The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week we discuss the recent GE Vernova investor call, discussing the company’s current situation, future plans, and how the US market will react. We also cover an article by TRESIOS from PES Wind Magazine about their offshore construction business. Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – 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: In an extraordinary display of memory and pattern recognition, a man who doesn’t speak Spanish has dominated the Spanish World Scrabble Championships. Nigel Richards, a New Zealander living in Malaysia, defeated 145 competitors and won 22 consecutive matches to claim the title in Grenada, Spain. Known as the quote, Tiger Woods of Scrabble, Richards has mastered the game across multiple languages despite not speaking them. He has a unique ability to memorize dictionaries without understanding anything what the words mean, and has led him to winning nearly 200 tournaments, including French in 2015 and 2018. Now, that is crazy, guys. Did you ever meet somebody with that kind of photographic memory, and you’re like, that is a very odd person? If you have done it, if you’ve won championships in Spanish and French, and I assume English, wow, that is a unique person. Joel Saxum: Is there money to be won playing Scrabble? Allen Hall: Evidently there is because he’s won so many championships. It’s the, from all the information I could find online he, this guy is super human in how he does this. According to some of his friends, he can look at a page of words and remember all those words. It’s like a photographic memory, even though he couldn’t carry a conversation in French or Spanish at all, he can’t carry one. It’s just understanding how words go together. Phil Totaro: It’s technically a I forget specifically what it’s called, but it’s actually technically a form of autism that allows you to do that. allows a person to do that. It’s still an astonishing talent. So Joel Saxum: what I would say to as a segue into the show today is some people have an optimized electrical grid in their brain and it works better. 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. Allen Hall: In the latest edition of PES Wind Magazine, which you can download at PESWind. com, a good article from Tresios, and I did not know that business very well until I read the article. It’s a big subsea construction and marine services company. And they’ve actually reorganized themselves because there’s so much offshore wind work that they’re, they have divided into basically two sections to do that, subseas construction and marine services. And they have a third division because there’s so much work in offshore wind. They have a sort of a human resources division. It’s a company, workforce company called Mr. James. You can go to the Mr. James website. It’s actually quite good. It’s one of the better human resource workforce websites that I’ve ever seen, honestly. It’s pretty cool. So when you’re looking for people to work at sea, Mr. James is not a bad place to go look for those people. But Joel the interesting thing about this is that there’s so much activity around wind. And you just don’t see all this work that’s happening, but it’s major construction work. You got to know what you’re doing out there and Trecios is one of those companies. The Joel Saxum: tough thing with Allen Hall: offshore Joel Saxum: construction is like the general public doesn’t see it, right? As for understanding, like you drive down the highway, high rises going up, cranes, big machines building the highway. So it’s so visible and you can understand it a little bit. But when you go offshore, it’s just, it’s it’s imaginary to most people to see Oh, you see these turbines in the water. Great. The one I always compare it to Allen, you and I talk about this often is like the subsea oil and gas infrastructures. Same thing with wind. Like you see these towers and the big blades up there, but you don’t see all the stuff that happens below the surface. The pile driving, the rock dumps, the cable lays, the trenching, all of the geo geophysical work that has to be done beforehand. There’s so much to do there and it’s inherently complex, right? Because almost everything you do outside of basically an offshore wind driving monopiles is remote work. So you’re working with ROVs. You don’t actually have people on it. You have, robotics and you’re dealing in sea states and keeping the vessel steady and customizing that vessel to be able to work with the kit that you need for that specific job. So having people like Tresios that have a lot of experience, it says, we’re reading the article here, doing a little research, the founders both previously worked for Allseas, huge offshore construction company. So these kinds of people that you grab for a construction project like this, they have these skill sets. They’re very specialized, right? I’ve been on projects before. We’re like, Hey, we need this one person to come in because they have the knowledge of how to do this. And that person costs 2, 500 a day. That’s the kind of crazy stuff that happens in offshore construction. Having a partner like Trecios, it has a lot of experience. They have the body shop part figured out. They know how to upfit vessels. They know how to go from feed study all the way through construction as a full on EPC. They’re the partner, the kind of partner you want to have. Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s quite remarkable. So if you want to learn all the things that TRESIOS is doing, just go to peswind.com ,download your issue and give it a good read. There’s a lot of great articles in this issue. This. This quarter. 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. All Allen Hall: right, GE just held an investor update as we’re recording this. It happened last night. Very interesting. GE Vernova is broken into the three main parts. They have a gas turbine division. They have an a switch transformer division. And they have the wind energy division. So they call different titles, but it’s essentially it. So she, understand what products are they’re serving there. So it’s really three different businesses that are all wrapped together, but it’s all about electrification. That’s where their emphasis is. That business is seeing tremendous growth in gas turbines, and it’s seeing really good growth in electrification, the switchgear and transformers that it’s delivering and the the, Outlook for that is fantastic. They’re sold out through 2028 for a lot of equipment already. They’re selling slots into 2029 right now, but the wind division, not so much. All right. So the wind divisions is reporting about a negative 10 and a half a percent EBITDA margin in 2023, but they’re expecting that to be have about a 50 percent improvement in 2024. Still negative, but half what it was, which is good. And they’re projecting EBITDA losses between 200 and 400 million into 2025. And that is all, or vastly all, from offshore. The offshore wind business is really dragging them down in terms of numbers, right? So they had the blade break at Dogger Bank and they had blades break at Vineyard. That and the slowdown of those projects really are pushing them to the right, which they wanted to have done sometime next year. Whatever now you’re talking about. 26 ish timeframe when they’re going to be wrapped up. And that is killing them because you can imagine, Joel, as you pointed out numerous times, ships are expensive and if you’re not producing, putting turbines up, you’re just spending money. And that’s what’s happening. Onshore, which is the real focus here, GE has not taken an order for offshore in 35, 37 months. And they don’t plan to take any more, so their focus is onshore. The vast majority of the onshore sales are in the United States, like 80 percent of the business is going to be in the United States, which kind of makes sense. But the projection of revenue is flat. So 2024 is expected to be flat. It’s roughly what it was last year, about almost 10 billion, 9 billion, 10 billion. And they’re projecting it’s going to be down a little bit in 2025. As I think Phil pointed out a while ago. They’re planning to make about 2, 000 wind turbines, and Joel and I had talked to a couple other people and involved with that, and he said, GE’s planning to make about 2, 000 wind turbines. They have the capability to make 4, 000. Their break even’s at 1, 000 for onshore. So they’re gonna get to 1, 000, be break even, make another 1, 000 more, and that’s essentially it. They have a capability to do twice that, but they have no plans to do it right now. Because they’re really focused on improving the quality. And that is the big driver. I mentioned in the Slack chat Also that GE said the word lean probably a thousand times during that hour and a half. One for each turbine. Pretty much. Everything was lean this, lean that. And what, when GE people say lean, they mean cut. That’s what that means. They are trying to reduce costs, because there’s not much they’re going to be able to do in wind in terms of raising prices. The concern here is we’re not going to see a lot of growth in wind. In fact, they’re projecting pretty flat growth. So that leads me to the question of what is going to happen to wind if GE is not driving it in the United States? Is it really going to be stagnant? Is it just repowering projects just to hit the PTC or what is driving that sort of slowdown in wind? Joel Saxum: I think one thing to, to add to your anecdotal comments to Alan is the statements that they made. 2024 revenue expected to be flat, right? And 2024 expecting improvements with nearly 50 percent EBITDA improvement. Only means cuts, right? If your revenue’s flat and you’re gonna get up your EBITDA, you gotta cut some fat somewhere. You gotta be doing something. And so they say it right in their statements, this is what we’re gonna do. What I see for the, the next few years, this is the we know that there’s players that are basically side by side developers with GE, right? We know NextEra’s gonna be putting in some GE turbines. And their big clients, I’m sure are going to soak up a lot of that market store, that share of the volume. Because basically it’s like, Alan, you and I were having the conversation about doing this thing like aerospace does. Hey, this is the capacity. We’ll sell you a slot in that capacity. And if you don’t like it or someone wants more then the prices just go up. Those are the slots. Sorry. That’s what’s available. I think that for GE as a company, that’s probably, or it’s a GE playbook thing, right? That’s a good way to get back to EBITDA and control getting back to profitable in a few years, writing that ship. What that does for the overall wind industry. I think it continues to leave a gap. So so the last few years we’ve been talking about a gap from Siemens Gamesa, right? When they stopped selling their turbines. They didn’t install many. Like, when you look at the install capacity in the United States, there’s a lot of Siemens 2. 3s and some, of that type size, these B53, B59 blade machines. But there’s not a whole lot of those when they started putting in the SG145s and stuff. There’s not a whole lot of them. Then you have that gap. B or GE will continue to put turbines in, but it might not be enough to satisfy the consumption of that development market. People will look to Vesta’s more. People may look to, you may see some Nordics turbines getting installed because I think that if you’re saying 2000 turbines a year, we’re going to install, and that’s not just the U S we know that 80 percent of that 75, 80 percent of that’s probably us, but we know that some of those are going elsewhere in the world. So that you say 1500 turbines a year from GE. That’s four, five, six big wind farms. And we know that Sun Z is already going to soak up, how many hundred of these things. So that leaves a lot of space for other players to come in and get some installed capacity numbers. That’s my opinion. I think we’re going to install a lot more than 1, 500 turbines in the United States in a per year, the next few years. Phil, what do you think? Phil Totaro: Yeah, I agreed, but. Keep in mind that the reason why everybody’s, revised their forecasts is because of the outcome of the election and everybody’s expecting, as we’ve talked about, there’s going to be, a spillover into 25 and 26 of everything that’s in the interconnection queue that can get money to get built, but that’s a finite amount of projects and that’s why GE’s saying it’s a finite amount of capacity that they’re going to serve. In that market I don’t necessarily expect that obviously Nordex wants to expand their footprint Siemens wants to come back into the US market, but they haven’t really done so with any brand new orders yet and Vestas is here and, is slugging it out with GE, but at the end of the day, I think everybody’s looking at a market where I don’t know how many times we’ve said it, probably just as many times I’ve said the word inflation and interest rates on the show as, as much as, GE said lean in their investor update last night. The reality is as long as interest rates are high, fewer projects are getting built. It’s just, that’s the reality, which means fewer turbines, it trickles down through the supply chain. Why Allen Hall: such a huge growth in gas turbines then? Phil Totaro: Because there’s still demand for electricity actually, electricity demand is still increasing, but because Oil and gas prices are still relatively stable to high and that kind of segment of the business is looking more profitable than wind or solar that frankly requires a lot more transmission build out. Rosemary Barnes: But also aren’t gas peakers quick and cheap to build, right? So if you. aren’t sure about the future. It doesn’t cost as much to, to build a gas plant as a gas peaker plant, as it does to build, a wind farm and batteries. Yeah. And also if you’re not sure when delaying making a decision, you eventually delay and delay long enough that you’ve got no choice but to, put in something like that. I think that’s part of it. Joel Saxum: I think transmission as well, Rosemary, on the same side, it’s easier to connect A peaker plant like that to a transmission than it is to put a wind farm where it might be intermittent and it might not be, you need, Alan, we’ve said before Hitachi, GE, all these switch gear and converter. Companies are way out with backlog. So it’s easier to put on more traditional power than to put on these more complex stuff. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But I think it must be like a partly US specific scenarios, right? Because the globe, wind isn’t stagnating anymore. We, we’re seeing growth again globally with wind, maybe, not as much as it could be or as much as we would hope, but I don’t think that interest rates are high everywhere. So I don’t think that that fully explains it. I think transmission is more of a problem than in the U S than elsewhere, but again, it’s not the only place that’s struggling with transmission. So yeah, I want to know, you guys are there on the ground. What is it about the U S? Last time, even Trump, last time. Trump was in, there was actually, a little surge in wind installations, probably by people, like you say Phil trying to try to get in before the, yeah, the door slammed shut. Yes it’s a hard one for me as an outsider to figure out. Phil Totaro: The reason, yes, transmission’s a big issue, but the reason we keep saying interest rates are probably the dominant thing is because there’s a finite amount of money that can be invested right now, and the sentiment amongst investors is, I’d rather put my money into oil and gas that’s giving me a certain degree of certainty and, you I can project my return a lot more clearly and cleanly than I can with, and this is the big problem and the big issue that, that a lot of people have is when you’ve got an administration coming in and you don’t know what they’re going to do, investors are just going to sit on the sidelines and not spend the money they could be spending, or they’re going to go spend it someplace else rather than in renewables. Cheers. And that’s the issue is, it, if you’re expecting chaos or uncertainty, you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna want to get in the middle of it. It’s, it is, that’s why it’s also, I think, a uniquely, U. S. kind of a challenge it’s much more of a scenario like in Australia, for example, where If you get sufficient transmission buildout, then it facilitates the buildout of renewable projects, even in a high interest rate environment, because you have the opportunity for offtake. We have a finite opportunity for offtake, and that’s right now being gobbled up by investors that want to put money into, gas projects gas turbine power generation projects rather than grid, batteries, and renewable power Allen Hall: generation. So the big push appears to be AI in data centers. From the gas turbine business it sounded like a number of these gas turbines are going to end up in either Texas or Louisiana because they could get permitted Rosemary Barnes: quicker. Allen Hall: And the data centers were going to be down there for a variety of reasons, so it sounds like there’s a lot of capacity being purchased trying to pick up those slots of, I’m going to put a data center down in Texas, I’m going to need something to power it, I’m going to gas because I can plug into the gas infrastructure that exists in Texas and Louisiana and it’s a quick and dirty way to, to do it. The troubling thing about it is it’s the quick and the dirty way to do it. Why the companies that are involved in those data centers, which are the Googles, the Metas, the, the SpaceX’s, the Tesla’s, the all those companies that are in that space, you would think that they want to have something that’s a little more technical. Cleaner, natural gas is not, obviously it’s way better than coal, but if you had the opportunity to do something wind or solar, you’d think that they’d be doing it maybe it’s a time frame? Rosemary Barnes: But they are they’re doing everything, like when they’re directly purchasing electricity it usually is through something clean. You’ve seen announcements with Nuclear, wind, solar, batteries, geothermal is a big one. So it’s like everything. They need electricity no matter what. I think a lot of it is also perspective. Like they’re a lot more worried about. Not being able to take an opportunity than they are in making sure that they don’t, procure too much data center capacity. So I’m not sure that the amount of activity is really representative of what will actually happen. But then a lot of it as well is utilities saying, we know that data centers are interested in connecting here, so we need more electricity and we need it fast, and the only way we can do that is with gas. And partly I think that’s because, utilities mostly everywhere around the world are highly incentivized to say, we’ve got capacities about to increase massively, we need to invest because it’s that investment is the only way that they can increase their rates and get a, guaranteed return on any investment they make. If you look back through history, we’ve had really flat electricity yeah, like growth in electricity demand over the last couple of decades. And still, if you look back at utilities predictions for what they would see in the future, it’s been a lot, it, they’ve on average been predicting quite a lot of growth. Actually, I was listening to a podcast. I think it was that one with Jesse Jenkins. Whatever it’s called, shift key or something like that. Anyway, and they were saying that some, one of them had done some research recently and looked at. The projections that utility companies make, and on average, they’re predicting two and a half percent more than the reality of what growth has been. And it sounds like not a big gap, but when you think that the real growth has been basically zero and they’re consistently estimating two and a half percent more than that, you can see that it was a real bias towards yeah, overestimating. And. In a lot of ways, that makes sense because you don’t want to find yourself short, right? If you’re an elected official or, in charge of running an electricity utility, then Yeah, people really don’t want any shortfalls. They’d be, they don’t want to pay too much, but they’d probably rather pay a bit more than have a lot of blackouts. So yeah, I think that like the story that gets told is not as predictive of the future as it maybe sounds on first blush. And I think that, yeah, when you look at. I don’t know, when we look back in a few years, I think that we will likely think, Oh, wow, everyone like freaked out over data centers, but it wasn’t that big a deal. I know currently data centers use less electricity in the US than televisions do. Like even if you double that, it’s still it’s not the electricity grid’s going to crash yeah, kind of scenario. So it’s. Significant. And for sure, electricity demand is increasing and is going to increase because, we’re trying to electrify everything. So I don’t want to disagree that it’s a challenge, but I think it does matter what proportion we think is going to be for data centers and also, like what kinds of data centers, because people think, Oh, this means like always on 24, seven electricity, there’s that’s, all that data center needs and all that we’re going to need in the future is going to be dominating electricity grids. But I think actually we’re not going to see as dramatic a change in the demand profile from what we see today by adding another, like 5 percent of like pretty constant around the clock. Demand, it’s not going to change curves too much. So yeah I tend to think that the future is going to look more like the past than what people are currently making it out to be. Joel Saxum: But I think you made an argument there for some of these, some of the constant powered baseload things, because. If I’m talking about my house, right? There’s a certain time of the day when wind and solar is usually pretty decent that the peak load is here. Whereas if these things run in all the time, 24 7, that you have to even that load out with something that can run like if you’re talking renewables like hydro or geothermal, it’s a better option for data center type driven things than would be wind or solar. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. If it’s not going on to the electricity grid, then I would agree with you. If and there is also a lot of data center stuff that is you can shift the demand around, a lot of training and yeah, especially from people who are cost conscious, you don’t have to do it. Not everything is a Google search that has to happen exactly when you want it to. Not everything is a, recording a podcast remotely where, this data needs to go through right now. Yeah. Otherwise, Alan’s going to, freeze in the middle of his one of his, one of his classic rants. Some of it is flexible, but the fact is like like Australia is an extreme example, Texas must be as well, where, like plenty of times rooftop solar is meeting, or solar at least, is meeting all of demand on the grid. And as solar increases, that’s going to get more and more. There’s no such thing as baseload in Australia anymore because there’s so many times when we have, even in Australia, literally behind the meter, there is more than enough electricity for everything in large parts of Australia now from time to time. And like we’re not at the end of our solar installation journey yet. So that’s going to continue to get more and more. It’s not that there’s no industry happening around the clock in Australia. It’s that there’s so much solar that it’s more than that amount of baseload. If you look at, if you see data center, like assume data centers are 24 seven, if you assume that’s going to increase by, it’s going to double, we end up with another, 5 percent of the electricity demand that comes from 24 seven data centers, that’s still not going to undo the fact of the vast amount of solar that’s in the grid. You’re still going to see that issue with. No baseload in the grid as a whole. It’s, I think people tend to think about things in isolation, like imagining that a data center is coming online and building its own nuclear power plant just for that data center, but really it’s not, it’s, once a piece of that, it’s gone. They definitely want thermoelectricity and would prefer it to be clean, but they’re not for the most part actually building their own generation and not planning to be part of the electricity market. Joel Saxum: Could there be an issue in the future? So this is a really a, me being daft, but when I think about power generation and companies that do it. You have people that, this company is known for building wind farms. This company is known for building solar and they connect to the grid and they do this, but there’s like a, there’s an old school group of companies that do, would buy a gas power plant. Could there be a future where you have random people buying, like not random people, but random companies that are new to the space. It’s Hey, we’re going to throw up a gas plant just for data centers. And then instead of wind or something. Allen Hall: No, that’s exactly what’s happening. Joel Saxum: Okay. Allen Hall: Right now, as GE just explained it, they said a lot of the slots that were taken by people or companies that didn’t have a lot of experience on energy projects. And so they were not sure they were actually going to be able to take that order, but they held that position in the manufacturing so they had the ability to get a turbine. But Joel, I think the question is, when GE says that there’s a lot of users that don’t have any experience or little experience in energy projects. That screams AI to me. That’s, that says Google, Meta, right? For sure. Amazon, whoever. Phil Totaro: So for Google’s benefit, by the way, they have actually just recently said this week that they’re going to start putting any new data centers co located, basically as to the extent that they can next to wind, solar, or conventional power generation. So that, it shortens the amount of transmission needed to get the power to the data center and gives them a faster reaction time to stabilize the grid when it comes to the actual power offtake. With a scenario like that it could actually it’s almost like you could have a data center serving the way that like hydro does to balance out, variable renewables where you could throttle, a data center’s consumption based upon, whether you have access or need, it needs additional so it can, it’s almost like it would act like a flywheel of sorts. Allen Hall: Yeah I think that’s true, Phil. Being, when you listen to GE Talk, who is into the HVDC, which is into the transformers, into the switchgear, that equipment is, there are orders for that for like separate grids. Again, going back to Joel’s point, AI, right? There’s separate things going on out in the desert somewhere and they need to have switchgear for it. There’s not a lot of switchgear HVDC projects going on for existing grid. Which is the worry. Going back to Rosemary’s point, the existing grid needs to get upgraded. There’s not much of that going on. There is some, but not at the level in which Rosemary’s talking about to upgrade the ability to transmit energy across the country. That doesn’t seem to be happening at a pace which is needed. Upgrading the grid doesn’t have an ROI. Immediately. No, it doesn’t. And, that’s just it. If I have an existing transmission system that’s been running for 50 years and a lot of the equipment that GE is going to be selling is replacement for the old transformers and the old switcher because they’re just aging out and they’re going to go back in and put new equipment in. Why are we not upgrading that, like doubling the capacity, tripling the capacity of those substations with new technology? HVDC, for example. It’s just a 50 year wrong move. You’re playing a transformer, you don’t want to touch it for 50 years. Once you do it, you’re like, oh, it’s oh, that sunk cost. I don’t want to do it again and upgrade it later. Isn’t it just like a self fulfilling argument, like Rosemary Barnes: sustaining and expanding? There’s a lot of people because it’s so hard to build new transmission in, especially in the U. S. There are a lot of people talking about ways that you can get more out of existing transmission. And, there’s a lot of cool tech actually people using carbon fiber instead of aluminum because it it sags less when it gets hot. And so you can, put a lot more power down the same lines with the same towers. And so like you can go through and change all that and get a lot more smart ways about. figuring out what’s the capacity, have a dynamic line rating so that, on a really windy day when there’s a lot of, convective heat transfer, then you should be able to put more power through before they get too hot and sag, which works perfectly for, if you’re connecting wind farms, because obviously when they want to put a lot of power down is when it’s really windy. So there’s heaps of smart smart things people are talking about. I haven’t actually heard anybody except for you mention the substations, but yeah, like upgrading them, it would be, obviously it makes no sense to do one part of it and not the rest of it. Otherwise there’s, yeah, it just doesn’t make any difference. So definitely people are talking about it. Are they doing it? I don’t know. Allen Hall: Going back to the money part, which is what Joel was on. I’ll throw out a little news snippet I saw earlier today. The F 35 fighter program in the United States. Lockheed Martin has roughly a 1 trillion contract for that. That may be canceled. 1 trillion. Now, 1 trillion in the grid could go a heck of a long way of electrifying more of the United States at higher energy levels than we could possibly imagine. So I think the funding may be there. The question is, do we have the knowledge, willpower, momentum, to do those upgrades? To take the capacity up 2x, 3x? I think as a country we used to. Joel Saxum: Think about the interstate highway system. The interstate highway system was built, is, that’s the Eisenhower stuff, right? So post World War II. That was built, that, what, people may not realize this, but that was built as a defense project. The Interstate Highway System of the United States is a defense project. There’s rules where every five miles you have to have a one mile straight stretch that can be utilized as a landing strip. Think about that next time you’re driving. Every five miles or, I can’t remember exactly the number it is, there’s a straight stretch. So the, our country used to have the gusto to get massive projects done like that. We just don’t have it anymore. You look at certain things like we’ve got to do we’ve got to fix this one bridge. It’s going to be a billion dollars to fix this bridge. And it’s going to take us four years or whatever, whoever, those numbers are crazy, but to do a massive overhaul like that, we need something that modernize our grid. Absolutely. But that won’t happen until in the, where we sit right now, until we have blackouts, brownouts, or some, something happens to push that along because we’re just not there. Allen Hall: Do you feel like we’re in a hold my beer moment? Yeah, I feel like there is like a hold my beer. Let’s see if we can pull this thing off moment or watch this because you see it, it’s palpable. It wasn’t palpable six months ago, I didn’t think, but today I’m like, man, anything that I thought was going to be firm, fixed, never change is completely up for debate. And an F 35 program, something that is so instrumental to the defense budget, to the Air Force, to the Marines. is willing to be cut, stop, cut, close the doors on the factory thing, and then anything’s possible. Literally anything’s possible. We could send a man to Mars or a woman to Mars, whoever to Mars, and we could sure as heck increase the grid. Back to Rosemary’s point, like just increase the cable, increase the transformer Phil Totaro: size, do it. Yeah Alan, this assumes that They’re going to cancel an F 35 project and then reallocate a trillion dollars into the grid, which is never going to happen. This is fun to speculate about, but Allen Hall: No. What I’m getting at though, Phil, is that the people at the top at the moment that are talking about these high level things, one of them is Musk, who is a huge solar proponent, who is a huge electrification proponent. There has to be a lot of discussions at the highest level at the moment about, we need more electricity, everybody. And we don’t have it. I can’t sell Teslas, and I don’t think that discussion’s happened, but maybe it has. I can’t sell Teslas if I can’t plug them in. I can’t, if there’s no plugs, there’s no power, there’s no electrification, there’s no electric vehicles. Now maybe Trump doesn’t care. I don’t know. Don’t, he probably owns a Tesla. Somebody in that organization probably owns a Tesla. One of his kids probably owns a Tesla. Cybertruck? Okay, there you go. He got gifted a Cybertruck. He’s got a Cybertruck. So he needs a place to plug that thing in. And at Mar a Lago, he probably has it. Let me tell you, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, getting a plug in for my Cybertruck, which I will never own, by the way, is almost impossible. I can’t get it. I can’t even keep the power on in my house at the minute. Joel Saxum: I think that you’re 100 percent correct, Alan, that we’re, that the possibilities of a wild ride, they’re coming. Allen Hall: I will say, one of the things that can happen right now, and America can change its direction relatively quickly. There is when this momentum at these election changes if you can get a clear message out let’s I’ll use the branding right making America great again. What’s gonna make quote unquote make America great again forget about all the other garbage is that America was electrified, like in the early 1900s. And that system still pretty much exists like it was in the 1900s. And obviously in the 1930s and 40s, there was a huge improvement, right? 1950s, obviously huge improvement. However, that was 70 years ago. And if someone at the highest level, like a musk, says, we need to get on this thing, and that means We need to create more energy, which is what Trump is talking about. We need more energy. Great. We need more energy. What the heck are you going to do with it? It is, you can’t deliver it anywhere. Where is it going to go? So you can drill all you want, or, and you can get all the natural gas, you can frack all you want, but you, the end use, which is electricity for the vast majority of that, has nowhere to go. You need to fix that problem first, which is the hardest problem. Transmission is the hardest problem. Where’s the DOE on this? Where’s the DOE on transmission? Joel, you asked that, that’s a really great question, because I think I’ve seen the nominee for the DOE, who was an oil and gas person, fine, not super. But those people, generally speaking, the DOE, whoever’s sitting on the DOE, doesn’t get to make the big picture outlook. Whoever that person is, and I think it’s someone, isn’t it someone from North Dakota? Maybe the former governor of North Dakota, one of those people. Chris Wright. He’s an oil gas person, right? That’s his background. He’s CEO of Denver based Liberty Energy. Okay, that’s it, Liberty Energy. Yeah. An oil gas company. Fine. But if he’s really wants to make America great again, having lower gas prices, yes, but electricity is going to be the thing. You can’t grow factories without electricity. You can’t do it. You can’t grow jobs without electricity. Can’t do it. And we’re capacity locked right now. Phil Totaro: Yeah, I think about FDR in the 30s trying to get everybody out of Let’s go CCC style, Allen Hall: man. I don’t think we need CCC. We don’t need that. Joel has pointed out to me numerous times when we drive across Texas and Oklahoma, he’ll say, we’re like driving over 50 pipelines between here and wherever we’re going. And he’s right. He’s totally right. Like we’re driving over a lot of oil and gas infrastructure all the time. He’s right. And you just don’t see the electrical infrastructure anywhere near that. If we spent some time, if we spent four years trying to get the infrastructure on the grid side upgraded, a lot of problems in America would go away and the GDP would definitely skyrocket. 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 channels below to Uptime Tech News or Weekly Newsletter. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

On News Flash this week we cover BP and JERA joining forces to create a offshore wind partnership called JERA Nex. Also Ørsted has signed an agreement with Cathay Life Insurance to sell a 50% stake in the Changhua 4 offshore wind farm. And Solaria has announced plans to reach 14. 3 gigawatts of install capacity by 2028. 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.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxom, 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 this week, Phil, BP and JERA are joining forces to create a major offshore wind partnership called JERA Next. BP and this equally owned joint venture will have a total of 13 gigawatts potential net generating capacity combining the operating assets and the development projects all together. The partners have committed up to 5. 8 billion in capital funding through 2030. All right, BP is trying to slowly back away from some renewable energy projects, but now they’ve joined forces with JIRA. I want to understand what this dynamic is. Philip Totaro: Well, it’s fascinating because with the resignation as well of the, BP offshore wind executive, their executive director It’s almost like this is the full effect of the oil and gas pivot coming to fruition. It’s kind of, it sounds to me, the way I read this is the resignation of, we’re not really going to do offshore wind except through this venture with JERA from now on where they basically do all the work and we’ll take a percentage. But it’s, it just feels like BP’s got bigger issues because even their oil and gas business isn’t the healthiest at the moment. So, they’re pivoting and focusing on that whilst providing JIRA the opportunity to continue the growth that they’ve been on. Joel Saxum: BP is confusing me here. I feel like their operations strategy and marketing and PR departments need to go and sit in a room together to figure out what they’re actually doing. They’re in the midst of selling all their onshore assets in the U. S. We know that. They’ve, sold stakes in certain offshore projects in the U. S. They’ve said they’re not going to do wind. They said they were going to do wind. So it’d be interesting to watch this one. And I think Phil, the, what you’re talking about is mirroring some of what others are doing, right? Like we know Shell now, Shell’s out. They’re like, we’re not doing offshore wind anymore. And we’ve seen Econor take a stake in Orsted to be able to provide capital, provide support, but kind of stand back and let the other people do it and just be a part of it. And that’s what it looks like BP is doing here more now. So maybe that just aligns with their strategy a bit better. For the long haul. So maybe we’ll see some more people doing this, just providing capital, being a part of it, but. Allen Hall: Orsted has signed an agreement with Cathay Life Insurance, Taiwan’s leading insurance company, to sell a 50 percent stake in the 583 megawatt grater Changhua 4 offshore wind farm. The 1. 6 billion transaction includes both ownership and funding commitments, with payments scheduled for 2024 and 2025. Phil, Orsted could use the cash right now to help fund other projects. Kathy is a unique partner though that being it from the insurance company And that’s their focus is mostly insurance, I believe. Philip Totaro: Yeah, I mean, it’s not the first time insurance companies have made investments in projects, particularly minority investments. I mean, we’ve got John Hancock making, onshore wind investments in the U. S. But I think this is actually the first time that Cathay Life has dove into any kind of power generation at all, let alone renewable power generation. So, good on them for that. But it’s also a recognition that they have the capital to be able to invest and they want and need to be able to park their money somewhere. And it’s a sign that they’re taking some confidence in the Taiwanese offshore market at the moment, which has had, a few fits and starts lately with, some policy hurdles and some, power offtake and pricing hurdles that I hope are largely resolved at this point. But it’s certainly enough for Cathay Life to be able to plunk down some cash. Joel Saxum: I like this move from Orsted. We’ve seen a lot of these kind of things happen, but what Orsted is doing, as you look at the greater mission of the company, is to get assets out there churning, to get, to help with the energy transition to make a greener, greener economy in the future. And what they’re doing is just that. They’re cycling capital and getting partners on board after they built some things to get money in the door, give off some ownership, and then move on to the next project. So I’d like, I like to see what they’re doing and I like to see a lot of that come in from other companies in the future. Allen Hall: And Solaria has announced plans to reach 14. 3 gigawatts of install capacity by 2028, working towards their ultimate goal of 18 gigawatts by 2030. The company is currently constructing 1. 4 gigawatts of photovoltaic plants in Spain with secured financing. Now, Phil, Solaria has a portfolio of mostly solar. a little wind and a tiny amount of batteries, but they’re a big player in Spain with 18 gigawatts by 2030. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and they actually want to expand significantly in wind, which says to me that they’re probably on the hunt for Projects that, I mean, certainly greenfield projects, but also potentially repowering opportunities in Spain, which there are plenty Spain has one of the older average lifespans of its installed base and needs to, get a little more serious about asset repowering and for Solaria to come in and want to deploy capital on wind and hybrid projects. I, again, I think this is overall a good move on their part. Joel Saxum: I like to see that they’re trying to technologically diversify themselves. And one of my big pushes right now in the market is. Batteries, battery energy storage system. So baths or whatever you want to call it. They’re about 6 percent batteries in their 2028 portfolio is the plan. So from, if we look back just a few years ago, there was barely any companies with any kind of battery storage built into them, and I think that’s a bigger part of the renewable energy mix in the future, so I’m glad to see they’re putting some capital towards it.

This week’s spotlight explores SkySpecs’ solution to the wind industry’s repair vendor management crisis with executives Dan Partin and Noah Fabes. The discussion covers how SkySpecs helps wind farm operators handle vendor shortages and quality control through their comprehensive vendor management services, which includes vetting contractors, overseeing repairs, and streamlining project management. 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.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.comSkyspecs – https://skyspecs.com Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. We’re shining a spotlight on a critical issue that’s causing headaches for wind farm operators across the globe, repair vendor management. So you imagine this scenario, your wind farm is running smoothly when suddenly a turbine goes offline. You need repairs fast, but your usual vendor is book solid, and we’ve heard this all year. Days turn into weeks and you’re losing money with every passing hour. Unfortunately, this isn’t a hypothetical or a recent industry survey revealed a starling statistic. 40% of operators frequently face delays or increased costs due to repair vendor storage. During peak periods, like the summertime of the United States. In today’s episode, we’re diving deep into this repair vendor crisis, walks for why there aren’t enough technicians to meet the man, how this shortage is impacting wind farm operations, and most importantly. What can be done about it? To help us unpack this complex issue, we’re joined by two experts from SkySpecs. Our first guest is Dan Parton, VP of Strategic Account Management at SkySpecs. Dan brings extensive experience in the wind industry, Dan Parton Dan Parton focusing on developing and maintaining clean air. Key client relationships, his role is crucial in understanding and addressing the complex challenges faced by wind farm operators, particularly in the area of repair vendor management. And our second guest is Noah Faves, senior product Manager at SkySpecs. Noah’s focused on workflow optimization and team leadership plays a key role in developing solutions that streamline and repair vendor management processes. His experience in creating robust solutions for previously unmet customer needs is particularly relevant to our discussion today. Guys, welcome to the program. Thanks for having us. Noah Faves: Thank you. Allen Hall: This is probably problem number one in the United States at the minute. I’m glad you guys are tackling it. Oh my gosh. What a disaster. There’s not enough technicians that are all tied up. If there are technicians. Somebody’s already locked him up months before, so you don’t even have access, forget about calling him because they’re not going to even pick up the phone. This has led to a crisis, such that, I think Joel and I have seen this a couple of times this summer, where people, operations are starting to get a little bit desperate. And are bringing in crews that probably aren’t qualified to do the work that they’re supposed to do. Not to say they’re not technically capable. They probably are technically capable. It’s all the periphery. Yeah. The PPE, showing up on time. All those things, booking their hours properly. That little stuff. Joel Saxum: Would you run into, when you have that issue, you run into one of my biggest pet peeves in operations in general? And it’s the cost of poor quality. Yeah. Joel Saxum: Cost of poor quality can be put together as did they do a bad repair or something like that? Yeah. You got to go back and fix it. That’s a cost, but that’s easy to quantify. But cost of poor quality can also be like, they showed up with garbage trucks or something, and they were getting flat tires all the time because they had six ply tires or some really silly things, but it can, all of those issues can compound an already demanding problem. Or, the biggest one we ran into this summer was people not using PPE. That’s just. Quite silly. So what that does is it gets you removed from site. That’s what’s gonna happen and even more of a reason to call you guys. So this is a new thing. This is something like as it sits usually you have wind turbine operator or ISP or someone looking into whatever their procurement department tells them and they may turn to procurement and say, procurement, any blades And procurement has found whoever’s going to be the cheapest or whoever has gone through their hurdles to get through their procurement system and say, Oh here’s four guys from these people. They show up on site. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know, you don’t know what their background is, these kinds of things. There, there’s issues all the time with this. So there will, Is space, was space, you guys are starting to fill it right now, of someone to come in and be that middleman, be that not necessarily procurement, but someone that will vet people, someone that will find these, and you’re, what you’re doing is you’re just expanding on SkySpecs opportunities to partner and to be that close partner with your clients. So how did the, this is a question I have, like, how does this conversation happen within SkySpecs of you know what we should do? We should do contractor management, Dan Parton: how does that work? It’s a really interesting story, so I think it comes back to how we try to position ourselves in the industry and how we try to provide a platform that allows customers to have greater transparency and visibility into what’s going on at their wind farms. And I love the idea of, loss of quality and tracking quality, because that’s what we’re trying to do. But what we discovered was you can build a platform, but you still need somebody to use it. And we found for a lot of our customers, they’re really lacking a lot of the time, effort, resources, really, to go in and Keep an eye on the vendors and really understand what’s happening out in the field. And they were coming to us not asking not only can we help with their decision making and their prioritization, but can we also help with their management of some of these vendors and essentially, yeah, exactly. Can we outsource some of this to you because we really don’t have time to do it ourselves. And it presented an interesting dilemma and opportunity for us. And we thought, that’s really interesting. Let’s give it a shot and I’ll see how we can do and let’s leverage some of our own tools, our expertise. And see if we can find areas where we can deliver value for those customers. I think so far it’s been successful and we’ve been able to do that. We’ve grown and we’ve developed and we’ve identified ways where we can scale that effectively. It’s been a tremendous journey so far. Allen Hall: What kind of pain have you seen for some of the people that call you up? What desperate situations have you been in? Noah Faves: They’re usually mostly desperate situations, I would say. And in many cases oftentimes Maybe they are under an O& M service contract or something like that and have been struggling to get the level of transparency into how repair projects are going or repair’s not getting done at all. And they come to us and ask for help. Allen Hall: Is it just because they know something should be happening on these turbines, but it’s like day 30 out of the five day project? And they’re like, what’s going on? Dan Parton: I think it’s it’s an interesting array of pain that you see. So I think a common one is just surprise damage on their blades. They’re not really anticipating or budgeted for, and they’re scrambling at the mid season or end of year to find crews availability, as you mentioned earlier at the onset, that’s a big one. The, their usual crew is unavailable or the teams that they usually work with are unavailable. Budgeting pain is a major one, obviously. Noah Faves: Yeah, I’m looking for out of the box solutions on, potentially recurring defects and things like that. Joel Saxum: Complex damages. Alan and I, we run into that quite often. We’re in the lightning world, right? That’s our main job. So when we talk to people, lightning is one of those things where That looked like a pinhole in the damage. And then we started opening the blade up and all of a sudden we’re a hundred, 120, 000 in. That, that crew that’s there doing that repair, they may have actually been contracted to come and do six other cat three repairs. And now they’ve spent their whole budget on doing one, or a cat three, cat four, something of that sort. Either way, those other repairs still need to get done, but now we need manpower. We need resources to get out there. The solution then can be, call you guys. Allen Hall: What does that look like? I want to understand, when do I pick up the phone and call SkySpecs? Is it sort of Joel’s scenario of they just identified a Cat 5 when they thought there was a Cat 2 or 3? Or is it, they have so much work and they just can’t find anybody competent to do it? Or is it both? I’m going to call them right now and say, Hey, Joel Saxum: next spring we need this all done, figure it out for us. And Dan Parton: What does that look like? When, Allen Hall: what are people Dan Parton: calling you for Allen Hall: today? Dan Parton: Ideally the earlier, the better, right? That’s the project planning number one, right? The sooner you can get to her, the better that isn’t always feasible, obviously. And that’s part of the problem. I think. A common place where we interject is around the time the customer’s getting inspection results because often they’re finding that they’re struggling to prioritize with what to repair. And if you come back and you get 100 Cat5s in your fleet and you have budget for 50, you have to start making hard decisions. And so one of the areas where we can interject is when that decision making process, we can help our customers. Prioritize within those 50 Cat5s that you have budget for what really needs to get done. Maybe you can squeak in a few temporary repairs and a few other issues, but what, what can potentially wait and how long can it wait? So we can help in that decision making process early Joel Saxum: on. Because at Skyspecs, as you guys grow the company, as you add more services, as you acquire companies, as you integrate solutions, you not only can be out there, Hey, we did your inspections. This is what we found. Now you’ve got this much budget. These are the ones that we should look at. But then you talk to Cheryl and the rest of your blade team and say, Hey, take a look at these because we’ve got to optimize this. And the same time, Noah and I are looking for blade contractors to make sure we get these repairs done. So you are starting to become a one stop shop for people to come and get things done. Noah Faves: Yeah. I was just going to say, and it’s interesting to think about, the evolution of this, because you talked about the challenge with scarcity of techs and availability and how it’s all, it’s all tied together, right? And. With our inspections business, and in many ways you can think about it we know, you can correct me if I’m wrong, perhaps 90 percent in North America of the repairs that need to be done or should be done. But then there’s a gap in for, owner operators to, secure enough budget early enough. But in many ways when you look into the future like we could provide a level of transparency to service providers as well with the repairs that need to be done, which can then facilitate better planning and staffing on their end. Oh, hopefully. Alleviate some of that availability. Say Joel Saxum: transparency and collaboration out loud to operators and they’re happy right now. Dan Parton: I think that’s a really good point about that. It’s not just the owner operators that benefit from this, but I think that the service providers themselves. Yeah. They want to know how their crews are doing out in the field. And they appreciate it and benefit from getting the feedback. What technician is showing up without his PPE? What technician is doing a poor job? So obviously they don’t necessarily want those folks in their crews. That reflects poorly on them in the end. So Joel Saxum: are you guys getting that deep into it now? Or like surface level, it’s Hey, we can find you some people to do your work. But are you getting that deep into where you’re doing the QA, QC, all field audits and all that kind of stuff of the repair? Dan Parton: Yeah. Joel Saxum: We have a pretty robust QC process. Oh, that’s fantastic. Dan Parton: Yep. Joel Saxum: So let me ask you another question about that then. Before you get to the idea where we’re doing field audits, QA, QC, these kind of things, you have to vet these contractors. What does that process look like? Noah Faves: Yeah, we have a pretty standard qualification process, so it was just a bit natural of an evolution for us to end up in repairmender management. Prior to that, we had a lot of established relationships with many customers who, And part of our service offering to them, we were doing some of this QA and QC work. So we had a, a level of understanding around quality of workmanship from a lot of the service providers out there already. So that was one method in which we evaluated and vetted the service providers that, that we work with. But in addition to that, the rest of it is, it’s pretty standard, right? We rely on feedback from customers that we have relationships with. We have a safety. Process that they have to adhere to. I’m not missing. Dan Parton: I think you covered it. We’re able to take, because we talk to so many different customers, we can take a bit of a bird’s eye view of the industry and see what we’re hearing from various people where as, you know, within your four walls of any particular company, limited who you’re talking to your day to day. So you guys end up Joel Saxum: being basically the owner’s representative. Yeah, in a lot of those systems. In the oil and gas world we call it being the bird dog. You’re the one out there making sure, sniffing here and sniffing there, making sure everything is going well. Exactly. And I think there’s certain advantages to that for the speed of procurement as well. You guys have been, to be a customer of that customer, you’ve been through their procurement process. So you know all the things, you know the insurance requirements, you know this, that, they must have. Yeah. Joel Saxum: So that leads me to another question, since you guys are, and maybe this is more of a contractual thing, but you’re not actually taking on any of the risk of the repair, correct? In terms of the warranty or the, yeah. So if that contractor goes on site and like screws it up, that’s on the contractor, right? Or is that on, or you guys taking on that contractual risk? Dan Parton: That would be on the contractor, but we’d be the ones responsible for managing that contract to get back out and get it addressed. So we still are the bird dog or bird dog in that scenario. Yeah, the, we were in the process of standardizing the warranty negotiation process with our vendors as well. So we want to put in some more rigorous standards there and that’s going to be a negotiation that’s going to take some time. Yeah. But in the meantime, we want to make sure that we’re We talked about earlier, the QC process goes to fruition. Hopefully you don’t end up in this situation, but obviously they do happen. But if there is an error and a mistake is made or workmanship has stopped itself, then we would be the ones to go back to the vendor and get them back out and have that taken care of. Allen Hall: Okay. So is there a. Accumulation of data over time, for example, you’ve seen certain ISPs do repairs and you’re out inspecting it year one, year two after the repair, and you say, that company isn’t doing a really decent job, and we’re starting to see that blade damage issue reappear again because it wasn’t properly repaired, so we’re going to red flag that ISP. To all of this, I think a lot of people are installing their repair documentation into Horizon. So now, if an ISP has come on site and said it’s going to take seven days, and they did it in seven days, and then you come back two years later, and yeah, that repair is still holding up, have you gathered that much information from all of the data that’s sitting in Horizon to then put an assessment on the ISPs? These are A’s, these are B’s, these are C’s. Noah Faves: Yeah, we have a, quite a large accumulation of data where you can start doing a bit of benchmarking and you’ve got a vendor scorecard that we use to evaluate. And I don’t, necessarily want to paint the picture like it’s, this one’s good, this one’s bad, but we can also look across their specialty and things like that to understand. What I’m getting at Allen Hall: is, Noah Faves: yeah, Allen Hall: there’s some companies that are good at blade repair, some are great at other things. Getting the right one on site is always critical. . Absolutely very c fixing blades, and Dan Parton: we try to have those conversations with the ISPs themselves. We want to let them know how they’re doing, like where we’re seeing issues and stuff like that. That’s great. Communication, transportation, like transparency. Yeah. Because they want to improve too, right? They want. Exactly. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Who’s the blade repair? ISP of the year. I don’t know if we can play a favorite song. Yeah, exactly. You won’t get that on LS. Allen Hall: But as the ISPs get bigger, that becomes even more important because I think at times they have so many crews out on site, they can’t manage everybody everywhere. They need a little bit of feedback. It’s almost like the AAA guidebook or the Yelp of ISPs in a sense that I’m getting an independent assessment of what, My crew has done. Yeah. It may be a great review. Maybe five stars. Maybe it’s a two star, but at least I know that I have a little bit of control back in it. And we’ve talked to a number of ISPs. They are super sensitive to what. The client thinks of them and whether they, if their technicians have done a good job or not, that is a huge criteria on the success of those companies. So much Dan Parton: is reputation based for sure. Joel Saxum: Yeah, that concept of a bird dog, that’s very common in most industrial places, right? Like you’re in aerospace or you’ve worked in aerospace your whole career. There’s usually If some big company is buying a hundred planes from Boeing, they’re going to send a rep to that factory. 100%. To QC the whole thing, because they’re like, we’re paying for these, we want to make sure it’s done well. You guys, that’s not done in wind. Allen Hall: In some aspects. Joel Saxum: In some aspects. But it is, it’s also intrinsically difficult as well, right? Like it’s hard to have a bird dog up hanging on ropes with the team that’s doing repairs. Out in the field, yeah. Dan Parton: But because you guys You’re looking at a report. Yeah, but Joel Saxum: because you guys are SkySpecs, not only do you have the ability of cataloging everything properly so you can review it, but you’re also doing inspection. You’re like, it’s the full you’re completing the full circle, with the only thing you’re not doing is mixing resin and glass. And Allen Hall: that’s what it comes down to right now. And I, one of the pieces that I wanted to get at is the scheduling part. I think, how much scheduling help do operators need right now? How much of the phone calls is, hey, you may need somebody out here in October, That started in March, I assume. Dan Parton: Yeah it varies a lot. I think, size of the owner makes a big difference in how complicated their procurement process is. Yes. Some of them could turn around and hire a new crew they’ve never worked with before in a week’s notice and some of them you need six months to a year of lead time to get through a procurement and. And the latter, I think we can help there, because obviously we, we are an approved vendor if we’re, if there already are. Yeah. So we’re guiding you. Yeah. So we, yeah, we can be the sub, right? So we’re like the general contractor to subcontractor. So because we’re approved. Yeah. Dan Parton: We can work with what vendors we’ve approved within reason, depends on how it all works contractually. Joel Saxum: So this is an industry, general industry, no, you’re, okay, you’re working with XYZ wind operator. And they’re a customer of you for inspections and maybe CMS, who we talked with Alan Larson earlier. And now they’re a customer of Noah and Dan’s professional services or whatever, so they’re working there. And so you’re making this, and this is a, maybe we don’t put this in an ad, but you’re making revenue off of them through your professional services. Are you also making revenue off of the ISPs? As far as helping them get through procurement and all of that kind of stuff. Because you’re doing a service for them as well. No, we’re not charging the ISPCA. Allen Hall: Okay. So you’re basically navigating through the procurement systems at the operators. And man, some of those procurement systems are, in my opinion, difficult. Dan Parton: Not necessarily. It depends on the arrangement. I know I can speak to this a little bit more. So some customers don’t require the if we’re a subcontractor, we’ll have a, I don’t want to get too much into the contractual T’s and C’s and stuff like here, but, if we have a MSA in place to the customer that allows us to subcontract in certain instances, then we Those vendors may not need to go through the procurement process with the end customer at all because we are, they’re, we are hiring them directly. So that gives us the benefits. So that’s, we’ve become like the top of the funnel. Where we have 10, 15 vendors that we can work with. The customer might only have us and maybe one or two others, but we have access to a wider library of vendors we can use because we’re allowed to subcontract with them. Joel Saxum: And are you doing, of course you’re doing blade repair services, but are you doing torque and tensioning Dan Parton: service, Joel Saxum: everything? Dan Parton: Right now, just blades. Okay. Because that’s where a lot of our expertise and our data and background is in. Yeah, it gets back to the inspections and the platform and everything like that. Yeah, that’s where we have our. A cool competency is really that’s not to say we want to explore these things in the future. If customers come asking, we’re always curious, we’ll try. How does this Allen Hall: work if I’m a customer of yours today and I want to look at vendor management? Am I doing that through Horizon? Is does that start when I just get that’s pretty inspection sequence of images and the categorizations and this is what you’re looking up, looking forward to in terms of a repair campaign? Is that when I trigger this button that says, I’m calling Noah? Yeah. Dan Parton: Do you want to Allen Hall: go? And I’m setting up a video call and figuring out like what are next steps? Is that how it works? Noah Faves: Yeah. And that’s basically the process. Okay. You hit on something good, right? Like one thing that I think is important to call out is that since we mean for all intents and purposes, we lack like the boots on the ground management when these projects are going on. For us, like we’re managing basically the entire process of the repair execution. In the Horizon platform, right? And so we pay, super close attention to the day-to-day operations, work logs and things like that, all, all through the platform. And it’s really great because then we can give an increased level of transparency and visibility into how projects are tracking close to real time for the customers that we work with. But to answer your question, like more directly, that’s typically how they engage with us. Engage with us. Get the inspection results and many of the many of our customers who transitioned into these under management services have usually been a service customer in another capacity. So maybe they’re already getting support with. From, the shareholds who are doing, looking at their inspection results, providing some recommendations, maybe doing some budgeting and things like that. And usually that is the evolution then into asking me or Dan about, Dan Parton: that’s a good point. So a lot of what we, a lot of the services we provide as part of managing repairs, we also provide without actually hiring the vendors. So we can do, 80 percent for some customers and then they still go out and hire the vendor themselves. Yeah. That’s it’s just the added step for some that they just want really a white glove treatment or don’t have the resources to hire a vendor or whatever those kind of cases may be. Allen Hall: So you have a sense because you’re taking all the inspection photos who’s likely to call. Do you anticipate that a little bit? Like you, you just did a drone inspection on a full site and Joel Saxum: boy, you just got hammered. And you send them the email, your inspections are done, and by the way, you should call us. Dan Parton: They get a critical notification email, just a standard process. Now, if there’s something that’s, this turbine needs to go offline immediately, that way it’s going to go. But no we’re not to the point where we’re so predictive that we’re anticipating that, that, just, yeah, hopefully someday we can be there soon, but, Joel Saxum: And I’d like to dial it back a second to something you said. Where, are we now referring to all the Blades experts as the Sheryls? We do it within our four walls. Allen Hall: Yeah, exactly. So how does an existing customer integrate the vendor management aspect? What does that look like? What do they do? If they’re not using you already to do that, how do they trigger it? How do they turn that on? Phone call. Basically con, a conversation did happen in a CP or something. They’re Dan Parton: usually already a customer in some capacity, so often it is like each other Hey, we need help. Yes, like help, but we weren’t anticipating XYI guess the problems are like, yes, like we’re the major problems. We ran into this major problem and we don’t know how to handle it. We heard you guys might Joel Saxum: be able to help Dan Parton: us out. And that’s, it’s often the conversation ready like that. What Allen Hall: percentage of customers have asked for vendor management? I wouldn’t, I’m thinking big numbers here because it’s knowing some of them that are customers of yours. I can see them activating Joel Saxum: this. Even if I was an engineering team that felt decently staffed, it would be such a nice thing to outsource. Dan Parton: That’s, yeah, that’s actually an interesting point too, because I think there’s a question like, do you have the resources to do it? And there’s another question of, is it a good use of your resources to have them spending time looking through repair reports or whatever? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That’s another common topic too. Far as like percentages, I don’t know that venture, but I, Noah Faves: And have a better guess. Dan Parton: Yeah, maybe 15 to 20 percent of our customers do something like this. Allen Hall: That seems low to me because I would always want to have that emergency button there. And I will always want to have you queue it up. Dan Parton: Yeah. It’s relatively new for us. So we started it like, we started this about two years ago. Yeah. With the, that kind of scenario where the customers came to us and asked us this wasn’t something we really set out to do initially and it came up. And then since then, we’ve decided it is something we want to lean into. We have made a focus in this past year, really scaled it tremendously into Joel Saxum: its own Dan Parton: product line. Yeah. So it’s been about, 18 months of really doing it. So it’s early. Joel Saxum: This is one thing I’ve noticed about SkySpecs. So like you guys know the conversation about SkySpecs and generally industry is they’ve got a lot of investment, acquired some companies. They’ve got all kinds of different things, but you guys are constantly listening to the market, right? Like you said, you didn’t go out to do primary market research on this new solution. It was just like someone came with an idea and you guys developed the whole product line out of it to help the industry. Because at the end of the day, there’s only so many turbines installed in the field. And to optimize what we can do with them to optimize this process in the field, you guys are coming up with solutions back here as well. Dan Parton: Yep, absolutely. Part of the reason I love working in the industry, honestly it’s the Wild West and there’s just so many unique and interesting problems that are out there to be solved. And there’s a million more that we could do if we’d love to be able to try if we had resources. It’s gonna grow. Allen Hall: So what are the outcomes with some of your existing clients? What have they seen over the last year or so as you’ve been doing vendor management? What are some of the success stories Dan Parton: there? Do you want to speak to the statistics you’re wearing a little bit? Noah Faves: Yeah, I’ll throw some so one of the things that we really pride ourselves in, which I was talking about just a bit earlier, is just that proactive project management through the Horizon platform. And so we’ve been able to save some of our customers. Costs through providing a level of like accountability to service providers. So like advocating for credits and things like that. So we’ve been able to save them money there. Other other ways that we’ve helped our customers we’ve worked to develop temporary repair plan strategies to get turbines back on, online faster, which has resulted in cost savings. Same with even going so far as, in some cases doing actual repair designs to try and, mitigate against some issues returning. So Joel Saxum: you guys are doing engineering repair Noah Faves: design Joel Saxum: as well? Yes. In some instances, yeah. Yeah, Noah Faves: in some instances. Yeah. So I think all of those are related to cost savings. In addition, I think another area of value that we provide, and we talked a little bit about this earlier, but oftentimes there’s this theme that the the the lowest bidder wins the work, right? And I think it’s a common pitfall to, that many owner operators fall into. So like one thing that we really pride ourselves in is providing owner operators with realistic. Estimates on the cost of repairs that helps with better cost management throughout the project. We Joel Saxum: hear that doesn’t matter if it’s happening offshore. UK, Canada, South Africa, people will low bid things, and there will be bids that come in that are pretty dang accurate, but they won’t get to work. Because they’re like, hey, this isn’t a realistic thing, but other companies just come in and they’re like, oh, yeah, we’ll do that in three days. Knowing come on, that’s not gonna happen. Yeah, but that’s where you bring in vendor Allen Hall: management. If you do have a Cut through the BS. ISP on there that’s doing that nonsense, then Send them home, get somebody in there who can actually do the work. Joel Saxum: This is, this is a, I can tell you procurement horror stories from my past, but not In some organizations, the procurement people know operations very well. They know what it takes. They know the they know what they should be looking at for weather risk. They know all these things. They know what blade repair stuff is or whatever the industry you’re in. But sometimes procurement people have no idea and they’re just going, this is what the look like. Okay. And this is, and their documentation looks good to me. Okay. You get it. And that’s not always realistic. That’s not always the best way to do things. Yep. Allen Hall: Definitely not. And I want to just highlight this one more time. There’s so much work out there. There’s so many problems out in the field right now, and a lot of operators are struggling. You need some sort of inter management. You need that help. And it’s October right now, as we’re speaking. The season’s coming, right? The wind season’s coming. Everyone’s going to make their money. But yeah, they’re firming up budgets. They’re trying to plan for next spring. Now’s the time to call SkySpecs and get the vendor management system turned on. Noah, how do they reach you? What’s the best way to contact you? Email. What is that? Noah Faves: Yeah noah. fabes, F A B E S, at SkySpecs. Dan Parton: And Dan, how do they get a hold of you? Dan. partson. com. P A R T I N at skyspecs. com. Allen Hall: And we’ll include that in the show notes and on the YouTube so you can get ahold of everybody or you can just visit skyspecs. com and you just enter your information in there. If you’re an existing client, if you’re on Horizon, is there anything you push in Horizon that would activate that to start a call? Dan Parton: No. If you’re an existing client, you can reach out to your account rep and ask them, tell them you’re interested and want to learn more. We’ll be happy to set up a call. Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s pretty easy. Dan and Noah, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Joel and I have learned a tremendous amount and we’ll be recommending you as we travel across the United States. I appreciate it, guys. Dan Parton: Always a pleasure. Thanks for having us.

This week on Power-Up, Ørsted’s offshore blade install method, SWANCOR’s degradable epoxy resin composite, and a precursor to the Google Glass! 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.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. First patent idea is from our friends over at Orsted, and they are looking at a really novel approach of installing wind turn blades vertically rather than the horizontally, which is we do today offshore. So if you’ve watched offshore blades being installed, you’ve always seen them placed horizontally and slid towards the hub and everybody tightens them on. Well, that requires a lot of really tall cranes to, to make that happen. But what Orsted’s thinking about is grabbing the blade kind of by the bottom and lifting it up vertically. In order to do this, you need a pretty rigid frame to hold this crane to keep it from the blade stabilized. So the crane doesn’t move too much. And it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a complicated mechanical problem. However, it does require a much shorter crane and that is the benefit and getting big cranes out at sea right now is really hard. Phil, so having a short crane with a much stronger crane head, I’ll call it, Philip Totaro: Does make a lot of sense. It does. And, and so just for context, we talked a couple of weeks ago about, Equinor getting a patent on, technology around optimization of floating platforms. This is another example of a development and independent power producer company, Orsted, getting a patent. IP themselves that they control on something related to, the, the business that they do on a daily basis. And the reason I’m bringing this up is it’s, it’s a bit unique in the wind energy sector because most of the, Particularly important patents have been held in the past by the OEMs or other supply chain companies. So for, a company like Orsted to, to even contemplate doing this is, is fascinating. This is still in the conceptual phase. There’s no rig that they’ve built yet. They’ve probably done some smaller scale bench testing, potentially. They’ve certainly done, plenty of computer modeling on, on this sort of thing. To get it to work. But it is, as Alan mentioned, an interesting concept because, the, the blade’s moment of inertia, when it’s in the vertical position, it, it has the opportunity to potentially flop around or tip over. But the counter to that is, as Alan mentioned as well, you need a much shorter crane boom. And so, these are some of the technical challenges that, that Orsted is trying to address with introducing this kind of technology. I guess the question maybe for Joel is, is, does this seem practical and, and how attractive is this going to be? Joel Saxum: I think from an operational standpoint, so for real world value of a patent, and this will happen eventually, and I don’t think it’s limited to offshore. I think it will happen onshore as well. And, and I’m saying this based on the global build out of wind farms, onshore, offshore, floating, you name it, what we’re doing and the goals we have in place. All of these, do an easy one. Onshore Windfarm has a big, huge crane, a Liebherr 1300, and it’s got a tail picker and all this stuff, you have to mobilize two cranes, even though one’s smaller than the other. The same thing with offshore, you have all these specialized vessels, you have to mobilize this one vessel, it’s the only one that can lift these, 130 meter blades or whatever it may be. We need ways, innovative ways, to be able to do installations easier. And not only installations, you gotta think about operations and maintenance. So as the lifetime, if we get more and more of these built, yes, construction, but now we’re getting to the point where we have to take and swap blades out, or if there’s an issue or something of that sort. So, things like this need to happen. Does it make sense for me as an armchair engineer? Of course. Especially sitting here with Phil and Alan, who are Much better engineers than I am talking about moments of inertia. And this is, I’m standing here with my sitting here with my pen and my fingers together trying to figure out how this balance works. I think it, I think there is a future for something like this. And kudos to Orsted. Maybe they’re gonna get the license it to a bunch of people. Allen Hall: Our second idea is a degradable wind turbine blade and manufacturing method by Swancor Advanced Materials. And if you’ve been watching in the news about recycling and wind turbine blades, there’s been a lot of discussion about creating resins that you can decompose. Well, this is one of them. And they, they’re. The idea is to create this resin. There’s a specific chemical compound that they’re creating, but when you break it down, you basically take the blade and drop it into an alkaline environment at somewhere around a hundred degrees Celsius for a period of time. And the resin separates into its intrinsic parts. You can also recover the fabric that was in the blade. So you basically can start over with all the ingredients. It’s like unbaking a cake in a sense. This is really important because there’s a big movement in Europe to not landfill used wind turbine blades, and I think that movement about not landfilling is going to happen here in the United States. So, SWAN Corps is really set up here for an opportunity, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and just for context for everybody, SWAN Corps is a a partner to a number of the OEMs already including Siemens Gamesa that has developed, recyclable blade, recyclable blade technology utilizing, I don’t know if it’s this specific formulation that they’re describing in this, this patent but it’s probably close. And they’re actually doing this together in, in the manufacturing facilities in Taiwan. as well for some of the offshore blades for Siemens Gamesa. I believe Squancore is also a supplier to Vestas and certainly some of the Chinese OEMs, Sonoma and Envision Energy. So the fact that this is, again, I’m not sure if they’re using this exact, formulation in their commercially available product. But like I said, it’s probably pretty close. And, it’s fantastic to see we just talked about another idea from Orsted that’s kind of, technology readiness level, like four or maybe five for those that are familiar with that, well, we track the, the technology readiness levels for all these patents that we catalog at Intel store. This one’s probably a TRL eight or nine. And so again, this is fantastic to be able to see the progression of technology come into the market. Joel Saxum: Phil, to, to your point there. A resin much like this one. I don’t know if it’s the exact same one. Like you said, RWE installed 2023 at the Cascasi wind farm offshore. And there were Siemens Mesa blades. So something like this is being used in the field right now. My fall down on this one is the same conversation that you have whenever you talk about recycling wind turbines blades is what’s the throughput of something like this. Right. So what this patent says is thermal degradation is conducted 60 degrees C to 180 degrees C for 1 to 48 hours. We don’t know exactly what it is. I’m sure that has to do with agitation in the, in, in the chemicals and these kinds of things, but that’s hugely energy intensive and it’s pretty slow. So when we get to the point where we’re having hundreds and hundreds and thousands of tons of turbine blades to recycle, which we have right now, and it’s only going to grow and grow and grow into the next 10, 20, 25 years, because that’s when, when, by the time these, this resin is into manufacturing, it will be another 25 years until we have to recycle them. Can a factory or can a mechanism handle this at scale in the real world? Because even as it sits right now, we have people that are having a hard time at scale, grinding these things up to use them in roadbed materials and other things. So, I like that we’re moving forward in this method, and it could be something really cool in the future. Does it sound like it’s ready for scale? Not to me. But I hope it is. Allen Hall: Our fun invention is an interesting one this week. Joel, do you know what beer goggles are? I wear them like every Saturday . So this is a relative to beer goggles, and it’s similar to what Google Glass was at the time. It’s a set of glasses and on the lenses they put subliminal messages above the normal sight line, so it’s a stereoscopic effect and so on there it can say, Joel, no beer. And then they can project that out in front of you on Saturdays so that you can remember what happened on Sunday. But this, this idea, I have not seen this implemented, but it is a very unique idea, just putting something on the edge of your vision all the time that you kind of lose track of. You don’t focus on it because your brain eventually just tries to ignore it. But some part of your brain may be paying attention to it. And. Could give you Joel Saxum: some healthy advice. I think there’s, this is, this could be really used in I, I have a lot of uses, I’m thinking marketing campaigns, here’s some free sunglasses to wear and then you never know what you’re actually getting from them or even messages from like maybe parents to kids, like, Hey, clean your room maybe me or maybe me this week, make sure you get my windshield repaired. If it had something that you could. That you can change in real time on them. That might work really well. I like the idea. Allen Hall: Come on, Phil, you have a use for this. Philip Totaro: Well, let’s also give some background on this. This was originally conceived by a couple of Canadian inventors back in 1990. And that’s, they filed it, I think they filed a U. S. version of the patent in 1991. It issued in 92. This patent is actually cited. As what’s called prior art, so kind of a previous invention to things like the Google Glass and some of these other goggle based technologies that Meta and some of these other companies, Apple have, have actually developed. So even though this isn’t using or contemplating necessarily augmented reality technology, which was, what a lot of the modern versions of, of these glasses are this was a predecessor to that and, and something that kind of inspired derivative contributions in, in that area. So this, this is actually kind of a fun and interesting one. I, again, you’re right. I’ve never seen anybody develop this, but it would probably come in handy

We discuss a PES Wind Magazine article featuring 4cast’s methodology for comprehensive wind resource assessment and site planning. Then cover Vestas CFO Hans Martin Smith’s departure after 20+ years. Finally offshore wind security concerns follow a Chinese vessel’s severance of Baltic Sea cables, and Tilt Renewables is announced as the title sponsor for Wind Energy O&M Australia. 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.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Well, since everybody is getting pardoned recently, uh, I thought it may be a good idea to, to put out there what we should be pardoned for, so we ought to get added to that list. Joel Saxum: How about this one? I would like to be pardoned for not getting my better half’s windshield changed in her Jeep from the crack from it. Allen Hall: Ooh, you’re gonna need a pardon for that. Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely pardonable material. Yeah. Phil, have you broken any scooter laws there in California? No, I have not. I don’t know, Phil, you ought to get them out now because the pardons are coming. Okay. Well, Rosemary, I’m not sure we can pardon anybody in another country, but we might as well just open it up to everybody right now. Why not? Rosemary, did you commit any offenses when you were in the States, in California, studying composites? Rosemary Barnes: I’ve got a pretty big one, actually. I don’t know if you guys have this, but in Australia, when you’re learning how to, to write, handwrite at school, you know, you start with a pencil and then when you pass a test and you can graduate up to a pen, you need a pen license. Um, do you have that? Allen Hall: That is not real. Rosemary Barnes: I did not get my pen license, but I do write with a pen sometimes. So, yeah, including in the United States. Philip Totaro: That’s as real as a hoop snake. Rosemary Barnes: That’s true. And I, um, I would like to invite Australians to comment on if you’re watching this on YouTube or anywhere that you can write comments but look it up on the LinkedIn post about this episode. Please comment and confirm that we do or at least did in the 90s. I have to get a pen license before if we graduate from pencil to pen. I never got it. Allen Hall: It’s a scandal. It’s an outright scandal. Alan, you have to share yours with us. What are you, what do you need to be pardoned for? Yeah, we could use some pardoning on the production side of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast because there are, there have been some times it’s pretty rough to edit and I gotta, I gotta plead guilty. Yes, it is. However. However. Our producer does a very fine job, and what comes out on the airwaves is much better than what we record. Clearly. In this quarter’s PES Win Magazine, a number of great articles, and you can download all of them at PESWin. com, but A really interesting article about weather from a company called Forecast. So if you go to their website, it’s fore cast. de, they’re based in Germany. And the article really describes how you do forecasting. Preliminary studies on wind sites to look at what the winds are now, get a really good understanding of that and how that plays into the yield of this farm and what the weather should be, the long term weather implications going forward, so you can at least have an estimate on the revenue you’re going to pay. Possibly be generating from these wind farms. And Joel, it seems like a lot of wind farm operators don’t do this. Either they don’t Joel Saxum: do it or they’re not doing it at a high enough fidelity, right? So they’re not doing it well enough. We run into some wind farms where all of a sudden, you know, the resource is down or the resource isn’t good enough or local competition for the wind resource, right? Someone’s building wind farms around them and it changes. And you, you see some people kind of, yeah, generally it looks like this at a hundred meters or at 80 meters. This is what we should have. And then they move on. Um, but what you’re seeing now is more sophisticated lenders as well. Wanting really good bankable insights on what is that wind resource going to be? How much profit are we going to generate out of this project? Um, you know, and there’s other things that factor into that, which, uh, forecast is taking into consideration when they do their estimates. Legal framework and regulations, right? Because that’s a part of a wind or a site assessment as well, because as those things change or develop depending on where you are, you may be used to doing wind in Texas and you move to Kansas. It’s a completely different regulatory framework, so that’s a big part of it. Uh, but, you know, if I’m building a wind farm, this is the kind of thing that I want to make sure that I tackle in a really good way. I don’t know if they do this, but I know, Alan, you and I talk about it would be nice if people would do lightning, lightning, uh, density as a part of their sighting assessment, but We’ll see. Allen Hall: Well, there’s less lightning strikes in Europe, in most places in Europe, than there is in the United States. But Europe does seem to have a history of doing more research on the sites before they decide to put turbines in, where in the States, there are assessments done, but maybe not the fidelity of what Forecast is doing here. Rosemary Barnes: In Australia, at least. I know that they do do lightning assessments, but, um, they don’t use it for estimating how many lightning repairs that you will need on blades or anything like that. It’s for, um, you know, they need to assess the lightning and protect the substation and things like that and make sure people aren’t going to die from lightning strikes on the site. Um, so I know that I, I’ve seen the, you know, initial assessments and when you had all the information there, it would not have taken very much for you to extrapolate to realize that you were going to have this big lightning problem on site. Like you should, you should have known before you stuck a single turbine in the ground that you’re going to have, you You know, a lot more, um, lightning repairs than, you know, other sites that you had that had a lower lightning strike, um, intensity. So yeah, I, I didn’t even think it would add that much more to the development process. If I just need to get the right expert in to, you know, just take a quick look at it and say, Hey guys, might budget in some, um, you know, more lightning repairs than you might be used to. Allen Hall: Yeah, there’s a recent article about wind farms in my area that are on ridgelines. They’re having huge problems with gusts. And they’re now realizing that maybe gusts aren’t the best thing for wind turbines. Maybe we didn’t site these turbines right because Half of them are down at any one time. Rosemary Barnes: That’s, that’s one thing to not check the lightning, uh, environment, but to not check the wind resource properly is a bit strange for a wind farm. Allen Hall: I agree. Uh, there’s been a huge shift in whether, uh, wind turbines should be cited on gusty sites or on top of mountains. There’s, there’s a lot less of the on top of the ridge lines and there were, uh, 10, 15 years ago, which is when our turbines were installed. So, you know, getting those wind resources right is a huge advantage. And if. If you want to go to a resource, you can go to PESWin. com, read the article from Forkast. As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PESWin 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: Well, an interesting departure from Vestas. Hans Martin Smith has left the company after 20 plus years at Vestas. Um, he’s a CFO who began that role in about two years ago, March 22, and was really instrumental in Vestas, uh, coming back into profitability in 23 and looks like 24. Uh, they’ve installed another person temporarily as CFO for the company. But this has rocked the stock market a little bit. Uh, the stock price was down the day of the announcement at about 10%. We’ll see what happens over the next couple of days to see if it recovers. But this is a real, uh, unique development, I think. We’ve seen wind energy companies really struggle lately, but we haven’t seen key players, uh, walk off the court, which is what just happened Philip Totaro: here, Phil. I mean, there, we don’t really know at this point as we record what the were for the departure. Uh, clearly Wall Street doesn’t like it because they prefer certainty. Um, but when you consider, you know, their, the divestitists had a bit of a hard time and, and it’s getting a bit clobbered with, uh, you know, a lot of these, uh, warranty claims and, and, uh, Uh, not accurately predicting the extent of, um, you know, their, their liability issues on the services side of the business. You know, they’re, they’re still making orders, uh, globally. They’re, they’re obviously still behind, you know, Gold Wind, um, internationally, uh, as far as, you know, global league tables and all that sort of thing. Um, but their services business has been, uh, a bit of, uh, thrown in their side, um, in the past few years. So, uh, you know, again, I, we really don’t know what this is related to. Um, but that’s, as far as their commercial business goes, I think that’s probably the only thing, uh, on the commercial side of the business that, uh, anybody could say, you know, hey, you’re, you’re underperforming and it’s time to bring in some fresh blood. If that’s what happened. Joel Saxum: I think something that’s interesting here is that we know, like, you know, back in 21, they had the big write down with some of the lightning protection system issues that they had, uh, you know, some couple of lawsuits and stuff there. But in the last year, news cycle ish, we’ve heard a lot about Siemens Gamesa and their problems. We’ve heard a lot about GE Vernova and some of the, some of the big moves they’re making with, you know, just pausing on some offshore wind and their shakeup with, uh, some of the. The C suite around there, um, and Vestas has kind of flown under the radar. But when you look at the, the wall street side of things, all of those major manufacturers of wind, like when anything happens with them, wall street, the investors, everybody is super apt to make a change real quick because it’s almost like the volatility index of each of the, of the wind sector is pretty high. So you’re people watching, watching, watching. So when you see an announcement like this and something drops 10 percent like that. A lot of times it’s a knee jerk reaction. I wouldn’t expect that to keep tumbling in at that rate. Now we do also know that Vesta stock in the last year has gone down a little over 50%. Um, and I think that that’s just a, I mean, they’re a pure wind play, right? And there’s been some headwinds in the sector on the OEM side. So. It’s kind of expected, but, um, I wouldn’t expect to see them keep just, I mean, I don’t expect another 10 percent tomorrow. Uh, but that’s, that’s me again, as we, as we always say, not investment advice. So don’t, don’t take that one for granted. Um, but Vestas as an OEM, I mean, they’re still there. The order book is still there. They’re still chugging things out. Um, they’re still, uh, looking at some offshore things. So, I mean, I don’t, I don’t think there’s a massive, this isn’t a massive hurt to the, uh, actual bottom line of Vestas. I think it’s, um, they’ll replace Allen Hall: them and keep moving on. Their earnings before interest and taxes are, the margin is about 4 to 5 percent, uh, at the moment. They’ve been looking to get that to grow to 10 percent margin, and so they’re about halfway there. To get to 10 percent earnings before interest and taxes margin is, would be remarkable for that business. It’s, it’s a hard thing to do because you get, you know, Really two buckets to play with. You can charge more for the turbines, which Vestas clearly is doing right now. But on the other side, trying to reduce supply chain costs and drive down the expenses internally, even labor costs, uh, is really difficult. And in the inflationary environment we still live in, with the raw materials being mostly steel and copper and Obviously, the composites needed for Blades, those prices are not really going to change that much. The CFO is kind of stuck in the middle of Joel Saxum: that, right? Yeah, I think he’s, he’s taking fire from all corners, right? You got the board looking at you, you got investors looking at you, you’re kind of trying to I think, I think at one point in time we have to look at this like, um People are human too, right? And sometimes maybe you just said, you know what? I’ve had enough of the stress here. I mean, we, if you follow the news today, there was a high powered C suite executive that was murdered on the street, the United Healthcare CEO, right? Like that kind of stuff is that’s, that’s ridiculous to be the head of these companies and imagine the stress these people are under and have to go through. And maybe he decided, you know what? I just want to. Take a little time with my family and do something a little less stressful. So that could Allen Hall: be the reason too. Here’s where I think that that didn’t happen because Vestas being the company that they are and always planning ahead would have had a plan in place that would have not gone wrong. allowed the stock to fall like that. They would have had more rationale as to why this is happening because the initial assumption from everything you saw online was, uh, he has been asked to leave, which is not, there was no data to back that up. So I, I’m also wondering like you, Joel, is that just guessing at the market and trying to get a leg up on where you think Vesta’s stock is going? Because there’s no indication of anything right now. It’s just that he’s going to leave the company and at the end of 24 and that’s it. So from a Vestas standpoint, obviously as a lot of people work at Vestas, it’s a very strong company. Uh, it just seems really hard for them to get to a 10 percent EBIT margin. That would be incredibly hard to be in that position. And who knows, you know, there’s a lot of moving pieces with Vestas at the moment, maybe, um, yeah, changes, more changes are likely to happen. Who knows? Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not, actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape 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: Although we haven’t heard a lot of news about this in the United States, uh, you know, NATO warships surrounded a Chinese bulk carrier in the Baltic Sea not long ago because, uh, of fiber optic cables, one from Sweden to Lithuania and one between Germany and Finland. were severed as this Chinese ship drug an anchor across them. From what we can tell, uh, as Joel pointed out, they turned off the vessel’s transponder during part of this. So the boat tried to disappear a number of Surrounding countries, including Denmark, got pretty suspicious when this was going on and ran out to, to find out what this ship was up to. It looks like they were, they drug an anchor about a hundred miles, roughly. And that is a huge problem. Uh, you can sever a lot of things. And, and, and I think Joel, I think you originally pulled into this out to me that it looked like the, the ship was making some circles around this cable. One of these cables, just trying to. happened to find it where he could sever it. Now, there’s been a number of investigations in this and obviously maritime rules exist, so there’s not a lot that can happen here because the the type of ship and what it’s carrying it’s it has Russian fertilizer on it and it has I believe a Russian Captain or a Chinese? No, it has a Chinese. Sorry. It has a Chinese captain and at least one Russian sailor. Yeah Uh, but they, they can’t bring the ship to port because of maritime law, so they got it parked out there. Denmark has it parked, uh, just off their shores. The big question is, this is the second time this has happened. What happens to an offshore wind farm? Where there’s a lot of cable laying on the bottom of the ocean that’s providing power, not just internet, and this fiber optic was carrying internet, of course. What happens in those situations and is there ways to protect the power cables and all those connective cables that run between the individual turbines, inter array cables, to protect them from Yeah, Joel Saxum: I think to, to, to understand the risk there, we’ve got to think about how these things are put in the water and what it looks like. So there’s a big difference between, say, you know, one of these big, you know, inter, intercontinental cables and what a local cable looks like. And the odd thing is, is it’s actually less aggressive. Protected. These big intercontinental cables are less protected than local ones are. Because to do, like, so, when I say protected, I mean rock dumps. So you lay the cable and then you dump rocks over them. Or you could put what’s called a mattress over them. Which is basically just like, um, a lot of times just a hunk of concrete that kind of shields them. Um, or of course you have bearing them. So you use a subsea trencher or in a, you know, in a transition zone where you’re going from deep water up on the shore, you might, you know, might actually, uh, horizontally drill for them. So. So, these big communications cables, a lot of times that were laid 50 years ago, they don’t have as much protection on them, uh, as the new stuff does. So, when you do a wind farm, you, there’s a lot of, because now we know, you know, we learn from our mistakes. So we know we need scour protection, we need to make sure that these cables are protected, and make sure that we’re not, um, uncovering them because of bend radiuses and all the bad things that can happen. So if you were to go into an offshore wind farm today and you looked at, let’s say just like inter array cables. So inter array cables being the cables from each turbine, say to the offshore substation, the majority of them are going to have a rock dump on top of them. Um, or like a Ridgeway rock bags, kind of like, um, engineered piece of, you know, rock or concrete that covers them. So they’re kind of protected. Um, and then you’re going to have the big export cable, which goes from the offshore substation to land. Okay. Uh, to wherever they’re, they’re, they’re beaching this thing at. And those will, should usually be buried a lot of times because that’s going to be a bigger cable. Uh, wanting to be protected more. Um, so they’ll bury it until they get into a certain water depth and then they’ll trench it into, use a trenching machine or a horizontal drilling machine to bring it into shore. So I do think that, and I would say that possibly in some of the older offshore wind farms, there’s the possibility of a ship coming through there and dropping an anchor and dragging some of these cables. Or if the anchor’s big enough, you might just, you know, plow the rocks out of the way and drag the thing anyways. So from an infrastructure risk standpoint, you know, of course we have insurance and all these things to cover this stuff, but what could really happen is, you know, a targeted attack is not out of the question in my mind. Um, I mean, we’ve seen them on onshore for substations, right? Uh, like a targeted attack is pretty easy to do. Um, it’s just how bad are the, uh, operators that I don’t, I’m not saying operators of the wind farms, but the international operators that don’t want that wind farm to, to, uh, Bring its power to shore. It’s, it’s possible. Allen Hall: Phil, have you seen any design data or patents in regards to anchor, uh, catchers, I’ll call them? Something that would stop an anchor from dragging onto a cable, some sort of preventive device? Nothing Philip Totaro: for, uh, offshore wind farms specifically, but what I’d like to go back to is the, the risk level. So, interarray cables, in order to drag something through there, you’d have to get a vessel through there that would You know, be able to fit, uh, first of all. The other thing is, wind farms are usually outside of the rather highly regulated shipping lanes, and while there isn’t always somebody out there patrolling 100 percent of the time, I mean, most people aren’t going anywhere zigzagging through wind farms, dragging an anchor. So, now, that said, the export cables, as Joel said, they’re already reasonably somewhat protected, but they’re also more exposed because they could intersect with shipping lanes. Um, I know even in like New York, New Jersey, where we’re talking about putting some offshore wind farms, they’ve had to kind of circuitously route the cables to avoid the shipping lanes, the New York Bight. Um, and it’s, it’s, you know, caused a lot of consternation because then there’s people in like Long Beach, um, You know, that don’t want the cable landing point there, uh, they’re trying to get it, you know, sent off to somewhere in Delaware or Maryland or what have you. And it, it’s, you know, causing, uh, causing all kinds of discussions. But, uh, you know, the, the possibility, as Joel said, the possibility of it happening is there. I, I think actually the, the more interesting thing with like offshore wind farm security would be proximity detection for things like submarines. Which might actually be a riskier thing where they could go in, they could deliberately find and cut a cable, um, you know, as opposed to, you know, some, some Chinese flag vessel that that’s just dragging an anchor and going in circles. I mean, that’s one way to do it. Um, but for an offshore wind farm, submarines are probably, you know, foreign submarines are probably a bigger risk than, um, you know, intentional or otherwise the, the random anchor drop and drag through, through the, uh, the ocean. Allen Hall: Are there sensors? Right? Are there sensors on foundations right now? Philip Totaro: In the UK, there are. Um, and I know it’s been a topic of discussion between the U. S. Navy and some of the project developers as well. I Joel Saxum: mean, because that technology is off, it’s off the shelf. Philip Totaro: Yeah. Keep in mind that they also, there are already deep water sonar sensor nets and things like that that are, frankly, probably more sophisticated than what they would just plop onto a jacket or mount a pile foundation, uh, at an offshore wind farm. But the point is that you probably still want a sensor at the outermost portion of the offshore wind farm as kind of a proximity detection capability. Um, you know, they can already track subs for the most part. Um, you know, we’re not living in the, uh, The hunt for Red October days over here, where they have caterpillar drives and all that sort of thing, so, uh, you know, we’re, we’re able to actually detect, you know, foreign subs for the most part, but, uh, having that proximity detection capability for offshore wind farms is probably what adds the most relevant level and layer of security for having cables cut, again, versus having some, you know, Accidentally or intentionally dredging up, uh, you know, dragging anchor and dredging up, uh, you know, a bunch of cables. Allen Hall: Are we concerned about underwater vehicles, smaller ones? Because there’s a lot of technology there right Joel Saxum: now. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of them out there from an ROV, from a tethered ROV standpoint, from an untethered AUV standpoint. And, but all of that, all that’s covered under detection too. Right? So like, if you’re interested in what this detection looks like, sonardyne. com, right, they have some of the best off the shelf stuff that’s been used in offshore oil and gas forever, and they have them small enough where they can detect, you know, Divers in the water and, and for, for, I mean, they put them on ships and in oil and gas, uh, infrastructure to make sure that there isn’t a diver coming in. That is a, you know, there’s something wanting to cause harm to infrastructure. So, but Alan, to what you said, I mean, I’ve seen AUVs. I know people that develop them that are the size of a. Pringles can of chips that can go and cause damage. Philip Totaro: Yeah, it’s scary, isn’t it? It’s just the extent to which like the bigger the ROV the The more likely you could mount something on it that would cause meaningful damage The the smallest things the worry there would be underwater explosives or something like that. Um In order to, like, cut through cable, you’d have to have something that could, you know, which it’s basically what I’m saying is it’s a beefy, you know, heavy mass object that would need to be attached to, you know, something. That’s why submarines, I’m saying submarines are probably the biggest risk because those are the things that are capable of carrying that kind of, um, uh, you know, technology on them. Uh, could an ROV do something? Yeah. Um, but again, it’s, it’s kind of a sliding scale here of, of risk. Allen Hall: Is there a European policy on that or any sort of directive on the design of the cables and all the sensors you would put out in the ocean? Philip Totaro: I’m not aware of a directive, but they, after there was an incident, um, I think earlier in the year, was it in Belgium or Holland? I want to say it was in Holland. They, uh, the EU got together and said, Hey, by the way, we got to do something about this. Uh, so they’re talking about it right now. Joel Saxum: I think the, when we talk about risk level here too, the next step that we need to think about is We’re talking fixed bottom, right? So we’re talking to 60 meters of water depth and closer to shore. When you talk about floating now, now you’ve opened up to thousand meters of water depth, possibly, and all kinds of stuff in the water column. So now that you’ve got mooring chains and export cables and stuff that are from the top of the water floating somewhere in the middle of the water column, that is much more easy to sabotage or to cause harm to. Accidentally or on purpose than anything that’s fixed bottom. Allen Hall: Do you remember recently on the east coast of the United States a discussion about having multiple cables to come on shore and they were connecting farms together so if a cable was severed they’d have another pathway for the electricity to get back on shore? I have not seen that moved upon. There was a big discussion about six months ago. I saw a lot of news about it, and then it went quiet. I assume that they decided not to do it because of the additional costs. But it seems like you’re almost have to do something like that now. Joel Saxum: I would think so. You’d want to, I mean, as a, as an operator, you’d want to protect. As an operator owning the wind farm, you’d want to protect your ability to, because if you don’t get that, if that gets caught, yes, there’s insurance policies for this, but you’re cutting so much. Uh, that, that until you get a new, yeah, but until you get a new cable built, because that’s custom built, that’s not off the shelf, right? That’s a, and get a vessel, get it loaded, get out there. I mean, you’re talking six months minimum. Right? Of complete downtime for a gigawatt of a wind farm. So that’s on the operator side. Now you’re talking about the actual grid operator and then they’re going to lose a gigawatt of capacity off of the grid. I mean, that’s rolling blackouts instantly if you’re at capacity. Allen Hall: Are those cables fixable? Unlike fiber optic, which I know can be fixed, but HVDC cable, they seem pretty robust themselves. I, I not seen a, a raw cut it and then figure out a way to put it back together again, that has worked. Maybe there is a way to do that. I Joel Saxum: don’t know about on the big export cables, but I have seen smaller cables fixed offshore where they basically sink. You sink a dive bell down on top of them, shut it all off. Of course, you would sink a dive bell down on top of them, pull off, pull all the water out of it. And then you have guys through people down there, technicians down there, just like they’re splicing it on shore, but they’re sitting on the bottom of the ocean. So I’ve seen that on smaller cables in the oil and gas world, but in the North, specifically in the North sea, because the North sea is fairly shallow. A lot of those platforms are in 30 meters of water, right? That’s not very much in the grand scheme of things. So when stuff happens out there, they just sink a dive bell down. People go down there. They’re in, they’re in, um, hyperbaric chambers for a little while and fix it up and move on. I don’t know about an export cable though, because those things are, when we talk export cables, I mean, they’re big as round as I am. And that’s not small. Allen Hall: It’d be a lot of work. I, I don’t know if there’s even the possibility of doing that today. Maybe one of the cable manufacturers could let us know about that. I would be interesting to hear if these are fixable. It seems like a really, uh, strong. area to attack if you wanted to. And since we’ve had it happen a couple of times over the last year, uh, wind operators need to be thinking about this and countries need to be thinking about it hard, uh, because it’s not going to end here. Philip Totaro: No way. HOFFMAN And we’ve already had challenges in the UK with the robustness of cables to begin with, where a lot of them had to be swapped out because they just weren’t, uh, adequate to the task. Again, as Joel mentioned, the scour protection and other things. So, you know, the fact that they may have to add in security as an extra layer of design consideration for this, you know, I don’t know what much more they can do, especially as you said with floating, it’s the, the, you know, Risk level and exposure is, is significant because there’s not really other, until you get close enough to shore where you could trench or bury or drill or whatever, you’re, the cables are going to be exposed and tethered to, you know, floating, um, I mean, what, what are they little pontoon things or something? I don’t even know. They’ll, they’ll, Joel Saxum: what they’ll do is basically the majority of designs will have what’s called, um, it’ll be a flex pipe for flex lay S pipe. So it’ll come down from the turbine, do an S in the water column, and then go to the sea floor. And that will, that S will have, will have flotation on it and it will allow for movement in the whole system. But you’re going to have that, you know, if you’re in 200 meters of water, you’re going to have. 250 meters of cable, and that’s, that’s not even the mooring system, right? 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: So we have a couple of big announcements about Wind Energy O& M in Melbourne, Australia on February 11th and 12th. Sponsors that have signed on. Phil, you want to give all the details? Uh, Philip Totaro: well, we’re delighted to announce that Tilt Renewables has signed on as the event title sponsor. Uh, so we’re, uh, very pleased to have them as, as part of the event. Um, they are one of the largest, um, operators of renewable assets, including solar, in Australia. Um, and they’re going to be participating in the event, uh, and speaking to their experience with, um, you know, particularly their, their wind assets and, uh, you know, some of the challenges that they’ve had, they do operate some assets in states like Victoria that have seen a lot of curtailment and negative pricing, and they’re going to have, uh, plenty of feedback for attendees about, um, Um, You know, what they’ve done to, to get their portfolio, uh, you know, operating smoothly. So again, we’re, we’re delighted to have Tilt Renewables on board, um, and Joel, actually, do you want to announce the other one? Joel Saxum: Yeah, so we’ve got our friends. They’ve been on the podcast before, uh, from Arones up in Latvia. They’re gonna come down, and they’re gonna talk to us about Some of the really cool new things they’re doing with robotics. So of course, Rowan’s has got the internal crawlers for internal inspections. They’ve got a great drone for doing external inspections. The most important robot they have right now is their fleet of LEP robots. So they’re actively doing LEP by robots. So you remove the. You know, the, some of the, you fix some of the quality issues. Uh, they’ve got fantastic coatings that they’re working with. Um, so they’re going to come talk to us about all of the, uh, new and improved robotics technologies for wind and what’s going to be on the horizon coming from the Arones team next. Allen Hall: If you’re interested in being a sponsor, there’s a couple of opportunities still left and you need to visit windaustralia. com. And if you want to register for the event and attend it on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne, also visit windaustralia. com. Rosemary Barnes: And the coffee carts haven’t been sponsored yet. Right? I think people shouldn’t sleep on that opportunity because this conference is taking place in Melbourne, which it’s got to be the number one city in the world for coffee snobbery. People are going to be demanding, demanding. A coffee and a good coffee. And then, you know, they’re going to be looking at that card to see who has sponsored that experience for them that day. It’s a difference between a good day and a bad day for the average Melburnian. Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Naturgy has secured $2.3 billion in financing to boost its Australian portfolio, MARA Holdings will acquire a wind farm in Texas, and TotalEnergies which will acquire VSB Group for €2 billion. 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.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.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.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Big news this week, Naturgy has secured 2. 3 billion Australian dollars in financing to boost its Australian renewable portfolio. The financing operation has been formalized with 11 international banks. Global Power Generation, which is a subsidiary of Naturgy. Closes 2024 with a portfolio of one gigawatts of projects in operation. Now, Phil, a lot of things are happening on Australia on their noble energy front, and particularly in wind at the moment. Philip Totaro: This is another one. Well, and this is an important one for GPG because they’re trying to build three projects right now two wind farms, the Ryan Corner and the Crookwell Three projects, and then also a, a hybrid project called the Cunderdin. Hybrid plant that’s gonna include some solar PV so they’re immediately going to be deploying this 2. 3 billion Australian dollars and, and put it to good use, building a significant amount of, of new capacity. So, good on them. Allen Hall: For you Bitcoin lovers, Marathon Digital Holdings will acquire a wind farm in Hansford County, Texas with 240 megawatts of interconnection capacity. Now the site includes 114 megawatts of operational wind currently and Marathon Digital Holdings will develop a behind the meter data center power Buy wind energy. And this allows them to do Bitcoin mining, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is actually the first of its kind in terms of this type of a deal structure where a, a Bitcoin miner specifically, I mean, there’s other companies like Amazon that have bought into wind farms or, or co developed and built wind farms. And agreed to take the power and feed it into their, their data centers but this is the first time, as you just mentioned, that they’re going to do a behind the meter data center where they can avoid So yeah. And agreed. Agreed. A lot of the issues you get in, in ERCOT and in Texas in general, where you’ve got, periods of negative pricing or what have you, where you’ve got to dump a lot of power. They’re at least taking the power that they would otherwise dump and putting it into their, their Bitcoin mining operations, which, is, is increasingly power intensive. I, I remember setting up a small Bitcoin mining operation on my laptop about ten years ago. I ended up getting about 80 bucks. So that’s, that’s the best I could do. These guys are going to be doing, a lot more with a lot more power. Joel Saxum: But I think you’ll see a lot more of this happening in specifically, like Phil said, in the Texas, in the ERCOT market down here, because it’s a triage market. When you look at it, you can see negative prices, positive price. You have a bad winter storm or some things come offline. All of a sudden power is 3, hour in a wholesale market. Like you see a lot of changes. So I’ve talked with over the few years that I’ve been involved in wind. Quite a few people down here that are looking at different behind the meter options. So of course this, blockchain data processing is one of them. Another one is hot green hydrogen behind the meter. So if you have the ability to flick on and flick off power directing it to the grid when it makes sense for money or back to an operation that makes sense for money, that’s a huge thing. And when you have a lot of distressed assets, which there is in Texas and from that early wind game that old, those are seven, nine, 10, 11, 12, even 13. Some of these assets are floating around that haven’t been maintained that well, or, they’re at the end of their kind of useful life. They need a little bit of capital injection to get them up and running. They can be bought for a decent price and they have interconnects with the grid as well. So, I think if you dig into the weeds of the wind industry, you’ll see some more of this starting to happen. Allen Hall: And another big acquisition with Total Energies, which will acquire VSB Group for 2 billion euros. Now, VSB Group has about 10 gigawatts of renewable pipeline across 10 European countries, and this acquisition by Total is part of their 100 gigawatts capacity by 2030 initiative. This gets me a long way, Phil. 10 gigawatts is a substantial acquisition. Philip Totaro: It does, although one could also contend that if they just kept investing in offshore wind, they’d get there a little faster. But this is kind of the reality, right? This is why they’re doing this deal at this point is the, the inflation and interest rate environment Totaro is such that they want to pull money out of offshore wind and, but they’ve got to do something with it. Total being one of the, oil and gas and utility companies that’s actually probably one of the more committed, along with RWE and Vattenfall Statcraft as well. Committed to, to renewables. So the fact that they are going to park their money in, in somebody that’s doing a lot of onshore wind and even solar and some storage development like VSB Group has throughout Europe is fantastic and, and this should go a long way to, to helping both VSB get more access to capital and help Total go a long way to getting. Their, their kind of internal goals met as far as their their energy targets and, and ESG targets. Joel Saxum: For those people that are interested in business risk, like I am, I think it’s, I think it’s a really interesting concept. You look at what Total Energies has done in the last few years. They had Total E Ren, so basically they funded a group. Like them with under the total name, but it wasn’t completely absorbed into total energies and just to see how the renewable energy Play would play out and they did very well So they said you know what total iran you are going to become part of total energies and now it’s one big group and then And now again looking at the risk profiles, and just today we’ve seen some really tumultuous news come out of the french government which may have some implications on what happens to renewable energies and Yeah, whether it’s subsidies or other things that happen over in that country, Total Energy’s being a French company, making all of a sudden this big move into renewable energy. So it’s a very interesting play. But I think like Phil said, they’re committed to a renewable energy future and fulfilling the goals that they want to. And they’re moving forward on it.

Allen Hall speaks with Helicoid Industries’ Dr. Lorenzo Mencattelli about their groundbreaking wind turbine blade LEP technology, which uses a biomimetic fiber pattern inspired by mantis shrimp. Their solution reduces erosion damage by 70% and can work with existing materials and manufacturing processes. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, and today we’re discussing one of the most persistent challenges in the wind energy industry, beating edge erosion on the wind turbine blades. To discuss an innovative solution to this problem, we’re joined by Dr. Lorenzo Micatelli, the Managing Director of Tech and Ops at Helicoid Industries. At Helicoid Industries, Lorenzo is spearheading the development of a groundbreaking technology that could significantly reduce leading edge erosion damage on wind turbine blades. Lorenzo. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Thank you very much, Allen for having me. Allen Hall: So leading edge erosion is one of those top issues, and I first ran across your company at DTU, at the Leading Edge Erosion Conference, and all the experts all around the world were there. I think it was in February or March earlier this year. And I sat through all the presentations and then Helichord came up and gave a presentation, and I was astounded because I hadn’t seen anything like this technology before. But first I want to talk about how big of a problem this is, and I think during that DTU conference we realized it’s a couple percentage points of power loss for a lot of operators, and it’s structural damage when leading edge erosion penetrates through the shell of a winter blade. That’s a huge problem. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, exactly. So the, the, the small percentage power loss is often acceptable if you want, because it doesn’t really force the operator to, to stop the blade and, and perform maintenance and repair. But when the erosion gets to the composite substrate and therefore the structural integrity of the blade is compromised, then it carries a whole lot of other issues. And, and then operations need to stop. Allen Hall: Yeah, and that’s where you see all the repair work going on, particularly in the United States, in the middle of the United States, where leading edge erosion has penetrated to the shell, and the amount of time and effort of independent people. service providers going and fixing blades, leading edge erosion is a, is an industry upon its own. And it’s a little shocking actually that your technology hasn’t been used yet. I want to just describe it here in a second because the, right now in order to prevent leading edge erosion out of the OEMs, the manufacturer’s equipment, you have to apply Plastic, basically plastic shells or rubberized plastic shells or put some sort of thick coating on to the blades, which is somewhat effective. I would say it’s going to give you a couple of years of life, but there really hasn’t been a true fix. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, so the, the focus indeed has been mainly on developing new solutions for the coating, right? That is applied on the, on the leading edge, while there is no be any engineering on the composite substrate underneath. And the reality of things is is that the operator, you know, spin their blades way beyond the erosion of the coating. So initially when we deployed. When we thought of this solution, we wanted to find something that would work together with the coating. So initially, we are not considering replacing entirely the coating with our fiber architecture. But the idea is to give the operator an extra margin of safety once the coating has been eroded to keep their blade spinning, produce energy and not worry about having issues of structural integrity because now the composite substrate has the strength to endure that erosion. Allen Hall: Yeah, and the failure mode on the structural side as it was described in your presentation, was the resin. Basically, the plastic that holds everything together, right? That the fibers go typically at 090 if you’re biaxial, and then you have these, these little pockets that are resin, and unsupported resin, has trouble in rain erosion. So it wants to be eaten away. And once you start to break that resin down, you get through one layer, then the next layer, the next layer. Pretty soon your, your fiber doesn’t have any support structure. It gets eroded away. And then you’re through the blade. Now Your solution is really unique in the sense that you’ve thought about the way lineage erosion happens, but you’ve also sort of tied it to the animal world. I want you to describe that for a second. Like, how did this idea come up and, and sort of describe how that animal world translates into materials? Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, so this is actually part of a discipline called biomimicry, where we take inspiration from features and some aspects of creatures and plants that can be found in nature. And trying to understand the relationship between the features that we observe and their function and then translate that into engineering principle and apply to material systems and so on. So in this case, we we got inspiration from this specific microstructure that can be found actually in a wide range of creatures, including the mantis shrimp which is our mascot, if you want. And the shrimp uses it’s club to strike praise. It feeds on, it deploys underwater at very high speed caliber bullet speed, and it, it manages to crack shells of creatures which are considered to be quite tough themselves. So if you look inside the club, you will see that this is in fact, a fiber reinforced composite structures is made out of unidirectional layers, which are slightly rotated one to respect to each other. to form this helicoidal distribution of fibers. So we are mimicking that and we initially deployed that solution for improving impact performance of of a wide range of applications from aerospace, automotive and so forth. And then we started thinking whether The same architecture could have been beneficial. So, so for, for rain erosion, because eventually the, the rain, the rain droplet is a low mass, high frequency, high speed type of impact that happens in an area of the, of the blade. And by orienting and redistributing into an helicoidal way, the fibers in the composite substrate, we are able to better redistribute stresses. That follows from the from the high velocity impact of the rain droplet, and therefore the structure is able to endure more impacts without an early on onset of erosion. Allen Hall: So, if you go to Helicoid’s website, which is helicoidind. com, you will see this mantis shrimp hammer, and the sort of microscopic images of it, and it, it is a series of fibers. It looks like a composite structure. It’s very interesting, by the way, so everybody should go look at that. But you’re right, it, the, the mantis shrimp has this helicoid pattern. type of arrangement of the fiber, which is much more tightly packed. So instead of zero 90 or plus or minus 45, how we typically do things in composite world, it’s, it’s every 15 degrees, maybe every 10 degrees, it’s the, the pattern starts to rotate. So it’s, it makes a much more Dents, fiber composite structure, and as you mentioned, composite structures are not forgiving on impacts. In the airplane world, which I’ve worked for a long time, that thing about composites around landing gear is any kind of rock that gets thrown up makes a dent and it damages it immediately. It’s a constant problem. It’s a constant repair problem, much like in wind turbines. This layering of the fabric and at different orientations then does create this little bit of a different structure. What happens when you put this structure, and I want to put a little framework around this, using existing materials, existing resin systems, existing fibers, I reorient those fibers in a much more prescribed way. What happens when you take it to rain erosion testing? What do you see? Lorenzo Mencattelli: Well, what it happens is you don’t see erosion for quite a few a few hours of testing. So we have we have done extensive rain erosion testing comparing a conventional substrate, as you mentioned, a plus minus 45 zero degree fiber, fiber orientation substrate, and we use the exact same fiber, the exact same resin, the exact same manufacturing process, but with our helicoid design leading edge. To show that instead of getting larger chips of material being removed very quickly as the erosion progresses in our case, we have a very smooth and slow erosion of the substrate. So, for once, you reduce by more than 70 percent the eroded mass under the same testing conditions. And for second, you also get a smoother erosion, which decreases the loss in performance, aerodynamic performance, and also allows for easier and faster repairs. Because now you can probably do a light sanding to recover the the shape of the profile instead of having to do a big cutoff and repatches of the of, of the leading edge. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a different kind of wear effect, right? It’s not, I wouldn’t really call it erosion. I mean, in the top level sense, it is erosion, but when you see your plus or minus 45s in a rain erosion testing, you see the resin pockets start to fail first and you get this little grid like pattern, of course, and then you wear that away and it becomes very uneven very quickly. And your material, it looks like someone has taken some sandpaper to it. That’s what it appears like, just worn it away instead of Pocketed and trying to bore through it. That’s a huge advantage like you mentioned. You don’t lose the aerodynamics with your Lorenzo Mencattelli: material. Exactly. And, and as you said, this you know, the, the technology is really material raw material agnostic, right? So it can be used with with conventional glass fiber and conventional resins used for wing blade manufacturing, but you can be also very creative and and start playing with with fiber type and resin system to, to Create a layering of performance enhancement into the leading edge. Wow. Allen Hall: Okay. On your website, you do talk about flax fiber. Obviously, the industry is trying to get to more natural fibers. That, that even putting flax fiber in for like 80 percent of the fibers and 20 percent glass fiber, you still roughly get the same result. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we have we have a big effort at the moment of leveraging our technology and natural fibers for automotive applications. And with the idea of using the technology to enhance the performance of a material that is known to be less performant than conventional glass fiber or carbon fiber, so that you can effectively replace a glass fiber component with a natural fiber component. Achieving the same performance, but now having a big offset in terms of carbon footprint, because you, you, you’re moving the use of rheumatoid to, to a lower embodied energy one. Allen Hall: Well, this makes really good sense. And seeing that presentation at DTU, it was eye opening because it just seemed like, wow, okay, this makes sense. It does seem to work. You have data behind it. You’ve done some testing on it. You’ve been in different industries, so you’re going to get a sense of different kinds of impacts. The one thing that I didn’t realize at the time was that the area in which your material would be applied is actually relatively limited. Very similar to, you know, How you would apply a leading edge coating. Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, that’s correct. So we don’t plan to use the fabric to change the entire skin of the blade because that will have a major impact on the elastic response of the blade itself, right? So we, it would be an issue of design of the entire blade at that point. The solution is is really a locally applied at the leading edge. to serve the function of leading edge protection. And that opens a possibility of implementing the technology in either at the manufacturing stage of the blade. Because again, it’s just a, an, another couple of pieces of fabric that you place in the mold before infusion, or it could be used and applied as a repair patch for a blade that have already gone into some extensive erosion. So we are looking both at the manufacturing stage of the blade as aftermarket solution. Allen Hall: Sure. And how does the different orientation of the fiber work? Handle infusion in a manufacturing sense Lorenzo Mencattelli: very well. We have been building components in various thicknesses for especially for the automotive industry using Vartam. So basic infusion technique, RTM process it, liquid composite molding. So various processing technologies using different type of fiber, carbon, glass, and different resins, and never been an issue, the infusion and processing of these fabrics. So virtually really they, they be, they behave in terms of processing and manufacturing. Exactly the same as a conventional fabric, but now with the advantage of gaining considerable performance. Allen Hall: And then in the repair scenario, I assume like if you’re out in a blade in the middle of Texas where there’s a lot of leading edge erosion, you were thinking about like a pre preg that would just be applied to the leading edge and come on like a kit form. What’s your thoughts there? Lorenzo Mencattelli: It could be both. So we have proven that the technology delivers its benefits even with just two layers of fabric on top of a conventional substrate. So we don’t need to replace the entire thickness of the leading edge with our technology. You can too, if you want. and extend that benefit of erosion resistance, but it can be just a couple of layers applied on top of a substrate. So it could come into a preformed format very easily. I think the solution that we have right now, if you think of a prepreg format, would be a single Piece of fabric of about 1, 200 grams per square meter. So very lightweight as well. Or it could be used as a conventional multi axial NCF patch. So dry format that is applied and then it’s infused with the rest of the of, of the components for the repair. Allen Hall: So how wide would this piece be for, you know, most of leading edge erosion happens, you know, on the outer third of the blade. How wide of a piece are you talking about? Are we talking, I’m going to talk in feet here, but are we talking about like one foot, a two foot, or two foot wide kind of pieces just to cover the leading edge and that’s it? Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, exactly. It could be it can be adapted to, to any size for any leading edge opportunity. It, it can be produced in very wide rolls as well. So as I said, using conventional multi axial non cream fabric technology so we can be very flexible to serve a specific subset of the wind industry and enable them to use the technology. Allen Hall: And in the resin system, obviously every blade manufacturer has their own specific polyester, epoxy resins, there’s a lot of variables there. Can your system be infused with any of those resin systems to match? Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yes, yes. It can be used using this exactly the same resin system. Again, the, the, the key of the technology is the orientation of the fibers into the fabric. That’s That’s what our technology is all about. Then it can integrate any combination of fiber and resin type. Allen Hall: So, where are you seeing the most action on this, or reaction to it, I suppose? In the United States, where the service life of a winter blade is roughly 10 years, in Europe and other places, it tends to be much longer. It would seem like if you started off with the helicoid material on your blade out of the factory, in the United States, you may not do any leading edge repairs at all over 10 years. Does that make sense? Lorenzo Mencattelli: Yeah, of course it does make sense. So we see from our collaborators that we that, you know, severe stages of erosion, so where the structural integrity of the blade is compromised are achieved within four or five years. Of lifetime of the blade, so we could potentially extend that interval and hopefully double that interval in, in a way that the blade, at least the substrate of the blade doesn’t need to be serviced again. So that, that’s the overall selling point of the technology. Giving an extra safety margin safety margin to the blade operator to perform the maintenance and delay as much as possible the intervation and the downtime of the blade. Allen Hall: So what’s left to do in the qualification of your material? Because when, when I saw you put it in. Several months ago now, eight, ten months ago, it looked like it was pretty well developed. That you had the data, that was shocking by the way, and congratulations for doing that because that really opens up a lot of doors for operators. What’s left to do? Is it just implementation, making sure the operators know about it? Where are you at? Lorenzo Mencattelli: Correct. So we have developed the fabric in collaboration with Sartex. Major supplier of the wind industry. So it’s been fully validated in terms of manufacturability and scalability. So for production at volume we have done the rain erosion tests at third party labs. that they test for the OEMs. And right now we are looking at putting it on a blade in the field and and see effectively in real life how how it performs. But based on the process that we have been following for the qualification of the product we have no doubt that also in field it will delivers what we observe in in the lab. Allen Hall: That is truly amazing. If any operator, or OEM for that matter, is interested in learning more about the Helicoid system and getting a hold of you, how do they do that? Lorenzo Mencattelli: They can reach out to through our website. We have an info at helicoidin. com. Or you can reach out to me Lorenzo Mincatelli over LinkedIn. Or over my email address lorenzom at elicoidin. com. And we would be happy to, you know, discuss, understand your needs and, and see how we could deploy and test the solution. Allen Hall: Yeah, this is a really great technology and it needs to be out in service. So go visit the website which is spelled H E L I C O I D I N D dot com. Lorenzo, thank you so much for being on the program. Great technology. Hopefully we’ll see it in service next year because it will change the blade industry. Thank you Lorenzo Mencattelli: very much, Adam, for having me. Been a pleasure.

This week on Power-Up, a method for installing offshore wind turbines with a substructure with built in containers that can be transported easily, and LM Windpower’s way of reducing some of the vibrations from stationary wind blades. Plus some over-the-top body armor… 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.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Phil, our first idea is assigned to Grant Prideco and it’s a method for installing an offshore wind turbine and a substructure, and this idea It is rather unique in offshore wind in that it has a substructure in built in containers that can be transported relatively easily. And so, and the way it’s described is like a vertical garage. when the, when the tower sections arrive at its destination. Once on site, the tower is raised straight up from its container using a winch. And this eliminates a need for some of the installation vessels, which are so expensive and what everybody’s trying to get away from right now. And you can’t find them. So there’s a number of really interesting concepts. that reduce that, and this is one of them. So it lets the simplest ships install towers and install the nacelles and blades much closer at sea level before a final tower lift is done. So it does change the complexity of offshore wind dramatically. I haven’t seen this implemented yet, but it seems like Philip Totaro: it will be soon. Well, it, it very well could be, considering the push towards larger turbine sizes offshore and as you mentioned, the desire to, eliminate a lot of extra reliance on large crane vessels and installation vessels. But the idea itself, you mentioned it’s currently assigned to Grand Pride Co., but it was originally conceived by National Oil Well Varco, NOV that’s actually got a pretty lengthy history at this point, obviously in oil and gas, but also in offshore wind including installation vessel involvement and concepts like this, they’ve, they’ve been patenting ideas for, for good on 10 years now. And what is kind of interesting and unique about this, as you mentioned, is imagine, a turban, where like the blades are all kind of folded down. The upper section of the tower is kind of folded down in and is telescoped down inside the lower sections of, of the tower and even down into, a portion of the transition piece and monopile. And basically what they’re saying is you can put the monopile in place and then take this thing out. Pick it and plop it down and then just have like this internal winch system to, to pluck out all the different bits and pieces of, of the turban inside, you would still have to do a nacelle pick. So I think it’s, maybe not quite as a cost and time efficient as, as everyone might think, but it is fewer sorties by the vessels themselves carrying and ferrying components from port to project site. So that is something that, that could prove to be useful in the future. And, and we’ll see, if, if they’re gonna, if NOV is gonna, continue to push this out and, and drive this technology into the state of commercial use. Well, our second Allen Hall: idea comes from LM Windpower, and again, this patent and this idea seems like something that will be used, or if it hasn’t already, will be used relatively shortly. And this idea is about reducing some of the vibrations from stationary wind blades. And offshore in particular, as you’re assembling a turbine, before it’s been turned on and operating, it’s just sitting there. There could be a lot of stress on the turbine itself from vibration on the blade just sitting in the wind. And what this system from LM does is it just kind of wraps onto the blade and reduces that vibration. dramatically. So all the vortex induced vibration that can happen at 90 degree angles and some stall induced vibration that happens it reduces it dramatically. And then when you’re ready to turn the turbine on, you pull this device off and then you can get rolling. So it’s for that sort of transitory period before commissioning when the turbine is just not operating. And we have seen a number of blade problems. Because of this, and this patent was applied to, what, in 2022? And it makes you think that LM has been really behind the scenes trying to fix a problem that they’ve seen on the engineering side for a little while, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and, and what’s kind of fascinating about all that is when, when they’ve originally conceived of this was probably back sometime in, in 2021, if they got around to kind of filing for their patent in 2022 so they’ve, they’ve been kind of noodling on this for almost, three years. Yeah. And considering the fact that, some of their blades have had issues during installation, again, whether the root cause of it was down to a manufacturing defect or whatever, what shook the blade apart and caused it to fray and split from the turbine was this vortex induced oscillations that happened when the turbine was in park position while they were still installing and commissioning, adjacent turbines or, or that turbine. And so it, one wonders, because this is kind of, I’ll call it maybe a bit more of an offbeat idea in, in terms of you wouldn’t have necessarily thought to use a solution like this. But this is akin to if you’ve seen companies that have wrapped the, a little spiral thing on the top of a wind turbine tower, particularly offshore when they’re going to install it, it’s to, to accomplish almost exactly the same thing. It’s to preclude the buildup of a vortex induced oscillation on the tower. So why a concept like this wasn’t being used is Kind of a question I’ve got but the, the reality of it is at least they’re, they’re thinking along these lines and they have these solutions in their back pocket. I, I actually hope that solutions like this are, are brought to bear because it’s certainly a lot more expensive for, for however much a system like this would cost to have and the, the pain in the butt that it might be to have to, put it on and take it off every time you’re doing. A, a turbine commissioning, it certainly costs a lot less than having to replace blades and, and slow down or stop, commissioning of a, of an offshore wind project, which we’ve now seen what the commercial impact of that can be substantially more expensive than, implementing this little kind of inflatable system that, that wraps around the blade and, and helps create a shape that’s going to deflect a lot more of the those vortex induced oscillations. Allen Hall: Our last idea comes from Katherine Rutherford, and if you’ve ever seen the John Wick movie series, there’s a lot of ballistic armor there. You never see it slow down John Wick. He can do all kinds of karate moves and sword play and while firing a weapon and the body armor moves with him, which always seems like an impossibility. However, Katherine Rutherford has come up with this ballistic resistant body covering where it does maintain the body armor. Mobility, and the key features include a torso portion with front and black plates that securely connect and an innovative cup shaped groin section with leg openings and a detachable neck guard. Now, this is the only place I would see this used, Phil, as in some sort of assassin group like a John Wick group. This is the only place I would even imagine this being used, which makes me wonder where the idea came from. Did it come straight from Hollywood? Maybe it did. But if it does work, there’s other applications for this, for Philip Totaro: sure. Alan, given the popularity of the film The Day of the Jackal right now, considering they just kind of redid a TV series about it, which is actually not that bad, by the way maybe that’s where they were going with it. The reason I, I wanted to throw this in was the, the general concept of this is kind of play. It’s almost like plate armor. When, when we have like Kevlar body armor today that can deform and deflect the fact that they have introduced this concept that it’s kind of a hybrid between like plate armor and Kevlar it’s a bit of a, it’s a bit of an odd, you know, an odd choice to me and, and, on top of it, the, the picture that they’ve included in the patent just looks a bit amusing. As, as many of the the talented artists though they are they sometimes come up with some some very strange looking ideas and inventions and ways of expressing them. So, I don’t know, this one, eh, if people are gonna want or frankly need plate armor and a codpiece, then it sounds like this is the right idea for you. But I can’t imagine too many people in today’s day and age that are gonna need it.

We hope you had a good Thanksgiving break! Allen and Phil dive into offshore news with Netherlands-based LiftOff and their uptower crane system. Recent successful MCE projects bode well for Liftoff in 2025. Plus, TPI Composites announced their Q3 results. Turkey’s inflation pressure and a shift to more American-based manufacturing is tamping the near-term growth. Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.comLiftOff – https://liftoff-mce.com Allen Hall: Phil, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and a lot of turkey. I did. Thank you. I hope you did too. I did. And one thing that goes with all the tryptophan and that turkey is caffeine, so you can fight off the tryptophan and watch your favorite football team lose. And during this time, Duncan’s been working, which is a big coffee producer in the United States is trying to break world records. And so they hooked up with Nick DiGiovanni to break the Guinness World Record for the largest ice latte. And that ice latte was in an 11 foot high Dunkin Cup with ice milk and espresso. That’s what a latte is, right? And it turns out that the Guinness World Records confirmed that it was 276 gallons in that cup. And the question is, what did they do with all that latte? That’s a lot of latte. Hopefully everybody drank Phil Totaro: that. You’d hate to think they would waste it. Allen Hall: According to Duncan, they served it To 300 employees at the corporate office in Massachusetts. Now, if you do the math on that’s roughly a gallon of latte per employee. Phil Totaro: That’s a lot. I know some people that do drink a lot of coffee. I don’t I guess I’m naturally a brilliant, but like some people need that much, I don’t know. Holy cow, that’s Allen Hall: a lot of coffee. This could be a lot of sleepless nights in Massachusetts from all the Dunkin employees. And productivity’s gotta go way up. The latest P. E. S. Win Magazine has a number of great articles in it, and if you haven’t PESWin. com and you can download it for free and read all the articles in it. And one of the more interesting articles that I thought was in this one is an article from Liftoff. And we’ve had Elko May from Liftoff on the podcast previously. And Liftoff is an offshoot of a podcast. arm of Liftworks, which is, Liftworks does onshore wind, heavy lift, and crane work, using a unique process to do that. And Liftoff is doing all the offshore work for Liftworks, and Liftoff is based in the Netherlands with Elco, and it has done a number of, a couple of amazing things this over the last couple of months, really. They’ve done some crane technology work on fixed bottom offshore winds, where instead of using jackup vessels to do maintenance, they’ve got the system now to work, where they can handle up to 9. 5 megawatt capacity turbines without using jackup vessels. So they’re using standard containers. on flat barges that are moved around via tugs. Now, Phil, this makes a ton of sense to me because the expensive part, as we always say on Offshore Wind, is not really the turbine, it’s the jackup vessels and all the specialized ships you need to go do this work, and liftoff is eliminating a lot of that and simplifying MCE for some of these tournaments. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And what strikes me about this is actually something slightly unrelated, which is Cattler just came out with their quarterly report saying that the demand for their services is huge right now. So maybe Liftoff helps alleviate some of that burden much to the chagrin maybe of Cattler. But it’s great. They can take, a technology that was developed for onshore and deploy it offshore. In, in that, you don’t always have the same obviously weather and site conditions. But the way in which the, this liftoff system works is using this kind of gen hook, what they call a gen hook. Which is a multi winch system that allows you to, better balance a load. And I think that’s probably one of the keys to how they’ve been able to more rapidly deploy this offshore is the fact that they have a winch system that allows for, whether it’s a gearbox swap out or even a, blade swap or some other uptower component this is a system that, will allow you to avoid, not only avoid using the vessels, but avoid using any kind of crane, other than the onboard crane avoid using any other type of crane because it, I don’t even think this needs transition piece based support cranes or anything like that, so this is fantastic and the fact that they can just lift or lower things, off of or onto a barge. Makes things a heck of a lot cheaper when you’re talking about doing, any kind of maintenance work, whether it’s a fixed bottom or a floating. I recall, didn’t they Alan, didn’t they test this at the Kinkerton floating offshore wind farm in the UK? Allen Hall: Yeah they did a floating platform Kinkerton. Generator exchange on a Vestas turbine, a nine and a half megawatt Vestas turbine, which is quite remarkable. Now, obviously floating turbines, everybody from the engineering side says, if you have a problem, what are you going to do? You’re just going to tow it back to port and fix it. Except that is also really expensive and it’s a lot less expensive to Do something on site from Liftoff and Liftoff was able to pull that off to replace that nine and a half megawatt generator on that floating platform. So it took them a while because they were trying to navigate the weather, obviously, with this floating platform, the up and down and all the crane motions and trying to keep everything steady, but they did it. So even if it took a little bit longer time to do it. It’s shorter than hauling that whole platform back to shore and trying to do the work there. This is remarkable. This kind of technology, this kind of engineering is going to change floating wind for sure because built into the cost model of floating wind is dragging it back to port. Or using an expensive jacket vessel on this floating platform, which is really complicated. That’s all built into the model. And if Liftoff can change that financial model, maybe that’ll help lower. The cost of electricity from some of these floating platforms, which make it much more enticing for operators and governments to go after. So this is really good from Liftoff and Preston. Maybe we’ll have Elko May back on the podcast again, because he’s a good person to talk to. Yeah, but if you want to learn more about PES Wind and this Liftoff process and Just go to PESWin. com and download the article. It’s a really good one. As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PESWin Magazine. PESWin 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: Phil, we haven’t talked about TPI in a little while but their Q3 results were announced. And just to give you some background here, sales for Q3 was about 380 million, which is about 2. 5 million. To 2.5% increase a little more than two and a half percent year on year. And adjusted EBITDA was roughly 8 million versus 200,000 a year ago. And the net loss this in Q3 was about $38 million versus 43 million last year. Now, a couple of positive things about GPI. 89 percent plant utilization, so their assets are being worked pretty hard. And they have 10 production line transitions complete, and the asking price for a blade increased to about 200, 000 from 175, 000. So prices are going up a lot. On wood turbine blades. Now, it’s a little hard to gauge because also the length of the blades are increasing, so Sizes are going up, yeah. Exactly, so the weight of the blade is going up, so prices have to go up with it. Now, a couple of strategic moves here. They are reopening the plant that they had in Iowa for GE. And GE plans to have TPI produced 2 megawatt blades there, which are very popular in the repowering scenario. So a lot of older 1. 5 sites, Siemens, Gamesis sites, are getting repowered with GE 2 megawatt turbines. Great. And there’s Also considering or in the process of acquiring another plant in the United States, what they call a brownfield plant to build more blades in the States. Now, not a lot of discussion about who is asking for that. My guess is GE, but it could be Nordex or it could be Bestos, honestly to see where that goes. But all right, so they’re moving some of their plants back into the United States. And as you pointed out earlier, Phil, it’s probably a 45x tax implication. This is Phil Totaro: presumably to in addition to taking advantage of the 45x manufacturing tax credits, this is presumably intended to ward off the incoming administrations implementation or proposed implementation of tariffs on goods, particularly, renewable energy related goods manufactured in Mexico, China, and Canada of which I suppose we do import technology from all three markets, although Canada it’s just, Blades for GE for offshore turbines from their plant in Gaspé. We don’t get a lot of other components anymore. We used to import some towers until, Arcosa and Broadwind complained about that. So You know we’re at a point now where, okay, companies, including TPI, want to be able to take advantage and on behalf of GE want to be able to take advantage of the 45X manufacturing tax credits. Keep in mind that the reason why GE’s on this is usually in the supply contract, the bulk of that 45X tax credit benefit goes to whoever’s buying the blades. And even I’ve had word from, project development companies and asset owners who have said, we’re also demanding that GE turn over a portion of that manufacturing tax credit to us when we buy the turbines. So that’s, it’s all getting fascinating and a little complicated there. As far as who’s really taking out the benefit of the tax credits. But in the meantime it does mean that you’re seeing some re domestication of production. But it’s also coming with this backdrop of this cloud hanging over LM at the moment. And one questions why TPI’s performance isn’t better than what it is, considering the fact that There aren’t that many independent blade producers out there anymore. Let’s put it that way, and NLM isn’t even an independent. Obviously they’re a subsidiary of GE. So for TPI to be able to, sustain its business, obviously I think that a lot of the stock price thing downward movement is largely because of everybody’s fear that, onshore wind tax credits may go away or, projects are going to get slowed down or this, that, whatever. But if they’ve already got an 89 percent chance factor utilization rate. I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon, because as we’ve talked about on the show you’re still going to see, this year hasn’t been the world’s best in terms of capacity additions in the US. But if interest rates do start to, going down next year, which again, we’ve, and we’ve talked about on the show, and anticipated, a mild, if not moderate recession where companies just, start laying off people, just tried to take advantage of the fact that interest rates are high and they want them to go down. So they just start mass layoffs and say, we want to induce this behavior in the Fed to try and get interest rates to lower faster soon. That can lead to a scenario where a company like TPI can take advantage of the fact that there’s going to be a lot more, orders potentially coming in for 26 and 27 delivery. Where You know, companies that are seeing, project development companies and investors that are seeing interest rates coming down next year are gonna start plowing some money back into, renewable development projects. So I think TPI’s prospects are a little bit better than what the mood is currently around the company. Allen Hall: So TPI obviously is a global company. And a lot of the operations are down in Mexico, but there’s also a substantial number of blade lines over in Turkey. And I think that the Turkey plants are really in question at the moment, just because they expect like a 40 percent reduction in Turkey in 2025. That’s, Massive. Now, NORDEC contracts I think for eight lines are going to expire at the end of 25. I think Vestas may have picked up a couple of those. However, Turkey is a really unique market in that a number of Chinese manufacturers are trying to enter that market. Turkey itself, is a big renewable country. So a lot of blades end up there or into Europe. But hyperinflation is a problem in Turkey right now. So raw materials can get to be a problem, which is increasing the price where this is where the Chinese are coming in and trying to undercut TPI. So now TPI has got a multi front problem. They’re trying to deal with 45 X tax implications in the United States, trying to move operations to the United States. At the same time. Europe is a little bit slowing down and the Turkey market has gotten a little unstable for them, which just adds to the losses. So meanwhile, while everything is in flux, TPI is trying to say, Hey, long term, we’re going to be fine. But our forward looking statements of a year ago are probably not going to be right because we didn’t expect this Turkey Piece to become so unpredictable. And how do they try to navigate that, Phil, that’s just as a global company and their stock prices is so low, there’s not a lot of wiggle room here. Where do they go? Phil Totaro: Yeah, it’s it’s fascinating. So going to the Turkey thing first the agreements that they have with Nordics, we would expect most of that to be extended. It’s just that the agreements, as you said, they will expire in 2025. But Nordex is still doing a fairly good clip of business in Turkey. There are, there’s still the number one OEM there, but Enercon also has just recently announced a deal with a couple of Turkish development companies for 2. 5 gigawatts, and Enercon’s also got Nacelle and Blade manufacturing capabilities there, so they’re trying to get to that. a lot of the market share that they lost. Vestas is more competitive in Turkey now. And as you said, with the Chinese coming in, the Turkish market overall is much more competitive for a bit smaller capacity, than what they’ve been adding. Normally they’re at about, seven, six, seven, 800 megawatts a year trying to expand up to, gigawatt and a half per year onshore anyway. But the, it’s getting a little tight, like you said, there’s things like hyperinflation that are impacting them there’s a number of things that they’re still having to try to go get, Russian gas and things against the, getting a sanctions exemption to be able to, get access to to, to Russian gas, so they’re facing some challenges that as a country that they wouldn’t have necessarily anticipated a couple of years ago, and that also trickles down then to a company like TPI, who You know, put a base there to serve customers, but also to have an export market to other countries where, you know, throughout that region of Eastern Europe where they’ve got customers they need to serve, but like markets like Serbia, Croatia they’re trying to get more of a pipeline going. But it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be 100 percent of that business is going to go TPI’s way. And so that’s still the uncertainty that I think a lot of people are baking into the price. Does that then Allen Hall: force TPI, and I don’t like using that word, but in a sense financially, does it end up forcing TPI to become America focused? Phil Totaro: Potentially, yes, and it could be to their benefit or detriment, depending on, again, how much work they’re going to get from both or you could say GE, Vestas, and Nordex. Potentially, yes. Because, Nordex in North America is going to stay relatively where they are, about, a gig or two a year. Vestas could grow them. But Vestas also leverages their own internal manufacturing and LM for particularly a lot of the turbines that they’re selling in the market now, which is the V163, the V150 and even the 6 megawatt platform. So You know, is TPI really going to get a lot of that business? Potentially. Again, if LM continues to falter or looks less competitive, that may be good news on the Vestas front. GE will continue to rely on TPI, particularly for older models. Like you said they’re extending the relationship to continue doing the two megawatt blades or even the blades that are retrofit onto the 1. 5 megawatt platforms, the, the 87 meter rotor, the 91 meter rotor. Those are pretty much all a TPI thing at this point, Allen Hall: but isn’t that where the vast majority of growth will happen is in that two megawatt band of turbines that the six megawatts are going to happen, but the repower almost is forced to go back to the two megawatt and GE has aligned itself to being really successful there. They need to be really successful there. So that’s a bonus for TPI. going to ride that wave a little Phil Totaro: bit. Yeah, and it’s interesting because, again, depending on And we’ve talked about, the implications of the election and all that sort of thing on what happens in the market. But if we’re going to be more of a repowering market than a greenfield buildout market, then that could be good for TPI. But again, I don’t think everybody really appreciates the extent to which, things are going to shift. And I say that deliberately, because I think that a repowering market helps TPI more than a greenfield build out because in a greenfield build out, they might be more likely to use larger turbines now that those larger turbines are A. available and B. proven in the market. You’ve got Vesta selling their 6 megawatt, you’ve got Nordax selling the 7 megawatt. The 5. 5, 5 to 5. 5 megawatt platform and also bringing the N169 or trying to into the market as well. And you’ve got, companies like GE that want to be able to roll out the Cypress platform as well over here. That’s great Allen Hall: stability though, Phil, right? That ends up creating stability for like a TPI and the problem that TPI has had over the last couple of years is that they get thrown new designs that they’ve tried. that don’t have a lot of vetting before they get out service and they, and TPI said that their warranty costs were still hanging around. It was about 7 million in the quarter of legacy costs and that now that they’re trying to, they’re getting over the hurdle of a lot of warranty repairs and then technicians can get on to other kinds of repairs. They’re learning, earning more money from their maintenance business than just go out and fixing the stuff they just produced, which. Looking forward, if they’re not making a lot of new blades or making the same blade over and over again, you would think that the, and with prices coming up a little bit, they would be in a much better financial position, but the stock market has not awarded them that yet. They’re still holding down the price at crazy low levels, in my opinion. You would think that would change and you just don’t see Wall Street looking at the two, three year timeline for TPI and saying this is going to grow. Phil Totaro: Yeah, and like we’ve just talked about, I think if they’re going to get more A bigger chunk of the repowering market, that’s a good thing for them, and that should be rewarded. Particularly as it looks we’re going to still have, new project build out where we kind of work through what’s in the interconnection queue at the moment, even if the interconnection queue starts slowing down or getting, stopped or impeded in some way. That doesn’t have an impact on the market until like 2027. So in the meantime, TPI is in a position to, be able to capitalize on the existing market conditions, including what we’re anticipating in the first and second and third quarter of next year. So. Yeah. Phil Totaro: I think you’ve got a point. Unlock your Wind Farm’s best performance at Wind Energy OM 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: Well, Phil, Equinor made an announcement that they’re going to cut 250 positions from its renewables unit, and that’s really focused on offshore wind. Equinor named a couple of different reasons why this is happening. Inflation, obviously, interest rates, supply chain bottlenecks, margins are going to be lower. But it does feel like the change in the Trump administration is a big part of this. And it started, it seemed like it started a couple of months ago. Like they could see the writing on the wall, like if this happens, we’re really going to have to make a decision sooner rather than later. And now Equinor is making the, that happen. A lot of the people that are going to leave the offshore wind business are being transitioned back to oil and gas because that’s where Equinor makes the vast majority of its revenue. Phil Totaro: The reality of this is that, they, a lot of people want to pin this on the incoming Trump administration and say that, if your project didn’t already have an offtake agreement or didn’t already have, approval from BOEM or this, that, whatever you’re probably dead in the water anyway, but the reality of it is if you don’t already have a PPA and if, Attentive Energy One decided not to move forward with their with their bid. Attentive Energy Two did have an offtake for for New Jersey but that project was a lot. In its development process and the fact that they already have an agreement in place is why they’re still keeping the door open to that phase of the project moving forward. But the interest rate environment and the, as you just said with Equinor moving people back into oil and gas. That’s also what Total is doing. That’s what Shell is doing. That’s what BP is doing. Every single one of the oil and gas players that has made a foray, particularly into offshore wind, and particularly in North America, where they’re seeing this high interest rate environment, they want out. And that’s what they’re doing is just transitioning everything back. So the point here is, and the message I take away is, we need to create a market environment in which investment is fostered. And in the past four years I can’t see how we’ve made all that much progress because, even if companies have, started building and commissioning some of these offshore wind farms, the fact that you’ve got major developers and players that could have been investing here, deciding to stop or pull out to lay people off, to transition back into oil and gas, that’s not a good thing for the market. That’s not creating an environment where everybody feels comfortable parking money and investing. And the reality of it is it, that’s not going to change. Again, we’ve talked before on the show about what we think is going to happen with interest rates and everything in 2025. But that’s still, even if interest rates change overnight, that’s not going to bring all these oil and gas players back into the market immediately. So you’re talking about redeployment of a lot of people that were focused on renewables back into oil and gas and across multiple different, five, six, seven different companies. And that’s not going to end up being a good thing for retaining the knowledge base that we need in order to, expedite the development of, offshore wind, particularly in a market like the U. S. So what do they do with the leases? Allen Hall: What do Totaro and Equinor do with the leases? And then these are bite leases, which they paid a tremendous amount of money for at the time. Are they going to just let them go and just say it’s a write off? Or they, or the plan just continue to pay down on the lease month to month, and then when the time is right, try to develop them? I guess it’s the same thing they do in oil and gas, right? There’s a lot of money in the ground that they haven’t even developed, so they’re paying leases on plots of land all over the world, and maybe that’s just part of business in oil and gas, and they’re just used to it. Phil Totaro: Yeah, and it’s a question of, okay they’re gonna have, a few million bucks a year in lease payments to make versus the tens of millions a year in development costs that you’re going to incur on a project that’s not able to move forward because you can’t secure a PPA and or you’ve got local opposition, which, starting next year, the Justice Department isn’t going to stand up anymore and help the development companies defend against all these, save the whale people. We’re. We’re at a point where, every, everybody can see the writing on the wall at this stage, and they’d rather, reallocate their resources where they think they’re gonna get a better bang for their buck. It just leaves you with the with a bad taste that, why couldn’t we get our act together sooner because this could have been, we could have fulfilled the promise of this market, but, how many factories got the plug pulled because nobody got the order book because we couldn’t get, PPAs at the right prices because, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s just, all of these things have conspired against investment being fostered in, This industry, and I think it’s a shame. Allen Hall: Yeah, it snowballed rather quickly, didn’t it? It seems like over roughly a year’s time span, it went from very lucrative to non existent. And that is not helpful. Phil Totaro: To answer your question though, they’re probably going to hold on to the leases. They could sell them. And, but there’s no deadline necessarily for them to to actually develop and implement a project. The lease payments are there whether they’re building something or not. That’s a corporate decision that they can make. But like I said, I mean, you’re gonna potentially be willing to make lease payments for a couple million bucks a year as opposed to spending ten million a year on a development that you know is not gonna get built potentially now for another, five, six, seven years. You’re not, you’re basically not going to be able to move forward on it because you don’t have all those pieces in place that you thought you were going to have, like the factories, like the government support, like et cetera, et cetera, down the list. So it’s, I think everybody’s just playing wait and see at this point. Some of those, let me put it another way. If you’re I don’t know who’s a, what’s a good name. I’m literally struggling to think right now who would come in and actually buy those leases off, when they paid whatever, four hundred million dollars for one of those New York Bight leases they didn’t, the Empire lease, at least And, into the into the hundreds of 100, 200 million for the New York bite leases who’s going to come in and allow them to recoup that loss? They’re either selling it. So if they sell it, they’re selling it at a loss, presumably, if they’re going to sell it. Or they’re just going to hold it until the environment in which we all operate here changes and improves to the point where you can get a project built cost effectively. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Allen Hall: Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening, and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the shows below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

This week on News Flash, Denker Wulf and Energie Engineering Nord are merging, Tata Power partners with the Asian Development Bank for $4.25 billion in clean energy projects, and TPG is considering buying Siemens Gamesa India assets. 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.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor. com. Allen Hall: Well, Phil, Tata Power has signed a 4. 25 billion memorandum of understanding with the Asian Development Bank for clean energy projects. And the agreement was signed during the ongoing COP 29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. The key initiatives coming out Out of this include a 966 megawatt solar wind hybrid project and a pump hydro storage project. Now the partnership will support India’s target of 500 gigawatt renewable energy capacity by 2030. This is really important, Phil, because Tata plays a significant role in that. A role in India’s economy. Philip Totaro: And not just in renewable energy project development and asset ownership and operations. Obviously they’ve got automotive, they’ve got steel making, they do any number of things. They’re a pretty diversified industrial company. And what actually a lot of people may not know is Tata Power is actually one of the top five asset owners and operators of renewable energy assets in India already. So getting an additional, MOU signed for, for 4. 25 billion is, is not going to hurt. But keep in mind, they also have broader ambitions outside of India. They, they signed an agreement with a company in Bhutan recently to do a five gigawatt renewable project there. They’ve had ambition in Sri Lanka and, other kind of regional markets within the Asia Pacific region there that it gives them, they’ve been kind of quietly going about, spreading their influence. And I, again, I think this is a fantastic move for them and, and to be able to get this Asian Development Bank agreement in place, I think is, if they get 100 percent of that, that money that they’re, they’re talking about in this MOU, that, that’s really gonna help push Tata Power forward. Allen Hall: Well, staying in India, TPG is in advanced talks to acquire the Siemens Gamesa Indian assets. And that deal could, well, it’s valued at more than 300 million currently. Now, TPG has emerged as a front runner after outbidding industry players and a number of private equity firms. And Phil, this is a valuable asset. I know a number of companies in India were really shooting for this Siemens Gamesa business. Thank you very much. But TPG has really rocketed to the top. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and it’s, it’s fascinating because I wouldn’t actually have expected private equity to win this one. Mainly because the, what Siemens is, is really offering in terms of their asset portfolio in, in India is their manufacturing facilities. Any operations and maintenance agreements that they have and, and that entire side of the business, I would have thought that, They would have either split off that side of the business. Maybe the Chinese were going to come in and take over the factory space. So this is, this is kind of a fascinating thing. And I’m, I’m curious to actually see what TPG’s strategy is going to be. Cause you’ve already got, obviously Suzlon in the market. You’ve got. Companies like Envision Energy coming into India, you’ve got Inox Wind, you’ve got Cenvion that still has their, their Indian operations and, and has, ambitions of their own. They want 10 percent market share in that market. So what What is TPG’s strategy here for continuing to develop this technology and, and more importantly, is will this deal include a technology license agreement so they can also manufacture the four or five megawatt plus platform in, in India as well? Because right now the majority of the turbines at Siemens Gamesa and the designs that they have and the tooling that they have in the manufacturing facilities are four megawatt. for the, the two and a half and three, up to, I think, 3. 4 megawatt, 132 platform. So, to the extent that TPG intends to continue the, this growth path I would be very interested to see what the ultimate scope of this agreement is is gonna be. Allen Hall: And up in northern Europe, there’s a lot of activity too, as German wind developer Dunkelwolf will eventually acquire. Energy Engineering, NORD the initial acquisition looks like to be about a 25 percent stake and it’s planned for early 2025, and the remaining 75 percent will transfer to Dunker Wolf in 2026, and the company showed those two fill earlier this year. It is really fascinating because you have an engineering focus group along with a developer and we usually, when you connect those two together, it’s greater than each individual company by themselves. So it’s, there’s a high value to this outcome. Philip Totaro: Yeah. And it’s very interesting because Germany in particular is, is a market, Austria, you could say the same way. They’re, they’re markets where they, they have a lot of smaller assets and Dunkerbolth certainly isn’t one of the bigger, asset owners in Germany, although they do have, I want to say it’s like, between 25 and 30 wind farms again, each of varying size, usually only a handful of turbines each. But, the, the important thing is that for the companies that do own assets in markets like Germany or Austria, if they’re not a big player and have like an internal, development and engineering capability they don’t have an internal asset management and maintenance and operations capability, this is, how you. Kind of get there is by joining together these different bits and pieces that are going to help, a smaller player like Dunker Wolf actually grow into becoming a more prominent, and frankly, more capable company.