The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast
Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
Uptime is a renewable energy podcast focused on wind energy and energy storage technologies. Experts Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead break down the latest research, tech, and policy.
Episodes
China Barred Vestas Software, Ørsted Buys Chinese Monopiles
Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen says China barred Vestas from monitoring its own turbines. Plus Ørsted takes heat for Chinese monopiles, India’s blade design gap, and tents that beat weather delays. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Ørsted Finishes Drone Trial, Iberdrola Exits South Korea
Allen covers Ørsted’s Hornsea 2 drone trial, the DeepWind test site, Germany’s proposed land rent cap, and Iberdrola’s Korea exit. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
How DTU’s Rain Test Facility Predicts Erosion
Rosemary visits DTU Wind & Energy Systems in Denmark, where Nicolai Frost-Jensen Johansen explains rain erosion testing, tip speed, and LEP defects. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
What Rosie Learned in Europe’s Wind Turbine Test Labs
Rosie returns from Denmark and shares her experiences seeing DTU blade testing, a lightning lab, and a 15 MW Vestas test turbine. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Why Vestas Wants Chinese Wind Turbines Off Europe’s Grid
Allen covers how Denmark, where modern wind began, is pushing back on China, as Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen argues to keep Chinese turbines off Europe’s grid. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Morten Handberg Answers the Big Drone Inspection Questions
Morten Handberg answers the big questions around drone inspections, including how often to inspect, how many turbines to sample, and how much AI results should be qualified. Contact Morten on LinkedIn The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Uptime’s Takeaways from Hamburg 2026
The crew discusses Hamburg takeaways, including the industry mood, bigger blade risks, and OEM announcements. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Nordex Invests in Türkiye, Vestas Wins First V182 Order
Allen covers Nordex’s Türkiye expansion, Chinese turbine makers seeking European partners, Vestas’ first V182 order, and two Pennsylvania repowers. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
How Active Training Team Kept 25,000 Tideway Workers Safe
Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-founder at Active Training Team, joins to discuss how the immersive EPIC safety center helped London’s £5 billion Thames Tideway tunnel finish with zero fatalities and zero life-changing injuries. Plus similar centers built for Ørsted’s Hornsea projects and SSE, and the mobile program his US team runs for wind and solar sites. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
GE Vernova and Vineyard Wind Settle, UK Approves Irish Sea Cables
GE Vernova and Vineyard Wind drop all claims in their $4.5 billion dispute. Plus the UK approves Irish Sea cables for Morgan and Morecambe, a GE turbine order in Japan, whale recorders in the Celtic Sea, and previews of WindEnergy Hamburg.Register for the SkySpecs Customer ForumMeet with Nikki Briggs at WindEnergy Hamburg to discuss the StrikeTape Ultra LPS upgradeFind Rosie & Matthew at Booth A1-115 at WindEnergy Hamburg The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Ørsted Finishes Revolution Wind, RWE Wins German Auction
Allen covers record bank financing for clean energy, Oracle's 1.7 GW Texas wind deal, RWE's German auction win, Denmark scrapping its turbine cap, and Revolution Wind finishing off Rhode Island. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript September 18, 2026Happy Monday, everyone.Off the coast of Rhode Island this past week, the last turbine went up. Hold that thought. First, the banks.BloombergNEF says global banks put one-point-one-five trillion dollars behind low-carbon energy last year. A record. For every dollar banks lent to fossil fuels, they lent ninety-seven cents to clean energy. Five years ago, that ratio was seventy-nine cents. Wind project finance in Europe grew seventy-five percent in a single year. The money is moving. And here is where it lands.In Texas, Oracle just signed wind energy deals across ten projects. One-point-seven gigawatts. Partners include RWE, Engie, Clearway Energy, and Scout Clean Energy. All feeding the ERCOT grid. All powering Oracle's data center campus in Abilene. Oracle wants one hundred percent of its AI data center electricity matched with carbon-free power by twenty thirty-five. Big tech needs big power. Wind is answering.Now cross the Atlantic. RWE won one hundred and nineteen megawatts of onshore wind in Germany's latest federal auction. Two projects. The first, Juchen Three. Eighty-four megawatts on reclaimed land at the former Garzweiler coal mine in North Rhine-Westphalia. Wind turbines, on a former coal mine. The second, Seedorf in Lower Saxony. Five old turbines totaling nine megawatts, replaced by five modern machines at thirty-five. Nearly four times the power. Same number of towers. Both projects target twenty twenty-eight.And just north of Germany, Denmark just made a move. The Danish government scrapped its cap on onshore wind turbines. That cap was set in twenty eighteen: eighteen hundred and fifty turbines by twenty forty. The government's own forecast says Denmark will need thirty-three hundred. Climate Minister Samira Nawa said tearing down working turbines because of an old cap would be outrageous. But the Danish Chamber of Commerce warns: more turbines need more grid.Now, back to Rhode Island. Ørsted's Revolution Wind has installed its sixty-fifth and final turbine. Seven hundred and four megawatts. Six-point-two billion dollars. The federal government issued two stop-work orders against this project. Federal judges threw them both out. Revolution Wind kept building. It joins South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind as the third completed large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States. During Winter Storm Fern, Vineyard Wind showed up big for New England. During the July heat wave, offshore wind kept oil-burning peakers quiet.So here is what matters. Banks are lending at near parity with fossil fuels. Big tech is signing gigawatt-scale wind deals. Turbines are going up despite political headwinds. The constraint now is the grid behind them. Denmark said it this week. Germany's offshore foundation said it last month. The next decade of wind energy growth will be won or lost on transmission and interconnection. Not turbines. Not money. Wires.And that is the state of the wind industry for the 21st of September 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.Sources:BloombergNEF — Low-Carbon Bank Financing Tops One TrillionCanary Media — Major US Offshore Wind Farm Installs Its Last TurbineDCD — Oracle Signs 1.7GW of Wind Energy Supply Agreements in TexasRWE — RWE Secures 119 MW of Onshore Wind in Latest German AuctionEnergyWatch — Denmark Scraps Onshore Wind Turbine Cap
How CNC Onsite Cuts Repair Delays for US Operators
Søren Kellenberger, CEO at CNC Onsite, joins to discuss the company's new US office, uptower yaw ring repairs, and blade root insert replacement. Email [email protected] to learn more. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Søren, welcome back to the program. Søren Kellenberger: Thank you very much, Allen. It's a pleasure. Allen Hall: Well, you have some really exciting news in the United States, because CNC Onsite has been growing tremendously. You're now worldwide, and you've established a presence in the United States. Søren Kellenberger: That's correct. We have been working in the US for quite some time, but we see that the demand is definitely there. The North American market has more than 100,000 turbines above one megawatt. So of course it's an interesting market, and we think that now is a good time for us to make that move and establish ourselves in the US. So we are really looking forward to that. Allen Hall: So you've seen a lot of growth in the company over the last couple of years as operators worldwide realize they have problems that they can't solve, and that will only be solved by precision machining, which is what CNC Onsite does. Where have you been doing work lately? I've seen things on LinkedIn from Asia, but I know you guys are pretty busy right now. Søren Kellenberger: As you started saying, we are basically working globally. So we have had technicians in Australia and Japan, and in other Asian countries as well. Our main market is still Europe, where we also started, and we are widely spread across Europe. But the US, including Canada, is becoming a very interesting and important market for us. Maybe the best way to explain it is that even though we are based in Denmark and working out of Denmark, 90% of what we do is outside of Denmark. And once you travel — whether you travel to Finland or if you travel to somewhere in the US — it doesn't make a huge difference. Our technicians are away from home and family anyway, so it's just the language that is a bit different. Allen Hall: What brings people to your business? What are they calling about today? I know the yaw ring was the number one item. That's what I remember as being, when you were getting started, the yaw ring with the teeth being broken. Is that still your number one request, or has that changed? Søren Kellenberger: It is definitely often a door opener, because everyone can relate to that. So it brings a lot of interest to the company. And then when we start talking to customers about other wear issues in the turbine, it often turns out that we start to talk about worn sliding surfaces on the yaw ring, or it can be worn out rotor lock holes, or wear and tear to generator shafts or main shafts. There's a whole lot of mechanical things that obviously get worn when you have a turbine running for so many years and hours. And then we just try to see if we can come up with smart ways to fix it uptower instead of deploying cranes and doing large disassemblies. Allen Hall: That's the real problem. I think a lot of operators realize that they have worn assemblies, but they don't really know of any way to address it, so they just live with it, or they try to accommodate as best they can. With the yaw ring teeth, the way I had seen that until I talked to you was they would get a guy with a welder up there and they'd try to weld these teeth back on. But that's really a temporary fix and it's not a long-term answer. You're doing something that is actually better than what the OEM installed to begin with, right? Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. Instead of welding — and I won't say that welding doesn't have its place, because for smaller repairs welding can be a good fix as well. We do also work with welding companies for certain smaller repairs. But imagine you are up in a very confined space, and when you have to start rebuilding a tooth by welding, the more of the tooth that is missing, the more you need. One thing is the welding, but grinding it back to shape again is also a manual process. It's obvious that the more of a tooth that is missing, the more difficult it is to get that actual shape of the tooth afterwards by grinding. So what we do is that we machine away the damaged teeth, and then we bring prefabricated segments that have the actual shape of the original tooth, so that we get very good contact between the yaw gear and the yaw ring after the repair. And I think that is probably the main reason why welding is sometimes not lasting as long as when you have to rebuild a full tooth and then manually grind it. It's very difficult to get that well-defined contact surface. So you get some peak points where you have higher loads, and that will just fatigue those repairs over time, where we have better chances of getting that very good fix. We get very accurate machining because we use CNC-controlled machining, so our repair is within a few hundredths of a millimeter. Allen Hall: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the other approach besides welding and your approach — and this is what I have seen more recently — is the whole nacelle comes off. So the rotor pops off, they lift the nacelle off with a crane, so they have to have a crane on site, and that's really expensive. And they set the nacelle down, and then they have to go in and physically remove the yaw ring, or these sections of it, and replace it. That is extremely expensive and time-consuming compared to what you're describing. What is the delta in cost, roughly? Søren Kellenberger: That is very difficult to say, because it depends how fast you can actually get a crane out. And I guess there is also, in the US, a huge spread on what the deployment cost is for a crane, how close you are to a local crane center, and what the deployment cost is. Then it also depends on your access roads. If the turbine has been out there for 5 or 10 years, maybe your access roads are unfit for the crane anymore. Your hard stand or the crane pad is not in sufficiently good condition to support your crane. So there can be a lot of extra costs that are adding up — not just the rental of the crane, but the overall cost of preparing it and the whole project management of getting that set up. Then you need your support fixtures to place on the nacelle. You need to get your plates down. So it's a lot of logistics, and just preparing the turbine for disassembly is probably about a week. And then you have all the craning and replacing and putting it back together. So if you say you could have everything ready, your turbine is down for, I would guess, two to three weeks. But in reality, the downtime before you can get a crane out there is much, much longer. And we can basically — we have repairs, spare parts, we have them in stock, so we can basically move out the day after we get the call and get your turbine up and running. Installing a segment, which repairs up to six teeth, takes about a day for us to do. Then we need a day to get up in the turbine and get ready, and a day to get back down. So what takes from several weeks to potentially months before you're up and running again, we can do in just about a week. Allen Hall: In the United States, one of the things I hear a lot of times, particularly dealing with cranes, is that procurement, when they want to buy a fix of some sort, doesn't necessarily consider the cost of the crane, the downtime, all those other factors. Obviously, the engineers on the backside are thinking about that, but when it comes to decisions for your technology, that doesn't always get into the mix. Is that a worldwide problem or an American problem? Because that feels like an American problem. Søren Kellenberger: No, it's not. I think it's a worldwide problem. I think what makes the difference is probably that the turbines are typically a bit older in Europe. So in that way, we are a few years ahead in that life cycle. Procurement and also technical organizations have maybe become a bit more used to including that thinking, where this is still a relatively new issue in the US because your fleet is newer. So I think it will change in the coming years, as it will develop naturally as it has done in Europe. But it's also sometimes the structure of the company — that you have a certain organization that takes care of the main component replacement, and then you have a part of the organization that takes care of day-to-day service. And now you don't need to replace your main component, but the work we do is on the main component, so it sort of falls in between those two areas of responsibility in the company. And that can also sometimes be challenging. Allen Hall: So it's not only that you have to get a crane to do a lot of these repairs that you can now do with CNC Onsite, right, internal to the nacelle — but there's also weather, right? I think the one thing we don't consider a lot of times, or have kind of preconceived notions about, is that the weather's, like, 30% downtime. Yes, if you're working with a crane and you're trying to lift heavy objects, there will be 30% downtime because of weather. But when you're doing the repair in the nacelle, what limitations do you have on weather? Is it a much wider window than a crane would have? Søren Kellenberger: Absolutely. We can work up to much higher wind speeds — basically the same wind speeds that you can do ordinary maintenance work within — because our machine is always mounted on the component that we are machining....
Ex-Ørsted Employees in Demand, CIP Orders Goldwind Turbines
CIP taps Goldwind for an Australian wind project even as Europe fights Chinese turbines. Plus, Alfanar's $100 million bet on Senvion, and where laid-off Ørsted staff are landing. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape — protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts.Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes and Yolanda Padron. And top of the week is Rosemary’s been out and about looking at wind turbines in Australia, and I would like to hear some of the details about that, Rosemary. What did you see out in the wilderness?Rosemary Barnes: You might have to settle for generalities rather than details.Allen Hall: Okay.Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know what’s going on with Australian wind turbines at the moment, but there have been a lot of problems — a lot of lightning damage and a lot of serial defects. That’s the category I’ve been looking at recently. It’s a wide variety, looking at a lot of Australia-specific, or not even Australia-specific, but just local problems. Certain wind farms are getting the same kind of problem over and over again — some of them I’ve never seen anywhere else before. I check in with people like you and other international friends who do similar kinds of work, and some of these damages are just like — everyone’s like, “Well, what is that? I wouldn’t have even believed that was possible.” So that always keeps it really interesting. The last couple of days I’ve spent crawling around inside some blades, getting covered in fiberglass — very reminiscent of my time in the factory, when I used to just be itchy for weeks or months in a row. My hot tip for that: you’ve got to feel the sensation, but it doesn’t bother you. It’s not itching, it’s just zen — zen out, and you can handle being itchy for days in a row.Allen Hall: It’s sort of the hot sauce analogy. Hot sauce is really not burning you, but it just feels like it is, so if you can think it away, it’s just fine. Similar thing. And you’re headed to Denmark and then to Germany pretty soon, right?Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I’m so sad that you’re not going to be able to come, because I’ve got some really cool tours lined up and cool meetings.Allen Hall: Me too.Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I’ll have more to report back. But definitely anybody who’s going to be at Hamburg — if you’re in Denmark and have something you want to show, feel free to get in touch. I don’t know what that might be. I’ve got some plans currently — it’s pretty jam-packed, itinerary so far, but looking forward. I always love going over.Allen Hall: Well, when you’re in Denmark, you should go by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Rosie, because they have an Australian project, and the turbines are coming from China. The Gawarra Bayya site is a 408 megawatt project, and CIP has confirmed to Finnos that Goldwind will supply the machines. That lands smack in the middle of the fight between a lot of countries that would like to use Chinese suppliers and the EU Commission, which is really prohibiting it at the moment.So in a sense, we have CIP — a Danish company that’s been pretty much avoiding any sort of Chinese wind turbines in the EU — but once they come out of the EU, they’re perfectly comfortable using Chinese wind turbines in Australia. It does seem like a real contradiction there. And my first thought was, well, Scotland has raised their hand and said, “What the heck — why is it okay for this Danish company to buy Chinese wind turbines and put them in Australia if they’re so afraid of all the technology that’s inside them, and maybe the spying or whatever else the concern is?” Is this going to play out okay, do you think, Rosemary? And especially Yolanda — you’ve worked for a Danish operator. This doesn’t feel right.Rosemary Barnes: I do personally see the contradiction, because Europe is worried about China taking over Europe’s electricity grid. They don’t care what happens to Australia’s electricity grid. Australia doesn’t manufacture any of our own wind turbines, so we don’t care that much. We have so many Chinese solar panels and Chinese cars, and China is our biggest trading partner, so I think we have a lot more comfort with China and Chinese technology in Australia than Europe does. If I’m honest, I think the main reason for Europe’s discomfort is probably primarily to protect their own manufacturing industry, and I don’t disagree with that. So, controversial — is that a hot take?Allen Hall: Well, it sort of is, yeah. I mean, obviously there is a Danish wind turbine manufacturer in CIP’s backyard, so to speak, that they could have easily chosen — Vestas — and put Vestas turbines in. And Vestas is the number one turbine maker in Australia in terms of quantities of turbines. It’s the vast majority Vestas. So it would have made a lot of sense to choose Vestas here. Don’t you think that’s going to create a little bit of tension between the Vestas group and the CIP group?Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. I don’t think so — I mean, they’re not the same company, right? They’re not sister companies or anything like that. There’s no official relationship other than that they come from the same country.Allen Hall: They’re probably next to one another.Rosemary Barnes: I think you either have a local content requirement, or you allow free competition. It’s a bit weird when you’re somewhere in the middle — officially there’s no local content, but in practice nothing else can be bought. I would rather it all just be on the table, and everyone knows where they stand from the very first days of project planning. You don’t want to get halfway through a project and realize that, even though it’s technically allowed, you’ll never get approval for this, or that the laws might change partway through. I think that’s worse than just knowing from the start that you’ve got to choose European. But in terms of the wind industry going better, I think it’s not a bad thing to see a bunch of different solutions to some of these challenges, and it would be nice if we could all learn from each other and improve.Allen Hall: Well, let me ask you a question here, Yolanda — as you used to work for a Danish operator that is considering using Chinese turbines, at least they haven’t eliminated the possibility of it — is this really just a ploy to push down prices from Vestas and Siemens Gamesa?Yolanda Padron: If it is, it wouldn’t be anything new, right? It’s something that a lot of owner-operators, whether they’re Danish or not, have seen if they can maybe get a lower price. But if they have a fairly homogenous fleet in a country, they might get a site from a different OEM just to prove to themselves, and to their OEM of choice, that they’re not the only ones out there. So this could be something that’s happening. I’m really curious — Rosie, I don’t know if you know, but a lot of times the IT department is all the same in a big company that owns a lot of assets in different countries, and sometimes they’ll try to silo it by continent or by country, or they’ll just keep the same thing everywhere. My understanding was that part of the reason some of these operators didn’t want Chinese wind turbines was because of that whole SCADA system, and everything would have to be integrated into their internal IT. Do you know if they’re siloing their Australian part of their IT department, or their Australian back end, for CIP?Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know about that, but from the sites that I’ve worked with, for the most part, the SCADA system is whoever’s operating the wind farm — that’s their thing. And who is operating this wind farm? I would have assumed it would be Goldwind, because that’s always how it works —Allen Hall: Yeah.Rosemary Barnes: — in Australia, at least. So usually it’s a matter of, if the owner wants to get into the SCADA, they get in and grab it and remove it from the system. It’s not like it’s all integrated. Yeah — it is a good point that maybe this is opening a backdoor into Europe somehow. I can see that as a European regulator, I’d be worried about that, and maybe be requiring something of CIP to ensure that that can’t happen.Allen Hall: Our next story takes us to India, where a Saudi group is writing a $100 million check. Back in a moment.As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out — visit peswind.com today.Well, Senvion is getting fresh capital, and a lot of it, coming from Saudi Arabia’s Alfanar Group. They’re investing $100 million into Senvion, and obviously Senvion is a huge wind turbine maker in India — Senvion originally started in Germany, and ends up in India. So the first $34 million already went out to Senvion, and the rest follows in the next couple of weeks, so there’ll be a lot of cash floating around at Senvion. Senvion builds about 1.5 gigawatts of turbine capacity a year and has roughly 16 to 17 gigawatts already deployed. The whole effort does seem like a play to expand Senvion internationally, now that India has essentially created a closed marketplace — if you’re going to put turbines into India, the technology must be developed in India, the manufacturing must be in India, the construction companies, everything else, must be India-based....
Orsted Wins Tax Fight, Vestas Breaks Onshore Height Record
Allen covers Vestas setting the tallest onshore turbine record in Germany, Skyborn's €3B Baltic wind financing close, Orsted's UK tax fight win, and the debate over turbines as national security assets. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript Wind Energy News Flash September 14, 2026 Happy Monday, everyone. Wind turbines... are supposed to be a threat to national security. At least... that is what some people say. But the militaries that actually operate near them? They are turning those turbines into weapons of defense. Hold that thought. First... let us go to Germany. In the little town of Winnberg... Vestas just set a record. The tallest onshore wind turbine ever built. An Enventus one-seventy-two... seven-point-two megawatts... sitting on a hub height of one hundred ninety-nine meters. That is taller than a sixty-story building. The tower is a concrete hybrid. A second turbine is planned for next year. Vestas says the height lets the machine reach stronger and steadier winds... which means more energy and more value. Simple idea. Build taller. Capture more. Now stay in Germany... but head north to the Baltic Sea. Skyborn Renewables just closed financing on the Gennaker offshore wind farm. Three billion euros. Nine hundred seventy-six megawatts. Sixty-three turbines. When it is running... Gennaker will produce three-point-eight terawatt-hours a year. Enough to power one million German homes. Sixteen commercial banks and the European Investment Bank put up the money. And Gennaker already has power purchase agreements with Uniper and Amazon. Commercial operations start in twenty twenty-eight. Now... speaking of the European Investment Bank. The EIB just signed a deal with Danske Bank out of Copenhagen. A two hundred fifty million euro guarantee. Here is why that matters. Before a wind turbine maker can build a single machine... it needs a bank guarantee for the buyer. No guarantee... no production. No turbines. No wind farm. This deal lets Danske Bank issue up to five hundred million euros in guarantees to European wind manufacturers. It is the first deal of its kind in the Nordic region under the EU's twenty twenty-three Wind Power Package. The EIB is backing all of this through a six-point-five billion euro wind program... aimed at building thirty-two gigawatts of new capacity. Now cross the English Channel. Ørsted... the Danish offshore wind giant... just won a tax fight. Back in twenty twenty... Danish tax authorities claimed six-point-six billion Danish crowns in taxes... about one billion dollars... on two British wind farms. Walney Extension in the Irish Sea. Hornsea One in the North Sea. Ørsted said those projects were built, owned, and operated by British subsidiaries. They already paid UK tax. An advisory commission under the EU Arbitration Convention just ruled in Ørsted's favor. The projects have genuine purpose in Britain. They are taxable there. Ørsted says the ruling will mean a minor adjustment in Denmark... largely offset by tax reductions in the UK. And Ørsted expects similar cases to be resolved on the same legal principles. Now head across the Atlantic. Danish service company Global Wind Service... GWS for short... just opened a business unit in Canada. GWS has been in the United States since twenty seventeen. They helped build Block Island. Vineyard Wind One. South Fork. Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. And finally... a quiet deal in Denmark. Polytech... a Danish wind industry supplier... just bought Dansk Gummi Industri. A family-owned company. Founded in nineteen fifteen. Four generations of the same family. Brothers Peter and Christian Thomsen decided it was time to let someone else take the company forward. Dansk Gummi makes transport solutions for moving blades, towers, and nacelles. Polytech now has four hundred sixty employees. CEO Rene Balle says the deal helps Polytech expand beyond wind and into other industries. Now... back to where we started. National security and wind turbines. Defense experts across Europe say the threat is real... but manageable. Yes... spinning blades create false radar returns. But modern phased-array radar can see right through them. The Trump administration itself quietly ordered four hundred thirty-eight million dollars in phased-array radar from Collins Aerospace... a company that markets wind farm radar mitigation as a core feature. And here is the twist. Poland now requires defense sensors on every offshore wind farm. Its first Baltic project sits two hundred kilometers south of Kaliningrad... a Russian military outpost. Sweden's SAAB tested radar on Ørsted's Hornsea One wind farm in twenty twenty-one... and extended surveillance beyond the reach of ground-based systems. The UK ordered eleven of those radar units. Belgium and the Netherlands are doing the same thing. They are not treating wind farms as obstacles. They are turning them into forward surveillance platforms. As one former Danish special forces commander put it... you are changing the battlefield. But it is a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever. Here is the takeaway for the week. The supply chain bottleneck is not turbines or steel. It is guarantees. The EIB-Danske Bank deal tells you where the real friction lives. Manufacturers cannot start work without bank paper. If you are an operator waiting on turbine deliveries... this is the deal that moves your timeline. And if you are still hearing that offshore wind is a security threat... the people who actually defend coastlines are building their radar networks on top of turbines. The threat narrative is not just outdated. It is backwards. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 14th of September 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
HeliService USA Brings Paramedics to Offshore Wind
Michael Tosi and Paul Russo of HeliService USA with Dr. Kenneth Williams discuss their offshore wind air ambulance service and paramedic hoist rescues. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript 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. As large offshore wind projects take shape off. The coast of Massachusetts and New York keeping technicians safe presents unique challenges that require innovative solutions. We are here at HeliService USA's Hangar in Rhode Island, discussing offshore wind operations, specifically emergency medical services and search and rescue capabilities. Joining us today are three leaders in emergency response, Dr. Kenneth Williams, division director of EMS and Professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University. Michael Tosi, founder and CEO of HeliService, USA, and Paul Russo, director of Operations at HeliService USA. Together we'll be discussing their collaboration to provide comprehensive emergency medical services and search and rescue operations for a US offshore wind. Michael, let's start with you today. And thanks for the invite to come out. This is tremendous. Of Michael Tosi: course. You're welcome. Thanks for coming. Thanks for spending the time, Allen Hall: as always, when we come to HeliService. The facilities are immaculate, the aircraft are immaculate. You run a really high class operation, which is desperately needed for offshore wind in the United States, but now you're expanding into emergency services rather than just carrying technicians out to site and dropping 'em on the top of turbines, now you're looking out for their health and safety a lot more. So what does offshore wind in the US involve in terms of EMS operations? It must throw a lot of hurdles at you. How do you even approach that problem? Michael Tosi: Absolutely. Thanks for spending the time today. A thanks for coming out and I certainly appreciate the compliments. The first thing for us is always safety, and it starts with your facility, starts with making sure everything's immaculate before people get on your helicopters. Regarding EMS and Emergency Medical Services offshore this has obviously been I wouldn't go as far as to a contentious topic, but it's been one that the industry knows there's some issues with. And knew that they're gonna need a solution for it. Of course, there's always budget challenges, but the biggest issue is you have folks offshore who are isolated who are it's almost like a town out there. At any given time, there'll be a thousand, 1500, 2000 people. If you run the numbers with all the heavy lift vessels offshore. So at any given time, you're talking hundreds if not thousands of people, and they don't have an ambulance service. There is no ambulance service. Out there, there's, you don't just call 9 1 1 and have a ambulance show up. Up to this point, they've been using the Coast Guard. To a limited degree, but the problem is the Coast Guard is also not an ambulance service. The Coast Guard serves the entire region of New England with one helicopter. They are out there for folks in the water. They're out there for sinking vessels. They're out there for law enforcement. They have a lot of other responsibilities. They're not designed to be an ambulance service for several hundred, if not thousands of people offshore. So what we've done with this program is filled that need because, that obviously can manifest itself in all sorts of different ways. Most of them not good if your ambulance service is not available. Developers have seen the need to have an ambulance service to bring folks back. Lord forbid there be any injury or medical conditions offshore. So that's that's how we got here. Allen Hall: I didn't realize only one helicopter serving the whole sort of northeast corridor. From the Coast Guard side. 'cause if you watch the news, anytime there's a severe storm, there's a boat that has sunk and people that need to be rescued and they're co constantly flying around trying to just do that. I didn't realize there's only one serving it. So offshore wind being 30, 40 miles off shore gets to be a real problem for the Coast Guard then? Michael Tosi: Yeah, absolutely. And it's twofold. One, it's, they can't guarantee anything. They have one helicopter in Falmouth. For these projects up here in New England. The next one is all the way down to Atlantic City, and that one helicopter in Falmouth may be on the board of Canada searching for a lost kayaker. I also part-time serving the International Guard. Every once in a while we'll back up the Coast Guard because they're all the way up in Northern Maine. And something would happen down on the island where I was at. And unfortunately we don't provide a guaranteed response posture, but if we were out, we would go look. So that's pretty commonplace. And also they won't guarantee that they come because they may have something of higher acuity. Paul spent several years in the Coast Guard flying a few jayhawks and Yeah. He can speak to a little bit about how that prioritization works Yeah. And how they're covering lots of folks. Paul Russo: Yeah. Yeah. So it's all priority, like Michael was saying, in terms of what the case may be. If you've got got a vessel cell that's sinking offshore, 200 miles offshore or something like that, then that'll take priority over somebody that may have a fracture. Or something like that on a wind turbine. So the availability of the Coast Guard while they're, listen, I spent, 14 years doing search and rescue in the Coast Guard. I have the highest regard for my brother and my colleagues there. But they are they're busy and to rely on them as a sole source for evacuating your people. It's just not the solution. If if you do indeed have a unfortunate injury offshore. Allen Hall: Yeah. And building offshore wind turbines is complicated and there's a lot of heavy equipment, a lot of moving pieces, and a lot of people as it, it sounds like now, and we're in that building phase in the United States where there's a number of construction sites going on. So there's a lot of people, technicians out there at the moment that don't have, maybe, don't have the coverage they think that they have. Correct. Paul Russo: Correct. Allen Hall: Okay. Wow, I didn't realize that. This brings in Dr. Williams on the EMS side. Because what HeliService is gonna provide is EMS services to those technicians that are offshore working on wind turbines. You've been in the EMS world for a long time, and you probably have seen everything. What are some of the challenges though, of doing helicopter EMS work and making sure that they have a program here that meets the high standards that Rhode Island and the US requires? Dr. Kenneth Williams: Thank you and thanks for inviting us to do this. One of the things that we like to say in emergency medicine is that you've never seen everything. There are always circumstances or conditions that come up that, that are novel. And when I was asked to get involved in this project I saw it as an interesting challenge and an interesting opportunity. In my past, I was medical director for. A regular medical helicopter service at the University of Massachusetts, which served both crash scenes and inter-hospital transfer, but not capable of doing this kind of work. And there's no regular medical helicopter service in the area that is capable of doing this both landing on some of the assets offshore. In doing the hoist work the regular med flights and life flights are not equipped and not capable, not trained, don't have the aviation or the medical training to do this. Their aircraft are not equipped with the hoist. They may not be the right configuration or power to do this kind of work. When Michael came to us at the Department of Health I happened to be sitting in the room. Because I'm also the state EMS medical director and it seemed like a good fit for me to participate and what we've put together in in very short timeframe and very efficiently with some great help from the whole team here is of paramedic level, fully staffed and fully equipped air ambulance that is limited to supporting the wind farm industry. We're not competing. With the med flights and life flights, we're not gonna be going to a hospital to hospital or going to a crash on the highway. We're here just to support the wind farm industry and we've done extensive training with a group of paramedics and the group of flight engineer hoist operators that we have both day and night, and of acquired an extensive outfit of equipment that meets the Rhode Island standards for a paramedic ambulance. So we have medications. We have a full cardiac monitor, we have oxygen, we have suction. All the things that we, you would get in a ground paramedic ambulance, we will have available for people out on the wind farm assets. Allen Hall: Wow, that is huge. And a difficult task actually to do that. It was Dr. Kenneth Williams: quite a challenge to assemble all of the equipment and to do it in short order and organize it. The state does have a list of things you need to have, but they don't tell you what color bag to put it in or what put to put in what pocket, and to figure out how to do it so that we can safely and efficiently place it in the aircraft and take good care of patients. Took a lot of work and a lot of cooperation from the excellent team here. Michael Tosi: And I,...
Nordex Outsells Vestas, GE Vernova Rebuilds Wind Team
Nordex closes in on Vestas in onshore orders, GE Vernova rebuilds its wind team, Nexxis buys BladeBug, and wooden blades draw doubts. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Allen Hall: Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with R- Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron, and it is another crazy week in wind energy. Uh, we should start off with GE Vernova, because if you've been following your LinkedIn pages, you will see a number of new faces and even a couple of press releases. And if you do follow wind closely, you know that GE Vernova has been in a little bit of a tailspin, and that won't go on very long before they will try to right that ship. Well, here we go. Uh, GE Vernova, uh, is grabbing a bunch of talent. Claire McDonough, the chief financial officer who took [00:01:00] Rivian, the, the truck maker, through its IPO recently and led its cost-cutting push, uh, is leaving the electric vehicle maker to become the CFO of GE Vernova. So not just wind, the whole kit and caboodle, uh, gas turbines and the, all the transformer businesses. Uh, and she'll start at the beginning of 2027. She replaces, uh, the retiring Ken Parks, and it sounds like Ken is gonna stay on and help Scott Strazik as an advisor, which I'm sure he appreciates. Uh, but, uh, Claire is not the only new face there. Christie Hopkins, who spent more than 26 years at Siemens Energy and Siemens Gamesa, has joined as executive director for Wind North America New Units, leading sales across US, Canada, and Mexico. And then Gio Scialdone, who has been on the podcast many times with 3S Left, is leaving 3S Left. I'm-- That's a big hit, I'm sure. Uh, and he's coming back to GE, where he started at many, many years ago as a technician and built the wind [00:02:00] farm outside my front door when I lived in Massachusetts. He'll come back as global head of, of commercial services and a number of other, uh, repowers and a number of other things. So basically between, uh, Christie and Gio, it sounds like they're gonna cover the planet, uh, for wind energy This is a big change, everybody. Uh, our concern was, was GE gonna shut down the wind division? Yolanda, it looks like they're keeping it and reinforcing it with some really strong candidates. Yolanda Padron: If they can hopefully get everything together and, and get at least the wind side, um, back to where it once was or close to it, uh, it could be a really good win for their operations sites, right? Their operational sites who currently don't really know what the forecast is gonna be for their sites in five, 10 years if GE just goes down. Rosemary Barnes: I was actually watching... There's this new creator, I don't know who they [00:03:00] are, but some creator I've been watching Instagram reels from where they go through just, uh, you know, like, historical things, but mostly related to business or government, and one of the ones that he was talking about that I thought was interesting was about, um, when engineering companies get a non-technical CEO in for the first time, like an MBA type, and what they typically do. And I think that GE is usually, like, the just shining example of how to run businesses in that way. But the typical pattern is, and he had some examples, which I can't recall, so yeah, sorry, my, um, anecdote will be fact-free, but trust me, there are, is some data behind it. But it, it gave the example of, yeah, so the, um, y- you know, like, a traditional engineering company like Boeing might be an example, and GE Vernova would be another one. They build up their strength and dominance by investing a lot in R&D, and all of the technical staff really care about the company and are [00:04:00] all contributing to, um, you know, making sure that they continue to dominate technologically. And then if you get an MBA-type manager in, the sh- the typical pattern goes that they fire a bunch of people that were working in R&D, like reduce the R&D spend massively, reduce the wages of all the technical people. Technical people start to have less say in how the company, um, is managed. And in the short term, they get spectacular results from that, right? You know, profits go massively up if you stop investing in R&D for a few years, um, because, you know, R&D takes quite a while to, to pay off, so you're not gonna notice the pain. You're gonna see the financial benefit immediately. You're not p- notice the pain for ages. And, you know, without going into too d- in-depth analysis about the wind energy companies that are around today, I think if you look at the companies that are going well You see that there are companies that continue to prioritize, um, research and [00:05:00] development and continue to prioritize the opinions of the technical people working for them. And I personally think that GE is maybe gone just a little bit too long with the MBA-type way of running a company. Um, and that, yeah, like that's really great for a little while, but it's not a long-term strategy, and I don't know how you pull back from it. Um, I haven't seen any turnaround stories like that. But yeah, just some, some food for thought that that might be part of the reason why they're struggling. But I would say that 'cause I'm an engineer, and yeah, engineers hate to be managed by non-technical people, so. Allen Hall: I wanna get Gio's title right because he is responsible for a lot at GE Vernova on the wind side. It would be Global Head of Commercial Services and Repower at GE Vernova. So global repower, that's a huge area, and in services, as we know, is one of the profitable areas within GE Vernova Wind. Very important position, and he's an engineer [00:06:00] That's good Maybe Rosemary Barnes: that's the start of the comeback, comeback king. Allen Hall: It, it def- definitely could be. Yeah. Well, the numbers are in for the first half of 2026, and Europe is having the best wind year ever. Wind Europe reported, uh, 8.8 gigawatts of new capacity installed in the first six months, uh, up 30% from the same period last year. Germany alone put up more than 500 turbines. That's quite a few. Uh, but behind those numbers, there's another story that is unfolding, which is Nordex, the German turbine maker, is closing in on Vestas, the Danish wind tu- turbine maker, in the onshore market. Uh, in August, Nordex booked more than twice the megawatts that Vestas did. Uh, a Danske Bank analyst says Nordex has been quicker on its feet, picking up market share that left behind b- by Siemens Gamesa and GE Vernova. Uh, although [00:07:00] Vestas is still way out in front in, in terms of total gigawatts that they're gonna produce. This is an interesting shift, right? I mean, we've been li- seeing this the last, ooh, year or so, where Nordex is picking up clients that were formerly GE Vernova or are even, like, massively dedicated to GE Vernova or Siemens Gamesa. Uh, it does seem like there's an opening there, and so far, at, at least people we've talked to, uh, from the Weather Guard side, l- literally like Nordex. They like the response to problems and questions and things that maybe they hadn't seen out of other suppliers. Was this unexpected, or is this a, a sort of a natural outgrowth of where Nordex is headed? Rosemary Barnes: Is this one year of this trend, or is it, has it been growing for a few? I, Allen Hall: I think it's been growing for a couple. It's been growing Rosemary Barnes: for a few years Matthew Stead: now. Isn't it one month? Yeah. One month? Allen Hall: It's one month, but if you- ... if you beat Ves- if you beat Vestas at all and you're Nordex, think, if you look, think [00:08:00] about four or five years ago, and I've, if I said Nordex had outsold Vestas, and maybe it had happened, uh, but it would just seem implausible Rosemary Barnes: Yeah Allen Hall: that that would Rosemary Barnes: even occur No, I mean, if it's, if it's several years then, then fair enough, that's a turn. I just say that because y- you know, most of this capacity is offshore, right? And offshore projects are so lumpy. You, you know, like, when you make a sale, you make, like, a gigawatt sale. Um, and so I think it's pretty hard to take, like, a single year, or even, like, within a couple of years it could still be the same project. So, um, that's one point. And then the other point is, like, when you look at the breakdown of, uh, what did we say? Europe put in 8.8 gigawatts, and 3.4 of that was in Germany. I think European countries do tend to be a little bit, like, protective of their own companies. Or, I mean, ev- it's natural for, for everyone, you know, has some sort of preference- Mm whether it's explicit encouragement or support, or whether it's just, like, a warm, fuzzy feeling that you have for a company that's from your [00:09:00] country. I think that that possibly has something to do with it. So yeah, if I would no- if I was Nordex, I would see this as encouraging and probably not just consider it a slam dunk from here. But, you know, something to, to grow on. 'Cause I, I know traditionally German companies have had some trouble succeeding as much outside of Germany as within it. Matthew Stead: Mm. I think this is a good example of the, the last discussion we had about GE. I mean, you know, Nordex, Vestas, Siemens, Gamesa are investing in their development, investing in their technology, improving the quality. ...
Siemens Gamesa Builds Hornsea Blades, NEMS Invests in Perth
Siemens Gamesa starts Hornsea 3 blade production in Hull, Germany approves an Offshore Wind Act amendment, and Nexxis buys BladeBUG. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript Uptime News FlashSeptember 7, 2026Happy Monday, everyone. Well, let's talk about the biggest wind farm on earth. It doesn't exist yet, but its blades are being built right now. Over in Hull, England, Siemens Gamesa just started making blades for Ørsted's Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm. That's two point nine gigawatts, one hundred and ninety-seven turbines. Each blade is longer than a football pitch. Fourteen hundred workers build blades in that factory, turning raw materials into finished product. When complete, Hornsea 3 will power more than three million British homes. It's the single largest offshore wind farm in the world.And if we slide over to Germany for a moment, the German cabinet just approved an amendment to the Offshore Wind Act, the WindSeeG. It's headed to the Bundestag next. The goal? New rules by January first, twenty twenty-seven. But the Offshore Wind Energy Foundation says the draft does not go far enough. Sixteen gigawatts of awarded projects are still waiting on final investment decisions. Sixteen — that's quite a few. The foundation wants a new way for developers to hand back sites they can't build, so those sites can be re-tendered quickly under conditions that actually work. Sort of a use-it-or-lose-it approach. That's the idea.We'll head a little further east to India. India ranks fourth in the world for installed wind power, but probably not for long. A government official said this week that India will overtake Germany and become the world's third-largest wind energy nation by twenty thirty — one hundred seven gigawatts of installed capacity. India added a record six gigawatts last year alone, shattering their previous record of a little over four gigawatts. And twenty-eight more gigawatts are under construction right now. Impressive.Let's head down to Western Australia, because a company called National Electric Motor Services, NEMS for short, is building a one million dollar facility in Perth to test and repair wind turbine generators. Right now, Australian wind farm operators ship their broken generators overseas for repairs, and that takes months. NEMS is the only authorized service center for ELIN Motoren in all of Western Australia. This is the fifth project funded through Australia's Wind Energy Manufacturing Co-investment program. Local repair, faster turnaround, and homegrown capability — that's all good.And staying in Australia, Perth-based Nexxis Technology just bought a British robotics company, BladeBUG. BladeBUG is a robot that uses suction cups to crawl across wind turbine blades. Nexxis already has a robot called Magneto that uses electromagnetic adhesion to climb steel structures. If you put the two together, you can inspect almost any surface on a turbine, or about anything else. Add AI and machine vision, and you have robots that can see what human eyes might miss, from places human hands shouldn't have to reach. It's safer, faster, and it's going to be a lot smarter.One more story before we finish today. Siemens Gamesa has now installed more than 300 recyclable blades in six countries. The secret is a new resin. Unlike conventional resins, this one lets you separate the blade components at end of life, so you can separate the fabric from the resin. Cool stuff. Jonas Pagh Jensen, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa, says the technology is ready for full-scale use. And Siemens Gamesa has already installed 36 GreenerTower units — steel towers with 63% lower carbon emissions. So although sustainability may have faded from the headlines, it's still in tender documents, and it's showing up more than ever. In Denmark, the Netherlands, and France, buyers are all asking about recyclability and decarbonization before they award contracts.So what should you be watching this week? Recyclability is no longer a nice-to-have — it's a must-have, and it's showing up in tender scoring. If your blades can't be recycled at end of life, you may not win the contract to begin with. And a lot of supply chains are going local. Australia doesn't want to ship generators overseas anymore. India is building its own turbine factories. The countries buying wind power want it built at home. For professionals in the wind industry, the competitive edge is shifting — it's not just who can build the best turbine, it's who can build it locally, recycle it fully, and inspect it without putting a person in a harness.
Motordoc Diagnoses Drivetrains From the Ground
Howard Penrose of MotorDoc joins to discuss the circulating currents killing main bearings and drivetrain checks without a climb. Reach out at [email protected] or on LinkedIn. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Howard, welcome back to the program. Howard Penrose: Hey, thanks for having me. Allen Hall: It's about time everybody realizes what motorDoc can do. There's so much technology, and I've been watching- Yeah ... your Chaos and Caffeine podcast on Saturday morning, which are full of really, really good information about the motorDoc as a company, all the things you're doing out in the field, and how you're solving real-world problems, not imaginary ones- Yeah real-world problems. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and Howard Penrose: whatever annoys me that week. Exactly. And, and whatever great coffee I'm trying out. Yes. Except for a few. We've had the ReliaSquatch down our- Yes ... um, a couple of times. Uh, yeah, no, I, I enjoy it, and we gotta get you on there sometime. I don't do- I, it- ... a lot of interviews other than an AI character we put in. Allen Hall: It's a very interesting show because you're [00:01:00] getting a little bit of comedy and humor and s- Yeah ... and a, and a coffee review, which is very helpful because I've tried some of the coffees that you have reviewed, that you've given the thumbs up to. But if you're operating wind turbines and you're trying to understand what's happening on the drivetrain side, on the generator, everything out to the blades even, main bearings, gearboxes- Yeah all those rotating heavy, expensive parts, there's a lot of ways to diagnose them- Howard Penrose: Yes ... Allen Hall: that are sort of like we can look at a gear, we can look at a joint, we can look at roller bearings, whatever, but motorDoc has a way to quickly diagnose all of that chain in about- Yeah ... 15 seconds. Howard Penrose: Well, a little longer than 15 sec- more like a minute. A minute, okay. It feels like paint drying. But- Uh, in any case, yeah. Uh, uh, and, and what's kind of funny is, um, back in the '90s, uh, EPRI actually accidentally steered the technology away from its [00:02:00] core purpose, which was in 1985, um, NAVSEA, the US Navy, had done research on using current signature analysis for looking at pumps, fans, and compressors, the bearings, the belts, the components, all the rotating components using the motor as the sensor. Not too much different than we are now. I mean, mind you, we got better resolution now, we've got, uh, more powerful-- I mean, I look at my data from the '90s, and now it's completely different. Um, and then Oak Ridge National Lab, same thing, bearings and gears in motor-operated valves. So in 2003, we were the first ones to apply electrical and current signature analysis to some wind turbines in the Mojave Desert. Wow. Yeah. So, um, nobody had tried it before. Everybody said it couldn't be done. And, uh, that was a bad thing to say to me because- ... it meant I was gonna get it [00:03:00] done. Right. At that time, um, we were looking at bearing issues and some blatant conditions with the, um, with the, uh, generator using a technology called Altest, 'cause I was with Altest at the time. And, uh, I had taken an EMPath software and blended it with a, a power analyzer, and they still have that tool to this day. I was using that technology all the way through 2015. 2016, I should say. And then- And then switched over to the pure EMPath, which was more of an engineering tool. And then more recently, in 2022, uh, made the decision to ha- to take all the work we'd done on over 6,000 turbines, uh, looking at how we were looking at the data and what we were doing on the industrial side, and took a, uh, created a current signature analyzer that would do one phase of current to analyze the entire powertrain. Allen Hall: So when you tell [00:04:00] operators you can do this magic, I think a lotta times they gotta go, " Howard Penrose: What?" Oh, yeah, yeah. They don't understand it because they're used to vibration- Right ... which is a point analysis system. Right. Allen Hall: Vibration at this- Yeah ... particular location. Yeah. One spot- Even if it's- ... or a couple Howard Penrose: spots triax, they're reading through material, up through a transducer. Hopefully, they put it above the bearing and not in the middle of the machine like everybody is now, because everybody's trying to sell a sensor. Right. True. They're not selling a- they're not selling accuracy. They're just selling sensors. Right. So, um- Yeah ... you know, uh, I, I'll, I'll even talk about one of the companies here. We've got Onyx here, and they do it right. I mean, they've been doing it right pretty well because we've been doing some of the same towers they're on, and we can match the data they're getting. Oh, good. Right? Yeah. Uh, so but they get it in multiple spots, and there's areas they can't quite reach, so we'll detect those areas as well. So it's a good melding of two technologies. Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Sure, Howard Penrose: sure. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you have electrical signature and you have vibration, but in [00:05:00] cases if you don't have vibration, we're a direct replacement. Allen Hall: Because the generator- I Howard Penrose: dare say that. Allen Hall: Yeah. Whichever-- Howard Penrose: I dare say that, um, with- Well, the Allen Hall: generator is acting as the sensor. Howard Penrose: The air gap. The air gap in the generator s- specifically, yes. Yeah. Generator, motor, transformer. Right. Allen Hall: Yeah. So any of those- Mm-hmm ... you can clamp onto, look at the current that's on there. Everything that's happening on the drivetrain, in the gearbox, out on the rotor- Yep ... main bearings, all of that creates vibration. Creates a torque. T- a, a torque. Yeah. Yes, more exactly a torque. Yeah. And that's seen in the generator, in the current coming out of the generator. Yes. So those signals, although minute, are still there. Yes. So if you clamp onto that current coming out of the generator, you'll see the typical AC sine wave sitting there. But on top of that- Is all the information about how that drivetrain is doing Howard Penrose: Absolutely, and everything else. Anything electrical comes through [00:06:00] that. So what you do is just like vibration, you do a spectral analysis. So every component has a frequency associated with it, just like vibration. It's, as a matter of fact, I, I keep having to try to explain to people electrical and current signature analysis is no different than vibration analysis. It's the same concept. We use the same tools. The signature looks just a little different. It's a little noisier, um, but you need that noise in order to see everything. But we have a time waveform, and instead of, um, inches per second or millimeters per second, whatever, you know, uh, velocity, acceleration, and displacement, uh, what we end up with is decibels is the optimal method. You can look at straight voltage signatures at those points or, or current signatures, but the values are so small that you have to look at it from a logarithmic standpoint. Right. There are some benefits to it versus vibration, and there's some things that aren't as good as vibration. [00:07:00] So, you know, we, we do... You have to... Any technology is gonna have their strengths and weaknesses. Sure. So we will see everything all at once. Load doesn't matter. Right. Speed doesn't matter. It's... Only reason speed matters is the location of the frequencies. Uh, so the higher the resolution, meaning the longer you take data, the less chance you have on a lightly lo- loaded machine of blending the peaks together. Right. Um, on the flip side, if I have two bearings turning at the exact same speed, I couldn't tell you which one it is. Because they're the same. Right. Allen Hall: And the mechanical features of that bearing is w- what creates the signal that you're measuring. Exactly. So if a bearing has five rollers versus 10, just imaginary thing. Yeah, yeah. Five rollers versus 10 has a different electrical signature, so you can determine, like, that bearing, that 10 roller bearing- Yes ... has the problem, the five is fine. Yes. Yeah. That's the magic, and I think people don't translate the mechanical world into the electrical world. That that's what's [00:08:00]happening. They, Howard Penrose: they don't because, because what's happening is they named it wrong. Allen Hall: Yes. Howard Penrose: A majority of our users are mechanical folks. Sure. Our vibration analysts and stuff like, 'cause they know how to look at the signatures. Right. Everybody tries to force it on their electrical people, and electrical people go, "We don't know what this is." Yeah. And it's, it's, it's a matter of that training and, and, you know, in the electrical world, you're not taught to look at that. Right. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Mechanical world, you're taught to look at that. So our intern, we were trying to bring in electrical engineering interns and found out that just wasn't working. So last year, I brought in my first, uh, intern that's, you know, he's been with us now since I brought him in. Okay. Uh, and, uh, Amar, and, uh, you know, he's helped us develop our vi- uh, vibration software to go along with it. Guess what? It's the same thing. It's the exact same sy- system Um, but we just take in a vibration signal instead. ...
India Locks Down Turbine Data, Danish Wind Jobs Dip
India now requires turbine data, control centers, and R&D to sit inside its borders. Plus a study on reverse flow loads in parked blades, Envision's spare parts push across Southeast Asia, and Danish wind employment falling to 32,700. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Maine Approves 800 MW Wind Farm, Ming Yang Lobbies UK
Allen covers Clearway's 800 MW wind farm in Maine, the state's largest ever, along with Suzlon's $1.2 billion project in India and Masdar's growing battery pipeline in the UK. Then Mingyang lobbies the UK's new Prime Minister to reverse its ban from British waters. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Up in Maine this week... they picked a spot for a wind farm. Eight hundred megawatts. The biggest the state has ever seen. Hold that thought. Halfway around the world... India broke ground on something even bigger. And in between... a Chinese company knocked on Britain's door. Again. Start in Aroostook County, Maine. The woods up there grow timber... and wind. The Maine Public Utilities Commission chose Clearway Energy to build eight hundred megawatts of turbines on commercial timberland in the rural north. Avangrid will string the power line to connect those turbines to the New England grid. Commission Chair Phil Bartlett says the project will save Maine ratepayers at least three hundred and eighty-seven million dollars. Two-point-four billion in economic output. Thousands of construction jobs. Six hundred megawatts stay in Maine. The rest goes to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. Five states... one wind farm... one forest. Now fly east across the Atlantic. In Rochdale, England... Abu Dhabi's Masdar just flipped the switch on its second battery storage plant in Britain. Thirty-five megawatts. Seventy megawatt-hours. Enough to power thirty-five thousand homes a day. And it responds to grid swings in milliseconds. This is part of Masdar's one-billion-pound pipeline of battery projects across the UK. Three gigawatt-hours planned. One of the largest storage buildouts in the country. Wind needs a partner. Batteries are volunteering. Now south... to India. Suzlon just broke ground on thirteen hundred and twenty-five megawatts of wind in Ananthapuramu, Andhra Pradesh. The investment... about one-point-two billion dollars. Sixteen hundred new jobs. Suzlon already has a blade factory in the region. Capacity... twelve hundred and sixty megawatts a year. And the company is training twelve thousand young people, including three thousand women, in green energy skills. India's wind sector just crossed fifty-eight gigawatts. It was twenty-one gigawatts in twenty fourteen. And staying in India... Saudi Arabia's Alfanar Group just put one hundred million dollars into its Indian turbine subsidiary Senvion. Thirty-four million released this month. The rest in weeks. Senvion builds one-point-five gigawatts of turbines a year. Saudi money. Indian manufacturing. Global ambition. Now... one more item. And this one has an edge. Ming Yang... the Chinese turbine maker banned from British waters on national security grounds... wants back in. The company had plans for a one-point-five-billion-pound factory in Inverness, Scotland. Fifteen hundred direct jobs. Eight thousand in the supply chain. Labour ministers shut it down in March. The Ministry of Defence worried about spying. European rivals complained about Chinese state subsidies. Now Ming Yang is lobbying the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to reverse the ban. The company says it can deliver "growth in every postcode." That phrase... is Burnham's own. A government spokesman says there are no plans to review the decision. So what does this week tell us? Supply chains are going local. Saudi capital into Indian turbine factories. Maine insisting on new transmission before new generation. Britain locking the door on Chinese hardware while Abu Dhabi builds its battery network. The message is clear. Countries want wind power. But they want to own the pieces. Watch for this. Permitting... not technology... is the bottleneck now. Maine's project was authorized in twenty twenty-one. It is twenty twenty-six and they are still years from turning a blade. And storage is no longer a side conversation. Masdar's billion-pound UK commitment says batteries are becoming infrastructure... not experiments. For professionals in this industry... the work ahead is not just building turbines. It is building trust with governments who are choosing energy security over speed. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 31st of August 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
Morten Handberg Answers the Big RCA Questions
Blade specialist Morten Handberg on when an RCA pays off, what SCADA data can and cannot tell you, and why erosion gets written off as wear and tear. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Morten, welcome back to the program. Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen. It's so-- It's, it's so such a great, great pleasure to be back again. Allen Hall: We have a lot to talk about today because of root cause analysis and the number of operators that are really struggling with RCAs, of when to do them or when not to go down the RCA pathway. It, it-- There's a, a ton of confusion in the industry about it, and we thought, well, this would be a great time for Morten to come back and explain when is the right time for an RCA. So Morten, when is the right time for an RCA? What should we look for? Or wh- how big of the problem sh-should it be [00:01:00]before I find somebody to help me do this RCA? Morten Handberg: So the obvious question is typically when something really bad happens, then I think everyone can agree that, you know, we should definitely do an RCA to get to the bottom of this. And that's also just from a-- It's both from a technical perspective to sort of figure out, you know, why did this happen, and, you know, um, who... Well, what is the, what is the main cause? Is it, is it something that, you know, it was happening while we were operating the asset, be it turbine or whatever? Uh, was it something that was inert in the bla- in the, in the turbine, the blade, the gearbox that was just waiting to happen? So that's always very important to know. Also because it tells you what is the chance of this happening again, you know, and, and can you prevent it in a meaningful way? Um, and there's also a, a safety aspect to it because it's-- so it also tells, you know, uh, what if, you know, you don't want blade falling left and right. You don't want gearbox ex- [00:02:00] gearboxes exploding. You don't want towers to collapse. We can all agree on that. Uh, and you don't want this to happen because you don't, you don't want to run the risk that someone gets hurt, uh, hurt by it. So then RCA is a really important tool to investigate and find out, well, what happened here, and how can we prevent it, and what is the chances that it happens another time? So that, that is sort of the-- That we can always agree and we would do it when, when something really terrible happens. Then there is the, you know, not so critical ones where, you know, you are just in time, uh, that, that, that you catch it, and then the question is, what is the-- when is then the right time for that? Allen Hall: There seems to be a couple of phases in the lifespan of a turbine where the RCA, it becomes a little more critical. In that first year or two, particularly if the turbine is under warranty or you're getting close to the end of the warranty, there-- at least from a lot of operators I have spoken with, that, uh, [00:03:00] they would like to do an RCA as more of a documentation of what has happened on the site to then maybe claim serial defect maybe l- at another point. There's just like the record-keeping part of RCAs, which I'm not sure is the right level of effort for what you're trying to accomplish. Is, is the RCA the right approach there if you have a, a gearbox issue or a blade issue early in the life cycle of a turbine? Morten Handberg: There is definitely before the end of warranty, there is a, there is an, there is an aspect, you know, when should you actually do an RCA? And it should, it, it should benefit you in a way where you can-- where there is an economical benefit, because it might not be a massive critical issue, but something that will lead to a lot of maintenance down the t- down the line. Um, but if you want to make it successful in the warranty claim, then you really need to know what is the, what is the cost behind it. Is it wear and tear? Is it [00:04:00] a manufacturing defect? Is it, uh, environmental conditions, uh, that are, that are causing it? And these, these becomes really important. That's also why you can, you, you can, you can do an RCA on erosion, uh, because it, it can be important if you see massive, uh, erosion degradation that you really want to understand, what are my local conditions? Um, and a good example here is Australia, because Australia doesn't work like Europe. We-- You can take all the experiences we have from Europe, but it does not work in Australia. So you might want to do your, your, uh, root cause on that specific issue localized, uh, to really understand it, and that's when RCA becomes really strong to sort of find out what are the underlying mechanisms, uh, that enables this. But you can also pour in a lot of cost and effort into relatively minor defects, uh, or issues, um, where it does not really benefit you in the long run, and that will always be a challenge before end of warranty because you don't really know what will, [00:05:00] what will hit you down the long run, and that's where you, you know, then, then it becomes more of a strategic decision. You know, breaking bolts, if you've seen one, maybe you don't want to do an RCA on it. That does not really seem to matter to you that much. It's just random occurrence. But if you start to see it, uh, in, in quick succession on multiple turbines, adjacent bolts, then it's important for several reasons. One, you might-- If you're still within warranty, you really wanna know why is this happening and, and how do you fix it long term so this not-- does not become a headache for the next 25 years? Um, so you want to, you want-- you really want to understand that. And two You can, you can live with a few broken bolts on the blade, but there, there will become a critical point where the blade will liberate and then, uh, it will, it will col- it will, it will, yeah, leave the turbine or, or collapse on its own, uh, depending on the turbine model. And, and that is really critical to, to, uh, to avoid and, and to, uh, to [00:06:00]understand that. Um, and maybe the outcome of the idea of the RCA is monitoring, but that is a really important knowledge to have. Allen Hall: That's a good point about the monitoring aspect because I think a lot of times when a operator chooses to go down the RCA path, what they're expecting is just to get a report of this is the conditions that created the damage or created the unexpected outcome Uh, it, sometimes you may not be able to get to that final answer, and the answer can be, we need to put conditioning monitoring on to have a better understanding of what the fault is. That's not a invalid RCA. That's a really useful tool. But a lot of operators don't think of an RCA as being that sort of outcome. That, that is actually where a lot of the industry problems can be solved, right, is to get the engineering up in upfront to then maybe have a little longer time or maybe instrument another [00:07:00] turbine to see how big this problem is. I- is, is that the approach that which you would, uh, aspire to apply to some of these wind sites today? Morten Handberg: I think that monitoring, uh, understanding the monitoring requirements is a very critical point, uh, outcome of an RCA. Both-- And you can use it both during your investigation to sort of find out when you have, you know, uh, to, to find out how do you detect it efficiently, uh, but also what are the right methodologies and what is it actually that you want to achieve, uh, with mitigating this issue, and then what, what kind of, what kind of monitoring do you need. So for instance, if you have, if you have, if you have cracks starting in your laminate, you know, do you need acoustics? Uh, do you need deflection monitoring? Um, is it es- is it vibration monitoring, or is it, um, or is it some kind of, uh, video monitoring, um, that or, or infrared scan that, that, that you need to, to keep, um, to, to, to ca- And again, the essential [00:08:00] part is then how do you catch it in time that it does not become a critical issue? Uh, and, and then by using the RCA to find out, well, what is the best methodology to, to detect this and detect it in a cost-effective way, uh, that, that leaves you in, in good shape to, to maintain your turbines. That is a, you know, that is a really strong value proposition for the RCA. Allen Hall: Morten, when I talk to a lot of operators about doing an RCA, uh, they don't have access to high-speed scada, scada data. They, they have access to low speed, depending on what their arrangement is with the OEM. Uh It's really hard to get the high-resolution data, and they do not have the algorithms that maybe be able to tell them something about the turbine. They'll just have sort of raw data streams. How important is it to get some of that high-speed data and the understanding of how that turbine is working as a, a fault [00:09:00] happens or s- some sort of failure happens? Morten Handberg: It kinda depends on what it is that you're, that you're looking for. So for a lot of... for, for, so for SCADA data, it will, it will give you, um, a more holistic view of what, how the turbine is performing. It will give you the power production, wind speeds, wind turbine, uh, the blade pitching. Um, so it kinda gives you an understanding about how it is, how, how it is operating, but it st- does not really give you any specifics about the condition of, of the blades, of the gearbox, of the bearing, of the main shaft, of the tower. So, um, so it does,...
What Operators Want to Hear at WOMA 2027
Two days of operator meetings in Melbourne shape the WOMA 2027 agenda, from performance upgrades and cable faults to foundations and bolts. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with Matthew Stead and Rosemary Barnes. And Rosemary, where are we? Rosemary Barnes: We're in Melbourne, and we have been visiting future attendees and sponsors and people interested in, in the event to see what topics that we should be talking about. What are the hot topics of the moment? Allen Hall: Which is a very interesting two days, Matthew, in that, uh, we h- did meet with a number of operators based in Australia, but, uh, they're also very worldly. They have talked to companies all over about operations and, and maintenance, and there are some really eye-opening topics- Mm that will be- Mm ... at WOMA 2027 this year. Matthew Stead: Yeah. The thing that was interesting for me was [00:01:00]that actually the topics have changed each year. So, um, they're evolving and the industry's continuing to, to do better, and so that, that was really interesting. Performance upgrades was probably one of the big areas of, of new interest, I think. I think we heard with the pressure on pricing, uh, the market and so forth, you know, that, that 1% or 2% now is becoming more important. Um, so I think, uh, upgrades will definitely feature quite a lot. Um, balance of plant was also a big topic. Um, you just can't ig- ignore the, um, transmission, you can't ignore the transformers, you can't ignore, uh, condensers and all these sorts of things, so yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Cables. Matthew Stead: Cables. Rosemary Barnes: Terminations. Terminations of cables. Specifically raised several times. Allen Hall: Yep. Yeah. It's all about being more efficient, uh, getting more production, and then with the PPA prices, uh, that are changing- Matthew Stead: Mm ... Allen Hall: rapidly, uh, everybody is paying more attention to the bottom line. Matthew Stead: Mm, mm. Allen Hall: Absolutely. There, there's less cash running around, uh, chasing new development. It's [00:02:00] more of a focus on making sure your, at least your existing assets are performing as, as well as they can be- Mm ... which then opens up the, uh, Pandora's box of opportunity. Mm. Because there are 1%'s all around a wind turbine. More specifically, uh, all the drive train issues, the blade issues, the generator issues, and even going into the substation. Mm. I, I was really shocked on BOP e- the, the one topic that came up, uh, yesterday and today was buried cables. Mm. Like- Matthew Stead: Faults ... Allen Hall: faults. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Junctions. Finding- Yeah ... finding faults and what to do about them. Yeah. Yeah. But I think in addition to just wanting more revenue, I think people have, are getting more sophisticated about what actually matters and then the finances. You know, everyone's focused so much on availability, and now people- Mm ... are like, okay, yeah, like once you're at a certain level of availability, gets harder and harder to get more. And actually, you know, not all availability is equal. Is good. It, it [00:03:00] depends. Yeah. Yeah, like you wanna, um, you wanna focus on how much you're generating at the times when electricity prices are high specifically, which usually means during lower wind speed periods. Yeah. Which is actually good because that matches really well with what is actually possible. It's, it's hard to get more power out of the turbine if it's at, you know, its rated power, then you're not g- More efficiency is not gonna get you any more, um, power output, whereas lower in the power curve- Mm ... um, when wind speeds are lower, there's less electricity in the grid and so prices are higher. And so- Mm ... yeah, I mean, that's, that's why people are really asking to know more about what efficiency upgrades are possible, better ways to operate, scheduled maintenance, um, all those sorts of things. Mm. So that will be really interesting. Matthew Stead: Raising the bar on sophistication. Um, but also life extension Allen Hall: Yes, a lot of discussion about life extension Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, end of life and life extension End of life Yeah, um- Matthew Stead: Foundations, structures Which is Allen Hall: tied to PPA. Mm. A lot of that [00:04:00] discussion I, at least I looked at it as, uh, if I had a PPA and I can continue with that PPA with an existing turbine, I want to do that. Mm, Matthew Stead: mm, Allen Hall: mm. But how do I do that and how do I know that that existing turbine can last another five years? It seemed to go in five-year blocks, like can we get to another five years and then another and then, then another. Wow. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Once you get to 20, 20, 25 years, I think people like, uh, they, you know- It's getting a little- Their original agreement might have been for 20, then they kind of just assume that there will be another five, and then after that they're- Yeah ... kind of reassessing cyclically and yeah, I know that people make plans for, you know, what components are replaceable, what would they have to get in, and I think that sometimes, uh, people doing those plans aren't as familiar with the, you know, actual technical issues that are being faced. Like, is a blade a replaceable component? It may be early on in the life it sort of is, not easily, but you know, like a 25-year-old wind turbine, you know, good luck trying to order 10 new blades because you've got a, you know, an issue that's- Allen Hall: Oh, well you, you need to read the news. Did you [00:05:00] see the news today about, uh, the, the wooden wind turbine blades as a replacement for aged blades? That, that's happening- ... in real time, Rosa. Rosemary Barnes: Okay. I know they- Yeah. Yep, yep. Okay. Okay. So that, that's, that's good. Making carbon new blade. E- even so, I don't think that they're- Okay. ... gonna be, like, super-duper cheap, so you're still gonna wanna be, um, doing a trade-off between y- you know, like, what kind of repairs. You might be able to change the way you're operating to reduce loads. Um, you might be able to monitor to make sure that your blades are safe. You know, if you know that there's an issue, um, you just wanna get some advanced warning before blades start falling off your, your tower. Mm. You know, and then you can push it further. Yeah. Whereas if you've got no information, then you have to be conservative and shut it down. Yeah. So yeah, I think there's a whole lot that can be g- can be done there in that area. Matthew Stead: There was a point that came up today, which I think was close to your heart, on, you know, if you're going to be going for 1% or 2% or 0.5% AEP improvement, how do you actually measure that and how do you set up a proper experiment? So- Rosemary Barnes: Yeah ... Matthew Stead: I, I, I love that topic. [00:06:00] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. No, it's one that I, um, yeah, I deal with m- my clients I, I'm often... It's one of the things that Pablo really loves to do, is to organize trials of that nature of new technologies and see if they work. But, um, yeah, asset managers are usually very, uh, focused on fast results. You know, they've got a, a big problem and they want a solution now, so they wanna just roll out the new technology over an entire wind farm. But if you do that, then it's almost impossible. Unless you get, like, a huge benefit, like, uh, 10% gains or, you know, like reduce your failures by 50% or more, it's really hard to actually- Mm pick that out if you just replace everything. Mm. Whereas if you do a really, really good, um, trial plan- Systematic. Yeah ... and you match pairs very well so that you have, you know, a control for each turbine and there's- so many variables in a wind farm. It's not, it's not as easy as just, like, randomly choosing 50% to do and not do. Mm. Mm. Mm. Like, you have to, you know, put some work into the trial design, and then, you know, like, do your statistical calculations ahead of time to know how long it's gonna take you to get s- statistical [00:07:00]significance. So then you don't just have a gut feeling about- Yep ... how something went. You've actually got numbers, and then you can take those numbers to, you know, other wind farms that you've got- Yeah and, and know what's going on much better. Matthew Stead: Worst study is an inconclusive study. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Definitely. Allen Hall: Well, that comes back to the data analysis- Mm ... which a lot of operators mentioned, and how much data there is and what to do with it, and it did seem like a couple of operators have chosen some AI tools, varying degrees, all the way down from Microsoft Copilot to something much more complicated. Uh, but I think there's, uh, getting that d- to the last 1, 2, 3%, you're going to need those tools- Absolutely ... because what do you choose? Do you choose a blade? Do you choose a gearbox? Do you choose a generator? Do you go to the substation to get that percentage point or two Without having some really powerful tools- Mm. you may be wasting your time [00:08:00] and money. Matthew Stead: Mm. Allen Hall: Which is a, a, a very interesting, uh, aspect to wind energy because it's such an industrial business that, uh, we haven't used heavy computational tools, uh, un- until really now. Matthew Stead: Mm. Allen Hall: And maybe Australia's at the forefront because of the PPA and negative pricing is
Germany Guarantees Offshore Prices, England Wind Surge
Allen covers Germany's new offshore wind price guarantee, England's onshore wind revival, wind for Korean chip plants, and Aeris debt trouble. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. Last summer … Germany held an auction for new offshore wind capacity. Not a single company bid. Zero. This week Berlin put forward a new law to fix that. The old system asked developers to pay for the right to build in the North Sea and the Baltic. TotalEnergies and BP bid billions of euros … then walked away. So the new plan introduces contracts for difference. Build the farm … and the government backstops the price of electricity. The offshore wind association wants abandoned projects … up to sixteen gigawatts … put back on the auction block under the new rules. That is fifty billion euros worth of wind farms waiting for a second chance. The cabinet vote could come as early as next week. Stay in Europe but head west. England just posted its highest number of onshore wind applications in a decade. About forty-five proposals. Before Labour lifted the Conservatives' ban two years ago … applications averaged one megawatt a month. Now they are running at thirty-six megawatts a month. But here is the catch. The average English wind farm has just two turbines. Eight megawatts. In Scotland … the average is nine turbines and fifty-nine megawatts. England is back in the game. It is just playing small. Now cross the Pacific. South Korea selected Pacifico Energy Korea to develop the Jindo offshore wind cluster. Two-point-one-three gigawatts. That is the second and third phases of a broader three-point-two-gigawatt project off the southern coast. And here is the connection worth noting. The region is also building the Honam Semiconductor Cluster … a major chip fabrication site. Semiconductor fabs need enormous and reliable power. This wind cluster is being positioned as the energy source to feed it. Wind as baseload for chip manufacturing. That is a new kind of offtaker. Now head to Brazil. Aeris Energy makes wind turbine blades. This week the company told its creditors it needs to restructure again. Roughly three hundred and thirty million dollars in debt. Aeris already restructured last year. But revenue fell forty-eight percent in the first half of this year. The company lost roughly fifty-three million dollars. It tried to find a buyer. No one came forward. Remember TPI Composites filing Chapter Eleven in Houston last year? The independent blade business keeps getting harder. Back to North America. In Nova Scotia … Port Hawkesbury Paper is spending four hundred and fifty million dollars on thirty-one Nordex turbines. They will be the biggest onshore turbines in North America. Each one … six-point-nine megawatts. And they carry electrothermal technology that prevents ice from forming on the blades. They operate down to minus thirty Celsius. Last January … Nova Scotia's existing turbines dropped from three hundred and fifty megawatts to seventy-five in a single evening when the cold hit. For anyone building in northern climates … cold-weather performance is no longer optional. And in Minnesota … Xcel Energy broke ground on two projects this week. A hundred-and-eighty-five-mile transmission line that can carry four thousand megawatts of new wind and solar to the grid. And alongside it … a four-hundred-and-twenty-megawatt natural gas peaking plant in Lyon County for the days when the wind stops. So what does this week tell us? Germany's auction reform is the story to watch. If Berlin gets contracts for difference right … sixteen gigawatts of stalled projects could come back to life. England proves that removing a political ban releases demand … but the scale gap with Scotland shows that planning culture matters as much as planning law. The blade supply chain is still under stress. If you are in procurement … know your supplier's balance sheet. South Korea is tying offshore wind directly to semiconductor manufacturing. That kind of industrial offtaker changes the project finance equation. And from Minnesota to Nova Scotia … the message is the same. Transmission … peaking power … cold-weather reliability. The turbine is the easy part. The system around it is where the money and the risk still live. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 24th of August 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
Sunrez Products Expand in Wind O&M
Bret Tollgaard, president at Sunrez, joins to discuss faster UV blade repairs, new leading edge materials, and growing OEM approvals. Reach out to [email protected] to learn more! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Brent, welcome back to the program. Bret Tollgaard: Appreciate you having me back on. Allen Hall: There's been so much happening in the world of UV prepregs and UV adhesives over the past year. Particularly on LinkedIn, I've seen numerous repairs which have used your material, SunRes material, to fix some pretty decent, uh, blade problems. Are you seeing, just seeing a, a much wider adoption now that everybody has basically agreed that UV is the way to go? Bret Tollgaard: I, I really do think that it's starting to become one of the go-to standards for a variety of repairs in the wind market. And yeah, it's great to see both our prepregs and lights being used all over LinkedIn, showing the [00:01:00] capabilities of the materials and how happy customers are to use and adopt the materials. Allen Hall: Yeah. The UV materials are, are getting adopted by OEMs. A lot of ISPs, a, a lot of operators now have it as a standard practice to use UV cured materials just because of the speed and the time that is saved. Uh, it's, it's remarkable how much time you're saving, because the, the real kicker right now if you're trying to do a repair, even in the summer months, let's just say it's warm outside and the temperatures are right and it's calm winds, you're saving multiple hours per repair. What generally... How much time are you generally saving on a kind of a, quote unquote, "standard blade repair"? Bret Tollgaard: More and more time, actually, with each session. So we might be saving 50 upwards of 80% of the labor of a traditional epoxy repair. Um, what we've been training companies to do more and more frequently is to actually pre-consolidate the entire repair patch downtower, whether it's in the trailer or inside the tower itself. Um, and so you can pre-consolidate, get [00:02:00] all the air out in between your layers, have the primer pre-applied to the backside. That way, when you're actually uptower, it's simply peel, stick, roll, and then cure it out with our UV light. Sub 10 minutes, uh, will get you a fully cured part. Allen Hall: Wow. That's remarkable. Yeah, when I see those LinkedIn posts from all kinds of operators all around the world using your material I also noticed that the weather conditions may not be pristine like you would have to do with epoxy. So there, there's like a band of temperatures that epoxy systems generally work in. But with the UV material, I'm noticing, I've s- I s- especially over the wintertime, I saw some cold weather repairs going on. Is there any limitation really to the UV cured patches and materials in temperatures? Bret Tollgaard: There, there really aren't for the temperature ranges that people will actually be out and installing these. Some of my favorite photos are when it's negative five Celsius outside and everyone's got the big gloves, the big [00:03:00] scarves, the big warmers and everything, and they're applying our prepreg materials, uh, in below freezing conditions and still curing with the same 10-minute cycle time. Uh, another big advantage of our UV prepregs is everything's already pre-wet out, so you're not uptower with your fiberglass and your resin kicking off an epoxy or even some other, uh, you know, materials out there where it's really hard to impregnate and get that saturation and kick off with UV. And so our prepreg repair patches really lend themselves to efficiency in the field, uh, over a really broad variety of, uh, ambient temperatures. So some of the negative five, negative 10 C installs all the way up to the hot ones in Texas and India and Australia, where you've got these people and it's 100 Fahrenheit or, you know, 35 plus C, and you still cure with the same consistency, the same cure rate, the k- same cure speeds, um, really, really makes it a very versatile system. Allen Hall: It just gets rid of the variation and, and [00:04:00] that's one of the items when we look at repairs. So we're on the lightning side of this business where lightning damage happens, so we see a lot of repairs happen. We also see a lot of repairs that don't look great. They're, I mean, the vast majority do look great, but you get these occasional ones where they've tried to use epoxy in the wintertime and use a heat blanket. It, it's difficult to do. It, it just is because of the material, it's very difficult to do. I'm recommending more and more that they use a UV cure material if they're gonna go off and do it, particularly as they, uh, do what I would consider to be a temporary patch until they get where they can do more in-depth work when it's warmer outside. But it, it does really change the game because the ability to buy the material quickly is amazing. Uh, b- there's no hazardous me- chemi- chemicals in, uh, the Sunrise material at all, so it can be shipped anywhere, anytime, overnight, on a airplane, on a truck, doesn't matter. Does that really open up the marketplaces for the [00:05:00] Sunrise UV cure materials? Bret Tollgaard: 100%. And because of the long shelf life as well, um, we stock and store all of the common, um, materials used for wind. The prepreg, the putties, the surface primers. Fiberglass also does a great job of stocking and storing things. And yeah, because these can ship as unregulated materials, we get calls for next-day air shipping all the time, all over the world. And so whether it's out here domestically, it's going up to Canada, Europe, uh, Asia, Australia, um, it's really, really simplifies the whole process from start to finish. Allen Hall: Are there any special tools you need to use when applying a, a UV cured prepreg patch to a blade, or is it just standard existing tools? Is there anything unique there? Bret Tollgaard: No. It's kind of as simple as it gets. There's no vacuum bag required. There's no heat blanket required. To truly install the materials, you're gonna take off the back, uh, layer of, of the film on the backside of the [00:06:00] prepreg, re-stack and consolidate your materials. Uh, you're gonna consolidate that with a basic three-inch or six-inch bubble buster hand roller. Every technician's gonna know exactly what that is. Uh, it's a simple piece of little rolling metal that, uh, simply rolls out any air between the, the repair patches. And then after that, you're gonna grab a paintbrush, and you're gonna spread some of our surface primer over the backside of the prepreg. So you got a hand roller, and you got a paintbrush That's all you're gonna need to get the material up onto the wind blade. And then of course, to cure the material, you need a UV light to do so. The sunshine, although it will cure the material, you never have consistent sun, light intensity, you're on the shady side of the blade, et cetera. And so we've developed a variety of UV curing devices to help facilitate that. So our standard in the industry right now is what we call our Gen 2 LED lamp. It's about the size of an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper. Um, but it'll, it'll cure several square feet at a time when you're 14 to 20 inches or so away from that [00:07:00] surface. Uh, but in addition to that, we're also working on a patent pending LED array system that is gonna be a broader... Right now, it's about a half meter by one square meter surface area, and it's gonna, um, emit a very, very uniform, uh, amount of light intensity across that entire surface all at once to make it even easier for the installers so they can just strap it to the blade, cure it for five minutes, and then move it over if they have a longer, uh, you know, one to two square meter repair. Allen Hall: Wow, that's remarkable. I, I have one of your lights, and I'm always shocked at how much light intensity there is because I've used other lights and seen other lights, and then they're not nearly as bright or consistent across a, a piece of fabric, for example, where you just see uniformity. Bret Tollgaard: That is certainly one of the challenges that we've actually encountered when people say, "Oh, well, I have a UV light. I bought it on Amazon. I bought it from eBay. I bought it from somewhere where that 200 watt listed on that is not truly 200 watts, or the light intensity, [00:08:00] uh, that they, you know, claim to have. UV cure materials need the correct wavelength. They also need the correct light intensity on that surface to guarantee your depth of cure and to make sure that you're truly bonding to the base substrate behind you. The thicker you go, the more light intensity you're going to need. So a lot of the knockoff materials really just don't do it justice, um, and which is why we've, you know, intentionally built the LED curing systems that we have to cure with our prepregs, uh, and putties and adhesives. So they are all true one, uh, one single system. Allen Hall: We've looked at different light systems here at Weather Guard, and I know we're engineer- we're an engineering group, right? So we're gonna go look to see what these different lights are, and are they really truly putting out the frequency of light which is written down on the ad. It's amazing, like, uh, the variation you get light to light. It really depends on what the source is, but, uh, to test a light, just to test a light to make sure it's putting out the right intensity at [00:09:00] th
Vestas Shares Jump 20%, UK Blocks Ming Yang Factory
Vestas doubles second quarter profit and adds €4.7 billion in market value overnight. Plus EnBW finishes He Dreiht after a V236 blade break, the UK blocks Ming Yang's Scottish factory, and India rules turbines are movable goods. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And three out of the four of us will be in Melbourne Australia talking to a number of operators and interested parties about WOMA 2027. Matthew, where will we be the couple of days we're in Melbourne? Matthew Stead: So, um, first of all, we've got the Pullman, uh, East Melbourne, which is, uh, where the venue will be for, for 2027. Um, so that'll be our home base. Um, we've got around about eight meetings planned already. So what we're doing is we're talking to the operators and a few other industry, um, players about [00:01:00] what we need to talk about, how we're gonna move the industry forward in Australia. Uh, so it's gonna be jam-packed, but there's a little bit of time left on the Friday afternoon if there's any late-minute, um, people that wanna get in contact and catch up with us, um, for next Thursday, Friday, or actually Friday. Uh, so yeah, it's gonna be a, a jam-packed time. I think we're gonna be tired, too many coffees, and talking to all the key, all the key operators, uh, about what they wanna hear about and how we can move the, the industry forward. Allen Hall: And if someone wants to put an input into the WOMA panel about what will be discussed at WOMA 2027, Matthew, how would they do that? How do they get ahold of you? Matthew Stead: Well, we have a wonderful website, and that's got all the details you could ever want. Um, you can also register on the website, so please register. Otherwise, um, I'm sure we're gonna be a sellout this year for sure. So woma2027.com. Rosemary Barnes: I just wanna add that when people talk to [00:02:00] me about the event, they always say how they love that the topics are so relevant, and the reason why that they're so relevant is because we make sure to go around to operators and find out what are the issues that they're really dealing with. So anybody that's thinking of attending, even if you can't, you know, meet us up, meet up with us in Melbourne, get in touch and tell us what are the, yeah, what are the topics that you're struggling with that you're not, um, you're having trouble finding enough information, having trouble finding the people that can help you. And y- yeah, like we take all of that information, and that's how we come up with our agenda each year. And yeah, I mean, for us, that's the, the main thing is that this has to be really relevant, up-to-date information for the industry, and we need your help to make sure it stays that way. I Matthew Stead: mean, that's what we've done the last two years, so this is-- we're just repeating the formula, um, listening to the operators and getting the good topics and the good speakers. Allen Hall: Well, Vestas has had a good quarter. Uh, the, for the last couple of years, honestly, s- [00:03:00] Vestas has been really thin on margins. There was questions about it continuing on. Rising costs mostly, uh, supply chains, especially during COVID, were bad. Uh, and, uh, but for the most part, the shareholders stayed attached. Well, that story is changing rapidly. The world's largest turbine maker posted second quarter operating profits of $400- €46 million, more than double what the analysts had expected, and it's raised its full-year margin guidance alongside half-year results for the first time in a decade. The shares climbed about 20% in Copenhagen, adding roughly €4.7 billion of market value in a single session. Now, the chief executive, uh, Henrik Andersen, ha- put it plainly to, uh, uh, in a couple of news sources that something much bigger is happening and Vestas is gonna be the, the leader in wind. That's how I read it, that everybody [00:04:00]at Vestas was super happy with the, the change in direction and things were moving up steadily. But a 20% jump in a day is remarkable. You don't see that in large industrial businesses like wind energy. Matthew, this has real implications on what happens next for Vestas because success like this usually means more orders. Matthew Stead: Yeah, I wonder what's going on under the hood there. Um, I mean, Vestas is a quality company, although, although can I just do a quick segue? How many turbines were installed in Denmark in the last, uh, two years? Like last year and the year before? Allen Hall: I don't know. How many? Matthew Stead: I believe it was eight turbines installed onshore in Denmark last year, and the year before it was 12. So, you know, maybe, maybe Vestas needs to focus on their own backyard a little bit as well. Allen Hall: I'm not sure there's a lot of opportunity there. Yeah, onshore. Matthew Stead: How can you ever be full? I mean, there's always, um, [00:05:00] uh, you know, um, you know, resiting or, um, you know, upgrades and- Rosemary Barnes: You know what? Allen and I are probably gonna get some time in Jutland, uh, later this year, um, and that area and the old wind turbines there was actually the inspiration for my whole YouTube channel. It just, 'cause there's, you know, there's turbines there from, the earliest one is, um, from the '70s and still going. I think it's one and a half megawatts, actually huge for, for that time. Um, and it was like community made, um, at Tvind. But anyway, I'm interested to revisit the site and have a look and see are these, you know, all these old turbines still there. It's only, like six years since I went through and did the experience but for the most part, they don't seem to be yet pulling down the, the small old ones and putting up big ones. There's a lot of, a lot of them are community owned. Um, and yeah, I mean, Danish people love wind turbines, but there's only so many that you can have onshore. Like, people are happy to live near them by, you know, the standards of people in other countries, but you don't want [00:06:00] one in your literal backyard. I think that there is, there, there is a, a limit to how many more onshore wind turbines that you can get in that area and offshore expansion is the more likely way to go. Um, and also I think it's, it's, it's good to recognize that if you have a domestic only or a domestic first strategy, that will only get you so far and then you have to expand, and I think Denmark did that really well. I think Germany a little bit less. I think that Enercon were a bit surprised, um, by their strategy. It, uh, they had a real hard time anyway when they had to transition away from mostly Germany to getting overseas. And obviously, like if you look at China, they have most of their installations are in China. They are trying so hard to get outside of China because it's not, like even a market as big as China, it's got decades to go before it will be full. Um, you can still recognize that that's not your, like long-term strategy for growth has to involve expansion, I think. Allen Hall: I think Vestas, regardless of what happens in Denmark, is making a play for the United States. That seems to be [00:07:00] where a significant effort is happening at the moment and on offshore. Their-- Vestas seems very excited about the offshore opportunities. Of course, there's a ton of wind turbines gonna be installed in the UK and, and all around Northern Europe. Offshore, the opportunities to buy turbines, there's only a couple that you could get today. Uh, uh, the GE Vernova offerings I, I don't think are gonna fit the mold, and I don't know if GE's even actively selling. So their competitor realistically is Siemens Gamesa, which does seem like the smaller player at the minute versus Vestas, which is heavily pushing the V236 and will fill order books like crazy, I think, uh, just based upon the, the history they've had and everybody knowing who they are. So Also on the move in Australia, right? Vestas is huge in Australia right now. Rosemary Barnes: I think it's really good that their, um, yeah, finances, uh, are [00:08:00] looking a bit better 'cause it's been funny. Like, I tried early on in my wind career to invest in, you know, wind turbine manufacturers knowing that there would be immense growth, and I was right. There, there was immense growth. Not that that was so hard to figure out that there would be, but it did not lead to any kind of, um, return on, on anything, you know. Like, that did not keep pace with the just general market. Um, so I, I stopped trying to, stopped trying to invest to that. But it has been really, really hard for the companies to, you know, raise money or y- you know, do any of the things that they need to do because they've always, like, they're growing, growing, growing, but finances has been so tight that it has been a real constraint on the amount of engineering that they could do, and I really hope that Vestas are gonna take this opportunity that they've got compared to, you know, a lot of the other manufacturers. Vestas do have really strong, um, innovation and, yeah, engineering capabilities for doing-- you know, developing new technologies and improving them, and I really hope that they're taking this opportunity to build that up. There are a lot [00:09:00] of very good engineers with a lot of
Danish Data Center Heats a Town, Vestas Breaks UK Record
A Danish data center will heat a town with its waste heat, Sumitomo buys into Celtic Sea floating wind, and Cadeler orders two more vessels. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. A data center broke ground in Denmark this week ... and the plan is for it to help heat the town. Not a slogan. But a pipe. Let me explain. The project is called Dansk Data Center 1. They put shovels in the ground on August thirteenth at the Port of Esbjerg in southern Denmark. The owners are the pension fund PensionDanmark ... the real estate firm Thylander ... and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. That last name should sound familiar. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has raised about forty-three billion euros across fifteen funds ... and builds energy projects in more than thirty countries. This time it is building a data center. Eleven and a half megawatts. By the standards of this business ... that is small. But watch how they built it. The waste heat will go into the town's district heating system ... in partnership with the local utility ... Din Forsyning. The cooling water runs in a closed loop and gets used again. And the plant can raise or lower its power draw to match whatever the Danish grid has to spare that hour. The chief technology officer put it plainly. The goal is for the data center not to be a burden ... but an active part of a balanced energy system. Commissioning is set for October of twenty twenty-seven. Now ... hold that model in your head. Because on the other side of the world ... they are still doing it the old way. Centuria Industrial is a warehouse landlord. Australia's largest pure-play industrial property trust. This week ... in its full-year results ... it told investors it is chasing more than two hundred and fifty megawatts of data center capacity. Some of that is expansion at sites it already owns. A twelve-megawatt building in Melbourne bought from Telstra back in twenty twenty. A small center in Toowoomba, Queensland. Another in Perth ... leased to Fujitsu. But the rest of that plan is warehouses. Old industrial yards in Victoria and Western Australia that Centuria wants to turn into data halls. And here is the tell. For three of those sites ... the company has already filed power applications. Not planning applications. Power applications. Because in this business ... the grid connection is the product. Centuria's head of funds management says Australian demand is now outpacing supply. He is not wrong. And he is not alone. So ... two continents. Two data center stories. One built as a part of the power system. The other waiting in line for it. Either way ... the load is coming. Which brings us to the people building the supply. Start in the Celtic Sea ... about forty kilometers off the British coast. There is a floating wind project out there called Gwynt Glas. That is Welsh for blue wind. Up to one and a half gigawatts. This week ... Japan's Sumitomo Corporation bought a third of it. The other two thirds are held by EDF ... and by Ireland's Electricity Supply Board. Three equal partners. Now ... Sumitomo has been investing in European offshore wind since twenty fourteen. But this is its first floating project anywhere in the world. And the timeline will test your patience. Consent applications do not even begin until twenty twenty-eight. Commercial operation is targeted for the late twenty thirties. That is a Japanese trading house writing a check today for electricity that shows up in fifteen years. The deal sits under a memorandum signed with the British government last year. Britain wants the Celtic Sea built. Japan just volunteered to help pay for it. Now up to Scotland. Vestas has installed the most powerful onshore wind turbine in Britain. It stands at Sanquhar II ... between Dumfries and Galloway and East Ayrshire. The machine comes off the EnVentus platform ... a bigger rotor married to a higher-rated generator. More energy out of the same wind. That project spent ten years in planning. And Vestas has more than six hundred megawatts of these machines under construction across Britain. But here is the argument going on inside the industry. Everybody is building bigger turbines. And yet a Vestas executive said this week ... quote ... we firmly believe bigger does not automatically mean better. Project economics are under pressure. In Germany and the Netherlands ... you cannot get a blade that size under a bridge or through a village. Scotland is empty enough to try it. Britain now has about thirty-three gigawatts of wind ... split about evenly between onshore and offshore. Onshore space is running out. So every new turbine has to do more work than the one before it. And then ... there are the ships. Cadeler runs the largest fleet of jack-up wind turbine installation vessels in the world. This week ... it ordered two more. The yard is COSCO Shipping Offshore in Qidong, China. The price ... about eight hundred and five million euros. Call it nine hundred and thirty million dollars. Delivery ... twenty thirty and twenty thirty-one. That will bring the fleet to fourteen vessels. And understand what these things are. The current class carries a deck of five thousand six hundred square meters ... a payload over eighteen thousand tonnes ... and a crane that lifts more than three thousand three hundred tonnes. Six extra-large monopile foundations per trip. The new class ... they say ... will be bigger still. Meanwhile the newest ship ... the Wind Ace ... is finishing commissioning right now. Its first job is East Anglia Two for ScottishPower Renewables ... starting in twenty twenty-seven. And here is the number that tells you the most. Cadeler's order backlog stands above three billion dollars. Eighty-two percent of that work is on projects where the customer has already taken a final investment decision. Nobody orders a nine-hundred-million-dollar ship for twenty thirty-one on a hunch. So ... here is what to watch. For years this industry has fought one bottleneck at a time. Permits. Then supply chain. Then vessels. Now the bottleneck is the grid connection itself. Centuria filed power applications before planning applications. Because in twenty twenty-six ... the scarce resource is not land or steel or capital. It is a slot on the transmission network. That changes the game for wind developers. The projects that win will not be the ones with the biggest turbines or the cheapest blades. They will be the ones that show up with a grid solution already in hand. Denmark just showed what that looks like. A data center that flexes its load ... feeds heat back to the community ... and makes the grid operator's job easier. If you are developing a wind farm today ... and you are not thinking about who will consume your electrons and how ... you are already behind. The old pitch was ... we generate clean power. The new pitch is ... we solve a grid problem. That is the difference between a project that gets built and one that sits in a queue for five years. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 18th of August ... twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.
AC883 Joins Muehlhan Wind Service
Lars Bendsen, founder and CEO at AC883, joins to discuss the Muehlhan Wind Service acquisition and Canada's aging turbine fleet. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Lars, welcome back to the podcast. Lars Bendsen: Thank you so much, Allen. Allen Hall: A lot has happened since I talked to you last. I saw some of the announcements on LinkedIn. I was really excited for you. So AC883 has news. Lars Bendsen: We have news. It was about a month ago now, but yes, things have been going very well. Allen Hall: Muehlhan has acquired AC883, which is a company you started how many years ago? Lars Bendsen: I started AC883 12 years ago. From my dining room table, basically. Allen Hall: Wow. And it's grown to quite the business over time. Lars Bendsen: Yes, we have been expanding, especially the last five years after my son came in. He has been the main driver, so we've been expanding like crazy the last five years. And, well, getting older. Now we are at a point where we should extend, spend more. And then when Muehlhan, one of the biggest companies in the wind industry, looked our way, it was an easy decision to make. Very easy. Allen Hall: Muehlhan is well known for being a leader in the ISP world in Europe, and a little bit in America. They're still making a presence here. That's why they wanted to talk to you, I'm sure, because AC883 has a nice Canadian market. People trust you and rely upon you, because you bring the quality people over, plus you have all the resources to get to parts that you can't acquire in Canada and the United States. You know who to call. It's part of that Danish connection. And that makes a lot of sense, because I do think as we see the industry mature, those quality companies like AC883 are very valuable. They see them as being a huge resource to the industry. Lars Bendsen: As I said, it makes us really proud that a big company is looking our way, and it's been a very smooth transition. As you were talking about earlier, the industry is maturing, meaning also big is getting bigger, and you need more horsepower, you need more muscle. And we also needed that, because we're expanding and there's only so much we can do. And we're all getting older, so at a certain time you have to do something. Allen Hall: Sure, but it comes at a point where you've proven yourself time and time again. How many times have you grown an industry in your lifetime? You've done it many, many times. That's why AC883 has always been the relied-upon source for so many things. Now Muehlhan brings a lot of advantages and a lot of horsepower to the organization. Because as you have gotten larger, you realize there's a lot of back office things that need to happen. Safety, gear, equipment. It's not just putting technicians on ropes out on site. There's all the management of that. That's where size matters. Lars Bendsen: Size matters, and also the whole health and safety perspective. You're putting more staff behind the scenes than actually in front of the scenes. So it's also extremely expensive. And now we're expanding our offering, because under the Muehlhan umbrella we can do everything, including main component changes, which we didn't do before. We decided before that anything we need a crane for, we do not do. Allen Hall: Right, I remember that. Lars Bendsen: Because it's a completely different animal from a health and safety perspective, equipment, et cetera. And now in Canada, the company we're going to be merging with, that's what they do. They're really strong in lifting and really strong in installation of turbines, complete wind farms. Where we are strong on the O&M side. And our primary customer is the asset owners. Allen Hall: Asset owners love you. Lars Bendsen: We hope so. We think so. Allen Hall: I know they do. Lars Bendsen: Where the other company is more focused on the OEM side. So there's actually a really good mix in that. And we don't step on each other's toes, because we are focused on the O&M part and they're focused on installation of turbines. So it's a perfect match in so many ways. Allen Hall: And particularly in Canada, because the Canadian market is poised to put a lot of turbines up in the next couple of years. But at the same time, there's an older fleet there, and spare parts is an issue. Some of the blades and the repairs are a little more complicated just because of the age of the turbine. And there are a lot of spares and components that you have access to and can bring into the Canadian market. You keep those turbines that are 15, 20 years old running. Lars Bendsen: Yes, we're in a sweet spot in that respect, where the turbines are getting older but they're not too old. So we need to keep them alive. And also, many owners still have the high PPA, which also means they want to do it. So there is a growing market for the O&M component, no doubt about it. But also, whatever happens in the US, leave that aside, they have a lot of good stuff happening in Canada on the offshore side, on the East Coast. Allen Hall: Oh, yes. Lars Bendsen: Nova Scotia. There are four big projects going out to bid, I think, within a year or so, and a lot of new projects coming up. So no doubt about it, Canada is a growing market. Where my impression is, and I have to be careful not to say too much, maybe the US is more a stagnating market. It's maybe not growing as fast as it used to be. Of course, I don't know enough to be smart about saying it. I'm just saying my impression is it's more a flat market. Allen Hall: Today. Lars Bendsen: Today, today. Allen Hall: But tomorrow it's something else. Lars Bendsen: That's the charm of the unpredictability. Allen Hall: Exactly. Welcome to wind, right? It's unpredictable. Well, I think that's good, because the Canadian market is one of those pieces that a lot of Americans don't pay attention to, because it's not the same scale. Lars Bendsen: Not yet. But also from the European side, every time we have talked to European vendors or customers, it's “yeah, be in America.” Yes, but I'm talking Canada. Canada has not even been on the radar. They're talking about it as of late, but they had not talked about anything else before. So now it's coming on the radar. And I know the Muehlhan people are smart people. They might be seeing that too. Allen Hall: Oh, I would imagine, yes. Lars Bendsen: So I have no doubt that it makes sense. The other thing that's critical, of course, the US is big as well, but Canada is area-wise extremely big. Allen Hall: Same width as America, roughly. That's a big territory. Lars Bendsen: But that also means it's further between the turbines. That means you can travel like crazy to meet very few clients. And that's why the one company is in western Canada and we are in eastern Canada. That makes sense. There are many reasons why you have to be local in your area. Allen Hall: Part of that is what's happening in the United States at the moment, but it's also on the part of Canada to react to it in a positive way. Like, if America's not going to do it, well, we're here. We have great wind resources in Canada. And that's what the Canadian government is saying to itself, I think. They're realizing the opportunity to go after that wind resource is now. And not only that, because of the way America has situated itself, they can sell a lot of that power that's going to be generated in Canada right down to the East Coast of the United States. Lars Bendsen: Yes. Well, the whole AI, the whole data center stuff. It takes seven to eight years to build a power plant. Normally they put a wind farm up in two years. You can't avoid it, whether you want to or not. I think the Canadians are a little bit optimistic right now, to say, “If you don't want to do it, we will do it.” And I think we are very happy, and we will see by the end of 2028 who's happy where. But it's all good. Allen Hall: Right. Lars Bendsen: It's all good. But again, by that time, well, only now I'm retired officially, so... Allen Hall: What does that mean? What does retired officially mean? Lars Bendsen: I don't know. But I'm retired in the respect that Muehlhan bought the company, and Jannik, my son, who's been running my company— Allen Hall: Jannik is awesome. Lars Bendsen: —he's been running my company anyhow the last three years. So there's no change in personnel, same person, people know the same him. Same place, same locations. Nothing has changed at all. Same reasons as before. We just have more horsepower and more offerings to do, and we're very happy, because we needed that too. Just the whole thing about main component routines. Now we can do it. We couldn't do that before. Allen Hall: There's a lot of need for that. Lars Bendsen: As you said, the aging fleet, they need to do main components. We need to lift a whole rotor down, different stuff. So that's good. Allen Hall: Isn't that exciting, though? Lars Bendsen: It's very exciting. Especially for our team. And I'm so proud and happy sitting on the sideline and following it. It's amazing. Allen Hall: Well, you're not going to sit there and let them do main component exchanges without going and watching that, right? You're going to have to go at least take a look at that. Lars Bendsen: I can't go on site, so I can sit from the highway and look at it. Allen Hall: They'll give you a hard hat, don't worry. Lars Bendsen: Oh, I won't do it. Allen Hall: Safety glasses and steel-toe shoes. Lars Bendsen: Maybe,...
ORE Catapult Blade Survey, Siemens Gamesa Turns a Profit
ORE Catapult wants industry blade failure data, Siemens Gamesa posts its first profit since 2022, and Vattenfall sweeps Denmark's offshore auction. Fill out the ORE Catapult survey! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Sted, and Yolanda Padron. And it has been a real interesting week out in the renewable land, uh, if you've been watching some of the news, and we're gonna talk about a number of those stories this week. But I wanna lead off with what ORE Catapult is doing over in the UK. So if, if you haven't followed ORE Catapult, they are a, a research investigative arm and a huge proponent of wind, offshore wind in the United Kingdom, and they've done a, a tre- really tremendous amount of work in some of the, uh, particular problems that exist in wind trying to help [00:01:00] solve them. They have a survey that's out, and if you haven't seen it, you can just Google ORE Catapult and put in survey, and you'll come to either an article or get to their site. And Rosemary and Yolanda, there's a couple of particular items that they're asking questions about. Uh, a lot of it is asking specific questions about torsional stability of blades. Have you seen more difficulty with torsion? Is... Do we need a torsion test? I think that was one of the questions. Uh, also looking at ranking of the different issues that happen with blades in particular. That's what I noticed. Uh, you know, where's lightning? Where's blade connections? Where's structural issues? Where do you rank all those different things? And I, I have not seen a survey like this in quite a while. Is this something that we need to do more of? I know [00:02:00] ORE Catapult will get a huge amount of feedback, at least I hope, over in the UK and, and around Europe. I don't think many Americans are gonna be contributing to that too much since you don't have a lot of offshore wind. But is this going in the right direction? Do we need more of these industry surveys about structural blade issues? Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I think these surveys are a really good idea. Uh, the only thing that scares me from the owner side is that sometimes there's a little bit of, uh- Teams don't really love the idea of sharing information that might seem like it's, um, like intellectual property to their internal teams. Even if as an engineer, of course, you love the idea of sharing and finding out like, um, what everybody else is, is experiencing on their site. Um, and so I really hope that the teams can really look, like their internal teams can really look past that because this would be a really great tool [00:03:00] for everybody to use. I know I looked at the survey myself and some of the questions kind of gave people the, the opportunity to kind of anonymize their data and then just kind of share it and have it. It seemed like it, it would probably be a platform that everybody could look at or everybody that, that shared could look at. And I think that it could be really, really good for operators to be able to know kind of if what they're seeing on site is normal and just to be able to see what they're signing up for when there's a new site coming in. Or if it's a site that's been operational for a while, you can see what's, hopefully, what's happening to a quite older site than yours. So just to, to be able to be a bit more prepared, um, since a lot of these sites are from different own- owners. But I think it's a really good idea. Allen Hall: The survey asked questions about leading edge erosion, torsional loads, root joint integrity, lightning damage, manufacturing defects, which is a big [00:04:00] issue right now, extreme loading events, which also, uh, is, uh, coming about more often, uh, repair performance, and end of life fatigue. So there's a, a series of questions about that and when do you experience these items in the lifetime of a blade. Is it more towards the beginning of the operation or more towards the end? That is important to know 'cause it, how you go about managing blades depends on that. The torsional questions were more specific. Uh, in your experience, how well understood are the effects on blade longevity of torsional loads compared to bending loads? And I think that relates back to some of the, uh, issues that have been seen on some offshore blades where there's no existing test for torsion because it's so hard to do. Whereas bending loads, we pretty well understand that and can do lifetime testing essentially for, for bending loads. So the torsional one I think is gonna raise a lot of question marks to hopefully with people, and we can come up [00:05:00] with a, a better approach to that. Yolanda Padron: Hopefully, yeah. I think this is, I mean, this is just a really good idea to if, if everybody could partake. Um, I would really love to see something similar if people could in, in onshore. And so just something that's, that's shared a, uh, a little bit more widely I think would be really, really great. Uh, the only thing that might stre- or not stress me out, but- you know, I think people need to be careful about is just making sure that you're not, um, that you actually use your data and not just kind of like, "Oh, I know that I remember this terrible lightning damage that I got in this really, really bad area, so I'm gonna mark as though most of my lightning damage happens in that bad area." So just, just make sure you don't use confirmation bias for, for that, but Matthew Stead: I can also add to it as well 'cause, um, we've done a fair bit of work with all Catapult over the years, um, particularly through the new IEC standard for blade O&M. Um, and, uh, [00:06:00] definitely through the new blade O&M standard, the topic of blade twist has come up multiple times. Um- And also adding to that, you know, our organization has done twist on, twist measurements on 100 meter blades, and the twist that we measured was more than the OEM expected. Um, so I think this is a bit of a sleeper topic, um, and I think OR Catapult is doing the right thing by gathering more information. Allen Hall: There is a l- little database that's gonna be put together, at least looking at the questions. Question 12, and everybody hopefully will go in and, and participate in the survey, but it says, "Would you be interested in sharing redacted failure data into a industry-wide database to help inform research agenda for blade development and O&M tools and solutions?" That is a great idea. Having a database so we understand the scale of problems and can put some numbers [00:07:00] to them, and then we can do some more research in those areas, and focus research where we're actually gonna spend money in the right places, which has been my fight for the last five, six years, where we spend a lot of money, but not necessarily where we need to. That's a great question, and hopefully OR Catapult does p- put together a database. Rosemary Barnes: Companies really, really, really struggle to provide access to their data. Like, um, it, y- yeah, it, it's, it's very hard to get it beyond just using for their own specific project. I'll be, I'll be so happy if this database gets up and becomes publicly available so that every- everybody can use it to create the solutions that the industry needs. But I know how hard a challenge it is, so I'm wishing them heaps of, heaps of luck to get it to work. Matthew Stead: And can I also add that, um, OR Catapult also did a wonderful presentation at Blades Europe, where they talked about life extension. They talked about the actual loading on the blades, um, influencing the fatigue life. And so I think, you know, that excellent [00:08:00] database hopefully, as we talked about, gets fed into some of their work about life extension. Allen Hall: Well, OR Catapult is trying to get ahead of blade failures before they cost money. Uh, our next company knows exactly what that costs. Siemens Gamesa is still climbing out of a serial defect problem, and it posted its first profit in four years. So we'll be back to talk about that in a moment. Speaker: Are you overspending on lightning repairs? Most operators are, because solving lightning damage is complicated. Weather Guard Lightning Tech helps operators reduce lightning damage. Our innovative StrikeTape lightning diverter protects over 20,000 blades worldwide. Now, StrikeTape Ultra installs faster than ever. StrikeTape Ultra cures uptower in just 15 minutes, even in cold weather. Visit weatherguardwind.com to schedule a call. Allen Hall: Siemens Gamesa has finally turned a [00:09:00] profit, its first time since 2022. Uh, now comes the hard part. Order intake in the third quarter fell 77% from 4.89 billion euros a year ago to 1.05 billion Chief Executive Christian Bruch, uh, says a lot of the offshore projects that were originally planned are slipping, and as we've seen in the news, and that developers are not willing to make final investment decisions right now. Uh, in Germany, developers are lobbying to hand 16 gigawatts of offshore sites back to the states, and, and Bruch says that the, the capacity is, is not going to be built. Onshore, uh, the relaunched 5.X platform is ramping up slowly after the serial defect shutdown, with approvals still holding some orders back. So Siemens Gamesa is going to make a push, or [00:10:00] Omtera I guess it is called now, w- is going to make a push, uh, into the 5.X machine and continue on on the offshore side. But boy, some of these, uh, auctions and, uh,...
Judge Ends Pentagon Wind Freeze, RWE Exits US Offshore
Allen covers a judge lifting the Pentagon's wind freeze, RWE's $1.22B US offshore exit, and TotalEnergies buying Shell's European renewables. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. You know ... there is an old saying. When one door closes ... another one opens. Well this week in wind energy ... a whole lot of doors were swinging. Let us start in Washington. For months ... the Pentagon had quietly stopped reviewing wind energy project applications. More than a hundred and fifty onshore wind projects ... stuck in limbo. The Defense Department claimed that drones in Ukraine had changed the game. Wind turbines ... they said ... could blind radar to incoming threats. So they hit the brakes. But on Thursday ... a federal judge said ... not so fast. Judge Karin Immergut ... a Trump appointee no less ... issued a preliminary injunction. Resume the reviews ... she ordered. Follow the law Congress wrote. The law gives the Pentagon seventy-five days for a preliminary review. As of late July ... not a single one had been completed since the halt began in May. When government lawyers were asked to name one project they had reviewed ... they could not name a single one. The judge told them plainly. If you want to change the rules ... go ask Congress. Now ... while one arm of the government was being told to do its job ... another arm was writing checks. German energy giant RWE ... handed back its American offshore wind leases. New York. California. Louisiana. In return ... the U.S. Department of the Interior cut RWE a check for one-point-two-two billion dollars. RWE is the fifth developer to walk away from American offshore wind under this administration. The company had spent more than a billion dollars on those leases. Years of planning. Investment. Partnership with federal agencies. But RWE said there is simply no path forward to permit these projects ... for the foreseeable future. So where does the $1.22B go? Nine hundred million dollars into Louisiana LNG. Three hundred million into natural gas turbine reservations. Fifteen gas peaking projects across the country. A company that came to America to build wind farms ... is now building gas plants instead. But here is the thing about RWE. They are not leaving the wind business. They are leaving American offshore wind. Globally ... RWE operates eighteen offshore wind farms. Four more under construction. And nearly seven gigawatts secured in the United Kingdom's latest auction. America said no. The rest of the world said ... come on in. And speaking of Europe ... TotalEnergies ... the French oil major ... just bought Shell's entire onshore renewables business in Europe. Four gigawatts of solar and wind. Five hundred megawatts already running or under construction in Italy and the Netherlands. Three-and-a-half gigawatts more in the pipeline across Italy ... the United Kingdom ... and Spain. And in the same breath ... TotalEnergies sold a fifty percent stake in a one-point-two gigawatt European portfolio to KKR ... for an enterprise value of one-point-eight billion euros. Build it. Sell half. Keep operating it. That is the model. Now let us fly east ... to India. GE Vernova just landed a hundred-and-sixty-three megawatt wind order from American developer Enfinity Global. Forty-three turbines. Three-point-eight megawatts each. Headed for the Fatehgarh wind farm in Rajasthan. Deliveries start late this year. And those turbines will be built at GE Vernova's factory in Pune ... which can turn out fifteen hundred megawatts a year. India is pushing for five hundred gigawatts of renewable energy. Meanwhile ... up in Denmark ... a Danish wind tower maker named Welcon is raising its voice. Swedish utility Vattenfall just won two offshore wind tenders in Denmark. But when asked whether they would use European-made turbines ... Vattenfall would not say. Welcon's chief executive Jens Risvig Pedersen said ... and I quote ... “It would be completely absurd not to buy European products for the two new Danish offshore wind farms. That would simply shut down the European industry.” The Danish trade union Dansk Metal agreed. Chinese turbines ... they said ... should not be financed with Danish taxpayer money. Vattenfall says it has not decided yet. But the debate is on. And finally ... a milestone that happened so quietly ... nobody noticed. The world just crossed three terawatts of installed solar power. It took ten years to build the first terawatt. Less than three years for the second. And not even two more years for the third. Seventy-four countries now have at least one gigawatt of solar installed. That is up from forty-two in twenty-twenty. BloombergNEF expects nine terawatts by twenty thirty-six. But here is the catch. Without batteries ... solar hits a ceiling. Places like Australia and California already have so much solar that electricity prices go negative during the day. You heard that right. They pay people to use power. The answer is battery storage. But batteries are not able to keep up with the pace of solar. Now ... if you step back from all of this ... something interesting emerges. Nobody in these stories is arguing about whether wind works. Not the judge in Oregon. Not RWE. Not even the Pentagon. The debate has moved on. The question is no longer ... can you build a wind farm. The question is ... who gets to decide where one goes. Think about that. A federal judge did not rule that wind turbines are safe or good or necessary. She ruled that the government cannot ignore its own laws. The science was not on trial. The process was. RWE did not surrender its leases because offshore wind failed. It surrendered them because one government made permitting impossible ... while eighteen other wind farms in its global portfolio kept spinning. And TotalEnergies did not buy four gigawatts of European renewables out of charity. It bought them because Shell ... an oil company ... decided those assets no longer fit its strategy. One oil major's exit is another's entrance. The assets did not lose value. They changed hands. That is the story underneath all these headlines. Wind energy has crossed a threshold that most industries never reach. It is no longer competing on technology. It is competing on governance. The turbines work. The economics work. The engineering works. What varies ... country by country ... is whether the rules of the road are clear enough for capital to show up. And capital ... as we saw this week ... will always find the door that is open. That is the state of the wind industry for the 10th of August ... twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
IWTG Consulting on Pitch Bearing Cracks, Loose Root Inserts
Jon Zalar, founder of IWTG Consulting, joins to discuss broken blade bolts, cracked pitch bearings, loose root inserts, and early detection. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Jon, welcome back to the program. Jon Zalar: Thanks for having me. Allen Hall: Uh, last time I saw you, we were in Melbourne- Yep ... at WOMA 2026, and that was a huge event. We know we're gonna do it again next year in March three, the 3rd through the 5th, so you're invited back, of course- I can't wait ... if you can make it. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a good time. A lot is happening in the blade world and in the wind turbine world more broadly. A lot of things we're hearing right now are related to blade bolt connection, pitch bearing inserts still. A lot of that still happening in the United States. What is the current status of, uh, the blade connection issues in the US? I, Jon Zalar: I feel like it's a growing [00:01:00] issue, not super, super fast, but it seems to be getting a little worse. There's, you know, more bolts breaking at that joint. Um, pitch bearing cracks are, seem to be pretty common. There's different solutions for it, and then, you know, the root inserts are another thing that we've talked about before that seem to be happening more and more, or maybe more and more people are finding them 'cause they're looking. Allen Hall: What are the first indications that you have a blade bolt or some sort of joint issue at the root of a blade? What can you see? Jon Zalar: A bolt laying in the hub bouncing around. Um, you know, from like a-- looking at it from, like, the sensors on the turbine, it's really hard to tell unless it gets really bad. Uh, some of the OEMs have some analytics developed to kinda start to indicate if there is a aero change because there's missing bolts or root inserts are coming out, and they're using that as a way to go figure out which ones to go inspect first. Allen Hall: Really? Yeah. You think [00:02:00] the SCADA data will give you some indication that you have a, basically a little bit of a loose blade? Jon Zalar: Yeah. I, I, I think because the number of turbines and the number of data points you have, I think there is a pretty good analytic out there right now. Allen Hall: Wow. All right. I think a lot of our operators have not taken advantage of that. Is, is that just b- based on the high-speed data, SCADA data, or is it low-speed data you could see that same effect? Jon Zalar: I believe it's on the low-speed data as well, but I bet the high-speed data was used to kinda develop it. Allen Hall: Wow. All right. So that's a huge help to operators. Yeah. So what are you looking for if you're looking through SCADA data, what would be the couple of markers there that say, "Hey, maybe we ought to go look up at the-- in the hub"? Jon Zalar: I don't know exactly what they're using, but they would basically look for maybe an imbalance or looking for certain components that are being overworked. Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Okay. Jon Zalar: Yeah. Allen Hall: So your pitch actuator may be getting a little bit overworked. It would seem like one of the places- I think that, yeah ... that would get loaded, right? Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm. Allen Hall: Okay. [00:03:00] And any vibration monitoring going on? Because it, it, uh, in some cases you're-- I'm hearing, like, millimeter gaps- Jon Zalar: Correct. Yeah ... Allen Hall: between the blade and the pitch bearing. Jon Zalar: So probably a combination of the ALC sensors, at least on a GE turbine, looking at that. But the PCH box also is looking at the tower vibration, so it could be a combination of all three. I don't know the exact- Okay ... details, but between all of that, I think there are some analytics that kinda say, "Hey, go take a look." And then I think there's some other companies that have- tools that go monitor it. Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. Jon Zalar: Dial indicators remotely or even, you know, people going up there with dial indicators to go kind of rotate the rotor and kind of see if there is gapping between the blade and the pitch bearing. Allen Hall: Is that a safe situation in your-- from the gapping? I've heard this where they've basically took shims and they're trying to measure this gap or some sort of dial indication. Is that a smart thing to do? Is it even reliable to do it that way? [00:04:00] Jon Zalar: I, I, I think there's some reliability there. And like, you know, these are really big parts, right? So like a little bit of gap, it, it's probably expected to a point, but growing gaps is where you should be a little more scared. Allen Hall: So you're-- you would have to go do that quarterly, monthly, weekly? How, how often would you have to do it to see the progression? Because I've heard stories of, uh, a couple of weeks from nothing to hub crack to, "Oh, it took a year or more." Jon Zalar: I think it depends on the issue. I think for-- if you're looking at that, the bolted joint itself between the root inserts and the, uh, bolts breaking itself, I, I think they're doing about quarterly. Now, the pitch bearings inspections are also quarterly. They're al- they're, they're leveraging the drone inspections for the blades, and they're looking at the pitch bearings to see if they're cracked, right? Uh, you guys are doing that too. Allen Hall: Okay. Jon Zalar: I think Coraly is doing a good job mitigating the risk, feels like. Allen Hall: Wow. All right. [00:05:00] Yolanda, looking at pitch bearings, you've looked at a lot of drone images in your lifetime. Mm-hmm. How much can you see on drone images on pitch bearings? Can you see cracks and, or y- or do you see grease, which is a really indication that something is wrong in the bearing? Yolanda Padron: You can see grease. You can see the cracks pretty, pretty well. Yeah. The drone images are, are really high quality. Uh, but you did mention that it's something that you're seeing a lot more. Is it because there's a lot more aging fleets, or is it a problem with a lot of the new turbines that are coming online? Jon Zalar: I, I think it's an, I think it's a more of a fatigue problem, so the aging of the fleet. And also, I think more people are looking at it, right? 'Cause, like, initially the drones that were looking for blade cracks weren't looking at pitch bearings, but then pitch bearings started cracking, so now they added that to whatever they buy off the drone companies, right? Go look at my pitch bearings, for example. Allen Hall: Hmm. Jon Zalar: So I, I think it's a problem of the more you look sometimes, the more you find. Yolanda Padron: Hmm. Jon Zalar: Yeah. Allen Hall: So we [00:06:00] have root insert issues, which are being addressed by a couple of different companies- Yes ... uh, uh, with somewhat similar solutions. OEM is offering one right now also. Jon Zalar: I, I think there's three solutions. There's two uptower that are basically looking at ways to go fill the void between the root insert itself and the blade root. Um, and I-- there's another company that's also more of a downtower solution where they're actually, like, r- drilling out the root inserts and putting new ones in that are gonna last better, longer. Allen Hall: Okay. So the drilling out is, would be CNC onsite. Correct. Jon Zalar: Yeah. Allen Hall: And they're based over in Europe. But th- the drilling out is a take the blade down, set it on the ground sort of- Yeah. Right ... doing really fine machining on the, on the blade itself. So that, that's a different, completely different insert that's going into that- Jon Zalar: Correct Allen Hall: new hole or- Yep ... clean hole, right? So it's a, just a, uh, totally different kind of product versus trying to inject [00:07:00] some s- sort of epoxy or resin into the, the void. Jon Zalar: Right. Yeah. Uh, I mean, you would prefer to do it uptower. It's gonna cost you less money. Allen Hall: Sure. Jon Zalar: But you wanna make sure you do it right, so I think, uh, I do foresee it being a combination of both solutions kinda going forward. Allen Hall: Is it dependent upon, like, how much damage has been already done, or what the fatigue w- uh, an estimate on what the fatigue life is? Jon Zalar: I think it's strictly on measurement perspective right now. So how much gapping you have, um, kinda determines what potential solutions you have. Allen Hall: So the gaps aren't big, right? So the, the gaps I hear are one millimeter is k- kind of sort of start a problem. Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm. Allen Hall: Three millimeters is, "I need to be making decisions." Jon Zalar: Yeah. So- That, that's what I've heard, too. Yes. Allen Hall: Three millimeters is about a eighth of an inch. Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm. Allen Hall: So it's not a lot of m- Jon Zalar: But you can see sunlight through it if you're s- down there. Allen Hall: Okay. That's not... Well, you should see. That's not Jon Zalar: good either. Yeah. Allen Hall: Right. Okay. So in a, in a three millimeter situation then, you're doing what? [00:08:00] Jon Zalar: You're trying to decide if the uptower solutions are something you wanna go try, 'cause they're still in the trial mode from my understanding or- Allen Hall: Okay ... Jon Zalar: people are learning a lot. ...
Blade Breaks at He Dreiht, Suzlon Posts Record Quarter
A V236 blade fails during construction at He Dreiht. Plus a 53 GW US wind forecast, Suzlon's record quarter, and what turbine noise really measures. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the "Uptime Wind Energy" podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes. And to lead off this week, s- there's been some trouble in the North Sea. On July 22nd, a blade failed on one of the turbines at EnBW's 960-megawatt He Dreiht offshore wind farm. Uh, EnBW spokesperson said there were no injuries, thank goodness, and that the authorities were notified immediately, which is generally the case in Europe. They're very safety conscious, of course. But the machine was a Vestas V236, which is a-- that 15-megawatt offshore turbine that Vestas is offering. And He Dreiht is where the platform [00:01:00] has made its debut. So Vestas and EnBW are working together on an investigation, an RCA, a- along, uh, looking at the environmental impact because parts of the blade landed in the water. And the, the images I saw online were like a sheer web that was being pulled in onto a ship, so big pieces of blade. Uh, there's gonna be 64 of these turbines going into that wind farm, but this is probably a little bit of a weird thing because it does seem like that the wind farm is under construction when the blade broke, which is not the first time this has happened, right? That we've seen blade breaks at, uh, Vineyard Wind and at Dogger Bank on the GE side. Is this just a construction issue, Yolanda, you think? Or is it some sort of, uh, vibration that's happening during construction that's putting extra stress on the blades? Yolanda Padron: We were talking about it a little bit offline and how it might be a loading [00:02:00] issue because it's not, uh, it's not in the optimal operating, uh, conditions, right? Uh, but this is-- It's-- I don't like that it's becoming a trend more than an anomaly from what we've seen on this podcast. Uh, Matt, I know you work a lot in solutions, right? What, what would you recommend people start doing? Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think, um, more and more there's ways of just checking out, you know, pre-construction, um, you know, some of the vibration modes, some of the unusual, um, wind loading when it's in standstill, you know, different yaw angles and so forth. So there, there's more and more ways of, um, checking out what the blade is doing when it's in those unusual, um, sort of pre-con, pre-operation phases. So, um, you know, for instance, um, we do know that there is some sort of sometimes edgewise or flatwise vibration, which, um, you know, maybe is not normal, um, and maybe could be, be [00:03:00] thought about in a bit more detail. Um, certainly I know there are some research organizations which are looking into this and also, you know, things like blade twists. Um, so what is actually happening in terms of the, um, the twisting of the blade along, along its axis. Allen Hall: I think the last time this happened, I remember going back and looking at patents about how to protect the blades during this construction phase. So you wanna prevent the blade from generating lift from sideways winds pretty much. So the designs that I saw were like putting like a, a netting across the blade to disrupt the airflow so that it wouldn't generate lift. But I haven't really seen that implemented. Maybe it is being implemented, but these loads are a little odd, right? I, I, I'm wondering if there's any IEC certification test that looks into them, uh, just because it's, it's happened a couple of times now, more than a handful. Matthew Stead: We, we saw, um, we saw that picture of some blades on the ground. [00:04:00] You remember they were in storage. Um, there was a, a strong wind that came across them when they were in storage, and there was some, some flutter and, you know, some, some damage it caused, uh, even when they were on the ground. Um, yeah, I think just thinking out loud, you know how on some, you know, wind stacks and, or, you know, turbine stacks and, um, you know, poles, you know, exhaust stacks. Sorry, that's the word I'm looking for. Exhaust stacks. They have the, the spiral around it. You know, it's for around vortex shedding. So maybe it's an opportunity for, for Rosie to jump in here and, uh, and comment. But, um, maybe we can put like vortex, uh, spiral vortex, um, you know, dissipators on the, on the blades before they're fully commissioned. Rosemary Barnes: So it's cer- certainly not a, a matter of the design just being a little bit wrong, right? That would mean that it would last for a, for a while and then And then break. But it, it also, it could be several things. It could [00:05:00] have been a manufacturing defect, a bad one. It could have been transport damage. Tho- those are two other things. It could have been, yeah, you know, like a, a new design feature or material that performed massively differently under real loads than what it did, um, you know, in their computer models and in their coupon tests and in their, um, static tests, fatigue tests that they did. It could be any of those things. Sometimes you do see problems where technically you're not supposed to leave the rotor locked out for any period of time because it is not designed for the off, off-axis weird loads that you can get when the blade is oriented in a suboptimal way compared to the wind. And there have been instances where it's like technically, you know, that was in the instruction manual, however, nobody ever followed it, and it's only under extreme circumstances where that actually is severe enough to break it. There, there can be instances like that [00:06:00] where I would say that it- it's pretty difficult/impossible to actually design s- for safety during any conceivable series of events during installation. The way that you would do it would be to make sure that the blade can handle any wind load and, you know, up to the maximum gust at any, at any time in any position. But having, you know, done a little bit of work, um, on blade design in my past, it is massive. That is just a massive, massive load that is y- it will never see in its lifetime. You would have such heavy, expensive blades if you actually designed it like that. Um, and so yeah, the That, that would be probably the most charitable reason for a failure where nobody really did their job wrong. It's just kind of like some bad luck that happens every now and then. Allen Hall: Well, it does seem like there's a trend there between Dogger Bank, Vineyard Wind, [00:07:00] some of the things we've seen in China. During the construction phase, those turbines are very vulnerable and the, the blades can break. Aren't there extra precautions that could be put in place? Like, you, you could obviously do weather forecasting, and I know that that's done, but it does seem like it's, uh, such a consequential problem to have a blade break on a turbine in the North Sea, near Germany. Like, that, that's just bad PR. Even if you have all the engineering precautions in the world there, you would still maybe play it a little bit safer so this wouldn't happen? Rosemary Barnes: It's really hard. Like I said, if you want to design it so that a blade won't break under these, like, really unusual set of operating conditions that happen during construction, not during-- Like, during operation it has to be able to handle whatever is thrown at it, like, no doubt. Um, everybody agrees on that, including, you know, certification bodies. But during installation, yeah, if you want your blade to be able to handle anything that [00:08:00] that area can throw at it, even, you know, one in 50, one in 100 year storm that comes up unexpectedly, I personally think I haven't done the optimization. I wouldn't be surprised if people had. In fact, I would be surprised if they hadn't. But I bet that it will cost more to design every blade to withstand that than it would to lose the occasional one, you know, one out of What is it? Like one out of 500 blades or something this happens to, one out of 1,000? I, I, I don't know, maybe even less, less than that. Um, you know, so it's, I don't know how much these blades cost new, but, you know, say a few hundred thousand. Uh, it's just, it's gonna be it, it'll be more cost-effective to lose the odd one every now and then. And like you say, it's bad PR, but, um, I don't know. Is it that, like- It- ... things, things happen, things break sometimes. Um, yeah, I don't know. Is the PR that bad? I'm not sure. Matthew Stead: So [00:09:00] I, I've got a question and, um, you know, on LinkedIn, you know, you see whenever there's a, um, whenever there's a failure on L- um, e- everyone posts about it. Rosemary Barnes: Condition monitoring would've stopped this. If there had only been condition monitoring that, that turbine, then they wouldn't have had a blade break during construction. That's why I'm so hesitant to, to, you know, make any calls now 'cause I don't wanna sound like one of those Allen Hall: LinkedIn losers. LinkedIn loser. Rosemary Barnes: I learned that the last, um, root cause analysis, like, you know, catastrophic blade failure, um, the last one that I, uh, yeah, got approached to work on,...
Dominion Absorbs $800M in Tariffs, Nordex Profits Double
Allen covers Dominion's $800M tariff hit, Eversource's 84% profit drop, Nordex's record quarter, and a looming floating wind vessel shortage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday, everyone. Let us start this week with a number. Eight hundred million dollars. That is what tariffs on steel and aluminum added to Dominion Energy's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. Dominion President Bob Blue shared the damage on a second-quarter earnings call. Two hundred and thirty million dollars … just in the latest quarter alone. That is on top of the five hundred and eighty million from the quarter before. The project is eighty-one percent complete. Thirty-one turbines are already spinning … producing more than four hundred and fifty megawatts. But the finish line just moved. Completion is now expected by the end of twenty twenty-seven. Weather delays. Vessel maintenance. And some particularly complicated turbines to install. Blue says the project will still save customers money. And Dominion expects to pocket more than five hundred million dollars in savings from grid upgrade cost shifts. The total price tag … eleven-point-six billion dollars. Now … if Dominion is feeling the squeeze in Virginia … Eversource up in New England is feeling something worse. The utility's second-quarter profit dropped eighty-four percent. Net income fell to just fifty-three-point-seven million dollars. Why? A one-hundred-and-sixty-four-million-dollar charge tied to the offshore wind projects they already sold. South Fork Wind. Revolution Wind. Eversource got out of offshore wind back in twenty twenty-four … but the bills keep coming. Higher-than-expected payments to Global Infrastructure Partners are dragging down the bottom line. So one company builds through the pain. Another walks away … and still pays for it. But here is some good news. Over in Hamburg, Germany … Nordex just posted a quarter that would make any CEO smile. Sales up sixteen percent. EBITDA … more than doubled … to two hundred and twenty-four million euros. Margins hit ten-point-three percent. Net income … one hundred and eleven million euros. Up from thirty-one million a year ago. And orders? Up thirty-two percent. Three-point-one gigawatts of new turbine orders in just one quarter. Their total order book now stands at eighteen-point-four billion euros. Nordex CEO José Luis Blanco confirmed the full-year guidance. The onshore wind giant is not just surviving. It is thriving. Now … let us go to sea. Classification society ABS says floating offshore wind is about to create a brand-new problem. Not enough ships. A new report says demand for large anchor-handling vessels and multipurpose support vessels will surge as floating wind projects go from small demonstrations to full commercial scale. Here is the number that tells the story. A single one-gigawatt floating wind farm needs about one hundred and ninety-eight anchors … and nearly two hundred kilometers of mooring lines. That is far more than a single deepwater oil and gas platform. ABS says shortages in certain vessel classes could hit as early as twenty twenty-nine. Global floating wind capacity is expected to grow from about two hundred and seventy megawatts today … to fourteen gigawatts by twenty forty. The race for ships … has begun. And speaking of ships … Japan just finished building one. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines held a naming ceremony in Nagasaki for the Wind Whale. Japan's first coastal deck carrier built specifically for offshore wind. One hundred and forty-nine meters long. A flush deck designed so that monopiles, towers, blades and nacelles can roll right on from the stern. It even has dynamic positioning … so it can transfer cargo directly to installation vessels at sea. Built in China by Taizhou Sanfu Ship Engineering … the Wind Whale will carry foundations from a factory in Okayama to construction sites around Japan. A country that once built ships for oil … now builds them for wind. And finally … back home in Iowa. The state Supreme Court ruled that the CEO of Global Fiberglass Solutions can be held personally liable for dumping thirteen hundred used wind turbine blades across the state. CEO Donald Lilly and another executive argued they were never in Iowa. The court disagreed. Lilly signed the contracts. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird put it plainly. They were hired to recycle used wind turbine blades. Instead … they dumped them. Four hundred blades piled up along Interstate 35 near Ellsworth alone. The lesson? You can build an industry on clean energy. But you still have to clean up after yourself. So what does all of this mean … if you work in wind? It means the money is real now. Projects are not getting canceled. They are getting more expensive. And that changes the math for every engineer, every project manager, every supply chain director reading a bid today. Tariffs come and go. But an eleven-billion-dollar project does not stop on a dime. It means the vessels you need may not be there when you need them. If you are planning a floating wind project for the early twenty thirties … your vessel strategy should already be on paper. It means manufacturers who kept their discipline … who held their margins and grew their order books … are the ones writing the next chapter. And it means accountability is coming to every corner of this business. You cannot just build turbines. You have to manage the turbines. This industry asked the world to trust it with the future of energy. That trust comes with responsibility. And that is the state of the wind industry for August 3rd, 2026.
Pardalote Studies Australian Blade Erosion and Heat Fatigue
Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of Pardalote Consulting, joins to discuss their new grant-funded study of blade erosion and heat fatigue in Australia. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall 2025: Well, Rosemary, welcome back to the show. Rosemary Barnes: Thanks, Allen. Great to be here. For, it's been a while since we did one of these one-on-one episodes, like a, yeah, a proper, proper guest. Allen Hall 2025: Well, this is kind of a celebratory episode because your company, Pardalote Consulting, has been awarded, uh, some funding from the Australian Capital Territory's government for the Energy Innovation Fund. Rosemary Barnes: It's a really good program that the ACT government has to try and get energy innovation In the state. It's not a state actually, it's technically a territory. Little more than just Canberra, the city. Uh, but there are actually quite a few, like, really interesting energy-related companies here, partly 'cause of the, the fund I think helps, but also just tracing back like, [00:01:00] uh, y- you know, in the 20-teens, Australia had a really conservative government that hated renewable energy, and the ACT government had a commitment at that time to 100%, um, 100% renewable electricity for the, the government. And that was one of the only programs that was resulting in a lot of, um, you know, clean energy projects being built, and one of the conditions that they put on that, uh, for people that would win PPAs with the ACT was that you had to have your headquarters in Canberra. So we've actually got quite a few, quite a few really cool, innovative companies out of here. Um, like Neoen's headquarters here. Windlab, uh, yeah, was, was founded here and still has a lot of people here. Pardalote obviously, and you know, a few other companies as well. So despite it being a small city of like, I don't know, maybe it's up to 400,000 or something people by now, um, yeah, there is actually quite a lot going on here for energy. Allen Hall 2025: And the Energy Innovation Fund is funded by the wind and solar operators in the area, and your particular [00:02:00] effort has really global consequences. You're focusing on two areas involving how wind turbines survive Australia, but more, uh, of relevance is to just really tough conditions which exist not just in Australia but around the world. What two areas are you going to focus on? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So the two focus areas are leading edge erosion and high temperature fatigue, which we can probably get into the definitions of those in a minute. But basically my, um-- what led me to wanna have a project like this was that when I moved back to Australia in 2021, I-- and I started working in O&M, uh, I noticed that the wind turbines that I would look at, the blades that I would look at here behaved really differently to the ones that I worked with overseas. You know, es- especially with leading edge erosion, like often I would be doing a condition assessment of a, you know, a new wind farm. Um, might only have been operating for, you know, two years. That's a pretty common time for people to get in and do a condition assessment [00:03:00] because their warranty period is about to end and they wanna, you know, make sure that everything is okay. Um, and I would just notice that often, like 90, 100% of blades would already have bad erosion after just a couple of years, which is super-duper fast. And then there are some tools available to check, um, like what kind of erosion are you likely to experience on your site. Like is it a higher severity erosion site or a, a low severity one? Um, and you basically, you know, the status quo globally is to just look at the annual rainfall, um, and the tip speed. And if you've got, you know, high for both of those, that's a bad erosion site. And if you've got low for both of those, it's a, a low erosion site. But when I plotted out the wind farms that I knew had really bad erosion problems onto, you know, a chart with those two axes, I just saw a random distribution of dots. You know? Like, this was not-- uh, this had no predictive value for Australian wind farms. And so that led me to believe that, okay, um, you know, things are a bit [00:04:00] different here. Makes sense, you know, most of the knowledge that we have about how wind turbines operate, it's been developed and validated mostly in Northern Europe. You know? Like it's, it's Denmark and the surrounding countries that had, like, the bulk of the early wind energy. First few decades of knowledge were, you know, were mostly there. Of course, there were some other, um, places that had wind turbines, but, you know, most of the The OEMs have been operating for decades, came from Denmark. And I know when I lived in Denmark, the rain there is very different to the rain in Australia. So in Denmark, it's basically always raining, right? Like, it's just... Like, even if it's not raining, you're still gonna get wet when you go outside 'cause it's just, like, the air has this just amazing ability to just hold onto moisture. Um, but it's very, very gentle. But, you know, over an entire year of most days having gentle rain, that adds up to a lot. Whereas in Australia, and especially if you go, like, north to Queensland, it rarely rains. It's mostly just dry, and when it [00:05:00] does rain, it's like a tap turns on, and I, I swear you will get bruised from the rain droplets hitting your skin. You know, they just have so much energy in them. So I think that that i- you know, when you look at just the overall rainfall, you really hide something important about how erosion, um, can progress. Then, um, there's other places in Australia that have very different characteristics. Again, they don't have that kind of really intense rain but, you know, some of those sites are also having really bad erosion. And so it just occurred to me, I did a lot of research, you know, into what's going on and, you know, the academics are studying erosion a whole lot, and they've got, you know, a lot of standardized tests and, you know, products are developed according to these standardized tests. But the standardized tests don't actually resemble reality, and especially they don't resemble reality in Australia. And so my client started asking me, "Okay, you know, the products that we have are, are terrible. We have to replace them every couple of years. It's, um, causing big problems with also [00:06:00] the amount of energy that you're losing." One of the types of, um, leading-edge erosion or leading-edge problems that we have in Australia is that the, the coatings tend to peel off and make these, like, big flakes which will just massively disrupt the airflow, can cause y- you know, at least a few percent AEP loss, and maybe up to five. And even worse than the AEP loss is the revenue loss because it affects it most at, you know, lower wind speeds. Um, you get a bigger hit than at rated wind speeds. So there's a variety of problems going on with leading edges in Australia, which mean that I, I basically... My clients would ask, "What product should we put on to prevent having to, you know, constantly replace this?" 'Cause it costs, like- you know, 30, $40,000 per turbine to replace the protection, not to mention, you know, one or two days of downtime. It's expensive, and I basically, I didn't have a good answer for them. What, what product should they put on? I don't know. No, we, we don't know. One, we don't know what the [00:07:00] specific, um, characteristics are that are... what the specific local environment, local conditions are that are accelerating leading-edge erosion, one. And two, all of the products tend to be tested around this, you know, there's this protocol that academics have come up with, and they've kind of like assumed that this is representative of how things behave in the field, and it's-- I don't think it's particularly true anyway, but it's especially not true in Australia. There are a few companies that are testing to different standards. Um, definitely applaud them. But without knowing wha- what are the conditions truly like in Australia, uh, it's really hard to advise, like, what kind of tests should you be demanding from a product you're considering to be sure that you're gonna put it on and not gonna be replacing it again in two years. Allen Hall 2025: Because that's really the trouble in Australia is when you get offered products They have been tested generally in somewhere in Europe and maybe in the United States, and then when they go to [00:08:00] Australia, it's really unknown as to how those products will do, which is a huge risk for the Australian wind market as to what to choose, how to choose, is it-- what's real in terms of test data. So now you're gonna go out and do what? Are you gonna put sensors out by the wind farms? Are you gonna try to do more of a statistical summary of the actual environment around wind farms using existing data? What's the approach here? Rosemary Barnes: It's all of the above, but the part that is supported by the grant is that we're gonna have enough money to be able to buy some scientific-grade sensors and put them on, um, a sample of Australian wind farms. So we're gonna be looking at a lot more characteristics about the rain than simply is it raining now, you know, how many millimeters per hour....
GE Vernova Q2 Wind Losses, Envision AI Turbine for Fortescue
GE Vernova posts a record quarter as gas and grid surge while wind orders drop 40%. Plus Envision grid-connects its first AI turbine for Fortescue. Visit https://woma2027.com/ to register speaking and sponsorship interest! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! If you haven't visited woma2027.com, you should do so right now because we are putting together all of the, uh, events at WOMA 2027, which is March 3rd through 5th in Melbourne at the Pullman, Matthew, Pullman East? Pullman East Melbourne. And it's packed full. Our, in fact, actually, we have so many people applying to attend the event, we're getting a little nervous on if the size of the venue is not large enough, and we, we have a lot of people already chime in wanting to be sponsors, which is great. But I wanna talk about what you will experience at WOMA. We've done it for two years now, and the feedback has been great. And Yolanda, you've been to the one just this past February, and participated in panels and saw some of the, uh, workshops and was involved in a lot of WOMA 2026. What are you expecting in 2027, and what did you think of 2026? Yolanda Padron: I thought [00:01:00] 2026 was great. I loved seeing everybody there. Uh, got to meet a lot of new people. It was, it was sweet. There was a lot of r- people returning from WOMA 2025, um, and a lot of new people that were told that that was the event to be at to learn about wind, which was really, really nice to hear. Uh, something that I loved, especially since we've been through quite a few conferences since then and before then, was just the fact that, like, you're, you're just talking about problems and just talking about solutions, and you're talking about real stories, and it's nothing that's super, super public. You know, like, you, you can have real conversations with real people. I know during a panel I mentioned a, a solution to an issue that I had seen that was kind of niche, and then, uh, like three minutes later, like I had had some people come up to me and we all talked about the problem that we saw and then [00:02:00]talked about their problem, and it was really similar, and obviously in a totally different continent. And it was, it was good to, to be able to have those conversations that you usually wouldn't have elsewhere, especially if everything's just really, really public and just big and you're having a lot of people sell at you, and it's, it's just something that we've really shied away from. What, what was your favorite part of it? Matthew Stead: I, I think, um, it was really the fact that it was a a technical, useful, helpful conference rather than having some rando talking about things that they're told to talk to you about Allen Hall: It's real answers from real problem solvers. And everybody's gonna be in Melbourne on the 3rd through the 5th of March 2027. If you're interested in attending, you need to go to woma2027.com. If you're interested in sponsoring, it's also woma2027.com. There's limited [00:03:00]sponsorship left, so if you wanna do something, you better get in quick. And if you wanna attend the event, and I suggest that you do, that you visit woma2027.com and get registered today The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. It's been a busy day as we record because GE just announced its second quarter earnings and a bunch of things about the business. They had an investor call early, early, early on the East Coast, and even earlier for those on the West Coast of the US, and it was a very good quarter for GE, but a really lopsided one. Uh, GE Vernova reported second quarter orders of [00:04:00] $24.2 billion, up 88% with a backlog that has now climbed to $176 billion. Free cash came in at $5.1 billion. Man, $5.1 billion is a lot of cash, everybody, which is more than the company generated in all of last year. So they made more in one quarter in cash than made in all of last year, and management is raising its full year guidance, but the strength is coming from gas power and the electric grid, not from wind. The wind segment saw orders fall 40% and revenue slip 10%, and the company still expects wind to lose about $400 million this year. Although in the investor call, they did say that the forecast for wind in Q3 and maybe even Q4 was to be essentially break even on the EBITDA scale. So that's a, a, a good number. It does seem like GE is being more [00:05:00] aggressive on pricing and selective on the projects they are choosing to participate with. Repowers was way down, if I remember correctly. Uh, they are not doing a lot of that at the moment. So there is a slowdown they're seeing in wind, but they're more than making up for it in gas turbines and electrification. Orders for gas turbines are out to '30, '31, and I think they're gonna close out all of '30, '31, um, book orders for gas turbines here shortly. So if you want a gas turbine, Matthew, you're gonna have to get in line because your GE has a long list of, of clients in front of them. What does this mean for wind? When I hear the discussion where GE is focused on gas and electrification because of the huge cash flow that comes in their door- Does that mean a good positive things for wind because they have the cash to kinda hang around wind? Or is it gonna be set aside for other [00:06:00] more profitable business segments? I Matthew Stead: mean, GE's had a number of setbacks over the years. Um, you know, we know, we know all about them. We've been talking about them, you know, multiple times. But, you know, they've gotta just wait it out, don't they? Um, you know, wind is not gonna go away, so they just need to wait it out, get their problems out of the way, get their cash flow in, build the order books again, just wait for things to improve. Um, I, I think one thing I just wanna pull out, the Sands Ear, i- isn't that a massive achievement? Allen Hall: It is. It's, it's a colossal engineering achievement on its own. Forget about just delivering and manufacturing all those turbines and getting them installed. And that's a pattern energy project, and Fairwind I think was involved with that in terms of project development, EPC items. It's huge. It's gigantic. But it may be the last one we see in the United States for a while. Matthew Stead: And but Vineyard, you know, they've gotta resolve that, don't they? We've spoken about that before. Get that one out the way, clear out the decks and, yeah. That'll come good. Allen Hall: Rosemary, of our former GE [00:07:00] employees, I guess we have two of them here. I'm one. Not of wind, but of another division. What's your thoughts on GE Vernova at the minute? Rosemary Barnes: These days I see them through the O&M lens. That's how I work with them, is when my clients need support for all their wind farms and It's just, it's just never enough. It's not a GE-specific thing. Uh, you know, across Australia, anybody with a full service agreement does not... Uh, the, the company performing that agreement just gives the impression that they just do not have enough, um, uh, enough people. Y- you know? It's just, just hands or maybe it's budget. Uh, I guess it, it's both at the same time. Yeah, I mean, I see some good things like their, the pace of new technologies has slowed and they're consolidating, which was needed, but it's just hard to imagine that it's even gonna be enough considering how many fewer blade engineers that they've got now. Like, how are they, [00:08:00] how are they going to get the, you know, the issues with the platforms that they are, uh, pushing, how are they gonna get all that under control with so many fewer engineers? And will they ever be able to, you know, go back to innovating a- again when they've lost so much of their, you know, institutional knowledge? Allen Hall: Two things they did not mention during the phone call today or in any of the documents that I saw was TPI Composites and that EPC has acquired that and is now operating the factories, uh, making GE blades. And LM Wind Power was not discussed either, although LM Wind Power has been integrated into the overall financials of the company, so it's not a standalone financial entity like it was last year. So you can't really r- read the tea leaves of what's happening at LM, but nobody talked about or even asked on the investor call what was happening on the wind side. They were very interested in gas turbines and what the order rate was going to be, and GE was concerned [00:09:00] on their side, saying that they're trying to ramp up production to make more gas turbines, but there's limitations to how much they can do. Rosemary Barnes: I guess that's the s- the zeitgeist now, right? Or it's the, I don't know, like, it's, it's a sign of the times. Everyone's obsessed with data centers, and for some reason, data centers are obsessed with gas turbines, um, even though, like, it's not a fast solution to, uh, y- you know, to, to anything. So I don't... You know, I'm not saying that building a, you know, a wind farm or solar farms, batteries, those are not without challenges. But I really don't think that the, yeah, gas turbine challenge is so much easier than the, um, yeah, than the renewables challenges. It's a bit weird to me how everyone has just kind of l
Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center
Allen covers the V236 blade failure at He Dreiht, Maine's first full-size floating turbine, and Japan's wind-powered data center. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday Everyone The V236 just had a bad week last week. a blade failed on one of the turbines at ENBW's [EN-bay-vay's] HE DREIHT [hay DRYT] offshore wind farm in the German North Sea. Nine hundred and sixty megawatts. There are 64 of those V236 machines. The project hit first power just last November. ENBW says no one was hurt. VESTAS says it has launched a root cause investigation. But a blade failure on your flagship turbine ... at one of Germany's biggest offshore wind farms? That will be a headline. And the industry is watching. Now ... from the North Sea ... to the coast of Maine. The UNIVERSITY OF MAINE has done something no one in America has done before. They put a full-size floating wind turbine in the ocean. And it is delivering power to the grid. The platform is called VOLTURNUS [vol-TURN-us]. It was assembled onshore ... in Brewer, Maine ... then towed thirty miles down the PENOBSCOT [peh-NOB-skot] River and out to sea. No specialized heavy-lift vessels. No deepwater pile driving. The hull is made of concrete ... sourced locally. Not imported steel. Eighty percent of the best offshore wind in America sits over water too deep for fixed-bottom foundations. Floating platforms like VOLTURNUS could change that math entirely. Meanwhile ... in Japan ... wind energy just found a brand-new customer. Data centers. EURUS [YOO-rus] ENERGY and TOYOTA TSUSHO [TOY-oh-tah TSOO-shoh] have broken ground on a wind-powered data center in HOKKAIDO [hoh-KY-doh]. It is the first data center in Japan directly connected to a wind farm. The facility sits next to the KOBAOKO [koh-bah-OH-koh] Wind Farm ... forty-two megawatts ... with a private power line running straight to the servers. And here is the bigger picture. Japan has most of its data centers packed into Tokyo and Osaka. HOKKAIDO has the wind ... but not the demand. So instead of sending the power somewhere else ... they are bringing the demand to the wind. TOYOTA TSUSHO already operates ten wind farms in the region ... more than five hundred megawatts. They are planning a much larger data center cluster by twenty thirty. Ten to twenty megawatts of capacity. And speaking of scale ... China just laid out its five-year plan for renewables. The target? A fifty-three percent jump in renewable energy consumption by twenty thirty. According to BLOOMBERG ... renewable power use should rise to about one-point-eight billion tons of coal equivalent ... Wind and solar generation alone should nearly double ... from two-point-three trillion kilowatt-hours to four trillion. And here is the part that matters for reliability. China wants wind and solar ... backed by storage ... to provide twenty percent of electricity during peak summer and winter evening hours. That is double the current level. Three hundred gigawatts of peak generation from renewables. That is not an aspiration. That is a published national target. Now ... before we go ... a story from the other end of the scale. In KONGIGANAK [KAHN-gig-uh-nak] ... a village in western Alaska ... they built five wind turbines. There is no grid connection. No transmission lines running to the outside world. For years ... the village ran on diesel generators. The turbines changed that. But they created a new problem. Sometimes ... the wind made more electricity than the village could use. No grid to send it to. No big battery bank to store it in. So the engineers came up with something simple. They put special ceramic heaters inside every home. When the wind blows hard ... the extra power flows into those heaters. Dense ceramic bricks soak up the energy as heat. And when the wind dies down ... that stored heat slowly releases into the house. In Alaska ... where winter never seems to end ... surplus wind power now keeps homes warm and cuts diesel bills at the same time. There is a shift in the wind energy business at the moment. It used to be utilities buying megawatts. Now it is tech companies buying uptime. Remote villages buying independence from diesel. And entire nations buying credibility on their climate commitments. Each of those buyers has a different definition of reliability. And every one of them needs turbines that can run for years and years. The wind industry has never had more demand. The question is whether the hardware can keep up with the ambition. `That is the state of the wind industry for the twenty-seventh of July ... twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
SkySpecs Turns Blade Data Into Smarter Repairs
Matt Sigala, Director of Asset Management at SkySpecs, joins to discuss blade inspection data, repair vendor management, and carbon fiber repairs. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall 2025: Matt, welcome to the program. Greatly appreciate it. So Matt Sagala has not been on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Although he's been asked for the last five or six years to be on, he has had other commitments. So now that he's available to be on the podcast, we love having him here. Uh, if you don't know Matt Sagala, Matt Sagala is a, a real special talent in wind. Very knowledgeable about repairs. He's a composites person, but he, you know, it's one thing to know composites and understand what that looks like, but also to run organizations that repair blades and manage blades and take care of large quantities of blades and do it very efficiently, where the assets are actually working and operating efficiently is hard to do. So, uh, [00:01:00] Matt is now with SkySpecs in a recent change from a, a large global wind operator, and he's come over to SkySpecs as Director of Asset Management. So Matt, congratulations first. Appreciate Matt Sigala: it. Appreciate it. Allen Hall 2025: So that's a, that's a big title there. What does that all mean, Director of Asset Management at SkySpecs? Matt Sigala: basically, it's just the overview of your entire asset from the start of the inspections to the reviewing of, of the inspections, to creating the RFP, going out to blade budgets and repairs, uh, and then having the actual repair teams on site and us being able to help execute those repairs in a systematic way, um, without having to overload or, or burden your, your internal, uh, systems in-house. Allen Hall 2025: Because as an operator, there's a lot on your plate. Matt Sigala: Yes. Allen Hall 2025: And a lot of operators don't necessarily have blade teams internally. You came from an organization- Yeah ... that did have a really good, still does have a really good blade organization. Matt Sigala: Oh, amazing, yeah. Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. Uh, that was unique, but a lot of operators in the United States or globally just don't have [00:02:00] that resource. SkySpecs has developed that resource over the last couple of years of we're blade experts, we have all the data coming in, but we can also help you downstream when it comes to maintaining and repairing blades, which is, is sort of a new feature for- Yeah ... SkySpecs. Now that you're there and you're seeing all the data, all the, the, the- the, data center, so to speak, of w- and you have access to blades globally, and you can put your fingers on it. What are you seeing out there in terms of blade health and, and going forward? Matt Sigala: There's a lot of work. There's definitely a lot of work upcoming and into the future. Um, and you know, I think a lot of it could be risk-based with, with inspections, annual inspections, semi-an-annual inspections. I think that's always the first line of defense on any blade management c- campaign. Um, and then, you know, coming behind that, I think that's where our preferred vendor lists and, uh, you know, being comfortable with working with certain suppliers on certain type of repairs. Um, we feel that, you know, we have an edge on the industry, [00:03:00] uh, with the data set that we have in hand, plus being able to build a relationship with ISPs. And not only build a relationship with them, but be able to continuously give them mindful insight to their repairs from a year now to two years now. Because we're the only ones really seeing those inspections and the repairs after they've been in operation for more than a year. It's very rare that a, an ISP, uh, even on my side of the house when I was working with EDF, of being able to see a repair from year to year. Um, I think that's, that's, that's pretty massive and- Yeah ... a lot of value within that, so. Allen Hall 2025: Oh, sure. Uh, you were one of the first ones when I met you years ago now, uh, that was a big proponent of more inspection. Yeah. That there are some blades in which you must inspect more. Matt Sigala: Yes. Allen Hall 2025: And here's the reason why. Matt Sigala: Yeah. Allen Hall 2025: Because you had thought through it a little bit and you'd come up with a plan. So you always had a plan. That's one thing about Sagales, he always has a plan. You can ask him any question, he's got a plan in relationship to blades. And you were the, you were the one that has said, "Hey, uh, there are certain blade types out there that we have seen that, well, you need to do a [00:04:00] little more inspection, and there are some others that it's totally fine." Yeah. A, a yearly inspection is, is, is fine. Well enough. And that SkySpecs data, now that you have access to it, is that also f- feeding back into your- Definitely ... logic of that? Matt Sigala: Yeah, yeah. How do you, how do you think about it? No, it's, it's, it's opened my mind a lot kinda getting me out of just being in, like, the trenches of certain decisions and being able to see this whole data set as a whole now. Uh, and holistically, it's like, all right, m- there's just certain things that I kinda need to adjust on my end. Um, definitely letting a lot of things just play out for, uh, this repair season and, and how things are running, and then kinda looking to make some changes into, into '27. Um, but the data set, it's, it's amazing. It's, it's almost over- overwhelming. Um, so just kinda going after- the low-hanging fruit as far as, like, the 62 twos, the 145s, and really understanding what those look like, uh, how we can help our customers Allen Hall 2025: that's a large part of the fleet in the States, but globally too. SkySpecs has made a lot of, uh, recent advancements into, uh, certain marketplaces outside the US. Mm-hmm. I won't go into the specifics there, [00:05:00] but e- essentially, like, SkySpecs is becoming definitely more of a global company than a US-based company. Uh, and seeing turbines from outside the US, so you see a, a GE or a Vestas turbine operating in Germany or in the UK, and you see the same turbine in the States. They're not- No ... performing the same, are they? No. It's a completely different- Same turbine. Matt Sigala: Yeah, different wind regimes, erosion characteristics, crack propagation rates, everything. Even we were seeing major, you know, differences from the West Coast to, to central Iowa with the same type of platform. So you can only imagine, you know, start going from a, a larger scale on, on the globe, Allen Hall 2025: So you're ac- because you have access to the data now, does that change the way you think about Blade management. Matt Sigala: Yes. I- Allen Hall 2025: in terms of when to, when to inspect, when to repair, or just leave it. Are you able to have clear definition of the variables that go into that equation? Matt Sigala: Definitely so. and I think that's the key to it. It's, it's, we- we're really stepping away from that blanket approach of inspections where you [00:06:00] do have your baseline inspection, but after that you start getting into the granulars of, okay, you know, this site has X amount of the 622Ps or whatever they are, uh, we need to inspect more on, on a biannual or semi-annual inspection. Um, and then we have, you know, certain turbines, like you said, that we, we touch once a year and it's kind of just, just let it go. But, um, no, it's, it's very site specific, um, on- Allen Hall 2025: That's what I'm wondering ... on- Is it how, how site specific is it? Very, very, Matt Sigala: very site specific. Allen Hall 2025: Really? Yeah. It's- So like, uh, is Central Iowa is different than Central Kansas- Matt Sigala: Eh Allen Hall 2025: in a sense, or is it more broader spread than that? It can Matt Sigala: get a little bit broader spread, but then we start looking into s- serial numbers for manufacturers, issues. Okay, are we seeing a certain batch that was released out and it's in, you know, the northern part of Iowa or half the park? And so that's what we're really getting down to now is like serial batch issues and, and trying to track that across the region. Allen Hall 2025: SkySpecs has been trying to use more AI over the last- Yes ... six months to a year. Is that helping to sort through some of that data? Matt Sigala: Yeah, it's accelerating it. Uh, definitely it's not like the, uh, [00:07:00] all end answer, but it's definitely, it's, it's- Allen Hall 2025: So you're not just thumbing through Excel spreadsheets- Yeah, no and looking at them one by one, you can actually use some, a little bit of Matt Sigala: AI to- A little bit ... to sort it. Yeah, Yeah, sort it out, get a high, high res summary, and then being able to kind of like pinpoint where we wanna go from there on it and, and dive in. But still, you know, AI hallucinates and, and does its thing. Oh, sure. And so we, we just, we wanna tread carefully with it, but making sure it's clean, Allen Hall 2025: a sanity check, right? Yeah, exactly. While you're there, a sanity check, like does that make sense? Exactly. Oh, okay. Exactly. Let's, let's scrape it again. Okay. So that's a huge advantage, and I, I know on the repair vendor management side- Yeah which has been a, an effort over the last year or two from SkySpecs, is to, uh, work with the ISPs and make sure that they're doing the repairs properly and they're vetted an
Omterra Rebrand, Goldwind Warns on Turbine Size
Siemens Gamesa rebrands as Omterra, Goldwind questions ever-bigger turbines, and MIT revisits the century-old Betz limit. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, who is recovering from a very serious illness, Matthew Stead, who has been healthy pretty much all the Australian winter, and Yolanda Padron in sunny, hot Austin, Texas. Welcome, Rosemary Rosemary Barnes: Thank you. I am recovering from man flu, and I say man flu because it's just a cold, but I'm complaining a lot about it. Allen Hall: there's gonna be a new name for Siemens Gamesa. So it was Siemens and then Gamesa's a separate company. They merged. Siemens Energy, uh, broke off from Siemens AG. So [00:01:00] that's a very well-known name, Siemens. It's-- Everybody knows Siemens at this point around the world. And the, the one family had, as a company, had s- label on everything, right? So it's, uh, Werner von Siemens started it 150 years ago. It's been a long time since Siemens was started, but it's everywhere. It's on turbines, transformers, and power plants around the world, and now they're changing their name, right? So when Siemens Energy broke off from Siemens AG, they, they had a limited time they could use that name, so they have rebranding themselves or are about to rebrand themselves, and I wanna pronounce this right, Omterra. O-M-T-E-R-R-A. Now, we did a little research on this, and I think it's Latin for all of the world. It's kind of a conjoined, uh, set of words, Latin words, kind of a, a schmear in a sense. So, uh, so the company that, you [00:02:00] know, that spun off in w- roughly 2020, if I remember this right, Matthew, does that sound right? It was roughly 2020 when Siemens Energy was established on its own. Uh, they're gonna be changing their name to Omterra. So instead of seeing, seeing Siemens Gamesa publications or Siemens Gamesa wind turbines, I guess they're gonna have this new name, Omterra. What do we all think? Matthew Stead: I think it's great. I think, and if you go back to, you know, GE Vernova, um, I, I thought Vernova was a bit weird for a while, but now it just rolls off the tongue and easy. It just makes so much sense. Um, so I'm, I'm, I'm for it. I, I like it. I've already... You know, can already say it. It took a lot longer to say Vernova than it's taking to say Terra. Rosemary Barnes: I think that it-- But it's not Vernova, it's GE Vernova, right? So everyone knows what it is. Whereas my understanding is it's not Siemens Omtera, it's just Omtera, which makes it sound like a new budget kind of [00:03:00] brandless, history-less, uh, company. So that's... Yeah, I'm no branding expert, but I think that, uh, like they, they must have not been able to use the word Siemens at all, um, because otherwise you surely would, because it has a very... Outside of, you know, their blade issues and bearing issues of a couple of years ago, they do have a, like a solid engineering reputation across many fields, so you wouldn't probably intentionally divorce yourself entirely from that. So, um, yeah, I, I think it will take some getting used to for me Matthew Stead: but everyone remembers. I mean, it's not like-- The people in the wind industry know their heritage, they know their history, so I don't think it matters. I mean, you know, you know, they, they purchase the Senvion, you know, technologies or, you know, licenses in Europe. You know, y- y- you don't forget these things, so I don't think it matters. I think it's just a, it's a color, it's a, it's a label Yolanda Padron: I think it'll be fine. I just think that there will be a little [00:04:00] bit of confusion down the line as with everything, right? Like I've, I've been on the side of conversations where I have to explain like Siemens versus like SGRE on paper and it's like, oh, it's-- this is why th- there was that paper trail, uh, because people would think it was an absolutely different thing. Um, so I, I can totally see those conversations coming, coming to play in the future where someone thinks that Ontier is a completely different entity that maybe they changed OEMs or something, um, for a site. But nothing a little history lesson won't fix, I guess. Matthew Stead: You just want people talking about you Rosemary Barnes: Name change every year Allen Hall: Change your name every year. Well, that's, that's one way to approach it. I w- always wonder what the boardroom looks like and sounds like when this discussion is going on, because Siemens, Siemens Energy is a big company, and there had to be outsourcing of this to probably several marketing firms, mostly [00:05:00] in Germany, I'm guessing. And they came back with a bunch of pitches, and eventually they picked one. But boardrooms are probably not the place to pick a name. And I always think like, "Oh, you just had such a opportunity to do something really cool or really impressive." Allen Hall: Well, we'll see how it goes with Omterra. The, it's gonna be, I'm sure, a huge marketing effort, and you'll probably see commercials for it during the Super Bowl. Developers are [00:06:00] eyeing Britain's next big renewables auction and have been waiting to learn the rules and most importantly, the price. Well, this week the UK government delivered both. It confirmed a package of changes to the CFD scheme ahead of allocation round eight, aimed at simplifying the process and keeping good projects from being tripped up by some paperwork. So AR7 was super successful, and they're hopefully gonna have a, a great allocation round eight. Uh, unchanged from last round, here are some pieces to it. AR7 brought in 15 gigawatts of, of new capacity, uh, well below the ceilings, and the government is betting that that's stability from AR7's gonna exist for AR8, so they're keeping the pricing limits the same. And let me give you some of the numbers here. So everything's in 2024 prices, just so we have a baseline here. It, 113 pounds per megawatt hour [00:07:00] for fixed bottom offshore wind, 271 pounds for floating offshore wind. That's, uh, pounds per megawatt. And then 92 pounds per megawatt for onshore wind, and s- 75 pounds per megawatt for solar. So 271 pounds per megawatt hour in 2044 dollars is, you know, you're probably talking, what, 290 pounds per megawatt hour. That's a really good strike price or ceiling to allow, uh, some more floating wind into the UK waters Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the UK have this newly signed agreement with Japan, right, to, to progress development of that technology. I feel like I, I haven't looked up any numbers to back this up, but I feel like the gap between fixed bottom and floating is narrowing. It's barely more than double now, which, um, yeah, I think is not that bad considering how little development there has been for floating offshore wind compared to fixed bottom. So [00:08:00] yeah, I think that it is an interesting technology to develop. I, I know with the, um, auction rounds and 'cause it's a government thing, it's easy to think, "Oh, why are you spending any money on anything other than the cheapest one?" Because y- you know, like, it, it feels weird that the government would play, you know, when they're purchasing power for their grid, that they would do any more than trying to just get, you know, bulk power at the cheapest price possible whilst ensuring, you know, reliability. Um, but in the previous or the previous, the one-- last one or the one before that, they had quite a few tidal projects announced that certainly, you know, an expensive and not mature technology. But I think that you can't say the same thing about floating offshore wind. I think that it is on a, like a good, a good development trajectory, and there are certainly places on Earth where floating offshore is one of the most appealing technologies. You know, if you think of through to 2030s, 2040s, there's plenty of places where, um, you know, slightly higher [00:09:00] price paid for floating offshore wind will still be worth it because they have so few other options available. So it makes sense as an industry to in- invest in capabilities there. Matthew Stead: think it's a really interesting method. It seems to be really successful, the contract for di-difference approach. So, um, I'm, I'm surprised that it's not adopted more widely, um, in other locations, Rosemary Barnes: it is around a bit. I would like to see it, like, in, in Australia, we are, we are developing some new wind projects, but not as fast as we need to, to, you know, hit our upcoming targets. And I think, like, while the government is doing some things to help move or help incentivize developers, it's not working that well, and maybe CFD would be a, you know, a bit of a better way to, like, just actually guarantee that these projects are gonna go ahead. Allen Hall: Australia has a shipping problem. there's been a concern at state-owned transport hubs are becoming less supportive of [00:10:00] wind energy projects with ACEN Renewables saying that they will now have to truck a large transformer from a wind project or for a wind project in northern New South Wales from the Port of Adelaide. That's not necessarily close. And h- they also said that the Port of Brisbane has
ECP Buys TPI Blade Factories, GE Pours Billions Into LM Wind Power
Allen covers Energy Capital Partners buying TPI's blade factories, GE Vernova's $1.7 billion rescue of LM Wind Power, offshore wind cutting oil burn during a heat wave, Scotland's Caledonia approval, and 19 states suing the Pentagon over stalled wind reviews. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. A few months ago, we told you about a Houston bankruptcy court carving up TPI Composites. Well, that story just got a whole lot bigger. On July sixth, TPI walked out of Chapter Eleven. Zero debt. New owners. A private equity firm called Energy Capital Partners picked up TPI's blade factories in Iowa and Juarez, Mexico for about twenty million dollars. Twenty million, against more than a billion dollars in liabilities. ECP did not stumble into wind blades. They bought Calpine back in twenty eighteen, inherited seventy-seven power plants, and became GE's biggest private gas turbine customer in the Western Hemisphere. That relationship, forged in gas turbine halls, is what brought them to composite factories. GE Vernova signed a five-year supply deal requiring it to send blade orders to ECP's factories. GE is ECP's partner, its customer, and was even the backup buyer if the deal fell through. So TPI lives on, leaner, debt-free, with locked-in demand from one of the biggest turbine makers on earth. But now, the other side of that coin. While ECP picked up two blade factories for twenty million dollars, GE Vernova recently pumped one-point-seven billion dollars into its own blade company, LM Wind Power. LM's equity had fallen to negative 575 million euros. Revenue dropped ninety-six percent in one year, from 2.1 billion Danish kroner down to just ninety-three million. The Danish workforce, cut to about twenty-five people. LM Wind Power has lost money every single year since GE bought it in twenty seventeen. Nine straight years of red ink. So think about that. Two American blade factories now serve GE Vernova's onshore business. One in Grand Forks, North Dakota, owned by GE, inside a division losing four hundred million dollars a year. The other in Newton, Iowa, owned by ECP, zero debt, five-year supply deal. The independent contract blade business that TPI Composites built is gone. Vestas took the India and Mexico plants in-house. GE's supply is locked to ECP. The OEMs and their financial partners now own the factories directly. And that is a new era for wind manufacturing. Now, let us talk about what those blades are doing once they are spinning. Earlier this month, a brutal heat wave hit the eastern United States. Air conditioners running full blast. Grid operators scrambling to keep up. And off the coast of New England, two offshore wind farms stepped up. Vineyard Wind, eight hundred and six megawatts off Massachusetts. Revolution Wind, seven hundred and four megawatts near Rhode Island. Together they pushed hundreds of megawatts into the grid right when people needed it most. And here is the number that matters. Oil-fired power plants met about ten percent of peak demand on July second this year. Last summer, at the height of a similar heat wave, oil plants covered nearly fifteen percent. That is more than a gigawatt less oil burned. The projects that survived lawsuits, survived construction shutdowns, survived lease freezes, are now keeping the lights on in New England. Across the Atlantic, Scotland just approved two massive offshore wind farms. The Caledonia North and South projects in the Moray Firth, up to one hundred and forty turbines spread across one hundred and sixty-five square miles. Enough power for two million homes. Ocean Wind is leading the development with a commitment of about 1.7 billion pounds. And here is what makes this project different. Caledonia South will mix fixed-bottom and floating turbines, up to thirty-nine floaters. That blend of proven and next-generation technology on a single project is something to watch. Back in the United States, nineteen state attorneys general are suing the Department of Defense. The reason, wind project reviews. Federal law says any wind turbine taller than two hundred feet must go through a Defense Department check, to make sure it does not interfere with military radar or flight paths. Last August, the Pentagon stopped reviewing those projects. No explanation. No timeline for starting again. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown is leading the coalition, joined by attorneys general from eighteen other states including California, New York, and New Jersey. They want a court to force the Defense Department to start doing its job again. And finally, a story from the sea floor. Down in southern New England, lobster populations have been falling for decades. Back in nineteen ninety-eight, there were about fifty million lobsters in those waters. By twenty twenty-two, fewer than ten million. But something else is moving in. Jonah crabs. Fishermen used to throw them back. Now they are hauling them in by the thousands, selling them as a cheaper option to lobster. And researchers at the University of Rhode Island are finding that offshore wind foundations are acting like artificial reefs. Algae grows first, then barnacles and mussels, then fish and crabs follow. The question scientists are working to answer is whether these structures create new marine life, or just pull it in from the surrounding ocean. Either way, the turbines are not just making electricity. They are making habitat. Now, here is what to watch. This Wednesday, July twenty-second, GE Vernova reports second quarter earnings. And the numbers we just talked about will be in the room. One-point-seven billion dollars pumped into LM Wind Power, a blade company that has lost money nine years straight. Twenty million dollars to let ECP walk away with two factories and a five-year supply deal. GE Vernova is guiding for four hundred million dollars in wind segment losses this year. Meanwhile, its Power and Electrification divisions are printing money, nearly five billion dollars in free cash flow last quarter alone. So the question on that earnings call is simple. If you are spending eighty times more to keep your in-house blade maker alive than a private equity firm paid to buy your contract supplier, how long do you keep doing both? Watch for what GE Vernova says about LM Wind Power's future, about North American onshore blade strategy, and about whether that 1.7 billion dollar injection was a rescue, or a goodbye. The answer could reshape who makes blades in this industry for the next decade. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 19th of July, twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.
Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures
Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind and Loren Walton of NSK on main bearing failures, why the industry is pulling DLC coatings, and the material changes replacing them. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Cory and Loren, welcome back to the podcast. Cory Mittleider: Thanks for having us. Allen Hall: So we've got two bearing experts in one location, and this is the point where we start asking all of our bearing questions. Cory, you're with Malloy Wind, and we've had you on the podcast two or three different times. Loren's with NSK — we've had Loren on at least once before. Loren Walton: Once, yes. Allen Hall: Yeah, and that was good. Loren Walton: I appreciate that. It was fun. Allen Hall: There are a lot of bearing issues happening in the States at the moment, but also globally. Whatever happens in the States, you can pretty much find in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, South America, Brazil — everywhere. We're hearing a lot about main bearings, and there's a variety of things that I think you two know from being on the inside that we on the outside haven't heard yet. I want to get some of those stories out and understand what's going on, because operators are trying to keep their assets running, and bearings are a big issue. Let's talk main bearings. What are you seeing in the field right now? What kinds of problems are happening? Cory Mittleider: It seems like operators are coming to us and asking us to supply bearings that no longer have DLC. That's a bit of a phenomenon lately. For a little over a decade we spent our time supplying bearings with DLC on the rollers to address problems found fifteen years ago. Allen Hall: DLC is diamond-like coating. Cory Mittleider: Correct. Allen Hall: Which is a really hard specialty coating applied to the bearing surfaces to provide hardness and durability — or it's supposed to provide durability. Cory Mittleider: That's a good point. It's a coating that's one to two microns thick — one to two thousandths of a millimeter — and a very hard material. The big feature was that it's a dissimilar material to the steel. So when we break through the mixed and boundary lubrication regimes and those asperities touch each other, that dissimilar material prevents the welding and tearing that leads to the peeling damage we saw fifteen years ago. That peeling damage eventually turned into spalling, cracking, and other failures. So it made a lot of sense at the time to turn to something like this to mitigate the peeling. Allen Hall: So the peeling damage was one of those issues where you basically had some sliding happening. In my electrical world, and from looking at these on the ground, you see things moving relative to one another instead of rolling relative to one another. Loren Walton: It's more of a welding and shearing of the contacts. I used a finger analogy last time: think of your asperities as fingers — one set is the roller, one set is the outer raceway. They weld under high load and high pressure, then they shear, leaving behind debris. That's what creates the beginning of the peeling damage, and then it continues to create more debris, and the bearing starts to basically eat itself alive. Allen Hall: The start of that process, though — is that a lack of lubrication, or a finish or hardness issue on the bearing? Loren Walton: I love that question, because this is the crux of the whole thing, and I think it's the part that gets missed. People immediately want to throw the whole thing out and start over with something different. Fundamentally, when we fixed the surface issue by adding the coating, the problems pretty much went away. We went from one-to-five years of life to ten-plus years, depending on the application — without changing the construction, the bearing type, or the contact angle. Just by adding the coating, we increased life significantly. The root of what you're asking is that the bearing would operate better if it had the proper amount of separation. It's not a fatigue issue and it's not a loading issue. At its heart, the bearing isn't able to create that separation. There isn't enough speed, and there isn't enough of a gap created by the lubricant. Allen Hall: So ideally you have this almost molecular-scale film of lubricant between the two surfaces. If it isn't designed properly, or you have an issue, that lubricant gets squeezed out of the space, and at that point you have trouble. That's some of what I'm hearing on main bearings — especially when turbines have been curtailed and aren't turning. Is that partly just the fact that there's so much load? Cory Mittleider: I think that's a fundamental difficulty of the main shaft bearing. You've got extremely variable loads, from full load to idle, and a wide range of operating conditions — from northern North Dakota in the winter to Texas in the heat this week. High load, heavy load, incredibly slow speed, and even slower if it's idling. It's hard to reliably build that film. It's not necessarily that there isn't enough lubrication; it's that the film isn't building properly where it needs to be to separate the metal and the rolling elements. Allen Hall: So the diamond-like coating was meant to solve that welding problem — you put the coated bearing in, and it worked okay until more recently, when all of a sudden we started having other issues. To me those aren't related to the coating itself, but to other things happening up in the nacelle. Loren Walton: If we recall some of your previous episodes, you were on the forefront of understanding and talking about DLC starting to become an accelerant to failure. I know you talked about it with Cory. Those episodes have aged very well. A lot of people now are recognizing what we were saying years ago and changing their strategy toward removing DLC — whether on bearings for newer turbines, typically two megawatts and greater, or in some cases going backwards and removing DLC as they do additional replacements, and looking for another solution, because there's potential for additional issues you weren't expecting by adding the coating. Allen Hall: The coating is non-conductive, which is part of the issue, because you wouldn't think bearings are conducting electricity. But as turbines got some of these uptower and downtower converters and inverters connected to the generator, we started seeing current levels — according to Motor Doc, where people like Howard Penrose have gone out and measured currents in the nacelles — of well over a hundred amps running through ground straps and the like, into bearings. That's a lot of current. If you're shoving that into a bearing that has DLC on it, you're going to break it down and create these really hard steel bits stuck inside the bearing, which wear it like pouring sand inside a bearing. That's what eventually happens, and it has nothing to do with the bearing. It has more to do with the electrical and control systems we stuck up top and didn't pay much attention to, but probably should have. We created an electrical situation, and now all the upkeep comes to people like you to deal with. You haven't seen a lot of work to eliminate it, although there are a couple of good attempts happening. The reality is: okay, we have to have a bearing, and I've got this current going around from the nacelle. How do I put those together in a way that removes the DLC? Cory Mittleider: That's what we've spent the last ten-plus years on. As a bearing supplier, we can't change the whole system. We have to do the best we can to accommodate what's happening in your system. We would absolutely encourage you, if you can identify and remove the electricity, please do that. Allen Hall: They should. And there are a lot of people who do. Cory Mittleider: There's a pursuit of that, absolutely. But the turbine still needs to run. Loren Walton: We work very closely with an owner-operator that did a lot of that work. To your point from before, it does sound like, from what they've investigated, the current has been there for a while. It's been there in different models and different turbines. Maybe the way it presented, or its impact, wasn't to the same extent as what we're seeing now. That's where I'd say there's more to it than just the current. I think I said last time it's not just a smoking gun. The bearing is sitting in front of a firing squad. You put it all together and now we're in a tough position. But to Cory's point, we get brought the application, we get brought the environment, and we get told, "Here, make it work." Allen Hall: And you don't actually see everything that's happened. You get all the mechanical loads, but they don't tell you, "Hey, we're running a hundred amps through this nacelle." Loren Walton: No, I don't remember hearing that. Cory Mittleider: No, that's not usually disclosed. Allen Hall: No one's ever said that. So that's a real troubling thing happening in the industry — we're assigning blame to mechanical components when really it's an electrical mistake. When you dig into it, what you find is that currents have been running up top for years, but what's changed now is that with more focus on emissions from inverters, they've pushed things into higher frequencies. Higher frequency bands are harder to ground out and get rid of. When things were in the kilohertz range, we could partly ground them and they'd go away. Now we're working at ten kilohertz and up, and that energy distributes into a lot of places, including the bearings,...
Dogger Bank Wake Lawsuit, EverWind Hydrogen Farm
Rosemary previews Pardalote's new hands-on blade repair course. EverWind's Ocean Lake, Canada's largest wind project, will feed a green hydrogen and ammonia plant in Nova Scotia rather than the grid. Plus BP's exit from an offshore project in Japan, and the wake-effect lawsuit pitting SSE, Equinor, and Vårgrønn against RWE's Dogger Bank South. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes is back this week. Rosemary, you've been to a number of training courses over the last couple of weeks. The first off was GWO. What was your experience at GWO training? Rosemary1: It was the fourth or maybe even fifth time that I've done it. Um, I did it a few times in Denmark and then, uh, this is the second time doing it in Australia. also, this was my first time doing first aid in Australia. Last time they did GWO here, but my first aid was still valid from Europe, so I, I didn't redo it. And it's like so much about [00:01:00] snakes and spiders and jellyfish But a good, good rule of thumb, not 100% accurate, but good rule of thumb, if it is something from the ocean that stung you, then you put something warm on it, and if it's something from the land that stung or bit you, then something cold on it, Allen Hall 2025: well, how often do you usually take GWO training? Rosemary1: You gotta do it every two years to be valid. I don't do it every two years because, um, if you do it every two years, like within two years, then you can do the refresher course. So that's three days instead of four However, um, because I don't climb constantly, like often it will be six months or more in between climbs, I'll just do it before I know that I've got a climb. all the other people except for one were technicians who, you know, have been working for a while. So they're also doing the full course, not the refresher. So they get a little bit more practice than I do. But, um, it's just not often enough. Y-you know, like every time I go it's like I, I really feel the need to have the refresher, um, because I'm just not fully on top of it. 'Cause it's [00:02:00] not just that you need to know what to do. You need to be able to... Like if you need to use it, you're gonna be freaking out, you know? This is the worst thing that's probably ever happened in your life, and now you've gotta remember all your training. It's like you want it to be actually second nature to some extent. So yeah, first day is manual handling, which is v- you know, very-- That one's very easy and I would be happy to never do that again. Like I will always remember that. Um, then you got fire, um, fire safety awareness, and that one's just fun 'cause you just get to, um, light fires and put stuff out then first aid, which I definitely always want a refresher on. The CPR dummies at this place, they had lights, um, and it lit up green if you were doing it right, and I haven't used a dummy that was so advanced before, so that was quite good. I realized I wasn't pressing hard enough. and then yeah, last two days is working at heights training, which is the most intense 'cause you got your harness on all day and, um, you know, climbing up and down and rescuing people. this was Rite Training in Goulburn, and, um, the [00:03:00] instructor's name was Claire. highly recommend doing that one. Allen Hall 2025: Is that a general requirement in Australia that you have GWO before you can climb? Rosemary1: Like, yeah, they will sometimes, um, let you climb if you are babysat by people. I would not recommend other engineers, like if you've never climbed a wind turbine before, like I would really not recommend that you just go up with a team and haven't done the training because you do need to be able to use a ladder safely and, um, you can, y- you can easily, like even inside the nacelle, you could easily hurt yourself really badly if you're used to working in an office, uh, you're upping your danger level by, you know, like many, many, many times by going up a turbine and it's just something that you gotta take seriously. Allen Hall 2025: How busy are the courses in Australia? Are a lot of technicians trying to get in and get trained? Rosemary1: No, it's people that have a job that are getting trained. But there were heaps of techs in this course. There were maybe eight or so, which is also part of the reason why it took a really long time. Allen Hall 2025: So [00:04:00] this week, as we record, y- you're presenting a blade repair course for engineers and technicians. a completely new area that you're, uh, going into in terms of offering advice and expertise that it's really hard to find on the planet. It's probably a, a, a busy or, or requested course, I would imagine, in Australia, where you just don't have access to a lot of the manufacturers. Rosemary2: it's a, it's a course for just for engineers or technical type people, um, but including hands-on stuff. So the way that I I forced this to come into being was just the last five years. I, um, you know, I started working a lot on wind turbine blade repairs and, um, people would ask me, you know, "Have these repairs been done right?" And the thing is that the only repairs that I had anything to do with when I was working at LM were weirdo ones, right? [00:05:00] Where the normal, like a technician couldn't, couldn't handle it. It was outside of, um, yeah, their, their standard, uh, kind of repairs that they can do for whatever reason. and now in the work that we do at Part Load, it's primarily normal repairs, and I just didn't know exactly what technicians know. You know, how do they, how do they know whether they can repair it or not? What do they know before they go up there? When are they calling the engineer? Um, all that sort of stuff, like the normal stuff. eventually it became less about me learning, 'cause like I said, I kind of picked up most of it. Um, but now I've got staff that I'm training up to be, uh, you know, composites engineers and to work with these kinds of issues. There's a lot of repetitive tasks involved in what we do when we, like, assess the condition of a wind farm. A lot of what we do is look main- manually looking through photos and thing- if things are classified right or not. I [00:06:00] Found this guy from Direct Wind Services, Jurij Eska. He's a blade engineer. He's worked in Europe and then come back to Australia, so a little bit like me. And, um, I just worked with him on a few projects and I'm like, "Oh, okay. Well, this guy, uh, he really gets it." And I asked him, "How do you, how do you train your technicians? What course do they do? Maybe I can do that course." And he said, "Oh, we train them ourselves." And so then I asked him to put this course together. So where we started off the course yesterday, that was, um, uh, an indoor session where I was talking through how are blades designed, uh, certified, tested, manufactured, um, what kinds of manufacturing defects can you see and what do they do about them in the factory? 'Cause you know that they're doing a lot of repairs in the factory already before you ever see a, a brand new blade. and then the next three days we're going to be working on, um, yeah, grinding and [00:07:00] infusions and a bit of a, a bit of theory about, um, composite repairs. Allen Hall 2025: What do you feel like are those key skill sets that engineers should know how to do, maybe not as well as a, a professional technician that does it a lot, but at least at a beginner's level should be able to complete them before they start repairing blades on their own and giving advice about how to repair blades? What, what are those key items? Rosemary2: part of it is that I want them to be able to understand what is a bad damage and what's not a bad damage cause you look a lot at images from the outside, but it's really about what's on the inside and how deep it goes is the real thing. So, um, it'll be about learning, you know, developing some judgment about, um, how bad it can be and how bad it can look on the outside. We're not gonna be looking at so many real damages 'cause like obviously we're just dealing with pieces that are in the, um, in the, uh, workshop and Yuri has [00:08:00] made some samples for us, um, purposely made them badly so that we've got some, you know, damage to find. Allen Hall 2025: Are you addressing carbon fiber at all? Rosemary2: Uh, I actually haven't asked about that. I don't think so. Carbon fiber is, um, is a real pain to work with because it's conductive. Like, even grinding it makes a bit of a hazardous work environment. We did talk a little bit about the different materials yesterday and, um, about pultrusions. And actually, it turns out Yuri used to work somewhere where they, uh, manufactured pultrusions, and I had always, I was always under the impression that a pultrusion is, you know, like, perfectly s- perfectly straight. That's the point. And he's like, "No way." No way. There's waviness in the pultrusions Allen Hall 2025: And on March 3rd through 5th at WOMA 2027, Rosie, you're gonna give part of this course as part of WOMA, right? Rosemary2: Little, little mini course. We'll have to decide what, what makes sense to include, 'cause it was... Yeah,...
Poland Powers First Offshore Wind, Vestas Expands in Japan
Allen covers Poland connecting its first offshore wind farm, Ocean Winds reaching full power in the Mediterranean, Stiesdal's floating wind cost breakthrough, Vestas expanding in Australia and Japan, a federal permitting freeze stalling 250 US projects, and India passing 50% clean power. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday, everyone. A coal-dependent nation just plugged into offshore wind for the very first time. Poland's power grid received electricity this past week from its first offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea. It's called Baltic Power, a joint venture between Poland's Orlen and Canada's Northland Power. It began sending electricity from its 76 turbines to shore — about a 1.4-gigawatt site, enough to power more than 1.5 million Polish homes. And this is more than just one wind farm. Poland is shifting its entire energy map. For decades, the center of electricity generation sat in the coal-rich south. Now it's moving to northern Poland, to the coast. The country plans six gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Equinor and Ørsted are both set to build along that Polish shoreline, and that's good news. A new 530-million-złoty substation — about $140 million — is part of a plan to build nearly 5,000 kilometers of high-voltage lines to carry the power to southern Poland. Coal still supplies more than half of Poland's electricity, but that number is about to change. And now down to the south of France. Ocean Winds, the offshore wind company created by EDP Renewables and Engie, just reached full power at a floating wind farm in the Mediterranean Sea. It's three 10-megawatt turbines sitting on semi-submersible floaters 16 kilometers off the coast. It's a pilot project, but the lessons are real: 99% of the suppliers are European, 85% French, and it proves that floating offshore wind can work in deep Mediterranean waters. Now we'll stay with floating wind for a moment. Danish company Stiesdal Offshore says it has cracked the cost code, and this is important. The company modeled what it would take to build a full-scale floating wind farm — one gigawatt from a single port in a single installation season, loading out one turbine per week. And the cost? Less than one million euros per megawatt. That is on par with the jacket foundations used for fixed-bottom turbines in deeper water. About 80% of the world's oceans are roughly too deep for conventional foundations. And if those numbers hold — one million per megawatt — floating wind just got a whole lot more investable. Meanwhile, Danish Vestas is making moves on two continents. In Australia, the Danish giant bought a 272-megawatt project in Tasmania from Ark Energy. It's called the St. Patrick's Plains Wind Farm, and once built it would be the biggest wind project site in the state. Vestas now has more than 13 gigawatts of wind projects in its Australian pipeline. So the model is clear: buy early-stage projects, bring in investors and offtakers, then supply the turbines to build the farm. The turbine supplier is turning into a wind developer. And over in Japan, Vestas secured backing from the Japanese government to build a wind turbine assembly factory. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has committed support for the facility. Vestas already has about two gigawatts of turbines installed in Japan, including machines at the country's largest operational offshore wind farm. A factory on Japanese soil puts Vestas closer to an offshore market that is just getting started. Now we turn back to the United States. In Minnesota, four wind energy projects are stuck in limbo. The Department of War has stopped completing national security reviews for proposed wind farms. Those reviews used to be routine. A new report says more than 250 wind projects are stalled nationwide because of it. In Minnesota alone, the four frozen projects represent over one gigawatt — that is more output than the state's twin nuclear reactors at the Prairie Island Power Plant. So at stake is $1.6 billion in direct investment, about 5,600 jobs, and more than $168 million in economic impact. Nine clean energy groups have sued the War Department to break the logjam. And over in Ohio, the state senate passed a bill that could block many new wind farms and solar farms. The bill says power sources must be available at least 50% of the time, and wind and solar on their own rarely hit that number. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce opposes the bill, and so does the grid operator. But the bill has passed the Senate and now heads to the House. And what a mess Ohio is creating for itself. And finally, in India, for the second time ever, clean energy met more than 50% of the country's electricity demand. It happened on July 6th. And in the first half of 2026, India installed nearly 29 gigawatts of new solar and wind combined. The country now has about 288 gigawatts of renewable capacity. A nation of 1.4 billion people just crossed the halfway mark on clean power. It's pretty good — and they've done it twice now. So here's what to watch. The industry's next chapter is not just about who builds the most megawatts. It's about who controls the choke points: ports, permits, foundations, factory floors. The companies and countries solving those problems are the ones that will lead. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 13th of July, 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
WindQuest Advisors on Repowering and Rising O&M Costs
Dan Fesenmeyer, Managing Partner at WindQuest Advisors, joins to discuss the repowering rush and the FAA permitting stall, rising O&M costs on larger turbines, tariff pass-throughs, and AI data center demand. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Dan, welcome back to the podcast. Dan Fesenmeyer: It's great to be here. Great to see you again. Allen Hall: There is so much happening in your particular area. Your name pops up quite a bit within Weather Guard because, uh, we're dealing with a lot of operators and- A number of times we'll ask them, "Have you read your turbine supply agreement?" "No." "Have you read your full service agreement?" "No." "Well, maybe you should do that." And then we say, "Have you talked to Dan? You should call Dan, 'cause he can help you understand what you have signed." Mm-hmm. "Oh, that's probably a good idea." So now that you're here, WindQuest Advisors, of course, obviously is your company. Mm-hmm. And you're talking to a number of operators. The, the big hurdle at the minute, the nearest short-term hurdle, is repowering. There's just a lot of [00:01:00] repowering efforts going on- Mm-hmm ... trying to get turbines in, start a project. There's a July 4th deadline and an end of the year deadline. There's a couple deadlines after that. What are you seeing right now from operators i- in terms of repowering? What's the effort happening? Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, there was a ton of effort to start physical work. That window's obviously closing- Allen Hall: Yes ... Dan Fesenmeyer: very quickly, but it's still open. Uh, and then once you're past that window, my understanding is if you get your repower completed by the end of '27, you didn't really need to have started physical work. But I think most folks, start physical work is kind of the insurance piece of it- Allen Hall: Sure ... Dan Fesenmeyer: if things take longer. Uh, another thing that's popped up is obviously FAA and other permitting. Allen Hall: On the permitting side, from the federal's, uh, standpoint, is that stopped? Or, or are projects able to continue putting turbines in the ground, or what's the status? Dan Fesenmeyer: My- From what I've seen, I think on the opening session here at [00:02:00] ACP, it was said, they said that there's, like, 130 projects that are- Allen Hall: At least ... Dan Fesenmeyer: caught. Yes. And I'm, I'm involved with some of them, and I have a fairly small shop, and there's just no FAA variances or permits or- They're not issuing- ... mitigation studies. Everything seems to have stopped. Allen Hall: So they're not even reviewing the documentation that's been submitted by the operators at all? Dan Fesenmeyer: That's what it seems, yes. Yeah. Allen Hall: Is that legal? Uh, uh, usually those federal requirements have a timeline which they're able to review those permits and get them approved or disapproved them. You're s- Right ... I think what I'm hearing is, what you're saying is they're not even looking at them. Dan Fesenmeyer: That's correct. That's what I've heard and seen. Allen Hall: Okay. Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Yeah. Allen Hall: So what is an operator to do then? How does this, how do they meet some of these deadlines if they can't get the permit? Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, I mean, it stalled a lot of projects 'cause of the associated risk with it. Although I've seen some, uh, you know, some repower folks think, "Well, you know, I'm just repair- repowering like for like, or I'm not changing much." [00:03:00] But if your, if your rotor's changing or pad location's changing, you need to update those permits. Allen Hall: So the, the groups and the operators that are repowering the existing turbines are putting basically the same turbine in the same hole. Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, Allen Hall: I- Would that be okay? Dan Fesenmeyer: I would say originally- The initial push on repower was kind of your larger rotors- Sure ... new drivetrain, et cetera. Yes. The market seemed to shift more towards, "Hey, let's do smaller upgrades, component exchanges." Allen Hall: Okay. Dan Fesenmeyer: Getting more towards the minimal investment, so to speak. Allen Hall: The 80% investment portion. Dan Fesenmeyer: Yes. Allen Hall: Right. Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. And less about, you know, a big new machine head, for example. Allen Hall: Well, if that gets you through and gets you the, the, uh, tax credit started back up again, which is the whole point- Right ... there would be a reason to do that. Dan Fesenmeyer: That's right. Allen Hall: Is there a marketplace then for those components if you're gonna repower a GE 1.5 machine, which there's a lot of them- Mm-hmm in the United States? Are you seeing a big emphasis to go get a new gearbox, [00:04:00] to upgrade the blades- Yeah, and, and- ... kind of Dan Fesenmeyer: thing? Or just do maybe a drivetrain and s- Okay ... and leave the rotor or, or- Allen Hall: So do a gearbox and- Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Gear or just full drivetrain- Or generator ... or yeah, s- things like that. And, um- Wow people are comfortable doing it, and then it's e- it's easier, obviously. Allen Hall: Sure. It's faster. Dan Fesenmeyer: And faster, and you don't necessarily have to touch permits or, yeah. Allen Hall: And is part of that repowering, I know one of the questions- Mm-hmm ... that's been bandied about quite a bit is, do I have to buy a, a new generator or a new gearbox, or is a refurbished gearbox enough to check the box in terms of upgrading or putting 80% of the value back into the turbine to qualify for those tax credits? Dan Fesenmeyer: I'm not a tax expert, but I've seen people do both. Allen Hall: Okay. Well, that'll tell you. Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah. Yeah. Allen Hall: They've obviously talked to- Right ... tax advisors about that. Dan Fesenmeyer: It's, it's their level of risk and whether they have outside tax money or whether- ... they're kind of balance sheet or taking it themselves. It's, it's- Yeah ... more of a risk profile that [00:05:00] everybody's different on. Allen Hall: Okay. So that has changed the landscape quite a bit. So now it's, once this window of opportunity passes by, we're into brave new world. Mm-hmm. And operating turbines now not really 10 years, operating till end of life, which could be 20, 25 years. Have operators started thinking about that and starting to address some of the, the, especially the contracts around that? Are they starting to rethink contracts? Are they starting to approach full service agreements differently? Is, is the marketplace changing in the US? Dan Fesenmeyer: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it, it, depending what you have and what you're doing, whether you have an existing agreement or you need a new one, and whether it's a renewal or if you're doing, let's say, a drivetrain or new machine head, then there's usually a service contract that's going to come with it- Sure 'cause it's essentially a new machine. Largely a new machine. Largely, Allen Hall: yeah. Dan Fesenmeyer: But in the case of a gearbox, right, you're probably out of your longterm O&M agreement anyway, and, uh, whether you're... And you probably [00:06:00] have, you don't have the unplanned coverage anymore. Right. So it's really, you're on, you're kind of on your own risk. Allen Hall: Okay, so that's the repower scenario. Mm-hmm. What's happening new turbine-wise? It seems like the, a lot of the operators are choosing six megawatt, seven megawatt, eight megawatt machines tends to be the, the, the band of opportunity for a lot of operators. What are they working on right now in terms of, uh, TSAs, full service agreements? What are you seeing out on the landscape US-wise? Dan Fesenmeyer: Well, I think, um, the TSAs haven't changed much. Allen Hall: Okay. Dan Fesenmeyer: But the- The, the scope and the risk has changed a bit, and the, the OEMs are, you know, holding their cards closer, and it's hard to get to certain terms that-- harder than it used to be. Allen Hall: So let's, let's talk about that for a minute because, uh, there's been some recent reports speaking to the O&M costs for larger machines. And so the, the goal was if I went from a [00:07:00] two-megawatt machine to a six-megawatt machine, my O&M cost may be 3x because of the size of the turbine, but ideally they drop. That, uh, the same amount of effort into a larger, m- newer machine, uh, so, uh, my spend wouldn't go up that much. In, in some places on the planet that I've seen feedback about that is that the O&M costs are not 3x, they're 5x. So the, the cost to operate the turbine, the six and eight megawatt machines, is higher than it would be proportionally to a two-megawatt machine. I think operators are just trying to start to figure that out. Are the OEMs already knowledgeable of that fact and are s- trying- I, in, in- ... to phrase the conversation I Dan Fesenmeyer: mean, in the pricing that you get from the OEMs for the full scope agreements, that's largely in there already. Allen Hall: Yes. Dan Fesenmeyer: And I always tell people look at it on a dollar per kWh or dollar per megawatt hour- Ah ... basis versus a dollar per turbine, and you- Sure ... you'll see a different number. Allen Hall: Different calculation done. Dan Fesenmeyer: Right....
GE Vernova Backs LM Wind Power, KKR Buys EDF Assets
GE Vernova pumps $1 billion into LM Wind Power, and KKR buys EDF's US and Canada renewables arm. Plus CIP sweeps South Korea's offshore auction and the CME plans wind derivatives across three continents. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now, your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Matthew Stead and Yolanda Padron. Rosemary is at GWO training this week. And we have an announcement about Wind Energy O&M Australia 2027. Matthew, you wanna give all the details? Matthew Stead: Drum roll Um, very pleased to announce that WOMA 2027 will be at the East Pullman Hotel in Melbourne's east, uh, not the other one, and, uh, 3rd to 5th of March. Um, the first two days will be two days of wind O&M, uh, conferences, [00:01:00] uh, and then the Friday will be a half-day, uh, training session. More information to come. Allen Hall: Well, she's not here, so we can probably just announce it, that Rosemary will be giving a terrific four-hour-long seminar on blades and blade repair, so you sign up now. Matthew, where do you go if you wanna just check out what's happening at WOMA Matthew Stead: 2027? Uh, well, actually, it's woma2027.com. Allen Hall: Uh, over at GE Vernova and LM Wind Power, there's been a whole bunch of turmoil over the last couple of years if you haven't been paying attention. Well, GE Vernova just injected about a billion dollars into that company. So although LM recently has shown very little in terms of revenue, it definitely had needed some capital injection in, uh, at least according to the Danish press, the number of employees at the Danish site is about 20 to 30. So it's really a fraction of what it once was. But [00:02:00] it does seem like GE is paying off all its existing debt and then giving it a little bit of a cash infusion to keep it rolling. The question really is, is what is GE Vernova gonna do with that business now? Are they planning on keeping it? Are they trying to get s- to get it back to health where they can service the other, uh, OEMs that they manufacture blades for? Or is there a larger action that will happen in the near future? What do we think? Matthew Stead: Yeah, I'm really confused by this one. I mean, a cash injection just so that you're not bankrupt on paper is, um, that's just playing with money as far as I'm concerned. Or I'm not sure if it's a US term, but, you know, shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. It doesn't-- Does it change anything? Allen Hall: Well, uh, th- they made no announcements about closing facilities. The LM blade facility in North Dakota still appears to be making blades. There's the TPI factories, which are going through a transition r- right now, appear to be making GE [00:03:00] blades. I, I assume Gaspé up in Canada is still making blades, at least that's the story. If GE's gonna rely upon LM to make blades, they're gonna need to keep them open. Is, is this more of just keeping the factories open with a skeleton engineering crew and possibly moving the blade design group into the States? Is that-- Or India or, or somewhere? Yolanda Padron: And they're still selling, right? They're still selling blades. It seems like they're still planning on manufacturing blades. Do we think that maybe- They're just trying to avoid that whole TPI bankruptcy deal to not have to kind of scrap for parts? Allen Hall: Yeah, it's a great question. I think TPI has been producing parts at high quantity, and some of the Things I've heard from the industry folk is that TPI is really busy in producing quality blades, and it's like the bankruptcy transaction is not happening, which is great to hear because the [00:04:00]industry needs blades, and there's a lot of repowering going on in the United States and a lot of activity in general, so they need blades. But does LM continue to be a part of that? Matthew Stead: Yeah, I mean, presumably the TPI, um, whole story only makes LM more important, you know, more important to have, uh, an additional manufacturer and, you know, providing, you know, options for the OEMs. Allen Hall: It does seem like, though, the GE offshore, GE Vernova offshore is not a thing. Although I've heard a couple of rumors that, yeah, GE Vernova is offering some products for offshore, it doesn't seem like their heart is in it. I can see that happening. So are they just trying to focus on onshore business, and that's it for the time being? Just let it play out and, uh, wait until the elections in 2028? I know that's gonna get me blocked on YouTube, but that, that does feel like what's happening at the moment. Matthew Stead: Yeah, I reckon it looks completely like that. Yolanda Padron: I mean, it also looks like they're [00:05:00] just kind of trying to play everything a little bit more safe, right? So they are scaling up, but not as fast as they used to, so scaling the blade sizes. And then they're-- it seems like they're, they're having their FSAs cut quite a bit shorter than they used to, right? So are they maybe just trying to focus on, like, cash up front and just trying to play it safe until they can get their, their footing right again? Allen Hall: Or is it focus on key customers? I could see GE Vernova actually doing that, that they have a history with certain operators worldwide, and they're just gonna focus on producing and delivering for those customers. Because you don't see a lot of announced orders for GE turbines. Vestas is announcing things practically every week. Nordex is doing something similar. Siemens once in a while. But what you really don't hear anything from in any quantity at [00:06:00] all at the moment is from GE Vernova. When a company needs cash badly enough, even the crown jewels go on the block. And EDF, the French state-owned utility, has to fund the upkeep of 57 aging nuclear reactors and build six new ones, so it is selling. EDF has agreed to hand its US and Canada renewables business, EDF Power Solutions, to the private equity firm KKR. The business runs 5.6 gigawatts of renewable assets across the two countries. Late last year, EDF's chief executive floated selling anywhere from half to all of the unit in a deal that could be, well, it's reported to be about $4.2 billion. That's the latest news I've heard. This is a big transaction. KKR is Canadian, right? And is a massive investment firm Uh, which I, I don't think have a lot of wind at the moment. Uh, what is the [00:07:00] KKR play here? Matthew Stead: I, I love this because this is, uh... So obviously I'm Australian, and Macquarie is a big Australian. So, um, Macquarie own a whole lot of wind farm, a whole lot of wind infrastructure. So I just see this as a wonderful g- you know, fight between KKR and Macquarie. And so KKR has a whole lot of, um, they o- they've got some, you know, stake in Australian wind farms. They've got some work, you know, through Europe with wind farms. So I, I, I think this is a good thing, just a bit more global competition and a bit more global growth. And I think it's all coming from the data centers and, you know, the future increase in growth of, um, demand. Allen Hall: Yolanda, EDF's wind fleet is a variety of turbines, right? They have some GE, some Siemens. Anything else in their portfolio? Yolanda Padron: I think they have a bit of Vestas there too, right? Is it something that we were saying? It's-- I think this is really interesting. Um, I know that there's not-- I mean, of course EDF is the latest, but there's some [00:08:00] operators that seem to be, um, consolidating into a bit more of those just higher private equity firms, and it's-- Do we think that maybe this is the way that the US is going to lean towards? I know we talked a lot about leaning towards funding the data centers and maybe a bit more the behind the meter things. Uh, but do we think that maybe that's the future of the US? There's a couple of companies that kind of just own all the major infrastructures and then- A Allen Hall: couple Canadian companies. Yolanda Padron: And what does it mean for, like, asset management and stuff, like, that's really, really different from what they're seeing in their desks in New York and stuff, and just the larger financial models versus what's happening on the ground, and how will they connect everything? Allen Hall: It's a great question. Matthew Stead: NextEra and Dominion, you know, things are only getting bigger. Scale's, scale's coming. Allen Hall: Yeah. I wonder how much, uh, this transaction will have to go through regulators in the US, uh, because it scares me when you have a, a-- such a [00:09:00] large foreign national company. There's actually two involved in here, right? So you, you have a, a French company and a Canadian company trying to transact on, in the United States on a lot of assets. Uh, it probably won't be that quick if there's any oversight at all. I, I'm guessing that we'll hear noise about it. So we're, we'll have to keep listening to all the news sources about it and, and telling our valued listeners what's going on. Because there's, uh, we know a whole bunch of people that work at EDF and like, love those people and are really concerned about what the future holds for them. I, at least it sounds like upfront that KKR is just gonna continue with operations,...
Storm Damages ENGIE Wind Farm, Mexico Plans 7 GW
Allen covers a storm that damaged ENGIE's South Dakota wind farm, Sumitomo exiting two Belgian offshore farms, Envision's loss in Denmark, and Continental building its own wind farm. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday everyone. Sometimes ... Mother Nature reminds the wind industry who is really in charge. Late last month ... hurricane-force winds ripped through Hyde County, South Dakota ... tearing into the Triple H Wind Farm operated by French energy giant Engie. One hundred and thirty-one miles per hour ... as strong as a Category Four hurricane. More than twenty of the site's ninety-two turbines ... damaged. The two-hundred-fifty-megawatt complex is out of service ... and turbine supplier GE Vernova is on-site now ... assessing the wreckage. No injuries ... but the governor declared a state of emergency. The machines that harvest the wind ... taken down by the wind itself. Now ... while one wind farm goes dark in the American plains ... ownership is reshuffling across the North Sea. Japan's Sumitomo Corporation has exited two Belgian offshore wind farms ... selling its stakes to joint venture partner Jera Nex BP. That is the partnership between oil major BP and Japan's largest power generator Jera. Jera Nex BP now has full ownership of the two-hundred-nineteen-megawatt Northwester 2 ... and has raised its stake in the one-hundred-sixty-five-megawatt Nobelwind to eighty percent. Both farms operate out of Ostend, Belgium ... and have been generating power since 2017 and 2020. Sumitomo walks away ... Jera Nex BP doubles down. Meanwhile ... in Denmark ... China's Envision Group is seeing red for the first time in fifteen years. The company's global innovation center in Silkeborg ... a strategic research hub for wind turbine components and advanced manufacturing ... posted a loss of just under one-point-three million Danish kroner. That is a swing of more than one hundred fifteen percent from last year's profit. The culprit is not the technology ... it is the currency. The U.S. dollar fell nearly twelve percent against the Danish krone in 2025 ... and Envision's books took the hit. Revenue also dropped eighteen percent ... but management says the underlying operations remained stable. The machines still work ... the math just changed. And speaking of money flowing into wind ... a Turkish energy company just tapped an unusual source. Aksa Enerji ... the largest publicly listed independent power producer in Turkiye ... has secured one hundred twenty-four million dollars in financing backed by China's export credit agency Sinosure. The money will fund a one-hundred-megawatt wind-plus-storage project in the southern province of Mersin. This is the first renewable energy project in Turkiye to receive a license as a storage-integrated facility. Aksa now operates power plants across seven countries ... with more than three gigawatts of total capacity. Chinese capital ... backing Turkish wind ... with battery storage baked in from day one. Now ... here is a story that might surprise you. Continental ... the German tyre maker ... yes ... the tyre company ... is building its own wind farm. Three Nordex turbines ... each standing two hundred sixty-seven meters tall ... right next to its tyre factory in Korbach, Germany. When they are online ... those turbines and the factory's existing solar panels will cover two-thirds of the plant's electricity demand. Fifty-five gigawatt-hours a year ... powering rubber mixing and extrusion lines ... directly from the wind. Continental calls it a model for its production sites worldwide. Cheaper power ... more predictable costs ... and less exposure to volatile energy markets. The wind industry just gained a tyre company as a customer ... and a competitor for electrons. And finally ... south of the border. Mexico has eight gigawatts of wind power installed today ... more than thirty-three hundred turbines across sixteen states. But the next chapter is already being written. The government plans to add nearly seven gigawatts of new wind capacity this term ... part of a broader push for thirty-two gigawatts of new generation overall. More than two gigawatts of wind projects are pending allocation right now ... and the industry estimates this next wave could mobilize four to five billion dollars in investment ... building thirteen to fourteen new wind farms before the decade is out. The final decisions come in October. Here is what stands out this week. The wind industry is no longer just selling kilowatt-hours to utilities ... it is selling energy independence directly to manufacturers ... and that changes the customer base entirely. At the same time ... capital for new wind projects is coming from places it never came from before ... export credit agencies ... cross-border joint ventures ... and government allocation programs with billions on the line. The money is there ... but so are the risks ... currency swings ... extreme weather ... and the constant reshuffling of who owns what. For wind energy professionals ... the takeaway is simple ... the industry is growing ... but the business model around it is getting more complex by the quarter. The turbines keep turning. And that's the state of the wind industry for the 5th of July 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
PowerCurve Recovers India AEP, Silent Edge Cuts Noise
Nicholas Gaudern, CTO at PowerCurve, joins to discuss India AEP gains, DragonScale VGs, and Silent Edge noise reduction. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Nicholas, welcome back to the podcast. Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Great to be back. Allen Hall: So there's a lot going on at Power Curve, and I saw some news online about Power Curve in India. Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. Allen Hall: Which is a new development. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, so we've been working in India for, for some years now, and we have, uh, more than 100 turbines out there with our equipment on, primarily vortex generators so far. And what we're seeing in India is some of the highest AEP gains we've ever recorded with our vortex generators And I think a lot of this is being driven by the fact that in certain parts of India, there's some very unique, uh, environmental conditions, climatic conditions, and there's parts of the year, like the dry season up in [00:01:00] the north of India, where you're getting this very sticky dirt accumulating on the blades. And it's really quite dramatic when you see the photographs, but that means that the blades are actually starting to, to stall, have flow separation on them. Allen Hall: I've seen pictures of that. Yeah. I was really shocked at the time, uh, 'cause I didn't know it was just kind of a black, gooey- Yeah ... kind of tar-like substance- Yeah, yeah on the blades, and, uh, it, it was only on there a limited time. As soon as the monsoons come through and the rains hit, it would wash, eventually wash it off. Yes. But while it's there, you could see the airflow over the blade surfaces. You, you could definitely see separation happening really early on those blades. Dramatic. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, absolutely, and I think the, um... Like you say, it's not all year. No. But it doesn't have to be all year to have a huge impact on, on how many, you know, megawatt hours you're getting out the other end. So there's a few months of the year where this problem is particularly severe, maybe sort of December through to February, something like that. And what we're finding is that when you see, uh, the power curves for these [00:02:00] turbines, some of them aren't even hitting rated power. They're not able to hit rated power because there's so much flow separation on the blades. Allen Hall: Wow. Nicholas Gaudern: And that, I mean, just imagine that. You've got a two megawatt turbine, for example. Maybe it doesn't cast- get past 1.5 megawatts for this, uh, time of the year. I mean, that's crazy. Allen Hall: Does the turbine try to adjust itself when that happens? Because the pictures I s- have seen indicates, like, the turbine is pitching the blades to, 'cause it knows- It can- ... Nicholas Gaudern: what the wind Allen Hall: speed is- I mean, yeah ... and it knows what it should be putting out, and it's not putting that out. Nicholas Gaudern: It's very turbine specific, kind of controller logic specific, but what we see is even the turbines that try to do something, they're very limited in how much pitch authority they have from the controller. They might be able to just do a little bit, a degree. Okay. Two degrees. You know, very, very small pitch adjustments. And when you have this kind of dirt on the leading edges, a degree of pitch ain't gonna save you really. Um- N- Allen Hall: no. And I think that's what we're seeing. And it's not gonna get that power back. No, no. Nicholas Gaudern: No. Allen Hall: But does it add extra load onto the blade structurally over [00:03:00] time when you do that? Nicholas Gaudern: In terms of the pitching, or- Allen Hall: Yeah, in terms of the pitching, where you're trying to be more aggressive on the angle of attack to get the power out of the turbine. Potentially. And the winds are still pretty strong, you just, the blades are inefficient. Nicholas Gaudern: I think it's one of those things where there's, there's so many interconnected items with the dirt and the controller and the structure. It's actually pretty difficult, I think, to say with confidence how much life impact you would have from that. But what I would say is the more that you might end up trying to pitch, if that's what's going on on some machines, that obviously puts wear on the pitch bearings themselves. But yeah, I think at the moment we're kind of at the beginning of really trying to understand how some of these turbines do deal with this phenomenon. But what we're trying to do is get to a point where the turbine doesn't really have to deal with it. Because if you fix the problem at the source, which is stop the flow separating, then the controller doesn't really have to, to worry. It doesn't have to try to, to fix it itself. Allen Hall: Yeah. That makes a lot more sense. Just the number of images I've seen over the last couple years from India- Nicholas Gaudern: [00:04:00] Yep ... Allen Hall: you realize how difficult it is to operate a wind turbine there. Nicholas Gaudern: So even when we, um, have this issue for a few months that we're resolving with the VGs, we can still be seeing over the whole year more than 5% increases in annual energy production. Because those months are really important. Um ' Allen Hall: Cause that's when they need the Nicholas Gaudern: power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. For sure. And this is primarily coming from the vortex generators towards the tips of the blades. So that's where you're having this, uh, heavy contamination issue, and that's where all the power would be produced. So kind of the outer third of a blade is 50, maybe 60% of the power production of a turbine, maybe closer to 50. So that means that if you have a problem out there, it's, it's a big problem in terms of your annual energy production. So- Allen Hall: Right ... Nicholas Gaudern: the VGs are, what they're doing is they are, they're injecting energy back into the flow. Allen Hall: Redirecting the flow, in a Nicholas Gaudern: sense. So, so basically you have all this contamination on the leading edge. It's generating more turbulence. The flow isn't able to retain, uh, remain attached [00:05:00] across the entire chord length. So the VGs are putting energy back into the flow and allowing it to remain attached all the way to, uh, to the trailing edge. Allen Hall: So even with the blades are dirty- Nicholas Gaudern: Yes ... Allen Hall: you get that power out- Exactly ... put, that you really desire or- Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah ... Allen Hall: are paying for. Yeah. You, you paid a lot of money for that turbine- Yeah, exactly ... you need to get the power out of it. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Allen Hall: And- Nicholas Gaudern: So of course, you know, that suggests that if you had a, a super clean blade, you went and pressure washed it, uh, you would get, uh, an increase in power as well, and that's true. You, you- That's true ... you will do. But that's a one-time thing. Um, so- And Allen Hall: it's expensive to do- Yeah ... and time-consuming. Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. Maybe a few days later, the dirt's back. So- Sure ... you know, it's not really a sustainable thing for you to be going out washing these blades the whole time. And washing the blades may not be great for the surface of the blade either. So, you know, a VG is just sat there the whole time. It doesn't matter if it's dirt, bugs, erosion, frost, it'll recover those losses that, that you're seeing. Allen Hall: Do the VG installations in a situation like that, [00:06:00] the actual location differ because of the contaminants that are present and the kind of, uh, leading edge effects that you're seeing? Do you design it for that environment? Or- Yeah ... is every- Oh, you do. So- Yeah, we Nicholas Gaudern: do. I mean, typ- typically our, our VG arrays are turbine model specific. But in India, we're finding we're actually having to be more site specific as well. Oh, Allen Hall: wow. Nicholas Gaudern: Because some of this contamination is so severe, we've seen that we need to design the VG layout a little bit differently to make sure that we're giving enough, uh, energy recovery potential when you have these really severe, uh, situations. Allen Hall: Are you using the AeroVista tool to do that? How do you, how do you quantify the contamination that's happened on the leading edge at a particular moment or roughly on scale a- and then try to model that? That just seems like a difficult computation. Nicholas Gaudern: It is. And, um, you know, we're, we're getting better all the time. AeroVista is definitely part of that. So AeroVista's primary function really is to look at, um- [00:07:00] AEP losses due to structural damages, things like erosion. But actually, erosion behaves very similar to dirt when it comes to, like- It, right ... aerodynamic behavior. Yeah. So we can actually use kind of the AeroVista engine to help us understand what is the loss from different levels of contamination. So we can add contamination levels into AeroVista, as well as, uh, erosion. And we can start to look at, well, what happens if the blade looks like this? What if it looks like this? And then this gets combined with our computational fluid dynamics, our CFD models that we're running, three-dimensional, two-dimensional. ...
Japan Backs Floating Wind, US Grid Sidelines Clean Energy
Japan and the UK sign a $12 billion floating wind deal for 5.9 GW, Muehlhan buys Coverwind Solutions in Spain, and US grid reform stalls as MISO, PJM, and SPP fast-track fossil resources over wind. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, just back from Japan, in Matthew's stead. Yolanda Padron is on special assignment. Well, Rosemary, what happened in Japan? You, you spent a, a week touring the country and looking at, uh, some energy projects. What did you learn? Rosemary Barnes: I was there for just five, five nights. I went over for an, um, an, a systems engineering conference by INCOSE. I was doing a keynote presentation there, and also spoke to some of their... They've got this program, an international programming for, like, upcoming leaders. Um, and yeah, it was funny, the topic that I chose for [00:01:00] that was how you can combine an online presence with a serious professional career. Uh, 'cause, you know, like, a lot of the advice that you see about building an online presence is, like, totally compat- incompatible with being taken seriously in a, uh, you know, in a, a job like engineering. So that was pretty fun. And then on the last day, I was able to arrange a tour of a community. Like, we went to this village near Fukushima, and they, a- after the Fukushima, uh, or the earthquake that led to the Fukushima, uh, shutdown, that town, some power lines came down, and that, that village was without power for three months. So in response to that, they're like, "Community power for the win." At this place, like, there was literally steam coming out of the ground just, you know, randomly. It's an onsen town, so you know, like, it's, um, it's built around tourism for these hot baths. And so they put in a couple of geothermal power plants, small ones, and, um, also some hydropower. But the reason why I wanted to go there was 'cause, you know, ge- [00:02:00]geothermal is such an obvious solution for Japan, for the energy, but they only have... .3% of their electricity is generated by geothermal currently. And, um, the main reason is that the onsen community in Japan is really opposed to it. They've lobbied against it because they're worried that, um, you know, the onsen community needs heat to come out, hot water to come out of the ground, and geothermal takes hot water out of the ground, so they're just worried that they're incompatible. Um, now I think the science says that that's not really true, that the, there isn't, they're not the same resource and that one doesn't affect the other. The wastewater from the geothermal is not really wastewater. It's just water that is not as hot as it was when it came up. Um, that goes down then into the onsen because it's a good temperature. And then some of the even cooler water, about 21, 23 degrees, they're using that to raise shrimp. Allen Hall: Well, just speaking of Japan, uh, the Japanese Prime Minister was just in the UK and a [00:03:00] big deal was signed between Japan and United Kingdom, £9 billion worth, which is about 12 billion US dollars, uh, to work together on 5.9 gigawatts of floating wind capacity in the UK, uh, across three different projects. W- And the goal is to get some Japanese partners working with, uh, the UK companies involved with it to suss out how to do offshore wind. And as we all know, Japan is gonna, is headed there right now and is going to need a little bit of a primer on how to do it. And, and, well, they should because, uh, there's been some really successful efforts in the UK and up north, Northern Europe. Uh, so the, the goal of this is to, to get these projects underway and, and Japan's committing all this money, which, uh, sure, it's a nice boost to the UK at the moment. It gets a little turbulent over there if you've been watching the news. Rosemary [00:04:00] Tying back to your experience in Japan recently, is there a big push internally? Do you see that internally in Japan for offshore wind and even offshore floating wind in Japan, or are they really prepping for it in country? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I'd say I went over there thinking that Japan was, like, oddly not bothered about wind energy of any flavor. Um, 'cause, you know, like onshore wind, they've got problems because the good ri- wind resource is right on the ridges, and they're getting just hammered by lightning, and they've got some, like, really interesting responses to how they think that they should manage that, that in my opinion are just gonna kill... Like, you would never bother to have an onshore wind farm if these, um, regulations go ahead. So offshore they have got, um, a bit of a, an, a fixed bottom resource, and they've had several auction rounds geared towards that, but they're, um, they haven't gone well. I think that, like, people have promised... It, it's a similar story to elsewhere in the world. Uh, people have, like, bid, like, [00:05:00] bid down to quite low prices and then not been able to deliver and pulled out. Mitsubishi just recently paid some, uh, some huge penalty for not going ahead with a, a project. There isn't actually that much fixed bottom potential, um, for Japan. So, um, if they wanna have a significant amount of wind energy in their grid, which they should, because they're, like, honestly it is probably the best or one of the couple of best options to provide big chunks of their electricity supply, then it needs to be floating. Um, and the government is actually pushing on that. I thought they weren't doing too much, but I did talk to someone from this group, Flora. It is a group that is, um, that, that is trying to form partnerships with other countries, but also with manufacturers to try and set the framework up so that it can, like, l- lay the groundwork for commercialization to happen without being prescriptive. Flora is in there [00:06:00] to try and, you know, get the pieces in place to be able to allow, um, you know, uh, innovation and competition to happen much, much faster. Allen Hall: What's the most complicated piece technically that needs to be solved before Japan can really move forward? Is it the money piece? I mean, um, um, I said technically, but I feel like there's always this money aspect to it, which is important, but on the technology side, i- is it, is there any technology that remains to be solved or is it just the will to do it? Rosemary Barnes: Basically in any engineering question, the answer is money, like, when you come down to it. So, like, it's almost boring to say, yeah, it's, it's money. Floating offshore wind- Too hard, too niche for most people to consider it a mainstream thing, but it's the legitimate, like, good contender for Japan. And you know what? That presents opportunity. It can actually be good to have to do something hard. Um, and Japan has the opportunity to be the [00:07:00] country where, you know, it's the country where floating wind makes the most sense, so they can be the ones, if they're smart about it, they can be the ones where the smart technologies evolve. There will at least be little niche things that they develop that will go on to succeed, and Japan really needs some new big manufacturing industry to... Like, their car industry is obviously, um, has been so important, the automotive manufacturing, and it's declining now relative to China. Um, so I am also hopeful that they can, you know, build that up a bit more, but I don't think that they're going to, you know, topple China, so they are looking for new industries that will be the new... Yeah, do for them what the auto industry did from, yeah, from the '70s onwards. Actually, you know, like, you can tie it back in a nice loop back to the oil crisis in the '70s because that's when the world was like, "Oh, actually small, efficient cars are, are quite a smart idea." And Japan had those because it was so [00:08:00] constrained in terms of, you know, the oil that it could bring in was expensive. Not having their own fossil resources, they learned to conserve it, and then that turned out to be, you know, a big advantage for them. Allen Hall: Using the 1970s gas price crisis and the movement towards Japanese cars in the United States, I mean, timing is everything. And Japan was in, uh, Honda in particular, was in the United States. I think Toyota was too, if I remember correctly. And when gas prices went through the roof, uh, yeah, they were very efficient cars, and not the most reliable at the moment, but obviously they've changed quite a bit and s- they are, particularly Honda and Toyota, are probably two of the more reliable blan- brands you can buy in the States today. So things change, right? You're just getting your foot in the door. But that, that break point is, is coming pretty soon, I would say, in, in terms of timing. I- is it the right time for Japan to move into floating offshore? It's gonna be within the next couple of years, don't you think, Rosie? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah, def- [00:09:00] definitely. Um, and yeah, I mean, I, it, it, it does frustrate me that any money is being spent on, um, hydrogen and ammonia imports. I, I would just rather that they just, just, just do the LNG until you figure out alternatives. Allen Hall: That makes more sense. ...
SunZia Switches On, Ørsted Weighs Chinese Turbines
Allen covers SunZia coming online as America's largest wind farm, Ørsted's stance on Chinese turbines, a record floating platform leaving China, Canada's first offshore wind bidders, and a centuries-old North Sea shipwreck. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. America just switched on the biggest wind farm it has ever built. Out in New Mexico ... a vast field of spinning turbines called SunZia. Enough power for more than a million homes across the Southwest. It is a landmark. It may be the last landmark for some time. After this year ... forecasters expect annual onshore wind additions to fall ... all the way to twenty thirty. The tax credits that powered the boom ... expire this year. Add tariffs ... supply troubles ... local opposition ... and a federal permitting freeze. One developer put it plainly. Capital investments ... frozen. Solar is cheaper now. Batteries are faster. And the wind industry did not see the breadth of the campaign against it. So the biggest American wind farm ever ... arrives just as the road ahead narrows. Now ... cross the Atlantic to Denmark. Ørsted ... the offshore giant half-owned by the Danish state ... is being asked a hard question. Will it buy Chinese wind turbines? Its chief executive will not say no. Right now ... he says ... it is not expected. But they are keeping an eye on it. Analysts call that a wake-up call. Because the Chinese builders offer lower cost ... faster delivery ... and bigger rotors. And if a European champion turns east for turbines ... that is a signal Europe is losing its edge. Not everyone is buying it. Britain has banned Chinese turbines from its offshore projects. The competitiveness fight ... is just beginning. Now set to sail from southern China. The world's largest tension-leg floating wind platform. Sixteen megawatts. More than three hundred meters tall ... and nearly eight thousand tons. It left port headed for the deep sea. And its power will run straight to an offshore oil field ... clean wind ... feeding fossil-fuel production. China connected more than three-quarters of the world's new offshore wind last year. As the shallow sites fill up ... the industry moves into deeper water. And the deep water ... is where floating wind grows up. Across the Pacific ... a brand-new frontier is opening. Canada cleared the first bidders for its very first offshore wind farms. Off the coast of Nova Scotia ... seven qualified players ... from nine countries. The province dreams big. A megaproject called Wind West ... forty gigawatts ... far more than the region could ever use itself. The first phase alone ... an estimated sixty billion dollars. Enough surplus power to supply a quarter of all Canada's demand. The formal call for bids comes later this year. And finally ... a story that comes up from the seabed. While surveying the site of a future wind farm in the North Sea ... Ørsted found something far older than any turbine. Three lead ingots ... resting beside the bones of a wooden shipwreck. Late sixteen-hundreds ... maybe early seventeen-hundreds. A Dutch vessel ... likely bound for home ... lost on the run from England to the Netherlands. Seventy kilograms each ... mined, it seems, in the very English hills they will now return to. And that's the state of the wind industry for the 28th of June 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
Everpoint’s BladeBlok Recycles Blades for Drilling
James Timmins, VP of Engineering at Everpoint Services, joins to discuss how recycled wind turbine blades become BladeBlok, a drilling fluid additive for oil, gas, and geothermal wells. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. There has been a lot of activity at EverPoint Services. So I wanna back up first because if you're not familiar with EverPoint Services, they are a recycler f- for renewable projects. James Timmins: So we're a, a renewable energy service company that specializes in, um, decommissioning and remediation services for, uh, wind and solar assets. Allen Hall: So when a solar farm gets hit by hail and the panels are broken, EverPoint comes up and cleans up that mess to, to allow the repair to happen. James Timmins: Correct, yes. Allen Hall: And on the wind turbine side, you're t- decommissioning wind turbines, but you're also taking the [00:01:00] blades. James Timmins: Yes. So it's our responsibility to haul off the damaged, I guess, the scrap. And, um, obviously there's a very healthy market for scrap steel that you find in the tower base- Yes ... but the fiberglass is a little less straightforward when it comes to disposal and/or recycling. Allen Hall: So typically with the fiberglass blades or any composite that's, that's being recycled, th- there's really two techniques that are being implemented right now. Uh, well, really three. Let's go over three of 'em. One of 'em is you can just bury them. They're c- essentially construction materials, so you can bury them. Not ideal, but it has happened in the past. The second is they grind up the, the blades and use 'em in, uh, c- the cement-making process, where they're burning some of the things that are combustible there and using it for fuel, but also the fiber can help with the cement. Does, does that sound right? Correct. And, and then the third one I've seen is just as a reinforcement product. [00:02:00] So it's, uh, they chop up the fiber in different lengths, they clean it up, and you can u- use it as an additive to different products. Yes. And, and that generally has been the marketplace in the blade recycling area for- Going on 20 years now probably Yes Until now. And that's where Everpoint has really changed the game because you're thinking about blade recycling a completely different way. James Timmins: Correct. So my background is oil and gas. I was a drilling engineer, uh, for major oil companies, so it was my job to plan, execute, and oversee drilling operations. So I worked kind of all over the world, and this project started as an icebreaker at a friend's birthday. I had never met Tyler Goodell before. I- Wait, Allen Hall: wait, wait. So you're at a birthday party- James Timmins: Yes ... Allen Hall: and your kids are having fun. They're eating cake. Oh, James Timmins: we were at a dive bar, so we- Oh, okay ... yeah, watching a band, uh- ... sitting over a bucket of Lone Stars and yeah. Allen Hall: Okay. That's the [00:03:00] best place for new ideas to occur clearly. So you're, you're, you're at a birthday event, you're hanging out, and what happens? James Timmins: He asked me what, what I would do with tens of thousands of tons of scrap fiberglass. Allen Hall: And you get asked that every day, or is it- No. Okay. James Timmins: And I thought it was a weird question, and I kinda put it in the back of my mind. And about 15 minutes later I was like, "Well, I have an idea that we could, uh- Put at least some of that to work. Allen Hall: And what was that idea? James Timmins: The idea was that we could grind it to a specific particle size distribution and use it as a fluid loss additive in oil, gas, and geothermal drilling operations. Allen Hall: Okay. That's a unique application. James Timmins: Yes. Allen Hall: So I think we need to walk into what happens when we're drilling an oil well or any sort of well, I suppose. Uh, there's unique things that happen that require specialty fluids or specially ... James Timmins: Uh, specialty additives you could say. Additives. Allen Hall: Yes. [00:04:00] So- Okay. That's a, that's a good way to describe it. All right. So, uh, I'm drilling a well. I'm in Texas. I'm an oil tycoon. I wanna drill this well. What am I doing? James Timmins: So you have what's called drilling mud, which is pumped down the drill string through the bit. Um, helps cool the bit, um, power down hole tools, and sweep the cuttings out, which is the- Okay ... drilled up rock. Allen Hall: Yep. James Timmins: So there's a, a hydrostatic pressure that the fluid column exerts on the formation. And if that fluid column exerts more pressure than the formation can stand, it splits open like a fracture. Allen Hall: Okay. James Timmins: In this case, an accidental fracture. Or you could have just a porous formation of, uh, low pressure. And so you have this pressure imbalance from the wellbore where the fluid wants to flow to the area of low pressure. And, uh, this mud is $300 or $400 a barrel. And if you're- Whoa ... losing 100 barrels an hour, the costs add up really quick. Can't drill ahead. Um, it's what's called non-productive time. [00:05:00] So you're spending 80 or $100,000 a day for all this equipment to be out there, and you're not drilling ahead, so. Allen Hall: Okay. So as the, the drill bit goes down into the formation, you're hitting rock. You hit a crack in a rock, or you create a crack in a rock. All your drilling mud, and it's not really mud, right? No, it's- It's, it's a special compound- James Timmins: Yes ... that we call mud. Very, Allen Hall: uh, James Timmins: yeah, it's drilling fluid, I guess, is the technical term. Okay . But, um- I've Allen Hall: heard mud used universally. James Timmins: It kinda looks like chocolate milk most of the time. Allen Hall: There you go. Yeah. Okay. So it's an expensive fluid. You're pushing it down in, but then you get a, a crack or a formation that you run into, and all that precious fluid goes running off somewhere else. Yep. So which it doesn't allow you to cool the bit, which basically stops all drilling. James Timmins: Correct. Allen Hall: Okay, that's a big problem. James Timmins: And in worst case scenario, the fluid column falls and the pressure on the formation falls, and then the well starts flowing and you have a well control problem, so. Allen Hall: So now you got a big problem. James Timmins: Yep. [00:06:00] Allen Hall: All right. So now you have fluid coming back at you that you're not ready for. James Timmins: Correct, yeah. Allen Hall: Okay, that seems like quite the mess. James Timmins: Yeah, so it's actually one of the... You know, in some parts of the world, one of the top drivers of non-productive time and cost. So it's a, kind of a problem as old as the oil field itself, but... Allen Hall: Okay, c- 'cause at the end of the day, you would like to have a specific hole tapped at a specific location pulling- James Timmins: Yes ... Allen Hall: hopefully petroleum products from that area or whatever you're going for. It's could, could be gas- Yeah ... uh, off of that site, but you have to have some constraints about it, right? Right. You d- d- to control everything. Okay. So n- that sets the problem. All right. We're gonna run to this, uh, area where we've, we've cracked the found- the, the rock or there's porous rock and we're pumping this, a really expensive fluid down it and we would like to stop that from happening. How does that end up involving wind turbine blade recycling? James Timmins: So we grind this material to a specific size and you mix it at a certain [00:07:00] concentration. Could be two pounds per barrel of mud or 80, uh, depending on the severity of the losses. But, um, this mixture is pumped down into the formation and this, um, kind of acts like a... Technical term is bridging. So this, these fibers from the recycled turbine blades cannot fit through all of the pore spaces. Sure. And gradually they be- begin to accumulate on the wall of the, the wellbore. So they- Okay ... uh, eventually it's kinda like a clogged sink with... You know, you get enough- So you get enough hair in the sink ... chopped vegetables. Yeah. Yeah. It, it eventually will stop flowing. Allen Hall: Oh, well, who hasn't experienced that? So it's, it's... So you, you wanna put things down into this hole that prevent the fluid from running off. Recycled blades seems like a very viable option just because it's in an inert substance, it's pretty durable. James Timmins: It is. Allen Hall: It's tough. It can handle high temperatures [00:08:00] and it now can be pumped. James Timmins: Yes. Allen Hall: Wow. All right. So that's a, that's a remarkable idea. But ideas and products, there's usually a long distance between those two. James Timmins: Correct, yes. Allen Hall: So from initial concept to where you are today, walk through what you had to go do to make this into a real product. James Timmins: Uh, so we... I basically have- was familiar with these types of products in the past, but at the level I was at, I was not getting into the granular detail- Allen Hall: Sure James Timmins: of the qualification of the product, of the spec of the product. So, um,...
Vineyard Wind Battles GE Vernova, UK Funds Blade Innovation
Fraunhofer studies uptower carbon blade repairs, Vineyard Wind's fight with GE Vernova deepens, the UK backs offshore innovation, and a 26-year Horns Rev study tracks how birds adapt to turbines. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead. Fraunhofer has published peer-reviewed feasibility research in wind energy science. And Rosemary, I don't know if you read wind energy science, but there's a lot of good information there about wind turbines and mechanical aspects. Not much on the electrical side, but a lot about mechanical. Uh, in, in, in wind energy science, uh, they had a discussion or an article about repairing damaged pultruded CFRP spar cap planks while the blade stays on the turbine. Using finite element analysis on a 81.6-meter [00:01:00] blade from a seven-megawatt offshore turbine, the researchers found that a shear web window cut out as short as one meter drops buckling resistance from 20.7 times critical load to four times critical load, a reduction of over 80%. The fix? Temporary external clamping frames with a pre-tensioned span-wise rod to carry gravity loads, combined with internal push rod assemblies and external stringers profiles to restore buckling resistance, all installed and removed uptower. Wow. I know we've discussed the carbon pultrusion repair situation and how critical that is or h- how difficult it is. I didn't realize it was that difficult, Rosemary, that if you actually try to replace a one-meter section of a carbon pultrusion, you're re- reducing the, the, what, the, the buckling resistance by 80%? [00:02:00] Holy moly. Rosemary Barnes: I don't think that's even 100% pultrusion specific, right? They're talking about cutting a, a window in the shear web. Allen Hall: Yes. Rosemary Barnes: So that could be for any kind of repair you might have to do that, including if you need to repair, like sometimes you need to repair the, the shear web. Um, and even though, like, they're not doing a lot of heavy lifting, um, that's kind of a structural pun, um, they're still super important. If they're not there, then you're gonna have big problems pretty immediately. The way that it works with repairs is that there's certain kinds of damage that you know that you can just do uptower. The technicians know they can do it. They don't need to call an engineer. The engineer doesn't call- need to call the expert engineer. But when you need to do something a bit unusual, like a whole meter of web removed, then you're gonna need to get an engineer to, um, dial in the, y- the, to rerun the design codes basically, um, but with this weak structure now to see is this okay and is it okay, you know, uh, [00:03:00] obviously a turbine that is just, um, idle or it's not even idle, it's just fixed in place while they're repairing it, that has different loads on it to one that's operating. So, you know, they'll run that and make sure that it's safe, um, before they do the repair. So what I really like about Fraunhofer is that they in some ways, like- Maybe it's not cutting-edge science or engineering because they are largely repeating what is already well known in industry. But the problem is that industry doesn't tell everybody else. And so it is, like, such a vital role to then go and illustrate, um, to everybody else what, what's happening in industry. And they, they are... Like, there is this problem with wind energy where academia and industry are not, um, talking too much, and a lot of the academic stuff just doesn't relate at all to what's happening in the industry. But Fraunhofer do, like, 90, 90% of the time seem to get it at pretty right. Allen Hall: When a carbon protrusion is [00:04:00] used, that really localizes where the load is versus in, in some of the more fiberglass designs that I've seen, the shell is actually taking some of the load. It's not all in the shear web, so to speak. So doesn't that sort of focus the loads into one location a little bit more when you move to carbon? Isn't that the point? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the carbon fiber is, is a lot, lot, lot stiffer than, um, fiberglass, and it's, it's a lot stronger. So yeah, you are designing... I, I mean, always the spar caps have been the main load carriers, the, um, you know, the main laminate, the bit between the shear webs or over the shear webs. Um, but it's, yeah, it probably is, um uh, e- exacerbated or the increased effect when you add carbon fiber. But the, the thing about carbon fiber is it's so susceptible to small damages or small deviations, so like a tiny little bit of fiber waviness, like if your fibers aren't perfectly straight, then you can easily get a, a crack. And [00:05:00] carbon fiber can also be a lot less forgiving than fiberglass. It is not uncommon that it will just break, and you didn't even know there was anything wrong. So that damage intolerance is what led to people moving away from carbon fiber fabric and into pultrusions, because they're made with perfectly straight fibers. Um, but it, it raises some, uh, problems of its own because y- yeah, like how do you repair that? You can't, um, you can't get the fibers as straight again unless you repair a whole plank, um, because like they look like, like two-by-fours or something. You know, like they look like little fence palings, basically. Black, black fence palings. Um, and so yeah, you, you'd have to repair, replace a whole one, and then you've got like a big chunk of structure that's missing there, so that's pretty hard to do uptower. I, I don't know anybody that does those uptower, actually. Um, m- maybe they can now with this reinforcement method, but I would still not enjoy being in a blade that was missing a, a [00:06:00] pultrusion and up in the air. Allen Hall: The offshore versus onshore equation, it, it would make more sense onshore to actually drop the blade, I assume. Offshore adds difficulty, but it sounds like with all the rigging a- and assembly that you would have to do offshore, it, it probably is gonna be close in terms of total cost to do an uptower repair versus a downtower repair I would think. It, it-- Wouldn't you think it'd be roughly right? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, like in, in offshore, there's always more motivation to do complicated, um, expe-expensive uh, things that will save you from having to do something even more expensive, like bringing, um, a whole blade back. Uh, yeah, going out, getting the vessel with the crane, bringing the blade down, and taking it in is just incredibly expensive. So you can spend a lot of time faffing around reinforcing a blade uptower before you, um, you know, would come out behind. But you know what? While we're on topic of carbon pultrusions, I think it, like it, um, it's almost bypassing the, the biggest risk with them 'cause [00:07:00] what I see is the-- Like it's one thing when you know you've got damage that you need to repair, but far more common, I think, is that you don't even know that you've got damage. It's very hard to, to see what's going on in there. Um, I mean, people aren't just going up periodically and doing ultrasounds, ul-ultrasound scans of their entire blade. But even if they were, it's still not that easy to find all of the, the little damages in, in pultrusions. So, um, yeah, that's something... 'Cause it's not such an old technology. It's been around for, I, I don't know, like not even 10 years these have been, being used consistently, probably more like five, um, that there's been a lot of them out there. And I just, yeah, I, uh, maybe I'm overreacting because all I see is broken blades in my career, but, um, you know, I am a little bit worried that we're gonna start to see as, you know, fatigue builds up, that we might start to see some more like sudden breakages in these blades. Allen Hall: If Fraunhofer's working on it, there must be a reason for the [00:08:00] analysis and all the engineering time that they spent on it, that it's a concern. I don't know how you would do it offshore, honestly, because of all the wind loads. That you would have this damaged blade, and yes, you would have all the engineering calculations, but I would just see the safety people being very concerned about it. Because if it does go free, you have a couple of people up there minimum, and who knows what's below. Rosemary Barnes: But even the amount of time in between knowing that you have to, um, replace a pultrusion and actually getting up there to do it, like I'd be surprised that it didn't break in that, in that time because it is such a big, a big, a big thing. Um, so yeah. Uh, but super interesting work and I do, I, I do really, really appreciate that the Fraunhofer exists to, you know, do this sort of stuff and, um, give us the information w-we need to get a better understanding. Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are [00:09:00]difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. ...
Invenergy Drops Four Offshore Leases, Turbines Become Reefs
Allen covers Invenergy returning four offshore wind leases for $765 million, a Block Island study finding turbines became reefs, RES's Smart Pilot drone inspections, RWE's three new French wind farms, and a $12 billion Japan-UK floating wind compact. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. There is a deal being made in Washington today … and the ocean is watching. Invenergy, the largest privately held power developer in North America, has agreed to hand back four offshore wind leases to the federal government. The price tag … seven hundred sixty-five million dollars. Those leases covered waters off New York, the Gulf of Maine, and Morro Bay off central California. One of those projects … Leading Light Wind … a two-point-four gigawatt development in the New York Bight … had already been canceled last November due to economic and regulatory pressure. The remaining three lease areas represented another four-point-eight gigawatts of potential capacity. All of it … gone. In exchange, Invenergy will redirect that capital into natural gas plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri … and into geothermal projects across the Western United States. This is now the eighth offshore wind lease the Trump administration has bought out. Total cost to the federal government across all eight deals … more than two-point-five billion dollars. Seven state attorneys general are already suing over an earlier buyout with another developer, arguing the administration lacks legal authority to use federal funds this way. Invenergy is already pivoting toward geothermal. Just last week, the company acquired a five thousand-acre geothermal parcel in New Mexico through a federal lease sale. That brings its total federal geothermal footprint to forty-five parcels … one hundred forty-four thousand acres … across five western states. While Invenergy's offshore leases are being canceled … the ocean beneath those kinds of projects may be quietly thriving. Scientists have spent seven years studying the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island … America's first offshore wind installation. They tracked nearly a million marine animals across seventy-one species. What they expected to find was damage. What they found instead … was astounding. Black sea bass abandoned their old wandering patterns and began clustering around the turbine foundations to feed. Blue mussels colonized the steel pylons. Macroalgae spread across the submerged surfaces. Cod, lobster, and reef fish moved into the rock piled around the bases. The turbines became reefs. Accidental … but unmistakable. Researchers at the University of St. Andrews strapped GPS trackers to harbor seals expecting them to flee offshore wind farms. Instead … the seals swam straight lines through the turbine rows … stopping to forage at each foundation … like a delivery driver working a route. One seal traced the turbine layout so precisely that researchers said you could have mapped every foundation from that single animal's trail alone. Researchers are finding a sobering conclusion: whether a turbine helps the ocean or hurts it depends almost entirely on how old it is … and where it stands. New foundations going in … disruptive. Old foundations with fifteen years of growth on them … something closer to a reef. The science is finally precise enough to say which is which. The seals figured it out years ago. They just went where the food was … in very straight lines. Meanwhile, on dry land … RES, the global renewable energy company, has launched a new tool called Smart Pilot that automates wind turbine blade inspections using drones. RES says it will take twenty-five percent less time. And it runs on standard DJI consumer drone hardware … no proprietary equipment required. RES currently supports approximately forty-five gigawatts of installed renewable capacity worldwide. And over in France … RWE has officially opened three new wind farms in northern France. Combined capacity: sixty-eight-point-eight megawatts. Together, they will power approximately thirty-eight thousand French households with electricity from the wind. The projects took a decade from development to inauguration. The turbines are spinning now. And over in the UK, Japan and the United Kingdom have signed an Offshore Wind Compact committing Japan to facilitate up to nine billion British pounds … roughly twelve billion dollars … in investment for five-point-nine gigawatts of floating offshore wind in British waters. Three projects underpin the deal. Ossian … three-point-six gigawatts … Green Volt … five hundred sixty megawatts … and Erebus … a one hundred megawatt demonstration project planned for the Celtic Sea. The United Kingdom called it a long-term structural measure. Not a reaction to the moment. But a bet on the future. There are many roadblocks ahead for offshore and onshore wind. That is clear. Invenergy turning over their offshore leases feels more like financial leveraging than an internal philosophy shift. At some point in the relatively near future Invenergy can probably buy back those leases at a fraction of the cost. Because wind energy — along with solar energy — is only getting cheaper. And economics eventually wins. And the worry about sea life due to offshore turbines — that worry seems misplaced. And that's the state of the wind industry for the 22nd of June 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.