The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week Allen and Phil discuss Siemens Gamesa’s accordion nacelle idea, Vestas’s innovative yaw control system, LM Windpower’s LEP install tool, and a helpful beach relaxation invention. Visit https://www.intelstor.com/ to learn more about their IP Prism services. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.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 idasaurus Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Hey Phil, the first thing on our list today is a unique patent idea from Siemens Gamesa. Which is for a wind turbine nacelle with movable sections to expand it out. Kind of like Louis Armstrong’s cheeks when he’s blowing that trumpet. It just pops out. And gives you a little more space to get some work done on the nacelles. This is a pretty cool idea, even though I have, we’ve seen other versions of this, we haven’t seen an expandable version of this, others have tried something similar though, right? Philip Totaro: Yeah, so this, Allen, this is basically what I’ve dubbed like the accordion nacelle, or bagpipe nacelle, I don’t know what you want to, how you want to label it, but the idea here is, and look, the bottom line is, I, to be blunt, I actually think this is a terrible patent, but it’s a clever idea, and I’ll explain what I mean by all that. So, in the world of going and, capturing innovation, whatever industry you’re in, You want to be able to capture Patentable ideas on things that a you’re going to use and manufacture because then it’s it’s protecting your own business or you want to get patents on things that are actually things that a competitor might want to use And by having the patent, you basically blocked them from, from going down that technological path. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is this particular patent from Siemens Gamesa accomplishes that, because I don’t think that they’re gonna use this idea, and I don’t think that Competitors would necessarily use this idea. So, however What I do like about this is the, the inventiveness of the concept and the way that the engineers were thinking and doing the creative problem solving around a legitimate transportation related issue that we have in the industry. So for those of you that aren’t familiar, there are certain transportation constraints that we’ve got in, in wind energy where, particularly if you’re trying to ship something, that has to fit underneath a bridge, overpass, or through a tunnel, You might have certain restrictions on things like the nacelle width and height, the blade root, the maximum chord of a blade, things like that, or even the tower diameter, and it creates certain technological challenges. And so that’s actually why I flagged this idea to talk about today is because this is really great problem solving and very creative problem solving to say, look, We’ve got this challenge where in order to transport something, it’s got to fit within those constraints of being, approximately 4. 2 meters. Or less it’s about, what, 22, 23 feet or less for, for those of us on the, on the English system but the, the, there are different ways to skin a cat, basically Vestas has come up with this idea of having basically, cargo containers that are converted, or specifically manufactured, is probably the better way to say it, So that they can bolt on to the sides. And they’re using that on their offshore machines, the V236. They’re actually also, if you haven’t noticed, they’re using it on the onshore 7 megawatt turbine as well. They actually have a nacelle with An extra kind of cargo container or shipping container sized thing. Bolted down at the right or left hand side of the nacelle. To provide them additional space for all the up tower components. The hydraulic system, the cooling system. Pumps, motors, fans for lubrication systems. If they’ve got I don’t, well, they don’t have an up tower transformer anymore, but any of the other electrical cabinets or anything else that they need up tower, they’ve got to have some extra space. So going again, going back to the Siemens Gamesa invention, is it a good patent? No, because I think, as I explained, it doesn’t really accomplish what you need a patent to accomplish. Is it a good, clever invention and, and technological solution and, and creative problem solving. Absolutely. And I, I encourage that and I applaud that. So even though this idea might not get used, it’s, it’s still a very clever way to, to tackle a relevant industry challenge. Allen Hall: Well, another industry challenge is leading edge protection and our friends at LM wind power have come up with some really simple tools, sort of ingenious tools to create those leading edge shells. And if you’ve seen these protective devices, they’re kind of floppy, they’re not solid. And one of the critical pieces of that is to make sure that the trailing edge of that is cut cleanly and crisply. So you don’t create any kind of aerodynamic problems. Plus it makes it a little bit easier to install because you’re working along a straight line. However, Phil, if you’ve ever tried to cut. Like a jelly or something that’s moving. It’s pretty hard to get a straight line and that’s what it’s like cutting those materials. You want to shift every time you apply some force to them. So this is a kind of an interesting concept to figure out how to basically trim something that’s pretty flexible. Philip Totaro: Yeah. So this, this is a, it’s a relatively simple innovation in terms of, it’s just basically a kind of like a table almost with a little, circular saw, at least that’s how they’ve conceptualized it in the, in the, the patent application they’ve got. But what’s clever about it, in addition to what you just mentioned, Allen, it’s, it’s necessary to be able to shape the the leading edge protection strips so that it. conforms to the shape of the blade and doesn’t adversely impact the, the aerodynamic profile on, on the blade. And so you need to be able to cut a pretty precise straight line or curved line that doesn’t have any of these, sharp ridges or anything or waves to it. That, that would otherwise impact the that, that aero performance. So this is one where it’s a pretty simple and straightforward innovation. We believe by the way, that this is actually in production that this is an invention that we think is, TRL, eight or nine, basically, if you’re not familiar with technology readiness levels or TRLs, that’s basically a measure from one up until nine. About the technological maturity. So we’re going to be referring to, to this with some of the inventions we talk about. This one we think is actually being used in some of the the Ellen factories or potentially some of their subcontractors that are, that are making some of these leading edge parts for them. So this is a, this is a very clever way of being able to accomplish something that provides both leading edge protection and ensures aero performance. Allen Hall: And as we move on to the electrical world, we have a concept from Vestas, which deals with the yaw control. And on an electrically driven yaw system, you got two, two elements. Basic elements, you have a motor or series of motors, and you have a series of brakes. Pretty straightforward. However, that if the turbine is connected to the grid and the grid frequency or voltage fluctuates, you can get some really strange results. One of them being is that you damage the brakes or drag the brakes, as they say, and create yourself an expensive repair to keep going out and fixing because the voltage on a wind turbine, sometimes depending on the time of day and where you are, That’s fluctuate a great deal. Philip Totaro: Yes, this one’s actually kind of fascinating because I had never really seen a company Conceptualize a yaw control Strategy like this. So it basically if you read through this this patent what they’re talking about is trying to use the detection circuit for whatever the grid voltage is and And use that as an input to the yaw control system, whether you’re continuing a yaw action or clamping on the, the brake. And the reason that I think Vestas came up with this is we’ve heard some feedback from folks in the field, that even though you may have yaw brakes that are segmented and so you could unbolt a section of it if, a piece of it got worn out. And that, that was an innovation that, that somebody came up with a long time ago. And that was a very clever one. But in order to prevent excessive wear, as you mentioned, Allen, on the, on the yaw brakes and on the, in the calipers themselves because those are, those are expensive parts and we know there’s been supply chain issues in the industry and, and it can be hard to get access to some of these replacement parts sometimes. So this is a pretty clever way of using the control system to ensure that the brakes don’t drag or clamp. And hold and cause spalling or any other type of thing that, that might happen from, from having the brakes clamped on to an excessive degree. So measuring the, the grid voltage and determining the grid fluctuations as an input to your yaw control system was actually a pretty unique thing. And so that, that’s kudos to, to Vestas for. Coming up with something pretty clever that I think solves a real world challenge. Allen Hall: Well, here’s a real world challenge, Bill. When you, when you go out to the beach and you want to take a quick nap, I always bring a pillow, but the problem with that is you fall asleep and then you just get sunburned. You’re, you’re roasted like a raisin, right? So, it’s not the greatest situation. So somebody’s come up with a really unique patent here, and this is our fun patent of the week. Where they have attached an umbrella to a pillow, and this got approved. This is actual intellectual property, Phil. Yes, Philip Totaro: it is. But just like I mentioned with Siemens, the question, Allen, is do we actually need a patent on something like this? I mean, maybe, if Joel were here, he would probably say, you know what, that’s a product I’d like to have. But, is this something that actually needs a patent? I’m not so sure. But we find some of these patents sometimes that we just have to talk about because they’re a little bit preposterous. And we, we question whether or not the patent office is is really all there when they’re, when they’re approving these sometimes. I think this pillow with an umbrella attached falls into that category, Allen. Allen Hall: I don’t, Bill, I’ve gone through this patent very thoroughly, and there is one piece of this patent which makes complete sense to me. Inside this little umbrella tube, There’s an open and you can unscrew it and you can put your keys and your loose change in this to secure it so you won’t lose your keys at the beach. I mean, how many times you lost your keys at the beach? Philip Totaro: Well, that, that is a real world challenge, but I’ll tell you if there are, insidious characters out there at the beach, I think the guy with a pillow that’s got an umbrella attached is probably target number one for, for having something, having something stolen. They’re probably going to get your keys anyway.

Joel and Phil dive in to liquidated damages and how the industry can avoid big payouts. GE Vernova is dealing with another offshore blade failure in the UK, and our thoughts on the latest renewable energy Instagram craze. And, a discussion on a very full eagle! If you have encountered metal staples in a GE 2.X-116 or 127 blades, reach out to Joel at joel.saxum@wglightning.com. There’s still time to register for AMI Event’s Wind Turbine Blade Conference in October 2-3rd! Click here – AMI Boston Wind Blade Conference Need low-cost lightning strike sensors for your turbine? Email Joel at Joel.saxum@wglightning.com. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: All right. Really urgent news story here. A supposedly injured bald eagle. Now, remember that the bald eagle is America’s bird. Is it America’s bird or national animal? National mammal? And it’s also like the national symbol too. It’s a national symbol. There we go. All right. So a supposedly injured bald eagle, which is America’s national symbol. Was rescued from a national park in Missouri and found it was acting like it was too injured to fly, but they took poor Eagle in and did an x ray on it and realized. That it was just full of raccoon. What? It was full? It had too much food? Yeah, it was found healthy, but engorged with raccoon. In other words, too fat to fly. Philip Totaro: Is there tryptophan in raccoons? Allen Hall: Oh, there may be. Joel Saxum: I’ll tell you a fun fact about the eagle as the United States national symbol. Ben Franklin actually wanted it to be the turkey. And his reason. His reasoning was, eagles are actually scavengers and they eat dead things and turkeys don’t. Allen Hall: Both of those birds are huge. If you’ve ever been anywhere near a bald eagle, they are massive creatures. I, the thing that bothers me about this is that eagle was living large, relaxing, chilling, and then somebody grabbed him! Somebody scooped him up and with the x ray in him, the next thing he knows, it’s like he’s waking up in a hospital and all he wanted to do was watch the Cowboys game, I’m Allen Hall and I’ll be joined by the rest of the Uptime hosts after these news headlines. Denmark is making waves in the renewable energy sector with a massive 13 billion euro investment in offshore wind power. Aiming to boost capacity by 10 gigawatts across three areas. This ambitious plan, representing the largest tender for offshore wind power ever issued in Denmark, introduces a novel financing model where companies are required to make concession payments and co invest with the state. Which will retain a 20 percent stake in each project. This initiative is expected to create thousands of jobs with estimates suggesting that each gigawatt of offshore wind power could generate around 9, 500. Direct and indirect positions and require a capital investment of approximately 2. 1 billion euros. Beyond meeting national energy needs, the expanded capacity is set to position Denmark as a key exporter of electricity to neighboring countries. and a producer of green hydrogen. The European Commission’s wind power package is breathing new life into the continent’s wind industry with major players like Vestas and Siemens Energy expanding their operations. Vestas is establishing a new nacelle and blade factory in Poland, potentially creating over 1, 700 direct jobs by 2026. While Siemens Energy plans to hire around 4, 000 new employees across Europe to bolster its grid equipment manufacturing capacity. To support this growth, the European Investment Bank has set up a 5 billion euro counter guarantee facility with the first tranche activated through a 500 million euro deal with Deutsche Bank. Part of a larger portfolio expected to catalyze up to 8 billion euros in additional private investments. GE Vernova has encountered a series of setbacks in its offshore wind operations with the most recent being a turbine blade failure at the Dogger Bank Wind Farm off England’s northeast coast. This incident follows a similar blade failure at the same facility in May. And another off the U. S. East Coast where a fallen blade has led to beach closures on Nantucket Island after debris washed ashore. Despite challenges, the global offshore wind sector is poised for remarkable growth, with capacity projected to surpass 520 gigawatts by 2040. Europe is expected to lead this expansion, hosting over 70 percent of global floating wind installations, while Asia aims to capture about 20 percent market share. For The UK, Germany, and the Netherlands are particularly well positioned, leveraging their proximity to the North Sea and ambitious carbon neutral goals to potentially achieve a combined capacity of 150 gigawatts by 2040. In the United States, offshore wind development remains heavily influenced by the political climate, with capacity forecasts of up to 40 gigawatts by 2040 contingent on stable political support. In technology advancements, SenseWind has successfully completed factory acceptance testing of its innovative 2 megawatt Sense self installing wind turbine system at Cali Ocean Systems facility in Glasgow, Scotland. The testing witnessed by ABL Group validated the lifting assembly designed to hoist the fully assembled turbine rotor nacelle up the tower, verifying crucial factors such as operational loads, bearing surfaces, repeatability, and contamination resistance. This milestone marks a significant step forward in their demonstration program and builds confidence for the planned installation of a two megawatt wind turbine. Next year. And the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is setting its sights on Hawaii for offshore wind development, planning a lease auction off Oahu’s coast for 2028 to support between 500 of wind energy. The initiative aligns with Hawaii’s decarbonization targets and aims to reduce the state’s reliance on imported oil, biofuels, and hydrogen. This project, agreed upon by Akahi Energy and the U. S. Department of Defense, would utilize floating wind technology to navigate the deep waters surrounding Hawaii, with BOEM considering depths up to 1, 300 meters feasible. 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 Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. 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 Weather Guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today. Allen Hall: The AMI Events Wind Turbine Blades event in Boston is on October 2nd and 3rd. So it’s coming pretty soon. If you haven’t booked your tickets to Boston, you better do it now. You won’t want to miss this conference. There’s big discussion on blade materials, blade design, blade manufacturing, and the supply chain. And with the recent high profile blade events, there will be plenty to discuss. So just Google AMI Events Wind Turbine Blades Boston, and it should take you to the proper page. Also, the new low cost Eologix PING Lightning Sensor is available now. We are getting a lot of great feedback about the Lightning Sensor’s performance in the field. It has just a little integrated solar panel for power and uses local cellular network for data transfer, means No wiring to the turbine. It’s just held on there by magnets. It’s truly incredible. Clean and simple, which is what everybody’s asking for. And if you want to purchase some lightning sensors for your turbines, you have to call Joel. And his number Joel Saxum: is 832 593 2782. And so you guys know, they’re in shipment right now. We’ve got some of them heading out to an operator or two different operators. As we speak, we’ve got confirmations today. Allen Hall: Phil, what do they call that in the newspapers where they’re giving the corre is it corrections? Is that what they call that in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times? Is there a corrections section of that newspaper? Philip Totaro: Are they ever wrong, though, Allen? Is that that is you’re correct. That’s what they call it, but do they ever really admit that they’re wrong? Allen Hall: Occasionally. We’re not going to be like the New York Times. We’re going to be one better than the New York Times. We’re going to talk about the email that comes in here. Some of it good and happy, some of it not so happy. So I think there’s one here that’s not so happy and has a point actually. So we’re going to be the first to correct this. This has to do with our discussion last week about Vestas or maybe two weeks ago now about Vestas in their Q2 reports. And how Vestas did sell a number of turbines and the order intake was pretty good, right? And we got mired up in the discussion between Vestas building wind turbines and the Vestas development portion of their business and Vestas development is, as Bill has described it to me where they go out and put wind turbines in the field, which is unique for, I think, a lot of OEMs, like GE doesn’t do that. Philip Totaro: Literally a project development division of the OEM company. Which, GAMESA used to do this, actually, GE did this with GE Financial Services, but they don’t do it anymore because, they still can get financing. The reason Vesta still does it is because there are some specific market opportunities they want to be able to pursue. And so they have a pipeline of projects through the development company that is separate from the order book that is part of the OEM. Allen Hall: So I conflated the two. Obviously, the order intake was up about 50% quarter on quarter to about 4 gigawatts, roughly. But the development side did not have a lot of activity. And that was what I was trying to point out is that the development side wasn’t, didn’t have a really great quarter. And what that meant for the industry. Obviously, development is where the action is. You have to have development before you can have wind turbine. The commenter here, should I name, I guess I shouldn’t name them, but it’s a good comment and they’re right. The second one is something we just actually discussed on the podcast and we weren’t sure about, which was this 3 percent metric that Vestas was discussing during their conference call with investors. Okay. This commenter points out that the 3% Is a loss production factor or, turbine availability. So I assume that means 3% loss means 90% up. If it can be up a hundred percent, that would be great. But they want, 97% is still pretty good. They’re working on trying to get that number up to that 97% or 3% down, and that’s what Vest was just trying to convey in that conference call. It was a little murky. Glad that someone actually wrote in and said, here’s what they meant. Here we go. Joel Saxum: Phil, let me ask, can I ask you a question about this, maybe? Because I want to make sure that I’m proper here. When people talk about liquidated damages, can that be like, okay, so say your contract is, say you have a contract with your FSA that says 95 percent availability is what you’re going to give us. If it’s 93 percent availability, does then the FSA holder have to pay the 2 percent in liquidated damages and production back to you, or how does that work? Philip Totaro: Yes, so it’s a great question, and it boils down to what’s in the actual contract, so that can vary, but typically what happens is they’ll take The, either previous, few days average hourly production, or maybe they calculate monthly production, again, that’s going to depend on whatever’s in the contract but they basically calculate, like, how much electricity should we have produced and delivered, and we didn’t because of some technical fault or failure or whatever that, that occurred, and based on, That we should have delivered the annual energy production or, hourly annual or hourly production, I should say that they should have delivered multiplied by the power purchase contract price or if the, if it’s a merchant power contract, they have all the pricing information for, minute by minute. What would we have gotten if we had delivered, X amount of power multiplied by that power purchase contract price. And that is essentially what they are obligated to deliver. Either in liquidated damages that they pay or they may have an insurance policy that covers a portion of those liquidated damages as well. And that’s an insurance product that you can buy. It’s offered by, any number of different insurance brokers and underwriters. Visit your favorite broker to to discuss but, literally it’s, it is a situation where there’s any number of things that can actually trigger liquidated damages, faults and failures are obviously the most common but there’s any number of things that the FSA holder or O and M provider May have to be beholden for if something goes wrong and it’s not just a quote unquote active God or some other type of thing that, if they cause the lack of availability, they have to pay as effectively. Joel Saxum: But that’s why in some respects people always want to point towards those first mature active God things like lightning damage or. I know icing is one, too, that sometimes people say hey, we, we can’t control this so that can be part of that wouldn’t, they wouldn’t have to pay with liquidated damages. Philip Totaro: It’s, but it’s also interesting, Joel, because that’s one of those things where technically they may be right, that those are quote unquote acts of God, but, not for nothing, but I’m, I’ll give you a little plug here, but with Strike Tape, you probably wouldn’t have the lightning damage in the first place, or with, our friends over at Fabric Air, you might not have the icing issues in the first place, so it’s it is technically preventable, it requires, a little more capex up front to have these systems in place that preclude that from happening, but that’s also a huge, because, that’s the thing, Joel, this is a great question, because you’re gonna end up paying more, In liquidated damages, then what you are gonna end up having to pay to implement these solutions, definitely, Strike Tape, you guys might have to raise the price, but, it’s like, you could definitely deploy Strike Tape for cheaper than what you’re gonna pay one or two times in liquidated damages for having, turbines down because of Joel Saxum: Yeah in my mind, and this is an argument, this is a not an argument, a conversation around the coffee. Machine around the water cooler right this at some level. Is there negligence here, right? If you have a turbine that’s in Saskatchewan that doesn’t have an Arctic package and you end up having to deal with liquidated damages and stuff like you. That’s just ignorance. Philip Totaro: Yeah. It, negligence as a legal definition is, we’re not gonna get into that kind of a discussion today, but I, at the end of the day, you, I know where you’re going, but you’d have a hard time proving that from a legal perspective. It, the reality of it is that if people don’t get it by now. There is ample data, ample evidence to suggest that, spending a little extra upfront is going to save you in the long run. And I’m not just talking about wind turbines. The same thing applies to your car or, doing predictive maintenance on anything is going to mean that you spend less having to repair that thing wholesale later when it just falls apart because you were too careless to actually. Allen Hall: That’s interesting, Phil. I haven’t thought about it that way. And I want everybody to think about something when we come back from the break, right? Because, Phil, I know you’re a big Instagram user. If you’ve been following all the traffic on Instagram from the wind turbine operators. I just have a, I have a grievance and I have to air this grievance and we’re going to do that right after the break. 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: If you haven’t visited BuildTurbines. com, you should do that. So if you’re interested in joining the wind energy revolution, and want to get a job in wind energy, you need some help, right? You need to understand what’s happening and all the variety of jobs and things you need to know. And what kind of training you will need. And a simple place to do that is at BuildTurbines. com. Click the links. You can figure out, look at different options. If you need to go to school, all the schools are listed in the United States. It’s makes it real simple thing. It’s totally free. It’s totally free. And it’s a service of Weather Guard. And on that vein if you haven’t seen some of the Instagram posts by some of the operators, I don’t want to name the operator specifically, but. There’s been one or two that have been posting a day in the life kind of videos on Instagram of an employee, typically an office worker the ones I’ve seen, I think I’ve been in Europe and maybe Joel, you want to describe what happens in these little vignettes? Joel Saxum: What these videos are. And I’ve seen them across. It’s not just the wind industry doing this. A lot of places are doing it and it’s a way to, it’s a recruiting mechanism. It’s a way to show in the life of the company, it lift, as they would say in the UK, lifting the bonnet a little bit on what’s happening in the, in that world of that company. But they’re starting off like, Oh, I show up at the office at 9. A. M. To me it’s crazy. I don’t think I don’t know the last time I ever showed up at work at 9 a. m But they follow them around the office and they show they’re working on this project meeting with these colleagues having lunch This that the other thing throughout the day and then heading home at the end of the day The particular one that Allen and I were talking about earlier shared some things that I think that if I was a, another employee of this company that wasn’t treated the same way or didn’t have the same perks of the job, I guess I would say I might be a little bit salty. That’s just me. Allen Hall: And the thing about the companies that post these videos or Instagram posts is that they have people who are doing really interesting things or very difficult things. And which is probably where they need people the most on the technician side and they haven’t posted a lot of pieces about those people because the ones I want to see is and a new employee with a chainsaw and a freaking blowtorch and they’re going out there and they’re making stuff happen right what you want to see let’s go Philip Totaro: with a chainsaw and a blowtorch hang on hang on wait what are they doing with what are they doing with Joel Saxum: that let’s go. But Allen, to what you say is so I understand the concept of it, right? It’s an, it’s a marketing thing. There’s two sides of marketing and communications and PR. There’s internal and external. Most people, of course, only see external. Unless you work for a really large company, then you understand it. There is an internal marketing team. There is an internal communications team. And the part of the goal there is, To show what the life is like. A lot of it is mostly on something like this is a recruiting tool. If you come and work for us, this is what your life looks like. However, to me, it comes off as tone deaf, right? To me, it’s do you, should you really put this out there? I don’t know, it’s Allen Hall: just. And the people we work with are not boring people. They’re not doing boring things like that, which is so weird. Philip Totaro: Okay, so there’s, I think there’s maybe two issues. One is, joel, this is how the kids are doing it these days, so that’s a part of it. Yeah, there you go. Secondly it’s also a way of storytelling. I think that’s really what the issue is. I don’t necessarily think, I didn’t see these because I’m actually not on Instagram, as Ellen has suggested. I wouldn’t even know how to sign up for it because, I’m getting up there too, but, It’s just it’s one of those things where, you know, the way in which you tell the story can have an impact on and Joel, it’s also morale, it’s like internal communications is also about maintaining morale, it is, as you said, about attracting talent. And so it’s just, they may need some guidance because I, look, the bottom line is in the, I’ve been in the industry now about 17 going on almost 18 years and the reality of it is I’ve never actually seen Good marketing, if I can say it that way, like from anybody in this, when’s the last time, not to say that we have to take out like Superbowl commercials, but like when’s the last time you saw anybody do anything that wasn’t just advertising their products or services in industry trade publications or online or something like that. It’s we don’t really. Have the cream of the crop of marketing helping us tell the story that we need to be able to tell and frankly It’s a problem for the industry because that impacts our ability to attract talent and attract investment Joel Saxum: I think what I would do phil is if I was a company within the wind industry I’d get on an amazing trend, and I’d probably start a podcast. Or you could buy a podcast. Philip Totaro: There may be one for sale. Or you could have a podcast that’s almost half a million YouTube subscribers. Such as the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Joel Saxum: I was thinking about this when we were talking about age just a second ago. To be honest with you, I think I have the most gray hair out of all of us. That’s probably Philip Totaro: true. I do spend a lot of time on the beach. Maybe a little pampered that way. Allen Hall: If we want to talk about beach, maybe we should talk about the ongoing issues over at Vineyard Wind and we’ve been talking about it on slack behind the scenes. And I said, I don’t want to talk about it this week because I feel like. We’ve talked about it a lot, however, and Phil brought up this point, it’s there’s been a lot of activity on some turbines at Vineyard Wind, and the only reason we know that is that there’s been photographers over there Monitoring what’s going on. And Joel Saxum: well, there was a, I just saw this the other day, just watching the news, of course, because we’re sticking to those things right now. But there was a, like a boat, not parade, but they called it a flotilla of protesters. Yeah, of angry protesters, like going out and fish on fishing boats and stuff out to vineyard wind. It’s getting pretty extreme over there. Allen Hall: Yeah. And we have a man on the ground real close to that situation who said that the locals are restless. Yeah. And yeah, you can. You can feel that happening. The one photo I thought was interesting, which came out, I think on Saturday or Sunday, a couple of days ago now was a of a technician, blade technician on the trailing edge of one of the vineyard blades and looked like there was an ultrasound piece of equipment there that they were doing some sort of scans along the trailing edge bond line. That’s what it looked like to me. And If that is the bonding issue that, that LM is having in those blades, that’s a problem. Once your bond line starts to break, Phil, isn’t that just going to cascade into massive load problems? Philip Totaro: Yeah, and we also have to mention this in the context of, there has now been yet another issue with a blade. on the same turban model over at Dogger Bank again. So this is making three incidents that I, we still don’t really have any confirmation whether they’re all interrelated or not, whether this new Dogger Bank issue was actually a manufacturing issue or an installation error or what, but it’s painting a rather unfortunate picture at this point of The manufacturing, and probably more importantly, the quality control process that, that’s happening. Whether that quality control process is even in the factory or just, when you’re doing a blade pick, you gotta check if the thing’s, in one piece before you put it up there, because if it’s not, Then you’re going to have these buckling issues and, whatever the root cause is, it’s bad for the company. It’s bad for the industry. And, the folks at vineyard wind are going to point to all of these issues and say, why are we even doing offshore wind farms? And there goes your local community support for all Joel Saxum: this. I think an advantage that they have at vineyard wind right now to solve this problem. Is a lot of the blades are not installed yet. I think that wind farm is correct if I’m wrong out. I think it was 64 turbines total Philip Totaro: 62 that were well, there were commissioned. They probably had blades on the other ones that when they stopped doing the blade installations after the. The failure, Joel Saxum: but if the blades are in a lay down yard somewhere, at least they have the capability of they’re in there on stands in a lay down yard. Hopefully they have the capabilities of doing some large scale N D. T. tests. I know these blades from talking with people in the industry have a lot of. Like a normal blade you look at has one shear web, and these have up to in certain locations, five different webs inside of them. So there’s a lot of bond lines to check here, and they have the advantage of the fact that these, a lot of these blades are probably, in lay down yards right now, and you’re able to do a large scale NDT campaign. And then it hopefully at that stage, they figure out we get to an RCA, right? We haven’t heard what they’re really pointing at, but I would imagine that comes out sooner than later because there’s gonna be a lot of people looking at it. GE, of course, you’re gonna have they talk to Gulfwind Technology as an independent to come in. I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw one of the certifications bodies sniffing around, and I’m sure insurance companies are going to have some experts on site, so there’s going to be a lot of people looking at it, some of probably the foremost blade experts in the world looking at these things, and we should hear of a conclusion, hopefully this quarter, I would hope. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think they’re going to need it before they can get going again at Vineyard, and back to your comment, Joel, I believe Aarons is doing the internal blade inspections, looking from the information GE has released, that is an Aarons rover crawler, yeah, so they’re up inside these blades, and my guess is at least From the information we do have about Vineyard Wind, there’s a bond line deficiency, a lack of glue, or something didn’t bond up right there, so the putting a camera inside the blade is one way to do that, and obviously putting a technician on the outside to go look for bond line deficiencies is the other way to go do that, so they’re probably doing both. That’s an educated guess at this point. But they got to get back up and running pretty soon. They’re gonna have to get RCA’s. Now they got two RCA’s to do, right? They have Vineyard plus Dogger Bank. It’s a lot of work on their plate. Joel Saxum: The tough thing here, too, is and Allen and I, you and I have first hand experience of it from this week, an email from a client offshore, where they, North Sea right now, it’s been a really tough summer for weather, so they haven’t had, they haven’t been able to get out, even with to do these inspections, getting someone out on the transmission, transition piece up into the tower, out onto the blades, rope access, because that’s the only way you can do work offshore is rope access on blades, can’t throw a platform up there or something, it doesn’t work like that. Yeah, So it’s tough to get access to these things. Now, the U. S. waters and watching the weather has been a little bit nicer, a little bit calmer, so they have a little bit better time getting access to these things, but offshore access is difficult. So that can extend the time frame as well. Allen Hall: So after the break, I want to talk about another potential GE. issue we came across this week that I need help from technicians in the field. And if they have some information, get ahold of us because we have a question. So after the break, let’s discuss that. Dealing with damaged blades, don’t let slower pairs keep your turbines down. Blade platforms get you back up and running fast. Blade Platform’s truck mounted platforms reach up to 100 meters, allowing for a quick setup, improved safety, and efficient repairs. Book soon to secure your spot and experience a difference in blade access, speed, and efficiency. Visit BladePlatforms. com and get started today. All right, Joel. What are we talking about here? We’ve been talking with some people that are out fixing GE2X blades, and they ran across something interesting while grinding. Joel Saxum: Yeah, sparks. And as a blade technician working on composites you shouldn’t see sparks. That is not a thing that you want, unless you know that your grinder is gonna LPS cable or something, which it hopefully doesn’t. But yes, someone doing repairs in the field and finding actual staples. In the blade, like in the blade layup. And I’m not, I don’t know the specifics about where exactly on the blade or how they came up across them, but they found staples in multiple blades on repairs they were doing. And they found them by. The grinder throwing sparks Allen Hall: and what started their investigation to go grind away at these blades. Joel Saxum: They’re doing lightning repairs, right? These GE 2x machines. We, on the strike tape side, we’re looking at 2x machines all over the place. 116 meter rotors, 127 meter rotors. There’s nine or 10, 000 of them in the United States alone. And a lot of them have lightning issues. Coincidentally, a lot of them are installed in basically the lightning alley, right up Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas. There’s a ton of them in the area up into Iowa. So there’s a lot of those machines out there and they have lightning issues. So this is lightning damage they’re digging into. And of course, if you’re a blade technician or a blade engineer, or you even just seen some pictures have been around the industry, that when you’re repairing lightning damages, you’re A lot of times you see a pinhole or a little delamination or something and you gotta take the grinder to it to figure out how deep it goes and it can go very deep. You can grind away the, part of the shell and you can end up into a repair the size of a truck hood. Pretty quickly. As they’re grinding away and scarfing into these things to do the proper repairs, as all of our great blade technicians do yeah, running into some staples in the composite layout. Philip Totaro: And can we also clarify here, these are, industrial staples that were intentionally put in there to provide structural rigidity? Or some type of reinforcement? Or what would be the purpose of a company doing that? I Joel Saxum: think it’s a small staple. That’s basically like in my mind, what I was having a conversation today, it was like someone with a hammer tack or like tacking fiberglass layup in place before they glued it down. That’s my interpretation Allen Hall: of it too. We, I have used plastic staples. If you get into some composite work I think you see this in boats a lot in some aerospace applications, but very specific, right? When you have a lot of layup material in these boats. Blades have a lot of material. Sometimes you want to bind them together to hold them together or try to keep them in place as you inject resin. So you can put, generally speaking, these little plastic clips in to do that. But it sounds like there are some metal ones floating around. And I’m, that can’t be good for lightning. And so if you know something about that, if you’ve run across that, if your grinder has hit a metal staple on a GE blade, Reach out to us and you can get ahold of the podcast at uptime@wglightning.com. Or you can just call Joel at ( Joel Saxum: 832) 593-2782 or send an email to, you can send it directly to me, joel.saxo, JEL do SAXU m@wglightning.com. Allen Hall: That’s gonna 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 you can find that same newsletter on Substack. Just look up Uptime Tech News on Substack. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Norges Bank Investment Management has committed $1 Billion CIP’s C IV renewables fund. Fortis Energy and PowerChina have agreed to collaborate on developing 850 MW of wind and solar in Serbia and southeast Europe. Evren, a renewable platform by Brookfield and Axis Energy, will invest $5 billion for renewables in Andhra Pradesh, India. 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, 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. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Norge’s Bank Investment Management, has committed one billion dollars Billion dollars to Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners fifth flagship renewable energy fund, CIV. The fund invests in offshore and onshore wind, solar farms, grid and distribution, and also storage. Investments will be equally split between North America, Western Europe, and developed countries in Asia Pacific. But why is Norway putting a billion dollars into CIP? What’s the plan for that fund? Philip Totaro: It’s a good question, Allen. I, I think Nordisk Bank has actually had a fairly decent track record of diverting some funds and, and investing them into renewables funds. Including some much smaller previous investments in with CIP and, and other project development companies or investors in, in renewables. The reason that they’re doing it is because and again, as you mentioned, this is the sovereign wealth fund of Norway. They’re really just looking to diversify their investment stream beyond just oil and gas. And so I, I don’t know what led them to this relationship with CIP to say, you know what, billion dollars, here you go. But that’s that’s a lot of money and a lot of trust in being able to invest it and, and see a return that I’m sure Norges Bank is, is looking for. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think it’s stable cash looking for a stable investment. And right now you, as you seen the big, the black rocks and the other pension funds these, what would be the equivalent of the size of like the sovereign wealth fund of Norway, putting money into renewables and into infrastructure for the future. Something to remember here is that CIP, the directors of CIP, and the direction of that company, they’re all ex Ørsted. So when you see CIP and Orsted kind of playing in the same arenas, it’s because they’re from the same stock. So, but one of the things that CIP does is they do and I like the way they’re spreading this fund around, but they do do a lot of work in the APAC region and other places around the world. So not only are you geographically diversifying your investment but putting it in infrastructure as well. Allen Hall: Turkish company Fortis Energy and Power China. I’ve signed an agreement to cooperate on the development and construction of over 850 megawatts of new solar and wind projects in Serbia and Southeast Europe. The partnership aims to support the region’s transition to greener and more sustainable energy. Fortis is currently developing 509 megawatts of wind farms in Serbia. For which it recently secured permits. All right, Phil, we’ve seen a lot of action with Turkey and China, more recently entering the periphery of Europe. Is this another one of those plays? Philip Totaro: Yeah, and for, for Power China, keep in mind, they’re a development and EPC contractor development company and EPC contractor, who has the ability to deliver turnkey projects and in these markets where a, the European Union is not going to have jurisdiction. And B, the, although Serbia is one, but there, there are a lot of other Eastern European countries where they’re, they’re not North Macedonia, Albania. Come to mind that, that it’s other countries where Fortis has assets under management, but, but the EU is not going to have an influence. So this is allowing power China as a developer and EPC contractor to come in to Eastern European countries where they can gain a foothold and provide turnkey service where it’s not going to undercut the any domestic players, basically. Joel Saxum: We talked, we’ve talked at length on the show about the Chinese OEMs progress in multiple geographies around the world. A lot of not going on in Brazil and APEC region, of course any project that’s in Africa or in the Middle East gets a sniff at a Chinese OEM. Of course, the gold wins, the envisions Ming Yang’s all the above. But what you’re seeing this getting closer to Europe, which may raise some feathers, but either way, what’s happening right now is the energy transition is being moving along forward. So, in these countries on that Eastern, Eastern side of Europe there. They need renewable energy too. And if this is the most cost effective way to do it, that’s what’s happening. Allen Hall: Everen, a clean energy platform promoted by Brookfield and Axis Energy has committed to invest 5 billion into India during a meeting with the state’s chief minister and energy minister. Everen plans to create 3, 500 megawatts of solar and 5, 500 megawatts of wind assets in a phased manner. Everen. 3000 megawatts of projects have already been initiated. All right, Phil, India is becoming more active over the last 12 months or so. We see much more activity there. What is driving that? Philip Totaro: Well, policy is one and more certainty around these discrepancies with the, between the discoms and the independent power producers. So the discoms are basically utility companies. either state owned and operated or or otherwise that kind of regulate how, basically how much they’re going to pay you for the power, how much power they want to even offtake. They do have auctions over in India that are now happening a lot more frequently and affording independent power producers more certainty and more opportunity to be able to build more projects, larger projects, get more power into the, into the system and so it’s attracting a lot more investment. Brookfield’s obviously been over in India for a number of years now and has been very active there. This new investment is, is actually rather sizable as far as, pumping a lot of investment into a single state and, and a lot of megawatts into a single state within India, so it’s it’s a good trend to see the, the country certainly needs to to decarbonize and wants to be able to decarbonize that’s, that’s part of what’s also driving their policy. But this is, political will being matched with investment, which is what we’d like to be able to see everywhere in the world. Joel Saxum: So speaking of India, what we’ve seen there from, from the outsider’s perspective, right? We’re, we’re over in the US. We’re not on the boots on the ground in India. So we don’t know exactly what’s happening, but what we’ve seen there and heard, heard from that market is that, of course, Siemens has been pulling, pulling out. GE has been pulling out. A lot of these Western manufacturers and support of their services and their turbines have been pulling out. So, this information comes from our contact that we use over there Phil Baby of Rotortek. He kind of knows all of the players, right? So he feeds us back some information. What we’re hearing from him is that, Suzlon is picking up a lot of the slack of everybody, like this backflow of people leaving the market, which is odd because we’re also hearing of a lot of people throwing money in there. So when some of these larger OEMs are leaving and leaving their service contracts and things behind, it leaves a lot of like an air gap for other companies to fill. And that’s what’s happening here. Is some other people are seeing the opportunity within that growing economy and growing energy need and that energy transition want within India and they’re making it happen.

This week on Power-Up, we discuss Ventus Engineering’s monitoring system which improves power production, GE’s system for finding broken blade heating systems, and Vestas’s lifetime extension strategy. Plus an interesting approach to diet control… Check out IntelStor‘s IP Prism offering and more! 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 Innosaur’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. Hey Phil, we got Joel Saxum here for our look at some really interesting wind ideas. And the first one is from Ventus Engineering. And it has to do with a monitoring system for wind turbines, which uses multiple data streams and looking at generator power output, mechanical measurements, torque, cell direction, and some meteorological conditions. And this is all processed real time using a computer to then assess where the rotor and the blade should be. to improve power production and the condition of the tower. So it’s usually a combination of, from what I can tell, SCADA, LiDAR, and a lookup camera to watch the rotor essentially. And, and Phil, when I reviewed this patent, I thought, man, that seems pretty complicated to, to do this. Is this. Is this idea going to move forward, do you think? Philip Totaro: This, so this company that’s developed this concept they are trying to commercialize it, and they, the real interesting thing about this, and the reason I wanted to talk about it on the show was, the, this combination of the lookup camera combined with SCADA data and LIDAR is, is a little unique, so the lookup camera idea for helping to improve rotor imbalance or, or pitch calibration issues that’s been done for, I don’t know, about 12 or 13 years now in the industry. Obviously using a nacelle mounted lidar is not a new idea and, and certainly SCADA data monitoring, not a new idea either, but the combination of all those, I don’t think has actually been done before in this kind of specific implementation where. They are intentionally trying to visualize any kind of issues that might cause these kinds of imbalances that would impact adversely impact performance. So this is a, it’s potentially complicated, but it’s also a level of sophistication that the industry is now capable of, of implementing because we’ve got a reasonable degree of maturity with all those three different concepts. So again, the skated data, the LIDAR system and the lookup camera. So Joel, I, what, what do you think about the commercial viability of this? Joel Saxum: So this to me is a CMS system on steroids that has multiple sensors and can give the operator more data. So I think that there is a, there’s definitely a possibility for back office engineers and people that are responsible for the operation of these turbines, a safe operation and efficient operation of turbines to use something like this. Allen Hall: Our next idea comes from Stefan Klumper for General Electric over in Spain. And it deals with failures in the blade heating elements. And the one thing we know about blade heating elements is they like to break. And when they break, they can become very difficult to detect where that break occurs. So what. This concept is, is they’re looking for that failure location, identifying it using electrical means by applying a voltage and looking for some leakage currents and then changes in capacitance, which will tell you that the system has degraded in some means. But then also using a method of sending voltage impulses Down the heating system and then timing those pulses when those pulses get reflected back as to where on the blade this damage may occur and this concept, Bill, has been used in lightning lightning protection systems for brakes and lightning protection systems, but this makes a little more sense to me. Using it for heaters. Philip Totaro: Yeah. And just to be clear, what this idea is around is for the ice protection technology, usually they have some kind of heating elements located on the leading edge or potentially other to a smaller degree, other sections of the blade that are, that are going to be prone to icing. But you know, the reason why we are tracking this at Intel store is as part of our, IP prism capability. We like to be able to try to identify. Clever ideas that we think are going to not necessarily in this case, like be game changing, but something that will definitely make the lives of people owning and operating wind turbines easier. I think this falls into that category because you’re, you’re talking about having that detection capability where if you find that there’s a fault, You don’t have to go through and strip off the entire heating element off the blade and then reapply it later. You can just go find and localize where that fault is and make your repairs a lot more cost and time efficient. So I think this is a really clever one. Joel Saxum: It’s reducing technician time in the field because these things are hard enough to repair when you get to them, but you got to find it. And now with longer blades and longer blades, if you’re talking some of the newest heating systems going up in the Nordic country on 70 and 80 meter long blades. It could take a team of technicians, or a couple guys on ropes, or whatever it may be, a long, a day to find the break, or two days to find the break. And then you got to dig into the repair and the repair is enough of a pain. So, when you’re dealing with something like this, making field operations more efficient, absolutely makes sense to me. Allen Hall: Next idea is from Siemens Gamesa and it has to do with lifetimes of wind turbines and trying to keep the whole farm operating until the end of life. And Phil, this is a really interesting concept just because it looks at the wind farm in total and the operational. Performance of the whole farm by controlling the upstream turbines and their effect on the downstream turbines. Downstream turbines can see a lot of turbulence, obviously, so they tend to get a little, have a little bit of a rougher life. And what this patent is trying to address is that lifespan. Could they organize the wind farm? In a way that extends to life. This is interesting. Philip Totaro: So what they’re doing with this concept is they’re looking at the amount of residual life and the expected annual energy production of individual turbines. And then they’re trying to develop a park level control system that will allow all turbines in the park to have the maximum park level output between whatever today is in the expected end of life of, of the asset. So this gives them a lot more flexibility and control over. How to optimize power production how to potentially optimize pitch control algorithms and things like that that could have an impact on the downwind turbines, yaw control algorithms and, and wake steering that, that could be anything that might adversely impact the, the lifetime or lifespan of the, the downwind turbines. So this is, this is very clever it’s one of, it’s not necessarily the first time that somebody’s tried to come up with like a park level optimization, but it’s, it’s a very clever way of thinking, and I, I particularly like this for the, the style of problem solving that the the engineers behind this at Siemens Gamesa have, have employed. Allen Hall: Well, in our most intriguing idea of the week Lucy Barnby, who is an individual inventor, has a patent that proposes a unique anti eating device. It’s a face mask, and it’s used for diet control. And it has, if you can envision this, a rigid sort of cup shaped cover that goes over your mouth and chin, kind of like a muzzle, Bill. And then it attaches to your head with some straps, and it has a lock. So this is, this is kind of a stream. I haven’t seen this in service anywhere, obviously, but It has holes for breathing, thank goodness, right? And, but on top of this, there has to be an emergency release mechanism, right? I mean, you have to… Philip Totaro: Well, you know what, Allen? Sometimes people need a little extra level of control. And so, by the way, for anyone in the audience wondering why we’re talking about this kind of thing, what we want to be able to do is, is cover a few of the kind of wacky ideas out there that that people have had. So this is definitely towards the top of the list. You’ll remember if you were with us for our first episode, we talked about a motorized ice cream cone. This one’s probably up there is amongst people in the patent world as, as one of their favorite wackiest ideas. And you know what, it, if you are familiar with this, this patent at all, or, we’re going to show you the some of the images of it. You, you’ll get the idea pretty quick and again, I think it was designed at a, in a time when people were potentially a little less sensitive about how to best control overeating. Joel Saxum: There’s apps out there that will control your eating. There’s other things that, but it all boils down to like Phil said, self control. My best trick is to have a better half who loves me and cares about my health instead of having a basically chastity belt, but for my waistline.

The Uptime team participated in Active Training Team’s (ATT) Thrive USA program launch, showcasing their revolutionary approach to safety training. Allen and Joel discuss ATT with Dermot Kerrigan, the company’s director. Their immersive actor-led scenarios are transforming safety culture through emotional engagement, de-escalation tools, and a focus on safety leadership. Their innovative UK-based training model is being adapted for the U.S. market through Thrive USA, bringing their effective approach to the expanding wind industry in the States. 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 back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. We all know the risks involved in our work, and all of us have participated in safety training. Recent serious accidents in the U. S. and abroad have placed a heavy toll on our industry, and I, like many others, have been concerned about a fall off in the effectiveness of safety training. Thank you And the overall safety culture. This podcast is fundamentally about safety training, but not your average run of the mill safety training. Joel Saxon and I were invited by active training team, a UK based company to participate in their thrive USA training event. Our host was Dermot Kerrigan director at active training team. The thrive USA event was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was well attended by health and safety representatives from large wind OEMs, developers. and owners, and it was a full house. The training I experienced was markedly more impactful, relevant, and memorable than any safety program I’ve encountered in my career. After the event, Joel and I sat down with the aforementioned Dermot Kerrigan of Active Training Team alongside Sara DaSilva, Deputy Project HSC Manager at Ørsted and Graeme Cooper, Global VP of Energy Transition with Jacobs to discuss how Active Training Team will change U. S. training methods, hopefully permanently. Enjoy the show. We’re in Boston, Massachusetts. Actually we’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a lovely area. And we’re here for one reason to participate in the Thrive USA training event, which is conducted by Active Training Team. And we have. Dermot Kerrigan, the director of Active Training Team, who has come all the way to America to train us Americans on how to do it right. I wouldn’t say that. Dermot you’re making our podcast even more famous because you’re the first guest we have on the you’re the first guest that has an IMDB. Okay. Yes. Yes. Now you’re going back a while. Because that’s part of ATT. That there is an immersive experience that involves actors in the actual training scenarios. It’s live. It’s immersive. It’s wraparound. And that is the brilliance you have brought to safety training. And maybe the thing to do here is just to start off by describing what this training experience is. Dermot Kerrigan: What is it? Any behavioral psychologist will tell you that if you want to reach someone’s intellect, the best way to do that is via their emotions. So put simply, if I can move you, I can make you think. So if you’re trying to get someone to think about safety, their role in safety how their behavior influences other people, and actually it’s individual behaviors that produces a culture. And a very good way to do that is by telling a story. And if you’re trying to tell a really impactful story theater, film, or a combination of the two, with professional actors facilitating that, it’s a pretty good way to go about telling a story and hitting people on an emotional level, rather than the usual kind of dry death by PowerPoint experience, which kind of blights traditional safety training, you know. Allen Hall: I think that’s the big difference here, right? Is, in America, we pretty much are Tick the box watch the training video, get out the VCR. I’ve actually seen the VCRs. You’re dating yourself. No, I saw through training just recently where they brought out a VCR and I couldn’t believe it still worked. And in terms of what I learned there, I’ve learned almost nothing. Sara DaSilva, deputy project HSC manager at Ørsted. Sara DaSilva: It takes that next step past. Sitting in a room and going through safety training to really engaging people and getting them involved in thinking about safety. And, we do try to do that with campaigns and initiatives within the projects. But I do see the benefit of a group coming in, making it very realistic and getting into the hearts and minds of all the workers. So everyone can reflect on their why they work safely, why they want to go home safe, whether it’s for their family or other motives. Everyone’s got their own reasons. But really to get people to think about that in their actions in their day to day is something that you can talk about in, in a lot of the training that we do, but really to get people immersed in, in thinking about it. Allen Hall: If you think about how we brought safety up in general in the world, we have brought it up in industrialized world. We brought it up a long way, but we now see the need, need that step change. Dermot Kerrigan: Right. Allen Hall: And that’s the immersive experience. Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, I think so. It’s not a U. S. experience alone, believe me. The U. K. and Europe have always got a long way to go in terms of traditional training. Sure. This is not commonplace necessarily. No. It’s still very cutting edge. Yeah. Even the U. K. and Europe, it’s still very innovative. But to my knowledge, there isn’t anything quite like it in safety. here in the US compared to what we do, what we have historically been doing in the UK, which is why we’re setting up ATT Inc and training up a US team to be able to do what we do in the UK, but, with American accent. So what we do with the mobile stuff is we make that, the fact that you can’t suspend your disbelief, a virtue. Yeah. So even though this thing is happening in a conference room, actually you very quickly think it’s really happening. And the way we do that is a combination of film and live performance. So you see an actor on film. For some reason, people, when they see a film, they actually buy that person is really that person. And then next thing, that person seems to walk through the screen and appear live in the room and they go, yeah, that’s crazy. Okay. That’s not an actor. That’s a real character. We’ll engage with them on those terms. They’ll have seen. The consequences of getting that wrong. I’ve seen that guy perhaps getting very badly hurt on film, but having engaged with them live, he then walks back into the screen and guess what? Nothing happens. This tragic Friday afternoon just becomes another rather boring day at work. Somehow you can play with people’s emotions by mixing this live performance with film. And It really messes with people’s brains, so we don’t necessarily do that in the centers, because we don’t have to. We’ve got the technical facilities to be able to play in a different way. But the mobile stuff, sometimes the very simple things work incredibly well. But that made it real. Allen Hall: Yeah. And I know it’s sometimes hard to understand when Dermot’s describing all these things, that doesn’t seem possible. But yet I experienced it, Sara DaSilva. Sara DaSilva: They did a really good job showing what not to do and having you feel the impact of responding in a way that may not be effective, right? So they put you in that situation, made you feel like, Oh, wow, that, being punitive or more aggressive towards somebody is going to have a negative effect. It’s not going to have that. response that you’re looking for somebody to change their behavior. So being able to live through those and see the changes of how the different actors responded was, it was impactful because you believed the way they responded in each of those situations. Joel Saxum: When we first connected with you, I thought to myself, This concept just makes too much sense. Why isn’t this a part of something in the United States? Graham Cooper, Global VP of Energy Transition with Jacobs. Graeme Cooper: This is about you going home safe, not at risk, not exposed. You going it actually takes it to almost a primeval level. That we’re all here just to look after each other. Yeah. I know it sounds like, that sounds a bit, worldly and, but actually, if you reflect on what you’ve seen today, and I reflect on it, when we were having a bite of lunch, Is there was emotion in the room, people gave willingly and freely, people exposed themselves to that level of discomfort, but it was never uncomfortable. Because it felt like we were in something together. Joel Saxum: It’s not just the actors. It’s not just the behavioral scientists behind the scenes. It’s not just that. The Tina today. Yeah. Who was giving, who was the facilitator for the whole thing. She was amazing at invoking emotion from the crowd and talking to people and engaging with them and Can I get some of your feedback? A lot of times when you sit in a room and someone asks for feedback, A lot of times everybody just sits there for a little while, it goes quiet for 10 15 seconds, and then the person just moves on. She was so good at getting people to participate. And evoking some of the emotion through the actors, but bringing that out in people, and getting them to think, some of the concepts and the thoughts, and hey, what did you think about this, or, what could have been better here, or those kind of things, the responses from the crowd. were fantastic and they were thought of okay. Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. Oh, I was amazed by just how involved everybody became. Usually it takes a much, it takes a lot longer to get them warmed up, and this is quite a senior audience, albeit, but even with senior audiences, they can feel that they’re a little, this is all a little bit beneath them, of course we know all about safety. We’re senior leaders. And actually the level of engagement was really gratifying, and in terms of what Teeter and the other facilitators do, they do have a, they’re trained to ask the right questions and wait for an answer, and if you wait long enough, people will answer. Joel Saxum: We sat in, we had actors, the whole group was in there. We were walking through some scenarios, hitting the rewind button, going back, seeing what, what could change with subtle changes in the emotional delivery or like how someone’s life went the day before, how it affects the way they think today, those kind of things. And then you guys also gave us some tools in the second half. Like you’ve seen this, you felt this, but now let’s put some tools in your pocket to be able to take back to your, to the field, to your teams and alleviate some of these issues when they pop up in the field. Allen Hall: I think that immersive experience evoked. Those responses that I’ll give you the good, really good example here. So there’s live action played out in front of you. There’s a scenario played out with actors in front of you and that we stop. And you can ask the actors what they were thinking or what was happening in the background and get answers. So now you’re participating in this sort of storyline, Graham Cooper. Graeme Cooper: It allows you to explore alternate realities. Yeah. That’s the thing is you can rewind. Exactly. The, effectively you rewind the video you rewind the film, and with what you’ve experienced, how would have the outcome been different? Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, I mean our take is that, I can’t directly influence your behavior. I can’t change your behavior. But what I can do is get a fairly good judgment of where your behavior is coming from, and adapt my behavior accordingly, and hopefully you’ll adapt yours. So that’s where we’re coming from, is is. It’s a, it’s quite a subtle thing that we’re Allen Hall: trying to achieve. It’s a communication piece. There’s a variety of people in the workforce doing a variety of different jobs. You’re going to get different responses. So if a safety issue does come up, You have to adapt to the person that’s involved in the safety issue, not treat everything the same. There’s a term in the United States, if you sell hammers, everything’s a nail. It’s right? That’s the way a lot of health and safety organizations and large organizations tend to be. Not so much in renewables, but in other organizations tend to be that way. You’re offering a different solution to be adaptive and to understand, maybe take a, just a brief moment to think about who’s on the other side of this and how do I connect with that person for an outcome that I want. Sara DaSilva. Sara DaSilva: We talk a lot about intervention and being comfortable speaking up. And that’s not just at the, safety manager or the project leader, everybody needs to feel comfortable, how to approach people to intervene if they see something unsafe. And this provided a lot of great tools of ways to have that conversation where you can approach it as a coach. You can approach it in a way that someone will really respond and respect what you’re saying to them. Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. Which is emotional intelligence, right? Yes. Yeah. It’s about. adapting your approach to the person that you’re faced with. And that depends on how well you know them. What is the situation that I find myself in? What’s the risk perspective here. And how do I adapt my behavior accordingly? Allen Hall: You’re new to America, but you’re not new to this process. And you have a proven track record over in the UK. You, we want to describe the number of projects that you’ve done. And the safety training you apply to these projects. Dermot Kerrigan: We tend to work mainly with major infrastructure projects whether that’s in construction or offshore or rail or transport, and it’s mainly in the UK, it’s what we’ve done is we’ve set up these safety leadership centers, which act as induction spaces. Facilities for people who are about to be engaged on the project. They have to go through these facilities before they’re allowed on site. The idea being that everybody gets the same experience, regardless of whether they’re a receptionist, a CEO, or a guy with a spade about to dig a hole in the ground. So that you get this common language, this common perspective. So what have, who have we worked with? So the first safety leadership center was built 10 years ago for the Thames Tideway Tunnel Project, also known as the Super Sewer. This is this huge tunnel being built under the River Thames. Try and take off some of the load, if you’ll forget the expression from the Victorian sewers. But it’s a 10 year project. So we’ve now, by the end of it next year, when it completes, we will have inducted 35, 000 people into that project. Joel Saxum: Wow. Dermot Kerrigan: Or in that region. So in all of these facilities, I think that the industry wakes up and goes, that seems to work. That’s different. So lo and behold, the next big infrastructure project says, we need to do that. So the likes of HS2, which is the big high speed rail project in the UK, we’ve built a center for them. We’ve built a center for the Trans Pennine route upgrade, which is another rail, big rail project linking a high speed link between Manchester and Leeds. We’ve just built a a center for SSE up in Perth. Near their headquarters. And then there’s Thrive, which was originally sponsored and partnered with Ørsted. The idea was that it would be a an induction facility for everybody gonna work on Horncy II Windfarm, which it was, but it was always supposed to be a legacy facility so that when Horncy II was done, it’s open to the entire industry, which is what’s happened. But yes, and that’s why we’ve had so many people from the likes of RWE, the Ocean Winds, Equinor, all these guys who’ve come through Thrive, their American counterparts have heard about this, or they’ve experienced it themselves and gone, we want to have a look at this because is there a version which can be adapted for the U. S. market, which rather than us going to them, or rather them coming to us at Thrive, we go to them. So this is a big country, the idea of having one center, somewhere like Newark, and everybody flies into it. It’s not really going to happen in this day and age. So if you’ve got something which is light on its feet and you can go to them, that’s going to be probably a better way of doing it. Graham Cooper. Graeme Cooper: What I would strongly advocate for is experience the ATT learning process. Is it a process? It’s an experience. Experience? Yes. Yeah. And that, fundamentally, if you get that it will drive that behavior, it will drive your approach. There’s no bad in that, right? It’s, it’s beyond the value of the cost of doing it. Actually, intrinsically, it just feels right. Allen Hall: Can you explain how you’ve made this? These centers now mobile. Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, the centers, the advantage with the centers is you’re able to build a controlled environment. If you like, you’re almost building a soundstage with multiple sets. And people walk, literally go through a journey. They go, they walk from set to set. And you’re able to create this world. For example, In the centers, three days after the incident, we lead people into a police interview suite. And they don’t have to pretend it’s a police interview suite. It is a police interview suite. And through a double sided mirror, they’re seeing the supervisor that they saw in the room next door, the canteen, being grilled by a police officer because the guy that he instructed to go out and finish the job, finished the job without being properly briefed or understanding what he had to do and why he had to do it, And not been given sufficient tools to do it. And lo and behold, he got killed. Three days later, we’ve got the supervisor now desperately trying to explain what happened and the fact that it’s not just his responsibility. He’s not to blame. And that interview ends. There’s a knock on the door. And then somebody will open the door and say, Is there a Joel Saxon here? It’s a in your world, an usher lawyer. And Joel will get led through, and he will also be grilled by the police. So you’re able to create these sets. Now, we can’t do that. With the mobile Allen Hall: stuff, there’s a lot of health and safety environment, people in the United States that need to connect with you to get this experience to, to come see this, maybe even travel to the UK and go right to the Thrive Center and see it up close. Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah they can come to the Thrive Center, of course they can. We will have set up a U team working outta New York come November and the, a aim is to be rolling this out at scale. Certainly for the wind industry and for other industries that we’ve worked with in, in the UK. Anybody is always welcome to come to any of our deliveries, so long as the client says they can, and they usually do. So if anybody’s interested, get in touch. We can sort something out for you. Dermot, how do they get in touch with you? What’s the best way? Email. Info at ActiveTrainingTeam. us. Or what is your website? It’s we have the US microsite, which is ActiveTrainingTeam. us. Or there’s the larger scale UK website, which shows all our stuff, which is ActiveTrainingTeam. co. uk. Allen Hall: And it is an impressive website. You’re going to learn a lot there. And when you want to Get a hold of Dermot and get a scheduling package in your system. You need to do it pretty quick because based on the attendees that were here today, ATT is going to be busy and you better get on the books now or you’re going to miss out. So get a hold of Dermot. Go to the website. Check out all the cool things that are there because this training is next level. So Dermot, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate the opportunity to go through that experience today and to meet you in person. Thanks very much guys. And thanks so much for coming as well.

This week the Uptime crew looks at Ørsted’s current financial state, reviewing recent difficulties and the pathway forward. What factor have offshore cancellations played? Is the American offshore environment too difficult? Will they source Chinese turbines? Who are their competitors? And our wind farm of the week is Cedar Springs Wind Farm in Wyoming! Register for the AMI Wind Turbine Blades Event! 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 just want to know when I go to Copenhagen next time are they going to be shooting me with squirt guns like they’re doing in Barcelona? You’re not a tourist there. You’re on business. Am I? I like Copenhagen. It’s quite nice. Rosemary tells me it’s a good place to hang out and the restaurants are quite good. There’s Michelin restaurants all over the place. Rosemary Barnes: I lived in Denmark for five years and I went to Copenhagen once in that time. It’s It is a cool, it’s a cool city. Europe’s full of cool cities. It’s so expensive to get from Western Denmark across to Copenhagen. You have to, yeah, it’s like there’s a bridge you have to pass each way that’s like a hundred dollars for the just in one, one toll. Yeah and I was, it was much easier for me to get to Hamburg or Berlin. So I usually went there when I Had a need for big city stuff. Also the I really liked seeing music events, concerts and stuff like that, and Germany is much, much better for that than Denmark. Allen Hall: Can somebody say something nice about Denmark? Rosemary Barnes: Denmark doesn’t need anyone to say anything nice about them. Denmark has the best PR out of any country in the world. Like how Facebook whatever? And it’s just, like little reels about some amazing thing in Denmark. It’s just. You get bombarded with it. Joel Saxum: Have you ever seen the Danish plug? It’s actually like the power plug. It’s actually a smiley face. That’s how smiley they are. Rosemary Barnes: Everyone knows the Australian plugs are the best design though. Joel Saxum: Are they like the English? Rosemary Barnes: No, they’re different. And they just it’s just so secure, like you got angled pins that you plug it in and it is. In, none of these, the US ones with the parallel things where it’s always just like sagging out a little bit with live, live wires, just just there, it, ugh, change it. Wait. And that’s why you can only have 110 volts. It’s survival. Have to lower your voltage so our kids can survive it. Allen Hall: The reason we have 110 volts is because we have the ability to mine copper. And we had the wealth to put in a little bit extra copper everywhere else in the United States versus Europe. Europe’s at 220 or whatever it is, 221 because they have less access to copper, it’s more expensive. Rosemary Barnes: So you’re lazy and inefficient is what you’re saying? Allen Hall: No, we just use the resources that are available. I’m Allen Hall and I’ll be joined by the rest of the Uptime hosts after these news headlines. Brisbane based power generator Renewable Energy Partners has proposed a 5 gigawatt wind power complex in Queensland, Australia. The Bogunda wind farm is planned to be installed in phases. The initial phase is expected to be 2 gigawatts, with the capacity to generate electricity for 200, 000 homes annually. The project will be connected to the proposed CopperString 2. 0 transmission link. Renewable Energy Partners aims to bring the initial 2 gigawatt portion online by the end of 2030. Vestas is restructuring its operations. The company will cut approximately 54 positions at its factory in Ringskobing, Denmark, while expanding production in Colorado in the USA. This move is in response to increased demand for its V 163 onshore turbines in the American market. After adjustments, about 350 employees are expected to remain at the Ringskobing factory. Ørsted reported impairment losses of 3. 9 billion Danish crowns in the second quarter of 2024. The losses were partly due to a delay in the construction of its 704 megawatt revolution wind project off of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The company has pushed back the start of commercial operations for this project from 2025 to 2026. Despite these challenges, Orr said beat analysts expectations with a 59 percent rise in second quarter profits before interest tax depreciation and amateurization. Orset has also stated that while it currently has no Chinese turbines in its project pipeline, it does not rule out buying turbines or technology from China in the future. The company is monitoring developments in the European wind turbine market where Chinese manufacturers have Been gaining momentum, Snipper mentioned that the company is already using Chinese components and steel for its projects. Netsco, a U. S. based naval architecture firm, is finalizing an agreement to build and operate a Jones Act compliant feeder vessel for offshore wind turbine installations. The new feeder barge design incorporates dynamic positioning, Anti roll motion technology and a specialized fendering system to address current operational challenges. The vessel is expected to be ready within 18 to 24 months after contract finalization. And Ibudrola, through its U. S. subsidiary Avangrid, has surpassed 9, 000 megawatts of installed wind and solar renewable capacity In the United States, this milestone enables the company to supply sustainable energy to more than 2. 3 million U. S. families. Iberdrola’s portfolio includes over 75 projects in 22 states with more than 8, 000 megawatts of wind capacity and around 1, 000 megawatts of solar power. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barnes. CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. Mark your calendars for AMI’s Winter in Blades conference happening October 2nd and 3rd in historic Boston, Massachusetts. This two day event, which is similar to the well established edition in Europe, We’ll bring together the whole blade value chain to examine market outlook, innovations in blade materials, design, manufacturing, testing, and lifecycle management with a special focus on the North America market. Gain insights from experts from Vestas, Along with scientists and engineers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Plan your trip to Boston this fall by visiting the link in the show notes or just Google 2024 Blades Boston. They always say when Orsted sneezes the rest of the energy world gets a cold. And right now, Orsted is coughing and wheezing pretty good. If you’re looking at the financial numbers from Orsted, they booked a 3. 9 billion Danish crowns, which is about 575 million in an impairment loss in Q2. So that’s a lot of money. And part of that is the revolution wind project in the States is being delayed due to soil contamination at the onshore site, which man can Orsted not win. And then that sort of had some other cascading effects. Shares of Orsted are down somewhere around 8%. And if you look at the last four years, three, four years, it’s roughly at one third of its peak in like the beginning of 2021. Now, even with those losses, they beat expectations with a 59 percent rise in profits. Even when things are looking down, Orson has some positive news. And it looks like guys, Orsted is cutting back so they’re not pushing on some of the more perimeter projects that they had, like this flagship one, the e methanol project for green fuels, that one’s been slowed down, and a bunch of other Orsted related items are getting slowed. I look at Orsted as one of the crown jewels in renewable energy, and if Orsted is having this much trouble today, What are they about to do with it? Are they really going to try to be, work closer to home, step out of America a little bit? Are they. Going to restructure. How does this look? Particularly in light of the cancellations they had, I think it was earlier this year Joel? On the East Coast. Joel Saxum: Yeah, earlier this year. I think that you just got to pull it in a little bit, to be honest with you. And we thought they were going to do a little bit more of that when they had the issues with the offshore wind plays in the U. S. Was just rain it back on the difficult projects. Which you can see right now with that the power to X type stuff or the sorry, the e methanol project that they had just canceled is that’s not normally from their core business. Their core businesses for a long time has been offshore wind in the North Atlantic. They, you could, I could see them pulling back a little bit more focusing on those things, getting a little bit more healthy and then going out and trying some other projects. Like you said, you’ve seen this, they’re, they pulled back from some of the things in the States but. Now going forward, but then you see a revolution wind come full on commissioning, pushed back to 2026. So now they’re running into some hurdles and some roadblocks around the world Allen Hall: is because there’s so much into the offshore piece and that is so expensive compared to Joel Saxum: onshore. It’s risky, right? There’s just a lot more capital at play. Rosemary rec or has recommended the books how big things get done before. There’s a book about how these big capital projects, lots of books about how they get done, but it’s because they’re difficult. They’re inherently risky to take on. And that’s one of the reasons why you’ll see in the insurance world, there’s a policy for just the construction. And then there’s a policy once the thing gets running for the next 25 years. These big projects are capital intensive. Along the same lines as this. Look in the oil and gas world. That’s the other big infrastructure project. In the world that happens offshore, they put up some big capital numbers for these things. I’ve seen in the, of course, in the billions of dollars to develop these oil fields and sometimes they’re a couple hundred million in or even a billion dollars in and they’ll pull the plug on it. Because the risk is so high operating in that offshore environment that it’s just like you can’t stomach it anymore. So you’re starting to see a little bit of that happen in offshore Philip Totaro: wind. In order for them to, continue driving profitability, they actually came out and announced this week that they’re not necessarily even opposed to looking at sourcing Chinese turbines if they can get something cheaper than what they’re having to buy right now. To develop some of these projects. I would imagine they are looking at it from, the perspective of European projects, but certainly also for projects they’re looking at and other markets like South Korea and potentially. Taiwan, I don’t know because that’s gonna get into a tricky area. I, I doubt they’re gonna allow Chinese turbines in the water there but if that’s the sort of thing that Ørsted’s having to do in order to, it’s frankly why Lux Kara signed the deal with Mingyang in the first place, cause, They can’t build the project that they wanted to build without having a cheaper alternative. It’s necessitating, the current market environment is just necessitating this this kind of a move. Joel Saxum: If you’re starting to see moves like that, Phil, which I mean, in, the grand scheme of things in the geopolitical environment we are in globally, it’s like a, ooh what’s going on here? Orson is saying this. Could you see other moves happening, right? Could you see a headline coming out next quarter that says Orsted lays off 500 people or a thousand people or something like that? Potentially. Philip Totaro: You’re also seeing that more and more companies are now pushing back on the European Union and European Commission. And their whole investigation of the Chinese saying, look, we can’t build projects without China as a supply chain option. If that’s the direction that the developers are having to go in, it’s either let’s get something cheaper in the door or what you just mentioned, Joel, layoffs are inevitable if they, if these companies expect to stay afloat. Allen Hall: Orsted is essentially Denmark, right? And at that point, they’re not going anywhere. Denmark is a very stable country. It’s too big to fail, right? But in terms of their competitors right now, RWE, Equinor, anybody else there that are playing at that level? Total? Philip Totaro: That and Fall, you could you could argue. Allen Hall: So is it because the footprint of available projects is diminished over the last six months or so? And all the same players are still there. Is it just less real estate to make projects happen? Plus the OEMs are increasing prices like Vestas has? Philip Totaro: Yes, and part of that is also, Denmark being a little wishy washy with their open door tender policy where, the Ørsted thought they had a bunch of projects lined up and they were trying to get capital for all those. And then the Danish government said, Oh, we’re not going to do the open door policy. Oh, yeah, we are. No, we’re not. Yeah, we are. How is a developer supposed to, pursue anything in that kind of an environment as well when a there’s regulatory uncertainty and B there’s a high inflationary and interest rate environment that still plagues the industry globally and precludes anybody from, diversifying the capital investments amongst a multitude of projects. You’re now having to get a lot more just to fund one. Allen Hall: That’s all true. If you look at two different landscapes at the minute, you have United States, which over the last year or so has stumbled badly and a lot of projects has been canceled or put on hold, particularly offshore. And then you see this burgeoning market happening down in Australia and you say all right, why is Australia getting such big projects announced and the planning is underway and the financing seems to be rolling and Denmark, the country of Denmark is, are funding some of these things in Australia. Why is that an easier landscape to conquer than some of these U. S. projects? Rosemary Barnes: It’s easy to say that Australia is easy while we’re at this very early stage of development. The U. S. market has been harder than most people would have expected. I’ve definitely been surprised how much, The U. S. has struggled to get offshore wind started given that it’s been going pretty smoothly with some pretty big projects for a long time in Europe. So I thought that, the rollout would be easier in the U. S. and that hasn’t been the case. Australia is the next shiny big thing, lots of potential, lots of big talk, but we haven’t yet got to the point where the U. S. failed, I don’t think that, I think it’s too early to say that it’s easier to get projects done in Australia. It’s just, I don’t know, we saw it in the US, everybody made a like a, it was a land grab. Everybody wanted to make sure that they were going to have a stake like a big bit of this huge potential new market. And so everyone rushed in with a lot of enthusiasm to stake their claim. And we’re at that point in Australia at the moment, whereas we haven’t actually started. We don’t even have any projects that are actually committed and, going to start construction, let alone having actually started construction and seeing, what kind of opposition that brings, what kind of supply chain challenges that brings, logistical challenges. All of those things are yet to be done in Australia and whilst I’m really hopeful that we will have learnt some of the lessons of the US and I think that in general it is an easier environment to get big things done in Australia because we do trust the government a little bit more to make decisions and go with it and the legal structure is also in place a little bit better that, individuals can’t hold things up as easily as they seem to be able to in the US. We’re going to have tainting problems. We just have, it’s too early to see them yet. Joel Saxum: If you look back at the history of U S offshore wind, there was companies coming, the Orsted’s and the Econor’s of the world coming over to the United States in Providence and other places along that Eastern seaboard establishing offices in 2017 in lieu of this offshore wind boom. So when we, when you look at the timeline that way, 6 years from the time we were talking about it a couple of years removed from that. Then we had the auctions and now, so it’s been 7 years since those offices were established. Right now, in Australia, you’re in of if it was the exact same timeline, which it’s, of course, going to be different, but you’re in you’re 2 of that 7 year timeline before steel was actually in the water for us. You’re, I agree with you, Rosemary. While I think that you guys will probably have an easier time, plus you get the advantage of watching another place. fall over hurdles and stub their own toes that you can hopefully make up for that. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And also, Australia is a bit of a cult, like culturally we’re in between Europe and the US. So I wouldn’t expect it to roll out as smoothly as it has in Europe. But it shouldn’t be as hard as the U S and like you said, we’ve got the advantage of having seen the problems. Some of the specific problems people, Australia addressing ahead of time, like some of the port stuff and yeah, a few things like that, but that said, there’s a lot of big pieces that have to be in place to get a offshore wind industry happening. And America does have some advantages that Australia doesn’t have. Like we don’t have this big. industrial heavy manufacturing industry to the extent that the U. S. does. Either a lot more time to, to build it back up in Australia, or it was going to be a lot more importing a lot more reliance on imports, which, supply chain issues have been a problem, basically across the entire economy the last few years, but especially in offshore wind. There’s some unique challenges that we’ll face as well, but yeah, the potential is big enough that people are pretty excited. And also because like Europe is divided up and the projects are going ahead. And that’s almost business as usual. Now, everyone got very excited about us, put a lot of money in there, saw a lot of losses for some of these projects, they’ve taken hits. And people are understandably less excited about the future in the U S at the moment. So it does feel like Australia is the next place to get to get excited about and talk to people. And make big talk about. Allen Hall: But wasn’t that driven by policy, and the push was on the east coast of the U. S. for offshore wind? That was the place that they were going to focus most of the effort from the administration’s point of view? And the states did too. NYSERDA definitely has made a big push for offshore wind versus onshore wind and solar. It seems like Australia is, even though it’s set up very similarly, where the vast majority of the population is right next to the water, it looks like a lot more projects are going to happen on land in Australia than what are happening in the United States. That is easier to do, right? It’s just simpler. Rosemary Barnes: Yes and no. In the U S of course, like in the, yeah, the Northeast part of the country, there’s no, like the onshore wind is so terrible there. If you look at the, the stats for it, it’s just you could never build an, a profitable onshore wind project there. So it’s. Either offshore wind or it’s huge transmission projects, like probably, HVDC running from the Midwest all the way across to yeah, New York, say, but in the U. S. transmission, it has proven in. Maybe even more difficult than offshore wind, but people are really opposed and it doesn’t seem like the legislative structure is in place to actually make it go smoothly. So in Australia, we’ve got some differences. So first of all, we’ve got reasonably good, like good to excellent onshore wind across the whole country, including where people are located. So you can build wind farms, onshore wind farms fairly close to Melbourne and Sydney. And there’s still like really good sites as well that aren’t too far away. In the north of South Australia, there’s some onshore wind sites with capacity factors in the into the 40s. So it’s it’s an offshore wind resource, but it just happens to be onshore. And there, there’s not a lot of, fight to get the transmission done. Not like it’s a walk in the park, but it’s certainly not impossible. And then the other thing is that whilst Australia has some of the same challenges with building new transmission that the US has, it’s to a much lower extent, like there’s protests about new transmission lines. People the country aren’t that stoked that they got, big new transmission projects running through their properties, and they say that they feel that they’re taking the hit to give city people cheaper electricity and that it’s not fair. There’s like some discussions there, but at the end of the day, whilst. The ideal scenario is that everybody is happy and on board with it and that affected landowners are compensated. Our, the Australian government does actually have the right to just say, too bad, the transmission is going through there and we’re going to compensate you according to this formula. They can do that if they want to, whereas I’m pretty sure that’s not the case in the US. You actually do have to get agreement. Joel Saxum: Eminent domain, you can do it, but it’s tough. But here’s the thing that Alan and I talk about this all the time. HVDC in the United States, why are we not doing more of it? Like we have 2. 6 million miles of pipelines across the country. 2. 6 million miles. Why can’t we bury HVDC the same way we bury a pipeline? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, or even better yet, dig up the pipeline. I’ve heard that there’s two or three years of US steel requirements buried in natural gas pipelines. Rip up the pipelines and use the channels to put HVDC electricity in. Job done. But I’m pretty sure that the legislation doesn’t allow that. Like it’s easier, like it’s a lot easier to get gas pipeline approved and If you’ve got an approval for a gas pipeline or if it physically exists and you’ve just dug it up, it doesn’t mean you have the right to do something else with the channel that’s left behind. Yeah, it’s just it’s really hard and I can see even as hard as offshore wind is proving to be, I still think it’s the easiest solution for for that part of the country. And looking forward into the future, it’ll be floating offshore wind as well. It’s actually worth the effort and the possibility to, get a big new industry with a lot of manufacturing associated with it in place and, I do think that’s going to be easier than trying to get your act together with transmission. It just, it looks so hard to get the transmission you would need to have, to like fully utilize all your onshore wind resource just looks so challenging in the U. S. Joel Saxum: Transmission is tough in the U. S. because of federal law, state law, county law, township law in all the stakeholders that are involved. Plus the fact that the way, our constitution is written with private land rights as opposed to other countries. It’s way easier to pass a power line or a pipeline in Canada than it is in the U. S. by far and a lot more expensive down here, but I don’t know, there’s really no other options for, in my mind, renewable energy off the east coast, unless you’re running HVDC from, say, Canada or something. Allen Hall: NYSERDA’s pushing now for a lot of solar and onshore wind, and New York’s a big state, right? Niagara Falls. Which has been operational since, what, the early 1900s has been providing power to Buffalo and also New York City, I believe, both, right? And same thing happens in Pennsylvania, by the way, which has Philadelphia doesn’t have, yeah, Pennsylvania doesn’t have a waterfall, but it does have some good wind on the West, on the Western side, right? So that’s where you see the wind farms. So they do have the ability to put some of this stuff in. And I feel like now that they’ve gone, tripped their, stubbed their toe on offshore that they’re trying to move towards more. onshore solar projects because they can get done. And maybe that Orsted got wrapped up in the big excitement of offshore wind. And they’re realizing it, that is just a long play. We were, we did not have the infrastructure for it. We didn’t have the ships. We hadn’t scanned the ocean bottoms. There’s a lot of maneuvering that had to happen. And here we are. And Orsted’s the one paying the price. Weirdly, Orsted’s paying the price for this. Rosemary Barnes: If I were the US government though, and thinking like all the way to net zero, I would be putting in the effort to make sure that offshore wind happens because like as much as if you’re a developer today and you want to make money on clean energy projects, of course, solar panels and batteries, it’s very easy to do that. But that is not going to be the full solution to power New York City through the winter. It’s not going to be predominantly solar and batteries at that time of year. Offshore wind, it’s not the offshore wind is the only solution. You can have onshore wind and transmission. You could also, invest in a lot of thermal energy storage and do district heating or, there’s a lot of things that you could do, but they’re all challenging to, for that, winter time in a big city. Yeah, a big city with a harsh winter, like New York. Allen Hall: That infrastructure already exists. New York City has power today, right? So New York City is getting power from Canada, Hydro Quebec is coming down that way, right? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But what about when they need to replace their heating with their gas heating with electric, like that’s not in place. Allen Hall: You’re talking about a millennia in terms of time. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But then what you’re saying is that then they’re not aiming for net zero by 2050 then, which honestly they’re not, then they’re not, they’re not planning for that. Allen Hall: Did they just not miss it? They missed it about six months ago. Rosemary Barnes: We’ve still got 26 years to get there they haven’t missed it yet. But Allen Hall: You think you’re gonna, you’re gonna think you’ll electrify all of New York City in 25 years? Rosemary Barnes: No, I’m saying that they, if you want to do that, then you need to make a plan and that plan has to involve more than solar panels and batteries so at the moment, I don’t see a plan. You could do a plan. Of course you could. Yeah, there’s Offshore wind is one. I’ve already, I’ve mentioned the solutions. Heat is the big thing to replace the winter heating load. And you can do thermal energy storage that will, last through the winter. But for a city as big as New York and as compact as New York it’s not easy. There is not an easy solution to get somewhere to get that region of the world to actually zero emissions is not easy. And it’s going to take a long time. So you can’t just rely on it. Developers doing the projects that make financial sense over the next five years, like that is not going to get you there. It’s going to have some longer term planning and things need to get started now that aren’t necessarily profitable now, but are going to be needed, 10 years, 20 years time. And I don’t that, that’s take some sort of, political capabilities to think that far ahead and implement it. I don’t know too much about the politics in that part of the world, but I don’t see, plans like that. I don’t see people on board. With that, I don’t see incentives to get companies participating in that sort of a plan. Joel Saxum: New York City uses on average five and a half gigawatts of power a day. Ten gigawatts in the summertime when all the AC gets turned on. It’s the summertime that’s the issue. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and I bet that does that include gas as well? Because somewhere like really cold. Joel Saxum: That’s just power in general. Power, electricity, right now. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Often the peak heating load is five times the peak electricity load. If you want to replace if you want to replace all of heating, if you want to electrify all of heating, then you’re going to have to, look at a large multiple of that. You save something if you go with heat pumps and, you get a good coefficient of performance, then it’s not going to be like you’re going to five times that. In the winter time, you could well be looking at a doubling of it. Joel Saxum: So a lot of energies, a lot of electricity to, to even get near a net zero to get to a net 40, you’re going to have to put a lot of electricity into that city. So like you’re like what we’re saying, generation wise, offshore wind may be your only bet. You don’t think so, Alan? I think the Allen Hall: infrastructure is not there today to do it. And in the mean, in the meantime, you’ve just really hurt the companies that could have helped you. They’re not going to be anxious to do a New York project now. Obviously they have some sites out there they’re going to want to use, but the American companies, except for essentially Dominion, have pulled out of offshore wind. So all you have left are non U. S. players. Does that tell you something? Philip Totaro: It’s also experience because, for the European companies that came in and tried to get partnerships going with. Orsted was one of them. They got partnerships with Eversource. They got partnerships with PSEG in New Jersey. But they ended up backing out because the government made it too kludgy to, to do business there. And, once everybody started, wanting their pound of flesh it, it, it delayed the projects enough where that coincided with rising interest rates and inflation that it’s now made a lot of projects unviable without having to renegotiate the PPA. And we all saw how that went with a lot of these companies having to. Pull out and rebid their entire projects. So the challenge. Okay, let’s go back, though, to, can we solve the problem with solar and batteries that the reason that a lot of companies and developers are interested in pursuing that in New York is because regardless of how much can talk about the fact that they don’t have good wind resource in the northeast. They also don’t have particularly good solar irradiance in the northeast by the way, but the reason to do it is if you can put solar plus storage in the storage is starting to become more valuable than anything because of the number of companies that want to be able to arbitrage the way that they can in markets like your cot, nice. Oh, is mostly a merchant market. Anything that’s interconnected there, there’s a few corporate power offtake agreements, bigger ones for renewables asset owners and operators, but when you have. Companies like energy traders, basically that have experience in those type of markets where they’re trading all the time. They want to be able to take advantage of, the fact that you can get batteries on the grid now and arbitrage on those again, the same way that you can in your cotton Southwest power pool these Joel Saxum: days. This week’s Wind Farm of the Week is the Cedar Springs complex outside of Casper and Douglas, Wyoming. It’s partially owned by NextEra and Pacific Corp, depending on what phase you’re looking at. But as it sits right now, there’s about 200 total turbines there. They built 76 miles of new roads, and the three phases are 532 megawatts all together. Now these are all GE turbines, the 2. 8 127s and 2. 3 116s. Some interesting things. They’re actually going to be looking at building another phase, which would be phase four, which could be up to 390 megawatts, taking the entire complex up to about 900 megawatts, which is pretty wild. One of the cool things they have going on here is what they have done around the warning lights that you see on turbines. So if you’ve driven anywhere near a wind turbine farm lately, red blinking lights for aircraft warnings and FAA stuff at night. But what they’re doing here is they have the aviation detection lighting system installed. So right now they have installed five radars out there around the project, which detect aircraft within three miles of the boundary. And once the system sits and understands its radar signatures for a while, it’ll take a couple of months to normalize. It’ll trigger the lights when, once there’s an aircraft within, Three miles so some sites are a little bit faster when these things are all done, but either way What this does is that has the lights off more than they’re on which is of course welcome for all the local landowners So the Cedar Springs complex outside of Casper and Douglas, Wyoming 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. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

This week Allen, Phil, and Joel discuss Ramboll’s acquisiton of K2 Management, Sumitomo Corporation’s acquired stake in EEW Offshore Wind Holding, and Aurora Energy Services acqusition of Altitech Blade Services. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.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 WeatherGuard, 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. Danish engineering firm Ramboll has acquired K2 Management, a wind and solar energy consultancy. This move expands Rambl’s global wind division to over 900 people across 20 countries, including a new presence in Vietnam, Thailand, and Portugal. The acquisition is part of Rambl’s strategy to grow its wind business to over 1, 000 people by 2025, enhancing its ability to provide services across all stages of wind energy projects globally. Now, Phil. Why the push to get into places like Vietnam and Thailand and Portugal at the minute? Philip Totaro: Well, it’s interesting because they’re, K2 has done a really good job over the years of doing a lot of owners engineering services and other consultancy services around project development, particularly in these kind of emerging markets. So, you And Ramble historically has gotten a lot of feed contracts doing, some of the EPC basically scope of work and, and design work on Offshore sites the fact that they would fold K2 management’s capabilities in with what they already have is, is going to provide the combined company the opportunity to get a wider scope of work from a lot of these, particularly a lot of these emerging markets where. In an emerging market, you want to turn key service provider. This gets them one step closer to, to doing that. Joel Saxum: Yeah, this, to me, this is a huge acquisition in the space. If you’re in the offshore wind space or in the wind space in general, and we’re just talking wind, not solar and everything else that both of these companies do two big players, you’re joining up. So it, like Phil said, you’re going to have a full suite of capabilities in a lot of parts of the world, because there’s parts where K2 operates where Rambo doesn’t, or where K2 has made inroads and Rambo hasn’t. Allen Hall: In Germany, EEW Group has reorganized its business into three holding companies. Japanese firm Sumitomo Corporation has acquired a stake in one of these, EEW Offshore Wind Holding. This holding company focuses on the monopile business and associated mechanical engineering activities. This partnership aims to secure EEW’s position as a global market leader in offshore wind foundations. And Phil, there’s a lot of work happening in foundations at the minute and a lot of movement in the business world about that. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and, and for Sumitomo’s benefit they have a lot of contracts to do, both foundations and to partner with other companies to do topsides on offshore substations in particular. So, like we just talked about with with Ramboll and K2 getting together. And having kind of complementary capabilities. This is a similar thing where Sumitomo obviously already has some presence in, in monopile fabrication, but EEW is without a doubt the, the global leader here. And EEW is also establishing themselves in the United States. They’re looking at the Brazilian market. They’re looking at other markets globally where they can, they can position themselves. Having Sumitomo’s backing helps make that a lot easier. Joel Saxum: As the offshore wind sector grows whether it’s fixed bottom, whether it is the new, the new frontiers of floating. There’s going to be a lot of work here, right? So we have talked in the last few weeks in the podcast about a couple of, another Spanish company kind of get that. So a leader in the space as well. What people don’t understand. I don’t think when they see pictures of these transition pieces, monopiles, and there’s other things offshore. Is that the size and scale and the scope of engineering that goes into these things is a massive and the interactions between, being in the water column, being in the air having some of it submerged under, in different geotechnical formations of mud bottom, sand bottom, rocky bottoms, all these different things. It is a very, very complex part of the offshore wind piece that we don’t see that much. And if you’re not involved in offshore infrastructure, and then you don’t really pay too much attention because you don’t even see it. But the, it is going to be a huge part of the industry as we move forward and build out our offshore wind fleet. Allen Hall: Aurora Energy Services, a Scottish headquartered company, has expanded into South America by acquiring the Latin American assets of Altitech blade services. This gives Aurora a presence in Chile with operations in Santiago. Aurora has already secured two significant projects in Chile and aims to grow its Chilean business to 5 to 10 million dollars annually with around 50 employees over the next three years. The company, which currently has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees and a forecast annual revenue of 95 million dollars, is also exploring opportunities in Asia Pacific and South Africa. Bill, the, the Scots are reaching out all over the world Philip Totaro: with wind. They are. And this is again, kind of a fascinating deal from the perspective of, Aurora obviously already has a presence in kind of other industry verticals and has been kind of dipping their toes in the water with tidbits of work that they can get in, in renewable energy. But it’s also fascinating from Ultitech’s perspective because they obviously still have their presence in the UK and other global markets, but to sell off the Chilean business is, is a bit of a fascinating move, I guess, because, Chile’s a growing market and I don’t know if Ultitech really had the resources necessary to be able to tackle what they want to be able to accomplish in that market without, the backing of somebody like Aurora so I think it’s, again, it’s a good play on, on their part and it gives them access to a few projects, as you mentioned but there’s significantly more potential there because it’s a lot of these South South American markets are highly fragmented in terms of where they’re getting their service from. Some of it’s coming from OEMs, some of it is independent service providers, and there’s a handful of companies that have tried to go it alone and operate and maintain their own assets. So, the fact that Aurora can step in with an ISP play that they can, bolster their, their position in the market where they, they are potentially poised to take advantage of any OEMs that are not really getting the job done on, on the assets that they have. Or the owner operators that have chosen to self perform. Joel Saxum: If Aurora seems like a name that you’ve heard before, and if you’re in the wind industry, especially, specifically in blades, it may be because Aurora, as they’re growing here by acquisition, Also acquired Kotec IRM out of Houston a couple years ago. So that’s the Aurora Kotec company, and they’re a big player in the, in the blade space on a global basis. I know they do a lot of work in Brazil as well. So you can see Aurora Energy coming from Scotland, like we said, spreading its wings by acquisition and, of course, organically to grow all over the world to be a big player in the blade world.

Welcome to Uptime Power-Up, our new show focused on the latest and greatest wind innovations that push the industry forward! This week, Allen and Phil explore FabricAir’s system installation tool, Itrec’s offshore wind blade lifting method, Beridi Maritime’s floating wind structure, and a new way to enjoy your favorite summer treat. To learn about these technologies or inquire about more new tech, contact IntelStor at https://www.intelstor.com/. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor – https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Alan Hall, and Itasaur’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future. All right, Fabric Air Canada. Phil, our friends up in Canada have been working on some tools for their game. The icing systems. Philip Totaro: Yes. And what’s really interesting and novel about this is they developed a system that allows them to punch holes into some of the bulkheads and ribs along the length of the blade so that they can actually install this. If you’re not familiar with fabric air, they have this kind of fabric tube that runs the length of the blade and circulates hot air to be able to de ice the blade. But in order to install it and retrofit it on older blades, you have to have a way that you can drill, drill a hole through some of the bulkheads and the ribs in the blade. And so their, their latest patent that came up in our technology trend watch and research this week indicates that they’ve, developed a new system that could even be remote operated by a little rover drone that they could send down the length of the blade and have this thing drill out the, the bulkheads. Allen Hall: And that tool can be used for other things besides this de icing system, right? If you’re putting holes in blades Allows access for a lot of other things to go up in a blade, right? Philip Totaro: Including repairs on a lightning conduction system for example, or just running any other things that you might need to down the length of the blade. You may need to install some arrow updates that would require some, some work in turn on the internal shell or the inside of the shell of the blade and so this would also facilitate facilitate that, so it’s it’s pretty clever. Allen Hall: The technology they describe in their patent is focused on Senveon blades, but this could be used on almost any wind turbine blade. Philip Totaro: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. The, the reason that they did that with Senveon is because they actually are working with up in Quebec, which if you’re not familiar, the independent research organization that actually has to send beyond turbines at their facility where fabric air through this partnership with with actually tested this this technology. So. It’s pretty great. Allen Hall: Next up is Itrec from the Netherlands and they have a offshore blade installation technique or tool that they developed. And it, well, the way I looked at this, it looks like a praying mantis almost that grabs onto the tower and then you take the blade on the back of the praying mantis up to the hub and plug in. Philip Totaro: What’s unique and interesting about this innovation is what they’re doing is they’ve created a system where you can actually have this crane structure on the service and operation vessel. The vessel comes up to the turbine and the foundation kind of clamps on and then deploys this railing system that’ll clamp up to the upper part of the tower. And then you can have, the blade, which is, in this clamp run up this little track that’s a removable this removable track, and then, like you said, it’ll, it’ll spin the blade around and orient it in, in the right position in order to, to get it installed and hooked up into the, into the hub. So of all the ideas I’ve seen. About having this kind of construction or service and repair type of system. This is actually one of the more clever ones. But keep in mind that this company in Holland that’s developed the technology, they, this is just a patent at this point. They are trying to get somebody interested in prototyping this and, and actually commercially developing it. So we hope that they’re successful with it. Because this actually is pretty, not only pretty clever but it’s, it’s something that’s probably a little easier to implement and safer to implement than some of the other concepts that we’ve seen. And we’re going to move down to Spain now, Allen Hall: Phil, with Burriti Mint Marine Time. And they have a patent that just come out, which talks about building a floating structure, a floating wind turbine structure. But it’s a series of walls that get assembled into like this triangular shape. And you Philip Totaro: want to describe this a little bit. It’s modular in the sense that they, they can do something key side where they can assemble, whatever the structure is and with, the levels of buoyancy that they need for, for, the, the size of turbine they’re going to install. They can assemble this quayside, and then bolt it together as it’s going in the water, and then you can take, with your quayside crane, and plop the turbine, fully assembled on this thing, and then float it out. So it’s, it’s pretty clever in terms of what they’re doing, and then the way they’ve designed it, it can either serve as a, a moored floating structure, or kind of like a, almost a tension like platform, where you would have different legs, tethered legs, basically coming off the bottom of this thing. This is a very early stage innovation at this point, and we hope that they can, can pursue it. There’s obviously a lot of different floating structure designs and concepts out there already. But this is one that actually has some promise based on the modularity of it and the fact that you could actually assemble it Keysight with whatever. Structure you needed to, to be able to assemble for, for, something that’s purpose built for a particular turbine model. Allen Hall: Last Philip Totaro: but Allen Hall: not least, Phil, the motorized ice cream cone. Hey, this patent technology needs to be applied rapidly because, based on what the sketches Philip Totaro: show, this is pretty cool. Alright, so this isn’t, strictly speaking, wind energy, but we’re gonna try to find some of these fun patents that people have come up with over the years. So, this one, it’s, it’s real interesting. There’s actually, basically the premise of it is, you can have your ice cream in a little cup on top of your cone, and the cone has a little gear mechanism in it, so that I, sorry, I can’t even get through this without laughing, but, it’ll, it’ll automatically rotate, The, the, your ice cream so that you can just stick your tongue out and lick and you don’t have to hand rotate Your ice cream cone and worry about the ice cream dripping down on on your hands So, I I’ve I’ve seen lots of things that are over engineered in my time This is probably one of them But this is also You know a pretty clever idea. I don’t know that the world needs this Alan Allen Hall: There’s upsides and downsides to this bill. One is that you don’t have to Do anything to heat your ice cream, I guess, besides hold it. Downside is you need a battery, right? So without the battery, this thing doesn’t go. So it doesn’t, didn’t seem to have a USB port to charge it. That’s the next patent, a USB chargeable ice cream cone. There you go. Like everything else in the world. Heh heh heh heh heh. You think the Europeans are gonna make us use a USB C or a USB lightning cable? Huh? Which one is it? Philip Totaro: USB C. Nah, they’ve already decided. Everything, everything’s gotta be standardized. Allen Hall: Well, there you have it. There’s three really interesting wind patents and one crazy patent for you this week. Thanks, Phil, for bringing these ideas to the table.

Holly Brown and Nathan Killeen from Hatch join the show to discuss how the company is tackling some of the most difficult energy issues. Their team works to bring renewable energy to remote areas, often working with First Nation’s communities to create an energy system that works for them. Engineers with a global focus, the Hatch team helps to create renewable energy projects that benefit communities of all sizes. 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 co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we’re diving into the renewable energy initiatives of Hatch, a global engineering powerhouse that’s been shaping industries for nearly seven decades. While Hatch is known for its wide ranging expertise in metals, minerals, And infrastructure will be shining a spotlight on their cutting edge work in the renewable energy sector, from solar farms to wind turbines and battery storage, Hatch is at the forefront of the clean energy revolution. We’ll explore how this employee owned company is leveraging its vast engineering experience to tackle the complex challenges of transitioning to sustainable, sustainable, And in this episode, we’ll discuss Hatch’s projects with First Nation communities in Canada and how they’re helping communities around the world access cleaner, more reliable energy. Our guests are Nathan Colleen, Wind Power Lead at Hatch and Holly Brown, Senior Environmental Consultant at Hatch. Nathan and Holly, welcome to the show. Holly Brown: Thank you, Allen. Nathan Killeen: Very nice to be here. Allen Hall: First off, I think we should introduce people that are not familiar to hatch to all the thing that Hatch does. And if you haven’t been on the website, you should go check it out. It’s hatch.com. But Holly, you want to give some description of all the things that Hatch. Does do. Holly Brown: At Hatch we refer to ourselves as entrepreneurs with a technical soul. So what that means is we’re really a group of people who are passionately committed to the pursuit of a better world through positive change. So I think a unique differentiator for Hatch is that we embrace our client’s vision as our own, and we partner with clients to develop ideas that are smarter, more efficient, and innovative. We have a global professional network of over 10, 000 people. We’re in about 150 different countries all over the globe, and we have three primary sectors that we work in, and that’s metals and mining, energy and infrastructure. We’re unique in the sense that we’re employee owned and independent, which means we’re free to bring our best thinking to our clients business needs, and our exceptional diverse teams combine not only the vast engineering and business knowledge, but we work in close partnerships with our clients to develop. market strategies, manage and optimize production for their businesses, and really develop new game changing technologies for design and deliver of complex capital projects. I think in summary, we tackle the tough, right? So we provide holistic solutions in this space. Another key portion of that we’ll talk about later on is the community engagement and social performance. Directly working with the First Nations and indigenous communities that’s their land and we want to make sure that we deliver the project, not only to our clients needs, but also to the local communities and that’ll create lasting success for the project in general. Our. Exceptional diverse teams include technical entrepreneurs and technical solutions to our client’s challenges. And so those optimized practices across environmental protection economic prosperity, social justice, as I mentioned before, and cultural vibrancy. So we really want businesses and the ecosystems and the communities to thrive both now and into the future on our projects. Allen Hall: Yeah, and I want to get to some of the projects you’re doing, but I think being in renewables, you have firsthand experience, both of you, of some of the complexities that are involved there. And I know when we had talked previously, we’re talking about a specific project that was pretty complicated. So that’s where I want to pick both of your brains today about renewable projects and getting out to some more remote places. And how Hatch has evolved that way, and maybe, can we have Nathan describe what’s happening with First Nations and the work that Hatch is doing there? Nathan Killeen: And what we’re doing with some of these First Nations, multiple First Nations These are very tough environments. A lot of the, these communities are remote. They’re dependent on diesel gen sets. Fuel is very expensive. It’s, it’s a fluctuating commodity. So a lot of these projects are the incorporation of, energy storage, solar and wind. And the project that we’re going to speaking about today combines all three. And obviously, this helps on multiple fronts. It’s, it’s obviously the people. The nations that we’re working with, this is their land, their environment. It’s their, it’s a sense of ownership. It’s a sense of independence that we’re working with them, beyond just the, first principles of saving money and helping the environment. It’s also the empowerment that this gives these people’s, In the in multiple locations, it’s not only, obviously there’s the difficulties of dealing in these environments. You have limited construction schedules, you’re integrating different technologies. So one of the things that we really. Emphasizes, we have a micro grid solution and we’re able to tie these things together. So it’s just as, Holly said, it’s we’re working with the communities, to provide them that energy independence that they’re looking for. Joel Saxum: So these projects like they like something like this in the Northwest territories it’s a renewable development project. While it may not be a. 200, 300 megawatt project. It is a project on steroids, right? Because you’re dealing with so many complications, logistics, complications stakeholder complications, there’s just so much involved in it. And that’s where patch thrives, right? Because you guys can, it’s a one stop shop. You come in, you have the technical expertise, you have environmental expertise, you have the civil expertise. Like it’s all there. Nathan Killeen: Can we do the turnkey projects? Absolutely. We’re there, we can do standard solar front end design, owners, engineering, independent engineering, but where we really excel is these multifaceted projects that are, Harsh environments, technically difficult, we have a great stakeholder engagement, a great relationship with these communities. It’s a project on steroids. There’s not many companies, consulting companies that can execute to the level that we can, because we understand this area. We have good engagement with the communities and we’re really, I think we like to tackle the tough. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give you two, two, two examples, like for the listeners here of my, from my network of. Working in remote Canada. I worked in oil and gas exploration, right? So Nuiqsut, those kinds of places. Like I’ve been there in the winter time and just getting food there for the crew, it takes dedicated personnel. The other one I like to say a lot is I have a really good friend. His name’s Joe Welter, a great civil engineer. But he worked for a company for six or eight years and they built hockey rinks. That’s what they did. That’s they traveled all over the world, building hockey rinks. And they did a ton of them fly in hockey rink building in Northern Canada. Like in these remote places and the stories he would tell about, not only are we fighting logistics and getting materials and stuff here, but we’re also fighting like bears off. And then, and he said, there’s nowhere to you got a crew here building stuff and these kinds of things, there’s nowhere to stay. You’re sleeping in some kid’s bedroom. Like he’s done that before. These are, those are really out there problems, but. You guys having that knowledge and knowing how to work within these situations really brings a lot of value to the client as well. Yeah, we have an entire division related to bear mitigation, that’s, Nathan Killeen: you mean Joel Saxum: Those are problems we don’t deal with in of, developing a wind farm in Texas. You don’t have to worry about bears taking people out. Nathan Killeen: Yeah, I think the most I ever had to contend with, working on wind farms in Iowa was maybe the occasional white tailed deer at about, three or four hundred yards, Joel Saxum: not very voracious. Allen Hall: I was involved with a project on the airplane side of modifying airplanes to haul diesel fuel. Up to the Northwest Territories and the Canadian government was involved in that. And at the time, I just remember thinking, we’re hauling like maybe 50 gallons of diesel fuel out to these remote areas. How expensive that was. It was crazy expensive. So it makes sense now for those remote areas to get a hold of Hatch. And to put in a wind and a solar and a battery storage system to get the dependency off diesel fuel and lower the cost. I think everybody misses how much Joel Saxum: cost that is. Yeah, when you factor the logistics in of diesel fuel for a genset in Northwest Territories, you’re paying 10, 12, 15 a gallon to get it up there. A lot of times it comes in like a 5, 000 pound bag in the back of a DC 5 airplane. And they land it, drag the bag out, here’s your fuel. That’s crazy. If you can get away from that and that’s what Hatch does. That’s what you guys are delivering for the first nations in that area. Right? Nathan Killeen: No, listen diesel gen sets are still a reality. You need it for the rotating inertia. You need it for grid, but. We’re moving towards, obviously a synchronous condenser is going to be pretty bitably expensive for something like that, but that’s why we’re including the energy storage. And this is you guys hit the nail right on the head. It’s the footprint is not only, the emissions and, pollution from that gen set, but it’s getting it up there. What are those overall costs right now? You may have somebody coming in to, perform an annual maintenance. Okay. Okay, that still has a footprint, but you’re not bringing in, you’re not, you’d be better off just sending the plane maybe, just with the fuel. I think you make a very good point there, Allen. Allen Hall: So what is the approach been with some of the First Nations on changing their energy future? And how does that Set up hatch because you can tap into so many different disciplines within one company, which is amazing. Where do you start off here? Holly Brown: Where do we start? We have a entire indigenous engagement team. That is all they do day in and day out. And so they’re a great resource to us. And really, I think it’s about meeting the community and the people. where they are with the values that they have and understanding where they’ve come from what their land looks like, do they have the experience with developers or whatnot coming in, contaminating their land maybe not involving them in the process. So we really understand, I think from the conception project inception and conceptually, we understand the connectivity and the critical need for that alignment piece between. integration between project delivery, social performance, indigenous engagement managing those communities, involving them, educating them, and building sort of a holistic path forward where everyone is on the same page, including the stakeholders including all of the components, all the logistics that go into this, and then actively involving the local indigenous First Nations community. It’s a critical part Of any project success. Particularly in Canada, where there’s such a large focus. I do believe in the U. S. We could do better on this front, having seen all that we do in Canada. Yeah, that’s my perspective on where we start. It really starts from inception project planning, getting all those different teams involved on the social community engagement, indigenous First Nations and integrating them with the technical project team to see how we’re going to deliver something that is suitable for all of us. Nathan Killeen: It’s a partnership. It’s not just the project is the outcome of that partnership. So it’s and the benefit, I think, again, it’s the point of any renewable energy project, of course, is to lower costs. And then in a lot of cases here, for these bigger projects, you have a PPA, it’s economic, the drivers behind that are economic. Of course, in these projects, you There’s always economic drivers, but it’s really that partnership and it’s I think we look at it as a holistic, it’s not a problem, but it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to better community. But again, we’re not, we have we’re part of the answer, but we’re not the solution. We’re working with those communities that, help them come to, all right. a good outcome. Allen Hall: We could use you in the States with a number of wind and solar projects where it doesn’t seem like the community is that engaged before the digging starts. And what a disaster that turns into. So I’m glad you actually have a whole group of people devoted to that. That’s amazing. And once you get buy in or get to some sort of agreement with the community, What happens next? There must be, I’m just thinking out loud here, but anytime we get into any sort of a renewable energy project, the first thing is like, all right, I got permits. I got government oversight. I have all these checkboxes I have to do before I can even put the first spade in the ground. Is that similar in the Northwest Territory? Is that same sort of regulatory structure or is it a little more freedom there? Nathan Killeen: I think, what it comes back to is we do have this holistic and like different professional services. And part of that is our permitting team. And I think they work hand in hand with these communities. And a lot of it, again, is getting, boots on the ground, community engagement. But, The motivations, every project is different. Every First Nations community is, it’s. Every situation is unique, right? And so I think where we really excel at is that we understand and we really emphasize those details. And, we’re working hand in hand with, in some cases it’s working directly, the First Nations community might own the assets and others, it’s a power company delivering to those. The devil is in the details. And I think, we’re excelling at that. Listening and then, understanding it’s a partnership. But again, this is that it’s, I think it’s that entrepreneurial spirit that Holly spoke about. It’s, this is not just a line item on our budget sheet. It’s a real project that affects people. Holly Brown: Yeah. And I think the regulatory environment in Canada is It is different from the U. S. In this space. That comes with some complexities, but I wouldn’t say it’s fundamentally easier or more difficult, right? It’s just a different set of, whether or not you’re working with provincial federal regulations in Canada. It’s a little bit different than the U. S. Kind of mix, but very similar in terms of permitting. Timelines may differ a little bit depending on where you are and what sort of regulatory approvals you need in order for you to then go dig in the ground. But yeah it’s a, it is different for sure. Joel Saxum: I think that there’s something, Allen mentioned it as well and I’d like to double down on it. Your, or the Hatch approach to getting these projects off the ground is something that Could very well be needed in the United States because we see this. We covered on the podcast a lot, right? Like these, the pushback from small communities and counties and townships and so and the moratoriums on solar and wind, and they seem, Politically driven. That’s my opinion. I’m just saying that a lot of times it’s politically driven rather than technically driven if you could get in and sometimes it’s because people feel like the projects are being shoved down their throat. Like they think big business is coming in here and they’re going to do whatever they want. And if you could get on the ground and get boots on the ground and conversations with stakeholders at an early stage, you can really get this thing, designed well and moving because at the end of the day, we know how to build wind farms, We know how to build battery storage systems. We know how to build solar farms. Like we can do it, but we need less opposition and more access to that land to get it done. I wish that other people would take the approach. I wish that more people would get that. We’d like, get an, it’s almost, it’s a PR approach and that needs to happen more. Holly Brown: It is Joel. And I think it’s a soft skill, right? It’s that communication sort of psychology component that is unfortunately lost in a lot of engineering and science firms. It’s rare that you have, a PhD with a psych degree, that’s a, that’s an odd combo, but I always say that’s such an asset in this business because really, when communities outright, in my opinion, based on my experience, when they outright reject a scope of work and there hasn’t even been any discussion, like you said, it could be, being shoved down their throats. But typically it comes from fear, right? They may not have a say, they’re concerned about X, Y, Z. What is this going to do? It could be anything, right? It could be, am I going to get cancer from this windmill that you’re putting in here? I’ve seen people say all sorts of things. So to have that level of scientific wherewithal, technical prowess, and excellence coupled with that social communication Component when you’re first at Project Inception. Again, it all goes back to Project Inception and getting that team in place, boots on the ground, maybe putting out a community letter and opening it up for questions. That is something that I think is not done enough in the states. Why? Because it’s it can be difficult. You’re right. It can delay the process. But in my opinion, it can also accelerate the process because the more you can have buy in from the communities and everybody up front, Typically, the faster and smoother the project will run. Joel Saxum: I think at a certain level, there’s an ethics conundrum there. The people that you’re, most of the time, where a wind farm or solar farm is being built, is going to be in a heavily conservative area, right? You’re in the mid, you’re in the middle of the Midwest, or you’re in Texas, you’re in Oklahoma. You’re somewhere in farm country, in general, and that’s where I am here in rural America, and none of, nobody likes to be lied to or feel like they’ve had the wool pull over their eyes, but that seems to happen or, I’m not gonna say it seems to happen, but it seems like the opinion is that it happens. Quite often with renewable energy projects. And if you can get in front of that by with community engagement, otherwise you’re fighting this, you’re fighting the land landowners for 20, 25 years. That’s just the reality of it, right? Every time a generator goes down and you’ve got to move a crane in for a wind turbine or something, it’s on Facebook and it says all these things. And then you start to get this misinformation spreading. And because people are angry and all these different things. So I think that the, that what it sounds like here now, I don’t know the hatch approach. I’ve never worked with you guys. But what it sounds like, what you’re telling us and what Allen and I’ve done a bit of research in the background is that’s how you approach things. That’s what, we like to hear that. We’re bringing good news we feel right now. Nathan Killeen: I’ve seen different approaches to community engagement and some is I’m sorry, you didn’t put the turbine on that piece of land that you owned. And, people respond in some parts of the country, with a lot of emotion, a lot of passion that sometimes leads to repairs of said turbines. So that’s true as a true statement. I think what we try to do, and I think is more successful. Like we’re talking, it’s like that rule of 10, in manufacturing if you catch it in design, it’s always going to be more expensive. The further it goes down the line. Allen Hall: Let’s talk about the finance piece. Cause I, that is the linchpin to most projects. If there’s no financing, projects do not move forward. But the community aspect of that is sometimes overlooked. And a financial group doesn’t want to be involved in some sort of conflict if they can avoid it. Does getting the community bought in or to be part of the process, does that help on the financing side? Sort of speeding a project up and getting more access to funds Holly Brown: on the financial front. Maybe not necessarily opening up more Avenues for financials, but I think it creates as an engagement or a project manager It creates having that community engagement up front Essentially a more streamlined path through your financials that have already been developed for that project, right? You’re not potentially encountering as many hurdles and therefore delays and therefore stop work, right? All of that To a project manager, engagement manager, it’s just dollars going out the window. So I do think it helps on that front. Allen Hall: On a larger context, what does the community engagement for Hatch look like going forward? What have you learned over the last several years that now is being implemented as you reach towards new projects? Holly Brown: From my perspective, the sooner the better. Earlier engagement is always better. Again, and so I think understanding that connectivity and that critical need for alignment and integration moving forward. It’s just an optimization in my mind off of what we’ve already developed over the last, 70 years now at this point, more if you’re looking at hydropower, as Nate mentioned, last 100 years. A century, a breadth of such experience in dealing with all these different types of communities and First Nations and engagement of Indigenous peoples. That’s how that team was formed, years ago knowing and realizing there was such a critical component to the success of our projects. And we needed that expertise in that, social, environmental governance of these communities and First Nations. So I think from that’s where I see it. It’s a refinement in optimization over time. And I think every project that we do, we also have, lessons learned at the end of the project that there’s anything, yeah, that we can take moving forward. Hey, was this difficult? How did this work with this community? Okay yeah, we had this over here and this worked well, but, this is a little bit different of a situation. Maybe this community Now they’re looking at, potential wind farm, but they were just looking at mining contamination. So it’s like knowing that history of that land as well, not just the indigenous peoples, but knowing, is it fresh Greenland or is it a brownfields, have they been dealing with people coming in and out consultants, stakeholders, regulators for decades and they’re just done what’s the pulse on them. So I think each project we do, each refinement we go through, Okay. It’s just always great to, to learn and to share and communicate that internally via the hatch hub that we have internal new sharing blogs project shares that we do. So yeah continual refinement, Nathan Killeen: especially when it comes to these projects. There’s two things that I would say we, we have a mantra kind of doing our homework. And I think that’s what this community engagement is about. And then it’s we’re acting like owners. And so it just speaks to that partnership. Wow. Allen Hall: This is why Hatch is so important to the industry, is that you’re well rounded and you have the staff to do a project right and to set it up for success. That’s really impressive. Holly and Nathan, this has been tremendous. I’ve learned so much in a short amount of time and really impressive work. And if anybody wants to connect with Hatch, probably the easiest way is to go to hatch. com and get on the website and see all the projects and the engineering and experience they have. It’s amazing. So Holly and Nathan, thank you so much for being on the program. Holly Brown: Absolutely. Please connect with us on LinkedIn. And thank you so much, Allen, Jill, Claire. Appreciate the opportunity. Nathan Killeen: Yes. Thank you very much.

As the number of wind turbines increases, the spare parts business has room to grow. But would third-party blade replacement options be technically or financially possible? Plus a review of Vestas’ quarter 2 financial call…the company posted a net loss of 156 million euros, widening from a 115 million euro loss from the same period last year. Visit https://www.eologix-ping.com/en/ to learn more about the EOLOGIX-PING lightning sensor. Register for the AMI Wind Turbine Blades Event! 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: This is a world announcement. We’ve been begging for a low cost lightning sensor to be installed on turbines that requires no wiring and no maintenance, and we finally have it. And it’s been produced by our friends at EOLOGIX-PING. I have a sample right here. It’s quite lovely. It’s small, it magnetizes to the turbine, and it tells you if your turbine’s been struck. Joel and I have been using it for the last year or so, and it has been 100 percent effective. So this new low cost sensor is being included with our StrikeTape sales, so anytime we sell StrikeTape to our turbine, we are including, we Weather Guard are paying to have a EOLOGIX-PING Lightning Sensor installed so you can track how your turbine is doing with StrikeTape. So this is what everybody’s been clamoring for. It is now here. And if you are interested in purchasing one of these low cost lightning units, You gotta get a hold of EOLOGIX-PING. Just go to https://www.eologix-ping.com/en/, or you can just call Joel, (832) 593-2782. We have about a thousand units that are ready to go, and now’s the time to get it installed. Call now. I’m Allen Hall and I’ll be joined by the rest of the uptime host. After these news headlines, Germany has announced results for a 5.5 gigawatt offshore wind auction. Three North Sea sites were awarded, RDE partnering with Total Energy secured two sites, while asset manager Luxkara won the third. These wind farms are set to become operational between 2029 and 2031. In the Belgian North Sea, the world’s first wind powered electric ship charging station has been launched. Developed by Parkwind and MJR Power and Automation, this station is connected to the Noble Wind Farm, 29 miles offshore. The system can deliver up to 8 megawatts of power to service vehicles, operating effectively in choppy seas. Parkwind aims to deliver the first commercial offshore charging system by early 2025. China’s central bank is extending its low carbon lending program to the end of 2027. This initiative provides financial institutions with low cost loans to support corporate carbon reduction efforts. China plans to promote battery powered vehicles, energy efficient appliances, and eco friendly building materials. The government aims to transition its economy to a green, low carbon model by 2035. Increasing non fossil energy consumption to about 25 percent by 2030. Vineyard Wind, America’s first large scale offshore wind farm, is resuming partial construction following a turbine blade incident on July 13th. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has authorized tower and nacelle installation, but blade installation and power generation remain suspended. GE Vernova attributes the blade failure to a manufacturing deviation of an adhesive bond line. GE is employing high tech crawlers to inspect the existing wind turbine blades at the Vineyard Wind site. The project also is developing a new algorithm to use with existing blade sensors to detect issues quicker. Vineyard Wind states that no blades will be installed or used until thoroughly inspected. In Hull, England, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has applied to expand its wind turbine factory. The expansion includes a multipurpose manufacturing building and a staff welfare building. This development is expected to create 40 additional full time jobs, bringing total site employment to over 1, 600 employees. The plan includes using environmentally friendly air source heat pumps instead of gas fired boilers. And Samsung Heavy Industries has signed a preferred supplier agreement with Equinor for floating foundations for the Firefly Bandabuli offshore wind farm in South Korea. This agreement covers fabrication of floating substructures and marshalling operations. The 800 megawatt project is set to be operational in 2027. Located 70 kilometers off the Olsen coast. This marks SHI’s expansion from oil and gas into renewable energy. And this project awaits selection into South Korea’s upcoming offshore wind auction. 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 Partello Consulting, Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of Intel Store, Phil Tataro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard. Mark your calendars for AMI’s Winter and Blades Conference happening October 2nd and 3rd in historic Boston, Massachusetts. This two day event, which is similar to the well established edition in Europe, will bring together the whole blade value chain to examine market outlook, innovations in blade materials, design, manufacturing, testing, and lifecycle management, with a special focus on the North American market. Gain insights from experts from Vestas, Along with scientists and engineers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Plan your trip to Boston this fall by visiting the link in the show notes or just Google 2024 Blades Boston. All right, so Joel and I have been on a number of jaunts across the states and every place we go, we get asked, Do you know where I can find X Blade? Because I need a couple. Joel Saxum: No, we are getting asked this all the time and it doesn’t matter what platform it is. Some of them, of course, more than others, Hey, do we need this? Do you have this? And the crazy thing is it’s. It’s not just blades. It’s all kinds of things associated with it. But the most problem is blades. So people want to repower. There’s multiple options. I’ve seen some discourse on LinkedIn about this and I’ve actually been through it myself as a, for projects. Hey, we’re going to do a repower. Okay. So our options are buying new blades from the OEM. We can get secondhand blades in the market that have already been built, that have been basically, safe Harbor or dry store. We can try to rebuild the ones that are there and maybe upgrade them. Like on our side. We’ve been called about this many times for weather guard to do lightning protection upgrades as a part of a program, right? They’re gonna re, they’re gonna redo these blades. So they’ve done internal inspections, external inspections, fix ’em up, put lightning protection upgrades on, put arrow upgrades on other things like that. So that’s an option. And then the other option is. Scrapping the turbines that are there and getting completely new ones. And then sometimes it’s an adapter plate on the tower and a, a Vestas to a GE or something of that sort. But Phil you were talking to us a little bit off air before this about an idea of a blade manufacturer repurposing some facilities to Build some blades for this same exact purpose. Philip Totaro: Exactly. And in particular for the asset owners or operators that are not on an OEM long term service contract, because what happens on that circumstance is the OEMs tend to lock in their subcomponent suppliers, whether it’s blades or bearings or gear boxes or what have you. Those suppliers are locked into supplying the OEM, then the OEM supplies, the customers. But what if there were a third party option, which is, we talk about this all the time, the similarities to the automotive sector or other industries, where you can go to someone else That can either reverse engineer what you need, or might be able to just build you something from scratch that would be an upgrade to what you have, and would still fit in, on the turban, in our case, on the turban. As long as you had the rough bolt circle diameter to be able to, figure out the size of the root and all that sort of thing, and as long as you also had a rough sense of the arrow profile so that you weren’t going to introduce loads or anything that, that were going to be too dissimilar to what the turbine was already used to experiencing, could you use more modern manufacturing techniques than that existed, 15 years ago, let’s say to make a higher quality blade that would be a replacement to the OEM supplied blade. And the reason this came up is we’ve been contacted by a couple of different customers who either want to sell blades, In that fashion, like as a third party offering, or the other trend that’s recently come up is there’s a lot of factories in particular in China that are idle right now because they’ve migrated their manufacturing capability from, two, three, and maybe even four megawatt turbines. up to 5, megawatt turbines for onshore, and they’re literally, rather than repurposing those factories that were used to make let’s say, 37 to 53 or maybe 55 meter long blades, they’re literally letting those, some of those factories sit idle. Instead of repurposing them for, they’re literally just building a new factory for building the, 60, 70, 80 meter long blades. So there’s potentially a market opportunity here. And I’m curious as to what everybody thinks about that kind of a scenario. Rosemary Barnes: I think it would be challenging. First question is why these factories just sitting around. Is the idea that, we’re making 70 meter long blades now, but that’s like a fashion trend and fashion cycle will come back and next year, 30 meter blades will be in. Joel Saxum: Bell bottoms are back in style. Rosemary Barnes: Just feel like once, if you’re not making 30 meter blades anymore, then you’re not going to. So it makes more sense to me to just close that factory. If you don’t have space to expand it, to, to extend it and raise the roof to make you big modern blades, then I can’t see the point in keeping that at all, but aside from that, I think there’s there’s a lot of challenges to, to making replacement blades. I, I’m struggling to see how the business model would work unless these blades are going to cost like, I don’t know, a million dollars each. Hard to see how just one offs and you never get a production line started. You must be talking about replacing a whole rotor every time that you replace a blade because there’s, like even from a specific manufacturer. When they’re got serial production, everything is happening the exact same way every time. It still isn’t a matter of just any three blades can fit together that, the weight tolerances aren’t close enough. They have to match them in sets that are close enough matched. So I’d really struggle to see how you would reverse engineer a blade that would end up being in spec in any way. Yeah, and then how are they going to certify these blades without knowing all of the information that the design engineers had in the first place? Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of problems that would, you know, solvable, but I feel like it would be so expensive to solve that you’d be better off just buying new turbines. Joel Saxum: At the earliest level of trying to solve this, it’s demand, right? So 30 to 50 meter blades, so you’re talking older turbines that in the United States may be in a repower campaign or something of that sort. Or if you’re like the, let me pull one out of the hat, the Spanish market that has a lot of aging 20, 25 year old turbines. That may need, some replacement in the future. So is this a, all team, we’re going to try to figure out how to reverse engineer and make a replacement for the G8X Gamesa blade or the G9X, cause there’s a lot of them in Spain. They might be coming up or, say in the United States, when we go to do a repower, the 40. 1 LM blades and there might be a lot of repowers for those. You have to figure out where this demand is to even try to make this series of blades that would constitute enough business case to build a mold for and start up a factory for, because it’s not like you’re going to make thousands of them, right? You’re saying, Rosemary, you’re like, you might have a project where you may make a hundred of these, and then you’re not going to get another order. It’s It would have to be some, there’s had to be some extreme demand for a specific size for a specific model for this to make sense. Philip Totaro: But wouldn’t this make sense to be able to leverage China? Because if we can put aside all of our, import duty discussions and all that and say, they can make a set of blades cheaper. Why can’t, if, particularly if the Chinese government is willing to subsidize these factories, which is what’s happening, by the way I agree with Rosemary from the perspective that I don’t know why there’s a bunch of factories sitting idle when they could have just designed them to expand the factory. They could have designed it with a bigger ceiling in the first place and then just had, the overhead cranes on, something that would allow it to go up or down. That’s a whole other discussion, but why can’t we leverage, these cheap Chinese goods that we’re all trying to keep out of, the U S and European markets at the moment? Why can’t we at least leverage it as an aftermarket play? Joel Saxum: Therein lies the exact problem. You have to find a first mover. Even if the business case makes sense, you have to find that customers. I’m going to speak from a United States perspective. You have to find that customer that’s willing to take a chance on a While the blade may be designed somewhere else, you have to be take a chance on a Chinese built blade, bring it to the United States, and put it up. I know people that have tried to do this kind of thing. There’s a company, Phil, maybe you know them, Volt, but spelled W O L T, W O L T Engineering. They’re down in Brazil. They tried to do this exact same thing for GE 1. 5s. 37C Texas blades, basically a Volt Engineering was gonna make a better, little bit longer tip kind of model that they could bring up here. People wouldn’t take the chance on the fact that it’s a Brazilian blade, it’s never been brought to the United States. Am I gonna get a warranty? Is the company gonna be around long enough to warranty it? Does it make sense to do this? So you have to have those first movers that are even willing to take the chance on something like this. Okay, Philip Totaro: so let me pose this question then. What if it weren’t something that was so dodgy? What if it was another proven OEM? What if Vestas, and this will be much more hypothetical then what I might make it sound like, but what if Vestas decided to make replacement blades for GE 1. 5s? Would the market be more accepting of that? What if it were, Goldwind instead? Making, or Goldwind, Sonoma, one of their, verifiable blade suppliers. As opposed to just some other random company in China. Joel Saxum: I see a bit Philip Totaro: more Joel Saxum: validity there. Then it would be just I guess the question next would be, What’s the warranty going to look like? Am I going to get a three year warranty? And are you guys going to, how, and how are you going to execute on the warranty if there’s claims? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And not just a warranty on the blade failing, if a blade fails then like badly, if it falls off, then you’ve got the, everything else in the turbine that could potentially be damaged as a result. And it would be unlikely to see a warranty for the whole turbine, but then I would imagine that your insurance wouldn’t be very happy about this blade replacement if, yeah, you no longer have any kind of recourse on the entire turbine. Joel Saxum: Yeah, because we’re not, then you’re not just convincing the operator to make a decision. You’re convincing their financiers and their insurance companies and everybody else. So I think that, Phil, I think it’s a good thing. In my opinion, it’s a grand idea, but in practice, I don’t think it’s viable. Rosemary Barnes: It’s one of those same things where yeah, there’s a whole bunch of challenges. Every individual challenge is solvable, but my gut feeling is that the the economics aren’t going to work out at the end of the day. It’s not only, The ones we’ve mentioned, but also, and I say it too, in my work that people, they’ve got a couple of blade failures in their wind farm, but that blade isn’t being made anymore. And so they’re like, what are we going to do? And yeah, they would love to be able to buy a blade, it’s one or two here or there. And so are you going to, these factories are going to have to build up a stockpile of what every single blade in the world and just keep them sitting around until somebody wants it and then hope that it, that it’s white and everything fits. Since. It just seems like too many problems. Even if none of them are showstoppers on their own, it feels hard to me, I’d be interested to watch someone try and do it. But yeah, I would be highly surprised if it ends up making anyone any money. Too many variables. Philip Totaro: Because at the end of the day, most blade orders are. On spec anyway. It’s they’re not going to build up that inventory to warehouse it if they don’t have a firm order from a customer. For, sets of blades, but it’s just it’s the timing of It’s not that they won’t eventually get somebody who’s interested in a handful But you never know how many and you never know when it’s gonna be at some point in the future So you have no way of being able to predict like how much extra in a production run should you do? How much time are you gonna have to warehouse it for and then amortize that cost? You they’re just sitting there. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and what are you making three or four blades and then swapping over to a new blade? So you’re gonna drag in a new mold. You’ve got to train everybody up and hope that they’re remembering the work instructions for the new blade and not the old one and you don’t get, a whole bunch of quality problems as a result of that and, all their materials as well, some of these materials have short shelf lives and Are they? I don’t know. It’s again, any one of those things you can solve, it’s just too many. Joel Saxum: So therein lies the question, like right now, if you call me and say, hey, I need this blade for this machine, more than likely, I can find you that blade, whether it’s from a supplier I know. Or someone that I know, some people in Denmark, I know some people over here, I know some people in Germany, I know some people in Spain, I can find most blades out there, even weird ones, like I had someone the other day call me for a Clipper C93, and I found two sets of them like I can find those blades, so if it’s a onesie, twosie thing, or a rotor set yeah, that can be done, but it’s the, you’d have to do this. That’s good to know, Joel, I didn’t I Rosemary Barnes: didn’t know this was a service that you provide. Joel Saxum: Call me, mate. We can everything. I’ll find donuts for you, whatever you want. Just call. Rare wines. I got all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Personal concierge service. The uptime concierge. That’s what it is. But so like the onesie twosie stuff that can be found, it’s the, if you’re going to do this, you need a large run. You need to be going like, hey, I’m going to do a repower of 300 turbines and I need 900 blades. Okay, let’s go do that. But. You’re gonna be so far out in timeline that I don’t know if it’ll work. Philip Totaro: Joel, can you find me an Australian professor that can actually breakdance? Joel Saxum: There’s, hey, there may be an Australian PhD on the phone right now that can breakdance. To the standard that’s been Rosemary Barnes: set, yes, I feel like I probably could. Allen Hall: Future Olympian. 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. Vestas has reported its second quarter results for this year. The company posted a net loss of 156 million euros, widening from a 115 million euro loss from the same period last year. Revenues declined 3. 9 percent year over year to 3. 3 billion euros, but Vestas order intake grew 54 percent year over year to about three and a half gigawatts, driven by onshore projects in Europe and Asia Pacific. America was tiny in that. The company entered the quarter with a record combined backlog of wind turbine orders and service agreements worth about 63 billion euros. So the only downside really for Vestas at the minute, there’s really two, is that their service business, which has typically been a really strong performer, had a negative EBIT of 107 million euros in the second quarter due to increased planned costs. So there, it looks like Vestas has warranty claims that are sucking down the service business where they’re having to devote more people to fixing their own. Turbine problems and not just doing standard maintenance things or doing maintenance on other turbines. And that’s really dragging on Vestas. The second thing, which I haven’t mentioned yet, which is they don’t have an order intake for Q2. They sold about 9 megawatts of turbines in Q2. And they have zero pipeline from Q2. Now, that seems really low on top of what Siemens Gamesa was saying, which they have a really low order book for their Q3, which is Vestas Q2. Which indicates to me that the market is slowing and that the OEMs are focused on specific regions. Vestas looks like it’s really hammering Europe down. And APAC GE seems to be focused on the Americas because the number of sales and activity in the United States and Vestas aside in 2024 are dramatically down from 2023. Joel Saxum: Does that make sense? Joel Saxum: It does to me because when I look at the maps, when we travel, when we’re out with our, the hands on the ground, I don’t see that many new Vestas machines being installed. So you’ll find a few, V150, V162 wind farms. Fairly small in size, but not that many. Most of the wind turbines you find out there that are Vestas are V110, V120, find some V126, V136, but they’re all from a couple of years ago. Oddly enough, the majority of the wind turbines going up new in the States are GE turbines. The data’s there, but it’s, it shows when you go in the field too. Allen Hall: And the CEO of Vestas talked about his plans and where he was going to be in the next couple of weeks. And one of those places was in the Americas, which makes me believe that they’re hopefully going to get some sales in the U. S. You’d hate for everything to stop. And a really good question came from. The financial institutions that we’re calling in the Q& A portion. One of them, which sounded like an American, and there’s a lot of voices from all over the world, obviously, on these Q& As, was asking about the IRA bill, and what the effect is of the IRA bill on Vestas. And Vestas is raising prices. Right now, if you do the math and they publicize this, it’s about 1. 2 million euros per megawatt. I think that’s both combined offshore and onshore, but they are definitely raising prices to increase profitability, overcome some of the supply chain. But when that translated into, does, did the IRA bill directly affect Vestas? The answer was no, shockingly. And maybe it’s the way the system is set up where it’s production tax credits and not anything going directly to the OEMs, but it feels okay. The OEMs and Vestas in particular is looking at this and going, all right, there’s protection tax credits happening. We need to participate in this. We’re just going to raise prices to get our share of what is being doled out by the U S government. Philip Totaro: Does that make sense, Phil? The other reason that they’re not directly taking advantage of any IRA bill benefits yet is because they were supposed to open some factories in the Northeast for offshore component manufacturing, which would have given them access to. Local tax credits and the 45 X manufacturing tax credits, but they haven’t committed to that yet because of all the, nonsensical stuff that’s happened in New York and New Jersey in particular with the offshore wind projects and worsted, as well. Amongst others, other companies have had to pull projects and rebid them as well. Joel Saxum: I would say the one thing I think the, if the CEO of Vestas has come into the States. I would be willing to bet that plane lands in New Mexico. 100%. Going to San Zia. In Allen Hall: Colorado, Joel Saxum: for sure. Allen Hall: Yeah. But they also pointed out that they had a really big project in Australia, like a 500 megawatt project. It was a phase two project. And the storyline that they were trying to convey was This is part two. Part one was completed successfully in Australia. Everything went fine. So we’re now on to part two. So if we can complete projects successfully, that’ll open the door up to more projects for Vestas, which I think is generally true. But it did seem like Australia will be a growth market for Vestas. For Vestas and Rosemary, you’re closer to that than we are. Is, are you seeing some of that on the ground? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there’s been a few announcements related to Vestas recently. One big one was that the Danish government is actually getting involved in developing projects. So similar to what happens with most of the Galdwin projects in Australia are actually developed by Galdwin. So they get to choose, they develop a project, they get to choose a turbine, they choose their own. So the Danish government made an investment in a big new wind farm and chose Vestas turbines for it. I think that they’re, yeah, they’re throwing more at it than just, trying to get people to choose their turbines. Yeah, but they’re, I think that, Based on the last wind energy conference that I went to, there were quite a few international people there. And they were saying that Australia is an attractive market because it’s easier to get big projects done here. The average project, I can’t remember the numbers now, but I think it was like. The average size of a new wind farm in Europe is, or maybe it was France, this was a French guy, the average size there is 30 megawatts and in Australia it’s 300 megawatts. Like a 300 megawatt project is harder to implement than a 30 megawatt one, but not 10 times harder. You still have to, do, there’s a lot of things you have to do once, regardless of the size of the wind farm. And you also I wish I had the details here, but there was another one announced recently. It was like, A huge wind farm, well over a gigawatt, and the first phase of it, at least, they only had, I think, nine landholders to get over a gigawatt wind farm in place, and I think that’s quite unusual in the world Australia has really big properties, and that obviously simplifies things a lot, Joel Saxum: as well. I know Allen and I were on the strike tape side of things, providing people with upgraded lightning protection. We get a lot of calls from the APAC region. Lately we’ve been talking with people from Vietnam and elsewhere, and that seems to be a lot of best disturbance. So Vestas Turbines in that whole region and when you look at the map from what Vestas said is, I think it was it 16 gigawatts of pipeline in the APAC region, Allen? Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah. Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s by far the heaviest pipeline that they have is in your corner of the world, Rosemary. Philip Totaro: Allen, if I can also bring it back to something you mentioned about their recent financial results. The one comment that Vestas also made was they specifically said in regards to the service businesses, the adjustment that they put out on, their financial guidance is, I’m reading here, is made on the background of a combination of sustained inflation within specific inflation components. So it sounds to me like they’re talking about, getting access to certain subcomponents could be balsa wood, could be, steel, could be any number of things, are still being subject to inflationary pressures, which is having an impact on them. And then also on the services business, because again, as we talked about recently as well, with having access to spare parts, they’re constrained by what their supply chain can give them. So the other, they went on to say, though, that the adjustment that they made to their financial results for the, or financial guidance for the services business is also due to indirect effects of increased repairs and upgrades. As well as operational inefficiencies, partly offset by expected future efficiency achievements and cost out initiatives. So what that sounds to me is as we’ve talked about on the show here for a while, they are facing these challenges of trying to have self insured their, their turbines. And, through this kind of extended warranty that they were offering through a full wrap service contract. And this is the direct result of that, but the fact that they’re also saying operational inefficiencies that will be, corrected in the future, as well as with cost out initiatives, that sounds to me as well, like they might not have had the best possible structure for executing some of these service contracts. Whether they needed something more centralized because they’re, vestas, if you are familiar with how they are structured, they’re very decentralized and regionally focused potentially there are things that they’re experiencing with this kind of services business model that would have benefited from having something more centralized. That’s, one, one thought. Allen Hall: The feeling I got, Phil, was that they were having quality problems in the turbines themselves, and that they, the rate of failures or problems was higher than they had estimated, and so they’re trying to correct it now, after the fact, which is, The most expensive way to do it, and it’s easier to correct it in the factory, as Rosemary’s pointed out a thousand times, than to fix it out in the field, just because the amount of man hours it takes to go out and correct it, and the money spent to go do it. There is an emphasis internally with investors to drive the repair rate down, the maintenance rate down to about 3 percent is where they were trying to get it to, which sounds reasonable. And I don’t. Rosemary better may have a better sense of what the repair rates are internally, but 3 percent seems like a reasonable number is it must be north of that right now. Rosemary Barnes: What does that 3 percent mean? Allen Hall: 3 percent of the value Rosemary Barnes: of Allen Hall: the turbine warranty Rosemary Barnes: repairs. Yeah, no, that sounds a bit, a little bit low. So yeah, that’s their goal. Philip Totaro: But against, if that’s their, if that’s their goal during the initial warranty period, that makes sense, but you’re never going to have, That kind of most aside from like infant mortality issues on components, you’re almost always going to have faults and failures come in the out years anyway, when the turbines on an extended warranty. And it sounds like that’s also part of the problem here is that they’re also underestimating. The volume of faults and failures, even on the extended warranty and stuff that’s under the full wrap service contract. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I’ve been surprised and I’ve been surprised and not singling out Vestas at all, I haven’t noticed much difference between the different OEMs that offer these full service agreements. But I’ve been surprised that if you know that you’re going to be servicing this turbine for, 20 years or. Whatever. I’m surprised that people aren’t more proactive about thinking about the total lifetime of yeah, repairs and maintenance. Cause I do see a lot of things getting pushed off like they would be if you were on a year to year contract and had to make sure that you were, as cheap as possible every year. Like I don’t see investment being made to be proactive about things and to, yeah, really keep on top of things so that you didn’t have bigger problems later. Yeah, so it’s been just something that I’ve noticed working with these service providers here. Joel Saxum: Alright, so the wind farm of the week this week comes from Scout Clean Energy. It is the Ranchero Wind Farm down in Texas. Pretty interesting things about this wind farm is on the Scout Clean Energy website, they actually have a ticker of their busiest wind turbine in the whole Scout Clean Energy fleet. And it is number 008 at the Ranchero Wind Farm. And since that wind turbine has been built, it has produced by itself, 81, 555 megawatt hours of power. So to put that in context, In the peak of the summer in the entire state of Texas, sometimes the demand is that high. It’s 81 gigawatts that happens. So that wind turbine, that one wind turbine, since it has been built, has produced enough for a hot summer day for the entire state and all the industry in Texas. So the Windfarm Ranchero Windfarm is 300 megawatts total output. There’s 120 GE 2. 5 megawatt, 127 meter rotor turbines there. It had 371 million dollars in investment and employed over 350 people during the development and construction. And oddly enough, if you think about big wind turbine farms in the United States, This wind farm, 300 megawatts, only has 5 landowners that they deal with. But, throughout those 5 landowners and the communities that they are engaged with in the area, there’s approximately 165 million in lifetime community benefits through wages, lease payments, property taxes, and tax abatement programs over the life of the project. The Ranchero Wind Farm of Scout Clean Energy, you are the Allen Hall: Wind Farm of the Week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform, and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And you can even subscribe on Substack to our newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.