The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week, Allen Hall and Joel Saxum explore Suzlon Energy’s record-breaking quarter, featuring a 5.1 GW order book and 96% earnings increase. They detail plans for the Wind Energy O&M Australia conference in Melbourne, aimed at sharing global technical expertise. Allen and Joel discuss the game-changing discovery of America’s largest lithium deposit in Arkansas, and spotlight Michigan’s Isabella Wind Farm project, which powers major automotive companies while generating substantial community benefits. 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.comWind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Well, Joel, we just don’t seem to have the luck of some people, I’m telling you. Because a gentleman down in North Carolina found a 20 bill laying on the ground outside of a gas station and used it to buy, of all things, a scratch off lottery ticket. And that ticket was worth one million dollars. Joel Saxum: You know, Allen, sometimes they say, you gotta play to win. And if someone, if some, by some luck of chance, you get 20 and it’s not, you’re playing with the house’s money, then. I think that, uh, maybe we need to just keep our heads on the ground a little bit more. Allen Hall: He had the opportunity to buy all kinds of lottery tickets. I don’t know if you go into a gas station in North Carolina, there’s several kinds there. He couldn’t find the one that he wanted. So he ended up buying just one that seemed okay. And that was the winning one. So if he had chosen the ticket that they had, the ticket that he wanted, he wouldn’t be a million dollars richer. Now, the real funny thing about this is they asked this gentleman, well, what are you going to do with all that money? And it says, we are going to head straight to Golden Corral and eat everything they’ve got. So he’s gonna spend like 40 bucks worth of it? It’s hard to spend a million dollars at Golden Corral. But, however, I, it did force me to take a look at the dessert menu. Cause that’s one thing about Golden Corral is that they have a lot of desserts. It’s like, it’s a big dessert bar thing. And If you, I will read some of these to you and go, wow, okay, this is not bad, right? Chocolate dip marshmallow skewers. Come on. I’m out on that. No way. So they have cakes and pies. They always have cakes and pies. All right. All right. Right? Pumpkin pie, peanut butter pie. The Sweet Home Carolina cake, which is popular. Uh, carrot cake. Are you a carrot cake fan? I am, but it has to have good frosting. It’s gotta be a cream cheese frosting. Otherwise, I’m out. Carrot cake is an acquired taste. I think it’s an American taste, weirdly enough. Now, do you want it with walnuts? No walnuts. No nuts. I want it clean and clear. And I have had one with a little bit of ginger in it that was Joel Saxum: really good. Allen Hall: Oh, the ginger is terrific in carrot cake. I have to admit, I’m a recent convert on that one because I thought, there’s no reason to put ginger into a cake. What are we doing? But it is quite good. So this, this gentleman is going to be a golden corral quite a while. I wonder what the calorie intake is going to be in his life for the next couple of years. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Halladay, and I’ll be joined by my Uptime co hosts after these news headlines. Vattenfall has expanded its landfill ban to include more wind turbine components beyond blades. The Swedish developer will now prohibit landfilling of permanent magnets, nacelle canopies, and nose cones from its wind farms. The company aims to achieve 100 percent recycling of these components by 2030, with a particular focus on recovering the rare earth elements from permanent magnets. This latest initiative builds upon Vattenfall’s 2021 blade recycling commitment and is already being integrated into current wind farm decommissioning contracts. The strategy underscores the company’s dedication to reducing dependency on newly mined materials while decreasing environmental and social impacts associated with Rare Earth Mining. In Texas, RWE’s Champion Wind Farm will power Rivian’s DC fast charging Adventure network through a new 15 year purchase power agreement. The 127 megawatt facility is undergoing repowering with 41 upgraded Siemens Gamesa turbines and six new 3. 1 megawatt units. Once completed by mid 2025, the wind farm will generate enough electricity to power nearly one billion miles of renewable driving annually. The project demonstrates innovative circular economy practices with decommissioned turbine blades being repurposed through regen fiber for use in construction materials. These recycled fibers will be incorporated into concrete To enhance strength and durability, extending infrastructure lifespan. Belgium is advancing the world’s first artificial energy island with a 650 million euro green loan from the European Investment Bank. The Princess Elizabeth Island, to be constructed 45 kilometers offshore, will channel 3. 5 gigawatts of wind power, enough for over 3 million households. The project scheduled for completion between 2024 and 2027 will feature both high voltage DC and AC infrastructure. Foundation caissons are already under construction in the Netherlands. Additional funding includes 100 million euros through the European Recovery and Resilience Facility. GE Vernova has launched an online store for wind turbine components in Latin America, featuring over 30, 000 items. The digital marketplace aims to reduce turbine downtime during maintenance and repairs across the region, where GE currently operates more than 3, 400 onshore wind turbines. The platform follows successful implementation in the United States and Europe, allowing wind farm owners to purchase spare parts and essential items in a single transaction. And Fred Olsen of 1848’s Floating Wind Foundation, Brunel, has received DNV Basic Design certification. The semi submersible steel foundation features a modular design with two forward leaning towers, and a single point mooring system. The design is specifically engineered for the North Sea conditions and aims to utilize existing global fabrication capacity. The Foundation’s weather veining function enables a passive ballast system that continuously optimizes its position relative to wind thrust force. The certification validates comprehensive design methodologies for primary steel design, secondary steel mooring, manufacturing, assembly. Integration, logistics, transportation, and installation protocols. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, the chief commercial officer of WeatherGuard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxom. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s 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: Well, Joel, we have been to a number of conferences, including SkySpecs annual forum. And there’s so much O& M activity at the moment, all over the world, it’s insane. Yeah, Joel Saxum: and you know, the problem is, is getting the right people in the right room to talk about it. Like you said, the Sky Specs Forum, to be honest with you, okay, it’s a private event, it’s like invite only, right? But that’s one of the best events I’ve been to, uh, from a knowledge sharing standpoint, in the wind industry ever. And to me, the reason being is, is you have all the people that are dealing with the same problems that have their own solutions that have figured things out in lessons learned and best practices to make their wind farms more profitable to solve problems in the field. Uh, so everybody together in one room and kind of breakout sessions about specific things. We, we were there, we did one about lightning, right? And we had a room in there, small room, not like we weren’t speaking to 2000 people, right? We’re speaking to 20 and everybody kind of broke, broke down and broke some barriers down because we’re all. Engineers in there talking about technical stuff. So I think that that’s, there’s a huge amount of value to that. And that’s why we got to the point where we said, you know what, let’s do this wind O& M Australia thing, because a lack of technical conferences, uh, in that part of the world, uh, it just kind of means that there’s nobody really talking about the things that matter day to day in the wind world, right? How do you run these turbines? What do you do to make them more profitable? How do you solve this problem? Um, and a lot of that knowledge exists. It just needs to be shared. Allen Hall: Yeah. And there’s not a lot of infrastructure in Australia at the moment, even though there are a significant number of turbines, there’s no blade factories there. There’s no nacelle factories there. Everything that they’re doing in Australia is imported. So the expertise doesn’t necessarily lie in country, unlike Europe and the United States where there’s. People that have worked in factories and what we find a lot of the people that are working on the O& M side in the United States have worked at an LM or a Siemens Gameso or a GE. So they have that inside knowledge of how these turbines work and then they’re applying that knowledge to an operator and that is a unique case evidently for Australia. Probably Rosemary is one of the few people that actually has inside plant experience that she can apply over to the wind farms in Australia. Which is pretty amazing. Really curious because it’s, it must be a struggle, right? Yeah, for sure. And I Joel Saxum: mean, a lot of that struggle comes at, um, the term, you know, within economies of scale. So the Australian wind market sits around nine to 10, 000 megawatts installed right now with another three in development, which is sizable, right? However, there’s operators like in the United States that have much more than that, just one operator, right? You’re talking about the next eras of the world, the EDFs of the world over here, so many, we’ve got 75, 000 turbines in the ground. So there’s just lessons that come with seeing lots of problems. You got a lot of turbines in the ground, you’re going to deal with a lot of problems, so you’ve got to figure out how to manage them. And here, you know, Uptime, the Uptime podcast, our network is, is very broad reaching. Uh, so I mean, between you and I, Allen, how many times a week do we get just a call from someone or a comment from someone like, this is a problem I have, how do I fix it? And we’re able to kind of, Hey, you know what, bearings talk to this person. Torque and tensioning. There’s a cool new technology over here. Do this. Uh, oh, LEP. What’s the latest LEP product? How do I install it? What’s the most efficient way? Oh, you talk to these people. So, since we know that stuff, or we have access to that network, why not share it? That’s, I guess, the way we’re looking at it. And because we have compadres in our network, You know, uh, Rosemary, of course, at Parleau Consulting, uh, Matthew Stead down there, he’s in Adelaide, uh, at Eologics Ping, that have been friends for a long time, and they see this kind of gap in the market down in Australia of, of some of this knowledge, um, let’s, let’s deliver it to them. Allen Hall: Right. And it does seem like there are a couple of universal problems, uh, that exist in Australia. Leading edge erosion being one of the bigger ones that I’m sure, the environment there is tough, right? It’s not, it’s not Denmark, that’s for sure. And, and then lightning was the other one and a couple of others. I think, uh, uh, bearings is obviously a problem worldwide at the minute, knowledge about blades and what the internal structure is and how blades are being addressed as part of an FSA. Those, those problems are, are huge and some of the technology that exists over in Europe and in the United States, um, has done at least a fairly decent job of trying to solve some of those problems. Australians are very, uh, intuitive and self sufficient, no doubt. But it’s always good to hear from others about how they’re trying to tackle some of these problems. Joel Saxum: You know, you touched on one point there, the FSA, the OEM controlled wind farm. And that’s, uh, of course, a contract and a use case all over the world from Brazil to America, Sweden, Germany, you name it, that thing is everywhere. Um, and it makes sense at some point, especially if you’re a financial investor, um, but what we’re seeing is, is as this industry evolves, the OEM relationship with the service contracts is taking a different feel onto it, where some of these operators are wanting to. Um, you know, at the Sky Specs event, we talked about shadow monitoring. Shadow monitoring to me is great. Uh, that, you know, that the idea that yet while you may have an FSA, you might want to put your own CMS on there. You might want to do your own inspection so that you can understand what’s going on with the assets you own. But then that takes in, there’s, there’s intricacies of that, right? Because every one of these full service agreements has certain contract language of what data the operator or the owner of the assets is entitled to. And what kind of access they have to the wind farm. And that rolls into much different, um, areas as well as, okay, when, when something goes wrong, what, what price am I on the hook for? What does that market even look like? And those are the, some of the things that we want to share with the mark, the Australian market at this, uh, technical conference we’re putting on as well as how do you, how do you navigate those intricacies? Because. It’s not easy. And, um, you know, it, it, to be honest with you, it’s not easy for either side of that ball, because in Australia, whether you’re a Festus, a Suzlon, Goldwyn, GE, whoever you are, that’s that OEM down there. They have a limited access to a supply chain as well, because at the end of the day, Australia is an island and they don’t create the products there on site. So there’s, there’s some things that we would love to share about lessons learned around those things from, um, other parts of the world that we think can help, um, get some of these wind farms into a more profitable status. Allen Hall: Yeah. And if you’re interested in attending the Wind Energy O& M Australia event, it will be held on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne, Australia. Uh, you can go visit the website, windaustralia. com, and on that site, there’s a number of pages. One of them is about general registration, if you want to attend it, uh, there’s another piece if you want to speak there, and I, we’ve talked to a number of people from Australia that would be great speakers at this event and get those signups in. And then if you would like to sponsor, uh, it would be a great opportunity for your company to highlight the work that you do in Australia or outside of Australia, even. And bring that knowledge to everybody in Australia. And so far, Joel, our conversations with, uh, Australian operators and ISPs has been remarkable. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Everybody that we talked to about the conference and what we want to bring to the, to the country there, they’re like, Oh, this is going to be amazing because all the other conferences, mostly in Australia, are focused on permit, finance, regulatory policy, all of those great things that make wind energy move forward and the energy transition happen. However, Uh, one of the comments we got was, yeah, those conferences are great. And then you see the couple of engineers standing in the corner talking to themselves, well, we’d like to give a platform and a forum for those engineers to be able to share with them amongst each other and get these, these, some of these problems that they’re dealing with solved. But like you said, Allen, um, even from, uh, us, our European counterparts, our friends in the States, like, yes, this would be, This will be something we would love to get involved with. We’ve got quite a few experts that want to come speak. Um, stay tuned to, you know, our, our LinkedIn pages and, uh, windaustralia. com website, because we’ll be announcing some of the sponsors and some of the attendees and, and, uh, kind of keep you up to date on what’s going on with that conference. Allen Hall: Yeah, so just check out windaustralia. com. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind. com today. Well, Indian wind turbine manufacturer Suzlan Energy has reported a really strong second quarter with a record breaking order book of 5. 1 gigawatts, Joel. That is really good. Net earnings increased 96 percent year over year to 23 million U. S. dollars and revenue reached about 250 million U. S. dollars up significantly from the 168 million dollars the previous year. And in fact, they delivered 256 megawatts of turbines up 94 percent from year prior. And they have secured India’s largest wind energy order. of a little over one gigawatt from NTPC Green Energy Limited. Now, that is impressive. All these numbers are amazing, and I was watching some of the sort of television coverage in India, uh, about this. It’s remarkable the turnaround at Suzlon and the growing Indian wind market is amazing. Thank you. Substantial. Suzlon has taken advantage of it. Joel Saxum: I think that’s the big key there, right? Uh, Suzlon is, that’s homegrown, right? That’s like, uh, if you’re in Detroit and you’re driving a GM or a Ford, that’s what you’re doing. Uh, India’s wind market, that’s the, that’s the home player. Of course you have Adani, that’s kind of, they’re trying to start up and some other things. But Suzlon, that’s the home team, right? And as India’s growth just keeps building and building and building, if you Pay attention to the news over there, or if you talk to, if you do any work, we have some friends that do a little bit of work over there as well. Besides, I mean, Weather Guard on the, on the Strike Tape side, they have a lot of lightning in India. So we get a lot of contact from over there. Um, you constantly are hearing about growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. And it’s reflected here, right? Of course, in these numbers that they’re doing. But if you watch news about Suiclon. I mean, Allen, how many, how many new turbines have we seen that they’ve, or new models that they’ve debuted just in the last year, like type certificates for like three different turbines, I think? Allen Hall: Right. Yeah. So the largest right now is like a three megawatt turbine, the S 144, I believe. And that turbine is big, right? And I think it really fits the Indian market. I’m not sure if they’re going to get to six megawatt kind of turbines. I know Adani’s talking about that, but. Suzlan seems to take a more, uh, reasonable approach on growth because as we see in the United States, going too fast is a problem. Joel Saxum: Yeah, for sure. And one thing that you see over, uh, that Suzlan does in India, that’s interesting, um, that I’m, I’m not quite sure, and I don’t know around the engineering reasons behind this. Why we don’t see it in the States or anywhere else to be, for that matter, is they do these hybrid towers. And I think the, I mean, of course, one of the reasons is, is they’re trying to get up higher into the, uh, off the ground, uh, AGL wise to get into, uh, though, you know, some nice wind, uh, resource, of course, but you see the bottom being a lattice tower and then the top being, um, uh, you know, just a mono steel tower. Uh, so that’s an interesting thing that you see in the Indian market that you don’t see in other places, but. I think that part of that’s driven by wind resource as well. However, it’s the same type of, like you said, three megawatt turbines, but you’re seeing, man, I think we saw one the other day. That was 140 meter tower height. That’s interesting. Allen Hall: Yeah. The tower height keeps getting higher because the winds at ground level in India don’t tend to be great and it’s a sort of a low wind area, however. The resource is still there a little bit higher up like it is in most places and, uh, the Indian marketplace demands higher towers. I think that all makes sense. You know, it comes down to a cost structure and, and trying to get deployment in India, which I think is constrained much like the rest of the world for interconnects. But the amount of order book that Cezanne is taking right now is astonishing. When you look at other OEMs at the minute, Western, what I call Western OEMs, They’re not doing as well, necessarily, as what Joel Saxum: Adani, Allen Hall: Adani and Susslund are Joel Saxum: doing. So, so let’s think about this. Uh, we have watched news in Europe about the pushback against Chinese market coming in. We’ve seen the Chinese market come into Brazil. We’re sitting in the U. S., staring down GE and Vestas as really the only two big suppliers. Nordex is, is here, of course. Siemens Gamesa is here, but Siemens hasn’t sold a turbine in a while, and for whatever reason, people kind of push back on Nordex. Could you see Suzlon taking some of this success and pushing it around the world? Allen Hall: Oh, yeah. I think there’s an opportunity for Suzlon to start entering the U. S. market, the Australian market. It must be something they’re thinking about. Um, because it’s relatively close and it’s all imported into Australia. So why not? Why not? Yeah. Right. Yeah. It would be an easy sale there. I think it just, it comes down to what can they manage efficiently. I think that’s one thing about Suzlon is that several years ago, one of the problems that they had historically was management control over all the assets that they have. That seems to have changed. They look like they’re a lot more focused now than they were 10 years ago. Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you are familiar in the U. S. market, you saw, you know, 12, 15 years ago, some Suzlon S 88s and S 64s being installed. They’re still, they’re still standing. Uh, the, they may not look super pretty, but they’ll operate. Um, so one of the reasons that they pulled out of the market is a little bit back then. And people had, some people had a bad taste was just the support, right? So it’s like, what can you focus on? What can you get done? So having the OEM support in country was tough. However, Like you said, um, they focused and grown and maybe there’s a change on the horizon for Suzlon, um, moving outside of India’s borders. Allen Hall: Well, the stock price has risen over a hundred percent year on year. So the markets are indicating that Suzlon has a huge growth potential because the Western OEMs do not show that sort of growth. In fact, they’ve shown the opposite of that. And even the operators, if you look at operators, Western operators are not showing that kind of growth. So there is an opportunity here. And I guess this is where. Uh, when you start looking at, uh, Chinese OEMs and Western OEMs, who’s in the middle here? Well, there’s really kind of two, Brazil and India. Those are the places that can slide in and play on both, both sides of that fence. This is going to be fascinating over the next couple of months, because I do think with the amount of cash influx that’s coming into Suzon, that they have an opportunity to do something unique. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean, cause we talked about, uh, Nordex quite a bit. Then you also have the Enercons of the world, right? But that’s our, that’s our Mercedes turbine that usually is just developed in Europe or Canada. Uh, but there’s other players out there. You’ve got Suzlan. Okay. You have Senvian, who’s making a push as of late in the news. You see Adani who is looking at, uh, you know, they’ve developed some of their own turbines. Uh, down in Brazil, you have WEG or WEG as some people call them. Um, and that’s outside of these, uh, the Chinese manufacturers that every week, I feel like I see a new name for one over there. You have Dongfang and Mingyang and, um, you know, Chinese Electric Corporation, a lot of different things. So, um, interesting that when you see the news and people are pushing back on the, uh, the Chinese side, trying to move into places, nobody says anything about pushing back on. The other players that could be coming. Um, so, you know, it’ll be interesting to see how the market develops. Allen Hall: How does Suzlon’s O& M business look over the next couple of months? Uh, just because GE and Siemens have pulled out essentially out of India. That must mean there is an opportunity on the operation and maintenance side for Suzlon too. Joel Saxum: Like put together a team to bid on the multi, like to bid on the Siemens Gamesa service business when they pulled out and then kind of expand into more of that multi brand service. I think they did. I don’t know who won that thing or if it even has gone through yet, but I know Siemens was selling their service department and I think Suzlon was bidding on it. That would be smart, right? Because. Um, then, then they expand their presence in there. They’re again, the local, the local home team, another win and a bit of expansion. Um, but from an operations and maintenance standpoint, even just take the Indian market. They have a lot of other complications that are pretty extreme there that we don’t see in other places, right? Like one of the things, Allen, again, you and I reviewing blades and blade images for strike tape installations to protect against lightning damage. We see a lot, like the dirtiest blades in the world, but the reason being is, is they actually burn some of their crops off over there. And it’s a dusty environment. So when we look at these blades, we see a lot of leading edge erosion and a lot of propensity for leading edge erosion building because of all the particulate in the air. So the maintenance market over there just for leading edge is huge. Allen Hall: Well, is there an offshore market? That is worth going after in India, or is it mostly going to be an onshore game? Because Cislan is, looks like it’s focused on onshore at the minute. Joel Saxum: Yeah, they’ve, the government, and I don’t know the name of the agency, but they’ve put out some, like, preliminary tenders along the, I think, southwest coast? Um, for offshore, I don’t know if it’s a huge play right now, to be honest with you, because there is so much good onshore, um, wind resource. Where we see a lot of the turbines, of course, is in the northwest corner. Um, that’s where there’s that crazy 30 gigawatt development that’s supposed to be going on. in one spot and then along, uh, behind like the first hill, basically I call it, as you come on from the coast, there’s tons of just flat agricultural plain land where it’s filled with turbines. But there’s a lot of, India’s a big country, right? There’s a lot of, a lot of, a lot of ground. So, um, like you said, transmission, I think is an issue there for sure. Um, if they can get that grid interconnected, I think growing onshore is probably a lot easier. However, the government there is not wanting to miss out on what could be an offshore push as well. I mean, that brings jobs. It brings, uh, economic influx, uh, among other things, um, and they have strong good winds there. Allen Hall: I will say just our presence on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast, one of the most active areas we hear from is India, that there is a huge interest in wind energy and the expansion of wind energy. In India, and on top of that, a lot of, uh, people trying to enter the industry because it, it is growing, right? It is, uh, if being a wind technician is a, probably a pretty good job like it is in most places. So you see a lot of, a lot of activity. Obviously, there’s more interest in India on what the technology is in wind than there is even in the United States, uh, of which there, there’s quite a good bit of interest. So it is a fascinating market. And, and I know from the Strike Tape standpoint and WeatherGuard. We’re busy in India and there’s a lot of lightning damage. And as, as the wind turbine market expands, you’re going to be pushing more and more into lightning prone areas. Hey, good time to reach out and contact Joel here and get some strike tape on your turbines. Because boy, oh boy, you don’t want downtime in India. That’s not going to be profitable. Joel Saxum: Yeah. We can tell you from experience as well. Um, doing business with locals. is definitely the way to go down there. Um, so we have some connections. If you’re looking to get something done in India, give us a call and we’ll connect you up. Uh, whether it’s lightning protection or leading edge protection, repairs and whatnot, inspections, we’ve got you covered. Allen Hall: Dealing with damaged blades? Don’t let slow repairs keep your turbines down. Blade Platforms get you back up and running fast. Blade Platform’s truck mounted platforms reach up to 100 meters, allowing for quick setup, improved safety, and efficient repairs. Book soon to secure your spot and experience a difference in blade access, speed, and efficiency. Visit bladeplatforms. com and get started today. There was landmark research done in the United States. Uh, in the last couple of years and they have found through a lot of investigation, America’s largest lithium deposit in the Arkansas smack over formation. Now smack over is a very, kind of a funny word for, for a lithium formation, but, uh, the discovery, which was published in Science Advances, uh, really could totally reshape the United States position in the global battery supply chain and electric vehicle manufacturing. Uh, this deposit, which it’s, I think is huge. It ranges somewhere between five and 19 million tons of lithium and represents upwards of a hundred percent of the total, total current US lithium. Resource, uh, that estimates. So they basically doubled the amount of lithium that they thought they had available in the States and which then dramatically lowers the cost of lithium. Because if you bring it in from Australia or someplace like that, it gets expensive because of the transportation costs. So this is fascinating because Joel, one of the things that always bothers me in renewable energy is we have to have access to specific minerals. Yes. And so we get very fixated on where those minerals exist today and say, well, we must get it from generally China. So let’s just work on the China movement of materials and try to negotiate or navigate agreements there. In the meantime, it does look like there’s a lot of research going on in the continental U. S. to find some of these minerals, lithium, probably being one of the most prevalent materials on Earth, actually, probably close to salt, it’s got to be close to it. It is generally everywhere, but in enough density that it makes sense to go ahead and try to mine it. Everything about U. S. battery production and electric vehicle production, right? Joel Saxum: Yeah, I agree. I think the, um, one of the things that, um, as Americans, we’re really lucky in natural resources. The way that this country, you know, over eons and eons of years, was developed and, you know, whatever happens on geotechnically. We have A ton of oil and gas. We have a ton of good resources, uh, mineral wise. And now we see this all of a sudden, boom, I saw the map too, Allen. I was looking at the Smackover Foundation. I love the name of it. Um, but it is, it goes all the way from, um, East Texas down dang near into Florida. And when I see that region from an, from a technical and economic standpoint, some of that is some pretty tough area to get through. I’ve worked in, um, Mississippi, Northern Mississippi. I’ve worked in. In Nifield in Northern Louisiana, in Eastern Texas, some of that’s, it’s some pretty unforgiving territory. However, it’s also a great opportunity economically for those communities. Because all of those places could use jobs, right? There’s an, and what this could bring now there’s, it’s going to be very controversial because if you look at anything that you see on the internet about lithium mining, it’s like, oh, these big pools and brining and all these crazy things, and you’re ruining the environment to make electrical cars and yada, yada, yada. I think that because we’re seeing an influx, uh, or not an influx, because we’re seeing this discovery of lithium there, I think that this could drive advancements in lithium mining and, uh, lithium production and refining because the, the current methods are, they are a little bit archaic. Um, they’re just fairly, fairly basic. And I think that we can do better there. Uh, but the fact that there’s enough lithium here, because I mean, I’ve talked to people that are, uh, one of my friends on Houston represents a group that is bringing a lithium battery manufacturing facility to Houston. Which is great for that economy and that market. However, at this point in time, they’re bringing all their lithium in from overseas. Well, if now they could just ship it down from, you know, the smack over foundation to Houston. Well, that changes a lot of stuff. And what we’re seeing now with the energy mix on the grid, and it’s not just a United States things, it’s everywhere. Um, we want to solve this duck curve problem where we have solar during the day, wind resource at night, wind cools off during the day, and you need to balance that load. Well, the answer to doing that is batteries. And if we can get some of these, um, this lithium that we’ve found here now locally that’s a resource for us into battery technology. Well, then we can really start pushing on the energy transition, and it can be homegrown, and that’s huge. And I wonder if there’s other deposits like this. Don’t you? Yeah, for sure. I mean, have you ever, have you ever flew, what was the last time you flew? Okay, so, uh, one of our team members, engineers on the strike team, or on the weather guard team here, lives out in San Diego. So when you fly out to see Adam, how many times have you looked out the window when you go over Nevada and Utah, and you see this massive expanse of area? That’s full of rare earth minerals. Like the mining that goes on in Nevada that people don’t know about is crazy. When you look out the window and you’re like, wow, it’s beautiful. It almost looks like Mars in some places when you’re looking. And then all of a sudden you see like. A development, you know, like what is this development? Well, that’s mostly all rare earth minerals or some kind of mining that’s happening out there. I guarantee that the other big lithium deposit in the United States that we know about right now that we’re actively mining is in Northern Nevada, I think. Allen Hall: Yes. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s where Tesla is. Right. And when they’ve got a battery factory there, it’s amazing. And just North of there too, kind of push up towards what’s the Oregon border. There’s a lot of useful materials sitting right there. Which is not heavily populated. That’s a pretty empty space if you’ve ever been up that way. So the amount of material you can get from those places that hasn’t really been developed is shocking at times. Like, we don’t know what we have in the ground in a lot of places. We know where the oil is, for the most part. But, minerals, not so much, because unless it was, well, unless it was coal. Yeah, we know where all the coal veins are across the U. S. Joel Saxum: Coal veins are co located with methane gas and oil and gas, natural gas. But, you know, like, I even, I remember listening to a, um, a podcast with Elon Musk on it a couple months ago, and he was talking about a massive lithium deposit beneath the Salton Sea in Southern California. Allen Hall: Oh, really? Okay. Joel Saxum: Well, that would make sense actually. Yeah, absolutely. So, and, and, and that was where I think you mentioned it before. He mentioned the fact that, uh, when people are saying, oh, we’re running on a lithium or lithium prices are changing, well, actually lithium is one of the most common materials. It’s just in the ground. It’s just, where do you find it in concentrations that make, you know, economic sense to, to mine? Uh, so having find, finding some of these areas that is making economic sense to mine or could make economic sense to mine. If we can, if we can turn that around as a, as a, you know, a burgeoning sector of the U S energy transition economy, uh, that could be huge for us. And you can put a lot of, there’s a lot of experienced miners that, uh, as coal plants shut down, need jobs. So, um, some of these areas could, could boom. Allen Hall: It is always amazing to me that. We panic without doing any of the work ahead of time, and maybe it’s just a new cycle we’re in at the moment, but when we need special minerals, we always say it’s always somewhere else, and we just haven’t really done our homework, and it is fascinating to watch. You know, the one thing about all of this is that you start to worry about the energy future, what renewable energy is going to look like, how expensive is it going to be? That’s the real killer, is the cost. Thank you very much. If all of a sudden those materials are under your feet, life just got a lot easier. Joel Saxum: So for our wind farm of the week, this week we are taking a trip up to the big mitten, uh, IE to the locals, the state of Michigan. So Isabella one n two, uh, we’re gonna loop, limp them. Loop. We’re, we’re gonna loop them together as one wind farm, uh, built by Apex. Uh, it was sold to DTE, which is a big energy company up in Michigan in 2021. It’s 383 megawatts, uh, powered by 136 GE. 2. 8 megawatt, 127 meter rotor machines. Uh, they push energy into the commercial and industrial space, uh, as well as onto DTE’s, uh, renewable programs. But some of their customers include Ford, General Motors, and the University of Michigan, which you would expect being you’re up in Michigan, some car companies and some universities. Uh, cool thing here is, um, there was a lot of grassroots effort. Uh, I really liked it. I was reading a bunch of articles about these wind farms when they were being built and how the, the community came together and they, they took, uh, proponents and opponents of the wind farms out to other wind farms to show them what they were like. They did tours, um, when they were trying to build this thing. And what that resulted in was, um, over 600 Isabella County landowners signing leases, um, with them. So a lot of money thrown around. Uh, generate the Isabella wind facilities will generate approximately 30 million in tax revenue for the local communities. And 100 million in landowner payments over the lifetime of the projects at 350 jobs and up to 20 local long term operations and maintenance jobs. And that’s a big one because those are, um, you know, central Michigan, those are some good paying, um, jobs that will keep that community running for a little while. So the power from this thing powers about 86, 000 homes. Um, and from it, they have done a lot of good up there. They’ve taken some money that the counties have made and they, they built a new jail. Um, they’ve also, uh, got, um, some revenues and wins to pay off some school debt and some other things that they built. So, uh, some wind farm development up in central Michigan doing good for the community. Uh, Isabella 1 and 2 from DTE. Allen Hall: You’re the wind farm of the week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. And please give us the five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly substack newsletter. And check out Rosie’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, Allen, Joel and Phil discuss DOF Group’s acquisition of Maersk Supply Service, TotalEnergies’ growth in the renewables market, and Brookfield’s acquisition of minority stake in four offshore wind farms owned by Ørsted. Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Joel, Norwegian offshore supply vessel company Dof Group has completed the acquisition of Denmark based Maersk Supply Service, which will be renamed Dof Denmark. The deal expands Dof’s fleet to 78 modern offshore and subsea vessels, including 65 owned vessels, with the addition of Maersk Supply Service’s 22 vessels. The combined company now has a workforce of more than 5, 000 employees and will continue offering integrated offshore services for both oil and gas and the growing offshore wind market. So you’re seeing big players here, Joel, in offshore wind support. This is one of them. Joel Saxum: Yeah. From my past in offshore oil and gas, DOF is, they’re in on every contract, right? They’re a big company. They do things well and they do it right. Norwegians in the offshore world, you’re always, you always look at them like the cream of the crop. Whenever they show up on site, they’re expensive. And there’s some specialists sometimes. But they are, they’re always getting things done correctly. That’s why people value them no matter where you are in the world. And DoF is a country, or a company, that values them. Full of all Norwegians. So, them grabbing Maersk, of course. The Norway Denmark connection of cousins or depending on which side you’re talking to. Little brother, big brother. It’s a, it’s an easy tie up. Maersk, of course. A fantastic company with a lot of assets running all over the world. But also looking to you never know what they’re going to do with this capital. Diversify a little bit try some other things. So Dof grabbing Maersk makes absolute sense to me. And if it was one company that would be buying some big chunks of Maersk assets as in Maersk supply service, Dof would be the one. Allen Hall: Total Energies has reported significant growth in its renewable energy operations for Q3 of 2024 with total power production reaching 29. 7 terawatt hours. Up 17 percent year over year. The company’s renewable power production increased by 45 percent to 19. 6 terawatt hours with net power generation capacity up 36 percent to 21. 6 gigawatts. Total energies reached a gross renewable capacity of 24. 2 gigawatts with solar dominating at 15. 6 gigawatts followed by onshore wind. At 5. 9 gigawatts. Phil, Total Energy is just becoming a huge player in renewables and the growth in the Q3 is amazing. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and what’s really fascinating is that with all the other oil and gas companies pulling away and pulling back from Investments in renewables totals remained committed to it and has always been one of the bigger, oil and gas and utility companies in Europe besides maybe, stack craft event fall to, well, you could say Orsted maybe but, they, they’ve remained committed to a renewables portfolio and have, based on their presence in the utility business around the world even in, as far foreign places as, as some of the Asia Pacific islands they’ve, they’ve had and own and operate renewable assets for, for more than a decade, going on, 15, almost 20 years at this point. So it’s, it’s good to see that they’re. Not only committed, but they’re actually seeing results because one of the reasons why a lot of these other oil and gas companies pulled out is because they were rationalizing that, hey, we can get better financial returns through oil and gas investments. Totaro’s making a go of it with renewables and actually turning a profit on renewables, so that’s great. Joel Saxum: I think Total did a really smart move when they started the Total E Ren group a few years back. And it was like, we’re going to go into renewables, we’re going to do it with, or in a portion, we’re going to do it with this Total E Ren group. And what you saw develop was, of course, they watched it, they played with it, and they made sure they got it right. And then Total Energies went back and just grabbed the whole thing, absorbed it as part of Total Energies back in, I think it was mid 2023 ish. So over, a year ago, year and a half ago. So, kind of a good strategy there that I’d like to see some more people play out with you’re able to manage risk that way, throw some capital over here, take a look at how it goes, see if it works, and then if it works well, as they did execute on Total E Ren, well, boom, grab it absorb it as part of the the parent company, and move forward, so now you see the, they’re yielding those fruits from that little farming experiment. Allen Hall: Brookfield has signed an agreement to acquire 12. 5 percent minority stake in four UK offshore wind farms owned by Orsted, marking their first investment in UK offshore wind. The transaction, valued at 1. 7 1, Hornsea 2, Walney Extension and Burbo Bank Extension projects, with a combined capacity of 3. 5 gigawatts. Orsted will retain a 37 percent ownership interest and continue to oversee maintenance and operation of the wind power plants. Now, Phil, Orsted has been making a number of transactions lately. It looks like this one is there to improve their performance. Their pocketbook a little bit. Philip Totaro: Yeah, certainly, because they, given some of the pullback from markets like the U. S. and some of the losses that they took and impairments they took from those projects, I think raising a bit of capital was necessary. Obviously, they got. An equity stake in the company from Econore a few weeks back. And with this investment by Brookfield, it’s, it’s interesting because these four assets, you would normally have attracted any kind of Typical kind of financial investor through an asset rotation, so it’s, it’s not uncommon to, to sell off a minority stake in, in these assets, but the timing of it is, is noteworthy, so as we just talked about, capital raise and, and cash in the pocket, that’s good, but the fact that it’s Brookfield who has made a concerted effort to entrenched themselves in the UK onshore wind market and a little bit in, in the solar world. That’s sending a strong signal that they are prepared to start opening their pocketbook as well for stakes in other projects potentially in the UK or elsewhere throughout throughout Europe where they haven’t actually had a presence yet. So Brookfield’s not done, a ton of investments in, German or Dutch or, or Belgian or Danish offshore wind at this point. So this could be, the beginning of that process. Joel Saxum: When you think about Brookfield, the, over the last five to 10 years, they haven’t quietly become a player. They’ve very loudly become a large player. And I think it’s great to see that amount of capital being placed into the market and used for good, right? They did the Deriva big acquisition the other year among others. And when you look at the, kind of the flag flying here, Horn C1, Bank, those are big time wind farms over in the North Atlantic on Oersted’s portfolio. So. Brookfield making some moves. Great to see that happening and the capital being reinvested. And it’ll help Orsted, right? Orsted needs a little bit of that black ink on the, on the sheet. So, kudos to the deal and I’d like to see more of it.

In this episode, Peter Winther, Key Account Manager at R&D Test Systems, discusses the construction of the world’s most powerful main bearing test facility at the Lindø Offshore Renewable Center in Denmark. Winther provides fascinating insights into the engineering challenges and scale of this groundbreaking 25-megawatt facility, including details about its massive concrete foundation and the specialized testing capabilities designed to simulate decades of wear in just months. 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.comWind 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: Today we’re joined by Peter Winther, Key Account Manager at R& D Test Systems, a company that’s revolutionizing how we test wind turbine components. R& D Test Systems is currently building the world’s most powerful main bearing test facility at the Lindo Offshore Renewable Center in Denmark. They have already delivered the largest halt test bench for nacelle testing at the same location and now these facilities are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in wind turbine testing with capabilities up to 25 megawatts. Peter brings extensive experience in large scale test system development and has been instrumental in multiple groundbreaking projects at LORC. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. All right, so you’re building a 25 megawatt main bearing test system. Facility. That’s big. That’s very big. So just give it a sense of scale. How big is a 25 megawatt bearing? Peter Winther: The bearing itself, I would guess the inside diameter is more than four meters in a typical bearing constellation. The test bench on the other high, on the other side is also relatively big to be able to break that bearing or bearings, depending on what you’re testing. The test bench itself pretty big. First of all, features a pretty decent size concrete block or foundation at the bottom, which is roundabout 35 meters long. It took 30 hours to cast the whole thing. It was a one continuous process. We had 280 trucks coming in and they were coming in every six minutes. And so we basically took all, I think, concrete production from Fyn, which is the island where Ålensø or the test bench is being realized. And then we had back off plants in case the plant went down because if you start casting, you can’t stop, you need to go ahead. You can’t have a cold joint. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the foundation itself. An essential thing when you make a foundation like this is also to make sure it cools in the right manner. You can’t just cast it and then go away and then come back in an hour or a week and then all is fine because then you risk not having. The right material properties throughout the foundation. So we had a more than one megawatt cooling system, making sure that the cross-sectional temperatures throughout different cross sec cross-sections and the foundation was right and not too much of a difference, so we didn’t get cracks and creeping and unwanted properties at the end because you, you can’t really get rid of it. Allen Hall: When you take this project on, how many engineering challenges are there? Obviously building the. Concrete Foundation by itself is a massive undertaking. How many, how do you break this down and how many big hurdles are there? We’re Peter Winther: in the lucky position that it’s not, you can say, the first time we’re building a big test rig. It’s the first time we’re building one that should break a 25 megawatt wind turbine main bearing arrangement. So that’s a first. We have some conceptual building blocks, which we of course relied upon, but it’s, the biggest we’ve ever made. So there’s always challenges. And it’s especially challenging when we need to break something very fast that is at the limit of what is possible to manufacture at this point in time. There’s a reason why they’re challenged with making 15 or 25 megawatt turbines or whatever they’re saying they can manufacture now. It’s because the, you need also the technology to make bearings sufficiently big enough machining. that you can machine the whole thing. And we need To break something that is intended for 20, 25 years of operation, we need to try to break that in 6 to 12 months. So it’s a bit of an engineering undertaking to figure out, okay, how do we make our test bench capable of doing that 24 7, also for 20 years. Allen Hall: I’m curious because you’ve already built a 25 megawatt HALT, Highly Accelerated Lifecycle Testing. At the LORC. And that’s there. So what was the need for a separate facility for the main bearing? What about main bearings makes the requirements a little bit different? Peter Winther: You can say in some areas the the 25 megawatt halt, It’s used for validation testing, so that is actually for testing the entire drivetrain, meaning the DUT is an abbreviation we use, device under testing in this case it’s the nacelle. And for the 25 megawatt HALT test bench, we have already commissioned and there’s an operation over there. It’s also Test the gearbox and the generator which mean we need to be able to apply a pretty significant amount of torque. Also, you wanna stress test the gearbox. Ergo you want to have a lot of torque for the main bearing for the main bearing test bench. That is not the case. You only have to overcome the friction in the bearings because they don’t see the torque. The torque goes through the main shaft to the gearbox at the back end, in case of a geared solution, and if not, then it’s directly to the generator, but that’s where, why the bearings are there. So it is actually, It’s overdoing it to test main bearings on the 25 megawatt Holt, because then you pay for a huge direct drive motor in this case, which you don’t need Allen Hall: in the test. That makes total sense. Okay. And the issues that the industry is having with main bearings is pretty evident and onshore right now there’s a lot of issues in the United States at the moment. But when we get offshore, that becomes even more critical as 25 megawatt turbines going to repair that gets increasingly difficult. So this is a really key piece of equipment. For offshore wind, isn’t this probably the linchpin to success out on the ocean? It’s at Peter Winther: least very difficult to change if something goes wrong. Let’s put it like, everything is difficult to change offshore, but the main bearing arrangement, everything is attached to that in some way, more or less. It’s the connection between the rotating part and the tower. To some extent, so you need to take off a lot of stuff if you are to change the main bearing arrangement or the main bearings. So yeah, there’s a lot of challenges there and I guess what is evident and what they see is, it is extremely important to test the bearings under the right conditions. What they actually experience in one, in the real life, to get as close to that as possible, which is also what has been the focus. Focus on this test benches is the main bearing units. We don’t test main bearing standalone, just a bearing, and then turn it around and try to bend it because it is very important, the housing around it, how the load is distributed in the bearings. What is it exposed to in the real life? You need to get as close to that as possible. So that has also been one of the things. Focuses for this main bearing test bench is it’s main bearing unit. It’s main bearing systems We need to test. Joel Saxum: Is it actually easier for the main bearing to support the load while it’s spinning? Or when it’s static, the actual hub. Peter Winther: It is when it’s spinning. And I guess that’s because you, if you have the large load, when it’s static, you risk that the oil is not properly distributed in the bearings and so on. So ideally, if you have the big loads, I’m pretty sure that the bearings would prefer to rotate. So in Joel Saxum: this case, okay, now we’re talking testing them. How do you. Okay, so when we talk to this a little bit off air, you explain to us like the test rig and what the hydraulic rams look like to put pressure on it in different ways. Do you do rotating testing and static testing with this thing for an accelerated lifetime test, or how does that work? Peter Winther: At the end of the day, it’s of course up to the customer. They’re the experts in how to test their bearings. But on the other hand, we are also trying not to limit them and what they can test. So it is also something we’ve been discussing with them, what their needs are in this area also. But. Ultimately, we also use bearings so we have the same challenges and the same limitations. All, some of our bearings, at least for the turbines that’s going on right now, our bearings are still somewhat bigger. We cannot at least we also put in some constraints and say, okay, if you want to do static testing, then it might not be full load or it might not be full load for several days or whatever, as again, we need to make sure that The large equipment doesn’t break but again, we also need to enable the customer to, to take their tests or their designs to the limit. Joel Saxum: But that’s, that’s an R& D specialty, right? That’s what you guys do. You link up with whoever needs the test benches, whoever needs the testing mechanisms, and you say Okay, let’s get yours, your specific design criteria and what you guys want to do. And we’re going to engineer this thing bespoke to you, but that throws in a bunch of other challenges for you guys as well, because now we’re talking about testing four meter diameter main bearings, but you have a rotating rig yourself. So you have to have a bearing that’s bigger and stronger than that. Peter Winther: Yes, that is always a challenge. And as you said Joel we start, it’s also above my head here, the winning concept. So it’s not like we come with a given product or a given solution that fits all testing needs. We usually start together with a customer, with a blank piece of paper and then figure out, okay, you have a given test needs or an idea at least. And then we figure out it along the way and then we find the winning concept. When we start with. different concepts. Of course, we have a track record and we have proofs, different concepts that use different concepts. And there are some of them we’ve used several times because they’re suitable for scaling up. And then We mature that along with the customer and make it sure it’s capable of fulfilling the customer’s requirements. But it is a challenge that we need to break the largest bearings that are being manufactured while still using Allen Hall: bearings in our rake. Where do you draw the line at Peter? They come in and say, I need a 25 megawatt bearing test center. And you say, Peter Winther: it’s the, at the end of the day, it’s the customer wallet, the customer’s wallet that draws the line. Allen Hall: Good reason. Peter Winther: We could make it bigger if needed, but again it’s also how big are they going to get and how much do we need to future prove? And so we usually don’t draw a line. We always try to find solutions. The same with the 25 megawatt Holtz test bench we talked about previously. At that point in time, we couldn’t get a solution. Get our hands on a direct drive motor of that size. So we had to design and engineer and manufacture it ourself because that was the need for the given test bench. So we don’t say okay, you want to go above 25. Keep us out of it. It is usually also a financial decision. We also had bigger on the table but bigger is more expensive. So it’s always also refers back to yeah, the investment on the business case and Allen Hall: how much of a 25 megawatt main bearing test rig. is designed by R& D test systems that is unique to that test bench. 95, Peter Winther: 99 percent of the control system is based on common industry you could say control, hardware, software stuff, the foundation, one of a kind the main shaft, we, one of a kind the bearings actually also. Order of one of a kind. The housing is of course also one of a kind. The hydraulic cylinders, they’re made to spec. So it’s not something we’re taking from a serial production. It’s made to us and it’s made to what we need for this one. As some of the biggest hydraulic actuators in the bench, they can, each of them apply more than 1000 ton. Wow. Allen Hall: That requires a team of engineers. What does that staff look like? The project team Peter Winther: peak was We are in manufacturing phase. We are having things manufactured and also soon delivered outside. So we are actually On the other side of the peak where all the engineering was carried out. But I guess 30, 40 engineers working on them. That seems like not enough. It is actually. Allen Hall: Yeah. So because you’ve done it before you have it honed. And so there, there are multiple phases to this. And as a project person, how does that work? Like the customer picks up the phone, calls you and says, I need a 25 megawatt main bearing test facility. And someone takes that phone call. How does it, what happens from there? Peter Winther: Usually they’re not that specific, but they send out a request at least. We have some testing needs. If we can start with let’s say we start with a feasibility study and figure out together with the customer what do we, what do they need? And What sort of concept is the winning concept and so on. So if they call, depending on which number they call and so on, but they would probably start with me as I’m a sales representative, a key account manager, so I would be in that process as well. And then taking it all the way to telling the customer what the thing actually costs. You can say part of that journey is also there is always at the beginning, everything is need to have. That’s it. But when you put a price tag on what the different requirements cost, some of them become nice to have. That’s also some of the journey we have with them together. For this one, for example there was one particular load case which had some pretty aggressive dynamics. And Dynamics, when we have hydraulics, we need a pretty big HPU, so that one load case implied the HPU had to be tripled compared to all the other load cases. So all of a sudden, that given requirement became a nice to have because they could just bend three times as long, that was okay with them so lowering the frequency. And then. At some point, then we get to the point where, okay, they have the requirements, we have the solution and we’re satisfied, they’re satisfied with the solution. In this case, it was a joint three party venture. Because we are the test bench realizer. Our customer is Log, which is a commercial test center. And their customer on the other side, that’s Sheffler. From Germany. So it was you can say a bit odd because it was, the requirements were actually coming from Schaeffler through Locke, but to us, but we were all working together on it to find, okay, now this design fulfills the requirements and this is then the cost of it, how we go ahead and we were, and then. Internally in R& D, we hand it over to operations. That’s what we call it which realizes it. So they take it from purchase order and then all the way to hand over to the customer. Allen Hall: So there’s two questions there. How long did it take to iron out the specifications with everybody at the table? How many months was that? And then once you decide to build it. How long does it take to actually, to complete a project? Peter Winther: So from, you can say we start to, it’s going to be completed. Building is around about 24 months. The process leading up to that. So the sales process was, also, I would say delayed. It was quite long and it was influenced by some probably some geopolitical situation going on in some part of Europe where, yeah, something happened at some point which changed priorities at the customer. So it took Actually years I would say. Because one thing is settling on the requirements. Another thing is also it’s a big investment. So committing to that, that, that takes some time. Is it quicker to build than it is to specify then? Not at all. I don’t, when, once we got, there was a big pause. So that’s, that shouldn’t be part of that. So once we got into the specification phase, it was a, it was a pretty intense months. But really good cooperation between the three of us. Allen Hall: And RD is going to open the facility. in 2025. 2025. Yes. So how soon before it then becomes commissioned and ready to take that first main bearing, is it ready to go day one there? Peter Winther: That’s the intention. Yes. The expectation. So right now, process wise we’ve left site, we’ve made the foundation and now we’ve stepped back a little bit. And now the building is being erected around it. It’s easier to make the big concrete block first and then build the building around it. So they’re making the floor as we speak, they might finish that already. And then they’ll build the walls around it and then come start next year. It’s the intention. We’ll come back in and start installing auxiliaries and the test load unit and. Joel Saxum: You know you’re making a big piece of kit when the building has to be built around it. Allen Hall: So obviously R& D Test Systems is the leader in big test equipment and building these test benches. There’s, you do impressive work. How much is on your plate at the minute? You have this 25 megawatt facility going in. Are there other things already in the pipeline to, that you haven’t even announced yet? That, that. You’re working on. How busy are you right Peter Winther: now? We’re busy realizing the projects we have. And, unfortunately, I’m not allowed to tell too much about the pipeline, but we definitely have some interesting stuff going on. That’s for sure. Allen Hall: That’s the beauty of R& D test systems. If you need somebody to build a piece of test equipment for big machines, you And do it right. I would imagine there’s only one place to go and that’s R& D test systems. And you’re going to have to get ahold of Peter because Peter is their salesperson. Peter Winther: Give me a call. I’m not the only one, but I can promise our sales organization, our sales team will take good care of you. If you have that particular need, we’ll love to help you solve it. How do they reach you? How do they contact you? We have our webpage on rdas. dk where there’s a contact information where they can reach us. Allen Hall: Yeah. And Peter’s available on LinkedIn. So if you get desperate and you need to have a 25 megawatt main bearing test facility built in your backyard or 30, you just reach out to Peter, he’s ready to take your phone call. And I, every time R& D test systems comes on the podcast, I’m always impressed because You’re doing such amazing things and it’s such a benefit to the industry and congratulations on that. Come on. I know how hard that is to do and I know how successful these test benches have been. That’s truly amazing. So Peter, thank you for being on the podcast. It’s been wonderful to have you. Peter Winther: We’re just a small piece of the puzzle and we’re just helping, trying to help this green transition and yeah, having wind succeed because it’s awesome.

This week on Power-Up, we discuss Siemens Gamesa’s method for stabilizing wind turbine blades by installing closeout plates. Then Vestas and ZF’s idea to replace the metal torque tube in the gearbox with a plastic piece, protecting from current. And finally, an Enercon patent for painting blades in an ombre pattern to lessen visual disturbances. 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.comWind 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. All right guys, our first idea is what’s turbine blades, and it’s an idea from Siemens Gamesa, and it In patent form, as they describe it here, it’s what they call a novel approach to stabilizing wind turbine blades without the need for traditional trailing edge beam designs. But what they’re really doing is they’re installing closeout plates on the, between the aft spar and the trailing edge. So, This idea is pretty much making a wind turbine blade look a lot like an airplane wing, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah, especially like an older style airplane wing. So those that aren’t familiar with the closeout plate, it’s like a rib design that has this, vertical element at different longitudinal locations throughout the Kind of the, the max cord section and in inner portion with the exception of like the, the immediate root section of the blade. But it’s, it’s interesting to me, besides just the, the general concept here, the timing of this was fascinating to me because they filed for this patent back in April of 2024. And the patent has now published in October and the question Is, is this a potential fix to a problem? Is this what’s this really doing? Allen Hall: Well, it’s stopping torsion is what it’s doing, Phil. It’s preventing the blade from twisting too much, which makes me think of a couple of blades that I’m familiar with that have torsion problems. Joel? Joel Saxum: Well, if you look at the image here, so I’ve crawled around in quite a few blades doing RCA’s and failures, and you’re always looking for failure modes, so you start getting into a different mindset of when you’re crawling around in them. But In multiple blades that I’ve been in, there’s an, what looks like an extra shear web in the, in some of like the max cord region and stuff like that, just to make sure that you keep that part of the shell supported and then that structure rigid there. And in this design, they’re removing that extra shear web and putting these closeout plates in there. And it is exactly like you guys say, the design looks like an airplane wing with a bunch of ribs in it. And to me, in my mind I’m, I’m not a, trained structural engineer, but from engineering principles and just kind of physics and forces and a little bit of knowledge there, this to me looks like it could solve some, some pretty big issues. However, in maintenance, that makes things a little bit more difficult because maintenance and construction, because it’s harder to place these things in construction, of course, and to get them right. We already sometimes have a hard enough time placing shear webs and getting those right. Now you’re adding perpendicular components and multiple of them. So that makes that a little bit more difficult. And then, you’re checking more glue, glue lines and bond lines and these kinds of things. But then, of course, what we’ve seen in the last two to four years and wind and the explosion of internal inspections. The only way you’re going to do an internal inspection on one of these blades is, from a structured standpoint, is with like an Elios drone or something like that, if they can fit through the holes in the closeout panels. But you’re not going to do it with a crawler anymore. So there’s some like manufacturing things, some trade offs with O& M. However, to me, it looks like if you could get this right, you might end up with some more structurally rigid blades. That could, could alleviate some of these cracking and, and blade failure issues we have. Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Zedaph Windpower and Vestas Wind. And it has to do with gearboxes and preventing electrical Currents, stray electrical currents from damaging the gearboxes, the drivetrain, and causing havoc and warranty claims and all kinds of other things. As you, as you pass through a gearbox, there’s usually a tube that sits in the middle of this where you can put hydraulics or electrical signals or whatever you want through them. However, when you put a piece of metal in this, in this drivetrain, it provides a pathway for stray currents to flow and thereby causing Damage to the gears and the bearings. And this idea from ZF Investus, takes that tube and makes it out of plastic. Seems like a really simple change, Phil. Philip Totaro: It is, but what’s interesting about it is a couple of things. First, not only that, that kind of physical interpretation of this idea to just have a, a portion of what would otherwise be a, a metallic but non structural component just changed over to plastic, it might seem like a really simple, stupid idea. But I gotta be honest, like, a lot of times, those are the things that A, are gonna help you with maintenance or otherwise solve a problem that’s being caused by the fact that you were using the metal in the first place. The other aspect of this is the fact that, because this is a joint, patent application between ZF and Vestas. This is potentially technology that’s already being used on the large onshore machines. We’re talking about the V162, V172 kind of product families or the large offshore machines like the V236 and, and above. So, the fact that we know that there’s a commercial tie in between ZF and Vestas on those those gearboxes means that we hope to be able to see this kind of technology used in real life applications soon. Joel Saxum: Yeah, Allen and I being part of the lightning world, and of course, Allen being an electrical engineer, we hear about a lot of problems within turbines with stray voltage, whether it’s static buildup or stray voltage coming from the turbine itself, and disregard the idea of even lightning moving around. They can wreak havoc on electronics. They can throw alarms that you don’t want to see. They can ruin coatings. They can do all kinds of things. So Vestas and ZF looking at, Fixing this problem. Maybe it’s something that they’ve learned and lesson learned from or something that they’re foreseeing good on them. And it’s good to see innovations like this making their way into the market. Allen Hall: All right. Our next patent idea is on a rotor blade and, and painting the rotor blade, different colors to reduce the visual impact. Now this is really fascinating. So the concept goes like this. You, you take, you paint a part near the hub, a lighter color. color. And then as you move out towards the tip, you paint that a darker color, like the color of the sky. So it’s blue or maybe even the color of the ground, green or brown to, to match the landscape. So when the rotor is spinning, this color gradation creates an optical illusion that makes the overall rotor diameter appear about 10 to 20 percent smaller than its actual size. Now, the only thing I can compare this to, Phil, is when you walk into a home and they have Two differently painted colored walls and the shape of the room changes. It’s an optical illusion of sorts. It sounds like that’s what they’re headed for in this painting scheme for wind turbine blades. Philip Totaro: It is. And this, so for those that aren’t familiar, this is a patent from Enercon. This was originally filed in Germany in October 20th, 1999. So we’re certainly talking about what is now an expired patent. So if other companies wanted to be able to use this technology, they could. What’s interesting about this and the other Enercon patent about, they, they literally patented painting the wind turbine tower different shades of green, and you may have seen this if you’ve seen, some of the wind farms in Germany or Austria or elsewhere in, in Europe where they’ve actually implemented this technology it was part of being a social acceptance of wind turbines. And that’s, that’s originally what the, the concept was behind it. Why they patented it is something I still kind of question to this day. And the reason we’re talking about something that’s an expired patent in the first place is, we, we have the luxury to be able to, look back and say over the last, 20 plus years has this really been a competitive differentiator for a company like Enercon selling their wind turbines? I’d have to say no. So the, the question of whether or not you want to spend, and, and companies will do this, they’ll spend upwards of 400, 000 on a single patent over the lifetime of the patent for all the countries that you could potentially go file your patent in. We’re talking about, major international markets where you’re going to sell wind turbines. That’s the U S throughout the EU jurisdictions like Brazil, Japan, China, Australia, et cetera. Canada, that, other major markets where you’re, you’re gonna sell your wind turbines, you’re gonna spend 400 grand over the lifetime of the patent to get a patent. So, was this 400 grand well spent? I’d probably have to say maybe not because while it may have helped in a handful of cases with social acceptance, I, it hasn’t really served as a significant competitive differentiator for for this company. Joel Saxum: I would say if they got this, if it took cost of 400 grand and they got to install one more turbine from it, it was worth it. However, I have never seen one that’s painted like this and I don’t believe anybody I know has ever seen one painted like this. So I don’t think it’s like exactly like you say, Phil, it caught on or it made any value. The interesting thing in this patent, I’m looking at a section of it and I’m going to read it right from the patent so you can all listen. That it says it goes sentence, sentence, sentence. That is to be achieved in particular in respect of installations with large rotor diameters. And in parentheses, large rotor diameters in 2000 or 99 when this thing was filed was larger than 40 Philip Totaro: meters. Well, considering the fact that we now have the, the Chinese have literally just last week at their China wind power event just proposed a 25 megawatt offshore wind turbine with a 304 meter rotor. So, I think we’re, we’re beyond the need for painting the tips.

In this episode, Allen, Joel, Phil and Rosemary analyze why 38% of Australian wind farms are struggling with profitability despite stable PPAs. They explore how solar saturation, coal plant inflexibility, and maintenance contract structures impact returns. Plus, the team examines BlueFloat Energy’s withdrawal from New Zealand and what recent auction results in Maine reveal about the broader challenges facing floating offshore wind development. 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.comWind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: It is almost fall. I guess it is fall. Joel Saxum: It’s almost November. Allen Hall: I was just outside today. It was like 70 degrees outside. It felt like the end of summer, not the beginning of fall. But we’re almost in winter. We got another month or two before we hit the official start of winter, which means all the bears up in my area are starting to thinking about hibernating. But in the meantime, they’re usually pretty hungry, trying to fatten up before the winter really hits. And This causes a lot of problems if you’re around bears, and a lady in Montana had a problem where she went out to work in her pickup truck early in the morning and realized that it had been all torn apart by a black bear, of all things, which is the thing that I worry about the most around here. At this time of year, when you’re bringing in things from the house, and a bear shows up and says, Oh, there’s groceries in the car, hops in, and then panics, which is what happened to this lady. The bear panics and just destroys the vehicle. And this has happened very close to us, actually. And not that long ago, it was this summer, where bears were walking in our driveway, walked right by my wife, she didn’t even know it was there. So it’s serious that don’t leave your car doors open. That’s the one thing I remember in the fall. Don’t leave your car doors open for any length of time. Otherwise, when you go back, you may have befriended a bear. Philip Totaro: Allen, I’ve seen videos where they’re opening car doors. So don’t even think about, you can close the door and they’re still gonna get in. So I don’t know, man. They’re getting sophisticated out there. Joel Saxum: I’ve got another tip for you from my childhood. You always put your trash out in the morning. Before your kids go to school, before you go to work, put your trash out in the morning on the street. Because if you put your trash out outside of your garage the night before, you’re gonna end up with trash all over the ground and the garbage man won’t pick it up and you, i. e. me, as a young child, would have to go pick up all of our trash multiple times. So that’s the hot tip. Allen Hall: It’s either the bears, the raccoons, or the wildcats. Those are the ones you really have to watch out for. Get a cat down in your neighborhood because it can do a lot of damage. Joel Saxum: You would think that Allen lived in like Northwest territories or something and not in Massachusetts. Allen Hall: I can walk out my back door and pet deer right now. That’s how close they’re sitting next to the house. Cause it’s hunting season also where I am and all the deer join into town. They’re hanging up. Yeah, there’s, they’re not stupid. Joel, he’s in the Berkshires. This is the wilderness. This is about as wilderness as you can get in Massachusetts. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’ll be joined by my Uptime co host, Chris. After these news headlines. New England’s floating offshore wind sector marked a milestone as their Bureau of Ocean Energy Management selected winning bids totaling 22 million for four lease areas in the Gulf of Maine. Two lease areas were awarded to Avangrade Renewable for areas approximately 35 miles from Massachusetts, while Invenergy Offshore Wind secured two leases about 25 miles from the coast. The combined areas covering more than 625 square miles At the potential to power over 2. 3 million homes, this marks the first offshore commercial sale for floating offshore wind on the Atlantic coast, supporting the administration’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. In Texas, Nova Clean Energy has secured interconnection agreements for a 1 gigawatt wind power portfolio. Construction is set to begin in late 2025, with power delivery scheduled for the winter of 2026. These projects located in the Delaware Basin and Central Gulf Coast will include co located battery storage. International energy giant BP continues its strategic shift away from renewables under new leadership. The company is now considering a minority stake sale in its offshore wind business. which has a project pipeline of nearly 10 gigawatts but no operational farms. This follows BP’s early decision to put its U. S. onshore wind energy business up for sale, which currently operates nine facilities across seven states with 1. 7 gigawatts of generating capacity. The company has also paused new offshore wind project bidding and plans to reduce its solar exposure through a stake sale. in light source BP, marking a significant pivot in its energy transition strategy. A startup backed by Breakthrough Energy has secured an additional 4 million in funding for its innovative floating wind platform. Aikido Technologies will launch its pilot project this fall, featuring a design that reduces assembly footprint by 75 percent and enables deployment from 80 percent of U. S. ports. And a delegation of 19 Dutch wind industry executives met with the Connecticut officials at The State Pier in New London, Connecticut, to explore collaboration opportunities in offshore wind development. The Dutch group, representing expertise from cabling to marine biodiversity, aims to share decades of experience from their domestic market, where wind power supplies up to 50 percent of the country’s electricity. The meeting coincided with construction at the State Pier, which is serving as the staging area for the Revolution Wind Project. Both sides emphasize the potential for joint research, shared knowledge, and manufacturing partnerships to reduce costs in the offshore wind energy sector. And French energy company Total Energies has announced plans to study A major renewable energy project in Morocco, the Shibika project, could combine one gigawatt of wind and solar capacity to produce green ammonia for export to Europe, potentially creating a significant hydrogen production hub. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting. Rosemary Barnes, the CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PESWind. com today. So if we’ve been following along in Australia, Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy has about a 14 gigawatts of a development pipeline and they have announced plans for the Bookham Wind Farm project in New South Wales. That project will be, it looks like 99 turbines, With a capacity of almost 600 megawatts, so six megawatt turbines there. The project includes battery storage, and it is one of the several products that are happening in Australia at the minute. Now, I did a little bit of research on this project, and one thing, there’s a lot of details about it, but the one thing I could not find is what turbine they were going to install at the site. I, my first thought, Phil, was it was going to be some Vestas turbines, but it’s pretty quiet. Usually, Vestas will announce that they’ve had a sale in Australia, but they won’t tell you where. You just connect the dots on the amount of power or the number of turbines, and then you can connect it up. But in this case, you can’t. What are the options here, Phil? And what is likely to happen? Philip Totaro: They have options like Vestas. They also have options like Goldwind that offers a 6x platform. They could buy GE. Squadron historically has opted for, Western OEMs, but they’ve been considering, their options lately on, on Chinese OEMs. The reality of this is, if they, this is, so let’s take a step back. Squadron’s got, I want to say more than a hundred gigawatts worth of projects proposed now in Australia that usually involve hydrogen or, there’s some kind of hybrid mega project like this where, they’ve got batteries and solar and, an enormous amount of wind, obviously, that’s going to be built out in phases. But the reality of this is promising for the market, but they, I’ll turn it over to Rosemary, who’s gonna, re educate us yet again on, like, why Australia probably doesn’t need this much. Wind, solar, and certainly hydrogen generation from, about eight or nine different megaprojects that have now been proposed across the whole country at this point. Again, fingers crossed that this gets downstream enough that they can announce orders for turbine vendors and things like that, but I cannot imagine that 100 percent of these, hydrogen producing projects or renewable energy hub projects actually get built. Rosemary Barnes: But is this a hydrogen one? I thought it was just a vanilla wind farm. Philip Totaro: It’s a wind, I think, hybrid, wind, solar and storage hybrid, yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that makes we need, we haven’t had that much utility scale renewables come on in the last few years. I feel like it really feels like announcements have slowed down, especially of things starting. I know there’s a couple of big wind farms that are just starting to be commissioned now, but we’ve got to get all the way to a hundred percent renewables. We’re only, I think, still in the thirties for Australia as a whole at the moment. We need stuff like this, don’t we? It’s not just utility solar, which I agree that it’s hard to see how we need more solar on its own, because we got so much negatively priced electricity the whole time that solar is generating and there’s a lot of curtailment for utility scale solar at the moment, but this one has wind as well, which is still going okay in terms of its value, cause it generates it a lot more times than just the middle of the day. And crucially storage. Everything’s got storage associated with it now. I think you can just get way more value out of your project if you have some storage on it. Yeah, no, I think we need this and I’m stoked because it’s very close to my home. I could probably drive out there in an hour. So yeah, we’ll be very excited if this happens and yeah, better get in touch and see, I’ve noticed on their website that they’re planning to do use the wind farm for education opportunities. So maybe we can partner up on something like that. It would be really nice to have such a huge wind farm. So close to home. Marc Thiessen. Allen Hall: I was looking at some data from Mental Store that Phil was sharing about the Australian wind farms and the profitability of a number of the farms, and the ones that are losing money big time. It’s almost three trillion dollars over the lifetimes of the project that they’re going to lose. And obviously, they’ll be offset by the wind farms that are producing and are, and profitable, but three trillion dollars in losses. Is a lot of money. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I gotta say I was shocked to see those figures as well. Philip Totaro: Let’s put that in a bit of context as well. The, this is a projection of, based on historical average pricing that comes from the publicly available data through, Australia’s NAM. Which is a, it’s a data platform for getting access to pricing data and production data and other miscellaneous information about project sites which is obviously helpful to have. But the, what we’re doing is we’re calculating based on, the price being paid for power and the amount of generation they have. Versus how much CapEx went into the project. We’re trying to calculate how long is it going to take a project to pay back the capital in addition to the operating expenses they’ve got on an annual basis, the land lease payments, and anything else that they have that they pay for annually. Out of the projects that are operating in Australia 62 percent of them are going to, are projecting at this point, based on data through, the last few weeks or months here 62 percent of projects in Australia are going to turn a net positive return on capital. During the planned lifetime of the project. Okay, so that means that if you designed a project for a 20 year life, you spent, whatever, 500 million Australian on building the thing, it’s gonna pay back that 500 million Australian, plus an extra, whatever, 100 million, 120 million whatever the number is. Now, 62%, however, is not that great. When you compare to a market like the United States, we have 86 percent of our projects, including projects that are a lot longer lived and a lot longer lifespan, plus a lot older technology. That we’ve leveraged. Keep in mind that most of the, Rosemary, when was the first wind farm in Australia? I think the first utility scale one was like late 1990s. Rosemary Barnes: Maybe even early 2000s, actually, like 2001. Philip Totaro: The reality of that market is that they have, most of their projects are 20 years old or less already, and a significant portion of them are a lot less, than 20 years old, so the fact that, in a market as, that frankly is a little more complicated in terms of, power pricing and distribution like we have in the United States with all our regional ISOs and things like that we’re actually doing a little bit better. On the asset profitability than a market like Australia is. And look, the bottom line is that plays there’s obviously market dynamics and we can talk about negative pricing in Victoria and South Australia and curtailments and stuff like that. The bottom line is there’s an element of this which asset owners are in control of and that is your Availability and your maintenance practices, which plays into how much you’re spending on an annual basis to keep these things up and running. And there’s work to be done there. Allen Hall: If a third of the projects in Australia are losing money, there is something seriously wrong when you compare them to the rest of the world. Is it related to the type of turbines that are being installed? Is it has to do with the amount of solar that has gone in on Australia? What are the driving, what are the top factors there? Philip Totaro: A lot of it has to do with the fact that Victoria has the the highest level of wind market penetration in terms of megawatts installed and Victoria is also the market. Or the state within Australia, the overall Australian market where you have the highest amount of curtailments and negative pricing events just because of, the market dynamics, the amount of rooftop solar that they’ve got just a lot of commercial things that go into the power offtake. Again I’ll turn it over to Rosemary at this point if you want to chime in with, what leads to a lot of the cheap prices that you see in Victoria and partly in South Australia, but that’s a lot of it. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think, yeah, basically so much rooftop solar is part of the problem because it’s not really planned or controllable very easily. And so that has led to issues for utility scale solar and you see a lot of curtailment there. And yeah, wind, it doesn’t only generate during the middle of the day, but it often does generate during the middle of the day. So it gets caught up in that as well with the curtailment. And then there’s also issues with coal as well. One thing that I learned recently, I was working on site up in Queensland and I was arriving on site a little before seven in the morning. And, um, wind farm was cranking and then it just, everything turned off basically at seven in the morning rooftop solar has barely had a chance to, start trickling onto the grid at that point. You can’t fully blame rooftop solar. It’s also a lot to do with the amount of coal that’s in the system that can only turn down a certain amount. And so when you get these really mild weather periods, like in spring, when this trip was there’s just not much demand. And even all the coal generators turned down as low as they can get is more than enough than then the grid needs when you add in wind as well. Wind farms are curtailed because. Coal will bid into the market at a negative a thousand dollars at the minimum because it costs them more than that to switch off. So Victoria also still has quite a lot of coal in the grid. So I think that people underestimate that, it’s very easy to just blame renewables for this. But it’s not, it’s a matter of the whole energy mix, not matching what what demand is rather than being able to pinpoint it on one technology in particular. But there has been some recent developments. One of the coal generators did manage to turn itself off completely in the middle of the day for a few hours and then back on again. Which has not normally been done. Usually you turn it down to the minimum load, the base load and then, ramp up and down from there slowly. But in this case, they actually managed to turn it fully off. So they are thinking of ways, cause they don’t want to pay negative 1, 000 through the middle of the day to keep on generating, paying like quite a lot for the privilege of staying on. So coal plants are pretty incentivized to try and, you adapt to the reality of the way that the grid is today. Joel Saxum: I think that’s why we’re calling it an energy transition, right? It’s, we know that these things, the market dynamics are changing and the power mix is changing. And as we put more renewables on the grid, we have to understand how everything plays together better. And in the future, as we get more renewables, you’ll see that coal plants will just get decommissioned because they won’t be able to sit and run. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. And that, that is happening, but I think it will prolong their lifetime if they are able to operate more flexibly. It’s harder. It’s definitely a lot harder. And I was actually talking with somebody, Recently, who used to work in a coal power plant saying that, they did a lot of work on how much you can turn down coal, but then they didn’t necessarily use it in reality because it’s a lot more work. It ends up with a lot more maintenance, it was never designed to operate that way. And they’re not like maybe fully confident that the test that they did actually, will ensure safe operation. Thanks Cause it’s, obviously a big deal when you have an unexpected outage from a coal power plant. It’s not when one wind turbine goes offline, that’s, a few megawatts, no big deal. But if a whole coal power plant trips then if that’s down, needs maintenance for a few weeks, that’s when you see energy crisis when you have a few things like that stucking up. It’s simple to say, oh yeah, they’ve solved this now. There’s been one successful trial, but the fact that. They’ve done it once is not nearly enough to say, yeah, moving forward. Coal is now a flexible source of generation. It’s definitely, you couldn’t consider it flexible, but yeah, we do see things changing. Do you think that people have been surprised? Is it poor planning for the one third that are not profitable? Is it things that. Like a more sophisticated developer with more experience might have known to expect in advance. Cause I know that, with the work that I do, a lot of times I come in when people have, much higher maintenance costs than they expected. And when you look at the site and the, the weather a few other, things that might cause more lightning, more leading edge erosion, like often you can say, you know what, if you’ve properly Did you? Pre site selection, if you did that well, you should have known that you would have these increased maintenance costs in these areas. Philip Totaro: That’s a great question though, and I’ll actually, I’ll pick up on that. Back in the good old days of 15 years ago We didn’t have the same type of philosophy for wind turbine design that we have today. Wind turbines were designed in, to fit into a specific IEC wind class, and they were either, 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, and maybe a class S kind of turbine, if you were lucky if an OEM decided to, offer that type of a product for your market. Australia has a lot of and look, the United States was the same way and it’s why we’re seeing a ton of repowering right now, or one reason, obviously we’re much more PTC driven, but there, there are a ton of project sites that had. The best available turbine sighted at the site, if that makes sense. So yeah, an IEC Class 2A turbine was the ideal turbine for this site, but it probably wasn’t, based on just the fact that was the turbine, the best available turbine. Not necessarily because that was the best possible turbine. Allen Hall: Yeah, but Phil, why would that matter? Philip Totaro: It matters only because you’re, it’s the amount of time you spend at full rated. And that, when you’re not at full rated, when you’re on that lower portion or the, ascending portion of the power curve, you’re not quite, Operating at peak efficiency either, when you’re a full rated power, you have more propensity to operate a full peak efficiency, like electrical conversion efficiency too, not just like aero efficiency. Allen Hall: Sure. Rosemary Barnes: Wouldn’t this fit into the category of things that people could have known ahead of time? What’s the issue here? Is it that the wind the. Wind distribution is different in Australia than it is in the sites where these turbines were originally developed for or what? Cause surely people, I know we’re still putting up MetMasks and getting, wind data here. So I’m sure that they’re calculating how much they expect to generate with the power curve for the turbine they’re thinking of buying. Why are they surprised? Philip Totaro: Yeah, but again, it’s not that they just got like the best available turbine they could get, not necessarily. They have to buy what’s available. If the OEM doesn’t have a turbine that is site specific designed for that particular Australian wind site, that maybe it operates at a turbulence intensity of, whatever at, 8. 9 meters per second average. But then there’s also seasonality factors that play into that. And my point is that. They just, they cited whatever the best available turbine they could get their hands on was and that’s what they’re, that, so they’re not necessarily getting the most out of the available wind resource, okay? That’s part of it. The other part is that based on what we talked about before with some of these commercial market dynamics, you have a scenario in Australia where it, if the PPAs are lower, Depending on how the OEM full service agreement is written, they may get a portion of, the upside benefit of the availability of the project site, but it’s also, they have to measure that against how much repair work they actually have to do in the, Capital cost of those repairs as well as the time and labor for the site techs. Whether they’re doing the work themselves or they’re farming it out to an independent service provider who’s local they have to balance that and that’s also part of what’s contributed to a lot of the OEMs not necessarily fulfilling the full scope of their contractual obligation because they, based on the PPA prices that you’re getting for project sites in Victoria, for example. You might not be able to do all of the repairs because the annual revenue for the project isn’t what you thought it was going to be. It’s lower than average. And that just eliminates a lot of the budget that you would otherwise spend on doing a bunch of the site repairs that you want to be able to tackle. Allen Hall: It feels like there has been a shift in the market dynamics because of all the solar that has been added. So if you were installing wind turbines 15 years ago and you had done all your projections. They, the accountants, know what they, in theory, were going to make 15 years ago, today. But there’s been such a huge shift in the energy grid towards solar in Australia. Doesn’t that really impact your financials as you’re halfway through the project and all of a sudden this decent return turns into a negative really quickly? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah PPAs are for, right? Allen Hall: Yeah, but the PPAs aren’t doing it, right? So either they’re getting curtailed or something’s happened, right? Because they or interest rates have changed so much that they’re no longer profitable because everything else is in cost so much that the PPAs don’t cover it. One or the other. Philip Totaro: I think that’s part of it. But the other aspect of this is Unlike a market like the United States, where after 10 years, we’ve got the production tax credit incentivizing companies that own and operate renewable energy assets to repower, they have lower average capacity factor in Australia than we do in the United States, just based on, wind resource and wind characteristics. However, They also, that basically implies that they’re also not running the turbines as hard. So you’re not seeing the amount of mechanical wear and degradation, particularly in the mechanical components. Maybe you’re still getting the amount of lightning strikes that you would in the U. S. Maybe you’re still getting the amount of leading edge erosion or whatever else. Again I’ll let Rosemary speak to some of that. But the, the reality is you’re just not running those turbines as hard, which opens the door to the refurbishment market and potentially the repowering market. Allen Hall: But Phil, I go back to the basic fundamentals of this. They estimated what they’re going to make when they started the project. Somewhere it went wrong. And for more than a third of the projects are on that red case of negative returns. Something dramatically has shifted in Australia. I’m not sure what that is. I doubt it’s wind. I, in terms of the quality of the wind and the power factor, sure, and the capacity factor, sure, and some of the other ones, but that shouldn’t drive it. So it’s gotta be something larger economically. Rosemary Barnes: Maybe we can request some more data crunching from Phil. We know he’s got the data. Can we pull apart, like what percentage of their generation is covered by PPAs for the profitable versus non profitable companies? Is it something to do with, the year that they were commissioned? Is it, a time based thing? State by state? Yeah, I think that you’ve mentioned before that. Queensland projects are more profitable than Victorian projects. A few things like that would be really interesting to, to dig deeper into it, to find out, what these are, because yeah, like Allen says, obviously no one does the sums, decides to invest in, no one does the sums and then decides to invest a project that they expect to lose the money. It’s gotta be something that came up that they weren’t expecting either because they didn’t have the information or because the circumstances changed. That’s basically the only two options, isn’t it? Joel Saxum: I’d like to see what the difference in contracts is with the OEMs and the FSAs versus other parts in the world. It’s not three trillion though, Joel. No, it’s definitely not three trillion. I don’t think it’s three trillion but you go to different places in the world and the uptime guarantees are different percentages, the LDE. Arrangements are different. So maybe there’s a thing in Australia where the LDs and the uptime guarantees aren’t quite as stringent as they are in other places in the world. And I’m not saying that’s going to make up 38 percent of the market there, but it might make up. Two to five percent of profitability. I don’t know. Rosemary Barnes: I’ve just got an email actually from a potential speaker at the conference and he’s, he said that one thing he could talk about was some of the bruises that he’s experienced as from development through to seeing those same assets in operation. And some of the surprises, and one of the things that he mentions is we should be focusing on dollars and gigawatt hours and not gigawatts in time, which is what the contracts are mostly based around in Australia. It’s an availability guarantee that’s time based and that’s something, one of the rants that I frequently have with my clients that, you set an availability guarantee in terms of time and where’s the incentive to make sure that, you’re doing the right, you’re doing your maintenance at a time when it’s going to cost you less, like the wind farms that I worked in. In Europe and especially in Canada, actually they were so fixated on how much, like the opportunity cost of doing maintenance now versus later, they had a big board up with the, the price of electricity just like firmly up. It just, that was the main thing that you saw when you got to work in the morning, you saw what the wind speeds were, what the farm was generating and, you That was down, you would see the cost of that. And they would look at the forecast a few days out in advance and decide what to do. What maintenance needed to be done now? What could be, what could wait for a time when prices were expected to be lower? I just don’t see any incentive to be that smart in Australia at the moment. Because you’ve got these full service agreements with time based availability guarantees. And then the other thing that you see, which is even worse and, like borderline deceptive is the service providers are like we’re going to meet our availability guarantee for this year, so we don’t need to, we don’t need to worry about anything. We can leave. Maintenance on this site and focus on another site where, you know, like where borderline going to meet it or not and have to pay a penalty or even worse. I’ve seen cases where they’re like, we know we’re not going to meet our availability guarantee this year. Forget about this site. Like it’s lost cause. We’re already going to have to pay that penalty. Focus on somewhere else. And that poor wind farm owner of the, the site that’s already got big enough problems that they can’t meet their availability guarantee. They’re just getting just hammered because they’ve got a bad contract. I just think that is so on point and not something that people think about when they’re, when they’re signing on the dotted line for the terms of their service agreement. I’m not sure people realize that they differ in the, types of agreements that you could get, and it makes a huge difference to your ongoing profitability. Joel Saxum: I think that’s why, that’s one of the reasons why that, when we started putting the event agenda together for that, for our Wind Australia conferences. That was one of the panels that popped up is as an asset owner, how do you deal with the OEMs on this stuff? And if you’re bound by a contract now, maybe the next one you sign can be a bit better. Allen Hall: And you should look into attending the Wind Energy O& M event in Melbourne, Australia on February 11th and 12th, because we’re going to be talking about this subject, the profitability of Australian wind farms and what you can do about it. But also hearing from a number of industry experts, you get to network with everybody in Melbourne and learn about some of the innovations that are going on all around the world. It’s going to be a good conference. So you don’t want to miss this opportunity to optimize your wind farm. And drive down some of the costs. You need to go visit www. windaustralia. com or you can just send something in the post to Rosemary and she’ll register you. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s 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: Down in New Zealand, offshore wind developer Blue Float Energy has withdrawn from New Zealand following concerns about conflicting seabed use with the proposed mining project included in the government’s fast track approvals bill. The trans Tasman resources plans to mine some vanadium rich areas on the bottom of the ocean. And the Blue Float Energy was really concerned about that and said, hey, we can’t do offshore wind and mine the seafloor at the same time. Now that has a big impact on jobs because that Blue Float Energy project was supposed to have created up to like 12, 000 jobs total. That’s pretty cool. It’s a big deal. I’m wondering, what are some of the key things here, guys? What is driving this decision and are we gonna start seeing this happen off some of the coastlines of the United States where they do drilling for oil and all kinds of other things? Joel Saxum: I think simultaneously, simultaneous operations are a part of any land use program, right? You don’t see You know, when you go to Midland, Texas, where there’s the most oil wells, you can stand on one of them with a handful of baseballs and hit 20 other ones. There’s also, that’s true. There’s also fiber optic in the ground and cable in the ground and water wells being drilled and salt brine disposals being made. And so you can use land for multiple things. You can put offshore wind in and you can still fish. You can do a lot of things. You can put oil and gas and pipelines all over the Gulf coast of the U. S. And you can still put offshore wind in there. The, so I’ve been following offshore or deep water subsea mining for quite a few years now because it’s very interesting to me in my past life, we created tools for that, the testing and exploration of that environment. Most of, most offshore deep sea mining is happening now in extreme depths. I’m talking, you’re talking three and four to 5, 000 meters of water. That’s where most of it’s happening because that’s where most of the resources are. For whatever reason that’s where they reside. There, a lot of them are like there’s cobalt, manganite and all kinds of good stuff molybdenum all in like little potato sized chunks, just all across the floor. So where you’re putting or where these wind farms are going to, are slated to go is in shallow or much shallower water than you see most subsea mining. So it’s not, that’s not going to be a normal thing where we are or where most floating offshore wind is going to go. Another thing to think about is the actual operation that it entails. So the actual operation that subsea mining entails is imagine you put a ship out in the water and you basically hook a big vacuum hose to it. And on the bottom of the seafloor, you put a vehicle that some of them are the size of a truck, some of them are the size of a house and they have tracks on them and they just vacuum up the sub, the seafloor and then deposit the sediment right back onto the seafloor. Lot most of the studying has been going on around how long will those sediment plumes last and how long will they settle out? So once you’ve gone through that area once you don’t need to go back because you’ve vacuumed up everything And the sediment resettles you do geotechnical and you can put anchors in that stuff Just like you could put it in anything else so I can see a pause here or something But to me this looks like political posturing rather than a technical problem. Philip Totaro: Yeah. And I will potentially concur with that based on a couple of things. One is the lack of maturity of the market and the level of communication that the government has had during this whole fast track process that they’ve supposedly put in place to get a number of renewable energy projects, including the one proposed by Blue Float to. It’s a come to fruition there. There’s a lot of challenges in a market as limited is as New Zealand would be. You’re only going to build maybe three or four major offshore wind farms there, and you could power both North and South islands and probably still have a surplus. The reality of it is, yeah, That, markets like New Zealand also, similarly, we just saw this week or last week as we’re recording that Columbia just announced that they have nine different companies participating in a potential auction for their offshore lease rights. The challenge with that, markets like, whether it’s Columbia, whether it’s New Zealand. Getting a little bit ahead of themselves because they don’t even have what they need in place for the infrastructure. Again, going back to Columbia, I went down there in 2018 to see what that onshore and offshore wind market potential was going to look like. Great wind resource. Same thing in New Zealand. Great wind resource. Don’t have the port infrastructure to be able to handle offshore wind. The port in Cartagena needs to be dredged. They don’t have the electrical off take infrastructure built yet. Again, similarly in New Zealand, they’d have to lay a whole new bunch of power lines. And get a lot of infrastructure built. before you’re really ready to do, offshore, meaningful offshore project development. So the fact that, these companies are getting excited about these far flung frontier markets it’s great and everything, but I don’t think that this, I think Blue Float is saying, you know what, this is probably just too immature of a market. At this point, they’re using this concern as more of an excuse to say, all right, we’re just gonna, pull back from New Zealand for the time being while we see the market evolve and come to fruition and at which point we’ll be back. And in the meantime, we’re gonna go investigate, other opportunities, including, by the way, Blue Float was one of the companies that ended up tendering in, to, or at least qualifying to tender for the market auction in Columbia. Allen Hall: Is floating wind really suffering right now with, especially with the offshore auction off the coast of Maine and Massachusetts, only garnering about 20 million in, in, in Having two companies submit, essentially was the minimum bid of roughly 50 per, what, acre? Something like that. Those prices are really low Phil, so even in New Zealand where it can probably make an argument for having Wind turbines there offshore. Even in Maine we’re having trouble getting floating going. And plus the DOE cancelled the, or didn’t fund, the port infrastructure where you could do floating wind off at Sears Island. Philip Totaro: They gave the money to Virginia instead. So that’s, there’s, a story behind that, which we’ll maybe get into later, but. Allen Hall: But that’s fixed bottom. That’s not floating, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah. But you’ve got a market in us, in New Zealand where you could actually justify the cost of an offshore wind PPA compared to what they pay for some of their onshore power generation facilities, because again, they’ve obviously got to import coal, or they don’t have a lot of gas down there, they have, I guess they have a little bit but not tons so they necessarily have to, rely on renewable resources and they haven’t built out a significant amount of solar in New Zealand yet, they have a few renewable offshore wind farms, it’s less than a gigawatt at this point, although they are building two new ones at this at this juncture, so You know, the reality is that, there is a potential for offshore wind in a market like New Zealand, but it’s going to be finite, as I mentioned. They’re, you’re not going to see, like 190 gigawatts, like is being proposed in Brazil right now, for example, or I think it’s something like 85 gigawatts or something proposed in South Korea at this point where, they have. The potential to exploit their infrastructure and they have load centers that are gonna be able to take that create that demand and take that power. I don’t know where, besides, Wellington and Auckland and some of the other major cities. I’m not really sure where they would even put, power from a multi gigawatt project, floating offshore wind project, which is the kind of scale you have to build at if you’re going to do floating wind commercially viable. So that’s your challenge. Joel Saxum: Rosemary, correct me if I’m wrong, but is Wellington the most windy city in the world? Rosemary Barnes: Windiest capital city in the world. Joel Saxum: The windiest capital city in the world. So the resource is there for sure. It’s a big caveat though. Philip Totaro: Capital city. Allen Hall: Come on. Philip Totaro: Compared to what? That this is the same scenario, by the way, that happens in the Gulf of Mexico where you’ve got onshore wind and solar in earcot that’s dirt cheap. Why am I building offshore wind particularly expensively? I’m not really, it just doesn’t make sense to be able to do that, why not leverage the natural resource that they’ve got to be able to build cheap onshore wind and solar and exploit that natural resource when, if they’re gonna, again, I, Joel’s right you don’t necessarily have overlapping use of that same area where they’d be putting the moorings for floating that would necessarily, because you’re not going to put, you’re not going to put something that’s floating in, 3, 000 or 4, 000 meter depth, because at the end of the day you still have to tether it, so you don’t want moorings that long. You might be willing to put moorings in a thousand meter depth preferably shallower, but, even that’s pushing it. Which is what, by the way, we’re doing, we’re going to be doing in California, is most of the project sites out here are going to be about a thousand meter water depth, so You know it just limits the amount of commercial viability for some of these sites. Allen Hall: Here’s what I think. I think the OEMs are not offering a lot of offshore wind. I think it really comes down to that. I think if, unless the Chinese are going to step into offshore, and they probably, they may, they clearly can. The Western OEMs are not going to be super interested in doing offshore wind, based on what’s happening with GE at the moment, and Siemens at the moment, and a little bit of Estes. Getting projects off the ground depends upon them. And if you can’t get an OEM to play along, and you don’t have a floating platform design that’s universal across the world, so you’re going to end up spending a bunch of money designing these things. It makes the project way too expensive. And so I can see everybody backing out at the minute, which explains what’s happening worldwide simultaneously. And it’s not just one project. It, there are most of them, the majority at this point. Are we considering or delaying or stopping? That tells you something about the market conditions. That maybe floating wind is not ready for prime time. Philip Totaro: Not in every market. What market is it? Europe and potentially North America, but Allen Hall: France has a lot of land, guys. You could plant some wind turbines on Joel Saxum: France with that much problem. The French aren’t happy with wind. I think at some level why people want to move offshore for things is just because of pushback onshore. I agree. And are you willing to pay for that? No, the French don’t like even okay, so take New Zealand. I spent, I’m not an expert. Rosemary, of course, knows a lot more about the people down there, but I spent about a month down there last spring or two springs ago. And what I found is traveling around talking with a lot of people is that it’s like the Midwest. A lot of the people I talk to, they’re not were very much it was like having the technical versus political conversations about wind, about guns, about all kinds of things that was mirrored what the same conversations you would have in Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, whatever. I was having the exact same ones over there with people that sounded, besides the accent, like they could have been my neighbors where I grew up. So I think that they’re, they had I was at one point in time, I was in the Marlborough region in the wine country there. And the, even some of the winemakers were pissed off about just south of them as a few wind farms in the hills. And they’re like, those dang wind, they didn’t like it. They didn’t want anything to do with it. And I know New Zealanders, they’re, and they, Yeah, and they’re very much about their natural re throw, the natural beauty of the place, which if you’ve ever been there, it is wild. It’s amazing. Everywhere you turn, it’s beautiful. So they, and they have this thing about we don’t want that messing up our landscape, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, these, this, that, and the other thing. So I think in some places, people just go want to go offshore because it’s their only choice geographically and politically, right? Like on the East coast, we have the same problem. Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know what their specific feelings about wind energy is, close to them. I know that historically New Zealanders have been a little bit funny about any kind of energy generation. They pretty much will be anti, if you just tell them, are pro coal power? No. Pro nuclear? Hell no. Are you pro hydro? Ah, not anymore. No. Like every single one, it’s a no, but yet they do having access to electricity. And yeah, like I’m sure there are plenty of people who are anti wind energy, but you have to make some compromises. If you want to have access to electricity, you have to generate it somehow. You can’t just rule out every single energy generation technology one after the other. Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a 5 star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, now on Substack. And check out Rosie’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

This week on Uptime News Flash, Avangrid sells the Kitty Hawk North lease area to Dominion Energy. In Saudia Arabia, the government signed two major localization agreements for wind energy steel towers. And Enerjisa Üretim has secured a major 1 billion 10 year term loan for the development of the YEKA 2 wind power plant. Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by Intelstor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Well, Phil, Saudi Arabia has taken a significant step forward in its wind energy sector with the signing of two major localization agreements for wind energy steel towers. The agreements were signed by the Kingdom’s Local Content and Government Procurement Authority with Al Yamama Steel Industries and Arabian International Company for Steel Structures. These deals are part of a large initiative that saw 107 agreements and memorandums of understanding signed during the Energy Localization Forum in Riyadh, valued at approximately 27 billion. I didn’t realize there was that much money in steel towers, Phil, but wow. These agreements are impressive. Philip Totaro: Yeah, that that’s for all agreements that they sign, not just the steel tower ones to, to clarify for everybody. But the, the interesting tidbit with this is the fact that, they obviously have a couple of, wind farms now in Saudi Arabia, one that’s operational, one under construction, as well as a demo turbine from GE from, from a few years back. And they’re, they’re at a point where they’re really looking at the future of renewable energy for themselves in, in their domestic market so that they can, have more control over, how much oil they export and, and where they export it to moving forward. So this gives them another knob to turn if they can use this renewable power for the power generation. Industry instead of leveraging their own oil abundant though it may be, they all recognize that there’s a finite amount. So this is part of their efforts at domestication of part of the industry that they see as, as being an important element for them moving forward. So much so that their public investment fund has, has, Also made moves in the past to, put money behind renewable ventures in in Europe and Asia and even looking at the United States as well. So, this is them taking a step forward in terms of their renewable energy market. Joel Saxum: Yeah, Saudi Arabia keeps on basically reinventing itself and, and morphing into something that it wasn’t in the past, which is very interesting. I, for one, I follow the, the Neom project very closely because it’s really interesting to me. So they’re spending a lot of money. I mean, they even went as far as to lure a lot of the PGA players away for their own golf league. And now they’re setting up with Dana White from the UFC, they’re setting up their own boxing league. So they’re doing a lot of things. They’re taking advantage of, of course, the money they have now to try and build what their economy is for the future. And, they have been a classically oil and gas economy. And, and that’s where a lot of their sovereign wealth comes from. So they have the capabilities to make large structures and invest in, in, in industry. So going to steel towers for wind makes absolute sense for them. Allen Hall: Avangrid has successfully closed the sale of its Kitty Hawk North offshore wind lease area to Dominion Energy. The transaction was completed for 160 million dollars, comprising a lease acquisition payment of 117 million plus development cost reimbursement. While selling the northern section, Avangrade retains ownership of Kitty Hawk South, which has the potential to deliver 2. 4 gigawatts of power to North Carolina, Virginia, and other states and private companies. Well, Phil, Dominion Energy is now a big player in offshore wind with the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, and now Kitty Hawk North. Philip Totaro: Yes, and this is really interesting for Avangard’s sake as well, because it gives them an extra 160 million of which they just recently committed a few million up in Maine. So it gives them some cash to, to redeploy in other lease areas and, and other development sites that they’ve got on the queue for the United States. They were intending to bid in the Oregon lease auction that also got postponed. So it’s interesting to note that, they, they obviously still went forward with this lease area asset sale to Dominion that has clearly, got their act together when it comes to getting the capital together and necessary for, for building major projects and, and moving forward with with building major projects. So, Dominion’s off and running, and this gives VonGrid a little bit extra cash so that they can hopefully pursue additional project developments here and, and take the, the U. S. offshore wind sector into, the, the next phase that we’ve all anticipated for a number of years. Joel Saxum: Yeah, one thing to talk about Dominion here as we follow the offshore wind play in the United States is they’re, they’re quietly getting it done. Down in Virginia. That coastal Virginia offshore wind is one of the largest projects that’s continuously been being built. Hasn’t had any interruptions. They’ve got a lot of steel in the water down there. They’re, they’re up and running. So Dominion starting to, has having that success. They’re looking to another play just north of them. So they’re keep keeping your assets close. And also doing a build on the success that they’ve had in construction right now. So good for them. Allen Hall: Enerjisa Üretim has secured a major 1 billion 10 year term loan for the development of the Yeka II wind power plant. The loan will finance nine wind power projects across three of Turkey’s provinces, with completion targeted for the first quarter of 2026. The loan structure includes an 18 month grace period with six month interval payments extending through 2034. Boy, that’s Getting financing for wind projects in Turkey just got a lot easier, Phil. Philip Totaro: Well, and so there’s a couple of things that are important and noteworthy with this this deal. First is that, for those that don’t know, Enerjisa is a joint venture between Sibanki Holding, which is a Turkish company, and E. ON, the, the German utility company. And they’ve been doing a lot of project development in Turkey for a number of years. I forget precisely how many megawatts they own at this point, but it’s it’s over a hundred megawatts. Let’s put it that way. And this, this new finance part of which is actually coming from the U. S. International Development Finance Corporation, which is kind of the upgrade and replacement to our overseas. Private Investment Corporation, OPIC. So the, the DFC again, the, the International Development Finance Corporation, they have, the opportunity to make investments with different. Companies are in different, projects, including renewable energy of which their, their predecessor company OPEC and the DFC have, have done over the years. And this actually is, in my mind, a bit of a good sign. Although they could have been investing in, maybe a U. S. based company that wanted to go overseas, but different, different topic. But we talk all the time on the show about how the Chinese government is subsidizing Chinese companies in their foreign investments and through their Belt and Road Initiative and other subsidies they receive. This is the U. S. government getting out their wallet and supporting at least a company that, to Energisa’s credit, they, they do source turbines from Germany’s Enercon and Nordex Essiona. So, the, we’re, we’re at least not contributing to China’s growth in the Turkish market with, with this investment, but. Besides the, the DFC you’ve got J. P. Morgan HSBC, KFW, IPEX from Germany, the German Investment Corporation Act Bank which is Tur Turkish bank and pro Parco who have also invested in this. So, this, billion dollar fund for, for 750 megawatts is, is a great thing that they’re gonna be able to, to deploy that capital for. Building additional wind energy capacity in, in Turkey.

In this episode, Allen and Joel speak with Tom Brady, CTO of SkySpecs, to discuss the challenges and solutions in managing multiple data sources in wind farm operations. Brady explores how SkySpecs is revolutionizing wind turbine maintenance through integrated data analytics, advanced drone technology, and AI-driven decision-making tools, while sharing a glimpse into exciting R&D developments that promise to transform the industry’s approach to predictive maintenance. 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.comWind 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, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. We’re going to discuss a challenge that’s becoming increasingly critical in our data driven world, managing and integrating data from multiple sources in wind farm operations. In the age of smart turbines and lot sensors, wind farm operators are awash in data. But here’s the catch. According to a recent industry survey, a staggering 54 percent of operators find managing multiple data sources to be difficult or very difficult. It’s like trying to conduct an orchestra where every instrument is playing from a different sheet of music. In today’s episode, we’ll be diving into this data dilemma. We’ll explore why integrating data from various sources is so challenging, how it impacts decision making and operational efficiency, And, most importantly, what innovative solutions are emerging to tackle this issue. But that’s not all. We are also pulling back the curtain on some exciting R& D projects at SkySpecs that promise to revolutionize how we handle data in the wind energy sectors. From advanced analytics to machine learning, we’ll get a glimpse of the future of wind farm data management. Our guest is Tom Brady, the CTO at SkySpecs. And Tom leads the technology vision and development at SkySpecs, overseeing the creation of innovative solutions for the wind energy industry. His expertise in managing complex data systems and R& D initiatives is crucial to addressing the challenges of multi source data management in wind farms. Tom, welcome to the program. Tom Brady: Glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Allen Hall: So we have a lot to discuss actually. So we just got the grand tour of the Sky Specs R& D facility. Both facilities. This is true. We were in the offices also this morning and, we meet with operators all the time. And one of the things they’ll tell us is, or especially if he asked them for data, they go, yeah, we have it, but I don’t know how to access it. Or I’m not sure what system it’s in. Let me go figure it out. Let me call somebody see if they can figure out where the data is. Or I have too many logins. Oh, absolutely. That’s a common one. Yeah. So what is happening right now? Is it just because we’re just getting so much information? We just lost track of it. We don’t have any place to put it. We’re using Google Drive still. Some of the operators are using Google Drive, which is insane to me. Is that where we are in the wind industry? Tom Brady: I would say all of the above. Winding back a little bit to when we got started in the industry back in 2016, we launched our autonomous drone inspection or blade inspection product. And prior to us being on the scenes we did our typical market discovery, customer discovery, learning a little bit about the market that we were about to try to enter and something that we saw was common across the board was exactly as you say, I’ve got folder folders in Google drive folders in box. And, maybe I’ve got I’ve got something like maybe I’m organizing by site, turbine, inspection date, blade, and then, radial distance. That might be how I’m organizing my inspection data. We, a couple of times, tried to ask our customers, Okay, can you show me the data from last year versus this year? Has anything gotten any worse? And, I’m like, It wasn’t even a question that anyone was thinking about, at least at the time. There’s also this backdrop of increasing blade issues and blades becoming an even more important operations and maintenance concern. But I would say it wasn’t even a thing back then to try to answer those kinds of questions. So I think that is one part of it. There weren’t, without now we’re seeing more of these modern data systems that can actually relate. And answer those questions in different ways that customers want to ask them. So that’s a big part of it. And I think the other big part of it, which we probably don’t talk enough about is that it’s really hard to compare apples to apples when I’m talking about, maybe it’s a drive train related issue or a blade related issue or performance related issue. So all of these systems exist in these different silos. And you talked about the, I have too many logins. Like I’m thinking about who is that asset manager? Who is that person that cares about, All of the issues, not just the blades, not just the drivetrains, not just the performance, but all of it holistically and I personally can’t imagine what that must be like for them because there is no, there’s not a there’s not a common way of speaking about maintenance issues or asset health risks that is common among all of those different data sources or main components. So I think that, that’s a big one for me and that’s one that. Drives a lot of our strategy, especially as it relates to our acquisition strategy. You may have seen in the last three years, we’ve acquired, a CMS company. We’ve acquired a finance class management company and a performance company. And that’s what we have our eye on is how can we actually tell a cohesive story and drive that insight to action across all of these different main component areas? Joel Saxum: At the simplest level let’s dive down and do just a blade problem because I’ve seen this before, right? At the simplest level and internal damage. And an external damage many times are related. Absolutely. But unless you have a decent data set, that is a, catalog data set, you can’t do that. You can’t look at them because what you’re saying about the, how you guys got into, the blade inspections with autonomous drones, that was really the first, really good data structured inspections where you could call up on, Hey, I would like to look at this radius on the leading edge of these blades. Okay, so you guys started that as a cascade and everybody else has followed suit and now it’s become normal in the industry and that’s fantastic. But now even two years ago, internal inspections, people were not looking as it was more of there’s technicians in there, they have a camera and they’re pulling a tape measure and they think they’re about four, 14 meters in the blade and they got a picture. Am I looking at the trailing edge or what bond line is that? But now you see that how those things could be related. So when we talk about large data sets, Now you’re talking, you’re getting even more in depth saying there may be a way where we can tie CMS data to blade damage data or something of that sort. Absolutely. But you need to be speaking the same language. This is a thing I always go back to language wise is what people don’t understand, they say the Wi Fi. Actually, Wi Fi is a common language. And that’s why everything can speak in it. And that’s something that we see every day, but not a lot of people realize if you could put that together for data, which is what you guys are starting to do to amalgamate all these different data sources and data types into one system, you can really get a holistic view of what could be happening to your blades or anything else for that matter. Tom Brady: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of work to be done in that, at the intersection of data, exactly. As you say I’m particularly interested in some of the work that’s ongoing both. Projects that we’re working on, but also out in the industry on things like blade sensing. So what can we do to actually drive the increased frequency or the the capability of continuously monitoring blades, I think is really exciting. Overlaying blade issues with SCADA issues, or excuse me, overlaying blade issues with SCADA data. Yeah. I’m very curious to say, or to see what kind of information we can derive about, Why blade damages propagate? Can we say something about how blades are loaded and therefore how they propagate? I think we’re starting to see glimpses of that in some of our research and development, but there’s a lot of work to do. I think that’s a really exciting area for future devs. Allen Hall: So what are those things that you’re finding right now? Just by, for just a top level look at connecting data sources together, are you realizing, yeah, there is a connection between this gearbox and that blade having a problem? Are those sort of Concepts and ideas and problems starting to rise to the top a little bit more. It’s an integrated system more than just individual components. Tom Brady: I would say right now we’re at more of the stage of having the data backing to support the things that some experts probably already had intuitions about. We don’t need to get into specific makes and models and the serial issues that are prevalent among them, but I We have a number of blade engineers on our staff and they act as consultants, both internally and for our customers at times, just to advise on their maintenance strategy. And they know from their experience that, a certain blade maker or a certain blade model is, if you see an issue at this spot, you better fix that thing very quickly. We’re now seeing in data what happens if you don’t, which is really, I think, really exciting because now it’s not only that that tribal knowledge or that, that expertise that they’ve built up, but there’s, we also have data to, to back it up and say, with a 10 percent probability, we’ve seen this thing that you’re calling a Cat 4 now turn into a Cat 5 the following year. And that is extremely powerful in terms of helping owners start to inform their maintenance strategy. When you can say. Okay, I have this set of issues. Yes, they’re very serious right now, but also I only have budget to fix the top 10. So maybe I can use that to say what I prioritize first and what I can let run. Joel Saxum: At the end of the day, an operator wants to be told they would rather not look at inspections. They want to be told what to do, right? And if you can back that up with analytics and data, then that’s huge, right? Like I’ve seen post mortem studies, I say post mortem blade failures. Yeah. Where you can see a crack propagate. At the time of failure with a pitch walk off, right? Where if you have because that blade is trying to stay in line with pitching to the other blades, then that crack develops. It has to pitch more and more as that blade is failing. And so that can be done, right? But that’s in an extreme case, if we can get closer and closer to doing that. And it’s it’s in minutia, right? There’s so many small little details, small, something that you could find in some of the SCADA data or some other CMS data to show this. But. What it’s really going to take is someone to tackle that project. And I don’t think that we’ve seen, we, we, Alan and I keep pretty close tabs on what’s going on at DTU and NREL and Sandia and Oak Ridge and all these other laboratories and universities across the world. I haven’t seen anybody academically taking that project on yet. But I think it could be very powerful. Like you say, for lowering the cost of energy across the board. Absolutely. Allen Hall: How much money do you think is on the table for a particular operator, a midsize operator in the States? How much money do you think they’re losing from not connecting those data sources together? Tom Brady: Oh, that’s a great question. I guess let’s think in terms of, orders of magnitude for typical blade budgets. I’ve seen that for a medium to large size operator, you might see a blade budget in the realm of call it. I don’t know, a few million up to ten million dollars in a year not more. How many failures is that typical owner experiencing in a given year? Again, on the order of ones to around 10, you’re not seeing tens of failures in a year. So how expensive is a failure when you break it down to when you break it down to how much production is lost and how much and how much that, that replacement cost is, not to mention the reputational damage whenever that occurs. And insurance premiums in the future. Yeah. I think you’re talking millions of dollars just when looking at blade failures. And that’s for every owner that is experiencing these. I think there’s a lot more to be done, both in terms of predicting blade failures, and I think that’s where the intersection of data particularly with SCADA or with in blade sensing, I think there’s a lot we can do on that front. I think when it comes to CMS and we, within our CMS business, it’s a lot it’s a lot better understood. It’s CMS and, vibration monitoring as a practice has been around for a very long time, not just in wind, but in other industries as well. And so I think there’s a, it’s a lot more prescriptive from that perspective. So we, what we see within the drivetrain world in our CMS product is, we have we’ve used machine learning and AI to train on this, the CMS signals that basically the early indicators of a fault. And we’re able to tell owners with some degree of confidence, again Similarly to how an expert in the field might comment on the issue and how fast it can evolve, we can tell them with some degree of certainty how much time is left on that drivetrain before that liability turns into something much more like a risk of cascading failures and so on, Allen Hall: so how are the SkySpecs connecting that data together? What are you, obviously everybody knows Horizon, that’s ubiquitous at this point. Is it? Horizon Plus, what is this software data set? Please tell me it’s with OneLogin. Tom Brady: Oh yeah we’re working on it. I won’t say we’ve nailed it yet. Not especially not the OneLogin thing. And yeah, exactly as you highlight we’ve brought together a number of companies under one roof in the last two years and there’s that constant push and pull of, do we spend that next engineering dollar on bringing these products together and making it so you have that OneLogin or is it on something that’s more like a A feature for one of the point solutions, right? So we’re constantly looking at those trade offs. The way I see it in the future where this is heading, I think we will start to see, like I said, that common language used to talk about risk and liability, like really distilling that blade issue. Like we need to stop talking about, in my view, category 4 and 5. That needs to be distilled to something that is Comparable and understandable by someone like an asset manager who what they really care about at the end of the day is how much is this turbine going to produce. So we have to get to a point where we can say this this blade damage is likely to lead to this amount of propagation in the coming year that affects repair costs in this way. And it it may lead to failure, which would lead to production loss in this way. So I think we’re in the early stages of Defining that language of starting to build that product that pulls together those different data sources. I think it, it’s important to note too that SkySpecs can’t solve all the problems. I wish we could. But there’s a number of really exciting tech companies and sensing companies and analytics companies out there that we need to find a way to answer that question of not just how do we bring the SkySpecs data together in one place, but also How do we allow that insight to action to take place for all of those other different really powerful sensing methods? So that comes to us being more of a an open platform such that we can bring in that data and we need to take it’s on us to create those connectors, to create those APIs in order to help our industry partners. Pull that data together as well. Allen Hall: So what you’re looking at going forward then is an ability to predict lifetimes, but also energy produced in terms of revenue and say, all right, if you let this damage go, it’s going to cost you a hundred grand over the lifetime. And you may be able to live with that and maybe that’s totally fine versus the cost of repairing it. That may be a win situation. But right now, Those calculations are not done, or if they’re done at the engineering level. The engineer tries to pencil that out, and I’m not sure that’s always the right approach, because they don’t know a lot of the financial details about the wind farm in particular, like how this thing’s financed, and couldn’t agree more. Yeah, so there’s a lot of unknown boxes in the engineering equation and I think this is really the first time the industry is really starting to address levelized costume. Energy. That they’re, the engineering groups are starting to focus on it. And obviously SkySight expects this has to be part of that solution because you have the data and now because you’ve acquired a couple more companies that have the ability to put, yeah, to put some context on it instead of just providing pictures, which are great. But what does it mean to me? Because that’s the question Joel and I get asked all the time. Joel Saxum: Yeah. What does it mean? What you’re looking to do is basically. At a highly granulated level, assign a floating ROI value to every action you would take. Tom Brady: Yeah. I think that in the future we’ll see that there, there is a right answer in terms of what your next best maintenance dollar is spent on. Yeah. We’re nowhere close. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think that’s Tom Brady: where we’re heading. Joel Saxum: Of course. I think, but I think that, I think that most industry, We’re in the wind industry. But most industries would love to have that. Yeah. It’s a very, that is a, that’s a precipice That would be fantastic to reach. ’cause it would be, it’s difficult right. To know which ones, because right now, like you said, a lot of people are just going we’re gonna try to re repair our cat four and cat fives. What does that mean? What did, do you need to repair now? Do you, if you repaired it in June versus repairing it in August, what is that gonna mean for the bottom dollar? Is that’s a, it’s a difficult question to ask, but if you had. Basically, because at the end of the day, Alan, like what you were getting at, I think is when we talk to operators, they want to be told what to do. They want to know what the best decision to make is today on this asset. So if you’ve got a wind farm with a hundred turbines in it and you’ve got half a million dollars right now, these are the things that you should do that will add up to that 450 with some 50 over for change. And then the next chunk of money, this is what you need to do. So getting to that point where it’s. It’s algorithmic, it’s modeled, it’s understood, it’s data driven but the decisions can be made that can show real value. Tom Brady: Yeah. Joel Saxum: That’s huge. Tom Brady: One of the ways that we’ve operationalized that that goal, at least within, within our blade world is that many of our customers have different ways of thinking about risk. And it. not just across customers, but also across individual sites within a given portfolio. Yeah, for sure. You, you mentioned, maybe this one is up for, maybe this one’s up for repower. And so therefore maybe I have more of a run until failure mentality. This one is on an FSA. And so I want to know about everything mentality. And so I one of the ways that we tackle that is with a some, a method broadly we call rules. So when we finish an inspection, For our own benefit we’d analyze all of our inspections with one schema, one methodology, one set of, think of it like a big lookup table where we say, damages that look like this, we are always going to label as a crack and maybe we’ll label it with this severity. Very early on, we saw that not all of our customers agreed with the way that we were tackling that, the way that we were labeling. And so we started getting these questions around, okay, hey you. Will you label things that look like this instead as a L E 1? And will you label these instead as a 2 instead of a 3? And with our volume that we were doing, with the number of customers that we had acquired at that point, it was not practical. We couldn’t train our team on all of those different ways of approaching it. So we created rules. And essentially what that is, is at the moment that our analysis finishes, there are a set of it’s an engine that runs on every single inspection that we deliver, and the Customers can essentially codify down to this site or this turbine or this make and model. When you see something that looks like this, perhaps it’s one of those serial issues that we were talking about before, I can say, alright, immediately tag that as a severity 5 because that’s a very, that’s a very risky issue. And also while you’re at it, create a task for me to follow up on this. So we’re connecting the output of our inspections directly to decisions that are, Individual, at the individual customer level and respecting all of that context that’s required in order to actually make the decision that is the right one. Allen Hall: Let’s talk about that rule based decision making because I think that’s a unique way of looking at particular assets as the asset owner wants to look at them. You do see unique approaches across the, particularly the United States in the wind industry, about how they deal with those problems. But the overriding factor in all of that is that there’s only so many staff to look at them. Amen. Yeah. So if you talk to Blade engineers on some of these larger operators, what do you do all day? I look at pictures. I’m looking at pictures. Yeah. That seems like a tremendous waste of resources to do that. Yeah. So with this rule based system then, you can apply some logic to it so that It’s like a pre filter. Are doing less of that now? Is that the goal? So that you can Tom Brady: actually use it more productively? Exactly right. And I think what, I think that the result is that for customers that are very engaged with the way that we think about rules and and using Horizon to its fullest extent, we’re seeing that they have less to review because they can set aside, okay, I. I don’t need to go hunting for those things that I know might be problems. I don’t need to be filtering to the 10 to 20 meter mark on this make and model in order to make sure that SkySpecs didn’t screw up. Because it’s transparent. I know that when a damage comes through or an observation comes through with this set of characteristics, I’m going to be flagged immediately and I trust that the system will let me know. So I think they can, I think they can spend more of their time on what really matters rather than hunting for What might be a problem for them next year? Allen Hall: I’d be remiss to let you go without talking about some of the R& D aspects that are happening. Joel and I took a quick tour of things that are not for public consumption, I would say. However, there is some really cool technology going on in the evolution of drones, hardware, electronics, storage, capability. Cameras, lenses, optics, all that are changing so fast in a couple of years. You want to describe what’s coming up for the following season? What everybody’s to expect from the R& D side? Tom Brady: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the big thing for us for right now is in 2020, Wait, gosh, what year is it? In 2024, excuse me. 2024 we we scaled up our next iteration, next generation hardware platform for inspections. We call it Foresight. That’s what we’re looking at here. And so throughout this season doing now over 50, 000 inspections in the year. We’re, we’ve had this sort of heterogeneous fleet. We’ve been doing some inspections with the old, some inspections with the new. And I think as we look ahead to next year, a big thing is going to be Concluding that rollout and making sure that our, all of our customers are getting the benefits of this new tech as compared to of the, as compared to the old some of the things that I think are really exciting about this new tech. First of all it’s a lot more productive than our old tech, and that’s not just a good thing for us. It means that we can get through more inspections faster, but it also means our customers are experiencing lower downtime. And I think that, That theme, especially as we see inspections, excuse me, turbines that are much bigger, we need to continue to focus on driving down downtime because what used to be a, Oh, it’s an inspection. So it’s cost me 20 because it’s half an hour, like not a big deal. In an offshore context, when that turbine’s off for half an hour, you’re talking about hundreds of dollars. And when you apply that across a whole fleet. It does matter, right? It starts to actually matter. And we’re constantly looking at ways that we can drive up the productivity. We’re looking at ways that we can do inspections without turning the turbine off at all. I think these are really exciting future methods for us to do inspections. We also have some things in the works with sensing. Let’s call it just leave behind type sensing capabilities. So We’re really excited about using, whether it’s cameras or in blade stress and strain type technologies both from, also from our partners, right? We’re not trying to build all of this stuff. All we’re trying to do is make use of it and help our customers benefit from it. Without naming specific names of the companies that are doing this kind of thing there’s a number of providers that are in that space. Yeah, just, wow. Allen Hall: That’s a good explanation because there’s so much more yet to come. Or Tom Brady: yet to come. Allen Hall: Yes, absolutely. A lot of people working hard here at Sky Specs, building the next generation of sensing technology, CMS, optics, drones, you name it, you guys are involved in it. And that’s you should. Congratulate yourself a little bit. I know it’s hard to do that in the wind industry because there’s never any down time. Amen. Yeah. It’s all the time. It’s a 24 hour Joel Saxum: a day kind of business. Everybody thinks of the shoulder season, you start to slow down, but in this world, that’s when the dev picks up. Exactly. Tom Brady: That’s it. That’s exactly it. There’s about four months a year where things are in like a low season and that’s when everything has to, if there’s going to be change, do it now. Yeah, exactly. Allen Hall: Tom, it’s been great to have you on the podcast. Really appreciate all the insight. We appreciate the tour and understanding. Where all this data is going it’s an amazing journey. Thanks. It’s been my pleasure. Nice to speak with you guys.

This week we discuss Flender’s adjustable rotor shaft assembly, designed to mitigate gear misalignment issues. Then Dolfines’ innovative solution for onsite repairs of floating wind platforms using a telescoping crane. Finally, we highlight Goodyear’s fun and practical glow-in-the-dark tires, which can help locate your vehicle in the dark and add a unique aesthetic touch. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to 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. All right, our first idea of the week is an adjustable rotor shaft assembly for wind turbines. And as we know, there’s all kinds of issues with anything rotating equipment on a wind turbine. Particularly if it involves gears and teeth. Well, this idea from Flender describes an adjustable rotor shaft assembly for connecting a gearbox to the generator. And the key feature is it uses a curved tooth coupling with the releasable support element which allows the both ends to move relative to one another, which And a lot of wind turbines, if you’ve been up in them, there is a lot of movement at times, and it lets that misalignment not destroy. The assembly. And this is really slick because we have all kinds of issues, like I’ve said, on anything with teeth, on, on some of these bigger wind turbines as the, the blades get bigger and they get taller and everything’s moving around. Phil, this makes a lot of sense. I’d be surprised if Flinders not using this already though. Philip Totaro: Yes, I would hope so. We haven’t been able to confirm it, but presumably for the turbines with larger capacity gearboxes for the, the larger onshore machines and maybe even some of the offshore ones. I would hope that this technology is being utilized because it will absolutely help make a difference in kind of bending moment and gear misalignment issues which can create a lot of maintenance work for, for the turbines. While the services folks may not be happy about it because they might be losing some, losing some revenue opportunities the owners and operators absolutely would love this kind of technology to be implemented because it’s it’s going to allow for a gearbox to be able to, to be operated in a slightly wider loads window which is also kind of an interesting application to this because, even in a market like the U. S. where we know that a lot of owners and operators are, are kind of PTC farming. They’re not just wind farming. And what that means is they want to be able to extract as much out of the turbine as they can. for the first 10 years of, of an asset life. A technology like this might actually be helpful in making sure that the gearbox lasts the full 10 years before you see any kind of major drop off in performance. So any technology where you can accommodate this kind of gear misalignment is going to be a good one for owners and operators and, and the gearbox manufacturers themselves. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean, if you have a small rigid component then you can have a fixed gear, fixed location. It’s easy to keep it in line where you don’t have a whole lot of crazy loads on it. But like, Allen was saying at the beginning of the section here, when you’re bent, if you’ve been up tower at all, these things are moving all over the place. And when you start to get to these larger size turbines and bed plates starting getting really big and things start to flex and move. Having a little bit of basically give in the connections can go a long ways to increasing longevity. So, it’d be a little bit more of a complicated thing for some, uptower technicians if something goes wrong with it. However, the idea behind the invention is that we won’t have things go wrong. So, this one has some, some good application in the real world. Allen Hall: Our second idea comes from Dolfines. And as we know, floating wind is, holds great promise. And, but one of the drawbacks to it is when things go wrong with a turbine, you pretty much have to drag that floating platform all the way back to port and to work on it. And. That can be a problem at times, as we’ve seen recently with some wind turbines over in Northern Europe dragging them back takes a long time as it’s expensive. So, the Dolfines’ approach is a little bit different where they have a crane on the floating platform and with a telescoping boom on it where they can get access to the blades. So, the way this, this patent idea works is that, They have some handling equipment and they can remove and reinstall blades without the need for any vessels to be out there or the need to tow the floating platform back to port. This, I think, holds promise, Phil, in that if floating wind is really going to be economical, the turbine size is going to have to get big, but that just increases the complexity, and you really want to repair it on site, putting some sort of crane on the floating platform. Does make sense. Philip Totaro: Yes. And this, their, their idea is kind of twofold. As you mentioned, part of it is putting the telescoping crane on the floating platform itself, either if it’s a a, you’re, you’re going to have a bit of trouble if it’s a kind of a spar buoy design, but for, other types of semi submersible arrangements, you can, you can actually have one of the pontoons actually have this this crane embedded but they also have an idea to include this telescopic crane on a jackup vessel as well. And so the, the core idea of the patent, again, is this telescopic crane, which by itself isn’t necessarily a new idea, but the placement and arrangement of these, and, and again, keep in mind, Dolfines is a oil and gas company that’s got, decades worth of experience in, in Europe in supporting that, that industry. So they know how to solve problems and their, their solution as far as supporting, floating offshore or even fixed offshore with this kind of, there’s, there’s another company that came up with the quote unquote jackup on a jackup, so we won’t call it that, but the telescoping crane on a jackup vessel is is also a pretty clever way to, to go about it. So I like it again, keep in mind that this is one they’re not actually using commercially yet, but we think with increasing crane size or with significant deployment of floating offshore platforms, they could. Eventually implement this kind of a solution and, and it’s something I’d actually like to see because it, it would help cut down on, on some, some service and repair costs substantially. Joel Saxum: When it comes to offshore construction, the two terms that always get thrown around for op enduring operations is coupled or decoupled. So when you talk about a decoupled activity, that would be what we do right now. So you may have a crane on a jackup or on a floating barge or something, go out to where the monopile is in, installed into the seafloor, and those two pieces of infrastructure, the monopile and the vessel are decoupled. They’re not connected whatsoever. So you have to deal with, movement and moments in both of them. So if the sea settle or the sea floor settles at all, the jackup can move. Or if the, if you get some high currents or something or some wind, you can get the, the monopile can move. And now these two pieces of. of kit are decoupled. They’re not together. So they move independently of one another and that makes things difficult. This concept from the floating side is coupling them together because you’re putting the crane right onto the same foundation. Now that foundation is a like, like for like the common denominator, if you will, that they move together. So you can now do, do operations in a lot easier way. Because if you try to go out to a floating platform Your vessel is not going to be a jackup anymore because the jackup legs cannot reach the bottom because it’s going to be too deep. So now you’re going to have two floating vessels moving in six degrees of freedom all the time. And it’s almost going to be impossible to swap components out or land studs and bolt holes and those kinds of things. But you couple them together, all of a sudden you can do it. So great, great innovation. I think that, like you said, Phil, if, as we get to floating offshore wind at scale, something like this has to happen. Otherwise, we won’t get to scale. So, we’ll see this one in the future, I’m sure. Allen Hall: Our last idea is a, a fun patent from the engineers over at Goodyear Tire and Rubber. Now, the scenario goes like this. It’s a dark night. It’s raining outside. You’re in a large parking lot after attending a concert. And you say to yourself, I do not know where I parked. If only if I had tires that glow to the dark. I could find my vehicle. Well, the engineers have already come up with this because Goodyear has a patent for it, where they are putting glow in the dark material in the sidewall of your tire and it will glow. Now, I, Phil, I do not understand why this is not being used today because they would sell, Millions of these tires. Philip Totaro: Allen, I got news for you. There’s, there’s two other very important applications and use cases beyond finding your car in the dark. The one is for the folks out there that want to be able to pimp their ride. This is number one way to pimp your ride. is glow in the dark tires, okay? The second one is, for those of us who, who follow motor racing, and particularly the World Endurance Championship, they do a lot of night racing, and wouldn’t it be cool to have glow in the dark tires during the 24 hours of Le Mans? Joel Saxum: I’m with Phil more on the pimp my ride thing here. I’m in, I’m in Texas, and you should see some of the ridiculous vehicles that drive around here. On the outside of that, there is there’s some legal ramifications here, but I don’t know if it is, because there’s like a, there’s laws that say you can’t have light up, like, valve stems, so you make these, they call them fireflies, make, there’s laws that say you can’t have some of that stuff, but this technically Isn’t battery powered, isn’t doesn’t have a filament in it, isn’t an LED. So I don’t know, maybe they will pass muster. Well, we’d have to ask the authorities. Allen Hall: It’s powered by the sun or some sort of nuclear reactor. I’m not sure how this material works, but it is clearly cool. And someone on the TikTok side of Goodyear needs to go back and take a look at this and get this out. Even if they did it in NASCAR. They would sell tens of millions of this if it’s on Dale Earnhardt Jr. ‘s car. It would go crazy.

In this episode, the hosts discuss GE Vernova’s financial results and blade issues, and announce the Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference. They also touch on innovative wind turbine recycling projects and the latest in safety equipment for wind technicians. 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.comWind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Down in Dunedin, New Zealand, they have a problem with people in front of the airport, uh, hugging it out too long as they depart. They’ve actually put signs out, max hug time, three minutes. Uh, because they’ve had problems with people just hanging out, cuddling, I guess, in front of the airport at the, on the drop off area. And the, when I saw this story, I thought, man, I’ve been to, I had probably a hundred, at least a hundred U. S. airports and dozens overseas. I’ve never seen this happen anywhere else on the planet. So maybe just New Zealanders are just friendlier people? They like to cuddle? Is, is that the difference, Rosemary? Rosemary Barnes: New Zealanders are very friendly, I would say. Yeah, maybe, maybe that’s it. Joel Saxum: It reminds me of my grandma. My grandma would give you a hug and then never let you go. And if you tried to like get away, she’d put her, put a hook around you and that’s it. You’re, you’re there, you’re there, you’re there for the evening. Now Allen Hall: did she give you some candies too? They individually wrapped candies as you, as you departed. Joel Saxum: She was more of a, less than a individual candy. She was more of like a, here’s a rum and coke that, that was my grandmother . Philip Totaro: We do not encourage underage drinking on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’ll be joined by my Uptime co hosts after these news headlines. In a major development for the U. S. offshore wind sector, GE Vernova has announced plans to remove and strengthen additional blades at the Vineyard Wind Project off the Massachusetts coast. This decision follows a blade failure incident in July. G. I. V. Ranoa’s Comprehensive Quality Assurance Program now includes the re examination of more than 8, 300 ultrasound images per blade and physical inspection using specialized crawler drones. While eight new towers and nacelles have been installed since mid August, the company emphasizes that operations and power production will resume only after meeting all requisite safety approvals. Britain’s energy sector is undertaking a transformative initiative as energy ministers direct the national energy system operator to develop the country’s first strategic spatial plan for energy infrastructure through 2050. This groundbreaking blueprint aims to revolutionize the nation’s approach to energy planning by identifying optimal locations for new infrastructure development. The government anticipates this comprehensive approach will significantly reduce grid connection waiting times. and provide investors with unprecedented clarity on project locations. The initial version of the plan, scheduled for release in 2026, will focus primarily on electricity generation and storage, encompassing offshore wind farms, hydrogen assets, and pump storage hydro facilities. In Scandinavian waters, Statcraft is advancing ambitious offshore wind development plans with their application for a 2. 1 gigawatt project in the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Offshore Delta North project, strategically positioned 100 kilometers east of Stockholm, will feature 105 bottom fixed wind turbines in waters ranging from 40 to 80 meters deep. Their project’s design prioritizes minimal visual impact with Turbines placed far from the mainland and inner archipelago. Once operational, the facility expects to generate 8 terawatt hours annually, satisfying approximately 40 percent of Stockholm County’s electricity demand and supporting the region’s low carbon transition. The state of Maine’s offshore wind aspirations face a significant challenge as federal authorities denied the request for a 456 million grant for the Sears Island port development. The proposed 760 million facility, intended to be the nation’s first offshore Purpose built port for floating turbines would have included construction of a specialized semi submersible barge for turbine assembly and installation. While the setback impacts the project’s timeline, state officials remain committed to the 2029 completion target and are actively pursuing an alternative 130 million federal funding opportunity. The project maintains strong support from business, environmental, and labor groups as a crucial component of Maine’s goal to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. The Philippines Renewable Energy Sector faces substantial challenges as the Department of Energy reports 105 projects at risk of termination due to timeline non compliance. The affected projects, namely awarded in 2017 and 2019, include 10 wind developments struggling with land rights acquisition and grid connection challenges. for your patience. In response, the government has implemented stronger oversight measures, including new guidelines requiring developers to obtain a Certificate of Authority valid for three years for onshore wind projects and five years for offshore wind initiatives. These measures align with the country’s ambitious target of achieving 35 percent renewables in its energy mix by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040. Iowa’s clean sector demonstrates remarkable resilience and growth, with employment increasing by 4. 5 percent in 2023. The state currently supports over 32, 000 clean energy positions, with small businesses driving expansion. 74 percent of clean energy companies employ fewer than 20 people. Adding to this momentum, Nordex Group announced the restart of a wind turbine production facility in West Branch, Iowa, capitalizing on federal tax incentives provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxum. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PESWind. com today. In the latest quarter. of PES Wind Magazine, Joel, there’s a really interesting article about safety equipment and it is from Cresto. And if you’ve seen some of their devices, they have a couple of emergency descent devices. One that’s a manual device, but the one I was looking at was the one they’re talking about in the article, which is this automatic, uh, descent device that is stuck to you. So it’s part of your general equipment you go up and down the tower with. So it’s Something a little bit different because a lot of those escape systems are actually mounted in the nacelle. This is a different approach, though. I Joel Saxum: really like this approach, uh, because what they’re doing is basically taking this, uh, what they call the Solo X, this rescue device, and they’re integrating it with your daily kit. So, think about it, it’s like something like you have your gloves with you all the time, so you know how your gloves work. You have your harness with you all the time, you know how to put your harness on, so you’re so used to the piece of kit that it becomes something, it becomes a part of you, right? Like your hard hat. Every day you put your helmet on. Like, you know these things. And this is a different approach as opposed to the traditional approach, which is, eh, there might be a self rescue kit or something up tower. It might be in a different spot stored in every nacelle. It might be behind a generator. It might be over, you know, by a bearing or somewhere. Or you’re, and if you’re traveling, especially if you’re a traveling wind technician, you’re going into different turbines. You don’t know exactly where the self rescue kit is. And that hasn’t even touched on the idea of, How do these things maintain? How often have they been checked? Are they, are, you know, are they fit for duty? Uh, and you don’t really, in the case that you need to use a self rescue device, you don’t have time to try to find it. Hopefully it’s in good use, or any of these other things. So, what Cresto has done with this device is, they’ve put it right With the person. It’s with them every day. They are trained on it. Of course, that’s one of the most important things. But it just becomes a part of your everyday kit, so you’re used to using it. Um, you know, because the last thing we ever want to hear about, uh, in the wind industry is something where someone gets stuck up tower, there’s a fire, there’s an incident, there’s an accident, or whatever may happen, or you know, someone, someone twists an ankle bad enough up tower, You’d need to use it just to get them down. They’re not gonna be able to climb the ladder down. So having this thing with you every day and being trained on it regularly, um, that’s key. I think. And then the other part of this is the training, right? So there’s a, there’s an old college football coach who used to say, Don’t train until you get it right. Train until you can’t get it wrong. Uh, and that’s part of what they’re taking on with this, with Cresto’s taking on here. Cresto also owns some training centers. So they’re, uh, doubling down on training, having the right kit, putting it with the people, and ensuring the safety of some of our, um, wind technicians out in the field. I think it’s a great product. Allen Hall: Yeah, so there’s plenty of great articles in PES Win this quarter, so if you want your free copy, just go to PESWin. com and download it. So there is a new innovator approach to wind turbine recycling. Our friends at Vattenfall and SuperU Studios have transformed a decommissioned turbine to sell Into a fully functional tiny house. And they’re showcasing this tiny house for end of life turbines. So they’re, they’re using a 20 year old Vestas V82 megawatt turbines. And they are about 350 square feet or about 35 square meters. Uh, Phil, they’re 13 feet long and 32 feet wide and about 10 foot high. So he has some high ceilings there, but they also have to have a lot of, uh, it’s just a shell, right? They got to put power in it and they have some solar panels and a solar boiler and an EV charging point, because why not? But it does have the necessities. It has a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room. After that, what else could you possibly need? Joel Saxum: It’s got a good sunlight. It would. That’s built, that’s Philip Totaro: built into every nacelle, right? Yeah, Vestas did pioneer that, uh, innovation, didn’t they? Allen Hall: So they, they must be adding insulation. Uh, right, too, because nacelles are notoriously cold and Philip Totaro: hot. Yeah. I will say this, too, because beyond just taking the nacelle and making it into a tiny home, they also had, um, another project where they’re trying to take old decommissioned blades and use them as floating pontoons. So my idea is, hey, Vattenfall, why don’t you combine this and make, like Tiny houseboats to replace all the little tiny houseboats in Holland. Like, there you go. Then you have no more wind turbine decommissioning challenges at all. Joel Saxum: I think I like to be honest with you. Okay, so if you watch this tiny house market, I lived in Airbnbs for like three years, right? So I’ve seen millions of them all over the place. People putting them in pretty cool spots up on the top of hills and all these different things. But there’s a tiny home market that is built with Connex boxes, right? Storage containers. And these, to be honest with you, they’re about the same size. Except for the storage container is one of the reasons why it works really well for this. Is it’s all self contained, steel, like there should be no mice getting in or anything like that. The nacelle has quite the same, as long as you see it. Seal up basically where the yaw bearing would go or you know, the entrance to this there and you put some nice doors where the hub would come out. I think I, for me, I’m waiting for like the Haleyide X, uh, decommissioning project. So I can, cause I think you can build a, you can build a proper house out of one of those. Philip Totaro: A townhouse. That’s the, Joel, that’s a townhouse right there. That’s, that’s a tiny, tiny townhouse. Joel Saxum: Yeah. But I, to be honest with you, like, I don’t think this is a bad idea. I think that, that there’s companies that have made. Um, they’ve made whole companies off of building out of shipping containers or just any kind of containerized little small house. And across the U S at least people are buying them left and right. Rosemary Barnes: I think that this is going to have the same problem as a lot of the wind turbine blade reuse projects, where it’s like the value of the product versus the extra cost of transport and logistics for, um, you know, getting, because wind turbines are spread all over the place. It’s not like they’re all coming from one factory and going to, you know, Um, you know, the just regular distribution channels, it’s coming from really diverse range of places. So trucks driving around and yeah, whatever, um, whatever you have to do to these, to these old nacelles to make them suitable for transport. Oh, sorry. Suitable, suitable for habitation. Do you do that, do you make a mobile factory that you, you know, bring to a wind farm that’s been decommissioned or do you bring the nacelles to a factory to do that and then ship them back out again? It, um, yeah, the pro, cause I’ve been involved in some, some similar kinds of projects for wind turbine blades and that’s pretty much always the killer is just, there’s a lot of extra transport and. You know, there’s, um, energy emissions, money associated with that. So it’s one of those ideas that sounds like a win win, but usually ends up a bit of a, I dunno, there’s, there’s some, some losses in there as well as some wins. Allen Hall: Well, I’m going to go back to Phil’s idea about the pontoon. So you take the blades, you cut them, you make them into pontoons, you put the nacelle on top and you float it down the river to where they can all be industrialized and made into tiny homes. See Phil, I’m going with you now. Tiny Philip Totaro: floating homes. Like, you know what, there’s a market, there’s a market here. I’m telling you, we’re going to do some research and figure out the tiny home market because there’s all these kids today that love the tiny homes. So let’s get them housing. It’s because I can’t Joel Saxum: afford a big Philip Totaro: one. Rosemary Barnes: Just need to make sure all, all wind turbines in the future get installed near rivers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Allen Hall: Well, I guess you could pull them, get some camels or something and use the blades as sleds. Come on. There’s this, this idea has to work, right? So, and now we, now I’ve seen pretty much everything, right? Where before, I mean, obviously the blades make a lot of sense because there’s a lot of material there. But the nacelles, not so much. I think, I thought what we were going to do with nacelles is basically chop them up and make them into new nacelles. I thought that was the purpose, but maybe we can make them into tiny homes. After the break, I want to talk about wind energy O& M. Australia, because Rosemary’s here, and we have this brand new conference going on. So right after the break, we’ll talk Australian conference. Dealing with damaged blades? Don’t let slower pairs keep your turbines down. Blade platforms get you back up and running fast. Blade Platform’s truck mounted platforms reach up to 100 meters, allowing for a quick setup, improved safety, and efficient repairs. Book soon to secure your spot and experience a difference in blade access, speed, and efficiency. Visit bladeplatforms. com and get started today. All right, Rosemary, we are going to hold a really interesting O& M conference in, of all places, Melbourne, Australia. Rosemary Barnes: Why do you say of all places? Allen Hall: Well, I would go to Sydney if it was my choice, but I didn’t get to choose, so. Rosemary Barnes: No, we, Victoria is, is, is the home of, of wind energy in Australia. Um. So, we’ve picked it logically. It’s not because Bill wants to go to the Phillip Island, uh, moto event. Philip Totaro: Which I do, but we’re going at the wrong time of year. I could, I could also, you know, stay, stay for the Formula One race, but that’s another three weeks after we’re, we’re doing the event. Joel Saxum: So Rosemary, this, uh, this idea popped up within the group here, basically us and a couple other people of, you know, our networking friends within the wind industry. And this has been compounded as we’ve spoke about the event that we’re putting on here in February is most of the conferences in Australia about wind energy are permitting focused, regulatory focused, finance focused, and there’s not a whole lot of specifically technical, uh, or operations and maintenance, you know, lessons learned, knowledge sharing. We, we actually had a funny conversation with some, some ISPs over there. I think it was yesterday morning, Alan, where they said, yeah, for the most part, when you go to a wind conference in Australia, the engineers are in the corners talking to themselves. I thought, well, we would like to give them a forum to talk amongst each other openly and, and share some lessons learned. So, I mean, Rosemary, uh, you know, We don’t work down there regularly, but you’re a consultant in the wind space in Australia. So what are some of the issues that we’re looking to solve at this conference or talk about at this conference? Rosemary Barnes: So kind of Australians recognize that there isn’t a whole lot of technical knowledge about wind turbines, um, within the country. You know, we’ve got a lot of great engineers, but not a lot of that kind of engineer. We don’t have a lot of manufacturing here. We don’t have, um, any wind turbine companies, you know, any design happening here. Um, so recognizing that they didn’t have that, that skills and knowledge, they thought that the, um, O& M service agreement was a really good way to make sure that that didn’t really matter. They didn’t have that knowledge because, you know, if you’ve got the manufacturer and the service provider for the full life of the, yeah, the manufacturer is the same as the service provider for the full life of the turbine. It, it kind of feels like anything that goes wrong will be taken care of and. everything’s good. Um, and now, you know, gradually as I’m working with clients that have, you know, they’ll just have a problem and realize that actually they don’t know. They don’t know enough to know if they’ve got a problem. They don’t know enough to know if things are being done right. They don’t know enough to know if they should try and renegotiate their service agreement, change to an independent provider. Um, so yeah, and like you said, we just don’t talk about those technical issues here. So we’re talking about things like, um, you know, there’s a lot of lightning damage in, um, areas of Australia, um, leading edge protection is an issue as well. You know, these are things that you would expect to be spending money on year after year maintaining, but like, how much should you be expecting? And, you know, you’re getting, um, you know, uh, the service provider saying, oh, you know, that’s, that’s outside of the agreement. So you’re getting kind of extra bills. You’ve got downtime that you don’t really know if it’s being minimized. All those sorts of things, people are starting to realize, Hey, even with a full service agreement, I need to understand these technical issues. And so that’s, that’s why I wanted to do it. And I just was so frustrated with, um, you know, we had to have some good conferences in Australia, but the good technical stuff is a lot more on like Grid integration and financing and, um, you know, like community acceptance, social license, like those things, like, you know, they really get into good details and it’s interesting, but anything to do with how wind turbines work and how to keep them working well and profitably, it’s like, you know, I’ve applied to several conferences to speak on these topics and. Yeah, just crickets. No one’s, um, no one’s interested. So I’m like, actually we need to know this information. People are starting to realize that they need to know this information. And so, yeah, I guess we decided, I never really saw myself as an event organizer, but luckily you guys, you guys are on the team as well. So, yeah, I, um, I’m really looking forward to being able to. To share information and talk amongst the technical side of the wind industry in Australia. Joel Saxum: Yeah, one of the conversations we had with someone, uh, speaking about the event was, you know, and looking at basically market research. There’s a lot of assets in Australia that are coming up on that 20 year mark, you know, the 15, 20 year FSAs are going to end. And you’ll have, uh, some of these assets getting turned back over to the owners. The FSA holders may walk away and all of a sudden you’re going to have a whole bunch of assets that either need repowers or might need a massive amount of maintenance. Um, but either way, the asset owner themselves is going to be left behind. With this asset in their hand, what do we do with it? Um, and they’re not quite up like it rosemary like you say haven’t had the need or the thought of the need to be up up to speed yet, but Uh, you know on this in this podcast and within our network that we have globally between you know, the four of us We know subject matter experts from basically every walk of turbine maintenance you can think of, so why not put them all together, take all the lessons learned and the trials and tribulations and, and all of the best practices that every, that the, you know, the rest of the collective, uh, wind industry has garnered over the years, put it in a spot and be able to share it with a market that we, we believe could use it. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, definitely. And I don’t think it’s just like, it’s not just people that are operating wind farms that would find this relevant or people with old wind farms that yeah, coming up to the end of a service agreement, I would really love if people involved in development would come too, because you know, like I work with a lot of really new wind farms actually, um, that are surprised at, you know, one aspect of their maintenance is 10 times more than um, they would have, they would have expected based on the other projects that they’ve done in Australia. There are big differences in how much you’re going to spend on maintenance and operations, depending on, yeah, like what your, I don’t know, your rainfall is, what your, um, lightning, um, activity is like in the area, you know, these sorts of things that are already well known. Um, if people would just have a bit of awareness about that before they started the project, it would help them to, you know, one, get a better idea about what the profit, profitability of the project long term was going to be. And two, um, you know, make sure that their service agreement was, was written with that in mind, because it’s not, yeah, it’s not always so, so simple as, you know, the service is being taken care of by somebody else because, you know, every time a turbine is down to be taken care of, uh, you know, a blade repair or, you know, Um, you know, some extra maintenance that that’s, that’s money that the owner is missing out on. It’s, you know, it’s not just a, it doesn’t just take you back to, um, you know, to a hundred percent. There’s always some losses involved. Philip Totaro: The challenge that a lot of wind farm sites in Australia have is that as Rosemary and Joel mentioned, they’re not really taking into account. The, uh, the degree to which they’re going to have repair and replacement issues, uh, and so the, the O& M expenses are a lot more than what they anticipate. Um, although it’s interesting because again, you’re, you’re only talking about costs for maintenance per megawatt hour produced that are only about 3 percent higher than the average in a market like the U. S., which has, you know, more than 10 times the, the capacity installed than, than what they have in Australia. Um, but in the U. S., uh, 86 percent of projects see a net positive return on capital, even projects that are, you know, 30, 40, whatever years old. They’re seeing a pretty healthy, um, you know, operating, uh, lifetime, whereas assets in Australia. You know, a lot of people think that it’s a, it’s a good idea or maybe it’s easier to do or it’s going to be easy money, but these things require, you know, maintenance and attention. And again, for us to be able to, to bring people in that have the expertise from Europe and the U. S. on how to run assets profitably, I think it’s going to do the market a world of good. And if you want Allen Hall: to join us in Melbourne The event is on February 11th and 12th at the State Library of Victoria, which is a beautiful facility, and to learn more about this event, which is totally being run not to make any money, by the way, if you want to learn more about it, you just visit windaustralia. com. The registration’s there. If you’re interested in sponsoring, and we’ve had a lot of companies reach out already about sponsoring. You can go to that page also and learn about sponsorship opportunities. So check out windaustralia. com. Rosemary Barnes: Can I just, um, chime in with one of the, the big things, big differences about this conference is that you don’t sponsor the conference and then get the opportunity to, um, you know, that doesn’t buy you the right to stand up and talk at an audience for 20 minutes about, you know, whatever sales pitch you want to make. The, the speakers are chosen because they’ve got something important to convey to you and sponsors are separate from that. So. Yeah, I think that’s something that frustrates a lot of people is that the quality of the presentations isn’t always as good as the, you know, the head. The title of the presentation might lead you to believe, and we’re doing everything we can to, to make this a really informative, um, event. 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 weather guard. 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: GE Vernova’s wind segment issued their Q3 results today as a recording, and on the wind side they showed some pretty strong progress on offshore operations, but it was offset by continued challenges in offshore wind. The division reported orders of about 1. 7 billion, down about 19 percent from the previous year, primarily due to lower onshore wind equipment orders outside of North America. And as we all have seen, GE is intensely focused on North America at the moment for onshore wind, and Europe not as much. The revenue for the wind segment remained flat at about 2. 9 billion. Onshore wind revenues increased from higher repowered deliveries in North America. Uh, and this is offset by slower execution in the offshore wind project. So, uh, they had a 500 million settlement related to a canceled offshore wind project and some other settlements and some gains and some losses due to offshore wind. The breakdown kind of goes like this. Um, offshore wind is really pulling down the total of the wind segment. Onshore wind seems to be at least profitable, and they’re working really hard to make it more profitable. Uh, thrown into this mix is the vineyard wind and dogger bank issues, vineyard wind. Uh, there was an announcement today from Vineyard that, and GE, that they have more blaze at Vineyard that may have an issue that need to get reworked or repaired, and some reinforcements added possibly from what it sounded like, so they have some more work to do at Vineyard to get everything back on course there. They had, GE has not been able to. Stall went turbine blades there. They’ve been doing towers into cells for a little while, but I think they’re still on hold in terms of blade installation. They ge Renova did admit, uh, say that the, the blade problem at vineyard was caused by an issue at the manufacturing facility up in Canada, which would be gas bay. Uh, in that, the, the number of blades that have problems are relatively few compared to the amount of blades they do produce, which is totally the case. Right. So. There is another interesting piece of this, which is they’re not, G. E. Vernova is not really taking orders, or not taking orders, on the offshore wind segment. They’re trying to get the offshore wind segment up and running on its own. That has caused some concern over in France, of course. Uh, where there’s factories and jobs at stake, but at the moment, if GE Offshore is not taking orders, Phil, that’s not good for the long term prognosis of that business, right? Precisely. I mean, Philip Totaro: you, you, we talked right before the, the spinoff of, of the different business units of, of GE, uh, into aerospace for Nova, et cetera. And. I remember part of that conversation was, you know, you can either have a ton of orders, but with low to minimal or even negative profitability versus zero orders or maybe a handful that were profitable, but not very much. And, and that was going to ultimately influence, you know, the, the stock price and the, the, you know, size of the balance sheet, and this is kind of. The worst case scenario, which is, you know, they’re, they’ve not only cut out all the unprofitable orders, which of course they wanted to, but they also cut out any orders whatsoever. And part of it, again, as you mentioned, was down to, you know, ocean wind one and two being canceled in New Jersey. Um, you know, a few other project cancellations or, or delay and rebids in, uh, the U. S. Northeast that are basically causing. Um, you know, the, the developer to have to retender, uh, and causing delays in getting turbine supply contracts signed, um, which is pushing back and pushing out the, um, you know, the revenue forecast that, that GE had. So at this point, it’s really just a question, an open question of, well, how does this offshore wind division actually. Start making money again, because there’s a lot of people over in Europe that are seeing these three blade failures, you know, two at Dogger Bank and one at Vineyard Wind, and also starting to think to themselves, Hey, you know, should I really be looking at a GE turbine? And are my insurance premiums going up and up? Because I’m, I’m buying these things that seem to have, um, you know, these issues, albeit again, we’ve acknowledged on the show before that they’re not all the same quote unquote root cause. Um, but they all were occurring as a result of, you know, installation issues during the, the time frame when GE still had responsibility. They hadn’t turned the, the project and the turbines over to the site owner yet. Um, until the project’s fully installed and commissioned. So, you know, it falls within their, their, um, scope of responsibility to, uh, to make sure that all that stuff is, is solid. So it’s, it’s not a good, you know, I guess you’re right. It’s not a good prognosis for them at this point to, uh, you know, to have this many issues and, and have it end up with. You know, basically no orders to speak of. And I mean, I don’t even know when they’re going to anticipate announcing new orders. There’s a few projects in Germany that they might be able to get some orders for. There’s a couple of projects in Holland, maybe same thing. And certainly a lot more projects in the UK where they’re hoping to get orders, but Everyone seems a little tentative now to be able to, to plunk down their, their checkbook for, for a GE offshore turbine at this point. I Joel Saxum: think one of the good things they’re doing here is, uh, part of the press release said with an abundance of caution, we are going to rework some of their, fix some of the blades that have some issues. So I don’t know if this means take some down that are already installed offshore. Yes. That, that does? Okay, so they’re gonna do that. I do know that Alan, you and I, I saw some, some scuttle that there was a few turbines on a barge heading back towards France coming from the U. S. Last week there were two going to France. So there’s at least two blades. There’s at least, you know, there, there’s a handful of blades that are affected by whatever a manufacturing defect is here. So Scott Straza from from GE Renova saying, we are gonna work on these, we are gonna fix these to try and increase this, the social sentiment of what GE ISS doing with this offshore wind. So they’re, they’re, they’re trying to. To do right by what needs to be done. Um, but I mean at this time the black eye is pretty big and they’re going to need a lot of makeup. Allen Hall: Joel, I think they’re just trying to put their financial house in order. If you look at the other parts of the business in GE, Vinnova is really three divisions. Wind is one of them, power is another, and electrification. The power, which is the gas turbines business, and electrification is all the infrastructure, switching, uh, power distribution, high voltage DC, business, both of those are doing remarkably well. Remarkably well. And if you look at the prognosis on Wall Street for GE Vernova as a company, big upside. That’s all the news you read over the last couple of days. So the, the wind is the one that they’re trying to struggle to figure out right now. Joel Saxum: Yeah, it was, it’s like, um, GE Vernova right now. So on that. The, with their earnings today, they dropped their stock, dropped big time, midday. They dropped like 4%, 5 percent midday. And then it recovered right back to okay. Earnings, everything seems fine. I think they were up 1 percent at the end of the day. So it’s kind of an odd, odd look. But again, we are looking at through a lens, as far as GE Vernova goes, this podcast, uh, the, the four of us, we’re looking at it straight through a wind lens and a wind lens only. Um, so we don’t see. Or we’re not as in tune with the rest of that business. Allen Hall: Yeah, but one of the things I’ve also talked about, and I’ve poke and fill about earlier today, is that they want to get profitable at a thousand turbines onshore. Like, that’s the threshold. Yeah, I need to make a thousand turbines to be profitable. I assume, reading between the lines here, because it wasn’t exactly explained, but Once they make a thousand turbines, everything else becomes, they paid off all the infrastructure and overhead. And so now they’re, they’re making money. Yeah, we saw this down in Florida with Blue Wind, who makes the nacelles for GE. They were planning to make a thousand nacelles in 2025. So that would align with the comment about being profitable at a thousand. But making a thousand turbines and say there’s two megawatt turbines would be two gigawatts. Even GE, Vernova management will admit that the U. S. needs to reach about 15 to 20 gigawatts. And if GE is only contributing two out of the 20, where’s the other 18 coming from? There’s a huge Delta between where the US needs to go and what GE is going to produce. Something doesn’t make sense here. Where’s the marketplace? Philip Totaro: Yeah, and even, I mean, look, even if you say it’s 3 gigawatts or something for GE, they, that’s just their break even point for, again, all the capital invested in the factories and all the sub component suppliers with the orders they need to make. They still, it still costs some money to make. Turbines above that thousand, just to be clear, but what they’re talking about is they, they get more net profit above that thousand turbine threshold than they would otherwise if they only just made a thousand or below. Um, so, which is good for, you know, it’s good for earnings. It makes extra money to reinvest in research and development, new product development, new technology, innovation programs, et cetera. Um, that, that’s the kind of stuff we all like to be able to see, but as you pointed out, the question is, well, if they’re normally, you know, almost 50%, you know, 45 to 50 percent of the U. S. market, and it’s supposed to be at, at 15, uh, you know, they’re, they’re well below, um, you know, there, there’s a chunk of, of capacity that they need to be able to, to capture. Um, and so far. Uh, as far as order announcements for 2025, it’s not looking great, uh, according to our numbers at Intel Store, it’s, you know, they’re, they’re getting, you know, the orders you would expect from NextEra and, and Invenergies of the world, um, you know, those type of companies, but, you know, they’re, they’re getting, you know, the orders you would expect from NextEra and, and Invenergies of the world, um, you know, those type of companies, but, There, there’s still a lot of other orders, um, including some repowering orders that haven’t quite come through yet, or the, the repowering that they thought they were going to do is not quite as big of a chunk of the portfolio. So, you know, we’re still playing a wait and see kind of game. Um, and it comes on the heels of, of, you know, Scott Strasick saying that they expect to the wind division to be able to show, uh, uh, Net profit in the fourth quarter, so he’s obviously extremely optimistic that they’re gonna have something to show for this in, you know, by Allen Hall: the end of this year. Oh, they’re, they’re dramatically cutting supply chains and getting, uh, costs off of their books as we have seen over the last several months. I, I don’t doubt that they’re gonna be more than break even. Infrastructure here matters, right? GE on the electrification side and HVDC and all the transformers and switching gear. That business is doing great. But it does seem like GE is kind of set up to, uh, get both ends of this. If we’re having interconnect problems in the United States, which we clearly are. The electrification side is going to be right there to put the cables in, put the transformers in, get the switchgear in, put the HVDC in, like in Texas is talking about doing, so that we can have interconnect and then we can start placing some turbines because if you can’t power on the grid, there’s no point in putting turbines in the ground. I think GE’s kind of caught up in that, what it looks like right now. It does seem like we’re backwards at the minute, right? GE is poised to go out and as a dominant U. S. manufacturer to go out and sell a lot of wind turbines because the market should be primed for it after what, two years after the IRA bill. But we’re really seeing flat numbers and they’re just trying to improve margins. GE on the wind side is just only, only trying to improve margins, not improve Improve the number of turbines that are being delivered necessarily. And they, Philip Totaro: they’ve done that with what they’ve, you know, how they’ve, you know, made cutbacks in certain areas, as you mentioned, but again, the, the reality of the market is we, we should be deploying a lot more than what we are. Transmission is holding things up. Uh, and the interconnection queues we’ve talked about, you know, at length on the show before, um, you know, here and frankly, in other parts of the world, you know, even. For a lot of offshore projects where, you know, Vernova’s business is, uh, also part of that, um, grid infrastructure and electrification, they haven’t seen, you know, they’ve had some orders, but they haven’t seen as many orders as they probably need to, in order to start unlocking more renewable energy capacity, whether it’s wind, solar or batteries. Um, you know, like you said, you can’t add that to the grid unless we’ve got some place for the power to go. So. It’s, it’s, um, they’re well positioned to be able to take advantage of it, but they, they aren’t seeing things happening fast enough as a result of whether it’s policy or what have Joel Saxum: you. So two, two questions here. Uh, first one leads into the second one, but rosemary. So when we’re talking right now, we’re talking about majority of what we see within the U. S. market and GE. Right, so we know we have interconnect problems, GE’s got some issues and stuff here. But in our talks about our WIND O& M Australia conference, technical conference that we’re putting on in February, the people that we’re talking to are saying Vestas has 65 70 percent of that installed capacity market down in Australia and GE is more like 10 or 15%? Does that mirror what you see or what the projects that you work on? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah. I think Vestas is definitely more common. Um, and yeah, I don’t know, the GA projects also seem to be lots of one offs. Like I don’t see a lot of developers doing project after project with GA, um, where they might sometimes with Vestas. And, um, yeah, I mean, I don’t know the real reason for that. I won’t say that I’ve noticed any difference with the projects that I work on. I mean, I only work on projects where things are going wrong. Sorry. I’m not going to be the right person to like give you an average of how like a really well functioning, um, wind farm goes, but I see equal amounts of problems and equal amounts of problems with communication, um, between all of the manufacturers that I have worked with. So. Yeah, I’m not, I’m not sure exactly. And sometimes it can just be a matter of, you know, whoever’s in there early. Um, it just, people are familiar with that and, and so inclined to use it again. But I also do think that Vestas are more, they’re more, um, looking to the future opportunities and trying to force those opportunities. Like I don’t hear, I hear, um, rumors that. Vestas is, you know, thinking about manufacturing facilities of various types, um, you know, around the country that Vestas is really watching closely, you know, whatever state and its plans for the future and is, you know, like actually working with developers to, um, make those projects happen. Like they’re kind of getting in earlier. I never hear those same things about GE. I mean, presumably they’ve got some sort of. presence here trying to, you know, get in and, um, create opportunities rather than just be offered them. But, um, yeah, usually when I’m hearing about, um, wind turbine manufacturers that are actually making opportunities rather than just, um, you know, yeah, making sales, it’s, it’s Vestas that I hear about doing, doing that. Joel Saxum: So the second part of that question is, okay, if we know the markets like that, um, of course, we’re not going to get a bunch of gold wind turbines in the states that I know of. I, I wouldn’t expect that. Um, but with GE kind of slowing down, or is there any other OEMs, Phil, that you know of that are scooping up any of that spare capacity? Like I had a conversation with someone today that said, like, To be honest with you, Nordex is really making a push at some of these, some of these difficult places and like the Scandinavian countries and whatnot. Um, are you, are we seeing that in the U. S.? Is someone else making a push to backfill this capacity? Philip Totaro: Well, the, the market for, for the longest time has always talked about wanting to have more than just, you know, GE Investus as, as primary options for, for turbine supply. And You know, for a while there, Siemens Gamesa was, was the next best alternative, uh, but they kind of pulled themselves out of the market with this, you know, uh, Blade and other issues that they had with the four megawatt plus platform. Nordex is trying to fill that void. Um, and what’s interesting is that I don’t think Nordex gets enough credit for the, the performance of the Turbine. Because the data that we’ve got shows that for most Nordex project sites, at least the ones that don’t have some teething issues, um, most Nordex project sites in the U. S., um, particularly the ones with the N149, for example, they operate at or, you know, almost consistently at the same level as Vestas V150s. So, you know, they’re, they’re trying to make a push, uh, absolutely to be the number three, you know, turbine OEM in the US market. The interesting thing about GE in Australia is that because of their placement and, and project site selection, um, and the partners that the, the development partners they have down there, they actually trounce everybody else in terms of the financial performance of the project sites with GE turbines. But that’s also because They have project sites up in Queensland where your average PPA is, let’s say, around 50 US dollars per megawatt hour versus the average you get down in Victoria on an annual basis where you see a lot of curtailments, some negative pricing, where your average is like 18 a megawatt hour. We released an analysis that said GE was making 1. 14 million per installed megawatt in net profit for each one of the turbines that they’ve got in Australia versus literally everyone else. Um, was making somewhere between, you know, 315, 000 and 344, 000. They’re going back to, let’s make good, high quality, profitable decisions, as opposed to, let’s sell everybody a turbine that we can possibly sell to anymore. Rosemary Barnes: Do you think that GAE, um, are then taking a lot of extra care to really keep those Queensland customers happy? Um, because it seems like, you know, they should be trying really hard for repeat business up there if that’s, um, you know, the secret to their success in Australia. I wonder if that’s happening. Philip Totaro: I would likely assume so. They, they only have, I think, one project down in Victoria, um, and I think it’s in, I forget which project it is, but I think it’s in a location that hasn’t seen as many curtailments and certainly as many, um, you know, repair issues as, as some of the other OEMs. Down there. So, you know, it’s, it’s just kind of an interesting thing that they’ve been, again, they’ve been very Joel Saxum: selective with, uh, with what they’ve done. So we started the conversation with Alan sharing us some details about GE’s Q3 results. We got into the fact that if you’re going to buy a turbine, you should probably actually ask Phil about which one’s best to buy, depending on geography. And then we ended with, uh, if you inevitably have a problem with this turbine, call Rosemary. Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to our Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

In this episode, we discuss Ocean Winds and Electrobras’ new partnership to develop offshore wind projects in Brazil, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ strategic alliance with Stiesdal Offshore, and Venterra Group’s acquisition of Oceanscan to strengthen offshore wind services. 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.comWind 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 IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www. intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Ocean Winds and Electrobras have announced a new partnership to develop offshore wind projects in Brazil. The collaboration, revealed at Brazil’s WindPower 2024, combines Ocean Winds offshore wind development expertise with Electrobras position as a leader in Latin American energy. Ocean Winds currently manages about 18. 5 gigawatts of offshore wind projects globally. and has registered 15 gigawatts of wind projects across multiple Brazilian states. Now, Phil, OceanWind has been pretty aggressive in hooking up with other places to develop offshore wind. Brazil makes imminent sense. Philip Totaro: Well, it does, as long as they get their act together on how they’re going to run their auctions and how the lease areas that they’ve identified are actually going to be kind of tendered out because they’ve allowed multiple different organizations to submit bids and, and layouts for, for offshore wind farms. They’re still getting some of their site assessment data figured out and they don’t have any kind of regime established like they do for onshore wind as far as the, the power offtake auctions are gonna transpire and, and how that’s all gonna work. So there’s, there, it’s still kind of a relatively, Immature market with a huge amount of potential. There’s I think something like 140 gigawatts of projects that have been proposed down there at this point including those by Ocean Winds, which would now presumably involve Electrobras. So they’re hoping to be able to leverage, this utility power offtake as a means to get their projects hopefully to the the front of the queue. Joel Saxum: Like Phil said, as long as they can get some of the regulatory and politics and the PPA stuff figured out, they’re in a good place. Because not only do they have great wind resources, Brazil knows how to operate in an offshore environment. They’ve been doing offshore oil and gas there for many, many, many years. So, Port facilities, work boats, all those things exist down there, and as does a mariner economy to boot. So, they build their own vessels, they do all kinds of great stuff in Brazil. They’ll be able to support the offshore wind market from a technical and operations standpoint. Easier than some of the emerging offshore markets will have. Allen Hall: Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has formed a strategic alliance with Stiesdal Offshore, acquiring a minority stake through its Copenhagen Infrastructure Partnership. Five Fund. The partnership focuses on driving innovation and cost efficiency in floating offshore wind technology. Stiesdal Offshore plans to expand its services from design and development of floating foundations to becoming a comprehensive provider of floating wind solutions. The company has developed over 30 specific initiatives aimed at reducing capital expenditures in floating wind projects. All right, Phil, this is really interesting because floating wind cost structure is much higher than fixed bottom offshore wind for sure. But it looks like Stiesdal is going to actually take a good look at floating and try to reduce some of the costs, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners joining along with them makes a ton of sense. Philip Totaro: It does and a little bit of this is, Danes doing things with other Danes but, The, the good news is this is kind of a mutually beneficial thing for, for both parties. Obviously, CIP has a lot of different options on the table as far as, floating foundation partners. And like you say, I mean, at this point, because of the lack of commercial deployment of floating, the, the LCOE doesn’t look, doesn’t look good. Good compared to fixed bottom, but even our own projections based on scaling up the, the floating foundations looks like you’re gonna get a better cost per megawatt installed. LCOE for, for floating offshore. So, a company that has this kind of a pedigree with Heinrich’s background, as well as Peter Nicholson is their, their CEO. They’re, they’re eminently qualified through their, their past history in Danish wind to be able to, to champion this. And Heinrich’s been working on this ever since he left Siemens, almost No, probably eight years ago or so now, I think at this point. So he’s putting, putting everything into making sure that, that this works and this kind of capital injection may, encourage them to get to that next step, which is plus this partnership will encourage the, the next step. for them to take, which is getting firm orders for these floating foundations at scale and being able to establish go out and get the credit established for them to be able to, to put the fabrication facilities in place to start building these things. Allen Hall: In other industry news, Venterra Group has acquired Oceanscan, strengthening its offshore wind service capabilities. Oceanscan provides subsea and non destructive test equipment, geotechnical services, and specialist personnel to the offshore wind sector. The acquisition was supported by a 30 million equity investment from General Atlantic’s Beyond Net Zero and First Reserve, along with a 110 million in bank facility from HSBC, NatWest, Rabobank, and Citibank. Oceanscan’s operations span multiple locations, including Aberdeen, Houston, Singapore, with specialized subsidiaries across the United Kingdom. The offshore, obviously in the UK, is really developed and it’s expanding rapidly with the change in government. And investment is starting to roll in on some of these offshore support organizations. Philip Totaro: It is, and it’s interesting because Venterra’s Typically known as being more of a, maintenance provider and, and overall kind of project management. They’ve been, however, branching out recently with investments in other companies. And this acquisition. Just kind of broadens out the scope of what they’re able to, to offer. So, I think it’s it’s a good thing certainly from, from their perspective where they, they want to be able to offer more reach and more scope, but it’s coming at a point in time when, as you mentioned, there’s a tremendous amount of work that Oceanscan’s going to need to be able to undertake to support those projects. So, I think this is coming at I think this is coming at a great time for both companies and it, it should prove to be a fruitful thing for Venterra.