The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Søren Kellenberger, sales director at CNC Onsite, joins the Uptime Spotlight to discuss their uptower yaw ring repair method. He describes the root causes of yaw ring failure, makes projections for the future, and introduces CNC Onsite’s patented yaw ring repair solution. Their portable precision machine can be lifted uptower to replace a damaged yaw ring, potentially saving operators significant downtime and repair costs.

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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: When wind turbine yaw gears fail, operators face a costly choice. Hire a crane for a complete replacement or attempt a risky repair. This week we speak with Søren Kellenberger, sales director and partner at CNC Onsite. CNC Onsite brings precision machining up tower. Making yaw gear repairs faster and more reliable without using an expensive frame.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight. Shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Søren, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Allen. And thank you for inviting me. Well, we want to understand first, what is causing yaw gear to break? teeth to be damaged in some of these turbines, because the photos I have seen are remarkable. The teeth are just gone. How does that happen?

Søren Kellenberger: I think there can be a number or there can be a number of reasons.

And it, it depends a little bit, I think, on the turbine, how the yaw ring was designed and stuff like that. But if you look at some of the older turbines the yaw ring. Wasn’t hardened. So there, in many cases, you’ll just see wear and tear from years of of use, operation. And typically in a, in a wind farm, you have a dominating wind direction, right?

So, Especially in Denmark, it’s mainly blowing from the west. So all our wind turbines are pointing that direction most of the time, which means that they are yawing within a limited area of of the yaw ring. So a limited area is taking the majority of, of the wear cycles. So, so therefore they, you, you see some, some local wear and tear and, and finally they will be worn down razor sharp basically and, and break off eventually.

So, so that can be, be just one cause of, of the, of the failure. We also see sometimes that even though they are hardened, they, of course, they don’t wear that much, but they will more break off and probably. Due to some extreme loading and I guess that can be caused by either some, some misaligned yaw gear it can be extreme loads.

You have some sites where you have Really wind directions changing very fast that is causing unforeseen loads on the turbine. So you have actual extreme loads that are, that are higher than the design loads. You could probably also sometimes see foreign objects that are, are falling into the, to the ying and being squeezed between the ying and your gear, causing some, some damages.

So. There are a number of, of different reasons for, for these damages, I guess.

Joel Saxum: Do you see anything environmental? Like in my mind, I think of these Arctic turbines, right? The ones that are operating in this, in the extreme cold. When, when metal gets cold, it gets brittle. Do you see more, more yaw teeth get damaged in those territories as others, or is it just kind of across the board the same?

Søren Kellenberger: No. We haven’t seen that, that these cold condition turbines are affected more than than others, but we do see that the weather conditions play a significant role. And. If you have maybe your ring damages on two to 5 percent of, of, of your turbine fleet, then they will not be evenly distributed across your different parks.

It tend to be that if you have an effective park due to some special weather conditions in that area, you seem to have a lot of problems in that one park, and you can have other parks that will run perfectly fine for, for your the entire lifetime without any issues on, on the yaw ring. Well, at least these inspections aren’t super difficult.

Yeah, it’s pretty obvious when they are missing.

Allen Hall: What’s the effect when they’re missing teeth like that? Is it, is, is the turbine just not able to yaw anymore or is it, it really, it risks some structural overloading when that happens?

Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. I mean, in in the beginning, I guess you, you won’t be able to, to yaw.

So at least you, you, it would be less accurate if you have. where it will start being less accurate. And that will of course cause some loss production. Potentially if, if you are misaligned on your, your system, you’re also introducing unwanted loads to your, to your turbine. So I guess it could have also other consequences when you are other than.

Just lost production when, when you have a yaw misalignment. But yeah, in, in the end you won’t be able to to yaw the turbine if you have too many damaged teeth.

Allen Hall: So is the turbine sent out an alarm when that happens? Is it just a, a complete shutdown? The turbine just says no more. I can’t move and I’m stopped or it doesn’t recognize that this is even a failure.

To be

Søren Kellenberger: honest, Alan, I’m not 100 percent sure. And I think it depends also on, on on the turbine how, how, how new or old they are and how advanced their control systems and condition monitoring systems are. Some of them, they just have on off on the, on the yaw gears. And, and they won’t recognize that, that one yaw gear is just spinning in free air but you can have others that have more advanced control systems where, where you can see that some of the yaw gears are suddenly using a lot more power to to yaw the turbine, which will indicate you have some kind of yaw issue.

If it’s a bad yaw. A broken yaw gear or if it’s some teeth missing in that area where that yaw gear is placed you, you can’t probably tell, but, but there are different warning systems possibilities, but again, depending on how old or how advanced your, your turbine is.

Allen Hall: Wow. So this is really serious.

It’s just beyond just the tooth missing. The consequences for the chairman can be quite dramatic. Now, CNC on site, obviously, is all about doing machining. How do you go about fixing this problem?

Søren Kellenberger: Basically, we have a a smaller CNC controlled, three axis CNC controlled machine that we bring up tower and these machines are adapted to the different different requirements.

Turbine types. As you can imagine, the turbines were not designed for these kinds of repairs. So the design engineers originally didn’t leave much space for for a machine in those areas. But so, so we, we customize the machines to fit the different turbine platforms and, and. Basically we use the internal crane of of the turbine to hoist the, the machine components to, to the turbine.

Use the internal crane to, to position it at the yar ring. And then we mount the machine on, on the Yar ring itself. Which also gives us the advantage that even if the turbine is moving a little bit due to, to wind we are moving along with it. So it doesn’t influence our our accuracy when, when machining.

Allen Hall: That’s quite impressive. Cause the alternative is, and what I’ve seen is you lift the whole, you take the blade set off and then you lift the whole in the cell off and then you go in, you try to replace the yaw gear, which is super expensive.

Søren Kellenberger: That is, that is very, very expensive.

Allen Hall: Yeah. So you’re really talking about taking up some precise machining equipment up tower.

Doesn’t really matter if the wind’s blowing or not. You’re, you’re fine. You’re all inside. And you’re going in and machining what remains of those teeth. I mean, I, I want to have a sort of a dentist equivalent of this. So it’s like you have a broken tooth and, and the dentist comes in and goes, okay, we’re going to grind that tooth off and we’re going to smooth out.

And we’re going to put a replacement. On top of it, like a crown, right? It’s basically a crown. So that process takes how long to do once you kind of uptower in your starting the machining process.

Søren Kellenberger: If we if we use like the, the Vestas V90, three megawatt platform as a sort of baseline then it takes we have, we have our, our teeth segments, our crowns.

If you, if you want in in segments of of six teeth and it takes roughly one day to once we are open and ready to, to replace six teeth. So for a replacement, you need to consider one day of hoisting and getting in place and then. One day for, for each segment you need to, to install and then one day to, to pack up and clean and get back down.

So so we, we get quite a fair bit done in a week.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s, that’s impressive. So, so there’s a couple of activities here that have to be done, right? Of course, you’re getting up there, you mount the CNC equipment. That’s one big part of it. But then you’re, you’re, you’re milling up tower. So you have to deal with, you guys have a, you have a system to deal with all the filings and tailings and catching all that stuff.

And then, and then once you put the new teeth or the new teeth get in place, is, are they welded in place or how are you, how are you attaching that?

Søren Kellenberger: No we bolt them in place. So that because we have a CNC machine, we, we, we can do a very accurate milling process up there. So, so. So basically we, we, as you say, we, we remove the, the remains of, of the old teeth and, and we machine like a pocket in, in the yaw ring.

And that one is milled within a couple of hundreds of millimeters in tolerance. And then we have the benefit because we know the design of the yaw ring. So we. We bring prefabricated segments that have the exact same shape as, as the original yaw ring. And, and they are of course manufactured in a, in a machine workshop.

So, so they have very good tolerances as well. And then we basically create a press fit. So we either slightly pre bent the segment to, to install it or we, we freeze it. We have some small freezers we can bring up tower as well and cool the segment down to minus 80 degrees, which gives us just enough space to, to easily fit it.

And then as it heats up, it’s a, it’s a press fit. And then we keep it in place with bolts as well.

Allen Hall: Wow. I didn’t realize it was a press fit. That’s insane. That’s better than the manufacturer delivered on site when the turbine was new. Yeah, it could be. The other way I’ve seen this repaired, if you watch LinkedIn enough and Joel and I are constant viewers of crazy LinkedIn wind turbine repair videos and Instagram, there’s a lot of this in Facebook too, when they have broken teeth, you see guys up there with welders and they’re up in there and they’re adding filler, trying to rebuild it, trying to reshape it.

Then you see them grinding on this gear. What are the problems with doing that approach?

Søren Kellenberger: We do actually also work with some welding companies, but because you can have some situation where welding is your only opportunity, but, but we can, we can get back to that. But, but the, the challenges with welding is of course you have a big, massive, steel ring so it absorbs the heat quite fast.

So controlling the the heat and the temperature in, in your welding process is is difficult. The space is just as limited for, for welding and they need to fit a person in there. So so you also have the disadvantage of, of having like hot works and confined space, which is, is not so nice.

And then finally being able to grind those Teeth into the original shape is also relatively challenging. You don’t have much space when you are in there and you would want to try and get that contact surface quite straight to distribute your, the load from, from your York year when you start operating again, and, and I think that probably the most challenging part where we have the benefit of, of machining, bringing a pre machined segment that has that exact shape.

I think that is probably one of the, the biggest benefits to, to, to our process. And, and because it’s such a manual process of, of grinding, it can be difficult to get that shape. And, and that can be, Can give you some extra loads on a, on a welded tooth which can lead to damages again faster than, than what we see on,

Joel Saxum: on segments.

There’s, I mean, there’s one thing for rebuilding teeth on like an excavator by welding, welding up a bunch of metal and, but, but, but teeth that need to be used in a, you know, basically a ring and pinion set or a ge you know, a a tooth gear thing. It’s gotta be exact. It has to be, because if not, you’re just gonna be back up there in a year or two.

Doing the same process because it’s just not going to last. It’s temporary. Does the, there’s

Allen Hall: a yaw motor gear and all the machinery that’s there and the mechanism there, does that need to be updated too? Because it’s been working against these, these gears that have been not the right shape for a long time, that in order to get this really fixed, you need to put the proper.

teeth in the R gear, but also on the motor, you need to take a look at it and make sure it’s up to snuff. Yeah,

Søren Kellenberger: I think that is a typically also a part of the inspection. They, they do that. They, they check that all the motors and, and gear wheels there are okay. It’s normally not a part of, of our process to do that, that, that would be the turbine owners or the, their own technicians who would check that.

Up front or, or right after we, we complete our work. So, but yes I mean, when you are up there fixing it, I, I, I would definitely recommend that you check the remaining system and potentially also try to look for the, for the root cause if you do have. Misaligned your gears or something like that.

It could for sure be an advantage to to get them aligned to avoid having the same damage again soon after the repair. So how many of

Allen Hall: these teeth replacement are you doing in a year? Because my guess is it’s a good Quite a number from what I’ve seen out in the field,

Søren Kellenberger: you can say it’s still a relatively new technology, even though we’ve been doing it for five years.

It’s still a conservative industry. You know, they, they want to see new technology introduced and, and see how it operates and works. So it’s not that we do a oaring every. But we we have installed more than a hundred segments since we started and, and we see that it is taking off now the first segments have now been running for more than five years and, and proven them themselves very well.

So, so we, we certainly do and also you see that. The turbines, the number of turbines that are reaching that age where you can could expect some, some wear or damages to your, your ring is also increasing significant significantly. So we, we will be seeing more repairs over the coming years for, for sure.

Joel Saxum: I think that’s a big part of the conversation here is you know, looking, looking in the European market, like if you look at Spain right now, their fleet is starting to get to that Close to end of life or life extension. What does it look like? Is it repower? Is it refurbished? How do we keep these things running?

And Alan and I just had a conversation with a company here in the States that’s doing a lot of repowers just the other day. And I was thinking about that there too, because in the States we have this, you know, PTC driven repower thing where you could put certain amount of value back into the turbine, still qualify for some subsidies.

And I was thinking, man, with all these older turbines. What else can be done here? And some of that would be refurbish, refuel, fix these raw yaw gears, fix these kinds of things to make sure that you’re, you’re maintaining that level of performance that you want. Or, I mean, if you’ve been operating like this for a long time, you may be getting back to back to baseline as well.

I mean, at a minimum would be nice to get that out of it. So I think that the market for what you guys are doing is going to grow massively. Globally right now, right? We’re seeing, we could see a lot of applications from here for it in the States with our 75, 000 and change turbines we have plus that European market that’s changing.

So are you guys starting to get some calls from, you know, how, is it, is it more like damage during regular operation and this is what’s happening or, Hey, we’re at getting close to end of life. Can you help us do an assessment on what this looks like? Are you getting those calls? Both. Yes.

Søren Kellenberger: So, so. Most most operators I guess they, they start really looking for this when they see an issue but if they have had turbines or in other wind farms, for instance, or, or even some of them that, that have been damaged earlier in the lifetime, they are more aware of these issues and, and they would also contact us for, for inspections and, and evaluations if, if what can be done and, and to get some, some budgetary quotes and, and stuff like that to see if there’s a return on, on investment within their potential lifetime extension.

So, so yes, we, we do get both And, and I mean, we’ve been in, in Japan to, to fix teeth on a, on a turbine. We’ve, we’ve been across multiple countries and in Europe we’ve just sold a machine to New Zealand together with the first 25 segments. They will, they will get together with this machine.

So it is picking up around the world. And, and we also have several inquiries from from the U S so, so I would be very surprised if we weren’t doing some turbines in, in the U S next year also on, on the Jolring site.

Allen Hall: So can an operator buy the machinery and do this process themselves with your direction, of course?

Or is it always required that CMC on site people be there to do the process?

Søren Kellenberger: No, it’s a, it’s not a requirement that, that we operate a machine. It, it is a very much a case by case discussion with with our customers, if, if they have The technicians with the right skills and, and they have the volume of turbines to keep them up to, up to speed on, on using these machines.

It can make sense that they buy a machine and we train them. Others prefer that, that we come and do an all inclusive service. So it is, it is basically up to, to the customer. And, and we discussed that case by case how, how we make the best project.

Allen Hall: What process is used if you’re offshore on these massive 8, 10, 12, now 15 megawatt turbines?

Is the process basically the same on those turbines?

Søren Kellenberger: It is. Completely the same process only, only difference is is, is the transport there that we have to go by CTV and not not a, not by car. So that, that is basically the only difference if the turbine is onshore, offshore, doesn’t make any difference for, for us.

It is still the, the exact same milling process and yeah. installation process. We don’t need any other external equipment.

Joel Saxum: How big is one of these kits? Like, if you’re going offshore, if you’re transferring, I know like, on offshore, on the transition piece, there’ll be a little crane sometimes and stuff, but like, how, like, weight and dimensions, what, what does it look like?

Søren Kellenberger: That depends on on the turbine. As I mentioned before, though, most of these turbines weren’t designed for this kind of, of repair. So, so we don’t have a one fit fits all machine. And, and the segments are also different because the yaw ring in a 8, 10, 15 megawatt turbine is, is way bigger.

Bigger than in a two or three megawatt, of course. But if we take the, the two, three megawatt size turbines, our machine is around 80 kilos. And the segment is weighing eight to 10 kilos. So it’s, it’s, it’s easily transferable. And we always make sure that we can, if the machine is too big or heavy when it’s assembled, we always make sure that each component can be handled by the internal crane and go through the hatch in, in in the nacelle.

Because that is very important also. And, and in terms of keeping the cost down that you don’t need any external cranes for, for this operation. But I think our, our heaviest machines for these large offshore turbines is around two, 300 kilograms. So when they are fully assembled.

Joel Saxum: So for me, if I’m, if I’m, if I’m an ISP in the States and I’m listening to this podcast, I’m thinking, Ooh, new service line.

I need to get ahold of Søren. And so I can, so I can be the, I can be the person that gets called in the States to do this. And

Allen Hall: Søren, how do people get ahold of you? How do they reach out to CNC onsite?

Søren Kellenberger: Either through our, our website cnconsite.dk where we have all our, our contact details listed or directly to me at my email [email protected] or call me.

Yeah, the, my phone number is also also on, on the website. So, there they are most welcome to to reach out to us.

Allen Hall: It’s amazing technology and it needs to be utilized across the world because I’ve run into a number of operators with yaw gear problems and they’re stuck and they didn’t realize you existed.

So hopefully this podcast gets to them and we can connect you up and get you busy because there’s a lot of yaw gear repairs that need to happen over the coming repair seasons. So. Søren, thank you so much for being on the program. Joel and I have learned a ton. Thank you very much for having me.

Dan Pickel joins the Uptime Spotlight today to discuss the NFPA’s Wind Turbine Technician I certification program. The program allows technicians to gain standardized recognition for their skills and understanding of safety protocols. With NFPA’s extensive background in fire and electrical safety training, the course covers the topics wind turbine technicians need to know and can be taken online.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: We have a distinguished guest who is at the forefront of developing professional standards in the rapidly growing wind energy sector. Dan Pickel is the Director of Certification and Accreditation at the National Fire Protection Association. Today, Dan will be discussing NFPA’s groundbreaking Wind Turbine Technician I certification program.

Which addresses the critical need for qualified technicians in our rapidly expanding wind energy sector. With projections showing a demand for over 500, 000 technicians globally by 2027, this certification program couldn’t come at a more crucial time.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators.

This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the program.

Dan Pickel: Thanks for having me. I’m really appreciative to be here today.

Allen Hall: It’s great to have you because there’s so many questions about this new certification and we decided to just go to the expert and find out. So, you know, obviously the wind energy sector is growing at a tremendous rate.

And with that comes issues about finding qualified technicians, and the new certification program is trying to address that, correct?

Dan Pickel: Yeah, so we, we developed the certification program, and I know we’ll get into the, the meat of it later on, but it was meant to address that issue where there are, there’s a lack of, uh, knowledge and skills for individuals that are entering the, uh, the industry as a wind turbine technician.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. You see, you hear that from a lot of service providers, right? Rather it’s blade repair, torque and tensioning construction. We’re at the point in the industry where we’re, we’re, we’re starting to just, I know this is for lack of a better term, but like grabbing warm bodies and training them up as fast as we can and throwing them out there.

Well, what, what that ends up doing is it kind of shoots us in the footlong run because you end up with cost of port quality issues, you know, other, other safety issues and things on site, let alone the technical knowledge. Yeah. Uh, that’s needed to advance the, the wind sector here, especially in the United States.

Dan Pickel: Yeah, definitely. I think there’s, we’ve spoken to, uh, some of NFPA’s customers in the past and their push is to get people to right trading. They want to make sure that their new employees have all the tools they need to be successful and to be safe out in the field. And they were struggling because there are some other training options out there.

Um, they reached out to us about getting 70E training for electrical safety, but they were finding that wasn’t enough. There were still some issues on the field. They were telling us about some really unsafe conditions that were Caused by people just being unskilled and, and not knowledgeable in terms of what they should be doing.

So that was when we really started to dig into the idea of developing a certification for entry-level wind turbine technicians, which is what we ended up doing.

Allen Hall: So that lack of a. standardized approach or some sort of label that’s applied to technicians, like they’re qualified to be here, that really affects two ends of it.

It affects the company that is hiring them, but it also affects a technician that is competent because they kind of get grouped into the larger pool where there’s sort of a mixed bag of, of technician qualifications.

Dan Pickel: Yeah. And that’s, that’s where certification. Can really be a game changer for individuals.

So if you look at two different candidates for the same job, um, you know, same education, same training, same experience, but one of them certified, I think what that shows is that there is a, um, that person invested in themselves. So they apply for the program. They take the job. You know, took whatever training they needed to, they studied for the exam, then they passed it.

And certification exams are meant to be pretty rigorous, so it’s, they’re developed by subject matter experts related to the actual job role. So if you look at those two individuals, they will, who should I, should I hire? Most employers are going to go with the person that invested themselves because that’s a, you know, a predictor of success.

Allen Hall: So let’s, let’s break this down a

Program is relatively new. I think I first heard about it this summer. And what from the industry drove you? Was it just an industry consensus? Was it, uh, industry resource groups that were saying, Hey, NFPA, you do a lot of certifications. You’re the leading body, particularly United States, for this. We need you to develop something.

Or how did this really come about?

Dan Pickel: I get emails and calls all the time from people with ideas for certification saying this person or this group of people don’t know what they’re doing. We need a certification. So at that point, we look into the business case. It’s what’s what’s the industry? What’s the role maturity?

You know, um, do we have any connection to that industry? As well, because NFPA works with fire life and electrical safety hazards, is this something that makes sense for us? In a lot of cases, it doesn’t. When we’re looking at the wind turbine technician role, uh, there’s a lot of, you know, electrical issues, um, electrical shock issues that we are hearing about.

Um, there’s some fall safety, there’s PPE issues, there’s hydraulics and mechanical systems and, and a lot of those align with what NFPA does, its mission. So we looked at that and we thought, this makes sense. Is the role mature enough? And from what we could find, it was. So we talked with subject matter experts about this, and ultimately we invited people to, to join our certification advisor group.

Now that’s a group of subject matter experts. They’re primarily based in the US, but, uh, several of them were based abroad. And, you know, we, we met with them to talk about what, what does this thing look like in terms of role? So we had a role delineation to determine what is exactly done by people that perform.

And that involves a pretty robust job task analysis and a number of other steps to come to a, uh, you know, formalized exam blueprint, which is the basis for the exam.

Allen Hall: Oh, wow. Okay. So who were some of the participants in this? And obviously a lot of the wind turbine, uh, Operators, and obviously the manufacturers, are not based in the U.

S., so there must have been a lot of differing inputs into that advisory group.

Dan Pickel: Yeah. So we have a, we have a, uh, a program overview that lists all of our, uh, CAG members, or the Certification Advisory Group members. Some came from GE, some came from Vestas. A lot of them had been working in the U. S., but then also worked abroad, and they traveled a bunch, so, and they’d worked at different companies, so they were, you pretty knowledgeable about what the different, uh, you know, manufacturers were doing, what the different installers were doing, and what, what maintenance companies were doing as well.

So we, we were really, we benefited from their expertise quite a bit when developing the certification program.

Allen Hall: Oh, that’s interesting. And the assessment that is performed to really determine competency, there are, from what I can see from the website, and if you haven’t visited the NFPA website, you should visit it and just put in wind turbine technician and it’ll pop right up to the page.

Wonderful site. There’s a lot of good information there. There are really four general areas that the comprehensive assessment is looking into. Uh, mechanical systems, hydraulic systems, electrical systems, and then sort of working at heights in general safety. But when you look at the distribution here, there’s a lot about general safety, which is a little alarming.

We should have that locked in already.

Dan Pickel: We should, yeah. So the way that it works is, so we, we work with our subject matter experts. We come up with this job task analysis. So it’s, what are all the behavioral things? What are the tasks that someone needs to perform to be competent in a role? Okay. Thank you.

So they put this list together and then what we do is we’ve sent it out as a validation survey to anyone that’s in the wind industry that works as a wind turbine technician. And they answered two questions in the survey for each of those tasks is how frequently do you perform the task and how critical is it?

Now we use that as a way to understand. How much of the exam should be devoted to specific sections? And when we got the results of the survey, we saw that a lot of individuals were saying, you know, on the, on this final don’t, uh, content domain related to safety at heights and just general safety, this is where we really are spending our time.

This is really critical. And that’s what we use to develop the, uh, the certification exemptions blueprint.

Allen Hall: That’s fascinating, because you think that the PPE working at heights is just ingrained into every technician, but maybe because the industry is growing so fast, it’s one of those areas that kind of gets lackadaisical as you go along in the industry.

Dan Pickel: Certainly could be. I mean, imagine someone is just getting into the industry and they don’t understand how to work at heights. Uh, they don’t understand how to, you know, properly use PPE. That’s, that’s really a critical thing. at that stage, but also it’s something they do frequently and it’s critical for their safety.

So that’s where I imagine as they were going through this survey and indicating how critical is this, I would find it pretty critical as well.

Joel Saxum: Honestly, though, when you get, even when we’re talking newcomers, but even people that are seasoned vets, one of the times that you get the A frequency, if you start looking at HSE statistics, a frequency of accidents, incidents, um, it happens based on complacency as well.

A lot of them happen, a lot of times it happens, to someone who’s been in the industry for 5 10 years and they’ve done this task a thousand times, so they become a little bit, you know, lackadaisical or, in that sense, or, a lot of times it’s on a hitch. When someone’s been out for 28 days and on day 27 or day 28 in the morning, when they’re thinking about going home, that’s when something happens.

So even having people brush up on these ideas in the midst of their career to achieve this certification is a good idea. So the people that were, that are being targeted for the certification that we’re looking at, People that work in the field, whether you work for an ISP, um, you’re a service provider of some sort, or you work for an operator and you’re a part of that operating team, or you work for an OEM, it’s basically anybody hands on that will touch a turbine in the field, correct?

Dan Pickel: Yeah, that’s correct.

Allen Hall: So let’s walk through the mechanical, hydraulic, electrical systems aspects of the assessment. It’s not, it’s not turbine specific. And I think a lot of technicians would get really worried about that. Like, hey, I just work GE turbines. I don’t know anything about Siemens turbines. So if you ask me, I’m not going to be able to answer that.

Are these questions in those three sections, are they more generic, like this is how a turbine generally works, on the braking system, and those sort of things? Is it sort of top level understanding of what’s happening inside of a turbine?

Dan Pickel: Yeah, it’s really high level, so we’re not looking at schematics for any particular type of manufacturer design.

It’s, you know, do you have the high level understanding of hydraulic systems, of, um, of mechanical systems, of electrical systems, and it, it, it isn’t devoted to any particular manufacturer.

Allen Hall: Okay. So, in the, sort of, the prep for this, if, if I’m interested in taking this exam and getting certified. What kind of prep work would I need to do before I took the assessment?

Dan Pickel: Yeah, so we had initially been in conversations with, uh, GWO and, and part of what we did was we looked at their training, uh, curricula as we were developing the certification exam. So, um, there, right now there isn’t a, devoted training course to this certification and we were talking with some training providers about developing something like that.

But I think when you look at G. W. O. ‘s basic safety training and basic technical training, those are going to cover most of what would be in the certification exam.

Allen Hall: Uh, okay. So they probably already have taken courses, been schooled up This is not deep but it’s really, knowledge of a particular aspect. It is really just, hey, how does this term work?

That, that’s, that’s fascinating because I think a lot of technicians would be interested in that if, if that’s the case. Are there eligibility requirements to take this exam? Yeah,

Dan Pickel: there are. And there’s really two pathways here. So one of them is that you took a training course that covers the exam blueprint.

And the other is that you’ve been working in the industry for six months. So that could be for an ISP or someone else, but you can verify that you’ve worked there and then you would meet that eligibility criteria and you could sit to take the exam.

Allen Hall: So would that be part of an onboarding process? I think a lot of ISPs right now that are bringing in.

Um, hundreds of technicians at a time is getting him on site, getting him working for six months, seeing how it all plays out, and then taking this exam to say, all right, let’s just check your competency. We’ll see how everybody’s doing. And from a company standpoint, that would make a lot of sense, right?

Dan Pickel: You know, we think so. Um, when we look at certification, those exam blueprints, so what is it that, uh, goes into the role? What are the tasks that need to be performed? What’s the knowledge with the skills? On top of it being sort of the basis for our certification exam, it’s also meant to be the basis for potential instructional design.

So it’s, we’re working with subject matter experts to understand what does someone do? What do they do? And that’s meant to be The, you know, a foundation for anyone that’s looking to develop a course that is teaching someone how to do those things. So we have those subject matter experts build that exam blueprint, hoping that it will become the, you know, the, the basis for a, an instructional design for a course that just going to prepare people for this type of a role.

So when you look at how this could potentially be used. There are a lot of organizations out there hiring lots of people and the industry is growing a ton. So we want to make sure people are safe and understand the role. This is something that they look at, say, can we align our, our internal training with this certification exam blueprint?

I think that’s maybe the first step if they don’t want to bring in an outside trainer. And then you can utilize a certification exam as a way to understand, all right. We went through this with our employees. Now, this is, this is meant to be sort of. A way to separate proficient from non proficient candidates.

Let’s, let’s have our employees take this as a way to really set that, that benchmark for our workforce development, uh, internally.

Joel Saxum: So the goal here is, is to roll this thing out to the wind industry. Is it just in the United States or is it going to be a global thing?

Dan Pickel: So when we were talking with our certification advisory group, like my questions always, you know, how, how localized is this?

Is this just an American thing? Um, is this a, you know, uh, you know, North American thing? And the response we got was that a lot of the, the wind turbines that are going up around the world are coming from the same manufacturers. So it was a lot of the same competencies. There’s a lot of the same skills.

They, they plug into different grids, but outside of that, The role is largely the same. So people, you know, in Asia could take this certification exam if they speak English and, and they would, you know, it would benchmark them the same way that it would benchmark someone in America that’s working as a wind turbine technician.

Joel Saxum: So you guys are actively trying to roll this thing out to operators, ISPs, directly to technicians. I know that was kind of a part of the goal too, is any which way it can get into the industry, but you’re looking for buy in from operators and buy in from the OEMs that this is a standard that they want to adhere to.

Dan Pickel: Yeah, think that’s right. Um, I don’t know what’s going to be the most successful way to help this certification grow. And, and, and in that way, I mean, I want the certification to be utilized as a way for individuals to separate themselves, differentiate themselves from their competitors when they’re applying for jobs, but also as a way to, to make sure that they’re safe and they’re going home at the end of the day.

Is that, that’s what we want. We want to make sure that we’re going to be able to hit our renewable energy growth goals. We want to make sure everyone is safe and revenue is great. But honestly, we built this because we wanted to make sure that that people are safe and that the companies that we work with.

are able to understand what those, you know, what are those competencies that someone needs to have to be safe in that role.

Allen Hall: I want to briefly touch on this because NFPA does a lot of certification work. It is not easy to, if you think that as an ISP, you’re going to create this set of standards on your own and, and go through the process that Tan has been through, good luck.

Because creating exams and, and evaluations are a rigorous, Well thought out u usually multi-year process so that you’re getting the qualified candidate, your, your desire without having some skewed results. It’s kind of like when you got outta school taking me a g or, or SAT or a CT one of those exams.

Those things are rigorous and, but there’s like scientists and evaluations and surveys. And all this work is done behind the scenes, I do think there’s, uh, uh, some emphasis going on right now in terms of the ISPs to try to have some sort of examination, but I’m always concerned, like, are you the right person to do that?

NFPA is. Can you explain all the work that goes on behind the scenes, or how you got to this point of being like the certification expert?

Dan Pickel: Yeah, it is a rigorous process. And I think people are used to the SATs. The SAT is meant to separate each person from everyone else along a bell curve, right? It’s a norm referenced exam.

Just trying to figure out where do you fall along that bell curve. Certification exams are pretty rigorous. Primarily criterion based, which means the criteria is, are you proficient or non proficient? It’s not a bell curve. It looks a little bit like a skewed bell curve, but, uh, the, the important point is figuring out what’s the, what’s, what’s that line of proficiency and that’s where that cut score is.

Now there’s, there’s a, a lot of work that goes into that as well. So, you know, we go through that whole job task analysis and the exam blueprint setting through the validation survey, which I mentioned. Then we do all the training with our subject matter experts to write items for the exam. Now, items are another way to say is questions.

It’s not easy. And I think everyone thinks, Oh, I’ll just pump some out. Usually it takes someone like an hour to get the first one and it’s terrible. And then it, so it, it’s, it’s a tough process. And a lot of people are like, Oh, I want to, I want to contribute. And then they get in there. Like, I hate this. I can never do this.

They’re like, all right. So if, if you’re better at just judging items, I have a spot for you as well. So once those, those questions, once those items have been developed, they are reviewed by NFPA tech services, uh, we review them as well for best practices. And then we have, we take the, the items that align with the blueprint and we go through a process called standard setting.

That’s where we have a, a group of subject matter experts. We talk about, all right, what is a minimally qualified candidate? Cause that’s the line. So who would barely pass this exam? Now look at each one of these questions and determine what percentage of that minimally qualified candidate would get this right.

Not should, that’s a different question, but what, what percentage would get this right based on your conception. And we go through that with them and then figure out, all right. So on a, you know, for the, the wind turbine certification exam, there’s 60 questions on there. What number of items do people need to get right?

And because each exam is maybe more, more difficult or easier, that passing point, that cut score is different. So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a little bit of a science, a little bit of an art to determine what’s that, that’s that line for the cut score. But at the end of it, we have this, this. Certification exam, which has a cut score, which has been developed by subject matter experts, and it, it separates individuals along that line.

So we, we know who’s proficient, we know who’s not proficient, need some more training or more experience before they, they should take it again.

Allen Hall: Very difficult task for sure. Oh, let’s just, let’s just bump into the, the cost of taking the, the, the certification process. What, what does that look like?

Dan Pickel: To take the exam, there’s just one fee, and it’s 249.

Uh, someone would go in through, you need to have an NFPA. org account. So, log in to NFPA. org, you click on a link for the Certification Management System. Then you fill out an application. At the end of it, you would pay the fee. From that point, uh, you would then decide whether you want to take the exam at a, an in person testing site through our Testing Vendor Prometric.

And there are hundreds in the U. S. and, you know, more than a thousand globally. Or you can choose to take it as an online remote proctor exam where you need to have a webcam, a stable internet connection, and a relatively clean room. Uh, and then you, you would be able to schedule, um, pretty much at any time.

You know, day or night, uh, you know, during the week or weekends, uh, they’re, they’re always running those things. So, uh, it’s, it’s whatever is most convenient for you. Now, what I should say is that there are people that love taking exams in that online remote proctoring environment, and there are people that hate it.

And no one knows who they are until they do it. Um, but there’s no in between. You either love it or you hate it. So just want to put that out there. Um, if you’re not sure if you’re going to love it, I’d recommend going to an actual physical testing site. But if you’re far away, and part of the reason we, we implemented the online remote proctored environment is because some people live far away from testing sites.

Now they would have to find childcare. They’d have to take the day off. Having that. Ability breaks down some of the traditional barriers to certification. So that’s why we offer it. But again, if you hate online remote projects exams, we have another option for you.

Allen Hall: Oh, that’s sweet. Uh, so if I, you know, if I was to take this, I’m sure I would not pass it on the first go through.

That was just the way that I take exams. If you don’t, what’s, what is the repeat effort look like to take a exam again? Is it another 249 or is it kind of built into the initial fee?

Dan Pickel: So you get the one exam for the 249. I think it’s 199 for a retest. So it’s 50 bucks less. And, uh, and then it’s, you know, you just go back in through the CMS.

It will update with your, uh, your failed score and you just click retest and you’re done. schedule to take it again.

Allen Hall: All right. So if in every certification process, there’s a recertification effort that has to happen, how, how often would I have to recertify to keep this certification?

Dan Pickel: It’s on the same timeline as all of our other certifications.

So that’s every three years. So you get certified from the day you get certified, you have three years to recertify. And that’s a process where you have to, at NFPA, um, you have to earn enough points. Now this can be, these points can either be earned by, uh, working in the industry and, and verified that work or, uh, taking continue education courses.

Allen Hall: Well, that’s like, okay. So there’s, there’s a real emphasis on continuing education, which there should be in the wind industry because it’s, it’s changing so rapidly. It’s, it’s hard to keep pace sometimes.

Dan Pickel: Yeah, it’s absolutely right. I mean, I think we all have, you know, uh, degrees from whatever programs and they’re all, they’re all, you know, valuable, but they’re all sort of, um, that at that point in time, there’s no requirement to continue to, you know, learn anything else.

Like I have some diplomas behind me that, uh, like this one says public policy analysis. You shouldn’t hire me to do a job in public policy analysis. I haven’t, I haven’t looked at the stuff in 20 years. Um, but for a certification, you earn it after taking a rigorous exam. And then you have to continue to prove that you’re in the industry.

You’re still taking courses. Um, you could, you know, earn points by being part of a board or writing industry articles, or maybe doing podcasts. We don’t have that on there yet, but maybe that’s somewhere to go. Bud. But being involved in the industry is how you maintain that certification. And, uh, and when people see that, they say, all right, well, you know, not only did this person earn a certification, but there’s a requirement that they continue to learn, continue to grow, to, to maintain it.

Allen Hall: If anybody wants to learn about the certification process for wind turbine technician, one, uh, certification, where should they go?

Dan Pickel: Sure. So best way to find out information outside of listening to this fantastic podcast, um, is to go to nfba. org and you go to there, there’s going to be an option, um, click at the top, you’ll get a dropdown for certification.

And then from there, you can choose the wind turbine technician one program and learn specifically what’s involved in that program on that page. There’s a program overview. That document includes the, uh, that exam blueprint. So you’re going to want to take a look at that first before you take the exam. I don’t, I don’t want to surprise anyone what’s on there.

Uh, I know we, we touched on those main content domains, but take a look because if you’re missing some pieces from there, there’s a chance that you may not pass. So go through it, understand where there might be a gap in your knowledge, make sure that you’re filling that gap, and then go ahead and take the exam.

Allen Hall: Absolutely. And if you’re a service provider or a training school in the U. S., do they reach out to you directly or do they also access via the NFPA website?

Dan Pickel: Yeah, they can always, uh, look, they can always go through the certification management platform as well. If it’s a larger organization that’s interested in having, uh, their, you know, workforce go through the process.

They can reach out to me and we can figure out a discount to get them all set up with, with vouchers to take the certification exam.

Allen Hall: And how do they reach you, Dan? Do they go via email or LinkedIn? You find me

Dan Pickel: on LinkedIn. A lot of people do. Um, but, uh, you can also reach out to me through email. It’s the best way to do it.

So that’s, uh, [email protected] or DPICKEL, looks like pickle, but I pronounce it the fancy way, um, at NFPA. org.

Allen Hall: Wow. This has been really interesting because it’s one of the missing areas in WIND right now is competency exams, and the NFPA is the right organization to go ahead and do this. Dan, thanks for your time and explaining all the intricacies and what goes on behind it, and Yeah, if any, if you’re a technician out there or you’re a training facility or an ISP and you wanted to get involved, reach out to Dan because he’s the right person to talk to.

So Dan, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Dan Pickel: Thanks for having me. This has been great.

This week we cover LM Wind Power’s patent for improved hybrid pultrusion plates for blades, trying to manage lightning. Also GE Vernova’s method for placing a crane assembly on the nacelle. And a double cereal bowl for slow breakfast-eaters.

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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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Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here’s your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro.

Allen Hall: Alright, Phil, our first patent of the week comes from our friends at LM Wind Power, and it is for improved hybrid pultrusion plates for wind turbine blades. That’s a mouthful, by the way.

But what they mean is that they have these protrusion plates that are the main structural element inside of the blade and LM likes to mix carbon fiber with fiberglass is a lot cheaper. So you can actually make stronger structural spars or spar caps by mixing carbon fiber with fiberglass. All that makes sense.

The issue is lightning, actually. And when lightning likes to flow down carbon fiber quite naturally if you don’t do it right, if you don’t mix the fiberglass and the carbon just right and lay them out in certain orientations, you can get carbon sparking the carbon, which can damage the fiberglass, which can damage the protrusion, and your blade falls over.

So LM has come up with a really unique way of controlling where the fibers go in a pultrusion.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, and this is really fascinating to me because they have been one of the pioneers of developing this hybrid glass and, and carbon blade over the past, you know, decade or more that they’ve been investigating this type of technology.

And what they’re specifically doing with this is, as you mentioned, it’s, it’s really about controlling the temperature. The fiber orientation so that you don’t have the arcing issues that you mentioned. But also, you know, when you’re passing the lightning current through anything, whether it’s copper wire, whether it’s carbon or what have you, it heats up and the way it heats up can, you know, with.

With this type of an application can specifically weaken or damage or deform the blade. And that’s obviously undesirable. So this is really fascinating how they’ve kind of taken this kind of hybrid material technology to the next level with, all right, well, we figured out how to, you know, orient fibers but we need to tune it.

in a way where you can actually conduct lightning that’s not going to, you know, overheat the blade and, and damage things. So this is actually really fascinating and I, I hope that they’re actually using this in or have this in commercial use because this is it’s quite an interesting idea and a really clever approach to You know, be able to address a, a pretty common problem.

Allen Hall: Our next patent comes from GE Vernova. It, it’s a way of creating a crane assembly on the the cell by using the hub as a means of transport. So the concept goes like this. I have a winch on the hub. I lower that winch cable down, and I pick up this crane assembly and I’ll hoist it up to the bottom. of the hub, and I mount it to the bottom of the hub.

Then I rotate the hub, so now this crane’s on top of the hub. I add some more support pieces into the nacelle, and now I have a crane on top of the nacelle without using another crane to get it there. It’s a pretty slick idea, Phil.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, and this is obviously different than some of the other systems that are in use today, which either involve, you know, a crane pick to be able to get the, you know, nacelle mounted crane up the tower But this is entirely as, as described by GE Renova self installing as far as using a, a, a turbine based or ground-based winch system to hoist the, the, you know, hub mounted crane up to you know, hub height.

And then as you said, kind of rotated around again. The difference between this being that this is hub mounted versus nacelle mounted. So it does add a little bit of complexity when it comes to balancing out your loads. Having something that’s nacelle mounted is necessarily safer in that you’ve got the tower basically directly underneath you, so you’re not creating this bending moment of inertia with, you know, having something kind of off axis from, from, you know, the tower support.

But it’s. Potential for cost savings might actually outweigh some of those structural risks and for certain types of repairs potentially that don’t necessarily involve picking the entire gearbox out and lowering it down you know, for, for maybe smaller component repairs, this is kind of an ideal solution.

So I, I really liked this one.

Allen Hall: I think it’s already being in use, Phil. Based upon the patent and the description of it, it looks like they’ve sussed this out and have at least tried it on a Turbine, but I haven’t seen it done in the United States, but maybe over in Europe, they’re, they’re using us for some applications.

Phil Totaro: Potentially. Yeah. And it’d be, it’d be great to see. And that’s one thing we try to do over at Intel Store is we want to be able to track the commercial use of these ideas that we talk about on the show. And so we’re, we’re constantly scouring for any publicly available information we can get. To to confirm the commercial use of any of these patented technologies.

Allen Hall: Our next patent touches an area which we are all have experienced. You get up in the morning, you, you go to the kitchen, you pour yourself a coffee and a bowl of cereal and the. Treachery begins right there because your cereal gets soggy. You’re just not quite awake and it takes you a long time to get going.

By the time you get active and just starting to eat the cereal, the cereal is soggy. Well, there has been an invention to deal with that situation. Now, if you can picture sort of two bowls connected to each other with a tube. The lower bowl holds the milk, the upper bowl holds the dry cereal, and the tube connects them together.

So the concept goes like this. I only push in some of the dry cereal into the milk just before I’m ready to eat it so my cereal doesn’t get soggy. Now, Phil, this sounds like a contraption that I would tip over and spill milk on myself in the morning, making my breakfast even worse than when I started it.

But, evidently this thing must have I did a little bit of search on the internet and there is a thing there that looks like it. So, it’s sort of a crazy idea, but seems to be in practice somewhere.

Phil Totaro: I mean, Allen, you can buy almost anything that your heart desires on Alibaba, you know, over in China. But as far as mainstream usage and acceptance of this, I’m I’m not quite sure that it’s gonna meet everybody’s needs.

It, it is a, it is a fascinating way to address a challenge, but you know, I, I guess for most people, they can just maybe eat a little faster or, I don’t know, before, before everything gets soggy.

We discuss the rapid rise of skills-based hiring in wind energy, with 81% of employers now prioritizing competency over degrees. Delaware strikes a major $128 million offshore wind agreement. We tackle the idea of “clean” natural gas. And mounting cybersecurity concerns arise as Chinese manufacturers gain control of critical supply chains.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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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Allen Hall: Skills based hiring shakes up wind energy recruitment, while Delaware strikes a 128 million offshore wind deal. Plus, what’s really behind those clean, natural gas claims? This is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

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. Alan Hall, Joel Saxom, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Hey,

Allen Hall: Uptime family. We’ve got something awesome brewing just for you. Want to help make your favorite wind energy podcast even better? Well, here’s your chance. And yes, there’s something special in it for you.

We’ve created a quick five minute survey to learn what gets you excited about our show and what topics you’d love us to dive into. The best part, everyone who completes a survey and drops their email Will be entered to win one of our coveted Uptime Podcast mugs and they’re so coveted I don’t have one.

It’ll go along with your morning coffee while catching up on the latest wind energy news And your input means everything to us whether you’ve been with us since day one or just discovered us last week We want to hear your thoughts and our Wind energy O& M Australia event is on in a big way. We’re all gonna be down there February 11th and 12th Bill, you want to give us the latest and greatest on sponsors and on the events at the conference?

Phil Totaro: Yeah, so we just had two, uh, very big name companies, uh, sign up to sponsor corporate roundtables. One is GE Vernova, and the other one is Winergy. And at this event, we’re going to have topics covering lightning protection and damage, leading into erosion, Condition monitoring technology, uh, noise and nuisance, uh, drive chain refurbishment, insurance, you name it.

We’ve got it covered. Uh, so please register today if you haven’t already.

Allen Hall: And you can do that at windaustralia. com. So register now.

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Allen Hall: Well, the U. S. Department of Labor published a Skills First Hiring Starter Kit last fall, and this has touched off a broader discussion about worker qualifications. And in 2024, 81 percent of employers Uh, practice skills based hiring up from 73 percent in 2023 and just 56 percent in 2022, according to some research.

So it’s up by 30%, almost 30 percent right now since 2022. Now, an analysis by Indeed, which is a job site, found the number of job postings requiring at least a four year degree fell to 17. 8 percent in January of 2024 compared to about 20 percent in 2019. So the number of employers who are requiring degrees to even apply for a job has dropped and there are more employers looking for skills.

Rather than diplomas, which is an interesting trend. And Joel was mentioning before we started today that Elon Musk put out a Twitter post or I guess it’s an ex post now. about this particular topic.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Today he’s, he put a post out. It says, if you’re a hardcore software engineer and want to build the everything app, please join us by sending your best work to code at X.

com. That’s not the important part. The important part here is what he states is we don’t care where you went to school or even whether you went to a school or what big name company you worked at. Just show us your code. And to me, I think that’s amazing because I guess there’s, it’s a pendulum swing. My whole life as a young person in the United States, it was, you got to get a good job.

You got to get a degree. You got to get a degree. You got to get a degree. And then you see that being beat into the culture. And then the cost of these degrees just going crazy over here, right now. I mean, an average four year degree, you’re paying 80, 100, a hundred thousand dollars plus just to get over or more, right?

Yeah. Alan’s, Alan’s giving me the thumbs up way more. So, so, you know, if, if I, if I I’m in Texas right here in Austin, if I want to go to UT Austin. It’s going to cost me like 40 to 45, 000 a year for your degree. That’s 180, 000 degree that like, that’s so, uh, like it’s so much of a hurdle to employment and to growing, uh, growing employment as a society and in good jobs, and I think that like, from my standpoint, I’ve always.

Try to lean on this. If you’re a hard worker, if you’ve got some skills, I don’t care where you’ve worked in the past, I don’t care what school you went to, or even if you went to one, if you can do the job, let’s do the damn job. And that’s my take on it.

Rosemary Barnes: Uh, so one thing that I think has changed recently is that in the past, like the reason why you would say you want X degree is because you want someone that has the knowledge that you would learn in that degree.

Um, but these days there’s like nothing that you can’t learn well on the internet, just as well as in a degree. It’s kind of insane the way that now that we have the internet available, it’s insane to keep on doing it in the same way. So I think now, yeah, like we can still have the same requirement that we used to have in terms of knowledge.

But it doesn’t need to be so gatekept by the universities. But that said, I do think that there’s some kinds of engineering, like a lot of what people call engineering, I don’t think needs a degree, you know, um, and especially the things that need engineering sign off. Like it’s really rare that you actually need to use your engineering judgment for something like that.

It’s much more often, you need to just check what’s being done, check what the design standard says, and make sure that it fits within that. I don’t think you need a degree for that. Where I think you need engineers is where something comes outside of the design standard so that an engineer can make sure that, you know, everything has been considered that should have and, um, you know, do the analyses that are required and just, you know, use their professional experience and education to make sure that, You’re not inadvertently doing something unsafe.

Joel Saxum: I think when, when engineering, when you talk engineering this way, the gap for me would be when liability rolls into place. So if you’re designing a bridge, I would like someone to sign off on that, that can demonstrate, demonstrate from. whatever training and these things that they’ve, they’ve achieved a certain level of being an engineer to, and in the States, that would be a structural engineer with a SCE stamp.

And that makes sense to me.

Rosemary Barnes: The higher the stakes, the less that you should be needing someone that has any sort of judgment applied to it. You know, it should be a really rigorous standard that was definitely developed by engineers. Um, make sure that that standard, you know, covers everything that it needs to.

And then the person signing off should just be saying that it, It has done what the standard says it should do. I don’t think that there is, or should be, a lot of individual judgment in place about, will this bridge fall down? Will this aeroplane fall out of the sky? Will this, uh, I don’t know, um, petrol station explode?

You know, like that shouldn’t be somebody’s like individual call on whether a valve is big enough or a bolt is replaced frequently enough. There shouldn’t be any judgment calls there. It should just be kind of, you know, do it as, um, as the design standard says. And that design standard is really rigorous and performed by engineers.

Phil Totaro: Let’s put it this way. As we’re talking about engineering, you know, I think skills based hiring is potentially more applicable than it would be, say, in like the medical field, for example. Like, I don’t want somebody who’s just watched a bunch of YouTube videos on surgery to perform brain surgery on me.

So, you know, there’s, I think there’s a difference. Uh, maybe we can, you know, there’s a bit more margin you can get away with. Uh, doing this sort of thing for engineering as, as society evolves and all that. But, uh, yeah, I, I don’t know if it’s applicable everywhere.

Rosemary Barnes: I think that sometimes like in Australia, I’ve never heard that term skills based hiring and until today, but I have noticed, you know, early in my career, people cared that I had my accredited engineering degree and was eligible to be a member of Engineers Australia.

I don’t know. It’s been decade, decades, more than one decade, probably since anybody cared about that for me. So I think it gets less important as you progress in your career. But one weird place where I have noticed that people really want an engineering degree is, uh, my project management roles for, um, construction of new wind farms, new solar farms and stuff.

And that strikes me as a place where you don’t need an engineering degree at all. That, that should be pretty easy. like work experience, you know, um, build, building up to it. I know heaps of people that would be excellent at that sort of role, um, that aren’t engineers. And there’s, you do need to understand, you know, what the regulations are technically and make sure that, you know, things are happening correctly.

So it’s not like it’s a non technical role, but it’s not one of those kind of creative engineering roles where you have to, you know, be. I don’t know, coming up with a lot of solutions on your, on your own. Um, so I think that that’s unnecessarily restricting something to, we don’t have that many engineers in Australia.

I think that, you know, there’s a lot of people that could do that role that don’t have an engineering degree.

Joel Saxum: And I think that that’s the basis of this report that came out from the department of labor in the U S here is you’re trying to, they’re trying to make the labor market less restrictive. Cause if you’re just going to put a thing in there and it says, you’ve got to have a degree for this.

You’ve got to have a degree for that. You got to, some of them don’t even make sense. Like I. Anecdotally, here’s one from the state of Wisconsin. You can be a substitute teacher in the state of Wisconsin, but only if you have a degree, a four year degree, but that four year degree does not have to be in teaching.

The four year degree can be in whatever you want. It can be from Rose Hulman University as an engineer. And, but you need that degree to go and sit in the math class for a day to make sure the students don’t revolt. That’s a weird one to me.

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Allen Hall: Delaware has signed a major agreement with U.

S. Wind worth 128 million dollars, marking a key development in offshore wind infrastructure along the east coast. The deal enables installation of transmission cables through Delaware waters and the state park land to connect two Maryland offshore wind projects to the grid. Now, there’s a couple of interesting pieces to this agreement.

$200 million is gonna be allocated for electrical grid upgrades within Delaware, and that’s gonna be focused on improving reliability and capacity. $12 million is for the cable right of way, which is pretty typical. Uh, $76 million, uh, of renewable ener energy credits are gonna be transferred to the state.

Which, um, Phil will know a lot about that. And then there’s 40 million going to the community for coastal dredging projects, clean energy workforce training, scholarship initiatives, and state park improvement. So the thing that raises my awareness of these kind of transactions, having seen something similar happen up in New Jersey, is that every time there’s an offshore wind project off the coast of one of these East Coast states.

They seem to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from the developers for state projects that may or may not have anything to do with the electrical grid. But raise the price of offshore wind, it has to raise the prices.

Phil Totaro: Absolutely. Um, you know, everything’s got to be accounted for in, in the budget and, and anytime you start stuffing these, you know, political pork projects into, you know, some kind of budget allocation, it’s necessarily going You know, end up being paid for by the project developer, but then ultimately it gets passed on to us as rate payers, because how do you think the developer makes money?

They want to be able to sell the power to somebody, and that means they also have to increase the power purchase contract price that they ask. Um, what’s interesting about this is, okay, so this is a deal in Delaware. New York actually also just announced that they’re going to do another allocation round, but only for the power generation because they have, um, you know, all the electrical infrastructure already being built and paid for by the preexisting projects.

So they’ve got a, you know, spare capacity in the substations to be able to do the power offtake. So the industry is cheering and everybody’s assuming that it’s going to lower the prices for this, you know, sixth round in, in the state of New York. Um, Um, except when everybody still comes to the realization that we haven’t done anything about inflation in a meaningful way.

Interest rates have come down a tad. I’m sure that, especially in a state like New York, they’re always going to find ways to start plumping up the price of things.

Allen Hall: What was the Orsted agreement with New Jersey for a while? Was it 400 million, 500 million? 300. 300 million? Okay. And that was the federal money that was going to come to Orstead for developing the project, right?

And then the state of New Jersey wanted to take that as a lump sum,

Phil Totaro: or take all of it. And, and that’s, that’s exactly, you know, a good, a good example where, you know, it was, the whole, Reason that there was this federal allocation of funds to the project developer was said that it could offset some of the capex cost to the developer.

And when the states see that somebody is, you know, getting 300 million dollars to go. do something to the benefit and of their state. They all start getting dollar signs in their eyes and saying, well, why aren’t we getting some of that federal money? Uh, and they devise clever ways and say, Oh, well, we’re not going to sign the power purchase agreement with you, or, uh, allow you to go build or hook into this substation over here, unless you give us some of that money.

Uh, that, that’s basically what this amounts to.

Allen Hall: but isn’t in The interest of the state to put offshore wind in it. Like Delaware is not the easiest place to get to for power generation. Right. And it’s, it’s a, it’s a little tiny state. It’s like 2000 square miles. Uh, there’s not a lot of power plants on it.

They’ve closed down some of them. That’s how they get in the power on shore from us. Wind is a going right where an old coal generation factory was because the grid infrastructure, so it’s going to plug into it there. So the whole situation for Delaware is weird in that it’s relatively simple to hook up the wind turbines to the existing grid in Delaware.

But now U. S. Wind is basically paying, what, 100, 000 per square mile to upgrade the electrical grid in Delaware? That seems like a lot of money to me.

Joel Saxum: I think Phil was spot on when he said political pork projects, right? Because to me, these are all, it’s all like earmarks. When you listen, when you watch a bill go through in D.

C. or at the state level, wherever, the bill may be about, you know, How many chicken wings we can eat this week, whatever it is. And, and, and then there’s an, there’s things earmarked. And you want the chicken wing bill passed? Well, you’re also going to give me 10 million bucks for this racetrack over here.

And then I’m also going to get this, this thing passed in the same, the same breath. If you want that, you’re going to get this. And what it ends up doing is, is it’s shooting these. These people, these states, they’re gonna, they shot themselves in the foot multiple times. We saw it in New Jersey, right? Like, Dorstad took the right down, backed off, and said, like, we’re not doing this anymore.

And we’ve seen this play out, this, this, I guess this, this concept is in my head right now, this pendulum swinging, right? Like, you’ve seen I’ve seen energy projects or watched the history of energy projects around the world where local geographies, local governments got taken advantage of, and they got resources pulled from them.

That happens. And then the pendulum swings the other way, and they put so many regulations and so much stuff in there like this. Like, this, if you add these up, they signed a 128 million dollar bill. Agreement. Great. But then there’s going to be a 200 million electrical grid, 12 million for cable right away, 76 here, 40 here.

You’re stacking this thing up to a 300 plus million extra tab just to develop a wind farm. You’re going to shoot yourself in the foot because the pendulum is that then the pendulum is swung too far the other way and you’re using up, uh, monies that Could be used for other things that in, in, in the development process.

Phil Totaro: And let’s go back to Alan’s question, which is why would they not want to build offshore wind? I mean, the answer is, well, guess what? If you like creating jobs, particularly jobs in the new economy, if you like tax revenue, if you like providing clean electricity, et cetera, I mean, these are, these are things that You do want to get reelected.

I’m talking to the politicians now. You know, you do want to get reelected. This is the way to do it is to ensure that you’re creating opportunity within the state. Um, you know, they’re, they’re taking advantage of opportunity by getting the cash, but then it’s not necessarily going to the benefit of everybody in the state because where do you think that cash came from in the first place?

It’s all the tax revenue from all of us. Collectively, in the first place, whether it’s the federal government or the state government tax coffers that it comes out of, so we’re the ones paying for it. And yet we don’t actually have, you know, a say in how, you know, like Joel’s talking about these, these horse trades and deals that end up happening when somebody is trying to pass a bill.

We have no say in how. That haggling happens. We elect somebody and we expect that they’re going to do a job for us, but I don’t necessarily always agree with the job that’s being done by the politicians that have been elected. I may not have even voted for them, and yet they’re deciding my fate.

Joel Saxum: I think it, Phil, if we could do, let’s look at a model that has worked in the past that didn’t require a bunch of this stuff.

If you know anything about the state of Alaska and the permanent fund dividend, right? The oil and gas companies are pulling oil and gas. Very, they’ve been doing it since the seventies. They’ve been pulling a lot of value in oil and gas out of the, out of the ground up there. So what they do is they have to do a, use a portion of those proceeds to fund a fund that goes back to the state.

Okay. So that is a, that is an, uh, an after development cost. So you build that into your operating model. Instead of saying upfront, you got to pay us 300 million to do this. How about we work together? And maybe we get a couple cents for every kilowatt hour produced or something off of these offshore wind farms, like the state of Louisiana is doing.

That’s where these things should go, in my opinion.

Phil Totaro: And not for nothing, but Louisiana is also making these reinvestments into, you know, developing things around coastal erosion and, and protecting the, the natural resources that they’ve got there, which I think is actually important and necessary for them to be able to do.

But that’s a decision that they made. And, and structured it in a way where it’s not impacting the CapEx cost of developing the project in the first place. And that’s the key thing here.

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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. Well Rosemary, I’m getting a little tired of hearing the term clean natural gas and that it is so much less expensive to use clean natural gas instead of renewable solar.

Wind, hydro, uh, that, uh, it makes no sense. We have to tear down all the wind turbines, all the solar panels should go away because clean natural gas is a better, uh, energy source. And I think that’s a very US perspective.

Rosemary Barnes: Can I just have two problems with that? Clean, natural gas. In that the only word that’s unproblematic is gas.

We can all agree that it’s a gas, but, um, clean. I mean, I don’t even know what they mean. Uh, natural, it’s a, it’s a fossil gas, like a natural, we don’t say natural coal, natural oil, um, you know, it’s fossil gas, it’s methane, right? Like that, that’s, that’s what it is. Uh, it’s incredibly good. Marketing that, I don’t know, the term, um, came about well before we cared about climate change.

So it wasn’t for that, but natural, natural gas makes it sound much nicer than what it is, which is fossil, fossil methane. How are they calling it clean? What’s their, what’s their definition or just that it’s cleaner than coal?

Allen Hall: They’ve dropped the er part from cleaner than coal. And it is cleaner than coal, and I will give them that.

Rosemary Barnes: I think even that’s debatable because, um, with methane, there’s losses, you know, like, because methane is like 84 times as strong a, um, a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is. It really matters small amounts getting leaked, and there’s always leakage, especially from, yeah, where it’s extracted, but. in the pipelines all along.

And I know that, you know, I’ve been following a little bit the research that’s been done on this area. And especially now that we can monitor with satellites, we find more and more and more leaks and the carbon or the, you know, greenhouse gas intensity of, um, fossil gas is increasing and increasing and increasing the more that we know.

And I have seen some studies try and say that in a lot of situations, it’s actually, um, overall worse for the climate than, than coal. That’s not the mainstream view and it’s not true on every. Every type of project, you know, some countries are better at extracting it cleanly, more cleanly than others, but, um, yeah, I don’t know.

How can they get away with that clean, clean natural gas? Come on.

Allen Hall: Well, the comparison of the cost of clean natural gas to other energy sources, particularly renewables, is very U. S. focused. They’ll say, well, in the U. S., uh, wind is a lot more expensive, particularly offshore wind is a lot more expensive than putting a gas, uh, electrification plant in.

True. For right now. True. But the rest of the world is not that way. Because the U. S. is full of natural gas. Pretty much Joel can walk around his backyard in Texas, drop in a pole, and get natural gas to come out of it. It’s not that hard. But if you look at the rest of the world, it’s much harder to find natural gas and the prices are widely variable.

So this is why the U. S. can make this claim. The U. S. right now is paying about 4 per million BTU. Alright, not bad. The U. K. right now is 14. per million BTU. And Germany is about 1350, right? So they’re three times more expensive, almost four times more expensive than the United States. That changes the whole economics of natural gas versus renewables.

So we are seeing renewable energy go in big time in France and in Germany, in the UK, and a lot of other places, but maybe not as much in the United States, uh, at the moment because natural gas is so low. So, Rosemary, do you see the same thing that this U. S. argument is being using globally?

Rosemary Barnes: Well, I mean, it’s an argument about, uh, cost that ignores the climate impact, right?

So, I think you first, we need to start with this only argument only works if we don’t care about the climate at all, which a lot of countries do. Um, Yeah, I mean, to a greater or lesser extent, and obviously it’s easier to care about the climate if the cost difference isn’t so great. Uh, I do think it’s a very, a very US thing, but, um, even, I mean, it’s relevant everywhere and I’ve heard the term called the, um, the spark gap, like how different the cost is between, you know, creating some sort of energy service by electricity versus with, um, natural gas.

So, you know, it might be comparing, um, A electric heat pump for heating your home versus a gas boiler. Um, what’s the cost difference for, you know, getting your house to the temperature that you want it. And, you know, some places in the world it’s cheaper to do it with electricity. In more places it’s cheaper to do it with gas.

I think that the US is like one end of a big continuum of the whole world dealing with that exact issue, but it’s definitely at, at the end, I think.

Allen Hall: But every country needs to think about it for themselves, right? The economics in the United States are totally different than the economics in Germany, the UK, France, India, South America, Brazil.

They’re just totally different, and I think we’re getting caught up, at least in the United States, that globally, wind is not an answer. Globally, solar is not an answer. Globally, hydro is not an answer. That the only answer is LNG. Which is just a complete distortion of what the reality is. For the time being, the natural gas is easy in the United States.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s also, in terms of energy security, like, you’ve got the gas there, so you’re fine. Europe wants to get off gas regardless of how much it costs. I mean, that’s, that makes it extra, an extra incentive that is expensive. But they don’t have it, so they have to import it. So they would prefer to have energy security by, you know, having their own wind farms.

Peace. Um, so I think that the US fails to see that as well, that there’s an energy security like for most countries, having your own renewables is, um, more better energy security than having to buy that, you know, your gas and your oil in from other countries.

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Well, a stark warning has been coming from Europe about wind energy’s supply chain growing dependence upon Chinese manufacturers and a Dutch government backed report report. Along with comments from former MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove highlights concerns about cybersecurity risks and strategic vulnerabilities in the offshore wind sector.

Now the background on the Chinese manufacturers, I think it’s pretty well known to people in wind, but there’s six of the top 10 wind turbine manufacturers in the world are now based in China. And a lot of Chinese firms control the critical supply chain. Uh, it’s particularly for rare earth magnets, right?

And there is a significant risk and concern among Intel officials like MI6 and my guess is the CIA, Joel, and others that, uh, putting Chinese manufactured assets into your grid makes them vulnerable, uh, which I, I think has been proven out time and time again from other different sectors of manufacturer from.

As we learned, Wi Fi routers to cell phones and a variety of other things. It’s not inconsequential, but there does seem to be a big conflict coming among Europeans because there are developers that are really going after Chinese manufacturers, or at least talking to it. Is that going to stop now that the governments and the Intel officials are basically saying, don’t do it.

We’re just not going to even consider

Joel Saxum: it. I think that depends on how much control the grid operator has over these decisions, right? Like in the United States, you can, do your permitting, do everything, but at the end of the day, FERC has to sign off on your wind farm and they have the ultimate control from a federal level.

Um, so the operators may have some, some sway and some pull, but not at the end of the day, it’s not their choice whether this happens to them or not, or whether they get to install these, these turbines or not. But I think it, it’s a viable concern. In my opinion, if we’re looking on the world stage of who, Foreseeable future we may have a conflict with.

We don’t want the ability for someone that we’re in a conflict with to shut our energy supply down. Whether you’re in the UK and you’re Part of MI6 or were part of MI6. I guess you’re probably always a part of MI6 if you were a part of MI6. Does that make sense? Um, but you know, you don’t want the, a foreign operator or a foreign, you know, at that point in time, that could be an adversary to be able to have control over of what you’ve got going on.

Uh, power generation wise, because it’s, I mean, that’s, that’s a, it’s a matter of national security and that’s my take on it.

Phil Totaro: Well, and let’s, let’s also give some context to this because the developers in Europe were initially saying, Oh, we’re going to go talk to the Chinese to try and get commercial negotiating leverage against the Western OEMs saying, Hey, Hey, you guys are trying to pass on all these cost increases to us as project developers.

We don’t want to pay more, so we’re going to go talk to the Chinese and maybe we get some of their turbines. Now, fast forward five years, we just had a tender in France for offshore where even Western, you know, hardcore Western project development companies, and I’m talking like NG, EDF, they were all quoting their, their project proposals with, you know, 20 plus megawatt Chinese wind turbines.

The Chinese turbines have become more of an attractive option to developers that I believe are making bad decisions about whether or not they should be considering Chinese turbines in the first place. I don’t really think that’s They’re taking total cost of ownership into account. You know, the developer is the one making the decision on something that has profound impact to everybody that is downstream from a very early upstage, you know, development decision about what equipment to use.

And how is that going to be maintained? How much does it cost, et cetera, et cetera. And security almost doesn’t even come into the equation, uh, at all. For this week’s wind

Joel Saxum: farm of the week. We’re heading up to New York state, uh, by Allen there. Um, so the wind farm of the week is eight point wind. It’s a next era site in Steuben County, New York.

And we’re focusing on this one because it is a big one. Big wind farm, not in number of turbines, but in megawatts per turbine. Uh, this is one of the first tur, uh, wind farms in the United States to install the GE 5.5 megawatt 1 58, uh, meter rotor machine. Uh, cool thing about it is eight point wind.com that NextEra put together has a comprehensive safety plan.

a public involvement plan, and various fact sheets about partners, and what NextEra does, and how Steuben County is a leader in in the renewable energy space. So they’ve tried to, you know, be a little bit more forward and open with the residents around there about what’s going on with these big turbines being installed.

So this wind farm also has a 16 and a half mile transmission line that was put in. As a part of it to, uh, uh, connect to the grid managed by the New York ISO. Uh, and it’s also producing enough clean, renewable energy, uh, to power more than 46, 000 New York homes. Uh, it’s expected to, uh, provide more than 40 million in revenue to local governments to support schools, infrastructure, and vital services, such as fire departments, which is a hot topic these days.

Um, the payments to landowners are also estimated to be around 25 million over 30 year expected life of the project. So the Eight Point Wind Energy Center, uh, up in Steuben County, New York, you are the wind farm of the week.

Allen Hall: Well, 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 sub stack, did I mention sub stack? Newsletter. And Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Waaree Energies will acquire 100% of Enel Green Power India for $95 million. BHE US Transmission will acquire 10% of the North Plains Connector Transmission Project from Grid United. And Constellation has announced it will acquire Calpine in a cash and stock transaction valued at $16. 4 billion.

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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. intelstore. com.

Allen Hall: Waaree Energies has signed a share purchase agreement to acquire 100 percent of Enel Green Power India for 95 million. The acquisition includes their portfolio of approximately 640 megawatts AC and 760 megawatts of DC operational solar and wind energy projects across India with additional projects under development.

The transaction will help Waaree diversify revenue streams and enhance wind project execution capabilities. Phil, my first question about this is why is Enel Green Power leaving India?

Phil Totaro: Well, it’s actually a really fascinating question that I’ve been getting over the past week or so since the announcement came out and it, it, basically has to do with Enel wanting to consolidate more operations in Europe effectively, as well as reinvest in other emerging markets that they find more promising.

Now, we’ve talked before on the show about how India’s growth market but it’s also still a challenging market if you’re not a, you know, kind of Indian based company or, you know, have a strong presence in that market. Enel had, you know, a reasonably sized portfolio for the size of the market overall.

And divesting it is really just about that cash and being able to redeploy it in markets like Chile or you know, even in Spain or Italy on on projects that are either, you know, repowering or, or new greenfield development. So You know, what’s happening in India effectively is that a lot of Western companies that were pioneers in project development or manufacturing in the market are pulling back a little bit and selling off their asset portfolio to Indian concerns.

So the Indian market’s becoming firmly much more Indian.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, and that fits with that rhetoric there. If you’ve dealt with Enel, they like to do their operations out of Italy. So they want things a little bit closer to home. And that’s been a ongoing trend with them. The interesting thing about Wari Energies here as well, as Phil said, they are very much an Indian company.

They’re a Fortune 500 company in India. And they’re India’s largest, a subsidiary of the Watery Group and Watery Energies is the largest photovoltaic panel producer in India. So they’re building a lot of solar as an OEM, and also now bolstering their portfolio of Solar projects and getting more into the wind side of things.

So bigger play from Wari Energies over in India.

Allen Hall: And in the states here, BHE US Transmission has signed a memorandum of understanding with Grid United to acquire 10 percent of the 3, 000 megawatt North Plains Connector Transmission Project. Now that project involves building a 420 mile high voltage DC transmission line connecting the U.

S. eastern and western electrical grids in North Dakota and Montana. It’s a 3. 2 billion dollar project and it’s entering the permitting phase with approval is expected in 2026 and operation planned in 2032. Phil, as the U. S. grid starts to connect itself a little more this BHE U. S. transmission agreement is one of several, I think, that are going to happen in the next couple of years.

Phil Totaro: Yes, and it’s indicative of the fact that, you know, some of the companies that were developing these high voltage DC transmission projects that are crossing multiple states. You know, first of all, they had, they were much smaller concerns. They had trouble getting access to capital and they had trouble getting right of way permits and other things to be able to actually build these projects.

Once Grid United actually got this project mature enough. It certainly attracted the interest, obviously, of BHE. But this is no different than, you know, some of the other projects that have seen interest from Invenergy, who bought into an HVDC line a couple years ago. And it’s, it’s, Part of the, the necessity of renewable energy to have this kind of transmission capacity so that we can move the power from, you know, where we’ve got the, the wind and solar resource over to load centers, which are typically, you know, taking power from the middle of the country and moving it out towards the coasts.

Joel Saxum: This. This article really excites me. I’m super, I’m super excited for this project to go because, and this is, HVDC is something that we talk about on the show, Alan and I talk about it off the show quite often. Why don’t we build more HVDC? Why don’t we build more HVDC? And now we have some big players.

BHE, so you know, BHE U. S. Transmission, Berkshire Hathaway Energy. So that is a Warren Buffett backed entity as are, you know, some other huge companies and portfolio companies within their group. So you have big players putting real money into projects like this. And sometimes when you have a project that’s, you know, HVDC is not groundbreaking, but it’s still kind of new in the space to be putting on land specifically in the United States.

This project builds to the fleet of these projects are being done. However, this one is North Dakota and Montana. If you know anything about North Dakota and Montana, it’s pretty easy to build big infrastructure projects across the plains up there. So you kind of have a softball across the plate. Large.

HVDC 420 miles across what’s basically a lot of farmland and rangeland. This project should go off without a hitch or with minimal hitches. I’m not going to say without a hitch, with minimal hitches in construction. And it will be, it has the possibility of really sparking some more of these HVDC developments here in the United States.

So like I said, I’m excited for this one.

Allen Hall: And big news in renewable energy solutions. Constellation has announced it will acquire Calpine in a cash and stock transaction valued at 16. 4 billion, consisting of 50 million shares of Constellation stock and 4. 5 billion in cash, plus assuming 12. 7 billion in Calpine debt.

Now, this merger creates America’s largest clean energy provider, combining Constellation’s nuclear fleet with Calpine’s natural gas and geothermal operations. Phil, when we talk about size of energy companies in the United States, this is actually not that big when you compare it to an Exxon Mobil or a ConocoPhillips, right?

Phil Totaro: Correct. And it’s an interesting thing because, you know, between Constellation and Calpine, their wind and solar portfolio isn’t huge, but they’re lumping things like nuclear and other technologies into this clean energy definition that they have. So we can have a debate about that later, but the, the reality of it is it’s a, it’s a big merger and it’s an important one because it also, you know, Constellation Was very excited about renewables there for a while, then backed off and now it feels like they’re getting excited about, you know, renewables again with with this kind of a deal.

So, like I said, I mean, the, the portfolio that they have of wind and solar projects is an enormous combined. It’s, you know, about I want to say a little under 2 gigawatts of wind and, and just over 1 gigawatt worth of solar. But they’re, they’re able to take the enormous balance sheet that, that Constellation has and that Calpine combined with it provides and leverage that into being able to get a lot more projects in the development pipeline.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Any pairing of engineering permitting expertise, it makes me happy. Right. Especially in the energy space. So bringing the constellation team that knows that has a widely varied a skill set and also bringing Calpine into that, the exact same thing. Putting this conglomerate together I would expect to see some pretty big moves after this thing closes within the next 12 months and in the next 12 months after that.

So be prepared to watch Constellation make some moves in the renewable energy space and, and the energy space in general. The interesting thing here, if you’ve been following it, Constellation stock jumped 35 percent or over 35 percent since this Merger. So good on him.

Bret Tollgaard, president of Sunrez, explores how UV-cured resins are transforming wind turbine blade repair by dramatically reducing cure times from hours to minutes. Sunrez’s technology enables repairs in extreme temperatures and high humidity, extending maintenance seasons and increasing turbine uptime. Drawing from decades of experience across aerospace and marine applications, Tollgaard demonstrates how pre-impregnated UV materials are helping operators and repair teams save thousands of dollars per repair while getting turbines back online faster.

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Joel Saxum: 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 Bret Tollgaard, president and CEO of Sunrez Corporation, a pioneering force in UV curing technology. Under Bret’s leadership, Sunrez has emerged as an industry leader.

Welcome in developing advanced UV cured resins and composites particularly for wind turbine blade repair. Based in El Cajon, California, Sunrez brings nearly four decades of expertise in UV curing technology. Today, we will explore how their cutting edge solutions are addressing some of the most pressing challenges in wind turbine maintenance.

Bret, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thanks for having me, Allen. Appreciate it. We know there’s a lot of challenges in the repair business at the moment on using standard materials resin systems out on blades. Particularly as it gets colder in the springtime and the fall where seasons get cut short and you still have blades to repair.

Everybody always has blades to repair. So you hear about this large rush to get blades stabilized to get to the next spring. That’s a big problem for the industry right now. How much of that do you see of people just saying, I don’t know what to do, I can’t get my blades fixed before the season. It’s where SunRez comes in with UV cured materials, right?

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, absolutely. Really one of the biggest values that we add for our customers is time. And we save time in a tremendous amount of ways. One, the time for the repair window is greatly increased because we don’t really require any heat to cure and kick off our UV curing resin. You can cure at much colder temperatures and much hotter temperatures without any impact from the ambient air.

Temperature or humidity. So you can hear materials a lot deeper into the season, so you’re no longer constrained by how cold it is outside. It’s really then, at that point, what kind of worker wants to get out, up on top of that wind tower.

Joel Saxum: I think a big thing there too, Brad, is, we’re talking about UV cured resins being able to extend seasons, but what it can do within a season, right?

So when you’re talking like a major repair that you got grinding layer, grinding layer, and all of a sudden you’re three weeks into this thing. A three week repair, if you’re able to, boom, cure fast, boom, cure fast, move to the next step, that might shorten that thing down to a week? So is that possible?

Is that much time savings?

Bret Tollgaard: Absolutely. So one of the big things that UVCure resins do is they use the light photons from either the sunshine or one of our handheld LED lamps to cure our, kick off our resin. And so what we can do is we can cure up to a quarter inch thick laminate in under five minutes.

And depending on the light intensity that you have and the surface area that you’re trying to cure you can really fast track your repairs. And so we provide pre impregnated sheets of fiber to the wind market. So you don’t have to worry about mixing any resin up tower, getting the right amount on there, vacuum bagging, heat blanket, et cetera.

We provide pre impregnated sheets that have the optimum amount of resin for mechanical properties and adhesion to the wind turbine blade. And so what that allows customers to do is to actually peel, stick, and cure a laminate piece. To go ahead and repair that surface really quickly.

Allen Hall: And I think there’s really two marketplaces I’ve seen your materials used out in the field.

One is just major structural repairs that it just gets so cumbersome to do. The UV cured makes sense. The other one is I have a blade that I has some substantial crack in it. And this is interesting cause I ran across this in Oklahoma of all places. Blade with a huge crack in it. And they had temporarily patched it to hold it together using your material just for sense of speed.

Let’s just stabilize it and move on and fix other blades and the farm will come back to this, which is really hard to do with existing resin systems.

Bret Tollgaard: Our prepregs in general are used in kind of three primary areas. Corrosion resistance, not quite as applicable to the wind market, but cosmetic and structural repairs.

And so they lend themselves really well to doing large, thick laminates. But also for smaller cosmetic things or even zippering certain cracks. So something that you might have seen where they have staged pre pregs to do some crack propagation mitigation. They’re using a variety of instances and really the technicians can get up and down tower just so quickly.

And so that’s where one of the big advantages of UV cure materials comes into place is how quickly they can get repairs done

Joel Saxum: from a commercial standpoint, Bret. There’s a lot of advantages here. So if I’m an ISP a blade repair company, I want to come to my clients and say, Hey, we’ve got a way to do this faster.

This bid, maybe a chance for an ISP to get in front in the bidding process or through an RFP. And now if I’m an operator, I’m thinking the same thing. Hey, this is going to be, it could have been a three week repair. Now a one week repair, or especially places like I’m in Canada and our blade repair season is only 12 weeks long.

And I’d like to extend it to 20 weeks or 24 weeks or something. There’s so many advantages to this. Where are you seeing the most draw? Is it the operators themselves? Is it ISPs? Is it the OEMs? Where’s this coming from?

Bret Tollgaard: So it’s a little bit of everything. So historically on the wind market, we actually partnered up with GE and LM five, six years ago, and they were the ones who really brought this material into the wind market.

They saw the value in it. And at that point in time, we actually had a styrenated resin system. So had VOCs, it was a flammable material. It was a vinyl ester based system, but they still saw the merit and being able to complete jobs extremely quick. And it wasn’t that different from some of the, epoxy issues that there were then that there were in the past since then we’ve sold a little over 50, 000 patches.

Sold tens of thousands of square meters of material into the wind market alone. And now we’ve brought out a new material actually in 2024, it’s our 7355 vinyl ester resin system. And so it’s non styrenated, no VOC, no haps, all single component. And now we’ve introduced that into the entire wind market.

And one of the things that will really help ISPs gain the confidence in the material is having some of the other OEMs come through, validate it, certify the material, and really check it off saying this works well with our epoxy or polyester blades. And so that’s been our big focus for 2024 is gaining a little bit more exposure.

Introducing people to the material. But then we also have a track record of both, cosmetic and structural repairs in this market.

Allen Hall: And I think that’s key. And your experience outside of WIND is also valuable. I know you’ve been helping a number of different applications, ship based at times, aerospace is another market you’re in.

Those are really helpful in the WIND market also, because it gives you more just world experience, world knowledge that you’re bringing to the table when you come back to help the WIND industry.

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, absolutely. So Sunrez was actually founded in 1986. It’s focused almost exclusively on UVCure resins, putties, and prepregs.

And so on the decades of R& D that we’ve done applications installs, new builds, et cetera we’ve gained a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience on how to really best service a customer’s specific repair requirements. For the wind market, it’s not that different from, let’s say marine, for instance, where you’re, going to be repairing composite components.

So we know how to make them stick. We know how to get the right structural properties. And being able to deliver that to, in a form factor that technicians up tower can actually use is a big challenge, but something that we’ve really worked on. And think we’ve come up with a pretty good package.

Allen Hall: How does the UV resin systems work? What is the magic in there? Because you, I’ve seen them over time, especially in aerospace, and now I’m seeing your material in a lot of places. What’s the chemistry? What, what’s actually happening when it says a UV resin?

Bret Tollgaard: Oh, that’s a great question, Allen.

So traditional resins, let’s say for an epoxy, for instance, you have a part A and a part B, you mix them together, and then you have a certain amount of time before they start to gel and then ultimately harden. And oftentimes to really get full mechanical and thermal properties, you have to elevate the temperature and cure it in an oven, post cure it with a heat blanket, or even an autoclave.

UV cure is completely different with respect to the way things actually cross link. And this is coming from a mechanical engineer, not a chemist, but simply put UV curing resins have something called photo initiator in them. Photo initiators are activated a tremendous amount of different rays ways and wavelengths.

There are hundreds of different photo initiators. And so you will blend a specific resin and concentration of photo initiator or photo initiators, depending on what you’re going to be curing with. But ultimately what happens is the light photons actually kick off make the photo initiators react then with the resin and or the monomers around them to crosslink and get a solidified part.

And so you don’t have any heat doing any of the work to make the resin molecules activate. It’s literally all the light photons hitting those photo initiators and going. And so what that means is you really need to pair the photo initiator with the light source. For instance, we’ve been doing stuff in the past where we sold to surfboard repair customers who were used in a broad spectrum sunlight that works relatively well, but you now have a broad spectrum of initiators to activate.

There are different ones that are good at surface curing, some that are better at depth of curing, and the light intensity, the dwell time that’s going to be on that, all of that really makes a really big difference with respect to the type of laminate that you can UV cure.

Allen Hall: Okay, so that explains a lot, because when you actually see UV cured resin systems kick off, They look hot.

Like there, there’s still a chemical reaction that’s happening there, but the photo initiators are essentially blocking that chemical reaction until they get exposed to, to, to the specific frequency of light, and then they step out of the way and the reaction happens. That is really unique because I, one of the things especially on winter blades is that generally you’re outside, so there’s gen to be sunlight.

Do you recommend just using the sunlight to cure the resin systems, or is it better to have a specific frequency light and to really get on top of it to make sure it cures out?

Bret Tollgaard: For the wind market in general, and the type of quality that we’re all really striving for, it’s absolutely recommended to be curing with a specific device.

Whether it’s one of our handheld lamps, which is something like one of these little guys. We’re teaming up with a group to do LED blankets as well, or sheets that you can just wrap around it and it’s all there’s thousands of LED lamp LEDs on there, excuse me and so there’s a variety of different curing methods that can be done, but to guarantee that depth of cure and your adhesion to that repair surface that’s really recommended because the sun at different times of the year, But softer for amount of light, depending on the Northern Southern hemisphere is the blade in the shade, or is it tilted?

And so you really can’t control as sufficiently as you can with, an actual curing device.

Joel Saxum: Bret, when I talk to any technician that’s used this stuff in the field, or even blade repair people that like, Hey, have you used this yet? Here’s how it works. All of every one of them, either their eyes get big and they explain how awesome this, a UV cured resin was, or their eyes get big and they go, what?

What is that? And that’s amazing to me that not that many people have heard about it. The one thing I wanted to share with you is I did get that was part of the feedback from some people that have used UV resins in general. And I don’t know if they were Sun Res or what else is out there, but they were saying, to get clarification on how we use the lights.

And what light source to use and because they’re like, early days, like I tried the one person said that to me one time, I tried UV cured resins on a boat one time, and they were like, one, I was trying to set it up. I took a sheet off and the thing cured and I had to grind it out and fix it. But you guys have gone to extra steps to make sure that this thing is easy to use in the field and you’re making that process combination of working with GE and work with other operators and stuff.

What are some of the special steps that you guys do to ensure the quality in the field and ease of installation?

Bret Tollgaard: One of the things that we do is we have an extensive lab here at Sunrez. We do mechanical testing. We’ve got a, 100 kilonewton instron for mechanical tests and coupon sampling. We have a DSC here, which is very valuable to us.

The DSC will measure the degree of cure, and then also some of the thermal properties that the TG most importantly, and so what we’ve done in the past and what we continue to do every time we’ve come out with a revised formula or different fabrics, for instance, that different customers might want to use E glass, S glass, et cetera.

We will cure. in field conditions. And then you can measure the mechanical properties of that part. Then also we can throw it in the DSC to really make sure that we’re getting the full mechanical and thermal benefits of a UV curing system. So for instance, most of the time our customers, we recommend curing with our lamp from 14 inches away.

When you do that, you can cure a 20 layer UD1000 prepreg in under 10 minutes. That’s almost a half inch thick.

Joel Saxum: That’s a day long usually.

Bret Tollgaard: That’s just it. And so there is a footprint though, that led light emits enough light intensity to cure 20 layers. As you start to go farther out and farther out, there’s less light because that led light on the top loses some of that intensity and that focus, right?

And so every LED creates a signature footprint. And then we’ve done all the testing internally to say, okay, from 14 inch distance, you’re going to be able to cure, I’ll say a nice round number two square feet, or if you go to 16 inch, you can hear three square feet, et cetera. And so we can give you the footprint that it’ll cure at the depth of cure that you can expect.

And then we can do some of the adhesion properties of that as well. And so we’ve built a catalog with our LED equipment to really make sure it’s as easy for the operators to use. And for some of the cosmetic repairs, it’s two layers of biax, or you throw some combi in there. The sun will cure that in under five minutes.

And so one of our LED lamps will certainly be and if you do have a cosmetic repair, you can put that light farther away because now you have a larger footprint, less light intensity, but you don’t need all that intensity to only cure a couple layers of material. And so we try to build this structure and this guideline for customers to follow.

To make it as easy to use as possible.

Joel Saxum: So Bret, we’ve talked a lot about the limitations of the traditional or classic resins, the time, the workability, these kinds of things that can be a pain. And one of the big items there is humidity, right? So temperature is one thing it has to cure at a certain temperature, but there’s also humidity and when you’re working in like I’m in Austin, right?

Not too far from here. There’s a lot of wind farms right along the coast in Texas. And those wind farms have huge limitations because of humidity. How does the UV cured products work within that?

Bret Tollgaard: Our stuff’s been known to cure underwater. Impact on curing with humidity is not that large of a deal for the material itself.

Now, on the humidity side of things, what you really need to look after is what your substrate you’re bonding to. If you’ve got standing water on there, you’re going to be bonding to that standing water. And so you do need to make sure that you have a nice clean surface. So that to actually be able to bond to, but yeah, the humidity itself won’t impact the cross linking and the curing of our materials.

Allen Hall: And what are the costs of UV cure material compared to the non UV brethren? Is it about the same or is less expensive, more expensive?

Bret Tollgaard: It’s going to be a slightly more expensive for them, the square foot of material that they’re actually going to be purchasing based on just pure fabric and resin alone.

Once again, a lot of our stuff comes pre impregnated. We do sell liquid resins, whether it’s infusion, really low viscosity, hand laminating resin, but for the wind market, we found the pre pregs to really add the most value to the customers. And so yeah, cost per square foot is going to go up a little bit.

But when you’re peering in five minutes versus six hours and there’s no mixing to do and the technician really has to just trim out the proper size part, peel off the backing film, roll it out with a hand roller, and then peel off the UV blocky film that’s on top. They add, or they save. Hours and hours per repair.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. At the most repair materials are 10 percent of a repair. It’s all, most of the costs in repairing blades, it’s all in just labor. It’s labor. It’s time. The materials is usually pretty small. So a slight increase in cost of materials will well over make up for itself in the grand scheme of things.

Bret Tollgaard: The ROI is incredibly short when using UV cured prepregs.

Allen Hall: So what forms does the UV cured prepregs come in? Come in. I’ve seen these little patch kits that you can buy online. It’s your material. It’s in a four line package. Is that how it generally comes or is it on rolls or how do you expect this to show up on site?

For the

Bret Tollgaard: wind market in particular, having a smaller style prepreg that’s easier for one or two people to handle has shown the greatest advantage. And traditionally we’ll sell them in flat sheets that are 300 millimetres wide and about 750 millimetres long. And so those flat sheets are easy for people to go, to stack, to build, and it’s easy enough to overlap as well.

But we’ve also had some more people ask us for continuous length rolls. And so now we’ve actually been building some 10 metre long versions that are still 300 millimetres wide. And so we’re starting to get those into the field to see what feedback and stuff we have from a broader range of customers to see if that continuous length will then serve more of advantage for a trailing edge repair or something along those lines where they don’t necessarily need or have the desire to continue to stack and overlap pre breaks.

Joel Saxum: Bret, LEP product.

Bret Tollgaard: We’re certainly looking in that direction. We have a couple of things in the works that we think is going to be really big for 2025 on the LEP side of things.

Allen Hall: So how’s it gone in the field? I obviously I’ve seen some of your materials up close out in the field, but you must be having a lot of success.

If you’ve done 50, 000 of these kits, that’s a lot of kits. How is it going out there?

Bret Tollgaard: So far so good. The feedback that we get from the customers is usually pretty positive. We are certainly open to understanding packaging things and that sort of stuff to make it easier for the customers to use in the field.

But by and large, we’ve had very positive feedback. We’ve had customers install in negative 20 degree Fahrenheit weather that was supposed to be a temporary winter repair to get them through to the summer, but it’s been going now for 3 straight years without needing to be replaced. Customers like that.

And then the other side of the thing is we’ve had customers in Puerto Rico, where some weather and storms were coming through, but they were to get up and down tower. Fixed that blade, get it spinning, and didn’t have to sit there for four days waiting for the rain to actually pass them by. And so we get a lot of positive feedback from that standpoint, where it’s just the time savings to be able to get up and down tower as effectively as possible.

And so people are pretty grateful for that kind of repair opportunity.

Allen Hall: What is generally that time savings for your materials versus the standard prepreg materials?

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. So time savings alone on, I’ve found smaller repairs, anywhere from two to six layers thick are several hours in the four to five hours per repair, because there’s no heat blanket required.

Which are anywhere from 3 to 6 plus hours, from what I’ve heard. And then also it comes pre impregnated. So everyone, all they really have to do is trim the prepregs to the appropriate size for that laminate schedule. And then the way that our prepregs come is they’re formed with a backing film, our pre impregnated fiberglass sheet.

We have a clear film over the top of that and then we have an orange UV blocking film that’s just lightly spray adhesive to that clear film. And so what that will allow customers to do is peel off the black backing film, stick it to your repair surface, take a standard three or six inch bubble buster roller to roll out any air that might have been in between the prepreg and the substrate.

If you’re building up more layers, you generally, they’re going to be slightly larger and slightly larger than the one underneath it. And so you can always have UV protection with that transparent orange UV blocking film over the top. You can build up your layers by removing the films in between. And then when you’re all said and done you peel off that orange UV blocking film.

You can leave the clear one on so you get a nice, hard, tack free surface. And you expose it, the sunlight will once again start to kick it off, but you use that LED lamp to really get in there and make sure you get the proper depth of cure. But in under five, generally under five minutes, we’ll tell people you’re eight to 10 minutes long.

For a little bit of a safety factor but you’re done curing in under 10 minutes, whereas you don’t have any extra components like a vacuum bag, a vacuum itself to pull, a heat blanket to tape and just, then wait for hours on end for that to actually go and hope that the blade is in the massive heat sink.

Tons of advantages in having a pre impregnated sheet coupled with a sub 10 minute cure.

Allen Hall: Joel, if you’re saving four or five hours per repair, how much money are you saving

Joel Saxum: Four or five hours per repair. If you’re talking just technician time. So let’s just take it as a concept of you got two technicians on ropes.

Each one of those technicians is going to be between 95 and 120 an hour. So we’re talking, so say we make some easy numbers. We’ll say 200 bucks an hour for that rope team. And that’s a cheap rope team. That’s not that’s a not, yeah. So you’re talking for five hours, thousand dollars. And that’s if everything goes perfectly, because now when you extend time, you also extend volatility and you also extend circumstances that you may not want, right?

So that’s a minimum right there. Bam. Thousand bucks. And we haven’t talked about a thousand dollars there, but let’s talk about the uptime for that turbine, because what we hear all the time, Allen from the field, uptime is the most important thing. Uptime is the most important thing. We need these turbines spinning.

So if, we’re saying, this is how much money you’re going to save on technicians. You’re also going to get five more hours of production out of that turbine.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I think about that. Someone just handed you a thousand dollars. For changing to a better material. Would you take it? Yes, all day.

I would do that all summer long that because it makes Infinite sense to do it. Yeah, I’d be glad please Bret Send me more because that’s the way that this works is as Joel pointed out You’re cutting the downtime of the turbine being off, but also you’re getting those technicians moving on to something else It’s just a huge money savings.

That’s why GE Vernova and so many others are switching to these Sun Res UV systems it’s Quite amazing. Bret, you’ve done so much already. You guys have been in business a long time. You’re based in the United States. You’re out in California. You have a long storied history.

What’s coming in 2025? What should we be watching for?

Bret Tollgaard: For the wind market in particular, the LAP side of things is definitely one of the hot button products that we’ve been working on and plan to roll out. We have a couple of different solutions. One there a pre preg solution, but then also a A more putty based option for people.

We do have a couple other kind of cool UV cure products that we are working on in the wind market that we’ll release in due time. But we’ll keep that in the back pocket for now. But really it’s just even more market penetration. We sell UV curing resins anywhere from bathtub to surfboard repair technicians.

We have some Amish folk who use it to make saddles for horses. We sell to the defense industry Marine, industrial sectors. So really we’ve been a small company for a rather long time. But we’re expecting some pretty significant growth in the next year, plus as we get some deeper market penetrations, a variety of these things where really we’re just starting to displace Other composite resin systems, mostly epoxy.

We have some filament winding customers actually who had a six to 12 hour post cure in an oven that we got down to 90 seconds. And so when you see that kind of time savings you’re opening up more mandrills, your production lines increase, you can automate the heck out of a lot of different things.

And yeah we’re ready for some more disruption.

Joel Saxum: Bret, you’ve been around the industry for a while. Multiple industries, say the industry, we’re in wind, right? You’ve been across all kinds of composites industry. What’s the craziest repair that you guys have used Sunrez UV cured repairs on?

Bret Tollgaard: Sunrez really started manufacturing prepregs during Operation Desert Storm, Desert Shield, eighties and early nineties. We had a lot of material going to the Middle East and originally it was used for doing spot repairs. On a variety of different things, but it ended up being used as a lot of armor repair.

But two really interesting repairs was an IED explosion at the bottom of a Humvee. It’s, it’s damaged, there’s holes, it needs to be filled so it can actually go and be used again. The guys in the field went up, installed our repairs underneath it, but they’re out in the middle of the desert and there’s no LED light.

So what do they do? They use the sunshine and they get a mirror and they bounce the sun off the mirror to cure to the underside of a Humvee. And so that reinstated the strength.

Joel Saxum: That’s super cool.

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And so that was one of the really unique things. And the other one that I heard was our materials were literally used on the leading edge of the A 10, the Warthog to help to help reinstate its ability to fly.

And so when you’re over and you’re in harm’s way. They have these BDRs, Battle Damage Repair Kits. And to really make sure that you can get back home and you reinstate the ability for the airfoil to work properly, you cover all those bullet holes, and you at least now have a plane to get back to back home.

Joel Saxum: That to me sounds like a leading edge repair. That really would work.

Allen Hall: It works on an airplane. I’m sure we can make it work on a wind blade. Bret, this is amazing. And Sunrez is doing amazing things at the minute. And we appreciate you having on the podcast. How do people get a hold of Sunrez? Now they’ve heard all this great about all the great advancements in the materials they can have for wind turbine blades.

How do they get a hold of Sunrez?

Bret Tollgaard: Easiest place to go is the website, www. Sunrez. com. S U N R E Z. We’re generating it, we’re starting a YouTube channel so we can actually make some more how to videos and ease of use things. We are same thing on LinkedIn and Instagram where we’re starting it all.

Yeah, the website’s great. Contact us through there. Phone number’s on there as well. And that would be the best way to reach us.

Allen Hall: Brad, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Great material. We’ll see it again in 2025. Thanks so much for being on. I appreciate the time. Thank you.

Nicholas Gaudern, CTO at PowerCurve joins the show to discuss advanced blade upgrades that improve turbine performance and reduce noise. PowerCurve’s technology helps operators make smart decisions about maintenance and upgrades. Gaudern explains why combining repairs with performance enhancements is a cost-effective strategy that benefits both operations and community relations.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxon. Today, we’re diving deep into the world of wind turbine aerodynamics and blade optimization with one of the industry’s leading experts. Our guest is Nicholas Gaudern, the Chief Technology Officer at PowerCurve, a company that’s revolutionizing how we approach wind turbine performance through advanced Aerodynamic solutions.

Now, Nicholas has over 15 years of industry experience and his journey includes significant roles at industry giants like Vestas, where he led the design of next generation blades. And as CTO of PowerCurve, Nicholas and his team are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in wind turbine optimization.

They’ve developed innovative solutions like AeroVista, which helps operators make data driven decisions about blade maintenance and upgrades. Their work spans from custom designed vortex generators to trailing edge serrations, all aimed at increasing AEP while reducing turbine noise. So please welcome to the Uptown Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight, Nicholas Gaudern.

Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Yeah, good to see you as well, Joe.

Allen Hall: We have a lot going on in the United States in terms of rotors on the ground. Variety of reasons, but anytime that Joel and I are running through the Midwest, we see rotors down, and when I run into those people, I always ask, why are you not putting arrow improvements on your blade?

It is the lowest cost way to do it. There’s an opportunity there Nicholas?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, there, there really is, and I find it very surprising as well, because whilst you can put upgrades on at lots of different points in a turbine’s life cycle, if you do have that roach on the ground it just makes everyone’s lives that bit easier, and also it’s going to save you a lot of money on installation costs.

So yes, I think it’s a great thing to be considering because you can be working on different parts of the blade at the same time. And if you’re going to increase the AEP with those devices you put on, you can consider that as a way of paying for some of the other work you might be doing while the rotor’s down.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And we’ve run into many operators that have talked to us about noise of all things in the middle of the United States where there’s not a lot of neighbors to them. But neighbors are concerned about the noise produced by the turbines and in very windy places. Yeah. like Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, there is blade noise.

It’s there. And most of the equipment out in service does not have trailing edge serrations. And I’m beginning to wonder if that is trying to be, if there’s needs to be an adjustment made there that you may not technically need trailing edge serrations for noise quieting, but to be a good neighbor.

To everybody around you, you may want to consider it

Nicholas Gaudern: or especially if you have blades on the ground. I think we should see more serrations out on the blades because as you say maybe it’s not about a regulatory thing Maybe the turbine is producing a an acceptable noise level to the letter of the law in that place But it is about being proactive and being a good neighbor and I think now Serrations have been out there from lots of different OEMs, lots of different turbines.

To me, they’re a proven technology. Serrations work to reduce noise. And now the actual magnitude of that noise reduction can vary from turbine to turbine and site to site. But you should easily be looking at getting one and a half to two decibels of peak noise reduction if you’re applying serrations.

Joel Saxum: I would say almost all of the new turbines that we’re seeing, like Allen, you and I just took a trip last week, right?

And we were bombing through, we were up in Kansas, a little like right near Kansas. We went through Oklahoma and we actually ran into a two piece GE blade on the side of the highway. So we stopped to take some pictures of, cause of course that’s who we are. And that, that blade had serrations on it.

And almost every blade I see, or that you see going down the highway on a truck, it’s got serrations on it. So proven technology. People understand that it’s probably easier to do during a capex phase than applying these things on uptower. Now, Powercurve, from your guys, from your armchair, you’ve been putting dinotails on, we call them dinotails in the field, right?

Yep. Dinotail serrations. You’ve been putting these things on for years as a retrofit. You’ve also sold them in during the capex phase. And I’ve actually worked with you guys in the past, in my blade life during a repower which is, that’s the extreme version of what we’re talking about here.

When you drop a rotor, of course you drop a rotor, you’re going to drop a ton of them during the wind farm. Or you’re putting new blades up. It just makes sense to do it during those stages because Let alone the, what you’re doing for the neighbors, right? You’re keeping things quiet.

There’s also some efficiency increases with serrations too, isn’t there?

Nicholas Gaudern: Like with anything, there’s lots of ways to define efficiency. So with serrations, I think one of the big gains you can get is if you’re in a site where the turbine is curtailed. So if it’s having power reductions in order to reduce noise at certain times a day, often called noise modes.

And different OEMs will have different kinds of noise modes available. That can cost huge amounts of AEP. For every one decibel of noise reduction, you might be looking at a couple AEP loss, depending on the turbine and the specific noise mode. So you can imagine if you can apply serrations to a blade that are going to take a couple of decibels off, and that means you can escape a noise mode.

That can give you some massive gains in annual energy production. And yeah, as you say, Joe, we’ve been retrofitting serrations for a while now. We’ve done it on lots of different turbine models often models where the OEMs may not support that particular blade with a dedicated serration product.

And that’s where we can really help because we can design serrations for any Yeah,

Joel Saxum: I know working with you guys in the past on many projects there’s a really intense way of getting things done at Powercurve. It’s done the right way. So when you’re looking at whenever, if you ever watch a commercial and you see something cool like wind tunnels and race cars and stuff like that’s Nicholas’s daily life.

So is that you guys are out there getting 3d models of certain blades. You have a library of 3d models of blades, and that’s what you build your products off of, because it’s all about aerodynamics.

Nicholas Gaudern: It is. And it’s really important when you’re putting something on a blade that you know how it’s going to perform over the whole blade system.

So when you put a serration on its job is to reduce noise. But it’s job is also to not break the blade that you’re putting it on. It’s job is also to not fall off. So it’s very important when you design a serration that you tailor it to the blade you’re working with so that you’re not changing the loads in a bad way.

And it should also be designed to interact with that blade. So it’s a robust product over the lifetime of the turbine. So there are lots of different ways you can design serrations. Some people claim that serrations can directly increase AP. That’s not an untrue statement, but it’s quite a subtle statement because serrations Can act a bit like flaps on the back of a blade if you angle them relative to the flay.

And if you angle them, maybe you can get some more lift. And maybe you want more lift. But sometimes you may not want more lift. I’m very cautious of making blanket statements around serration as directly increasing AP. Because there’s some subtleties around how you do it and whether you are concerned about loads or not.

As a general rule, at Powercurve we design our serrations to be load neutral, i. e. they won’t increase or reduce power. Their job is to reduce noise. Now, if there’s scope to do other things, we can talk about it, but yeah, please think about serrations as a noise reduction tool. If you want to change lift of a blade, there are some smarter ways to do it that are a little bit less invasive.

Allen Hall: Because The serrations by the different manufacturers are not all the same. We obviously see them from the side of the road or if you’re out of sight. They just look like triangles on the back of a turbine blade. But they’re not all made the same. And some more recent news from PowerCurve is big noise reductions because of the specific design that PowerCurve has invested in.

Do you want to talk about that a little bit? What is special about your serrations versus the generic ones you typically see outside?

Nicholas Gaudern: I think what we found over the years and through doing a lot of wind tone testing as well, is that there’s a lot of very subtle features on the serration and a combination of different kinds of subtle features can give some quite significant changes to the noise reduction performance.

So you have to think about every aspect of a serration, not just the general shape of the tooth, and most serrations are saw teeth, as of some some definition. But what is the edge thickness? What is the chamfer of the thickness down to that edge? What’s your base plate thickness? How do you seal it relative to the blade?

All of these things matter when it comes to noise reduction. So I think We’ve tried to just pull together as many beneficial features as we can and then just be careful when we’re tailoring it to a blade. But what I will say is that if someone tells you that they truly understand how a serration works, they’re very probably lying.

The physics is incredibly difficult around noise reduction and noise generation on aerodynamic devices. And we understand it more than most, sure, but we can’t model it fully. We can’t run CFD models to accurately predict how noise is being generated and scatters and how we can manipulate it subtly.

There’s a lot of active research in the field, which is exciting. It means that there’s space to, to change and to innovate. But it also means that sometimes serrations don’t work if you’re not careful. Yeah, I think we, we take a very practical approach where we base it on a lot of wind tone testing with real components and then testing in the field.

So we’ve been on a lot of turbines now and we’ve measured up to three and a half decibels of noise reduction on some of our trials with our products.

Joel Saxum: How are you measuring that? What’s the mechanism for measuring decibels? Did you go, is it like go out a hundred meters, 200, 500 meters microphone?

How does that work? Okay.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah so like lots of things with wind turbine testing, there’s an IEC standard for noise testing, and that lays out different microphone positions, different amounts of data capture you have to achieve to satisfy that standard. Again, like other other standards, there are flaws in it, there’s uncertainties, but.

If you want to get a measurement that people are going to accept, then you would follow the IEC noise measurement guidelines, which is, yeah, positioning microphones different places, gathering data.

Allen Hall: Let’s talk about the fundamentals of serrations for a minute. I think people really understand how they work, what they are trying to accomplish in the first place.

On the back edge of a blade, you have high pressure and low pressure that are mixing very rapidly, and that causes a slapping effect, right? And then As the blade is moving downwards, not upwards, but downwards, a lot of that noise is projected forward. That’s where the vast majority of noise comes from on the downward blade.

It doesn’t seem obvious at the time. It’s like it on the upward side should be the one, but

Nicholas Gaudern: I think what you I mean, there are lots of noise sources on the turbine. And there’s also more than one aerodynamic noise source on a blade. I think most people accept that the dominant noise source, aerodynamic noise source in most blades is what we call trailing edge turbulent boundary layer noise.

So that’s just that turbulent boundary layer interacting with a blunt edge being scattered out into the atmosphere. And that’s what we’re hearing as noise, but there are other noise sources as well, but they don’t seem to be as important from the experimental work that’s been carried out over the years.

So yeah, with a serration, you’re trying to, you’re trying to modify that scattering mechanism effectively. Your flow is traveling over the blade surface. Boundary layers developing interacts with the trailing edge. So boundary layer health and boundary layer development are really important to noise, but serration doesn’t change that.

The serration is dealing with what happens when it gets to the trailing edge. But that’s where things like vortex generators can come in. Because if you have a boundary layer that is not healthy, not happy, it’s starting to separate off the back of the trailing edge. The noise is going to increase dramatically.

So we will always look at whether there’s benefit in combining things like VGs. With serrations to get a even better noise reduction effect.

Allen Hall: Because a serration design and installation depends upon what the airflow is across the surface of the blade, because you’re mixing high pressure and low pressure on that trailing edge.

So the way those serrations are designed are meant to handle a specific set of airflow. I’ll call it. And if that airflow deviates quite a bit as we see blaze age and become full of leading edge erosion, your serrations on the back end are not doing what they should do because the airflow is just completely different.

No they can’t deal

Nicholas Gaudern: with

Allen Hall: it. And that’s where the vortex generators come in because they’re controlling the airflow that goes over the serrations. You want to talk about how those two work together where if serrations and actually vortex generators are a package, That they work together to control the airflow.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And I think the point you just made about leading edge erosion is a really important one because. Leading edge erosion harms the boundary layer health. It harms the quality of the flow over the aerofoil surface. It means more turbulent flow, typically leads to more drag, more noise, lower AEP. And if you apply vortex generators, what you’re aiming to do is to re energize the boundary layer, re energize that flow over the blade to make sure that it remains fully attached.

And ideally that you don’t have such a thick boundary layer by the time it hits the trailing edge. So basically VGs are working on the source of the problem, if you will, the boundary layer health and serrations are working on the other part of the problem, which is what happens when we’re trying to scatter that.

Noise out into the atmosphere. So the nice thing about them is they do some together. So they’re working on different parts of the problem. VG is upstream, serration is downstream.

Allen Hall: They work in tandem. A lot of operators, when they have leading edge erosion, they’ll say the blades are a lot noisier than they used to be.

Of course, there’s a lot more turbulence coming off the leading edge. The question is what you should do about it. And are there things that can control it? The simple way, the way that I think it should be done is when the blades are on the gun, you put VGs and serrations on as a match set, and then when the leading edge erosion happens, and it inevitably will, it doesn’t impact the noise so much.

Obviously, going ahead and fixing the leading edge is a way to do it, but you can’t do that every year.

Nicholas Gaudern: No, you can’t. And, fixing the leading edge you have to think about leading edge. Degradation in two different ways. A positive, not as in good, but a positive is in building up material and a negative is in removing material.

So erosion removes material. Dirt, bugs, algae, frost, whatever, that accumulates material. But both are bad aerodynamically and even if you’ve got the best leading edge protection in the world. It probably can’t do much about the contamination side, the accumulation side, only the degradation side.

Allen Hall: At PowerCurve, you’re not just providing generic parts for a generic turbine blade, serrations, vortex generators.

You actually have CFD analysis, a lot of wind tunnel experience that goes along with that. The new product, which is AeroVista, is there to help with those design elements. And I think it’s a really fascinating approach. I don’t know if everybody’s seen this, but you can just put an AeroVista power curve into Google and you’ll get to the right page.

Now AeroVista is actually looking at your specific blade, your specific kind of leading edge your very specific kind of damage to then predict what Power you’re losing, how much, also generally how much noise it’s making, so that you can put the right set of vortex generators, the right kind of serrations on your blade.

Do you want to explain how that process works?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. So AeroVista is something that has been out there for for a year or so now, and the whole idea is that we take existing drone inspection data for blades that tells us very clearly where all the damages are on the blade. And we combine that with a very.

High fidelity aerodynamic model of that specific blade type. So if we bring those two things together, what it allows us to do is to calculate the expected ammunial energy production loss due to all the blade degradations, the blade damages. So whenever you have anything on a blade that means it doesn’t look like it did when it was new, it will reduce AEP, whether that be a crack, erosion, dirt bugs, whatever.

And each of those damages will have a unique aerodynamic signature as to how much it will change the lift and the drag of that specific slice of the blade. So what we’ve been working on is a method that will calculate that loss for every different kind of damage along a blade surface. And we build the models by actually taking the real blade geometry.

So we’ll go out into the field, we’ll carry out a laser scan of a blade, And that allows us to get the kind of as built shape of a wind turbine blade. And every blade model is different. So even if it’s a hundred meter rotor, if it’s from Vestas or Siemens, aerofoils will be different and the whole plan form will be different.

And that means it will react differently to erosion. So it’s simply not good enough to say, Oh, this hundred meter rotor is damaged like this. Therefore the AP loss is this. You have to actually look at the aerodynamics of that specific blade. So Avista is an automated tool. It will link to databases such as those you might find from drone inspector, Nerf labs, sky Spec Robotics, these different companies.

And it will take all of their tagging data. It’ll combine it with the aerodynamic model we’ve made, and then it will calculate the a EP loss based on all the damages that have been identified. The idea being that you can then prioritize where to spend your money as an operator. We speak to so many operators where they have a budget and they’ll use that budget through the year, but they didn’t necessarily know how to make the most of that money.

And if you’ve got a hundred turbines on the site, you can only fix 20. Which 20 do you fix? If structurally they look much of a muchness. Erevist will tell you where to target the money to recover the most energy by either repairing or refurbishing the blades or by installing upgrades, things like VGs.

Allen Hall: So the process for a customer sort of looks like this. I have existing SkySpecs images. I send them to PowerCurve. PowerCurve analyzes them and says this is the right configuration, vortex generators, trailing insurations for your turbine. Oh, that all makes sense to me and also helps me identify what turbines to go after for the most power production.

That all makes sense to me. So what does the process look like of installing VGs and trailing insurations? What is involved

Nicholas Gaudern: there?

Allen Hall: The

Nicholas Gaudern: process is pretty straightforward, really. You have to Measure up the blade. You have to mark up the blade with with the positions that we specify in in the manual that we’ll give you.

You then have to prep the blade surface. Pretty basically, a bit of sandpaper to get rid of any contamination and just key the surface mechanically a little bit. Wipe it off with standard blade surface cleaner, something isopropanol based. And then we specify a Methacrylate to component adhesive to attach our products to the blade.

So it’s a wet adhesive. And the reason we spec the wet adhesive is that means they’re not coming off.

Joel Saxum: It’s the good stuff. The good stuff.

Nicholas Gaudern: It’s the good stuff. Exactly. And it’s really important that they can stay there for the entire lifetime of the blade. Now, I’m not saying that some tape solutions can’t be good as well, but we have seen a lot of components that have come off when they’ve only been taped on.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s something that Allen and I talk about with blade repair, blade, operators and stuff all the time, especially like strike tape, same thing, right? When you put a blade add on, it’s only as good as its installation. You can do all of the wind tunnel testing you want and all of this high fidelity, everything.

But if it’s not installed right, it’s no good. So that I’ve seen your guys manuals and putting them into the field. It easy. It’s easy for technicians to do. And the fact that you’re specking the exact consumables, that works fantastic. I love it.

Nicholas Gaudern: And we work with the technicians themselves. We’re not in the business of just handing over A cardboard box and a piece of paper.

We need to go and work with the technicians directly. We need to talk to them. We need to walk through the manual, show them videos, share them photos. And we’ll often be live on call when those technicians are on site. So if they have an issue. They can, WhatsApp us, they can call us, show us what’s happening and we can help.

Joel Saxum: I absolutely love that approach. It’s the same thing that Allen and I do. And I know from my experience with PowerCurve on projects, one of the things that you guys do as well is send us the installation reports the day that they’re done so we can do some QA, QC and make sure that the team’s got it right.

So that way, as we move forward, we’re not, there’s no, no issues.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. We just, there’s always a learning curve, right? No one can do something perfect. Straight off the bat. So it’s about making sure we, we learn and get the process down as quickly as possible. And we find typically that the techs we’ve worked with can get these devices on very efficiently.

And once they’ve done one or two turbines, they’re off and running and they can work through a site very efficiently.

Allen Hall: And there’s so much happening in the aspect of aerodynamics on blades and aftermarket upgrades on blades. It’s amazing. And PowerCurve is leading that charge. If you want to check out PowerCurve’s offerings, just go to powercurve.

dk and you can, all the cool things are on their website. If you want to get a hold of Nicholas, you can find him on LinkedIn, just Nicholas Gaudern, PowerCurve, and he’ll pop right up and connect with them. Because if you need help with your turbines and producing more power. Nicholas is your guy to reach out to.

So Nicholas, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Appreciate all the time you spend with us teaching us about aerodynamics. It’s wonderful.

Nicholas Gaudern: Thank you. Yeah. Great talking again. Nice to be back.

We discuss a rope management tool for wind turbine maintenance, TotalEnergies’ floating offshore wind anchor idea, and a stress relief device.

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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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This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here’s your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro.

Allen Hall: Well, Phil, our first patent of the week is a clever, portable device for managing industrial ropes used in wind turbine maintenance. Now, the key to this innovation is a rope driver system that combines mechanical and electrical components to safely control wind energy.

Heavy duty ropes, and we know those can be kind of a pain to deal with. This device features a rope storage container with a hardened lower portion and a flexible top portion, along with a motorized driver mechanism that can both lift and lower ropes. And I’ll think of it as a sophisticated wind system that not only moves the rope, but stores it properly, too.

Seems like a lot of good uses for this idea, Phil.

Phil Totaro: And when you consider that regardless of remote inspection technology, we still do end up dangling a lot of service techs off ropes in, in this industry. So, this is actually something that comes from seemingly independent inventors with no corporate affiliation.

And it’s, there’s a lot of patents like that that are usually just kind of crackpot things that, Is something that’s never going to be adopted by the industry. This is something I hope they can find a way to commercialize or, find somebody that is interested in licensing this or acquiring the, the patent because this is actually Besides being kind of a clever and unique idea, I think this would actually come in handy in a lot of sites, because if you have multiple techs working on a blade repair up tower you can get techs.

Crossed ropes, and it creates a safety issue. So having proper storage really does come in handy and, and enhances safety of, of uptower workers.

Allen Hall: Our next idea comes from TotalEnergies, One Tech. And it is a patent that tackles one of the biggest challenges in offshore wind, how to securely Anchor wind turbines to the seabed.

Now, the invention introduces an innovative monopile foundation design that’s specifically engineered for offshore wind turbines. And the key feature is a specialized lower end structure with inner and outer tubes connected by Wing plates, they create compartments, think of it as a hybrid between a traditional monopile and a suction bucket foundation.

Now, what makes this design special is how it handles both the vertical and horizontal forces from the turbine. And Phil, we all know trying to attach the C4 is really complicated and Totaro Energies has been out in the forefront of this for a number of years. This patent is just one of those ideas from Totaro.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, and, and, like we’ve been talking about on PowerUp over the past few weeks, the reason I wanted to, to key in on this one today was, besides being this clever combination of kind of a, as you said, either a suction bucket or a jacket type approach and a monopile which, again, you would, you would not necessarily use this everywhere, but this is something that would come in for potentially sites in France where they’re looking to deploy and other project sites around the world where Totaro is involved where you might have specific, site specific soil conditions that necessitate some kind of structural reinforcement like this. Total’s never going to go have, somebody build this for them specifically, they might contract manufacture these types of things, but in doing so they’re leveraging IP that they’ve captured and that they own and control to the benefit of being able to, potentially get a discount on these, these foundations.

Because the offset, the royalty that they receive. For licensing, the design IP offsets some of the costs that they would otherwise pay for, purchasing these, these fabricated units. So this is a really clever strategy on the part of Totaro to capture IP on this, and it’s going to be a theme.

We talk about. Over the coming weeks as well on, on PowerUp, because they’re, Total’s not the only, kind of, development company or owner operator that, that’s getting into this area.

Allen Hall: Our fun patent of the week comes from a couple, looks like maybe a married couple, and it is a patent that describes a personal sound muffler device that let users Vent their frustrations without disturbing others, and the device is essentially a foam lined muffler that fits over the mouth and includes integrated electronics to measure just how loud you are yelling.

And the first thing I think about here, Phil, is Seinfeld in the Serenity Now episode. Where they say, you’re not supposed to scream that, and this is a device which is supposed to limit the amount of noise coming out if you’re really upset, I guess,

Phil Totaro: and just scream into this tube. I mean, I, we’ve had some really goofy things on PowerUp since we started doing this, and this, this has to be on the, the end of the spectrum that I find rather absurd.

The, the sides, just the, the practical application of it. It’s just, I mean, I’m sure it’s one of these things, like if they, if they ever like really designed this and put it into like the, sharper image or a hammock or Schlemmer catalog, somebody might buy that sort of thing. But this is never really gonna.

I don’t know. I think if people need to yell, then maybe just go outside or something. I mean, save yourself the 180 that I’m sure they would try to charge you for a device like this.

Allen Hall: Yeah, as your favorite NFL team loses in the playoffs, I could see a lot of these devices being used, actually.

Phil Totaro: Well, maybe, yeah.

I mean, maybe that’s, that’s what it is. Or, it, it could also be like if you’re, if you’re at work in your office or something and, you, you get a little upset, maybe you just go shout into this thing and nobody, nobody is, is any the wiser.

Allen Hall: Well, Phil, you have seen those little quiet cubes at work centers.

Some of them have been turned into screen rooms. Or they actually can go in and scream and yell. So this device, although this device is a much simpler device, it’s been expanded now into room size instead of just mouth size.

There were 500 attacks on undersea energy in Europe in 2024–what does that mean for offshore wind? SunTrain may be powering Denver in the near future. And the latest workplace trend, “Coffee Badging”, may not be the best plan for new employees.

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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: Coffee badging hits the workplace, NATO addresses offshore wind security, and a wild proposal to move solar power by train. Plus, NextEra’s massive Montana wind project powers up.

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: Hey, Uptime Community. We want to help to shape the future of your favorite wind energy podcast. I need you to take our quick five minute survey at uptimewindenergy.

com for a chance to win an exclusive Uptime mug. Now your insights matter to us, whether you’re a longtime listener or have just joined us. So please go to uptimewindenergy. com and complete the survey. And our friends at Wind Energy O& M Australia. are busy at the moment because everybody’s registering.

Now you don’t want to miss this event. It’s on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne, and you’re going to get hands on with solutions, including leading edge erosion, lightning protection advances, life extensions, CMS. Gearbox. Anything you want to know about turbines, we’re going to be talking about it in Melbourne.

And you’re going to be able to connect with a bunch of experts from Maroon, SkySpecs, Tilt Renewables, GE Vernova, RigCom, Whirly, Elogix Ping, and many, many more. So you need to reserve your spot now by visiting windaustralia. com Phil, is there any highlights on, on windaustralia.

Phil Totaro: com? Allen, you’re right. We have a total of 32, uh, or participants and speakers from a total of 32 different companies at this point, registrations today, uh, that I haven’t even checked in yet.

So, it’s, uh, you know, tickets are going like hotcakes at this point, and we are actually capacity limited at this facility, so get yours today, uh, if you want to be part of this event.

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Allen Hall: There’s a new workplace trend called coffee badging and companies are pushing for return to office and employees are doing what this new thing is called coffee badging, and what that means is that you walk into the office, check in, get yourself a cup of coffee. You hang out, chit chat. And then you go back home.

And employers obviously know about this, but they’re not really doing too much about it at the minute. It does meet minimum office requirements. So a lot of large companies say that counts as being in the office. But the demographics for this are really interesting, Joel. Uh, if you look at who is actually doing the coffee badging, mostly men, like 60, 40 men to women are doing this practice and it also is related to age.

Uh, it looks like Gen X and Gen Z are the ones who are most active in this coffee badging scenario. And to me, this is a little weird because it’s got to be the most expensive cup of coffee you can get, right?

Joel Saxum: So a big thing here that’s not being taken into consideration in any of these conversations. We talked a little bit about this return to work last week.

Is the cost of it, right? So in this article, we’re talking about, you know, a hybrid worker, they’re spending an average of 50, 50 or so a day to commute into the office. So, I mean, that, that adds up, right? 400, 500 a month for a hybrid worker, or even a thousand dollars for someone full time. And, and it’s something that I, it was taken into, taken into consideration, you know, or not taken into consideration before when we never, not that many people were working remotely.

But now when people are starting to go back and then see that cost, that’s a lot of money. I mean, for a lot of people, that’s a big percentage of salary. So I think I align right with you, Allen, saying this is a really, really expensive cup of coffee. Cause if it’s going to be 50 to go in and out, that’s.

Plus your coffee. That’s 50 bucks for your coffee.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, you say Australian coffee is really good. So it’s probably worth going into the office for, is this a trend in Australia too?

Rosemary Barnes: Um, I don’t know. I work for myself primarily. I do have an office, um, for the startup that I work for and I go in there.

Once a week or so. They’ve got terrible coffee in, in there. Um, yeah, but I mean, I actually, I think maybe I’m, although you said, right, that this is a gen X and Z thing, missing out millennials in the middle, gen Y.

Allen Hall: Millennials are also highly involved in this.

Rosemary Barnes: Okay. Cause I’m a millennial and, um, I actually miss the office quite a lot because, uh, I don’t know.

I, um, I think when you’re trying to work. Creatively, like, you know, to me, engineering is a creative, creative discipline, which, you know, a lot of people might be surprised to learn. But, um, I really gained a lot from, um, coffee, chit chat, and talking in the canteen when I used to work in Denmark, there was a canteen and everyone had lunch together every day away from the computer.

And, um, yeah, like you learn about what else is going on in the company. You learn about, you know, Oh, Hey, this guy worked on something similar 15 years ago, and you would never have known except for that you ran into him and, Um, he overheard you talking about something that he knew about and Yeah. So I, I kind of actually think that all that is incredibly valuable.

Allen Hall: Was this similar to the mouse moving devices that have become popular? I’ve got hit with a lot of ads over the Christmas holidays for mouse movers. And I thought, really, is this something? But evidently a large number of people that work from home have. Little mouse movers just look like they’re active at the desk.

Rosemary Barnes: Aren’t managers tracking the output? Like a mouse mover, like are there really managers who are like, it’s super important that you’re moving your mouse eight hours every day and they don’t actually care if you get any work done or not. I just find this so. Crazy that anybody manages like

Phil Totaro: that. On my end, I mean, I said this last week already, like, but we’re, you know, my company is, you know, half consultancy, half, you know, software as a service, uh, kind of development platform.

And we have the ability for, for myself and all the contract employees to work wherever everybody wants to. Um, so at the end of the day, people are, you Engaged in a job, especially like a back office, you know, white collar, typically, uh, type of job, like, you don’t have to actually be in the office. I agree with Rosie that you do lose a lot when you’re not there, and it’s maybe important for a younger generation to do it, but I’m not surprised that people, I am Gen X, I’m not surprised people in my generation and, and above are You know, doing this because it just, there’s a point at which being in the office is more consuming than the ability that you have when working remotely to increase your productivity.

Um, because you’re not always being bothered by somebody that wants, you know, an answer for, for two minutes of your time or this, that, whatever. Um, so it’s, it’s, there needs to be a balance though. And at the end of the day, like I said last week, you know, people. need to get their job done or they get fired one way or the other.

So mouse movers and all this other coffee badging, I mean, whatever. Like, as long as you get your job done and you’re helping the company achieve the goals and objectives that are important here, then whatever it takes.

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Allen Hall: A new clean energy transportation concept called Trains Mission is being proposed in Colorado with SunTrain launching a demonstration project between Pueblo and Denver. The project aims to use rail cars equipped with iron phosphate batteries to transport renewable energy from solar farms to urban areas.

SunTrain, along with the Colorado Governor, Xcel Energy, and Clean Energy Advocates, are seeking 10 million in a federal grant to begin operations by 2026. Now, the SunTrain plans to demonstrate this transportation system using train cars with these big batteries, essentially. They’re going to have 20 of these train cars, and it’s going to move about 100 miles between Pueblo and Denver.

So it’s going to charge them in Pueblo, Move them up using a diesel train to Colorado and discharge them and keep going back and forth. And evidently there is some economics to do this.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s not even an electric train.

Allen Hall: No, it’s not an electric train. I

Rosemary Barnes: guess if they had electrified railway, they could just use that to transmit the electricity instead.

Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re talking about making an electric train as they move along through this process, but it is odd, Rosemary, that you can’t get power from Pueblo to Denver efficiently. And, and the, one of the ways you would do it is basically charge up a bunch of batteries and drag them up to the destination.

That makes no sense. And maybe you’re right. Maybe we do electrify the train rails. Maybe that’s an easier way to do this. It’s, it’s a little crazy, but where have we gotten to in transmission if this project makes sense?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you’ve worked on the front range of Colorado before doing any kind of development project, you know that there’s a lot of political problems there.

Whether, because there’s a division, there’s, when you’re down in Pueblo, you get to the edge of where you’re in ranching territory and then you get across that and you get towards Colorado Springs and it becomes a lot more Denver City. There’s a big blue red divide there, so you’re fighting political problems the whole way.

While you try to push this, you know, what would be essentially a transmission line there. And so if it’s gotten to that point, that means that the permitting is either, or the permitting is too tough. It’s too expensive to build, which that actually would be kind of an expense. The real estate, once you start getting close to Denver is expensive.

And then you’re also punching through some foothills and through some mountains and some other difficult terrain, some federal land, some forest reserves and some other things that are difficult. I think going back to where are we at, we’re in a bad spot. I mean, because of whatever hurdle it was or whatever, the economic sense, it makes sense.

And if you’re looking for 10 million dollars to do this project, it must be costing a lot more than 10 million to build that uh, transmission line.

Rosemary Barnes: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of there’s, um, you know, gravity energy storage, like energy vault, where they lift blocks uphill and then drag it down.

Um, there’s actually a version of that concept that involves rail. It’s called advanced rail energy storage. And they do use railways to drag blocks up a hill and then, um, drag them down again. And, you know, it’s I’ve got to say that makes a whole lot more sense than charging an electric, um, yeah, battery, uh, and then physically transporting it to discharge and then take it back again.

It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s very strange.

Phil Totaro: I mean, that’s, Rosie, what you’re describing is a mechanical equivalent to pumped storage, and we have a ton of that around the world, especially in Scandinavian countries, where, you know, they’ve got a lot of fjords and whatnot, so, you know, it’s, uh, this, however, like, putting, like, solar power into batteries on a train and then dragging the train up with diesel to, it just doesn’t compute.

And at the end of the day, I mean, no matter how expensive the transmission is, the electrons are used by everybody. Uh, you know, so the, the various forms of power generation that we can have, you know, everybody’s going to be able to benefit from that. So this is one of those, maybe eminent domain has to come into play here and they just need to get the job done.

This, I mean, look, this is one of these things we talk about on the show quite a bit, like sounds viable technologically doesn’t really sound viable commercially. I’m sure that they can get 10 million in grant money or whatever seed money from the government or somebody else to go build one of these pilot projects, but I don’t really see this happening.

I think this is a specific solution for a problem. Different problem than what we really have. Yeah, they have a transmission problem, but that’s the problem we need to solve, not doing it this way.

Rosemary Barnes: Do you think that maybe it’s, um, a higher level play that really the point of this project is to say, come on guys, like, can we really not get transmission done?

This is what we’re looking at. If we can’t just build the damn transmission line, let’s just get our act together and then maybe it will focus people’s attention to say, uh, yeah, okay, you know what? This is getting ridiculous. Let’s put some new transmission in.

Joel Saxum: I don’t understand that like the there’s a technical part of this too, though, that we’re not, it’s not laid out here and I’m sure this has been thought of, but how long does it take to charge and discharge?

They’re looking at the first thing is 20, 20 cars that can power 20 or a thousand homes for a full day. So, and now they’re going to want to expand it to a hundred train cars at the end of the How fast can you charge and discharge those?

Phil Totaro: I mean, they can, Joel, they can charge fairly fast. You can, uh, uh, 20 megawatt hour battery or so can charge in, like, Two hours, I think, if it’s, you know, if you’re doing it the right way, and you don’t blow it up.

But the, the reality is, I don’t know why they would do this with solar power, because if you’re trying to, like, it would make more sense to do it with wind, because wind blows at night, especially in the wintertime. You know, you charge up the batteries at night, you drag them up in the morning, and then you’ve got power during the peak time of the day.

Like, what are you doing Hmm Charging. I mean, I guess if you’re doing it with solar, you’re charging between basically 10 AM when the sun’s actually up and then, you know, maybe 2 PM.

Rosemary Barnes: I guess it’s a bit more predictable. Like you could get on a regular schedule with solar power, whereas you couldn’t with wind, but how, what’s the distance, Allen, that you said that they want to do this a hundred miles or something?

Allen Hall: It’s about a hundred miles. Yeah. It’s about a hundred miles.

Rosemary Barnes: So, I mean, is a solar resource. It’s actually different between those two locations. Why not just put the solar panels where you want to use the solar energy and have stationary batteries? I, um.

Joel Saxum: The price of land. The price of land around Denver is extreme.

Rosemary Barnes: Well, put them on roofs. Well, you know, you guys can learn how to do it when you come to Australia. You can get some tips on, on how to put solar panels on roofs. It’s um, it’s cheaper for us to put them on roofs than land. Not for you, I know, but.

Joel Saxum: This is I 25. Like, this is a I’ve driven this many times. This is a main highway.

I can’t understand why they why this is even a thought process. Why I can’t just hook into the existing grid. Clearly there must be an issue with it, but it doesn’t seem like there should be. These are two, like, Pueblo’s a big city and Denver’s a hundred miles away. They should be connected with sufficient capacity, throughput capacity.

Allen Hall: I would think, but apparently not. Just as an aside, I did look up what one train car of coal would generate in terms of gigawatt hours. It’s about 0. 8. So it’s about 800 megawatt hours per train. Car of coal. So if they’re in theory, if you get the energy density way up, then it may make sense to push batteries around.

Phil Totaro: Well, I don’t know that pushing batteries around, if we got the energy density of storage way up, then that would actually unlock a lot more. You know, ancillary services and other commercially viable things that we could do with longer duration storage that would probably resolve a lot of these issues in the first place, and then you wouldn’t need to be dragging batteries around by train, you know, especially a diesel train.

Like, this just, this is one of these, like, I don’t think it makes sense. We should, we should introduce a thing on the show, like, you know, uh, I don’t know, like, yay, yay or nay, and it’s just, I, I vote nay on this one.

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Allen Hall: A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about underwater cables and some sabotage that happened, uh, up around Finland and Germany.

And that led to a kind of a larger discussion between us of what is happening out there and how much cable damage is there. Actually, there’s a lot more than I thought there was. Now, NATO has held a meeting and is trying to understand some of the risks here and put some frameworks in, and it’s reinforced its commitment to protecting Europe’s critical undersea energy infrastructure at its annual roundtable in Brussels.

Now, this recent meeting addressed growing concerns about the physical and cyber threats to offshore wind farms and undersea cables. particularly in the Baltic and the Arctic Seas, uh, Wind Europe CEO, Giles Dixon, joined the discussion to highlight the importance of protecting both, uh, physical assets and data security around wind energy infrastructure.

Now, some of the numbers here are quite disturbing. NATO has documented 500 suspicious incidents in Europe. in 2024 with approximately 100 tribute attributed to Russian hybrid attacks, espionage and influence operations. And with modern wind turbine, modern wind turbines utilizing several hundred sensors at times.

Uh, there’s a lot of ways to sneak into a wind turbine and to get past some of the security systems. So this is a pretty large threat, everybody. If you’re having 500 Documented threats a year. I’m not sure the infrastructure is hardened enough to handle all that. Joel, being our underwater expert, what is the likely outcome of this?

Are we going to see more hardening of underwater cables in particularly around wind turbines?

Joel Saxum: I think you definitely will in the upcoming future. As we build out more and more things and we’ve started to see this as a higher risk, of course. Insurance companies are going to demand it. Financial companies are going to demand it.

And it’s not that hard to do, right? It’s just expensive. So you lay a cable on the bottom of the ocean. What people don’t realize is, and you can Google this just like, Hey, map of cables in the ocean. You will be wildly surprised of what the world’s oceans look like up a spaghetti bowl of cables and pipelines, because they’re everywhere.

Uh, you just think about how, you know, how. How quickly we can communicate. We’re talking with Rosemary right now down in Australia. Australia’s an island, right? There’s cables, redundancy and redundancy and bandwidth all over the place to connect everybody. So you’re not going to see, maybe on some high value things, uh, a, you know, retrofit campaigns to, to, like you say, Allen Harden, these assets to put some, you know, some concrete mattresses or something, or some rock dumps on them to protect them.

I don’t think you’ll see that, but I believe going forward. I think the recent, you know, global actions will demand it. You’re going to have to say, put, you know, put a rock dump on top of this thing, or, or put some, um, you know, preformed concrete blocks or bollards on top of these cables to protect them.

Allen Hall: So does this then change the way we start designing wind turbines? Siemens, Kamesa and Vestas are going to be the two offshore wind turbines providers. And all the companies that are involved with this, are they changing designs as we speak? Is NATO talking to them and saying, look, we need to harden these turbines way beyond what they are right now, if they plan to stay out in the water for 20, 30 years?

Because I guarantee you the opposition is trying to develop ways to Take down these turbines, plus other data lines, everything else. And they have to be working this and they’re using very crude methods at the moment, basically dragging anchors. But that ain’t, that’s going to end pretty quickly. They’re going to come to more advanced techniques, you’d think over the next year or two.

I think they’re, they’re from,

Joel Saxum: from a cyber security standpoint, the turbines are designed fairly robustly. There is cybersecurity insurance out there. That’s becoming a new product as well. I’ve, I’ve seen on the market. But from that standpoint, we do pretty well. Idaho National Labs and our friends over at Everpoint, Everpoint Resources in a little Pringle wind farm.

They’ve been doing a lot of testing there. Um, and if you have something that you want to test, you can get ahold of them and they’ll help you out. But I think it’s more what we’re worried about now is the more agricultural kind of physical things, right? Running into a turbine or dragging a cable. Um, those are the design, uh, and construction things that are going to change less than the The actual electronics part of it, I think.

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Joel Saxum: So the Wind Farm of the Week this week is the Clear Water Energy Project, uh, by NextEra and Portland General Electric, uh, which is up in Montana, northwest of Miles City. Uh, it’s three phases. began commercial operation in December of 23. So it’s just a year old.

Uh, the interesting thing about this is, uh, and Rosemary, we talk about it regularly on the podcast about the differences between, um, wind resources in certain areas of the country. They’re taking wind energy, which is across the Rockies, From Eastern Montana, from this wind farm. And they’re bringing it, PGE is bringing it to their customers in Oregon.

So they’re pushing, putting, uh, enough power in through, from this wind farm to power 830, 000 homes over in Oregon. Uh, that’s a hundred million LED light bulbs or 83 percent of a time traveling DeLorean. Yes. So the Clearwater Energy Project, which is, um, up, up over 200 turbines, Uh, 243 to be exact, GE2X machines, uh, you are our wind farm

Allen Hall: of the week.

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 show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our Substack weekly newsletter. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

This week in business news, Allete is going private in a $6.2B deal, Aeris suffers from financial struggles, and Vestas secures 6, 000 MW in new orders during Q4.

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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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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.intelstor.com.

Allen Hall: First up, the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has given its approval for a 6. 2 billion acquisition of Allete. The buyers are the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and Global Infrastructure Partners. The company brings significant renewable assets to the table, including Minnesota Power and Allete Clean Energy, which operates over 1, 300 megawatts of wind capacity across seven states.

Now, Phil, this has been going on for several months now, but it looks like it’s finally climbed that last rung in that ladder to become a private company again.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, which I think is interesting and important given who the investors are. Keep in mind that GIP just got gobbled up by BlackRock. And the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board has been making, you know, boatloads of investments around the world.

Not only in Canada. Companies like this, but also individual assets where they are a usually minority but co owner so this is giving them the diversity, it’s giving BlackRock and, you know, through GIP you know, more assets in their portfolio, which they, you know, they’re obviously making a concerted effort and it’s, it’s part of their strategy to you know, to build up that, that pipeline.

So this is, I believe You know, a total of 1. 3 gigawatts of operational wind with substantially more in, in the pipeline. So, you know, it’s a great thing to, to see this happen and, and usually in a take, in a go private deal The reason you want to do that is to kind of sort out some of the financials and, and there’s an opportunity that they could, you know, re IPO Allete at some point.

I like the move because

Joel Saxum: Allete is a, you know, they’re not a huge wind operator, but Clean energy, but I know that they’ve got ambitions to do some more development. So we are bringing in fresh capital. Also Allete’s headquarters in Minnesota power is up in Duluth, Minnesota, which is a small town of about 80, people.

And this will bring some hope, hopefully bring some jobs in up there and a little bit of an expansion.

Allen Hall: Down in South America, Brazilian wind blade manufacturer Aeris has approached its creditors seeking a 60 day extension on upcoming interest payments.

The company’s financial strain stems from a slowdown in new wind turbine contracts. Leading to mounting pressure on its balance sheet. Now, current financials show a concerning picture with net debt reaching about 550 million reales and a debt to EBITDA ratio of 3. 2. Joel, Sonoma has made acquisition efforts towards Aeris for the last couple of years.

Do those offers become more serious on Aeris part as they run into some financial difficulty?

Joel Saxum: I think Aeris as a company has to turn to Sonoma as a more and more possible outlet. It just reminds me of a game of Monopoly I played at one point in time where I was trying to buy some houses and every time I came around to the houses that I wanted, The person who was holding them, they got a little bit more expensive.

And the game of Monopoly didn’t end as well as I wanted it to. But at this point in time, Iris uh, more than likely, I mean, this is, this is public knowledge approaching creditors for the 60 day extension there. That just signifies pain, right? And when pain is there, and the the Pain reliever is knocking on your door, sometimes you answer.

Phil Totaro: And, and just keep in mind what’s going on in the Brazilian market at this point and, and potentially why they’re, they’re in this situation. You know, they had orders with a number of different manufacturers, and those manufacturers have pulled back or pulled out of the market entirely. And the order book that they’ve got in Brazil is robust, but a lot of it’s very far in the future.

So it’s, it’s making for a bit of a short term challenging situation for them. And there are potentially several outlets they can avail themselves of to you know, to get back to a strong financial picture. And, and the Brazilian market, frankly, really needs to get back to, uh, you know, to doing more auctions and, and tenders for you know, additional power offtake.

And, and really start. Getting back on the horse.

Allen Hall: Vestas has secured over 6, 000 megawatts in new orders during the fourth quarter of 2024, spanning multiple continents. Now the U. S. is a big landing spot for a number of Vestas turbines and Europe also. So Vestas is spreading its wings a little bit. 1000 megawatts is a pretty substantial total.

It’s not the highest they’ve ever had in a particular quarter, but it is a strong quarter for Vestas, right, Phil?

Phil Totaro: Yeah, and it totals out to with the addition of all their offshore sales or order book that they took in 2024 to about 16 gigawatts. For the whole year, so it’s a, it’s a pretty, you know, decent, you know, slate of orders where, you know, in the U.

S. in particular, they, they’ve got a bunch of new orders for the V163 4. 5 which really seems like that’s starting to take off. We’ve calculated they’ve got about 2. 8 gigawatts worth of order book now for that turbine globally. With a bunch more that we’re expecting to be announced here in, in 2025.

So, you know, they’re, they’re doing pretty well with a brand new product platform and certainly their, their offshore orders as well for the V236.

Joel Saxum: Something to keep in mind with Vesta is when you see these new order numbers coming out from them, one of their strategic standpoints, they’re going to is to offer service packages with these turbines.

So depending on geography and where they’re at, some of these come with a 25 year FSA. So that is a lot more booked revenue for the future for them. That being said, since the new year, their stock is up about 6%. That looks good on Vestas.

From the surge in lightning strikes damaging wind turbines to the game-changing potential of nacelle-based LiDAR systems, Lars Bendsen of AC883 shares insights on wind farm maintenance. Lars describes how LiDAR installations can boost power output by 3.5%, and warns how ignoring simple pitch alignment issues leads to catastrophic turbine failures. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.com Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Lars Bendsen: 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. Today, we're diving into the costly challenges plaguing wind farms with Lars Bendsen from AC883. From a surge in severe lightning strikes to devastating turbine misalignments, Lars reveals why seemingly minor issues can lead to catastrophic failures, and how cutting edge solutions like nacelle based lidars are transforming maintenance strategies. Plus, discover why Lars believes too many industry tourists are making decisions that cost operators millions in unnecessary repairs. So get ready for a no holds bar discussion about what's really happening in wind farm maintenance. Lars, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Well, you've had a busy blade season and you've had crews all over Canada and parts of the U S what kind of problems were you solving with your blade crews this year? Lars Bendsen: That was, that was a crazy repair season. Um, and it's not to feed directly into, but it, we had a ton of lightning strikes and lightning repairs higher than I would say the average. And some of the strikes were severe. So I don't know, uh, you probably know better than me if the weather pattern has been leading up to better or worse. Um, what we do know, we had a really, um, wet summer. We had a ton of weather delays. We had a ton of high winds. We have a ton of rain. Uh, so we had our, our standby time, time was, was higher than usual. And it's annoying for everybody involved. Owners don't get their job done and money is flying out the window. So. And we don't get the job done either. So, so, so it's really wet that way. So I don't know if that's the aftermath was going on over the winter. I have no idea because you can't really see when this like was there. Uh, and, and the owners, the owners have a system that can measure when it comes. But. I don't think they're looking at it. Allen Hall: That's, that's true. Uh, we are seeing more lightning strike damage over this past summer. It's been really bad. I, I think it's just the, the set of storms that came through. But in, in your case with AC 8A3, when you have technicians on site, you're bringing high quality sort of apprenticeship plus technicians that have a lot of training so that when you get into these complicated repairs, you can actually accomplish them properly. Lars Bendsen: We are, we are getting our people from mostly from Europe, uh, simply because there's no cable, there's, there's no, uh, availability for, for staff in Canada. Uh, so we get them in from Europe on a proper work permit, simply because we are short staffed. Uh, we do pay more. We also get, uh, GWO certified technicians, all of them. And, um,

Andreas Kipker, CEO of Jupiter Bach, discusses their dominance in wind turbine nacelle and spinner cover manufacturing and major U.S. expansion plans, including a new 20,000-square-foot facility in Pensacola and two decades of partnership with GE Vernova. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.com Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. And today we have an exceptional guest who brings deep insight from one of the wind industry's most important manufacturing sectors. Andreas Kipker is the CEO of Jupiter Bach, the world's largest supplier of nacelle and spinner covers for wind turbines. Andreas joins us at an exciting time for Jupiter Bach the company just celebrated a remarkable 20 year partnership with GE Vernova and broke ground on a 20, 000 square foot expansion of their Pensacola, Florida facility. And today under Andreas's leadership, Jupiter Bach operates state of the art manufacturing facilities across Europe, Asia, and North America. The company's focus goes beyond just manufacturing. They're driving innovation in composite materials and. Engineering to help reduce the levelized cost of energy for wind power. Andreas, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Andreas Kipker: Thank you very much. Pleased to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. Allen Hall: Well, Jupiter Bach is the world's largest supplier of nacelles and spinner covers. Could you give us just a sense of what your global footprint looks like? Andreas Kipker: Absolutely. Happy to do that. Yeah, so, um, In the global market, we consider ourselves leaders. We have, um, we have factories. We have four main manufacturing facilities one in China two in Europe, then Poland and Lithuania, and then one in Sonia, Florida. Um, and then adding to that's where we do our composites. And then, and in addition to that, we have we have a number of assembly sites that are. closer to servicing this Nacelle manufacturing plants assembly plants of our customers. So they're spread. Somewhat in the same regions, but but closer to customers. Allen Hall: Well, you just recently celebrated 20 years with G. E. Vernova, which is remarkable. And you're also expanding a facility down in Florida to another 20, 000 square feet. What is your footprint right now in Florida alone? Andreas Kipker: I'm a little bit in doubt, actually, the exact number. We're around 100, 000 square foot in in, in, in Florida today of, um, of. on the roof. And then it's a process that takes a bit of outdoors storage at outdoor space as well. So, the site itself is significantly bigger. You will know this from blade manufacturing plants as well, that the parts are quite big. So it takes a little bit of storage around. But yeah, we're super excited to have to have longstanding relationship with with several of our customers, but G we just we just reached this milestone. Um, um, so yeah, proud of that. Joel Saxum: I think it's important to to talk about nacelles here, right? Like when you see, when you say when we're in the wind world, where Alan and I touch most of the time, everybody in the large manufacturing space, you hear about gearbox manufacturers, bearing manufacturers,

On Power-Up this week, LM Wind Power's method using thermal imaging to estimate power performance, ZF's system which allows the generator to be rotated independently from the gearbox, and a patent for a flame-throwing trumpet. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here's your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: First up this week, Phil, is an idea from LM Wind Power, and this idea uses thermal imaging to turbine turbulence and then to use that data to predict the power calculations and energy production. on an actual wind turbine blade. So this approach is thermal imaging can detect turbulence and losses on a blade. If you can use that data then in a calculation, in a predictive model, then you can pretty well estimate what the power output of a turbine would be. This is a really useful piece of information. If you're trying to predict the outcome of a wind farm and what the power production will be like. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And this is, this is not new in terms of utilizing, infrared technology. We've actually done this before in the industry, not only for, remote inspections and things like that. But to apply this technology to an operational asset where you're using that output for modeling purposes is unique because what they're able to actually detect is changes in surface roughness. So when it comes to figuring out leading edge erosion and how much is that actually dinging your performance and your annual energy production, this comes in kind of handy. But it's my understanding that, LM isn't the only company that's been investigating this, right? Allen Hall: Yeah. There've been several efforts in the EU to do this. We've had some of them on the podcast. The technique is very fascinating, because you wouldn't think you could see turbulence with an infrared camera and, but you can. And once you do that, then you can use the BEM method of calculating power production, which is how a lot of Blazer design is with the BEM method. The tools are all available. The missing link was just really determining how much turbulence there was on a blade. And this idea makes an infinite amount of sense if it can be put into production. There's a lot of theoretical things we talk about on the podcast that are really hard to implement. This is going to be one of them. Getting some real thermal images off of blades is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Phil Totaro: Yeah, but it makes for a valuable IP for a company like LM to own and there's a high degree of likelihood that this technology could be obviously leveraged by GE their parent organization, or even licensed to some of these other companies. Our next Allen Hall: idea is Phil Totaro: from ZF Frederick Allen Hall: Schaffen, AG, and it is a patent that presents an innovative design for maintaining wind turbine gearboxes with integrated generators. Now, the key innovation is a special gearing system that allows the generator rotor to be rotated independently from the gearbox output shaft during maintenance. And this enables technicians to safely position and lock the rotor for service without having to completely remove the gearbox.

Allen, Joel, and Phil discuss the growing popularity of return-to-office mandates. New York state has signed a climate change superfund act, making companies pay for pollution retroactively. And Dominion Energy's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project should be successfully finished in 2026. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Newark launches a landmark challenge to Big Energy. Dominion Energy proves offshore wind can work in America and the great return to office debate hits the wind industry. All this, plus much more. You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. 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: Hey Uptime community, want to help shape the future of your favorite wind energy podcast? Take our quick 5 minute survey at UptimeWindEnergy.com com for a chance to win an exclusive Your insights matter to us, whether you're a long time listener or just joined us. Please go to uptimewindenergy. com and complete the survey. We would appreciate it. And then, if you haven't registered for Wind Energy O& M Australia, now's the time to get on that because we're gonna have a great time down in Melbourne, and we'll be with bunch of industry leaders on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne. It's a great time to discuss leading edge erosion, lightning protection, life extension, CMS, all the things that we talk about all over the world. We're going to focus on the Australian market and we'll have industry experts from our own Sky Specs, Tilt Renewables, GE, Vernova, RigCom, Whirly, Eelogix, Ping and many more. So reserve your spot now by visiting www. WindAustralia. com. It's time to transform your safety program at Active Training Team's Free Houston Expo on January 24th. Experience the innovative training methods that are revolutionizing the energy sector. And let's face it, the era of laptop training is over. Is Dead Active training team uses real actors live humans on site to place your team members in real world situations. Now there's limited spots available. And to secure your spot, you need to go to active Training team.us/contact, or email [email protected]. 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: All right. 2025 is going to be an exciting year for the return to office. Now, a lot of companies are mandating the return to office, but the attendance hasn't been so great. The. Office attendance reached about 62 percent at pre pandemic levels, according to Betty. And it's planned to increase to almost 70%. So there's 30 percent of society that hasn't really returned to office. Now, as we have seen on X and on With Amazon and a number of other tech companies,

The USDA has announced $4.37 B in funding for the Empowering Rural America program, Brookfield Asset Management has acquired a 53% stake in Neoen, and European Energy and Nova Holdings will upgrade 17 aging German wind farms. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.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.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Right, first up, the U. S. Department of Agriculture has announced a 4. 37 billion dollars in funding through their Empowering Rural America program. This historic investment, the largest in rural electrification since 1936, will support clean energy development across seven states. Now the program aims 5, 000 jobs, reduce electricity costs, and cut climate pollution by about 1. 1 million tons annually. 4. 37 billion as the Biden administration exits the executive branch is a lot of money. Does this have a chance of, of existing once the new administration comes in? Phil Totaro: Yeah, I actually think so because this, this program is done through the Department of Agriculture interestingly enough, not the Department of Energy, and the reason that they're doing it is because the co ops are actually, outside of kind of the, the organized utilities coordinating like corporate power buying. The co ops are actually one of the biggest You know, in aggregate power buyers in, in the United States, especially when you start talking about all the co ops, we're getting kind of gobbled up by Touchstone and, you know, most co ops in the United States are now organized under, you know, a parent kind of umbrella corporation. So this is a lot of money that's going into, you know, basically subsidizing renewable energy power buying or the development of distributed power generation facilities. That are gonna be adjacent to these these rural communities that are able to take advantage of this this bunny. So, this is one where I really do hope that they don't try and cut it because this is actually, like, Putting money in the pockets of people that are doing clean energy power buying, and it's actually helping get wind and solar and storage deployed on the grid. So I, this is actually a great program. Great for the department of agriculture to be doing it. Not sure why the department of energy wasn't previously on board with something like this. Joel Saxum: Coming from someone who has co op power now and grew up with co op power up in Northern Wisconsin in a rural area, injection of capital into rural environments anywhere makes me smile. So, because they usually don't see as much, right? So when a big project comes through or something gets announced like this, everybody gets a little bit happy in those areas. And so, weird to see it. Not weird, I suppose, in a lame duck situation from the federal government, but yeah, I hope this one continues to, to roll forward in these projects to get some ink behind them before January 20th. Allen Hall: In our next story, Brookfield Asset Management has completed its acquisition of 53 percent stake in French renewable power ...

From mysterious white etching cracks to cutting-edge material innovations, Malloy Wind's expert Cory Mittleider reveals the complex world of gearbox bearing failures that plague wind turbines. Learn why traditional monitoring may not be enough and what operators need to know about the latest solutions to keep their gearboxes running reliably. Read the EPRI article Cory references: https://restservice.epri.com/publicdownload/000000003002021422/0/Product Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.com Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! 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 back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight, where we tackle the technical challenges and innovations in wind energy. I'm your host, Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum. We're excited to welcome back one of our most popular guests, Cory Mittleider from Malloy Wind. In his previous appearance, Cory shared his expertise on main bearing failures. And many of you reached out asking for a deep dive into gearbox bearings. Today, Cory returns to do exactly that. As Malloy's business unit manager, he and his team have diagnosed and solved countless gearbox bearing issues across different turbine platforms. Having spent over 15 years in power transmission, Cory has become a specialist in understanding why these critical components fail and, more importantly, how to prevent those failures through better bearing selection and maintenance practices. Cory, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thanks for having me again. All right, so we've got a lot of requests to hear about gearbox, bearing, and what the issues are with those bearings. Gearboxes is something I know a little bit about. But you're the expert. I hear a lot of complaining from the field. What is happening to gearbox bearings at the minute? Cory Mittleider: Sure. Gearbox bearings has been an interesting one for me. So when I started in wind in 2011, it was generator bearings and gearbox bearings is where I started learning about this stuff. A lot of the generator stuff was electrical fluting damage. That's pretty well figured out how to avoid that. The gearbox one was a little more complex than that. And I don't know if you've heard of. NREL's Drivetrain Reliability Conference that's happened for the last 12 plus years now. That's a recurring topic for the last every single year, right? Is gearbox bearing failures. A lot of the conversation that started back in the day and is still going on is around what they call white etching cracking or white etching failures. And back, in say, 11 and 12, A lot of the conversation was around was around that. It was around, the oils in the gearboxes. It was around coatings and bearing types and how they could affect the bearing itself to improve the life. And, specifically when it comes to gearbox bearings That was really hard back in the, the service providers and the operators themselves weren't used to having to replace gearbox bearings. They maybe weren't even planning on having to replace gearbox bearings, right? But they started to see these problems. They started to get their head around the scope and how to identify them early and started to dig into it.

We discuss Vestas' anti-oscillation blade tool, which seems to have a dual purpose, Windspider's self-erecting tower method, and a terrifying way to disguise vaccinations for kids. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here's your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: Well, Phil, our first idea of the week is from our friends at Vestas, and it's an anti oscillation tool for wind turbine blades. And how this patent is described, it's like a sock for your wind turbine blade with a little bit of a covering over the trailing edge serrations, and you slide this device on And it stops oscillations during deployment, when the, when the turbine may be a little more vulnerable, it's not a full operation, maybe in lockouts, where you really don't want any lift, and particularly you don't want any oscillations that could, in theory, Phil Totaro: Yeah. And maybe it's an idea that GE should have come up with or LM should have come up with first considering some of the issues they've had this year. But what's kind of fascinating about this though, is that this isn't necessarily a new idea from the perspective of putting a little sock on the end of your wind turbine blade to protect the tip during a lift. Usually it's for making sure that you don't damage the serrations or whatever you've stuck on the trailing edge of the blade. In this case, Vestas and, and I'm, I'm kind of expressing my opinion or suggestion here that I think Vestas is basically trying to get an extra 20 years of life on a patented concept that, They, are potentially using on a daily basis for that construction purpose. They found another way to describe that same technology and as an anti oscillation tool. Allen Hall: You ever seen a device called a slap chopper, Phil? No. It slices and it dices. Oh, that thing. Yeah, I have. I have. So what they've To have done, in a sense, is they've taken the Slapchopper and got a patent for slicing, and then when that got close to expiring, they came back and said, well, it dices too, which is a separate patent, and thereby you can extend the same device for Covering two areas. It's very unique way of patenting and very effective by the way. It's smart. Phil Totaro: Yeah, it is. If, if you're trying to capture and protect your IP, but it also doesn't say much for the patent examiners we've ever had in this industry who can't seem to recognize that this is what companies are doing because this is not the first time this has happened. I can recall a few examples in the past where companies had You know, had, their 20 years of patent protection on a concept and then repatented basically the same thing and said, Oh, well, it's not for cooling. It's for vibration damping, or it's not for one thing. It's for something else. So it looks like that's what's happening here. And, I guess kudos to Vestas for trying and maybe not so many kudos to the U. S. Patent Office for allowing stuff like this to get pushed Allen Hall: through. Roncopeel made a living doing that. If you're familiar with Ronco, it's Christmas time and every Christmas you would have another Ronco product, which slices, dices, cooked a chicken or something.

This week, we discuss Siemens Gamesa's MASSIVE 21 MW turbine prototype, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa layoffs in Europe, trade relations between the US and EU in 2025, and the proper out-of-office email etiquette. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: If you want to know why Siemens Gamesa is betting big on a 21 megawatt offshore turbine while others scale back, what Norway's 25 billion oil and gas investment means for renewables, and how manufacturing challenges are reshaping European wind energy, stick around. Plus, we've got big news about Wind Energy O& M Australia and a chance to win an exclusive Uptime Podcast mug in our first ever listener survey. I'm Allen Hall, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. 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: Just the season of giving, and this year we want to give you a voice in shaping Uptime's future. As we wrap up another amazing year of wind energy conversations, we're launching our first in person event. And yes, there's a special holiday surprise involved. Picture yourself sipping your morning coffee from an exclusive Uptime Podcast mug. Which could be yours just for participating. All we need is five minutes of your time to tell us what sparks your interest and what you'd love to hear more in 2025. Whether you've been with us since day one or just caught your first episode, your thoughts matter to us. So dash over to uptimewindenergy. com or slay down to the show notes below. And from all of us at Uptime, thank you for making this community possible. Second, wind energy professionals won't want to miss the premier O& M event in the Asia Pacific region, the Wind Energy O& M Australia conference happening February 11th and 12th in Melbourne. And we're thrilled to have industry powerhouses like Tilt Renewables, Worley, Aerones. Phil Totaro: And we're pleased to announce Sky Specs is actually going to be joining us as a corporate roundtable sponsor for the event. Allen Hall: The conference tackles crucial topics that directly impact your operations, leading into erosion, lightning protection, CMS, insurance, and life extension strategies. This is your chance to connect with the industry leaders and gain practical insights that you can implement immediately. So secure your spot now by visiting And finally, don't miss out on a game changing opportunity for your safety program. Active training team known for their innovative and immersive safety training methods. ATT is hosting a free expo in Houston on January 24th, and this isn't your typical safety presentation by no means. ATT brings safety culture to life through dynamic hands on experiences that have transformed safety programs across the energy sector. So this is a rare chance to experience their methods first hand. Spacers are filling up fast, so register now by emailing [email protected] or visiting activetrainingteam.us/contact. Unlock your wind farm's best performance at Wind Energy O& M Australia, February 11th to 12th, in sunny Melbourne.

Connecticut and Massachusetts have backed out of their portions of the Vineyard Wind 2 offshore project, Avaada Group is investing $12B in renewables for Rajasthan by 2030, and Enersense is selling its onshore wind and solar project development business to Fortum. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.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.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: There's been a significant setback for offshore wind development from Vineyard Offshore as they announced the withdrawal of its 800 megawatt portion of the Vineyard Wind 2 project from Massachusetts contract negotiations and that decision came after Connecticut opted not to purchase its planned 400 megawatt share of the project. This development impacts Massachusetts ambitious offshore wind goals, where despite earlier procurement of 3200 megawatts of capacity, only Vineyard Wind 1 remains active in the state's pipeline. And Phil, this is due to the combination of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island working together to draw from some of these offshore projects. But now, Connecticut is full stop, not going to be involved in offshore wind, they said, for at least a couple of years. Phil Totaro: Yeah, not that Connecticut has always been Wind Energy's biggest well, biggest fan, pardon the pun. Connecticut has, is basically saying that they're pulling out of this procurement because offshore wind is just too expensive, and that's entirely true. . Given what the industry has to price the PPA at to be able to pay for the project, given the the cost of money and the cost of equipment these days. So I can see why they did it, but it does kind of screw Rhode Island and Massachusetts a little bit because, they were counting on that offtake. So the question then becomes, does Massachusetts unilaterally go and sign an agreement 2 at some point? Is that even something that's going to be able to move forward, before January 20th, where presumably we're not going to get, four years worth of BOEM approvals on offshore wind farms? So there's a lot of uncertainty and unfortunately chaos caused by, Connecticut's decision here and, and certainly unfortunate for, for vineyard offshore wind. Joel Saxum: I think one thing to think about here is that like you said, Phil, that there's a looming deadline that might close the door on some of these wind things or not, not slam the door, but close it a little bit more this offshore wind program that we have going on the East Coast for no matter what state you're in. And, and the way I'm looking at some of this is, yes, the PPAs are expensive. I see that. Tech, the technology is expensive. I see that the financing is, has been a bit difficult. It should be hopefully getting easier to see that. However, If your goal is to have renewable energies and you're in the northeast part of the United States, you don't have a whole lot of options. Your options basically are offshore wind and something else that someone dreams up for something because that's it.

This week on Power-Up, Goldwind's coil pipe system for cooling towers, an idea from Enercon for a predictive model of power output under certain weather conditions, and an interesting alarm clock patent from the 1800s. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.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. Our first idea is from Goldwind. It is a concept where they have a specialized coil pipe system for liquid cooling in wind turbines, mostly offshore it appears. It is designed to handle the rotation between the nacelle and the tower. So you can think about all this coiled tube in the tower itself and the nacelle is spinning around. So it Keeps everything organized, so it doesn't twist, bend, and kink where the fluid flow would stop. Phil, this one's a little interesting to me because I haven't seen a lot of cooling happening in towers, but obviously GoldWind wants to proceed with this idea to mostly for their offshore turbines, it looks like. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is designed for larger machines where they're gonna leverage either using the tower as a heatsink or some other downed tower mechanism where they can dump waste heat and theoretically minimize the size of the radiator that they have on the nacelle. And keep in mind that GoldWind, because they're using a permanent magnet generator, they have different requirements up tower for for the, the magnet cooling and stator cooling. So what's kind of fascinating about this to me is that, you've got certainly for, for transmitting, electrical. Current and things like that. You have things like slip rings. You even have kind of hydraulic slip rings when you want to be able to move, from a, from a rotating frame of reference to a fixed frame of reference, you, you can use kind of a, a, an equivalent of a hydraulic slip ring to, to pass fluid that way. This is literally like a twist loop the same way that we have kind of an electrical cable twist loop in the upper part of a, the tower and nacelle but it's specifically designed for liquid coolant. And so, kudos to them for kind of creativity and ingenuity. Whether or not this is going to be more efficient than a nacelle mounted radiator, I'm not. So it'd be interesting to see some feedback or some data on that, but it's it's definitely a unique and kind of fascinating way of developing a liquid based cooling system and implementing it in a way that's going to help them. Address other considerations, design considerations, like wanting to minimize the the volume and the, the size, and frankly, the weight of an uptower radiator or a cell mounted radiator. Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Waban Properties, and it is a concept for using weather data, in particular, more widespread weather data. coupled with performance of a wind turbine over time to create a predicted model for the power output under certain weather conditions. And this idea seems to be driven, Phil, from grid restoration or black start scenarios where they need to turn The grid on restarting the grid and they need to know what pow...