Max Le Tallec from SOCOMORE speaks about their new SOCOBLADE product, in partnership with Hontek. The product was originally created to protect military helicopters, and is now an LEP solution that reduces downtime, maintenance costs, and power losses. 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! Allen Hall: Imagine spending half a million dollars on leading edge repairs only to watch them fail again in just 18 months. That’s the reality many wind operators face today. This week on the Uptime Spotlight, Max Le Tallec joins us from Socomore to discuss how helicopter technology designed to withstand combat conditions is now protecting wind turbine blades. The wait for a military grade leading edge solution is finally over. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Max, welcome to the program. Maxime Le Tallec: Thank you. Thanks for welcoming me. Allen Hall: I think we’re gonna talk leading edge erosion and what to do about it. I want to back up a little bit because there’s a lot of operators with a lot of leading edge erosion. Why should they care about the leading edge erosion? Why does that matter? Maxime Le Tallec: The, we’ve seen the blade today been eroded, almost destroyed with holes of the size [00:01:00] of a fist which. Create issues on the aerodynamics of the blade and the downtime and major repairs or major downtimes on the blade. Allen Hall: Yeah. And that turns into a lot of expensive repairs, obviously. And we’re also hearing from a lot of operators about the power. Loss of you hear numbers from anywhere from a fraction of a percent to somewhere north of three 4%. Are you hearing those same sort of things? Just the power loss gets to be so expensive. Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. And even up to five certain are saying so that’s why you need to be preventive on this aspect and actually not to wait for the damage to come on the plate. Joel Saxum: I think that when we talk a EP loss, it’s exacerbated even more in the market nowadays when we’re starting to look at these 5.5, 6.1, 6.8, and I’m just talking about onshore turbines, these big megawatt turbines. If you’re losing 1% from that big turbine, that’s a lot more than it would’ve been, 10, 15 years ago on a GE 1.5, or you’re not lo, you’re [00:02:00] losing, but 1% doesn’t hurt you as much. But when you start talking these big, long blades, like everybody has to have a leading edge, erosion, leading edge. Protection strategy in place to make sure that they don’t get to that point where they have big repairs or they’re losing a bunch of production. Are you, are operators engaging with you guys now with your with the new product? Socoblade? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. A lot of companies, so our product today has been on the market for a while. This is the non-tech technology, which actually we scale up today. So we’ve worked for more than a year now with Ontech to scale up the manufacturing, to make the product available worldwide. So the product is pretty well known already in North America and the world spread farms to farms. Now with our headquarter in Europe and our local forces we are reaching more and more European farms as well. We’ve seen a very high interest back in December during a Dusseldorf show. The everyone is coming. Yes. Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s unique. [00:03:00] So Hontek has developed a leading edge erosion, preventive coating that came from the military and on helicopters originally. And that technology has now evolved quite a bit. Into, and a product that can be made for wind turbine blades. And the problem with Hontek was, or originally, is that there was so much demand for the product that it got really difficult to get in line to get enough of it to do your wind farm, and particularly in Europe because the Americans would use it up most quickly. So bringing smore into this equation does. Greatly improved the likelihood of putting this Hontek product on. Now, obviously, so Sommore is a great chemical company. That’s what you are. You have all kinds of technologies for a variety of industries, including aerospace, which is where I first ran across Sommore. But this Hontek collaboration opens up a number of [00:04:00] doors for smore to really help the wind operator, correct? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes, of course. We, the product today is designed to be rolled on damaged turbine or as a preventative leading edge protection. But now thanks to our collaboration, we’re freeing ontech to keep developing new solution and adapt to the new challenges that the farms are meeting. The product that we have today, as we were seeing is actually the result of 30 years of development BioNTech. So they come from far and they tremendously. Analyze and develop the product to meet the exact field need. Allen Hall: And that’s huge, right? That, that the product has so much service history that in aerospace and now on wind turbines and the word of mouth spread very quickly that service history is something that smore is using. To to explore other markets with and to grow the wind base. That is really critical because I think when you see a lot of new leading edge erosion [00:05:00] products pop up, they have maybe six months of service life at best, or it’s a brand new product for a 2025. Okay, great, but what am I gonna spend a hundred K, 200 K, 500 k putting this on my turbines when it don’t and have a lot of history. Samore provides all that. All that data, all that history with this product. And can you explain like all the effort that went into this product to get to here? Maxime Le Tallec: So as you were saying, the backbone of the chemistry is coming or has been used by the military in the past. And over the past years, the product has been challenged against different aerospace testing, military testing so under way more severe. Conditions that the wind tests are currently with tremendous results. So that’s where we are always pushing the limit higher and higher. Joel Saxum: You know, as Alan and I, of course we’re talking with operators all the time and ISPs across the wind space and globally really. [00:06:00] But a lot of people in the US. You talk, you mention the word Hantek and Ooh, that stuff’s good. Ooh, that stuff’s good. But as we all know, if you’ve been in wind or if you’ve been around blades at all, a product that’s installed on a blade is only as good as its installation. Can you tell us a little bit about how you guys install this or how the Hontek stuff is applied and it doesn’t have to be versus other part products in the market? Just how is it applied? So we’re making life easy on a technician so they get a good end product, one particular of our products. Maxime Le Tallec: So that’s a two component products. We need to warm one of the part for preparation is one of the specificity. We recommend some equipment that can be used actually at the back of a truck. So no matter where the turbine, we can actually prepare the solution. Then pouring the part A in the Part B, you get your can. Ready to go, and that’s a rollable solution. So you have your roller. The product has been designed for the, I would say, the most complicated application for ropers. And the rollable application is [00:07:00] actually very forgiving. So no matter if you splash a bit, if you swing a bit on the blade you can easily correct the application and make it clean and lean all along the leading edge. We’ve designed the kit just to cover one blade at a time. So everything has been thought for the epi for the operator. Sorry. To be easy for the application. Allen Hall: Oh, that’s so critical, right? Because you don’t wanna mix a bunch of the product together and have to paint three turbines at a time. You want to do it one blade at a time, and obviously soccer more. Is really good at packaging and making this simple for the technician on site. Now, there are really two different versions of the same product. You want to de describe what those differences are? Maxime Le Tallec: Yeah, so we talk about LEP two 20 and LEP two 20 age. The two 20 has been developed for dri drier environment, more cheek, so low humidity. Where the 2 23 8 has a way wider conditions, window of application from [00:08:00] 35 to 95 relative humidity. So the technology of the product is moisture secure, so it will actually cure with the ambient moisture in the air. Allen Hall: So it’s sim it’s similar to a superglue, right? Superglue cures with humidity in the air. And so you need a little bit of humidity to make this work. However, if you look at other products, I think this is why the Hontek product is so well loved, is that. You could be in dry Texas, New Mexico, places that are hot and pretty dry, and you can apply it. You can apply it offshore where the humidity is exactly 95%. And how do you do that? A lot of other products don’t have that variability or they have trouble in there. They don’t cure up. Quite as nice. The Huntec product basically removes all those barriers. Max, you have this mixture. It does magic. It’s applied generally with rollers. I thought I have seen it applied with different methods though. Are there other ways to apply it beyond roller? Maxime Le Tallec: So there is [00:09:00] a brushable application possible as well and we are customizing the product to be applicable through robot. We’ve seen more and more robot application nowadays. And we want to make sure to, that’s. This application is compatible with our product. Allen Hall: Okay. So as we move to a lot more robotic repairs that are happening, and obviously there’s a couple of leaders in leading edge erosion protection robots. So you can actually connect your Hontek product with an existing robotic company together. Is that a product today that I could. Turn on and use on my turbines this season? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes, we’re we’re working on it, finalizing it. All the tests have been very promising. So we are, we’re in the last stage of getting this available for the market. Cool. Joel Saxum: I like that. So a question for you, max. Now I know this is a, this is an open-ended question because LEP leading edge erosion, LEP is different everywhere. I know Alan, last year you were at the leading edge erosion [00:10:00] symposium that DTU put on all kinds of smart research has been done about leading edge erosion for years. And it’s different everywhere you go, right? If you’re offshore in, in the Germany offshore wind farms in the North Sea, or. The UK or in the desert in California or in the Midwest. If you’re near agriculture, if you’re near gray grazing land, it’s, everything is different. But what are you guys seeing for the testing? I know they, they’ve done rain erosion testing and other things I. In an aggressive environment. How long is this stuff lasting? How long do you expect it to last uptower? We’ve seen now by experience the first application have are eight years old, and we haven’t seen those leading age being redone. So per experience, that’s the longest that we’ve seen. That’s huge in the United States, right? Because when you, if you’re talking eight years, what that looks like to me is a turbine that came out of warranty. Got Hontek LEP installed and then made it all the way until repower without having to touch the leading edge again. [00:11:00] That’s what I’m seeing from a business case. That’s a good business case. Allen Hall: Because what does that cost Max? The, when we talk leading edge erosion the first discussion point I have with operators and they’re always focused on how much it’s gonna cost and how long it’s gonna take to apply. What does generally that look like? What does ballpark mean into the timeframe it takes to finish a turbine with guys on ropes and buying all the equipment and the material, the socket blade material. Maxime Le Tallec: Today we’re talking about one to two turbines a day, depending on the familiarity of the technicians and the number of technicians with with the product. Obviously the labor is actually the major cost on those operation or the equipment needed either ropers or the baskets. So this is where moving to a robotic application may be a real asset and that’s what we are targeting for this season. And as you’re saying, the. Or the lens of durability of our product, just reduce the frequency of maintenance [00:12:00] of those. Allen Hall: So the ROI question, return on investment is the ultimate answer. It, so even if it does cost some time to get the technicians there to put a, apply it because it’s lasting so long as Joel pointed out, it’s gonna last basically through the 10 year period to repower. That’s the magic. If you can do that, then the value of the material itself is grows exponentially, right? So it’s not really a cost factor early on. It’s how long you can make it work, and you’re getting max production outta your turbines. That’s why everybody loves this Hontek product. When it is applied and it’s set on, is there any sort of inspection that has to happen once it’s on, or are you just doing typical drone inspections with a sky specs to verify that it, it’s working like it should. Maxime Le Tallec: Typical inspection is enough. There is nothing specific to, to follow up or to reactivate the product. Once it, it’s all cured. It’s one piece. And protect your blade for. Joel Saxum: Yeah, the coming years. So there’s the [00:13:00] different, there’s apo not opposing strategies, but there’s multiple strategies on how you do LEP, right? So if you’re on a 62 meter blade or a 70 meter blade, or a 50 meter blade. Certain people will say, ah, protect six to eight meters of it up. Only protect three meters of it, protect four meters of it. What are you guys seeing and what do you recommend for LEP protection from the length, from the tip back in that high erosion area? Maxime Le Tallec: So I’ll briefly mentioned previously our key to our design to cover three square meters or the equivalent. So we are usually seeing 10 meters long on 30 meters 30 centimeters wide, so 10 meters on each side of the leading age. In the shorten and they, it can go to 15 meters, so you just make your. Your protection a bit narrower and some farms are expecting up to 15 meters long coverage. Joel Saxum: Yeah. ’cause I know like some of the, some people’s strategy is let’s look at, let’s, okay, we’re, we’ve got this a hundred wind farm or this a hundred turbine wind farm. Let’s go and look at the average leading edge erosion. What’s [00:14:00] happening on it where we have chipping, peeling, bad erosion. Okay. The worst case scenario looks like we’re at, 11 meters on a couple of turbines, but the majority of it stops at about eight. So I know a lot of people go okay, cost effectively, let’s go put eight meters of LEP on. Or some people say we want max protection. Let’s go and do the worst case scenario on all of ’em. But one of the questions that pops up there is, if we’re putting on a coating, this is a big thing. ’cause there’s been other coatings in the blade world that people have had issues with in the past with reworking or things like that. So I Is there a specific way you recommend people to. Rework or if there’s some damage, or if you have a little bit, like if the technician doesn’t get the, a cold joint when you’re trying to apply it or something. Is there anything specific about how you work with the product up blade to ensure that, you have that nice, smooth finish the whole way? Or can you rework it? Can you grind on it? Can you sand on it? Maxime Le Tallec: So we can rework it. Yes. The one is key and you mentioned it earlier, is the application as critical [00:15:00] as the product. So in that way, we make a point of honor to train the teams that will apply our product. So we’re always connecting with them making sure the conditions are met for best application and we train them on how to get the best performance of it. The product itself self labeling, so all the smoothness of the surface is somehow. Inbound into the technology of the product as well. Allen Hall: Okay. So even an engineer could apply it, is that what you’re saying, max? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. I’ve been successful into it. The one one one key thing is you were mentioning the surface preparation. That’s something that sometimes is a bit rushed or not really taken seriously by the operators. The best you repair is before the application of the leading edge. So you repair. Your poor filler application. The better the adherence of our leading edge will be on the plate as well. Allen Hall: So I’ve [00:16:00] run into a number of operators in the United States and overseas, actually in Europe, that have reached out and were asking about the Hontek product. Have you seen it? How’s it work? And I said, yes, I’ve seen it on helicopters. It’s amazing. Hold tight. So I always tell him, hold tight. There’s gonna be a big announcement about it where you can now get better access to it and get it on your blazes season. That just happened, right? You just announced that smore is gonna be the lead on distributing the product worldwide. And the conference in Dusseldorf was the big kickoff. How has it gone in terms of reaction into the industry? Because everybody I know has probably already called you Max. Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. The, it creates a lot of interest in Europe mostly due to the location of the show, but. The Altech product was less delivered in Europe even if there is already a certain footprint. And we are now answering all those requests and we are online. We have a dedicated websites, a applied.com where the product will [00:17:00] be processable directly online in the coming weeks. So we aim for two week, shipping lead time on our product, keeping it on the shelf, being able to be responsive. Looking at the market for more than a year now we are conscious about all the constraints. The operators have to apply the product considering team availability, equipment availability weather forecast. We want the product to be available. To be delivered when needed on the different wind farms. Allen Hall: Okay. I have been on your website the Socomore website, and you can just Google it. And if you put in LEP or Socoblade, it’ll come right to it. The website is full of useful information, so your technical data sheets are already there. Your safety data sheets are already up and loaded. You are gonna be turning on online ordering, which I think is gonna get bombarded, max. Honestly, I think you have a lot of orders that way. That’s the way to connect with you max? If you’re really interested in the product, you really wanna get to that website today. Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. The best way, the first source of [00:18:00] information and any inquiries you will make from there I will be behind and will connect personally with you. Allen Hall: So the, the best way to, to get the product and to get the data and to see samples, and to understand what this Hontek product is in the now called Socoblade. Is to get ahold of Max, go to the website. So Max you can find, they can find you on LinkedIn also, which is how I generally find you. Maxime Le Tallec: Correct. So I’m reachable on LinkedIn through solight.com on so more.com. All our products are also shared there. We have all the Legacy, so more products that are applicable for the wind turbine as well that you can discover on the sommore.com website. Allen Hall: Yeah, so if you wanna reach Max, you want to try the material, the easy way is to go to socoblade.com, S-O-C-O-B-L-A-D-E.com, and you then you can download all of the information there yourself and take a look at it, or even reach Max on LinkedIn. Max is wonderful. This is great news because I know so many operators that are waiting to get a chance to try this [00:19:00] new socket blade material. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate you spending some time with us today. Maxime Le Tallec: Thanks again.

Allen interviews Michael Tosi, Paul Russo, and Dr. Kenneth Williams, from HeliService USA about their Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) offerings for offshore wind farms. As large offshore wind projects develop off the US east coast, the need for high-standard EMS operations has become critical. HeliService USA steps in to offer comprehensive EMS solutions, featuring a fully-equipped paramedic-level air ambulance service designed exclusively for offshore wind sites. 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! 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, I actually think that it hits off on something else that’s really important. So if you do get that Coast Guard, if they are available helicopter and they do come one, they’re probably not gonna launch as quick as typically as you’ll see as the civilian operation. It’s the military. Paul and I have both experienced that they want to get out the door. The crews wanna get out the door as quickly as they can, but there’s just inherently bureaucracy between them and launching. They need to talk to the folks on site. They need to assess if it’s medically acute or not. Risk for us we say call first, ask questions later. You call. We get the helicopter there if it was too minor. Say Levy, we we were closer to it because Lord forbid it was a major incident. You wanna get that helicopter en route. And the other thing is when that Coast Guard helicopter comes, and Ken can speak a little bit more to this as well. Sorry, Dr. Williams. When it shows up it’s not going to be as capable as what you would expect to see from a typical ambulance. It’s the back of a pickup truck. The folks flying ’em will tell you it’s theirs. They call the Paul Russo: pickup truck. Yep, it is. It is a Michael Tosi: pickup truck. And all the stuff that, that Dr. Williams just described. It’s not in the back of a Coast Guard helicopter. So just because they’re there doesn’t mean that you have now upgraded your care. In most cases, they’ve actually downgraded because they have paramedics offshore, whereas at best you get an EMT basic with the Coast Guard that’s, you took a two week course online and you’re an EMT basic. I’m being a bit facetious, but it is very quick, basic level of medicine. Not to ask the questions here, but I know that. That Dr. Williams can probably speak to that a little bit as well. Dr. Kenneth Williams: And some of the assets offshore are staffed with a paramedic, a medic of some sort. And we don’t know all their qualifications. It depends on the customer and where these people have come from. But in some cases, the Coast Guard will have to bring that person with them, which leaves the offshore asset without coverage or transfer the patient to the Coast Guard helicopter. And again, all due respect to our friends in the Coast Guard. I’m in the auxiliary. I know what they do in boats quite well, and I see the aircraft operation. They’re focused on rescue and saving your life. They’re not focused on starting an IV and giving you pain medication for your fractured leg. They can get you outta the water and they can get you into a litter and get you to the hospital, but you’re not getting paramedic level care during the transport unless they bring someone with them. And as Michael mentioned, the process of doing that usually involves consulting. A flight surgeon doing a risk assessment. It may take a long time to make that decision. And then there’s some things that because of their rules and regulations, they won’t do that. He service can do like landing on some of these assets where the Coast Guard will hover and do a winch procedure. So we can provide. Probably faster service, higher level service, and safer service because we can land and transferring the patient is much safer if the aircraft is sitting on a helipad than if it’s hovering over. Although we are equipped to hoist the patient, we would prefer that the aircraft land and that we can carry them to, to the aircraft. Wow. Allen Hall: I guess the only experience that as an American watching the Coast Guard do those hoists is on deadliest catch. The. The crab boats that go out and when you see somebody get injured, you see the coast Guard come out and they drop down and they hoist them up. They throw ’em inside, and that’s the last of it. You don’t see them providing any services to the injured person. You just see them flying away. I guess there really isn’t anything going on there. They’re just taking them to the nearest airport or hospital, wherever they’re going to get services. I didn’t realize that. So that’s an important fact, especially if you’re operating offshore wind farms and you’re involved in the ships and all the activity. You need to be thinking about that quite a bit because someone’s gonna get hurt at some point. There’s just too many moving pieces of this and we’re too far offshore in the United States to allow someone to get hurt and get seriously hurt and not have a way to get them back and get them care given to them. It seems like this is a much better solution than putting ’em on a ship and hauling them back to shore. Dr. Kenneth Williams: Getting them onto a ship safely is problematic, depending on the sea state and where they are. And then it’s a multi-hour probably bumpy ride in the ship and then they need to get into a ground ambulance. We don’t have any hospitals in Rhode Island that have a dock. We have a couple that are pretty close to marinas, but they would have to get in a ground ambulance and then, and go into the hospital So much longer evolution to get. An injured person or an ill person to shore. And the other aspect of this certainly there, there was risk there in, in terms of injury for the people working there. But if you put a thousand or 2000 people somewhere, people are going to have regular illnesses as well. There will be asthma attacks and allergic reactions and stomach aches and maybe even strokes and heart attacks and things like that. The Coast Guard is able to do CPR and hemorrhage control. So certainly they’re very good at basic first aid things, but not only are they not trained and equipped to do some of the advanced things, but their environment is one where they expect everything to get wet. And most of our stuff is not waterproof. So our cardiac monitor and all the other devices that we have here, ah, would not do well in a wet salt water environment. So they don’t equip the Coast Guard boats or aircraft with things that, one, one wave will destroy. And they really can’t offer that level. Routinely they may be able to hoist a paramedic from the boat and go with them with their equipment, but that’s one of the reasons that the back of that. Flying pickup truck is not equipped with all of this electronic medical equipment, is, it’s just not their operational environment. Michael Tosi: And another thing to, to hit off on that is that you, there’s two groups of personnel that we can go to. There’s those that are on vessels that have a paramedic, thankfully, but there are also those on the turbines. And the turbines, they’re extremely isolated. You have three technicians who, of course they receive some rudimentary medical care and they have a little bit of medical equipment. But I think most of the technicians will be the first to tell you that they are in no way, shape or form qualified medical professionals. And when they’re on the top of that turbine, particularly when delivered via helicopter, the only way to get them off is via helicopter. So what that means is that the Coast Guard goes out there with this very rudimentary medical capability. Several hours later because if they’re coming from Canada, it could be four hour flight back down to a turbine here south of Nantucket or the vineyard. And when they get there, you are getting an EMT at best. That is not particularly compatible at a, at the risk of be a bit blunt with life. If you have something that happened to you and four hours later you are getting a response, that’s unacceptable. Everybody knows that. And that causes huge limitations to access. To the wind form with helicopters. Because you can’t put folks out there if you don’t have a way to get them out. And the entire reason that you use helicopters in your wind form is to insulate you or insure you against not having access for huge swaths of the year. So with the helicopter, you also need to provide folks a good way to get out, and quite frankly, even if you don’t have helicopter access. As Dr. Williams said, I don’t know anyone in the world who wants to take a vessel back if there is a helicopter available and on call. Allen Hall: Yeah it makes total sense. So if you’re an operator or a developer off the East coast, you be talking to hea, service USA and getting this service on your project because there’s really no other way to do it. Let’s just be honest. Yep. The other way is so horribly. Developed and we just don’t have the infrastructure for it in the US right now. Helicopter is the right way to go. Now let’s talk about what that looks like operationally. You get a phone call from a turbine or an operator that says, Hey, I got a guy that got hurt. What happens next? Michael Tosi: So for us, we try and make it as easy as possible. There’s just a phone number they contact. Okay. We have our dispatch available currently it is during daylight hours, and here in, in just under a week or so. Two weeks max. We’re going to be operating 24 7. Okay? Our dispatch channel be staff twenty four seven. The call goes to them. Within about a minute, that helicopter is already starting to get underway to launch. That is the key is to get those folks ready, to get those folks mobilized, get the helicopter converted and then it turns over to the pilots who who start Paul Russo: getting, yeah, they’ll take a look at the weather, look at where the asset’s located, if they’re gonna land, if they’re, or if it’s gonna be a hoist mission. And then they decide to accept the mission or not. And as long as all the factors are good and safe to do then they head out. Allen Hall: Okay. Are people stationed in the hangar? Correct. 24 hours? Yeah. So they’re not driving from the home to get over here? No, they’re here. They’re here. Paul Russo: Correct. So we have two pilots, a paramedic and a hoist operator. Allen Hall: 24 4 hours a day. Paul Russo: MT? Wow. Allen Hall: Okay. That’s, and Dr. Kenneth Williams: the hoist operator will be trained as an EMT? Yeah. So we have two medically trained people in the back and two pilots up front. Allen Hall: Yeah. So four people inside the helicopter. And there’s a switchover that has to happen because it’s configured to take technicians on and off. Correct. Of the wind turbines at the moment. Michael Tosi: Yep. What does that look like? So that’s a great question. This goes back to some of the economics of it. There, there is precedent for this. This is not a totally new concept. The folks in the Gulf of Mexico have been doing oil and natural gas work offshore for 60, 70 years or more. Paul came from a program in the Gulf that was a large search and rescue and EMS program. They had five dedicated helicopters and let Paul speak a little bit more to it. That comes with a price tag. And since offshore wind is newer. And smaller. We understand that is a difficult bill to foot. And while that is probably where this will go with continued development is to have a dedicated asset what we had to do this economically was use the assets we have because we understand that while the developers know they need to get there and they want to get there, there are ultimately resource limitations. And so with that, we use our existing fleet of helicopters, so the same helicopters that we take the folks out on. We can rapidly convert in less than 10 minutes. I believe the crews have done it. It’s a Paul Russo: little six minutes. Yeah. Michael Tosi: They’re all the way down to six minutes to take this and and it is a proper ambulance in the back. When you look back there, it’s not only a proper ambulance because this helicopter is much larger than most onshore medical helicopters. This is like the, the Cadillac or the Mercedes for the cruise. It’s got a ton of space, lots of space for gear, the stretcher, and it’s really great access. But we were able to do this economically for these first couple of developers to get them a solution at a price point that, that works, Allen Hall: right? Yeah. ’cause everybody’s worried about cost at the minute and rightfully however, you need to be worried about all your people that are out there. Yeah. So you need to weigh that off. And so you can, from phone call to being out on a flight line, less than 10 minutes. Yeah, Paul’s done all the weather research. He knows where he is going. Everybody’s in the helicopter. You got four people in off, you go to the turbine. What happens then? Are you calling Dr. Williams and say, Hey, we got somebody who’s injured and be ready? We, Paul Russo: so when we do get the call, we have an intake form that dispatch will write down the basic information of, okay, of where we’re going, patient. If it’s ambulatory, non-inventory. And then they’ll get further information. Paramedic will get that information as well, which is patient condition. Is this, is this a fractured leg? Is this a stroke, a heart attack? Is it just somebody that’s not feeling well? Okay. Whatever the case may be. Once they get that, then and that’s how all happening at the same time. How does that work? Allen Hall: If I’m a technician on top of a turbine, I’m. 30 miles from shore. Do I have a radio? How am I getting cell phone? How am I calling you? I’m talking to you. They have, yeah, they have Paul Russo: comms on shore. Cell phones are actually work pretty well. Okay. There’s really good coverage out there. These turbines are 500 feet off, off the water, sure. At the nael. So they’ve they’re great cell service. They have pretty good cell service out there, but they also, I think they also have tetra radios as well that they use. So they have several ways of communicating back with their people. And they have several ships out there as well that are vessels that are. And comms with them. Okay? Okay. So they would make a call to that entity out there to, to their marine control center. Okay. Or coordination center. And then and then that call would come to us. All right. Somebody gets hurt. It’s basically get on the radio 9 1 1. We’ve got somebody. That’s got injured and need to get ’em off. And here’s the condition, whatever it may be. Allen Hall: Okay, Paul Russo: so Allen Hall: you’re now flying towards the turbine, right? You get to the turbine. This person is not ambulatory. They’re just sitting on the deck. Broken leg, broken arm, whatever it is. What does that look like and how does weather play into this? Paul Russo: If the weather is really low, then we may not be able to get to the turbine. Again, it’s 500 feet above the water line, 500. So if you have ceilings down at 300 feet, that could be prohibited from for getting up there. Most days we don’t get that here in New England. Weather more than likely be okay the majority of the time. We get into a position to hoist out our paramedic. He’ll go out first. He or she will go out first and then and then medical equipment after that. And then they’ll pack the pack, the patient do whatever they gotta do, take as much time as they need to take the aircraft and that, during that time, we’ll just enter a loiter pattern just a conserve fuel, come back in, pick up the patient, pick up the paramedic, and off they go to the hospital. Allen Hall: Okay? So they’re actually stabilizing the patient on the top of the turbine. Get, you Paul Russo: get packed in the, Allen Hall: get ’em all Correct in our stretcher system. Okay. That’s one heck of a ride then. Yeah. Okay. So the get back onto the helicopter you’re flying to, where are you going? You going to Massachusetts? Probably Rhode Island. Rhode Island Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital. Okay. Whatever’s closest. Brown, I guess we Dr. Kenneth Williams: call it now, whatever that’s Rhode Island Hospital is the only level one trauma center in Southeastern New England. It’s also a burn center, an excellent helipad system. There’s a ground-based helipad that can handle two pretty good sized aircraft and a rooftop helipad that’s right over the emergency department. And it’s a couple minute flight from here where we are. So it’s our intended destination for almost all of our patients. They have an excellent medical communication center. It’s staffed by paramedics have radios and telephones and computer screens that we can communicate with them. So from the medical chronology of this everything that we need to take care of the patient is coming on every flight. So we’re not picking and choosing, oh, the guy has a broken leg. Let’s go get a splint out of the cabinet. Everything is on the aircraft. If we get additional medical information. So let’s say there’s a paramedic out there, or our medic here can talk to whoever is with the person. Yes. We’d love to have that information to know what we’re going to, we’re trusting our paramedics to make that decision that this is, how I’m gonna manage this patient. And as Michael said we’re not triaging. If they call us, we’re gonna go and we will sort it out later. But once we’ve got. Some information, there’ll probably be a notification to the hospital, Hey, we’re going on a mission. You’re gonna be getting a patient. Once they get to the patient, they’ll do what they need to do. They’ll get the patient back in the aircraft, and then there will be communication to the hospital. Now we’re inbound, we’re 10 minutes out. This is what we have with a much more detailed medical report. And that’ll either go directly to the hospital or be relayed through dispatch here depending on where the aircraft is and. Who we have radio communication with. And then the trauma center will get ready to receive the patient with whatever they have. They’re fully prepared there to handle strokes and heart attacks and medical issues as well as trauma. So they can handle anything that that we might be bringing them. Michael Tosi: Wow. Okay. That actually brings up something I think is also important to highlight is. A lot of folks perceive with the military as just very organized. Everyone knows exactly what they’re doing. For those of us who spent some time in the military while it does come across that way, sometimes internally, see a bit how the cake is baked. And the military is not designed to be an ambulance service, never, has, never will be it the Coast Guard, be it in deployed in environments. I, I. On many missions in the military providing, search and rescue services or coverage or medevacs. And some issues that they’ve seen is that military helicopters don’t have the ability to necessarily deliver a report to the hospital they’re going to. So they show up and hate to say it, they say, Hey, here’s your guy, and they dump ’em off on the hospital. And the hospital doesn’t initially know what it was, what the symptoms were. And there’s been several cases up here in New England, where that has happened, where they have had someone go to Rhode Island Hospital, the hospital didn’t know what they were getting and they had a difficulty, I don’t wanna say diagnosing per se, but they didn’t get the best level of care immediately because the hospital needs to know what they’re getting. They need a good handoff. And there have also been some adverse outcomes. From folks that have gotten potentially delayed responses or there’s been cases here on the eastern seaboard where the Coast Guard has said no. And for those who’ve been involved they’ve heard this, for the last couple years. Hey, they are gonna say no. And at some point the Coast Guard is gonna have limitations because however acute you may think your particular patient is, I guarantee you that the, fisherman whose vessel sank and is in 33 degree water. Is in a far more acute condition than almost anything you can imagine, because that person has a very limited window, and the Coast Guard is going to prioritize that. So there are going to be times, and there have been times now where they have said no. And I think that’s really important for folks to understand if they’re not utilizing a service like this yet. Allen Hall: So now I’m curious because last year Ella Service USA did about 10,000 flights to turbines. Offshore, which was an incredible number. I didn’t realize you had done that many flights last year. How many injuries happened last year where they could have used your service? Michael Tosi: It is a fabulous question. So admittedly while we are part of the industry folks, there are organizations like G plus, but our observation is that, folks don’t like airing their dirty laundry to be entirely frank. What we have seen from behind the scenes is that I know that one particular tier one operator out there had over a dozen alone in one summer campaign. There are and that is just one. There are many out there I would estimate at any given time or any given year so far. I think 30, 40, 50 different cases now, mi mind you, the acuity can go from, extraordinarily low. All the way up to there have absolutely been some much higher acuity cases out there. The other thing that speaks to is the lower acuity cases where the Coast Guard just is not, you’re not gonna call them. But it’s this in between where you don’t necessarily wanna stick them on a vessel. You do want to get them to care in the next 12 hours. Maybe it doesn’t need to be in the next hour or two hours, but the next 12 hours and the vessels are not necessarily running in, in some of the poor sea conditions. There is a whole Whitney of stuff. Most of your town’s ambulance calls are not tremendously acute. That doesn’t mean you don’t need an ambulance service or you count on the ambulance service from four towns over. You still need your own ambulance service to handle those. And that Allen Hall: goes back to Dr. Williams’s point that. A lot of what happens on the EMS side is not, acute, horrible injury. A lot of it is just general things, but they require EMS services. Dr. Kenneth Williams: And to amplify on that, one of the reasons why medicine is so interesting, but so frustrating for some people is things can look minor and actually be a serious problem. Yeah. And so if somebody’s on top of a turbine and gets a sudden toothache, maybe they’re having a heart attack. Okay, so somebody made triage. Oh, it’s just a toothache. Why don’t you give the guy a couple of Tylenols and he can finish his workday. Maybe they do need to be evacuated. And when our paramedic gets out there and says, oh, when did you start having this job pain? Do you have any chest discomfort with, as now that you mentioned it, my chest is tight. That person now needs a cardiogram and an IV and maybe oxygen and maybe a medication. All of which we can provide. None of which the Coast Guard can provide, and none of which is available on top of that turbine. It may be available if they’re on a boat with a paramedic offshore, but now you’ve got a patient where advanced care is started and the Coast Guard can’t continue that advanced care. So either, again, the paramedic that’s on the boat gets on the Coast Guard aircraft with the patient, or a service like our service can come in and. A handoff at a the same level of care or even a more advanced level of care. Than what’s available out there. Paul Russo: Yeah. I experienced that many times in my previous operation prior to coming up here where we going out to pick up somebody that is complaining of heartburn or maybe a tingling in the arm, whatever the case may be, and we get ’em on and they’re, they’re coating out from a heart attack. Whoa. And without that advanced level of care that we provided same level of care we’re providing here, we provided down there as well. That person would automate it. Allen Hall: Wow. This is amazing because I didn’t realize. How serious this was. Now you walk me through it. If you’re out on a turbine and something happens, it’s an isolated place to be. You’re on an island and you may be there for several hours unless you have HeliService coming to your rescue. How quickly can you get somebody off of that top of that turbine and into Rhode Island Hospital? Michael Tosi: It’s, so overall, it is a very quick response time. So we’re here for our closest turbines for the nearest wind park that we serve. Only about a 13 minute flight. Wow. So if that helicopter’s off the ground 15 minutes, which during the day is very plausible, especially when the crew is here and postured. You’re talking of 15 minute launch time, 15 minutes offshore. You’re at 30 minutes until that person is receiving the highest level of care that you could ever expect. The same that you would get if you called 9 1 1 in the biggest city with the best a LS. Level of care that you’re going to see to recover that person depending on how they’re packaged. 10 minutes 15 minutes would be a long time. It can be very quick depending on how ready they are. So you’re off the turbine in 15 minutes, 15 minute flight to the hospital, and you’re talking that it is possible on some of the nearest turbines to be an hour from the point where that entry occurs to the hospital. Now, obviously you can see delays with. With confusion with folks. And there, there’s the fog of war as US military folks call it. But an hour is very doable. For some of the turbines that we service. There are a bit further out. 90 minutes is very doable. The other day we had a drill we did at our furthest turbine that is currently in our service area. In between call when we received our call to getting that person to Rhode Island Hospital was just a little over 90 minutes from that call. Yeah. From what we’ve seen with the Coast Guard responses in the area. It’s been generally three hours or more from that call just because of their launch time is a little bit slower. The notification process, the medical discussion, sometimes that’s four to five hours that we’ve seen on several other calls. So the difference is dramatic. You’re talking about an improvement almost a hundred percent or more. So it is drastic. So if you Allen Hall: can hear behind us, we’re at an active flight line and how the service is busy today taking technicians on and off of wind turbines. So it is a busy place. Place. This discussion has been fantastic. I did not realize the need for this as much as I, I thought the Coast Guard would handle some of this and that’s what was going on, but in reality, they’re not able to do the service at the level in which it is required. And Dr. Williams, you pointed out very clearly, there’s a lot of things that happen on wind turbines in a lot of cases that need to take, be taken care of. Service is the way to do that. And they’re qualified and they’re trained and they got 24 hour coverage. That is the right way to do this in the states. Michael, how do people get ahold of you and turn on the service and get it implemented for their wind farm? Michael Tosi: Yeah, so very fortunately, the service is now here. We had a big industry stakeholder, really stepped up, made the right decision to do this. Go ahead and because they have taken that leap now it is really easy for everybody else because the service is here. All that needs to happen is a contractual discussion. Another big item with this is we are doing cost sharing with this. So the next person who participates the first participant is going to see a reduction. In their service. So a pretty substantial reduction. The next member is gonna see an already reduced price, and then as that keeps going it’s a bit of a consortium. It’s, unfortunately it’s almost impossible to organize a consortium with a lot of big players. But what I like to call it is cost sharing. I. So as each member goes and joins the service, the price continues to drop. Also, you tend to see the service increase in quality because there’s a little bit of an additional margin with each to provide coverage for a greater swath of the offshore population. So the more people that participate in it, the better the service gets and the less that it costs, because very obviously, thankfully even if there are say 36 calls a year that’s three every month. Nobody needs to pay for their individual service for each wind park. That, that’s a gross misuse of resources. So by having that cost sharing model, everyone can get a really high quality service but they’re not paying a loan for it. And that, that I think, is a huge deal for the industry that now that there’s, like I said. Someone who took the first big jump. Now it’s really easy for everybody else to scale that, to get involved. They just need to reach out to us and the service is here. It’s really just a commercial discussion. Allen Hall: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that the more people that join HeliServices EMS service, the lower the cost is for each one of them, and you’re gonna need it. So the, you’re gonna have to have it really, if you want to do your technicians and all your people, right? You wanna have the MS services for them, thank you so much for inviting us back to Rhode Island and to the wonderful HeliService site. Dr. Williams, thank you for being here. I didn’t realize all the complexities to yeah. The EMS world. It’s it’s quite enlightening. And to Michael and to Paul, thank you so much for having us back. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming. Michael Tosi: Yeah, of course. No, thanks. Thanks for your time. Thanks for for joining and I hope you’re excited to watch the demo. Dr. Kenneth Williams: Yeah. Thank you for coming. Yeah. We we’re thrilled to be able to offer. The people working in offshore wind the same level of EMS service they would expect on shore.

The Uptime Podcast team celebrates their fifth anniversary, reflecting on their journey and contributions from team members. They also discuss Siemens Gamesa’s India operations acquisition by TPG and future renewable energy investments. Additionally, the episode covers innovations in carbon-negative building materials. 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! Allen Hall: We just celebrated our fifth year of podcasting, everybody. So the uptime podcast is of officially five years old. I can’t believe we’ve made it this far. That’s we were trying to do the math on it the other day at five times 50. Roughly. It’s 250 odd episodes. That’s a lot of episodes, Rosemary Barnes: but that’s only the weekly episodes. What about all the others? You’re not only putting out one a week these days. Allen Hall: No, it’s two or three or four, right? It’s somewhere in there. But I just wanted to say congratulations to each of you on behalf of the Uptime podcast and all the work that happens behind the scenes. Everybody listens to the finished product, and I know it sounds great and the comments are great, and the ideas are great, but there’s. A ton of work that goes into this every week to give you this content, and everybody that’s been on the podcast as a guest, it was just trying to remember all the faces and names that are. Big and wind that have been on the podcast. It’s amazing the people we’ve touched, the people we’ve met that are friends that have come from the podcast. It’s a nice little family, weirdly enough. And it’s one of those it feels like a pair of comfortable shoes that hey, when you go to a conference, you just know everybody and you, and they know us. You feel like we’ve known them forever because we just spend every week together talking about what’s happening in wind. It’s a great little experience. Phil Totaro: Can we add that, a big thank you to everyone who listens because we wouldn’t keep doing it if you weren’t also showing up. Thank you to everyone that listens. Again, your feedback is fantastic. Good and bad. It it keeps us entertained. So we thank you all. Joel Saxum: I would say from my seat as well, Alan, thank you for having all of us and organizing the things that you do. And the unsung hero that you guys don’t hear from or usually see unless you’re a guest on the podcast is Claire Hall in the background. Who’s our producer who puts all of these episodes together and is juggling work life. School, a million different things to make sure this thing goes out every week. So thank you Claire as well. And of course, Rosemary. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah I was gonna say that, Alan has abnormal persistence. I think it took it like now it’s obvious why, the value and why we would all keep going and why we come back every week. But yeah, Alan’s efforts, especially in the early years was like, just. Just kept on doing it week after week. And, when I started, all I had to do was show up and try and read the material beforehand. I definitely would not have been doing a weekly podcast for, I think I’ve been on it for four years or so. I wouldn’t have been doing that on my own, that’s for sure. I think yeah, 90% of the success comes from Alan’s abnormal persistence. So Thanks Alan. Allen Hall: Yeah. I appreciate everybody coming every week. I know we’ve all been through ups and downs over the last several years, rosemary, you’ve grown a family. And Joel is. Been in and out and I’ve been in and out and Phil too, right? So between the four of us, we can actually make a decent podcast, which is what I like listening to. And I, we actually reduce the there’s a lot of back and forth. We don’t put on the air because. We disagree quite a bit, but that’s what makes it fun for, at least for me. I know Rosemary and I sometimes sound like we, we don’t get along, but actually we quite do. I like Rosemary. I think she’s fantastic and I think she brings a ton to the podcast, but there are times it doesn’t seem like we, we get along. I’m fine with it honestly. And Phil, brings in all the investor and the analysis and the data stream and all that which just. Puts depth to this and puts the numbers together so it makes sense and Joel’s experience in oil and gas and in wind and working for a company in Denmark and all those pieces that you can’t. Find anywhere, make this podcast work. It’s just what it is. It was just great. So I’m just thrilled we met, made it five years and thanks to everybody that’s listened and we’re gonna cross a million subscribers on YouTube in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to everybody who has. Has joined us on this journey, and yeah, let’s look forward to the next five years to see if we make it that long. You’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by build turbines.com. 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 Ro and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: A consortium led by TPG. Is set to acquire Siemens Gomesa renewable powers, India operations. Now that deal, Phil is valued at 500 to 550 million, and it comes as Siemen energy works to streamline its operation. Following some significant challenges over the last year or two. Phil, do you know all the groups that are involved along with TPG and what’s the approach inside of India once they close this deal with Siemens cesa? Phil Totaro: That’s a really good question, and I don’t know if we know all the answers yet, but it looks like Siemens energy is slated to retain a little bit less than 10% share in, in the company. TPG Capital is working with the consortium of local companies. Have prior experience in the renewable energy sector. So that’s a good sign. They’ve got nine gigawatts of installed capacity in India at this point with, legacy kind of Ga, Mesa technology. So the question is they bought the whole thing, including the manufacturing facilities of which they have, I think three. It’s. Interesting that it’s a, an investor TPG capital, basically, that’s taking majority ownership of this and not somebody that’s, again, they’ve brought in these couple of guys that, that run these other two investment partners that are I. Experienced in the Indian renewable space, but I don’t know if that’s enough to keep everybody going. The capital infusion is certainly enough to keep the manufacturing operations going if they want to, but are they really getting orders? I’m assuming this means they’ve got the license to keep manufacturing these, two to three megawatt Siemens ESA designs. So where do they go from there? Joel Saxum: Phil, when Alan and I are doing, we do quite a bit of communication work and lightning stuff in the Indian market and we run into a lot of G one fourteens. A ton of them actually. So in my mind I’m thinking, okay, we know that when this thing was up on the block to be sold, they were people that were looking at it, were wanting mostly from what I saw, was the services revenue. They wanted to take over that service organization ’cause they wanted the revenue. From that, in my mind, I’m thinking. Who’s on the hook for the risk of warranty? Because if they’re built, if there’s stuff that has been deployed, are they take, are they buying the warranty risk or does that still go back to Siemens Ag? Of course, we probably won’t. The details of this won’t be public, but at this point in time, I don’t know because that seems risky as hell to me. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And for those that aren’t familiar, legacy ESA technology, of which the G one 14 was a derivative of, the technology that they originally licensed from Vestas and made the G 80 series and the G 90 series that was lightning prone is all get out. And, those things have suffered immeasurably, throughout the world. The G eighties, g and g one 14 of are. Just absolute lightning magnets. I’m sure there’s someone that’s gonna be accepting whatever risk there is. Joel Saxum: If you own G eighties, G nineties, or G one fourteens, call us. We can help. Allen Hall: Private equity firms are capitalizing on depressed, renewable energy stock prices to acquire clean energy assets at attractive valuations. Now despite the challenging market conditions for wind and solar companies, investors see strong long-term fundamentals in the sector, particularly as oil majors retreat from the renewable energy commitments. Now Phil, we’ve seen a lot of this activity over the last year. Brookfield is a big player in acquisitions at the moment. Masar is making a lot of moves. There is ripe fruit. Out there that is valued right to grab now, and I think you’re gonna see a lot more of these acquisitions happening because the more recent acquisitions have not been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve been in the billions of dollars and a lot of billions. I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And particularly as the oil and gas companies pull back some of these companies you mentioned Brookfield and Masar Master also just announced they were contemplating an IPO. So that’s gonna give them even more resources to, to plow into that if they go that route. But the reality of it is too, that these are also companies that have made the long-term commitment. To renewables and a renewables portfolio. They’re not just getting in to flip an asset. They’re getting in to build out their portfolio of what they can own, what they can operate, what they can repower. This is what happens at the beginning where we are right now, which is almost the beginning of a recession. Everybody starts smelling blood and water and starts mobilizing their capital, but it’s the companies that are already active and talking to everybody. Like your Brookfields, like your KKRs, like your BlackRocks of the world. They already know where to go and what to do. But the funny thing is if you don’t. Give us a call because I got news for you. We’ve got a huge catalog of every project, particularly in the US where, we can tell like who’s making money, who’s not, who’s ready to repower, and, how much is it gonna cost. There’s definitely ways of, if you haven’t already figured that out and you want to get in on this, don’t waste time, mobilize your capital the right way. Joel Saxum: I think something to be that’s important to notice or to note here as well is if you watch the press releases from these big oil companies that are retreating. They’re not saying we’re done with renewables, they’re just saying, for now we’re gonna reallocate our capital and our efforts elsewhere. So I’ve, I would fully see like in the next, maybe not in the next four years, but in the next few, 20 30, 20 35, like as things continue to evolve, you’re going to see those players come back. And maybe at that point in time that those, some of those markets will be more mature. You may have the technology for floating wind may be like ready to roll. ’cause right now we’re still in those early stages. Very early stages. You see some of these permitting things happening and a little bit more of a it’ll be a more mature market when I think they come back and there will be SOVs available, there’ll be key side facilities available. Those kind of things will be in place. It’ll de-risk the. The investment, I believe. So I don’t think you’ll see this as a complete departure of big oil, but. Of course this private equity wave is back filling that gap that they, that, that vacuum that they left, they’ll be back. I fully believe Allen Hall: that, Phil, can we stick on oil and gas just for another moment? The oil prices have been dropping steadily for the last year-ish. Getting back into oil and gas is not a big money maker at the moment. It isn’t like oil prices are a hundred dollars a barrel. They’re down in the sixties right at the moment, so there’s not a huge revenue stream. And if everybody’s getting back at the same time, it’s gonna really lower the price. It’s supply demand. So is this the right time to get back in oil and gas, or is it just because they’re just trying to get back to what they know rather than be on the periphery of something that they just don’t maybe really understand? Phil Totaro: It’s also getting back to what. They know and, but more importantly, maybe what’s made them money already and what’s more in vogue, if you actually wanna look more at fundamental economics renewables are cheaper and can be deployed faster. And the reality of it is if you’re gonna. If you only look at the power generation sector if it’s based on, petroleum or natural gas generation, there’s a finite amount of order book available. All the manufacturers and the global supply chain, it, it’s. Booked up for through the end of the decade already. So good luck getting anything deployed. Wind and solar are cheap and deployable right now. If you’re Shell or your BP or whomever and you do oil and gas for a living, like pivoting back to that, not gonna be a problem. But again, if you’re trying to get into a market and you have a decision to make about where to park, capital renewables are actually the better option even longer term because, fixed price contracts and things like that, that you don’t have to be susceptible to, all these press fluctuations and all this other stuff that you gotta put up with compliance related in the oil and gas industry. That’s what I’d be doing if I had, billions to invest. Joel Saxum: Oil and gas is is not, oh. Okay. So when we talk about oil and gas being cyclical in nature, if you’re outside of the industry, when you look, when you hear oil and gas is cyclical in nature, you look at price per barrel, what does it cost you with the gas pump, that kind of thing. However, there is a lot more cycles within gas, oil and gas, and a lot of those cycles have to do with when are you developing capital facilities and when are you doing exploration? So exploration has been happening for a while as capital was high exploration. You grab the war chest, you go out and you look for some resources. You do some unconventional stuff. You look around, you build plans to get into the play. Right now you have this drill, baby drill thing now as well. If you look at the rig counts global and. In the, in North America, they’re down about 5% right now than they were today, last year. And that’s unconventional knowledge when people are like, why? Why is that happening? Because they’re pumping. They don’t need to be drilling right now. They have resources that were ready to roll that they’re just flip that capital Twitter at switchback on let’s go. And that’s why you’re seeing prices come down. So we, there’s a lot of odd cyclical, there’s a lot of sign waves in the cycle of oil and gas that are being played on right now. And, but if you look at the, like the Shell’s recent announcement that they talked about, what they talked about was we’re, you know what, we’re gonna pull it into the chest. We’re gonna get dividends back up for our shareholders. And to me that’s Hey, we’re gonna get, we’re gonna de-risk our operation. We’re gonna build up the war chest a little bit more, and then. You never know what we could deploy capital on, but we don’t need to do it right now. We’re making money and I think that’s where there, the volatility index in the stock markets is through the roof. It’s easier to pull it back in and drive some shareholder value without taking risks right now. Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Phil, I think you sent me an article talking about. How natural gas, which six months ago was gonna be the energy supply for AI and all these data centers that are gonna plan to be built in the United States, mostly around Texas. And now that that was the pathway. Everybody’s realizing that they can’t build gas turbines that quickly. So the oil and gas demand, the natural gas demand may not be there because they can’t have no way of burning it and turning into electricity. So the net is that renewables are gonna fill that space. Phil Totaro: Theoretically, in Texas in particular though, they just passed a Senate bill, which seems like it’s gonna get signed by the governor to basically offset every megawatt of renewable generation. So basically if you’re a renewable asset owner in Texas you’re no longer allowed to deploy batteries to back up your renewables. You actually have to deploy gas. To back up your renewables. And so I don’t know how that’s actually gonna work if they, if the governor actually does sign this ridiculous nonsense. But the reality as well is, you have the ability to deploy renewables, to be able to, power data centers and things like that. A as we talked about a lot faster, and b in a more consistent fashion than. What you would be able to get with with gas anyway. Because if, especially if you’re talking about putting something like behind a meter for example, like renewables are probably the way to go again, because even though it’s variable generation, you’re still doing it on a relatively fixed price contract. So I’m not sure why that’s not a viable option again, when it can be deployed cheaper and faster than whatever else. Could be leveraged, whatever other technologies could Allen Hall: be leveraged, and data centers are mobile. You would just pick it up, put it in the back of a truck and take it to Iowa, which is what you should be doing to start off with, because the electricity prices in Iowa are really aggressive. There’s a ton of renewables there, a lot of wind, a good bit of solar. If you want to go someplace where electricity is readily available. I’m still a little confused to why Texas would be that place. Obviously if you’re doing gas turbines yes, true. But if you’re looking to do renewables, there’s a lot of land in Iowa. As Joel knows, there’s a lot of cornfields in Iowa you can make into data centers. It wouldn’t take much Iowa’s a fixed price market. Some of it is, Phil Totaro: not all of it but you’re also now running into all of these local restrictions, at the county and township level on wind and solar project development and that’s coming back to bite everybody in the butt. At this point because, you’re, you’ve restricted renewables, which could be deployed fast, but you’re allowing natural gas and fracking and whatever else, but you, it’s gonna take you forever to get the power. But you’ve got companies that wanna deploy these data centers if you have put all these blockades in place from being able to, allow this data center to be built. They’re just gonna, like Helen just said they’re mobile. Like they’re gonna move it someplace else. They’re gonna take it down to Texas, they’re gonna take it to, heck they could take it anywhere and buy revenue from, the data center and the power generation. Joel Saxum: So this is, but this is part of our, this is a cultural or a societal problem that we have, and it’s a global problem. It’s worse in Europe. Is this need or like the delay in permitting and we used to be able to get done things so fast, like the Empire State Building was built in a little over 400 days from like start to finish, right? There’s no way we would do that now. Because they, oh, we have to this, we gotta slow down because of this or this ant might not, like whatever it may be. We can’t get anything done quickly anymore. Allen Hall: How soon before they put data centers on barges and how soon before they put data centers in Australia where there’s plenty of resources and electricity is cheap? Why would you not do that? Because the, it’s just a data line. It could be anywhere. It could literally be anywhere. Joel Saxum: The best data center model for me is yeah, sinking one in the ocean and putting a tal turbine on it. Cooling, no cooling problems. Gonna say that. Yeah. Rosemary Barnes: But they are being located places where cooling is easy, like scandinavia’s getting a lot because the, yeah, the water that is nearby is cool. And then sometimes they can also use the heat for district heating. It’s a easy kind of way to integrate all that. And I visited a project in in. Denmark, I think it was in where they have their yeah, a Facebook data center that was using cool Danish water to cool it, and then it was providing heat to the district heating, and there was no money changed hands because it’s like. Facebook were getting rid of some heat for no cost and the district heating system was getting some heating energy for no cost. So it was a win-win. And I know that there are a few other projects around like that. It’s definitely not all data centers can be located just wherever you want. Some of them need to be near the cities that they’re serving, sometimes it needs to be just really fast. Yeah. But I know that they are thinking about things like that, about the climate of the place that they’re putting it in many cases because. Cooling is a huge part of their their energy cost. It’s very significant Allen Hall: in Norway, Iceland, natural resources to generate electricity with, right? And it’s cold most of the year, so you solve two problems right there. The third one, it gets solved by SpaceX because Elon’s putting up all those high speed low earth orbit satellites so you can transmit the data at crazy speeds around the world. You don’t even need a cable anymore. W this gets very mobile and I think we’re thinking like 1980s approach here. I’m gonna connect to a pipeline. I’m gonna plant this data center in, I’m gonna put a gas turbine next to it. I’m gonna crank this thing up like I’m Henry Ford. The reality is that data centers can be placed anywhere, and I do think there’s an opportunity for a large part of Northern Europe, just like Joel was saying. And you too, Rosemary. I agree with you. There. This thing’s gonna get moved around quick. Rosemary Barnes: What else is interesting about the mobile nature of data centers? I was listening, I think it was a Vaults podcast I was listening to yesterday. Allen Hall: What? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I listened to other podcasts as well. And. Their guest on there, I can’t remember who it was talking about how that’s a risk for you. ’cause you know how like a lot of, data centers, there’s a lot more data centers in the US because there’s a lot more tech companies using them in the us so that makes sense. And it’s really hard to tease out what the actual, upcoming demand will be on electricity grids because they they shop around a few different locations to find the place that’s gonna give ’em the most favorable, yeah, the most favorable deal. And one of the challenges is that, the same data center might be represented in 2, 3, 4 different utilities, forward planning. And then there’s a big risk because, if the utility’s gonna build real infrastructure to serve those projects, real gas turbines, real transmission lines that sort of thing. What happens if the data center does just pack up and leave, like those assets are still there and who’s gonna pay for it? Then once the data center’s gone, it’s gonna be, the the, the rest of the utilities customers. So it’s yeah, it’s really. Challenging to figure out like how American consumers or just regular American consumers of electricity are not gonna end up paying like a significant chunk of the bill for this data center expansion because they really are wooed by the local areas to get this business there. But yeah, like it’s far from certain that the benefits are gonna outweigh the cost to the communities that host them. Joel Saxum: Have you guys heard of the company wind cores? Wind cores is a German company and they’re putting mini data centers, right? ’cause they’re not huge in the foundations, in the towers of existing turbines. Phil Totaro: Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah, I have heard of them. Joel Saxum: So I just, I’m just looking on my other screen and I was Googling it and it says, on average 85 to 92% of the power for each of these. Many data centers is coming directly from the hosting wind turbine, so they’re taking advantage of when markets are curtailed and other things like that to power these things. So taking that behind the meter approach, but with it, you’re doing. You’re eliminating the other infrastructure, you’re eliminating the, the need to build a building to do all these other things. ’cause it’s in the tower already. So like a solution like that. Now that one’s not infinitely scalable of course. But that’s a cool solution that could be used. I think that one’s neat. Phil Totaro: Joel, there’s more than 500,000 wind turbines in the world, so it’s scalable if they want it to be. Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. I. 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 PS wind.com. Today, Northwestern University scientists have developed a new carbon negative building material that could transform the concrete and cement industries using seawater. Now, Rosemary. Stay with me here. You’re gonna using sea water, electricity, and carbon dioxide. The researchers have created a process that not only permanently locks away CO2, but also produces valuable materials for construction. And as a bonus, hydrogen gas as a clean fuel byproduct. Now. So let’s just walk through this just for a minute. The material can be used in concrete as a substitute for gravel or sand to manufacture cement, plaster, and paints, right? So you get this gritty substance you can mix in. And it produces hydrogen gas, which obviously can eventually burn, and it was developed to maximize the value of captured CO2 rather than just storing it underground. So the first question is it worth it? Is it worth all that hassle and all the electricity to do this? Or should you just be bearing CO2 underground and leaving it? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so there’s there’s a few. Concrete, cement based solutions that can be carbon negative. I think carbon cure is one where they bubble in CO2 into the into the concrete as it’s curing and that stores carbon. And yeah, as I. Concrete cures over like over many years of its lifetime. It continues to absorb CO2. All just even regular concrete with regular cement does that already. And then there’s some other companies there’s an Australia one actually that Canberra based where I’m from, called Mineral Carbonation International, and they’ve got a product that can yeah, basically absorb CO2 and it makes a. Yeah. A material, a mineral that you can use for a bunch of different things, including, you can put it in building materials, another option that does roughly the same things, will it? Work or not? I’m sure it works. The challenge is scale. The challenge is the cost as well. Does it cost more than regular concrete, then who’s gonna pay for it? And that’s the biggest challenge with any carbon capture project is at the moment, unless the material you’re making is actually. Better or cheaper in some way than the thing it’s replacing. And I haven’t seen it. You said it came out of a lab, so I’m sure that for now it’s not at the point where it is cheaper. Perhaps there is cost potential cement. Really, you need something besides capitalism to, to get you there. Joel Saxum: It’s the sa it’s the same outline of the problem we have with recycling, wind turbine mine blades. You can recycle them, you can make this material out of ’em. To put, to use as in, in concrete. But if it’s not cheaper, unless it’s substantially better, then it’s not, it’s hard to build an economic model around it. Rosemary Barnes: You know what, even the better part is actually hard because there are a few like really cool smart cement alternatives that are you, and even some of them I chemically identical to Portland Cement, but the standards for cement around the world for using cement, they don’t say it needs to be this strong or, it doesn’t give a bunch of. Materials, properties that it has to hit. It says it has to use this much Portland cement, like it’s specified in building standards all over the world that you have to use this ratio of Portland cement. And so that’s actually one of the hardest obstacles to overcome. Yeah, like it’s funny that one of the biggest obstacles to decarbonizing that industry is all the standards in place. And I, I do think this is one place where governments could make a really big difference besides not actually just, putting in a carbon tax or something. But actually like helping to rewrite those standards. One and two. The biggest user of the biggest purchaser of concrete and cement in most countries is the government. For a lot of these, like urban infrastructure projects, also defense, they, they could start specifying, we’re going to require, I don’t know, 5% needs to be, these alternative materials that are, just as good, better properties in many cases, but just haven’t been used before. If the government would would start to use them, we could really accelerate their development and the the costs coming down. I. As they got used more. Yeah, that that’s one of my hopes. I don’t often look to the government for solutions technology solutions, but I do think that this is one area where they really could make a big difference without changing things too much. Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening, and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to uptime tech news, or next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

This week, SSE appoints Martin Pibsworth as the next CEO, GE Vernova inaugurates a new customer center in Florida, RWE advances its Sophia Offshore Wind Project, and Nantucket challenges three offshore wind projects along Massachusetts coast. 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! Welcome to Uptime Newsflash, industry News Lightning fast. Newsflash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Starting off the week, British Utility Company SSE has named Martin Pibsworth as its chief executive designate. Pibsworth joined SSE in 1998 and currently serves as Chief Commercial Officer. Pibsworth will take over from Alistair Phillips Davies, who has been CEO since 2013 and will hand over the reigns following the annual general meeting on July 17th. Before leaving the company in November, uh, the new CEO will lead SSE renewables push helping the UK deliver on its decarbonization goals. During Philip’s Davies tenure, SSE made a strategic shift toward networks and renewables with shares gaining about 4% during his leadership. Last year. SSE announced plans to invest at least 22 billion pounds in grid infrastructure over five years. Over in the United States, GE Vernova has opened a new customer experience center at its Pensacola facility in Florida, marked by a ribbing cutting event hosted by CEO Scott Strazik. The center includes multiple conference rooms, collaboration areas, and direct access to production space. The investments are part of GE Vernova’s broader plan announced in January to invest nearly $600 million in its US factories and facilities. Over the next two years, the Pensacola factory has already produced enough turbines to supply over 1.2 gigawatts of the 2.4 gigawatts ordered for the Sunzia Wind Farm in New Mexico. German Energy group RWE has installed its first turbines at its 1.4 Gigawatt Sophia Offshore Wind Project in the uk Located on Dogger Bank, 195 kilometers off the northeast coast of Britain. Sophia is set to become one of the world’s largest single offshore wind farms. The project will consist of 100 Siemens Gamesa turbines featuring 150 recyclable blades. The wind park is scheduled to be fully operational in the second half of 2026. RWE’s Chief Operating Officer for offshore wind commented that Sophia will make a significant contribution to the UK’s clean power 2030 targets. And over in Massachusetts, the town of Nantucket and a Nantucket based activist group are challenging three offshore wind projects off the Massachusetts coast. The town recently sued the US Department of Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management requesting that the government set aside its approval of South Coast Wind and restart the environmental review. Meanwhile, the group ACK for Whales is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to rescind permits granted to Vineyard Wind and New England wind. These challenges come amid the Trump administration’s opposition to offshore wind. Industry analyst Timothy Fox’s Vineyard Wind faces less risk from these challenges since it’s already under construction while projects in planning stages are at higher risk. South Coast wind, which receive final federal approval on the last business day of the Biden administration could be delayed by up to four years. Vineyard wind is the furthest along among these projects with more than half of its 62 turbine towers already installed. Massachusetts Energy Secretary Rebecca Tepper has reiterated the state support for offshore wind emphasizing the need for energy independence. That’s this week’s top. News stories. Stay tuned for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.  

Lars Bendsen joins the spotlight to discuss how AC883 helps operators source turbine parts to cut costs and reduce downtime. AC883 can offer faster response times and better pricing than manufacturers based in Europe. Lars shares how his company’s approach helps prevent extended turbine downtime by providing quick access to critical components. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: In the wind industry, a turbine standing still often means one thing, waiting for parts that should be readily available. This week on the uptime spotlight, we’re joined by Lars Benson of AC 8 83, which is based in Canada. AC883 has direct connections to manufacturers in Denmark where most critical worm turbine components are actually produced Lars shares, house site operators can cut costs and dramatically reduce downtime by bypassing the OEM middleman and sourcing parts directly from the original suppliers. 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 show. Thank you. Spare Parts is a huge issue all over the world, but it seems like in the US and Canada, there’s always a shortage. They’re looking for spare parts. They don’t know where to get them, and the easy answer has been to call the original equipment manufacturer in terms of the GE Vestus Siemens, cesa, Nordex, whoever that may be, and just to place a order. There are other opportunities out there. What happens when a wind side in Texas just decides to buy from the wind turbine manufacturer? How much are they paying overpaying for that part? Lars Bendsen: I can’t say exactly on on dollars and cents, but but we know the markup from the OEMs. Then they’re not shy of earning money on that, those parts. And yeah, so it’s very simple. We can get those parts directly from Europe directly from the suppliers to the OEMs. Allen Hall: Yeah. And if I’m an operator, and I haven’t been over to Denmark to look at the situation there, a significant number of critical parts are actually manufactured in Denmark or in the surrounding areas. You have no way of knowing that if you own the turbine, Lars Bendsen: that’s true. You don’t. Somehow the OEMs have been really good and keeping a bit of cloud cloudy around that area. It’s actually pretty simple. They all produced either in in Denmark and Germany for basically all turbines. GE turbines is a target turbine from Germany that that they bought back when. So that’s why sim that’s a German turbine as well. It’s not a US turbine at all. Allen Hall: And the supply chain has remained that way for a long time. Lars Bendsen: It’s a BP parts. It’s standard parts. There’s no rocket sites in it. Of course, there’s some legacy some software parts and stuff that we could be desk, some, what we call it electronic boards, which software on, of course we can’t do that. That’s fair enough, right? That’s actually where the OOM has its value. That’s totally good. Joel Saxum: I think part of the reason that you see this, that gap there in the industry is the simple fact that, and I don’t take this as a slight Lars because I love your website and what you guys do for marketing and branding, but in that corner of the world, and Alan, you and I were just talking about this couple of German companies we’re talking about they’re not that good at global branding and global marketing. As a unit like culturally, so you don’t see really what’s going on almost behind that curtain as an American, when you log in and go I need some breaks, or I need this, or whatever. You don’t see that manufacturer’s website pop up. You may see an AC 8 83 pop up that says, Hey we have we sales spare parts. But you just don’t as an American and to be honest with you. Running around the United States talking to all these wind site operators, they’re so dang busy with their day-to-day life and solving the, putting out the fires and the problems that they have every day, that they don’t have time to go search for that stuff. So what do they do? They just call their procurement or the person that they know and they say, Hey, get me this. And if they end up overpaying for. 10, 20, 50% or whatever. It got the turbine back up and runway because uptime is king. So what else are you guys doing to strategically work with your clients and your customers to make sure that they don’t have to do that? Lars Bendsen: Generally speaking, I agree with larger countries let it be germinated. But the US and Big Canada they have such a big inner market. They’re horrible in doing export, generally speaking. They’re not good at it. They’re really good at producing stuff and doing the take care of their own stuff. Denmark, I think it’s 97% is export or being produced in Denmark, something like that. Because we have five, 5 million people, there’s no inner market we need to get out there where the market, inner market in US and Canada and Germany is so big. You don’t, we don’t need export. We’re not real good at it. And don’t call Canada US export. It’s not export, it’s the in the market. So far, Allen Hall: the turnaround times from the OEMs tends to be slow if they have the part in stock and there’s so much demand at for some specific parts that they don’t always don’t have it sitting on a shelf to send to you, which is a huge problem. So you have to develop a subsequent chain, a supply chain, and why not go right to the source? Which is gonna be in Denmark for the most part. Why not do that as to source the actual part instead of an imitation part or a refurbished part, which I’ve seen more of recently. You can actually get the real part. Lars Bendsen: It’s still surprising me sometimes. We hadn’t known em last year. They just closed their warehouse for three months. We just closing them. We cannot supply it for three months. How’s that gonna work? This wasn’t a European summer thing, was it? No, that was gonna be six weeks. That’s only six weeks. No, it was exactly in the fall, I think it was. And they just decided to close it for three months. And I don’t understand this, OEMs should earn $0 on the turbines itself. They’re earning money on the service and the parts look at the accounting on vest and seems real. They’re earning no money. It’s only on their aftermarket and vest, in all fairness, are extremely good at it. Really good at it. They have 75% or whatever the accurate number is covered of the fleet with service and parts is great. So we are not hunting as much vessel because why would we find that needle in the haystack where you could say that Siemens and ge they have less percentage, way less, maybe half of that depending on countries, et cetera and areas. But still, again, how can you allow yourself to just close your warehouse to three months? Joel Saxum: That’s crazy. Do let me ask you something about that, Vesta the vests setup ’cause in my mind, okay. I worked with a Danish company, very process driven, very controlled. There was step changes in gates and, everything was mapped out very well in how the company operated. So do you believe that the, one of the reasons that Vestas may have a really good control of spare parts inventory and the direct connection to those sites is because they sign those. 20, 25, even 30 year FSAs. Is it all based on this overarching business model that, that encompasses that and the others aren’t just, aren’t doing that? Lars Bendsen: I don’t know. I think it’s I think everybody wants to do it. That’s just my 2 cents. I’m not an expert in that area, but my 2 cents is that vessel has the power to demand that. And they’re not selling any new wind farm without a service contract, whatever’s 5, 10, 15. They do not. Where some of the wind inside the smaller, they have less power. The owners say, you know what, that’s all well and good, but then we’re not gonna buy your turbines. And then GE and Siemens has to cave in a little bit. That’s my 2 cents. Joel Saxum: I think strategically like GE with having expanded in their service thing and then now changing it to the hub and spoke model, like I think that this is my 2 cents, right? I think GE saw some bloat. In what was happening in service. And I’m not gonna say parts ’cause I don’t think that’s true, but service and this FSA and I think that GE is actually strategically pulling back from signing these FSAs. And because some of the stuff with, we’ve heard horror stories with, and this isn’t just ge, it’s all the OEMs with, liquidated damages, catching up with people and those kind of things because they don’t have access to spare parts. So they don’t have access, they don’t have the service people to get out there quick enough. So it’s a, there’s a large problem in the industry and I would say that if you’re a wind farm operator or wind site supervisor, technician, whatever, it’s at some point in time, you’ve felt the pain of not having that spare part that you need to get your turbine up and running. And that’s where a C 83 comes into play. Lars Bendsen: Yeah, I agree, but I also believe that some some owners are too small that the OEMs even care. We have seen some horrible example that, you know. Care list. That sales person sold that wind farm. That’s it. He can care list and the aftermarket people sitting in Denmark and they are, they’re closing at four o’clock eastern as it’s four o’clock. It’s not four 10. It’s four o’clock. Joel Saxum: So if you’re in the central part of the United States, you need to be on the phone by 7:30 AM Otherwise you’re not getting your stuff. Lars Bendsen: No. Or on Fridays is close by noon, so forget about it. You get an answering machine, so you can’t even call on Fridays. So that happens. We have a policy, we pick, we always pick up the phone, we all always answer our emails. We don’t have an out on office, not on purpose. At least doesn’t exist so I think it’s more avail, be available and go the extra mile instead of just sitting for a number. There are might be two picture lenders. Let’s take an assemble of that. There’s four different vendors, which the same A nine B number from Siemens. There are four different A nine B sorry, producer of a nine BXX, x. So you can pick the most expensive one. You can pick the cheapest one, pick whatever you want. And there’s probably a reason between something, a correlation between quality and price often this. So yeah. It’s about knowing those manufacturers and have access to them. Yeah. And we are, I think we’re pretty good at it. Joel Saxum: Yeah. As I’m gonna put my wind farm operator hat on for me that, that’s that triangle. Good. Fast and cheap. Pick two. I. That’s what I always look at. Two outta three. Yeah. But having someone in the corner, like AC 80, 83 that knows, hey hey Lars, I need this part. Great. Okay. I can get it from one of these four people. Here’s the cost for all four of ’em. Here’s the quality of our opinion and the track record we’ve seen, and here’s the lead time. ’cause that’s always the big one. If it’s a reactive situation where I need a part now, which we hope we’re not doing as much reactive as proactive, but if it’s a reactive part and I need it now, I need to get that turbine back up and running. You guys have the answers to those questions. Lars Bendsen: Yeah, I think I agree with you that’s the reactive part of it and that happens. SC actually happens a lot and I think we are back to what you said around before, that everybody is so lean, that site manager don’t have that extra person to source those parts. And all of a sudden we have a turbine down, we are missing one animal meal for $500. How can that happen? And of course you could be unlucky as well. I totally get that part. We are trying to be more proactive. So if we have a major owner that have 20 or 30 sites, because you see they use the same parts, all of them. So one, don’t, we bundle out procurement instead of taking one off all the time. We spending a ton of time with one off $500. Procurement and it takes too much time and it’s too expensive for everybody involved. There are some suppliers now I got actually hit by it. Some suppliers in in Denmark now they have a minimum or a quantity, or you get a fee, extra fee on it. So you can order a one animal meter used as an example without, is a 250 or $300 fee on it for handling the order. We’ve seen that as well. Joel Saxum: So reactive is a lot of where the market sits, but how are you guys working with customers to be more proactive in their strategies for spare parts? Lars Bendsen: As in the back office say GaN, Sydney, et cetera, they’re extremely data driven. We can see the history of what had been quoted, what had been ordered, what pricing has been ordered, when was it, et cetera. So we know the history. I said, why? We can see we are buying 40. Why do you buy one or two design? And even if that person cannot do it, we’re still gonna buy five or 10. So we have something that helps our what call it procurement power. We leave it un stock because we are trying to avoid, has too much in stock and we do not wanna have obsolete parts either. So that’s the kind of the balance we have, we are finding. Allen Hall: Lars, can you gimme a sense of what kind of parts you can acquire or from the original equipment manufacturer? In Denmark, Lars Bendsen: we just set up a big agreement with one of the main the major filter suppliers. Now we have a nine p numbers for all fillers in the world and for western fillers where we have all fillers and it’s a fraction of the price we’re paying today. Fraction, pit cylinders motors, gears, et cetera. We are staying away from major components. We’re staying away from from gear boxes, generators, habit supply, main shaft and bearings for simul because that’s the focal point. So that’s, we could do that. But gearbox, generators it’s not worthwhile for us to do it. We don’t add any value. You could get that part. It’s just a part number. We can’t add any value at all. So decided of staying away from it. We don’t wanna take the risk for a small portion of dollars. Allen Hall: And if I’m sitting at a wind site and I’m getting requests for a specific part, how does that process work? So I’m calling Sydney at your site or go, or getting ahold of you on LinkedIn. Then how does that work? How does that procurement system work? How do you navigate that? Because it sounds like you have some of the parts sitting on the shelf. Some you have to go acquire and negotiate. What’s that process look like? Lars Bendsen: The process is that you’ll get an email we got your R fq, we’re working on it right now. You’ll get an email within an hour that we have. It don’t, we won’t leave you high and dry. We are responding and then we are gonna source it right off the bat. If you don’t have it, and within a day or two you will have an answer back with a, with the price and lead time. Allen Hall: Okay. So that’s a really short response time because usually it takes several days to get someone to re return that phone call. Lars Bendsen: Yeah, so that’s the thing. Availability is key, right? Availability to the parts availability is key and it goes for the parts as well. You said lead time? We get way short on lead time, but call the manufacturers directly. Waste or, Allen Hall: and the, obviously the equipment manufacturers must have stock on the shelf. They have to do that so that those parts do exist. We just didn’t know where to find them until we called AC 8 83. Joel Saxum: That’s a story that you hear a lot in the United States, right? Again, Alan and I travel wood Farm. Oh, these, there was some German guys here. There was some Danish guys here. It’s always German and Danish. We had to get these special bolts from Germany, or we had this. So now everybody has their own Danish guy that they can call Lars that person Yeah. That has the connections to, to the mainland, to the motherland that can get these things for ’em, because that’s the troubling part. Like we said, you don’t have time to, procurement is tough. Strategic procurement is difficult. Even people that are doing procurement at a large scale in an organization, say you’re in the back office and you’re the procurement person. They’re dealing with so many things that to find this one part at one of these few manufacturers over in Denmark, that’s difficult. So now you have every, everybody that’s listening here has the connection to that dane that has the connections over there and can get it done for ’em. Allen Hall: One of the big criticism in the United States and Canada is that when anybody drives by a wind farm and turbines not operating. It’s just, it’s a knock on the industry. And the most times that is occurring is because they’re waiting for a spare part, honestly. Real simple stuff. Filters, for example, is a good one, right? And parts that they can’t get the hold of, but they just don’t know how to acquire them. And now they’ll listen to the podcast. This is the way to do it. You call ours, you call Sydney at AC eight eighty three and you get this process started and then at that same moment I know Sydney is really sharp. She’s gonna provide you the list of things you can get. So she, you tell her, Hey, I got a GE two X machine. She says here’s the list of parts we can get for you. Wow. That just saved my life for most procurement people. And that’s a personal, Sidney is not your friend for life because she is saving you. A lot of money and a lot of time, and a lot of hassle, which is the point, right? This is why everybody goes to AC 83 because it’s simple, easy to get things done. Lars, how does an operator a site supervisor, a procurement person, get a hold of you to start ordering some of their spare parts through AC883? Lars Bendsen: You have a website, ac883.com or my email, lars@ac883.com Allen Hall: And you can also reach Lars and AC 8 8 3 at contact at ac883.com. The website’s great, so get ahold of Lars, get ahold of Sydney, get your projects moving. Again, Lars, thank you so much for being back on the program. We love having you. Thank you. Thanks.

Pete Andrews from EchoBolt discusses their advanced ultrasonic technology for inspecting and maintaining wind turbine bolts, which can reduce maintenance costs by up to 90%. He emphasizes the importance of proper bolt tensioning during installation and highlights recent improvements in their automated inspection processes. 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! Allen Hall: With wind turbines growing larger and critical bolted connections under strain, the wind industry needs smarter inspection methods to prevent costly failures. This week we speak with Pete Andrews, managing director at EchoBolt. EchoBolt has developed ultrasonic technology that makes bolt inspections faster, more reliable, and saves wind farm operators up to 90% on maintenance costs while preventing catastrophic failures. Stay tuned. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Pete, welcome back to the show. Pete Andrews: Hi, Allen. Hi Joel. Good to be back. I was trying to work out when I was last on here, but it was it two years ago. It’s been a while. Anyway, we’ve had a lot change at alt yeah, it’s good to catch up with you guys again. Allen Hall: It’s been too long and so we’re glad to have you back because I know there’s been a lot of improvements and EchoBolt has been really busy checking bolts all over the place and we’ve, Joel and I have been traveling around quite a bit and we’ve noticed problems with. Bolts in the United States and we think where’s Pete? Where’s Ebol? We could really use you in the United States to help us on some of these bolted connections because it does seem like there’s a lot of issues from tower bolts to blade bolts to bolts in general, there are a number of problems that exist. And I wanna start off there, Pete, because I think you’re the knowledge base for bolts. Are bolts being tightened correctly based upon all the measurements that you have done? Pete Andrews: Say, it’s a very mixed picture. I think you’re right to point out, it’s every wind operator will have issues in their fleets with the bolt of connections, but it’s almost always. Blade studs that caused the most headache. You do see things on towers. You do see a kind of occasional issues elsewhere, maybe with foundations. I’d say it’s probably, I. In our experience, once, once sites are in operation, there’s not too much that happens that influences the integrity. An awful lot happens at the point of installation, and it’s what we always try and say to customers if it. If you confirm that the bolts are tightened to the load, you expect at the point of installation, you’ve set yourself up for a fantastic operational li life. But if it’s wrong at the start, you’ve got embedded integrity issues that are really hard to manage going forward. So yeah it’s a mixed picture, but what I’d always say is focus on the QA at the point of installation and things should go easy from there on in. Allen Hall: It does seem like blade bolts are becoming more of an issue. As you mentioned, the blade insert question of are we over tightening fasteners that go into the blades and pulling out these inserts and causing some of the problems downstream root cracking, instruments becoming loose, blades becoming loose and wobbling on the pitch bearings. It does seem like we don’t have a really good way of consistently tightening or tensioning. Those fasteners are bolts that are in composite structure just a lot more sensitive to or the composites more sensitive to the tensioning tightening that happens? I Pete Andrews: think without doubt it’s a harder joint to design and I think probably all of the major turbine OEMs. It’s the area, I guess probably with the most dynamic loading or the most variable dynamic loading and probably the hardest to anticipate the performance of the joint. I guess we see a couple of things. We see a. Occasionally you do get overt tightening, particularly on torqued joints. Most blade studs tend to be tensioned, where you stretch the bolt rather than turn the nut or the bolthead. But where it’s torked, you have a very wide degree of variability and there can be, there can be issues with going back and retalking and trying to measure an angle of turn and over overstretching the bolt and failing them. So we’ve seen that. I think on the tensioned joints, typically you get very good variability and the bolts tend to be within a narrow band, but probably not enough is being done to ensure that you’ve got as much preload safely within the bolt as you can. And I think. The one meaningful action operators can take without having to redesign the joint or try and redesign the fastener, is just to measure the preload and see how much operational headroom you’ve got and maybe look at increasing it slightly. That’s probably the one area. If you’re suffering a lot of TED failures, you can address quickly and cheaply without getting into. Design fundamentals. Joel Saxum: Pete this week we were at the Blades USA conference here in Texas and we had many side, everybody’s talking blades, right? So what blade issue do you have? What blade issue do you have? And one of them that Allen and I had a couple conversations on with operators, there was, oh, we have the root bushing pullout issue. And some people were very familiar with the issue and, but some people just weren’t. They were like, what do you mean by that? I was like, these things are actually loosening in the, breaking bonds and pulling through and all kinds of stuff. So in a blade root, you have upwards of a hundred studs or a, or a hundred of those blade bushings. How many of them have to start to become loose before it starts to be like a cascading effect? For that blade, Pete Andrews: the failing of the fixing within the composite structure is not really something we’ve encountered or looked into a lot. I think typically most manufacturers would place a limit on how many alts failed be before you need to stop the turbine. Some of them have overall limits about the number in the joint and some have adjacent limits. I think it’s pretty normal for people to run with one or two failures and the structured still be still be safe to operate. But I think where you start getting consecutive failures, you have to look quite hard about. The decision to continue to operate the unit, but particularly since the failures often in segments. So there is typically leading and trailing edge segments where you’ll see higher risk of failure. So as soon as you’ve got a couple of bolts in that area that aren’t doing what they want or what they’re supposed to be, then yeah, I think it’s a much harder decision to carry on. Carry on operating without replacing those fasteners. Allen Hall: Are there OEMs that are asking for those blade bolts to be torque still or has everybody moved on to tensioning? I Pete Andrews: think every modern turbine we work on is tensioned. Some of the, we get quite involved in life extension projects where turbines have got to sort 20, 25 year operating life. People are trying to make an assessment of, is it safe to continue? Do we need to do wholesale replacement of components, et cetera. And so a lot of the older fleet or some of the older fleet would have talked talk blade studs, but often, we can go in and if we can prove that the bolts are operating in the preload envelope. The ideal preload envelope, let’s say. We can also look for defects, so we can look if the bots have got cracks in them and help the people make that call to just continue to operate safely with a monitoring regime in place rather than perhaps following a recommendation. From an OEM, which might involve wholesale replacement. Allen Hall: I think that’s fascinating, but I asked that question because there’s a lot of repowering happening in the United States, and it did seem like turbines that are 10 plus years old. There was a lot of torquing of blade bolts, and now that we’re going to repower, one of the questions is, do I need to go back and look at that blade root area and do I need to address it because I overt, tightened, and or retort over the years and damaged that root section. Is that something that EchoBolt and its technology can actually check? Because I think that’s one of the variables that we don’t know right now is this bolted connection okay. To live another 10 or 15 years. Is that something that the technology at EchoBolt can derive? We can Pete Andrews: definitely to derive the bulk loads so we can have a look if. If the bolt is over or under tightened, what we don’t do is the structural non-destructive testing. So we couldn’t look at the blade root bolt fixing structure and make any comments about the integrity of that. But we can look with you or with operators. What’s the tension or tithing process they’ve followed? Does it generate the preloads that you would expect? Is there a risk of overti or in the tighten box? So that’s really our specialism. Joel Saxum: What you guys do is very valuable at different life’s stages of a turbine, right? ’cause what earlier we talked about hey, right at commissioning you should be doing, you should be checking all these bolt connections or tension connections. Either way. And then we talked a little bit we jumped forward, talked a little bit about lifetime extension during the repower phase. But another critical phase of life, specifically in the States that we deal with all the time is end of warranty. And it’s a worldwide problem. Are you guys getting into a lot of end of warranty campaigns right now where you’re checking everything before it gets handed back to the operator? Pete Andrews: Yeah, we sort of, you’re absolutely right. There’s a few kind of obvious moments where you want to do more than the standard sort of asset status, asset health check and end of warranty is clearly one of those points. We have done end of warranty projects. Particularly a lot of our offshore customers, the age of the sites are at that point where sites are coming outta long-term service agreements. The operators may be the owner is maybe taking on the operational responsibility and they want to transition from. What’s gone before to their own maintenance philosophy. So yeah, you’re right that’s one of the moments that we’ve been involved in, particularly when there’s been a serial defect. And the OEM has proposed an upgrade, so we’ve had that on blade studs where just before end of warranty, an OEM has changed the design of the fastener. To alleviate bladed failures, we were actually able to show that in the population of the modified fastener, there were more defects than in the non-modified fastener. So right at the end of warranty, we were able to show the customer the proposed solution was actually it actually made the situation worse. So they were able to, carry on the commercial. Debate with the their OEM and hopefully get a better res resolution. Allen Hall: Okay, Pete, so I want to dig into that a little bit ’cause I know your technology is improving and one of the issues that’s we’ve seen quite a bit more recently is defects in the studs or the bolts themselves in the clin structure of the metal. Occasionally there are some. Embedded defects that visually they can’t really detect. But it does sound like there’s new technology that can help delineate like that. Stud. That bolt has a defect in it where the next one doesn’t, which is incredibly valuable because depending where that bolt is on the blade ring, it could be critical or not critical. I Is that technology now available more worldwide because of what EchoBolt has done? Pete Andrews: Yeah, I think the. The technology we use for looking for very small defects is an ultrasonic technique called phase array, which is a more complex, non-destructive testing methodology than we would use for a preload inspections. It’s a bit more specialist, but that can be really quite precise here. So down to the one or two millimeter. So scale or resolution for defects? So where we know there’s a problem in a population of bolts and the customer’s really keen to identify all the studs that are in the process of failing, we might use that to, to get themselves like a clean joint, if you like, of defect free fastas. So they’ve got a good baseline to monitor from going forward, but as I said, that’s a bit more specialist. So it’s not it’s not trivial, let’s say, for customers to carry those inspections out themselves. But our bulk inspection technology that we use for monitoring a thousand bolts a day, to get through all the primary structure of a turbine. We’ve worked on a lot over the last two years since we last spoke, to really optimize that to be as straightforward and user friendly for customers to adopt directly. And that methodology, whilst it’s primarily designed to identify the load within the bolts where we get big defects in bolts, we often see. A fatigue rack propagating maybe 70 or 80% of the diameter of the bolt before it ruptures. So once you’ve looking at defects of that sort of size, our standard technology will also identify that, that there’s an issue with that fastener. So it does give you a chance to capture the fastener before it. Catastrophically fails, which is quite useful, particularly for the blade studs because when they fail they can do an awful lot of damage. There’s all the hitch system, electronics, cabinets, lighting, et cetera. The number of turbines that have been in where the lights don’t work in the hub because there’s been, been half of a blade stud or a nut rattling around in there, smashing it all to pieces. So it is quite valuable to get to get the bottles out before they actually fail. Allen Hall: I didn’t think about the associated damage when the studs fall out, but yeah, it does seem like it’s a, I guess it’d be actually dangerous and expensive when that happens. So not only is it a structural issue, it’s just there’s equipment wiring all the. Activity inside of the hub could be damaged too. That’s really interesting. Okay, so the thing about echo belt is it’s all non-destructive. You’re doing things that don’t affect the bolt themselves. You’re not playing around with ’em. You’re just using ultrasound technology and some really high advanced ultrasound technology to learn about the tensioning of the bolt, make sure it’s been elongated properly. That the structure of the bolt is all intact. So you know that bolted joint can have a long lifetime. Now, there’s been a lot of advancements that at echo, EchoBolt to one, make that faster because the number of bolts that you’re doing in a day has increased quite a bit. But also the whole system, the way you guys operate, is now really automated from what I could tell. You want to describe what it would be like to have you come on site and go. All right, Pete, we’re just gonna have you go check out the critical bolts in these turbines go. What does that look like now? Pete Andrews: Yeah, perhaps if I go back to what it was like before. So when we started the company, we were primarily really a service provider and we were using off the shelf hardware, and we were quite technology agnostic really. We just we’re trying to find different technologies we could bring into the wind industry to help with this problem. And we were using off the shelf ultrasonic bolt measurement devices, but I. I don’t think any of those devices were really conceived with the wind turbine use case in mind. So they’re very good at, if you have a small number of very high-end fasteners that you’ll really want to be super precise in a laboratory environment or a, a very specialized piece of equipment. You can be very precise, but you have to be quite a skilled operator and it’s relatively time consuming. Whereas what we were trying to do is inspect a wind turbine a day, the whole primary structure. So the foundation, the tower joints, the your joints up to main shaft plate studs. Pitch bearing to hub, so all the connections that if that connection fails, a part of the turbine would fall off. So you’re into needing to inspect a thousand bolts plus particularly on more modern machines which are getting larger and larger. You’re into the multiple thousands. So that hardware was just really suboptimal for it. It was a very clunky way of trying to export data. Onto your laptop with CSV files and manipulating Excel, and it just, it, it was taking almost as long to do the post inspection analysis as it was to do the inspection. So we’ve completely re-looked at the technology purely from the perspective of what’s the optimum device for the wind industry. And we recognize that we are quite a small company, so the ability for ebol to service. The global Wind industries a as a service business with our own technicians is, we can only do so much. So all of our effort has gone into really streamlining the experience. So now it’s very straightforward for a customer to pick up one of our devices. We have a sort of half day training course. The. The main sort of ultrasonic electronics device is wirelessly linked to iPhone. So you download an i an iPhone app and all the user interface is via phone. So it’s a really familiar platform for technicians to work with rather than this complex suite of buttons and needing a 10 page work instruction or press this button followed by this. So superficial. Now we have a cloud database where you set up your projects when you’re on the turbine or in the office, you synchronize the projects to your phone. Once you’re on the phone, on the turbine, you select the project you wanna work on. Take your inspections. It’s probably 10 seconds, a bolt. It’s really very quick. Finish inspections and then resynchronize backup to the cloud. And we’ve got a whole customer platform where you can see all the inspections that have been done, any anomalous readings you can do a level of qa, you can comment on things and say, this reading looks furious. We’d like to check it again. These bolts look like they’re under load. We’d like to get those RET tightened, et cetera. So we’ve really tried to build this kind of end-to-end technology. Architecture that just solves this very niche problem for the wind industry. So we believe it’s a it’s a much more efficient way of carrying this work out than what it would’ve felt like two or three years ago. They’re trying to achieve the same thing. Joel Saxum: So one of the things of course when you introduce a new technology, everybody wants to know, of course, cost efficiency. What’s the business case? All these things. Allen and I talk about this all the time with operators on for our products. But I think one of the things that you’re doing here with EchoBolt, it’s the efficiency of how. Fast, you can get these things done. So if you’re gonna come in and do, re just retorque or retention a turbine, you’re logging huge equipment, you’re doing all kinds of things. Even if you’re just doing like the the 10 percenting around each connection, that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of people, you guys are able to cut that way down. So is it can you run us through this as a single technician, how fast can you actually get things done? I, Pete Andrews: I. A large offshore turbine, maybe six megawatts plus, we would always try and do all those primary joints, a hundred percent of the bolts in a single working day. So in a kind of eight hour working window. Which is a much more efficient than if you tried to re-tighten all of those bolts, as you said, with hydraulic toing or attention and gear. But the really big saving. Comes from the fact that you have a measurement that you can track over time. So you have information about the condition of how the joints are behaving, and because you have that detailed information, you can extrapolate out from a sample. So you can start to say instead of visiting a hundred percent of the turbines in a wind farm to retighten 10% of the bolts, we’re just gonna visit 20% or 15%. And if the that 20 or 15%, all the joints are where we expect them to be and are not relaxing, then you can quite comfortably start to make some engineering judgment about the behavior of the whole. Whole wind farm. So we reckon that you could save about 90% of the cost associated with bulk maintenance by moving to an ultrasonic inspection regime. And as a kind of rule of thumb, I, for anyone interested out there, once you combine labor cost, logistics, and turbine downtime. The status quo of we’re gonna reti 10% of bolts every year and a hundred percent every five years is probably costing the industry in the region of $1.2 million per in store gigawatt per year. If you’re running a wind farm of 500 megawatts, there’s probably five or 600,000. Dollars a year of savings to be made. So it’s, I think once our customers have tried the technology, realize it’s very doable and reliable. We’ve not had anyone make the decision to go back to bolt tightening. That’s a good use case. Yeah. That’s the, it’s, it is getting yourself comfortable with a change. And different companies will have different levels of, um. Engineering management of change, for their assets. But once people are through that process we’ve found, adoption has really ramped Allen Hall: up well, if you can save a wind farm a half a million dollars. In any way. I can’t believe they’re not doing it. And maybe they just don’t realize at this point that Echo Bull exists because you’re mostly based in the UK and you’re busy doing offshore work, which is really important that UK has a lot of offshore wind turbines and those need to be running. And the loss of an offshore turbine obviously is. Really critical there, but the onshore turbine world also needs your help. And I just think they haven’t realized the amount of money they’re spending on retentioning fasteners automatically because the spec says they need to do it. There are smarter ways to go about and do that now, and Ebot is, I think, the way to, to do it. And the number of times you have been out in the field and all that learned experience has now culminated into this platform. Which is incredibly valuable. Simplifying the bolt experience for engineering at an operator is immensely valuable because there just aren’t a lot of engineers to go through that data. So everything that EchoBolt has done in terms of making the platform easier is a huge advantage. So not only are you saving a lot of money on physically going out and Retentioning, but you’re also saving a lot of engineering time. This is, this makes imminent sense. So your phone must be ringing quite a bit right at this point because you’ve, you cracked the nut, so to speak. Pete Andrews: Yeah, it’s it’s quite an interesting sort of how the business has evolved, has been a really interesting and satisfying things to witness. We’re obviously based in the uk, the majority of our works. The uk but it’s, I’d say we’re probably 60 40 between the UK and other markets. As you said, we do a lot of offshore work in Europe, but we also do a lot of onshore. We probably do 30% of our turnovers onshore. But yeah, it’s I feel that we have been. Historically when we were running a much more service focused business using technology that was hard to put into customer’s hands, we’ve been somewhat constrained by our own size. It’s not trivial for us to get teams out to other parts of the world. It’s not always. The most cost effective solution for people. But that said, we’ve been out to the states for a number of projects. We did a offshore project in Taiwan, which was really interesting just over a year ago. We do a lot around Europe, a lot of the other European wind market, Germany, Denmark Netherlands, et cetera. So yeah, we’ve been growing. I guess within our being, yeah, let’s say the team’s been kept busy, for the people we have, we’ve been growing as fast as we can. But I think we’re gonna see a bit of a step change now where it’s much more, it’s much more credible to hand the technology over to customers to deliver themselves and get really good results. Um. Yeah, I think the opportunity, it’s it’s a really timely conversation because the opportunity for people to take this on with self-service teams really, really, it’s a bit of a game changer for us. Allen Hall: So now that EchoBolt has grown in scale and operators are reaching out to you, and they should, because if they really want to cut the cost of the operational side and save themselves literally millions of dollars here, which is what we’re talking about, you need to get a whole the P to EchoBolt. Pete, how do they find you? How do they find Cobolt? Pete Andrews: So probably the easiest way is our website. So that’s cobolt.co uk. We’re also on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. They’re probably the main channels we’ve got. You’ll find us on YouTube. You’ll find us on Instagram, but they’re more just for marketing and like a bit about, outward facing stuff, but yeah, website and LinkedIn are the easiest ways to get in touch. Allen Hall: Yeah, checked out ALT’s LinkedIn page. You can check out the YouTube page. You can actually see them in action, which is really interesting, so you can understand what the process is and how efficient. Alt is at determining if your bolts are okay. Pete, thank you so much for being on the podcast again. We love having you. You gotta come on more often because you’re really changing the wind world at the minute. Love having you. Pete Andrews: Thanks very much guys. It was, yeah, nice being back and we’ll, we will do it again sometime.

This week, we cover the unionization of Vestas technicians in Michigan, and research revealing significant blade damage occurs in short but intense weather events. At the Atlantic Shores offshore farm, an environmental permit was remanded by a judge. Dermot Wind Farm in Texas, also known as the Amazon Wind Farm, is our wind farm of the week. Register for the start of our webinar series with SkySpecs! 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! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Before we start the program this week on March 26th. At 11:00 AM Uptime sits down with Josh Goryl CRO of SkySpecs, and their newly appointed CEO Dave Roberts for an exclusive conversation in our new joint webinar series. You may have heard about Dave recently stepping into the role. Now’s your chance to hear from him directly and we’ll dive into what’s new at SkySpecs, the latest industry insights, and what their newest announcement means for the future of wind turbine inspections. Wind o and m. And asset health management, so don’t miss it. Tune in on March 26th, 11:00 AM Eastern, and we’ll include the webinar registration link in the show notes. Up in Michigan, wind turbine technicians who perform operations and maintenance on Vestas turbines have voted to join the Utility Workers Union of America. Marks the first Vestas wind technicians in North America to unionize. The 11 member group voted nine to one, so someone abstained obviously in favor of organizing and will become members of the UWUA local 2, 2 3, which also represents winex at DTE in Michigan. Now these workers are responsible for operations and maintenance on about 120 odd turbines, including MCE. So Joel, this one’s a little unique and maybe ’cause it’s Michigan unions are really strong in Michigan, have been for a hundred years. ’cause the auto workers, and this seems like an outgrowth of that, but what is the relationship with Vestus in unions? Is that something that they have done in Europe quite often and this is just carrying over into the United States? Or is this. An American move. Joel Saxum: I think it’s an American move. If you look at the state of Michigan, like you said, auto workers are there. They’re heavily unionized. And because they’re heavily unionized and that state has looked at them as, they do well. It’s in good middle class incomes and, that, that’s driven some progress over the last a hundred years in Michigan. My, some of my in-laws are from Michigan and they’re boilermakers and they’re all unionized. And when they say get that union job, they’ve got it. They’ve made it right. So I understand the city or the state of Michigan and some of the ideas around there. And I think that if you, in wind, if you were to pick a state that would’ve unionized first. Michigan would be at the top of your list probably. So I don’t think it’s a Vesta thing necessarily. I think this is a local Michigan thing, but I don’t also believe, Vesta is being a Danish company and they have, a lot of trade representation there from in all trades in that northern part of Europe. I think that’s, it’s not abnormal to Vestas either. It’s probably abnormal to Vestas. United States Management, but Vestas as a company, eh, pretty standard thing. I’m curious to see what their package looks like, because now we’re in this era of IRA bill things, right? So we, IRA bills, apprenticeships, and white sheet wages and these kind of things to, to fulfill these needs for all these projects. So I would. Be interested to see what the package looks like and what they’ve signed with or as a union to Vestas and to the people that you’re working for, to see if it aligns with the IRA bill. Rosemary Barnes: What can you explain for non-Americans? What does that mean to have unionized in America? Because we have unions in Australia, but my understanding, like it must be incredibly different here than it is there. ’cause like you say, it could be, you can have a union job, like I’m pretty sure in Australia, like you are. There’s no such thing as a union job. They can’t I think they’re explicitly prohibited from discriminating based on whether you are in a union or not. Everyone has a right to join a union, but, what does a union job mean? And Yeah tell those of us who aren’t from America. What does this actually mean? Joel Saxum: It’s different depending on the organization, the industry, the area, right? So technically same thing. It’s not, it’s, it is illegal to technically discriminate against non-union or union, however, they become such a strong presence that when, if you’re part of the union and you. Say there’s a strike going on, and then you cross that picket line, like you will be ostracized from that group of people, even though it’s technically illegal to do they’re not sanctioned by the government. It’s all independent organizations, but they have a lot of power, the auto workers unions and stuff, like if they go on strike, they shut down gm, they shut down forward, they can’t do anything. So they have a, an insane amount of power. And it, it rolls over into, when I say good union jobs, they have good packages. In my opinion, I’ve seen some union packages that are just crazy, right? Like I was working in Chicago and there was guys that were holding shovels clearing, clearing off manholes, and they were making $48 an hour because they were in the union. And the guy next to him that wasn’t in the union, that wasn’t working for the union company was making like 16. And doing the same work except for after eight hours he was still working. The other guy put a shovel down one home. So there’s a give and take. Phil Totaro: Yeah. But that’s the flip side of this as well, which is okay, there’s a benefits package that, that they offer as being part of a union, but there’s a price that’s paid for all of that. It’s the same sort of thing with, like a government that leans a little more socialist. They’re gonna collect a lot more in tax. And then have a lot more programs for everybody that’s based on all that money that they’ve collected. But the reality of it is who do you think pays for that? At the end of the day, that’s gonna be the asset owner and then all of us as electricity rate payers who end up, the power purchase contract price is necessarily gonna be, more than what it might have been otherwise. There’s. There’s two sides to it. And yeah, you can, you can get unionized labor and their argument with joining the union was, safety training, access to safety training, access to benefits, things they weren’t getting either from vestus or independently. But somebody’s gotta pay for it and it’s gonna be all of us Joel Saxum: as busy wind energy professionals. Staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it. Difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES WIN 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 ps win.com today. Allen Hall: New research from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific research in collaboration with offshore wind operators reveals that approximately 30% of annual wind turbine blade damage occurs during just 12 hours of harsh weather conditions. The PROWESS project conducted. Year long, detailed measurements of precipitation in the North Sea, a pretty rough place finding that damage happens when the tip speeds reach about 325 kilometers an hour as wind speeds exceed about 63 kilometers an hour, which is pretty fast and rainfall surpasses about 7.5 millimeters per hour, which is a lot of rain. Now, these findings have led to the creation of a erosion atlas in the. That could help wind farm operators proactively reduce turbine speeds to prevent damage. Now, I think that’s the goal everybody, is that if they know there’s certain environmental times when rain erosion is going to occur, then you basically slow the tip speeds down, which will reduce the amount of erosion. Maybe I’m missing some of this. Rosemary, I know you’ve heard the same story that you can slow the tip speeds down when the rainfall is really high and the wind speeds are really high. And sure you can reduce the amount of erosion, but it’s still a problem. Rosemary Barnes: And I haven’t seen this this atlas, is it just for the North Sea is is it just Europe? Europe, Joel Saxum: TTU was working on one to cover all of Europe. Allen Hall: Yes, they were. Yeah, I haven’t seen it yet, but it maybe out. Rosemary Barnes: One of the things that I’ve been working on. Recently with a few different clients is leading edge erosion in Australia. And just noting that we don’t see things behave the same way that they do in Europe. And one of the reasons is, or that I suspect actually I don’t suspect, I know I’ve back backed up with data, that we have much higher rainfall intensity and a lot of places and. Australia. Like I just know that from living here. When I lived in Denmark when I moved to Denmark I checked the climate data before moving to see, things like, oh, what’s the annual rainfall and how does it compare? And it wasn’t so different to a lot of parts of Australia. And in fact, it’s less than a lot of parts of Australia. I’m like, oh, okay, it’s not gonna be that bad. But when you actually live there, like in Australia, it rains and it rains. Like it’s not joking around. It is raining. But whereas when you. In Denmark it’s just always drizzling, just I don’t know, definitely more than 50% of the time. It’s just it’s raining a little bit. And sometimes I would call it static rain. It’s it’s technically not raining, but if you go outside, you will get wet because it’s just there’s, it’s just there’s so much moisture in the air. So I, and yeah, so I noticed. Then like a lot of the traditional ways to assess how severe your leading edge your site is for leading edge erosion. You have a look at you average wind speed, the tip speed of the blade and the annual rainfall of a site. And I just noticed I don’t know, I. 500 bill of rainfall in a year is not the same in Europe as it is in Australia. And not all Europe is the same. There are some places like in Scotland where they have like big fat, heavy rain droplets. But what was the amount that you said was the threshold? How, what was the rainfall intensity? Allen Hall: No I think I said three inches in arrow. That’s not right. I think it’s 0.3 inches an hour or 7.5 millimeters. Rosemary Barnes: Okay. So I have I, I. I collected data for a bunch of Australian sites with their one minute. One minute rainfall record, or it’s like the average amount that they get every five years that will get in rainfall intensity of one in one minute of four, four millimeters in one minute. So that’s like half of what you’re saying in an hour. We’re getting in a minute. So it’s 30 times, 30 times more. There are sites in Australia, they’re getting 30 times more than intense rain than that. So yeah, just I guess just look a little, another little bit of. Bit of evidence that Australia has in intense rainfall. That’s why we have so much flooding. It just, it suddenly the tap turns on and you’ve got it’s the inverted ocean kind of situation where it’s just all of a sudden Yeah. Like above ground is wet now. It’s, yeah, it’s just water. Joel Saxum: I thinking about that sometimes, like in, in Texas, the way it rains, like in Houston when it rains, like seven and a half millimeters an hour is nothing. I’ve been in Houston before where they’ve gotten 10 inches of rain in an hour. That would be 250 millimeters in an hour. That’s 80, 80 times that. Rosemary Barnes: That’s, so that’s what I mean. Maybe the numbers are wrong. We should probably, have all of read the paper and done some calculations before we started talking. Allen Hall: There’s just two articles that say the same thing. Rosemary Barnes: I, that’s that kind of like reinforces that Europe is the wrong place to do this study or to get this benefit, right? Like you get the benefit where because it’s only, it’s not. That huge amount of erosion that you’re gonna stop by, having that threshold in Europe, but like in Texas or in Queensland, you would be able to very easily cut out the extremely intense rain events I bet are doing way more. ’cause like I, I often see on Australia and wind farms erosion leading edge protection that is destroyed. A year after it was last replaced or two years after, and I bet that you could stop that by just turning the turbine off for the super intense rain. So I’ve been trying to convince clients to, to start looking at this. It’s hard when the. My client, the owner of the wind farm, doesn’t actually control the operation of the wind farm. So that’s the biggest challenge isn’t the potential of a, technological capability to do it. It’s it’s a matter of who, who would go to the effort to doing this versus who gets the benefit from it. Joel Saxum: There’s two interesting things here too just when I was looking at this leading edge erosion problem with rain mapping and stuff at a previous life. One of the things I didn’t think about right away is actually why it’s so bad is because as that turbine spins, you’re actually going this waterfall is measured in a single water column that hits, say, the ground. Well, 7.5 millimeters an hour, but that turbine blade is experiencing like 15 times that because it’s chasing the rain down and then hitting it, going back up again and hitting. It’s in engaging with the rain constantly and that’s why it causes so much damage. Phil Totaro: Yeah. Particularly a high tip speed ratio and it’s the almost like what you get on a helicopter rotor in, a brownout condition. It’s Joel Saxum: yeah. And we’re talking just rain erosion here, right? Like this whole, I just talked to an operator in West Texas an hour ago, and he said that sandstorm craziness that blew through there on Sunday hasn’t let up. He’s still at 45 mile an hour. Wind with sand blowing so fast, you can’t see across the o and m parking lot. And this is in like by San Angelo. Allen Hall: I saw that. Global Blade Group is over at Eros this week and they’re talking leading edge repairs for erosion and looking at the Eros robot and how they do it. And there’s a number of operators that are at Arons with that global. Playgroup and Berg junker. Obviously leading edge erosion is still a problem. There hasn’t been a universal solution, but it does look like different parts of the world have different kinds of raindrops and maybe it’s a temperature aspect. Also, it’s definitely gonna be colder in Northern Europe and. Typically in Australia. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Another thing we struggle with in Australia is the UV here is so much more intense and so like a lot of things just don’t stay put or stay intact regardless of erosion. You, if the adhesive degrades under you. UV of salt, then yeah, things don’t last because of that. So I would really love to see more erosion test facilities doing things like temperature cycling. That’s another thing. You get really hot, really cold temperatures here, much more than in Europe where it’s less diagonal variation. Yeah, put a UV lamp in your facility and they look after us in Australia. Allen Hall: GTU has a new rain RO facility in Ross Gilda. That facility, they can change the temperature of the water. It’s one of the variables they added to their rain erosion test facility, which plays into the result. I’m really curious about that because in the rain erosion testing that we have done over a number of years now, 15 plus years, you can tell the difference between cold water and warm water. It is noticeable. Rosemary Barnes: Oh, interesting. I think thermal cycling though, is a thing as well. Just even the yeah, the temperature of the blade heating up and cooling down every single day. I think that, that doesn’t help. There’s so much going on. We’ve seen these simple erosion site assessment maps that use like one or two parameters, and even this new study is, similar. Just a couple of things, but it’s like that. You can find some good correlations, but it’s not like there’s a lot of ways to have a bad, there’s only one way to have a good site for erosion, which is to have, not much rain, small droplets, not high wind speeds. Oh, that’s not great for you. Your site in general? No, no dust, no salt water. But any one of those things can be really bad. So it’s yeah, like making a map is really hard. You need to have like a series, I think a series of maps for looking at each parameter. And I don’t think that we have remotely figured out what all the parameters are that affect it, and then the next step is actually the testing for leading edge erosion products for leading edge protection products needs to include all of those parameters, which it currently doesn’t. It’s like basically that they’ll change the speed and the rainfall. The, yeah the speed of the rain, the how this volume of the rain and now we became, so there’s a facility that can change the temperature of the rain, but there are so many more things that we need to include before you can it’s one thing to know. Yeah, like your product will perform under these conditions, but that’s not what in the real world. And nowhere in the world are we seeing leading edge protection perform in the way that the test results suggests that they should, which means it’s just currently wrong. Really need to get more in depth on erosion testing. Joel Saxum: How much money do you think the wind industry has chased or spent testing LEP and trying to figure out this leading edge erosion problem? From grant funding and all these different things. ’cause I constantly see Alan. We were talking about this the other day about. How mu have, how have we not solved leading edge erosion yet we’ve hit this project and that project and this university and that grant funding and this EUDP thing and ORE catapult this. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And the OEMs are putting their own money into it too. They’re not just, waiting around for grant funding. It’s people being. Trying hard. I personally think that they’ve been too, it’s been too Eurocentric. The the research and development and, yeah. My company is too small to embark on a research program, but I’m so confident that we could do much, much better for Australian leading edge protection if we would do a proper test program that represented the, conditions that we actually face in Australia. And that’s that, that’s true, not just for leading edge ion. There’s a whole range of. Things that we would get Australian Wind Farms performing way better if we would, do some of that development here. And I’m sure that Texas or some of the more extreme locations within the US is probably ex exactly the same. And I know you do have some research organizations doing stuff over there, but yeah, I would really love to have a, give me a couple of million dollars and I will, I’ll solve this problem. Allen Hall: Just call RD test systems and they will. Send over one of their latest and greatest rain erosion testers. That’s the way to do it. That test equipment is outstanding. The issue is there’s so many variables that’s the problem, and you have to try to take them one at a time and solve it. And obviously Australia’s different than Northern Europe. It just is and Joel’s pointed out numerous times. It’s not necessarily the water, it’s what’s in the water a lot of times is dirt and debris, which is an abrasive and it changes everything really. Everything. Plus yet on the UV amount of UV in Australia, and I agree with you, Rosemary Australia has aggressive sunlight. It does a lot more damage there than in Denmark. Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health. Today. There’s big news off the shores of New Jersey Environmental Appeals Court Judge Mary Kay Lynch has ruled to remand a cleaner act permit issued to Atlantic Shores offshore wind. Back to the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA filed a motion in February to review the Wind Energy projects, environmental impacts in response to. President Trump’s January memorandum to withdraw offshore wind leases for further review. Now, this setback follows shell’s withdrawal from the Atlantic Shores Project in January where the company reported a roughly $1 billion loss associated with the plan. 2,800 megawatt array off of Long Beach Island and Entine. Now, Phil, this permit. Poll is actually a result of a lawsuit which opened the door for the EPA to pull the permit. You wanna explain the logistics of this? So Phil Totaro: effectively the lawsuit triggered a reevaluation of the the. Way in which the permit review was undertaken, the process that they followed. And what the judge is effectively saying is that there was cause to uh, suggest that the process according to the EPA rules was not. Properly followed. And what that did is it allowed the EPA to pull the permit for a project that, I’m not sure if there was for knowledge of this. And that’s why, ’cause you mentioned Shell pulled out EDF also pulled out, which was the other partner in the project. So it, the project, I don’t know if the project was already dead and they’re just putting a nail in the coffin or these companies pulled out because they felt like. This this ruling wasn’t gonna go their way. But it’s. Concerning considering that, this was a process that was, done in a hurry at the end of, president Biden’s term where a lot of things, EPA reviews, Boeing reviews, a lot of permits were being issued for offshore wind to try and get things going. The assumption being that if they had all those permits in place. They could just get on with business and get to building their projects. But it seems as though that’s not the case. And it, it’s, bad news for Atlantic Shores, which obviously seems dead now. But there’s 19 gigawatts worth of other projects that are still, theoretically in the pipeline that could be built. And we’ll see if they actually get built. Allen Hall: So that permit dealt with air pollutant emissions from the project during the pile driving construction phase, and its impact on the Brittin National Wilderness Area, which is just offshore of the coast of New Jersey. Where they have limitations on air quality degradation. And my comment to Joel before we started the podcast was what kind of air quality pollutants are being emitted during pilot driving besides the ships? Driving the piles. Is there something else that I’m missing here? And would it matter all that much in the big scheme of things? Joel Saxum: There’s two things, right? You have just the simple noise, pollution, right from boom. And some of times you have a little vibration in there, but that’s the only thing that happens there. And you can hear that a long ways away. But that’s not gonna affect anything. I’m not an EPA specialist, I’m not a noise specialist. Maybe we should have Matthew Stead talk about this, but that, simple pounding is one thing, and that seems to be so minimal to me because, regular construction onshore is happening. It’s the guy’s putting a new roof on the house next door, pounding away, sounds like that, but it’s miles away. And the other thing would be just emissions from the vessels that are out there. However, when you’re ve have a vessel out there for construction, it’s gonna be either one jack or one. A steady vessel doing pile driving, one work vessel and maybe a CTV or maybe a work boat. So maybe three vessels out there, max. And if you’re managing it with a helicopter, maybe a helicopter. But it seems to me here that this is a, just a kind of a grab at some. Process problem and not an actual problem because it doesn’t seem like that’s an actual problem to me and either of these noise emission things. Allen Hall: I actually looked this up, Joel. It says the Brier wilderness area. Is a class one air quality area within the refuge, which protects it from manmade air pollution. And that means that they’re monitoring the air at that site all the time. Us Fish and Wildlife Surface is doing the monitoring there. But I assume there’s ships and all kinds of things just rolling right by there for emissions. Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s what it says. Okay, so tell ’em. They tell ’em they can’t have the vessel idled up when the wind is blowing east to west. Allen Hall: That’s the weird part. What would the report have said that would, or what would’ve been in the report that was an error that would say there’s a lot of human made pollution landing on entine. That, that doesn’t even make a lot of sense to me. Rosemary Barnes: That’s gotta be shipping emissions. It’s not like it’s bringing up dust that escapes the earth’s, the, sorry, the water’s surface. How far is the wind site Phil Totaro: from Entine? It’s a couple of miles. Yeah, it’s, no, it’s at least 10. If it’s in the shelf, there are 12 if it’s in the outer continental shelf. But the look folks the real issue here. Is that this is what is likely to start happening more and more with any of the remaining wind farms, even if they’re under construction. Before, in, in Biden’s term, there were matters that were in the courts and they were getting dismissed because, the judges were, this isn’t supposed to happen, but the judges were being, told what to do. The judge is theoretically supposed to rule independently, we all know how the system works. So nowadays they are, and the Justice Department used to be providing support to the defendants of all these kind of lawsuits. There have been lawsuits on vineyard, wind, there have been lawsuits on revolution on, pick every project you can name, and there’s been a lawsuit against it from one party or another. Whether it’s Save the Whales or EPA or whatever. And the bottom line here is that this is what’s gonna be happening now in the new world order that we find ourselves in. They are gonna nitpick any stupid little thing in all of these little lawsuits that we’re getting tossed out before are gonna have legs. Now Rosemary Barnes: I’ve I’ve heard. Rumors that it’s potentially even more widespread than that, and not just offshore and things that are still working on permits, maybe projects that are already under construction. Like any kind of government involvement that you need, whether it’s just I don’t know, potentially even something as simple as you need a road closure to get some stuff on site. That government departments are just simply not looking at those things. And so they just can’t progress. And I have heard that some developers considering maybe already have that, just putting a pause on anything that’s not started, pause it for four years so that, ’cause the worst thing is to get partway through a project and not be able to finish it. Because then it’s gonna. It cost you more to restart it than it would be to just, pause it at the start. At least you can, start again from a clean slate and get everything done at once. So I think that, yeah, even though, like on the first blush of it, like there weren’t any executive orders or any, legislation that’s been passed that has. On the face of it affected onshore wind all that much. I think that people are starting to realize that it could really slow that down as well. Phil Totaro: Yeah, the only, so far, the only one that executive order that was passed for onshore was no renewable energy development on federal lands. That’s only affecting out of 32 or so gigawatts of wind energy in the. Realistic project pipeline I’ll call it the stuff that’s actually likely to get built, that’s only gonna affect about six or seven gigawatts. It’s not an insubstantial percentage, but, at the end of the day, again it’s delaying things. It’s not totally stopping them. But it’s concerning. In that offshore is much more expensive to develop, much more, time consuming to develop and whereas it was already a klugy process before, this is making it, a hundred times worse. Joel Saxum: This week’s wind Farm of the week is the Dermot Wind Farm, which is owned by Osted, also called the Amazon Wind Farm. So this thing was commissioned back in 2017 and commissioned in a special way. Jeff Bezos actually climbed to the top of a wind turbine and broke a bottle of champagne Oh. On one of the the attachment points up top. So he I’m hoping he was. Climb, safe, trained and everything to be up there as well. But there was 110 GE 2.31 16 machines out there. It’s a 253 megawatt wind farm, and one of the focuses of this wind farm is a focus that if you pay attention to the energy markets, you’ve heard lately, there hasn’t been a huge spike in demand in energy in the United States. In the last 20, 30 years. But now just in the last few and looking forward because of data centers and all these different things there, there is this forecasted spike of energy wanted. So thinking a little bit ahead of time, Amazon back in 2017 started investing in a lot of renewable energy projects. So this one is one of their 600 renewable energy projects across the globe right now. Which is a pretty freaking large number. So this project has provided over $3 million in landowner payments and property taxes. And so it gives back to the local communities enough to power 74,000 homes annually. And it’s out by Abilene, Texas. So a little bit more about what Amazon is doing in the renewable energy space is they’ve invested over $12.6 billion. Since 2014 in renewable energies. So the Dermot Wind Farm owned by Sted out in the central part of Texas. You are our wind farm of the week. I. Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. And 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 or substack weekly newsletter and register for that Sky Specs webinar. You won’t wanna miss it. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

CIP achieves financial closure for an offshore wind project in Taiwan and the UK may shift towards a domestic offshore wind supply chain. GE Vernova plans to equip two RWE farms in Texas, and Masdar will potentially acquire TotalEnergies’ renewable assets in Portugal. Register for the start of our webinar series with SkySpecs! Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Newsflash, industry News Lightning fast. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Starting off the week, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has secured financial close on the 495 megawatt Fengmiao offshore wind project off Taiwan’s Coast. This Marks CIP’s third offshore wind project in Taiwan and is the first of Taiwan’s round three projects to start construction. The project secured approximately $3.1 billion in financing from 27 banks with debt partially guaranteed by export credit agencies. Now Vestas will supply 33 of its latest 15 megawatt turbines for the projects and construction will finish by late 2027 with six corporate customers already signed for long-term power purchase agreements covering its entire capacity. Dan McGrail Interim, CEO of Britain’s new state owned GB Energy believes the UK should challenge oversee renewable energy companies by exporting its expertise globally. McGrail sees floating offshore wind as a huge opportunity for British technology leveraging existing supply chains from the oil and gas industry. He aims to shift focus from importing parts to building them domestically, which could create an export industry over time. GE Vernova will equip two RWE farms in Texas with over 100 turbines with deliveries beginning later this year. The projects will help RWE surpass one gigawatt of rebuilt and repowered wind capacity across the US and generate enough electricity to power approximately 85,000 Texas homes and businesses annually. Boosting US content. Then the sales for the project will be manufactured at GE Vernova’s Florida facility, which employs about 20% Veterans. RWE’s Chief Operating Officer emphasized their commitment to American energy production and strengthening domestic manufacturing and supply chains. GE Vernova’s Entre Wind Division currently has a total installed base of 56,000 turbines worldwide with nearly 120 gigawatts of installed capacity. Abu Dhabi’s Masdar is considering acquiring a stake and total energy’s Portuguese renewable energy assets. The deal will likely be through SATA yield. The Green Energy Company masar purchased from Brookfield last year. This would add to MAs dollar’s growing European portfolio, which includes recent acquisitions in Spain and Greece as the company works towards its global target of 100 gigawatts by 2030. Total Energy is currently has about 600 megawatts of installed renewable capacity in Portugal, mostly higher valued wind power assets. Total energy. CEO previously mentioned plans to divest around two gigawatts annually as part of portfolio consolidation. And that wraps up our wind industry headlines from Monday, March 24th. The conversation continues tomorrow on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, where we’ll explore even more insights shaping the future of renewable energy. And don’t forget to join our exclusive live webinar this Wednesday featuring Sky Specs New CEO Dave Roberts. He’ll be sharing his roadmap for the company’s exciting future. All access details are awaiting for you in the show notes.

Martin Kristelijn, the co-founder of IntoMachines, discusses innovative tools designed to make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and less expensive. The conversation highlights the challenges of manually tensioning thousands of bolts, the advantages of automated bolt tensioning for wind turbines, and the development of a weightless, more efficient tensioning system. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: With wind turbines growing larger and bolts getting bigger, the industry needs smarter ways to handle critical bolted connections. This week we speak with Martin Kristelijn co-founder of IntoMachines. IntoMachines has developed unique tools that make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and much less expensive. Welcome to Uptime, spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Martin, welcome to. To the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Martin Kristelijn: Thank you. Glad to be here. Allen Hall: Martin, there’s a big problem out in the field that we have a lot of bolts to tension and not a lot of people to go do it. Plus I think as you and I had discussed previously, the bolt sizers are getting much bigger. Everything is becoming heavier and just being very difficult to do into machines changes all that. But let’s talk about the problem first. What are you seeing on factory lines and out in service as people try to tension bolts. Martin Kristelijn: Past couple of months, year, I would say we spoke to a lot of people visited wind turbines, went in the field, see our technicians tighten the bolts also to the factories, so Elle production you name it. And well, the, we kept on keeping getting the same feedback over and over. That they would like to speed up the bolting process and also that they would like to increase the quality, so to prevent any loose bolts or forgotten bolts. That was really the starting point for us. We started to focus on bolt tensioning, to automate it, to speed it up, and to increase the quality. Allen Hall: So tensioning is the way going forward. A lot of of us remember torquing as being the preferred method to tighten bolts, but tensioning is now the way you wanna describe why that is? Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, still it depends on who you ask, but the main objective for everyone usually is to get a maintenance free building connection, right? That you keep the maintenance cost as low as possible. So that’s also our goal. And bolt tensioning for us is the most yeah. Convenient way forward to reach that. Allen Hall: It’s the most consistent way too, right? Is that with torquing, we really don’t know what the preload is on the bolt. That’s why engineers are preferring tension tools instead of torquing tools now. Martin Kristelijn: Exactly. So with torquing you have a friction coefficient you need to take into account. That’s an unpredictable. Value parameter. So you would like to get rid of that. And you do that by just grabbing the bolt itself, apply hydraulic pressure and stretch the bolt directly. And then you have your hydraulic pressure times the surface of your tension to, and that gives you exactly the the preload in your bolt and you tighten the nut, release the pressure, and your bolt is perfectly pretense. As simple as that, Allen Hall: right? So that process takes time to do. And if you have a factory worker or a technician doing tensioning to a lot of bolts of which there are thousands on a wind turbine but there’s probably what, a couple hundred that are critical. Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So around, give or take, 600 bolts critical bolted connections in a wind turbine. And imagine that I said tightening the nut by hand. You have a wrench wrenching each of those 600 bolts. Then you have your pull bar. You need to thread that onto your bolt as well, or bolt stop bolt. Yeah, I can tell you that you don’t want to do that all day by hand. Allen Hall: So how does that work right now in, in the factories? If they’re doing it by hand? Is it are they changing people at that station because it just has to wear you out? Those bolts are big and that technique of tensioning manually is tiresome, right? Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, exactly. We visited some factories as well and also the installation sites. And the feedback we got is that people they hurt their arm. And not after the 10 bolt, not after the a hundred bolt maybe. But after a thousand volts your arm really starts to hurt. And yeah. That’s not good for your workforce, right? People need to be happy they need to be coming to work with a smile and we try to, to accomplish that by automating this this job. Allen Hall: Joel, if I had a tension a thousand bolts a day on Monday, I don’t, not sure. I would be going back on Tuesday, would you? Joel Saxum: No. And I think of that on Saturday and Sunday. I’m definitely trying to get as much rest as possible. But if you, but you make this a little bit more, think about the complication here is because as the global fleet. Grows. Okay. The conversation we just had was about in the factory in a controlled setting. That’s one thing, right? Like you can have these into machines like it, it’s a good size tool. There’s a lot of weight there. There’s, you have the classical tensioning tools, like that’s. It’s all hydraulic, like there’s a lot of things, but it’s controlled because you’re in a factory, at least you have decent conditions to work in. Even now, see the fleet grow and see what the, the projections are for how many wind turbines are gonna be installed over the next 2, 5, 10, 20 years globally. This is a problem that you guys are solving for people in the field in a big way, and that’s the important part for me, when I talk to technicians and I talk to people in the field. You’re lugging this equipment, it’s the classical equipment. You’re lugging it up there and you’re doing this and it’s strain and drain on the body. And then we know that’s when the body gets worn down, then the mind gets worn down and that’s when HSE in incidents happen and we’re trying to reduce all of those things. That’s what you guys are working on. When someone goes into the field with this kit what are you guys seeing for the change in the operators or the change in the technicians? Are they, do they have a big smile on their face when they see something like this? Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. They, at least when we see them with our stuff in their hands, then they smile a lot. Yes. But no the bottom line is that the, this tool says, so for 42 attention tool, you are looking at 1520 kilograms. With some electric motors on it, and that goes up to 50 kilograms or 60 for M 72 tensioner. Allen Hall: That’s a hundred pounds Joel in America. That’s a very heavy tool. Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So you need to carry that along, let’s say 150 bolts in a flinch, and that’s one flange. Exactly. Yeah. Joel Saxum: Yeah. And so like you, you go to an onshore turbine, say even your flange bolts, you have bolts on the foundation, then you have. A lot of times, four to five tower sections, those all have to be bolted together. Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Joel Saxum: Yeah. And now, and then you talk up in the nelle and you’re, you have the blade bolts that have to get attention and all kinds of things. So like you said, 600 different connections that need to be worked on. So that was Martin Kristelijn: Let’s say our starting point heavy tooling. And we thought, okay, how can we make these tools weightless for the operators and move them fast from one ball to the other? Because that’s also a thing you need to move it fast from one bolt to the other to complete your 150 bolts in time because in the end before dark, you want to go home, you need to finish the bolt bolts. So what we did there is we designed a very specific lift trolley. It’s very low and compact, very lightweight as well. So you should have let’s say less problems with passing obstacles. For example, you have the stairs in the wind turbine and due to our low trolley design, it usually should go underneath the stairs. So you’re not bothered by that. And it makes attention to weightless. If you combine. That literally with the automated tensioning tool we made. Yeah. Then you have an unbeatable system. Allen Hall: Yeah. So that’s what in two machines has done, and your team over there are mechanical geniuses. You actually make the tension tool quasi weightless by using mechanical means. So you’ve designed. Very smart systems tools in which the tension tool adapts into to make it so much easier to do. And we’re gonna put some of these tensioning tool improvement devices, I’ll call them on the YouTube version so people can see them. But the simplest version of this is the trolley. And maybe Martin, you can describe what this thing is because. It’s a little hard to see. We’ll put it on YouTube, obviously. But for those listening, what does the trolley do in terms of the tensioning unit? Martin Kristelijn: First of all it needs to operate in a very r rugged environment as a wind turbine. So it needs to be super, super simple. It needs to be super robust and easy to maintain. We took, design. It’s made of steel, galvanized steel, so you can hit it with a hammer and it should still work. Then we made some nice interface brackets that you can just hang your attention to in the trolley. Okay, and we have just a very simple gas spring, which compensates the weight of the tension tool. Allen Hall: Okay? So now when you’re putting together tower sections, if you have this trolley that’s holding the tension tool, and so the technician is just using almost no force to lift the tension tool, make the tension tool do its thing and move it to the next bolt. That I’ve watched that tool on your LinkedIn page, it is quite remarkable how fast that tool is. Just by making it more mobile and taking some of the weight away from the technician, that technician is much more productive. Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. If you have the trolley and then you have our smart tensioning system it is motorized. So the tension tool comes from our partner Tension Pro. They’re very good at making tension tools. So we partnered up with them and we said, Hey, let’s make a kick ass product which we call the quantum Smart Tensioner. So they are very good at making tensioners. We are very good in developing user-friendly software and mechatronics. So electric motors put that all together in the quantum system. And the basis for the quantum system, again, is a super robust system. Easy to maintain, easy to operate, and it yeah, no bells and whistles, let’s say. And so you don’t want it to break down. It needs to be a usable for practical people. Let’s say, Ellen, if I take you in a wind turbine, I want to give you our quantum system. I will give you a 15 minute explanation, and then it’s so easy to operate that you can do the bolting works for us. Allen Hall: Wow, that’s impressive because I’m probably not very good at that job. Martin, that Martin, that’s a big task you just took on. But I have watched it. I’ve watched your videos and I do think I could do it. Martin Kristelijn: I think so too, because I really believe in our content. Quantum system, so I really think you could do it for us. Allen Hall: That tool is universal. It can be used in any tower, essentially anywhere. To speed up that process to get bolts, tensioned, and have all the quality data that you need, and to know that tower section has been properly installed now. I’ve seen some more advancements on LinkedIn. I saw this little robot that was crawling around doing bolt tensioning, and it just blew my mind and that’s why I reached out to you like, whoa, okay, this is life altering for people. You wanna explain what that next generation is from the trolley up to this sort of crawling robot tensioning tool? Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. So our vision for the bold tensioning markets is that we want to speed up the process. To tension all those bolts quicker for the coming turbines and also to prevent any loose bolts. You do that by documenting each bolted connection. So we register the pressure, we register the nut angle, we register at the nut torque, we register the boat number. All that stuff is nicely registered in a A PDF document. However if you can speed it up even more by using a robotic system, that’s our end goal. At the moment we are developing a autonomous bolt tensioning robot for blade bolts. So it’s it’s working in an cell factory there. It’s just crawling around the hip. Tensioning all the bolts one by one. And then we develop we develop the quantum system in such a way that for the near future, let’s say yeah, coming year you can have the quantum system with a literally, and then a technician will operate it. But that same quantum smart tensioner in one year, if we’ve launched the robot for, field usage. You can place that same quantum smart tensioner inside our robot and have a fully automated and autonomous bolt tensioning system. Joel Saxum: I think an important thing to touch on here, Martin, is what the developments that you guys are doing. We, when we said it earlier you’re experts in software, me and mechatronics. I’ve been around the robotics industry in wind, in oil and gas and sub-C, oil and gas. The best pieces of kit that come out that do that automated process or automate a task are ones like exactly like in two machines has created here that are robust and simple to operate. There’s way too many tools out there that require a software engineer to be on site to do these things, right? Like when autonomous drones first came out for inspections in turbines. You would see three people at the base of the turbine and two of those people were literally software engineers, like going through code and fixing things and people got a little bit turned off by ’em ah, I can’t be doing this. Or, I’ve been on sub c oil and gas projects before where you gotta. Fly an ROV technician, a mechatronics expert in from Norway for $2,500 a day to solve this problem that’s happening in Nigeria. Like you can’t have that, like that. That is a barrier to entry for robotics in this space. You guys have taken the leap past that you’ve made it simple. You’ve made it robust, you’ve made it tough. You’ve made it so that people can operate these things without having a, a year long training course, and that you guys don’t have to be there to do it for them. So I think that’s one of the most important things to get across here for people that are listening, is if you want to make your operations more efficient in the field, if you want to have good data tracking for the tension that you’ve done. Into machines has done the hard work, they’ve done the legwork to get to that stage. So I guess a question for you then, Martin, is what does it look like? What’s your track record in the field? How many of these things, how many bolts have you guys tensioned? What does it look like? Martin Kristelijn: I have to say the product has launched quite recently. We have several customers that say who are using the system. And the feedback we get back from them is indeed yeah, compared to what they had is that it’s faster and easier to operate, but also that we and that’s very difficult to have to say that we don’t have a lot of sensors. We don’t have difficult software. So it’s all straightforward to operate what I said with 15 minutes, I can teach Alan how to tension a flinch altogether with the quantum system. Yeah we really went back to basic. We stripped all the unnecessary stuff from it, which could break down. We took it off and only the bare minimum we kept such that the guys in the field that they need to use it every day, that they’re also happy to use it. And indeed they don’t need to read the user manual every day before they start a job. That’s not what we want. Allen Hall: You must be the technician’s best friend after they use that tool for a day or two. They must love into machines. Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Yeah. We, yeah, actually we always say what I said, we always go go away with the smile from our turbines and the guys trying our our equipment as well. So that’s always really good feedback. Joel Saxum: I think there’s something to be said there too for the global problem that we have, I in, in the wind world is technician shortage, right? And so we’ve talked to Alan and I’ve talked to quite a few people working in this space. How do we tackle this problem? How can we get more training, get more people in here? One of the things that we can ensure that we can do is make it easier for the technicians in the field to get up to speed fast, to be able to get a task done without having to have five years of experience to figure out how to do it. So now you can bring someone that’s fairly green to the industry. They’ve got their safety certifications. They know what they’re doing. They know their way around a turbine, but now they can be. The torque or the, I would say the torque tensioning technician, but I’ll say the tensioning tech technician. But they can do it in a relatively short amount of time, so that helps the overall industry and or, an ISP or an EPC contract or whatever it is, scale their workforce up faster to get more projects done. With high quality at speed, and that’s what we want. That’s the, you guys are doing, you’re doing the hard work, the heavy lifting for the industry. Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. That was for us also one key factor to make this thing work. Because what I said, we are a relatively new player into machines is now five years old. And yeah, we set together with tension problem. We said, okay, in order to make this work. It’s you should be operated, be able to operate it within that 15 minutes and maybe, okay, maybe it takes you half an hour, but then you really are up to speed with the system and you yeah you just can go for it. So speed is really really important for us. Allen Hall: So where is in two machines at, on the planet at the moment? I know you’re all over Europe. Are you in the States? Are you in Australia or are you in South America? Martin Kristelijn: Our office is based in the Netherlands. So that, that’s Europe. Then we have some systems in Europe itself. We have some systems in Asia, and we’re now looking in looking for the US So we have some, some talks there to to launch the product. Allen Hall: I could see a lot of opportunity in the United States, and Joel and I have been to some of those places and watched bolts being assembled manually. It just seemed like an arduous process. And because I, I think a lot of operators have not seen you in, a lot of technicians haven’t seen you. They need to get to your website and check this out. Where do they go? Martin Kristelijn: The first thing they go is to into machines.com. That I see some product videos of us had to get a feel of how it looks, how it works, the products. So the lift trolleys the quantum system, quantum Smart Tensioner, as well as the fully autonomous tensioning robot. And we have a very active LinkedIn page into machines where you can see also videos inside wind turbines where we have the trolleys. The lift rolls and also the robots jumping around on a flinch. So that’s that’s the stuff you want to see. Allen Hall: Martin, if I wanna demo one of your robotic assistants and make tensioning so much easier, how do I do that? Can I get my hands on the tool to try it out? Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, you can. So the first thing you do or you can do is send us an email sales@intomachines.com. Then we we’ll arrange, a demo for you and the second is send us a DM on the link LinkedIn page. Then we we’ll also organize a demo and an online call to answer all the questions. Allen Hall: And once you try it, you’re going to want to buy it because that tool is gonna save you a tremendous amount of time. And so you need to check out into machines.com if you wanna see all the wonderful things that Martin and his team has designed. Martin, you’re always coming up with really cool ideas and putting ’em into action and saving the wind industry. Tremendous amount of labor and time and effort in making the job simpler, which is what we need to do. So congratulations, really good tools. Martin Kristelijn: Thank you very much for that. Allen Hall: And thanks for being on the podcast. We love having you on. Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, I also loved speaking to you about about these topics. Really nice.

We discuss the recent acquisition of Innergex by CDPQ for $3.6 billion, highlighting its implications on the wind industry. We also delve into LM Wind Power producing blades for ENERCON from its factory in Turkey and feature the Buffalo Mountain Wind Farm, a unique project on a reclaimed coal mine in Tennessee. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Big news, Innergex Renewable Energy has announced that it will be acquired by CDPQ. A major community and pension fund manager for about $13 and 75 cents per share. I’ve seen a couple different numbers about that. This transaction represents a total enterprise value of approximately 3.6 billion US dollars, and marks a really a substantial consolidation in the wind industry. The deal offers about a 40% premium on interjects closing share. Of a couple months ago. So that’s a pretty good premium that CDPQ put on interjects value. And now Phil, this is part of a larger play of a lot of consolidation. This one in particular, interject is going to become a private company after this acquisition. Why? Phil Totaro: It, that’s an interesting question because normally when a company gets taken private by a large institutional investor, it’s to restructure. I am not sure that. Innergex needs that much restructuring per se. It’s not like they’ve got a huge team to begin with. But a reasonably competent team in terms of the pedigree of their developments, obviously in Canada and throughout Europe as well. And they’ve been trying to venture off and dip their toe in other markets as well. The reality of this is that it, it’s a fantastic thing for CDPQ to strengthen their position and it comes at a point in time when a lot of these Canadian pension funds are looking at the profitability and the returns that they’re seeing on their investments globally, including the US right now with all the trade tensions and everything we’ve got. And I think you’re gonna see more of these Canadian. Pension funds and investors pulling back and doing things that are ignoring the US at this point. Looking at deals in Canada, looking at deals in Europe, looking at deals in Southeast Asia and South America for that matter. Joel Saxum: I think it makes sense for me like CDPQ keeping their Canadian money mostly in Canada. However, I know Innergex has a hand small handful of wind farms in the United States as well. Did you see a reality where just because of geopolitical reasons, they might just. Sell those couple of wind farms off. Phil Totaro: Let’s put it this way, Brookfield’s not going anywhere and they’re always on the hunt for, good assets. But there’s other people that could want to gobble up wind assets right now, especially if, the assets that Enerex owns in the US they’re not quite ready for repowering yet. But maybe that’s part of the play. Joel Saxum: Moving forward. Yeah, I know, like you said, you mentioned Brookfield. Brookfield, same thing. We’re talking about market consolidation. They just bought National Grid renewables not too long ago, and I know National Grid renewables in the States. A couple, A handful of wind farms and some solar assets, some other things. So yes, continuing to see that trend. Allen Hall: I still wonder though if taking them private is a better long-term play. Because of the turbulence that’s gonna happen over the next couple of years. It gets rid of all the shareholder complaints and the back and forth and where to save money and whatnot. If you’re really trying to look for a longer play, doesn’t taking renewable assets, especially large scale renewable assets off the public markets, the better long-term play. I just think that. There’s so much turbulence in renewable energy, and it’s getting bashed so much that the value was still there, but in the public eye, it’s like it doesn’t have as much value. But when you’re producing power and you’re delivering it and getting paid, you’re still making money. Phil Totaro: Maybe to answer that question. I think again, the reason that you would take something private is if you wanna avoid the scrutiny in general. And the reason to wanna avoid the scrutiny at this point is partly what you just described, but I think mainly if you’re looking to own and operate for a longer term, this is something, and look, CDPQ is putting money into something that they’re not making a short-term play themselves either. This isn’t just, Hey, let’s buy Inex to flip it in a year and a half or something. They’re, if they’re. Going in like they did with a minority stake that they’ve got in energy or any other investments that they’ve got and partnerships they’ve got around the world on individual projects or with development and owner operator companies then, they’re very deliberate about what they’ve done. So again, taking it private. To me feels like they want to, just go about their business for the time being. Allen Hall: Would the Canadian US tariff exchanges influence that decision Phil Totaro: A little bit. I. Not necessarily a take private deal specifically, but you’ve got a scenario where, again, there, the Canadian pension funds and institutional investors, which is also gonna include, the likes of CDPQ and Brookfield. They are going to make it a point to de-emphasize investments in the US for the time being, because there’s, it’s, and it’s really not even, ’cause look, we talked about this on the show before. If we end up in a recession and interest rates end up coming down, that’s actually really good for investors because they wanna plow money in when the cost of money’s cheap, if interest rates are low. But the reality of it is we’re not quite there yet. We’re not, all the way into a recession yet there’s, everybody’s still on the fence. The what they’re, what everyone’s trying to avoid right now is the chaos that’s ensuing from the uncertainty around. The tariffs that are either in place, not in place, now they’re in place again. We had Ontario trying to impose tariffs on the energy exports. Now they’re not, because there was a conversation with the commerce department. So I, who knows what’s gonna happen. This is the problem. Nobody knows what the hell’s gonna happen tomorrow. So how the hell can you plan financially? Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. EOLOGIX-PING sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks. EOLOGIX-PING has you covered. The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit EOLOGIX-PING.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. LM Windpower has announced an extension of its partnership with Evolv. Company’s Intercon leading wind turbine provider, obviously. Through a new contract that’ll supply LM 78.3 meter blades for intercom’s, E one 60, EP five, E two wind turbines. This, these blades are gonna be manufactured over in Turkey at the end of this year and it. It seems like LM is moving away from manufacturing GE equipment to picking up some work for other manufacturers. I, we’ve been noticing this trend for several months now. It does seem like this alliance falls into that bucket of maybe LM is moving on a little bit, but Turkey, the thing about this is LM getting work in Turkey because it did seem like a lot of. Companies were starting to pull out a Turkey. Intercon is starting to fill the void. Isn’t that what it looks like, Phil? Phil Totaro: Yes. Although this is slightly confusing. ’cause if you remember last year they were talking about laying everybody off in Turkey at LM and shutting the whole factory because I thought Intercon was working with TPI, who also has a facility there on the manufacturing of blades. So did something happen? And if so, what? I don’t think we know. But also this, this deal, while it’s obviously not necessarily bad news for lm, keep in mind there’s only five or so gigawatts of order book for these intercon turbines. That’s specific model of turbine. So it’s not like this is game changing for lm and it’s not oh, this is gonna save the company, it’ll keep a factory in Turkey operational for. 18 months while they produce these things. And then after that, I don’t know what happens. ’cause intercom’s not been like the strongest in terms of their global sales lately. So we’ll see. Joel Saxum: Yeah. So Rosemary, you worked at lm as part of some special projects. Of course you had one that was your general remit, but when things came through the door from other manufacturers of turbines, intercon being one of ’em, Intercon builds the turbine itself. They don’t build their own blades. How was that handled within lm? Do you, did you have any experience with that? Rosemary Barnes: So when I started at lm, there was nothing but other companies blades, right? LM Wind Power didn’t make turbines and so the blades they made were exclusively for other manufacturers to put another manufacturers turbines. And then a couple of years. Into my time at lm, I think must have been about 2018 or something. They got bought by ge who had been one of their main customers, one of the biggest customers. And wanted to, reduce some of the supply chain uncertainty by bringing that in-house. And at the time there was lots and lots of reassurances of, we wouldn’t have paid so much for the company if we didn’t want you to still be making blades for other customers, and nothing’s gonna change there. There was a lot of effort put into they call them Chinese walls, right? Where like just because you’re working on one manufacturer’s technology, you just can’t go and work on their competitors and tell them all the, all their secrets and stuff like that. I’d say that they did that as well as they probably could have not perfect. I’m sure. But yeah, as time’s gone on, I think that a lot of the other manufacturers got a little bit didn’t feel super duper comfortable even, with those things in place. There is of course still the worry that you’re just telling your competitor all of yeah, everything they need to know to just copy what you’re doing. I think people have got less keen on it. Yeah, in a sense, like when I left LM it was only a couple of years into the merge and it really, things didn’t feel that different in terms of working for other manufacturers, but I’m sure that five years later it does. And so this is maybe more of a. More of a big deal now, but yeah, to me it’s just the way that every project was. It didn’t make any difference if a blade was to be made for GE versus any of the other manufacturers. Joel Saxum: I know Allen, with some of our work we’ve done with lightning protection in India, we’ve seen Intercon turbines with. LM Blades, and I think we’ve seen Envision turbines with LM blades in India as well, haven’t we? Allen Hall: Yes, we have. Joel Saxum: Definitely. Rosemary Barnes: I think LM made blades for maybe literally every single manufacturer. There were a few that they didn’t make many for. I know Vestas was one that they were continuously chasing and had never. At the time I was working there, they had never really done a lot for vest and were always wanting to, but for the most part, I’m pretty sure that they had at least dabbled with every single OEM and I myself had some meetings at Anacon for yeah, for a deicing a blade that had deicing systems and it was very it was culturally very different to other manufacturers that I had worked with. I worked a lot with ge and. A bit with Siemens Gomesa and just, I just did some introductory meetings at Anacon and it was exactly like you would expect the German engineering stereotype to, exactly like that would tell you. They really wanted things optimized. I’m much more of a, you make things. As good as they need to be and not better because when you make them better, you make them more expensive, you make them take longer, you can often add extra points of failure that you know didn’t need to be there if the feature is a bit unnecessary. Yeah. But when you talk to. Maintenance personnel service teams, they love servicing anacon turbines. I’ve heard it described over and over again as the Mercedes of wind turbines. They say, I’ve never climbed one, but they say that when you get up there, it is like the interior of a, I dunno, luxury yacht or something. Allen Hall: 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 PES wind.com today. Joel Saxum: Isn’t it true with Intercon as well that they’d like, they won’t sell a turbine unless they get the maintenance contract Phil Totaro: in Germany? Yes. I think they’ve had to relent in other countries because again, financiers may not allow that. To, like it’s just, oh, this is way too expensive. ’cause like a lot of OEMs, no matter how much an intercon turbine costs, when they’re also selling the maintenance package, they’re trying to make whatever they feel like they lost on the upfront CapEx and turbine costs up with the long-term service contract. They. It just depends on which market. Definitely in Germany, they, I don’t think they’ll sell a turbine unless it’s their maintenance because they are so well-oiled. And you could probably argue almost all of Western Europe they’re so well-oiled in terms of, I, I heard a story once when I was at Clipper, this would’ve been around 2009, where there was a. Intercon turbine in Germany that had a nelle fire and they literally had a brand new Nelle in 24 hours. They had swapped it, they had been able to swap out a newness cell and had the turbine back up and running within 24 hours of that fire, which is just astonishing. You’re paying for it like Rosie’s talking about, you’re paying for it. Rosemary Barnes: That’s the kind of benefit that you would expect to see when you have OEM service agreement, right? That they have the ability to keep an inventory of spare parts and, nearby and they can just swap stuff out and everything’s very fast, but. We don’t see in Australia where those kind of agreements are very common. We don’t see, we don’t see that kind of preferential treatment, that’s for sure. And then the second thing is that it may be technically the OEMs aren’t requiring that if you buy their turbines, you have to buy their service agreements. I. It’s almost like a, I don’t know, like a strong man kind of sales tactics. Like sure you can, self self support this, self service this, but good luck getting any spare parts for it. Good luck getting any help. If you’ve got a, a warranty claim and they like pressure so much that you have no choice, which to me, like I would rather. That they were just honest, that they’re like, we can’t make a profit on the turbine without the service. So you have to buy the service like that. I would rather know and have it, be honest about it than pretend like you’ve got a choice, but you’re just gonna be, like bullied and yeah, this thuggery to, to force you into using, or they’ll go outta their way to make your life hard. Phil Totaro: And this, frankly, this is also what’s been talked about lately is that with people not being able to get access to spares for some, older. Turbines and older models of blade. There are companies out there that are having the conversation. Do we just reverse engineer, one of these, one of these blades? Do we just buy one and scan it and figure out the arrow profiles and then. We already know how to manufacture a blade of that style anyway, so we’re just gonna do our own version. And there are OEMs that are discussing that literally right now because they wanna be able to sell spare parts. Basically, and that’s probably extends beyond blades, but they wanna be able to sell spare parts to a market that is thirsty for spare parts. And it’s certainly happening, it’s conversations that are happening in the us but I could imagine it’s something that they would talk about in Australia too, because access to spares down there is also, quite finite and or time consuming to get your hands on. Rosemary Barnes: One of the things, even, yeah back in my early LM days, that was one of the things that I learned early on. ’cause I was shocked at the secrecy and everyone rolled their eyes and said, it’s so dumb anyway, because the big customers, like if they buy hundreds of turbines worth of blades, then they buy an extra, one extra blade and slice it up into, I don’t know a hundred millimeter slices and then they can easily reverse engineer. Maybe they don’t know. Exact materials, although I’m sure that it wouldn’t be too hard to do that either. Like you’re not gonna get a hundred percent of the way there. But I do think you could get like 95% of the way there and, do your own engineering on top to, do the analysis to, to make sure it’s okay. So that, that’s why I think that the excessive secret is. Secrecy is silly because you send the you sell the product, you’re not in control of it anymore. Once it’s, left you, then why is it impossible to get from the OEM? Just like a simple line drawing that tells you where within the blade the lightning cable goes for instance, there’s just no reason for them to be um, like just to have their white knuckled grip on the, those drawings that they can’t even share. Basic information like that, that you need to use their product properly when all you need to do is just yeah, you don’t even need to buy a spam, just wait till you’ve you’ve got a failure and okay, we’re not scrapping this blade, we’re slicing it. And then you’ll get all the information you need. And, but with a harm drip relationship between customer and supplier, it doesn’t I don’t feel the need to make such an adversarial relationship over that. Joel Saxum: The Wind Farm of the week this week is inspired by our A-C-P-O-M-S trip last week to Nashville. And it is one of the only wind farms within the state of Tennessee. It’s called the Buffalo Mountain Wind Farm. It’s an old one. It’s been around for a long time. Started in October of 2000, so it’s in Anderson County, Tennessee, and it was the home of the first commercial wind generation facility in the southeastern United States. It’s owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority TVA, which is also the nation’s largest public power company, which I did not know. They started by building three turbines up on top of a, former strip coal mine. So these were 660 kilowatt turbines. And they powered about a four, 400 homes. But then they expanded the wind farm in 2004 after it was successful to have 15 turbines. As of April, 2003, they’ve had 15 turbines and they’re producing about 9,500 megawatt hours of electricity per year. The cool thing about this, like I was saying though, is this, is, this wind farm is located at the top. Of an abandoned or backfilled reclaimed coal mine. So the Coal Creek Mining Company was a part of this thing and it was a part of TVA’s Green Switch program. So this is using a, an formerly operated strip mine in Tennessee to produce renewable green energy with a 29 megawatt wind farm. And energy works with TVA to run it. So the Buffalo Mountain Wind Farm. In Tennessee, you are the Wind Farm of the week. Allen Hall: That’s gonna 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 or weekly substack newsletter and subscribe to engineering with Rosie because she’s going to hit 100,000 subscribers sometime over the next week or two. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.