The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Lene Hellstern, director of engineering at PEAK Wind, discusses the critical importance of thorough technical, commercial, and financial due diligence before investing in wind farm projects. She shares insights from her 24 years of experience on how developers can avoid common pitfalls, manage risks, and build better relationships with turbine manufacturers to ensure more accurate power production estimates. 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: Wind farm developers often face a challenging reality. Projected power output doesn’t match actual performance. This gap can mean millions in lost revenue and unexpected challenges. This week we speak with Lene Hellstern director of engineering at PEAK Wind. With over 24 years of experience analyzing wind projects worldwide, Lene brings crucial insights about what developers need to know before investing millions in wind farm development. This is a great interview. Stay tuned. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Lene, welcome to the program. Lene Hellstern: Good to be here. Allen Hall: We’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time. So I’m glad you’re on the podcast because your interaction with developers is remarkable and the process that you go through I think is eye-opening. ’cause I don’t see that process happening at all wind sites and in Europe I think it happens more commonly. But in the United States not so much. Why or when developers not consulting experts like you before, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars. What is the problem with that? Lene Hellstern: It actually, it does happen, but yeah, sometimes it don’t. And yeah, I might not be the right one of asking to ask this question. Maybe you should ask them as well why don’t you do it? But I, so for some it’s it’s budget constraints, right? Because you’re a consultant and then they don’t immediately see, how this money that I’m paying the consultant, how does that convert into a gain? Profit. It could be seen as some loose and money just because they’re asking a lot of questions on technical stuff. It could also be that they are unaware, many are more into the financial part of it. And they have this perception that it’s not needed, the the technical due diligence or the commercial due diligence as the financial, because it’s like buying a car. It is really not like buying a car. So maybe that is, that’s the reason. And that they think, the wind always blows, so it’s gotta go the turbine. But that’s just not how this world. Joel Saxum: Would it be fair to say that some of your customers have felt the pain or they’ve gotten burned and that’s why they’re there? Lene Hellstern: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And you also, we can ask a lot of questions in the process before you buy the turbines. And then we can cover a lot of risks and you can mitigate before everything falls apart. Right. And that gives them a really good advantage, right? They can cover their themself and take all kind of scenarios into consideration, right? And you get a much, if you ask kindly to the OE em, you do get some answers and you get a better collaboration with the OEM. If you conduct these technical due diligence, if you yell and scream at them, it’s not gonna go well. No. Kill with kindness. That’s much better than threats. And I want this, and demand that and just ask, right? Allen Hall: So what are they missing? Generally, when you’re starting a due diligence and you’re walking into a new situation, what are the highlights that a general developer just doesn’t really think about that really needs expertise like yours? Lene Hellstern: Oh, but they don’t know the consequences of the selections they do in this process. There is a not lot of things, technical topics that you need to make a decision on what kind of leading its protection do you want? Of course the OEM is guiding you you also on, on various technical topic, but you also as an owner, have some requirements you want fulfill and sometimes they don’t, they’re not even aware of what is it that is important to me. They don’t know, and then they don’t know the technical consequences that they make. How does that end up, if you, let’s say you, you can some people are not aware that turbines come with a design lifetime, but if you’re smart, you can actually run it longer. But if you prepare early. Then it doesn’t cost so much to run it longer. And if you run the turbines for a longer time, the, your levelized cost of energy goes down. But they don’t know what they need to do technically and what they need to cover. Let’s say, I can give you an example. Without getting too nerdy. Let’s say that you need, you wanna run your wind farm long, but you know that in this area, in order to get that, the authorities are gonna ask for track record. They’re gonna, they wanna see data throughout the years from your control monitoring system. But and you can provide that. Perhaps depending on if you, in the contract, made sure that you actually have access to the control monitoring system and that you can download the data because if you don’t have that in the contract and have that settled upfront, it’s gonna, either you won’t get it because it’s not your property, you haven’t made sure that you get it, or the OEM is gonna ask you for money. So if you have that sorted out before then, if the authorities come and say, Hey, I wanna see the track record for your condition monitoring system, you don’t need to start paying for it. And you don’t need to start digging. And so that, that’s just one example that, where we can help them and say what is it you want? We can also say what things is it you need to take into consideration? Joel Saxum: Steer Lene Hellstern: owner. Joel Saxum: My question originally is, what percentage would you think your due diligence is commercial versus technical? But at the same time, I think that they fit together because the technical side of things will drive the commercial and the contract side of negotiation. Lene Hellstern: Maybe it’s one third each. Financial, commercial, and technical. Joel Saxum: That makes sense. Lene Hellstern: And can you live with on route one? Yeah. But then it’s gonna, you’re gonna be in pain. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I boil it down to say if I was building a house, and I think I can generally as a, this is my, me as a wind farm developer, I’m building a house and I generally know how to do everything. However, I may not be an expert on the foundation, but I tried it myself and now 10 years down the line, I’ve got foundation issues. So while I could have done it, I, there was a lot of things I didn’t know specifically. So that’s when I would call someone like the peak team like you have, because you have the relationships with the OEMs, you know how to deal with them, you know the questions to ask. You’ve been through these processes a ton of times. So you’re that subject matter expert. But can you focus a little bit and tell us how. The difference between having a good relationship with the OE em or a long standing one. ’cause I know when we were talking off air, you were saying, sometimes I walk into me and they go, oh, le, nice to see you. Lene Hellstern: It’s a small world actually. And I’ve been in this industry for 20. Four years soon. I know I don’t look that old, but I have and people, go around and you don’t know when you’re meeting this person and then they sit on another side of the table, right? So always keep good relations. Always ask nicely, give them your arguments because if they understand what you are gonna use the information. For then they are, they might be more willing to give it to you. Let’s take a an example. The failure rates, right? That they really don’t wanna give you that unless they understand what it is you they’re gonna use it for. Or I would use it for and sometimes I tell ’em, okay, can I please have the failure rates for your main components? And they say, go, no. And I go, okay, that’s fine. But the problem here is then I am gonna guess them. And why not get it from you because. Then in my guessing I would, although I am getting pretty good at it, but I would put in, a, a sort of a risk, right? So it, I’m automatically pumping it a little bit up, right? Because I’m not really sure, so I need to cover myself here. Where if I get it from the OM and they can tell me why did you come to this conclusion? And I can see, I can think, okay, this is, they’ve done a pretty good job. They used, the background is God knows how many turbines, so this is, they’ve done their homework. I trust this. Then I, we can use it in our calculations. So that’s that’s and then you don’t get that from them if they don’t trust you and you started yelling and screaming at them. And also, and when we have contract negotiations, you just you tell them, sometimes we don’t reach an agreement, but, all wanna have things signed at the end of the day. And and tell them why is it you are asking these questions instead of just demanding left and right. Why is it a value to you? And then make them, give them the arguments for internally in their organization to make sure that you can actually have the information you need. Allen Hall: Yeah. It, it puts PEAK Wind in a unique position here. And I want to dive into this a little bit deeper. So you’re walking into OEM, big powerful, OEM makes thousands of turbines, has a long service history to developer, which may have a long service history with this. OE em or may not have any history at all with them. They’re, they may be completely new to the industry. That puts you in a really odd position that you have to navigate both of those conditions and try to get to a good conclusion like that. But PEAK Wind is the one to go do this. And because you bring a lot to the table. And I’m just, I think we ought just step back for a minute and explain all the things you do when you’re in those discussions interacting between the OEM and the developer. What does that look like? Lene Hellstern: So if we are in a due diligence, right? We have a of course we don’t almost say we don’t kiss until, right? So there’s a we don’t say, oh yeah, listen, this client, this happened and this client, you don’t do that, right? Then we did. So we don’t do that. But we do know that there, and you can also see that in the press. There are certain platforms that have certain issues, right? And then we go in. And then let’s say that this OEM has had a history of issues with the cooling system. And so then we ask questions on the cooling system in this technical due diligence, sometimes you’re lucky and you go to the OEM and you sit with them in meetings and say, and if you are back lucky. You always give them a list of what would I like as a consultant to hear about here? So they have a chance to prepare, right? If you don’t do that, how on earth can they repair? So then you say, we know that for, that your platform has previous history issues here. So what how, what have you done to improve this? And can we be sure that the turbine is their client is buying, it’s actually taken into consideration, or you’re gonna do a retrofit later down the line? Or because, the OEMs are not stupid, they will try and fix it. They’re good people so they don’t wanna put anything on the market with flaws and errors in it, right? So then they get mad customers. So that’s where we go in and we we try to see how, how big a risk is this now when you buy this platform and sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it is. And then we need to find out what, so what are you gonna do? What can the client here expect? Allen Hall: So you’re trying to understand what the risk is in terms of dollars, I assume, and that, or whatever the currency is at the location, trying to put some numbers to it to say this turbine’s gonna produce this amount of revenue, this turbine’s gonna produce that kind of revenue. Or These are the problems you’re gonna have if it’s lifetime. You need to build that into your models. That has to be a real eye-opener for developers at times. Because I think a lot of times, like you’re saying, like they, they pick a turbine, they get focused on it, and they don’t realize what that means. And I’m wondering do, does an operator. Developer changed the turbine they were gonna buy because of this interaction? Because you’re giving ’em some advice and saying maybe this may not be the right turbine for that space. Lene Hellstern: Yeah. Sometimes they actually have to, right? Because if the site suitability is completely off if it’s overloaded, then either you’re gonna be faced with extreme containment where you’re losing a lot of production and then, the business case just doesn’t hold water. So always have your site suitability. Everybody. I once heard someone say, yeah, there’s no business reason for site suitability. Wow. That particular company now has a whole team of site suitability experts. But yes they learned one of the people that learned. But so you in your, in that if you have a good team you always have, you have a selection of turbines you find suitable for the site. And you have a layout. If you’re smart, you have a layout that fits them all because then you don’t need to wiggle them around all the time, which is not fun because depending on what country you are, wherever you are in the world, there are different permitting procedures, right? So I have destroyed, or I have didn’t destroy, but that was working for an OEM. But I have actually not well, they. They got the wind direction wrong, so they spaced them too tight. Yeah, so I found that there was an offset on the wind direction and I could say. Yeah you gotta do it. I could do a new sign layout out for you. Or you gotta do it yourself because you you spaced the turbines too tight. Then they would get overloaded and then they came back and said, yeah, we’re scrapping the project because the, it’s gonna take us five to eight years to get a new permit. So you could, I, to some degree killed it, but. It wasn’t my fault, I would say. And so you wanna have your spacing, right? And then you can’t know what turbines you’re gonna be buying, right? Because when you do the layout, you are five minutes before. But if you are nice to the OEMs, you’ll know. What’s coming up Allen Hall: when you get into these discussions between the OEM and the developer and the pieces that they’re typically missing are related to operational losses, clearly and loads. Those are two things they haven’t thought about, and they assume that the OEM has ’em all figured out. How do you step into that discussion and try to navigate that? Lene Hellstern: But the OEM you need to have your wind resource assessment done a lot earlier. Be way before you contact OEM and you need to do wind, you need to do production estimates on several different kind of turbines to find out which one is best. You also need to know about site suitability because you, if you are in complex terrain. Like a mountain or you have forestry, then you need to know what does it do to your turbine? How tight can you space it? So you need to have a prop and you always have site limit limitations part. If it’s flat land in Texas, then you have, I. Huge sites, right? And also if you have neighboring wind farms. So all of these things need to be mapped out and then you need to look at what is the design of the turbines. And you don’t actually start contacting your, the OEM before you could do it if you have good connection, but you can also, have a tinder and but you don’t. And OEMs. Calculate, and I’m not saying they’re wrong because then some of them are gonna call me. They calculate when resource assessment on one in one way, and then you would want it in another way. And the reason that the OEMs and without, I’m gonna try not put to put too many words in their mouth for them it is okay if the production is overestimated. Because that for them, that is just, they just put high loads on the turbines and then they are sure that the turbine is sighted for or suitable for site. And also the OEM does not take account all your other losses. They only take the turbine, they. They don’t take grid losses into consideration. They don’t take substation. All of these, the losses you have, they don’t take that into consideration because they sometimes, they don’t often know what it is, right? What they’re selling you, the turbine, they are not selling you the grid access. Joel Saxum: Are they doing that because they’re assuming, basically it’s a horse, a piece, like if you put this turbine in or that turbine in, or that turbine in all of the grid losses and things behind the turbine. Are equal based on what? It doesn’t matter what turbine you install. Is that why they assume that? Or are they just saying this is our technology, so this is the one that we can do? Lene Hellstern: No, it’s just this. Yeah, they’re just, this is what we sell you. This is what we know about. Then they, if they started calculating on all other things, then they’re giving you a free service. Right. That someone else in the market is already, I completely understand it. I’m not criticizing it. They sell a turbine. They sell a power curve on the certain condition conditions, but that’s what they sell. Allen Hall: That’s the number one complaint in the United States though, is that the power that was predicted from the farm. Is higher than what actually happens by a several percentage points. Sometimes I’ve heard double digits. At times it seems completely unreasonable. You should not have double digit errors in that calculation. But is that just because they haven’t done a system assessment to the level like PEAK Wind would do to. Put all your losses in there and tell you what you can deliver to the transmission lines. Lene Hellstern: First of all, nobody is interested in the right numbers because the people that are developing this is only interested in a high number ’cause that is a greater likelihood of success. I used to be very annoyed about this, but after 24 years, I’m like, yeah, so this, they nobody’s interested in the real number, right? They want a high number so they can make sure that this pro project is gonna happen. So also it also internally within the, when I worked a lot with wind resource assessment, I would always get complaints. It would be you, it should be nine meters per second. No, but it’s not. We’ve studied it. We analyzed it, we deducted everything. Your average wind speed is 8.5 just per second. Yeah. But it should be nine. No. Or, why are you giving it such a high grid loss? Because the grid’s gonna be congested. We are, look, we are looking at 25 years. It is already starting. They’re starting to contain, there is no plan of building out the grid anytime soon. It’ll be worse. Your grid containment. So I’m not gonna tell you don’t have anything because you will. Always, I also worked as a developer. You, if you wanna not please anyone, go into wind resource assessment and production estimates, because they’re always gonna be unhappy. Joel Saxum: Okay. So you’re, you guys operate your course at Danish company, but you’ve done projects all over the world in the states, in Europe, offshore, onshore. Great. So do you see a difference in where the demand is coming from your services? Say. Is it partially coming from the fin financiers of the projects? The insurers? Or is it purely developers, or is that geographically dependent? Lene Hellstern: We have a lot of different clients, so we don’t believe in putting all the eggs in one basket, so we have financial institution that are looking to acquire a part of a offshore wind farm somewhere in the world. We have developers. That they are looking they wanna develop projects or they wanna sell them. We have utilities. It, it’s different, right? It’s also some have the the capacity to do this kind of work. Others have already done it, but they want a third pair of eyes, right? So that’s fair enough. And then, we try, we, of course, I’m not, I’m gonna get so hammered if I say we don’t try and please anyone. We always try to please our clients, but we also try to be honest and say, this, the production estimates, you have forgotten this, and that. Or you, there, there are some gray areas here that you’ve gotta make a guess. I, and your guess is a bit too low. If you take these things into consideration so it can be a lot of different clients and that’s the beauty of being a consultant. ’cause I’ve been an OEM, I’ve been a developer, I’ve been working for utility. But as a consultant you, it’s, and then you try and find out what is it they want? What do they need? Um, and then we try and help them and please them. But we also try to be honest so they understand what is they’re venturing into. Then they can make the right, we dress ’em up so they make the right decisions, right? Make them aware of the risks. Allen Hall: So that honesty is why you would get a hold of PEAK Wind because you’d rather know now and get an outside independent assessment before you spent the a hundred, 200, 400, $500 million on a project and then learn afterwards that, lene was right. You want to know that upfront because she does know what she’s talking about. She does. However, that history and PEAK Wind is full of people like that, that know wind and know where the problems lie and can give you that information upfront in a project. And that’s why we, that’s why we had Lene on today is because she’s just so full of knowledge and experience and there’s a lot of developers that don’t have that. And it’s hard to find it lene, how do people get ahold of PEAK Wind and get you on board to help them through this process? Lene Hellstern: You just call us. We’ll help you but we won’t, we won’t always say what you wanna hear, but we will say what you need to hear. Yeah, it’s so you just contact us. We, we are on LinkedIn. We have a webpage. Yeah. Just reach out. Allen Hall: The website is peak-wind.com and PEAK Wind is based in Denmark. Adjust accordingly on your two time zone and the US Exactly. Lene Hellstern: And Korea, Taiwan, uk I forget someone. Yeah. Yeah. Hamburg, Germany. Two places in Denmark. Yeah. Yes. So we are very much global. We are like 211 currently. And it’s not just leaning. Who’s doing this work, but they, I have a whole army of good people behind me helping with this. ’cause I am not the specialist on everything. We pull in the specialist on the, on different topics like whether it’s components. And I am not the specialist on commercial or financial. I’m the director of engineering, so I that’s my area. And then. I pull in my people on the different specialist topics, and we would love to help. Allen Hall: Having those talented people in one place is what you’re paying for, and that’s why PEAK Wind is so important to the industry. So reach out to PEAK Wind and you can just go to the website, it’s PEAK-Wind.com. You can find Lene on LinkedIn and contact her and she’ll get you started. But the honesty is. Part of the equation. And Lene, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Great guest. We love to have you back on, so you’re always welcome to come back onto the podcast. Lene Hellstern: Sure. This was super fun. I just hope somebody got smarter by listening to this.

Allen and Joel discuss their experience at the ACP OMS event in Nashville, Tennessee. Ameren’s High Prairie Wind Farm shuts down all turbines following three turbine collapses. GE Vernova partners with Amazon Web Services on wind projects. And a larger discussion about the way OEMs attempt to solve problems. 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: To start off the week, Joel and I have just completed a couple of days that. ACP OMS in Nashville, Tennessee. And if you don’t know where Nashville is in the center ish of the country, more towards the eastern part than the western part. It’s the same state where it Davey Crockett came from Daniel Boone. Am I right about that, Joel? Sergeant York, Andrew Jackson. Yeah. This is some old names. Yeah, it’s right next to, actually next to North Carolina. So we’re like I don’t know, an hour’s drive from North Carolina with the area that got hit with hurricane a couple of months ago. We’re not very far from it. But Nashville, the event was pretty well populated. I was trying to relate it to the OM and S event that happened in San Diego a year ago. It felt like it was a little bit smaller of an event, Joel, and maybe the attendance was a little bit lower. Joel Saxum: Yeah, the interesting, we were at the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center. It’s absolutely massive. I learned today that it’s the largest like resort convention center without a casino in the entire world. Like it felt like he walked like a mile through the inside of the thing to get to it. Like the conference center. What I think the issue there was, or what it felt like, is it didn’t feel like it was as well attended as it was last year. A lot of ISPs, so a lot of blade repair companies, a lot of service companies, all floating around, not as many operators, but my thought is we’re used to having this thing in San Diego. It was 40 degrees and raining today. And in San Diego every year it’s like 75, 80 degrees. Beautiful. Everything is fantastic. People bring their families and stuff like that. So you hear a lot of people, oh yeah, I can’t grab dinner tonight. I got, my, my wife and kids we’re gonna go do this. When you’re in the San Diego event here, not so much. ’cause it’s, there’s live music that’s great that but it, you’re also 20 minutes from downtown. It is a little bit of a different feel. But yeah the show floor. Of course, Allen and you and I took a couple laps around it and Claire, our producer as well. We took a couple laps around to see what was there. A lot of the same players that we’re used to seeing a lot of the same companies. Nothing super new that stuck out. Nothing groundbreaking, however. A couple cool things, right? We sat down, I think we rec, we recorded a bunch of great material with some of our podcast friends and people new to the podcast at the thing. You’ll hear those in the coming weeks, of course. But we did get to look at the Earth next platform from Earth Wind. That was really cool. Also the Gulf Wind Technology team was there and they were show showcasing their up tower root bushing repair. That was really cool. Other than that, ah, c nnc onsite, right? The ability to do precision machining up tower, which is really neat. But other than that, yeah, kinda lackluster for new technology or really cool new stuff. I don’t know what you thought about that, Allen. Allen Hall: I didn’t see much new there. I motor dock or brought some new stuff in terms of software to analyze wind turbines and that’s always cool. I love when Howard Pinrose. Brings new technology to the market and he’s so gung-ho about it. And as an electrical engineer, I just find his approach to solving problems. Interesting. Arons has some cool stuff, obviously. They always bring the robots and they have a New Rover internal drone inspection robot that has en enhanced lighting for some of these offshore blades. And obviously they’re doing a lot of work with GE Renova at the minute. Yeah. But the operator’s part of it was really non-existent. GE Renova had a really small booth. Vestas also had a booth. Joel Joel Saxum: Vestas had the same so you can see the scale Vestas had the same size booth. We did, yes. Yeah. It was, I would say a lot of ISPs there. We talked to a ton of blade repair companies a lot of people providing services to the industry, which is normally what’s at this event. But a, it seemed to be lacking in the operator, the asset owners, the actual purchasers of services and products, almost like. A pendulum swung and all the operators started to figure out that this is really the event to go to. So there was a ton of them here, but there happened to be less operators. I’m I did hear some really good conversations around the booth business getting done, everybody getting prepared for the upcoming repair, blade repair seasons. Of course. We talked to a couple of ISPs that say this has been their busiest winter that they’ve ever had, which is interesting in the states here that people are starting to kick off a bit earlier in the year to try to get more done. I don’t know if that’s a budget crunch problem or it’s, we’ve just gotten to the point where people are looking for capacity. If you’re looking for blade repair teams that’s the conversation we kept hearing. How many teams do you have? I’ve got 15. 10 of ’em are spoken for, right? If you want to. Be a part of the other five. You better react soon. Allen Hall: Yeah. I would say in general though, don’t you think that this spend was less this year for booze and you didn’t see the big flashy booth? A CP probably had the largest booth this year and the most show type things happening. Of course, they have a couple of speakers that come and all that generally goes on, but you didn’t see a lot at the booze themselves. There were a couple of. Rather interesting parties that happened. We should talk about the town for a minute. The last time I was in Nashville was probably 15 years ago. So the NFL team was here and the Tennessee Titans were here, and Broadway was always there with the live music in the bars. You could always walk along that, but the number of people that are here now is so much more. It’s crazy. The airport. Is probably the nicest airport in the United States and it competes with Copenhagen’s Airport. Couldn’t believe it, right? We saw Louis Hamilton’s Formula one car at the conference center. Like you don’t see those things in America. That doesn’t happen. So what the activity in Nashville economic activity is off the charts. It is so much different than I remember it and I. I guess that’s good for Nashville. People are tending to move to the southeast of the United States at the minute, so my guess is a lot of my fellow compatriots from Massachusetts and New York that are moving down this way based on the license plates that I saw. And that’s good. Obviously you want to go to a city that is vibrant for sort of these trade shows, but I’m not sure early March is the right time to be in Nashville. April would feel like the right kind of weather. And where are we going next year? Joel. Where? Where’s Joel Saxum: A-C-P-O-M-S. So A-C-P-O-M-S. This same conference will be in Orlando next year in Orlando course. Very fun. And so I said, when I said that to someone our friend Armando from Aland, he said, Ooh, I’ll bring my wife and kids. We’ll go to Disneyland and do universal studios and all that. So I think that one could could peak some more interest for some travelers. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a lot closer. If you’re coming from Europe too, you can usually direct flight. To Orlando, which makes life easier. Yeah, that, that’s good. But I still think San Diego is everybody’s number one Joel Saxum: for sure. Yeah. Next, so the next show if you’re. Wondering where you might be able to catch Allen, myself or anybody else will be in Phoenix for a CP up there in late May. 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. So most moon turbines at Ameren’s High Prairie Wind Farm in Missouri remain offline. And if you remember, they had three turbines collapse last year due to some blade failures. Now according to Ameren’s, director of Renewable operations, only about 15 of the turbines have been reactivated while the company continues to perform inspections to identify which units require blade replacement. And when I. Saw a blade replacement. I thought, oh, Rosemary, there’s, we need to understand why they are going to be replacing blades, because usually they would try to repair them. Now, Joel and I did a little bit of investigation because it’s been a while since I’ve followed this story, but there’s about what, 160 V one 20 at this site. 163. There you go. 163 V one twenties at this site, and then a handful of V one twelves. And it looks like the, probably the V one twelves are operating right now. It’s the larger quantity of V one twenties. This is not a great look for wind at the moment, especially with the political activity that is happening when you have a wind farm that’s shut off and you don’t have corrective action after all these months. Something really serious is playing out. What I want to get from the group here is one, what is the likely cause where they wouldn’t be able to turn at least some of the wind turbines on? And second, how do we resolve this quickly? What needs to be done? Do we need us to replace the blades kinda like they’re doing at Vineyard Wind at the moment? Or is this a deeper issue? Phil Totaro: Let’s start with why everything’s turned off. That’s Ameren’s decision to be prudent presumably and not some kind of, regulatory requirement by. Some state or county officials although you could run into that kind of a scenario if you have, repeated damage issues which frankly we were all expecting to come out of the lightning strike on vineyard wind this past week, and we’re still awaiting some kind of word on that. But for them to be losing that kind of revenue. That has to be offset by their perception of the risk that would be associated with having yet another turbine collapse. Potentially if there’s some kind of, serial issue with the blades or something else. And we don’t, unfortunately, we just don’t have enough detail on what actually happened there. Whether it was lightning strikes that were causing the issues or whether it was a manufacturing defect, we don’t know. But yeah, for them to shut off like most of the turbines in their wind farm that’s a huge financial loss for them. That is a decision they would have to make based on. Not wanting to undertake the risk of continuing to operate and have a fourth or a fifth or a sixth turbine collapse this year. Joel Saxum: So right now, then operationally they’ve gotta be, I. Doing inspections, they’ve gotta be putting people in blades, crawlers, external drills. There’s gotta be something that they’re pinpointing on, right? Is it a structural issue? Is it a lightning issue? Something that they’ve gotta be out investigating? And I would under, I would, this is what I would expect. Either an inspection and or a CMS solution for whatever the problem is. But I would expect to see them cascading back online. Hey, we’ve done inspection on Turbine seven, and it seemed clear. Let’s turn it on. Turbine eight. Let’s turn it on. It’s cleared, didn’t, yeah. Yeah, but we haven’t seen that yet. Rosemary Barnes: I’ve got an article here that says that they are bringing them back online. It’s, it is, yeah. An article on k tvo.com. I dunno about the quality of that one. But it’s quoting David Miner’s Aron’s, director of renewable operations, that we had some turbines where the blades came off and the imbalance caused the turbines to fall. So it sounds like, yeah, it’s a, like a root insert problem or, something related to the attachment based on his language doesn’t sound like the blades were snapping or that they were getting struck by lightning and falling off. And then it also says that they. Have started up wind turbines that they know are unaffected. And they have about 15 wind turbines across the site running right now, and we’ll add to those. So it’s been months right since it was initially shut down. It looks like they are going pretty slow, but does sound like in their root cause analysis, they have managed to narrow it down to perhaps it’s, like one manufacturing location that is associated with the problem. And so they’re confident about some other ones or it’s possible that they did do some they’re able to do some kind of testing. They were very cautious at first, and to be honest, it’s quite a slow, a slow process to get them restarted? From my perspective, it could be because it was hard to pinpoint. It could be because they were getting terrible customer service from their OEM. Like both things are possible. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think, I’m thinking in my mind right now the cost implications of it. Like you were saying, Phil, so terrible service from the OEM, depending on if they’re under an FSA or not. At some stage you might be able to get some insurance coverage for the business interruption, but because you’ve. Basically it takes an incident, right? So there has to be some kind of property damage to trigger an insurance case. You had that. But that was per turbine. And if you’re turning ones off, they technically don’t have any issues with them. Do they have to cover that? I don’t know. I’m not, I don’t know what their contract looks like. Rosemary Barnes: And even if they’ve got a full service agreement, they’re not usually uncapped. It’s not like you can just get infinite infinite damages off them. There’s usually a flaw to availability and that they have to pay for. And then beyond that, there’s actually no incentive for them to do anything for the current, the rest of the, the year of the contract. Sometimes those, yeah, like the comfort that you feel from those kinds of agreements actually is not that comforting when you come to have an issue. Allen Hall: No, I haven’t thought of it that way. Phil mentioned it’s all, I’ll continue the discussion here about the lightning strike that did happen or appears to have happened at Vineyard Wind on February 27th and we hit. I just finished our last podcast episode, talking about CMS and where that can be implemented very cost efficiently, which clearly is for lightning strikes. And I was on the airplane to Nashville when the news reports started coming out, that there had been a lightning strike to the blade that had been broken, which was a blink turbine, a W 38 out there at Vineyard Wind, and that. That broken blade got struck and then it caught fire for some length of time. At least that’s what the report said. But I was watching livestream from my airplane, the helicopter search basically going to look at all the turbines in vineyard when my guest is looking for additional lightning strike damage or, and or debris. There was a couple of boats out there, also vessels that were looking for debris in the water, and I was slacking everybody. On the airplane again, we live in the 21st century, so these things happen. I was literally watching a helicopter fly over vineyard wind while I was flying at 35,000 feet. And the thing that ran through my head was, how do they not know where lightning struck on that wind farm? And I think the answer is because they don’t have each of the turbines instrumented with a $250 sensor. So they probably spent 20 grand in fuel and helicopter time. Check in all the blades with a helicopter, which just didn’t make any sense to me at all. And it just that, I would still had my, I built up about we should be putting CMS systems on for lightning strike. And then that happened it’s like the perfect test gates for putting on simple sensors. So it’s just been the one year in quote unquote service. Joel, since those tournaments have really Joel Saxum: been in the water, not even, eh. We know that of course more offshore turbines designed by engineering teams that are sitting in Denmark where they have a or Germany, that have a specific type of lightning and not very much of it, to be honest with you, in the North Sea. And when they come over to that northeast coast of the US they are gonna get pounded. It’s gonna Allen Hall: happen. So I know a guy that can hook ge slash vineyard, wind up with how many turbines are out there, 25, 30 turbines that are out there with sensors. For a couple of grand that would fix this problem. Yeah, it’s time to move on everybody. Let’s go. 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. OG 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. GE Renova and Amazon Web Services have formed a strategic partnership to develop onshore wind projects that will support AWS’s expanding data sensor operations. Now, the collaboration aims to help Amazon secure, reliable, cost-effective and sustainable electricity. It sounds like Rosemary wrote this press release for all of its growing computing capabilities while addressing. Global energy demands. Now, not very long ago, remember when GE Renova had a big release about the number of gas turbines that they were going to sell. I think it Phil, I think it was like 20 gigawatts per year was the number they were talking about, mostly for data centers. But it looks like Amazon Web Services has decided to use wind turbines instead of. Gas turbines. That’s pretty good. Phil Totaro: Yes, and it’s interesting too because some of those gas turbines are gonna be for behind the meter. Um. Data centers and things like that. And they, the point is they continue to expand as data centers continue to expand. Amazon’s gonna be one of the leaders in that. And the fact that they also want to be able to leverage renewables, it’s not just a PR thing for them. They actually understand that even though renewables may be variable, they can leverage that based on. The way they’ve structured the data center to be able to do a lot of the processing when there’s, wind or solar that they can offtake. And because of the ba, the natural balance between solar, which obviously happens during the day, and a lot of wind, which in most places in the world is stronger at night than it is during the day you get enough of a base load out of renewables that you can actually run. A data center almost entirely off renewables and minimize the amount of gas that you would necessarily have to use. Good on them for being proactive in in finding ways to, to leverage this. Allen Hall: So we have the discussion that we’re dealing with right now, Joel operators taking what the OEM delivers and just swallowing it, whole hog and saying whatever’s on there, what are the, whatever the OEM done has done is good enough and we’re gonna fly it without doing their homework first. That happened to us today, man. Is that frustrating? Joel Saxum: It’s such a frustrating thing ’cause we talked about this at the Australia o and m event to honestly, it, it was a comment made up on stage is it’s really frustrating when Allen and I are dealing with engineers left and right. Performance people, engineers, asset managers in the field. I’m the technician, site supervisors, the people that are actually dealing with the technology. In many organizations, they either aren’t asked for their feedback, aren’t allowed to give it, or aren’t even invited to the table with the development side of the corporation that is talking with the OEMs and buying the kit, right? So it’d be like if I’m driving a Ford truck trying to pull a trailer every day, but my trailer hitch sucks and I know it, and it bothers me every day in the field, and the person buying the trucks doesn’t ask me or I’m not allowed to talk to them, and then they buy me another truck and send me that one again. The trailer, it doesn’t work again. That’s. Not smart. And that’s what’s happening. We see that in our wind industry is the feedback from the engineers. And after you’ve been dealing with this asset for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, some of these things are the same six, 7-year-old turbines that they’re buying again. Not asking the OEM or putting in the RFP, Hey, can you fix this? Can you upgrade this? This is a big problem for us. What can you do for us here? That conversation just seems to be lagging so bad in the wind industry that there’s like this, the circular feedback mechanism isn’t there. Allen Hall: The OEMs deliver blades in particular and turbines in a larger scale to the operators, and the operators don’t even know what they’re getting when they arrive on site. That is wrong. I don’t know how to even frame that into a logical discussion that makes sense to me. If I’m buying turbines and the OEM just says plunk, here it is. Oh yeah, we did X, Y, Z to these things which you have no knowledge of. The engineers are just finding out, and when they get on site, it’s a completely different model. And now you gotta go unwind. I’ll spool up engineering, figure out what’s going on, realize, do I have a problem here or not do what do I need to plan for? That was different from the last set, last time they delivered blades to me or turbines to me. That can’t happen. It can’t happen. Someone’s gonna push back and say, we’re not playing this game anymore. This is over. Phil Totaro: Yeah. There’s two things with this as well. One is the procurement people aren’t. Getting that feedback either because people involved in procurement are just disconnected and it’s ultimately their responsibility to, if you’re spending whatever, seven, $8 million per turbine hey, why don’t we make sure that we’re getting a high quality product here? So that, that’s part of it. And that’s where I really see the failure and the fall down is the procurement people are the ones that need that type of feedback and information. Yeah. The developers. Yeah. But if the developer is an entirely separate organization and you’re buying a project, you’re typically, especially if you’re a financially focused investor, you’re buying a project and you’re expecting either the OEM or whoever is the operator to just. Manage the thing for you. You’re buying that as a, as, it’s almost like a piece of art on a wall or something. You’re buying it as an investment. You’re not necessarily gonna be involved in the day-to-day upkeep, which basically means that there, there’s already that level of separation between the people who build projects specifically for the purpose of. Selling them off to somebody else and they don’t have a vested interest in, as long as they can see a return on that transaction, they don’t have to worry about whether or not the OEM is fulfilling their obligations under a full wrap service contract. It’s not their problem anymore. Joel Saxum: One of the things we have here on this fantastic panel is someone who’s lived this life and has been a part of this value chain, Rosemary. So you were, at a blade company responsible for a specific component, a specific system within the blades. Did you ever get like an email that says, Hey, this wind farm at here has this issue. Are we gonna fix this on the next model? Or how are we gonna work within this? Or did you ever see that feedback or what was that feedback mechanism for you when you were at lm? Rosemary Barnes: Yes I did. I don’t know if I I. Had the most typical thing ’cause so I was leading the blade heating, the blade deicing team, and it’s quite a small niche product that isn’t widely available, but for the, widely used or needed, but for the. The sites that need it, they like desperately need it. I was the engineer leading that team and my electrical engineer as well. We both were qualified to climb towers and we would go onto site and make sure that they were being installed properly and then we’d go and look at them after a little while to see that they were doing what we expected them to do. And then when there were problems, one of us would probably go out there too. And so it was actually quite a high level. I will say I was the first engineer at LM that was qualified to climb towers, to actually go inside and look inside the blades. And it was quite a fight at first to make them realize that I couldn’t just design something and work on it in the factory. Joel Saxum: Rosemary, let me ask you this question then. You’re talking about a niche problem that operators have some issues with. Allen and I are talking about the largest problem, and it has been noted by insurance OEM operators, which is lightning, and we’re seeing garbage systems come out of of the OEMs that the just continuing to have lightning problems, but nobody’s doing, nobody’s fixed seems to be fixing them. Like we’ve talked to some people in the background at some different places and they’re like, is lightning that bad of an issue? I’m like. Are you that disconnected from the field that you don’t know this, like these numbers are? Staggering. Rosemary Barnes: That’s something I’ve got some experience on. My last deicing system that I I led before I left was a conductive system, so it was carbon fiber and we had resisted doing that system the whole time because of its effect on lightning, but we really couldn’t a, avoid it in the end. It is just far superior in terms of ice melting performance. But I will say that project was 75% a lightning protection project and 25% a, a blade heating project. Certainly the Lightning team is incredibly or were, it’s been five years since I was there, so I can’t say what they’re like now, but. We’re very passionate about making sure that lightning systems were improved. Everybody was aware that there is a huge gulf between being able to design a system that can pass certification very easy to do, versus a system that is gonna survive in the wild much harder. So whilst I agree that we have not come up with. Satisfactory Lightning protection systems. I wouldn’t say no one’s doing anything about it. It’s it’s a hard it’s an incredibly hard problem that people are working on and not yet succeeding at, is what I would say. Allen Hall: I will grant you that, but then here’s a big but here. If you’re gonna put something on a wind turbine, it better live there for 20 years and you better have data to show. It’s gonna live there for 20 years. This sort of Hey, let’s just temporarily fix this so I get out of the warranty period, and then the operator has to deal with the remnants of the system for the next 18 years or eight years in the us. That is not good customer support and service. It just isn’t. Rosemary Barnes: No, that’s not one, that’s not the goal. And two, if it’s a serial issue, then they don’t, it’s not a gal jail free card, like the OEM is still gonna be on the hook for it if it’s a serial issue. What I will say is that you don’t know how it’s gonna perform after 20 years until you’ve got, thousands of turbines out there that have been out there for a number of years. Testing one prototype turbine, like doing a bunch of simulations, tests in the Lightning Lab, doing one prototype turbine that is not. Remotely close enough to telling you if you are gonna have problems on a whole, in all these different lightning environments with a little bit of damage all of those sorts of things. Yeah, and I think that the. Lightning protection problem was much easier 10 years ago, right? The a bit shorter. All glass blades were protected satisfactorily. I, I believe right on in, in general. And then the designs changed. Lightning problem got harder. They knew that and knew that they had to make new lightning protection systems, and they did. And, did plenty of simulations and the required testing and prototypes, which yeah, like everybody knows that doesn’t do much. And then they got out in the field and they see failures, and now they have to fix ’em. It takes there’s a lag. Exacerbated by the fact that it was just like such a fast push from, like 2015 onwards. It’s just been like accelerated pace of technology development. Allen Hall: I just wanna interject here because I think, Rosemary, you touched on a pain point with me. When OEMs run into trouble that they’ve experienced problems in the field and they feel like they don’t have the expertise in-house, and lightning is one of those areas where that happens quite frequently, where do they go? Generally speaking, they run to academia. People who have never been around a wind turbine in service, have not had that experience, have not done any sort of lightning protection in another field that’s complicated like aerospace. And what they end up doing is they get the most PhD D qualified, but real world novice person to come in and provide him guidance, which is the opposite. And this is my struggle with you too, Rosemary. He is here’s Rosemary this. Blade expert knows a ton, has real world experience, has actually climbed a turbine or two. And when the rubber hits the road and someone runs into trouble, where do they go? They go running back to the academia to give them the, to give them the answer instead of talking to the people who are out on the front lines, who could give them better solutions, faster solutions, more cost effective solutions today. And that is a corporate environment, which is making huge mistakes. And I would rather see wind turbines be successful, particularly in today’s environment, political environment in particular, where we have to be better. And I’ve met so many people at in Nashville this week that want things to be better, that have the expertise and could fix the problems, and could make the industry much more vibrant than it is. They’re left on the sidelines. God knows why. It is just a real struggle with me, and I think everybody on this podcast that we’ve had on kind of fits into that mold. They really do. Phil Totaro: And let me just add that this is the conversation we’re having about blades and lightning and stuff right now is the same conversation that was actually being had about. 18 or so years ago about gear boxes and it’s a squeaky wheel kind of issue. So the same thing that Joel said before about the pain points that everybody has, and the same thing that a said before about, not leveraging the right people that was the same. They didn’t understand what white etching cracks were, back then they didn’t understand, all these things because they didn’t have the right kind of people. Addressing the issue Allen Hall: and they ran academia and they slowed it down. Phil Totaro: Yeah. But we got to a point where gearbox are closer to a 20 year design life than they ever have been before. Th that had to have a critical mass of complaints before it got fully addressed, and that’s where we are with blades. It feels like in the industry at this point we’re, there’s a lot of people that are starting to get a lot more vocal about the pain points they’ve got and the issues that they’re having, but it’s gonna be another three to five years before we really fix a lot of these issues. I. So we’ve just gotta keep speaking up about it, as Rosemary has pointed out, we’re gonna put a woman Allen Hall: on Mars Phil Totaro: before Allen Hall: we picks some of these plate issues, and that’s insane.

Australia has approved three major wind farms, adding 2.4 gigawatts of clean energy capacity. Brazil’s president has authorized offshore wind farms to enhance the country’s renewable energy strategy. Additionally, Swedish company Modvion unveils a revolutionary wind turbine tower made from laminated veneer lumber. 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. Newsflash is brought to you by Intel Store. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intel store.com. Australia has greenlit three massive wind farms in New South Wales, adding 2.4 gigawatts of clean energy capacity, the country’s environment minister announced approvals for tilt renewables, 1300 megawatt Liverpool Range. Squadron Energy’s 700 megawatt Spicers Creek and Inge 372 megawatt hills of gold projects. These renewable powerhouses will offset 6.5. Billion kilograms of carbon emissions yearly, a crucial step in Australia’s plan to become a green energy leader. The $838 million Liverpool Range Project will use fewer but more powerful turbines while Scroggins Energy, Spicer Creek development will power nearly 400,000 homes. Down in South America, Brazil’s president has signed landmark legislation authorizing offshore wind farms, boosting the country’s renewable energy strategy. The law creates incentives for wind projects in Brazilian waters while requiring consultation with coastal communities to respect local traditions already ranking six globally. For onshore wind capacity, Brazil is strengthening its clean energy portfolio, which currently provides 80% of the nation’s electricity. The president specifically vetoed provisions that would have supported more polluting energy sources like coal and gas plants. Over in Europe, Portuguese renewable energy, giant EDPR is considering selling its 50% stake in ocean winds jointly owned with France Engie. The potential sale comes as EDPR aims to offset 550 million Euro losses in 2024, partly caused by suspended US East Coast projects following the presidential election. Sacramento, California based LCAP Technologies has landed a multimillion dollar contract from a leading wind energy company for its innovative ultra capacitor technology. LCAPs Ultra capacitor retrofit solution replaces traditional lead acid batteries in wind turbine pitch control systems. The deal strengthens lockout’s position as a key supplier for renewable energy infrastructure as the global transition to clean energy accelerates. Swedish company Ian has unveiled a groundbreaking wind turbine tower designed to support massive 6.4 megawatt turbines. The Innovative Tower has received official third party certification, foot to zoo, confirming it meets international quality standards engineered for Vestus fee 1 62 dash six. Point four megawatt machines. The tower uses laminated veneer lumber instead of traditional steel and concrete. Avion is now adapting the design for series production with plans to construct towers reaching up to 219 meters that’s over 700 feet tall. The company’s modular wooden design offers two major advantages, significantly reduce carbon emissions and elimination of transportation challenges that plague traditional towers. 

Loren Walton from NSK discusses the challenges of main shaft bearing failures in wind turbines and NSK’s Super-TF bearing technology as a durable solution. He also covers the limitations of previous diamond-like carbon coatings and how NSK’s advanced heat-treated steel can improve turbine longevity. 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 modern wind turbines growing larger and main shaft bearings failing prematurely. The industry needs innovative solutions rather than relying on yesterday’s technology. This week we speak with Loren Walton, manager of corporate accounts at NSK. NSK has developed super tough bearing technology, a special heat treated steel that creates a significantly harder surface without coatings delivering long lifespans and eliminating catastrophic failures in today’s larger wind turbines. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Loren, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Appreciate your time today. Loren, we brought you in the program because you’re an expert in bearings. You’re with NSK, A lot of knowledge, a lot of history there. First, I want to ask a real simple question because we’ve run into operators all across the United States and the world. Generally speaking, we just got back from Australia who are having problems with main shaft bearings. And maybe the first thing to do here is to describe what some of the problems are that operators are facing with the traditional main shaft bearings. Yeah. So Loren Walton: traditionally what we were saying was a whole lot of, I guess I’ll say combined loading, right? So it’s a, radio load that is, up and down and some axial thrust that’s coming in from the wind shear, right? So combining the weight of the main shaft, which is you’re taking up from that radio load with that wind shear. So then you end up having some combined loading where. The downed wind row is seeing a little bit more of load share than the upwind row. That’s getting through the lubricant regime, which is then creating some micro welding and shearing, any amount of metal, any steel. When it’s created, it’s going to have some disparities. I use my fingers as the disparities, right? So your roller, your raceway, or your raceway, your roller. There’s gonna be some welding and shearing that happens when that is under high pressure. And so your lubricant is supposed to create a little bit of a gap between those. When you don’t have that gap you end up with the welding and shearing, you end up with what we call peeling damage, and then that peeling basically goes over and over again, and you start having high levels of debris. Inside of the system. And then once that debris starts going all bets are off, right? ’cause you can’t really even model debris very linearly. It just goes into additional sping and then you end up, if you keep letting it run, you end up with a through crack inside of one of your components, which is typically your inner ring. ’cause it’s press fit on the shaft. Joel Saxum: And a important concept here as well is because main bearings are basically a sealed lubricant system. There isn’t filters on these, right? So like when you start to get debris moving around in the system, it stays there. It just, it’s not oh, let’s go change oil on this thing. And we remove the debris, we put a new filter on it, we’re good to go. It’s not, it’s just, it’s in that system now. If it, because it’s a closed loop basically, right? Correct. Yeah. So the grease shift is in there, Loren Walton: there is an opportunity for you to have, replenishment, right? So you can put new grease in so that old grease comes out. But even then, you’re reliant on gravity and whatever you can get out of the system. You’re hoping that as you put new grease in, old grease comes out. But depending on how long you’ve been running, it is very possible too that you might end up putting new grease in and new grease out, right? Because the old grease is so stuck in there. Is now hard to move. It’s very difficult to get that old grease to actually come out. So depending on, if you have maybe a auto lube system or something like that, it might be, you might be running that grease a little bit more consistently. Otherwise, yeah. You’re stuck with what you’re stuck with once that debris gets going. Allen Hall: So what you’re saying is as the weight of the shaft and the rotors, everything has gone up on basically two and a half megawatts seems to be that critical area. And above that, depending upon the bearing design, the coatings or the finishes combined with the lubricants, you can actually, or what is happening is we’re micro welding the bearings together because of the weight and the, just the the friction that’s between those two things that. I don’t think anybody from the technical side realizes it’s happening. It’s not something you think about in a bearing. That gets me into the next question of obviously the bearing manufacturers try to treat the bearings some way to prevent that from happening. It seems like diamond, like carbon coatings were the solution a couple of years ago. Why was that chosen? Why did that thought process happen? Is that something that was successful previously on smaller turbines and was this implemented on the larger turbines or what was the engineering behind that? Loren Walton: Yeah, so I started my career in the when generation space in bearings somewhere around 2011. And at that time, that was when. We were moving from the kilowatt class to the megawatt class turbines. And that was when we first started seeing a whole lot of main shaft bearing problems. And it is all the stuff that I just described, right? The micro welding the micro welding, macro micro pitting, leading the macro pitting, leading the sping, all that stuff, right? So that was something that was very prominent once you started going from that kilowatt class to that megawatt class and to combat that. DLC was introduced and the thought there was you have a dissimilar material. So what I just described is that, again, I’ll bring my disparities back that micro welding happening, that welding and shearing. That only happens because you have two of the same like materials. That doesn’t happen if you have a dissimilar material. So DLC di like carving. So what you have is an amorphous tsin carbide that you adhere to the surface of one of those components. So in this case, the roller is what you adhere, the amorphous tsin carbide too. So that was a game changer. That was huge, right? We went from a few years of life, maybe on average three to five. To I remember seeing a report where A DOC bearing came out after 10 years and still looked beautiful. It was, sorry I like bearing, so I use terminology like beautiful, right? That I don’t know if that I caught myself after I said the word beautiful for bearing, but that’s just, bear with me. So when we were doing inspections on some turbines that were greater than two megawatt we found. Some abnormalities, we’ll say, in some of our inspections, we didn’t expect to see certain things that we started to see. We started to see more issues on the inner ring instead of the outer ring, we started to see more issues on rollers than we had seen before. And these were on coating rollers, right? So somebody had already gone to the solution of DLC because it had worked before. And in this case, the customer we were working with. They actually shortened their life. They went from four years of operation to two years of operation on average when they were using a product that had the coating on it. So again, an abnormality, something that we weren’t used to seeing. So we did all of our investigations, all of the inspections that we normally run through. We saw that there was actually damage to the DLC. There was the DOC was being harmed. We saw that there was also subsurface wide edge area, wide edge cracking that was also in, in the inner ring and in the rollers. So then we saw that when you compare the uncoated to the coated, the once the DOC was harmed, now you have actually an accelerant to failure. It. It wasn’t that the DOC was wrong, there was nothing wrong with the DOC. But once it was harmed, you had an accelerant to failure. So instead of it lasting about four years, you’re saying it lasted two years. Joel Saxum: When you have starting to have a failure with DLC, what are the things that an operator should be looking for, whether it’s a, the DLC ones, because they’re very common right now. The, in the say the US fleet, there is a ton of DLC coded bearings out there. What are things that an operator should be looking for to see a failure before it turns into a really big problem? Loren Walton: Yeah, so you’ll primarily see some amount of vibration signatures in your rollers is what I’ve understood from some of the people that I’ve talked to. It’s really hard to see though, I think. I think that is still getting, like people are still getting better and better at identifying it. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, what you have to do is see. If you have to look backward on your vibration to see, okay, this was the point because in a number of cases, you might look on Monday, let’s say you see it on vibration, you go do a physical inspection and the rollers look fine. Finding damage to DOC is not typically something that you can easily catch with the eye. When you’re doing a physical inspection, you’re limited on how many rollers you can check. You’re limited on. What you can actually see. There’s strong limitations there. I don’t fault anyone, if you’re, if you end up with a bearing that blows up because you had a catastrophic roller failure, that isn’t usually something that you can quickly catch unless have learned what the signature looks like from your vibration. For us, the way we see it is a little, we cheat, right? We have a scanning electron microscope. Where we can see the damage, we can see it almost looks like fractured glass. If you can think of when maybe something hits your windshield and it shatters, right? It looks like that for us under the microscope. So we can see the damage to the DLC, we can see where there’s maybe some sort of a slit or something like that on the coating. So that’s easy for us to find because we’re. Checking it after it’s already out. Joel Saxum: There was a certain time, right? It went from the kilowatt class, then we started putting DLC in and then we got a little bit bigger, and then the DLC started to fail. In between that one and two megawatt class, it worked really well. And maybe that’s the, is it the weight of the rotors or like why did it, why is it starting DLC starting to fail now in these larger rotors, in your opinion? Loren Walton: For as a bearing manufacturer? We have to adjust to whatever is thrown our way, right? So I, I don’t get to change anything about the application. I am told this is the application, this is what’s failing. Make it better, please. So that’s the constraint that I’m left. You play the car as you do, right? I can’t ask for a reshow. There’s a lot of investigation that’s happening. I think that there’s a number of different. Things that are happening. I think people were looking for one smoking gun, but I think we’re more so standing in front of a brigade. I don’t think that there is one. I think there’s a bunch of them. That there’s things like, as the turbine gets larger now, the angles are changing on what is, what was the plane of where the bearing was sitting. The angles are now changing. You have the aspect of people are seeing that there’s more current that’s going through that, that they weren’t finding before. But even you can’t discount the part of the rotor size today. I think that there is still a multitude of different. Problems that we’re addressing, but the biggest one that I see is that we know that the DLC is being harmed. So we have to address that because that is the biggest, known right now. I think we have to be willing to change what was the mindset before that. DLC is the solution to everything. And we have to change that to, we have to come up with solutions that are agnostic to the coating that are just. Able to still combat that peeling damage without needing the coating to be the way to to solve it. Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s a really interesting way to look at it. At some point you just go, it doesn’t matter why it’s failing. We need to move on to some other technology and. NSK has a lot of bearing knowledge and treatments, and the one I’ve seen for main bearings more recent, most recently is what you guys call super tough. It’s not a coating, it’s a heat treatment, but it’s unique. Can you describe what that treatment is and why it is so effective in these two megawatt machines? Loren Walton: So super tough is a medium carbon base steel with varying alloy elements that gives it some different properties and then it’s heat treated. It’s a cargo nitrite, heat treatment that then leaves the surface significantly hard while having a a mediumly softer core. That’s a bunch of words. I’ll go into a little bit more of what that means. There’s different parts of why that is important, right? So we talked about peeling damage, we talked about the disparity contacts. We talked about some of that already. The important thing to think through on that is if you look at the matrix of the skin of a steel component, they’re made up of something called carbides. Carbides are basically the hard parts that the bearing runs on. If you have those carbides organized in a very fine and uniform dispersion, you now have uniform wear. If those are also very hard, they also now I guess push against each other in a stronger way as opposed to. Welding to each other like we described before. So a harder surface is harder to have a welding and shearing than a softer surface. Super tough. It leaves a significantly hard surface, harder than other I’ll call ’em competing. Technologies, whether it’s a through hard or a case car rise significantly harder than both of those. And we lead with super tough because of the peeling damage that it combats super tough. Was created originally four applications similar to main shaft, where it was slow speed. It was high low. There was the debris, but typically the debris was coming from the outside in. In the case of main shaft, typically the debris is created by its own bearing. The bearing is eating itself alive, right? It’s from the inside out. And yeah, super tough is got a number of different characteristics that we like. And to be honest for NSK, for material, that’s one of our core competencies. Super tough wasn’t the only option for us to choose, but it’s the one that made the most sense. We had a few other choices that we could have gone with. We have other materials that we use for slow speeds and high lows and applications like steel making and things like that. For the size of the shafts. For the operations, it made the most sense to use Super tough. Joel Saxum: This isn’t something that you engineered for win. This is something that you’ve adapted to win because you have a track record of using it in other places as well. What other, like from an NSK standpoint, what other kind of bearing applications do you use? Super tough in just to to understand. The track record of it, it was created for, Loren Walton: Like I said, steel making was one of the big places where we use the NSK as a Japanese company. Steel is manufactured heavily in Japan. Japan is known for steel. Other places where we would use it would be like paper mining, heavy industries basically, where we would use super tough wherever there was a situation where we needed a combination of. High loading and ability to combat any amount of debris that’s being put into the system. So it was introduced into wind, actually, I wanna say in gearbox because there was some other things that we saw that actually you could combat. Why X area and YX cracking. So actually I should probably take a step back and say from when we were doing our inspections and we saw that the DOC was being harmed, and I mentioned that we also saw a wide edge area and wide edge cracking inside of the inner ring and the rollers. Another reason that we used super tough as the way to combat was because we had already had success with using super tough to combat wide edge cracking. So when we started seeing it in main shaft, in addition to having the ability to combat the peeling damage. Also when we started seeing why that area in main shaft, another reason that it made sense to go away from just standard through hard, going into the super tough. And Allen Hall: as we talk to operators across the United States at the moment that have DLC throughout their turbines farms you get a lot of worried looks and. Until we had talked to you and to Corey MIT lighter, we did not have any suggestions. And now that we’re talking with you here NSK seems like an obvious choice. How do operators start to implement the super tough design into their turbines? What does that look like? Can they, how fast is a swap out? Do they need to do a lot of engineering ahead of time? What does that process look like? Loren Walton: Yeah, so the bearings that we’re offering are the same construction, right? So it’s a. Spherical roller bearing same IDOD. With that, the OEM design had it with it there shouldn’t be any sort of retrofitting or changing of anything required. Honestly, the biggest thing is I think for most people, understanding that we are making changes from the inside out is the biggest thing to understand, right? Because if we look at one shiny round object and another shiny round object. And one of them has black rollers and you say yeah, that one looks like it’s different. Or one has a change to contact angle. Yeah, that one looks like it’s different. It’s a little bit harder to see, yeah, we make some changes to the internal geometry, but you can’t see it. Or we made changes to the material and the heat treat, but you can’t see that. So we are, usually having to educate. What you are not seeing is what you’re getting from us, right? It’s all of the information, it’s all of the gathering, it’s all of the inspections. And then knowing that we can combat that with a different approach than what was used previously. So everything for installation is exactly Allen Hall: the same. Alright, so if an operator wants to start working with NSK, and it sounds like they probably should start talking to you, Loren, because you’re a wealth of information and you can help them out greatly speed up this process to get the DLC bearings off of their turbines and get running again before they have really big problems. How do they do that? How do they get ahold of you? You, Loren? How do they get ahold of NSK? Where should they go? Loren Walton: Yeah, so I guess I hope that they listen to this podcast and then we are visible, right? We attend all of the major events, right? I just came from presenting at the Drivetrain Reliability Collaborative LA this week week after next I’ll be at the operation Maintenance Safety conference for a CP. I’ll also be at Clean Power in Phoenix. I typically go to all three of those conferences every year. But it’s not just me, right? We also have a team of engineers and segment personnel that work and win. But if you’re specifically looking for me I guess I can give out my email address. It’s my, my last name Walton, W-A-O-T-O-N, and then my first initial L and that’s at. k.com. So Walton l@nskcorp.com. So you could email me at any time, always looking for the next science fair project to work on, and you need to go Allen Hall: to nsk.com and check out the website. There is a great deal of information about wind turbine bearing specifically. Really informative videos to go along with it. You can see the super tough coding and all the details there on the website, and you obviously you can connect with Loren on LinkedIn. He’s available there too, so reach out to Loren. Loren, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Learned a great deal today. We need you to come back and talk bearing some more. Loren Walton: Yes. Yes. Appreciate it.

Laura Fleming and Alfredo Parres from Hitachi Energy dive into the critical challenges of integrating renewable energy, particularly offshore wind power, into the UK grid. They explore innovative solutions, including HVDC technology and digital advancements, that are driving efficient, reliable energy distribution and shaping the future of the global energy landscape. With Laura’s over 25 years of experience in the energy sector and Alfredo’s long history in renewables, the two give insights into how Hitachi is making the energy transition possible. 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 power grids adapting to accommodate growing renewable energy, the challenges of integration had never been more critical. This week, we speak with Alfredo Parres group, senior Vice President and head of Renewables at Hitachi Energy. And Laura Fleming, country managing director at Hitachi Energy UK and Ireland. Together, they explain how Hitachi’s technology is enabling efficient, reliable connections between massive wind farms and our existing electrical infrastructure. This is a great interview. Stay tuned. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress. Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Laura and Alfredo, welcome to the podcast. Laura Flemming: Glad to be here. Alfredo Parres: Hey, huh. Allen Hall: How are you? Laura, let’s start with you because I’ve watched a number of your interviews on YouTube and there’s just a lot happening within Hitachi. What are some of the main challenges in the UK facing sort of the renewable energy grid and all of the particularly wind power, which is what we’re focused on. There’s a lot of wind power offshore being deployed in the UK at the minute. How is a Hitachi trying to handle that and distribute that energy? Laura Flemming: Yeah. Thank you for the question. And uh, it’s a super exciting time, as you’re saying in in the uk energy space. And maybe just to explain briefly what is going on the UK. At the moment, it’s very hard at work to decarbonize the electricity grid. It’s actually planning to be fully carbon zero by 2030. That’s only in five years time now. And that’s obviously a very big job. What we’re doing in order to reach that as a country is switching away from from carbon sources. And so about six weeks ago. We switched off our last coal-fired power station, for example. But of course we still need energy and we still need a lot of electricity. So what we’re doing instead is building out a lot of renewable energy predominantly offshore wind because that allows us to produce vast amounts of electricity quickly cheaply and sustainably. The result of all of that is that actually we’re producing electricity in very different places than that we used to. So offshore wind, obviously produced in the sea, mainly in the north of Scotland particularly in Scotland. But the demand centers are all in the s of the country, predominantly around London and Birmingham areas. So we needing to transport this electricity around the system in a very different way. And all of that is triggering lots of grid reinforcements requiring to be done as well. So, and obviously without that grid, we can’t move around this this new electricity from the generation source to the to the demand centers in a very efficient and also in a reliable way. And also making sure that we don’t have too many losses on the system. So this is a huge task. The role that Hitachi energy in is playing in all of this is to ensure that a large number of these offshore wind projects can be connected to the UK grid. We are also supporting the transmission owners to help build out the grid, to make it more flexible, more reliable, and more efficient. And then we’re also supporting, for example, onshore and solar generators connecting their projects in via, via substations, et cetera. Allen Hall: Alfredo, what happens if the, this interconnection doesn’t happen to the UK economy and more? Wider impacts in terms of Europe. It does seem Laura has mentioned a lot of the energy sources are coming from remote places, but the power is being used in kind of the big places. Paris, London in Germany, there’s just big power usage areas. If we don’t connect them, what’s the outcome of that? Alfredo Parres: Yeah. I think it’s fair to say that it’s difficult to think about an energy transition without grids. Grids, electricity is about to be everything as we move on. And we need a lot of those. And grids that’s in many places are also oldish. Depending where you are on the world can have assets where that are pretty old. So we need to pay attention to that. The good news on this, a Noel, as I like to say, is that I see that. The conversation on grid has evolved drastically, compared to a to previous years. I see the conversation as has already evolved a lot, typically in my early days in, in this business it’s a few years. We had to educate people, educate governments on the importance of grids, anticipating what was coming, or it was a lot of education to be done. These days, you go to any conference, any civil servant speaks about grids as well as I do. So that means they, they are aware, they’ve educated themselves, they know what they’re talking about. And they the connections, I think in Europe, if you think about the grid action plan that the commission has put together is looking at implementing. I think that speaks what I’m mentioning here, the plans are there and the options to do things are huge. From increasing capacity or improving the usage of the existing grids. That’s the first step we can do. Technologies are there to do that, building new grids and planning the development of new grids. There are things that are doing, so in a nutshell, Alan, and we can go in further details in the conversation, there is no energy transition without greats good news or politicians or governments. Got it. We start putting the real Joel Saxum: actions required, I think to speak on this problem here with grids and integration with renewables. Again, for the energy transitions. Someone once said there’ll be no transition without transmission. I like that statement. But to speak on that issue more when these, when the grid that we’re, that we’ve lived with for, a long time it was originally developed. Most of that was with this consistent power delivery to it, right? It was coal fired power plants and other sources where it was consistent. And now when we add renewables to the mix, and they are by nature, intermittent, whether it’s solar or wind or however and people are trying to control that now as we move forward with battery storage and things. It complicates that grid question as well because now we’re saying, Hey, we need to upgrade the grid, but we also need to upgrade and future proof the grid, and I think that’s a very important statement there as well. And Hitachi, that’s what you guys are doing. You’ve got loads of people working on these problems to solve this intermittent delivery issues. And that’s hand in hand with the contemporary term, I guess is the smart grid. So Alfredo, I’d like to ask you this question. At what point in time did you start to see, the stakeholders that can make some of these decisions around the grid start to open their eyes to the difference that we need to future proof this? The energy mix looks different, and if we don’t fix this, we’re gonna really run into issues Alfredo Parres: beside grids. We are spending a lot of time to tell exactly about that. It’s not just the grid, it’s the complexity of the power system we are developing. We are going to manage intermittent source of generation. Different side of science type of generation based on power electronics, which basically says it’s a generation profile that is much more volatile with less inertia. We will have to manage all those elements in a harmonious way because we want to keep a sustainable power system at power safe and save power system. So the education is happening and we see the message getting there. As I said, you think from a planning perspective and everything start with planning. There’s no point to try to solve it if you don’t have a visibility 5, 10, 15, 20 years ahead to see what are we going to need? What are the investments we going to need? What is infras going to need? And that is happening. We still, of course, need to always to improve, and that’s what we’re talking right now with the authorities, know how we can improve the planning piece on the technology side, we tell them technology exists to manage this complexity we’re going to face. Intermittency is not the end of the world. It should not stop penetration of renewables. We can bring much more into the system and technologies are there to help us for electronics. These things we use for batteries management to use fax, all those system, I have to stabilize grids to be the HVDC connections. Essential to keep the stability, to keep this flow of energy oriented in different directions. Digital, absolutely key. Also because digital will help us to manage this complexity we’re facing. From a demand perspective, from a generation perspective, to operate, to maintain, the digital piece absolutely key. And that’s a not so easy story to get through because digital, not everybody understand what it means. For real. We are Hitachi, we make it as a party for us, no to tell how digital is real and can help us to to address our challenges. No. Allen Hall: Laura, I want to use the Eastern GreenLake two as our test case here to walk through some of the things Hitachi is doing. So the Eastern GreenLake two is A-H-V-D-C project, two gigawatts that is being transmitted from Northern Scotland down to England offshore, and the this distance is 440 kilometers, which in America terms is about 250 plus miles. That’s a long way for an HVE DC cable. The complexities of that project have to be enormous. How does Hitachi fit into that infrastructure project? Laura Flemming: Yeah, it’s a really good question. And the exactly as you say, the Eastern Greenland project is a is massive in terms of scale. But it’s also groundbreaking in terms of what it’s trying to do. It it will be collecting the power from a number of offshore wind farms and renewable generation capacity from the north of Scotland collected at this this, really large substation that’s going to be built in in the north of Scotland, as you say. And then to be transporting that power to the somewhere in the middle of England. Via an offshore connection. So rather than transporting that power via, multiple pylons and multiple cables that going onshore overground as we would’ve done in the maybe in the good old days. All of this power is being transported offshore. And that has a number, a number of advantages. In terms of connection with the communities in terms of environmental impact in terms of, being able to cross communities, et cetera. But it also has an added benefit because actually using A three DC over a large distance also means that, the energy losses will be significantly reduced. So what is it that Hitachi Energy is doing? We’re providing both the on and offshore substations that’s basically can, making the connection. So we don’t do the cables, but we do, we effectively provide the plug, right? That allows this energy to be collected and to be put into the cables. And then to be taken out of the cables and then put into the grid so it can actually be usefully used. And what that’s actually allowing, the UK electricity system operator to do is manage the power flows around the country. So really providing that security and that stabilization delivering power as and when they need it but also as and when it is being produced and really optimizing. What we’re producing as a country. And as you say, also that helps us manage the the renewable resource, which is sometimes, is it is intermittent. So there’s a lot more work around digitalization power electronics going on in the background to to manage those flows. At any given time of the day, we can still keep the lights on. Allen Hall: I want to dig into that a little bit because we use HV dc you just throw on that term. It’s we just use HVDC, but that is really complicated. The power electronics that are going into these devices are revolutionary. To do something at a high voltage DC wise in the electronics to make that happen are truly incredible. And to do it bidirectionally, you can move power around as needed because of the renewable energy factor where sometimes as the wind’s not blowing, sometimes it’s not as sunny out. You need to redirect where energy is flowing. H Feed DC gives you that. But how much infrastructure on the Hitachi side is. Dedicated to HVDC and the software and all the control systems to create this grid. Alfredo Parres: So we just celebrated 75 years of anniversary for the technology. We started back in the early fifties. So that tells is a young, old technology we are talking about here, the last version or the last technology we’re using. The VSC variable source converter version of it is a bit younger. No, but this is a technology that has been proving by the years benefits. No you mentioned it, long distance transmission, bidirectional flow, but there are a lot of orders benefits, no, not the least, the low losses. No. We use it because we reduce drastically the losses of our lung transmission. Plus the support we can give to the grid to which the HBC link is connected. So actually this link is supporting the stability of the grid. And in these days with the high penetration renewables, that’s extremely important just to tell. The benefits are absolutely phenomenal. And it’s true that with the emergence and the boom on around offshore wind, the technologies is facing fantastic times. And for us it’s really where we are putting a lot of our investments, a lot of our people we’re talking about, of thousands of people are being hired to support this business. Among the six billions we are investing these days, a lot is going in manufacturing of new valve new valve manufacturings, hiring new engineers to go in all different centers. And in Sweden, ru where we have, the capital, the place where the technology was born. Are we talking about the middle of Sweden in a very nice natural place, but not necessarily the place you would go for to in business, having hundreds of people going there, finding the, finding themselves comfortable with a clean mission, which is to accelerate this energy, trans transition and working with, for leading company, they got education. They work in a diverse environment because of course we got people coming from all over the world. They find themselves and they can law. So really I think HVDC is leaving extraordinary times. We see that all suppliers knowing this technology investing. So we are not the only ones, which is good also because that’s, the demand is huge. We need. Everybody to contribute, and we need then society to understand the benefits now of the technology. Joel Saxum: So HVDC in my mind, I think would it’s going to be as the grid gets newer, fresher, more innovative, and we start putting some money into it. You’re starting to see some of that here in the states. Couple saw a couple of reports in the last week of some big money rolling into it. HVDC to me should start to be a much broader part of that energy grid as you guys are focusing a lot of effort into it with employees and investment. How mu, how much of a percentage growth do you think, and I know that’s a pointed question, do you see an HVDC versus in the past? Laura Flemming: If I can maybe comment on in terms of the growth that we see in the uk, we’re seeing the UK really moving for maybe doing. One HVDC project that, as a country, right? Not necessarily as Hitachi Energy by themselves, but as a country we’re really moving from doing one of these projects a year to doing, multiple, like three or four, maybe even more projects a year. So the growth is, not just huge, it’s exponential. And as Alfredo was saying earlier, that’s really why we’re, we’re resourcing up, we’re hiring, thousands of people. To be able to work on HVDC solutions around the world. And because it’s not just the manufacturing of the converters and all of the other equipments that goes onto the, into the platforms and into the substations. There’s a huge amount of engineering, of front end engineering that and design that needs to be done. Before you can start building such a project and really planning all of that in, in a strategic way into the overall grid is really crucial. And I think this is really the interesting thing that we’re seeing in the UK where we’ve really, moved from a connect and manage sort of approach. So we’ll connect it when there is a need for it, and we know we have everything ready. To, know, let’s actually plan for, let’s plan for the future and we’re going to see what we need in the future, and we’re going to get ready and build that because we know that the generation and the demand will be coming. And that’s when solutions such as HVDC become really critical. And it also depends on distance, right? So the distance is really a big element in HVDC. So anything. Over 120, 30 miles away. Is really going to be beneficial to use HVDC Allen Hall: and Hitachi touches. Almost everyone’s lives in Europe and the United States. You may not realize that, but Hitachi’s big on H-V-A-C-H-V-D-C and on the monitoring and support side they’re involved everywhere. And maybe touch upon Alfredo what. Hitachi is doing after the sale, after the grid’s been installed. There’s a lot of monitoring, support and software that goes on after the grid has been connected, right? Absolutely. Alfredo Parres: And welcome to, to, to this new world know, and I mentioned it before, know, which is digital, I mean with our new owners, as I guess more many people know by, by now. As a former a PB now owned by Hitachi. We have new owners that believe deeply in, in the role of digital and they invest heavily as a business itself. And we are enjoying the benefits of being part of this larger corporation and developing the, those solutions of the future based on the core knowledge we do have. ’cause at the end, what makes a difference in digital is the understanding of the product and the process and the technology, which we master in Hitachi. And you put a layer of digital on top of that. Which is the embedded digital solution we have in product solutions plus the layers of digital. You have to control and operate all those assets. Bingo. Then you start having comprehensive solutions that bring value to customers. No, and that’s where we are heading for the train has left the station ready for a while now. We are not so starting now but the journey is still long to go until we reach full benefits. And Forest Service is going to be a huge focus area because we are sitting not only on a huge install base, you think about what a hundred years working on, on, on the market with millions of equipments out there that we can serve and we to serve more of them, but the requirements really come higher as the system will become more complex, more fragile. So we need to be able to react quickly. But also we have to react to the environment, conditions that we are facing. Going to tell about all the climate incidents that we’re facing. That’s part also of operating an asset. No. And here too, a digital play, a big role or to not only anticipate forecasting evidence that can happen. Get prepared with your plans. Get prepared with your actions to add quickly. Definitely for us is a critical area. Allen Hall: Can we discuss the order book for Hitachi at a top level A little bit? How busy is Hitachi right now on orders and my guess is that your phone is ringing all the time. People trying to get orders in for HVDC, even HVAC at the minute. How busy are you? Laura Flemming: Yeah, now I can comment from a UK and Ireland perspective, so no, we’re very busy. And obviously that is wonderful. What’s really important for us is to ensure how do we bring the best of what Hitachi energy has got offer to our customers? And therefore we have changed slightly the approach in which we are working with customers really working in programs. And frameworks and again, in in a systematic and strategic way. And that is a number of benefits. Yes, it allows us to understand, what work is coming. And that is really important for us, for our production planning, for making the investments that we talked about earlier. And also for hiring people because the biggest. Obstacle that we have in in this energy transition is actually people we need. We need to train, we need to hire, we need to manage a vast amount of new people coming into the industry, not just in Hitachi energy, but into the industry. So we’re really facing facing quite an uphill battle there. And so yeah, having that visibility requires us to, and allows us to plan in advance, there’s another very important aspect to all of this as well is that when we know what our customers are looking to do over the next few years or so, we can start working and engaging with them at a much earlier stage in their project. That will allow us to help them standardize some of the solutions and that standardization will allow us to speed up, it’ll allow us to work more safely. It will allow us to, move from site to site knowing the issues that can appear on sites and actually be able to anticipate on the, on those in advance. So yeah, that early engagement and a strategic approach to, to the order book, as you were saying earlier is super critical for us, but also ultimately for the customer and for the overall, for the greater good. Allen Hall: Let’s talk about that variations that you see on orders and everybody when you hear about the power grid, a lot of operators, owners want a very specific set of parameters. They don’t want to order a generic piece of equipment, but that’s a huge problem for the grid and for the manufacturing and planning. Are you starting to see a little more standardization as. The demand goes up that maybe I can use a slightly better HVD system that’s standardized for my project instead of having a tailored one for my specific needs. Alfredo Parres: I think it’s a moving reality. And, and we cannot say we are there. Of course, we cannot say we are there, but we mentioned this always on the different ways. No, now I refer to the first one. Or if you have a frame agreement, if you work on a portfolio of project. Here we go. That’s what we got. That’s what we did with the transmission system operator tenant in Germany where they came out with a large number of HVDC connection, 12 in one shot, and they went to markets. We got half of them, 13 billion contracts, 3 billion US dollar contract with that. You can imagine with that in, in ahead of us, ahead of you to be delivered the next. Five to six years, there is an opportunity to go project by project, get lessons learned, standardize improve efficiency, and that’s what’s the opportunity we are in front of us and customer get it. Of course, they’ll still like to specify. And that’s the second message we are giving. No, we talk about standardization. We should not think about having equipment out of the shelf. No, I don’t think we get there, and we should be dreaming of that. It’s more strategizing the requirements and then the manufacturers will put all their innovation, their creativity, to make those equipment as standard, as reputable as possible. We had to start with the requirements. No, as you said, the transmission system operators, the utility companies, if they could standardize their requirements as much as possible, that will help the supply chain big time. Not only Hitachi energy, the whole supply chain. Allen Hall: Yeah. If we wanna build the grid quickly, we need to have some level of standardization. The number of varieties of transformers that exist in the world is in the thousands. The tens of thousands at the moment, which is a little crazy because we’re just moving power from A to B. We can have some standardization. I and Hitachi being a huge company worldwide, global company, country to country, that changes also. So you’re getting to different types of requirements in different countries. If we’re going to go fast, we have to standardize at least a little bit and have maybe have a little more flexibility, which I think is afraid of what your point is. Come in with a spec sheet, but have a little bit of movement in it so we can deliver you the products faster. Because the grid buildout is important right now, right? We say we need to Alfredo Parres: go at speed and scale. That’s the name of the game, and that’s standardization. It’s innovation technology, but also innovation business models. Laura Flemming: Standardization doesn’t mean, it is off the shelf and it’s, I am, 100% identical. So much time is being used up because every time you start with a blank sheet and start, designing and engineering from the ground up, what if we could start at 70 or 80% and then, specify and and personalize that last 20. That saves saves so much time, but also removes the the the room for error redesign, et cetera, et cetera. And as of, as Alfredo was saying, that’s really gonna speed us up Joel Saxum: and I want to touch on that too, because of. Big part of what you guys do, and Alan had said this earlier, even if you don’t really realize it, Hitachi is touching your life somewhere, right When you flip the lights on at some point in time, Laura and Alfredo had something to do with that. But what I wanna say is that with all of the innovation and the work that you guys are doing, and we’re talking about kind of economies of scale and standardization and getting things done more efficiently. What kind of impact do you think that Hitachi’s work has on the public perception of renewables? Alfredo Parres: First of all, I want to say we like to be humbled also. We are a large corporation. We do a lot of things. We are a successful company, but we are only one part of the whole value chain. And it’s true that the big weight is carried by the investors or the ones who have to build the projects. The trust the utility companies will have to build those lines. So our contribution to that is, is very much in providing the education, explaining what we do, explaining the benefits of the technologies, or sometimes also to make sure we don’t get misleaded in some wrong concepts, nor what could be the impact on people of high voltage transmission lines to say something, so we can tell things in a simple way. We like to do it, but we are only what we are. No, we are a technology companies. And we have to support all of us, those who are taking the major risk to to define, to provide investments to to talk to to, to people, to talk to civil servants, to talk to local populations, to say what’s, what are the benefits of those technologies? Laura Flemming: I think what Hitachi Energy is doing is, really showing also how all of the different pieces, come together. A lot of our technology and equipment, it’s usually a little bit hidden, right? The in terms of renewable energy, the attention goes to the the, the lovely shiny turbines and the things, and the things that we see. But they are also usually the ones that attract, a lot of the negative attention. And I think by showing how renewable energy. Can be integrated into the grid successfully. How we make sure that where the turbines are turning, that we don’t throw any of that energy away. Because we’re now optimizing, we can be more flexible and actually we can provide energy security because, at the end of the day, this has been one of the big drivers. Particularly so since we saw the impacts after, COVID and in Europe, particularly the the war in Ukraine, how easily, we can really be caught on the back foot in, in terms of our energy supply. So providing that energy security is absolutely critical because, let’s be honest, as we go on and on as a country and as a population, we’ll be needing more energy as we go forward. So bringing the public along is super important. I don’t think as an industry we’re doing enough yet. But I’m really pleased that since the summer, IT energy is now actually one of the key five key requirements and action plans in the UK in terms of what the government is driving forward. So having that specific focus. On energy, the same as education, the same as health is is a massive game changer. And I think what that oil will also do is make a lot more people interested to come and work in the energy industry going forward, which is exactly what we need. Allen Hall: So what does the energy future look like with Hitachi? What should we be looking for in the next year or two? Laura Flemming: I think we’ll be building a lot of projects. I will be, think we’ll be supporting a lot of customers. And I also think you’ll be seeing a lot of innovation in terms of how we speed up, how we do things more quickly and flexibly. But also how the grid is actually going to look like, once we’re actually building up to the capacity that we need. How is digitization really going to help us, accurately create the flows through the electricity system? And making sure that at any given time, the lights will stay on. Allen Hall: Lauren Alfredo, this has been a terrific discussion. I’ve learned a tremendous amount. I think the world needs to know more about Hitachi energy and what you’re doing to make the grid more reliable. I. And larger. And Laura, how do people get ahold of Hitachi Energy? How do they find out more about the great things that Hitachi is doing? Laura Flemming: Thank you very much. It was indeed a very interesting conversation. So thank you for inviting us. And for anyone who would like to find out more about Hitachi Energy please follow us. Via the usual channels or find us on Hitachi energy.com. Allen Hall: Laura and Alfredo, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Really enjoy speaking with you today. Laura Flemming: Thank you. Thank you.

We discuss how using continuous monitoring systems (CMS) can prevent catastrophic blade damage from transportation and lightning. We also share insights from GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik on potential industry growth. And TPI Composites has hit the milestone of manufacturing their 100,000th blade. 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: On this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, we discuss how continuous monitoring systems could prevent catastrophic blade damage due to transportation issues and lightning strikes. And that’s a good discussion. GE Renova, CEO Scott Straza sees a soft entree wind market through early 2025, highlighting potential growth in Repowering projects. TPI composites manufactures their 100,000th blade. Congratulations. And our wind farm of the week is the Jericho Rise Wind Farm in upstate New York. You’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by bill 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: in his first appearance at Barclays Conference. Since GE Vernova’s spinoff, CEO Scott Strazik offered a sobering assessment of their wind business while highlighting some positive developments. Now, Strazik, uh, described the onshore wind market. Is currently very soft, quote unquote, with weak order expectations for the first half of 2025, though he noted opportunities in Repowering projects and certain international markets that could, uh, at least partially offset North American weakness. Now, one of the things that was mentioned during the Scott Straza, um, conference or discussion was that they are doing internal inspections and a lot of them using crawlers, which I, I believe is are from Aeros, where they’re looking at. Uh, the blades at the factory internally after transportation, and then once they’re up on tower trying to capture any defects that are happening. And this, at, at, when I saw this, I thought, oh, it goes back to Phil’s comment that a lot of damage is actually happening during transportation. And that there maybe they’re trying to, uh, work on that transportation piece or at least be able to make some claims that their blades have been damaged during transportation. That’s a unique piece ’cause I don’t know any other. OEM that is doing that many inspections at the moment. Joel, do you know any of Joel Saxum: others that are doing that? I know they should be. Uh, but, but, uh, yeah, same page. I don’t know anybody that actually is. I think it’s a, a bit of a. It’s good market response, to be honest with you, from my opinion, because I mean, you know, we’ve, we’ve seen so many blades that are brand new or within warranty having issues. Well now you can trace them back. If you get that inspection done at the factory, you put in a, uh, basically a, a. Data point of traceability. If it was good then and it got to site and then all of a sudden there’s a damage, well that happened during transportation and handling. So you can start to say, that was your fault. This is who should pay for this. These are the things that are being traced. Right. Um, and we did see in a presentation, uh, just yesterday or two days ago from Arons that they were putting statistics to the findings of their internal crawlers. And one of them was rad at like that. 70% from root to tip mark where that handling happens. There was a spike in damages that they’re finding. And it was mostly all related to handling, so I don’t know of any others. I know it’s actually kind of hard to get anybody as, even as an operator, get any of these OEMs or blade manufacturers to agree to get inspections done of the factory. Allen Hall: Joel, do you think that some of the damage is caused by the cradles or the saddles that are used during transport, or is it more about just the roughness of the roads and the, the trucks that are used to move the Joel Saxum: blades around? Well, it’s ha, it’s handling. Uh, for the most part because if you can eliminate how many times you have to handle anything, you can avoid damages. This is why offshore wind farms have a, a problem as well, because if you’re going to move, even if the factory is key, the factory’s close to keyside for those blades, you still have to get them out of the factory, into the lay down yard to the key, and then craned onto the vessel, and then crane, you know, moved on the vessel and then craned off the vessel. And if you’re in that Jones Act situation, like we are here in this. States, you’ve got to move them twice offshore. That’s just not good, right? Uh, you don’t want to be, you want to handle these things as minimal amounts as possible, because at the end of the day, they’re fragile. How many blades Allen have we seen where like the trailing edge has like a little. Crunch in it, you know, a lot too, way too many. Allen Hall: Rosemary. Is there a lot of structural reinforcement that happens on these longer blades for the lifting points and the transportation points? Rosemary Barnes: No, they don’t. Uh, I, I mean they definitely, um, consider that, uh, as a potential failure mode, but they’re not. Necessarily trying to reinforce a blade as they are trying to make the cradle so that it won’t damage the blade and put it in a location where there is some, um, reinforcement there. I’m not a hundred percent sure that it’s like purely one way direction. They might, you know, know where the cradles roughly have to go and make sure that there is, you know, like a bulkhead or something there that can, um, stiffen, stiffen up that area a bit locally. But they’re definitely, they definitely don’t want, you know, a bunch of extra weight added purely for the. Point of transportation, because then it’s up there on the turbine weighing more than it needs to for 20, 30 years. And that affects every, every other component. The, you know, bearings, the. Um, drive, train the tower. The foundations all need to be beefed up a little bit extra because of the extra weight. Allen Hall: Phil, what is the cost to the industry due to transportation damage? I think that number’s big. Phil Totaro: Yeah. It’s, it’s in the millions and we’ve actually been rerunning our calculations, um, recently. So, um, blade transportation damage is actually now number three. Um, lightning damage to blades has actually overtaken it as being the number one issue. Um, which may or may not be a good thing, I guess, depending on what area of the business you’re in. Certainly if you’re selling people lightning protection technology, uh, maybe that’s good. Um, but, uh, blade root cracking, uh, is also now a big issue. But all three of those, so. Lightning damage, blade root cracking and transportation damage are like your top three, uh, issues. And it’s all well into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, uh, in annual, um, operations and maintenance expenditure just for the US market alone. Unfortunately, we don’t have data on, um, the faults and failure rates in other countries yet. Um, but based on recent conversations, uh, with my new friends in Australia that. Uh, it looks like we may get some data. Allen Hall: Alright, so after the break, I want to highlight what Phil was discussing here about the hundreds of millions of dollars in transportation expenses do to damage and what we’re doing about it or what we can do about it. Don’t let blade damage catch you off Guard the logics. 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. Okay, Phil. If there’s so much damage happening from transportation and lightning, by the way, it does seem like CMS should be used to detect it. Now it looks like GE is actually gonna use the internal rovers from Aeros to inspect them, but are there any CMS systems on a. Truck or on the cradle when blades are being transported at the minute? Phil Totaro: No. No way. That’s that’s way more sophisticated than this industry would ever employ. And way more expensive than anything we would ever choose to do if we can’t even get people to put CMS systems on turbines. Um, you know, even 4, 5, 6 megawatt turbines, then we’re not gonna have, you know, any kind of, uh, fault and failure detection on the, the transportation systems themselves. Not to say that that wouldn’t probably catch certain issues and, you know, you can certainly put like strain gauges and accelerometers on the truck, uh, or on a cradle. Um, and some people may in rare occasions use things like that. Um, but it’s not standard Joel Saxum: for sure. Yeah, Phil, I was gonna mention that. Not standard as well, right? So in Hamburg, two years ago, I ran into a company that was doing just this. They had a sensor that was about the size of a cell phone, and it’s really basic sensor, to be honest with you. It’s just GPS communications, a battery, and then an accelerometer and a gyro inside of it. And they were, it’s the same kind of stuff that’s used to track fleet vehicles, right? Like, oh, this is this vehicle, this is, so, you can see where it is if they hit the brakes hard, these kind of things. But they were wanting to put them, that was their goal. We’re gonna put ’em on turbine blades from the factory. So locationally geographically, we can track them, uh, wherever they go. And then also if they hit a bump hard, if they do something, if they get dropped or whatever, you can see the different G-forces on the blades themselves. But. You know, when I was speaking with him, I was like, that’s cool. I said, probably the locational part, because at the, to be honest with you, you’d have to put a half a dozen of these things on different parts of the blade to start to see if the root bending moments moved a bunch or something of that sort. And at the end of the day, you’re not gonna get, like, blades don’t show up cracked in half, you know what I mean? Mostly it’s lifting damage or something like that. So the accelerometer thing, I don’t know if that’s really a valid, but people have tried to do it. It just has never, could, never caught on. Allen Hall: Okay, Rosemary, when a CMS system should be installed, there must be some sort of criteria here, and I want, I want to get your thoughts about this because there is a lot of discussions about CMS and monitoring of blades and monitoring of gear boxes, and there’s a spec gonna come out in the next, I don’t know, it’s a couple of weeks, I suppose, and. There is so much discussion about it, but I want to hear some sane thoughts about when you should use a CMS system. Rosemary Barnes: You know what? I think that it’s got a lot to do with, um, the amount of. Um, spare time that your operators have on their hands, people that working in operations and maintenance and, um, all of those sort of, you know, like afterwards things, um, they’re so pressed for time. They do not have enough time to do all of the things that they already know they have to do. They kind of don’t want to know about additional things. And so when you say how much should you have, they should have that CMS because it will ultimately make their job smaller. Right? That, um. You that that will instead of. Having to replace, you know, some gearbox component or some bearings that means, you know, like a shutdown of a turbine for a long time and all of a sudden an emergency to, you know, get this fixed quickly. Instead of that, they would be able to, you know, monitor across the fleet. They would know, okay, we’ve got a few that are coming up and we’ll need to be replaced soon, so we’ll make a campaign and we’ll get them all together. But, um, yeah, so that’s, that’s what should be happening. The industry would work much smoother, but I know that the reality of it is that people are too pressed to start thinking about stuff like that. Allen Hall: Phil, what are the top four or five money losers? On turbines at the minute? Phil Totaro: Uh, well, generally blades, I mean, I can’t, you know, again, I can’t really categorize everything, um, specifically ’cause we don’t have enough information about all the faults and failure modes, but blades number one, uh, gear boxes, particularly bearings and anything having to do with kind of the drivetrain overall, uh, main shaft, et cetera. So that’s all kinda lumped in there. Um. Jaw bearing and pitch bearing. Those are, those are kind of your top three or four. Allen Hall: Okay. Let’s look. Let’s look at sources of problems. It was lightning’s number one, right? In terms of sources of problems Phil Totaro: for Allen Hall: blades? Yes. Phil Totaro: And for tower. And for tower collapses, potentially, yes. I mean, Allen Hall: right tower collapses. Catastrophic lightning has gotta be close to the top. The insurance companies will tell you that. Phil Totaro: Uh, yeah. Again, I don’t have the data to say that if an insurance company will tell you that, then I’ll believe it because that seems logical that, you know, I mean, how a blade is even able to strike the tower to kind of knock it down is if the blade’s got some kind of damage and there’s a load imbalance, um, it’s hard to just get a load imbalance from some other. You know, like you’re not gonna get a load imbalance from leading edge erosion, let’s put it that way. I mean, you’d have to have ridiculous leading edge erosion to have a load imbalance on the blade or the rotor Allen Hall: catastrophic. The things that will take down turbines today are light. It gotta be lightning. It’s gotta be number one. It’s not even a close second to that, I don’t think. Some sort of serial defect in blades. De bonding. Yeah, de bonding, right. Something that’s just. Almost immediate, but uh, but, but a structural problem, right? A structural problem that’s probably a factory issue, a quality issue. After that, it gets pretty consistent, right? You’re talking about gearbox failures, which are really. Time driven, some sort of bearing failure Rosemary Barnes: loose bolts in the tower. Right? Haven’t we seen a few of, a few of those Allen Hall: root blade root cracks, which are a manufacturing issue and yeah. The tightening of bolts. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Root inserts, Allen Hall: right Root inserts, Rosemary Barnes: detaching. Also foundation problems can cause it. Um, and, uh, could I just, uh, go off on a, a tiny tangent that you said, you know, lightning obviously I was talking to somebody recently, um, ’cause there was a, a tower collapse in Australia and they’re saying it was probably lightning. And anecdotally in the Australian wind industry, people are rolling their eyes going, oh, come on. As if that’s the case. So I don’t think it’s necessarily obvious. Um, I mean, I, I know that we all, we all know. That anything that can damage a blade so much that it, you know, falls in half or folds in half, or, um, you know, gets a big crack so it hits a tower, then you’ve got a big enough imbalance that your tower’s gonna start wobbling around like a noodle and then it’s gonna, you know, it’s gonna fall over. Right. Um, so it doesn’t, it’s not that the lightning. Struck the tower down, you know, even though, I mean, lightning can do that, we’ve all seen trees fall down right. From being struck by, struck by lightning. So I guess it, it, it could happen, but that’s not what the failure modes we’re talking about, right? It’s, it’s any, anything that can make the blades, um, damage, get damaged so much that they have strike the tower or a big chunk falls off and sets the, sets the tower wobbling. Allen Hall: I, I totally agree. And if those are the big money losers. The why are they’re not CMS systems installed to protect against the million two, four, $5 million loss. We’re focused on, weirdly enough gearbox monitoring, which is great, you know, but it, it is a time, long time derivative problem. It’s gonna degrade slowly. And we know what those curves are like, is just like leading edge erosion, right? So why wouldn’t you do the simplest. One first lightning transportation lifts. Then you’re looking at sort of serial defects. I think if, you know you got a, a root cracking issue in a particular kind of blade, then we put a CMS on it. But the, the gearbox monitoring and the oil monitoring all great, but are they, they’re not, wouldn’t be top priority in terms of money. Saved. Right. Rosemary Barnes: But I think it’s in terms of how easy it is to monitor these things, because I mean, maybe there are blade monitoring solutions today, I, I, maybe I’m not a hundred percent up to date, but at least until recently, there were ways to monitor it, but not cheap and not. Easy to actually monitor. You know, like it’s really hard to say, like, you know, um, wind turbines are, are, are cracking and stuff all the time. It’s like impossible to say, when is a crack gonna turn into something that I need to worry about? And unless you’ve got strain sensors like covering a blade like a net, you’re not actually gonna be sure that you’re gonna catch every single big crack that might happen. So I think that that one. Hard. Lightning I know is easy, but I don’t think it’s well understood how easy it is to monitor for lightning. Allen Hall: It’s a couple hundred dollars per turbine, right? Today. It’s cheap compared to a drone inspection, but I don’t think that’s Rosemary Barnes: well Allen Hall: known. Rosie would, would you say that the, all the cracks and the leading edge erosion and even some of those serial defects, because we’ve have drone inspections happening in some cases mandatory quarterly, quarterly. Yeah, quarterly. Would you, would you put a CMS system in, or we just rely on the internal external drone inspections as your quote unquote CMS? Rosemary Barnes: Well, I, I mean, I don’t think, I think you might end up with a false of a sense of false security by putting CMS to monitor cracks that were identified in drone inspections. I mean, if it’s a big enough crack to be worried about, it needs to be getting repaired right away. Um, it, and then there’s the next category down where. You wanna monitor it and see how it grows, then? Yeah. I mean. I dunno, it’s hard to say. I can see CMSI, I don’t know if even know if it counts in CMS ’cause CMS to me sounds like a, you know, like a monitoring while normal operation is happening. But when you know you’ve got a bad crack or maybe you’ve got like a serial defect issue and you know you’ve got 10 affected turbines in your site and it’s, you know, taking your long time to get, maybe you need even replacement blades or you know, you need to take them down and do a month long repair on each one. Um, sometimes you would really like to keep badly damaged blades operating. If possible, and then I can definitely see a case for you, you know, you’ve got an, a specific area that you’re monitoring, put some, there are systems that you can put in place to monitor a known one location of a, a crack. And then yes, definitely then you can, you know, run, you don’t have to be as cautious about shutting down your whole potentially affected, um, you know, uh, uh, population of, of turbines and, and blades. But beyond that, I actually, I don’t think that. Drone inspections are good enough and definitely not on their own. I mean, they don’t capture all of the inside stuff. Even the internal inspections don’t capture all of the inside stuff. I just think that you’re not actually like, you’ll get a little bit closer. Um, to knowing what’s going on with your blades, but not close enough to not have to worry about it. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think that there’s a, there’s a couple of new advancements in, in CMS for blade cracks as well, so of course there’s, there’s multiple of these solutions actually out there, right? Uh, we have, we have a good friend of the show that’s installing cameras inside of. Blades to monitor cracks right now too. Uh, but also Aeros was doing that. They talked about it at Blades USA this week, uh, putting cracks in or cameras into monitor specific cracks. But there’s also been advances in CMS at that really minute level of ac accelerometers and vibration where, so a blade is inherently stiff, you know, the frequency of vibrates that if you start to get a crack in it. It reduces the stiffness, so the frequency changes in the whole blade. So it’s one of those things where like, if that happens, then it’s a flag come and look at me, I think. But, but I think where we’re at here now is this, Alan, you raised a great point with this conversation because if you were to ask Phil, Phil, what are the numbers for failures in the most expensive ones? 10 years ago, it would’ve been gear boxes. So in, in response to that, the industry was like, we need to monitor gear boxes. We need to monitor oil, we need to monitor all this stuff. And we have solved that. Not solved, but we have greatly reduced the cost of that problem as an industry. I. Right. So now we’re at the next stage. It’s like the industry has forgot that that’s how we solve that problem. And now we have the next iteration of problem, which is blades, and we have solutions for it, but nobody’s implementing them. Phil Totaro: Well, and the other, the other real issue for blades was about 15 years ago when a lot of companies were developing very sophisticated. You know, blade monitoring systems. They had, you know, fiber Bragg sensors that they wanted to put into everything. And I mean, but these, these systems were all so fantastically expensive and unfortunately unreliable, particularly as it, as these systems and the sensors on the blades interacted with lightning. Um, you know, you, you end up with. Uh, you know, a boondoggle that doesn’t really pay for itself. Uh, and so a lot of companies were just like, you know what, we’ll rely on drones. Which, you know, even again, going back 10 years, were cheap and still relatively are, um, to, to do that kind of an inspection as opposed to having a full fledged CMS system integrated into the blade as CMS technology gets cheaper. That increases the rate of adoption. Um, the reality is that the industry still needs solutions, but it needs more cost effective and targeted solutions. It sounds like Allen Hall: That’s what I’m saying is that I can go back to Phil’s point. You gotta have RROI, high, ROI on any kind of CMS. You put on your most expensive. Losses are catastrophic. Go cover those at a minimum. And the cost of those sensors to catch the catastrophic before they turn catastrophic are incredibly low. They’re in the hundreds of dollars well below a thousand dollars. Lightning ones are about $250 at the minute. They’re crazy low, they’re way less expensive than pretty much any other CMS on, on the turbine right now. Put them on, at least you’re gonna. Protect your Joel Saxum: huge downside loss. Yeah. Think about the simple math on that one. Alan. 250 bucks a turbine for lightning sensors so you know exactly when a tower got struck. And if you use them properly in operations, you can, you can instrument a thousand turbines. For the cost of one insurance deductible. 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. CPI composites, A major supplier in the wind energy industry has celebrated the production of its 100,000. Uh, the milestone highlights the company’s longstanding role in supporting the growth of wind energy through, uh, blade manufacturing across multiple global facilities. So, you know, obviously you do the math. 100,000 divided by three is like 33. Thousand turbines plus. That’s a lot of wind turbines. I was trying to do the math on where most of those blades were built. That, my guess is that a significant portion were built or, or are built right Joel Saxum: now down in Mexico. Right? Yeah. Everybody you talked to is like that. Yeah. That factory. That factory in Mexico. I think there’s three factories in Mexico. Two. I know there’s two. I think there’s three, but to me that seems, doesn’t that I, I honestly con congrats to TPI for the a hundred thousand to play, but. 30. Then when you do the math, Alan, you said 33,000 turbines. There’s almost 500,000 turbines in the world right now. That seems low. I would think that TPI would have a larger share. Allen Hall: Yeah, it does seem low. I, I would say they would have a lot more, so the a hundred thousand doesn’t make sense except that they were kind of, Johnny come lately in a sense that, that they were doing small production runs for a while. Mostly in the States when they started, they were making blades, I think in Rhode Island for a while. And then once it got to scale mostly in Mexico and Turkey and some other places, then it really picked up, right? Phil Totaro: Yeah. And then, but then they mothballed the, the Newton, Iowa factory in 2021 to shift production down to Mexico and India, where it was cheaper cost of labor and, um, you still had access to, to raw materials. Um, but. They’re now talking about, in part because of the, the threat of tariffs that are to be imposed on, on Mexico, potentially. They’re talking about restarting the, or accelerating the restarting of the Newton, Iowa factory, um, specifically to meet the demand for GE Joel Saxum: Renova. Oh, that’s cool. I mean, ge like the, the article you said today, Alan Scott Straza said a softening of the market there, but they still have order book. They still gotta create a lot of blades. I mean. They’re we’re, we’re, we’re built. Just think about the Sun Zia project. They’ve got hundreds of turbines just for that one project that they’ve gotta build. So, uh, yeah, I think maybe the TPI thing in my mind about why I thought it would be a bigger market share is just because a lot of the projects that, uh, that Alan, you and I, or our compadres in the industry work on. I have TPI blades in ’em. So maybe that’s just why my mind was going that way. Allen Hall: Well, and our friends at Vestas have opened up another presence in the United States. They opened some offices in Houston, Texas to much a great fanfare. Uh, they used to have an office in Houston years ago, as Phil has pointed out before we started recording today. Uh, but they’re back at it and it looks like they’re trying to get more of a foothold into the United States. They have about. 500 employees in Texas at the minute, but it does seem a lot of the manufacturing and production is coming out of Colorado. And obviously as Joel pointed out, you know, sun Z is a big project that Vestas is also involved with. Uh, so what does the growth outlook look like for Vestas and why the move right Joel Saxum: now? I, I don’t know what the growth outlook looks like, but I do know that being a person who lived in Houston and works and plays there still. There’s so many good engineers in Houston, and it’s not just mechanical electrical engineers. It’s every sort of engineer you can imagine, and a lot of it from that oil and gas world, right? So Houston as the. Energy capital of the world for oil and gas. Now that city is starting to rebrand itself as the energy transition capital of the world. They’re all the trade organizations are trying to do this. They’re grabbing people at oil and gas to be engineers. So there’s a lot of really good, smart people that understand the energy industry in Houston. If you’re gonna put an office in the United States and as a wind company, it’s a good place to be or or to do an event. Uh, this week’s wind farm of the week is the Jericho Rise Wind Farm. It’s an EDPR wind farm and it’s really close to the Canadian border, so it’s up in the northern part of New York state. And we’ll do a little bit of a wind farm, uh, by the numbers this week for the wind farm of the week. So, uh, this wind farm 37 S-G-R-E-G 1 14 2 0.1 megawatt machines, uh, that creates a total of 77. Point seven megawatts, uh, coming outta this wind farm. But the scope of work for some of the build out was, is kind of interesting. 55, 50 5,000 linear feet of access. Roads, 175,000 tons of sub based placed for roads and pads, 3.6 million pounds of rebar. Procured and installed for foundations. 23,300 cubic yards of concrete. Procured and installed 60,000 cubic yards of backfill, a hundred acres of trees. Uh, $132 million. Went into this wind farm with, uh, 76 construction jobs and six jobs created locally. So it gives you a little bit of the scale of what it takes to. Build one of these wind farms, uh, and this is 37 turbines, right? We’re seeing wind farms a hundred, a hundred fifty, two hundred, three hundred, even more than that for wind turbine numbers. So the, the size and scale of these things is, is growing and growing. So Jericho Rise Wind Farm, up at upstate New York by the Canadian border from EDPR, you are the Wind Farm of the week. And that’s gonna Allen Hall: do it for this week’s Uptime with Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe it in the show notes below to Uptime, tech News or Substack Newsletter. And if you haven’t joined us on YouTube yet, we’re getting close to a million subscribers. So you. Better click in there before we cross that magic number. We have to have some sort of giveaway at a million if we can figure out who that person is. That would be kind of cool. So we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

This week on News Flash, Nordex’s determined stance on US growth, the Cenos Floating Wind Farm project, National Grid’s sale of its US renewable assets, and Europe’s wind energy production expansion to meet 2030 climate targets. 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. Newsflash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Starting off the week, German wind leader Nordex remains bullish on US growth despite President’s Trump Day one, suspension of offshore wind leasing. CEO, Jose Hlu Blanco confidently told Reuters they’ll hit targets, quote, even in worse case scenarios. North American business surged 3% to 10% of orders in 2024 while Nordex exceeded profit forecast with 296 million euros. The company now aims to recapture its former 15 to 18% of the US market position and projects five to 7% profit margins for 2025. Energy developers, flotation Energy and Vagrønn have filed for approval of their groundbreaking Cenos floating Wind Farm with Scottish authorities. The 95 turbine project will tower 320 meters above the North Sea, 190 kilometers from Scotland’s coast. The innovative offshore wind development secured through Crown Estate Scotland’s in into program will power both UK homes and North Sea oil platforms. Public consultation remains open until April 4th, building on momentum from their successful Green Volt project. In a major market move, national Grid is offloading its entire US renewable portfolio to Canadian giant Brookfield for $1.74 billion. The strategic divestment includes 1.8 gigawatts of operational assets and 1.3 gigawatts under development across solar, wind, and battery technologies. This sale follows similar renewable pullbacks by energy majors Shell, BP and Equinor Amid Profitability Challenges. National Grid will now concentrate investment on its core energy network infrastructure with the transaction expected to complete by early 2026. And finally, European wind energy suppliers are rapidly expanding production capacity with over 30 factories across the continent being expanded or newly built to meet ambitious EU 2030 climate targets. SEF is investing 300 million euros in Rotterdam to produce 200 triple XL offshore wind foundations. Annually by mid 2025 while Siemens Gamesa announced a 200 million Euro investment to upgrade its facility in France to produce next generation 14 megawatt turbine blades, creating 200 new jobs. The manufacturing expansion spans cable production in nine European countries and turbine component factories in Denmark, France, Poland, Italy, and the uk. These investments totaling 11 billion euros over two years, strengthens Europe’s energy security and creates thousands of jobs.

Allen and Joel speak with Birgit Junker, co-founder of the Global Blade Group, a forum created to share knowledge and innovation around wind turbine blades. For over ten years, the group has been making blade information more accessible and approachable. For more information on joining the Global Blade Group, email tgbg@statkraft.com. Link to Blade Handbook – https://www.bladena.com/uploads/8/7/3/7/87379536/cortir_handbook_2019.pdf 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: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, I’m delighted to welcome Birgit Junker, a true pioneer in wind energy blade technology and the co founder of the Global Blade Group. This organization has become the premier forum for the wind turbine blade experts to collaborate, share knowledge, and drive innovation in areas like structural design, Lightning protection and blade inspection technologies. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight. Shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Birgit, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Birgit Junker: Thank you very much and thanks for having me. Allen Hall: I want to start off by looking back a little bit into 2013. What were some of the challenges that when farm owners were facing with Blade technology and maintenance that led you to create the global Blade group? Birgit Junker: To start with Rege from Vattenfall and I, we were relatively new on the owner operator side. And we both found that when we were speaking to our colleagues, they, their eyes just glazed over every single time we said Blade. Cause nobody knew anything about blade. When I was hired at Eon I came from from Siemens. I was hired at Eon. I was told that they didn’t have blade issues. So I should expect to work about 80%, 75 percent on blades. And the rest of the time I should be spending on a drivetrain. 10 years later, when I left, there were 10 blade people. And I never ever had to look at a drivetrain. That was the attitude then. Blades were not a problem. We didn’t have blade problems. Blades were like that black box that you had. You just went out there and counted that they were all there. And you listened just to make sure that there wasn’t anything strange going on. And about, you 99. 9 percent of the time, nothing happened. There was nothing wrong. We even had contracts that said that blades were maintenance free. But then Reg and I started on the owner operator side. We came, we both came from OEMs. I’ve done catastrophic failure investigation. I’ve done field failures. I’ve done all sorts of things for what, 10 years before that. And knew that we did have blade problems. Ian just hadn’t found out yet. So when I started, Reg and I, we decided that we needed to talk to one another because we couldn’t talk to colleagues. Joel Saxum: Birgit, from experiences in the field I would, I want to follow up with that as a hard second. Because so many people Don’t understand even today what’s going on in the with blades. Like I’ll give you an anecdotal problem. I was in a field doing an RCA and out there with a site supervisor who was in charge of 120 odd turbines, big wind farms in the States, right? And he was looking up. He said, yeah, those blades, he’s they’re just, big plastic wings in the skies. And I was like, they’re not actually plastic. And he goes what do you mean? I said it’s it’s like fiberglass and this and that. He’s wait a second. So you mean to tell me that thing’s like a, it’s built like a boat. Like it’s like a fiberglass boat up in the sky. And I said, yeah. And I was like, I was like, that’s more in line of Ben, a plastic wing. And he goes, Oh, he’s I never really knew that. And I said, Oh, further conversations with this this gentleman, he’d been in wind for 15 years and it was running wind farms and didn’t know that the blades were made out of fiberglass. So I think that when you came in, what you’re talking about, it’s the origination story of Global Blade Group here. That could be echoed all over the world. There’s so many people that don’t know. What it really is. You and Reketpale from Vattenfall, so you guys got together, you understood that, Hey, we could talk to each other about these things and try to fix these problems. Did the next conversation go, let’s bring more along? Let’s bring some others along? Birgit Junker: Our initial goal was to increase the knowledge about blades in the industry. And I am still now after 22 years in the industry, I’m still asked, are blades hollow? So that goes along with your your guy in the U S asking if, glass fiber, really? But but yeah, the initial goal was to increase the knowledge, but also. And to have a common front towards OEMs and other interesting parties, the first meeting we had was actually with DNV and GL about the the guideline for blade design. And while we were sitting at the table, one of the managers looked at us and said, very discreetly, I’ve actually never spoken to an end user before. And these are the people doing the guideline for blade design that all blades are type approved type approved from. And with my normal way of speaking, sometimes I speak without thinking. I just looked at him and said, I guess that was about bloody time. Allen Hall: It leads to a good point, Birgit. So what is all this, when you have all this fragmenting knowledge running around from different organizations, how does that affect the performance and maintenance of blades out in the field? If you don’t understand some of the fundamentals, what are the consequences of that? Birgit Junker: You got two two very extreme consequences and then something in the middle. The. The worst consequence is that people look at them like a black box. Like Joel’s American site manager and don’t do anything. Especially if they have one of the really old contracts where it says that blades are maintenance free. And then you have the they don’t do anything. They run them and suddenly they fail and they get shocked and they’re like, Oh my God, something happened. I don’t know what to do. And then you have the other extreme. Where a company will have an independent service provider on blade repairs servicing their blades or the OEM servicing the blade, and they will do repairs that aren’t necessary because they are being over eager. They want to make sure that the blades are perfect all the time. And you don’t need that. You need something in the middle. You need to maintain your blades in such a way that they don’t fail and you get the expected AEP. But that doesn’t mean that you have to repair them every single year. It just means that you need to keep an eye on them, make sure that they don’t crack that they don’t have cracks in structural areas, that they don’t have open leading edges or open tips, that they don’t have lightning damages that are severe. And if you do that, you can cut down on your maintenance. And have a turbine that operates really well. Joel Saxum: I liken some of this, and this is not just this comet is not just blades, it’s drive, train, gearbox, bearings, all these things and wind. So if you have say, we talk about a fleet wide problem. You have a, we’re in the States, a Ford truck. Okay? A Ford truck. There’s millions and millions of these things out there. In the hands of all kinds of people. And so when there’s an issue with something, there is a tribal knowledge that’s so deep that you can reach out in every direction and find an answer. Everybody has an answer to how to fix this carburetor or whatever it may be on this vehicle. In wind, we have such a small size of a fleet, right? So if you’re, say you’re a XYZ wind operator and you’re a decent size, you have a thousand megawatts of wind production. You may only have 50 of one kind of turbine and 60 of one kind of turbine 80 of one kind of turbine So that’s not a very big like statistical fleet to pull information from because failures happen at different rates and different things and different blade Manufacturers then we get deeper and we get into this one was manufactured at this plant versus that and we have this model But they have those blades and so it creates an inherently tough problem for the industry And the answer to it is the same answer that we, or in my opinion, the answer to it is the same answer that we hear at almost every conference, trade show, industry get together. We hear collaboration and transparency. However, it’s hard to make that happen, but that’s what you guys have done here. That’s what the global blade group is based on is collaboration and transparency, because if you’re one operator and now all of a sudden you have, Eight friends that are operators and they can share information from their fleets with you. Now you have this collective piece of info or collective batch of information that can give you so much more insight into what may be happening on your own fleet. You guys have taken on a lot of projects in this manner. What, what does that look like for collaboration? Birgit Junker: To start with, we we were on a much lower level. We were just like, we want to function as small own operators, a back office support. We had companies that were part of the initial, we started being the blade group and then there was the. Scandinavian Blake group or Nordic Blake group. And then it became the European Blake group. And now it’s the global Blake group. But to start with, we had small owned operators that were part of it. And they would call us, some of us, one of us and say, my OEM says this. What is he actually saying? Or in one case, it was like, can I actually believe this? And we could then go in and translate what was being said to make them understand it a bit better. And that’s what I mean by we wanted to raise the awareness and the knowledge with, within the industry, especially the small owned operators, because a lot of those people, they were appointed blade specialists with actually never really seeing a blade. But that was just their area of responsibility in in the company. And they were just trying their best and and that’s fine too, but we wanted them to have a bit more knowledge when they said yes or no to to an OEM. Primary goal was to increase the knowledge. Secondary goal increase the matureness of the industry and increase the Communication between OEMs, ISPs, and OWN operators. Allen Hall: And that’s a different approach than other organizations take on BLADEs in particular. I’m not going to name them, but there are several organizations that are trying to do something similar. But I always feel like they’re very rigorous in the documentation phase, creating of standards, whatever that is. But they don’t have the requisite engineering at the table to help explain these things. Is that what the global Blake group really brings to the offering? Birgit Junker: We we’ve actually requested not to have any kind of commercial people present. We want it to be an open technical discussion. Of course we honor everything, which is, NDAs and all that sort of stuff is on it, but it’s critical. Communication of a technical nature between owner operators and and sometimes it’s also helping somebody to decipher what they’ve been told in connection with a failure or a new kind of blade, all that sort of stuff. And it’s just, um, because it’s free and because we only have own operators because of GDPR, which is the European rule set for communication and and data. We are able to speak relatively free, relatively freely without having to have lawyers present. And because we don’t have commercial people, and we don’t talk about projects if they haven’t been signed yet. We don’t talk about a lot of things where we would, you know, Require lawyers or commercial people. It’s technical stuff. And very often we don’t know what site people are asking us questions about. We don’t know. We know what turbine type because we don’t need to know what blade type, but we very often don’t know what country it’s in what area it’s in. We know if it’s onshore or offshore and whether it’s in a lightning area or not. If we’re talking about lightning, that kind of stuff. Allen Hall: Let’s focus on one particular problem, which I think is universal, which is lead, leading edge protection, leading edge damage. And I know you’ve been vocal in that area and I talked to you at Sandia a couple of months ago about this and I got an earful, which is fantastic by the way, because I like hearing your opinion about this, but how does that work in terms of the global Blake group? If you’re looking at a particular problem, how’s it sussed out among the members? Birgit Junker: We create what is called a JIP, which stands for joint industry project. Right now we actually have a JIP on leading edge erosion where seven own operators in Europe and the U S have decided to put some LEPs on turbines. And for most of them, I think it’s seven the seven own operators that are part of it. Six of them have put the same material on at least one turbine in the test. And then they have put two or three different LEPs on different turbines so that we all have the same one. So we have some, a reference point and then we have all the other ones and we we got some assistance from a third party in the UK, they get access to all the data from our inspections. They put everything together and we can now see five years down the line, which LEPs are better than others. Which ones fail first, which ones fail last. And because we all put the same LEP on as a reference point, that is the one that everything is compared to. And we can see that some of the LEPs fare really well, some of them not so much. And we can also see that some of them should have been put on from platform but weren’t and some have have been really easy to put on. And we’ve also seen a difference between the different LEPs in the sense that some tapes work better than other tapes. Some precasts are better than other precasts and within paints there are differences as well. And we got everything from a three layers LEP to a single layer paint LEP. Yeah, we do joint industry projects and it’s voluntary for the ones that want to be part of it. They pay what they do. And each company, each individual company pays for their part. So there’s nothing between us financially. Allen Hall: Yeah. So there’s no money coming to the table just to belong to the group. But if you want to participate in the testing program, like on this leading edge protection effort, you’re going to put some coatings on your blades. You’re going to donate that time and effort to go do that. But the return on that investment is a hundred X because you can’t find good information on leading edge protection from real world turbines. That is the hardest part. And then to tie it together with the engineering knowledge, And history of blades that the global blade group brings to the table. That’s not anywhere else on the planet right now. Is this just one of several projects that you’re working on at the minute? What are the other projects that you’re working on? Birgit Junker: We focused very much on the LEP because when we started this project we were three companies to start with Stattgart, Vattenfall and and Eon. And we tested 20 LEP projects. On a rain erosion test and chose the ones that behave the best. And then we made this JIP where we invited the rest of the Blake group to participate. And we ended up being seven own operators. And we’ve been, that has been running now for five years. We’re actually at the moment talking about starting two new JIPs, one on on databases and inspections and how we can deal with those because we we get information and very many different kinds of data. Formats and quality and stuff like that. Try and make something where we can do added benefit from the data that we get, and we’re also looking into the last one is that beginning, beginner stage. We want to test some some CMS data or CMS systems. But it’s like having a project that’s seven times as large as the one that you can do yourself individually in your company, And and you’re only paying for your own part. So it’s, you get a lot for nothing or a lot for a little. Joel Saxum: How do we add a fourth one for lightning protection upgrades? How can we do that? Birgit Junker: You ask kindly. Joel Saxum: I can get down on, I can get down on a knee. I think it’s a fantastic idea, right? Because you’re not only are you getting different I think the installation part is a big one. You’re testing the LAPs. Yes. But you’re testing how they were put on the ambient conditions. They were put on all that stuff is great. But the big part here for me is It’s being tested in varied geographies, right? Because you can put LEP on one wind farm in one spot and you’ll get a certain amount of tests. But if you spread that test from different corners of the world, different corners, closer to the ocean, maybe offshore, maybe onshore, maybe up in a mountainous range, maybe in Spain, maybe in Canada, wherever. And you add all of those together, you start to get a much better picture of the overall qualities of whatever this product is. So in that project, you had seven owners involved. What does a normal meeting look like? How many people, how many different operators are involved in a normal meeting? Birgit Junker: We don’t have a lot of meetings because we have a third party that does all the the analysis. The JIP was actually started by EDF. And they sent a project proposal to all the own operators and said anybody want to be part of this, you want increased knowledge. And the only way we can get it is by going out and doing it. And if we should do it ourselves, it’s going to be humongous. But if we do it together with the rest of you we can get more for less. And so EDF is running it. But we have a third party doing all the analysis and the reports. And if you come to the DTU event on leading edges in February, I think it is you will actually hear about the five year report. And we are also looking into extending it because there are at least three new LEPs that we haven’t trialed. And so we are right now discussing whether we can extend it or whether we should start a new one and and how we can do that. Joel Saxum: Bjerken, let me ask you a question, cause this is one that I have quite often and Alan, earlier in the show or in this little recording, you had mentioned different groups. In those different groups, and so this is, this may be a point of contention here, in those different groups, they want operators, and that’s great because they don’t want outside influence changing how they are. However, in my opinion, I think that at some of those meetings, they should have, or some of those conferences, some of those meetings, some of those get togethers, some of those white papers that are written, I believe that they should bring in subject matter experts in individual subjects. Like I’m talking, if you’re talking aerodynamics and you have a bunch of blatant people, that’s fantastic. But, in my mind, I would bring in Nicholas Goddard as an aerodynamic subject matter expert to supplement that conversation. It’s the same thing I talk, like, when we see people talking operators talking lightning. Alan and I live lightning all day, every day. That’s all we do for our day job, is we have to eat. When I believe that, in some of those conversations, that, that bit of knowledge could be very beneficial to that group. Do you guys bring that in, or is it all just operators and nobody else is allowed? Birgit Junker: Because of the confidentiality and GDPR and all that, we can’t bring in ISPs or subcontractors on specific areas, especially not if they’re suppliers. One of the main parts is that we’re not allowed to talk about the cost of using these subcontractors or suppliers. Because that would be a competition issue. But what we’ve done is that we’ve made working groups right now Bladina has a working group on stock on structural damages. So on the team site, which is the new place where we’re going to store all the data Bladina has access to the group the working group called structural damages and talking about Nick from PowerCurve After New Year he will actually be heading up a new group called Aerodynamics. And and Politech has yet said yes to head up a working group called Lightning. There will be webinars. There will be sharing of information. We will perhaps be making some kind of inspection reports together so that we are talking the same language. That’s one of the things that started the whole I think it was you, Alan, that mentioned it earlier. The Blade Handbook. The Blade Handbook was actually written by one of the owners. And it was like four pages. It was an information for employees. And then Vladina helped them make it. And and after agreement with this owner Vladina said, when we do these projects because they do a project very, very often they do projects for us we could add more data. We could add more knowledge, we could add words, we should have a common language. So that’s actually how the Blade Handbook started. It was it was an attempt for us to speak the same language, use the same words, understand what everybody was going on about. And it’s it’s now a very comprehensive book with lots of terminology. And that was the common goal was a terminology. So everybody understood what we were talking about. Whether it was, leading edge or trailing edge, the abbreviation for it, whether it was pressure side or suction side the abbreviation of it, but also the different ways that blades are built up. You’ve got the box bar, you’ve got the integral blades, you’ve got the web blades, you’ve got carbon, you’ve got a glass fiber, you’ve got balsa, you’ve got pine, you’ve got PVC, you’ve got PET, you’ve got all of that is in that blade handbook. to make sure that we speak the same language. Allen Hall: We’re going to put the link to the Winter and Blaze handbook in the show notes, because if you don’t have that as a reference on your laptop, your desktop, or printed out next to you on your desk, you need to do that because a lot of the knowledge that comes from the industry and all the experts that are from around the world when they put that into a condensed volume, that is explanatory. The average human can understand what’s happening. Those things are invaluable. And you need to go find that. We’ll include that in the show notes, Birgit, because it’s a really important document for the industry to continue to grow and understand what is happening. And I know we, Joel and I had talked to a number of operators and engineers that are interested in joining the Global Blade Group. How do they do that? What’s the process? Birgit Junker: They send an email. Allen Hall: It’s that easy? Birgit Junker: It’s that easy. If you’re an owner operator. And you send an email to the email that you will share on the screen at some point, Alan. I will be on the other end and I will send you an email specifying exactly what you have to do. And it’s all based on teams. So you have to join a team’s site and you’ll have to put your name in a membership list. That’s how easy it is. There are also bylaws because more and more owners didn’t want to join unless there were bylaws. Before COVID we were 52 owner operators. There are quite a few people that have left their jobs. So we need to reestablish the contact with some of these companies, but we’re we’re getting up there. And and the whole idea is to increase the knowledge. and have a common area where people can share information and ask questions and also ask the stupid questions. Personally, I don’t think there are stupid questions, just stupid answers, and they’re usually supplied by me. But if you don’t know what the leading edge of a blade is, you should have somewhere where you can ask that question. Because a lot of the people that actually work with blades. Don’t have the introduction to what a blade actually is. Allen Hall: Yes, that is so true. And if you want to join the global blade group and get connected with Burgett, the email address is tgbg@Statkraft.com. So tgbg@statkraft. com. Birgit, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We’ve wanted to have you on for a long time. We need to have you back more often because there’s so much information and you’re. Tremendous help to industry. So thank you for being on the Uptime Podcast. Birgit Junker: You are more than welcome.

Allen and Joel speak with Allan Larson, VP of CMS Products at SkySpecs, about their remaining useful life estimates for operators. By predicting component failures, operators can create better maintenance schedules, saving time and money. 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 Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. And today we’re diving into a critical challenge facing wind farm operators, predicting component failures and optimizing maintenance schedules. Imagine if wind farm operators could instantly gauge the cost impact of their decisions And automatically assign a dollar value to the risk. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually becoming a reality through innovative approaches to remaining useful life assessments and automated risk detection. In today’s episode, we’ll explore how these technologies are revolutionizing wind turbine maintenance. Helping operators reduce downtime, cut costs, and extend the lifespan of their assets. We’ll learn how advanced analytics and artificial intelligence are enabling more precise predictions and smarter decision making in a WinFarm world. Our guest is Allan Larson, the VP of CMS products at SkySpecs. In his role, Allan leads all aspects of product development for the Horizon CMS platform, which is crucial for wind turbine drivetrain monitoring and diagnostics. As part of SkySpecs product team, Allan manages the product roadmap, conducts market research, and oversees the development and launch of new features. His expertise is key. In condition monitoring systems and AI based fault detection for wind turbines makes him a key player in shaping innovative solutions for the wind industry. Allan welcome to the show. Allan Larson: Thank you. Allen Hall: That was pretty good, wasn’t it? That was a pretty good intro. I feel pretty good about myself now. Play it when you go home from the show here, yeah. That’s the rap, people. Uh, so, you’re a drivetrain specialist. CMS drive space. Allan Larson: Yes. Specialist. These days, that’s what I’ve become. Yes. Allen Hall: Yeah. And that is, uh, obviously a really needed, uh, knowledge base, particularly as the number of wind turbines has grown dramatically and we’re rapidly producing turbines. We also rapidly produce drive train problems. And CMS is going to be the only way for us to dig ourselves out of a little bit of a hole on gearboxes and bearings and some of the drive train issues. Uh, what do you see as sort of the top level issues out in the field today and what are you, what are you hearing? Allan Larson: Well, I mean, I think about it not so much in terms of, uh, which, uh, which failure mode is occurring most today or whatever. It’s more, um, the failure modes that you have today is something that we need to detect early so we can act on it, right? And, uh, that’s what CMS is all about. It’s about this early and accurate detection of failure. of drive train failure modes so you can take appropriate action at the appropriate time. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s been a very busy crane season in the middle of the United States. We’ve noticed a lot of gearboxes and main bearings being replaced. The CMS systems are going to play a bigger part in that. I think a lot of operators are becoming much more aware that CMS is needed on drive train. Allan Larson: Yes, um, actually when we, when we started, uh, the Company Vertical AI that SkySpecs acquired in 2021. When we started that, we thought, uh, our perception of the market was, say, uh, Europe is in front here, like they’re the most mature, most likely to adopt a new software solution. And then we thought US is a bit behind based on what we knew about the market. And we would say, well, I think the US is maybe a decade behind in CMS adoption. That’s it. Uh, and I think it’s almost the other way around now. And so the U. S. market has picked CMS up like crazy. Really? Yes. So, uh, this is more and more becoming the perception that you just need to have that. There’s no new turbines being produced in the market that doesn’t have a CMS system. Right. The manufacturer simply can’t offer a guarantee without it. Because they need to make the same maintenance decisions during warranty. And they need to know about it. Hey. Pending failures, uh, leading up to an, uh, end of warranty date. And if they want to offer long term guarantees like FSAs, uh, they need to know what the current, uh, failure status is in their fleet. And so you do that with drivetrain condition monitoring. There’s some damages you can detect up to a year, several years in advance. Right. And others that’s months, half a year away. Right. Like I said, we’ve, we’ve sort of. Uh, with our software focused in the beginning, of course, I’m solving the whole condition monitoring problem. But, uh, now we turn our attention a lot more towards how to drive action in the field more efficiently. That’s where the remaining useful life comes, comes into it. Um, How was Allen Hall: that, how was that implemented? I’m really curious how you think through that as a problem set and get to an output. What does that look like? Obviously you’re taking out all this data and we know more about turbines today than we knew 10 years ago. A lot more. There’s just so many more sensors on a turbine than there were, especially coming out of the factory. Even though I think a lot of operators do complain that the number of, uh, amount of sensors that are on there probably isn’t enough. However, uh, you got to give the OEMs credit. There is more data coming down and people are adding their CMOS systems on top of them. What do you do with that? How do you process that? What does that look like? How do you attack the problem of assessment? Allan Larson: As in on the actual condition monitoring Allen Hall: part? Yeah, how do you look at all that conditioning monitoring and then helping that site manager make a decision? Allan Larson: Um, I think the detection problem is too hard to explain on radio. Laughter Um, and uh, others have done it. I think I’d rather talk about the, the, um, Well, yeah, that’s what I’m trying to get at is it will kind of surprise you a little bit on how we approach it because, um, at the moment, it’s not so much about like, Oh, we’re going to combine all our data streams and then produce a magic output. It’s actually more of an understanding of the problem itself. So let’s say that you, um, detect something on a main bearing, detect damage on a main bearing, right? It’s, we’re not predicting that something might happen. We detect something that is happening right now. like a damage that’s ongoing and that will last a certain amount of time. But, uh, and so we, the diagnostic piece of that is saying, well, it’s an, it’s an inner ring fault or it’s an outer ring fault, or it’s a bearing, a spalling issue or something like that, right? You can diagnose it down to a really specific level. Um, but regardless of what it is, you’re going to have to exchange that main bearing at some point. You can’t avoid it. Maybe you can extend the life by greasing the bearings and purging the grease and re greasing it, so on. But the sort of prognostic of it, right, the prognosis, sorry, is clear, right? That main bearing is going to die, you’re going to have to exchange it. Allen Hall: So the remaining useful life is an interesting concept. Not a concept, I mean, it’s an action. But, obviously, when the designers of a component like a main bearing come to you and say, Well, The lifetime of this bearing is a thousand years. Allan Larson: Yes. Allen Hall: And then it’s five and it’s toast. Allan Larson: Yeah. Allen Hall: So something’s wrong there. Are you coming in for the remaining useful life and saying the lifetime of this bearing is actually a lot lower? Which then increases its cost? Is it based on history? Allan Larson: Yeah. No, so, um, Allen Hall: Because the predictive failure, right, the predictive failure rates are built into specs. So the OEMs are out going to the manufacturers saying, I need to have one of these out of a million fail. Yeah, well, so, Allan Larson: I mean, we’re talking about a domain where you detect something, right? You detect, let’s say that main variable, the probability of you having to exchange that main variable is 100%. Sure. It’s going to happen. Sure. It’s going to happen. Yeah. But there’s a, there’s a, there’s a time when there’s a step change in the cost and time on, and the time you have until then, that’s basically your remaining useful life, right? That’s what you, what’s for you, but you should be interested in the time until I think I incur a risk. So instead of saying that you have a probability for a risk, right? You’re talking more about using RUL as a proxy for risk probability. Okay. Okay, right. So you’re Allen Hall: saying there’s a time window where that risk is can occur in or maybe not. I’ll give you the US versus European example. 10 years, repower US. 30 years, Germany probably still running. Allan Larson: Yeah, but here you’re talking more about risk quantification on a fleet level. So like, should I buy this turbine or not? And like looking long term projections, but I’m talking about the detection of the individual failure mode. We have an ongoing case on a main bearing right now. How do I, how do I, uh, how do I make decisions on should I fix it? Yeah. When should I, when should I repair it? Is it when, or if Allen Hall: I want to get to that point, is it, is it a win or is it more like an if with a, with a 10 year lifespan and the economics, I think you raised a good, good question, Alan, which is Allan Larson: 10 years into the future. Like we just said earlier that the main bearing damage, like you, what will last you, maybe 12 months, right? Sure. You’re looking, you’re looking into either this or next financial year. Allen Hall: Sure. Allan Larson: Uh, and, and you’re not, you’re not doing, um, like, uh, you know, like your, your, your, your Weibull, uh, uh, Weibull based statistics to forecast failure rates in your fleet. You’re looking to make decisions on the, on the actual repair test. That’s in front of you. When should I do it? And how should I prioritize it up against the others? Okay. All right. Yeah. So it’s not that 10 years into the future or this and that fleet, you’re really looking at, um, um, I know what the, I know what the costs are sort of predetermined, right? I know what the liability is approximately, right? Sure. And I know what the risk is approximately. You can actually put that for all failure modes for the drive train. The individual customer will have an individual owner will have a cost assumptions they can put into something like that. Yeah. So the liability and risk, but you need something else just other than that to understand when I should and how I should prioritize. So. Okay. Okay. So. That’s a very interesting aspect. I’m realizing now this is also tough for radio to explain. No, no, no. Allen Hall: It’s good because I think this little walkthrough is indicative of the dilemma that a site supervisor would have and decisions they have to make. So, what you’re saying is, okay, inevitably we’re going to have to replace this part or a couple of parts probably were up there. When do we, when do we manage, how do we manage that? The outlay of funds. How do we best manage it so we’re, uh, best spending money? Allan Larson: Because that’s Allen Hall: ultimately what it comes down to. Allan Larson: You want to do two things. You want to, uh, you want to avoid risk, obviously. You want to avoid those costs. Sure. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. You want to avoid the risk. And on the liabilities you have, uh, or you can say all your, when I say liabilities, I mean all your, Repair tasks. Let’s say you have two gearbox repairs that are pending. You want to do it at the same time. So you only have to get the crane out to site one time, right? Right. That’s the, and you optimize on your liabilities in a way. So there’s optimize your liabilities and avoid your risks. RUL comes into place when you say like, well, look, uh, the ideal world would be, I have a countdown timer. I had it say, I have a 269 days until I have to exchange this main bearing or have to place the order because there’s an additional two months of lead time. Between my, my place in the order and it happening, right. And then I avoid unplanned downtime or you have, you have exactly 29 days until you lose that uptower repair opportunity. Right. But that’s, it doesn’t work like that. You don’t get that precise. RUL is really difficult. Allen Hall: Is it though? Allan Larson: It’s very difficult. Allen Hall: I’m asking, you’re the expert here. I’m the novice at this. For as many wind turbines, if we are built at particular models, I can think of, you know, Early Vestas turbines, GE 1. 5s, all those Siemens Gamesa turbines that are all the same. Do you not have some, at this point, predictive modeling of what that looks like? So that, if my CMS system is giving me this level of vibration noise, that, hey, that means you do have 300 days to make a decision. Allan Larson: Sure. Allen Hall: For Allan Larson: some, for some, uh, often occurring failure modes for certain populations of turbines. You’ll have a big enough data set to say something. That’s usually valuable. Yes, but it’s very rare that one actor has all of that data all at once, other than the OEM. And even when they have it, there’s huge mechanical variance. Even if you look at 2. 3s, Siemens 2. 3s, for example. Oh, sure. Joel Saxum: Different kinds of bearings in them. Even Allan Larson: those bearings, even if they have the same model, have used different batches of metal, right? Yeah. It’s often how you find like serial defects, right? Is that this or that batch of gearboxes was produced with a poor quality metal or something like that. Temper, right? So even within the same model, there are batches of, so the mechanical variance is huge. And then there are loads of factors that we don’t know what that, uh, that we can’t measure that drives a failure mode degradation. It’s really hard to measure loads. For example, on a live turbine, you can, you can approximate it with power curves, but you can’t really do it. Right. All right. And, uh, how is the individual turbine lubricated and, uh, cooling systems? How are they running? It’s a very, very complex problem to say, and they all affect the remaining useful life. I give you a counter example, right? Predict EV range, right? Let’s take Tesla cars, right? There’s probably how many millions of cars, millions of like, say, model threes out there, right? They’re, they’re very similar mechanically, like it’s not exactly the same, almost close, right? You have probably 500 million to a billion samples of battery drain from time to end. You have very few and measurable factors like acceleration, elevation, temperature, all that stuff to help you make predictions on battery life. But still, nobody drives their batteries to zero. Allen Hall: Right, because they know that’s a problem. It’s an estimation. Yes. Allan Larson: Right. Not only do you not really, um, trust that you would also constantly be looking at that countdown because it’s going to live update all the time, right? Right. It’s very hard to do with wind turbines. Is Allen Hall: it, is, let me, that’s a good analogy, right? So the electric vehicle is a good analogy in the sense that Tesla has Millions of vehicles on the road. I own two Teslas. Allan Larson: Oh, well you’re Allen Hall: contributing to the data set. Yeah, but, yeah, I know. You see what I’m saying? I just Allan Larson: want to say, just for good measure, I bought them before I knew Elon was crazy. Okay? Allen Hall: He’s going to put a man on Mars pretty soon, so. We’re a woman on Mars, we’re not the other. So you can’t be that crazy, but you know what they’re on the on that side on the on the Tesla side that they’re Analyzing all that data to do predictive analysis on lifetime and it then turns it to value it turns it to value for them turns It to valuation of the vehicle. I Want to return my vehicle and buy a new model 3. What is this model old model 3 worth? Well, only Tesla really knows. Yes, they can Use predictive analysis and remaining useful life on Allan Larson: it. And stuff like knowing what batch of metals goes into that. Only the OEM knows. And maybe, and maybe only really that the gearbox OEM, right? Yeah, true. But really no, really no, right? Like that visibility throughout the supply chain. It’s not, that’s not our transparency. It’s just not there. And I think it would be too complex a problem to solve to get it. So you need a, you need a different approach. So it’s, it’s, so actually that’s the best way to say like, so One of the things I’ve learned with working with our CMS engineers is that they’re not, um, they’re not afraid of saying, we think this failure mode will last this and that many months. So the true reality of RUL is that today you’ll say, Hey, this, this failure mode will probably last another two months, but, but I’ll check it again tomorrow. Allen Hall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the smart move. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think the smart move is to take the worst case scenario. Like if you had, uh, 40 different types of bearings and different ones, the one that’s going to be the worst, that’s the one you model it off of. So you don’t run into the Allan Larson: Yeah. But you still need some sort of framework to communicate to site that they can use to communicate to their investors or management or whatever to tell them something about, you know, What’s the cost impact of this and that damage? What risk am I avoiding? And essentially, what value am I getting out of my CMS system? And that’s been sort of, that’s been what I’ve been really trying to do something about over the last year. Just come up with a model that kind of works. And I think one of the things we shouldn’t be afraid to do is just Rely on some of that experience from CMS engineers and put it in a framework. That’s big uncertainty. So you can say, Hey, I think this, you know, this main bearing typically lasts 12 months plus minus three months, but then you can use that uncertainty as a, as a, as a, as a risk gradient. So you will say until it gets to the lower bounds of this uncertainty, it’s low risk when it gets to the right, when it gets to the lower bounds, it’s medium. Upper bounds of uncertainty high and beyond that it’s critical, right? Cause then you have a decision framework. You can sort of look at your fleet and ongoing things to make priorities with. Suddenly you can make a trade off. Let’s say you have two gearbox damages. One is in very early stages and one is in the late stages, but I can get a 25 percent discount if I replace them both now, but what I’m sacrificing, so I’m winning and avoided risk, but I’m also. I’m, I’m, I’m exchanging another gearbox too early. What am I sacrificing? What am I sacrificing? Well, you’re pushing, you’re pushing, there’s two things, right? You’re pushing, uh, uh, uh, uh, a liability forward. So then you’re looking at it from a financial perspective. You’re saying, well, what’s the future value of cash, right? Yes. Right. That’s all about. Right. And so I’m willingly, I can, I can make that calculation because I’d have an internal discount rate of maybe 10 percent that I do that up against. And then I can say that, well, I’m, I’m saving, I’m saving 50, 000 by doing this, these two people at the same time, but I’m, I’m trading off 25, 000 in like life. Yeah. Yeah. In, in like early spend. Yeah. Right. Allen Hall: Right. Yeah. That’s the part that that’s the missing variable. And a lot of these equations is how much am I going to lose if I don’t do it? Yeah. And then, Allan Larson: and then that plan can change because then suddenly something happens that makes that someone, someone ran into a gate, right? That’s part of it. Allen Hall: Isn’t that the fight right now. If you look at an O and M building and you talk to the site supervisors, they’re held financially accountable for everything that happens on site. So they have to go get approval, especially when you’re talking about bearing replacement, gearbox replacement, anything involving crane. The big thing is the crane. Is, is, is you have to get approval up the chain and, and those people up the chain want to have a better understanding of why, why now? That’s usually the most important one. Why now? Why can’t I wait six months so they can combine it with another project? Or whatever they’re trying to do, right? There’s a lot of complexity to this. Allan Larson: Here you can present them with a strategy they can choose. Allen Hall: Yeah. Allan Larson: So if you have this fly buzzing around in my eye and my nose constantly and I don’t know why it’s Is it also you? It’s like Joel Saxum: turbine problems. They just don’t go, they won’t go away. Allan Larson: Rule. Um Um Do you want a high risk strategy? Because then we can run it into the high risk zone. Right. Right? Visual framework. You know the risk you’re taking is, uh, it’ll suddenly, here there’s a high risk that it’ll suddenly get to the stage where it can’t run anymore. And so, then you have two months of downtime. Because that’s our typical lead time for ordering a main bearing. Allen Hall: Yeah. Allan Larson: Right. Allen Hall: Yeah. Okay. Allan Larson: So yeah, I can clearly communicate it. And that’s the whole point of what we’re, what we’re trying to do. Joel Saxum: I’m going to ask you an overreaching or overarching question about the CMS product, like that SkySpecs is producing for the market right now. As we know, like most, every, every turbine that comes off the line is going to have some type of CMS that the OEM can monitor it, whether it’s under FSA or under warranty period or whatever, your CMS product is a built in It’s not a bolt on sensor, it’s not external sensors, it’s just taking data streams. It’s Allan Larson: just a software. Joel Saxum: So it’s just software, but it’s, it’s for an operator that maybe Running the site by themselves or running it with an ISP or even running it as an FSA with the OEM But they want to have their own eyes on what’s going on. Correct. So it’s like it’s because the Whoever wants to get control of that CMS that’s in the turbine. That’s not the OEM doesn’t get it Like that’s just not they’re not gonna get it So you guys are the option in the aftermarket to be able to give them the eyes and ears of that CMS. Allan Larson: Yeah In general there are three Three operating modes for like live monitoring or continuous monitoring. As we see it, there’s a, for the really big asset owners that have the in house engineering capabilities to do it, we can offer the software, they use the software, right? But they can then reduce the complexity of how they monitor because they could do it all from one software instead of five, one for each hardware, right? Allen Hall: Right. Allan Larson: The second thing is you might not have that internal expertise. Maybe you just have one mechanical engineer that oversees suppliers that deliver stuff into your fleet. They maybe help prioritize and stuff and like channel stuff to the site and so on. And there we do a service. We do the monitoring. Um, and, um, and there’s also a journey there where we support the in housing journey a lot. That’s, that’s kind of how we position ourselves as well. We, the companies that are just on the edge there, They want to in house it. We offer a flexible model to do that. The final model is that, and that’s, those two first ones are specifically for self performing sites and self performing. Right. As if you have an FSA, you’re right. You need that second pair of eyes because, um, and this is not to do OEM bashing. I know, although I know you love that, is, uh, the OEM is monitoring, monitoring. Tens of thousands of turbines, maybe 20, 30, 000 turbines that they have full scope services for. And I can guarantee you, your top priority site is not their top priority site. Right. Exactly. So how do you drive action? You drive that by actually knowing what’s going on. Allen Hall: Yep. Allan Larson: And it’s not about, it’s not about that. You have to get like some sort of gotcha moment with the OEM. You have to be a good partner to them, right? Because their site operations are also struggling. It is also sometimes a bonfire, a dumpster fire of side operations. And they’re struggling as well with the right resources and their internal priorities and stuff like that. But you can be a good partner to them if you know what’s going on in their turbine. Allen Hall: Oh, sure. And it’s the same thing with Allan Larson: performance analytics and other things as well. You want to be a good partner to the OEM, a strict, a firm partner. That knows how to drive your priorities, but you can’t do that without transparency. And so shadow monitoring is something that’s really on the rise in the industry right now. And actually also a lot in Europe. Allen Hall: Oh, I can imagine. We’ve seen it a lot more in the United States in the last two years, I would say. The shadow monitoring, because they’re trying to understand what they have purchased. Yeah. And they have another 10, 8 years or so of operating it. So they’re trying to get some insights before the warranty runs out. And even if they have an FSA, they’re really trying to validate it. And that’s what mostly happens in Europe. So that makes total sense. So the Verizon CMS approach is getting adopted more widely now, I would assume. Operators are becoming more aware of the situation in which they’re in and need help. Allan Larson: I don’t think anybody in the future is going to buy a sensor system specific software. Right? That’s going away. Yeah. And, uh, and, uh, and I think the sensor manufacturers out there that haven’t adopted this on their roadmap, they’re going to lose out in the market. Allen Hall: You’re seeing the essential manufacturers deliver API so that the data can be pulled into a system like Horizon CPS. Allan Larson: Yes. Yeah. Allen Hall: And that’s the right approach. And if, if, if an operator out there that. It has this issue and I, I don’t know of one in the states that doesn’t have this issue right now in terms of CMS and trying to understand the data and then look at remaining useful life. How do they get a hold of you, Alan? How do they start picking your brain and saying, Hey, explain to me this Horizon CMS system and how it all works and how do I integrate it into my platform? Allan Larson: Um, Find me on LinkedIn or they can just go to SkySpecs. com and look up. Well, that’s easy. That’s easy enough. That’s easy enough. Uh, you know, uh, carry a pigeon, uh, owl, owl, whatever. You’re, Allen Hall: you’re based in Denmark though. I’m based in Denmark. Yeah. Yeah. You’re not, you’re not in Michigan like the rest of the Sky Specs team, but no, that’s, you know, it’s good to bring in. But I speak to a lot of Allan Larson: US asset owners as well. That’s a big part of my job is to. Speak to customers and talk about the solution we have and understand their problems and challenges. Allen Hall: Alan, we’re going to put your LinkedIn information into this podcast so people can find you. Uh, this has been a really fascinating discussion. Uh, as SkySpecs pushes into new areas like CMS and Drivetrain, it opens up so many opportunities and it’s good to know that smart people are working on these projects like you. So I appreciate you being on the . I appreciate you being on the podcast. Of course. Course. And thank you for joining us. Allan Larson: Yeah. And it was cozy here, right in our drone hanger in an, it was a, a good setting for this. Yes, it is. Well, thanks for, thanks for having.

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