The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

In this episode, we explore Meta’s shift to natural gas for AI data centers, analyze a major Mingyang offshore turbine blade failure, and discuss Shell’s head of renewables moving to Ørsted’. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug!

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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!

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Allen Hall: If you want to know why turbine blades are disappearing from social media and why Shell’s Renewables Chief is jumping to worsted and why META is betting big on natural gas, stick around. Plus, we’ve got a special announcement, a chance to win an exclusive Uptime Podcast mug that even I don’t have yet.

You’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.

Allen Hall: We’ve got something new for uptime listeners.

We’re running a quick listener survey to learn more about what you love about the show and how we can make it even better. And there is an exciting part to this. Everyone who completes and leaves an email address will be entered to win an exclusive Uptime podcast mug. Now, I do not have one of these podcast mugs, so whoever wins this, hopefully I get a second hand one or something.

Somebody can throw me a mug. But the survey will take about five minutes of your time, and your feedback is really needed to help shape the future episodes of the show. And whether you’re a long time listener or have just joined us recently, we’d We want to hear from you. So I need you to go to uptimewindenergy.

com or just check the show notes to participate in the survey. So we’d appreciate if you would do that. And we have a couple other things happening. One of which is Wind Energy O& M Australia film where everybody’s going to be on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne. And we have a number of sponsors that we can announce this week.

Joel Saxum: So sponsorships and the people joining us at the show will be from Tilt Renewables, Worley, Aerones and RigCom. We’ve got a bunch of other people signed up too. To date, we’ve got quite a few operators, some ISPs, some cool technology companies, and other people’s that are going to be in attendance along with some speakers.

And we’re going to start releasing. Some agenda points and some of the speakers and panelists and roundtables. So the goal of, one of the goals of the conference is to drive engagement with the crowd because we want everybody to leave there with insights that they can take back and actually do something to their wind farms.

We want to help. We want to help make it more profitable. We want to help make operational decisions and drive some success at the field level. So that’s the goal of the show. And we hope you’ll join us.

Allen Hall: Yeah. The conference is going to tackle crucial topics that directly impact operations, leading edge erosion, lightening protection, CMS, insurance, life extension strategy.

So this is your chance to connect with industry leaders and gain. Some practical experience and insights that you can implement immediately. So you need to secure your spot by visiting windaustralia. com. And down in Houston, Joel, we have Active Training Team. They’re going to be giving a demonstration of their Thrive USA product, which is a safety training seminar, a live interactive.

It’s the most impactful training seminar for safety I have ever been at. You want to Talk about what is all involved in the Thrive USA, Joel.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s a step change in training. It’s experiential. I know that’s a weird word, but Alan and I and Claire, our producer, went through this training in Boston a few months ago.

And we’re sitting in the crowd and we’re at tables with people from all kinds of different companies and levels of the company so that everybody’s intermixed. And then all of a sudden, They’re going through a little bit of a presentation and a few actors, real actors, like Screen Actors Guild, card carrying people come through the door and they’re fighting and yelling at each other and going through the scenario.

And then all stop. There’s someone that maintains the, that would be flow of the event. And they say, okay, what do you think about this? And you’re getting engaged and you’re thinking. And just talking about this right now, it reminded me of what happened while we were there. And I have goosebumps on my arms that are popping up because they’re it’s.

It hit me when we were there internally. I’ve never been through a training where I left in thinking like, wow, that was impactful. I am actually thinking about this. I’d like to action some of these things in my day to day life. We did breakout sessions. We talked through things. It was fantastic. So if you have the opportunity we would love to see you in Houston.

It’s going to be January 24th. Down by the medical center. And if you want some details on it, of course, you can get a hold of us at the show any either Alan or I can point you in the right spot. [email protected] or feel free to reach out to Florence at the active training team. She’s guiding the whole process, so [email protected] can be your contact there, and we hope to see you in January there in Houston.

Allen Hall: Yeah, we’ll see you in Houston and the website for Active Training Team in the U. S. is ActiveTrainingTeam. us, so check that out.

Unlock your wind farm’s best performance at Wind Energy O& M Australia, February 11th to 12th in sunny Melbourne. Join industry leaders as they share practical solutions for maintenance, OEM relations, and asset management.

Discover strategies to cut costs. Keep your assets running smoothly and drive long term success in today’s competitive market. Register today and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com.

Allen Hall: In the latest PES Wind Magazine, it’s Q4 of 2024. You can go online and read it yourself at peswind. com. Interesting article from DSHIP carriers, and DSHIP has designed a new carrier of blades. And it’s really interesting because it’s a new approach on how to move blades around offshore. And Joel, being our offshore expert, you want to explain these fun things about the D500 ship?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that what we need to understand first is that we’ve been doing offshore wind for a long time. And we’re ready for a step change. We’re ready to see things turn over into new innovative techniques that are going to make things better. So when you talk shipping with anything, it’s always about efficiency, fuel burn, how can we get things on offshore better and The the DSHP team has taken all of this into consideration and making a purpose built vessel just for transport, transporting wind turbine parts.

And when you say that offshore, usually that doesn’t happen. A vessel is usually multi purpose because you want to make sure that you have a contract where someone can rent it out and have it on the lease for a long time and use it for multiple kinds of different things and transporting this or transporting that.

But what they’ve done here is made a vessel that’s super efficient, that’s specifically designed and built for optimum use for transporting wind turbine parts. So the hull has been optimized. The way you load things has been optimized. The way you unload things has been optimized even all the way down to how the crew gets around the vessel and what their walk times are in between areas of the vessel that they need to do their jobs.

That’s crazy impressive. The other things that they’ve done is make sure that this thing is future proofed. And future proof means the next generation of fuels, whether we get to the point where we’re using ammonia or hydrogen or some other kind of power the propulsion units in this vessel can be swapped over to what that next generation looks like.

The D Ship team in their new D 500 vessels, this is what they’re calling this, they have taken some really innovative steps to making offshore wind in their part of the supply chain, More efficient and more cost effective.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a really interesting ship design. It’s going to be built in China. But if you want to read more about this ship and all the things that DShip is up to, go to PESWind.

com, download your issue, and read it for yourself. Good stuff in there. 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: In a significant shift in data center power strategies, Major technology companies, energy companies are turning to, of all things, natural gas to bridge the power for these growing, power hungry artificial intelligence infrastructures, these data centers.

And Meta is probably the key one at the minute. And they are planning a site in Louisiana that is going to be using natural gas as being provided through Intergy. And they need about two and a half years. gigawatts of electricity over a 15 year period. And Entergy is going to be fast tracked in the construction of three facilities to support this 10 billion data center project.

Now, Joel, first off, and Rosemary, why are we building data centers in Louisiana? What’s driving that? And why natural gas instead of a renewable?

Joel Saxum: It’s historically easy to get large capital projects done in that state because of the way the governments are set up and the way the parishes control things.

It’s pretty easy to get the wheels greased and get a large capital project moving. So that’s one thing in Louisiana. Other thing in Louisiana is energy is fairly cheap. The weather’s decent, like you don’t have to fight a lot of weird things. But if I was to say why gas, I think that’s a different Conversation.

For one, in Louisiana, renewable energy generation is not super prevalent, right? They don’t have wind farms. Solar farms can be built there. Yes. However, in a data center that is going to be a need a 1. 5 gigawatt facility. That means it’s so big. It’s a 10 billion project. That means it’s so big that you can’t afford to have intermittent power.

And, as we are on the show here, we love renewables and we want wind and solar and battery storage and all these great things to happen. At some levels, natural gas, in this case, just makes more sense. Thanks. Because you need that continuous power, you’re going to have continuous power demand.

This thing is going to be built behind the grid. I imagine they’ll still connect it to the grid so they can do some power triaging if they need to. But it will be built, for the most part, behind the grid. So you don’t have as much government oversight, you don’t have as much looking in on it. And in that level, if you just want to have this one data center sitting there by itself, chugging and doing its thing, a 100 percent like kind of steady load power supply is more effective than it is to have inter the intermittency of renewables.

I don’t know. Rosemary, what’s your opinion on that?

Rosemary Barnes: I’ve got a list actually that I’m keeping track of planning a video on AI, maybe a couple, but I’m keeping track of all the announcements about data center and big tech companies and their power purchase agreements or investments that they’re making in energy.

And everything is on there. There’s nuclear, there’s geothermal, a big announcement from Google just a couple of weeks ago about wind and solar being their preference for future plans. Data centers, they’re in a huge period of growth. It’s not necessarily really certain how much energy they’re going to need, but they know that they don’t want to be short because, if you miss out or you don’t have enough capacity, that’s a big loss for them.

Whereas if you. Sign a, or, start looking into a project now, not even signing anything, then it’s not actually that much lost if you realize that you don’t need it. So I think that you can’t use like the number of announcements gives us this idea that this is like the biggest user of energy in the world.

And it is so far from that. We’re not going to see this amount of activity in the next few years. I’m sure it will be a lot. Yeah, but that’s my thought. And I just think it’s, they want energy of any kind, pretty much, preferably clean. And if it can’t be clean, then, like they, they need it, whatever they can get.

Allen Hall: Meta is trying to do a carbon offset while meanwhile ExxonMobil, which is diving into this power generation business is specifically going to use natural gas, Plants with carbon capture to try to remove 90 percent of the emissions. Meta’s not doing that. Meta’s saying, we’ll put in some more solar and wind farms to offset what we’re doing in Louisiana.

Why is the big Oil and gas company doing carbon capture and Meta is not.

Joel Saxum: ExxonMobil knows how to do it too, right? Carbon capture is very much about understanding, underspeak, understanding subsurface geophysics and understanding where you can store this stuff and how you can do it, how you drill for this, how you build a facility that can inject deep underground.

ExxonMobil knows how to do that in spades as well, right? The other side of the thing where ExxonMobil is their headquarters in Houston and around Houston. This is a weird geophysical thing, but you have one of the highest concentrations of salt domes. In the world, in a lot along the Gulf coast and along the Louisiana deltas and stuff.

That’s why there’s a lot of oil and gas in there. One of the reasons, but those are picture perfect for carbon sequestration to capture. And there’s a lot of other things down there, other kinds of formations, subsurface that make Louisiana and Texas prime for all of this carbon sequestration work.

And at the end of the day, ExxonMobil knows how to do it. Meta doesn’t have a clue unless they grab some kind of subcontractor.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, but they would, they would do that anyway, because it’s not their core competency. So they would necessarily partner with somebody and be the capital provider to it, but they could do that with anybody.

I will go back to, there is more than a billion dollars. That the U. S. Department of Energy has allocated towards, carbon capture and sequestration projects just this year alone. As, as far as grant money and other incentives for companies to, to do that sort of thing. If the government’s throwing free money at them to just even try out that technology, they’re gonna do it.

I think at the end of

Joel Saxum: the day, you have to look at what the, what it looks like for ESG stamps, ESG plans, marketing, and PR from some of these companies as well. Nobody cares about ESG anymore. But you still have, they still, there’s still written items on quarterly statements that say this and that, and we’re going to do this.

And we’re going to do that. So maybe sometime along the line, Meta has said, we’re going to do more renewable generation. Whereas Exxon Mobil being an oil and gas company says, we’re going to do it this way.

Allen Hall: Let’s stick in oil and gas for a minute. We’ll Shell’s head of renewables for America, Amanda Dash, will be taking the helm of Orsted’s U.

S. operations starting mid January. That’s a big move. And this transition happens at a pivotal moment for both companies because Shell is trying to get out of renewables and Orsted is trying to survive in it. But picking Amanda Dash for that C suite position is interesting because you’ve got someone who knows a lot about oil and gas and a lot about offshore.

And then renewable. So

Phil Totaro: those people tend to be hard to find, Phil. And somebody who’s got potentially better connections with people in government. Which I think was, yeah, potentially one of Orsted’s challenges coming over here and trying to develop projects in New York, New Jersey offshore. While they still have an onshore wind and solar portfolio as well, it’s relatively small compared to what they’re doing with they’re offshore pipelines, so that’s gonna dominate and somebody with background from Shell will hopefully help them take another step.

At one point,

Allen Hall: Orsted had a larger market cap than Shell, which is now hard to believe. For five minutes. For a little while, yeah, they did, but that actually happened. The world flipped over, right? The polls reversed something. But the, now you’re taking, but you’re, now you’re taking that sort of key person out of Shell.

and plug them in into Orsted. Orsted has a lot of projects going on in the U. S. right now. Obviously there’s a little bit on the offshore, which are problematic, but they also have a ton of onshore projects going on that they’re trying to navigate, which I, which may be their biggest revenue source.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I know Orsted’s got quite a few onshore wind farms and they’re building some new ones as we speak, but one of the other things I want to touch on was the knowledge that may come with. Ms. Dash coming from Shell. Shell did a lot of exploration in the Gulf as far as offshore wind, and they’ve put a lot of money into R& D and some kind of technology development and ideas and information gathering in the background.

She’s coming over there also with some probably new information for the Orsted management team.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I totally agree upon that. It’s a new perspective for sure. It’s a very American perspective in an oil and gas perspective. And now’s the time, right? This is going to be fascinating.

The board meetings will be interesting, I think, because you really have a defined oil and gas person with a lot of knowledge plugged into this sort of Danish infrastructure.

Joel Saxum: I did say something that may be controversial, but this is from someone coming from an oil and gas background. Yeah, But no matter where it is in the world, oil and gas people tend to know how to get stuff done.

Whether that’s through relationships, or through capital engagement, or whatever. You can see that same story playing out over and over and over. No matter where you are in the world. I think that grabbing someone that’s been a part of one of those organizations is a good move.

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Allen Hall: If you’ve watched social media for that brief moment in time, you saw a Mingyang wind turbine. The Mingyang SE 18. X 20 megawatt turbine have a blade failure. Actually had two blade failures, according to reports. Now this is a big deal cause it has multiple levels to it.

First was the video that showed these blades toppling down and landing on the ground. And then they got quiet for about 24 hours and I couldn’t find any of those videos anymore or photos. It seemed to be a scrub from the internet. But then Ming Yang came back on LinkedIn social media and said that there was an incident of extreme abnormal conditions.

And while the turban had previously survived September’s super typhoon Yagi without issues something happened where it overloaded the blade structure. Now Rosemary is first to point out on LinkedIn to say how could it have been over the threshold of its strength capabilities? How did that happen?

Why didn’t you know that? Why wasn’t it tested? What really happened? I think that’s the question everybody has, is what really happened with that? Turban, was it truly some sort of unique air loading on it? Was it stopped? Was it rotor locked? They had a wind gust? What brought this set of blades down?

Rosemary, do you have any guess on that? Because the information we get out of China is really limited right now.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s really interesting as well. I’m trying to pull up the post cause there’s some really interesting comments in there from people mostly with Western sounding names, but maybe working for some sort of Chinese company or yeah, something their work.

It’s obviously related to China somehow. So the Ming Yang post, I don’t have it with me now. And I will say, I haven’t found any posts that have been deleted or anything. I can still find plenty of examples of the images up there. So

Phil Totaro: On LinkedIn, but not on the web, greater. The source, some of the Chinese sources were removed, but we cataloged it.

So we, we still have it.

Rosemary Barnes: But yeah, the Ming Yang Post was saying, this is a prototype and it faced abnormal conditions, extreme abnormal conditions, I think it said. And so my response was did you make a mistake with your site your site assessment that you were surprised by the conditions?

Because obviously, wind turbines have to exist in the real world, and they also have to exist in places where you didn’t necessarily have the greatest data. There are ways of, extrapolating from, maybe one year’s worth of met data to get like a representative example of what it should experience in its lifetime.

And Ming Yang didn’t reply to me, but lots of other people did telling me that yeah, that the, cause I said, yeah, did you overestimate underestimate the loads that were the blade was going to see? And people said, no, they didn’t say that the loads were exceeded. They said that the conditions were abnormal.

And I thought obviously if you’ve got a mechanical failure, then At some point, there’s been a load that has exceeded a strength. That’s why things break, but I do take the point that it could have been that, like the control system was wrong or responded to August incorrectly or something, but it’s still a mistake.

A lot of people who I don’t think understand how Technology development process works and especially not the wind industry, but people saying, this is a prototype. That’s what’s supposed to happen to prototypes. And I say, absolutely not. You do obviously it’s a prototype because you haven’t ironed out absolutely every single kink in it.

But, like for a major failure, like the blade, you could see in the video, the blade just snapped. It snapped I don’t know, quite close to the root, not at the root, but quite close to the root. And it just broke off and fell away. That is something that for sure should have been ironed out well before the point that turbine.

It’s incredibly dangerous.

Phil Totaro: How dangerous is it though to end up Testing blades to where you have two on a single turban, and they have two turbans there, by the way, so they are still learning something, but they’ve failed two blades on a single turban that could have struck the tower. You can cause the whole thing to come down.

So that’s an incredibly dangerous way to,

Rosemary Barnes: For sure, the tower is damaged now. There’s no way that the rest of it, you’re not just going to wipe two new blades up there and carry on your merry way. And in fact, if the other one is still turning, I don’t think that’s very smart unless they have done a much better root cause analysis than what they have publicized.

And this is not uniquely Chinese, that no one ever tells you the real progress of their root cause analysis until they have really got it dialed in. They know exactly what caused it and they have actions in place to fix it. But that’s the time that Companies tend to want to start talking about it.

Joel Saxum: I think at the end of the day, we’ve seen disinformation come from that end of the world. They didn’t engineer this thing correctly and it failed. They made a mistake. Move on. That’s what that’s the reality. In my opinion, it’s a huge blade. It’s like a, how long is this blade? 143 meter blade.

That’s ridiculous. That 143 meters. That’s a football field and a half or a pitch and a half. Like at some point in time, we’re going to get to the point where materials science is outliving what the reality of what we’re trying to build. And that’s what happened here. In my opinion, this thing failed. And now they’re trying to cover up that it failed.

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Allen Hall: Monster. com has published a comprehensive guide on office holiday party etiquette. Offering practical advice for navigating these professional social events. Now, they recommend, and you can chime in here, everybody, arriving 15 to 30 minutes after the party starts, being sociably late, and plan to stay for at least an hour, and follow the dress code.

This is the one that I think gets everybody in at least situations hyped around. Whether it’s ugly sweaters or formal business attire. Try to stick to that general area and use the opportunity to network with colleagues and other people that you don’t necessarily get to see all year. This is just a fun thing to do, and avoid the politics, religion, and workplace complaints.

Now, workplace complaints always seem to pop up. No matter where you are, but the one thing I think has changed over time, and hopefully it continues on this pathway, is the PDAs, the sexist drinking, and the inappropriate dancing. Not that long ago, everybody wow yeah, some really awkward situations would pop up at holiday parties that you wouldn’t see the rest of the year.

And it had consequences. Any recommendations as you go to holiday parties from the group here?

Joel Saxum: I think there’s an important one here that says, get permission before posting any photos or videos on social media. I would switch that one to just don’t. Just don’t do it. The other thing I want to say is because I’ve been I’ve worked for a couple international companies, as everybody on this panel has, The, how things are handled in different countries and different places are very different.

This is a monster. com list of probably what you should do in the United States. A Danish Christmas party is much different than a United States Christmas party. So I think that understanding where you are and the people around you being a little bit of aware and having some introspect on the situation is very important.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, you didn’t go to any LM holiday parties?

Rosemary Barnes: I did. I miss them so much. Danish Christmas party is the best. It’s nearly the best thing about living in Denmark. It might be the best thing. They’re so good.

Joel Saxum: You have to sign an NDA when you walk in. Yeah. They take your phone away from you?

Rosemary Barnes: They should, they didn’t, but they should.

And actually, when you moved to Denmark or at least back when I did, they had a program where they give you language classes and also it’s a bit of a cultural education. And one of the things I remember learning at that class was that be careful of the office Christmas party. There’s usually a peak in divorces shortly after.

It’s because of people cheating on their spouses with their colleagues. I never saw that, so I think that might be an urban myth, but yeah, they do get a bit wild.

Phil Totaro: Alternatively, you, since most people, start a new job in January, you can do whatever you want at the old Christmas party, if you’re leaving the company, like You can tell everybody what you think, exactly what you think before you leave. Yeah, do a Costanza. I’m gonna tell all you people what I think about you.

Allen Hall: Yeah, the one I didn’t like was when people started fighting. That just got to be ridiculous. Not here, not now, but he’s trying to have a nice time.

Take it out to the parking lot. What kind of Christmas

Joel Saxum: parties did you go to? New Jersey. Yeah, that makes sense. This week’s Wind Farm of the Week is the Crocker Wind Farm up in South Dakota that is owned by National Grid Renewables. This wind energy project was built by Wonset Construction using GE 2.

7116 wind turbines. It’s a 200 megawatt project. It has virtual power purchase agreements with Walmart and Cargill. Cargill being really important up in the Upper Midwest because they’re a seed company. They do a lot of stuff with the agricultural side of things. Thanks. But one thing really interesting about this wind farm is when they set it up, of course, there’s the 83 million in direct economic impact and there’s 36 million in new tax revenue and 175 construction and operation jobs.

We see those stats for a lot of wind farms, but what they did here was they put together a community fund it’s a charitable fund. So if you’re in that community, you can apply to get these funds. Every year it reloads. And it’s 40, 000 available every year for the next 20 years from when this wind farm was started.

Adding up to about 800, 000 in charitable funding. So if you want to, put new paint down on the football field in the town, you can apply for a little bit of funding. If you want to do something else for the schools or the four H Club or just the community center or something of that sort.

Groups get together and they can pull from this pool of money that is provided by National Grid Renewables as a part of this wind farm. So I think that’s really cool ’cause it’s direct giving back it’s dollars and cents and people can get on board with it. So kudos to national good Renewables for setting up that $800,000 charitable fund at the Crocker Wind Farm.

All of the men and women that are operating that wind farm this week, you are the Uptime Wind Energy podcast wind farm of the week.

Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast, and thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes to our Substack Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, and check out Rosie’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

This week on News Flash, Grenergy is selling 23 percent of its Oasis de Atacama project for up to $962M, a consortium led by APG Asset Management NV and Australian Retirement Trust will acquire Riverstone Holdings LLC equity stake in Pattern Energy, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has acquired a majority stake in Toqlukuti’k Wind and Hydrogen.

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
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Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: Alright, first up, Grenergy is selling 23 percent of its Oasis del Atacama project. To CONT Global A KKR company for up to $962 million. The sale includes three of the seven phases of what would be the world’s largest energy storage facility, compromising 451 megawatts of solar and two and a half gigawatt hours of storage capacity.

The three phases are already under construction and will generate more than 1.3 terawatt hours of energy annually. Now, Phil, why is Grinergy removing itself from some of these projects? Is it cash constriction?

Philip Totaro: This one’s kind of fascinating because this isn’t just a simple asset rotation.

I think this is more that they have to be able to dump some of their pipeline in order to have some cash on hand to cover operations of existing assets as well as eventually reinvest in their pipeline. But this, normally when you do an asset rotation, you either sell off a small percentage minority stake in your asset portfolio, or you take, some of your projects and sell them off.

This is a fairly large deal for a good chunk of capacity that, Contour Global is is going to have as part of their portfolio now, bolstering what KKR’s doing with their backing as well. KKR wants Contour Global to start expanding more and it’s put them On the hunt for, asset acquisitions like this.

So, it’s a good fit, but it’s an interesting move from Greenergy at this point to really start getting some more cash in the door.

Joel Saxum: Aside from the sale here, we’re talking, M& A here in Newsflash. I want to focus on this Grenergy’s asset rotation target. So they’re looking at, they have a target for 2026 and ensures funding for a 2.

6 billion euro strategic plan. That strategic plan is to become a world leader in energy storage, which, I mean, if you’ve been following anything that we talk about on the podcast, in the last few years, energy storage has become a very important part

Allen Hall: A consortium led by APG Asset Management NV and Australian Retirement Trust will acquire Riverstone Holdings LLC equity stake in Pattern Energy. Now, Pattern Energy is currently developing over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy and transmission projects for nearly 10, 000 megawatts across North America, either operating or under construction.

Phil, Pattern Energy is a privately held company up to this point, but they are seeking a little bit of money to help with these projects that they have going on, Sunzea being one of them.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that Riverstone Holdings is selling out their stake. They were one of the founding partners along with management for Pattern.

It’s a big signal for Pattern to be able to take a next step in terms of their growth plan. But also a big deal where, these two pension companies are investment and an investment fund is coming in alongside the Canadian pension plan investment board that also owns a stake along with the pattern management.

So, all of that combined means a lot more. kind of, retirement money and pension money going into, renewable project development, which whether it’s been through direct investment or in this case, like this deal, the equity stake in pattern you’re seeing, we’ve talked about.

On the show before, there’s a lot more investments coming in from insurance companies, pension plan companies and those type of management companies and investment vehicles. So this is kind of furthering that through, in this case, again, an equity stake as opposed to direct investment in projects, but it’s a, really good deal for Pattern, who, has continued to kind of outperform a lot of their industry peers especially when it comes to being able to raise capital.

Joel Saxum: When you talk about an Australian retirement trust getting involved in this, what I see is long term investment being excited about. wind and renewable projects, but short term we want to make money type of investments not being as interested. So you can see that like the black rocks are involved in the Canadian pension funds are involved.

These are very long term stable investments in these infrastructure projects, but the people that want to make money quick are getting out of renewables. So see that as a trend.

Allen Hall: Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has acquired a majority stake in Toqlukuti’k Wind and Hydrogen, a large scale project in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, from ABO Energy.

The project is expected to produce competitive green hydrogen and ammonia, leveraging exceptional wind resources and existing infrastructure. Now that project will create over 4, 000 construction jobs and 400, 000 jobs.

And Phil, is this the first Green Hydrogen and Ammonia project for CIP?

Philip Totaro: It is for CIP which is kind of an interesting move. We’ve talked before on both the Uptime Wind Energy podcast and Newsflash here about Whether or not we need, tons and tons of hydrogen, this project has the potential to be upwards of five gigawatts of wind or other power generation that would feed into, this hydrogen and ammonia production.

Whether or not they’re going to actually build it that big, we don’t know yet because this is still in a fairly early stage of development, so it gives CIP a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor or something. We’ll see how this goes. Canada does seem very enthusiastic about the hydrogen projects though, because they have Well, except for the locals, I guess, but Canada in general, the Canadian government certainly And the provincial governments are a lot more excited about getting some of these projects built.

So I think they will welcome CIP’s acquisition and we’ll see where projects like this go in the future.

Joel Saxum: Newfoundland and Labrador have some of the best wind resources in North America. So that’s a thing, right? But the other side of it is the energy mix in Newfoundland and Labrador is very heavily renewables already.

There’s a lot of hydro. They’re flush with renewable generation. So adding these on is of course going to go secondary market, hydrogen, ammonia. But the big thing here for the locals is 4, 000 construction jobs, 400 long term operational positions. Jobs and good paying jobs are scarce in that corner of the world, so this will be a great boom for the economy up in the Maritimes in Canada.

The spotlight today is on Romotioncam, a company with an inspection method that works while blades are in motion. René Harendt, CTO at Romotioncam, and Michael Stamm, a researcher from the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung in Germany, discuss this groundbreaking technology. Learn about innovations at the company, from a new 840 mm focal length camera to thermal imaging data, that will make inspections more helpful for operators.

Check out Michael’s research at BAM! https://zenodo.org/records/14170341, https://www.bam.de/Content/EN/Projects/KI-Visir/KI-Visir.html

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
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Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today we have two experts pioneering innovative wind turbine inspection methods. René Harent is the CTO of Romotioncam whose patented technology enables high res photography of operating wind turbines.

And Michael Stamm from Germany’s Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, who specializes in thermographic inspection methods for wind turbines. Together, they’re combining visual and infrared imaging to revolutionize how we detect early stage blade issues. Rene and Michael, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.

Thank you. We have seen Romotioncam a number of times, and the technology is really good, Rene. I like it because the turbine continues to operate. As you take high quality images, the technology has evolved quite a bit from the last time I have seen it. Do you want to explain where you’re at with Romotioncam today?

So

René Harendt: at the moment, we actually build up a fleet to scale up and to provide it to a bigger market. And yeah, I actually have a new prototype with A bigger focal length. So the actual system has a 500 millimeter focal length. The new system has an 840 millimeter, millimeter focal length. So that means that we can, even on higher turbines and bigger blades, because this is related to our distance to the turbines, we can provide GSDs like 0.

06 centimeter per pixel. So something up to 0. pixel.

Allen Hall: So in that kind of imaging resolution, you can detect all kinds of blade abnormalities.

René Harendt: Yes, even little hair cracks and stuff like this.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, because you’re approaching what a drone can do, right? That’s, even a couple of years ago, two millimeters per pixel, three millimeters per pixel is normal.

But now that one millimeter per pixel, a lot of times you’ll see that in an RFP, right? When someone puts out, Hey, we’re, we want inspections and they put it out to the market. One millimeter per pixel will be the standard, but you guys are offering this without actually having to stop the turbine. So your value add goes through the roof because you’re keeping that production going.

René Harendt: That’s true. And if you think about it with that, sometimes we add a distance of 160 meters, something like this and provide that kind of GSD. Yeah, this. Sometimes there are. That’s amazing, yeah.

Allen Hall: So maybe, René, for those uninitiated, who are not familiar with Romotioncam, what are the fundamentals here?

How does this system work?

René Harendt: The easiest way is to go to our website and watch the video. I think this can explain. Everything. So go to romotioncam com and watch it here. But I’ll try to explain it a little bit. So the key thing is that we’re using one camera to track the whole rotor and the blades and a special tracking technology behind it, which is also patented.

Can detect the wingtips and can calculate the rotation speed and the position of the turbine and stuff like this. And then calculators and the kind of movement data for a pan tilt head. And we have the camera integrated into a pan tilt head that can follow the blade all the time. So that means even on high tip speeds, we can follow the Tip.

It’s two fast cars driving next to each other. You literally can shake hands. And this is, this allows us for the camera to use low shutter speeds. And yeah, we can deal also with low light condition because we don’t have to put the ISO too high and stuff like this. It’s also weak. We Yeah, I can eliminate some photographic issues you would normally have if you’re trying to freeze some motions.

Yeah.

Allen Hall: Now, the majority of the work you do is in Europe, but you were in the United States for a short while. Can you explain what kind of work you’re doing

René Harendt: in Europe at the minute? So we are subcontractors, so we have a frame contact with RWE, so we’re running out some inspections and, but we want to open the market a little bit more.

There is a plan for next year to open up an entity in the U. S. To be honest, at the moment, it’s now a political situation. So we have to take a look what happened. And if it’s, it’s not that easy for us yet to come over to the U. S. It’s not that we just saying, okay, we want to open an entity.

There’s a lot of paperwork. We try to clarify now, but at the moment, the political situation is a little bit. Yeah, we don’t really know. I think we have to wait. It could be more complicated, maybe more easier. Let’s see what happens. Yeah, but the goal is to come to the US and open an entity there

Allen Hall: as

René Harendt: well.

Allen Hall: And the latest technology, and we talked several weeks ago now, that Romotioncam has been involved with, is on the thermal imaging side. And the first time I heard about this was a probably a year ago when we were in Amsterdam at one of the blade conferences and I was just blown away. You can take thermal imaging from a Romotioncam cam on the ground.

That’s amazing. One. That’s amazing. And then it was described what that camera and that technology could do. And this is where Michael comes in. Where Michael is our thermal imaging expert. And Michael, can you describe where you work at? Just to make sure I get the right label on it.

Michael Stamm: Yeah. Hi, I’m Michael.

I work at a research institute. So I’m definitely on the research side of this technology. And We are performing thermal imaging of operating wind turbines from the ground. And this is actually also where we met with Romotioncam, because it’s really important to, for a proper interpretation of our thermal images, we really needed high resolution visual images.

And then we were just looking for somebody providing this simultaneously from the same point we were looking at. And then that was like the match with the RamoshiCAM. And now we just had a big measurement campaign where we tried to benchmark what is possible, where are we?

We are working on this, like BAM is working on this since, Something like seven years. And I know even when I have discussions with experts from the field, I know that even 15 years ago, people were already talking about thermal expression of rotor blades. So it’s like not, really inherently new.

I just say like things develop, cameras develop, understanding develops, simulation develop. So we are, we are trying to get it where it’s really useful for the industry.

Joel Saxum: Traditionally, we know in the wind turbine world, visual inspections via drone romotioncam as you guys are doing, it’s fantastic.

Pairing that with Thermal. What exactly can you guys see? Are you trying to image and what, like what value are you trying to bring to the inspections?

Michael Stamm: I want to distinguish two physical phenomena, and I think it’s really important to get this once clarified and then we can go to the. But there are different physical phenomenons that give you a thermal signature on your blade.

And you have to distinguish these signatures. And one of the signatures is flow, air flow. Turbulent flow has a higher heat exchange between air and blade than laminar flow. So you see the difference between laminar and turbulent flow, which for example, Helps you to characterize leading edge defects, which result in turbulent flow patterns.

That’s the first point. And the second point is completely independent of the flow. It’s really like the inner structure of the blade. It’s like just a different thing to look into the things. The sun is rising, you see the entire blade gets warm, and wherever there is, for example, foam, balsa, air, it gets warmer faster.

Why? Because you just don’t have that high heat capacity. Having a big part of CFRP of a few centimeters, it takes time to heat this up. And then, this honeycomb structure is warm already. And that’s like the second physical phenomena. So you really have to distinguish. And then, definitely, You look for the application in this case, for example, with romotioncam we were really looking for this flow visualization.

Joel Saxum: And you’re also can look for, and I think this is an important one, friction creates heat and, or a lack of friction can create a colder spot. And so it’s more like you’re looking on the blade. You’re not looking for a specific temperature, right? We’re not looking for, I want to see the spot. That’s, 21.

2 degrees Celsius. I want to see the spots that are. 21. 2 and 21. 0 in between the two to see the differences because if you can find a delta within this homogenous blade structure then you might be able to pinpoint something. Then if it’s friction you might be seeing a crack or you might be seeing a despond in the shear web where that shear web is moving as the blade moves it creates a little bit of friction, creates a little bit of heat as things move on.

So is that part of the one of the goals and the one of the things that you guys can work with here and how is that working? That’s physics part number

Michael Stamm: three. Okay. I’m ahead of the, I’m ahead of the conversation. Sorry. At this point, best greetings to the DTU, Aquatic Goal Project from Shoushen. They are focusing exactly on this.

It’s a third way to look at things. I just, I don’t know. And here you, I know that 15 years ago people already started to operate the turbine, stop it, and do the inspection. What do you get then? You do not have the flow anymore because you stopped the turbine, but you still have the heat from the friction.

So that’s one way of doing things. We, before meeting in RoamOceanCamp, we were really focusing on these inner defects. The inner defects, the delamination, which not due to friction, you see it due to the air in your system, which is almost like a pillow. It’s like an isolator. Air is a perfect isolator.

So when you have, for example, a deamination between the spar and the web, you might see it if you have a delamination at the trailing edge, you see it very well way before it’s actually open, before it opens up. You already see that there’s like a deamination. We were focusing on this, so that it’s like.

You always use it, the thermal camera, you always look at the temperature of your blade, but you really have to understand to what look for and under which conditions. That’s the main message.

Allen Hall: So then thermal imaging becomes extremely valuable with Romotioncama because now you can, in theory, see structural issues.

You can see thermal changes that way, but you can also see aerodynamic. Differences between the ideal blade and what you actually have without stopping the turbine. So it doesn’t take any lockout tag out. No one’s climbing the turbine. Everything is remote from the turbine. And the big problem I think that exists today is a lot of operators know they have leading edge erosion or some sort of aerodynamic problem.

But it’s very difficult to visualize that. You just can’t walk up to a blade and say to yourself I know this blade is losing 3%. I can’t do that today. It’s too much to process. And then I have to do a CFD analysis or some sort of interpretive engineering effort to determine roughly what that loss is.

You can walk up there today. Put a thermal camera Romotion camera up there and say this is how much energy is being wasted in turbulence. This is where your problems are. These are the areas that you need to focus on. Instantaneously, almost.

René Harendt: Exactly. And this is what we with Romotioncam. So our next step is to integrate both cameras in one system so that we can take a one shot the thermal images.

And then on that part, we also have to separate within a little bit. We have to see the TTP patterns or the turbulent flow patterns the terminal turbulent flow patterns. This is something we can deliver, in one shot with our normal blade inspections, with the normal visual inspections.

Yeah, we can lay over the images and we can see, okay, which damage causes some turbulences. And we also, sometimes we see also turbulences that is not related to to, to damages we’re seeing. So there’s something more we don’t know yet. Yeah. And this is something we can carry out as a normal inspection.

And then we are trying with the same system, but in another way of doing it. Yeah. And this is the more challenging part, what we’re trying to do. Yeah. And then in our next project. So to figure out what conditions we need to look into the blades, because it’s not about to seeing something is.

We, we have to make sure when we’re coming and doing this kind of blade inspections also that we want to look inside a blade. We want to make sure that when we don’t see anything, then there is nothing. And that’s the check. Because it might be that on the one day with everybody can buy a camera and trying to do this.

And it could be that you can come to the toe and on the one day you’re seeing something on the next day you see nothing. And. In the end of the day, when you see Nazi, what is it? Was it a bad day? What is the wrong condition? Or something like this. And this is the challenge, yeah, we were trying to solve.

Joel Saxum: When you’re really looking at, scientific grade thermal images, there’s a lot you can learn from them, but there’s also a lot you need to understand as an expert, like Michael, like yourself. To know that if the sun is hitting this blade surface at a certain angle, how does that possibly interfere with the things that we’re trying to get from it?

And if today is cloudy or, it’s a cold morning versus a hot morning, those kinds of things, that’s where you guys come into play.

Michael Stamm: A good colleague of mine, he always says, You do not only need the fast car to win the race. You also need the driver, you need the maintenance, you need the ground station.

And it’s exactly this, you need more than just a good camera. Yes, with Romotioncam we are absolutely on the edge. This system will be really cool. And still, what we are working on are, for example, finite element simulations. You simulate your structure, you simulate your weather conditions, and then you get an idea of am I actually possible to see on Tuesday morning these defects.

Or is it the wrong weather conditions? So like to exclude these false negatives, false positives, this we are trying to do with simulations. And then you have to combine all this knowledge, you have to know your blades. And then you get way more than the turbulence patterns. The turbulence patterns you almost see in almost all conditions.

It’s like a nice added value. But to look into your blade 10 centimeters deep, you really have to know what you’re doing. And then you must be sure that if you do not see anything, you don’t have a crack. Otherwise, the value is

Allen Hall: Michael, you’ve done a number of tests. You’ve done about 30 turbines worth with the thermal imaging camera.

And that data is available. You can just go look on the internet. You can find it. Those images with their romotioncam are really good. It is shocking to see those images because it just, it’s eye opening like, oh my gosh that leading edge defect is causing turbulence. There it is. It’s remarkable how fast that works.

How good is that technology? Do you expect this to just operators to start implementing this as just a sanity check? Because that’s what I would see. And particularly because Romotioncam doesn’t involve shutting off the turbine, there’s a whole cold season here where the turbines are spinning and no one wants to stop them.

The wintertime’s great time to make power, but you could also learn so much about your turbines and how they’re really performing in a short amount of time. Is that the value

René Harendt: add here? Yeah, from my perspectives, to go back to the data set we’re providing. It does not really represent our normal inspection data, because we had to find a compromise with Michael from the BAM and with their system.

And this is where also the idea was born, okay, to really make it and to really have different angles, different views on the blade, even with film and with the visual images. There’s no way around that putting two cameras in one system. Yeah. And then it’s good. And of course the added value is that we.

doing it with no downtime so we are completely invisible we’re just coming we just tell me okay what’s the size of your turbine what’s the blade length and where is the turbine can i access this by alone or do i have to make some yeah is there a fence on something like this i mean in europe normally the turbines are pretty big Open, you can access that.

So we are pretty much invisible. So we just going there, taking the images and the next contact you will have with me is the report. Yeah. And you don’t know when we have been there, when we did it from the, like this is our normal procedures. So there’s no communication anymore with with our clients.

We don’t need a technician in field. We don’t have to plan in advance. You just give us the locations. We checking everything independently. We see if everything’s accessible and then we plan planning to capture the data completely independent by ourselves. So that’s the thing. And of course the goal for the next year is to put.

Both cameras in one system so that we can deliver on the report, the added value that we can at least show you the turbulences. I don’t think that you can really say you’re losing this percentage of efficiency, but we can give you an overall view compared maybe to the normal flows that we can see.

Okay. These turbine or these blades, if we compare it with other ones is a little bit critical. So we can give the clients a little bit, another viewpoint on, on, on damages. And maybe it helps a little bit to define some repair times because it’s not only related on safety reasons anymore. It’s also that there comes another point here and that’s the efficiency.

Yeah. And it might be that because of the efficiency loss, it’s cheaper to repair it now.

Joel Saxum: I think the important thing to focus on here is that you, the Romotioncam system and the advances that you guys have done, You just talked about an lens coming and the ground basically per pixel on the blade.

The ability to do that and not interrupt field operations. Alan and I were just in the field last week. We talked with multiple places where they’re like, We’ve got so much going on now we’re talking to us for the most part here, right? Where there’s a hundred, 120, 150 turbines in a wind farm.

There’s so many activities going on daily on those things. To find the guy for lotto, to get a, to get another technician to help you, escort you around the field and do all these different things. That takes away from other things that need to be done in the wind farm and site supervisors, it’s a pain in the butt for them.

They’re like oh, the inspection, or the inspection guys are here, this or there. This is here. The fact that you guys can show up on site, do your safety orientation, get a map of the field, and then just say, see you later. We’re not going to affect your production. And we’re going to deliver you results without basically bothering you in the field.

That to me, as a site supervisor would make me smile from ear to ear. And then now you’re getting to the point where, hey, we’re also adding this thermal technology. We’re doing other things that are value add in the field. So when you’re out there, you’re collecting more data, you’re delivering more insights, and you’re not bothering anybody, basically, during your operation.

So I think this is something that definitely, if you haven’t looked into Romotioncam, you need to give these guys a call if you’re in the inspect, if you’re looking for inspections. The

Allen Hall: information from this is remarkable, and I encourage everybody to go online and look for Michael’s data, and we’ll put the link in the show notes so you can see this stuff.

It’s truly revolutionary. I know we use that term a lot in the wind energy industry. To me, engineer, this is magic, and I have to commend both of you. Combining these two technologies, I’m sure, was not easy, and I know there’s a lot of computer software. Behind the scenes to make all these pictures possible, but it is truly remarkable.

And Rene, obviously a lot of people are going to be interested in Romotioncam. How do they reach out to you? How do they

René Harendt: connect? I think they can just go on our website and they can connect. Would link on LinkedIn, of course, just connect on LinkedIn. And we try and to keep you updated also with the progress of developments and stuff like this.

Allen Hall: So just visit romotioncam.com and Michael, you’re a researcher, one of those great scientists over in Germany.

Michael Stamm: How do they connect with you? I’m on LinkedIn and we have a quite nice webpage, I must say, for a governmental institution. And there you find also find some links. We work the scientific way.

So what we do, we put down in scientific papers where it’s described in detail. And these are online, these are available and you can just check them out. You check out the data and then give me a call and we’ll see if we come together. Yeah. Would be happy to, yeah, propose this really new or revolutional technology to some others.

Also in the U. S. by the way.

Allen Hall: Yes. Yeah. You’re welcome in the U. S. anytime. Rene and Michael, thank you so much for being on the podcast Truly Remarkable Technology. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation.

On Power-Up today, a pre-tensioning mechanism for concrete towers, Vestas’ idea for reducing sway in towers, and the patent behind the Smooth Criminal performances.

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

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Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

Allen Hall: Alright, our first idea comes from the brain of Max Boegl Wind AG, and it is a really unique patent. When you deal with concrete towers, like you see on Nordex turbines, some Acciona turbines, where they stack the concrete cylinders on one another. Have you ever asked yourself, how do those keep from tipping over and everything landing on the ground?

Well, there’s a series of tension cables inside of there that keeps those things stacked up properly and provides pressure the whole time. That is a really tricky system. And this patent idea, which is a pretension element, It creates these, this mechanism to provide tension and simply on these concrete towers so they don’t fall over and don’t come apart like kids blocks.

And Phil, this one I think is being used, right? I would assume a this technique, because it’s really unique and simple and effective, has to be out in service already.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and we believe it’s being used on some of their hybrid concrete and steel tube towers. So just for everybody’s benefit too, this is kind of a pretensioned tower anchor concept where you know, the, the benefit of that is, is if you, if you want to be able to control the amount of, of load and deflection pre tensioning can kind of help facilitate that versus post tensioning something where once you’ve already poured concrete and it’s hardened, there’s only so much kind of post tensioning you can do without overstressing either the tendons or the concrete itself, which, which could weaken it.

So pre tensioning this allows you to You know, have the, the correct amount of tension in the tendons and, and the bolt the anchor bolts. And then when you’re laying in your concrete it’s, it’s going to help facilitate the, the strength and reliability of that connection. Now, what’s also kind of fascinating about this is that we haven’t, we’ve seen, kind of pre tensioning and post tensioning used in different areas of, of the turbine before where some of the companies, Vestas, I think, tried a a post tensioned tower with die cables and things like that.

So, there, there have been companies that have tried different arrangements and techniques before but it was never really widely adopted, but Max Bogle, obviously has the, the pedigree in, in wind energy to have this more widely adopted and the hybrid towers that they’ve been deploying.

I believe number more than like three or four hundred at this point that they’ve got deployed mostly throughout Europe, I believe. So, this is fantastic technology and, and again, great to see that somebody’s, capturing IP on a technology that they’re actually rolling out commercially and, and, getting the commercial benefit out of leveraging.

Joel Saxum: I think an important note here, pre tensioning. So just to give example if you’re not familiar with concrete pre tensioning or post tensioning, think of the most, the easiest example of concrete pre tensioning is when they make, when you make a bridge beam. And you see the bridge beams have a little bit of an arc to them, kind of?

How that was made is, You put cables through a form, you pour concrete in the form, and while that form is still wet, you put tension on those cables on the outsides of the form, so they actually, like, they’ll pull on the inside, and then once the concrete sets, you release the form, and now it puts pressure on that concrete, and concrete is always by strength of how well it’s pushed together.

So PSI, the pressure of concrete, is how strong it is usually. So when that, When that pretensioning is done, it makes the connection stronger. It makes the piece stronger. It makes everything stronger. So that’s the technology they’re using here. So switching gears to going, how is this used in the field or what does it look like?

In the United States, we don’t have a whole lot of concrete towers. And in general, concrete towers aren’t that widely used. To my knowledge, I’m not a developer. I haven’t looked into the commercial models or the business case for concrete versus steel, but I know steel is pretty dang easy to just roll to site and boom, boom, boom, put up.

So I think that’s why we see more steel ones than, than concrete. But technology like this may change that in the future.

Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Vestas and they have a patent and really a really strong idea. About the control system and their turbines when the turbine isn’t pointed in the right direction.

So they can get yaw off center from where it needed to be. It’s not really pointed in the wind. And that can cause the tower to sway. And once the tower starts to sway, that can set off an alarm and shut everything down. Which you don’t necessarily want to do. So this patent idea looks at where the yaw error is and derates that switch, the vibration switch on the sway.

They say, Hey, we’re just out of yaw. Let’s get back in the right direction. And that swaying that is happening will go away. So it’s like a temporary way of reducing this control system so that the turbine continues to operate and produce maximum power. It’s a really complicated thing though, because as Phil, as turbines have gotten more instrumentation and more control systems, there’s turbine than there ever used to be.

And tower sway is one of those. This tries to deal with some of the unique situations that pop up with yaw.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and, and what’s kind of interesting about this is you’re, you’re right, because we, we now have, algorithms in the Turbine Controller that you would think would overlap or compete with each other.

You’ve got yaw angle optimization for controlling wake. You’ve got pitch angle optimization for performance or noise. And so there’s all kinds of things that you might be be doing at the same time. And I think this is a solution that they came up with specific to a problem they might’ve had with a specific tower frequency or something like that, where, you were getting this, this oscillation and you want to be able to leverage the, the yaw errors and input to.

This algorithm that, that’s basically going to determine, how do you reduce the amount of wobble? We were talking off air about this is almost like, if you’ve got like high speed wobble on a, on a, well, I get it on my scooter my electric scooter, sometimes you gotta lean forward or throttle back a little bit to be able to, just get out of that oscillation window and then you can get back to, to normal operation.

Joel Saxum: I think that these problems didn’t exist a long time ago, right? If you think about this is a Vestas patent, right? Yes. So if you think about a V47, a V47, it’s stout blades, not a whole lot of flexibility, not a whole lot of movement, not a big tall tower, not 70 meter long blades. So it could handle vibration a bit better.

Whether that’s vortex induced vibration, of the tower with wind going past it, or it’s, Vibration induced by the rotating equipment within the tower. Now as you get, we’re getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This patent’s from 2021. So that was right when Vestas was coming out with like the, the V 150.

Now we’re in the V 163. So these things are getting bigger, taller, longer blades. So they’re a lot more sensitive to, Motion induced or rotational imbalances induced issues within the turbine. So they’re coming up with, controller methodologies to fix some of these problems. I think that’s something we definitely have to be doing as it’s going to get as we get larger and larger.

And I think you’ll see more and more OEMs having to chase this same dragon.

Allen Hall: For our fun patent a week, we go to Hollywood and some of the most famous patents that we actually use today have come from Hollywood. The Marx Brothers were involved in a number of patents and products that are used in aerospace today.

Hedy Lamarr, the famous actress, has a patent for frequency hopping, which is a way that we transmit signals and code today around the world. Well, this one is a little more common usage in that it’s a special pair of shoes that you have seen these shoes, if you’ve watched MTV before, in Michael Jackson, in that video Smooth Criminal.

And when you see Michael Jackson sort of lean forward, you’re like, Oh man, that’s amazing. How did he do that without falling over? Well, he had invented a special shoe and in this shoe is a little slot in the heel is a slot and it picks up a bolt head that’s built into the floor, so you kind of lock yourself into the floor and you can lean forward.

And Michael Jackson is one of the inventors of this system, Phil. It’s quite interesting that they went ahead and patented it. to keep others from copying it.

Philip Totaro: Well, besides that it’s actually something that they ended up using for the live stage performances back in the eighties and nineties. And, it’s funny because when they originally shot the music video, the, the lean.

The famous smooth criminal lean was kind of done with, with just Hollywood tricks. And I forget what the specific system was, but they wanted to be able to do this maneuver with all the dancers, including Michael, at a live stage show. So they had to come up with a system for how to handle this.

I don’t know if even at the time, I don’t remember this back in the 80s, but I don’t know if everybody even knew how. It was being done at the time. I think it was everybody just assumed it was like magic or he was actually like leaning over and, it was just in control of himself that much. Like, it’s just it’s fascinating to see how like IP can can end up kind of popping up in in random places like, the entertainment industry or, how we use, technology in, in wind.

I mean, it’s, it’s a similar kind of thing where the, the dumbest, cleverest little things can, can end up being the most revolutionary.

This week we discuss the recent GE Vernova investor call, discussing the company’s current situation, future plans, and how the US market will react. We also cover an article by TRESIOS from PES Wind Magazine about their offshore construction business. Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com

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Allen Hall: In an extraordinary display of memory and pattern recognition, a man who doesn’t speak Spanish has dominated the Spanish World Scrabble Championships. Nigel Richards, a New Zealander living in Malaysia, defeated 145 competitors and won 22 consecutive matches to claim the title in Grenada, Spain. Known as the quote, Tiger Woods of Scrabble, Richards has mastered the game across multiple languages despite not speaking them.

He has a unique ability to memorize dictionaries without understanding anything what the words mean, and has led him to winning nearly 200 tournaments, including French in 2015 and 2018. Now, that is crazy, guys. Did you ever meet somebody with that kind of photographic memory, and you’re like, that is a very odd person?

If you have done it, if you’ve won championships in Spanish and French, and I assume English, wow, that is a unique person.

Joel Saxum: Is there money to be won playing Scrabble?

Allen Hall: Evidently there is because he’s won so many championships. It’s the, from all the information I could find online he, this guy is super human in how he does this.

According to some of his friends, he can look at a page of words and remember all those words. It’s like a photographic memory, even though he couldn’t carry a conversation in French or Spanish at all, he can’t carry one. It’s just understanding how words go together.

Phil Totaro: It’s technically a I forget specifically what it’s called, but it’s actually technically a form of autism that allows you to do that.

allows a person to do that. It’s still an astonishing talent. So

Joel Saxum: what I would say to as a segue into the show today is some people have an optimized electrical grid in their brain and it works better.

You’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by BuildTurbines.

com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today.

Allen Hall: In the latest edition of PES Wind Magazine, which you can download at PESWind. com, a good article from Tresios, and I did not know that business very well until I read the article. It’s a big subsea construction and marine services company. And they’ve actually reorganized themselves because there’s so much offshore wind work that they’re, they have divided into basically two sections to do that, subseas construction and marine services.

And they have a third division because there’s so much work in offshore wind. They have a sort of a human resources division. It’s a company, workforce company called Mr. James. You can go to the Mr. James website. It’s actually quite good. It’s one of the better human resource workforce websites that I’ve ever seen, honestly.

It’s pretty cool. So when you’re looking for people to work at sea, Mr. James is not a bad place to go look for those people. But Joel the interesting thing about this is that there’s so much activity around wind. And you just don’t see all this work that’s happening, but it’s major construction work.

You got to know what you’re doing out there and Trecios is one of those companies. The

Joel Saxum: tough thing with

Allen Hall: offshore

Joel Saxum: construction is like the general public doesn’t see it, right? As for understanding, like you drive down the highway, high rises going up, cranes, big machines building the highway.

So it’s so visible and you can understand it a little bit. But when you go offshore, it’s just, it’s it’s imaginary to most people to see Oh, you see these turbines in the water. Great. The one I always compare it to Allen, you and I talk about this often is like the subsea oil and gas infrastructures.

Same thing with wind. Like you see these towers and the big blades up there, but you don’t see all the stuff that happens below the surface. The pile driving, the rock dumps, the cable lays, the trenching, all of the geo geophysical work that has to be done beforehand. There’s so much to do there and it’s inherently complex, right?

Because almost everything you do outside of basically an offshore wind driving monopiles is remote work. So you’re working with ROVs. You don’t actually have people on it. You have, robotics and you’re dealing in sea states and keeping the vessel steady and customizing that vessel to be able to work with the kit that you need for that specific job.

So having people like Tresios that have a lot of experience, it says, we’re reading the article here, doing a little research, the founders both previously worked for Allseas, huge offshore construction company. So these kinds of people that you grab for a construction project like this, they have these skill sets.

They’re very specialized, right? I’ve been on projects before. We’re like, Hey, we need this one person to come in because they have the knowledge of how to do this. And that person costs 2, 500 a day. That’s the kind of crazy stuff that happens in offshore construction. Having a partner like Trecios, it has a lot of experience.

They have the body shop part figured out. They know how to upfit vessels. They know how to go from feed study all the way through construction as a full on EPC. They’re the partner, the kind of partner you want to have.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s quite remarkable. So if you want to learn all the things that TRESIOS is doing, just go to peswind.com

,download your issue and give it a good read. There’s a lot of great articles in this issue. This. This quarter.

Unlock your wind farm’s best performance at Wind Energy O& M Australia, February 11th to 12th in sunny Melbourne. Join industry leaders as they share practical solutions for maintenance, OEM relations, and asset management.

Discover strategies to cut costs, keep your assets running smoothly, and drive long term success in today’s competitive market. Register today and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com. All

Allen Hall: right, GE just held an investor update as we’re recording this. It happened last night. Very interesting.

GE Vernova is broken into the three main parts. They have a gas turbine division. They have an a switch transformer division. And they have the wind energy division. So they call different titles, but it’s essentially it. So she, understand what products are they’re serving there. So it’s really three different businesses that are all wrapped together, but it’s all about electrification.

That’s where their emphasis is. That business is seeing tremendous growth in gas turbines, and it’s seeing really good growth in electrification, the switchgear and transformers that it’s delivering and the the, Outlook for that is fantastic. They’re sold out through 2028 for a lot of equipment already.

They’re selling slots into 2029 right now, but the wind division, not so much. All right. So the wind divisions is reporting about a negative 10 and a half a percent EBITDA margin in 2023, but they’re expecting that to be have about a 50 percent improvement in 2024. Still negative, but half what it was, which is good.

And they’re projecting EBITDA losses between 200 and 400 million into 2025. And that is all, or vastly all, from offshore. The offshore wind business is really dragging them down in terms of numbers, right? So they had the blade break at Dogger Bank and they had blades break at Vineyard. That and the slowdown of those projects really are pushing them to the right, which they wanted to have done sometime next year.

Whatever now you’re talking about. 26 ish timeframe when they’re going to be wrapped up. And that is killing them because you can imagine, Joel, as you pointed out numerous times, ships are expensive and if you’re not producing, putting turbines up, you’re just spending money. And that’s what’s happening.

Onshore, which is the real focus here, GE has not taken an order for offshore in 35, 37 months. And they don’t plan to take any more, so their focus is onshore. The vast majority of the onshore sales are in the United States, like 80 percent of the business is going to be in the United States, which kind of makes sense.

But the projection of revenue is flat. So 2024 is expected to be flat. It’s roughly what it was last year, about almost 10 billion, 9 billion, 10 billion. And they’re projecting it’s going to be down a little bit in 2025. As I think Phil pointed out a while ago. They’re planning to make about 2, 000 wind turbines, and Joel and I had talked to a couple other people and involved with that, and he said, GE’s planning to make about 2, 000 wind turbines.

They have the capability to make 4, 000. Their break even’s at 1, 000 for onshore. So they’re gonna get to 1, 000, be break even, make another 1, 000 more, and that’s essentially it. They have a capability to do twice that, but they have no plans to do it right now. Because they’re really focused on improving the quality.

And that is the big driver. I mentioned in the Slack chat Also that GE said the word lean probably a thousand times during that hour and a half. One for each turbine. Pretty much. Everything was lean this, lean that. And what, when GE people say lean, they mean cut. That’s what that means. They are trying to reduce costs, because there’s not much they’re going to be able to do in wind in terms of raising prices.

The concern here is we’re not going to see a lot of growth in wind. In fact, they’re projecting pretty flat growth. So that leads me to the question of what is going to happen to wind if GE is not driving it in the United States? Is it really going to be stagnant? Is it just repowering projects just to hit the PTC or what is driving that sort of slowdown in wind?

Joel Saxum: I think one thing to, to add to your anecdotal comments to Alan is the statements that they made. 2024 revenue expected to be flat, right? And 2024 expecting improvements with nearly 50 percent EBITDA improvement. Only means cuts, right? If your revenue’s flat and you’re gonna get up your EBITDA, you gotta cut some fat somewhere.

You gotta be doing something. And so they say it right in their statements, this is what we’re gonna do. What I see for the, the next few years, this is the we know that there’s players that are basically side by side developers with GE, right? We know NextEra’s gonna be putting in some GE turbines.

And their big clients, I’m sure are going to soak up a lot of that market store, that share of the volume. Because basically it’s like, Alan, you and I were having the conversation about doing this thing like aerospace does. Hey, this is the capacity. We’ll sell you a slot in that capacity. And if you don’t like it or someone wants more then the prices just go up.

Those are the slots. Sorry. That’s what’s available. I think that for GE as a company, that’s probably, or it’s a GE playbook thing, right? That’s a good way to get back to EBITDA and control getting back to profitable in a few years, writing that ship. What that does for the overall wind industry. I think it continues to leave a gap.

So so the last few years we’ve been talking about a gap from Siemens Gamesa, right? When they stopped selling their turbines. They didn’t install many. Like, when you look at the install capacity in the United States, there’s a lot of Siemens 2. 3s and some, of that type size, these B53, B59 blade machines.

But there’s not a whole lot of those when they started putting in the SG145s and stuff. There’s not a whole lot of them. Then you have that gap. B or GE will continue to put turbines in, but it might not be enough to satisfy the consumption of that development market. People will look to Vesta’s more.

People may look to, you may see some Nordics turbines getting installed because I think that if you’re saying 2000 turbines a year, we’re going to install, and that’s not just the U S we know that 80 percent of that 75, 80 percent of that’s probably us, but we know that some of those are going elsewhere in the world.

So that you say 1500 turbines a year from GE. That’s four, five, six big wind farms. And we know that Sun Z is already going to soak up, how many hundred of these things. So that leaves a lot of space for other players to come in and get some installed capacity numbers.

That’s my opinion. I think we’re going to install a lot more than 1, 500 turbines in the United States in a per year, the next few years. Phil, what do you think?

Phil Totaro: Yeah, I agreed, but. Keep in mind that the reason why everybody’s, revised their forecasts is because of the outcome of the election and everybody’s expecting, as we’ve talked about, there’s going to be, a spillover into 25 and 26 of everything that’s in the interconnection queue that can get money to get built, but that’s a finite amount of projects and that’s why GE’s saying it’s a finite amount of capacity that they’re going to serve.

In that market I don’t necessarily expect that obviously Nordex wants to expand their footprint Siemens wants to come back into the US market, but they haven’t really done so with any brand new orders yet and Vestas is here and, is slugging it out with GE, but at the end of the day, I think everybody’s looking at a market where I don’t know how many times we’ve said it, probably just as many times I’ve said the word inflation and interest rates on the show as, as much as, GE said lean in their investor update last night.

The reality is as long as interest rates are high, fewer projects are getting built. It’s just, that’s the reality, which means fewer turbines, it trickles down through the supply chain. Why

Allen Hall: such a huge growth in gas turbines then?

Phil Totaro: Because there’s still demand for electricity actually, electricity demand is still increasing, but because Oil and gas prices are still relatively stable to high and that kind of segment of the business is looking more profitable than wind or solar that frankly requires a lot more transmission build out.

Rosemary Barnes: But also aren’t gas peakers quick and cheap to build, right? So if you. aren’t sure about the future. It doesn’t cost as much to, to build a gas plant as a gas peaker plant, as it does to build, a wind farm and batteries. Yeah. And also if you’re not sure when delaying making a decision, you eventually delay and delay long enough that you’ve got no choice but to, put in something like that.

I think that’s part of it.

Joel Saxum: I think transmission as well, Rosemary, on the same side, it’s easier to connect A peaker plant like that to a transmission than it is to put a wind farm where it might be intermittent and it might not be, you need, Alan, we’ve said before Hitachi, GE, all these switch gear and converter.

Companies are way out with backlog. So it’s easier to put on more traditional power than to put on these more complex stuff.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But I think it must be like a partly US specific scenarios, right? Because the globe, wind isn’t stagnating anymore. We, we’re seeing growth again globally with wind, maybe, not as much as it could be or as much as we would hope, but I don’t think that interest rates are high everywhere.

So I don’t think that that fully explains it. I think transmission is more of a problem than in the U S than elsewhere, but again, it’s not the only place that’s struggling with transmission. So yeah, I want to know, you guys are there on the ground. What is it about the U S? Last time, even Trump, last time.

Trump was in, there was actually, a little surge in wind installations, probably by people, like you say Phil trying to try to get in before the, yeah, the door slammed shut. Yes it’s a hard one for me as an outsider to figure out.

Phil Totaro: The reason, yes, transmission’s a big issue, but the reason we keep saying interest rates are probably the dominant thing is because there’s a finite amount of money that can be invested right now, and the sentiment amongst investors is, I’d rather put my money into oil and gas that’s giving me a certain degree of certainty and, you I can project my return a lot more clearly and cleanly than I can with, and this is the big problem and the big issue that, that a lot of people have is when you’ve got an administration coming in and you don’t know what they’re going to do, investors are just going to sit on the sidelines and not spend the money they could be spending, or they’re going to go spend it someplace else rather than in renewables.

Cheers. And that’s the issue is, it, if you’re expecting chaos or uncertainty, you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna want to get in the middle of it. It’s, it is, that’s why it’s also, I think, a uniquely, U. S. kind of a challenge it’s much more of a scenario like in Australia, for example, where If you get sufficient transmission buildout, then it facilitates the buildout of renewable projects, even in a high interest rate environment, because you have the opportunity for offtake.

We have a finite opportunity for offtake, and that’s right now being gobbled up by investors that want to put money into, gas projects gas turbine power generation projects rather than grid, batteries, and renewable power

Allen Hall: generation. So the big push appears to be AI in data centers.

From the gas turbine business it sounded like a number of these gas turbines are going to end up in either Texas or Louisiana because they could get permitted

Rosemary Barnes: quicker.

Allen Hall: And the data centers were going to be down there for a variety of reasons, so it sounds like there’s a lot of capacity being purchased trying to pick up those slots of, I’m going to put a data center down in Texas, I’m going to need something to power it, I’m going to gas because I can plug into the gas infrastructure that exists in Texas and Louisiana and it’s a quick and dirty way to, to do it.

The troubling thing about it is it’s the quick and the dirty way to do it. Why the companies that are involved in those data centers, which are the Googles, the Metas, the, the SpaceX’s, the Tesla’s, the all those companies that are in that space, you would think that they want to have something that’s a little more technical.

Cleaner, natural gas is not, obviously it’s way better than coal, but if you had the opportunity to do something wind or solar, you’d think that they’d be doing it maybe it’s a time frame?

Rosemary Barnes: But they are they’re doing everything, like when they’re directly purchasing electricity it usually is through something clean.

You’ve seen announcements with Nuclear, wind, solar, batteries, geothermal is a big one. So it’s like everything. They need electricity no matter what. I think a lot of it is also perspective. Like they’re a lot more worried about. Not being able to take an opportunity than they are in making sure that they don’t, procure too much data center capacity.

So I’m not sure that the amount of activity is really representative of what will actually happen. But then a lot of it as well is utilities saying, we know that data centers are interested in connecting here, so we need more electricity and we need it fast, and the only way we can do that is with gas.

And partly I think that’s because, utilities mostly everywhere around the world are highly incentivized to say, we’ve got capacities about to increase massively, we need to invest because it’s that investment is the only way that they can increase their rates and get a, guaranteed return on any investment they make.

If you look back through history, we’ve had really flat electricity yeah, like growth in electricity demand over the last couple of decades. And still, if you look back at utilities predictions for what they would see in the future, it’s been a lot, it, they’ve on average been predicting quite a lot of growth.

Actually, I was listening to a podcast. I think it was that one with Jesse Jenkins. Whatever it’s called, shift key or something like that. Anyway, and they were saying that some, one of them had done some research recently and looked at. The projections that utility companies make, and on average, they’re predicting two and a half percent more than the reality of what growth has been.

And it sounds like not a big gap, but when you think that the real growth has been basically zero and they’re consistently estimating two and a half percent more than that, you can see that it was a real bias towards yeah, overestimating. And. In a lot of ways, that makes sense because you don’t want to find yourself short, right?

If you’re an elected official or, in charge of running an electricity utility, then Yeah, people really don’t want any shortfalls. They’d be, they don’t want to pay too much, but they’d probably rather pay a bit more than have a lot of blackouts. So yeah, I think that like the story that gets told is not as predictive of the future as it maybe sounds on first blush.

And I think that, yeah, when you look at. I don’t know, when we look back in a few years, I think that we will likely think, Oh, wow, everyone like freaked out over data centers, but it wasn’t that big a deal. I know currently data centers use less electricity in the US than televisions do. Like even if you double that, it’s still it’s not the electricity grid’s going to crash yeah, kind of scenario.

So it’s. Significant. And for sure, electricity demand is increasing and is going to increase because, we’re trying to electrify everything. So I don’t want to disagree that it’s a challenge, but I think it does matter what proportion we think is going to be for data centers and also, like what kinds of data centers, because people think, Oh, this means like always on 24, seven electricity, there’s that’s, all that data center needs and all that we’re going to need in the future is going to be dominating electricity grids.

But I think actually we’re not going to see as dramatic a change in the demand profile from what we see today by adding another, like 5 percent of like pretty constant around the clock. Demand, it’s not going to change curves too much. So yeah I tend to think that the future is going to look more like the past than what people are currently making it out to be.

Joel Saxum: But I think you made an argument there for some of these, some of the constant powered baseload things, because. If I’m talking about my house, right? There’s a certain time of the day when wind and solar is usually pretty decent that the peak load is here. Whereas if these things run in all the time, 24 7, that you have to even that load out with something that can run like if you’re talking renewables like hydro or geothermal, it’s a better option for data center type driven things than would be wind or solar.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. If it’s not going on to the electricity grid, then I would agree with you. If and there is also a lot of data center stuff that is you can shift the demand around, a lot of training and yeah, especially from people who are cost conscious, you don’t have to do it. Not everything is a Google search that has to happen exactly when you want it to.

Not everything is a, recording a podcast remotely where, this data needs to go through right now. Yeah. Otherwise, Alan’s going to, freeze in the middle of his one of his, one of his classic rants. Some of it is flexible, but the fact is like like Australia is an extreme example, Texas must be as well, where, like plenty of times rooftop solar is meeting, or solar at least, is meeting all of demand on the grid.

And as solar increases, that’s going to get more and more. There’s no such thing as baseload in Australia anymore because there’s so many times when we have, even in Australia, literally behind the meter, there is more than enough electricity for everything in large parts of Australia now from time to time.

And like we’re not at the end of our solar installation journey yet. So that’s going to continue to get more and more. It’s not that there’s no industry happening around the clock in Australia. It’s that there’s so much solar that it’s more than that amount of baseload. If you look at, if you see data center, like assume data centers are 24 seven, if you assume that’s going to increase by, it’s going to double, we end up with another, 5 percent of the electricity demand that comes from 24 seven data centers, that’s still not going to undo the fact of the vast amount of solar that’s in the grid.

You’re still going to see that issue with. No baseload in the grid as a whole. It’s, I think people tend to think about things in isolation, like imagining that a data center is coming online and building its own nuclear power plant just for that data center, but really it’s not, it’s, once a piece of that, it’s gone.

They definitely want thermoelectricity and would prefer it to be clean, but they’re not for the most part actually building their own generation and not planning to be part of the electricity market.

Joel Saxum: Could there be an issue in the future? So this is a really a, me being daft, but when I think about power generation and companies that do it.

You have people that, this company is known for building wind farms. This company is known for building solar and they connect to the grid and they do this, but there’s like a, there’s an old school group of companies that do, would buy a gas power plant. Could there be a future where you have random people buying, like not random people, but random companies that are new to the space.

It’s Hey, we’re going to throw up a gas plant just for data centers. And then instead of wind or something.

Allen Hall: No, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Joel Saxum: Okay.

Allen Hall: Right now, as GE just explained it, they said a lot of the slots that were taken by people or companies that didn’t have a lot of experience on energy projects.

And so they were not sure they were actually going to be able to take that order, but they held that position in the manufacturing so they had the ability to get a turbine. But Joel, I think the question is, when GE says that there’s a lot of users that don’t have any experience or little experience in energy projects.

That screams AI to me. That’s, that says Google, Meta, right? For sure. Amazon, whoever.

Phil Totaro: So for Google’s benefit, by the way, they have actually just recently said this week that they’re going to start putting any new data centers co located, basically as to the extent that they can next to wind, solar, or conventional power generation.

So that, it shortens the amount of transmission needed to get the power to the data center and gives them a faster reaction time to stabilize the grid when it comes to the actual power offtake. With a scenario like that it could actually it’s almost like you could have a data center serving the way that like hydro does to balance out, variable renewables where you could throttle, a data center’s consumption based upon, whether you have access or need, it needs additional so it can, it’s almost like it would act like a flywheel of sorts.

Allen Hall: Yeah I think that’s true, Phil. Being, when you listen to GE Talk, who is into the HVDC, which is into the transformers, into the switchgear, that equipment is, there are orders for that for like separate grids. Again, going back to Joel’s point, AI, right? There’s separate things going on out in the desert somewhere and they need to have switchgear for it.

There’s not a lot of switchgear HVDC projects going on for existing grid. Which is the worry. Going back to Rosemary’s point, the existing grid needs to get upgraded. There’s not much of that going on. There is some, but not at the level in which Rosemary’s talking about to upgrade the ability to transmit energy across the country.

That doesn’t seem to be happening at a pace which is needed. Upgrading the grid doesn’t have an ROI. Immediately. No, it doesn’t. And, that’s just it. If I have an existing transmission system that’s been running for 50 years and a lot of the equipment that GE is going to be selling is replacement for the old transformers and the old switcher because they’re just aging out and they’re going to go back in and put new equipment in.

Why are we not upgrading that, like doubling the capacity, tripling the capacity of those substations with new technology? HVDC, for example. It’s just a 50 year wrong move. You’re playing a transformer, you don’t want to touch it for 50 years. Once you do it, you’re like, oh, it’s oh, that sunk cost.

I don’t want to do it again and upgrade it later. Isn’t it just like a self fulfilling argument, like

Rosemary Barnes: sustaining and expanding? There’s a lot of people because it’s so hard to build new transmission in, especially in the U. S. There are a lot of people talking about ways that you can get more out of existing transmission.

And, there’s a lot of cool tech actually people using carbon fiber instead of aluminum because it it sags less when it gets hot. And so you can, put a lot more power down the same lines with the same towers. And so like you can go through and change all that and get a lot more smart ways about.

figuring out what’s the capacity, have a dynamic line rating so that, on a really windy day when there’s a lot of, convective heat transfer, then you should be able to put more power through before they get too hot and sag, which works perfectly for, if you’re connecting wind farms, because obviously when they want to put a lot of power down is when it’s really windy.

So there’s heaps of smart smart things people are talking about. I haven’t actually heard anybody except for you mention the substations, but yeah, like upgrading them, it would be, obviously it makes no sense to do one part of it and not the rest of it. Otherwise there’s, yeah, it just doesn’t make any difference.

So definitely people are talking about it. Are they doing it? I don’t know.

Allen Hall: Going back to the money part, which is what Joel was on. I’ll throw out a little news snippet I saw earlier today. The F 35 fighter program in the United States. Lockheed Martin has roughly a 1 trillion contract for that. That may be canceled.

1 trillion. Now, 1 trillion in the grid could go a heck of a long way of electrifying more of the United States at higher energy levels than we could possibly imagine. So I think the funding may be there. The question is, do we have the knowledge, willpower, momentum, to do those upgrades? To take the capacity up 2x, 3x?

I think as a country we used to.

Joel Saxum: Think about the interstate highway system. The interstate highway system was built, is, that’s the Eisenhower stuff, right? So post World War II. That was built, that, what, people may not realize this, but that was built as a defense project. The Interstate Highway System of the United States is a defense project.

There’s rules where every five miles you have to have a one mile straight stretch that can be utilized as a landing strip. Think about that next time you’re driving. Every five miles or, I can’t remember exactly the number it is, there’s a straight stretch. So the, our country used to have the gusto to get massive projects done like that.

We just don’t have it anymore. You look at certain things like we’ve got to do we’ve got to fix this one bridge. It’s going to be a billion dollars to fix this bridge. And it’s going to take us four years or whatever, whoever, those numbers are crazy, but to do a massive overhaul like that, we need something that modernize our grid.

Absolutely. But that won’t happen until in the, where we sit right now, until we have blackouts, brownouts, or some, something happens to push that along because we’re just not there.

Allen Hall: Do you feel like we’re in a hold my beer moment? Yeah, I feel like there is like a hold my beer. Let’s see if we can pull this thing off moment or watch this because you see it, it’s palpable.

It wasn’t palpable six months ago, I didn’t think, but today I’m like, man, anything that I thought was going to be firm, fixed, never change is completely up for debate. And an F 35 program, something that is so instrumental to the defense budget, to the Air Force, to the Marines. is willing to be cut, stop, cut, close the doors on the factory thing, and then anything’s possible.

Literally anything’s possible. We could send a man to Mars or a woman to Mars, whoever to Mars, and we could sure as heck increase the grid. Back to Rosemary’s point, like just increase the cable, increase the transformer

Phil Totaro: size, do it. Yeah Alan, this assumes that They’re going to cancel an F 35 project and then reallocate a trillion dollars into the grid, which is never going to happen.

This is fun to speculate about, but

Allen Hall: No. What I’m getting at though, Phil, is that the people at the top at the moment that are talking about these high level things, one of them is Musk, who is a huge solar proponent, who is a huge electrification proponent. There has to be a lot of discussions at the highest level at the moment about, we need more electricity, everybody.

And we don’t have it. I can’t sell Teslas, and I don’t think that discussion’s happened, but maybe it has. I can’t sell Teslas if I can’t plug them in. I can’t, if there’s no plugs, there’s no power, there’s no electrification, there’s no electric vehicles. Now maybe Trump doesn’t care. I don’t know. Don’t, he probably owns a Tesla.

Somebody in that organization probably owns a Tesla. One of his kids probably owns a Tesla. Cybertruck? Okay, there you go. He got gifted a Cybertruck. He’s got a Cybertruck. So he needs a place to plug that thing in. And at Mar a Lago, he probably has it. Let me tell you, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, getting a plug in for my Cybertruck, which I will never own, by the way, is almost impossible.

I can’t get it. I can’t even keep the power on in my house at the minute.

Joel Saxum: I think that you’re 100 percent correct, Alan, that we’re, that the possibilities of a wild ride, they’re coming.

Allen Hall: I will say, one of the things that can happen right now, and America can change its direction relatively quickly.

There is when this momentum at these election changes if you can get a clear message out let’s I’ll use the branding right making America great again. What’s gonna make quote unquote make America great again forget about all the other garbage is that America was electrified, like in the early 1900s.

And that system still pretty much exists like it was in the 1900s. And obviously in the 1930s and 40s, there was a huge improvement, right? 1950s, obviously huge improvement. However, that was 70 years ago. And if someone at the highest level, like a musk, says, we need to get on this thing, and that means We need to create more energy, which is what Trump is talking about.

We need more energy. Great. We need more energy. What the heck are you going to do with it? It is, you can’t deliver it anywhere. Where is it going to go? So you can drill all you want, or, and you can get all the natural gas, you can frack all you want, but you, the end use, which is electricity for the vast majority of that, has nowhere to go.

You need to fix that problem first, which is the hardest problem. Transmission is the hardest problem. Where’s the DOE on this? Where’s the DOE on transmission? Joel, you asked that, that’s a really great question, because I think I’ve seen the nominee for the DOE, who was an oil and gas person, fine, not super.

But those people, generally speaking, the DOE, whoever’s sitting on the DOE, doesn’t get to make the big picture outlook. Whoever that person is, and I think it’s someone, isn’t it someone from North Dakota? Maybe the former governor of North Dakota, one of those people. Chris Wright. He’s an oil gas person, right?

That’s his background. He’s CEO of Denver based Liberty Energy. Okay, that’s it, Liberty Energy. Yeah. An oil gas company. Fine. But if he’s really wants to make America great again, having lower gas prices, yes, but electricity is going to be the thing. You can’t grow factories without electricity. You can’t do it.

You can’t grow jobs without electricity. Can’t do it. And we’re capacity locked right now.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, I think about FDR in the 30s trying to get everybody out of Let’s go CCC style,

Allen Hall: man. I don’t think we need CCC. We don’t need that. Joel has pointed out to me numerous times when we drive across Texas and Oklahoma, he’ll say, we’re like driving over 50 pipelines between here and wherever we’re going.

And he’s right. He’s totally right. Like we’re driving over a lot of oil and gas infrastructure all the time. He’s right. And you just don’t see the electrical infrastructure anywhere near that. If we spent some time, if we spent four years trying to get the infrastructure on the grid side upgraded, a lot of problems in America would go away and the GDP would definitely skyrocket.

That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. And subscribe in the channels below to Uptime Tech News or Weekly Newsletter. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

On News Flash this week we cover BP and JERA joining forces to create a offshore wind partnership called JERA Nex. Also Ørsted has signed an agreement with Cathay Life Insurance to sell a 50% stake in the Changhua 4 offshore wind farm. And Solaria has announced plans to reach 14. 3 gigawatts of install capacity by 2028.

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com

Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxom, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www. intelstor. com.

Allen Hall: First up this week, Phil, BP and JERA are joining forces to create a major offshore wind partnership called JERA Next. BP and this equally owned joint venture will have a total of 13 gigawatts potential net generating capacity combining the operating assets and the development projects all together.

The partners have committed up to 5. 8 billion in capital funding through 2030. All right, BP is trying to slowly back away from some renewable energy projects, but now they’ve joined forces with JIRA. I want to understand what this dynamic is.

Philip Totaro: Well, it’s fascinating because with the resignation as well of the, BP offshore wind executive, their executive director It’s almost like this is the full effect of the oil and gas pivot coming to fruition.

It’s kind of, it sounds to me, the way I read this is the resignation of, we’re not really going to do offshore wind except through this venture with JERA from now on where they basically do all the work and we’ll take a percentage. But it’s, it just feels like BP’s got bigger issues because even their oil and gas business isn’t the healthiest at the moment.

So, they’re pivoting and focusing on that whilst providing JIRA the opportunity to continue the growth that they’ve been on.

Joel Saxum: BP is confusing me here. I feel like their operations strategy and marketing and PR departments need to go and sit in a room together to figure out what they’re actually doing.

They’re in the midst of selling all their onshore assets in the U. S. We know that. They’ve, sold stakes in certain offshore projects in the U. S. They’ve said they’re not going to do wind. They said they were going to do wind. So it’d be interesting to watch this one. And I think Phil, the, what you’re talking about is mirroring some of what others are doing, right?

Like we know Shell now, Shell’s out. They’re like, we’re not doing offshore wind anymore. And we’ve seen Econor take a stake in Orsted to be able to provide capital, provide support, but kind of stand back and let the other people do it and just be a part of it. And that’s what it looks like BP is doing here more now.

So maybe that just aligns with their strategy a bit better. For the long haul. So maybe we’ll see some more people doing this, just providing capital, being a part of it, but.

Allen Hall: Orsted has signed an agreement with Cathay Life Insurance, Taiwan’s leading insurance company, to sell a 50 percent stake in the 583 megawatt grater Changhua 4 offshore wind farm.

The 1. 6 billion transaction includes both ownership and funding commitments, with payments scheduled for 2024 and 2025. Phil, Orsted could use the cash right now to help fund other projects. Kathy is a unique partner though that being it from the insurance company And that’s their focus is mostly insurance, I believe.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, I mean, it’s not the first time insurance companies have made investments in projects, particularly minority investments. I mean, we’ve got John Hancock making, onshore wind investments in the U. S. But I think this is actually the first time that Cathay Life has dove into any kind of power generation at all, let alone renewable power generation.

So, good on them for that. But it’s also a recognition that they have the capital to be able to invest and they want and need to be able to park their money somewhere. And it’s a sign that they’re taking some confidence in the Taiwanese offshore market at the moment, which has had, a few fits and starts lately with, some policy hurdles and some, power offtake and pricing hurdles that I hope are largely resolved at this point.

But it’s certainly enough for Cathay Life to be able to plunk down some cash.

Joel Saxum: I like this move from Orsted. We’ve seen a lot of these kind of things happen, but what Orsted is doing, as you look at the greater mission of the company, is to get assets out there churning, to get, to help with the energy transition to make a greener, greener economy in the future.

And what they’re doing is just that. They’re cycling capital and getting partners on board after they built some things to get money in the door, give off some ownership, and then move on to the next project. So I’d like, I like to see what they’re doing and I like to see a lot of that come in from other companies in the future.

Allen Hall: And Solaria has announced plans to reach 14. 3 gigawatts of install capacity by 2028, working towards their ultimate goal of 18 gigawatts by 2030. The company is currently constructing 1. 4 gigawatts of photovoltaic plants in Spain with secured financing. Now, Phil, Solaria has a portfolio of mostly solar.

a little wind and a tiny amount of batteries, but they’re a big player in Spain with 18 gigawatts by 2030.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and they actually want to expand significantly in wind, which says to me that they’re probably on the hunt for Projects that, I mean, certainly greenfield projects, but also potentially repowering opportunities in Spain, which there are plenty Spain has one of the older average lifespans of its installed base and needs to, get a little more serious about asset repowering and for Solaria to come in and want to deploy capital on wind and hybrid projects.

I, again, I think this is overall a good move on their part.

Joel Saxum: I like to see that they’re trying to technologically diversify themselves. And one of my big pushes right now in the market is. Batteries, battery energy storage system. So baths or whatever you want to call it.

They’re about 6 percent batteries in their 2028 portfolio is the plan. So from, if we look back just a few years ago, there was barely any companies with any kind of battery storage built into them, and I think that’s a bigger part of the renewable energy mix in the future, so I’m glad to see they’re putting some capital towards it.

This week’s spotlight explores SkySpecs’ solution to the wind industry’s repair vendor management crisis with executives Dan Partin and Noah Fabes. The discussion covers how SkySpecs helps wind farm operators handle vendor shortages and quality control through their comprehensive vendor management services, which includes vetting contractors, overseeing repairs, and streamlining project management.

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com
Skyspecs – https://skyspecs.com

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. We’re shining a spotlight on a critical issue that’s causing headaches for wind farm operators across the globe, repair vendor management. So you imagine this scenario, your wind farm is running smoothly when suddenly a turbine goes offline.

You need repairs fast, but your usual vendor is book solid, and we’ve heard this all year. Days turn into weeks and you’re losing money with every passing hour. Unfortunately, this isn’t a hypothetical or a recent industry survey revealed a starling statistic. 40% of operators frequently face delays or increased costs due to repair vendor storage.

During peak periods, like the summertime of the United States. In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into this repair vendor crisis, walks for why there aren’t enough technicians to meet the man, how this shortage is impacting wind farm operations, and most importantly. What can be done about it? To help us unpack this complex issue, we’re joined by two experts from SkySpecs.

Our first guest is Dan Parton, VP of Strategic Account Management at SkySpecs. Dan brings extensive experience in the wind industry, Dan Parton Dan Parton focusing on developing and maintaining clean air. Key client relationships, his role is crucial in understanding and addressing the complex challenges faced by wind farm operators, particularly in the area of repair vendor management.

And our second guest is Noah Faves, senior product Manager at SkySpecs. Noah’s focused on workflow optimization and team leadership plays a key role in developing solutions that streamline and repair vendor management processes. His experience in creating robust solutions for previously unmet customer needs is particularly relevant to our discussion today.

Guys, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having us.

Noah Faves: Thank you.

Allen Hall: This is probably problem number one in the United States at the minute. I’m glad you guys are tackling it. Oh my gosh. What a disaster. There’s not enough technicians that are all tied up. If there are technicians. Somebody’s already locked him up months before, so you don’t even have access, forget about calling him because they’re not going to even pick up the phone.

This has led to a crisis, such that, I think Joel and I have seen this a couple of times this summer, where people, operations are starting to get a little bit desperate. And are bringing in crews that probably aren’t qualified to do the work that they’re supposed to do. Not to say they’re not technically capable.

They probably are technically capable. It’s all the periphery. Yeah. The PPE, showing up on time. All those things, booking their hours properly. That little stuff.

Joel Saxum: Would you run into, when you have that issue, you run into one of my biggest pet peeves in operations in general? And it’s the cost of poor quality.

Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Cost of poor quality can be put together as did they do a bad repair or something like that? Yeah. You got to go back and fix it. That’s a cost, but that’s easy to quantify. But cost of poor quality can also be like, they showed up with garbage trucks or something, and they were getting flat tires all the time because they had six ply tires or some really silly things, but it can, all of those issues can compound an already demanding problem.

Or, the biggest one we ran into this summer was people not using PPE. That’s just. Quite silly. So what that does is it gets you removed from site. That’s what’s gonna happen and even more of a reason to call you guys. So this is a new thing. This is something like as it sits usually you have wind turbine operator or ISP or someone looking into whatever their procurement department tells them and they may turn to procurement and say, procurement, any blades And procurement has found whoever’s going to be the cheapest or whoever has gone through their hurdles to get through their procurement system and say, Oh here’s four guys from these people.

They show up on site. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know, you don’t know what their background is, these kinds of things. There, there’s issues all the time with this. So there will, Is space, was space, you guys are starting to fill it right now, of someone to come in and be that middleman, be that not necessarily procurement, but someone that will vet people, someone that will find these, and you’re, what you’re doing is you’re just expanding on SkySpecs opportunities to partner and to be that close partner with your clients.

So how did the, this is a question I have, like, how does this conversation happen within SkySpecs of you know what we should do? We should do contractor management,

Dan Parton: how does that work? It’s a really interesting story, so I think it comes back to how we try to position ourselves in the industry and how we try to provide a platform that allows customers to have greater transparency and visibility into what’s going on at their wind farms.

And I love the idea of, loss of quality and tracking quality, because that’s what we’re trying to do. But what we discovered was you can build a platform, but you still need somebody to use it. And we found for a lot of our customers, they’re really lacking a lot of the time, effort, resources, really, to go in and Keep an eye on the vendors and really understand what’s happening out in the field.

And they were coming to us not asking not only can we help with their decision making and their prioritization, but can we also help with their management of some of these vendors and essentially, yeah, exactly. Can we outsource some of this to you because we really don’t have time to do it ourselves.

And it presented an interesting dilemma and opportunity for us. And we thought, that’s really interesting. Let’s give it a shot and I’ll see how we can do and let’s leverage some of our own tools, our expertise. And see if we can find areas where we can deliver value for those customers.

I think so far it’s been successful and we’ve been able to do that. We’ve grown and we’ve developed and we’ve identified ways where we can scale that effectively. It’s been a tremendous journey so far.

Allen Hall: What kind of pain have you seen for some of the people that call you up? What desperate situations have you been in?

Noah Faves: They’re usually mostly desperate situations, I would say. And in many cases oftentimes Maybe they are under an O& M service contract or something like that and have been struggling to get the level of transparency into how repair projects are going or repair’s not getting done at all.

And they come to us and ask for help.

Allen Hall: Is it just because they know something should be happening on these turbines, but it’s like day 30 out of the five day project? And they’re like, what’s going on?

Dan Parton: I think it’s it’s an interesting array of pain that you see. So I think a common one is just surprise damage on their blades.

They’re not really anticipating or budgeted for, and they’re scrambling at the mid season or end of year to find crews availability, as you mentioned earlier at the onset, that’s a big one. The, their usual crew is unavailable or the teams that they usually work with are unavailable.

Budgeting pain is a major one, obviously.

Noah Faves: Yeah, I’m looking for out of the box solutions on, potentially recurring defects and things like that.

Joel Saxum: Complex damages. Alan and I, we run into that quite often. We’re in the lightning world, right? That’s our main job. So when we talk to people, lightning is one of those things where That looked like a pinhole in the damage.

And then we started opening the blade up and all of a sudden we’re a hundred, 120, 000 in. That, that crew that’s there doing that repair, they may have actually been contracted to come and do six other cat three repairs. And now they’ve spent their whole budget on doing one, or a cat three, cat four, something of that sort.

Either way, those other repairs still need to get done, but now we need manpower. We need resources to get out there. The solution then can be, call you guys.

Allen Hall: What does that look like? I want to understand, when do I pick up the phone and call SkySpecs? Is it sort of Joel’s scenario of they just identified a Cat 5 when they thought there was a Cat 2 or 3?

Or is it, they have so much work and they just can’t find anybody competent to do it? Or is it both? I’m going to call them right now and say, Hey,

Joel Saxum: next spring we need this all done, figure it out for us. And

Dan Parton: What does that look like? When,

Allen Hall: what are people

Dan Parton: calling you for

Allen Hall: today?

Dan Parton: Ideally the earlier, the better, right?

That’s the project planning number one, right? The sooner you can get to her, the better that isn’t always feasible, obviously. And that’s part of the problem. I think. A common place where we interject is around the time the customer’s getting inspection results because often they’re finding that they’re struggling to prioritize with what to repair.

And if you come back and you get 100 Cat5s in your fleet and you have budget for 50, you have to start making hard decisions. And so one of the areas where we can interject is when that decision making process, we can help our customers. Prioritize within those 50 Cat5s that you have budget for what really needs to get done.

Maybe you can squeak in a few temporary repairs and a few other issues, but what, what can potentially wait and how long can it wait? So we can help in that decision making process early

Joel Saxum: on. Because at Skyspecs, as you guys grow the company, as you add more services, as you acquire companies, as you integrate solutions, you not only can be out there, Hey, we did your inspections.

This is what we found. Now you’ve got this much budget. These are the ones that we should look at. But then you talk to Cheryl and the rest of your blade team and say, Hey, take a look at these because we’ve got to optimize this. And the same time, Noah and I are looking for blade contractors to make sure we get these repairs done.

So you are starting to become a one stop shop for people to come and get things done.

Noah Faves: Yeah. I was just going to say, and it’s interesting to think about, the evolution of this, because you talked about the challenge with scarcity of techs and availability and how it’s all, it’s all tied together, right?

And. With our inspections business, and in many ways you can think about it we know, you can correct me if I’m wrong, perhaps 90 percent in North America of the repairs that need to be done or should be done. But then there’s a gap in for, owner operators to, secure enough budget early enough.

But in many ways when you look into the future like we could provide a level of transparency to service providers as well with the repairs that need to be done, which can then facilitate better planning and staffing on their end. Oh, hopefully. Alleviate some of that availability. Say

Joel Saxum: transparency and collaboration out loud to operators and they’re happy right now.

Dan Parton: I think that’s a really good point about that. It’s not just the owner operators that benefit from this, but I think that the service providers themselves. Yeah. They want to know how their crews are doing out in the field. And they appreciate it and benefit from getting the feedback. What technician is showing up without his PPE?

What technician is doing a poor job? So obviously they don’t necessarily want those folks in their crews. That reflects poorly on them in the end. So

Joel Saxum: are you guys getting that deep into it now? Or like surface level, it’s Hey, we can find you some people to do your work.

But are you getting that deep into where you’re doing the QA, QC, all field audits and all that kind of stuff of the repair?

Dan Parton: Yeah.

Joel Saxum: We have a pretty robust QC process. Oh, that’s fantastic.

Dan Parton: Yep.

Joel Saxum: So let me ask you another question about that then. Before you get to the idea where we’re doing field audits, QA, QC, these kind of things, you have to vet these contractors.

What does that process look like?

Noah Faves: Yeah, we have a pretty standard qualification process, so it was just a bit natural of an evolution for us to end up in repairmender management. Prior to that, we had a lot of established relationships with many customers who, And part of our service offering to them, we were doing some of this QA and QC work.

So we had a, a level of understanding around quality of workmanship from a lot of the service providers out there already. So that was one method in which we evaluated and vetted the service providers that, that we work with. But in addition to that, the rest of it is, it’s pretty standard, right?

We rely on feedback from customers that we have relationships with. We have a safety. Process that they have to adhere to. I’m not missing.

Dan Parton: I think you covered it. We’re able to take, because we talk to so many different customers, we can take a bit of a bird’s eye view of the industry and see what we’re hearing from various people where as, you know, within your four walls of any particular company, limited who you’re talking to your day to day.

So you guys end up

Joel Saxum: being basically the owner’s representative. Yeah, in a lot of those systems. In the oil and gas world we call it being the bird dog. You’re the one out there making sure, sniffing here and sniffing there, making sure everything is going well. Exactly. And I think there’s certain advantages to that for the speed of procurement as well.

You guys have been, to be a customer of that customer, you’ve been through their procurement process. So you know all the things, you know the insurance requirements, you know this, that, they must have.

Yeah.

Joel Saxum: So that leads me to another question, since you guys are, and maybe this is more of a contractual thing, but you’re not actually taking on any of the risk of the repair, correct?

In terms of the warranty or the, yeah. So if that contractor goes on site and like screws it up, that’s on the contractor, right? Or is that on, or you guys taking on that contractual risk?

Dan Parton: That would be on the contractor, but we’d be the ones responsible for managing that contract to get back out and get it addressed.

So we still are the bird dog or bird dog in that scenario. Yeah, the, we were in the process of standardizing the warranty negotiation process with our vendors as well. So we want to put in some more rigorous standards there and that’s going to be a negotiation that’s going to take some time.

Yeah. But in the meantime, we want to make sure that we’re We talked about earlier, the QC process goes to fruition. Hopefully you don’t end up in this situation, but obviously they do happen. But if there is an error and a mistake is made or workmanship has stopped itself, then we would be the ones to go back to the vendor and get them back out and have that taken care of.

Allen Hall: Okay. So is there a. Accumulation of data over time, for example, you’ve seen certain ISPs do repairs and you’re out inspecting it year one, year two after the repair, and you say, that company isn’t doing a really decent job, and we’re starting to see that blade damage issue reappear again because it wasn’t properly repaired, so we’re going to red flag that ISP.

To all of this, I think a lot of people are installing their repair documentation into Horizon. So now, if an ISP has come on site and said it’s going to take seven days, and they did it in seven days, and then you come back two years later, and yeah, that repair is still holding up, have you gathered that much information from all of the data that’s sitting in Horizon to then put an assessment on the ISPs?

These are A’s, these are B’s, these are C’s.

Noah Faves: Yeah, we have a, quite a large accumulation of data where you can start doing a bit of benchmarking and you’ve got a vendor scorecard that we use to evaluate. And I don’t, necessarily want to paint the picture like it’s, this one’s good, this one’s bad, but we can also look across their specialty and things like that to understand.

What I’m getting at

Allen Hall: is,

Noah Faves: yeah,

Allen Hall: there’s some companies that are good at blade repair, some are great at other things. Getting the right one on site is always critical. . Absolutely very c fixing blades, and

Dan Parton: we try to have those conversations with the ISPs themselves. We want to let them know how they’re doing, like where we’re seeing issues and stuff like that.

That’s great. Communication, transportation, like transparency. Yeah. Because they want to improve too, right? They want. Exactly. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Who’s the blade repair? ISP of the year. I don’t know if we can play a favorite song. Yeah, exactly. You won’t get that on LS.

Allen Hall: But as the ISPs get bigger, that becomes even more important because I think at times they have so many crews out on site, they can’t manage everybody everywhere. They need a little bit of feedback. It’s almost like the AAA guidebook or the Yelp of ISPs in a sense that I’m getting an independent assessment of what, My crew has done.

Yeah. It may be a great review. Maybe five stars. Maybe it’s a two star, but at least I know that I have a little bit of control back in it. And we’ve talked to a number of ISPs. They are super sensitive to what. The client thinks of them and whether they, if their technicians have done a good job or not, that is a huge criteria on the success of those companies.

So much

Dan Parton: is reputation based for sure.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, that concept of a bird dog, that’s very common in most industrial places, right? Like you’re in aerospace or you’ve worked in aerospace your whole career. There’s usually If some big company is buying a hundred planes from Boeing, they’re going to send a rep to that factory.

100%. To QC the whole thing, because they’re like, we’re paying for these, we want to make sure it’s done well. You guys, that’s not done in wind.

Allen Hall: In some aspects.

Joel Saxum: In some aspects. But it is, it’s also intrinsically difficult as well, right? Like it’s hard to have a bird dog up hanging on ropes with the team that’s doing repairs.

Out in the field, yeah.

Dan Parton: But because you guys You’re looking at a report. Yeah, but

Joel Saxum: because you guys are SkySpecs, not only do you have the ability of cataloging everything properly so you can review it, but you’re also doing inspection. You’re like, it’s the full you’re completing the full circle, with the only thing you’re not doing is mixing resin and glass.

And

Allen Hall: that’s what it comes down to right now. And I, one of the pieces that I wanted to get at is the scheduling part. I think, how much scheduling help do operators need right now? How much of the phone calls is, hey, you may need somebody out here in October, That started in March, I assume.

Dan Parton: Yeah it varies a lot.

I think, size of the owner makes a big difference in how complicated their procurement process is. Yes. Some of them could turn around and hire a new crew they’ve never worked with before in a week’s notice and some of them you need six months to a year of lead time to get through a procurement and.

And the latter, I think we can help there, because obviously we, we are an approved vendor if we’re, if there already are. Yeah. So we’re guiding you. Yeah. So we, yeah, we can be the sub, right? So we’re like the general contractor to subcontractor. So because we’re approved.

Yeah.

Dan Parton: We can work with what vendors we’ve approved within reason, depends on how it all works contractually.

Joel Saxum: So this is an industry, general industry, no, you’re, okay, you’re working with XYZ wind operator. And they’re a customer of you for inspections and maybe CMS, who we talked with Alan Larson earlier. And now they’re a customer of Noah and Dan’s professional services or whatever, so they’re working there. And so you’re making this, and this is a, maybe we don’t put this in an ad, but you’re making revenue off of them through your professional services. Are you also making revenue off of the ISPs? As far as helping them get through procurement and all of that kind of stuff.

Because you’re doing a service for them as well. No, we’re not charging the ISPCA.

Allen Hall: Okay. So you’re basically navigating through the procurement systems at the operators. And man, some of those procurement systems are, in my opinion, difficult.

Dan Parton: Not necessarily. It depends on the arrangement. I know I can speak to this a little bit more.

So some customers don’t require the if we’re a subcontractor, we’ll have a, I don’t want to get too much into the contractual T’s and C’s and stuff like here, but, if we have a MSA in place to the customer that allows us to subcontract in certain instances, then we Those vendors may not need to go through the procurement process with the end customer at all because we are, they’re, we are hiring them directly.

So that gives us the benefits. So that’s, we’ve become like the top of the funnel. Where we have 10, 15 vendors that we can work with. The customer might only have us and maybe one or two others, but we have access to a wider library of vendors we can use because we’re allowed to subcontract with them.

Joel Saxum: And are you doing, of course you’re doing blade repair services, but are you doing torque and tensioning

Dan Parton: service,

Joel Saxum: everything?

Dan Parton: Right now, just blades. Okay. Because that’s where a lot of our expertise and our data and background is in. Yeah, it gets back to the inspections and the platform and everything like that.

Yeah, that’s where we have our. A cool competency is really that’s not to say we want to explore these things in the future. If customers come asking, we’re always curious, we’ll try. How does this

Allen Hall: work if I’m a customer of yours today and I want to look at vendor management? Am I doing that through Horizon?

Is does that start when I just get that’s pretty inspection sequence of images and the categorizations and this is what you’re looking up, looking forward to in terms of a repair campaign? Is that when I trigger this button that says, I’m calling Noah? Yeah.

Dan Parton: Do you want to

Allen Hall: go? And I’m setting up a video call and figuring out like what are next steps?

Is that how it works?

Noah Faves: Yeah. And that’s basically the process. Okay. You hit on something good, right? Like one thing that I think is important to call out is that since we mean for all intents and purposes, we lack like the boots on the ground management when these projects are going on.

For us, like we’re managing basically the entire process of the repair execution. In the Horizon platform, right? And so we pay, super close attention to the day-to-day operations, work logs and things like that, all, all through the platform. And it’s really great because then we can give an increased level of transparency and visibility into how projects are tracking close to real time for the customers that we work with.

But to answer your question, like more directly, that’s typically how they engage with us. Engage with us. Get the inspection results and many of the many of our customers who transitioned into these under management services have usually been a service customer in another capacity.

So maybe they’re already getting support with. From, the shareholds who are doing, looking at their inspection results, providing some recommendations, maybe doing some budgeting and things like that. And usually that is the evolution then into asking me or Dan about,

Dan Parton: that’s a good point.

So a lot of what we, a lot of the services we provide as part of managing repairs, we also provide without actually hiring the vendors. So we can do, 80 percent for some customers and then they still go out and hire the vendor themselves. Yeah. That’s it’s just the added step for some that they just want really a white glove treatment or don’t have the resources to hire a vendor or whatever those kind of cases may be.

Allen Hall: So you have a sense because you’re taking all the inspection photos who’s likely to call. Do you anticipate that a little bit? Like you, you just did a drone inspection on a full site and

Joel Saxum: boy, you just got hammered. And you send them the email, your inspections are done, and by the way, you should call us.

Dan Parton: They get a critical notification email, just a standard process. Now, if there’s something that’s, this turbine needs to go offline immediately, that way it’s going to go. But no we’re not to the point where we’re so predictive that we’re anticipating that, that, just, yeah, hopefully someday we can be there soon, but,

Joel Saxum: And I’d like to dial it back a second to something you said. Where, are we now referring to all the Blades experts as the Sheryls? We do it within our four walls.

Allen Hall: Yeah, exactly. So how does an existing customer integrate the vendor management aspect? What does that look like? What do they do? If they’re not using you already to do that, how do they trigger it?

How do they turn that on? Phone call. Basically con, a conversation did happen in a CP or something. They’re

Dan Parton: usually already a customer in some capacity, so often it is like each other Hey, we need help. Yes, like help, but we weren’t anticipating XYI guess the problems are like, yes, like we’re the major problems.

We ran into this major problem and we don’t know how to handle it. We heard you guys might

Joel Saxum: be able to help

Dan Parton: us out. And that’s, it’s often the conversation ready like that. What

Allen Hall: percentage of customers have asked for vendor management? I wouldn’t, I’m thinking big numbers here because it’s knowing some of them that are customers of yours.

I can see them activating

Joel Saxum: this. Even if I was an engineering team that felt decently staffed, it would be such a nice thing to outsource.

Dan Parton: That’s, yeah, that’s actually an interesting point too, because I think there’s a question like, do you have the resources to do it? And there’s another question of, is it a good use of your resources to have them spending time looking through repair reports or whatever?

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That’s another common topic too. Far as like percentages, I don’t know that venture, but I,

Noah Faves: And have a better guess.

Dan Parton: Yeah, maybe 15 to 20 percent of our customers do something like this.

Allen Hall: That seems low to me because I would always want to have that emergency button there.

And I will always want to have you queue it up.

Dan Parton: Yeah. It’s relatively new for us. So we started it like, we started this about two years ago. Yeah. With the, that kind of scenario where the customers came to us and asked us this wasn’t something we really set out to do initially and it came up.

And then since then, we’ve decided it is something we want to lean into. We have made a focus in this past year, really scaled it tremendously into

Joel Saxum: its own

Dan Parton: product line. Yeah. So it’s been about, 18 months of really doing it. So it’s early.

Joel Saxum: This is one thing I’ve noticed about SkySpecs.

So like you guys know the conversation about SkySpecs and generally industry is they’ve got a lot of investment, acquired some companies. They’ve got all kinds of different things, but you guys are constantly listening to the market, right? Like you said, you didn’t go out to do primary market research on this new solution.

It was just like someone came with an idea and you guys developed the whole product line out of it to help the industry. Because at the end of the day, there’s only so many turbines installed in the field. And to optimize what we can do with them to optimize this process in the field, you guys are coming up with solutions back here as well.

Dan Parton: Yep, absolutely. Part of the reason I love working in the industry, honestly it’s the Wild West and there’s just so many unique and interesting problems that are out there to be solved. And there’s a million more that we could do if we’d love to be able to try if we had resources.

It’s gonna grow.

Allen Hall: So what are the outcomes with some of your existing clients? What have they seen over the last year or so as you’ve been doing vendor management? What are some of the success stories

Dan Parton: there? Do you want to speak to the statistics you’re wearing a little bit?

Noah Faves: Yeah, I’ll throw some so one of the things that we really pride ourselves in, which I was talking about just a bit earlier, is just that proactive project management through the Horizon platform. And so we’ve been able to save some of our customers. Costs through providing a level of like accountability to service providers.

So like advocating for credits and things like that. So we’ve been able to save them money there. Other other ways that we’ve helped our customers we’ve worked to develop temporary repair plan strategies to get turbines back on, online faster, which has resulted in cost savings.

Same with even going so far as, in some cases doing actual repair designs to try and, mitigate against some issues returning. So

Joel Saxum: you guys are doing engineering repair

Noah Faves: design

Joel Saxum: as well? Yes. In some instances, yeah. Yeah,

Noah Faves: in some instances. Yeah. So I think all of those are related to cost savings.

In addition, I think another area of value that we provide, and we talked a little bit about this earlier, but oftentimes there’s this theme that the the the lowest bidder wins the work, right? And I think it’s a common pitfall to, that many owner operators fall into. So like one thing that we really pride ourselves in is providing owner operators with realistic.

Estimates on the cost of repairs that helps with better cost management throughout the project. We

Joel Saxum: hear that doesn’t matter if it’s happening offshore. UK, Canada, South Africa, people will low bid things, and there will be bids that come in that are pretty dang accurate, but they won’t get to work.

Because they’re like, hey, this isn’t a realistic thing, but other companies just come in and they’re like, oh, yeah, we’ll do that in three days. Knowing come on, that’s not gonna happen. Yeah, but that’s where you bring in vendor

Allen Hall: management. If you do have a Cut through the BS. ISP on there that’s doing that nonsense, then Send them home, get somebody in there who can actually do the work.

Joel Saxum: This is, this is a, I can tell you procurement horror stories from my past, but not In some organizations, the procurement people know operations very well. They know what it takes. They know the they know what they should be looking at for weather risk. They know all these things. They know what blade repair stuff is or whatever the industry you’re in.

But sometimes procurement people have no idea and they’re just going, this is what the look like. Okay. And this is, and their documentation looks good to me. Okay. You get it. And that’s not always realistic. That’s not always the best way to do things. Yep.

Allen Hall: Definitely not. And I want to just highlight this one more time.

There’s so much work out there. There’s so many problems out in the field right now, and a lot of operators are struggling. You need some sort of inter management. You need that help. And it’s October right now, as we’re speaking. The season’s coming, right? The wind season’s coming. Everyone’s going to make their money.

But yeah, they’re firming up budgets. They’re trying to plan for next spring. Now’s the time to call SkySpecs and get the vendor management system turned on. Noah, how do they reach you? What’s the best way to contact you? Email. What is that?

Noah Faves: Yeah noah. fabes, F A B E S, at SkySpecs.

Dan Parton: And Dan, how do they get a hold of you?

Dan. partson. com. P A R T I N at skyspecs. com.

Allen Hall: And we’ll include that in the show notes and on the YouTube so you can get ahold of everybody or you can just visit skyspecs. com and you just enter your information in there. If you’re an existing client, if you’re on Horizon, is there anything you push in Horizon that would activate that to start a call?

Dan Parton: No. If you’re an existing client, you can reach out to your account rep and ask them, tell them you’re interested and want to learn more. We’ll be happy to set up a call.

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s pretty easy. Dan and Noah, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Joel and I have learned a tremendous amount and we’ll be recommending you as we travel across the United States.

I appreciate it, guys.

Dan Parton: Always a pleasure. Thanks for having us.

This week on Power-Up, Ørsted’s offshore blade install method, SWANCOR’s degradable epoxy resin composite, and a precursor to the Google Glass!

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!

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Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com

Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

First patent idea is from our friends over at Orsted, and they are looking at a really novel approach of installing wind turn blades vertically rather than the horizontally, which is we do today offshore. So if you’ve watched offshore blades being installed, you’ve always seen them placed horizontally and slid towards the hub and everybody tightens them on.

Well, that requires a lot of really tall cranes to, to make that happen. But what Orsted’s thinking about is grabbing the blade kind of by the bottom and lifting it up vertically. In order to do this, you need a pretty rigid frame to hold this crane to keep it from the blade stabilized. So the crane doesn’t move too much.

And it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a complicated mechanical problem. However, it does require a much shorter crane and that is the benefit and getting big cranes out at sea right now is really hard. Phil, so having a short crane with a much stronger crane head, I’ll call it,

Philip Totaro: Does make a lot of sense. It does.

And, and so just for context, we talked a couple of weeks ago about, Equinor getting a patent on, technology around optimization of floating platforms. This is another example of a development and independent power producer company, Orsted, getting a patent. IP themselves that they control on something related to, the, the business that they do on a daily basis.

And the reason I’m bringing this up is it’s, it’s a bit unique in the wind energy sector because most of the, Particularly important patents have been held in the past by the OEMs or other supply chain companies. So for, a company like Orsted to, to even contemplate doing this is, is fascinating.

This is still in the conceptual phase. There’s no rig that they’ve built yet. They’ve probably done some smaller scale bench testing, potentially. They’ve certainly done, plenty of computer modeling on, on this sort of thing. To get it to work. But it is, as Alan mentioned, an interesting concept because, the, the blade’s moment of inertia, when it’s in the vertical position, it, it has the opportunity to potentially flop around or tip over.

But the counter to that is, as Alan mentioned as well, you need a much shorter crane boom. And so, these are some of the technical challenges that, that Orsted is trying to address with introducing this kind of technology. I guess the question maybe for Joel is, is, does this seem practical and, and how attractive is this going to be?

Joel Saxum: I think from an operational standpoint, so for real world value of a patent, and this will happen eventually, and I don’t think it’s limited to offshore. I think it will happen onshore as well. And, and I’m saying this based on the global build out of wind farms, onshore, offshore, floating, you name it, what we’re doing and the goals we have in place.

All of these, do an easy one. Onshore Windfarm has a big, huge crane, a Liebherr 1300, and it’s got a tail picker and all this stuff, you have to mobilize two cranes, even though one’s smaller than the other. The same thing with offshore, you have all these specialized vessels, you have to mobilize this one vessel, it’s the only one that can lift these, 130 meter blades or whatever it may be.

We need ways, innovative ways, to be able to do installations easier. And not only installations, you gotta think about operations and maintenance. So as the lifetime, if we get more and more of these built, yes, construction, but now we’re getting to the point where we have to take and swap blades out, or if there’s an issue or something of that sort.

So, things like this need to happen. Does it make sense for me as an armchair engineer? Of course. Especially sitting here with Phil and Alan, who are Much better engineers than I am talking about moments of inertia. And this is, I’m standing here with my sitting here with my pen and my fingers together trying to figure out how this balance works.

I think it, I think there is a future for something like this. And kudos to Orsted. Maybe they’re gonna get the license it to a bunch of people.

Allen Hall: Our second idea is a degradable wind turbine blade and manufacturing method by Swancor Advanced Materials. And if you’ve been watching in the news about recycling and wind turbine blades, there’s been a lot of discussion about creating resins that you can decompose.

Well, this is one of them. And they, they’re. The idea is to create this resin. There’s a specific chemical compound that they’re creating, but when you break it down, you basically take the blade and drop it into an alkaline environment at somewhere around a hundred degrees Celsius for a period of time.

And the resin separates into its intrinsic parts. You can also recover the fabric that was in the blade. So you basically can start over with all the ingredients. It’s like unbaking a cake in a sense. This is really important because there’s a big movement in Europe to not landfill used wind turbine blades, and I think that movement about not landfilling is going to happen here in the United States.

So, SWAN Corps is really set up here for an opportunity, Phil.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and just for context for everybody, SWAN Corps is a a partner to a number of the OEMs already including Siemens Gamesa that has developed, recyclable blade, recyclable blade technology utilizing, I don’t know if it’s this specific formulation that they’re describing in this, this patent but it’s probably close.

And they’re actually doing this together in, in the manufacturing facilities in Taiwan. as well for some of the offshore blades for Siemens Gamesa. I believe Squancore is also a supplier to Vestas and certainly some of the Chinese OEMs, Sonoma and Envision Energy. So the fact that this is, again, I’m not sure if they’re using this exact, formulation in their commercially available product.

But like I said, it’s probably pretty close. And, it’s fantastic to see we just talked about another idea from Orsted that’s kind of, technology readiness level, like four or maybe five for those that are familiar with that, well, we track the, the technology readiness levels for all these patents that we catalog at Intel store.

This one’s probably a TRL eight or nine. And so again, this is fantastic to be able to see the progression of technology come into the market.

Joel Saxum: Phil, to, to your point there. A resin much like this one. I don’t know if it’s the exact same one. Like you said, RWE installed 2023 at the Cascasi wind farm offshore.

And there were Siemens Mesa blades. So something like this is being used in the field right now. My fall down on this one is the same conversation that you have whenever you talk about recycling wind turbines blades is what’s the throughput of something like this. Right. So what this patent says is thermal degradation is conducted 60 degrees C to 180 degrees C for 1 to 48 hours.

We don’t know exactly what it is. I’m sure that has to do with agitation in the, in, in the chemicals and these kinds of things, but that’s hugely energy intensive and it’s pretty slow. So when we get to the point where we’re having hundreds and hundreds and thousands of tons of turbine blades to recycle, which we have right now, and it’s only going to grow and grow and grow into the next 10, 20, 25 years, because that’s when, when, by the time these, this resin is into manufacturing, it will be another 25 years until we have to recycle them.

Can a factory or can a mechanism handle this at scale in the real world? Because even as it sits right now, we have people that are having a hard time at scale, grinding these things up to use them in roadbed materials and other things. So, I like that we’re moving forward in this method, and it could be something really cool in the future.

Does it sound like it’s ready for scale? Not to me. But I hope it is.

Allen Hall: Our fun invention is an interesting one this week. Joel, do you know what beer goggles are? I wear them like every Saturday . So this is a relative to beer goggles, and it’s similar to what Google Glass was at the time. It’s a set of glasses and on the lenses they put subliminal messages above the normal sight line, so it’s a stereoscopic effect and so on there it can say, Joel, no beer.

And then they can project that out in front of you on Saturdays so that you can remember what happened on Sunday. But this, this idea, I have not seen this implemented, but it is a very unique idea, just putting something on the edge of your vision all the time that you kind of lose track of. You don’t focus on it because your brain eventually just tries to ignore it.

But some part of your brain may be paying attention to it. And. Could give you

Joel Saxum: some healthy advice. I think there’s, this is, this could be really used in I, I have a lot of uses, I’m thinking marketing campaigns, here’s some free sunglasses to wear and then you never know what you’re actually getting from them or even messages from like maybe parents to kids, like, Hey, clean your room maybe me or maybe me this week, make sure you get my windshield repaired.

If it had something that you could. That you can change in real time on them. That might work really well. I like the idea.

Allen Hall: Come on, Phil, you have a use for this.

Philip Totaro: Well, let’s also give some background on this. This was originally conceived by a couple of Canadian inventors back in 1990. And that’s, they filed it, I think they filed a U.

S. version of the patent in 1991. It issued in 92. This patent is actually cited. As what’s called prior art, so kind of a previous invention to things like the Google Glass and some of these other goggle based technologies that Meta and some of these other companies, Apple have, have actually developed.

So even though this isn’t using or contemplating necessarily augmented reality technology, which was, what a lot of the modern versions of, of these glasses are this was a predecessor to that and, and something that kind of inspired derivative contributions in, in that area.

So this, this is actually kind of a fun and interesting one. I, again, you’re right. I’ve never seen anybody develop this, but it would probably come in handy

We discuss a PES Wind Magazine article featuring 4cast’s methodology for comprehensive wind resource assessment and site planning. Then cover Vestas CFO Hans Martin Smith’s departure after 20+ years. Finally offshore wind security concerns follow a Chinese vessel’s severance of Baltic Sea cables, and Tilt Renewables is announced as the title sponsor for Wind Energy O&M Australia.

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com

Allen Hall: Well, since everybody is getting pardoned recently, uh, I thought it may be a good idea to, to put out there what we should be pardoned for, so we ought to get added to that list.

Joel Saxum: How about this one? I would like to be pardoned for not getting my better half’s windshield changed in her Jeep from the crack from it.

Allen Hall: Ooh, you’re gonna need a pardon for that. Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely pardonable material. Yeah. Phil, have you broken any scooter laws there in California? No, I have not. I don’t know, Phil, you ought to get them out now because the pardons are coming. Okay. Well, Rosemary, I’m not sure we can pardon anybody in another country, but we might as well just open it up to everybody right now.

Why not? Rosemary, did you commit any offenses when you were in the States, in California, studying composites?

Rosemary Barnes: I’ve got a pretty big one, actually. I don’t know if you guys have this, but in Australia, when you’re learning how to, to write, handwrite at school, you know, you start with a pencil and then when you pass a test and you can graduate up to a pen, you need a pen license.

Um, do you have that?

Allen Hall: That is not real.

Rosemary Barnes: I did not get my pen license, but I do write with a pen sometimes. So, yeah, including in the United States.

Philip Totaro: That’s as real as a hoop snake.

Rosemary Barnes: That’s true. And I, um, I would like to invite Australians to comment on if you’re watching this on YouTube or anywhere that you can write comments but look it up on the LinkedIn post about this episode.

Please comment and confirm that we do or at least did in the 90s. I have to get a pen license before if we graduate from pencil to pen. I never got it.

Allen Hall: It’s a scandal. It’s an outright scandal. Alan, you have to share yours with us. What are you, what do you need to be pardoned for? Yeah, we could use some pardoning on the production side of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast because there are, there have been some times it’s pretty rough to edit and I gotta, I gotta plead guilty.

Yes, it is. However. However. Our producer does a very fine job, and what comes out on the airwaves is much better than what we record. Clearly. In

this quarter’s PES Win Magazine, a number of great articles, and you can download all of them at PESWin. com, but A really interesting article about weather from a company called Forecast. So if you go to their website, it’s fore cast. de, they’re based in Germany. And the article really describes how you do forecasting.

Preliminary studies on wind sites to look at what the winds are now, get a really good understanding of that and how that plays into the yield of this farm and what the weather should be, the long term weather implications going forward, so you can at least have an estimate on the revenue you’re going to pay.

Possibly be generating from these wind farms. And Joel, it seems like a lot of wind farm operators don’t do this. Either they don’t

Joel Saxum: do it or they’re not doing it at a high enough fidelity, right? So they’re not doing it well enough. We run into some wind farms where all of a sudden, you know, the resource is down or the resource isn’t good enough or local competition for the wind resource, right?

Someone’s building wind farms around them and it changes. And you, you see some people kind of, yeah, generally it looks like this at a hundred meters or at 80 meters. This is what we should have. And then they move on. Um, but what you’re seeing now is more sophisticated lenders as well. Wanting really good bankable insights on what is that wind resource going to be?

How much profit are we going to generate out of this project? Um, you know, and there’s other things that factor into that, which, uh, forecast is taking into consideration when they do their estimates. Legal framework and regulations, right? Because that’s a part of a wind or a site assessment as well, because as those things change or develop depending on where you are, you may be used to doing wind in Texas and you move to Kansas.

It’s a completely different regulatory framework, so that’s a big part of it. Uh, but, you know, if I’m building a wind farm, this is the kind of thing that I want to make sure that I tackle in a really good way. I don’t know if they do this, but I know, Alan, you and I talk about it would be nice if people would do lightning, lightning, uh, density as a part of their sighting assessment, but We’ll see.

Allen Hall: Well, there’s less lightning strikes in Europe, in most places in Europe, than there is in the United States. But Europe does seem to have a history of doing more research on the sites before they decide to put turbines in, where in the States, there are assessments done, but maybe not the fidelity of what Forecast is doing here.

Rosemary Barnes: In Australia, at least. I know that they do do lightning assessments, but, um, they don’t use it for estimating how many lightning repairs that you will need on blades or anything like that. It’s for, um, you know, they need to assess the lightning and protect the substation and things like that and make sure people aren’t going to die from lightning strikes on the site.

Um, so I know that I, I’ve seen the, you know, initial assessments and when you had all the information there, it would not have taken very much for you to extrapolate to realize that you were going to have this big lightning problem on site. Like you should, you should have known before you stuck a single turbine in the ground that you’re going to have, you You know, a lot more, um, lightning repairs than, you know, other sites that you had that had a lower lightning strike, um, intensity.

So yeah, I, I didn’t even think it would add that much more to the development process. If I just need to get the right expert in to, you know, just take a quick look at it and say, Hey guys, might budget in some, um, you know, more lightning repairs than you might be used to.

Allen Hall: Yeah, there’s a recent article about wind farms in my area that are on ridgelines.

They’re having huge problems with gusts. And they’re now realizing that maybe gusts aren’t the best thing for wind turbines. Maybe we didn’t site these turbines right because Half of them are down at any one time.

Rosemary Barnes: That’s, that’s one thing to not check the lightning, uh, environment, but to not check the wind resource properly is a bit strange for a wind farm.

Allen Hall: I agree. Uh, there’s been a huge shift in whether, uh, wind turbines should be cited on gusty sites or on top of mountains. There’s, there’s a lot less of the on top of the ridge lines and there were, uh, 10, 15 years ago, which is when our turbines were installed. So, you know, getting those wind resources right is a huge advantage.

And if. If you want to go to a resource, you can go to PESWin. com, read the article from Forkast.

As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PESWin 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, an interesting departure from Vestas. Hans Martin Smith has left the company after 20 plus years at Vestas. Um, he’s a CFO who began that role in about two years ago, March 22, and was really instrumental in Vestas, uh, coming back into profitability in 23 and looks like 24.

Uh, they’ve installed another person temporarily as CFO for the company. But this has rocked the stock market a little bit. Uh, the stock price was down the day of the announcement at about 10%. We’ll see what happens over the next couple of days to see if it recovers. But this is a real, uh, unique development, I think.

We’ve seen wind energy companies really struggle lately, but we haven’t seen key players, uh, walk off the court, which is what just happened

Philip Totaro: here, Phil. I mean, there, we don’t really know at this point as we record what the were for the departure. Uh, clearly Wall Street doesn’t like it because they prefer certainty.

Um, but when you consider, you know, their, the divestitists had a bit of a hard time and, and it’s getting a bit clobbered with, uh, you know, a lot of these, uh, warranty claims and, and, uh, Uh, not accurately predicting the extent of, um, you know, their, their liability issues on the services side of the business.

You know, they’re, they’re still making orders, uh, globally. They’re, they’re obviously still behind, you know, Gold Wind, um, internationally, uh, as far as, you know, global league tables and all that sort of thing. Um, but their services business has been, uh, a bit of, uh, thrown in their side, um, in the past few years.

So, uh, you know, again, I, we really don’t know what this is related to. Um, but that’s, as far as their commercial business goes, I think that’s probably the only thing, uh, on the commercial side of the business that, uh, anybody could say, you know, hey, you’re, you’re underperforming and it’s time to bring in some fresh blood.

If that’s what happened.

Joel Saxum: I think something that’s interesting here is that we know, like, you know, back in 21, they had the big write down with some of the lightning protection system issues that they had, uh, you know, some couple of lawsuits and stuff there. But in the last year, news cycle ish, we’ve heard a lot about Siemens Gamesa and their problems.

We’ve heard a lot about GE Vernova and some of the, some of the big moves they’re making with, you know, just pausing on some offshore wind and their shakeup with, uh, some of the. The C suite around there, um, and Vestas has kind of flown under the radar. But when you look at the, the wall street side of things, all of those major manufacturers of wind, like when anything happens with them, wall street, the investors, everybody is super apt to make a change real quick because it’s almost like the volatility index of each of the, of the wind sector is pretty high.

So you’re people watching, watching, watching. So when you see an announcement like this and something drops 10 percent like that. A lot of times it’s a knee jerk reaction. I wouldn’t expect that to keep tumbling in at that rate. Now we do also know that Vesta stock in the last year has gone down a little over 50%.

Um, and I think that that’s just a, I mean, they’re a pure wind play, right? And there’s been some headwinds in the sector on the OEM side. So. It’s kind of expected, but, um, I wouldn’t expect to see them keep just, I mean, I don’t expect another 10 percent tomorrow. Uh, but that’s, that’s me again, as we, as we always say, not investment advice.

So don’t, don’t take that one for granted. Um, but Vestas as an OEM, I mean, they’re still there. The order book is still there. They’re still chugging things out. Um, they’re still, uh, looking at some offshore things. So, I mean, I don’t, I don’t think there’s a massive, this isn’t a massive hurt to the, uh, actual bottom line of Vestas.

I think it’s, um, they’ll replace

Allen Hall: them and keep moving on. Their earnings before interest and taxes are, the margin is about 4 to 5 percent, uh, at the moment. They’ve been looking to get that to grow to 10 percent margin, and so they’re about halfway there. To get to 10 percent earnings before interest and taxes margin is, would be remarkable for that business.

It’s, it’s a hard thing to do because you get, you know, Really two buckets to play with. You can charge more for the turbines, which Vestas clearly is doing right now. But on the other side, trying to reduce supply chain costs and drive down the expenses internally, even labor costs, uh, is really difficult.

And in the inflationary environment we still live in, with the raw materials being mostly steel and copper and Obviously, the composites needed for Blades, those prices are not really going to change that much. The CFO is kind of stuck in the middle of

Joel Saxum: that, right? Yeah, I think he’s, he’s taking fire from all corners, right?

You got the board looking at you, you got investors looking at you, you’re kind of trying to I think, I think at one point in time we have to look at this like, um People are human too, right? And sometimes maybe you just said, you know what? I’ve had enough of the stress here. I mean, we, if you follow the news today, there was a high powered C suite executive that was murdered on the street, the United Healthcare CEO, right?

Like that kind of stuff is that’s, that’s ridiculous to be the head of these companies and imagine the stress these people are under and have to go through. And maybe he decided, you know what? I just want to. Take a little time with my family and do something a little less stressful. So that could

Allen Hall: be the reason too.

Here’s where I think that that didn’t happen because Vestas being the company that they are and always planning ahead would have had a plan in place that would have not gone wrong. allowed the stock to fall like that. They would have had more rationale as to why this is happening because the initial assumption from everything you saw online was, uh, he has been asked to leave, which is not, there was no data to back that up.

So I, I’m also wondering like you, Joel, is that just guessing at the market and trying to get a leg up on where you think Vesta’s stock is going? Because there’s no indication of anything right now. It’s just that he’s going to leave the company and at the end of 24 and that’s it. So from a Vestas standpoint, obviously as a lot of people work at Vestas, it’s a very strong company.

Uh, it just seems really hard for them to get to a 10 percent EBIT margin. That would be incredibly hard to be in that position. And who knows, you know, there’s a lot of moving pieces with Vestas at the moment, maybe, um, yeah, changes, more changes are likely to happen. Who knows?

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Allen Hall: Although we haven’t heard a lot of news about this in the United States, uh, you know, NATO warships surrounded a Chinese bulk carrier in the Baltic Sea not long ago because, uh, of fiber optic cables, one from Sweden to Lithuania and one between Germany and Finland.

were severed as this Chinese ship drug an anchor across them. From what we can tell, uh, as Joel pointed out, they turned off the vessel’s transponder during part of this. So the boat tried to disappear a number of Surrounding countries, including Denmark, got pretty suspicious when this was going on and ran out to, to find out what this ship was up to.

It looks like they were, they drug an anchor about a hundred miles, roughly. And that is a huge problem. Uh, you can sever a lot of things. And, and, and I think Joel, I think you originally pulled into this out to me that it looked like the, the ship was making some circles around this cable. One of these cables, just trying to.

happened to find it where he could sever it. Now, there’s been a number of investigations in this and obviously maritime rules exist, so there’s not a lot that can happen here because the the type of ship and what it’s carrying it’s it has Russian fertilizer on it and it has I believe a Russian Captain or a Chinese?

No, it has a Chinese. Sorry. It has a Chinese captain and at least one Russian sailor. Yeah Uh, but they, they can’t bring the ship to port because of maritime law, so they got it parked out there. Denmark has it parked, uh, just off their shores. The big question is, this is the second time this has happened.

What happens to an offshore wind farm? Where there’s a lot of cable laying on the bottom of the ocean that’s providing power, not just internet, and this fiber optic was carrying internet, of course. What happens in those situations and is there ways to protect the power cables and all those connective cables that run between the individual turbines, inter array cables, to protect them from Yeah,

Joel Saxum: I think to, to, to understand the risk there, we’ve got to think about how these things are put in the water and what it looks like.

So there’s a big difference between, say, you know, one of these big, you know, inter, intercontinental cables and what a local cable looks like. And the odd thing is, is it’s actually less aggressive. Protected. These big intercontinental cables are less protected than local ones are. Because to do, like, so, when I say protected, I mean rock dumps.

So you lay the cable and then you dump rocks over them. Or you could put what’s called a mattress over them. Which is basically just like, um, a lot of times just a hunk of concrete that kind of shields them. Um, or of course you have bearing them. So you use a subsea trencher or in a, you know, in a transition zone where you’re going from deep water up on the shore, you might, you know, might actually, uh, horizontally drill for them.

So. So, these big communications cables, a lot of times that were laid 50 years ago, they don’t have as much protection on them, uh, as the new stuff does. So, when you do a wind farm, you, there’s a lot of, because now we know, you know, we learn from our mistakes. So we know we need scour protection, we need to make sure that these cables are protected, and make sure that we’re not, um, uncovering them because of bend radiuses and all the bad things that can happen.

So if you were to go into an offshore wind farm today and you looked at, let’s say just like inter array cables. So inter array cables being the cables from each turbine, say to the offshore substation, the majority of them are going to have a rock dump on top of them. Um, or like a Ridgeway rock bags, kind of like, um, engineered piece of, you know, rock or concrete that covers them.

So they’re kind of protected. Um, and then you’re going to have the big export cable, which goes from the offshore substation to land. Okay. Uh, to wherever they’re, they’re, they’re beaching this thing at. And those will, should usually be buried a lot of times because that’s going to be a bigger cable. Uh, wanting to be protected more.

Um, so they’ll bury it until they get into a certain water depth and then they’ll trench it into, use a trenching machine or a horizontal drilling machine to bring it into shore. So I do think that, and I would say that possibly in some of the older offshore wind farms, there’s the possibility of a ship coming through there and dropping an anchor and dragging some of these cables.

Or if the anchor’s big enough, you might just, you know, plow the rocks out of the way and drag the thing anyways. So from an infrastructure risk standpoint, you know, of course we have insurance and all these things to cover this stuff, but what could really happen is, you know, a targeted attack is not out of the question in my mind.

Um, I mean, we’ve seen them on onshore for substations, right? Uh, like a targeted attack is pretty easy to do. Um, it’s just how bad are the, uh, operators that I don’t, I’m not saying operators of the wind farms, but the international operators that don’t want that wind farm to, to, uh, Bring its power to shore.

It’s, it’s possible.

Allen Hall: Phil, have you seen any design data or patents in regards to anchor, uh, catchers, I’ll call them? Something that would stop an anchor from dragging onto a cable, some sort of preventive device? Nothing

Philip Totaro: for, uh, offshore wind farms specifically, but what I’d like to go back to is the, the risk level.

So, interarray cables, in order to drag something through there, you’d have to get a vessel through there that would You know, be able to fit, uh, first of all. The other thing is, wind farms are usually outside of the rather highly regulated shipping lanes, and while there isn’t always somebody out there patrolling 100 percent of the time, I mean, most people aren’t going anywhere zigzagging through wind farms, dragging an anchor.

So, now, that said, the export cables, as Joel said, they’re already reasonably somewhat protected, but they’re also more exposed because they could intersect with shipping lanes. Um, I know even in like New York, New Jersey, where we’re talking about putting some offshore wind farms, they’ve had to kind of circuitously route the cables to avoid the shipping lanes, the New York Bight.

Um, and it’s, it’s, you know, caused a lot of consternation because then there’s people in like Long Beach, um, You know, that don’t want the cable landing point there, uh, they’re trying to get it, you know, sent off to somewhere in Delaware or Maryland or what have you. And it, it’s, you know, causing, uh, causing all kinds of discussions.

But, uh, you know, the, the possibility, as Joel said, the possibility of it happening is there. I, I think actually the, the more interesting thing with like offshore wind farm security would be proximity detection for things like submarines. Which might actually be a riskier thing where they could go in, they could deliberately find and cut a cable, um, you know, as opposed to, you know, some, some Chinese flag vessel that that’s just dragging an anchor and going in circles.

I mean, that’s one way to do it. Um, but for an offshore wind farm, submarines are probably, you know, foreign submarines are probably a bigger risk than, um, you know, intentional or otherwise the, the random anchor drop and drag through, through the, uh, the ocean.

Allen Hall: Are there sensors? Right? Are there sensors on foundations right now?

Philip Totaro: In the UK, there are. Um, and I know it’s been a topic of discussion between the U. S. Navy and some of the project developers as well. I

Joel Saxum: mean, because that technology is off, it’s off the shelf.

Philip Totaro: Yeah. Keep in mind that they also, there are already deep water sonar sensor nets and things like that that are, frankly, probably more sophisticated than what they would just plop onto a jacket or mount a pile foundation, uh, at an offshore wind farm.

But the point is that you probably still want a sensor at the outermost portion of the offshore wind farm as kind of a proximity detection capability. Um, you know, they can already track subs for the most part. Um, you know, we’re not living in the, uh, The hunt for Red October days over here, where they have caterpillar drives and all that sort of thing, so, uh, you know, we’re, we’re able to actually detect, you know, foreign subs for the most part, but, uh, having that proximity detection capability for offshore wind farms is probably what adds the most relevant level and layer of security for having cables cut, again, versus having some, you know, Accidentally or intentionally dredging up, uh, you know, dragging anchor and dredging up, uh, you know, a bunch of cables.

Allen Hall: Are we concerned about underwater vehicles, smaller ones? Because there’s a lot of technology there right

Joel Saxum: now. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of them out there from an ROV, from a tethered ROV standpoint, from an untethered AUV standpoint. And, but all of that, all that’s covered under detection too. Right?

So like, if you’re interested in what this detection looks like, sonardyne. com, right, they have some of the best off the shelf stuff that’s been used in offshore oil and gas forever, and they have them small enough where they can detect, you know, Divers in the water and, and for, for, I mean, they put them on ships and in oil and gas, uh, infrastructure to make sure that there isn’t a diver coming in.

That is a, you know, there’s something wanting to cause harm to infrastructure. So, but Alan, to what you said, I mean, I’ve seen AUVs. I know people that develop them that are the size of a. Pringles can of chips that can go and cause damage.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, it’s scary, isn’t it? It’s just the extent to which like the bigger the ROV the The more likely you could mount something on it that would cause meaningful damage The the smallest things the worry there would be underwater explosives or something like that.

Um In order to, like, cut through cable, you’d have to have something that could, you know, which it’s basically what I’m saying is it’s a beefy, you know, heavy mass object that would need to be attached to, you know, something. That’s why submarines, I’m saying submarines are probably the biggest risk because those are the things that are capable of carrying that kind of, um, uh, you know, technology on them.

Uh, could an ROV do something? Yeah. Um, but again, it’s, it’s kind of a sliding scale here of, of risk.

Allen Hall: Is there a European policy on that or any sort of directive on the design of the cables and all the sensors you would put out in the ocean?

Philip Totaro: I’m not aware of a directive, but they, after there was an incident, um, I think earlier in the year, was it in Belgium or Holland?

I want to say it was in Holland. They, uh, the EU got together and said, Hey, by the way, we got to do something about this. Uh, so they’re talking about it right now.

Joel Saxum: I think the, when we talk about risk level here too, the next step that we need to think about is We’re talking fixed bottom, right? So we’re talking to 60 meters of water depth and closer to shore.

When you talk about floating now, now you’ve opened up to thousand meters of water depth, possibly, and all kinds of stuff in the water column. So now that you’ve got mooring chains and export cables and stuff that are from the top of the water floating somewhere in the middle of the water column, that is much more easy to sabotage or to cause harm to.

Accidentally or on purpose than anything that’s fixed bottom.

Allen Hall: Do you remember recently on the east coast of the United States a discussion about having multiple cables to come on shore and they were connecting farms together so if a cable was severed they’d have another pathway for the electricity to get back on shore?

I have not seen that moved upon. There was a big discussion about six months ago. I saw a lot of news about it, and then it went quiet. I assume that they decided not to do it because of the additional costs. But it seems like you’re almost have to do something like that now.

Joel Saxum: I would think so. You’d want to, I mean, as a, as an operator, you’d want to protect.

As an operator owning the wind farm, you’d want to protect your ability to, because if you don’t get that, if that gets caught, yes, there’s insurance policies for this, but you’re cutting so much. Uh, that, that until you get a new, yeah, but until you get a new cable built, because that’s custom built, that’s not off the shelf, right?

That’s a, and get a vessel, get it loaded, get out there. I mean, you’re talking six months minimum. Right? Of complete downtime for a gigawatt of a wind farm. So that’s on the operator side. Now you’re talking about the actual grid operator and then they’re going to lose a gigawatt of capacity off of the grid.

I mean, that’s rolling blackouts instantly if you’re at capacity.

Allen Hall: Are those cables fixable? Unlike fiber optic, which I know can be fixed, but HVDC cable, they seem pretty robust themselves. I, I not seen a, a raw cut it and then figure out a way to put it back together again, that has worked. Maybe there is a way to do that.

I

Joel Saxum: don’t know about on the big export cables, but I have seen smaller cables fixed offshore where they basically sink. You sink a dive bell down on top of them, shut it all off. Of course, you would sink a dive bell down on top of them, pull off, pull all the water out of it. And then you have guys through people down there, technicians down there, just like they’re splicing it on shore, but they’re sitting on the bottom of the ocean.

So I’ve seen that on smaller cables in the oil and gas world, but in the North, specifically in the North sea, because the North sea is fairly shallow. A lot of those platforms are in 30 meters of water, right? That’s not very much in the grand scheme of things. So when stuff happens out there, they just sink a dive bell down.

People go down there. They’re in, they’re in, um, hyperbaric chambers for a little while and fix it up and move on. I don’t know about an export cable though, because those things are, when we talk export cables, I mean, they’re big as round as I am. And that’s not small.

Allen Hall: It’d be a lot of work. I, I don’t know if there’s even the possibility of doing that today.

Maybe one of the cable manufacturers could let us know about that. I would be interesting to hear if these are fixable. It seems like a really, uh, strong. area to attack if you wanted to. And since we’ve had it happen a couple of times over the last year, uh, wind operators need to be thinking about this and countries need to be thinking about it hard, uh, because it’s not going to end here.

Philip Totaro: No way. HOFFMAN And we’ve already had challenges in the UK with the robustness of cables to begin with, where a lot of them had to be swapped out because they just weren’t, uh, adequate to the task. Again, as Joel mentioned, the scour protection and other things. So, you know, the fact that they may have to add in security as an extra layer of design consideration for this, you know, I don’t know what much more they can do, especially as you said with floating, it’s the, the, you know, Risk level and exposure is, is significant because there’s not really other, until you get close enough to shore where you could trench or bury or drill or whatever, you’re, the cables are going to be exposed and tethered to, you know, floating, um, I mean, what, what are they little pontoon things or something?

I don’t even know. They’ll, they’ll,

Joel Saxum: what they’ll do is basically the majority of designs will have what’s called, um, it’ll be a flex pipe for flex lay S pipe. So it’ll come down from the turbine, do an S in the water column, and then go to the sea floor. And that will, that S will have, will have flotation on it and it will allow for movement in the whole system.

But you’re going to have that, you know, if you’re in 200 meters of water, you’re going to have. 250 meters of cable, and that’s, that’s not even the mooring system, right?

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Discover strategies to cut costs, keep your assets running smoothly, and drive long term success in today’s competitive market. Register today and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com

Allen Hall: So we have a couple of big announcements about Wind Energy O& M in Melbourne, Australia on February 11th and 12th. Sponsors that have signed on. Phil, you want to give all the details? Uh,

Philip Totaro: well, we’re delighted to announce that Tilt Renewables has signed on as the event title sponsor. Uh, so we’re, uh, very pleased to have them as, as part of the event.

Um, they are one of the largest, um, operators of renewable assets, including solar, in Australia. Um, and they’re going to be participating in the event, uh, and speaking to their experience with, um, you know, particularly their, their wind assets and, uh, you know, some of the challenges that they’ve had, they do operate some assets in states like Victoria that have seen a lot of curtailment and negative pricing, and they’re going to have, uh, plenty of feedback for attendees about, um, Um, You know, what they’ve done to, to get their portfolio, uh, you know, operating smoothly.

So again, we’re, we’re delighted to have Tilt Renewables on board, um, and Joel, actually, do you want to announce the other one?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, so we’ve got our friends. They’ve been on the podcast before, uh, from Arones up in Latvia. They’re gonna come down, and they’re gonna talk to us about Some of the really cool new things they’re doing with robotics.

So of course, Rowan’s has got the internal crawlers for internal inspections. They’ve got a great drone for doing external inspections. The most important robot they have right now is their fleet of LEP robots. So they’re actively doing LEP by robots. So you remove the. You know, the, some of the, you fix some of the quality issues.

Uh, they’ve got fantastic coatings that they’re working with. Um, so they’re going to come talk to us about all of the, uh, new and improved robotics technologies for wind and what’s going to be on the horizon coming from the Arones team next.

Allen Hall: If you’re interested in being a sponsor, there’s a couple of opportunities still left and you need to visit windaustralia.

com. And if you want to register for the event and attend it on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne, also visit windaustralia. com.

Rosemary Barnes: And the coffee carts haven’t been sponsored yet. Right? I think people shouldn’t sleep on that opportunity because this conference is taking place in Melbourne, which it’s got to be the number one city in the world for coffee snobbery.

People are going to be demanding, demanding. A coffee and a good coffee. And then, you know, they’re going to be looking at that card to see who has sponsored that experience for them that day. It’s a difference between a good day and a bad day for the average Melburnian.

Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Naturgy has secured $2.3 billion in financing to boost its Australian portfolio, MARA Holdings will acquire a wind farm in Texas, and TotalEnergies which will acquire VSB Group for €2 billion.

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!

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Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news, lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro, discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by Intel Store. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com.

Allen Hall: Big news this week, Naturgy has secured 2. 3 billion Australian dollars in financing to boost its Australian renewable portfolio. The financing operation has been formalized with 11 international banks. Global Power Generation, which is a subsidiary of Naturgy. Closes 2024 with a portfolio of one gigawatts of projects in operation.

Now, Phil, a lot of things are happening on Australia on their noble energy front, and particularly in wind at the moment.

Philip Totaro: This is another one. Well, and this is an important one for GPG because they’re trying to build three projects right now two wind farms, the Ryan Corner and the Crookwell Three projects, and then also a, a hybrid project called the Cunderdin.

Hybrid plant that’s gonna include some solar PV so they’re immediately going to be deploying this 2. 3 billion Australian dollars and, and put it to good use, building a significant amount of, of new capacity. So, good on them.

Allen Hall: For you Bitcoin lovers, Marathon Digital Holdings will acquire a wind farm in Hansford County, Texas with 240 megawatts of interconnection capacity.

Now the site includes 114 megawatts of operational wind currently and Marathon Digital Holdings will develop a behind the meter data center power Buy wind energy. And this allows them to do Bitcoin mining, Phil.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is actually the first of its kind in terms of this type of a deal structure where a, a Bitcoin miner specifically, I mean, there’s other companies like Amazon that have bought into wind farms or, or co developed and built wind farms.

And agreed to take the power and feed it into their, their data centers but this is the first time, as you just mentioned, that they’re going to do a behind the meter data center where they can avoid So yeah. And agreed. Agreed. A lot of the issues you get in, in ERCOT and in Texas in general, where you’ve got, periods of negative pricing or what have you, where you’ve got to dump a lot of power.

They’re at least taking the power that they would otherwise dump and putting it into their, their Bitcoin mining operations, which, is, is increasingly power intensive. I, I remember setting up a small Bitcoin mining operation on my laptop about ten years ago. I ended up getting about 80 bucks.

So that’s, that’s the best I could do. These guys are going to be doing, a lot more with a lot more power.

Joel Saxum: But I think you’ll see a lot more of this happening in specifically, like Phil said, in the Texas, in the ERCOT market down here, because it’s a triage market. When you look at it, you can see negative prices, positive price.

You have a bad winter storm or some things come offline. All of a sudden power is 3, hour in a wholesale market. Like you see a lot of changes. So I’ve talked with over the few years that I’ve been involved in wind. Quite a few people down here that are looking at different behind the meter options.

So of course this, blockchain data processing is one of them. Another one is hot green hydrogen behind the meter. So if you have the ability to flick on and flick off power directing it to the grid when it makes sense for money or back to an operation that makes sense for money, that’s a huge thing.

And when you have a lot of distressed assets, which there is in Texas and from that early wind game that old, those are seven, nine, 10, 11, 12, even 13. Some of these assets are floating around that haven’t been maintained that well, or, they’re at the end of their kind of useful life. They need a little bit of capital injection to get them up and running.

They can be bought for a decent price and they have interconnects with the grid as well. So, I think if you dig into the weeds of the wind industry, you’ll see some more of this starting to happen.

Allen Hall: And another big acquisition with Total Energies, which will acquire VSB Group for 2 billion euros.

Now, VSB Group has about 10 gigawatts of renewable pipeline across 10 European countries, and this acquisition by Total is part of their 100 gigawatts capacity by 2030 initiative. This gets me a long way, Phil. 10 gigawatts is a substantial acquisition.

Philip Totaro: It does, although one could also contend that if they just kept investing in offshore wind, they’d get there a little faster.

But this is kind of the reality, right? This is why they’re doing this deal at this point is the, the inflation and interest rate environment Totaro is such that they want to pull money out of offshore wind and, but they’ve got to do something with it. Total being one of the, oil and gas and utility companies that’s actually probably one of the more committed, along with RWE and Vattenfall Statcraft as well.

Committed to, to renewables. So the fact that they are going to park their money in, in somebody that’s doing a lot of onshore wind and even solar and some storage development like VSB Group has throughout Europe is fantastic and, and this should go a long way to, to helping both VSB get more access to capital and help Total go a long way to getting.

Their, their kind of internal goals met as far as their their energy targets and, and ESG targets.

Joel Saxum: For those people that are interested in business risk, like I am, I think it’s, I think it’s a really interesting concept. You look at what Total Energies has done in the last few years.

They had Total E Ren, so basically they funded a group. Like them with under the total name, but it wasn’t completely absorbed into total energies and just to see how the renewable energy Play would play out and they did very well So they said you know what total iran you are going to become part of total energies and now it’s one big group and then And now again looking at the risk profiles, and just today we’ve seen some really tumultuous news come out of the french government which may have some implications on what happens to renewable energies and Yeah, whether it’s subsidies or other things that happen over in that country, Total Energy’s being a French company, making all of a sudden this big move into renewable energy.

So it’s a very interesting play. But I think like Phil said, they’re committed to a renewable energy future and fulfilling the goals that they want to. And they’re moving forward on it.

Allen Hall speaks with Helicoid Industries' Dr. Lorenzo Mencattelli about their groundbreaking wind turbine blade LEP technology, which uses a biomimetic fiber pattern inspired by mantis shrimp. Their solution reduces erosion damage by 70% and can work with existing materials and manufacturing processes. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall, and today we're discussing one of the most persistent challenges in the wind energy industry, beating edge erosion on the wind turbine blades. To discuss an innovative solution to this problem, we're joined by Dr. Lorenzo Micatelli, the Managing Director of Tech and Ops at Helicoid Industries. At Helicoid Industries, Lorenzo is spearheading the development of a groundbreaking technology that could significantly reduce leading edge erosion damage on wind turbine blades. Lorenzo. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Thank you very much, Allen for having me. Allen Hall: So leading edge erosion is one of those top issues, and I first ran across your company at DTU, at the Leading Edge Erosion Conference, and all the experts all around the world were there. I think it was in February or March earlier this year. And I sat through all the presentations and then Helichord came up and gave a presentation, and I was astounded because I hadn't seen anything like this technology before. But first I want to talk about how big of a problem this is, and I think during that DTU conference we realized it's a couple percentage points of power loss for a lot of operators, and it's structural damage when leading edge erosion penetrates through the shell of a winter blade. That's a huge problem. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, exactly. So the, the, the small percentage power loss is often acceptable if you want, because it doesn't really force the operator to, to stop the blade and, and perform maintenance and repair. But when the erosion gets to the composite substrate and therefore the structural integrity of the blade is compromised, then it carries a whole lot of other issues. And, and then operations need to stop. Allen Hall: Yeah, and that's where you see all the repair work going on, particularly in the United States, in the middle of the United States, where leading edge erosion has penetrated to the shell, and the amount of time and effort of independent people. service providers going and fixing blades, leading edge erosion is a, is an industry upon its own. And it's a little shocking actually that your technology hasn't been used yet. I want to just describe it here in a second because the, right now in order to prevent leading edge erosion out of the OEMs, the manufacturer's equipment, you have to apply Plastic, basically plastic shells or rubberized plastic shells or put some sort of thick coating on to the blades, which is somewhat effective. I would say it's going to give you a couple of years of life, but there really hasn't been a true fix. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, so the, the focus indeed has been mainly on developing new solutions for the coating, right? That is applied on the, on the leading edge,

This week on Power-Up, a method for installing offshore wind turbines with a substructure with built in containers that can be transported easily, and LM Windpower's way of reducing some of the vibrations from stationary wind blades. Plus some over-the-top body armor... 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Phil, our first idea is assigned to Grant Prideco and it's a method for installing an offshore wind turbine and a substructure, and this idea It is rather unique in offshore wind in that it has a substructure in built in containers that can be transported relatively easily. And so, and the way it's described is like a vertical garage. when the, when the tower sections arrive at its destination. Once on site, the tower is raised straight up from its container using a winch. And this eliminates a need for some of the installation vessels, which are so expensive and what everybody's trying to get away from right now. And you can't find them. So there's a number of really interesting concepts. that reduce that, and this is one of them. So it lets the simplest ships install towers and install the nacelles and blades much closer at sea level before a final tower lift is done. So it does change the complexity of offshore wind dramatically. I haven't seen this implemented yet, but it seems like Philip Totaro: it will be soon. Well, it, it very well could be, considering the push towards larger turbine sizes offshore and as you mentioned, the desire to, eliminate a lot of extra reliance on large crane vessels and installation vessels. But the idea itself, you mentioned it's currently assigned to Grand Pride Co., but it was originally conceived by National Oil Well Varco, NOV that's actually got a pretty lengthy history at this point, obviously in oil and gas, but also in offshore wind including installation vessel involvement and concepts like this, they've, they've been patenting ideas for, for good on 10 years now. And what is kind of interesting and unique about this, as you mentioned, is imagine, a turban, where like the blades are all kind of folded down. The upper section of the tower is kind of folded down in and is telescoped down inside the lower sections of, of the tower and even down into, a portion of the transition piece and monopile. And basically what they're saying is you can put the monopile in place and then take this thing out. Pick it and plop it down and then just have like this internal winch system to, to pluck out all the different bits and pieces of, of the turban inside, you would still have to do a nacelle pick. So I think it's, maybe not quite as a cost and time efficient as, as everyone might think, but it is fewer sorties by the vessels themselves carrying and ferrying components from port to project site. So that is something that, that could prove to be useful in the future. And, and we'll see, if, if they're gonna, if NOV is gonna, continue to push this out and, and drive this technology into the state of commercial use. Well, our second

We hope you had a good Thanksgiving break! Allen and Phil dive into offshore news with Netherlands-based LiftOff and their uptower crane system. Recent successful MCE projects bode well for Liftoff in 2025. Plus, TPI Composites announced their Q3 results. Turkey's inflation pressure and a shift to more American-based manufacturing is tamping the near-term growth. Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.comLiftOff - https://liftoff-mce.com Allen Hall: Phil, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and a lot of turkey. I did. Thank you. I hope you did too. I did. And one thing that goes with all the tryptophan and that turkey is caffeine, so you can fight off the tryptophan and watch your favorite football team lose. And during this time, Duncan's been working, which is a big coffee producer in the United States is trying to break world records. And so they hooked up with Nick DiGiovanni to break the Guinness World Record for the largest ice latte. And that ice latte was in an 11 foot high Dunkin Cup with ice milk and espresso. That's what a latte is, right? And it turns out that the Guinness World Records confirmed that it was 276 gallons in that cup. And the question is, what did they do with all that latte? That's a lot of latte. Hopefully everybody drank Phil Totaro: that. You'd hate to think they would waste it. Allen Hall: According to Duncan, they served it To 300 employees at the corporate office in Massachusetts. Now, if you do the math on that's roughly a gallon of latte per employee. Phil Totaro: That's a lot. I know some people that do drink a lot of coffee. I don't I guess I'm naturally a brilliant, but like some people need that much, I don't know. Holy cow, that's Allen Hall: a lot of coffee. This could be a lot of sleepless nights in Massachusetts from all the Dunkin employees. And productivity's gotta go way up. The latest P. E. S. Win Magazine has a number of great articles in it, and if you haven't PESWin. com and you can download it for free and read all the articles in it. And one of the more interesting articles that I thought was in this one is an article from Liftoff. And we've had Elko May from Liftoff on the podcast previously. And Liftoff is an offshoot of a podcast. arm of Liftworks, which is, Liftworks does onshore wind, heavy lift, and crane work, using a unique process to do that. And Liftoff is doing all the offshore work for Liftworks, and Liftoff is based in the Netherlands with Elco, and it has done a number of, a couple of amazing things this over the last couple of months, really. They've done some crane technology work on fixed bottom offshore winds, where instead of using jackup vessels to do maintenance, they've got the system now to work, where they can handle up to 9. 5 megawatt capacity turbines without using jackup vessels. So they're using standard containers. on flat barges that are moved around via tugs. Now, Phil, this makes a ton of sense to me because the expensive part, as we always say on Offshore Wind, is not really the turbine, it's the jackup vessels and all the specialized ships you need to go do this work, and liftoff is eliminating a lot of that and simplifying MCE for some of these tournaments. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And what strikes me about this is actually something slightly unrelated, which is Cattler just came out with their quarterly report saying that the demand for their services is huge right now. So maybe Liftoff helps alleviate some of that burden much to the chagrin maybe of Cattler. But it's great. They can take, a technology that was developed for onshore and deploy it offshore. In, in that, you don't always have the same obviously weather and site conditions. But the way in which the, this liftoff system works is using this kind of ...

This week on News Flash, Denker Wulf and Energie Engineering Nord are merging, Tata Power partners with the Asian Development Bank for $4.25 billion in clean energy projects, and TPG is considering buying Siemens Gamesa India assets. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor. com. Allen Hall: Well, Phil, Tata Power has signed a 4. 25 billion memorandum of understanding with the Asian Development Bank for clean energy projects. And the agreement was signed during the ongoing COP 29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. The key initiatives coming out Out of this include a 966 megawatt solar wind hybrid project and a pump hydro storage project. Now the partnership will support India's target of 500 gigawatt renewable energy capacity by 2030. This is really important, Phil, because Tata plays a significant role in that. A role in India's economy. Philip Totaro: And not just in renewable energy project development and asset ownership and operations. Obviously they've got automotive, they've got steel making, they do any number of things. They're a pretty diversified industrial company. And what actually a lot of people may not know is Tata Power is actually one of the top five asset owners and operators of renewable energy assets in India already. So getting an additional, MOU signed for, for 4. 25 billion is, is not going to hurt. But keep in mind, they also have broader ambitions outside of India. They, they signed an agreement with a company in Bhutan recently to do a five gigawatt renewable project there. They've had ambition in Sri Lanka and, other kind of regional markets within the Asia Pacific region there that it gives them, they've been kind of quietly going about, spreading their influence. And I, again, I think this is a fantastic move for them and, and to be able to get this Asian Development Bank agreement in place, I think is, if they get 100 percent of that, that money that they're, they're talking about in this MOU, that, that's really gonna help push Tata Power forward. Allen Hall: Well, staying in India, TPG is in advanced talks to acquire the Siemens Gamesa Indian assets. And that deal could, well, it's valued at more than 300 million currently. Now, TPG has emerged as a front runner after outbidding industry players and a number of private equity firms. And Phil, this is a valuable asset. I know a number of companies in India were really shooting for this Siemens Gamesa business. Thank you very much. But TPG has really rocketed to the top. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and it's, it's fascinating because I wouldn't actually have expected private equity to win this one. Mainly because the, what Siemens is, is really offering in terms of their asset portfolio in, in India is their manufacturing facilities. Any operations and maintenance agreements that they have and, and that entire side of the business, I would have thought that, They would have either split off that side of the business. Maybe the Chinese were going to come in and take over the factory space. So this is,

GE Vernova is making bold moves in Australia with their Cypress 6MW workhorse turbine. With a renewed focus on power production and reliability, GE Vernova's Nicholas McVey - ANZ Service Director highlights all the changes with Joel and Allen. GE Vernova Australia is looking for qualified technicians and electricians to join their team. Contact Nicholas on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/nicholas-mcvey-2802bb5b or via email at [email protected]. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime Spotlight. Shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're joined by Nicholas McVey, Service Director at GE Vernova, where he leads operations and maintenance for wind farms across Australia and New Zealand. With over 15 years of experience in operations and commercial leadership roles, Nicholas brings valuable insights on maximizing wind farm performance and implementing strategic upgrades. Prior to his current role, he served as Contract Performance Manager at GE Vernova and has extensive experience in project management and commercial operations. Nicholas, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. We have a global audience that is listening to this episode for sure. And I would like to know, and I think a lot of people would like to know, what are some of the challenges you have in Australia in regards to turbines and O& M? Because it does seem like a relatively harsh environment. Nicholas McVey: Look, of course Australia is a harsh environment. We're very different environments. We've got and we call it down here the tyranny of distance. So we've got a lot of different got wind farms in a place called Broken Hill, which is, almost in the middle of Australia. Extremely hot, extremely dry, lots of dust, sand. A lot of challenges specific to that environment. We've also got a wind farm in in the snowy mountains, we've got, one of the things about Australia is that you've got every environment you can think of in the one place. From an environment perspective, it's harsh.  Joel Saxum: I know when I first heard actually Rosemary on the podcast, talk about going to the snowy mountains. I was like, there's not snow in Australia. What are you talking about? Cause from a American, I didn't think that. And then she's yeah, of course we, she's we have jungles, we have deserts, we have extreme heat, we have snow, we have cold, we have all these things. And of course, like you said, the size. So all of that from an O and M's perspective, because Nicholas, that's what you do every day. You're concentrated on. The operations and maintenance of GE's turbines within Australia. That creates Logistical nightmares. It also creates a lot of different problems, right? So if we're talking about the turbines that are out in the dust there, it doesn't matter what OEM it is. You're going to have leading edge erosion issues, and you're going to have different things that pop up based on that environment.  Allen Hall: So Nicholas, how big is the organization you run in Australia? Because I think the sense of scale would be helpful here. I know you're scattered all around Australia and Australia is a gigantic ...

This week on Uptime Power-Up, Equinor's system to keep their offshore floating wind platforms stable, Vestas's patent for customizing blade root angles, and fresh air breathing device for emergencies. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Well guys, our first idea of the week is from Equinor, and they have developed a system and patented a system about trying to keep their offshore floating wind platforms stable in rough seas. And that technique involves using the turbine blades to actually control the blade angle and the generator torque to counteract the motions of the seas to provide stability. There's a lot of rotating mass on a wind turbine, obviously, so the moment of inertia is there and it's kind of self stabilizing to a point. But the seas are massive, and they're still gonna cause the, the floating platforms to bounce a little bit. This is an interesting patent. I always wonder about these systems, what the effectives on the mechanical system, on the rotating equipment. Does it start to wear on bearings? Does it cause problems further downstream when you try to actively control a turbine from swaying? Phil, this one is interesting in terms of its approach. It's a relatively new patent though, right? Philip Totaro: Yeah. So this, this was just issued a couple of weeks ago and that's why we, we tagged it because we're tracking, new. Patent publications and application publications on a weekly basis. We've cataloged something like 60, 000 plus at Intel Store at this point. But this one stood out because, first of all, it's patents from owner operators and independent power producers are, are usually rare and it's the bigger companies that tend to get them if they get them at all. So the fact that Equinor actually made it a point to, to patent something in general is, is noteworthy. The other thing I take from this is that they originally filed this. In 2019 in the UK and that was the jurisdiction that they claimed the, the patent priority filing in. The Highwind Scotland site was originally commissioned and started producing power back in 2017. So, the fact that they came up with this concept. And wanted to basically, I mean Joel will be able to explain this in, in a bit more detail, but it's almost like they wanted to use the turbine as a giant gyro stabilizer on this floating platform. Joel Saxum: So some quick math here on what this looks like in the real world. In the North Sea, the average wave period is about seven to nine seconds. So period of a wave is between crest to crest. So if we're talking about trying to counteract what a platform might do between a wave, you're talking seven to nine seconds from crest to crest. Okay. And now you look at the these larger turbines and you're looking at about the same RPM. Six to nine RPM, something like that. Six to 10 RPM. So you're talking, and what I'm trying to get to is, is if you're going to use a part of the turbine as an act, an active part of the turbine to counteract some of this movement,

This week Allen, Joel, and Phil discuss Bonfiglioli's advanced servo motors featured in PES Wind magazine, China's offshore wind dominance, and the economic challenges facing U.S. offshore projects. The Wind Farm of the Week is the 170MW English Farms facility in Iowa, the recipient of the Envision Platinum Award. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: We've all had our rental car problems over the last couple of years, ever since COVID. It's been as Joel put it, a crap show in rental car land. Over in Syracuse, which is not very far from me, I was just over there a few weeks ago now the employees at the Syracuse Airport Hertz location left their counter unattended, and they left about six hours early. There's a number of people that had landed in Syracuse and needed a car and there was no one at the counter. So what they decided to do is and about 20 of them decided to do this, they just took the keys that were available at the counter and then went on their way. And one of them was Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, was one of them that needed to be somewhere and didn't have ability to get a car and just grabbed some keys and left. Now, this created a lot of problems, right? Because all of a sudden these cars have disappeared. They don't know who have them, and they were starting to look for them. And now they're concerned that people that did this are concerned what's Hertz going to do to us? But I think they felt like at the time, Joel, that What else am I gonna do? If your employee's left, I need to get a car, I gotta go. Joel Saxum: Yeah, that's a Hertz problem. That's the way I look at it. Technically, it's probably theft, right? Like grand larceny or something like that. I don't know if it's larceny. Grand theft auto? Video games? GTA? Yeah but, it's illegal when you look at it, right? But I can understand being that I've been in that situation where you show up at 11 p. m., you've been traveling all day, and you're like, Worst. Where's my damn car? Like, where's the dang car that I want to go? And I don't know if there's one person in that group who was the first mover, right? There was a pioneer before the settlers. One person was like, screw it guys. Let's go. I'm grabbing these keys. I don't know who that is, but this, that's I don't know. There's some cojones there. Allen Hall: My recent experience with Hertz in Oklahoma was getting to the counter at about 1230 in the morning. And there not being a single car there. And then I was the second one into the little office they have. And then another person came and another person came and then pretty soon there's about 10 of us standing there and the Hertz employee who was attending the place and was trying to do the best that she possibly could said, I have two cars. I'm picking you and you. Just pointed at people. Wow. Yeah, I got one. I never get that. Philip Totaro: Allen, that's like a Seinfeld episode right there. You guys know how to take a reservation, but you don't know how to hold a reservation. Allen Hall: I felt horrible because I was meeting Joel the next morning. I really needed this car. We were going far off into Oklahoma, but there were all kinds of military people there that had things to do, too. Everybody had something to do. So they're, Uber was their best friend at the moment, but man,

This week on News Flash, we discuss CIP and AMPIN Energy Transition's $300 million investment in Indian renewables, Enel investing €38 billion in grid and renewables through 2027, and the Long Beach Harbor's $14 million match for their upcoming state grant. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www. intelstore. com. Allen Hall: Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Ampen Energy Transition are investing 300 million in joint equity for Indian renewables. The partnership will enable approximately 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects across India. Their combined portfolio will include solar, wind, hybrid and storage technologies. Now, this new deal creates massive 2. 7 to 3 billion dollars of renewable energy assets as a base in India. Now, Phil, India is a huge market at the minute, and a lot of renewable projects are moving towards India. This is another one by CIP. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and it's, it's fascinating because, as you mentioned, the, the market's really seeing an uptick in wind and hybrid projects, and this is exactly where CIP wants to be able to park themselves with this partnership. So putting the capital behind a local developer and independent power producer that's, had a track record of success is good for both parties but they're capitalizing on it at a time when you know, India's likely to add a, something like 80 gigawatts of renewables over the next, like, five years or six years alone. Which is a massive amount. And again, they've had, big pipe dreams and, and big pipelines in, in India for a long time. But they seem to be getting serious about it, especially when companies start, plowing more and more money into the market and starting to unlock a lot more repowering opportunities in India, where they've gotten their policies all kind of squared away at the state level to, to start doing a lot more project repowering and also their transmission infrastructure which they also recognize they're going to have to heavily invest in to be able to, to get all these renewable projects on their grid. So, they're, they're really starting to push hard, in, in India they've, they've, like I said, have pretty big pretty big ambitions to be able to add a lot of gigawatts here in the coming years. Joel Saxum: I'd like to see CIP's kind of strategy play out wherever you see an emerging market. They're there. They're in every offshore play. They're in a lot of, like in, in, I'm not saying India is an emerging market. It's a very dynamic market right now. A lot of players moving and grooving people in, people out, but there's one thing they have a big renewable energy goals and there's a lot of money coming in there. So CIP, you're seeing them. They've been in, they've been in country in India since 2021. Not only with Ampen, but with Vivid, Vivid or Vivid as well. So they've been in that market for a little while. And as Allen and I know, working in India, the Indian market, it's nice to have a local compadre there to kind of guide what you're going to do to safeguard your assets t...

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum talk with Cory Mittleider from Malloy Wind about the complex world of wind turbine main bearings. Cory breaks down why traditional bearing coatings are failing in newer turbine models and explores how electrical discharge, material choices, and monitoring systems play crucial roles in solving these costly failures. Dive into the technical challenges of detecting problems in these massive, slow-moving components and learn what operators should do during warranty periods to prepare for long-term maintenance. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comWind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. Allen Hall: This is the progress powering tomorrow. I'm your host, Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're tackling a critical issue that's affecting wind farm operators across the industry, main bearing failures and the evolving solutions to combat them. Joining us is Cory Mittleider business unit manager at Malloy Wind, who brings over 15 years of hands on experience in power transmission and bearing technology. Cory has built his career at Malloy Electric where he's become their go to expert for complex bearing challenges. His journey from technical sales support engineer to wind business unit manager has given him a unique perspective on the evolution of bearing technology and the real world challenges faced by wind farm operators. Malloy Wind, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has been at the forefront of developing solutions for wind turbine bearing issues, particularly focusing on advanced materials. and designs to combat common failure modes like peeling damage and premature wear. Cory, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thanks for having me. You are our go to guy for Anything bearing related. And as Joel and I travel around the United States this summer, we ran into a lot of people with bearing issues and now main bearing issues. And we've seen quite a bit in the press this summer about main bearings and coatings on main bearings and what is the right kind of main bearing to use and a lot of operators looking at different solutions at the minute, and we figured. Cory will know. So let's just ask Cory what his thoughts were on main bearings and try to get a sense of what can be done. Cory Mittleider: Yeah. We've definitely spent a lot of time looking into main bearings, main bearing failures. Joel Saxum: So let's dive into this, Cory, then what is the. Just for our users or users, for our listeners can you give us the rundown basically of what the main bearing is, where it sits in the turbine and what it does? Cory Mittleider: On the wind turbine drivetrain, you've got the blades and the rotor hanging out front, and then ultimately that's connected to a shaft. Which then connects it to the gearbox and the generator. And on that shaft, that's what we'll call the main shaft. On that shaft, there is a really big pillow block. And it's got the main bearing inside. So we'll call it the main bearing, the main shaft bearing, a couple of different nomenclatures there. But that's what helps support that load of this very heavy drive train, but also connect it and allow the rotation to generate the power from the turbine. Some turbines do have two. main bearings on this main shaft.

This week on Uptime Power-Up we discuss Vestas' offshore blade repair method, Siemens Gamesa's way of optimizing power production for floating turbines, and a fun way for kid's to collect their Halloween candy. ign 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comWind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. All right, our first idea is from our friends at Vestas, and it is a a relatively sophisticated system for handling wind turned blades during maintenance, particularly offshore. And if you think about how you try to manipulate a blade offshore to do repair work on it, it's not, it's not easy to do that on the deck of a ship. So the, the concept is you take a crane, get the blade off the turbine, you move it down to the deck of the ship and it sits in these cradles. And they move it from the support cradles to a third device, which allows the blade to rotate. And they could slide it into a shelter that's built up on deck so you can actually repair the blade without getting wet or, or too hot or too cold, probably, probably too cold in most cases which is a really difficult task to do and Vestas, Phil, has, has come up with a really unique idea on how to manage this. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this, this one is very Interesting, because we have comparable systems to this onshore, but it's obviously a lot harder to implement offshore. So, for instance, having the tent, it's going to sound like the stupidest thing ever, just like having a tent around the blade to be able to, protect the, the area that you're scarfing out or whatever, if you're doing that kind of a repair. That's, that's important. That's an important consideration. And while it's obviously possible to do that today offshore the fact that you would have to use the crane to, place and pick or use the, um, the fixtures that are attached to the crane to rotate the blade and then lower it into the cradle. That can be complicated and time consuming and expensive to do with the on board crane on the vessel. So, the fact that you can lower it into this rotating, we'll call it a rotating, cradle. Or fixture and the fact that, they've, they've got this capability to be able to put up the, the, tarp or tent to be able to protect the blade to, to do the repairs, it's, it's really helpful and, and gives you potentially improved quality in, in the repairs pretty much at the same level that you would get from doing it onshore. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I like the idea here that we're basically taking a concept that we know if you've seen major blade repairs on the ground, a lot of times a temporary tent is put up so that you can work in the wind, rain, snow, cold, whatever it may be. Doing the same thing here offshore. Important for operations and maintenance for the future as we have to start doing some, larger and larger repairs to these blades. But a big important part of this is if anybody that's been involved in lifting operations, you want to minimize the amount of times that you actually touch these blades. When you talk about installing them offshore, you build them in the factory, you move them from the factory to the yard,