Siemens Gamesa Struggles, RWE & Nordex Thrive, DOE Invests in Floating Wind

In this episode, Allen, Joel, and Philip discuss Siemens Gamesa's leadership changes and quality issues, the strong financial performance of Nordex and RWE, and upgrades to UK wind turbine testing facilities. They also cover the christening of the first American-built offshore wind service operation vessel, the EcoEdison, and the DOE's selection of five floating wind technologies for the Flow Wind Prize readiness competition. 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: All right, Lego lovers a Canadian man has combined his love of Lego and Star Wars, shocker, to build the 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon in a record breaking time of, Joel, take a guess. Joel Saxum: How much coffee did he have first? Allen Hall: Red Bull. Joel Saxum: I'm gonna say Allen Hall: That's not too far off. Phil, what's your guess? Philip Totaro: Six? I don't know. Allen Hall: Seven hours, 36 minutes and 37 seconds. Ivan Wu of Markham, Ontario earned the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to build a Lego Star Wars 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon. It's 10, 000 pieces an hour. That's insane. How did that, Phil, can your fingers move that fast? Philip Totaro: 10, 000 pieces an hour? Only when I'm typing Intel store research. Allen Hall: You get the bags, right? And the bags are all just mixed parts, right? And they say, you open up the manual and it says, open up manual one out of six. And then you open bag one and six, and then you have to, that's three pieces a second. How do you tell your spouse Hey, I'm I really need to buy the 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon to set a Guinness Philip Totaro: World Record. Sorry to stereotype, but this guy does not have a spouse. Joel Saxum: But it only took seven hours of his life, so Seven hours of peace and quiet. Yeah, but how much training did it get to that point? Allen Hall: See that, Joel, that's the ultimate question. I was thinking the same thing. That guy worked on that for weeks. Joel Saxum: How many times has he built that thing? He's trained like an Olympic athlete. Seven hours was the record winning attempt, right? He's probably done it a hundred times or more. Canadian winters are long. They are, and now they're the world champions. There you go. Allen Hall: Vinod's Philip, who will take over as CEO of Ascension. Seaman's Kamesa on August 1st, which happens to be my birthday, by the way, plans to conduct a thorough review of the company's onshore and wind turbine development process. I hope so, because that's desperately needed at this point. Philip believes that the current two year development cycle may be insufficient for onshore turbines leading to inadequate testing and quality control issues that have played. Siggins Gamesa's newest onshore turbines, and in that he means the 4x and 5x machines. By comparison, offshore wind turbine platforms have usually a five to seven year development cycle. Philip is suggesting that the onshore industry needs to slow down a little bit and work on a supply chain. to get rid of some quality concerns. Now that all sounds great, right? But everybody's waiting for Siemens Gamesa to get back into action again. And they're thinking, or at least they're still saying by 2026, they're going to break even. And they're going to get rid of these quality concerns. And now, Phil, something has to happen within Siemens Gamesa, right? We haven't seen many changes internally.