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.

Allen covers Britain’s radar fix unlocking 10 GW of offshore wind, Revolution Wind delivering first power off Rhode Island, typhoon-proof turbines rising in the Philippines, and an Iowa bill to dim turbine lights at night. 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! This is Uptime News Flash. I’m Allen Hall. Here’s the wind energy stories you need to know. For years, offshore wind developers in the United Kingdom ran into an invisible wall. Not weather. Not financing. Radar. Military air defence radars could not distinguish a wind turbine from an aircraft. So certain stretches of British waters were simply off-limits to offshore development. Not anymore. The UK government has purchased specially designed air defence radars built to coexist with offshore wind farms. Installation begins in early 2029. Ten gigawatts of previously blocked offshore wind capacity, now unlocked. That follows the largest single offshore wind procurement in British and European history — 8.4 gigawatts, at a price forty percent lower than new gas. Enough to power twelve million homes. And the UK is not stopping at the water’s edge. The government has also proposed removing planning permission requirements for small onshore turbines up to thirty meters tall, no bigger than an oak tree. Farmers. Schools. Factories. All of them able to generate their own clean power on site. No planning application required. Now, let us cross the Atlantic. Off the coast of Rhode Island, the Revolution Wind project is delivering on a promise that once seemed very much in doubt. On March thirteenth of this year, Revolution Wind delivered its first power to the New England grid. The project is led by Ørsted, the Danish offshore wind leader, alongside Skyborn Renewables. As of March sixteenth, the project stood ninety-three percent complete. Sixty-five turbines, each one eleven megawatts, manufactured by Siemens Gamesa. When fully operational, Revolution Wind will power more than three hundred and fifty thousand homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Let us go somewhere you might not expect to find wind energy news today. The Philippines. Spanish firm Acciona Energia has installed the first turbine for its Kalayaan 2 wind farm in Laguna province, in the Philippines. One hundred and one megawatts. Seventeen turbines, Goldwind GW 165 units, each one six megawatts, with blades spanning one hundred and sixty-five meters. Every one of them designed specifically to survive typhoons. Structural reinforcement. Smart control algorithms. Advanced sensors to protect infrastructure during storms. Commercial operations are scheduled for December of this year. When that happens, roughly two hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide will not enter the atmosphere, every single year. And finally, back home in Iowa, a bill is moving through the statehouse that has nothing to do with megawatts. It is about sleep. Iowa House File 2081 would require wind turbines across the state to use aircraft detection lighting systems. Instead of blinking red lights all night long, the lights would only activate when radar detects an approaching aircraft. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Dean Fisher of Montour, put it simply. His constituents used to enjoy a quiet sunset view. Now they stare at rows of flashing red lights through the night. About twenty-seven percent of Iowa’s turbines already have the sensor-based lights. The rest are being upgraded, year by year. The American Clean Power Association registered undecided. New projects, they said, are already planning to use the sensor lights. But retrofitting existing turbines? That cost goes straight to the customer. No groups registered in opposition. Even the environmental advocates said yes. And now you know the rest of the story. From British radar systems finally making room in the sky for offshore wind, to a court-rescued project delivering first power off Rhode Island, to typhoon-proof turbines rising in the Philippines, to an Iowa lawmaker who just wants his neighbors to sleep — wind energy in 2026 keeps moving forward. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 23rd of March 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast for more.

Bret Tollgaard from Sunrez joins to discuss UV-curing prepreg that cuts blade repair time by up to 90% and has recently received OEM approval. 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: Brett, welcome back to the program.  Bret Tollgaard: Thanks for having me again.  Allen Hall: So a lot’s happening at sunrise at the moment. Uh, there’s, uh, activity with sunrise materials on a lot of blades this year. Over the last couple of years actually, ISPs, operators, OEMs, are realizing that UV curing is a huge advantage.  Bret Tollgaard: Turns out there’s a lot of value added, uh, to the entire process when utilizing UV cure, uh, pre-req.  Allen Hall: So the, the pre pres are, have been available for a couple of years. The qualification though was always the concern. Has the OEM qualified this material? Are they gonna give you the blessing? Does this show up in the manual? If I call the OEM, are they gonna say they have talked to you guys? A lot of those hurdles have been cleared at this point.  Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, great question. And we are happy to announce that we have finally been approved by a large OEM for use on the epoxy blade for now all general kind of repairs. We have several more OEMs that have already passed their phase one mechanical testing, and we’re iterating through now [00:01:00] their, uh, secondary and tertiary kind of tests. And so we do expect to be fully qualified by several OEMs before the end of the year, which should make the ISPs integration and utilization of our materials much, much easier. Allen Hall: So the, the, the problem you’re solving is repairs in the field for the most part, or sometimes in the factory. Mm-hmm. But a lot of times in the field that those repairs. It happened quite a bit. They’re the same repair, the same area, the same kind of thing over and over and over again. And wetting out fabric on site takes time. Particularly if you’re using standard materials, you have to bag it. You have to apply heat in some cases to get it to kick, and then you have to wait several hours for it to cure. So in the repair cycle time, most of your time is waiting.  Bret Tollgaard: It sure is. Uh, and on top of all that, we all know that there aren’t enough technicians in this industry to even do all the repairs, uh, that would like to be done. Yeah. And so to really kind of streamline all of that, [00:02:00] uh, we’ve rolled out a couple of new things and we’ve had a lot more interest in some pre consolidated preki patches for customers. Uh, if a particular blade model has an issue that is a standardized kind of repair. We’re actually now building custom prepregs, or we will build the appropriate width length, stack it, consolidate it, uh, wrap it between our films. So then all the customer has to do when they get on site is, uh, you know, do do the appropriate surface prep. Scarfing, apply a little bit of our UV surface primer to the backside of that patch. But now they can go up tower, single peel, stick, roll out, and then they’re cured.  Allen Hall: And that’s a. How many hours of saving is that? It’s gotta be like six, 12 hours of saving, of, of  Bret Tollgaard: labor. It’s upwards of 80 to 90% of the labor that’s gonna actually need to be done to apply that. Otherwise, and then same thing too. We’ve had a couple instances where we took a several day repair down to one, to two to three hours. And these are multi-meter long repairs that were fast tracked because we pre consolidated preki [00:03:00] everything. Some were in flat sheet forms, some were much longer on rolls, where you’re actually then rolling out with a team. Um, and so we’ve been able to demonstrate several times, uh, over the last 12 months, uh, the, the value that a UV cure preprint.  Allen Hall: Well, sure, because that, that would make sense. The issue about wetting out fabric in the field you just done in the back of a trailer or something, somewhere like that. Usually it is, it’s that you’re never really sure that you got the fabric wetted out. The experienced technicians always feel like, have done it enough that they get very consistent results. But as you mentioned, getting technicians is hard and, and there’s so many repairs to do. So you’re doing those wetting out composite things takes practice and skill. Just buying it, preki it, where you have control over it. And you guys sell to the military all the time. So that, and you’re, are you ass 91 qualified yet? You’re in the midst of that?  Bret Tollgaard: So we, I mean, a, we just got ISO certified, uh, at the end of last year in December. So our [00:04:00] QMS system and everything like that’s up to date, that’s huge. Another big qualification for the OEMs that want to see, you know, true quality and output.  Allen Hall: That’s it. I, if I’m gonna buy a preki patch, so, uh, uh, that would make sense to me, knowing that. There’s a lot of rigor as a quality system. So when I get out the the site and I open that package, I know what’s inside of it every single time. Bret Tollgaard: Well, and that’s just it. And like we got qualified based on the materials that we can provide and the testing that’s being done in real world situations when you’re wetting out by hand and you’re vacuum backing and you’re trying to cure. It is a little bit of an art form when you’re doing that. It is, and you might think you have a great laminate, you got void content, or you haven’t properly went out that glass ’cause humidity or the way the glass was stored or it was exposed. The sizing and the resin don’t really bite. Well. You might think you have a great repair, but you might be prematurely failing as well after X cycles and fatigue. Uh, simply because it’s not as easy to, to truly do. Right? And so having the [00:05:00] pre-wet, uh, pre impregnated glass really goes a long way for the quality, uh, and the consistency from repair to repair. Allen Hall: Well, even just the length of the season to do repairs is a huge issue. I, I know I’ve had some discussions this week about opening the season up a little bit, and some of the ISPs have said, Hey, we we’re pretty much working year round at this point. We’re, we’ll go to California. We’ll go to Southern Texas. We’ll work those situations. ’cause the weather’s decent, but with the sunrise material, the temperature doesn’t matter.  Bret Tollgaard: Correct. And I was actually just speaking to someone maybe half hour ago who came by and was talking about repairs that they had to do in Vermont, uh, in December. They could only do two layers of an epoxy repair at a time because of the amount of the temperature. Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Whereas you could go through, apply a six or an eight layer pre-reg cure it in 20 minutes. Uh, you know, throughout that entire length that he had and you would’ve been done. That’s, and so it took several days to do a single repair that could have been done in sub one hour with our material.  Allen Hall: I know where those wind turbines are. [00:06:00] They weren’t very far from, we used to live, so I understand that temperature, once you hit about November up in Vermont, it’s over for a lot of, uh, standard epoxy materials and cures, it is just not warm enough.  Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, we, we’ve literally had repairs done with our materials at negative 20 Fahrenheit. That were supposed to be temporary repairs. They were installed four or five years ago. Uh, and they’re still active, perfectly done patches that haven’t needed to be replaced yet. So,  Allen Hall: so, because the magic ingredient is you’re adding UV to a, a chemistry where the UV kicks it off. Correct. Basically, so you’re, it’s not activated until it’s hit with uv. You hit it with uv that starts a chemical process, but it doesn’t rely on external heat. To cure  Bret Tollgaard: exactly. It, it is a true single component system, whether it’s in the liquid pre preg, the thickened, uh, the thickened putties that we sell, or even the hand lamination and effusion resin. It’s doped with a, a variety of different food initiators and packages based on the type of light that’s [00:07:00] being, uh, used to, to cure it. But it will truly stay dormant until it’s exposed to UV light. And so we’ve been able to formulate systems over the last 40 years of our company’s history that provide an incredibly long shelf life. Don’t prematurely gel, don’t prematurely, uh, you know, erode in the packaging, all those  Allen Hall: things.  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. Like we’ve been at this for a really long time. We’ve been able to do literally decades of r and d to develop out systems. Uh, and that’s why we’ve been able to come to this market with some materials that truly just haven’t been able to be seen, uh, delivered and installed and cured the way that we can do it. Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s a huge thing, the, the shelf life.  Bret Tollgaard: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: You talk to a lot of. Operators, ISPs that buy materials that do have an expiration date or they gotta keep in a freezer and all those little handling things.  Bret Tollgaard: Yep.  Allen Hall: Sunrise gets rid of all of that. And because how many times have you heard of an is SP saying, oh, we had a throwaway material at the end of the season because it expired. Bret Tollgaard: Oh, tremendously  Allen Hall: amount of, hundred of thousands of dollars of material, [00:08:00] Bret Tollgaard: and I would probably even argue, say, millions of dollars over the course of the year gets, gets thrown out simply because of the expiration date. Um, we are so confident in our materials. Uh, and the distributors and stuff that we use, we can also recertify material now, most of the time it’s gonna get consumed within 12 months Sure. Going into this kind of industry.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, but there have been several times where we’ve actually had some of that material sent back to us. We’ll test and analyze it, make sure it’s curing the way it is, give it another six months shelf, uh, service life.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, and so you’re good to go on that front  Allen Hall: too. Yeah. So if you make the spend to, to move to sun, you have time to use it.  Bret Tollgaard: Yes.  Allen Hall: So if it snows early or whatever’s going on at that site where you can’t get access anymore, you just wait till the spring comes and you’re still good with the same material. You don’t have to re-buy it.  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And with no special storage requirements, like you mentioned, no frozen oven or frozen freezer, excuse me, uh, or certain temperature windows that has to be stored in, uh, it allows the operators and the technicians, you know, a lot more latitude of how things actually get  Allen Hall: done. And, and so if. When we [00:09:00] think about UV materials, the, the questions always pop up, like, how thick of a laminate can you do and still illuminate with the UV light? And make sure you curate I I, because you’re showing some samples here. These are,  Bret Tollgaard: yeah.  Allen Hall: Quarter inch or more,  Bret Tollgaard: correct. So  Allen Hall: thick samples. How did you cure these? Bret Tollgaard: So that was cured with the lamp that we’ve got right here, which are standard issued light, sold a couple hundred into this space already. Um, that’s 10 layers of a thousand GSM unidirectional fiber. Whoa. This other one is, uh, 10 layers of, of a biox. 800 fiber.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Bret Tollgaard: Uh, those were cured in six minutes. So you can Six  Allen Hall: minutes. Bret Tollgaard: Six minutes.  Allen Hall: What would it take to do this in a standard epoxy form?  Bret Tollgaard: Oh, hours,  Allen Hall: eight hours maybe?  Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. About for, for the, for the post cure required to get the TGS that they need in the wind space, right? Absolutely. And so yeah, we can do that in true minutes. And it’s pre impregnated. You simply cut it to shape and you’re ready to rock. Allen Hall: And it looks great when you’re done, mean the, the surface finish is really good. I know sometimes with the epoxies, particularly if they get ’em wetted out, it doesn’t. It [00:10:00] doesn’t have that kind of like finished look to it.  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And the way that we provide, uh, for our standard, uh, you know, pre pprs are in between films and so if you cure with that film, you get a nice, clean, glossy surface tack free. But as more and more people go to the pre consolidation method down tower, so even if they buy our standard prereg sheets or rolls, they’re preki down tower, you can also then just apply a pre, uh, a peel ply to that top film. Oh, sure. So if you wet out a peel ply and then you build your laminate over the top. Put the primer and the black film over when they actually get that up on tower, they can then just remove that fuel ply and go straight to Sandy or uh, uh, painting and they’re ready to rock.  Allen Hall: Wow. Okay. That’s, that’s impressive. If you think about the thousands and thousands of hours you’ll save in a season. Where you could be fixing another blade, but you’re just waiting for the res, the cure,  Bret Tollgaard: and that’s just it. When you’re saving the amount of labor and the amount of time, and it’s not just one technician, it’s their entire team that is saving that time. Sure. And can move on to the next [00:11:00] repair and the next process. Allen Hall: So one of the questions I get asked all the time, like, okay, great, this UV material sounds like space, age stuff. It must cost a fortune. And the answer is no. It doesn’t cost a fortune. It’s very price competitive.  Bret Tollgaard: It, it really is. And it might be slightly more expensive cost per square foot versus you doing it with glass and resin, but you’re paying for that labor to wait for that thing to cure. And so you’re still saving 20, 30, 40 plus percent per repair. When you can do it as quickly as we can do it.  Allen Hall: So for ISPs that are out doing blade repairs, you’re actually making more money.  Bret Tollgaard: You are making more money, you are saving more money. That same group and band of technicians you have are doing more repairs in a faster amount of time. So as you are charging per repair, per blade, per turbine, whatever that might be, uh, you’re walking away with more money and you can still pass that on to the owner operators, uh, by getting their turbines up and spinning and making them more money.  Allen Hall: Right. And that’s what happens now. You see in today’s world, companies ISPs that are proposing [00:12:00] using UV materials versus standard resin systems, the standard residence systems are losing because how much extra time they’re, they’re paying for the technicians to be on site. Bret Tollgaard: Correct.  Allen Hall: So the, the industry has to move if you wanna be. Competitive at all. As an ISP, you’re gonna have to move to UV materials. You better be calling suns  Bret Tollgaard: very quickly. Well, especially as this last winter has come through, the windows that you have before, bad weather comes in on any given day, ebbs and flows and changes. But when you can get up, finish a repair, get it spinning, you might finish that work 2, 3, 4 later, uh, days later. But that turbine’s now been spinning for several days, generating money. Uh, and then you can come back up and paint and do whatever kind of cosmetic work over the top of that patch is required. Allen Hall: So what are the extra tools I need to use Sunz in the kits. Do I need a light?  Bret Tollgaard: Not a whole lot. You’re gonna need yourself a light. Okay. You’re gonna need yourself a standard three to six inch, uh, bubble buster roller to actually compact and consolidate. Sure. Uh, that’s really all you need. There’s no vacuum lights. And you sell the lights. We do, we, [00:13:00] we sell the lights. Um, our distributors also sell the lights, fiberglass and comp one. Uh, so they’re sourced and available, uh, okay. Domestically, but we sell worldwide too. And so, uh, we can handle you wherever you are in the world that you wanna start using uv, uh, materials. And yeah, we have some standardized, uh, glass, but at the same time, we can pre-reg up to a 50 inch wide roll. Okay, so then it really becomes the limiting factor of how wide, how heavy, uh, of a lamette does a, a technician in the field want to handle?  Allen Hall: Yeah, sure. Okay. In terms of safety, with UV light, you’re gonna be wearing UV glasses,  Bret Tollgaard: some standard safety glasses that are tinted for UV protection. So they’ll  Allen Hall: look yellow,  Bret Tollgaard: they’ll look a little yellow. They’ve got the shaded gray ones. Sunglasses, honestly do the same.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: But with a traditional PPE, the technicians would be wearing a tower anyways. Safety glasses, a pair of gloves. You’re good to go. If you’re doing confined space, work on the inside of a, a, a blade, uh, the biggest value now to this generation of material that are getting qualified. No VOC non [00:14:00] flammable, uh, no haps. And so it’s a much safer material to actually use in those confined spaces as well as  Allen Hall: well ship  Bret Tollgaard: as well as ship it ships unregulated and so you can ship it. Next day air, which a lot of these customers always end. They do. I know that.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, so next day air, uh, you know, there’s no extra hazmat or dangerous goods shipping for there. Uh, and same thing with storage conditions. You don’t need a, a flammable cabinet to actually store the material in.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, so it really opens you up for a lot more opportunities.  Allen Hall: I just solves all kinds of problems.  Bret Tollgaard: It, it really does. And that’s the big value that, you know, the UV materials can provide. Allen Hall: So. I see the putty material and it comes in these little tubes, squeeze tubes. What are these putties used for?  Bret Tollgaard: So right now, the, the existing putty is really just the same exact thickened, uh, resin that’s in the pre-print.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Bret Tollgaard: And it’s worked well. It’s, it’s nice we’re kind of filling some cracks and some faring, some edges and stuff if things need to be feathered in. But we’ve [00:15:00] been working on this year that we’ll be rolling out very, very soon is a new structural putty. Okay. So we’ll actually have milled fibers in there and components that will make it a much more robust system. And so we’ve been getting more inquiries of, particularly for leading edge rehabilitation. Where Cat three, cat four, even cat five kind of damage, you need to start filling and profiling before any kind of over laminates can really be done properly. And so we’re working on, uh, rolling that out here very, very soon. Um, and so that will, I think, solve a couple of needs, um, for the wind market. Uh, and then in addition to some new products that we’re rolling out, uh, is gonna be the LEP system that we’re been working on. Uh, the rain erosion testing showed some pretty good results. But we’re buying some new equipment to make a truly void free, air free system that we’re gonna it, uh, probably submit end of April, beginning of May for the next round, that we expect to have some very, very good, uh, duration and weather ability with,  Allen Hall: because it’s all about speed,  Bret Tollgaard: it’s durability. Allen Hall: All about e  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And ease of use by someone in the [00:16:00] field. Yeah. Or OEMs on, you know, in the manufacturing plant. Um, there has yet, in my opinion, to be a true winner in the LEP space. That is just the right answer. And so by applying our materials with the really high abrasion resistance that we expect this to have and be as simple to do as it really appeal, stick and cure, um, we think it’s gonna be a bit of a game changer in this industry. Allen Hall: Well, all the sunrise materials, once they’re cured, are sandal  Bret Tollgaard: correct.  Allen Hall: And I think that’s one of the things about some of the other systems, I always worry about them like, alright, they can do the work today, but tomorrow I have to come back and touch it again. Do I have a problem? Well, and the sun rests stuff is at least my playing around with it has been really easy to use. It’s, it’s. Uh, things that I had seen maybe 20 years ago in the aerospace market that have they thought about using the material not only [00:17:00] in the factory, but outside the factory. How easy is it to adapt to, how easy to, to paint, to all those little nuances that come up? When you’re out working in the field and trying to do some very difficult work, uh, the sunroom material is ready to go, easy to use and checks all the boxes, all those little nuances, like it’s cold outside, it’s wet outside. Uh, it’s, it’s hot outside, right? It’s all those things that, that stop ISPs or OEMs from being super efficient. All those parameters start to get washed away. That’s the game changer and the price point is right. How do. People get a hold of you and learn about the sun rose material. Maybe they, you can buy through fiberglass or through composite one. Mm-hmm. That’s an easy way to do, just get to play with some samples. But when they want to get into some quantity work, they got a lot of blade repair. They know what they’re doing this summer or out in the fall or this winter come wintertime. How do they get [00:18:00] started? What do they do?  Bret Tollgaard: Well, one of the first things to do is they can reach us through our website. Um, we’re developing a larger and larger library now for how to videos and install procedures, um, generating SOPs that are, you know, semi, uh, industry specific. But at the same time too, it’s a relatively blanket peel and stick patch, whether it’s a wind turbine blade, a corroded tank, or a pressure pipe. Um, and so yeah, www.suns.com Okay, is gonna be a great way to do it. Uh, we’re actively building more videos to put on, uh, our YouTube channel as well. Um, and so that’s kind of gonna be the best way to reach out, uh, for us. One of the big things that we’re also pushing for, for 26 is to truly get people, uh, in this, in industry, specifically trained and comfortable using the products. At the end of the day, it’s a composite, it’s a pre impregnated sheet. It’s not difficult, but there are some tips and tricks that really make the, the use case. Uh, the install process a lot easier.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Bret Tollgaard: Uh, and so just making sure that people are, are caught up on the latest and greatest on the training techniques will [00:19:00] go a long way too. Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s only as good as the technician that applies it  Bret Tollgaard: e Exactly.  Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s great. Uh, it’s great all the things you guys are doing, you’re really changing the industry. In a positive way, making repairs faster, uh, more efficient, getting those turbines running. It’s always sad when you see turbines down with something that I know you guys could fix with sun. Uh, but it does happen, so I, I need the ISPs to reach out and start calling Sun and getting in place because the OEMs are blessing your material. ISPs that are using it are winning contracts. It’s time to make the phone call to Sun Rez. Go to the website, check out all the details there. If you wanna play with your material, get ahold of fiberglass or composite one just. Order it overnight. It’ll come overnight and you can play with it. And, and once you, once you realize what that material is, you’ll want to call Brett and get started.  Bret Tollgaard: A hundred percent appreciate the time.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Thanks Brett, for being on the podcast. I, I love talking to you guys because you have such cool material. Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, no, we’re looking, uh, forward to continuing to innovate, uh, really make this, uh, material [00:20:00] splash in this industry.

The crew discusses the UK removing tariffs on offshore wind equipment, Vineyard Wind’s final blade shipment from New Bedford, and Ming Yang joining Germany’s offshore wind association. 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. I’m here with Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes and Yolanda Padron. And the UK is really gearing up for offshore wind and they’re making some really smart moves and. One of them is, uh, the change in tariffs. So the British offshore wind manufacturers have been fighting really an uphill battle for a long time and for years. The companies that build turbines and components in the UK have faced import tariffs on the materials needed most, which tends to be steels like steel. Uh, cables, specialized parts from overseas all carried a tariff with it. Well, now the federal government has acted to [00:01:00] remove those tariffs on offshore wind equipment. The move is expected to save UK manufacturers tens of millions of pounds every year. And for an industry trying to cut costs and scale up that kind of relief could make the difference between winning. Losing contracts, and I’m surprised the UK has waited this long and I think other countries have the same problem. Obviously the US is taring the heck out of everything at the minute, but uh, a lot of European countries do put tariffs on the raw materials and the components that are used to make wind turbines. That’s not a smart long term move if you’re trying to deploy. Gigawatts of offshore wind.  Matthew Stead: Well, I, I think, uh, the recent events in the world show that energy security and not importing energy is a wonderful thing. And so this completely aligns with that, um, that objective. So I think that’s why we all agree with you, Alan. Allen Hall: Well do, is there a, a. A threshold here where other countries start to do it [00:02:00] and for whatever reason there’s, there’s tends to be tariffs on energy in all forms of it. Right. And there and on steel in particular, that seems to be a big area of concern. Are we gonna start to see some of those come down just to lower the cost of wind turbines and to deploy the middle of the water? ’cause there is a lot of steel in an offshore wind turbine.  Matthew Stead: It’s been like China. I mean China has, you know, a lot of clean energy, low cost energy and it is to their advantage. So I, I think it’s a entirely logical approach and I would’ve thought it’s, if you’re a good on policy, you would definitely be looking at this. Allen Hall: Is this has been a concern of the UK steel industry, which has been diminishing over the years? Uh, so it’s always been a pain point with the uk. They’ve been trying to stand up their own steel industry and forever they had a big steel industry In the uk you think of all the. The steel that was built from late 18 hundreds all the way up to the 1980s and nineties. Uh, but it does sound like you, you gotta pick and choose your battles here. And maybe the UK has [00:03:00] finally said, okay, the, the steel battle is a separate issue within offshore wind, and maybe we gotta do something different.  Matthew Stead: I mean, I think Australia did the same thing ages ago. I mean, we had a car, car industry and you know, we just didn’t have the scale. So, you know, Australia’s picking its battles and um, yeah, I mean, you can’t be good at everything, so you know why not. Uh, get the, the lower cost energy and um, deal with it that way.  Rosemary Barnes: Australia has actually just announced, you know how Australia’s got the policy to support clean energy technology manufacturing in Australia. And they started with, um, solar panels and then they’ve also got something related to battery cells. Well, they just announced wind turbine tower manufacturing, um, which is very simple. The reason why Australia doesn’t have, um, wind turbine tower manufacturing anymore. Is just because we can’t compete on price with Asia, um, in general and China specifically. It’s interesting now to be like, okay, let’s support Australian [00:04:00]manufacturing of wind turbine towers when like there’s no technological barrier. It’s pure cost, cost issues. I would really love to see the Australian government supporting some of the new manufacturing methods and you know, like we’ve seen that Fortescue has invested in. Um, in Ena Lift, the Spanish, Spanish company, um, ESCU has, has bought their tower manufacturing. Um, it’s, it’s like modular, advanced thing that’s gonna work well for remote areas. Otherwise it’s just like, pay a bunch of money so that we can make towers more expensively, but we can sell them at a competitive rate with the Chinese. And I don’t know, to me that’s not very strategic. I always prefer we support the next, the next thing.  Allen Hall: Whatever happened to spiral welding and making towers on site. I think that died about a year or two ago because they were trying it here in the United States and about building ’em at the wind farm. But it sounded like just setting it up to [00:05:00] build the spiral mechanism, the, the cold, uh, forming plus all the welding on top of it. It got to be so expensive to install on site that it was just easier to, to build a central location, which I think they were going for. I’m not even sure that in today’s world, because of the advanced technology in the existing way of manufacturing is so good and inexpensive that it makes any sense to try anything else. It just seems like it’s, there’s just stamping out parts right now.  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, no. I mean, we definitely need new, new methods because we’re really constrained on how tall towers can get if you just wanna make a steel cylinder and ship it out in, you know, whole pieces, like whole cross sections and. Um, put them together vertically. That’s you. You know, like we’ve, we’ve gotten about as tall as we’re gonna get for that because if you want to go any taller, you’re gonna have to start massively increasing the thickness of the tower to make it stiffen up. And that just means way more steel to keep material costs reasonable. You need to increase the diameter, um, beyond [00:06:00] what you can transport on the road. Um, but I think that it’s like the, the, the problem is definitely real and well established, but it’s like with many other. Problems. You know when you start thinking, okay, we’ve got a solution to this problem at that time, there aren’t other solutions, so you’re sure that you know you’re gonna win. And so spiral welding was one of the early ones. Oh, we can fix this problem, but. While they’re developing that and trying to get the capabilities where it needs to be, the cost down, you’ve got a dozen other competing ways that you could solve that problem. And they include like, um, some manufacturers, I think Vestus is one. They’re cutting longitudinally. And so instead of, um, shipping out towers in a single cross section, it’ll be like four. And then they’re bolted together on site. Um, and then Concrete Towers is another one. The Naber Lift, um, thing that I mentioned.  Matthew Stead: Wooden towers.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, wooden Wooden towers is, uh, another one I’ve covered, uh, [00:07:00] on my YouTube channel. Matthew Stead: They really should make them out of carbon fiber, shouldn’t they?  Rosemary Barnes: Well, I have, it’s not, it’s You’re saying that as a, as a crazy thing. It’s not, it’s not such a crazy thing. And I have, I have, I have looked into it. You wouldn’t do it outta carbon fiber. You’d do it outta glass. Um, there’s a lot of. There’s a lot of benefits to it, and I actually do believe that we might eventually see like 3D printed glass, um, towers. Allen Hall: No.  Rosemary Barnes: Now we’re just getting into our standard. I, I believe the future might look different to the, to the present day, and Alan never thinks that anything’s ever gonna change.  Matthew Stead: I would’ve. 3D uh, printed concrete towers would have some logic.  Rosemary Barnes: There’s been pilots of 3D printed concrete, concrete towers. I’m, I’m pretty sure GE had a, um, a project on that and there might have been somebody else that did, took it a bit further. It’s all possible. It’s also like concrete towers are, are good, but it is local. Like it depends on having the right materials around locally. ’cause you don’t want to have to transport Hess of. Concrete and water to site. Um, [00:08:00] so yeah, anyway, the point is that like, just because you’ve identified a real problem and you’ve got a solution to it, if you are gonna take five or 10 years to develop your technology and get it to the right price point, you are not gonna be the only, the only solution anymore. So people often like massively overestimate how valuable their idea is. Um, and by the time that it’s ready, it’s not the best solution anymore. So I think like the lesson from that is to just. You need to just move really, really fast and keep your peripheral vision available to see what other technologies are developing in tandem and know when, when to pull the pin. If you are no longer, you no longer have a path to be the best solution, then. Stop. Even if you’ve got 90% of a solution, don’t bother with the last 10%. If you’re never gonna sell it, you know it’s a waste go. Um, let, let all your smart people work on something else. Allen Hall: Delamination and bottom line, failures and blades are [00:09:00]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. Can we pull the pin? On digital twins. I came across another company that was pushing digital twins in the wind turbine space. And I thought, I thought we got rid of that a year ago. Can we stop doing that?  Rosemary Barnes: I, um, in general, like I think a lot of times you see digital twins and I can’t see the point, but there are some applications where you [00:10:00] definitely can,  Matthew Stead: uh, I can add on the digital twin, so the IEC 61 400 dash 32, the new blade o and m standard has in the, in its current draft, it has a section on digital twins. Um, and um, at the last meeting there was a debate as to whether that should be taken out because actually, um, AI, ml, um, all these, um, approaches will just overrun the concept of the traditional digital twin. So, um, I was voting for it to be removed, um, but. Other people didn’t. And so it’s still in the current draft. Yolanda Padron: I am a little bit tired around digital twins at the idea of, like, I’ve seen the title slapped around a lot of things that just aren’t digital twins. And I think that gets even more confusing to a lot of people who are just new to the space or new to the idea that then they, they, they hear digital twin, they have like an idea about it or like, oh, it’s really great, and then they pursue something that just [00:11:00] really isn’t, it’s just a. A monitoring system that they wanted to name something else.  Allen Hall: Yes, that’s it.  Rosemary Barnes: I’ve seen it used well in manufacturing, which is not usually what people are selling it as, but you know, if you have a new composite part, for example, and like a wind turbine blade is a really good example, you design it. And then you can only test it to a certain extent. Um, and you never know exactly what you’ve made, right? And so it’s really hard to kind of relate, like to validate your design tools when not every blade is the same. You know, it’s aiming to be the same. The design is the same every time, but you’re gonna get different results every time you test it. But with some advanced, uh, manufacturing, like my favorite thing to argue with Alan about 3D printing, um, fiber reinforced composites. You can really precisely know exactly what your part looks like all through the structure. You know where every void is. Um, you know where every fiber is and then so you know that exact part. Then you can test that exact part, and you do that with, you know, a dozen of them and you can really [00:12:00] build up a model of what kinds of defects are really, um, you know, doing what to the performance output. And then that can help you to get your quality, um, acceptance to really, like you, you can do the things that matter instead of guessing, oh, okay, yeah, we know that we want this much. Bond line, you can actually know, okay, well like where does that matter? Where doesn’t it? What’s the actual threshold? However, it’s very expensive to do that, and I don’t know that it would make sense for wind turbine blades economically, maybe. Maybe it will one day. I mean, if we can get the quality data that we need, there are big pro quality problems that need to be solved with blades so. I think it’s something to not totally rule out anyway. Matthew Stead: That’s quality control. That’s not a digital twin.  Rosemary Barnes: No, but it is. You have the di you have the make up a digital twin of the, of the part that you’ve made, and then you test it and then you can, um, digitally test the [00:13:00] part that you, the model that you have. So it is a digital twin. Um, it’s just used in a very different way to what digital twins are usually sold as. It’s not at the right level yet for a hundred meter long. Composite wind turbine blade. Um, and also because you would need to destructively test, you know, a, a whole bunch of blades which no one can afford to, to do that.  Yolanda Padron: What if we were to take all the money from like FSAs and stuff that they have to spend, like the OEMs actually have to spend from all of the manufacturing defects from, oh, I tweaked this on this blade type in this. Factory and set it to print and then I tweaked it over here and then I set it to print for like hundreds and hundreds of blades. Um, you know, all of that money spent accumulates too, if we really wanna look at the business case. But eventually, I think maybe it’d be great if it were to work out. I am also.[00:14:00] Hoping  Rosemary Barnes: I, I think it would be a really interesting project to work, and I bet I could. I, I bet that, you know, a good project manager could get, get a positive business case out of it. At the end. One of the problems is that like service, the service department bucket of money is not at all related to the manufacturing bucket of money. Um, so, or the, yeah, the engineering back of the money that, that, that would be a really big problem and make it harder to find a positive business case. But I still think that it’s, um. Yeah, it, there’s a lot of potential there. It would be really interesting project to work on.  Matthew Stead: In terms of the operational phase, I, I think, um, like I said before, the A IML tools. A way more powerful with anomaly detection rather than building a, a fancy digital model, which is not accurate. Um, actually you’re better off looking at the deviations and then the anomalies from what you expect. And I, and there are quite a few people that are doing that, and I, I personally think that’s a way more effective method during the operations and maintenance phase. Rosemary Barnes: But I think that that [00:15:00] would be related. It would be a way to improve what you’re doing there because you said, yeah, digital twin, that’s not. Accurate. So you would need to be accurate. That would be the project to figure out like how you can get accuracy in the right places that you need it. You wouldn’t be able to afford to have accuracy over the entire blade ’cause it’s just way too much data. And then, um, it would help you to figure out like what anoma, what anomalies do we need to look for that are the, the critical ones. I, I think that they would, they would work in partnership. Um, not as two separate things. Can I just plug, because I’m gonna go to China in April and can I just plug that if anyone has any projects, I’ll be there anyway. And um, yeah, so I am sharing the cost of the trip between a few different collaborations and there will be a chance. To, to get me out there to see some manufacturing, et cetera. Would be really excited to go visit some Chinese [00:16:00] manufacturing, some Chinese development. Got a few, few tentative irons in fires at the moment, but would love to have Chinese companies reach out to me and see if we can arrange a collaboration  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 wind.com today. It has been a turbulent chapter in offshore wind in America. No doubt about that vineyard wind. The first large scale offshore wind project in the US has faced a crazy difficult road after months of uncertainty, partial construction, and a federally ordered pause. The [00:17:00] project has reached a telling milestone the first. And final shipment of the last blade has departed the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts. And, uh, the blades were just sitting on port for a little while. Uh, Keyside. So this is the last blades or set of blades that’s going out to a turbine. This should sort of wrap it up. I, although I do think there are a couple of blades that may still need some modification updates, something of the sort. But in terms of getting termites out in the water. This should be it. And remember a few months ago, GE and uh, a number of others, vineyard was saying that they’re trying to be done in March. So they’re going to come really close to doing that. And that I know they’re trying to get power all turned on for the site. Because once that happens, it’s really hard for the, uh, the federal government to put any stops on them. I, I guess the question is now, is there any future for offshore wind for [00:18:00]ge now that this is complete and, and it’s kind of off the books, which is what they’ve been trying to do for the last roughly two years, is get it off the books. Matthew Stead: Um, as a positive, I mean. You know, every industry goes through challenges and improve. So I mean, despite all the turmoil, you know, there has to be some good come from it, even though it is been a painful, horrible process. You know, surely there’s some good come from it in terms of improved quality in the future, improved processes, so,  Allen Hall: well, I, I guess that’s the question is are they taking some of these lessons learned and applying them, or are they taking the lessons learned and saying we’re not gonna do that again in, in terms of going down the pathway for offshore wind. Matthew Stead: Well, I think if, uh, if they don’t apply the lessons, that’s sort of, it shows a massive failure of an organization.  Allen Hall: Yeah. It may, I guess it’s a question if it’s a technical failure or a financial failure. Maybe it’s both at the minute until they get everything up and running. But I think the financial side has been. Driving a number of the, of the decisions because the [00:19:00] technical side hasn’t gone all that well.  Matthew Stead: Uh, I think, uh, I think the financial side is an art, which I don’t understand.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of moving pieces in financing offshore wind. Now, Vestas has won a, a couple of big. Uh, orders from RWB offshore and Vestus has obviously been in, in some offshore, not at the scale as originally as some of the other OEMs. It does look like the future is bright for Vestus offshore. Is that just gonna continue on that? Vestus is going to invest heavily in offshore and basically dominate that market. Or compete against a a Chinese manufacturer. It doesn’t seem like Siemens is gonna win a lot of offshore contracts off. At least today it doesn’t. You don’t see a lot of noise about that. You see mostly Vestas winning these gigawatt orders. It almost seems inevitable they’re gonna win most of them.  Matthew Stead: Um, I don’t, being long way, way away from where these projects are being made, uh, installed. Um, I don’t have the same sort of insights. [00:20:00] Um, but, um, I mean, obviously yeah, vest, MHI, the previous, um, you know, joint venture with MHI, which especially heavy industries. Um, obviously they’ve come from a, a long pedigree of, um, working offshore, so yeah, I mean, why not? And, um, it seems to be a more of a gradual ramp up, um, and a more orderly, systematic ramp up for offshore. So, yeah. Why, why wouldn’t that work?  Allen Hall: Well, we should hop on the. China discussion because, uh, China’s when turbine makers obviously been trying to build turbines in, in Europe at scale for quite a while now. Uh, and Ying Yang is talking about focusing their efforts on. Germany and they have joined the German Offshore Wind Association BWO. And this is not just a membership cards, uh, that they have subscribed to. It is really like, in a lot of people’s opinion, a strategic signal that Ming Yang intends to compete in the European off.[00:21:00] Market, maybe starting with Germany. Ming Yang was trying to get into Scotland originally, and they were talking about a billion and a half pounds being poured into Scotland to develop factories for offshore wind. Maybe that has come, uh, time has passed and Ming Yang is moving on to Germany. That’s what it reads like to me. Or, or they’re gonna hedge their bets and, and look at both places to see if they can get a foot. Print established in either country.  Matthew Stead: I mean, reputation matters. So you really need to build up a, a footprint. And why would you apply a scatter gun approach? So, I mean, you know, just targeting, you know, one region or, um, you know, makes complete sense to me. So, you know, get, get, get some turbines in the water, get them up and running, get them, get the reliability and the, the reputation, and then, and then go from there. I mean, made complete business sense.  Allen Hall: Well, does that mean that, uh, a mean yang is going to have to lose a little bit of money early on to get some turbines in the water just to demonstrate that they [00:22:00] can do it at scale in Europe? Matthew Stead: I might defer to Rosie, but I would’ve thought they don’t need to, you know, cut costs. I think they’re already cost effective. So you would’ve thought they would just go in, um, with their, their normal product offering and still be successful. Uh, but maybe I’m, I’m on the wrong mark there.  Rosemary Barnes: My understanding is, and I, I don’t know heaps. But my understanding is with Chinese when turbines, that there’s a separate version for the Chinese market, and then if they wanna sell it internationally, then they need to make a new version of it that will pass the IEC, um, standards and the kinds of, you know, certification testing that everybody in those markets is used to. So you’re not always getting, or I don’t think you, I think you’re usually not getting the exact same product. So just because the product exists in China doesn’t mean that it is. Um, without risk in new markets.  Allen Hall: Well, I’m, I’m just curious if ING Yang will have to do a complete IEC certification process because they haven’t done it yet. Uh, is that what you’re saying?  Rosemary Barnes: They do [00:23:00] a, actually a redesign so that they can pass the, um. Certification and then they, yes, they do the whole certification process. However, Mingan hasn’t sold no turbines outside of China. So they have, or it’s not like this is a brand new thing for them that they’ll have to have to, you know, figure out as they go. Um, they’ve, they’ve, you know, I, I, if they haven’t done it for these specific turbines that they’re planning to manufacture in that factory, they’ve at least done it for others and know the process. Um, yeah, and I think we all know it’s not that hard to pass a certification test, so it’s not like a huge obstacle for them. But it will add, it will add cost to the, um, to the process and to the product. Probab probably, you know, there are some design changes that will be needed that will increase the cost of the product. So I don’t think that we’re gonna see, um, you know, Chinese turbines from any, any manufacturer outside of China that are as cheap as the prices that you see within China. Matthew Stead: To be fair though, um, there is a strong, um, Chinese involvement in the IAC committees. So, um, [00:24:00] definitely the, the standards are being used. So, you know, the standards are being used in China, and so I, I don’t think it’s a huge stretch from, you know, the, the domestic product versus the international product. 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. 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 other wind energy professionals discover this show for Rosa, Yolanda, and Matthew. I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next time on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers a week of offshore wind milestones including the Maersk Viridis sailing toward New York, Revolution Wind’s first power delivery, Vineyard Wind’s final blade, RWE’s Thor project in Denmark, and Kinewell Energy’s fundraise in England. 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. There is a ship sailing toward America right now. And when it arrives, it will be the most powerful wind turbine installation vessel ever to work in United States waters. Her name is Maersk Viridis. Built by Seatrium in Singapore. Forty thousand tonnes of steel. A main crane reaching one hundred and eighty meters into the sky. Designed to lift the next generation of fifteen-megawatt turbines. At her naming ceremony, godmother Charlotte Norkjer Larsen smashed a bottle of champagne against the main crane pedestal. Viridis — the Latin word for green. The Viridis is headed for Equinor’s Empire Wind project off the coast of New York. When complete, five hundred thousand homes will have power. Now, there is something worth noting. This vessel was built as a Jones Act-compliant solution. That means it can work legally in United States offshore waters. It was built with zero lost time injuries. And while one great ship sails west, the wind industry is moving forward on every front. In New England, the Revolution Wind project delivered its first power to the grid. Seven hundred and four megawatts. Power enough for up to three hundred and fifty thousand homes. Built by local union workers logging more than two million hours. That same week, workers installed the last turbine blade on Vineyard Wind. A project that endured a fractured blade in July of twenty twenty-four, a legal battle to survive a federal stop-work order, and came out the other side — still standing. On the other side of the world, Denmark is doing what Denmark does. The first turbine is now installed at the Thor offshore wind project. In the North Sea, off the west coast of Jutland. When finished, Thor will be Denmark’s largest offshore wind farm. Seventy-two turbines. Each capable of fifteen megawatts. Each turbine rising one hundred and forty-eight meters above the sea. Total project capacity — one-point-one gigawatts. The installation vessel is the Brave Tern, operated by Fred. Olsen Windcarrier. She carries three turbines per trip. Some blades on Thor are recyclable. That is not a headline you could have written ten years ago. And the developer building Thor? That would be RWE. RWE is everywhere right now. Now, for a small story with a large idea behind it. In Wallsend, England, a twelve-person company called Kinewell just raised seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Founded by an engineer named Andrew Jenkins while he was earning his PhD at Newcastle University. Kinewell builds software — software that optimises the design of offshore wind farms. Cable layouts, turbine placement, transmission systems. All three, working together. Their clients include Equinor, SSE Renewables, and Eurus Energy. The new funding unlocks a further six-figure grant, bringing total new capital to more than one million pounds. Ten new jobs in the next six months. Their software has saved clients hundreds of millions of pounds. That is what the right tool can do. So let us step back and look at the week. A ship christened and sailing to New York. A New England grid receiving its first offshore wind power. Vineyard Wind — finished at last. Denmark’s largest wind farm, growing turbine by turbine. And a twelve-person software firm in northeast England, helping shape the invisible architecture of the energy transition. That is the Wind Energy News for the 16th of March, 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Andrew Billingsly, CEO at Plaswire, joins to discuss how the company recycles wind turbine blades into construction materials, timber replacements, and utility products. Plus carbon fiber recovery, zero-dust cutting technology, and plans to license blueprint factories worldwide. 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! Andrew Billingsly: Exactly.  Allen Hall: Are we good?  Andrew Billingsly: I’m truly impressed with this great operation you’ve got. You really moved this forward, isn’t it? That’s great. We try. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Yeah, we try. We’re not  Andrew Billingsly: trying. You do.  Allen Hall: So I, I will put an intro to this episode when we get back to the states. So I’m just gonna say, Andrew, welcome to the show. And then we will start talking.  Andrew Billingsly: Where do I look  Allen Hall: here?  Andrew Billingsly: Right? Just, just here.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Don’t worry about those. We’ll figure that out later. That’s,  Andrew Billingsly: yeah. A bit of AI in that. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Andrew Billingsly: And you’ll see as well. Andrew, welcome to the program. Thank you very much, Alan. Joe, really great pleasure to be here today.  Allen Hall: So we’re here to learn about PLA wire and all the great things you’re doing in Northern Ireland because you’re involved in a lot of recycling efforts in wind, outside of wind. You’re doing very novel things, which I think the world needs to hear about. Let’s just back up a minute, because not everybody. And particularly [00:01:00]in North America has heard of PLA wire, even though you, you’re all over LinkedIn. What does PLA wire do? What is this basic fundamental of PLA wire?  Andrew Billingsly: Basically, we’re a processor of polymers. Okay?  Andrew Billingsly: So that’s how we see ourselves, that’s how we frame ourselves. We’re a polymer processor with a waste management license. Uh,  Joel Saxum: I think the important thing here, and this is why I wanted to have this conversation, you and I have been talking in the background for a few years, is. The rhetoric around a lot of the world is we have this problem with recycling blades. We can’t figure it out. Nobody’s got any solutions. Um, and if they do, it’s very agricultural as we say, right? They’re just grinding them up, using ’em in this, that, and what I tell people is like, no, no, you’re incorrect here. There are people doing this. There is, there is solutions out there. It just needs to be, we need, we need to talk about it. We need to put it out there.  Andrew Billingsly: Absolutely. Uh, I fight very hard to tell the true story. Of course, there’s a [00:02:00] lot of greenwashing in every sector of every industry in the world, and those who do it right have to defend themselves. I mean, unfortunately, that’s what we have to do. Fortunately, mostly we’re able to do that if we work hard at it. For us, we do not have a problem in general, dealing with wind farm waste. Wind farm waste is for us blades. Because we’ve taken a pragmatic approach to it. We have to look at how we deal with any waste coming into our, uh, process to ensure it’s environmentally handled, that it’s handled correctly, environmentally, that it meets a price point so that whatever we do with it, we can sell that product, ensure that it’s sustainable in how we operate, and it’s fully circular. So that’s how we’ve addressed wind blades. We were invited into the industry and we worked out what was needed in the industry. But [00:03:00] before we went all full on with it, we had to make sure we could make products that was saleable, that was usable, and could be utilized within the industry wherever possible. But you thought outside of the box  Allen Hall: quite a bit because the way I think the wind turbine blade recycling efforts have gone is to say, well, we’ll, just like Joel was saying, we’ll just grind them up. You’re taking polymer outside of the wind blade world that you’ve been using in aerospace and other industries and saying the valuable part of the wind turbine blade is the fiber and the resin, whatever remains there. If I combine that with other polymers, I can create products with a lifetime that can replace other more expensive items, metal items, cement items. That is the, the, the wisdom that went into what you have done. How did you come up with that?  Andrew Billingsly: I think I was born outta the box. Frankly. I’ve been told that several times.[00:04:00] We’re a solution orientated company. Uh, I was talking recently to somebody about how we built our first factory in Northern Ireland that went up in 10 weeks. That’s 20,000 square feet. And because the pressure we were under, we had that factory erected and in operation in 10 weeks. And that’s just a fact. That’s a recorded fact. And I looked back only two years later and said, heck, what did we do there? Yeah, because we had to do it. So we did it. Yeah. We looked at the problem with the wind blade and we thought, we’ve gotta get a good solution for this. And we’d done that years before with aviation. We were presented with the challenge to deal with plastics arising from the manufacturer’s seating. Now the US produces all the plastics for that sector. It comes into Europe for manufacturing seats, a lot of it local to where our factory is, but nobody had a solution. I have to put my hands up now. I broke a few rules here. I filled two [00:05:00] barn up with this material chopped up and ready to sell, but I actually couldn’t sell it, but I knew there was a solution. So I worked on that for perhaps 18 months and then it worked. And today we are the main, uh, processor of this plastic that comes out of aircraft seating manufacturing, possibly. We still are the only one doing that.  Allen Hall: So you actually take the plastics from the manufacturer of seating and there’s a lot of scrap that’s involved in that. Andrew Billingsly: Yep.  Allen Hall: You take all that plastic waste, you bring it back into your facility, you recombine and pelletize it again so that it can be reused somewhere else.  Andrew Billingsly: Yes, that material goes into, uh, an extrusion process with another company now. Okay. Wow.  Joel Saxum: But, but that’s the same thing you’re doing in wind right now, right? The making it circular, but you’re adding or you’re, you’re adding other second use plastics to it.  Andrew Billingsly: Yeah. So our outta the box thinking was looking back in 2018, how do we grow our business [00:06:00] because recycling plastics within the extrusion world and the injection molding world. What’s getting more internal companies getting better at dealing with their own waste and putting it back into the circuit. So what’s the waste? Nobody wants. It’s the really mucky stuff. It’s this material that comes out of, for example, bio digesters that take the supermarket garbage, the yellow label food that people don’t buy because it’s really is in a bad state. And that goes for digestion and they pull outta those biodigester 10% plastic waste. Hmm. That is a really difficult product to deal with. And not only that, you also find a similar volume of waste coming maybe 24 tons a day, in some cases, sometimes more from the municipal waste processing centers as well. All this waste plastic goes for incineration. Nobody knows how to economically recycle that. So we took on that challenge and produced what we call [00:07:00] RX polymer, which is. Hm, going through pattern now. I got the number only yesterday incidentally for it. And, uh, this enables us then to combine plastics that would not normally combine. So think about polyethylene, polypropylene. Yeah, they mix, but then add in nylon, adding polyester. PET, add in styrene, adding up to 8%, uh, PVC materials. It’s an unknown for a polymer engineer, but we did that. And we cooperated with the university in Ireland to prove it. Uh, this is the technology Uni University in Shannon, and we still have an extremely good relationship with them. So we have this polymer. Along comes COVID, we worked with it. We did the deep dive. We went out to find out could we make product with it, could we make a product people wanted, and could we sell that product because what’s the point otherwise? And then after COVID. [00:08:00] We went out into the market, met with aviation, had a very substantial and transformative almost meeting with Paul Bella, director at Boeing. So by the end of the year we’d worked out along with some discussions with Air Airbus and with Tarmac Aero serve, how we could help them with their composite wastes as part of our RX polymer January, 2023. We got sucked into a, into the wind sector.  Allen Hall: Mm-hmm.  Andrew Billingsly: January, 2023. We got sucked into the wind sector with a significant phone call from Ted. We had a meeting and agreed to take their first blades. We went out bo more land and that was start of a journey.  Allen Hall: Okay. So it just calls you up and says, Andrew, I need you to start recycling our offshore, mostly offshore or all offshore blades.  Andrew Billingsly: These were initially on shore blades. On  Allen Hall: shore blades. Okay. Andrew Billingsly: And they said, did we know how to do it? Could [00:09:00]we do it?  Allen Hall: Okay?  Andrew Billingsly: And we said, yes.  Allen Hall: You said that? Yes. Without really knowing if the answer is yes.  Andrew Billingsly: Yes.  Allen Hall: Okay. I, I think that one of the things, I’m gonna back up just for a minute here. One of the things about Northern Ireland that people in the states don’t really realize is plastics and ejection molding are a focal point for Northern Ireland. Roy, which is the big plastic comb. Brush manufacturer is based in Northern Ireland, so there’s a tremendous amount of plastic knowledge, injection molding knowledge sitting right in the same area. So hearing your story just makes me think, yes, this all starts to make sense now that, that the whole region is a, uh, epicenter in it, so to speak, of how to think about plastics working with shorts and bombardier and all the now Airbus and Boeing. Those people are brilliant and you’re cut off the same limb of the tree. Right. [00:10:00] Where are these products now being used? So you now you’re getting blade from Wared and you, well, let’s talk first.  Andrew Billingsly: You have other customers besides Wared now you have some big names there. Oh, absolutely. So we do work with Airbus. We do work with Boeing on the aviation side, but we’re talking wind today. Uh, so we have Sted, we work with Eola, Scottish Power Renewables, work with GE Verona. RWE uh, a host of them actually just goes on and on, you know, and it’s very important to serve these companies as best we can. Uh, we’ve recently started working with EDF and taking first fleets from a lot of these first fleets of blades from these companies. We have a contract with BNM, which is in partnership with Ocean Wind for the future. BNM is B and Owner one of those great stories of a dirty company in the sense of producing. Fuel for, uh, households from Pete, which is extremely smoky and so forth, transforming to being the best [00:11:00] when it comes to, uh, renewables in Ireland. Wow. Wow. Yeah,  Joel Saxum: I didn’t even know you could do that. Make fuel out of Pete. I just knew you made whiskey out of it. My knowledge is not as good as your, your knowledge. Uh, but so questions for you. Then you have all these other customers coming in. You’re bringing in plastics from other areas and other sectors. How many right now as it sits, how many wind blades can you guys run through, you think? What does a yearly put throughput look like? So  Andrew Billingsly: when we get to capacity as we grow the business, we’ll be able to process up to 11,000 tons of blades on our site.  Joel Saxum: Okay.  Andrew Billingsly: Whoa. Which is a good size capacity. Yeah. Uh, far, far in excess of what we expected, but that was to do with development. We moved from putting 10% blade into our finished product to 30%. Joel Saxum: Yeah.  Andrew Billingsly: It was a big step. We achieved that in March this year, and it was just a. Happy days. And,  Joel Saxum: and when we talk product, right, we’re talking the RX polymer, but what is the end product? What can that be used for?  Andrew Billingsly: So the end product, uh, we can directly [00:12:00] replace virgin plastics in certain situations in the construction industry. Things like protection board, shuttering board and that type of thing. For, uh, precast concrete, there’s a lot of precast concrete products are manufactured because it’s easy to do with, uh, concrete and to use virgin plastics. It’s just not even thought of doing that. But with our RX polymer and the combination of a fiber base in it, we can produce precast concrete products, which outperform concrete versions. We’ve now got a polymer version, which won’t crack through temperature, variation through vibration, through wet and dry cycling, that type of thing. Wow. It’s kind of no brainer in a sense. And then on the timber replacement,  Joel Saxum: scour protection, offshore wind.  Allen Hall: There’s certain, well being in Northern Ireland, there’s a lot of wind and rain and sea and all the above. Oh yeah. It’s  Andrew Billingsly: plenty of all of those. There it is. Definitely. It’s just wet and a bit like Glasgow, plenty of rain, you [00:13:00] know, and or Seattle’s not so different actually. It’s sure. Very similar. It could be quite similar. Yeah. So, and timber replacement is a big thing because the supply of timber cannot meet demand. Yeah. To try and accelerate the supply of timber. They accelerate the growth of the trees using hydrocarbons in the form of fertilizers. And it’s not really gonna go anywhere in the right way. But to be able to put out product now, which outperforms timber for the utilities is a logical step for us. And that’s what we’ve done. Producing poles and posts, which are fiber reinforced, which outperformed timber for the utility companies. Just one design by one utility in the UK consumes 33,000 tons a year. It is madness. I know. But we can offer them a product which lasts a minimum of 30 years certified versus a timber version that because of the regulations regarding, uh, preservatives, it could only last between eight and 10 years. Allen Hall: Oh, [00:14:00] sure. Well that makes a lot of sense. So you’ve, you’ve broken through the barrier of blade recycling into now almost consumer products, industrial products, construction products. Uh. What’s next? Where are you going next? You gonna start making airplanes and cars out of this material or  Andrew Billingsly: no? That I fell outta the box actually bumping my head so I can’t go any further. Um, where do we go from this Look, we are always going to be looking to be better at what we do, so on the blade side, we have great cutting technology that everybody should look at and consider doing something at least similar. So no dust. Very important, and we are moving sometime next year. We haven’t got a date for this yet, where we’ll have a robotic cutting system with absolutely no ze, no dust at all. Zero dust. That’s amazing. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: That’s a, that is a, that’s a big problem in like the states for plane recycling. The, the [00:15:00] regulations around dust and um, and how close you can be to residential areas and siding and all those kind of things.  Andrew Billingsly: If you’re making dust and it’s landing on the ground, it’s gonna be there forever. So don’t make it.  Joel Saxum: There you go.  Andrew Billingsly: That’s the fact. Um, the idea of the robotics is also to be able to recover the carbon fiber, stay in the center of the blade.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. ‘ Andrew Billingsly: cause carbon fiber is heading towards being a shortage product. And we have the opportunity to preserve that and re reuse that product effectively. If you see the carbon fiber in a blade and the big blades, 70 meters and so forth, you go, wow, it’s pencil thickness. You don’t want to see that getting weight.  Allen Hall: Right.  Andrew Billingsly: So using expensive  Allen Hall: too. Yeah.  Andrew Billingsly: Using, yeah, it’s very expensive. Get more so, you know, we are using carbon fiber for novelty. Things like fass in cars and so forth, right. Or wrongs and other matter. But it’s utilizing a product that needs to be going into better applications. No doubt about it. So we’re going in that way to improve the cutting technology. And then [00:16:00] another area is a recyclable blade. So we are talking with the developers of the original recyclable Blade technology about should we be working with them to operate a facility to enable that future technology to become operable. It’s okay to sell the product, but are you recycling it afterwards?  Allen Hall: Right. Can you break it down and get the fiber out of it? Yeah.  Andrew Billingsly: So they’re early discussions and we’d like to progress those over time and achieve a success for everybody there.  Joel Saxum: So Audi, the, the, the facility in Ireland, you’re doing a lot of process improvement. You’re getting better and better and better, but you can, you can process a certain amount of tons there per year. Are you looking at mainland Europe, US South America? Are you, are you moving around yet or,  Andrew Billingsly: yeah. You are a mind reader, aren’t you? I think. Come on now. Look. So we are working with the crown estate. I don’t know, how do you know about the crown estate? Very, uh, influential party, uh, regarding offshore wind [00:17:00] and onshore wind. Okay. And we are working on a feasibility study with them to create a blueprint factory and put up a new facility in the United Kingdom in Scotland. Where we put, that is still under negotiation at the moment because it depends whether or not there’s gonna be a blade manufacturing facility there. Blade manufacturing waste has to be dealt with. Oh yes, it has to. And it’s been ignored and it has to be dealt with and we align to be doing that.  Allen Hall: So you would set up shop next door to the blade manufacturing facility.  Andrew Billingsly: That’s the optimal thing to do.  Allen Hall: Sure it  is.  Andrew Billingsly: Yep. And there’s various discussions taking place with more than one manufacturer about putting a facility into Scotland, but I’m not privy to discuss those things. And then in England, working with a consortium to put up a facility there which will support the offshore wind as it decommissions.  Allen Hall: Oh sure. Wow. See, we have a lot of plans. Yeah. For  Andrew Billingsly: the future. Yeah. And we real, we will realize them. Uh, the beauty of all of this [00:18:00] is the carbon saving because we are diverting products away from incineration. And if you take a blade and put into cement kilt, you’re still producing CO2.  Allen Hall: Sure. It  Andrew Billingsly: has to. And we know that’s not a long term solution because when you melt glass, glass sinks to the bottom of the furnace and one by one cement kiln say, we’ve had enough of this and it seems to affect the refractory bricks as well. Which causes deterioration and another cost for the cement companies. So we can prevent between 2.7 and 2.9 tons of CO2 production. For every ton of waste we divert from this generation.  Allen Hall: Wow. That’s tremendous.  Andrew Billingsly: That’s tremendous. Yeah. And then the products we replace in the market, the virgin plastics, the precast concrete replacements, the, the timber replacements all have high carbon numbers, but now that’s finished. Right. Yeah. So we can net up to 1.7 tons of CO2 offset saving, [00:19:00]whatever way you want to put it, for every time we process. That’s quite fantastic. Well, now we never knew these numbers. As I say, we were pulled into this industry and then we started to look at what are we doing here? And whoa, we didn’t realize. Joel Saxum: Fantastic.  Allen Hall: Well, for, for everybody who’s listening today that deals with blades and that, that’s a vast majority of our relationship has to do with blades somewhat during their life cycle. And I’m wondering what the next generation of recycling actually looks like. It’s PLA wire and they need to get a hold of you, Andrew. How would they do that? To learn more?  Andrew Billingsly: Yes. Well, we are talking with potential partners. Our way to grow is really through a licensing system.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Andrew Billingsly: A reasonable licensing system. So our intention is to put out this blueprint factory, which can be manipulated to suit the market. It can be smaller, it can be larger. The equipment for it is standard. It’s a lot of standard machines joined together in a particular way. The keys and the process and so forth. [00:20:00] So for example, we can offer a blueprint to a company and they equip it with US machinery or Mexican machinery or whatever, machinery. Sure. Yep. So they can control the cost of that. So we sell that design, sell them the engineering work to it. Work with ’em on their market surveys in advance to make sure they’re not going into a world that’s not gonna produce revenue for them. Everything has to be profitable. Assure them of the markets for the finished products, and then work on a license fee with them. Allen Hall: Okay. And they can do that by going to the website PLA wire. You can just Google PLAs Wire,  Andrew Billingsly: Google. Yeah. So you’ll find me at andrew@plaswire.com, which is easy enough for everybody, I believe. Yeah.  Allen Hall: P-L-A-S-W-I-R-E. Dot com.  Andrew Billingsly: That’s correct, Alan. Yeah. Thank you.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a really interesting website and Andrew, I’m really glad we had the time to sit down and to discuss your business because it is fascinating. It’s next generation on recycling, and it’s good to spread the word a little bit. So thank you for [00:21:00] joining us today,  Andrew Billingsly: Alan. Joel. It’s been really good for me too. It. I’m so pleased to be able to do this. Yes. And you know what you want the most fantastic podcast to listen to, I have to tell you that. Yeah. Allen Hall: Well we need to have Yon Moore. So  Andrew Billingsly: yeah, I’ll be very happy and love to be able to share our progress as we develop and just, we are always gonna be a changing organization, but always for the better. And you’re gonna understand, I guess we’re quite passionate about what we do.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Andrew Billingsly: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Yes. Congratulations and thank you for joining us.  Andrew Billingsly: Thank you very much. Yep. Perfect. Cool. Wonderful. Wow. So easy now.

Allen reports live from ACP OM&S in Orlando, where the crew discusses high attendance costs, a pay-to-play model that shuts out newcomers, and how the event compares to WOMA. Plus, Vestas CEO Henrik Anderson says he’ll leave Denmark if proposed wealth taxes go through, sparking a debate on executive pay and Danish culture. 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 Yolanda Padron, Rosemary Barnes and Matthew Stead. I am at ACP OM&S in Orlando. Home of Mickey Mouse and we’ve had, uh, this is our second day at OM and S and this is the conference where all the operators and the maintenance and the ISPs and all the new technologies show up to, to discuss their products and try to get some work for the summertime. Uh, so there’s a, a good number of vendors here. Solars here, not as much best as I would as expected, and obviously a lot to do with wind. [00:01:00] Uh, I know we’ve been talking internally on Slack and amongst one another. This is one of the, the most expensive conferences I have ever attended. It’s about $2,200 to attend just to get yourself into the door. Rosemary Barnes: And that’s US dollars too.  Matthew Stead: Real dollars.  Allen Hall: Green backs.  Rosemary Barnes: That’s like three and a half times what our event cost. What warmer cost. If you do the conversion  Allen Hall: yes.  Rosemary Barnes: And you get access to what? An exhibition and all of a whole bunch, a variety of amazing, informative, technical topics included with that ticket price, right?  Allen Hall: No. You get access to the exhibition, they will feed you some, uh, enchiladas and some, uh, free beer, but all the technical talks are extra. You have to pay. Uh, a couple hundred dollars  Rosemary Barnes: enchiladas and beer are a must have that everyone obviously wants, but talking about wind energy, totally optional. Nobody. Now, obviously not everybody is gonna wanna talk about wind energy, [00:02:00] so that’s, that’s an extra ticket that you need for that one. Allen Hall: Well, in order to go to the, I would call them technical talks, you have to pay for those. They have an A space in the middle of the convention where they’re doing what they call powered cast. Which are kind of modeled on podcasts, uh, that are sort of a produced thing where they have a panel up there. It’s similar what to where you’d done in Melbourne with Woma, but not with real technical people. The more polishing people. That’s what I saw. I don’t know a lot of the names and I’m pretty used to, to recognizing names of wind and it looks like to be a lot more policy people not. Blade experts or people like that. Rosemary Barnes: I’m a little bit confused because it’s very different to, you know, I love to complain about the Australian wind energy events, but this sounds very different to the way that it’s run here. Like usually at the exhibitions, the exhibitors pay like a bunch of money to be there, and what they want is people to come see it. So [00:03:00] usually here the exhibition is. Free to attend because you are there to be advertised to, you know, like it’s not some like amazing, valuable thing to you. It’s super valuable to the exhibitors. That’s why they have to pay, you know, $10,000 plus to, to be there. Right, but you are saying that they’re, they’re charging the, the attendees are, they’re giving the exhibition space away for free then? Allen Hall: No, the exhibition space costs a tremendous amount of money for a little tiny space. I’m actually in our slot, we share. A slot because the prices are so high, we’re sharing it with AC 8 83 who we love and with C and C onsite, who also we love. So it’s a good combination ’cause we like one another. We’re fun to hang out with, but it’s probably a nine by nine space. Uh, and then you have to pay for carpet and all the furniture that happens inside of that space, you can easily spend. $10,000 on a salon.  Matthew Stead: Question for you, Allen. So, um, how [00:04:00] does, how does the industry foster, you know, new, new technology, new companies, you know, growth of the industry, new ideas, so, you know, how does this event, um, foster those sorts of things? Allen Hall: It doesn’t because it’s really, it’s pay to play as Rosemary has pointed out a number of times and is frustrated by. In order to get heard, you have to pay to one, have a booth, or if you want to get up on stage, it costs money. It’s, it’s not a small amount, by the way. So, uh, if you’re a new company, you got a great idea. You even have traction. Say you’re TRL seven plus and you want to connect with operators, it’s hard to do that here. Uh, the operators tend to be a little gun shy and, and they’re. Off on the side. I, I know some of them obviously, ’cause I, I know who they are, but it isn’t like, uh, the operators are walking around necessarily talking to all the exhibitors. That’s not how this [00:05:00] works. What generally is happening is the operators are talking, uh, to people that are selling products in these conference rooms on the side. So those things are completely off the show floor. It’s not the best situation. Like, I gotta admit, I’ve been to a lot of other conferences like in aerospace. Those tend to be a little more free flowing.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting ’cause it’s like, obviously you go to the events because everybody goes to the event and I’m sure you’ve had some great conversations. Um, however, you don’t need to go inside. Like when you go to one of these huge events, you’re trapped inside a windowless room for all day, every day for several days in a row. Like, why does it need, why does it need to be there if they’re discourage, actively discouraging people from going to any presentations? Why couldn’t you just grab a bunch of friends, you know, put on an open invite, Hey, we’re all gonna the beach this week. Let’s go talk wind energy at the beach. Like, I, I don’t understand why we need to subject ourselves to this sort of, this sort of event. Like I [00:06:00] just, it it’s gotten out outta control, don’t you think?  Allen Hall: It has. I would never talk wind energy while I’m at the beach. I go, that’s probably one place where I’m not talking wind energy, but there are other nice places you could be. To talk about what’s happening in the industry and, and that’s one of the frustrating pieces about this is, although I love a lot of the people that are here, it’s not a great place to share new ideas or to learn something new. It’s, it’s mostly a, a meet and greet and catch up a reunion in a sense. Of, Hey, we’re the survivors. That’s it. Part of it is that feel right.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s pretty hard though if you are not like, you know, everybody you need to talk to. And I started doing the same thing, like at the um, one, one of the recent events or one of the events last year in, in Australia. I was so fed up with it the year before. I’m like, I’m not giving them any money this year. I was at least allowed to go to the exhibition for free at that event. So, you know, at least that’s something, but I mean, I barely even did that. Anyway. What I did was I set up at a cafe near to the event and just, I just [00:07:00]scheduled meetings like back to back for two days. Um, everyone just came to the cafe. But that’s ’cause I know everybody, right? Like, it’s like someone that’s new to the industry can get nothing out of these events. Now it seems like it’s just, it’s so, it’s so sad. Like where, how, how are you going? Like, you know, people brand new to the industry. You used to be able to go to an event and just be like, okay, I’m gonna just have information overload for two or three days, meet a bunch of great people and I’ll come away feeling like I’m part of this industry. I just can’t imagine. That happening at the event that you are describing, that someone would, would show up and, you know, come away knowing a lot more about the industry and with, with a bunch of useful connections. Am I right?  Allen Hall: Uh, I think you’re right. There’s were a couple of people that I ran into that were new to the industry, trying to start a service provider or repair business, generally speaking that, or a drone business that we’re trying to get into the, the industry and we’re reaching out and talking to people and. The thing about [00:08:00] wind is when you actually get ahold of somebody, they will help you. It’s, it’s very, uh, open. What do you do? What are you trying to do? Wherever you talk, who you talk to, here’s some names that will happen, but it is daunting because there’s a lot of people here. You don’t know anybody, and there’s no way to really introduce them. I think that one of the things that, uh, American C Clean powered. Did, uh, that I noticed was they had like a first timers reunion space, so, or a meeting space so that it had some beach balls and a little Tahiti hut or whatever those tiki hut or whatever that was where you could kind of hang out because you knew. But I’m not sure that’s the best way to do that. I think, you know, American clean power could do a much better job of knowing who’s first time and connecting them. If the industry’s gonna grow, you need to be taking in new people and new ideas. To it. The only way you’re gonna be able to do that is if you actively make it happen. Matthew Stead: Did you learn anything new [00:09:00] so far?  Allen Hall: Not new. Uh, I, because we’re doing the podcast and we’re recorded several episodes in the last two days, I was able to ask specific questions like, what are you working on? What’s new? What’s coming out? And that’s the way to get to those answers. But if you’re walking the exhibit four, you would not see a lot of new technology and. Three years ago, I think four years ago, especially like during COVID, there was some pretty cool technology out on the show floor, uh, but not so much Today, the industry’s matured and, and it’s a tough industry to, to survive in. So what you generally see is companies that have been around 3, 4, 5 years that have made it, that are profitable, that are making good and income, and are providing a service and have sustained businesses, that’s what’s here today. Yolanda Padron: I think that a CP, the intent behind events like the one you’re, and Allen and the one we’ve, the ones we’ve all been to are, the intent is great, but the [00:10:00] execution isn’t super great. Not just from the the point of view of people coming in from new to the industry and wanting to start an ISP or something, but just from the owner operator. Point of view, you know, you’re, if you have to pay to go to specific talks or to go to technical talks that you don’t really know how much they’ll benefit you until basically the end of it. Once you see the information that’s gone into it and the practicality of everything that they, they’re talking about, and then when you’re walking in the showroom like four, like it’s a little bit daunting sometimes. There’s hundreds of companies. Sitting around in kind of like a maze, right? And it’s not always like, oh, you need lightning protection. Like that’s that area. Or you need better locks for your o and m buildings or for your towers or something. It’s that section like you’re just walking around everywhere. And then just. It kind of turns [00:11:00] into, like sometimes it can turn into just a game of like, if you’re going with a lot of colleagues, like a kind of a drinking day or a day to just see who can collect more freebies. Like I remember one year we had a group chat of like, oh, like every time you saw something cool that was like a, a merchandise thing, like you would put it in the group chat, like E 46 has this. And then we would all go and get it and it was. I don’t think that’s the intent behind what, what we wanted to do. It really wasn’t what we saw at oma if we’re being completely honest.  Matthew Stead: What I’m hearing is that there’s a really strong need in the US for another event. Is that, is that what I’m hearing?  Allen Hall: I think there needs to be a real technical event run by people who are technical experts. I think that’s it because there are a lot of new solutions out there, but you’re not gonna find them at OMX. That’s just not the place. Now, I’m sure a CP would dispute that and that’s fine. They [00:12:00] have their own opinion. But I think having attended this for several years and a CP and a number of other, uh, conferences in wins, there’s a small subset that are sharing solutions. It’s small and maybe there is need for one in America. It’s hard saying, Matthew, I. I think that maybe there’s is a time and place for it. I’m not sure America’s ready for it in, in a broader scope, but maybe something small. Maybe that’s the way to start off, is to do something small. Bring in the people we know and love from around the world have, go back to Rosemary’s point. Maybe we do something by the, by the pool or by the ocean. Maybe we do talk wind energy for, for an afternoon.  Rosemary Barnes: I understand why you can’t, um, have an event at. A resort. And it was suggested actually to me a couple of times, like people when we were organizing Wilma, why is this in Melbourne? Why isn’t this in the Maldives? Or you know, some, something like that. And the [00:13:00] one of the reasons like for us, ’cause in our Melbourne event it’s a, you know, it’s a very low cost event. We don’t make any money from it. It’s small. At least half of wind energy People in Australia are living in Melbourne, so it’s very, you know, easy for them to go to that it doesn’t, it doesn’t cost much or take much time. So that was that reason. But I think that, you know, more broadly, like say we did a global event and we put it in the, in the malice or in Fiji or Hawaii or whatever, like, people aren’t gonna get that approved from their managers, right? So even though you know, you’ve spent, I don’t know how much the technical sessions were, but by the time that you’ve gotten to a CP, if you had to. Even, you know, fly there in Australian hotel for a few nights, like it’s gonna be, you know, four grand or something. You can get to a nice location, probably an all-inclusive resort for a week, somewhere nice for similar money. Like you would spend more time having quality conversations and it would be, you know, nice and enjoyable, but [00:14:00] your manager is never gonna approve that. So I think that’s the challenge. To find somewhere that’s like nice and conducive to being relaxed and open, but that doesn’t sound like. So obviously a junket that no one will get approval to go to it. That’s the, that’s the challenge.  Matthew Stead: Um, just this week we got the feedback from the WMA conference. So we got, um, some of the results from the survey and I think, uh, probably the key thing to me was that we achieved 4.6 out of five, um, star rating. Um, everyone gave it a four or a five. And we know people that give things four out of five actually mean five. So I think we did really well. So, uh, and the feedback was also, um, you know, the technical content, but people want more, more and more, uh, technical content and, and the interaction with people. Rosemary Barnes: That’s a really, a really key thing to get feedback on if there are. Experts or categories of information that you would like to see covered that haven’t been, because I think, like we talk a lot about how, what the [00:15:00]problems are with a pay to play kind of model where speakers pay and get up and give a sales pitch and you know, there’s a lot of problems with that. But then when it’s the other way around and you know, we’re choosing speakers that we know are good, then you fall into the risk of having it become cliquey where it’s just, you know, like all our friends over and over again. It’s uh, like hard for us to both vet the quality and bring in people that we don’t know. So that’s where the outside feedback is gonna make that a lot better. Um, and it takes a long time, you know, you do, ’cause you, you do need to get to know a speaker before you can decide whether they’re gonna get up in the acne. You don’t sell at you for half an hour when they were supposed to, you know, do something informative. So, would love to hear that feedback.  Matthew Stead: I think the proof is in the pudding because, uh, at for woma, no one said that they were unlikely to attend.  Allen Hall: Oh, I, I would hate to see what the numbers are gonna be for OMS this year. Uh, ’cause you know, you know why I say that? Because a lot of people that have exhibited in the past do not have a booth this year, and they’re walking [00:16:00] around the show. And to me that’s an alarm signal. They should have a booth. They have good things to talk about. They’re a successful company. They’re doing great things to win, but they feel like this is just too much. It’s too much. Eventually you reach too much. I think we’re there.  Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s been a really good, like, uh, a big event with an exhibition can be a real money maker. And for, you know, like, uh, assuming that SAP uses this. The money that they make from this event to deliver services for the American Wind Industry. Uh, I mean, you, you know, you can probably argue about how well or not they do that. I don’t have an opinion ’cause I’m not in America. But, you know, like, I, I’m not saying that that’s not the, um, a, a noble goal and a good thing to, for the business to be doing. However, I think that it, that you can overshoot and, you know, so you can make a, a bunch of money for a few years. You know, you’ve got a good reputation for your event. You’ve got everybody comes to it. You can charge squillions to exhibitors. You can charge squillions more to speakers. You can even start charging people to watch the speakers who have [00:17:00] paid to be there. Probably, I don’t, I don’t actually know in this case, my assumption. Um, but at some point. Like you’ve cottoned on that, hey, it’s not actually worth paying extra for the, um, you know, to go watch the speakers. And the last one of these, you know, similar Australian events I was at, I was like, Hey, it’s not actually worth me paying to go into there because I can get all the benefits by just being near to it, like then. Once you don’t have heaps and heaps of people moving through, then exhibitors don’t wanna pay $10,000 to be there. Um, and so like, it’s just, it’s not sustainable to run the event like that. And that’s what I don’t think that, um, a lot of these event organization companies, especially the ones that aren’t run by an industry body, um, the ones that are just run by a company who exist to make money off events. You know, like they’re not, I don’t think that they’re planning these events to be sustainable in the long term and to improve the industry.  Matthew Stead: Can I ask, um, a question for Yolanda and Allen. Um, so assuming this money for a CP [00:18:00] ends up as lobbying money, do you think lobbying at the moment actually helps? Allen Hall: Here’s the feeling about it on the floor, and I haven’t talked to everybody here clearly. But the significant percentage I had talked to thinks that the policy efforts have not borne fruit, and that in some aspects, uh, they have increased the tension. Whether they’ve intentionally have done that or not, I don’t know. But I think the feeling on the floor here, the last two days has been the industry is in a quote unquote downturn or a pause, and they’re waiting till 2028 to see what happens. That’s not the answer I wanted to hear. And also at the state level, I think, uh, the amount of policy changes that are happening are not pro wind, pro solar or pro best, except maybe in a couple of states. So, uh, you feel like although [00:19:00] American clean power is on a national level, you will also like them to be at a state level, helping move some things forward and stop some of the prohibitions that are happening, or to get some of the permits issued. That’s one of the things that popped up today, talking to someone in the know as that permits are hard to get hold of in some states. Well, American Clean Power is supposed to be helping with that. I’m not sure that they are, at least if they are, you can’t see anything visible happening. From the outside, which is a shame. That’s really a shame. So, you know where we go from here? I, I, I’m kind of in Rosemary’s camp. I had no idea. Uh, next year gonna be really interesting. I, I don’t know what the numbers of attendees are. Uh, I’m guessing a couple thousand people are here. I’m guessing, let’s just say it’s 2000 people. I may be off plus or minus. Well, not on the negative side. It’s more than a thousand people here, but it’s not 10,000. That’s for sure.  Yolanda Padron: I think that, uh, someone at Woma summed it up really [00:20:00] well when they said that, um, we need to shift the conversation from this is the right thing to do to this, is this, we should make this to be cost effective and it should be the obvious decision to make. Right? Just from a financial standpoint. Uh, and I think, I think that’s right from my, uh. Personal interactions with a lot of people in dc I think that lobbying really helps regardless of the political party that one is affiliated to. Um, just, just the way that sometimes our, our system seems to. I not, not to say that anything’s negative, I think it’s, I mean, it’s just the, the way things pan out, uh, oftentimes in the [00:21:00] us. Um, yeah, I mean, I’ve, I’ve heard from. From both sides.  Allen Hall: Well, to Yolanda’s point, I would say we don’t belong to American clean power because one, it’s expensive and as a small business, does it make sense as the changing policy that helps me? The answer to that historically has been no. It doesn’t mean it’s not gonna happen in the future. I think a lot of. Companies of our size are saying the same thing. There are some that have been here a lot longer that have knew a CP before it was a CP when it was a, a slightly different organization and they’ve continued on on, on some level just I think because they’re familiar with it. But I think the newcomers are having a heart attack. And I would consider me to be a newcomer that we’ve been in wind since about 2012 or 2013, so we’ve been in it quite a while at this point. But there’s some old guard here. The new. The new players though, I think are struggling. I think there’s very few new companies that are flashy. Like we saw in San Antonio a [00:22:00] couple of years ago at American Clean Power. We’re like, wow, there are some boosts here. And man, there’s some firepower happening and some really good marketing and some new products and new ideas. That’s not. That’s not here. Not, not this year. 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 before they become a. 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.[00:23:00] Denmark has long been the home of the wind industry, but now our proposed new wealth taxes threatening to push one of its most prominent executives out the door. And Henrik Anderson, chief executive officer of Vestas says he will leave Denmark rather than pay the new tax, even if it costs him tens of millions of Broner and exit fees. Uh, Anderson earned 32 million Kroger last year, and estimates he pays an effective tax rate of 60% already. He argues Denmark already leads Europe in income taxation and adding a wealth tax crosses the line and he, if he goes, he warns senior leadership could follow. Now, that’s a pretty bold statement for someone who was seen as one of the leadership. Uh, a group of Denmark on the industrial side. Of course,  Rosemary Barnes: I’d argue it’s also culturally, [00:24:00] culturally not a super Danish thing to, to say at least publicly. Um, yeah, I dunno how many Danish listeners we’ve got, but one thing that I learned when I lived there, they’ve got this thing called yte Long. I think it comes from an, an old book, like fictional book, but it does pretty. Well, Danish people say it pretty accurately describes Danish culture. I’ve just, uh, looked it up. But, um, so it’s Y Y’s law and that has 10, there’s 10 rules in Y’s law and they are, one, you’re not to think that you are anything special. Two, you’re not to think you are as good as we are. Three, you’re not to think you are smarter than we are, or you’re not to imagine yourself better than we are. You know, it can, it continues down like that. But I just wonder like, is the Danish wind industry, have they flown too close to the sun? Have they become too thought themselves too special? Is this an example of where Denmark Danish people would say, you know [00:25:00] what? Who do you think you are when dentistry, you think that you’re better than us? You think you’re smarter than us? Do you think that you don’t deserve to contribute to society? Because that is one of the biggest cultural differences that I found in in Denmark, was that people genuinely think that they have the um, responsibility when they’re doing well to make sure that everybody else in society is doing well. This is an interesting cultural moment for Denmark, is all I would try to say that this to me, I’m very interested to see how Danish people respond to this idea that. We’re gonna, we’re gonna leave now because we don’t wanna share our, uh, wealth with the Danish, with Danish society as a whole  Allen Hall: 32 million kroners, that’s actually extremely low and in the United States. Uh, there are thousands of companies, much smaller than Vestas, where the CEO is making a lot more than that, and to give half of that, more than [00:26:00] half of that away, so the CEO is taking home a million and US dollars, like 1,000,002, that’s not a tremendous amount of money. I for the responsibility which are on that person’s shoulders. I could see being a little upset about that. And obviously he travels in circles in which he meets a lot of people that are making a lot more money come to America, stop at a, I don’t know, there’s a lot of places, machine shops that’ll make more money than that. Uh, so I think there’s a right to be upset about it. You know, the, everything that’s happening in Denmark at the moment, I’m trying to. I feel like Denmark is getting it together. And then these things happen and I start to worry again. Uh, there’s, there’s so many things that have happened in the United States. They’re pushing against Denmark, and I feel, I’m always apologizing to my people I know in Denmark and like, this is another one. Like, oh, geez, yeah, we, you know, vest can move to America. Oh, no, no, no, no. I want buses to be where it is. Stay [00:27:00] there. But I think there’s opportunities for investors to move and you kind of get the feeling that they’re leaving Denmark slowly. Have you noticed that recently?  Rosemary Barnes: Maybe. I mean, uh, all of those Danish wind energy companies used to manufacture in Denmark and barely, there’s barely any Danish manufacturing now. So I mean, to a certain extent this is, you know, started a long time ago, but I also think that the, what you described at the tax of the CEO income and the income not being high, it’s not just, uh. Top 1% kind of issue. That’s something that I, I definitely felt it when I worked there, but I think that like, would your average Danish person wish that CEOs were paid more like Americans and that Danish society became more like American with a huge wealth inequality? I, I’m gonna go out in a limb and say. 90% plus of Danish people would absolutely abhor the idea of that happening there. And they will be very firmly on side of you should be, um, CEOs should not be [00:28:00] making that much money and people that are making a lot of money should be paying a lot of tax to support the rest of society at just, I, I, I’m. Pretty sure that he is like a really core cultural value.  Matthew Stead: I think he is good at, I mean, things don’t change unless things change. And, um, uh, I think it’s good for him to be pushing and, you know, making this a, a public discussion and a public topic. I mean, if he hadn’t have come out talking about this problem, we wouldn’t have been talking about it. So, uh, I think yeah. Good on him for raising it and for being brave. I mean, you, like you say, Rosie, um, is not traditional cultural. Values in, in, in Denmark, but, you know, good on him for, for pushing the, pushing the, the, the barrow.  Allen Hall: It’s, it’s hard, right? I think Vestas works in a global community and they see all different kinds of cultures and all kinds of economic systems, and they operate in all of ’em. And, uh, the CEO of Vestus were in the United States and they have a large manufacturing presence in the United States. Let’s face it. [00:29:00] Uh, easily making 10 million in the United States, maybe more easy. And I don’t think they’re paying him nearly enough for the work that he has done and things that he has accomplished. You have to admit, the CEO of Vestus has really put a lot of time and effort into that company and has improved it in ways that are somehow, uh, never discussed, but are, in my opinion, immeasurable. So for the long-term health of that company, they are seen as the preeminent wind turbine manufactured today. That’s hard to do. 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 to you. Never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s this conversation for. 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 [00:30:00] Podcast.

Allen covers a substation failure that has left Scotland’s 882 MW Moray West farm half-offline since November, GE Vernova’s new Italy contract and Milan factory investment, Iberdrola’s sixth Australian acquisition of 2026, and Flender India’s new gearbox test rig near Chennai. 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 had quite a week. Let us start in Scotland, off the rugged north-east coast, where something has gone quietly wrong. Ocean Winds and Ignitis built Moray West, an eight hundred and eighty-two megawatt offshore wind farm — one of the largest in Scotland. But one of its two offshore substations has been offline since November. Half the farm’s capacity … gone dark. And there is more. The project missed a contractual milestone last September under an off-take agreement. That triggered an event of default under its project lending agreements. The lenders and the sponsors have agreed to a short-term waiver. Discussions are described as constructive. Commercial operations, originally expected last year, are now targeted for sometime in 2026. Eight hundred and eighty-two megawatts … waiting. Now, let us travel south to Italy. GE Vernova has won a contract to supply seventeen onshore turbines to IVPC Group’s Fortore wind farm in the Benevento region of southern Italy. The project tops one hundred megawatts. Turbine deliveries begin in twenty twenty-seven. GE Vernova is also investing thirty million dollars to expand its Sesto San Giovanni plant outside Milan. That investment boosts production of transformer bushings, the insulating components that keep high-voltage equipment running. About fifty new jobs are coming to that facility. And GE Vernova’s two-piece blade design for its six-point-one megawatt turbines is already drawing attention as developers scramble to crack Italy’s notoriously complex logistics and permitting hurdles. Italy is a market in motion. Now, to the other side of the world. Iberdrola has completed the acquisition of the Ararat wind farm in Victoria, Australia. Two hundred and forty-two megawatts. Operational since twenty seventeen. This is Iberdrola’s sixth transaction of twenty twenty-six alone, and it marks the Spanish giant’s first owned generation asset in Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state. Iberdrola now operates in five Australian states with more than twenty-five hundred megawatts of installed capacity. Victoria has set a target of ninety-five percent renewable energy by twenty thirty-five. Iberdrola intends to help get it there. And finally, from Chennai, India, comes a story about getting ready for what is coming. Flender India has just inaugurated its largest and most advanced gearbox test rig for wind turbines at its Walajabad facility near Chennai. The project began in January of twenty twenty-five at Flender’s Voerde site in Germany. From start to finish, thirteen months. Final assembly, three months. This is a collaboration between Flender’s operations in Germany, China, and India. CEO Andreas Evertz called it a testament to their global commitment to driving renewable energy solutions worldwide. India’s wind market is growing fast, and Flender is making sure it can test every gearbox that growth demands. So, let us step back and look at the picture. A Scottish offshore wind farm sits half-dark while its owners negotiate with lenders. GE Vernova plants its flag in southern Italy and invests thirty million dollars in an Italian factory. Iberdrola expands to a sixth Australian transaction in a single year. And Flender India builds the biggest gearbox test rig on the subcontinent. And that is the state of the wind industry for the ninth of March, twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow

Peter Giddings of the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership joins to discuss the UK’s industrial growth plan for offshore wind, the five priority supply chain areas being targeted, and how OWGP helps businesses scale from small suppliers into globally competitive manufacturers. 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: Peter, welcome to the program.  Peter Giddings: Thanks for having me out.  Allen Hall: The UK right now is just a global leader in offshore wind, which I think a, a lot of us in the United States don’t even realize that, but the UK is a. Giant leader in offshore wind. Uh, but we keep hearing about the supply chain constraints that are threatening some of the timelines here. What are some of the fundamental problems that the UK offshore wind supply chain has today?  Peter Giddings: We are in a great situation for supply chain, but the 2000 companies, some of them with 25 years experience. At the scale where we can deliver the four gigawatts a year for the next five years that we need to hit our 2030 deployment targets and to keep that deployment rolling. So we are [00:01:00] brilliant at the UK of planning, developing and deploying wind farms. We have a really strong maintenance base. We do some great supply chain work, and IWGP Offshore Wind Growth Partnership has helped those businesses grow, but we don’t have as much capacity as we would like. For the major items. So we have a great set of facilities making blades. We have good facilities, uh, great facilities in JDR making cables, but we don’t capture as much of the manufacturing value of our deployment as we would like. That means we create fewer jobs, we create less economic benefit, and those developers are exposed to more supply chain risk. Specifically, we want to build globally competitive supply chain capacity. We, we we’re, we’re not a charity. We are building businesses that can win contracts. They are attractive to the procurement teams and they’re sustainable, they grow, right? Competitive capacity is what we’re after. Um, and that’s, that’s really what [00:02:00] we’re after. Allen Hall: And if the UK doesn’t really address these problems now, what does that look like for the supply chain? Because you’re talking about moving from roughly 16. Gigawatts in the water to approximately 50 gigawatts, 45, 50 gigawatts by 2030 and beyond. So that’s, you know, it’s roughly a tripling of the amount of capacity in the water supply chain becomes then really critical to that and in order to feed that. But what happens here, if the supply chain has not grown locally,  Peter Giddings: it’s a missed opportunity. I mean, the businesses that are here today would be an incremental growth. And that’s not bad. That’s an okay outcome. But if your deployment is a huge opportunity and you get an okay outcome, that’s not acceptable. That’s not a way to run an industry, right? We have this massive opportunity in front of us. There’s a huge amount that we could do that the UK is great at that the opportunity is to stretch [00:03:00] and help communities all around the coast have. Hundreds, thousands of jobs that are there. They’re stable, they’re good quality, and they are prosperous. It’s a real community initiative. Those towns, which are probably seeing a decline in oil and gas revenue or are strapped to tourism or kind of don’t have an industry, those towns, those people as humans are gonna have a much better future. There’s a, actually a really nice exemplar, um, it’s not. The biggest component, but Cable protection Systems is something that the UK is already globally renowned for. If you open up a tender pack, if you’re allowed to in other markets kind of anywhere, and you look to the CPS package, you would more than likely see a couple of, if not all four of CRP techmark, sub C and Balmoral, right? They, they serve the UK market real well, but they are globally renowned. [00:04:00]That’s, that’s one example. We are looking to do that for the priority sections of the industrial growth plan. You know, we’re going to pick and are picking the areas of the supply chain where we think the UK can be genuinely competitive and we have something to offer. A developer is not gonna choose a substandard product that’s a bit more expensive, but we can build up supply chains that offer fantastic products. Cable protection systems, and we can capture big market share there. Develop a product that can be exported, or if it’s a bit too far to ship, develop a business which can open up a new base. You know, so we, we get that, um, combination of local demand being served. And when I say local, I mean like the North Sea in Baltic and that global opportunity. So it’s, but it’s not gonna be everything. You know, people might. I might get a little bit heat for this, but [00:05:00] if you spread the jam too thin, it doesn’t taste very good. You haven’t committed to win a few things rather than come second and third everywhere. We have to choose what we win at.  Allen Hall: Let’s get into the industrial growth plan, ’cause I wanna understand that a little bit better and how OWGP. Fits in that as the delivery body. Right? So you have this industrial growth plan, OWGP is, is sort of administering it and, and taking action on it. How does this system work and, and why is it different than other attempts at supply chain development?  Peter Giddings: Uh, a couple of years ago, 2023, um, most of the major institutional stakeholders came together and said, oh, that we see this big opportunity coming. We want to make sure that the UK benefits from having all that deployment. So if you’ve got a bunch of demand and you [00:06:00] don’t have much supply, you don’t have as much supply as you want, that’s an obvious gap to fill. And the Crown of State, the Crown of State Scotland, the departments from government, the Offshore Wind Industry Council, a consortium of developers in the uk, uh, came together. Um. And funded a piece of work that allowed, um, a team to bring in lots of industry input. Look at what the big opportunities were in the market. So where is there substantial value? Where is there substantial demand? And match that up to where does the UK have capability and where could we grow a competitive advantage? So. What prizes are worth winning? What prizes can we win? And we’ve matched those up and there’s kind of five priority areas that we’ve selected. Um, it’s kind of the first things we’re gonna go after. Um, [00:07:00] they’re, they’re quite broad, those five. It’s advanced turbine technologies, deep water foundations, cable and electrical systems, uh, smart environmental services, and, uh, smart operations and maintenance. If you kind of open those boxes up, there are some very specific supply chains that are prioritized. So I’ll take the one that, uh, is the first one that we’re looking at. Advanced turbine technology. Uh, we talked just before we started recording, um, that the UK has real strength in blades. Blades is a big opportunity. We have a really well established composite industry. We have a great facility up in Hull. We have an r and d base and an onshore, um, factory on the isle of White with Vestas. And I think the thing we don’t really say is we have chief engineer for blades of Vestas in the UK structures lead. The r and d team is 140 strong down on the island [00:08:00] and we have a really productive facility in Hull. Um. That is putting product out, has been making, um, recyclable blades, is making the one 15. We have depth, so it’s a good opportunity. We have strength, we have a massive innovation ecosystem, so that’s a really obvious win. And we’ve been through the rest of the supply chain taking cables, good capacity, excellent experience from oil and gas, and so that’s a priority area. Okay. Going through those supply chains, finding big opportunities that the UK has, the ability to win contracts in, and then mapping out what do you need to do to make that capacity happen? How much capacity, at what cost, with what performance? And that’s, that’s kind of the OWGP role is owning that plan, bringing input from industry, [00:09:00] bringing input from experts. Turning the ambition of we want to have the ability to supply 50% of UK demand and export into a tangible plan of, cool, these businesses need this investment by this time to stand up a facility so they’re ready. It’s not just a blade factory. Right. That’s, um, that’s important. It’s the 20 businesses that sell product, that sell services into that. We talk about pyramids, right? You’ve got one facility at the top and a big wide base with lots of people who are employed in that big wide base. And I think, you know, it’s natural. Everybody looks to the top of the mountain. We’re looking to build the whole thing, and that’s a really powerful reason for industries to stay for the long term. So I think tracking back to your [00:10:00] question. What’s our role? We own that plan. We bring together the expertise and convert it into a set of measurable steps really. And that kind of second part is coordinate. Everybody needs to be playing the same game, aiming at the same targets. And that’s a really important part. Allen Hall: Well, I think for a lot of people outside the UK, it’s hard to envision the amount of industry that exists. In the UK you’re about 70 million people, so you’re roughly maybe a quarter of the population size of the United States roughly. But you’re, you, you have internal industries there and other areas that have that supply chain growth. So you’ve watched it in aerospace, which is one I’m familiar with, but in other industries, you, automobiles and a number of other areas, uh, you have that supply chain. So you know how to, the UK knows how to do that, but, but that hasn’t really necessarily happened in offshore wind, which I think is where the [00:11:00] opportunity is because I think watching. Being around this industry for as long as I have. One of the key elements is that, uh, the, the smaller businesses are sort of tier twos or tier threes that make the tier ones possible are kind of forgotten about. But the UK historically has looked at tier two and tier three as being the fundamentals to a successful product delivery and, and a, a global marketplace. Is, is that where the initial focus is? Because just listening to. And going to your website, uh, which I encourage everybody to do, you see where there’s smart decisions being made to create that base and what does that look like? And when you’re trying to attack that base on offshore wind, obviously cables and turbine technology, anything to do basically with being in the water, which the UK is great at. Do you see that being a relatively quick exercise because the UK has done it before in other industries? Or [00:12:00] is this problem just a little bit different because of the scale of it?  Peter Giddings: It’s really similar to, uh, the way supply chain’s been supported in aerospace, for example. Um, the Airbus has a deep supply chain in the UK and has a very strong voice into government. Their supply chain is supported. They’ve built that base. Um, and so from the outcome, that’s gonna be pretty similar? I think so. We, we have a template. I’ve worked in aerospace, many colleagues, um, that we’re, we’re calling on have, um, I guess the difference is, uh, maturity of industry. So the developers are very mature businesses. They’re global. They have been big for time. They know how to do supply chain development from oil and gas, where you build enormous unicorns. Exactly. Once, [00:13:00] then move on. You know, an oil and gas project is, is a one time deal. It’s tremendous, but you don’t have to make a hundred of them and it’s slightly different. So you end up with a, a single point, and if you are. Experience and your, um, relationship with government sits with developers that can create some really, um, it, it takes time to build up your supply chain so that they have the same experience of running, um, large development programs. They have the stability as businesses to kind of build through. It’s really important to remember that turbine OEMs and the tier ones haven’t had 30 years of stable business modeling wind. Because 30 years ago, wind wasn’t really a big industry, right? They have had plenty of success scaling their business, and we’re just entering the phase now where you can, um, pretty credibly say that wind is [00:14:00] a global business with a long-term future. And it needs to find the right way for those OEMs, those big tier one manufacturing businesses to support their business in the long term. That is, I would say quite new. Um, hopefully I don’t get pilled for saying that, but Airbus, spin Airbus for 2, 3, 4 generations. Right. So they know their game. Same with roles, same with, you know, Nissan and Toyota. It’s, it’s gonna take a little minute for the manufacturing part of the wind industry to settle and learn what works. We think OWGP and our partners, GB Energy, crown State, we think. We have a good starter for 10. You know, it’s modeled off what we’ve done in other industries. It provides stability, provides capital and a plan. I think that’s a really good mix. Um, [00:15:00] and I think it’ll just take a bit of time to mature those relationships and get everybody comfortable. Um, the developers have been really supportive. The OWGP money comes from. A developer contribution. So they are playing their part. Absolutely they are. We need to find the right way for manufacturing businesses to scale and then start pumping in innovations into that capacity so it stays competitive. You know, it’s a build capacity that’s competitive today. Feed it with innovation so it stays competitive and gets better and better and better.  Allen Hall: How far off the technology chain do you want them to be before you consider them to be part of the supply chain  Peter Giddings: today? Uh, 21st of January, 2026. There is good money for people that are within about a year of getting their technology to market. So that’s the, the approximate. Um, you’ll notice I dodge TRLI don’t think it’s super helpful. Um, time to market is, uh, is, is [00:16:00] really a good indicator. Yeah. Alan’s, give me the thumbs up of someone that’s done a TRL assessment or two. Um, we, we are looking for businesses that are commercially. Viable. They have relationships with customers. Um, they’re trading the earliest currently, and it’s currently, um, is like a year, maybe two years to market at the outside and up, um, we’re working with. And so that’s not just OWGP, that’s across the funding streams that are available. Um, and there are many we are working with and hopeful in the next week or two to have, um. A positive result from the UK government on earlier stage innovation funding so that we can align the early stage innovation at the problems that really count for making businesses competitive. You know, to be super clear, that’s not gonna be OWGP Cash. Our hope is that it’s OWGP derived questions [00:17:00] delivered by the innovation institute’s offshore renewable energy catapult, the high value manufacturing catapults. Academia, innovative businesses. Those guys do the innovation and we work together with them and with industry to really find the questions that count and we can focus our attention on commercializing that and scaling up the things that are commercial.  Allen Hall: Peter, walk us through how a UK supply chain company actually engages with OWGP. Uh, what does that. Uh, look like. And what are the, sort of the different options to, to engage with OWGP?  Peter Giddings: So I, I think the first thing to say is you, you don’t have to be UK today. We would love to attract businesses from overseas. Um, you can start a UK entity quite quickly. The first people, first place people tend to engage is in our, um, business, uh, support services. So we help, uh, businesses orientate themselves commercially. Understand how the contracting works, understand who [00:18:00] their, their pot potential customers are. Um, and that’s, yeah, it’s on our website. It’s Business Transformation Services, the West Program, wind Expert Services. There’s a t in there, there’s something else. Um, but that’s really the entry point for businesses that need to orientate themselves in the UK market. And we, and that. Intensity and the, the depth of the commercial support kind of ramps up through base and up to sig sharing in growth. Um, and you’ll also see us in the next year or two, um, take a, a more proactive approach to supporting businesses commercially. Um, I’m actually down with a, a fantastic business in the blade supply chain, um, composite integration in Saltash, helping them build a strategic, um, business plan. So a little more than just going, oh, this is where you get your contract. Actually helping them model what a future bigger business would look like and what they will need to do to, to reach it. You know, commercial support is growing for us. I think it could be really important, right? It’s [00:19:00] new for us, so, you know, we’ll learn. But the first point of call, go to the website, get in touch with the team, um, and often people choose that commercial support, the business transformation. We also run grant funding. Um, we have innovation calls. Um, we have a whole range of different calls going from innovation up to development into Dev X. So manufacturing, um, facility support program, they’re all grant. You can choose to pay them back. You do need to be UK entity, but you need to be quite close to market that one to two year zone with commercial traction. Um, and again, information is available. There is a team of people. Who are really great at taking those triaging, figuring out what’s right for you, what’s not, and if it’s not something from us, we do and we are delighted to pass you on to other people. You know, if you talk to us, we will make sure you find a home.[00:20:00] I think that’s really important to say.  Allen Hall: I think that’s very critical and one of the more difficult. Periods for, uh, it’s a smaller company to become bigger and be part of this massive supply chain, is that sort of 1 million pound, the 5 million pound kind of business, which has a technology which has proven itself and is delivering something or very close to delivering something. That transition is incredibly hard and getting some help there and some advice even would make the transition so much shorter and more efficient than what it typically is. That’s what OWGP does. So it’s not just the money. Obviously money helps everything generally. It’s the context, it’s the advice, it’s the knowledge that, uh, OWGP brings to the table that helps you grow your technology, your small business, into that mid-tier business and takes that mid-tier business into that gigantic world leader business. Those are the things that are, [00:21:00] are so hard to quantify, to put some, uh, some people in place. Boy, OWGP can really ramp up and has, the UK in general has done this many, many times. So I, I, I just encourage everybody who’s listening to this podcast to think about OWGP as a contact point and reach out. And Peter, how can they do that? What are the first steps to contact OWGP?  Peter Giddings: It’s always best to come in through our website. So my contact details will be in the, um, in the show notes, but you, you can look at the different programs there are contact US buttons all over it. Um, it also gives you sight of the industrial growth plan, um, and the priority areas. We are trying where we can to focus our efforts on those priority areas, and we would absolutely be delighted to hear from businesses active in the IGB priorities. Um, if you are, if you are not in one of those, you’re not excluded, come talk to us and we, we are supporting ambitious [00:22:00] businesses. We’re just focusing most of our efforts on the ones that are aligned to priority. We’re, we’re on your team. We would like to hear from you. Um, yeah, do, do start with the website. Hit one of the contact buttons you’ll come into to one of the team and we will connect you in. Um, I think that’s probably the, the best way  Allen Hall: and the website is ow gp.org.uk. Very easy to get to. You can just Google it and it’ll come right up. There’s a ton of information on that website. Peter, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate this. Learned a lot and very excited for what the UK is about to do.  Peter Giddings: I’m looking forward to talking to you again.

Allen, Rosemary, Yolanda, and Matthew discuss highlights from Blades USA including the carbon blade debate. Plus TPI Composites’ bankruptcy sale hits major obstacles as partners dispute over $100M in claims. And Europe’s offshore and onshore wind developers clash over state aid, with WindEurope’s new CEO urging unity. 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 Alan Hall, and I’m here with Yolanda Padron, Rosemary Barnes and Matthew Stead. Yolanda and Matthew have just wrapped up a couple of days at the Blade USA forum in Austin, Texas. Maybe we should start there. Thoughts on the forum this year? Things that were highlights?  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Lightning Root de bond. One positive was that, um, there are a couple of startups there, so, you know, kudos to them for, you know, making the investment. There was a. There was a startup around, you know, data analytics and, you know, bringing machine learning in. And then there was also another startup looking at recycling. [00:01:00] Um, really trying to get that, that food chain through of, um, you know, grinding and then turning into some sort of valuable product. Um, yeah. However, I think someone also from EPRI said that, you know, at the moment, you know, the recycling path is, you know, eight times more expensive than the, um, the landfill path. There was a lot of carbon discussion actually. So, and, um, yeah, a lot of discussion about repairs, a lot of discussion about testing, uh, a lot of discussion about, you know, how maybe a carbon blade can last 40 years. Um, so a lot of discussion about lifetime extensions around carbon. Um, but, but, but, but, you know, really, really hard to repair.  Allen Hall 2025: That goes back to the comments Rosemary and Morton Hanberg made about carbon blades. Should we be making. Carbon blades are not. And I think Morton’s opinion, and maybe Rosemary’s, I don’t wanna speak for her, was carbon blades are okay, but they are really difficult to repair. Almost impossible to repair. And is it [00:02:00] worth even building them?  Rosemary Barnes: I think if you consider the blade in isolation, then it probably is adding more headaches than it’s worth. But carbon fiber is a bit of an enabler for improvements across the whole system of a, a wind turbine. ’cause when you take, like you can take a lot of weight out of a blade by using carbon fiber. I mean, it’s never been cheaper to make a blade with carbon fiber than an equivalent blade with glass. You do, you buy the more expensive carbon fiber blade because it’s lighter, a like, a lot lighter, and then you can take, um, weight. It, it reduces the requirements for basically every other component in the wind turbine, but especially stuff like the pitch bearings. Um, so you solve a lot of other problems, but you create blade problems. So. I think if you ask some of the only works on maintaining blades, then you’re gonna be like, why would you make a carbon fiber blade? It is so much headache. Um, but that’s not the reason why they were ever made in the first place. [00:03:00] So you’d need to talk to, you know, somebody on, uh, I dunno, front end engineering. Someone from the sales team about why it is that they are going with a more expensive carbon fiber blade. Even acknowledging that they probably underestimate how many problems there are with o and m with, uh, carbon fiber blades. But even so, like they’re already aware that there are trade offs. Um, and yeah, there’s non blade reasons for, for taking, taking that pain.  Allen Hall 2025: Are there other fibers that could be substituted besides carbon? There, I, I know fiberglass. A, a good, relatively strong fiber and carbon obviously is much stronger. But are there things in the middle that could be substituted that are non-conductive? Rosemary Barnes: Uh, y yeah, there are, but carbon fibers, it’s not just strong. It’s really stiff. And that’s what its benefit is. Um, like there’s Kevlar but it’s not very stiff. So you would, we would make a really heavy blade if you used Kevlar. It would be probably bulletproof though. So I guess that would be a plus. I, I haven’t looked into it recently, but nothing is [00:04:00] at the, um, like got the performance specs and the cost specs that you would need to, um, make it replace carbon fiber. Matthew Stead: So one thing that I picked up I thought was pretty, uh, interesting was that by having a stronger, you know, carbon protrusion, you know, the, you know, the backbone of the blade, um, it took a little bit of pressure off the skin. And so therefore, um, you know, the life, life of the blade, um, and the ability to keep running it ’cause the skin is not so critical. Those seem to be a real, a real plus as well.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know, people talk about this in like absolutes, but everything is just a con continuum, right? Like you can make an all glass blade that would last a thousand years if you really wanted to. You just, you know, you just have to make it very, very strong. ’cause it’s, you know, it’s all based on fatigue lifetime. And the smaller that your, um, strain on every component in the blade is, then the less, um, the less fatigue damage is gonna accumulate. Making it a little bit stiffer will actually increase the lifetime by [00:05:00] a a lot. I think the main benefit to protrusions is just that you avoid all of the um, or you avoid a lot of the possibilities for manufacturing defects. It’s easy to control the manufacture ’cause carbon fiber, like much more so than glass fiber. It’s so, um, it’s so dependent on the fibers being perfectly straight. If you have a little wrinkle, like a little wrinkle is bad in glass fiber, but it’s like really bad in carbon fiber. So protrusions mean that you won’t get wrinkles. Uh, and you can, you know, control the manufacturing process a lot better, but they are barely repairable, right? So that’s the trade off. You can do some small repairs, but you’re not gonna be just. Um, if you’ve got a, a, a full thickness crack or something, it’s, you know, it’s gonna be game over. You’re not gonna be building that up again. Allen Hall 2025: Delamination and bottomline failures and blades are difficult problems to [00:06:00] 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  Yolanda Padron: will save you millions.  Allen Hall 2025: Well keep going on the, the subject of blades. Imagine if you were selling your house and you told the bank you owe nothing on it. Then the bank shows up with a bill for over a hundred million dollars. That is essentially what’s happening right now in the TPI composites bankruptcy. Uh, the wind blade manufacturer canceled its [00:07:00] February 17th asset auction after only one bidder came forward. A firm called ECP five LLC, which is, uh, part of Energy Capital Partners, which is based in New Jersey. Uh, but before TPI. Can hand over the keys. It has to settle up with its business partners. TPI told the court many of those partners were owed little or nothing. Uh, the partners check their books. Strongly disagree. Now, the judge has a mountain of competing claims to sort through before the sale can close. And everyone, I mean, the, the claims are big. Uh, there are several large names listed, and if you go through the filings, uh, Siemens C Mesa is probably the largest one, and it, it claims TPI owes about 84 million plus an unpaid inspection, repair, and replacement costs. Plus under 22 million [00:08:00]under apparent guarantee. Others include Aurora Energy Services stating it is owned about $5 million, uh, for post-bankruptcy services, plus 38,000, uh, for before the filing of bankruptcy. The landlord up in Iowa for the TPI facility there is objecting because they’re owed some rent. Some other ones include, uh. Oracle, uh, which is, uh, has a lot of software licenses that TPI currently has, and they’re saying those licenses will not swap over to the new owner. So there, this is a series of these filings going on at the minute, and they’re pushing back the closing of the, uh, sale hearing until March 9th. So they got about another two weeks as we record right now. This is a big deal and, and although I have seen almost nothing about it in the press. Because it’s hard. One, it’s hard to find, and two, it’s really [00:09:00] difficult to sort through. Uh, but it is a major milestone for TPI that they’re gonna be able to sell the, or at least transfer ownership to, uh, energy capital partners. And the none of the buyers investors had bought part of the facilities. But GE Renova or Siemens cesa, for that matter, are not involved, at least at the top level. Which is really to, in my opinion, odd. I thought GE Renova would’ve been involved, at least at some level. They have been supporting TPI through this process. But in terms of going forward, doesn’t look like too much is going on with Renova or Siemens Ga Mesa in, in terms of the operations of these facilities. Thoughts.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I agree. It’s strange that they wouldn’t have taken that opportunity and that makes me wonder what I don’t know that, you know, ’cause obviously it’s not a strange decision to the people who have made it so. They’ve got more information, a lot more information than us. So what is it that made it unappealing to them? That’s, um, that’s my question. [00:10:00] Yolanda Padron: What did TP, I think was gonna happen with all of that money that they owe everyone?  Allen Hall 2025: Well, it’s a bankruptcy hearing. Obviously they like to wipe that debt free and so would Energy Capital partners. They don’t wanna pay the a hundred million plus of whatever, uh, the court would ict, but. You just like to get the assets. If you can do it, that’s your cheapest option if you’re Energy Capital partners. But do you see Energy Capital Partners running the facilities? There’s a lot of organization within TPI that manages those facilities and controls the operation. From the quality side engineering side, there’s, there’s a lot of pieces to TPI here. Do you think they’re just gonna pick it up and run, run the company as it stands today? Or, or,  Rosemary Barnes: oh my goodness. I would be so nervous to, um, buy blades, uh, from them in that situation. I mean, we’ve seen so many examples in the last few years of decisions being made by senior management that have really compromised the quality at the end of the day. Like in theory, yes, the factory, you know, all the processes are in place to do things. Um, to do things [00:11:00] right, but you know, as soon as they get the next new project, which they’re doing constantly, right? It’s not like they just make a blade and they just make it over and over again. They make many different kinds of blades. There’s decisions to be made and you’re trying to get the price right and the quality right. And then, you know, given that we know that TPI was not profitable the way they were doing it before, they’re gonna have to spend less money. Then somebody who isn’t from the industry is making those calls about where to save it. It just seems like totally implausible to me.  Matthew Stead: Can I just add though, you know, TPI was mentioned multiple times at, um, at Blades, USA, and so, you know, a lot of people are relying on them or have relied on them and so forth. And so maybe this is a strategy about supporting the industry into the future. Like I think Alan, you, you said that they’re involved in, um, this investment business has other wind assets, so maybe it’s just like. Securing supply chain and, which I mean, that’s a pretty logical approach, isn’t it?  Allen Hall 2025: Oh, it would be. Uh, they’re about 50% owners of Ted’s US onshore fleet and a number. There are [00:12:00] other projects they’re involved in a number of renewable projects. Uh, so it would make sense for them to try to keep the supply chain going. But the largest purchaser of GB GE turbines that I know of is NextEra. So you would think NextEra would want to step into the mix too and at least in all the court filings, I haven’t seen much from NextEra or nothing from them at all. It if Osted US is wanting to keep their supply chain and Energy Capital partners wanted to keep the supply chain going, that would make a lot of sense to me. However, I just don’t know if they have the infrastructure to manage it. As Rosemary has described on numerous occasions running LM wind power is not easy. There’s just a lot of moving pieces, supply chain problems. You’ve got people problems, you have quality problems, you have repair problems, warranty issues. It’s a lot to that business. It isn’t like you’re stamping out widgets. You, you have a responsibility to that product after it goes out into [00:13:00] service. So if you have problems out in service, you’re, you’re kind of on the hook for all those warranty claims. It’s complicated.  Rosemary Barnes: You make it sound like I was running lm  Yolanda Padron: Rosie runs the world. Rosemary Barnes: I just wanna make it clear I was not running lm  Allen Hall 2025: Not yet. Rosie. There’s still time.  Rosemary Barnes: I was ru running one very tiny, tiny corner of it.  Yolanda Padron: I’d almost be curious ’cause like since ECP is so much into risk management and just, just in general, they have so many things that they are like part owners in, but they don’t necessarily manage the day to day hands on. Uh. I’d almost be curious to see if maybe they take a page out of Rosie’s book and try to make one thing. Well,  Matthew Stead: mm, that’d be novel, wouldn’t it?  Rosemary Barnes: It has actually been tried before. Um, you know, it’s, it’s uh, not something that has escaped the notice of blade engineers, uh, that if you make one thing, you can do it right. And wind turbine blades are a pretty similar there. No, you know, like great [00:14:00] differentiator between. How well performing the blades are from one company to another. I know at, at least at lm, they did have a blade that they designed, and their plan was to sell just heaps and heaps of those to multiple different manufacturers and just no one wanted it. Um, so it just quietly died. Um, so yeah, the, the concept is good. I think it’s. A little bit harder to pull off than you would hope. There are also some Chinese companies that are kind of selling just parts, generic parts. And so if you wanted to make your own wind turbine, um, company, if you wanted to be a wind energy o and m Yolanda, you could just buy an assortment of parts from Chinese manufacturers and put a. Yolanda Wind energy sticker on it and um, and, and, and you could be an an OEM. So it is, it, it, it is possible. I haven’t seen any of these out in the wild. Um, I have [00:15:00] heard of, you know, people considering it for, you know, certain aspects of certain types of projects. So it kind of exists in a way.  Matthew Stead: But the financial aspect, I mean, that’s accounting 1 0 1, I mean. You gotta know your assets and to owe people a hundred million dollars, that’s absolutely shocking. Really?  Allen Hall 2025: They owed a lot more than that before the bankruptcy. It is a lot of money.  Matthew Stead: How do you miss that?  Allen Hall 2025: Well, I don’t think they missed it. I just think the warranty claims and some of the repair that was going on and the, the, it sounded like price discounting was happening to some of the OEMs just caught up to ’em. But at the end of the day, I, I, I guess the question is. Does TPI as an entity remain? Obviously the Vestas portion will, because Vestas is gonna make them Vestas factories in a sense, and, uh, integrate as part of their overall operations. But Renova is not, Siemens is not interested in doing it, at least as we speak. No one’s [00:16:00] making any noise over at Nordex. It, it does leave these assets questionable as to what the real value is. We haven’t heard how much, uh, ECP has paid for them yet. The Vestas factories that were purchased, I think the, the two TPI factories in Mexico, I think Vestas paid about $10 million for each factory, which is a really inexpensive price to pay for new factories because Vestus had talked about at one point a year or two ago, about standing up a new factory saying it would cost him roughly a half a billion dollars to do. So buying a, that same asset for $10 million is a discount, a deep, deep discount, which maybe Vestas figures, Hey, it’s 20 million bucks, plus they got the India operations. Uh, it’s not that much money. If it all goes sour, it’s not that much money and we’re okay. Whereas Ver Nova decided to not to participate in that. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why [00:17:00] 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 p ps wind.com. Today, over in Denmark, a fight has been brewing between offshore and onshore wind developers and. Sted once State Aid brought back for offshore wind auctions, onshore developers say that would tilt the playing field against them. Well, some have even walked out on their own trade group, uh, over it. Now the new CEO of Wind Europe, Tina Van Stratton, uh, is stepping in the middle of that discussion with a simple message. We need both. Don’t let offshore and onshore wind divide us. Nearly 90% of Europe’s installed wind capacity sits currently on land, and [00:18:00] she says that is not going to change anytime soon. Uh, so there, there is a big dispute about this right there. There does seem to be a, a amount of money being poured into offshore wind and requests of governments to support offshore wind at the same time. Onshore wind, which has been the primary growth market for wind in Europe, is getting the cold shoulder. In a sense. How does this play out everyone? Is there a, a good solution to it or is the need for offshore wind so great that, that they have to ignore onshore wind development for a couple of years?  Matthew Stead: I think we should just all be friends. So, I mean, really. Yeah, we need both and, um, I mean for the diversity and, you know, uh, I’ll leave all the technical topics to Rosie, but, um, um, really I think we need both. I mean, so what, it’d be crazy to, to drop the onshore, onshore industry.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that, or said, especially Orid Europe doesn’t have any onshore anymore. Right. So it’s just [00:19:00]offshore. It would make sense that they really wanna push for help for themselves. And it’s, it’s great. It, it’s, it’s great to help, but I, I agree with Matt. Allen Hall 2025: Well, the Northern Europe and Scandinavian countries are talking about 100 gigawatts in the water by what, 2050? Something of that sort. So that’s a lot of energy in the water. In order to do that, you have to devote a number of resources to it, which. Will mean onshore wind is not gonna get the support it probably deserves, even though it has a proven track record. Rosemary Barnes: I just think it, it’s really interesting because I guess wind is, um, a very Europe. LED industry. Um, and so yeah, in Europe, e everything big and exciting is in offshore and the volume is in offshore. Um, I feel like that’s kind of filtered through to other regions though, because I mean, in Australia we don’t even have any offshore wind yet. We are probably getting some, but you go to any wind energy event, it’s gonna be. [00:20:00] More than 50% offshore wind and sometimes like 90% offshore wind, um, focused, which is, I think crazy when onshore is, is exists and has plenty of problems that need to be solved, and we need to be building more, a lot faster. I, I do actually wish that. If we could spend as much of the, you know, like some of the effort and the political effort that’s going into paving the way for offshore wind, I think would be much better spent on solving the problems. Um, the obstacles stopping us from rolling out onshore wind faster. Because we’re not on track in Australia to meet our renewable energy targets if we can’t get that under control. And then in the US yes you have some offshore wind, but it is not a growth industry at the moment or it’s not very appealing at the moment, at least. Right. So, and I dunno how much you talk about it there, but I do hear a lot of, like a whole lot of talk about offshore compared to how important it is for regions outside of Europe. Yolanda Padron: I think it’s important too to [00:21:00] note that. When you have a lot of offshore wind in your fleet, like you can sometimes test out products onshore that maybe they’re, of course not the exact same conditions, but you can test out products to a degree onshore. And I’ve seen, you know, owner operators that have to go across continents just to test that product because it’s cheaper to do that onshore than to do it offshore in your home site, in your backyard. So I mean that that would really benefit from an RD standpoint. It would really benefit everyone. If  Allen Hall 2025: they gave it up attention  Yolanda Padron: to onshore.  Rosemary Barnes: When I was at lm, one of my, well my key team member who was an electrical engineer, he had, um, done a bunch of work for a system that was only implemented on an offshore wind farm. And it sucked up so much time when stuff started going wrong with that, like even small things. And he was the only one [00:22:00] that could do it. You know, you go out, if you’ve got a five minute job to do, to get, you know, like turn something off and on again off. Reconnect something that’s a whole day of work, right? Like you, and, and not like a normal day, but like a 12 hour day, you’re gonna go out in the morning, they, you know, they go around in a boat or whatever and drop people off and they don’t come get you when you’re done 10 minutes later, you know, they come get you at the end of the day when they’re picking everyone up again. So, um, it, it was, it was incredibly challenging. I mean, for him personally and the team. Um, and I always recommend to, or, you know, sometimes I’m advising, um, companies that have offshore wind, um, technologies. And I’m always advising anything that you can test on shore, do it and get creative about it as well. ’cause you might think that you can’t, you certainly can’t get all the way there without testing in your real operating environment. But any problem that could happen onshore that you, um, learn about when it’s onshore is gonna cost you probably like, you know, one 10th as much [00:23:00] to fix. Um. So, and, and the time as well. So, yeah, I, I think that you’re right that we should be actually considering onshore as an opportunity for, um, improving offshore technology as well.  Allen Hall 2025: Can we talk about, uh, data centers for a minute? Just off the top of mind, I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts over the last month or two talking about powering AI data centers and how much coal or natural gas. It’s gonna be needed to provide the stable, reliable power that these data centers supposedly need. In the meantime, there’s like this industry being built, uh, and you see the, the purchases of gas turbines going out to like, what, 2032? I think it’s what Renova is talking about now is when you could actually get in line for a gas turbine. Other manufacturers or gas turbines are basically saying the same thing in the meantime. [00:24:00] Elon Musk and SpaceX are talking about putting AI data centers up in space where you don’t have any regulatory issues. You don’t have to burn coal or natural gas or any of these things. So the, the ground-based AI data centers appear to be locked into making these really expensive buildings and assets and putting generation and transmission and, and this infrastructure together, which will cost them. Hundreds of millions at a minimum, likely tens of billions of dollars to do, and that’s just in the United States. Meanwhile, SpaceX is really on a pathway of doing this up in the sky for probably a fraction of the cost. Is there a break point here? Because it does seem like the, the natural gas, coal, oil, petroleum industry and the on ground build, the building, people are ignoring that. SpaceX has a [00:25:00] capability of doing this, and if Musk decides to do it, and SpaceX decides to do it, that all those gas turbine orders, all that infrastructure, all the gas pipeline, all the drilling that would have to happen would just go immediately. Poof. Gone.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know about immediately because I mean, we’re not at the point yet where you can just launch a data center into space. So there is a bit of a, a, a transition period. Um, I. I also think that it’s overblown that, you know, I think you might have even fallen into the trap also, where you’re like, oh, when data centers need more energy, so therefore it has to be coal or gas or nuclear.  Allen Hall 2025: Nope, I agree with you.  Rosemary Barnes: Those things aren’t quick to build either. If you truly wanted to do it quickly, you’d be putting in, um, you know, heaps of solar panels and batteries and, and you know, wind turbines where that made sense. But that said, I, I do agree that, uh, like I, I don’t think space-based data centers is farfetched at all. I, I guess the biggest [00:26:00] challenges, uh, are, um, the cooling and heating requirements space has very large temperature fluctuations. So I guess you’re gonna need to design that carefully. I don’t think it’s insurmountable. Um, and then the next thing is a cost of launch, which I’m sure you’re about to tell me how. Dramatically the cost of launch is dropping. Um, you know, like, it, it’s got, it’s got a very good learning curve. The space launches, which is basically, you know, SpaceX is probably the main reason why that is just dropping and dropping and dropping. So I don’t think that it’s unrealistic at all. I don’t know the timeframe. You would know more, Alan, you work in, um, aerospace. I just. You know, um, follow it for general interest.  Matthew Stead: I reckon it’s stupid. He’s really stupid on a number of grounds. So first of all, you know, why do that when. You just, I can’t see how it can ever be more cost effective and you know, [00:27:00] I, you know, you should really, should be putting that effort into things like, you know, better healthcare and so forth. I mean, what a waste of resources. But why? I mean, why, why?  Allen Hall 2025: Because it’s a lot less expensive and it’s faster.  Matthew Stead: You’d do it in the ocean before that, wouldn’t you?  Rosemary Barnes: No, but the ocean still has, like how do you power it? You, you get the 24 7 solar power in space. That’s what you. That’s what you get, um, which you can’t get on Earth  Matthew Stead: or you put it next to a wind farm and you, you, and you make the load go up and down depending on the wind. I mean, seriously, there’s so many other ways of doing it. You put it next to a wind and solar.  Rosemary Barnes: I agree with you, Matt, that I think that the, the bulk of the solutions with data centers is gonna come from one demand not being what people think it is today. Like the numbers that get reported are just like the. Absolute best, best, best case scenario and then multiplied by three or four times because they’re looking at different options for locating each of the data centers they plan to make. So I think I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with 10% of what people think that we’re gonna get. [00:28:00] Now, the first thing, secondly, people assume that it needs to be 24 7. Just, you know, like a hundred percent reliable power, and that’s. That’s simply, yeah, it’s not, not everything needs to be just, um, you know, done at, at the exact time that it’s requested. There’s heaps of things that can be shifted and uh, when the price differential is there, then people are naturally going to choose that. And in fact, there are already some companies offering different levels of reliability depend, you know, for different prices. And companies can choose which of their processes can be put on hold. Like a lot of the training stuff, you’re happy don’t. Need 99.999% reliability, you’re probably happy with 90% reliability. And so, you know, if it costs a whole lot less than you will, I, I agree with you, Matt, that that’s gonna take most of it. But I do still think that for the, like, super reliable, um, data centers, I, I bet that we see at least one. And even if it’s just because Elon Musk is the type to push something through, um, you know, [00:29:00] first and. Wait for the market to catch up later. Uh, maybe that will be the reason, but I, I honestly think it’s more than 50% likely that we see a data center in space in the next, in the next decade,  Matthew Stead: it would make more sense to like drill a hole to the center of the earth and get the, the hot well cutting rock  Rosemary Barnes: and or there’s also plenty of geothermal. You did thermal projects as well.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, it’s just ridiculous.  Rosemary Barnes: I think that we’ve had our first hot take from Matthew, so I don’t know some sort of sound effect to be added here. Claire. Uh, yeah, Allen Hall 2025: 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. Just 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 give us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosa, Yolanda and [00:30:00] Matthew, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers Nova Scotia’s ambitious 60 GW Wind West offshore plan and the standoff between Ottawa and developers over who invests first. Plus a scaled-back English onshore project faces local opposition, Blue Elephant Energy triples its German wind portfolio, Adani prepares to build India’s longest onshore blade, and Rivian signs a wind PPA to power its Illinois factory. 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 something happening in the wind business right now. Something big … and something small. Let us start with big. In Nova Scotia … Premier Tim Houston has a dream. He calls it Wind West. Sixty gigawatts of offshore wind turbines. A transmission line to move that power across Canada and into the United States. The price tag … sixty billion dollars. Forty billion for the turbines. Twenty billion for the cables. But Ottawa says … not so fast. Federal Energy Minister Tim Hodgson told reporters the Major Projects Office needs to see private industry commit first. No private partners … no national interest designation. And here is the catch. The developers want to see transmission infrastructure before they invest. Ottawa wants to see developers before it invests. Everybody is waiting for everybody else. Still … Houston is not worried. He says the response from developers has been … through the roof. French firm Q Energy has already applied to pre-qualify. And Natural Resources Canada just put up nearly five million dollars for a feasibility study. Houston says the wind is there. It blows … a lot. The only question is where the power goes. Now … across the Atlantic. In England … a developer is learning that sometimes bigger is not better. Calderdale Energy Park wanted to build sixty-five turbines on Walshaw Moor near Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. That would have made it the largest onshore wind farm in England. Last April they cut it to forty-one. Now … thirty-four. That would match the current largest site at Keadby in Lincolnshire. Campaigners say it will still damage the peat bogs and threaten ground-nesting birds. A local parish council survey found ninety-three percent of residents opposed. The developer says it could power a quarter million homes. That application goes to the Planning Inspectorate in November. Meanwhile … in Hamburg, Germany … Blue Elephant Energy is doing some shopping. The company just acquired a three hundred eighty-one megawatt wind portfolio from Wind-Projekt. That is thirty-seven operating wind farms in northern Germany. Two hundred sixty megawatts already feeding the grid. Another forty-six megawatts under construction … coming online this year. And seventy-five more megawatts in the pipeline for twenty twenty-seven. This deal will triple their German wind capacity … from one hundred seventy-three to five hundred thirty-three megawatts. It still needs approval from the German Federal Cartel Office. Now … to India. The Adani Group is about to build the longest onshore wind turbine blade in the country. Ninety-one-point-two meters. That is the length of a football field. Those blades will create a rotor diameter of one hundred eighty-five meters. Each rotation sweeps an area larger than three football fields combined. The factory is at Mundra in the state of Gujarat. Current capacity … two-point-two-five gigawatts per year. They plan to double that to five … and eventually reach ten. India added six-point-three gigawatts of wind last year alone. That was an eighty-five percent jump over the year before. And finally … back home in the American heartland. Rivian … the electric vehicle maker … just signed a power purchase agreement with Apex Clean Energy. Fifty megawatts from the proposed Goose Creek wind farm in Piatt County, Illinois. That wind farm sits within an hour of Rivian’s flagship plant in Normal, Illinois. With this deal … Rivian could power up to seventy-five percent of its factory with carbon-free energy. An electric truck company … powered by wind. So let us step back. Nova Scotia dreams of sixty gigawatts off its coast. An English moor fights over thirty-four turbines. A German company triples its wind portfolio overnight. India builds blades as long as football fields. And an American truck maker turns to the prairie wind to build its future. From the North Atlantic to the plains of Illinois … from the moors of Yorkshire to the coast of Gujarat … the wind keeps blowing. And people … keep building. And that is the state of the wind industry for the first of March twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Chris Cieslak, CEO of BladeBug, joins the show to discuss how their walking robot is making ultrasonic blade inspections faster and more accessible. They cover new horizontal scanning capabilities for lay down yards, blade root inspections for bushing defects, and plans to expand into North America in 2026. 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: Chris, welcome back to the show.  Chris Cieslak: It’s great to be back. Thank you very much for having me on again.  Allen Hall: It’s great to see you in person, and a lot has been happening at Blade Bugs since the last time I saw Blade Bug in person. Yeah, the robot. It looks a lot different and it has really new capabilities.  Chris Cieslak: So we’ve continued to develop our ultrasonic, non-destructive testing capabilities of the blade bug robot. Um, but what we’ve now added to its capabilities is to do horizontal blade scans as well. So we’re able to do blades that are in lay down yards or blades that have come down for inspections as well as up tower. So we can do up tower, down tower inspections. We’re trying to capture. I guess the opportunity to inspect blades after transportation when they get delivered to site, to look [00:01:00] for any transport damage or anything that might have been missed in the factory inspections. And then we can do subsequent installation inspections as well to make sure there’s no mishandling damage on those blades. So yeah, we’ve been just refining what we can do with the NDT side of things and improving its capabilities  Joel Saxum: was that need driven from like market response and people say, Hey, we need, we need. We like the blade blood product. We like what you’re doing, but we need it here. Or do you guys just say like, Hey, this is the next, this is the next thing we can do. Why not?  Chris Cieslak: It was very much market response. We had a lot of inquiries this year from, um, OEMs, blade manufacturers across the board with issues within their blades that need to be inspected on the ground, up the tap, any which way they can. There there was no, um, rhyme or reason, which was better, but the fact that he wanted to improve the ability of it horizontally has led the. Sort of modifications that you’ve seen and now we’re doing like down tower, right? Blade scans. Yeah. A really fast breed. So  Joel Saxum: I think the, the important thing there is too is that because of the way the robot is built [00:02:00] now, when you see NDT in a factory, it’s this robot rolls along this perfectly flat concrete floor and it does this and it does that. But the way the robot is built, if a blade is sitting in a chair trailing edge up, or if it’s flap wise, any which way the robot can adapt to, right? And the idea is. We, we looked at it today and kind of the new cage and the new things you have around it with all the different encoders and for the heads and everything is you can collect data however is needed. If it’s rasterized, if there’s a vector, if there’s a line, if we go down a bond line, if we need to scan a two foot wide path down the middle of the top of the spa cap, we can do all those different things and all kinds of orientations. That’s a fantastic capability.  Chris Cieslak: Yeah, absolutely. And it, that’s again for the market needs. So we are able to scan maybe a meter wide in one sort of cord wise. Pass of that probe whilst walking in the span-wise direction. So we’re able to do that raster scan at various spacing. So if you’ve got a defect that you wanna find that maximum 20 mil, we’ll just have a 20 mil step [00:03:00] size between each scan. If you’ve got a bigger tolerance, we can have 50 mil, a hundred mil it, it’s so tuneable and it removes any of the variability that you get from a human to human operator doing that scanning. And this is all about. Repeatable, consistent high quality data that you can then use to make real informed decisions about the state of those blades and act upon it. So this is not about, um, an alternative to humans. It’s just a better, it’s just an evolution of how humans do it. We can just do it really quick and it’s probably, we, we say it’s like six times faster than a human, but actually we’re 10 times faster. We don’t need to do any of the mapping out of the blade, but it’s all encoded all that data. We know where the robot is as we walk. That’s all captured. And then you end up with really. Consistent data. It doesn’t matter who’s operating a robot, the robot will have those settings preset and you just walk down the blade, get that data, and then our subject matter experts, they’re offline, you know, they are in their offices, warm, cozy offices, reviewing data from multiple sources of robots. And it’s about, you know, improving that [00:04:00] efficiency of getting that report out to the customer and letting ’em know what’s wrong with their blades, actually,  Allen Hall: because that’s always been the drawback of, with NDT. Is that I think the engineers have always wanted to go do it. There’s been crush core transportation damage, which is sometimes hard to see. You can maybe see a little bit of a wobble on the blade service, but you’re not sure what’s underneath. Bond line’s always an issue for engineering, but the cost to take a person, fly them out to look at a spot on a blade is really expensive, especially someone who is qualified. Yeah, so the, the difference now with play bug is you can have the technology to do the scan. Much faster and do a lot of blades, which is what the de market demand is right now to do a lot of blades simultaneously and get the same level of data by the review, by the same expert just sitting somewhere else.  Chris Cieslak: Absolutely.  Joel Saxum: I think that the quality of data is a, it’s something to touch on here because when you send someone out to the field, it’s like if, if, if I go, if I go to the wall here and you go to the wall here and we both take a paintbrush, we paint a little bit [00:05:00] different, you’re probably gonna be better. You’re gonna be able to reach higher spots than I can.  Allen Hall: This is true.  Joel Saxum: That’s true. It’s the same thing with like an NDT process. Now you’re taking the variability of the technician out of it as well. So the data quality collection at the source, that’s what played bug ducts.  Allen Hall: Yeah,  Joel Saxum: that’s the robotic processes. That is making sure that if I scan this, whatever it may be, LM 48.7 and I do another one and another one and another one, I’m gonna get a consistent set of quality data and then it’s goes to analysis. We can make real decisions off.  Allen Hall: Well, I, I think in today’s world now, especially with transportation damage and warranties, that they’re trying to pick up a lot of things at two years in that they could have picked up free installation. Yeah. Or lifting of the blades. That world is changing very rapidly. I think a lot of operators are getting smarter about this, but they haven’t thought about where do we go find the tool.  Speaker: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And, and I know Joel knows that, Hey, it, it’s Chris at Blade Bug. You need to call him and get to the technology. But I think for a lot of [00:06:00] operators around the world, they haven’t thought about the cost They’re paying the warranty costs, they’re paying the insurance costs they’re paying because they don’t have the set of data. And it’s not tremendously expensive to go do. But now the capability is here. What is the market saying? Is it, is it coming back to you now and saying, okay, let’s go. We gotta, we gotta mobilize. We need 10 of these blade bugs out here to go, go take a scan. Where, where, where are we at today?  Chris Cieslak: We’ve hads. Validation this year that this is needed. And it’s a case of we just need to be around for when they come back round for that because the, the issues that we’re looking for, you know, it solves the problem of these new big 80 a hundred meter plus blades that have issues, which shouldn’t. Frankly exist like process manufacturer issues, but they are there. They need to be investigated. If you’re an asset only, you wanna know that. Do I have a blade that’s likely to fail compared to one which is, which is okay? And sort of focus on that and not essentially remove any uncertainty or worry that you have about your assets. ’cause you can see other [00:07:00] turbine blades falling. Um, so we are trying to solve that problem. But at the same time, end of warranty claims, if you’re gonna be taken over these blades and doing the maintenance yourself, you wanna know that what you are being given. It hasn’t gotten any nasties lurking inside that’s gonna bite you. Joel Saxum: Yeah.  Chris Cieslak: Very expensively in a few years down the line. And so you wanna be able to, you know, tick a box, go, actually these are fine. Well actually these are problems. I, you need to give me some money so I can perform remedial work on these blades. And then you end of life, you know, how hard have they lived? Can you do an assessment to go, actually you can sweat these assets for longer. So we, we kind of see ourselves being, you know, useful right now for the new blades, but actually throughout the value chain of a life of a blade. People need to start seeing that NDT ultrasonic being one of them. We are working on other forms of NDT as well, but there are ways of using it to just really remove a lot of uncertainty and potential risk for that. You’re gonna end up paying through the, you know, through the, the roof wall because you’ve underestimated something or you’ve missed something, which you could have captured with a, with a quick inspection.  Joel Saxum: To [00:08:00] me, NDT has been floating around there, but it just hasn’t been as accessible or easy. The knowledge hasn’t been there about it, but the what it can do for an operator. In de-risking their fleet is amazing. They just need to understand it and know it. But you guys with the robotic technology to me, are bringing NDT to the masses  Chris Cieslak: Yeah.  Joel Saxum: In a way that hasn’t been able to be done, done before  Chris Cieslak: that. And that that’s, we, we are trying to really just be able to roll it out at a way that you’re not limited to those limited experts in the composite NDT world. So we wanna work with them, with the C-N-C-C-I-C NDTs of this world because they are the expertise in composite. So being able to interpret those, those scams. Is not a quick thing to become proficient at. So we are like, okay, let’s work with these people, but let’s give them the best quality data, consistent data that we possibly can and let’s remove those barriers of those limited people so we can roll it out to the masses. Yeah, and we are that sort of next level of information where it isn’t just seen as like a nice to have, it’s like an essential to have, but just how [00:09:00] we see it now. It’s not NDT is no longer like, it’s the last thing that we would look at. It should be just part of the drones. It should inspection, be part of the internal crawlers regimes. Yeah, it’s just part of it. ’cause there isn’t one type of inspection that ticks all the boxes. There isn’t silver bullet of NDT. And so it’s just making sure that you use the right system for the right inspection type. And so it’s complementary to drones, it’s complimentary to the internal drones, uh, crawlers. It’s just the next level to give you certainty. Remove any, you know, if you see something indicated on a a on a photograph. That doesn’t tell you the true picture of what’s going on with the structure. So this is really about, okay, I’ve got an indication of something there. Let’s find out what that really is. And then with that information you can go, right, I know a repair schedule is gonna take this long. The downtime of that turbine’s gonna be this long and you can plan it in. ’cause everyone’s already got limited budgets, which I think why NDT hasn’t taken off as it should have done because nobody’s got money for more inspections. Right. Even though there is a money saving to be had long term, everyone is fighting [00:10:00] fires and you know, they’ve really got a limited inspection budget. Drone prices or drone inspections have come down. It’s sort, sort of rise to the bottom. But with that next value add to really add certainty to what you’re trying to inspect without, you know, you go to do a day repair and it ends up being three months or something like, well  Allen Hall: that’s the lightning,  Joel Saxum: right? Allen Hall: Yeah. Lightning is the, the one case where every time you start to scarf. The exterior of the blade, you’re not sure how deep that’s going and how expensive it is. Yeah, and it always amazes me when we talk to a customer and they’re started like, well, you know, it’s gonna be a foot wide scarf, and now we’re into 10 meters and now we’re on the inside. Yeah. And the outside. Why did you not do an NDT? It seems like money well spent Yeah. To do, especially if you have a, a quantity of them. And I think the quantity is a key now because in the US there’s 75,000 turbines worldwide, several hundred thousand turbines. The number of turbines is there. The number of problems is there. It makes more financial sense today than ever because drone [00:11:00]information has come down on cost. And the internal rovers though expensive has also come down on cost. NDT has also come down where it’s now available to the masses. Yeah. But it has been such a mental barrier. That barrier has to go away. If we’re going going to keep blades in operation for 25, 30 years, I  Joel Saxum: mean, we’re seeing no  Allen Hall: way you can do it  Joel Saxum: otherwise. We’re seeing serial defects. But the only way that you can inspect and or control them is with NDT now.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Joel Saxum: And if we would’ve been on this years ago, we wouldn’t have so many, what is our term? Blade liberations liberating  Chris Cieslak: blades.  Joel Saxum: Right, right.  Allen Hall: What about blade route? Can the robot get around the blade route and see for the bushings and the insert issues? Chris Cieslak: Yeah, so the robot can, we can walk circumferentially around that blade route and we can look for issues which are affecting thousands of blades. Especially in North America. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Oh yeah.  Chris Cieslak: So that is an area that is. You know, we are lucky that we’ve got, um, a warehouse full of blade samples or route down to tip, and we were able to sort of calibrate, verify, prove everything in our facility to [00:12:00] then take out to the field because that is just, you know, NDT of bushings is great, whether it’s ultrasonic or whether we’re using like CMS, uh, type systems as well. But we can really just say, okay, this is the area where the problem is. This needs to be resolved. And then, you know, we go to some of the companies that can resolve those issues with it. And this is really about played by being part of a group of technologies working together to give overall solutions  Allen Hall: because the robot’s not that big. It could be taken up tower relatively easily, put on the root of the blade, told to walk around it. You gotta scan now, you know. It’s a lot easier than trying to put a technician on ropes out there for sure.  Chris Cieslak: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And the speed up it.  Joel Saxum: So let’s talk about execution then for a second. When that goes to the field from you, someone says, Chris needs some help, what does it look like? How does it work?  Chris Cieslak: Once we get a call out, um, we’ll do a site assessment. We’ve got all our rams, everything in place. You know, we’ve been on turbines. We know the process of getting out there. We’re all GWO qualified and go to site and do their work. Um, for us, we can [00:13:00] turn up on site, unload the van, the robot is on a blade in less than an hour. Ready to inspect? Yep. Typically half an hour. You know, if we’ve been on that same turbine a number of times, it’s somewhere just like clockwork. You know, muscle memory comes in, you’ve got all those processes down, um, and then it’s just scanning. Our robot operator just presses a button and we just watch it perform scans. And as I said, you know, we are not necessarily the NDT experts. We obviously are very mindful of NDT and know what scans look like. But if there’s any issues, we have a styling, we dial in remote to our supplement expert, they can actually remotely take control, change the settings, parameters.  Allen Hall: Wow.  Chris Cieslak: And so they’re virtually present and that’s one of the beauties, you know, you don’t need to have people on site. You can have our general, um, robot techs to do the work, but you still have that comfort of knowing that the data is being overlooked if need be by those experts.  Joel Saxum: The next level, um, commercial evolution would be being able to lease the kit to someone and or have ISPs do it for [00:14:00] you guys kinda globally, or what is the thought  Chris Cieslak: there? Absolutely. So. Yeah, so we to, to really roll this out, we just wanna have people operate in the robots as if it’s like a drone. So drone inspection companies are a classic company that we see perfectly aligned with. You’ve got the sky specs of this world, you know, you’ve got drone operator, they do a scan, they can find something, put the robot up there and get that next level of information always straight away and feed that into their systems to give that insight into that customer. Um, you know, be it an OEM who’s got a small service team, they can all be trained up. You’ve got general turbine technicians. They’ve all got G We working at height. That’s all you need to operate the bay by road, but you don’t need to have the RAA level qualified people, which are in short supply anyway. Let them do the jobs that we are not gonna solve. They can do the big repairs we are taking away, you know, another problem for them, but giving them insights that make their job easier and more successful by removing any of those surprises when they’re gonna do that work.  Allen Hall: So what’s the plans for 2026 then? Chris Cieslak: 2026 for us is to pick up where 2025 should have ended. [00:15:00] So we were, we were meant to be in the States. Yeah. On some projects that got postponed until 26. So it’s really, for us North America is, um, what we’re really, as you said, there’s seven, 5,000 turbines there, but there’s also a lot of, um, turbines with known issues that we can help determine which blades are affected. And that involves blades on the ground, that involves blades, uh, that are flying. So. For us, we wanna get out to the states as soon as possible, so we’re working with some of the OEMs and, and essentially some of the asset owners.  Allen Hall: Chris, it’s so great to meet you in person and talk about the latest that’s happening. Thank you. With Blade Bug, if people need to get ahold of you or Blade Bug, how do they do that?  Chris Cieslak: I, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best place to find myself and also Blade Bug and contact us, um, through that.  Allen Hall: Alright, great. Thanks Chris for joining us and we will see you at the next. So hopefully in America, come to America sometime. We’d love to see you there.  Chris Cieslak: Thank you very [00:16:00] much.

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda, joined by Morten Handberg from Wind Power LAB, recap WOMA 2026 live from Melbourne. The crew discusses leading edge erosion challenges unique to Australia, the frustration operators face getting data from full service agreements, and the push for better documentation during project handovers. Plus the birds and bats management debate, why several operators said they’d choose smaller glass fiber blades over bigger carbon fiber ones, and what topics WOMA 2027 should tackle next year. 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. Welcome to the Uptime Winner Energy podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Pone, Rosemary Barnes, and the Blade Whisperer, Morton Hamburg. And we’re all in Melbourne at the Pullman on the park. We just finished up Woma 2026. Massive event. Over 200 people, two days, and a ton of knowledge. Rosemary, what did you think? Yeah, I mean it was a, a really good event. It was really nice ’cause we had event organization, um, taken care of by an external company this time. So that saved us some headaches, I think. Um. But yeah, it was, it was really good. It was different than last year, and I think next year will be different again because yeah, we don’t need to talk about the same topics every single year. But, um, yeah, I got really great [00:01:00] feedback. So that’s shows we’re doing something right? Yeah, a lot of the, the sessions were based upon feedback from Australian industry and, uh, so we did AI rotating bits, the, the drive train blades. Uh, we had a. Master class on lightning to start off. Uh, a number of discussions about BOP and electrical, BOP. All those were really good. Mm-hmm. Uh, the, the content was there, the expertise was there. We had worldwide representation. Morton, you, you talked about blades a good bit and what the Danish and Worldwide experience was. You know, talked about the American experience on Blades. That opened up a lot of discussions because I’m never really sure where Australia is in the, uh, operations side, because a lot of it is full service agreements still. But it does seem like from last year to this year. There’s more onboarding of the technical expertise internally at the operators. Martin, [00:02:00] you saw, uh, a good bit of it. This is your first time mm-hmm. At this conference. What were your impressions of the, the content and the approach, which is a little bit different than any other conference? I see an industry that really wants to learn, uh, Australia, they really want to learn how to do this. Uh, and they’re willing to listen to us, uh, whether you live in Australia, in the US or in Europe. You know, they want to lean on our experiences, but they wanna, you know, they want to take it out to their wind farms and they ga then gain their own knowledge with it, which I think is really amicable. You know, something that, you know, we should actually try and think about how we can copy that in Europe and the US. Because they, they are, they’re listening to us and they’re taking in our input, and then they try and go out. They go out and then they, they try and implement it. Um, so I think really that is something, uh, I’ve learned, you know, and, and really, um, yeah, really impressed by, from this conference. Yeah. Yolanda, you were on several panels over the, the two days. What were your impressions of the conference and what were your thoughts [00:03:00] on the Australia marketplace? I think the conference itself is very refreshing or I think we all feel that way being on the, on the circuit sometimes going on a lot of different conferences. It was really sweet to see everybody be very collaborative, as Morton was saying. Um, and it was, it was just really great about everybody. Yes, they were really willing to listen to us, but they were also really willing to share with each other, which is nice. Uh, I did hear about a few trials that we’re doing in other places. From other people, just kind of, everybody wants to learn from each other and everybody wants to, to make sure they’re in as best a spot as they can. Yeah, and the, the, probably the noisiest part of the conferences were at the coffees and the lunch. Uh, the, the collaboration was really good. A lot of noise in the hallways. Uh, just people getting together and then talking about problems, talking about solutions, trying to connect up with someone they may have seen [00:04:00]somewhere else in the part of the world that they were here. It’s a different kind of conference. And Rosemary, I know when, uh, you came up to with a suggestion like, Hey. If there’s not gonna be any sales talks, we’re not gonna sit and watch a 30 minute presentation about what you do. We’re gonna talk about solutions. That did play a a different dynamic because. It allowed people to ingest at their own rate and, and not just sit through another presentation. Yeah. It was made it more engaging, I think. Yeah, and I mean, anyway, the approach that I take for sales for my company that I think works best is not to do the hard sell. It’s to talk about smart things. Um, and if you are talking about describing a problem or a solution that somebody in the audience has that problem or solution, then they’re gonna seek you out afterwards. And so. There’s plenty of sales happening in an event like this, but you’re just not like, you know, subjecting people to sales. It’s more presenting them with the information that they need. And then I, I think also the size of the conference really [00:05:00] helps ’cause yeah, about 200 people. Any, everybody is here for the same technical kind. Content. So it’s like if you just randomly start talking to somebody while you’re waiting for a coffee or whatever, you have gonna have heaps to talk about with them, with ev every single other person there. And so I think that that’s why, yeah, there was so much talking happening and you know, we had social events, um, the first two evenings and so. Mo like I was surprised actually. So many people stayed. Most people, maybe everybody stayed for those events and so just so much talking and yeah, we did try to have quite long breaks, um, and quite a lot of them and, you know, good enough food and coffee to keep people here. And I think that that’s as important as, you know, just sitting and listening. Well, that was part of the trouble, some of the conference that you and I have been at, it’s just like six hours of sitting down listening to sort of a droning mm-hmm. Presenter trying to sell you something. Here we were. It was back and forth. A lot more panel talk with experts from around the world and then.[00:06:00] Break because you just can’t absorb all that without having a little bit of a brain rest, some coffee and just trying to get to the next session. I, I think that made it, uh, a, a, a more of a takeaway than I would say a lot of other conferences are, where there’s spender booze, and. Brochures and samples being handed out and all that. We didn’t have any of that. No vendor booze, no, uh, upfront sales going on and even into the workshop. So there was specific, uh, topics provided by people that. Provide services mostly, uh, speaking about what they do, but more on a case study, uh, side. And Rosie, you and I sat in on one that was about, uh, birds and bats, birds and bats in Australia. That one was really good. Yeah, that was great. I learned, I learned a lot. Your mind was blown, but Totally. Yeah. It is crazy how much, how much you have to manage, um, bird and wildlife deaths related to wind farms in Australia. Like compared to, I mean, ’cause you see. Dead birds all the time, right? Cars hit [00:07:00] birds, birds hit buildings, power lines kill birds, and no one cares about those birds. But if a bird is injured near a wind farm, then you know, everybody has to stop. We have to make sure that you can do a positive id. If you’re not sure, send it away for a DNA analysis. Keep the bird in a freezer for a year and make sure that it’s logged by the, you know, appropriate people. It’s, it’s really a lot. And I mean, on the one hand, like I’m a real bird lover, so I am, I’m glad that birds are being taken seriously, but on the other hand, I. I think that it is maybe a little bit over the top, like I don’t see extra birds being saved because of that level of, of watching throughout the entire life of the wind farm. It feels more like something for the pre-study and the first couple of years of operation, and then you can chill after that if everything’s under control. But I, I guess it’s quite a political issue because people do. Do worry about, about beds and bats? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I thought the output of that was more technology, a little or a little more technology. Not a lot of technology in today’s world [00:08:00] because we could definitely monitor for where birds are and where bats are and, uh, you know. Slow down the turbines or whatever we’re gonna do. Yeah. And they are doing that in, in sites where there is a problem. But, um, yeah, the sites we’re talking about with that monitoring, that’s not sites that have a big, big problem at sites that are just Yeah, a few, a few birds dying every year. Um, yeah. So it’s interesting. And some of the blade issues in Australia, or a little unique, I thought, uh, the leading edge erosion. Being a big one. Uh, I’ve seen a lot of leading edge erosion over the last couple of weeks from Australia. It is Texas Times two in some cases. And, uh, the discussion that was had about leading edge erosion, we had ETT junker from Stack Raft and, and video form all the way from Sweden, uh, talking to us live, which was really nice actually. Uh, the, the amount of knowledge that the Global Blade group. Brought to the discussion and just [00:09:00] opening up some eyes about what matters in leading edge erosion. It’s not so much the leading edge erosion in terms of a EP, although there is some a EP loss. It’s more about structural damage and if you let the structure go too far. And Martin, you’ve seen a lot of this, and I think we had a discussion about this on the podcast of, Hey, pay attention to the structural damage. Yeah, that’s where, that’s where your money is. I mean, if you go, if you get into structural damage, then your repair costs and your downtime will multiply. That is just a known fact. So it’s really about keeping it, uh, coding related because then you can, you can, you can move really fast. You can get it the blade up to speed and you won’t have the same problems. You won’t have to spend so much time rebuilding the blade. So that’s really what you need to get to. I do think that one of the things that might stand out in Australia that we’re going to learn about. Is the effect of hail, because we talked a lot about it in Europe, that, you know, what is the effect of, of hail on leading edge erosion? We’ve never really been able to nail it down, but down here I heard from an, [00:10:00] from an operator that they, they, uh, referenced mangoes this year in terms of hail size. It was, it was, it was incredible. So if you think about that hitting a leading edge, then, uh, well maybe we don’t really need to, we don’t really get to the point where, so coding related, maybe we will be structural from the beginning, but. Then at least it can be less a structural. Um, but that also means that we need to think differently in terms of leading edge, uh, protection and what kinds of solutions that are there. Maybe some of the traditional ones we have in Europe, maybe they just don’t work, want, they, they won’t work in some part of Australia. Australia is so big, so we can’t just say. Northern Territory is the same as as, uh, uh, um, yeah. Victoria or uh, or Queensland. Or Queensland or West Australia. I think that what we’re probably going to learn is that there will be different solutions fitting different parts of Australia, and that will be one of the key challenges. Um, yeah. And Blades in Australia sometimes do. Arrive without leading edge protection from the OEMs. [00:11:00] Yeah, I’m sure some of the sites that I’ve been reviewing recently that the, the asset manager swears it’s got leading edge protection and even I saw some blades on the ground and. I don’t, I don’t see any leading edge protection. I can’t feel any leading edge protection. Like maybe it’s a magical one that’s, you know, invisible and, um, yeah, it doesn’t even feel different, but I suspect that some people are getting blades that should have been protected that aren’t. Um, so why? Yeah, it’s interesting. I think before we, we rule it out. Then there are some coatings that really look like the original coating. Mm. So we, we, I know that for some of the European base that what they come out of a factory, you can’t really see the difference, but they’re multilayer coating, uh, on the blades. What you can do is that you can check your, uh, your rotor certificate sometimes will be there. You can check your, uh, your blade sheet, uh, that you get from manufacturer. If you get it. Um, if you get it, then it will, it will be there. But, um, yeah, I, I mean, it can be difficult to say, to see from the outset and there’s no [00:12:00]documentation then. Yeah, I mean. If I can’t see any leading edge erosion protection, and I don’t know if it’s there or not, I don’t think I will go so far and then start installing something on something that is essentially a new blade. I would probably still put it into operation because most LEP products that can be installed up tower. So I don’t think that that necessarily is, is something we should, shouldn’t still start doing just because we suspect there isn’t the LEP. But one thing that I think is gonna be really good is, um, you know, after the sessions and you know, I’ve been talking a lot. With my clients about, um, leading edge erosion. People are now aware that it’s coming. I think the most important thing is to plan for it. It’s not right to get to the point where you’ve got half a dozen blades with, you know, just the full leading edge, just fully missing holes through your laminate, and then your rest of your blades have all got laminate damage. That’s not the time to start thinking about it because one, it’s a lot more expensive for each repair than it would’ve been, but also. No one’s got the budget to, to get through all of that in one season. So I do really [00:13:00] like that, you know, some of the sites that have been operating for five years or so are starting to see pitting. They can start to plan that into their budget now and have a strategy for how they’re going to approach it. Um, yeah. And hopefully avoid getting over to the point where they’ve missing just the full leading edge of some of their blades. Yeah. But to Morton’s earlier point, I think it’s also important for people to stop the damage once it happens too. If, if it’s something that. You get a site or for what, whatever reason, half of your site does look like terrible and there’s holes in the blade and stuff. You need to, you need to patch it up in some sort of way and not just wait for the perfect product to come along to, to help you with that. Some of the hot topics this week were the handover. From, uh, development into production and the lack of documentation during the transfer. Uh, the discussion from Tilt was that you need to make sure it is all there, uh, because once you sign off. You probably can’t go back and get it. And [00:14:00] some of the frustration around that and the, the amount of data flow from the full service provider to the operator seemed to be a, a really hot topic. And, and, uh, we did a little, uh, surveyed a about that. Just the amount of, um, I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, it was bordering on anger maybe is a way. Describe it. Uh, that they feel that operators feel like they don’t have enough insight to run the turbines and the operations as well as they can, and that they should have more insight into what they have operating and why it is not operat. A certain way or where did the blades come from? Are there issues with those blades? Just the transparency WA was lacking. And we had Dan Meyer, who is from the States, he’s from Colorado, he was an xge person talking about contracts, uh, the turbine supply agreement and what should be in there, the full service [00:15:00] agreement, what should be in there. Those are very interesting. I thought a lot of, uh, operators are very attentive to that, just to give themselves an advantage of what you can. Put on paper to help yourself out and what you should think about. And if you have a existing wind farm from a certain OEM and you’re gonna buy another wind farm from ’em, you ought to be taking the lessons learned. And I, I thought that was a, a very important discussion. The second one was on repairs. And what you see from the field, and I know Yolanda’s been looking at a lot of repairs. Well, all of you have been looking at repairs in Australia. What’s your feeling on sort of the repairs and the quality of repairs and the amount of data that comes along with it? Are we at a place that we should be, or do we need a little more detail as to what’s happening out there? It’s one of the big challenges with the full service agreements is that, you know, if everything’s running smoothly, then repairs are getting done, but the information isn’t. Usually getting passed on. And so it’s seems fine and it seems like really good actually. Probably if you’re an [00:16:00] asset manager and everything’s just being repaired without you ever knowing about it, perfect. But then at some point when something does happen, you’ve got no history and especially like even before handover. You need to know all of the repairs that have happened for, you know, for or exchanges for any components because you know, you’re worried about, um, serial defects, for example. You need every single one. ’cause the threshold is quite high to, you know, ever reach a serial defect. So you wanna know if there were five before there was a handover. Include that in your population. Um, yeah, so that’s probably the biggest problem with repairs is that they’re just not being. Um, the reports aren’t being handed over. You know, one of the things that Jeremy Hanks from C-I-C-N-D-T, and he’s an NDT expert and has, has seen about everything was saying, is that you really need to understand what’s happening deep inside the blade, particularly for inserts or, uh, at the root, uh, even up in, with some, some Cory interactions happening or splicing that It’s hard to [00:17:00] see that hard to just take a drone inspection and go, okay, I know what’s happening. You need a little more technology in there at times, especially if you have a serial defect. Why do you have a serial defect? Do you need to be, uh, uh, scanning the, the blade a little more deeply, which hasn’t really happened too much in Australia, and I think there’s some issues I’ve seen where it may come into use. Yeah, I think it, it, it’ll be coming soon. I know some people are bringing stuff in. I’ve got emails sitting in my inbox I need to chase up, but I’m, I’m really going to, to get more into that. Yeah. And John Zalar brought up a very similar, uh, note during his presentation. Go visit your turbines. Yeah, several people said that. Um, actually Liz said that too. Love it. And, um, let’s this, yeah, you just gotta go have a look. Oh, Barend, I think said bar said it too. Go on site. Have a look at the lunchroom. If the lunch room’s tidy, then you know, win turbine’s gonna be tidy too. And I don’t know about that ’cause I’ve seen some tidy lunchroom that were associated with some, you know, uh, less well performing assets, but it’s, you know, it’s [00:18:00] a good start. What are we gonna hope for in 2027? What should we. Be talking about it. What do you think we’ll be talking about a year from now? Well, a few people, quite a few people mentioned to me that they were here, they’re new in the industry, and they heard this was the event to go to. Um, and so I, I was always asking them was it okay? ’cause we pitch it quite technical and I definitely don’t wanna reduce. How technical it is. One thing I thought of was maybe we start with a two to five minute introduction, maybe prerecorded about the, the topic, just to know, like for example, um, we had some sessions on rotating equipment. Um, I’m a Blades person. I don’t know that much about rotating equipment, so maybe, you know, we just explain this is where the pitch bearings are. They do this and you know, there’s the main bearing and it, you know, it does this and just a few minutes like that to orient people. Think that could be good. Last, uh, this year we did a, a masterclass on lightning, a half day masterclass. Maybe we change that topic every year. Maybe next year it’s blade design, [00:19:00] certification, manufacturing. Um, and then, you know, the next year, whatever, open to suggestions. I mean, in general, we’re open to suggestions, right? Like people write in and, and tell us what you’d wanna see. Um, absolutely. I think we could focus more on technologies might be an, an area like. It’s a bit, it’s a bit hard ’cause it gets salesy, but Yeah. I think one thing that could actually be interesting and that, uh, there was one guy came up with an older turbine on the LPS system. Mm. Where he wanted to look for a solution and some of the wind farms are getting older and it’s older technology. So maybe having some, uh, uh, some sessions on that. Because the older turbines, they are vastly different from what we, what we see in the majority with wind farms today. But the maintenance of those are just as important. And if you do that correctly, they’re much easier to lifetime extent than it will likely be for some of the nuance. But, you know, let. Knock on wood. Um, but, but I think that’s something that could be really interesting and really relevant for the industry and something [00:20:00] that we don’t talk enough about. Yeah. Yeah, that’s true because I, I’m working on a lot of old wind turbines now, and that has been, um, quite a challenge for me because they’re design and built in a way that’s quite different to when, you know, I was poking, designing and building, uh, wind turbine components. So that’s a good one. Other people mentioned end of life. Mm-hmm. Not just like end of life, like the life is over, but how do you decide when the life end of life is going to be? ’cause you know, like you have a planned life and then you might like to extend, but then you discover you’ve got a serial issue. Are you gonna fix it? Or you know, how are you gonna fix it? Those are all very interesting questions that, um, can occur. And then also, yeah, what to do with the. The stuff at the end of the Wind Farm lifetime, we could make a half day around those kinds of sessions. I think recycling could actually be good to, to also touch upon and, and I think, yeah, Australia is more on the front of that because of, of your high focus on, on nature and sustainability. So looking at, well, what do we do with these blades? Or what do we do with the towers of foundation once, uh, [00:21:00] once we do need to decommission them, you know, what is, what are we going to do in Australia about that? Or what is Australia going to do about that? But, you know, what can we bring to the, to the table that that can help drive that discussion? I think maybe too, helping people sort of templates for their formats on, on how to successfully shadow, monitor, maybe showing them a bit mute, more of, uh. Like cases and stuff, so to get them going a bit more. ’cause we heard a lot of people too say, oh, we’re, we’re teetering on whether we should self operate or whether we continue our FSA, but we, we we’re kind of, we don’t know what we’re doing. Yeah. In, in not those words. Right. But just providing a bit more of a guidance too. On that side, we say shadow monitoring and I think we all know what it means. If you’ve seen it done, if you haven’t seen it done before. It seems daunting. Mm-hmm. What do you mean shadow monitoring? You mean you got a crack into the SCADA system? Does that mean I’ve gotta, uh, put CMS out there? Do I do, do I have to be out [00:22:00] on site all the time? The answer that is no to all of those. But there are some fundamental things you do need to do to get to the shadow monitoring that feels good. And the easy one is if there’s drone inspections happening because your FSA, you find out who’s doing the drone inspections and you pay ’em for a second set of drone inspections, just so you have a validation of it, you can see it. Those are really inexpensive ways to shadow monitor. Uh, but I, I do think we say a lot of terms like that in Australia because we’ve seen it done elsewhere that. Doesn’t really translate. And I, if I, I’m always kind of looking at Rosemary, like, does it, this make sense? What I’m saying makes sense, Rosemary, because it’s hard to tell because so many operators are in sort of a building mode. I, I see it as. When I talked to them a few years ago, they’re completely FSA, they had really small staffs. Now the staffs are growing much larger, which makes me feel like they’re gonna transition out an FSA. Do we need to provide a little more, uh, insight into how that is done deeper. [00:23:00] Like, these are the tools you, you will need. This is the kind of people you need to have on staff. This is how you’re gonna organize it, and this is the re these are the resources that you should go after. Mm. Does that make a little si more sense? Yeah. That might be a good. Uh, idea for getting somebody who’s, you know, working for a company that is shadow monitoring overseas and bring them in and they can talk through what that, what that means exactly. And that goes back to the discussion we were having earlier today by having operators talk about how they’re running their operations. Mm. And I know the last year we tried to have everybody do that and, and they were standoffish. I get it. Because you don’t want to disclose things that your company doesn’t want out in public. And year two, it felt like there’s a little more. Openness about that. Yeah, there was a few people were quite open about, um, yeah, talking about challenges and some successes as well. I think we’ll have more successes next year ’cause we’ve got more, more things going on. But yeah, definitely would encourage any operators to think about what’s a you A case study that you could give about? Yeah, it could just be a problem that’s unsolved and I bet you’ll find people that wanna help you [00:24:00] solve that problem. Or it could be something that you struggled with and then you’re doing a better job and Yeah, I mean the. Some operators think that they’re in competition with each other and some think that they’re not really, and the answer is somewhere, somewhere in the middle. There are, you know, some at least small amounts of competition. But, you know, I just, I just really think that. We’re fighting against each other, trying to win within the wind industry. Then, you know, in 10, 20 years time, especially in Australia, there won’t be any new wind. It’ll just be wind and solar everywhere and, and the energy transition stalled because everyone knows that’s not gonna get us all the way to, you know, a hundred percent renewables. So, um, I do think that we need to, first of all, fight for wind energy to improve. The status quo is not good enough to take us through the next 20 years. So we do need to collaborate to get better. And then, yeah, I don’t know, once we’re, once we’re one, wind has won, then we can go back to fighting amongst ourselves, I guess. Is Australia that [00:25:00] laboratory? Yeah, I think I, I say it all the time. I think Australia is the perfect place because I, I do think we’re a little bit more naturally collaborative. For some reason, I don’t know why, it’s not really like a, a cultural thing, but seems to be the case in Australian wind. Um, and also our, our problems are harder than, uh, than what’s being faced elsewhere. I mean, America has some specific problems right now that are, you know, worse, but in general, operating environment is very harsh Here. We’re so spread out. Everything is so expensive. Cranes are so expensive. Repairs are so expensive. Spares spare. Yeah, spares are crazy expensive. You know, I look every now and then and do reports for people about, you know, what, what’s the average cost for and times for repairs and you know, you get an American values and it’s like, okay, well at a minimum times by five Australia and you know, so. It, there’s a lot more bang for buck. And the other thing is we just do not have enough, um, enough people, enough. Uh, we’ve got some really smart people. We need a lot more [00:26:00] people that are as smart as that. And you can’t just get that immediately. Like there has been a lot of good transfer over from related industries. A lot of people that spoke so that, you know, they used to work for thermal power plants and, um, railway, a guy that spoke to a guy had come in from railway. Um. That’s, that’s really good. But it will take some years to get them up to speed. And so in the meantime, we just need to use technology as much as we can to be able to, you know, make the people that good people that we do have, you know, make them go a lot further, um, increase what they can do. ’cause yeah, I don’t think there’s a single, um, asset owner where they couldn’t, you know, double the number of asset managers they had and, you know, ev everyone could use twice as many I think. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I think something that we really focused on this year is kind of removing the stones that are in people’s path or like helping at least like to, to say like, don’t trip over there. Don’t trip over here. And I think part of that, like, like you mentioned, is that. [00:27:00] The, the collaborative manner that everyone seemed to have and just, I think 50% of our time that we were in those rooms was just people asking questions to experts, to anybody they really wanted to. Um, and it, it just, everybody getting the same answers, which is really just a really different way to, to do things, I think. But more than, I mean, we, we we’re still. We’re still struggling with quality in Australia. That’s still a major issue on, on a lot of the components. So until we have that solved, we don’t really know how much of an influence the other factors they really have because it just overshadows everything. And yes, it will be accelerated by extreme weather conditions, but. What will, how will it work if, if the components are actually fit, uh, fit for purpose in the sense that we don’t have wrinkles in the laminates, that we don’t have, uh, bond lines that are detaching. Mm-hmm. Maybe some of it is because of, uh, mango size hails hitting the blades. Maybe it’s because of extreme temperatures. Maybe it’s [00:28:00] because of, uh, uh, yeah. At extreme topography, you know, creating, uh, wind conditions that the blades are not designed for. We don’t really know that. We don’t really know for sure. Uh, we just assume, um, Australia has some problems with, not problems, but some challenges with remoteness. We don’t, with, uh, with getting new, new spares that much is absolutely true. We can’t do anything about that. We just have to, uh, find a way to, to mitigate that. Mm-hmm. But I think we should really be focused on getting quality, uh, getting the quality in, in order. You know, one thing that’s interesting about that, um, so yeah, Australia should be focused more on quality than anybody else, but in, in, in the industry, yeah. Uh, entire world should be more focused on quality, but also Australia. Yeah. But Australia, probably more than anyone considering how hard it is to, you know, make up for poor quality here. Um. At the same time, Australia for some reason, loves to be the first one with a new technology, loves to have the biggest [00:29:00] turbine. Um, and the, the latest thing and the newest thing, and I thought it was interesting. I mean, this was operations and maintenance, um, conference, so not really talking about new designs and manufacturing too much, but at least three or four people said, uh. Uh, I would be using less carbon fiber in blades. I would not be, not be going bigger and bigger and bigger. If I was buying turbines for a new wind farm, I would have, you know, small glass blades and just more of them. So I think that that was really interesting to hear. So many people say it, and I wasn’t even one of them, even though, you know, I would definitely. Say that. I mean, you know, in terms of business, I guess it’s really good to get a lot of, a lot of big blades, but, um, because they just, people, I don’t think people understand that, that bigger blades just have dramatically more quality problems than the smaller ones. Um, were really kind of exceeded the sweet spot for the current manufacturing methods and materials. I don’t know if you would agree, but it’s, it’s. Possible, but [00:30:00] it’s, it, you know, it’s not like a blade that’s twice as long, doesn’t have twice as many defects. It probably has a hundred times as many defects. It’s just, uh, it’s really, really challenging to make those big blades, high quality, and no one is doing it all that well right now. I would, however, I got an interesting hypothetical and they’re. Congrats to her for, for putting out that out. But there was an operator that said to me at the conference, so what would you choose hypothetically? A 70 meter glass fiber blade or a 50 meter carbon fiber blade, so a blade with carbon fiber reinforcement. And I did have to think quite a while about it because there was, it was she say, longer blades, more problems, but carbon blade. Also a lot of new problems. So, so what is it? So I, I ended up saying, well, glass fiber, I would probably go for a longer glass fiber blade, even though it will have some, some different challenges. It’s easier to repair. Yeah, that’s true. So we can overcome some of the challenges that are, we can also repair carbon. We have done it in air, air, uh, aeronautics for many, many years. But wind is a different beast because we don’t have, uh, [00:31:00] perfect laboratory conditions to repair in. So that would just be a, a really extreme challenge. So that’s, that’s why I, I would have gone for carbon if, for glass fiber, if, if I, if I could in that hypothe hypothetical. Also makes more energy, the 70 meter compared to it’s a win-win situation. Well, it’s great to see all of you. Australia. I thought it was a really good conference. And thanks to all our sponsors, uh, til being the primary sponsor for this conference. Uh, we are starting to ramp up for 2027. Hopefully all of you can attend next year. And, uh, Rosie, it’s good to see you in person. Oh, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s exciting when we are actually on the same continent. Uh, it doesn’t happen very often. And Morton, it’s great to see you too, Yolanda. I see you every day pretty much. So she’s part of our team, so I, it’s great to see you out. This is actually the first time, me and Rosie, we have seen each other. We’ve, we’ve known each other for years. Yeah. Yeah. The first time we actually, uh, been, been, yeah. Within, uh, yeah. [00:32:00] Same room. Yep. And same continent. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s been awesome. And also it’s my first time meeting Yolanda in person too. So yeah, that’s our first time. And same. So thanks so much for everybody that attended, uh, woma 2026. We’ll see you at Woma 2027 and uh, check us out next week for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers Vestas’ turbine supply deal with RWE for the 1.4 GW Vanguard West offshore project in England and its bid for TPI Composites’ blade factories in bankruptcy court. Plus Germany’s Nordlicht One foundations arrive ahead of schedule and Enel buys $1 billion in US wind and solar assets. 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! You know … there is a company in Denmark that makes wind turbines. Vestas. And this week … Vestas had itself quite a week. On one hand … the Danish giant just locked in a deal to supply ninety-two of its massive V236 turbines to RWE’s Vanguard West project off the east coast of England. One-point-four gigawatts of offshore wind. Each turbine … fifteen megawatts. That project just won a Contract for Difference in the UK’s Allocation Round Seven. RWE and its partner KKR want a final investment decision by this summer … and power flowing by twenty twenty-nine. And this is part of something bigger. RWE signed preferred supplier agreements with Vestas back in December of twenty twenty-three for the entire four-point-two gigawatt Norfolk Wind Zone. That is three massive projects … off one English coast. So Vestas is building turbines for the British. But here is where it gets interesting. Over in a Houston bankruptcy court … wind blade maker TPI Composites has been carving up its assets since filing Chapter Eleven last August. A firm called ECP V acquired the bulk of TPI’s remaining operations. They were the only bidder. The auction … canceled. But certain facilities in Mexico and India? Those were carved out of the deal entirely. And the company circling those assets? Vestas. The very same Vestas building turbines for England has put in its own qualified bid for the blade-making plants that once served it as a customer. So while one hand signs turbine contracts … the other reaches into bankruptcy court to secure its own supply chain. Now … across the North Sea in Germany … the Nordlicht offshore wind cluster just hit a milestone of its own. The first monopiles and transition pieces for Nordlicht One … finished ahead of schedule. Sixty-eight foundations. Each monopile … eighty meters long. Nearly thirteen hundred tonnes of steel. When complete … Nordlicht One will be Germany’s largest offshore wind farm at nine hundred and eighty megawatts. Combined with Nordlicht Two … the cluster will generate six terawatt-hours of clean electricity every year. And then there is Italy’s Enel. The power giant announced it is buying eight hundred and thirty megawatts of American wind and solar assets from Excelsior Energy Capital … for one billion dollars. That deal closes later this year. And it will push Enel’s North American renewable capacity to thirteen gigawatts. Globally … Enel Green Power now commands sixty-eight gigawatts of clean energy. So let us step back and look at the picture. A Danish turbine maker wins a massive English contract … while quietly bidding on bankrupt blade factories to protect its own supply chain. German foundations arrive ahead of schedule. And an Italian energy giant bets one billion dollars on American renewables. From the North Sea to the Gulf of Mexico … from English coastlines to Houston courtrooms … wind energy is not slowing down. It is building … faster. And now you know … the rest of the story. Good day!

Recorded live at the Wind Operation and Maintenance Australia 2026 conference, Allen, Rosemary, Matthew, and Yolanda are joined by Thomas Schlegl for a panel discussion on where the Australian wind industry is headed over the next five years. 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! Alright, let’s get started. This is the, the final event of this three day marathon. Uh, where will we be in five years? And I have, uh, pretty much everybody from the Uptime podcast and Thomas Schlagel from eLog Ping. Uh. Uh, Rosie and I had a big argument before we all came about what we were going to be in five years, and Rosie’s and my opinion differed quite a bit just on, that’s, uh, that’s what led to me suggesting the personality test because yes, and that was, that’s actually a really good suggestion. So I know something about myself now, but, uh, I, I think talking to people here, watching the presentations. And having an American slash European perspective on it. I think every, everybody can chime in here. Australia’s probably on a better pathway than a lot of places. Yeah. Well, I know I’ve been back in Australia for about [00:01:00] five years, five years. Before that I was in Denmark. I left Australia. Because I was so like in despair about the state of renewables and also manufacturing and just doing smart engineering in Australia. Um, so yeah, when I came back five years ago, I was a bit shocked at how different things were in Australia. And I was also, you know, like I will say that it, we were, we were behind like way less mature than other, um, markets in terms of how we operated our wind energy assets. Um, and it’s changed so much in five years, so like a half day, if I’m making predictions for where we’ll be in five years time, I have to, you know, like use that as a, it, it’s probably gonna be more than you would think in five years, just based on how far we’ve already come in, in five years. Um, so yeah, I think that five years ago people were trusting a lot more in the full service agreements. Um, definitely there’s very few people who are still naive that that’s just, you know, um, a set and forget kind of thing that you [00:02:00] can do and not worry about it. Everybody’s now aware that you need to know, um, about your assets and we’re already to the point where there are like a lot of asset managers know so much, um, and, you know, have become real experts and really wasn’t, wasn’t the case five years ago. So. I’m hopeful for that. Um, you know, that it, it will continue and yeah, probably at a faster pace than, um, what we see elsewhere. I think Australia is a really attractive market, not just for developing new wind projects, but also for developing all of the kinds of supporting technologies, which is, you know, like a lot of the people here either using or developing those kind of technologies. And some of our challenges here make it the perfect place to, yeah, develop new text because. Things are, it’s really expensive to do repairs here. Um, the operating conditions are harsh and so things wear out and it just means that it’s, you can put together a positive business case for a new tech here much sooner than you could overseas. So I’m really [00:03:00] hopeful that we see, you know, like a whole lot of innovation, um, in, in those kinds of technologies that are gonna help wind energy get a lot more mature. And even hearing some of the answers from last year to this year, you see that shift. Uh, I was really shocked last year how much reliance there was on. The FSA and now I hearing a lot more discussion about, all right, we need to be shadow monitoring. We need to be looking at the, the, the data coming off, trying to hack, break into the passwords to get to the SCADA system, which was new, but I feel like very Australian thing to do. Matthew, you’ve been in the small business in Australia for, for several years in the wind business. What do you see? I mean, you’ve been in it like for five years now. Plus actually more than that, uh, I actually did my first wind farm around 20 oh 2001. Okay. Or 2002. Um, that was from a noise perspective. So I, I’ve seen things, you know, the full cycle. Um, you know, there were many years of [00:04:00]despair, the whole, um, stop these, stop these things. I’m actually featured, I was featured on Stop these things. So, um, don’t, don’t Google it. It was pretty horrible. So, um, we did a lot of work around infrasound and noise impacts and so there was many years which were, were pretty horrible. Um. Over that time, I sort of relate to my daughter. My daughter’s turning 21 soon. She is a beautiful girl, turning into an adult, a wonderful adult, and it’s, I think the wind industry is really growing, maturing, growing up, and you know, is wonderful to see. And I think we are, we’re only gonna get better, stronger. And I think one may, one note I made here is that now they’ve got wind, solar batteries. I just think it’s unstoppable, so I’m super optimistic that we’re only gonna keep, you know, raising that bar. Well, if you look at where Australia is compared to a lot of the places on the [00:05:00] planet, way ahead, in terms of renewable energy. I mean, you’ve got basically $0 in electricity for, because of how much solar there is, plus the batteries are coming in and, and the transmission’s coming online. And I’m talking to some people about, uh, what these new developments look like. If you’re trying to develop some of these projects in the United States, you’re not gonna be able to do them. There’s, there’s too many regulatory hurdles, and it seems like Australia has at least opened some of the doors to explore. Uh, people in America, the companies in Europe are gonna be watching Australia, I think in, in terms of where we go next. Because if Australia can pull off pretty much a renewable grid, which is where you’re headed, others will follow because it’s just a lower cost way of running a, running an electricity grid system. Yeah. Now I need to perform my, um, regular role of being a Debbie Downer. Um, I, I think that there’s, there’s big challenges and it’s definitely not, um, a case of [00:06:00] the status quo now is good enough to carry us through to a hundred percent renewables. Um, there are some big, big problems that need to be solved. Like, uh, solar plus batteries in Australia is, is going amazing and it’s gonna do a lot. It’s not gonna, it will be incredibly hard to get to, you know, a fully renewable grid that way. The problem with wind is at the moment, I mean, it’s getting more expensive to install wind now and we don’t only need to install new wind farms, we’ve also got existing wind farms that are retiring. So we need to either extend those or we need to, um, you know, build new wind farms in their place. So we do need to get better there. And then I think that the new technologies, like, you know, I’m the blades person and the bigger blades are bigger problems like, like dramatically. I don’t think that your average, um, wind farm owner or wannabe wind farm owner is aware, like actually how many more problems there are with big blades compared to smaller ones and. I think that, like I said earlier, I [00:07:00] think Australia’s a great place to get those technologies, um, you know, developed. But we, we need to do that. That’s not like a nice to have and oh, everything will be a little bit better, but if we can’t maintain our assets better and get more out of them, um, we also need improvements with manufacturing. But it’s not really an o and m thing. I won’t talk too much about it. But yeah, I think that like we can’t be remotely complacent. Well, I think in, in Europe, uh, Thomas, you actually spent several months in Australia, and you’re obviously from Austria, so it’s an Austria Australian connection. Do you see the differences between the Austrian market, the German market, and what’s happening here in Australia? What, what do you think of the comparison between the two? So, what I, what really was fascinating from was the speed of, um, improvements we see here in Australia. It. Um, just for me, wind industry in my young industry, sorry, was always rather slow in Europe and [00:08:00] like not really adopting. Um, and here, sorry. For example, last year you asked the question how many. Of the audience to use sensors for shadow monitoring and no hand was raised right. It was zero silence. And uh, this year we even had a few percentage on, on sensors on the, on the cido. So you see only within a year like this gradually graduated, improvements are happening and I think that makes such a, um, speed in, in improvements and that will. Close to the rescue again. Thank you. And that, um, that will bring Australia to a big advantage. Um, especially I think overtaking, uh, at a certain point, and it would be great to see in five years from now, um, maybe Europeans, Austrians, uh, coming to Australia to. [00:09:00] To learn and not the other way around. Yeah, and, and especially with Yolanda working for the biggest energy company in Denmark, uh, in America, you see how Americans react to change and, and the reluctance to move forward on some of the things we talked about this week, which are, do seem to be moving a little bit quicker. There is more an acceptance of CMS systems here. And on in the States, it seems like you have to really fight. A lot of times to get anybody to listen, to do something because it’s all, it’s financially driven in some aspects, but it’s sort of like, we don’t do that here, so we’re not gonna listen to it. What’s been your experience being on a, this is your first time in Australia, what, what has been your experience this week and what have you learned? I was very pleasantly surprised by just the amount of collaboration that everybody really wants to have here and the openness to, to do so, and to learn from each [00:10:00] other, um, and to accept just, you know, if you’ve seen an issue and or someone else has seen an issue, then you can really learn from each other. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to silo yourself as much as, as you typically do in the United States. I mean, it is a different culture, right? And so it’s just. Honestly, hats off to, to Australians for, for being able to, to work with each other, so, so well, yeah. The discussions out at the lunchtime and the coffee area were uniquely different than what we generally will see in the United States. And Matthew, you’ve been around a lot of that too, where it kinda gets a little clique. But here, I mean, obviously, I mean, not just human nature, but on some level I felt like, oh, there’s a lot of interaction happening and it’s really loud. So people are engaging with one another and trying to learn from one another, or at least connect. And I, I think in a lot of times in Europe, there’s not a lot of the connection until the, the drinking starts, you know, at about 10. Uh, but. Uh, Matthew, did you see that too? [00:11:00] Like I was really pleasantly surprised. That was a good thing to see here. Yeah. And in my former life as a consultant, I dealt with, you know, construction, uh, road rail, you know, I mining a whole range of industries. And, um, one of the reasons why I’ve stayed in wind is ’cause I, you know, I love the people, you know, I love you all. So, or, um, but no, I think, um, the. The collaboration, the willingness to talk, um, the willingness to share ideas. And I think, I think I’ve been super, super, super happy about the way the panels have run, you know, everyone’s willing to share. Um, yeah, I’m, I’m just stoked. Yeah, Rosie, this is all your fault, honestly, because Rosie was always the, the contrary opinion. So I would say something and Rosie would feel obligated to say something as the opposite. But when, when we all started this discussion about, uh, a, a wind turbine conference, you had been to a bad wind turbine conference in Australia and I had been to a really bad one in the States and we were just, okay, that’s enough. And the movement [00:12:00] toward, let’s get some information, let’s everybody interact with one another. Let’s, we will give all the presentations to people at the end of this so you can access data. You’re not spending a ton of money to come. That was a, a big part of the discussion, like, I’m spending $5,000 to listen to sales presentations for three days. I don’t want to do that anymore. We try to avoid that in this conference. Hopefully, if you notice that and, and, and. I guess the conference board is up here right now. Are we gonna do Woma 2027? Are we gonna decide that today? Or. Yes, yes, the website is live. Um, I also wanna take this opportunity to, um, thank the, the sponsors of the event. And I hope that you’ve noticed that it’s not like these aren’t the sponsors of normal events where they’re like, okay, we’ll give you a bunch of money and then we’re gonna stand up and talk at you for half an hour about our new product launch or whatever. Like these sponsors haven’t, they haven’t got back [00:13:00] in the traditional way that you, you would with a kind of, um, event. So I’m really grateful for the very high quality sponsors that we’ve got. And, um, yeah, I just, I, I dunno if I’m allowed to share a little bit about the, the economics of this event. Um, if we didn’t have the sponsors tickets would cost twice as much. So, um, that’s one thing. But then the other key thing that we. Really couldn’t do it without sponsors is that we didn’t, our event didn’t break even until about a week ago because everyone buys their tickets late. Um, so yeah, the, the, we would’ve been having heart attacks, um, months ago about our potential, you know, bankruptcy from running the event if it wasn’t for, um, yeah, the, the great sponsors. So thanks to everybody that did that. Um, and everybody that attended consider buying a ticket earlier next time. Um, I, I’m the worst. I often buy my ticket the day of, of, of an event. So it’s, you know, like it’s a pot calling the kettle black. But, um, yeah, that’s just a bit of the, [00:14:00] the reality. And we have a number of poll questions. Uh, let’s get producer Claire back there to throw ’em up on the screen. So while we’re doing that, we should really thank Claire. Claire has been amazing. Yeah. Thank you, Claire. So the emojis are from Claire. Claire, clearly here. Uh, how do you feel about the, the current state of the wind industry? Hopefully there’s more smiley faces after this week. Well, alright, we’re a hundred percent rosemary. We had to put the one with the, yeah. And for me personally, um, I used to feel a lot more optimistic when I worked in design and manufacturing. And then when I come into operations, that like automatically makes you feel a bit more pessimistic. And then me specifically, like I only get involved when really bad things are happening. And so sometimes for me, like it’s easy to think. [00:15:00] When technology is just not good enough and, you know, I need to find a new industry to move into. So, uh, it is good to talk, talk to other people and, you know, like bring my reality back to a kind of a midpoint. And I, I just like to say, I, I think, I mean maybe there’s been a bit of OE em bashing here maybe. Um. Um, however, we need really strong OEMs, so I just wanna put a shout out to the OEMs and say, yeah, we absolutely need you. So just keep doing it. You will keep doing better, so thank you. Yeah, it’s a difficult industry to be in and we put a lot of demands on them and they, they’re pushing limits, so yeah, they’re gonna run into problems. That’s fine. Let’s just find solutions for them. Alright, uh, next question, producer Claire. What is the best thing you learned at Woma? This is not multiple choice. You can write whatever you want. Stealing passwords. [00:16:00] Did any of us learn anything? Unexpected contracting? Oh yeah. Get the contract right? Oh yeah. Yeah. Dan was really good. Yeah, Dan was great about contracting, looking on the other side of that fence. Cybersecurity is not that big of an issue in Australia. That’s some big thing in Europe, so yeah, it is. I was surprised by the environmental factor in Australia. I was surprised about the birds. Yeah. Everyone who wasn’t in the birds workshop yesterday, Alan was freaking out about, about how Australian wind farms have to manage birds and um, you have to freeze a bird for 12 months. I don’t, where do you have to freeze it for a bird? I don’t know. But that, it just is a little odd, I would say. Yeah. All right, Rosemary, you gotta take away Rosemary’s phone. Alan’s personality test. Yeah, there we go. That was not me. Wind farm toilets was a good one. Thank you, Liz, for, for raising that. [00:17:00] Yeah, I know when I worked in, um, Europe and Canadian wind farms, I would have to strategize my liquid intake for the day. Balancing out tea will help keep me warm, but on the other hand. Did everybody meet up with someone who had a solution? That was part of the goal here is to put people with solutions in the room with people with problems and let you all sort it out. So hopefully that was one of the things that happened this week. Or if you haven’t connected here, be able to connect with over LinkedIn or over coffee later. And the networking on the app and networking page on the website. Right. So you can actually use that now that’s all live. Yeah. So you can, you can connect through there if you’ve selected to. To keep your contact information open. Yep. You can connect through there so it’s easy to, if you need somebody to find my or Matthew’s email, you can just find it right there and we’ll upload the presentations, as you said. Right. The presentations we uploaded. But you have to select into that, Matthew, is that right? Also, the speakers [00:18:00] have to approve them as well. Right. And the, and all the speakers, you know who you are. Can let us know if we can use your slide decks to public size them. I didn’t see anything there that looked highly classified, so I think that would be fine. Alright. This is really interesting. Convince OEMs to install better pitch bearings. That’s very true. Okay, thanks you for that. Claire, what’s the next one? What do you wish you learned more about? So Matthew did a tour before the conference several months ago. And, and went to a lot of the operators and said, what would you like to hear about? So the things that were, uh, the seminar or the different workshops and all that were the result of talking to each of the operators about what you would like to see. So hopefully we covered most of them. Uh, obvious There. There’s some new things. Gear boxes. Yeah. I figured that one was coming. Tower retrofits. Okay. Good, good, [00:19:00] good. ISPs? Yeah. Life extension. Yeah. A lot of life extension. I agree. Well, we’re gonna run into that to the United States also. Asbestos. I’ve read some things about that in Australia. Okay. Which leading protection work by name. I do, I do have, well, lemme see. I do know that answer, but you’re gonna have to talk to Rosemary to get the, the key to the vault there. I I also think that you can’t assume that it’s gonna work in Australia. I think that, that like really seriously, I, I wouldn’t, um. I wouldn’t replace my entire wind farms leading edge protection based on what worked well in Europe and America. So, um, I would highly suggest, um, getting in touch with me and or bigger to get involved in a trial if you, that’s a problem for you. Yeah, definitely get involved in the trial. Uh, more data is better and if you do join that trial, you will have the keys to the castle. They will tell you how all the other pro uh, blades went. Uh, trainings and [00:20:00] skills, obviously that’s a, that’s a international one. When does ROI really happen? Yeah. Yep. We hear that quite a bit. Needs have proven good products for leading edge erosion. Yep. Okay. Yeah. So the que I guess one of the questions is, is that we did not on purpose, did not have any vendor things. I haven’t mentioned my product once this week. I, because I don’t want to, you know, that’s not the point of this conference, but should we. I don’t know. I mean, that’s a, should we have people standing up and I don’t know if it’s standing out there, but able to, to trial things. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree with what. I, I don’t, I don’t want that. Oh, yeah. No, I don’t want that. But it’s not my conference. Right. It’s, it’s everybody who c comes and wants to participate. What do you wanna see? Do you wanna see 10 leading edge products out in the hallway or, I didn’t mind that people were putting like stickers and like little knickknacks out on [00:21:00] tables. That was fun. Rosemary’s got a, a satchel full of them. Alright, Claire, is that the last one? There’s one more. All right. Hang on for one more. What’s your biggest takeaway from Woma? That you’re gonna buy your tickets early for WMA 2027, hopefully, and you’re gonna sponsor. I had a lot of people come up to me and say they would like to sponsor next year. And that’s wonderful. That will really keep the, the cost down because we’re not making anything off of this. I’m losing money to be here, which is totally fine ’cause I think this is a noble effort. Uh, but we will keep the cost as low as we can. We have an upgraded venue from last year. If you attend last year we were at the library, which was also a very nice facility, but this is just another level. Mm. Um, and the website has the ability to register interest in sponsorship. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve already got, uh, Jeremy’s already shook my hand. He’s already committed. Yeah. [00:22:00] Uh, I think we’ll have a lot of three pizzas on, on sponsorship for next year, and that’s good. Uh, that tells you there’s some value to be here and, and, uh, connect stickers, Rosemary stickers. There you go. I like whoever put calories up there. That’s funny. Yeah. You know the thing about, uh, this city is you can eat and it’s so dang good. You can’t do that in the states. You can’t just walk around in a random. Downtown like Detroit, Chicago. There are places you can eat there, but every place you walk into in this city is really good food. It’s crazy. Yeah. It’s, it’s uh, sort of addictive. I’m gonna have to go home on Saturday or not gonna fit in my seat. Um, alright. This is great. Yeah. We really love, um, constructive feedback. I think we’re all, or at least. Vast majority of us are engineers. We like to know about problems and fix them. So, um, most of us can’t have our feelings hurt easily. So, you [00:23:00] know, be very, very direct with your feedback. And, um, yeah, I mean the event should be different every year, right? Like, we don’t wanna do the exact same thing every year, so, um, it will change. Yeah. Yeah. And there is a survey going out as well, so Georgina will send out a survey. All right. So those surveys go to who? Matthew, are they going to you or are they going to all attendees and go? I think it goes back to Georgina, but we’ll, okay. Yeah. Great. So if you do get a, a form to fill out, please fill it out. That helps us for next year. Are we gonna be back in the same city? I say Yes. Yes. Yeah, this place is great. Sydney is also lovely. I spent an hour there at the airport. It was quite nice, but it was long enough. As I learned from people from Melbourne that Sydney is not their favorite place to go. So I guess we’re, we’re here next year. Is there anything else we need to talk about? Um, no. I mean, I’ve just been, uh, my favorite thing about this event is like the, the size of it and that people, uh, like very closely related in what we’re interested in that. It’s not like a, [00:24:00] you can put any two random people together and then we’ll have an interesting conversation. So I’ve really enjoyed all of the, you know, dozens of conversations that I’ve had this week. And, um, yeah. So thank you everybody for showing up with a open and collaborative, um, yeah. Frame of mind. It’s, yeah, couldn’t be done without everybody here. We do have a little bit of an award ceremony here for Rosemary, so we actually put together. A collage of videos over the last, um, five years. Uh, this is news to me. What? Yeah. Surprise. All right. Let it roll. Claire. Champion Rosie Barnes is here. Everybody. Climate change is a problem that our politicians don’t seem to be trying. Particularly hard to solve. This used to frustrate me until I realized that as an engineer, I have the power to [00:25:00] change the world, and unlike some politicians, I choose to use my powers for good. So I made a gingerbread wind turbine, I mean, a functional gingerbread, wind turbine, functional and edible. Everything except for the generator is edible. Alan, what were some of your takeaways from our talk with, uh, with Rosie? Well, I just like the way she thinks she thinks in terms of systems, not in terms of components. And I, I think that’s a, for an engineer is a good way to think about bigger problems. On today’s episode, we’ve got, well, some exciting news. Number one. Rosemary, uh, Barnes will be joining us here today as our co our new co-host. Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for having me. So, you know, one wind turbine with, um, wooden 80 meter long wooden blades. Yeah. Like, that’s so cool. What a great engineering challenge or, you know, craftsmanship challenge, um, there, but, you know, I’d like to see one [00:26:00]wooden wind turbine blade, but not, not more than that. It’s a, it’s a cool, it’s a cool novelty. And then burn it, right? If you burn it, then you’ll catch the carbon. We need someone within the Australian wind industry to start up a, a better conference. Um, you know, it should be allowing you to kind of put your finger on the pulse and figure out, you know, what, what’s the vibe of wind energy in Australia at the moment? Um, what are the big problems people are having and then, you know, some potential solutions, some people talking about things that are coming up that you might not have heard about yet. I just think that it’s much easier to get a good value conference from a, like a, a small organization that is really dedicated to the, um, topic of the, of the conference. So as part of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, Rosemary, the YouTube ci, these little gold plaques. So this is actually, this is your first gold plaque, but you have two [00:27:00] silver plaques also. ’cause engineering with Rosie reached a 100,000 subscribers. Uh, the uptime also reached a hundred thousand subscribers a while ago, but we reached 1 million. This is the first time I, we’ve been in person, but I could actually hand you this award. So congratulations Zi. Very, very well done. Thank you. This is treasured and, um. Yeah, added in. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before, so I’m bit overwhelmed. I, I’m interested to know, we got that Wheel of Fortune footage from, ’cause I thought that was lost. Lost forever. It’s over. It’s on YouTube. Sadly. It is. It’s 24. All the episodes Rosemary competed in the Wheel of Fortune. She was on four times. Six times. Six times. Sorry. There’s only four available on the internet. You may have white scrub tube. I wanna massaging Lazy Boy. Is that your husband? He made me get rid of it. He is like, that thing is hideous. And [00:28:00] it was, yeah. Thank, thank you so much. And I mean, yeah, this is the, the uptime wind energy. Um. Yeah, podcast achievement. It’s, um, it’s crazy how, how popular that, um, it’s in insanely popular since we crossed the 1 million mark that was a while ago. We’re up to 1.6 million right now. We’ll cross 2 million this year. I know it’s, it’s clear Claire’s reason. It mostly clear and it honestly is. Uh, but wind energy is a big part of the energy future, and as I’m realizing now, uh, when you start to reach out to people, you realize how important it is for the planet and for individual countries that wind energy is part of their electricity grid. So the, the information we exchange here this week is very valuable and reach out to others. I think that’s part of this wind industry and Matthew’s pointed out many times, is that we share. So unlike other places, uh. Wind energy likes to work together. And that’s great to hear and it’s great to participate in. So I wanna thank everybody here for attending, uh, this conference. Thank you to all the sponsors. Uh, you [00:29:00] made this thing possible. Uh, as Matthew has pointed out, we’ll be at WMA 2027. The website is live. So, uh, listen to Rosie. Please register now. Uh, and uh, yeah. Thank you so much for, for being with us. And we’ll see you in February right here. Thank you.

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss Ming Yang’s proposed $1.5 billion factory in Scotland and why the UK government is hesitating. Plus the challenges of reviving wind turbine manufacturing in Australia, how quickly a blade factory can be stood up, and whether advanced manufacturing methods could give Australia a competitive edge in the next generation of wind 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! 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 Yolanda Padron and Rosemary Barnes, and we’re all in Australia at the same time. We’re getting ready for Woma 2026, which is going to happen when this release is, will be through the first day. Uh, it’ll, it’s gonna be a big conference and right now. We’re so close to, to selling it out within a couple of people, so it’ll be a great event. So those of you listening to this podcast, hopefully you’re at Wilma 2026 and we’ll see, see you there. Uh, the news for this week, there’s a number of, of big, uh, country versus country situations going on. Uh, the one at the moment is [00:01:00] ING Yang in Scotland, and as we know, uh, Scotland. It has been offered by Ming Yang, uh, to build a factory there. They’re put about one and a half billion pounds into Scotland, uh, that is not going so well. So, so they’re talking about 3000 jobs, 1.5 billion in investment and then. Building, uh, offshore turbines for Britain and the larger Europe, but the UK government is hesitating and they have not approved it yet. And Scotland’s kind of caught in the middle. Ming Yang is supposedly looking elsewhere that they’re tired of waiting and figure they can probably get another factory somewhere in Europe. I don’t think this is gonna end well. Everyone. I think Bing Yang is obviously being pushed by the Chinese, uh, government to, to explore Scotland and try to get into Scotland and the Scottish government and leaders in the Scottish government have been meeting with, uh, [00:02:00] Chinese officials for a year or two. From what I can tell, if this doesn’t end with the factory in Scotland. Is China gonna take it out on the uk? And are they gonna build, is is me gonna be able to build a factory in Europe? Europe at the minute is looking into the Chinese investments into their wind turbine infrastructure in, in terms of basically tax support and, and funding and grants of that, uh, uh, aspect to, to see if China is undercutting prices artificially. Uh, which I think the answer is gonna be. Yes. So where does this go? It seems like a real impasse. At a moment when the UK in particular, and Europe, uh, the greater Europe are talking about more than a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind,  Yolanda Padron: I mean, just with the, the business that you mentioned that’s coming into to the uk, right? Will they have without Min Yang the ability to, to reach their goals?  Allen Hall: So you have the Siemens [00:03:00] factory in hall. They have a Vestus factory in Hollow White on the sort of the bottom of the country. Right. Then Vestus has had a facility there for a long time and the UK just threw about 20 million pounds into reopening the onshore blade portion of that factory ’cause it had been mothballed several months ago. It does seem like maybe there’s an alternative plan within the UK to stand up its own blade manufacturing and turbine manufacturing facilities, uh, to do a lot of things in country. Who I don’t think we know. Is it Siemens? Is it ge? Is it Vestus or is it something completely British? Maybe all the above. Rosemary. You know, being inside of a Blade factory for a long time with lm, it’s pretty hard to stand up a Blade factory quickly. How many years would it take you if you wanted to start today? Before you would actually produce a a hundred meter long offshore blade,  Rosemary Barnes: I reckon you could do it in a year if you had like real, real strong motivation [00:04:00] Allen Hall: really. Rosemary Barnes: I think so. I mean, it’s a big shed and like, it, it would be, most of the delays would be like regulatory and, you know, hiring, getting enough people hired and trained and that sort of thing. But, um, if you had good. Support from the, the government and not too much red tape to deal with. Then, uh, you know, if you’ve got lots of manufacturing capability elsewhere, then you can move people. Like usually when, um, when I worked at LM there were a few new factories opened while I was working there, and I’m sure that they took longer than, than a year in terms of like when it was first thought of. But, um, you know, once the decision was made, I, I actually dunno how long, how long it took. So it is a guess, but it didn’t, it didn’t take. As long as you would think it wasn’t. It wasn’t years and years, that’s for sure. Um, and what they would do is they don’t, you know, hire a whole new workforce and train them up right from the start. And then once they’re ready to go, then they start operating. What they’ll do to start with is they’ve got, you know, like a bunch [00:05:00] of really good people from the global factories, like all around, um, who will go, um, you know, from all roles. And I’m not talking just management at all, like it will include technicians, um, you know, every, every role in the factory, they’ll get people from another factory to go over. And, um, you know, they do some of the work. They’re training up local people so you know, there’s more of a gradual handover. And also so that you know, the best practices, um, get spread from factory to factory and make a good global culture. ’cause obviously like you’ve got the same design everywhere. You want the same quality coming out everywhere. Um, there is, as much as you try and document everything should be documented in work instructions. That should make it, you know, impossible to do things wrong. However, you never quite get to that standard and, um. There is a lot, a lot to be said for just the know-how and the culture of the people doing the um, yeah, doing the work.  Allen Hall: So the infrastructure would take about a year to build, but the people would have to come from the broader Europe then at [00:06:00] least temporarily.  Rosemary Barnes: That, that would be the fastest and safest way to do it. Like if it’s a brand new company that has never made a wind turbine before and someone just got a few, you know, I don’t know, a billion dollars, and um, said, let’s start a wind turbine factory, then I think it’s gonna be a few years and there’s gonna be some learning curve before it starts making blades fast enough. And. With the correct quality. Um, yeah. But if you’re just talking about one more factory from a company that already has half a dozen or a dozen wind turbine blade factories elsewhere in the world, then that’s where I think it can be done fast.  Allen Hall: This, uh, type of situation actually pops up a lot in aerospace, uh, power plants, engines. The jet engines on a lot of aircraft are kind of a combined effort from. Big multinational companies. So if they want to build something in country, they’ll hook up with a GE or a, a Honeywell or somebody who makes Jet engines and they’ll create this division and they’ll [00:07:00] stand this, this, uh, plant up. Maybe it’s gonna be something like that where GB energy is in the middle, uh, providing the funding and some of the resources, but they bring in another company, like a Siemens, like a Vestas, like a GE or a Nordex even to come in and to. Do the operational aspects and maybe some of the training pieces. But, uh, there’s a, there’s a funding arm and a technical arm, and they create a standalone, uh, British company to go manufacture towers to go manufacture in the cells to manufacture blades. Is that where you think this goes?  Rosemary Barnes: It depends also what kind of, um, component you’re talking about. Like if you’re talking about, I, I was talking a specific example of wind turbine blades, which are a mediumly complex thing to make, I would say, um. Yeah. And then if you go on the simpler side, when turbine towers, most countries would have the. Rough expertise needed, um, to, to do that. Nearly all towers at the moment come out of [00:08:00] China, um, or out of Asia. And with China being the, the vast bulk of those. Um, and it’s because they’ve got, aside from having very, very cheap steel, um, they also have just got huge factories that are set up with assembly lines so that, you know, there’s not very much moving of things back and forth. So they have the exact right bit of equipment to do. The exact right kind of, you know, like rolling and welding and they’re not moving tower sections around a lot. That makes it really hard for, um, for other countries to compete. But it’s not because they couldn’t make towers, it’s because they would struggle to make them cheap enough. Um, so yeah, if you set up a factory, you know, say you set up a wind turbine, um, factory in, uh, wind turbine tower factory in Australia, you, you could buy the equipment that you needed for, you know, a few hundred million dollars and, um. You could make it, but unless you have enough orders to keep that factory busy, you know, with the, the volume that you need to keep all of that [00:09:00] modern equipment, uh, operating just absolutely around the clock, your towers are gonna be expensive out of that facility. So that’s kind of the, that it’s cost is the main barrier when it comes to towers  Allen Hall: with Vestus in Mitsubishi recently having a partnership and then ending that partnership. It would seem like Vestus has the most experience in putting large corporations together to work on a, an advanced wind turbine project is they would, it would make sense to me if, if, if Vestus was involved because Vestus also has facilities in the uk. Are they the leading choice you think just because they have that experience with Mitsubishi and they have something in country or you think it’s somebody else? Is it a ge  Rosemary Barnes: My instinct is saying Vestas. Yes,  Allen Hall: me too. Okay.  Rosemary Barnes: Ge. It’s wind turbine Manufacturing seems to be in a bit of a, more of an ebb rather than a flow right now, so I [00:10:00] mean that’s, that’s probably as much as what it’s based on. Um, and then yes, like the location of, of factories, there are already some vest, uh, factories, vest people in the uk so that would make it easier. : 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 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.[00:11:00] Allen Hall: Can you build a renewable energy future on someone else’s supply chain? Well, in Australia, the last domestic wind tower manufacturers are down. Last year, after losing a 15 year battle against cheaper imports from China, now the Albanese government wants to try again, launching a consultation to revive local manufacturing. Meanwhile, giant turbines are rising in Western Australia’s. Largest wind farms soon to power 164,000 homes. Uh, the steel towers, blades and the cells, they all arrive on ships. And the question is whether that’s going to change anytime soon. Rosemary?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s a topic I’ve thought about a lot and done a fair bit of work on as well, local manufacturing and whether you should or shouldn’t, the Australian government does try to support local manufacturing in. General, um, and in particular for renewables, but they focused much more on solar and [00:12:00] batteries. Um, with their manufacturing support, Australian government and agencies like a uh, arena, Australian Renewable Energy Agency have not traditionally supported wind like at all. It bothers me because actually Australia is a fantastic place to be developing some of these supporting technologies for wind energy and even the next generation of wind energy. Um, technologies, we, not any manufacturing. There are heaps of, um, things that would make it more suitable Australia, like just actually a really natural place to develop that. The thing about Australian projects is that they are. Big. Right. That makes it really attractive to developers because like in Europe where they’re, you know, still building wind, but you know, an onshore wind farm in Europe is like a couple of turbines here or there, maybe five, like a big wind farm would be 10, 10 turbines over there. Um, in Australia it’s like a hundred, 200 turbines at a time. Um, for onshore also choosing. Really big turbines. Australians, for some reason, Australian developers really like to [00:13:00] choose the latest technologies. And then if we think about some of the, um, you know, like new supporting technologies for existing wind turbines, like, you know, let’s, um, talk about. O and m there’s a whole lot of, um, o and m technologies, and Australia’s a great place for that too because as Australia wind farms spend so much on o and m compared to other countries. So a technology provider that can improve some of those pain points can much quicker get like a positive, um, return on investment in Australia than they would be able to in somewhere like America or, or Europe. So I think it makes sense to develop here  Allen Hall: with the number of wind farms. Rosie, I, I completely agree with you and. When we were talking about the war Dge wind Farm, which is the Western Australian wind farm that’s gonna expand, they’re adding 30 turbines to provide 283 megawatts. That’s like a nine and a half megawatt machine. Those are big turbines. Those are new turbines, right? That’s not something that’s been around for a couple years. They’ve been around for a couple of months in, in terms of the lifespan of, of wind [00:14:00] turbines. So if Australia’s gonna go down the pathway of larger turbines, the, the most advanced turbines. It has to make sense that some of this has, has to be developed in country just because you need to have the knowledge to go repair, modify, improve, adjust, figure out what the next generation is, right? I don’t know how you, this happens.  Rosemary Barnes: We see some examples of that. Right. And I think that Fortescue is the best example of, um, companies that are trying to think forward to what they’re going to need to make their, you know, they’ve got ambitious plans for putting in some big wind farms with. Big wind turbines in really remote locations. So they’ve got a lot of, um, it’s a lot of obvious challenges there. Um, and I know that they’re thinking ahead and working through that. And so, you know, we saw their investment in, um, nbra wind, the Spanish company and in particular their nbra lift. The bit of the tower that attaches to the rotor. It looks [00:15:00] pretty normal. Um, but then they make it taller by, um, slotting in like a lattice framework. Um, and then they jack it up and slot in another one underneath and jack it up and slot in another one underneath. So they don’t need a gigantic crane and they don’t need, um, I mean, it’s still a huge crane, but they don’t, they don’t, it doesn’t need to be as, as big because, you know, the rotor starts, starts off already on there by the time that the tower gets su to its full height. So, um, yeah, it’s a lot. That’s an innovative solution, I think, and it would, I would be very surprised if they weren’t also looking at every other technology that they’re gonna need in these turbines.  Allen Hall: If Australia’s gonna go down the pathway of large turbines on shore, then the manufacturing needs to happen in country. There’s no other way to do it. And you could have manufacturing facilities in Western Australia or Victoria and still get massive turbine blades shipped or trucked either way. To [00:16:00] wherever they needed it to go. In country, it would, it’s not that hard to get around Australia and unlike other countries like, like Germany was a lot of mountains and you had bridges and narrow roads and all that, and it, it’s, it’s much more expansive in Australia where you can move big projects around. And obviously with all the, the mining that happens in Australia, it’s pretty much normal. So I, I just trying to get over the hurdle of where the Albanese government is having an issue of sort of pushing this forward. It seems like it’s a simple thing because the Australian infrastructure is already ready. Someone need to flip the switch and say go.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know if I’d say that we’re we’re ready. ’cause Australia doesn’t have a whole lot of manufacturing of anything at the moment. It’s not true that we have no manufacturing. That’s what Australians like to say. We don’t manufacture anything and that’s not true. We do manufacture. We have some pretty good advanced manufacturing. If you just look at the hard economics of wind turbine manufacturing in Australia of solar panel manufacturing, battery manufacturing. Any of that, it is cheaper to just get it from China, not least [00:17:00] because some of the, um, those components are subsidized by the, the Chinese government. If you start saying, okay, we’re gonna have local manufacturing, like, you can either, you can achieve that either by supporting the local manufacturing industry, you know, like giving subsidies to our manufacturing. Or you could, um, make a local content requirement. Um, say things, you know, if you want project approval for this, then it has to have so much local content. You have to do it really carefully because if you get the settings wrong, then you just end up with very, very expensive, um, renewable energy. And at the moment, especially wind is. Expensive, and I think it’s still getting more expensive in Australia. It has been since, basically since the pandemic. If you then said, we’ve gotta also make it in Australia, then you add a bunch more costs and we would just probably not have wind energy then, so, uh, or new, new wind energy. So there needs to be that balance. But I think that like, even though you can say, okay, cheapest is best, it is also not good to rely on. [00:18:00] Exclusively on other countries, and especially not on just one other country to give you all of your energy infrastructure. If it was up to me, I would be much more supporting the next wave of, um, technologies. I would really love to see, you know, a new Australian. Wind turbine blade manufacturing method. Like at some point in the next decade, we’re going to start getting, uh, advanced manufacturing is gonna make it into wind turbine blades. It’s already there in some of the other components.  Allen Hall: Wait, so you just said if we were gonna build a factory in Scotland, it would take about a year. Why would it take 10 years to do it in Australia? Australia’s a nice place to live.  Rosemary Barnes: No, I didn’t say that. It would, it would take teens. I said in, sometime in the next decade around the world, wind turbine blades are basically handmade, right? They, you know, there are some, um, machines that are helping people, but you know, you have a look at a picture of a wind turbine blade factor and there’s, you know, there’s 20 people walking over, walking over a blade, smoothing down glass. And at some point we’re gonna start using advanced manufacturing methods. I [00:19:00] mean, there are really advanced composite manufacturing methods. Um, you know, with, um, individual fiber placement and 3D printing with, um, continuous fibers. And that’s being used for like aerospace components a lot. It’s early days for that technology and there is no barrier to the technologies to being able to put them, you know, like say on a GaN gantry that just, you know, like ran down the length of a whole blade like that, that could be done. If it was economic, that’s the kind of technology that Australia should be supporting before that’s the mainstream, and everybody else has already done it, right? You need to find the next thing, and ideally not just one next thing, but several next things because you’re not gonna, you don’t know ahead of time, um, which is gonna be the winner. Allen Hall: That hasn’t been the tack that China has taken, that the latest technology in batteries is not something that China is producing today. They’re producing a generation prior, but they’re doing it at scale. At some point they, the Chinese just said, we’re stopping here and we’re gonna do this, this kind of [00:20:00] battery, and that’s it. And away we go. If we keep waiting until the next generation of blade techniques come out, I think we’re gonna be waiting forever.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think why I think. Do, you know, make the next generation of, of blade bio technologies?  Yolanda Padron: I think it makes sense for someplace like Australia, right? Because we, we’ve talked about the fact that like here, you, you have to consider a lot of factors in operation that you don’t have to consider in other places, especially for blades, right? So if you can eliminate all of those issues, for the most part that are happening in the factory at manufacturing, then that can really help boost. The next operational projects.  Allen Hall: So then what you’re saying is that. There are new technologies, but what stage are they at? Are they TRL two, TRL five, TRL seven. How close is this technology because I’d hate for Australia to miss out on this big opportunity.  Rosemary Barnes: Frown Hoffer has actually just published an article recently, uh, [00:21:00] about some, I can’t remember if it was fiber, um, tape placement or if it was printed, small wind turbine blades. Small wind is a nice, like, it’s a, a nice bite-sized kind of thing that you can master a lot quicker than you can, you know, you can make a thousand small wind turbines and learn a lot more than making 100 meter long blade. That would probably be bad because it’s your first one and you didn’t realize all of the downsides to the new technology yet. Um, so I, I think it is kind of promising, but. In terms of, yeah, like a major, like in terms of let’s say a hundred meter long blade that was made with 3D printing, that would be terra, L one. Like it’s an idea now. Nobody has actually made one or, um, done, done too much. Um, as far as I know. I think you could get, could get to nine over the next year. Like I said, like I think sometime in the next decade will be when that, when that comes.  Allen Hall: Okay. If you, you didn’t get to a nine that quickly. No, it is possible. Yeah. You gotta put some money into it.  Rosemary Barnes: If someone wants to give me, [00:22:00] you know, enough money, then I’ll make it. I’ll make it happen. I’ll, I would, I would absolutely be able to make that happen, but I don’t know when it’s gonna be cheap enough.  Allen Hall: I would just love to see it. If, if, if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a, a factory, you got squirreled away somewhere in the. Inland of Australia that is making blades at quantity or has the technology to do that. I would love to see it because that would be amazing.  Rosemary Barnes: Technologies don’t just fall out of the sky, you know, like they, you, you, you force them into existence. That’s what you, that’s what you do. You know what this comes down to? Have you ever done the, is it Myers-Briggs where you get the, like letters of your personality? You and I are in opposite corners inside some ways.  Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, and it surely should, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, particularly Rosie, so it’s Rosemary Barnes on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to subscribe to who you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind [00:23:00] energy professionals discover the show. For Rosie and Yolanda, I am Alan Hall, and we’ll see here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers the world’s first 20 MW offshore wind turbine now grid-connected in China, a European breakthrough in recyclable blade composites, Nova Scotia’s push to become Canada’s offshore wind leader, Great British Energy’s new headquarters in Aberdeen, and South Dakota’s largest wind farm approval. 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: Happy Monday, everyone. You know what they say about records? They’re made to be broken. Well, off the coast of the Virginian Province in China, a new machine is spinning China three. Gorges and Goldwin have connected the world’s first 20 megawatt offshore wind turbine to the electrical grid. 20 megawatts from a single turbine. It’s blade stretched 147 meters long. That’s nearly 500 feet. The rotor sweeps an area equal to about 10 football fields. The hub sits 174 meters above the waves, a 58 story building floating its sea. This one wind [00:01:00] turbine will power 44,000 homes. And here’s what makes it interesting. This is the same wind farm where the world’s first 16 megawatt turbine went in. That record lasted barely two years. Meanwhile, Chinese turbine exports hit a record, 8 million kilowatts in 2025, a 50% from the year before. Chinese companies now operate in more than 60 countries. Uh. Across the Atlantic, a different kind of milestone. Nova Scotia has quietly become Canada’s leader in corporate clean energy deals while Alberta fumbled through policy moratoriums, the maritime province signed agreements that drew renewable investment northward The $60 billion Wind West project aims to unlock 62 gigawatts of offshore capacity. That’s a quarter of Canada’s total energy needs. Premier, Tim Houston traveled to New York this past month for the [00:02:00] International Partnering Forum. He signed a deal with Massachusetts to collaborate on offshore wind development . Lisa Engler from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center put it simply worked together lower costs, build the Atlantic Wind Industry. Nova Scotia’s first offshore lease auction comes later this year. And in Scotland, great British energy, announced its permanent headquarters. Location. Marshall Square. In Aberdeen, CEO, Dan McGrail called Aberdeen the perfect home for Britain’s publicly owned energy company. Thousands of engineers and technicians already call the city home Energy Minister Michael Shanks noted that Aberdeen has powered Britain for decades. First with oil and gas. Now with clean energy and on the American Prairie, South Dakota, regulators approved the state’s largest wind farm. Philip Wind Partners, a subsidiary of Chicago based Invenergy will build [00:03:00] 87 turbines across 110 square miles of private land north of Phillip. The price tag $750 million. The capacity. 333 megawatts enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and in laboratories across Europe. Researchers announced a breakthrough that could solve when energy’s most stubborn problem. What happens when turbine blades were out The Oleum project has produced the first bal salt fiber reinforced vier composite laminate through a new infusion technique in plain English. Its recyclable blades made from volcanic rock fiber. The goal blades that last 20% longer repair 40% faster and costs 15% less over the lifetime. So there you have it from China’s colossal machines to Nova Scotia’s Bold Ambitions from [00:04:00] Aberdeen’s new energy company to South Dakota’s Prairie Wind Farm from European laboratories working on the recycling puzzle. The wind industry just keeps moving forward, and that’s a state of the wind industry on the 16th of February. 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen and Joel are joined by Will Howell from Armour Edge in Edinburgh, Scotland. They discuss how Armour Edge’s semi-rigid polymer shields protect against leading edge erosion in harsh environments, the simplified installation process designed for rope access technicians, and the company’s expansion into North American manufacturing ahead of the 2026 blade season. 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: Will welcome back to the program.  Will Howell: Thanks so much for having me guys. Nice to see you.  Allen Hall: So Edinborough is the home of Armor Edge.  Will Howell: Yes, indeed.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And we went to visit your facility a couple of days ago. Really impressive. There’s a lot going on there. Will Howell: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So the, we’ve been in the facility for, um, a couple of years now, and it’s really just all part of our expansion as we continue to. To, uh, grow as a business?  Allen Hall: Uh, well the thing that struck me first was efficiency. If you’re gonna be in wind, do you need to be efficient?  Will Howell: Yeah,  Allen Hall: exactly. You have  Will Howell: to  be,  Will Howell: look, we know that we are a, a relatively small team, but we’re, we are, we are very reactive and we are gonna be always responding to the, the requests. The, the market drive for us internationally now is where we are really focusing. And even though we’ve got our small base from there, we’re exporting internationally around the world. And so. Yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m glad you guys came by and kind of saw what we’re up to.  Joel Saxum: If we could ask one thing, this is what we would ask. Turn up the heat. Turn down the wind. Turn off the rain.  Will Howell: Yeah, I’m [00:01:00] sorry about that. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, uh, there’s not much we can do about that at the moment.  Joel Saxum: Well, I’ll tell you what, if, if you’re talking leading Edge protection products, leading edge protection shield. Born from an area that’s rainy, that has heavy rain erosion, that understands,  Will Howell: we know, we know rain. We know rain. Yes. Look, we’ve been out in the North Sea now for over, over, over five years. These things are just being abused by Mother Nature out there and, you know, but we’ve, we are, we’re getting really good results consistently. Um, the products lasting really well against that, against that weather. And I think what’s interesting for us as well is it’s, it’s not just the Scottish rain and the ice and the snow. We’re, we’re getting good results out in the. The planes in the Midwest as well now. Yeah. And yeah, so yeah, very uh, universal products, we hope,  Joel Saxum: I mean, so this is one of the things we always talk about. When you talk wind turbine blades and you listen to the manufacturers, a lot of them sit in Denmark where the problem is mist in the air, it is rain, it is droplet size. It’s all the conversation you hear. But where we [00:02:00] see wind is dust, bugs, those kind of things. Like, it’s, it’s different stuff, right? So like I’m, I live in Texas. One of the things that’s beautiful about my home in Austin is when I look to the west in the, at, in the evening, it’s bright red skies all the time. Well, that means there’s dust in the air.  Will Howell: Yeah.  Joel Saxum: Right. And that’s, and when I look west, what am I looking at? 23,000 turbines out in West Texas. Right. So everything out there is getting beat up where we look at, um, inspections of turbines and we see turbines that are 1, 2, 3 years old that look like they’ve been in operation for 15 years. Will Howell: Yeah. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: There’s nothing left of them.  Will Howell: I know. And. You know, people use analogies like, oh, it looks like it’s been sand sandblasted. But it it has, it has, it is sandblasted, you know, we’ve, we’ve now conducted testing where we have literally taken kind of aerospace level testing and blasted sand at these shields, and they’re super resilient. But it has to be that universal products of resisting the water droplet that the mist, that side [00:03:00] of the, of the erosion problem, but also the particulate matter in the air. And there’ve been some of the. Places that we’ve installed. There was actually one site where they had a local, um, open cast mining nearby, and there was like marble particulate matter in the air. And these machines were getting trash in a couple couple of seasons. And again, we’ve been on there now for, I think now is our third year in that particular site. And again, really good results.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think, um, I mean, we did take some B roll when we were at your facility. And again, thanks for welcoming Sam. We love doing those. It’s, uh, but you showed us your installation methodology, and maybe we’ll show some of that with our producer Claire on mm-hmm. On this video. Uh, but the, the way you guys design your installation methodology to be simple and robust, easy for the technicians to make sure they can’t get it wrong in the field because they got enough other things to worry about. Will Howell: Uh, you know, I think, I think that’s been a big part of our, of our kind of design ethos since the, since the early days in the, in the r and d phase, it wasn’t only finding a robust material for the LEP Shields, a robust. [00:04:00]Adhesive to bond them on, but it’s the, it’s the kind of higher level. How do you actually get that onto a blade in the field by a rope or standing in a platform up in the, up in the winds And so, yeah, understanding what the technicians are having to go through in order to install this stuff. And that then feeds into your quality. ’cause you can have the best lab results in the world from your perfect installation sitting in a factory somewhere. But actually it’s the guys on ropes that are doing the, doing the hard work out there.  Joel Saxum: We see that all the time with our, like with our lightning protection products like. People, can you give us this lab test? Like we can, we’ll stack you up with lab tests. Mm-hmm. But what we really wanna show you is the test from the field.  Will Howell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Joel Saxum: The test that where it’s been sitting, soaking, getting hit by lightning. Mm-hmm. All of these things for years and years and years. Yeah. That’s the results we wanna show you. ’cause those are real.  Will Howell: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes  Allen Hall: the demo you gave us to install the shields and it’s basically a series of shields that go along the leading edge of the blade, sort of two parts of that one. Obviously you’re trying to recover the lost power, the a EP, that’s, that tends to be the big thing, [00:05:00] except in some locations, like Joel’s pointed out, it’s not that the leading edge is just kind of lightly beat up. It’s really beat up.  Will Howell: Yeah. Yeah.  Allen Hall: And you’re trying to prevent that from happening or to just to provide some protection, uh, if you’re just sort of category three, and I, I wanna walk through that for a minute because the demo you did was really interesting and I. It, it made sense once you watch the process happen. Mm-hmm. It’s really clear, but you’re able to take sort of cat three damage on the leading edge and not have to go back and do a lot of repair to it, which is where the vast majority of the funds are used to sort of get the blade to a point you can apply leading product. Oh yeah. Yeah. With Armor Edge, you don’t really need to do that. Will Howell: Yeah. And I think that that that really comes into the. Into the value proposition of the, of the whole, of the whole process. If the labor costs and the downtime of the machines, there’s so much value in that. And so if you can reduce the repair time or just remove it completely, because you can install [00:06:00] directly on top of existing erosion, you’ve really saved some significant cost out of the, out of the job. And that’s really only just by function of the design of the shields. We are a, a semi rigid polymer material, so we don’t conform to the existing erosion that’s on the surface. So. Yes. If you, if you have a cap four or five and you have some structural glass repair that needs to happen to maintain the integrity of the blades, you still need to complete that repair. You don’t need to go any further. So if you’ve only got a one, two, or three, you’re talking the fillers, the putties on, on the surface. You don’t need to, to replace those. Just apply our high build adhesive, get the shield on top, and you’re finished.  Allen Hall: And so you start at the tip with a, a tip. Shield and then you work your way, kind of Lego wise up up the leading edge of the blade. Yeah,  Will Howell: yeah, yeah.  Allen Hall: It’s really straightforward and, and the, the system you’re using, the adhesives you’re using, and the techniques are really adapted for the technician. What I watched you do, I’m like, oh, wow, this is really [00:07:00] slick because there’s been a lot of thought going into this. You have done this. Hundreds of times yourself before you’ve shipped it out to  Will Howell: the world. Yeah, exactly. And, and that was, that was a big part of the, part of the r and d process is to, again, as I said, it’s, it’s not just affecting these applications in a lab environment. It’s saying, how does this feel up on a rope? How does it feel strapped into your work, into your work position? You’re handling stuff with your gear off your belt, and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a very difficult position to be installing any bit of, any bit of kit on. And if we can. Make that as an intuitive and as simpler process as possible, that’s gonna lead to quality installations down down the line.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. One of the things I really liked when you were showing us the installation was the fact that you had your own tools that you developed for it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it wasn’t, we’re not talking $10,000 tools here, but, but it was something that was. Specific, your scraper that you use to spread things around. Mm-hmm. That makes sense for that application. That helps the technician in the field.  Will Howell: Yeah.  Joel Saxum: And that was from  Will Howell: direct market feedback. Absolutely. [00:08:00] And so you’re not only getting feedback from the technicians every season. And we are, we are, we are really careful to get these, to get that feedback, have these washup meetings, you know, maybe a bit of constructive criticism. Criticism in the early days and build that into your design revs. Yeah. But as you say, hands, tools or processes, it’s all just. Quality steps. As we, as we, as we kind of move on.  Joel Saxum: I do, I do wanna make sure for anybody listening or watching this on YouTube, that that, that they know that this is not the actual final problem. These are trade show things. It’s not a bunch of little shells like this. You’re about a meter long. They’re about meter  Will Howell: long. Yeah. Yeah. Full size. And again, even the, even the length is optimized for, um, kind of rope access. We feel a meter is about as long as you can handle as a, as a kind of single, single piece. The. Adhesive is kind of curing during the time that you’re installing the shields. So a meter is good, you just just move on. Depending on what the customer’s looking for, that can be 10, maybe even 15 shields on [00:09:00] longer. Yeah, installations. Look, blades are getting bigger. The leading edge, erosion problems getting worse. So yeah, up about 15, 15 shields is probably about a maximum length that we tend to do in the field. Joel Saxum: So let’s you, you, you mentioned customers we’re talking about what they wanna see. Let’s talk customers a little bit. What does the geographic footprint look like for you guys commercially going into next year? Where, where do the installs go and what’s your focus?  Will Howell: Well, at the moment we are, we are spread internationally. Uh, obviously we are based here in Edinburgh and starting our out in the, out in the North Sea. Um, but over the past few seasons, our, our biggest market has been, has been North America. Um, so we’ve, we’ve really started to expand out there and that. I, I think even this season, again, it’s gonna be our biggest, our biggest market. Um, Joel Saxum: wha wha  Will Howell: okay. So yeah, the North American market’s gonna continue to be our biggest, um, installation base. So, um, this year we are probably on another thousand blades [00:10:00] or so, last season, um, this, this year significantly more, more than that. It’s been interesting for us to see the. The continued growth of the market, but also the, a bit of additional interest early on in this season or even pre, pre-season Now, we’re only coming up to Christmas as we record this. Um, so the big step for us is gonna be not only expanding our European operation that you guys have seen, um, here from, from Edinburg to, to support the market here, but also looking at the manufacturing in America. So in North America, we’re gonna have. A couple of different manufacturing sites. We’re able to supply customers locally, which is not only gonna be reducing lead times, but also removing the the tariff burden, the import cost, any additional additional steps so we’re able to respond quicker to our customers over there. Joel Saxum: Thanks for bringing the jobs to the states too.  Will Howell: Oh, there we go. Love those.  Allen Hall: There’s a lot of variety of wind turbines in the US and around the world, and you’re actively scanning blaze [00:11:00] because the shields are specifically molded for each different blade type. How many models do you have already scanned and ready to go? Will Howell: So at the moment, um, I believe the database sits about 45 designs or so. Um, so obviously there, there are more designs than that out there, out there in the wild. But we’ve, we’ve made a big effort to try and focus on the really key, key OEMs, the really key blades types that are particularly, particularly prevalent. Um, so yeah, we’ve got a lot of designs. We’ve got a lot of existing tooling, so we can make part. Very quickly. Again, trying to be as reactive as we, as we can to, to our, to our customer base. But as you say, that database is continually growing. So we have maybe some of the, the less popular blade models that we haven’t yet got to some of the out, the kind of fringe shoulder, shoulder models. Um, we’ll be trying to scan a few more of those. This, this coming season, just to keep on building up that, that kind of knowledge, knowledge base.  Allen Hall: So what does that look like now that you have this large database and. Uh, the sort of the [00:12:00] molds to make the product. Mm-hmm. You can do things at scale, I assume now you’re, you’re talking about thousands of blades for this upcoming season. Will Howell: Yeah, I mean, it’s, uh, when we, when we approach our manufacturing partners, obviously what we’re talking about are individual tools and then making plastic polymer parts from those, from those tools. And so when we start talking about wind farms with just a few hundred machines, then that’s maybe a few thousand parts. But for these, for these manufacturers, that is small fry. So our ability to scale from the point of having those tools is very rapid. So our approach to the market and our ease of scaling very quickly has just, it’s, again, it is part of our, it’s part of our model. That’s why we can engage now in local manufacturer, like in North America to, to support the market there. And it’s not only North Americas, we start to grow in, [00:13:00] um, in Europe here and as well as some of other target target markets. We’ve got some, some smaller in stores in India and in Australia. These are also targets where potentially we could start Manu Manufacturing as well in the future to assist in our scale up. Allen Hall: What, what is your lead time right now That’s from, from, from the point of, I call up will say, well, I’ve got a GE 62 2. I probably have 500 of them. What does that lead time look like?  Will Howell: So, uh, 6 2 2 is a very good example. It’s a very prevalent blade. Um, we’ve, we’ve had a number of projects for this, so we’ve got tooling ready to, ready to go. You’re probably talking around four to six weeks to get that. That’s fast material out. Yeah. Um, if it was a new design, it would be, it would be longer, but still you’re only up at 10 to 12 weeks for a new, a new design. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, as you guys have seen it, it’s quite an involved process. We’ve had a lot of. Design evolution to get here, but we’re quite a finesse process now.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, that was the exact question I was gonna ask because it’s one we get asked all the time too, right? What? What? Hey, and now it’s, we’re, [00:14:00] we’re sitting at the end of the year coming into the new year and in the United States, our blade season in the southern part of the states. Right. You’re south Texas, you’re starting in the next two months, right? Oh yeah. You’re starting end of January, beginning of February, and then that starts to roll north as we go. And by May we’re in full swing Absolutely. Across North America. So. If you’re a manufacturer listening to this, or a manufacturer, if you’re an operator listening to this and, um, you’re thinking, Hey, maybe, maybe I’d like to, if I don’t wanna roll it all out, maybe I’d like to try a couple. We’re gonna do an LEP campaign. Let’s get this stuff out there and see what it looks like. Um, you need to get ahold of will.  Allen Hall: Oh, you should, and you should try it. I think a lot of the operators haven’t dabbled too much. They’ve seen a lot of products on the market, a lot of sort of, uh, chemical mixing apply. A polymer to the leading edge tapes, products, tapes, paint, yeah. All, all of that. And the, the, the harder products haven’t seen as much favor, but the, the issue is, is that all the softer products, I’ll call them, wear easy or particularly with [00:15:00] dirt.  Joel Saxum: To me this is set it and forget it. Right. So this is a, this is an uptime podcast consultant type thing. I have always felt in the last, I don’t know, four or five years of my career that I get access to a lot of the. Subject matter experts and the products and solutions that are like top tier, right? These are the ones that I would, yeah, so I think a lot of times like, man, if I wasn’t, if I, Joel Saxon owned a wind farm and I was an operator, I would do this. I would do that. I would, you know, I’d have Pete Andrews from me both here on here earlier today and I’d be doing these kind, but I would put a product like your under the armor edge shields on simply because to me, this is set it and forget it. Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna do it once and I’m done.  Will Howell: That’s it. You know, and we’ve got, we’ve got the initial lab test to kind of validate the really long lifetime of our products. But again, now we have the field data to back that up as there are many, many happy, happy customers in varying conditions. And, and yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s performing well. Interesting what you’re saying though, about. The lead time of the, um, products. You know, we’ve, we’ve really tried to [00:16:00] drive that down as much as, as much as possible. And look, we know the, the planning world out there is not, is not a perfect science, and there’s always gonna be people coming to us with super short, short lead times. But as we’ve scaled, that’s another, another issue that we’re trying to combat. So now that we have many years under our belt, our stock holding is increasing. We can do small projects, pretty much X stock. So we have. A stock of parts now that are available within a few days to ship out. It might just be a few, a few, a few machines. It could be a, a spot repair or a trial. Right, right, right. But we’ve got those, we’ve got those parts ready to go. So yeah, if anyone’s interested, even in a very short, short time scale, contact us. I mean, we may be able to help you out very, very quickly.  Joel Saxum: We’ve all heard about product. Disappearing outta the back of technician pickups in hotel parking lots too. Sometimes you just need an extra turbines worth the kit while you’re on site.  Allen Hall: That is for sure. And will I, if you, people haven’t heard of Armor Edge, which is hard to believe, [00:17:00] but I do run across them occasionally. Where should they go to learn more? How did they get ahold of you to, to set up a 2026 trial?  Will Howell: Yeah, so, um, I mean, our. Our, our website@armedge.com and that’s the, the UK spelling of arm edge with you in there. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, please come to the, come to the website. You can contact us through there. Um, I’m available on, on LinkedIn. Um, yeah, you can contact us anytime. Anytime. We, we do travel between, uh, the uk. Again, our US is a big, big market, so if you’re gonna be at any of the trade shows, you can come and come and say, Hey, and arrange a, arrange a time to. Time to talk. Yeah. Which, which of the trade shows are gonna be at this year? So we’ve got, um, blades, uh, the end of end of February, uh, in the US we’ve got, uh, the A-C-P-O-O and M event, um, event. And that’s the start of the start of March. Just before that, we’ll be, um, we’ve got one of our representatives in Australia at the Woma, [00:18:00] um, show as well. So, yeah. Yeah, it’s, uh, that’s the kind of the start, the start of the year as we move on. Um. Again, there’s gonna be a lot of, uh, interaction with customers and suppliers. So even outside the shows you, you might be able to get a hold of us, look out for us. Um, but I think coming up to the summer, we’ve then got the clean power event. We like to visit, visit that for a bit more of a higher, higher level view of what’s, uh, going on in, in the industry as well. Allen Hall: Well, will thank you so much for allowing us to get behind the scenes and. See the, the shop and see the, uh, demonstration of the installation of the shields. It was wonderful to see that. And thank you for joining us today.  Will Howell: No, great. Thank you very much for your time again. Appreciate it.

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda, joined by Matthew Stead, discuss Vestas’ Q4 earnings beating competitors but disappointing investors, and the latest on the Wind Energy O&M Australia 2026 conference in Melbourne. Plus the European Commission opens a subsidy investigation into Goldwind, Texas sues over 3,000 dumped wind turbine blades, and Muehlhan Wind Service acquires Canadian AC883. 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 strike tape.com. And now your hosts.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Alan Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron. Matthew Stead down in Australia. So welcome Matthew.  Matthew Stead: Great to be here. Thank you, Alan.  Allen Hall: We have a number of articles and interesting topics this week. Top of the list is Vestus. Vestus announced their Q4 numbers, and although the the revenue is great, uh, they, they had a profit of about 580 million euros. It was below what analysts expected, so the shares dropped about 6% on the news. But the CEO of Vestus is saying, uh, full speed ahead. They’re, they’re willing to make some concessions. Vestus, as it sounds like, in terms [00:01:00] of thinning out the company a little bit, which I, that’s been a, a, a complaint from investors for a little while. But in, in terms of, uh, going forward in renewable energy, Vestus is still going to pursue that. The offshore wind business looks like it’s gonna be profitable in 2027. And as we all know, and we, we see wind turbine prices, uh, quite a bit in each of our positions. Vestas is the most expensive one on the block, but they’re still winning a whole bunch of orders. And, and Matthew, uh, Vestas globally. I would say is the leader right now, if you look at Siemens GAA and GE Vestas is really winning a lot of the orders. Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think a very strong reputation for quality. Um, I have to say, I’ve got some Vestas turbines behind me, so, um, all paid for by myself. They’ve always been well regarded for their, um, you know, quality of [00:02:00] product. And when I first got into wind, um, you know, probably 15 years ago, you know, they were, they were the leaders at that point in time. And so, you know, quality. Reduces future o and m cost. I think  Rosemary Barnes: it’s not just about like the simple o and m, either it’s the risk that something really bad goes wrong and you’re just stuck with, you know, like a, a whole a hundred turbines that can’t be fixed or, you know, at least a large, a large chunk of them. The more that I work in, in o and m, the more you see, like on occasion when you do have those serial issues that mean, you know, like. Sometimes all the blades in the wind farm have to be replaced or sometimes all the generators or you know, even if it’s not replaced, if you’ve gotta take them all out and do something and put ’em back in, it is just such a massive cost. And, um, reducing the chance that that’s gonna happen is actually really valuable for insurance. And yeah, all sorts of other financial reasons.  Yolanda Padron: And even as an FSA customer, I feel like Vestus has a lot more transparency as to what actually is going on, [00:03:00] on site and more able to, to collaborate on, on like a site to site basis, which is very obviously helping them in getting a lot of return customers. Allen Hall: Yeah. One of the key revenues for Vestus has been the FSA, where almost every project I’ve seen over the last couple of years has had a 2030 year FSA attached to it. Rarely do you see. Order without that, and that’s a long-term revenue stream. The, the thing about Vestus and the complaints that are happening, uh, around vestus are odd because if you look at Siemens Cab Mesa, they’re really struggling to be profitable. And then GE Renova, which is really, really struggling to be profitable and they’re losing several hundred millions of dollars a year. Vestas is bringing in a profit, and, and yet the investors are wanting even more. I, I guess, is, is this just a relationship to the. Where you can invest money today. The stock market going up so high, gold and silver prices are at record highs. Rosemary Barnes: Haven’t they just [00:04:00] crushed?  Allen Hall: They have a little bit. They’ve, they’ve rescinded some, but they’re still at really high numbers, right? So Gold Cross, what? $5,000 and ounce and then, uh, it was it 2000 a year ago? So the, the rise in the value of, of, uh, rear metals is crazy. Is there a plan you think Vestas is changing the way they’re gonna operate? ’cause uh, they’re talking about thinning out the ranks and they do seem to be becoming more vertically integrated with the acquisition of the TPI factories down in Mexico. GPI in India  Rosemary Barnes: before we make it sound too much like a paid segment from investors, I have to say I disagree that they’re like just crushing it with the, the FSAs. I think that the full service agreements are across the board. Perform badly in Australia, at least I think it’s different elsewhere. Um, maybe it’s a good segue into, uh, talk about our event that we’ve got coming up to talk [00:05:00] about, um, the difficult operating conditions in Australia. But I, I think that best as, like everybody else has been surprised at how many things can go wrong in an Australia and wind farm. And, um, I don’t, I I would’ve put them up on a pedestal for. Particularly noteworthy, um, brilliant service with the FSAs. I think, yeah, across the board everyone’s doing a little bit less than they should be, and I have no doubt that they’re also making a whole lot less money on those agreements than what they spent or spending a lot more than what they’re expecting. So I don’t wanna be too harsh in my judgment.  Yolanda Padron: That’s fair. The bar is very low.  Rosemary Barnes: But what I do notice when I go to international events, um, and I, you know, I talk to, I’ve got a lot of ex-colleagues that’s still working in the industry and vest. Stands out as still investing a lot in r and d. And that doesn’t mean like crushing out a new platform every single year or every two years. It’s not that. But they are investing in a lot of new technologies that are more incremental. They’re [00:06:00] looking at bigger technology leaps and um, you know, still investigating stuff like that. Like I think if I was to go back working for an OEM, that’s the kind of work I’d like to do. And investors does seem like it’s the main company that’s still doing a whole lot of that. With the exception of, of the Chinese manufacturers, which are obviously doing like tons and tons of new development. But, um, I don’t have the insight into them like I do with the European ones.  Allen Hall: As you’re listening to this podcast, most of the people on this podcast are traveling to Melbourne, Australia for Woma 26. That’s Wind Energy and M Australia. Big event. Matthew, the numbers are impressive. I’m getting a little bit scared. Run out of food and uh, seats because there is a massive influx in the last 24, 48 hours, which is great to see, but wind energy in Australia. Is huge, and the o and m aspect is one of those key pain points. Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think, uh, thanks to Rosie and Alan, your argument, [00:07:00] um, a little while ago, your argument, which spurred the whole, um, the reason for the conference. Um, you know, the, the lack of, uh, Australian content, the lack of, um, poor. Conferences in Australia. I think unless you’d have that argument, um, this event wouldn’t, wouldn’t be there. Allen Hall: Rosie did bring up that she had been to a number of conferences and so had I that were pretty much useless in terms of take home. What could we be able to use in the world and, and make the world just slightly better from our knowledge and. With all the policy talk and uh, discussion about sort of global warming things that it’s not really useful necessarily in making your operations run more efficiently. And this was what Woma is all about is. Sharing information. Not everybody runs their operations the same. And you can learn from that of the way, uh, others do it. And at the same time, we’re bringing in experts from around the world to talk about some of [00:08:00] those really critical issues. One of them being leading edge erosion. And Rosie’s been doing a lot of work in Australia on leading edge erosion and the complexities around that. Rosie, the leading edge erosion discussion and the panel involved in the people are gonna be on the panel are impressive. What are you looking forward to?  Rosemary Barnes: I’m looking forward to, um, getting the international perspective because leading edge erosion, I mean, there’s heaps of aspects of wind turbine operation that I think are just dramatically different in Australia, but I think leading edge erosion is the one that like really, really jumped out at me. When I was, um, when I moved back to Australia and started looking at inspection reports for wind farms that were like one or two years old, and you see 90, 99% of turbines that have significant erosion like within a couple of years. It’s like, this is, this is not. Like, I’ve never, I’ve never seen this before. It’s clear that no one is designing these products that are gonna peel off [00:09:00] within a couple of years. Um, and so that was what kind of got me thinking, you know what, like Australia is really different. Climatically and in terms of the weather. Um, and so we need to start not just getting our information from overseas, but also relating it back to Australia. So I think that that’s what we’re trying really hard with the conference to do, is to like really ground it on Australian problems and solutions that have worked in Australia, but then draw on, you know, we don’t need to invent every single new product ourselves. Although there will also be. I, I’m very confident that, that we do need new products developed specifically for Australia. Um, but you know, there are a lot of things out there we can really accelerate how quickly we can solve our Australian problems if we know what’s worked overseas in, you know, different places and just get ideas about how things work. So I think that’s a really good mix of, of local and international. Matthew Stead: Yeah, as [00:10:00] we were talking before about, um, registrations, so we had. Definitely over 200 now. Um, and, um, I, I think we just need to warn people that we might need to cap it out. Um, so the venue’s told us two 50 maximum, so getting in quick  Allen Hall: and if you haven’t registered, you need to do so today. Go to WMA 2020 six.com. It’s very easy to do. It’s an inexpensive conference and full of great information. And the one thing you wanna register for also when you’re there is the free Lightning workshop. On the Monday, so this, it will be February 16th. It’s a lightning workshop in the afternoon, and then the, the full event begins Tuesday the 17th, and running through Wednesday the 18th. So you have two and a half full days of o and m. Knowledge sharing.  Matthew Stead: Don’t, don’t forget the workshops. There are two sessions of workshops with three, um, parallel sessions. And also don’t forget the chance to catch up with your buddies. So, uh, on the Monday [00:11:00] night, um, after the Lightning Masterclass, there’s, um, an event, you know, food and wine and drinks, et cetera. And then also on the, the Tuesday after the first day, there’s also a chance to catch up  Allen Hall: and you’ll go to Wilma 2026. Com and register. Now.  Speaker: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Pullman on the park for Wind energy o and m Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management and OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at WM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by Wind professionals for wind professionals. Because this industry needs solutions, not speeches,  Allen Hall: the European Commission [00:12:00] has a message for Chinese wind turbine manufacturers. We are watching. Uh, Brussels just opened an in-depth investigation into Goldwind, that’s one of China’s biggest turbine makers. The concern is really straightforward. European regulators believe Goldwin may have received government subsidies that given it unfair advantage. Over European competitors such as Vestus and Siemens, GOMESA, Nordics, and others, grants preferential tax treatment and below market loans are all on the table. And if confirmed, the EU could impose corrective measures under its foreign subsidies regulation, which is a tool designed to keep the playing field level for everyone doing business in Europe. This has led to a number of heated exchanges in the press between China and the eu. China has, uh, said, Hey, eu, calm down. It’s not that big of a deal. We, and we don’t really do this. And if you wanna point [00:13:00] fingers, uh, the EU has given a lot of money and resources to the wind turbine operations in the eu. So it’s a, a, a bunch of back and forth, which is an odd thing at the moment because China is really trying to penetrate the EU market and the UK market for that matter, offshore in particular. Uh, Matthew, when you watch this go on and, and China obviously being the largest player in wind turbines, uh, there is some. Protection isn’t going into this. China has protected themselves from European manufactured turbines for the most part. Uh, it does seem like the EU has a leg to stand on and saying, Hey, if you’re gonna protect your borders, we’re gonna protect our borders. How does this end up? Does this end up with, uh, China making turbines or getting turbines shipped into EU or. There’s just gonna be a prohibition.  Matthew Stead: Uh, actually, I’m a little bit surprised that this hasn’t happened already. [00:14:00] I mean, there’s obviously plenty of European investigations and I’m a little bit surprised it didn’t happen earlier. Um, I, I guess my expectation is that, you know, this will be done and dusted and we can just move, move forward. Um, you know, my, my guesstimate is that it’ll be showing that, you know, this is all fine and, uh, yeah, just continue as per normal. Um, yep. Maybe, maybe critically. Um, I actually think a bit more competition in the industry is a good thing. Um, and so I think the whole, you know, global industry can, can, can benefit.  Allen Hall: And when we’re talking about, uh, the construction of wind farms in the eu, the Chinese manufacturers always come up because they tend to be somewhere between 30 and 40% less expensive than the European counterparts for basically the same turbine. What is the, the real linchpin there, because it does seem like operators and sted uh, evidently had a project going on where they’re looking at Chinese [00:15:00] turbines, but hasn’t made any decisions about it. There’s not a lot of history on the Chinese turbines. You can’t go back and pull, uh, o and m records. You can’t see reliability rates. You can’t see what their insurance rates have been. And Rosie, I think you’ve talked about this quite a bit. It does seem like the manufacturing capability in China is quite good, but then we see things on LinkedIn quite often. We’re uh, there has been some really massive failures there. How is the EU thinking about this? Is it really a competitive issue at this point, or is it a technology issue? What is the real. Uh, linchpin that it, it is, it everybody is trying to get at.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well I think Europe would be crazy to not support their wind industry because China is so big and has, um, you know, so many wind turbine manufacturers now that if Europe doesn’t specifically try to, you know, compete and survive, then I can [00:16:00] imagine no. non-Chinese manufacturers in 10 years time, um, or you know, at least 20, which I think would be a shame because there is a huge, long history of really good engineering, um, in Europe. Yes. Uh, every country supports their manufacturers. China do it in many, maybe most of their export industries. Everybody knows that. Chinese solar panels are subsidized most countries and regions, except that steel is heavily subsidized in, um, in China. And so there are in many countries restrictions on Chinese made wind turbine towers or tariffs on them. Because of that reason, it’s like pretty. It is pretty uncontroversial. Like it’s pretty obvious, right? That um, if you don’t fight, then um, you say, yeah, we’ll accept all these cheap products then, um, you know, because that’s beneficial for our economy to have them cheap. That’s like a short term thing. It’s [00:17:00] a lot easier in a country like Australia where we don’t have competing industries for many of these, um, many of these products, it’s a bit easier to say, yes, we would love cheap solar panels and cheap wind turbines and cheap electric vehicles and cheap batteries. But I mean, even Australia is trying to regain some of some of that, um, manufacturing capability.  Matthew Stead: But Rosie to, I guess Rosie to challenge you there. I mean, it won’t, it to improve the world’s, you know, position if we, you know, continue to drive prices down and drive a bit of innovation.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. If we drive prices down, but not if we drive, um, all competition out of business. And then you’re left with just one country that controls the supply chain for absolutely everything, which they’re already very largely. Do in terms of, you know, like, yeah, batteries, EVs, uh, solar panels, um, heaps of the raw materials, you know, like rare earths and a lot of other critical, um, critical [00:18:00] minerals. But I do think it’s a little bit different for Europe with wind because, um, if that, if that dies, it’s a big chunk of, um, just engineering knowledge that will just. Die with it. I would definitely, especially the countries like Denmark, where it is a, a significant industry for them, I have been a little bit surprised that they haven’t been supporting more the industry through some hard patches. But yeah, let’s, um. It’ll be an interesting next few years. Speaker 6: 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 [00:19:00] 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. Allen Hall: Well, occasionally the wind industry has a recycling problem and down in Texas this has come to a head, uh, an Attorney General Ken Paxton. We as the Attorney General of Texas has sued global fiberglass solutions and affiliated companies for illegally dumping more than 3000 wind turbine blades in Sweetwater, Texas. Uh, the company was hired to break down and recycle the blades many years ago. Instead, it stockpiled them at two unpermitted disposal sites. The attorney General is seeking civil [00:20:00] penalties, complete removal of the waste and full cleanup costs paid to the state. And Yolanda, you have seen this facility, I’ve seen this facility down by Sweetwater. It is not a small site. It is massively large and has been there for a number of years. I, I guess there hasn’t been anybody willing to do it, and Global Fiberglass Solutions hasn’t stepped up to even start from what I understand. To take care of the problem. Is there a happy outcome of this? Does anybody else step into the, the fray and, and try to clean up these 3000 blades? Yolanda Padron: We were talking a little bit about this offline, but Rosie you mentioned there’s so many companies that can recycle in general, right? We know just in Texas, there’s a lot of smaller companies. That could take on at least part of, of what’s going on here. And I think, I mean, it’s, it’s something that is [00:21:00] affecting the people that are living there. It’s not just an eyesore. I mean, it’s just, I mean, nobody wants their home to be just this big dumping ground. It’s like a graveyard for blades. And it’s so sad to see that this is really affecting people and just their, how they view wind in the area because. Texas does really, really well with wind in general and that area gets a lot of money in. It’s very oftentimes rural areas that don’t get a lot of funding that are getting a lot of funding for schools are getting a lot of funding for hospitals are, are making sure that their roads are paved. Just in general, a lot of jobs are coming into town and it’s, it should be a really great win-win and it’s just really sad to know that it’s come to this point after years and years where it just, all of the pros are outweighed by a huge calm that is a [00:22:00] huge dumping site in the middle of people. General homes,  Rosemary Barnes: are they saying that it’s they’re storing the blades or did they just pretend that they recycled them and actually landfill them? What’s the Or? It’s unclear.  Allen Hall: They didn’t landfill them. I mean, in a sense, they didn’t bury them. They’re just sitting on the surface.  Yolanda Padron: Piled up.  Rosemary Barnes: I think a lot of this comes down to what, what does recycling mean? What’s your definition of it? Um, and it, depending on what your definition is, there absolutely are plenty of, um, companies, you know, like all over. And I’m sure that there are many more in Texas than there would be in, um, yeah, in the Australian regions I’ve looked at. But there’ll be companies that. Um, already a shredding waste of, from multiple sources and putting it into products like concrete for non-structural applications like, um, footpaths or sidewalks, stuff like that. Um, asphalt is another one. And then a little bit more high tech. You get, um, plastic products that [00:23:00] again, aren’t super duper structurally, um, demanding. So like, um. Decking materials or outdoor furniture, or even I saw one company who’s using recycled material in, um, rainwater tanks. I just really feel like any decent project manager could actually given enough money, like I’m, I’m not saying it’s an economic thing to do, like it’ll always be cheaper to landfill them, um, than to do something with them. But if you’ve been given money to recycle them enough money. Any decent project manager could make that happen?  Allen Hall: Well, just down the road is ever Point Services. And Rosemary, I don’t know if I’ve introduced you to ever Point Services, Tyler Goodell, Candace Woods, uh, they are recycling blades in a totally different way. They’re, they’re grinding them down, but they’re end use product is totally different than anything you have seen and all, although that is just getting ramped up from what I understand so far. The product they’re delivering has a [00:24:00] decent commercial value. It’s helping out in other industries. So it’s not just getting mixed with asphalt necessarily. Those 3000 turbine blades have value. They really do. And ever point, I think if they were involved, would turn them into something really useful. So there is the opportunity to recycle these blades by grinding them down in different, in different ways. But there are new markets. For this product and I’m, I’m just a little shocked that no one’s really stepped forward to say, Hey, I, I’ll take those blazes, but because it’s in a lawsuit, I assume that’s the problem. No wants to walk into there and say. Take responsibility for this thing that’s been hanging around for several years at this point.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. I think I would disagree when, when you say those blades have value, I would be highly surprised if someone would just take them and make a profit from them. I would expect if I had 3000 blades in my backyard, I would expect to pay somebody to take them off my hands. Um. That should have been covered by the fee that they were paid for this [00:25:00] recycling, right? So if that money’s gone now, then there is gonna be a challenge in, um, doing something with it. Because I just want to you reiterate that like recycling is not the economic thing to do with wind turbine blades. Now it’s not even the best thing to do in terms of an energy or environmental or climate change, um, consideration. But if you are sure that you don’t want, um, to deal with the physicality of 3000 blades, um, then. You know, you and you’re prepared to pay to get rid of them, then there are definitely things that you can do.  Matthew Stead: Uh, I think this makes me like super angry because really if we look at it more from a social perspective, um, this is. These pictures are shown all over the world, and whenever I talk to someone and say, Hey, yeah, I’m in the wind industry, they say, oh yeah, what about all those blades in Yeah, and the, the stockpile, blah, blah, blah. So really this, this incident has really screwed up the whole global industry. So it may have destroyed parts of Texas, but it’s also destroyed part of [00:26:00] the global industry. Rosemary Barnes: I agree and it’s, it’s crazy because wind turbine blade waste is five to 10% of global composite waste. So the boats and cars and airplanes, um, and other composites are. They’re not piled up in a recognizable form. And so nobody is absolutely outraged that people are, you know, um, disposing of fiberglass boats every year. Um, so yeah, I mean, that, that, that es me too. I have, um, I’ve spent a long time being annoyed about that fact, and I’ve kind of come around to the, the fact that universally people absolutely hate. Wind turbine blades to be wasted and it just needs to be solved. For that reason, it’s not, it doesn’t need to be solved because of the economics. It doesn’t need to be solved because of the environment. It doesn’t need to be solved because of climate change, but it does really need to be solved because of the social perception.  Allen Hall: Well, as North American Wind Farms age, the companies that keep them running. Keep getting bigger. [00:27:00] And Mohan Wind Service, which if you haven’t worked with them, is a Danish turbine service provider. Uh, and they’ve acquired the operating assets of Canada based AC 8 83. And our friends at AC 8 83 have been evidently working behind the scenes to make that deal go through, which is. Awesome. Actually, uh, the deal gives Mulan a local platform for blade repair and turbine services across Canada and the United States, uh, with more than three. Thousand certified technicians in over 35 countries. Muhan says it is confident the long-term growth in North American market will, uh, continue to prosper. So Muhan come in and saying to AC 83 and others, uh, that they’re, uh, gonna be a, a real powerhouse in terms of a service provider in Canada and the United States and acquiring AC 83 is, is one of the good moves. And we know Lars Benson, [00:28:00] who’s run that business, and Yannick Benson who operates that business today. This is a big deal for both of them and the company.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I mean, uh, Lars is a great guy and I, I think this is wonderful that you get more economies of scale by, you know, these companies growing and it has to be, has to be great for the industry. O obviously, you know, it’s a good thing for, for Lars and, um, Yanick. Um, but yeah. Yeah. Good on them for, for doing this. And you, we need more companies that are larger and able to operate across different industries. I know the seasonality might, might play into it. I don’t know. Maybe not. Um, but, and the more that companies can work across different regions, the better. Allen Hall: Well, it just gives a C 83 a lot of operating power. So as a sort of a small, medium sized business, that’s one of the problems that you try to scale is just a lot of detail. Human resources, all the legal aspects, and. Uh, international travel people coming back and forth all the time. It is just a lot to operate. Muhan gives them all that infrastructure support. So, [00:29:00] uh, the brain powers that lie at AC 8 83 to do great work can do that work. And they have the muhan to come underneath and provide the support and the, the financial stability. Matthew, as you point out, the season is pretty short up in Canada, uh, to make this thing go. So this is really great news and we’re, I think we’re gonna see more. Of this type of structure happen where the companies that have grown and have shown value to the wind industry, regardless of where they’re located at, are gonna become prized possessions and, and larger companies are gonna want to come in and, and acquire them to expand their portfolio at the same time. And there’s value there. I, I think a lot of ISPs around the world have shown themselves to be profitable, even in some really tough economic times. Uh, they’ve had. Done a good job. And it does seem like the industry is rewarding. Those companies that have put the effort in and have shown themselves to be the professionals that AC 83 is. So this, [00:30:00] this is a really great development. And do we see this happening, uh, through 26 and 27? Because I think, I think that’s where the industry’s headed. But I talk to a lot of my counterparts who say, oh, there is no. Everything’s gloomy and doomy, and none of this is gonna happen, and these companies are gonna just fade away. Where do you think this is headed at Matthew?  Matthew Stead: I think, um, we, we’ve done a little bit of work and we’ve been looking at the industry and I think, uh, if you compare it to, you know, construction or, you know, automotive or whatever, I, I think the, there is a, a strong opportunity for the industry to have some consolidation amongst companies. So I think, um, you know, the industry is still a bit of a baby. You know, maybe whatever, 30 years there is still opportunity, um, for consolidation. You know, much like a few of the other more mature industries, like I said. Um, so I, I, I think there’ll be more of this, um, going on the next few years.  Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s [00:31:00] 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 Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen’s optimism on European auction reforms and bilateral CfDs, Australia’s Warradarge wind farm expansion paired with major grid upgrades, New Zealand’s wind-to-hydrogen project, South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean building a new installation vessel, and Siemens Energy’s debate over spinning off Gamesa. 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 Henrik Andersen has seen a lot of failed auctions. The Vestas chief executive watched subsidy-free tenders collapse in Germany… France… the Netherlands… even his home country of Denmark. Developers wouldn’t bid. The risk was too high. But this week… Andersen stood before investors with different news. The UK’s AR7 delivered eight point four gigawatts. A record. Eight projects approved… including two floaters. Denmark and eight North Sea nations committed to one hundred gigawatts. And Germany’s onshore auction pipeline… is finally moving. Andersen sent thanks directly to Ed Miliband… Britain’s Energy Minister. “Now it’s starting to work.” … The difference? Bilateral CfDs. After watching zero-subsidy models fail across Europe… governments returned to revenue stabilization. Strike prices developers can actually finance. Andersen believes the industry should learn from these auction designs… before repeating old mistakes. Steen Brødbæk at Semco Maritime agrees. Projects are maturing. Suppliers… can finally earn a living. … Vestas identified three priority markets in their annual report. Germany for onshore. North America. And Australia. The drivers? Energy security concerns. Data center load growth. And the AI electricity surge that every grid operator is scrambling to model. As for Chinese OEMs entering European tenders? Andersen would be surprised. “You should never be surprised by anything these days,” he said. “But in this case… I would actually be surprised.” … Down in Western Australia… Warradarge is proving his point about mature markets. Four of thirty additional turbines are now vertical. When the expansion completes… eighty-one machines will generate two hundred eighty-three megawatts. The state’s largest wind farm. Owned by Bright Energy Investments… a joint venture between Synergy and Potentia. One hundred twenty workers at peak construction. And critically… the state is building transmission to match. Clean Energy Link North… the largest grid upgrade in Western Australia in more than a decade… will unlock capacity in the South West Interconnected System. Generation AND grid… moving together. That’s how you hit a 2030 coal exit. … Meanwhile in Taranaki… New Zealand… Vestas secured a twenty-six megawatt order with a twenty-year service agreement. Hiringa Energy is integrating wind with green hydrogen production at scale… serving transport… industry… and agriculture. Turbine delivery begins Q1 this year. Commissioning… Q2 twenty-twenty-seven. One of New Zealand’s first large-scale wind-to-hydrogen projects. The electrolyzer economics are finally penciling. … But you can’t install offshore turbines without vessels. And South Korea just solved a bottleneck. Hanwha Ocean won a three hundred eighty-five million pound contract… to build a WTIV capable of fifteen-megawatt class installations. Korea’s first vessel at that scale. Delivery… early twenty-twenty-eight. Korea expects twenty-five gigawatts of offshore capacity by 2035. They’re not waiting for European vessel contractors. They’re building their own supply chain. Hanwha has now delivered four WTIVs globally. … Not everyone is celebrating. At Siemens Energy… activist investor Ananym Capital is pushing to spin off Siemens Gamesa. CEO Christian Bruch calls the idea reasonable. But timing matters. The wind division must stabilize first. Bruch believes offshore wind can follow the same recovery path as the grid business… which went from crisis… to profitability. Turnaround before transaction. … So, last week we had: CfDs reviving European auctions. Australia building generation AND transmission together. New Zealand coupling wind with hydrogen. Korea investing in installation vessel capacity. And Siemens… working to fix its turbine business before any restructuring. Different geographies. Same lesson. The projects that succeed… are the ones where policy… supply chain… and capital… finally align. … And that is the state of the wind industry for the 9th of February 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime wind energy podcast.

Morten Handberg, Uptime’s blade whisperer, returns to the show to tackle leading edge erosion. He covers the fatigue physics behind rain erosion, why OEMs offer no warranty coverage for it, how operators should time repairs before costs multiply, and what LEP solutions are working in the field. 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: Morten, welcome back to the program.  Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen. It’s fantastic to be back on on, on the podcast. Really excited to, uh, record an episode on Erosion Today.  Allen Hall: Wow. Leading as erosion is such a huge worldwide issue and. Operators are having big problems with it right now. It does seem like there’s not a lot of information readily available to operators to understand the issue quite yet. Morten Handberg: Well, it, I mean, it’s something that we’ve been looking at for the, at least the past 10 years. We started looking at it when I was in in DONG or as it back in 2014. But we also saw it very early on because we were in offshore environment, much harsher. Uh, rain erosion conditions, and you were also starting to change the way that the, the, uh, the coatings [00:01:00]that were applied. So there was sort of a, there was several things at play that meant that we saw very early on, early on offshore.  Allen Hall: Well, let’s get to the basics of rain erosion and leading edge erosion. What is the physics behind it? What, what happens to the leading edges of these blades as rain? Impacts them.  Morten Handberg: Well, you should see it as um, millions of, of small fat, uh, small fatigue loads on the coating because each raindrop, it creates a small impact load on the blade. It creates a rail wave that sort of creates a. Uh, share, share loads out on, uh, into the coating that is then absorbed by the coating, by the filler and and so on. And the more absorbent that your substrate is, the longer survivability you, you’re leading into coating will have, uh, if you have manufacturing defects in the coating, that will accelerate the erosion. But it is a fatigue effect that is then accelerated or decelerate depending on, uh, local blade conditions.  Allen Hall: Yeah, what I’ve seen in the [00:02:00] field is the blades look great. Nothing. Nothing. You don’t see anything happening and then all of a sudden it’s like instantaneous, like a fatigue failure.  Morten Handberg: I mean, a lot of things is going on. Uh, actually you start out by, uh, by having it’s, they call, it’s called mass loss and it’s actually where the erosion is starting to change the material characteristics of the coating. And that is just the first step. So you don’t see that. You can measure it in a, um, in the laboratory setting, you can actually see that there is a changing in, in the coating condition. You just can’t see it yet. Then you start to get pitting, and that is these very, very, very small, almost microscopic chippings of the coating. They will then accelerate and then you start to actually see the first sign, which is like a slight, a braided surface. It’s like someone took a, a fine grain sandpaper across the surface of the plate, but you only see it on the leading edge. If it’s erosion, it’s only on the center of the leading edge. That’s very important. If you see it on the sides and further down, then it’s, it’s [00:03:00] something else. Uh, it’s not pure erosion, but then you see this fine grain. Then as that progresses, you see more and more and more chipping, more and more degradation across the, the leading edge of the blade. Worse in the tip of it, less so into the inner third of the blade, but it is a gradual process that you see over the leading edge. Finally, you’ll then start to see the, uh, the coating coming off and you’ll start to see exposed laminate. Um, and from there it can, it can accelerate or exposed filler or laminate. From there, it can accelerate because. Neither of those are actually designed to handle any kind of erosion.  Allen Hall: What are the critical variables in relation to leading edge erosion? Which variables seem to matter most? Is it raindrop size? Is it tip speed? What factors should we be looking for?  Morten Handberg: Tip speeds and rain intensity. Uh, obviously droplet size have an impact, but. But what is an operator you can actually see and monitor for is, well, you know, your tip speed of the blade that matters. Uh, but it is really the rain intensity. So if you have [00:04:00] sort of a, an average drizzle over the year, that’s a much better condition than if you have like, you know, showers in, in, in, in a, in a few hour sessions at certain points of time. Because then, then it becomes an aggressive erosion. It’s not, it’s, you don’t, you get much higher up on the. On the, on the fatigue curve, uh, then if it’s just an average baseline load over long periods of time,  Allen Hall: yeah, that fatigue curve really does matter. And today we’re looking at what generally is called VN curves, velocity versus number of impacts, and. The rain erosion facilities I’ve seen, I’ve been able to, to give some parameters to, uh, provide a baseline or a comparison between different kinds of coatings. Is is that the, the standard as everybody sees it today, the sort of the VN curve  Morten Handberg: that is what’s been developed by this scientific, uh, community, these VN curve, that that gives you some level of measure. I would still say, you know, from what we can do in a rain erosion tester to what is then actually going on [00:05:00] the field is still very two very, very, very different things you can say. If you can survive a thousand hours in a rain erosion tester, then it’s the similar in the field that doesn’t really work like that. But there are comparisons so you can do, you know, uh, a relationship study, uh, between them. And you can use the VN curves to determine the ERO erosion aggressiveness. Field. We did that in the bait defect forecasting that we did in wind pile up with DCU back in 2019, uh, where we actually looked at rain erosion across Europe. Uh, and then the, uh, the actual erosion propagation that we saw within these different sites, both for offshore and for onshore, where we actually mapped out, um, across Europe, you know, which areas will be the most erosion prone. And then utilize that to, to then mo then, then to determine what would be the red, the best maintenance strategy and also, uh, erosion, uh, LEP, uh, solution for that wind farm. Allen Hall: Oh, okay. Uh, is it raindrop size then, or just [00:06:00] quantity of raindrops? Obviously drizzle has smaller impact. There’s less mass there, but larger raindrops, more frequent rain.  Morten Handberg: If you have showers, it tends to be larger drops. Right. So, so they kind of follow each other. And if it’s more of a drizzle. It will be smaller raindrops. They typically follow each other. You know, if you’ve been outside in a rainstorm before we just showered, you would have sense that these are, these are much higher, you know, raindrop sizes. So, so there is typically an a relation between raindrop size and then showers versus a drizzle. It’s typically more fine, fine grain rain drops. Allen Hall: And what impact does dirt and debris mixed in with the rain, uh, affect leading edge erosion? I know a lot of, there’s a lot of concern. And farm fields and places where there’s a lot of plowing and turnover of the dirt that it, it, it does seem like there’s more leading edge erosion and I, I think there’s a little bit of an unknown about it, uh, just because they see leading edge [00:07:00]erosion close to these areas where there’s a lot of tilling going on. Is it just dirt impact worth a blade or is it a combination of dirt plus rain and, and those two come combining together to make a worse case. Uh, damage scenario.  Morten Handberg: Technically it would be slightly worse than if it were, if there is some soil or, or sand, or sand contamination in the raindrops. But I mean, logically rain typically, you know, comes down from the sky. It doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t mix in with the dirt then, you know, it would be more if you have dirt on the blades. It’s typically during a dry season where it would get mixed up and then blown onto the blades. Honestly, I don’t think that that is really what’s having an impact, because having contamination in the blade is not something that is, that would drive erosion. I think that that is, I think that is, that is a misunderstanding. We do see sand, sand erosion in some part of the world where you have massive, uh, sand, uh, how do you say, sandstorms [00:08:00] coming through and, and that actually creates an, an abrasive wear on the plate. It looks different from rain erosion because it’s two different mechanisms. Uh, where the sand is actually like a sandpaper just blowing across the surface, so you can see that. Whereas rain is more of this fatigue effect. So I think in the, theoretically if you had soil mixed in with rain, yes that could have an impact because you would have an a, a hardened particle. But I do, I don’t think it’s what’s driving erosion, to be honest. Allen Hall: Okay, so then there’s really two different kinds of failure modes. A particle erosion, which is more of an abrasive erosion, which I would assume be a maybe a little wider, spread along the leading edge of the blade versus a fatigue impact from a raindrop collision. They just look different, right?  Morten Handberg: Yeah, so, so sand erosion you could have spreading across a larger surface of the blade because it, because it doesn’t bounce off in the same way that a raindrop would, you know, because that’s more of an impact angle and the load that it’s applying. So if it comes in at a, at a st [00:09:00] at a, um, at the, at the, at a, at a steep angle, then it would just bounce off because the amount of load that it’s impacting on would be very limited. So that’s also why we don’t really see it on the, um, uh, outside of the leading edge. Whereas sand erosion would have a, would, would have a different effect because even at a steep angle, it would still, you know, create some kind of wear because of the hardened particle and the effect of that. Allen Hall: Okay. So let’s talk about incubation period, because I’ve seen a lot of literature. Talking about incubation period and, and what that means. What does incubation period mean on a leading edge coating?  Morten Handberg: So that is, that, that is from when you start having the first impacts until you get the, the, the change in structure. So when you get to the mass loss or first pitting, that would be your incubation period, because that is from when it starts until you can see the actual effects. Would say that, that that is what would be defined as the incubation period of leading into erosion.  Allen Hall: Okay. So you wanna then maximize the incubation period where the coating still looks mostly pristine [00:10:00] once incubation period is over and you get into the coating. Are there different rates at which the coatings will deteriorate, or are they all pretty much deteriorating at roughly the same rate?  Morten Handberg: I mean, for the really high durability. We don’t really have good enough data to say anything about whether the, um, the, the period after the incubation period, whether that would actually, how that would work in the field. We don’t really know that yet. I would say, because the, um, some of the, the shell solutions, some of the high end polyurethane coatings, if they fail, typically it’s because of workmanship. Or adhesion issues. It’s has so far not really been tied in directly in, into leading edge erosion. Uh, the ones that I’ve seen, so typically, and, and, you know, all of these high-end coatings, they’re just, they, they have shown, you know, some of them you couldn’t even wear down in a rain erosion tester. Um, so, so we don’t really know. Um, how, [00:11:00] how the, how the shells, they would, they, they, they, they, how they would react over the five, 10 year period because we haven’t seen that much yet. And what we have seen have been more of a mechanical failure in, in the bonding  Allen Hall: that, I guess that makes sense. Then operators are still buying wind turbine blades without any leading edge coating at all. It is basically a painted piece of fiberglass structure. Is that still advisable today or are there places where you could just get away with that? Or is that just not reality because of the tip speeds?  Morten Handberg: For the larger, I would say anything beyond two megawatt turbines, you should have leading edge protection because you’re at tip speeds where, you know, any kind of rain would create erosion within, um, within the lifetime of the late. That is just a fact. Um, so. I don’t, I don’t see any real areas of the world where that would not apply. And if it, if you are in a place where it’s really dry, then it would typically also mean that then you would have sand erosion. Is that, that, [00:12:00] that would, I would expect that it would be one of the two. You wouldn’t be in an area where it couldn’t get any kind of erosion to the blades. Um, so either you should have either a very tough gel code, um, coating, or you should have have an LEP per urethane based coating. On the blades,  Allen Hall: well do the manufacturers provide data on the leading edge offerings, on the coatings, or even the harder plastic shells or shields. Does, is there any information? If I’m an operator and I’m buying a a three megawatt turbine that comes along with the blade that says, this is the li, this is the estimated lifetime, is that a thing right now? Or is it just We’re putting on a coating and we are hoping for the best?  Morten Handberg: The OEMs, as far as I, I haven’t seen any. Any contract or agreement where today, where erosion is not considered a wear and tear issue, there is simply no, no coverage for it. So if you buy a turbine and there’s any kind of leading [00:13:00] edge erosion outside of the end of warranty period, it’s your your problem. There is no guarantee on that.  Allen Hall: So the operator is at risk,  Morten Handberg: well, they’re at risk and if they don’t take matters into their own hands and make decisions on their own. But they would still be locked in because within the warranty period, they will still be tied to the OEM and the decisions that they make. And if they have a service agreement with the OEM, then they would also be tied in with what the OEM provides.  Allen Hall: So that does place a lot of the burden on the owner operator to understand the effects of rate erosion, particularly at the at a new site if they don’t have any history on it at all. To then try to identify a, a coating or some sort of protecting device to prevent leading edge erosion. ’cause at the end of the day, it does sound like the operator owner is gonna be responsible for fixing it and keeping the blades, uh, in some aerodynamic shape. That that’s, that’s a big hurdle for a lot of operators. Morten Handberg: The problem is that if you have a service [00:14:00]contract, but you are depending on the OEM, providing that service. Then you have to be really certain that any leading edge erosion or anywhere on the leading edge is then covered by that contract. Otherwise, you’re in, you’re in a really bad, you’re in a really risky situation because you can’t do anything on your own. Because if you’re a service contract, but you’re beholden to whatever the, your service provider is, is, is agreeing to providing to you. So you might not get the best service.  Allen Hall: And what are the risks of this? Uh, obviously there can be some structural issues. Particularly around the tips of the blaze, but that’s also power loss. What are typical power loss numbers?  Morten Handberg: Well, there is a theoretically theoretical power loss to it, but for any modern turbine, the blade, the, the turbine would simply regulate itself out of any leading erosion loss. So, so the blades would just change their behavior that the turbine would just change, its its operation [00:15:00]conditions so that it would achieve the same lift to the blade. So. Uh, any study that we have done or been a part of, uh, even, you know, comparing blades that were repaired, blades that were cleaned, blades that were, uh, left eroded, and then operating the, uh, the deviation was within half, half percent and that was within the margin of error. We couldn’t read, we couldn’t see it even for really, you know, really er road blades. Of course there is different between turbines. Some turbines, they, they could show it, but I haven’t seen any data that suggests that erosion actually leads to a lot of power loss. There is a theoretical loss because there is a loss in aerodynamic performance, but because blades today they’re pitch controlled, then you can, you can regulate yourself out of that. Some of that, uh, power laws,  Allen Hall: so the control laws in the turbine. Would know what the wind speeds are and what their power output should be, and it’ll adjust the [00:16:00]pitch of each of the blades sort of independently to, to drive the power output.  Morten Handberg: Typically, erosion is a uniform issue, so what happens on one blade happens on three. So it’s rare to see that one blade is just completely erod in the two other they look fine. That’s really rare unless you start, you know, doing uh, abnormal repairs on them. Then you might get something. But even then, I mean, we’re not talking, you know, 10 per 10 degrees in, in variation. You know, it’s not, it’s not anything like that. It’s very small changes. And if they would do a lot of weird DA, you know, uh, different angles, you would get instant imbalance and then, you know, you would get scatter alarm. So, so you would see that quite fast.  Allen Hall: Well, let me, let me just understand this just a little bit. So what the control logs would do would increase the pitch angle of the blaze, be a little more aggressive. On power production to bring the power production up. If leading edge erosion was knocking it down a percentage point or two, does that have a consequence? Are like when you [00:17:00] start pitching the blades at slightly different angles, does that increase the area where rain erosion will occur? Is like, are you just. Keep chasing this dragon by doing that,  Morten Handberg: you could change the area a little bit, but it’s not, it’s not something that, that changes the erosion, uh, that the erosion zone, that that much. It’s very minimal. Um, and one, one of the, another, another reason why, why you might see it might, might not see it as much is because voltage generator panels is widely used in the industry today. And, and Vortex panel, they are. Uh, negating some of the negative effect from, uh, leading erosion. So that also adds to the effect that there, that the aerodynamic effect of leading erosion is limited, uh, compared to what we’ve seen in the past.  Allen Hall: Okay. So there’s a couple manufacturers that do use vortex generators around the tip, around the leading edge erosion areas right outta the factory, and then there’s other OEMs that don’t do that at all. Is, is there a benefit to [00:18:00] having the VGs. Right out of the factory. Is that, is that just to, uh, as you think about the power output of the generator over time, like, this is gonna gimme a longer time before I have to do anything. Is, is in terms of repair,  Morten Handberg: it does help you if you have contamination of the blade. It does help you if you have surface defects off the blade. That, that any, uh, any change to the air, to the aerodynamics is, is reduced and that’s really important if you have an optimized blade. Then the negative effect of leading erosion might get, uh, you know, might, might, might get, might get affected. But there are, there are still reasons why I do want to do leading erosion repairs. You should do that anyway, even if you can’t see it on your power curve or not, because if you wait too long, you’ll start to get structural damages to the blade. As we talked about last time. It’s not that leading edge erosion will turn into a critical damage right away, but if you need, if you go into structural erosion, then the, then the cost of damage. The cost of repairing the damage will multiply. Uh, [00:19:00] and at, at a certain point, you know, you will get a re structure. It might not make the blade, you know, uh, cost a, a condition where the blade could collapse or you’re at risk, but you do get a weakened blade that is then susceptible to damage from other sources. Like if you have a lighting strike damage or you have a heavy storm or something like that, then that can accelerate the damage, turning it into a critical damage. So you should still keep your leading edge in, in shape. If you want to do to, to minimize your cost, you should still repair it before it becomes structural. Allen Hall: Okay. So the blades I have seen where they actually have holes in the leading edge, that’s a big problem just because of contamination and water ingress and yeah, lightning obviously be another one. So that should be repaired immediately. Is is that the, do we treat it like a cat four or cat five when that happens? Or how, what? How are we thinking about that?  Morten Handberg: Maximum cat, cat four, even, even in those circumstances because it is a, it is a severe issue, but it’s not critical on, on its own. So I would not treat it as a cat five where you need to stop [00:20:00] the turbine, stuff like that. Of course, you do want, you don’t want to say, okay, let’s wait on, let’s wait for a year or so before we repair it. You know, do plan, you know, with some urgency to get it fixed, but it’s not something where you need to, you know, stubble works and then get that done. You know, the blade can survive it for, for a period of time, but you’re just. Susceptible to other risks, I would say.  Allen Hall: Alright. So in in today’s world, there’s a lot of options, uh, to select from in terms of leading edge protection. What are some of the leading candidates? What, what are some of the things that are actually working out in the field?  Morten Handberg: What we typically do, uh, when we’re looking at leading edge erosion, we’re looking at the, the raw data from the wind farm. Seeing how, how bad is it and how long have the wind farm been operated without being repaired? So we get a sense of the aggressiveness of the erosion and. Um, if we have reliable weather data, we can also do some modeling to see, okay, what is the, what is the, the, uh, environmental conditions? Also, just to get a sense, is this [00:21:00] material driven fatigue or is it actually rain erosion driven fatigue? Because if the, if the coating quality was not, was not very good, if the former lead leading edge, it was not applied very, very, very good, then, you know, you still get erosion really fast. You get surface defects that, uh, that trigger erosion. So that’s very important to, to, to have a look at. But then when we’ve established that, then we look at, okay, where do we have the, the, the, uh, the structural erosion zone? So that means in what, in what part of the BA would you be at risk of getting structural damage? That’s the part where that you want to protect at all costs. And in that, I would look at either shell solution or high duty, um, put urethane coating something that has a a long durability. But then you also need to look at, depending on whether you want to go for coating or shell, you need to look at what is your environmental condition, what is your, you know, yeah. Your environmental conditions, because you also wanna apply it without it falling off again. Uh, and if you have issues with [00:22:00] high humidity, high temperatures, uh, then a lot of the coatings will be really difficult to process or, you know, to, to. Uh, to handle in the field. And, you know, and if you don’t, if you don’t get that right, then you just might end up with a lot of peeling coating or uh, peeling shells. Um, so it’s very important to understand what is your environmental conditions that you’re trying to do repairs in. And that’s also why we try not to recommend, uh, these shell repairs over the entire, out a third of the blade. Because you’re, you’re just putting up a lot of risk for, for, uh, for detaching blades if you put on too high, um, uh, how do you say, high height, sea of solutions. Allen Hall: Yeah. So I, I guess it does matter how much of the blade you’re gonna cover. Is there a general rule of thumb? Like are we covering the outer 10%, outer 20%? What is the. What is that rule of thumb?  Morten Handberg: Typically, you know, you, you get a long way by somewhere between the outer four to six meters. Um, so that would [00:23:00]probably equivalate to the, out of the outer third. That would likely be something between the outer 10 to 15 to 20% at max. Um, but, but it is, I, I mean, instead of looking at a percentage, I usually look at, okay, what can we see from the data? What does that tell us? And we can see that from the progression of the erosion. Because you can clearly see if you have turbines that’s been operating, what part of the blade has already, you know, exposed laminate. And where do you only have a light abrasion where you only have a light abrasion, you can just continue with, and with the, with, with the general coating, you don’t need to go for any high tier solutions. And that’s also just to avoid applying, applying something that is difficult to process because it will just end up, that it falls off and then you’re worse off than, than before actually. Allen Hall: Right. It’s about mitigating risk at some level. On a repair,  Morten Handberg: reducing repair cost. Um, so, so if you, if you look at your, your conditions of your blades and then select a solution that is, that is right for that part of [00:24:00] the blade  Allen Hall: is the best way to repair a blade up tower or down tower is what is the easiest, I guess what’s easier, I know I’ve heard conflicting reports about it. A lot of people today, operators today are saying we can do it up tower. It’s, it’s pretty good that way. Then I hear other operators say, no, no, no, no, no. The quality is much better if the blade is down on the ground. What’s the recommendation there?  Morten Handberg: In general, it can be done up tower. Um, it is correct if you do a down tower, the quality is better, but that, that, that means you need to have a crane on standby to swap out blades. Uh, and you should have a spare set of blades that you can swap with. Maybe that can work. Um. But I would say in general, the, your, your, your, your cheaper solution and your more, you know, you know, uh, would be to do up tower. And if, and again, if you do your, your, your homework right and, and selecting the right, uh, products for, for your [00:25:00] local environments, then you can do up tower then leading it, erosion. Not something that you need to, you should not need to consider during a down tower. Unless you are offshore in an environment where you only have, uh, 10 repair days per year, then you might want to look at something else. But again, if we talk for offs for onshore, I would, I would always go for up, up tower. I, I don’t, I don’t really see the need for, for, for taking the blades down.  Allen Hall: So what is the optimum point in a blaze life where a leading edge coating should be applied? Like, do you let it get to the point where you’re doing structural repairs or. When you start to see that first little bit of chipping, do you start taking care of it then there I, there’s gotta be a sweet spot somewhere in the middle there. Where is that?  Morten Handberg: There is sweet spot. So the sweet spot is as soon as you have exposed laminate, because from exposed laminate, uh, the repair cost is exactly the same as if it was just, you know, uh, a light abrasion of the coating because the, the, the time to, to, um, prepare the [00:26:00] surface to apply the coating is exactly the same. From, you know, from, from, from light surface damage to exposed laminate. That is the same, that is the same repair cost. But as soon as you have a structural damage to your blade, then you have to do a structural repair first, and then you’re, you’re multiplying the repair time and your repair cost. So that is the right point in time. The way to, to determine when that is, is to do inspections, annual inspections, if you do 10% of your wind farm per year. Then you would know why, what, how the rest of your wind farm looks like because erosion is very uniform across the wind farm. Maybe there are some small deviations, but if you do a subset, uh, then, then you would have a good basic understanding about what erosion is. You don’t need to do a full sweep of the, of the wind farm to know, okay, now is my right time to do repairs.  Allen Hall: Okay, so you’re gonna have a, a couple years notice then if you’re doing drone inspections. Hopefully you put, as you put your blades up, doing a drone inspection maybe on the ground so you [00:27:00] have a idea of what you have, and then year one, year two, year three, you’re tracking that progression across at least a sampling of the wind farm. And then, then you can almost project out then like year five, I need to be doing something and I need to be putting it into my budget.  Morten Handberg: When you start to see the first minor areas of exposed laminate. Then the year after, typically then you would have a larger swat of, of laminated exposure, still not as structural. So when you start to see that, then I would say, okay, next year for next year’s budget, we should really do repairs. It’s difficult when you just direct the wind farm, maybe have the first year of inspection. It’s difficult to get any, any kind of, you know, real sense of what is the, you know, what is the where of scale that we have. You can be off by a factor of two or three if, you know, if, um, so I would, I would give it a few years and then, uh, then, then, then see how things progresses before starting to make, uh, plans for repairs. If you [00:28:00] don’t have any leading edge erosion protection installed from the start. I would say plan, at least for year, year five, you should expect that you need to go out, do and do a repair. Again, I don’t have a crystal ball for every, you know, that’s good enough to predict for every wind farm in the world, but that would be a good starting point. Maybe it’s year three, maybe it’s year seven, depending on your local conditions. That is, but then at least you know that you need to do something. Allen Hall: Well, there’s been a number of robotic, uh, applications of rain erosion coatings. Over the last two, three years. So now you see several different, uh, repair companies offering that. What does the robotic approach have to its advantage versus technicians on ropes?  Morten Handberg: Obviously robots, they don’t, they don’t, uh, get affected by how good the morning coffee was, what the latest conversation with the wife was, or how many hours of sleep it got. There is something to, with the grown operator, uh, you know how good they are. But it’s more about how well, uh, [00:29:00] adjusted the, the controls of the, of the, the robot or the drone is in its application. So in principle, the drone should be a lot better, uh, because you can, it will do it the right, the same way every single time. What it should at least. So in, so in principle, if you, you, you, when we get there, then the leading it then, then the robot should be, should outmatch any repair technician in, in the world. Because repair technician, they’re really good. They’re exceptionally good at what they do. The, the, the far majority of them, but they’re, they’re still people. So they, you know, anyone, you know, maybe standing is not a hundred percent each time, maybe mixing of. Um, of materials and they’re much better at it than I am. So no question there. But again, that’s just real reality. So I would say that the, the, the draw, the robots, they should, uh, they should get to a point at some, at some point to that they will, they will be the preferable choice, especially for this kind of, this kind of repair. Allen Hall: What should [00:30:00] operators be budgeting to apply a coating? Say they’re, you know, they got a new wind farm. It’s just getting started. They’re gonna be five years out before they’re gonna do something, but they, they probably need to start budgeting it now and, and have a scope on it. ’cause it’s gonna be a capital campaign probably. How much per turbine should they be setting aside?  Morten Handberg: I would just, as a baseline, at least set aside 20,000 per per blade  Allen Hall: dollars or a Corona  Morten Handberg: dollars.  Allen Hall: Really. Okay.  Morten Handberg: Assuming that you actually need to do a repair campaign, I would say you’re probably ending up in that region again. I can be wrong with by a factor of, you know, uh, by several factors. Uh, but, um, but I would say that as a starting point, we don’t know anything else. I would just say, okay, this should be the, the, the, the budget I would go for, maybe it’ll be only 10 because we have a lesser campaign. Maybe it will be twice because we have severe damages. So we need just to, to, to source a, um, a high end, uh, LEP solution. Um, so, so [00:31:00] again, that would just be my starting point, Alan. It’s not something that I can say with accuracy that will go for every single plate, but it would be a good starting point.  Allen Hall: Well, you need to have a number and you need to be, get in the budget ahead of time. And so it, it’s a lot easier to do upfront than waiting till the last minute always. Uh, and it is the future of leading edge erosion and protection products. Is it changing? Do you see, uh, the industry? Winning this battle against erosion.  Morten Handberg: I see it winning it because we do have the technology, we do have the solutions. So I would say it’s compared to when we started looking at it in 14, where, you know, we had a lot of erosion issues, it seems a lot more manageable. Now, of course, if you’re a, if you’re a new owner, you just bought a wind farm and you’re seeing this for this first time, it might not be as manageable. But as an, as an industry, I would say we’re quite far. In understanding erosion, what, how it develops and what kind of solutions that that can actually, uh, withstand it. We’re still not there in [00:32:00] terms of, uh, quality in, in repairs, but that’s, um, but, but, uh, I, I think technology wise, we are, we are in a really good, good place.  Allen Hall: All the work that has been done by DTU and RD test systems for creating a rain erosion test. Facility and there’s several of those, more than a dozen spread around the world at this point. Those are really making a huge impact on how quickly the problem is being solved. Right? Because you’re just bringing together the, the, the brain power of the industry to work on this problem.  Morten Handberg: They have the annual erosion Symposium and that has been really a driving force and also really put DTU on the map in terms of, uh, leading edge erosion, understanding that, and they’re also trying to tie, tie it in with lightning, uh, because, uh. If you have a ro, if you have erosion, that changes your aerodynamics. That in fact changes how your LPS system works. So, so there is also some, some risks in that, uh, that is worth considering when, when, when discussing [00:33:00]repairs. But I think these of you, they’ve done a tremendous amount of work and r and d system have done a lot of good work in terms of standardizing the way that we do rain erosion testing, whether or not we can then say with a hundred uncertainty that this, uh, this test will then match with. With, um, how say local environment conditions, that’s fine, but we can at least test a DP systems on, on the same scale and then use that to, to, to look at, well how, how good would they then ferry in in the, um, out out in the real world.  Allen Hall: Yeah, there’s a lot too leading edge erosion and there’s more to come and everybody needs to be paying attention to it. ’cause it, it is gonna be a cost during the lifetime of your wind turbines and you just need to be prepared for it. Mor how do people get ahold of you to learn more about leading edge erosion and, and some of the approaches to, to control it?  Morten Handberg: Well, you can always re reach me, uh, on my email, meh, at wind power.com or on my LinkedIn, uh, page and I would strongly advise, you know, reach out if you have any concerns regarding erosion or you need support with, um, [00:34:00] uh, with blade maintenance strategies, uh, we can definitely help you out with that. Or any blade related topic that you might be concerned about for your old local wind farm.  Allen Hall: Yes. If you have any blade questions or leading edge erosion questions, reach out to Morton. He’s easy to get ahold of. Thank you so much for being back on the podcast. We love having you. It  Morten Handberg: was fantastic being here. Cheers. A.

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda discuss the North Sea Summit where nine European countries committed to 100 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity and the massive economic impact that comes with it. They also break down the federal court ruling that allows Vineyard Wind to resume construction with a tight 45-day window before installation vessels leave. Plus GE Vernova’s Q4 results show $600 million in wind losses and Wind Power Lab CEO Lene Helstern raises concerns about blade quality across the industry. 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, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum, and Yolanda Padron.  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alln Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxum. Rosemary Barnes is snorkeling at the Greek Barrier Reef this week, uh, big news out of Northern Europe. Uh, the Northeast Summit, which happened in Hamburg, uh, about a week or so ago, nine European countries are. Making a huge commitment for offshore wind. So it’s the, the countries involved are Britain, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, question Mark Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Norway. That together they want to develop [00:01:00] 100 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity in shared waters. Uh, that’s enough to power about. 85 million households and the PAC comes as Europe is trying to wean itself from natural gas from where they had it previously and the United States. Uh, so they, they would become electricity in independent. Uh, and this is one way to do it. Two big happy, uh, companies. At the moment, Vattenfall who develops s lot offshore and Siemens gaa of course, are really excited by the news. If you run the numbers and you, you, you have a hundred gigawatts out in the water and you’re using 20 megawatt turbines, then you’re talking about 5,000 turbines in the water total. That is a huge offshore wind order, and I, I think this would be great news for. Obviously Vestas and [00:02:00] Siemens cesa. Uh, the, the question is there’s a lot of political maneuvering that is happening. It looks like Belgium, uh, as a country is not super active and offshore and is rethinking it and trying to figure out where they want to go. But I think the big names will stay, right? France and Germany, all in on offshore. Denmark will be Britain already is. So the question really is at the moment then. Can Siemens get back into the win game and start making money because they have projected themselves to be very profitable coming this year, into this year. This may be the, the stepping stone, Joel.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think that, yeah, we talked about last week their 21 megawatt, or 21 and a half megawatt. I believe it is. Big new flagship going to be ready to roll, uh, with the big auctions happening like AR seven in the uk. Uh, and you know, that’s eight gigawatts, 8.4 gigawatts there. People are gonna be, the, the order book’s gonna start to fill up, like [00:03:00]Siemens is, this is a possibility of a big turnaround. And to put some of these numbers in perspective, um, a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind. So what does that really mean? Right? Um, what it means is if you, if you take the, if you take two of the industrial big industrial powerhouses that are a part of this pact, the UK and Germany combine their total demand. That’s a hundred gigawatt. That’s what they, that’s what their demand is basically on a, you know, today. Right? So that’s gonna continue to grow, right? As, uh, we electrify a lot of things. And the indus, you know, the, the next, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 or whatever we’re calling it now is happening. Um, that’s, that’s a possibility, right? So this a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind. Is gonna drive jobs all up all over Europe. Right. This isn’t just a jobs at the port in Rotterdam or wherever it may be. Right? This is, this is manufacturing jobs, supply chain jobs, the same stuff we’ve been talking about on the podcast for a while here with [00:04:00] what the UK is doing with OWGP and the, or e Catapult and all the kind of the monies that the, the, the Crown and, and other, uh, private entities are putting in there. They’re starting to really, they’re, or this a hundred gigawatts is really gonna look like building out that local supply chain. Jobs, all these different things. ’cause Alan, like you, you mentioned off air. If you look at a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind, that’s $200 billion or was to put it in Euros, 175 billion euros, 170 billion euros, just in turbine orders. Right. That doesn’t mean, or that doesn’t cover ships, lodging, food, like, you know, everything around the ports like tools, PPE, all of the stuff that’s needed by this industry. I mean, there’s a, there’s a trillion dollar impact here.  Speaker 2: Oh, it’s close. Yeah. It’s at least 500 billion, I would say. And Yolanda, from the asset management side, have we seen anything of this scale to manage? It does seem like there’d be a lot of [00:05:00] turbines in the water. A whole bunch of moving pieces, ships, turbines, cables, transformers, substations, going different directions. How, what kind of infrastructure is that going to take?  Yolanda Padron: You know, a lot of the teams that are there, they’re used to doing this on a grand scale, but globally, right? And so having this be all at once in the UK is definitely gonna be interesting. It’ll be a good opportunity for everybody to take all of the lessons learned to, to just try to make sure that they don’t come across any issues that they might have seen in the past, in other sites, in other countries. They just bring everything back home to their countries and then just make sure that everything’s fine. Um, from like development, construction, and, and operations.  Joel Saxum: I was thinking about that. Just thinking about development, construction, operations, right? So some of [00:06:00] these sites we’re thinking about like how, you know, that, that, that map of offshore wind in, in the Northern Atlantic, right? So if this is gonna go and we’re talking about the countries involved here, Norway, Germany, Denmark, France, Belgium, you’re gonna have it all over. So into the Baltic Sea. Around Denmark, into the Norwegian waters, uk, Ireland all the way over, and Iceland is there. I don’t think there’s gonna be any development there. I think maybe they’re just there as a, as cheerleaders. Um, offtake, possibly, yes. Some cables running over there. But you’re going to need to repurpose some of the existing infrastructure, or you’re not, not, you’re going to need to, you’re going to get the opportunity to, and this hasn’t happened in offshore wind yet, right? So. Basically repowering offshore wind, and you’re going to be able to look at, you know, you’re not doing, um, greenfield geotechnical work and greenfield, um, sub c mapping. Like, some of those things are done right, or most of those things are done. So there, I know there’s a lot of, like, there’s a, there’s two and [00:07:00] three and six and seven megawatt turbines all over the North Atlantic, so we’re gonna be able to pop some of those up. Put some 15 and 20 megawatt machines in place there. I mean, of course you’re not gonna be able to reuse the same mono piles, but when it comes to Yolanda, like you said, the lessons learned, Hey, the vessel plans for this area are done. The how, how, how we change crews out here, the CTVs and now and SOVs into port and that stuff, that those learnings are done. How do we maintain export cables and inter array cables with the geotechnic here, you’re not in a green field, you’re in a brown field. That, that, that work. A lot of those lessons learned. They’re done, right? You’ve, you’ve stumbled through them, you’ve made those mistakes. You’ve had to learn on the fly and go ahead here. But when you go to the next phase of Repowering, an offshore wind farm, the the Dev X cost is gonna go way down, in my opinion. Now, someone, someone may fight back on that and say, well, we have to go do some demolition or something of that sort. I’m not sure, but [00:08:00] Yolanda Padron: yeah. But I think, you know. We like to complain sometimes in the US about how some of the studies just aren’t catered toward us, right? And so we’ve seen it a lot and it’s a lot of the studies that are made are just made in Europe where, where this is all taking place. So it’s gonna be really, really interesting to see such a massive growth where everything’s being developed and where the studies are localized from where. You have this very niche area and they can, they’ve studied it. They know exactly what’s going on there. And to your point, they’ve seen a lot of, they’ve minimized the risk, like the environmental risks as much as they could. Right. And so it’s, it’s going to be really, really interesting to have them  Joel Saxum: ensuring and financing these projects should be way easier  Speaker 2: when Europe is saying that the industry has pledged to cut costs by 30% between. 20, 25 and 2040. So you would think that the turbine [00:09:00] costs and the installation costs would have to be really cost conscious on the supply chain and, uh, taking lessons learned from the previous generations of offshore wind. I think that makes sense. 30% is still a lot, and I, I think the, the feeling I’m getting from this is, Hey, we’re making a hundred gigawatt commitment to this industry. You have to work really hard to deliver a efficient product, get the cost down so it’s not costing as much as, you know. Could do if we, if we did it today, and we’re kind of in from an offshore standpoint over in Europe, what a generation are we in, in terms of turbines three? Are we going into four? A lot of lessons learned. Joel Saxum: Yeah. The, the new Siemens one’s probably generation four. Yeah. I would say generation four in the new, because you went from like the two and three megawatt machines. Like there’s like Vesta three megawatts all over the place, and then you went into the directive [00:10:00] machines. You got into that seven and eight megawatt class, and then you got into the, where we’re at now, the 15, the 12 and 15 megawatt units, the Docker bank style stuff, and then I would say generation four is the, yeah, the Siemens 21 and a half machine. Um, that’s a good way to look at it. Alan four we’re on the fourth generation of offshore wind and, and so it’s Generation one is about ready to start being cycled. There’s some, and some of these are easier, they’re nearer to shore. We’ll see what, uh, who starts to take those projects on. ’cause that’s gonna be an undertaking too. Question on the 30%, uh, wind Europe says industry has pledged to cut cost by 30% by 20. Is that. LCOE or is it devex costs or is it operational costs or did they, were they specific on it or they just kinda like cut cutting costs?  Speaker 2: My recollection when that first came about, which was six months ago, maybe a little longer, it was LCOE, [00:11:00] right? So they’re, they’re trying to drive down the, uh, dollars per, or euros per megawatt hour output, but that the capital costs, if the governments can help with the capital costs. On the interest rates, just posting bonds and keeping that down, keeping the interest rates low for these projects by funding them somehow or financing them, that will help a tremendous amount. ’cause if. Interest rates remain high. I know Europe is much lower than it is in the United States at the minute, but if they interest rates start to creep up, these projects will not happen. They’re marginal  Joel Saxum: because you have your central in, in, in Europe, you have your central bank interest rates, but even like the f the, the Indi Individual nation states will subsidize that. Right? Like if you go to buy a house in Denmark right now, you pay like 1.2%. Interest  Speaker 2: compared to what, six and a half right now in the states? Yeah, it’s low.  Speaker 4: Australia’s wind farms are [00:12:00] growing fast. But are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Pullman on the park for Wind energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at WMA 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions, not speeches,  Speaker 2: as we all know. On December 22nd, the federal government issued a stop work order. On all offshore winds that included vineyard wind up off the coast of Massachusetts, that’s a 62 turbine, $4.5 billion wind farm. Uh, that’s being powered by some GE turbines. Uh, the government [00:13:00] has, uh, cited national security concerns, but vineyard went to court and Federal Judge Brian Murphy rolled the, the administration failed to adequately explain or justify the decision to shut it down. Uh, the judge issued a stay, which it is allowing Vineyard went to immediately resume work on the project now. They’re close to being finished at a vineyard. There are 44 turbines that are up and running right now and creating power and delivering power on shore. There are 17 that are partially installed. Uh, when the stop order came. The biggest issue at the moment, if they can’t get rolling again, there are 10 towers with Noels on them, what they call hammerheads. That don’t have blades. And, uh, the vineyard wind. Last week as we were recording this, said you really don’t want hammerheads out in the water because they become a risk. They’re not assembled, completed [00:14:00] items. So lightning strikes and other things could happen, and you really don’t want them to be that way. You want to finish those turbines, so now they have an opportunity to do it. The window’s gonna be short. And Yolanda listening to some GE discussions, they were announcing their Q4 results from last year. The ships are available till about the end of March, and then the ships are gonna finally go away and go work on another project. So they have about 45 days to get these turbines done. I guess my question is, can they get it done work-wise? And I, I, I guess the, the issue is they gotta get the turbines running and if they do maintenance on it, that’s gonna be okay. So I’m wondering what they do with blade sets. Do they have a, a set of blades that are, maybe they pass QC but they would like them to be better? Do they install ’em just to get a turbine operational even temporarily to get this project quote unquote completed so they can get paid?  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. If, if the risk is low, low [00:15:00] enough, it, it should be. I mean a little bit tight, but what, what else can you do? Right? I mean, the vessel, like you might have a shot of getting the vessel back eventually, or being able to get something in so you can do some of the blade repairs. And the blade repairs of tower would require a different vessel than like bringing in a whole blade, right? And so just. You have a very limited time scope to be able to do everything. So I don’t know that I would risk just not being able to pull this off altogether and just risk the, you know, the rest of the tower by not having a complete, you know, LPS and everything on there just because not everything’s a hundred percent perfect. Joel Saxum: There’s a weird mix in technical and commercial risk here, right? Because. Technically, we have these hammerheads out there, right? There’s a million things that can happen with those. Like I, I’ve [00:16:00] personally done RCAs where, um, you have a hammerhead on this was onshore, right? But they, they will get, um, what’s called, uh, Viv, uh, vortex induced vibration. So when they don’t have the full components out there, wind will go by and they’ll start to shake these things. I’ve seen it where they shook them so much because they’re not designed to be up there like that. They shook them so much that like the bolts started loosening and concrete started cracking in the foundations and like it destroyed the cable systems inside the tower ’cause they sat there and vibrated so violently. So like that kind of stuff is a possibility if you don’t have the right, you know. Viv protection on and those kind of things, let alone lightning risk and some other things. So you have this technical risk of them sitting out there like that. But you also have the commercial risk, right? Because the, the banks, the financiers, the insurance companies, there’s the construction policies and there’s, there’s, you gotta hit these certain timelines or it’s just like if you’re building a house, right? You’re building a house, you have to go by the loan that the bank gives you in, you know, in micro [00:17:00] terms to kind of think about that. That’s the same thing that happens with this project, except for this project’s four and a half billion dollars and probably has. It’s 6, 8, 10 banks involved in it. Right? So you have a lot of, there’s a lot of commercial risk. If you don’t, if you don’t move forward when you have the opportunity to, they won’t, they’ll frown on that. Right? But then you have to balance the technical side. So, so looking at the project as a whole, you’ve got 62 turbines, 44 or fully operational. So that leaves us with 18 that are not. Of those 18, you said Alan? 10 needed blades.  Speaker 2: 10 need blades, and one still needs to be erected.  Joel Saxum: Okay, so what’s the other seven?  Speaker 2: They’re partially installed, so they, they haven’t completed the turbine, so everything’s put together, but they haven’t powered them up yet.  Joel Saxum: I was told that. Basically with the kit that they have out of vineyard wind, that they can do one turbine a day blades. Speaker 2: That would be, yeah, that would make sense to me.  Joel Saxum: But, but you also have to, you have 45 days of vessel time left. You said they’re gonna leave in March, but you also gotta think it’s fricking winter in. The, [00:18:00] in the Atlantic  Speaker 2: they are using jackass. However, there’s big snow storms and, and low uh, pressure storms that are rolling through just that area. ’cause they, they’ve kind of come to the Midwest and then shoot up the east coast. That’s where you see New York City with a lot of snow. Boston had a lot of snow just recently. They’re supposed to get another storm like that. And then once it hits Boston, it kind of hits the water, which is where vineyard is. So turbulent water for sure. Super cold this time of year out there,  Joel Saxum: but wind, you can’t sling blades in, in probably more than what, six meters per second’s? Probably your cutoff.  Speaker 2: Yeah. This is not the best time of year to be putting blade sets up offshore us.  Joel Saxum: Technically, if you had blue skies, yeah, this thing can get done and we can move. But with weather risk added in you, you’ve got, there’s some wild cards there.  Speaker 2: I It’s gonna be close.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. If we looked at the, the weather, it looks like even, I think this coming weekend now we’re recording in January here, and [00:19:00] this weekend’s, first week in February coming, there’s supposed to be another storm rolling up through there too. Speaker 2: It was pretty typical having lived in Massachusetts almost 25 years. It will be stormy until April. So we’re talking about the time span of which GE and Vineyard want to be done. That’s a rough period for snow. And as historically, uh, that timeframe is also when nor’easters happened, where the storms just sit there and cyclone off the shore around vineyard and then dump the snow back on land. Those storms are really violent and there’s no way they’re gonna be hanging. Anything out in the water, so I think it’s gonna be close. They’re gonna have to hope for good weather. Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs, ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you [00:20:00] the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. So while GE Ver Nova celebrated strong results in its Q4 report, in both its energy and electrification business, the company’s wind division told a different story. In the fourth quarter of 2025, wind revenue fell 24% to $2.37 billion. Uh, driven primarily by offshore wind struggles, vineyard, wind, uh. The company recorded approximately $600 million in win losses for the full year up from earlier expectations of about $400 million. That’s what I remember from last summer. Uh, the, the culprit was. All vineyard wind, they gotta get this project done. And with this work stoppages, it just keeps dragging it on and on and on. And I know GE has really wanted to wrap that up as [00:21:00] fast as they can. Uh, CEO Scott Straza has said the company delivered strong financial results, which they clearly have because they’re gas turbine business is taking orders out to roughly 2035, and I think the number on the back order was gonna be somewhere in the realm of 150 billion. Dollars, which is an astronomical number for back orders. And because they had the back orders that far out, they’re raising prices which improves margins, which makes everybody on the stock market happy. You would think, Joel? Except after the, the Q4 results today, GE Renovo stock is really flat,  Joel Saxum: which is an odd thing, right? I talk about it all the time. Um, I’m always thinking they’re gonna drop and they go up and they go up and they go up. But today was just kind of like a, I don’t know how to take it. Yeah. And I don’t know if it’s a, a broader sentiment across what the market was doing today because there was some other tech earnings and things of that sort, but it’s always something to watch, right? So. Uh, there, [00:22:00] there’s some interesting stuff going on on in the GE world, but one thing I want to touch on here, we’re talking like vineyard wind caused them this, these delays right there is a, a, a larger call to understand why there was these delays and because it’s causing. Havoc across the industry. Right. But even the, like, a lot of like, uh, conservative lawmakers, like there were some senators and stuff coming out saying like, we need more transparency to understand these 90 day halts because of what it’s doing to the industry, right? Because to date there hasn’t been really any explanation and the judges have been just kind of throwing ’em out. Um, but you can see what it’s done here to ge. Recording $600 million in win losses. I mean, and that is mostly all vineyard wind, right? But there’s a little bit of Dogger bank stuff in there. I would imagine  Speaker 2: a tiny bit. Really? ’cause Dogger has been a lot less stressful to ge.  Joel Saxum: But it is, yeah. The, the uncertainty of the market. And that’s why we kind of said a little bit, I said a little bit ago, like when this thing is done, when Vineyard [00:23:00] Point is like, and when you can put the final nail in the coffin of construction on that, it is gonna be agh sigh of relief over at GEs offices For sure.  Speaker 2: Our friend Alina, Hal Stern appeared in Energy Watch this week and she’s spent a long time in the wind industry. She’s been in it 25 years, and, uh, she commented that she’s seeing some troubling things. Uh, she’s also the new CEO of Wind Power Lab over in Denmark, and they’re a consultancy firm on wind turbines and particularly blades. Uh, Lena says that she’s watched some. Really significant manufacturing errors in operational defects and wind turbine blades become more frequent. And in 2025 alone, Windpower lab analyzed and provided repair recommendations for over 700 blades globally. And I assume, or Blade Whisperer Morton Hamburg was involved in a number of those. Uh, the problem she says is that the market eagerly, uh, [00:24:00] demanded cheap turbines, which is true. And, uh. Everything had to be done faster and with lower costs, and you end up with a product that reflects that. Uh, we’ve had Lena on a podcast a couple of times, super smart. Uh, she’s great to talk to, get offline and understand what’s happening behind the scenes. And, uh, in some of these conference rooms between asset managers, operators, and OEMs, those are sometimes tough. Discussions, but I, I think Lena’s pointing out something that I, the industry has been trying to deal with and she’s raising it up sort of to a higher level because she has that weight to do that. We have some issues with blades that we need to figure out pretty quickly. And Yolanda, you ran, uh, a large, uh, operator in the United States. We’re dealing with more than a thousand turbines. How locked in is Lena, uh, to [00:25:00]some of these issues? And are they purely driven just by the push to lower the cost of the blades or was it more of a speed issue that they making a longer blades in the same amount of time? Where’s that balance and, and what are we going to do about it going forward as we continue to make larger turbines?  Yolanda Padron: She’s great with, with her point, and I think it’s. A little bit about the, or equally about the OEMs maybe not being aware of these issues as much, or not having the, the bandwidth to take care of these issues with limited staff and just a lot of the people who are charge of developing and constructing these projects at a very short amount of time, or at least with having to wear so many hats that they. Don’t necessarily have the, the bandwidth to do a deep dive on what the potential risks could be in [00:26:00] operations. And so I think the way I’ve, I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it. It’s almost like everybody’s running a marathon. Their shoe laces untied, so they trip and then they just kind of keep on running ’cause you’re behind, ’cause you tripped. And so it just keeps on, it’s, it’s, it’s a vicious cycle. Um. But, uh, we’ve also seen just, just in our time together and everything, that there’s a lot of people that are noticing this and that are taking the time to just pause, you know, tie those releases and just talk to each other a little bit more of, Hey, I’m the one engineer doing this for so many turbines. You have these turbines too. Are you seeing this issue? Yes. No. Are, how are you tackling it? How have you tackled it in the past? How can we work together to, to use the data we have? Right? That, I mean, if you’re not going to get a really great answer from your OEMs or if you’re not going to get a lot of [00:27:00] easily available answers just from the dataset that you’re seeing from your turbine, it’s really easy now to to reach out to other people within the industry and to be able to talk it over, which I think is something that Lena. Is definitely encouraging here.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, I mean, she, she makes a statement about owners needing to be technically mature, ensure you have inspections, get your TSAs right. So these are, again, it’s lessons learned. It’s sharing knowledge within the market because at the end of the day, this is a new, not a new reality. This is the reality we’re living in. Right. It’s not new. Um, but, but we’re getting better at it. I think that’s the, the important thing here, right? From a, from a. If we take a, the collective group of operators in the world and say like, you know, where were you two, three years ago and where are you today? I think we’re in a much better place, and that’s from knowledge sharing and, and understanding these issues. And, you know, we’re, we’re at the behest of, uh, good, fast, cheap pick. [00:28:00] Right. And so that’s got us where we are today. But now we’re, we’re starting to get best practices, lessons learned, fix things for the next go around. And you’re seeing efforts at the OEM level as well to, uh, and some, some of these consultants coming out, um, to, to try to fix some of these manufacturing issues. You know, Alan, you and I have talked with DFS composites with Gulf Wind Technology. Like there, there’s things here that we could possibly fix. You’re starting to see operators do. Internal inspections to the blades on the ground before they fly them. That’s huge. Right? That’s been the Wind Power lab has been talking about that since 2021. Right. But the message is finally getting out to the industry of this is what you should be doing as a best practice to, you know, de-risk. ’cause that’s the whole thing. You de-risk, de-risk, de-risk. Uh, so I think. Lena’s spot on, right? We know that this, these things are happening. We’re working with the OEMs to do them, but it takes them a technically mature operator. And if you’re, if you don’t have the staff to be technically mature, go grab a consultant, [00:29:00] go grab someone that is to help you out. I think that’s a, that’s an important, uh, thing to take from this as well. Those people are out there, those groups are out there, so go and go in, enlist that to make sure you’re de-risking this thing, because at the end of the day, if we’re de-risking turbines. It’s better for the whole industry.  Speaker 2: Yeah. You want to grab somebody that has seen a lot of blades, not a sole consultant on a particular turbine mine. You’re talking about at this point in the development of the wind industry, you’re talking about wind power labs, sky specs kind of companies that have seen thousands of turbines and have a broad reach where they’ve done things globally, just not in Scandinavia or the US or Australia or somewhere else. They’ve, they’ve seen problems worldwide. Those people exist, and I, I don’t think we as an industry use them as much as we could, but it would get to the solutions faster because having seen so many global [00:30:00] issues with the St turbine, the solution set does vary depending on where you are. But it’s been proven out already. So even though you as an asset manager. May have never heard of this technique to make your performance better. You make your blades last longer. It’s probably been done at this point, unless it’s a brand new turbine. So a lot of the two x machines and three X machines, and now we’re talking about six X machines. There’s answers out there, but you’re gonna have to reach out to somebody who has a global reach. We’ve grown too big to do it small anymore,  Yolanda Padron: which really should be a relief to. All of the asset managers and operations people and everything out there, right? Like. You don’t have to use your turbines as Guinea pigs anymore. You don’t have to struggle with this.  Speaker 2: 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. [00:31:00] 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 Joel. I am Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.