LM Wind Power Cuts 60% of Denmark Staff

The crew discusses LM Wind Power’s dramatic layoff of 60% of remaining Danish staff, dropping from 90 to just 31 workers. What does this mean for thousands of wind farms with LM blades? Is government intervention possible? Who might acquire the struggling blade manufacturer? Plus, a preview of the Wind Energy O&M Australia 2026 conference in Melbourne this February.

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Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy [00:01:00]Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve got Yolanda Padron in Texas.

Joel Saxon up in Wisconsin and Rosemary Barnes down under in Australia, and it has been a, a really odd Newsweek. There is a slow down happening in wind. Latest news from Ella Wind Power is they’re gonna lay off about 60% of their staff in Denmark. They’ve only have about 90 employees there at the moment.

Which is a dramatic reduction of what that company once was. Uh, so they’re planning to lay off about 59 of the 90 workers that are still there. Uh, the Danish media is reporting. There’s a lot of Danish media reporting on this at the moment. Uh, there’s a letter that was put out by Ellen Windpower and it discusses that customers have canceled orders and are moving, uh, their blade production to internal factories.

And I, I assume. That’s a [00:02:00] GE slash Siemens effort that is happening, uh, that’s affecting lm and customers are willing to pay prices that make it possible to run the LM business profitably. Uh, the company has also abandoned all efforts on large blades because I, I assume just because they don’t see a future in it for the time being now, everybody is wondering.

How GE Renova is involved in this because they still do own LM wind power. It does seem like there’s two pieces to LM at the minute. One that serves GE Renova and then the another portion of the company that’s just serving outside customers. Uh, so far, if, if you look at what GE Renova paid for the company and what revenue has been brought in, GE Renova has lost about 8.3 billion croner, which is a little over a billion dollars since buying the company in 2017.

So it’s never really been. Hugely profitable over that time. And remember a few months ago, maybe a month ago now, or two months ago, the CEO of LM [00:03:00] Windpower left the company. Uh, and I now everyone, I’m not sure what the future is for LM Windpower, uh, because it’s, it has really dramatically shrunk. It’s down to what, like 3000 total employees?

I think they were up at one point to a little over when Rosie was there, about 14,000 employees. What has happened? Maybe Rosemary, you should start since you were working there at one point. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I dunno. It always makes me really sad and there’s still a few people that I used to work with that were there when I went to Denmark in May and caught up with a bunch of, um, my old colleagues and most of them had moved on because a lot of firing had already happened by that point.

But there were still a few there, but the mood was pretty despondent and I think that they guessed that this was coming. But I just find it really hard to see how with the number, just the pure number of people that are left there. I, I find it really hard to see how they can even support what they’ve still [00:04:00] got in the field.

Um. Let alone like obviously they cut way back on manufacturing. Okay. Cut Way back on developing new products. Okay. But you still do need some capabilities to work through warranty claims and um, you know, and any kind of serial issues. Yeah, I would be worried about things like, um, you know, from time to time you need a new, a new blade or a new set of blades produced.

Maybe a lot of them, you know, if you discover an issue, there’s a serial defect that doesn’t, um, become obvious until 10 years into the turbine’s lifetime. You might need to replace a whole bunch of blades and are you gonna be able to, like, what’s, what is gonna happen to this huge number of assets that are out there with LM blades on there?

Uh, I, yeah, I, I would really like to see some announcements about what they’re keeping, you know, what functionality they’re planning to keep and what they’re planning to excise. 

Joel Saxum: But I mean, at the end of the day, if it’s, if [00:05:00] the business is not profitable to run that they have no. Legal standing to have to stay open?

Rosemary Barnes: No, no, of course not. We all know that there, there’s, you know, especially like you go through California, there’s all sorts of coast turbines there that nobody knows how to maintain them anymore. Right. And, um, yeah, and, and around there was one in, um, in Texas as well with some weird kind of gearbox. I can’t remember what exactly, but yeah, like the company went bankrupt, no one knew what to do with them, so they just, you know, like fell into disrepair and couldn’t be used anymore.

’cause if you can’t. Operate them safely, then you can’t let no one, the government is not gonna let you just, you know, just. Try your luck, operate them until rotors start flying off. You know, like that’s not really how it works. So yeah, I do think that like you, you can’t just stay silent about, um, what you expect to happen because you know, like maybe I have just done some, a bit of catastrophizing and, you know, finding worst case scenarios, but that is where your mind naturally goes.

And the absence of information about what you can expect, [00:06:00] then that’s what. People are naturally gonna do what I’ve just done and just think through, oh, you know, what, what could this mean for me? It might be really bad. So, um, yeah, it is a little bit, a little bit interesting. 

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Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades. Back in service, so visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. Yolanda, what are asset managers [00:07:00] thinking about the LM changes as they proceed with orders and think about managing their LM Blade fleet over the next couple of years, knowing that LM is getting much smaller Quicker?

Yolanda Padron: Yeah, and this all comes at a time when. A lot of projects are reaching the end of the full service agreements that they had with some of these OEMs, right? So you already know that your risk profile is increasing. You already know. I mean, like Rosie, you said worst case scenario, you have a few years left before you don’t know what to do with some of the issues that are being presented.

Uh, because you don’t count with that first line of support that you typically would in this industry. It’s really important to be able to get a good mix of the technical and the commercial. Right? We’ve all seen it, and of course, we’re all a little bit biased because we’re all engineers, right? So we, to us it makes a lot of sense to go over the engineering route.

But the pendulum swung, swung so [00:08:00] far towards the commercial for Ella, the ge, that it just, it. They were always thinking about, or it seemed from an outsider’s point of view, right, that they were always thinking about, how can I get the easiest dollar today without really thinking about, okay, five 10 steps in the future, what’s going to happen to my business model?

Like, will this be sustainable? It did Just, I don’t know, it seems to me like just letting go of so many engineers and just going, I know Rosie, you mentioned a couple of podcasts ago about how they just kept on going from like Gen A to Gen B, to Gen C, D, and then it just, without really solving any problems initially.

Like, it, it, it was just. It’s difficult for me to think that nobody in those leadership positions thought about what was gonna happen in the [00:09:00]future. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think it was about day-to-day survival. ’cause I was definitely there like saying, you know, there’s too many, um, technical problems that Yeah. When I was saying that a hundred, a hundred of versions of me were all saying that, a lot of us were saying it.

Just in the cafeteria amongst ourselves. And a lot of us, uh, you know, a bit more outspoken Danish people don’t really believe a lot in a strict hierarchy. So certainly people were saying it to directors and VPs and CEOs, but, um, yeah, it was, uh, I think it was more about like the commercial reality of today is that there won’t be a commercial.

Tomorrow to experience these engineering problems if we don’t make these, um, decisions. Now, if, if that makes sense. As a really complicated way of saying we need to be able to sell this product, otherwise we’re not gonna sell anything. And then no one will be, no one will have a job in 10 years regardless.

So. We’ll solve, you know, whatever quality problems that arise from doing too many new technologies at once, at [00:10:00] least we’ll be, the company will still exist to be able to have a go at solving them if we, you know, make these sales. Um, which it won’t if we don’t. So I think that that would be the, like the other point of view, like it’s really easy to say now, oh yeah, we should have, um, we shouldn’t have done that, but yeah, I, I’m pretty sure management’s gonna tell you why they did it is for the sales.

Joel Saxum: This is an odd case being lm an ex Danish company now owned by GE Renova, which is a US based company. 

Allen Hall: Global. 

Joel Saxum: Global really. But yeah, but when we get into this, too big to fail type thing, right? So like Siemens cesa, having the German government back them up with a note, um, when they were having troubles a year and a half ago.

Uh. Is there a award like the too big to fail in the United States where the government bailed out the auto worker or the auto manufacturers and stuff like that. I don’t see that happening here because the company’s too small. But at what level do governments [00:11:00] intervene? Right? So it’s, I know every government’s gonna be different and every, but there’s have their own criteria and there’s not a hard set, probably line or metric of like, oh, you have this much impact on society, so we must support you to make sure you survive.

Well, when Rosemary, when you say like in, when you were there, you were there five years ago, 2020, right before COVID. Right. At that point in time, 20% of the world’s blades were LM blades of the global fleet. Well, if that’s was true still, that would be a hundred thousand plus turbines in the global fleet.

That would be LM blades. And if we have. Issues with them and we can’t solve them. I think one, one of the, one of the things that we’re, that we’re probably thankful for is there is that many, so there has been a lot of independent engineering expertise that’s been able to fix some of them. A lot of independent ISPs, you know, out there, service companies, blade repair companies that have been able to figure out how to make these things even, you know, regardless of getting the layup pattern or layup designs or any kind of engineering information from, from Malam [00:12:00] or from the OEMs.

Um, we have been able to maintain them, so that’s good. But is there a level where, I know Alan, you were shaking your head, but is there a level where anybody steps in from a government standpoint to save lm? 

Allen Hall: I would almost bet that Renova has talked to the Danish government. Somebody at LM has, I would have to think that they have already.

And has been, at least in the press, no response. And with this latest announcement, it doesn’t seem like the Danish government wants to be involved. So my, my take on it is they have an American stamp on ’em right now, and Denmark and the United States are not playing nice to one another. So why would I help ge?

Why would I do that? And that’s not a bad response. 

Rosemary Barnes: Potentially it wouldn’t even have to be necessarily the US or the Danish government that might have to get involved, because I know in Australia, and I’m, I can’t believe it’s different anywhere else. You have to be able to safely operate, uh, an asset like a, a wind turbine.

And that’s, um, some, [00:13:00] a responsibility of both the asset owner and the operator, but also the manufacturer and so they can compel to provide the information that you need to operate safely. I’ve always wondered how, um, ’cause you know, all the OEMs not talking, uh, LM or GE specifically here, they, they don’t really give away enough information to, um, operate assets safely, in my opinion.

So that is the key thing that you just, you can’t lose otherwise. You’re going to end up with blades that have to be scrapped or that you have to, you know, guess that it’s probably okay and then see how it goes. And, you know, that’s. Good a lot of the time, but it’s, it’s gonna make things less safe into the future.

You would expect to see more blade failures if you saw that happening a lot. So, you know, I would at least wanna make sure that you’re keeping, keeping people, keeping those models and keeping the people that know how to run them. Enough of them around. [00:14:00] Or making them publicly available. 

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How soon before ING Yang puts in an offer to buy LM and or TPI? That’s gonna happen in the next six months. It has to. 

Joel Saxum: What about instead of buying the factory, what if someone rises from the ashes and just buys the molds? 

Allen Hall: I think you have to eat the workers. I think that’s gonna be the trouble, 

Joel Saxum: but I don’t think you want them.

Allen Hall: Wow. That’s a hot take. 

Joel Saxum: But honestly, like the quality coming out now, and I’ll, and I will caveat this as well, the [00:15:00] quality is not their, the quality is not all their fault. The quality of some respects is the way it was designed for manufacturing. But there is issues that we have seen and has been, have been uncovered that have been in the news, in the, in the free press that show that stuff happening in factories that shouldn’t be happening.

So do you actually want that or do you, this is why I say someone rises from the ashes and, and or, and creates something with a bunch of inco, you know, like knowing the pitfalls and the, the, the things that have happened that are bad, the things that can go well that are good. You know, when we talk to some of the people in the industry that have been around blade manufacturing, and they, and they have told us, man, we’ve seen.

Quality, uh, control mechanisms thrown on the shelves, even though we know they work just because people, defactor didn’t wanna use them for whatever reason. I don’t, you know, you don’t know, um, whether it’s inspection, whether it’s, you know, robotics this, or whether it’s [00:16:00] this solution here. Like there’s a possibility that we could do this way better.

Maybe there’s this case right now where someone is like, you know what, robotics, let’s do this. Let’s try to make it happen. Let’s get rid of this incumbent knowledge of automated blades and start fresh from a. Scratch 

Allen Hall: my other hot take was GE sells their wind business, 

Joel Saxum: the entire wind business. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: To who 

Allen Hall: Ing Yang or somebody?

Anybody, 

Rosemary Barnes: if they wanna do that, I’d recommend doing it in the, um, current administration would probably be the most likely to allow that to happen because I would imagine that, uh, another time that people might not be so happy that, uh, the US has therefore no wind turbine manufacturer. 

Allen Hall: Does anybody else not think so that that’s a possibility.

They’re not listening to offers right now. 

Joel Saxum: I would say Mitsubishi maybe. I don’t think Ming Yang. I don’t think some, I don’t think a Chinese, no, but I do think a Korea and a Japanese, a German 

Allen Hall: could do it. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Well, that would entertain the offer. [00:17:00]

Rosemary Barnes: What about one of the large ISPs buying, you know, the ability to, you know.

Properly, properly service blades for, you know, many, many, many manufacturers. There’s a lot of knowledge that you’d get there. Um, the ability to replace blades, maybe it splits into two and there’s, you know, one company takes it for manufacturing into the future, and which case they’re probably just buying factories and not really worried about much else.

And then somebody else buys molds and, um, knowledge. Models, those sorts of things 

Joel Saxum: as a pitch for what exactly what you’re saying. So now let’s go back to, um, was it Larry Fink who said that they’re in investing in infrastructure, big time in the future, energy infrastructure is the future, da, da, da. And they, or like BlackRock’s been throwing money at everything, right?

They’ve been just buying, buying, buying, buying, buying. If some, someone came to them with the right [00:18:00] plan, there’s where your capital could come from. Who is it? Right? You know, that there’s players out there that may not be in the ISP world, I think is, p is interesting, Rosemary, but like a, a next era that’s like this with GEs, 

Allen Hall: Adani, 

Joel Saxum: a Donny’s in too much hot water to to, to make a deal with that, to let the SEC allow that.

Rosemary Barnes: Here’s my hot take. So LM started at the lm, it stands for lco Mills Fabric, which means, um, furniture manufacturer, right? So they started out making furniture, then they were making, um, caravans, I believe, and then there were, so that was all wood. Then they started making caravans outta fiberglass. Then they started making boats because those are also fiberglass and wood kind of things.

Then they moved into wind turbine blades and became LM glass fiber. So now they’re only doing fiberglass things. And then it was LM wind power. They only were doing wind power. Maybe, you know, [00:19:00] are they gonna go into, I don’t know, making airplanes next, or, or rockets, or are they gonna take a step backwards and, you know, go back into furniture?

Allen Hall: How do you put a value on a company that’s losing money? 

Joel Saxum: That’s where I was going, Mr. Hall, October of 2016 when GE bought them, they paid one point. Six, 5 billion US dollars. I don’t think that that’s was probably a too wild of a price back then, but there’s no way that they’re worth that much now with what has has happened.

That being said, say they’re worth, I don’t know, I’m just gonna throw a number out there. Say they’re worth 800 million, half of that. I don’t see that as like a crazy amount for someone else, like Rosemary said, that may be crossing industry silos to pick up. Some factories, some, some composites knowledge, some other things as well, as long as they get, get into it.

With the understanding that this is a fire sale and [00:20:00] things need to be fixed, 

Rosemary Barnes: isn’t, um, ozempic Danish? So there must be some, build, some Danish billionaires. Maybe there’s gonna be some national pride that that kicks in and makes somebody want to, you know, like Denmark is quite known for wind power. Um, if you combine, you know, the demise of LM with vest also.

Announcing a whole lot of job cuts. I, it’s not such a fast stretch to think that some Danish billionaire is gonna be like, you know what, Denmark should still have wind industry and I’m gonna make sure it happens. 

Allen Hall: No shot. I don’t see it. I, it would be awesome if they did 

Joel Saxum: Maersk, lm, 

Allen Hall: but Meers doesn’t wanna lose money.

Why you, why would you invest in something that’s going to lose money for the next five years? Who’s doing that today? 

Joel Saxum: Let’s just do a little comparison. So TPI claiming bankruptcy the other day when we looked at the Val, the market cap of them, they’re publicly traded. They were a hundred million, weren’t they?

Like a couple, six months ago, 

Allen Hall: [00:21:00] $1.5 million. 

Joel Saxum: Oh my God. It’s 1.5 million. Do you mean you could buy TPI over 1.5 million? 

Allen Hall: I can get a second mortgage and have a pretty good take of that business. It has no value because it’s not making money. You, you’ve, it’s EBITDA times X. 

Yolanda Padron: It’d be really interesting to see like an is like them turning into an ISB.

Like I will fix everything that I manufactured, gear, the molds, or like I will replace the parts. 

Rosemary Barnes: It’s hard as well. I just make a few blades here or there. Um, because they only get cheap when you make thousands of them. But that said like sometimes people have to pay, at least in Australia, like it’s not uncommon that you need a new blade.

You have to pay a million dollars for it. So in that case, you know, like that’s apparently, you know, TPI, you buy TPI for one and a half and you make two blades in your first year. Then you know, 

Yolanda Padron: you make a blade set, you’re done. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So they were worth a hundred million in market cap a year ago today. [00:22:00] So it’s like a 99.6% decrease since last year.

Allen Hall: When you file bankruptcy, stuff like that happens. Here’s gonna be the rub. Whoever decides to do whatever with it, they’re gonna have to have a lot of cash because I guarantee you vendors have not been paid or. Or vendors are asking for money upfront before they make a delivery, and that’s not the way that GE likes to operate.

GE likes to operate. I buy this thing and then six months later I pay you half and another six months later, I may pay the remaining half. They don’t like to pay things upfront and. It’s gonna be a problem. 

Joel Saxum: Net 180, and then on day 179, they’re gonna find a magic error in your invoice and it resets the clock.

Allen Hall: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Poolman on the park for Wind Energy o and m Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the [00:23:00] experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management and OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site.

Register now at WM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by Wind professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions, not speeches. So looking for something to do in February while America is in the middle of a winter snowstorm. You wanna go to Australia for?

Wind O and M Australia 2026 and it is going to be February, what, Joel? 

Joel Saxum: 17th and 18th at the Pullman on the park in sunny. Melbourne 

Allen Hall: and Rosemary, what’s on the schedule for the event in Sunny Australia? 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, it’s, uh, agenda just full of the topics that Australian operators are talking about at the moment.

Um, there’s, you are gonna be [00:24:00] topics on compliance. Um, also training is a, a big thing. Training and resources to get workforce up to speed. Um, also some on big data and ai, they’re catchy. Uh, yeah, hyped up terms. But can you actually do something useful with it? I mean, you definitely can, but how do you, um, and then just heaps of stuff about just specific asset management problems that people are having be a lot of talking about problems.

And there’s also gonna be a lot of talking about solutions. So that’s kind of the point. It’s the, it’s the place where you can get. Both sides. ’cause I think, yeah, both sides are very important. 

Joel Saxum: I think one, one of the things that is was good about the event last year and we’re excited about this year as well, is we tried to fit in as many networking opportunities as we could.

We’ve got a lot of coffee breaks. We’ve got breakfast, we’ve got a cocktail hour, we’ve got lunches, we’ve got all these things, and it’s kind of designed around keeping the whole crew together in one spot. So we’re able to share information, have those conversations. Oh, you have this asset. Oh, I [00:25:00] know this one.

Um, operators, speaking to operators, speaking to ISPs about specialties fixes. What are you doing? Could we implement that in our fleet? Those kind of things, right? And that’s about the, we, we talk on the podcast and in our daily lives regularly. Everybody here in the podcast is about collaboration and sharing information and sharing knowledge, and that’s the way that we’re gonna forward the, uh, industry.

So we’re really excited. Again, again, this is round two. We’re bringing this event down to Australia. Last year was great. I think we had basically every major operator represented, uh, at the event. And we’re gonna repeat that again this year. 

Rosemary Barnes: I really like the size of it. Last year, I think we were about 170 or 180, which was our limit for that, that event, we did sell out this year.

We, uh, increased that a little bit to 250. Um, but it’s a good size. It’s not like, I don’t know if there’s any other, um, introverts out there, but usually when I go to an event, I get so exhausted from just. Uh, I don’t know the, the pressure of if there’s [00:26:00] an exhibition hole that you’re supposed to wander around and, you know, like the last conference I went to had like probably 20 parallel streams and it’s just like, what am I supposed to see?

Oh, these sessions all sound similar, which is gonna be the good one. Um, and then you’re trying to meet up with people as well. This event, it’s targeted enough. It’s one session. You’re gonna find probably at least 95% of the sessions interesting if you are working in wind energy, o and m in Australia. So you just go there, you sit down, you watch the interesting information, and every single person that you run into when you at lunch or coffee or whatever, every every single person is gonna be someone you can have an interesting conversation with.

So it’s just. It’s a lot, uh, it’s a lot easier for someone who, I mean, you, Americans, you’re all, uh, it’s like national law, right? That you have to be extroverted. It’s not allowed to be any kind of other personality type in America. But in Australia, there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of introverts. And, uh, I would say that this is a much, much more introvert friendly event than [00:27:00] your typical big, big, broad conference.

Allen Hall: Well, you won’t want to miss Wilma 2026. In order to get, what are those 250 seats, you need to register and you need to register now. So visit wma w om a 2020 six.com and. Get signed in, get registered, and we’ll see you in Australia in February. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Thanks for joining us as we explore the latest in wind energy technology and industry insights. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation.

Please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show and we’ll catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:28:00] Podcast.