The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

On News Flash this week, substantial investment for renewables across Europe by the European Investment Bank, Octopus Energy’s “The Collective” proves a success in the UK, and Xcel Energy plans to eliminate their coal power plants in the US Midwest by 2030. 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: Starting off the week, the European Investment Bank is making bold moves to accelerate wind energy development across Europe, signing significant agreements with both BNP Paribas and Banco Satandier. These partnerships will generate up to 16 billion euros in wind energy investments through innovative counter guarantee agreements. The initiatives are part of the EIB’s broader 5 billion euro wind power package, demonstrating Europe’s commitment to renewable energy expansion and industrial competitiveness. The deals will enable manufacturers to receive advanced payments and provide performance guarantees for new wind projects, while also supporting supply chain efficiency and grid interconnections. This financing structure is backed by Invest eu, the eus ambitious program aiming to mobilize over 372 billion euros in investments by 2027. 2400 onshore wind turbines representing 14 gigawatts of capacity. While the upcoming election has introduced some uncertainty with skepticism from leading parties, Industry experts still remain optimistic. The CDU, likely to lead the next government, is expected to maintain support for wind energy given its reliability and cost effectiveness in producing clean energy. Over in the UK, Octopus Energy’s groundbreaking investment platform, The Collective, has demonstrated remarkable success with its first two wind projects selling out within just one week. The platform democratizes renewable energy investment by allowing public participation with investments ranging from 25 to 20, 000 with no fees. Located in Yorkshire and Wales, these projects attracted hundreds of investors. And the company is now expanding to expand the platform through its Pass the Power campaign, inviting more renewable energy projects to list on the platform. And in the United States, despite challenging political headwinds, Xcel Energy is making significant progress in renewable energy deployment in the Upper Midwest. Their ambitious plan includes adding 3, 400 megawatts of wind energy and 550 megawatts of solar power. The company aims to retire all coal plants in the region by 2030 and potentially reduce emissions by up to 88 percent compared to 2005 levels. The plan also includes innovative energy storage solutions including testing new iron air battery technology at their Becker site. That’s this week’s top news stories. Stay tuned tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast with Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and me.

Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik discuss their innovative training programs for wind turbine technicians. Momme, as Head of Training Center, and Russ, as Director of Quality and Ops Support, explore how the company is tackling workforce challenges through apprenticeships and advanced training methods in both Europe and the US. 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 Energy is facing a critical workforce challenge, finding and retaining skilled technicians to maintain the growing fleet of turbines. This week we speak with Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik. Deutsche Windtechnik is setting new standards for technician development through their comprehensive training programs, combining hands-on experience with cutting edge technology. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Momme and Russ, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Momme Feddersen: Thank you. Good to be here. Thank you so much. Allen Hall: Well Deutche Wind Technique. Has always, to me, been a really high standard in terms of a company. But that comes through training. And Deutsche Windtechnik spends a great amount of time and energy on the training side. I want to talk to some of the challenges that are out there first, and what are some of those challenges that exist in training wind turbine technicians today? Russ Leach: Yeah, so they’re the same ones we’ve had since my entire time in wind. It’s finding the qualified personnel who are ready, available to climb that turbine and do great maintenances and great troubleshooting. The problem has been exacerbated with the growth of renewables with wind, right? They’re harder to come by. Um, And we’re all fighting for the same people, aren’t we? So that’s why we have our training programs, right? We have to start people out from nothing many times and build them up and get those competencies out there with them. Um, and, um, that’s the main challenge. Plus the distributed nature of the workforce, right? We’re, we’re across the country here in MoMA, they’re, they’re across Europe. And, um, so you have to put mechanisms in place to get the training to them many times and get them competent and, and verified as competent many times out where they’re at. So it’s a combination of Training facilities, which are very valuable, but also training that extends out to the field with the people themselves. Allen Hall: And Mame, let’s talk about the technical challenges because wind turbines have gotten more complicated. There’s more computers in them. There’s more electronics in them. There’s more cooling systems. How has that impacted the training of technicians? Did it just make it harder because there’s so much new things happening? Momme Feddersen: Here in Deutsche Windtechnik, we have to, we are focusing more and more on the, um, not on the, on the, on the MOOC. Highest moderns, tur, modern turbines, um, but more, um, on the older ones. So, um, but uh, when we look into the future, the, the topics you say are, are exactly the topics we have to, we have to face. Um, what what we did in the past was focusing on the practical side of the training and not focusing on the theoretical side. That’s why I think we did a. Kind of, um, interesting approach, uh, how we train here in Germany. Um, as you know, we are a multi brand, uh, company. We are servicing different brands. We are not focusing on Vestas or on Anaconda or something like that. We are, we have all of them. Also a challenge. And that’s why, um, we did that approach here in Germany, uh, what I think is outstanding in the, in the home. Allen Hall: And that comes with a unique thing that Deutsche Wing Technik does, is that you do have resources for the variety of turbines, which I think just makes this really complicated. Discuss the sort of the differences between what happens in Europe for Deutsche Wind Technique. Momme Feddersen: Yeah, we have different, uh, different, um, ways of training here in Germany. It depends on your experience. It depends on your age, on your, uh, on your skills you already got. Um, so for example, the, the people who are, who come directly from school, then they don’t know how to do it. So we have to start with, with the real basics. Um, our apprenticeships program, uh, starts when they are 18 years old, uh, directly from school. And they are in, in Deutsche Windtechnik for three and a half years, just with education, just with learning, just with everything. So, um, there are ways to shorten the time, but, um, yeah, you, you learn the basic. mechanic work in, in our training center, for example. Um, this is one way to learn it. The other way is when you have more experience, um, we got a level training for the people who are already working in the field. So we don’t stop working on ourself. We don’t stop educating ourself. Um, we have a level training from basic to level two or level three, where you learn how to troubleshoot very well. And the third one is the, uh, the, the career changer program. This is one of my favorite programs, I have to say, because these are people who are highly motivated. These are people who come from completely different fields, uh, uh, uh, in, in Germany, they all have, uh, uh, uh, uh, had a job before. So for example, they are plumbers, they are carpenters, they are something else. And in our training center, they learn, um, the real, uh, the, the, the, to be a wind technician, wind technician, they learn it in about six months, but only in the training center they are here for six months. And then they’ll go out and they start working what they learned here in the training center. And they did it and they do it then in the, in the field. And that’s my favorite program because, because the people. see this as a second chance in their life and they learn something completely new. Say they learn, um, to be an electrician. Um, and as you said before, the turbines are more and more complex. They are more and more, um, you have to be perfect in so many things. You have to be a mechanic. You have to be a technician, an electronic specialist. You have to be a Um, and yeah, so different things, so, um, yeah, it’s, it’s quite complex. Joel Saxum: That’s a stark difference from what we see in the United States because, um, and Russ, you can probably speak to this. You hear these, sometimes you hear horror stories from whether it’s an ISP, you know, OEM, it doesn’t really matter where it’s like, Hey, you’ve got your GWOs or even, you know, your equivalent of GWOs. You’ve been safety trained. You got a couple of tickets, get out in the field and now you’re expecting to produce. Uh, throw, thrown right into the fire. And, you know, from someone who grew up in some oil and gas worlds, that’s a tough place to be. That is a pretty , pretty, pretty stressful thing. Um, and so I know when Alan and I initially talked with the DWT team about the training, how it goes on in Germany, uh, it blew my mind. It was like three and a half years of, of actual. Really, uh, curating these technicians to get them to the point where they can get on their own in like three and a half years in the States. I’m thinking, that’s a bachelor’s degree. I’m at university. You know, that’s a really advanced person. Are you guys taking some of the, the lessons learned and the training and, and applying that in the States to your, your technicians here too? Russ Leach: Absolutely. We have our own apprenticeship program. We stood it up in May. Um, it’s a WIN Laborer. It’s part of the Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeship, um, under Construction Laborer. Really excited about it. Um, the model is MoMA and what they do over there. Ours is a two year. It’s a two year. Um, and it combines many of the same things. Um, we have our, uh, online learning. We have our in person training. It’s called Related Technical Instruction in the Apprenticeship World. And we got a heavy dose of on the job learning. It was structured on the job learning, well documented on the job learning that leads to competency verification. So, We’re really excited about it. Um, that, and it’s right now, it’s geared more towards the, uh, well, our existing training program. That was the beauty of it, right? We had our existing program that we just rolled right into a two year apprentice program. Um, but it’s geared more towards repower right now. What we’re doing in January, I’m super excited to say, is, is standing up one for O& M Techs. Probably be two year. And many of the same things, slightly different, um, around that too. So we have a structured learning path now for our people. Again, we had that already here in the U. S., right? But now it’s registered with the Department of Labor to their standards, with all the requirements for on the job learning. You need 2, 000 hours a year minimum on the job learning. You need 144 hours of what’s called related technical instruction, which is basically, Classroom type stuff, right? And, and certain structured, uh, um, competency verifications there. We got all that. It’s launched right now. And at the end of the day, they get a certificate that’s valid wherever, wherever they go. And, uh, and, and Momay mentioned life changes. We have something kind of similar to that too with veterans, with veterans. Um, we’re really excited to just get signed off on, uh, with the Veterans Administration to be a training facility where young men and women coming out of the military, can receive their GI Bill benefits while they’re earning money with us, their hourly rate. That’s huge, Russ. Congrats on that. Yeah, we’re really proud of that. We’re going to be bringing in a lot of veterans to us. But the main thing is, are they learning, right? Are they learning the safety things that matter? Um, the electrical, the mechanical, how to hoist and rig and things like that. That’s all part of it. Um, and that all leads to getting the all important competency verifications, the sign offs. What we say here is all roads lead to competency verifications, or JPMs. We call them job performance measures, right? They have to be able to understand hazards. Well, first understand the paperwork, the job safety plan, and the lockout tagout paperwork. How to call the operation center and shut down the turbine. Then they have to be able to recognize the hazards in the task and do it with high quality. And they’ll go perform the task, and then roll it back out, take off their lotto, fill out their paperwork, and they get signed off by, by what we call journey workers, or the more senior level people who are already signed off, or a technical instructor. It depends on the situation, really, right? So, so really the key to the kingdom in training is not the training itself. It’s the end result that they are competent to perform the task safely and with high quality, and that’s where our program’s going. I Joel Saxum: think it’s important that you just mentioned it is well, uh, on your repowers. You’re focusing on your repowers because there’s that nuance in the IRA bill of you must have an approved apprenticeship, a program, and you guys have to have that in place for PTC credits to roll for on those repowers of people working them. So the, that’s a huge part of that. And, um, I’m really liking, like, like that part of it. Russ Leach: Yeah. That’s a major forcing function in the industry. I will say that, um, the industry is moving towards, or the U S I should say, is moving towards apprentice programs slowly anyway, from 2011 to 2021, the number of apprentices went about 60%. But it’s still a small number compared to our, our, our, um, colleagues in, in Germany, right? They are, where they’re 1. 9 percent of their population is in registered apprentice programs. Here it’s 0. 18, right? So it’s really small. Yeah. But the IRA Act is a major forcing function around apprenticeship. If you have four more people in your company and you’re doing work that applies to the Inflation Reduction Act, for that owner to get the tax credits, they have to employ a Registered apprentices. 15 percent of the labor hours have to be from registered apprentices. Joel Saxum: Yeah, so let me, let me ask you a question about this one. So, at the end of the day, when we’re talking training, when we’re talking all these things, It’s a function of recruiting and resourcing for people to do the jobs. One of the problems that, and I know this is a global thing, but really exacerbated in the States is, um, basically retention of technicians because you may get them in and get them trained up and get them working on your processes. And then because there’s such high demand, it’s like, Oh, I’ll get, these guys will give me another dollar an hour. I’m over here. I’m over here. I have to imagine that the training programs and what you guys are putting in place to really build these, these technicians up in their career has to have a positive effect on retention rates. Are you seeing that too? Russ Leach: Yeah, it absolutely helps. Yeah. And of course the, uh, and you’re right, they’ll leave for a dollar an hour somewhere, but it’s a combination of culture and what’s in it for them and their future. Right. So we try to wrap them in a, in a really respectful culture that, In a growing company that people are having fun, but at the same time, especially with the apprentice program, give them a goal. Give them a goal. They want to stick around because they’re going to get this, this really valuable certificate that’s valuable for their career. Um, and if not a certificate, just a lot of training, right? Um, for instance, January, we’re, we’re, we’re standing up a two week intense, very intense intermediate troubleshooting course. What do we, what do we find out this last year? Lesson learned from us. We had a one week troubleshooting course that we set up, but 60 percent of the technicians who ran through it didn’t pass because we got them from other companies because we’re growing quickly, right? So we, we hire a lot of people from other companies and we put them into this, uh, senior techs into this, this troubleshooting course. And, and 60, like I said, 60 percent of them didn’t pass because they had not had training, detailed training around schematics and how to, and how components function and things like that. So. Lesson learned, right? Lesson learned. So what we did was, now we’re blowing that out to two weeks, two intense weeks where we’re focused on fundamentals, and then they get into the troubleshooting. But here’s the thing, here’s the really unique thing about it, they also teach, they’re taught how to teach back, they have to do teach backs. Um, you know, the, the, in this business, the team leader over the technicians, is almighty, right? They, they dictate everything that happens to them, right? So if they’re good instructors, if they’re trained to teach, if they’re trained to pass down that knowledge around, um, schematics, around how components work, around whatever, right? It’s just going to make the, these technicians, their experience just that much better and they’re more likely to stay around because somebody’s paying attention to them. So, to keep people, you have to give them a good culture. You have to pay them attention. You have to tell them what’s in it for them. And they have to see the value in that. And that’s one thing. That’s why we’re investing so much. I’m, you know, pinch me, right? Momi has all these nacelles, these beautiful nacelles in his facility. Guess what? We just signed an agreement. We’re getting a seamless 2. 3 megawatt nacelle this first or second quarter into our training center. As well as a Mitsubishi simulator. We have a lot of Mitsubishi 1000s. Great little machine if you, if you operate it right and maintain it right. We’re sort of taking the guts out of that and we’re putting that in there as well. And then after that it’ll be probably a GE15, I think, 1X of some kind in there. Just to get really hands on experience in our center. Similar to what Maume is doing there. Couple that with the apprentice program and you’ve got a winning combination that the Germans have proven over time. Right? Um, a good center, good apprentice program, on the job learning. And you wrap all that together and you get really good text out of it. Allen Hall: Moment. I want to talk about the type of people that are attracted to your training program in Germany, and I’m going to come back and ask Russ the same thing, but who are those people that are attracted to being wind turbine technicians today? Momme Feddersen: You have to learn, love to work with your hands. You have to work on your own. It’s a real tough job. I think you all know that. I think you, you need the experience in your job. I doubt that you are the person who, uh, That a person who always wants to go to the same shop, do the same thing is the real, um, uh, turbine technician. You have to be excited about everything. You have to be excited about the height. You have to be excited about, uh, small rooms. Um, I think, and you have to be really passionate about what you’re doing. And you, I think that’s the, the type of person. Um, who work in that and in our company and, uh, work in the bread. Allen Hall: Do they come to you straight out of school or are a lot of them coming from other industries and deciding to getting to win, to get a little more venture, maybe get out of the office? Momme Feddersen: All kinds. Um, so the apprentices all come, mostly come from school. The career changer already has a, has a different job, but we also have The ones who comes from other companies like Vestas, like Anaconda, or something like that. So we are, we are hiring about, just here in Germany, we are hiring about 150 people a year, just in the field. So we are growing quite fast. Allen Hall: And Russ, what does that look like in the United States? I think that the demographic for Future wind turbine technicians is a little bit different. What are you seeing in the U. S.? Russ Leach: A lot of entry level people or people who have tried other jobs and it just wasn’t fulfilling for them. We get a lot of folks who’ve, uh, just a few I’ve talked to recently worked at an auto store, like an, um, well, auto parts store, for instance. I’ve got others who come from the prisons, lots from the military, which we love. Um, and it’s really all across the board, but they all have some things in common is that they don’t want that office job. They see it as a challenge. They’re very proud of what they do. They’re all smart. They’re really smart. And, uh, they just want to do something that’s different than everybody else. And climbing wind turbines is as different as you can get. Joel Saxum: We see that as like an adventurist spirit sometimes, like a lot of, a lot of the, uh, the blade people we know, like when they’re done with the blade season, they go rock climbing and they’re free soloing in the Tetons and all kinds of crazy stuff. And it’s like, man, you guys are really nice. Um, but that makes that the right person to be. I mean, when you look at like, say again, like blade repair techs, they’re hanging from ropes, like, you know, hundreds of feet off the air. Like that takes a certain person that wants to do that. Or when you walk into the base of a turbine and you look up that ladder, there’s a specific person that is cool, that wants to climb 80, 100 meters every morning. Russ Leach: Well, they’re mentally and physically tough, right? If you’re climbing a turbine in South Texas or Oklahoma in August, you know, you’re not weak mentally or physically. And I have so much respect for the men and women who do that every day. Momme Feddersen: And what I really like is Our technicians are really proud to be that. Um, when you, when you have a look at our, for example, Instagram channel, you always see pictures from, from our technicians who are on a turbine. You see how proud they are, what they are doing, how thrilled they are about what they are doing. It’s, it’s, it’s so cool. Allen Hall: And what does that look like if you want to join Deutsche Windtechnik and you, and you want to be part of this apprenticeship program or, or try to advance your career or get out of the auto parts store or get out, you’re coming out of the military, what are they looking forward to? What is the next six months, year look like for them? Russ Leach: We start out with a one week of onboarding, which is just intense safety stuff, Allen Hall: right? Uh, Russ Leach: uh, individual, you know, competent climber, rescue training, the things you’re familiar with. We also throw in a high dose of, uh. Hydraulic tooling, because there’s a lot of fingers, fingers have been lost over time with hydraulic tooling. First day CPR, OSHA 10, things like that. NFPA 70 is a big one. Electrical safety, of course. Um, and, and of course, just the company policies. That’s, that’s the first week. And then they get assigned a whole bunch of training, and they go out. People learn better on, for wind turbines or anything, if they’ve been exposed to it already. So to get out there, working under the PAE, Primary Authorized Employee, from an OSHA standpoint, the person who’s there to make sure everybody’s working safely, also known as a team leader in many ways, working under them, um, and start getting sign offs on competency verifications on the, on the basic things. This is how you start a turbine, right? This is how you connect a bucket, for instance, just to keep things simple. Um, and they, they start going through that, and then, then when they’re ready, then we, we start cycling through more, more formal training. That we do now, and especially as we build out our center more, there’ll be more of it. That two weeks of training, for instance, um, that we talked about for troubleshooting and then, and it’s just a lot of experience on the job learning sprinkled with, of course, the regulatory online stuff that everybody has to do from an OSHA standpoint, um, and other training. And it takes time. It takes time to cook a good wind technician. It really does. Allen Hall: Deutsche Windtechnik has been involved in e learning, online learning at the same time, because you have people deployed. all over the place that need to keep up to date on the technology, on the training, on those certifications. You want to talk about what that looks like once you get into the Deutsche Windtechnik system? Momme Feddersen: Um, we are starting to do that because, um, we want to reduce our, uh, time in the training center with where you just learn theoretical stuff. We want to reduce the travel time. To, to training center. We want touse our, so, um, and, uh, that’s why we developed some online trainings. But, but especially the in instructions, what we have to do and especially the safety instruction where you, what you have to do on a regular basis. Um, but uh, as I said, right now we are focusing on the older turbines, but in the future we have to be. Um, prepared for the newer ones, and that’s why we, um, uh, develop kind of 360 degree, uh, videos of turbines, what we can use in our training facilities. Um, we have different things here in the training center where we can, what we use. Um, yeah, but also, uh, virtual reality is also a topic, what we are developing right now, where you can use your hands, do something without having the turbine in place, without having the tools in place. Uh, so that will, that will be a part of the future, definitely. Russ Leach: Yeah, we, we made a lot of custom, uh, e learning, uh, using our own internal developers and outside developers. There’s a lot of value around custom e learning. What we found is that technicians don’t like e learning that doesn’t specifically apply to what they’re doing every day. They don’t like it. They don’t want to waste their time on it. But you get one that’s specific to that, say, CEMAS that they’re going to work on every day, now they have a lot more interest, right? But like Mome says, we’re moving into this new realm. For us, in first quarter, we’re making one for, well, two of them, probably a Mitsubishi and a GE, this 360 degree type training where, You got these special cameras that you go film the whole turbine. And you, you load it in your software and you can look any direction like a 3d thing. But the main thing is you can, um, click on a cabinet. Well, it’ll cabinet opens, click on a component, zooms in on that. You got links to, um, hazards or work instructions that, that goes with it. And the cool thing about that is you can now tie it in with your engineering support and your technical support, where they can say, Hey, go check this component out, let’s take a look. And they open up the software and they zoom in on that contactor. You know, check the DIN rail behind this contactor. Let me show you which one it is. You know, especially if you have somebody who’s just learning troubleshooting. Um, or the site manager who might be really, really experienced in the turbine, you know, looking on their phone. Here, go check here. So we’re trying to leverage that to increase the, uh, to amplify the effectiveness of our technical teams to get the turbines up quicker. So we’re super excited about that. That’s rolling out this next year for us. Germany’s already using it. Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. Uh, to be a wind technician now is the right time doing it. 10 years ago, it just seems like it, it is a hundred years ago because the technology has got so much better and the training is light years, uh, away from where we were just a couple of years ago. And the investment by a number of operators and Deutsche Wind technique being the forefront of this is tremendous. Uh, so if you are interested in being a wind technician. You better get in line right now because there’s going to be a line at Deutsche Windtechnik store because of the training and the skill set you’re going to get from a high quality company. Now, Mami, how do people get a hold of Deutsche Windtechnik? How do they get into your system over in Germany? Momme Feddersen: The regular way. Uh, apply online. Uh, we got an awesome recruitment department. Um, so when you apply, I think a week later you have a, uh, an appointment with our recruiter. So nice people. Um, yeah, so it’s, we are extremely fast. Um, that is outstanding. I think here, I worked at different companies before and it took. Month to, to, to hire new people because the, the recruitment departments were slow and, uh, the, yeah, it should be honest. And I think this is really different here, um, to be fast, to be able to find the right people, to talk to people, um, to, and yeah. And for example, here at the training center, we, Always have people, um, who come, who come here to, to, to see what we are doing and, uh, to be able to see something, what, uh, when technicians do, um, even if they don’t work here, they, they see the training center. They see how serious. We, we do our things and, um, that’s why they are really interested in, in working for Deutsche Windtechnik. Allen Hall: And Russ, how does that happen in the, in the United States? How do they get a hold of Deutsche Windtechnik and get into the training program? Russ Leach: Very similar. The best way is to go on our website and our jobs listed and apply. That gets you into the system. We have some wonderful recruiters as well who are, uh, who are right on it. Talk to them, and it starts a sequence of interviews, Allen Hall: right? Russ Leach: And, uh, and once they, you know, everybody agrees to, that they’ll come on, then we schedule a date for them to come on. We have an onboarding every month, sometimes two onboardings a month in the summertime, kind of our peak hiring season. We’ve had up to 20 people in these. We average around 10 ish, uh, a month, uh, coming on. And, uh, they, you know, they come on. That starts their journey with us, uh, depending on where they’re going to go. We have our traveler teams, about 80 or 90 of those who travel everywhere. That’s right. We have our O& M teams or fixed sites. We got our new repower team that, that, that we’re building right now and is already operational, um, that can go there. Um, they’ll hire on for one of those teams. And then, um, of course, leadership development is a big deal, right? We have our leadership development program and the best and brightest can go in there and start moving into lead positions, manager positions, and things like that. We always prefer to hire from within our leadership because they know the company and they earned it, right? So they also have a chance to get into our LDP as well over time. Allen Hall: That’s really, that’s really impressive. So if you’re out there and you’re thinking about getting into wind and being a technician, and there’s a lot of opportunities right now. Think about Deutsche Wind Technique and you need to go visit their website, which is www. deutschewindtechnique. com. Uh, you just Google it and it’ll take you right there. And Momme and Russ, this is great. Thank you for being on the podcast. Well, we really appreciate you having us on and we look forward to Russ Leach: doing it again. Maybe we’ll have one on quality someday.

For the first time ever, all the Uptime hosts are in the same place! They discuss the fantastic outcome of the Wind Energy O&M Australia conference last week, highlighting the amazing presentations, attendees, and discussions. Keep an eye out for next year’s event! 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’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: For the first time ever, I think all four of us on the podcast are in The same location at the same time. Rosemary Barnes: If you include our amazing producer. So Allen Hall: this is a unique time and we just finished wind energy, O& M Australia. which was completely packed, insanely full, and it was a day and a half of informative discussions, no sales talks per Rosemary’s strict instructions. Good call. To get the information out to the industry and let everybody know what’s happening around the world? Is it, Australia is a really unique place, Rosemary. There’s a lot going on here. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so. And the wind market is definitely unique. We’ve got a few unique problems. We also, a little bit different to other markets I’ve worked in, like in in Europe and in North America, where there are a lot of engineers around who’ve worked on the design and manufacturing side. We don’t have those industries in Australia. And there aren’t as many people filtering through with that deep technical knowledge. So it’s taken us a bit longer to get to the point where one, people realize that they need to have that information. It’s not enough to just have, a service agreement and trust that they know what they’re doing and that they’re acting in your best interest at every moment. And two, for people to begin to, yeah, get that expertise. There was no shortage of, Expertise on the panels. And yeah, my favorite thing about the conference was hearing just conversations going on, just, overhearing people just geeking out over some, really niche topic that they hadn’t thought of that they’d heard, someone mentioned on stage, a couple of people connected who didn’t know each other, and now they know that they’re got the same problem or one of them’s got a solution and one of them’s got a problem. It’s yeah, just exactly what I wanted from the conference. Joel Saxum: I think one of the things I took is this joke was told a few times, literally and figuratively on an island here in Australia when it comes to wind energy knowledge, right? So we tried to, when we put this conference together, we tried bringing some expertise from around the world. Simply because, it’s hard to travel down here, right? That’s just a simple fact. It’s geographically remote. So bringing that expertise in here and And after we went through a bunch of things on stage, a lot of people talking on the sides like, I didn’t know this solution existed. Like the Soren Kellenberger stuff from CNC Onsite. I didn’t know you could precision machine things up tower. That was just like, to a lot of people that, that exists, right? Lightning protection upgrades do exist. There’s people that can do it. There’s things you can sense. Shadow monitoring of your fleet. Even when you have an an FSA with an OEM. Oh, this is a great concept. These are things that like in the States. In Europe, we’ve been doing for quite a long time and these things are there, but it’s just not down here because it’s a smaller market as well. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s also hard for Australian Australians that are working in the industry, can’t all get over to those international conferences. And to be honest, they’re not always great either. They’re, often very sales pitchy and yeah, cover the same topics over and over again, the kind of more lowest common denominator stuff, rather than that really technical. Geeky stuff that sometimes you just need . Phil Totaro: So I was fortunate enough to moderate the operator panel where it’s funny because we all joked before the event that might be one of the more contentious things that would come out of this is, the challenges that are being faced by owners and operators with these full wrap service contracts. But I was struck by the remarkable amount of, maybe they were biting their tongue a little, but the remarkable amount of collaboration that they were talking about and espousing and saying, we, we want to be able to, we’re a small market and we need to be able to depend and rely on each other. And so we can’t burn bridges and we can’t, do things to, to disrupt the the OEM relationship. Even if we choose to, eventually rely on an independent service provider. So that was very that was very interesting. And it was a very free flowing dialogue. Not only in that session, but throughout the whole day and a half. People actually opened up. Which is one of the things we wanted with developing the program. Was we wanted people to start talking. And they did Joel Saxum: sometimes when you do a panel and you say, Hey, can we get some questions from the audience? And you have to like pry one out. Oh, I know Alan, you and I, when we’re at conferences, it’s usually you and I, Hey, I got a question. We had no shortage of that at every single panel. We were running around with mics. Here’s a question. We got a question over here. We’ve got a comment over here. And I think the spirit of that culture, Went through the whole event up until the second day when we’re doing roundtables. Joel Saxum: You were, I was in the back of a few of them guiding some things. You were bouncing through, man, there’s conversations going on over here. Yeah. I know I was Joel Saxum: in one I had there was like 30 people in there and nearly half of them had different questions during the roundtables. So the audience here the wind industry here in Australia, it’s hungry for knowledge. Phil Totaro: Absolutely. And actually that’s one thing that I didn’t get a chance to say at the end was, We’re all here for you, not only the four of us, but the companies organizing the event, anybody that came from the States we came or anywhere else around the world, for that matter, we came because we are interested in helping the Australian market grow. The whole thing with us doing events is we’re not event planners, as Rosie said at the end of the session, but. We don’t measure success based on, how many pictures we get taken shaking hands with a politician. We measure success based on how many megawatts go in the ground and how efficiently you’re able to operate them. So whether you need Rosy’s, technical expertise, whether you need lightning upgrades, whether you need, CMS and sensor technology from eLogic’s Ping, or, any kind of strategy consulting or benchmarking that we can provide at Intel Store. Ask us. Please rely on us. We’re here to help you, and we want to help you, and I will bear the 15 and a half hour flight to come all the way back down here very gladly. One thing Joel Saxum: we should touch on there too, as we said, the four of us here, Matthew Stead and Thomas Schlegel from Eologics Ping. They’re not in this room right now, but they were key components of putting this thing together. Of course, Ping is a Australian born company. So the local connections here and all the way down to where we should go eat. That was fantastic, but much, much more than that. We wish those guys could be sitting here with us, but everybody’s got to travel. Allen Hall: Melbourne has been a great city. I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I thought it was gonna be really too hot, according to Rosemary. I Rosemary Barnes: think it’s gonna be 37 today, so you may still Allen Hall: get that wish. We did enjoy walking along the river. The restaurants are fantastic. There’s just a buzz to the city, which you don’t necessarily see the United States at the minute. So everywhere we walk, even this morning, there’s just people. Happily walking down the street and going to their offices and having coffee. And it’s, it is a lively city, which is enjoyable. You don’t always see that wherever you travel. So that was quite nice. And the, the piece I pulled out of yesterday was the expertise that Australia has developed, and I thought a lot of the things that Operational side should be coming over to the United States, actually, particularly on noise. I thought the session on noise was really informative about how the operators deal with noise and how they try to address it and how they deal with the neighbors. We don’t have that. And we just don’t do that. No. At all. In the States. Rarely. And it is a huge stumbling block. Yeah. But some of the approaches that Tilt and some of the other companies that were represented were surprisingly good. Thought out and were planned ahead. They weren’t just trying to be reactionary. They were proactive about noise. Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s cause I think Australia got hit turbine syndrome thing. And Yeah. Yeah. I know that you had problems with people thinking wind turbines made you sick in the United States. Maybe it was as bad as here, but it was pretty shocking here. Like even while I was doing my PhD, like just just sitting in an office by myself running finite element analysis models and publishing in academic papers, I was getting people emailing me about how, evil I was and how much damage I was doing to the world because I was captured by big wind and, you Making everyone sick. And like I know I was really shocked cause when I first heard about that, I was like that’s not a real thing, so I’m not going to worry about it. And I think the industry thought that, and then we realized, oh, okay, we can’t actually put new projects in because everybody thinks this. So thinking it’s a problem means it is a problem. And yeah, if you go to the more mainstream wind energy conferences in Australia, The word social license is mentioned at least once in every session, no matter what the topics are. I think that it’s just like super duper front of mind for developers here and yeah, and operators. Allen Hall: And supply chain also. Because you’re on an island and nothing is really manufactured in country. It always comes from somewhere else. The planning involved in supply chain was surprisingly aggressive and good. They’re thinking ahead, way ahead. In America, if something breaks, they just think I’ll just order it from China and maybe it’ll come soon. We have the Amazon syndrome there. Totally do. on Joel Saxum: Amazon. Allen Hall: And it doesn’t always arrive like you think it’s supposed to. And the term is down for much longer. In Australia, they don’t tend to do that. They tend to be much more ready for those situations, which is, I think, good. Beneficial to them. You want those turbines to be running all the time. Joel Saxum: Yeah. The one slide that someone popped up and I don’t remember exactly which assessment it was in. And there was, I think, Phil and you and I talked about it. It was like, these are the installed turbines in Australia. And it was like, there’s 13 of these and there’s eight of those. And there’s 11 of these and there’s, I think Rosemary Barnes: it was Katrina Joel Saxum: Swallow from Wind Lab. There’s 22 of these and there’s 46 of these. It was like, man, to find parts for that, to get them down here for those specific turbines, like that’s going to be tough. Tough as they start to age. So I think that was actually a really good session we had was the lifetime extensions session that the people were when you turn around and you look in the crowd and I did this quite regularly during the whole event was just to see how many, when slides are up, how many people had their phones up, trying to take a picture of a slide or how people paying attention stuff. And it was all eyes forward. Everybody, You didn’t see a lot of people sitting back like, yeah, I’m at a conference because I have to be here because I’m typing away on my computer. People were engaged. It was good content. Phil Totaro: And one other thing with that panel that Rosie moderated, the Life Extension panel, was You know, when my biggest question coming down here and having studied this market for a while was they’ve got a lot of assets that underperform because the market is so highly dependent on wholesale market. For their power sales and those prices fluctuate wildly, day to day and even year on year. But the proactive thinking about wanting or frankly even needing to to life extend and how much benefit is that buying you. That was something that I still feel like we didn’t quite fully address it. So hopefully that’s a topic that we continue to talk about next year. But also it was interesting the foresight that you know, Katrina, who represents WIDLAB and Christian Peek, who was also on that panel from Mint Renewables the, they were the two the two owner operators there. They. had some very good insight on, what’s going to be necessary in terms of both market conditions and technical requirements to be able to do any kind of life extension. And it was it’s obviously fundamentally different than the kind of market we have in the United States where it’s subsidy driven, repowering after 10 or 11 years. This requires, just like you were talking about with logistics and everything, Joel, it’s, this requires a lot more forethought to, all right if we get to, 20 years of life and we haven’t necessarily fully paid back the capital that got spent on this project, what do we do? Because we have to life extend, we can’t be underwater on a project. What do we do to ensure that we get the kind of operational life out of this thing while maintaining the performance level? And Joel Saxum: the flow of the sessions worked out well for that conversation is at the same time because we had a complete session on just CMS and CMS for, yes, we can solve problems with it, like the noise mitigation thing. But also CMS for understanding the health of the assets before we get to that stage of lifetime extension. And then you roll that in with having some of these MCE providers at Gearbox, people with the ZF and the Schefflers up there. Hey, if we’re going to be doing this, let’s all work together. We can get kit here. We’ll have it in country stationed and ready to go. There was quite a few of those collaborative conversations and that’s something we even say in the U S all the time, transparency and collaboration. Everybody’s saying to the operators, to the OEMs, involving the ISPs, involving the supply chain and the, those conversations were flowing with the gates wide open during the day and a half. I was impressed with that. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And the one thing about that too, is that the more, and I talked to three or four different people, both, folks that came from other countries, including the U S down here or Australians about this. And the consensus was that, Hey, we recognize the fact that if we are more transparent. It’s going to attract more foreign direct investment into this market. And that’s something that not everybody in the world kind of understands. So again, good foresight on their part to recognize the fact that, they, the whole reason we’re able to do all of the analysis we do on profitability of assets, et cetera, et cetera, is because they take the five minute Skated data and put it online so that the entire public can get access to it, which is nuts. Try getting that in Germany or, anywhere else in Europe or, we barely have that in the United States, but we get it published after, nine months later. We’re gonna wait until September of 2025 to get data on what happened in 2024. to every single wind farm in the US. It’s preposterous. So the fact that they have, the five minute average data available like that for every project, every type of renewable to solar battery storage, you name it it’s all out there and it’s public and they’re transparent about it, which gives you the ability to analyze it, to see where things are working well and where it’s not and focus investment to, to help improve it. But that’s the thing about Australia, Allen Hall: which is a little bit different than any other country in the world at the minute, is that they have a large renewable grid and they’re able to do it every time in the States. And Rosemary knows that when we get criticized in the States, it’s renewables are never going to have a place. And I just say Australia. Yeah, we have Rosemary Barnes: the same conversation here. It’s power prices spiked because a coal power plant blew up in the hate and two other coal mines are flooded. It’s renewables. Renewables can’t, they’re not reliable. Look how high our prices are. It doesn’t matter what happens. There’s a storm that blows out of our power line. Oh, wind power to blame again. It’s it’s a political conversation, Joel Saxum: not a technical one. Yeah. Yeah. The, Rosemary Barnes: It happens, I think. But what I think is a little bit unique, or it’s not unique, but like rare in Australia, is that it’s not it is really primarily not governments pushing for this to happen. Coal power plants have announced their closure date based on economics projects are going in based on the economics of it. And yeah, there are some struggles at the moment. There’s a lot of negative power prices. A lot of, a lot more curtailment than people would like, but we’ve also got. So many batteries that are online. I was just trying to Google to find but the pipeline of projects under construction is gigawatts. And I think I saw that it was like four or 500 megawatts in the last quarter connected. So I think even within the next 12 months. that you’re going to start to see batteries make a huge difference and like slice out like a huge amount of the high evening prices where gas peakers come on and, demand a lot of money for doing that. I think you’re going to see like in regular days where, you got really sunny middle of the day and batteries can charge, which is nearly every day in Australia, let’s be honest. You’re going to see the, yeah, pricing environment completely change. I’m not a. Financial analyst or energy market modeler, so I’m not going to try and guess what the impact is going to be, but yeah, you like, look at the number of gigawatts of batteries we’re going to have compared to the number of gigawatts of gas in the evening, and it’s very similar. There’s not like much of a difference. And so intuitively, that’s going to make a difference. And Yeah projects that are struggling now I do hope that they are going to struggle a bit less. We’ll get a lot further with renewables before before we start to see the same sort of pricing thing happen again. Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s actually a good question because Australia is leading in so many different areas. Solar for one battery two now. Does that battery addition make profitability and wind go up? Because there’s just evening out the grid and you’re not going to, the curtailment basically stops. Is that the magic ingredient that a lot of countries are not really invested in at the moment to make the solar, wind grid work? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so. And I think it has the most obvious effect on solar because solar is all, it all comes on at the same time in the middle of the day when price is negative. It would be, horrible to be trying to make a profit off a, Utility scale solar farm that was just, exposed to market prices and nothing else. But yeah, no, I think it is a solution, but I think also you need to have the problem before anyone will invest in the solution. So I think like Australia has really high volatility and it’s electricity prices and you need that to attract people to want to buy. A battery and install it. Joel Saxum: We’re seeing that same thing. I would say the closest market to here in the states would be Ercot in Texas. Yeah. And you’re seeing how many you and I driving around there, how many battery installations are going in and talking with some of the ISPs out there and the construction companies, EPCs, they’re just like Word. We’re building batteries, we’re servicing batteries, we’re signing contracts. So battery, that’s going to be the key to the renewable mix as we go forward. Rosemary Barnes: But it’s another, it is really similar and I think actually the same people were involved in designing the electricity market in, I can’t remember who got inspired by who, but Australia and Texas’s. Energy only markets are very similar in design, and I understand that it’s not a coincidence. But, it’s not like the Texan government. It’s yay renewables, let’s do whatever it takes, right? That’s happening because the, conditions are right there for it to make money for developers, and so they put it in. It’s similar here. Joel Saxum: I could say something that’s a little bit controversial, but one time I was told that Australia is basically British Texas. Here we go. Here we go. Phil Totaro: Now, there’s one other comment on this concept, though, of energy storage solving the problem. Theoretically, yes, but keep in mind two things. One, as Rosie just said, how much Price volatility and how much dependence there is. So for wind energy projects in Australia, I think about 94 percent of the power offtake is done through a wholesale market. Like a, merchant, what we call a merchant market. With very few projects actually having a fixed price or some kind of firm power offtake. With, a utility company or, some kind of government entity or what have you. That’s very different than in the United States where it’s 80 percent of our projects have some kind of utility fixed price off take contract etc. The second thing is, Storage can solve a problem like curtailment and negative pricing in Australia because of the transmission and grid constraints as well. So if they were to build more transmission, then you don’t need as much storage. But the question then becomes is a battery cheaper and faster to implement than it would be to build additional transmission? Allen Hall: Yes. Phil Totaro: The answer to that is yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. And we Rosemary Barnes: did see in one case, Broken Hill, which is a it’s connected to the main grid, but it’s quite far away. It’s very far inland and away from most of the grid. They have transmission connection, but it’s not enough. So they considered, do we want to upgrade that or, assumed that they would need to upgrade it, but then did, ran the numbers and found that energy storage would be the cheaper way to get that same reliability. I think they actually went with compressed air energy storage for a big part of that. So we’ll see how that goes. And I also have to caveat with yeah, recently they had a very lengthy period of blackouts or brownouts yeah in the town because, yeah, so it’s not totally smooth sailing, but they, at least the concept is there. And I think that household batteries is going to be a big thing too, cause we have Like at the moment in Australia, rooftop solar, if you add it all up, that’s the biggest generator in Australia by quite a lot, but there’s not many batteries and yeah it’s a really challenging for the grid because it’s not controllable, like it’s just yeah, it just goes in, we’re starting now to come up with some mechanisms to be able to control it, super duper unpopular. You can imagine, you’ve spent 10, 20 grand putting solar panels on your roof, you don’t want to be told you can’t use it. But I think that yeah, home batteries, even though I know I’ve been told over and over again by very smart engineers who have very good models, it’s not the cheapest way to get storage in the system, but I think we’ll see it anyway because it means that individual households can make that decision on their own and use their own power later in the evening or whatever. And I think that’s going to be a big thing in Australia in a couple of years time. That’s my unpopular prediction. Joel Saxum: Democratizing power generation. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s yeah, I don’t probably necessarily disagree with your British Texas thing. Maybe the British part, I don’t like that bit so much, but Australians do to not have to rely on the utilities. Like people, Australians do not like utilities in, in general. They don’t like the government telling us what to do with stuff that we’ve bought. I’m putting our Phil Totaro: own house, like how very right wing of you. Joel Saxum: Interesting. Let me shift gears a little bit to the, in within the context of our conference here that we put on. There’s a difference between of course, how the market operates down here and how say we operate in the U S versus with ISPs, OEMs, full service agreements. However, Down here I was. ’cause I wanna see what each of you heard and what your opinions are on the ISP involvement in the market for operations and maintenance. So to, we saw RES, we had a conversation with RES, of course RES, huge ISP around the world. Rig comm was here, rig comm, of course. The sponsored the coffee carts. Fantastic team. They were up there on some panels as well. They’re a part of a larger blade group, GEV, that’s operates all over the world as well. So they’re bringing that expertise down here at, from a local standpoint. Rosemary Barnes: Worley. Joel Saxum: Worley. Of course, Worley. Dr. Larry’s presentation on some leading edge erosion stuff. Fantastic. So there is some ISPs down here. I don’t see the market fully saturated, right? Cause it’s just, there isn’t the want or the drive for it. The market’s not big enough. But you started to see a lot of the ISPs that I saw here were really happy about this conference. They were happy about the conversations we were having and saw the opportunity. My question, Alan, what did you hear and see from the ISP world as far as operations and maintenance opportunities here? Allen Hall: Everybody’s trying to break into Australia. They’re still trying to find a foothold. There’s a lot of ISPs outside of Australia that have been looking at Australia for quite a while. Four or five years, roughly, and are trying to find that time to make the transition over. With the amount of growth that Phil pointed out that’s going to happen over the next ten years, you better get into Australia relatively soon if you want to be part of that growth. It is such a dynamic market. It’s insanely changing from what I could tell. And just listen to the people talk. One of the key things I picked up was they, the engineers working for ISPs or operators, know what they’re doing. We talked to a lot of operators around the world and sometimes it’s wow, they really are struggling. Not here. There’s a game plan. There is a process. There’s a reason why they’re doing what they’re doing to get return on investment or try to create more power to level out the grid. It is all planned, which is amazing. And when one of the beneficial things I pulled out of it was like, wow, it’s a lot of resources and maybe we need to bring some of these people over to Europe and then we get them into America and start talking to some of the operators over there, because There is a lot of knowledge here, and that marketplace is going to explode. Now, one of the things that happened at the end of the discussion yesterday was we were all gathered around figuring, Are we going to do this next year? Was there enough response back that we would see people wanting to do it again? Was it a high enough quality conference? Did they learn enough that they would want to do it again? Overwhelmingly, yes. Everybody was like, you got to do this again. When can we schedule it? Can we get on the books? Can I sponsor? Whoa, okay, we just finished this. We’ve been working pretty hard, not necessarily me, but everybody else on the team has been working really hard on it. And yeah, it’s just whoa, okay, great. So we, I think we did fill a little bit of a void and that is important. I think that’s one of the things about the podcast and Rosemary, you’ve been on it with me the longest. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, out of the current crew. Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. How many years has it been? We’re almost about five years, by the way. Rosemary Barnes: The podcast as a whole. Yeah. Every now and then I I’m like researching a topic and I I, a 20, 20, 20 episode of Uptime Podcast comes up and I go back and listen to it. You and Dan. Jokes about Godzilla and stuff like that. That’s what it was like when I started, it was really fun. Yeah, but it has been fun to see it evolve and have, having more people is good. Obviously it gets hard to find the time every single week to, to get together. So yeah, it’s nice to be able to tap out, but yeah, Yeah. I think we agreed that we will, we might change things up a bit because this year we really wanted it to be not for profit because that’s one of the ways that we could get people. It’s hard on your first event to get people to trust that it’s going to be good. And I was like, really I don’t know, I felt really I’m trying to think of a word that doesn’t sound like really over the top, but I’m thinking like blast. I don’t use that word, something like that, but turn it down a bit. I was pleased that people trusted us to, people came from overseas, people, took time off work and came to this little conference that has never been put on before by people have never put an event on before. I think all of us heard like probably dozens of times. That’s better than I thought. That was like the Rosemary Barnes: number one comment for the first day at lunchtime was off. Wow. Yeah, no, this is better than I thought. And then a lot of people have told me, I haven’t been to a conference that had so many topics that I really needed to know about in so long. So we’ll do it again. I think none of us can manage the organization effort again. So we’ll probably partner with a event. organization next time, which will necessarily remove the not for profit part of it, because they’re going to want to make a profit, but it’s definitely still keep the thrust of it, use the money to get good people in. I think that’s a big difference with our conference and others is like really focus on getting the right people speaking, not the person that has the most money, definitely still not doing pay to present. That’s not a thing that you’ll ever see at this event. I don’t think, Oh yeah, not while I’m working on it anyways. So yeah, put together a really good program and we’ll still manage the agenda and the speakers and definitely people listening get in touch if you’ve got a good speaker. Cause yeah, it was we won’t be able to come up with another program based on people we just know next year. So we’re going to need help. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think that’s a good point here is to touch on some of the speakers that we had. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Joel Saxum: We had a couple come from, we had Jeremy Hanks from CIC NDT bringing that NDT experts, expertise over here from the States. Our friend of the show, John Zalar, he’s been on the podcast a few times. 22 years in GE, right? So he’s bringing a lot of information over. He came over and got onto a few panels. We had operators here from, of course, Tilt. We’re in Tilt’s office recording right now. Thank you, Tilt. Yeah, thank you, Tilt. Baron was fantastic. We had some of the team from Sky Specs here talking about CMS, right? How you can shadow monitor some of these assets to Make sure your OEM FSA is getting fulfilled the way you want to. We talked about some brand new technologies that, say, the Rowan’s team is putting forth, internal inspections. I sat on a roundtable with, about some of these technologies and the questions were just boom. You couldn’t keep the hands down enough. So the new technologies bringing in asset management strategies, some of the supply chain stuff. It was, Allen Hall: To get that level of knowledge exchange, you would have to Travel to their sites. Like you would have to go to Latvia. It was a lot easier to go to Melbourne. And it’s nicer in the Joel Saxum: wintertime. Way better. The northern winter, northern hemisphere winter. I’d rather be here than Latvia right now. No offense to the Rowan’s team. Rosemary Barnes: The last session of the conference was really good too, because we had two international people who had come over and brought knowledge of solutions I didn’t know exist. Yeah. Kellenberger. Talking about precision machining up on a tower, while it’s swaying around they’re doing precision machining so you don’t have to, do component replacements. You can repair. We had, yeah, Jeremy how do you say his name? Hanks. Hanks. We had Jeremy Hanks who has similarly like amazing repairs for blades. But then we had two Australians, Katrina Swalwell and Christian Peake. Both of who have been working in the Australian wind industry since 2001, which is day one of Australian wind. So they’ve seen the whole thing happen. And I think that’s just like the, I don’t know, the conference in a nutshell. It’s that mix. It’s, like everyone that knows, The specifics of the Australian industry are specific problems. People from overseas who know, how the range of solutions available there, so we don’t have to travel there to see them. And I think it’s really important that it’s not just it’s not a flow of speakers to audience for, these are the solutions now, receive them. I think it’s as valuable for sponsors and any other company that’s there to hear the problems. Yeah, like a lot of us in the industry are engineers and that’s our favorite thing. It’s to know the right problem to solve. That’s how you get a really good product and, sales and profitability is much easier if you’re solving the right problems, I think. So I, yeah, I really think it’s that, Joel Saxum: that Rosemary Barnes: good Joel Saxum: mix. One other person that we had on stage that was on multiple panels and the guys literally in encyclopedias, David King from Golfwind technology. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, he was good. Joel Saxum: You ask him a question and it was like he had rehearsed, no matter what the question was, What’d you have for lunch today, David? It was like he had rehearsed and had a perfect speech written for it. But I think the overwhelming wealth of knowledge, this back to your point, Alan, you said earlier about like, I didn’t realize we would run into as much knowledge as we did down here. I thought it was going to be a little bit more nascent of a market and the people that were on stage, Christian Peak from Mint Renewables and his, the strategies and the things you think all everybody up there, I was really surprised. So the, to be honest with you, Allen Hall: that’s not a negative. It just, we deal with the whole world, Rosemary. It’s a thing when we run across somebody that’s like super confident. And then we ran into a whole room full of super confident people. It’s wow, this is great. I love this place. Yeah. That’s why we’ll be back next year. Yeah. Allen Hall: And if anybody’s interested in being a sponsor next year or be a speaker, and I know there’s a lot of people that wanted to speak this year that couldn’t do it, so they need to start planning for it. I’m planning for next year right now. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah topic ideas for the round tables were we had these small breakout sessions where people got together to discuss a certain topic that they were all interested in. Those worked really well. We’ll do more of them next year. So more scope, tell us what you, where you, you want the ability to, yeah, get together in a small setting to discuss your problem in detail, then, suggest the topic. Allen Hall: And you need to get a hold of Phil to start that process. And Phil’s going to be the repository of all emails that come in. So if you send it to Rosemary, Rosemary’s going to send it to Phil. Phil Totaro: We can, everybody can just go back to windaustralia. com and we’ll update the website with those kind of submittal forms. So we’ll be capturing ideas and capturing speaker requests as soon as we can. Get the website updated. As soon as you get some sleep and get back on California time. Or at least more than three hours of sleep. Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary this whole conference started because you and I had a complaint session on, with microphones at the time. And then Matthew Stead heard it and said Why don’t you just run a conference? And my first response is are you insane, Matthew? Rosemary Barnes: The magic words, I’ve got some people that can help. Organize, we could do it. We Allen Hall: could do we totally do it. It’s Australia. People will pitch in and that is exactly what happened. So I appreciate your participation and your idea to kick this thing off because it’s been tremendously successful. It really has. I’ve Rosemary Barnes: been blown away. Yeah. I didn’t know we were capable of putting on such a high quality event. So lots of teething problems, like small little details that you can see why, like expert conference planners, they have learned a trick or two, but it’s not the part that people really care about. People will. We’ll tolerate a few little teething issues if the agenda is right, if the speakers are right, and I think that’s what we, that’s what we achieved. Allen Hall: Yeah, so thanks to everybody and good to see everybody in Australia, and I guess we’ll see everyone a year from now. And reach out, yeah, if you’re interested in participating in Wind Energy O& M Australia 2026, you better start now because that room was full. We’re going to have to expand this thing, but you want to get your tickets and get a hold of Phil and Rosemary and Go to windaustralia. com as soon as you can.

In this Uptime Spotlight, Erik Klaas and Johannes Leib from 8-Tree discuss their waveCHECK system, which detects and measures surface defects on wind turbine blades. The system uses 3D optical scanning technology to identify wrinkles and other issues with high precision, helping improve quality control in blade manufacturing and maintenance. 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, we’re diving into revolutionary blade inspection technology from 8-Tree. 8-Tree’s WaveCheck system uses 3D optical scanning and augmented reality to detect and measure surface defects on wind turned blades with unprecedented precision. Joining us is Erik Klaas, the co founder and CTO of 8-Tree, and Johannes Leib, a program manager with 8-Tree, who brings over 15 years of wind blade industry experience, specializing in composites and fiber reinforced plastics. Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Erik and Johannes, welcome to the show. Erik Klaas: We are glad to be on your podcast. Allen Hall: I’m excited to talk to both of you because I’ve seen your technology on YouTube quite a bit and now on LinkedIn and it’s quite impressive. And I want to start by asking really, how are you trying to handle wrinkles? It seems like wrinkles are a huge problem in the wind industry. They’re hard to detect and we’re getting escapes out of the factory. You want to discuss how big of an issue wrinkles are. And Blades is at the moment. Erik Klaas: Yeah, most likely this is a good topic for Johannes to speak about for one hour. But as I got into this business late, maybe I get to give you my perspective. So when I got into the wind business first, our legacy is in aerospace. So I saw a wrinkle and I never thought it could be such a problem or lead to catastrophic results. What is a wrinkle? I happen to have a separate part here. Which is a mock up that we did. We do this for testing our system. A wrinkle basically is a deviation in the glass fiber layup of a turbine blade. And it’s very small, so you can’t even almost not see it. But it can lead to the blade cracking in these particular areas where the wrinkle happens. And therefore, the inspector’s task is to measure how wide and how high is a wrinkle. And so the ratio between width and height is what they then calculate, and there’s a limit to that ratio. And that is what an inspector has to do. And currently, they are doing it with hand tools. And a hand tool is a Dial gauge or it can be what they call a comp gauge. So they push it on the surface so they get the contour of this wrinkle and then with that contour they measure actually the width and the height of it. Allen Hall: It can be very difficult to detect some of these wrinkles because the laminates in these longer blades, the laminate is very thick. So if you have a wrinkle somewhere in the middle of this laminate, the surface Defect or the surface curvature change is minuscule, right? Erik Klaas: It is. And there is a limitation of our technology that I need to speak about. So we can only detect and measure those which are on the top layer. So if they go through the whole layup of layers and they are visible on the surface, we can measure them. And if they only appear in deeper layers, we can’t. So you need like NDT measures, methods that go to deeper layers to inspect those. But most often also the layer the wrinkles in deeper layers are visible than on the top surface. Joel Saxum: So you need that physical deviation on the top. If you ran your hand over it, you’d be able to feel it. And that’s what you guys need to be able to have to sense it. Okay. Erik Klaas: Yes. What we are doing Joel Saxum: so our Erik Klaas: measurement technology is a surface inspection technology. So it always measures deviations on the surface. Correct. Allen Hall: So as part of blade inspections, ideally those wrinkles are getting measured for length and width and all of them in which there can be a number of them on any blade because wrinkles are not uncommon. It’s the question of, are they serious enough to be repaired? I think the question then becomes how sensitive is your equipment to do this? Because we seem to have a lot of blades out in service that do have wrinkles. I’ve seen them. Yeah. Over the summertime, I saw a number of them. It’s hard sometimes to detect the wrinkles. It is not necessarily obvious to an inspector that the wrinkle that exit may exist there or how critical that is, but the sensitivity of your equipment is quite impressive. You want to describe how sensitive it is to small perturbations on the surface? Erik Klaas: Yeah. So what we use, the technology is, it’s called structured light scanning and how it works. It projects a pattern on the surface and from a different angles. Those patterns are observed from a camera, a digital camera, and as there’s an angle in between, so when the surface changes, also the shape of these patterns changes, and that’s how is, how we get access to the third dimension in these measurements. And so what’s good for us, that technology has developed over the last 20 years quite significantly and it’s not a to go into the micron level of detail. surface deviations. And I mentioned, so our background is aviation industry. So we, with the same technology, we measured dents and bumps on the outer skin of aircrafts. And so there are our measurement uncertainties in the magnitude of 50 microns, or those People that prefer inches, so that is two thousandths of an inch yeah, 50 microns. Accuracy in the wind power industry, or on surfaces like glass laminates, is a bit worse. Because the surfaces are difficult to measure. They are a bit transparent, they are a bit rough. Yeah, it’s, in the best case, 50 micron. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think anybody that’s been inside of a blade can attest to at least one defect in every blade, right? If you’re in there looking around, you see something, whether it’s a, extra glue here, or some dry glass here, or a little bit of D lam here, and it, one of the difficult things from, from an untrained eye, I’ve been in a lot of them supporting people. is knowing what’s actually an issue, right? Because you’d look and be like, oh, is that a problem? Is that going to affect structural integrity? Maybe not. Maybe this one will. And that takes expertise. But what you guys have created is a tool to help these experts. And so what I want to talk about is then, The ability to scan, cause a lot of times we’re talking inside of the blade, right? Cause we’re looking, cause the outsides gel coat, it’s all cleaned up. Everything looks pretty. So everything’s been sanded and smooth. But if you’re inside the blade to get that 50 micron accuracy, Okay. So in my mind, I’m always thinking geometry, there has to be a certain distance to be able to look at that angle. How big is this tool? So how far can these experts get in the blade with it to be able to look at things? Erik Klaas: Yeah, good question. And so of course also the tool has evolved over time. So in the background we see actually two versions. There’s one over there. I hope that’s visible in the image. So that tool has a standoff of about 50 centimeters. The weight is about four kilograms, four and a half kilograms. It’s all self contained. So it’s battery powered, so there’s not an additional computer. It’s all within that unit. And. Yeah, you can go pretty far into a blade to use it until your space is limited to this about maybe 70 centimeters. So that’s the space you need in front of the surface. Joel Saxum: And anything I mean, 70 centimeters is, so if you’re getting down to basically, with someone operating at like a meter of a chamber or so, most all of the defects that need to be dealt with are going to be from there back towards the root anyways. Because that’s going to be the high structural loading zone. That’s where, if you’re going to develop a crack or something, those are the ones that you really need to see. Can you tell us about some use cases in the field or where this thing’s being used right now? Erik Klaas: So yeah, we mentioned wrinkle measurements and wrinkles in and maybe that’s a better question for Johannes to answer because how blades are made, I think is that there’s different opportunities and as these butterfly blades, where they make them out of two shells. And glue them together afterwards. There it’s not a problem to access the entire inside of the blade. So to the very tip of the blade. But what are the other technologies, Johannes, that used to make Johannes Georg Leib: Currently, our tool is mainly used in the manufacturing because that’s where we started developing it with some of the big global blade manufacturers. But we are also looking into applications in the field because the, yeah. The functionality of the tool is just the same in the field as it would be in the factory. In the factory, we are now also going towards automatization. That it’s not a handheld tool anymore, but we’re doing some research on having it automated on either a robot or yeah. a portal stuff. Basically the technology works everywhere because it’s independent from any infrastructure, you can take it anywhere. It’s a, it’s very portable. It’s battery powered. You don’t need a a power Allen Hall: supply. So the wave check system has changed or morphed over time to become more compact, more powerful. The first generation I remember seeing. The sensor was maybe, I’m going to speak in feet here, but it may be two feet, two thirds of a meter away from the surface. I saw it in aerospace quite a bit. And it was, it’s fairly far away, but now it’s getting more compact and is still all battery powered. So really it, it doesn’t take anything to hold it up against the surface and take an image. Exactly. So that’s the Erik Klaas: first unit’s design and then we took all the user feedback that we got from the first five, six years of A Tree being in existence. And we came up with this design, which looks quite a bit different, but, The measurement engine and the technology is still the same. So we’re using a projector on this side where the light comes out. We’re using a camera on this side. We are having a battery now in the bottom, which makes a bit more ergonomic handling possible. It’s more like a power tool, where you have your battery in the handle or below the handle. So that makes a nicer central center of gravity. And the handling is just easier. And yeah, it lost like one kilogram in weight. I see a lot of carbon fiber there. Yeah. And there’s carbon fiber in the handles and in the housing and on top is a display, so that makes it a bit easier to adjust for different settings. So you can change tolerances for your wrinkles or you can change also what we take into account is the fiber direction. So usually we are measuring perpendicular to the fiber direction, but there’s requirements sometimes also for the other direction. So things like this can be set with the help of this touch display. Joel Saxum: So how do you actually collect data with it? Is it taking a snapshot? Is it taking a video? Is it giving you a 3d map? What does that look like? It’s all of the above, but Erik Klaas: the main feature is a 3d map. Not sure whether that’s visible in the video, but I push the trigger here on the handle now and you see a blue flickering light being projected on the surface. And that’s taken in a tenth of a second and about two, three, four seconds later, we get the result. And the result is a 3D map, about 2. 4 million points, 3D data points on the surface. And what’s unique about the system, it projects those results on the surface. So you don’t have a computer attached where you see the result on the display of the computer, but everything is visible on the screen. On the surface where the defect actually happens. Joel Saxum: Yeah. You got a two man team there. Like one guy can run the gun. One’s got a pen. You can mark it out perfectly, exactly in real time, what you’re seeing for that anomaly on the blade, if it’s a wrinkle Erik Klaas: and on top of that, the Joel Saxum: results are Erik Klaas: stored on the device. So there’s a relatively large hard disk. So you can save 10 thousands of those measurements on the hard drive, just like a photo. Allen Hall: I just want to get to the use piece. Cause I think people want to understand how this actually works. Erik, I take your device, I push it against the blade, I press a trigger, it takes a photo, it processes it, and then it re displays the changes in the surface. on the blade itself. So you see color changes right on the surface, which you then can just take a pen and highlight. And it stores that data on the unit, but also stores it in the cloud, right? So not only do you have a record right in front of you, this is what that defect looks like in a wrinkle, but everybody back in the office, all the engineers and the quality department have an instant record of what this thing looks like. Is from your unit. So there’s, it’s very quick and precise, which is the problem with blade checks today is that they’re slow, cumbersome and inexact, and you fix all of that with one tool. Erik Klaas: Yeah. That’s a very nice summary. Thanks for that, Helen. And on top of that, so we also now in the process of making interfaces to quality systems, because we know we are not the end of the game. The results that we are delivering need to go somewhere. And now we try to make that even more seamless by defining APIs that then connect to a quality management system or an ERP system so that these results are filed away. Ideally, they travel then with a blade to the customer. So the customer has a digital twin of that blade and he can look up, okay, there was a wrinkle in production, but it was below the limits. And Allen Hall: some of the best blade manufacturers in the world are using your technology now in the factory. You want to describe that? Who’s using it? We developed this Johannes Georg Leib: with input, even before I, as the blade expert in EITRI joined. We developed this together with LM Windpower and they were actually also the first first users of this. But nowadays some other of the global blade makers such as TPI have also implemented it in the, during the last year, yeah. And yeah, we see that they have a lot of yeah, making a lot of progress in this let’s say digital evaluation of defects, which yeah, which is really driving quality assurance of blades, a big leap forward from our point of view. I’ve been working in blade manufacturing as well as in certification, and I remember the times when there were big fat file folders with paper yeah, tons of paper per blade. And if you wanted to look up something then it was not properly filled in and so on. It was not traceable at all. If you wanted to look up something in the aftermath, you just had no chance because yeah. And nowadays, you would have like a. Exact representations, 3D representation of certain defects, which you could easily retrieve 10 years later and and check, what was going on there. For example, if a blade breaks you could really have accurate records and check if there was something or not. And that’s something that is not yet appreciated enough. from our point of view, from the industry, because they want to avoid any cost. Yeah. As we all know in blade manufacturing, cost is still a big topic while quality is, yeah, more on a second or third position. And we think it’s time for changing this by by applying, let’s say 21st century technology to blade inspection, because let’s say the tools that were used when I entered this This industry in 2008? Yeah. These were actually the tools that were already used or that you could have already have been used a hundred years ago, I would say. Yeah. So we had no involvement in, in, in such inspection tools over a hundred years. And we think now, with all these AI stuff, the time should have come for doing something. In a new and in a different way. And that’s what we are striving for and working on. Joel Saxum: I think that the basis of that is what you guys are delivering. It’s data, it’s structured data. If blade manufacturers want to get better at what they’re doing. The one thing is in, in, at the end of the day, Inspections in the factory are basically reactive in my opinion, right? They’re done. We look at it right now. Okay, now we might have to do a repair because I know a lot of these blade manufacturers have on site repair teams to prepare stuff before the blades leave because it’s a controlled environment and all that. But there is times when a lot of these blades make it out to the field and then all of a sudden, oh no, we have to do this big repair out in the field. But the idea behind collecting structured data that can be cataloged, reviewed, and once you get. enough of this stuff amalgamated, you can start running some algorithms on it. You can start running a little AI. You can start doing some analysis to see where the manufacturing process might get better in the future. That’s a big thing for me is if you’re collecting all this data, that’s fantastic. We can fix problems right now. But if you get some smart people behind taking that data and using it for the next next edition, next iteration, next legacy of blades and how we may adjust manufacturing things. If we keep seeing the same wrinkle of the same size in the same kind of space because you guys have collected or your tools have collected the data to show that, now we can get to the point where let’s put a manufacturing fix in. Let’s get to the manufacturing engineers and see if they can’t design something to solve this issue in the future and that makes That’s better for the whole wind industry, that’s what we want. We want blades that come out of the factory that are good to go, that we don’t have to worry about in the future. Thank you guys for creating this tool for that. Yeah, that brings me to Johannes Georg Leib: one point I want to mention because right now our tool is mostly used when the blade has already been produced and there is a need for repair often then if you detect something, but what we are also investigating together with some partners is to apply it even before the The problem happens. Yeah. So for example, during the layup, we do scans of the layup. And then, the workers are told online during the manufacturing process, Hey, this layer is maybe 10 centimeters too far away from the correct position. Please move it even before the blade is being infused. And that’s let’s say the next generation we are working on where the tool is not anymore used handheld by an inspector who just evaluates things that have already happened, but use it, let’s say proactively Beforehand, the stuff even happens and in an automated environment, where you have a lot of different sensors, like cameras but also our 3d scanner that then creates information that avoids the mistakes already during, in the course of the manufacturing process. And that’s another initiative that we’re doing yeah, and that might also be interested in, maybe it will take another 3 to 5 years until it’s ready for market. But it’s, I think it’s good to know that there are some people also working on such things. Allen Hall: Erik, it can’t take three to five years. We need this in about six months. So you got to get to work. Erik Klaas: Yeah. The good news is, yeah, I see a lot of parallels between the wind power industry and the aerospace industry, for example. So in the early days, when we founded A3, like in 2012, We went to a rigorous process of running so called gauge R& R testing. So because our customers wanted to know, how do you make sure one tenth of a millimeter is one tenth of a millimeter or one thou is one thou? And so we learned it the hard way that we needed to test and test. And we ran like thousands of such gauge R& R tests. And now, when we started with LM Windpower, we did that again. So people wanted to trust us that when we say, okay, this wrinkle is within or without limits, that we are really on the right side of that decision. And how can you make sure? And then we found out that there is actually an ISO 17025, which guarantees your measurements are traceable to national standards and you can trust us. And so in the course of this development, and that took a long time, and now I’m back to that question, why does, do things take so long? We had to run with Johannes help, we got our calibration accredited by German lab so that they say, okay, you can trust these guys. And now we have that stamp of approval, which is called ISO 17025. And that helps a lot now because in industrial processes, they want to know, okay, how do they make sure they measure what they measure is correct. Allen Hall: Absolutely. ISO 17025 is the world standard for calibration. And if you can show that your tool. matches those requirements, it’s a really good tool and it’s used all over aerospace when that happens. So the accuracy has to be there when you’re dealing with aircraft in particular because of the, there’s a lot of people inside of there. So those systems that are developed from aerospace now directly. Correlate over to the wind industry. So it’s tremendous to have that level of calibration. Now, I want to expand this out a little bit because there’s a lot of old blades in service, hundreds of thousands of blades in service that didn’t use your technology in the factory. And. I want to understand, is there a use case for this for independent service providers to go in and to look for places where wrinkles could occur? Back to Joel’s earlier statement, around the root area where the loading is so great and where cracks start to develop. Can you take this existing tool off the shelf and start looking at existing blades and documenting where wrinkles may exist? Erik Klaas: Yeah, we absolutely think you can and we start to talk to the first companies that do that sort of inspection. And of course, that’s a different story because getting up tower, getting into the plate is a different story. It’s more work and it’s also more time consuming and it requires smaller tools. And that’s why we did the second generation. So that also helps to to enable this inspection up tower. And but we are in the early stages. Joel Saxum: Yeah. The looks of it, it looks like the second generation can fit through a root closure panel and to get into a blade a lot easier than the first version. Yeah. So for that Erik Klaas: exact reason, we can fold this frame together. We can remove that handle so that you can put this in a backpack when you go up tower. So it’s just more compact for that purpose. Allen Hall: It looks like the system is ready to go for inspections out in the field, which is tremendous. So if you’re an independent service provider or a quality organization or an NDT organization, And you want to learn more about WaveCheck and all the great things that are happening at 8-Tree. How do they get a hold of you, Erik? How do they contact your company? Erik Klaas: Very simple. Send an email to info at 8-Tree. We have for wind power applications, a dedicated LinkedIn page. Go up there or go to our webpage, 8-Tree. com. Eight with a hyphen tree. com. And yeah, we are happy to explore what’s next. Allen Hall: And the website is the number eight dash tree, T R E E. com. Erik and Johannes. It’s wonderful to have you in the program. I’ve learned a tremendous amount. Your technology is very exciting. So congratulations on all the breakthroughs that you have. And yeah, we love to have you on the program again as you get further out into the field. We’d like to learn how that’s going. So you’re invited back. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having us. Erik Klaas: Really enjoyed Allen Hall: it. Yeah, it was fun. Thanks.

We discuss Siemens Gamesa’s advanced blade de-icing system, their blade root repair fix, and a tower designed by Vestas with its own permanent crane system. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here’s your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: We have really interesting patents this week, Phil, including this first one from Siemens Gamesa, and it is a wind turbine blade with an advanced de icing system. Now, you say to yourself, well, there’s been a lot of de icing systems on wind turbine blades. In fact, Rosie has worked on a number of them for LM. But this one’s a little bit different. So it It uses a kind of a matrix setup of thermal heating areas arranged in sort of series and parallel connections, and it creates overlapping heating zones that can be very precisely controlled. Now that is very beneficial because a lot of times you More temperature, more heat towards the tip than you do at the root. So you would like the temperature to be graded up towards the tip. It’s kind of hard to do a lot of times. But in this situation, you can adapt it to the situation. And this seems smart, but I haven’t seen it implemented. And I know Siemens Gamesa owners. Like the icing system. So maybe this is coming out in the near future, Phil. Phil Totaro: Yeah, this would be interesting because this is very different than your conventional like blown air solution, like Enercon and other companies use. Where you could have a scenario where you’ve got like hotspots and, and heat concentrations at different points along the blades, particularly where you have ribs or bulkheads or something that would kind of get in the way of the airflow. a thermal heating mat with again, different zones where you can kind of trigger, on off to, to try and either prevent ice accretion or actually provide deicing for the blade. So it’s, it’s a really interesting approach in that it gives you more granular control over where you want to be able to, to de ice and again, based on ice thickness, and you can, monitor your Phil Totaro: performance, or you might have a more sophisticated system that actually monitors how much ice is still stuck on the blade. So. The, the implementation of this I think would be welcome. And it’s probably something that, I mean, heating mats are almost inevitably, they do introduce a certain amount of challenges, especially with lightning interactions. But generally speaking, they are a good way for wind turbine blades to to be de iced. So hopefully this does make its way into more commercially available products in the future. Allen Hall: Well, it looks like it will save somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of energy consumption to, to heat the blade. That would be remarkable if you could make a, even a 10 percent change in the amount of power required to heat the blade up. Going to 50 percent would be astounding. And that makes me think you’re going to see this, this patent idea Phil Totaro: show up pretty soon. I mean, to be blunt, like, and I’ll do respect to Enercon that pioneered a lot of this technology, but volumetric heating is just wildly inefficient, so it’s like, something that’s a more, cost efficient and thermally efficient solution is probably desirable. Allen Hall: Our next patent is from Vestas and this. Seems like a relatively simple idea, but it evidently isn’t because they were able to patent it. So, rather than relying on an expensive jackup vessel for every major maintenance operation, Vestas has designed a tower with its own permanent crane system. The crane’s base is fixedly mounted to the tower with a pivoting arm that can be positioned in multiple configurations, so you can pick up your Cargo container from the ship, lift it, and then rotate the, this crane that’s built onto the, the transition piece, it looks like, and then put it on deck. The wind turbine, pretty slick, but it seems like one of those patents, Phil, that’s, doesn’t pass the obvious test. Like it’s, seems obvious, like I would need a crane to lift things on and off, but there must be unique pieces to this that allow the patent office to issue a patent. What, what actually is unique about it and what’s really, frankly, pretty innovative about it is the fact that it doesn’t take up space on the deck for the transition piece, because the jib cranes from, pick your favorite brand they usually are fixedly mounted, as you said, onto the platform itself, but then it’s also requires a longer, a bit of a longer boom arm and it physically takes up whatever that footprint is to, to mount it to the, the transition piece itself. Phil Totaro: So I, I like this conceptually I, we haven’t seen this implemented anywhere, and I don’t know if they’re likely to do it. I think this is kind of just defensive IP because , there’s still already kind of, a commercially available solution where they typically mount it to the Transition piece on the deck, and the reality of that is unless there’s a big reason to, to change that design philosophy, you’re probably going to see this just be kind of a defensive patent for, for a company like Festus to ensure that nobody else is going out there capturing the same thing and, developing the next big thing without owing them a bunch of royalties. Allen Hall: Our third patent comes from Siemens Gamesa, and it has to do with repairing a blade root. So if you look at the end of the blade where the fibers all end and the bolts pop into the root end, there’s sometimes cracking around those holes, and that’s not great. You would like to repair that because those cracks don’t necessarily stop and you want to prevent further damage to the blade. So the way it has generally been done is you can put a sacrificial plate in there to kind of stiffen up that area. But if you really need to fix it becomes sort of a problem. Like, how do you correct this cracking that’s happening and stabilize it? Well, what the Siemens idea is basically have a Get the blade off where you can get down to the root end and then machine those areas, so you can put in basically a metal shim with a gasket around it so it sits in place but remains sealed and keeps out dirt and debris and all the bad stuff that can happen along that blade root area, but it provides again a better surface to mate up with the hub. That is the hard part, and so typically this gets really expensive to do and it’s hard to do on site. You would have to send it somewhere and the big expensive machines to do this. So you spend a bunch of money taking care of it. But Phil, this could be done. Drop the blade down. Bore it. Put these magical shims in there and save yourself a lot of money, it looks like. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And, and while they don’t explicitly contemplate doing this as an in situ repair, it’s certainly highly desirable to be able to, to do this out in the field. The interesting thing though, for me about this idea is it’s basically like, just putting a washer on a nut and a bolt. And the whole reason you use a washer is because it distributes the load at the point where, you know, the, the end of the bolt interfaces with whatever piece of, of metal or, or, carbon or, carbon, Thermal plastic or whatever, whatever you’re interconnecting this to. It’s basically providing a way for you to do that kind of a retrofit and repair that is going to necessarily strengthen and structurally reinforce the root, which has been a big problem for Siemens Gamesa and others over the years. So I, I like this one as an, an innovative idea. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think you’re going to see a lot more. in the field machining over the next year or two or three than we’ve seen in the last 10. And that’s going to be a way to keep some of these blades running long term. It’s a great idea and nice on Siemens to put it into action.

This week on Uptime, we discuss Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper stepping down, Shell withdrawing from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, and a study showing only 15% of employees feel their managers are transparent about challenges in the workplace. 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’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxom, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Danish Renewable Energy Company, Ørsted, announced a leadership change, with CEO Mad Snipper stepping down after four years at the helm. Rasmus Erbo. Uh, the company’s deputy CEO and chief commercial officer will take over as group president and CEO, uh, in February. Uh, the transition comes as Orsted adapts to evolving market conditions in the offshore wind sector. Now this, uh, I guess around the industry was expected news. Uh, if you had talked to somebody, uh, about offshore in the US, uh, they felt like what had happened over the last year or so was really rough on the leadership at Oersted, part of this too, guys, is that some of it is just happenstance, interest rates rising, the supply chain nightmares that were happening and Mads Knipper would just happen to be there at that specific time. Is, is that the feeling like it was just bad timing, uh, for Mads? Phil Totaro: Yeah, it’s, it’s part of it, but the, the reality I think is you, you’ve got a scenario where he, he was there and the buck stops here and all that sort of stuff, um, if you’re the boss, but he also was one kind of overseeing a lot of the deals that got him put in place that led to all those impairments that they ended up having. It’s like, yeah, okay. Interest rates are high, but. It’s like he, he, you know, was there signing off on these, these deals with, uh, PSEG in New Jersey and, uh, Eversource in, in Connecticut, uh, and Rhode Island that were just frankly terrible deals. I mean, it just, they, they ended up, Orsted ended up having to pay. for whatever the utility companies had invested time and money and effort and et cetera, uh, into, you know, the development work on these deals, um, in case they decided to pull out plus, you know, uh, a little extra. And it’s like, that’s, that’s the way it is. You know, you might think that that’s typical, but when you get into a deal like this for an offshore wind farm, uh, I mean, we’re starting to talk in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it led to this, this multi billion dollar impairment that they had, you know, last year. So, you know, I think I said on the show six months ago that he was likely to be gone, and guess what? He is. Allen Hall: My feeling about it is there’s just a little bit of happenstance, but that’s the problem at being in leadership You don’t get to choose the economic times in which you’re running the company and you have to play what the cards are dealt right, I Wouldn’t say any offshore wind developer in the United States. This has great numbers at the minute So it isn’t like Orsted has is in a different bucket at the minute it but I I I think the, my contention at the time was New Jersey really screwed Orsted. Not the, the government in New Jersey was just negotiating in bad faith. And they wanted to take all the federal tax credits, which Orsted agreed to, and then they needed them back. And then it just went back and forth there. And it just felt like it was unnatural for a Scandinavian country. Like an organization in Scandinavia like Orsted is, which is, you know, the national, uh, energy source for Denmark to deal with such kind of shady characters. It’s, it wouldn’t happen if they were dealing with Norway or Finland or Germany, those things wouldn’t have happened like that, but it just felt like, uh, they were a little bit out of the elements in terms of how they could get screwed. And they, and they did. I Joel Saxum: think if you look at the, like what the background with Mad Snippers was, is he was there for four years and they grew their portfolio big time, right? They went from 11, about 11 gigawatts. That’s seven gigawatts of growth in four years of installed capacity is huge. So he has a skillset of scaling up, moving, making things go fast. Uh, and if you read his like a little letter that he wrote on LinkedIn, thanks for all the time with the colleagues, the standard stuff you read, right? Um, but he did in that letter, he said, you know, look at the, the, you know, leadership’s looking for someone with a little bit of a different skill set. And if you look at Rasmus, Airbo’s skill set, he was a, he was lead, leading the IPO. He was a part of divesting in the oil and gas business. So he has, it looks like he has a bit more of a financial or commercial mind than say Mads was just like, blow and go, let’s, let’s develop as much as we can is what it looks like from the numbers. Right? Allen Hall: Yeah. But Orsted financially is doing just fine. It didn’t look great, but Orsted is doing quite well. But the stock, the, the stock price is the, is the one, right? That’s the one you can’t really walk away from, but you don’t have any control over the stock price. In a sense, he delivered EBITDA numbers that were true, and it wasn’t like he was trying to deceive the market, but no one ever accused Mads of that. He, he was really straightforward When bad stuff happened, he’d get out in front of it and tell you bad stuff’s about to happen, which is great. However, the market just moved away from Orsted and from renewables from that sense, uh, does that sound something he can really control, right? Phil Totaro: No, uh, from, from that perspective, but, and, and look again, to, to, you know, not beat up on him too much, like what Joel said, you know, he oversaw the expansion of the company. Orsted acquires, uh, Lincoln Electric under his, um, you know, watchful eye. Uh, and, and they moved into a lot of new, new markets, including, you know, developing offshore in Taiwan, um, you know, growing their portfolio in Europe and pioneering a lot of what got, you know, built and, and, you know, is still being built here with, With revolution wind, uh, in, in the US, you know, I mean, he, he caused the company a certain amount of frustration and embarrassment. And, you know, typically in Europe, like they, they don’t just like, unless it’s like egregious, like you won’t see an executive get, you know, heave hoed, right. Immediately after, you know, something happens, they’ll usually give it six months and then they’ll, they’ll just shift in a new direction, which is basically what they’re saying. So again, unsurprising that this happened, there were plenty of good things to talk about, but also some, some concerns that I’m sure the company had as to how things were being handled and bringing in somebody else. That’s probably going to handle them in a, in a bit of a different way is what we’re going to talk about. Um, you know, something that, uh, frankly needs to happen sometimes at a company to, to, you know, stabilize, especially for a publicly traded company, like you need to, to provide investors with confidence and, and stabilize the situation. Allen Hall: Is Oristed going to structurally change from what it is now? Phil Totaro: That’s a interesting question because they don’t actually have a whole lot. That they could, you know, like lump off and. Right. I think they can lean a little bit, but not much. Yeah. I mean, but it’s also, you know, if you made it a point to acquire an onshore renewable portfolio, I mean, maybe they sell that off, but that could also just be like, What a lot of other companies do with an asset rotation, just like, Hey, let’s get some cash by divesting some, some older assets, um, and reinvest the proceeds in new greenfield projects. That could, and it is probably, if anything were to happen, that’s the likeliest thing to happen, but it’s not like you can take and split the company up. Or anything any more than it already was, they already got rid of the oil and gas stuff and they already got rid of the utility, um, retail business over in Denmark as well, a year or two or three ago. So, you know, that this is it, like, you know, Orsted’s, uh, uh, pretty much an offshore wind and a little bit of onshore renewable development company. Joel Saxum: Well, you have other, other people investing in Orsted too. So, so you have, you know, Econor’s, they, they’re 10%. Now from, from the Norwegian side, getting into this thing to kind of drive their goals, of course, towards, um, you know, investing in renewable energies, but what does it look like there, right? Is what’s the, what does the fly on the wall say at Econor’s office looking at this thing there? I mean, in my mind, probably happy about this change because there’s a, it looks like there could be a way forward. Allen Hall: Well, did they drive it, Joel? I think the question is how much influence did Equinor have in the boardroom to make this swap and to, to put more focus on the sort of day to day finances? I think with Joel Saxum: their, with their 10 percent investment, they actually didn’t get a board seat. That doesn’t mean they don’t have influence over what happens at the board level, right? But from a, from a legal standpoint, I think they, they didn’t have that. Yeah, but there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of coffee being drank on the streets in Allen Hall: Copenhagen. There’s always a voice if that kind of percentage of a company. And I think that’s probably the, the, you know, if you look at the straw that broke the camel’s back here, it was probably that it just feels like it. Maybe it wasn’t, but it does feel like it when you talk to people. It’s Denmark itself is very proud of. Ørsted. They should be. It’s an amazing company. It’s done wonderful things, uh, but to have the Norwegians come in and acquire 10 percent of it to write the company at the time just didn’t feel good. Joel Saxum: Merit with a Danish offshore wind auction, and the Danish government owns part of Ørsted, and they couldn’t even, they didn’t even solicit a bid for any of the projects there. So there’s like some weird Yeah, there’s some weird stuff going on in Offshore Wind over there, so it demands a little change. Phil Totaro: You know, developers are changing their tune pretty quick here, saying, oh, well, we wanted subsidies, and it’s like, well, no, now we don’t want subsidies. Uh, we want, you know, whatever we want, and it just, like, let the government Just let us go do our thing. But it’s, it’s kind of strange because I, you know, the, the Orsted is still, you know, in terms of, well, with the exception of China, the, the number one global, um, you know, offshore wind project developer and asset owner. They are are still in a position where they can, you know, take advantage of a lot of emerging markets if they choose to do so. So it’ll be interesting to see if some of those plans, you know, given again, we’ve still got a high interest rate environment right now. But is that going to be the case in 9 months or 10 months? Um, you know, now that we’re already in in February here, Uh, you know, by the end of 2025, what’s the market really going to look like? And I, I think it’s going to change up quite a bit. Um, and, and it could be an environment where a lot more investment is poised to flow. And, you know, Orsted still knows how to develop a project or two. So it’s not like they’re not going to be well positioned. As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends P. E. S. Wind magazine. P. E. S. 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, P. E. S. Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind. com today. Allen Hall: Shell has announced its withdrawal from Atlantic Shores offshore wind project off the coast of New Jersey, much like everything that happened in Orsted. This decision comes amid regulatory changes and follows a recent executive order that placed new restrictions on offshore wind development. Now, the project, which had secured most of its permits, was designed to power approximately one million homes across two phases of development. In the press, In the United States, it’s being seen as a Trump win. But a billion dollars is still a billion dollars. A shell, which would obviously indicate a shell loss. So it’s like this, somebody wins, somebody loses scenario. I’m not sure that’s actually true. Obviously there was going to be some slowdown because of the Current administration. Wiping this away and just saying it’s a complete write off, Phil, seems a little unusual right now. And maybe they just wanted to get out of the project altogether, and it has really nothing to do with, with the administration. Phil Totaro: Yeah, but, uh, look, at the end of the day, that was just the nail in the coffin, because it, it, they were certainly looking at, you don’t just make a decision like this to divest, and take an impairment of, you know, 996 million, although, again, most of it wasn’t necessarily, uh, fully attributed to the Atlantic Shores Project, but a large chunk of it was, um, because of, A, everything they had already invested in the project development, and B, what they were, you know, future revenues, etc., etc., that they were expecting. You know, you’re, you’re still in an environment where they’ve spent You know, tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on leases, they’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on project development expenses up until now, trying to cultivate the project as well as the supply chain around the project that they’re going to need to, to build. They’ve also invested heavily into developing the concept for the interconnection and, and, you know, the, the Atlantic shores interconnection wasn’t just going to be fed in. You know, from one project, there were other projects and, you know, adjacent to that, that we’re also going to be fed into New Jersey. And now New Jersey’s saying, you know, the governor is basically saying, well, that’s it for offshore wind for a while. Uh, so, you know, I, I consider this to be a failure on. Uh, the part of, of the current administration to not foster an environment where people feel comfortable investing. Allen Hall: So that’s a good point, Phil. I want to flip that on its head a little bit. Isn’t a large part of this, the New Jersey governor, the reason that Orsted is not there is because of the New Jersey governor, the reason that Shell’s pulling out is because of the New Jersey governor. You can’t have it both ways. When the election was kind of around and renewables weren’t as in favor. It’s like, Oh, I think we ought to just take our time, slow it down. We’ll develop it over time. Like when you have billions of dollars on the line, that’s the last thing you want to hear from the government. Like make your freaking mind up and let’s go. Trump had nothing to do with that. That was, that was New Jersey. Phil Totaro: I mean, let’s, let’s be fair though. It’s, it’s both of them because at the end of the day, again, you can’t, you know, if I’m, if I’m looking at trying to do, and again, to be clear, Trump’s order. really applies to leases for new leases that weren’t already allocated. The problem, however, is that for leases that already have been allocated, they’re also talking about slowing down or stopping any additional permitting for, for those existing leases. So if I’ve come into the market, particularly from abroad, and I’ve spent 400 million combined on a lease, development costs, and supply chain costs, expecting to see some kind of a return, and I get both the governor of the state that I’m trying to do the project in and now the new president trying to preclude me from doing it, I’m Yeah, I’m frankly going to be pissed and I’m going to be, you know, I’m going to want to either pull out. I’m going to want my money back. I’m going to be, I mean, he’s making people’s wallets lighter and it’s affecting people here. You know, if you are the leader of anything, if you’re the governor of a state, if you’re the president of the United States, if you’re, you know, the leader of a company, your responsibility is to foster an environment where whatever it is you’re responsible for, And I don’t see the people in positions of power doing that. That’s what my problem is. Joel Saxum: I think three words here that may not be very common to our wind brethren and sisters. Veto. Whale. Ardo. Those are the three platforms that Shell has been developing and is developing in the offshore oil and gas plays in the Gulf of Mexico right now. They’re the, they’re one of the top producers out there, right? So as soon as Trump goes, drill, baby, drill, drill, baby, drill, we don’t know what we’re going to do to win. And you’re looking at it going, I don’t know what we’re going to do, maybe this, maybe that. And you look at the margins that can be had in offshore oil and gas versus offshore wind. You say, you know what? We’re I’ve had enough of this problem. I’m done with it. I’m going back to where I know I can make money for my stakeholders and my company. And, and they’re one of the top producers in the Gulf of Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, whatever you want to call it. And they’re going to, they’re going to continue to push that way. But they just got, but, but they’ve, they’ve optimized what they’re doing out there with these three plat, these three new platforms are the first platforms of their kind that are built. They almost exactly the same. They’re replicas of each other. That has, that doesn’t happen in offshore oil and gas. Usually everything is bespoke and custom. These are replicas of each other and they plan to be. Operations and maintenance, smart platforms, a lot of tech out there, a lot of AI on these platforms. And they’re going to make, that’s going to make margins increase and increase and increase in offshore oil and gas. And that’s where they’re going to make money. That’s where they’re going to put their money to make money. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not, actually is very predictable and very preventable. StrikeTape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today. Allen Hall: Well, I wish Rosie was here because she provides some good feedback because this is an interesting news item that’s popped up. A recent leadership IQ poll has revealed concerning trends in workplace communication with only 15 percent of employees feeling their organizations are transparent about challenges in the workplace. Uh, the phenomenon known as glossing occurs when managers downplay workplace issues in an attempt to maintain positivity, potentially creating disconnects between leadership and staff. Now, uh, that study found that only 24 percent of respondents reported their leaders consistently encourage and acknowledge suggestions for improvement, while 16 percent said their leaders never do this. So this has a lot to do with, I think, the economic times. In order to keep an office running and headed towards some direction, you have to downplay the horrible scenarios you watch as there may be layoffs next door and the company down the street. You may see closing of businesses as you drive home. That starts to worry everybody. And so what happens is Managers tend to downplay and say, no, no, no, we’re fine. We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re going to work 80 hour weeks, but we’re fine. And that doesn’t feel right to a lot of people. And I think, you know, people, a lot of employees know, they, they see the writing on the wall, they read the newspaper, they read the, uh, The internet, they see it. It’s there. Uh, and I see this a lot in renewables, actually. Uh, some of the names we talked about earlier in this episode, I think we’re in that moat, like we’re going to be fine. It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine. And then it’s not, it’s one of those, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s slowly changes, slowly changes, and then there’s an abrupt stop and everybody’s waiting for that abrupt stop. It’s that’s hard thing to manage for the low level managers though. And Phil, you’ve been there. I mean, you’ve been in some real tough situations in your career. How do you handle that? Do you just ignore what the management’s saying? You just say, I’m going to pay more attention to what’s happening on the outside, no matter what management’s saying? Phil Totaro: It depends on what level of influence, I guess, you feel like you have within the company and, you know, cause ultimately you are. If you’re in a position where you’re interacting with customers, especially, they need a certain perception, um, of your company and, and your company’s health and success and everything in order to feel comfortable working with you and, and frankly, allocating, you know, tens of thousands, if not, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, uh, on, on projects and, and whatnot that they, they work with you on. So that’s, that’s, that’s That’s a part of it. The other part is, you know, how does that reflect back internally? Um, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, look, I’ve been in a company where, you know, it was Clipper Windpower. I’ll, I’ll, um, name names because it’s been, you know, 15 years since any of us have been there. Um, but we couldn’t. We suffered from a dearth of talent, but a leadership that couldn’t pull the trigger on me, you know, and, and just make a decision and say, this is what we’re doing and we’re going forward. I left Clipper in 2010 because I felt like I was in an environment where we weren’t going to change. We, we were not going to, it was a sinking ship and I could see it. And I didn’t want to be on the Titanic as it went down. You know, people can look at me however they want to look at me for making that decision, but, I mean, I’ve now been running a consultancy that’s lasted longer than Clipper did. I mean, my company’s been around for 15 years, not for nothing, but hey, you know, we, we made it, we made it longer than Clipper did, so I guess I must be doing something right, uh, over here. So, you know, I guess that’s my, my two cents on, on the whole matter. Joel Saxum: I think there’s a little bit of something else in play here. That’s a, like a cultural change, right? So with the newer generations of workers coming into place, I think it’s, everybody’s a little bit more, Oh, you gotta be a little nice, got to dance around a little bit and kind of, um, make sure their feelings aren’t hurting at the, where the older generations of workers were just kind of like, you could lay it to people bluntly and they would just kind of carry on. Um, so I think that there’s a little bit of a difference with the younger workforce coming into play where they’re intermixing with everybody and working great and bringing new ideas. Cool. But you know, some, some people you got to handle more with like kid gloves versus being able to, um, you know, really say what you want to say, I think is the difference. I guess I like it to like, my brother was, my brother was HR in the military and he retired after 20 years. Uh, and I was like, oh man, you’re a shoo in for any kind of position you want. He’s like, no, I’m not because he can’t do HR in the real world like you do it in the military. Um, so he’s like, yeah, you kind of get, you know, it’s not going to work. And I think it’s kind of the same thing. You have, uh, you’ve got these different dynamics in play in the workplace that, uh, a little bit more care of people’s feelings, uh, these days than there used to be. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think as an employee in those situations, I’m much more on Phil’s side on this than, than I typically see out in the rest of the world. Protect your backside all the time. Always be looking behind you to make sure, uh, it’s going like you think it’s going and always generally have an out plan. Maybe because I worked in aerospace so long that airplane programs were notoriously, um, going to run out of money much sooner than they thought. And you could feel it, because the amount of work hours would increase. So it was generally 40, and then it became 44, then it was 50, then it becomes 60, and you’re like, all right, now I’m approaching 70. Okay, this is, we’re not, nothing is progressing any faster for us working all these extra hours. What’s about to happen? Well, what’s about to happen is they’re not going to pay you, and then all those hours will just go poof. Uh, that was always the downside of that. In today’s world, I do think. Mostly because of the pandemic, that there’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a hard place to be. Everybody was sort of laid off for a little while because of the pandemic, and they don’t want to be laid off again, so they’re pretty sensitive about it. And they’re trying to figure out a way to navigate that. I always, for engineers, I always recommend, like Phil said, have a plan B. Whether you re enact it or not. Always have a plan B. Always be making a plan B. If your plan B is so so, then have a plan C and a D. Always, because things change. And as Phil pointed out, Clipper was a great company. I remember working with Clipper back in the day. And early on, it was like, wow, this is cool. This is good stuff. And then all of a sudden, it just didn’t. You don’t want to be there. And Phil’s not, right? So that’s a good example of pay attention to what’s going on. This week’s Wind Joel Saxum: Farm of the Week is Red Barn Wind. It’s an elite clean energy site down in southern Wisconsin and it has 28 GE 3. 4 140 kilowatts. Turbines. So it’s 92 megawatts. There’s enough to power about 32, 000 homes. And one of the things to touch on here is during construction of this site, they used slag cement and slag cement is an interesting product because it’s actually. Partially recycled. So when they’d use slag cement, it’s uh, it actually increases some of the performance of the product. But it, uh, they take it from industrial usage and they pulverize the powder and they supplement it for cement. So this one actually had about 50 percent, 50 percent slag cement, 50 percent regular cement. But it is a recycled product that went into the bases of these turbines. So that’s pretty cool. Uh, they employ 250 people during construction and about 10 people during full on operation and the power goes, stays right in there in Wisconsin. So Madison Gas and Electric is getting some of it. Wisconsin Public Service is getting some of it. WEC Energy Group gets the rest. So, uh, it’s a pretty cool project that they use some recycled materials for there in Wisconsin. So, um, and Red Barn Wind Allen Hall: from Elite Clean Energy, you are the wind farm of the week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening. And please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our substack newsletter. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

On News Flash, Allen and Phil discuss Caverion’s acquisition of Huolto-Lepistö, Mitsubishi re-evaluating their offshore wind assets and Shell’s 2024 financial report. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com 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 News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Well Phil, a busy week in mergers and acquisitions. Caverion has acquired Huolto-Lepistö’s, a wind turbine maintenance business. Now this acquisition gives Caverion a new base on Finland’s west coast. And the acquired business specializes in wind turbine service lifts. Repairs, inspections, and maintenance. There does seem to be a lot more activity in Finland Phil Totaro: for wind. Yeah. And, and as their installed base grows they have a lot of large turbines up there in, in Finland. So I think the average, if I remember correctly based on our data and Intel store, the average turbine size in Finland these days is Something like. 5. 5 megawatts and upwards of like 140 something meter rotor. Again, taking the entire installed base in, into account. So, growing installed base, big turbines, big responsibility, and. Admittedly, I don’t know very much about Kaverian as a company, but looking into it after this deal was announced earlier this week it’s, it’s very interesting how they’re trying to position themselves. And the fact that they want to go after the, the wind services market also demonstrates, I think that they’re making a commitment to a segment that they see a lot more growth potential with. Allen Hall: Over in Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation is reviewing its offshore wind projects due to significant changes in the business environment. Now, the company leads consortia that won three projects in Japan’s first state run offshore wind auction in 2021, and those projects total about 1. 7 gigawatts of capacity. Capacity. The partner company, Chubu Electric, posted an 18 billion yen loss on these projects. It looks like Mitsubishi is trying to reevaluate the profit margin on these projects, and with the high inflation in Japan and maybe even stagnation being discussed, it’s going to get a little rough for Mitsubishi. I wonder if they’re going to finish these projects. Phil Totaro: Yeah, well, it’s funny because Japan was a market with their offshore wind potential that looked, poised to take off. They heavily invested in floating offshore wind demonstrator projects, more than a decade ago. They have a finite amount of, of space on land, obviously, where, They can install onshore wind and solar for that matter. So the exploitation of offshore wind looked like a really promising segment to the market. But they’ve never been able to get their act together. And I mean, this is frankly a very common thing amongst a lot of governments that, that have a lot of offshore wind potential, resource potential. But they don’t have the right structure in place. And you could say the same thing about South Korea. You can say the same thing about Brazil. That they, they’ve got a tremendous amount of interest and enthusiasm. And frankly, people that want to invest money there, including Mitsubishi, but if they don’t get a sense of like how they’re going to see a return on, on these investments, then, I guess I can’t blame Mitsubishi at this point for, for having to reevaluate the market. Allen Hall: No, Mitsubishi being the global company at which it is. is very financially responsible. So if you watch the way they run their different divisions, they are paying attention to the bottom line. Now they’ll be willing to extend out some of these projects knowing that they’re going to come to completion and there’s going to be a revenue stream, but offshore wind for them seems to be a little bit less on the margins than they want. So. Big things happening in Japan. Shell, obviously a huge oil and gas company and dabbling in renewables, achieved a huge amount of cash flow in 2024, almost 40 billion in free cash flow. And the company delivered over 3 billion in structural cost reductions since 2022. All this is being announced in their 2024 financial report. Phil, when you watch Shell and watch the amount of money they’re making in oil and gas, and now they’re leaving the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project off the coast of New Jersey, what’s the writing on the wall here for Shell? Is it just oil and gas? Is it just making big dollars pumping oil out of the Gulf of America? Phil Totaro: Well, I mean, at the end of the day, you’re, you’re talking about a company that that’s their bread and butter. And I mean, Joel’s mentioned it on the show before that companies that don’t necessarily get enough return on investment out of renewables are, are likely to pivot back to, their core competency. So you’ve seen BP do a similar thing where they had a bunch of layoffs and they’ve re Purposed a lot of capital into, oil and gas projects. Shell is now following that same approach. They’ve recently announced a number of layoffs and some executive repositioning within their organization. And it now looks like, particularly to offset some of the impairments and other losses that they incurred from their renewables portfolio, which includes a modest amount of onshore wind and solar. But certainly a large chunk of, of offshore. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like it’s pumping oil and gas till the cows come home.

In the Uptime Spotlight today is Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, the company building the world’s largest offshore wind farm with a government contract: Green Volt. Stephen discusses the massive project’s progress, planning, and logistics to be completed by 2030. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com 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 excited to welcome Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, who is leading the charge in developing some of Europe’s most ambitious floating offshore wind projects. Stephen brings over 25 years of energy industry experience and currently oversees Vårgrønn’s Impressive portfolio of projects across Northern Europe, including Greenvolt, set to become the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm with a government contract. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Steven, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, great to be here. Well, the Greenvolt project is one of the most important Impressive projects going on in the world right now, and you’re heavily involved with that, of course, as being the CEO of Vårgrønn and I want to understand a little bit about how that project came together and what problem Greenvolt is trying to solve. Stephen Bull: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s kind of neat to say it’s the most exciting project. I think it’s, uh, it’s quite a scary project in many respects for us as well when you work within the offshore wind sector at the moment, but definitely within floating offshore wind. Yeah. If we sort of dial it back down to the project itself, I mean, what we’re solving for here is, is the generic problem with offshore wind in deeper waters. And, uh, and really when you start to push the boundaries beyond 60, you know, 60 odd plus, 70 meter water depths, you need to start to go into the floating territory. Um, and that’s something that you find distinctly within the coast of Scotland as well. There’s only so much of that seabed that is shallow and then it starts to push out there. So, Scottish authorities, the Scottish Crown Estate, the guys who basically own the seabed license around there, want to have further developments within offshore wind, but um, they are inhibited in the sense that they have deeper waters. Um, at the same time, there’s still a quite large oil and gas industry in, of Scottish waters as there is in Norway, as well as the two largest producers in Europe. They also have carbon issues, carbon problems of CO2 emissions from their own Scope 1 emissions. So the Scottish authorities have put together a concept which is called targeted oil and gas. And essentially they’ve been looking to lease out areas where we could develop offshore wind, both that go straight into the grid. For the benefit of consumers, but also could help decarbonize oil and gas operations as well. So that’s the background around it. It’s happened pretty quickly. To be honest, we, we received our, uh, you know, essentially our lease just over a year ago, year and a half ago. Uh, we won a contract for difference from the UK government in September. Uh, for 400 megawatts and we’re just basically right in the middle of procurement and developing the whole concept now so we could be online by 2030. Allen Hall: Wow, that’s a really short timeline. There’s a lot to be done between now and then. In terms of the electricity for a minute, let me just walk through this. Your plan, and the way it’s proposed, is there’s floating platforms with wind, there’s a HVDC line, I think is where you’re going, that will run to offshore oil and gas platforms, so it will power those oil and gas platforms, but it also runs onshore into Scotland. So, you can power oil and gas offshore, also power onshore, and then that’s sort of a bi directional feed that, in the event that the wind’s not blowing enough in Scotland, which is really important. Pretty rare, honestly, then the power can come onshore to the oil and gas platform. So it’s sort of a redundant tool to offtake system. Stephen Bull: Yeah, it is. So the, the, the, what underpins the project itself is, is the contract with difference. And this is the policy mechanism. The UK government has basically dialed down for, for some time. Um, it’s, it’s a 15 year price you receive. So actually you go into an auction, you win a 15 years and basically it’s a, We received 139 per megawatt hour in 2012 prices. So that’s just shy of 200 per megawatt hour. Uh, and it’s, so it’s an inflation adjusted, uh, within that, that period. Um, and that’s great because what you can do with that one, you can use that to essentially underpin the financing of the project itself. Um, and what we do on top of that one is that, you know, in outside of the 400 megawatts, then we have up to 560 megawatts that we could produce in the total area, uh, which can, you know, help towards oil and gas decarbonization. And it was the, you know, again, that, that has to be, that’s a direct relationship we will have with oil and gas operators with their, with the PPA. But the idea being is that, If they obviously want to turn off their gas turbines, or if they’re using diesel, then they need 100 percent guaranteed power. Yeah. Joel Saxum: So a question for you there then, um, you’re gonna be pseudo co located, right? You’re gonna be within, you know, within distance of these offshore oil and gas platforms, so you’re not running an export cable hundreds and hundreds of kilometers. But what is, so how, how many of those platforms will you guys be able to feed? And what’s the actual power demand of those platforms? Stephen Bull: It varies quite dramatically. So the area that we have, and we were in an area which is about 80 kilometers off the coast of a place called Peterhead, which is just north of Aberdeen in Scotland. Um, there are some oil and gas installations in the area. Most of them are a bit further out. So what we did is we were awarded two licenses from Scottish authorities. One called Greenvault. Sinos is much further out. That’s, uh, that is within the HVDC territory, but it’s much closer to oil and gas operations. And that’s actually quite close to the Norwegian border as well when it comes to, uh, the Norwegian border between the UK continental shelf and the Norwegian continental shelf. So that could be potentially an opportunity to decarbonize also outside towards Norwegian platforms as well. Um, it’s, it’s kind of, it’s, it’s when you put things in perspective, I mean, the most important thing is that this project has got a contract for difference. We’re going to get it going. We hope we can find strong support from oil and gas who want to sign up for a PPA so that we actually can. Uh, work with them, decarbonize their, their emissions, and they’re not inconsiderable. They’re, you know, it’s between up to maybe 13 to 15 million tons of CO2 emissions come from the UK sector. Uh, roughly about the same in terms of Norway, uh, as well. So, you know, 25 odd million tons of, of CO2 reductions is something which is quite considerable, which, which oil and gas needs to do in a, in a net zero context. So. There’s different drivers of this. Some could be complete cable from shore. Others could be that you just have don’t full, fully decarbonize, but you can reduce the amount that you use by having a gas. Uh, turbine would also, uh, a ring fence system that you could have with offshore wind. They do that in a project in Norway already. It’s called Highwind Tampen. So it’s a, you know, an experimental project there, but it’s the largest floating offshore wind, uh, farm today, uh, in operation. So there’s, there’s different ways you can cut and slide this up, uh, in, in terms of that. But the, the key one around it is that In many respects, you’re using oil and gas technology, for example, floating technology, deep water technology for spas or for semi submersibles, but you’re dialing it down into something which could be, you know, in a renewable context, and obviously repeatable as well. Joel Saxum: So it’s saying that, Highwind Tampin, I think that was an Econor project, correct? That powered some offshore oil and gas platforms. But this being said now, 400 megawatt contract contract for difference permit, plus another 160 out there. So 560 total, that will put you guys in place to be the largest offshore floating wind farm in the world. Stephen Bull: Correct? We’ll see, you know, China’s pushing things on Korea, boosting things as well. You know, so we’ll see. And then France has also threatened some 750 megawatt projects as well. I mean, the thing is that we want to see them all happening. And again, the hard bit about it, when you think of the 70 odd gigawatts of offshore wind probably commissioned today, 300 megawatts is in floating. You know, it has anywhere near the scale and the repetition and the modularization that we need to get so we can bring the cost down. We’re all for as many projects as possible, but um, but us probably, we could probably safely say it’s the largest commercial project in Europe. A lot of people aren’t quite sure exactly what water depths that mean. What water depths are you guys in? Joel Saxum: So we’re in about 110 meter water depths, which you know again, this sounds a bit weird, but you actually want the right kind of water depth. So you don’t want something under a hundred generally, because you have a mooring system that would be a quite cattery mooring system, which would be quite costly to have that. That’s a lot of chain you need in there. Super deep is quite difficult, you know, so I think finding the right kind of, uh, the water depths then, and again, the site conditions are very different with all these projects as well. You know, the kind of site conditions you get off the coast of Norway or where you get off the coast of Scotland or France or Japan as well are very different. So. In that sense, you also have to tailor make the mooring system, the floater itself, the integration of the tower, the turbine. Yeah, a lot of bespoke stuff. So we’re, we’re not on the standardization train yet. Yeah. I had that conversation with someone the other day, we’re talking about offshore floating wind. Who’s going to, what, you know, what technology is going to emerge as the, as the forefront, as that, as that front runner, who’s going to be the big one. And, and we got a little bit deeper into the engineering side of things. My background from offshore oil and gases. Exactly what you just said. Every water depth, every seafloor condition, every topside condition is different around the world. So there, you’re not necessarily, you’re not necessarily going to have one type of technology that just dominates the whole market. There’s going to be specific ones. So if, if you guys are, building for, you know, specifically, you know, 80 kilometers off Peterhead up in that North Atlantic. Is there a certain kind of technologies that you guys are looking at right now in your, in your RFP for building this thing? Or is it spars or what do you guys, where are you focused on? Stephen Bull: We’ve dialed it down to, to a few designs already. Um, and the key thing about this is it’s generally, it’s, it’s, it’s actually water depth of the key. Uh, and when you start to do the assembly work is often some of the drivers. So. For example, the Highwind Tampon Project from Equinor, they used a spar. And that’s a concrete spar. So it was, uh, it was a slip formed concrete spar, which is, you know, oil and gas technology. You’ve seen these in massive concrete floating foundations over time, but just, you know, much smaller. But you can do that when you’ve got water depths of, you know, a hundred plus meters right next to the quay here in Norway. So you have some obviously deep fjords. Scotland doesn’t have that. So unless you wanted to build it out into Norway and you drag it across the, the North Sea, then that’s the other option you do. And it has been done. Harbour Scotland was built in that way as well, which, uh, which Equinor built, um, uh, you know, only about five years ago. But what we can see for our one is, you know, we’re, we’re thinking more around the semi submersible type of space for the concept here. Again, we’re in the middle of a procurement system at the moment, so I won’t be giving away all the fun facts around that one, but again, it’s, it’s, it’s different strokes for different folks based on these, these kinds of conditions. But I think if I was dared to bet on the technologies, the spar is great for Norway and the harsh conditions of the Norwegian continental shelf. You’ve got a, an oil and gas supply chain there that knows this business. It, it, it’s, it works. It’s good. Not to say that’s the only design there, but for, you know, Scotland, for France, for others, you’re probably going to see more of the semi submersible. And you might see some tension like platforms. You might see some barge type solutions as well. But again, it depends very much on the bathymetry and the, you know, site conditions as well. Joel Saxum: I think you guys have a great advantage up there of just being in an area that’s been an oil and gas hub. There’s been offshore infrastructure being built there for decades. 60 years now, so the port facilities are there, the vessels are there, the people that know how to get things done are there. Um, so that’s, that’s huge. Now, so my next question would be like, you guys get this thing into operation. Is who’s going to maintain this thing? Are you guys going to be doing all of the, the service yourself? Are you going to build that out as a, as a capacity or we’ll, you know, we’ll go to the turbine OEMs or how are you going to operate Stephen Bull: that? I think it’d be a hybrid of things, but we’re both with the turbine OEMs, uh, and how we would operate ourselves. So there’s different philosophies around this, as you know, you know, I’m, you know, there’s an outsourced market or third party market, isn’t it, for O and M operations, which. Works great in mature areas. I think when you are doing this for a new technology, um, and particularly with more harsh conditions as well, you need a service operation vessel to run this, not a crew transfer vessel because of the distance from shore and also wave height as well to try and access the turbines. So you, you know, need a different concept there. But these are things that we’ve seen already. We’ve seen it in the Dogger Bank project, which SSE and ourselves are owners in, we’ve seen it in other projects around too, but the key thing about it, and we’ll probably come on to the financing discussion is that to finance this and actually think of the, um, uh, risk management around that is that, you know, you want to have a very, very clear hands on operating concept. So I think that that would be part of part of parcel of that. But again, when we start to think about more digital solutions and the idea is we want to be touching these turbines less. We don’t want to be out there all the time, especially in the winter months. That’s Allen Hall: the key bit. And some of those lessons were learned from high wind Tampin, right? Is that that was a really critical project. I know there’s been a lot of controversy about that project, uh, about the success of the project in, in the engineering world. However, that project led the way so that. Greenvolt can happen. You just, it’s continued on and on. And that happens in the financing world also, right? That, that, the, the financing of how Equinor ran Highwind also rolls into how Greenvolt approached financing a little bit. Can you explain how this all comes together financing wise and how you’re trying to, With a new government in place and you have a new government, we have a new government, um, in the United States. How that works together to push this project forward. I mean, you know, Stephen Bull: there is this sort of standing on the shoulder of the giants, uh, thing going on here. And I think, um, again, I’m sort of kind of lucky enough in the sense I actually worked in both Noshkidro and in Equinor. So I’ve been involved in some of this for a personal level and, uh, of many, many hundreds or thousands of other people involved in floating offshore wind. But. That first demo project in 2007 off the coast of, of Senga, which, uh, noro developed initially and then they came under the wings of EOR afterwards. I mean, that, that set up some fascinating DR and D work. And it was in, you know, pitch blade motion control. It was under understanding the spa, the interaction between the tower, uh, all the forces that you have at work, uh, within, you know, within these operations. And then you came behind, um, Scotland on top of that, tampon built on the top and obviously. There’s the other Daikin Cardean has been developed, you’ve got, you know, demos that are in Portugal and, and, and other areas as well. So I think that the main thing is that to, you know, to take some of those learning and some of those projects, you know, help our project finance, but the majority haven’t been, you know, they’ve either been demos or, you know, having Tampin, you wouldn’t need to project finance. It’s all in gas, so essentially, you know, essentially the sort of the licenses behind it. But what you do know is that we. When you do talk to banks and you discuss what’s going on here, I mean, one thing is there’s actually quite a strong appetite for banks to be involved in the project financing of floating offshore wind. They see a lot of opportunities, particularly Japan, uh, not surprisingly, and a lot of Japanese banks are already deeply into the UK offshore wind market already as, as finances, um, and infrastructure anyway. And then what you do is you start to use references and, and essentially verification from the oil and gas industry. So, one thing is you can, what we take, learning we can take from other projects like Kim Kardine or, or any of the, the Equinor projects. But you do use references, for example, mooring systems, suction anchors, technical integrity of steel, uh, operations and maintenance using SOV vessels, these kinds of things, stuff that’s been tested already. You just have to contextualize it for that particular project for the lenders. Allen Hall: And that’s a unique approach. I think bringing Japanese in makes complete sense to me. And you do see a lot of activity in Japan on floating wind. Obviously, that’s going to be where they’re going to go. So it’s a learning experience for everybody. When you’re Building out now in, around Aberdeen, you have an office now in Aberdeen and you’re trying to grow that. How big does this become in and around Aberdeen in terms of the number of employees and the amount of funds that are gonna happen in that area? So the, I mean, the Stephen Bull: numbers are, the gross value added, we say, total investment is about 2. 5 billion pounds. And a lot of that, so it’s, it’s, a big chunky change, no doubt about it. them. And then it’s around about 2, 800 people we’ve measured up there with jobs during construction. And obviously you have, you know, you’ll have probably 40 to 60 working operations and maintenance or office work to, you know, essentially go into office mode. Um, we know, I mean, literally three weeks after we were awarded our contract, the difference of the government, we announced that we’re putting our office in, uh, in Aberdeen. So we’ll build on the office there with our partners, Flotation Energy. Um, and again, we, you know, we’re building a lot of from competence, from, you know, pure offshore wind background, but also many from the oil and gas sector as well, uh, including myself from that type of background. So there’s, you know, there’s a great investment there, but the key one around this one is that when it comes to port infrastructure, when it comes to grid connections, all the rest of it in more remote areas, like the Northeast of the United Kingdom, is that this project does actually open up grid new investments. And then they say, it’s not one port. Or yard that can fix this. You know, we’re talking about 35 plus floaters. They’re the size of a football field. Each of them were a football stadium, essentially. Um, you know, there’s a logistics play going on here is that, you know, we need to crack the code for this so that others can jump on the back of it as well. And again, there’s a, there’s a whole wall of new investments and potential projects in something called ScotWind, which was a very large leasing process in Scotland, a lot of mix there between floating and fixed bottom. Um, But to, to have those investments in the ports and infrastructure that have, you know, previously oil and gas means that they can start taking those investments. We can be part of an anchor investment there for them and then we can bring it on for others as well. You know, we hope that that drives investments, not just in jobs and skills, but also reduce down the cost of energy as well, and actually make it more competitive Allen Hall: too. Right. That gives Scotland and the UK a huge advantage going forward, because there will be competition from France in particular. Yes. So that’s going to be an impressive amount of effort. So what does your schedule look like now? And as a CEO, we’re going to need you. It must be schedules all the time. What happens over the next year or so? What, what, what’s the plans here? I know you have a lot of RFPs out there. What does the next year look like? Stephen Bull: So we’re just, you know, again, working with the long lead items at the moment, which is offshore transmission. It’s the turbines in particular. That’s, that’s brick and mortar packages we’re working with at the moment. Um, and then we’d really, we’re looking at probably signing some pretty heavy contracts through 2025. And then the FID will be taking 26. Bruce. And then the idea that would be, uh, you know, we hope first, first wind production by the end of 29. Again, but it’s actually, you’re on the clock when it comes to delivery in terms of the contract for difference. Um, you can do that. There’s, there’s some guardrails around how you can work with that one, but. You know, you guys, you follow this up all the time. It’s a tough market in terms of the supply chain, availability, floating’s different and needs a little bit more bespoke engineering around it. It’s not off the shelf technology, a lot of infrastructure that needs to be invested in the UK to make this work. So I think, uh, again, it’s, it’s a tough one, but I mean, that’s the exciting, this is why we do it, isn’t it? Because it is so motivating and exciting to work with these kinds of projects. Joel Saxum: I think that what you guys are doing right now, that like the, first off, Allen and I kind of talking off air, the hedge between the two. delivering power to the oil and gas platforms and shore. I mean, that’s, uh, innovation that makes things like this happen. That’s fantastic. But you’re doing a lot of, uh, there’s a lot of new, right? This is like, uh, we, we, you know, in the investment world, we call it folk, you know, first of a kind, but the whole project is like that, right? So it’s, there’s kind of a lot of first of its kind things. How do you handle that role of leadership as you guys move forward in the industry? Stephen Bull: No, it’s, it’s an interesting question, Joel. I think, um, Again, the background, I think, again, someone’s worked in oil and gas. Oil and gas is pretty good at sharing ideas and working together in terms of partnerships. Offshore wind has been less good at that. It’s been a bit more secretive around how they, you know, how they feel that things are technically sensitive, commercially, R& D. I think for us, you know, we have to be a bit open here completely. Again, it’s if we want this to succeed for others as well. Um, then we know we have to, we have to play, play openly with others. So I think we’re actually looking into some of that, how we actually think of the data sharing that we can use here as well. I mean, our team are out there, you know, conferences all over explaining a lot about how we’re thinking about working. We need suppliers, what we think in terms of actually infrastructure investments. And when, when we start signing contracts for, for, for some of the major engineering packages, I mean, Others will be looking at it and thinking, okay, you know, what can I learn from this? And hopefully the smartest people will be the ones that look at it and actually don’t make the mistakes that we maybe end up or will be doing. We know that happens in projects. Although they can start to think, how do we standardize? How do we reduce weight? How do we reduce costs? How do we bring uptime further? So, you know, there’s so many benefits that I think to, to build on this one. And, but I think, you know, you’re right. We, we have a responsibility, you know, both for not just to provide the right type of content for the UK as well for investment so that the UK can reach its floating offshore wind targets. But, you know, again, this goes for a bit of the rest of the industry. And when you, you know, again, worked in this industry for quite a long time, but definitely the last few years have been pretty tough and a bit depressing in terms of headlines. And people say just, you know, you know, fantastic news. Love it that you guys won Greenville, you know, and it’s literally don’t screw it up. So you feel that there, you know, they’re kind of staring over your shoulder, you know, to, to not make that mistake. But yet again, we, we, we, we take that fully on ourselves. And I think that goes for a stakeholder relationship between Scotland, the UK, local authorities as well. You know, you’ve got to play Allen Hall: really well with everybody. As far as hiring right now, it seems like you’re going to need a bunch of people to show up in Aberdeen. What’s the plan there? Stephen Bull: Yeah, we are, we’re hiring pretty heavily. So we’re, we’re spamming LinkedIn with all our new positions out there. Yeah. Um, so some within our company, some, uh, our partner Flotation Energy are bringing in and then we’re bringing people directly in for the, for the Greenbelt project itself. So definitely we’re hiring a lot. And also we, you know, our model is that we’re not going to be doing everything in house. You know, we have an outsourced model, we have a domain expertise within certain packages, and then we will be using engineering houses to work through those. So that’s, you know, Admittedly, we’re driving quite a lot of the volume within, uh, engineering consultancy at the moment, uh, across the, across the, across Europe. Allen Hall: If you’re interested in working with Stephen at Vårgrønn, or even some of the suppliers going to be around in Aberdeen, you need to go check out Stephen’s website. Stephen, you want to give all the addresses of where they can find Vårgrønn? Stephen Bull: Yeah, definitely. So it’s just vagron. com, uh, go in there, or if you just Google GreenVault as well, and you find that we have a supply chain, uh, So, I mean, literally, you’ll, you’ll see us all over. We, we kind of spam as much social media as we can for a company like ourselves. But And then we’re out there also talking about these great to do this with you guys as well and tell about the project, but we’re definitely telling more about it as we as we develop it. Allen Hall: Absolutely. It’s a wonderful project. I know you have a lot on your plate at the moment and the best of luck to you. I’d like to have you back on the podcast to talk about how things are going in a few months because I think we’ll hear some more details coming out soon. So, Stephen, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure. Stephen Bull: Thanks so much, Allen. Thanks, Joel.

This week we discuss cooling system patents, including Siemens Gamesa’s method for creating air channels for better temperature control, Goldwind’s predictive temperature moderating, and GE’s adjustable power output based on component temperatures. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com 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! This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here’s your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: Phil, this episode of Power Up is going to focus on cooling. And as wind turbines get bigger and bigger, thermal controls are becoming more important. You need to make sure that there’s no thermal runaways, and with the amount of power. 8, 10, 12, 15 megawatts going on inside of some of these nacelles. You’re seeing a lot of patents and innovation around cooling, and this first one is from Siemens Gamesa, and it has to do with the generator itself. And the patent describes a cooling system for the generator that places air channels to better control temperature. Within the generator. Now, the key feature includes the magnet elements arranged in rows with groove like recesses that allow for targeted airflow between the components. Now, that design creates multiple cooling paths with gaps somewhere between like a half a millimeter and ten millimeters wide that enable better heat dissipation. So, obviously Siemens Gamesa sees the future, which is thermal control in a generator, because if you have overheating in generators That can be quite expensive to fix, so they’re trying to address it up front, Phil, with this basically airflow pattern. Phil Totaro: Yeah, and, and as you mentioned, not only are generators getting bigger but particularly for offshore, the operational efficiency matters a lot. and how you control both the flux density and efficiency of the generator, balanced against how you have to cool the thing to maintain the kind of an air gap that you need in order to get the efficiency you want. It, it just throws these thermal engineers into complete chaos most of the time. So the way that they’re architecting this is so that you can control the airflow in those channels in between the, the magnet holders to prevent hotspots. For the long term, if it keeps happening and you keep getting the hotspot, it can actually cause thermal degradation in the magnets and in The, the generator structure itself. So again, in order to maintain kind of peak operational efficiency, cooling becomes a a critical component to that. Allen Hall: Our second patent is from Goldwind and it is also focused on cooling up and then the cell. And it. Is an idea that is wrapped around really a sophisticated coolings control system that uses predictive temperature monitoring to optimize cooling. And as you can well imagine, as these generators get bigger, there’s just a lot of nooks and crannies and you need to be able to monitor the hole in the cell area for temperature increases and to control it. Well, this system connects a cooling device and a yaw controller to a frequency converter that controls the operation based on the predictive temperature. Temperature thresholds. Now the key innovation is ability to anticipate when cooling will be needed and by calculating future temperature profiles and allowing a more proactive reaction to that temperature control. So they’re, they’re using a lot more information to predict where the temperatures will be and from what it sounds like, Phil, is they’re kind of yawing the turbine out of peak power slightly. to control the temperature so they don’t have a thermal runaway. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And what makes this innovation really unique is, as you mentioned, the fact that they have it connected to the frequency converter itself, because what they can do with that and how that’s going to impact and influence The temperature prediction is they can look at frequencies over time and see if there’s, a substantial increase or decrease in, in the frequency on the converter and use that to kind of inform this, this predictive model that they’re going to use to determine. How much they need to kind of, I’ve likened this to, you’re, you’re flat on the accelerator in your car or something, and then you kind of let off a little bit to, to just let everything cool down. And then, you, you step back on, on full throttle once your, your brakes and your bearings all get back down into a temperature range that, that’s, not going to cause your wheels to explode. It’s kind of a similar principle here with being able to connect this first to the frequency converter and use that to influence the, the model and the signals that are, that are being generated. And then secondly, as you mentioned, connecting it to the yaw system is also very unique in that they want to be able to just angle the turbine slightly so that, as you mentioned, it’s not on peak power 100 percent of the time because that can cause, thermal degradation. So it’s a, it’s a really clever idea. I like it. And our Allen Hall: third patent is from GE Renewables over in Spain, and the patent is very similar to the Goldwind one, actually. And it’s a method for dynamically adjusting the wind turbine power output based on component temperatures. And in this particular case, they’re, instead of just using ambient temperature to determine the power decisions. So in Spain it can get quite hot, or in India it can get quite hot. Instead of just monitoring outside temperature, internal temperature inside the nacelle around the generator, they have a system to monitor multiple component temperatures. And then you have a thermodynamic model that predicts what the temperature will climb to. And in this particular patent, they also talk about derating essentially the turbine, slowing it down, let everything cool down a little bit and stabilize so it doesn’t have a thermal runaway. So the GE approach is a little different in that they’re looking at basically sensors that probably already exist in the turbine and using that knowledge to then create a thermodynamic model. So the idea is similar, Phil, to what Goldman was proposing. Phil Totaro: Yeah, similar, but what GE is specifically talking about is how you’re, you’re establishing the maximum power set point. And so that’s not something that Goldwind had contemplated in theirs. And what GE is trying to do with this is ensuring that As I, as I mentioned when describing the Goldwyn Patent, if you, if you liken this to, keeping your foot on the accelerator in a car, what GE’s doing is they’re, they’re controlling when you let off and, and put your foot back on, but normally how a lot of companies do it is, you, you, Let off the accelerator and in the case of a wind turbine, you’re kind of derating down to the point where the thermal sensor triggers, a below threshold kind of thing. And then, you can ramp power back up. What GE is specifically doing is they’re going to They’re using the temperature whether it’s thermocouples or other, temperature sensors that are, that are monitoring the, the components in the turbine, they’re using that to determine the, the maximum power set point. So that at all times they’re outputting as much power as they possibly can. They’re not just letting their foot off the accelerator. They’re. Completely, and then putting it back on, they’re basically throttling back a little and, but still giving, their, their customers basically of, of their wind turbines, the maximum amount of power output that they can. Allen Hall: Does that create a hunt and peck situation for the turbine that it’s going to be yawing quite a bit to maintain that peak power without Phil Totaro: thermal runaway? They can tune it. to the point where it’s not going to be as much hunt and pack and cause a lot of issues with the Yaw system. To be blunt, I haven’t actually seen whether or not they’ve implemented this yet. So we’ve, we’ve kind of marked this down as something that we hope they explore at some point in the future commercially, because I think it’d be a really clever addition to their, their technical repertoire. And something that’s probably, desirable. bit of functionality for, an asset owner or an operator to, to have is, keeping the turbine’s maximum power set point at literally the, the maximum it can possibly be at all times. While maintaining the, the thermal regulation on all the components in, in in the nacelle. Allen Hall: That’s the key to operating a wind turbine. You can make one part of the turbine more efficient, but you have to look at what the downstream effects are. And if you start, Damaging yaw brakes and yaw motors. It may not be worth it. So it’s a real trade off. It’s, it’s complicated. Phil Totaro: There’s, there’s always design compromises whenever you’re doing any type of system optimization, particularly around controls. And as we talked about a few weeks ago on, on PowerUp, you can. You can over optimize a little bit too much, and have way too many controls doing way too many opposing things. So, this is one of those where it requires dependence and interaction with the mechanical system. So that’s something that in order to not induce wear on the turbine, that’s probably something that takes a good degree of precision, and a good degree of importance too when again, it comes to both the, the engineering side of it and the operation side.

On Uptime this week, we discuss Nordex’s installation of a 179 meter hub-height wind turbine in Germany, the expected drop in oil prices in the US, and the emerging “hushed hybrid” trend. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com 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! Nordex breaks records with their tallest onshore wind turbine. Wall Street predicts conservative oil and gas spending for 2025 and Australia prepares for the wind energy O&M conference. This is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. You’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Well, you won’t want to miss the Wind Energy O& M Australia event because it’s coming up soon, February 11th and 12th in Melbourne. And at this point, Phil, there’s like 65, 67 different companies represented at this event. Yes, uh, we’ve got about 125 people registered at this point and all our sponsors are on board. So a big thank you to Tilt Renewables, GE Vernova, Winergy. Uh, warley rig com. Skys specs and aons. That’s gonna be quite a crowd. And, and the, the panels I saw, if you go online to wind australia.com, you can see all the different panels we’re talking, leading edge erosion, some lightning strikes, CMS. Pretty much anything to do with wind turbines we’re going to be discussing and because we’ll have all the experts there at one place It’s the right time to get your questions answered and even Rosemary is going to be talking on a panel and hosting a panel A couple in fact, I’ve got leading edge erosion and then end of life Considerations what to do at the end of life of wind turbines. So looking forward to both of those And Joel, you’re hosting a panel on insurance, correct? Yeah, I was actually speaking with some of the people that are going to be involved in it today, and they’re super excited about being able to actually engage with the public that they don’t get to, or they engage with the wind industry that they don’t normally get to. So they want to share their messages in operational strategies and how to deal with your insurers. Yeah, it’s a really different crowd to what, um, I typically see at Australian conferences or most, even the international ones where it’s much more about, I don’t know, finance and developing and, um, maybe politics a little bit, community engagement, all important things. But, um, yeah, I’m always, always missing the really technical stuff. And obviously that’s why we organized this conference, but it’s, it’s, It’s been good to see the kinds of attendees that have been registering, and I think that we are gonna hit that brief of getting a, you know, a really good technical discussion going about what are the problems that we’re facing in Australia and what are the solutions and, you know, learning, um, all of us learning together. So, um, yeah, I’m really excited for, it’s only a few seats left. If you want to attend Wind Energy o and m Australia, you need to go to wind australia.com and click the button and register. Literally, there’s like a handful of seats left. Better do it now, and we’ll see you in Melbourne. Unlock your wind farm’s best performance at Wind Energy O& M Australia, February 11th to 12th in sunny Melbourne. Join industry leaders as they share practical solutions for maintenance, OEM relations, and asset management. Discover strategies to cut costs, keep your assets running smoothly, and drive long term success in today’s competitive market. Register today. and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com. There’s a new workplace trend called hushed hybrid and it’s gaining attention where managers quietly allow their teams to work remotely despite company policies requiring office attendance and I’ve seen this up close. I didn’t realize this was happening, but there is like an underground black market for working at home. Now, research shows that about 70 percent of UK managers are now practicing this approach, uh, which is highlighting, uh, the return to office mandates that a lot of people don’t want to come back and the managers really don’t need them to come back, and so they’re negotiating on a person by person basis. And they’re finding that People quit less if they can work out of the house, maybe even just a couple of days a week. Uh, and it’s leading to more job satisfaction. Now, before we started recording today, Rosie was talking, uh, about a situation she’s involved with, which is sort of the opposite, they want you to not come into the office for office Real estate reasons, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. My friend, my friend, Brian, he, um, had an office, but there were not that many people in there. They were allowed to work from home when they wanted to anyway. But anyway, the company just saw that it was underutilized. Didn’t like how much they were spending and kicked them out of their real office. Got them some coworking space. And yeah, usually most people are just choosing to stay home because. Coworking spaces are a bit of a pain. You know, you get inconsiderate. Coworkers, except for they’re not your coworkers, so that you can’t, you can’t actually complain to them. It’s a different person every day. And. Yeah, so that, that’s one example, but I was also reflecting recently how, um, I work from home mostly. I, I do have an office I can go to. Um, and I do sometimes, I actually miss the office. I, I feel like I’m kind of like paused in my career at the moment while I’m working so much from home, but at the same time, I kind of need it while I’ve got a young kid and just, yeah, always so much, so much stuff to do in so little time. And I just thinking through, Yesterday, like I, um, I had to do some research and I was watching YouTube while I was chopping carrots. Um, I was removing my nail polish while I was participating in a meeting. Um, I don’t know, any number of things like that. You can iron or fold laundry or, you know, lots of things. If you’ve got work where it’s mostly talking. really convenient to be able to multitask like that. But I mean, I personally miss having an office to go into or a workshop to go into even better with, you know, physical things are happening and you’re seeing technologies. I don’t feel like I’m going, like I’m, you know, trading off the experiences that I’ve had in the first 20 years of my career, not getting a whole lot more right now. And I would really. I’d like to change that at some point in the future. Do you think, Joel, because of the return to office mandates that are happening at the moment, do you think that they don’t, the companies don’t want to pay for the real estate that they own, that they’re looking to cut costs because interest rates are not going to come down, as I learned today? Uh, that they’re gonna, they’re gonna start selling the properties, which I do see a number of companies, large companies. getting rid of major properties and telling everybody like work from the house. Yeah. If you, if I’ve talked with a commercial real estate friend in Houston, uh, a couple months back and they were talking about, it’s a really weird market because there’s good stuff available. Um, and the prices, you know, they want that premium for prices, but nobody’s willing to pay it. People are cutting back. And there was a couple of things he talked about where during COVID they actually had. Leaseholders approach them and say, Hey, we’re breaking our lease. Claiming COVID is force majeure in the contract to be able to try to get, to be able to try to get out of it. And I don’t know where they ended up. I’m sure that lawyers talk to lawyers and that kind of stuff, but yeah, it’s, it’s upended the commercial real estate market big time. And right now you see, again, people trying to, you don’t see a whole lot of like, you know, baseless commercial real estate going up. Maybe companies that are big that are building their own facility. Yeah. But you’re not seeing these large rental spaces. And when you do see them, you’re seeing for, for lease, for lease, for lease, or, you know, for sale on the bottom of it. So is the plan now for. People on wind, if they’re in the office right now, is to check the commercial listing to see if that building is for sale and think, okay, I got to work from home. Maybe now’s the time to put my application in to go back, go back to the house office. I think that the, you know, this is another story of talking with another friend that works in the software industry. They tracked through COVID. They actually had, like, partial the way through COVID, they had increases in productivity in their software engineers when they were working from home. Like in, you know, in the double digits, 10, 12 percent were actually getting more done than they were when they were coming into the office because they’re not hanging out BSing in the hallways. And I think the other side of it, this hush, the hush hybrid working, if you’re a manager that needs, say, these software engineers or these people or whoever it may be, And you’re being, you have this top down going, you need to, that, you know, they’ve got to be back in the office. You don’t want to have a mutiny on your hands. You still need to get some stuff done. You don’t want to lose team members. So that’s why I think they’re insulating or buffering some of these people that they’re just kind of like, yeah, it’s great. You know, just keep, keep doing what you’re doing. Um, and not, you know, listening to them or abiding by the mandates. I’d do it though. I mean, if you have a good, a good, um, person working for you, then, you know, and, and work from home is important to them, someone else will snap them up if you, um, if you won’t allow it. So, I think that, um, Yeah, I don’t know. I would be, I would be flexible on it if I had people that I wanted to keep whilst also trying to get people to, you know, like think about what, what aspects of return to office are needed. I think what people really complain about is when there’s no point, you know, like if you go into the office, you’re forced to go into the office and you sit all day on your computer on Zoom calls, then that is just incredibly frustrating. It feels really disrespectful of the employee’s time. But, you know, if you’re in there for specific purposes, um, and that includes, you know, teamwork purposes and definitely projects go much faster when you’ve met people in person and, you know, spend a little time with them. I think, you know, like you’ve really got to make people understand why they need to go back in the office and, um, what’s in it for them, what’s in it for the quality of their work. And then that will work a lot better than just making an across the board mandate. And then, you know, yeah, like I said, going and sitting on Zoom calls all day, it’s just like, that’s going to piss you off and make you want to quit your job for sure. As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind. com today. Nordex has achieved a notable milestone in wind turbine technology with its latest installation in Germany. The company’s N175 6X turbine now stands at an impressive hub height of 179 meters. Now I had to do the math on that. That’s about 580 feet, which is, makes it the tallest turbine ever, uh, constructed by the Nordex group. Now, a couple of things about this, Nordex likes to use concrete steel towers, and this uses that technology. And, uh, obviously if you’re going that high, you have to have an insert to improve concrete design. But they are talking about. Having these hybrid towers grow to 200 meters, which would be 650 odd feet. This is remarkable. And I, and Rosie’s talked about this a number of times, like the higher you go, the better the winds are. And on a six megawatt machine, you probably want to push that up as high as you can. And when you’re crossing 500 feet on the tower with a six megawatt generator on top of it. This is a huge machine. Is this had a limited scope as to where it can be placed? Is it just gonna be Germany or maybe in northern Europe? Because I just don’t see this being placed in Texas or Kansas or Illinois, Phil. I’m surprised to hear you say that because I thought it was nearly the opposite that Europe is more using small machines in places like the US and Australia. And I definitely, I know Australia moving more towards big ones. I mean, I hear a lot of developers for some of these really big new Australian projects that are hopefully imminent. They’re looking not just six megawatts, but you know, like 10 megawatts. Megawatts or whatever they can get their hands on the biggest. Um, so yeah, I would have thought that what you need to go that big is to be not in a really built up area and there’s, yeah, not much of Europe that’s not very built up, but I could be totally wrong. I think in Germany, the reason they’re going to some of these bigger cities. big ones is simply because they’re land constricted, right? They want to get as much renewable energy production out of the small amounts of land. Is it a small wind farm that only has like maybe two or three turbines? So they’re not too worried about, yeah, like if you’ve got a bigger wind farm, then you’ve got to worry about the spacing distance, which obviously increases with the height of it. Um, yeah, that makes sense. If it’s one or two turbines there, then. You don’t have to worry about, um, how, how far apart you’re going to have to put the next turbine because there isn’t going to be one. And we’re, because we’re not land constrained in markets like the United States or, you know, Brazil, Argentina, I mean, you would think like if you wanted to put a tall tower somewhere it’d be a, maybe a place like Argentina, but you don’t even have to, uh, in a market like that because you’ve got such strong, consistent, uh, Um, average wind speeds, um, that it’s just not necessary. So in, again, in a market like the U. S. where we’re not land constrained, we can spread projects out, um, and we don’t have to necessarily go as tall because we still have, you know, transportation and logistics constraints that, that also kind of preclude us from, from doing that. Okay. Um, we’re still getting a lot of, you know, components imported and we have to load them on trucks and trains, uh, to be able to get them to a project site. Now, while a hybrid tower with a concrete base and a steel tube upper, uh, is, uh, Conducive to that, that type of approach where you could technically have the staves of concrete trucked out to a site and then just kind of pick them, you know, with a crane and put them together. Um, it’s still something that we just haven’t really explored. Alan, do you think when they developed this thing, they called our friend Gio a 3S lift? They better have a lift. Can you imagine climbing that? I thought about that today, like, man, 500 feet. That’s a lot of climbing with the gear on your back. Yeah, that’s, that will not be fun. But I guess it adds to the question of what do you do about the crane, right? The crane has got to be massive to do this. Do you even have the crane in the United States to do it? Or Australia, even. Does it make sense to do this? And we’ve seen all the technology around those, uh, devices that you can build the tower with it without using a crane and to make it simpler, but still 500 feet. It’s still pretty tall. Yeah, well, one of the companies that I know that’s interested in really big turbines for onshore in Australia is Fortescue, who, you know, planning wind energy to support their, um, They’re net zero ambitions or plans, I should say, rather than ambitions. And they have, um, just increased their investment in narrow wind who, um, have got, uh, yeah, one of, one of the several solutions out there for really big turbines or several, actually, they’ve got the tower solution and they’ve got the blade installation solution. I can’t remember. Um, there’s a couple of things, so I think that they are looking at that. Let me ask you a question, Rosemary, because you’re, of course, more engineering savvy than I am. But is there a future where we have two turbines, or like, multiple sizes of turbines, co located in the same wind farm to take advantage of wind resource? Like, say they get up to 200 meter towers and they put this big thing way up there. Is there, can we put a two megawatt turbine mixed in the wind farm to take advantage of those? The wind speeds below. I have seen research where they, yeah, tried to catch two slices of the wind, one really high and one lower down. And in the end it, like the benefit that you got was not worth the hassle of it. Cause basically it’s the tall one that’s, that’s doing everything. And then the small ones, it’s like, Oh, it’s not worth the effort to add this, to add this in. So, um, yeah, so it tends not to be used even though, yeah, the benefit doesn’t exist, like you’re saying, but. I haven’t seen it actually used beyond an academic paper or two. And it’s got to be adversely impacting productivity for some of the smaller turbines, you know, because the, the wind, the, the taller turbines are going to suck up more of the, the, the You know, the available wind, basically, and, and, uh, draw that into the, the rotor plane, um, and it actually does, you know, ding the performance a little bit of the smaller ones, but, um, you know, it depends, it depends on how you’re actually doing the layout and, um, uh, you know, as Rosie said, I think the, the cost benefit doesn’t trade well enough for, for the OEMs to be recommending that. I think you also can’t underestimate how much just like the, um, the extra time that it adds on to running a wind farm really matters because nobody has enough time to do all the things that they should be. You definitely do want to think about not making things harder than necessary for the team that has to operate a wind farm. But lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. StrikeTape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today. So despite calls for increasing drilling from some U. S. political quarters, Wall Street is anticipating conservative spending patterns from U. S. oil and gas companies in 2025. Now, analysts expect companies to maintain their focus on shareholder returns, but oil prices are not going to rise very much. In fact, they’re expected to drop down about 5 per barrel. At a point that doesn’t make it really profitable to, to drill baby drill. Now this has sort of a follow on effect where, uh, a lot of, uh, mergers and acquisitions have slowed down, especially in Q4 of last year. So, the oil companies themselves are not looking to drill baby drill, they’re looking to hold on to cash. And I have seen layoffs happen, and as Joel pointed out recently, last episode, the number of drill rigs is down, which is an indication of how much they really want to pump from the ground. That opens up another avenue for renewables to step into, and this week with DeepSeq, which is the Chinese AI bot that uses a lot less, supposedly a lot less, uh, computational power and can use, um, older styles of chips, and they developed this, uh, AI model with about six million dollars, supposedly, uh, All of the money that was headed on Wall Street to natural gas, uh, electricity sites has quieted quite a bit, and the GE Vernova stock dropped, what, like 90 points in a day because of that? Uh, so, if we’re not going to build data centers to power all the AI, and oil and gas is expecting the price of oil to drop, Where are we going to get new electricity from, guys? If we’re not permitted to build renewables, I don’t know. Well, you’re still permitted and no one’s stopping the permitting. How many wind turbines are on federal land, Phil? I will tell you precisely because we just researched this for a client. So, this order to restrict renewable energy development, particularly wind, on federal lands, actually impacts about, uh, seven gigawatts worth of what’s in the consent pipeline right now. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that in the next, you know, four years, let’s say, uh, we’re only going to be adding something like 40 gigawatts anyway, that is a decent percentage. All right. It’s noteworthy, Joel, but Where are they going to get the electricity? Where’s Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas going to get their power from because they’re not getting it from federal lands at the minute. That’s true. But if you look at what’s on federal lands right now, it’s just not very much. And part of that is just because it’s a nightmare. It is an absolute nightmare to build on federal lands, whether it’s an oil and gas project, a wind project, whatever. But there is a lot of oil and gas projects on federal land. But it’s because oil and gas projects operate in big margins, right? But an interesting article that came out, uh, just yesterday was Chevron pairing up with GE Vernova to power data centers. So they’ve put an, they put an order in as a kind of like a joint venture with Chevron. And GE for seven gas turbines. At the same time, you had this crazy deep seek thing come from China, spook the entire market. Nextera stopped, dropped, GE, Vernova stock dropped, NVIDIA, all the AI people, their stock dropped. Um, I think that there’s two, there’s two, there’s two fields of that. There’s two, two families. There’s one saying, well, if. If it’s going to become cheaper to do AI computing, well then we can just have more and more and more AI, so it’s going to keep growing anyways. That’s one side of it, and the other side of it, well, is like, well, maybe it’ll tabletop or stagnate because we don’t need that much power. But, when I think when you see big players still, I mean, G. E. Vranova’s stock regained 6 percent or something today. So I think that it’s a spook market, people buying dip, things going back. Like, I don’t think it’s going to have long term effects on the market with this deep seek thing, but to the oil, main oil industry players, when you see major players getting in, it’s, it’s a, it’s a big sign. Rossi, I want to move over to coal for a minute. There’s a lot of countries in Eastern Europe that are talking about starting or building coal fire generation plants all of a sudden. Is that something you’re hearing from Australia? Australia being one of the places where coal is plentiful. Is, is that happening? Are you hearing that news? Uh, it’s not, it’s not in Australia’s plans. No, I don’t think that it ever will be unless we’ve got, at the moment, we’ve got an election coming up. And I think one of the big issues in the election is going to be, um, whether we continue with our energy transition based on wind and solar power, which is what the current government wants to do. Or if we decide to start from scratch a new nuclear power industry, um, instead, which will mean halting renewable plans quite in the quite near future, because we would have too much energy otherwise, if we both continued with renewables and built new nuclear. And then the issue with that is that, uh, starting from a totally standing start with is not even legal in Australia at the moment. So we would need to. First do all of the legal stuff that’s required, develop a regulatory framework, then, you know, actually start the process of designing and building and staffing a series of nuclear power plants. That’s going to take a longer time to get that power online than the life, the time that’s actually left in the current coal power plants. I think the economics in Australia really don’t point towards coal being built or even maintained to their full lifetime, unless We were to decide to go for nuclear power and then we, we would need a stopgap. We would need something to get us through to, you know, 2040 or Um, 45 by the time we would actually get a lot of nuclear power up and running. This week’s wind farm of the week is the Palmas Altas and La Chalupa. And while it’s two names, it’s actually one wind farm owned by Axiona down in the southern part of Texas. Uh, it’s outside of Harlingen. And if you’ve ever been down there, these wind farms exist in a sea of almost a thousand other turbines in that area. It’s a great wind resource, right as the wind comes on, uh, on land from the Gulf of Mexico. Uh, so in 2019, the Axiona brought the Palmas Altas wind farm online. Uh, and it’s powering 97, 000 Texas homes. So together, La Chalupa is 343 megawatts of wind. And they are, uh, there’s 109 of the AW125. 3150 Axiona Nordex turbines. So they have 125 meter rotor diameters and they’re an 87 and a half meter tower, which is an interesting size because earlier in the show, we were talking about really tall tower heights, but in the United States, it’s a lot easier to get a wind farm permitted if you stay under 500 feet. uh, of height above ground level because that’s the cutoff, uh, for the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration permitting. And these turbines are 498 feet tall. Uh, so that, that one’s interesting. Uh, but this wind farm during construction created 270 jobs, uh, and, uh, and for Palmas Altas and 300 during the construction of La Chalupa. So there’s 19 full time O& M jobs with both projects operational. Uh, so the Palmas Altas and La Chalupa wind farms from Acciona, you’re the wind farm of the week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe. In the show notes to Uptime Tech News, our Substack newsletter, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.