The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Ørsted and New Jersey settle their dispute over cancelled offshore wind farms, Belgium objects to a French offshore wind farm near Dunkirk, Vestas merges its technology and manufacturing divisions, a new blade root bushing repair method is patented by We4Ce, and details on NextEra’s Hubbard Wind Project in Texas. 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: Over in the UK, and this is the only place where I think this would Obviously occur for multiple reasons. Adam Spencer, a serial thief from Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, was recently caught and sentenced after a string of burglaries and shoplifting incidents. Most notable theft, 17 tubes of Pringles potato chips, all stolen in one go. When arrested by police, Spencer reportedly quipped, Once you pop, you can’t stop. A reference to Pringle’s famous advertising slogan. But Prince’s crime spree went beyond just chips. He broke into the same Iceland shop twice in one morning, stealing meat and then returning a couple hours later to steal over 300 pounds worth of additional stock. Okay this is gonna become the Pringle’s defense. It has to be, right? Once you pop, you can’t stop. I like it. Rosemary are we would call them potato chips in the United States, but they’re called other things in other places. Are they popular in Australia? Rosemary Barnes: No, they’re they’re chips in Australia. They’re crisps in the UK. Joel Saxum: Are they popular and or would you be willing to steal 17 tubes of them? Rosemary Barnes: I certainly wouldn’t. Wouldn’t steal them. It’s hard to imagine how you could sneak out 17 tubes of Pringles in one go. So that’s, obviously I guess they, they didn’t because they were caught, but yeah, no, I think, I don’t know with chips, I I don’t like them particularly, but if they’re there, I’ll eat them and then regret it. So I would not. I would not keep 17 tubes in my house because there’s, it’s hard to, It’s hard to eat healthy foods while you’ve got Pringles available. Even if I don’t like them. I don’t, yeah, I guess ones you probably can’t stop. Allen Hall: A Belgian minister has joined several coastal municipalities in filing an objection against a large wind farm off the coast of Dunkirk, France. And if you remember Dunkirk, France is the place where the British removed all their coal. Troops at the beginning of world war two very famous place The plans would build 46 wind turbines barely 10 kilometers from the coast which Belgian authorities say would cause visual nuisance impact shipping routes and harm protected seabirds Belgium has been opposing this Project since 2016 has proposed an alternate location further out to sea if necessary Belgium is prepared to go to the European court to safeguard the rights of coastal residents and other stakeholders Okay, guys, so when you decide to build an offshore wind farm along your border You have to anticipate if the country or the other side is going to have some concerns about it, right? Particularly in Dunkirk France, which is a very next to Belgium, which is quite beautiful You it’s just like the coastline of New Jersey that and Virginia and everywhere else in the United States where the sight lines can’t be interrupted. Six, 10 kilometers, which is six miles, right? Six miles isn’t that far offshore. Joel Saxum: How do they navigate this? I’d be the like to be the first one to say that if we’re gonna take a uptime podcast field trip to visit a coastline I would much rather go to the northern coast of France than New Jersey. Philip Totaro: You beat me to it. I was gonna say something about New Jersey. They’re not the same. Rosemary Barnes: Have you seen the movie Dunkirk? That place is bleak. You watch the movie Dunkirk and you’re like, yeah, holiday destination. Joel Saxum: Even Rosemary knows. So Allen, I know you and I, when we were talking, I think it was when it was the Virginia wind farms, Commonwealth or something of that sort, where we were actually doing the math with the curvature of the earth and how far off the the beach, the turbines need to be if you’re six feet tall before you can’t see them anymore. And they’re just going to be specks out there and all this stuff. We did that. So this one, 10 kilometers off the coast, that’s six miles. You’ll still be able to see them fairly clear. If they’ve, I guess the way I see it is if they’ve proposed another spot, that’s a little bit further out. And if it doesn’t change the economics of the project too much, then I would just move it out. And that, if that was my development decision, just make it easier because otherwise you’re running into so many stakeholders that you got to have a piece and they’re just going to fight and fight, they’ve been fighting it for eight years already. Philip Totaro: Look at the end of the day this sort of thing happens all the time with onshore wind as well. Somebody’s got an easement in place to put a wind turbine, but it’s gonna cast a shadow on the neighbor’s, backyard and diminish their enjoyment of their property or some nonsense like that. So it’s just buy them off and move on. At the end of the day, you’re seeing Allen Hall: France should buy Belgium. I don’t know if that’s possible. Philip Totaro: No, FRA What France is gonna do is they’re gonna give a contract to Deme and you know that’s gonna take care of it. And then everybody’s happy. Deme is Belgian anyways, aren’t they? Yeah, that’s what I mean. France is gonna give a contract to DE and then they get some tax revenue off and then everybody goes home happy. This is a, it doesn’t have to be an issue. But the Belgians keep making it an issue. Joel Saxum: If they keep delaying it, the turbines are going to get taller and taller anyways. If they would have just built it back in 2016, I think those were only six megawatt direct drives back then or something, weren’t they? Should have built it then. Allen Hall: Over in New Jersey, speaking of New Jersey, Danish wind farm developer Orsted will pay New Jersey 125 million. To settle claims over the company’s cancellation of two onshore wind farms last year. This settlement amount is just over a third of the 300 million ORSID was once required to pay in guarantees and development obligations. The state will use the settlement funds to support investments in wind energy facilities, component manufacturing facilities, and other clean energy programs. All right, everybody. Do you think New Jersey’s really going to use 125 million for clean energy investments? Joel Saxum: It would be nice if you, if it would go into some fund that could, fund some loans or something of that sort, but I, but the trouble with this and most all other federal funds in general, regard that it’s green, transparency is usually an issue. So if they would put this up on a simple to use website that would be nice and transparent where you could take a peek at where the funds are being used. That would be fantastic. But I doubt that’s going to happen. Allen Hall: The Orsted lawyers earned their money for sure. They knocked it down by 175 million. That’s a nice job well done. Hopefully they take a percentage of that home. Still, these situations. Are going to arise again and again, and I wonder at what point will the developers stop getting involved in this like this down payment thing that the states require when the states hold all the cards and in New Jersey’s case, pretty much made it untenable for Orsted to move forward on these projects. It’s feels like you’re bludgeoning them and then encourage him to come over for some more bludgeoning. And there’s nothing that the developer can do. They’re trying to play nice. And at some point they, they’re. And true New Jersey nature and some point of watching enough mobster movies It feels like they’re just gotten whacked, right? It’s it is a really not a good look for New Jersey and Orsted You know from I have to give Orsted some credit here, right? That Orsted PR wise It’s done a pretty good job of this. Joel Saxum: In the article here that we’re referring to they say some environmentalists have criticized the settlement as a sellout, saying the state basically gave up or gave in to Orsett. The end of the day here, those states on the East Coast, while they’re fighting and fighting, they all still say within their policies that they want to have a settlement. offshore wind as a clean energy, renewable energy source. So if they’re going to, if they were going to force Orsted to pay that 300 million and keep pushing, if I was Orsted, I’d move my capital down to the next state. I wouldn’t deal with them anymore. So there’s a reason. Rosemary Barnes: But I don’t understand the environmentalist angle here. Shouldn’t that be. Pro wind, if they’re environmentalists why are they pro New Jersey, and Joel Saxum: It’s the pro whale, or the pro bird, or, yeah. It’s a really, it’s a really, it’s really quite a fight in the U. S. right now. Rosemary Barnes: The environmentalists who are opposing wind farms on the basis of whale deaths I don’t, I wouldn’t call them environmentalists, because there isn’t any basis in fact to that. I think it’s, at best, I Maybe there’s some naive environmentalists in there who, love whales and don’t have very good reading comprehension or something to be able to look into it a bit further, but I think much more likely it’s an astro turfing kind of thing where, you know interests that are anti wind for other reasons are riling people up about these Yeah, there’s fake things about whales and we’ve been through the birds thing for ages, there’s, some tiny element of truth to it, but I have yet to see any evidence that there’s any tiny element of truth about the whale thing. And I don’t recall. Everyone getting outraged about whales dying from, offshore oil and gas platforms. Like, what’s the difference? These are hydrocarbon environmentalists, Rosemary. It’s a new subset. Allen Hall: Speaking of New Jersey, New York, while we’re at it, Ecuador has announced the finalization of an agreement with NYSERDA. On the offtake removal power generated at the 810 megawatt Empire Wind 1 offshore wind project, the deal comes after Equinor was selected as the conditional winner in New York’s fourth offshore wind solicitation back in February. The strike price for the project fill will be 155 per megawatt hour which is roughly double What Massachusetts was asking for about six months ago for one of their projects. So 155 per megawatt hour doesn’t even feel like they negotiated on the NYSERDA side. They needed to get a project up and running and Ecuador has been waiting. Quite honestly, Ecuador has done all the right things here. It’s been the state that has been dragging their feet to make it a difficult. I’m glad this is settled finally. But 155 then becomes a floor for every other project going forward. Philip Totaro: Potentially. But look let’s also back up for a second because originally when some of these New York projects that got pulled and then had to be retendered were, asking for strike prices around like between, 80, 90, 110, 120 bucks, they wanted to renegotiate. They asked for 190, which obviously, in a negotiation, you’re going to ask for a lot more than what you’re actually willing to settle on. They were probably willing to settle on 155 about 9 months ago, so the question is, why did it take this long to get to this point? That’s where I have a frustration with this whole thing and NYSERDA in particular. Now the actual challenge to, the there’s two things. So one, I’ll address the question of, Is 155 a new floor? I don’t necessarily think so. I think this is the reality of that particular project, the turbines they want to use, the availability of vessels, etc. Everything that, inflation, everything that’s gone into what’s gotten us all these delays and all that. I think probably there’s a few projects that are going to be done in New York, Massachusetts Connecticut and Rhode Island that are going to be cheaper. Probably around 130 to 135. And then again, if we ever see a future reduction in interest rates, then we’ll have a basis to lower that price tag even more. So that’s one aspect of it. All of the things I just mentioned about inflation and vessel availability and having to pay for project delays and all that, is the fact that just today there was a news article indicating that some of the other proposed projects including Attentive Energy One, Community Offshore Wind, and Excelsior are now also struggling to find wind. Available turbines because they were originally going to use the GE 18 megawatt, and now they’re either not going to be able to get the GE 15. 5, or they’re trying to spool up Vestas or Siemens Gamesa, and there’s not enough availability of supply in the timeframe they’re going to be obligated to actually build these projects. So this is one additional thing that’s complicating. Getting some of these projects built and what may end up influencing the price that they end up negotiating on some of these future projects. Joel Saxum: But Phil, wasn’t Empire Wind 1, that was originally supposed to be Avesta’s? Machines, right? There was there. I don’t remember the V 264s or something like that. They were two big ones Philip Totaro: 236 Joel Saxum: Yeah, so that so they but they should I mean there isn’t an Slow down on Vestas turbines offshore is there right now, Philip Totaro: but it’s also Joel It’s also impacted by the fact that a lot of these companies like GE and Vestas both said they were gonna do factories Nacelle factories blades etc in the US And now they’re not those that didn’t happen because New York in particular delayed some of these projects and forced the companies to retender. The retendering meant that they, the supply chain companies didn’t have enough order book to commit to the capital that was going to be required to do the factories for domestic content and all that sort of thing. So now it’s a question of where do we get blades from? Can we get them from, LM up in gas Bay? Can we, do we have to get them in, in. Do we get them in Denmark? Do we get them from someplace else and get them all the way over here? And there’s only so much, there’s only a finite amount of production capacity at any one of these factories. And if they’ve already got an order book that’s full, it Joel Saxum: just puts you to the back of the queue. But that, what you’re saying basically is this, hey, you’re at 155 per megawatt hour for a PPA. You probably would have been at this nine months ago if you would have just negotiated at that time and you would have had all of the factories and all those things still happening but because you did this now you don’t have those and you did it to yourself. Philip Totaro: Thanks NYSERDA because you’re costing me as a rate payer more money. Joel Saxum: Is that the most expensive PPA in North, in the country? 155? It has to be. There’s nothing close to that. Philip Totaro: Hawaii, there’s one onshore that’s more expensive, but that’s Hawaii. Allen Hall: Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And PES Wind is written by the experts. So you can get the in depth info. You need check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication PES wind@pswind.com. Vestas has announced plans to merge its technology and manufacturing and global procurement divisions into a single technology and operations organization. To accelerate ramp up in industrialization, the restructuring expected to be implemented by Q3 of this year will be led by current CTO Anders Nielsen and is anticipated to only impact senior management role. So essentially, they’re reorganizing at the top to. bring technology and manufacturing and procurement together under one head. And this is a cyclical thing within engineering, at least where engineering and manufacturing get merged, Phil, and then they get broken apart when they need to develop something again, and they come back together when they’re in production mode. Is this just part of the natural ebb and flow of a manufacturing business? Philip Totaro: I’d have to say yes. This, we talked off air about this. This happens in aerospace quite a bit where. It’s just sometimes you need to reorganize the profit and loss centers inside a company to, Make it look a little healthier than what it probably is if they were separate So that’s really probably what’s going on with this. I don’t really have any additional knowledge about it Unfortunately, Joel Saxum: I am when I see it. I see that I see a company that wants to optimize their production, right? So Vesta CEO and the last year just like Siemens and GE have to have talked about Hey, let’s slow down on this arms race. Let’s, we’re going to build less models and not have 300 different options. We’re going to hone in on and do it right and get things better, get the quality up, get costs down. All these things are going to be working on. To me, that’s what this screams, but that’s just me. I’ve never worked in a, in an engineering to manufacturing role, but we do have someone who is an expert. From Australia who has, so Rosemary, what are your thoughts on this? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think a lot of the Western wind turbine manufacturers at the moment trying to get away from so much, that they’re really short technology development cycles, new and, more new and new stuff and get more into having, a good range of turbines and then getting as much value out of the engineering that went into them as possible. So that means probably putting more effort into. Engineering effort as well as all kinds of roles, putting effort into the manufacturing yeah, to drive down costs of the technologies that already exist. We see a few companies having layoffs that are with those sorts of goals. And this is maybe in that end as well. If the only thing that’s happening is changes in, very senior management, then, I don’t know, it doesn’t, it might be no kind of change at all, or it might be the start of bigger changes. It’s hard to say at this really early stage. Joel Saxum: I think that’s what it is. I think at this early stage, you’re saying it’s only going to affect top, top senior management until they get their heads wrapped around and then they’ll start. Optimizing the whole value chain the hierarchy, I, you would have to, otherwise what would be the point of doing this, besides just making it easier to communicate or something? Rosemary Barnes: Maybe it’s a way to hedge their bets to keep to commit to this new order of yeah, getting out of the rotor race, like constantly having bigger and bigger rotors and new technologies all the time. Yeah. But they also don’t want to dismantle their ability to compete in that race. If it turns out that, everybody else does go back to it, you can’t be the only ones not competing in, in that kind of a race because then you just won’t make sales. It is starting to look like Western manufacturers, definitely not Chinese, but Western manufacturers do seem to be taking a pause. I think that’s sensible, but unless most people do it, maybe even all, then it’s not going to work. Like you can’t just be the only ones to opt out. Yeah, maybe it’s a bit of a cautious strategy. Allen Hall: Hasn’t GE Vernova opted out at this point? Doing the same thing. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. I think that some of the other companies have made more definitive moves in this way. Joel Saxum: Yeah. So Vestas is doing it now. Geez. Doing it as well. And Seaman’s Grace is doing it by proxy Philip Totaro: if they’re not already. Yeah. They’re going to be forced to write. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but it’s funny because Vestas are the ones that have been saying this for the longest. They’ve been saying for years and years, we don’t need bigger wind turbines, we need to, make more of the ones we’ve got now. We need to get more realistic about what they cost. They’ve been saying. All the right things for at least five years. I can’t remember exactly, before it was obvious to me, at least that’s what needed to happen. It took the kind of the crisis of the last year or two before people realized, you know what we have. There’s no future in continuing the way that we have been. So we’ve got no choice but to change tactic. But now, yeah, I do see investors with a more cautious approach than. The other players that you mentioned. So that’s a little bit interesting. What’s the cost of Allen Hall: doing this Rosemary? Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think they have a lot of cost at this point. They’ve what are they’ve fired one, one guy on a high salary, that’s that’s good. And probably they’ve, had a few town hall meetings and. That might be the extent of it so far. I, yeah, I’ve got no way of knowing without being a worker in the company. Philip Totaro: Plus this is supposed to, this is supposed to save money not be something that even if they have to spend a little bit to do this merger of these two business units, it’s supposed to save them in the long run. So that’s how they’re justifying it. Rosemary Barnes: But if you compare to what, GA has done where there are, I think they’ve lost at least a thousand personnel with years of knowledge of the industry and the company. That’s a cost, right? They are saving money financially, but they have lost very valuable know how that is, these kinds of companies, that’s their most valuable asset that they have. And they go to great lengths usually to try hard to yeah, to protect that. So that’s a cost. And So far, Vestas don’t have that cost yet. So that’s why I say, it’s it’s cautious for now because they could always undo it. Whereas GA would struggle very hard to, just overnight say oops, nope, changed our mind. We want to actually go back to the way that we were. Doing all our blade development and manufacturing. Yeah. Oops. They couldn’t do that now. They’re committed. And if they did try and rebuild, it would be incredibly costly and surely unsuccessful. Think that’s a big difference. Allen Hall: When I’ve seen this done in multiple other large organizations, when they become manufacturing focused they lose about a third of the engineering staff. from attrition who do not want to be doing manufacturing work. They want to be doing advanced engineering work. Yeah, I could see that. Rosemary Barnes: So I haven’t looked at Vestas, but I, in these wind turbine Manufacturers. It really is designed to manufacture. It’s always there’s no engineer that’s working on something that is not like really tied into manufacturing. At LM, every single engineer has to go spend a week in a manufacturing facility, learning every single process, like you’re literally there on a grinder. And then you I don’t know you, you do all the jobs, right? And yeah. Yeah, you’re in the factory, you’re working on a you work on a design and there’s some people that work only in early stage development. So they would only be working in in like pilot plants and that sort of thing. But even then they’re still usually going into the factory for projects from time to time. I think it’s different to, some other industries that might be a bit more separated. But I really feel like, yeah, I constantly hear people commenting, oh, they need to work on, Design for manufacture. And these are just, they’re manufacturing companies through and through. And I don’t, I would be surprised if there are a lot of engineers that aren’t involved in their day to day isn’t, intimately involved with manufacturing as it is, who that would be such a big change to. There’ll be some people perhaps who get annoyed that the priorities change just purely based on the fact that they’ve got a new boss or boss’s boss or boss’s boss. That, that happens. And, that happens every time, even if there’s no organizational change, but just they replace the VP or whatever. That often causes people’s favorite projects to get scrapped or a direction that they didn’t like. So yeah, for sure that, but I’d be pretty surprised if there’s a lot of engineers working for Vestas who weren’t on board with the fact that they’re ultimately there to make a product that has to be manufactured, manufacturable all those sorts of things. But just one Philip Totaro: another anecdote maybe from my experience with aerospace, when I started off working at Sikorsky We were just at that point. This was back in you know between 2003 and 2005 we were just at that point reviving what is now still not even really a product that they offer. It’s called the S 97. It’s a twin axis rotor helicopter that they wanted to have as a mission replacement for the Apache. They wanted to be able to leverage. Yeah, Allen, you keep gesturing counter rotating at me. It is, it’s a counter rotating rotor. Allen Hall: I saw that program. Philip Totaro: I read the magazines. But it took, it took 22 years for them to get something from, technically it took from 1972 when they first, piloted the technology and tried it out. But the point is like even. There are some people who work at the company that are still there doing their job on that platform for the last literally 20 plus years. And, personally for me, I can see where, the attrition comes from because I wouldn’t have wanted to work on one thing for that long. Being an engineer myself, it’s like I, you don’t want me designing your helicopters or your wind turbines for that matter, but I I do still enjoy, Doing other things, at all times. It’s that’s why I do what I do now because it’s there’s, constant dynamism to everything. So it’s, I can see where. People may get frustrated with, just having to do one thing for a very long time. Allen Hall: Yeah, Rosemary, engineers are people too. Philip Totaro: This is what happens in, in a maturing industry. Rosemary Barnes: I personally wanted to get out of working solely in wind energy because I didn’t find it as satisfying to work on, cost out as I like developing new technologies. And yeah, like the wind industry of 10 years ago was more interesting to me than the wind industry of now. And, there’s a lot of other energy transition technologies that are in that really exciting part where you care more about technology than you do about the cost. Yeah, of course, I don’t necessarily see that that, that is that it’s a big change, obvious to me, that kind of change investors from this restructure. They’re not getting rid of any of the engineers that are working on, blue sky projects and investors does. Does do probably more than the average of, like bold ideas that they know are probably not going to be economic or be a product anytime soon, but they’re just testing the limits. And yeah, exactly. Cable stay rotors and a multi rotor. And there’s like quite, quite a few that they do to, advance their learnings and to just, see if the assumptions that they’re working under still hold, is this still the right turbine design? Okay. They do a lot of that, and so probably they are attracting more of that kind of engineer, my kind of engineer than the average manufacturer, but are they announcing that they’re going to close that? Are they necessarily going to focus less on it because they have integrated the manufacturing with the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, with the technology I don’t know, maybe, I guess it’s, I guess it’s a possibility. Allen Hall: In order to ramp up production, they’re going to have engineering focused on the manufacturing floor to get product out and to get rid of problems and make it, manufacturing more efficient. The downside risk to this is when the development cycle kicks back in again, a lot of the development people you relied on for the last go around, they’re Or not at the company. And when you try to flip that switch, it’s hard. And what in aerospace is that you can’t recreate that feeling. All the people that learned all those great things have moved on. So you’re stuck. Rosemary Barnes: But I also think to a certain extent, it is a one way street because, the wind industry is maturing. A wind industry is it’s needs a different now than they were 20 years ago. And if we want to, yeah get prices down, we need to. Pause and do the same thing a lot of times. That’s you know, that’s how it works. So I didn’t start looking around for other jobs purely in the wind industry because I could see that you know my perfect time to work in wind has passed now because it’s a mature technology that is mostly focused on the cost and not so much about making it work. I mean there’s still pockets of within wind that are doing what I do and I mean I could certainly find a job that. Would be interesting to me. But as a whole, the number of jobs like that are naturally going to decrease as a technology matures. So I would say that, those kinds of engineers will gradually start or have already been gradually making the same decision I made to move into other technologies that are in that earlier part of the yeah, the technology maturation cycle. Allen Hall: Phil, if we were going to put the wind industry in some sort of alignment with the aerospace industry, airplane industry, 1903 Wright Brothers first flight, right? We can pick one. The first electricity producing wind turbine was it? It’s a lot of variations there, right? But let’s say that’s in the 1970s. Airplanes got really popular and there’s a lot of airplanes produced during World War one. And that tended to be in, in wind industry about 10 timeframe is when the big push happened. And then we hit this lull and we’re back in we’re in this sort of lull period, which is like 1930s aerospace. And then boom, eventually the money hits, everything hits, which you feel like you’re on in the wind industry. It’s like you’re on this precipice. You still don’t know when the ramp up’s really going to start. When that happened in the aerospace world, like all of California turned into aerospace companies. That’s why the Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because the aerospace companies were there. There was a time when everybody was focused on aerospace. There will be some time, I think in the near future, where it’s going to be a lot more engineers involved in wind. We just don’t see it yet. And what I’m afraid of is we’re going to Divert the good talent to other fun projects because Rosemary is a very creative thinking engineer, right? She likes to play with cool stuff. If she’s not working on cool stuff, she goes find something else to do. It’s hard to get Rosemary back. Rosemary Barnes: I think the wind boom is going to, it’s going to be in manufacturing though. We, maybe airborne wind is going to take off. Maybe there’s going to be, floating offshore wind is going to be by far the bigger the bigger market, but ultimately we need to be build wind turbines. And there’s plenty of interesting, satisfying engineering and new manufacturing processes. It’s still, a very manual manufacturing process. It will eventually be automated. I’m sure, there’s lots of cool, fun engineering to do in manufacturing, which I really think it’s highly likely that’s going to be The main thing into the future. But also like you can go back again. If the future development needs, if when does, yeah, does, cycle back and go through a big, technology boom with something new that we haven’t thought of yet. Then, it will need new skills from other industries and can pull them back in. I, yeah, I think it’s okay. Allen Hall: Maybe Aerospace is a hard time getting engineers back at this point. Philip Totaro: But here’s where we’re at in technology development and innovation in wind right now is. We’ve really We started off where, we had to develop concepts and there were different technology architectures and there was, direct drive and with permanent magnet generator and doubly fed and, there are companies that even tried hydraulic gearboxes and all this sort of thing Allen Hall: by planes, triplanes, pushers, Philip Totaro: right? And that’s the thing is we got through that point where, you, we downselected on some of the technologies that look like they were the best fit. We had reliability issues, particularly with gearboxes. We still have some with blades and et cetera, quality problems, all that. But the point is that you engage the engineers that you need at the time. So we engaged a lot of people who are mechanical focused to help improve the reliability gearboxes. We did that. So those people, now that they don’t necessarily have a gearbox to improve the reliability of. They go on and do other things where we’re at right now in the industries. We need people that are experts in material science and data science, because those are still the two areas where there’s a possibility for engineers to have the most impact on innovation and product development, as well as manufacturing, because we’re still not taking advantage of, all the different types of manufacturing process. We could. There’s a lot of, you talk about aerospace technology. There’s a lot of aerospace technology that we haven’t adopted because they haven’t made it cheap enough to be able to do it. And that’s the other thing is if you can engineer something that’s going to be more cost effective, it’ll start getting more widely utilized and then everyone else will want to come in and start copying it. Allen Hall: Are we at the spruce goose phase of wind? Philip Totaro: Yeah, you could say that. Yeah. Allen Hall: I think there’s a huge jump going to happen in the next 10 years. We’re there, almost there. Joel Saxum: I think Phil’s right. In blade manufacturings, I could see something in blade manufacturing needs to happen. I don’t know what it is, but something’s got to happen. Allen Hall: Yeah, and even in things like bearings, right? Come on, there’s a lot of technology that needs to be developed because the reliability is not as good as it should be. Philip Totaro: Let me make a prediction and I’ll tell our producer to bookmark this. Allen Hall: Are we going to be doing this program in 10 years? Because I’m not going to make Philip Totaro: it. I’ll still do it. But in 10 years, We’re gonna be, we’re gonna be at a point where there’s probably not gonna be a whole lot of hand layup on blades anymore. I’m saying it now. Like I don’t Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna have hand layup anymore in about 10 more years. We’re Allen Hall: making them in space too, Joel Saxum: in a vacuum. That’s how you get rid of bubbles in the resin infusion. Allen Hall: If we’re gonna pay $155 a megawatt hour. Rosemary wants us to do, which is like 230 Australian, which is insane, Joel Saxum: right? That turbine better be running. Allen Hall: If the turbine better be running. And at what point are GE, Vernova and Vestas and Siemens eventually going to get their pound of flesh out of the operators, right? They see that money what the operator is going to make and what they’re getting for the turbines. At some point, that’s going to transition. That 155. Dollars a megawatt hour is not going to sit with the operator for very long Philip Totaro: It’s like joel talks about all the time It’s like a pendulum like right now the operators have the negotiating leverage and the pendulum swung their way and The margins are on their side And eventually the margins are going to swing back to the OEMs, because they’re going to start commanding a higher price, and Allen Hall: That’s right now. That’s why I’m surprised Rosemary’s phone’s not ringing off the hook. Philip Totaro: Yeah, although, it’s a higher price, but it’s not a higher margin. And that’s the problem, is it’s You know, everybody’s still struggling to, to deal with logistics issues. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today. Allen Hall: We4C, a Dutch company with over 25 years of experience in rotor blade design, has patented a new method of repairing leaf root bushings, which is essentially blade bolts, everybody, which is the part that holds a rotor blade onto the hub. The refit method offers up to a 60 percent cost savings compared to the cost of a new sheet and saves wind farm operators months of downtime. The way when you have a blade bolt go bad you We have a hard time trying to repair that in the field and a lot of times they bring the blade down I have to send it off site to get the blade bolts repaired What we foresee has done is figured out a way to do it on site So it’s just a lot less down time And it has some sort of novel ways of gluing essentially an insert into a machined Recess so it doesn’t come out now part of the description rosemary was You one of the problems with polyester resin is it micro cracks and loosens up on these blade bolts. At least that’s what the claim is and they’re trying to fix that problem with some sort of repair. And as Joel and I have traveled around Oklahoma and Texas a lot recently blade bolts Loosening in the blades are a huge problem at the minute. So is there some value to these new blade inserts? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. This is a type of failure that is not. It’s not uncommon, all failures are uncommon within the subset of blades that have failed, this is, reasonably common kind and it can be very significant because it’s the kind of thing where you can end up with a fleet wide problem that you don’t realize until all the blades are out in the field. That can obviously be very serious because in the worst case scenario, if that connection point where the blade connects to the hub, if that fails, then you can have, blades just flying off and like javelining themselves. A long way away. So that’s obviously pretty close to a worst case scenario. For a wind turbine failure? Yeah, it’s just, it’s really challenging structural part of a wind turbine because the, the entire load from the entire rotor. Goes through this connection point. So you’ve got huge aerodynamic forces acting on a big, long lever, a big moment arm that, that root connection needs to withstand. And then from a materials point of view, it’s really hard because the the hub is really stiff compared to the blade. And anytime that you have a change in stiffness, you have a stress concentration and a stress concentration is what you’ll get. Failures. And then to add to that. You also have to, that you’re going to bolt it in with some kind of metal connection, metal fastener. And then you’re trying to put it into a fiberglass blade and actually getting that to stick is is challenging. So there’s a bunch of different ways that it can be done and yeah, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this particular repair method, if it’s talking about polyester, then that means LM blades, I’m pretty sure most or everybody else is using epoxy, this is a, an LM specific solution for their older blades. Obviously if it’s newer blades, then that’s on LM still to, to repair them if you’re getting serial failures across the fleet, then even if it’s out of warranty, that’s something that the original manufacturer has to take care of. So definitely good to see. Solution emerging, but yet such a challenging component. Joel Saxum: Allen, I do know that we were, when we were at ACP, we were talking with our buddy Lars Benson from AC 883, and he was talking somewhat about this We4C solution, and the fact that We4C also works with a company out of Denmark called CNC Onsite. And they’re doing some other really cool things yeah, facing the blades and some other stuff right at the wind turbine, so to cutting down all those logistics costs, one of the things they basically have mobile milling machines that are, can fix these things and refurb these blades and get them back up tower if you’ve got some blade bushing issues or some facing issues or something of that sort. CNC on site and we foresee the people to call. Philip Totaro: And keep in mind that what we just recently uncovered with the analysis that we did for the new O& M tool we built was that this issue is actually, as Rosemary was suggesting, it’s actually the number three issue in terms of cost of repair in the United States. So transportation damage was number one, lightning damage number two, and these root issues is number three. So we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis to, to have these blades get, get fixed. And there’s, I don’t know quite the number off the top of my head, but let’s say that LM’s got probably 40 percent of the blades deployed in the U S market. So that’s what, 72, 000 turbines by 40%. Joel Saxum: That’s pretty big chunk. So what you’re saying, Phil, is yell at your trucking company, call Weatherguard Lightning Tech, and then deal with your bushing issues. That’s one, two, three. Your three steps. That’s what I heard. When you think of Waco, Texas, you may be thinking of Chip and Joanna Gaines and their Magnolia Media conglomerate. However, Waco is also home to the Hubbard Wind Project from NextEra. With phase one producing energy and another phase being planned. So phase one is 108 GE wind turbines generating approximately 300 megawatts of clean renewable energy that began commercial opera operation in 2021. Phase two is in the planning stages. Still. Originally it was supposed to start operations by 2023, but it looks like now 2026 is the target. That phase two is gonna cost about 400 million to build. Interesting thing about this wind farm as well as it also included a 15 mile, 345 kilovolt single circuit transmission line to connect the ERCOT grid. And also, as you may not know, this NextEra has a lot of subsidiaries and other companies. They also own a company called Lone Star Transmission that will actually, or was actually the company that built the transmission line to connect these. Wind farms to the grid. So this will be a total of 600 megawatts. Once totally complete producing a hundreds of construction jobs up to 15 full time local jobs over 78 million in payments to the limestone and Hill County landowners there in central Texas and millions of dollars in tax revenue for the local schools. The other interesting thing about it is you think Texas wind, actually most all of Texas wind is either in the south. southwest corner or the western northwest. So there’s not a whole lot in the east side of Texas at all because you run into the big pine forests. So this is actually the only utility scale wind farm that is within the Dallas Houston, San Antonio kind of triangle that I 45, I 10 and I 35 makes. But it will when complete be over 600 megawatts. So next era’s. Hubbard Wind, you are the 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 YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Muehlhan Wind Service acquires a controlling interest in Portugal’s Endiprev to create a global front runner in wind installation and maintenance services. Energy Capital Partners raises over $4.4 billion for its latest fund focused on power generation, renewables, and decarbonization infrastructure. FiberLine Composites is moving all production from Denmark to India over competition from Chinese manufacturers, while also working on domesticating some production in the U.S. to take advantage of tax credits. 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 your friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com. Danish company Muehlhan Wind Service has acquired a controlling interest in Endiprev, a Portugal based company specializing in commissioning and electrical work for the wind industry. This acquisition aims to create a global front runner in wind installation and maintenance services. Endiprev will continue to operate under its existing brand with current executive management team remaining in place. Muehlhan has expanded significantly over the past seven years and has acquired several companies in the last 18 months. And Phil, this seems to be the trend in any sort of repair, maintenance company is to acquire, acquire, acquire. Philip Totaro: At this point, yes, Allen. And it’s interesting because we’ve talked over the past, six to 12 months about Any number of different deals where companies have either kind of merged together an EPC contracting capability with maintenance services or maintenance providers getting together in some cases, maintenance providers acquiring supply chain, smaller, tier three or four supply chain companies as well. So, I mean, this is, it’s starting to get serious. We’ve talked on the show before about, the increased need for maintenance services, quality of maintenance services, et cetera. And this puts Muehlhan and, and Endiprev in in a really great position globally. Joel Saxum: Yeah. So if you aren’t familiar with kind of what this business model looks like as it expands is Endiprev being a basically front end commissioning services company, they do a lot of build outs. They do electrical work of these things. Muehlhan has been Classically a more of a maintenance company. So now what you do is you come in on the front end of a project, you help build it or you build it as the EPC is the front runner there. And then when that project switches over to commissioning, which normally you would walk away. Now you just back your other players in there and you’ve already got built in work for the maintenance and operation side of things. So it’s a great tie up and you’re going to start to see a lot more of these as well. Allen Hall: Energy Capital Partners, an investor in power transition, electrification, and decarbonization infrastructure assets, has raised over 4. 4 billion for its fifth flagship equity strategy, ECP5, or better called Fund 5. The fund exceeds its initial target by 10 percent and also raised an additional 2. 3 billion in co investment capital. Fund 5 will continue Energy Capital Partners investment strategy of transforming companies in power generation, renewable and storage assets, and critical sustainability and decarbonization infrastructure. Phil, where are these billions of dollars coming from? Philip Totaro: Well, they’re, they’re able to raise money for investments in infrastructure from other funds, pension funds, et cetera, where everybody, Has a general sense that, power generation in general and renewables in particular is in a market they want to be able to get into. They’re seeing the quality of their terms they can get. It hasn’t been, fantastic compared to oil and gas, but it’s getting better now. In in recent times, it’s it’s certainly not quite dirt cheap as it used to be. But just keep in mind too for ECP specifically they own a chunk of companies like TerraGen here in North America, which has, 1. 7 gigawatts of wind and are pretty significant pipeline. So, they’re getting ready as, as we’ve talked about before on the show as well with a lot of other companies they’re getting ready to deploy. More capital in building out a pipeline that is going to dramatically change the face of power generation in North America and throughout the rest of the world. Joel Saxum: Speaking here, of course, with Phil from Intel store, they have all of this data on performance of assets, right? So what we’ve seen and what is the truth out there in the world is there is a lot of way to make these wind farms more efficient. So there’s a Quite a few people I’ve been talking to in the investment space, and now I don’t know if this is ECP’s strategy with this fund, but there is a space where a lot of people are buying assets they’re going to run them for two to five years improve the performance of them, and then sell them again. So there is this trade trade or buy in basically refurbish get the performance up on these things and then, and then sell at a higher level. So that’s happening as well. Some of this capital will be repurposed for that. Allen Hall: 120 Danish jobs are in jeopardy as FiberLine Composites is moving all production from Denmark to India. The move will occur over the next 12 months, with only 40 to 50 employees in administrative and strategic positions remaining in Denmark. FiberLine, which produces components for wind turbine blades, has faced uncertainty due to a lack of orders in idle machines. Swiss company Gerrit bought the shares of FiberLine Composites over the last two years. The closure of production is attributed to fierce competition from state owned Chinese manufacturers. and rising interest rates. Phil, how does FiberLine and Gurrit Get this company up and running again because the wind industry needs fiber line. Philip Totaro: Absolutely. So two things that they’re doing. One, as you just mentioned, they’re relocating some of their production capacity to India, which is actually, from a lot of Things that I’ve been hearing lately, just as competitive as on cost, for instance, as China, but without the, any kind of import duties. Although don’t expect that to last forever. The other thing that they’re doing is they’re taking advantage of the IRA money, specifically the, the 45 X manufactured tax credits for domesticating production of some of the subcomponents of blades in the United States. They’re working on supposedly a super secret project with the Colorado Economic Development Corporation although Colorado has a funny way of not keeping things a very good secret so we, we have indications that FiberLine’s been trying to domesticate some of their production capacity over here so that basically they’re going in to to markets where there’s more of an opportunity, either through subsidies in the U. S. or through low cost of production, like in India, where they’re going to be better able to cost effectively compete. Keep in mind as well, they were seeing quite a bit of orders for Nordex Aciona turbines, which it’s our understanding has been also either reallocated for production through India or down in Spain. And so it looks like a lot of the Danish manufacturing capacity has just unfortunately dried up. Joel Saxum: Well, what’s happening here is what the EU has been fighting for fighting against, and has feared for quite a few years now, and they’ve been very vocal about it in the last year about needing to make some changes within the wind industry to keep jobs in the EU to keep that local supply chain moving. And Either they didn’t make the moves fast enough or whatever moves were made or in the pipeline are not going to be enough financially to save FiberLine from having to move their production elsewhere. So, moving it to India, I mean, a lot of blades, a lot of components are already getting built there so the world is no stranger to Indian labor and Indian suppliers in the value chain. It’s just a fact of life when your employees cost too much or it’s too hard to maintain that facility, you got to move it elsewhere.

Rosemary interviews Ivar Knutsen, Senior VP of Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching Systems, to discuss their innovative floating offshore wind concept. Wind Catching’s design features a grid of small wind turbines that benefit from the multirotor effect and enable easier installation and maintenance compared to traditional large offshore turbines. Wind Catching will also present at the Multi Rotor 2024 seminar June 12-13. You can find more information here: https://multirotor24.zohobackstage.eu/MR24. 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 Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to a special episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Rosie Barnes, and I have today with me Ivar Knutsen who is the Senior Vice President for Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching. Thanks for joining us, Ivar. Ivar Knutsen: Thank you for inviting us, Rosie. Rosemary Barnes: Okay, so for those who don’t know, I’m just gonna quickly start by summarizing what the concept of Wind Catching is. So basically it’s a grid of wind turbines that is floating offshore. So you’ve got a whole lot of small wind turbine turbines arranged in the grid, and they’re benefiting from being close to together with the multirotor effect, which we’ll get into later. And obviously there’s also, more modularity all the. Turbines are arranged in this grid so that they can all yaw at the same time to face a differing wind direction. And yeah I’ll hand it over to you Eva to explain more about what the concept is and yeah, why you decided that this was a, an interesting company to get involved with. Ivar Knutsen: It has become apparent to us that there are fundamental differences Between a bottom fixed and a floating wind turbine and they those differences are so big that you might need to Take a second look at that, you need to maybe consider a completely new approach to the design, but also to the operation. So we find that multi rotors have three or four key benefits. One is that you’re actually able to avoid. The infamous tow to port. If the turbines are sufficiently small, you can handle them offshore and perform a turbine replacement offshore without using a crane vessel. You just need to bring people aboard a unit as long as you have the right technology to, to do that. And as, as we see it, there are no options for. Return to port for big single rotor floaters today, there are many concepts out there, but we don’t see any of them as being tackling the real problems is that it’s going on in an offshore environment with a lot of motions. The other thing we also find very interesting about multirotors is that you decouple the turbine development from the sort of the development, both on the supply chain, but also on capacity. So if you can go from 20 to 30 to 40 megawatts without developing new turbines for every single step, that’s interesting. If you can use the same turbine, But you can change your installed capacity by building on your support structure. That is a very interesting part of the multirotor concept. And the other thing is that with a standardized turbine, you can actually enable a much broader supply chain. You can enable local content in each country because the sophistication required to turbine is much lower. And the reason for that, this is that if you now look at the biggest turbines and the turbines expected to come later. With blade lengths of 120, 130 meters to overcome the scaling effect where the weight of those blades should scale cubically with the length. They actually scale by the square and that is done by introducing more and more sophisticated technology in the blade design and manufacturing, which is really important. Prohibitive to local content. You can’t build those plates just anywhere. Rosemary Barnes: Let’s cover though what you said about the modularity and the supply chain. So I think that’s really interesting. I think that’s something that most people are aware of that, modular technologies tend to reduce their cost faster. If you look at the difference between solar panels and wind turbines, that’s a big difference is that the solar panels are a lot more modular and they’re yeah, can make the exact same thing many more times, which tends to lead to, yeah, getting better at manufacturing that thing and, making it cheaper. Then there’s other physical thing that you mentioned about how the structural scaling laws, the amount of wind that you capture it scales with the square of the length of the blade, but the volume scales with the cube. So you actually. Don’t get a better structural outcome from having a big, one big rotor. You have a better structural outcome, like a, less material should be able to be used if you have a lot of small rotors than one equivalent large one. Yeah, so maybe you can talk a little bit more about that benefit that you expect to get from the modularity and the supply chain. Ivar Knutsen: What we’re working on now is a 40 rotor unit. So a 40 rotor floater which we see as perhaps the lower scale or at least the lower region of what we see as a fully commercial, not the pilot size, but they fully commercial size. And I say for three rotors and the turbine we are designing is a one megawatt, 30 meter diameter turbine. So 40 rotors is 40 turbines 40 megawatt. Having said that we have. That kind of scalability on the turbine rating, we wouldn’t probably wouldn’t differ in turbine diameter in rotor diameter, because that has implications on the, how the design of the structure, not only the, how you scale the structure, but the whole sort of arrangement of the structure. But of course, turbine rating is something you can play with on project specific basis, because we do see project. Different types of projects, different types of markets. Even if you start looking at electrification projects, where what we see, interestingly, when I say electrification electrification of oil and gas platforms, which is, has been done in Norway for some time, and it’s probably coming to Scotland as well. They are often very clear and they have a clear cap on what they can receive of power because their facilities can’t receive any above, any sort of access power can’t be Received or utilized. Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, you mentioned a couple of terms there that not everyone might be familiar with. So you mentioned that there the rating is higher. Ivar Knutsen: So meaning basically we have a higher rated wind speed and a bigger generator relative to the rotor size. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And it’s usually an economic optimization to figure out what that size should be. And you’ve come up with a different answer than. Than others. Is that what you’re saying? Ivar Knutsen: Absolutely. And and it’s an interesting question because you’re coming back to why our turbines like they are today. And that’s not a straightforward question to answer, because there’s so many, there’s an evolutionary history that has led them in a certain direction. But if you consider very large offshore turbines today, we see that the rated wind speed has gone down. typically gone down to now. If you see turbines 10 years ago, they were maybe had ratings of 12 meters per second. And now we’re see down to 10. 5. You could get immense capacity factors by just reducing it down to say rating at a five meter per second. And you would get like a very good capacity factor, but it doesn’t make sense. Rosemary Barnes: You wouldn’t get a lot of annual energy production though. Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. So what I would say is that for very large rotors what I believe is that the cost of generator size, so increasing a generator size by 5 percent for a 15 megawatt turbine is, has immense consequences. First off, you actually have to build this, but you have to install it and you have to transmit the rotor loads through this. And this comes from the same kind of scaling law, but that applies to us as well. It just applies in the other direction. So we have a very, a much, much lower impact on that. So we could increase our generator size or decrease our generator size by 20%. And it wouldn’t really matter too much. Rosemary Barnes: Because it’s still a very small generator compared to what we’re used to handling. Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. So you’re saving three tons of generator weight per turbine, maybe if you make a substantial change. And as long as you can handle the turbine well. Why not just make a big generator? And that’s what we’re doing. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Okay. That’s really interesting. And I’m sure that there are, a thousand different little tiny things like that, that are different for your design than a regular configuration. But I just want to go back to one other technical point that you mentioned that people might not be familiar with. You said one P and three P that’s a tower passing frequency, right? Which I guess when you’ve got a single. tower with a, a three bladed rotor on it, then that’s obvious what that means every time that the yeah, there’s a certain frequency of when the blades are passing the tower. Your design has this big grid latticework there’s not just one tower and three blades anymore, there’s What have you got, 120 blades if you’ve got three blades per rotor and all sorts of components of a tower latticework. That’s opening a huge can of worms structurally, right? Because I know that, resonant frequencies and all those sorts of things and dynamic loading yeah, all these aerodynamics interferences. Have all been things that the history of wind energy is, littered with people that were surprised by these effects, and had, sensible looking designs that just, shook themselves apart. So what have you, I’m assuming that a lot of the development that you’ve been done has been on under understanding how these are gonna work for your unique design. Can you tell me a bit about what you have done there? Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. It’s absolutely right. Because we see that. Because when you design the traditional turbine, you want to tune your tower to have a certain natural period or a certain set of natural periods. And if you have a lattice work, you basically have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of structural modes that where one turbine could by chance trigger a vibration far away at the other side of the lattice, just by, because there’s this you happen to trigger some, it’s like an interior of a car. There’s always something rattling and it’s almost impossible to design your way around that kind of rattling because you’re exposed to so many different frequencies, different motor RPMs. Basically we’ve said that there’s no way to try to design your way around that you need to embrace it and accept it. So what we’ve done, two things we’ve done we have a fairly big distance between the blade and the tower. So we have about five meters, which for such a small rotor is actually quite a long distance. So, and we’ve done some work on seeing how big that distance should be before the kind of the aerodynamic pulse cost. On the on the rotor, but also on the structure is lessened. And the other thing we’re doing, and that’s we’ve done a few structural simulations where we applied vibrations to all the turbine locations and starting extracting the responses in all these members. And what we’re looking for is we’re not looking for these single extremes. We’re looking for what is the average fatigue damage that this. Applies to the structure so that you can add it to your fatigue budget when you’re doing a fatigue design of the structure and by that you can obtain stress amplitudes. And you can see the stress amplitudes caused by this and try to say, okay, there’s this fussy picture that we don’t know exactly what’s happening inside this fussy picture, but we know that the envelope of it. So we will design our way. around this kind of, we have a top and bottom and say, okay, we will accept what’s going on in there. And that’s the approach. Rosemary Barnes: When you say you’ve done tests, are you talking computer simulations? Are you talking small scale models in wind tunnels? Ivar Knutsen: Computer simulation. So we’ve done a, in a time domain software. Rosemary Barnes: Early on you mentioned about maintenance strategy. I think that’s something else that’s quite interesting with this multi rotor design. So yeah, if you’ve got 40 wind turbines and one of them gets knocked out, what’s that two and a half percent power reduction. I’m assuming it’ll also cause some, funny structural things, but you’ve already mentioned that your design, your plan is to not have yeah, you’re not designed so that the frequencies matter that much that would affect it, I’m assuming. Guess you’ll know for sure when you’ve built one, but how would it work? One rotors out, so you send out a repair crew or you wait for two, three, four, like at what point, and do you have to stop the whole 40 to go work on one? Cause I’ve, I climbed wind turbines for my work and you, you definitely, you don’t want to be up there while it’s cranking. Yeah, what’s the strategy? Ivar Knutsen: So imagine the event you have 40 turbines. If you look at failure rates on a number of failures per turbine we account for turbines stopping or. That we choose to stop them because we have some alarm on some sensor that not sure what’s going on there, but let’s stop the turbine. And then we say, okay, let’s, this is happening now in December, a very difficult time in Europe for doing anything offshore. But as you say, it’s a very small percentage of the total production, so we can just leave that for now. And then we see that, okay. We have, we are planning with regular intervention campaigns. So once the two rotors have stopped or maybe three rotors have stopped, okay. We decide to do an intervention campaign and and maybe basically that is limited by the ability to put people on board a unit. So which are the same limits as any kind of both floating and bottom fixed have today that you have a. wave height limitation of around two and a half meters and a wind speed limitation of 15 to 20 meters per second, actually quite high for these walk to work systems. So you send out this your service ship with your crew, your small team. And They use this elevator they shift the elevator to right position. They try they move to the right turbine. They do an inspection. And either they decide that, okay this, that was a faulty sensor. There was nothing wrong. And or there was something significantly wrong. And you either restart the turbine or you do something or you plan for a longer, a more substantial replacement. And yes. Would you stop all the rotors at that time? So what I’m understanding is that some developers or operators of wind farms, they are happy to have people on the TP when the rotor is going. And it’s a sort of a risk Management thing, I would say that you wouldn’t have any kind of rotors moving in vicinity of this elevator because when that’s moving, regardless of if there’s people on it or not, because you’re doing stuff very close to moving rotors. So you don’t want to lose a spanner and then it falls onto a rotor, which is already spinning or something. That’s so it is a risk management thing that you do. It’s not technically impossible to do it. So, Basically, the system we have allows you to have a working, a safe working platform at your turbine, just next to your turbine, allowing you to do an inspection, but also allowing you to do a blade replacement or a complete miscellaneous replacement. So for the blade replacement are what we’re working on is basically to have a rack of blades that you prepare the rack of three blades on shore in your warehouse and the blade stays in those in that rack until on the elevator and until the You’re up next to the turbine. So you have your blade rack right next to your turbine, allowing you to do a complete rotor replacement. And our target is that we should be able to do that during one shift. And if we were to do a turbine replacement, we would have to take the blades off, bring them down to deck, and then do the turbine separately, at least in the first round, but we can do it but. The idea is that we don’t do repairs up there. If they’re running in the, the difficulty of doing a turbine replacement should be sufficiently low that you don’t bother with it, just swap it. So idea is that you have a pool of turbines and blades on shore. And you can rotate. So if you have one turbine with some slight issue, okay, we’ll swap it out and we’ll figure out on shore what’s going on with that turbine if we want to do something which means that the criticality of having a turbine failure. It comes lower, so you don’t need to design it so that you absolutely sure that it never fails. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s a really dramatically different approach and it does seem like you’ve covered a lot of a bit of a best of both worlds because, there’s a reason why people have gone bigger and bigger for offshore turbines and, a lot of it’s to do with the number of connections, electrical connections that you need. It’s just simply expensive to have Yeah. Underwater cables and connection points and everything, but you would still have fewer of those, but you also get rid of yeah, a lot of the downsides of the really big turbines that you’ve already mentioned. Ivar Knutsen: So with turbines becoming very big, it has like a commercial momentum. That means that yes, you can do innovation, but. The costs of doing something significantly different become prohibitive to doing it because yeah, there there’s so much invested now in the current direction, the factories, the designs that it’s becoming more difficult to disrupt. And what we find very interesting is that there’s a whole range of onshore OEMs that are not in offshore wind today. And basically for them to enter offshore wind is an enormous technical lift and commercial lift. So they, let’s say a onshore OEM who wanted to enter offshore wind today, what would they need to do? Probably they would need to launch a 16, 17 megawatt offshore turbine. And that’s that just the cost of developing something like that is enormous. So it is prohibiting them from it’s certainly Makes it very difficult for them to enter the market, meaning that new OEMs are not likely to come in soon. What we think we can offer with a multi rotor approach is that we can actually introduce these new OEMs to the offshore wind market. Because a one megawatt turbine, there’s a significant higher number of companies that can do that. Also on the component side. That’s where you can use more local suppliers. We see that in Norway we see it in Scotland to produce a generator or produce a fairly straightforward 15 meter epoxy blade. There’s a lot more companies that can do that. And that I think is good that you can broaden your supply chain. Because I think the supply chain is perhaps one of the biggest constraints we have in offshore wind today. Rosemary Barnes: So you mentioned so far you haven’t built any prototypes for testing, but I assume that would be the next step would be to it will be a step to build a unit and get it out in the water. How far along the path to that are you? When do you think we’ll see that? Ivar Knutsen: So what we’re doing is that we have our turbine development program. We have a license to test a prototype in Norway. So from the regulator We actually did a a model test two weeks ago in a tank in Norway. So we did a hydrodynamic model test of quite a, it’s quite a big model hub. We’ll share some pictures soon. Then we’re working towards this this 40 megawatt unit. And. Saying, okay, what are the big validation needs? What are the big sort of uncertainties? And we’re tackling those and then seeing, okay, how can we pilot this specific problem in order to understand it as well as possible? So say blade passing effects, two blades passing at high speed. How do you understand that mechanism and that the physics best? CFD, maybe not, wind tunnel, yes, maybe, or maybe all of that. So that’s how we’re thinking at the moment. Can I actually, in the last minute, promote that the University of Strathclyde and University of Hamburg are hosting a multirotor seminar in June? We had one in Hamburg last year, which was very good, very interesting. It is a seminar for those infected by the multirotor virus. And I invite people to look it up on LinkedIn. Rosemary Barnes: Thank you so much for talking to us about Wind Catching. I’m definitely going to be following your progress closely. I hope you’ll keep us up to date and I really wish you the best of luck. Ivar Knutsen: Thank you very much.

In this episode, Petr Bartusek from Blade Platforms discusses how their truck-mounted platforms, capable of safely reaching over 100 meters, are transforming wind turbine blade repair access. With increased speed, skill utilization, and 24-hour shift capabilities, using Blade Platforms minimizes turbine downtime and maximizes efficiency in blade repair campaigns. 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 tackling a critical issue in the wind industry. Accessing wind turbine blades for repairs. And our guest is Petr Bartusek, commercial VP of Blade Platforms. And Blade Platforms is a truck mounted platform company based in Abilene, Texas. And with wind turbines hubs reaching new heights, traditional repair access methods can be slow and inefficient. Blade Platforms solves this problem with a fleet of machines that can safely reach over 100 meters, allowing technicians to quickly and efficiently repair blades while minimizing turbine downtime. Today, Petr will share how Blade Platforms is transforming blade repair access and discuss the future of this innovative company in the wind industry. Petr, welcome to the show. Petr Bartusek: All right. Thanks for having me. Allen Hall: So Joel and I happened to visit your facility in Abilene. And the reason we did was because of speed. It comes down to quickness and our strike click take application where we’re touching a lot of blades, we have to get up and down very quickly because we touched so many blades simultaneously, which is a common industry problem. If you’re going to fix one blade pretty easy, you can use whatever method. But when we’re. At some farms that have a hundred, 200, 300 plus turbines, it becomes so slow and efficient that there has to be a new way to do it, a faster way to get on blade and to make repairs. And this is where we stopped. And Abilene met with your folks down there at Blade Platforms. It is impressive the speed at which you guys move and it has really changed the industry. And we, Joel and I have been around a lot of parts of Texas and Oklahoma and we see Blade Platforms. And now we understand why, because you’re really changing the industry. Petr Bartusek: I’ll add, it’s not just speed, I think. There’s a couple of things. You get speed, you get skill, and you get time utilization, right? So the speed kind of speaks for itself, right? I tell everyone on a 12 hour day, We’ll do 11 hours worth of work, right? So you got some truck set up time and, some idle time that just, you cannot monetize that, that, that’s one aspect. The other thing is utilization of time and that, these sites are, on windy projects, right? So you’re, you don’t put turbines where the wind doesn’t blow. So you have to be able to operate in increments of time. When that happens. I use a traditional means of access or ropes or suspended platforms. It’s the rigging time and everything else that goes into it changes the dynamics of what you’re doing because, let’s say you got a rig for two hours, then you go up and you get a three hour weather window. Then you got to go down and maybe or maybe not, you have to pull it a day. If at two o’clock a storm roll in or something will happen. So for us, we get, six hours worth of work. There’s three hours storm going through. All of a sudden we can take a, three hour lunch to kill that storm, weather a storm, and then we go work again. So that’s what I would call the time utilization. Third aspect, which is skill or training, right? And the way I look at it is the older you get as a skilled technician, the less likely you are. To be one, I hang on the ropes. So let’s say you’re 20 year old. This is fun. You’re 40. You may have some midsection weight, you may have some bum knees. You know, you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge and you. Basically could become a liability rather than an assets to a traditional access company. Whereas with us, if your knees a little bum, it doesn’t matter if used to be 175 and now you’re 275. It’s not that big of a deal because the basket can handle 1, 300 pounds. So we can then effectively monetize or help our customers monetize The skill that particular technician has already built up over, let’s say, 10, 15, 20 years. So I think that those are the 3 advantages that I see. It’s the time utilization and the skill utilization that comes with it. And I’m not even talking about the safety aspects of, being up there where, there’s 4 redundant systems or how you can get down and. You don’t have to worry about anything. Joel Saxum: And I can speak to that too, Petr. So I know that you guys have some aid in house that can help someone with a bit of a blade issue if they need it. But if a company has technicians that they need to put up there, this is not, you don’t have to come to site and do a three day training mechanism or something when this, when the. Blade Platform’s truck shows up, there’s a technician with it, there’s a, there’s someone who can operate it I was there, like I was gonna say, I’ll speak to this we came to the Abilene facility, saw the fantastic facility when you pull in, all the trucks everywhere being worked on the army of people maintaining these things and making sure they’re ready to go at a minute’s notice, I did an orientation with one of your techs on site who was fantastic. Rigged, the guys rigged me up for a harness and showed me where to hook off and all these things. And within 5 minutes I was up 200 and some odd feet in the air. Just a little scared, I’m gonna be honest with you. I think I was the one who actually said, Okay, that’s high enough, we’re good here. I have a beautiful view of Abilene, Texas, right from the sky. But what I’m saying or what I’m getting at there is if you have technicians or if you have people on the ground already, they don’t need to go through a big training program to do this, right? It was literally 15 minutes of orientation, safety rigging up a harness, which if you’re in a wind industry, you already probably have your own or you know how to do it anyways. And then Going up and you’re ready to work, right? It was like, now we’re ready to go. Petr Bartusek: Yeah, that’s exactly it. As long as you have your basic wind search, which is your, safety GW now, which, it’s becoming the prevalent requirement it’s more of an orientation for you, Hey, here’s where you’re going to step here is where you’re going to clip your lanyard. And then you’re good to go. And then other than that, you’ve been trained for everything. So you’re right. Our unit will roll up to site. Or whoever needs to use it, but I would call self contained. That means there is an operator in the basket. They’ll do all the work. And we also have a ground control technician. That’s somebody who manages the ground, make sure nobody gets underneath because there is a drop zone. If something were to happen, this person can also serve as a secondary rescue. So if you’ve never seen these units as a future potential customer it’s out of sight, out of mind. Almost. We roll in, we’d set up everything and we take your super skilled technician or inspector or whoever that needs to be and take him up and then they got to do whatever they got to do. We do have a limited capability. So helping mostly our OEM customers in house, but. Our bread and butter is truly truck rental and access and truck sales. Joel Saxum: The majority of platforms or the majority, I’m saying platforms as in turbines, right? The majority of the turbines out in the fleet in the United States right now are, or let’s say North America in general, are under a hundred meter hub height. A lot of them, 80 meters, 90 meters for the majority of the fleet. It’s pretty odd that you get turbines over a hundred meters. So what that means is I know that you guys have trucks at all different levels, like you have 30 meter access all the way to a hundred meter access, correct? Petr Bartusek: Correct. Yeah, we go 30, 50, 70, 75, 90, and then 103. Joel Saxum: That’s flipping a football field on its nose and going from the end of the end zone to the end of the other end zone. Not the, not just the end lines, but the whole thing. That’s huge. You’re 330 feet and you’re 340. Petr Bartusek: 336 is almost 340. These trucks are actually the highest reaching trucks that exist in North America, South America, probably in Europe. Joel Saxum: So with these, all these different heights, right? So if you wanted to go just work on the tip of a turbine blade, great. If you want to go up the side of the tower and look underneath the nacelle, great. If you want to go and work the whole blade length of the tower, we can do that as well. But all of these different heights also have different kind of wind restrictions to go with it, right? Because you’re not going to be up at 100 meters with a 20 meter per second wind, like that’s just not going to happen, right? But what do the wind restrictions look like for you guys? Because I’m just looking at weather windows. Petr Bartusek: Yeah for us traditionally, especially on a newer fleet we have what’s called an extended wind regime. So the truck is 12 and a half meters a second, 16 meters a second, and 19 meters a second that you actually can go and operate. It may have a restricted envelope, so you may not able to hit the full reach. So 90 meter truck, you got only hit. 80 meters at 19 meters a second. And you may not hit the full outreach, which is up to 130 feet. Then you may be limited to a hundred feet on outreach, during those dicey conditions, nobody will want to do anything crazy. And most wind farms will catch you off at 12, 12 meters a second anyway, because it’s just considered the safe. safe practice. I think for us where it comes in is that, Hey, I know the truck can handle a lot higher wind gusts. So everybody’s safe and then it allows you to finish a job in an emergency situation. So that’s the use we’re looking at for the extended working at a low based on extended wind regime. Joel Saxum: Yeah, because at the, in a general rule of thumb, there isn’t many turbines out there that you would even lock out after 15 meters per second. Most of them you just feather the blades negative and let it sit up there. You’re not going to be able to work on them no matter what the access method is that’s wind speed. Petr Bartusek: Yeah, that’s right. And, operators want to make money too. We can generate, they want to add the other day that’s their business. We get it. And again, that’s why I know we have the capability and capacity. We don’t really, dangle the carrot much in front of people because it’s, we’re going to work to a point where it’s safe. And where are we adding value? So if, let’s say you’re working just on the tip, and you start getting 30 meters a second, we could probably still be there. The tip may be flapping to where it’s just not safe for the basket or it’s you’re just, you can be up in the air, but you’re creating zero value because you can’t actually do the work. It depends on where you’re working on that flight. If I’m somewhere, mid span or max core, there’s a lot less movement. Okay. On that blade, so it could still be possible to finish the job, but at a tip, it just poses a whole other dimension. Joel Saxum: Okay, so we’ve talked about 30, 30 all the way to a hundred meter reach height. How many trucks do you guys have? What does the fleet look like? Petr Bartusek: Pushing close to 40, it’s 35 plus. There is a pipeline of about 10 trucks being delivered each year. As we have it, we’re currently still evaluating the mix. I know this is more of a wind show, but we’ve made a huge leap into the transmission space which is adjacent market for us. That changed our mix a little bit. We operate in other spaces too, like aerospace construction, building big stadiums and highly bridges and whatever else just needs some special equipment like this, but our bread and butter is traditionally going to be wind power. And transmission, right? With. You’re talking about the average hub height being 80, 90 meters. Your workhorse truly ends up being a 90 meter machine which is a 295 footer. So that means that no matter what happens, you’re going to roll on the side, you can hit it and you don’t have to worry about it because it’s a, it’s an overall workhorse. Now, if you know you’re only structuring a campaign that’s geared maybe towards strike tape and leading edge protection, Then the 50 or 70 meter variety will likely do. And, there is obviously money savings because it’s a cheaper machine to start with. But it’s going to be limited to that particular campaign that you’re doing. Allen Hall: And what are the restrictions about moving such a large vehicle around in the United States? Are there permits and things that need to be pulled before? Bringing it some parts. Petr Bartusek: The problem with the DLT generally is that each state has individual DLTs. There is not like a federal DLT that would make everything super easy. So each state may have different requirements on weight, actual spacing and how much weight you can have on each axle, basically 30, 50, 70 meter variety. You can drive around the U. S. without any issues at all. That includes California which is not a super friendly state to large equipment. The 90 meters virtually drivable everywhere except a couple states where they may need to get low boyed. And, it’s just, it’s a permit situation of 1 to 3 days wait, depending on what each state requires, and the 100 meters, they’re about 50 60. I would say about half of the states are. Road friendly and half of the states are not. So sometimes you end up having to piecemeal Hey, we’re going to drive here. Then you’re going to put it in a low boy, fortunately own a low boy in house. So that makes moves a lot easier on us. And then, again, you get to unload it and you can drive. It has to do with the overall weight of the vehicle or axle spacing. Joel Saxum: But when it, when it comes to access within a wind farm, at one point in time, all of these wind farms were built with heavy trucks having to move usually big crawler cranes in, so the roads are, the roads and pads are good for you guys, the bridges, the bridge crossings, the roads around the wind farms once you get to the site, there’s, there should be no issues, no matter what the place is, unless it’s like, Hey, you can’t, put a, put an outrigger out here because the sage grouse is mating this spring or something like that. You might run into a deal, but there’s nothing we can do about those. Petr Bartusek: No, generally there are no issues at all. Especially if the turbine operator or, the construction company was a good steward to the County. If they were not, sometimes we walk into the hornet’s nest, they just close. And I say, Hey, we know it’s not you guys that, that build it or, it’s. It’s not an angry landowner that, didn’t want to sign and now he doesn’t have a turbine on his field and his neighbor has five turbines and all of a sudden this guy has a brand new truck every year and neighbor doesn’t. There’s that type of dynamic we walk into. There is some specific seasonal issues like, where there’s a little whale mating or some salamanders somewhere in California or, you’re going to have frost loss up north that, that kick in or if you had heavy rain somewhere in the Iowa cornfields or, even in the corpus area, then the ground is too soft. So you may wait 2 or 3 days for it to dry, but yeah, no, we don’t have access issues. I think there is one site somewhere in New Hampshire that we have to get a little bit of a. So with a tractor just because the grade was relatively steep, but if any, if a truck can get there, if a car can get there, we usually don’t have issues and our truck are, all wheel drive and rear steering, so we can navigate sites pretty well. Allen Hall: I think I’ve been to that site in New Hampshire. It is very steep. So that makes a lot of sense. So do you cover Canada as well as the United States? What’s your territory here? Petr Bartusek: We so we specialize in the U. S. We have the ability to go to Canada. I don’t necessarily pursue it actively, passively we do it. But there is just so much work in the U. S. for our trucks that, that to actually focus on Canada, it’s borderline counterproductive, nothing against Canadians, I like hockey and everything else. But the service window is so much shorter up there than it is stateside because of the climate and certain provinces have certain restrictions, and, French Canada being one of the harshest ones. That it, it poses a whole new aspect in terms of, how you bill how you kind of work around labor laws, what you cannot do. So it, again, customer orders it, we’ll bring it there or bring it to the border and they can take it, we’ll deliver it. I say yes, but I don’t seek it out. Joel Saxum: That’s a market that could greatly benefit from the efficiency of the trucks, right? But if it’s not, if it’s not good, if it’s not as good for your business model, like I get it, like just stay down here and make money where the hate. Petr Bartusek: What they could benefit is something we discovered by accident about two years ago. Actually, we discovered we were the beneficiary. Some of our customers discovered it and they’re saying, Hey, the machine doesn’t get tired. Why don’t we run two shifts? That’s something that probably should be utilized in Canada. That is, there is so much work that you truly cannot get everything done in a season. And especially of the shoulder sort of season. The weather’s a little dicey. So he tried to compress everything into where she was saying may through September in an ideal case. And if everybody had their wish, it would be like June through August. So at that point, how do you. How do you handle the limited capacity of trucks or technicians that want R& Rs and everything else that is happening? So we’ve been with a couple of our customers. We’ve been running a 24 hour shift. That means I actually have two sets of operators and they have two sets of light decks and we run around the clock. And that truly is, we’re into what I’ve called the peak season. Joel Saxum: Yeah, take advantage of the good weather windows, right? Yeah, we know that, like if you’re working on site, even in the U. S., once September hits and October starts looking, if you’re working anywhere north of basically South Texas, you have the possibility of snow or some other bad weather moving in, why not? You could get two weeks worth of, Or four weeks worth of work done in two weeks if you run night shifts. That’s just makes sense. Petr Bartusek: And with less of a standby risk, right? So your actual two weeks. Could mean six weeks in real life, right? Cause it gives you a factor, a standby. So yeah, it’s not everyone’s receptive to it. Again, I did not invent it. I’m sure this is being used because the petrochemical industry all the time during shutdown and turnaround, but, some of our customers came to us and say, Hey, this is what we want to do. And, always figure out how to say yes. So that is my job, virtually and then operation guys have to figure out how they gonna deliver on that. Allen Hall: That does seem like a really good idea. And I know there’s a lot of operators that have used Blade Platforms, but there’s still a substantial number that haven’t used your services yet. How do they reach out to you, Petr? How do they get ahold of Blade Platforms? Petr Bartusek: So the easiest way is the 21st century, that’s www.bladeplatforms.com. That probably will guide you to our 1 800 number, or, eventually get you to someone who you’ve talked to and they can get to me. I don’t mind sharing my number. That’s 469-371-4284. If someone needs to get me direct. Allen Hall: If you need Blade Platforms services, go to bladeplatforms. com. Check out their website, get ahold of Petr. They are really efficient and are experts on blade upgrades and blade repairs. So this Petr, it’s been great having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining. Awesome. Thank you guys. Thanks for having me.

The team discusses the job cuts at Siemens Gamesa and the challenges of finding skilled wind energy workers in the U.S. They also touch on Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and MOL Drybulk’s move to outfit ships with wind propulsion technology from Anemoi Marine Technologies to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. 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: Residents in Evan an English Town are complaining about the noisy chickens. There was a flock about 100 feral chickens. Now, Joel, down in Texas, you have feral hogs. They are everywhere. But I have not seen feral chickens. Feral chickens are easier to get a hold of. Joel Saxum: Then the feral hogs, I think, but the chickens you got to watch out for because they can’t survive in the heat by themselves They got to Allen Hall: have some shade. Dude, do chickens travel in packs like wolves? You know what I’m saying? What is it? What does a feral chicken flock look like? Joel Saxum: I don’t know if it’s the same they have the same goals as a flock of wolves or a pack of wolves But they do travel in groups like Allen Hall: turkeys it’s this, it’s something that happens down in Australia too, Rosemaridia, feral chickens. It seems like a UK event. Rosemary Barnes: No, we have native chickens. There’s a lot of native, they’re just a native bird. That is a kind of chicken, and yeah, they run around being chickens in the wild. Allen Hall: It seems like the chickens are the most defenseless creatures on the planet, right? And because one, they’re so tasty, and two, they have no defenses. Rosemary Barnes: They play chicken. Allen Hall: Ah, the sage grouse is worse. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, the pheasant is the stupidest animal, the stupidest bird, I think that’s why I always think it’s yeah, like particularly lame when people go hunting for pheasants, which I found out in Denmark that they’re not even native. They bring, they found a stupid pheasant. Stupid easy to kill bird and then they restock it for all these people to hunt. It’s so sad. Joel Saxum: I once referred to pheasant hunting in the United States as the bowling of hunting. Rosemary Barnes: Like you could run up and grab one with your hands. They’re so dumb. Philip Totaro: No skill required. Allen Hall: Siemens Gamesa is making some moves. They plan to cut 4, 100 jobs, according to CEO Jochen Eichholz. In an internal letter to staff, so you can find this news article pretty much anywhere at the moment because it’s really important the company aims to adapt to lower business volumes, particularly in the 4X and 5X machines, which they evidently are not selling and some reduced activity in non core markets India being one of those evidently also, and they’re trying to streamline their portfolio, right? So despite the job cuts, I cold stated that the goal is to maintain a stable workforce by shifting jobs and hiring in other parts of the division. Now, Phil, I assume this is wrapped around India, that the, they’re going to sell that factory in India. And then I still think they’re going to have some layoffs in Denmark and in Spain, but they’re not, I’m not being specific yet, but isn’t this like the precursor to those layoffs in the union factories that they need to give them advance warning that this is coming and this letter is starting that process? So I, I assume Spain and Denmark are going to be impacted and India obviously is going to be sold. So what does this all mean and where is Seamus Gamesa headed? Philip Totaro: Yeah first of all, it’s unfortunate that they’re having to downsize this much, but it’s the net result of it taking so long for them to get back to selling the four to five megawatt platform that had these played quality issues. As far as where the company’s going at this point, they’ve already publicly stated they’re going to focus more on core markets, which is really what, frankly, a lot of companies have been doing lately, the, but for them, that means Western Europe and the U. S. And, but they’ve got to have products to sell. And, while they’re not generating revenue, workforce reductions are almost a necessity. They’re probably going to have, and already have, plants that are close to, if not already idled. This is just the unfortunate consequence of of all these product quality issues. Joel Saxum: Question for you, Phil. The On your Intel store, basically database, or you could, you guys watch the news. You see basically everything that’s going on. When was the last time you saw a major Siemens Gamesa onshore sale of equipment? Of turbines. Someone said, Hey, we’ve contracted since Mesa for Philip Totaro: They’ve been selling their direct drive, their legacy direct drive turbines in Japan. There’s been a number of projects there. They’ve sold some of the 3 megawatt, 132 meter rotor turbines in different markets, including Africa. But they haven’t really been selling anything. They were intending to sell the four to five megawatt platform in the U. S. They’ve been selling some of the six megawatt one seventies in Scandinavia and Brazil and offering it for sale in Australia. But that’s about it. You’re, Joel, I guess to your point, it’s, it, but it’s been kind of dribs and drabs of those kind of sales. The, so for instance, the Direct Drive 4 megawatt 130 meter rotor that they sell in Japan, again, that’s based on the legacy Siemens design but that’s also, selling like, Maybe a maximum of about 20 units at a time for either new projects or repowerings that are going on in Japan all the other markets where they’re selling turbines other than the six megawatt 170, where, you know, again, throughout Scandinavia and Brazil, where they’re getting somewhat larger orders, most of the orders they’re getting for anything else is, in the hand, the handfuls, few, two, three dozen of units. It’s not big orders. Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s my kind of the direction of the question. I guess it’s a little bit loaded, but you watch here in the U. S., right? And it’s, you’re just not seeing it. The last time I saw, say Vesta secures order for, X amount of V 150s or GE, Sol, like the big Sunzea project and, and Alan, you and I talk regularly about seeing turbine blades move around on the highways down here in Texas. I’m like, yeah, I saw a bunch going this way. I saw a bunch going that way. None of those blades are Siemens Kamesa blades. They’re, they, like you said earlier in the, this little section here, 4, 100 staff cuts, that’s got to happen at some point in time, just based on the lack of sales performance. So coming, bringing, bringing in the troops and have to cut some fat out. And then streamlining the portfolio is a big one for me. We’ve heard GE say this as well. We’re going to cut down on so many, having, so many options and so many of these and so many of that and get back to a. A core offering that’s easier to scale up, easier for the supply chains to manage, easier to, for logistics. And should, in all reality, reduce some quality issues and speed up the Allen Hall: So while they’re losing jobs at Siemens Gamesa, the latest report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory said that we need about 120, 000 workers in the United States by 2030 if the current hiring and training trends continue. The study by NREL found that wind energy firms are experiencing increasing hiring difficulty for both entry level and experienced positions compared to 2020. Which seems odd, Joel. The top reasons cited include a lack of applicants, insufficient experience among candidates and inadequate education and training. Meanwhile, students and recent graduates interested in wind energy careers report barriers, such as a lack of exposure to the industry in coursework, uncertainty about available jobs and difficulty finding opportunities in desired locations. So something is amiss. If there are so many jobs. Available, but the students don’t know that they’re there. Isn’t that the point of NREL, maybe Department of Energy and some others to try to connect them together? ACP? ACP is, yeah, another one, and that’s what happened? Joel Saxum: There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of oddities around this too. So we were at ACP back a month ago or so, something like that, three weeks ago. And they had the collegiate win competition there. And there was a massive turnout for that. There was A lot of college teams I would say over 10 easily and that’s, to get the funds together and to put these projects on and do this, that’s a big undertaking for a university. So there’s a lot of money involved there. There was also a really cool section they had where You know at most of these conferences you have e posters or you have the poster kind of setup where people present projects and this And that the other thing and there was a Section of that they had that was just for students and there was a ton of them that were doing a ton of students that I saw were doing capstone projects for the end of their engineering degree or end of their environmental sciences degree or whatnot about wind that weren’t necessarily from wind industry like focused You schools. And that was great to see. So from that side, and I’m talking in two different, two different lanes here, basically, but from that side on the engineering and technical at the university level side, I saw a lot more, I think basically players at the, at ACP than I have in the past. So I wasn’t happy about that. Now to switch on to what we’re talking about here, NREL and the employment part for the, on the technician side. There’s something odd about this because I’m always on LinkedIn, and I constantly read about people on LinkedIn complaining that Hey, I have this certification, and this certification, and I have this many years of work, but nobody will call me back. Why? I can’t get and then you see other people chime in Hey! Call these people they’re hiring now, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you’ll, they’ll tag the company and then you’ll see someone from that company come in and talk, right? So I think that there’s a what might be missing here at the technician level for just experienced people is a place where they can go, that’s easy to get connected to all of these places. Because once you get siloed, like if you work in Abilene, Texas, like a lot of times you’re applying to companies in Abilene, you don’t realize that in Dallas and in Houston and in Oklahoma City and in Denver, there’s companies hiring all over the place. So you do see that. And then on the recruiter side, you also see, Hey, we need we’re hiring blade techs, but we’ve got enough entry level blade techs now we need. Siemens blade D’s or whatever they may be. So I think that it’s that industry really is, or that side of the industry is really frustrating because there’s Demand needed. There’s people there, but then the people, then the demand that’s needed says that people aren’t good enough. And then, and I think that to be honest with you, some of it is some of these employees get into the field and if you’ve done some, if you’ve made a bad mistake on one site or something, a lot of people know each other and then they have a hard time finding a job as well. Yeah. So I think what we need to do is have some more of a grassroots effort to communicate with new net new capacity here is at That high school level, that vocational technical school level. To just let people know where these opportunities are and how to get to them. Allen Hall: Oil and gas at the minute is pumping more product than ever before in the United States. There’s a huge draw towards oil and gas and oil and gas tends to pay a little bit better a Joel Saxum: lot bit better Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a lot better. Let’s just say it. It’s a lot better at the minute just because they’re just pumping so much petroleum product. So it’s hard for wind to keep up with that, but it does seem like there’s a lack of connectivity in wind. And many moons ago, Rosemary, you were a student and wanted to become a wind engineer. I don’t think I’ve heard this story before, so I’m interested in finding out, like, how did you want to become a wind blade specialist? Like, how did that happen? And was that something you just saw in school or is that something you learned at on your own? Rosemary Barnes: I wanted to work with renewables and my background was with aerodynamics and composite materials. And in particular, I always really loved composite materials. And. Knew that I’d have to study more because, yeah, composite materials are really complicated. You can’t really cover everything in an undergraduate degree. And my undergraduate degree was systems engineering, so quite broad. Yeah, obviously the combination of renewables, aerodynamics, composite materials means wind turbine blades. That’s the obvious place. I knew I wouldn’t probably get a job for, I wanted to work in manufacturing. So I went back to uni to do a PhD. And so I did a project on. When turbine blade design methods. And then I handed in my PhD thesis one day and the next day, the literal next day I was on an airplane to Denmark to meet the team where I had a job offer. So yeah, it was quite intentional. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Very purposeful. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And and there’s a lot of courses for engineering that will be, like renewable energy engineering or something quite specific like that, and there has been for a while, at least in Europe and I know that there’s a few like master’s courses in Australia like that. But when I was working for the manufacturer, it, people are just as happy to, or maybe even more happy to employ just the really standard engineering stuff. I’m a chemical engineer and electrical engineer, like you don’t, it doesn’t need to be so specific as a wind energy engineer. Joel Saxum: Alan, to your point, to sister onto that, as far as Rosemary’s. Purposeful and like kind of a plan. This is what I want to do. This is where I want to be. I think if we were able to get some more of the education of what the wind industry is, what it can offer you as a career into, like I say, into these early level, into the high schools, into these things to get to communicate with these, what could be that next era of workforce, then there could be plans put forth. Like I know myself when I was a junior in college or junior in college, junior in high school, I didn’t know what I was going to do. And I was talking to a high school teacher of mine and he was like yeah, this may be odd to you guys, but my undergrads actually is a land surveyor. So that’s my background, my educational background. But he said, I’d be a land surveyor. I get to work, you get to work outside, work with cool technology and you can make decent money. And I was like, all right, I’ll be a land surveyor. So that’s what I went for. But it’s the same thing with the wind industry. Like you don’t think about it. It’s a tertiary thing. And like oil and gas, if you’re in, Wyoming or Colorado, the front range of Colorado, or you’re in the Marcellus shale or you’re in. The Permian Basin, you think about oil and gas as a career path because it’s in front of you, it’s there, it’s accessible. The wind industry is in front of you and there and accessible in a lot of other places that like oil and gas isn’t. It’s just that people aren’t exposed to it. They just see the big turbines go by and they don’t know how would you get into that? How would you do it? What can a career offer you in it? And those kind of things. Allen Hall: That raises a good point, which is in relationship to To advertising for positions. When we’ve been in Texas and Oklahoma, I’ve seen postings about oil and gas jobs. I’ve never seen a posting about wind weirdly enough. Joel Saxum: Those hiring fairs where they just like the, some, somebody will go rent out like a conference room in a hotel and just say just come here, we will find you a job. Oil and gas Allen Hall: is super aggressive right now. And wind, I don’t think is so much in that mode of hiring like oil and gases right now. And maybe it’s just a. Turn of events where oil and gas just slows down maybe 10%, right? The amount of oil America is pumping out right now is amazing. But once that slows down, there’s gonna be a lot of employees. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, is it setting it up well though? Because the skills that you get from an oil and gas career translate pretty well to the wind industry, don’t they? I know a lot of people that have gone from one to the Joel Saxum: other. I would say the difference there, Rosemary, is if you’re an employee that has skills that could translate into the wind industry from the oil and gas world, When there’s a downturn, you don’t leave. They keep you. It’s the guys who are like roustabouts and stuff. They’re just like, Hey, you’re going to pick up truck, go out to these 20 wells today and check these valves. That guy that’s still, that guy still makes a hundred grand a year, but that person doesn’t have that many skills that translate because you don’t, there’s, that doesn’t exist in the wind industry. You gotta have something. You gotta be worse. You gotta be able to go and do something. There’s a lot of people in the oil field that are just like, Come to this hiring fair, you go there and they’re like, do you have a CDL? Because we can just use people to drive a truck around and they’ll pay him a hundred thousand dollars a year. Yeah. It’s a real competition. If you’ve got compressor skills or mechanical skills of some that are somewhat decent, like when there’s a downturn and they get rid of 40 percent of the staff, they’re keeping you because you’re worth Allen Hall: keeping. But the thing about wind is it’s localized, right? Once you find a position, you’re going to stay there for, you got a 20 year job if you want it. Yeah, Philip Totaro: theoretically, yeah. But the, there’s two two things. One, Joel, don’t worry about it because George Washington was also a land surveyor before, he ended up being our nation’s first president and getting a state named after him. Joel Saxum: Hey, all four presidents on the, on Mount Rushmore. They got room for a fifth face Philip Totaro: up there, Joel, or? No, so the real issue here is this, it seems like companies aren’t willing to train people up. They want somebody that’s already credentialed and certified, they’ve got an errata four or whatever, three, four level something. And it’s not everybody’s going to have that. And you’re going to have to find some of these people who are younger and enthusiastic that need to be trained up and need to be upskilled to be able to have a contribution. here. I met a guy in Minneapolis at the Clean Power event, works for Deutsche Windtechnik, name’s John. And he went through a a university program for wind energy specifically. And he told me all about and I was amazed, like they, they’re teaching them about, project development and a little bit of finance, a little bit of, what a site tech does and just everything, all the aspects of it, but that’s only, those kinds of programs are a little bit few and far between. So that’s one aspect of it. So people aren’t getting the proper education that they need to be getting in, a university environment, but they’re also then trying to come into the workforce and not getting the appropriate level of training. And that’s where it’s not just okay, let’s find, and get GWO matched up with some kind of trade school. It’s more than that. It’s something that frankly, probably used to happen a little bit more back in the good old days when we would do a lot more grassroots things and was more involved at the state level. And had more boots on the ground. Nowadays, they’re, predominantly focused on federal policy. They’ve left kind of state level things and grassroots things to these different regional organizations that probably aren’t doing as much outreach on things like job opportunities and educational programs. that you’re, you’ve been talking about, so that’s where we seem to have a gap at the moment in terms of what the industry wants and what’s available. Rosemary Barnes: I was listening to a podcast with Jagger Shaw recently, and he was talking about everything that they’re doing with the government is doing to try to get. Yeah, the jobs to match up with this, big push on manufacturing because, for decades, the U. S. has basically been encouraging either, inadvertently or advertently, that’s the word, to offshore everything, all the manufacturing and now all of a sudden we want to onshore and it’s not, they realize that’s not something that’s just going to happen. And he was saying that one of the, a big part of his job, I think he’s at the loans office. And a big part of his job is getting people companies to understand what is available to support them. And so he was saying that, a lot of people don’t realize the program’s available. And I’m definitely no expert. I’m not even an American living there. Looking into a bit more, but he was saying companies can actually, go to their local community college and have a course made that will suit the needs of the company. It’s not even, cause it’s, it’s one of my. Topic that I frequently roll my eyes over is companies complaining that there’s not enough skilled workers But they want people coming out of university that are trained to work at their company which is not how university really works or high school or vocational colleges But in this case, it seemed like it is how it can work You can actually you know have the the University of the Community College, whatever You can have them design a course specifically related to the skills that you need. So I wonder if, all of the wind companies that are lacking workers, if they’re aware of these programs. I think it sounds like they really are trying to bridge this gap and help people out. But I also think that companies need to remember that back when you did, manufacture a lot in the U. S. And back when, more things were done locally, that companies invested in their staff and, they trained them and they kept them on board for a long time. And that’s why. They used to have all those skills available because they made sure they had them available. So I do think we need a little bit more of that as well. Allen Hall: Sort of chicken and the egg though, Rosemary. The number of technical training programs exist in the U. S. high schools has dropped dramatically over the last 20 years. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah it’s obviously got to rise if you want manufacturing local again, then you know, that just can’t continue. But I think it, It’s also one of the problems is probably the same as problem across the wind industry, the whole world over that, that, the pipeline of projects is just so lumpy, companies aren’t confident to invest in stuff like training up hiring a lot of people and training up the workforce. They want, people that they can hire seasonally to, to fill a need because they don’t know if they’ll need them again next year. Allen Hall: As much as Jigar Shah can push out loans. It really is not going to have any effect on the low level workforce that is now entering into the wind industry. What’s happening in the United States is what Pierce is doing, TSL STL, all the places that Joel and I visited when we were in Texas a few weeks ago, they’re creating their own facilities to train people. The community colleges in the United States are not going to be the leader in that. It’s going to be the companies that are working in wind right now. And they’re all creating their own training facility. It wasn’t who must Rangel’s doing the same thing, right? Aren’t, GEV. Joel Saxum: So that’s their solution to fixing the pain that they have, right? Because they’re like, we, At the end of the day, they’re tired of trying to rely on outside sources for these people. They’re just like, screw it we’ll recruit and train them on our own. And and I think part, part of that’s driven economically, right? Because if you have to go outsource someone to get GWOs, you’re like, oh, we got to do 10 guys. That’s 25 grand. For 25, 000, we can build our own training center in our office. And, why would we outsource that? But then that leads to being able to train more people. I think one of the issues here that, Alan, you touched on it with the vocational and technical programs in our high schools. You’re going to have to gamify and make an app of how to maintain these turbines to get any of these young kids to even want to look at them because they’re not going to pick up a wrench. Just don’t do it. Philip Totaro: Keep in mind to the IRA bill, which has provisions in it for, additional production tax credit benefits for pay or requirements for paying prevailing wages. To site technicians that hasn’t really had any kind of dramatic impact on increasing wages overall for site techs, because most of them were already getting at or above the prevailing wage within that the county where, the wind turbines or wind farm was installed in the first place. Policy wise, we’re not going to get there. It’s going to be incumbent on the industry to have to invest in this if you want to see, anything happen. Allen Hall: I’ve never seen a company regulate themselves into prosperity. Definitely not. And I think it’s an easy answer for Jigar Shah to say the community colleges can start their own program. You know how hard that is? That’s why no one’s doing it. And the reality is that all these companies, Pierce being one of them of many that they’re having to build these massive training facilities and train people on their own. I think that the trainability is there in a lot of the students that show up and Joel and I met numbers of them while we were at the Pierce facility. So it’s a little odd that NREL is saying they can’t find people in the meantime, Pierce and TSL, STL, all these companies are out there doing it. Live we just saw it. So there’s a there’s this like the government doesn’t understand what’s happening And which is a sad part right NREL should be able to say hey all these great facilities that these companies are developing GEV be another one that are producing students producing workers. We should support that Joel Saxum: I don’t know if they are I can’t tell When was the last time that we knew our government to do something that was intelligent and or know what’s going on the ground? Allen Hall: It really is trouble. It’s, that’s why I brought this NREL report up was because it just seems so disconnected from the realities of the situation on the ground. It didn’t make any sense to me. Yeah, it’s and the one thing that the federal government does have an input into is the education requirements for students across the United States They were leading the effort to drop all the technical training classes that happened in the United States not long ago So here we are like Rosemary pointed out. Yeah, you’re gonna have to train some people Hey, Uptime listeners, we know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES Wind is written by the experts. So you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication. SSE has announced that the commercial operation state for the massive 1. 2 gigawatt Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm in the UK has been pushed back to 2025. Ouch. Despite progress on monopile and transition piece installation, challenging weather conditions, vessel availability, and quote unquote supply chain issues have impacted the timeline for turbine installation. SSC, which owns a 40 percent stake in the project expects turbine commissioning and export to occur in tandem with installation over the summer months, targeting a full commercial operations in the first half of 2025. Phil, what happened here on Dogger Bank A? Philip Totaro: It’s, this isn’t the first time we’ve had a chance to touch on this on the show because at the end of the day, it looks like vessel availability is playing the biggest role. But the fact that they specifically, SSE specifically mentioned supply chain issues, I think harkens back to this issue that they had at the Schauberg blade facility in France that LM Windpower had an issue with one of the molds. And there, it seemed to be some kind of industrial accident, and, there’s conflicting, it seems, reports, because if you talk to people from LM, they’ve said, Oh all the blades for Dogger Bank A were already, produced and were sitting in port waiting to be transported. But then, if those blades, if this mold was supposed to be for blades for Dogger Bank B, then why is SSE saying that there are supply chain issues? What other supply chain issue is there? Besides something like that, I, I think all the other components for the turbines are available or didn’t have any other kind of known production issues. This, the blades seem to have this sort of issue. Rosemary Barnes: I think when I’ve worked on projects that have gone a bit wrong, my part of the project has delayed, that there’s a high chance, like when you’re working on, something new, which I mean, these turbines are new then there’s a high chance of many aspects of it, going wrong. And so when it’s your part, that’s causing a delay, or, there’s going to be a delay, You start really hoping that there’s going to be another one somewhere as well so that it’s not all pinned on you. And there usually is, right? Because, when you do something for the first time, it always takes longer than you think. I think it’s going to be really hard to actually tease apart, what was the one thing that caused the biggest delay? Because, if the I don’t know, if a ship has a delay of one day longer than what they’re able to get the blade situation under control, then the blades can say it wasn’t us, it was a ship, which is true, but only so I, I would guess that there would be quite, quite a lot of things going on there and you’re never gonna get the reality of it from reading press releases as, it’s like that analogy of, The, duck swimming looks very calm above the water, but below ground, it’s all scrambling. Every single one of these, first of a kind wind farms that goes out has got a lot of scrambling duck feet underneath the water. And, you only get to, you only get to look underwater when you know, there’s something big happens and it gets announced. So yeah, I didn’t know how to tease it apart. Allen Hall: That was a great explanation of corporate planning. There’s, it’s all chaos anyway, so no one can be sure what’s exactly happening. And from the book that you always tell us about Rosemary, how, Joel Saxum: how was it, how big things get done? Every, everybody’s scrambling. Rosemary Barnes: No, it’s not. It’s not, but you only need to have your D’laby one day less than somebody else’s for it to not get pinned on you. Joel Saxum: That’s if you run into a grizzly bear in the woods, you don’t have to be the fastest. You just gotta be faster than the guy next to you. Allen Hall: What’s the analogy in Australia for that, Rosemary? Is that a crocodile or a emu? What is it? Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. An Australian one, actually. I have to think, but yeah maybe A drop bearer or a hoop snake. Allen Hall: Hoop snake? Rosemary Barnes: Have you got hoop snakes in America? Allen Hall: I hope not. Rosemary Barnes: Oh, yeah, no, it’s a snake that it puts its tail in its mouth and then it can roll along so it can go very fast and yeah, chase people down. Allen Hall: That is not real, is it? Deadly. Deadly. Deadly? Deadly how? Rosemary Barnes: They roll, they, they put their tail in their mouth so it’s like a hoop. That’s why they’re called a hoop snake. And then they can roll along like much faster than a slithering snake can travel. And so they can. Yeah, they can hunt down, small children and dogs and yeah, anyone. Small Allen Hall: children and dogs. I do not understand Australia. I just don’t. Joel Saxum: It has a venomous tail. It’s not, it doesn’t bite you at its tail, stings you. Wow. Oh, so here’s how, here’s where we go. The snake grasps his tail in his mouth and rolls after its prey, thereby achieving great speed, especially when going downhill. At the end of the tip of its tail is a highly venomous stinger. The snake straightens out at the last second, skewering its victim with its venomous tail. The only escape is to hide behind a tree, which receives the deadly blow instead and promptly dies from the poison. Okay, that part might not be real. Allen Hall: All the rest of it’s real. Have you experienced a hoop snake? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, for sure. I haven’t been stung by one, obviously. Allen Hall: Thank God. Wow. Okay. Alright. Alright, Rosemary, in a move to reduce fuel consumption and emissions, Mitsui OSK Lines and it’s subsidiary, MOL Drybulk are outfitting seven new bulk carriers and multi purpose vessels with wind propulsion technology. Here we go! Now we’re talking about putting fiberglass blades on ships. So six ships will feature MOL’s wind challenge or telescoping hard sails, while some may also incorporate Animoid Marine Technologies rotor sails system, and I think I’ve talked to them actually so Rosemary, they’re basically putting these big blades or sails, they’re generally made out of fiberglass, on ships to reduce the fuel burn, and they say they can cut fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions by somewhere between 15 and almost 30 percent annually and I haven’t seen one of these ships in Real life, all I see at this point is just images of what these ships are going to look like. But this is turning into a real thing. It does seem like there’s a lot of technology and ships and sort of winter blades on the front of them. Sometimes multiple blades set up on these ships to reduce fuel burn. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I have a list actually of of this examples of this technology. I’m working on one day. I will work on a video about it. It’s definitely a real thing and there’s heaps of them coming out. I’ve got five versions of this on my list so far. And maybe I need to add another one. We’ve got wind wings, rotor sails, sea wing, ventafoil, and sky sails, which they gave up on that. It’s a airborne wind system that they initially were doing on ships, but now they’ve just transferred over to purely focusing on land based one, but maybe they’ll move back. But yeah, no there’s quite a few around and these emissions savings, they’re not or fuel savings, it’s not just calculations. It’s actual, measured values by now from from some of them at least. So yeah, it’s definitely interesting. The whole shipping industry is interesting. I think emissions from shipping, if you add it all up, it’s like the eighth largest country, the same size of emissions. And so Definitely significant. And it’s a bit of a hard challenge, not necessarily because the technology is hard, but because the fuel that they use currently is so bloody cheap, but, they use a literal bottom of the barrel with the heavy fuel oil. Yes, you can use biofuel as a drop in fuel, but a lot of other industries want biofuel like aviation, for example, is really short on sustainable aviation fuel, which is largely. Made from biofeed stocks and you can imagine that, like the airline industry can pay a lot more for their fuel if there’s, if it’s in short supply, which it is then yeah, it’s you can imagine shipping is going to have a hard time finding it. And I know I, I have spoken with some people in the shipping industry while I’ve been working on a video on that. They are having trouble finding enough biofuel, so they’re adding, nobody is attempting to, go back to sailing ships that are purely wind powered, but, if you do you put these wings on your ship and you can save 15 30 percent of your fuel, then that’s a big emissions reduction chunk right up front. And secondly, if you combine it with some fuel that’s a bit more expensive or hard to get, then you need less of it. So I think that there’s heaps of small or not small. 15, 30 percent isn’t small, but there’s quite a lot of examples of, I guess this would be like an efficiency gain. They’ve got some other, redesigning the hulls. You can save a lot from redesigning the hull to be more hydrodynamic. Also just going slower as well. So they’re doing a bit of work with AI to optimize the logistics so that you don’t, go full steam ahead. Just, travel really fast and then wait in the line in the port. So they’re trying to, have, be just in time so that you go slower and save the fuel that way you can get big savings. Yeah, and then the other technologies to move beyond just efficiency and to zero emissions, they’re a little way away. We’re starting to see some some methanol ships being purchased, but methanol is quite expensive. Green methanol is expensive and also in short supply. And then in the long term. Probably ammonia is the one that people are most commonly investing in, but those engines don’t exist, they don’t exist yet. There’s huge safety concerns related to ammonia and they haven’t quite been solved. But there are companies working on it and they expect to, you’ll be selling engines in a couple of years. And a lot of ships are being made that are ammonia ready. But. That sounds more advanced than it is because yeah, when I heard ammonia ready, I thought, okay, so they’ve got an engine there and they’re just waiting for the ammonia fuel to put into it. But what it really is they’re like we know we don’t know how to make an ammonia engine, but we know it’s going to be bigger. So make your engine room bigger. And then now your ship is ammonia ready. That’s the extent of it. Yeah, but that said, it’s only the really long distance stuff that needs these complicated solutions for the shorter stuff, which makes up quite a lot of the proportion of global shipping. There’s already a lot of electric and hydrogen fuel cells as well. So there’s, there’s a really wide range of options. And it’s an interesting one. It’s one where I’m not really. Convinced that I understand what the future is going to look like here. Allen Hall: The limitation on these sails is the bridge heights that as you come into port, usually you have to go underneath a bridge, right? So that limits how high these things can go. So Rosemary Barnes: they fall down. Allen Hall: Some don’t. Rosemary Barnes: Some don’t. Okay. Allen Hall: Some collapse, some fold. Some collapse down, you’re right, yeah. But even then, you still have to, you have this sort of complicated telescoping bit, or the mechanism to fold it. It makes it harder, right? But, it does, weirdly, change how you design the ships. Cause you think you’d just build the biggest sail you could possibly build, right? And we know how to make 100 meter long fiberglass, carbon fiber fiberglass blades for wind turbines. It wouldn’t seem like a straight line. Two out of the round to put some really big sails on these ships, but you can’t get into port. Rosemary Barnes: The ones that I’ve seen, and I haven’t, like fully researched this, but the prototype ones that I have seen have mostly taken an existing ship and put on a sail onto it. So they haven’t redesigned a whole ship around. So that obviously is going to limit the, the loads, the extra loads that you’re going to be able to put through it.  I would expect that, once this is proven out in a few years, if it becomes popular, then we’re going to see them get bigger and, have more of an impact. Yeah, so it, it’s the kind of thing that a couple of years ago, if you said, yeah, we’ll go back to, to wind power for shipping. People would think that was such a today, like a hippie kind of idea that, we’ll just transport everything by sailing ship again. But here we are with so many shipping companies taking this very seriously. So I think it’s super cool. Joel Saxum: I actually think at Rosemary, I’ve been, I was looking into some of this is the efficiency mechanisms for some of these large shipping things. Cause I dealt with some people in Houston that were making Really cool biofouling coatings. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah that’s one of them. Joel Saxum: Yeah the, two, one was biofouling coatings. I also have a connection to some people that made a an ROV called the Bat. Cause it kinda looks like a bat, but like it goes in the water, and then it sucks onto the bottom of the ship, magnetically, and then it cleans it and inspects it. Cleans all the stuff off, like while they’re in port. So they pull them in port to offload, they just have these things, That can be rigged up on the side of the, on quay side and they just Oh, ship’s here, throw them in and they autonomously clean the whole bottom of the boat and then pull them out when they leave. It’s pretty slick. Rosemary Barnes: I was just going to say, that’s why I’ve just pulled up my draft script on shipping in general and the efficiency gains. Yeah, it’s hull design, operational strategies defouling technologies. And wind assistance is a kind of, like efficiency, but it’s really interesting because, if you look at the regulations that they’re introducing for shipping in the EU, and I think that the international maritime organization, IMO is also bringing them in they it’s a really interesting example of how it matters, what kinds of regulations that you bring in, because. From what I’ve seen, a lot of the plan revolves around replacing a certain amount of fuel, like a certain percentage of fuel has to be low carbon. And so then it’s you don’t then get the option to be more efficient because that doesn’t count, you, you can’t save 10 percent of your fuel needs by efficiency gains because you still won’t have any zero emissions fuel. So you would need to. Still go down the fuel route. So yeah, I think it really it really, the regulations that countries choose to make or organizations choose to make to move towards net zero, you can inadvertently dictate the technology that has to be chosen by by the way that you do it. So if if you say that you got to do fuel blending and gradually increase the percentage of of sustainable fuel that you use. you locked into a fuel route because otherwise a company that just goes for, a total, like a totally electric or totally wind based solution is going to, make zero progress every year until they finally get rid of it all, all at once, more or less. They get around that a bit by having it averaged out across a whole fleet, but yeah, no, it is really interesting to think how. Like regulators don’t usually want to choose winners in, in technologies, but you can end up doing it by mistake if you design your scheme without that in mind. Allen Hall: You don’t design a scheme without corporate interests putting their fingers in it ever, right? So you, we always shocked at the way it’s written is because somebody’s written it for them. Rosemary Barnes: And it depends who had the loudest voice or who they trusted more, like Europe’s policies are, a lot of people think that they’re, so skewed towards hydrogen because there was this one particular hydrogen obsessed guy that, run around convincing all the relevant people that, That was super important. And yeah, if you’ve got companies that want to sell ammonia, then you’re going to end up with, that in your regulations. 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.

Invenergy enters the Spanish offshore wind market with a planned 552 MW floating wind farm. Iberdrola considers selling US renewable assets to fund its Avangrid acquisition. Tata Power secures a major loan to finance clean energy projects in India, while National Grid divests US assets to focus on UK decarbonization. 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 NewsFlash. NewsFlash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at intelstor.com. Invenergy has announced its entry into the spanish offshore wind market with the proposed oh boy floating wind farm the planned capacity 552 megawatt site Is will be the furthest site away from the shoreline of spain if approved it will power over 600 thousand Spanish households. Wow, Phil the construction of the offshore floating wind farm is estimated to take between eight and ten years with Invenergy prioritizing local hiring and procurement through the project’s development. So this is a really neat project by Invenergy, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah, it’s interesting too, because the Spanish are trying to get an offshore market going. There’s, something like 40 plus gigawatts of projects that have been kind of tentatively proposed for different tenders that they’re supposed to have in Spain, but they haven’t actually gotten a framework in place for how any kind of You know, subsidies are going to work. And I think power offtake may also still be a bit of a challenge there as far as the infrastructure needed to be able to support this much capacity. But the fact that, I mean, this is, and we’ve talked before about the fact that Invenergy is not exactly a U. S. company. They’re, it’s Canadian majority owned company as far as their, their parent investor, but let’s say they’re, the first occasion where I can recall a North American based company anyway, is venturing off into the European offshore wind market. So this is pretty interesting and, and an exciting play for them. Joel Saxum: One of the nice things here is that, that northwest corner of Spain. Good deep water port as well. So, the area’s gonna be primed and ready for it. There’s some demand locally there. They’re ready and willing to go here. 552 megawatts for a floating offshore wind farm. That’s again, I think last week we talked about the largest one we’ve heard of. This is now the largest one I’ve heard of. And the facilities are there, ready to go. Keyside to put these things out. So, 8 to 10 years, I think we’ll see a big floating wind farm there. Allen Hall: Spanish utility company Iberdrola is considering selling a 50 percent stake in a portfolio of U. S. renewable energy assets, which includes 400 megawatts of solar plants and 300 megawatts of onshore wind. For an estimated 1. 6 to 1. 8 billion us dollars. The company is working with the bank of America on the potential sale and plans to formally launch the process in July with the aim of completing the transaction by the end of the year. This move comes as part of a broader review of Iberdrola’s strategy in the U S following its recent agreement to fully acquire its subsidiary of on grid for 2. 5, 5 billion. So, Phil, are they helping to fund the purchase of Avangrid with the sell off of a portion of Avangrid’s assets? Philip Totaro: It sounds like it, yes. But keep in mind what we’ve also talked about is, first, they’re looking to deploy some capital in offshore, so it could be that they’re going to reuse some of this capital for that. They’re also coming up at a point in time when, like we’ve talked about on the show before, they’re You know, at a point where they’re contemplating the repower on some of these assets as well. So part of this portfolio that they’re offering for sale could just be assets that are, the closest to the end of their PPA life. Because again, as we’ve talked about there, Iberdrola, it hasn’t been doing kind of a 10 year PTC driven repower. Because despite how lucrative the production tax credit is, if they repower, they might have to renegotiate their PPA. And since they have such lucrative PPAs on a lot of their assets, they’re letting the PPAs expire. And then they’re going to look at repowering their assets. So, presumably, this 300 megawatts of wind is what’s kind of oldest in their portfolio and probably closest to the end of the PPA life, which means that they can sell it off to some investor who wants to be able to repower the site and run, run it from there. Joel Saxum: What it sounds like to me is there’s a play here in the United States with a lot of these assets coming up for sale. for a company to come in that is good at purchasing dilapidated assets or not, not necessarily dilapidated, but performance rundown assets and getting them back up to running for running at a higher efficiency. And I’ve heard of a few companies doing that, but I think there’s openings for more. Allen Hall: Indian conglomerate Tata Power is in talks with several lenders to secure a loan of up to 1 billion U. S. dollars. The funds will be used to finance Tata Power’s clean energy projects, including a 1. 6 billion investment in pumped hydro storage. The loan, which could be the largest local currency loan in India this year, is expected to be finalized within the next three to six months. Tata Power aims to expand its renewable generation capacity by nearly four times by 2027. Phil, there’s so much activity in India at the moment, and Tata is not going to be left out of that activity, and it’s taking a huge loan out to be part of it. Philip Totaro: Yeah, and well, so India’s the market where they’ve gigawatts and gigawatts worth of capacity. In, in wind and solar and we’re gonna, decarbonize and, build out transmission and, and all this stuff. And for so many years, I mean, I’ve been in the industry 17 years. And I’ve heard this since almost day one the good news is it sounds like it’s finally happening because companies aren’t out there, taking out billion dollar loans unless they’re actually serious about spending the capital. So India still struggles a little bit with kind of discrepancies between the Independent power producers and what are called the discoms or the power distribution companies over there. So that still caused a bit of consternation. I mean, bottom line, like whenever these guys strike a, a PPA agreement almost immediately, they, one side or the other wants to try renegotiating it because of inflation or other, operational concerns that have driven up costs and whatnot. But. The good news is on the whole the Indian market looks like it’s getting its act together. They do besides a market like Brazil, which is doing like one auction this year, India does an auction almost once every six weeks for, for power capacity. So, they’ve got a regular routine now where, a significant amount of power blocks are, are available and whether it’s existing capacity that can be bid into these auctions or new capacity, like what taught a power wants to be able to get this this loan to, to produce they’re out there right now with reliant with a Donnie group with continuum and, and a lot of other big companies, renew power a lot of companies in India that are, starting to open the purse strings, so to speak, and, and start deploying the capital that’s needed to be able to get this infrastructure built, both on the generation side and transmission. Joel Saxum: Like you were saying at the beginning of the section there a lot of power, a lot of power generation, a lot of movement here in India. We’re seeing even possible OEMs pop up down there, big moves by Siemens to some, someone might grab that thing and run with it. What they sell off some Siemens assets. But we are talking, I mean, on the weather guard side, we talk with a lot of people that are working in India. So, there’s a, there’s rumors of, and they have started construction on a site that at the end of the day is supposed to be 30 gigawatts up in the Northwest corner of the country. One site of solar, it’s going to be like a hybrid energy production area. Okay. But that’s, I mean, unprecedented globally. So, kudos to the, to India for putting their money where the mouth is. Allen Hall: National grid has announced plans to sell its grain LNG terminal in the UK and it’s us onshore renewables business, national grid renewables. The decision comes as the company outlines a 60 billion pound investment plan to accelerate. The decarbonization of the energy system and become a pure play networks business. Now, Phil, there seems to be a lot of companies exiting the United States. National grid is not a huge presence in the States, but it is another indicator that maybe the busy activity is not in the United States at the moment at. Philip Totaro: Well, it’s, it’s fascinating because like we’ve talked about on Newsflash before, there are any number of companies that have a small to medium sized portfolio that are probably looking at selling products. Predominantly, if their primary focus of their business, like National Grid, in their case, it’s, operating as a utility and, and transmission and distribution company. So asset ownership was something that they kind of inherited. They, if you recall, a number of years ago, they actually bought Geronimo, which is how they ended up with the, the asset portfolio that they had. But the reason for that acquisition was just an opportunistic thing. This is basically in partly you could call it kind of asset rotation type of thing where, they want to be able to redeploy their capital. Now that particularly the UK government is serious about doing a lot more on onshore transmission this gives a company like National Grid, which is obviously has that significant presence in that market. This gives them the opportunity to refocus their their, their capital on that infrastructure build out.

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum speak with Brandon McKelvain and Jeremy McKelvain from Safety Technology USA (STL) to discuss their trailblazing WindStart program. They visited STL’s impressive training facilities in Abilene, Texas and discovered how the organization is addressing the critical shortage of wind technicians through hands-on, industry-focused education. 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. The U. S. wind industry needs to train thousands of new wind turbine technicians in the coming years to meet our ambitious goals for wind energy deployment. And today we’re joined by Brandon McKelvain training manager at Safety Technology USA. Better known as STL. Also, Jeremy McKelvain who is the WindStart program manager at Safety Technology USA. Safety Technology USA, which is commonly called STL for short, is a leading wind technician training organization that provides industry standard accredited courses. Their goal is to help build the wind workforce. of the future by training safer, more competent entry level and intermediate technicians. Joel and I visited the Safety Technology USA training facilities in Abilene, Texas recently. So if you haven’t been to Abilene, you should visit their facility. It’s pretty impressive. There we met with Brandon, and we’re really impressed by the level of training equipment and the variety of training programs. So Brandon, Jeremy, welcome to the program. Brandon McKelvain: Yeah, thank you, Allen. Allen Hall: We need thousands of wind technicians. And right now, especially in West Texas, where you guys are there’s a huge demand for technicians that are trained and are knowledgeable in the wind industry. And, one of the, one of the programs you have To do that is the wind start program. And I want to start there because I want to everybody understand what is the wind start program. And if you want to get into wind, why would you choose that program? Jeremy McKelvain: What we do is we go out to career fairs trade schools, community college. advertise WindStart. Yes, it is STL or safety technology but it’s a program for it. We get them interested and tell them what we offer through our WindStart program at safety technology, get them interested and then get them signed up for these classes. Give them their relevant training, all their certifications give them some extra training as well. That’s a little bit more technical to prepare them for an entry level job into the wind industry. And then connect them with our partners that we have, our customers that we have for interviews, try and get them hired on right away. You mentioned that we have thousands of people that we need to hire. By 2030, it’s estimated that we need to hire close to 500, 000 bodies for the wind industry. So doing this as a wind star program as the manager go in and we try and find those bodies there. You get good paying jobs. You have a reliable career. And for me, my whole thing was, I love helping people. I love helping people and guiding people. I’ve done it for 20 years in the Air Force. Now I just transitioned into this, so that’s what the windstar program is a way to introduce people into the wind industry. Let’s be real. Let’s face it. Renewable energy is the way of the future and through safety technology, we can train those people through the windstar program and get them in an amazing career in wind as a wind technician. That’s it. Joel Saxum: So you guys are going to high schools, community colleges what other kind of community outreach you do you guys do? Cause you’re actually being like the boots on the ground, going and grabbing these people. Cause that’s what the industry needs, right? We know there’s training centers dot, dot it all over the place, but that effort to actually be the people that are going in talking to who could be these candidates and bringing them in to get them to that training. That’s what’s really needed. So you guys are actually doing the boots on the ground activities as well. Jeremy McKelvain: I went to one in Roswell, New Mexico last week that was for the job corps, for students young people who were either didn’t finish high school and they’re going back to finish their diploma, get their GED and learn some trait. They reached out and wanted to see if we could, If we could attend. And I went and those people, they were extremely excited to see me. The students were, but also the director of the job corps and some of their instructors that taught their electrical training, their painting, their construction, their plumbing. It’s just getting our voice out there, our name out there, and getting people interested for to basically spread the word on. Allen Hall: So who is your typical candidate? What, like where, what’s their background education level? What are they looking to do for, to further their career? Jeremy McKelvain: A lot of them know people, either friends or family that have been in the wind industry, and they know about it. They want to do it. They just don’t know how to get into it. Or we’ll have recent high school graduates. People that did not finish a four year degree that want a job, want a good, reliable, good paying job with benefits just like our partners have. And those are the ones that really seem to pique the interest. Somebody that wants to make something, make a better life for themselves and their families. Allen Hall: And are they primarily based in Texas or are they coming from elsewhere? Jeremy McKelvain: Right now we have traveled mainly through Texas. Thank you But I have had people reach out to me from Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico Iowa, South Africa. I’ve had people from the UK reach out. We are, we’re not going to discriminate. And that’s one of my big things that I definitely learned in the military is provide people a chance. Diversity makes your workforce. And different points of view, work ethics. That’s what we want. We want to give people a chance. We want to give them the tools to succeed in what we’re doing and what we can provide. Joel Saxum: Yeah. So right now we’re talking about the wind start program. So when someone goes into the wind start program, what can they expect as far as costs, the act of education, they come out of there, any certifications they come out with and it’s in the length of time so that, if they’re listening, go, okay, I understand basically what’s required of me. And. And what I’ll leave the program with. Jeremy McKelvain: Our WindStart program has has a couple of different options. We offer a three week course and a four week course. Our three week course focuses around the GWO certifications, the Global Wind Organization certifications. You get your basic safety training, your basic technical training, your advanced rescue training, and then you get to take an elective. Now that four week course, you’re going to get all of those things as well, but you’re also going to get An additional five days that focuses more on your technical training your your electrical, your mechanical, your hydraulics, things like that. That’s gonna be a little bit more industry specific, which everything really is. But that’s gonna. going to give you a little bit more, but that’s our four week course. Joel Saxum: So they may not come out of there as an expert, but at least he’s been exposed to, it’s going to not be the first time they’ve heard the word hydraulic or electric motor or something. When they get to the field, they may have, they’ll seen it before and they may have some working knowledge of it and, be that new team member that is going to need to be trained up in the real world, they’re not coming in completely green. They’ve got. They’ve got all their safety search. They’re ready to hit the field. And they’ve been exposed to the, the general concepts within a wind turbine. To me, they’ll be steps ahead, right? Light years ahead of someone that’s just walking off the street. Brandon McKelvain: The WindStar program, it really it hits home to me personally, because, What Jeremy’s talking about that was me, I didn’t have I wasn’t gonna go to school for four years I was you know, I was not suited well for that didn’t want anything to do with school But I needed a good pay a job, you know Wasn’t you know, I needed to get out and work, And that’s the other thing is, to go to a you know A two year trade school or something like that also wasn’t in the cards for me I needed something quick. I needed to just get in. And, fortunately I was hired, right out of high school, but I was just thrown off into the deep end, and there, there wasn’t good training for me for the first few years and whatnot. And then I linked up with a better company and I got the good training and I grew up around a shop atmosphere and, things like that. I knew, mechanics and, all that good stuff. My dad was a mechanic going to shop and. So I knew some stuff, but when it came to things like electricity, I knew nothing and I had no business being out there, so we come at it from a unique perspective. All of our instructors here have, most of them have over 10 years of field experience in this industry, and they really know what the competencies are and what we need. And all of us have that same perspective of man I wish I would have known this a long time ago. I wish I would have known this day one These are the fundamentals. Why aren’t why isn’t anybody teaching us these things, and it’s simple stuff, like schematics, digital multimeters just very basic fundamental things that we’ve tried to push into the Windstar program, for us, it’s the experience of this is the, this is what we feel like is the most pertinent information to get into three, four weeks, and that’s going to build safety, but it also triggers a base for for them to start growing as technicians. And those are the things we really want to focus on. Joel Saxum: So Brandon, now we’ve been talking about the WindStart program, but when Alan and I visited the facility, there was a lot more than that going on. Actually, matter of fact, we visited two facilities, right? We visited a brand new training center that you guys were building out for more technical. There was a frickin gearbox in there. You had awesome setups for bore scope inspections, and you had cabinets for, electrical training and all kinds of tools. It was a great, that was a great facility, but the first one we were at, All kinds of training going on, advanced rescue, you had mock ups of nacelles where people had to, pull, basically pull, what would be a body, I’m gonna call it a dummy, not that we’re, none of us are dummies, but they had to pull them, had to pull them through a whole tower set up out back for for rescue training and, going over, we talked at length about, that, that last step going over the edge when you’re descending on ropes, but you had all kinds of other training things and there, and the whole parking lot was full. There was people from. crane companies and service companies, ISPs doing all kinds of different safety training, CPR stuff. So you want to touch on some of the other things that you guys offer as well? Brandon McKelvain: Yeah, absolutely. Like Jeremy said, the GWO, the basic technical, basic safety, the advanced rescue we do a lot of QEW, qualified electrical worker training for low voltage, high voltage based on the 2024 version of 70E. That’s really popular and honestly, that’s become one of my favorite courses out there because I think that’s one of the things that the industry isn’t doing that great of a job, at least in terms of execution. So that one’s great. But yeah, the technical facility, we’re starting to build out more advanced courses gearbox, bore scope class we’re working on adding a Three phase motor control class. So I think that’s going to be very beneficial. That’s another thing that the I think is lacking a little bit as far as the, the education for our technicians because we deal with a lot of three phase and as and I’m just speaking from experience, but I didn’t understand three phase the way I should, so there we are again, we’re looking back at things that, really would have helped us as technicians, not only from a safety perspective, but, Also to just grow and develop, those are the things we’re trying to focus on. And, as we continue to build out those more advanced courses, that’s great. But really, the wind start is that, okay, what’s day one? What is what does it take to get somebody, say, out of high school or who wants to change career path? Somebody coming out of oil and gas, or a veteran coming out of the, services. What does it take to get them, not only safe, but also start introducing them? To, to these concepts that they’re really going to need as a technician in wind. Allen Hall: The facility if I’m coming into a training facility, one of the scary parts here is, does it have the latest equipment? Does it, are they, do they have classrooms that are upkept and clean? And do they have, even the fundamentals like, is there restrooms? Those kind of silly things matter if you’re going to be there for three or four weeks. If you’re going to be there for a day, Not mad or so much, but when Joel and I took the tour of both facilities, clean, up to date, modern, had all the proper equipment, particularly all the, like the voltmeters and all that kind of thing. Borescopes, new. The equipment that’s being used out in the real world. So it’s not such a huge jump where you’re going from the classroom to an actual turbine. That’s the stuff they’re using. And you’re putting your hands on it as a new entry. into that wind turbine technician world. You need that, right? You need to be familiar with the equipment they’re using out there. And I think this is where your training makes total sense for someone who’s coming into the industry that probably has mechanical skills, has some electrical skills as we see the new technicians roll in, but they haven’t played with the fancy toys yet. Joel Saxum: That may be the downfall. You guys stuff may be too advanced and too nice for them. They’re going to, they’re going to get out into a turbine and be like, this wasn’t what it was like when I was in training. Brandon McKelvain: But we can take them out of the tower whenever it’s 110 degrees, then they they get a good experience. Joel Saxum: Wait for a dust storm to roll through Abilene and then go outside. Come on guys. Brandon McKelvain: No, we really appreciate that. And and it, and again, I think that’s the, that’s the fidelity of this, and that’s why the experience really matters and coming from the industry and it’s certainly not me. We’ve got some really good instructors here and the secret is I’m a C minus guy myself, right? So if they can get their delivery to where I can understand what they’re teaching, hey we’re doing really good, and we have a good product, Allen Hall: Brandon, I want to get to that point because I do think people downgrade themselves based on what happened in high school. And I think that’s a tragic mistake. If you’re a C plus student in high school, it has really no influence on what you’re going to do going forward, right? It’s time to pick up that heavy load and put that on your back and do the right thing here. You can get educated. The people I mean are technicians or smart people, right? They may not have, they may not understand calculus, but who the heck cares? They make computers for that. Yeah, to each their own. But the thing is Joel and I spent a good couple of weeks in Oklahoma and Texas meeting a whole bunch of technicians Those guys are doing all right. A lot of them are doing great. Yeah, it’s, it can be a great profession and you don’t have to have a perfect high school score to get in to learn how to do electrical work, to do how, learn how to do mechanical work, to learn how to climb a turbine. Those things are skills. Those are your hands and your brains working together, which is a talent still. Brandon McKelvain: Yeah, and and this was something that really changed me whenever I got into the training was, Oh, very good. You realize exactly what you said, high school, even college is really no basis to what, you can do is in terms of performance in your career. Because a lot of that is focused around teacher centered learning lectures and things like that, which are great for some people, but not for a lot of us, especially the ones that are going to be more technician more hands on or go into more vocational schemes. So we try to make things as student centered as possible. That’s where all those tools and, the meters and all that stuff comes in because you, if you’re putting those on the desk and they have something to touch and to follow along with, and then at the end of it, they have a knowledge check to where they can go out in the shop and they can try to implement the knowledge that you’re trying to to give them it’s great. And that’s not only just, that’s just adult learners in general, I think, because we have good experience, you’re not dealing with people that have nothing, you can. You can find something that they know that they’re already really sharp at. And we just, we try to just build on that. Joel Saxum: And like you said, all of your trainers are ex technicians. So they’ve been through it. They’ve been in that position before they’d been in the turbine. They, it’s not you’re listening to an HR professor teach you about HR. That’s never actually worked in the, in HR. You know what I mean? So and I guess and I guarantee that almost all of you can be on the same page as this one is sometimes a client, an asset owner will send some of their engineers from the back office out to the field to go visit the turbines. Those people need their hands held by the technicians that are out there doing the work when they go up tower. And this hands in your pockets, hands in your pockets. Allen Hall: So let’s talk about how people can get rolled, enrolled at STL either in the WindStart program or some of your GWO training that’s there. How does that happen? What’s the, Best steps to get started here. Brandon McKelvain: Yeah if people want to sign up they can go to our websites. We have a tab dedicated to the WindStart program. Very short information that they fill out and then somebody gets in contact with them gives them, a lot of good detail on the program which is also available on the website. But if they have any questions or, want to talk to somebody Jeremy will be reaching out to them or somebody else. Joel Saxum: Yeah. One of the things I want to touch on here as well as there is some financial assistance available. So through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. There’s a possibility of up to 4, 500 towards course fees. There’s also some Sally Mae funding eligible. And then you guys actually, I believe because of the IRA bill are working forward towards getting that apprenticeship program going that will fulfill that for people in the field as well. Brandon McKelvain: That is correct. And those are all things that we’re super excited about. Because, we recognize that not everybody can do this, financially and, you look, let’s be honest. We’re targeting people that want to get out there quickly and start working, right? So they probably, they’re ready to go make some money. So if we can assist them in any way, that’s exactly what we want to try to do. And we’re already starting to do that right here on our own backyard. Abilene is, I call it The wind capital of Texas, and like you guys said, there’s a lot of technician jobs just in West Texas. So let’s start right here, we’re starting to reach out to as many people as we can and just letting them know. And, Jeremy touched on it earlier. I think a lot of it is, there’s plenty of people that want into the industry, but they have no clue where to start. And, you think about it this way, probably the top five emplo employers that have the most technicians in the U. S. If you weren’t in the industry, you probably have no clue who they are, I could say some really big names to you guys, and sure, yeah, I know all about them. But if I say it to somebody who’s getting out of high school or is just outside the industry in general, They go, okay, that’s cool, but they have no clue some of them. They go. Oh, I didn’t know they did that I thought they just made microwaves, right? And you guys can you can deduce who I’m talking about But that’s the point, and so I think that’s why things like the wind start program and what Jeremy’s doing this grassroots approach of He’s he’s My heart goes out to him because it’s got to be frustrating, because he’s going out there and he’s having these same conversations again and and, but that’s what needs to happen. That’s what needs to happen. I don’t know how else you do it, unless you start running ads in the Superbowl or something. But that’s it was. Joel Saxum: We’ll wait to see that next year. But you guys are also doing your, you’re helping buy side sell side, right? So all the companies the big ones that we’re talking about, whether it’s an OEM or a big ISP or anybody, they’re looking for people. Contact STL as well, because not only can you get your people that you have trained, but they’re bringing in a pool and Jeremy becomes basically one of your best recruiters that you actually don’t pay for. Because he’s going out grassroots, grabbing the people, getting them trained, and then basically can provide you a portfolio of, Hey, all these guys are ready to hit all these guys or girls ready to hit the field. You want some of them? And they’re already vetted. They already have a little bit of training that’s. So if I was an ISP, I’d be contacting you guys. Brandon McKelvain: Absolutely. And that’s the idea. People can scoop them up as they come through the program and they’ve had some financial assistance. Hey that’s even better for the companies, cause otherwise they’re going to hire them without experience and then send them here anyway, probably. So it’s a win for everybody and that’s what we’re trying to do. Jeremy mentioned that 500k number, which just is crazy to me every time I hear that, is all we know to do, to try to start chipping away at that. And hopefully, everybody else gets on board with that. Start talking to your neighbors start in your own community, there’s plenty of hard working people out there, I worked some really hard jobs growing up, did some, pre bar roofing, construction, things like that, and it makes you appreciate, finding a good job, finding a good career, so I know there’s a lot of hard working talent out there. And what we’re teaching isn’t rocket science, it’s, it, you can get as deep into it as you want, but at an entry level for a wind tech, you can pick this stuff up pretty easy. You just need a good work mentality. You got to show up and be a hard worker and listen and learn and. That’s it. You can do really good. Allen Hall: Like you said, Brandon, we have a lot of technicians that need to fill that void in there. Oh, there’s several good paying jobs available right now. So if you get trained up you can be part of the wind revolution that’s happening in Texas and all around the United States. So reach out to everybody at STL by going to the website at safetytechnologyusa. com. Brandon, Jeremy, it’s been great to have you on the program and yeah, keep us up to date as things progress because the wind technician shortage needs to end and you’re part of that fix. Thank you guys. Brandon McKelvain: Thank you, Allen. Thank you, Joel.

Phil Totaro, CEO of IntelStor, dives deep into the latest trends and data surrounding onshore wind turbine blade operations and maintenance costs. He discusses the strategies and innovations being employed to optimize blade performance, reduce downtime, and drive down costs. 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. As the wind energy industry continues to grow and mature, the focus on reducing costs and improving efficiency has never Been more important. Operations and maintenance costs can account for a significant portion of the total cost of energy production, making it a critical area of concern for wind farm operators and energy users alike. In this episode, Phil Totaro, CEO and founder of IntelStor, will share the latest data and trends related to Onshore Wind Turbine Blade Operations and maintenance costs, which everybody’s wondering about is going to provide some valuable insights into the current state of the blade industry and how we manage blades. You also discussed some of the strategies, innovations being employed to optimize blade performance, reduce downtime, and ultimately. Drive down costs, so whether you’re a wind farm operator, an energy user, or just simply interested in the future of renewable energy, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Welcome again. Thanks, Allen. Thanks for having me. So the IntelStor report you just published, and there’s some news about it on LinkedIn, is really fascinating because Joel and I have been wandering around Oklahoma and Texas and other parts of the country looking at blades. And there is a lot of concern. About the costs associated with damaged blades and how to forecast that and how to appropriately budget for them, particularly in terms of all the new types of blades that are being introduced, the bigger generators, the three megawatts, the four megawatts, the six megawatt machines versus the one and a half and two megawatts that we’re kind of used to it becomes really a guessing game for a lot of operators because they don’t have a sense of How much is it going to cost me to operate this turbine, and how do I manage that, and how do I appropriately schedule my technicians? Like, how many technicians do I need for a season? These are subjects that come up all the time, and, and if you’ve been around anywhere in Canada or the United States over the last year, there’s so much more talk about it now. And this is where your new tool comes in, your Onshore tool. Basically estimator or looking at turbine size versus the types of damage a blade may suffer. Phil, will you, will you walk us through what this tool is at the top Philip Totaro: level? Sure. Of course. So, What we have been repeatedly getting asked about is, for the ISPs we work with, they want to understand the, a detailed market forecast. And the only way to get to a detailed market forecast is, we obviously know based on the work that we already do, how much capacity we’re expecting to be installed. And that’s not based on like estimates, that’s based on actual pipeline of turbines. And so we know in markets like the United States or Brazil, where, there’s reasonably good detailed publication of those turbine sizes, we, we’ve built out that, that pipeline. But what we then needed to do was determine, all right, how many of those units are going to be online within the next, 10 years or so? What’s the, most importantly, what are the top kind of failure modes? And then what’s the probability and, and kind of the annual failure rate for each one of those type of failure modes on the turbine as a whole. And then we started looking at blades in particular because it, as it turns out, most people will recall either anecdotally or through some previously published information that gearboxes were probably the most expensive. Item in terms of downtime that you could have on a smaller turbine. But as we go bigger the gearboxes and generators have actually become more slightly more reliable. You still have, your, your periodic faults and failures. But they’ve developed a lot of technology through either modularization or other up tower cranes and things like that that allow you to service gearboxes, generators, etc. in situ. Blades, if you’ve got a major issue, you probably still need to take it down. And that can either involve a single blade swap kind of, crane mechanism or a big crane. And it’s basically all that said, what’s happening now with bigger turbines is the bigger the turbines go, the The more cost is involved because of the amount of repair time and the crane cost associated with undertaking that type of repair. So as compared to gearboxes or generators or pitch systems and, and maybe main bearings that used to be like the, the biggest causes of, O& M expense and, and the biggest impact on downtime. Blades are now kind of, unfortunately, taking the, the lead. And I guess right up your alley, lightning is probably still, like, one of the number one causes of both minor repairs and major. Repairs and replacements. Allen Hall: Yeah, so we’re seeing the, the common faults that existed on the one and a half megawatt machines and two megawatt machines when they move up to three and four megawatt machines. They didn’t always require a crane. Pretty much when you get to three megawatts, four megawatts, you’re going to require a crane from most of the, the major items. Any sort of trailing edge bond line on the back end to lightning damage to any, anything internal. Boy, it just seems like there’s a real risk reward to using a larger turbine at the minute. And, and that’s where I think this data is very interesting because we, we are moving away from the one megawatt machines. We obviously we’re kind of the one and a half to two range at the moment. Right. And then we’re going to be in the threes. What does that mean in terms of operational costs? What do we need to be planning for here? Do we need to be ordering more cranes? Do we need to have other plans Philip Totaro: to deal with this? So there’s a couple of things at play here. One is Besides lightning damage, one of the number one expenditures that you’re going to have is actually been a fatigue failure in the route. That’s again, according to the data we’ve got, as far as the probability of occurrence and, and the annual failure rate, that’s one of the highest impact repairs that you’re going to have. Again, besides lightning damage and followed closely by transportation damage, which, unfortunately, transportation damage is just kind of part of the cost of doing business, so to speak. But it can, it can vary. You can get to site and notice that you’ve got a few little things, maybe in the chips in the top coat that you just need to fix, or you could actually have some some severe issues with leading or trailing edge cracking or other things, you might get to site and notice that you’ve got some, missing parts or, or things like that. Maybe they’re the the root inserts weren’t weren’t aligned perfectly correctly or, or something like that, when you go and try to install. So. There’s all kinds of things that, that can, have an impact here, but those are, those are probably the, the top issues you’ve got. And then, you’ve, you’ve still got, while it’s infrequent, a full separation of the blade is probably the, the number five thing that happens in terms of total cost impact. So we’re looking at just for the U. S. market, by the way this year, it’s about 2. 5 billion in blade repairs that we’re anticipating are going to be necessary. By 2030, we’re talking about 3 billion. And by, we, we only did our projection out about 10 years, but by, within 10 years, it’s going to be around 3. 3 billion. And that’s assuming that you have turbines that have no service lift. For turbines with a service lift, thankfully and since most, three, four, five, six megawatt turbines are gonna be installed that way from, from now on We’re looking at, anywhere from about two and a quarter billion up to, maybe three billion within ten years. So, whether you’ve got a service lift or not, we’re talking, close to three billion dollars in, in a blade repair market alone that is Going to need to be serviced and those costs are continuing to inch up. So the other aspect of this that, that you asked about was regarding the growth in turbine size and, and power rating. And what we’re noticing is that it’s not necessarily reducing the. The frequency of occurrence and the annual failure rate for specific failure modes. You’re still seeing lightning damage. In fact, with longer rotors, you may we don’t have enough data, unfortunately, because there’s not enough turbines out there, but you may actually see an increase in lightning damage as a result of longer blades. So the reality of this is these, we’re kind of considering these estimates to be a bit conservative at this point. And we’re, we’re looking at a scenario where as turbines are getting bigger, Yes, you get more power out of it but you also get a higher impact on your downtime because for a single turbine going down, you’re not only talking about the repair cost and time you’re also talking about the, the loss of production. And with that much of a, of an impact on lost production, it’s actually just as financially impactful to the asset owner. Because keep in mind that when we calculate these repair costs and the numbers I’ve just quoted, that’s literally only the, the actual cost of repairs. That’s not even taking into account the downtime which we will be kind of factoring into this. When we kind of expand on this analysis later, later this year we want to be able to get down to a point where we can see what that impact is going to be on, on owners depending on the, the frequency of occurrence and regional distribution and all that, that sort of thing. Allen Hall: So what I have seen from the field is as operators have chosen larger turbines, it seems great, right? There’s less wires in the ground, fewer pads. Concrete everything adds up on that side, right? So it’s just less stuff, but what I’m seeing on the blade side is blades are newer less service history Transportation tends to be more of a problem You see more blade damage from transporting and lifting because of the blades have just gotten bigger and they’re harder to manage On top of that the the unknowns are still there, right? so instead of We don’t have a good understanding, in some cases, in the early in the design phase of some of the twisting moments and, and the weird things you see out in the field. So you just experience it once they get out there. So instead of having a one and a half megawatt machine in which you have a proven service history, you get it up with this new big massive blade out there. And what I’m seeing is that the failure rates go up. Not down. So the, the history we have with smaller blades seems to stop with those smaller plates. That’s not, you’re not having a, like a 3 percent failure rate doesn’t seem to be steady across platforms. What seems to be happening as the platforms get larger, the failure rates go up. So even though you’re putting in fewer turbines, you’re, you’re still working against the failure rate going up. So you’re still roughly losing, you’re losing more power out of the farm than you were previously by having larger turbines is what it So is there really a savings? And this is where I want to get to folks. I think this is the interesting piece to the analysis is, is it actually less expensive to put more turbines in of a lesser Philip Totaro: power rating? If the availability is better and the reliability of the components is better, then yes. And, but here’s the thing, here’s the catch on why everybody wants a bigger turbine is because it’s necessarily a bit lower upfront CapEx. It can, it can lower the, like you said, it’s a fewer number of pads, fewer electrical connections, et cetera. So everybody thinks about it in terms of, Oh, I’ve got to finance this, this project. And we’ve got to reduce the upfront CapEx as much as possible. So how can we do that? Well, let’s get the biggest turbines we can get. And that’s the mentality. That’s what’s being, so basically what’s happening is developers and. The asset owners that they’re, if they’re doing a build and transfer a business model the asset owners and the developers who originally built the projects, they aren’t necessarily taking into account this total cost of ownership. They’re assuming that, certain fault and failure rates that are underestimating what we’re actually seeing. And what it’s resulting in is actually bigger losses because of all the things we just talked about, what you’re seeing in the field and what we’re seeing from data. Allen Hall: So the end of store data becomes really critical here because if you’re making those decisions, you need to understand a craneless repair versus a crane repair. And the fact that it multiplies it times a hundred, a lot of cases on the cost and then the business interruption and all the other things that come with it. There is a real trade off here. We are crossing this threshold, which you guys are identifying of size versus quantity, right? That’s what it is. Bigger size or more quantity. You need to pick one. The data, we don’t have a lot of data yet, and this is where I think the end of store data becomes really critical to the decision process, right? Philip Totaro: Well, we hope so. And, and look, we’re, we’ve built this based on a data set that’s been collected from various independent power producers ISPs, and some academic research papers. But we need more. And so this is a call to action, and frankly, an opportunity for asset owners and operators will pay you royalties for access to some of this information. You don’t have to give us like necessarily site specific data. We would certainly prefer to have turbine specific data so that we could identify which OEMs are really kind of, or which products are really the, the red headed stepchild, if you will, of the, the product family. But we need to be able to quantify it. I think a lot of people know, kind of anecdotally, it gets talked about, texts from different sites talk to each other, Oh, this thing’s a big pain in the butt. That thing’s not, but You know that we need to quantify it and and in quantifying it at the end of the day, the reason that we do what we do with all this data is we’re trying to tell a story and we’re trying to attract investors to this industry. Okay, we’ve got a good story to tell. Despite the fact that we’re going to have this, this O and M challenge, we’ve got a really good story to tell in terms of cost of energy in terms of, greening the electric system there, there’s a great story to tell here, but we need data to be able to convince people that we’ve got, a place where they can feel confident in parking their money. The more data we can get our hands on in terms of fault and failure rates, in terms of, time it takes to do a particular type of repair, which, frankly speaking, It doesn’t necessarily have to be that sensitive, okay? It’s, we’re, we’re just trying to, come up with the best estimates that we can so that we can all work together to try and attract more investment to this industry. That’s ultimately what we need to be able to do, and, and having the data at our disposal as an industry to be able to tell that story is absolutely essential. Allen Hall: Does this help us better understand where the next plateau of wind turbine sizes will be? Like GE and Vestas have done offshore at 15 megawatts, is there going to be a data point crossing where you say, All right, 3 megawatts is as far as we should go onshore because it is the most efficient machine we’re going to be able to build and transport and install and maintain today. Anything bigger than that is going to be trouble. For Doesn’t that data lead us to that kind of decision matrix and also in terms of PPAs? Because the PPA market is a sort of a fixed market out there And if you know what that sort of ballpark cap is for PPAs You’re really trying to keep your costs well underneath those PPAs ideally Philip Totaro: that’s going to have a decision matrix too, right? Well, and keep in mind something that we’ve been analyzing recently, which was If you’ve got a PPA that’s below what you’re getting for production tax credit revenue, so basically if your PPA is below, like, let’s say 26 a megawatt hour or, 26. 80 or whatever it’s indexed to these days, if you’ve got a PPA below what you’re getting for PTC revenue, you are absolutely dependent not only on the PTC revenue, but you are absolutely dependent on high availability. If you do not have high availability, you’ve got a big problem, a revenue problem, and you’re not only going to have to repower, but you’re probably going to have to repower with refinancing a substantial portion of your project site. In that repowering cost any residual value that you haven’t already paid off from the original project, you got to carry that over if you’re debt refinancing your project or whatever you’re doing you’re, you’re going to have a certain amount of, of money left over that you’re going to have to include in, in that refinance. The more you can pay that down, the faster it, which again, translates back to high availability. The, the faster you can generate revenue on your project, the faster you can reduce the residual value of your project down to a point where you’ve, you’ve broken even and you’re seeing a net positive return on capital that is essential in terms of financial health and, and portfolio viability. The good news is we’re seeing merchant market prices trend back up there around, 35 to 40 this year. But, going back a few years, I mean, you were seeing power purchase contracts in the U. S. market get executed down like 10, 11, 12 for, for some projects. Now they might have only been like a three or five year duration on that On that PPA, but it’s still a problem, like you, if you’re not going to be able to then transition into a merchant market, if you’re going back to these, power off takers that are only going to pay you like 15 bucks a megawatt hour, you have to be on top of your availability. Because availability equals PTC revenue equals financial viability of your project. And that’s Allen Hall: where the IntelStor data comes in, right? Because IntelStor has done the analysis in all the wind farms in the United States to look at availability, which then goes to how the turbines are maintained, the type of turbine that is installed, all those little variables that do produce an availability number. In a store has, you can go back and look and say, well, this turban did really well in this part of the country because they’re using this type of maintenance scheme. Maybe I want to repeat that because I know what my output will be at the end of the day. Well, my payback Philip Totaro: time will be right. Absolutely. And this goes back to what I just talked about. We’re trying to tell a story about. If there’s a particular asset owner or operator that’s doing a really good job and has a really financially healthy portfolio, that’s the kind of, place that investors want to be able to park their money. That’s the type of, the people who originally developed that project. They’re going to get, an easier time of it, trying to go get financing. The people who are owning and operating those projects are going to have an easier time of it going and getting financing. And it’s largely down to the fact that they’ve taken things like this O& M challenge seriously. They, they’ve recognized the fact that we’re seeing these issues and they’re getting on top of it by being proactive with their maintenance. Because of, again, all these things we just talked about, you need high availability, you need to reduce your OpEx cost, you need to reduce the frequency with which things fail, and you need to be able to detect that something’s going to fail earlier, so that before you need to call out a crane, you can, you can address it, and you won’t have that that escalation of cost that you necessarily see. Thank you. So this was, I mean, look, I’ll go back to when we had our IntelStor event the O and M in San Diego, back in February, there was an independent power producer who was there that specifically asked for this. They, they wanted to know how much, we’ve got a finite amount of, of budget to spend, how much can we realistically. Get out of, addressing all the things that were like a cat 4, cat 5 damage on, on the blade that we have to address to be able to get it back up and running. But going down into things that were maybe cat 2 or cat 3. Should we really put off doing the maintenance on those or are we going to get to a point where we’re going to incur a substantially increased cost later because we’re going to have more crane callouts than we would otherwise have? And anytime you can reduce crane time, everybody already knows inherently that’s, that’s critical. And I Allen Hall: think this data from what I’ve reviewed of it drives you to some questions about continuous monitoring systems. very much. And other types of systems just to, to keep your turbine from, and that could be technicians having more touch time with the lifts inside the turbines where you can get up and down and take a quick look like, like blade bolts seems to be a big issue, pitch bearings, big issue, right? That seems to be industry wide. You, you have to stay on top of these things where before, I think, five years ago, ten years ago, you weren’t as on top of them, you didn’t need to monitor them, your farms were smaller even, and now that we kind of crossed this threshold, we’re like, Sunzea, which is, I don’t know how many turbines, 650 turbines or something like that. Those numbers are massive. There’s no way you’re gonna be able to monitor all those turbines. Doesn’t that, with the, especially with the data you have, and the failure rates, and the projections forward, doesn’t that really force your hand into some sort of continuous monitoring systems so that you can then keep track of what your failure rates are and get ahead of some of these maintenance items. Philip Totaro: The good news is that the reason that condition monitoring had such a hard time getting adopted with smaller turbines was because of As a percentage of cost of the overall turbine capex, a condition monitoring system was just too expensive. But the technology’s improved, the cost per kind of installed megawatt, shall we say, has come down a little bit. Over the years based on just economies of scale with deploying more CMS systems. But as turbines get bigger, you can more sort of easily afford I’ll, I’ll say a full kind of condition monitoring system. If you’re getting up to the point where you have a four, five, six megawatt turbine, you’re almost going to want this because you also frankly, whether you’ve got a service lift or not, if you can avoid sending a tech up tower, That right there is, or multiple techs up tower, that right there is saving you, potentially thousands if not millions of dollars across your entire fleet during the course of a year. If, if we go back to the data we just calculated, Cost Delta between for just for blade repairs for if you assume nobody’s got a service lift versus there’s 100 percent service lift adoption, it’s a diff it’s a difference of 300 million just in the time that techs are taking to climb towers. And that’s, again, that’s just for blade repairs. We haven’t even done the math on, pitch systems, main shafts. Gearboxes, generators, converters, et cetera. Everything else that might necessitate having a tech go up tower. So, not, we’re, we’re not necessarily doing a, an advertisement for, the service lift companies, but, if I’m, if I’m the sales guy at a service lift company, I should expect my phone to be off the hook at this point. Allen Hall: Yeah, I would imagine. So the, the IntelStor data is pointing everybody in the right direction. And I think the industry is starting to wake up to what, what data IntelStor has and the power it has and the advantage it gives you going forward, particularly as we build out more turbines across the United States and all over the world. This data becomes important in the decision making process. So, Phil, how do people get ahold of you and check out IntelStor’s data? Philip Totaro: They can visit our website, www. intelstor. com, intelstor.com/contact. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, any way you can get in touch. We’re always happy to have a conversation, and we’d love to be able to help you.

In this episode, Allen, Joel, Phil, and Rosemary discuss new German legislation to streamline wind permitting, the economics of floating offshore wind in France, and Iberdrola’s increased investments in offshore wind. They also delve into how the U.S. Production Tax Credit has impacted wind farm maintenance practices and explore the industry-wide challenges that arose when sales teams overpromised on turbine capabilities, creating tension with the engineering realities. 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: Down in Kyle, Texas… Joel Saxum: That’s by me! Allen Hall: It’s near Joel. That’s why I’m bringing it up. They were trying to break a world record for the largest gathering of people with one name and despite having 706 Kyles they missed The bar because the crown is held by a town in Bosnia. They had 2, 300 people named Ivan together in 2017, but it seems a lot easier to do quite honestly. Having a lot of people named Kyle and Kyle, Texas, that’s got to be relatively hard, Joel, because there’s not, we know Kyle Weatherman, right? So we have a Kyle. We know, I know a couple of other Kyles, but I don’t think I could get 2, 300 Kyles in a two town in Texas. Joel Saxum: I think we could do this one. We go to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. And see how many fills we can get. Allen Hall: Oooooh. Joel Saxum: It has to be on the groundhog day. Allen Hall: Phil, has that been tried? Philip Totaro: I, to my knowledge, it has not been tried. I have never heard of this. I’m befuddled by these what constitutes a Guinness World Record now? Shouldn’t we be striving for things that are, like, advancing society, rather than, hey, can we get 8, 000 people with the same name in a fricking single town. I don’t know. What are we doing? What are we doing? Allen Hall: I’m not with Phil. This is fun. We should do more of this. See, here’s the problem with this whole thing in Kyle, Texas is that they chose the 416th ranked name. You got to pick something in the top 10. Well, Joel, the German government has agreed to speed up authorizations for wind turbines and industrial plants. The new law aims to enable faster construction through digitalization, And reducing bureaucratic hurdles. Plants affected include wind turbines, metal mills, foundries, waste disposal, and hydrogen production facilities. And I think Rosemary would be against the hydrogen production facility, but the change is expected to be finalized in the coming weeks and. Renewable energy plants will get special priority for faster approval under the coalition agreement. So that has been one of the big holdups in Germany in terms of wind deployment. They don’t have the space to put up a thousand turbines, right? So you’re getting turbines spread around the country a good bit. And every little province town has had restrictions, right? And they’ve been trying to remove those restrictions. Piece by piece. This is a big move for Germany, I think, Joel. Joel Saxum: Yeah. If you look at the way it’s this, these things are rolling out in developments worldwide, right? So the ACP and the developers and people have been complaining about permit restrictions and let’s get this thing streamlined, let’s get this, able to put more Megawatts in the ground for renewable energy production. Everybody on the U S has been screaming about that. They’ve been screaming about it at wind. Europe has been doing it for a few years, right? All the way up to now, the OEM saying Hey, like government, stop stepping on our own feet here. Let’s streamline some of these processes. I know we, Allen, you and I have complained about it in, in private, where we heard the U S was it last year, they said that they, Put 80, 000 new IRS agents. And we’re like, can we just have 10, 000 of them to streamline some projects for us in the renewable energy space? And this is right in the face of the European union and even like in the UK. A lot of hair on the back of people’s necks being raised about the possibility of some Chinese competition coming in if Germany is able to do this and some of the other EU countries start to follow suit about easy, not necessarily easing restrictions, but just streamlining the processes to get these things built. It’s going to be better for the whole entire renewable energy transition because we’re going to be able to get things in the ground. We’re going to be able to get it quicker instead of being held up. I know I saw something. A few years ago where they were talking about like an onshore wind farm. I think it might have been Germany taking seven years or nine years from, like plan to actually having a tower in the ground. That’s ridiculous. Philip Totaro: This is obviously good news if they’re actually going to follow through this time and speed things up. There have been a lot of permitting changes that have been promised over the years. The good news is this seems to have been done in conjunction with the European Commission. To not just fix the issue in Germany and the red tape there but, Italy’s had severe problems you’ve even run into, issues throughout some of the other countries in Europe. The reality of it is that any time you remove red tape, it’s usually a good thing. And it’s something that we’ve been calling for as an industry For a long time. Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s like the pendulum swinging, right? When things first started, you were one way, and now we’re coming back and finding an equilibrium that makes sense for having things done properly, but also getting them done. Allen Hall: Over in France, they had a big announcement for offshore wind. Bewa and Alicio Consortium won the French floating wind auction with a price of 86 euros per megawatt hour, which is a decent price. It’s actually much lower than what’s happening in the states at the minute. The word of capacity was 270 megawatts with 10 participants bidding. It is a huge milestone fill for Europe on the floating wind side. Now, there’s going to be more, right? There’s a lot more in the pipeline for France? Philip Totaro: Yes, this is also the cheapest power offtake agreement that anyone’s ever struck globally for floating offshore. So in spite of the fact that it’s, I think it’s what, 86, 45 Euro per megawatt hour, that’s About 94 U. S. dollars. That, that’s competitive, very competitive. And the funny thing is, we’ve We’ve studied this at Intel Store, and we’ve come to the conclusion that at scale you, you actually see floating offshore being cheaper than fixed bottom in a lot of cases. And, the reality is that we have to get to, sufficient scale with floating offshore wind so that we don’t have to see these fits and starts with that kind of segment of the industry anymore. So this is exciting. Again, as you mentioned, it’s only 270 megawatts, so it’s a baby step. It’s a good first step to start getting more. France definitely wants to do more of these. They’ve got something like, 500 gigawatts worth of offshore wind resource, I believe, so 500, 600 gigawatts. The more they can start exploiting that in both the Atlantic and the Med that’s gonna be great. Allen Hall: Are they gonna be Vestas or GE turbines? Philip Totaro: Eh let’s put it this way. Some of these pilot projects in France have already had some Vestas, some Siemens Gamesa, they were, there were a few projects that were actually supposed to use GE Haliad turbines the original Haliad the, 6 megawatt platform and they switched. Because of availability and other things. It’s probably, all, I think all three of them are contenders. I definitely don’t see the Chinese actually getting involved in any of these kinds of tenders, at least not. To a serious degree, the it’s interesting because they’re there and they’re supposedly offering turbines and undercutting the market and all this insidious stuff. But in reality, it’s really just the independent power producers in Europe trying to use the Chinese as negotiating leverage to get a better price out of, the likes of Festus that’s probably, Those three Western companies are probably going to be where the turbines are coming from. Allen Hall: Does the 94 a megawatt hour drive other countries to push the prices down for offshore electricity? Philip Totaro: Not necessarily because what’s going on in France at the moment is they’ve got, um, there’s pretty high prices onshore for regardless of fuel type or power generation source. So the fact that they can do a cheap offshore project where, you know they’re going to use the power close to the load centers with these, with these sites that, that they were in Eliseo of one in this tender that’s likely to end up resulting in some economies of scale being achieved in France. You could probably also, if Spain ever decides to get their act together with their floating offshore wind market or their offshore wind market in general they’d probably have some pretty cheap prices in Spain as well. But it’s not necessarily something where the entire rest of the world is going to say, Oh, that’s the price floor or the ceiling or whatever. And we’ve got to, come in underneath it. I think that’s, we’re still a ways off yet on achieving meaningful scale with a utility scale, floating offshore installations around the world to say that everybody’s going to be down at that that kind of a price level. Allen Hall: What say you, Rosemary? Are the French going to be delivering cheap electricity via a high voltage DC transmission line from offshore wind turbines? Rosemary Barnes: Yes I think it’s good for France to get a few more clean energy options, bit of diversification. Sounds good to me. Allen Hall: Floating wind will be HVDC. I think everybody just decided that as a, Rosemary Barnes: No, it is exciting seeing what’s happening with with floating offshore wind. The potential is there for it to become cheaper than fixed bottom. And there’s a lot of countries around the world that would really love to have cheap floating offshore wind. It will make a big difference to the amount of energy that they need to import, countries like Japan or Taiwan lots of places that could really benefit from it. Joel Saxum: I think it’s just good to see that someone’s throwing a 270 megawatt wind farm out there, right? Because up until now, we haven’t had very many large deployments. I think the Highwind Scotland was six, seven turbines at six megawatts a piece, Phil, if I’m correct? Forty two megawatts or something? So this one’s gonna be like, seven times the size, or six times the size of the largest one out there to date. So we’re making strides, right? We’re seeing big things start to happen. Rosemary Barnes: It’s starting to get serious. It’s been very much the prototype pilot phase. So far people have been proceeding cautiously. I think, you don’t want to throw in a whole, gigawatt size wind farm full of experimental technology because. Especially for something like offshore, and especially for floating offshore where, a big problem maintenance means dragging a whole wind farm back into a port, potentially, if you discover a big problem. It’s made sense to be cautious, and it looks like now people are feeling confident enough about the technology to move ahead with bigger projects, so we’re definitely about to enter the next phase of floating offshore wind, I’d say. Allen Hall: The announcement by Iberdrola that they plan to increase the value of its offshore wind assets by 17 billion euros, does this fit in line with what’s happening in France, Phil? Philip Totaro: That specifically was something they announced in conjunction with investments in Japan, South Korea, and Australia that they’re looking at. In fact, they just won a 375 megawatt offshore wind project in Japan with Japan Renewable Energy and Tohoku Electric Power. So they You know are girding themselves and also, talking about investments with projects in the U. S. and. Germany and, other markets where they’re, actively pursuing developments. Clearly, they would also, again, as I mentioned before, if Spain never decides to, pursue their offshore wind market and at all, obviously, Iberdrola is going to be there along with Capital Energy and Aciona. Joel Saxum: So here’s a almost a brief overview. Issue that I have with this one. I’m reading this report and it says fifth offshore wind will take 50 percent of its planned 15. 5 billion euro investment in renewables through 2026. These numbers don’t make sense to me. 15 and a half billion dollars in the next 18 months. How are you going to deploy that? Isn’t this the same issue that we just talked about last week with this, with what one of the Canadian pension funds saying like we get 7 billion and we want to put it out, but. Yeah, CDPQ, we got seven and a half billion bucks, but we don’t know what to do with it. No, we don’t know where to put it. There’s not, we can’t deploy it fast enough. How is Ebert’s really going to put 16 billion euros out in the world in 18 months? That’s not possible, is it? Philip Totaro: Funding, funding the project in Japan will take, a chunk megawatts. Joel Saxum: Okay, give it a billion bucks. Philip Totaro: Yeah, but the rest of it is, I believe, intended and earmarked for projects that they’re expecting to happen sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, as I just mentioned, they’re targeting markets like South Korea and Australia. Australia’s not ready to pull the trigger on anything yet. And South Korea can’t get out of their own way on their own permitting issues unlike the red tape we just talked about being cleaned up in Germany. It’s a good question. It is a legitimate question where are they going to actually deploy that. But those are the markets that they’ve talked about unless there’s some kind of miraculous thing that happens in Germany where either they start acquiring assets or they’re going to start pulling the trigger on FID with some of the capacity that they’ve already procured. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I could see it being earmarked by the end of 2026 oh, this money is allocated to this project, but there’s no way they’re going to spend it by then. That’s crazy to think about. You can give some to me. Allen Hall: Have you watched the department of energy in the U S lately, Joel? They seem to be deploying a lot of cash and billion dollar chunks. Joel Saxum: Deploying and burning cash are two separate things. It’s all semantics, Joel, all semantics. It’s all going somewhere. I guess it’s probably going to Australia actually. So have you been following this Orsted pushed for Australia to when they do offshore deals, is to hedge against inflation that they’ve, they’re learning from the U. S. experience clearly and Australia is going to be a leader in offshore wind. Why wouldn’t it be? But they’re going to try to build in some inflationary offsets. I know Rosemary’s been down there in Australia, hopefully, from what I understand, telling all the future operators of wind turbines down there that they better hedge their bets on inflation and build it into the contract. Isn’t that right, Rosemary? You’ve been, you’ve been the Pied Piper of Australia? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, assuming that lots of Australians that have, Decision making ability or listening to the podcast, then they definitely would have heard me talking about how, I’ve always found it crazy that you’d write a contract whose success depended on a factor that you had no control over and, inflation is a big one there. It’s yeah, you promise to deliver for a price, but you can’t guarantee what price you’re going to have to pay for it. The equipment that you need to fulfill your contract. So yes, it makes sense for everyone everywhere to include inflation as part of the deal. Yeah, the same way as you wouldn’t, guarantee that the wind’s going to blow or that, the sun’s going to shine or, anything about the any other factor that’s out of your control. Allen Hall: Is the Victoria government listening to all this input at the moment, or is it still? Rosemary Barnes: thinking about it from what I’ve seen with the way that they’re setting things up. I do feel like people are watching carefully what’s happened around, around the world and mistakes that have been made and that they making sure that we don’t make those same mistakes. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to make others. Of course, I’m sure it’s not, it’s never going to run out, flawlessly and smoothly the first time that you build an offshore wind project in a totally new market. But yeah, I am pretty happy with the way that things are being set up and being organized so far. So I would say they, they must be listening and paying attention. I can’t guarantee they’re listening to this podcast, they probably are there. It’s a good, it’s a good source of information about wind energy around the world. So why wouldn’t they? Allen Hall: According to our ratings in australia, I think that they are. Philip Totaro: And just keep in mind too, they haven’t set final rules yet for the procurement process for offshore wind in Australia yet. So in any state. Hopefully they do take this what Orsted’s suggesting here into consideration because as we’ve talked about before on the show, inflation’s inevitably going to happen and one direction or the other, and somebody’s going to feel like they want to renegotiate later. Allen Hall: Phil, when we were over in Minneapolis for American Clean Power 2024, a lot of the news on the floor was from Brazil and our friends from Brazil stopped by the booth. It was good to see everybody. But one of the bigger mentions was that AERIS is going to become more involved in servicing wind turbines in the United States. And they’ve had an office for a couple of years in the United States and, but they haven’t been, one of those top tier, top of mind companies. But it looks like they’re going to try to spool up just because of the number of wind turbines that are being placed in the United States and the lack of full service agreements that are being signed in the United States. It seems as there’s an opportunity for a knowledgeable Brazilian. particularly blade company to use that expertise in the United States in light of, and this is my understanding, I haven’t done a ton of research into this, is that the Brazilian wind market is at an impasse. So a company like Aeris is going to broaden their reach. Isn’t that the basic understanding with you, Phil? Philip Totaro: Yes, and this is based on, statements they’ve made publicly that they want to be able to target markets like the United States and Western Europe. Now, what’s interesting is that other than the OEMs, as a pure play kind of blade manufacturer and you’ve seen this with Inga Team in Spain where they actually have spooled up a whole services division that they actually recently just sold off to Rez. But. As a major component supplier, Aeris is in a unique position where, they’ve deployed some of these blades that are operating now in the U. S. And if they’re getting lightning damage, if they’re getting leading edge erosion or structural damage, what have you they’re in the best kind of position to be able to go in and say, all right here’s what some of the issues are or were. And we’re in a kind of a unique position to be able to fix it. What’s fascinating about this play is whether or not they’re going to come in as a pure play ISP and compete with the likes of basically every other ISP that’s out there. Or are they looking for partnerships with existing ISPs, particularly anybody that’s a long term service contract in place. We’re seeing much more transactional services being used in the U. S. market. The opportunity for them is potentially pretty big. Whether they partner with somebody. That would be the primary operations and maintenance provider. And then they’re a blade specialist or potentially under, some type of transactional services where, even companies like NextEra would potentially leverage them because some of their blades are deployed in GE turbines at NextEra project sites. So it the doors are potentially open for them if they they have the right strategy and they pursue it. Joel Saxum: Phil, from a strategic standpoint, you can’t miss, right? If you’re coming into the United States right now and you have highly trained from a technical standpoint in blade repair people, and they already have all their GWO certs or whatever. So you’re just bringing a bulk of them in, or you can provide them on demand. You’re going to hit home runs, right? Let rather you partner with ISP, say they went to someone, that. That independent that does FSAs or something like that to come in and build up theirs or a big company like a I don’t know Like an IEA or something like that has a massive construction team wants a blade department. Boom there’s your bolt on blade department or a Mortenson or a Blattner or something like that Here’s a bolt on blade department for you with a bunch of highly trained people at everybody needs technicians Now you even hear people that are finally getting blade techs. They’re like, oh we finally got a couple But they’re, they just don’t know what they’re doing in the field. So we’re running into the cost of poor quality issues. Things are slow. You’re training people on the fly. So if you can bring in people that have, the technical capabilities ready to roll you’re off and running. Cause you’re already ahead of the competition. Allen Hall: So the lack of full service agreements is a new trend in the United States Phil? Because it seems like Vestas was signing, signing what’s the terminology? AO something, 5, 000? Philip Totaro: Active output management 4, 000 and 5, 000. So they’re, the 4, 000 basically covers like a few of the components. 5, 000 is your kind of what GE calls like a full wrap contract. So all of the components under a long term warranty, et cetera, et cetera. Allen Hall: So the AOM 5000 is not being readily used in the United States. Right now. It was like a year ago, though. Philip Totaro: The reason for that seems to be, it seems to be these owner operators, first of all, aren’t getting the quality of service they expected under that type of agreement. Number one. So they’re a little more reticent to sign it. But the second thing is every single O. E. M. That keeps reporting their quarterly earnings, etcetera. They have Mhm. Explained that the huge losses they’re taking on these full wrap contracts because of the, particularly the amount of blade damage. That’s being seen, whether it’s Vestas has a substantial amount of lightning damage because of the carbon in their blades or, GE with some of the issues they’ve got with some of the TPI made blades, for instance there, there’s just an inordinate amount of it wouldn’t bubble up to the point of a warranty claim, but or like an insurance claim, but it would come up to the level of a warranty claim under the OEM for them to have to To provide service. And the more of those claims they get, the more it eats away at their margin and their revenue. It’s basically the OEMs got into the insurance business and realized, hey, guess what? We shouldn’t be in the insurance business because it’s not our specialty. Allen Hall: That’s a good, that’s a question that I had was Who pulled the plug first? Was it the OEMs or was it the operators? Because Joel and I were in Amsterdam last year. And I remember, I think it was Amsterdam or was it up in Canada, Joel and Calgary, where we were talking about full service agreements and I’m sitting in the audience next to an operator like, Don’t do full service agreements. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. And I thought, wow, that’s new. That was in Amsterdam. Okay, there you go. It was in Amsterdam. And I thought to myself that’s weird because everybody has been signing full service agreements. And now I have this operator next to me saying no. Joel Saxum: That was right after we had heard about that someone signing a 30 year FSA up in Finland or something. Allen Hall: Yes. Joel Saxum: I was like, what? 30 years? Philip Totaro: You’re nuts. Let’s also break that down a little because what’s happening with that is you’ve got the experienced owner operators that might otherwise have the capability, particularly after the full service agreement would expire, to maintain their own assets. They may be the ones that are preferring to, opt out. Of those type of, or at least shorten the duration of those type of, full warranty agreements to as short as they can get it, maybe back down to, three years, five years, what have you. But there are also, Vestas just announced a deal today for a repowering project in Austria where they signed a 25 year AOM 5000 contract, which again is their full wrap agreement. And the reason is that. The company there doesn’t have the requisite experience, they’re reliant on the OEM. And in, in cases like that, maybe the operating conditions in Austria are a little different where they don’t think that they’re going to have the same kinds of issues that they’ve seen in a market like the U S where they’ve picked up an inordinate amount of blade or other damage. Joel Saxum: Do you think someone at Vestas is like, we’re learning some lessons. Okay. I’m going to go to. Over into London, jump into the insurance markets. I’m gonna go to Bishopsgate and I’m gonna go start buying up some bar tabs for people and I’m gonna get someone to cover this stuff. From a risk standpoint, maybe they’re getting reinsurance for themselves on the backend. Allen Hall: Whoa. You phil, is that happening? Philip Totaro: Don’t actually have visibility to that. I would be surprised if they weren’t, but I would also be surprised. In the past, a lot of these companies would just balance sheet, backstop a lot of the liability claims that they had, unless they were required to carry a specific type of insurance, how can you do that? Joel Saxum: 25 years out? But that’s exactly, Joel, that’s the point. How can you do that with a 25 or 30 year full service contract? Yeah, you’re signing the agreement to the day of end of life. Telling me that thing’s going to work perfectly until the day of end of life? That’s nuts. It just, that doesn’t make any sense. Philip Totaro: But it just in the U. S. though, it’s less of an issue because we’ve got this PTC driven repowering after 10 years. We all know already, and it’s been, confirmed many times over through kind of ad hoc discussions that You know, these independent power producers are just running turbines into the ground. Just to get the maximum power out of them in the first 10 years of operation, then after 10 years, they’re all gonna repower and take the extra production tax credit they can get if they’ve got a PPA that, that’s too cheap. Joel Saxum: I got two questions for you, Phil. Okay, so two questions for you, Phil. The first one is, this is a theoretical question. When we did the last IRA bill, do you think that a bargaining chip from both sides of the aisle could have been maybe, how about going to a a 15 year, then PTC? Or a 20 year than PTC. So we actually get the more life out of these turbines out in the field, because you would want to think that as the mid, you want to think this, of course, we all know it’s not actually true. You want to think that the quality of the machines is going to get better as time goes on. So when it. PTC first came out in what 1994 or something, right? 1991. They were talking 10 years, okay, because they didn’t really know the extended life. But it’s been 10 years, 10 years, 10 years, and it’s still 10 year, 10 year, 10 years. And you would think that we would be like, Alright guys, you’ve been giving this, We’ve been throwing away a lot of good stuff after 10 years. How about we extend that out to 15? That’s a theoretical question. Would that work for economics? Philip Totaro: Basically the implication of it, because they’re not going to spend any more like total cash. So it would mean that instead of, right now we’re at like 26 and 80 cents or whatever the indexation from last year was right now you would basically reduce that down to, let’s say like 15. And have 15 for the 15 year duration. 15 a megawatt hour for 15 years instead of, 26 plus for 10 years. So that’s the implication of it. I don’t think that any of the stakeholders are going to be on board with that. Even though it’s a longer duration, it’s a lower level. Joel Saxum: Yeah, but you could run the same 26. 2 cents or whatever it is all the way for all 15 years because you’re getting it anyways. Windfarm A says, I’m gonna, I built it in 2014, they just redid it and they’re getting 26 cents again. Philip Totaro: Yeah, if they’re repowering, yes, I see your point they’re actually getting 20 years out of, production tax credit, or longer, if they repower it a third time, theoretically. I don’t know that would be possible, but that, that’s the thing. It’s, you’re not wrong, but the, I guess they haven’t considered how, the only way to really solve the quality issue would PTC less lucrative and, or increase PPA prices. But again, that would need to be done artificially, and then you’ve got a situation where the government’s involving themselves in the market. Nobody likes that either. So the problem with the quality thing though is that you can run the turbines into the ground for 10 years, then repower them. You could try to do something where it’s a 15 year term, but you’re still gonna end up having, you’ll maybe over design a turbine that’s gonna be even more expensive than what it is, so you can get a 15 year life out of it, and then repower it again. It’s just the PTC, the way it’s structured has made turbines disposable. And I’ve said this before, like we’re not wind farming anymore. We’re PTC farming. And as long as. We’re going to have a PTC at all, the, both the supply chain companies and the power producers are going to figure out a way to maximize the commercial value of that. And if that means that quality suffers, they don’t care. Joel Saxum: If you shut PTC off at the end of this, s Say a swipe of a pen shuts it off. There is going to be a massive percentage of wind farms in the United States that stop maintaining themselves. That just go eh, can’t afford to do it. Run them to failure. That will happen. Philip Totaro: And that’s the reality is, had they, we are the only country in the world that has this kind of a structure where You know we’re this aggressive with operations and we’re this aggressive with repowering. They’ve done repowering in Germany, for example, to, to a pretty healthy degree. But it’s usually replacing something that was like a 250, a bunch of 250 kilowatt turbines with a big Enercon four or five megawatt thing. And it’s The reason you’re doing that is to take advantage of something that is bigger, operates more efficiently, can take advantage of medium voltage power delivery and all that sort of thing. And there’s all kinds of ancillary benefits to all that. So it’s a technology refresh as opposed to what we do in the U. S., which is entirely. driven enterprise. It’s not even about it’s just how can we get electrons produced? It’s not even about the technology. But Rosemary, when Allen Hall: they designed wind turbines, Whether they are operating in Austria or Australia or the United States, they’re designed for a 20 year lifespan, right? Rosemary Barnes: Yes and no. There’s definitely nothing that’s designed for less than 20 year lifespan, and it will often be, it’s more common, I think, when you say 25, years these days. But they will do site specific loads. If you’ve got enough of a market that warrants a new version of a turbine or I mainly know the blades. I’ve seen, examples where they want to put it somewhere with slightly, I don’t know, harsher conditions, and then they will rerun the loads and add in some reinforcement. That’s the way it normally happens. But the process would allow for them to also make a slightly cheaper blade if they wanted to reduce the lifetime of the standard blade that they’re selling elsewhere. They could take a few layers of glass out and reduce the lifetime, save a bit of weight, but I think it would be a pretty small. A pretty small cough saving for the effort. And I certainly never saw a project like that. Like I saw plenty of blades get upgraded for more harsh environments. But I never saw them say, this is going to America. So just don’t worry about the lifetime. Just, Allen Hall: Come on, they’re just Americans. Are you sure? It’s a sworn testimony. You never participated in a scheme to defraud Americans with blades? Is that what you’re saying, Rosemary? Rosemary Barnes: But they run them differently, right? They run them to last 10 years instead of running them to last 30 years. That’s the real difference. Allen Hall: Rosemary, how do you take a 20 wait, how do you take a 20 year blade in Austria and then bring it to America and drive it into the ground and eat? How do you do that? How does that happen? Rosemary Barnes: You just, push a little bit past the, every blade has a cut out wind speed. Allen Hall: Yeah, but that’s all programmed by the operator, the OEM. The operators don’t get into that. They’re not in the control systems. They’re not dialing in new control curves. Are they? Joel Saxum: Depends what the controller is. Philip Totaro: It depends if they have access. Rosemary Barnes: Is it the blades that are wearing out anyway at eight years? Blades are just falling apart? That’s not, that’s Joel Saxum: It’s usually the gearbox. Allen Hall: Gearbox, bearings, it’s usually the two. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so if you just, cut back a bit on, cut back a bit on maintenance and be a little bit less cautious in some of your other operating decisions. And yeah, it’s hard to see how a blade would wear out in eight years without seriously, yeah, increasing the cutout wind speed, which is unlikely that you’re able to do without. I don’t know, without getting into the control system. Joel Saxum: We’ve seen mis sighted, like what we feel is mis sighted, this is a weird term, mis sighted turbines, where like you’re looking and you’re like, why is this wind farm, why are the main bearings going bad on this wind farm all the time? And then you figure it out, you’re like, oh the, this is a IEC 2B standard turbine. It shouldn’t be in high turbulence areas, or it shouldn’t be in a, Average 10 meters per second winds like this is a miss sighted turbine and that’s why it’s burning up and that happens in the states. Philip Totaro: But joel, that’s also because the turbines before Vestas invented this concept of variable power rating on the same product platform with the v105 the v112, 117, etc That product family that was the first time anybody had really done that You Prior to that, the industry developed what I’ve referred to in the past as point solutions, which is you had something that was explicitly designed for an IEC class 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, or 3, an application, or maybe a class S if you had some kind of special circumstances or whatever. But that’s what you had, and you had to cite the best available turbine That you’ve got in the product portfolio for a given project site. We didn’t have the kind of flexibility we do now where, you know, the whole point with Vestas developing this capability was you’ve designed in loads or you’ve designed material into a turbine that can handle loads in between the range of 3. 3 all the way up to 3. 6 or even 3. 8 when they started upgrading some of these. And so they’ve made it a point to be able to offer more flexibility, whereas, if you have a site where you’re only going to operate at 3. 3, you have more margin because the turbine was designed for a 3. 6 megawatt power rating. So there’s more mechanical margin in the components and it gives you the opportunity to operate above the manufacturer specifications. Joel Saxum: So that’s part of it. Speaking of class S, this is, I gotta drop this one on you real quick. Allen and I were having one of our lengthy conversations the other day, and we were looking in some wind farms, and looking at some technology, and this, the GE 103 rotor came up. And what we believe is that they got 50. 2 blades on them, like LM designed 50. 2, 50. 2 blades. I found a turbine that is a 103 meter rotor, class S, specialty, user defined, with a 3. 2 megawatt turbine on it, or generator on it. And that can’t be, right? Rosemary, that has to be a typo. That was deployed. A GE? GE 3. 2 103. Philip Totaro: They’ve done that in Ireland. Ireland and the UK they have those. What kind of wins are those? It was based on the 2. 75 platform. Upgrade from the 2. 5 megawatt platform that they scaled up to 3, 3. 2. But yeah, they’ve done that in Ireland and the UK. Joel Saxum: That was crazy! Because, we’re used to, like, when we’re looking in the U. S., in the central part of the U. S., when we’re looking at these G. E. machines, 2. 5, 2. 82. Those are 127 meter rotors. And I found one that was 103 and it was a turbine. It’s crazy. So there’s a lot of different. We’ve talked about this before, a lot of different models out there. Allen Hall: Isn’t this what Vic Abate was talking about in regards to simplifying the portfolio so you had less variations and the designers like Rosemary could design a blade such that it had a 20 year lifespan and actually met it. Isn’t that part of the problem is that we had all these variations all over the place and some of them work, some of them didn’t, and everybody’s finding out now they need to standardize that. Philip Totaro: Yes, that’s part of it because G. E. was at a point where they were designing like 1. 5s with, 70 meter up to 82 and a half. And it’s as long as you had a standard, IEC class site, then you were fine. But what started happening is they got a lot of customer feedback that we don’t quite have, you don’t have a turban for me, GE that fits my unique site characteristics. Can you build me a variant of this product family that accommodates my needs? And GE, instead of saying, no, they said, yes. And at the end of the day that’s what it boils down to is they were like, it got to a point where GE was advertising the fact that, hey, if you need a site specific turbine design, we can design something for you in nine months and field it in nine months, as long as it’s like a derivative of something we’ve already built. And so that was just a shift in, in business strategy. Allen Hall: Yeah. But there’s your problem. Cause then it puts Rosemary in this really weird predicament where they got to design Blades with various short test spans that have to live 20 years and it’s all new all the time, right? Isn’t that the cycle that they got into? So from the GE perspective today, in order to stop that cycle, they just pull people away from the business. They just. Isn’t that what happened? We have to start the mentality, alright, everybody that wanted to do that, you no longer work here. That’s what it feels like has happened. Philip Totaro: Yeah. It’s a change in mentality as far as we’re not going to do that kind of site specific design anymore. And while it means we may lose a few customers, It also means we’re going to streamline other things like supply chain and everything else. That’s frankly more important because when we streamline supply chain at scale, that’s going to save us more money than the revenue we would have generated from doing a one off turbine for a special customer. Allen Hall: But engineers love the little variations. Rosemary Barnes: No, that’s so boring. That’s so boring. I can tell you, all these layoffs. Danish blade designers. It wasn’t because they were all in there demanding to make the exact same blade again, but with one more layer of glass in it or one more, one less layer of glass in it, which is all that happens. If you’re going to make a variation. Allen Hall: No, they wanted to make a two piece blade and they wanted to move it on two trucks. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but that’s not what you’re talking about. You’re talking about tiny tweaks. They’re never making a new blade geometry for a site specific condition. Allen Hall: No, but they didn’t have a history from the previous blade. Maybe, let’s see this, I don’t want to clear this up because I’m trying to understand this, Rosemary. They had, say, two years on this basic blade design that they just created. And then they were making variations based on this design that hadn’t been out very long, and so they have a generational issue where now they’re like three generations down from a blade that had a couple of years of service life, they realize oops. Rosemary Barnes: It’s not really like that because it’s more you had decades of a blade and making variations on it. Every year it would be like one or two meters longer. That stretch it out, that add more layers of glass where it was needed, that, and then, this, then you run the loads and you find out that, oh, actually, this location, you have slightly less safety than what you need. Allen Hall: So when do you learn if it has a 20 year lifespan or not? At what point did you figure that one out? Cause it seems like that’s what Vestas and GE are doing at the moment. Philip Totaro: It never has a 20 year design. Rosemary Barnes: No, you’re misunderstanding the kinds of changes that lead to failures and the kinds that, that don’t. So they basically made the same blade over and over again for decades with tiny tweaks. Tweaks, up until about the 20 teens some, somewhere, early 20 teens. It started to be. We can’t just tweak this anymore. To go up to a 75 meter blade, you can’t just tweak the same design that you started at 20 meters. What we need now is we need to add in new materials. We need to add in. different kinds of structures. Yeah, you’ve got carbon fiber, you may be changing a resin or something, adding pultrusions, you’re adding a third shear web, maybe some trailing edge reinforcement. Like it’s things like that. Those are the ones that are causing the problems and where you need years to see the effect, the full effect of what you’ve done. And yeah, all of these like little variations on the platform, it’s not really an engineering risk. The other than that, you tie up a bunch of your engineers working on these tiny boring changes that no one wants to work on projects like that. Not really. Like it’s super boring. It’s just like recipe book engineering. It’s not, Like it’s not interesting. Like there are maybe engineers that could have been spending their time on better testing carbon fiber or something, it would have had an effect like that. Allen Hall: Why does it have to be exciting? Rosemary? Rosemary Barnes: Not every engineer needs to be excited, but if you’re working for a technology development company, like there’s a lot of people in there who want to work on that new, cool. Technology that’s never been done before. Allen Hall: Sometimes boring is the best thing he could do for a wind turbine. That’s what we’re talking about, right? If GE got off of track into 2012 or whenever it was, why was that? And did anybody recognize it at the time? I think the answer was maybe, but it turned out it was it went, it did go sideways because that’s how they’re in the predicament they’re in right now, and they don’t want to relive that, right? So they’re going to take that. away from the company. They’re gonna take all the toys away and say, it’s going to be boring and you’re going to like it because otherwise we’re going to lose money. Rosemary Barnes: I totally agree that it was not a good business strategy to be making a small number of a slightly different blade over and over again. Because you just don’t have as much time to recoup the, because there still is engineering effort to do that. And you have less units to to recoup that over. But the team that you need to fire is the sales team. You need less, less enthusiastic sales people who will do whatever it takes to close a deal, including promising a slightly tweaked design. And every engineer would agree with you. No engineer thinks it’s cool and. The sales team goes and sells a design that you don’t actually make. And like I was on the receiving end of that, they would promise things that not only did we not make, but were not physically possible, and then, you have problems. Philip Totaro: So that happened at every OEM. Where the sales team came back and said, all right we just sold a turbine that we don’t actually have, but how fast can you build that? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and that’s the problem is that everyone was doing it, which meant that everyone had to do it. So if you’re, if you had in your company, you said sales, salespeople. You’re not going to do that anymore. Then they would just not be making sales because the customer could go someone that would do exactly what they told them. And so that’s why I think it was like an industry problem. Philip Totaro: It was, but that’s what led Vestas to this fundamental design change that said, we’re not going to sell point solutions anymore, like wind turbines that are site specific designed, we’re going to, we’re going to develop turbines that have more flexibility to them so that we can accommodate site specific. Requests within the envelope that it’s been designed for. And again, where you’ve over designed a turban with more material, more structural rigidity, et cetera, to be able to handle a higher loads envelope than where you’re operating it, that gives you more operational margin to be able to do things that, you wouldn’t otherwise and that can actually extend the life of the asset. So they were the ones that pioneered that you saw many companies follow. That kind of a design philosophy, Goldwyn’s done it to an extent GE’s done it and, Nordex and Siemens Gamesa followed suit with their onshore portfolios, but that’s what instigated it was they wanted to get away from these salespeople just selling turbines that didn’t exist to, all right let’s give you a bigger envelope of something that you can sell that has the physical ability to be able to accommodate You know this type of application for whatever the customer wants. Allen Hall: So I, I drug everybody down this path because I wanted to get to this point. Eventually someone’s going to sale. The sales group was driving this, what in leader in the leadership, what happened in the leadership where they let it go on and what eventually caused them to cut the sales group off like at Vestas, what happened there? Philip Totaro: For Vestas, it was probably the three megawatt platform main bearing Issues. They had to swap out almost every single main bearing they ever installed. So that, that, that’ll hit you in the pocketbook. Joel Saxum: Why it got loose is simply people going for land grabs. People wanting to there’s a global competition here. We want to sell as many as we can. I always, I go back to wind turbines, like I go back to the big three. You got the big three in wind turbines that at least get installed in the U. S. Vestas. G. Siemens Gamesa, the big three, Dodge, Ford, Chevy, right? The truck wars and wind turbine wars are very much alike. Where in between 2000 and 2000, basically 16, all of those manufacturers of those trucks were introducing new motors and new transmissions and stuff Like sometimes you have a model like, okay, if you go back down to the half ton truck, Chevy has been putting the same engine block in trucks since 1999 for their base 5. 3 liter motor. Okay. That’s. iterations of this little small changes and that is still a bulletproof motor. Now if you go back to the diesel wars where you had these three quarter ton one ton trucks where there’s oh we can outpull you we got more horsepower we got more torque there was a period where ford put three different motors as their flagship diesel motor in four years. That’s ridiculous. And they had problems. And that’s what the same, it’s the same thing. It’s this land grab of this new market where everybody wants to get it. We’re good. We’re the best. We’re the biggest. So they’re like, do whatever you can to sell these turbines. And then you end up with issues like this. And now you’ve got to rescind it. Allen Hall: But is that a function of having a leadership that comes from sales? Cause that’s what it seems like when the leadership comes from sales, you get what happened in GE. When the leadership comes from engineering, you get the stability. Everything is based on stock price. Philip Totaro: Which, the sales guys are going to be much more in tune with. But I’ll let me throw a curveball into this whole thing. This actually comes back to transmission. Because, here’s what happens when you have a finite amount of transmission available. You’re going to find the best sites That are, IEC class 1 or 2, and then 3 eventually. And you’re going to build out those sites that are in close proximity to transmission. When you start running out of those sites, and you don’t build new transmission fast enough, you start getting into these crazy IEC class S. Situations where you have to have a specialized turbine to be able to deploy in that kind of a, for that kind of a solution. So what we need is more transmission. Then you can start more transmission equals workhorse turbines, because then you start building transmission to the places where you’ve got consistent turbulence intensity, IEC class one sites, class two sites, class three sites. And you don’t have to start doing all these specialist turbines one off. Site specific turbines that, that, aren’t going to be necessary if you build your transmission the right way. So Phil just summarized this saying it’s the government’s fault. Exactly. It’s never GE leadership’s fault. Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think you can say, because it’s, it’s been a global problem. It’s not like it’s a US specific problem. Philip Totaro: But transmission build outs a global problem too. That’s why I’m saying it. Rosemary Barnes: I agree. I agree to a certain extent, but I do think that the industry as a whole got, got silly about like making a sale at any cost and not worrying about the amount of engineering that had to happen that I working in the industry, I felt a real disconnect between senior management and the realities of engineering. Like in sales or business, it does feel like you can fake it till you make it and just force things through. Engineers work with the laws of physics and yeah, economics. And Joel Saxum: I think I just got slapped. I think so. Yeah. I got insulted working with the laws of physics, not like these sales guys. Rosemary Barnes: I personally was in many meetings where senior management said, we’re like, you’re having an argument, an engineer is telling you this thing is not going to happen. And senior management just says, make it happen. We’ve sold it. And I’m sure that conversation was had, thousand times, ten thousand times in every single company Yeah I think that to me that’s one of the big tensions that led to a whole suite of problems that we’ve had. Allen Hall: This has been one of the best panel discussions that I’ve heard in the last two years about WINT. Honestly. Because they, when you watch these panel discussions, they talk about all this ephemeral stuff and how good it feels and what about this author and what I read in the New York Times. The reality is that none of that plays out there. It plays out when people like Rosemary are sitting in the front lines designing turbines and Phil watching the interconnect market and going, Hey, this is going to be chaos. And this is what it results in. So unless there’s leadership there to say, like Vestas did. We need to broaden the box of the turbine, what it can do, so we have less variability in the turbines. Which was a smart move. We’re gonna be back in this hole again. This is a great discussion. Joel Saxum: Who better to tell you how to fix problems in the future than the guy from Clipper? Allen Hall: Zing! Man, I thought Rosemary hammered us. Philip Totaro: Wow! Joel, we’re not friends anymore, I think. Jesus Christ. Allen Hall: You’re not invited to the Clipper reunion there, Joel. Yeah, no kidding. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening and please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen Hall, Philip Totaro, and Joel Saxum discuss the sale of Siemens Gamesa’s India Wind Turbine unit, Iberdrola’s acquisition of remaining Avangrid shares, and Auren Energy’s merger with AES Brazil Energy. 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, and who doesn’t? Then book a demonstration of Intastore at intelstor.com. Siemens Energy has put the India Wind Turbine unit of its subsidiary, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, up for sale. The India business has an annual revenue of 700 million and is being valued at 1. 5 billion. 1 billion for the transaction. Siemens has appointed Investment Bank Barclays to find buyers with Adani Renewable Energy, TPG Rise, Brookfield Energy, Transition Funds, Macquarie, and Masdar being sounded out. Siemens Gamesa has reported poor results over the last few years and has been working on a turnaround, of course, aiming to break even in 2021. 2026. Phil, how does this fit into the overall strategies for Siemens Gamesa with this India sale? Philip Totaro: It’s interesting because they have said that they’re still interested in doing something in the Indian market and it sounds like they want to continue servicing some of the projects in India, but the fact that they would put You know, whatever other assets they have up for sale, potentially inclusive of their their order book, so to speak with sales and services is quite fascinating for companies like, INOX and Adani Group, who it sounds like is the the leader of this charge to potentially acquire. These assets, it would actually be a pretty good fit for Adani because they don’t necessarily need the Siemens turban technology but they would want the manufacturing facilities and certainly some of the services order book that, that they could acquire through this. Joel Saxum: And would it be smart for a competing OEM to try to scoop this up just to get a peek at some of the. IP. Now I’m not saying the IP is going with it because of course you’re not going to sell that. But if you’re going to get the services portfolio, you’ve got to get every in depth piece of schematic and all these other things with it. So my question would be then what’s all going to go with this sale, right? You’re going to have, you may have the services order book crate contracts for service. There’s a, because we all know there’s a lot of G 97 G one fourteens. There’s a ton of two megawatt ish machines that are Siemens Mesa in, right? India. So you get that, you may get some manufacturing facilities and other things, but it’s really a confusing sale to me, but just because I don’t understand. What the value of Siemens Gamesit to me is the turbine IP, but you’re not getting any of that. You’re just getting this like commercial and services side. Am I correct or am I seeing something incorrect here? Philip Totaro: No you’re correct. The value would be different to different companies. So let’s, if we go through the list of, the companies Allen just rattled off, you look at Brookfield the reason that they would be interested in this is purely for the services side of the business, where, considering the fact that all four of those companies already are substantial asset owners, this gives them the option and opportunity to build up their kind of services credentials and, take on a turnkey services business without having to build it up organically. So that’s appealing, but is it really the best fit? The reason why it looks like Adani might be the better fit is not only is Adani the, number one independent power producer in India, and even has It’s project sites with Siemens Turbans, so they’d be taking over, the service on their own sites with the services contracts. The fact that Adani would also be able to make use of the manufacturing facilities for the wind turbines that they’ve got now the fact that they could, leverage the supply chain it, it gives them, a leg up as far as, this type of an acquisition is concerned. However, going back to your other question, Joel, wouldn’t it be good for a competing OEM to step in? Yes, theoretically, if that meant that they could take over a factory and retool it for their turbines, it would cost effectively enough where they would also have scale. The only company that would probably be capable or interested in doing that would be either Envision Energy or Sany from China. I doubt that Vestas would actually do it because Vestas already has some facilities over there, so does GE including, LM has some blade factories in India. So you’re, nobody’s going to spend the money to acquire a thing just to take a look at the IP and then not fully leverage the manufacturing facility. I think the reason why this fits so well for a company like Adani is they would not only get the opportunity to leverage all of that, but they would also be able to make use of all of the IP. They would also be able to make use of. The manufacturing footprint to grow their own business in India and Sri Lanka. Allen Hall: You would really work, acquire the remaining 18. 4 percent of Alvin grid shares. It doesn’t own for 35 and 75 cents per share in cash. Their price represents an 11 percent premium over the closing price. On March 6th of this year, Avans Grid’s Board of Directors unanimously approved the agreement. The transaction is expected to close in Q4 of this year, subject to the customary closing conditions and shareholder approval. Phil, this is a big move for Iberdrola, bringing everything in house into the U. S., so now they’re just one large company again. Phil, does this have a benefit to them in the short term, or is this more of a long term play? Philip Totaro: I’d say both, because what they’re doing here is, in addition to the commercial idea of Putting the company back together. The reason why they would do this is it’s going to make it easier for them to potentially redeploy capital. Their onshore wind fleet in the United States has an average age above 15 years. And they’re getting close to the point where unlike a lot of other companies that have repowered their fleet after 10 years they haven’t done that at Iberdrola because they have such lucrative power purchase contracts that they’re just going to continue running those projects out till the point where those PPAs expire after 20, presumably 20 years, then they’re going to repower. They know that they’re not going to get those same level of PPAs when they have to renegotiate them with either the utility that they’re already dealing with. Or if they have to, slide back into the merchant market, they’re not gonna get anything that lucrative. So this is, I think this is about structuring and positioning themselves for this repowering. Allen Hall: Auren Energy S. A. has agreed to merge with AES Brazil Energy S. A., creating a platform with 8. 8 gigawatts of renewable energy output. The AES Corporation will sell its 47. 3 percent equities interest in AES Brazil to Auren for about 640 million dollars. Auren intends to absorb AES Brazil and make it a wholly owned subsidiary. Now, with all the transactions that are happening in Brazil, it seems like there’s companies going in and companies going out. What is the move by Auren trying to accomplish here? Philip Totaro: I think this has to do with diversification. So if you’re familiar with Auren’s portfolio, they are quite strong in solar and wind. But we’ve talked about before on the show, the fact that in Brazil, you’ve got some challenges with the distribution companies in Brazil wanting to, add wind at the pace in which the industry is ready to develop it. They’re still going to be active throughout the region, but given the current state of, renewables development in Brazil, I think it’s just The time that AES has decided to pull out and, Auren is given an opportunity to diversify their portfolio which also contains other, kind of conventional power generation and now a rather substantial portfolio of renewables.