The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Waaree Energies will acquire 100% of Enel Green Power India for $95 million. BHE US Transmission will acquire 10% of the North Plains Connector Transmission Project from Grid United. And Constellation has announced it will acquire Calpine in a cash and stock transaction valued at $16. 4 billion. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com 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 Intel Store. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www. intelstore. com. Allen Hall: Waaree Energies has signed a share purchase agreement to acquire 100 percent of Enel Green Power India for 95 million. The acquisition includes their portfolio of approximately 640 megawatts AC and 760 megawatts of DC operational solar and wind energy projects across India with additional projects under development. The transaction will help Waaree diversify revenue streams and enhance wind project execution capabilities. Phil, my first question about this is why is Enel Green Power leaving India? Phil Totaro: Well, it’s actually a really fascinating question that I’ve been getting over the past week or so since the announcement came out and it, it, basically has to do with Enel wanting to consolidate more operations in Europe effectively, as well as reinvest in other emerging markets that they find more promising. Now, we’ve talked before on the show about how India’s growth market but it’s also still a challenging market if you’re not a, you know, kind of Indian based company or, you know, have a strong presence in that market. Enel had, you know, a reasonably sized portfolio for the size of the market overall. And divesting it is really just about that cash and being able to redeploy it in markets like Chile or you know, even in Spain or Italy on on projects that are either, you know, repowering or, or new greenfield development. So You know, what’s happening in India effectively is that a lot of Western companies that were pioneers in project development or manufacturing in the market are pulling back a little bit and selling off their asset portfolio to Indian concerns. So the Indian market’s becoming firmly much more Indian. Joel Saxum: Yeah, and that fits with that rhetoric there. If you’ve dealt with Enel, they like to do their operations out of Italy. So they want things a little bit closer to home. And that’s been a ongoing trend with them. The interesting thing about Wari Energies here as well, as Phil said, they are very much an Indian company. They’re a Fortune 500 company in India. And they’re India’s largest, a subsidiary of the Watery Group and Watery Energies is the largest photovoltaic panel producer in India. So they’re building a lot of solar as an OEM, and also now bolstering their portfolio of Solar projects and getting more into the wind side of things. So bigger play from Wari Energies over in India. Allen Hall: And in the states here, BHE US Transmission has signed a memorandum of understanding with Grid United to acquire 10 percent of the 3, 000 megawatt North Plains Connector Transmission Project. Now that project involves building a 420 mile high voltage DC transmission line connecting the U. S. eastern and western electrical grids in North Dakota and Montana. It’s a 3. 2 billion dollar project and it’s entering the permitting phase with approval is expected in 2026 and operation planned in 2032. Phil, as the U. S. grid starts to connect itself a little more this BHE U. S. transmission agreement is one of several, I think, that are going to happen in the next couple of years. Phil Totaro: Yes, and it’s indicative of the fact that, you know, some of the companies that were developing these high voltage DC transmission projects that are crossing multiple states. You know, first of all, they had, they were much smaller concerns. They had trouble getting access to capital and they had trouble getting right of way permits and other things to be able to actually build these projects. Once Grid United actually got this project mature enough. It certainly attracted the interest, obviously, of BHE. But this is no different than, you know, some of the other projects that have seen interest from Invenergy, who bought into an HVDC line a couple years ago. And it’s, it’s, Part of the, the necessity of renewable energy to have this kind of transmission capacity so that we can move the power from, you know, where we’ve got the, the wind and solar resource over to load centers, which are typically, you know, taking power from the middle of the country and moving it out towards the coasts. Joel Saxum: This. This article really excites me. I’m super, I’m super excited for this project to go because, and this is, HVDC is something that we talk about on the show, Alan and I talk about it off the show quite often. Why don’t we build more HVDC? Why don’t we build more HVDC? And now we have some big players. BHE, so you know, BHE U. S. Transmission, Berkshire Hathaway Energy. So that is a Warren Buffett backed entity as are, you know, some other huge companies and portfolio companies within their group. So you have big players putting real money into projects like this. And sometimes when you have a project that’s, you know, HVDC is not groundbreaking, but it’s still kind of new in the space to be putting on land specifically in the United States. This project builds to the fleet of these projects are being done. However, this one is North Dakota and Montana. If you know anything about North Dakota and Montana, it’s pretty easy to build big infrastructure projects across the plains up there. So you kind of have a softball across the plate. Large. HVDC 420 miles across what’s basically a lot of farmland and rangeland. This project should go off without a hitch or with minimal hitches. I’m not going to say without a hitch, with minimal hitches in construction. And it will be, it has the possibility of really sparking some more of these HVDC developments here in the United States. So like I said, I’m excited for this one. Allen Hall: And big news in renewable energy solutions. Constellation has announced it will acquire Calpine in a cash and stock transaction valued at 16. 4 billion, consisting of 50 million shares of Constellation stock and 4. 5 billion in cash, plus assuming 12. 7 billion in Calpine debt. Now, this merger creates America’s largest clean energy provider, combining Constellation’s nuclear fleet with Calpine’s natural gas and geothermal operations. Phil, when we talk about size of energy companies in the United States, this is actually not that big when you compare it to an Exxon Mobil or a ConocoPhillips, right? Phil Totaro: Correct. And it’s an interesting thing because, you know, between Constellation and Calpine, their wind and solar portfolio isn’t huge, but they’re lumping things like nuclear and other technologies into this clean energy definition that they have. So we can have a debate about that later, but the, the reality of it is it’s a, it’s a big merger and it’s an important one because it also, you know, Constellation Was very excited about renewables there for a while, then backed off and now it feels like they’re getting excited about, you know, renewables again with with this kind of a deal. So, like I said, I mean, the, the portfolio that they have of wind and solar projects is an enormous combined. It’s, you know, about I want to say a little under 2 gigawatts of wind and, and just over 1 gigawatt worth of solar. But they’re, they’re able to take the enormous balance sheet that, that Constellation has and that Calpine combined with it provides and leverage that into being able to get a lot more projects in the development pipeline. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Any pairing of engineering permitting expertise, it makes me happy. Right. Especially in the energy space. So bringing the constellation team that knows that has a widely varied a skill set and also bringing Calpine into that, the exact same thing. Putting this conglomerate together I would expect to see some pretty big moves after this thing closes within the next 12 months and in the next 12 months after that. So be prepared to watch Constellation make some moves in the renewable energy space and, and the energy space in general. The interesting thing here, if you’ve been following it, Constellation stock jumped 35 percent or over 35 percent since this Merger. So good on him.

Bret Tollgaard, president of Sunrez, explores how UV-cured resins are transforming wind turbine blade repair by dramatically reducing cure times from hours to minutes. Sunrez’s technology enables repairs in extreme temperatures and high humidity, extending maintenance seasons and increasing turbine uptime. Drawing from decades of experience across aerospace and marine applications, Tollgaard demonstrates how pre-impregnated UV materials are helping operators and repair teams save thousands of dollars per repair while getting turbines back online faster. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we’re joined by Bret Tollgaard, president and CEO of Sunrez Corporation, a pioneering force in UV curing technology. Under Bret’s leadership, Sunrez has emerged as an industry leader. Welcome in developing advanced UV cured resins and composites particularly for wind turbine blade repair. Based in El Cajon, California, Sunrez brings nearly four decades of expertise in UV curing technology. Today, we will explore how their cutting edge solutions are addressing some of the most pressing challenges in wind turbine maintenance. Bret, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thanks for having me, Allen. Appreciate it. We know there’s a lot of challenges in the repair business at the moment on using standard materials resin systems out on blades. Particularly as it gets colder in the springtime and the fall where seasons get cut short and you still have blades to repair. Everybody always has blades to repair. So you hear about this large rush to get blades stabilized to get to the next spring. That’s a big problem for the industry right now. How much of that do you see of people just saying, I don’t know what to do, I can’t get my blades fixed before the season. It’s where SunRez comes in with UV cured materials, right? Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, absolutely. Really one of the biggest values that we add for our customers is time. And we save time in a tremendous amount of ways. One, the time for the repair window is greatly increased because we don’t really require any heat to cure and kick off our UV curing resin. You can cure at much colder temperatures and much hotter temperatures without any impact from the ambient air. Temperature or humidity. So you can hear materials a lot deeper into the season, so you’re no longer constrained by how cold it is outside. It’s really then, at that point, what kind of worker wants to get out, up on top of that wind tower. Joel Saxum: I think a big thing there too, Brad, is, we’re talking about UV cured resins being able to extend seasons, but what it can do within a season, right? So when you’re talking like a major repair that you got grinding layer, grinding layer, and all of a sudden you’re three weeks into this thing. A three week repair, if you’re able to, boom, cure fast, boom, cure fast, move to the next step, that might shorten that thing down to a week? So is that possible? Is that much time savings? Bret Tollgaard: Absolutely. So one of the big things that UVCure resins do is they use the light photons from either the sunshine or one of our handheld LED lamps to cure our, kick off our resin. And so what we can do is we can cure up to a quarter inch thick laminate in under five minutes. And depending on the light intensity that you have and the surface area that you’re trying to cure you can really fast track your repairs. And so we provide pre impregnated sheets of fiber to the wind market. So you don’t have to worry about mixing any resin up tower, getting the right amount on there, vacuum bagging, heat blanket, et cetera. We provide pre impregnated sheets that have the optimum amount of resin for mechanical properties and adhesion to the wind turbine blade. And so what that allows customers to do is to actually peel, stick, and cure a laminate piece. To go ahead and repair that surface really quickly. Allen Hall: And I think there’s really two marketplaces I’ve seen your materials used out in the field. One is just major structural repairs that it just gets so cumbersome to do. The UV cured makes sense. The other one is I have a blade that I has some substantial crack in it. And this is interesting cause I ran across this in Oklahoma of all places. Blade with a huge crack in it. And they had temporarily patched it to hold it together using your material just for sense of speed. Let’s just stabilize it and move on and fix other blades and the farm will come back to this, which is really hard to do with existing resin systems. Bret Tollgaard: Our prepregs in general are used in kind of three primary areas. Corrosion resistance, not quite as applicable to the wind market, but cosmetic and structural repairs. And so they lend themselves really well to doing large, thick laminates. But also for smaller cosmetic things or even zippering certain cracks. So something that you might have seen where they have staged pre pregs to do some crack propagation mitigation. They’re using a variety of instances and really the technicians can get up and down tower just so quickly. And so that’s where one of the big advantages of UV cure materials comes into place is how quickly they can get repairs done Joel Saxum: from a commercial standpoint, Bret. There’s a lot of advantages here. So if I’m an ISP a blade repair company, I want to come to my clients and say, Hey, we’ve got a way to do this faster. This bid, maybe a chance for an ISP to get in front in the bidding process or through an RFP. And now if I’m an operator, I’m thinking the same thing. Hey, this is going to be, it could have been a three week repair. Now a one week repair, or especially places like I’m in Canada and our blade repair season is only 12 weeks long. And I’d like to extend it to 20 weeks or 24 weeks or something. There’s so many advantages to this. Where are you seeing the most draw? Is it the operators themselves? Is it ISPs? Is it the OEMs? Where’s this coming from? Bret Tollgaard: So it’s a little bit of everything. So historically on the wind market, we actually partnered up with GE and LM five, six years ago, and they were the ones who really brought this material into the wind market. They saw the value in it. And at that point in time, we actually had a styrenated resin system. So had VOCs, it was a flammable material. It was a vinyl ester based system, but they still saw the merit and being able to complete jobs extremely quick. And it wasn’t that different from some of the, epoxy issues that there were then that there were in the past since then we’ve sold a little over 50, 000 patches. Sold tens of thousands of square meters of material into the wind market alone. And now we’ve brought out a new material actually in 2024, it’s our 7355 vinyl ester resin system. And so it’s non styrenated, no VOC, no haps, all single component. And now we’ve introduced that into the entire wind market. And one of the things that will really help ISPs gain the confidence in the material is having some of the other OEMs come through, validate it, certify the material, and really check it off saying this works well with our epoxy or polyester blades. And so that’s been our big focus for 2024 is gaining a little bit more exposure. Introducing people to the material. But then we also have a track record of both, cosmetic and structural repairs in this market. Allen Hall: And I think that’s key. And your experience outside of WIND is also valuable. I know you’ve been helping a number of different applications, ship based at times, aerospace is another market you’re in. Those are really helpful in the WIND market also, because it gives you more just world experience, world knowledge that you’re bringing to the table when you come back to help the WIND industry. Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, absolutely. So Sunrez was actually founded in 1986. It’s focused almost exclusively on UVCure resins, putties, and prepregs. And so on the decades of R& D that we’ve done applications installs, new builds, et cetera we’ve gained a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience on how to really best service a customer’s specific repair requirements. For the wind market, it’s not that different from, let’s say marine, for instance, where you’re, going to be repairing composite components. So we know how to make them stick. We know how to get the right structural properties. And being able to deliver that to, in a form factor that technicians up tower can actually use is a big challenge, but something that we’ve really worked on. And think we’ve come up with a pretty good package. Allen Hall: How does the UV resin systems work? What is the magic in there? Because you, I’ve seen them over time, especially in aerospace, and now I’m seeing your material in a lot of places. What’s the chemistry? What, what’s actually happening when it says a UV resin? Bret Tollgaard: Oh, that’s a great question, Allen. So traditional resins, let’s say for an epoxy, for instance, you have a part A and a part B, you mix them together, and then you have a certain amount of time before they start to gel and then ultimately harden. And oftentimes to really get full mechanical and thermal properties, you have to elevate the temperature and cure it in an oven, post cure it with a heat blanket, or even an autoclave. UV cure is completely different with respect to the way things actually cross link. And this is coming from a mechanical engineer, not a chemist, but simply put UV curing resins have something called photo initiator in them. Photo initiators are activated a tremendous amount of different rays ways and wavelengths. There are hundreds of different photo initiators. And so you will blend a specific resin and concentration of photo initiator or photo initiators, depending on what you’re going to be curing with. But ultimately what happens is the light photons actually kick off make the photo initiators react then with the resin and or the monomers around them to crosslink and get a solidified part. And so you don’t have any heat doing any of the work to make the resin molecules activate. It’s literally all the light photons hitting those photo initiators and going. And so what that means is you really need to pair the photo initiator with the light source. For instance, we’ve been doing stuff in the past where we sold to surfboard repair customers who were used in a broad spectrum sunlight that works relatively well, but you now have a broad spectrum of initiators to activate. There are different ones that are good at surface curing, some that are better at depth of curing, and the light intensity, the dwell time that’s going to be on that, all of that really makes a really big difference with respect to the type of laminate that you can UV cure. Allen Hall: Okay, so that explains a lot, because when you actually see UV cured resin systems kick off, They look hot. Like there, there’s still a chemical reaction that’s happening there, but the photo initiators are essentially blocking that chemical reaction until they get exposed to, to, to the specific frequency of light, and then they step out of the way and the reaction happens. That is really unique because I, one of the things especially on winter blades is that generally you’re outside, so there’s gen to be sunlight. Do you recommend just using the sunlight to cure the resin systems, or is it better to have a specific frequency light and to really get on top of it to make sure it cures out? Bret Tollgaard: For the wind market in general, and the type of quality that we’re all really striving for, it’s absolutely recommended to be curing with a specific device. Whether it’s one of our handheld lamps, which is something like one of these little guys. We’re teaming up with a group to do LED blankets as well, or sheets that you can just wrap around it and it’s all there’s thousands of LED lamp LEDs on there, excuse me and so there’s a variety of different curing methods that can be done, but to guarantee that depth of cure and your adhesion to that repair surface that’s really recommended because the sun at different times of the year, But softer for amount of light, depending on the Northern Southern hemisphere is the blade in the shade, or is it tilted? And so you really can’t control as sufficiently as you can with, an actual curing device. Joel Saxum: Bret, when I talk to any technician that’s used this stuff in the field, or even blade repair people that like, Hey, have you used this yet? Here’s how it works. All of every one of them, either their eyes get big and they explain how awesome this, a UV cured resin was, or their eyes get big and they go, what? What is that? And that’s amazing to me that not that many people have heard about it. The one thing I wanted to share with you is I did get that was part of the feedback from some people that have used UV resins in general. And I don’t know if they were Sun Res or what else is out there, but they were saying, to get clarification on how we use the lights. And what light source to use and because they’re like, early days, like I tried the one person said that to me one time, I tried UV cured resins on a boat one time, and they were like, one, I was trying to set it up. I took a sheet off and the thing cured and I had to grind it out and fix it. But you guys have gone to extra steps to make sure that this thing is easy to use in the field and you’re making that process combination of working with GE and work with other operators and stuff. What are some of the special steps that you guys do to ensure the quality in the field and ease of installation? Bret Tollgaard: One of the things that we do is we have an extensive lab here at Sunrez. We do mechanical testing. We’ve got a, 100 kilonewton instron for mechanical tests and coupon sampling. We have a DSC here, which is very valuable to us. The DSC will measure the degree of cure, and then also some of the thermal properties that the TG most importantly, and so what we’ve done in the past and what we continue to do every time we’ve come out with a revised formula or different fabrics, for instance, that different customers might want to use E glass, S glass, et cetera. We will cure. in field conditions. And then you can measure the mechanical properties of that part. Then also we can throw it in the DSC to really make sure that we’re getting the full mechanical and thermal benefits of a UV curing system. So for instance, most of the time our customers, we recommend curing with our lamp from 14 inches away. When you do that, you can cure a 20 layer UD1000 prepreg in under 10 minutes. That’s almost a half inch thick. Joel Saxum: That’s a day long usually. Bret Tollgaard: That’s just it. And so there is a footprint though, that led light emits enough light intensity to cure 20 layers. As you start to go farther out and farther out, there’s less light because that led light on the top loses some of that intensity and that focus, right? And so every LED creates a signature footprint. And then we’ve done all the testing internally to say, okay, from 14 inch distance, you’re going to be able to cure, I’ll say a nice round number two square feet, or if you go to 16 inch, you can hear three square feet, et cetera. And so we can give you the footprint that it’ll cure at the depth of cure that you can expect. And then we can do some of the adhesion properties of that as well. And so we’ve built a catalog with our LED equipment to really make sure it’s as easy for the operators to use. And for some of the cosmetic repairs, it’s two layers of biax, or you throw some combi in there. The sun will cure that in under five minutes. And so one of our LED lamps will certainly be and if you do have a cosmetic repair, you can put that light farther away because now you have a larger footprint, less light intensity, but you don’t need all that intensity to only cure a couple layers of material. And so we try to build this structure and this guideline for customers to follow. To make it as easy to use as possible. Joel Saxum: So Bret, we’ve talked a lot about the limitations of the traditional or classic resins, the time, the workability, these kinds of things that can be a pain. And one of the big items there is humidity, right? So temperature is one thing it has to cure at a certain temperature, but there’s also humidity and when you’re working in like I’m in Austin, right? Not too far from here. There’s a lot of wind farms right along the coast in Texas. And those wind farms have huge limitations because of humidity. How does the UV cured products work within that? Bret Tollgaard: Our stuff’s been known to cure underwater. Impact on curing with humidity is not that large of a deal for the material itself. Now, on the humidity side of things, what you really need to look after is what your substrate you’re bonding to. If you’ve got standing water on there, you’re going to be bonding to that standing water. And so you do need to make sure that you have a nice clean surface. So that to actually be able to bond to, but yeah, the humidity itself won’t impact the cross linking and the curing of our materials. Allen Hall: And what are the costs of UV cure material compared to the non UV brethren? Is it about the same or is less expensive, more expensive? Bret Tollgaard: It’s going to be a slightly more expensive for them, the square foot of material that they’re actually going to be purchasing based on just pure fabric and resin alone. Once again, a lot of our stuff comes pre impregnated. We do sell liquid resins, whether it’s infusion, really low viscosity, hand laminating resin, but for the wind market, we found the pre pregs to really add the most value to the customers. And so yeah, cost per square foot is going to go up a little bit. But when you’re peering in five minutes versus six hours and there’s no mixing to do and the technician really has to just trim out the proper size part, peel off the backing film, roll it out with a hand roller, and then peel off the UV blocky film that’s on top. They add, or they save. Hours and hours per repair. Joel Saxum: Yeah. At the most repair materials are 10 percent of a repair. It’s all, most of the costs in repairing blades, it’s all in just labor. It’s labor. It’s time. The materials is usually pretty small. So a slight increase in cost of materials will well over make up for itself in the grand scheme of things. Bret Tollgaard: The ROI is incredibly short when using UV cured prepregs. Allen Hall: So what forms does the UV cured prepregs come in? Come in. I’ve seen these little patch kits that you can buy online. It’s your material. It’s in a four line package. Is that how it generally comes or is it on rolls or how do you expect this to show up on site? For the Bret Tollgaard: wind market in particular, having a smaller style prepreg that’s easier for one or two people to handle has shown the greatest advantage. And traditionally we’ll sell them in flat sheets that are 300 millimetres wide and about 750 millimetres long. And so those flat sheets are easy for people to go, to stack, to build, and it’s easy enough to overlap as well. But we’ve also had some more people ask us for continuous length rolls. And so now we’ve actually been building some 10 metre long versions that are still 300 millimetres wide. And so we’re starting to get those into the field to see what feedback and stuff we have from a broader range of customers to see if that continuous length will then serve more of advantage for a trailing edge repair or something along those lines where they don’t necessarily need or have the desire to continue to stack and overlap pre breaks. Joel Saxum: Bret, LEP product. Bret Tollgaard: We’re certainly looking in that direction. We have a couple of things in the works that we think is going to be really big for 2025 on the LEP side of things. Allen Hall: So how’s it gone in the field? I obviously I’ve seen some of your materials up close out in the field, but you must be having a lot of success. If you’ve done 50, 000 of these kits, that’s a lot of kits. How is it going out there? Bret Tollgaard: So far so good. The feedback that we get from the customers is usually pretty positive. We are certainly open to understanding packaging things and that sort of stuff to make it easier for the customers to use in the field. But by and large, we’ve had very positive feedback. We’ve had customers install in negative 20 degree Fahrenheit weather that was supposed to be a temporary winter repair to get them through to the summer, but it’s been going now for 3 straight years without needing to be replaced. Customers like that. And then the other side of the thing is we’ve had customers in Puerto Rico, where some weather and storms were coming through, but they were to get up and down tower. Fixed that blade, get it spinning, and didn’t have to sit there for four days waiting for the rain to actually pass them by. And so we get a lot of positive feedback from that standpoint, where it’s just the time savings to be able to get up and down tower as effectively as possible. And so people are pretty grateful for that kind of repair opportunity. Allen Hall: What is generally that time savings for your materials versus the standard prepreg materials? Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. So time savings alone on, I’ve found smaller repairs, anywhere from two to six layers thick are several hours in the four to five hours per repair, because there’s no heat blanket required. Which are anywhere from 3 to 6 plus hours, from what I’ve heard. And then also it comes pre impregnated. So everyone, all they really have to do is trim the prepregs to the appropriate size for that laminate schedule. And then the way that our prepregs come is they’re formed with a backing film, our pre impregnated fiberglass sheet. We have a clear film over the top of that and then we have an orange UV blocking film that’s just lightly spray adhesive to that clear film. And so what that will allow customers to do is peel off the black backing film, stick it to your repair surface, take a standard three or six inch bubble buster roller to roll out any air that might have been in between the prepreg and the substrate. If you’re building up more layers, you generally, they’re going to be slightly larger and slightly larger than the one underneath it. And so you can always have UV protection with that transparent orange UV blocking film over the top. You can build up your layers by removing the films in between. And then when you’re all said and done you peel off that orange UV blocking film. You can leave the clear one on so you get a nice, hard, tack free surface. And you expose it, the sunlight will once again start to kick it off, but you use that LED lamp to really get in there and make sure you get the proper depth of cure. But in under five, generally under five minutes, we’ll tell people you’re eight to 10 minutes long. For a little bit of a safety factor but you’re done curing in under 10 minutes, whereas you don’t have any extra components like a vacuum bag, a vacuum itself to pull, a heat blanket to tape and just, then wait for hours on end for that to actually go and hope that the blade is in the massive heat sink. Tons of advantages in having a pre impregnated sheet coupled with a sub 10 minute cure. Allen Hall: Joel, if you’re saving four or five hours per repair, how much money are you saving Joel Saxum: Four or five hours per repair. If you’re talking just technician time. So let’s just take it as a concept of you got two technicians on ropes. Each one of those technicians is going to be between 95 and 120 an hour. So we’re talking, so say we make some easy numbers. We’ll say 200 bucks an hour for that rope team. And that’s a cheap rope team. That’s not that’s a not, yeah. So you’re talking for five hours, thousand dollars. And that’s if everything goes perfectly, because now when you extend time, you also extend volatility and you also extend circumstances that you may not want, right? So that’s a minimum right there. Bam. Thousand bucks. And we haven’t talked about a thousand dollars there, but let’s talk about the uptime for that turbine, because what we hear all the time, Allen from the field, uptime is the most important thing. Uptime is the most important thing. We need these turbines spinning. So if, we’re saying, this is how much money you’re going to save on technicians. You’re also going to get five more hours of production out of that turbine. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think about that. Someone just handed you a thousand dollars. For changing to a better material. Would you take it? Yes, all day. I would do that all summer long that because it makes Infinite sense to do it. Yeah, I’d be glad please Bret Send me more because that’s the way that this works is as Joel pointed out You’re cutting the downtime of the turbine being off, but also you’re getting those technicians moving on to something else It’s just a huge money savings. That’s why GE Vernova and so many others are switching to these Sun Res UV systems it’s Quite amazing. Bret, you’ve done so much already. You guys have been in business a long time. You’re based in the United States. You’re out in California. You have a long storied history. What’s coming in 2025? What should we be watching for? Bret Tollgaard: For the wind market in particular, the LAP side of things is definitely one of the hot button products that we’ve been working on and plan to roll out. We have a couple of different solutions. One there a pre preg solution, but then also a A more putty based option for people. We do have a couple other kind of cool UV cure products that we are working on in the wind market that we’ll release in due time. But we’ll keep that in the back pocket for now. But really it’s just even more market penetration. We sell UV curing resins anywhere from bathtub to surfboard repair technicians. We have some Amish folk who use it to make saddles for horses. We sell to the defense industry Marine, industrial sectors. So really we’ve been a small company for a rather long time. But we’re expecting some pretty significant growth in the next year, plus as we get some deeper market penetrations, a variety of these things where really we’re just starting to displace Other composite resin systems, mostly epoxy. We have some filament winding customers actually who had a six to 12 hour post cure in an oven that we got down to 90 seconds. And so when you see that kind of time savings you’re opening up more mandrills, your production lines increase, you can automate the heck out of a lot of different things. And yeah we’re ready for some more disruption. Joel Saxum: Bret, you’ve been around the industry for a while. Multiple industries, say the industry, we’re in wind, right? You’ve been across all kinds of composites industry. What’s the craziest repair that you guys have used Sunrez UV cured repairs on? Bret Tollgaard: Sunrez really started manufacturing prepregs during Operation Desert Storm, Desert Shield, eighties and early nineties. We had a lot of material going to the Middle East and originally it was used for doing spot repairs. On a variety of different things, but it ended up being used as a lot of armor repair. But two really interesting repairs was an IED explosion at the bottom of a Humvee. It’s, it’s damaged, there’s holes, it needs to be filled so it can actually go and be used again. The guys in the field went up, installed our repairs underneath it, but they’re out in the middle of the desert and there’s no LED light. So what do they do? They use the sunshine and they get a mirror and they bounce the sun off the mirror to cure to the underside of a Humvee. And so that reinstated the strength. Joel Saxum: That’s super cool. Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And so that was one of the really unique things. And the other one that I heard was our materials were literally used on the leading edge of the A 10, the Warthog to help to help reinstate its ability to fly. And so when you’re over and you’re in harm’s way. They have these BDRs, Battle Damage Repair Kits. And to really make sure that you can get back home and you reinstate the ability for the airfoil to work properly, you cover all those bullet holes, and you at least now have a plane to get back to back home. Joel Saxum: That to me sounds like a leading edge repair. That really would work. Allen Hall: It works on an airplane. I’m sure we can make it work on a wind blade. Bret, this is amazing. And Sunrez is doing amazing things at the minute. And we appreciate you having on the podcast. How do people get a hold of Sunrez? Now they’ve heard all this great about all the great advancements in the materials they can have for wind turbine blades. How do they get a hold of Sunrez? Bret Tollgaard: Easiest place to go is the website, www. Sunrez. com. S U N R E Z. We’re generating it, we’re starting a YouTube channel so we can actually make some more how to videos and ease of use things. We are same thing on LinkedIn and Instagram where we’re starting it all. Yeah, the website’s great. Contact us through there. Phone number’s on there as well. And that would be the best way to reach us. Allen Hall: Brad, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Great material. We’ll see it again in 2025. Thanks so much for being on. I appreciate the time. Thank you.

Nicholas Gaudern, CTO at PowerCurve joins the show to discuss advanced blade upgrades that improve turbine performance and reduce noise. PowerCurve’s technology helps operators make smart decisions about maintenance and upgrades. Gaudern explains why combining repairs with performance enhancements is a cost-effective strategy that benefits both operations and community relations. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxon. Today, we’re diving deep into the world of wind turbine aerodynamics and blade optimization with one of the industry’s leading experts. Our guest is Nicholas Gaudern, the Chief Technology Officer at PowerCurve, a company that’s revolutionizing how we approach wind turbine performance through advanced Aerodynamic solutions. Now, Nicholas has over 15 years of industry experience and his journey includes significant roles at industry giants like Vestas, where he led the design of next generation blades. And as CTO of PowerCurve, Nicholas and his team are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in wind turbine optimization. They’ve developed innovative solutions like AeroVista, which helps operators make data driven decisions about blade maintenance and upgrades. Their work spans from custom designed vortex generators to trailing edge serrations, all aimed at increasing AEP while reducing turbine noise. So please welcome to the Uptown Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight, Nicholas Gaudern. Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Yeah, good to see you as well, Joe. Allen Hall: We have a lot going on in the United States in terms of rotors on the ground. Variety of reasons, but anytime that Joel and I are running through the Midwest, we see rotors down, and when I run into those people, I always ask, why are you not putting arrow improvements on your blade? It is the lowest cost way to do it. There’s an opportunity there Nicholas? Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, there, there really is, and I find it very surprising as well, because whilst you can put upgrades on at lots of different points in a turbine’s life cycle, if you do have that roach on the ground it just makes everyone’s lives that bit easier, and also it’s going to save you a lot of money on installation costs. So yes, I think it’s a great thing to be considering because you can be working on different parts of the blade at the same time. And if you’re going to increase the AEP with those devices you put on, you can consider that as a way of paying for some of the other work you might be doing while the rotor’s down. Allen Hall: Yeah. And we’ve run into many operators that have talked to us about noise of all things in the middle of the United States where there’s not a lot of neighbors to them. But neighbors are concerned about the noise produced by the turbines and in very windy places. Yeah. like Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, there is blade noise. It’s there. And most of the equipment out in service does not have trailing edge serrations. And I’m beginning to wonder if that is trying to be, if there’s needs to be an adjustment made there that you may not technically need trailing edge serrations for noise quieting, but to be a good neighbor. To everybody around you, you may want to consider it Nicholas Gaudern: or especially if you have blades on the ground. I think we should see more serrations out on the blades because as you say maybe it’s not about a regulatory thing Maybe the turbine is producing a an acceptable noise level to the letter of the law in that place But it is about being proactive and being a good neighbor and I think now Serrations have been out there from lots of different OEMs, lots of different turbines. To me, they’re a proven technology. Serrations work to reduce noise. And now the actual magnitude of that noise reduction can vary from turbine to turbine and site to site. But you should easily be looking at getting one and a half to two decibels of peak noise reduction if you’re applying serrations. Joel Saxum: I would say almost all of the new turbines that we’re seeing, like Allen, you and I just took a trip last week, right? And we were bombing through, we were up in Kansas, a little like right near Kansas. We went through Oklahoma and we actually ran into a two piece GE blade on the side of the highway. So we stopped to take some pictures of, cause of course that’s who we are. And that, that blade had serrations on it. And almost every blade I see, or that you see going down the highway on a truck, it’s got serrations on it. So proven technology. People understand that it’s probably easier to do during a capex phase than applying these things on uptower. Now, Powercurve, from your guys, from your armchair, you’ve been putting dinotails on, we call them dinotails in the field, right? Yep. Dinotail serrations. You’ve been putting these things on for years as a retrofit. You’ve also sold them in during the capex phase. And I’ve actually worked with you guys in the past, in my blade life during a repower which is, that’s the extreme version of what we’re talking about here. When you drop a rotor, of course you drop a rotor, you’re going to drop a ton of them during the wind farm. Or you’re putting new blades up. It just makes sense to do it during those stages because Let alone the, what you’re doing for the neighbors, right? You’re keeping things quiet. There’s also some efficiency increases with serrations too, isn’t there? Nicholas Gaudern: Like with anything, there’s lots of ways to define efficiency. So with serrations, I think one of the big gains you can get is if you’re in a site where the turbine is curtailed. So if it’s having power reductions in order to reduce noise at certain times a day, often called noise modes. And different OEMs will have different kinds of noise modes available. That can cost huge amounts of AEP. For every one decibel of noise reduction, you might be looking at a couple AEP loss, depending on the turbine and the specific noise mode. So you can imagine if you can apply serrations to a blade that are going to take a couple of decibels off, and that means you can escape a noise mode. That can give you some massive gains in annual energy production. And yeah, as you say, Joe, we’ve been retrofitting serrations for a while now. We’ve done it on lots of different turbine models often models where the OEMs may not support that particular blade with a dedicated serration product. And that’s where we can really help because we can design serrations for any Yeah, Joel Saxum: I know working with you guys in the past on many projects there’s a really intense way of getting things done at Powercurve. It’s done the right way. So when you’re looking at whenever, if you ever watch a commercial and you see something cool like wind tunnels and race cars and stuff like that’s Nicholas’s daily life. So is that you guys are out there getting 3d models of certain blades. You have a library of 3d models of blades, and that’s what you build your products off of, because it’s all about aerodynamics. Nicholas Gaudern: It is. And it’s really important when you’re putting something on a blade that you know how it’s going to perform over the whole blade system. So when you put a serration on its job is to reduce noise. But it’s job is also to not break the blade that you’re putting it on. It’s job is also to not fall off. So it’s very important when you design a serration that you tailor it to the blade you’re working with so that you’re not changing the loads in a bad way. And it should also be designed to interact with that blade. So it’s a robust product over the lifetime of the turbine. So there are lots of different ways you can design serrations. Some people claim that serrations can directly increase AP. That’s not an untrue statement, but it’s quite a subtle statement because serrations Can act a bit like flaps on the back of a blade if you angle them relative to the flay. And if you angle them, maybe you can get some more lift. And maybe you want more lift. But sometimes you may not want more lift. I’m very cautious of making blanket statements around serration as directly increasing AP. Because there’s some subtleties around how you do it and whether you are concerned about loads or not. As a general rule, at Powercurve we design our serrations to be load neutral, i. e. they won’t increase or reduce power. Their job is to reduce noise. Now, if there’s scope to do other things, we can talk about it, but yeah, please think about serrations as a noise reduction tool. If you want to change lift of a blade, there are some smarter ways to do it that are a little bit less invasive. Allen Hall: Because The serrations by the different manufacturers are not all the same. We obviously see them from the side of the road or if you’re out of sight. They just look like triangles on the back of a turbine blade. But they’re not all made the same. And some more recent news from PowerCurve is big noise reductions because of the specific design that PowerCurve has invested in. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? What is special about your serrations versus the generic ones you typically see outside? Nicholas Gaudern: I think what we found over the years and through doing a lot of wind tone testing as well, is that there’s a lot of very subtle features on the serration and a combination of different kinds of subtle features can give some quite significant changes to the noise reduction performance. So you have to think about every aspect of a serration, not just the general shape of the tooth, and most serrations are saw teeth, as of some some definition. But what is the edge thickness? What is the chamfer of the thickness down to that edge? What’s your base plate thickness? How do you seal it relative to the blade? All of these things matter when it comes to noise reduction. So I think We’ve tried to just pull together as many beneficial features as we can and then just be careful when we’re tailoring it to a blade. But what I will say is that if someone tells you that they truly understand how a serration works, they’re very probably lying. The physics is incredibly difficult around noise reduction and noise generation on aerodynamic devices. And we understand it more than most, sure, but we can’t model it fully. We can’t run CFD models to accurately predict how noise is being generated and scatters and how we can manipulate it subtly. There’s a lot of active research in the field, which is exciting. It means that there’s space to, to change and to innovate. But it also means that sometimes serrations don’t work if you’re not careful. Yeah, I think we, we take a very practical approach where we base it on a lot of wind tone testing with real components and then testing in the field. So we’ve been on a lot of turbines now and we’ve measured up to three and a half decibels of noise reduction on some of our trials with our products. Joel Saxum: How are you measuring that? What’s the mechanism for measuring decibels? Did you go, is it like go out a hundred meters, 200, 500 meters microphone? How does that work? Okay. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah so like lots of things with wind turbine testing, there’s an IEC standard for noise testing, and that lays out different microphone positions, different amounts of data capture you have to achieve to satisfy that standard. Again, like other other standards, there are flaws in it, there’s uncertainties, but. If you want to get a measurement that people are going to accept, then you would follow the IEC noise measurement guidelines, which is, yeah, positioning microphones different places, gathering data. Allen Hall: Let’s talk about the fundamentals of serrations for a minute. I think people really understand how they work, what they are trying to accomplish in the first place. On the back edge of a blade, you have high pressure and low pressure that are mixing very rapidly, and that causes a slapping effect, right? And then As the blade is moving downwards, not upwards, but downwards, a lot of that noise is projected forward. That’s where the vast majority of noise comes from on the downward blade. It doesn’t seem obvious at the time. It’s like it on the upward side should be the one, but Nicholas Gaudern: I think what you I mean, there are lots of noise sources on the turbine. And there’s also more than one aerodynamic noise source on a blade. I think most people accept that the dominant noise source, aerodynamic noise source in most blades is what we call trailing edge turbulent boundary layer noise. So that’s just that turbulent boundary layer interacting with a blunt edge being scattered out into the atmosphere. And that’s what we’re hearing as noise, but there are other noise sources as well, but they don’t seem to be as important from the experimental work that’s been carried out over the years. So yeah, with a serration, you’re trying to, you’re trying to modify that scattering mechanism effectively. Your flow is traveling over the blade surface. Boundary layers developing interacts with the trailing edge. So boundary layer health and boundary layer development are really important to noise, but serration doesn’t change that. The serration is dealing with what happens when it gets to the trailing edge. But that’s where things like vortex generators can come in. Because if you have a boundary layer that is not healthy, not happy, it’s starting to separate off the back of the trailing edge. The noise is going to increase dramatically. So we will always look at whether there’s benefit in combining things like VGs. With serrations to get a even better noise reduction effect. Allen Hall: Because a serration design and installation depends upon what the airflow is across the surface of the blade, because you’re mixing high pressure and low pressure on that trailing edge. So the way those serrations are designed are meant to handle a specific set of airflow. I’ll call it. And if that airflow deviates quite a bit as we see blaze age and become full of leading edge erosion, your serrations on the back end are not doing what they should do because the airflow is just completely different. No they can’t deal Nicholas Gaudern: with Allen Hall: it. And that’s where the vortex generators come in because they’re controlling the airflow that goes over the serrations. You want to talk about how those two work together where if serrations and actually vortex generators are a package, That they work together to control the airflow. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And I think the point you just made about leading edge erosion is a really important one because. Leading edge erosion harms the boundary layer health. It harms the quality of the flow over the aerofoil surface. It means more turbulent flow, typically leads to more drag, more noise, lower AEP. And if you apply vortex generators, what you’re aiming to do is to re energize the boundary layer, re energize that flow over the blade to make sure that it remains fully attached. And ideally that you don’t have such a thick boundary layer by the time it hits the trailing edge. So basically VGs are working on the source of the problem, if you will, the boundary layer health and serrations are working on the other part of the problem, which is what happens when we’re trying to scatter that. Noise out into the atmosphere. So the nice thing about them is they do some together. So they’re working on different parts of the problem. VG is upstream, serration is downstream. Allen Hall: They work in tandem. A lot of operators, when they have leading edge erosion, they’ll say the blades are a lot noisier than they used to be. Of course, there’s a lot more turbulence coming off the leading edge. The question is what you should do about it. And are there things that can control it? The simple way, the way that I think it should be done is when the blades are on the gun, you put VGs and serrations on as a match set, and then when the leading edge erosion happens, and it inevitably will, it doesn’t impact the noise so much. Obviously, going ahead and fixing the leading edge is a way to do it, but you can’t do that every year. Nicholas Gaudern: No, you can’t. And, fixing the leading edge you have to think about leading edge. Degradation in two different ways. A positive, not as in good, but a positive is in building up material and a negative is in removing material. So erosion removes material. Dirt, bugs, algae, frost, whatever, that accumulates material. But both are bad aerodynamically and even if you’ve got the best leading edge protection in the world. It probably can’t do much about the contamination side, the accumulation side, only the degradation side. Allen Hall: At PowerCurve, you’re not just providing generic parts for a generic turbine blade, serrations, vortex generators. You actually have CFD analysis, a lot of wind tunnel experience that goes along with that. The new product, which is AeroVista, is there to help with those design elements. And I think it’s a really fascinating approach. I don’t know if everybody’s seen this, but you can just put an AeroVista power curve into Google and you’ll get to the right page. Now AeroVista is actually looking at your specific blade, your specific kind of leading edge your very specific kind of damage to then predict what Power you’re losing, how much, also generally how much noise it’s making, so that you can put the right set of vortex generators, the right kind of serrations on your blade. Do you want to explain how that process works? Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. So AeroVista is something that has been out there for for a year or so now, and the whole idea is that we take existing drone inspection data for blades that tells us very clearly where all the damages are on the blade. And we combine that with a very. High fidelity aerodynamic model of that specific blade type. So if we bring those two things together, what it allows us to do is to calculate the expected ammunial energy production loss due to all the blade degradations, the blade damages. So whenever you have anything on a blade that means it doesn’t look like it did when it was new, it will reduce AEP, whether that be a crack, erosion, dirt bugs, whatever. And each of those damages will have a unique aerodynamic signature as to how much it will change the lift and the drag of that specific slice of the blade. So what we’ve been working on is a method that will calculate that loss for every different kind of damage along a blade surface. And we build the models by actually taking the real blade geometry. So we’ll go out into the field, we’ll carry out a laser scan of a blade, And that allows us to get the kind of as built shape of a wind turbine blade. And every blade model is different. So even if it’s a hundred meter rotor, if it’s from Vestas or Siemens, aerofoils will be different and the whole plan form will be different. And that means it will react differently to erosion. So it’s simply not good enough to say, Oh, this hundred meter rotor is damaged like this. Therefore the AP loss is this. You have to actually look at the aerodynamics of that specific blade. So Avista is an automated tool. It will link to databases such as those you might find from drone inspector, Nerf labs, sky Spec Robotics, these different companies. And it will take all of their tagging data. It’ll combine it with the aerodynamic model we’ve made, and then it will calculate the a EP loss based on all the damages that have been identified. The idea being that you can then prioritize where to spend your money as an operator. We speak to so many operators where they have a budget and they’ll use that budget through the year, but they didn’t necessarily know how to make the most of that money. And if you’ve got a hundred turbines on the site, you can only fix 20. Which 20 do you fix? If structurally they look much of a muchness. Erevist will tell you where to target the money to recover the most energy by either repairing or refurbishing the blades or by installing upgrades, things like VGs. Allen Hall: So the process for a customer sort of looks like this. I have existing SkySpecs images. I send them to PowerCurve. PowerCurve analyzes them and says this is the right configuration, vortex generators, trailing insurations for your turbine. Oh, that all makes sense to me and also helps me identify what turbines to go after for the most power production. That all makes sense to me. So what does the process look like of installing VGs and trailing insurations? What is involved Nicholas Gaudern: there? Allen Hall: The Nicholas Gaudern: process is pretty straightforward, really. You have to Measure up the blade. You have to mark up the blade with with the positions that we specify in in the manual that we’ll give you. You then have to prep the blade surface. Pretty basically, a bit of sandpaper to get rid of any contamination and just key the surface mechanically a little bit. Wipe it off with standard blade surface cleaner, something isopropanol based. And then we specify a Methacrylate to component adhesive to attach our products to the blade. So it’s a wet adhesive. And the reason we spec the wet adhesive is that means they’re not coming off. Joel Saxum: It’s the good stuff. The good stuff. Nicholas Gaudern: It’s the good stuff. Exactly. And it’s really important that they can stay there for the entire lifetime of the blade. Now, I’m not saying that some tape solutions can’t be good as well, but we have seen a lot of components that have come off when they’ve only been taped on. Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s something that Allen and I talk about with blade repair, blade, operators and stuff all the time, especially like strike tape, same thing, right? When you put a blade add on, it’s only as good as its installation. You can do all of the wind tunnel testing you want and all of this high fidelity, everything. But if it’s not installed right, it’s no good. So that I’ve seen your guys manuals and putting them into the field. It easy. It’s easy for technicians to do. And the fact that you’re specking the exact consumables, that works fantastic. I love it. Nicholas Gaudern: And we work with the technicians themselves. We’re not in the business of just handing over A cardboard box and a piece of paper. We need to go and work with the technicians directly. We need to talk to them. We need to walk through the manual, show them videos, share them photos. And we’ll often be live on call when those technicians are on site. So if they have an issue. They can, WhatsApp us, they can call us, show us what’s happening and we can help. Joel Saxum: I absolutely love that approach. It’s the same thing that Allen and I do. And I know from my experience with PowerCurve on projects, one of the things that you guys do as well is send us the installation reports the day that they’re done so we can do some QA, QC and make sure that the team’s got it right. So that way, as we move forward, we’re not, there’s no, no issues. Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. We just, there’s always a learning curve, right? No one can do something perfect. Straight off the bat. So it’s about making sure we, we learn and get the process down as quickly as possible. And we find typically that the techs we’ve worked with can get these devices on very efficiently. And once they’ve done one or two turbines, they’re off and running and they can work through a site very efficiently. Allen Hall: And there’s so much happening in the aspect of aerodynamics on blades and aftermarket upgrades on blades. It’s amazing. And PowerCurve is leading that charge. If you want to check out PowerCurve’s offerings, just go to powercurve. dk and you can, all the cool things are on their website. If you want to get a hold of Nicholas, you can find him on LinkedIn, just Nicholas Gaudern, PowerCurve, and he’ll pop right up and connect with them. Because if you need help with your turbines and producing more power. Nicholas is your guy to reach out to. So Nicholas, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Appreciate all the time you spend with us teaching us about aerodynamics. It’s wonderful. Nicholas Gaudern: Thank you. Yeah. Great talking again. Nice to be back.

We discuss a rope management tool for wind turbine maintenance, TotalEnergies’ floating offshore wind anchor idea, and a stress relief device. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com 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: Well, Phil, our first patent of the week is a clever, portable device for managing industrial ropes used in wind turbine maintenance. Now, the key to this innovation is a rope driver system that combines mechanical and electrical components to safely control wind energy. Heavy duty ropes, and we know those can be kind of a pain to deal with. This device features a rope storage container with a hardened lower portion and a flexible top portion, along with a motorized driver mechanism that can both lift and lower ropes. And I’ll think of it as a sophisticated wind system that not only moves the rope, but stores it properly, too. Seems like a lot of good uses for this idea, Phil. Phil Totaro: And when you consider that regardless of remote inspection technology, we still do end up dangling a lot of service techs off ropes in, in this industry. So, this is actually something that comes from seemingly independent inventors with no corporate affiliation. And it’s, there’s a lot of patents like that that are usually just kind of crackpot things that, Is something that’s never going to be adopted by the industry. This is something I hope they can find a way to commercialize or, find somebody that is interested in licensing this or acquiring the, the patent because this is actually Besides being kind of a clever and unique idea, I think this would actually come in handy in a lot of sites, because if you have multiple techs working on a blade repair up tower you can get techs. Crossed ropes, and it creates a safety issue. So having proper storage really does come in handy and, and enhances safety of, of uptower workers. Allen Hall: Our next idea comes from TotalEnergies, One Tech. And it is a patent that tackles one of the biggest challenges in offshore wind, how to securely Anchor wind turbines to the seabed. Now, the invention introduces an innovative monopile foundation design that’s specifically engineered for offshore wind turbines. And the key feature is a specialized lower end structure with inner and outer tubes connected by Wing plates, they create compartments, think of it as a hybrid between a traditional monopile and a suction bucket foundation. Now, what makes this design special is how it handles both the vertical and horizontal forces from the turbine. And Phil, we all know trying to attach the C4 is really complicated and Totaro Energies has been out in the forefront of this for a number of years. This patent is just one of those ideas from Totaro. Phil Totaro: Yeah, and, and, like we’ve been talking about on PowerUp over the past few weeks, the reason I wanted to, to key in on this one today was, besides being this clever combination of kind of a, as you said, either a suction bucket or a jacket type approach and a monopile which, again, you would, you would not necessarily use this everywhere, but this is something that would come in for potentially sites in France where they’re looking to deploy and other project sites around the world where Totaro is involved where you might have specific, site specific soil conditions that necessitate some kind of structural reinforcement like this. Total’s never going to go have, somebody build this for them specifically, they might contract manufacture these types of things, but in doing so they’re leveraging IP that they’ve captured and that they own and control to the benefit of being able to, potentially get a discount on these, these foundations. Because the offset, the royalty that they receive. For licensing, the design IP offsets some of the costs that they would otherwise pay for, purchasing these, these fabricated units. So this is a really clever strategy on the part of Totaro to capture IP on this, and it’s going to be a theme. We talk about. Over the coming weeks as well on, on PowerUp, because they’re, Total’s not the only, kind of, development company or owner operator that, that’s getting into this area. Allen Hall: Our fun patent of the week comes from a couple, looks like maybe a married couple, and it is a patent that describes a personal sound muffler device that let users Vent their frustrations without disturbing others, and the device is essentially a foam lined muffler that fits over the mouth and includes integrated electronics to measure just how loud you are yelling. And the first thing I think about here, Phil, is Seinfeld in the Serenity Now episode. Where they say, you’re not supposed to scream that, and this is a device which is supposed to limit the amount of noise coming out if you’re really upset, I guess, Phil Totaro: and just scream into this tube. I mean, I, we’ve had some really goofy things on PowerUp since we started doing this, and this, this has to be on the, the end of the spectrum that I find rather absurd. The, the sides, just the, the practical application of it. It’s just, I mean, I’m sure it’s one of these things, like if they, if they ever like really designed this and put it into like the, sharper image or a hammock or Schlemmer catalog, somebody might buy that sort of thing. But this is never really gonna. I don’t know. I think if people need to yell, then maybe just go outside or something. I mean, save yourself the 180 that I’m sure they would try to charge you for a device like this. Allen Hall: Yeah, as your favorite NFL team loses in the playoffs, I could see a lot of these devices being used, actually. Phil Totaro: Well, maybe, yeah. I mean, maybe that’s, that’s what it is. Or, it, it could also be like if you’re, if you’re at work in your office or something and, you, you get a little upset, maybe you just go shout into this thing and nobody, nobody is, is any the wiser. Allen Hall: Well, Phil, you have seen those little quiet cubes at work centers. Some of them have been turned into screen rooms. Or they actually can go in and scream and yell. So this device, although this device is a much simpler device, it’s been expanded now into room size instead of just mouth size.

There were 500 attacks on undersea energy in Europe in 2024–what does that mean for offshore wind? SunTrain may be powering Denver in the near future. And the latest workplace trend, “Coffee Badging”, may not be the best plan for new employees. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Coffee badging hits the workplace, NATO addresses offshore wind security, and a wild proposal to move solar power by train. Plus, NextEra’s massive Montana wind project powers up. 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: Hey, Uptime Community. We want to help to shape the future of your favorite wind energy podcast. I need you to take our quick five minute survey at uptimewindenergy. com for a chance to win an exclusive Uptime mug. Now your insights matter to us, whether you’re a longtime listener or have just joined us. So please go to uptimewindenergy. com and complete the survey. And our friends at Wind Energy O& M Australia. are busy at the moment because everybody’s registering. Now you don’t want to miss this event. It’s on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne, and you’re going to get hands on with solutions, including leading edge erosion, lightning protection advances, life extensions, CMS. Gearbox. Anything you want to know about turbines, we’re going to be talking about it in Melbourne. And you’re going to be able to connect with a bunch of experts from Maroon, SkySpecs, Tilt Renewables, GE Vernova, RigCom, Whirly, Elogix Ping, and many, many more. So you need to reserve your spot now by visiting windaustralia. com Phil, is there any highlights on, on windaustralia. Phil Totaro: com? Allen, you’re right. We have a total of 32, uh, or participants and speakers from a total of 32 different companies at this point, registrations today, uh, that I haven’t even checked in yet. So, it’s, uh, you know, tickets are going like hotcakes at this point, and we are actually capacity limited at this facility, so get yours today, uh, if you want to be part of this event. Allen Hall: And it’s time to transform your safety program with Active Training Team’s Free Houston Expo on January 24th. Experience the innovative training methods that are revolutionizing the energy sector. And let’s face it, laptop training sucks. But Active Training Team uses real live actors on site to place your team members in real world situations. 24th, and to secure your spot, you should go to ActiveTrainingTeam. org. dot U S H slash contact or email Florence at ActiveTrainingTeam dot co dot U K. 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 and save money. Keep your assets running smoothly and drive long term success in today’s competitive market. Register today and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com. Allen Hall: There’s a new workplace trend called coffee badging and companies are pushing for return to office and employees are doing what this new thing is called coffee badging, and what that means is that you walk into the office, check in, get yourself a cup of coffee. You hang out, chit chat. And then you go back home. And employers obviously know about this, but they’re not really doing too much about it at the minute. It does meet minimum office requirements. So a lot of large companies say that counts as being in the office. But the demographics for this are really interesting, Joel. Uh, if you look at who is actually doing the coffee badging, mostly men, like 60, 40 men to women are doing this practice and it also is related to age. Uh, it looks like Gen X and Gen Z are the ones who are most active in this coffee badging scenario. And to me, this is a little weird because it’s got to be the most expensive cup of coffee you can get, right? Joel Saxum: So a big thing here that’s not being taken into consideration in any of these conversations. We talked a little bit about this return to work last week. Is the cost of it, right? So in this article, we’re talking about, you know, a hybrid worker, they’re spending an average of 50, 50 or so a day to commute into the office. So, I mean, that, that adds up, right? 400, 500 a month for a hybrid worker, or even a thousand dollars for someone full time. And, and it’s something that I, it was taken into, taken into consideration, you know, or not taken into consideration before when we never, not that many people were working remotely. But now when people are starting to go back and then see that cost, that’s a lot of money. I mean, for a lot of people, that’s a big percentage of salary. So I think I align right with you, Allen, saying this is a really, really expensive cup of coffee. Cause if it’s going to be 50 to go in and out, that’s. Plus your coffee. That’s 50 bucks for your coffee. Allen Hall: Rosemary, you say Australian coffee is really good. So it’s probably worth going into the office for, is this a trend in Australia too? Rosemary Barnes: Um, I don’t know. I work for myself primarily. I do have an office, um, for the startup that I work for and I go in there. Once a week or so. They’ve got terrible coffee in, in there. Um, yeah, but I mean, I actually, I think maybe I’m, although you said, right, that this is a gen X and Z thing, missing out millennials in the middle, gen Y. Allen Hall: Millennials are also highly involved in this. Rosemary Barnes: Okay. Cause I’m a millennial and, um, I actually miss the office quite a lot because, uh, I don’t know. I, um, I think when you’re trying to work. Creatively, like, you know, to me, engineering is a creative, creative discipline, which, you know, a lot of people might be surprised to learn. But, um, I really gained a lot from, um, coffee, chit chat, and talking in the canteen when I used to work in Denmark, there was a canteen and everyone had lunch together every day away from the computer. And, um, yeah, like you learn about what else is going on in the company. You learn about, you know, Oh, Hey, this guy worked on something similar 15 years ago, and you would never have known except for that you ran into him and, Um, he overheard you talking about something that he knew about and Yeah. So I, I kind of actually think that all that is incredibly valuable. Allen Hall: Was this similar to the mouse moving devices that have become popular? I’ve got hit with a lot of ads over the Christmas holidays for mouse movers. And I thought, really, is this something? But evidently a large number of people that work from home have. Little mouse movers just look like they’re active at the desk. Rosemary Barnes: Aren’t managers tracking the output? Like a mouse mover, like are there really managers who are like, it’s super important that you’re moving your mouse eight hours every day and they don’t actually care if you get any work done or not. I just find this so. Crazy that anybody manages like Phil Totaro: that. On my end, I mean, I said this last week already, like, but we’re, you know, my company is, you know, half consultancy, half, you know, software as a service, uh, kind of development platform. And we have the ability for, for myself and all the contract employees to work wherever everybody wants to. Um, so at the end of the day, people are, you Engaged in a job, especially like a back office, you know, white collar, typically, uh, type of job, like, you don’t have to actually be in the office. I agree with Rosie that you do lose a lot when you’re not there, and it’s maybe important for a younger generation to do it, but I’m not surprised that people, I am Gen X, I’m not surprised people in my generation and, and above are You know, doing this because it just, there’s a point at which being in the office is more consuming than the ability that you have when working remotely to increase your productivity. Um, because you’re not always being bothered by somebody that wants, you know, an answer for, for two minutes of your time or this, that, whatever. Um, so it’s, it’s, there needs to be a balance though. And at the end of the day, like I said last week, you know, people. need to get their job done or they get fired one way or the other. So mouse movers and all this other coffee badging, I mean, whatever. Like, as long as you get your job done and you’re helping the company achieve the goals and objectives that are important here, then whatever it takes. Joel Saxum: As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES 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. Allen Hall: A new clean energy transportation concept called Trains Mission is being proposed in Colorado with SunTrain launching a demonstration project between Pueblo and Denver. The project aims to use rail cars equipped with iron phosphate batteries to transport renewable energy from solar farms to urban areas. SunTrain, along with the Colorado Governor, Xcel Energy, and Clean Energy Advocates, are seeking 10 million in a federal grant to begin operations by 2026. Now, the SunTrain plans to demonstrate this transportation system using train cars with these big batteries, essentially. They’re going to have 20 of these train cars, and it’s going to move about 100 miles between Pueblo and Denver. So it’s going to charge them in Pueblo, Move them up using a diesel train to Colorado and discharge them and keep going back and forth. And evidently there is some economics to do this. Rosemary Barnes: It’s not even an electric train. Allen Hall: No, it’s not an electric train. I Rosemary Barnes: guess if they had electrified railway, they could just use that to transmit the electricity instead. Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re talking about making an electric train as they move along through this process, but it is odd, Rosemary, that you can’t get power from Pueblo to Denver efficiently. And, and the, one of the ways you would do it is basically charge up a bunch of batteries and drag them up to the destination. That makes no sense. And maybe you’re right. Maybe we do electrify the train rails. Maybe that’s an easier way to do this. It’s, it’s a little crazy, but where have we gotten to in transmission if this project makes sense? Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you’ve worked on the front range of Colorado before doing any kind of development project, you know that there’s a lot of political problems there. Whether, because there’s a division, there’s, when you’re down in Pueblo, you get to the edge of where you’re in ranching territory and then you get across that and you get towards Colorado Springs and it becomes a lot more Denver City. There’s a big blue red divide there, so you’re fighting political problems the whole way. While you try to push this, you know, what would be essentially a transmission line there. And so if it’s gotten to that point, that means that the permitting is either, or the permitting is too tough. It’s too expensive to build, which that actually would be kind of an expense. The real estate, once you start getting close to Denver is expensive. And then you’re also punching through some foothills and through some mountains and some other difficult terrain, some federal land, some forest reserves and some other things that are difficult. I think going back to where are we at, we’re in a bad spot. I mean, because of whatever hurdle it was or whatever, the economic sense, it makes sense. And if you’re looking for 10 million dollars to do this project, it must be costing a lot more than 10 million to build that uh, transmission line. Rosemary Barnes: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of there’s, um, you know, gravity energy storage, like energy vault, where they lift blocks uphill and then drag it down. Um, there’s actually a version of that concept that involves rail. It’s called advanced rail energy storage. And they do use railways to drag blocks up a hill and then, um, drag them down again. And, you know, it’s I’ve got to say that makes a whole lot more sense than charging an electric, um, yeah, battery, uh, and then physically transporting it to discharge and then take it back again. It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s very strange. Phil Totaro: I mean, that’s, Rosie, what you’re describing is a mechanical equivalent to pumped storage, and we have a ton of that around the world, especially in Scandinavian countries, where, you know, they’ve got a lot of fjords and whatnot, so, you know, it’s, uh, this, however, like, putting, like, solar power into batteries on a train and then dragging the train up with diesel to, it just doesn’t compute. And at the end of the day, I mean, no matter how expensive the transmission is, the electrons are used by everybody. Uh, you know, so the, the various forms of power generation that we can have, you know, everybody’s going to be able to benefit from that. So this is one of those, maybe eminent domain has to come into play here and they just need to get the job done. This, I mean, look, this is one of these things we talk about on the show quite a bit, like sounds viable technologically doesn’t really sound viable commercially. I’m sure that they can get 10 million in grant money or whatever seed money from the government or somebody else to go build one of these pilot projects, but I don’t really see this happening. I think this is a specific solution for a problem. Different problem than what we really have. Yeah, they have a transmission problem, but that’s the problem we need to solve, not doing it this way. Rosemary Barnes: Do you think that maybe it’s, um, a higher level play that really the point of this project is to say, come on guys, like, can we really not get transmission done? This is what we’re looking at. If we can’t just build the damn transmission line, let’s just get our act together and then maybe it will focus people’s attention to say, uh, yeah, okay, you know what? This is getting ridiculous. Let’s put some new transmission in. Joel Saxum: I don’t understand that like the there’s a technical part of this too, though, that we’re not, it’s not laid out here and I’m sure this has been thought of, but how long does it take to charge and discharge? They’re looking at the first thing is 20, 20 cars that can power 20 or a thousand homes for a full day. So, and now they’re going to want to expand it to a hundred train cars at the end of the How fast can you charge and discharge those? Phil Totaro: I mean, they can, Joel, they can charge fairly fast. You can, uh, uh, 20 megawatt hour battery or so can charge in, like, Two hours, I think, if it’s, you know, if you’re doing it the right way, and you don’t blow it up. But the, the reality is, I don’t know why they would do this with solar power, because if you’re trying to, like, it would make more sense to do it with wind, because wind blows at night, especially in the wintertime. You know, you charge up the batteries at night, you drag them up in the morning, and then you’ve got power during the peak time of the day. Like, what are you doing Hmm Charging. I mean, I guess if you’re doing it with solar, you’re charging between basically 10 AM when the sun’s actually up and then, you know, maybe 2 PM. Rosemary Barnes: I guess it’s a bit more predictable. Like you could get on a regular schedule with solar power, whereas you couldn’t with wind, but how, what’s the distance, Allen, that you said that they want to do this a hundred miles or something? Allen Hall: It’s about a hundred miles. Yeah. It’s about a hundred miles. Rosemary Barnes: So, I mean, is a solar resource. It’s actually different between those two locations. Why not just put the solar panels where you want to use the solar energy and have stationary batteries? I, um. Joel Saxum: The price of land. The price of land around Denver is extreme. Rosemary Barnes: Well, put them on roofs. Well, you know, you guys can learn how to do it when you come to Australia. You can get some tips on, on how to put solar panels on roofs. It’s um, it’s cheaper for us to put them on roofs than land. Not for you, I know, but. Joel Saxum: This is I 25. Like, this is a I’ve driven this many times. This is a main highway. I can’t understand why they why this is even a thought process. Why I can’t just hook into the existing grid. Clearly there must be an issue with it, but it doesn’t seem like there should be. These are two, like, Pueblo’s a big city and Denver’s a hundred miles away. They should be connected with sufficient capacity, throughput capacity. Allen Hall: I would think, but apparently not. Just as an aside, I did look up what one train car of coal would generate in terms of gigawatt hours. It’s about 0. 8. So it’s about 800 megawatt hours per train. Car of coal. So if they’re in theory, if you get the energy density way up, then it may make sense to push batteries around. Phil Totaro: Well, I don’t know that pushing batteries around, if we got the energy density of storage way up, then that would actually unlock a lot more. You know, ancillary services and other commercially viable things that we could do with longer duration storage that would probably resolve a lot of these issues in the first place, and then you wouldn’t need to be dragging batteries around by train, you know, especially a diesel train. Like, this just, this is one of these, like, I don’t think it makes sense. We should, we should introduce a thing on the show, like, you know, uh, I don’t know, like, yay, yay or nay, and it’s just, I, I vote nay on this one. Lightning is an act of God, 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. Allen Hall: A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about underwater cables and some sabotage that happened, uh, up around Finland and Germany. And that led to a kind of a larger discussion between us of what is happening out there and how much cable damage is there. Actually, there’s a lot more than I thought there was. Now, NATO has held a meeting and is trying to understand some of the risks here and put some frameworks in, and it’s reinforced its commitment to protecting Europe’s critical undersea energy infrastructure at its annual roundtable in Brussels. Now, this recent meeting addressed growing concerns about the physical and cyber threats to offshore wind farms and undersea cables. particularly in the Baltic and the Arctic Seas, uh, Wind Europe CEO, Giles Dixon, joined the discussion to highlight the importance of protecting both, uh, physical assets and data security around wind energy infrastructure. Now, some of the numbers here are quite disturbing. NATO has documented 500 suspicious incidents in Europe. in 2024 with approximately 100 tribute attributed to Russian hybrid attacks, espionage and influence operations. And with modern wind turbine, modern wind turbines utilizing several hundred sensors at times. Uh, there’s a lot of ways to sneak into a wind turbine and to get past some of the security systems. So this is a pretty large threat, everybody. If you’re having 500 Documented threats a year. I’m not sure the infrastructure is hardened enough to handle all that. Joel, being our underwater expert, what is the likely outcome of this? Are we going to see more hardening of underwater cables in particularly around wind turbines? Joel Saxum: I think you definitely will in the upcoming future. As we build out more and more things and we’ve started to see this as a higher risk, of course. Insurance companies are going to demand it. Financial companies are going to demand it. And it’s not that hard to do, right? It’s just expensive. So you lay a cable on the bottom of the ocean. What people don’t realize is, and you can Google this just like, Hey, map of cables in the ocean. You will be wildly surprised of what the world’s oceans look like up a spaghetti bowl of cables and pipelines, because they’re everywhere. Uh, you just think about how, you know, how. How quickly we can communicate. We’re talking with Rosemary right now down in Australia. Australia’s an island, right? There’s cables, redundancy and redundancy and bandwidth all over the place to connect everybody. So you’re not going to see, maybe on some high value things, uh, a, you know, retrofit campaigns to, to, like you say, Allen Harden, these assets to put some, you know, some concrete mattresses or something, or some rock dumps on them to protect them. I don’t think you’ll see that, but I believe going forward. I think the recent, you know, global actions will demand it. You’re going to have to say, put, you know, put a rock dump on top of this thing, or, or put some, um, you know, preformed concrete blocks or bollards on top of these cables to protect them. Allen Hall: So does this then change the way we start designing wind turbines? Siemens, Kamesa and Vestas are going to be the two offshore wind turbines providers. And all the companies that are involved with this, are they changing designs as we speak? Is NATO talking to them and saying, look, we need to harden these turbines way beyond what they are right now, if they plan to stay out in the water for 20, 30 years? Because I guarantee you the opposition is trying to develop ways to Take down these turbines, plus other data lines, everything else. And they have to be working this and they’re using very crude methods at the moment, basically dragging anchors. But that ain’t, that’s going to end pretty quickly. They’re going to come to more advanced techniques, you’d think over the next year or two. I think they’re, they’re from, Joel Saxum: from a cyber security standpoint, the turbines are designed fairly robustly. There is cybersecurity insurance out there. That’s becoming a new product as well. I’ve, I’ve seen on the market. But from that standpoint, we do pretty well. Idaho National Labs and our friends over at Everpoint, Everpoint Resources in a little Pringle wind farm. They’ve been doing a lot of testing there. Um, and if you have something that you want to test, you can get ahold of them and they’ll help you out. But I think it’s more what we’re worried about now is the more agricultural kind of physical things, right? Running into a turbine or dragging a cable. Um, those are the design, uh, and construction things that are going to change less than the The actual electronics part of it, I think. Allen Hall: Dealing with dammit blades? Don’t let slower pairs keep your turbines down. Blade platforms get you back up and running fast. Blade Platform’s truck mounted platforms reach up to 100 meters, allowing for a quick setup, improved safety, and efficient repairs. Book soon to secure your spot and experience a difference in blade access, speed, and efficiency. Visit bladeplatforms. com and get started today. Joel Saxum: So the Wind Farm of the Week this week is the Clear Water Energy Project, uh, by NextEra and Portland General Electric, uh, which is up in Montana, northwest of Miles City. Uh, it’s three phases. began commercial operation in December of 23. So it’s just a year old. Uh, the interesting thing about this is, uh, and Rosemary, we talk about it regularly on the podcast about the differences between, um, wind resources in certain areas of the country. They’re taking wind energy, which is across the Rockies, From Eastern Montana, from this wind farm. And they’re bringing it, PGE is bringing it to their customers in Oregon. So they’re pushing, putting, uh, enough power in through, from this wind farm to power 830, 000 homes over in Oregon. Uh, that’s a hundred million LED light bulbs or 83 percent of a time traveling DeLorean. Yes. So the Clearwater Energy Project, which is, um, up, up over 200 turbines, Uh, 243 to be exact, GE2X machines, uh, you are our wind farm Allen Hall: of the week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our Substack weekly newsletter. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

This week in business news, Allete is going private in a $6.2B deal, Aeris suffers from financial struggles, and Vestas secures 6, 000 MW in new orders during Q4. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com 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: First up, the U. S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has given its approval for a 6. 2 billion acquisition of Allete. The buyers are the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and Global Infrastructure Partners. The company brings significant renewable assets to the table, including Minnesota Power and Allete Clean Energy, which operates over 1, 300 megawatts of wind capacity across seven states. Now, Phil, this has been going on for several months now, but it looks like it’s finally climbed that last rung in that ladder to become a private company again. Phil Totaro: Yeah, which I think is interesting and important given who the investors are. Keep in mind that GIP just got gobbled up by BlackRock. And the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board has been making, you know, boatloads of investments around the world. Not only in Canada. Companies like this, but also individual assets where they are a usually minority but co owner so this is giving them the diversity, it’s giving BlackRock and, you know, through GIP you know, more assets in their portfolio, which they, you know, they’re obviously making a concerted effort and it’s, it’s part of their strategy to you know, to build up that, that pipeline. So this is, I believe You know, a total of 1. 3 gigawatts of operational wind with substantially more in, in the pipeline. So, you know, it’s a great thing to, to see this happen and, and usually in a take, in a go private deal The reason you want to do that is to kind of sort out some of the financials and, and there’s an opportunity that they could, you know, re IPO Allete at some point. I like the move because Joel Saxum: Allete is a, you know, they’re not a huge wind operator, but Clean energy, but I know that they’ve got ambitions to do some more development. So we are bringing in fresh capital. Also Allete’s headquarters in Minnesota power is up in Duluth, Minnesota, which is a small town of about 80, people. And this will bring some hope, hopefully bring some jobs in up there and a little bit of an expansion. Allen Hall: Down in South America, Brazilian wind blade manufacturer Aeris has approached its creditors seeking a 60 day extension on upcoming interest payments. The company’s financial strain stems from a slowdown in new wind turbine contracts. Leading to mounting pressure on its balance sheet. Now, current financials show a concerning picture with net debt reaching about 550 million reales and a debt to EBITDA ratio of 3. 2. Joel, Sonoma has made acquisition efforts towards Aeris for the last couple of years. Do those offers become more serious on Aeris part as they run into some financial difficulty? Joel Saxum: I think Aeris as a company has to turn to Sonoma as a more and more possible outlet. It just reminds me of a game of Monopoly I played at one point in time where I was trying to buy some houses and every time I came around to the houses that I wanted, The person who was holding them, they got a little bit more expensive. And the game of Monopoly didn’t end as well as I wanted it to. But at this point in time, Iris uh, more than likely, I mean, this is, this is public knowledge approaching creditors for the 60 day extension there. That just signifies pain, right? And when pain is there, and the the Pain reliever is knocking on your door, sometimes you answer. Phil Totaro: And, and just keep in mind what’s going on in the Brazilian market at this point and, and potentially why they’re, they’re in this situation. You know, they had orders with a number of different manufacturers, and those manufacturers have pulled back or pulled out of the market entirely. And the order book that they’ve got in Brazil is robust, but a lot of it’s very far in the future. So it’s, it’s making for a bit of a short term challenging situation for them. And there are potentially several outlets they can avail themselves of to you know, to get back to a strong financial picture. And, and the Brazilian market, frankly, really needs to get back to, uh, you know, to doing more auctions and, and tenders for you know, additional power offtake. And, and really start. Getting back on the horse. Allen Hall: Vestas has secured over 6, 000 megawatts in new orders during the fourth quarter of 2024, spanning multiple continents. Now the U. S. is a big landing spot for a number of Vestas turbines and Europe also. So Vestas is spreading its wings a little bit. 1000 megawatts is a pretty substantial total. It’s not the highest they’ve ever had in a particular quarter, but it is a strong quarter for Vestas, right, Phil? Phil Totaro: Yeah, and it totals out to with the addition of all their offshore sales or order book that they took in 2024 to about 16 gigawatts. For the whole year, so it’s a, it’s a pretty, you know, decent, you know, slate of orders where, you know, in the U. S. in particular, they, they’ve got a bunch of new orders for the V163 4. 5 which really seems like that’s starting to take off. We’ve calculated they’ve got about 2. 8 gigawatts worth of order book now for that turbine globally. With a bunch more that we’re expecting to be announced here in, in 2025. So, you know, they’re, they’re doing pretty well with a brand new product platform and certainly their, their offshore orders as well for the V236. Joel Saxum: Something to keep in mind with Vesta is when you see these new order numbers coming out from them, one of their strategic standpoints, they’re going to is to offer service packages with these turbines. So depending on geography and where they’re at, some of these come with a 25 year FSA. So that is a lot more booked revenue for the future for them. That being said, since the new year, their stock is up about 6%. That looks good on Vestas.

From the surge in lightning strikes damaging wind turbines to the game-changing potential of nacelle-based LiDAR systems, Lars Bendsen of AC883 shares insights on wind farm maintenance. Lars describes how LiDAR installations can boost power output by 3.5%, and warns how ignoring simple pitch alignment issues leads to catastrophic turbine failures. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Lars Bendsen: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall. Today, we’re diving into the costly challenges plaguing wind farms with Lars Bendsen from AC883. From a surge in severe lightning strikes to devastating turbine misalignments, Lars reveals why seemingly minor issues can lead to catastrophic failures, and how cutting edge solutions like nacelle based lidars are transforming maintenance strategies. Plus, discover why Lars believes too many industry tourists are making decisions that cost operators millions in unnecessary repairs. So get ready for a no holds bar discussion about what’s really happening in wind farm maintenance. Lars, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Well, you’ve had a busy blade season and you’ve had crews all over Canada and parts of the U S what kind of problems were you solving with your blade crews this year? Lars Bendsen: That was, that was a crazy repair season. Um, and it’s not to feed directly into, but it, we had a ton of lightning strikes and lightning repairs higher than I would say the average. And some of the strikes were severe. So I don’t know, uh, you probably know better than me if the weather pattern has been leading up to better or worse. Um, what we do know, we had a really, um, wet summer. We had a ton of weather delays. We had a ton of high winds. We have a ton of rain. Uh, so we had our, our standby time, time was, was higher than usual. And it’s annoying for everybody involved. Owners don’t get their job done and money is flying out the window. So. And we don’t get the job done either. So, so, so it’s really wet that way. So I don’t know if that’s the aftermath was going on over the winter. I have no idea because you can’t really see when this like was there. Uh, and, and the owners, the owners have a system that can measure when it comes. But. I don’t think they’re looking at it. Allen Hall: That’s, that’s true. Uh, we are seeing more lightning strike damage over this past summer. It’s been really bad. I, I think it’s just the, the set of storms that came through. But in, in your case with AC 8A3, when you have technicians on site, you’re bringing high quality sort of apprenticeship plus technicians that have a lot of training so that when you get into these complicated repairs, you can actually accomplish them properly. Lars Bendsen: We are, we are getting our people from mostly from Europe, uh, simply because there’s no cable, there’s, there’s no, uh, availability for, for staff in Canada. Uh, so we get them in from Europe on a proper work permit, simply because we are short staffed. Uh, we do pay more. We also get, uh, GWO certified technicians, all of them. And, um, last year we had about 60 percent that could do. Cat 4, Cat 5. Next year they’re all doing Cat 4 and Cat 5. That means on some simple LEP work we could maybe be either be earning less. Or we might be a little more expensive on regular LEP work because it is highly trained technicians. Uh, we learned from last year based on the percentage of Cat 4 and Cat 5 damages. We simply need to have more flexibility so we won’t, we will only have Cat 4 and Cat 5 technicians. Allen Hall: Do you think there’s more Cat 4, Cat 5 damage lately? Because that’s what I think. I’ve seen a lot more Lars Bendsen: over the last couple years. From, uh, from, uh, 23 to 24 there’s a significant increase. Uh, if it’s really high, uh, lightning strikes, uh, damages from tailed headspin, everything. Allen Hall: Yeah. Is that driven by just the lack of understanding that what looks like to be maybe a small pinhole in a blade is really much larger and the operators don’t catch it early enough or is there other factors involved there? Lars Bendsen: I don’t know. I think it might be that, um, I mean, everybody knows that all the engineering departments are all owners. are really lean or in best case lean, but mostly understaffed. So that means the poor guys, they are struggling to keep up with everything. They can’t see it. And, um, and, uh, I have, I have a strong, I think I have a strong opinion about the drone inspection all the time, because the AI and the pictures, it’s, it, you cannot run an autopilot. You cannot just take a picture, see that’s it. You can’t, you simply have to get up there. We had minimum Minimum of 10 blades were simply just a grease spot that was categorized as Category 4. We also had the opposite, where just a grease spot was actually a lightning strike. So we had it, we had it all over the place, so you cannot, you cannot run an autopilot. Allen Hall: That’s interesting because I, I’ve heard that same discussion from a couple of operators about whether the drone inspection categorization has been correct. But I think as the lightning strikes, uh get more frequent. We’re seeing what looks to be smaller damage further down the blade, which would typically be grease. If you, especially as you get closer to the root of a blade, you always think, well, that’s grease from inside the nacelle that’s fallen onto the blade. Don’t worry about it. But in reality, I think we’re seeing more lightning strike damage in more critical areas that lead to this cat four and cat five issues. Lars Bendsen: Well, uh, you’ve seen it very often as well. It’s a small lightning strike. Once you start opening it up, then you are 16 layer deep. Just an example, right? So we had some of them that looked very small and then you’re ending up in a 78, 000, 100, 000 bill, right? Even though it looks very small and therefore, yeah, good. No, I’m just saying, that’s why I don’t, I personally, I know it has a ton of opinion about it, but I personally don’t think you can run on autopilot, which also go back to the, you know, we’ve been involved in robotics as well, robotic repair and all that jazz, and I know there’s a place in the market for it. Absolutely. But based on our experience, pure LEP and nothing else is only having, might be 10 percent of the blades. There’s always something to look for. There’s always an extra damage. There’s always something. So we have to get up there anyhow. Allen Hall: Is that because the industry for the longest time has only inspected like a third of the farm at a time. So it’d take three years to really get across the whole site. So if you did have damage. It may have sat there for two years before anybody even could identify it. Isn’t that changing a little bit though, that meeting operators that are doing a lot more inspection and trying to catch these ideas, you know, these problems early? Lars Bendsen: No, and I, I agree. And I, I agree. And during the drone inspection, do drew your whole fleet every year? Just do it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s peanuts compared to whatever, but on that said, I think it’s great with drone inspection, but you cannot rely on a hundred percent outer pilot. Somebody has to look at it. With qualified eye to look at it. And it’s better to climb one, one blade. Too many than one, too less, too little, so. Allen Hall: So the question in my mind when it comes to lightning damage up in Canada is because it’s so cold and there’s so much freeze thaw that happens. As part of the issue that once you have this wound in a blade that just the freeze thaw over a year or two can really expand it and then cause trailing edge separation and all those sort of horrible things that happen to blades? Lars Bendsen: Well, I guess as soon as you get more intrusions, uh Uh, then of course, uh, up here, uh, water had a chance to get stiff under zero degrees C. So, uh, so of course then you have a, uh, have an issue. Allen Hall: That leads into the discussion about, well, it’s cold in Canada, which means you guys get the winter first and then it comes down our way, uh, because we’re getting close. Which then gets me into, it’s pitch alignment and sort of yaw alignment season for you. Because it’s nice to have the fields sort of knocked down and everything frozen. Pitch alignment is a huge problem and what balancing is a huge problem too. What are you seeing out in the field right now? Lars Bendsen: Well, I’m seeing that owners relying on OEM statements that we can, we can do a. We can do pitch correction without control, we can do x factor, we can do automatic, uh, yaw alignment, which is, um, which is questionable, when put it that way. And, um, I said, uh, my new word is, uh, there are so many tourists in this, in this industry. They’re tourists. They simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They come and look at it. It looks nice, but they actually don’t know what they’re talking about. A yaw alignment is one thing, but say we can correct your yaw alignment. No, you can’t, because you can static align your turbine. But turbines are misaligned differently in different wind bins. So you need a dynamic alignment. Yaw alignment, not a static yaw alignment. And the only thing you can do is static, you cannot do any dynamic yaw alignment. Um, very simple, uh, just to give you a, just a brief, I mean the, the, the equipment sitting behind the rotor, that means the, the anemometer, uh, cup anemometer, sensor, whatever you have, is sitting behind the rotor. That means it’s sitting in turbulent, in turbulent wind. And it’s always chasing whatever has happened already. They get the information later and then try to chase the wind. Uh, there are some OEMs that don’t, because also you cannot yaw yaw bearings and brakes, et cetera. So but there’s also some OEMs that they’re allowing up to 7. 9 degrees before they do anything. And then they have, you know, uh, when you boil an egg, you have a watch that’s starting and they have a counter for 30 seconds. If it stays above 8 for 30 seconds, they start yawing back towards zero. And that’s the better one of them, they’re doing that. So that’s the, that’s the dynamic yaw alignment that you need to have. I have no, we have no stake in LIDARs per se. We know them, we work with them, but we don’t have any monetary stake in it. Uh, but you need a Nacelle based LIDAR, basically, if you want to run optimal. That means you’re measuring 80 meters in front of the turbine in a clean airstream, that you get a way more accurate. Uh, well wind speed and, and wind direction measurement. And then you connect that to controller and then that control your yoing, your yours. You’re not changing any, your strategy. You’re still doing the same. You don’t overdo the yawing. You just wanna make sure that you have a more accurate read on speed and direction where scan feeds into your pits. Allen Hall: Yeah. Let, let’s, let’s talk about lidars for a minute because, uh, I know you and I have had a couple of discussions about Lidars. I don’t see them used very much in the United States at the moment. Uh, because I don’t think people really understand them, of what the, how they can use them for operational purposes, I, I think they see them as sort of a calib, kind of a calibration issue, and then once they’re done, they’re kind of move on. But you’re saying that the LiDAR can really improve your operational performance. Lars Bendsen: Oh, absolutely. Uh, you have, of course, I think it’s misinterpretation because there’s only, basically only one supplier of nacelle based LiDARs. There’s a ton of ground based LiDARs. There’s measuring up and kind of measuring in a cone when you do site assessment. And that’s totally good for that. But this is a nacelle based LiDAR. Two beam. They can also get into four beam so we can measure wind shear. But for operational purposes, it’s actually more to get the wind speed and wind direction more accurate. And that is connected to the controller. With a, it doesn’t matter which controller, and that means that will do your, uh, your alignment in each wind bin. Allen Hall: Okay, so the LiDAR is acting as an alignment tool constantly to try to correct for what the OEM equipment didn’t Lars Bendsen: do. It’s kind of a third party, uh, call it, uh, anemometer just measuring 80 meters out in front of the turbine. And it does, and it does more accurate because it is laser basically, right? Right. Right. Right. Allen Hall: The implementation of LIDAR on turbines is what? Does every turbine have a separate lidar, or is a LIDAR good for a couple of turbines around it? Lars Bendsen: No, you do. You do it on every single turbine because you cannot remote control. You cannot remote connect to every turbine’s controller. We had to be connected to the, to the controller. And it’s very simple. We do a two turbines a day, so it’s not a big thing to do. It takes a couple of hours to get it aligned, connect to the controller. It’s very simple, actually. Allen Hall: What does that process look like? Because now you got me curious. I’m taking, I’m taking this LIDAR unit. I’m bringing it up tower. I’m mounting it to the top of the nacelle. I’m maybe doing a little bit of alignment to get it. Focus in the right place. And then I’m plugging that into the SCADA system, the control system? In Lars Bendsen: the Allen Hall: controller Lars Bendsen: itself. Allen Hall: Oh, in the controller itself. Lars Bendsen: Yeah, and it’s a failsafe system. It’s running on different bus connections. It’s too technical, also for me. But it’s a failsafe system, so if something goes wrong with the LiDAR, or the LiDAR can’t see heavy fog or something like that, then it goes back on the controller. on their own original anemometer. So it’s not, there’s no danger to it. Um, right now we have huge success on, uh, V82 in the US and Canada. Um, the V82 is a bit of a different animal because it’s a stall regulated turbine. Uh, but again, uh, I talked to a colleague of mine said, well, that guy should change the, uh, the algorithm. He was not, he was not working that day. So, uh, so, so it’s not, it’s not very accurate. It’s not. Uh, so that’s one thing. So V82 specifically, and also an interesting is that when a V82 running above radio wind speed, it very often come up with an alarm and shuts down. Alarm 236 or whatever it’s called, the flap wise, so it simply shuts down in high wind because it’s running at over speed because it’s only stall regulated. So, What we are doing is running down on a ton of vibrations, that’s why it stops. So, um, so we are misaligning the turbine on purpose above radio wind speed. Below we are running as close to zero as we can. But above rated wind speed, we are misaligning the turbine. That removes the, uh, the vibrations and we also have a less load on that turbine. So we’re actually opposite what you normally would think. Allen Hall: You can produce more power having a little bit of an offset because the turbine doesn’t shut down. Lars Bendsen: And we have now on, um, we have of the more than 200 turbines we have outfitted in Canada and the U. S., we are seeing, uh, we’re seeing, say, AP gains of 2. 8 to 3. 5 percent AP. And that’s without the extra uptime. That is just because of AP power. That’s remarkable. Allen Hall: Getting 1 percent today can be a lot, because the turbines are usually pretty good, but if you can squeeze out more than that, that’s remarkable. Where is the LiDAR generally used at? What kind of farms be interested in LIDAR. Is it kind of ridgeline farms or the wind can be a little more unique or is it in the flat plains of Kansas and Oklahoma and Canada? Lars Bendsen: Well, of course, the more, the more obstacles you have in front of your turbines, the worse it gets. Uh, I’ve seen down in Mojave Desert, actually, on, on, on the side down there, the turbines on the same side are basically 90 degrees. Misaligned from each other, but they’re both right. They’re, they’re well aligned, but of course the wind is simply coming around like that. So it looks weird when you’re driving there. They’re 90 degrees different or they the same wind farm, but they’re both correct. Aligned. Allen Hall: Yeah. I would say something is wrong. Stop the turbine. But yeah, Lars Bendsen: but no, they’re both right. . So, uh, but that’s, that is really, so that’s, that’s one thing I think is the critical, we talk about maintenance. The, uh, the, the, um, again, back to my old phrase that some of VM have bored. The rotor is the motor, and it means if the rotor is not aligned in pitch and yaw, mass imbalance, et cetera, then you’re paying for it. Allen Hall: That makes a lot of sense then. So knowing more about the wind with LiDAR has a, what kind of ROI is that on a LiDAR system? Lars Bendsen: Well, depending on, uh, what market you’re in on the AP or the PPA, of course, right? So, so that’s depending on, but, uh, but we have seen less than a year. We also seen, uh, depending on, uh, what you’re in, right? What is your, uh, what is your, uh, your factor up to your capacity factor, your PP, et cetera, so it’s not a, it’s not a, uh, one size fits all we have to look at it and, and make smart decisions, right? Boy, Allen Hall: any ROI less than a year, I want to get involved with. Lars Bendsen: This will actually get fired for not doing it. Allen Hall: Right. You should. That’s too easy. Yeah. It sounds interesting. So let’s, let’s bump into pitch alignment and unbalanced rotors, which are very prevalent. Joel and I were traveling across Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas quite a bit this year. It’s fairly easy to see rotors that are imbalanced or that they’re just not, you can tell because there’s a little bit of wobble going on there. Yeah. And often you can hear it. You can hear it. Yes. Lars Bendsen: So what is the solution for that? How do they fix it? Well, first of all, we have to measure if it’s imbalanced and, uh, if, if it’s, uh, if it’s aerodynamically balanced or not. That’s, that’s number one. Let’s figure that out. Do we have the same pitch angle? Regardless of what it is, it has to be the same. And it has to be the same all the time. Actual pitch or not is to be the same. So, uh, and they’re not, um, based on, on our, we had done more than, I think we had 2, 500 turbines now in the US and Canada, and, um, based, based on age of the fleet and also the, the, the manufacturer, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s crazy And, and people, they know it, but they don’t do anything. And that’s where back to what I said before, but we have too many tourists in our industry, so the decision making, right? So I’m just took my note here. Uh, we talking to, to, to an engineering department. They understand it. Engineering and no money. They just, they just have to nod. Yeah, it’s good. Passing it down to the site, site looks at it. They think it’s a great idea too. Now they have to sell it to either director of operations or asset management. Some director of operations, they understand it. But if you have money now, we can’t put it on import because that’s already cut in. So it absolutely Zero fat on that bone. There’s no money left for anything, projects like that. And then sometimes we go to the as a manager, which might be often, or sometimes it’s a commercial, or you’re the person, less technical. And that’s where, that’s where the tourists come in because they simply don’t know technically enough about it. Allen Hall: Well with an unbalanced rotor, It’s an almost inevitable. You’re going to destroy a main bearing set. You’re going to probably take down a gearbox with it if you let it go on long enough. And in some of these cases that I’ve heard, the control cabinets are moving around so much that they’re damaging the control cabinets. At what point do you say it’s worth, I can’t replace control cabinets anymore, I’m just going to do a pitch alignment and be done with it. It seems like an obvious choice. Lars Bendsen: Sometimes what we have seen on, especially hydraulic pits, that it’s not as bad as you think, it’s way worse. So, um, we have had a customer change the cabinets. Three or four times a year. And they don’t know what it is. They just have vibrations. So now they buy vibration sensors. Now they’re looking at extra bearings for the gearbox. Now they look at all kinds of stuff without looking at the front of your rotor. Look at the rotor. That’s the root cause. For 99 percent of your troubles. Allen Hall: Well, I’ve heard of turbines, not often, but occasionally, where the, where the turbine enters the ground, right? Or the tower enters the ground, that there’s gaps, big gaps, like almost a foot wide, whereas the turbine’s been swaying around, it’s pushing the soil away from it so much, which means, that’s, at that point, you have major problems, and I’m surprised I see Uh, the technicians and I hear stories about throw more gravel into the hole that’s happened near the tower because the tower is swaying so much like, like that’s going to solve it. Lars Bendsen: It’s, it’s beyond right. It’s just really when we have, uh, I won’t mention the name of course, we have one customer we kind of rested our case. We can spend more time. That customer had amount of issue on foundation, even turbines falling over, shutting down sites. Second site they’re running, we have evidence that 60 percent of turbines are misaligned, but we cannot get 100, 000 to fix it. You know what? That’s fine. We have tried now for a couple of years. We rest our case. We told you. We proved it. We measured 10 of your turbines. We know it is. We rest our case. We cannot spend more time if you don’t want to do it. And that is typically one of these situations that comes up to commercial people. Far away from the site, they only look at dollars. Do we really need it? Do we really need it today, this year? And then the poor guy from operations said, well, we don’t technically need it this year, but, and then they shut it down. Done. So we kind of just resting our case. And, uh, that, but that’s, there is, there is more, there’s sophisticated owners and it has might be less sophisticated owners. There’s also the owners that, um, financial owners, they get the 8%. We don’t want to hear about it. We do not want to hear. And the, uh, as a management company. Don’t want to take that battle because now their business case looks bad. They get the 8%. And now we’re adding custom operations. Can’t do that. Just gonna pay for gearbox. Allen Hall: Well, you know, yeah, they like paying for gearboxes clearly How much is a pitch alignment typically to do in terms of time? Is it a day? An hour? Lars Bendsen: Depending on again if it’s an older, just say V80 You have to go up and change the pit ramps. Our measurement takes 10 15 minutes and then to get it Stop the turbine, get it done, and go back again. Might be an hour and a half, two hours. And we can re measure, and then it’s okay, and it’s up running. So it’s a two hour operation, worst case scenario. On a newer turbine, many of them, you have a tablet down tower. Siemens 2 3 on many of those. You can simply just put in on a tablet, put an offset in on blade A, B, C. And it’s running, it’s a five minutes, 10 minutes operation. Allen Hall: So I assume you can do multiple towers a day then. So you’re talking about in a couple of days, you can do a complete wind farm. Yeah. And stop all the vibration, all the main bearing replacement issues, the gearbox issues, the foundation issues, the cabinet issues in literally a couple of hours Lars Bendsen: per tower. We can for sure remove the root case in many of the cases. Again, it’s not like one size fits all. But in many cases we could do that. And, um, let’s say when the turbines are between eight and 12 years old, for sure, 50%, uh, roughly 50%, uh, are misaligned to a certain degree. Um, the better turbines, Siemens 2 3, hands down, they’re the least misaligned turbine, but it’s still about 30%. And if they’re misaligned, it’s not too, too bad. Siemens has actually a part of their service scope to look after a misalignment. As the only one, as far as I know, they have a bracket they put in, and that works somehow. It’s better than nothing. It’s not ideal, but it’s And I say, okay, it’s, it’s, it’s doable way better than anything else. Some OEMs don’t even have it in their service scope. Yeah. I, I’ve seen mostly that they don’t have it in the service scope at all. We also have a client where the OEM is supposed to look after that. It’s a pits where they get turbine. I don’t want to want an inch named a brand because some people might be guess where it is. But, uh, the OEM service screen is supposed to look after that, but they don’t do it. And then the owner said, well, I’m not going to pay for it because they should do it. We have done the whole campaign. So we have put it out there and it’s more than 50 percent of the fleet. And now we have done a project. We have followed it for two years. And of course, a pitch, sorry, a hydraulic pitch will leak all the time. So the turbo we just adjusted two years ago, that’s all misaligned again. Two years later, not crazy, but it’s been wandering. It’s been misaligned again. Who’s going to pay for that? If it’s a part of the OEM service concept, but they don’t do it, then the owner don’t want to pay for it. But the owner’s gonna pay anyhow. Allen Hall: Right, at the end of the day, the owner’s gonna pay anyhow. They Lars Bendsen: just pay next to the Allen Hall: gearbox. Well, yeah, you can do a very inexpensive pitch alignment test, or you can replace a gearbox. There’s sort of your choices right now. And I know, well, this is busy season for pitch alignment. As we get into winter and the ground freezes, and you guys can get out there and do dozens of turbines. Uh, what do people do if they have pitch alignment problems? Do you see their towers swaying? Or the rotor moving in unusual ways? How do they get ahold of you? How do they contact you? Lars Bendsen: Well, uh, we have the best website in the world, so a3.com. So, uh, that’s, that’s as simple as it is. Um, and we have equipment, we have, we have capacity. We are doing right now. We are might be gonna buy an extra sort of equipment. It’s quite expensive piece of equipment. We are, we are running, but we are considering buying one more, uh, because we are, we are quite busy for sure. Doing this year, I think we are six or 700 turbines. We’re done. Uh, this, this season alone. Um, so I think also that, and promotion or not, we know what we are Allen Hall: doing. Here’s, here’s the, here’s the rub. You can get this done, get the pitch alignment done now, right? When it’s windy season in the wintertime in the United States, this is where everybody makes all their money, but you want to make sure your turbine is operating at peak performance and it doesn’t take much time to get this done. The problem is, is that if you wait too long. Lars and AC 883 are going to be booked and you’re not going to be able to get them lined up to do this. So if you want to get it done You better get on ac883. com or get ahold of Lars via LinkedIn and get rolling now. And the same thing for the blade repair season. I’ve had a lot of people contact Joel and me about blade repair season next year. We’re trying to find technicians or we need a capacity. We got problems. We need, we have cat fours and cat fives. We know they’re coming. They need to be reaching out to AC883. Also to get ready for next season because otherwise you’re not gonna have anybody on site. Uh, so Lars Thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s great to connect again, and we’re going to see you in Nashville At the O& M. Lars Bendsen: That’s true. And the Ole Miss down there in Nashville. That would be interesting So the San Diego is a new Nashville and Nashville is new San Diego Allen Hall: I’m going to miss the ocean, but it’ll be a good time in Nashville. Thank you so much, Allen.

Andreas Kipker, CEO of Jupiter Bach, discusses their dominance in wind turbine nacelle and spinner cover manufacturing and major U.S. expansion plans, including a new 20,000-square-foot facility in Pensacola and two decades of partnership with GE Vernova. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. And today we have an exceptional guest who brings deep insight from one of the wind industry’s most important manufacturing sectors. Andreas Kipker is the CEO of Jupiter Bach, the world’s largest supplier of nacelle and spinner covers for wind turbines. Andreas joins us at an exciting time for Jupiter Bach the company just celebrated a remarkable 20 year partnership with GE Vernova and broke ground on a 20, 000 square foot expansion of their Pensacola, Florida facility. And today under Andreas’s leadership, Jupiter Bach operates state of the art manufacturing facilities across Europe, Asia, and North America. The company’s focus goes beyond just manufacturing. They’re driving innovation in composite materials and. Engineering to help reduce the levelized cost of energy for wind power. Andreas, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Andreas Kipker: Thank you very much. Pleased to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. Allen Hall: Well, Jupiter Bach is the world’s largest supplier of nacelles and spinner covers. Could you give us just a sense of what your global footprint looks like? Andreas Kipker: Absolutely. Happy to do that. Yeah, so, um, In the global market, we consider ourselves leaders. We have, um, we have factories. We have four main manufacturing facilities one in China two in Europe, then Poland and Lithuania, and then one in Sonia, Florida. Um, and then adding to that’s where we do our composites. And then, and in addition to that, we have we have a number of assembly sites that are. closer to servicing this Nacelle manufacturing plants assembly plants of our customers. So they’re spread. Somewhat in the same regions, but but closer to customers. Allen Hall: Well, you just recently celebrated 20 years with G. E. Vernova, which is remarkable. And you’re also expanding a facility down in Florida to another 20, 000 square feet. What is your footprint right now in Florida alone? Andreas Kipker: I’m a little bit in doubt, actually, the exact number. We’re around 100, 000 square foot in in, in, in Florida today of, um, of. on the roof. And then it’s a process that takes a bit of outdoors storage at outdoor space as well. So, the site itself is significantly bigger. You will know this from blade manufacturing plants as well, that the parts are quite big. So it takes a little bit of storage around. But yeah, we’re super excited to have to have longstanding relationship with with several of our customers, but G we just we just reached this milestone. Um, um, so yeah, proud of that. Joel Saxum: I think it’s important to to talk about nacelles here, right? Like when you see, when you say when we’re in the wind world, where Alan and I touch most of the time, everybody in the large manufacturing space, you hear about gearbox manufacturers, bearing manufacturers, and then a few tower things here and there, but it’s mostly blades. Everybody’s worried. You know, what’s TPI here? What’s Iris doing here? What’s, You know, LM doing here or how is that all working? But the part that’s like the most recognizable part on the whole turbine, the nacelle, it’s the box that holds the brains. It’s the thing that gets all of the work done inside of it. We don’t talk about that much. And I think one of the reasons is there’s usually not very many issues with it, right? Andreas Kipker: No, I would say we do not see a lot of issues. I think we could in, in all fairness, talk a little bit more about it because There’s a lot of safety features that allows our technicians, not our technicians, but the industry’s technicians to, to carry out their job safely is really important. Things that we mount on on, on, on the nacelle. So yeah it, it deserves probably a little bit more face time in in a world where we where we expose our technicians to a lot of a lot of risks and we need to keep them safe from that. Allen Hall: So let’s talk about the nacelle for a minute. The nacelles are made out of. Basically fiberglass and foam is that how they’re constructed? Andreas Kipker: Before I joined Jupyterbug, I worked in a company that supplies blade manufacturers. The materials that are being used here are very much the same. It’s slightly different densities of foam because it does less of a structural load than a blade, but yeah, we’re talking about. Glass fibers, foams, and then the typical resin systems as well. And then surprisingly enough quite a bit of steel parts that are mounted on on that as well. Allen Hall: So the approach from Jupiter. Box manufacturing, and I’ve seen some things on YouTube, which are quite interesting how you do this. It is a resident fusion process, very similar to blades, but instead of making a, you know, a shell, you’re making these panels, but then it’s sort of a modular assembly, right? Andreas Kipker: Different OEMs have different design philosophies, and we work with them on optimizing that. Some are focusing on the ease of the assembly plant, and some are focusing more on The flexibility in, in, in the supply chain. So we see it going both ways. We do manufacture both parts that that are quite modular, but we do also manufacture a lot of parts that are quite significant in size and do not fit into a container in in, in any way. That that’s also why we have. Regional setups and some setups that are, need to be closer to the customer so that we can assemble these containerized parts into something that’s easier to install for turbine for the OEM. Allen Hall: Can we use GE as an example here? You’re manufacturing basic sub assemblies down in Pensacola, Florida, and then they’re moving them up to Schenectady, New York, which is nearby to me, and then you’re assembling them. near the manufacturing facility that GE has established. Isn’t that the process? Andreas Kipker: We have this plant down in Florida that makes actually fully fully assembled nacelles. It’s an oversized transport that goes down to the GE factory as well. When we talk about the parts in Schenectady, these are these are from a different design philosophy. Where we manufacture them offshore. We sent them into Schenectady and then we mount them in Schenectady to to ease the assembly at the GE plant in Schenectady. So, so actually GE has I hope I’m not giving anything away here, but they will they use both design methodologies. And you will see that if you see the the turbine up close. Allen Hall: Quite amazing. Okay. So some of your OEMs, even internally to a single OEM asking for like a full completed. Nacelle, other ones want something that’s modular. That’s really fascinating. And on top of that, they’re asking you to install a bunch of a number of safety features and accessories to these nacelles that, there’s, it’s quite complicated now. It used to be when, years ago, the nacelles tend to be really simple. Now they’ve figured out that they can add on a lot of features to the nacelles, right? Andreas Kipker: And we see that as some of our value add here in trying to take these parts that can be mounted already in advance. That does not have to go into the assembly line at at the OEM facility. And we try to take that over, prepare that, make it as easy as possible, mounting as much as we can on the covers. But then also, um, preparing kits. So they are, so they fit right for installation into the assembly line. So yeah, that, that’s an avenue that we have been trying to go. Going down that road with a higher pace over the past two years. Um, so yeah we, we see the need in certain markets for that, for sure. Joel Saxum: I like the approach because one of the things that you hear, whether you’re at an offshore conference, an onshore conference, or you’re talking to Anybody in development, it’s all about supply chain, right? It’s like supply chain, building out local supply chain. How can we optimize the supply chain? Um, you know, like to the point where procurement, good procurement people in supply chain, people in wind are, they’re worth gold, right? But if, so you guys are taking on a bit of that front end work and alleviating the pressures from the OEMs to get it done themselves is what it sounds like. Andreas Kipker: Absolutely. And, um, you’d say in a growth market that’s making a lot of sense, right? You, yeah, you go to less parts that you need to procure, less logistics that you need to worry about. And we step into that role as a partner. Joel Saxum: Um, so Jupiter Buck sees that sees that I don’t want to say revenue, but let’s see that opportunity and just grabs, grabs it as well. It’s a good place to be. Andreas Kipker: We see it as a way of. servicing our customers much better. So, yes, it gives us more revenue, but it also, and I think more importantly for me, actually gives us an opportunity to move closer to the customer, to become more of a partner, enabling their their higher outputs. And we see that especially in offshore today. As a need that to meet the growth of the next few years there’s a need for someone to step into that role. And we’re happy where we can take it that that we get that opportunity. Joel Saxum: So let me ask you a question with staying in that supply chain procurement kind of mode, what drives or what drove the original decision and what drives the staying power to, to be in Pensacola? Because when you think wind, you don’t think Pensacola, Florida. I guess, unless we’re talking about next era, we don’t talk about Florida that much, but why Pensacola? What’s attractive to that as a manufacturing center? Andreas Kipker: There’s a very clear logic behind it. There’s a big G E Vanova manufacturing plant in Pensacola. So, we are like five miles away from from that plant. And that’s the main reason why we we picked that place in the original space It started on a smaller scale and it’s been growing up to to now being um, one of our biggest plants. Um, so yeah, I’m I’m proud of that journey. And with how we see the wind evolving in US for the next few years, we expect that that to continue. And that’s also why we’re building that out. Yeah. It’s because of proximity to to the market especially to GE that we’re in now. Allen Hall: How much of the engineering is done by Jupyter box? So when you’re working with an OEM say it’s Festus or Nord X or whatever you and you do work with those companies You’re pretty much everybody on the planet at the moment how much are they throwing over to you in terms of engineering saying? Here’s the shape, build it. We have Andreas Kipker: some where we get a fully complete design that we take over. And we, we just take that from a part design until how are we going to manufacture it. And we do only really process engineering on, on, on that. And there’s other parts where we come in very early in the stage. We do load calculations. We help with. Developing the manufacturing, um, taking design for manufacturing into the design. So, so we, some places we step in very early, some places we step in very late and If I get an opportunity, we would like to step in early because that, that, that will, in the end we believe that we can save costs in, in, in such a setup. So, Allen Hall: absolutely. It’s always a smart idea to bring the manufacturer of the component in early because you don’t realize where. You can actually save on costs and improve the process time. And that’s one thing that JupyterBot has been very aggressive about. There’s been a number of changes I know you’ve implemented internally. You want to talk about some of the concepts and ideas that you’ve been implementing to make the nacelles more efficient and lower costs? If Andreas Kipker: we look at some of the some things we’ve done in the past, it has been focused on how to help standardize and improve performance. In, in an industry creating solutions that that we could work with across across the OEMs. If I look at where we are focusing right now, a lot of our focus is on internally, how do we prepare ourselves for the growth? How do we prepare ourselves for standardization of processes? Um, so, so, While we’re of course working on some opportunities to help the industry grow outside, we, there’s a, quite a bit of focus on internally growing right now growing our readiness for the future. Yeah, for Joel Saxum: the next few years. So with that one being said, a question for you then, is the, where’s the majority of your bandwidth going right now? So is it, are you, we had some great conversations with a few OEMs in the last few weeks, and I know like GE say, we’ve been talking about GE a lot here. GE is shifting towards that. We’re going to make a workhorse and we’re going to, you know, we’re going to not have 300 models we can do. And we’re going to get down to brass tacks here. So are you guys building a lot of those, like, um, the Cyprus, the 606. 1 nacelles or where’s most of your bandwidth right now? I would say Andreas Kipker: where we focus right now on ramping up is certainly on supporting the Sierra ramp up in in, in, in US. The Sonsia project naturally takes a lot of attention these these months. But second to that, we have we’ve had a steep ramp up over the past year in in in Europe, um, that that we will continue to see also coming into next year on, on offshore products. So there’s projects around the world that that are at different stages. Um, but I would say offshore in U. S. is where we see. The biggest movements right right now. Joel Saxum: What are, what do you guys do special to the marine bound nacelles? Is there special gaskets? Is there special close outs? So what are they, how are they different than the onshore ones in a general sense? It’s quite similar, right? Where Andreas Kipker: we see the main difference is just the sheer size of it. You see these parts that go on the road? Yes. And then you see these parts that are just too big to ever fit fit on the highway. So, I, that, that’s the first real impression you get when you get close to this. You think, wow, that’s a big part. And then you realize it’s only it’s only one back end corner of of the full nacelle that we’re looking at here. So that’s number one, right? But to, to your point, no, where we see the bigger, the difference on offshore is actually on, um, coating of the steel that go out there. Right. It’s a pretty tough environment that we ship these parts into. So, that’s where the biggest difference is. Joel Saxum: Always a focus offshore coatings because if you have one little nick in the coating like it’s gonna be a month before that’s Rusting and showing and all kinds of stuff. That’s why I’ve seen RFPs for offshore projects And maybe our listeners have never seen this before but when they do offshore projects There’s an RFP right before, or that goes out to all kinds of people, that right before commissioning, they bring in people just to touch up paint. And these are people on ropes, and they’re going up and down the towers, everywhere around that thing, because there cannot be any exposed metal. There cannot be any nicks, dents, anything that happened in, you know, transportation or anything like that. So yeah, coatings. Definitely huge offshore. What I want to, what I’m thinking about right now is, um, when GE originally put the hate, they had the first kind of press releases about the Heliad X platform, and they showed that in a cell and it was like rolling out of a factory door and there was a bunch of people standing around it. And it is literally the size of like a three story home. Like it, it’s massive. Andreas Kipker: It is very big. Um, no but I would like to come back to Joel you have a good point here in that there’s a lot of repair jobs that are being done to make sure that it fits in the end. Right. That’s on us as an industry to help also design solutions that do not need that extra service and attention. Now while your business might appreciate that I would say for us. We appreciate if we can take some of these parts and we can convert them into composites instead, because then corrosion doesn’t, it’s not a problem, right? So, so we see some parts where we actually do change it into corrosion to avoid issues. Joel Saxum: Smart. I like that. I like, I think that’s great as an, as a lifetime O& M cost saver. Convert steel parts into composites if you can, because then you don’t have to deal with rust and that kind of stuff. That’s smart. It Andreas Kipker: of course depends on what we’re talking about. We’re not going to make a tower out of composites. Right. But there are a lot of parts that can be converted into composites up tower. Allen Hall: Well, that’s why it’s important for OEMs to talk to Jupiter Bach early in the process to get those details figured out. It saves yourself a tremendous amount of money and time, and Jupiter Bach clearly has the advantage there. And let’s talk about the end of life, the recycling efforts that are going on across the world at the minute. I mean, the United States is a big proponent of recycling. You are already thinking about that and have some ideas about The nacelle and the spinner itself, those are composite structures that have a lot of useful life in them. What’s the future there? Andreas Kipker: Let’s say today when you design and when our customers design a new turbine, they’re talking about a lifetime of more than 30 years on, on, on average, right? As a useful lifetime. Um, the composites that that we deliver for the vast majority, if not all of it has a lifetime that extends well beyond that with with what it’s the conditions that it’s in. So, we have looked at different avenues we’re both looking at end of life solutions that, um, where we where we follow some of the solutions that the blade manufacturers has been following, right? We see with a lot of interest into projects like decom blades. Um, there’s other avenues as well. When we get more com more, more standardized panels back, it’s easier to find a way to use them to, to build new stuff when it comes back. Um, so that was part of our, um, our thoughts into a design concept as well. We do not have the full solution to all of these problems, but we see that the parts that we’re making today certainly certainly has a very long lead time. Oh, lifetime, sorry. We can find other uses for it at the end of at the end of the current life. Allen Hall: What is the future for JupyterBock? You seem very busy at the moment and wind is growing faster than ever. What’s what’s going to happen over the next year or two for JupyterBock? Andreas Kipker: I’m the super happy version of myself here today because right now things are quite positive. Let’s see how it evolves. But as we see it right now, focus remains on ramping up with the U. S. market, barring any big changes. We expect that to continue for the next for the next two or three years and then find a good stable level after that, um, and then offshore. I know we talked about Offshore being being on a ramp up for already more than a year, but that’s continuing, right? That’s, um, we’re still at the very early stage of of the volumes that Offshore should be able to deliver. Now here, it’s all dependent on on the markets coming together and making sure that the projects are delivered and not do not end up Um, being canceled again. But if we look at the opportunities, yeah, offshore is where we where we still see a lot of growth potential also going forward. So, and stepping into this assembly partnerships with with our customers assembly means a lot of different things. I mean, for me, it’s making their Nacelle manufacturing assembly easier by by delivering larger parts of that. Allen Hall: Well, the next time you’re down in Pensacola, Florida, we need to come down and visit you. I would love to see your facility, because I think you’re doing remarkable things, and the scale of nacelles and even spinners is remarkable, and it’s hard to even envision some of these things. And Jupiter Bach is poised for big growth. Andreas, it’s been Remarkable having you on the podcast. I’ve learned a ton. I know we talked a lot off here. I’ve learned a tremendous amount and, you know, and the best of luck to you over the new year. It’s gonna be a fantastic 2025 for you, I think. Andreas Kipker: I hope it is for us and for the entire industry here. Right. That, that’s what that’s what we all need. So it’s been it’s been a joy chatting here about, about wind and about the passions that we have. So thank you very much for for this opportunity. And I hope have a great time coming forward as well.

On Power-Up this week, LM Wind Power’s method using thermal imaging to estimate power performance, ZF’s system which allows the generator to be rotated independently from the gearbox, and a patent for a flame-throwing trumpet. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com 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: First up this week, Phil, is an idea from LM Wind Power, and this idea uses thermal imaging to turbine turbulence and then to use that data to predict the power calculations and energy production. on an actual wind turbine blade. So this approach is thermal imaging can detect turbulence and losses on a blade. If you can use that data then in a calculation, in a predictive model, then you can pretty well estimate what the power output of a turbine would be. This is a really useful piece of information. If you’re trying to predict the outcome of a wind farm and what the power production will be like. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And this is, this is not new in terms of utilizing, infrared technology. We’ve actually done this before in the industry, not only for, remote inspections and things like that. But to apply this technology to an operational asset where you’re using that output for modeling purposes is unique because what they’re able to actually detect is changes in surface roughness. So when it comes to figuring out leading edge erosion and how much is that actually dinging your performance and your annual energy production, this comes in kind of handy. But it’s my understanding that, LM isn’t the only company that’s been investigating this, right? Allen Hall: Yeah. There’ve been several efforts in the EU to do this. We’ve had some of them on the podcast. The technique is very fascinating, because you wouldn’t think you could see turbulence with an infrared camera and, but you can. And once you do that, then you can use the BEM method of calculating power production, which is how a lot of Blazer design is with the BEM method. The tools are all available. The missing link was just really determining how much turbulence there was on a blade. And this idea makes an infinite amount of sense if it can be put into production. There’s a lot of theoretical things we talk about on the podcast that are really hard to implement. This is going to be one of them. Getting some real thermal images off of blades is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Phil Totaro: Yeah, but it makes for a valuable IP for a company like LM to own and there’s a high degree of likelihood that this technology could be obviously leveraged by GE their parent organization, or even licensed to some of these other companies. Our next Allen Hall: idea is Phil Totaro: from ZF Frederick Allen Hall: Schaffen, AG, and it is a patent that presents an innovative design for maintaining wind turbine gearboxes with integrated generators. Now, the key innovation is a special gearing system that allows the generator rotor to be rotated independently from the gearbox output shaft during maintenance. And this enables technicians to safely position and lock the rotor for service without having to completely remove the gearbox. There’s a lot of operational improvements. If this could be done, Phil, is this being implemented anywhere? Have you seen it out in the field? Phil Totaro: Yes, actually. So that’s a really great question because, ZF is obviously a pioneer in gearbox technology and has designed a lot of the going back a number of years, 15, 20 years, they were the pioneer of a lot of the large capacity. Gearboxes, they famously brought a gearbox for a 10 megawatt wind turbine to the Wind Energy Hamburg event one year. And, we’re starting to get even bigger. But you mentioned something else that was pretty key to this, which is, There’s a lot of companies that are starting to shift towards this kind of integrated semi direct drive, what they call semi direct drive. It’s basically a permanent magnet generator connected and coupled to a, at least a two or maybe three stage gearbox. So that you can you know, at least get a a decent RPM going. The higher the RPM you can get on the generator, the more efficient and smaller the air gap you can usually maintain on the generator. So having that technology implemented, but also a way to facilitate service, because as you mentioned, in the past with, without this technology and without this design, somebody wanted to. service a and an integrated generator design, particularly on a larger onshore or what this was originally designed for, which is an offshore machine. You would have to bring out a big crane. And you might have to actually physically decouple, or you could try using one of these onboard cranes. There’s a few companies out there that are obviously doing that technology as well. But it still meant you had to physically decouple. So the fact that they’ve designed something that is integrated into the system that allows you to decouple without physical removal of the gearbox or the generator, that’s actually very useful from a maintenance standpoint. And that’s why this is one of the more Useful inventions and clever inventions that is, actually has a practical purpose in the industry. Allen Hall: Now for our fun patent of the week is a 1981 application that describes a trumpet modified to shoot controlled flames. from its bell. Now the inventor created the system using a butane cartridge mounted on the trumpet’s body with a valve mechanism allowing the musician to control the gas flow and a spark wheel ignition system at the bell that creates an impressive flame shooting out the end of the trumpet. Now, Phil, in the era of Michael Jackson getting his hair caught on fire from pyrotechnics, this idea seemed that it would have a very short lifetime, because that happened just after this patent would have been released. Phil Totaro: Yeah, and I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen anybody do this in real life with a flamethrower trumpet, although Ron Burgundy famously did have his flamethrowing flute in Anchorman, cool. Hollywood at least likes ideas like this, and maybe that’s the only way we can ever see it implemented. Allen Hall: Would they have had to pay rights for that, to put that in the movie? Even though it’s a trumpet that’s shown in the patents, would it have been pretty much any instrument that shot off flames that was blown into a flute or a trumpet? I Phil Totaro: mean, the mechanism is still the same. Alan, this is actually a really good and important question for everybody to hear and understand. I actually don’t think so, because the patent application we’re talking about for the trumpet, it’s specific to a trumpet. And so that, that actually comes into play a lot in even, the wind energy sector that we talk about, because there’s all kinds of ideas that people have where they write the patent claims very specifically to offshore wind or onshore wind. And you’ll also see companies go the other direction where they write something highly generic, whether it’s related to a generator or a blade. They may not say. A wind turbine blade. They may even be talking about utilizing the technology on a fan blade in a turbo generator or an airplane engine. So to answer your question, no, I don’t think they owe royalties for this guy’s flamethrowing trumpet patent. But it’s, it does actually make a big difference the way you construct your claims because if flamethrower trumpet man had had just been, a little less specific about this being a trumpet in his patent claims, then he might’ve been able to get some royalties out of I think it was Warner Brothers that was the producer and distributor of of Anchorman. So who knows? Maybe Will Ferrell owns the patent for Allen Hall: the flamethrowing flute.

Allen, Joel, and Phil discuss the growing popularity of return-to-office mandates. New York state has signed a climate change superfund act, making companies pay for pollution retroactively. And Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project should be successfully finished in 2026. 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! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Newark launches a landmark challenge to Big Energy. Dominion Energy proves offshore wind can work in America and the great return to office debate hits the wind industry. All this, plus much more. You’re listening to 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. Allen Hall: Hey Uptime community, want to help shape the future of your favorite wind energy podcast? Take our quick 5 minute survey at UptimeWindEnergy.com com for a chance to win an exclusive Your insights matter to us, whether you’re a long time listener or just joined us. Please go to uptimewindenergy. com and complete the survey. We would appreciate it. And then, if you haven’t registered for Wind Energy O& M Australia, now’s the time to get on that because we’re gonna have a great time down in Melbourne, and we’ll be with bunch of industry leaders on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne. It’s a great time to discuss leading edge erosion, lightning protection, life extension, CMS, all the things that we talk about all over the world. We’re going to focus on the Australian market and we’ll have industry experts from our own Sky Specs, Tilt Renewables, GE, Vernova, RigCom, Whirly, Eelogix, Ping and many more. So reserve your spot now by visiting www. WindAustralia. com. It’s time to transform your safety program at Active Training Team’s Free Houston Expo on January 24th. Experience the innovative training methods that are revolutionizing the energy sector. And let’s face it, the era of laptop training is over. Is Dead Active training team uses real actors live humans on site to place your team members in real world situations. Now there’s limited spots available. And to secure your spot, you need to go to active Training team.us/contact, or email florence@activetrainingteam.co. 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. Allen Hall: All right. 2025 is going to be an exciting year for the return to office. Now, a lot of companies are mandating the return to office, but the attendance hasn’t been so great. The. Office attendance reached about 62 percent at pre pandemic levels, according to Betty. And it’s planned to increase to almost 70%. So there’s 30 percent of society that hasn’t really returned to office. Now, as we have seen on X and on With Amazon and a number of other tech companies, they are really pushing for it to get back in the office, and they’ve seen about an 11 percent rise in office attendance, and it is becoming mandated. So Amazon is requiring three days and plans to reach five days during 2025. Apple requires Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus one team day in the office. And Disney’s mandated four days. Minimum on site, but in the wind industry, we’re haven’t really seen that yet. There’s a lot of offices, Joel, you and I have been to it over the last six months or so. Which are still pretty empty. Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s the nature of the work too, right? Wind is distributed, right? It’s all over the place. So when you’re saying, Hey, I’d love to go talk to, this team of engineers. In general, that team of engineers is spread all over the country anyways. You may have one in Chicago and one in Houston and one in. wherever South Carolina or whatnot. So you don’t it’s an odd thing, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the wind industry does remote work pretty well. Just because we’ve always had to do it, right? You’re always if you’re a back office engineer, or if you’re an asset manager, if you’re in procurement, you’ve always been dealing with remote sites since wind has been a thing, so it’s not something that’s crazy new for us to do well. The other side of it is, I think that this is a personal thing from business wise. I’m not 100 percent opposed to the back in office thing. I don’t like the idea of mandate four or five days a week, but I think there is value that you get out of sitting face to face with team members that you just can’t get over teams. And I think that extends to a lot of things in business. Right now I talk with salespeople all the time, sales and revenue generation and client facing and it’s almost like in some respects. People have forgot how to do that part of business in person. If that, does that, does that make sense? Phil, have you seen that in your BD activities? Phil Totaro: Yeah. The reality of it is that people would still rather shake hands than, as a way to, to close a business deal than, do it remotely. It’s pretty rare to do a big deal having never met face to face including from my own company but even from my experience. Before the pandemic, we had an office in Houston, and it was, it wasn’t necessarily mandatory to come into the office all the time, but it was a good idea to get people to, to come together. Since the pandemic, I’ve allowed everyone to work remotely, because frankly, I work remotely too, for the last 14 or 15 years since I started the company, because prior to the pandemic, I was traveling all the time as well. Business development reasons. And my own philosophy on it is look, you’re even though all my employees are contract employees, the reality of it is they’re also, on salary, they are not chained to a desk nine to five. The idea is you get your job done and you get your compensation for doing the, helping us achieve the goals and objectives as the company. And the reality of that is that if you can work from the beach, I don’t care, but if you don’t get your job done, you’re out. And that’s, that sounds harsh, but that’s just the reality of how we’ve done things. It’s a new version of leadership. Allen Hall: It is a new version of leadership. And the thing about the wind industry is there’s so much of the technician side, which has to be on site and has to be there every day and has to put in that 40 plus hours a week. And then when you get to the sort of the front office people, they seem to have dispersed a little bit. I don’t know how that culture works internally. I’m actually a little concerned for some of the companies because the technician side has to be a little bit upset with this. It’s Hey, when I need. That engineer, I really need that person to be here. If they’re not in the office, that can be a little bit difficult. I would see those conflicts really arising this year in particular. Phil Totaro: It’s possible because, but what’s also interesting about it is that there’s a lot of companies and you mentioned active training team in the intro, Alan, that a lot of companies are trying to leverage. More technology to enable onsite technicians to do their job more efficiently, including you could have somebody leveraging, remote inspection technology that then goes back to an office for an engineer to review it, then that, the end result of that analysis goes back out in the field to tell the technician what to do. And so there’s a whole chain that, that has to be doing their job. But again my point, is, and I take what Joel’s saying here, but my point is that it doesn’t really matter where they are when they perform their job function as long as they’re doing it to make sure that they’re not the weak link in that chain for, making sure assets perform to a, to an operationally sound level. Allen Hall: Joel, do you think you’ll see people leave? Companies this year because they’re forced back in the office. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think the really important thing to consider here is exactly what you’re saying Alan is this is a this will be Whether it’s to what’s supposed to be temporary or will be permanent or whatever. This is a cultural change within a company this is a change management thing that needs to be handled very well. And if it’s not handled properly some companies are using it as a tool to flush people. They’re like we’ve got 2000 people. We’re going to mandate it back to office. And you got part of them just saying we’re not coming. Okay, cool. Then you’re released. All right. Now we’re down to, 1800 employees that we have to pay. So it’s a tactic that’s being used to force people out. But I just think that if you’re. So take this note, if you’re a person that’s in charge of this mandate or in charge of making sure this mandate goes well, whether you’re in HR or whatever, make sure you have a good plan and it’s been spot through and you understand what’s going to happen because you probably will lose some people if you’re going to force this and just make sure that the transition back to an in office thing goes well because if it’s done poorly, I think it can have big reverberations around any company. Allen Hall: And Phil, middle management has been getting decimated over the last two or three years since COVID. It’s a really hard thing to manage if everybody is off site all the time and you’re trying to run this organization, you’re being held accountable for numbers, in particular, and schedule dates that if you got people all over the place, it does make it hard to get that momentum built up, doesn’t it? Phil Totaro: Yeah, that’s a good point. And I think that, with what we’ve been talking about with, a return to office and be the how it’s applicable to the wind industry. I think in a larger company in general, it might be more important for people to be. Not necessarily back in an office at all times, but what Joel was mentioning, to have that face to face collaboration more frequently than it, it is necessarily for a smaller, more nimble company. Because it just depends on, how quickly you need to be able to react and whether or not everybody’s bought into the vision for what you’re trying to achieve, whether it’s your corporate goals at the top level the middle management level where they have to get, the people with boots on the ground to, execute. That’s where the rubber meets the road. Almost literally. When you talk about getting You know these corporate objectives executed on, you need to have everybody on the same page being able to do that. And in a, if you want to manage your smaller team in a way where, some people can work remote, As long as you’re making it happen, that’s fine, but as you mentioned, Alan, people are responsible for hitting their numbers, and if they’re not doing it, then they are going to be on the chopping block. Allen Hall: If there’s a number of people that still want to work from home, which I think that there are, how are they going to do it? Are they looking to get into another industry? Are they looking to become consultants? Are they looking to change their job description where they can do this? How do they remain remote? When there’s going to be a big pull to get them back in the office. Joel Saxum: I think you’ll see a lot of that. The future, I believe that the future of work is consultants. Specialists that can work for multiple people and do certain things. And I think that’s what we’ve seen with the layoffs at GELM, all the other things. We’ve seen a lot of independent consultants pop up because it gives people more control over their, their day to day, their future, their, whatever they want to, whatever they want to do. So I think that you may see some people do this. The other one is when you hire on this is a, thing from within my family household, when you hire on, if you want to be remote, make sure that it says remote worker in your job offer, because then if they try to come back at a later date and say, you have to return to office, say I signed a contract that says I’m a remote worker. Allen Hall: Yeah. Still doesn’t mean they can’t cancel your contract, but I do think that does help to clarify the situation because a lot of times people have gone remote. Just because of situations family issues, whatever, and they end up staying remote and it does create this little conflict at the end where management’s saying, Hey, you were in the office six months ago. I really need you back here because we’ve got these big projects we’re supposed to finish. Gonna need people here. And that’s, I think, where the conflict really begins to become escalated. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PESWind. com today. There’s been two big news articles coming out of New York State. The first is Governor Hochul has signed a 75 billion climate change superfund act requiring large oil and gas companies to pay for climate resilience projects across the state. Now this, New law targets companies that have emitted over 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases between 2000 and 2018. The Department of Environmental Conservation will oversee the implementation, identifying the highest emitters, and managing payment collections. And this is coupled to a couple of the things that are happening in your state, the second being that they’re blocking the northern access gas pipeline, which was a 500 million project that was running from Pennsylvania towards the Midwest and part of it went through Western New York and New York doesn’t want it. So it’s canceling that project. It’s about 1, 600 construction jobs and tax revenue for rural counties. Now Joel, New York State is putting itself in a real bind here if they’re going to hit oil and gas companies with a 75 billion tax, and then cutting off oil and gas exploration, which they’re doing, have done for a number of years, and renewables are not really backing up their electricity grid and their power infrastructure. Where is New York headed? Joel Saxum: I think this is a classic case to me of biting the hand that feeds if you will oil and gas industry. First off. Like I address the $75 billion initiative in this New York Climate Change Super Fund Act. How you’re going to tell each of these companies what they actually produced in greenhouse gases between 2000 and 2018. And then basically fining them for something that they did in the past that was not legislated when it happened. I don’t know how you’re gonna manage any of this. The first thing I see is some other circuit court judge striking this down, or the first time that the state of New York tries to send Exxon Mobil an initial, a bill of 200 plus million dollars. Exxon’s gonna laugh, first off, and then they’re gonna send their lawyers to Albany to fix this. Because I think that one of the things in New York is New York City and Albany may want things, but New York as a state Is not the same. There’s a lot of great do gooding for the climate, which I’m all for. However, you need to have a backup plan. And what I see for them now is rolling brownouts or blackouts in the future because they don’t have a backup plan for their Phil Totaro: energy. This is what happened in California in 2004 and led to the governor being ousted. Because they didn’t, they just didn’t plan ahead with their, it wasn’t triggered by them mandating a super fund and all that sort of thing, but they didn’t invest enough in the energy infrastructure to the point where they could avoid the rolling brownouts and blackouts. And people got so mad about it that they just got rid of who was it, Gray Davis? As governor. I can see why they’re putting something in place that would necessarily go and look back on the amount of emissions. By the way, Joel, they can’t measure how much the emissions that they produced they can measure NOx and SOx emissions out of the different plants and stuff like that. So there are ways of monitoring how much was produced and that’s not likely to be the subject of debate. What is the other thing you mentioned, which is, why am I being taxed on something that I wasn’t being, regulated on before or taxed on before? If you’re going to implement a new, yeah, if you’re going to implement something new, make it from today forward, not retroactively back, to the year 2000, when I, I would have run my plant differently if I knew I was going to be taxed for it later. It’s just a preposterous approach. Allen Hall: I guess it comes back to my question. Can you tax a company for something they did outside of your state like that? How does that work? You can say there’s carbon dioxide in the air, sure, but there’s carbon dioxide everywhere. How much do you associate with a particular oil company? I know you can quasi measure that, Phil. But realistically, are you going to do this to a Saudi based company? How does this work? Where are you going to send the bill? Phil Totaro: Let’s also take the example of when Spain tried to apply retroactive taxes on wind farms. It caused absolute chaos over there and for years, nobody wanted to even build new wind farms, let alone operate the old ones that, that they had and it’s what caused a lot of these, wind farms in Spain to become so decrepit at this point. Joel Saxum: But I think that’s what New York State is doing, so this, let’s set this one as an example. But New York State right now, if you watch what they’re doing to Taxes and different things. Like it’s becoming a state that you don’t want to do business in. Like I, I wouldn’t you’d never find, unless I had to be in New York city for something, I wouldn’t, set up a company there because of the tax laws and the problems, it’s the same thing. Like the Cook County, the city of Chicago, where the taxes are so much higher than all the surrounding areas. Like I wouldn’t do business there. That’s crazy. So what they’re going to end up doing by trying to implement all these things is they’re just going to drive business away because they’re on, basically, this is untrustworthy. This thing to me is, Allen Hall: yeah, you can’t plan ahead in New York right now. If you’re a business, it makes it really hard because the energy prices are just going to skyrocket when you start doing this, that’s an inevitable outcome of this dealing with damaged blades. Don’t let slower pairs. Keep your turbines down. Blade platforms get you back up and running fast. Blade Platform’s truck mounted platforms reach up to 100 meters, allowing for a quick setup, improved safety, and efficient repairs. Book soon to secure your spot and experience a difference in blade access, speed, and efficiency. Visit bladeplatforms. com and get started today. I want to move on to something that is successful, which is Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, which is half way. Mark in construction, and remember that’s a 176 Siemens Gamesa turbine off the coast of Virginia, which is supposed to complete in late 2026. And as far as I can tell, and I’ve been watching this pretty closely over the last several months. At least the installations and all the deployments and all the activity has gone relatively smoothly compared to some other projects in the U. S. I would assume that’s just because of the massive effort and the planning that went into it ahead of time. To get this thing right, Phil, right? Phil Totaro: We’ve talked on the show before about like, why is Dominion just smooth sailing while everybody else is having all these problems? And a couple of things come to mind about it. Number one, Dominion’s already the, utility in Virginia that is off taking the power so they don’t have to haggle with the utility companies or the state or whatever, some state regulator. about how to structure the PPA and how much to pay for it, this, that, and whatever. They’re off taking the power and selling it to, utility customers whether it’s commercial or residential. And making whatever margin they can make on, the generation cost versus the ultimate sale price. The second thing is that Dominion, remember, budgeted, I think it was 9. 8 billion for this project, which is frankly a rather large amount of money. And yes, that does include their transmission infrastructure and everything too. But they’ve got plenty of what do you call it? Management reserve. In there in case they run into any problems which they frankly haven’t as far as the installation and construction goes they’re I think just a fraction over 50 percent done with the the foundations now. They paused for the winter and they’re going to resume in the spring. I think the only thing I’ve heard of that was any kind of a complaint was some of the locals complaining about some of the noise from the monopile driving. But, the thing is so far offshore that I’m not even sure really how anybody can complain about that. This looks like it’s going to be probably one of the better run projects not only in the United States, but potentially in the world. Joel Saxum: I think the big thing there that you touched on, Phil, is just a reduction of stakeholders. Yeah. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Exactly. There’s not there’s just a few really good cooks and they’re getting it done quietly down there for this coastal Virginia offshore wind farm. And I think that’s the big part. It’s difficult to pull off a large capital project, and it doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s a freaking football stadium, a bridge, a highway, an offshore wind farm, whatever, it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s difficult when you have a lot of stakeholders, but when you reduce that down to the number of decision makers can get things through the pipeline quicker, and you can make operational decisions quicker, this is the result you have. Allen Hall: They’re expected to save their customers 3 billion in fuel costs over the first decade of operation. And it’s going to serve like 25 percent of their residential customers. This is a huge project for them. And it’s going really well, so congratulations to Dominion Energy. It’s remarkable. And let’s close this project out Joel Saxum: with success. The Wind Farm of the Week this week is the Karankawa Wind Farm by Avangrid Renewables down in Texas. The project reached Commercial operation in December of 2019. And it is a mix of 124 GE turbines from 2. 3 to 2. 5, two. So if you’re in the wind industry, these is the one 16 meter rotors and the one 27 meter rotors. Some interesting things it’s doing down there in Texas is they. Make sure that they looked after the whooping cranes. If you’re been along the South Texas coastline, that kind of intermediate area between the ocean and the protection islands and the marshes is a very sensitive ecosystem. This wind farm being just outside of that, they took care of the whooping cranes in the area as, By burying all of the electrical cable that was used on site. So instead of leaving power lines up above ground, they buried every single one of them over 90 miles of electrical lines within this wind farm to protect for those wind farms. Or to peck for those whooping cranes. So the interesting thing here, after achieving commercial operation, the facility has 12 full time employees and it will provide over 125 million in taxes and over 3 million annually, that is. Supporting schools, public health, fire, library, and other public services in the area. So the Karankawa Wind Farm by Avon Grid Renewables down there in South Central Texas, you are the wind farm of the week. That’s going to do it for Allen Hall: this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. And subscribe to our substack, Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.