Third-Party Blade Replacements, Vestas Financial Trouble

As the number of wind turbines increases, the spare parts business has room to grow. But would third-party blade replacement options be technically or financially possible? Plus a review of Vestas’ quarter 2 financial call…the company posted a net loss of 156 million euros, widening from a 115 million euro loss from the same period last year. Visit https://www.eologix-ping.com/en/ to learn more about the EOLOGIX-PING lightning sensor.

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Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

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Allen Hall: This is a world announcement. We’ve been begging for a low cost lightning sensor to be installed on turbines that requires no wiring and no maintenance, and we finally have it. And it’s been produced by our friends at EOLOGIX-PING. I have a sample right here. It’s quite lovely. It’s small, it magnetizes to the turbine, and it tells you if your turbine’s been struck.

Joel and I have been using it for the last year or so, and it has been 100 percent effective. So this new low cost sensor is being included with our StrikeTape sales, so anytime we sell StrikeTape to our turbine, we are including, we Weather Guard are paying to have a EOLOGIX-PING Lightning Sensor installed so you can track how your turbine is doing with StrikeTape.

So this is what everybody’s been clamoring for. It is now here. And if you are interested in purchasing one of these low cost lightning units, You gotta get a hold of EOLOGIX-PING. Just go to https://www.eologix-ping.com/en/, or you can just call Joel, (832) 593-2782. We have about a thousand units that are ready to go, and now’s the time to get it installed.

Call now.

I’m Allen Hall and I’ll be joined by the rest of the uptime host. After these news headlines, Germany has announced results for a 5.5 gigawatt offshore wind auction. Three North Sea sites were awarded, RDE partnering with Total Energy secured two sites, while asset manager Luxkara won the third. These wind farms are set to become operational between 2029 and 2031.

In the Belgian North Sea, the world’s first wind powered electric ship charging station has been launched. Developed by Parkwind and MJR Power and Automation, this station is connected to the Noble Wind Farm, 29 miles offshore. The system can deliver up to 8 megawatts of power to service vehicles, operating effectively in choppy seas.

Parkwind aims to deliver the first commercial offshore charging system by early 2025. China’s central bank is extending its low carbon lending program to the end of 2027. This initiative provides financial institutions with low cost loans to support corporate carbon reduction efforts. China plans to promote battery powered vehicles, energy efficient appliances, and eco friendly building materials.

The government aims to transition its economy to a green, low carbon model by 2035. Increasing non fossil energy consumption to about 25 percent by 2030. Vineyard Wind, America’s first large scale offshore wind farm, is resuming partial construction following a turbine blade incident on July 13th. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has authorized tower and nacelle installation, but blade installation and power generation remain suspended.

GE Vernova attributes the blade failure to a manufacturing deviation of an adhesive bond line. GE is employing high tech crawlers to inspect the existing wind turbine blades at the Vineyard Wind site. The project also is developing a new algorithm to use with existing blade sensors to detect issues quicker.

Vineyard Wind states that no blades will be installed or used until thoroughly inspected. In Hull, England, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has applied to expand its wind turbine factory. The expansion includes a multipurpose manufacturing building and a staff welfare building. This development is expected to create 40 additional full time jobs, bringing total site employment to over 1, 600 employees.

The plan includes using environmentally friendly air source heat pumps instead of gas fired boilers. And Samsung Heavy Industries has signed a preferred supplier agreement with Equinor for floating foundations for the Firefly Bandabuli offshore wind farm in South Korea. This agreement covers fabrication of floating substructures and marshalling operations.

The 800 megawatt project is set to be operational in 2027. Located 70 kilometers off the Olsen coast. This marks SHI’s expansion from oil and gas into renewable energy. And this project awaits selection into South Korea’s upcoming offshore wind auction. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, Renewable Energy Expert and founder of Partello Consulting, Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of Intel Store, Phil Tataro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard.

Mark your calendars for AMI’s Winter and Blades Conference happening October 2nd and 3rd in historic Boston, Massachusetts. This two day event, which is similar to the well established edition in Europe, will bring together the whole blade value chain to examine market outlook, innovations in blade materials, design, manufacturing, testing, and lifecycle management, with a special focus on the North American market.

Gain insights from experts from Vestas, Along with scientists and engineers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Plan your trip to Boston this fall by visiting the link in the show notes or just Google 2024 Blades Boston.

All right, so Joel and I have been on a number of jaunts across the states and every place we go, we get asked, Do you know where I can find X Blade? Because I need a couple.

Joel Saxum: No, we are getting asked this all the time and it doesn’t matter what platform it is. Some of them, of course, more than others, Hey, do we need this?

Do you have this? And the crazy thing is it’s. It’s not just blades. It’s all kinds of things associated with it. But the most problem is blades. So people want to repower. There’s multiple options. I’ve seen some discourse on LinkedIn about this and I’ve actually been through it myself as a, for projects.

Hey, we’re going to do a repower. Okay. So our options are buying new blades from the OEM. We can get secondhand blades in the market that have already been built, that have been basically, safe Harbor or dry store. We can try to rebuild the ones that are there and maybe upgrade them. Like on our side.

We’ve been called about this many times for weather guard to do lightning protection upgrades as a part of a program, right? They’re gonna re, they’re gonna redo these blades. So they’ve done internal inspections, external inspections, fix ’em up, put lightning protection upgrades on, put arrow upgrades on other things like that.

So that’s an option. And then the other option is. Scrapping the turbines that are there and getting completely new ones. And then sometimes it’s an adapter plate on the tower and a, a Vestas to a GE or something of that sort. But Phil you were talking to us a little bit off air before this about an idea of a blade manufacturer repurposing some facilities to Build some blades for this same exact purpose.

Philip Totaro: Exactly. And in particular for the asset owners or operators that are not on an OEM long term service contract, because what happens on that circumstance is the OEMs tend to lock in their subcomponent suppliers, whether it’s blades or bearings or gear boxes or what have you. Those suppliers are locked into supplying the OEM, then the OEM supplies, the customers.

But what if there were a third party option, which is, we talk about this all the time, the similarities to the automotive sector or other industries, where you can go to someone else That can either reverse engineer what you need, or might be able to just build you something from scratch that would be an upgrade to what you have, and would still fit in, on the turban, in our case, on the turban.

As long as you had the rough bolt circle diameter to be able to, figure out the size of the root and all that sort of thing, and as long as you also had a rough sense of the arrow profile so that you weren’t going to introduce loads or anything that, that were going to be too dissimilar to what the turbine was already used to experiencing, could you use more modern manufacturing techniques than that existed, 15 years ago, let’s say to make a higher quality blade that would be a replacement to the OEM supplied blade.

And the reason this came up is we’ve been contacted by a couple of different customers who either want to sell blades, In that fashion, like as a third party offering, or the other trend that’s recently come up is there’s a lot of factories in particular in China that are idle right now because they’ve migrated their manufacturing capability from, two, three, and maybe even four megawatt turbines.

up to 5, megawatt turbines for onshore, and they’re literally, rather than repurposing those factories that were used to make let’s say, 37 to 53 or maybe 55 meter long blades, they’re literally letting those, some of those factories sit idle. Instead of repurposing them for, they’re literally just building a new factory for building the, 60, 70, 80 meter long blades.

So there’s potentially a market opportunity here. And I’m curious as to what everybody thinks about that kind of a scenario.

Rosemary Barnes: I think it would be challenging. First question is why these factories just sitting around. Is the idea that, we’re making 70 meter long blades now, but that’s like a fashion trend and fashion cycle will come back and next year, 30 meter blades will be in.

Joel Saxum: Bell bottoms are back in style.

Rosemary Barnes: Just feel like once, if you’re not making 30 meter blades anymore, then you’re not going to. So it makes more sense to me to just close that factory. If you don’t have space to expand it, to, to extend it and raise the roof to make you big modern blades, then I can’t see the point in keeping that at all, but aside from that, I think there’s there’s a lot of challenges to, to making replacement blades.

I, I’m struggling to see how the business model would work unless these blades are going to cost like, I don’t know, a million dollars each. Hard to see how just one offs and you never get a production line started. You must be talking about replacing a whole rotor every time that you replace a blade because there’s, like even from a specific manufacturer.

When they’re got serial production, everything is happening the exact same way every time. It still isn’t a matter of just any three blades can fit together that, the weight tolerances aren’t close enough. They have to match them in sets that are close enough matched. So I’d really struggle to see how you would reverse engineer a blade that would end up being in spec in any way.

Yeah, and then how are they going to certify these blades without knowing all of the information that the design engineers had in the first place? Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of problems that would, you know, solvable, but I feel like it would be so expensive to solve that you’d be better off just buying new turbines.

Joel Saxum: At the earliest level of trying to solve this, it’s demand, right? So 30 to 50 meter blades, so you’re talking older turbines that in the United States may be in a repower campaign or something of that sort. Or if you’re like the, let me pull one out of the hat, the Spanish market that has a lot of aging 20, 25 year old turbines.

That may need, some replacement in the future. So is this a, all team, we’re going to try to figure out how to reverse engineer and make a replacement for the G8X Gamesa blade or the G9X, cause there’s a lot of them in Spain. They might be coming up or, say in the United States, when we go to do a repower, the 40.

1 LM blades and there might be a lot of repowers for those. You have to figure out where this demand is to even try to make this series of blades that would constitute enough business case to build a mold for and start up a factory for, because it’s not like you’re going to make thousands of them, right?

You’re saying, Rosemary, you’re like, you might have a project where you may make a hundred of these, and then you’re not going to get another order. It’s It would have to be some, there’s had to be some extreme demand for a specific size for a specific model for this to make sense.

Philip Totaro: But wouldn’t this make sense to be able to leverage China?

Because if we can put aside all of our, import duty discussions and all that and say, they can make a set of blades cheaper. Why can’t, if, particularly if the Chinese government is willing to subsidize these factories, which is what’s happening, by the way I agree with Rosemary from the perspective that I don’t know why there’s a bunch of factories sitting idle when they could have just designed them to expand the factory.

They could have designed it with a bigger ceiling in the first place and then just had, the overhead cranes on, something that would allow it to go up or down. That’s a whole other discussion, but why can’t we leverage, these cheap Chinese goods that we’re all trying to keep out of, the U S and European markets at the moment?

Why can’t we at least leverage it as an aftermarket play?

Joel Saxum: Therein lies the exact problem. You have to find a first mover. Even if the business case makes sense, you have to find that customers. I’m going to speak from a United States perspective. You have to find that customer that’s willing to take a chance on a While the blade may be designed somewhere else, you have to be take a chance on a Chinese built blade, bring it to the United States, and put it up.

I know people that have tried to do this kind of thing. There’s a company, Phil, maybe you know them, Volt, but spelled W O L T, W O L T Engineering. They’re down in Brazil. They tried to do this exact same thing for GE 1. 5s. 37C Texas blades, basically a Volt Engineering was gonna make a better, little bit longer tip kind of model that they could bring up here.

People wouldn’t take the chance on the fact that it’s a Brazilian blade, it’s never been brought to the United States. Am I gonna get a warranty? Is the company gonna be around long enough to warranty it? Does it make sense to do this? So you have to have those first movers that are even willing to take the chance on something like this.

Okay,

Philip Totaro: so let me pose this question then. What if it weren’t something that was so dodgy? What if it was another proven OEM? What if Vestas, and this will be much more hypothetical then what I might make it sound like, but what if Vestas decided to make replacement blades for GE 1. 5s?

Would the market be more accepting of that? What if it were, Goldwind instead? Making, or Goldwind, Sonoma, one of their, verifiable blade suppliers. As opposed to just some other random company in China.

Joel Saxum: I see a bit

Philip Totaro: more

Joel Saxum: validity there. Then it would be just I guess the question next would be, What’s the warranty going to look like?

Am I going to get a three year warranty? And are you guys going to, how, and how are you going to execute on the warranty if there’s claims?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And not just a warranty on the blade failing, if a blade fails then like badly, if it falls off, then you’ve got the, everything else in the turbine that could potentially be damaged as a result.

And it would be unlikely to see a warranty for the whole turbine, but then I would imagine that your insurance wouldn’t be very happy about this blade replacement if, yeah, you no longer have any kind of recourse on the entire turbine.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, because we’re not, then you’re not just convincing the operator to make a decision.

You’re convincing their financiers and their insurance companies and everybody else. So I think that, Phil, I think it’s a good thing. In my opinion, it’s a grand idea, but in practice, I don’t think it’s viable.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s one of those same things where yeah, there’s a whole bunch of challenges.

Every individual challenge is solvable, but my gut feeling is that the the economics aren’t going to work out at the end of the day. It’s not only, The ones we’ve mentioned, but also, and I say it too, in my work that people, they’ve got a couple of blade failures in their wind farm, but that blade isn’t being made anymore.

And so they’re like, what are we going to do? And yeah, they would love to be able to buy a blade, it’s one or two here or there. And so are you going to, these factories are going to have to build up a stockpile of what every single blade in the world and just keep them sitting around until somebody wants it and then hope that it, that it’s white and everything fits.

Since. It just seems like too many problems. Even if none of them are showstoppers on their own, it feels hard to me, I’d be interested to watch someone try and do it. But yeah, I would be highly surprised if it ends up making anyone any money. Too many variables.

Philip Totaro: Because at the end of the day, most blade orders are.

On spec anyway. It’s they’re not going to build up that inventory to warehouse it if they don’t have a firm order from a customer. For, sets of blades, but it’s just it’s the timing of It’s not that they won’t eventually get somebody who’s interested in a handful But you never know how many and you never know when it’s gonna be at some point in the future So you have no way of being able to predict like how much extra in a production run should you do?

How much time are you gonna have to warehouse it for and then amortize that cost? You they’re just sitting there.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and what are you making three or four blades and then swapping over to a new blade? So you’re gonna drag in a new mold. You’ve got to train everybody up and hope that they’re remembering the work instructions for the new blade and not the old one and you don’t get, a whole bunch of quality problems as a result of that and, all their materials as well, some of these materials have short shelf lives and Are they?

I don’t know. It’s again, any one of those things you can solve, it’s just too many.

Joel Saxum: So therein lies the question, like right now, if you call me and say, hey, I need this blade for this machine, more than likely, I can find you that blade, whether it’s from a supplier I know. Or someone that I know, some people in Denmark, I know some people over here, I know some people in Germany, I know some people in Spain, I can find most blades out there, even weird ones, like I had someone the other day call me for a Clipper C93, and I found two sets of them like I can find those blades, so if it’s a onesie, twosie thing, or a rotor set yeah, that can be done, but it’s the, you’d have to do this.

That’s good to know, Joel, I didn’t I

Rosemary Barnes: didn’t know this was a service that you provide.

Joel Saxum: Call me, mate. We can everything. I’ll find donuts for you, whatever you want. Just call. Rare wines. I got all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Personal concierge service. The uptime concierge. That’s what it is.

But so like the onesie twosie stuff that can be found, it’s the, if you’re going to do this, you need a large run. You need to be going like, hey, I’m going to do a repower of 300 turbines and I need 900 blades. Okay, let’s go do that. But. You’re gonna be so far out in timeline that I don’t know if it’ll work.

Philip Totaro: Joel, can you find me an Australian professor that can actually breakdance?

Joel Saxum: There’s, hey, there may be an Australian PhD on the phone right now that can breakdance. To the standard that’s been

Rosemary Barnes: set, yes, I feel like I probably could.

Allen Hall: Future Olympian. 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. Vestas has reported its second quarter results for this year. The company posted a net loss of 156 million euros, widening from a 115 million euro loss from the same period last year. Revenues declined 3. 9 percent year over year to 3. 3 billion euros, but Vestas order intake grew 54 percent year over year to about three and a half gigawatts, driven by onshore projects in Europe and Asia Pacific.

America was tiny in that. The company entered the quarter with a record combined backlog of wind turbine orders and service agreements worth about 63 billion euros. So the only downside really for Vestas at the minute, there’s really two, is that their service business, which has typically been a really strong performer, had a negative EBIT of 107 million euros in the second quarter due to increased planned costs.

So there, it looks like Vestas has warranty claims that are sucking down the service business where they’re having to devote more people to fixing their own. Turbine problems and not just doing standard maintenance things or doing maintenance on other turbines. And that’s really dragging on Vestas.

The second thing, which I haven’t mentioned yet, which is they don’t have an order intake for Q2. They sold about 9 megawatts of turbines in Q2. And they have zero pipeline from Q2. Now, that seems really low on top of what Siemens Gamesa was saying, which they have a really low order book for their Q3, which is Vestas Q2.

Which indicates to me that the market is slowing and that the OEMs are focused on specific regions. Vestas looks like it’s really hammering Europe down. And APAC GE seems to be focused on the Americas because the number of sales and activity in the United States and Vestas aside in 2024 are dramatically down from 2023.

Joel Saxum: Does that make sense?

Joel Saxum: It does to me because when I look at the maps, when we travel, when we’re out with our, the hands on the ground, I don’t see that many new Vestas machines being installed. So you’ll find a few, V150, V162 wind farms. Fairly small in size, but not that many. Most of the wind turbines you find out there that are Vestas are V110, V120, find some V126, V136, but they’re all from a couple of years ago.

Oddly enough, the majority of the wind turbines going up new in the States are GE turbines. The data’s there, but it’s, it shows when you go in the field too.

Allen Hall: And the CEO of Vestas talked about his plans and where he was going to be in the next couple of weeks. And one of those places was in the Americas, which makes me believe that they’re hopefully going to get some sales in the U.

S. You’d hate for everything to stop. And a really good question came from. The financial institutions that we’re calling in the Q& A portion. One of them, which sounded like an American, and there’s a lot of voices from all over the world, obviously, on these Q& As, was asking about the IRA bill, and what the effect is of the IRA bill on Vestas.

And Vestas is raising prices. Right now, if you do the math and they publicize this, it’s about 1. 2 million euros per megawatt. I think that’s both combined offshore and onshore, but they are definitely raising prices to increase profitability, overcome some of the supply chain. But when that translated into, does, did the IRA bill directly affect Vestas?

The answer was no, shockingly. And maybe it’s the way the system is set up where it’s production tax credits and not anything going directly to the OEMs, but it feels okay. The OEMs and Vestas in particular is looking at this and going, all right, there’s protection tax credits happening. We need to participate in this.

We’re just going to raise prices to get our share of what is being doled out by the U S government.

Philip Totaro: Does that make sense, Phil? The other reason that they’re not directly taking advantage of any IRA bill benefits yet is because they were supposed to open some factories in the Northeast for offshore component manufacturing, which would have given them access to.

Local tax credits and the 45 X manufacturing tax credits, but they haven’t committed to that yet because of all the, nonsensical stuff that’s happened in New York and New Jersey in particular with the offshore wind projects and worsted, as well. Amongst others, other companies have had to pull projects and rebid them as well.

Joel Saxum: I would say the one thing I think the, if the CEO of Vestas has come into the States. I would be willing to bet that plane lands in New Mexico. 100%. Going to San Zia. In

Allen Hall: Colorado,

Joel Saxum: for sure.

Allen Hall: Yeah. But they also pointed out that they had a really big project in Australia, like a 500 megawatt project.

It was a phase two project. And the storyline that they were trying to convey was This is part two. Part one was completed successfully in Australia. Everything went fine. So we’re now on to part two. So if we can complete projects successfully, that’ll open the door up to more projects for Vestas, which I think is generally true.

But it did seem like Australia will be a growth market for Vestas. For Vestas and Rosemary, you’re closer to that than we are. Is, are you seeing some of that on the ground?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there’s been a few announcements related to Vestas recently. One big one was that the Danish government is actually getting involved in developing projects.

So similar to what happens with most of the Galdwin projects in Australia are actually developed by Galdwin. So they get to choose, they develop a project, they get to choose a turbine, they choose their own. So the Danish government made an investment in a big new wind farm and chose Vestas turbines for it.

I think that they’re, yeah, they’re throwing more at it than just, trying to get people to choose their turbines. Yeah, but they’re, I think that, Based on the last wind energy conference that I went to, there were quite a few international people there. And they were saying that Australia is an attractive market because it’s easier to get big projects done here.

The average project, I can’t remember the numbers now, but I think it was like. The average size of a new wind farm in Europe is, or maybe it was France, this was a French guy, the average size there is 30 megawatts and in Australia it’s 300 megawatts. Like a 300 megawatt project is harder to implement than a 30 megawatt one, but not 10 times harder.

You still have to, do, there’s a lot of things you have to do once, regardless of the size of the wind farm. And you also I wish I had the details here, but there was another one announced recently. It was like, A huge wind farm, well over a gigawatt, and the first phase of it, at least, they only had, I think, nine landholders to get over a gigawatt wind farm in place, and I think that’s quite unusual in the world Australia has really big properties, and that obviously simplifies things a lot,

Joel Saxum: as well.

I know Allen and I were on the strike tape side of things, providing people with upgraded lightning protection. We get a lot of calls from the APAC region. Lately we’ve been talking with people from Vietnam and elsewhere, and that seems to be a lot of best disturbance. So Vestas Turbines in that whole region and when you look at the map from what Vestas said is, I think it was it 16 gigawatts of pipeline in the APAC region, Allen?

Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s by far the heaviest pipeline that they have is in your corner of the world, Rosemary.

Philip Totaro: Allen, if I can also bring it back to something you mentioned about their recent financial results. The one comment that Vestas also made was they specifically said in regards to the service businesses, the adjustment that they put out on, their financial guidance is, I’m reading here, is made on the background of a combination of sustained inflation within specific inflation components.

So it sounds to me like they’re talking about, getting access to certain subcomponents could be balsa wood, could be, steel, could be any number of things, are still being subject to inflationary pressures, which is having an impact on them. And then also on the services business, because again, as we talked about recently as well, with having access to spare parts, they’re constrained by what their supply chain can give them.

So the other, they went on to say, though, that the adjustment that they made to their financial results for the, or financial guidance for the services business is also due to indirect effects of increased repairs and upgrades. As well as operational inefficiencies, partly offset by expected future efficiency achievements and cost out initiatives.

So what that sounds to me is as we’ve talked about on the show here for a while, they are facing these challenges of trying to have self insured their, their turbines. And, through this kind of extended warranty that they were offering through a full wrap service contract. And this is the direct result of that, but the fact that they’re also saying operational inefficiencies that will be, corrected in the future, as well as with cost out initiatives, that sounds to me as well, like they might not have had the best possible structure for executing some of these service contracts.

Whether they needed something more centralized because they’re, vestas, if you are familiar with how they are structured, they’re very decentralized and regionally focused potentially there are things that they’re experiencing with this kind of services business model that would have benefited from having something more centralized.

That’s, one, one thought.

Allen Hall: The feeling I got, Phil, was that they were having quality problems in the turbines themselves, and that they, the rate of failures or problems was higher than they had estimated, and so they’re trying to correct it now, after the fact, which is, The most expensive way to do it, and it’s easier to correct it in the factory, as Rosemary’s pointed out a thousand times, than to fix it out in the field, just because the amount of man hours it takes to go out and correct it, and the money spent to go do it.

There is an emphasis internally with investors to drive the repair rate down, the maintenance rate down to about 3 percent is where they were trying to get it to, which sounds reasonable. And I don’t. Rosemary better may have a better sense of what the repair rates are internally, but 3 percent seems like a reasonable number is it must be north of that right now.

Rosemary Barnes: What does that 3 percent mean?

Allen Hall: 3 percent of the value

Rosemary Barnes: of

Allen Hall: the turbine warranty

Rosemary Barnes: repairs. Yeah, no, that sounds a bit, a little bit low. So yeah, that’s their goal.

Philip Totaro: But against, if that’s their, if that’s their goal during the initial warranty period, that makes sense, but you’re never going to have, That kind of most aside from like infant mortality issues on components, you’re almost always going to have faults and failures come in the out years anyway, when the turbines on an extended warranty.

And it sounds like that’s also part of the problem here is that they’re also underestimating. The volume of faults and failures, even on the extended warranty and stuff that’s under the full wrap service contract.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I’ve been surprised and I’ve been surprised and not singling out Vestas at all, I haven’t noticed much difference between the different OEMs that offer these full service agreements.

But I’ve been surprised that if you know that you’re going to be servicing this turbine for, 20 years or. Whatever. I’m surprised that people aren’t more proactive about thinking about the total lifetime of yeah, repairs and maintenance. Cause I do see a lot of things getting pushed off like they would be if you were on a year to year contract and had to make sure that you were, as cheap as possible every year.

Like I don’t see investment being made to be proactive about things and to, yeah, really keep on top of things so that you didn’t have bigger problems later. Yeah, so it’s been just something that I’ve noticed working with these service providers here.

Joel Saxum: Alright, so the wind farm of the week this week comes from Scout Clean Energy.

It is the Ranchero Wind Farm down in Texas. Pretty interesting things about this wind farm is on the Scout Clean Energy website, they actually have a ticker of their busiest wind turbine in the whole Scout Clean Energy fleet. And it is number 008 at the Ranchero Wind Farm. And since that wind turbine has been built, it has produced by itself, 81, 555 megawatt hours of power.

So to put that in context, In the peak of the summer in the entire state of Texas, sometimes the demand is that high. It’s 81 gigawatts that happens. So that wind turbine, that one wind turbine, since it has been built, has produced enough for a hot summer day for the entire state and all the industry in Texas.

So the Windfarm Ranchero Windfarm is 300 megawatts total output. There’s 120 GE 2. 5 megawatt, 127 meter rotor turbines there. It had 371 million dollars in investment and employed over 350 people during the development and construction. And oddly enough, if you think about big wind turbine farms in the United States, This wind farm, 300 megawatts, only has 5 landowners that they deal with.

But, throughout those 5 landowners and the communities that they are engaged with in the area, there’s approximately 165 million in lifetime community benefits through wages, lease payments, property taxes, and tax abatement programs over the life of the project. The Ranchero Wind Farm of Scout Clean Energy, you are the

Allen Hall: Wind Farm of the Week.

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