The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week we go on a deep dive on offshore wind in the US–what’s the status of projects that have been approved? Why do approvals for new sites seem to be slowing down? Is there enough manufacturing capacity to meet the transition goals? What can be done to boost wind energy growth? 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: All right, Joel, it’s baseball season, and it’s actually playoff baseball season. Did you have a bunch of money on the Brewers already? Joel Saxum: I don’t bet on my own teams, but I love them. And my heart got ripped out of my chest last night watching that damn game. Because it was, if you didn’t follow, it was 0 0 going into the seventh. We hit two back to back home runs, and the Brewers, everybody in Wisconsin was riding high, and then we had four runs rung up on us in the ninth. So there goes our playoff run. And I was looking forward to being able to josh back and forth with our weather guard, lightning tech COO about her Philly fanatic fandom. But we won’t get to see them in the playoffs. Allen Hall: Well, it is fall in America, and that’s when the baseball playoffs start and college football kicks off. So everything, food wise, changes. The pumpkin spice is out, Joel. Not a fan. God, please. No one’s a fan of pumpkin spice? Pumpkin spice French toast, I’m a fan of, but that’s the only thing. That’s not bad. What about squash and cranberries? I mean, you gotta like one of those. Philip Totaro: Cranberry, I’ll take cranberries. Joel Saxum: Cranberries up from northern Wisconsin, right? I grew up next to a cranberry bog. Allen Hall: Alright, this is something everybody can agree upon. Maple syrup. Two cheers for maple syrup. Sure, why not. Joel Saxum: You’re from northern New York, Phil! They do maples. There’s that syrup country. Sure. But I’m also not 12 years old eating a stack of pancakes anymore. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, and I’ll be joined by my Uptime co host. After these news headlines, in a bold move, Spain’s Acciona Energy has unveiled plans for a massive 3 gigawatt wind farm in Western Australia. The project, named Bellwether, aims to install 400 turbines, each with a capacity of 6. 2 megawatts. Once operational, it could become the largest onshore wind farm outside of China, significantly boosting Australia’s renewable energy capacity. Shifting to technology advancements, Weidmüller USA has introduced BoltControl, an innovative monitoring system for wind turbine blades. This system detects broken bolts in the blade root, potentially preventing costly damage and reducing downtime. The technology promises to enhance safety and efficiency in wind farm operations. In South Korea, Unison has achieved a milestone by developing the country’s largest offshore wind turbine. The 10 megawatt direct drive turbine represents a significant leap in Korea’s wind energy capabilities. For Unison plans to begin performance tests in October of this year, with commercialization expected by early 2026. GE Vernova has secured five new agreements in Spain, further solidifying its presence in the European wind market. The company will supply a total of 16 turbines for wind farms in Castilla, León, each with a capacity of 6. 1 megawatts. Additionally, GE Vernova will repower a wind farm in Catalonia and supply turbines for a new project in Andalusia. Lastly, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has postponed the Oregon Offshore Wind Energy Auction. Due to insufficient bidder interest, this delay highlights the challenges facing offshore wind development in certain regions. BOEM plans to continue collaborating with stakeholders to support ongoing engagement processes and develop a strategic roadmap for offshore wind in Oregon. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, CEO and founder of IntelStore, Phil Totaro, And the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Sexson. 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. Well, as offshore wind is really slowing down on the West Coast, particularly in Oregon, there’s been a number of changes on the East Coast around New York. Massachusetts Rhode Island where the ownership is changing hands pretty rapidly. And some projects have been kicked down the road a little bit to allow the developers to get everything in, in, in place before. They start pounding monopiles in the ocean bottom. But there, Phil, there’s been a number of more financial transactions than there has been putting monopiles in. A lot of financial companies have entered into the marketplace. A lot of power companies, state owned power companies for essentially are pulling out of offshore wind. That has changed the dynamic quite a bit. And you’re getting more outside players, non U. S. players into the U. S. offshore market. What is the, sort of, the current status of that? And Joel, sort of, what does that look like in terms of growth? Is it really going to stagnate? Or what do you see out in the In the ocean there from all the ship activity. Joel Saxum: Well, I know like, Alan, you and I we kind of regularly watch that marine traffic. com. I, and I every couple of weeks I’m flipping up looking at like the TGS or foresee offshore maps and just kind of peeking around what’s happening. But we know right now, of course, Block Island, steel in the water. She’s been there for a while. That one’s always going to be there and running. But as far as all these other wind farms we’ve been talking about for the last few years, active steel in the water, we have Vineyard Wind, which is Avangrid, right? And we also have South Fork, which is Orsted. And these are off the coast of Massachusetts. Rhode Island here, but South Fork is small, right? Like Block Island, it’s like five turbines. South Fork, I think there’s a dozen turbines there in the water. Vineyard Wind, of course, a little bit bigger, but they had, the blade issues. So they slowed down and they paused on that one. And outside of those wind farms, as far as I know, the only other one that has steel in the water is the CVOW, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. Down off the coast of Virginia. So Phil, am I right or wrong there? Those are the only ones with steel in the water. Philip Totaro: Yeah. The, so there’s some kind of early stage development activity still happening for a lot of the stuff that’s obviously not gone through tendering yet, the stuff that has gone through Boehm. Consent is not quite as much as, everyone has hoped and to go back to the beginning of this Alan mentioned that, Oregon’s not really moving forward which is unfortunate, but it’s just reflective of the times. So we’re, whereas we were going through. A phase where we were having a lot of auctions. Now, BOEM is kind of slowing down the process of having these auctions and trying to take the projects that are, quote unquote shovel ready and getting them, approved as much as they can. That said, there, there is still kind of a need and an opportunity for offshore wind and his interest rates will hopefully continue to come down. It opens the door for a more profitable project where, if you remember back, what, three years ago, even, we had projects with PPAs that were being executed for like 77, hour. That’s relatively competitive with, some of the legacy onshore wind or solar projects in some of these same states where we would be doing the offshore wind offtake. So. Offshore wind will make some sense moving forward. It’s really not going quite as quick as we would like, of course. But it looks like BOEM has at this point shifted their approach from doing more auctions to doing more consents and approvals of projects that have already been tendered. Presumably to get the ball rolling on BOEM. Once this project’s been approved by everybody, including the government, makes it a lot harder to be undone by any kind of future regime change in, the presidency and whoever’s in control of Boehm. Joel Saxum: So, Phil, one of the things that we talked about this slow down, not going as fast as we wanted to these things. One of the positive things that I’m actually hearing from, my connections within the WIM network is that it’s allowing the ISPs a little bit of time to catch up. So we’re allow, we’re being able to get more people trained. There’s been some, some shifting, some gears and people working offshore and some things going on. We’ve launched our first SOV, our first Jones Act compliant SOV. There’s another, I think there’s another two of those being built right now in different places around the country, but it’s giving, we went really hard and fast at it and there was all these kinds of issues and now we’re backing off, slowing down a little bit. And like the pendulum has kind of swung the other way. It seems like the from a supply chain standpoint, and maybe not a supply chain as far as hardware, but a supply chain as far as services and those kinds of things. As a unit, the offshore wind industry in the United States is supported by the onshore wind industry in the United States because that’s what’s happening. Is being able to catch up a little bit. Allen Hall: Alan, are you hear that same thing? Oh, I think there’s been a lot of effort focused on offshore on the O& M side. There’s more people gathering steam and getting expertise from overseas to spool up their offerings. That was a smart move. I think the bigger picture going back into Phil’s discussion of, hey, what’s going to be developed over the next couple of years, not much, and the reason is because the factories do not exist to ramp it up. If you take a look at Siemens Gamesa was supposed to build a blade factory in Virginia. They decided not to do that. GE is closing down half a line in France. The, that means they got one line in France and one light up in gas bay to build offshore blades with Siemens is going to rely on Hull in England to do the 108 meter blades. Vestas is kind of in a similar situation that in order to start putting a lot of turbines out on the East coast of the United States, you would have to. add at least five, six, seven factories, blade factories or blade lines, so to speak to fulfill these orders. So even though there may be some demand in the U. S. with the high interest rates, you’re still stuck because you can’t get the blades, you can’t get them you may be able to get towers, but that’s it. Which I think is what’s going to happen is they’re going to end up driving monopiles in some of these and waiting, which could be more than 12 months, maybe closer to 36 months before you start seeing some turbine deliveries is they’re just not increasing capacity. Joel Saxum: Yeah. And at the end of the day the steel isn’t the hard component, right? Like can ramp up, you can ramp up factories all over the place to create the steel components. We need transition pieces, monopiles, these kinds of things. They’re specialized, but they’re not that specialized. Not like 108 meter blade or these nacelles or the other thing that need to be built. So yeah, there’s definitely I could see that Alan. I said, that’s a concept I didn’t really have thought of is. Putting steel in the water and then just waiting until the turbines come. Yeah. Philip Totaro: Well, but the reality with that is that it’s unlikely to happen because they don’t want to, there are still reliability issues with doing that. If you’re waiting on parts, they’re just gonna delay the project. The problem, Allen Hall: Phil, is gonna be driving the monopiles and having the ships to drive the monopiles, right? They have a schedule set, to do that part of it. I think that may happen because of the schedule Philip Totaro: with the ships. Well, yes and no, but that’s kind of my point, is we, there are so few projects that have even been consented in the U. S. right now that, that are ready to be built, that don’t already have a vessel assigned. And at the end of the day, these new power offtake agreements that have been signed with different states like New York or New Jersey or whomever, they don’t have, they just have, a price tag without necessarily a definitive, install by date if you will. So we, we have a situation where the developers and independent power producers have an opportunity to kind of. Stretch things out, stretch your schedule out to be able to accommodate when the vessels are going to be available and the turbine components are going to be available. But this goes, the reason that we don’t have all those factories goes back to the pace of. the approvals and the pace of the build out to begin with. We got caught in a scenario where everybody wanted to do factories in the U. S. GE wanted to have factories, Vestas wanted to do one in Jersey, Joel just talked about some of the other ones in Virginia and elsewhere. At the end of the day, most of them didn’t get built because we just got caught in this scenario of, escalating interest rates, and which triggered all those, power purchase contract renegotiations, which, delayed things because with PPAs going up, CapEx has to go up, it’s more money that the developer has to go ask for, and the bank is saying, well, We’re not giving you any more, we, this is the situation. We got to spread our risk out and diversify our investments as well. We’re only prepared to give you, this much. And if you’re trying to get your project to a financial close to FID, you can’t do that if the bank is only giving you a 60 percent of the capital you’re going to need to be able to build a project. So. The industry’s having to do more with less, but this also addresses your earlier point, which is if we’re not going to be in a position to spend the CapEx now, it’s easier to get ramped up on all those soft costs around the OpEx and the services and everything else, because it’s cheaper to do. And we have the time and bandwidth to be able to do it. So we might as well take advantage of that. Allen Hall: I want to take a quick break here, but after the break, I want to talk about the investors and how they have driven. This marketplace. We’re now the OEMs. Some of them don’t want to participate anymore. 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. Also The aspect of the investment banks and all the financiers that have been involved in offshore wind have driven the marketplace in a very unique way. At first it was, we wanted to put the biggest turbines we can out in the water, reduce the number of monopiles, reduce the amount of cables. So on your spreadsheet, setting up in an office, probably in Toronto or somewhere, that they’ve looked at it and said, hey, I can get more power out of a larger turbine, obviously, I can reduce my cost, my profitability goes up, everything seems hunky dory on that spreadsheet. The problem has been, though, is that when Vestas went after these turbines and started, pushing 12 to 15, and it sounds like Siemens is going to develop a 20 megawatt turbine for sure, but GE and Vestas are going to hang around 15 megawatt, that they ran into development problems. That it wasn’t as easy as just building it. It wasn’t, it was more of an engineering task than they thought it was going to be in a manufacturing test for that matter. So now the investment decisions that were made a year or two, three years ago now are really wreaking havoc. The GEs of the world don’t see profit on offshore wind on a major scale. Why would I build a factory? Why would I build that factory to build a factory? I think Joel, I think the number of investors was about a half a billion dollars to build a blade factory, something in that realm. So if you have to build five, six, seven of these things, you’re talking about three, four, five, probably five in this marketplace, 5 billion to build up blade factories, that’s just for the blades, goodness sakes. Why would you do that? There’s no ROI on that. So if the investment banks want to go off and make ROI on the projects, You have to look at it from the OAN’s perspective, they need an ROI also, and that has been stripped, completely stripped from them. Philip Totaro: There’s two things at play there though, one is Vessels aren’t gonna be capable, not for a while, of installing anything that’s, 18 to 20 like the Siemens Gamesa looks like they’re gonna do. It’s, so, the reality there is the supply chain, notwithstanding, you also have vessels that are the bigger holdup in being able to do that. Because it’s not just the construction of the project site. If you have a problem with one of those turbines, and we’ve been talking on various, iterations of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast about, replaceable technology and whatnot. But at the end of the day, if you have to have service performed on a 20 megawatt offshore wind turbine or bigger. There are only going to be a handful of vessels that are going to be capable of doing it, and if they’re already booked for installations elsewhere in the world, what are you going to do to repair a turbine? Now, instead of having, a project site where you’ve got one turbine goes down, and it’s maybe, three to five percent of your entire project site’s power output, if you have fewer turbines and a 20 megawatt turbine goes down, that could be 10 percent of your or, something substantial in terms of your site’s power output. So the bottom line is that’s where the financial forecasters, a spreadsheet breaks down, but it also, it just one other thing. It also comes back to, the, there’s not actually that much different, and this is why, cause this is kind of related to what leading light has or what happened with leading light. Why they’re delaying the project is. They said that they can’t get the size turbine they want from GE, which was an 18 megawatt. GE is only going to give them a 15 and a half. Now, I don’t really see much of a difference between the two other than obviously some power ratings, some rotor size, etc. But it’s not like it’s actually going to be that much LCOE difference between a 15 and a half megawatt turbine and an 18 megawatt turbine. Okay, so I don’t understand why that’s a problem. Allen Hall: No, but on the Excel spreadsheet, if you start looking at the third digit there, Pass the decimal, it’s bigger. And that’s what’s happening. It gets down to that sort of a couple half a percentage point, a quarter of a percentage point. Philip Totaro: It is, but they also said, okay, that we can’t use a Vestas turbine at the site. Okay, fine, that’s a technical issue. Has less to do with, I mean, I still think they probably could have made a Vestas turbine work at the site, but so I think that’s maybe a bit of salesmanship there. But then they also suggested that we can’t really source from Siemens because Siemens turbines are just going to be too expensive. And that’s. Just the new reality we’re in. The reality is that the OEMs are not going to lose money. Not anymore. They were prepared to do that before, Joel Saxum: but they’re not going to do it anymore. Nope. That day is over. The one thing I’m looking at is this, is like, there’s a really simple number that we need to look at. Right now, we’ve only got a hundred turbines in the water. And in the next year, maybe a hundred more. In the next two, three years, maybe two hundred. So, like, there’s no, there’s absolutely no demand or reason to build new blade factories or build a nacelle factory. Like, if you’re going to build one, build it somewhere where they’re going to throw a lot of stuff in the water and, like, and just use it Philip Totaro: to support as a global thing. Joel, why aren’t we buying turbines from China, then? Because they seem to have plenty of factories over there. Allen Hall: I’ll tell you why we’re not. We’re not because the DOE and the administration said it was going to create good paying American jobs. Thanks. And those good paying American jobs were going to be in blade factories and the cell factories and the assemblies and the ports, and that can’t happen now, but you can feel it though, right? You can feel that tension building on what is going on in offshore wind. Why is it taking so long? And I have to throw in, and I was at the AMI wind turbine blade conference this past week. Which was tremendous, by the way, I had a really good time and man, did I meet a lot of new people and a lot of people that I knew from all over the world. But the consensus on offshore is that it is going to go much slower than was ever envisioned and that the OEMs are not going to start building things on wishes and dreams. That is completely done that and even getting to your point about ships, Joel, the ships are coming in at, way over budget. And the delays in the schedules have been really pronounced. That’s not going to help anything. So, in the meantime, which is what I was concerned with coming out of EMI is, alright, what is going to happen by 2030? Where is all this electricity going to come from? Evidently, Microsoft is going to restart one of the nuclear facilities in New York just for servers and AI, but is there going to be a push, a more broader push, because offshore can’t develop fast enough to get other renewables online, if that hydro, solar, Onshore wind, where is this going and how Philip Totaro: fast? Keep in mind too, that for all the stuff that’s in the interconnection queue right now, all those developers have paid money to be in that queue, and are gonna pay even more money to get out of the queue and get their thing approved, and get the project built. So, it’s not like the government doesn’t have the financial resources to be able to go and staff up and get the appropriate people in place to start speeding up the interconnection queue issue that we’ve got, but that’s only one part of it. Transmission build out and demand are still going to end up driving the majority of this if demand keeps going up, particularly driven by these data centers and AI use and that sort of thing. Then that’s going to necessitate speeding up the permitting process. That’s going to, coincide with lowering interest rates, which would hopefully unlock some floodgates as far as capital is concerned, and should get more projects going. But, Again you’re going to have to invest in the infrastructure necessary, which is really Joel Saxum: transmission. Alan, you said it right. Like the consensus here is that there’s a lot of great wind resources. We need to connect things to the grid, but none of that is near the load centers that need the renewable energy. That’s why three mile Island got just signed up by Microsoft to start back up because. It’s a load center that’s near, like, we have New York, you have that whole east coast. That’s why we’re going with offshore wind over there, because there’s no real estate to build renewables or, other kind of There’s a great onshore wind resource. I mean, there’s some in upstate New York and you can, and that’s being moved on transmission to New York city and stuff. But like at the end of the day, like the only option you got here is what we’ve talked about before. It’s like HVDC somewhere else to get Philip Totaro: power. And look the 1. 5 billion for some additional transmission, including the Southern Spirit transmission Linking, for the first time ever, ERCOT to any other part of the United States. So they’re not going to be fully islanded anymore down in Texas, Joel. Allen Hall: If they’re going to, if they’re going to be investing money into renewable energy and they really want to get offshore wind going, they’re going to have to build GE a factory. New York or the feds are going to have to put down a billion dollars in some sort of factory in New York. Or New Jersey, somewhere up in there to speed this on if you could say, Hey, GE, here’s the facility. Here’s all the infrastructure. You need to put a blade mold in there and some people let’s go. I’m going to or I’m going to low cost you on the loan to go do this and give you a low interest loan. 0 percent loan. You’re going to pay it back over 20 years and deferred taxes or whatever they wanted to do to it. You’re going to have to sweeten that pot to get a GE or a Siemens to start producing blades in quantity. Philip Totaro: All right, let me break it down like this, because we’ve been, one of the hot topics coming out of the Wind Energy Hamburg last week was, China’s incursion into the European market. And at the end of the day, we started doing some research ourselves on, China, since they’ve started doing the Belt and Road, I don’t remember off the top of my head, like, how much they’ve spent, but just in the past 21 months China spent over 100 billion, the equivalent of 100 billion Euro in pursuing energy related projects through their Belt and Road initiative, which is investments in foreign markets, okay? The European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development have collectively spent about 18 billion euros in that same time frame. I don’t have numbers yet for how much we’ve spent in terms of foreign direct investment. That’s one equation and one part of it. But even domestically, how are we keeping up with China when their government has dedicated that much money to ensuring that their OEMs are successful? You’re absolutely right if the government in the U. S. doesn’t step in and help to build a factory for G. E. Because right now, G. E. would build a factory, but they can’t do it because they don’t have order book. The reason they don’t have order book is because of all these other things we just talked about. But at the end of the day, some, somebody, something’s gotta give, and if you’re committed to supporting domestic production and building a domestic industry, then you gotta get your wallet out and start spending some taxpayer money on, re prioritizing it from whatever else you’re spending it on to this, alright? You want an offshore wind industry, you gotta build it, you gotta invest in it. Allen Hall: Bill, the IRA bill was 670 billion dollars, right? Right. We couldn’t have built a factory inside of that 600 plus billion. Philip Totaro: Or two, or three, or four? Sounds like we could have built a few of them, y’know? If they’re half a billion each for, y’know, a blade factory and a cell factory, I mean, y’know, yeah. We probably could have included some of that cost, or at least done some kind of tax deferment on some of that, considering the circumstances where we all know that we’re in a high, y’know, interest rate environment still. So let’s do something to either, let’s lower those interest rates a little faster, or let’s, do something else that’s gonna spur in interest and investment. Because with oil and gas companies pulling capital out, Everybody else is going to start pulling capital out of renewables and we’re not going to have, we’re going to be, we’re supposed to be, top in the world on onshore wind, offshore wind, everything else we are going to be. You know the laughing stock of the industry where you know europe and asia continue to outpace us Allen Hall: it’s there’s a good racing analogy to this which I like to use in this case if they lowered interest rates back down to something normal the problem is you’re in 20th position. And the lead car is a half mile in front of you, maybe more. And now you’re going exactly the same speed. You can’t catch up. You have to pour a little more gas into that fire to get back up to where you want to be. Right? So that delay doesn’t go away. Now you have to really pour money into it. To catch up, Philip Totaro: right? And they’ve made it, they’ve created a situation where you’re right. It is even more expensive, although you also don’t want to lower interest rates too much, too fast, because that creates other economic issues. But the point is that we’ve, even the jobs report we saw this week where unemployment’s dropped to 4. 1 percent in the U S you’ve got us, you’ve got an economic scenario where, you know, everybody, including the Fed now kind of agrees that the market can probably handle. More rate easing, and we’re going to get into a scenario where you’re going to be able to create more of a favorable environment. But that’s just, as Alan just pointed out, that’s just getting us back up to the speed that we were going before. How do we catch up to where we’re supposed to be? We’ve talked on the show about how the government put, a 15 gigawatt by 2030 plan in place, and then they had to revise it because it was clear that we were never going to achieve that much in installation and operating facilities. So now it’s 15 gigawatts permitted by 2030, which probably isn’t even going to happen now at this point either with the pace they’re going. Especially if Boehm’s gonna reining in the auctions because there’s such limited interest. I mean, this is exactly what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with Texas in particular. Even the Louisiana sites that they did auction when they had that auction about a, a little over a year ago Pitton’s was paid, by the companies who got those lease sites. Nobody wants to even do an auction in Oregon at the moment, particularly with, the tribes and other people there locally piling on and saying, we’re going to oppose this, which, look, at the end of the day, even the opposition that we’ve got in Massachusetts, New Jersey, None of these people that’s opposing offshore wind legally is actually going to stop that process from happening, the development process on a project site from happening, unless they hit them when they’re, they kick them when they’re down. Basically, they hit them at a point where interest rates are slowing down the project development process to the point where it causes the government to have a bit of a rethink on, well, can we really sustain this? And if they’re gonna start pulling the plug on the mechanisms that create a market environment where everybody’s free to invest, then all these crackpots are gonna come out of the woodwork and try and file a lawsuit to try and pile on the offshore wind developers, trying to get them to divert money and resources away from project development to legal fees. So, none of this is helping us go fast and catch back up to where we need to be. And get us back into a position where we are market leading in offshore wind. Joel Saxum: Okay, the wind farm of the week this week is the seven cowboy wind farm built by nl in oklahoma It’s out west of oklahoma city about an hour and a half It has 107 ge 2x machines the 2. 82 with 127 meter rotors it’s located in Washita and Kiowa Counties. That 107 turbines will generate approximately 1. 3 terawatt hours of energy annually. And it will, that’s enough energy to power 120, 000 households, which in western Oklahoma is a lot. So that energy though, and this is an interesting thing, is being sold from this wind farm on some PPA or virtual PPAs. The companies lined up for them are Campbell Soup Company, which is kind of a neat one. Thermo Fisher Scientific is another one of the PPAs. They’re taking 90 megawatts of a virtual PPA. And then the other interesting one is a Japanese pharmaceutical company called Katayama. Takeda and they’re taking 79 megawatts of electricity off this wind farm. Now the thing Enel is doing with this one that I really like is they have built a training facility in Oklahoma city to bolster the wind technician shortage that we’re seeing. And this is a thing that’s near and dear to us here at the Uptime podcast. We’ve started the build turbines. com website as a resource for technicians looking to get in or companies looking to recruit technicians, but Enel is also doing the same thing by having their own training facility up there in Oklahoma city. So, these 300 construction jobs created by the seven cowboy wind farm during construction, 55 million in local tax revenue, and 41 million in landowner payments over the life of the wind farm are a great thing for Oklahoma. So seven cowboy wind farm from NL out there in Western Oklahoma, you are our wind farm of the week. 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 Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. Transcribed 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, the hosts discuss Macquarie Asset Management’s acquisition of Ziton, a Denmark based provider of operations and maintenance services to the offshore industry. Also, Octopus Energy solidifies its entry into the US renewables market with an investment to create 600 megawatts of new solar farms in the U. S. And Berkshire Hathaway consolidates their company operations, opening the door for more renewable projects. 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: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxum. And this Is your newsflash news flashes brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway energy, the second largest us clean power owner will pay about 3. 9 billion for the minority 8 percent stake held by the family of late board member, Walter Scott. The deal involves 2. 37 billion in cash. The exchange of Berkshire Class B shares for 1. 6 billion BHE shares and issuance of a 600 million one year note. As of January 1st, Berkshire Hathaway Energy owned about 14 gigawatts of clean energy capacity, including 12 gigawatts of wind. And roughly 2 gigawatts of solar and storage. Now, Phil, Berkshire Hathaway Energy has been consolidating operations over the last 6 to 12 months. Is this part of that larger plan to consolidate? Philip Totaro: It sounds like it although this is also obviously a bit of a legacy thing with taking over the stake held by, by Scott’s family and presumably in some kind of a trust or something. Like. It’s giving Berkshire Hathaway Energy the opportunity, as you mentioned, to just consolidate the, the company’s ownership and consolidate the brands under the Berkshire Hathaway Energy umbrella, which theoretically gives them more power. Bandwidth and more capacity to keep borrowing if they need to borrow to go, build out the pipeline of renewable energy projects that they’ve got. So one thing that we’ve talked about recently on the show is the fact that there’s a lot of investment funds and firms coming into the renewable sector. What they bring with them is capital, or the ability to go leverage the, the capital base that they’ve got to go borrow money. So for your big utility company owner operators, they want to be able to do a similar thing. And this is going to help kind of bolster the, the company’s ability to, to do that. Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s the same thing. Like Phil saying, we’ve talked about on the show before Berkshire Hathaway backed Warren Buffett, big money is following the same concept as you’re seeing with a lot of other big money groups, Vanguard, BlackRock, all these different and, and of course, pension funds and whatnot of putting their capital Into energy infrastructure world, right? So they’re helping build up the energy transition, but that’s because they see it as good business. So when you see big money coming into a certain sector, you can bet it’s going to be around a while and they’re betting banking on success. UK Allen Hall: based Octopus Energy has made two new investments in the U. S. green energy market. Following its initial entry just three months ago with solar farm acquisitions in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the company sealed a deal with solar farm developer SoCal to help them rapidly scale up, targeting 600 megawatts of new solar farms in the U. S. Over the next five years, primarily in Texas, this is expected to generate enough green power for about 40, 000 Texan homes. UK based solar developer Zestec, supported by Octopus Energy, is also moving into the U. S. market, focusing on commercial and industrial rooftop solar projects. Okay, Phil, so the solar industry is really ramping up in the United States. Octopus has been active there and is now bringing others over. The rapid development of solar in the United States is pushing a lot of investment, too. How fast do you expect solar to grow here over the next 12 months? Philip Totaro: There’s a tremendous amount of solar projects in the pipeline of project development pipeline, as well as in the interconnection cubes. And the reason for the timing of this, and why we want to cover a solar play here on, on the wind energy podcast is the fact that Octopus Group in general, an octopus energy, they’re, they’re obviously energy focus subsidiary is, is doing this at this time is they feel the conditions are right for. Their type of business model and what that is, is they sometimes will go leverage the capital that they bring to the table, but they also have a pretty unique perspective where they’ve partnered with companies in the UK, like Ripple Energy, for instance, where they do either fractional ownership or community development. Of sites on behalf of a multitude of, of different owners and investors in a project. And so that’s part of the angle here is for them to be able to deploy a rather substantial amount of capital into, much smaller, um, solar plays within the market. In, in the US which hasn’t really been particularly well penetrated. We’ve got a lot of corporate and industrial power buying for solar and, and industrial rooftop solar. Obviously we’ve got some residential and that still, needs to be built out. We’re not quite at the same levels of penetration, at least on a percentage wise basis compared to places like Australia, for example. But there’s, there’s more room to grow and as octopus, pardon the pun, but extends his tentacles and, and, tries to, Ensure that they’ve got a, a presence in in both utility scale, wind utility scale, solar utility scale, energy storage technology. This also gives them a chance with these partnerships to get into the residential solar market and ensure that they could take advantage of. The growth potential that that we see in the market. Joel Saxum: So in the United States, there’s a two, two very separate markets for solar, right? You have your big utility scale stuff and you have your smaller stuff that is industrial commercial residential, whether it’s rooftops or or some people putting solar panels on top of parking structures, these kind of things. As Phil mentioned, Australia is leading the world, of course, in this, in this space of integration with solar and the community itself. Octopus coming in with their knowledge, their expertise, and some capital behind them to make a move in this sector. It’s a good thing for the energy transition within the United States. Allen Hall: Macquarie Asset Management is set to acquire 100 percent ownership of Ziton, a Denmark based provider of operations and maintenance services to the offshore wind industry. The acquisition is expected to be completed in December of this year, or the first quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approvals. Zyton recently launched a new brand identity, Zyton 2. 0, signaling its focus on future decades of O& M service solutions for offshore wind turbines. All right, Phil, so Macquarie has been investing in renewable energy, and particularly in wind. The push offshore and then being an australian based organization is that to prepare for the offshore growth in australia or they really focused on offshore Philip Totaro: growth over in northern europe they’re looking at a global perspective Allen. Is it on themselves has been active in eleven different countries on i think it’s something like eighty or eighty five different projects. And. It’s mostly European but that’s also based on the legacy of their, EPC vessels and service vessels that they’ve developed and utilized over the past few decades. Now, with the industry looking to push to much bigger scale and heights in, in terms of turbine size, as well as the pace of deployment globally with the consolidation in the market with Kedler. For example, and, other companies, Van Oord and Bonner and, and companies like this, really building out their portfolio of vessels. The Chinese are also starting to look like they’re going to be competition globally as far as both the equipment providers and the EPC contractors and vessels even if you’re gonna have a European flagged vessel, you may end up still having it fabricated over in China just because of how cost effective it can be to do that. So this play on behalf of Macquarie is helping them kind of build pieces of a puzzle where, you’ve seen them make acquisitions in onshore wind, offshore wind, some solar and storage, they’ve made acquisitions in asset management. They’ve made acquisitions now in companies that can provide services. I would anticipate that they’re not done yet making acquisitions, but it’s also part of bringing a lot of capabilities in house and positioning themselves for the future of the industry. So, Joel Saxum: talking at the recent Hamburg event, a lot of, People got together, a lot of ideas were shared, a lot of information was shared. One of the things you heard out of the, coming out of that market over there in the EU is that there is some consolidation going on. And part of this goes hand in hand with some margin compression and some other things that are happening within the market. But when you see a group like Zaytan that, their EBITDAs, Going up this year and things are looking bright having some big money come in. It looks good for that space the whole offshore wind O& M space as the, we continue the build out for offshore wind. Nice to see more money coming in in the face of some different market conditions.

Allen and Joel sit down with Jonathan Zalar, Managing Partner at Independent Wind Turbine Generator Consulting (IWTG). With over a decade of experience at GE Renewable Energy, Jonathan shares invaluable insights on recent wind turbine issues, including blade defects, bearing problems, and the challenges of rapid rotor size increases. This is a must-listen episode for a deep exploration of wind turbine maintenance, data analytics, and the importance of thorough inspections in the ever-evolving wind energy industry. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxon. Today, we’re joined by Jonathan Zalar, Managing Partner at Independent Wind Turbine Generator Consulting, or IWTG. With over a decade of experience at GE Renewable Energy, including roles in root cause analysis and systems engineering, Jonathan brings a deep industry knowledge to his consulting work. We’ll discuss recent events that we have seen in the field. Explore how his expertise is helping wind turbine owners optimize their assets and tackle some industry challenges. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So you’ve been around looking at blades and turbines for the last several months. Thanks. Thanks. And we’ve been in contact a little bit about what you’ve been seeing. Maybe just give us a brief description of what’s happened this summer in terms of blades and turbines. A lot of Jonathan Zalar: customers are starting to realize that there’s some, some bigger issues that are coming to a head. And the need to like, look more is becoming more apparent. So, just because you have an external crack and you’re about to go repair, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Maybe take a look inside, especially if it’s easy to get to. I have a few customers that are finding, internal cracks and needs to monitor some internal. Issues more and more. So, relying just on drones is maybe not the best thing anymore. Allen Hall: Yeah. Let, let’s, let’s talk about that because we’re seeing a lot of internal cracks. It doesn’t, the manufacturer doesn’t seem to be important here. It seems to be universal. the crack situation. Operators don’t really have tools to go do that themselves besides, and they’ve been using drone inspections forever. So they, are they interpreting drone inspections external once it looks good on the outside is probably good on the inside. And is that the right Jonathan Zalar: move? In most cases, it probably is, but depending on the type of crack you have and potentially like some history on the particular blades, you might want to start taking a look inside. And I think More, I think as I don’t know, the industry keeps going with the blade repairs, they’re going to start finding that, some of these might have started on the inside versus the outside. I mean, historically, most of the stuff that’s starting on the outside, I mean, you got a lot of, the coding coming off the small stuff that, cat ones that you can steal with later, but as some, so you can cat fours and fives. They started somewhere and if you’re not confident it was the outside, spend the extra money, look on the inside. Joel Saxum: So, someone like yourself who’s got experience like you, you have experience from GEs, right? So you’ve been around the block for most all the, the last ten plus years of GE turbines. You, you understand them, you know them, you have manufacturing experience, you have the RCA experience. So someone like yourself going to help, One of these operators be that extra bit of bandwidth that they need in engineering. It’s, it’s priceless for them because the knowledge that you bring is huge. So we’re seeing like, I’m, why I’m highlighting that is it’s important in my mind for some of these operators to not just look to their internal teams to solve problems, right? What does it look like? I mean, for clients coming to you. To solve these problems, is your book full? What does it look like? Jonathan Zalar: It’s pretty full and some of the problems I do have history with, if they’re on a GE, something I worked on before, but no, there’s new problems that are coming up and that’s kind of the part that’s exciting for me. It’s like, all right, Hey, we got this at, a bunch of turbines. What is it? I’m like, well. Cool. I don’t know for sure, but this is how I would address it. And then that’s how I help, my customers talk to the OEM and kind of get to the point of like, all right, what’s not so much what the root cause is. It’s like, how big is the LAT list of affected turbines? The goal of the beginning of most RCA is like, how bad is it? How much bleeding do I need to stop? And, that’s usually where I spend most of my time initially. And then after that, it’s like, all right, why did this happen? What do we need to do about it? What’s the long term solution? Allen Hall: Are a lot of the turbine issues we’re having today because of the newness of the turbine, or the length of the blades? There seems to be a lot of problems out there that are not super old, right? They’re a year or two old. What is the driving Jonathan Zalar: factor Allen Hall: in that? Jonathan Zalar: My personal opinion? I think the industry as a whole Went very fast in rotor size. It was, the market was driven for 18 to 24 month rotor size increases. Right. And the OEMs were like, all right, how many parts can we reuse? Can it handle these more loads? And, maybe got too big, too fast. I mean, that’s not OEM specific or anything, but the industry went very fast in the last 10 years. And I think there’s been multiple articles about all the OEMs slowing down a little bit, right. Reducing their number of rotors there. They’re applying the field Allen Hall: now, right? Yeah. They’re, they’re definitely consolidating the number of models, I think, to recover a little bit and get a beat on how to handle these longer blades. So what are you, what are you seeing on these turbines that are less than five years old? What kind of defects, problems serial defects are out there? Jonathan Zalar: You the blades ones, I think we’ve talked about, there’s been some issues on different OEMs with the manufacturing. Issues. Not too many huge design issues that I’ve seen. And then, bearings are a big issue too, main bearings and pitch bearings, they’re very expensive, right? Multiple OEMs are having different bearing issues and, a lot of that could be back to what I said earlier, like how fast are you growing this rotor size and are you actually understanding what these parts are going to be doing, Joel Saxum: especially long term? Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve talked actually between the three of us just about pitch bearings, right? So the blades got longer. But the diameter of the root didn’t in some cases. So you have the same kind of forces and pressures on that root diameter, but with further and further basically the fulcrum of that lever arm moves further and further away and puts more and more pressure on that thing. So it’s hard to keep up with the design thing there. So bearings being a huge one, do you, do you see a, a sweeping fix for some of these bearing issues? Now this is, I’m saying we’ve got pitch bearings. We’ve got yaw bearings. We’ve got main bearings. Main bearing seems to be a big one right now. Is there a fix for this or is we going to be on some of these platforms that are having these issues? Are we going to be replacing these things every two, three years for their lifetime? I mean, I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as two Jonathan Zalar: to three years. I think. There are other suppliers that are looking at different answers to these problems, right? The pitch bearings, I think there’s, they’re looking at a third, basically, roller bearing, I believe, on the outside. The other bearing manufacturers are seeing, okay, hey, these are, these bearings are not working right now. What else can we do, right? And you can’t really increase the size of the bearings because you can’t change the main shaft. You’re not going to change the pillow block or the bed plate. So they’re kind of limited in what they can do. So it’s going to be a lot of, with strength of materials and different greases too. So there, there will be some fixes that come out. They’re very limited in what they can do just from a real estate perspective. On the current designs, Allen Hall: the issue comes about in terms of lifetime on bearings and a lot of operators don’t have a way to guess when they would need to replace bearings. But seeing, besides seeing parts fall out and if I, if I’m going to replace a bearing, what am I going to replace it with? Jonathan Zalar: Right. Well, and even before that, if you can get an indication that you know, this bearing’s gonna fail and you can derate. And maybe run it for a year and line up the cranes better. There’s opportunities there too, with analytics. So both I, the greasing is interesting. I’m not heard of that, but that’s definitely an indicator when you start losing coatings as an example. So if you have that indication, you have higher vibration and you have some other analytics that kind of package together a, all right, this bearing’s got 18 months. So what are you going to do about it? Well, how many more 18 month bearings do I have at site? If I de rate them, I get 24 months. That’s a lever to play, Joel Saxum: right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Because, yeah, at some point in time you have to look into the reality of grain availability and how can we put a campaign together and what’s the most cost effective way to do this. John, you have some Allen Hall: advanced insights because you’re on the other side, on the OEM side in SCADA data where you had high speed SCADA data and the operators typically do not. And now you’re on the other side of this fence with the low speed SCADA data. How do you leverage that data to your advantage where you can self diagnose what’s happening to a turbine, maybe a little bit earlier than you otherwise would? Jonathan Zalar: So that’s one of the biggest learnings I’ve had since going out on my own is I thought data would be easier to get from the owners and I’m, I was wrong, very wrong. It could take, it could take weeks or months to get 10 different channels of 10 minute data, if they even have all the channels I’m looking for. So it’s been a learning curve. And Now, a lot of customers I work with do actually collect higher speed data than I was expecting. A lot of them use Pi, if you guys are familiar with it, and they do have one second, five second, ten second data channels. Now, the number of channels are limited, so I’ve had to be creative in some of the analytics I’m looking at, but especially in issues that have just started, getting that higher speed data, looking at trip logs. That’s really important and it’s a really good tool to figure out what’s going on. So it, it takes me a longer time to do it than I, than I used to at the OEM, because we had all the data pretty much as fast as we wanted it. But there are still tools available to the owners to get the higher speed data for certain issues. What are those tools, John? This is definitely G specific. So it’s called G toolbox. It’s what, is running. The software at the site and you can log into a turbine, you can set up a dynamic data recorder and pull high speed data anytime a certain fault happens so you can set stuff up like that to, pull the millisecond data and start looking at it when you’re seeing certain faults over and over again, or you’re trying to hunt an issue down. Joel Saxum: Because if you just decided to put that on record for a whole, 100 turbine wind farm, you’d have so much data, you wouldn’t even be able to handle it. Right. Jonathan Zalar: Probably, yeah. If the server would stop working, it’d be terrible. Allen Hall: Well, are you seeing operators put added systems on to get more data from the turbines? I’ve heard of operators that are doing that in some instances. Is that becoming more common? Jonathan Zalar: A lot of it’s OPC tags, right? So the pie basically like scrapes the OPC tags as it’s going through the network. I think a lot of customers are doing that. I mean, some are using genius data as an example or the OEMs version, but it, it does become expensive, right? Cause you know, If you don’t have an engineering team looking at this data, you’re probably going to stop collecting it when you start getting those big checks or if you have to pay those big checks. But then when you have an issue and you’re like, Oh man, I wish I had that. You’re kind of like, should have kept that going. Right. So it’s a toss up like the, the bigger owners that have, thousand turbines plus they all seem to have some sort of consistent data recording system. For higher speed than 10 minute. Joel Saxum: Is that like a, like a base field or power factors or something? Or is that on the other side of things? Is that, are those companies more on the performance analytics side? Less than SCADA. Jonathan Zalar: I don’t know for sure. I’m assuming there are. Using something like Pi to pull the data to go do their analysis. I think they’re added on. I don’t think they’re scraping the data, but I could be wrong. Allen Hall: Is that helping to drive some of these solutions and just having more data? Because it does seem like when you walk up to A wind site and especially if it’s got 100 turbines or more and you talk to technicians, they will rattle off five issues. No sweat that are like universal across the site. These turbines have X, Y, Z, but they don’t It’ll they have a solution for it and they don’t really have a way to monitor it. They just see the after effect. Like I have to do an MCE on these turbines because of this problem. Are we getting ahead of that now? Or are there more tools in the toolbox? I know you guys at IWTG have some of that knowledge, but I mean, what do you tell your customers? You’re, you’re, you’re one person doing a really great job for the industry. How do you, how do you help them help Jonathan Zalar: themselves? Some of the issues do have analytics that like the OEMs provide, there’s some catastrophic blade crack analytics. There’s, I think some on the root inserts as an example in main bearing, right? Main bearings, they look at temperature and vibration. I mean, I think every OEM does that for main bearings, right? So there are some analytics that, the OEMs want to create because they also have, full service agreements. So they’re also motivated to do that. But the problems I don’t have them. There are opportunities for people like me. And I have one or two people helping me out that, if given the, given the time and you have enough failures, like there’s definitely analytics that can be developed and, I’ve been working on a couple of things with. One of my customers, but it’s not something that’s a, all right, you’re going to send me three failures in two weeks of data, I’m going to have an analytic for you and it like, it doesn’t work that fast. So it’s something that you have to be working with somebody over a period of time. And have very accurate data on, failure dates, which blade actually failed, stuff like that. Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk to the blade insert issue because I hear that one a lot from pretty much every technician I ran into this summer. Blade inserts are loose in some of these blades. They’re sometimes hard to, detect until it’s like really serious. And then they limit who can go up and down the towers. Even at that point, are there ways to detect that early on? So you can at least evaluate that issue Jonathan Zalar: from an analytics perspective. My understanding, it’s still in development from the OEM. I first had looked at it a little bit and it’s really tough because you’re trying to catch something that’s moving like this much on a pitch bearing. Right? Because the interface between the pitch bearer and the blade. That’s going to be tough to do. Now there are third party non destructive testing options that I’ve seen as well, which if you’re worried about population, that’s, that’s. Now, it’s probably a good way to go. I think if the owners are, would continue to work with GE and the OEMs on getting the right data, understanding if it’s a false positive, I think there could be something there over time, but it’s all about getting the false positives back to the right people. Allen Hall: So there may be a solution coming up in the future, but right now you, the visual inspection is the key to catching it early? Jonathan Zalar: I think so. I don’t know for sure. It seems. If. I hear, but I don’t hear a lot of Failures that are like confirmed. I hear a lot of people talking about it, but I’m not seeing a lot of actual failures. Joel Allen Hall: and I have seen a number of blades with that issue and a lot of complaints coming back from the field about it because it’s, it is hard to detect. I think that’s the issue is the technicians say, Oh, there is pitch bearing grease on the blade. I must have a seal issue. I need, I need to go up and look. And that’s the real first indicator is Grease on the hub. Joel Saxum: Yeah. One of the, one of the companies working on is we foresee over in the Netherlands and Ado from Ado Kuipers from over there, he says. When you’re doing inspections of the nacelle or inspections of the blades, if you’re up there, peel back the sealant a bit where the blade root meets the bearing face. And if you peel that sealant back and there’s a gap there, then more than likely you have an issue. And it could be, look here, look at the top. But if you, if you, if the blade is 90 degrees east west, then you look at the top and see if it’s actually peeling. way and you can see then that if you’ve got, if there’s an air gap there, if you can see through it, then you’ve more than likely have an issue. Jonathan Zalar: And Meyer saying some of the other inspection techniques, if it does get flagged as a potential failure, it’s takes some time to do. It’s some dial indicators and some movement of the rotor in the blade. So that might have been, Where those technicians were complaining, because I think the term is down for a half day trying to figure it out. Allen Hall: Yeah, right, exactly. So that, that kind of leads to a little bit of a broader question. It’s Almost fall, right? Or beginning of September, it’s going to get cold and then inspections pretty much stop in the next month or so. What should operators be doing now to carry their turbines through the winter time? What things should it be looking at? What things should be watching out for? What have you Jonathan Zalar: seen? Hopefully everyone’s through their I don’t know, second quarter inspections. If not, you better make sure you go do that. And then. I mean, really prioritize the Cat5s, Cat4s be cautious on temporary repairs. If you’re going to repair it, go repair it. I, I’ve seen some temporary repairs recently that have failed and that just adds to the problem. Allen Hall: Okay. I’ve seen some of those temporary repairs that looked on. Look to be severe cat five is the one I remember seeing earlier this year. And I thought, wow, is that going to make it? Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, in the, in the Northern environments, Northern climates, people do that just so they can get through the winter time. Right. But sometimes it exacerbates the issue where you might be better off properly repairing it or using, some kind of. I know it’s tough as the winter gets along and you’re looking at what might be like a month long repair or something. So there’s this, this balance there, but I don’t know. When they get water ingress in and all of a sudden you got to freaking open up, six, eight meters of the blade to get it proper in the springtime. You might be, have been better off to properly repair it and spend a little bit more money that fall. And, Jonathan Zalar: I’m, I’m saying this from a technical perspective. I’m not looking at, from an owner’s revenue perspective either. So. Take that with a grain of salt. Allen Hall: Yeah. And what other things should we be looking at to kind of triage before the wintertime hits? I mean, Jonathan Zalar: I kind of touched on a little bit about internal inspections. I feel, I don’t think every blade needs to have a hundred percent internal inspections. I, I think doing some sampling of some Cat5s might not be a bad idea. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, what we’ve looked at in the past from my wind blade experiences is it’s a good idea to do 10 percent of your fleet, 10 to 20 percent of your fleet. And then if you start to see something or then, then expand the scope and then look a little bit deeper. Now, there’s other, there’s specific models where we know of issues, right? We know where there’s some cracking issues or some flashover issues in specific ones. And then that, it’s smarter to do, a higher percentage of the fleet or all of the fleet in some cases. But at a minimum, they should be looking at a small percentage and kind of triaging it after that. Allen Hall: Well, John, what defects that they’ve stumbled across during the summertime really force them to do a hundred percent inspection? I mean, something Jonathan Zalar: that’s at a location on the blade that is going to lead to a catastrophic failure. I mean, if you start seeing something like that, then that’s when you yell, throw the red flag in and be like, all right, we need to make sure. We’re safe here. When it starts becoming a safety risk. Allen Hall: Well, let me ask the one I’ve seen, because I think you’ve probably seen the same thing, where you see cracks in the hub on some more recent blades. If that has happened on a site, Is that indicative of there may be a more on the site that have that issue and maybe internal inspections are required sooner? Like a hundred percent? You just cracking Jonathan Zalar: the hub like you mean the casting? Allen Hall: Well, not, not, well, the, the hub itself. Yes. I mean, we, we think we’ve seen cracked in husband cracked at the base of the blade that have propagated. I’ve seen some of that this year, just driving around in the Midwest. And then, then the cracked hub, which is the I think that’s subsequent where they’ve, they’ve Crack the casting of the hub. Does that then drive you into 100 percent inspection because it’s such a severe failure mode? Jonathan Zalar: I mean, it is a very expensive failure mode. I believe there is already a standard inspection a few months or whatever. I believe that particular issue is being handled with a routine inspection, is my understanding. Joel Saxum: But anything blade wise, it’s probably like This is me, this is me pulling a number out, right? If you’re basically from root to max cord and maybe another 30 percent of the blade or 40 percent of the blade length, if there’s something that you’re seeing within there, then you should address it. Before you let it just sit and run. Jonathan Zalar: Yeah. Brutamax core. That’s, something cracks there and liberates. Turbine’s going to fall over. Allen Hall: This is where IWTG comes in because I know there’s a lot of operators that as Joel mentioned, are really understaffed and they don’t have the bodies to throw at some of these problems, especially if they’re unique and to, to, to. bring you in to take a look at what’s happening on a site so that they can plan ahead. And so I think you’re right, crane operators, power generation, all those factors come into play. And the first piece of information they need is how severe is it? And do I really need, how cautious should I be? That’s where they don’t have an answer for. And that’s why John, they bring you in. Jonathan Zalar: Yeah, understanding the risk is very important, and then understanding the LAT, like number of turbines this is on. Those are very important factors. Allen Hall: Can we talk about serial defects for a minute? Because I think this is, I, I’m seeing what I think are serial defects, and operators Have well, there’s been one operator in particular is screaming serial defect. Others are sort of following that Parade and just and joining in on it at times Are we seeing more serial defect from the manufacturing side that’s causing everybody to have more work out in the field on? Maintaining the turbines and what is that? What what is your feeling on what’s driving? Manufacturing issues that sort of plaguing some of the turbines at the minute. Yeah, I Jonathan Zalar: I’m not too sure about the serial defect part because it’s really tough to, and contracts are very different in what a definition of a serial defect is. And that’s not my expertise. Your other question of like, why are we seeing this now? I mean, the volume of turbines have increased. The speed of design was increased. Then you had two years of COVID manufacturing, which you can’t put numbers on or calculate the effect. I, I, and DL design tools have been slower than rotor size increases as an example. I think a lot of those things are just kind of coming together for multiple OEMs at some really bad times. Allen Hall: So then do you look to see what the, when your blade was manufactured, it was March of 2020 through March of 2020. Basically March of 22. Do you then pay more attention to those series of blades? Jonathan Zalar: The tangular defect, yeah. I mean, like I said earlier, like you really want to reduce the number of turbines by whatever problem you have. So you, from a blade perspective, you look at manufacturing location, manufacturing dates, serial numbers, mold lines. Core kits, different materials used. I mean, that’s where I mean, it’s hard to get that information. It’s not usually easily available, but that’s where I try to help push my customers is like getting that information and say, all right, I have a 20 turbine problem versus a 200 turbine problem completely changes what you’re going to do. Allen Hall: Okay, so that’s where a lot of operators do not dig into, in my opinion, they’re not looking at molds. They’re not looking at manufacturing dates, so to speak. They’re looking at blade types and trying to address it as, and coming from different manufacturing facilities. So is there a difference if a Blade is made in Europe versus the factory in the United States. Are they just not the same thing, and yet we do treat them as the same? Jonathan Zalar: No, I’m not a materials expert, but there are definitely material restrictions depending on the country. Different resins are approved here, and different balsa suppliers are used in different places. So there is, if you’re coming from five different countries, the blades are not exactly the same. Allen Hall: Is the arrow shape the same? I’ve seen, I’ve seen a particular OEM that uses multiple manufacturers and the arrow shape is not exactly the same. And the lightning protection system’s not the same, even though the basic fundamental is Joel Saxum: there. Drain holes in different places, all kinds of stuff. Jonathan Zalar: So you guys did a built SPAC built to print episode, right? Walk through the difference between the two. So like in GE’s case, they had a built to SPAC and a built to print blade. So the built to print blade is the one they have manufactured a TPI, for example, But they also haven’t built a spec blade, which was basically the blade needs away this much, needs to have this arrow shape, use this many bolts, be this slide at the root. And that was what, they used LM for it. Cause LM yelled, this is before G purchased them. Like LM would design the blade themselves and they would meet that arrow shape, number of bolts, stuff like that. So it fit. And then they would have, very similar, similar performance, not exactly the same, two different designs. And two different materials. Allen Hall: And when you’re digging into blade issues, as particularly at some of these hundred plus wind turbine farms, you need to know all the way down what that particular blade is, right? When it was made, where it was made, even down to the molds, because that’ll tell you a lot about. Where this problem may be on other blades in your site, right? Not Jonathan Zalar: every issue is going to be mold to mold specific, but that’s just an example of getting down to that level of information can help you understand your Joel Saxum: problem. So it really depends on, it can be the team that was working on it, right. But we’re diving down into a lot of these details, manufacture, location possible, materials or consumables restrictions down into the shift level. But what that, what that all says to me is. If you have limited bandwidth and engineering, you need to, and you have an issue, you need to grab someone from the outside to help you. You need to grab a consultant. Allen Hall: Well, John, it’s been great to connect again, because you’ve been out in the field like us over the summertime. You’ve seen a lot of things and you’re a huge resource to operators that use you in the U S and we’ve, Joel and I have met a number of them and they love having you come in and diagnose their problems. So how do people get ahold of IWTG? Jonathan Zalar: They can reach out to me directly with email, jzallar, Z A L L A R, at IWTGconsulting. com. And the website is, www. iwtgconsulting. com. Allen Hall: Well thanks John for being on the program. Really enjoy having you. Jonathan Zalar: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed talking to you guys.

This week on Uptime Power-Up, we discuss Siemens Gamesa’s unique leading edge protection solution which uses a shock absorbing cavity for added cushion. Then Vestas’ Utopus Insights patent that uses vibration monitoring to determine turbine health. And finally, a diaper for your bird, which Joel may be in the market for. 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. Phil, our first idea is a Siemens Gamesa, and this leading edge protection is a little bit different than things we have normally seen. It includes basically a cavity. So it’s like a shell sort of device that would go on the leading edge, but it has a cavity with a shock absorbing medium. Inside of it. So it take the blows of the raindrops or the bugs or the hail. So it absorbs that energy. And then the, the wind turbine lives a long time. That’s a interesting concept. I haven’t seen Philip Totaro: it implemented yet though. I think because this patent application is also recent is probably something they’re still testing. They’ve got a blade tip with a double layer with an elastomeric. Or, I mean, I guess they’ve described it in the patent as it could be anything kind of squishy, let’s call it polymeric material, any kind of, squishy type material. But what their, what their theory is behind this is that Because the leading edge, the, particularly around the tip, your tip speed is so high on a wind turbine blade that when you impact a raindrop or you impact a bug, obviously it makes little dents and you hit enough, especially if you’ve got like a swarm of bugs or flies or something, it can actually act like you’re, you’re sandblasting the leading edge of the blade. And, everybody in the industry has probably seen, leading edge erosion and knows what it is. But the idea behind this is to say, all right, behind, the, the blade leading edge and the gel coat, there’s this cavity with this, elastomeric damper kind of in there that would theoretically absorb some of that impact and also provide a, um, so it, it provides a rebound on the tip to, to allow it to maintain the aerodynamic profile. The elastomeric material can be shaped to conform to the cavity so that it will, it will maintain It’s aerodynamic profile on the leading edge, regardless of the amount of tip damage. So there’s, there’s a potential performance and certainly noise benefit to it. But I mean, Joel, I’m, I guess I’m curious about this. There, there’s other concepts out there, one from polytech included that seems kind of similar to this. Is this gonna be a thing? Joel Saxum: What i’m looking at this material is like I see it the concept makes sense. Everything is great We have been installing shells on turbines because that’s what the installation of this will look like it’ll look like a shell We’ve been installing shells for a long time You have armor edge polytech like those things those solutions are out there but the reason i’m looking at this one with a little bit of a side eye is If this thing starts to fail, if that front edge opens up and then you have this shock absorbing elastomeric compound all of a sudden exposed and this thing starts to open itself up, because that’s what will happen if it starts to open up, then you’re going to have an AEP loss and possible noise issues and all kinds of weird stuff going on up there that you don’t want. So I think that some of the, and I don’t know what the, chemical makeup of this thing is or the how they’re going to design it, but. In my mind, some of the existing solutions that are on the market today may have a better lifespan once they start to degrade than something like this. Allen Hall: The key to this patent is the goo you put inside of it, and my suggestion is to use that Stretch Armstrong toy goo. You ever had one of those, Joel? Yeah, yeah, for sure. That thing was indestructible. Whatever that goo was, we need to be putting that on the leading edge. Our second idea comes from our friends at Utopis Insights. And it is a system for monitoring wind turbines using vibration data. And this is a little unique, Phil, in that it’s a sort of a data driven approach to health monitoring. And they’re measuring vibration on a number of turbines and trying to group those vibrations into two sets, one that’s sort of healthy, normal operations, and another set that’s unhealthy, and then use that data to provide forecasting on the health of the turbines. This does make sense. I thought I have seen this in other, in other farms already. Is this idea unique? Philip Totaro: Well, it’s, it’s, there is a unique aspect to this. And I also want to preface this by explaining to people. So Utopis Insights is now kind of the, the data analytics and asset management platform component of Vestas Wind Systems for those who aren’t familiar. What they’re doing with clustering the turbines is kind of fascinating because What they’re actually trying to accomplish is what a lot of people in the industry want, which is, tell me which of my turbines operating in a wind farm might need to be taken down or could be taken offline at the same time to have maintenance scheduled. And so if you can monitor several turbines in the wind farm that are seeing largely the same kind of loading, largely the same kind of damage accumulation, and the clustering of these turbines together in, this data analytics platform can help you determine, okay, well, there’s six turbines that are coming up to, a timeframe in about three months where we might have a high probability of a catastrophic failure. We’re going to take those turbines, offline at a point in time in between now and when, our analytics platform says that’s going to happen to be able to address that, those issues, whether it’s just a, a lubrication change in the gearbox, whether it might be, gear damage, whether it’s something to do with the blades whatever the issues are, they can monitor these turbines. In a way that lets them do predictive maintenance scheduling that is a helpful component to be able to minimize the AEP loss of taking turbines offline. This technology is actually in use right now on the VX Plus platform for Utopis Insights, so, please get in touch with Vestas and Utopis if you want to learn more. Or talk to us because we’ve cataloged, something like 65, 000 patents and we can tell you who’s using what. Allen Hall: Our fun patent of the week is entitled Bird Diaper. Now this, this is an actual patent. That is for your pet bird. And if you have a pet bird in the house or in enclosed space, you can imagine what the mess is. And this, this patent is really interesting because Phil there, it’s like a leotard for your bird, but I’m not sure how you’re supposed to hold the bird to put the diaper on this thing. Cause it’s got wing holes and obviously tail hole and a head hole. There’s a lot of holes here. Philip Totaro: Well, and in addition to all that, it’s also got a connector for a leash. So just in case you want to be able to, walk or, tether your bird and keep it, keep it on its leash, Joel Saxum: this thing does it all. My sister in law has a green cheek parakeet. And when you go to her house, you may end up with a little mess on your shirt, on your shoulder. So this thing, I might search this out and try to purchase one of these. Because I believe it could be a good Christmas gift for my sister in law and her family for their green cheeked parakeet Philip Totaro: You see a patent like this and your immediate thought is well, that’s great If you have a pet bird at home, but you know, unless we’re gonna outfit every bird on earth with this It’s not really gonna solve our wider problem. Phil, do they make this in large sizes for like big bird? Allen, I don’t know the answer to that, but probably.

Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Philip Totaro, and Joel Saxum discuss the evolution of wind turbine blade inspections, from external drones to internal rovers. They debate the potential of AI in predicting damage progression and managing repair priorities, with Rosemary emphasizing the complexity of crack propagation in composites. Joel highlights Top 7’s innovative drone technology for detecting lightning protection system faults in blades, as featured in PES Wind magazine. 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: On the mean streets of Lowville, New York, Phil that’s your neck of the woods. The local Kraft Heinz plant has reclaimed the Guinness World Record for the largest cheesecake. Tipping the scales at a whopping 15, 008 pounds. Yes, that’s right. That’s seven and a half tons of creamy goodness. Joel Saxum: I absolutely love cheesecake. My brother loves cheesecake so much that’s what he had at his wedding. He had a smorgasbord of different kinds of cheesecake that you could pick from. Allen Hall: They broke the record, almost double the record that was held from a team from Russia. So here we go. Now we’re back into the 1980s. Olympic hockey Philip Totaro: exit no that’s great that’s good that’s a good thing we should be world domination in cheesecake size Allen Hall: and Philip Totaro: wait. Allen Hall: Yeah why did we get an invite joel i don’t understand we should’ve been top of the list to come to lowville. Philip Totaro: That’s yeah that’s what i’m saying like did they pass it out to everybody in town like how do you eat a cheesecake seven tons of cheesecake. Allen Hall: They donated to local food bank is what they did after everybody had a slice or two or three. But 15, 000 pounds of cheesecake. What’s that in metric tons, Phil? Come on. I need a sense of this for the Europeans in our audience. 6. 8 metric tons. That’s a lot of metric tons, but this, these are the things you got to keep your eyes open for, right? So if they’re going for a world record. And anything food related, they need to be calling the Uptime Podcast and at least give us a heads up so we can plan our travel accordingly, because this cheesecake thing seems like we missed out. I’m Alan Hall and here are this week’s top news stories. In our first story, Vestas has secured its largest onshore wind project to date in Japan. The company has received a 134 megawatt order from Invenergy. for the Inaniwa Wind Energy Center. The order includes 32 V117 4. 2 megawatt wind turbines and a 20 year service agreement. Deliveries are expected to begin in the first half of 2027 with commissioning planned for Q1 2028. Moving to Spain, Windar has started preparatory work to construct a new monopile factory. The facility will have the capacity to manufacture monopiles up to 12. 5 meters in diameter, 3, 500 tons, and 130 meters in length. With an annual capacity of 100 to 120 monopiles, the factory aims to supply wind farms in the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, as well as the East Coast of the United States. In a significant development for the Mediterranean region, nine Southern European Union member countries have pledged to turn the area into a renewable energy hub. Officials from Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Croatia, Greece, Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain are focusing on harnessing offshore wind and solar energy. They aim to set up a joint renewable energies project across borders and have called on the European Commission to conduct a study on the region’s renewable energy potential. Shifting to Sweden, Northvolt has announced a revised scope of operations in response to challenging market conditions. The company will focus on ramping up its first 16 gigawatt hour production capacity at Northvolt ET. resulting in the redundancy of approximately 1, 600 employees. Northvolt will suspend the expansion project at Northvolt at this time. and slowdown programs at Northvolt Labs. In India, Xcel Composites and its joint venture Koneko Xcel India have won a bidding process to supply poultry to Carbon Planks for wind turbine spar caps to Vestas. The products will be manufactured in KECI’s new factory in Goa, India, with deliveries estimated to begin in the last quarter of 2025. This agreement extends an existing multi year frame contract and deepens the collaboration between the companies. And Denmark is making strides in wind turbine testing capabilities. R& D Test Systems has completed the foundation of a test bench for main bearings at the Offshore Renewable Center in Odense Port. The facility will be able to test both geared and direct drive main bearing arrangements for 25 megawatt turbines. The project, supported by a 10 million euro grant from the Danish Greenlab program, is expected to be delivered in 2025. Lastly, Nikon Corporation is set to provide Eurus Energy Holdings Corporation with a riblet film for wind turbine blades, aimed at improving wind turbine generation efficiency. In Japan’s first such verification test, the film will be attached to turbine blades at the Yurisoya Misaki wind farm. Nikon anticipates that the Riblet film could improve wind power generation efficiency by approximately 3%. 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 founder and CEO of Intel Store, Phil Totaro, And the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxon. 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: It’s almost fall in the northern hemisphere, which means that blade inspections are occurring. A lot of drone inspections are happening right about now at the end of season after all the repairs have been done. So you’re typically seeing two scans in some wind farms. One in the spring, one in the fall, just to keep track of how things are progressing. But there’s been a recent big shift, I think, in from moving away from external drone inspections, which had been the norm, to a lot more of internal rover inspections. With a little automated car with the cameras on it and the lights and the beepers and the whole thing. And I think the industry has really learned from that. I’ve been talking to a number of blade engineers and we were at Sandia last week that the significant structural defects are turning up sooner on the inside. And that’s a big shift, Rosemary, I think, because for so long, we were just doing drone inspections and when we got to standardized drone inspection, that was the big deal. But. Now we’re doing inside and outside. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I actually wondered this because of a job I was on recently They were going to go do internal inspections that I mean to be honest I hadn’t even been doing external inspections properly But yeah They were going to go do some internal inspections and I just wondered how they actually get into the blade like I know that you can get in between the two webs and trailing edge is mostly pretty clear, but in the leading edge between the front web and the leading edge, there are bulkheads all the way down these bits of foam or whatever. They’re structural, mostly not, mostly to assist with manufacturing, but they’re blocking off the cavity. You can’t just crawl into the leading edge cavity and crawl all the way down, no matter how small you are, because you’re going to encounter these solid obstacles. What do they do about that? Are they punching their way through them, which it being, like I said they’re not primarily structural, but they’re not structural. How do they manage that? Allen Hall: I don’t think they’re doing anything at the bulkheads. I think a lot of it is right between the spars, the shear webs. And I think from what I can tell so far, are they not looking for problems with core splice areas, transverse cracks? Which are the Cat 4, Cat 5s that you would need to know. I know they have leading edge and trailing edge dis bonds, but the big ones seem to be in the mid span region. Rosemary Barnes: That’s true, that they would catch most of the catastrophic, like most of the catastrophic stuff would happen on the main laminate, which is, yeah, right down the middle where it should be possible to get a really long way down, so I guess they can probably capture most of it. But yeah the system that, or the, one of the things that, I know that they’re looking for with drone inspections is, when lightning flashover happens, then that can cause damage on the inside. And you might not see it on the outside until it’s like a category five and the blades about to snap in half. That can obviously happen on the leading edge. And yeah, but I guess maybe they’re not catching all of that, but they’re catching other damage that. Might cause big structural problems. Makes sense. Philip Totaro: Wouldn’t it make sense to have a channel running the length of the blade adjacent to the one of the, like the front or the rear spar so that you could put, rather than a Rover, couldn’t you use one of those, like a larger size of a surgical camera and just run it down this channel and have it do the inspection on the trailing edge bond line? Rosemary Barnes: They do boroscope inspections. Although often that’s also from the outside. I think that they, find lightening damage and then poke around inside with a a broscript to see if there’s a lot of internal damage so that they would need to, cut it open and fully repair it or not. But I was just thinking, I thought you were going to say shouldn’t the manufacturers make that channel so it makes maintenance and operations easier? I think they should and that they never will because no one cares about the full lifetime, life, yeah, full life cycle of a wind turbine. It’s all just about that, upfront cost. Philip Totaro: Not when they’re in the business of selling aftermarket blades. Yeah. Yeah. And they’re service. It’s Hey, we got a brand new blade you could buy instead Rosemary Barnes: of repairing the old one. It’s basically like the inkjet blade. Printer model now and wind turbines like, Oh, give me the wind turbine for free. But yeah, extort you on the service and and spare parts. But I was at this conference this week. It was a systems engineering conference. They brought me in to do yeah, one of the keynote speeches there. And so of course I stayed around for most of the rest of the conference and learned some interesting things. And one of the guys I got talking to he, he does a system analysis. He’s worked with offshore wind in the Netherlands. For installations actually, but he was saying that, systems engineering approach, what the industry desperately needs is to do a systems engineering approach right from the start, where you take into account like the full life cycle of the turbine so that you are when you’re designing a wind turbine, you are actually thinking about, repairs and all that sort of thing that is going to need over the next 10, 20, 30 years of its lifetime. And that should be a yeah, a design requirement early on. And I was thinking that, yeah, we do need that, but I just can’t see the mechanism that we could ever get that. Cause it would just cost money for the manufacturer and they wouldn’t be able to sell it for anymore. So yeah, they’re obviously not going to do it. Joel Saxum: We were at the Sandia conference last week talking with a lot of operators and you’re starting to see a difference in approaches with internal inspections. So you see some that are, yeah, we do internal inspections just like we do external inspections. We inspect everything. There’s some that are even large operators looking at, we just do targeted ones on issues that we know exist, or blades that have a history of certain things, and some doing the, hey, we do 10 percent of a wind farm because they’re expensive, right? They’re, in the United States, they’re between 1, 000 and 1, 800 per turbine. So they’re, five times the cost of an external inspection. So you have a lot of people doing 10 or 20 percent of their fleet or 10 or 20 percent of a wind farm. And if they find an issue, then they’ll go and start expanding the scope. But one of the things that was common, right? Is we know that there’s quite a few people starting to look at doing crawlers and inspections internal in blades. With not just with people, but with actual, with the crawlers to get a good baseline from commissioning. So they’re either doing it right when they come out of the factory or right when they get delivered on site to make sure that they’ve got documented what that blade looked like before it was hung up. And to me that is a fantastic idea. Allen Hall: Are the crawlers still being operated by the ISPs or are the operators starting to rent them basically to do the internal inspections? You’re getting a little bit of Joel Saxum: both and that’s driven by cost model, right? So same thing with external inspections where we started to see that Hey, you can rent a drone from us or you can buy a drone from us and you can fly whenever you have a good day or winds are negligible or whatever that may be in the external side. You’re starting to see that in the internal side. I know our good friends Armando at Earthwind and Rodolfo and the team down there from Brazil they’re start, they have some of them up in the United States now. So they’re putting them out there and that their idea is they made it easy enough to pilot them. Easy enough to collect the data where they can basically put one in a box, send it out to a site, they can do their inspections, and then the data goes back to the mothership, down in Sao Paulo, and they do all of the analysis and stuff down there. You have, there’s other places like like the Aarons team, they’re very efficient at doing these in a cost effective way because When they’re on site, a lot of times they’re doing LEP, external inspections, internal inspections, cleaning towers, all kinds of stuff, so they have the same crew, less mobilization costs. But yeah, if it was me, the cost of these things are to rent them, it’s not and a robot internal crawler is not like a drone that requires a lot of maintenance. Drone after so many hours, you gotta replace motors, you gotta do this, it’s very difficult to fly, you gotta have special license, or not very difficult to fly, but can be, you gotta have special licenses, all this stuff a crawler is can your six year old kid drive a remote control truck? Okay? They can basically do an inspection, so the technicians can do that themselves. Fairly easily with a little bit of training. Allen Hall: And the latest generation of crawlers, the images are outstanding. It’s scary. The one, Joel Saxum: the one I really like is what Aaron’s has done for the the root inspections, because of course, the root in some of these blades is huge, right? Especially offshore. Some of these things are. three meters across at the root. They’re massive. So what they did was they have, of course, their regular camera setups at the nose that can see in, 180 degrees as they go through the whole thing. But they actually took a full frame CMOS sensor, like what would be, like a Sony a seven R type thing. And they put it on the back of the drone and it’s perpendicular, it’s pointed perpendicular to the path. Then it rotates in a 270 degree angle up. So you’re getting a very high resolution image of the root area as you go into the root or through the root area. Allen Hall: Is that really changing the dynamic though? I think that the key to all this data is in the, because the images are so heavy and detailed now, are we just into the phase of, we need some AI to go through the images to find out what’s going on. Joel Saxum: Yeah, everybody that’s a big player in the internal inspection world is developing some kind of AI to handle the analysis, right? Because to be honest with you, the most important thing in internal inspection robotics, whether it’s with the Helios drones or whether it’s with the crawler or whatever, is the lighting, the quality of the lighting. Because if your lighting isn’t good in there, or if your lighting is too vibrant or too high color, you end up with sheen and shear off the fiberglass and you can’t see, or sometimes you’re kicking up dust, or you got some other things going on, so if the lighting is right, and the lenses are correct, then you can get these amazing images, and you get a ton of them, right? You’re gonna get a whole pile of data, so I think Marone’s is doing some AI stuff. I think Earth Wind’s doing a little bit of AI stuff. Of course, every trade show you go to, there’s another one kind of popping out. Allen Hall: When does UT happen? I, we at Sandia, we ran into a number of people that were doing ultrasonic tests and looking at specific parts of the blade that was particularly the root area was a big emphasis. We need to see what’s going on down there. Are we doing a lot of ultrasonic inspections in the fall? quantify what’s happening on our blaze before it gets Joel Saxum: cold? Not really. The thing with UT is it’s very specialized. It is an amazing tool. In Rosemary, you know this better than probably all of us, but NDT is an amazing tool to get what you want. However, it’s expensive. It’s difficult to get really highly skilled, level two, level three, NDT technicians out there. The processing Is in, is intensive because composite NDT is very difficult compared to steel. Steel NDT is pretty cut and dry. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And also, really to get really good visuals, it needs to be quite flat and wind turbine blades mostly not flat. Even in the factory where they’ve got like the full big kit and the, full time employee who’s a expert, they still can’t just scan everything and see everything inside a blade. It’s like there’s certain parts that you can get a pretty good image of. And yeah stuff does get missed, but I guess they’re developing the technology all the time to get more portable machines and also to just improve the kinds of image you can get and the amount of, Complexity that it can deal with in terms of curvature and that sort of thing. Joel Saxum: And then the other thing about NDT that people maybe don’t realize as much, if you’ve never played in that space is NDT is not one technology, right? Like CIC NDT and the team over there, those guys have I think a half a dozen or even more, maybe even 10 different kinds of technologies where, you know, laser shearography and just the UT that you would think. And then you have, you’re looking at microwave for composites and all kinds of stuff. It’s right now. I think that when there’s specific and targeted issues and wind turbines, yes, they’re getting some of them are getting regular quarterly inspections, right? You’re seeing the root sections of some of these turbine models being inspected quarterly out in the field, but that’s because they know there’s an issue and there’s a specific problem there, but to have a like an autonomous external drones style, we’re just going to look at everything. Okay. Thank you. Doesn’t happen yet in the NDT world. And it’s cool that we’re developing robotics for, cause that could un, unlock a little bit more power in the NDT world. But right now you have like experts like Jeremy Hanks over at CIC NDT that they have the teams that know how to do it. It’s just not in super high demand. Allen Hall: And does thermal imaging start taking some of that space in terms of inspection because of the, sort of the localization that has to happen with. Ultrasonic inspections, where thermal inspections, it gives you a quick sense of how the blade’s doing. If you can get images, the resolution you want, is that the next generation of inspection before you hit wintertime? I Joel Saxum: think thermal inspections are a good, or can be, when it gets developed a little bit better than it is now, can be a good screening tool, but I don’t think they’re an inspection method that is something you bank on. Allen Hall: Going back to Rosemary’s comment, you can’t see the leading edge, you can’t see the trailing edge, because the access is poor. Thermal imagery should get you some image of the Joel Saxum: leading and trailing edge. I don’t think the leading and trailing edge besides the trailing, a trailing edge crack that’s doing this, but you can see that most likely with a visual drone, you don’t need a thermal drone for that. The ones you’re looking for are the ones that are under the gel coat that are causing some friction or something of that sort, or a little hairline crack. That’s why I think it’s a screening tool. You may look and see, okay, we’ve got, Hey, there’s something weird going on here. Let’s go up and look at it. Allen Hall: Going back to your 10 percent rule of look at 10 percent of the turbines, would you quick scan a number of turbines just to get a gross sense of, Hey we have these, we may have this potential issue, then come back with UT to, to suss it out. Joel Saxum: And if it’s fast enough, like I know the Rom R MotionCam guys have been working on this for a while. The Rom R MotionCam concept. Is a very quick and speedy inspection process because you don’t need lotto, you don’t shut the turbines down, you don’t do any of that. Especially if you’re in like, cornfields or something, or cut cave fields, you just put that remote cam unit in the back of a truck and drive and boom, as the turbine spins, you take a peek at it, take some inspection images, you move on to the next one. Like I just, in my opinion, that’s a good screening tool, but that’s not an end all be all inspection. You may find an or isolate an issue like, Hey, we need to look at blade B on this turbine because there’s something going on there, but you’re not going to be able to diagnose what the issue is from that. At the end of the day, right now, thermal imaging technology, unless you’re getting some kind of ITAR approved thermal imaging system from a, like an Apache helicopter, like you’re not going to see any kind of detail that you need to be able to diagnose a problem. Allen Hall: The next generation after thermal is terahertz. We saw some of that at Sandia where the, you in theory can see individual layers of fabric in the layup because the wavelengths are so small you can measure that and detect dis bonds and it’s giving you, from what I saw, a really accurate look at an evenness in the composite structure, much more than ultrasound can do, but I’m sure it’s not nearly as fast as ultrasound is, Which is the problem, right? Is so as technology develops, are we going to just know too much? Philip Totaro: And look, the reality with AI is that the image quality we have today results in AI that can only be a certain level of accurate. If we address the issues that Joel’s mentioned, and you get higher quality and higher resolution, not only with visual, but some of these other technologies, and you start layering things together, it can be data overload if you don’t take AI to scrub it, and figure out how to actually take that results of the AI analysis and do something useful with it. Which is where, that’s really where a lot of the AI developed predictive maintenance solutions have fallen down. Up until now, is, we’ve got a ton of data, people aren’t really using it right. With or without AI, it’s still too much to analyze even today, and you don’t even get the quality, so there’s a lot of false positives in the data sets that we have. Assuming that you can improve the quality of the imagery and reduce the false positive rate down to a point where you could actually do visual or any other type of inspection, get actionable information out of it, the question is then, how are you leveraging that actionable information to be able to address things like We see something that’s maybe a cat two or three damage right now. I need to be able to determine how fast that crack’s going to propagate to become a cat four or five so that we can avoid a crane call out. Do we prioritize fixing that now? Or do we only have the budget to be able to fix the cat four and five issues that we’ve got? That’s still a huge challenge for operators at the moment. So that’s where AI can take us. Rosemary Barnes: Can it though? It’s I never. Never heard anybody that thought that you could tell you to tell how fast a crack was going to propagate over composites It’s just it’s unpredictable. You know, like a cat one crack could become cat five tomorrow or might never progress and Yeah, and Joel Saxum: There’s people that are working on that project, right? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but it’s like the holy grail of composites for at least the last 20 years. So I don’t know if we’re close and It might be the sort of thing that AI can crack. Ha, funny intended. It might be the sort of problem that AI can crack if if they had the data, but how are they going to get the data? I guess if you like, maybe a cool research project would be to put cameras inside a hundred thousand blades and just have them, like watching cracks, and then they might, AI might be able to pick up something that does give you a, a tip off for when something’s about to happen. You would need at least tens of thousands of data points. It’s not something that you get from, the amount of data that’s being collected today and and if, yeah, someone was to go through it, it’s all just, like one off snapshots and I don’t see us learning anything unless we set out to learn it. Joel Saxum: The trouble with that, Rosemary, is exactly like you’re saying, you need all those data points, but then you also have to. You also have to filter all that data by blade model, sub model, manufacturer, resin type, core ramp. There’s so many things that you can’t actually, if all the blades were the same, then yeah, we could probably do that. But there’s so many variations and out in the field that. It’s not possible. I don’t at this stage. Philip Totaro: No and that’s, but that’s the point, isn’t it? As, as technology evolves and becomes cheaper, because it’s more reliable, whatever, it’ll get used more, and then we’ll start building that catalog of information over time. But now is when we really, up until now, what we’ve been doing is just Stumbling through the methodology of like, how do you leverage, technology to do internal and external inspections. We’re now at a point where the technology is sophisticated enough to actually start giving us meaningful data and feedback that could eventually be used to build models that’ll do some of that prediction. I think you’ll start getting more useful information out of it from what we have the opportunity to collect. But you’re right, I we are just at the beginning of the meaningful data collection process to be able to do anything with all that. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. There is heaps of, in useful information that is coming out from ai looked at images and especially compared to a few years ago, it was doing, it was worse than. Worse than not looking at the images because you just got so many damn false positive positives that no, no one like was just totally overwhelming. Cat five grease Joel Saxum: smudges. Rosemary Barnes: Oh yeah. Like on two thirds of the blades and one of the ones I looked at there, had cat five damage and everyone else spent, oh yeah, that’s cool. And continued on, like no one ever looked into it. So it was just like, it meant that they didn’t. They did these inspections instead of other ones and then couldn’t use the information. So it was just as if I never did any inspections really. So they went backwards, only a few years since then, like we do say a lot of really useful information now from AI stuff. And of course, like for cat five, you’re going to look at the image yourself like with the human eyeballs as well and get up to, get a better look around. We haven’t totally divorced the need for humans involved at this point and I’m sure it will get better. But there’s definitely some issues are much, much easier for AI than others. And yeah, I think that’s the thing, like AI, you just need just so much data. And especially with crack propagation, that is such a such a complex topic to start with. I don’t think that is going to be one of the next ones that we say, but. I would love to be surprised by that. Joel Saxum: If we rewind to what Phil said, like Rosemary, you’re a consultant in the wind energy and renewable energy world. So you deal with people on blade issues and other things. So you hear this from your clients. I’m sure Phil, you and I have talked about this in the off air. Many times, Alan, you and I talked to everybody else about this. Everybody just wants to be told what to do. They would rather not even have to look at these inspections. Just tell me on turbine 7 you need to do this and on turbine 8 you need to do this and you’ll be fine. Great. Thank you. That’s where I want to go. Because we know there’s this, we always talk about the shortage of technicians but there’s a Even worse shortage of good engineers. Rosemary Barnes: I’m happy to tell people what to do. If someone needs to be told what to do, they can, they Philip Totaro: can call me and I’ll tell them. The, Joel, the other thing there’s a shortage of is budget. Because I hear all the time that, most of the owner operators, not all of them, and there was one I spoke to back in Minneapolis at the wind power event who, I asked him like, Hey, do you guys like ever run out of budget before you have the opportunity to fix your, Cat 2, Cat 3 damage on blades or whatever else. And they were like, Rosemary Barnes: no, we’re good. Cat 2 and 3. People are running out of budget before they get to all the Cat 4 damage in my experience. Maybe it’s just an Australian thing, but definitely Cat 2 is never being repaired unless maybe if they’re up there anyway, that it might get done. Philip Totaro: One owner operator in the U. S. is doing that, or so they say. But that’s exactly my point, is most of the time, companies run out of budget fixing the Cat 4 and 5 damage that they obviously have to fix, because you gotta get the turbines back up and running, or prevent further catastrophic failure. The issue with that is, can we figure out a way, because, something that’s a Cat 4 today wasn’t always a Cat 4, and that’s why I keep going back to, can AI help us figure out how you can avoid a crane callout, Because that’s where it just gets preposterously expensive. That’s why everybody runs out of budget. Because they’re getting to these too late, they’re being reactionary in their repairs, and not just on blades, but even on things like gearboxes or anything else, generators. They’re being, they’re still being reactionary. Rosemary Barnes: With a good spreadsheet of every blade and every inspection and damage and tracking over time. what it was, knowing, you can know from that what the average cost is for different categories of damage. I think you could definitely come up with a better strategy for repairs. Yeah, and because it would be statistical then, you don’t need to know. This particular blade is going to go from cut three to cut five on, August 27th, it’s going to say that statistically, if you leave this, it’s going to cost you more than what it would cost you to get up and fix a few that were never going to progress. It’ll tell you where that point is that at category two, or is that at category three? for that you should be doing them that day. Or I think that definitely like a larger operator with a good spreadsheet and people usually don’t have good spreadsheets in my experience. The, like it’s always like a lot of the work that I do is so tedious. You’re going back through. manually opening PDFs for this blade, okay this, was there a, chasing up the, I can’t see the report, in this year, was there one, and you can’t expect AI to make anything of that either, but if you put it all in a in an organized database, then I think that you could definitely pull out a Better repair strategy. I wonder if people are already doing that. Joel Saxum: When you open any one of those spreadsheets at any one of these operators, and you go filter by lightning damage, that spreadsheet is going to tell you to call WeatherGuard Lightning Tech and get strike tape installed because it’s going to lessen your costs over time. Philip Totaro: Well, Joel if that database doesn’t exist, they should be calling Intel store and we’ll help them build that database because that’s where, you The real value is in, in understanding how those things, how this can escalate. I’ve had literally three different asset owners say that if that kind of tool existed, they’d buy it. Joel Saxum: As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind. com today. Allen Hall: The new PES win magazine is out and it is thick, Joel. I was looking at it in the office this morning. I thought I was getting a workout from holding this magazine. My gosh, there’s a lot in this episode or this issue of the magazine. And obviously the thing about PES Wind is that the images and the photographs are amazing. So it’s very easy just to look at the pictures, which is something I like to do when I first get it, like Picture book kind of guy? It is! It’s The quality of the images and the printing is just way beyond what you usually see in a print Magazine today, but the article I stopped on was one from top seven because it said lightning and anytime I flip through and I see something about lightning, I have to pause and look at it. But top seven, which is a essentially a drone company or drone based company has this technique where they can determine if your lightning protection system is broken. Without crawling inside or doing a bunch of resistance measurements. And Joel, you want to describe how this device works, how the system works? Yeah, Joel Saxum: absolutely. So tech, classically. LPS measurements are usually done by resistance. So you put physically put a meter on the end of a receptor and either a meter on, the ground or within the blade. If you’re just checking in the blade, you have to have a technician in there and a technician on ropes or something of that sort. So it’s usually done by a resistance measurement. So if you have very low resistance, your LPS looks good. The challenge with that can be is low resistance is how do I explain this? The cable, the LPS cable within a turbine is so large that you can have damage to it, you can have cracks in it, you can have strands, you can have partial disconnects, where the next lightning strike that comes will break that thing. But it will still give you a good ohm reading. What this drone does is this is not a from a physics and electrical engineering standpoint, this is not a new concept. But it is the first time we’ve seen it commercially readily available on a drone and able to do this. What they’re, what the concept is you put a, basically an electromagnetic pulse through the down conductor. And then with the drone, you have a sensor on the drone that has an electromagnetic field reader. And then you chase that pulse along the blade. So you don’t actually touch the blade, you can do it remotely, so you’re not having to fly right into it or up against it. You can still do it back a little ways. But what you’re gonna do, or what this solution does is it pinpoints where the damage is or where the break is within the blade. Something that technicians have wanted forever, right? So technicians will be, hey, we’ve got a broken LPS, we gotta fix it, where is it in the blade? We don’t know, we know it’s broken. So you can put someone in the blade and you can get so far along it until probably, it gets pretty tight once you get about to the 40 percent mark. Where a guy the size of me is definitely not gonna make it. I’d probably make it to the 50 percent mark. Allen Hall: I was gonna say the root, but Joel Saxum: Yeah, scoot along with a skateboard on my belly or something. Allen Hall: Yeah, I’d Joel Saxum: peek in there. Allen Hall: I can’t get through the access panel. I’m way too tall for that craziness, yeah. Joel Saxum: So what this tool does is it’s able to let the technicians pinpoint exactly where the damage is. So if you need to open up a part of the blade to fix the LPS, you can do it in that specific spot. It’s a great time saver. It is. It has the capability. Now, I’ve never seen this piece of kit run in the field, so I don’t know exactly what the operation looks like, but in theory, I get it and I like it. So again, Top 7, they’ve got high resolution cameras on drones, they’ve got some other things, they’re a drone company, but this is their kind of flagship device that we’ve heard about for a while, able to find where the break is Allen Hall: in the LPS cable. So if you haven’t read this Top 7 article, you better get that. To PESWIN. com, download it and read it. You get this great information in there. Joel Saxum: Okay, I was just hanging out with some of my cousins from San Diego that live near La Jolla Beach, but this wind farm is called La Joya. Wind farm in New Mexico, and I don’t want to get that wrong. It’s an Avangrid wind farm. It was built by Wanzik in February of 2020. They finished it in May of 2021 with balance of plant and everything else. The project has 111 turbines, and this is the interesting part of this wind farm. 74 of those 111 turbines are on state trust land. The other ones are on private land. So there is Some SGRE G114s and 76 GE 2. 82127 machines in this wind farm. And to get it built on the state trust land, why they did it and how they did it. They had a bunch of support from U. S. Senator Tom Udall, U. S. Senator Martin Heinrich, a Congresswoman, Deb Highland from New Mexico’s 1st District. And the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Luan Grisham. And one of the reasons that they pushed so hard to do this was on the state trust land, is it’s going to give a ton of money back to the state. New Mexico classically is a state that doesn’t have a huge tax base. So nice for them to get some income from a resource that they have in spades, which is wind. So we’re seeing, the Sun Zia project. That’s in New Mexico. So New Mexico is becoming a haven for wind farm developers. There’s hundreds of thousands of acres of state trust land. That’s prime for renewable energy generation. Avon grid took advantage of this partnered up with PNM, which is the power corporation in New Mexico. Helped PNM hit some other state emissions free goals. They’re well on their way to the 100 percent carbon free by 2040 benchmark that they’ve set with this wind farm in place. And some of the other ones that are moving there. So the Avon grid. La Joya Wind Farm in New Mexico is Torrance County. Allen Hall: You are the wind farm of the week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the shows below to the Uptime Tech News newsletter and check out Rosie’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Macquarie Asset Management invest $1. 7 billion in D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments, which operates over 6 gigawatts. Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Sany is preparing to establish a production facility in Europe by 2026. GCM Grosvenor has acquired a 25% stake in the 845 megawatt Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon. 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: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Joel Saxum and this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at intelstor. com. Macquarie Asset Management has agreed to acquire a substantial minority stake in D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments, also known as DESRE. This investment, valued up to 1. 7 billion U. S. dollars, aims to bolster Desiree’s growth and enhance its market position. Desiree, a leading renewable energy company, currently operates a platform with over 6 gigawatts of gross capacity in projects either operational or under construction. Phill, when you start tossing around the B for billion number in financial exchanges, there’s a massive movement of cash in renewables. Philip Totaro: Well, and this follows on the theme that we’ve been talking about over the past, whatever, two, three months about asset management firms and financial investors kind of pouring money into renewable energy asset owners. Obviously, Macquarie’s got a substantial background throughout their investments in Australia, in Europe throughout the rest of the world. Interestingly enough, the U. S. is a market where they’ve been kind of under penetrated. So, they took their time with evaluating who to partner up with and the fact they picked D. E. Shaw is, is kind of fascinating. You Shaw’s got a, a fine track record with the, the performance of their assets, according to our data. And most of their projects are quite profitable. So it’s it’s a good way for Macquarie to get their, their foot in the door. Joel Saxum: De Shaw on the renewable side, right? De Shaw is a very large company, $60 billion in assets and committed capital with a smaller portion of that being the renewables arm. But it’s, it’s an odd thing because in the, in the operational circles that we talk to a lot in the wind energy industry in the United States, we don’t hear de Shah’s name too much. But of course you look at this six gigawatts of power moving and grooving here. One thing that’s interesting to me, of course, is the stuff that we follow on the the Uptime podcast here is Macquarie Asset Management recently acquired Onyx Insight. So you could see some Onyx Insight kit being deployed on these DE Shaw renewables Allen Hall: assets shortly. Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Sany is preparing to establish a production facility in Europe by 2026. The company is in advanced talks with potential European customers and has narrowed down potential production locations to three, with Germany and Spain among the options. The company expects to finalize its first European order by the end of this year, initially shipping turbines from China while offering services through partners in Europe. And it’s service center in Germany, China, moving into the European marketplace with a factory is going to upset the balance of powers in the wind industry, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is interesting because it’s another Chinese company trying to set up shop in Europe. But one that already has an R and D presence down in Spain for those that don’t know and actually Saini Heavy Industries actually has. Manufacturing facilities and space available in Germany already, which is why they’re likely to locate their manufacturing in one of those two countries. This has been kind of the talk of the town lately, particularly the wind energy Hamburg event this week. The, the debate rages on about whether or not it’s a good thing to have the, the Chinese OEMs setting up shop in Europe but I liken this to, Vestas coming over to the U. S. and getting, tax credits and, and rebates for being able to create jobs and create tax revenue now if you’re going to get into the debate about Well, it’s a little different because a chinese owned company is not just a chinese owned company It’s also potentially state owned and military owned partially military owned that’s a bit of a different conversation still to be addressed by the european commission, but As far as, having another manufacturer in the market, probably a good thing to be able to keep price pressure on the Western guys and, it does offer an opportunity for some of the people who have recently been laid off or otherwise let go from some of the mainstream Western OEMs. Or major supply chain companies a chance to, to get back in the door with with a Chinese company who’s, who’s looking to staff up. Joel Saxum: So, for those of you think that this is a, just a Chinese play coming into the, to Europe, into the Western market, something to remember here is Sany Renewable Energy’s Managing Director for Europe Paulo Fernandes Sores. He is ex Siemens Kamesa. He ran the C, he was the CEO of Siemens Kamesa onshore business in Asia Pacific. So this isn’t a, there, there is some market presence and some continuity of people that know the market and that have been in that position before to make moves in Europe within this group and all of this being released at Hamburg this week in Germany, the biggest onshore and offshore wind show. So, Saini looking to make some moves. Allen Hall: Lastly, U S alternative asset manager, GCM Grosvenor. has acquired a 25 percent stake in the 845 megawatt Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon. The stake was purchased from a group led by Brookfield Asset Management. Shepherds Flat, titled as the largest repowered wind farm in North America, boasts 338 turbines producing over 2, 000 gigawatt hours of clean electricity annually. So, there’s a lot of transactions being conducted currently for farms that are about to be repowered. To get the new PPA and then the tax credits. Why would you purchase a win from that has just been repowered? Philip Totaro: It’s well, there’s two reasons why I think this transaction has taken place. Now, first of all GCM Grosvenor is an asset manager that financial asset manager that has only recently been kind of poking around the renewables markets. They do have similar to other, asset financial asset firms. They do have kind of the deep pockets, but they don’t have the experience. And so they wanted to be able to partner up with somebody like Brookfield, for instance, in this case, that had the requisite experience. and it could offer them an opportunity to get into something at scale. Why they wanted to get in, after the thing’s already been repowered is they’re still reaping the benefits it was repowered. So Brookfield took over this asset in 2021. It was originally built in 2012 and commissioned with as you mentioned a lot through 338 GE 2. 5s. And since they’ve repowered it they not only requalified the project for another 10 years of the production tax credit, the, the project is actually been repowered since 2022. So it’s, they’re still able to take advantage of another eight years worth of asset ownership before, I mean, with these, with these guys, they could either flip their, their 25 percent to somebody else. They could increase it. They could decrease it. They’re just looking to get into something profitable. Kind of figure out how it all works, and if it’s something that they like and want to stay invested in, they’re gonna do that. If something else comes along that’s more attractive, they’re a little fickle sometimes with with their investments and their cash. But they definitely want to get involved in something that they think is gonna be, Profitable for them. Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s another one of the large capital houses, just deploying some capital, trying to get into renewables like you’re seeing the black rocks and although it’s in the infrastructure world doing, but smart move, right? Brookfield renewables established player, massive portfolio to learn from lots of good engineers over there. They know how to run assets and make money with them. So if you’re going to, Take a minority stake in a wind farm, great one to hop on board with, especially a big one like this. Even though in Oregon it is that is a tough operating environment for wind turbines with intermittent icing issues and some other things. They don’t experience lightning like we do in the Midwestern or the middle part of the country, but icing issues and other things are a bit of a task up there. But kudos to them for hopping in the market.

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum visit Gulf Wind Technology in New Orleans, where they sit down with CEO James Martin and CTO David King to explore the company’s innovative work in wind turbine technology. The conversation delves into Gulf Wind’s unique facility, their approach to solving industry challenges, and their role in developing wind energy solutions for the Gulf of Mexico. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my cohost, Joel Saxum. And we are in New Orleans, Louisiana, of all places, at Gulf Wind Technology. And we have James Martin, who is the CEO of Gulf Wind Technology, and David King, the Chief Technical Officer at Gulf Wind Technology. And first of all, welcome to the podcast, guys. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks for coming to visit us. We’ve had a wonderful time here today going through the Gulf Wind Technology. offices and workspace. It is impressive. It’s not something I knew we even had in the United States, honestly. And you guys have been working for a couple years on a variety of different projects and technologies. And we had a meeting this morning, just full disclosure, about all the things that Gulfwind has been involved with. I’m like, whoa, all right, I didn’t know that. Some of it is top secret still, some of it not top secret. James, let’s just start with you. I think people in the U. S. don’t have a lot of experience, haven’t met you before, haven’t worked with Gulfwind. Can you just give us a brief background on what Gulfwind Technology is as a business? James Martin: Certainly, yeah. Gulfwind Technology, we are all first principles, blades engineers essentially, first. OEM industry for a number of years. We’ve seen some of the challenges that the industry is up against today, and we like to think that we can predict maybe some of the challenges for tomorrow. So with that team, we’ve been able to build assets, equipment get ourselves out there as problem solvers and offering technology solutions to basically problems that can reduce the cost of energy over time. It gets talked about a lot. We’re going to talk about some of the assets we’ve invested in, but yeah, we’ve got reliability products that get involved with today. The problems of today’s market. We’re really passionate about the products of tomorrow. So more performance projects for the future. And we love running projects. So we like, we specifically, we’ve been working in our region to open up or demystify, remove roadblocks for the Gulf of Mexico market. Which have got some great technology problem statements in there Allen Hall: Because that’s where we first heard of gulfwind was with the work with shell gulfwind, right? Yeah, that’s It’s a double edged sword and we had you on the podcast in a sense because we were talking about the first wind turbine being Installed in louisiana and gulfwind is involved with that. James Martin: Yeah, I mean we really thought Because a lot of our challenges about how to get technology to products how can we demonstrate that we can take it off a desktop study in terms of a solution or an idea, and how can we show it works? How can we de risk that for our customers? So the first thing we thought is that we really want to invest put our money where our mouth is, make sure that we can design, make sure we can test on a sub component level, make sure we can actually spin anything we’re talking about. And yeah, demystify some of that technology, essentially. One of the things Joel Saxum: Allen and I talk about regularly, whether it’s on the podcast or in our many Slack conversations every day, is the fact that there’s not a whole lot of technology development, either companies, solutions, services, coming out of the United States, right? We know that we are a bit younger of a wind market as a whole than there is our European counterparts and a lot of solutions come out of them. So the, some of the performance enhancements, some of the those fixes that we’re talking about here, like you guys are working on. We’re sitting in this, you can see on the camera here, if you’re watching on the YouTube version, that we’ve got planes and we’ve got a rapid prototyping facility. And we’ve got offices over here and people running around and There’s a lot of things that can go on here because they have the facility built for it. If you haven’t looked into it, both wind technologies and what it can bring to not only the global market, but the local U. S. Market. It’s huge. It’s a game changer for what we should be doing here, and more operators should be coming in here to talk with the team. So with that being said, I know we’re in Louisiana. What is the rest of the team and the rest of the James Martin: outfit look? Yeah, the core team and where we were founded is really here at the shipyard, Abendale Global Gateway. Yeah, this is almost the jewel in the crown of former glory North American manufacturing. They used to manufacture giant ships here for the Navy, oil and gas projects. They had 26, 000 people here. So this, this 30, 000 square foot facility. It’s our true north. This is our headquarters. But we’ve got a fantastic, we got an engineering office actually in Hickory in North Carolina. Dead center between Asheville and Charlotte where our chief engineer and our, some of our blade inspection and our loads teams sit. So it’s only a few people there, but they really much complement what we’re up to here. David King: Yeah, no. And just as James mentioned, all we’ve really done is taken that, that jewel in the crown and filled it with all the things you need to Really understand the problem statements and when really dive into the hands on engineering work that’s needed to drive these problem statements into solutions. And so that’s really why it’s been such a joy to be part of this Gulf wind team to build this team out is because we’ve been able to almost match that kind of handshake between engineering and hands on work in a very real substantive way. So you have Joel Saxum: the engineering resources, but you’ve got the resources as well. We’re in so everybody knows, the heat index here in Louisiana is 105 degrees, but it’s comfortable here, right? So we’re in an insulated air conditioned facility that is 125 meters long. And if I look through the camera here, I see this is where there’s a composite repair testing facility. We have rapid prototyping. There’s a wind, there’s an actual wind tunnel that you guys built design. Had calibrated and are regularly using it down at that end. And so what you would need, like you said, is Hey, not only do we have engineering resources and all the smart people, but we have the capabilities of testing of, Hey, there is a solution. What if we thought about this? Let’s action it here. Let’s test it out. Let’s build a piece and then put it in the test chamber. We were right over here earlier when we were walking around. Of course, we’re recording this sitting at a desk. We’re in full PPE walking through here. And there’s a material testing station and SNAP! We had the energy. The sweet sound of composite failure. Yeah, that’s right. There we go. And then we all turned. Yay! Success, right? But those facilities and those capabilities are here. As an operator, you have a problem. You have a, you say you’ve got, you name the turbine XYZ turbine, and we’re starting to see this kind of issue in our fleet. Call Gulf Wind Technologies. They could replicate the issue with them, get in the field, do the inspections, figure out what’s going on, come back here, fix it. Build what could be, will be the fix, test the fix, David King: and make sure it works. And it’s really all about getting engineers as close to the problem statement as possible. Whether that’s sending engineers up tower, having engineers stood around problem statements in a lab setting, or trying to bring the field into the lab to really break these problem statements down and understand them. As you go through that asset list, it’s been all about how do we remove these different barriers that we’ve seen in the past, slow down projects, make things take longer than they really should and allow us to move quite quickly and rapidly through that kind of prototyping that fail forward fast type mentality and get to something where we can actually offer a solution for a customer, whether that’s on the performance load side of thing with, like you mentioned, the wind tunnel or whether it’s testing materials, doing subcomponent testing, really just want to remove these barriers. And as you mentioned a little bit earlier, With the the turbine down in Port Fouchon, that’s been a huge part of that as well, is what’s that, that, top of the testing pyramid where these problems really shake themselves out on these prototype turbines, and how can we, in a very quick, rapid, fast way, get to that prototype turbine level. We can make blades for a turbine like that in a couple weeks, really, which allows us to, again, move super, super fast through these Allen Hall: problems. And being so knowledgeable in blades, the root cause analysis ends up at your doorstep quite a bit in terms of engineering review in the United States. That’s, seems to be a relatively growing business as people realize Gulfwind is here. They’re going to be tapping you to do that kind of work. What kind of root cause analysis work have you been doing lately? James Martin: A lot of what we do is we treat a turbine like a it’s a production line for energy. So we want to break it down in times of a very repeatable engineering based approach to the problems thing. You can brand it as a whether it’s a six sigma project and you’re breaking it down into those nice steps with gates, or it’s the first principles technology development project or product development project. But we start with the business case. It all starts with that a customer. What do they want out of our solution? What’s their budget for it? What’s the time period that they want it both designed and implemented? How long do they want the solution to last for? So once you go through that defined stage, it then starts to, you’re setting up your design experiments, you’re putting your sandpit of engineers together so they can actually innovate. And like David said, fail forward fast, but using all the tools around us. to make sure that we’re, working with the customer lockstep with them. We’re independent. We’ve got high integrity. We like to create areas for customers that they can come here. So customers can ship their full blades here. And they can do it under very tight NDA terms, totally confidential. If we see a pattern, then we can approach those customers and actually in a very controlled way cross pollinate and create more consortia of driven environments, and switch. As we know, in this industry, it’s sometimes about removing the barriers, like we were talking about earlier on today, demystifying, getting as close a collaboration between an operator, an OEM, an independent, a field technician, what David was talking about, but creating that appropriate collaborative space to problem solve and then put a really robust solution together, something that is designed with its end intent which is You know, there’s no point doing something on a desktop or on a subcomponent level. If by the time it’s deployed, that’s when you introduce the variation. So we, it’s all about de risking our approach, essentially. Joel Saxum: On what, you’re just de risking what you guys do as a company. But in a grand scheme, you’re de risking what the global fleet looks like. So people can come here, like you said, operate in, under close NDAs. But if they want to iterate with others, it’s available. Right now I’m looking at one, two, three, four blades, four or five root sections. Out beyond this door to my left, there’s eight or 10 full blade sections there. So customers have actually gotten to the point where they say we want to ship you a blade. You guys figure it out. We may send some engineers, we may help out. But when we talk about on the podcast, a lot of. The Shroud of Secrecy around everything. You guys have created a facility. Basically, it For a lack of a better term, it’s an engineer’s playground. To come here and solve these problems for the industry. Allen Hall: Yeah, and I think that gets back to the industry need. An operator has a problem with a blade, is probably not on a blade, is probably just a series of blades, have a similar issue. A lot of times when an RCA is done, there’s an engineer comes out to the field, takes some photos of the blade, They may take a couple of samples maybe, and then they’ll see a report shoved out on the other side. And it doesn’t really get down to the heart of what is really causing the issue, and a lot of times companies that are doing RCA’s don’t have the mechanical ability to start breaking things apart, or cross sectioning, or doing NDA. That’s a huge advantage. Because if I’m a large operator, I’m going to send you that blade to tear it apart and figure out what’s going on because it’s not just one. David King: It’s really about, approaching in that systematic way where, whether it’s, understanding failure modes, effects analysis, using that as a tool that extracts out what does that teardown need to look like? What do we need to be evaluating here? Is it we need to be doing mechanical testing, looking under the microscope at parts, approaching with a different inspection method? And then ultimately, opening up for a period of time, maybe potentially some different innovative solutions around how you can approach a solution coming out of that RCA. So you’re not just identifying that problem, but you’re also starting to think ahead on what am I going to do about this problem? How am I going to manage this at scale? How am I going to manage risk? And how am I going to do that? At that fleet level, I’d be thinking about that on the onset of the RCA to truly get the most value out of that exercise. And it’s Allen Hall: not the really critical part, because when it comes down to it, it eventually becomes a money issue. How do I minimize the cost impact and my downtime impact, my business interruption, to get these turbines back up and running so I can get through their useful lifespan? And I think, From what we’ve seen today, when technology has that expertise for sure, but also has a sense of what the business is. I don’t need to extend a blade for another 20 years if it really only has 3 or 4 years of life in it. I need to get it to its end of useful life. That kind of repair is different than the 20 year repair. That knowledge, I think, is really important in how you apply engineering principles to that. So not every problem has the same solution. James Martin: Yeah, no, I’m free matters. Absolutely. Yeah. And that, from our very first problem statement, there was a a life extension to get through to repower as you say, or whether it’s one of our more programmatic guess opportunities. So with the shell sponsored golf wind technology accelerator, that was about looking actually quite far in the future. That was saying, Hey, this is a high risk environment with specific economic challenges. What does that look like? Like, how are we going to remove the barriers and how are we going to approach it? So we like looking, we look at today, we look at the reliability and we love applying that to what the future might be. Allen Hall: So let’s walk through the hurricane scenario because this always comes up about the Gulf of Mexico and Shell anointed Gulfwind to be the company to go look at it. Really, that’s what happened. And that’s great. They obviously have done their homework and decided to come here and that’s, congratulations on that. But, when you put a turbine out in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s always a concern in two phases. One, that it’s essentially low wind conditions, except when there’s a hurricane. Then it’s super high wind conditions. That requires a different kind of technology or approach to designing blades and you’ve been working on that for a little while. Do you have that solution or are there multiple solutions? What does that look like? Because we want to put some wind turbines out in the Gulf of Mexico. How does that happen? James Martin: Yeah, I mean from a programmatic approach and then I may hand it over to David on the blades approach but From a programmatic approach, it was about the whole ecosystem of wind in the Gulf. Maybe just leaning out from just the blades part for a minute, but we talked a little bit about this. It was about the workforce, the infrastructure what can be leveraged from oil and gas to actually deploy and take percentage points out of the cost structure in the backyard of the Gulf. And you have just have to go down there to realize that. It’s It’s a huge production system, and the stats are amazing, the amount of mileage of pipeline, Joel Saxum: Platforms, workforce, James Martin: cranes, so much stuff that can be transposed into wind. So it was looking at it from that cost of capital, from the economics of wind, from, workforce, training, equipment, deployment, servicing. And then you start to think at the system level, okay, how can the rotor affect that? The foundation where the foundation design and I’ll hand the ball to David to talk about more of the rotor and the loads technology part because that’s also pretty damn interesting. David King: No, absolutely. As James mentioned, it really has to be rooted in that business case. If you’re just looking at things from an engineering problem solving point of view, it’s probably actually an easy problem to solve. You can put more material in a blade. You can put more expensive material in it. You can solve the problem. But what you haven’t done is you haven’t solved the economic problem. So you’ve got to come into it. With an engineering hat on and an economic hat to make sure that you can really deploy turbines in an efficient manner that’s going to make that energy competitive and the open market and actually useful for everybody. Especially Joel Saxum: in the Gulf, you’re going to be in the ERCOT market. Exactly. That’s usually not a fixed PPA and you’re going to be playing with what’s going on there. James Martin: Yeah, Texas side. Sure. No, Joel Saxum: absolutely. Like there was a that’s Boehm James Martin: sale off of Galveston’s. Yeah. And that, I’m in it. Yeah, I mean from a, we’ve learned a lot about that by bringing Parties to the table. So we know our background is blades. We’ve got the assets to be able to demystify it. But on a programmatic approach, it’s about bringing in the experts and actually being quite humble about where are they going to be lessons learned. So we showed you a little bit earlier about where we can we like collaborating a lot. So if we can have people that are experts in sighting, ground conditions, deployment aviation, lightning birds migratory patterns. It’s getting all the problems on the table and getting an appropriate size forum where people can talk frankly, and not, have a particular lens. And that, so that collaboration piece is critical. Exactly, and that’s David King: almost part of that optimization problem. If you’re, again, putting on an engineering hat now and listening to all those problem statements, how do you find that optimal solution that’s incorporating all those different, design curves, whether it’s a stakeholder management curve, whether it’s understand the economics, the loads, you can boil it down into a lot of different ways. You want to find that lowest kind of intersecting point between those curves to solve the problem. So with, as you mentioned, the gulf low wind speed, you’ve got high loads. How do you solve that fundamental problem? That was your original question there. And what it really comes down to is loads management and being smart with your aerodynamics on the front end. To be able to drive out the need for materials, drive out the amount of loads that are being experienced by those foundations. And basically, selecting airfoils appropriately, selecting your material appropriately, and being a bit creative with how you combine those things together. To without adding cost to that turbine, be able to reduce the load. So it really boils down to a series of technologies that manage those loads appropriately, both from a structural performance point of view, an aero performance point of view, a controller point of view, and then validating that those things are going to work on a demonstration turbine on different scales. And so that’s a lot of what the work’s been to date. Joel Saxum: So if we wrap up that basically when Shell approached you guys, the Gulfwind Technology Accelerator, they were looking for an independent set of experts to bring in experts as you need, as consultants or whatever. But they were looking for someone independent to do a holistic review of how do we deploy this technology in this environment? And it’s something that we talk about regularly. We wish that would happen in more emerging markets because, as it sits right now, offshore wind in the United States, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the East Coast, West Coast, California, the Gulf, it’s all an emerging market. And if you don’t understand that, then You haven’t looked at it deep enough because the east coast where we sit right now, there’s the maritime help, the vessels, the people, the expertise. It seems to be that there’s a lot of lessons that a lot of those operators have from working in the North Atlantic. Great. However, when you get over to the United States, it’s a different problem. And we’re focusing on low speed, low wind speeds, hurricane force winds in the Gulf. That also exists on the east coast. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I don’t know, and okay, I’m not a fly on the wall in those meetings of those operators and those OEMs, but I don’t know if they’ve taken that stuff into consideration or not. So I’m not saying that. Yeah. But that holistic, independent review all would love and really have an emerging market coming up on the west coast with the floating wheel. So I would love to see some of those operators engage you guys for that same kind of holistic project to bring the whole, wrap the whole thing up. But as an independent and look at it from an. from different lenses, right? It’s not looking at it from where they sit and what they feel. It’s someone else telling them these are the realities. James Martin: And the OEMs are they’re working on phenomenal programs and projects their own. So they’ve been really supportive of what we’re doing. So again, doing something in an emerging market, like you say the OEMs are very public that they’ve got. They’ve got a lot to focus on, they’re working about ramping up supply chains and, demonstrating that improving quality. There’s a lot going on at the OEM level. So finding this niche and being between the OEM and the operator and collaborating in that space. Yeah, it’s, it, we’ve really enjoyed it. And I think it was very valuable for our stakeholders over the last couple of years. And it’s part of a multi year program. So we really hope to be, talking to you guys about this over the next few years as we get to steel in the water. Allen Hall: You’re dealing with a lot of blades. Joel and I walked around the facility and there are a lot of blades outside even, so there’s a lot of blade knowledge here. What are the top issues that operators on shore are having with blades at the moment? David King: Yeah, so I can speak to that a bit. A lot of the issues are stemming from various types of damage that we’re seeing from erosion, which is your typical stuff your lightning strikes, that sort of thing. There’s a lot of problem statements right now around various manufacturing deviations, quality issues that might have found their way into the field that are resulting in cracked laminates, cracked balsa panel regions, core regions, things like that. And really, a lot of these defects they need real true due diligence and understanding what’s going on with that problem statement. And again, coming back to that kind of understanding the business case for how we’re going to deal with these issues. Is it getting something to through to repower? Is it getting a 20 year life out of it? Is it getting a two year life out of it? And again, it really comes back to understanding these first principle composite problems and seeing some of the similarities that are coming out of that, whether it’s a crack in the balsa region, a crack in the root region, a crack in the spar a lot of the, solutions have overlaps, have commonalities between them that you can piggyback off of. And this goes back Allen Hall: to the question of how do I monitor this? So it’s one thing to notice you have a crack. The second is, what do I do about it? And maybe the answer is nothing. And we’ve seen a number of continuous monitoring systems being applied just in that case and the question from every operator is how do I know that this CMS system works or which is the best one? Or I have this particular application. Is there a particular CMS system that works in particular better for that kind of problem, that crack problem or that lightning problem, whatever it is, you’re looking at that. David King: It’s all data collection at its fundamentals, right? Whether you’re using a drone inspection, whether you’re visually going out and looking at something, whether you’re using accelerometers, audible noise, acoustics any of these different systems out there, it’s all about really just trying to capture data in different forms and understanding what to do with those data streams. And something we’ve seen is that each data stream might have a different way of capturing a different damage mode that you’re seeing on a blade. So the same solution is gonna apply to all damage modes, whether it’s an acoustic system or an accelerometer based system. And what we have been doing here at the GWA facility is trying to categorize and understand that in a lab setting and then try and expand out from that lab setting into how do things scale into the field. In a controlled way, where you’re eliminating noise you’re getting rid of the things that are gonna cause variation in that data stream that allow you to not make an actual conclusion off of that. For example, one of the things we did is we built a spar box beam in house, and put that on one of our in house test rigs and put load into it. And the first thing we want to do is actually have no defects, no damage on it. And what do all these systems detect when there’s no damage? What’s that baseline look like? So we’ve got comparable data later on. And then we can start introducing defects of different types, different distances from these these systems. Start to categorize things in a very holistic view, and then start adding the complexities of how do the variables of the field apply over the top of that sort of controlled Allen Hall: data set. And if I’m an operator, I don’t want to be calling David and getting hooked up with that because I have that problem. Every operator that Joel and I have talked to over the last couple of years They all need monitoring of some sort. Every one of them needs a monitor. But they don’t know which one to choose. And we provide recommendations because we have knowledge of some of that, obviously. But we don’t have direct knowledge. We have anecdotal knowledge. Joel Saxum: Yeah. We don’t have the We can tell you it works Our own boxed And there’s David King: a huge amount of value even in that anecdotal You know, I think that’s something that, data is obviously extremely important, but also how is that information being received often plays out in some of those anecdotal stories that I’m sure you guys have worked through personally, where maybe the data was confusing. Maybe it gave conflicting signals or things like that. And those are all important considerations. But Allen Hall: there’s no place to go besides Gulfwind technology right now. Honestly, where are you going to go in the United States? I know of places that you could do it or you’re doing it’s up and running right now. You’d have to start over somewhere else. This is why your leadership in the industry in the United States in particular is so valuable because we’re not, we’re ahead of where I thought we were. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of trying to solve problems. Yeah. James Martin: And a lot of it’s about talking to, it’s like doing a gap analysis. So early on we’d worked with the labs. I know you got, NRA and Sandia Labs, they’re phenomenal bonds. So they’ll, they’ve got, they’re a wealth of knowledge and they might be able to help us curate what we’re gonna invest in. Certainly you mentioned that turn the lights on, doing those blade autopsies. So using the fact that it’s a shipyard, it’s very, you got a mile and a half of Mississippi River next door, we got 35 rail cars can roll onto site. We could have the largest blade in the world wheeled into the factory. That is, there’s something that we know is, we’re really proud that’s pretty unique. And then cutting it up, polishing it, the racks of samples that we showed you earlier. But, turning the lights on, rather than looking around with a spotlight, and again, that’s something that we’ve we’ve found is extremely valuable for what we’re trying to do. Joel Saxum: In with respect to, of course NDAs have in place, we don’t want to, we don’t want to lift anybody’s Hood too much. But what are some of the other projects that you’re working on? We talked about the CMS thing. Can you give us a couple of them where it’s Miss, we’re doing this, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. Yeah. David King: Yeah just going around the factory, a bit. We do a little bit of composite manufacturing. Whether that’s, producing parts that can go in the field and put on a wind turbine. We can actually pre infuse a lot of parts that find their ways on to blades and solve problems in the field. In a variety of different manners. You mentioned the CMS problem statement. We also do a lot of performance characterization. That involves a rapid prototyping lab where we’ll 3D print, scan airfoils, characterize airfoils, understand how erosion impacts performance, loads, a variety of different kind of factors. I think one of the key takeaways or kind of key facts for us coming out of that, the rapid prototyping lab is the ability to have an airfoil and CAD and turn it around to an air foil on the wind tunnel in less than five days. That’s really the real aim of that whole entire facility there. So we do a lot of projects around that. We mentioned a little bit about RCA, so that’s receiving blade components, doing blade tear downs, looking at those blade parts under microscope, looking at them when they’re on a test stand, putting them underneath NDT and a laboratory setting a little bit different than sometimes doing that in the field. Cutting sections out of them and actually, again, mechanically characterizing those sections as well. And then, mentioned a little bit about the wind tunnel testing. We do have the wind tunnel here, so we can do a variety of different test campaigns on that, whether that’s emerging technologies that somebody wants to validate, or whether it’s something that’s out in the field right now that someone wants to understand how that’s performing. And then the other side of this is actually deploying solutions. As we speak today, we actually have two or three teams out in the field. One of those teams is doing uptower NDT inspections, so they’re inspecting blade roots uptower. They can do a turbine in about four hours or so, so it’s a quick turnaround. We can get big deployment very fast with that team. We’ve got another team that’s actually doing repairs in the field today, and they’re deploying that repair with some bit of custom kit that we’ve got, whether it’s some custom equipment that we’ve developed in house to be capable of going uptower. Equipment that maybe traditionally has always been thought of as a down tower solution or a down tower fix and basically applying composites, carbon fiber, specking them out so that we can bring them up tower. That’s been a huge element. And then also just more of some of your more traditional composite repairs in the field as well, where you’ve got trucks and trailers and, fiberglass get applied to blades. So you can really cover a lot of the spectrum with those projects. And yeah, it certainly keeps us busy. Yeah. Yeah, when you look at your website, Joel Saxum: there, you, if you like to read, Fantastic website. Yeah. But it shows I know Allen and I were looking at it before we came down here when we originally had talked with you on the phone and then it’s man, they do this, and they can do that, and they can do this, and they can do that. It’s man, okay, what’s the next page? They can do this, too. They can do that, too. Basically if you have a page, whether it is leading edge erosion on a blade that you just need fixed all the way to, rapid prototyping and testing things to the nth degree you guys can solve. James Martin: Yeah. And that we’re a young company and we certainly have been involved with a lot of problem statements. Like you say David talks about some things that are getting deployed, but yeah, really specializing in that route region up tower. Repair and life extension. That’s something we’re really proud of. We’ve done a lot of work on for almost three years now. And yeah, just moving into something that can be deployed as as engineers intended it to be deployed. So a lot of. Kind of first principles in terms of lean and repeatability. Just making sure that you don’t have any risk when you take it out of the tech center and put it into the field. David King: And a lot of that comes down to the cross functionality of the team. I think James mentioned earlier a little bit about the North Carolina office and some of the different skill sets around the team. But when we were building out the team, we started out with, almost like an inputs, outputs look on the design of a turbine, right? So we’ve got. Site assessments. We’ve got loads, understanding the loads of the system level, understanding those loads at the blade level and then understanding the loads within the blade. So structural engineering composite material engineering, then understanding how are those processes developed and having process engineers on the team that have got, hands on composite experience, have spent decades in factories building things, repairing things, doing the full spectrum of that side of it and really trying to bring again all that different cross functionality into one roof so that we’re not, Blind to maybe certain areas of that design where we might be trying to put out a solution or a repair method that, that isn’t taking into account that full spectrum of what else might we be affecting? And that’s really where that team plays out quite well. Allen Hall: Yeah, you have a lot of talented people on your team and to be such a young company, to have that lineup of people on your staff, it’s impressive. There’s a huge resume behind these names. That says a lot. As an operator, I want to go to a company that has people that have worked for OEMs in the industry a little while and understand what composites are and what repairs are and what can go wrong out in the field, which is the front. I think the big problem is that we do a lot of things engineering wise that when getting to the hands of a technician that’s not familiar with the problem’s scope, mistakes are made. And we went through a number of scenarios here. That hey, we’re looking at what the technicians could do taking away the variability of this or if there is variability It’s not gonna affect the overall performance. Those are huge. That’s such a huge advantage besides Repair in the repair world you get a repair instruction sheet and it just says do X but X rarely happens the way James Martin: We’re having a compliment what’s going on in the OEM and the operator level. I think that’s What the feedback loop that we get from OEMs and operators that we’re in the right space. We do have a pretty romantic idea of the future in terms of wind. We believe in wind. We’ve been with veterans of the industry. We know there are cycles. We know there are challenges. But we, ultimately we’ve seen innovation get to product. We’ve seen rotor sizes increase. We’ve seen quality increase even though there are sensitivities on quality. We’ve seen a lot of good, steps forward. It’s a young industry in the scheme of things versus some of the other industries we talked about. But yeah, you’re right. You need the talent. You need the culture. You need the collaboration that we talked about a lot today So yeah, we’re optimistic. Allen Hall: Yeah. James, where does Gulfwind technology go from here? What’s the next year or two look like? James Martin: The next year or two, I think, like David alluded to, we really want to scale a lot of our early TRL projects from a couple of years ago and maturing. So working through that technology readiness spectrum. And, we’re in pre series, as David said, for a number of things. So deployment on you really, putting the rubber on the road, and getting some of these things out there in alignment with the customer risk profile. But we also love innovating. We secured our first Wind Energy Technologies Office, SBIR DOE loan grant last year. Big difference. But that was fantastic because we get to fund some of the white paper innovations that we’re pretty passionate about as well. You have consortia. It’s never done in isolation. OEMs, labs, operators, universities, colleges. So we look forward to doing stuff like that. Of course we do. And there’s going to be more of that to come. But yeah, really de risking and keeping very tight reins on how we get our product out there. That’s what looks for the next year or so. Allen Hall: So James, how do people find you on the internet? How do they connect with you? James Martin: Okay, so we we’ve got our very lengthy website that we’re very proud of. So golfwindtechnology. com. We are trying to get better on LinkedIn about talking about what we’re doing. In terms of what is out there that we can talk about. And, yeah, we really enjoy going to all these array of shows out there. Allen Hall: If you’re down in New Orleans stop by and check out the facility because it is impressive. James and David, thank you so much for inviting us to New Orleans and to see the facility. It is well worth the trip. And learned a ton visiting with you today. Thank you so much. James Martin: Thank Allen Hall: you, guys. James Martin: Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

First up, Aerodyn Consulting’s patent for a single point mooring system with dual wind turbines. This concept is only being utilized by MingYang for their OceanX wind turbine so far, but it’s promising. Then Newtech Group’s method for connecting modular wind turbine blades, which could make the concept more viable. Finally, a method for keeping your dogs ears out of their food. 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. Phil, another busy week in the ID and patent world. And we’re going to start off with the single point mooring wind turbine with two wind energy conversion units. That’s a complicated name for something that seems rather simple from Aerodyn Consulting over in Singapore. And this idea has been implemented by MinYang and we’ve seen this, I think it’s called OceanX, where they have two independent turbines on a platform. a master controller for the two and it’s floating and it points itself on a single mooring system But there’s more details to that you want to explain what else they have going on in this idea. Philip Totaro: Yeah, so this this is a pretty complicated and but clever idea And I actually want to take a step back and talk about the fact that nobody else in the industry at this point is using this technology other than Ming Yang, who’s licensed the design from, from Aerodyn. And, and again, what this does is it’s going to ensure that. Basically, the, the platform that has these two counter rotating turbines on it doesn’t basically kind of yaw itself or shake itself apart from, from having the having the both rotors pointed in, in different directions. Directions that they shouldn’t be pointed in. So the mooring system is kind of helping with with that to an extent. But it’s also ensuring that the entire platform is able to yaw into into the wind in a way that’s going to be favorable, including the typhoon that this thing actually just survived over in China. So when they deployed this prototype, it’s, in a typhoon prone area. And it seems like this single mooring system did his job pretty well. Joel Saxum: Yeah, the single point mooring is not a new concept, right? It’s just with this patent, it’s filed with the addition of the twin rotor and how that thing works together. But single point mooring has been used offshore and oil and gas world for a very long time. There’s a, There’s a type of vessel called an FPSO. It’s a floating production and storage and offloading facility. But these things are massive. If you’ve ever seen an offshore, what they, it looks like an offshore oil rig. They look like a big ship, but usually they aren’t powered or anything. They’re drug out there by tugs and they’re hooked up to what is called the single point mooring system. And that single point mooring system is a way of affixing that structure topside to one spot and then it can rotate around it. in production and one of the downfalls of this this setup for operations and maintenance is not so much with this ming yang machine because it’s a 16 megawatt machine it’s a big big thing but if you have to put a lot of these out there a single point more Needs to be anchored off in usually the four cardinal directions. Sometimes they do six. So you end up with a lot of lines and a lot of anchors coming off of this single point more. So there’s a lot of work to be done to get these things out into position. ’cause you have to do geotechnical investigations. All the anchors go in these kind of things. A lot of anchor lines, chain lines to get ’em. to get them in place. Now, that being said, these processes have been done many times in the offshore world. So the knowledge of how to install a single point mooring system is there. It’s pretty common. You’re not reinventing the wheel to get this done. And they’re robust. That’s one of the reasons they use them for these massive SPF, SPF PSOs. They can be 1300 feet long. Those ships can and weigh hundreds of tons. So, It proved itself in the typhoon that just came through in that part of the world. And I think that it’s a good design, it’s a robust design, and you’re not going to be reinventing the wheel to get it installed offshore. Philip Totaro: At this point, Ming Yang, as I mentioned, is the only company that’s utilizing this. So this patent is kind of a purely defensive thing for them, just protecting their little corner of the world. But the fact that this technology has proven itself to be kind of typhoon resistant, so to speak this could encourage more companies to go talk to Eridan about licensing this technology and utilizing it in, in other markets where, floating platforms are, are likely to become more prevalent, including places like South Korea. And potentially even Brazil. Allen Hall: One of the dreams in the blade world is to be able to make modular blade sections and allow you to make sorter sections, transport them, and then maybe even assemble them on site. Well, this next idea comes from the new tech group over in China for a cord wise segment connection structure for wind turbine blades. And to simplify this a little bit, the they’re building the blade in roughly three sections of leading it, a trailing edge, and then a Sort of a box section in the middle. But Phil, the key to this idea is how they’re attaching all the pieces together. Philip Totaro: Yeah. And it’s kind of interesting. And I made the comment off air that this seems very similar to how you already kind of bond and attach a shear clip. For those that aren’t familiar, this is basically a part of the blade that goes into what we call the shear web. So it’s a structural beam. Usually towards the, the back end of, of the blade and the, the trailing edge of the blade away from, the, the, what Allen just mentioned, the, the box beam section or your, your either single or dual vertical spars and vertical supports. So, The, the interesting thing about this is it’s, it’s maybe kind of combining a couple ideas and while that usually doesn’t sound very exciting to, engineers or even, patent office reviewers, what they Are able to do with concepts like this, where you’re combining kind of preexisting technologies is say, and explain that, Hey, we’re doing something in a new way and that’s still valid and viable to be able to go get a patent on whether or not this technology is going to revolutionize the market. We’ll see. The one thing I can say though, is in China, the reason that they’ve probably developed this is because you’re now seeing blades that are at a minimum. meters in length, just the blade. And some of these rotors for onshore turbines are now going up to like, And I’ll call it 230 meters rotor diameter. So there, you, like I said, you’re talking about blades that are anywhere from 85 up to, potentially 120 meters in, in length. And you’re, you’re going to need, new technologies and new ways of assembly potentially to, to be able to address that those kind of logistical challenges. Joel Saxum: So what this aims to do is solve some of the structural issues in the sealing up of these blades in a modularized fashion, if you can build them on site The validity of it and the reality of it is, is what, what I’ve heard and what we’ve seen on root cause analysis studies and stuff for modularized blades right now is the technology’s just not quite ready. So maybe this can get some of these projects down the road and over some of the hurdles that we have and make that a reality. Philip Totaro: And, and that’s a good point, Joel, because a lot of what we’ve seen for modular blades in the past was, was, bolted joint connections that tends not to work that well. You get fatigue failure and other things that, that happen. This is literally a, a means for assembling a modular blade utilizing again, kind of the same type of bonding methods that you would use in a factory controlled environment, it’s just whether or not you can have that same level of quality control out in the field when you’re trying to put together these little bonded sections of, of blades. Allen Hall: And our last idea of the week is a really useful device to keep your ears from falling into your food. Now, most people don’t have that problem, but your four legged friends probably do, particularly if you’re a poodle, that when you reach down into your bowl to eat your dinner, your ears flop around into your food. So this device rolls over the poodle’s ears and wraps around the back of its head to keep its ears up and away from the dinner bowl. Now, Phil, come on. This is a really good idea. There’s a lot of poodles with this problem. I’ll tell you what, I, Joel Saxum: I’m gonna agree. It’s a useful idea. And I’m here to tell you, if you try to put this on, on my dog, Yogi, at dinner time, you’re gonna lose a finger. This is not gonna happen. This is not gonna happen while there’s food ready in the bowl. She’s not gonna go down with it. You’re gonna have to just let it go and use a rag to clean off the ears, or in her case, her chin beard. Philip Totaro: Which is, you know what, Joel? That may be another patent for another day.

Allen, Joel, and Phil dissect GE Vernova’s restructuring of its offshore wind operations, potentially cutting 900 jobs globally. What will be the implications for the US and international wind energy markets? They also share key insights from the Sandia Blades Workshop, emphasizing the importance of prescriptive operations and digitizing tribal knowledge. Enter to win a bunch of Yeti and StrikeTape swag at https://weatherguardwind.com/yeti! 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: Hello everyone. Joel and I have been traveling across America talking with GE2X wind farm operators about how strike tape can protect their blades against lightning damage. If you work on a GE2X site, you need to visit our new website. weatherguardwind.com/yeti. We’ll show you how your turbines can be protected against lightning with Strike Tape, and you can also register to win a nice Yeti Roadie 48 cooler, four Yeti mugs, and some Strike Tape swag. Just visit weatherguardwind.com/yeti. Phil, have you been to the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York? Philip Totaro: I have not. Allen Hall: Oh my gosh, you’re missing out because they have the finalists, the twelfth finalists for induction into the National Toy Hall of Fame this year. And they include, are you ready? Drum roll please. Balloons, Pokemon cards, your own adventure books, which is a particular kind of interesting book. Hess toy trucks, which we see at Christmas time here in the United States. My Little Pony, which should have been an entrance a long time ago, honestly. How is that not already in there? Exactly my point. Remote control vehicles, stick horses, trampolines, and probably one of Joel’s favorite, Transformers. I’m a Transformers fan. Hang on, let’s go back to stick horses for a second, because again, how long has this museum been, or Hall of Fame been in business? I mean, are they, they’re digging up some pretty legacy toy technology there. Stick horses are back. Have you seen those competitions of, where people are riding the stick horses over a competitive course where they’re hopping over things and running around? Philip Totaro: There are some people that think that the United States Is not going in the right direction. I think these people are probably steering us in exactly where we don’t need to be. Joel Saxum: Allen, when you said that the Toy Hall of Fame, I looked over at my bookshelf and I have to, I went and grabbed this toy, because to me, this is American Toy Hall of Fame material. This was, this toy was my dad’s when he was a kid. And this is the original Mound, Minnesota built Tonka trucks. Allen Hall: I think we all need to take a moment and observe and salute the old Tonka truck. I Philip Totaro: will salute that. Joel Saxum: Working tailgate, I’m telling you, that’s it right there. Philip Totaro: That’s a toy. Joel Saxum: It even says USA on the tires. Allen Hall: Made out of American steel and the edges are sharp like they should be. I’m Allen Hall and here are this week’s top stories. In a significant corporate development, the Spanish government has authorized BlackRock’s stake in Natergy. This follows BlackRock’s acquisition of GIP, which owns 20. 6 percent of the Spanish energy company. The approval comes with conditions, including support for energy transition projects and maintaining Natergy’s headquarters in Spain. This move positions BlackRock as a major player in Spain’s energy sector. Denmark has inaugurated two new offshore wind farms. Vesterhavnord and Vesterhavnsyd, developed by Vattenfall, these farms feature 41 wind turbines with a combined capacity of 344 megawatts. Located between 5 and 10 kilometers from the Danish west coast, they will generate 1. 5 terawatt hours of electricity annually, enough to power 350, 000 households. This addition brings Vattenfall’s total offshore wind capacity in Denmark to 1. 5 gigawatts. Marking a substantial increase in the country’s renewable energy output and a boost for the North American wind industry. The Canadian port of Argentina has secured a contract to handle wind turbine blades for U. S. East Coast offshore wind farms. The port will receive and store 220 wind turbine blades starting this fall and continuing into 2025. This agreement with ScanGlobal Logistics positions Argentina as a key player in the offshore wind supply chain, building on its previous contract for monopile marshalling and strengthening the infrastructure for wind energy development in North America. In Canada, Marmot Energy is restarting wind tower manufacturing activities in Quebec. A new wind project will add 100 jobs to the facility and install 56 Vestas turbines generating 350 megawatts of renewable energy. The 1 billion project is set to begin construction in 2025 with commissioning planned for next year. Moving to Hawaii, AES Hawaii reports success with a new bat deterrent system at its Kahuku Wind Farm on Oahu. The project uses an ultrasonic mechanism on its turbines to keep bats away. Since operations began in December 2020, only one bat strike has been recorded. The project’s eight turbines, reaching 40 stories high, generate enough power for 16, 000 homes. Breaking news. And in the UK, an investigation is underway following a collision between a service operation vessel and a wind turbine at Oersted’s Hornsea One wind farm. The incident involved a Wind of Hope vessel carrying 72 people. No injuries or pollution were reported, but damage was sustained to the vessel and to the turbine base. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard 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 this quarter’s PES Wind Magazine, there’s a lot of good articles and you can check them all out at PESWind. com. And if you’re over in Hamburg, And looking at the exhibitions all over the floors there, a big part of that exhibition is about offshore wind. And one of the issues with offshore wind is the tooling that has to live out there. And an article from Hamatro, who makes hydraulic tooling that’s made for offshore they have a really interesting description of what they do and all the processes and application tools that they have to have hydraulic tools in an offshore environment, because as Joel knows, anytime you get saltwater and moving hydraulics, it is a disaster. Joel Saxum: Corrosion Allen Hall: central. Joel Saxum: Yeah. One of the things to think about or to understand here is that when you get in an offshore operating environment, not only like Allen says is the salt water, the wave heights, the bad, moving things around with lifts and all this stuff. It’s a very difficult environment to operate in, but almost everything. And this is where it makes it difficult. Almost every tool you use offshore for construction or decommissioning for that matter is custom built. And you’re dealing with really large things. It’s not like you go to snap on and say, Hey, give me this tool or Milwaukee tool. Hey, give me this thing. And we’ll, and yeah, we may, we make a hundred thousand of these and we’ll sell you one, every single piece of equipment that goes offshore in these large applications is custom built for the application. So whether it’s decommissioning or construction. You have to make it usually these things are designed in like a front end study. So someone like home mantra will get involved with a wind farm that’s being built years. Sometimes ahead of when they actually think it’s out there, because they need to develop the tool. They need to build the tool. They need to test the tool. They need to get it ready to roll before that thing is. Gets out moving that construction project because you don’t get to just run to Home Depot and buy a new tool. Everything has to be custom built. And the other side of this thing is what whole mottro does is their hydraulic specialists. In the offshore world, hydraulics is the only thing that you really can, Make the kind of power, create the kind of power that you need to cut, to move, to, straighten out a monopile or to crush something down or connect something because electric pumps or just don’t do it. A lot of the times in a subsea environment, you’re having a, what’s called a work class ROV, the remotely operated vehicle, becomes the hands, the eyes, the ears, the everything in that subsea realm. And a work class ROV will usually be like 150 horsepower is what they call it, but that 150 horsepower Is driving hydraulic pumps. And if you’ve ever seen like a house lifting jack or a car jack or something, that’s all hydraulics. And there’s the only way to control that kind of power. But these guys are a specialist, this Homatro company that’s in PS when this magazine this month, they’re specialists in creating these special, these. Specific tools that are needed for specific actions on an offshore wind farm for from construction all the way through decommissioning. Yeah. 1 of the things that whole matro focuses on is in house R and D and innovation and that can go really far into making sure as a client of someone like this. So I’ve seen places where some of the engineering gets farmed out here. Some of the engineering gets farmed out there. A piece gets built here. You put things together here and the companies that usually provide tools that just simply work and work day in and day out are the ones that have controlled the design and build and deployment process from start to finish. And that’s what Homatro does. Bringing quality to the to the offshore wind market. Allen Hall: So check out the latest PES wind magazine at PESwind. com. GE Vernova has announced a major restructuring of its offshore wind operations and the company plans to downsize its global workforce in the offshore sector, potentially affecting around 900 jobs out of an estimated 1700 employees involved in offshore. In France, about 360 positions will be cut in two facilities that represents about 60 percent of the employees between those two facilities, somewhere 50 60%. The restructuring as it’s being explained today is in response to challenges in the offshore wind sector, obviously inflation, supply chain disruptions, and some project delays. And with the offshore wind division having financial difficulties and expected to lose about 300 million dollars in the third quarter, the Vernova heads of the company are thinking about, Really reducing the offshore business greatly and Phil, I think this has a couple of implications Globally particularly in the US right now where GE has been selected to do a couple of offshore projects and then What’s happening internationally if for Nova reduces its offshore Manufacturing capability are they going to aggressively go after business or are they going to sit on the sidelines for a while? Philip Totaro: No, I Allen I think it Indicates they’re potentially going to sit on the sidelines and they may still maintain, a sales force in, emerging markets that they want to be in, like Australia, for instance or even South Korea but operationally, I question how they’re going to be able to execute without getting the order book built up in those markets in the first place. The reason why they’re largely targeting Europe and potentially the U. S. is there have been some, in the U. S. there have been some project cancellations where, G. E. turbines were going to be utilized. There are also projects where leading light that has delayed the project as a result of GE indicating that they’re not going to develop the 18 megawatt variant of the turbine, which to be blunt, I find a little curious because he, there’s not that much difference. On LCOE between a 15 and a half megawatt turbine. Yeah, you’re gonna save yourself some capex on foundations, but it’s not actually that great of a gulf. So I’m getting the sense that maybe there’s something else going on there. But for GE’s benefit, they just haven’t been getting the orders, particularly in Europe. So they’re getting through Dogger Bank. They’re getting through some of the, big and small projects that they have lined up in France. But after that, I am not seeing them getting significant orders in, for instance, Holland or Germany, where, and even some of the emerging projects in Sweden and Norway and elsewhere in Denmark, they want to be able to play in those markets, but they’ve been unsuccessful due to competition from Siemens Gomesa and or Festus. So the industry keeps saying they want, multiple supply chain options, but if they’re not going to give GE the order book, then this is the inevitable consequence of that. Joel Saxum: Yeah. In this press release that we’re following along with here, one of the things they say is they are experiencing lower than expected volume. And that’s a and that part of that is delays in known projects, but some of it is just, they’re not getting the new ones. And we’ve talked before about other brands and when things happen that are, in the recent news, right? Like we’ve seen Vineyard win. We’ve seen the Dogger Bank blade issues. They also go on to say in this press release that the company will continue to allocate resources to support existing projects, including quality control issues affecting its plates. So there’s they know they have that issue. And what that points to me is wounded brand, which we’ve used that comment before, but it’s something to look at, right? If you’re going to be developing a project right now, and you’re picking your turbines, and you’ve seen 3 blade failures on the Haliide platform offshore for GE Vernova. You’re going to get the hair on your back of your neck up a little bit about that. So that is something also that’s driving that lower than expected volume of order book. So it’s a tough spot to be in. I know as GE Vernova, the spinoff last spring from aerospace and health, and what they’ve done as a GE as a whole. But now we’ve seen massive layoffs at the on the LM side of things, some plants closing, GE getting rid of a bunch of other engineers. So they continue to whittle down at the massive tree that was GE to get to something more profitable. But as it sits right now, it’s tough to look forward in a crystal ball and see how, what’s going to happen in a few years or how they’re going to arrive at this profitability and then come out of it stronger. Philip Totaro: GE Vernova was in a period where. They went through something similar with the onshore wind business as well, where they had supply chain pressures and other profitability pressures that caused them to really scale back the size of the business, the size of their product portfolio, et cetera. I think with the lack of order book, it’s just again and an inevitable consequence of saying, all right, we’re going to focus more on profitability. And this is what that entails. We can’t employ, these 900 people globally, if we’re just not getting the order volumes, we anticipated part of that again is because of interest rates. But I don’t it’s interesting because like in the past few days prior to this announcement, Wall Street was already, pumping up Vernova’s stock, and it’s almost like they had, some, maybe, knowledge that, that this sort of announcement was coming, because typically, Wall Street Actually likes layoffs because they think it leads to more profitability. And so even as horrible as that sounds for the people, working in the factories that is the cold hard reality of, equity investors they like to see companies downsizing, if it means that they’re going to be more profitable and. That’s the direction that GE Vernova feels like they, they have to go at this point. And, again, without the order book I can’t blame them. It’s basically a scenario where, again they’ll scale back up, either when interest rates come down more, and more capital starts flowing, But keep in mind as well, we can also pin this on, New York and New Jersey a little bit playing a lot of baseball with, project developers. The factory commitments that GE had made a lot of the jobs that we’re talking about right here would have been either preserved or even increased had those factories moved forward. But project cancellations or delays in the U. S. has resulted in. A lot of this if you’re going to the voting booth in November, remember that when it comes time to tick the box for, the governors in the states of New Jersey and Joel Saxum: New York. I think the one thing that we need to make sure we focus on here as well as GE has stated for these projects that are under development. They’re going to have the resources that they need to fulfill the contractual obligations right there for the upcoming years. No problems with what’s going to happen to make sure that the things that they’ve got going right now are going to continue to they want to execute the projects in a timely manner, keeping safety and quality at the forefront. This makes GE Varnova stronger. And Allen Hall: the next couple of years. Philip Totaro: It does, or it eliminates resources that they’re really going to need when the time comes to, execute on things it’s, you’re seeing this right now with some of these challenges that they do have with Vineyard Wind and Dogger Bank with the blades, because a lot of the engineers at LM that would be responsible for potentially designing and fixing some of these. Again, whether they were operational issues or, manufacturing issues or what have you, you still need engineers to, to help you fix that you can’t lay everybody off and then just have salespeople say we’ll, still be able to maintain our contractual commitments. You know the asset owners and operators and more importantly probably the insurance companies aren’t stupid So even though it looks good to investors you also have to balance that with actually being able to fill your contractual obligations Joel Saxum: I think you’ll see that the same thing that you see in a lot of situations like this whether it’s wind or the Doesn’t matter aerospace sector or anything Is a lot of these people, as soon as that next project ramps back up, you’re going to see a bunch of contractors, quote, unquote, getting hired by GE, which is going to be the exact engineers that just laid off, just writing them contracts to come back and work temporarily. Cause that’s the smarter way to do things right now. Allen Hall: There’s a high demand for these skilled positions, engineering technicians, even people laying up blades. They’re hard to find. There’s a lot of opportunity out there. And if it’s not with GE Vernova today, it’s worth. One of the other manufacturers that will be going into offshore and I kind of wonder Phil if they intend to eventually sell off. The factories that are in France and consolidate in Canada and in the U S Philip Totaro: that’s complicated because they, going back about 10 years to when GE was merging with Alstom, there were a lot of promises made and the whole reason that the factories got built in St. Nazaire and Cherbourg and France. Was because of the commitments that GE had to make to the French government not to lay people off in the first place. So we’re getting 10 years later and now a lot of those layoffs that, that potentially could have happened back then are happening now. But I, it’s, that gets tricky when you start talking about the unions in Europe especially, because they still have quite a lot of power. Joel Saxum: The interesting thing we heard at Sandia this week, Allen, was one of our respected friends in the blade world looking for a new engineering colleague, and the end of the job thing, or job posting basically was, Do they know what glass fiber is? Perfect. We’ll train him on the rest. Allen Hall: That’s the reality though, Joel, is that people who have that knowledge are already working somewhere and it’s hard to find people to come into the industry and you’re willing to take about anybody at the minute that has particularly an engineering degree or any technical training in composites. It’s going to get pulled into a company. Philip Totaro: I don’t think it’s just them necessarily trying to get trained up with other OEMs or supply chain companies in particular, there’s also a pretty big demand amongst independent service providers or potentially even owner operators who would want to staff up with somebody that’s got expertise, particularly in how certain models of blades or whatever were designed and manufactured. Yeah, so that could afford some of these people an opportunity to go in there and continue scaling up in the services business or the aftermarket parts businesses that are seeing a tremendous amount of growth right now globally. Allen Hall: Did the blade mold getting broken in Cherbourg Philip Totaro: a couple of months ago kick off this process? Hard to say. To be honest, it let’s put it this way, it doesn’t help, but that was probably more of just an industrial accident sort of a thing, but it came at an unfortunate time when they were already facing so much pressure to deliver on Dogger Bank. And that’s the reality of that. I think it just was unfortunate timing. Joel Saxum: It’s a lot of weight, right? You get enough things stacked, and stacked, that was the first one on the bottom of the pile, and then you lose a couple of blades offshore, and the global market situation, some other things, once they compound the sum of the parts It’s a lot heavier than the parts themselves. Allen Hall: When we come back from the break, I want to talk about our experience at the Sandia Blades Workshop this past week. And all the things that Joel and I learned and saw, and hopefully we’ll see you again in two years, because it was a really good conference. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. StrikeTape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS. So you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study and schedule a call today. Allen Hall: All right, Joel. So we just spent the week at the Sandia blade workshop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And we met with a lot of colleagues. It was like the creme de la creme of blade and wind engineers in one place, particularly in the United States. Many good presentations. Some more on the technical side, but others on the operational side and the operational Part is the one I think you and I were drawn into the most. Joel Saxum: Yeah. You bring together Sandia brings together a lot of academics. It brings together our national labs here in the United States. But what they’re doing at these labs is they’re working on all kinds of crazy projects. Some of these labs are ones that have, they’ve worked on DOD things for the military. Or they’ve worked on nuclear energy for other purposes. They’re working on looking at things in the grid and what is next? And so you bring those people together. And the people that want to hear from what’s happening at these labs are some of the best, like Allen said, some of the best engineers in blades or anything to do with wind turbines from the bigger, biggest and small operators all over the United States. When you put those people together, you start getting into DTU and TU Delft and all kinds of other Universities that are doing project as well. So you end up, that the thing is put on by Sandia National Lab So you hear about a lot about what they’re doing and some of the other national labs and some of those Presentations get really in depth On the projects that they’re working on. And because some people, people want to come in here. What’s the next thing. But then you also, since you have those great engineers sitting there in the crowd of course they take advantage of them being there. And then those awesome engineers are sitting on panels and they’re talking about the things that they’re doing to help other people out in the crowd. So you have, the likes of next era and RWE these big players sitting up on stage. Telling everybody, basically, these are the problems we’ve encountered, this is the solutions that we had from them, and that’s, that tribal knowledge gets spread out amongst the crowd, so it’s like a, we always like to say, floating or rising waters floats all ships. It’s a great conference, and there’s a lot of good information that goes on there. Allen Hall: The one repeating focus, I thought, was the need to be very prescriptive on operations. Whether that be in the factory or out in the field there was a lot of emphasis on almost a checklist mentality of how to approach any sort of construction, any repair effort, any supply chain issue, any real large manufacturing is to eliminate it. Problems by and variability because it’s the number of people coming in and out of any job site, whether it be in the factory out in the field, which should delineate what has to happen up front and to be very precise and controlled over it. And Matt Segala gave a really good presentation from EDF. About how to do this on repairs and wow, there’s a lot of emphasis on the work ahead of the work, all the preparation and knowing to plan ahead for, Hey, we may need another lightning receptor. So we should have those on stock when the truck, as we get out to the site, we’re probably going to need them. That’s a learned experience, but if you haven’t done it, like Matt has. You wouldn’t know, and then you get to site and not have all the tools and the equipment you need. And that was a really great insight, I thought. Joel Saxum: Yeah, Matt’s presentation, in my opinion, was the best one of the whole week. And he brought that, I’m gonna give a presentation, and I’m gonna tell you exactly what you need, or what you can do, to get the same kind of results that we have. And part of that is, is, I said tribal knowledge a little bit ago. Part of that is, is taking tribal knowledge and turning it into process and into knowledge that can be passed down, right? Because if it just exists in Allen’s head, or Phil’s head, or Rosie’s head, or my head, and I go do a thing, then I’m the only one that has that information, and I’m the only one who can replicate it. It doesn’t make sense for a large organization, especially when we see in the wind industry, we see so many people moving from place to place. We talk about it with technicians, but it happens with engineers a lot as well. Oh, this person was at this. Now they’re over here or they were at the OEM and now they work for this operator or whatever that may be. They’re Matt and that team at EDF with Ken Lee and Trevor Angle and all these other guys over there are taking what they know, what they’ve learned from experience, and they’re writing it down. They’re putting roadmaps down, processes down. Being able to make sure that everybody can follow along and get the same results time after time and what he showed us With some statistics and some metrics at the end of that presentation shows that EDF’s fleet is benefiting greatly from what they’re doing in that process driven basically program. Philip Totaro: So Joel, what you’re saying is a company that digitizes its tribal knowledge, whether it’s from a consulting business or an owner operator is probably ahead of the curve. Absolutely. You can quote that. Allen Hall: Rhodes had done that too. Yannis Petroms had discussed what they do with the rooms because they deal with a lot of technology and new people coming in and out. And the robots are really intricate. There’s a lot going on there. Video pressure sensors, they’re pushing out fluids, curing things. And yeah, they’re using a little on the phone checklist to make sure everything gets done properly. The one he mentioned in particular was making sure that the closeout was put back on, on the blade, make sure the doors were all closed and fastened before they left. They had to physically take a photo and record it before they left the blade. And. Things like that don’t seem obvious until you have something go wrong, and then they become really obvious and then you implement them. Joel it’s a learned experience. So you gotta climb back up that Joel Saxum: tower? And to put the blade closer on? Yeah, that sucks. No, I think it’s I think it’s something that the industry can definitely benefit from, and at this conference, it was a technical conference, we didn’t talk about some of the issues that we normally talk about when you get industry professionals together What is the technician pool look like in the shortage of blade repair knowledge? We didn’t really touch on those things, but this what we’re talking about here is digitizing and making processes and these kind of things that can actually help scale the industry because you’re removing some of those learning barriers by providing tools. For people to execute in their daily jobs. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a good conference. And the next Joel Saxum: conference is in two years Joel? Yeah, they do Sandia every two years. It’s in the same town. It’s in Albuquerque. The Sandia lab is right there. So that makes sense for less spending for the Sandia people to be there. But Albuquerque, man, we were there. The weather was fantastic the whole time. We had a great time with a bunch of our industry colleagues. ISPs, operators, there’s some blade repair companies there. There was of course, some of the operators we regularly get with some drone companies and catching up with colleagues is always great, but what happens in the conference and the technical situations is fantastic. The things that you can learn sitting around a table, having dinner with friends from different operators as well. We sat with. BP and Orsted and Nextera and Elite Clean Energy all around in one group and the things that you can learn from each other, just being able to share, to break bread with each other is fantastic as well. Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosie’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

BP has decided to sell its onshore wind business in the US, aligning with the company’s return focusing on oil and gas. GE Vernova has partnered with Italian company Lizard Renewables to develop over a gigawatt of renewable power in Italy. Engie has added Ares Management as a partner in a 2.7 gigawatt portfolio in North America. 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 NF92324 Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. Newsflash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com French power utility Engie has partnered with Ares management in a significant us renewable energy deal. Engie North America has attracted Ares management infrastructure opportunities fund as a minority partner in a 2. 7 gigawatt portfolio. of operational solar, wind, and co located storage assets across the U. S. This transaction, NJ’s largest operating portfolio sell down in the U. S., involves 15 plants across ERCOT, MESO, PJM, and SPP. Okay, Phil, a lot of acquisitions and mergers happening again, this time with Engie. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this one is Interesting a little bit because it’s More or less their first foray besides what they’ve done in offshore. It’s one of their first kind of forays into significant minority ownership from a financially focused partner And, Ares obviously has an appetite. Ares owns a few other assets in the U. S., either majority or significant minority as well. And so to add this kind of a portfolio to the mix gives both companies, It helps both companies achieve what they want in terms of, freeing up some additional capital for Engie to go reinvest in other projects and, bringing on a partner that wants financially viable assets in their, in their portfolio mix. So, look, we’ve talked about a number of these kinds of deals in the past where, a financially focused company gets into a portfolio, either minority, majority but partners in some way, shape, or form with an experienced owner and operator and it’s, it’s good to see this, this matchup. And I would expect if there’s anyone else out there that hasn’t already, executed deals like this, they are probably looking to go in this direction because there is a lot of capital that it’s sitting on the sidelines right now. You’re, you’re not seeing tons and tons of new capital go into new project build out because of interest rates and et cetera. But there is capital kind of sitting on the sidelines that wants to be able to get into renewables. This is still one way they can do that by partnering on a pre existing portfolio. Joel Saxum: And from an operational standpoint, Ares just, I think, a few years ago acquired the majority stake in Apex Clean Energy. And when that happened, I know the Apex Teams ended up operating their assets more themselves. So, and where they were traditionally kind of like letting other ISPs or whatever, or, or FSAs manage them, they turned into a different financial model. So you can look for some of these assets that Engie manages right now with the Ares funds and to possibly adjust how they manage these things. from a operational standpoint as well. But like Phil said, a lot of, a lot of moving parts here, and this is a way to put capital to work. Allen Hall: BP has announced plans to sell its U. S. onshore wind energy business. The company will soon launch the sale process for BP Wind Energy, which has interest in 10 operating onshore wind assets across seven U. S. states, with a total net generating capacity of 1. 3 gigawatts. BP executive William Lin stated that the business is likely to be of greater value for another owner. Bill, a lot of oil and gas based businesses that have been in renewables for several years are pushing back into oil and gas because of interest rates. But there’s also something more at play about scale I think here with BP. There is a big push to be big in wind or to be big in solar and BP doesn’t want to take that step at the moment. Philip Totaro: Yeah, well, I mean, Allen, not for nothing, it’s been 15 years of them not really wanting to take that step, to be perfectly blunt about it and, and it’s unfortunate because they could have, poured a lot of money in. But they also had a bit of a sour taste in their mouth because when, even 15 years ago, when they did start investing in some of these wind farms, they probably thought they were going to be a easier to operate and own and be more profitable to operate and own than what they ended up being. Now, that said, a lot of this 1. 3 gigawatts of portfolio that they’re selling or offering for sale is likely to be repowered if there’s a couple of projects that have already been recently, but we’ll This is largely a repower play for somebody that wants to get in on something that’s probably, at least 10 years old. I’d say the vast majority of this portfolio is, 10 years old or older. So you can qualify for a PTC repowering on this. It’s sad from the perspective of, oil and gas companies just saying, you know what, we tried renewables, it wasn’t profitable enough, so we’re dumping out of it for the most part, and maybe we’ll come back in later when it looks like it’s more profitable again. Which is an easy thing to do when you’ve got piles and piles of cash like they do. And, right now it’s more profitable to just do oil and gas than it is So when we see oil and gas prices go down and, profits from renewables go back up, you’ll see these guys come back, but it’s a good way to, to, um, recycle, so to speak some some assets and, and allow someone else to, to take over and, and repower them while they redeploy capital elsewhere. Joel Saxum: Yeah, this is a, like we’ve talked about, this is a trend, these major oil and gas companies. What, what drives it? Returns for stakeholders, returns for shareholders, the Wall Street stuff. When BP’s changed over CEOs in the last, in the last year, the message was clear, we’re going to do what we can to drive profits for our stakeholders and in oil and gas, there’s just higher margins than there is in, in the wind industry or renewables industry. However, of course, as a renewables industry, we want to see the transition move forward. So. Hoping that when things move a little bit further along here, you see some of that capital redeployed and do the renewable energy generation sector. But for right now BP putting their own money elsewhere. Allen Hall: Lastly, GE Vernova has formed a joint venture with Italian renewables company, Lazard Renewables to develop over one gigawatts of wind, solar, and battery. Energy storage projects in Italy, the 50 50 joint venture named Alva Power, will initially work on bringing this portfolio to the ready to build stage, with Lazard having already selected and prepared the projects. The partnership aims to contribute to Italy’s renewable energy targets of 30 percent renewables in total energy consumption and 55 percent renewables in electricity generation. By 2030 bill, Italy has become a kind of a renewables battleground between Chinese manufacturers and now G. E. Vernova is this makes sense to, to partner with a large player like Lazard, where you’re highly integrated into the Italian grid. Philip Totaro: It does for GE and this deal is actually particularly kind of interesting to me because anything that is a GE turbine that’s already been previously deployed in Italy is either a 1. 5 megawatt or the, the 2. 5 120 platform. That was, that was pretty popular, but even a lot of those are getting to be, those assets are getting to be at least 10 years old or older. He, GE hasn’t been particularly successful in selling a lot of their existing product portfolio into the Italian market. So a development partnership. Seems like the way to go in Strategic markets like this where yes, there’s been some kind of competition you could say from from companies like gold wind onshore although it’s it gets blown out of proportion a little bit, but The reality for ge is that they need a partnership like this to be able to continue selling, newer models in, in a market like Italy, which, is an important, they’ve got 9, 000 turbines over there, and a lot of them are going to need to be repowered as well in, in the coming, five years, you’re going to have an opportunity to take advantage of by establishing this kind of this kind of a JV. Joel Saxum: So as well to the listeners, this isn’t the first of its kind of a JV or a. OEM being or having a development arm, but the ones that like a Vestas has had it in the past as well. But what the goal of most of these are is to build out a pipeline and go through the permitting processes, go through all of the, the government rigamarole and into getting the transmission connection stuff, but not actually. Putting assets in the ground. Once they get to that stage, sometimes they they’ll bring in another group to actually do construction and then operations, maintenance, and that, those kinds of things. But what it is, is it’s them getting everything ready to go with a earmark for their turbines to go into that project. And then they usually pass it off. So as like Phil says, it’s a great move by GE to get some more of their kit deployed in the Italian market. And that market used to it. So, Hey, you got to repower coming up all the down the road. There’s a new GE turbines. Why don’t we take a look at those? So that’s a, that’s a good play.