yeah. They can’t believe how accurate it is. Yeah. Well, the thing about that is we as an industry need to make sure that our turbines are operating at [00:19:00] maximum efficiency. Yep. And if a simple tool like the Motordoc EMPath system exists, we need to get customers, operators in line to start doing it worldwide. Australia- Oh … Europe-  Howard Penrose: Yeah. We- … Canada. Australia, we’re trying to get into, but right now we even have OEMs using it through North- That’s good … and South America, Asia. Good. Uh, Middle East, um, and, uh, and some of Europe. Good. So it’s, it’s, it’s really taking off. Uh, I’d say probably our biggest market right now is Brazil. Sure. They’re going crazy. Well, the, the turbines are- They’re having a lot of problems. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Right. And the, well, those turbines have a h- high usage, right? So because- Oh, yeah … the winds are so good, they’re operating at, like, capacity factor is above 50%. Yes. It’s insane. Yeah. So there’s a lot of wear and tear. There’s no downtime for those turbines.  Howard Penrose: Yeah. Well, and, and people think it’s all the starting and stopping. It’s not. No. It’s a grid-related issue. So we have- Sure … we have a low frequency. And you know some of the stuff I volun- I, I’m, I’ve been volunteered for- [00:20:00] Yeah … uh, including the CIGRE thing. Um, so I get to sit in the grid code committees for IEEE and put my, and our input into that, uh, and kind of watch the back of the IBR industry, right? Mm-hmm. ‘Cause there’s a definitely bias against our industry. Um, and I also, uh, get to hear what’s going on in the grid side of things from CIGRE worldwide, and it’s all very similar, and it has to do with low-frequency oscillating currents- Yes … called subsynchronous currents- Yes … which are low enough not to damage large synchronous machines. And they thought, and there’s books written on this, by the way, multiple books written on wind turbine impact- Uh, and they’re seeing now, um… Well, we detected it first, along with Timken. Hank, uh, and, and I went out to a site, and we detected for the first time, because of how they wanna do the testing and where the site was located, we saw the oscillating torque [00:21:00] in the air gap, ’cause that’s one of the things the technology does. It actually measures the torque, air gap torque. Sure. So we were watching the oscillating torque as a tower started up. And so we did, we went through the rest of that site looking at the same stuff in the same way. It increased our time and data collection, and time on site. But then we started looking for it at other sites, and going to pass data because I don’t have to go back and retake data. Right. And we’re like, “Oh my God. It’s everywhere.” 16 hertz, 21 hertz, and 50 hertz. And we found a paper that specifically identified that as the sub synchronous frequencies for 60 hertz. So we know what they are also for 50 hertz. Once we identified that and we saw how much the torsi- torque was oscillating, we worked with Shermco, who got us some information on Y-rings that were failing. Yeah. And they were all failing… When the metallurgy was done, they were all failing from fatigue. And you’re like, fatigue how? What’s fatiguing these connections? [00:22:00] Well, the fatigue is that air gap torque- Exactly … because you’re basically causing the, the, everything to oscillate a little bit, and that causes the windings to move slightly. It’s a living,  Allen Hall: breathing machine-  Howard Penrose: Exactly … this generator  Allen Hall: is.  Howard Penrose: Yeah.  Allen Hall: It’s not  Howard Penrose: static. It’s definitely not sta- no electric machine is static. No. Even a transformer’s not static. Right.  Allen Hall: So- There’s a little  Howard Penrose: bit of wiggle going on there all the time All the time. And it’s minute, so it takes a long time. Right. And what, uh, uh, everybody… Well, first people thought it was a particular manufacturer, which it wasn’t. Turned out every defig’s failing the same way. Sure. You’re fatiguing it. Yeah. Every bearing is failing the same way, even in the gearbox, main bearings, and everything else. Right. All of these conditions are happening across all the OEMs, but they’re not allowed to talk. Well, this is, this is the thing that  Allen Hall: I like watching your podcast.  Howard Penrose: Yeah.  Allen Hall: The Chaos and Caffeine. It comes out Saturday mornings. It’s on YouTube. If you haven’t- Yeah … clicked into it, you should click into it  Howard Penrose: because a lot of these issues are discussed there. It’s definitely, um… [00:23:00] Let’s just say I’ll speak Navy quite a bit. Allen Hall: It’s a great podcast, and I think what you’re doing with the EMPath system- Yes … at motor dock is really a game changer. Yeah. I’m talking to everybody, all the operators I know. I keep telling them to call you and to try the system out because it’s so inexpensive and it does the work quickly and efficiently, and it’s been proven. There’s no messing- Oh, yeah … around when you’re talking to MotorDoc. I…  Howard Penrose: Somebody dared tell me that there’s no standard for it. There’s ISO standards for it. Yes. There’s IEEE 1415- Yes … which I chair. Uh, and there’s other standards coming out- This is- … associated with it. And there’s a document that I also chair for Sea Gray- Called A178, which is the practical application of the technology. So it’s well-documented. There are traceable standards for it. I need more  Allen Hall: operators to call you- Yeah … and to talk to you and get systems in the back of the trucks that they can use to check out the health of their gear boxes and their drive trains and their generators. How [00:24:00] do they do that? Where do they go? Where, where’s, what’s- Well- … the first place they should look for?  Howard Penrose: Uh, info@motordoc.com. Okay. I get all, I get all of those as well, so do my people. Um, or, uh, LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s really good.  Allen Hall: Look up anything. Yeah.  Howard Penrose: Yeah, yeah. So, so either the company at Motordoc, or, uh, I’m, I sh- I’ll show up either searching for my name or, uh, linkedin.com/in/motordoc. Come straight to me ’cause I’ve been in, on LinkedIn forever, so- Right, just- … I got to do that … look up  Allen Hall: Howard Penrose, P-E-N-R-O-S-E. Yep. Or go to motordoc.com is- Yep, motordoc.com … the website address.  Howard Penrose: Yep. There’s a lot of great information there. And we have partners, and we have people. We’re growing the company. You know, talk to me. I, I’ll- Yes … I like answering the phone and talking. It’s, it’s a thing. My people go, “Can we answer the phone one?” No. Um, but, but yeah, we, we, y- when you call us, you’re not just dealing with a single person. Right. The Motordoc is far more expansive. Right now, we [00:25:00] just got our partnership with, uh, Hitachi and, and Juliet- Yeah, that’s great and stuff like that. Uh, we’re helping them with certain things. Uh, we’re partnered with some of the big OEMs, almost all of them, um, you know, helping identify the issues, you know. And, and when users contact us, often they’ll tell us what’s going on, and we’ll, we can, uh, sometimes say, “Yeah, it’s this, and here’s how we prove it.” Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s the, that’s the beauty- Yeah … of calling Motordoc. So I need my operators that, that watch the show- Yeah … worldwide, go online, go on LinkedIn, get ahold of Howard, get ahold of Motordoc, and get started. Yep. Howard, thank you- And- … so much for being on the podcast. Yeah. This is fantastic. I love talking to you because- it’s, it’s like talking to, you know… Uh, no, really, it’s talking like someone who’s a real good industry expert, who’s been there a long time, and understands- Yeah … how this  [00:26:00] works.

Matthew Stead recaps WindEurope Madrid and Blades Europe Edinburgh. Plus Suzlon unveils its Blue Sky platform for Europe, Muehlhan consolidates six specialist firms, and Mingyang keeps hunting for a European home. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Speaker: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now, your hosts.  Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Matthew Stead, who is back in Australia, but not at home. He’s up in Queensland. Or actually, not even on– in Queensland, technically. He’s on an island off the coast of Queensland. Where are you at, Matthew?  Matthew Stead: Uh, Moreton Island. It’s, uh, like a resort island off, uh, off of Brisbane, so beautiful outside.  Allen Hall 2025: Well, you need a little bit of resort time because you’ve been to two conferences, and you spent a good bit of time in Austria after that. So you were at WindEurope in Madrid, and then following that, you went right over to Scotland for Blades Europe. So I wanna hear your thoughts. We’ll start with, uh, WindEurope and what was going on at that conference. It did sound like there was a pretty [00:01:00] good attendance, and some people that I have talked to about it really en-enjoyed being in Madrid. It’s just  Matthew Stead: a bigger city. Um, first time I’d ever been to Madrid, and, uh, yeah, the show was amazing, actually. I was, I was a bit blown away by, uh, I think the OEMs were back out in force. You know, so like the Vestas, Siemens were, um, really– and Nordexes and so forth were really back out in force, so that was really good to see. Um, the, some of the larger operators had really, really strong presence as well. So you could see that, you know, Iberdrola, Res, um, those sorts of companies were, um, really, you know, putting a big effort in and meeting their customers and, um, really showing, uh, the world who they were. So that was really, um, you know, really good to see. There were so many people seriously. Um, the queues for food at lunch were, were, um, one of the major problems. Um, so, um, yeah, it was really a lot of people, so that was really exciting. Um, and I mean, for me, I was [00:02:00]trying to catch up with, with partners and friends and, yeah, it was, it was jam, jam-packed just meeting people in the industry. Um, probably a few other things. So s- you know, SkySpecs and Aerones had a really strong, um, presence there. So, um, SkySpecs and Aerones were, were doing really well. Um, maybe one of the, um, surprises for me, and I know this has been a topic on a few other previous episodes, was there was a lot of interest in bird and bat detection. I, I, I think there had to be, like, five companies that were, were– had really big setups, and it was a really, really big topic around cameras and so forth. So, um, that was a, a big topic. And, um, then there, there was a really, really strong, you know, supply chain, you know, from, from vessels to cables to, you know, repairs. Allen Hall 2025: What was the ratio of offshore companies to onshore companies? I’m always curious.  Matthew Stead: You’re looking through the, the list. Um- I would, I’m only guessing it [00:03:00] was probably about 40% had an offshore focus of some kind. So it was definitely a strong offshore focus. Um, obviously, you know, a lot of onshore, offshore combined companies. But yeah, definitely the word offshore kept on popping up a lot.  Allen Hall 2025: Because Spain is mostly onshore. Like, um, like 99% onshore, right? I think it’s a couple of small projects going offshore. Does it look like the onshore business is gonna pick up, uh, just in terms of the activity on the floor in Madrid?  Matthew Stead: Uh, yeah. Um, I, I think, you know, like I said, you know, those big operators like the REZAs and the Iberdrolas and, and the OEMs, I, I think it’s just a given that, um, you know, things are buoyant. Um, well, they appear to be definitely very buoyant. Uh, I think we’ve heard, you know, some of the positive, um, financial news from a few of the OEMs recently. So yeah, yeah, it seems like o- onshore is, is maturing further, further, further. And so you went straight  Allen Hall 2025: from Madrid, right, to [00:04:00] Edinburgh, Scotland. That was a change in weather, I would assume. Uh, probably about a 20 degree Celsius difference. 25 down to 15, yes. Whoa. Okay. Yeah, that’s a good bit. Uh, but the Edinburgh conference, that’s the first time that Blades Europe has been to Edinburgh. I, at least I don’t remember them being there before. That tends to be a more technical conference than Wind Europe. Uh, the, the Blades conference is obviously focused on blades, and all the relevant experts in Europe do tend to show up there. What were some of the hot topics at Blades Europe this year? Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think it was, um, an interesting conference. Um, I, I’d been to Blades USA, so I was able to contrast, um, Blades USA a little bit. I think probably the differences here were, yeah, there was definitely some strong, strong, uh, experts there, like you say. Um, you know, Birgit, um, our friend was, was in attendance and a few of her colleagues from Statkraft. Um, I think, and or, uh, actually ORE Catapult, the, the [00:05:00] UK research, um, offshore renewable energy research, um, they did some great presentations. I really, um, they really shared some really good insights. So, um, ORE Catapult were talking about life extension and, um, you know, looking at the, the fatigue on blades and, uh, how they’re, how they’re going to perform and life extension. So some great stuff from ORE Catapult there. Probably another key topic that came up was around, uh, sort of related to life extension, but also recycling. The, there was a really good session on the new IEC standard. Um, um, to, you know, full disclosure, I was actually on the panel. So I, I thought it was a great panel. But, um, the new IEC standard for blade operations and maintenance, um, is really well a-advanced now in its development. Um, very strong risk focus, you know. So depending on the risk then drives your, your blade O&M program. [00:06:00] Um, so that was a, a great talk as well. Uh, and then maybe finally, um, something close to my heart, um, I think the, the, you know, the maturity of CMS companies. There actually, there were five blade CMS companies there, which is probably the biggest turnout I’ve seen around blade CMS, um, ever. And so it was good to see that sort of, um, interest and growth, um, and the need for, for blade CMS. Uh, and, um, obviously the last one, lightning. So lightning always an issue. Lots of discussions around lightning, um, you know, through Greece and a few of the, the, the Balkan go- Balkan states. On the blade recycling front, there’s a  Allen Hall 2025: company in Scotland called ReBlade that is involved in some of the recycling efforts. Did they give a presentation of, of what they’re up to at the moment? Matthew Stead: Uh, yes, I think they did. Um, they’re talking about setting up a, a site in a, a [00:07:00] couple of sites, and I think Inverness was the, the location where they’re, where they’re setting up a site. The, um, the port is supportive, so they’re working through those, those, those challenges. You know, getting a site, getting transport and access to the blades. Um, working out when, when the, when the blades will come to them. You know, the storage of blades. Um, the, the end, end uses for those blades. Getting all that supply chain, um, lined up was, you know, yeah, it was, that was quite thorough and quite, um, yeah, inspiring.  Allen Hall 2025: And on the CMS side, what are operators trying to monitor? ‘Cause usually have something in mind that they’re going after.  Matthew Stead: For better or for worse, there’s still some serial, um, failure modes. Um, and so the industry is looking at very particular, you know, challenges that, um, certain make and model have. Um, so root insert failures was definitely one of those, um, one of those topics. Um, and that was actually one of the, the, the [00:08:00] roundtable discussions at, uh, Blades Europe. Some other, um, monitoring around, you know, lightning and- lightning damage and what’s happening with the LPS. That was also, uh, another big topic for, for monitoring. And then a few other sort of general, more, more general, um, you know, natural frequencies of blades and seeing if the natural frequencies are changing, indicating a change in stiffness, which relates to potential damage. So yeah, there was– it was quite a mix of the types of, um, CMS that was discussed.  Allen Hall 2025: Has the digital twin finally died? Anybody talk about that?  Matthew Stead: There’s actually a current call-out for a new research project in Europe around digital twins. So, um, yeah, one of the larger, one of the larger operators is, is putting, pulling together a team to talk about digital twins, so-  Allen Hall 2025: I, I think this is one of the more difficult things to do, but just because you’re dealing with a variety of blades and blade factories and unique issues that pop up that are…[00:09:00] You, you really can’t model until after they happen. And after they happen, everybody knows about them anyway. So what’s the point of the digital twin if you can’t detect things early? It, it, it is a great concept, but hard to implement.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. And why? Why would you do it? I mean, you, you’re only gonna do it if there’s a benefit, and what is the benefit? So, but I think, uh, actually at Blades Europe, digital twins was not really a topic. And maybe one thing I forgot to say is that the, um, Wind Power Lab did a, a good, um, presentation on carbon blades as well, so.  Allen Hall 2025: The, the carbon blades are, is a very good discussion, just because the trend has been lately to scrap blades and bring new ones on site. And the carbon can be difficult to repair, or it takes a long time to repair, and you just don’t have the manpower or woman power to go out and fix it. So the, the fastest option is to build a new blade. But it does leave a lot of blade waste, which is where the industry is not going. Uh, recyclable blades, which is [00:10:00] in process at the moment, will make that easier, but you just don’t wanna be recycling blades. You like to be able to repair them. Composites are repairable. And it’s, it is so odd that they, they wanna continue on that pathway, but we’ll see. We’ll see. You don’t really learn the lesson until you do it.  Matthew Stead: Um, however, you know, the, the presentation on carbon blades was, um, you know, highlighted a lot of the challenges, but also highlighted some of the positives and the, you know, how they do help. Um, and so there was a lot of support for carbon blades, but there’s a lot of unknowns and, um, and there was a lot of discussion around how do you even test if the LPS is working. Uh, it’s just impossible. So, you know, traditional methods on carbon blades, yeah, it just don’t work. So, um, but there was a lot of support that the carbon does bring benefit. But yeah, I agree with you. There’s a lot of challenges there.  Allen Hall 2025: That’s one of the things we learned years ago back in the late ’80s, early ’90s when we, at least in, in the [00:11:00] States, started building a number of carbon fiber aircraft. And the repair situation and dealing with repairs in, in remote locations became difficult. And you’ve learned how much training it took to keep an industry running, and you’re starting from zero for a lot of places that all he had worked on was aluminum. It, it’s a completely different world. You’re, you’re training tens of thousands of technicians around the world. You weren’t planning to go do that, and now you are. So it just, it adds to the cost.  Matthew Stead: It also ties into the OEM, um, you know, providing, you know, details on how to repair those blades because they’re not, they’re not just a standard item, so-  Allen Hall 2025: No, you, you don’t wanna be grinding into a protrusion if you can avoid it. It- you’re just never gonna get it back into that original form because protrusions are in some part magic. And taking a grinder to them is not gonna… It’s breaking the magic. All the magic will be leaving that protrusion when you do that. Yeah, very [00:12:00]difficult. Delamination and bond line failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. Well, as we know, the wind industry has long been dominated by a handful of European and American turbine makers, uh, particularly in the, quote-unquote, “West.” Uh, but that landscape may be [00:13:00] shifting. Suzlon, the Indian turbine giant that nearly collapsed under about a $1.5 billion of debt just a few years ago, is back. The company has unveiled a new turbine platform aimed squarely at Europe, and says it will build its first factory on the continent if it wins enough orders. Vice Chairman Girish Tanti, uh, delivered the announcement at the WindEurope conference in Madrid, where Matthew was Signaling that Suzlon believes its time has come. And since you were there, Matthew, did you hear any news on the floor, any discussion on the show floor about Suzlon entering Europe?  Matthew Stead: Well, actually, yes. So, um, um, there was actually a good, uh, contingent of Suzlon people at, uh, Blades Europe. So, uh, they attended, uh, Wind Europe and then Blades Europe. Um, and I, you know, I was able to have a bit of discussion with them. I think, I think, uh, they were quite optimistic about, um, [00:14:00] you know, moving back or moving into, into Europe in terms of manufacturing. Um, however, there was an element of skepticism. Am I allowed to say that? So they, uh, were, they were not completely, um, convinced that it’s gonna happen, but, uh, they were certainly excited by that. It was definitely a, a clear possibility, but not a given.  Allen Hall 2025: Well, they have a, a new platform called the Blue Sky platform, um, which will have, I think, two turbines here, a 5 megawatt and a 6.3 megawatt, which is squarely aimed at Europe and also the United States, for that matter. And building a factory, though, doesn’t make a lot of sense if the cost driver for a factory in Europe is the European employees, which it tends to be when you hear the discussions about the cost structure, it’s about the employees. I’m not sure why Suzlon would make blades or nacelles in Europe unless they could avoid tariffs or taxation, because India is a very [00:15:00] cost, uh, driven, uh, manufacturing facilities writing country. So why would you wanna go build another expensive factory, probably in the realm of a couple hundred million pounds, uh, if you’re gonna go do it? It probably doesn’t make any sense to do that as well as just selling turbines into Europe. It seems like the easier path.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. And then you’ve got all the, like, the quality control challenges and, you know, you get the cultural challenges. So yeah, to be honest, I don’t qu- I don’t quite understand the logic behind that either. Um, maybe there’s, there’s some things that we don’t know about behind the scenes in terms of tariffs and other, other incentives that we don’t know about.  Allen Hall 2025: Would you see operators taking, uh, a Suzlon presentation and maybe even writing plans for developing with Suzlon turbines in the next couple of years? Is that a, a feeling that Europeans would, would do that, or is Vestas mainly and Siemens Gamesa so strong in Europe that it doesn’t make any sense unless [00:16:00] you’re in sort of the periphery countries of Europe?  Matthew Stead: I mean, my first exposure to a wind turbine was a Suzlon turbine in Australia, and there are many, many, many Suzlon turbines in Australia. And they’re all, they’re all still working. They’re all still reliable. So I mean, from a reputation and reliability and, um Yeah, history point of view, I can’t see why not. I mean, you know, uh, the operators will see that, you know, they’ve proven themselves. They’re not new kids on the block. Um, and so why wouldn’t an operator think about it? Allen Hall 2025: Well,  Matthew Stead: in  Allen Hall 2025: this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, which you can download for free at peswind.com, there is a nice article from Muelhen Wind Services, and that is a growing company. A lot going on there. Our friends at AC883 just joined Muelhen a f- few months ago, and is being part of that conglomerate. And, and we know that obviously building wind farm used to mean [00:17:00]consulting with dozens of contractors, and this is where Mue- Muelhen has really s- stepped into the breach here. So from blade repair at one company and heavy lift cranes at another company, all that had to be managed separately. You’re calling s- different companies all the time. And watching asset managers and site supervisors do this, uh, it is a thankless job. Well, Muelhen’s trying to change that a little bit, uh, and they’re saying that that model no longer works, and I totally agree with them. It’s insane. Uh, but so Muelhen has consolidated six specialist firms under its one brand, and covering everything from port pre-assembly to long-term operations and maintenance across Europe, the US and Canada, uh, and Asia-Pacific. Its CEO, Søren Hoffer, uh, puts it plainly, “The next phase of wind will not be won by turbine size alone. It will be decided by the supply chain’s ability to execute.” Boy, [00:18:00]couldn’t say truer words. Uh, I’ve worked with Muelhen or my company, Weather Guard Lightning Tech, has worked with Muelhen on a couple of projects over the years, and we’ve always had, uh, great service from them, and we have talked to a number of operators that love them, that love using Muelhen. So it’s not a surprise that they’re trying to grow and expand and make life easier for the operators.  Matthew Stead: Sounds like a brilliant move, really. I mean, you know, pulling all these sort of things together is, is a real challenge, isn’t it? I mean, coordinating all these subcontractors, um, getting to turn up at the right time, and yeah, I mean, it just sounds like a brilliant move, and I think that we need more, more, more efficient service companies to service the growing fleet. So the more they can get organized, the better.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah, the scale matters here, and the expertise matters. As we’ve have a couple hundred thousand turbines that are [00:19:00] operating in the, quote-unquote, “West,” it does make sense to have a larger player that has seen most of those turbines and has some experience with them. It’s always the scary scenario when you’re working with a new company. Have they been on this turbine before? Do they know what they’re doing? Do they know- Lockout tagout. Even simple things like that come to the forefront. And the, the trouble is on some of these smaller companies that are in that business is that, uh, you just don’t get the level of service, you don’t get the level of response, you don’t have the horsepower if something were to, to go wrong on site. They don’t have the cash to, to bring in a second crane or another crew to get this job done. It, it does become scale at some point. And, uh, for a long time in the wind industry, particularly United States, it, it has been a lot of, quote-unquote, “mom-and-pop operations,” and those are slowly getting acquired by the likes of Muehlhan. I, I, I think this is inevitable at some point. Uh, from the asset owner’s, uh, desktop watching this go on, [00:20:00] how do you see, you know, a large operator interfacing with Muehlhan? Are they gonna do just one-stop shopping at this point? They’re, they’re not gonna have three or four different companies to work with, that they’re just gonna lock into, uh, Muehlhan? ‘Cause, uh, that’s what I see.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. I, I think, you know, from the, the WOMA Conference in, in Melbourne, we saw a bit of a, bit of a shift towards, um, outsourcing, at least in Australia Pacific region. And I mean, if, if you’re gonna outsource, um, you’re, you’re probably gonna join up with a, a Muehlhan, um, equivalent. So, you know, that way it just takes some of the risk out of, out of it, so it, it sort of makes sense. Um, the other observation I’ve heard is that, you know, because of the seasonality of blade repairs, it’s really hard to keep hold of, um, blade techs. And so if you’re a global company, you’ve got at least some opportunity of using the ses- seasonality and keeping hold of the good techs and, um, you know, so, you know, you know, summer in, in North, North, uh, America, and then, you know, summer in [00:21:00] Australia. So it, it, it allows these company, allows these companies to keep hold of their good people.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. And that, that’s always been the yearly problem, right? That you have a, a crew of a couple good crews in the summertime, and you come back the next summer and it’s a whole different group of people and yeah, that, that, that’s trouble for the industry. Well, a- and it’s good. It’s fi- it’s finally good to see this happening, and I know, uh, we’ve talked about it internally here at Weather Guard of who to work with and who to partner with. We like working with companies that have scale, and I think we’re finally there. So it’s really interesting to see this article from Johan in PES Wind. So if you, if you haven’t read the article, you should go visit peswind.com and take a look. There’s a lot of great content in this quarter’s issue, and y- you don’t wanna miss it. So go to peswind.com today. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers [00:22:00] a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind.com today. So when, when the energy prices spike like they’re happening right now, uh, the Iran war being one of the main drivers, and obviously gasoline prices have jumped quite a bit, here’s what happens. The China’s clean energy sector goes to work, and they’re racing to make connections and make sales. As electricity prices jump up, gas prices jump up, everybody wants to try to find a cheaper way to provide energy to their countries or locales. Uh, China’s there to offer it. So it’s solar panels, batteries, EVs, and even wind turbines are, are looking for homes out of China. Uh, for European wind professionals, [00:23:00] the most important part comes from Mingyang, right? So they were unable to get a production facility in Scotland, but they haven’t given up yet. They are still searching for a home somewhere in Europe. And as of today, I don’t think they’ve found it. They’re s- I think they’re still looking for some country to host them. But how long is that gonna go on, Matthew? I, I think with the domination of Vestas and Siemens Gamesa in Europe and Suzlon trying to make an entry, will Mingyang and other Chinese manufacturers eventually find a home?  Matthew Stead: It’s interesting. I think, uh, if you look at the airline industry, you’ve always had premium providers, and you’ve always had low-end providers, and I think there’s always a place for all of them. And so I re- I reckon they’ll find, I think they’ll find their place in, in the market and just, you know, it might just take a while. But they’ve got the strength, haven’t they? They’ve got the product. They’ve got the strength. So it’s just a matter [00:24:00] of time.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. I, I, I d- I do think eventually it will happen. But Vestas and, and Siemens Gamesa have done a pretty good job of controlling it, and wind Europe, honestly. Wind Europe has not been a proponent of a Chinese manufacturer in Europe, so that generally will help slow down any business plans they would have But at the same time, there’s a lot of opportunities around the world that’s not necessarily in Europe, right? South America has strong ties with China. They’re– And Chinese companies are, are starting production in China. There’s a lot th- things happening there. You’re gonna see that in Africa and other places. So it doesn’t necessarily have to happen in Europe, which is, I think Europeans and Americans think, “Well, we can’t have China in those locales.” Fine. But it isn’t like China doesn’t have other opportunities to, to sell turbines or solar panels or batteries. There are plenty places on the planet where  Matthew Stead: people that  Allen Hall 2025: need  Matthew Stead: lower cost energy, and they’re gonna find them. Um, I did attend a, a panel [00:25:00] discussion on Türkiye, um, and the growth, and there was a lot of growth in Türkiye around onshore and offshore. And so maybe Mingyang, that might be a, a place, um, for them to, to start, you know, on the doorstep of, of Europe. The stepping stone, so to speak. Stepping country.  Allen Hall 2025: Is there risk in that, uh, uh, if, uh, uh, Mingyang decided to put a plant in Türkiye? Is, does that come with some political aspect? Because I, I, I don’t remember. Türkiye t-tends to play, uh, uh, k- kind of like Switzerland in, in terms of working with different, uh, political systems over time. Yeah.  Matthew Stead: I, I’ve had a bit more to do with a few, a few, um, sort of organizations in Türkiye recently and, um, you know, it’s highly professional, highly, you know, logical, and so I, I can’t see why it’d be a challenge. So I think, yeah, that stepping stone into Europe might be a, a logical way to go. Well, maybe  Allen Hall 2025: we’ll see that in the next [00:26:00] couple of months. I don’t know. There’s gonna be a lot to happen there. There’s so much money being spent in Europe on renewables, wind, solar, battery, all the above, that there’s plenty of opportunity, and every company that has a product that’s gonna be trying to sell it in Europe right now. It’s a smart move. Absolutely.  Matthew Stead: I think the other thing that we’ll probably be talking about a little bit more is EV trucks or, you know, electric trucks.  Allen Hall 2025: You think so?  Matthew Stead: I reckon we’ll be talking more and more about electric trucks.  Allen Hall 2025: Does Europe even have a, a le- a real true EV tractor-trailer, large truck? What do they call… I guess they call it a lorry.  Matthew Stead: I don’t think yet. But that’s why I’m saying I think this is a topic that’s gonna raise itself. Um, I’ve, I’ve seen some numbers recently which says that it’s a bit of a no-brainer to go from diesel to, um, to battery now.  Allen Hall 2025: So is Tesla gonna be the, the winner there just because of their, I don’t even what they call it, the Tesla truck? Is that what they call that now?  Matthew Stead: Not the Cybertruck, the, the truck truck.  Allen Hall 2025: Electric semi-truck. There you go. [00:27:00] Thank you, producer Claire.  Matthew Stead: I think you’ve gotta watch, you know, you’ve gotta watch BYD and a few of the other, the other, um, other companies.  Allen Hall 2025: Do they have something as large as what, uh, Tesla is offering today? Because Tesla is offering a true semi or tractor-trailer  Matthew Stead: I, I, I must admit I’m not a, a huge expert on the topic, but I’m sure Rosemary is.  Allen Hall 2025: She drives the big rigs? Is that what she’s doing?  Matthew Stead: But I think we– Yeah, I think, I think it’s an in-interesting thing to watch because, um, certainly fuel prices in Australia are definitely pushing, um, this idea of, um, electric trucks. Allen Hall 2025: Yeah, diesel prices are really high in the States. I- if they’re high in the States, I can’t even imagine what they are in Europe or Australia. They must be through the roof. So if you have a diesel vehicle, although they run forever and are pretty efficient, the price of fuel is insane right now.  Matthew Stead: And, you know, if you, if you take that a step further into mining, so Twiggy Forest, um, and Fortescue, you know, switching to [00:28:00] electric, uh, trucks and electric mining, yeah, it makes sense. Allen Hall 2025: Does the math work out on that? Uh, obviously Fortescue is taking, uh, really a pretty significant risk in that they’re developing their own electricity generation sites via wind and solar and battery, the whole thing, and they’re converting some of their larger vehicles to electric. Does that hold a big risk, or is this just a financial no-brainer, particularly when diesel prices are so high? Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think it’s a financial no-brainer. Uh, and that’s why partly I think we’ll be talking about trucks because, you know, once the finances make sense, um, there’ll be a faster transition. And I think, you know, Fortescue is not a silly company.  Allen Hall 2025: Fortescue is willing to dabble, right? So they’re willing to, to see where the technology is and spend a little bit of money and possibly it works out, right? I think there’s– you have to take a little bit of risk if you’re in that business because you are spending so much money on fuel. [00:29:00] You can spend a couple million dollars playing in different areas to pick an eventual winner. Obviously, they’re gonna– Well, it’s not obvious at the moment, but it, it seems obvious to us being on the electricity side. Electricity is gonna be the answer. Renewable energy is gonna be the easy way to do it, the lowest cost way to do it. There you go. Go do it. Well, American Clean Power’s event, uh, which is in Houston this year, will be happening June 1st through the 4th at the convention center downtown in Houston. It’s gonna be warm, everybody, so if you’re traveling from a cooler country like Denmark to Houston, bring something cool to wear. It will be warm in June. It, it– Houston is just a very warm place, and it’s quite humid, so it’ll, it’ll be a, a unique environment. However, it does sound like there’s gonna be a, a, an– A number of interesting companies and a lot of people that are attending that event this year, and one of them is gonna be Matthew and EOLOGIX-PING with Weather Guard Lightning Tech will [00:30:00] both be down at the event in a booth and seeing everybody and, and, and meeting a whole bunch of, of, uh, new people that are getting into the industry, which is, to me, is always the fun part. Like, we just meet so many really fun people. Uh, and Matthew, you know, we had a discussion internally about that, like, uh, our, our new, uh, chief commercial officer, Nikki Briggs, has been commenting. We’ve been talking to so many operators around the world, and after every, uh, little meeting briefing that we have, we do a post-briefing, and she goes, “They were so nice.” And I s- yes, Nikki, the wind industry people are fantastic to work with. Like, they’re all focused on doing something positive, and they’re trying to, to do it the best that they can. And there’s a lot of constraints to it, and they’re making a number of hard decisions. But when we all come together at American Clean Power here in the States, hey, we can kinda commiserate and [00:31:00] talk about what’s happening and catch up. And I feel like we need a little bit of catch-up time in this industry, particularly here in the United States.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think, um, I, I definitely agree. And I, I found, you know, previously I used to work in the construction industry and work with engineers and, you know, transport, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And actually, I found that the renewable industry, there’s a lot of really open people, really happy to have a discussion, um, not the big egos, so I completely agree. And, um, I’m thinking back, um, I first met people in the wind industry in, you know, around 2012, 2013, and, you know, I still know a number of those people and really appreciate catching up with them. Um, so actually, Berend van der Pol was probably one of the first, and, uh, Birgit Junker was, um, maybe one of the second, so yeah. And I’m definitely looking forward to ACP.  Allen Hall 2025: If you’re, if you’re down in Houston at American Clean Power, definitely stop by a- and say hi to everybody from [00:32:00]EOLOGIX-PING and Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and hey, learn about all the things that are going on because both companies have new products that’ll, were gonna be announced at the site. Uh, we’re already getting inundated with requests on the Weather Guard side. It’s insane. We’re telling people, like, “Slow down, slow down, slow down. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll talk to you about it when we get to Houston.” But, uh, expect a very attentive audience this year, which is exciting. That wraps up another episode of “The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.” If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas- We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It helps other wind energy professionals follow the show. For Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:33:00] Podcast.

Allen covers NextEra’s potential $400 billion buy of Dominion Energy, US developers racing the July tax credit deadline, Ming Yang scouting Spain for a factory, Turkey opening its first offshore wind tender, and Hornsea 3’s first foundation going in. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall 2025: Good morning, everyone. The world is racing at the minute, and let’s start with the biggest race of all. NextEra Energy, the largest utility in America by market value, is in talks to buy Dominion Energy of Virginia. The price? It’s about $76 a share, roughly $66 billion. With debt, the combined company would be valued at about $400 billion. That would make it the largest power deal on record. A mostly stock transaction, at least that’s what’s being reported, and a deal could come as soon as this week. Pretty shocking. Now, why does this matter to wind? NextEra is [00:01:00] not just a utility. It is one of the largest renewable energy developers on the planet. And Dominion sits on top of Northern Virginia’s data center alley, the biggest concentration of data centers in the country. Dominion expects its peak demand to double by the end of the twenty-thirties, American power consumption hit a second straight record in twenty-twenty-five, and it’s still climbing. So the company that builds more wind and solar than almost anyone wants to merge with the company that serves the hungriest grid in America. That is a race to the top. But down on the ground, developers are running a very different kind of race. Wind projects under construction in the United States are up 60% since the start of twenty-twenty-five. Solar is up about 50%. Why the surge? Well, the clock is ticking. Tax credits for wind and solar were gutted in the one big beautiful bill. Projects must begin construction by July 4th [00:02:00] and prove they are building continuously to qualify. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, those credits were supposed to phase out at the end of twenty-thirty-three. Now that deadline is just a couple of weeks away. Developers are pushing hard on projects that can make it and abandoning the ones that cannot. One solar executive put it plainly: “A lot of the projects are going to die on the vine.” And that’s a real shame. Labor is short. Of course, electricians are in demand. Transformer lead times have stretched to 18 months because data centers are buying them too. Even permits are hard to get. Projects that touch federal land, of course, that once took a month to approve are now waiting up to a year. So while NextEra races to buy the grid, developers are racing to build before the door shuts. Now, across the Atlantic, there’s a different kind of race going on. Chinese turbine manufacturer MingYang [00:03:00] Smart Energy is looking for a new home, and quick. Back in March, Britain blocked the company’s plans for a one-and-a-half billion pound factory in Scotland, mostly based on security grounds. MingYang’s European chief, Horatio Evers, says the company is now talking to Spain and scouting other locations on the continent. He says MingYang wants to build turbines in Europe with a European workforce. And this is the part I don’t understand, ’cause European workforce tend to be more expensive. However, uh, MingYang wants to build that factory, but there’s a condition. They need a guarantee that their turbines will be allowed into the market, and so far that hasn’t happened. The European Commission launched a review of Chinese manufacturers back in 2024. Those findings are still unpublished. So MingYang is racing to find a country willing to say “Yes.” Further east, Turkey is entering the offshore wind [00:04:00] race for the first time. The government has defined four areas along its western coast, all on the Aegean, for its first ever offshore wind tender. Turkey’s energy minister says Turkey aims for five gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. The country has committed $30 billion to transmission infrastructure. And Turkey already has 15 gigawatts of onshore wind spinning today. Turkey is, of course, a NATO ally, and it straddles Europe and Asia, and now it’s stepping into offshore wind. And finally, up in the North Sea, off the coast of Norfolk, England, 75 miles from shore, Cadeler of Copenhagen just installed the first monopile foundation at Hornsea 3. When complete, Hornsea 3 will be the single largest offshore wind farm on the planet. 2.9 gigawatts, 197 foundations, enough power for 3.3 [00:05:00] million British homes. The project is owned by Danish giant Ørsted and will bring 5,000 construction jobs to the region. Hornsea 1 and 2 are already spinning, and of course, Hornsea 4 is on the drawing board. So here’s the picture. America’s two biggest utilities are racing toward a $400 billion merger. Developers are sprinting to break ground before the Fourth of July. A Chinese turbine maker is searching Europe for a factory, and Turkey is marking out its first offshore wind zones. And over in Britain, they just planted the first foundation at the world’s largest wind farm. Everyone is racing. The only question is, who gets there first? And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 18th of May, 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast

Alfred Crabtree, founder of Blade Repair Academy, and Sheryl Weinstein of SkySpecs join to discuss standardized technician training and risk reduction in blade repair. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Alfred and Sheryl, welcome to the program. Sheryl Weinstein: Thanks. Allen Hall: So we’re in Dunlap, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, uh, and also close to. Chattanooga Chattanooga, and we’re in the Smoky Mountains ish region. We’re Alfred Crabtree: no, we’re, we’re, you could consider it Appalachia for sure. Sure. Okay. Uh, we’re on the, in the valley called the Seche Valley, uh, which splits the Cumberland Plateau. So we’re, we’re in a valley and we have hills a thousand feet above us here. Yeah. Either way. It’s beautiful. Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s a great drive in here. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. It’s a unique place. Yeah. Allen Hall: And we’re at Blade Repair Academy, which, uh, if you’re not familiar with Blade Repair Academy, you should be. Uh, because a lot of the good training that happens in the United States actually happens to play repair, repair Care blade, repair academy. Uh, yeah, it’s been a long week at uh, OMS this week and we got the introduction today. This is the first time we’ve been on site. That’s right. And, uh, we wanted to see all the cool things that are happening [00:01:00] here. And it really comes down to technician training competency. Working with blades, working with tools, knowing what you’re doing up tower when you’re on the blade, which is hard to train. It’s really hard to train, and both you and Cheryl have a ton of experience being up on blades and repairing blades and scarfing and doing all the critical features that have to happen to make blades work today. It’s a tough training regimen. There’s a lot to it and a lot of subtleties that don’t always get transferred over from teachers to students unless you have. Done it for a number of years. You wanna kind of just walk through the philosophy of Blade Repair Academy? Alfred Crabtree: Yes. The, uh, you’ve, you’ve outlined quite well some of the issues. The environment where we work is very hard to take a ti the time to put somebody through a training regimen. We’re so constrained by weather windows and then. You know, even if the weather’s nice, lightning can come, wind [00:02:00] speeds can cut off your workday. So production, production, production is what’s important. And Cheryl and I both come from the rope access method. And in the rope access method, 95% of the time you’re up there alone. And if you’re up there and you’re producing, you’ve got your blinders on. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: And you’re not ready to share with somebody else what to do. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: With the basket or platform, you can have two even three people up on Blade, but it still has all these constraints of get the job done, get the job done. There’s a lot of stress up there. And having the bandwidth to take on new information or to challenge some preconceived notions or try, that’s not the place to do it. So knowing that. Blade Repair Academy is built so that we have an environment that simulates all of the up tower stuff without being up tower. And you’re gonna have the time you need to invest in your learning without consequences. Right. So it’s a very much a [00:03:00] about creating the right environment to uptake the new information. And we have found a lot of help from. Manufacturers and suppliers in the industry to sponsor us because obviously it behooves them to have their materials in the hands of trainees. So we’re also able to help companies come up with, uh, new solutions, try new products. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: New, uh, you know, what’s the best practice. For this, if you’re up on Blade and you have a way of top coating and you get a new product and your way of top coating doesn’t suit that product, well chuck it down. I’ll never touch it again. Yeah. Because I did not perform well here we can, we can give you training. We have, of course, been trained by the suppliers about what’s the best product to use, what’s the best way to go about things, and then, and then we can disseminate it. So that’s the fundamental reason why the space is. Is [00:04:00] what it is. Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I think that that’s, that’s a good segue to be honest with you, right here, right behind these doors you have a classroom. That’s right. Right. So in this facility, all composed in one, we have a classroom here we have your additive and subtractive. I liked how you said that to us when you’re giving us the tour. Uh, but we’ve got a, a grinding booth basically over here and we’ve got, um, a layup area here where you can teach. 16 people at a time. Alfred Crabtree: That’s right. Yeah. That would be max Joel Saxum: for sure. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. Sheryl Weinstein: And in a vertical surface, so, ’cause all the stuff that you’re doing in the field, right, is always in a vertical surface. Mm-hmm. So there’s a, there is a big difference between working where gravity is sort of against you, especially with larger laminations and things like that. So being able to do your training and simulate the same, a similar way that you would work in the field is pretty critical, I would think. Allen Hall: And actually working on. Actual repairs. Simulated repairs, yeah. Mm-hmm. Now, don’t explain how you created them, because I know secret sauce. It’s a secret sauce. Yes. But I did look at the blade [00:05:00] damage. It, it looks exactly like a lightly strike. Yeah. Which a predominant amount of repairs are about, unless there’s, you know, serial defects, as Cheryl has pointed out numerous times, but. Being able to repair something that’s quasi real is critical because we’ve been to other places and the repairs are, well, I’ll take a hammer and I’ll hit this and, okay, sure you got a DA, you gotta repair that. But that’s not real. And getting, getting the people to use the tools in the right way, vertically Speaker 2: mm-hmm. Allen Hall: Is the key. Because although the, the, the article, the test sample isn’t moving around like you are up on a blade, it’s still difficult. And unless you have the proper techniques and the approaches, yeah, it’s gonna be dang near impossible. We explain some of the blade repairs that Joel and I have seen more recently is like. It’s a little rough and it shouldn’t have to be so rough because it is a skill that you have to learn and acquire over time. But you have to know the fundamentals. That’s what Blade Repair Academy is here to teach you those [00:06:00] fundamentals. Like, yes, it’s gonna take time, but if you work it this way, at least you’re gonna be successful. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. And if you’re managing a team of employees who are doing this, it, it would be great to have the insight of what your teams. Strengths and weaknesses are, yeah, you can figure out how to deploy people, but also how to, you know, maybe fix some of those problems. Mm-hmm. Our panels that you brought up are standardized. Everyone looks exactly the same. It’s the exact same makeup, and we standardize the damage. So when somebody has to repair damage here, the core removal size is the same on everyone. That way when we’re comparing the reports, you can actually have a apples to apples comparison of the, the trainees. Outcome. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: And now you, you know, in, in the model that you talked about where people will go to a, you know, their junkyard of blades and they’ll find spots on blades to put their eight guys on. Those eight people are not gonna be doing the same repair. And even if they are collecting data, what are you [00:07:00] comparing? It’s not Joel Saxum: apples to apples. Yeah. It’s not. Alfred Crabtree: So we really tried to start from the beginning, fresh with a whole new idea of how to approach this. Mm-hmm. By not being attached to an ISP, we don’t have to deal with. Oh, here, use all our leftovers. Yeah. Yeah. That’s your training budget. Yeah. Yeah. And oh yeah. We, you know, we’re an, we’re a owner operator, so yeah. Go work on that blade in the grass. Mm-hmm. That those limit what precious time we have available to train. Yeah. So this thing from the ground up is about. Making as much advance in the skillset and understanding that technician in the, in the week that they’re here. Joel Saxum: I think that was a really cool thing we touched on as well. Your, your team here as well, Cheryl. Thanks for traveling up to, to hang out with us. Offer some insights too. But you guys, because you’ve been in the people that have developed a curriculum yourself, Cheryl, your, some of your team sitting over here, uh, and, and people around the industry that have helped out with the place, you have the ability of like, okay, we have. Eight brand new technicians. Let’s make [00:08:00] sure we walk through how to measure from the trailing edge to the blade center up, mark this thing out, these kind of things all the way to some stuff that I didn’t really think about that much. Like I’ve used an angle grinder before, right? But I’ve never looked at five different ones and decided which one would be the best for my hands. Thinking about it up on the blade, how you’d handle it with your fingers, these kind of things like, I was like, man, that’s, those are real insights that you’re not gonna get to learn. Like why put someone up to let them have a whole season or a whole summer, two summers figuring out how to hold a grinder? Well, when they can learn from someone that’s been doing it for years and years and years and can teach them these things. So from advanced or from very beginners learning fundamentals to advanced training, you guys have gotta cover here. Alfred Crabtree: There’s something here to glean for everybody, and even if you are a well experienced technician, maybe what you’re gonna get most is learning how to talk the language of the new techs and the new hires who are getting the. Introductory course training. You know, our, our el our basic course is called support. It’s 40 hours [00:09:00] and it’s really about making, uh, an employee who can support a lead. And then if that person follows up with the lead training in a whatever interval of time of their choice, which is kind of another benefit here, we can train you any week of the year. That is where we start to really get this, we call it the retention vortex. Right where we layer up technician training and somebody who’s had level two now gets a level one with them. Now there’s some synergies. Now they’re getting some really efficiencies. A commonality of language, a commonality of process, you know, eliminating variables. Uh, and that’s how you’re gonna have to build new net capacity and build new teams Allen Hall: and that common language. Is really unique, but that comes from your experience in the field, mostly at rope partner, where you both really got your teeth in this industry. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Allen Hall: But communicating to one another correctly so you can pass along to the next crew or even explain what you did to the engineer, the. Properly [00:10:00] there is. There is a culture to it. There is a language to it, and you just don’t pick that up. By going from wind turbine to wind turbine. You pick it up in training from someone who knows how to do it. It’s really critical. Sheryl Weinstein: It’s pretty critical to have baseline training. I think it is also very important to follow it up with field experience and skills building because every blade model is different. Every repair is different. You’re always gonna encounter something that deviates from that like standard approach to your repair. You have to kind of know how to problem solve, and that kind of only comes with the field experience, but having a more standardized training to start with, it’s something that industry doesn’t really have and is really needed. I think across the board it also helps, you know. Owner operators or even OEMs kind of track their ISPs and understand what level of text do you have, what experience do they have and how, how does that differ across their different [00:11:00] levels? If we have one ISP training one way over here and another one training another way over here, and they have different sets of certifications. It’s really hard to keep that all together and evaluate it as an owner operator or an OEM, you know, using a vendor. So I think having a place like Blade Academy that’s agnostic and separate from like, you know, the actual ISP really helps to standardize that a bit more. Allen Hall: Yeah, because the key is we’re getting to, well, we’re gonna cross a hundred thousand turbines in the United States pretty quickly. Yep. Joel Saxum: Before 2030, or probably rated about 2030. Allen Hall: Right. That’s. Soon. Mm-hmm. How are we gonna manage that? And there’s a lot of new people coming into the industry, obviously. How are we gonna train ’em up properly? How are we gonna communicate to one another? And there’s just so much movement in the industry. I. It makes it hard, I think, because weirdly enough, I think ISPs develop their own little culture about how to deal with things, and then they hop to the next company and it’s a different language. Exactly. And that needs to go away. Yeah. There’s a, Alfred Crabtree: there’s a branch of business that’s [00:12:00] OEM centric and there’s a branch of business that’s asset owner. Yeah. Post warranty. And those are really two different things. And, and there’s a veil of secrecy between one and the other. Yeah. And we kind of feel here at Blade Repair Academy that we’re like this polyglot that can talk to everybody because we don’t have, we’re not an ip You’re not competing, we’re not an O You’re not competing. Yeah, we’re not competing. But we, we, you know, we have the, we wanna provide this data as a clearinghouse. You know, we talk about certification in the non standards. Well, the way we deal with it is we’ll give you a certificate. And it’s got our brand on it. But you know, what does that mean? Yeah. What? That And $4 will get you a Starbucks the way we do it, maybe not even then. Right? The way, the way we, not four bucks Sheryl Weinstein: for Starbucks, maybe 10 Alfred Crabtree: and a half hour wait in the line. But the way you know, what we do is we provide you with a deliverable. We knew, we knew that. Okay. Our certification is, you know, ether. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: But [00:13:00] this report. That everybody who comes through here generates that you can compare. Now you’re gonna have to go to work and study these reports when you get ’em as a deliverable. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: As a, you know, an employer, but we we’re giving you what you need. Mm-hmm. To make some decisions about what do I have to work on, what else do we need to improve upon? Allen Hall: Yeah. Not everybody’s built for this job, but you wanna be able to suss that out. Earlier rather than later. Yeah. Right. I mean, there’s other things to do with wind turbines that don’t evolve blade repair. And if they don’t necessarily have the skillset or the comprehension to do some of these more complex things, maybe blade repair is not it. Right. But rather know that now. Yeah. Right. And the Blade Repair Academy is a place to do that because there’s a standard there, right? Mm-hmm. And I, I, as Joel has pointed out, yeah, there’s a lot of erratic training that goes on. Mm-hmm. You can’t compare student A to student Z. Blade repair academy. You can. Alfred Crabtree: We can. Mm-hmm. Right. Allen Hall: And if, if I’m an ISP, I want that. Sure. I want you to tell me [00:14:00] who’s on top and who’s kind of the middle so I can make decisions about where to deploy ’em and who and who to put ’em with. Joel Saxum: Yeah. ’cause at the end of the day, every ISP, uh, every ISP that’s trying to grow and scale effectively is trying to do that at the end of the year, right? Yeah. They’re looking through, they’re grading their technicians, finding out who’s the next lead, who’s this, who’s that? But this is a great way to do that, sort them through in a controlled setting. I mean, we sat in, in your training facility in the actual classroom here, and you walked us through some of the online, the online training platform that you have built. Some of the things the students have to do before they get here, and then kind of how you walk ’em through things, and it’s impressive. It’s good stuff, right? So when you have that combined with the both sides of blade repair, subtractive, additive, right? You get to get this, this holistic view of what that blade technician can do. Yeah. Right? And that’s, that’s one of the things you guys offer here, which I think is fantastic. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. And we’re trying to constantly improve, you know, we’re talking with OEMs about dissemination of operating procedures or work instructions, share with us [00:15:00] work instructions. We’ll build analogs. That we can train to. Mm-hmm. And we can test off of it. We can verify skill sets. You know, we have a lot of serial flaw campaigns out there that are critical. And do we wanna unleash anybody on it or do we want to know that those people can do it? I think everybody wants to know that they can do it, whether they’re the. Technician themselves, or the person writing the checks. Speaker 2: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: Everywhere in that loop wants to Now not everybody wants to pay for it. Yeah. But we all need it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Alfred Crabtree: And so somewhere along the line, you’re paying for it in the forms of our favorite acronym, COPQ. That’s Joel Saxum: right. Cost support, quality. You know, speaking about the idea of serial defects or known problems in the industry and how to prepare people for those, how do you prepare people for those? Well, they gotta get the experience by just. Grinding away Top coat and getting into him. I walked in here and I looked at this blade sample we have here, and I was looking at it and I go, it looks like a 48.7 C Oh yeah. Buddy walks over you like our 48.7 C I’m like, [00:16:00] man, you guys did a good job on, you know, like, so, so I made a lot of money on 48.7, you know, so to walk in here and see these different tickets that you guys have built, you know, carbon plank and different things with carbon spars and hey, we’re gonna do a carbon spa repair. We have this boom, now we can work on it. Mm-hmm. You know, and we’ll Alfred Crabtree: work with you to solve your problem in a really quick, efficient manner. Mm-hmm. You know, I think one of the things that we have is operational readiness. Most people who are training in-house flip their hat around for a couple weeks and train composites. Mm-hmm. In a limited capacity in the warehouse or at the dock at the truck during January. During January, whatever. And then they flip their hat back on and they go deal with it. And I think the hiring situation is so tough. Like working at Height, you probably need to make sure somebody can tolerate working at height. Yeah. Before you invest in composite training, I mean. You have so many things you have to juggle in your particular situation. When do I put money in this person? We get that. [00:17:00] And so we’re open all the weeks of the year. So we can do this at any time. Of course, everyone wants it in the end of first quarter. Mm-hmm. You know, right before the season starts. So we have a, you know, you have to, you gotta schedule with us, but we can really do this anytime. And so you don’t have to one and done and live with it. Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Alfred Crabtree: You know, it. You can fit the training into your hiring schema wherever you feel fit, and you can hire people. And if there are stars, bring them in for their secondary, they’re execute their lead training whenever you want. You know, so you can, we can be very flexible and in the advanced stages we will make what you need, you know, obviously has to make business sense for us, but we’ll make blades to replicate the problems you’re facing. Sheryl Weinstein: And I think in terms of like what you were saying when you’re working on, you knows whether we wanna call them recurring issues or serial defects. A lot of it is awareness, right? It’s awareness [00:18:00] of understanding the blade structure, at least at a basic level. It’s awareness of understanding what you’re looking at. It’s, you know, we’re only gonna better inform the industry and the OEM if our technicians have a level of awareness to sort of bring up things that they see as they’re doing repairs. So if they notice that, for example, the, the fibers are misaligned, right? That could indicate that that was a wrinkle, and them having that level of communication or documentation will only help then inform the OEM. Like, is this the reason behind that problem? And so I think like. You know, with Alfred and, and the curriculum here at Blade Academy, them kind of, you know, setting a standard for how, how you know, the structure of the blade, the different types of blades you may see, whether they have carbon fiber in them, or you know, fiberglass, UD spars. Where those things are located, [00:19:00] what to be aware of as you’re removing damaged material. It’s really critical to the overall quality and just the awareness of the tech on the blade and that feedback loop that we’re lacking so much in this industry. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and we have our boilerplate products that come from, you know, like, uh, Cheryl was my mentor at RP and wrote partner, and she taught me a lot and a lot of the. The, the way we do things here comes from the rope, a rope access paradigm, which, you know, actually is backward compatible because if with rope access, you’re doing things alone. Speaker 2: Yeah. Alfred Crabtree: So if we’ve have ways and, and processes that allow that to happen alone, then when you’re on a basket or a platform with an extra person, you can only benefit Yeah. That much easier. Yeah. Um, it’s where we come from, you Joel Saxum: know, and, and that’s a good point, right? Like when we’re sitting here, rip Blade Repair Academy. Alfred, you’re here. Cheryll, you’re joining us today. These are two X blade technicians that have been on all kinds of blades. They have been up and down on ropes. So it’s training by [00:20:00] trainers who have been the technicians that’s important. Who have seen the problems. Yeah, yeah. You know, who have lived, have lived that road life. We talked, you’re joking about living in hotels, right? Mm-hmm. Like that have done, gone through that, right? So you’re learning from people that aren’t just like, oh, I hate the idea of going to a university and learning HR or something, whatever, from someone who’s never done it in the real world. Yeah. You know, uh, the trainers here have done it in the real world, um, and it shows. Alfred Crabtree: Thanks, man. And you know, the other thing too is our tagline is practical and contemporary. And the thing is, I’m no longer contemporary. Like I left the field years ago. I rely on folks like Cheryl, who’s still in the, in the Blade Services game over there at Skys Specs. She’s on, she’s got a full subscription to the cereal floss that are out there. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Probably the best one in the industry, to be honest with you. Alfred Crabtree: Well, you know. Uh, I think so. I don’t know anything about serial flaw, but it’s, it’s input from the rest of the industry that’s gonna allow this to continue. Otherwise, we’re gonna be, you know, [00:21:00] a 10-year-old standard that isn’t relevant anymore and that’s not what we want to do. So, outreach like Cheryl and I are talking about, Hey, what is it in your product line that should be in our product line? And I want to talk to OEMs and, uh. Owner operators, you know, what is it? What are your pain points? What in your fleet is needing attention? And of course, we’re gonna do all this with the business case, right? Mm-hmm. Like we wanna take LEP products and place them head to head and give a two day clinic or seminar to stakeholders, to purchasers. You know, we wanna give our, our two, our five day course condensed into two days. Where people who are stakeholders who are making decisions about where to place technicians, they should get out here and gr and grind a little bit and get a little empathy for their position. Hard work. The hard work of the Sheryl Weinstein: hard work that it is. Yeah. And then kind of understand Alfred Crabtree: from another side where the [00:22:00] communication breakdown is. ’cause it’s, it’s not all the texts, right? Mm-hmm. You know, they have a, you gotta understand how heavily loaded they are, you know, when they’re in the field. Mm-hmm. Um, so we’re, we’re at the place now where we’re really looking to do some outreach and talk to, uh, regulatory bodies that are starting to come up with standards, right? Like the IEC group met and pro produce a draft standard and they’re gonna work on the repair standard. And that’s a, a little bit of a ways away, but I can’t sit around and wait for, for standards to come to me. So we got this thing started. If you build it, they will come. You guys came, you know, Cheryl came and, um. We we’re really proud of where we’re at, but at the same time, it’s like, okay guys, the rest of the industry, now we’re here. Now you need to know, now you need to take advantage of us. Mm-hmm. And help tell us what you need. So I think the Sheryl Weinstein: LEP thing is a really good call out because I do see a lot of customers questioning what do I choose? How do I know [00:23:00] what to choose? Absolutely. Should my vendor be telling me what to choose? And that’s what happens in many cases, is that the ISP just kind of tells the owner operator. This is what you should use. Well, why, and, and what, you know, how have we ever really sized up like one against the other? Like in any true, I don’t know, study? No. And a lot of the, a lot of the like. Those different types of LEP, the, the companies that you know have these, they don’t have a lot of good documentation on showing like how their products stand up. I mean, it’s kind of, it’s more theory based than anything. I mean, they put ’em through rain erosion tests and whatever, but. It’s, I feel like that’s a tough space. It’s also a very, like, um, a very tough scope of work to have high quality at. So more training around it is necessary. You know, repair companies don’t wanna use their high skilled repair techs for the LEP because they need them for the more complex repairs [00:24:00] yet. The LEP is so susceptible to quality issues, and if you’re gonna pay an extreme amount of money to, you know, put the LEP to fix your erosion, put the LEP on blades, hope for a performance improvement, and then it fails in a year. I. That’s no help to anybody. So these different products, they also come with different price points. Like, can we really value the shell over the coating? I, I just find that this is a tough space. And so doing something like that and doing more training around LEPI think is probably pretty important. Yes. You know, unless the robots are gonna take it over and then, well, even then, I think it’s the only app. Allen Hall: The application, that’s the variable there. And not having people trained up for that particular LEP product is a huge problem because it’s super risky. You’re risking all that money and time and having to do it all over again and removing LEP that has been improperly applied. It’s a nightmare. [00:25:00] Nightmare. Total nightmare. You don’t want that to happen. And I’ve seen sites where that’s happened, getting technicians. Trained properly for the right material and doing that here up in Tennessee is, is the right approach. It’s risk reduction, which is what the industry is in right now. Risk reduction. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. Yeah, we, we’ve beliefs. That’s a great way to put it. You know, if you hire somebody. We were talking earlier how there are like two models. One is like the New York Yankees, where you’re going to be buying all the expensive free agents. You can poaching people from other, you know, trying to get experienced talent. You’re paying a premium for them, but you aren’t gonna know until halfway through that season how that person is performing. Yeah. You know, that is a lot of. That was, that is a lot of variability that you could control. Mm-hmm. And in a seasonal business, those weeks are really multiplied by two or three. Right. In terms of like the impact on your revenue and your opportunity to make money. It’s risk reduction, like Alan was saying. Yeah. It’s Allen Hall: all risk, right? Yeah. And the, [00:26:00] the way that the industry is moving and the pace at which is moving right now, risk reduction starts to move to the top five years ago. We do a lot of risky things because we’re making money. Interest rates are low and, but today we cannot afford to do that. And if you watch the industry change right now, it is gonna be more focused than ever in having proper technicians on site that they complete the job that they were intended to do. Precisely, accurately, and once, not twice. Once. Yeah. And that is gonna be the marker of the, whether this industry grows or not. Mm-hmm. And that’s why Blade Repair Academy is needed so much. Now, Alfred, how do you interface with the ISPs, OEMs, and the operators in terms of getting people out here? How do they, how do they push that button and say, Alfred, I’m gonna send you 40 technicians next week. How does that, how does that go? I don’t quite have that down Alfred Crabtree: yet. But, uh, you know, it, we talked earlier, it’s a small world. You know, blade repair is small. There [00:27:00] we mentioned if you, there’s a hundred people in the industry you need to know and then you’ve covered it. Um, our, I think we’ve been, we’ve been kind of riding this new wave of like, oh, who’s this new kid on the block? And, and we can kind of be quiet and still are mysterious. And I pop up at a conference and host a round table or whatever. Uh, so far. It’s mainly been our personal network, which is large enough in this gig to, to get people in. ISPs are much more likely to do it small is ISPs are much more likely to do it. Owner operators, they’re trying to build their training centers. They have a little different, that’s a different model though. It’s a different model. Um, they’re, they’re tougher to get. So primarily it’s been ISPs. We have definitely a, a, a curriculum for new hires, right? We call it support, but we’re [00:28:00] reluctant to go sell that to the street or to the public. Like, Hey, enter the industry here, because we don’t quite yet have that, you know, guarantee that people will recognize our certificate and. Use it to hire people. I don’t quite have that system in place. However, I have so much interest from the Department of Labor to support us in creating an occupation. They want us to build apprenticeship programs. We need corporate sponsor, we need a big employer or to to buy in, and then we can create an apprenticeship program. Then we can find public money for people to get some support to get into a new, a new industry. So, well, they Allen Hall: need to come out here. They need to come out to Dunlap. And visit the facilities, talk with you, understand what the philosophy is, see it up close. There’s a lot of them have been to other places. Sure. And see what the differences are here. And, and that’s gonna be the decision maker. They’re gonna see what the product walking out the door is and [00:29:00] go into the classroom and, and get the grinder, right? Yes. Get, get your hands dirty a little bit. Yeah. And realize, yes, this is what I was looking for to begin with. I just couldn’t find it. And I found it here in Tennessee. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, I, I think you’re right. And, and we, we are slowly, you know, bringing people in that we know, like the reason why y’all are here and some other folks have visited us this week is because o and m was in Nashville. And I was like, come on, come on. We’re only two hours away. We’ll buy you lunch. Come on. Pretty place. Yeah. You have to see this place to understand it because we are sort of, you know, outsiders, right? I mean, we’re, we’re from the, the industry, but we’re not. We’re not a spinoff of any company. We’re not a division of an ISP. We’re totally organic and unique in a, in a part of the world that doesn’t have any wind. So, yeah. Uh, but once you get here, you get it. The economics make sense. You know, we couldn’t do what we’ve done anywhere else as cheaply as we’ve done, which means we feel like we’re super value rich for what you’re paying and for the amount of time that you’re spending [00:30:00] here. Allen Hall: Oh, 100%. Uh. Let’s give the ISPs, the OEMs and the operators, uh, where to go. What’s the website? Where can they find you on LinkedIn? Alfred Crabtree: We’re at blade repair academy.com. Uh, we’re located in Dunlap, Tennessee. We’re on Blade Repair Academy at LinkedIn. I’m Alfred Crabtree. You can find me there. Uh. Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s where you need to go because that’s how the process starts. If you want to have high level technicians that really know how to work on composites and are working with real materials on simulated, but. Pretty realistic damage. Yeah. Weirdly realistic. Yeah. Secret sauce. And to get some sort of validation and to kind of get graded. Mm-hmm. And so you have a, a, a sense of how they’re doing. You’re going to have to go to Blade Repair Academy. You need to get out to Tennessee and you better check it out because I, Alfred, I gotta be honest, this place is gonna get crazy busy [00:31:00] and I’m gonna have. ISPs calling me saying, can you get a hold of Alfred and get me inside? Can you get me in? No, I can’t because it’s Alfred’s deal and Alfred’s gonna run this thing. We’re very approachable and, but very approachable. Keep calling, he’ll answer and take care of you, but it’s gonna get busy because the philosophy here is the right one. Thanks. So congratulations for putting this together and thank you for the invite. Uh, it is been a pleasure to see it. It’s uh, it, it’s great to know that you are around and you’re helping the industry. Alfred Crabtree: Thank you. We appreciate it and you guys are a great clarion for the industry. A great voice. So, uh, those words, uh, right in the fields. And I wanna thank Cheryl too for coming out. I haven’t seen her for a while. It’s funny ’cause today I, on my phone, you know, five years ago today, she and I were here before this business existed as rope partner employees working on r and d week doing infusions. So, uh, Sheryl Weinstein: the space has transformed. It’s amazing. Yeah. You guys have done a, a [00:32:00] really great job. Like I, yeah, I think you’re definitely pushing the industry into a, like a new realm. Bringing something that, that it really needs, you know, that we don’t have at the moment or that we didn’t have. Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, well hopefully, uh, it improves everybody’s quality of product and the bottom line. ’cause uh, you know, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll affect your bottom line for sure. Allen Hall: So Sheryl and Alfred, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thanks guys. Right, Sheryl Weinstein: thank you.

Rystad reports offshore turbine prices have jumped 45% since 2020, plus data centers squeeze US grids, Fortescue chases real zero by 2030, and GE Vernova battles Vineyard Wind in court. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now, your hosts.  Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, who’s been busy in Australia up in Sydney at a energy conference. Rosemary, what happened this past week?  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, yeah. I’ve been up in Sydney for the Smart Energy Conference and Exhibition. It’s a big… I don’t know if it’s the biggest. I think they get about 12,000 people or something through the doors. So yeah, it’s, it’s one of the big, maybe the biggest, um, energy conference in Australia. It’s really focused on distributed energy households. So in the past, it was, like, nearly all solar, um, like rooftop solar. There used to be lots of installers that were there and, yeah, there’s heaps of solar [00:01:00] panels around in the exhibition hall. And over the last few years it’s been a mix of batteries and solar, and then now this year it was basically 99% batteries, 1% EV chargers, and almost not a solar panel to be seen. I didn’t actually spend that much time in the exhibition this year. I mostly was, um, attending sessions. Andrew Forrest from Fortescue headlined, and that was really good. I haven’t seen him speak live before. Y- you know, he, he told about all the, like, good plans that Fortescue’s doing to get to real zero by 2030. So he’s on a real rampage at the moment to try and get rid of the diesel rebate that we pay at the moment. We pay diesel users a, a, yeah, a fuel, fuel rebate. It was just cool to hear about y- you know, all of Fortescue’s plans, why they’ve got this big green grid that they’re building out in the Pilbara. Um, I really liked when he said, you know, it’s not, it’s not magic, it’s, um, it’s just, what did he say? Like, maths, physics, engineering, and [00:02:00]economics, and a bit of courageous leadership. That’s what you need to make a green, a green electricity grid. So I really like that the, you know, engineering was mentioned, was mentioned there. I did actually get the chance to ask him a question, too. Wanted to know, um, you know, like, Fortescue is, is really one of the most interesting things about the company is that they are using brand-new technologies or even not quite there yet technologies. I asked, uh, Andrew Forrest, I asked him, you know, like, how you make these bold, bold decisions, does it ever, you know, worry you that it’s not gonna work out? And I was assuming he would say, “It doesn’t worry me,” um, because, you know, he has that kind of brash, confident personality. So I, you know, my follow-up was, what, what steps do you take so that you aren’t worried by it? And he said it does worry him, and he s- stays awake every night worrying, worrying about if these technologies aren’t going to work. And that, uh, basically they try and have a really, really solid plan B that isn’t a [00:03:00] brand-new technology. So, um, you can, you know, infer from that, that if the– I mean, first of all, he said, “We don’t invest in the technology until they have demons- demonstrated with a good prototype that it’s likely to work.” Um, but I guess that, you know, assuming that they’ve ran into problems in the rollout of all of these Naberebo towers, that, um, they have a backup of some conventional towers.  Speaker 2: Yeah, uh, the, the Fortescue people, when we talked to them about, pfoof, probably six months ago, maybe a little bit longer, we were helping to build a farm out in Western Australia. It was a small team, much smaller than anything you would see in the US, and it does sort of align with the Australian approach to it, is that you don’t need a massive team of people to do these projects. You just need to know what you’re doing, and that was really remarkable. So e- I’m not surprised that Fortescue is continuing on in, in different aspects. It does seem like they’re pretty bold about their engineering approach and taking on massive projects that otherwise wouldn’t be [00:04:00] done and-  Rosemary Barnes: It, it’s also really cool to hear, uh, Andrew Forrest or anyone from Fortescue talk because they’re talking about things that they’ve done. You know, like we have so much when you’re at these, uh, events and, you know, everyone’s doing these inspiring talks, it’s always about, “Oh, this is the possibility for the future.” But Fortescue has actually, has actually done it. Yeah, there was a lot of, like, actual progress discussed at this conference. It wasn’t, “This is what we could do if we all joined hands and sang Kumbaya.” It wasn’t like that, you know? It’s like, this is what’s happening when the engineering is there, the economics are there, and the government isn’t standing in the way. Um, y- you know, you can make a lot of, a lot of progress. And you know what? Like now we’ve got so much distributed energy in Australia. It’s the rooftop solar that we’ve been building for, you know, 20 years by now. Um, and it’s the, the batteries especially. Like it is a- starting to have a noticeable impact on electricity prices, and co- coal and gas are both reducing in the grid. I think the last quarter of gas use in Australia was the lowest it’s [00:05:00] been since 1999. Like, um, yeah, so it’s, yeah, it’s, it, it’s dropping, you know? And so I think that that’s a really unique story for Australia is that households can actually really change the dial.  Speaker 2: Well, can I ask you about that? Because the data center issue is popping up again in the United States, and one of the things about data centers is they feel like you, you’re gonna need a good amount of batteries to support if the grid hops on or turns off, that they wanna be able to support this data center, so having a buffer and batteries would make a lot of sense. However, there’s not a lot of battery storage in the US at the minute versus a place like Australia where there’s a lot of it. Doesn’t it make a lot of sense to start putting data centers in Australia? I still don’t understand Why that hasn’t been done? Because electricity prices are cheaper, the land is available, the infrastructure’s there. It’s going [00:06:00] to be, you would think, easier to build in Australia than it would be in the United States. What’s the dilemma there?  Rosemary Barnes: I think certainly there are plenty of plans to build big data centers in Australia. Um, and now I’m gonna go, like, move a little bit outside my expertise, but I think that one of the issues is that at the moment, a lot of the data centers need to be quite close to where the work is happening. So I mean, you’re always gonna need data centers close to any big city where people are, are using the internet. Um, but aside from that, you know, like, the tech sector in the US is much bigger, so the people actually developing, um, you know, training, um, uh, yeah, training AI models, um, are more likely to be sitting in the US and, you know, need a large amount… Not all of their compute needs to happen nearby, but a fair chunk of it. And so I think that that is one reason why so far that’s where it is. Um, but it also doesn’t mean… I mean, there’s [00:07:00] plenty of smart, um smart computer types in Australia as well as the US, so you could start to see more companies moving, um, moving to where electricity is cheap. I think that– And grid connections are fast.  Speaker 2: The one thing you notice about using any of the AI platforms today is, like, there’s a built-in delay. Unlike when you’re on Amazon or any other s- active site, when you click, you want something to happen immediately. With AI, they, they build in a little wait process, which means you can have a data center anywhere, because you’re not expecting an instantaneous response from it. That means, in a sense, they’re setting it up to be a global industry. There is more of a delay now than there was a month ago. And I assume that has to do with usage, and they’re trying to manage all the data usage, right? So electricity is one of the limitations in the United States. That’s evident right now. The amount of data centers is a problem, so they’re trying to spread out the usage, and they are definitely… At least Anthropic is slowing it down. [00:08:00] I’d imagine all the other ones are doing the same thing. So it does open up the world to cheaper electricity.  Rosemary Barnes: There’s heaps of really interesting work happening in trying to get, um, AI and data centers to be better grid citizens, not probably primarily out of the goodness of their heart, but because of two things. One, grid connections are really slow, and so there’s a strong incentive that you can save, in some places, years off your development time if you can just bring in enough batteries, enough smart tech to make sure that you’re never going to, um, you know, add to peak, peak load in the grid, then you can- You know, change how things go. It’s also a matter of, like, social license as well, because at the moment it’s probably not too bad. People don’t realize too much. But if people’s electricity prices start going up because, you know, grid had to be built out because of da- data centers, they’re gonna start getting pissed as soon as they realize what that is. So I think [00:09:00] that, um, you know, these big companies, what do they call them? Hyperscalers. I think that they’re aware that that is gonna come and that that is a really strong incentive to do the right thing before they are made to do the right thing. Because, you know, like, if people got really upset then, um, you could easily have the rug pulled out from underneath a project that you thought was all set to go ahead, you know, could very easily be delayed indefinitely. I mean, we’ve definitely seen in the US that-  Speaker 2: Right. In 30 states in the US have already put prohibitions or limitations on data centers. That means there’s only 20 states left. Alaska is probably not a prime choice, Hawaii is not either, so you even have fewer. It does seem odd that when these limitations pop up that the discussion doesn’t move to other countries. Australia being an easy one, because electricity there is practically free. It seems like a smart move, but they haven’t made it yet.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, it’s not, it’s not [00:10:00] practically free in Australia yet, but I think that the, um, horizon, um, like the, you know, the outlook is it’s, it’s getting cheap. We… And we are finally seeing wholesale prices actually start to come down. But there’s this really awkward middle period though, you know, like, because, um, at the moment we’ve still got all of the… nearly all of the coal generation there, nearly all of the gas generation is there, and you need to have it there until you build out the other stuff. But it’s like prices drop and drop and drop when you’ve got this oversupply problem. But you’re gonna have the oversupply problem until you’ve got enough to start turning off, you know, gigawatt, two gigawatt, um, thermal generators. So it is a really weird middle, um, mid- mid-transition, I think is the term for it. You need planning. You know, you need… You actually do need… At some point you need a plan, and you need to execute it and expect that, like, every step you take is not gonna be better. Y- you know, like [00:11:00] some steps you’re gonna take that are gonna make it, um, economically worse for the short term. But, you know, like, if you’ve got a mountain range in between you and your destination, then yeah, like it’s, it’s really hard going for a while. But you’ve gotta climb that mountain if you wanna get to the other side and, um, you, and you, you can’t do that without a plan. Speaker 2: Well, what other place on the planet has or will have shortly unused gigawatts of old generation? I don’t think I know of one. It, it’s gonna be Australia So th-those gigawatt plants that were thermal plants that won’t be needed ’cause the price of electricity is so low, it does seem like a smart person would put a data center right next door to it. Rosemary Barnes: No, but we wanna turn ’em off. I  Speaker 2: don’t think you’re gonna be able to, Rosemary. I’m just saying, the world needs, uh, AI and it’s coming.  Rosemary Barnes: We’ll see. I think that, um, you know, I did get quite energized by the event, the, um, SSE event that I was at this week because it’s like there are a few things that [00:12:00] Australia, um, you know, really has, like, an opportunity to be world leaders in. And when you get to be the leader, then it means that the technologies that you invent to solve the problems that, you know, the early adopters have, you have the headstart on that. And, you know, as other countries follow in your footsteps, you have the opportunity to lead, lead those technologies.  Speaker 2: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why “The Uptime Podcast” recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind.com today. So if you want to build an offshore wind farm in Europe right now, you had better be ready to pay. A new analysis from Rystad Energy shows that the turbine selling prices have jumped between 40% and 45% [00:13:00] since 2020. And here’s the thing, manufacturing costs only went up about 20% to 25% over the same period. The difference is pure pricing power. And with GE Vernova out of the new offshore order book and only Siemens Gamesa and Vestas left to supply Western markets, developers are facing a seller’s market in the most critical of components. Nacelles and blades are where the bottleneck hits hardest, and there is no quick fix in sight. So Rosemary, Siemens Gamesa and Vestas are leveraging the, the lack of com- competition, particularly from China at the moment, to gather market share and to raise prices, which I think everybody would agree if you’re on the engineering side of wind turbines, the prices needed to come up because there’s some work that needs to be done, and the engineering side has been pretty thin. To make these turbines more resilient, [00:14:00] you’re gonna need more engineering, it can be a little bit more on the manufacturing side. That takes money So prices had to come up  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I agree. It’s definitely n- not the case that everyone would agree. Anybody who has a spreadsheet and they’re trying to get the number, number right so that they can develop a new project is gonna say that it’s a bad thing, and it will also probably slow down development a little bit. Although, I guess if there was a supply constraint, then that was already a natural, um, handbrake, so maybe there’s no difference. But I do think that, um, you know, and I’ve said it a lot of times, like, you know, wind power reduced, it had a really steep cost reduction curve through the 20-teens, and I think that it was just artificial. You know, like it was driven by competition rather than true cost reductions in the technology. I think we undershot the price level that it needed to go for, and there just wasn’t enough money to do proper engineering, and, you know, w- we see that. Y- you know, you and I work in O&M, and we deal ev- every day with, with things where it’s like how did, [00:15:00] uh, how, how did they think that this technology was ready when they went and sold thousands of turbines with it? And I know that the answer is not that, um, engineers were lazy or stupid or just didn’t s- see the problems coming up. It was just too, too fast a pace of technology, um, rollout, like new technologies combined with just relentless focus on, on cost. You know, like all of my projects, it’s just like you just have to reduce cost and reduce it and reduce it and reduce it and, you know, to the point where you’re making changes that you don’t have time to fully check. Um, and, you know, then you have quality problems in the field.  Speaker 2: What’s the effect of an Indian manufacturing company in Europe on the offshore marketplace? If like an Adani or one of the other, Suzlon, one of the, one of the big manufacturers in India decides to make offshore wind turbines at scale, [00:16:00] wouldn’t that dramatically shift the marketplace in Europe? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I guess if you’ve got a new player, it’s always gonna shift things a bit. I don’t think it matters specifically that it’s Indian. Um, but a new player is gonna wanna be making sales and probably, you know, setting their price at the point that, that they need to, to, um, get those sales, maybe not initially worried so much about profits. If we were talking about Chinese manufacturers in Europe, and we have in the past, if we’re talking about that, then I think that that is a bit more relevant which, which country it is because China, you know, has just like essentially infinite money to put behind it and can keep on going long enough. You know, like they don’t need to make a, a profit every single year or every single five-year period even. They can think longer term. I, I, as far as I know, India is not quite the same as that, so I would expect it to be a bit more short-lived, but that’s always the risk that, you know, someone comes in and [00:17:00] undercuts, um, undercuts for long enough that it- causes the local local, uh, manufacturers to not be able to compete and shut down  Speaker 2: Well, just knowing some of the operators that were doing offshore wind projects and their desire to bring in a alternative to keep prices to the level that they could accept, with Mingyang being shut out at the minute, they’re gonna have to look somewhere else. So I think the only place they can find an alternative lower price competitor is gonna be India. Although the turbines aren’t at scale yet, I, I think you’ll see somebody make noise about it in the next six months on the operations side.  Rosemary Barnes: I think the European manufacturer is a probably better place to just scale up. Speaker 2: Well, let’s talk about GE Vernova for a minute, because the legal fight over America’s first large off-scale wind farm just got more complicated because Vineyard Wind reached commercial operations on April 24th, about a week or [00:18:00] two ago, and activated its purchase power agreement. Well, uh, now GE Vernova is using those very milestones against Vineyard Wind in court. GE Vernova filed an emergency motion arguing that the activation of those contracts undermines Vineyard Wind’s claims of irreparable harm. But Vineyard Wind’s attorney says the project is generating at less than half of its 806 megawatts capacity, and GE Vernova’s work is still needed to get it there. The next court hearing is set for this week. This little battle continues, and it’s– Although it seems fairly quiet, you don’t hear a lot of news reports about it in, uh, particularly the mainstream press, not too much about it, it– this has huge ramifications because as we talked about offshore wind over in Europe, if, if GE is truly getting out, and particularly if they’re in a fight with one of their largest purchasers of turbines, it’s gonna [00:19:00] disincentivize Europeans from even considering GE. In my opinion, I don’t know how you would think that GE would be one of the options. Although you would like to have three competitors bidding on every project in Europe, I think GE’s taken itself out of the marketplace because of this, this lawsuit.  Rosemary Barnes: Mm. You know what it reminds me of? It, um, it reminds me of the Justin Baldoni versus Blake Lively lawsuit that’s ongoing at the moment, where it’s just, like, mutually assured destruction. Speaker 2: But at least they settled, Rosemary. They’re, they’re not fighting anymore.  Rosemary Barnes: They settled, but they didn’t settle all aspects of it.  Speaker 2: The only reason I know about that is because you keep mentioning it. So when I see it pop up, I would normally just let it go. But I figured Rosemary’s focused on this, I should probably at least dabble in it briefly. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you Reach out to us [00:20:00] on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It helps other wind energy professionals follow the show. For Rosie, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers the Pentagon stalling 165 US wind projects on private land, New York stepping in to defend Sunrise Wind, New Mexico approving a 212 MW wind farm, Octopus Energy’s €584M European buying spree, and Europe’s tightening offshore turbine market. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good morning, everyone. Here is a number for you. One hundred and sixty-five. That is how many onshore wind projects the Pentagon is now holding up across the United States. One hundred and sixty-five projects… on private land. Thirty gigawatts of generating capacity… frozen. The American Clean Power Association says the delays began last August. Canceled meetings. Applications no longer being processed. Then in April… letters went out. The Pentagon said it was reviewing how it evaluates the national security impact of energy projects. That review has no deadline. This is the same justification used against offshore wind… the one courts have already struck down. And the administration has already paid nearly two billion dollars in taxpayer money to buy out offshore leases… paying developers not to build. Thirty gigawatts… enough to power millions of American homes… sitting in a stack of unprocessed paperwork. But here is the thing about wind. It does not wait for permission. In a federal courtroom in Washington… New York State just stepped up to fight. Attorney General Letitia James filed a motion to intervene on behalf of Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind project. A Rhode Island nonprofit called Green Oceans sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management back in March… trying to overturn the project’s federal permits. New York is not having it. Sunrise Wind is a nine hundred and twenty-four megawatt project. Already under construction. Expected online next year. NYSERDA says the project carries eight hundred and seventy-five million dollars in economic benefits for the state… including nearly one hundred and seventy million dollars for the Town of Brookhaven alone. If it gets canceled… New York says those benefits vanish… tax credits expire… and replacement power would cost ratepayers far more. So the state is putting its name on the line… in open court. Meanwhile… out in New Mexico… a different kind of wind story. Ten thousand acres of state land in Torrance County just got approved for a new wind farm. Two hundred and twelve megawatts. Enough to power sixty thousand homes. It will become the second-largest wind farm on state land. And it is projected to send nearly ninety-nine million dollars to New Mexico public schools over the life of the lease. Now… across the Atlantic. Britain’s Octopus Energy just went on a shopping spree. Five hundred and eighty-four million euros… for seventeen onshore wind farms. Three hundred and twenty-one megawatts spread across France, Germany, and Poland. Ten farms in France. Four in Germany. Three in Poland. Combined… enough power for a quarter million European homes. Octopus now manages sixty-seven onshore wind farms across Europe. Zoisa North-Bond, Octopus Energy Generation’s CEO, said Europe has exceptional wind resources… but needs to move faster. Faster. There is that word again. And then there is the supply side of the equation. Rystad Energy reports that Europe’s offshore wind market is running into a structural supply constraint. With GE Vernova having paused new offshore wind orders… the Western turbine market is now essentially a two-player game. Siemens Gamesa and Vestas. Turbine selling prices are up forty to forty-five percent since twenty twenty. Manufacturing costs? Up only twenty to twenty-five percent. The OEMs are recovering their margins… and developers are absorbing the difference. That is the new reality for European offshore wind. So let us step back. In America… the federal government blocks thirty gigawatts of wind on private land. New York goes to court to protect a project already under construction. New Mexico approves a wind farm that will fund schools for a generation. In Europe… a British company spends more than half a billion euros on wind farms in three countries. And OEMs finally have the pricing power they have been chasing for years. The push… and the pull. Washington pulls back. But everywhere else… the industry pushes forward. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 11th of May 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Søren Kellenberger, CEO of CNC Onsite, joins to discuss uptower yaw gear repairs, flat tower flanges, and replacing 1,000 blade root bushings across 26 turbines. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall 2025: Soren, welcome back to the podcast.  Søren Kellenberger: Thank you, Allen, and, uh, nice doing it, uh, face-to-face- Yes, it’s great … and not as a team, uh, call. Right. That’s  Allen Hall 2025: true. Yeah. You’ve been doing a good bit of traveling, and you’re the new head of CNC Onsite.  Søren Kellenberger: I am, yes.  Allen Hall 2025: So congratulations on that.  Søren Kellenberger: Thank you very much.  Allen Hall 2025: And all the exciting new things that CNC Onsite [00:01:00] is doing, plus all the things you have developed and are now out in the field implementing, the, the list goes on and on and on. I’m alwa- every time I talk to you, “Oh, we got a new-” Yeah … “machine to do something uptower.” So it’s all uptower, which is the, the beauty of CNC Onsite. You’re thinking about the operator and the cost to pull the blades off and do lifting the cell off and all those things. If we can do it uptower, we can save 30, 40, 50% of the cost of a repair. Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: That’s where CNC Onsite is just really killing it. You guys are doing great. Thank  Søren Kellenberger: you. Of course, we like what we do, but, uh, thank you.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it’s good, it’s good. And, and so w- let’s talk about the things that I know about, and we’ll start there, and then we’ll go to all the new things you’re doing. So the one that I see a lot of operators asking about is yaw tooth. Yeah.  Søren Kellenberger: Uh,  Allen Hall 2025: deformations, broken teeth on the yaw gear. That’s a big problem. And when I talk to [00:02:00] technicians, and I have them texting me about this, like, “Oh, well, I just weld on the gear back on, weld the tooth back on.” That’s a short-term solution. That’s not gonna be long-term. The long-term solution is the CNC Onsite. Can you explain what you do to permanently fix these yaw gear problems?  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. So what we do is actually we start by getting information about the, uh, original yaw ring, so the dimension of the teeth, and we get some load data. And, uh, then we start designing a replacement segment. Uh, so what we ac- the process is actually that we bring a CNC controlled machine uptower, mount it on the yaw ring, and then we mill away that worn area, uh, creating a small pocket. And then those, uh, segments that we have designed, they are prefabricated. We bring them up and mount them in, in that, uh, pocket and bring the- The yaw ring back to where it’s, you can say, original design, uh, [00:03:00] that way. Yeah  Allen Hall 2025: It’s better than the original design, ’cause you’re actually putting in better teeth than the, the manufacturer did originally.  Søren Kellenberger: True. Yeah, yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: So that happens, so you’re, you’re machining out those old teeth, broken teeth, putting the new set of teeth in th- and that all bolts in, and that’s it. That’s it. But the, the difficulty is getting the machinery uptower to do that. That’s where a lot of your, your technology comes from, is getting this very accurate, uh, well-defined machine uptower and doing very controlled grinding and milling. Yes. So can you explain what that system looks like? If I’m gonna grind off those yaw, broken yaw teeth, how big is that kit? Søren Kellenberger: It… Obviously, it depends a little bit on the turbine size. Sure, okay. Yeah. So, uh, it, so the, the newer five, six, uh, 10 megawatt turbines have larger teeth, so yeah, there you need a, a larger machine.  Allen Hall 2025: Okay.  Søren Kellenberger: But let’s say for, uh, Vestas three megawatt, the, the [00:04:00] complete machine weighs about 250 kilos. That’s it? So yeah. So it, it comes up in smaller components. We just use, uh, the, the internal crane in, in the nacelle, and, uh, then we can lift the components to the yaw ring, assemble the machine, and then we are basically good to go. So it take, takes less than a day to get everything up and, uh, get set and be ready to, to machine. Allen Hall 2025: So if you wanna fix a yaw gear problem, how long does it take from start to finish to get that done?  Søren Kellenberger: It typically, it takes one day to get everything up and get ready, and then per six teeth, which is a typical segment, it takes about a day to machine that. Okay. So, uh, let’s say you have, uh, somewhere between 10 and 15 teeth, it’s, uh, two to three segments. So we do that in a week. Um-  Allen Hall 2025: Wow … and- ‘Cause the alternative is call a crane, have them lifting the cell off.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: Take the yaw gear off, put a yaw gear on, if you can find a yaw gear. Yes. Put the nacelle back on. [00:05:00] Well, and I guess obviously the rotors are coming down too, so- Yeah. You’re talking about- Yes hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime. Yeah. It’s a big ordeal. The CNC Onsite method is so much easier.  Søren Kellenberger: We will just put our equipment in the back of our truck- … and then, uh, we’ll, we are ready to mobilize in a few days. So yeah, we can significantly, uh, bring down the downtime and, and as you said, the crane cost is of course extremely high. And then you can add all the project management. You know, con- do I actually have my access roads, uh, still available? Right. Is the crane pad intact? And all of that stuff you need to organize. You can just forget about that and, uh- And  Allen Hall 2025: get it done …  Søren Kellenberger: get it done. Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. There’s, there’s a lot of owners, we, everybody knows who the machines are that have the, the, the yaw tooth problem. Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: So if you’re one of those owner operators, you better get ahold of CNC Onsite. Now, flanges on tower sections. It’s become a, a really critical issue. You hear a lot of, of [00:06:00] operators, OEMs talking about, “I’m putting together these tower sections and those flanges don’t really meet up quite right.”  Søren Kellenberger: Yep. Allen Hall 2025: “I’m creating uneven torque patterns, bolt pat- my bolt tightening is not quite right.”  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: And it never really seats right, so you have this mechanical, built-in mechanical problem. CNC Onsite is now fixing that so those flanges are actually really flat. Really flat, yes. ‘Cause that’s what you need.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. They’re highly loaded.  Søren Kellenberger: If, if you want, uh… If you want your joints to be, uh, basically maintenance free, uh, we can, uh, achieve that with machining the flanges. And then, of course, you need to be in control with your bolt tightening process. Sure. But if you do those two things, you can have maintenance free bolted connections, and there’s so much money to be saved in the operations. Um, and of course, when you have these bolts that end up fatiguing, some of them don’t get caught in time and you end up ha- having a catastrophic failure on the turbine. Uh- We’ve [00:07:00] seen that … because you have that zipper effect. Once a bolt starts breaking, the neighboring ones take that extra load and it accelerates really quickly. Uh, yeah. Sure does.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. It’s a very serious situation, but it starts with this very simple solution which is just make the flange flat.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. But I think it’s some… a part of the issue is that those buying the towers aren’t necessarily responsible for the operational cost of maintaining that bolted connection. So they might save a little bit of money when they buy the tower sections with rougher tolerances, but you will spend the money 10 times in the operations. Uh, and, and that’s, I think that’s where some of the operations, uh, re- the, the, those responsible for operational costs should, uh, get a little bit more CapEx spend, uh- Oh, sure. Yeah. And, and then, uh, actually save a lot of money and, and reduce risk. Uh, it’s a huge, huge risk  Allen Hall 2025: It’s, it’s one of those lessons learned. You [00:08:00] don’t know that they should be flat. You shouldn’t know… You don’t know your flanges should be flat until you experience the problems, and then you want all your flanges flat from here on out. Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: But there’s only one way to do that really, and that’s to call CNC Onsite to come in and to make them flat.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: Because it’s a difficult thing to do. You really need to have the machining prowess and the tight tolerances that CNC Onsite’s gonna deliver in a tool that can actually be adapted to that tower ring and make those surfaces flat. It’s complicated. Exactly.  Søren Kellenberger: It is. Uh, but that is what we do every day, so, uh- Yes, I’ve noticed … yeah, so  Allen Hall 2025: so- You take on those challenges  Søren Kellenberger: So we are optimizing our machines to be not only fit for one-offs, but actually to go into a manufacturing, uh, process. So we have op- optimized our machines a lot with, uh, automatic alignment and, uh, stuff like that to, to really make that process, uh, easier. Because it has been considered that when you had to machine a flange, you weren’t in [00:09:00] control with your production, uh, processes. But I think that is, um, a bit of a misinterpretation. It’s, it’s a little bit like saying when I have a casted component, I cannot get a bearing fit, uh, in my cast process. That’s not because your cast process is wrong, there’s just some limitations to what you can do. Sure. And it’s basically the same here. Yes. And, and if you apply that con- uh, planned machining, you can gain some real benefits, uh, later on and the cost will, of course, drop dra- dramatically if you plan it, rather than call for one, uh, every time you have one that is out of tolerances and, and you can even narrow those tolerances down and get the benefits from maintenance-free bowler connections. Allen Hall 2025: Right.  Søren Kellenberger: Uh-  Allen Hall 2025: Right, ’cause you’re gonna pay for it for the next 20, 30 years. Yeah. Yeah. That’s absolutely right. Now, you’re getting involved in some of the safety aspects of operating a turbine. Uh, some of the pins and the lockouts on the low-speed gearboxes get a little worn over time, so the hole [00:10:00] you put the pin in gets worn. There’s a lot of loads on that and- Yeah … it starts to oblong out and eventually, if you’re trying to work on that gearbox, you’re trying to keep that and your technicians safe, which is what you’re doing- Yeah … that lockout pin doesn’t quite fit in the hole and it creates a little bit of a safety risk. Yeah. So now CNC on-site’s coming in and saying, “Hey, wait a minute. We can realign that, clean that hole up, make that safe again.”  Søren Kellenberger: Yes.  Allen Hall 2025: Explain what that looks like and what that process is to do that.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. So again, it’s the same thought like with the, with the O-ring, uh, that instead of bringing a component down and trying to fix it, we have designed some machinery we can bring uptower and then make that repair. So basically what we do is that, that we mill that hole a little bit larger and then we bring a bushing, uh, that we, uh, freeze into that hole- Okay … and to recreate that tight fit again with a, with a locking pin. Uh, so it’s, it’s not that [00:11:00] complicated, but you still need to know, of course, what you are doing. So finding the center of the original hole is one of the critical things because you want the center of the new ring to be in that same position- Sure … to make sure it fits with the pin  Allen Hall 2025: right. So- Right. You can’t just take a drill up there and try to clean out that hole. No, no. That is not the way to do that That,  Søren Kellenberger: that  Allen Hall 2025: won’t work. No, no . I’m sure it’s been tried, but- Yeah … no, you wanna have accurate mach- actual, uh, tight tolerance machinery up there to, to align that hole, drill it properly, put that insert back into that spot- Yeah … which is gonna be a hardened insert so it’ll last longer, right?  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah, yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: So once you do that, y- it’s a permanent fix to a otherwise nagging problem. That’s wonderful.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: So, th- again, that kit just goes right uptower, right up the, the lift, right up the cl- crane- Exactly … and bang, you’re done. Yeah. Okay.  Søren Kellenberger: So all our machines are designed to be able to be lifted with the internal crane-  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah …  Søren Kellenberger: of that specific nacelle.  Allen Hall 2025: Okay.  Søren Kellenberger: So obviously as the cells go bigger, they have more load cap- uh- Me too load capacity. Yeah. So for the smaller [00:12:00] turbines, the machines come in, in a bit smaller parts- Okay … so that we are sure we stay within that 250 or 500 kilogram or even whatever the limit is of, of that- Yeah, yeah, yeah … crane. And then we can, uh, reassemble everything uptower and still do tolerances within a few hundredths of a millimeter. And, and I think that is, that is really the core of, of what we do that, that we can achieve those workshop tolerances on site, um-  Allen Hall 2025: It’s crazy when I tell people that. I say, “Well, you know, CNC on-site, they can’t… I mean, those, those tolerances can’t be that tight.” And I say, “No, no, no, no. They’re talking about, you know, fractions of a millimeter,” which in, in American terms means fractions of a mil. Yeah. That’s 1/1000th of an inch. That’s the tolerance you’re doing.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: Uh, and that means quality at the end of the day. If you can machine things that tight, that means what you’re getting is gonna be right for that job. Yeah. It’s gonna fix that, fix that problem permanently, which is the goal. Yes. Don’t recreate the problem. Just fix it once and be done. Now, blade root [00:13:00] inserts, huge issue. CNC on-site has been developing tooling to drill out those existing inserts and, and put in new inserts, and you’re having success with that.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: That’s a… it seems like a complicated process, but you have owned that quite well. Talk about what that machinery looks like today, how you’re doing that process, and what have you learned from doing some, uh, field work. Søren Kellenberger: It’s, uh… we actually, we’ve, we’ve developed two different machines now. Okay. So we, we have, we have one that is, uh, fully CNC controlled, uh, when you need to do a lot of bushings. Yeah. Um, that one takes a bit more, uh, time to set up, but, but, uh, each drilling process is, is really fast. Uh, and then we have developed a semi-automatic machine as well, uh, which is a little bit easier to mount, mounts directly on the blade. And it’s, uh, really perfect when you only have smaller areas of the, the blade root where you don’t need to replace all bushings- But maybe typically it’s, it’s in the high load [00:14:00] area, which is 15 to 20 bushings maybe. Right. Something like that, right? Yes.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah.  Søren Kellenberger: So, so there we can just mount it directly on the blade and, and then drill from, uh, from there. Um, and it works really well. We completed, uh, the first large scale, uh, commercial, uh, project, uh, together with our good friends from, uh, We4C. Uh- Right.  Allen Hall 2025: Yes.  Søren Kellenberger: And, uh, and now we are producing, uh, two more drilling machines- Oh … uh, for, for new upcoming, uh, projects also together with, uh, the guys from, from We4C. Allen Hall 2025: Wow.  Søren Kellenberger: So now it’s, it’s starting to, uh, to pick up. Um, it’s been a relatively long process, and I guess no one really wants to be the first mover on, uh, on new technology, right? Right. So we’ve had a lot of questions. Oh, that… And that looks interesting, but how many, uh, turbines, uh, or how many blades have you repaired? And it’s been up until now, well, it’s only tested in the lab. Uh, but now we have the first, uh, large scale commercial, uh, project with, uh, 26, uh, turbines, [00:15:00] uh, repaired and, uh, and 1,000 bushings, uh, that were replaced, uh, across those, uh, 26 turbines. So-  Allen Hall 2025: Wow …  Søren Kellenberger: so I guess that is now large scale. Uh-  Allen Hall 2025: That’s large scale. Yeah. Yeah. I would consider 1,000 a large scale test. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And that brings all those turbines back to life.  Søren Kellenberger: Absolutely. They are up running, uh, full power again, so, uh, that is, uh-  Allen Hall 2025: That’s huge …  Søren Kellenberger: really nice.  Allen Hall 2025: For the operator, I’m sure they love that.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. And, and of course, uh, there’s, there’s been a lot of discussions about blades and, uh, bla- the, the waste, uh, issue you have on, on worn- Oh out blades. Sure. So by being able to fix them instead of replacing them, not only is the, the cost for fixing a blade a lot lower than buying new ones, uh, but, but also from a, an environmental perspective. The not having to scrap them and create that waste is, uh, is also a nice, uh,  Allen Hall 2025: thing. Yeah, it’s one of the things that pops up more recently about replacing blades, and I think the [00:16:00] industry and the operators are pushing back on that. Uh, because a lot of times the OEM wants to replace a blade, it’s just easier for them to do.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: But the reality is, is that yeah, you’re creating this additional problem. What are you gonna do with the disposal of this blade? Do we really need to do that? Is it so far gone that I can’t recover it? I think a lot of times, especially with fiberglass blades- Yeah you can bring them back to life.  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: Just with a little bit of engineering, uh, prowess and some good machinery- Yeah. You can, you can make magic happen, and that’s what CNC OnSite is doing. So that, that’s really amazing that, uh, you’re starting to get more adoption of that on, on the blade root inserts. I know across the United States there’s all kinds of issues, and you’re proving it out. I think the adoption rate in America and all over is gonna really step up. Now, uh, you always have some cool new project, sort of top secret. What are you working on that the world needs to know about?  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. W- I mean, we are constantly, uh, [00:17:00]expanding our, our line of services. Uh, so- Sure … so we are just out there trying to listen to what kind of issues do we see in, in the industry-  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah Søren Kellenberger: and how can that be fixed, uh, uptower. So, so some of the, the latest, uh, innovations we’ve been doing is a, a new machine on, um… to, to do shaft milling. Uh, so that c- that can be on generator shafts, uh, for instance. There are some machines out there, but we’ve decided to go, uh, against CNC control- Okay because it gives us a lot of, uh, opportunities both on, on speed, uh, of the process. It’s a more safe, uh, way to, uh, to do it.  Allen Hall 2025: Sure.  Søren Kellenberger: And we can actually also do different, uh, shapes on the shaft, so, so we can do more advanced, uh, repairs. Okay. We, we don’t need to stick to a certain diameter all the way. Now we can, we can mo- make grooves, and we can do, uh- Really? all sort of sorts of stuff, uh- Oh … along that process because it’s CNC controlled.  Allen Hall 2025: Oh, sure. Okay. Um, and- Boy, okay. That makes a lot of sense. So you can actually take a, a, a basic, [00:18:00] basic, basic design of a shaft and make modifications to it- Yeah … to extend the lifetime and make it work better.  Søren Kellenberger: Yes. So typically we would mill down, uh, the shaft and- Sure install a sleeve- Sure … to recreate a, a bearing fit, for instance.  Allen Hall 2025: Right. Yeah.  Søren Kellenberger: But we have possibilities to, uh, to create, um, grooves or anything that would do a stress relief or whatever you need, lubrication, or if you, if you want to do something, uh, afterwards, we, we can do that with, uh, with our machines. Uh- Yeah. So yeah, we, we have some new machines for, for hollow shaft, uh, machining, so we can do stuff, uh, inside the main shaft, for instance. We can do stuff on the, the outside, as I mentioned on, on the generator shaft, but that could be on the gearbox as well. So- Sure … sometimes we see issues on the main shaft to, to gearbox, uh, connection. Allen Hall 2025: Yeah.  Søren Kellenberger: We are able to, to fix, uh, those, uh, things uptower. Wow. And, uh, so yeah, lot of new, uh, stuff being, uh, developed.  Allen Hall 2025: That’s, that’s awesome.  Søren Kellenberger: [00:19:00] Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: And I, I know you guys are busy, but- If somebody wants to get ahold of CNC Onsite and get work done this year, they better be making phone calls to you- … quickly. So I, I know your order book is filling up and you’re, you’re having to devote crews and machinery and time. Yeah. How do people get ahold of you and get on that contact list and can start working the process?  Søren Kellenberger: I would say go into, uh, cnconsite.dk and, uh, there we have all our, our contacts. Uh, so just reach out. There’s a, yeah, formula you can, uh, fill in, uh, or you can find our direct contacts in our webpage, and, uh, then we can start looking at it. So we are quite busy, but we are always- Yeah … open for, uh, discussions and, uh, yeah. That,  Allen Hall 2025: that’s a problem with being successful, is you’re just always busy running around trying to take care of problems, and that’s the thing, is that everybody I talk to that’s used CNC Onsite loves it-  Søren Kellenberger: Yeah …  Allen Hall 2025: and loves the process and loves the work you do. So there’s gonna be a lot more phone calls and a lot more orders coming your way, and that’s- Yeah … that’s awesome. [00:20:00] Soren- Yeah … it’s so good to see you again and it’s so good to see you in person. Yeah. And congratulations on the promotion and everything that’s happening at CNC Onsite.  Søren Kellenberger: Thank you, Allen. It’s a pleasure.

Rosemary reports back on her visit to multiple Chinese renewable energy companies, Vineyard Wind activates a $69.50/MWh PPA with Massachusetts utilities, and Bronze Age jewelry halts a German wind project. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com and now your hosts. Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron in Austin, Texas, who is back from the massive wedding event. Everybody’s super happy about that, and Rosemary Barnes had her own adventures. She just got back from China and Rosemary. You visited a a lot of different places inside of China. Saw some cool factories. What all happened?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it was really cool. I went over for an influencer event. So if you are maybe, you know, in the middle of your career, not, not particularly attractive or anything you might have thought influencer was ruled out for you as a career. No one, no one needs engineering influencers in their [00:01:00] forties. It’s incorrect. It turns out that’s, that’s where, that’s where I, I found myself. It was pretty cool. I, I did get the red carpet rolled out for me. Many gifts. I had to buy a second bag to bring home the gifts, and when I say I had to buy a second bag, I had to mention. Oh, I have so many gifts, I’m gonna need another bag. And then there was a new bag presented to me about half an hour later. But, so yeah, what did I do? I got to, um, as I was over there for a Sun Grow event. Huge, huge event. They, um, it’s for, it’s for their staff a lot, but it’s also, they also bring over partners. They also bring over international experts to talk about topics that are relevant to them. Yeah. They gave everybody factory tours in, um, yeah, in, in shifts. Um, I got to see a module assembly factory, so where they take cells, which are like, I don’t know, the size of a small cereal box, um, and assemble them into a whole module. Then the warehouse, warehouse was [00:02:00] gigantic. It, um, was, yeah, 1.8 gigawatt hours worth of cells that couldn’t hold in that one building. They’re totally obsessed with fire safety there in everything related to batterie, like in the design of the product, but also in, in the warehouse. And they do, yeah, fire drills all the, all the time. Some of them quite big and impressive. Um, I saw inverter manufacturing facility that was really cool. Heaps of robots. Sw incredibly fast. Saw a test facility.  Allen Hall 2025: So was most of the manufacturing, robotics, or humans?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So at the factory it was like anything that needed to be done really fast or with really good quality was done by robots. So they had, um, you know, pick and place machines putting in. Um, you know, components in the circuit board, like just insane, insane rate. I’m sure it’s quite, quite normal, but, um, just very fast. Everything lined up in a row. Most of their quality control is done by robots. Um, so it does well it’s done by ai, I should say. [00:03:00] Taking photos of, of things and then, um, AI’s interpreting that. Repairs, I think were done by humans. There were humans doing, um, like custom components as well. Like not every product is exactly the same. So the custom stuff was done by humans.  Allen H: So that’s the Sun Grove facility, right? You, but you went to a couple of different places within China?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I went to another, a factory, a solar panel, a factory, um, from Longie. That was really cool too. I got to see a bit more probably of the, um, interesting, interesting stuff there, like, uh, a bit more. Um, yeah, I don’t, I dunno, processes that aren’t, aren’t so obvious. Not just assembly, but um, you know, like printing on, um, bus bars and, you know, all of the different connections and yeah, it was a bit, a bit more to it in what I saw. Um, so that was, but it, it’s the same, you know, as humans are only involved when it’s a little bit out of the. Norm or, um, where they’re doing repairs, actual actually re [00:04:00]repairing. You know, the robots or the AI is identifying which components don’t meet the standard and then they’ll go somewhere where a human will come and, um, fix them.  Allen H: Being the engineer there. Did you notice where the robots are made? Was everything made in China that was inside the factory or were they bringing in outside? Technology.  Rosemary Barnes: I didn’t think to look for that, but I would assume that it was Chinese made, also  Allen H: all built in country  Rosemary Barnes: 20 years ago that wouldn’t have been the case, but I think that China has had a long, a long time to, to learn that. Again, it’s not like, it’s not, it’s not rocket science. These are, these are pick and place machines, you know, like I remember working on a project very early in my career, so. Literally 20 years ago, um, I was working with pick and place machines. It’s the same, it’s the same thing. Um, some of them are bigger ’cause they’re, you know, hauling whole, um, battery packs around. It’s just the, um, the way that it’s set up, but then also the scale that they can achieve. You just, you can’t make things that cheap if you don’t have the [00:05:00] scale to utilize everything. A hundred percent. Like I said, wind turbine towers is a really good example. ’cause anyone, any steel fabricating  Allen H: shop  Rosemary Barnes: could make a wind turbine tower. Right? They, they could, they could do that. You know, the Chinese, um, wind turbine tower factories have the exact right machine. They don’t have a welder that they also use for welding bits of bridges or whatever. Uh, they have the one that does the exact kind of world that they need, um, for the tower. They, you know, they do that precisely. Robotically, uh, exactly the same. And, you know, a, a tower section comes on, they weld it, it moves off to the next thing, and then a new one comes on. They’re not trying to move things around to then do another weld in the same machine. You know, like they’re, um, but the exact right. Super expensive machine for the job costs a whole bunch to set up a factory. And then you need to be making multiple towers every single day out of that factory to be able to recoup on your cost. And so that is [00:06:00] the. The, um, bar that is just incredibly hard slash impossible for, um, other countries to clear. Allen H: Can I ask you about that? Because I was watching a YouTube video about Tesla early on Tesla, where they wanted to bring in a lot of robotics to make vehicles and that they felt like that was the wrong thing to do. In fact, they, they, they kinda locked robots in and realized that this is not the right way to do it. We need to change the whole process. It was a big deal to kind of pull those. Specialized piece of equipment, robots out and to put something else in its place in that they learned, you know, the first time, instead of deciding on a process, putting it in place and then trying to turn it on, see if it works, was to sort of gradually do it. But don’t bolt anything down. Don’t lock it in place such that it doesn’t feel like it’s permanent. So you engineer can think about removing it if it’s not working. But it sounds like this is sort of the opposite approach of. A highly specialized [00:07:00] machine set in place permanently to produce. Infinite amounts of this particular product, does that then restrict future changes and what they can make or, I, I, how do they see that? Did, did you talk about that? Because I think that’s one of an interesting approaches.  Rosemary Barnes: I didn’t actually get as much chances I would’ve liked to speak to engineers. Um, I was talking mostly to salespeople and installers. Um, so they know a lot, but I couldn’t, um, like in the factory tours, I was asking questions. Um. That kind of question and, and they could answer all, all that. Um, but outside of that, and I couldn’t record in the factory obviously. Um, but I did, I did take notes, but what I would say is that they would have a separate facility where they would be working out the details of new products and new manufacturing processes and testing them out thoroughly before they went and, you know, um, installed everything correctly. But what I do hear is that, you know, especially with solar power. Maybe to [00:08:00] batteries to a lesser extent. You, you know, you like, you have these kind of waves of technology. Um, so you know, like everyone’s making whatever certain type of solar cell and then five years later, um, there’s a new more efficient configuration and everybody’s making that. And I know that there are a lot of factories that kind of get scrapped. Um, and the way that China’s set up their, like, you know, their economy around all this sort of thing is set up is that it’s not that, like every company doesn’t succeed. Right. They SGO was a big exception because they’ve been going since 1997, I think it was. It was started by a professor quid his job and hired a room across the, across the road from his old university and, you know, built his first inverter and, um, you know, ’cause he, he could see that. Uh, the grid was gonna have to change to incorporate all of the solar power that was coming, which to be honest, in 1997, that was like pretty, pretty farsighted. That was not obvious to me when I started working in solar in mid two thousands. And it was not obvious to me that this was a winner.  Allen H: Well, has sun grow evolved then quite a bit? ’cause if you’re [00:09:00] saying that they’ve minimized the cost to produce any of their products by the use of robotics, they have been through an evolutionary process. You didn’t see any of the previous generations of. Factories. You, you were just seeing the most modern factory that that’s actually producing parts today. So is that a, is that a, is that just a cost mindset that’s going on in China? Like, we’re just gonna produce the lowest cost thing as fast as we can, or is it a market penetration approach? What are, what were, were the engineers in management saying about that?  Rosemary Barnes: I think there’s a few different aspects to that, like within China. So Sun Grow is the big company with a long track record and they’re not making the cheapest product out of China. So I think that they are still trying to make the cheapest product, but they’re not thinking about it just in the purchase price. Right. They’re thinking more in terms of the long, long term. You know, they’ve been around for 30 years and probably expect to be around for another 30 years. They don’t wanna be having [00:10:00] recalls of their products and you know, like having to, um. Installers in particular are probably working with them because they know that they won’t have to go back and do rework and the support is good and all that sort of thing. So they’re spending so much money on testing and you know, just getting everything exactly right. But I don’t think that that’s the only way that China is doing it. There’s, you know, dozens, probably hundreds of companies. Um. Doing similar stuff between Yeah, like solar panels and associated stuff like inverters and, and batteries. So many companies and all of them won’t succeed. You know, sun Girls Facility in, I was in her and it’s huge, you know, it’s like a, a medium sized country town. Just their, um, their campus there, they’re not, they’re not scrapping that and moving to a new site, you know, they’re gonna be. Rejiggering and I would expect that, you know, like everything’s set up exactly the way it needs to be, but it’s not like gigantic machines.[00:11:00] It’s not like setting up a wind turbine blade factory where it’s hard if you designed it for 40 meter blades, you can’t suddenly start making 120 meter blades. Like it’s, they will be able to be sliding machines in and out as they need to. Um, so I, I, yeah, I guess that it’s some, some flexibility. But not at the cost of making the product correctly. Allen H: Did you see wind turbines while you were in China?  Rosemary Barnes: I, the only winter I saw, I actually, I saw, because I caught the train from Shanghai, I actually caught the fast train from Shanghai to, which is about, it depends which one you get between like an hour 40 or three hours if it stops everywhere. Um, and I did see a couple of wind turbines on the way there, out the window, just randomly like a wind turbine in the middle of a, a town. Um, so that was a bit, a bit interesting. But then in the plane, on the way back, the plane from Shanghai to Hong Kong, I, at the window I saw a cooling tower of some sort. So either like a, yeah, some kind of thermal [00:12:00] power plant. And then. Around all around, well, wind turbines, so onshore wind turbines. So I don’t know. Um, yeah, I, I don’t know the story behind that, but it’s also not a particularly windy area, right? Like most of the wind in China is, um, to the west where, uh, I wasn’t  Allen H: as wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS win.com today. So there are two stories out of the US at the minute that really paint a picture of the industry. It was just being pulled in opposite directions. The Department of Interior announced agreements to terminate two more. Offshore wind leases, uh, [00:13:00] Bluepoint wind and Golden State wind have agreed to walk away from their projects. Global Infrastructure Partners, which is part of BlackRock, will invest up to $765 million in a liquified natural gas facility instead of developing blue point wind. Ah. And Golden State Wind will recover approximately $120 million in lease fees after redirecting investment to oil and gas projects along the Gulf Coast, and both companies say they will not pursue further offshore wind development in the United States. Well, we’ll see how that plays out. Right? Meanwhile. In Massachusetts Vineyard Wind, which has been fighting with GE Renova recently has activated its long awaited power purchase agreement with three utilities. The contract set a fixed electricity price of drum roll please. [00:14:00] $69 and 50 cents per megawatt hour for the first year and a two and a half percent annual increase. Uh, state officials say the agreements will save rate payers $1.4 billion over 20 years. So $69 and 50 cents per megawatt hour is a really low PPA price for offshore wind. A lot of the New York projects that. Renegotiated we’re somewhere in the realm of 120 to $130 a megawatt hour, and there’s been a lot of discussion in Congress about the, the usefulness of offshore wind. It’s intermittent blahdi, blahdi, blah. Uh, but the, the big driver is what costs too much. In fact, it doesn’t cost too much. And because it’s consistent, particularly in the wintertime, uh, electricity prices in Massachusetts in the surrounding area are really high. ’cause of the demand and ’cause how cold it is that this offshore wind project, vineyard wind would be a huge rate saving. And [00:15:00] actually the math works out the math. Math everybody. Do you think this is, when we go back five years from now, look back at this. This vineyard wind project really makes sense for Massachusetts.  Yolanda Padron: I think it really makes sense for Massachusetts. I’m really interested to know what the asset managers are thinking on the vineyard wind side, um, and if they’re scared at all to take this on. I mean, it’s great and I’m sure they can absolutely deliver. Like generation I don’t think should be an issue. Um. I just don’t know. It’s, it sounds like they’re leaving a lot of money on the table.  Allen H: I would say so, yeah. But remember, the vineyard win was one of the early, uh, agreements made when things were, this is pre Ukraine war, pre Iran conflict on a lot of other, a lot of other things. It was pre, so I remember at the time when this was going on that. P. PA prices were higher than obviously a lot of other [00:16:00] things. Onshore solar, onshore wind, it would, offshore is always more expensive, but I don’t remember $69 popping up anywhere in any filing that I remember seeing. So even if they had said $69 five years ago, I think that would’ve still been like, wow, that’s pretty good for an offshore wind project. And now it looks fantastic for the state of Massachusetts  Yolanda Padron: because I know that there’s sometimes, and we’ve talked about this in the past, right? There are sometimes projects where, you know, you think you, you’ve got a really good price and you’re really excited about it, and then it goes into operation and then like a couple years down the road, prices increase quite a bit and it’s not the worst thing in the world. But you do just kind of think a little bit like, I wish I could. Renegotiate this or you know, just to get, to get our team a bit of a better deal or to get a bit more money in operations and everything.  Allen H: Does this play into Vineyard wind claiming $850 [00:17:00] million in dispute with GE Renova that at $69 PPA, there’s not a lot of profit at the end of this and need to get the money out of GE Renova right now, and maybe why GE Renova wants to get out of this because they realize. The conflict that is coming that they need to separate the, the themselves from this project. It’s, it’s very, as an asset manager, Yoland, as you have done this in the past, would you be concerned about the viability of the project going forward, or is all the upfront costs. Pretty much done in that operationally year to year. It’s, it’s not that big of a deal.  Yolanda Padron: As an asset manager taking this on, I’d probably have started preparation on this project a lot earlier than other of my projects like I do. I know that usually there’s, you know, we’ve talked about the different teams, right, throughout the stages of the project until it goes into operations, [00:18:00] but. And usually you don’t have a lot of time to prepare to, to make sure all of your i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, um, by the time you take the project and operations from a commercial standpoint. But this project, I think would absolutely, like you, you would need to make sure that a lot of the, of the things that you’re, that might be issues for some of your projects like aren’t issues for this project. Just to make sure at least the first few years you can. You can avoid a lot of, a lot of turmoil that the pricing and the disputes and the technical issues are gonna cause you, because I feel like it’s just, there’s, there’s just so many things that just keep this side, just keeps on getting hit, you know? Allen H: Well, I, I guess the question is from my side, Yolanda, is obviously inflation, when this project started was pretty consistent, like one point half, 2%. It was very flat for a long time. And interest rates, if you remember when this project started, were very, very low. Almost [00:19:00] nonexistent, some interest rates. Now that’s hugely different. How does a contract get set up where a vineyard can’t raise prices? It would just seem to me like you would have to tie some of the price increase to whatever the inflation rate is for the country, maybe even locally, so that if there were a, a war in Ukraine or some conflict in the Middle East. That you, you would at least be able to, to generate some revenue out of this project because at some point it becomes untenable, right? You just can’t afford to operate it anymore. And,  Yolanda Padron: and I think, um, I, I haven’t, I obviously haven’t read the, the contracts themselves, but I know that there’s sometimes there, it’s pretty common for a PPA to have some sort of step up year by year. And it’s usually, it can be tied to, um, the CPI for. Like the, the change in CPI for the year to year. So you’re [00:20:00] absolutely like, right, like maybe, I mean, hopefully they’re, they’re not just tied to the fixed 69 bucks per megawatt hour. Um, but, but yeah, to, to your point like that, that price increase could, could really save them. Now that we’re, we’re talking the, the increase in, in inflation right now and foreseeable future,  Allen H: if you think about what electricity rates are up in the northeast. I think I was paying 30 cents a kilowatt hour, which is 300. Does that sound right? $300 a megawatt hour. Delivered at the house, something like that. Right? So  Yolanda Padron: prices in the northeast are crazy to me,  Allen H: right? They’re like double what they are in North Carolina. Yeah. Delamination and bottom line failures and blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws [00:21:00]before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep dip blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps Every critical defect, delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades. Back in service, so visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save  Yolanda Padron: you millions. Allen H: Well, sometimes building a wind farm turns out more than expected construction workers at a 19 turbine wind project in lower Saxony Germany under Earth. What experts call the largest Bronze age Amber Horde ever found? The region, the very first scoop of an excavator brought up bronze and amber artifacts that stopped construction and brought archeologists back to the site. Uh, the hoard has been dated between [00:22:00] 1500 and 1300 DCE and is believed to have belonged to at least three. Status women possibly buried as a religious offering. Now as we push further and further across Germany with wind turbines and solar panels for, for that matter, uh, we’re coming across older sites, uh, older pieces of ground that haven’t been touched in a long time and we’re, we’re gonna find more and more, uh, historically significant things buried in the soil. What is the obligation? Of the constructor of this project and maybe across Europe. I, I would assume in the United States too, if we came across something that old and America’s just not that old to, to have anything of, of that kind of, um, maybe value or historically significant. What is the process here? Rosemary Barnes: I assume that they’ve gotta stop, stop work. Um, yeah, that’s my, my understanding and I don’t think, do you have [00:23:00] grand designs in America?  Allen H: I don’t know what that is. Yes.  Rosemary Barnes: So missing out by not having that chat. It’s a TV show about people who are building houses or doing, um, ambitious renovations, and it just, it follows, it follows them. You can learn a lot about project management or. The consequences if you decide that you don’t need to, project management isn’t a thing that you need to do. Um, anyway. I’m sure that in some of those ones I’ve seen they have had work stop because in their excavation they found a, um, yeah, some, some kind of relic, um, from the, from the past. So based on that very well-credentialed experience that I have, I can confidently say that they would be stopping stopping work on that site. I mean, it’s so bad, bad for the developer, I guess, but it’s cool, right? That they’re, you know, uncovering, uh, new archeology and we can learn more about, you know, people that lived thousands of years ago. Allen H: It, it does seem [00:24:00] like, obviously. Do push into places where humans have lived for thousands of years. We’re going to stumble across these things. Does that mean from a project standpoint, there’s, there’s some sort of financial consequence, like does the lower Saxony government contribute to the wind turbine fund to to pay the workers for a while? ’cause it seems like if they’re gonna do an archeological dig. That that’s gonna take months at a minimum, may, maybe not, but it usually, having watched these things go on it, it’s. It’s long.  Rosemary Barnes: But wouldn’t that be something that you’d have insurance for?  Allen H: Oh, maybe that’s it.  Rosemary Barnes: You know, it seems to me like an insurable, an insurable thing, like not so hard to, it would’ve affected plenty of other, like any project that involves excavation in Europe would come with a risk of, um, finding Yeah. An archeological find. And having work stopped, I would assume.  Allen H: Yolanda, how does that work in the United States do, is there some insurance policy towards finding [00:25:00] a. Ancient burial ground and what happens to your project?  Yolanda Padron: I don’t know. I, um, the most I’ve heard has been, it’s just talking to like the government and like the local government and making sure that you have all your permits in place and making sure, you know, you might need to, to have certain studies so you know, you might not have to get rid of the whole wind farm or remove the hole wind farm, but at least a section. Of it has to be displaced from what you originally had thought. I don’t know. I know it happens a lot in Mexico where you get a lot of changes to construction plans because you find historical artifacts or obviously not everybody does this, but like. Tales of construction workers who will like, find, they’re so jaded from finding historical artifacts that they just kind of like take and then dump them to the next plot over to not deal with it right now. Not that it’s anything ethical, uh, or done by everybody, [00:26:00] uh, but it’s, but, but it’s a common occurrence, a relatively common occurrence.  Allen H: You would think it where a lot of wind turbines are in the United States, which is mostly Texas and kind of that. Midwest, uh, wind corridor that they would’ve stumbled across something somewhere. But I did just a quick search. I really hadn’t found anything that there wasn’t like a Native American burial ground or something of that sort, which they previously knew. For the most part. It’s, so, it’s rare that, that you find something significant besides, well, maybe used some woolly mammoths tusks or something of that sort. Uh, in the Midwest, it’s, it’s, so, it’s an odd thing, but is there a. A finder’s fee? Like do does the wind company get to take some of the proceeds of, of this? Trove of jewelry.  Rosemary Barnes: I, I would be highly surprised.  Allen H: Well, how does that work then? Rosemary?  Rosemary Barnes: I’d be highly surprised if that’s the case in Europe. I bet it would happen like that in America. Allen H: Sounds like pirate bounty in a sense.  Rosemary Barnes: In, in Australia it wouldn’t be like that because [00:27:00]you, when you own land, you don’t actually. You, you own the right to do things from surface level and above, basically. I don’t know how excavation works. So you don’t generally have a a right to anything you find like that? I mean, you shouldn’t either. It’s not, it’s not yours. It’s a, it belongs to the, I don’t know, the people that, that were buried. When you then to the, the land, like, I guess. The government in some way. I mean, in Australia it’s, um, like we don’t have so many archeological fines that you would find from digging. I mean, it’s not that there’s none, but there’s not so many like that. But it is pretty common that, you know, there are special trees, um, you know, some old trees that predate, uh, white people arriving in Australia. And, um, you know, that have been used for, you know, like it might have a, a shield that’s been, um. Carved out of it. Or, uh, hunting. Hunting things, ceremonial things, baskets, canoes, canoe like things, stuff like that. They call ’em a scar [00:28:00] tree ’cause they would cut it out of a living, living tree. And you know, so when you see a tree with those scars and that’s got, um, cultural significance. There’s also, you know, just trees that were, um. That that was significant for cultural reasons and so you wouldn’t be able to cut down those trees if you were building any, doing any kind of development in Australia and a wind farm would be no different. I know that they are, there are guidelines for, if you do come across any kind of thing like that or you find any anything of cultural significance, then you have to report it and hopefully you don’t just move it onto the neighboring property. Allen H: I know one of the things about watching, um. Some crazy Canadian shows is that. Uh, you have to have a Treasure Hunter’s license in Canada. So if you’re involved in that process, like you can’t dig, you can’t shovel things, only certain people can shovel. ’cause if they were to find something of value, you. You’ll get taxed on it. So there’s just a lot of rules [00:29:00] about it. Even in Canada,  Rosemary Barnes: if I was an indigenous Australian and you know, some Europe person of European descent came and found some artifacts, uh, aboriginal. Artifacts. I would be pissed if they just took it and sold it. Like that’s just clearly inappropriate right. To, to do that. So you, I don’t think it should be a free for all. If you find artifacts of cultural significance and you just, it’s, you find its keepers that, that doesn’t sound right to me at all.  Allen H: Can we talk about King Charles II’s visit to the United States for a brief moment? Uh, he is a really good ambassador, just like, uh, the queen was forever. He’s, he does take it very seriously and the way that he interacted with the US delegation was remarkable at times in, in terms of knowing how to deal with somebody that there’s a war going on right now. So there’s a lot [00:30:00] happening in the United States that, uh, not only could it be. Uh, respecting both sides of the UK and the United States’ position in a, in a number of different areas, but at the same time being humorous, trying to build bridges. Uh, king Charles, uh, had the scotch whiskey tariffs removed just by negotiating with President Trump, and sometimes that’s what it takes. It’s a little bit of, uh. Being a good ambassador.  Allen H: Yeah. The very polished you would expect that. Right? But this is the first visit of. The king to the United States, I believe. ’cause he, he’s been obviously as a prince many, many, many times to the United States. [00:31:00]But this time as, as a, the representative of the country, the former representative or head of the country, which was unique. I think he did a really good job. And I wish he, they would’ve talked about offshore wind. Maybe he could’ve calmed down the administration on offshore wind.  Rosemary Barnes: I bet that’s one of the, the goals. I mean, that’s an industry that’s important to. So  Allen H: I wonder if that happened actually. ’cause that’s not gonna be reported in, in the news, but how the UK is going on its own way in terms of electrification and I guarantee offshore wind had to come up it. Although I have been not seen any article about it, I, I find it hard to believe that King Charles being the environmentalist that he is, and a proponent of offshore wind for a long time. Didn’t bring it up and try to mend some fences.  Rosemary Barnes: Maybe he’s playing the long game though. I mean, Trump is pretty, he’s transactional, but he also, you know, he has people that he really likes and you know, will act in their interests. So maybe it’s enough to just be [00:32:00] really liked by Trump, and then that’s the smartest way you can go about it. Allen H: Did you see the gift that King Charles presented to, uh, the US this past week? It was a be from, uh, world War II submarine, which was the British, I dunno what the British called their submarines, but it was, the name of it was Trump. So they had the bell from. The submarine when it had been commissioned and they, they gave that to the United States, or give to the president. It goes to the United States. The president doesn’t get to keep those things, but it was such a smart, it’s a great president. It’s such a smart gift, and somebody had to think about it and the king had to deliver it in a way that got rid of all the noise between the United States and the uk. Brought it back to, Hey, we have a lot in common [00:33:00] here. We shouldn’t be bickering as much as we are. And I thought that was a really smart, tactful, sensible way to try to men some fences. That was really good. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss this episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosie and Yolanda, I’m Allen Hall and we with. See you’re here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers CIP’s €1.44 billion buyout of Ørsted’s European onshore wind, the new Perigus Energy name, and Vestas paying €506 million for its stake in the firm. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! In Denmark, there is an old expression. “What goes around comes around.” The founders of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — known in the industry simply as CIP — know exactly what that means. Back in 2012, four executives were fired from DONG Energy, the Danish energy giant that would later rebrand itself as Ørsted. Their offense? Their paychecks were considered too large. So large that DONG Energy’s own CEO was forced out as well. Four men shown the door were. A year later, a woman joined them from that same company. The Danish press had a name for these five. They called them “the golden birds.” With six billion Danish krone from the pension fund PensionDanmark, they launched what is now one of the world’s largest clean energy fund managers. In 2020, turbine maker Vestas purchased a 25 percent stake in CIP. The deal included a performance-based earn-out arrangement. This week, the books revealed the size of that windfall. The five partners have now collected a combined 1.8 billion Danish krone — roughly 240 million euros. Vestas expects to make one final payment of 71 million euros this year. Including interest, Vestas will have paid 506 million euros for its stake in CIP. Not a bad return for a group of people who were shown the door. And. This week, CIP completed its acquisition of Ørsted’s European onshore wind business for 1.44 billion euros. They renamed it Perigus Energy. The new company holds 826 megawatts of wind and solar capacity, operating in Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Let that circle close. The executives fired from DONG Energy — the company that became Ørsted — just bought Ørsted’s business. Meanwhile, CIP’s annual report for 2025 tells the story of a company in transition. Profit for the year came in at 561 million Danish krone, down from 683 million the year before. The employee count fell by nearly a fifth, to 441 people. And yet, their CI Five fund closed this year at 12.3 billion euros — the largest greenfield renewable infrastructure fund ever raised. Looking ahead, CIP expects profit of 600 to 800 million Danish krone in 2026 as new fund closings take shape. So the picture this week is this. The men and women once considered overpaid, at a company that no longer carries the same name, have built the world’s largest greenfield renewable energy fund. And they now own a piece of the legacy that fired them. The golden birds are still flying. And that is the wind energy news for the fourth of May, 2026. Join us for more on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Nick Martocci, founder of Technical Training Academy in Las Vegas, joins to discuss expanding from wind technician training to other energy technologies and career pathways for veterans in energy. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Nick, welcome back to the program. We’re Tower Trading Academy. Now your technical trading Academy since we last spoke and we last spoke at OM and S in Nashville. Yep. Now we’re here in Orlando. A lot’s changed over the last year.  Nick Martocci: We went through a lot of growth and changes, if you will, to the point where, because I added the program from just wind turbine technician to battery energy storage technician as well. And obviously like always I’ve got something brewing behind the green curtain. Right, right. Uh, we’re, we’re always doing something and adding and changing training. And what we really did is get to a place where we’re getting really technical with some of the things that we’re doing. And what I did want to [00:01:00] do is rebrand, go through all of the, you know, uh, marketing and pieces again, and try to change things. And so I tried to find what was the most simplistic, easy pivot, but also kept us out in the people’s eye. Yeah. And we went to Technical Training Academy. So we really didn’t have to do a whole heavy rebrand. We didn’t have to change a lot, but those that are already working with us, it was just letting them know, Hey, we are still Legally Tower Training Academy. Even the Department of Labor recognizes that, uh, we just have a DBA in place and the DBA doing business as, uh, allows us to now really open that up as far as what are we capable of doing when it comes to. Deliverables for, you know, people in energy and those types of security places.  Allen Hall: Well, I’ve been watching your shorts. I, they’re on YouTube or on LinkedIn. They’re really good. The little clips about what you [00:02:00] guys are up to, they’re excellent. And the, what I follow, because I, I met you several times, it was just kind of cool to follow the progression there. The state of Nevada has recognized you. There’s a lot of, uh, congratulatory, uh, events that are happening and like, all right, Hey, Nick’s making this thing happen because it’s so hard to be in that training business. Mm-hmm. To get to where you have brought that whole company. Two is all right. This, this is a, this is a good spot.  Nick Martocci: Yeah. Uh, you’re  Allen Hall: making some progress  Nick Martocci: there. We had Susie Lee’s office last year help us announce the Battery Energy Storage Program, so there was a congressional recognition there as well. Uh, we’ve also been working with other local politicians and things of that nature to be able to showcase some of the things that not just TTA is doing, but veterans and energy. Because of my partnership with Project Vanguard, I am a state, uh, representative [00:03:00] for Project Vanguard in the state of Nevada. So it’s another piece of also being able to showcase, hey, this is not just what TTA is doing, but what are veterans doing in energy? And I want to be able to not only highlight, you know, obviously TTA, but those pieces as well. And whatever you state, you know, the veteran pieces, obviously legislators will listen, if that makes sense. That when you start saying, Hey, a veteran is speaking legislation. We’ll quiet down for a second to see, hey, what is this rumble that you guys are creating? And they start to see what we’re doing and they wanna be a part of that. Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s wonderful. And all the effort and time that you put towards veterans and veteran efforts. Mm-hmm. Thank you so much for doing that. You’re a veteran, you’re a helicopter pilot, you served Yep. Uh, for a number of years. That’s a difficult job. I, you know, obviously the US is involved in some activity at the moment, but. You know, shout out to all the veterans out there, [00:04:00] obviously. And, and there’s a lot of ’em in renewable energy right now.  Nick Martocci: Well, I mean, not just renewables, but energy, period. ’cause I, I speak to a lot of veterans throughout my downtime, if you’ll say I have that. And you know, the, there’s people that are PMs, program project managers, there are folks that are doing logistics, warehouse hr, and seeing that movement migration. Of transitioning individuals from active duty, even some folks that are in my program that are in the guard and now getting into a position where, hey, you know, I’m a technician. I’m in energy. Whether they’re a wind turbine tech, they’re in battery, solar, hydro, what have you. Uh, there are quite a number of veterans in the energy market and industry. Allen Hall: So if you’re a veteran right now or just exiting, uh, the military. I, I think a lot of opportunity is there. They may not [00:05:00] realize. Mm-hmm. Uh, so getting trained up is a lot easier than it used to be. I remember years ago, I think I, we knew people that came outta the military and, and they were just sort of tossed out the door and had to go find things for themselves. There’s a lot more resources now I would Right. I it feel like than there were even a couple of years ago. And it’s people like you that are kind of bridging that gap for the military to, to get people onboard, to get people trained, to get ’em out in. And doing work in the civilian world, that’s huge.  Nick Martocci: Yeah. There’s so many leadership traits and skills that veterans already bring to the table. It’s a matter of taking some of those skills that maybe they, you know, worked in motor T and uh, and the motor pools, and they were turning wrenches and fixing, you know, Humvees and other, you know, mechanical vehicles, or they were. Um, A and p, so airframe and power plant for, uh, aviation and things of that nature. Sure. So now they understand these different types of systems. Already it’s a matter of, oh, how, [00:06:00] how do I transition this over to wind? How do I transition this over to solar? How do I transition this to battery and such? And then be able to pick that up? It, it, it makes it easier for them because of the familiarity, if you will. To be able to say, Hey, this is very similar to that. All I gotta do is change this information here and now I’m good to go.  Allen Hall: Right. And Project Vanguard’s helping with that a a great deal.  Nick Martocci: Oh yeah. You talked about Project Vanguard, if you don’t know what that is, so Project Vanguard is an initiative to help veterans get into renewable energy careers, utilizing the network that we already have because. Um, America’s energy is our security as well, and so who better to help take care of the nation’s security of energy than veterans who have already been doing it. And so being able to help individuals, like I said, not always be a technician. Maybe they wanna be able to get into, uh, program or project management. Maybe they want to get into hr. And by utilizing the [00:07:00] vast network that Project Vanguard has, it, it gives them that ease of entrance and access that maybe they didn’t have before.  Allen Hall: Well, that’s the key. Finding out where those opportunities lie, and it’s hard to do that on your own. Right. Reaching out for some help is the right answer, I think all the time. And every, especially now, uh, there’s a lot of, uh, military focused companies that, like technical training Academy that are bridging that gap and, and absolutely. That’s fantastic. Now, the amount of training you’re doing on site is impressive and you’re, you’re growing. You’re into Best now, and you’re into more, more and more training, doing some OSHA training. So there’s a lot of resources available and the website’s been updated. Right. And I think a lot of people are, go to the website, just Google it. You can get there. But the offerings are getting more expansive. The, the technical details are getting deeper into the aspects of all parts of the industry,  Nick Martocci: right? We’ve worked with, uh, a few entities, uh, to name Drop Ner [00:08:00] and um, destructible. They’ve donated quite a bit of different pieces for our training programs, for blades, for brake systems and things of that nature. For us to be able to take our program to that next level and actually put what technicians are going to be putting their hands on in our training places rather than something as simple as a, uh, like an theory plate piece and actually putting something that a manufacturer is building for these entities. And saying, Hey, here, this is the exact same thing you’re gonna see, uh, they donated a, a unit that goes to a GE one X, but you know, if you go out to a four X, it’s gonna be the same thing, just a little bigger.  Allen Hall: Bigger. Right,  Nick Martocci: right. And, and so it, it makes it so that it goes from serious hands-on theory to, oh, I’ve seen something just like this, but it was a little smaller. This is just bigger. I get it. Same thing. And so with destructible being able to make those donations for blades and other pieces. Uh, we’re putting together a LPS program, lightning [00:09:00] Protection Systems. Oh,  Allen Hall: good.  Nick Martocci: And so that’s something That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s something that, it’s a  Allen Hall: lightning protection company. That’s fantastic.  Nick Martocci: You know, uh, there’s a lot of stuff coming down the pipe for all of those additional pieces. We, we even revamped our whole website when we did the name change back in July, and it allows people to be able to go in and see all those pieces that we’re doing. One of the things is we became a Sprat facility, so being able to do rope access, especially when it comes to those offshore technicians and things of that nature. So we’re gonna be able to. Help out the wind industry with a lot more of those pieces that they’re looking for. Uh, like I said, the rope access, they’re definitely gonna need, uh, for offshore and things of that nature. Uh, being able to do LPS training, there’s so many other pieces. I’m gonna try not to reveal that we’re working on that are in addition to just the apprenticeship program, but okay. Somebody went out to the field, I want to get a certification in. Become better SME in this piece and start putting building blocks into people’s [00:10:00]careers.  Allen Hall: Well, that’s the key, right? It it’s the industry’s grown to be more SMEs being on site.  Nick Martocci: Yep.  Allen Hall: And there you have your gearbox people, you have your electrical, diagnosing, debugging people that are out there. And I think as the industry evolves, we’re gonna have more subject matter experts on sites. Mm-hmm. Doing LPS systems, doing gear boxes, handling some of the electrical things that are happening, even in blades and blade repair. They’re becoming more of subject matter experts. ’cause you have people that, that’s what they do. They are the expert in fixing this particular kind of blade problem. And they make a great living doing that.  Nick Martocci: And uh, one of the other things that we’re doing is the complimentary training. Right. And what I mean by that is I’ve partnered with, uh, CSN  Allen Hall: Oh Good  Nick Martocci: College of Southern Nevada. Uh, I’m also partnering with some other universities and working on those pieces because I understand that technicians, as they grow in this industry, they want to be able to do other [00:11:00] things, whether that be be a pm, be an engineer. They want to be able to go and get that piece. And so if I can help refer through our partnerships. Hey, if you want to go get your construction management at CSN, we’re a preferred partner, go talk to. This individual and we can actually, rather than say, Hey, go forth and do great things, we can actually say, Hey, you need to speak to this person, and you know what? Better yet, let me do an email intro. Making it easier for the end user to actually now say, Hey, you know what? That was so much easier when you create that holistic program similar to what I’ve done, which doesn’t just say, Hey, here, you’re a technician. Bye. Um, you’re actually a part of their career. That, that’s one of the major big things that just really stuck out as far as a different difference maker from me to everybody else. I don’t just say, Hey, here you go. I, I create a program [00:12:00] with you and your career in mind. You can call back to either TTA or my other business, IFC, infinite Fidelis Consulting, and that is exactly what they do. They, it’s a nonprofit that does workforce development. That is exactly what they do, and they will help. And so through those partnerships, you now have access immediately to those resources. And I think some of the misnomers and steps that I’ve seen before me is, is exactly that of, hey, you know, we’re finished, right? We’ve taken care of your certs, we’ve taken care of your basic training. Bye-bye. And there there is no un until you see ’em in two years and you do their recertification. Then you don’t really get to interact with them. And so there’s two years of just what I call dead space. There’s just two, two years of I’ve never seen this person again. And that’s, if they come back to me, they might work for company A, B, or C. And that company might have an internal recertification program where now I’m not [00:13:00] able to still help them and they’re just on a maybe. Well, that’s where Technical Training Academy  Allen Hall: is doing something different. I, I think you’re right about. The, some of the training schools that exist today are very focused on getting technicians out on a site, and then that’s where it ends. The, the problem is those people tend to grow, especially if they’re from the military. They tend to go up and rank as they get out in the field a little bit because they do, are doing the right things and every, the, the management realizes I’ve got these people out there that know what they’re doing. I’m gonna promote them, I’m gonna make them the lead, I’m gonna make them the project manager, I’m gonna expand their role. But you have to also learn that skillset, right? And I think that’s where you’re thinking ahead and trying to help those people grow as they get more experience.  Nick Martocci: And I’m probably repeating myself from two years ago, but this is why I built it. I built it off of the similar frame of leadership style and progression piece that is familiar to us as veterans in the military. When you’re an E [00:14:00] one, you’re being groomed to be an E two. E two to be groomed to be an E three in, in the civilian world, there really is no grooming process to help you do that ladder climbing piece. And what I wanted to do was help bridge that gap,  Allen Hall: right?  Nick Martocci: And help put those support structures and pieces in place so that somebody could say, Hey, I want to do this. Who can help me? Well, you can come over to TTA or IFC and we’ll give you a hand. No problem.  Allen Hall: Well, that’s a part about TTA and I think if I was coming outta the military. I, and I wanted to get into renewables. I wouldn’t necessarily necessarily think Las Vegas. I would think Texas, Oklahoma, maybe Indiana, where there’s wind turbines and there’s solar and there’s batteries. But the reality is, is that the resources that Nevada is putting into veterans and into supporting you make your facility much more powerful than a lot of other places.  Nick Martocci: Well, and and I kind of remember this conversation we had last year about. [00:15:00] The negative connotation of a two mile square space in Las Vegas. Right. Right. And, and when people immediately think of Las Vegas, that two mile strip is what they immediately think of.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Nick Martocci: Without understanding. And they’re doing a little homework. And that’s why even, you know, tell people, Hey, come out for a tour, check this out and see where we are. Because we’re right across from Nellis Air Force Base right next to the speedway. One more exit from my, uh, my training center and you’re out of Las Vegas.  Allen Hall: A lot of people coming up in the industry just don’t think about outside that Midwest, that Texas spot. Mm-hmm. And they need to have their horizons open a little bit and realize that there are other places to get training that are high quality, that are gonna be caring about you as a person and the growth of you. Think about that when you’re applying to school, Joe. Absolutely. Just take whatever’s the closest. And head toward it.  Nick Martocci: We, we don’t play, and we’re going to treat this just like a career. That’s why [00:16:00] training at our school is a 12 hour training day. It’s not an eight hour day, it’s a 12 hour day.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nick Martocci: And that gets them acclimated to a 12 hour work day. Allen Hall: But that’s  Nick Martocci: what it’s gonna be. Exactly. So that way when you hit the field and some supervisor says, Hey, it’s gonna be a long day. We’re doing 10 hours today. Ah, part-time job. Got it. You know?  Allen Hall: Right. Right. That’s it. So I, I think there, uh, a lot of people have choices if they’re trying to get into renewables. Mm-hmm. And they need to be thinking about the choices they make. Technical training Academy should be high up on the list.  Nick Martocci: Absolutely  Allen Hall: high up on the list now, especially with veterans. I mean, that, that’s, that’s a no brainer that Do people get ahold of you? How do they contact you? Where should they start that process? Should they reach out to you on LinkedIn? Should they go to the website? What’s the best way?  Nick Martocci: Best way is really just to go to the website and, uh. O one of the misnomers I made was the Technical Training Academy, and there, there are so many in the United States, I did not realize that. But if you do Technical Training Academy Las Vegas, it narrows it down to four and [00:17:00] we’re the ones on top. And it makes it easier. And so if you do, uh, technical Training Academy in the Google Bar and just say, Hey, technical Training Academy, Las Vegas will pop up. Otherwise, on LinkedIn, you’ll find us under Technical Training Academy. Uh, Facebook and Instagram. Were still Tower Training Academy. I’m working on getting that changed over, uh, and then from there, yeah, the, I, I think that’s, oh no, we have a YouTube channel. Tower Training Academy. We’re also on YouTube. Yeah, YouTube. But as far as reaching us, go on our website. Hit enroll now. Uh, also on our website is our phone number, (725) 272-9495.  Allen Hall: There you go.  Nick Martocci: And so you can just ping that or you can even. Hit up my head of administration at admin1@towertrainingacademy.com. Allen Hall: Great. So everybody reach out, connect up with Nick, get started, figure out what your future looks like because Nick’s here to help and uh, it’s great to connect with you [00:18:00] again because year it’s something more exciting. Like, alright, this is, this is great. It’s expanding. You’re doing training, you got technicians out in the world, you’re going to the best. That’s fantastic. I’m always cooking. Congratulations because it’s hard. Your business is hard. Yep. And And that is amazing. It’s amazing.  Nick Martocci: I’ve always got something brewing behind the green curtain.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Nick Martocci: Always got something brewing back there.  Allen Hall: Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

US wind PPA prices climb to $79.40/MWh as the IRA sunsets. Plus GE Vernova ordered to stay at Vineyard Wind, lessons from Spain’s blackout, and data centers straining the US grid. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com and now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall here with Nikki Briggs, who is in North Carolina this week, and Yolanda Padron who is back from the exciting wedding and weekend in Mexico. Welcome back, Yolanda.  Yolanda Padron: Thank you. Excited to be here,  Allen Hall: uh, this week there’s a, there’s a lot going on and we’re gonna touch upon some of it. Uh, Rosemary is over in China this week and Matthew is actually at Wind Europe in Madrid. And so this is gonna be an American focused episode mostly, but it’s gonna have global implications. One of the key items is PPA prices in the United States and with the on sunsetting of the [00:01:00] IRA Bills, uh, tax credits, and the whole infrastructure there with the one big beautiful bill when it crushed the IRA bill. PPA Prices needed to come up well. That’s happening, right? So developers, uh, can’t live without some money to compensate for the roughly 26, 26 7 20 $7 in PPA prices that were compensated by the tax credits. But, uh, when purchase price agreements have hit the highest level since they begin tracking it at Wood Mac. The average wind PPA now stands at $79 and 40 cents per megawatt hour up 24% from just one year ago now, Yolanda, you and I were talking before we started recording today about how low some of those PPA prices were two years ago, three years ago. Some of them were almost single digits.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, yeah. Some of them were pretty low. I [00:02:00] remember 16, $19 EPA prices and then a couple years ago we were looking at those and thinking, oh no, I can’t believe we, we kept those prices and they’re so low and everything’s changed so much, and the prices grown so much, and that was two years ago and now it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s almost four times as much as, as what we had originally thought, which is. Not super great for those older projects,  Allen Hall: obviously, uh, when they, if they do repower, the extent they’re gonna have to renegotiate the PPAs. Right. The, the landscape has changed quite a bit. So the, the question really is now are they gonna be able to renegotiate new PPAs when the existing PPA hopefully ends? You can’t, you can’t run turbines for free and will they repower. Or will they just try to extend the lifetime? I think it’s a lot of operators trying to figure that out right now. And that’s in light of installations. So Whim Mac also says that US wind installations are [00:03:00] on track to nearly double in 2026, uh, building towards 48 gigawatts of new capacity through 2030, which all makes sense, right? That the, the. Uh, everybody’s trying to get all their assets in the ground so they, they qualify for the, the tax credits. So there’s a big push. So 2026 and 2027 are gonna be pretty busy years. Uh, but the, the negotiations are still going on and we’re talking to operators. Nikki and I have been talking to operators this past week or the last couple of weeks, honestly. There is all kinds of negotiations going on for turbines right now and who can get turbines? Can they get ’em in time? Can they get ’em planted fast enough? Nikki, it is causing a lot of operators to spend a great deal of time doing planning that they otherwise wouldn’t have been working on two years ago. Nikki Briggs: Definitely. I mean, it seems kind of weird to me because it’s like a weird spot. It’s like, um, you know, we want more power and we need to do all these projects, [00:04:00] but then. The permitting process is just like a brick wall or something, you know? Um, like it just takes them so much more to get through, um, and get it moving. Allen Hall: Well, I, I think if you have an existing site, you’re gonna repower it. I mean, that’s probably the easiest thing to do if, if you can pull it off. The, the question is how big of a turbine are you gonna purchase? A lot of those turbines that are gonna get repowered are probably 1.5. To two megawatt machines. They’re going to move up to five or six megawatt machines, generally speaking. So they’re reducing the amount of turbines that are gonna be on site. But the, the amount of power that’s delivered usually is about the same, maybe a little bit more. Which, which, which strives the, which drives the, the equation of, Hey, what’s everybody gonna do in the next couple of years with the data centers. Having listened to the GE Renova financial report for Q1 that just came out as we’re earlier today. GE is trying to sell gas turbines like there’s no tomorrow. However, the weird thing about it was that they were [00:05:00] very nervous about locking in firm orders that a lot of the deposits they had for like 2029 or moving into 2030. So they had a, a discussion about GE Renova building gas turbines. They could do about 20 gigawatts a year, but they had like a 10 gigawatt hole. In 20 29, 20 30 of orders because the data centers are realizing, like to get a contractor to put a hole in the ground so you can put a data center in is taking more time than they thought. It’s not Silicon Valley where you can just type some software. And Yolanda, you’re kind of in the middle of this right now, being in Austin, Texas. Is the, the drive for data centers and the drive for power, what it was six months ago, is that landscape changed? Has everybody come back to reality? Like building physical projects takes time. Yolanda Padron: I think people are starting to get, get back to reality from the little bit that, that I’ve been, that. I privy to, uh, I do think that you mentioned the GE renova and [00:06:00] just kind of all the changes and everything. And I know in the past we’ve talked about, um, the fact that, you know, a lot of blade manufacturers have changed hands for wind and a lot of things are uncertain in general. Um, I think right now with the boom of people trying to repower and doing everything as quickly as possible and as safely as possible, it’s really important that everybody should. Try to get as much documentation on everything as possible, not just to, to protect yourselves, right? I mean, if there’s some sort of, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re checking that the foundation on your turbine is perfect still, um, doing all the civil engineering studies that you need to do and making sure that, that everything’s fine, um, for, for the long term, right? If you’re not, you’re not planning on repowering again in five years. Um. But just to track everything. There’s so much movement right now and so much uncertainty that at the very least, so you know, what you’re dealing with, if and when you have an issue, [00:07:00] you know, five years down the line, like, oh, this is what happened and this is why, this is who I need to talk to, or this is how I’m going to solve this. Or, you know, it’s not a new problem. Um, because it’s just, there’s just so many, so many factors changing. All at once that it’s, it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit daunting for everyone in this space. I don’t know if you guys feel the same way.  Nikki Briggs: I have a separate question, um, which is, you know about these PPA pricing, if it’s going up, it continues to go up. Is the old adage about like green energy is the, is is the cheapest? Is that like out of the wind now? I mean, that’s not even. You can’t even apply that.  Allen Hall: No, I think renewable energy, solar and wind are the lowest cost, fastest way to get power onto the grid. The, the, the question is, uh, will state and federal governments prohibit it? Because if you’re talking about the gas turbines, [00:08:00] which is not cheap, and you’re talking maybe the earliest is 20 30, 20 32. Uh, as when you be able to, to get something scale there. What else did there that you’re gonna build? Nuclear. Nuclear GE iss. Talking about nuclear small modular reactors again today. And they got a project going up in Canada, it sounded like that’s not vast either. So if you’re talking about speed and deployment, solar’s quick, right? You can just put ’em up and you can get wind turbines up pretty fast too. But anything that’s uh, gas turbine or god forbid, we start burning oil again to make electricity. Uh, I, I just don’t see it. This has implications obviously over in Europe too, right? So Wind Europe is this week, and it’s in Madrid, of course. And the Vesta, CEO, Henrik Anderson’s, uh, told the audience over in Europe that, uh, hey, there’s a lot of choices to be made [00:09:00] here the next couple of years, and it’s more important now than ever, uh, to. Think about renewables with the problems in the ous, straight of ous, sending prices higher. Does Europe want to be connected to a petroleum future? I think Europe has been struggling with that since obviously the Ukraine war started. So the, the problems in Iran are just gonna double down on that. The EU Energy Commissioner, uh, Dan Jorgenson, uh, called it out. Earlier this week and said it’s, this is not an energy crisis, it’s a fossil fuel crisis. So if we don’t have to rely on fossil fuel so much, then the energy crisis will hopefully come down in Europe. Uh, but one of the weird things about what’s happening and where Europe is, although Vestas and the EU energy Minister Commissioner are talking about fossil fuels and moving to electricity into more renewables, when [00:10:00] Europe is talking about, uh. Unfettered media posts that are, that there’s misinformation happening and, and how they’re going to deal with misinformation. That’s not their, to me it’s not their problem. Misinformation is not slowing down projects you, you have to deal with. Uh, obviously people are gonna oppose power plants, Tesla facilities, whatever’s going on in their neighborhood. The, there’s gonna be opposition to it. You have to learn how to deal with it. And I, I’m always shocked when, when a, a large organization, be it American Clean Power or, or Wind Europe or one of the many others, or complaining about misinformation, they’re in their information business. They need to be doing more work, laying the groundwork locally to deal with some of these issues. But it does feel like. Yolanda have seen this up close, uh, where there’s been sort of local disputes about, particularly wind, uh, that you, you need a little bit of help, right? [00:11:00] You can’t rely on the, the operator, owner operator to provide all the ammunition to, to, to fight off. Uh, you know, the, the generic Facebook posts about wind turbines killing birds or whatever they’re gonna post. Is, is there a, a, a future here where a a, a Wind Europe does a, an American clean power for that matter, do a better job of communicating why you would wanna have renewable energy in your backyard?  Yolanda Padron: I think we just all need to just agree in general about what our approach is here. Right? Because we, I know there’s, we’ve talked about companies that really, really wanna do, you know, if, if you can. Produce X amount of money by creating wind power, then you’re, I’m gonna charge you X minus one. Right? Like, I’m gonna maximize my profits as much as possible. Um, and then there’s other people who are just really, really trying to, [00:12:00] to do with, deal with what they can. You know, they, you have 25-year-old projects that have been going on forever and ever. No one’s manufacturing them anymore. And people are still finding solutions to keep those alive. And then there’s, I know we talked about, I think it was Japan that was doing that really crazy work with these smaller turbines that, I mean, they already know what the issues with those turbines are. So just, just removing a lot of the factors going into something very experimental for, you know. We could all talk about the greater good, which is making sure that renewable energy is something that’s financially accessible. Right. I, I know we have a friend who’s been talking about it for a really long time and he said, you know, it shouldn’t be a thing of this is the right thing to do, should be a thing. This is the most cost effective thing to do, and I think he’s right. I think we should all just really try [00:13:00] to make sure that we work together. To make it the most cost effective way of producing energy, um, of solving all the problems that we can and not just, I mean, we can focus about competition later, right? If we really, really want to.  Allen Hall: Let’s talk about the, the power demand for a minute. So, a number of states in the US have prohibited data centers altogether. I think the number I saw last was like 30 states have prohibited. Data centers main being the most recent one that I recall, where they just prohibited ’em in the state. That has to do with electricity prices. That the concern is if I have a couple of gigawatts being devoted to any, you know, uh, ai, Facebook, Google, uh, x, ai, any of those that my electricity rates are gonna go up and, and a lot of the states are putting blockades in essentially to prevent that from happening. That changes the landscape dramatically, right? [00:14:00] Where now, uh, if they were gonna put renewable energy in, in advance of ai, those projects are gonna die, obviously. Is there, is there a, a place where data centers, ai, electricity demand being increased, is met with renewables and some logic? Will that ever come to a place where everybody will be happy? Yolanda Padron: I mean, I think it can, in that case, I guess when Europe is correct in saying, you know, we need to stop the misinformation spread, right? But it’s also, I think it’s, it’s, it’s like one of those things where it’s like, it’s such a small part of the equation to make sure that the people who don’t exactly have a lot to do with the decisions that are being made. Legally, um, are on the same page. I think it’s more of, you know, the people who [00:15:00] are making these decisions need to come to an agreement on what’s, what’s best and what’s fiscally responsible for the area.  Allen Hall: Would you wanna turn away? I, I think the thing about AI data centers and the issues that’s driving it, it’s once you have a AI data center up and running, there’s hardly anybody working there, so it doesn’t create jobs. A lot of times they don’t even have lights. Right? Why do you need lights? The computers don’t need lights. They’re just gonna sit there and run that. If it was bringing jobs, I think everybody would think differently about data centers. But because data centers don’t bring jobs, except in the power generation side, there’s not a big incentive for states to allow them. So I don’t see how this works. Right. At some point, somebody somewhere is gonna figure it out. That I’m gonna have to have a lot of excess electricity. Maybe it’s Norway and it has to be pretty cold again, Norway or Sweden, where I could put data centers and it, it may not even happen in the us. Is that what we’re, is [00:16:00] that what we’re gonna see? Nikki Briggs: I don’t know what we’re gonna see, but I’ve, I’ve heard that, um, aren’t they putting data centers in the, in the water now too underwater and like in the ocean and there’s talk about putting data centers in space and, you know, all kinds of things to, to find these different environments. But I think, um, with the. Increased demand and power that it’s gonna be all these data centers are gonna be taking. And as, um, we know AI is very exponential, right? So it’s, it’s growing exponentially in the use and, um, the adoption of it and the models are getting stronger and so it’s consuming a lot more energy, right? And so I feel like the switch back around to sustainability as, as, uh, like a core need of. Of the Earth is gonna have to, it’s gonna have to come back around for sustainability. I mean, because you can’t, you can’t just keep doing that.  Allen Hall: I think the thing is, in, in Europe, they [00:17:00] obviously are interested in having some AI data centers, and that will be the, the growth plan of course, because they want to be able to compete with the rest of the world. So Europe will be in this mode of we need to create more electricity. But they want, at the same time, decouple from the Middle East and maybe even from the United States in terms of using, uh, petroleum based products to, to power their grid. I think that’s, that’s inevitable. So they’re gonna have to make a huge change in Europe. We’re, we’re looking at massive changes in the US who knows about China right now. Uh, what they’re planning to do besides pour money into everything, all the above strategy is what China seems to be doing. Does that then. If, especially, let’s just talk about the GE and over thing. So, Yolanda, I think this touches your point, which is GE and over win business is really not healthy. They lost about 300 plus million dollars in the first quarter, EBITDA wise, uh, compared to, uh, roughly a [00:18:00] year ago. It was like a hundred million dollars they lost. So the, the continued pain at GE Renova Wind. Uh, is maybe, which I thought was gonna flatline, it seems to be getting worse. All of a sudden. They think it’s gonna be better in the second half of the year. And maybe that’s true. Hopefully it is. But if you’re, if you’re talking about putting on more data centers, more electricity demand, just ’cause of population growth and your wind companies maybe besides vestus or not doing that well. Do we get there? Does, can we, can we do this? Can we actually turn this corner, make that turn, get onto, uh, more electricity, be able to compete against the world in AI and everything else, electricity wise. Is this gonna happen or is everybody gonna. Take a five year pause while they figure it out.  Yolanda Padron: I just think that everybody’s just kind of running with their shoes untied, right? Like we’re all trying to race.  Allen Hall: They’re running with scissors and the shoes untied.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, it is like it. I mean, eventually someone’s gonna have to [00:19:00] pause or trip  Allen Hall: because you always wonder how serious some of these data center projects are because you hear the names like who? Uh, and the one that always gets me is, no, no offense to Stanford University, but. Lately, I’m hearing a lot of Stanford University graduates that are planning some massive power generation source of some sun type and just go, okay, no. Can we stop? Can we stop for a minute? No. Having a master’s degree from Stanford doesn’t know. You probably don’t know how to build a data center. Sorry. And you probably don’t know how to do distributed energy. You don’t. It’s just those are complicated and industrial things that take a lot of money and time and resources, so, no. So the, the reality of what is. Real that will be built, that’s gonna come due. I think there’s a lot of projects that were theoretical and grand and, uh, six months ago even are going to go kapoof, like pets.com. In 2001, it’s gonna be the same thing.  Nikki Briggs: You’re dating yourself, Alan.  Allen Hall: There was a time when. [00:20:00] When everybody was gonna be, be a internet billionaire, and one of ’em was pets.com, right? So pets.com was this pet store thing, and, and it was, they had a great URL of course, but as soon as, you know, there was any e you know, the, the, the, the, uh, planes hit the towers in New York City, poof, that thing was gone and they could sustain the, the economics of, um. The US at the moment, and when I think of Austin, I think all the tech bros are in Austin. Like you drive around Austin, you just see it. There’s a lot of smart people on the ground trying to do these grandiose things. Electricity generation is a hundred and twenty five, a hundred forty years old. That is an industrial process that is really hard to break into and you can’t AI your way into creating data centers. Does somebody realize that? And was the GE talk today? I’m gonna be the GE talk today, Yolanda, on the gas turbines. Obviously [00:21:00] they wanna take as many orders as they can or get place placeholder deposits in one of the GEs competitors is not even taking orders past 2030 ’cause they don’t think they’re real if they were real. I think everybody taking orders and I think they’re, they’re seeing the quality of that individual walking in the door trying to place, place that deposit and realize. They don’t know how to work EPC.  Yolanda Padron: Have you seen, I know there’s, there’s been a lot of like memes right now about how the use of electricity in AI and data centers and it’s like, you know, we’ve increased exponentially, so we will continue increasing exponentially until the end of time. Allen Hall: Till the world explodes.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like, I don’t think, I mean, to your point, like I, is it real like it. It could, it was sort of, um, it did grow a lot and it’s continuing to grow a lot. I just don’t know that it’s gonna be something where like everybody has a data center in their backyard, or everyone’s connected to a data center within a mile. You [00:22:00] know,  Allen Hall: I think you’re a hundred percent right about that. So the realism is hitting the market, right? So as PPA prices increase and the realities of construction projects hits everybody, this is gonna slow down. Quite a bit.  Yolanda Padron: I’m curious to see how long that’ll be before we overshoot it for the PPA prices. Allen Hall: Oh, you think, okay. That’s a, that’s a really good point because I, I was wondering that today, I’ve been telling people for two years now, as soon as they, uh, the tax credits sunset that PPA prices necessarily have to go up, they just have to go up the, the, the offshore wind PPA prices, were in the $150, uh, megawatt hour. Ballpark, uh, for a couple of projects off the coast in New York. I don’t know what they are in Europe at the minute. I, I should go look. I do actually do know. I should go back and look though. But the onshore prices are obviously much less, right? If you’re in the $80 per megawatt hour, although it does seem high, it is relatively [00:23:00] low compared to everything else you’re gonna be able to do. What, what are the choices you’re gonna do? What other, what other choices can you make?  Yolanda Padron: What kind of structure are you gonna. Work with is if you’re increasing, increasing, increasing, and then eventually we’re gonna hit a plateau eventually, or like an almost plateau. But I highly doubt everyone’s gonna be able to forecast exactly when that is without overshooting it. Allen Hall: Yeah. I guess the question is how much is the overshoot. Is it a hundred dollars? Is it $120? Is it $150?  Nikki Briggs: I have a question though, because are these AI data centers, are they meant to be running completely on wind power?  Allen Hall: They in theory can’t. Right?  Nikki Briggs: They need power 24 7. So  Yolanda Padron: yeah, they need to have some sort of backup thing, so maybe even backup in the grid or something if it’s not something directly hitting it. A lot of projects are like co-located, so you might have wind and battery or wind solar battery or something. All together,  Allen Hall: the XAI effort in Memphis, right? There’s, it is gas turbines, a bunch of gas turbines they’ve bought from [00:24:00] all over, but it has a pretty good best backup to provide stability to that. I think you’d have to do that, right?  Nikki Briggs: You’d have to have a a, a failover plan or something. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Having watched the internet and at different times of day, there’s nothing happening between like us time midnight and 6:00 AM. There is zero going on, and I always think does 24 7 AI data center need is so not gonna happen because when people are, if, if the data center is providing roughly national, or say it’s Europe, there’s, there’s, people are awake as a certain time of day and then they’re not. Right? So unless your data center’s gonna feed China, which it won’t, and Europe at the same time, or the US and Europe, it’s still, there’s just blocks of time where the. You just don’t need a lot of power. You just don’t need it. So the 24 7 demand, I think is not real  Nikki Briggs: well, but they have to keep them cool. And you [00:25:00] know, I mean there’s like the environment inside of the data center has to be a certain, uh. Uh, specification, I guess. Right? One question that I, that I had come up here on the side, Alan, had you heard about the, uh, CEO from Vestas talking about the need for an energy union?  Allen Hall: Yes, but this is not the first time it’s come up, uh, to, to try to, to gather everybody together. Ideally, if you’re thinking about the eu. Working together, and rarely does that happen, but if it were to happen, Vestas would be a huge winner in that. So would Siemens esa Honestly, the, the weird thing about all what’s happening in Madrid and at, when Europe at the moment is that sizzle’s back and they’re talking about doing projects in Europe and uh, I think a Donny is also talking about doing projects in Europe or providing turbines, right? So there’s. [00:26:00] Once Ming Yang was rejected in Scotland, which I thought was inevitable, I’ve always thought that the second place to go to get turbines that would compete with Avesta and Siemens is in India, and I do, because it’s an English speaking country, it does break down a lot of barriers. That’s for sure. And because obviously it was a, a, a British colony for a long time, there’s the relationship there. That would be it. It, I think something that makes, makes sense. So Vestus, who would obviously be the winner of all the offshore and maybe even some of the onshore projects in the UK may have competition. So although Vestas may be hoping for more of a energy block, which. Uh, could work, honestly. It could work and you could see a lot of wind and solar and batteries and hydro in, in Europe and obviously France with nuclear. I think [00:27:00] India has a really good shot at penetrating that market that would change the dynamics quite a bit. That would put pressure on Vestas to lower prices, no doubt. And so the, the, the dream scenario of Vestas is the only. OM standing in this huge demand market, which is all local to them. Uh, that may not actually turn out there. There could be some really rough patches here. If, uh, the so salons, a Donnies of the world, they can produce a five megawatt, six megawatt turbine. God knows if they could make a a 15 megawatt offshore turbine, that would put a tremendous amount of pressure on Vestus. Tremendous, and that would be harder to stop. I think from a a UK standpoint, very interesting times. Vestus is well suited to, to gain market share and is rapidly in the United States and a number of other countries, Australia being another, and Europe, but woo. Huh. The dream scenario never works out like you think it [00:28:00] will. It never does. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or a new. Wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. So there’s been more information come out about the, this Iberian blackout that happened about a year ago. And as the, the details are, uh, published and everybody has a chance to review them, uh, one, one person to check out is, um. Howard Pinrose at Motor Dock and his chaos in Caffeine podcast, which happens on the weekends because he provides some good summaries about some of the latest news from the Iberian Peninsula and the reports that are being published. [00:29:00] The Iberian blackout and the role of renewables is very interesting. The, the problem that they had was, uh. Instability. So it, the grid was just generally unstable and they had a transformer fail and that just cascaded where, uh, they were disconnected from the rest of Europe. So the Liberian peninsula was just automatically disconnected and that happened relatively quickly. One of the things that could have supported the grid, and I think you’re gonna see changes happening, and Howard Pinrose was just in Washington DC with American clean power pushing for this, which is. As Yolanda knows, solar and wind have sort of two moats. They can follow the grid and produce power and just kind of follow along. Or better yet, they can form the grid and support the grid and be a resource when things get wobbly on the grid. And Spain learn that lesson really [00:30:00] well about a year ago, and I think we’re gonna find that all those solar panels that disconnected and because you’re in a following mode, protect mode. If they had had ’em in a, a more, uh, command role into managing the grid, that maybe the Iberian peninsula may not have blacked out. Maybe parts of it had because they lost a transformer, but there may be a role for renewables in terms of grid stability. Doesn’t that seem odd? Because the story and the mis, maybe the misinformation that’s happening around the world is, well, if the wind turbine isn’t turning, it can’t help monitor the grid. It actually can, same thing for solar. Those inverters that sit on the grid are actually thinking and working and reacting. So they can actually provide a lot more, uh, stability to the grid than maybe be some other resources at, at a lot less cost. Is there a scenario where we start changing the rules about wind and solar where we, instead of them playing dumb, that they become smart [00:31:00] and provide more stability? Yolanda Padron: Well, it happens a lot I think in Texas, right? We have, like you, you dispatch wind when you need it and you dispatch solar when you need it. And there’s a whole, I mean, the whole market. Behind the scenes that it’s for people a lot smarter than I am. But, uh, but yeah, I mean, you, you get, like, you’ll see sometimes wind turbines that are pitched slightly so they won’t generate electricity when it’s not needed, or they’re just free flowing when, I mean, it’s, it’s not necessarily to produce a lot of electricity or, you know, sometimes you’ll say, oh, you know what, I need this much. Energy from you at this moment, and so Sure. Switch. I mean, it’s, it’s literally a click of a computer. You turn it on, make sure the, that it’s dispatching energy, and then once you need it to be cut off, it’s cut off. Especially if it’s a co-located site, it’s a lot easier to make sure that you are [00:32:00] actually giving all the energy that you need to give in any given moment. Allen Hall: Because a grid reacts very quickly when things go wrong in the grid. It happens in seconds, and the only thing they can respond in seconds. Is renewables, inverter based resources. That’s the only thing you can respond. You can’t spool up a synchronous condenser to stabilize your grid in a couple of seconds. You may need a couple of hours typically to get that going. Isn’t this where we’re going? It because of the digital age and everything is on off so fast. If I had a data center that, you know, it collapses pulling a gigawatt, man, you need to be react almost instantaneously to that. The only thing that can do it today if they chose to do it is wind, solar, and battery. That’s it. In the digital age,  Yolanda Padron: I think it’s great. There was this one time, uh, a few years ago where, um, uh, a, a buddy who’s, who was a, a traitor for, you know, the, the, uh, energy markets in the [00:33:00] states. Um, he, he saw what was happening and he knew that he could. You know, he was controlling like wind, solar, and, and battery. And it was a co-located solar and battery site. And so he let them dispatch the solar for a bit and then he held off on the battery. And then the moment that he dispatched it was like he. Within like five minutes, it was $3,000. Something crazy like that. ’cause it was just like the mo, like he was just, everybody was amazed. Just the moment that he was like, amazing. Just like, well this is, this is why you do what, what you do. You know? Um, but yeah. Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s a really, it’s a really interesting, interesting, for anybody that wants to read up on it. Like the, the market for that is really, really interesting.  Nikki Briggs: It does sound really interesting and like, I’ve been thinking a little bit about, um. The, the role of wind and, and you know, in Colorado we have a lot of high wind and then we have this [00:34:00] wildfire danger as well because of the drought. And so what happens when it gets really, really windy is they turn off the power ’cause they don’t wanna start a fire, a wildfire. So, um, so you know, here you want the wind so that you can generate the power, but then you can’t give it. So how do you store that and how do you, you know, like how do you manage that, you know? It’s a, it’s a tricky situation.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. That’s where they’re co-locating. I think a lot of sites, there’s a lot of, I know there’s a wind farm in Arizona that’s really huge and they have a, a whole, they have a certain perimeter around it where they just really make sure that there’s nothing that can spread there. Like it’s, it’s just. Kind of barren land, so in case there is a wildfire or anything, ’cause it’s in a very dry area. Um, nothing will really happen to that in theory, you know, that has all the systems for the battery.  Nikki Briggs: What if the, what if the electric transmission lines are what, you know, causes the fire [00:35:00] because of the wind? The wind is causing those to break or to fall down. The poles fall down and then they cause a spark. And then they cause a fire. That’s what happened in Colorado a long time ago, a couple years ago.  Allen Hall: Same thing in California.  Nikki Briggs: So in order to protect from that, there’s like, it’s super windy. So they turn off the power. Allen Hall: Does it make it right? Right. Well this, this comes back to the infrastructure of the United States and how old that it is, and if you pay attention as you drive across the US you’ll realize that some of the. Towers and some of the infrastructure that you see on the side of the road. Dang, you’re a hundred years old and it doesn’t get replaced. It was never meant to be replaced. Or maybe they thought we were gonna be living on Mars in a hundred years, but basically it’s the same. Technology. It’s a wire on a kind of suspended up there in the air, and the wind moves around and it’ll burn and it wears out. It just wears out, right? Eventually you’ll just wear through that stuff, and we’re seeing that [00:36:00] across the United States. You’re seeing it in Europe, you see it in Spain, in other places where the infrastructure has just has a lot of age on it until we decide to do something new and refurbish it, like we refurbish the roads all the time. Uh, we’re gonna have trouble. We just are gonna have trouble in the states.  Yolanda Padron: Alan, as an electrical engineer, I do have a question. So would the forecasted generation needed by all these data centers and stuff, like with our current system, would we be okay with that? Or what kind of changes would we need to make just as a country in general?  Allen Hall: I think the problem with. A large data center as you’re seeing some of them being built on the east coast right now is one, trying to keep them up and running. Two, the infrastructure that are feeding and it’s old, right? So the transformers and all that. The things that don’t move, that are just planted on a concrete pad [00:37:00] that’s seem like they, they would never age, age, had fail. Eventually. So when you put a big demand on existing infrastructure that’s kind of powering old light bulbs and um, motors and things that are old and that have very well-known patterns, and you start putting these, uh, basically big digital power sinks that go up and down in in power usage. The grid can’t take that. It just won’t be able to take it at scale. It’ll take it for a while and we’ll figure out a way because electrical engineers tend to be pretty sy um, at how to make miracles out of, uh, uh, uh, of questionable things. That’s how we, how we do that, that’s why we get paid so much. But the, the, the problem is, is that at some point it’s gonna break, right? And, and the, the electrical grid in the US and the people that support that. Internally, I think we’re getting a little bit worried about it [00:38:00] and trying to figure out what we can do to keep the grid up and running. It’s a huge problem, huge problem, because when the grid was built back in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, there were a lot less people, and somehow we managed to get to about 350 million people. All with the mobile phones and big screen TVs, and now electric vehicles and laptops, and blahdy, blahdy, blah. How this thing is still running is a miracle. It really is it. It obviously is Yolanda Padron: delamination and bottom line. Failures and blades are  Allen Hall: difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep into the label materials. To find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss [00:39:00] C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. So G Renova was ordered by the courts just recently to stay at Vineyard Wind. Vineyard. Wind had. Filed a complaint that, um, GE was gonna leave the site, uh, off the coast of Massachusetts at the end of April. That obviously caused some concern with vineyard winds, so they went to court, sort of bypass the arbitration process. According GE went straight to court to get an injunction to prevent GE from moving on. Well, they have that injunction now, and GE has to stay on at least for about the next 60 days. If I read this right. Then there’s gonna be more court proceedings. GE is trying to get it back into arbitration where they can do some negotiation, but it’s all about big, big dollars.[00:40:00] The one thing that came out with Scott Straza, uh, Q1 discussion, which was uh, a phone call today, had to do with the completion of GE Ver Nova’s offshore wind projects, and when they could be complete. That includes sort of the doer bank projects in the uk, which I think are gonna wrap up sometime in 2027 to try to get those finished and vineyard wind, which they said was gonna be finished at the end of April. So from a GE Renova standpoint, I think they’re considering vineyard wind to be done at the end of the month and that’s gonna be their position. It was very odd. To hear the CEO of GE Renova talk about something that’s in litigation. ’cause usually that doesn’t happen. But if the company position is, Hey, we’re leaving at the end of April, we’ll see you a vineyard wind. That’s a problem. And let me explain a little bit of the details of this. GE Renova is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not that far away from vineyard wind, which [00:41:00] is also based in Massachusetts. So you have this corporate entity, which just. Opened an office in Cambridge. It’s really swanky place, not very far from where MIT and Harvard and all the, the elite universities are just outside of Boston. And then you have this vineyard wind project, which is important to the state of Massachusetts where they need that power to happen and they need it to be sustained and needed to run properly inside the state of Massachusetts. There must be huge discussions about this in the state government. Massive discussions about how these two entities have to work together for the next 20 years, and they are really at each other’s throats. That’s not the way you wanna start an offshore project. And Yolanda, you’ve been around some of these offshore projects. Is it always this tense between the OEM and the operator? Is, is this where all these projects end in some sort of disagreement and [00:42:00] separation?  Yolanda Padron: No, I think, I mean, from my experience. There’s usually someone at some point, and it’s usually, I think, I mean the. The owner, but you’ll stop and say, okay, I need to work with this person. I need to work with this company for the next X amount of years. I need to make sure that they give me the proper documentation once I need it. I need to make sure that they’re doing things in good faith. You know, I mean, if I can’t, it’s not like the technicians have like a camera strapped onto them to, so you can monitor every single blade repair, right? Like you need to make sure that they’re doing things right. Um, and not just patching things up because. Because they’re mad at you. Uh, so, so, no, I think it’s, it’s a little bit crazy to me that no one’s yielding as much. Allen Hall: I think GEs position is we’re gonna give vineyard all the manuals and the equipment would be up and running. You can find somebody to run it. You, you, you think that’s possible On a brand new turbine that [00:43:00] is only one other places on the planet that’s being run, which is over in the uk. Are you gonna be able to find people if GE walks off? Yolanda Padron: I mean, even if you can find people, once GE walks off, it’s like you, you need to be able to train your technicians. You know, like all of these, all of these projects are you, you need to have them in constant supervision. You need to make sure that everything’s working smoothly and you can’t just afford, I don’t know if we’re being really optimistic, like a month of no one touching those turbines. That’s crazy. Like anybody in the wind world is even onshore. Could you imagine if we just walked off a site and just let the wind turbines just be for a month? Like that’s, I mean, I don’t know, I, I’m not super, super well versed in exactly what they’re getting, but are they getting any sort of, at least like technical support? Allen Hall: I don’t think so. No. Yeah,  Yolanda Padron: no rock system, no. Nothing.  Allen Hall: If it all works out like GE wants it to, [00:44:00] no. You get the manuals. You get a, a, a nice, uh. Card in the mail saying Thank you for your business. And that’s it. It, that’s, I think that’s where it’s going.  Nikki Briggs: Doesn’t seem like a good way to, like, doesn’t seem like they’re stand standing behind their product or what they sold. Um, I mean, and it seems like there would be some downstream ramifications for other, other companies that want to buy ge.  Allen Hall: They don’t wanna be in that business. I, I think that’s one of the discussion points that never comes up when the quarterly calls is. Is GE gonna remain in the wind business? Because I think the answer to it is maybe how could a lot, I mean, you said on the financial side of some of these, uh, wind farms and paid attention to the details. If you were losing a billion dollars a year, how long would you be in that business?  Yolanda Padron: I mean, not very long. I think you’d have to change things to make it work. Um, yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I think, [00:45:00] I think it’s one of those things where they’re trying to. Find exactly where they fit into this business, if they still fit in at all. Uh, I really hope they don’t fully back out because of everyone that’s in operations that has GE products out there that’s really gonna need that support. Uh, I think especially for a vineyard’s sake, at the very least that they’ve are doing, that vineyard is doing a better job than a lot of the operators I know at making sure that. Everything you need within operations has been asked for since development and construction. Um, I’m not super, super optimistic about that. Just because like everyone has so many things to do that you don’t like if you’re in development, you don’t always have time to think about. Oh yeah, I really hope they give me the repair manuals in case there’s a lightning strike on the blade at R 20. You know, like it’s just, um, so it’s just. It’s, [00:46:00] it’s just gonna, it’s gonna be a very interesting case study. Whatever they end up doing, I think it’s gonna be something that will be worth following a bit more closely. We’ve seen, there’s been projects where, you know, day one, the OEM just backs off, but that was at least. They knew that, you know, the, the owner knew it two years in advance, and so they tried to get as many people as possible. There were to, to get on those turbines. There were of course mishaps and stuff, um, and it was more of a financial than an engineering decision. Um, but when the decision was made, people knew about it and people had time to act. I mean, people having a week to find, I. Someone to, to, to take care of every single aspect of their site is a little bit insane. Especially, I mean, [00:47:00]with the history of veneer, right? Like, come on, they had a, they had a blade break,  Allen Hall: right? There’s gotta be a lot of questions about the durability. There has to be Right. Even if, even if GEs figured it out, and I think they probably have, and then they’ve put a, a lot of money and time into resolving the issue. You still have to wonder. Is it right? And if you’re vineyard, I think that’s one of the questions is, is it right and could we operate it by ourselves without needing a lot of handholding from ge? Or paying GE more money than we already agreed to, which is probably what’s likely to happen, right? That GE iss gonna ask for more money if they can break the contract legally and renegotiate, that would be a smart move. I think they will try to do it. It’s unfortunate and it causes a lot of grief for a lot of people, but I think GE probably needs to renegotiate and probably Vineyard wants to renegotiate it too ’cause they both feel disgruntled at this point. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, and I think it’s really interesting ’cause we focus a lot on vineyard and just the [00:48:00] way that the OEM and the owner operated with each other just because it gets, it’s so close to such an important part of the country that gets so much PR all the time. It’s just, it kind of sets the mood for a lot of things that go on. So it’s, I mean, it’s not that we’re just picking a lot of vineyards, it’s just really, it’s a really important site just in general from where it is, right? It’s not like it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s a very important place that gets a lot of attention  Allen Hall: that writes up another episode or the Uptime Wind Energy Podcasts. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode, if you found any value in today’s conversation, I mean any value, please leave us a review. And those reviews, we actually. Take and use to help create the next episode. So send us your notes, send us your comments. Send us what you would like us to discuss. Because the wind energy marketplace and [00:49:00] development are changing so rapidly, it sometimes it’s, it’s faster than we can keep up with. So please send us your ideas. Uh, and anytime you have a chance, please like and subscribe because it really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. So for Nikki and Yolanda, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers WindEurope Madrid, the ten-point Call to Action, Vestas CEO Andersen’s mission impossible warning, Siemens Gamesa’s narrowing losses, and CNC Onsite’s deals in Asia. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday, everyone. This past week… some big things happened in Madrid. Fifteen thousand wind energy people from every corner of the world walked into the same room. They came to talk. They came to listen. They came to ask for help. And they came to warn. The WindEurope Annual Event opened on Tuesday, the twenty-first of April, with six hundred twenty exhibitors and four hundred speakers across three days. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gave the opening address. Fourteen national ministers stood on the stages, alongside European Commission Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera and European Commissioner for Energy Dan Jorgensen. And the message coming out of Madrid… was a single piece of paper. They called it the Madrid Call to Action. Ten points. Ten things European governments need to do… right now. Fast-track permitting, and treat wind as overriding public interest. Award at least eighty percent of wind auction bids… no more artificial scarcity. Repower aging wind farms and triple their output with fewer turbines. Multiply EU grid funding by five. Zero VAT on heat pumps and electric vehicles. And permanently cut taxes on electricity… because homegrown power should be the cheapest power. The framing was simple. From crisis… to confidence… in a decade. But while the speeches were polite… the panels were not. On Thursday afternoon, Vestas chief executive Henrik Andersen took the microphone, and he did not mince words. Andersen called it mission impossible. He told politicians to stop submitting wish lists for new auctions. He pointed at Denmark’s recent failed offshore auction… an auction that no developer would even bid on. And he pointed at countries trying to build a three-dimensional CSRD into the next tender. Then he delivered the line that quieted the room. If we don’t get this under control… we’ll be sitting here in five years… begging to keep the lights on. Now… while the warnings were echoing through Madrid… something quieter was happening on a balance sheet in Munich. Siemens Energy released preliminary second-quarter results on Wednesday, and then raised their full-year outlook. Group orders for the quarter came in at seventeen point seven billion euros… up almost thirty percent year on year. Net income for the full year is now expected to be around four billion euros, with Grid Technologies orders alone up forty-one percent. And the wind unit… Siemens Gamesa… their losses narrowed to forty-four million euros. A year ago, that number was two hundred forty-nine million. Still in the red. Still operating at a margin of negative one point seven percent. But the trend is clear. The Spanish wind unit is closing in on break-even. After years of crisis… after billions of euros in impairments… Siemens Gamesa is healing. Now back to Madrid. Because last Thursday, WindEurope published a different kind of paper. Not about money. Not about megawatts. About sabotage. Across Europe’s seas, energy infrastructure has become a target. Cables, substations, offshore platforms… spread across thousands of square kilometers of open ocean… difficult to protect. WindEurope Chief Executive Tinne Van Der Straeten said it plainly. The physical security of Europe’s wind turbines must be treated as an integral part of energy security… not as an afterthought. The policy paper calls for civilian protection, not military. Risk-based and proportionate, with clear cost allocation between government and industry. Wind farms now generate twenty percent of Europe’s electricity, and the North Sea countries have pledged three hundred gigawatts of offshore wind by twenty fifty. That is a lot of critical infrastructure… sitting in the open ocean. But here is where Madrid got uncomfortable. Vestas’ senior vice president stood on a panel Wednesday afternoon and offered a reality check. The EU has set a goal of twenty-two gigawatts of new wind installation every year through twenty thirty. What is the reality? The EU installed fifteen gigawatts in twenty twenty-five. Sixteen the year before. There is a gap… between political will, goals, and promises… and the reality we see in the market. The Madrid Call to Action wants to close that gap. The paper exists. The politicians have been told. Now… we wait. And while the speeches were happening in Madrid… a small Danish company was quietly opening doors in Asia. CNC Onsite… a wind sector subsupplier… signed two deals this month. One with Dutch firm WE4CE for Thai customer Cewa Plus, a deal that opens twelve Asian countries. The technology? A specialized machine that drills out the steel bushings holding a wind turbine blade to the hub, so they can be replaced without scrapping the blade. Repair on site. Save the blade. Extend its life. The second deal… a CNC milling machine sold into Japan for offshore monopile and foundation work. CEO Soren Kellenberger says the combined opportunity could deliver up to fifty million Danish kroner in revenue… roughly six point seven million euros. Not big numbers. Not yet. But while everyone in Madrid was talking about politicians… CNC Onsite was signing contracts in Bangkok and Tokyo. The number of wind turbines reaching the age where their blades need replacing… Kellenberger calls it… huge. So let us step back. In Madrid, fifteen thousand people gathered. A ten-point plan was published. A CEO warned of mission impossible. A trade association said the offshore turbines need physical protection from sabotage. In Munich, a balance sheet showed the wind business is healing… slowly, quietly, quarter by quarter. And in Bangkok, a Danish technician was teaching a Thai partner how to drill out a steel bushing. Six stories. One week. The wind industry showed up… asked for what it needed… and put the numbers on the table. The financial proof is starting to come. The political follow-through… we wait. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 27th of April… 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Nicholas Gaudern from PowerCurve joins to discuss SilentEdge serrations with up to 5 dB noise reduction, Dragon Scale VGs for AEP recovery, and their approach to products that actually perform in the field. Contact PowerCurve on LinkedIn for more information. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Nicholas, welcome back to the show.  Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Always a pleasure.  Allen Hall: Well, there’s a lot of new products coming outta PowerCurve. And PowerCurve is the aerodynamic leader in add-ons and making your turbines perform at higher efficiency with less loss. Uh, so basically taking that standard OEM blade and making it work the way it was intended to work. Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. We  Allen Hall: like to  Nicholas Gaudern: think so. Yeah.  Allen Hall: And there’s a, there’s a lot of new technology that you’ve been working on in the lab that you haven’t been able to explore to the, introduce to the world, so to speak. Yeah. And we’ve seen some of it from the inside of, you know, you’re working behind the scenes or working really hard to get this done, but now that technology has been released to the world, and we’re gonna introduce it today, some new trailing edge. [00:01:00] Components. Yeah. That really, really reduce the noise. But they, they look a little bit odd. Yes. There’s a lot of ADON dams going on with  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: With these. So what, what do you call these new trailing edge parts?  Nicholas Gaudern: So, so what you have in your hand here? This is the Silence edge, uh, serration. So this is our new trailing Edge Serration products. Now, most people, when they think of training restorations, they are thinking of triangles.  Allen Hall: Exactly.  Nicholas Gaudern: These Dino tails. Dino Tails, that’s the Siemens, Siemens name for them. Pretty, pretty standard. You see ’em on a lot of turbines now. Sure. And they work, you know, they do do a job. They do a job. They reduce noise. But like with lots of things in, in aerodynamics, there’s lots of different ways that you can solve a problem and some are better than others. So we’ve worked for a long, long time in the wind tunnel, uh, in the CFD simulations, and we’ve come up with this pretty unique shape. We think,  Allen Hall: well, the, the, the shape is unique and if you, if you look at it, there’s actually different heights to the, the triangle, so to speak. To mix the air from the pressure and the [00:02:00] suction side to reduce the, the level of noise coming off the blade  Nicholas Gaudern: e Exactly. So we have, uh, we have an asymmetry to the part. We have these different tooth lengths. We have, uh, a lot of changes in thickness going on across the part. So it may be a little bit difficult to see on the camera, but these are quite sculpted 3D components. They’re not, they’re not flat stock white triangles. No, no. There’s a lot of thickness detail going on here. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the edges. We’ve paid a lot of attention to these gaps between the teeth as well. So all of this is about trying to figure out what is the best way to reduce noise. And something that not a lot of people will, will admit, but it’s true, is that as an industry we don’t really understand the fundamentals of how serrations work.  Allen Hall: It’s a complicated  Nicholas Gaudern: problem. It’s a really complicated thing. Problem, yeah. Yes. So trying to simulate it in CFD is an absolute nightmare. The, the mesh sizes required, the physics models required are really, really difficult. So what we found is that you’re probably better off spending [00:03:00] most of your time and money in the wind tunnel. Yes. So, so we go to DTU, they have this wonderful, uh, air acoustic wind tunnel, the pool of core tunnel. It’s one the best tunnels in the industry for doing this kind of work. It  Allen Hall: is  Nicholas Gaudern: because you can measure acoustics and aerodynamics at the same time. So this allows us to do a lot of very cost effective iteration for this kind of design work. So we know what’s important. You know, we’ve, we’ve studied all the different parameters of serrations lengths, aspect ratios, angles, thicknesses, all this kind of stuff. And it’s about bringing them together into a, into a coherent product. So this is, this is a result of a lot of design of experiments, a lot of iteration, and combining wind tunnel and CFD to kind of get the best of both of those tools. So,  Allen Hall: so what’s the. Noise reduction compared to those standard triangular trailing aerations. Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: So there’s lots of different ways of, of thinking about noise reduction, but I think probably the most useful is the O-A-S-P-L. So this is the overall sound pressure level. Right. Is kind of what [00:04:00]typically you’ll be measuring in an IEC test.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s measured in decibels, but a way to decibels because it’s important that we’re waiting to what the human ear can actually hear. Right. Perceive. Exactly. So that’s the numbers we report. For the field test we’ve recently completed with Silent Edge, we’re seeing up to five decibels of O-A-S-P-L noise reduction.  Allen Hall: Okay. So what’s that mean in terms of what I hear on the ground?  Nicholas Gaudern: So that is an absolutely huge reduction. It’s multiple times of reduction because you know, decibels on a log scale,  Allen Hall: right? Nicholas Gaudern: So five DB is is enormous. It’s  Allen Hall: a lot. Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really interesting is that if you have a turbine that’s running in a noise mode, just one decibel reduction. Of power, sound, sound, power level might be three or 4% P loss. I mean, that, that’s, that’s huge. Think about that loss. So if you need to reduce noise by five decibels to get within a regulation, imagine how much a EP you have to throw away by basically turning down the [00:05:00] turbine to do that. Allen Hall: That’s right.  Nicholas Gaudern: So that’s really what the, the business case for these kind of products is. It means you can escape noise modes because as soon as you use a noise mode. You are throwing away energy.  Allen Hall: You’re throwing well you’re throwing away profits.  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.  Allen Hall: So you’re just losing money to reduce the noise. Now you can operate at peak.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.  Allen Hall: Power output without the creating the noise where you have that risk. Right. So, and particularly in a lot of countries now, there are noise regulations. Yes. And they are very well monitored.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.  Allen Hall: We’re seeing it more and more where, uh, government agencies are coming out and checking. Yes. ’cause they have a complaint and so you get a complaint. Oh, that’s fine. Or someone can complain. Yeah. You know, you need to be making your numbers.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And, and the industry needs to be good neighbors, you know? It  Allen Hall: certainly does.  Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, we have to make sure that people are, you know, approving and comfortable with having wind turbines in their backyard. Sure. And noise is a big part of that.  Allen Hall: It is.  Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah. Ap sure. That’s really important. Being a good [00:06:00] neighbor also important.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: Meeting the regulations. Obviously you have to meet the regulations. So this product, um, has been through a really long development cycle, and we’re now putting the final touches to the, to the tooling. So this is available now.  Allen Hall: Oh, wow.  Nicholas Gaudern: Okay. Great. Um, and we’re hoping that in the next uh, few months we’ll be getting even more turbines equipped out in the field with, with the technology.  Allen Hall: So, oh, sure. There’s a, you think about the number of turbines that are in service, hundreds of thousands total worldwide. A lot of them have no noise reduction at all.  Nicholas Gaudern: No. No.  Allen Hall: And they have a lot of complaints from the neighbors.  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.  Allen Hall: Trying to expand wind into new areas, uh, is hard because the, the experience of the previous Yes. Neighbor  Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.  Allen Hall: Grows into future neighbors. So fixing the turbines you have out in sight today helps you get the next site. I know we don’t always think about that, but that’s exactly how it works. Yeah, of course. Uh, we need to be conscientious of the people of the turbines we have in service right now. So that we can continue to grow wind [00:07:00] globally and more regulations on noise are gonna come unless we start taking care of the problem ourselves. Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And another really important thing with Serrations is that you have to design them so that they don’t impact the loads on the rest of the turbine.  Allen Hall: Right. And people forget about that.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.  Allen Hall: Can you just, can’t just throw up any device up there. And think, well, my blade’s gonna be happy with it. It may not be happy with that device. Nicholas Gaudern: You have to really carefully understand what the existing blade aerodynamic signature is.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Nicholas Gaudern: How is that blade performing? What is the lift distribution across the span? Yeah.  Allen Hall: Right. Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: So what we do, and we, we’ve talked about it before we go and laser scan blades. We build CAD models, we build CFD models so we can actually understand how much lift a blade can take and what’s the benefit or the penalty of doing so. So these serrations are designed by default to be load neutral. They won’t increase lift. They won’t reduce lift. That’s what  Allen Hall: it should  Nicholas Gaudern: be. That’s where you should start,  Allen Hall: right?  Nicholas Gaudern: And maybe there’s some scope to do something else [00:08:00] on certain turbines, but you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t guess. You, you need to calculate, you need to simulate, you need to think very carefully about that. So that’s what we do with these, uh, with these serrations, we go through this very careful aerodynamic design process to make sure that they reduce noise and that’s it. They don’t increase loads, they don’t reduce AP by killing lift. And that’s, that’s an important aspect.  Allen Hall: Well, that’s the goal.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes,  Allen Hall: exactly. I don’t necessarily want to increase power. I don’t wanna put more load in my blade, but people do that. I’ve seen that happen and man, they regret it.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, regret it. There’s, there’s some pretty wild claims out there as well about observations can and can’t do. And uh, like with lots of things, it’s important to just do the simulations, speak to some experts and, um. Yeah, maybe take the, the less exciting path, you know, sometimes,  Allen Hall: well, no. Yeah. Well, less exciting path where I don’t have a broken blade.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.  Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s a lot less exciting. It’s, it’s definitely more profitable. Now, the Dragon Scale Vortex generator has been [00:09:00] around about a year or so.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yep, yep.  Allen Hall: And the thing about these devices, and they’re so unique, interesting to think about because you typically think of a vortex generator as this being this little bit of a fence. Where you are tripping the air and making it fall back down onto the blade.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.  Allen Hall: A really, it works.  Nicholas Gaudern: It works.  Allen Hall: But it’s it’s  Nicholas Gaudern: been around a long time.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It, it does, it does do this thing. And they, they were, they came outta the aviation business. We use ’em on airplanes to keep air flow over the control surfaces so we can continue to fly even in close to stall conditions. All that makes sense. And airplanes are not a wind turbine.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.  Allen Hall: So there’s different things happening there. So although they work great on on aircraft, they’re not necessarily the most efficient thing for a wind turbine where you’re trying to generate power and revenue from the rotation of the blades. Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.  Allen Hall: So this is a completely different way of thinking about getting the airflow back onto the blade where it produces [00:10:00] revenue.  Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really nice is to actually see this together with silent edge, because historically, and maybe not even historically. Serrations VGs, they’re triangles. They work, they do a job. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it in a different way. In a better way.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s the same principles from applying with Silence Edge and Dragon Scale. We want to work the flow in the most efficient way possible.  Allen Hall: Right. You’re trying to get to an  outcome.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.  Allen Hall: Efficiently.  Nicholas Gaudern: We want to, we want to target very specific things on the blade, and that’s where you can see there’s a few different styles of Dragon Scale that we have on the table here. We have some that are two fins. We have some that are three fins. We have different sizes, and this is because they’re tailored to different parts of the blade. So these three Fin Dragon scales, their focus is ultimate lift. We are creating a really powerful vortex through this combination of three air foils, if you imagine, um, the inside of a Turbo fan. You have these cascading air force. [00:11:00] You look at the leading edge slacks on an aircraft. You look at the front wing of a Formula one car. It’s that kind of concept.  Allen Hall: It’s like that,  Nicholas Gaudern: and it’s these air force that are cooperating with each other.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: To end up with a more beneficial result. ‘ Allen Hall: cause an air force by itself does a function, but when you combine airflows together in the right way  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. Allen Hall: You can really control airflow efficiently, less losses. More of what you want out the backside. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s the backside you’re trying to work on, on a VG or, or dragon scales. You’re trying to create this flow which gets the airflow back onto the blade to create power. We,  Nicholas Gaudern: we want as much attached flow as possible and down exactly down in the roots of a blade. We have to have really thick aerofoils, you know, blades about round. They’re basically cylinders.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: And that, that’s essential, right? We have to have the blade take a lot of load into the root aerodynamically. They’re horrible.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: So this is where these, uh, these powerful Dragon Scale VGs come into play because what they do is they’re [00:12:00] reenergizing the flow over the aerofoils, and they’re ensuring that that flow remains attached for much, much longer than if those bgs weren’t there. So down in the root, you’ll get significant boosts to the lift that those sections can generate. And what’s more lift? It goes to more torque, it goes to more power, goes to more a EP. So these dragon scale VGs in the root are there to boost, lift, and boost EP out on the tip of the blade. Things are actually a little bit different because it’s way different. You shouldn’t really have stall there to begin with if your blade’s been designed well.  Allen Hall: But if you have leading edge erosion exactly. Or some other things that are happening, you can have real aerodynamic problems.  Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah, as soon as you have erosion, uh, maybe your stall margin is not as big as you thought it was. You’re starting to get some significant losses of lift Yes out towards the tip of the blade. So that’s where these, uh, TwoFin uh, variants come in. So it’s still a dragon scale vg, it’s still the same concept of these cascading error foils. Yeah, but these are [00:13:00] designed for basically ultimate lift to drag ratio. Mm-hmm. So we don’t really want more maximum lift outta the tip. We kind of have enough, but what we do want is to keep stable attached flow and we want to do it for the less, uh, least drag penalty possible. So basically we want to get rid of as much parasitic drag as we can. These two fin dragon scales, we are seeing 25 plus percent improvements in lift to drag ratio. Compared to a standard triangle vg. I mean that’s huge.  Allen Hall: That that is really  Nicholas Gaudern: huge.  Allen Hall: That’s huge, right? Because people have seen these, uh, triangular VGs in a lot of places. And one thing I’m noticing more recently is that those VGs, because they’re so draggy, they tend to flutter and they tend to break in just off. Nicholas Gaudern: Interesting.  Allen Hall: So you’re having this failure mode because this thing is just blocking the air, getting the air to trip.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: It’s not efficient. It does have its downsides ’cause it is. D definitely drag. Just face it, it’s it, is it a draggy [00:14:00] 1940s technology? That’s what it is. Where with the dragon scales, now we’re doing things a lot more efficiently and thinking about how do I get the airflow that the blade designer originally wanted? Nicholas Gaudern: Yes,  Allen Hall: because the blade designer, they’re really intelligent people. They’re, they’re sitting designing blades. But the reality is what you design is on an ideal airflow, and what you have out in service are totally different things. As, as it turns out, the shape of the airflow is not what you think it is because it comes out of the tool and there’s a lot of touching with by humans that are grinding on the leading edges and doing the things that have to be done to manufacture it. So you don’t really have an ideal blade when it comes out of the  Nicholas Gaudern: No. You  Allen Hall: never do factory. No, you never do.  Nicholas Gaudern: And it’s not polished either.  Allen Hall: It’s not polished. Right. So  Nicholas Gaudern: when you go to the wind tunnel, you have a perfect profile. Yes. And it’s polished. And it works basically. It  Allen Hall: works great. It  Nicholas Gaudern: works great.  Allen Hall: The theoretical and the actual match. Yeah. In reality they do. I think a lot of operators are not [00:15:00] connected with that reality of, Hey, that Blade should be producing this amount of revenue for me, and it’s not. And you hear that discussion all the time, particularly in the us. It should be producing this amount of power. I’m doing all the calculations. We are not producing that power. Why? The blade length’s saying, but the power’s not coming out of it. Well take a look at your leading edge, take a look at your yard full of shape and realize you’re going to have to do something like dragon scales to get that E energy. Exactly. Revenue back.  Nicholas Gaudern: You need to do a full aerodynamic health check. Basically you do. And see what are all the possibilities to improve my blade performance. And some of it is down to the fundamental shape of the blade,  Allen Hall: right?  Nicholas Gaudern: But some of it is down to blade condition. Yes. Blade Blade manufacturing quality.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, what kind of paint did they put on it? What day of the week was it made? And all these things can be compensated for by VGs and you’ll get more revenue out at the end.  Allen Hall: You say? ’cause what happens? The, the, the scenario which is hard to visualize unless [00:16:00] you’re an A and emesis, is that there comes on the suction side, and it should be, in a ideal sense, rolling all the way to the back edge of the blade and coming off. What happens is though, is that. When you get leading edge erosion is that the air flow actually separates. Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: It  Allen Hall: doesn’t  Nicholas Gaudern: always make it, yeah.  Allen Hall: Doesn’t make it to the back edge. Yeah. And so you can see that, especially if, if there’s dirt in the air, you can look on dirty blades, you can see where that separation line is, and a lot of operators have sky specs, images or Zeit view images, and then go back and look at the blades. It takes two minutes to go. I have  Nicholas Gaudern: particularly down in the root, you’ll see it.  Allen Hall: Oh, in the root all the time. You, you  Nicholas Gaudern: see it really clearly that that separation line  Allen Hall: all the time, you really see that separation line. I’m seeing it more and more up towards the tip. Interesting. That’s where the lightning protection, yeah. Systems sit.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: I see a lot of airflow that is not front to back on the suc. Well, you  Nicholas Gaudern: have a lot of three dimensional flow out there.  Allen Hall: You do towards the tip you do. And you realize how much power you’re losing there. And I think operators are just throwing away money.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.  Allen Hall: So you could [00:17:00] put dragon skills on it very efficiently, very quickly. Get that revenue back into your system and it’s gonna stay. So even if leading edge erosion happens, the dragon scales are gonna compensate for it. It’s gonna get the airflow back where it should be.  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. And the nice thing about this is, you know, we are building on well over a decade of upgrading turbines with aerodynamic components. Oh yes. So this technology stands on the foundations of all of that work. In terms of the materials, the work instructions. Um, the fatigue calculate, you know, everything  Allen Hall: Yes.  Nicholas Gaudern: Is built on thousands of installations that we’ve done. Yes. So, although it’s a new technology aerodynamically, it’s not really new in lots of sensors. Allen Hall: Well, I look at it this way. If you turn on Formula One today and look at what the new generation of cars running around as you look at the, that front. Yes. Uh. Fin. Yeah. What do I call it? Air foil shape in the front. It’s super complicated.  Nicholas Gaudern: The sculpting of the [00:18:00] surfaces is really impressive,  Allen Hall: right? There’s a lot of thought going into those surfaces versus you turn on a Formula One race or go on YouTube and look at a Formula One race from the 1980s. Yeah, it’s basically a piece.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: To provide down downforce. That’s it. The aerodynamics wasn’t really there, so we come a long way and a lot of that technology that happens in Formula One that happens in aviation eventually rolls down into. Yeah. Wind.  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly  Allen Hall: right. So we, we, although we are not designing Formula One style blaze today, we’re taking that same knowledge and information and we’re applying that back in. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. We’re  Allen Hall: secondarily we,  Nicholas Gaudern: which is a right thing to do. We’re taking, taking inspiration from all these different aerodynamic fields and, you know, picking the best  Allen Hall: Yes.  Nicholas Gaudern: From what’s available and just allowing ourselves to be a little bit more creative.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Nicholas Gaudern: And thinking outside the box a bit. There’s so many ways to do this as we’ve been saying. And the import. And the  Allen Hall: data’s there.  Nicholas Gaudern: The data’s there. Exactly.  Allen Hall: The data’s there because you’ve been at the DTU Yep. Uh, wind Tunnel, which also has the acoustic piece to it. Yeah. So you have measured data from a reliable source. [00:19:00] You have field data, and you know, you put all these together, you’re gonna get that improvement back. You’re gonna get your invest back, you’ll be more profitable.  Nicholas Gaudern: So Dragon Scale, focus on the AP. And that a EP will, uh, vary depending on the turbine.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Nicholas Gaudern: But we’ll assess the turbine and, and decide the best configuration, and then say silent edge. That’s the focus on the noise reduction. And we’re seeing up to five decibels OASP on the field. It’s, which  Allen Hall: is crazy.  Nicholas Gaudern: It’s even more That’s really good that we were hoping for, you know?  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Nicholas Gaudern: So we, we know this is gonna be a, a great product.  Allen Hall: It looks very interesting.  Nicholas Gaudern: It does.  Allen Hall: It does it. It looks complicated and you think air airflow is complicated. It’s a compressible fluid. It’s not easy to, to just assume it’s gonna do what you think it is. Yeah. You need to get into the tunnel. You need to replicate, you need to do all that work, which is expensive in time consuming. That’s why you go to someone like Power. Curver knows what they’re doing in the wind tunnel, knows how to measure those things and know when they’re getting nonsense. Out of their computer. I  Nicholas Gaudern: mean, you, you’ll pay thousands and thousands of [00:20:00] Euros dollars a day to run a wind tunnel.  Allen Hall: You will.  Nicholas Gaudern: You’ve gotta Absolutely. You’ve gotta turn up with your plan in hand, that’s for sure.  Allen Hall: Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there’s a lot of assumptions because it, aerodynamics is hard. You know, you watch these blade spin around, you don’t realize how complicated these devices are. They are complicated. Those air force shapes we are running today have been through a lot of history, a lot of history to get to where we are now. Now we’re just gonna take him into the next generation. This, we’re bringing ’em into the two thousands. In sort of a  Nicholas Gaudern: sense, what I’m hoping to see is, you know, with the OEMs, some OEMs do it already, but it’s important to think about these components when you’re designing new blades as well, you should because then that will allow you a much bigger design space to work in. And  Allen Hall: a lot less customer complaints.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.  Allen Hall: Where’s my power?  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, these products, particularly the VGs, are really important tools for PowerCurve robustness. And some OEMs have known this for a long, long time.  Allen Hall: Yep.  Nicholas Gaudern: And you’ll see VGs on most of their blades. Mm-hmm. Others not so much. And that’s a design choice. It’s a design philosophy. Um, and I think it may not [00:21:00] be the right one, you know?  Allen Hall: Well, I think the operators are asking to get the most out of their turbines. Yeah. Why shouldn’t they? They should be asking for that.  Nicholas Gaudern: I think for a, for a long time, and it’s not just in wind devices, like these have been considered, you know, band-aids fixes when you’ve, you’ve messed something up. But I feel that’s a really negative way to think about products like this. They’re doing something that the kind of raw air fall shape on its own cannot achieve. Sure. Oh no. Right. You know, you might be able to mold some interesting stuff. Uh, as part of the blade, it’s very difficult to, to recreate the kind of aerodynamic effects that these products, uh, have. Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: So they shouldn’t be considered bandaids or fixes. No. They should be considered opportunities. And ways that you can maximize performance and unlock areas of the design space that previously weren’t accessible to.  Allen Hall: Sure. Every possible component that deals with fluid air is moving this way.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.  Allen Hall: Jet engines, you look at jet engine, how much more is going into those jet engines today in terms of this kind of [00:22:00] technology? Yeah. All the race colors, doesn’t matter what class, where it is, is all looking at this anything to do with aircraft, it’s all over this.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah,  Allen Hall: exactly. Or, or doing this today. It’s just wind that’s behind  Nicholas Gaudern: wind. Wind is  Allen Hall: significantly  Nicholas Gaudern: behind. No,  Allen Hall: it’s not magic. It’s proven technology. It’s  Nicholas Gaudern: just good engineering. Allen Hall: Well, it’s good engineering and if you call PowerCurve, they’re gonna help you under to to, to understand what you have today and what you could have tomorrow.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.  Allen Hall: And how this, these devices will improve your revenue stream.  Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, we will look at your blades, we’ll give you some good advice and maybe that advice will be that. You know, a certain product isn’t right for your blade. Right. That’s fine.  Allen Hall: That’s an answer.  Nicholas Gaudern: That’s an answer.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it is.  Nicholas Gaudern: But let’s, let’s look at the blade. Let’s see what’s possible, and let’s just have a, have a proper conversation about it over some real data, some real  Allen Hall: facts. Right. I think that’s the key, and a lot of operators are afraid to talk about aerodynamics is it’s, it’s a difficult area to, to start the conversation on, right? Yeah. But I think at the end of the day, when I work with PowerCurve, and I’ve worked with you guys for a [00:23:00] number of years, the answers I get back are intelligent and they’re not. Super complicated. This is what you’re gonna see. This is the improvement. And then we can, this is how we’re going to show you can get that improvement. It’s not magic,  Nicholas Gaudern: no  Allen Hall: power crews backing up with data, which I think is the key, right? Because you’re the, you do hear a lot of noise in this industry about magical products that’ll do all these things. Particularly aerodynamic ones. Yes. PowerCurves, the ones really bringing the data.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And we have, we have the track record now. We have like we do 17, 1800 turbines. Should be over 2000 very soon with our products on. Yeah. So we have a lot, we have a lot of data to draw on to know that we’re doing a good thing.  Allen Hall: Well, and speaking of that, because one of the questions that always pops up is, well, we have put these new VGs or trailing edges on, are they gonna stay on? How durable are they?  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And that’s a, that’s a really important question to ask was it doesn’t matter how fancy aerodynamic product is, if it falls off the blade.  Allen Hall: Right.  Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, we’ve spent a lot of, uh, time and effort looking at how we should be fixing these products on. [00:24:00] So we use a, uh, a wet adhesive. We specify a plexus adhesive to put our products in place. Really good adhesive. It’s a great adhesive and it means that they are not going anywhere. Basically. It’s a very, uh, forgiving adhesive. Uh, and it’s a very high spec. So we, we don’t use, uh, sided tape. We might have some of our products for some initial tack to help, you know, get the clear, the clear outta the line exactly. But in terms of the bond itself, that is with a, a proper structural adhesive. So one thing that we are really proud of is that we haven’t got any, uh, reported failures of our panels over all the installations we’ve made. And that’s a combination of materials, but also geometry, work, instructions, adhesive. It’s, it’s the full package. So it’s something that, um, yes, say we’re very proud of. And I think it’s, it’s a big part of what we do at PowerCurve, making sure the product is the right shape. Sure. But also making sure it stays on the blade.  Allen Hall: Well, you see it [00:25:00] from OEMs who have all kinds of aerodynamic treatments on there, and they’ll double set a tape to the blade, and then those parts are on the ground. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And double-sided tape. You can get some really nice spec tape. Sure.  Allen Hall: You,  Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. But it’s not  a  Allen Hall: 20 year device.  Nicholas Gaudern: No. And the installation tolerance required on surface prep is really, really high. So it’s possible. It’s just harder. I think it’s riskier,  Allen Hall: it’s risky.  Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, I think for us, the adhesive is, is the way to go. And, and it’s been proven out by the, by the track record.  Allen Hall: And some of the things we’ve seen over in Australia is when trailing ulcerations have come off, it’s been a safety concern. So now you got  Nicholas Gaudern: absolutely  Allen Hall: government officials involved in safety because parts are coming up. Turbine.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: You  Nicholas Gaudern: can’t have these components flying, flying through the air. That’s, that’s not safe.  Allen Hall: That’s because PowerCurve has done the homework.  Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.  Allen Hall: And has the track record. That’s why you wanna choose PowerCurve. So how do people get a hold of PowerCurve? How do they get a hold of you, Nicholas, to start the process?  Nicholas Gaudern: So, um, you’re welcome to reach out to us in lots of different ways. We’re on LinkedIn. Uh, we have our website, [00:26:00] PowerCurve, dk, um, so yeah, LinkedIn websites. There’ll probably some links on this podcast as well to get in touch. But, um, yeah, whatever way works best for you.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s gonna be a busy season. So if you’re interested in doing anything with PowerCurve this year, you need to get on the website, get ahold of Nicholas. And get started, uh, because now’s the time to maximize your revenue.  Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks a lot and great to talk to you,  Allen Hall: Nicholas. Thanks so much for being back on the podcast.

Vineyard Wind sues GE Renewables to block a walkout over $300M in withheld payments and defective blades. Plus Ørsted posts a $262M quarterly loss and shakes up its board. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Uptime316 Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall, and I’m here with Matthew Stead and Rosemary Barnes who are in Australia. Before we get too far into this episode, I would like to mention that the UK US relationship has been very tense recently, as you have seen in the, in the news articles and on television. But there was one good news piece that just happened, which is the band Oasis just got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So that is trying to mend those relationships, bring the UK and US back together. In at least a musical sense. So I know Rosemary was watching that closely as the votes were counted. But, [00:01:00] uh, everybody in the UK is super thrilled about it as they should be. And all us Oasis fans can’t wait for the induction ceremony. In fact, we’re planning to go to Cleveland. They’ll go watch it if we can. We shall see now onto more important information this week. Vineyard, wind and GE are not getting along. And if you have been paying attention for the last two years, you would’ve noticed that there’s been a couple of tense moments. Well, uh, that wind project is a little bit up in the air because vineyard wind has filed suit against GE renewables to stop the turbine maker from walking away after GE sent a termination notice. Over a $300 million ish, uh, disagreement in unpaid bills. At the center of this dispute are defective blades, of course, that, uh, broke off in 2024 and caused a number of problems, uh, for GE and vineyard Wind is particularly a delay in the [00:02:00] project and ge having to fix pull blades off of turbines that were already installed and I think they ended up sending those back to France. Reading the lawsuit, it seems like GE did not repair those blades. They replaced those blades because, uh, they may not have been able to repair them or maybe is the amount of time it’s gonna take to repair them. You can repair almost anything made out of. Composite. Uh, but this is a big problem because, uh, if GE does walk away and they’re talking about walking away from this project at the end of April, vineyard, wind believes that the turbines are not ready to be operated, and they don’t have a way to operate those turbines. They don’t have the knowledge or the people because the people belong to GE that need to make some of these turbines operate. Even there’s even some question about if all the turbines are operating at the required [00:03:00]handover requirements. This is unique because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wind turbine manufacturer leave before a wind site is finished. It must have happened before, but. It does put both sides in quite a pinch. Right.  Rosemary Barnes: Can I just jump, jump back to, to something that you said, um, that you can repair almost anything when it comes to composites? I would say that that doesn’t necessarily apply if your design was insufficient in the first place. And I mean the design for manufacturing in this case, I think that the, like computer model design worked fine, but obviously it was not as easy to manufacture or as possible to manufacture. With the correct quality as what they expected. It can’t have been so simple to just, just repair. That’s, um, that’s what I want to say. Like it, it’s obvious to me that if it was possible to repair, that would’ve been much easier than what they’ve ended up with, which I think is pretty foreseeable. Or most [00:04:00] engineers would probably have foreseen that if you, you know, put blades out there that, um, don’t meet your. Standard, um, quality control acceptance criteria that, you know, the consequence of that would be that it would be more likely to fail. So yeah, I think you can repair nearly anything on a standard blade that is possible to make correctly. But if you’ve got big quality problems, then it’s not, it’s, it’s not easy and it’s possibly not possible to, you know, just get, um, just get onto that in repair.  Matthew Stead: I, I think you’re both right. Because it all comes down to economics. So I think Alan’s statement, you know, things can be repaired. It just comes back to economics, doesn’t it?  Rosemary Barnes: U usually, yes. And like for your average, like if you’ve got a wind farm and you’ve got a blade with a big, a big repair, or you know, like a big defect right on the main laminate, that’s gonna require, you know, like a huge repair, taking the blade down and keeping it down for, you know, like three months while you rebuild like 20 meters [00:05:00] of laminate. Yes, that would be technically possible, but you wouldn’t because it would be so expensive. So us usually, like in 99% of cases, that would be it. That it’s not actually impossible to repair. It’s just very hard. But, you know, in these really huge blades and, you know, um, bearing in mind that I don’t, I don’t know the specific quality problems that they face, but, you know, just from my knowledge of composites, you can say what the challenging areas would be, but you know, a really big blade is gonna have a really thick laminate and, um, composites don’t like to have really thick laminates. When they cure, it’s usually an, an exothermic reaction, puts off heat, you know, like the temperature is changing and um, it works fine for thin laminates, but when it’s really thick you can get hot spots and cold spots and maybe it’s hard to get the resin to go all the way through evenly. But you know, imagine if you’ve got a really thick laminate and there’s a chunk of it that just didn’t get any resin in it. How are you gonna repair that? Like, I wouldn’t say impossible. I’m sure if the fate of the human race depended on it, then you would, you would make it work. But it’s [00:06:00] certainly very close to impossible.  Matthew Stead: Economically, it does not make sense.  Rosemary Barnes: You would probably have to make a few inventions. Along the way to be able to make it work as well. I think,  Allen Hall: I think I should read part of, and I don’t like reading these lawsuits, but this is informative in a sense that it provides some relative background as to what Vineyard Wind is thinking in some of the contract details that are involved here. So in June 4th, 2021, this is directly from the lawsuit, uh, vineyard Wind entered into A TSA with GE renewables in which. GE Renewables agreed to design, manufacture supply, install commission, and test the wind turbine generators for the vineyard wind project at a contract price of more than $1.3 billion. There you go. On the same day as an integral part of the commercial agreement, the parties entered into an SMA, uh, by which GE renewables agreed to maintain and service that wind turbine [00:07:00]generators for the first five years. Of operations of the project and guarantee that all wind turbine generators will operate at a 97% of production availability. Uh, this guarantee is central, is a central component of the commercial viability of the Vineyard Wind Project. So I would say so, right. Uh, at present, all of the wind turbine generators on the project have been installed. However, the wind turbine generators are not yet fully operational and are. Able to reduce power at only levels well below those intended under the contracts fundamental to the project’s commitment to Massachusetts to achieve full commercial operation. The project requires repair, commissioning, and maintenance of GE renewables, 62 proprietary wind turbine generators, and their component parts work that only GE renewables knows how to perform. So it sounds like Vineyard Wind has a five-year contract that GE ISS gonna operate these [00:08:00] turbines, and if they leave in a couple of weeks, vineyard wind really doesn’t have a backup plan. They may have. Were planning on a plan five years down the road where they could operate ’em, but to operate those turbines immediately when they haven’t, at least as. Indicated here may not be fully commissioned to providing the right amount of availability. That’s a huge problem for Vineyard. Huge.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting to me that they’ve decided to withhold some money that I think everyone agrees that they owe that money to ge. But then there’s a dispute because Vineyard when says that GE owes them money for some other stuff That sounds like GE disputes. Um, it’s like if you have a problem. With your landlord, they always tell you, don’t, don’t withhold rent, because then they can, you know, that’s, that’s their out of the contract. Right? So it seems weird, like it’s a relatively small amount compared to what vineyard wind is risking. So. It seems to me like, are they, is this a mistake from them? Are they giving ge an out from this contract that’s gonna be [00:09:00] really hard for them to meet? It might be that GE knows what it would cost to entirely fix the wind farm and have it producing the way that it should. But, you know, let’s say in a worst case scenario, that means remaking every single blade in the um, in the wind farm. At the, at the French factory, you know, like that could be your, your worst case scenario. GE knows that that’s gonna cost more than what they’re ever gonna pay over the five years of, um, you know, the, uh, of missing the availability guarantee. So then it is worth, for them, the cost effective thing to do is to just walk away and they’re kind of, the amount that they’ll have to pay is limited. If I’m thinking fairness, it’s so unfair that vineyard wind would be stuck with this wind farm that they can’t really get to do anything. But if I think about how I see these disputes work out in the smaller versions of them that I’ve seen, it seems like vineyard wind actually probably is the one more likely to come out with a bad outcome from the way that they’re [00:10:00] choosing to play this right. Uh, because they, they risk not being able to operate at all. And they have potentially, like, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t, I don’t know about, you know, how likely it is that the 300 million, that their withholding will be enough for GE to walk away with without having to pay anything for, um, you know, not operating, uh, correctly over the next five years. But, um, you know, it just seems like it’s not so much money compared to the billions that are at stake. To risk that they will be left unable to operate the wind farm at all. You know, it’s just, uh, I don’t know. It seems risky.  Allen Hall: Let’s start with the kickoff of what happened and what vineyard wind is alleging happened from these, their perspective on it. It does provide some insight into all the things we talked about on the podcast for the last two years. We, we saw bits and pieces of it. According to vineyard wind, uh, GE Renewable [00:11:00] claims that it is owed quote amounts due unquote for milestone payments is, is contrary in in language to the TSA, so the turbine supply agreement put simply vineyard wind owes nothing to GE renewables because the TSA turbine supply agreement allows vineyard wind to withhold amounts. The project engineer determines that GE Renewable owes vineyard wind from milestone payments otherwise due under the contract. So what they’re saying is GE owes is a bunch of money. Yes, we do owe GE renewables money, but it’s in Vineyard Wind’s favor. So why would they send GE money? Um, those set off amounts are substantial because GE renewables caused catastrophic injury to vineyard wind by installing 68 defective blades on 24. Wind turbine generators resulting in two years of delay and over a billion dollars of damages. In July, 2024, one of the GE renewable offshore blades collapsed and fell into the waters off Nantucket resuscitating a massive environmental cleanup and requiring a six month [00:12:00] construction hiatus during which GE Renewable performed a root cause analysis, concluding that 68 of the 72 GE renewable. Blades installed at the project, nearly all manufactured by GE Renewable in Gaspay Canada, and they say nearly all, not all, nearly all were also defected because they were inadequately bonded together, the original blades were so poorly made that they were beyond repair. Indeed, the federal government required GE renewable to remove all the blades and to replace all gas bay blades with others manufactured at a different facility in Sherbrook, France. So that’s really the kickoff to all of this disagreement was the quality issues from Gas Bay. Uh, vineyard Wind goes on to say that GE Renewables and, and their CEO, Scott Straza, basically admitted to, uh, a, a serious, um. Overlook or quality issue? Quality escape, something of the [00:13:00] sort, uh, in some of the statements, which I, I remember him talking about  Rosemary Barnes: allegedly, in your opinion. Allen Hall: Well, and Scott Streek did say it. In fact, here’s, here’s what Scott Streek did say. Streek, uh, acknowledged that the blade failure and said, quote, we have identified a material deviation or a manufacturing deviation. In one of our factories that through the inspection or quality assurance process we should have identified. Because of that, we’re going to use our existing data and reinspect all of the blades that we have made for offshore wind and for context in this factory in Gus Bay, Canada, where the material deviation existed. That’s a quote. What happens now,  Rosemary Barnes: obviously I’ve never worked on anything that’s, this is the biggest example of, um, a, you know, a blade quality problem, a serial issue probably that’s ever happened in the wind industry. I’ve never worked on something this big, but I have worked on probably half a dozen small, small versions that are quite similar. Um. To this, but just on a, you know, a much, much smaller scale. And I will say that it never [00:14:00] feels fair what the owner of the wind farm, like, what the outcome is, never feels fair to the owner of the wind farm. Like when you’ve got a serial defect in, um, in play it like, and everyone suffers. It costs, it’s gonna cost the, um, you know, the manufacturer a lot of money. But I think that proportionally it is. Affects the owners more in nearly every case. It’s just there are some contractual things that you don’t end up with outcomes that feel, feel fair to anybody that, um, you know, would take a casual look at it. So I don’t think that an outcome that feels fair is probably likely for, for vineyard wind. Um, and I guess it all just comes down to whether or not GE agree that they owe that 800 million or whatever the figure is. Um, or if a court finds that they owe it. Because surely the contract doesn’t say that Vineyard wins engineer at any time can just, or project manager can at any time decide [00:15:00] that, um, GE owes the money and so they don’t have to pay. That obviously wouldn’t be a very, um, nice contract for GE to sign. So there’s gotta be some more nuance to it other than. That our project manager says, you owe us money so we’re not paying. And then, you know, you have to continue. Like, I, it’s probably impossible for us to, without, um, you know, having access to all of, all of the documents and the legal degree to understand it. Probably, probably hard for us to Yeah. Come up with a, a reasonable conclusion.  Allen Hall: It does make you think, usually the progression is dispute. Whatever contractually is obligated in the beginning happens. And so if there’s someone who decides what pot of money goes where, that, that’s usually the first step. Second step is usually arbitration in the us. I’d be surprised if they haven’t gone through at least an attempt at arbitration. And then once arbitration breaks down, then you go into the courts, which is clearly where they’re at now you’re, you’re at the highest level that you can be in terms of legal proceedings to try to sort this matter out. And I’m sure both sides. Do not want to be in front of a [00:16:00] courtroom if they can avoid it. So there’s a much more to come about this. I, I think the other operators, uh, GEs this is, is this GEs only? Yeah. This is GEs only wind farm offshore in the us So this is it. But I would imagine that the other, uh, operators in offshore wind in the US or. Being very careful word through contracts and how this is proceeding.  Rosemary Barnes: That’s something else I think about this case is that it’s going to be like the GE are the ones who have more at stake in terms of reputational harm. I would’ve thought then. Um, so. Yeah, that’s obviously a consideration that they’ve, they’ve gotta have, it isn’t, regardless of where the facts are, it’s not a good look. Right. Um, to be seen, to be walking away from a wind farm. And it probably would make other people considering big expensive GE wind farms to be like, oh, you know, are we actually gonna get across the line with this? Or is there a risk that they just, you know, throw a tantrum towards the end and threaten to walk away and we have to renegotiate [00:17:00] everything. So, um, I guess that there’s a, yeah, there’s always just the perception. Is as important in a lot of ways to what the actual facts are.  Matthew Stead: The thing I find is, um, I mean this is largely a legal thing, isn’t it? You know, we, we’ve agreed that it’s, with the lawyers, it’s a largely a legal thing. The, the sort of topic that I’m interested in is, um, like the example of you buy a car, you know, you buy a Toyota, um, you expect to be able to maintain it. You expect to be able to run it and get a serviced by a Toyota, you don’t expect in the first year to take your Toyota to Ford and get them to fix it in the first year. The bigger issue is the turbine supplier agreement does not actually allow the turbine to be operated without the OEM, so no one knows. No one knows how to run it. So for me, it’s a massive industry challenge, access of data, access of how to run a turbine. If the OEM is no longer there, so I think hopefully [00:18:00] this can have rama bigger ramifications for the industry that operators and owners can actually run the assets they own.  Rosemary Barnes: Well, there are companies that will come in and pull out your control system of your, you know, your turbine. If it, you know, if you, um, if you don’t wanna work with them anymore or if the company went bankrupt, then there are companies that will rip it out and put a new one in. It’s not, not saying that that’s like an easy, cost effective thing to do and probably not gonna get the same, um, performance as, as you originally did. But that’s what happens if you are, um, you know, your turbine manufacturer goes bankrupt and they just don’t exist to support anymore. Sometimes people have to resort to literally pulling out the whole control system and starting again. Not easy. When it’s something as big and new as this one obviously  Matthew Stead: isn’t the better answer that when you buy something, you actually buy the information to actually run it. Rosemary Barnes: I don’t fully agree [00:19:00] though, because. It’s like, um, o often what you say, oh, you know, like this would be good. Like the one common thing is people say, oh, you know, like it’s planned obsolescence. People, engineers plan design things to fail so that you’ll need to replace them. And I think that that does, that does happen again in like consumer, consumer products. Like, um, yeah, like your, your battery isn’t really designed to last for 10 years in your, your phone the same way that it is in an electric car. Um, more than 10 years in the case of an electric car. Um. But it’s not. It’s not what happens in industrial scale equipment. You are mostly worried about getting the price point right. And if you want something to last longer, if you want something that anybody can come in and fix it easily, it costs more to engineer like that and usually like a a lot more. So it’s not just people like evil engineers or evil. Um. Evil management at these, at these companies.  Allen Hall: I already get to evil engineers. Rosemary Barnes: No, people think it is. People think it’s evil. Engineers like purposely designing bad products to [00:20:00] um, make money, which I actually do think that they do with consumer products. Some of the time. Um, but when it comes to like industrial equipment, I, I don’t think that that’s the main, the main thing that planned obsolescence is not, is not a major factor here. It’s about trying to get the price point competitive to make sales. And if you want to get better engineering, you, you will, you will pay for it.  Matthew Stead: I got a call with someone today that, which is on this topic. So, you know, we, we are a sensor company and, um, we pro we provide results, okay? So if we actually provided the raw data that we measure, it actually allows people, other people to reverse engineer our products. So we don’t generally provide the raw data, so we provide the end outcome. Because it means that people can’t copy what we do. It means we can actually charge a lower price. So actually there’s a lot of logic to, you know, having, you know, [00:21:00] all these ways of engineering a product to, you know, give a better outcome to the end customer. Allen Hall: I know Rosie doesn’t like Elon Musk, but this one of the things that Elon Musk did with Tesla at least, I don’t know about the other companies that he runs, but with Tesla, they went off and. Made patents, right? So they applied for a bunch of patents and received them and then just made them open use. And the reason they did that was so somebody couldn’t jump the patent line, create a patent about some car related electric thing, and prohibit Tesla from doing. And so Tesla has always had the need to create patents that cost them, I’m sure, a, a pretty penny, just so they can avoid. Patent conflicts and lawsuits going forward. And it’s sort of the same thing, right? That the evil engineer bit, that’s the evil engineer bit I, that I don’t like is that when you get these crazy patent things happening out there that are just there to collect money and not do any of the work,  Rosemary Barnes: and some of the patents are. Absolutely crazy. Like when you do a patent search and it’s like you’re [00:22:00] reading the language and like it sounds like they’ve just patented the concept of a wheel, you know? And then you’ve gotta try and figure out like what’s actually going on. Yeah. In  Matthew Stead: our world, someone has a patent around the Doppler shift. Allen Hall: How can you have a patent on Doppler shift? That’s crazy.  Matthew Stead: It’s fundamental physical. You know, there’s a shift in frequency of a sound, um,  Allen Hall: based on speed  Matthew Stead: and yes, sound comes from a blade and there’s a doppler shift.  Allen Hall: That’s real. I, I, I guess, uh, see, that’s, that’s, that’s the craziness of that. See, you should have thought about. The idiots that were gonna do that and then write a patent about Doppler shift.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s really annoying because it’s like, you know that it’s not gonna be, I mean, a lot of them you are like 99% sure it’s not gonna be possible for them to defend that if it gets challenged. But it’s like, to what extent do we trust that, you know? Um, so you still usually end up steering around it anyway, but it, it really gets in the way of elegant engineering solutions. All these. Bizaro patents that are out there like clogging up [00:23:00] the design landscape.  Allen Hall: That happened recently. Right? Rosa? You had and I were talking about a particular patent. I thought had it existed and it did at one point exist and I. Rosie said, I don’t, I don’t see it anymore. So I did some search on it. Yeah, it got pulled off. Uh, the list of valid patents. It was a lightning related thing.  Rosemary Barnes: And you were complaining that it was so obvious that they should never have been able to patent it, but yeah, and somebody obviously said, said something at some. I don’t think patents are not the best way to protect an idea anyway. Right? Like nobody, if you, if you’ve got a new technology idea and you’re relying on a patent to protect other people from copying it, it’s not the best idea. I do work with a lot of small inventors who are like, oh, I’ve got a patent application, and they think it means something, that it doesn’t. They think, oh, you know, patent was approved. That means it works. It means it’s a good idea. It doesn’t mean any of those things for like small, outside of big companies. I, I think it’s super rare that you would get more. You would get a positive return [00:24:00] on. On filing and maintaining a patent in all the countries that, um, are relevant  Allen Hall: as wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. Sted posted a net loss of 1.7 billion Danish groner, roughly $262 million for the third quarter, as the cost of battling us anti win policies continues to mount the CEO. Rasmus abo, uh, says the company is about. One year into a turnaround plan, uh, that’s set to [00:25:00] run through beginning of 2028, and that the medicine is starting to work. Uh, one major strategic change. Ted will enter partnerships on new projects far earlier, and so it will never again, uh, be forced into damaging late stage divestments The company maintained its full year EBITDA and, uh, guidance of, of, of. 24 to 27 billion Danish kroner. That’s a good bit of money. And the sale of a 50% stake in the horn, C3 to Apollo Global Management for a billion dollars is already under. Well, at least in progress, but there’s a lot more behind the scenes here. Sted had an basically an investor meeting and a shareholder meeting, and, uh, they have three new board members. They let go of, if I remember correctly, three board members that were [00:26:00] employees that they just, uh, had reductions in forces that happen to affect board members, which is very odd. Very, very odd in my. Humble opinion, having watched number of boards for a long time, usually don’t remove board members in that fashion, but there does seem to be a, a, a more emphasis on the board to help, uh, the CEO of stead get through some of these tumultuous times and maybe a little bit of concern about the, the, the way the board was constructed to get or sit back into profitability sooner rather than later. This is a big deal up in Denmark. Of course, stead is the power company for Denmark. This has implications worldwide, though, uh, what stead does everybody else follows. And the one thing that, uh, that was sort of in dispute before the shareholder meeting was EOR at one point, was. At least contemplating a board seat. And then right [00:27:00] before the meeting they backed off and said, no, it’s fine. We don’t want a board seat. Maybe they had some sense of what the changes were gonna be made to the board, so they felt better about it. But orsa is not out of the rough seas at the moment. There’s a couple more years of, of growing pains and learning some lessons that they wish they didn’t have to learn. I guess that’s the way I would look at it. What implications does this have on the greater offshore wind community? Is stead taking basically a step back and, and trying to focus. Herding offshore wind, or is it just other, another companies are gonna step into that, that space that Sted may have previously occupied? Matthew Stead: I think what you’re talking about, um, Alan, is, is all logical. I mean, you know, you can’t have everything. So, um, as in you can’t, you know, getting late to a project and expect it to go well, um, spreading risk is a good thing, you know, so the whole, you know, [00:28:00] doing it fast. Doing it cheap and doing it well. Um, you, you, you can’t have all of those things at once. So actually what they’re talking about, I think is entirely logical. Um, so yeah, I think if they can lead the way that way and, and you know, I’ve come from, um, some other industries like construction and they, they spread the risk across multiple. Organizations that know what they’re doing. So the idea of joint ventures where you get the best of both worlds makes complete sense to me. Allen Hall: Do they start making different decisions on projects based upon their financial stake at the moment? A And more importantly, when they start looking for offshore wind projects, are they likely to hook up with Vestas? Because I, I think that’s where this is all going.  Matthew Stead: Pick a horse.  Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re gonna pick a horse. I, I mean, that’s the best, best way to think about it. They’re gonna pick a horse and gonna stick with them. Instead of having, uh, a lot of options and playing one against the other, I could see alignment happening, uh, versus being the [00:29:00] one offshore, of course. And or instead being a big player. There is, is that the combo that’s gonna push the industry forward? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think it’s more similar to what Chinese manufacturers are doing, a lot more vertical integration. You can, um, yeah, save, save a lot of money by doing that. It is. Uh, you know, not always ideal from other points of view. And it might be nice to have a, you know, a thriving technology ecosystem of, you know, different manufacturers competing with each other and, you know, making better products. So, um, yeah, I don’t know, uh, have sit on the fence on this one for what’s good. I do feel really bad for osted though, like in terms of the, the. Shocks that they’ve had over the last couple of years. I, I don’t think most people would’ve foreseen that it would be so risky to try and expand into the US like everybody. A few years ago, everybody thought that that was the next big profitable frontier in offshore wind. And [00:30:00] I don’t think that many people would’ve foreseen things going the way that they did.  Allen Hall: Is it the result of large industrial projects take time and that in that timeframe, five, 10 years, that the world changes so much? You can’t. Accurately predict what the outcome will be and or it just got caught up in it.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that’s actually one of the themes you guys have read, um, how big things get Done Right by Ben. Um, that’s one of the things that he mentions that the quicker that you can do the execution phase of your project, like spend plenty of time planning it, but when you’re actually committed, work super fast because the longer that you’re working, the more your chance of a, a black swan. Um, a Black Swan event be, you know, a government that turns out to, you know, want to, you know, tear up contracts and you know, do all these other unprecedented stuff. You know, if you’ve got projects that take 10 or more years to build, then there’s just like a lot more risk of something like that happening. And I think that, um, you know, like in some ways that’s just one of the inherent weaknesses of [00:31:00] wind energy in general, but offshore wind especially is that it does actually take a long time to get through all of the things that you need to do to. Um, to complete a project. And so it’s just, yeah, a lot more chance for, you know, the government will change two or three times probably in, um, you know, during a project. How many wars can start, how many, you know, pandemics. Can there be you? Like, the longer that you’re going, you might think none of those things could be predicted and that can’t, but you can predict that those sorts of big things happen. And the longer that you, um, are exposed and the more of them that you’re probably gonna face. And I think that, yeah, like something like a solar farm is much quicker to roll out. Um, battery projects are much quicker to roll out. So it’s just like that, those are benefits of those technologies compared to wind. You just have to kind of accept that that’s one of the weaknesses of this, this industry that we’re in. Allen Hall: Is it a benefit to have solar because it can deploy very quickly, or, or is it just [00:32:00] smarter to have. More wind turbines of smaller megawatt outputs because you can manufacture ’em at scale quicker, and so the economies of scale don’t really matter so much. This is an argument we’ve been making for months now, that when you start selecting a single turbine, which doesn’t have any history, and it’s a big one, and it takes a long time to produce, you are really setting up yourself to fall into that window where something can go wrong. Versus just stamping out two or three megawatt turbines and going like crazy. It just seems so much less risky.  Rosemary Barnes: I think that I definitely agree with you for onshore and then for offshore. Probably also, like I don’t think it’s necessarily go for a smaller turbine. It’s just don’t go for the brand new one. Like that’s why I don’t understand how many people are like so obsessed with this, you know, small, small amount of improvement that they get from the very biggest. Turbine, but I don’t think that they realize the amount of technical risk. And I think that it gets, it’s getting [00:33:00] more and more like the, um, technology increment is getting more and more the bigger that we go. It’s not that like, oh, we’re learning how to do this, this, well, it’s, it’s the opposite that, you know, like every, um, increment up in size as an exponentially more like larger number of problems, technical problems that have to be solved. And, um, I think that, yeah, that’s. That’s something people don’t factor in. Allen Hall: Is it the gold rush problem where the miners were trying to hit that pocket of gold and spending all their time trying to find this gold, find this gold. In the meantime, a lot of them obviously broke, and the people that made money in the gold rush or the stores that sold the pickaxes, if you, you making a pickaxes, you have a customer page, you can just sell those things in. Levi’s, be the other one, right? So they’re selling genes of pickaxes to the miners. Guess who won in that battle, right? Levi’s.  Rosemary Barnes: But what’s the analogy with win two of the pickax manufacturers,  Allen Hall: the people that make the two megawatt machines? In my opinion, that’s gonna be who the pickaxes are because you don’t have to think about it. If [00:34:00] you can talk to operators of the United States today and you say, what turbine would you like to buy over again? And they will almost all tell you, GE one point fives. Almost all of them. And you go, yeah. Oh, okay. I understand it because it’s a machine. It’s pretty simple. But it does work. And it is, it is a true warhorse turbine. And some of the vested ones are the same. Simpson Siemens turbines are very similar, right? Uh, but in today’s world, when we’re talking about 15, 20 megawatt turbines, I just think, man, you gotta be careful doing that just because of the time it takes to develop it and produce it, and. Work at all the kinks? Uh, Rosemary, I think you’re right about that.  Rosemary Barnes: I think the issue is that, um, when you’re deciding whether to develop a project or not, it really depends a lot on what the spreadsheet tells you your return is going to be. And, um, you know, a bigger turbine with, uh, you know, like larger output over its lifetime, longer lifetime. Those are all gonna give you really good. Spreadsheet numbers, but what’s not in the spreadsheet [00:35:00] is, oh, you know, you’ve actually increased your risk of having to wait two years while they replace every single blade in this, um, in this wind farm. Oh, by the way, yeah, you’re gonna be dealing with, um, you know, twice as many repairs and your, um, downtime is not gonna be 2%, it’s gonna be 3.5% or, or something. You know, those, those sorts of things, I don’t think, uh, adequately captured in the, the spreadsheets whe say when you, whether you should or shouldn’t develop a new project.  Matthew Stead: So, so the evil engineering should be making decisions, not the evil lawyers.  Allen Hall: The financial people always make the decisions, right? The insurance companies make the decisions.  Rosemary Barnes: Don’t think there’s a lot of engineering into, um, input in the, the very first stages. But I also think that if you put in the reality, like most engineers, I think are a little bit pessimistic because our job is to see what problems exist at, you know, and then solve them ideally. Um, but at least part of it, like our brains are wired to look for problems, right? That’s, um, that’s a necessary part of the job, in my opinion. But if you were, you know, like pessimistic in your assumptions in the [00:36:00] spreadsheet, you would probably the majority of the time say, don’t make this project. The return is not very good. Allen Hall: Well, that would be a smart move, right? Yeah.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So I don’t actually think you probably should have too many engineers in in involved.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. But what is the CEO incentivized by is the, yeah, so it, it comes back to, you know, what, what, what drives the project And it’s not just engineering.  Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode and if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps. For Rosie and Matthew, I am Allen Hall and we’ll see you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:37:00] Podcast.

Allen covers Ørsted’s first turbine install at Sunrise Wind, Cadeler’s fleet expansion, the Pentagon’s 7.5 GW onshore backlog, and the UK’s £154B onshore wind opportunity. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday, everyone. While headlines this week captured courtrooms and bankruptcy filings and permitting backlogs, out on the open water and deep inside factory order books, the wind turbines kept getting built. Let us start off the coast of New York. Friday morning, April seventeenth, Ørsted installed the first wind turbine generator at Sunrise Wind — a 924-megawatt project, 84 turbines when complete. This is the same Sunrise Wind that was shut down just four months ago. The same Sunrise Wind that won a preliminary injunction in February. The same Sunrise Wind the Trump Administration chose not to appeal. And now the first turbine stands above the water. Cadeler’s wind turbine installation vessel Wind Scylla is doing the work. She just finished the same job at Revolution Wind. Ørsted says first power flows to New York later this year. Commercial operation the second half of 2027. Six hundred thousand homes on the grid. Now follow us across the Atlantic. In the Polish Baltic Sea, another Cadeler vessel just began her maiden campaign. Her name: Wind Mover. Delivered last November from Hanwha Ocean in Korea, ahead of schedule. This new M-class installation vessel now sits at the 1.2-gigawatt Baltic Power offshore wind farm, installing Vestas V236 turbines — 15 megawatts apiece. Wind Mover’s sister vessel, Wind Osprey, is moving to the United Kingdom to start work at East Anglia Three. Cadeler has doubled its fleet in twelve months. By mid-2027, twelve vessels — the largest offshore wind installation fleet in the industry. While turbines go up on the eastern side of the Atlantic, on the western side a different kind of wait is setting in. Bloomberg reported last week that the Pentagon is sitting on a backlog of at least 30 proposed American wind farms — 7.5 gigawatts of onshore capacity. Paperwork stalled. The issue is Section 10-32, the Defense Department’s review to ensure turbines do not interfere with military radar or aviation. Jason Grumet, head of the American Clean Power Association, calls it direct obstruction. His group sent a letter to the Pentagon earlier this month. The deadline for a response was April eighth. That deadline came and went. Seven point five gigawatts, waiting. Now turn to the United Kingdom, where the direction could not be more different. A new report commissioned by Renewable UK and written by consultants at Everoze says expanding Britain’s onshore wind supply chain between now and 2050 could add £56 billion in economic value. That is on top of another £98 billion already expected — a total of £154 billion. UK onshore capacity is set to grow from 16 gigawatts today to more than 50 gigawatts by 2050. Seventy percent of lifecycle spend already stays in the UK. The report points to blades, towers, nacelles, drivetrains, and electrical gear for substations as the highest-value opportunities. So let us step back. One turbine above the water off Long Island. A new vessel installing 15-megawatt machines in the Polish Baltic. Seven point five gigawatts of American onshore wind held up in Washington. And £56 billion staked on British onshore. The policy fights are loud. The legal fights are louder. But this past week, the turbines went up. That is the state of the wind industry for the 20th of April, 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Nicole Johnson Murphy, CEO of ECO TLP, and Gordon Jackson join to discuss concrete floating wind foundations, production-line construction, and markets from Hawaii to Japan. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Offshore wind obviously is a big deal right now. There’s a lot of, countries looking at it and investigating it, doing it, but not really at scale yet. And this is where ECO TLP comes in and. Nicole, let’s just start there with a background. What problem were you trying to solve when you started ECO TLP? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, so, we were designing for, a site off of Hawaii in 2011, for the HECO RFP. And so we were designing for 300 meter water depth from the beginning. so we were always trying to find a way to work with the ports, with the vessel, with the infrastructure that was existing off Hawaii. And with, and that worked with Jones Act vessels. So we were always trying to meet that [00:01:00] requirement with, and meet the cost, try to, we saw there were much tighter margins in offshore wind than in oil and gas, for example, at that water depth. So we’re trying to find something that was cost effective.  Allen Hall: Next question, obviously is what makes those deep water foundations so difficult? Gordon Jackson: It’s the water depth, primarily, you need to put foundations down in, extremely deep water. and they’re gonna be pretty flexible. so you’re trying to control the amount of motion that you get at the surface through your, your deep water, facility. it’s really. Really that challenge, and, the weight of components through the water depth, likes of chain would be completely impossible. in 300 meters of water. you need to use something that’s a little bit lighter. Yeah, to mow you to the, to the seabed. Allen Hall: [00:02:00] Because it does seem a little odd just not to make the foundations taller, basically. More steel drive it down in, we know that process, we understand that process. It works offshore, near shore in a, lot of locations. But once you get to what depth as it becomes financially or engineering wise, impossible.  Gordon Jackson: For offshore wind, fixed, structures in, maybe a hundred meters of water are gonna be. Economic. they’ll be costly compared to what’s been done now because, of all the extra structure you need for the, for the deeper water. But, I think you’ll see, a crossover between fixed and floating, around the, 70 to a hundred meter water mark. that’s sort the range. Allen Hall: And that leads to the next question, which is. It’s all financial, right? At some point, the numbers [00:03:00] don’t work. If the cost of foundations don’t come down, especially in fixed bottom offshore or floating offshore, we lose a lot of offshore wind resource. Nicole can you gimme a scale at what we’re missing if we don’t get to a more economical solution for floating offshore? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So we’ve estimated for our market for, a very deep water market. So we now actually have a solution that goes across all water depths. So we’re starting with, this, gravity based structure now with, and, Gordon’s team has been really involved in that, development. And then now we can take that same slip form, concrete cylinder. Format and take it across all the water depths. so we basically can hit every water depth now for a very low cost. It’s a very simple, just, local, regionally designed and built, system. We, crowdsource the labor and the inputs. and so we [00:04:00] try to, and we also try to give the procurement team of our clients their, an ability to do their job and, be able to bid out aspects of our design, across. Different vendors. So you always wanna give, in construction, you always wanna give, the procurement team a job to do so they can actually get that price, keep that price down on the installation.  Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s a unique look that ECO TLP is putting to this problem. Which is moving away from steel, which is expensive obviously, and it’s difficult to transport at times to a more localized solution, which is concrete. And thinking about the problem a little bit differently, does that open up a number of doors then in terms of the countries that can get involved in, floating or near shore, wind projects, but just because you’re driving the cost down?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. And I’ll let Gordon speak to that.. He’s worked. His whole career in offshore concrete. But I think it’s, I think it’s a, great, it’s the only way we would do it. We actually have shipyards in our companies, our partners own [00:05:00] shipyards, and we, just would never probably ex try to create this many units across the world and scale and steel. We’d only do concrete.  Gordon Jackson: Yeah. My first concrete project broke the mold of how you do, construction of concrete offshore structures. it was entirely built within a dry dock and, After we’d gone on and delivered that project, that was in the late eighties. I spent the next 10 years, working on projects all around the world, looking at doing the same sort of thing in different countries. because you only needed, 10, 12 meters of water, at the shore and you could, build a structure and get it out there in the water. It really opened up the market for offshore concrete structures that, that, first project that we did.  Allen Hall: So using that first project as leverage and knowledge of how to do these things, how much advantage [00:06:00] does concrete give you over steel? Gordon Jackson: It’s difficult to say because it bends country to country. And, quite often you’re competing against, steel built in some, very low cost fabrication countries. so if you’re in a high cost, high labor cost country, I worked in Australia, and the labor cost there was extremely high. So concrete wasn’t particularly cheap, but the overall solutions that we came up with, were cheap. Allen Hall: So does that involve basically like slip forms or how are you, thinking about that problem? Because it’s a huge engineering task and you only learn. By doing it on some level because all great plans, always run into trouble as soon as you try to implement them. So you took all that previous knowledge and then applied it to this problem, and now you have, basically [00:07:00]trimmed or, slimmed, the design down into, you have a, very economical model, even in more uneconomical economies because of labor laws and cost of labor and access and those kind of things. What does that look like now? And what’s your thought process on, Hey, this is what it’s gonna look like? Can we get, quayside how do we do this and how do we keep this thing simple? Gordon Jackson: The key thing is we’re looking at, a production line approach, which has been, it’s tried and tested for, for marine, concrete construction, construction of quay walls and and the we’re using exactly that same system. We’ve just been tried and tested to create a production line of, ECO TLP units or ECO GBS units where we’re building, onshore and where we’re going from station to station, doing a task at each station. [00:08:00] So it’s exactly like a production line, that you’re be familiar with and, you load out the completed structure onto a barge, and then you. Submerge that barge and your structure floats off and that’s, the real key to getting the, the economy from the concrete basis.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, and I’ll say that the OpEX is really something we focus a lot on because it’s not just what you’re doing on the CapEx and the development and the port, it’s actually that 30 year lifetime maintenance. And this is a, when you, we fully submerge our floater, which is basically inert in the ocean. It’s, very eco-friendly with the ocean. There’s no paint, there’s no, maintenance on the floater over the lifespan. You’re, monitoring those, the moorings and the, weight of any marine, buildup on those moorings and things like that. But generally it’s a very low maintenance solution and it’s very heavy and a comfortable car [00:09:00] ride for the turbine. It really has slow motions. it’s, almost like a, a high skyscraper in the water. you’re just the top of that skyscraper is moving a little bit. But you’re, you’re really giving it that comfortable, slow ride over its lifetime. It’s not hitting a lot of turbulence, like a different type of floater.  Allen Hall: Yeah. It is a different concept, really, right? That you have this mass at the bottom and you have this mass at the top, which is the, cell on the wind turbine. And if you can design it just right, everything dampens becomes stable. Even in turbulent water. How long did it take you to figure out that aspect of the design? Because it does seem like a lot of projects hit a, an end point right there because the motion of the turbine is not good for the lifetime of the turbine.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: We, look at it as a, kind of hybrid spar, TLP so, the original design came from my late father who was, who had designed Ekofisk for Phillips [00:10:00] petroleum in the early. Late sixties, And, so he’d come from oil and gas and he’d come from that concrete, construction background. And, he is very comfortable with it. And I think, Gordon, that’s part of why I like working with Gordon ’cause Gordon has that same, long-term view on, these construction principles. And I think that, what we saw though is the margins are so different from oil and gas, and so you have to have almost a poor man’s TLP is what we would call it because it’s. It’s gotta be a very simple version of a TLP that can roll out in mass quantities. And, as coming up with a company that, business plan, you’d wanna be able to really scale the business. And so we had to come up with something that you can make. In different parts of the world at the same time, you’re not tied to one shipyard or one construction. Allen Hall: Even in terms of ship usage, you’re going to reduce the size of the ship considerably. You’re not using big dedicated ships that are really [00:11:00]expensive to operate or to keep in the area, even just to have them there as a lot of money. You’re thinking about, a different design in terms of. Simple ships that you can find locally. How much does that really lower the cost of deployment?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Quite a lot actually. it depends on, so the other, there’s this other, aspect of installing the wind turbine on the foundation. So we have this fixed to fixed platform concept where you come further, a little bit further offshore and, give you that, draft depth that we need. And then we have a fixed platform that just stays in place and, we bring the turbines to it and, float them out. It’s all a self floating unit, whether it’s the GBS that, Gordon’s been working with us and or the ECO TLP. So we’re really independent of those large vessels. for the most part, we’re, really try and then you, once you install the turbine, you can tow the entire unit out with two tugs. Two to three tugs.  Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. So essentially because you [00:12:00] used a basic henry Ford type process to, to create these foundations and to think about the problem differently. Not only can you deploy it, easier than a lot of things we’re doing right now on top of it, it works over a variety of depths and I think that’s a the hard thing for people to grasp because when we talk about offshore particularly start getting off the continental shelves here, you’re talking about. More than a hundred meters typically of water. But you also have a, the gravity based system and the TLP system are all interconnected into the basic philosophy. can you explain like the, backbone of how that engineering works? Gordon Jackson: It’s essentially, it’s, we’re using the same structural form in both, fixed and floating. It’s basically, it’s two cylinders, one inside the other. A little bit of structure, which joins the two cylinders together. that’s it.  Allen Hall: Gordon, you make it sound so simple, but the, [00:13:00]engineering is complicated to get to that point. And once you get to that level of, oh, that design actually works in a variety of depths, that opens up your customer base quite a bit. Have you had inquiries from nearshore people? Or fixed bottom people thinking whoa, I could actually save myself a bunch of time and money, which is the real limiting factor on offshore wind at the moment. Are you starting to see some momentum there that, operators, developers are starting to rethink this problem and not just do what they did last week? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. one of the ways we came about the g you know, taking the ECO TLP and transforming it to the ECO GBS was, recommended by a client, was, that was their ask actions. That’s always the best way to start a product development cycle because, somebody’s interested. and I think, and part of the reason I found Gordon to work with early on in our, the life of our company is, his background in, in GBS development. He did, he developed the Gravitas GBS [00:14:00] 10 years ago. So I think we, we got lucky that our, civil structural engineering partner with ARUP was, already really comfortable with, looking at this. So I think that’s, part of, you always want the clients to be interested, before you start investing. You don’t wanna design a product that’s in your head or your, in your company lunchroom without a real ask for it.  Allen Hall: And I, think also you have a, once you have the engineering pretty well done and. Obviously do now you’re trying to touch a number of countries and every culture has its own way of, one of the construction business to do it slightly differently. South Korea does it different than Scotland, for example. You are working across cultures and trying to make the same design. apply to all those different areas. Are, have you learned [00:15:00] some things from that? Is it, are you able to basically set the same assembly line in every place? or are there different, kinds of concrete, different kinds of access, different kinds of ports that you have to deal with? What are those variables there that, that change the way you do business? Gordon Jackson: All the characteristics, ports are, obviously different. Really you just need space. And access to reasonably deep water from, that, from that space. And, it can get surprisingly difficult to find that, certainly in the UK and, in Northern Europe, people wanna build marines and, waterfront living, rather than having, an industrial facility, on the doorsteps. In, developed countries it can be hard to find that space. But, in some, parts of the world, there’s lots of [00:16:00] space, available. some good port facilities that can be utilized. and then it’s just in, in all civil engineering works, you go to do the job, you go wherever the job is, you mobilize there. You put in the systems, and equipment that you need to build, a structure, and then normally you go away at the end of the job, you hand it over to the client. you know what, what, would be good here is if we could set up some regional centers where you’ve done the, investment in the yard, and then you can, you can amortize those costs of development over a number of projects. Then you should start to see, real, real good cost savings.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Just one thing, our footprint of our, cylinders is about a third of the footprint of a semi-sub, for example. [00:17:00] So, our footprint on the land port is very small.  Allen Hall: I think that makes sense because if you watch the fixed bottom projects, particularly in the United States. The first thing they had to do is rebuild the ports. The ports weren’t set for the scale and so they needed to expand the ports. That means you have to acquire land, you’ve gotta develop it. There’s a lot of processes involved. ’cause you’re talking about city, state, and federal government being involved. Obviously federal in the United States is a problem. so just getting the port developed was a huge process for fixed bottom. You’re thinking about that differently though, because the reduced amount of space, the, you don’t have to be in a huge industrial area, but all obviously it would be nice, but you do run against that problem. Are you thinking, when you talk about regional centers, are you thinking kind of Mediterranean, west Coast, us, Australia, one in Japan? How do you think about that problem? Because [00:18:00] once you get a site established, it does seem like because of the, how fast you can move these things around that it’ll become a pretty good job center for a lot of people. Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah. There’s a long-term maintenance, crew that needs to be developed while we build these. Yeah, I think, it’s been a moving target of what’s really gonna develop in offshore wind. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown with football. I think we, constantly try to, get lined up to, to kick football and then it falls. It’s more of the developers I, I feel for on that ’cause they’re these investing tremendous amount of money for these, development sites. We are open to any, we’ve been, we’ve looked at, some developers are looking at steel production and concrete production, two different reports servicing. An array and we’re really flexible. It doesn’t, matter. When we first started on that Hawaii project, we were gonna do floating barges to slipform. [00:19:00]And we talked about that with ARUP. Some still this floating dock idea and submerging that dock. And it’s just a matter of finding the right, a large enough, dock for that type of, so then you’re not even using the land base port. You’re learn, you’re using just to. Maybe a 400 foot frontage on the, along the port. Allen Hall: That’s amazingly small, right? Because if you look at some of these ports right now that are doing, fixed bottom offshore, they’re massive, they’re huge sites. You’re talking about something roughly a 10th of the scale to get the same end result, which is turbines in the water. Nicole Johnson-Murphy: For our part of it. We still, you still have the components and those are, that’s a, it’s another logistical challenge, and so I understand why the ports are. Looking at a lot more lay down space and things, maybe at a certain point these components are so large that they just stay on a vessel and they, and we take them off of a vessel directly and load them in. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s one of the considerations [00:20:00] is do you really tie it to land in, terms of needing a, massive amount of space, acres of space, thousands of square meters of space. Do you need that or is this, or can you do it much more efficiently because that overhead adds up over time. Not only are you trying to save on, the ships and the, especially the dedicated ships, you’re also looking at smaller footprints on shore and doing it a lot more economically. What does that future look like now, because it does seem like we’re at a precipice where floating wind is no longer just being discussed. In theory, it’s, going to be implemented. What are those next steps here for ECO TLP?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So next week we’re headed to Tokyo, to Japan for the wind expo. And, ARUP is also presenting at the Asia Wind Offshore Show. I think we’re, we’re, good to learn. There’s just so much to learn about each culture, and I think this is something that, Gordon and I’ve talked about in terms of these international [00:21:00] projects, you’ve, gotta understand your culture that you’re moving into and you’ve gotta understand how to mediate across those different companies that come in. Our company has seven different. Countries represented in our team. So right now, so, we’re, a US company, but we’re barely, we’re just by name, but I think most of our team members are not in the us and that’s international collaboration is something, I, really, loved working on it. And I think, so when we go to Japan next week, it’s really mainly just to learn. we don’t. We have a lot to learn about Japan, and that’s what’s fun about each of these regions.  Gordon Jackson: And that’s where we can help because, we’ve got a presence in Japan. We’ve been doing offshore wind in Japan, so we’re there, to help eight to ECO TLP with our, those little contacts and h do business, in Japan and things like that.[00:22:00] We have a big international network, so you know, it can help. Some, in some areas, open some doors and, forge some, some friendships between, count companies.  Allen Hall: Gordon you did a big project out in Perth, Australia, which is a difficult place, Australia is a very difficult place to manufacture things. What are some of the lessons learned and what was that process like?  Gordon Jackson: So he had a, client, a very small client who was prepared to. Seed responsibility for delivering his project to a, team, an alliance team. And he just, interviewed a number of teams and, we were lucky enough to be selected, as the team to deliver their project. There was no tendering, it was just done on, how the, client felt about the, individuals that he met. And that, that was [00:23:00] very new to me. And, the whole project was delivered, by companies from the uk, from Australia, from Singapore, from be Netherlands, the Marine, the marine, vessels. A lot of ’em are coming from, from, Northern Europe, even though you’re in Australia. And, every company wants to do things differently and they all want to look after their interests, but the big thing about this alliance project was that, you were focused on one particular project and we were, we were coached and, facilitated, and trained to, to throw away our, our company affiliations and work together. And, to collaborate together. And, [00:24:00] we’re all working towards the, end goal of delivering a particular product. And I think that’s, I think it’s got a lot of, lot of potential to be used in the offshore wind sector. This, was, an oil platform that we were gonna build on the, the northwest shelf of Australia, which happened to be built in concrete, because the client. The client came to us with a notion of, doing something in concrete, which we, took his idea, decided we could do something a little bit cheaper and more straightforward and, went on to deliver it. We were given the opportunity to deliver it. And, yeah, I, it was my best project. it was a tremendous experience for all the companies involved. And everyone made money so everyone’s happy.  Allen Hall: That is difficult, right? You do see on these offshore projects, people coming from around the world to [00:25:00] work on this one big effort, a lot of money, and at times, thousands of people involved. Companies stu stumble there, obviously because you’re trying to tie cultures, you’re trying to tie companies together, but at the end of the day, you have to get this project done. Are, there some top level lessons learned from that of, how to bridge those differences?  Gordon Jackson: I did another project, this was a steel project, where we had a US oil company. And, The successful contractor was Hyundai in Korea. And they said to, me over the course of the project, we always lose money with, with American oil companies. Why are we doing business with them? And it, all came down to the, the approach to the [00:26:00] contract. Hyundai used to working in a more collaborative way with our clients. Whereas, this project, this is what the contract says, this is what you’ve taken on to do, there’s no negotiation, you’ll do it and that’s how much money you’re getting. And, but they find that very difficult. And, it was at the time when they were opening up their business more internationally. And I think it was a big learning experience for them. Yeah I think a lot of the offshore wind tried to follow the same path and, yeah, I think more collaborative working is to be encouraged for me. More talking to each other and negotiating rather than, imposing.  Allen Hall: Where should developers go to find out more about ECO TLP? [00:27:00] Because you have a gravity based system. You got the tension leg platform, there’s a lot inside of the company. What’s the first stop? Should they visit your website? Should they connect with you on LinkedIn? Where do they go?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: The LinkedIn where website is great.  Allen Hall: So go visit ECO TLP. It’s ecotlp.com. Nicole and Gordon, this has been a great discussion. I’ve learned a lot. It’s very exciting because I think you’re on the precipice of something great. So thank you for joining me today. Gordon Jackson: Thank you. Thank you.

The crew discusses the White House missing its offshore wind appeal deadline, France’s 12 GW tender with restrictions on Chinese permanent magnets, and WOMA 2027 planning. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, who is in Australia, and our newest guest is Nikki Briggs, who is the new CCO of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Welcome to the show, Nikki.  Nikki Briggs: Thank you. Nice to, nice to be here.  Allen Hall: So there’s the full docket, and Nikki’s gonna get indoctrinated today to the podcast, and she’s gonna be holding on tight because we have a really, uh, very controversial podcast. I think once Rosemary gets in here and starts talking about. Offshore wind. And I wanna lead off this week ’cause it is a big deal, although not many people are talking about it, that, uh, the White House missed a deadline to file an [00:01:00] appeal against all the offshore wind farms in the United States. And the feeling was, is that there was gonna be an appeal and they’re gonna push to slow down those projects or cancel those projects. And obviously, uh, one of the purchasers of one of the sites decided to sell it back to the US for about a. Billion US dollars, but the administration missed a key deadline for appeals, uh, which may indicate that they have other things to do besides fight offshore wind Now. The question really remains is, is this going to continue on that nothing is going to happen. Uh, hopefully all the wind projects that are being built at the moment will complete and we’ll be providing power to all the onshore locations, particularly up and down along the East coast. But, uh, there’s still a long way to go here. Rosemary, I know there’s been a lot of concern about what’s happened in the United States on offshore [00:02:00] wind for several months now. You think this is gonna be just a change of direction because there’s other things happening in the world.  Rosemary Barnes: To me, it just sounded like too hard to, unlikely to actually succeed and kind of keeps on drawing attention back to the issue. So better to just kind of let it quietly fade away and not talk about it anymore. Allen Hall: And there is a financial emphasis for those companies that have these wind farms because if they can get their projects done. They get paid sooner. They can produce power, obviously they’re gonna get paid sooner. So there is a big incentive to push, push, push, push. And a lot of the projects are delivering power right now. And I think the, the biggest one, which is uh, dominion Energy’s Project of Coastal Virginia, offshore Wind is doing that. So. All these wind projects that are kinder in a way I think are going to finish, which is gonna be a, a big relief to a lot of the states.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t wanna talk about us, um, politics because I am not living there. But don’t you have midterms coming up and potential [00:03:00] for the situation to dramatically change? Like, my understanding is that the expectation is that there will be. More, um, democratic involvement in, in decision making after the midterms. And so surely, you know, like if they don’t, if they’re not acting now, then things are likely to be easier from here on out. Is that, is that a correct interpretation of what’s going on over there?  Allen Hall: Not correct. And Nikki, you can jump in here too. Congress can change and does every two years there’s elections in the US and so the full House of Representatives is voted in or out. So all 435 members of the House of Representatives have an election, but about a third of the Senate has an election. So the Senate doesn’t change as dramatically as the House does, but, uh, for everything that’s been codified into law, which happened a year and a half ago, uh, the executive branch can kind of do what they [00:04:00] want there. So there will be very little that Congress can do. Once a law is a pass and the executive branch can continue on,  Rosemary Barnes: it’s two year terms for your house of reps. Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s two years terms. Yeah.  Rosemary Barnes: That’s not very long. That’s not very good job security.  Allen Hall: It was never meant to be  Rosemary Barnes: in school. About a thousand years ago, I learned that, um, the Australian government is, is, is largely based on a combination of um, UK and. US government basically. But I think it’s a lot closer to the us. Um, and yeah, we have, I, I think we have not, we haven’t got fixed terms, but it’s usually about every three years and yeah, you lose a few, a few months, but we don’t, we don’t do the big song and dance about it that you do with all of the, um, pre-selection and all that stuff. We don’t do that. So our, our system is a lot quicker. Um, so yeah, I just wonder like how, how do you actually govern when you have to spend half of your time worried about, um, getting in and then you can only make plans for basically one year [00:05:00] ahead or two years ahead, like at the absolute maximum.  Allen Hall: That’s the problem with House of Representative is you nailed it right on the head, which is they’re constantly fundraising and trying to get to the next election. Two years is a short amount of time anymore. They didn’t used to do it like that, where the last six months, maybe a year were campaign time, but pretty much once they get an election over, which happens in November, they’re already campaigning for the next one. So it does lead to a lot of chaos where things don’t happen in the House of Representatives like. They used to maybe 20, 25 years ago. It’s changed dramatically and I don’t think Australia has that same issue weirdly enough. Although I would say you’re becoming more like the US in a lot of ways. That’s not one of them.  Rosemary Barnes: We’ve got some, there’s some things in place, like one of the advantages of basing our system on other countries as we could take. Take the bits that worked and see what, what we could already see what didn’t really work and um, you know, try to, try to take it, um, try to take care of that, ensure that it couldn’t happen. [00:06:00] So  Allen Hall: the offshore wind piece in America rolls into other offshore wind, uh, across Europe in that, uh, although US is reconsidering offshore wind in some sense. Europe is not. In fact, uh, France is getting very active. So you remember the France has been trying to launch, uh, offshore wind tenders for about two years. So you keep hearing France is gonna go to offshore wind, and then it didn’t really happen. Well, that political gridlock is, uh, over really how to pay for the renewables, uh, and how they’re gonna try to finance this thing. Meanwhile, uh, France has, uh. Less than what? Two gigawatts of offshore wind operating against a, a national target of about 15 gigawatts by 2035. Uh, so there’s a lot of catching up to do the 12. They just had a 12 gigawatt package. They announced where, uh, they, they’re [00:07:00] attempting to really catch up all at once, uh, but buried inside of this tender. Is a supply chain rule, which is very unique. So coming outta Scotland and all the things that happen with Ming Yang in Scotland, France is doing something very similar. France is limiting the percentage or the quantity of permanent magnets that can come from China. So France is saying, Hey, they don’t wanna get locked into an offshore, offshore wind supply chain that involves China specifically for, but they’re probably the most important ingredient, which is. Permanent magnets. The Netherlands is moving ahead also and has offered two one gigawatt offshore wind farms, and it’ll be permitting those pretty quickly. So all of a sudden, the offshore wind effort for some of the countries that have been quiet in Netherlands in particular, and then France, all of a sudden probably ’cause of what’s happening in the. The straight in the Middle East have decided to speed up their offshore wind [00:08:00] projects. Is this gonna be the right move? Do you think they’re gonna stick with this process of, of completing these projects or is this a spur of the moment decision that they’re gonna change their minds later on in the next year or two once things calm down to the Middle East? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, if it is a, a knee jerk response to the. Specific right now problem and doesn’t seem very well advised because it’s gonna be years before they actually see any electricity entering their grid. I mean, France is a bit different to other European countries ’cause they’ve got so much nuclear and in general, uh, I think with the exception of like the year before last, they had that summer where it was really hot. They had heat waves and they had to shut down a lot of. Nuclear power plants because the cooling water was too hot. They, they couldn’t, they couldn’t put it back into the river. And, um, yeah, uh, river levels were too low in some cases. So in, in that year, they did have to import energy. Um, but in general, their energy exporters. So I don’t, I, I would be surprised if this [00:09:00] was in direct response to, you know, that I don’t think they have an electricity crisis right now. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think it’s probably more of a long-term plan.  Allen Hall: Are they gonna force the OEMs to build product in country? GE already has an offshore wind blade factory in France. And, uh, they can get a lot of components in Europe for sure. You could actually dictate what percentage of the wind turbine is built in France and what is built in Europe and what’s gonna be left to be imported in from China. You think this is where everybody is headed?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, I think it is. Smart move to make sure that you don’t have one single country locking down any critical part of your supply chain. So I’ll agree with that. I haven’t seen the exact wording, but it’s not like it’s just banned that anything comes from China. I mean, that would be a good way to make sure that you didn’t ever get a timely, uh, a project completed in time. Um. So, you know, that makes sense. But, you know, if no one [00:10:00] project can use a hundred percent Chinese magnets or I, I don’t know the wording, maybe they’re allowed to buy, um, the rare Earth materials from China and then turn them into magnets locally. I don’t, I don’t know what the wording is, but, um, it is going to require that, you know, some new manufacturers start up and I just wonder what kind of support they’re gonna provide for that and what kind of guarantees, because it’s not, um. So straightforward to just start up a new manufacturing facility for something that has never been made in that, in that area before. Um, you know, there’s a lot of risk and hard to get financing. They’re gonna want to have some, um, guarantees from the government or some support to, you know, make sure that the risk benefit is worth it.  Allen Hall: I think that’s probably the most important part of this, is the business aspect. You can’t spool up a 20 year business. In a year that’s hard to do and you’re not gonna do it if the supply chain can willy-nilly switch to an external supply chain to China, for example. So if you do set up [00:11:00] something complicated in France, I would almost bet that they would have to pass something in law and lock it in before you see a lot of investment happening that way. Similar things happen in the UK really is uh, with all the offshore wind growth and wanting to build turbines in the country. They’re gonna have to put some barriers in to keep the Chinese out, which they’re obviously doing  Rosemary Barnes: or provide direct support. They don’t necessarily need to make it a law. I think like the way we would do it in Australia is that the government would either co-invest or they would, you know, underride a loan or um, you know, guarantee revenue or something, something like that, to make all the pieces fall into place. I don’t think, um, law is the only way to do it.  Allen Hall: France obviously is gonna be able to choose from a couple of wind OEMs. Where do you think they’ll go is It’s pretty much right now, I guess it’s Siemens and Vestas for sure. I’m not even sure GE is offering a offshore wind turbine at the moment. Does France [00:12:00] have a Siemens or Vestas stake at the minute? Rosemary Barnes: Not that I know of, but what’s happening to the um, Bel Factory? The GE Blade Factory? That was. They were making blades for hall aids, which is the troubled platform that kind of turned them off. Offshore wind altogether. Um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know what’s happened to that one.  Allen Hall: Remember that GE sold the LM factory, what up in Poland and Vestas ended up buying that? I wonder if something similar happened here.  Rosemary Barnes: Uh, yeah. I dunno. I need to, we should have, we should have looked it up before we started recording.  Allen Hall: The thing about this podcast is that we start putting the puzzle pieces together. Before the, the pieces are out on the table. And when you see the way that GE has really slowed down offshore, obviously they talked about it a number of times that they don’t like the offshore business and would like to finish vineyard wind and all the commitments they have and then pause until they can make sure they’re gonna make money on offshore wind. Vestas is going crazy and has made a lot of sales, [00:13:00] and I know Siemens is trying to get back into that offshore market. So you really have two players. If you are not gonna choose a Chinese turbine, you see image and you have Vestas. But onshoring, that work is an obvious, uh, French move, I think just like it was in the uk. Rosemary Barnes: I mean, assuming that they are not gonna be choosing, uh, Chinese manufacturers, given that they’re trying to move away from that, um, yeah. Complete dominance, but I mean, why couldn’t Ming Yang or someone supply turbines but just, you know, get their, their magnets from a local supplier instead? I mean, it’s very common that, you know, like European manufacturers, if they wanna sell in India, then they have to have a certain local, um, you know, amount of local manufacturing. So. Why wouldn’t a, a Chinese company do the same thing? So, yeah, I don’t think they’ve only got two choices, but. Those will be the obvious ones.  Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast [00:14:00] recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. So Rosemary, after the successful WMA 2026 event in Melbourne, in which I know I mispronounced, but you’re just gonna have to let it go. There’s been a a ton of inquiries about WMA 2027 and I. I’m thinking, man, we just finished moment 2026. You ready for 2027? The answer is yes, we need to go.  Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s because the, um, certain other Australian wind energy events are spamming everyone’s inboxes with like multiple emails a day, months out. It’s got everyone thinking, gee, this conference is super annoying. Thought about that [00:15:00] non annoying conference that I went to.  Nikki Briggs: Yeah. Well I’m not pestering people, but if anybody wants to, you know, get signed up to be a sponsor for WMA 2027, reach out to me because, you know, we’re that not annoying conference. So, um, we gotta have good sponsors. And  Rosemary Barnes: that is true. That is one thing about, about Wilmar is we keep it really cheap for attendees, but it is still a high quality conference. And the main way that we’re able to do that is because we have really good sponsors that. Um, yeah, they, they provide money obviously, to pay for, uh, a large chunk of the event, but they also don’t expect to be allowed to get up and sell at people. Um, yeah, I, I don’t even know how we managed to get such great sponsors that are, you know, happy with that trade off, but I guess that, yeah, they’ve figured out that it isn’t actually that beneficial to get up and give a sales pitch to people who. Receptive to it. It is much better to just get up and talk about all the things that you know, and then the people who have problems that can be solved by what you [00:16:00] do will naturally get in touch with you. I mean. I think it works better. That’s, that’s my entire sales sales approach. And I guess everybody at the, at the conference, that’s what, yeah, that’s what we’re relying on. I think it’s a better way  Nikki Briggs: and we’re here to help and save you money.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And the Woma 2027 website is up. Just Google. It’s, and we’re looking for sponsors, although a number of sponsors, pretty much everybody from 26 who wants to be back into twenties. 27. So we’ll be, uh, reaching out to all of you and making sure that happens. But the conference is probably gonna get bigger in 2027 just because of the demand. So we’ll be looking for a, a couple of more key sponsors. We want you to get involved as soon as possible. You should do that by, in the us. You can do that by getting a hold of, of Nikki. It’s Nikki, N-I-K-K-I dot Briggs, B-R-I-G-G s@wglightning.com. Or you can just go to Nikki’s LinkedIn page and send her an InMail and, uh, get ahold of her that way or [00:17:00] connect with her on LinkedIn and she’d be glad to help you. Now, Rosemary, I know one of the things we talked about was, uh, some of the expansion of topics for 2027. There was a lot of feedback and we are paying close attention. And thanks to everybody who sent us feedback on the conference, uh, the number of five star reviews are really high, and I, I’m, I’m still a little shocked and um, maybe embarrassed by like, wow. Uh, that’s awesome. But we wanna expand on some of the topics for next year, and we’re talking about doing a blade masterclass and that which would involve rosemary. Maybe some others talking about some of the blade issues that exist around the world. And Rosemary, what are you thinking about?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, describing how the process works. ’cause that’s the, that’s probably one of the main things, or the main value that I bring to Australia is the time that I spent working at a, um, um. Wind turbine blade manufacturer, and you know, how does the design process work? What kind of testing do they do? What [00:18:00] does certification mean? Um, all those sorts of things. Uh, they, you might think, oh, I don’t really care about that ’cause I just use the blade once I’ve got it. But anytime you run into a problem, you do need to kind of know how all that stuff works, basically. So, um, yeah, we’ll give a, a masterclass on that topic and so you can come and get. You know, a bit of an understanding about how that works. Ask whatever questions that you’ve got that relate to your specific problems, but then, you know, even if you don’t have a problem now in the future when something comes up, you’ll have that knowledge to fall back on. And it just really helps to be able to know when something’s not right, um, when something wasn’t done right. Um, yeah, I mean there are always at some point an argument about, you know, who’s gonna pay. So it is really helpful to know if things have been done the way that they said that they would be. The way they should be. Um, yeah, but I’m also. I’m really keen to hear about what to include in the main conference. ’cause you know, it can’t be the same every year. Um, I’m super focused on, on blades and I, I think we, I [00:19:00] mean, blades is the biggest, the biggest topic in wind turbine o and m, so it makes sense that we would be focused on that and we’re, we will, but I have less of, um, yeah, in depth knowledge about what non blade issues people are really struggling with at the moment. So definitely be keen to hear from. Viewers about, um, sorry, I’ll say that again. Definitely be keen to hear about potential attendees about what topics they would wanna see covered to make sure that, yeah, it’s interesting and fresh every year.  Allen Hall: Can I circle back on the masterclass a little bit because I had my own little, little mini masterclass this past week looking at the IE specification for wind turbine blades, and I don’t know what prompted me to read that document. I thought it was gonna be a lot thicker than it was, and I was shocked at the lack of detail that on the requirement side, I always think the blade people must have millions of requirements to go [00:20:00] do. And it’s gonna be very technical and a lot of check boxes there, but turns out maybe not as many as I thought there would be. Rosemary Barnes: Oh yeah. That’s interesting that you’re, you’re surprised. Um. I mean, I haven’t worked with it closely since when I was doing my PhD, uh, the PhD was on, there was a, yeah, design of a family, family of wind turbine blades. And so, you know, I was looking at the standard to see what, um, load cases that you had to consider, you know, like the 50 year extreme gust is one of the big ones. And then, you know, various operational loads and that sort of thing. Um, it’s never gonna cover absolutely everything. But I, yeah. What, what, what issues do you see that are, are missing from it?  Allen Hall: Well, when, when I look at the airplane world and we qualify an airplane with the Federal Authority, whoever that could be, it could be Yasa in Europe, could be the FAA in the United States, there’s a pages, there are books of requirements and [00:21:00] guidance materials and details of things you must do to show that the airplane is. Safe to go fly. I figured the wind turbine world would’ve adapted that to some level to have very specific requirements on design margins and, and maybe they’re there as an electrical engineer. I can’t suss all that out, but I can usually tell how rigorous the requirements are by the weight of the document. Usually those documents make a lot of noise when you drop ’em on the desk. This was, uh, a very soft whimper. I thought, well, okay, maybe there’s a lot here I’m missing. I’m sure that I am. I’m an electrical guy. I’m gonna admit it. Right now, I don’t understand all the structural things, but on the airplane side, I know that the airplanes have a lot to do and the requirements are crazy hard, but maybe there’s a lot more tolerance in wind. Rosemary Barnes: They do include safety margins, and there is, uh. A lot more, a lot more tolerance in wind as [00:22:00] there should be because people aren’t flying and wind turbines. You know, like if there was somebody like physically seated inside every blade 24 7, then I think that you would see that the, the standard would be, would be tightened up because you know, like every tightening of the standard is going to result in an increase in cost. So I mean, the biggest difference that I. I I see between, um, arrow and wind, aside from the, the safety issue is the maintenance. There is annual maintenance and they are maintained more than that. They’re, they’re constantly doing stuff, but like if it’s possible to design it to last for 20 or 30 years without needing maintenance, and that’s the way that you want it to be. In general, blades are not supposed to be maintained until there’s a problem. Um, you know, it’s not like. Places where you know that you’re gonna be replacing grease or, um, you know, anything, anything like that that’s built for accessibility. The blades are certainly, certainly not. So yeah, I mean, [00:23:00]you’re definitely not maintaining in the same way as you are with, um, aerospace or Yeah, just aviation. Allen Hall: Howard Pinrose has the, for motor dock, has the Chaos and Caffeine podcast. Which is on YouTube and I watch that. Typically Saturday morning, I think that’s when it comes out. It’s on the weekend. And his last, uh, podcast was about the studies about general maintenance. Back to Rosemary, your point that performing general maintenance, regardless of how much there is, is less costly than trying to fix it on the fly. And that if you devote. Sufficient resources to keeping the equipment maintained in the, in the way it was intended to. You’re gonna have significantly less problems. Uh, and lower costs, but it’s surprising. Wind doesn’t do that  Rosemary Barnes: well, but I mean, the difference is that wind is designed to not be maintained. So it’s, it’s not easier engineering, or not [00:24:00] engineering. It’s not like lazy. It’s actually the opposite. It’s actually really hard to design something that won’t need to be maintained for 30 years. I mean, think about another machine that is not supposed to be looked at for 30 years and you know, that will go through the stress that a wind turbine blade does. But you know, if you think of. Yeah, anything that’s inside your blade, like think about, um, the lightning cable in a blade. Um, you know, like the, if it, if it breaks, you have to cut open the blade to get into it. And, um, most of the length of the blade, that would be, that would be what you would do. It’s huge, huge, huge repair. Um, so, you know, you design it so that that will very rarely happen in theory, you know, if everything’s working well, maybe the lightning cable is a bad example because, um, the lightning protection system is. Almost certainly the, the least well-functioning part of a, a wind turbine, I’d say. But you know, like you think about in every other part of the blade structure, you know, you design it so that it will last for 30 years easily. Um, and then [00:25:00] it’s only when several things go wrong that you would end up having to go in and do that. Um, that maintenance.  Allen Hall: This should be kind of a woma topic actually, because is it even conceivable that you could have minimal maintenance on such a. Heavy industrial piece of equipment for 30 years versus every other machine in human operation that can’t do that. What other machine, I’m sure somebody will write in about that. And if you, if you know what, a machine will operate for 30 years with no maintenance, please send us a note because I don’t know what that is.  Rosemary Barnes: No, I, I think Brent turbines are really, are really special and I think that it is, uh, like commonly misunderstood that, um, you know. Not maintaining for 30 years is, you know, somehow not in engineering correctly or making the engineering easier, but it’s the opposite. You’re making the engineering harder. The same with manufacturing of, um, the blades specifically or anything made out of composite materials. Like the tolerances are huge, but the fact is that that makes the engineering harder, not easier because it has to work at [00:26:00] any, you know, if the web is here or if it’s a hundred millimeters this way, it’s still has to work exactly the same for the exact same amount of time. So to make it low cost and reliable for that amount of time with that little maintenance is a huge job. Um, and you know, one world record that I know that wind turbines have is that the blades are the largest, like single piece component of any human made structure. There is nothing, there’s nothing bigger than, um, a wind turbine blade. Like a bridge is made of multiple different members and a airplane. Has, you know, two, two wings that don’t even, even the span of most airplanes isn’t, um, both wings together isn’t the same as the longest wind turbine blades. Like, there’s not, there’s no one big single component that’s bigger than a wind turbine blade. Not to mention the strain. Um, they bend a lot that they, they really, they really bend a lot. That’s a very. Difficult operating environment. They do millions of, of fatigue cycles in their [00:27:00] lifetime. Uh, it’s just like, you know, they’re, they’re breaking records all over the place. It’s a, it’s a super cool thing to mark on as an engineer, to be honest. Allen Hall: Okay. So at Walmart 2026, I know that was one of the discussions that popped up, uh, on the panel, was what should we expect for a lifetime? Or sort of a less re a reduced level of maintenance on a wind turbine. And the answer was maybe a year. And I thought that was a very Australian way of answering that question. It’s, it’s a real answer. I think, uh, the people that operate wind turbines know that that probably is true. You got about a year and then you gotta get on it. But financial investors don’t necessarily have that opinion about it. They think you just turn it on, let it run 30 years and collect all this money and. What we’re learning is it’s, it’s a complicated problem. And Rosemary, I think you’re 100% right. All the variables that happen during the manufacturing and the design of a wind turbine have to incorporate safety features that keep that operating for 30 years. That’s really hard to do, [00:28:00] and you’d have no way to really verify it once you shove it out the door, especially the first thousand you make. It’s almost an impossible task.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean there obviously there is heaps of maintenance that needs to be done to, to wind turbines, even if it is incredibly low maintenance compared to other kinds of machines. And if you are skipping that kind of maintenance or doing it incorrectly, then that is definitely a very um, Australia relevant issue. You know, everyone’s on these full service agreements. Sometimes not for the full lifetime of the the turbine. So you can imagine if you’re kind of like half-assing your maintenance for the, those first 10 years, then you’re just sending a, you know, time bomb to the next person to take over that contract. So. That’s a real challenge, but I’d see it with blades where it’s like, oh, they’re just quietly fixing, um, damages. They get the same damage over and over again and they just quietly fix it and not say anything and, or, you know, not really raise it like maybe you’re technically getting the reports, but it’s never flagged that, you know, Hey, this is a serial issue and no one’s ever investigating. What’s the [00:29:00] real root cause of this? It might be that, you know, they’re fixing it well enough to last to the end of the FSA period. And then, yeah. Oh hey. Turns out your whole fleet has a serial issue that you need to take care of now with, without the backing of the manufacturer, which, um, you know, obviously makes it about 10 times harder. Allen Hall: And that’s why you want to go to Wilma 2027 because we’re gonna to talk about that issue in a. About 20 others during the two day event. At least that’s what it’s scheduled for right now. Maybe it’ll go to a third day. Rosemary, maybe we need to add a third day because of all the topics  Rosemary Barnes: we need to move to a beach location. If we’re gonna start going for multiple days,  Allen Hall: Rosemary wants to have it in Fiji or was it Tahiti? What was the other place you were saying you would like to go to?  Rosemary Barnes: Tahiti would be fine. Um, Maldives is what I was saying, but yeah, I will accept that. It’s not that. Logical to run Australia. Um, win o and m event offshore. Allen Hall: We wanna send a congratulations to Yolanda and [00:30:00]Manuel as they have gotten married down in Mexico, uh, with all friends and family, several hundred attendees as I have learned. So congratulations to those two. And Yolanda will be back on the podcast. In the next week or two, that wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love for to hear from you, just reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosie and Nikki, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:31:00] Podcast.

Allen covers EEW American Offshore Structures’ Chapter 11 filing, Vineyard Wind suing GE Vernova for $545 million, Europe’s exit from Korea, and wind project wins in Australia and Canada. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! There is a story unfolding across this industry right now. It is a story of two worlds. One world is closing its doors. The other is throwing them wide open. Let us start in New Jersey. EEW American Offshore Structures filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy on April eighth. This was the first monopile manufacturing facility ever built in the United States. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced a two hundred fifty million dollar investment in the Paulsboro Marine Terminal back in twenty twenty. It was called the largest industrial offshore wind investment in the country at the time. At full buildout… five hundred thousand square feet of production space. More than one hundred monopiles per year. Five hundred workers. They even built the first American-made monopile… for Orsted’s Ocean Wind project. It weighed three million pounds. It measured three hundred feet long. Then Orsted canceled Ocean Wind One and Two. Then Shell pulled out of Atlantic Shores. Without contracted work… workers disassembled and recycled finished monopiles for scrap. Federal policy shifts removed the pipeline of future projects. A landlord eviction filing followed. And then… Chapter Eleven. That is a two hundred fifty million dollar facility… with nowhere left to go. Now stay with us. Because just offshore… another American offshore wind story is fighting for its life. Vineyard Wind… the sixty-two turbine project fifteen miles south of Martha’s Vineyard… filed suit in Massachusetts against GE Renewables. GE Vernova says Vineyard Wind owes it three hundred million dollars for work already performed… and it wants to walk away at the end of April. Vineyard Wind says not so fast. The developer says GE still owes five hundred forty-five million dollars for what it calls inexcusably poor performance after a catastrophic turbine blade collapse in July of twenty twenty-four. Fiberglass blade fragments washed onto Nantucket beaches during peak tourist season. Sixty-eight of seventy-two blades had to be removed and replaced. That set the project back nearly two years. Construction did reach completion in March… making Vineyard Wind the first offshore project to finish under the current administration. But now the only contractor capable of completing the remaining work… wants out. A court hearing was scheduled for Thursday. And now… look eastward. Something similar is playing out in Korea. European offshore wind companies are exiting the Korean market one by one. Corio Generation, a British firm owned by Macquarie, disbanded its Korean unit and pulled out of joint projects in Busan and Ulsan. Germany’s RWE quit offshore wind projects in Taean and Sinan counties. Vestas postponed its turbine factory in Mokpo… indefinitely. Equinor began reducing its Korean workforce. Shell exited the Korean offshore market entirely in twenty twenty-four. These companies point to worsening global profitability… and Korean government policies they say favor domestic companies over firms with greater experience. Korea had a target of three gigawatts of offshore wind by twenty thirty. That goal is now in serious doubt. But here is where the story turns. Not every market is closing its door. Eight thousand miles from New Jersey… in the Sunshine State of Queensland, Australia… the final forty-one turbines just arrived at the Wambo wind project. Cubico Sustainable Investments and Stanwell are building a five hundred six megawatt project on the Darling Downs. Stage One… two hundred fifty-two megawatts… already feeding the Queensland grid. Stage Two deliveries are now complete. Commissioning and full operations are on track for the end of twenty twenty-six. And up in Ontario, Canada… the province just approved fourteen new wind and solar projects totaling more than thirteen hundred megawatts. The average price… eight point eight cents per kilowatt hour. Compare that to twenty-one point four cents for some proposed nuclear projects… and more than thirty-two cents for certain new reactor designs. Contracts run for twenty years, with all projects online before twenty thirty. So let us step back. In New Jersey… the first American monopile factory files for bankruptcy. Off Massachusetts… a completed offshore wind farm fights to keep its contractor. In Korea… European developers pack their bags. But in Australia… turbines arrive on schedule. And in Canada… wind power undercuts nuclear at the meter. The wind energy industry is not in retreat. It is choosing its battlegrounds. And where the conditions are right… the blades are turning. And now you know… the rest of the story. That is the state of the wind industry for the 13th of April, twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Dr. Liz Beavis, Asset Manager at Tilt Renewables, joins to discuss O&M contracts, balance of plant, and lessons from Australia’s biggest and oldest wind farms. Contact Liz on LinkedIn or by email. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Liz, welcome to the program. Thanks,  Liz Beavis: Alan. I feel I’m a long time listener. First time caller, so it’s exciting.  Allen Hall: You are a long time listener and thanks for doing that. Uh, and Liz, I just find you to be a wealth of knowledge and, uh, we met on a couple occasions since I’ve been in Australia and it’s just, uh, a fun to connect here because I think a lot of the things that are happening in Australia need to be spread around the world. A lot of, uh, good o and m practices happening in Australia, uh, from hard lessons learned. So that’s what I want to dive into today. And then the first one is, I don’t think many people realize this, that you went. From commissioning, Australia’s largest wind farm, Cooper’s gap to managing seven [00:01:00] of the 10 oldest operational wind farms in the country. So you got some of the biggest, newest to some of the oldest assets. Uh. Uh, my question is like, when you started that, did you just kind of assume like wind, wind farms or wind farms or wind turbines or wind turbines and you could just basically own and end them the same, or do, or did it just occur to you immediately like, I need to take a different plan of attack here? Liz Beavis: I think I, I knew nothing about wind farms when I turned up at Cooper’s Gap, so, so yeah, I got my, well, okay, we’ll go right back to the start. So I was working at a thermal power station and I was just thinking. There’s no future in coal. How do I get into renewables? And then a wind farm got built like 50 kilometers from my house. I can, I can see it in the horizon. Um, and I thought, oh, they’re not gonna need a chemical engineer there, but I wonder if they need a site manager or something. And then the site manager role came up, I applied for it. So the services site manager. So, [00:02:00] um. That was July, 2020. That’s when I first started listening to the podcast. ’cause I thought I better find out something about this industry before I do my job interview. And so I’ve been listening ever since. But, um, yeah, so I don’t know. I was just lucky to get that role. And I turned up and, um, I think it was the end of September, 2020 first time I’d ever set foot on a wind farm ’cause of COVID and everything. I didn’t, I didn’t go there for the interview. My manager was in Thailand. I just turned up. And, um, so they, they’d finished construc, they’d built all the towers where they hadn’t finished commissioning. And so we’re still working out of construction, dongas, you know, temporary buildings and um, and there was hundreds of people on site and it was just the absolute chaos of. Constructing a two hundred, a hundred and twenty three turbines. You know, like there’s just people everywhere. And I thought, wow, I’ve just gotta figure out what I’m supposed to be doing here. There were a few technicians. I found out how many technicians I supposed to have. Just started recruiting, started figuring out what I was supposed to be doing there, and I just [00:03:00] learned so much. In the two years we took over the new r and m building. We had failed gear, boxes, generators, transformers, overhead line, underground line, pretty much. Anything that could fail failed, and I got to see what we needed to do. Um, but through all of that, I was also thinking, oh, how do I manage this wind farm better? I don’t know anything about wind farms, and I’m reaching out to the other GE sites, but the, the next biggest site was 75 turbines, and all of the rest of them are 30 and 40. So they’re saying to me, oh, you just get a team to go around. And I’m thinking. Well, that’s six weeks of work. You know, like, like everything is so much bigger on a bigger wind farm. And then I’d reach out to the, the American sites. That had big wind farms, but their contracts were so different, and I didn’t understand at first, I started to realize, well, their contracts are completely different and their focus is different, and so they’re not facing the same issues that I’m facing. Um, and then, you know, even speaking to a wind farm in [00:04:00] Sweden that was a similar size, but they, you know, they. They have to think about climate and what work they can do in winter. So I started to, as you said, you start to think, well actually everyone farms very different. And it’s, um, you know, you can learn from others, but you really need to understand how your conditions are affecting what you can and can’t do. Um, and then, so then I got the job at Wally Power Services with as a portfolio manager for the renewables, um, fleet There. And yeah, a whole lot of really old turbines. And it was just so interesting to see that contrast between the new turbines and the old ones and um, and also being a independent service provider, what we could do and what the technicians. So many clever technicians out there on wind farms, just figuring stuff out and, and fixing things that if you tried to do that within the OEM, you get really hamstring Engineers say, oh no, you can’t. You can’t do that. You can’t fiddle with that. Whereas once you’re released from that, for better or worse, [00:05:00] the technicians are just off sorting things out. So that was really interesting to see that contrast. And now I’m with, um, tilt Renewables. So I’m the asset manager for Cooper’s Gap and Silverton Wind Farms. So I’m, I’m now seeing from the owner’s point of view how we actually manage these contracts with the OEMs and with ISPs and how we, how can we do r and m better? Matthew Stead: And from the, um, from the ISP, um, experience, um, compared to your experience now, what are some of the biggest differences that you’ve observed between the old, the other sites and the, and the new site?  Liz Beavis: Yeah, I think it, it’s really just that you’re on your own. Um, so you’re relying on good technicians. To figure things out, you can, you need a parts and service agreement with the OEM, um, so you can reach out to them and ask for support, but they’re, you are the lowest priority. So yeah, you don’t always get information, [00:06:00] so you just gotta be set up to figure things out. But then that does give you the freedom to make changes and to, to fix the things that you’re saying, whereas. Often the OEMs are so, uh, stuck with that mindset of, oh, we, we don’t want people to know we’ve got a serial defect. So we’ll just keep kind of patching things up and hopefully, hopefully no other sites find out about this. You know, instead of just saying, Hey, we know this is an issue, here’s a good way of fixing it. ’cause just all I understand, all of the liability that throws, that, that flows from that, uh, you know. You can’t handle it. Allen Hall: Does that change your perspective, knowing all those things? Do you have a, just a unique background in so many ways where you’ve seen, uh, pretty much all sides of wind operations. How do you think about that now? How are you, are you are addressing contracts differently or are you thinking about the way you staff differently just from your experience?[00:07:00] How does that play into it?  Liz Beavis: Yeah, so definitely from a owner’s point of view. I understand what the limitations are of the OEMs and the ISPs, and so I know, I know what I can push them to do and what I can’t push them to do. And even though you’ve got the contract in front of you and you know it, it says you’re gonna do this, there’s certain things where you, you know, that you need to let it slide because it’s just not reasonable to push it. You just, you just know that they can’t achieve things. Um. But then also going into new r and m contracts, you kind of know what’s critical, what to ask for, what, you know, what, what we need to make sure that we’re getting right from the start.  Allen Hall: How do you sort that out? Because I’ve heard, uh, I’ve talked to many operators. that are doing O&M and they look at the contract much like you, and then they, they look at the contract and go, okay, here’s are the things I can probably get. Here’s the things I can’t get. How did you come to that determination is just because you’ve been so close at all this time? Because I think a [00:08:00] lot of people in wind that are new look at that contract, as the rule of law and you’re gonna get everything in there. But I think the more experienced people realize it’s more of a negotiation or starting point, even  Liz Beavis: particularly, uh, like Comparing construction to O&M I say, construction’s the. sprint and O&M’s the marathon, and you’re in a relationship with this O&M provider for 10, 15, 25, 30 years, depending on your contract terms. So you can’t go in at year three and just have a big fight with each other And you know you, need to, You need to be able to work together. So it’s understanding what the value drivers are on both sides and, um. And focusing on that. So, you know, for us as the owner, we, we just want generation. So even though availability is what’s in the contract, really what we want is generation. So if we can figure things out together to get the maximum generation, and maybe that helps the O&M [00:09:00] provider save some costs because, they’re not just doing what’s in the contract, but they’re doing what actually helps us get generation. That’s, that’s kind of the. That’s how we work. And then the contracts there. If, everything falls apart, you’ve got a legal document underpinning where you can say, hold on, you were supposed to do this. This is the damages we can claim. And this is where we can go with it. But you’re not just enforcing every, clause. Because some of it’s been written so long ago, it’s not even relevant.  Allen Hall: Does that lead you down the path of shadow monitoring then?  Liz Beavis: My view is I would rather have, I would rather be at a point where I have a relationship with the OEM where we can agree that there’s no point me spending money that they’ve already spent and that. That we get access to their data. Even if I pay half of what I would spend on shadow monitoring as an additional fee to the OM provider, so they get some revenue and they provide me with the data, I think that’s a better outcome for both parties than to [00:10:00] feel like I’m there looking over their shoulder monitoring what they’re doing. So, I mean, it depends on what your relationship is, but our, our preference would be. That we’re working together and that we’re both benefiting from something rather than spending more money than we need to on doing something twice.  Matthew Stead: Maybe a question, Liz, in terms of your, you know, former, you know, thermal, uh, background, what, what sort of lessons learned or, or things did you sort of bring across from that, that previous um, experience? You know, although six years ago,  Liz Beavis: I think that the first thing was safety. There was, um. There’s a big difference and, and particularly coming into a construction site, that’s, it’s always a challenge because there’s just this time crunch and cost crunch and, and it’s all just, we need to just jump in and get everything done. We can’t stop and make sure we’re doing this safely or properly. Um, so getting my [00:11:00] team to stop thinking like that. We are here, we’re doing o and m. We’re here for the long term. If we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it properly. If we need to wait a couple of days to have the right tooling, that’s what we’re gonna do. And just kind of slow everyone down and then, and get the right procedures and the equipment and, and everything. Uh, so we did that. Um, and then. I think the other thing I’ve probably just brought across is understanding of the market. So I was quite involved, um, with thermal generation and, um, market and bidding and um, and I think if you come into Wind Farm o and m, you’re kind of separated from that because you are just there to maintain the turbines and you, you don’t care what the market’s doing, but your owner cares what the market’s doing. So being able to, to think about, well, what. What does my owner actually need? Um, and, and do that, you know, support that as well. Then you, you’re better at [00:12:00] delivering the o and m,  Allen Hall: right? Because it does add a little bit of perspective to it. I see a lot of operations and maintenance where availability is a thing, but it’s not like the top priority. It’s, it’s odd how they think about it. At the end of the day, you’re producing power, and I know Tilt Renewable, having been to your offices there. Is focused on availability. You’re selling power to the grid. You need to be looking at what the prices are. You’re actually monitoring that. There’s, it’s a complicated enterprise. It’s much more complex than I think, uh, you would think of a old power company, uh, particularly in the states where everything just kind of runs and it’s, it just happens in Australia. It’s a lot more freewheeling, I would say, and there’s more emphasis on. Making sure the assets are running, that they’re available and they are producing power. That must change the way you think about managing the assets and particularly. You, you, there will be problems, right? There’s always problems. Are you, are you trying to then categorize [00:13:00] problems and trying to assess when you’re gonna take turbines out? Or you’re just saying, Hey, we just can’t fix this thing until next year. There must be some sort of organization going on there. How do you think about that in terms of keeping your availability so high?  Liz Beavis: That’s one thing that I had to change my mindset. From thermal to wind because there’s a lot of work you can do on a thermal power station while it’s running. Whereas anything, anything you wanna fix on a wind turbine, you’re taking it down. And then on a thermal power station, you have a six or eight week outage where everything’s shut down, 200 people turn up, everything gets fixed. And then you run it back up again and then you hope that it doesn’t come back down. Yeah. Whereas the wind turbine, it’s like, it’s, the way I see it is just if it’s running, it’s running. You don’t go and stop it for any reason. You know, so it’s you, you only, you’re going there to do reactive work. When it stops and you’re going to do proactive annual maintenance work every 12 months, [00:14:00] and it’s really about getting the scope of your annual maintenance, right, so that you’re addressing everything. And you know, the goal is like, this is what was drilled into me with GE was the goal is you go to that turbine once a year or twice a year if it has a semi-annual. Maintenance requirement, but that’s, that’s what you’re trying to achieve. So you’re trying to get the reliability to a point where you only need to go there when it breaks, and Oh, so you only need to go there for the annual maintenance and it shouldn’t be breaking down in between. Unfortunately, that’s. Very difficult to achieve. I think. I think what it was interesting to see the older turbines, um, have a lot more engineering, uh, margin in them. Everything sort of does perform better.  Allen Hall: Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you because I do think there’s a difference between a slightly older turbine, even a turbine that was manufactured 20 years ago versus today. It does seem like there’s a lot more knowledge about those turbines. Maybe it’s just, uh, tribal knowledge. Over time you’re gonna learn more about them, but there, there is a huge knowledge [00:15:00] gap. Between on a new turbine, you just, you just don’t know what you don’t know. How are you trying to address that? Are, are you getting involved in RCAs or are you, are you trying to be proactive monitoring scada, the, it’s just a lot of your plate here. How do you try to manage all that and what’s your process there?  Liz Beavis: So the way the contract is structured, that’s all the OEM’s responsibility. Uh, but what, what we’re trying to do is say, well, we’ve got a lot of expertise in our asset management team. Involve us. Like, we’d like to help. We can ask the questions, we can tell you what we’ve seen on other sites. We can, you know, we, we can actually help with this. Um, it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s kind of awkward that, um. There’s no requirement in the RM phase for them to provide us with an RCA under this contract. So, you know, there’s some, there’s some contracts where they may have to, but, um, yeah, [00:16:00] I think that’s an oversight because we’re kind of guessing or we’re, we’re getting given. Part of the information, but we don’t necessarily have the whole story. And I think the advantage that the OEM has is that they’ve got hundreds of thousands of turbines out there and they, they’re monitoring all of them. They, they should be able to figure out what’s going on a lot easier than I can. I’m looking at two sites and saying, oh, hey, is, is that an issue? Or is, you know, they’ve got all that data. And, and that was the challenge with an RSP is that you, you’re only looking at a limited. Subset of sites, you’re not necessarily being able to put everything together, but I’m not sure that we all get the value of that knowledge, whether, whether they’re actually crunching the data or whether they’re keeping it to themselves because they don’t want us to know about serial issues. Um, but yeah, I, I feel like the OEMs could be leveraging that more.  Allen Hall: Are you able to bridge that gap sometimes with the [00:17:00]OEMs? I do feel like the OEMs have. Pretty good. Uh, at a minimum. I mean, I think a lot of times they’re really good on the back offices, on the engineering side of the technical expertise and the subject matter experts do exist there, and they are pretty quick to get to the root cause of a problem. But are you able to get to those back offices, to those engineering experts and to talk to them? Have you found a way to do that, that that kind of works for, for both sides of that, of that business?  Liz Beavis: Something I found really helpful is, um. We’ve joined some international groups. There’s a few groups around that say the O2 O, they’ve, they were O2 O wind, they’re now O2 O renewables and also epr, um, electric Power Research Institute. So we’ve joined them. We are sharing sort of general, um, breakdown information and issues. Um. Within those groups. And so then we are hearing from, you know, there’s a wind farm in Scotland that says, oh yeah, we’ve got the same [00:18:00] component. We are seeing this issue. And then I say, oh, well I better go check if we’ve got that problem. And then, you know, so, so we’re, we’re kind of owner to owner learning things, so that’s quite helpful.  Allen Hall: So you’re leveraging the other, uh, operators of the same turbines or, or really something similar to what you’re operating globally? That’s a, that’s a smart move and a lot of operators do not do that. I mean, and maybe in the States there’s a couple of, of organizations in the states, EPRI being one of them. O2 O is, I think, uh, definitely popular in Europe. They’re both very effective. So in instead of having to rely on the OM all the time, you’re basically word of mouth with other operators saying, I have this problem. Does anybody else have this problem? Have you solved it? Or maybe what the OEM has said, maybe the OEM has has told another operator what the answer is. Uh, is that the way you’re kind of thinking about attacking that problem?  Liz Beavis: Yes, but we’re not sharing any confidential information [00:19:00]through those forums.  Allen Hall: Never gonna do that. However, it does, I mean, if you get some heads nodding in those discussions, like an oh two, oh, uh, uh, meeting or even an EPRI meeting, uh, or e-cig in the United States. Basically doing something very similar. A lot of times I don’t think operators use them, the, maybe the way that they should, they, they, they turn into kind of complaint sessions instead of solutions, uh, that could be shared. Are you finding that you’re able to get to some solutions through those organizations? Liz Beavis: I probably found out more about failure modes and things to look out for. Necessarily then solutions. But yeah, it, it’s definitely, it’s definitely been valuable.  Matthew Stead: Um, and Liz, we went for a bit of a drive around your site. Once  Liz Beavis: I be how many days, Matt? You’re like, oh, come up for a day. And then I said, you’re gonna need to come for longer. Matthew Stead: The one day turned into three days. It was a wonderful time. Um, um, however, I think a part of our conversation was about. All the extra balance [00:20:00] of plant. And, um, I know you’ve got a few te uh, pet topics around balance of plant, including, um, toilet facilities. So maybe you could, uh, share your thoughts on, you know, the, the forgotten part of the, the site. Liz Beavis: Okay. Well, I can talk about toilets. Um, I think, I think we got away with. Um, small wind farms with just an o and m building and, um, technicians could drive back to the toilet pretty easily. Now. Cooper’s Gap Wind Farm is um, uh, 123 turbines. The furthest turbine is an hour’s drive. No one’s driving, you know. Back from the turbine and then to the r and m building and then back to their work site. So, um, we need to, we need to consider that in the design phase, but also I’ve just been talking about it every opportunity ’cause um, people just aren’t aware and that we need to think about what facilities we’re providing to our technicians. And particularly in Australia, we’ve got a big [00:21:00] energy transition we’re trying to deliver and we’re not gonna get the workforce. If people think that wind farms aren’t nice places to work, so I, I think it’s really important. So I’ve, um, I have purchased a demountable containerized toilet facility that’s gonna go out into one of our furthest corners of the wind farm. Um, so I’m gonna establish that and then look at where else we need to put them. And that was, um, $50,000 Australian delivered. So it’s really. A small cost considering everything else we spend on that one farm. Um, just to provide suitable facilities for our workforce. So, uh, I’m encouraging people to think about that and I’ve had some good conversations since I brought it up at wma, so it’s been good. Matthew Stead: Yeah, it also struck me several, um, several challenges were a much bigger issue than you may have thought them to be at the start.  Liz Beavis: I think what I found interesting is, uh, o over all the different wind farms is, um, it’s [00:22:00] really difficult to predict what the civil cost is gonna be. You, you can have some wind farms that are just dead flat and have very minimal civil costs, but as soon as you build a wind farm. On a ridge, you know, ridge line and you’ve got lots of bridges and steep roads and drainage issues. Yeah. And then depending on the erod ability of the soil and the rainfall, suddenly you’re out there grading pretty regularly. Um, I have now learned way too much about civil engineering, and it’s not my area of interest, but, um, I think there’s, there’s better decisions that can be made during construction and. Design stage of the wind farm. There’s, you know, there’s some roads, uh, I’ve driven around as a civil contractor at one of my sites and, um, he was involved during construction and he’s also a landholder and he said, well, I told them to put the road over there where it would’ve been sort of gentle slope up the hill, but they wanted to just build a shorter road. So they [00:23:00] just put a straight up the hill and then they had to bring, um, extra machines in to tow all the components up the hill. ’cause they made it too steep. But that’s then what they’ve left us. For RM to maintain, you know, so that it’s just bad decisions and, and I think it’s, yeah, it gets very fraught during construction. And then, um, you know, towards the end you’re just trying to get the project finished and you’re trying to get handover and you’re just worried about the turbines, you know, like what’s happening with these generators. And all of that becomes a focus. And meanwhile, the, the civil work hasn’t been finished to the standard and the drains haven’t been built to the drawing. And, and that’s just. The last thing on anyone’s list. ’cause we’re trying to get the turbines right. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s a cost that you then wear for the rest of the project, so it’s worth thinking about. Um, and in Australia we’ve also, it’s quite common for the electrical balancer plant to be maintained by the OEM. Um, and we’re starting to find it’s not really their area of [00:24:00] expertise. They’re not really set up for it. You know, there’s sort of a question mark whether that’s. The best approach or whether, uh, as an owner, we are better to split that out and look after it ourselves, but then that complicates availability guarantees. And who’s responsible for the underground cable? Yes. And there’s, there’s a lot to think about.  Allen Hall: I was gonna ask you about that because that is an important difference, uh, in Australia where the BOP seems to be, uh, more, or the responsibility of the operator than the OEM, and that must be at least somewhat Australian specific because of the nature of the country and the difficulties that are involved there, but. Does that mean that as you, as the operator need to be bringing on people that know, uh, substation, architecture, underground cables, transformers, pads, uh, roads, all that, is that something that you just have decided that it makes more sense to do and we can probably do it [00:25:00] better, uh, as a, to make availability better and make the site more accessible? Is that, is that the thought process that went into that?  Liz Beavis: I think the driver was, um. The lenders. So, so finance, um, they, and that’s, that’s why that there was a real trend for the fully wrapped contract. So a, a 25 year fully wrapped contract and, and the finance world is de-risked, you know, it’s magically de-risked because, because you’ve locked it in and it’s all just gonna get done. And it’s, and now I think everyone’s realizing, well, it’s not actually DeRoot. Like there’s, there’s a lot. That we need to manage and, and now we’ve lost control over it. And actually maybe we’d like to pull that back, but it, it’s, it’s site specific. You know what you. What makes sense to, to give to the o and m contractor versus separating it out and managing it  Allen Hall: Well then let’s talk about the two wind farms you are involved with day to day, Silverton [00:26:00] and Cooper’s Gap, and now they are not next door to one another. Silverton’s in New South Wales, far west. Right. And then, uh, Cooper’s Gap is up in Queensland, way up north Counter by Brisbane. Uh, those are what, 500,000 miles apart from one another. They’re a long ways away.  Liz Beavis: Yeah, I haven’t looked at how far they’re, but um, so I live near Cooper’s Gap, so everyone in Melbourne’s quite pleased with that because it’s a pain for them to get here. ’cause it, I, it’s a three hours, I’m three hours drive from Brisbane. That’s not even North Queensland. That’s, I’m still in Southeast Queensland. Really.  Allen Hall: Right. True. Yeah.  Liz Beavis: So then for me to get to Broken Hill, I have to drive to Brisbane and then fly to Sydney or fly to Adelaide and then fly into Broken Hill. So it’s two flies. So we did have, we’ve got another asset manager who was very involved with Silverton, uh, for a long time, and she lives in Sydney. And so I. When I came in, because I lived near Cooper’s Gap, obviously I took Cooper’s Gap and then it made sense for me to also have Silverton because it’s another [00:27:00] GE three X site. So that’s why I’ve got those two. Yeah. Uh, even though it’s not my closest site, so I go out to Silverton about four times a year. Um. I make sure I spend a week there and I drive around and look at everything, and I go up tower and I spend time with the team and I, I do feel like I don’t have as much control over that site as Cooper’s Gap. I’m here most days and I’m, and I’m in the pre-start and I see where all the teams are going, and I go and talk to them. Yeah, so I, I get a lot more information and I think as an asset manager, it’s really important to be on site and to be up tower and to be talking to everyone. Um, so when I do go to Silverton, I make sure I go there for a long time, or I see some owners will just pop in for the day, or they, they’ll sort of come in at 10 o’clock in the morning and, and then leave. So they don’t even see preset. You can’t really get a feel for what’s going on in site if you’re not. Um, so I would like to be at Silverton more often, but [00:28:00] I just don’t like the 12 hours of traveling it takes me to get there. Um, but um, we have, so teams is amazing, right? Like what we can do remotely now. Um, I have a fortnightly call with the site manager and we go through what turbines are on and what’s off and what’s he working on and what issues. And, um, so I do get a lot of information. Um, not being on site and, and all the systems that we have access to, I’m constantly spying on them. They all know that. But also I’m there to help. Like, I’ll, I’ll read the fault code and go, what does this fault code mean? That sounds really bad. And they’re like, oh yeah, we better go check that. So, um, yeah, we we’re working together. Um. And it’s really just, yeah, they know that we’re, we just wanna try and get the availability up. We don’t wanna be charging them damages all the time. We, it, it doesn’t really cover our costs. So it’s better for all of us that we just improve the availability and it doesn’t matter who’s doing it, we just need to figure it out. [00:29:00] Allen Hall: Well, Liz, you’re a busy person and in your off time you co-founded an organization called Power Up Queensland and you mentor female engineers. Uh, and you have done that for a while throughout your career. What’s your message to women that are considering entering the wind energy sector?  Liz Beavis: Oh, we need more women in wind. Onsite, not just in the, in the head office. And, um, I’m fixing the toilet situation, so I’ve got it under control. Um, yeah, it’s, it’s really sad when I sort of look around at preset and there’s, I’m, I’m the only woman in the room usually. Um, but yeah, I, like, I go up tower and, um. I think it’s, it’s a lot of fun if you’re, if you’re someone that likes heights and doing something a bit more physical. And I think also the, um, for the, from the trade point of view, you get to work across mechanical and electrical. So if you’re not, uh, you know, if you’re interested in sort of working across your trade instead [00:30:00] of just a purely being a mechanic or an electrician, I think it’s a really interesting, um, uh, workplace to be in. You get. And, and there’s lots of civil work to do and, um. And then as an asset manager, you know, you can, you can come into that from a, from a mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or mechanical engineer. There’s, there’s lots of civil work to do, but even in our team, we’ve got people from finance and accounting backgrounds and, um, trade backgrounds. So it’s, it’s, um, something that you can come. From a broad range of, um, disciplines. Um, and I just, I love being out and about this morning before I came on the call, I had to go out and put some signs out for a biosecurity issue. So, so I like, that’s the kind of thing, like I, I’m not stuck in the office. I just go for a drive and put some signs on the gate and yeah. So it’s, you’re not stuck in the office. I think it’s, it’s really. It’s, it’s a really awesome job. [00:31:00] So I encourage, yeah, people that want, don’t wanna be in the office and actually be outdoors and involved and doing some physical stuff. It’s a good job.  Allen Hall: Well, Liz, you’re a wealth of knowledge and uh, it’s always great to see you in Australia and thanks for coming to the Woma event. If people wanna reach out to you and connect about o and m issues or entering the wind industry, how can they do that?  Liz Beavis: Um, so I’m on LinkedIn. Maybe I can just put my email in the show notes because I get, I get a lot of LinkedIn connection requests and I sort of don’t know who’s who.  Allen Hall: We’ll definitely put your email in the show notes, and I know we’ve had a lot of discussions of, of getting you on this podcast. I’ve been really looking forward to this discussion, and this has been great. We need to have you on more often. So, Liz, the invitation is. Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast and yeah, we’ll see you soon.  Liz Beavis: Thanks [00:32:00] El.

Vestas hasn’t shared SCADA data after a South Korea turbine collapse, citing an expired warranty. Plus workers at Nordex in Iowa are concerned about tariffs. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strikeTape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes. And Fergus is here. Hi. Welcome to our top story. This week is a wind turbine collapse that happened in South Korea at the Changpo Wind Power Complex in Yeongdeok, and the turbine lost a blade. There’s some video here that was recorded when the turbine collapsed, so it happened a couple of months ago, and investigators have been trying to determine the cause of that failure. They’re having a little bit of difficulty because they would like to access the SCADA system of that turbine because that would have a lot of more information about [00:01:00] how the tower was operating at that particular moment. And they’re having trouble in that it is a Vestas turbine and Vestas has not released the SCADA data and it’s citing an expired warranty. Now, Rosemary, this leads to a lot of problems because obviously there’s a ton of sensors in wind turbines today, and they can help determine causes of failures pretty rapidly. But without it, you’re just really looking at video in this particular collapse. Rosemary Barnes It’s amazing that you can look at video. The video is far more useful than the SCADA data is, probably. Um, yeah, it’s, well, I’ve never actually, like, I’ve worked on a lot of RCAs and I’ve never actually got to see video footage of the incident, so that’s actually really cool that they’ve got this dash cam footage. Looking at it now, you can, um, see the lower, probably two thirds of the turbine tower, so you can see the blades coming past. I wish the video would start just like 10 seconds earlier. [00:02:00] Um, because maybe you can see a bit of wobble in the tower. You can see that one of the blades is already missing a tip, or the tip kind of flies off anyway, so maybe it was bent. So definitely looks to me like the root cause was that there was a blade failure. The, um, part of the blade broke off, caused a rotor imbalance, which then meant that one of the blades hit the tower and then it’s really easy for a tower to buckle once it’s got some damage in it. So that, that in itself, like, that’s not an uncommon scenario. Um, and yeah, for sure, like you would ask for the SCADA data, but, uh, I don’t think it’s accurate that they’re saying. There must have been a faulty sensor or something because when there’s a rotor imbalance, it should stop, um, stop the turbine. But I do know from experience, it does not always stop the turbine quickly enough to stop this happening. So, um, I’m not, I’m not sure that the SCADA data would tell you anything [00:03:00] groundbreaking. However, I think it is very interesting Vestas are very publicly not sharing because it’s out of warranty because to me, access to the SCADA data is a key part of being able to operate your turbine safely. And you don’t sell a turbine — like you might sell a turbine with a two year warranty, sure, but that doesn’t mean that you are selling a turbine that can only be operated safely for two years. That’s just like absolutely insane and contrary to — at least a lot of the world’s laws, there’s laws around, you know, how safely you can operate equipment, and especially energy generation assets have specific laws about that. You have to be able to operate them safely and yeah, from what we can see here, like you can’t get access to the SCADA data. So in, in this case, I don’t know if there was a problem with the turbine controller that contributed to this problem. I, I mean, I’m, I’m always a bit surprised that a turbine can shake itself apart and it’s not, you know, there isn’t a sensor in there that can stop it in time to stop the collapse because if you take just the population of turbines that have collapsed, which is, you know, [00:04:00] very, very few from considering the whole global population, but looking at those ones that have collapsed, it’s pretty common way that it happens is from, um, part of a blade falling off and then a rotor imbalance causing the tower to, um, start wobbling and the blades to hit the tower. Allen Hall So would it be in the control laws, Rosemary, where the shutdown would happen in terms of detecting vibration or motion? Maybe swing of the tower? Would that would then drive a safety circuit? Rosemary Barnes At a certain, at a certain level? Um, ’cause all of those, like the rotor does get in a bit of imbalance. The tower does accelerate in, you know, four and a half side to side, that all happens and can happen like quite, quite a lot as well. Like if you’re inside a wind turbine and when they stop it, um, then it makes like a very noticeable shudder right as that stops. And if you do an emergency stop, um, hopefully not while, you know, hopefully you’re not inside the tower when it goes from full, um, operation [00:05:00] to stopping as soon as, as quickly as possible. But that does make a big, um, jump. So, you know, like it’s not shutting down every time that there’s some kind of imbalance or, um, tower acceleration. But yeah, it just, the thing is, it’s, you just, they’re big and heavy, right? And there’s just so much inertia in the system that things can’t happen that fast. Like even if the control system can respond really quickly, it doesn’t mean that it can respond — like it can actually physically stop things before it’s had, you know, even one rotation to hit the tower, um, can be enough. What’s really interesting is that it could be a control system problem, right? That would — that they have now learned. There’s some faulty logic they need to replace it across the wind farm. But Vestas is saying, we’re not gonna tell you if that’s the case or not, because you can’t access this data. And I think that that is really interesting because like I’m constantly frustrated by how little, um, cooperation you can get for root cause analysis and like you can [00:06:00] understand it, no one wants to share their data, but it is in theory covered by laws, at least in, uh, Australian states. You, you know, that you, you’re required to provide information to operate the assets safely for its lifetime. And I, it just, to me is really highlighting that that’s not the case. It’s, it’s not an unusual situation, is kind of what I’m saying. Um, it’s very common that they don’t wanna cooperate, and I’m surprised that they’re happy to say that so, so publicly. Allen Hall Well, the threshold needs to be set somewhere when investigators are looking into an accident like this. I always think you try to help the investigators as much as you can. In the airplane world when there’s an accident, that’s one of the first things that happens is they go pull all the data from the aircraft and then go search through it and see what happened. In the wind turbine world, that’s not necessarily the case, but there is a lot of data at all the OEMs, and it’s not necessarily locked into the turbine. It’s usually remote access, so it would be very easy to give access to [00:07:00] investigators. So it’s, it’s curious to me as to why there’s any hesitation at all if the Korean investigators wanna see the data, just give it to ’em. Rosemary Barnes Yeah. Especially because like from just the brief look that I’ve had, it doesn’t look like it’s gonna turn out that there’s some problem with the turbine controller. If Vestas aren’t to blame, it would be much easier for them to just privately release the data under an NDA and say, look, hey, it’s nothing. It’s not here. But I will say that, um, in the RCAs that I’ve worked on, safety regulators can compel data from the owner and the operator, but it’s not so clear that they have the right to get data from the manufacturer. When you’ve got full service agreements, you can get that because the manufacturer is the operator. But in this case, if Vestas had nothing to do with the operation, then like, I don’t know what the laws are in South Korea, but it is possible at least that they don’t have any right to compel Vestas for the data. Um, for the data. And I think that [00:08:00] is wrong. And, um, this, you know, will hopefully highlight to people, safety regulators around the world — hey, you know, do we need to be changing this regulation a little bit to make sure that when you sell a wind turbine, or you know, any, anything else, any other big bit of industrial equipment, when you sell it, you have to — you have to provide enough information for the life of the wind turbine to operate it safely. Doesn’t mean you need to give away all your trade secrets, but it needs to be safe. And part of that is when you have a catastrophic failure, you do need to make sure that this is not gonna repeat itself across the whole wind farm or across, you know, every turbine of this type in the world. That’s why you do a root cause analysis after the fact. Like you’re not saving this turbine. It’s in like absolute pieces on the ground, right? Like the most value you’ll ever get out of this turbine again is probably recycling the steel. Um, that’ll be the most value. So you don’t do the root cause analysis for the lost asset. You do it to make sure that you understand what’s happened and you are [00:09:00] able to, um, know ahead of time if this is a risk for future assets. Um, and you can’t, yeah, you cannot do that if you don’t have all the data. So, yeah. Very interesting. Allen Hall Like we talked about at the WOMA conference a few months ago, access to SCADA data is paramount for a lot of operators. And, uh, when contracts are assigned, a lot of times that is not lined into the contract — that I will have full access to the SCADA data — and it can be, which I think a lot of operators don’t even consider. So that’s a negotiated item for most contracts and most wind turbine purchases. Especially in Europe now with the new data laws in Europe. I think all the OEMs have to provide that data regardless if there’s an accident or not. You just have — yeah, I think they have to give full access. The means of doing it, I think it’s being implemented this year. Well, it sounds like talking to operators they are just getting some of that data, but once that door opens in Europe, do you think the rest of the world will probably follow? Rosemary Barnes Yeah, I mean, it’s one thing, like they don’t want you reverse engineering their [00:10:00] IP. That’s, that’s basically it. All their trade secrets. Allen Hall Could you do that? I mean, that, that, that’s always the, the, the real issue, right? So I hear that quite a bit from OEMs. We don’t want you to reverse engineer the turbine, but can you do that from the SCADA data? That seems like an impossible task. Rosemary Barnes I also don’t think that anybody is doing anything that tricky, that it’s really gonna be worth the, the effort, you know. And it’s one thing, like it’s annoying — you can’t access the control system. Um, so you can’t make improvements, you know, like you could get a bit more yield out of your wind farm if you can start doing things like wake steering or, you know, changing the speed of operation to, um, you know, depending on environmental conditions, and those, like you, you can improve your operations a bit from that. And so it’s been annoying that you, you can’t actually do those cool projects because you can’t get into the control system. And you know, there exist companies that will come in and take a, a, you know, 10-year-old wind turbine, rip out the control system, put in a new [00:11:00] one, and people go through that whole painful, expensive process just so that they can get control over operation and the data. And that’s, that’s annoying. And, you know, maybe getting an extra, you know, I don’t know, two or 3% AEP out of your wind farm is a big deal. But, um, you know, that’s on the one hand. But on the other hand, when it comes to being able to safely operate your asset, it just shouldn’t be any question. You know? And I don’t know why a manufacturer would be really digging their heels in on this because like I do see, and I hope that this is the kind of incident that makes safety regulators go, hey, you know, this isn’t, this isn’t cool. This is not okay, that we don’t have the information we need to make sure that these turbines are safe across the rest of the, um, the country, you know. Like an overzealous safety regulator could easily be like, oh, okay, well we don’t have a root cause, we can’t rule out that there’s not a fleet-wide problem — all of these Vestas turbines across, um, South [00:12:00] Korea have to shut down now. You know, like that, that is a potential outcome that could happen. That would be terrible for Vestas. Um, so I just don’t understand why they don’t just give the data. — SPONSOR: PES WIND MAGAZINE — Allen Hall As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial — and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PESwind.com today. Allen Hall Well, a wind turbine factory in West Branch, Iowa just reopened after sitting idle for 12 years and already its workers are worried about tariffs. Nordex restarted the facility in July of last year to manufacture nacelles and drivetrains for the American and Canadian markets. [00:13:00] Orders are strong for this Nordex facility. Alliant Energy awarded Nordex contracts for up to 190 turbines — that’s pretty good — representing over 1,060 megawatts of capacity, the largest single award in the company’s 25-year history in American operations. Uh, but the concerns at the Nordex facility at the moment have to do with tariffs, where a lot of the components that are coming into the factory are running into hefty tariffs, which makes the margins really tough for Nordex to operate that plant. Uh, so the tax advantages of having a facility in the United States are really being offset by some of these extra taxes that are being levied on wind turbine components. Uh, this is not the only facility in Iowa that must be thinking hard about this. The TPI facility in Iowa that is going through the bankruptcy hearings at the moment. [00:14:00] There’s an offer from a company to buy that facility, or acquire that facility, and a couple of the TPI facilities down in Mexico. As it stands, GE is backing the Iowa plant in case those initial purchases of those factories fall through — GE would like to have the Iowa factory, most likely for tax purposes, because some of the projects probably depend upon the tax advantages of building particularly blades and large components like nacelles in the US. So Iowa is a real key here. The restart and some of the increased operations in the United States are indicative of how things are going, I think, globally in the wind energy world, where factories have been closed or they’ve been considering closing a number of factories in Europe and trying to find key places to manufacture components where maybe the tariffs are lower or the operational costs are lower, or [00:15:00] labor costs are lower. Uh, we’re seeing a real big shuffle at the moment. Do you think that this is gonna settle up very quickly? ‘Cause it does seem like there is a migration to the UK because of the amount of money being spent in the United Kingdom, and a migration out of Northern Europe, and probably a migration out of America over time. Rosemary Barnes I mean, it’s interesting how much governments are playing a role. You know, government policies are playing a role in where manufacturing is happening. Um, I think it’s not even like you would’ve said until really recently that you put factories where labor is cheap. And, you know, for the really big components, you want to get roughly close to where the final project is, or at least close to a port so that you can get on a ship and, you know, ’cause um, overland transport is an issue. Um, but now I don’t even think that the labor is the main factor anymore, and maybe even [00:16:00] the geographical location in the world is not even the biggest issue now. It’s about, you know, where are the favorable conditions, and whether that’s because, you know, because of tariffs. And so I do think that we see in the UK the biggest thing that they have — it’s certainly not cheap labor, right? Um, it is, it’s pretty well located for a lot of projects. Um, the UK government has got a good, um, plan for, you know, a decade or more into the future. Right. You know, they’ve also executed on some of those, so we know that it’s not all just talk, and they’ve got some pretty good certainty about these projects and how the economics are going to work out. Allen Hall The UK is a good example of, of maybe a process that’s going well at the moment, but the long-term prospects I think is where everybody gets a little bit nervous. This thing that happened in America like two years ago where everybody was really excited about creating new factories — and then we get down the line a little bit and now we’re not happy to have factories. It really depends upon how [00:17:00] dedicated the government is and how many, uh, barriers they put in to prevent the money from going away. Right? When you lock in long-term funding where it doesn’t put the projects at risk, then it’s great, but if it can be wiped away by the next administration or just the passage of a single bill, then it just makes it really risky. Rosemary Barnes I think I just wanted to make the point that, you know, labor is expensive in the UK, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have manufacturing, even, you know, like wind turbine blades at least are a very labor intensive thing to manufacture compared to most things these days. Um, but even then it’s not the most important thing anymore. So, you know, um, any country has the ability to put in place the ingredients that would be needed to get, uh, manufacturing of wind turbines in their own country. Um, so, you know, it’s a choice to a large extent, but people are scared to commit long term. You know, the manufacturers are scared to [00:18:00] commit a factory. Countries are scared to commit to a pipeline ’cause they don’t wanna be, you know, interfering in the market. But it’s just, it’s a big lumpy market that just makes it hard for people to want to invest and commit. And so, you know, if you want that manufacturing in your country, then you can, you can get it if you give confidence. Allen Hall At what point do you make decisions about manufacturing for wind turbines or even solar panels in your country with what’s happening in the Middle East? Does that really change the dynamic quite a bit, where the incremental cost delta of making it in-country is totally worth it with the knowledge that you’ll be free of all, uh, connections to the Middle East and the turmoil that does seem to happen there every couple of years. Rosemary Barnes It’s not like a direct enough link that it’s gonna make people make that decision overnight. We’re not buying our wind turbines from the Middle East currently, right? So, you know, existing turbine supply chain. So I think [00:19:00] it could definitely make you wanna turn up the pace at which you buy wind turbines and install them. And if you’ve got, you know, um, bigger pipelines, then it nudges you more and more towards local manufacturing. I guess that people are nervous in general of relying on other supply chains, um, or supply chains from overseas, but it’s a huge difference between, you know, relying on liquid fuels, which are, you know, arriving every day and you need them to continue arriving every day. And if one strait gets closed and that’s a 20% decline in the, you know, volume that can be moved around — you know, try and take 20% of, um, demand out of the system — and that’s obviously huge. But if you had the same thing, if it was wind turbine blades being transported through the strait, then, um, you know, it’d be no new wind farms [00:20:00] this year. It wouldn’t be that all of your existing wind turbines have to be turned off — like they keep on running. It’s just that the future doesn’t grow as fast as you would like it to. So I think it’s just like a much slower timeframe for shocks if you are relying on, um, wind turbines and solar panels, even if they’re made overseas. I still think that it is worth considering, like for security, like if you got into a big long war, and especially with, um, China because they’re the ones that make most of, uh, solar panels and batteries — at least, not wind turbines, although they are a major manufacturer, they’re not the majority for projects outside of China. Most countries are investing in some, you know, local capability to make things, you know, like Australia is investing in capacity to make solar panels, even though we know that we’ll never make them as cheap as China. The US also has done a lot to encourage local manufacturing of solar panels. Um, everybody is [00:21:00] trying to make batteries. Um, so yeah, I think we are doing that. I heard on a podcast, I think it was the Energy Transition Show, reference to, you know, every country does their study about what is net zero gonna cost. Um, and whatever the study was done in the UK, the amount that the energy transition was gonna cost — net zero by 2050, what is the cost to the economy — um, and it was, I can’t remember the number, some amount of trillions. They pointed out that that is the same as one crisis. Like what we’re going through now costs about that same amount of money. Um, you know, one fuel crisis. So it’s like if you can save yourself from one crisis, um, yeah, if you can insulate yourself from one crisis, it’s paid for itself. Do we really think that in the next 24 years — and it’s not just over 24 years, it’s, you know, it’s forever after that — do you think that there’s only gonna be one? No way. There’s gonna be lots. So I’m hopeful that, [00:22:00] um, this crisis is gonna get people thinking, hey, we can insure against this sort of thing by electrifying, um, that, you know, we’ve had oil shocks before. We’ll have them again in the future. I mean, in Australia, like, I’ve heard international commentary saying things like, you know, Australia will be a winner out of this because we’re such a big exporter of LNG. But in reality in Australia, there are petrol stations that don’t have any diesel — um, like, you know, lots of them. So people with diesel cars are driving around and around and around to, um, you know, find somewhere where they can buy fuel. And in a just delicious piece of irony, like back two or three elections ago, um, the conservative party was having this point of difference with the more progressive party — the Labor party — that, you know, they wanted to promote EVs, and the coalition said they’re gonna ruin your weekend. They’re gonna end, they’re gonna end the [00:23:00] weekend, I think was the saying, because yeah, like EVs, you can’t go camping or whatever with an EV. And now we’ve got the Easter long weekend and people are legitimately saying I can’t find fuel to drive to my plans for the Easter weekend. So now it’s diesel specifically — you know, fossil fuel cars in general — that are ending the weekend. You know, people have had their weekend ended by, um, not having an EV this time around. So I think that it should really reframe people’s thinking, refocus us. Allen Hall But isn’t that what eventually happens — is that the realism hits, and so no matter what your ideology is or your thought process, you still have to deal with what’s happening on the ground at any particular moment. And this is not the first time these events have happened, they’re not gonna be the last time that they’ve happened. Your best mode of operation is to decouple from these events as much as [00:24:00] you can. Where I think the UK is headed. Obviously Norway has, in a sense, decoupled itself because of the amount of electric vehicles that it has and the natural resources that it has. Honestly, every country — every major country — if they can decouple, is going to try to decouple. Just to stop, uh, because it has seemed like in the United States, well, since the 1970s, it’s just been this rocky road. And the discussion — at least you hear discussions here now more recently about what are we doing? We just keep doing the same thing and we end up with these trillion dollar spends to create some new future, and the future never really shifts all that much. Should we be involving ourselves in this? In terms of energy production, I think you see more of a push for more independent energy production and decoupling, which I think Australia’s headed to and could do. The UK is [00:25:00] trying to do it, and other countries are trying to do it. If you have enough of an economy to do it, when energy is one of those things, I think you just can’t not do it — you would need to be involved in solar and wind. You need to be involved in batteries and you need to be involved in LNG if you can do it, you need to be involved in nuclear if you can pull it off. All of the above is gonna be the answer for a lot of countries to get out of the strait. Rosemary Barnes I think the US is a bit different though, because, um, unlike many countries, you could become more energy secure or entirely energy secure without electrifying. I think that you, you have enough of the various different kinds of, um, fossil fuels that you could. Uh, and I’m sure that will be the response as well in the, at least immediate future in the US. Whereas other countries who don’t have that option, we’re forced to move into the future. And I think that, you know, is better for us in the long term. Allen Hall Well, this is the thing about Australia — and we pointed out at WOMA — [00:26:00] is Australia is leading the world in a lot of ways, and electrification is one of them. So the rest of the world is watching what happens in the way that Australia goes about it. A lot of wind, even more solar, and some batteries — and how that plays out’s gonna affect where the rest of the world goes. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode. And if you have found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. So for Rosie — Yolanda and Matthew are on holiday — I’m Allen Hall and we’ll see you here next time on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:27:00] Podcast.  

Allen covers Quebec’s record wind project, Madawaska’s financial close, Nova Scotia’s first direct-to-consumer wind sales, PEI’s retiring wind farm, and Aikido’s floating offshore AI data center. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Transcript Good Monday everyone. Canada is building. On the last day of March… the province of Quebec broke ground on the largest wind energy project in Canadian history. It is called Des Neiges… French for “of the snows.” One hundred and fourteen turbines. Two hundred meters tall each. Seven megawatts apiece. When the first two phases are complete… those turbines will power one hundred and forty thousand homes. The partners are Boralex, Énergir, and Hydro-Quebec. The investment: three billion dollars. Quebec Premier Francois Legault said it plainly at a recent ceremony: “There is a global race right now to dramatically increase electricity production.” He is not wrong. Also in Quebec… the Madawaska Wind Energy Project just reached financial close. EDF Renewables and Hydro-Quebec are behind that one. Two hundred and seventy-four megawatts. Forty-five turbines. Financed under Green Loan Principles. Expected to power more than forty-four thousand homes. Now… across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence… Nova Scotia is launching the Mersey River Wind project. One hundred and forty-eight-point-five megawatts. Thirty-three turbines. And here is where it gets interesting. For the first time… consumers in the province will be able to buy electricity directly from a wind farm. Not from the utility. From the source. A company called Renewall Energy is already signing contracts with homeowners… businesses… even the city of Halifax. And then there is Prince Edward Island. That province is saying goodbye to its very first wind farm. North Cape began in two thousand and one. Sixteen turbines. Each rated at just point-six-six megawatts. The province’s newest turbines? Four-point-two megawatts each. The P.E.I. Energy Corporation is seeking bids for an environmental impact assessment… the first step toward replacement. Twenty-five years ago… North Cape was a pioneer. Today… it is showing its age. That is how progress works. But let us end on this. Out in California… a company called Aikido Technologies has unveiled a floating wind platform… that also serves as an AI data center. The platform pairs an eighteen-megawatt turbine with onboard computing power… cooled by the surrounding ocean. A prototype is being built in Norway. Commercial launch: the United Kingdom… twenty twenty-eight. The CEO put it simply: “Before we go off-world… we should go offshore.” So… from Quebec to Nova Scotia to Prince Edward Island… Canada is building its energy future at full speed. And somewhere out on the open ocean… someone is building the next chapter altogether. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 6th of April 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Michael Henriksen, CEO at Wavepiston, joins to discuss wave energy’s advantages for island communities, the company’s hydraulic piston system, offshore wind co-location, and the Barbados pilot project. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Michael, welcome to the program.  Thanks, Allen. A pleasure.  Allen Hall: Well, this is gonna be a, a really interesting discussion today because, uh, I don’t know a lot about wave power, but. Obviously the world has made some substantial progress in wind and solar, but the ocean energy is still relatively unknown and. I want you to, just to paint the picture of the problem, what gap exists in renewable energy today that wave energy can fill? Michael Henriksen: Thanks. Thanks. A yes. Uh, that’s right. So ocean energy as such. And we have, um, we are working with the wave energy side of the other things here in Wave Piston has a very large potential because there’s a lot of waves around us. We all feel it when we are out in the sea, when we’re out swimming or whatever.[00:01:00] So what can it fill out that is that, that the, the interesting thing about wave energy is that is, um, timewise shift compared to wind. You know, it’s the wind that builds up the waves. The waves come, uh, the wind comes and goes, but the waves that keep rolling also afterwards. Yeah. So this timewise shift that gives some extra value. Of the energy that you can actually produce at the same time, it’s actually also, it’s a more of stable resource. So you, you don’t have these large fluctuation, it, it, it comes slowly and then dies away slowly depending on where you are in the world, of course. And then the last for the least is it’s very predictable. So stable days advantage, you can actually very precise predict what sort of your energy production profile. So by adding an extra renewable energy source, you can actually sort of, it gives extra value to both have sort as much solar PV as possible, as much wind as possible, but also have wave energy there to have sort of a better, uh, in the end, uh, [00:02:00] uh, energy production. Allen Hall: Yeah. And that, and the technology is really applicable to, uh, a lot of regions, uh, around just like island communities and places of a little more remote. Uh, because the cost of electricity on islands is incredibly high. They’re buying diesel usually, and they have a kind of a, a double problem in that they have to buy diesel to run electricity plants, and then at the same time they’re, they’re having to make fresh water all the time ’cause fresh water’s a problem. Wave Piston solves both of these problems together. But why are we in this? Space right now. I, I just wanna back up a minute. I mean, there, there does seem like for the last 30, 40 years that I can remember, the island communities have been really stuck. Solar hasn’t really filled the void. Wind has been intermittent option at times. Why waves?  Michael Henriksen: Yeah. But that’s actually, uh, where we see our, like our step to, uh, [00:03:00] you know, uh, go to market strategy, so to speak. See, that is the first step because as you mentioned, all the island communities, I would also say remote coastal communities still have this, this challenge of being dependent on fossil fuels. And as you know, it’s, it’s mainly because of course you have limited, uh, uh, uh, land space. Uh, of course they should have as much solar PB as wind as possible, but you still have this, you know, you don’t wanna have it in your backyard. It’s difficult to have, you know, spatial beautiful islands where you have, uh, tourism, et cetera. And then you have, uh, solar PB and winter turbines all over the place. It’s not gonna happen. So they’re looking at to go to, of course, offshore. What they have a lot of us is they have ocean. Yeah. And the challenge there again, is. Most places when you go just a few kilometers from shore get very, very deep. Yeah. So you need to find something that is sustainable, something that it will not spoil the view. Something that is actually, uh, uh, an [00:04:00]environmental friendly way, you know, of harnessing the energy that that is where wave energy come into the picture because. It’s happening below the sea. So the, the surface and, and, and the, it can sort of coexist with other things happening there. Of course, you need to have an area where just say this is for wave minute. Yeah. But you don’t, so sort of spoil view. You don’t have this issue with the, not in my background as such. So, so, so by coming in, of course we will be at another cost level to begin with. Yeah. By coming in, taking that part of it, then we can actually be a part of solutions for these remote islands and the coastal communities. Allen Hall: Well, because some of these islands are spending more than 10% of the GDP just on energy to import it. That’s. Really high and a, on a big burden on the economy is how do you see wave piston affecting that?  Michael Henriksen: But it’s just actually that is this, uh, it’s, it’s both, you know, in the first phase, of course, the islands in milk richi, but also you can say [00:05:00] countries as such that are dependent on fossil. Because you can just reduce your dependency and also these volatility of the price. Uh, but, but go coming back to wave piece, of course we, uh, the special thing about our system is that we actually, we can both produce electricity and we can also desalinate sea water ’cause it’s hydraulic system. So this about coming into an island community where they have both these challenges. We can actually come with a double. Sort of a, uh, solution and then, uh, work with how much energy you need, how much water you need at a given time. It could be an off grid solution or an on grid or micro grid, whatever, where, where, where. That makes sense. Yeah. So coming in and that’s actually why there is a big uh, uh, sort of. Focus on wave, not only on us, but also others in the sector, that we can be a part of the solution, which is actually when you come with a new thing, you need to sort of to say, okay, this is new, this is fantastic. But you also need to say, okay, we are part of the solution now. We are solving some of the problems you have. We’re not [00:06:00] creating new ones. Or maybe you not, not, there’s always some challenges, but we are not creating that many of big ones. You know? We are solving things. Yeah, we’re solving. Your challenges?  Allen Hall: Well, e even if you look beyond the island, island economies, uh, there’s a bigger picture here about renewable energy sector that is not really considered wave energy too much, especially for offshore wind, right? There’s, uh, uh, offshore wind, particularly in the North Sea and off the coast of England and other places where there’s our massive wave resources. We haven’t really addressed that at all. Are we missing out on a, on a lot of energy production? That would be relatively easy to go get.  Michael Henriksen: We are missing out. That’s the, the, the short, the short, uh, uh, answers there. Of course, we see relatively easy need to look at the relatively side of it because it is difficult going offshore. You know why? But it’s also why I’m asking. It’s actually why it hasn’t wave energy succeeded so far. Well, that’s simply because it’s [00:07:00]not the low hanging fruit. Now being able to take a wind turbine. You know, in Denmark it was the farmer. You could just go, or the local Smith blacksmith go, go and fix things. Now we need to go offshore immediately. You didn’t throw the wind turbines in the middle of the North Sea in the first place? No. So this of course, solving the issue with. The survivability someplace. Sometimes you have really extreme large weight, large, uh, forces you need to work with. You have your ability, you know, you have this, that, that there are millions of cycles in the corrosive, uh, environment. So all that of course you need to, uh, design the system to handle and still being able to, you can see through cost trajectory will get you down to, to a competitive cost limit. So of course, yes, we’re missing out. Uh. There is a large, uh, uh, sea space, especially in the, all the newer, uh, offshore wind turbine areas because they take up a lot of space. They have very large, beautiful wind turbines, but you have a large sea [00:08:00] space in between where you can actually use that for energy production. So, so yes. That’s, uh, definitely a large of opportunity.  Allen Hall: Well, so let’s talk about what Wave Piston has built. Can you walk us through what the Wave Energy system does, kind of how it works in simple terms and what makes it different from some of the earlier Wave energy devices that have been tried over the years? Michael Henriksen: So, so we, uh, in Wave Piston is actually going a bit back to the, the whole old style. It was not me actually, that’s the clever one There is by colleagues in, in, in, in Wave Piston. So, uh, but they, they was general analyzing. What are the, the challenges, you know, or has been the challenges, uh, on, on Wave 80. Why haven’t we succeeded so far? And it, what they came up with is actually this brilliant concept we have now that is so hard so far, not so. Put it in a, in a labor perspective. Something also I understand, I understand. Even, I understand that is, you know, we’re not, you know, fighting the forces. We’re just working together with the forces of the ocean, and that’s what it came up with, this [00:09:00] concept where we have many of these. Sail that are put in the water. They are like vertical sail. And when you put a sail in the water like that, it will move back and forth with a wave pass by and the breed thing, they say, okay, but what happens then? If you have many of these in the same structure, then actually they work together the the way together. And that way they each can convert the energy in the waves to what we, we converted to high prices seawater. But the, the Im the way, the impact on the structure of the things that hold it together, they, that’s actually reduced. So we have forced cancellation because any of these are moving in different, you know, uh, uh, timings compared to where the waves comes by. Yeah. So there are things, so to speak, so we can reduce the mooring loads. So the, the loads should keep things in place to less than a 10 compared to having, you know, individual wave in conversions out there. So that’s sort of the main thing. That’s our main concept. Uh, that’s our also made, made ip. And you can just a back to me, that’s one of our, that’s our actually test in the North Sea. We did [00:10:00] in 20 18, 20 19, um, of, of string there was only four energy collectors on. So what we see is that we, we will go plus 20 on these sales that are on the same structure and then up to 30 in the, in the thirties on each of these strings.  Allen Hall: Yeah. So the, the concept is you have a string of sales that are tied together that are. Pumps, basically water pumps, and instead of trying to create electricity in each of the pistons themselves, what the pistons are pushing water to another location, typically on shore, which is then spinning a turbine, which creates electricity. So it’s more of a. High pressure water pump system instead of something more complex. The, the, the simplicity of it, I, I like because it, it is not a lot of moving parts here. Pumps are very well known, but one of the questions I think that comes up a lot about anything in the water is survivability because the ocean can get a little [00:11:00] crazy at times. How have you designed this system to handle some of the loads from the ocean? Michael Henriksen: So how do we handle the loads? There are two things, the survivability of these extremes. We both have this, as I tried to explain before, that we that, that by having all these energy collectors, we call ’em these sails on the same structure. With the prob, we can reduce the total loads of the full system or the boring low. To, to, to less than than 10%. So one 10th of what is needed normally, and then the local low that, so these sales, they are actually built away. So if I look at what my hand said, that’s a good way of showing it, that, that, uh, when the wage gets too large, they move back and forth. Then actually it’s just like spreading the fingers on, on, on, on, on, on the, the, the sails where they do the AC CJC pitch, a bit like the wind turbine blades, but it’s actually the, the. The material in itself. Off the, the, the sail. So it’s, they consist of simple blades like my fingers, and they, they, they, uh, they, [00:12:00] um, flex out when the weight gets too high. So the material in itself is bending and opening up just like my fingers. So when you go swimming, if you open your fingers like this, you don’t get very far. But if you do it like this, you get very far. So by, just by doing that, we reduce the load dramatically. That’s a sub variability mode, so to speak, but they keep working. We don’t, it’s a passage system. There’s no active control, so it’s the material in itself that takes off the loads.  Allen Hall: You’ve been through quite the journey on the design of way Piston, and you’ve gone from like a one 30 ish scale. Lab model all the way out to full scale ocean testing. What were some of the critical milestones there? What did you learn from all that testing?  Michael Henriksen: Yeah. Uh, yeah. First of all, this about just sitting and, and, uh, and, uh, uh, you know, you’re designing, you doing or onshore, you think about what, what you need to think about, what can go wrong, whatever. Not, you can’t compare with this by just going on and also trying it offshore because a lot of things happened out there, which [00:13:00] you did think about. Of course, we try to build in the learnings from oil and gas, from offshore wind for everything else, and have people that have experience with this. But still, this is a, this is a different system, you know, of course it has moorings. We have different, uh, pipes, et cetera, we need to install, but there’s always this, you know. How do you install this the most efficient way? How do you operate these systems? How do you sort of, what will, how will they behave? Depend, you know, when you go from smaller scale to the larger scale, then there is this. It is important to do. On short, it is important to do wave, wave tank. We still do that, go back, you know, and do when we do some tests and then see how would the behave with these situations, which gives a lot of input and then getting offshore that that is when you really. Uh, sort of gets the, the, the, the punches in the stomach where you see, okay, uh, you really, prince is like there, there’s also the human factor. Yeah. When you [00:14:00] get out, you do some operation. You tell the, the crew on the vessel, you do this and this, and suddenly they don’t do it as you propose because they’re not used to these things. So you really need to be very. Uh, focused on following, these are the procedures, these are the quality check. These are the things we do. So because we have had something water, they put on a wrong shackle that this broke or whatever things, and you need to go back. You need to do things again. So all this is just, is the sign, it’s the, it’s the procedures and, and that and that being able sort of to. Get that learning into the next versions and the next versions, et cetera, to where we are now. Allen Hall: Well, you’ve come a long way because earlier this year, uh, Wade Piston signed a MOU with the government of Barbados. Can you tell us about that partnership and what it means moving forward and, and some of, take some of these studies into. Full scale.  Michael Henriksen: Yes, yes, yes. Because that, that’s of course important as you know, uh, we can create the most beautiful product if, if the market is not there. One is, is not, you know, [00:15:00] uh, demanding or want to do this, uh, not having mentioned like, uh, hydrogen project, et cetera, which has issues with that. Yeah. So of course it’s very important to see, you know, are they, are there the cause of this? So the user import. Both. That is they, they would like this project and they, they are like an island and remote community. So just right down our lane of where we wanna go in the step one. And they also want to co-invest in the beginning for the first projects where there’s still risk, you know, these pilot projects, the farms, of course there are still some risk here because you need to take the first, uh, farms in the water. There’ll be learnings around this and that. Having customers that want to co-invest in this, in getting it out from a few megawatts and they want to have up to, uh, a mean 50 megawatt in the water. That’s of course very important both for us to show is as demand. There is are customers, there are someone who wants to pay for this and want to do it together with us, and also getting the first sales.[00:16:00] Within a reasonably short time. Uh, and that is also sort of a good signal for getting a business on board. Yeah. Because they’re looking at, they say, okay, this looks very nice. You have a nice concept, but, but anyone wants to buy this. Uh, because you start at a higher price, it’s still a bit risky, and then you need to take it down. Yeah. Because we’ve not been out there for more than 20 years lying like, uh, in the water, like offshore wind. We need to start, you know, a place where we get the first sch in the water. So that’s the way it’s.  Allen Hall: Well, let’s look forward then, if the Wave Pistons, Barbados projects is a success, which it is really headed in that direction right at the moment. What does it look like for other Caribbean Island communities, uh, using Wave Piston? Is it just then taking the Barbados example on just carrying it over, or is it more of a bespoke solution for each of the different locations?  Michael Henriksen: Oh, let’s says we, we see that this is. This is, uh, I wouldn’t say one size fits all, but it is a modular system, [00:17:00] so you put in. The system, the size of the system that you need at that game location. And we are not, it’s not with the wind turbines that we just, we go, when we scale, it has to be larger and larger sails. We actually see, especially the first number of years, it’s number of units that you put out. So it giving location, how much maker, what do you need? Okay, what’s the wave climate? And then say, okay, then we put these number of units down and we can start with a smaller number, you know, and then we can just expand over time. So you go from. From, from any scale needed. And then you see, okay, this is fine. We need more, then we can just expand, uh, these, these wave farms. Yeah. So that’s the modular approach that we’re working with,  Allen Hall: right? Because the wave piston actually comes in these chains, and then you can make them into array. So subsequent chains, so you, you start out, you could start out relatively small, see how it goes, and then keep expanding and expanding, expanding. You can go from kilowatts to megawatts pretty easily from what I’ve seen from your technical information. So in, [00:18:00] in terms of, hey, let’s get, uh, an example in the water to, I’m using the energy as, uh, as part of my electricity grid. That step is very small. Basically, you’re just adding more units to an existing array. Michael Henriksen: Exactly, so, so the main thing is because we have, we work as you, as we always talked about earlier, so we are out at sea because to keep it as similar as possible, we generate pressure as sea water. So if we are within a few kilometers from shore, that will be taken to an on shore. Conversion station. Yeah. So this is just adding more modules. Then we will add more in the end. Uh, if you have the piping to, to, to show, you’ll add more modules to this or you add more pipes. Also over the time you can need that depending on the size of the system. Yeah. So this. Starting small, going larger, preparing the infrastructure and that we just get going to any size that’s needed. Of course, giving the c space that they have availability available for this because we don’t want to go, you [00:19:00] know, where a la the, where the good servers are. We don’t wanna fight with the servers. I lost server so they can do surfing. The ways that we go, other places where you don’t wanna serve. Or, uh, with a fisherman that goes fishing some places. But, but, so, but, but that’s actually also, I think it’s something we, it’s important about this having these, these, uh, sea space that you use for, for energy. Uh, or yeah, for either energy, water, and water. That actually they also become like a, um, a sealed area where we can see that marine life is actually thriving around this because, because like arts and fisheries. So it almost becomes like a nature of the surf because you have a lot of life around it. So, so, so this is actually the, the, the benefit we see also for putting like these structures in and then at the same time being able to harvest the energy of the waves. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Oh, that all makes sense. So. Beyond the Caribbean, what is your vision for wave piston and wave [00:20:00] energy in the next five to 10 years? Where do you think this technology ends up at?  Michael Henriksen: We see this as a, again, you know, um, if we look at this go to market, we have step one, step two. Step one are islands, remote, commun Caribbean, we are the Canary Islands. Uh, we can see things in the Pacific now also in the west of Atlantic. So there are a lot, there’s a lot of potential there. Indian Ocean, we also talk with the potential or. Customer slash islands there. So that’s the step one. That’s actually the foundation that will continue the whole time. And then we can add on step two, which is the utility scale market. And that’s especially what we talked about earlier with about this co-location. Wind and Wave has a very large uh, uh, uh. Opportunity here because you have these large areas. You have one giga lott of wind. You get there, let’s get the waves in there as well, and the wave energy devices within, between the, the turbine wind turbine, ensuring of course you have access to the wind turbines, et cetera, et cetera. But, but the, and it is go for our type of technology and others in the sector that [00:21:00] that needs to be going. I think I call this a no brainer when I talk. Uh, and I when talk with the offshore wind developer, but they don’t want to, oh, don’t, don’t, Michael don’t come with any, you know, uncertainty now. No, no innovation. We just want to get these offshore with the turbines out there and then we need to talk a bit with the politicians and others saying, okay, that’s fine, but please, you know, think a bit hits, be a bit more, you know, uh, look, what do we do in the next five to 10 years about this? And can we even get more out of the sea space? And sea space will also be limited. Yeah. There’s a lot of things happening out there, so of course let’s try to use this as much as possible, as sustainable as possible, and then we can actually get more energy out of the systems or the same area and actually also more sustainable way. And then actually the last thing that’s this about when you have wind and wave, this is this about, you know, getting good quality energy, energy production to the. And the impact on the grids that is this, this positive thing. That’s also, there’s been several studies about this that, uh, to balance in the grids, if you have [00:22:00] these different resources, especially wind the wave, you can actually reduce your, uh, grid balancing cost considerably.  Allen Hall: Well, Michael, final question. What would you say to a wind energy professional or investor right now who is just curious and doesn’t know a lot about wave energy or hasn’t paid much attention to it? Why should they care? What should they do next?  Michael Henriksen: Well, they should, you know, of course, let’s get so much Austria wind going as possible. The next thing will be that we have these co-location project that we have wind and wave, that we get, you know, more energy out of the same, same areas or even some areas where wind is not a good option. There are several areas where you can inspect up with the waves is, but we also talk about these locations where you have get very. A deep. Now most of the oceans, you get very deep waters within a few kilometers, so you start having explosion offshore. Of course, it’s very good. You get that different areas, but it also gets very expensive when it gets, yeah, so then some places makes sense to wind. Some places wave, and a lot of [00:23:00] places wind and wave combined will be. Allen Hall: Michael, how do people find out about Wave Piston? Where should they go look and how do they get ahold of you?  Michael Henriksen: They call my number. Uh, it’s on my website, wave Piston, dk. Uh, and then they all, of course, always, uh, welcome to reach out. Um, and, and we are. Open to talk, of course, with anyone that wants to, uh, do something together with us that are just as excited about wave energy and, and wave business such as, as we are. And if there any investors out there, we are also open to discussing, you know, uh, potential investments here.  Allen Hall: Yeah. So the website is wave piston.dk up in Denmark. And check out the website ’cause the website is really good. It’s a a ton of resources there. So if you’re interested in Wave Energy, that’s where you should check First Wave piston.dk. Michael, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate this discussion. Very insightful.  Michael Henriksen: Well, thanks a lot Emily. It’s. Truly a pleasure and I’m looking very much forward to keeping in touch over the [00:24:00] next period of time. And then maybe next time we’ll do one with a large system in the water or we go to Barbados together, maybe even. Yeah, to check the things out.  Allen Hall: You got a deal. Thank you, Michael.  Michael Henriksen: Thank you.

The UK bars Ming Yang on security grounds while Vestas announces a €250M nacelle factory in Scotland. Also, Nordex reaches a 199-meter hub height milestone and male bats use turbines as courtship song perches. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And. The hot news this week is Scotland, and Scotland is gonna be a major hub for manufacturing for all the offshore wind that is happening in the UK and around Europe. Well, the UK government ruled that Chinese turbine maker Ming Yang poses a national security threat and blocked its products from UK offshore wind projects, which in turn killed a plan for a one and a half billion pound Scottish factory. And then a couple of hours later, Dana Danish Giant Vestus announced plans to build its own cell [00:01:00] and hub factory in Scotland with an investment of about 250 million euros and up to about 500 jobs. Uh, but there is still a catch. Vestus is only going to move forward if it wins enough orders from the UK’s offshore wind. Auction program and allocation round eight was announced recently, so that’s gonna happen. So obviously Vestus would like to win a number of turbine orders from that, but that’s a pretty major announcement by the UK and by Vestus. It does seem like Vestus will be the leader in offshore winds in the uk. Is that the long term play now? Is that there’ll be a primary. Wind turbine source for the uk and that would be Vestas.  Rosemary Barnes: Weren’t we just covering, didn’t we just cover last week about another Danish manufacturer who just closed in a cell, uh, manufacturing facility in Denmark? Allen Hall: Siemens did.  Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, one week [00:02:00] Siemens is closing a factory in Denmark and the next week. As Bestus is opening similar factory in the uk. So that’s a interesting little geographic, uh, bit of information,  Matthew Stead: isn’t it? Thanks to our friends, the royal family in the uk, that they’re really promoting offshore wind. Matthew Stead: Uh, my understanding is they own the rights to the offshore water. Uh, well, obviously the offshore, offshore area, and they, they have promoted, um, the use of leases. And I, I understand, I might be cor incorrect, that the royal family is the one that may gain the, the benefit from the leases.  Allen Hall: It’s the crown of state in the UK that. Manages the royal family’s holdings. [00:03:00] Some part of the awarded amount or the, the leases are going to go to the royal family. I forget what that number is. Maybe 10% of ’em. And the rest basically are the treasury of the uk.  Matthew Stead: Oh, not all of it.  Allen Hall: Yeah, not all of it. But yeah, I mean it definitely benefits the royal family.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. So kiosk to the royal family for promoting it.  Allen Hall: Well, the price of petroleum in oil products recently has skyrocketed, of course. And, uh. The push to get renewables as the leading source of electricity generation in the UK is a massive move, which will. Promulgate all through Europe, everybody’s gonna be on that same pathway, I would think. Right now, the, the, the unique part about the UK and these, these Scottish efforts is that the speed at which the UK and Scotland in particular are going after it, you see some commitment by the Scandinavians in Germany to get to some of these numbers. But, uh, the UK is putting in an action. And they have a in, uh, industrial growth plan, which [00:04:00] is a little bit unique that this is part of the growth strategy of the UK is they’re trying to grow jobs, they’re trying to get higher paying jobs into the uk and this is the, the one way they’re trying to accomplish it. I was listening to a podcast today talking about this. It was someone representing, I think it was great British energy, but they are at least the, as the discussion points, they were trying to show comparisons. To what will happen and when to What has happened in the past with aerospace that the UK realized it’s good at composites, manufacturing wings, doing power plants, rolls Royce is there, right? So there’s a number of parallel. Tracks that the UK is going to to try to do through, um, their knowledge of aerospace into the wind turbine market. We’ll see if that comes to fruition. I’m not sure where these vestus turbine blades are gonna be built. They’re gonna be V 2 36 turbines, 15 megawatt machines out in the water. I, I assume that the turbine blades are gonna be coming from outside the [00:05:00] uk, but maybe the UK is working on something with Vestus about that.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know, but, but the UK government with their auctions has definitely laid the framework that would enable manufacturers to make that sort of investment or that, that sort of investment decision. So it wouldn’t, wouldn’t surprise me if we saw more manufacturing there. They’ve got, you know, the most secure, uh, and long, long term pipeline, more the most visibility around. Future projects. So if I was a company looking for, you know, where am I gonna open another factory, that would probably be quite appealing. That security really helps when you’re planning out a factory to know that you’re highly likely to have orders filling it for, you know, the lifetime of the factory. Even if costs are a little bit higher, I think that it would be, you know, you can offset a certain amount of cost by. The certainty.  Allen Hall: What are the short term ramifications for Chinese wind turbine manufacturers in Europe? Are you gonna see [00:06:00] more of these type of moves like the UK just did today, where they’re gonna put some prohibitions in? Or will there be some places that, uh, Chinese manufacturers can set up base?  Rosemary Barnes: To me, it’s really strange because it’s, it’s like you’re worried about security, so you don’t let them come bring their technology to your country. It’s. Like the, to me, the obvious thing is the other way around. If they’re worried about, um, technology transfer and IP theft, that they, um, should have prevented European wind turbine manufacturers from sitting up factories in China, because surely that’s how the big transfer of knowledge happened. Now China, you know that that’s where, that’s where they learn how to make win winter turbines 10, 20 years ago. Um, and what they’re doing today in China is, is not, it’s not like static from that. They have also developed their own, you know, their own ideas and taken the technology in a different direction. Why don’t we take the opportunity to learn from that? I, I find it a bit, [00:07:00] a bit funny that, um. Yeah, that you would ban a manufacturer from coming to your country because you’re concerned that they have, um, you know, copied or stolen your technology in the past and can’t see how they’re gonna do that by bringing their tech to your country. Matthew Stead: And how does that tie in with the discussion we had the other week about the tariffs and removal of tariffs on certain components? Um, Alan, do you know if that’s linked at all?  Allen Hall: I don’t think it’s linked. There hasn’t been any news articles about it. However, there’s gonna be a lot of hard choices made about where components do come from. That does seem like the UK government is thinking about what components can be made in the uk where UK engineering and technology can be applied to, to change the marketplace and where they want to go buy components. Uh, are they gonna buy them from China or are they gonna buy them from Poland or somewhere in Eastern Europe or somewhere in South America? There’s a lot of places to buy components today. Or India. I think India is obviously, uh, one of the top choices, [00:08:00] right? Just because it was a colony years ago. And there’s a relationship there between the UK and India. Is that where the technology transfer begins? Uh, instead of it with China? Probably so delamination and bottomline failures and blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep into the label materials. To find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions.[00:09:00] Alright, how tall is too tall? Well, for onshore wind, the answer keeps changing with. Nordics group just receiving its first order for a turbine with a hub height of. Drum roll please. 199 meters. So there must be some sort of limitation at 200 meters is where the limit is. So they came in one meter below it. It’s what it smells like.  Rosemary Barnes: The limitation would be on the tip height, not the hub height.  Matthew Stead: Should have been 200,  Allen Hall: just routed up to 200. See?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But this is Germany, right? Where it’s like you, the number is what engineering says it should be, not what looks nice on a marketing brochure or in a press release. You know, if, if the tower should be 199.2 meters, then that’s what it will be.  Allen Hall: Well, three of these 199 meter towers rise up in a project in the North Rhine with Flia area of Germany, and it’s gonna drink power in a very [00:10:00] low wind speed region. Uh, the. Towers are gonna be constructed in typical Nordic fashion, and the, the top portion of the tower will be steel. The, the lower portion will be concrete. So you may be talking about what height for concrete are you talking about a 50 or a hundred meters of a concrete tower? That seems amazingly high because Nordex does a unique thing where they, they kind of jigsaw piece together and erected that way. I don’t. I think I’ve seen them do anything nearly that high. But, uh, there are other ways to get to that hub height, but it does seem like concrete and steel are gonna be the pathway. Are we gonna see more of this? Uh, as wind turbines move off the prime spots where the wind speeds are high, that instead of looking, putting more turbines where the wind speeds are high, you’re just gonna put. Really, really tall turbines up with massive rotor diameters to keep them spinning.  Rosemary Barnes: [00:11:00] Yeah. But I think it kind of makes sense in Europe, like this project, it’s three turbines, right? So if you had smaller turbines, like a smaller turbine might be cheaper per megawatt. Um, in terms of like if you have a really large wind farm with just a lot of them. But this site, you know, imagine they’ve got a triangular plot and they can put one turbine at each corner. They’ve really, really wanna maximize the amount of power that they can get from each, each turbine because it, you know, like on a small site, the area it’s capturing, it kind of extends past the, the edges of the land footprint, right? Because they’ve got, you know, such huge, huge turbines. So for those really small projects, I think that it is a different, um, equation that they’re calculating. For what the optimal turbine size is. And it, it does make sense to really go after every what that you can get from that site. Since you, you’ve got so few turbines that you can work with. Allen Hall: Well, they need unique construction methods to get the [00:12:00]blades that high and to get them the cell on top of the tower.  Rosemary Barnes: I guess a crane, a specialized crane will be the, a tricky thing.  Matthew Stead: And then how do you repair it? You know when, when you need to change a blade out, how you gonna get it? That crane bag. Uh, how, how, how are you gonna get up and down? I mean, it’s gonna take you half an hour to, in a little lift to get up. And what if you need to go to the toilet?  Allen Hall: Let’s get to the heart of the matter.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I mean, at least it’s only three, right?  Allen Hall: But it’s gonna take you how long to get up that tower if you’re in the lift. Those lifts don’t move that fast. And it isn’t like you’re in, you know, a modern office building where the elevators move very quickly. It’s gonna take a little bit of time. Uh, I guess things, things we’re gonna have to figure out, uh, because we have seen a number of technologies that, they talked about installing blades, using cables, and you see some of that more recently, but 200, roughly 200 meters high is a long way to go. So they must have a plan on how they’re going to do it.  Rosemary Barnes: So a co Google says that wind turbine [00:13:00] lifts slash elevators range from 0.3 meters per second to one meters per second. Um, I guess at your fast  Allen Hall: 200 seconds.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So at at best, it’ll take you three and a half minutes to get up there and at worst. 10 minutes. Matthew Stead: So definitely a toilet up  Rosemary Barnes: there. There’s no way there’s a toilet up there. Kept real, Matt, they put toilets up in wind turbines, you hold it or you know, if you’re a gross man, then you just, you, you go off the side and they will tell you, you know, like when you. When you’re doing site, your site inductions, it’s like, oh, don’t park in this location because people pee there. Allen Hall: Are you downwind?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, your car could get hit.  Allen Hall: Do they have a wind sock at the bottom of each of the towers? Is that what’s going on?  Yolanda Padron: I mean, at least like 10 minutes isn’t too bad compared to like when you’re free climbing the smaller towers that didn’t have the lifts in them yet. Like that take, I mean, I might be slow. It took me like half an hour at least  Rosemary Barnes: Last [00:14:00] time I was on site, some of the team were climbing. ’cause that’s just the exercise that they get. And they climbed the same speed as the um, as the lift roughly. Um, but I don’t think they would do that over 200 meters. You know, I think, you know, there’s a difference at a hundred meters versus 200 meters of, of climbing like that. I mean, it makes sense. You don’t need a gym membership, you don’t need to go for a run after work ’cause you’ve got your exercise during the day.  Yolanda Padron: That’s after that.  Matthew Stead: I’m just wondering about how much it would actually be moving around, like when it’s, when it’s under maintenance, how much, um, horizontal sway you’d actually get. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, already when you stand at the top of a, um, a wind turbine tower, you definitely feel it.  Matthew Stead: You’re getting sway.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So. More than that, but it is, I mean, it’s, it’s evolution not revolution, right? Like, we’ve already got towers that are 160, 180 meters tall, so it’s a, a little bit more than that. It’s let’s not, let’s not get too crazy. It’s not changing the world, it’s just, [00:15:00] you know, we, we know all the bad problems for tall towers and these are a little bit worse,  Yolanda Padron: but it’s only pre, so it’s not a hundred big, big, big towers, right?  Allen Hall: I think you gotta be careful because it, when you get to these hub heights. Everybody on the ground in the neighborhood can see it forever. Uh, it does raise concerns. I know it will in the states. I don’t think you’ll ever see a hub height that high. It could be wrong on shore, but it, it wouldn’t seem like that would be a smart move for a lot of operators. ’cause there’s a lot more ground. Right. And the winds are pretty good in America, so you can just spread it out. But making taller turbines would be a big pushback I think, from society.  Rosemary Barnes: Then, which who, whose record are they breaking? I thought that they, this, yeah, this is the tallest hub height on shore.  Allen Hall: Their own.  Rosemary Barnes: But don’t we also have that announced project from Fortescue? What are their Tower Heights gonna be using the NRA lift technology a hundred, 180. Those are in the absolute middle of nowhere. There’s definitely no neighbors there that are [00:16:00] complaining about heights, but there’s also absolutely no shortage of land there. You know, have as many turbines as you want, so they’re. Doing it. Yeah. Like a totally different calculation to figure out what’s the optimal tower height. And they’ve come to similar conclusions. So that’s kind of interesting.  Yolanda Padron: Going back to the, the, you know, people complaining issue. I know of some communities who have benefited a lot from wind turbines in the states and like seeing them just because they know like, oh. Every time that’s spinning, like, I’m getting more this quarter. You know, like that, that’ll be my nice little bonus. It’s like, it’s a nice passive income. ’cause all they have to do is just have him there. Um, and so I think it, I mean it really depends on what the community is like over there and with regards to. How they would like, like whether or not they would like to see these huge things in their backyards or to Rosie’s point, if they’ll see them in their backyards. Right. Like it’s, it could just be like the middle of nowhere. [00:17:00] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I know in some parts of Europe people don’t mind too much. Like in Denmark, you’re never very far away. Or in Jutland, at least where I live, you’re never very far away from wind turbine. Like, I couldn’t see them. I probably could see one old one from my house, but, um, you know, like they’re, they’re not like looming over you. But people aren’t, aren’t so bothered as they would be in Australian suburbs or in parts of the us and also other parts of, like, Southern Germany is not so fond on wind turbines. So, you know, I think it, it just totally depends on where the area is as to how, how, how happy people are gonna be to, to see them in their daily life  Matthew Stead: or offshore Japan.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think the key is that you make them, you don’t want ’em to be so tall that someone can look at it, that isn’t benefiting from it. So. Like in the us if people are getting payments for the turbines, I’m sure they’re happy to look at them and just see dollar signs. But if you are the neighbor whose site was supposed to have a turbine and then they redrew the wind farm and now it doesn’t have a turbine, if you can still see them, they’re gonna piss you off every time you, you [00:18:00] see them. I think so probably really depends.  Allen Hall: The Tavis billing in Germany is the Commerce Bank at 259 meters. So these turbines will be bigger than that, or taller than that? Yeah,  Matthew Stead: the whole of Germany. Wow.  Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS win.com today. While wind turbines and bats have always had an uneasy relationship, now researchers in Germany have found a surprising reason why bats keep flying into the danger zone. Male bats are using wind turbines as song purs, circling the the cells while [00:19:00] singing courtship calls to attract female bats. A study from the Museum of Nature and in Germany analyze more than. 80,000 audio recordings from its six German turbine sites and found bat songs right in the rotor web zone. The songs draw females tore the turbines, which helps explain why more females than males are found hurt underneath the turbines. During mating season, uh, researchers say smarter curtailment strategies based on the behavior. It could reduce fatalities and without sacrificing too much energy production. So this is a unique, uh, aspect of bats. I guess there’s a mating process that happens where the bats are chirping and the females come together, but the, the, it’s not a very successful strategy if you run your mate into a winter turbine plate that’s not really accomplishing the goal. [00:20:00] However, the, the turbine curtailment. Period would actually be limited. Right. So you would know when the bats are out doing this little disco dance or whatever they’re going doing out in Germany. What kind of, what kind of dance does Germany do right now? What, what’s, what’s the end dance in Germany? Rosemary must know,  Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s still, still pretty, pretty electronic and um, in Berlin the last time I was there anyway,  Allen Hall: so electronic music. Okay. Well, maybe they can play some electronic music and push the male bats away ’cause that’s probably what it’ll do. But the, this leads back to a lot of discussions about birds and bats in the United States and around the world where there’s just different things happening in every site and we, we tend to wanna have one engineering answer for the worldwide bat and bird community. And that’s not going to be the answer. You’re gonna have to do a little bit of homework. And Rosemary has pointed this out numbers of times in regards to painting one blade. Black and that that was one experiment and one place, and it’s not transferrable. This could als this, uh, [00:21:00] bat dance span song issue. Could be very local.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that’s right. I, I think it’s a, at least a second project with the one blade black thing. But thanks for. Preemptively raising that? I guess so. No, I see everywhere. All over social media. Oh, all you need to do is paint one blade black. Anyway, moving on from that. I, I think you’re right that it’s gonna be highly localized. It’s gonna depend on the specific kind of bat. Um, and, you know, probably a specific population of bat as well. I know, um, in the US at least, and it’s probably true around the world. There has been a, a massive increase in the amount of funding available for bat scientists, uh, since wind farms started being built and people realized that they affect bats. So I bet that there’s some, some bat scientists who is just, you know, geeking out over. Just, you know, this new information that they have about the way that, um, bat mating rituals happen. So that’s pretty interesting. It does make me [00:22:00] sad though that, um, yeah, these, these poor bats just trying to fall in love and find a partner and. Make baby bats and instead they’re getting whacked by a wind turbine. That, yeah, that, that’s not great. I hope that they’re able to pretty, pretty promptly learn enough to be able to at least, you know, stop the turbines and then, you know, they can work on refining it so that they reduce the, um, the losses, um, in order to do that over time. Allen Hall: Yolanda, you live in one of the back capitals of the world?  Yolanda Padron: I do, yeah.  Allen Hall: I mean.  Yolanda Padron: I’m, I’m not, I cannot say I’m a bad expert at all, but I am really curious to see exactly like. Whether these bats would, or this type of bat would do a similar thing to other tall structures, or if it’s just dependent on structures that move like turbines or have some component that moves. Or is it just a turbine specific thing? Because I mean, we have bat season right now [00:23:00] in Austin, so like you have all the bats coming out at Sunset, and it’s this huge. Thing and you’ll see them in like tall buildings, but they’ve, not one bat has ever hit my window in my apartment in the whole like four years that I’ve been here. And a lot of birds have hit it because, I mean, I think birds are slightly dumber than bats, some of them at least.  Allen Hall: Whoa, easy  Rosemary Barnes: bats are amazing though. Like, think, think about it. They have developed sonar capabilities. They’re mammals just like us. They can fly. We had to develop fighter jets, basically like billions of dollars spent on defense programs to develop the capabilities that bats have just evolved for themselves. So I think that you do have to give bats a whole lot of credit. I think you have to give birds a lot of credit too. There’s a lot of very smart birds, but birds do fly into stationary things in a way. Bats don’t seem as likely to. What you do see in Australia is a lot of bats, um, electrocute themselves on power [00:24:00] lines if they, ’cause our bats are quite big here. Matthew Stead: Um, but I was thinking, um, you know, like, uh, a way of keeping away males from shopping malls is to play elevator music, so maybe they could change the sound that. Around the turbine, and maybe they could play like elevator music rather than disco music.  Allen Hall: I, I, I, I like you a lot. This question like, why are they there? Like what’s, what’s attracting the bats to the turbines to begin with? Why are the male bats there? What’s their echolocation something?  Rosemary Barnes: But I mean, these are questions, I’m sure bat scientists asking these questions, and now they’ll probably have funding open up to them to know the answer. So I like, I, I think. There’s, there’s pluses and minuses. There’s obviously minuses for the bats that are being affected right now, but in the long term I think that it’s, you know, it’s good for the field of bat science. I’m sure that there’s like some, um, technical name for a bat scientist, and I’m sorry, I dunno it. Chiro neurologist. Chiro neurologist. [00:25:00] I.  Allen Hall: If that another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show For Rosie, Yolanda and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers the UK’s all-time wind record, the Crown Estate’s new 6 GW leasing round, Port Talbot’s floating wind assembly port, and Ørsted and BlueFloat’s exit from the Stromar project. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone! Last Wednesday, the British Isles did something remarkable. Wind turbines across the United Kingdom generated twenty-three thousand eight hundred and eighty megawatts of electricity — an all-time national record. That is enough to power twenty-three million homes at the same moment. And while wind was hitting its record high, natural gas fell to just two-point-three percent of total British supply. A two-year low for gas. In a single day. Britain is not stopping there. The Crown Estate has announced a new offshore wind leasing round, targeting six gigawatts of new capacity off the northeast coast of England — enough to power six million more homes. And now the United Kingdom is building the physical infrastructure to match that ambition. Ministers have committed up to sixty-four million pounds in support for Port Talbot in South Wales. The plan: the UK’s first dedicated assembly port for floating offshore wind. Associated British Ports says total investment could exceed five hundred million pounds once fully built out. The goal is the Celtic Sea, where developers are targeting four gigawatts of floating wind. Four gigawatts. Floating. In open ocean. Floating offshore wind is the industry’s next frontier. But it is also the industry’s most expensive and complicated technology. Consider what happened quietly this last week off the coast of Caithness, Scotland. Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, and BlueFloat Energy have both walked away from the Stromar floating wind project. Stromar is a one-point-five gigawatt floating wind farm — sixty to one hundred meters of water depth, fifty kilometers offshore, enough power for one-point-five million homes. Construction was not expected to begin until twenty twenty-eight. Now Nadara, the project’s remaining partner, holds one hundred percent of Stromar alone. For Ørsted, the exit signals tighter capital discipline. For floating wind, it signals just how difficult the economics remain. And yet, across the North Sea, a solution is taking shape. The University of Strathclyde and Japan Marine United signed a Memorandum of Understanding last week. Their mission: standardise and mass-produce floating offshore wind turbines. Japan Marine United has been developing floating wind technology since 1999. Their Jade Wind floater is headed for large-scale government-led deployment in Japan. Standardisation — the same answer that made fixed-bottom offshore wind competitive. So here is where we are. Britain just broke its wind generation record. The Crown Estate is opening new ocean for development. Port Talbot is becoming a floating wind assembly hub. And Strathclyde and Japan Marine United are building the engineering knowledge to make it all affordable. Two companies stepped back from Stromar. But the Celtic Sea is still waiting. And that’s the state of the wind industry on the 30th of March 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Dainis Kruze and Janis Putrams, co-founders of Aerones, welcome Allen to their new Denton, Texas facility to discuss robotic spray-coat LEP repairs, third-generation internal blade crawlers, and their US-made inspection drone that eliminates Chinese components. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Dainis and Janis, welcome back to the program.  Dainis Kruze: Thank you, Alan, for visiting us, uh, in, in our new facility.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Is a great new facility. We’re in Denton, Texas, which is just north of Dallas. Uh, and you move from. Lake Dallas area. Mm-hmm. And we had visited that facility a year or so ago. This new facility is amazing. It’s what, probably four times the size. Yeah. Maybe a little bit bigger. And it is, uh, indicative of the growing business that Aeros has in the United States. And that’s wonderful. Uh, and I’m glad I could catch you in Texas ’cause I know you, you guys are running around the world all the time. Uh, I think the last time I was at. A facility with both of you was over in Riga?  Dainis Kruze: Yes.  Allen Hall: Uh, probably two years ago now. Oh,  Dainis Kruze: yeah.  Allen Hall: So I saw the Riga operation and, and now we’re seeing [00:01:00]the, the Denton US operation. You have facilities in other places too, right?  Dainis Kruze: A small one in Australia, but, but yeah, the main facilities in Riga and the second biggest one here in, in Dallas. Allen Hall: A lot of technology changes since Rose Riga. Uh. Leading edge being the big one, leading edge protection materials. And when I talk to US operators, even operators in Australia, we’re just there. They love the idea and the application of a robot for leading edge repairs.  Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah,  Allen Hall: it makes total sense. It’s one of those areas that, uh, Rons has shown you can do this with a robot much more consistently. Has that business grown quite a bit since you first started it?  Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We did more than 500 turbines last year, so we. The plan for this season is about one and a half thousand turbines, so it is growing quite a lot.  Allen Hall: So the, the speed and the quantity of robots here in the United States is must have grown considerably. Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Uh, one team now gets [00:02:00] up to 15 turbines a month. So if it’s category one or two turbine, uh, leading edge, uh, erosion, it’s about one day to do one turbine category three. Uh, one turbine is being done in two days, and we are talking about like 12 meter repair. It’s not a spot repair, it’s a full repair, like  Allen Hall: full repair. Okay.  Dainis Kruze: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And the robot technology and the, the amount of technology on the robot is behind us has grown quite a bit. Uh oh. Yeah. You’re learning as you’re going. Obviously. I looked at a number of robots in at the Denton facility. Smarter robots. More data, more consistency. Particularly because the leading edge protection materials require a lot more care than rope technicians can generally create on site. Right. Walk us through what this robot is doing, why it’s doing what it’s doing, and, and like the, the quality you get coming out of it. ’cause what I see behind me is really nice. Better than, than [00:03:00] what I’ve seen typically coming out of a factory.  Janis Putrams: Yeah. So multiple things actually we’ve been. Kind of what we’ve been hearing sometimes is that, um, that material’s good, the application seems good, but then it comes off after some time and you don’t understand what’s what happened, right? Yeah. So we understood to, to make it right. We need to make sure that both the kind of, we take the full ownership for the, for the whole process, for the application. And so we’ve been investing quite a lot in our lab to, to actually understand what the material needs, how the surface needs to be, be prepared. How do we measure it? How do we make sure the process is right? So actually what we saw is that, yeah, making sure adhesion, uh, is, is right, is is very important part. Also, when you go out there, there’s a quite a spectrum of the weather forecast, like information. You have humidity, you have temperatures, and you need to be able to guarantee the, the, yeah, the output in all of that spectrum. So yeah, we’ve done quite a lot on, [00:04:00] uh, on those. And  Allen Hall: so from a technology perspective, you’re incorporating all those measurements actually into the robot. So you know what the temperature was when the application was made, you know what the humidity was, you know what the mixture was exactly. Remember the temperature of the, the ingredients that went into make the, the LEP material. That’s remarkable. And now it’s, uh, I think a lot of people think of LEP as being something you would apply with a, you see it still, you see it with rollers and sort of. Basic human tools. You’re spray coating today. Yes.  Janis Putrams: Yes.  Allen Hall: And the, the smoothness of that coating is remarkable.  Janis Putrams: Yeah. For example, I dunno if you, if you know in factories where the cars are made Yeah. You don’t see people rolling the car. Yeah. So, because the, the spraying technology, it enables us to actually guarantee the robot when it moves, it moves in a constant speed. It’s not manually, it’s kind of on a cruise control. So it’s, it’s moving in a constant speed [00:05:00] and the spraying is constant. And so yeah, the, the thickness is, is, is always the same. And also it kind of nicely tempers off on the, on the sides. So there’s no vortexes, kind of, no aerodynamics loss. Uh, so yeah, it, it comes out very, very nice and  well.  Allen Hall: That’s the thing about when you put a leading edge coating on, a lot of times there’s a taped edge or a hard edge there. And then they gotta come back and try to fill it. Or maybe they don’t fill it and the filler doesn’t stay. It may. I’ve seen all varieties of that. So when you spray coat it, not only do you get a very smooth finish, aerodynamically, you lose the step on the backside. Right. So the, the entire assembly is, is just more aerodynamic. And that’s the reason you’re doing in the first place. Mm-hmm. It’s not just we’re recovering this shape. Yes, you’re recovering the shape, but you’d like to get some more power outta your, your turbines. That makes sense to me. When you’re, uh, cleaning the blade too. There’s a lot of technology about just getting the blade prepped because we’ve seen so many times where a leading edge coating’s been applied to a very [00:06:00] poorly prepped blade surface, and it just doesn’t stick. A year later, you’re out doing it again. Describe what you’re doing on the prep side.  Janis Putrams: Yeah, so what we also see, uh, saw that, um, if there’s some damaged material, it’s very important to get it off. If you put it on top of the damaged material, it’s just not gonna hold. So we have one of those robots, it has quite a powerful kind of belt sanding tool, uh, where you can truly take it off. And then the second tool prepares the surface and also the tool kind of makes sure that it’s not up to the, to the operator to choose which point to, to prepare, but just the tool goes in, in a single step and prepares all of it so we can kind of. Be sure that nothing’s missed. And then when you, when you put it on, uh, then, then what’s gonna, it’s gonna hold. Dainis Kruze: And to develop that tool. We have a laboratory where two chemical engineers are actually working and testing and doing pulley tests and surface, uh, adhesion tests [00:07:00] and, uh, to get the result, the best result possible. Because, as Ian said, we’re taking, we, we are giving guarantee, uh, of our work. Uh, and we don’t do that. Oh yeah, it peeled off because the material was bad. We, we, we take the guarantee of application and materials that it’s gonna be stick, uh, is gonna stick and it’s gonna stay there.  Allen Hall: I think there’s a lot into that. And having been to the Riga facility, I understand you have a lot of capabilities there. When we talk to. Independent service providers and they’re applying materials. They’re not doing all the research. Oh, yeah. That aone is doing. You, you are actually looking at material properties, you’re looking at surface conditions, you’re looking at the chemical reactions that are happening. You’re doing the mechanical pull test. You’re putting engineering behind it. Oh, yeah. Which, which has to happen. We’re still early in this leading edge protection world. We have, we don’t have 50 years of experience. We have two or three really good years, and we’re still learning and there’s a lot of different materials being proposed right now. That mechanical testing and evaluation [00:08:00] laboratory really raises the bar.  Dainis Kruze: Oh  Allen Hall: yeah. I think in terms of just what you’re expecting to get out and, and EC saying, you back up what you do. Oh yeah. Which is completely different than the rest of the industry. De describe what that means to an operator that chooses their owns to do leading edge protection. Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s a turnkey, uh, solution, right? So, uh, you won’t get in a situation when, um, somebody comes, supplies the material and after a year it peels off and then you, um, have months and months of debating and negotiating, right? Uh, whom to blame, right? So who will take care of that? Um, and in the end, basically, you don’t know either that was a material or that was a applicator. Um, that’s it, but. The result is not met. Right. So the the, yeah, the the still, the, the blade is not protected. In our case, we take full responsibility, full accountability. If the material is gonna put peel, uh, peel off, we are gonna come and fix it.  Allen Hall: Because I think a EP loss from leading edge erosion is one thing.[00:09:00] A EP loss from a bad leading edge protection material that’s peeling off is exponentially worse from what I have seen. It just gets very draggy. Yes. And that material just starts to. Actually create massive drag. So you need to get that bad material off. And I think a lot of operators that have used other services probably won’t be calling you this year to go, we need to sand that off and put on something with robot. Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.  Allen Hall: Does that then change the dynamic because of the, the amount of robotics, uh, applications you can do in a year where before when we talked to operators, us Europe, robots are nice. But we don’t see the ROI.  Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: Has that flipped on its head now where the robots are just so much faster than rope technicians, that it just makes sense to do it with robots? Dainis Kruze: I still, we even have systems in our portal where customers can see, um, at which category, how much of efficiency they’re losing, uh, during the year. Yeah. So what is the a a p loss and roughly speaking, it’s like three, four years of return of investment just [00:10:00] on AP loss. If you’re not fixing it at category three, you’re gonna lose in two, three years. Same amount of money as on investing on, on repairing that. Yeah. So the return of investment is two, three years, uh, worst cases for four years. Um, as we see, um, and not even speaking about, uh, when the erosion happens to, to category four and five, your repair cost is just like at least double or triple. So you don’t want to do that in category fours and fives. It’s lot smarter to do that at category two, three.  Allen Hall: Oh, that makes a lot of sense. However, I would say that a lot of operators worldwide let it get to three plus. Mm-hmm. Before they start to worry about it. Alright, so the, then the question becomes, am I gonna put a bunch of technicians up on ropes anyway to go fix this? Or is there a robotic solution that I can fix those leading edge, uh, where the, the, the glue has been eaten away by leading a rosn. Can I fix that without putting technicians on ropes?  Janis Putrams: Right. So currently we are [00:11:00] doing categories like 1, 2, 3.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Janis Putrams: Um, if we have category four repair, we would cooperate with a rope technicians. They come and laminate, and then the robot does, does everything else. But there’s a, yeah, there’s a new, uh, new technology that we are working on, which is kind of a reinforced, uh, yeah. Application on the leading edge, uh, where we can be able to actually repair category for. Uh, for as well.  Intro: Mm-hmm.  Janis Putrams: Yeah. This, and it’s, um, it’s a uv uh, UV curable solution, uh, which is also great because you can apply it in, in, in, in, in humid environments, in, in colder environments. Um, and then, and then of course the, the, yeah, the, the leading kind of protection that we put on would go, go on there as well. And, and this is actually quite a, um, amazing, uh, uh, yeah, sample. So for those who don’t know this, this goes into rain erosion, uh, kind of machine test machine. And [00:12:00] uh, and then they get kind of the spin and, and, and rain droplets are, are falling. And, and, and then you measure how long it lasts. And, and this has been in there for 200 hours and we actually had to stop the test because it was becoming just outrageously expensive. But it’s, it’s like a lifetime, like the, the turbine would not experience this amount of erosion in lifetime, so we thought it was  Dainis Kruze: 130 meters, uh, per second. Uh, speed. Speed. Um, but, and yeah, as Ian said, like we also have a system in our portal where you can look up your, any wind park in us, and it’ll tell how many hours per year you have this severe, uh, rain, which would be like compatible with, uh. Close to this, uh, speed tip speed and, and the rain. And basically there is no wind park in the world, uh, where the erosion would happen, uh, where the rain would be like 200 hours, like, uh, in, in, in lifetime of the turbine in 25 years. Hmm. So basically [00:13:00] it’s in most of the cases it’s like four or 5, 6, 7 hours a year, which means like basically it’s gonna last for 30 years, um, like in, in a, on the rain erosion test,  Allen Hall: but really only if the application is good.  Dainis Kruze: Only if the application is good. Yeah.  Allen Hall: That which is the key, right? Yeah. So you can have the best material in the world, you can have the best lab results in the world, but if you can’t repeat it out of the world Yeah. Then it’s just a waste of time.  Dainis Kruze: Yeah.  Janis Putrams: Yeah,  Dainis Kruze: exactly.  Janis Putrams: There’s another interesting aspect that we, we saw when we, because we, we did a lot of those tests and what we noticed is that the surface smooth smoothness, uh, actually is also very important because like if it’s more like an orange peel, you get those cavities and when the rain droplets hit. They kind of, they, they creates more like a stress concentrations there just  Allen Hall: a  Janis Putrams: pull. We’ve seen like, like about the performance kind of getting into half. If the, if the surface is not, not, not smooth.  Allen Hall: And that’s what you see in the field when they apply it by hand. It’s not nearly as smooth as what I see on the spray version here with the robot. Janis Putrams: Mm-hmm. And [00:14:00] once it finds a place where the erosion can start, then it just grows.  Allen Hall: That’s the magic. Right. I, I know a lot of operators don’t think about all those little details. Mm-hmm. But because roads has the ability to do the work, to do the manual motion testing, to do the lab testing, to look at the materials and apply it. Like it should be that that’s a game changer.  Dainis Kruze: Yeah. And, and scale it. Right. So when we do this with robots, like, uh, like most of the job is done by the semi-autonomous robot. So it’s not again, um, a bottleneck of how many good technicians you have,  Allen Hall: right?  Dainis Kruze: Like it’s, it’s, uh, it’s about technology which is doing the job. And you will have a consistent result, whether it’s Australia, US, or Europe, you will have exactly the same result, uh, because it was done by exactly the same robot.  Allen Hall: Well, speaking of robots, uh, the latest gen three internal crawler is remarkable. Uh, Yana should give me the details of all the cool features that are on it. I’ve seen it in video. I haven’t seen it out in the world live [00:15:00] inside of a blade yet, but I will this year. I think there’s a lot of technology in there from your first gen robot to, uh, this third gen. The pictures that I’ve seen downstream are really good. Because it matters and, and because there’s lot of the defects you can’t see on the outside. You need to be on the inside.  Janis Putrams: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: Uh, core, uh, bonding, most of them. Well, that’s true then. That’s totally true. No, the industry, you’re right. I do, I do think we started off on the outside because that’s what we could do. Mm-hmm. Not realizing that probably we should be on the inside should sort of started there first. But the robot now is so much better at taking pictures. And if you, if you can take pictures, but the pictures are not so good, why are you wasting your time even taking them?  Janis Putrams: Right.  Allen Hall: Explain what’s all in that robot to take high quality images and to focus on the defects that you find.  Janis Putrams: Right. So kind of, we’ve done a lot of inspections with our previous generation crawler and, and then we, we got a lot of feedback also, and we, we do [00:16:00] ourselves the, the inspections of the, the data, uh, and give, give information to customers. So we worked our way back. And also not just that, uh, when you go out and do it on a big scale. You get feedback, like, for example, from the technicians, uh, what’s easy for them, like different blade models, maybe some specific blade models have some obstruction in there that you need to drive around. So, so those kind of small details when, when you gather and, and, and, and even just manufacturability to make sure that, uh, yeah, it’s easy and faster to manufacture, easy to maintain. Um, so, but that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s the kind of, uh, the part on. On the, on the inspection itself, uh, of course it has a improved 360, uh, kind of inspection. So we gather everything. Uh, there’s additional camera for, uh, much detailed kind of areas. For example, the, the root zone, you would want to, to have the kind of the top part inspected [00:17:00] in higher resolution, but also it has like a smart feature where you can tell that, for example, particular area in the blade, if you want that in a higher resolution. So when it gets there, it, it would point and, and, and take that particular area because maybe there’s a serial defect and you would want it in a much, much higher, uh, higher resolution. Also, what we got feedback from, from customers is that for them, it’s very important that, for example, if there’s a defect, you want to know exactly the size of the defect, and you want to know exactly the distance to the root. And maybe you want to, you might need to open the blade from the outside and you don’t want to be off by even a half meter. So we’ve been working a lot to, to improve that. But it’s like centimeter precision  Allen Hall: because a lot of the defects are actually happening closer to the root. I, I think lightning company, which is what we are, we get a lot of defects kind of further towards the tip, but the manufacturing defects that really matter are closer to the root [00:18:00] and they tend to, if you think about the root that’s. The largest diameter part of the blade. So you need to be able to take really good images where the rover is not right next to the damage that matters. Mm-hmm. So you’re looking for megapixels, you’re looking for light intensity, you’re looking for exposures right to be right so that you can actually measure it, track it. So even if you notice there’s a crack talking to operators, there’s a crack. Okay. But is it propagating yes or no? If you can’t measure it, actually, you can’t tell if it’s growing or not, which is ultimately. What you need. So those improvements are gonna be a, a massive improvement in terms of the operators buying in because we talk to operators all the time, you need to be doing internal inspections. And they say, yeah, sure. Like, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand. You need to do a set up internal inspections so you understand what’s going on inside your blades because there are a lot of like kind of serial defect things or uniqueness things that happening, or wind, wind specific events that are happening and are causing issues with your [00:19:00] blade. And that gets me to outside the blade. So, uh, once you’ve done the internal inspections and you should be doing some external inspections, particularly for lightning and some other issues. Question in America right now is you can’t use a drone that has Chinese components in it. There owns drone image. Those are all Chinese free, ready to go right now to take high resolution images. And there’s actually more technology. Yeah. And this drone that I’ve seen in, in previous versions.  Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.  Allen Hall: Tell me about that.  Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s us made, uh, so we, uh, are, are compliant, um, with, with the rule, uh, regulations that you can’t use the Chinese, uh, parts. That’s one thing. Another thing is like how the technology works. So, um, we have very sophisticated system how the drone flies and scans the blade, uh, the blades and the turbine itself. So we don’t need to put the blades in particular angles like you. [00:20:00] Whatever the blades are being stopped, the drone is gonna be capable of doing that inspection. Um, that saves time, uh, time and makes it easier. Also, you don’t need to navigate, like if you take the drone and do the inspections yourself, you just push start and the drone does, uh, all the jobs. So you don’t need to fly to point it at the tip of the blade or whatever it’s gonna do. 100% of the jobs is gonna be by, by, by itself. Um, and also like we have, um, a. Bigger angle, like variety, how we can put the camera. So we always will take the picture from the best angle. It’s not gonna be, look, you’re not gonna look at the crack under an angle. You will look at the, uh, crack directly, uh, onto it and it actually, it actually moves the needle. It, it, it’s very, very important when you’re reviewing the data.  Janis Putrams: Yeah. So basically what you want to do is like, if you want to take a picture of this. You want to be looking perpendicular to it.  Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm.  Janis Putrams: And, and if the turbine is like this, you, you want like, you want want to look like this and if the blade kind of, you go from the top, you [00:21:00] want to look like this. So this drone was built, it wasn’t adapted, it was built particularly for wind turbine inspection. So the kind of, it was taken account that it can do all these angles Exactly as, as they need for, for, for blades. So to, to get the, the, the best, uh, inspection data.  Allen Hall: I’m always surprised at the lack of quality of inspection images for cracks. I see a lot of them because we get sent a lot of lightning damage mm-hmm. Inspections to go through and, but we see the cracks. Also, when I look at the crack, it’s always at an angle and I think, how do those engineers even have a sense of what the scale of that is? Because I can barely see it in this really poor drone image. Having something that’s actually 90 degrees to the damage is. A game changer because now again, going back to there’s a crack, but what do I do about it? If it’s not growing, I may just live with it. Mm-hmm. But you can’t measure it if you don’t have a good, consistent image of it, which everyone’s thinks about. Right.  Dainis Kruze: Not only image, but also a 3D model of the blade. So because we are scanning [00:22:00] it with the lighters, we actually have a 3D model of that blade. So we can actually physically measure, we understand what we are seeing, uh, and we can measure, uh, with high precision. So both the internal crawlers and the drones are by far the best, uh, robotic technology for wind turbine inspections, uh, in the industry by far. Like, uh, yeah. Uh, nothing comparable in the, in, in the industry.  Janis Putrams: Yeah. What Dyna says, it’s that the precision is also important for another aspect, because when you have a drone inspection from the outside, an internal inspection on the inside, and you have this precision, what you get is that, for example, there’s something on the inside of Blade. And you want to see what’s on the outside. You can flip in, in our portal, you can just flip and look at it from the outside and you say, oh yeah, there’s something on the outside and what’s on the inside. It gives you much better understanding what the defect to release. Is it just on the inside or is it already propagating on the outside? Dainis Kruze: Yeah, and it’s one click. It’s not reviewing two reports, uh, trying to understand, uh, going back [00:23:00] and forth. It’s just one click you and you get outside.  Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the software platform. There is a software platform. It is called the  Dainis Kruze: your Owns platform. Okay.  Allen Hall: You guys gotta  Dainis Kruze: work  Allen Hall: on a name?  Dainis Kruze: Yeah, we, we haven’t blocked on, on the name. Yeah, we should. We should.  Allen Hall: But the, the Eros platform is a useful platform because you can have all the images you want, but they’re not really useful unless you can correlate it back to what the blade design is and then figure out where. The the crack or the DA or whatever this is going on. Where it is on the blade. Exactly. So then you can assess whether you need to have a response to it. Do you need to derate the turbine, shut down the turbine, or just let her run? Those are big, important decisions to make because it has to do with profits at the end of the day. That platform allows every the engineers to do that. You’re seeing more adoption of that platform by the Oh yeah, by the operators.  Dainis Kruze: We are stepping up. Me and Jans, we actually graduated, uh, computer science. So we are software developers by [00:24:00] education, not the mechanical engineers. Uh, uh, and we, we, for, for all of these years, we, we’ve worked more on the robotic technology, how to get the data, how to get the best quality picture, how to, uh, get the, uh, best quality data. Um, and now we have stepped up on the portal development and, uh, again, uh, in, in, we’ve built the best portal in the industry, like seamless review of the data of internals and externals and lightning protection system tests. Um, and, uh, yeah, the easiness, how to you, you can use the, the system, uh, review the data, uh, navigate, see the. Um, different kind of analytics and, and help from our blade engineers on decision making, um, is again, the best in the industry now.  Allen Hall: Well, you mentioned lightning protection resistance measurements because it’s something you’ve done for a number of years now, and I run into a lot of operators that say we’ve, we’ve had our drones do the LPS resistance measurements. They should still be doing those. I think there’s, because Aeros has done it [00:25:00] so well and has a, a nice data set with it. Operators are thinking, I don’t I need to do it anymore.  Dainis Kruze: Yeah. It’s a, uh, it’s  Allen Hall: a conflict, isn’t it? It, it, it’s, you get so good at one thing that, that it changes the dynamic of the industry. Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. I, I think, I think that we are a bit, we, we need a bit more data on understanding, um, how much these lightning damages actually cost. Yep. Comparing to what would cost, uh, like a proper inspection campaign.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Dainis Kruze: So kind of in a, in a way, you know, like these lighting damages are not there yet.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Dainis Kruze: Why should I test anything? Yeah. And when you get that lighting damage and you lose a blade and it have a fire it to fire. Yeah. Or have a fire and you have, uh, hundreds of thousands, if not millions in losses, it’s already too late. It is. Yeah. It’s, uh, and, and that’s, and that’s an issue of the. Chicken and egg. Uh, yeah, I think in the industry. Uh, but, but I see that the industry [00:26:00]is improving and we do more and more of these lighting protection system tests. Um, customers are becoming smarter on this and, and, uh, I hope, uh, that it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s gonna, and it’s gonna get to the right place.  Janis Putrams: Also, what we saw is that sometimes we, we would give reports to the customer that, for example, for this Blade lightning protection is not working. So they are asking like, okay, what’s next? Yeah, what do I do with this data? Right, right. So we developed a kind of a tool which helps to actually track exactly where that damage is, where that cable is, is kind of connection is lost. Uh, so it’s kind of like a, I dunno, same as you would kind of, uh, look for, I dunno, golden coins or something. So it’s kind of a similar technology. The robot goes up and it kind of, uh, slides, kind of scans, uh, very closely to the blade. And when you find the, where the cable problem is, it has actually like a red marker and it can make a mark on the blade. Uh, so [00:27:00] actually if the rob guys, if they need to go up and, and open up the blade to fix the cable, they know exactly where, where to look. So it’s not, again, you’re not doing it half a meter away or, or you can open up and then fix it.  Dainis Kruze: We call it open circuit finder. For, at least for that, we have the name. Allen Hall: It’s a very useful thing though. I think the, the more that you get out to site, the more you realize what the problems are, what the priorities are, and design solutions around those. The linet protection one is obviously, is massive, right? Mm-hmm. You just kind of see it everywhere in, uh, particularly United States and Southern United States. You see leading erosion being the, the number one. And then lightning damage being number two, when you see a lot of operators going after both of those things simultaneously to save money, that’s a massive improvement than five years ago. The, you guys have really changed the industry. There’s, everybody’s starting to think a little bit differently about how they approach the repair [00:28:00] season that, uh, owns, has extended the repair season. So a lot wider window than it was. It’s not just March to October. Yeah, almost a full year at this point because of the technology the robot brings and the amount of data.  Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: Now everybody can react because they have something to base their decisions on. That’s, oh yeah. That’s impressive. It’s hard. I know you guys have a hard time seeing that because you’re in the day-to-day of Yeah. Of trying to run a company has paced in, in Riga and you got places in Australia and America, so it’s a lot. But I do think deep breath, take a look back. You really have influenced the industry in the positive in a lot of ways. Thank you. Congratulations on that. It’s impressive. It really is. And uh, you know, when we talk next time in a year from now, probably you’ll have more done out in the field and you’ll have done several thousand turbines leading edge protection and you’ll have that history and you’ll have that data. That’s [00:29:00] remarkable. Now your season. Your calendar is getting pretty full with a lot of operators calling you, saying, I need you out here to do leading edge protection and a variety of other tasks. Is there any room in your schedule right now to get on it and, and how do they, how do they get on your schedule? Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah, there is room because we are building 30 additional, uh, leading edge repair robots. So it’s, it’s quite a lot. Like one robot is actually doing, um, up to 150 repairs a year. So it’s, it’s, it’s quite a big capacity. So yeah, we’re building more and more robots. Demand is there. Um, and, and the wind industry is gonna generate more clean energy because of that. Right. So because bleeding edge erosion affects the efficiency and, and we are fixing that.  Allen Hall: Improving the profitability of all these operators.  Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.  Allen Hall: Which is what we should be doing. So if you haven’t contacted our owns, just Google our own’s website and go to it. There’s a a lot of information there. You can get a hold of Dyna, you can get ahold of Giannis via LinkedIn. It’s [00:30:00] really easy to get a hold of these guys and at least start the process. Start thinking about how robots can improve your operation, how it can save you money. Generate more revenue on the production side. Save money on the repair side. So at the end of the day, uh, your management is happy.  Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. We even help to do the calculations of return of investment, so it’s easier to justify, uh, with the management and so on.  Allen Hall: Oh, it’s wonderful. Wonderful. Well, Dynas and Giannis, thank you so much for spending some time with me today and showing us around this Denton facility is quite oppressive and congratulations. And yeah, we’ll, we’ll see you on the road at some point.  Dainis Kruze: Thank you for stopping by.

Denmark’s royal trade mission brings 54 companies to Australia’s renewables market. Plus the UK opens CFD allocation round eight for up to 18 offshore wind farms, and wind tech startups weigh focus against diversification into defense. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!  The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m here with Yolanda Padron, Rosemary Barnes at Matthews Stead, and we start off. On the Danish trip to Australia, 54 Danish companies traveled to Australia alongside King Frederick II and Queen Mary. Uh, over the past week, most work in the renewable energy and green construction businesses that traveled along several signed agreements during the trip. Denmark sees Australia as a growth market, and Rosemary is tied to royalty here. Loosely that Queen Mary is actually from Tasmania, much like Rosemary. [00:01:00] So there is possibly a line to the throne, the Danish throne for Rosemary.  Rosemary Barnes: My dad’s from Tasmania. I, I live in Canberra, but I was, the whole five years I was living in Denmark, I kept waiting for Princess. She was Princess Mary at that point, but Princess Mary to get in touch with her phone number, catch up. You know, Australians have moved to Denmark. Never happened. And now I see that they’ve come to Australia. And do you think that Mary reached out and got in touch with me? No, she didn’t. So I continue, continue to be disappointed in, in Queen Mary. Matthew Stead: Maybe she’s waiting for you, Rosie.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, she could be waiting for me to reach out. That’s true.  Allen Hall: But I clearly, Australia is a growth market. Denmark sees it. I know there’s been a number of Danish companies in Australia over the last two, three years, or con companies from all over the world have been down to Australia, realizing that the growth of renewables is gonna be big because Australia is targeting 82% renewables by 2030. Uh, and right now it’s about 50% renewables, which is [00:02:00] remarkable by the way, that connection to Denmark. Is only going to grow, especially with the relationship with Queen Mary to the area. What are some of the growth areas that Denmark can walk into in Australia right now, Matthew?  Matthew Stead: I mean, obviously the proposed offshore wind is a, is a big thing. So, um, once that gets up and running, obviously the Danish technology will come in there. Um, but, but also, you know, through vest have been here forever. Uh, Siemens, gaa, you know, there’s a strong Danish connection there. Um, so. Yeah, I, I think it’s already, already, already really strong. And, um, obviously having the, the queen, the Danish queen, um, yeah. Ties in with all of that.  Allen Hall: Is it a reciprocal agreement that Australians can do work in Denmark?  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think, it’s not any sort of like free trade agreement, is it? It’s just some individual, I dunno how much we’ve, we’ve got to [00:03:00]teach Denmark, although there are some good Australian technologies, like maybe not building wind turbines themselves, but there are some good technologies like here, logic’s Ping, uh, Australian developed the ping part of it anyway. And then also, you know, I think some, some future manufacturing methods, uh, doing some exciting things here in Australia. Also, it’s not that hard to move to Denmark if you, um, like when I moved there, all I needed to get a Visa was a, a job offer. That was a certain, I, I don’t think it, I don’t, I don’t remember exactly if it was the type of job or if it was the salary, but you know, like you’re not gonna get a job offer. Like working part-time at a bar isn’t gonna be enough to get you a, a working visa in Denmark. But certainly. Any engineers, um, you can, if you get a good engineering position offered to you in Denmark, it’s not hard for the company to make that happen. So I don’t know that we need, we don’t, we don’t really need it made that much easier for us [00:04:00] to get over there. Allen Hall: Is it difficult to get a work permit in Australia if you’re from Denmark?  Rosemary Barnes: Yes and no. It’s not like I would so love to be hiring my XLM colleagues to come. I know that I’d moved to Australia too. Some of them, it’s, it’s not super duper easy. Um. It’s not impossible. And uh, if people are young enough, it’s a bit easier. But, um, it’s, it’s definitely possible, but it’s not, it’s not straightforward. It’s quite expensive and lengthy process.  Matthew Stead: You know, if they can fund a fund, um, themselves with a couple of million dollars, that’ll make it easier.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s definitely beyond my capabilities as a small company of like four, four people to be able to, um, sponsor someone. But I have had, um, actually. Most, maybe. Yeah. Every single employee actually that I’ve had has been, has non, not an Australian citizen, but they’ve all had visas for other reasons. You know, either because they came over with a partner who, um, was an unskilled working visa or because they did a master’s [00:05:00] here and then got a, um, a, yeah, after that got permanent residency through the, you know, the, there’s a pretty established pathway after studying to be able to get permanent residency. Definitely appreciate that there is so much, um, international talent that’s willing to come to Australia, but just yeah, unfortunately any, any random skilled person, you, it’s not, it’s not easy for a small company to bring them over.  Matthew Stead: Rosie, would you recommend Australians to go to Denmark to learn about the wind industry and then, and come back again like you did? Rosemary Barnes: I recommend that they do that in 2016 when I did it. Um, so everyone who’s got a time machine. Hop, hop in, hop in your time machine and go, go do that. I mean, it’s, uh, I was looking back through, um, photos, uh, of my time there recently and was just, uh, like thinking about how much work I did and the amount of time that I spent like in, in production is like I got in my. Four years that I was working for lm, I had at least 10 years worth of experience. And I mean there were [00:06:00] some long, long weeks, but I’m not sure that Denmark’s the right place now because for LM there’s nearly no engineering left in Denmark and certainly not doing the cool, new, exciting technologies that they were while I was there. So that’s not the go Vestas is still doing a fair bit. But you know, we talked recently about the Vestas CO wanting to, wanting to move somewhere with more favorable. Taxation of CEOs salaries. So, you know, maybe that’s not continuing. So I definitely recommend moving to another part of the world early on in your career while you’ve still got enough energy to, to, to like really, really hard work. Um, but I dunno that Denmark is, is the right place anymore. There’s not that much manufacturing left Now.  Based on your experience in both Denmark and Australia, how likely do you think that any of these companies that are coming in. To Australia will do any r and d with data from Australia for all of these wind technologies that they’re bringing. Rosemary Barnes: I, I think that there’s some interest in that. I haven’t heard [00:07:00] Danish companies specifically. I have heard a few little inklings of US companies who are interested and I think that that makes a lot of sense because the US was a much more attractive environment for wind energy technologies until a couple of years ago. So there’s a lot of companies that got partway and now are frustrated and I think that Australia seems quite attractive to them. So that’s where I’ve heard people interested, maybe British as well. Um, the Denmark Danish companies would do well. Like any company, um, that’s trying to develop a technology related to wind energy would, um, do really well to come try and develop in Australia because, you know, like, um, we’re so short staffed or like for expert staff. Things are really spread out. Costs are very high. Um, things wear out faster. Like we just have more operational problems here. So, you know, when you’re putting a business case together, you need to, um, you know, an environment where you are. The alternative of just doing everything manually is [00:08:00]far more expensive here, and it takes far longer so you can get a much more positive business case, um, in Australia, like earlier than you could somewhere else. So I think that that makes it really. Really like perfect place to develop technologies. Um, yeah, but I don’t think everybody realizes that yet. But I do see some, some people starting to,  Matthew Stead: and I’m adding to what you’re saying, Rosie, when I first started in wind, um, back in 2012, um, I got great reception from Denmark. Actually, I probably got the most. Positive responses to my outreach from Denmark. So, um, I, at that point in time, you know, it is a little bit before 2016, but, um, um, um, I, you know, I found really positive engagement and willingness to be open to new technologies. So that was my experience  Allen Hall: as Wind energy professionals. Staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. [00:09:00] PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. The UK government announced contracts for difference allocation round eight, which will open in July of this year. This follows AR seven in January, which secured 8.4 gigawatts of offshore wind. The largest UK CFD procurement ever and renewable UK says up to 18 offshore wind farms could compete for this AR eight round now. The amount of wind going in offshore in the UK is astonishing. Uh, AR eight. I haven’t seen any numbers yet of what they think the total gigawatts will be, but it has to be somewhere around the eight range just to keep up with the [00:10:00] expected rate, uh, to meet their environmental targets and electricity targets in the uk. This is changing the way wind is developed in Europe, especially with the UK changing its tariffs and eliminating tariffs on wind turbine parts and components that come into the country. That is going to really improve the economics of wind turbines in the uk. Plus turn out a lot of European countries and companies to to feed the UK energy goals. Is this the right move in, in terms of the government approach? Because a lot of, uh, other auctions that have happened up in Germany all the way up into Scandinavia have not had such success as this recent UK round. Is their model just a little bit different? And maybe the UK approach is, is the winning method with the the CFDs. Rosemary Barnes: We have some in Australia too. The A [00:11:00] CT Australian Capital Territory where I live has the same thing and, um, for at least several years. Recently, I think most years recently we’ve had our electricity prices in Canberra have been reduced while in the rest of Australia they’ve gone up. It doesn’t always happen that way. Um, it depends on, yeah, how expensive. Electricity was compared to normal. But you know, like when the gas, uh, shock was happening and pushing up electricity prices everywhere, it didn’t affect Canberra very much because we already have PPAs for a hundred percent of our electricity from clean sources. So,  Allen Hall: but isn’t that the goal at the end of the day to get. Some levelized pricing, which is the allocation rounds are doing, is they’re getting levelized pricing over a fixed period, so you know what your electricity is going to cost you. None of this up and down, like with the gas market in the United States and elsewhere.  Rosemary Barnes: My understanding is that it’s the most crucial aspect of that is certainty, so that new projects can get financing.[00:12:00] It’s not actually about it being a, like, whether it’s a subsidy or a payment is not as important as, like, it’s not that that renewable electricity is too expensive and the government needs to subsidize it. It’s that the bank needs to know how, how much you’re gonna get for the electricity that you generate, um, in order to fuel Okay, to lend it to you. And I mean, you can understand why, like, think about. As, um, batteries enter the electricity grid, you, you know, the pricing, the market movements throughout a day are really starting to change. We used to have, you know, like big spikes in price every evening as a lot of gas generators came on. ’cause they’re expensive to run. But now we’re needing less and less of that as we add more batteries. And, you know, people know these. Trends are generally happening, but not exactly. So how can you forecast what your revenue is going to be? Um, if you’re lending billions of dollars to a project, then you want to know that your person you’re lending to is gonna be able to, to pay you back, which they, they can’t if the revenue goes through the floor. So, yeah, my [00:13:00] understanding is that’s, that’s what it’s really for, is to provide the certainty. It’s, it’s like a bit outdated to refer to it as a subsidy. Um, ’cause it’s not always a subsidy. Sometimes it’s the opposite. But what’s really needed is like knowing how much you’re gonna get for the product that you are delivering. I think it makes sense. I just think that like if there’s all this, all the changes that are coming down the pipeline for the uk, it’s a little bit difficult to actually pinpoint where that price is gonna be. Like a sweet spot for all parties involved. Um. Which I think is something that we saw on the PPA side a lot in the US a few years ago. Rosemary Barnes: They had issues in the UK as well, like a couple of auctions ago. Um, they set the price way too low and I mean, they were told leading up to it, no one can deliver a project at this cost and then nobody bid. And it was, it was a real shame because, you know, like it set them back on, you know, that there’s no projects entered the pipeline, um, in that year as a result. But it’s also what’s interesting to [00:14:00] me is that it’s a different price for different. Types of project. So, you know, onshore wind has a, a different safety price than a, um, offshore wind. And fixed offshore wind has a very different price from floating offshore. Solar’s different. They also have special, uh, price for tidal energy. And that to me is a really interesting thing because who is looking at the UK’s energy mix and saying, yep, title energy needs to be part of this, and we we’re happy to pay, you know, 2, 3, 4 times whatever it is, more. For that than for offshore wind. It’s, um, that, that’s interesting to me. How, how they’ve come up with, with the Yeah, like how the mix is going to look. I mean, they don’t control it precisely. It’s not like they say we are gonna have exactly this many gigawatts for offshore wind and exactly this many gigawatts for solar farms. But they do have, um, different prices and different technologies that are targeted.  Matthew Stead: Seems like it really relates really well to the energy [00:15:00]security as well. You know, an extra eight gigawatt here, extra eight gigawatt there. I mean, that can only help with energy security, which is obviously a massive topic. I’m not sure how the newspapers has been coping in the last week or so in the us but over here it’s all about rationing of fuel. It’s all about queues at the pump. So energy security is, is definitely a huge topic.  Rosemary Barnes: You wanna know where there isn’t a queue. In my driveway when I plug my car into the, the outlet in my garage. It’s been a really, really fun time to be a smug EV owner. I’ve been, um, reveling in it. Yeah. Really, really, really enjoying, uh. And Joan, but I also do think like it’s gonna last, like we, because we still talk about the oil crisis in the 1970s, right? Like that, uh, we, uh, people overreacted and then reverted for the most part pretty quickly after that. With Denmark being one exception, they, they went all in on when consistently after that. Um, but [00:16:00] you know, like this, even if it’s only a few weeks long, this little shock is going to. Make people think, okay, oh, I was super worried that I might have to spend 20 minutes refueling on a road trip instead of 10 minutes. Um, but actually remember that time when I couldn’t even get petrol at all and I had to spend yeah, like half an hour lining up because everyone was freaking out and. Uh, I wasn’t sure if I was even gonna be able to get to work the next week because the Australian government only thinks we need 30 days worth of, um, of oil in reserve. Uh, I, I think that it’s, it’s got to help EV sales and then. The EV sales is only one part of it because you need then also, you know, security of electricity generation. And I mean, in Australia we’ve got our own coal, so we’re not, um, probably ever going to be able to not generate electricity. But, um, renewables is a, is a huge part of that as well, being able to, you know, have cheap, cheap electricity all the time. So I, I do think that. It, it’s got to be, you [00:17:00] know, helping some of these technologies move, move ahead a little bit faster now.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, and I also heard that, uh, the UK is sort of patting themselves on the bat for, uh, actually, you know, transitioning and, you know, securing their own, um, energy supply and not being as reliant as some other countries on imports of, of energy. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, we’ve had so many opportunities to learn that lesson over the last few years. Right. So. Anybody that just, um, relaxes after this and says, yep, okay, we’re all good. To go back to relying a hundred percent on, on gas is, you know, like, really. Really going to big lengths to nod to not futureproof themselves from the next one. I do. Do we could, would anybody believe that this is the last time that we’re gonna see, uh, a shock like this? I mean, it will happen definitely. Again,  Matthew Stead: rather embarrassing, but actually currently I own approximately six EVs.  Allen Hall: It sounds like a lot. Matthew,  Rosemary Barnes: you’ll have people beating down your door. Share. Share the love around. We need, it  Allen Hall: should give taxi rides. [00:18:00] Ubers  Matthew Stead: in 2026. I wanna sell, I wanna sell three of them. So this is just. I’m just so happy.  Rosemary Barnes: So message ’em on LinkedIn if you need an ev. Now we’re running classified ads in the uptime When new podcast  Allen Hall: are they? BMW electrified? BMWs  Matthew Stead: no one’s. One’s BMW. Um, another one is, uh, Austin 10. From 1947,  Allen Hall: this is an ad.  Matthew Stead: The other one’s in Nissan Leaf, uh, NISO leaf with about 16,000 Ks on the clock.  Rosemary Barnes: But the first two you converted yourself.  Matthew Stead: Yeah,  Allen Hall: we can reach out to Matthew on LinkedIn and he will sell you an electric vehicle. He’s in Adelaide and there’s plenty of people listening to the podcast in Adelaide and all around Australia. Honestly, he, he will deliver. If asked, so Matthew Stead, S-T-E-A-D on LinkedIn.  Matthew Stead: The BMW that I converted is a 2 0 2, um, from 19 in the the seventies. And, uh, actually BMW um, converted the same car to an electric vehicle for the Munich [00:19:00] Olympics. So yeah, all I did was, um, recreated what. BMW had done back in 1972. Allen Hall: Delamination and bottomline. Failures and blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep to blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections, completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades. Back in service, so visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. Well, south Korean Drone Company Earth Lab built its vision AI [00:20:00]through wind turbine inspections, and I’ve seen hundreds of those in the states. A $10 million defense export deal in 2025 shifted revenue from 80% inspections to. A much larger defense share. Now they have a, a pretty sizable deal, obviously in the Middle East right now, where they’re using their drone technology to be involved in the defense sector. And North Lab I think got driven to that just because, uh, some of their business in the United States didn’t turn out properly the way they expected it to, although they had. Really great technology. In every conference I would attend with Ner lab, like, uh, and they would explain what they were doing. At one point, they were probably three or four years ahead on the, doing your own drone inspections with the little drone and you just buy their software and it would just, it would go up and take pictures of your wind turbine. Didn’t need a separate [00:21:00] pilot. It, it made all things a lot simpler, but that did never seem to catch on. But the technology is there and North Lab does have good engineering teams to develop drone technology. One of the things about this article, which I, I saw the other day, is that North Labs is thinking about their technology in a broader sense. That they’re not just focused on wind turbine inspections. And we see companies that are only tied to wind quite often. The struggle when wind slows down like it’s doing right now, where an Earth Lab is thinking about the problem a little bit differently and saying, I have this technology. It solves a bunch of problems. Maybe we ought to explore those other problem areas and see if we could generate some revenue. And clearly they have. Is that good advice for the wind industry in terms of technology companies is not to just focus on wind, but to think about solutions for adjacent industries? Does that just broaden the portfolio enough where? It keeps your, [00:22:00] it keeps your company viable for longer periods of time.  Matthew Stead: This is a huge topic for us because, um, you know, our technologies can be applied to, you know, rail mining defense, you know, so we’ve, we’ve got sensors which can instrument a whole range of things. Like, you know, we can listen for a conveyor belt when it’s failing. We can measure the ice. On the platform next to a railway line, we can measure ice on an aircraft. Um, you know, with our sensors we can do so much. Um, and um, what we’ve decided is that we need to really conquer. Wind in a nice way, as in, you know, actually help the wind industry first. So we really need to, um, you know, focus there. But, you know, we, we’ve all always been sort of dragged into other industries. Um, but, you know, I think being a technology startup is all about focus. Um, but, you know, revenue is hard. Um, you know, gaining traction is hard. The industry [00:23:00] is hard. Um, so I can see why it might be attractive to, to look at other, other verticals. Um, yeah, so it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s a reality of a technology startup, unfortunately, that you need to look for other applications for your tech. And, and the other thing is, you know, obviously if we can sell our sensors. Into say, mining or, or rail or whatever. Then it can lower the cost and then, you know, that benefits wind as well. Allen Hall: Well, there’s other technology developments can happen in those other industries you could bring into wind makes both avenues possible. Yeah. A lot of industries are gonna benefit from the technology that has been evolved from wind turbines growth into other industries. But it works both ways and it just adds complexity to the business. But to me it’s complexity you have to take on.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’ve worked with a bunch of startups through my career and I’m trying to think of even one that hasn’t had a defense project at some point. It’s very, very common for development, like, um, [00:24:00]technologies that are in development. Is a very appealing avenue to get funds because, you know, defense spends a lot of, a lot of money on developing new technologies. I’m sure that’s true in every country, not just Australia. Um, and they’re also prepared to, like, if you’ve got a capability that they want, they are like, you don’t, it’s not so commercially cutthroat, you know, like they are prepared to pay a lot for something that, um, has unique capabilities. So I do see that that is incredibly attractive to startups, but I really like what Matt said when he said that as a startup you’ve gotta stay focused because that is what the startups that I have worked with in the past nine, outta 10 of them have done the opposite. They’re just like trying to grab any grant that they think that they could possibly, you know, um, apply for. Then they win it and then now all of a sudden they’ve got a project in a direction that is not. Taking them to their actual business. It’s, you know, it’s not step on the way towards their bus achieving their business goals. Um, and it’s like, [00:25:00] what is the startup for? Are you trying to commercialize a technology or find out if, if it’s not possible and stop? Or are you trying to just keep on working on this as long as possible? And I think that, like, honestly, nine outta 10 of the startups that I’ve worked with, it’s the the latter where they just want to keep on doing cool stuff. Then yeah. Grabbing any, any grant that you can to continue working on that. And a lot of them are defense. Um, makes a lot of sense. But I, I do think that, you know, you’ve got to be goal oriented, keep your eyes on the prize and, um, yeah, like Matt said, say focus if you wanna succeed as a startup,  Allen Hall: you think that’s a difference between grants and actual business? I agree with you, Rosemary. When you get hooked into a grant that has a particular outcome and you tend to deviate from what the market. Once, because you’re not listening to the market when you’re going through this grant process, but if you’re in a second business area, it may make sense just because you have a customer, you’re learning from that experience. A lot of things between wind and the other industries are similar in [00:26:00]terms of the way they’re structured, the demands, the expectations, the. It’s, it’s close.  Rosemary Barnes: Grants are amazing when it’s the right grant, and you shouldn’t choose a grant for the sake of getting the money. You should choose it because it helps you achieve something that you wanted to achieve anyway. Um, I think that that’s what you’ve gotta, gotta consider. Um, and yeah, definitely don’t turn down free money if it’s available to help you, you know, get to where you need to get, but don’t deviate on. A bunch of side quests just because you can get funding for that.  Matthew Stead: I think half the battle is that, uh, half the challenge of commercialization is actually the industry. So half, half the challenge is the technology and r and d and making stuff, but the other half is actually knowing the industry, knowing how to price it, knowing the people, knowing where to sell it, you know, knowing the return on investment. So every time you go into a new market, you might think, oh yeah, I’ll just reapply what I’ve already learned. But that’s, that’s. Definitely not true. So your rail is completely different from [00:27:00] wind. Um, in terms of the actual market, the tech, the tech might be the same, the same for, you know, aerospace.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I see that a lot with companies that are trying to take a, a technology that they have from another area and try and bring it into wind. And people are always shocked at. At how different, um, wind energy is. I mean, in terms of the physical operating environment, that’s a, a shock for most companies to start with. It’s like, like in several aspects, it wouldn’t be a more harsh operating environment than, you know, sticking something in or on a wind turbine blade and expecting it to last without maintenance for 20, 30 years. Um, but then also just the way that the, the market works. But it’s interesting that you say 50 50, it’s half about the technology. Do you reckon it’s even half? I, I have come to believe that the technology is like, yeah, like really understanding the problem is and, and knowing that there is a need for a solution. Is the vast majority of the way there, there are so many good engineers in the world that they will find, find the solution if they know exactly what problem they should be solving. [00:28:00] I, I reckon it’s less than 50%. I don’t know about 10%, but, um, certainly I don’t think it’s 50 50.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Maybe it depends on what, what stage of development it is and, you know, what, what maturity level you’re at, perhaps. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, your company started. From a, um, you, you didn’t just think, Hey, I want, you know, I know a lot about noise. I wonder what technology I can develop with this. You, you started from, Hey, we’ve got a, a, a problem that, uh, I don’t wanna, you know, um, tell your origin story for you, but you started with a, a problem and a potential solution and then, you know, went from there. Right? So,  Matthew Stead: yeah, Bre, you know, I, I think B would be happy for me to say his name, Bre, basically throughout a challenge saying. But, you know, technicians can hear, um, blade damage. So, you know, it should be really simple and easy to make a machine to do the same as what a human can do.  Rosemary Barnes: And it was simple and easy, right? Matthew Stead: Ah, yeah. It was so easy. Look, look at all that, all that gray hair.  Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s the trouble, right? Is that [00:29:00] if you want to be tied to an industry, hopefully you hit it during a peak time. Because there are ebbs and flows to every economy about every seven years. There’s always something cataclysmic that happens. You just don’t wanna be in that down cycle. You want to be in the upcycle and have something ready to go. When the upcycle hits, you’ll see a lot of businesses do that. In the aerospace, you see it quite a bit that they’ll kind of go dormant and then when they feel like the, the economy is going to boom, they’ll ramp up operations real quick and, and try to make their money while the kidding is good. Then slow it down when it’s not. They have taken a, a more longer term perspective on it. Large businesses can do that. ’cause usually they’re stockpiling cash to, to manage that. Small businesses don’t usually have the cash flow to get over those, uh, lean times. And that’s the trouble. I, I think a lot of companies that I know, in fact. Rosemary and I are working on a project and a couple of names of companies that were in [00:30:00] Wind two, three years ago popped up and I thought they had such great technology and the business model was right. It just hit a rough patch. That’s all it was, and that if you revive that technology a year from now, it would still be applicable. You could still sell that product. It’s just trying to manage the cash flow. It’s hard because I, and back to Rosemary’s point. How much of it is the technology? Uh, and I, I say 10%, and I think that’s roughly right from my experience. A lot of it is everything else. Managing the books, managing your risks, people, uh, all that manufacturing, right, all quality, all every, all that’s involved. And it’s, unless you do it, you don’t realize it. It’s hard to see it unless you’re on the inside. You know, the inside. You think every minute is some other. Major calamity that you have to manage. If you don’t manage it right, you may not make it out the other [00:31:00] side. That’s what small businesses are all about. But it’s, that’s what makes it so hard.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I know that at Parlo we’re spending a lot more effort on understanding the problems that people need solved, um, rather than developing solutions, which has been a bit of a tough thing for me to. Kind of, uh, stick to because, uh, you know, I’m an engineer. I’ve developed products my whole career and that I, I love tinkering and, you know, like making things work and doing things that haven’t been done before. But I, I, I do think that there is a real, real need for, um, understanding the problem really well, understanding, um, what solutions are available and, and fitting them together. I think that that is actually a really, um, a, a really needed part of the, you know, the whole wind energy ecosystem.  Allen Hall: We had a listener reach out from Japan, Sini Kajima, who was a city counselor in one of the cities, in obviously in Japan, who was a regular listener and. He wrote in [00:32:00] about some of the wind turbine installations that are going on in sort of northern western Japan. They’ve installed some eight megawatt turbines about a mile, 1.6 kilometers offshore, and that’s creating a lot of concern for the local residents there. Those are big turbines, and they’re talking about using 15 megawatt turbines to do something similar and. As, uh, advocate for, uh, the, the city he’s advocating, uh, a 10 kilometer minimum setback in the national diet in Japan. You’re gonna see a lot more of this come up, I think. And the pictures that was sent along with it is pretty, um, eye-opening in that you got this really big turbine, really close to shore. Are we going to put setbacks [00:33:00] in as, uh, a regulation or law in some of these territories, like especially Northern Japan where there is great wind resources, amazing wind resources, but at the same time, there’s a lot of people who live there that will like to have some view of the ocean, not just turbines in the water right off the coastline. This is not just a Japanese problem, but it does seem to be a, a big problem ’cause of the, the way the Continental shelf is around Japan, it drops up pretty quick.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, exactly. It’s not a specific Japanese problem, and I mean, in most cases there’s development approvals and people have plenty of opportunity to express their displeasure at where turbines are cited. But for Japan, it wouldn’t be as simple as saying, okay, we just increase the offset dis distance by a little bit because you increase the, I’m assuming these turbines are cited already as far out as they can be while still being fixed bottom. And if you wanted to push them further away, then you move to floating and you double or triple the cost, [00:34:00] which Japan is looking into floating offshore wind a lot. Um, but Japan. Has no, has no easy options. I mean, Japan likes electricity as much as every other country does. They don’t want to rely on nuclear as much as they have been, which is, you know, probably, at least to a certain extent, understandable. They don’t have great solar resources. I mean, they have some, um, and they could do more. They don’t have good onshore wind opportunities. They have geothermal potential, but they don’t like that so much because their, um, NAL hot springs are, you know, a very important tourism industry and very important culturally. So they’re worried about doing anything that would mess that up. The offshore wind solution, this particular environment haven’t seen, it doesn’t sound like the best situated project, but take any other option that they’ve got for generating electricity in Japan and it has. Probably equal disadvantages. I just think that they have a, a hard problem and [00:35:00] have to choose which compromise they wanna make.  Allen Hall: Mr. Kuma brings up a couple of points here that. There’s about 150 residents that are at risk of insomnia from the wind turbine noise, and they’re concerned about the migratory zones for protected wildlife. In this case, geese about five kilometers offshore.  Rosemary Barnes: Then there might be birds that are affected, and if they are, they can use technologies to spot the birds. Stop the turbines. Like there’s, there’s, you know. Dozens of success stories, um, related to birds and wind turbines. That’s, that’s a solved problem. The noise, I mean, how far away are they? Matt’s the noise expert. Like how, how far away from a wind turbine do you have to be before you can even hear it over the wind noise?  Matthew Stead: Uh, the wind turbine noise is not gonna be an issue.  Allen Hall: So then it comes down to sight lines. And Japan has some of the most beautiful coastline in the world. Rosemary Barnes: I mean, I’m not gonna tell someone that they should, like looking at wind turbines, like I would also rather not look at a wind turbine if I could be looking at an ocean view or a mountain view or whatever. But any energy project would [00:36:00] be nicer if it wasn’t there in the first place. Like, you know, there’s not like a beautiful coal power plant to look at. There’s not a beautiful transmission line to look at. There’s not a beautiful petrol pump, um, to look at. Like, none of none. None of these things are like beautiful technologies that we enjoy interacting with on our daily lives, but we prefer to, you know, have the trade off of having that infrastructure. And trade off for the, the benefits that it brings. And, um, you know, there’s, in that sense, there’s nothing different about renewable energy technologies. It’s different, different trade offs, but they’re always gonna be there.  Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on Linked. And don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode. And if you’ve found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show for Rosie, Yolanda and Matthew, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:37:00] Podcast.