The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

OEG celebrates 500 offshore turbine toilet installations while BlackRock acquires AES for $38 billion, signaling continued investment despite global wind auction slowdowns and European wind droughts. 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! Welcome to Uptime News. Flash Industry News Lightning fast. Your host, Allen Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed. Allen Hall 2025: There’s good news today from the wind energy sector, and it starts of all places with toilets. OEG and Aberdeen Headquartered company just reached a milestone. They’ve installed their 500th in turbine welfare unit across the UK’s offshore wind sector. If you’ve ever worked on an offshore wind turbine, you know why this matters. These aren’t just convenience facilities. Their dignity and their safety. The other difference between a dangerous transfer to a standby vessel and staying on the job. The units operate in the harshest offshore conditions with no external power or water. Nine offshore wind farms now have these facilities and they’re making offshore work accessible for [00:01:00] women helping retain a more diverse workforce. And while OEG celebrates 500 installations, something much larger is happening in the American Midwest. Gulf Pacific Power. Just completed a major transaction with NL Green Power North America. Gulf Pacific acquired all of E L’s interest in five operating wind facilities, totaling over 800 megawatts of capacity. The portfolio includes Prairie Rose in Minnesota, Goodwill and Origin, and Rocky Ridge in Oklahoma, and a facility in North Dakota. Projects with long-term power purchase agreements and high credit counterparties. And then there’s BlackRock. The world’s largest asset manager is placing a $38 billion bet on American clean energy. They’re close to acquiring power Giant a ES, which have give BlackRock ownership of nearly eight gigawatts of wind power capacity. A [00:02:00] ES leads in sign deals with data center customers with artificial intelligence driving unprecedented electricity demand. That positioning matters. The weather numbers tell their own story about wind’s challenging year. Most of Europe recorded wind speeds four to 8% below normal in the first half of this year. The wind drought curtailed generation in Germany, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. But the Northeastern United States saw winds seven to 10% above average in parts of Norway, Sweden, and Northern China also benefited. And in storm, Amy, which is passing through the uk, it drove wholesale electricity prices negative for 17 hours. 20 gigawatts of wind power flooded the grid and the grid paid users to consume electricity. Too much wind, not enough demand. The offshore wind industry faces real headwinds. Global awards fell more than 70% in the first nine months of this year. Of about 20 gigawatts of expected auctions, [00:03:00] only 2.2 gigawatts have been awarded. Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark are preparing new frameworks to restore investor confidence and Japan designated two promising offshore zones, but confidence there is still shaken when Mitsubishi pulled out of its first auction due to some sorry costs. So here’s what we have. An Aberdeen company celebrating 500 toilet installations that transform working conditions. A Midwestern power company expanding its wind portfolio by 800 megawatts and the world’s largest asset manager, betting $38 billion on American energy infrastructure. All while offshore auctions stall globally, all while Europe experiences a wind drought and the UK experiences at times too much wind. The sector faces challenges US federal opposition, variable weather, and market slowdowns, but the fundamentals haven’t changed. Data centers. Need power and [00:04:00]someone has to generate those megawatts and companies are still buying wind farms. Asset managers, are still making billion dollar bets, and engineers are still improving infrastructure. One toilet at a time. When a company celebrates its 500th toilet installation, it’s about commitment to an industry they believe has a future. When investors acquire 800 megawatts of operating capacity, they’re betting on tomorrow. And when the world’s largest asset manager places a $38 billion bet. They’re looking past the turbulence to see the demand. 500 reasons to believe each one installed in a turbine tower. Each one making life better for workers in harsh conditions. Each. One. A sign that this industry isn’t going anywhere.

Kyle Mason (Associate Planner) and Robert Freudenberg (VP, Energy & Environment Program) from the Regional Plan Association break down why New Jersey electricity rates spiked 17-20% in June 2024. They explore how outdated grid infrastructure, AI-driven energy demand, and stalled renewable projects are creating a perfect storm for ratepayers. 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! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Kyle and Rob, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having us.  Robert Freudenberg: Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.  Allen Hall: Uh, so I was doing a lot of homework online a couple of days ago and looking into, uh, some statements with an administration about the electricity rates in New Jersey, and I thought, well, I need, I need to do my homework because some of this is new to me and throughout all my research and spent several hours on it. Your organization is the only one that had any real data. So I’m glad you’re joining us today. So, Kyle, I would like to start with you first, and, and. There’s a fundamental challenge that’s happening, uh, in New Jersey. Can you just paint a picture of what around New Jersey rate payers are facing with their electricity bills? Kyle Mason: Yeah, absolutely. So starting [00:01:00] June of this year, uh, electricity rates in New Jersey went up between 17 to 20%, depending on your utility company. Uh, that is a cause of a larger problem with the regional grid operator. PJM. Uh, PJM is the grid operator for New Jersey and 12 other states. It covers over 60 million people in a wide geographic area. Uh, they run a annual capacity auction, which secures power for when the grid is at peak load or when most power is being used on the grid. And that capacity market saw record high prices, which trickled down to. Increased electricity rates for New Jersey rate payers.  Allen Hall: Rob, from a policy perspective, how did we get here? Robert Freudenberg: Yeah, I mean, there are, there are so many ways we got here and that’s part of the issue. Um, you know, I think what we’ve seen in, in the aftermath [00:02:00] of these rate hikes is everybody trying to point to one thing. Uh, and there is no one thing here. This is, this is a series of changes over time. Um, you know, we’re. We’re, we’re looking at, um, the way we bring energy onto a system on an old grid. We have a very old grid. And we’re trying to update it in real time. And the process to put things on the grid is, uh, taking a lot longer than it used to. And we’re putting new and more, uh, various types of, of energy sources onto the grid. So, um, as we’re, it’s like trying to, to build the plane while you’re flying it, and we’re trying to update our grid. As we need the energy and as demand is increasing. So, um, you know, as we add these new and various sources, uh, to the grid, they’re going through a process that used to take a few years, and now it takes many years. And we’re also in a, in a phase where we’re adding a lot of renewables, which are, you know, not big behemoth like power plants. Um, you know, they’re [00:03:00] smaller, more distributed. So the process that’s set up to bring new energy, new infrastructure online is outdated. And, um, you know, I think what we’re, what we’re finding is as we go and more energy is demanded that the system is not keeping up, uh, with the demand. And so we’re falling behind and projects are getting stuck in the queue. And the, the federal government, which is overseeing this, is trying to update it, um, and trying to make changes, but the grid operators are trying to react to that and, and find the realistic balance. So at the end of the day, you have, uh, new systems that want to come online with an old system that’s not letting them come online as, as quickly as they need to. Joel Saxum: And, and there’s a compounding factor here too, right? Rob and Kyle, correct me if I’m wrong, but we have new types of generation on an old grid. But then we also have new types of demand on that grid, right? So with, you know, the buzzword around energy, of course, AI, [00:04:00] data centers, all these things. But we’re really looking at a change. And Kyle, when we talked a bit kind of offline and planning this, and you, you noted to, to us that. This, this 1% of like annual load growth now is looking at like 5% in the future, and we haven’t had that kind of growth since. Was the air conditioning was invented? Is that what you said?  Kyle Mason: Yeah, absolutely. We are seeing in our lifetimes unprecedented load growth. I mean, we have not seen the amount of year over year percentage low growth since. Air conditionings were invented and they started going up in places like New York City and Detroit and Chicago and other big cities throughout the us. And what we’re seeing right now is a massive, massive expansion of data centers. Not just small data centers that we saw expand during the, uh, years leading up to the.com bubble, but rather these massive, uh, hundred plus megawatt data [00:05:00] centers that are. Very, uh, tightly geographically located. So there’s clusters of these in Northern Virginia, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Ohio, and they’re using massive amounts of electricity and they largely were not, uh, predicting 10 years ago they were not predicting AI to, uh, develop as it has and for data centers to expand as they have. So it’s really been a. Tricky, tricky planning situation with grid operators, the federal government and state governments.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that’s something that the general public doesn’t really see or understand right now is like when you’re playing around on CH GPT making a, a funny picture of your friend picking up a house or whatever the thing is, you know, the amount of energy that, that those resources are taking up. Is massive and the growth is there. The things are happening behind the scenes. You don’t see the issue now as a rate payer, as a normal citizen because the lights are still on in your house. Everything’s cruising lock you. You see [00:06:00] this little blurb, like you said last June, like in June, like, oh, my electricity price just went up. Well, that’s gonna continue to keep happening here. And then you have this, this, this perfect storm of. Now we’re, we have an interconnection queue issue within PJM, and then you have like the 1100 megawatt ocean winds project offshore wind that would’ve been connected in New Jersey there that is, has been abandoned for now. At least. There’s, there’s a lot of things happening. Chess pieces moving on the board. They’re going the wrong way. We don’t wanna see.  Robert Freudenberg: Yeah. And here’s the real challenge, and this is where policy comes back, is, you know, up until, uh, the last year or couple years, um, we were all rowing towards the same direction that we’re gonna electrify things, we’re gonna electrify our cars, we’re gonna electrify our buildings, we’re gonna be more plugged in, uh, use more data. And we’re gonna create new renewable energy to feed that hunger, uh, for power. And, and what has just been completely upended is, is [00:07:00] this idea that, okay, we can have more, we can do more, and we’ll have clean energy, uh, to kind of feed that. We’ll get these projects in the queue, we’ll get ’em lined up, and we’ve been spending the better part of the last decade or so. Planning for new big renewable energy projects to feed that demand, um, and, and feed our electric cars and feed our more electrified buildings. And now all of a sudden the plug has been pulled on that, and we’re still moving towards the direction of having electric cars and having electric buildings and having data centers. But now without the renewable energy, that was really just on the verge of coming online. And, and that’s the, the kind of conundrum we’re in right now is that we are, we are hungry for more. We have set things on track to kind of move towards a more electrified, more plugged in world. And now we’re unplugging the, the renewable energy sources. I could have said that.  Allen Hall: And New Jersey’s really at risk because it’s its own energy island, so to speak. It uses more energy [00:08:00] than they produce. But they’re also tied to all this data center. So the larger PJM, uh, grid, I’ll call it, is what? Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, and a number other big power hungry states. They’re all interconnected. New Jersey was trying to help forge a path to bring more energy online, but obviously that has stopped from what we have seen. There was supposed to be about around five gigawatts of offshore wind. To be able to supply New Jersey and that has all stopped. But at the same time, uh, Kyle, I think you mentioned there’s over 200 gigawatts of interconnect queue. That is vast majority is renewable, just waiting to be connected.  Kyle Mason: Yeah. Yeah. As of about. April of last year, there were over 200 gigawatts of projects in the internet connection queue waiting to be studied. And around 98% of them were solar, wind, both onshore and offshore, and [00:09:00] storage. Now a project being in the queue and completing the study doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to come online, but even if 50% of those projects came online, uh, it would’ve. Uh, markedly improved the rate situation, and those are clean energy, uh, systems that can be deployed in small, already geographically constrained areas like New Jersey, for example, is a, the most densely populated state in the country and is fairly geographically constrained. A lot of the open land will. Uh, municipalities would rather use it for housing or open space than large energy projects. And solar, uh, and storage can fill those gaps. And then offshore wind for New Jersey is the ideal solution for a large scale generator. And having those projects stuck in the queue only, uh, decreases supply [00:10:00] or limits the supply supply that will go onto the grid. And at the same time, we’re seeing generator deactivations either from policy or reliability concerns, uh, particularly with coal and oil and gas plants. Uh, there’s a lot of reliability concerns during extreme weather events, extreme cold events. And, uh, PJM recently changed their market rules to, uh, make the reliability rules stricter, which, uh. Which made a lot of those fossil fuel plants ineligible to even enter their capacity market.  Allen Hall: Yeah. That buffer dropped from about 16 gigawatts of, of supposedly reliable, uh, energy sources to about 500 megawatts when the reliability requirements were issued. That’s. Amazing because I think the normal assumption is that, well, your, your base load is always gonna be covered by gas fired generation [00:11:00] or coal fired generation. What could possibly go wrong with that? But when they had to do the reliability review, they realized. They’re not really set up for extreme cold weather events or some of these other situations, and so they’ve removed them from the, the reliability factor that even tightens the news, so to speak. On New Jersey and PJM, what are they about to do here? What is, is, is there a current. Plan or market dynamics in, in place to put some structure back in to get us out of this hole?  Kyle Mason: Yeah, to an extent. Uh, PJM has worked with, uh, ferc, which is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to improve their interconnection Q process. So starting back in 2021 and 2022, uh, PJM worked with the federal government to create a new cluster study prop. Process. So their previous interconnection study process was first come, first [00:12:00] serve, and that was a serial basis. And it didn’t matter if the project would take one year to build or 10 years, if it went into the queue earlier than another project, it would be studied earlier. They have since changed it to reviewing, uh, projects in clusters and on a, uh, first. Ready for serve basis. So a project that will only take one year to build will get a precedent over a project that will take 10 years to build. And they’ve started to implement it on a staggered basis, starting in 2023. And they have made significant progress. They’ve, uh, looked at, they studied over 40 gigawatts of energy already, and that’s starting to get built. Um, but it is a very slow process and. Uh, there, there is the question of whether that can, uh, outpace the rising demand.  Allen Hall: What is the consistency or, or what is that [00:13:00] new generation comprised of? Is it gas fired? Is it solar, is it wind or a combination of all of those?  Kyle Mason: Yeah, from my understanding it’s mostly solar and storage, um, when there is some wind, but with, uh, federal policy around offshore wind that has been stagnated. Um, and there’s also a significant amount of up rates to gas plants. Up rates are increasing the, uh, nameplate capacity of a plant. So basically, uh. Categorical improvements to improve efficiency and the amount of generation these plants can have.  Robert Freudenberg: This process has been, um, good. Right. This is, this kind of sets us on a better path, um, especially because we were going to bring, you know, a lot more renewables on. I think what’s interesting to think now is as, as there’s a federal shift away from, from offshore wind and there’s, there’s actually a push, uh, for fossil [00:14:00]fuels. Um, I think it’ll be interesting to see how this process plays out now for those projects, right? Because we’re gonna need energy and, and there’s a lot working against renewable energy. And now this speedier better process might favor, uh, and work for, uh, kind of the, the, the fossil generated things. I think we’re, we’re gonna hit a problem with is, is we’re back to supply chain issues, uh, where we’re years away from getting new, um, fossil, you know, fired, uh, turbines, right? We’re. We’re years away from, uh, the nuclear dream, uh, that, that so many people seem to have. Um, and, and we had these renewable projects coming along and we’re gonna hit right when we needed it. So. It will be interesting to see how, what’s in the queue now, um, you know, keeps moving forward. And then what comes next in the queue. What, what shifts, uh, is, is it, you know, policy is driving us, uh, away from renewables right now. Uh, it will be interesting to see how, how that actually plays out in [00:15:00]reality.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Because speed is part of the answer in trying to get more generation online. That’s why I think solar is a big part of that, right. Is just because you can deploy very quickly. With gas and other petroleum based systems, they’re slow. It’s gonna take, you may not even be able to get a gas turbine for 20 30, 20 31 if you, if you put your order in today and at, at that point when we get to 2030, I think you’re projecting what, 10%, 12% of the electricity demand on PJM is just from data centers, which is crazy. That’s a huge amount of energy. With the, uh, uh, the federal administration at the moment, uh, pushing wind off the table, so to speak. How do you fill that demand quickly? Or, or do we just not do it and get to 2030 and hope that we have some gas generation? Is is that where policy is headed? Because  Robert Freudenberg: PJM. [00:16:00] The territory is so large, uh, and it includes so many states. You know, I think, you know New Jersey. As a state, uh, we might be looking at importing even more energy, uh, from places and it’ll be importing it from states that didn’t necessarily have, uh, renewable energy goals or, or climate goals. Right there. There are states that make up, uh, the PJM territory. That kind of never left that track or didn’t leave that track as much, and that might start to fill, uh, the demand, um, or that, that we have, uh, again, Kyle, correct me if I’m wrong on that. Kyle Mason: No, you’re, you’re absolutely right. And then if it gets even, and if it gets to a certain point, PJM as a whole may have to start purchasing power from outside authorities, whether it’s states on its border like Miso or Southern states, um, or even Canada. Uh, we’re seeing that in New York with, uh, the Chippy line. Uh, New York is purchasing power directly from [00:17:00] Canada, uh, di uh, plugging in directly to New York City, which is great. It’s clean, hydroelectric energy, but they are relying on, uh. Energy from outside of our borders.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. So what do you start comp? You’re compounding the issue, or not you, sorry, not you, but we are compounding this or issue more here. Right? So if you start relying on energy from Canada, now you’re running into energy security, which is national security issues, right? And then the other side of this thing, at the same time, we would love to see more renewable energies come from. Uh, environments regeneration is easy, right? So we’re talking about like the mid, the middle of the country, the all the wind states. It would be fantastic to be plumbing that, uh, that power back to the east coast, to the PGM, to different, uh, operators through like high voltage transmission lines. However. Now those are under attack. We saw this with the, the grain belt express coming across from the middle of the [00:18:00] country heading east. That’s been, you know, the d the DOE loan guarantee was pulled from that, so now they’re looking at private funding and whatnot. But so like, there’s just so many things happening here that, like I said earlier, we’re kind of in this perfect storm where what you’re gonna end up having is extreme rates possible blackouts, brownouts, and, and. Also, and this is the thing that nobody wants to see, is, in my opinion, job loss. Because energy intensive industries are gonna have to leave the East Coast because they’re not gonna be able to afford energy. You’re gonna see more of them, what you’re seeing now actually from around the country, like heading to Ercot, heading to Texas, where power’s cheaper. Because at the end of the day, if that’s, that’s a consumable for a manufacturing operation. And if you’re looking at rates that are, I think like in Austin, outside of Austin, I’m paying like 9 cents a kilowatt hour. Uh, your, that, that can’t compete with something that is in, you know, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 times that in the future, as these rates start to keep increasing, jobs are [00:19:00] gonna leave as well. Leave that pla that area as well. And so there’s this, this issue that’s compounding, compounding, compounding. And it’s great to hear that the permitting, uh, issues have been. Addressed that there’s, if there’s a plan working for there in the PJM. But the big thing here is to me, generation, you got to stop taking generation off the off the table. And that is in the form of offshore wind because. N there’s no other resource over there, right? Nuclear dream nuclear could be great for the energy grid. However, when are you gonna get a new pet built? 10, 12 years? Same thing with gas right now. You’re not gonna get ’em online till 20 30, 20 32. So the generation, and we wanna be this AI Super house AI powerhouse. We need power Now. Why are we shooting ourselves in the foot at the generation that we need? Is there? It’s ready to go. Shovel ready. We’re ready to collect, connect the electrons to the grid. Um, but we’re, uh. We seem to be going backwards on that.  Kyle Mason: Yeah, absolutely. And I do wanna just touch on one thing you said. Uh, so PJM still hasn’t [00:20:00] figured out the permitting issue. They figured out they’re working on the studying issue. The permitting issue is a, a federal, state, and local process, and PJM doesn’t really have much say over that. Um, and there is still a lot of reform that could be done. And it’s been, there’s been a lot of talk, especially in the last two, three years around permitting reform, and a lot of states are working on solutions. There’s. Legislation within state governments to try and figure out permitting for energy systems, um, and transmission wires in particular. Transmission wires is a, a big, uh, issue right now. ’cause the average amount of time to build a high voltage transmission wire is 10 years. So you have the issue of it taking years and years just to get the materials to build. Power plants and then 10 years with permitting costs and supply chain issues and, uh, permitting timelines to build the transmission wires that will bring that power to the load centers.  Allen Hall: Isn’t that where offshore wind was gonna solve that problem? Because instead of [00:21:00] drawing power a thousand miles away, you’re gonna draw from about 20 miles offshore. And is there a scenario where offshore wind. Plays a factor in New Jersey electricity rates to help bring them down, or is it completely off the table? We are not even planning to see any offshore wind because of what’s happening with the current administration.  Robert Freudenberg: That’s the question, um, is what’s going on with federal policy, federal aggression, honestly, towards offshore wind? Is this a pause or is it. A death blow. Right. And, and I think, you know, probably the answer to somewhere in between there, but we’re certainly losing time. Um, we’re losing kind of the opportunities. We have an offshore wind farm working right now off of the South Fork on Long Island. And if you look at the data from that, that is performing very well, it’s reliable. Uh, the folks who pay, uh, the rates on that, you know, they get a a dollar [00:22:00] and a half more on their bill. Um, but it’s not gonna go up because they negotiated that rate, um, you know, years ago. And that’s set. It’s not gonna fluctuate. Like, uh, other rates do, uh, put a thousand people to work. Uh, we have the proof that these projects work and they deliver on what they said they were going to do. Um, and we’re, we’re actively citing against us. We’re not, but the federal government is. Um, so I think what. You know, offshore wind developers, uh, around the, the world are asking themselves right now is, you know, are we just leading, uh, to see what the US ends up doing with offshore wind? Or is this damaging enough that we just go away? I, I think the way we think of it is the ingredients here are so good for offshore wind. Everything you just said. Uh, the proximity, the, the wind speeds. Um, all we have to do is build those things and connect them into our grid and we’ve got a lot of power. Um, and I think that [00:23:00] opportunity doesn’t go away. It’s just what are the, what is the damage we’re doing to the industry now? How, how many years are we setting ourselves back? Um, if you look in New Jersey. You know, there was a plan to build this pre-built infrastructure, PPI, um, where they were going to connect, you know, build the infrastructure in ducts so that when offshore wind farms come online, they have nice, one nice duct to put a few projects in, uh, minimizes disruption on communities. And, um, it really just allows a place for multiple farms to plug in. And, you know, the state is in a, in a, a limb in limbo right now because, um, they don’t see offshore wind coming anytime soon. So why should they go ahead and build this and put the resources and time into it? New York did something similar. They had a, you know, plan for building transmission infrastructure for the future offshore wind farms. And, and now those projects are on ice. Um, in [00:24:00] some cases not even, not even moving forward. So how far are we setting ourselves back? Our hope is that offshore wind comes back quickly. We would like to see states continue to make these investments in transmission, uh, but we also understand that it’s, it’s tricky, um, to get the timing right, but, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a real challenge. Allen Hall: Well, what is the message then for New Jersey policy makers, uh, about offshore wind renewables going forward? I  Robert Freudenberg: think it’s, um, you know, as much as a state can, uh, because there are limits to what a state can do without federal approval, I think states need to keep the charge on for offshore wind. They need to keep the fire burning for it. Um, I think they need to, you know, recognize that this, this likely is a pause. Uh, work closely with developers, work closely with communities to prepare them, uh, but know that we have, uh, some, some time and space here where, where it’s not gonna move forward, but have all the plans ready to go. [00:25:00] Um, want the minute? Kind of this federal policy changes. Um, I have to think that with everything going for offshore wind, with the demand that’s gonna come with the prices that are gonna come, there’s gonna be an outcry, uh, for more energy. And we have the lease areas, we even have projects on paper, right? We can, we can get these things going again. And I think, uh, states, uh, should be doing everything they can to prepare for that. And I do think that includes, you know, getting the transmission and infrastructure ready so that. As soon as we can build them, we can plug ’em in versus having to start from scratch and leap for them to be built and leap to go through the process. We can get some of this done that’s in the state’s, uh, power right now to, to move on the transmission infrastructure, uh, to the degree it doesn’t need federal approvals.  Kyle Mason: Yeah. And uh, and along that line, uh, the state recently has announced some major steps forward to building transmission infrastructure, not necessarily for offshore wind, but general. Grid modification. They [00:26:00] recently announced their Garden State Energy Storage program, which, uh, aims to get, uh, over two gigawatts of energy storage onto New Jersey’s grid in the next few years. And they, uh, release their first set of grid modification rules, which really are more statutory, but they require. All of the utility companies to conform to a, um, modern standard in New Jersey. But they’re hoping to release another set of rules later about actual technical grant modification standards that they would like utilities to follow, and that that workup can really improve efficiency, bring down costs for rate payers, and prepare the grid for, uh, renewable energy like offshore  Allen Hall: wind. There’s so much that’s gonna happen over the next. Six months to a year, to two years in New Jersey and PJM, uh, it’s gonna be amazing to watch. And if you want to learn more about what’s about to happen, you need to visit Regional [00:27:00] Plant Association. And guys, your report has. Was fantastic. And if you haven’t visited their website, you should, it’s rpa.org. And I assume, are you gonna have any new information coming out or any new reports coming out? Uh, talking about more electricity prices in the region?  Kyle Mason: Yeah, we will be having three more lab posts. Uh. Featuring a, a state of the grid for each of our three states in the region. So that’s New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Oh, wow. Okay. That’s terrific. I’ll, I’ll look forward to  Allen Hall: that. Well, Kyle and Rob, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We’d love to have you back. As those reports get issued, we’d learn to learn more about what’s about to happen on electricity rate. So thank you so much for joining us.  Kyle Mason: Yeah, thank you both. It was great to speak with you. Yeah, great conversation.  Robert Freudenberg: Appreciate what you’re. Talking [00:28:00] about.

The crew discusses the Chinese S1500 airborne wind turbine, how NLMK DanSteel manufactures steel for offshore wind, and results from ORE Catapult showing extended blade lifetimes. 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! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall in the Queen City, Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes and. Australia Phil Totaro’s in California and Joel Saxum’s back home in Texas. We’ve all decided that we’re not gonna talk about anything negative this week. That’s good. Phil did have his pre-recorded rant. That’s always good. So there, there is some dirt going on out there in wind, but I don’t think we’re gonna talk about it this week ’cause we just need a little bit of a break. The top of the order is, uh, this Chinese flying wind turbine that looks like a Zeppelin, and [00:01:00] they have supposedly tested over in China, the world’s largest airborne wind turbine, and it’s called the S 1500. It’s developed by Beijing’s Saws Energy Technology, and it made us made in flight recently in Hames. The, it looks like a Zeppelin and, and Rosemary, there has been a previous version of this that was around, but I don’t think it went to anywhere, but it looks like it’s what? It’s about 40 meters tall, about 40 meters wide and about 60 meters long. So it’s sort of this long tube. And inside of this tube they have 1200 kilowatt generators. So they’re creating power up at altitude, and they have a cable that bring down all the power. Down to earth. It’s kind of like a heliostat and some of these, uh, other tethered systems. My question is, why are we trying that now? And especially in China where they have huge, massive wind turbine is [00:02:00]being built. Why this?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Uh, I don’t know. I often question why China makes certain decisions with investments they make. ’cause they have, um, yeah, invested in a whole bunch of. Out there technologies as well as dominating most of the mainstream ones. And, uh, what I usually come up with is that they’ve gotta try everything. Strategy, very, very similar concept came out of MITI think that they developed it originally as a power generating thing, you know, basically just based on the idea that, um, wind speeds are way higher the further up you go. So they wanna. Get, get up into those really high, um, wind speeds that, you know, way higher than what a tower can reach for a traditional wind turbine. And yeah, this, these original concept that I saw out of MIT, that originally they were planning to use it for power generation, then I think that they pivoted to telecommunications. Um, and then I believe that they pivoted to not doing that anymore. Um, so I haven’t looked at it recently. Could, could be that [00:03:00]I’m a little bit outta date on that. But it is interesting to see a concept picked up that. Like, I don’t think anybody would really say that that was the most promising of all the different kinds of airborne wind. Um, yeah. So it’s interesting to see that that’s the one that’s been picked up. I think it’s got some promise in that it’s, it’s true that the wind resource is much better at, um, at high wind speed, but there are a whole lot of challenges that need to be overcome. Um, so it’s not yet I would say sure whether this. Is any of these technologies are ever gonna go anywhere? Um, we’re kind of at the point now where some companies are ready to find out, but it’s um, yeah, definitely not taking over the world anytime soon.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. I was gonna say, Rosie, I tend to agree with you. I, we’ve, there’s the one I’m thinking about, Alan is the, it was containerized and it was like we had a winch. He let led the thing up and went up to higher altitudes. I just. I think there’s too many moving parts to these [00:04:00]solutions to be something that’s gonna be done at scale. I think there’s a great use for them in say, I don’t know, military operations or disaster response, um, those kind of things. Or very remote areas where you can’t get anything else in, you know, like a Caribbean island or some crazy thing like that. I think there’s, there’s possibility there. However, to do this at scale. I just don’t see it, right? This one’s, this is by far the biggest one. I think I’ve heard of 1.2 megawatts. That’s a lot of juice, right? That’s creating a lot of energy. So I think that you can see this like, oh, we’re trying to go to scale with this thing, but. What’s the practical use? I think, Phil, you actually said it before off air, like this is a solution looking for a problem almost.  Phil Totaro: Yeah, and it, what’s funny to me about this is there’s, there’s a couple of things here. One is what you just mentioned, Joel, like the economies of scale on doing this as some kind of displacement to conventional power generation is just completely [00:05:00] impractical because we have so much infrastructure in place that’s not associated with. With Airborne, but we actually looked at, I just wanna say like 12 years ago as a company, we did the math on whether or not this type of technology made sense to use in, you know, like islands or, um, you know, displacement of like diesel generation basically, uh, places like Alaska or the Caribbean, like you said. Um, so the math came out like if the price of oil is above. Something like 120 bucks a barrel, then a solution like this makes sense. Uh, otherwise you’re probably better off, especially now. ’cause again, when we did this analysis, it was years ago, but batteries are easily more dispatchable now. You know, the technology, this is one of those things like you were saying, like, yeah, the technology works and you can make this like a TL nine, but [00:06:00] for what? Like, nobody’s gonna pay for this.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think that they’re up to TL nine yet. ’cause there’s some like, it, it works. And they’ve done autonomous operation, like in steady state operation. They’ve done some autonomous, um, like launches and. I dunno, what’s the opposite of a launch? Um, pulling, pulling back in. You can’t just stay up there through any kind of storm, right? So they have to be able to launch and, um, re retract land, um, under deploy. You have to be able to do that autonomously if you are gonna imagine, you know, this having any kind of scale. And I think that, yeah, autonomous launch and, um, landing has been done. But not in all conditions. At least last time I looked into it deeply, they, that was the last bit that was left. It’s like, yeah, it can, can be done autonomously in good conditions, but not bad ones. Um, yeah, so I think that there’s still some proving out to go and I think that failure raise a really good [00:07:00] point that it becomes like the further that other technologies develop, the less likely it is that airborne wind can catch up. And also that people like those early. Early markets are going to want it now. Islands obviously solar panels, um, are already deployed on a lot of islands. And then when you do have batteries so cheap that you can start to build up a whole day, a couple of days, you know, a week worth of batteries would probably not be a totally non-comparable cost to the airborne wind. And also just so much less maintenance required. So much less that can go wrong.  Joel Saxum: You know, there’s one thing I wanted to touch on here that we, we skipped, we kind of, we breezed by it because we do, we talk about these things all the time, but for people that are, aren’t used to r and d or aren’t used to technology development. T when we mention TRL nine on the show here, uh, Phil mentioned it, Rosemary mentioned it. That is a scale. TRL one through TRL [00:08:00] nine, and it is, it was developed by NASA a long time ago, but basically TRL one means concept and idea all the way through. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9 means commercially ready. We’re ready to roll with this product as a, as a thing. So when we say a one of those levels, that’s what we’re referring to.  Allen Hall: The United States had something very similar, or it still does, I think along the east coast they put up Aerostats around Washington DC and they had a little radar underneath them so they could look over the horizon. So along the east coast there are these big, massive aerostats, and I don’t know if you recall or not, but several years ago, probably 10 years ago now, they had one of those aerostats break loose in Maryland and that cable. That holds it to the earth is conductive. So every power line it came across, started creating shorts and blackouts all along this pathway until it finally crashed in Pennsylvania. I think they had an F 16 [00:09:00] chasing it for a little bit, uh, once it broke free. But I remember that happening and thinking, man, that is a really difficult engineering, uh, design to create something as big as a basically a BLI size piece and have a cable and have it hold it. For eternity.  Rosemary Barnes: That’s one of the biggest challenges. As aside from the autonomous operation, one of the biggest challenges is just the materials, properties of the cable itself. Because Yeah, the, the tether to get, and obviously it has to be conductive because the electricity has to, um, travel through it. That’s the point. Um, yeah. And then, you know, to reach the really good wind speeds, you have to be very far above the ground. I mean, you would want to go like, what’s a jet stream? Is what, like a kilometer up or, or something. So, you know, that would be ideal. But at least, you know, several hundred meters and just the pure weight of that cable, um, you have to then, you know, like all of the lift that you need to keep in the, in the sky to support that cable is all just coming off, [00:10:00] you know, being subtracted from the, um, lift that is going into generation. So it’s, yeah, it’s really tricky.  Allen Hall: I did work on one of those designs for a cable years ago. You’d be shocked how small those cables are for as high of altitude. That the balloon would go. So it’s maybe about twice the size of your thumb, at least my thumb, and it’s just full of really strong material plus power in it. So if anything kinks or goes wrong in the winding process and you damage that cable, it’s a big deal. But if you do create a weak spot in it, your whole design floats away. Chaos reigns.  Phil Totaro: The other thing is that that’s why they wanna try the technology with the shroud design, because that obviously increases the rotor induction and everything like Rosie was talking about before. The problem though, with it is it’s. Like, so theoretically you could [00:11:00]put it at a lower altitude with, with lower wind shear because you’re getting that acceleration when they’ve done these designs though on shore. Uh, ’cause there have been a number of companies that have tried doing shrouded turbine designs. It, it. Ends up increasing the fatigue load on the blade route to such a degree that the, the blades end up shearing and you just, you lose all the benefit of the shroud. So  Rosemary Barnes: yeah, with ground, ground based, uh, ducted wind turbines, it’s always, it’s like a, almost like a little cheat because you can get higher, higher efficiency and, you know, beat the bets factor, which is a theoretical limit for how efficient a, a wind turbine can be. A horizontal axis wind turbine can be, but it’s just, it’s just trickery because the shroud accelerates air from a, a bigger, like it’s capturing a bigger surface area. Um, the energy doesn’t come from nowhere, so it’s. You know, you can get the same effect by just having a bigger rotor, right? [00:12:00] Um, and then instead of a bigger rotor, you’ve used extra material to make the, the duct or the shroud. And so it’s, you know, if they use the same amount of materials, do you actually improve anything? You can get a better efficiency number, but you’re not gonna get a better cost effectiveness. In any of the, like more advanced ducted designs that I have seen, they always end up using more material in the duct than they do. They would to make a bigger wind turbine if it’s way up in the sky, like why are you limited on the diameter That it, it can be. So it’s like, yeah, I’m not, I’m not sure. Aside from the fact that they want the buoyancy from the, you know, the, the blimps of it, um. So they might as well make that into a shroud. I guess If they’re not using any extra material to make the shroud, then sure. But in general, ducted desires like they, they work and depending on your. How you’re calculating efficiency. They can be more efficient, but they’re not more cost effective.  Allen Hall: [00:13:00] As wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS wind.com Today in this quarter’s PS Wind Magazine. Lot of good articles need to go. Download it@pswind.com. Uh. I wanna highlight an article I’ve been reading about, ’cause this ties into things that Rosemary has been talking about in regards to steel and steel manufacturing, that it’s very carbon intensive and CO2 intensive, and there’s been a number of efforts to use electric arc furnaces to reduce amount of CO2. And when you do that. You use recycled material, you throw back into the mix to create the, to bring the carbon into play. [00:14:00] Uh, but NLMK, Dan Steel, which is based in Denmark, uh, makes the heavy plate steel, it’s used in wind turbines, have been doing it for a long, long time. And the article on PES Wind talks about the complexities of doing that today because we’re asking wind turbine. Towers out in the ocean to do more and more and more. We’re putting more weight on top of them so any sort of grain defect becomes, can become catastrophic over time. So the amount of effort going into the steel plate and the technology that’s going into making that steel is exponentially higher than it was even 10 years ago. And. Rosemary, I, I know the effort to decarbonize steel has been there for a number of years, but NL MK is already starting that process and I think it’s really interesting to see it and see those pieces of steel that are using less or remitting less CO2 now being put out into service. It [00:15:00] does take a very specific process though, right? To do that.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know if, um, if you saw it, but I actually got to tour an electric arc furnace when I was in Sweden earlier this year. So that was really cool. We didn’t talk a whole lot about what I was there mostly to see. It’s the world’s lowest emissions, um, steel production. So when the electricity price was low, they would make hydrogen and um, then burn. Burn that. They’d burn it immediately. They don’t store it anywhere. They make it onsite and then. Use it immediately. Um, and then when the electricity price is high, then they’re using propane. So, um, it was kind of like, uh, a more economical way to retrofit, uh, facility to be lower emissions. But it was, it was such a cool thing to experience. It’s, uh, you know, like a lot of the decarbonization things, uh, you know, like if you’re in your home, it’s like putting solar panels on a roof and a battery, uh, in the backyard and you don’t really like, it doesn’t feel that that. [00:16:00]Challenging. Uh, at least in Australia, it really doesn’t feel challenging. You know, electric car is nice to drive, plug it in at home. You never have to go to a petrol station. It’s all good, good, good. But then when I was in a steel facility, it’s like, you know, like you’re standing. 20 meters away from this molten steel and, uh, you know, just the, the weight of it. They’re just like throwing around this like red hot steel, throwing it around like it’s, uh, a noodle, um, rolling it and yeah, just, just literally just throwing it around, grabbing it with claws and throwing it over there. And, um, it’s like you just, the, the weight and the heat, it’s just so obvious how much energy is, is used. But that is an electrified process also. So you know, even then it is still quite similar.  Joel Saxum: Rosie, do you think this is Okay, so I’m just going further down the path of what N-N-L-M-K is doing here in this decarbonization of steel production. ’cause steel, the steel production industry is like, it’s not like cement, where cement is one of the highest energy. Users in the world, uh, but steel [00:17:00]uses a lot and that’s why there’s an effort to do this. Can you see, so in this electric arc furnace process, is there a possibility of these things having say, behind the meter, wind backed up by batteries or behind the meter solar, like, can that produce enough power to run one of these plants or enough constant power? Because I imagine these things need on-demand power now. Can that happen or do they have to be hooked up to the grid?  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know about behind the meter because that’s just, you know, like a whole lot of power and any one wind farm or any one set of solar panels is going to be quite variable. Um, so I don’t see that it would make sense really to separate from the grid, which can combine, you know, a lot of different sources and it’s all, you know, it’s whole, um. Its whole operational existence is geared around being very, very, very reliable. So I’m not sure. I mean, it’s one of those things that I guess, um, as the, um, cost of batteries comes down, down, down, down, down, then you can start seeing people probably inch closer to that themselves. But I can’t really see why you would need to be [00:18:00] off. Sure there’s lots of steel plants with power purchase agreements out there. Um, you know, with individual wind farms.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. What kind, what kind, what’s the demand? Did they tell you what the demand is? Like, what is, what is peak power usage? What do we use it?  Rosemary Barnes: I didn’t, I didn’t talk about it in in that one, but I mean, electric arc furnace, it’s very, it’s a very normal technology and it’s something that’s been around since way before anybody cared about the emissions. Um, CO2 emissions of steel because it’s very cost effective to take existing steel and, you know, just makes a, a new kind of steel product out of it compared to taking dirt and trying to turn that into iron and then steel, um, it’s a lot more cost effective. To the extent that we have enough steel scrap that’s, you know, from steel use that’s being retired now. Um, you would obviously go with that for everything you can, but at the moment we’re still, you know, as a, a planet, we’re still using more and more steel every, every year. So it’s definitely not the full solution, but it’s a part of it. [00:19:00] Allen Hall: Did they make, make you leave your wallet and watch behind when you went into that arc furnace area? That’s what happened when I used to work for Alcoa. Years ago because the arc furnace is there.  Rosemary Barnes: The arc furnace wasn’t on. They, they do a weekly, um, cycle, so they shut down every Friday and um, they kind of shut it down in, in order, you know, because the, yeah, so the ARC furnace had had already shut down for the week, but the rolling was still going on. But it was kind of good ’cause I could get right up to the equipment. You can’t stand very close to it, obviously while it’s  Phil Totaro: operating. So co couple of things. First is the, the companies that have signed PPAs for steel production offtake, they’ve actually said that they’re, they’re not doing a hundred percent of their power demand because they still have to, like, there’s a certain amount of base load power that they need, which they’re actually taking from renewables instead of taking from some other base load power generation. Um, but they still need to [00:20:00] have like a peaker uh, capability. From the utility company that they’re getting power from. Uh, so, uh, Zenger in Germany signed a PPA, like that. I, there’s another company in Scandinavia somewhere that also did that, um, like late last year, I wanna say, or early this year. Um, so there’s, there’s a couple of companies that are, that are, uh, doing that. The other aspect of this that I find fascinating is the fact that. When you make a wind turbine tower, it contains what we call a, a specific type of detail category, um, of the steel. So it’s a certain grade and a certain thickness to it. What’s basically going on with the evolution of this kind of technology, and what’s so fascinating about it is that you can now make things cheaper. Faster and thinner than you ever could before using this type of process. So there’s less carbon, it’s cheaper, it’s faster, it’s better, it’s everything. That’s what’s actually really kind [00:21:00] of cool about this and and really fascinating to me and Joel though, making plate about 10 inches  Allen Hall: thick. That’s amazing. Joel Saxum: That’s crazy. While we’ve been talking, I’m curious about some numbers here. So I went and kind of just did a little bit of basic math and this stuff is probably gonna ring true to a lot, but. A seven, so a 70. They, they rate these electric arc arc furnaces in tons. So a 70 ton electric arc furnace when producing 500,000 tons of steel per year. The annual power consumption via 190 million kilowatt hours. Wind farm operating at 40% capacity is a 54 megawatt wind farm dedicated to this one steel factory. So that’s like 36 G one fifteens. Just to power this one steel factory for the year. One furnace. One furnace outputting, right, outputting 500,000 tons, one furnace. Allen Hall: It’s impressive. And if you want to be even more impressed, you wanna download the latest quarters PS WIN magazine, ps win.com. A lot of great [00:22:00] articles, a lot of people that we know in there this quarter, download it. It’s free. A lot of good stuff in there. Are you worried about unexpected blade root failures and the high cost of repairs? Meet Eco Pitch by Onyx Insight. The standard in blade root monitoring. Onyx iss state-of-the-art sensor tracks blade root movement in real time, delivering continuous data to keep your wind farm running smoothly and efficiently. With eco pitch, you can catch problems early. Saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Field tested on over 3000 blades. It’s proven reliability at your fingertips. Choose Eco Pitch for peace of mind. Contact Onyx Insight today to schedule your demo of Eco Pitch and experience the future of blade monitoring. Well, what if we told you that winter term blades collapse 50% longer than their intended lifespan? Rosie would say that’s crazy. Well, Ori Catapult has been working with RWE [00:23:00] on a breakthrough testing program, so what they have done is they’ve. Pulled a 20-year-old blade from one of rws e’s uh, harshest onshore insights and replicated real world conditions, and they did it with 11 I devices, Joel. And they simulated the aging process and they successfully compressed one year of real world impact into about 48 hours. Doing that allows you to then rapidly test. Blades for lifetime extension. Sally Pakistan, who was a principal validation engineer at, or a catapult called this potentially a breakthrough moment for the wind industry, unquote,  Phil Totaro: and I would agree with her. What’s awesome is that they’re improving the reliability of. The, the blades. But this is also fascinating for the companies that repair blades. ’cause anytime you make something, you know, cheaper, [00:24:00] better, higher quality, less repair work equals less revenue for them. So they’re not gonna like it that much. I’m gonna throw a red flag on this study.  Joel Saxum: I like, uh, the 11 I technology and I think it’s really good ’cause I’ve seen it work, right? Um, bill and the team over there do a great job, however. All of the blade conferences, all of the blade knowledge, all of the experts that I’ve talked to over the last five years, everybody basically has the same synopsis of the blade industry. 20-year-old blades. Yes. They were tough. They were designed tough. They’re gonna last a long time. I don’t care about those that much. I expect those the last 30 years. It’s the new blades that I’m concerned about. Those are the ones that I don’t believe. So if you’re gonna do this test again, I’m throwing the red flag. You’re gonna do this test, do it on a 1-year-old blade, do it on a brand new design we’re installing today, then I bet you it won’t last 30 years. Allen Hall: Well, that’s the question, right? I think. The, all the E-cig groups and the [00:25:00] dvs and uls have to be wondering like, okay, now what? Because the certification test that Rosemary’s been involved with in terms of blade qualification, is that real? Because that test is supposed to show the blades last 20 years if they do these series of tests, right? And now our catapult’s coming back and saying, we have a way to really hone in on it. I think lifetime tests could get. Much more advanced, I’d imagine.  Rosemary Barnes: So in the early days of the wind industry, when they started making blades out of composites, they had huge safety factors, or probably safety factor isn’t the right way to think about it. ’cause the safety factor itself has probably not changed or not changed much since those days. But what they used as their material. Properties that, you know, the, um, values that they would put in their design codes, they were incredibly conservative. You know, they didn’t know exactly how strong it was. They didn’t know exactly what fatigue behavior would be like. Over decades, we’ve adjusted the materials properties, [00:26:00] so now it’s much closer to what it really is. But the problem is that then we’ve got, we’ve rightfully reduced the. Buffer in those kinds of areas, but it used to also kind of compensate for a bunch of other things that we didn’t know that well, like manufacturing defects and, um, yeah, like all, all sorts of funny operating methods or, um, weird things that can happen that was kind of all included in that fudge factor. And now that we have, um, really, you know, come down, you get to the point where yes, you can pass a, a, a. Certification test, but then when you get it out into the real world, things don’t happen exactly the same way every time. And there’s, you know, like little shocks from the sudden gust of wind or some turbulence that you just behaved in some sort of way that you didn’t expect, or, you know, like breaking loads, all these sorts of things can start to [00:27:00]then cause failures. Phil Totaro: So let me, let me ask a question on this Is. Is the fact that we started moving away from, you know, kind of traditional, um, composite to start including carbon. You know, ev basically everybody wants a longer blade with less weight. We had to start introducing carbon to be able to make that possible. Is, is it? The carbon protrusions are, are part of the problem or what’s the, what’s really kind of behind this?  Rosemary Barnes: I mean, carbon protrusions are part of the solution and then part of the problem as well, you know, you solve, they solved some, some things immensely and introduce new, new, um, damage modes, value modes, which. You would say for any kind of new technology? I don’t think it’s all to do with carwood. I see plenty of, plenty of interesting failures in all glass blades. Um, it’s to do with them being longer. I think definitely like composite [00:28:00]materials actually don’t like to be thick. Um, the thickness of um, just even fiberglass in a wind turbine blade is like really unusual for, you know, I was doing my PhD 10. 13 years ago I started and at that time, like thick, thick composites, that’s an area of research and what counted as thick then is not as thick as what we see in, um, wind turbine blades all the time. And it’s not, these aren’t being made under lab conditions, you know, so there’s just a lot more things that can go wrong and not be discovered in the factory. You know, when you have a small blade, defects are more visible from the outside and from standard, um, non-destructive testing techniques. Um, so yeah, now they can kind of be, be a lot more hidden and you might not learn until you’ve already got, you know, 5,000 blades out in operation.  Joel Saxum: I know this is a factor of economics, but this is one of the troubles that I have with, with, with standards, certifications, and all these things. Just what [00:29:00] you said earlier, Rosemary, is the testing, right? So everybody’s seen a test rig. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve seen a blade test rig. It sticks the blade out. You’re gonna do some flap wise, you might do some oscillations. You might do some edgewise. Great. However, there is not a test stand in the world that can simulate centrifugal forces, gravity loading, aerodynamic loading, and those are major things with that happen to these wind turbine blades. All day, every day. So the answer to me is install them, run ’em for a year or two. Figure these things out before you build 5,000 of ’em.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but they do. But the problem is, with any kind of certification, is you’re testing one thing, one example of something that’s gonna be serially produced with all sorts of random distributions. And in some ways it’s conservative ’cause it’s your first blade and you probably haven’t figured out how to well make ’em that well. But on the other hand, you’ve made it really slow and everyone’s paying a lot of attention. Um, I don’t think necessarily people are making it differently because they know it’s gonna be tested. I never saw that. But definitely [00:30:00] everybody’s paying attention for the first few blades because it’s not become second nature anymore. You know, you’re still reading the work instructions carefully and engineers are still there supervising everything. You just can’t get the statistical variation in a full population of blades by doing one test. Allen Hall: Isn’t the 11 I sensors that were used during this process, I assume to show aging if they’re installing 11 I imus Joel, that’s basically what they are is like an IMU  Joel Saxum: multiple ones in each blade.  Allen Hall: You can detect different modes of vibration and how the blade is moving over time. If you can do that at some reasonable scale, seeing it’s even 1% of the blades that are out in service for a particular farm, why wouldn’t you? Because the lifetime issue is gonna come up at some point you would be able to tell if the blade has changed vibration modes or whatever else these structural engineers are [00:31:00] doing. You would be able to see that over time. And I’m guessing that’s what they’re doing at, or a catapult is looking at structural changes. That would occur naturally over time in the aging process, and they can accelerate that and that’s how they’re validating it. But the same token, you can use that same technology to look at existing blades to predict what the lifetime of the blade would be.  Joel Saxum: It’s, it’s another thing what the, like Rosemary is saying though, popula, when we’re we’re talking about this, we, we have to introduce the conversation of statistics. Populations samples. What is pop? What are proper statistics? What do they look like? How do you test for ’em? Because if I’m a, say I’m a big operator and a, or a small operator, I don’t care, or a consortium, this is what it should be. A consortium of operators gets together and says, Hey, we buy a bunch of these type of turbines between the five of us. Why don’t we force this OEM to put these sensors in here on five of your turbines? Five of mine, five of mine, five of mine. That would be great, and then we would have a picture of what’s going on. However, here’s the practical problem there. If you’re, if you’ve got [00:32:00] 500, we’ll throw this out there. GE two X, we look at a ton of them. One 20 sevens ge, two x one 20 sevens. If you’ve got 500 of these, the chances are those 500 turbines, 1500 blades came from probably eight different factories from three different manufacturers, or four or five different manufacturer. And they may be any of 10 different versions from a, a one, A two B two, B three, C one, C two, C3, and now we’ve even seen Gen D. So all of the results you’re gonna have to repeat for every one of those generations of that same blade. Like it’s a, it’s a problem that we have in wind that is a, it’s a very unique, because we’re doing things in serial production like we, like we talk about, but the serial production changes so much and there’s so much variability that to get statistically meaningful. Data is tough. Yeah. But the cost is relatively  Allen Hall: low.  Rosemary Barnes: The cost that’s, that’s, that’s relevant. It’s not even so much the cost of the sensors, it’s the people to manage the data. That’s, that’s what I found. [00:33:00] Um, yeah. When I was always like, why can’t I just install all of the sensors and, you know, just record all of his information and gimme all of the scatter data? And they’re just like, no, we can’t, you know, we can’t manage that. And it’s one thing to do it on the prototype, I, I would. Um, you know, I could just install a, a separate system and manage that on my own. But if you want to do it, um, operationally, then um, that’s the, the biggest challenge. I mean, these OEMs are all, you know, they wanna hire the fewest number of engineers possible, right? Because that’s, uh, they’ve gotta, gotta keep costs down and they just, I don’t think there’s enough human power to be this smart in, you know, across the board. Unfortunately,  Phil Totaro: Joel, this goes back to the issue in the industry that we’ve had absolutely forever, which is the OEMs have some, but not necessarily all of that kind of data because they obviously have an outfitted every single. Turbine with sensors, but they are the ones that [00:34:00] hold all the keys when it comes to what Blade was manufactured, where, uh, what gearbox was manufactured where. ’cause that’s also a consideration too, just talking about general things. But, so from the standpoint of the owners and operators, they’re maybe not even gonna have visibility to some of that kind of information. Even if they retrofit a sensor platform onto the turbines that they own, that may give them visibility. You know, Rosie’s point notwithstanding like, you know, doing the, the data analysis and, and all that, and the resources and money that, that’s necessary to commit to that. But there’s a missing piece that the OEMs are just fundamentally unwilling to share. We’ve been begging them for 20 years to let’s do a project together where you give us some access to that type of information for purposes of benchmarking this, that, and whatever. Like, Hey, you think you’re better than Vestas? Then tell us ge, how you’re better than Vestas. Let us see some of your data. We don’t need all of it, [00:35:00] but some of your data, they won’t even do it. Not even a little bit. So  Joel Saxum: I mean, what, what it would take in my mind, and this is a macro thing, but what it would take in my mind is. A consortium of people in the industry that are saying, okay, enough, we got our insurance company together. We got a finance company together. We got a couple of operators together. We’re gonna put together a, well, what would we call A-J-I-P-A joint industry project. Everybody devotes a little bit of resources to it, and we stare at an OEM and say, we’re not buying any more turbines until you give us some of this data or let us instrument these things. Rosemary Barnes: I reckon that’s the path through. If, um, insurance companies can say, you know, this is costing us too much and start offering a discount to clients that have this kind of monitoring, then I think that that will, you know, create a big enough push pull to get this happening. ’cause you know, maybe. Um, the OEMs can see they can charge more for a product that has this because they just never wanna include sensors [00:36:00] even, you know, just operationally when I want to, you know, get my client who owns a wind farm to, you know, stick a sensor somewhere that’s totally not affecting any structure. Doesn’t need to get into scatter or power through. Its solar powered and remotely. Um. Uh, monitored. They still often say, no, you can’t do that. And it’s, you know, to a turbine that they, that the my client owns. Um, so they just hate to allow anything at all. It’s so, it’s so irritating and so senseless because it’s actually, uh, preventing the industry from maturing in the way that it would need to, to, you know, be future-proof as a, you know, long-term, major technology. Phil Totaro: And here’s, here’s what’s interesting is in in industries like automotive, there’s been a mandate in industries like aerospace and aviation, there’s been a mandate for that kind of. Transparency there has not been a mandate. And going back to Rosie, your question, why do the [00:37:00]insurance companies not have the power of mandate through, you know, the insurance? It’s because they’re not actually backstopping every single thing that goes on out there. The only way we’re gonna get access to the type of data that we want. That we’re all talking about right now that’s gonna solve these problems and help move the industry forward is through some kind of mandate. Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate all the feedback and support we receive from the wind industry, and if today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and please don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For Joel Rosemary and Phil, I’m Alan Hall and we’ll catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:38:00] Podcast.

This episode covers how the wind industry is adapting to political and regulatory challenges, from Ørsted’s legal battle to restart Revolution Wind to a wind executive preparing to row across the Atlantic for ocean conservation. 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! There’s something fascinating happening in the world of wind power right now. Something that tells us less about the technology itself, and more about human determination. You know the story – Danish energy giant Ørsted the world’s largest offshore wind developer – spent five billion dollars building the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island. Eighty percent complete. Three hundred and fifty thousand homes depending on the electricity. Then, one August morning, the phone rings – The new administration says: “Stop. Everything. Now.” Just like that, Orsted is losing a reported two million dollars every single day the turbines sit idle. Last Monday, federal judge Royce Lamberth looked at the government’s reasoning and said – and I quote – “There is no question in my mind of irreparable harm.” He ordered work to resume immediately. Ørsted’s stock jumped. The workers went back to their jobs. The turbines will spin again. Meanwhile, President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has triggered something nobody saw coming: the great wind energy consolidation. Clean energy deals jumped from seven billion dollars to thirty-four billion dollars in just six months. Companies like Agilitas Energy are swooping in, buying up distressed assets from companies that may struggle with the new reality. As Barrett Bilotta from Agilitas put it: “We are on the buy side.” Across the Atlantic, let’s talk about France. Now, you might think the French would be leading the offshore wind revolution. After all, they’ve got coastline, they’ve got technology, they’ve got TotalEnergies. But you’d be wrong. Patrick Pouyanne, TotalEnergies’ chief executive, put it bluntly this week: “It’s hell to invest in France for regulatory reasons.” Get this – it takes two and a half to three years just to bid on offshore wind projects in France. In Germany, Pouyanne can get permits twice as fast. “I don’t understand,” Pouyanne said, “why we’re able to renovate Notre Dame Cathedral in five years and unable to build solar or wind plants at the same pace.” And yet – here’s the kicker – even as he criticized his home country, TotalEnergies just won the contract for France’s largest offshore wind farm ever. One and a half gigawatts off the coast of Normandy. But here’s where the story gets interesting. While France stumbles with red tape, parts of North America is waking up. Up in Nova Scotia, Minister Sean Fraser announced this week that Canada is moving full steam ahead with offshore wind development. They’re calling it part of a sixty billion dollar opportunity. The Canadians are doing something smart: they’re learning from everyone else’s mistakes. Streamlined processes. Clear timelines. So what does all this tell us? It tells us that wind energy isn’t just about technology anymore. It’s about adaptation. It’s about resilience. It’s about knowing when to fight and when to pivot. Ørsted fought in court – and won. TotalEnergies called out France’s bureaucracy – while quietly building their biggest offshore wind farm ever. Canada saw opportunity in others’ uncertainty. And the smart money? It’s buying up assets while they’re cheap, knowing that the wind is a long-term investment. Speaking of people who understand resilience, let me tell you about Stacey Rivers. She’s the Chief Innovation Officer at BladeBug – a company that builds robotics for NDT inspectinos of offshore wind turbines. In seventy-five days, Stacey and her teammates Jonno Hammond and Emma Wolstenholme will do something extraordinary. They’ll row three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean in the World’s Toughest Row. Why would a successful wind energy executive attempt something so dangerous? Because she believes the ocean is calling for help. “This journey is more than just a test of endurance,” Stacey says. “It’s a powerful platform to champion ocean conservation and sustainable innovation.” Every stroke across the Atlantic will raise awareness for a zero-carbon future – the same future that offshore wind farms are helping to build. If you’d like to support their mission, visit www.calltoearth.co.uk. You see, there’s something about human nature: we adapt. We overcome. We find a way. The wind energy industry is learning that lesson right now. Some companies will fall. Some will consolidate. Some will pivot to friendlier markets. But the wind… the wind keeps blowing. Off the coast of Rhode Island, those Revolution Wind turbines are spinning again. In Britain, massive wind farms continue to rise from the sea. Canada is planning its offshore future. And somewhere, a smart investor is buying tomorrow’s energy infrastructure at today’s distressed prices. Meanwhile, people like Stacey Rivers are literally rowing toward that sustainable future, one stroke at a time. The storm will pass. The wind remains. And human determination will carry us forward. That’s the story of resilience in renewable energy.

Jewel Williams, an engineering manager at Ørsted, shares insights about managing a diverse renewables portfolio and the distinct challenges of offshore and onshore wind. Leading operations of over 27 sites, containing wind, solar, and battery storage, Jewel showcases the skillset needed to successfully work in wind. 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!  Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Hey, Jewel, welcome to the program.  Jewel Williams: Hey, nice to be here.  Allen Hall: Well, we have a lot to talk to you about. You’re an engineering manager. In wind and uh, we know all the pressure that’s involved there just from the outside. Um, we’re not working in it day to day. Of course. I am really curious with all the recent changes of things that are happening on the ground, what is your day to day like right now? Jewel Williams: Yeah. Uh, well, you know, it kind of depends on the day, of course. Uh, so, you know, in addition to wind, both in the onshore and offshore, we have, um, best solar and, uh, crane support on my team. So. Kind of depends on what’s, what today’s challenges are, what are the impending deadlines. [00:01:00] Um, so, you know, it could be compliance, it could be dealing with legal, it could be disputing an RCA or building an RCA it, it really just depends on the day. Joel Saxum: I think we breezed over that one almost too quick when we were talking about wind engineering manager and we kind of said engineering manager, and then you went wind solar. Battery storage and then this wild card cranes, you know, when, when we speak with people in the industry, everybody’s busy. That’s, that’s the constant email you see back and forth. Oh, sorry, I was a little bit late there. Thanks for your patience with this. We’re busy with this, we’re busy with that. I don’t think we’ve talked to anybody, Alan, that has like a complete renewables portfolio as an engineering manager. And then also cranes. We’re just gonna throw that in there. Um, so, so I have a net specialty. I is, is it a lot of firefighting?  Jewel Williams: It, it can be. It can be. Ideally we are shifting towards the kind of reactive to the proactive, but you’re in operations and so a lot of times when work is hitting your desk, the first thing that [00:02:00] happens is a problem where failure and then the work comes to you. So in that case, like there’s certainly quite a bit of, uh, firefighting and you mentioned the cranes is a bit of a wild card. I think that was one that. They weren’t quite sure where to put. And we had a good team and a decent people leader, and so they were said Jewel, hey, here’s a job description. We need you to hire a crane guy. And that was an interesting experience because I did not have the background to make the hire in the first place. But it’s worked out really well. I’ve got an awesome guy to support.  Allen Hall: So how many people are on your staff At the minute?  Jewel Williams: Right now we have nine engineers.  Allen Hall: Okay. So you’re doing wind, best, solar, and cranes with nine people. How many wind farms, solar farms and best sites do you have altogether?  Jewel Williams: Altogether? 24. Allen Hall: Wow.  Jewel Williams: So we have two onshore bests, uh, four solar, and the rest is winds. Uh, and then, uh, three of those are offshore wind sites.  Allen Hall: And how far scattered [00:03:00] about the country are they?  Jewel Williams: Well, they’re a little bit of everywhere, but I will say we have two regions. We have Texas and then we have central, and that means everything except for Texas. So there’s a lot in Texas.  Joel Saxum: Well, then offshore as well. Right. That’s a, that’s a big, a big wild card to be, to be dealt with from an engineering side because. And I think in, in your organization, you guys are taking on the management of that yourselves as well, correct? There’s no, there’s no FSA here. This is self-perform. Jewel Williams: Yeah, no, exactly. And for that reason, it’s um, pretty important to kind of know what skills you’re hiring for, I think in the offshore versus the onshore space, the offshore, like you mentioned, we are self performing and so. You need to, you’re gonna be handling all the data, you’re gonna be handling the drawings, you’re gonna be handling this really, uh, extremely technical, uh, level of information. And the onshore, because you’re behind an ESA, um, you’re not gonna always, you know, you’re very rarely gonna have the [00:04:00] drawings. Uh, you’re gonna have oftentimes a little bit more limited data, and you’re gonna need to be a lot more commercially apt. To be able to kind of just handle the different day to day for that position. So, but you just, we have everyone on the same team and it’s still working. Great.  Allen Hall: Talk about how old that offshore site is. It is what the oldest offshore site in America of, of any scale, right?  Jewel Williams: Yeah. Block Island Wind, um, is one of the, the oldest offshore sites. For the South Fork in Revolution, which I know revolutionists kind of transfer from construction to operation, but we still work with heavily. Those are a little bit newer, but, um, walk Island Wind, what is it, 2017 COD.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s been there for a little while, but it’s, it, it’s, it’s interesting concept too, because when you talk about offshore versus onshore wind, they’re two completely different animals and. Most companies around the world will have a dedicated offshore group. This is, you guys do with this because the, the geotechnic, the cable lay stuff, the, the marine environment, [00:05:00] just working within that, like at, at the end of a day, like the, the ne inside the nelle is inside the nelle. It’s just larger scale, right. Uh, blades kind of the same thing, but there’s a lot of marine environment things that you don’t deal with. And that’s a, that’s a specialty, right? I come from offshore oil and gas, like that is a special engineer. That usually is dedicated to that process because there’s little things there. That little, little problems turn into massive problems when you go offshore, commercially, economically. Right. And but also technically, so to that, you guys are covering that breadth of things. It seems like, and we talked about this a little bit off air, to be on your team, to be on the Jewel team. Uh, you must be a kind of lots of, lots of pieces in your pie as a person to be able to ma maintain these things.  Jewel Williams: Yeah, no, absolutely. It, it is a wide scope and the two business cases are very different. And even sometimes, you know, when we have our recap at the end of the year and we wanna talk about what was working well and what was not working well, we do need to break into the two [00:06:00] groups because these guys are, have a whole team, you know, the offshore team, they have a warranty team. They have. The global support functions that are working directly with them, because those guys are the offshore group where in the onshore you are your own warranty team and procurement and all these other things, and so your escalation path is different. Your. Almost, you know, the technology is different as well, but I would say that that’s the easiest thing to translate back and forth. Uh, it gets more complicated when you start to bring in the, the moving parts, like you said, logistically.  Allen Hall: So how do you think about your team then? If you’re covering so many different areas at the same time, what approach are you taking?  Jewel Williams: Particularly I would say I took each role individually when I went to go and hire for that position. And you’re looking at this, what is this? Particular position needed in terms of skillset? Who’s the customer? What do they need to be? Uh, you know, what, how deep, what are the hard skills of the job? [00:07:00] Do they need to be able to be extremely nitty gritty, or do I need them to be somebody that can take that nitty gritty information to translate into a higher level content for sharing, you know, with the non-technical people, so. Definitely had to take an individualized approach. And, um, for my team, I would say it makes it difficult for us to just always cover for each other. We can’t have the VTG engineer step in for the best engineer when they’re out because it’s just two completely different beasts. Right.  Allen Hall: So the hard skill versus the soft skill. I know when we talk to people that are thinking about joining wind and are going to school to be in wind. I think they really focus on the hard skills, which is great. You, you need to have people understand how best works or solar works, or how a wind turbine operates. But a lot of times the decision seems to be made up on the soft skills, right? The human relations skills and negotiating skills. It sounds like you’re, [00:08:00]because you have such a small group, you’re totally in negotiation mode almost all the time. How, how do you weigh that, you know, the hard skills, can they learn on the job versus the soft skills? How do you think about that?  Jewel Williams: You know, the hard skills are always going to be a plus. Like you said, you need them. You can’t get away without them. Every engineer on my team is extremely sharp and and intelligent. The soft skills are gonna be necessary though to make that intelligence worthwhile and impactful across the business. So to me, it is really important not to have engineers that are just intelligent, but also can’t communicate. And that doesn’t necessarily mean I want outgoing, you know, extroverted engineers. It just means that they have to be able to, you know, take ownership of a project. Drive initiatives on their own, work independently and work with technicians, work with stakeholders, you know, whoever it needs to be and be able to. Convey their ideas and their recommendations, uh, with strength and confidence. [00:09:00] Joel Saxum: I think that’s important too because the, the stakeholder map that you must fulfill is huge, right? You’re, you’re to get things done, as we were talking about the customer, right? The customer is the wind farm sites. You guys are there to support them, so you need to be able to synthesize ideas for site supervisors, technicians. Then the next day you might, or that afternoon, you might need to turn around and synthesize the same idea and concept in a business case for a tax equity partner or an asset manager, right? So that, that ability to kind of be a chameleon in your communication styles, like that’s a, that’s a tough thing to do. And some of that doesn’t come, like that’s a hard thing to train, right? Some people don’t, they just don’t take to it. And that’s fine. Like I said, the, the, the, the world needs all types of people and a team needs all types of people. But I think at, uh, like your level and where you’re at, um, the importance of being able to adjust the way you speak, um, take ideas and put ’em in different contexts and formats, that’s tough. Uh, but it [00:10:00] needs, it needs, it’s a skill. It needs to happen.  Jewel Williams: Yeah, no, absolutely. I definitely prefer to hire, you know, a little bit of grit over academic. Success, I would say you want somebody that can get out there and get it done.  Allen Hall: So in terms of wind right now. You have a number of wind sites, are they all the same turbines? Are there a variety of turbines? What have you been handed with in terms of a portfolio that you have to manage?  Jewel Williams: Our portfolio is mostly homogenous. We do have, uh, occasional site here or there that’s a little bit different, uh, breaking the mold. When it comes to wind. So, um, we have a lot of the GE two Xs, but we also have a Siemens CESA and a VESTUS site onshore offshore. We have both, uh, GE and SGRE equipment. So,  Allen Hall: and what does that do to your staff then, when you have that variety, particularly onshore and offshore? Are you constantly training up your people like a Siemens cesa, offshore turbine, you’re it in the [00:11:00] us? How do you manage all, all of that? Are you, are you trying to. Trying to spool up, uh, talent? Or are you trying to bring in talent? What does that even look like?  Jewel Williams: Yeah, no, I mean, I’ve gotten to a pretty good place right now where I feel like I’m somewhat coasting. I’m kind of surfing the wave, but I’ll say the last two years we had a lot of, a lot of training up, but you need experience, uh. For the offshore space, you’re completely right, like you need an extremely strong engineer. You’re not gonna bring someone fresh out of school and try to teach them. We have that strength in our offshore, offshore talent pool. And so now anybody you bring in under them, they have the, the senior engineer there to just learn from them. And it’s, you know, easy pipeline. After that, I’m training my people to train the next ones.  Joel Saxum: Well, how do you, so let’s think about that one. So just have that conversation because. Right now, again, we talk about the shortage of technicians regularly, but there is really a shortage of engineering talent engineers, asset managers, people that can really make these things. And by these things, [00:12:00] I mean, winter rides make ’em sing. How do you, how do you, as a people leader, right, as as Jewel, that manages this team? How do you deal with, uh, attrition rates? I know you had said some, some great words. We heard it, but I actually, I know a lot of your team, right? So I’ve heard some great words about you from them. That’s fantastic. But how do you handle attrition? What does it, what does it look like? What are some of your retainment strategies as a manager to keep these people engaged and happy in their job and moving forward?  Jewel Williams: I will say that I’ve been fortunate enough not to deal with a ton of attrition and the attrition that I do have. I think they’re usually really sad to go and there’s some extenuating circumstance to, you know, personal life, whatever, for the reason that they’ve had to leave, which has made it easy for me to kind of be happy for them at, at the end of that transition, say, Hey, you know, you’re doing the best thing for you, and I’m absolutely happy for that. It, it does put a strain on us. Short term, we run very lean, so if one of us is gone, it, it can be a little bit, uh, of a, a [00:13:00] stress points on the machine there. Um. We have a good talent acquisition team, and we’re usually pretty well supported for going, getting another role, uh, started if somebody does leave. Um, but we also have just talent elsewhere in the business that you can rely on. So there’s experts that are in EPC, there’s experts that are in those global functions that if something comes up while they’re gone. You can usually get help. I think more of the time I feel the attrition and the like administrative or the day-to-day, like the, the small stuff where you’re like, oh, this would be so easy to delegate. But now I’m doing that because there’s no one. In that space to, to help me kind of work through the small stuff.  Joel Saxum: So how do you, so, so give me, okay, so we talked to Tricia a little bit, but give me a, a, uh, let me, let me dive into the mind of Jewel here. As a manager, what are the kind of things you do? How do you like to manage your people? To keep ’em, keep ’em engaged, to keep ’em happy?  Jewel Williams: Yeah. Uh, I think a lot [00:14:00] about what. You know, the different teammates on my team are motivated by, I think as a leader, it’s always been my primary strategy to just show up with mutual respect and lead by example. A lot of times when people see you working really hard and see how much effort you’re putting into their career or their team, it seems like you don’t have to ask many times for them to try to match that. It just kind of builds the right community. I like to think of just the different ways. You know, my husband’s talking my ear off at tax season. I’m thinking, you know, I have a lot of young engineers. Why don’t I get a tax guru on here to give us a little refresher on tax stuff and we’ll do that. Or, you know, morale is a little low. Like we will put together a summer series and we’ll kind of align our presentation, skill improvement with business agendas and try to get our names out there in the business. You know, it just. Kind of trying to keep things a little bit exciting. And then [00:15:00] another big one would just be making their problems. My problems in terms of like escalation and advocacy. Like nothing is worse when you tell your manager then something’s bothering you again and again and you’re just not getting any reaction. So, you know, if, if something is an issue like that, that becomes my first priority.  Allen Hall: Well, I always see sort of Jewel’s layer of management as being on an island because there’s people below you. Doing all the digging and doing the the thing and doing the work, right? And then there’s people above you who have the bigger project schedules and budgets and are able to move bigger, big chess pieces around in the company you. Have to translate all that both directions. Here’s what the frontline people are saying up to management, and then translate it back down. Here’s what management’s up to, and this is why we’re going in this direction. And in neither case, does your opinion matter all that much in this, in the [00:16:00] sense you can say your piece, of course, but the direction of the company is the direction of the company and what your people think is what your people think. And you have to just carry all of it. It. How does Jewel train Jewel to do that?  Jewel Williams: That is a good question, and I would just say maybe I’m winging it, but  Allen Hall: are you doing things on your own to say, I, I need to be able to disconnect? I mean, it could be simple as that. Like. At five o’clock on Friday, I’m unplugging. That’s it. I need a little bit of sanity time. Or is it, Hey, I’m, I’m reading a book or I’m listening to a podcast like the Uptime Wind Energy podcast or something to like, give me a little more meat to what I do to be able to manage some of this, because I just see you as being in a really hard position today. ’cause you have a small team, they’re super talented, they’re really good people, but it doesn’t make it easier in a sense. You, you’re still. You’re still in a under a crunch. How do you just navigate that?  Jewel Williams: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, [00:17:00] I definitely listen to the podcast, but in my mind, you guys serve me more of the industry facts ’cause I’m laser focused in my area. So you guys tell me what’s going on in the world, um, when it comes to. To leadership advice and like dealing with an issue. You know, one thing Worsted does have is a really strong talent pool and you say that I’m an island, but there’s islands next door. You know, my counterpart in high voltage or Tommy with the, the generation in central, like I call them when I have a thought and they’re close enough to the issue with, of course, like maintaining any sort of privacy that you can talk them through and say, Hey, this is what I’m struggling with. What are your thoughts and get their perspective. And even if sometimes you just stay on the phone for an hour and just complain about how things are, a lot of times you get off the phone and you’re feeling a lot better. And then other than that, you know, I’m just, I, I, I would like to read and do a lot of like, leadership kind of trainings and, and listen to the audio books or [00:18:00]whatever. Um. A lot of it, I think is just so situational, and when you have that aha moment, it’ll be on a dog walk or laying your head down to go to sleep tonight. But there will be something and you’re just gonna think, oh my gosh, that’s how I’m gonna get. This person to, to, to understand what I mean or how that’s how I’m gonna communicate this to, to this other person, you know? And, and that’s, those are the lights where I’m like, I text my, my personal phone, my work phone. Like, we’re doing this tomorrow at work.  Joel Saxum: Well, that, but that’s what you said, like, I’m, I’m just, I’m just winging it. Right. But I think that there’s, and I’ll go back to that statement and kind of what you said after that. One of the largest trends in leadership, uh, of the last 10 to 15 years is authenticity. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being led by someone who’s faking it or who’s like not, who’s like giving them a half truth or kind of like feels greasy or something like this, or is a salesman to them type thing. Authenticity is, is how, in my [00:19:00] opinion, and that’s how you lead properly, right? So when we talk about, when you went back to say like, Hey, if I’m working hard, they see that. If I make their problems, my problems, they see that that’s authentic jewel. That’s who you are as a person. That’s not you going like, I should do this strategically. That’s you going like, this is just how I am. This is who I am. That’s what makes you a good leader, right? So when you’re having these, like no matter, no matter what you listen to, what training you do, whatever, that person still needs that, that authentic aha moment to make that an action, right? So you can, you can go get a degree in leadership. Right. But if, if you don’t have those aha moments or those things that pop up when you’re walking the dog or laying, laying down to sleep, you don’t, it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna come through as true and real. And I think that that’s a big thing. Like within your team, we’ve talked about this. Like, like I said, we’ve dealt with your team, we’ve, we’ve worked with them. They all love you. Right. That’s why you’re, that’s why we’re here talking about this. We wanted to get some more of the opinions of like what makes a great, uh, people manager here in. In wind because we [00:20:00] see a, you know, this kind of big turmoil, this boiling water of engineers in wind, whether you’re at an OEM, whether you’re at a, uh, and, and people are, people are losing positions and not necessarily always because of them, right? Sometimes it’s just a reorg and whack and all of a sudden all these good engineers hit the market. Um, and people look at like, why’d you lose your job? Or whatever. Like, that’s not the case. Um, but all of these people need landing spots. Right. So that’s when we say like, let’s, let’s talk with someone who’s got, dude, you know, who’s front lines on this engineering, managing, um, war. And see what they have to say. So I, I would thank you Jewel, for lending us your ears.  Jewel Williams: Oh, absolutely. And you know, you say, they say great things about me. I would say the same. Same about all of them. It’s one of these, the rising, the rising tide raises all ships. Just today I’m getting messages from a different hiring manager that was like. You hired all these people and they’re so incredible. Can you give me some tips about going into this interview process? Because you clearly are doing something right, and I was [00:21:00] like, you know, send ’em a little snip. And I was like, you guys are just making me look good just by showing up today. Like, so I, if I’m getting like 10% commission on their accomplishments, I’m like one of the best employees they’ve got. Then  Allen Hall: well, let’s talk about that hiring role because I, I know there’s gonna be a, at least a decent bit of hiring for specific positions in wind and solar and besson. All the above. What does that look like? How are you managing that? I know we talked off air and the number of, uh, personal interviews you do was astoundingly high, like wow. Uh, several weeks of your year or just devoted to that. How do you think about that? What approach are you taking to. Find these people.  Jewel Williams: Yeah. Well, uh, as I mentioned before, you know, we have a really good talent acquisition team that does a lot of the, you know, promoting roles and pushing these things to different areas so that you get good applicants and you have the good pool of people just to pick with originally. And then, uh, you know, [00:22:00] from there, I think, like I said earlier, it is very specific on what role you’re hiring for, but for me, the, you know. I, I like to prefer to do my own phone interviews, um, when I can. Of course there’s sometimes time constraints where you’re just never gonna get to do that very initial interview. But, uh, you know, I’m looking for somebody that has, uh. You know, a passion or ambition that seems to be aligned with my team and the company. I’m looking for somebody that is promising long term for the role that it’s not necess, you know, I’d rather give it to somebody that’s slightly underqualified than somebody who’s obviously overqualified because you’ve got an opportunity to give to somebody that’s gonna work really hard and and be very fulfilled in that position, versus maybe alternatively somebody that’s considering it as like a placeholder for now. Allen Hall: Well, has there been a, a philosophical change over the last couple of years? Uh, at least I’ll give my thought on it for a long time. [00:23:00] In wind, you would hire the person with a PhD if you could find them, and then it was the masters and then there’s the bachelor’s. It’s sort of chain of what, what was happening. It, it wasn’t necessarily for those ability to navigate people, it was more about their knowledge of, of particular subject. Is that changing just because of the, the way the industry is moving, that there’s a lot more thinking on your feet, those kind of skills than there are in a diploma?  Jewel Williams: Well, I can only answer for. The ED perspective where, you know, we’re the owner and operator. So if I were designing these turbines, I might be looking for the PhD in bearings for my bearings. But you know, that’s, that’s not the job for us, for ed, you need to know the entire system and. You need to be able to be very resourceful in your, your fact finding. And so while you do need those hard engineering skills, there’s a lot more soft skills that you need as an engineer from the owner and operator side, especially if you’re working behind an ESA. [00:24:00] Joel Saxum: Yeah, the co the, just that knowledge. The knowledge of, like, you go to engineering school, you don’t necessarily learn contract knowledge and you, you don’t learn interpersonal relationships, so like you don’t have an oral interpersonal communication class, maybe as an engineer. Um, but so I, I think those, those skills, and it’s compounded now because ORs, Ted’s been through a few reorgs in the last few years. You can, you can’t name me an operator in the United States that hasn’t been through a reorg in the last few years. And when you’re in those reorg situations, the, the stakeholders change. The job may change. Today, you may have been looking just at drivetrain tomorrow, you may be looking at a complete system. As an engineer, you need to be able to think on your feet and, and, and move and groove and, and I think that, and I’ll, I’ll go to this one, Alan, with you. I think that that’s actually a, a class, and, and maybe I’m wrong, you’re more, you have dealt way more with engineers than I have that is more of a classical engineering thought is I’m a specialist in this, this is what I do. That is something of. [00:25:00] 10, 20 years ago where you didn’t have, Nope, not everybody in the company was on Slack talking about all kinds of different things. It was just like you’re in your office doing your work. Someone may come by and visit you once a week to make sure that you got your problem solved. But now it’s kind of like there’s this, it’s a, it’s a broader communication. It’s a broader skill set. It’s a ever changing dynamic workplace. At least in the wind industry, right? That that’s what I see. So I think that as and if I was to talk to a young engineers right now, or engineers that are switching jobs or that are forced into the job market, expand your horizons on communication skills. That’s, that’s a big thing for me.  Jewel Williams: It’s a big thing for my team too. Like I mentioned, right now we have a whole summer initiative, uh, improving our presentation and communication skills, and everybody has to do at least one presentation in some manner to stretch themselves. Um, because I completely agree with you. I think it’s understated how important that is in, you know, corporate America. Or really any [00:26:00] corporation, I suppose.  Allen Hall: Do you think of it more as a, I would use some loose terms here just so I can ask a proper question, but do you think of your, your group as an organism, a living, breathing, moving thing? Then just a structure. I, I’ve worked for a number of companies over the years, and if there’s an empty slot in this organizational structure, I need to fill it because the whole thing will collapse. That was their thought. It was like putting brick on brick in terms of a structure. What you’re describing right now is more of, Hey, we’re, we are all this moving breathing group and we’re working together, and yes, we’re gonna cover each other. It’s less hierarchical, it’s more interactive. That requires I, I think a, just a different mindset as a manager to be able to do that. How do you think about that? How do you see a move like that? It could be from the outside. That’s what it looks like to us. With your people.  Jewel Williams: Oh yeah. No, absolutely. And you know, this is. Partly, I think, personal experience of [00:27:00] mine, but my thesis was actually taking like ecological metrics and assigning them to like operating systems and thinking of it as like, okay, you have this ecosystem and we, we all need to survive and we need things moving through and we need, you know, um, and so that’s kind of, I would say probably how I’m looking at it too. So these are the types of things that are really important to be aware of. You can’t have everything streamlined because you’re gonna hit bumps in the road and then, and then what? Allen Hall: So how do you look at the next couple of years then? Because right now, watching from the outside, we’re not as deep into the wind. Uh, I’ll say craziness as it exists today as you are. What are you doing over the next six months to a year as far as your team and how you’re thinking about your team and keeping them engaged and, uh, enthused, happy hour? It could be as simple as that. Oh, seriously. That that gets a, that’s a very valid answer though, because there are people. [00:28:00] Jewel Williams: Yeah, they are, although they’re also engineers and I will say in our corner of the office sometimes we’re complaining about the next happy hour. Okay, so maybe, maybe stick to the free food and the mini turbines. That’s what makes our heart sore. And actually that’s, if you guys know, to where to get some mini turbines that might go on the six month plan, lego.com. I like to like understand people’s like personal passion as well. So you know, for example, one of my employees just. Is really passionate about the AI technology and we have him running different presentations across the entire organization. I mean, we invited just 901 people to his next invite where he’s gonna teach people how to prompt AI and he’s going to, to walk them through how he could change their business. Allen Hall: One of the things I wanted to ask about going forward was about ai, because I think as we, AI becomes more agentic and you’re bringing it into the company and they have their own special ai, everybody seems to be having their own special ai. Are you being asked to implement that as part of your team? Like you, [00:29:00] you have all these great employees and you have this AI bot on the sideline. Are, are you, are you using that as in sort of the day-to-day or how are you thinking about AI and then, and sort of the pressure from corporate to implement it, to save money or. Whatever they wanna do. Improve efficiency.  Jewel Williams: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, no one’s having to pressure us in particular for the ai. Um, so we have, uh, we do have our internal AI and Okay, so it depends on the capabilities. Every AI is gonna have different capabilities, but, um, you know, we have an AI that’s available to anyone that is gonna be great for brainstorming, going to be great for sending an email or cleaning up some text or checking for grammar. Then we also have co-pilot, which actually is not available to the entire organization yet. I’m hoping that they’re expanding it. There’s only a certain amount of license, and those are highly coveted, which is why I say nobody’s forcing us.  Joel Saxum: I didn’t even know you needed a license for co-pilot.  Allen Hall: Yeah, or the engineers [00:30:00] engaged with that. Like, I want to use AI because I’m an engineer. I wanna play with a toy. Is is that the feeling you’re getting from. Those tools.  Jewel Williams: Yes, there’s the aspect of just like that engineering curiosity and this being a new technology that everybody is very interested in. But I think more than that too. We’ve realized how to leverage it. You can’t do it without an engineer. I would never let it become the engineer by itself. But like we’ve been able to use it to write gooeys, we’ve been using, able to use it for a quick data analytics. I’ve been able to just take pictures and throw it into there and say, can you do the math on this? And then the average and stuff, and it just takes that and does it in two seconds. And so it’s not something that is doing the job, but it’s a tool that’s helping the job get done.  Joel Saxum: I think that’s the important thing, and maybe this is where you’re going with the conversation, Alan, is, is, you know, we keep seeing these, I saw a report today that was like, these are the jobs that are gonna get lost to ai. And that’s why I, that’s why I focus on the communication ability, because there’s just certain things that, like [00:31:00] you, ca, AI’s not gonna replace certain things. Right? And the high level engineers and, and the te people that are on your team and the dynamic workplace, like they’re not gonna replace it, in my opinion, is embrace ai, embrace these technologies because this is what’s gonna make you more efficient at your job, get things done better, faster. Uh, more cost effective. Uh, that’s my take that, I mean, I use AI stuff all day. I know Alan does, I know Claire does. We use things regularly here at, at Weather Guard and the Uptime podcast to make things kind of, uh, cruise. Everybody I talk to that’s in an advanced position is using it somehow. I’ve seen things come across companies, like we’re literally having a symposium on how can we use a AI faster. One of our, uh, friends of the podcast is doing that right now in their company. So I, I think that it’s, IM, it’s important to embrace the tools and not be afraid of them. And, and I think that some people are getting that analysis paralysis where they’re kinda like, I don’t want to see this. I don’t wanna do this. Like, it’s gonna leave you behind. That’s, that’s my take.  Jewel Williams: No, certainly. I think it’s not gonna [00:32:00] be AI that takes your job. It’s gonna be somebody that knows how to use AI that takes your job.  Allen Hall: Can I, I wanna ask you about the, the repair business and how you’re managing that a little bit, because you’re a small team and you have. So many sites and you have a specific kinds of turbines that have certain issues and you have crews out, uh, doing work. One of the, one of the things we hear from all owners operators right now is like, managing all these people out in the field can be really a lot for engineers to do that. How are you trying to manage all that and keep your operational efficiency up at the same time? Get the job done. ’cause you, you have to manage those people on some level, especially on the engineering side. How are you trying to navigate that and control that and manage that today?  Jewel Williams: Yeah, so actually, so the operations engineering group we’re. In operations, but that would be handled by the generation group. So we, that’s kind of who we think of as our [00:33:00] customers. Those are the guys that are managing the day-to-day operations. And you’re absolutely right because, you know, especially in the middle of blade season, you might go out to a site that has 38 turbines and 60 technicians onto it that day. Like it’s just crawling with people. Right. Um, and. Oh, I don’t know how they do it. You’re gonna have to ask them because it is impressive.  Allen Hall: It all, it all kind of goes downhill. If there’s an engineering problem and they need to get to the expert, there must be sort of a constant barrage of incoming from, Hey, we opened up this blade. It’s not what we thought it was. What do we do? Or, Hey, we noticed that there’s this bearing issue, or whatever it is. Uh. In the summertime, it, it seems like you would just be constant bombardment of problems. Is, is that the way it is, or, or is it a little more organized than that? It’s.  Jewel Williams: A little more organized than that, but it is still like that in some way. So, like you said, you know, especially you’ve got, you know, [00:34:00] 16 different sites with blade repairs going on and they’re gonna say, oh, we found this, we found that just to one blade engineer, they’re gonna be inundated with a lot of communication from site, um, for a lot of our other. So what we usually do is we have these kind of structured performance dialogues where at a week at a time we take, try to take the things on. For the week, you know, um, because we do also have just a fleet that has a lot of the same turbines. Some of these things are con, you know, you already have this logged, and we have a case management tool that we keep updated. We just need to add, add one note, or, you know, it’s, it’s going into a ticketing system. The site managers put in tickets for this. That will be then linked in to the case. We’ve assigned to it. So it is more organized. But I will say, you know, especially you mentioned blades in the blade space, I do think, um, that’s one of the ones where [00:35:00] you’re probably getting just the most. Inundation of requests during this time of year. ’cause people need an answer and they need it now. They’re not gonna wait for the ticket to get resolved or whatever. They’re like, Hey, you know, repair or replace or, hey, you know Exactly. It’s, it’s calls and so. Shout out to Yolanda for, for being the, the Great Wall of China in between me and those day-to-day messages. Joel Saxum: So is that, so, okay, so say Yolanda’s getting in, in like just pounded with these requests, but is it like a Tommy and a Todd that have to go and make the things happen in the field so she’s dealing with those guys every day? Or is it their people?  Jewel Williams: So it’s their, Tommy and Todd are the people, leaders of the guys that are gonna do it every day. Now, of course, like if they need to get out there, they absolutely will. Um, but that, you know, Tommy and Todd and I, we also meet very regularly and we have a monthly kind of scrum call where it’s like, Hey, here’s. Here’s the top problems. I know it’s, it’s not the Agile scrum, but that’s just what [00:36:00]I’ve named it, so. So  Allen Hall: what’s the hardest part of the job right now?  Jewel Williams: I think in positions like ours, I would say that one of the most common challenges would just be like your time management and your prioritization of when everything is urgent to all of the people who are coming to you. How do you then decide what’s most urgent? Um, and then there’s of course, just like the personal aspect, you know, what, what do you personally enjoy? Um, for me, not the biggest fan of compliance. I recognize and respect the need for it, but a day that’s, uh, all compliance might be like the worst part for me. But conversely, I have other teammates and they’re like, no, jewel, I live for this. And they’re like, you don’t get why it’s important. And I’m like, no, I, I do, but that just doesn’t make it fun for me.  Joel Saxum: I’m with you. Administrative stuff drives me nuts.  Jewel Williams: Yeah. So that I think sometimes, you know, making sure everyone fully understands like the technical gravity before going [00:37:00]into a decision you can try as best you can, but then six months it seems like the message is lost. So like another hard part I think is making sure that you have properly communicated your stance and that everyone. All the essential parties know where you stand about a certain issue and what your recommendation is so that when they go and have that commercial negotiation or whatnot, they have the feedback from you and they haven’t forgotten, and just making sure nothing falls through the cracks there. That’s a big challenge as well.  Joel Saxum: What I see here from Jewel, from you as a people leader, people manager, team leader, is a decidedly millennial take on the workplace. It’s not so much like the Gen Z really young stuff where it’s like we need, you know, a foosball table and this and that. Like I don’t think that’s Gen Z, but Okay. Yeah, maybe Gen Z’s not playing foosball. I don’t know what it is anymore. Sorry, I’m getting old. The TikTok booth, you have the leftover from your, your Texas. Upbringing, your a and m education, your [00:38:00] doer attitude, your, your watching your parents in small business of this, like, there’s things we need to get done. We need to have doers, we need to be there. That’s kind of the old school mix, but into that millennial side of things where you’re, you are caring about your people individually. You’re looking at what drives them, what impacts them, what their personal passions are, those kind of things, and checking in with them regularly on these things. But you, you have the ability to get things done. Respect and, and honor and support those parts of the individual on your team. Um, and, and you’ve found success in it. And I, that’s why I was saying like, I think it’s a decidedly millennial take or an older millennial take on what management looks like now versus what. A Gen X management in engineering looked like before, and that, I guess that may be a hot take. I may piss some people off, but,  Jewel Williams: well, I am a millennial, so  Allen Hall: I come from a, I come from a time when people threw staplers at one another in, uh, conference rooms and like, there’s fist fights and that kind of nonsense. And big [00:39:00] corporations of all things like, yeah. Did you know that Bob threw a stapler Joe over there? Like, uh, it’s, you know, it’s today’s Tuesday. What’s, what’s new? Right? But that doesn’t, that doesn’t happen like that anymore. At least not in, not at the level it once did. It’s a little less rough around the edges, but it is, you, you have to adapt to the times in terms of being a manager. You, you don’t get to choose who comes outta school. What those. People have been through, like for example, I’ll give you the good example right now, there’s a lot of people coming through engineering school now that spent their high school in COVID. Maybe even part of their college education was in COVID. Though they have a totally different world experience than someone who spent their summers abroad or spent their summers as an intern working on a cool project. They probably didn’t get any of that. So thinking about like who is coming out now and who, who is my available workforce and what, how do I adapt as a manager [00:40:00] to that, I think is really critical. If you wanna be successful and. Uh, Joel, I, I know you, you have to deal with that every day. Are you, do you see that sort of same thing, just the, the different personalities, but it’s also somewhat scattered by, you know, what era they came out of?  Jewel Williams: Yeah, no, and I mean, now that you mention it, I’m thinking about it and the teams that are managed more closely to how I’m managing my team, it is more of that. Millennial generation, and then you get maybe into some different sections and you’re like, okay, the more kind of rigid you gotta be, the tough boss. I’m not gonna tell you. Good job kind of mentality. Tends to be a little bit more of the older generation, I’d say. And you know, if it, if it wasn’t working for me, I would’ve gone to the other ring. Like,  Joel Saxum: that’s a good default. It’s an easy default. Yeah.  Jewel Williams: Somehow it, it’s, it’s going great. I’m, I feel like I have to beg my guys to log off sometimes, you know? Somehow they’re still wanting to put in the time and you know it. Like I said, I think it’s just that, that [00:41:00]mutual respect that goes so far with so many people. Allen Hall: Yeah, the respect piece bridges all eras from what I’ve seen. You can get the person sort of rough and tumble and is a hands-on person and tech technical and maybe a little rough around the edges, but if you build up that respect, it will do wonders and that, I think that’s the tricky part as a manager, knowing that. Everybody in your organization is looking to do something positive and they’re trying to, you know, have a family, provide for their family, have a career, all of that. It doesn’t always feel like that at times, but just it’s hard to kind of suss that out because you manager have tasks to do. You’re so, you have to translate tasks into people. The hardest part of engineering is that. Do you see it that way? Do you think of it that way?  Jewel Williams: No, absolutely. I mean, we’re, we’re all human. There’s gonna be days and weeks that we can’t give it the 100% because you’ve got something else going [00:42:00] on. And as a manager sometimes it can be frustrating. You’re like, I know this person can deliver more, but you gotta meet people where they’re at and you gotta invest in that long term, you know, talent and, and that’s the kind of thing that’s gonna pay your pay. Back in dividends where you’ve, you’ve shown someone that you’re, you know, loyal in the way that you’re gonna commit and, you know, consistency with integrity and these other things, and they all of a sudden are like, okay, yeah, this is a team I really wanna be a part of, you know?  Allen Hall: Yeah. I think that’s it. I don’t discard that. And listen to Jewel here, which she’s saying is very wise. And, and how you build a team. It’s, it’s how we’re gonna get through some of this, uh, rough and tumble changes that are happening at, at the moment in wind. And I know Joel, I know a lot of people are gonna wanna reach out to you, uh, via LinkedIn. Are you on LinkedIn? How do people connect with you? Especially people are in your same position or, or interested coming to work for Ted?  Jewel Williams: Yeah. Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, under [00:43:00] Jewel Williams. So just. Shoot me a message. You know, I, I’m, I’m pretty available. Looking forward to the, the fame and fortune.  Allen Hall: Uh, Joel, thank you for being on the podcast. It’s really important that we highlight the people that are doing the work and you’re in a really difficult position and succeeding. So we wish we wanted to highlight that and. Thanks for coming on the podcast.  Jewel Williams: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Allen and Joel discuss the best conferences in the wind industry in the upcoming months. Across the world, the wind industry is coming together to better the industry and share knowledge. 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! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall, and I’m. Here with Joel Saxum, who’s up in Wisconsin, and Joel and I have been talking back and forth about all the conferences that we need to attend, and it’s going to be that time of year. We need to be planning for the end of your conferences in 25. And then getting, uh, your registrations in for conferences in 2026. It’s coming up fast, Joel.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, I know. This is the time of year where like blade season is over. A lot of the heavy repair season is over. MCE work starts to get a little bit touch and go depending on where you are. We’re getting into September, October. It starts to snow here soon in some places in the northern, uh, [00:01:00] latitudes. So it’s also coinciding with that is the time when companies starts. Spooling up their budgets for 26. And those budgets are operations and maintenance budgets. They also include for, you know, depending on the team, you’re on, engineering asset management. It, it is conference budgets and it’s, uh, you know, these things aren’t cheap. Uh, so that’s one of the complaints that we have globally about a lot of these conferences is, uh, you know, some of ’em are getting up to, it used to be a couple hundred dollars to get in. Now they’re 1500. 2000. I even heard of one to 2,500 to get in the door, which is. A bit extreme. So if I could say anything to the, uh, conference organizers, please stop raising the prices. But like Allen said, it’s that time of year to start planning these things. ’cause it’s conference, the fall conference season starts kicking back off, uh, at a global way. So, uh, we’re gonna walk through some of those conferences and, uh. Can I share with you our thoughts and the knowledge that we have around some of ’em and where we’ll be? Allen Hall: Yeah. And the, the first one on the list is one that it’s just gonna pass by the time this podcast comes out, which is hu Some [00:02:00] and Hu Some’s the big energy conference in Germany. And uh, it is. Just massively popular. It has been the, uh, counterpart to, uh, Hamburg every year. So the alternate year to year. So everybody that goes to Hamburg tends to go to Husam, and whoever goes to Husam tends to go to Hamburg. It’s a great place. There’s a ton of technology there, and anybody that’s of interest in wind needs to go there at least once in their lifetime and see it.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s like a, it’s a wind mecca. Conference. So when we talk Huso, usually it’s more focused on onshore. Hamburg is more focused on offshore, uh, which is really cool to see. Of course, most companies that are playing in these spaces are dabbling in a little bit of both, whether you’re an ISP or you’re an operator or a financier, whatever it may be. But this is one of those conferences that Allen and I regularly tell people specifically from the North American market, if you haven’t been over to the European conferences, the big European [00:03:00]conferences. You should go, um, just to see what kind of technology, what they’re doing, what’s a little bit different. Have some conversations with some different mindsets around operations and maintenance or development, or whether it’s greenfield, brownfield, whatever it may be. Because the Europeans are, you know, they’ve been in wind longer than we have over here in, in the North America, so they have some different ways of doing things and different technologies. We always come back from there with, uh, some good context. I would say that. So, uh, encourage people to travel over there for that one.  Allen Hall: October is when the conference season for companies begins. There’s a lot of user forums happening. Two in particular that, uh, we have been paying attention to the last couple years and participated in. One is the Sky Specs user forum, or customer forum, which is happening October 7th and eighth up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Joel and I will be there again this year. Hosting some panels, uh, talking a little bit about lightning protection, uh, part in most of the us uh, most of their customers are in the US but [00:04:00] the Sky Specs event is really, really good. If you’re interested in optimum maintenance schedules for your turbines, what’s going on with blades and new blades that are out in service? What’s happening there? It’s the way to connect with the industry, at least in the US It is, yeah. This year, the, the,  Joel Saxum: the focus of the event is predict. Prevent perform. Um, so that they’re gonna talk through a lot of the different, uh, solu solutions that Skys spec has. And it’s not really a sales conversation, so I don’t wanna say that, but it’s, it’s how these things fit. It’s what can be done. And we’ve been, we were there last year as well. And it is, just to be clear, it is an invite only event. So if you would like to go shoot us an email, um, and we could probably get you in there. But the conference is. Very focused on how to solve problems. You have this problem, this is how you solve it. We’re looking at this strategy, this is how you implement it. Um, we’ve, we’ve ran into this issue at say, end of warranty. This is how you do these things. Um, and it is a, [00:05:00] I really like it because it’s an, it’s an intimate setting. There’s, you know, 50, 60 people there, and it’s all engineers, asset managers from a, from. Uh, you know, scada engineers do blade engineers. It’s, it’s the group of some of the smartest people in wind. Um, a lot of ’em from the US and North and North American general. Uh, but yeah, that event, um, we really like that one. So we’ll be up there in Ann Arbor, uh, October 7th and eighth for sure.  Allen Hall: The other one, which is really popular is the Onyx event in Colorado, and it’s in the middle of October, October 14th and 15th. That also, I think that’s an invite only event, Joel, is that right? Joel Saxum: Yeah. You got to reach out to Onyx. Um, we, we don’t deal with that team directly usually, so if you wanna try to get into that one, you’re on your own.  Allen Hall: Yeah. But I hear great things from it, people that have attended that event. Love it and have usually attend it quite frequently, every year. Uh, if, especially if you’re needing some CMS help or some, uh, specific things with there, there’s a lot of, uh, onyx [00:06:00] systems on a number of turbines, so it came delivered that way. If you need help or insights as to what is actually happening with your turban, uh, it’s a good place to go. Onyx, we’ve had him on the podcast. Smart people, a good resource, and you should think about going there. The, the first real big open event, uh, in terms of wind energy, particularly o and m, is the wind summit event in Houston, which is the first annual event, October 14th and 15th. Joel Saxum: Yeah. So that one, uh, down in Houston, I believe it as the, is at the Asian Society, so downtown, um, near the medical center. Uh, it is going to be a lot of, uh, some of the same MA material that we’re familiar with from our Melbourne conference last year. So, uh, again, a lot of value add. You can leave this event, um. Learning something, something you can bring back to your team to uh, be able to implement to help in the future. And, uh, Allen and I, uh, as well as Rosemary here on the podcast, uh, of course [00:07:00] plus Phil Phil’s about organizing this one. Uh, mostly uh, we will be presenting, we’ll be hosting some panels moderating, um, and sharing some insights. So that one is in Houston the same time as Onyx is, uh, going on up in Colorado.  Allen Hall: Yeah, the Wind Summit event, you can actually find online@windsummit.org. You can check out the events happening there. Uh, and then Joel and I are look, going to attend or try to attend two events at the same time. I’m not sure how we’re gonna pull that one off, but UK Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight in Edinburgh, Scotland is December 11th, and just before that one is the Mi Plastics, uh, wind Turbine Blades Europe event, which is more of a supply. Chain for blades, and that’s in Dusseldorf, and I haven’t been to the Dusseldorf event before. However, uh, everybody I talk to that has. Spin to that. Loves it and returns to it if you need anything in terms of sourcing materials, what’s, uh, about to come out in terms of new resin systems, new kinds of fibers, new [00:08:00] technology, uh, things in the factory to make blades, uh, quicker, lower cost. All that happens in Juel, Dorf Plus, uh, you get to, I think a lot of the OEM blade designers are there, so you can actually cross paths with the people that are designing blades. It’s a, it is a good place to meet. Dusseldorf, uh, in December should be really nice. All the Christmas activities will be in full force. It should be a good time, but, you know, be prepared. It’s gonna be a little bit chilly, I’m afraid, Joel.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. But I think, uh, uh, at the same time as well, the event in Edinburgh that we’re gonna go to the Ori Catapult, the UK offshore wind, uh, supply chain spotlight. We’re bringing jackets, uh, jackets and boots to both of those events for sure. Um, yeah, that, that winter ride and Blades, Europe, uh, we’ve been a part of the a MI plastics event that’s kind of a mirror to this one in the states. Uh, Allen, I think you were there last year moderating a few panels.  Allen Hall: Yeah. In Boston.  Joel Saxum: Up in Boston there. And it is, it is a unique event, uh, because most of the blade stuff that we go to, blades or uh, o and m focused is [00:09:00] where are we at now? Right? Once they’re installed, once we’re doing operations maintenance, once we’re running these wind farms, whereas this one you get access to a lot of knowledge, material knowledge. Um. Science, presentations, technology, and people that are actually designing and building the blades. Um, so you will see some, some aftermarket companies will be there, right? Such as, I mean like, like, uh, weather guard here with our strike tape product. Um, that is something that can be, you know, applied in the factory as well. So you’ll see some of, uh, the likes of the, of the aftermarket type people like ourselves there, but. It is one of the few events where you can get access to those blade engineers. So whether you’re really happy with them or you wanna stare ’em straight in the eye, they’re gonna be there and you can have conversation at that time. That one’s exciting. Uh, Dusseldorf as well. A beautiful little town.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s gonna be a good time in December.  Joel Saxum: One of the reasons that I’m excited for the ORE Catapult, uh, UK offshore wind supply chain spotlight, Allen is. There’s gonna be like 80 to 90 exhibitors. It’s only [00:10:00] a one day event. Um, and they’re very keen on making it an even playing field for everybody there. So the goal is to be able to showcase to engineers, asset managers, procurement people, uh, from all of these asset owners and OEMs what is available in the marketplace and from the uk. So we know some of our friends are gonna be there, like our buddy Bill Slatter over at 11 I who, uh, just was purchased by Onyx. Congratulations, bill. Um, he’ll be there. And so you’ll see those kind of, those, the, some of the smaller companies, some of the bigger companies showcasing themselves. And one thing I wanna flag with this event that I am really, really keen on is I think it’s like 500 bucks to get in the door. It’s inexpensive. Yeah. Inexpensive. So you get the value out of the thing. You’re not shelling out a fortune. And you get to see the best of the best of what’s happening in the UK market. Uh. To help your wind farms.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Everybody affiliated with that conference swears to me, Scotland, it’s gonna be beautiful in December, so, but if it’s not, there’s plenty of, of, uh, great [00:11:00] whiskey to have, so don’t, don’t sweat it too much. Are you worried about unexpected blade root failures and the high cost of repairs? Meet Eco Pitch by Onyx Insight, the standard in blade root monitoring. Onyx state-of-the-art sensor tracks blade root movement in real time, delivering continuous data to keep your wind farm running smoothly and efficiently. With eco Pitch, you can catch problems early, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Field tested on over 3000 blades. It’s proven reliability at your fingertips. Choose Eagle Pitch for peace of mind. Contact Onyx Insight today. To schedule your demo of Eco Pitch and experience the future of blade monitoring. And then we get into, uh, January after the holidays, there’s not much going on. Uh, the first big conference is really in February, which is the Wind Energy o and m Australia 2026 event, which Joel [00:12:00] Rosemary. I am helping with, uh, everybody at eLog Ping is helping with, that’s the 17th and 18th of February in Melbourne, Australia. Uh, we had a, a great attendance last year. It’s gonna even be slightly bigger this year. And I have a feeling ’cause it’s, it’s already starting. Registrations are starting. We’re gonna run outta space here pretty quick here, Joel. Last year  Joel Saxum: we were, we thought to ourselves when we were putting the, in the inaugural girl conference together, if we get a hundred people, that’d be great. We ended up with like 172 and capacity was 175, had to shut ticket sales off. Uh, so we are actually moving venues for that event this year. We’re gonna cap it at 250 people. Uh, but a, a resounding um, yes from the Australian, uh, wind energy world from that conference as it’s one of the only technically focused o and m. Again, how can you bring value back from this conference to your company and, and learn something? Uh, one of the things that was really cool last year, we brought in some of our, our [00:13:00] friends and family from the podcast network from around the world, and I think almost every one of those companies has opportunities ongoing in Australia now. Reason being, if you don’t know the Australian market, it’s, I mean, it is quite literally on an island. Uh, so it’s hard to get people, resources, technology, things down there. Um, and when they do get, uh, opportunities, uh, to fix their problems, they’re keen on it, right? Because it’s. It’s a remote place. The wind farms are far out. You don’t, uh oh. And it’s not like you’re turning around to go to the, you know, the, the wind turbine store next, next door, grab some parts and go fix a turbine. It’s difficult to keep these things running in a remote and tough environment in Australia. So the, uh, operations and maintenance teams of those wind farms are very keen on solutions. Um, we. We had a great time down there. Um, thank you to all of the Australian Wind Energy folks that we met. Um, and we will be repeating this year, uh, and it will be bigger and better. So we’re, we’re quite excited about it.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And [00:14:00] if you’re interested in sponsoring that event, just go to Woma, WM a 2026 or get a hold of Joel on LinkedIn and he can get you hooked up there, uh, because they’re gonna. Run outta space for sponsors. That’s happening very quickly. I’m, I’m really shocked, uh, at how responsive the Australian market is to o and m events because there’s so many non o and m events. I guess this is pretty much the one. Great work that’s happening in Australia. There’s so much to learn too. So if you’re from Europe or you’re in the United States, Canada, even Brazil, uh, if you want to see how resilient and, and, and remarkably efficient, uh, to, to run a wind farm, go check out what what they’re doing in Australia. And Joel and I had an opportunity after the event last year, we went to a couple of the operators there. I was blown away. I really was blown away. Really efficient teams, super bright, right on top of it. Uh, we’re [00:15:00] doing things in unique but at just smart ways that I, I hadn’t seen in the states. That is why you want to go check out other places because, uh, you know, not only answers lie in Europe and, and Brazil or the States, right? And those are the big markets, uh, that they fly in places like Australia, which has to be resilient. That’s the beauty of Australia. They’ve taken  Joel Saxum: advantage in a good way of, of entering a wind market in a certain age, right? So they came in, they’ve, they’ve allowed, uh, the, the turbine suppliers, OEMs, this to be these FSA holders for them for a while. But now as the market matures, they watched the lessons from all the other markets and now they’re taking it, taking it on themselves. Um, so it’s really cool to see them grow. I mean, the, there’s total salt capacity down there is about. 4,700 turbines, but it’s growing. Uh, we’ve been having conversations with a lot of, a lot of wind, a lot of operators are developing right now. Um, so I would expect that market to grow, grow fast too. Go to  Allen Hall: [00:16:00] Wilma 2020 six.com. Sign up now and get your tickets booked, uh, in March. Uh, American Clean Power was back with OMNS in Orlando. They were, we were in Orlando, what, two, three years ago for OMNS. Uh, pretty good attendance down there. Obviously Orlando is where the Magic Kingdom is, and all the, the fun amusement parks are all down there. The new Harry Potter, uh, rides and all that are happening. It’s a good place to to go. It’s easy to get in and out of, particularly if, if you’re from Europe, you can fly to Orlando usually cheaply. It’s kinda like going to Vegas without all the gambling. Uh, but. It’s a big event for Weather Guard, lightning Tech, because we’re part of that om and s solution. So all the, uh, the gearbox people are there, all the equipment, people for technicians, all the tool people are there. It’s really more of a hands-on event than it is a theoretical policy event. This is the [00:17:00] one. I think is the more interesting of the two. Honestly, the, you know, the, a big A CP is fun, but it’s not as hands-on as om and s we get to see everybody too before the blade season starts. Joel Saxum: Yeah. That’s the big key there is, um, om and s of course, operations, maintenance and safety is what it stands for. Um, so the safety guys are there too, which is, which goes hand in hand the operations and maintenance. Right? They, those are three things that. Bang, bang, bang. So Orlando this year, we were in Tennessee last year. I know a lot of people complaining that we’re not back in San Diego yet, and hopefully a CP listens and gets us back out to Coronado Island. ’cause that’s always fun out there. Uh, but yeah, so Orlando this year, uh, March in Florida, come on. It’s beautiful. Um, a lot of golf courses around there. If you’re a fan of golfing, this is a good one to take the family to. Yeah, Lars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we can shout out to our buddy, uh, Kyle Rener from bp. I know he, he’s a fan of the golf course and Matt Segal. Um, so, uh, that’s a, that’s, that’s a, that’s a callback to Phoenix if you guys are listening. Um, but um, [00:18:00] yeah, so that event is always really good. Like Allen said, we get to run into everybody that’s basically dealing with the problems that we here at Weather Guard Solve are there. Right. So it’s Blade people, it’s the ISPs that are looking for the blade people. The one thing I feel bad for sometime at this event is. The, the asset managers and engineers from the operators. ’cause they get hounded, like, like there’s a bunch of bird dogs falling around, which was all the ISPs. Um, but, uh, yes, a great event. It is a, this one is, it’s a bit smaller, right? One, we, I think the first oh, M and SI went to is like 1100 people and now it’s about 22, 2300. Um, but it does seem more and more like it’s a. I mean, from the uptime side, right? From our, from our desks. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a network event. It’s a family event. We’re a constant, it’s just people we know all day long. Coming up to the booth, talking last, last year, uh, we are, we were sitting in the booth with AC 8 83 and of course those guys, uh, goofy Danish Canadians, draw crowd as [00:19:00]well. Um, so lots of good friends, lots of good times. O, m and S is a good event.  Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES win.com today. The one blade event that does happen in, in the US is Blaze, USA, which happens in February. It looks like it’s what, 23rd or 24th this year down in Austin, Joel?  Joel Saxum: Yeah. So you and I will just be coming back from Australia, um, and then turn around and have that event. Luckily it’s in my hometown, so I only have to drive down 45 minutes. You have to fly. Uh, but Blades us a is a, it’s the Perennial Blade event, uh, that everybody likes to go to in the States. Um, Austin again in February is nice, but, um. I [00:20:00] know this year I’ve talked with the organizers a little bit and they’re, they’re wanting to, uh, freshen up some of the material. You know, we’ve been talking about the same kind of inspections and strategy and stuff the last few years, so I would expect to see a bit of a refreshed, um, lineup for panelists in those kind of panels. Um, at that event.  Allen Hall: Well, it should because of the change in the production tax credits. The whole landscape has changed in terms of operation and maintenance on blades in particular. Obviously gear boxes are a problem. Sure. But blades tend to be the, the bigger overall problem and uh, getting everybody together to talk about how to keep blades running 20 years instead of 10 is something that we haven’t really done in the United States in a long time. Uh, obviously. The expertise lies within the operators generally, but, uh, you, you gotta, it’s just a different reframe to a problem that we’ve been solving by putting new blades [00:21:00] on every 10 years. And if you want to get the latest info of what operators are doing or how they’re trying to approach this problem, you need to get down to Austin. So to register for the blade USA forum. Go to ablate usa forum.com. I think you, the registration page is up. You can actually book a spot at that event. Uh, what’s the general size of that event, Joel? It’s a couple hundred people, roughly 200 maybe? Uh, yeah,  Joel Saxum: a hundred and seventy five, two hundred, something like that. Um, I, I, I would say when you’re trying to figure out the event, um. If you’re working on a work computer, I would caution you to not type in Blades USA or you’re gonna get blocked ’cause you’ll get a bunch of knife websites. Um, but yeah, as Allen was saying, and, and this is less of a focus on conferences here, but this is just a conversation we’ve been having ongoing on the podcast and the background and whatnot. Is that, and with operators and ISPs and then the as market, is that the changes from this one big beautiful bill act [00:22:00] and how it’s going to impact wind operations for the next. For the foreseeable future. We don’t know what can happen in four years, eight years, whatever it may be. Uh, but we are looking at a, a big change in how we’re gonna operate. Wind turbines, uh, blades being a very specific one, right? Because, uh, again, PTC Repower, Hey, at 10, 11 years old, let’s just fix these things. Whereas now you need to extend the life, um, and have a, you know, tracking remaining useful life. What does strategy look like? When do we put on LEP now, because that strategy all changes when you’re gonna just decommission these blades before. Do we add a product, like a strike tape? Do we add zgs? What do we do here? So a lot of these conferences in the United States, and I’m gonna say. Sky Spec user forum will touch on it. Um, the, of course the blades, USA conference will touch on it. A-A-C-P-O-M-S there’s gonna be big, big conversations about it that is gonna be a big part of the conversation and win for the next few years while we, um, are staring at [00:23:00] these big strategic or tactical changes within management. Allen Hall: Yeah. And I, and with the blades, USA, this may be a, just a really unique year. It would be good to have more OEM presence there. Uh, I think there’d be a lot of questions about how are we gonna maintain these blades? And obviously the people that designed the blade should have a, a pretty good idea about that. But also, uh, people coming up from Brazil or even Spain and, you know, a lot of the turbines in Spain are kind of reaching that end of life period. Some of the UK it is kind of spread around Europe actually. It would be good to have some people, knowledgeable people come over to that blade USA conference and get on stage. Talk about how they’re approaching this problem where you don’t have the financial incentives to, uh, remove and replace the blades every 10 years. How do you deal with this issue? I know there’s a lot you and I, Joel, have here. All kinds of operators talk about all kinds of things at the minute. Everybody’s just really trying to understand the scope of the problem. They got a year or two to figure it [00:24:00] out, but. Come 2026, you better start forming a plan. ’cause you’re, honestly, we’re not even really sure what’s gonna happen in 2026 at this point. As fast as things are changing in the us who knows? Joel Saxum: Yeah, I can see. So, back at the beginning of this conversation, we started this episode of the of the Uptime podcast. Here. We talked a little bit about, Hey, it’s the end of blade season. People are starting to set their budgets for 26 budgets, meaning operations and maintenance, how much we’re gonna spend per turbine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, I have heard from a few operators that they are actually increasing their blade repair budgets. Two reasons. Yeah, two reasons. Partially because they’re behind on blade repairs, right? They’re running into like, Hey, we ran outta budget this year again, right? So they’re, the, the blade repairs, they, they’re running outta deficit to get things done with the budget they’ve had. So that is starting to stack upon itself. So now they have to inject, uh, a larger amount to get it up to speed at this time. Compounding on that is [00:25:00] the same idea. Hey, you’re not gonna get PTCs right now, you’re, unless you got a repower basically in the works and you’ve got something either safe harbor or turbines quoted on delivery before July 4th of next year. You’re in a tough spot. So I could see some budgets that some of these operators changing, um, for the 2026 fiscal year. Um, now I haven’t heard specifically like from anybody that’s like, yeah, we’re increasing by 21.6%. I haven’t heard that. Um, but I, I have heard whisperings of changes happening in that world. Allen Hall: Well, and I think if you’re an engineer or technician at some of these companies. It’s good to invest in yourself and obviously if your company will pay for you to attend these events, great. Love it, right? Definitely put in for it. Hopefully the operators, uh, will pay for this educational trip. That’s exactly what it is, right? It’s, it’s a way for everybody to get spooled up to, to learn a bunch of things. But sometimes, you know, you know, the first thing to go [00:26:00] after marketing is travel budgets. And, uh, if you don’t have a travel budget. And you plan to stay on in wind, you need to do a little spending on yourself. Some of these conferences are relatively easy to get to. Blades. USA is an easy one to get to in Austin. Uh, a CP in Orlando, OMS is easy to get to. You’re not gonna spend a bunch of money. Usually your company will give you a day or two off to go do these events if you’re gonna pay for ’em yourself. That’s the way I used to do it. Not that you have to do it that way, but that’s the way I used to do it. It’s important to keep up at the latest and greatest because your value to your company is what’s in your head. And the more good stuff you can get in your head and more answers you can help them with, the more likely, um, you’re gonna be promoted and, and grow within those organizations. Because right now, all the operators are looking for. Smart people. They’re, they’re just looking for bodies. They used to be looking [00:27:00] for bodies two years ago. Now they’re looking for the, the brightest, the most connected, the, the most on top of what the industry is doing. That’s who they’re hiring. Yeah. I want to focus on that one  word you said there. Allen was the most connected. Joel Saxum: Um, and this is coming from, uh, an, an ex engineer or still an engineer, I guess technically, but, uh, that has gone to the dark set of commercial things. So one, one time. A guy told me, um, your network is your network. Um, so focusing on that, I know like engineers for the most part, like, um, stereotypically it’s a psyche. It’s this, I’m gonna solve this problem. I’m gonna do these things, I’m gonna do this. Now if you, if you sit back for a second and you fly over the top of the trenches and you look out, sometimes it’s nice to just know people that can solve problems for you or with you. So if you have this, like we get those calls like, oh man, I’m so glad I met you guys. Help me, helping me to solve my lightning problem. Because that’s what we do at Weather Guard. We partner with people, we support, we work in, in cohesion to make sure we’re solving those issues. We’re not just selling [00:28:00] a product walking away. So we’re a good person to have in your network. Right. So I have in my network, or Allen, we both have the same people. Like in the CMS world, we know. Man. Beer box, CMS blade, CMS, icing, CMS, acoustics, lightning. We know all kinds of people, so if someone has a CMS problem, we can help them out. So we’re able to help people solve problems. I think that that’s a very important thing. I know that, um, you know, these, the events at conferences, whether it is a opening reception, um, whether it is walking the exhibition floor. Whatever it may be, meeting those people and making those connections also can help you, um, to learn more, to expand your horizons and, um, kind of, uh, be able to be of more value to your team, um, in the  Allen Hall: future. Absolutely. So Joel, this has been great to, to walk through what the conferences and symposiums I, I do wanna bring up one more that’s sort of near and dear to me [00:29:00] because leading edge erosion is one of the things that we have dealt with at Weather Guard when, ’cause a lot of operators talk to us about it. There’s the sixth International Symposium on leading edge erosion and protection of wind turbine blades, and that’s in Ross, Gilda, Denmark. It’s, it’s sponsored by DTU. It’s fourth through 6th of February, so I’ve been to that one about two years ago. It’s not unpleasant weather, but it is a little chilly. Uh, but anybody that’s anybody in leading edge erosion is there. Blade aerodynamics is there. Uh, it’s a worldwide event. People from all over come to that event and it’s, it’s hard to describe because there’s so much information coming at you so fast. It’s about, it’s really roughly two days of just leading edge. This leading edge that here’s what we tried, this is what works. This is the testing we’re doing, this is the testing you should be doing. All that data [00:30:00] has no other place to reside, and DTU has put this conference together for a last couple of years. Wonderful conference. If you can get there. Do it. So even if you’re an operator in Texas, hey you, I know you have leading edge erosion. Come on, let’s be honest. You have leading edge erosion and you probably reached out to different companies to see what they have to offer. All that information is sitting there at DTU in February. Everybody, all the, everybody that makes a product will be there. Everybody that has tried a product will be there. So you can actually talk to someone who has used a leading edge protection material. You could talk to the people who offer leading Edge protection materials. You can talk about, uh, the testing that happens because at DTU, they have a rain erosion test facility, which we had on the podcast. Uh, that is the best one on the planet. So you’re going to the right place. For leading edge protection. So you want to, just that one, you have to Google, and that’s the best way to find that one. DTU, uh, six [00:31:00] International Symposium on leading edge erosion. Put that into the Google machine, it’ll pop up. Uh, getting to there is relatively easy. You have to find a Copenhagen. It’s just up the road. It’s it Ross Gill. It’s not that far from Copenhagen. Uh, it, it is very well done, so I have to speak highly of that one. I have presented there with, uh, Nicholas Godder with Power Curve about two years ago. Fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. So I’m trying to get to that one. If Joel will let me go this year, uh, to, ’cause I just, I think everybody’s there is really interested to talk to. It’s a, it’s a very scientific community, but it’s worldwide. It’s, it’s, it’s unlike any other conference you’re gonna go to, in my opinion.  Joel Saxum: So, Allen, as we’re sitting here. You talked, you, you brought up the Leading Edge Symposium beginning of February. There’s another conference in the beginning of February every year that is much like this one. So Leading Edge Symposium is very much focused on a problem leading edge erosion, what’s happening, what’s the science, what’s going on there. The other one, which is the, is the few days right before this, so you [00:32:00] could make a trip and hit both of them is winter wind, winter wind up in sva, so winter, and they do this one February 2nd and fourth in Northern Sweden. So if you’re, it’s all about Arctic climate and, and to make sure that you’re thinking about Arctic climate, they put you in the middle of the Arctic climate in the beginning of February.  Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s mostly Scandinavians that are there. But, uh, where’s it gonna be held out this year? Joel? Is it in Aura? It’s in sva. Sva, okay. All right. So I went there two years ago and it was in Aura. Beautiful ski chalet place. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. The sight lanes were incredible. Uh, and, but the technical content there, if you have any icing issue, if you’re in Canada, Northern us, anywhere in Northern Europe, uh, that is the place to go. Because all icing questions can get answered there. All the technology people are there. All the protective coatings are there. All the de-icing companies [00:33:00] are there. All the sensor companies are there. It’s not the biggest conference in the world. Again, there’s probably a hundred, maybe 150 people that attend it, but it’s extremely well organized. Very well organized, and it’s it, it’s maybe not the easiest place to get to. Traveling around Sweden, in my opinion, is not necessarily easy. However, once you’re there, you’re gonna learn so much. You’re gonna connect with both, all the, everybody that is doing research in icing or has a system that you’re interested in, you can talk to them about it and get the latest, uh, you know, how they’re using a system, how it works. Do they like it? What do you like, what do you don’t like? That’s why you travel to Sweden for winter wind is to get that knowledge because anything in icing is expensive, in my opinion. To do anything about it is not cheap. So you, you want to have the right answer for your application and you’re gonna get it if you travel to Sweden. Yeah, and that  Joel Saxum: one, um, they do a really cool job. Everybody I’ve talked to up [00:34:00] there is like, well, when it was an hour they, they’d go skiing, right? It was like, oh, we’ll go a day before the day after we go skiing. But I know last year they, they, the conference organizers organized a field trip to one of the largest wind farms in Sweden. Um, and the, a ton of people from the conference went, so they had bus, bus loads of people that got to go out, see things in an extreme arctic environment to see how they operate up there in, in northern Sweden. And I think that that is a. That’s a really nice thing to be able to do. Kind of like if you’re in Copenhagen and you get the chance to go out to Stri and see the big test site like that is a, again, a wind mecca thing. So very, very cool. Um, uh, thinking about doing that one myself here soon.  Allen Hall: Yeah. You wanna bring your mittens to winter wind. It’s cold. Yeah, be prepared. It’s so, yeah, if you’re from one of the southern US states or France or somewhere where the weather is decent. Spain, Italy, Greece. Oh, Greece is beautiful. It takes a little, [00:35:00] uh, a might to get stuff on that airplane knowing when you get off that airplane, it’s going to be cold. But, uh, you know, a lot of operators have wind turbines all over the place. We, we’ve talked to operators in Southern Europe that have turbines up north, and you’re gonna have to take one for the team and go up there and, and participate in that. That way you can just Google, uh, Joel, what’s the website for that? It is Winter wind.se. So Joel, I mean that, that’s a pretty good list for everybody. Uh, we just wanted to, to put it out there. Now’s the time to start looking at your travel schedules. Yes, yes, yes, I know. Travel budgets are being cut. However you need to invest in yourself and get out there and find out what’s going on in the wind world. So this has been a, a great update. Joel. I appreciate uh, you organizing this. If you have any questions, obviously reach out to us. We’re both on LinkedIn and uh, next week Rosie and Phil will be back. And we will have a, a regular uptime episode. So thank you so much for joining us, and we’ll see you here next week [00:36:00] on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

ONYX Insight has acquired UK-based ELEVEN-I, a company that specializes in advanced blade monitoring technology. The acquisition shows the wind industry’s move towards supporting companies that can prevent expensive turbine breakdowns. 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! Twenty twenty-five has been a record-breaker for energy deals – over four hundred billion dollars in acquisitions, the highest in three years. But buried in all those massive oil and gas mergers is a quieter revolution happening in the wind fields of the world. It started in March last year when Macquarie Capital, the Australian investment giant, made a move that sent ripples through the wind industry. They acquired Onyx Insight, a British company that had been quietly revolutionizing how wind turbines are monitored. Onyx wasn’t just another tech startup – they were monitoring seventeen thousand turbines across thirty countries, serving seven of the world’s top ten wind operators. Macquarie knew what they were buying. This wasn’t just about the technology – it was about the data. In the wind business, data is the new oil, and Onyx had been collecting it from turbines spinning from Texas to Tasmania. But Macquarie wasn’t finished. A few days ago, Onyx announced they had acquired Eleven-i, a smaller British firm run by Bill Slatter. While Onyx could monitor most parts of a wind turbine, they had a critical blind spot: the blades themselves. Slatter had spent six years perfecting sensors that could detect blade problems weeks before they became catastrophes. His technology had successfully spotted a crack smaller than one meter, three weeks before the most sophisticated drones could see it. In an industry where a single blade failure can cost millions and shut down entire wind farms, that’s pure gold. Here’s what they don’t tell you about the wind industry: it’s not just about building bigger turbines anymore. As these giants grow longer than football fields and taller than skyscrapers, they’re failing in ways nobody anticipated. Blade detachment, tower collapse, catastrophic gearbox failures – the list goes on. The smart money – and we’re talking about some of the biggest infrastructure funds in the world – has figured out that the real value isn’t in building more turbines. It’s in keeping the ones already spinning from falling apart. The math is simple: artificial intelligence and data centers are driving electricity demand through the roof. The U.S. could see data centers consuming twelve percent of all electricity by twenty twenty-eight. That’s staggering demand that can’t wait for new power plants to be built. So investors are swarming companies that can squeeze more power out of existing infrastructure. Onyx, with its Macquarie backing, can now offer wind farm operators something they’ve never had: a complete picture of their turbine’s health from the foundation to the blade tips. The Eleven-i acquisition fits perfectly into Macquarie’s broader energy strategy. They’ve been on a buying spree – solar developers, waste management companies, renewable energy platforms. In Australia alone, they’ve completed sixty-five acquisitions across the energy sector. But here’s the bigger picture: the wind industry is consolidating at breakneck speed. Just like oil and gas, where the top fifty companies have been whittled down to forty through mega-mergers, renewable energy is heading the same direction. The survivors won’t be the companies that build the most turbines. They’ll be the ones that can keep them spinning reliably for twenty, thirty, even forty years. As Dr. Zhiwei Zhang, Onyx’s chief commercial officer, puts it: “Failures don’t just drive unplanned costs – they can escalate into catastrophic events, including blade detachment and full turbine collapse.” The wind industry’s gold rush days of easy government subsidies and guaranteed returns are over. What’s left is the harder work of engineering reliability into machines that must withstand decades of punishment from Mother Nature. In this new reality, a small British company that learned to listen to wind turbine blades whisper their troubles has become worth millions to one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors. And Bill Slatter? He didn’t just sell his company and walk away. Last month, he announced on LinkedIn that he was taking on a new role as Director of Blade Products at Onyx Insight. After six years building Eleven-i, he’s now helping integrate his blade-whispering technology into a global platform that monitors turbines on five continents. The acquisition wave rolling through renewable energy isn’t just about money changing hands. It’s about building the technological backbone for a world running on wind, solar, and batteries instead of coal, oil, and gas. The companies getting swallowed up aren’t failing – they’re succeeding so well that the infrastructure giants can’t afford to let their competitors have them. This consolidation represents a fundamental shift in renewable energy from growth at any cost to operational excellence and reliability – a maturation that signals the industry’s evolution from startup phase to industrial scale.

Edo Kuipers from We4Ce and Søren Kellenberger from CNC Onsite discuss their Re-FIT blade root repair solution, which has been successfully implemented at a wind farm in Southeast Asia. The solution allows operators to keep blades onsite while repairing critical blade root bushing failures. 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! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Ed0o and Soren, welcome to the program.  Edo Kuipers: Thank you very much. Thank you both. Allen Hall: We have some really exciting news from you, from the field, but first I, I want to start with the problem, which. A lot of operators have right now, which is this blade root, bushing it in or insert issue, which is really critical to blades and you’re the creator of the device that’s gonna save a lot of blades. You want to talk about what happens? When these blade root bushings fail?  Edo Kuipers: Uh, yeah. What we have seen is that it especially concerns, um, uh, polyester type of blades. And what we see is that, um, bushings and, and, and composites, they are not attached to each other anymore. And after a [00:01:00] while, blades are simply flying off. That’s the, that’s the whole, that’s the whole problem. Of course. And now going back to the root cause, the root cause here is we are working with, with foes and. The fact is that if you’re working with polyesters, they already have, um, at the, uh, uh, during the process, the curing process, they have already curing shrinkages. So we have already curing shrinkages, which means we have already initial micro flagging going on, on the interface between the bushing and, and, and, and the limited around it. And that reduces, that reduces the um, surface. Carrying area. And by doing so, because we have less area, surface area that can transfer the loads from the hub, um, from the blades to the hub, eh, we have limited amount of, of years on running. So we are reducing, uh, the, the amount of years [00:02:00] that the blades are on the, on the, on the turbine safely.  Joel Saxum: This problem is compounding right now simply because there’s a lot of the global wind turbine fleet that’s starting to age. Right. Like we, we, we went through a big push in, you know, the early two thousands, 2000 tens, 2000 twenties to now where, you know, if you look at the country of Spain, we hear that regularly, Alan is, Hey, we’re getting to the end of life. We’re close to the end of life. Then there’s people saying, what is the remaining useful life? Where are we at? Um, and this is one of those issues where. It can develop rapidly, right? So if there’s an issue, you can, if you catch it in time, great. You’re good. But it can develop rapidly and that can lead to catastrophic losses. But I guess my, one of the questions I want to ask you, and you guys of course have done some commercial here. Uh, how many turbines do you think are affected by this globally affected by this root bushing issues?  Edo Kuipers: Oh, that’s a good one. If I, if I talk a number of blades at the moment, we are more or less at a ball point figure about 30, [00:03:00] 40,000. Blades. Wow. Worldwide. So we see many us, we see many in South America and we see also in Southeast Asia, like India. And those blades are running, let’s say from 10 years, 12 years, and some of them also after six years,  Allen Hall: and a lot of manufacturing. Uh, blades happens in multiple sites, right? So if you have a particular OEM wind turbine, you may have a variety of different blades on your site. You typically do. Some of them are polyesters, some of them may be epoxy, but it’s the polyester ones we need to pay attention to first, right?  Edo Kuipers: Correct. The one we are, uh, concentrating on with our solution are dealing with polyester blades because there we see the problem, especially in the, in the interface layer. There are also root problems with epoxy types, but they are from a, from a different level.  Allen Hall: So the thing that we’re looking for when we start to see [00:04:00]the problem, so if I’m an operator and I have technicians out in the field and they’re looking at blades from the ground, typically very quickly, what are the first signs that you have problems with the bushings? Edo Kuipers: What we generally see, the first signs is that there is a cracking going on in the ceiling, which is between the blade. The pitch bearing. So if you go up tower as a surface guy, then then look for those initial cracks, and if you see cracking, cracking in that sealant, then remove the sealant just by with a knife and, and, and go with a fill gauge to see if you’re caping going on between the root lum. Uh, so between the bushing and the, and the, and the pitch bearing,  Allen Hall: so that sealant or gasket between the blade and the pitch bearing shouldn’t be moving or shouldn’t have flexed it. It shouldn’t have broken. It can flex. It’s made to flex a little bit, but if it breaks, it tells you there’s too much stress [00:05:00] on that sealant. That’s really the first sign.  Edo Kuipers: That’s really the first sign. Then you still have time, but then you have to start monitoring  Allen Hall: and the, the monitoring is telling you what,  Edo Kuipers: once you. Notice this. What you have to do is, for example, you are positioning a leading edge, uh, under the tensile loading of the dead weight. Then you measure a cap, then you pitch the blade, eh, that the, that, the, that the, that, that side is down. So it’s, it’s, it’s feeling a compressive loading, and then you can see if there is a difference. So what you’re doing is you’re measuring the variable cap. That’s a static gap, but the variation of the capping due to the, due to its own weight of the blade, and that is a sign that that movement is going on. Allen Hall: So you’ll see compression versus tension, that gap get larger and smaller. There is always some movement in that gap, but it’s very limited if you, what typically is a threshold where you say. [00:06:00] If it’s beyond a couple of millimeters, that’s a problem. Where is that dimensional gap become an issue  Edo Kuipers: with our present customers? We are saying, um, um, one millimeter and you have to hoist, uh, hoist the blade down.  Allen Hall: One millimeter is 40 thousandths of an inch. That’s not very much.  Edo Kuipers: If it’s, for example, five millimeters, I mean. It’s, it’s not, you’re in a, in a bad stage that within three months your, your blood, your blade could fly off. And if you are in, in the range of one millimeter, the nice thing on that is that you have a limited amount of bushings, which needs to be replaced. So you are li limiting the effect of the repair.  Joel Saxum: So, but that’s the big thing here, right? So catching it early, it’s like anything in blades, we talk about this. We’ve been, we’ve been beating this, this horse for a long time. Catch it early, fix it early, or you’re gonna be in a bad state. Because I mean, the, the, the worst thing that happens here, of course is the safety issue, loss of life or anything like that. But what? But the, [00:07:00] what We have seen blade breaks, blade comes down, hits the tower. Then the tower comes down, then you’re replacing an entire turbine. And that’s, that’s horrible for the operator, the industry, everything in, in, in general. Um, but if you catch it early, now each blade has de, depending on the model, the make the design, um. 60 to 80 bushings. 60 to a hundred bushings. What’s that number? Edo Kuipers: Yeah. 92 for example. Or 74 or, yeah. In that area.  Joel Saxum: Right. So, so, and when you, and when your solution is engaged, when the, you have to bring the, bring the blade down tower and then fix it if you catch it early. Are you talking, we’re fixing six of these, we’re fixing 40 of these. What does it usually look like? Edo Kuipers: It’s, uh, in the, in the area of 24 to 30.  Joel Saxum: Okay.  Edo Kuipers: The nice thing on that, the nice thing is on that if we working with a drilling machine, we can do that in 24 hours drilling. So limited time. Limited time of, of [00:08:00] taking out the bushings. And if we would wait longer and we need to repair 60 bushings, it takes, let’s say 60 hours to, to drill out, so to lower the cost of the repair. Because it’s like a chain reaction. Once it starts, it, it grows to lower the amount of the repair and the cost of repair, let’s, let’s not wait too long.  Allen Hall: Okay. So that’s a really good input into this discussion because I think a lot of operators assume if I have to do this repair, replace the bushings, I’m replacing a number of bushings regardless of the level of damage, because they’re gonna fail eventually. But you know, what you’re saying is that. It starts in a highly loaded couple of bushings and spreads from there, if you can, if you can fix or upgrade those particular bushings, then the remaining bushings may be okay.  Edo Kuipers: Correct. Because there is always a highly loaded, like you said, and there’s always a a side which is more tensile loaded, and the other side is more compressive loaded, and especially the tensile loaded part is, is [00:09:00]more severely for the fatigue. Joel Saxum: The other side of this is a blade replacement. So you’re either gonna, you’re going to have to, you’re gonna do something like this, or you’re gonna replace the blade. And, but now again, we’re talking about this aging fleets remaining useful life, what spares look like out in the field. A lot of these turbines. Spares are not readily available for them. Right. If we’re talking about, and we’re talking about different markets like you, you ju you guys just executed. We’re gonna talk about this a little bit, but you just executed this amazing project, uh, over in the APAC region. It’s not easy to get blades shipped over there, or like in Australia or South America, like in the States. We’re kind of lucky people don’t realize this, but we’re kind of lucky that we have a fleet of 75,000 turbines because there are spares around for some things. However, as these blades get older, like nobody’s gonna do you a run of a 12-year-old, 15-year-old blade, it’s what, whatever’s on the ground around the world is what we have. And that is it Ev And then in composites, again, everything can be repaired, but it’s just how much, what is the [00:10:00] economic case for? So you guys are building that economic case to make this make sense.  Edo Kuipers: A new blade, let’s, let’s. Have the old fashioned prices of 10 euros per kilo or whatever, and you have a blade of 15 tons that will cost you like 150,000 euros. As a new blade, you already paid for that price. Then you have to do it a second time. It’s not only that, it’s also the waiting time. If you have to wait for one year, your loss, your loss in, in, in, in, in, in revenue. Also, let’s say like 100, 150, maybe 200,000 depending on your feed into reef tariffs that you get. It’s also, that’s also a loss. So the total thing will cost you already like easily like 200, 300,000 euros for for one turbine, right? Or one for one rot blade. If you do a repair, then there’s a repair. It’ll cost you like a fraction of that. It’ll cost you maybe like 30, 40,000 euros.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. And the reality is, is when you [00:11:00] replace one blade, you normally are replacing all three. I mean, unless you, unless you can find a, a matching, you know, a good, well you, you get lucky and you find one blade that has the weight certificate and a bending moment certificate that matches your other. Two that are up tower. Mm, pretty rare. More than likely you’re getting all three new blades. So then all of a sudden your 150 turns into 450 before you even start it. Soren Kellenberger: Absolutely. And that’s, that’s if you can get a replacement blade because if you need to go back to a, a manufacturer Right, they, they will not sell you that blade for the original 150,000 Euros. Uh, so. If they at all have a mold before they get it started up and all the initial cost in, in getting that up and running, you are looking at 2, 3, 4 times the price of the, of the new blade. So it, it really adds up if you have to replace. And there’s of course also the whole discussion right now with, um, the old blades and all the waste it’s, uh, creating. So from an environmental perspective, it’s [00:12:00] also a huge benefit to, uh, repairs instead have replaced. Uh, but, but the financial is, it’s just, uh, yeah. Basically a no brainer, right?  Allen Hall: Oh yeah. The financials make total sense. And this is where we’re gonna get to the solution from WE four C, which is called Refit, which is a, a bushing upgrade and the workings together of two separate companies. So we have WE four C, which is, uh, based in the Netherlands of course, and then we. We have Sorin and CNC onsite, which is based in Denmark, so they’re really relatively close to one another, and both companies are powerhouses in wind and, and fixing wind and making it more efficient and getting our turbines optimized for long-term duration, which. What we in the states have not been doing, but we’re, that’s gonna rapidly change in the next couple of months. Uh, so this refit solution does make a lot of sense to me just because the demand is [00:13:00] gonna be there and we need to have some way of doing this. And, uh, this is what I want to talk to both of you about, because understanding how to replace these bushings, it, it seems at first, like it’s an impossible task. You brought two powerhouses together to solve this problem. You wanna discuss how the two companies work together, we foresee and CNC onsite, and how this, uh, repair rework is accomplished.  Soren Kellenberger: I think if we, if we take it back a step, um, we at CNC or uh, onsite was originally involved in a plate repair project. Uh. Before, actually before the, the Corona uh, uh, situation. Uh, so we had worked on a machine and made some, uh, tests in, in our workshop on this repair, drilling out bushings. Um, then Corona came and the project was stopped and never restarted again. So about four years, pretty much to the, [00:14:00] to the date because it was at the Huon wind, which is now coming up again in, in one and a half week. Um, we were in, we met, uh, we foresee, uh, so we had this drilling technology sitting there, and I walked around and I saw these, uh, nice, uh, bushings and, and, uh, a couple of nice gentlemen standing there. So I approached, uh, IDO and, and Arnold and said, uh, Hey guys, this, uh, this, this looks nice. What is it? And, uh, we started talking about that. Uh, they actually had the. Pushing technology ready. They needed someone who could drill out the old ones. And yeah, we had the technology to drill out the old ones and needed someone who could insert those replacement pushing. So it was actually, um, a very, a very good fit. And then the whole corporation just started off basically on trust. I mean, we signed the NDA and stuff like that, but we just trusted each other and, and moved, uh, forward. And it took some time before getting to the first customer also. What you mentioned in the [00:15:00] beginning, right, Alan, that there’s, yeah, it looks nice, but has it been done before? It’s been, we’ve heard that question, uh, a lot of times. Um, so it took some time before we got through all the testing and stuff like that, but, uh, now it’s up and running and, uh, works really well.  Edo Kuipers: At the third point, the customer said to us, if you can show a test with this number of cycles and fatigue, it was something like a certain level and a 1 million cycles test. If you can show that to me, then we will sign the contract. So we sent two coupons, you one to a, to a Dutch Institute, independent, one to a German Institute who was doing um, um, coupon testings. And we said, okay, run it. Run them off both for 1 million cycles. And they had, they had the same result. So, and both, both have reached the 1 million cycles. So we said to the customers, we did not provide one component with 1 million cycles, but two for you to, to make sure. And also at different test institute. [00:16:00] And then they signed the contract and at all went. Very fast after that.  Allen Hall: Well, yeah, if as soon as you can show the technology works in the laboratory, the next step is to get it deployed. So the, the, the process works sort of like this. And, and stop me if I’m too far off because I’ve had to explain to me very slowly. Ada has done this very carefully. So let’s see if I can, uh, explain it to the teacher. I’m gonna take, I’m gonna remove the blade off. I’m gonna bring the blade down, and they’re gonna call Soren’s people at CNC onsite. And they’re going to actually. Have tooling this amazing tooling to drill out this old bushing and make it such that this ados wonderful refit solution can slide into this new drilled spot that’s been perfectly honed. And this new bushing goes in and there’s a bunch of epoxies added behind it to hold that new bushing in place. And then once that’s done, I move to the next one. And because the system is set up with CNC onsite to have [00:17:00] to go ahead and, and drill out multiple bushings, uh, very quickly, this process, once the blade is down, is actually very quick. So you’re talking about maybe a couple of days total to repair a blade that otherwise would be  Edo Kuipers: discarded. This is, I’m very happy with this at the moment. And this is also with thanks to the um, uh, to the criteria, to the cap measurements of up tower we are doing. So this is the first step we have to do, of course. But thanks to that we only need a limited amount of bushing. So we are doing, let’s say like 24 to 30 bushings are being drilled out. This takes us. 24 hours, more or less, we are doing it. We could do it in three shifts, so then it’s one day, but we are not doing it in one sh one shift. They, they are working neatly, they are working accurate and with the same team. And so they are doing three days. After these three days, they are, they are done with the drilling. Um, then we need to start the [00:18:00] preparations, so the new bushings needs to be implemented. That will take us, let’s say like eight hours of preparations, because everything needs to be far tight and that that is essential for our solution. It needs to be low, far level, so all the air out. And then after this, that takes about eight hours, and after that we have the infusion day. That’s a really exciting day always, because once. The resin is running. We can’t stop it anymore. Right? So this, this day is also, let’s say eight hours. So, and then we have some finishing because it would be nice if we are hoisting up the blade again. A tower that the, that the root is, is flat. Yeah. All the resin pieces are off. And we may have to make sure that, uh, that all the, all the bushings are aligned well for the proper load distributions. Um, another, let’s say another few hours, maybe eight hours. So then we are 48 hours, 50 hours of the whole process working with three or four people. That’s it.  Allen Hall: [00:19:00] Wow. And does it take anybody special to be on site from like the CNC onsite? You know, c NNC onsite makes these great machines that are highly accurate. Uh, Soren, do you need to have specialized people on site or are you training people that are local to do this work?  Soren Kellenberger: We are training local people. So that is, that is part of, of the whole solution that, that we do a technology transfer. So it’s, people are trained with this specific project. We started by having the, the team in Europe, uh, so they had some, some training days with, uh, IDO and the guys in the Netherlands on the, uh, whole mounting and infusion technology. And then they came to our workshop and trained in operating the drilling machine. Afterwards. Then for the startup, we send the technicians, uh, to, to the customer, um, who supported for a couple of weeks, and then we went back. Uh, and then we are basically, uh, always ready to support. But on teams or whatever, we can set up a link and, and [00:20:00] a system if needed. They are running with it, uh, very well. So it’s, it’s been very limited what we’ve had to do. Uh, we get some feedback on the drilling process so we can optimize some parameters and, and step by step, uh, improve the process time. We’ve done some optimizations to the drills, uh, to make them last longer and, and do. Those, uh, things more efficiently, but they are basically running on their own  Joel Saxum: guys. I think that’s something to make sure that we don’t breeze over here as well. Is the local content part of your solution. So you’ve done all the expert engineering, uh, figuring out the processes, of course, all the, the precision machining equipment from Soren’s team as well, but you can export it to different locales and train up the local staff and get them moving. So places like it’s, it’s expensive. It’s difficult to get people into South Asia. It’s expensive, it’s difficult to get people into South America, to Australia, to, to anywhere really. You’re gonna export this. However, what you’re also doing is bringing local jobs, local [00:21:00] work, local revenue to the local teams. And I know that that makes a lot of, a lot of people happy. Um, including, I know, like we’re, we’re sitting in the States, right? There’s a lot of ISPs over here, hopefully listening to this. They’re saying like, Ooh, we’d like to be the people that implement this solution over in the States. Let’s get ahold of these guys. Uh, so kudos to you on that as well.  Edo Kuipers: Yes. The idea is indeed to have, um, on different regions in the world, uh, different, uh, repair hubs so that we can always work with the same teams, with the, with the, with the same people. So we train them, educate them, and then of course, from the Netherlands and of course from Denmark, we still, we will always support them, but it can also be done by a teams or a conference calling. Allen Hall: And let’s talk about the Southeast Asia. Project you just completed successfully and uh, it looked fantastic. That was the first major project that you’ve tried this technology on. Besides everything in a laboratory, kind of one off things, but now you’re going to scale. This is a big step. [00:22:00] How did it go? How did that process start? What did it look like afterwards?  Edo Kuipers: Um, how did it start? Uh, by doing it, I mean, sir and his team went on site, of course, and we encountered difficulties, of course, first time with drilling. And, um, that had multiple reasons. So the guys, uh, even the, the, the, the colleague of Sir went, went back to Denmark. He changed, he fixed something on a drill, had sent a new type of drill and it ran perfectly. So from there, from that point, the drilling was no problem anymore. Then after we created the holes together, um, of course we have to do the infusion. And going from going from infusing like five bushings in a row, we had to go to 30 in a row. And that was in the beginning, quite challenging. Um, to have, so it was a little bit like keep your fingers crossed if everything is going fine, but it works somehow. Um, it works [00:23:00] and, and all the resin came out. So we are quite happy with that. Uh, of course there are some fine tuning in the processing in the quality. Uh, but that’s, that’s important for us is, is, is to keep, you need to keep following the. The quality processes. If you, if you strictly follow the quality processes, make sure it’s vacuum tight, make sure that you work in sections, so don’t open your resin folds all at the same time, one by one correctly. And then just monitor and make sure that, of course, refresh your resin from time to time. Because that’s a pot life thing, and it takes, let’s say like maybe two hours before the whole resident is going through the bushing and also in the depth direction that is being impregnated well. Um, so you have to make sure that your pot life is under control. And also we work with a tent, which is like 100 square meters, which is air conditioned, and, and that all contributes to a, [00:24:00] a controlled process. And yeah, that was very scary for the first time. I must admit that if you do second time. You get more relaxed. And the third time, it’s like driving a car the first time. Oh, this, I need to pay attention to the gear. In the, in, in Europe, we have gears and, um, on the car and um, we, we need to, we need to drive and look around us and the navigation system. Um, so, and at a certain point it’s all going automatically. Right. How many blade did you repair in Southeast Asia? 18. Now we are working the, the, the sixth set. Set number six has just completed, and I know this every week, I have contact, uh, with, with, with, with. With. With one guy there. It’s, it’s, we know each other good. So he, he gives us the feedback and it costs me every week. It costs me half an hour, not more.  Joel Saxum: It’s usually not one blade. It’s usually the whole step has an issue, correct? Edo Kuipers: Yes and no. Um, what they do now at the moment, um, they, they, [00:25:00] they, they, they see that one, one blade has, um, uh, a problem. So they, they, they already. Start thinking ahead by taking all three blades down. So even if, if one or two blades within the set does not have the variable capping, they know in half a year it will happen. That’s the experience they already have. And the the, there is the certain. They have a certain agreement here with the crane. The crane is coming, let’s say they use a crane every month for a fixed period. So they say, let’s hoist the complete set down. Then we have three weeks to repair, and in the fourth week we will hoist it out again. Joel Saxum: Yeah. And the, and the technicians on site, once they’re trained up, uh, they’re loving it because whether it’s in the hot in South, south Asia, or if you’re doing this in the cold, you’re working in a tank. So if they got an extra couple blades to work on as a blade technician. I’m all for it. I’m all for it. A little bit more time in the AC or in the heat and nice kind, controlled facility. It’s,  Soren Kellenberger: uh, I think the, the guys will like that a lot in the [00:26:00] field. One of the benefits you, you get also is, as Ido mentioned in, in the beginning, if you catch it early, you have fewer, uh. Bushings to repair. So, uh, you, if you catch it or, or repair it while you have your blades down already, you can repair fewer bushings. And in terms of process time, it’s also a little bit faster. That’s also what we learned to, uh, to drill out the bushings when they are not. Too loose. Um, the more loose they get, the more risk you have of vibrations when you start drilling and that can potentially damage your drills. Uh, um, and it, it just adds to the process time. So. There are a lot of benefits by catching these, uh, things early and getting the process, uh, completed at an earlier damage stage.  Allen Hall: Now you’ve completed your first big project. What’s next? It sounds like there’s a lot of opportunity worldwide to do this refit process.  Edo Kuipers: Yeah, we, the, the, the first, the first [00:27:00] team is the, is our number one team. You can see it also here on the, on the breast. And, um, we are now looking basically a number two team, which is, is as excellent as the number one team. Um, so yeah, it’s not only that, um, we have to do, I mean. If you would like to have this, this technology implemented, um, it’s, it’s going Pfizer versa. So, um, very, very important is that we are working together with teams, service teams, which 100% trust each other. That’s where it starts already. Um, and they are fixed. So if, if you have fixed teams, you teach them and they, they, they, they, they, they learn by experience and that that’s how it should be. Um, so yeah. The next step is, is we are talking with. Next step is we are talking with different, uh, potential, um, service companies, um, worldwide. So we are talking within America with, with one or two, um, potential, um, good guys, good [00:28:00] groups. Um, the same in, in India, for example, and the same in, in, in South America. That’s, that’s our aim to have, let’s say in, in South America. Two service companies, uh, in, in, in India, two or three, uh, um, in India, in America, one, two, or three or whatever. So that’s, we are now discussing with these parties, and it’s not only one direction, okay? We want to sell it to you. Now, it’s also the other direction. Are you capable? How do we want to work with 24 hour cycle? Do you have a place where we can install everything? So that’s our next step to explore.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And Sorin, you have to start making more machines. I hope so.  Soren Kellenberger: No, it’s, it’s definitely, we’ve, we’ve seen a lot of interest and, and we’ve also had numerous contacts over the years. But again, it’s been back to this, have this been done before and. It sort of, no one wanted maybe to be the first, but now the first commercial project is, is out there. It’s, it’s still [00:29:00] ongoing. And, and once this is completed, we will have installed more than a thousand bushings. Uh, so, so I think it’s, it’s a decent. Proof of concept. It’s a, it’s a real case. It’s not just one blade or one set. It’s, it’s actually a, a, a larger farm that, where, that we have, will have repaired once, uh, this project is, is, uh, 100% completed. So it’s, it’s going really well. Uh, and I think that of course they will, once the potential customers see that, that this project is now open and running, it will move forward with, uh, contracts for, for other projects. But who is gonna be the first is still, uh, difficult to say, but, uh, I’m pretty sure that, that there will be more. Edo Kuipers: Yeah. We would also quite be keen on getting on the table with the big OEMs because there are many parks which have still some kind of, uh, service contract, eh, uh, full service agreement or whatever. So even if park owners, many time [00:30:00] park owners say to us, Hey, we would like to have your technology implemented because that sounds to be the most robust one. Um, but you need to convince the, the, the, the, the Big O oms. Um, and sometimes that is, that is, that is a difficult part because you need to go through, through these different steps with a lot of decision makers, uh, in these organizations. And that takes time. So request is, are on these big, OMS is to define clear criteria for us. How, what should be, what should we fulfill? And if we fulfill this. Basically, do we then have a deal with each other? Because in the end, for us, we need to help those park owners because they are in the end, eh, um, they have the, they are feeling the pain on, on, on, on this kind of, um, yeah, sometimes hidden problems. Allen Hall: Well, if you’re an OEM or an operator, where do you start this process? Who do you call first? Do you call we foresee or do you call CNC onsite or does it matter?  Soren Kellenberger: Call either of us and, uh, we [00:31:00] will be, make sure to, uh, involve the other parts. So that’s where the trust and cooperation comes into play. Uh, yeah, just reach out and, uh, we will, we will. Set up joint meetings.  Allen Hall: The website for CNC onsite is CNC onsite.dk because they’re in Denmark. And the website for WE four C is we the number four, letter C, letter e.eu. And either one of those addresses will get you to the information you need about the refit and. Uh, get you started because as we’ve seen the United States, a lot of things are changing and worldwide. We need to keep these turbines up and running longer. The way to do that is to put a little bit of money into them now instead of spending a whole bunch of money later. This is why we love we four C and C and C onsite because they’re saving operators, literally millions of dollars. So. You know, and Soren, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We, we love having you. And as you finish up the Southeast Asia project, you gotta come back on after you [00:32:00] finish those thousand bushings and give us an update. Absolutely. We’ll be happy to.  Edo Kuipers: Yes, thanks a lot. We are fully happy to.

The crew discusses Husum Wind, Arthwind’s blade consulting work featured in PES Wind, and a major cable damage incident at Taiwan’s Greater Changhua offshore wind project. They also cover Japan’s plans for a national floating wind test center, Australia’s offshore wind development struggles, and feature Scotland’s Moray West wind farm as the Wind Farm of the Week. 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! Speaker: [00:00:00] You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Joel Saxum up in the great state of Wisconsin. Phil Totaro is in California, and Rosemary Barnes is here, but she’s in a vehicle in Australia somewhere. But there has been a tremendous amount of news over the last couple of days, and I think we should talk about some of them. Uh, I guess it’s, it’s a where the group would like to go. This week, guys, you know, we’ve been talking about the administration for the last several weeks and about administration out, uh, the latest is with, uh, the administration in [00:01:00]court about Empire Wind. Do you want to even talk about that stuff this week or do you wanna move on to some things? A little happier? Let’s do happier. Alan. I think we should, we need some different news. I feel the same way, Joel, you know, uh, when this podcast comes out, everybody’s, everybody’s gonna be in Husam, Germany having a great time, uh, talking wind energy, particularly in Europe. And it sounds like that event is gonna be bonkers from what I can tell on LinkedIn.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. The, I mean, HU is only second to Hamburg right in, in Germany there. Everybody that I go, they enjoy it. Husam is like the, the. Correct me if I’m wrong, Phil, but I think it was like the first place they had onshore wind in a big way in Germany. Phil Totaro: Yes. So it’s vestus, um, put up a factory there, uh, and was selling wind turbines to farmers. It’s also where they used to do, the reason that it’s there is they used to do an agriculture. Um, event and then they used to invite some of the wind guys. This is going back to like the, you know, late eighties, early nineties. [00:02:00] They used to invite the wind guys, or the wind guys used to show up to try and sell turbines at this agriculture event. The amount of people interested in wind got to such an extent that they started doing a separate wind event. Um, and it got. Before they started the separation with the, the Wind Energy Hamburg, um, event, they, uh, that got to a point, I mean, I remember being there in what, 2015 or 2016 when it had to have been. 30,000 people in a field in Huso. You know, I, my best memory of it, I think was when, uh, well it was eon at the time, but, uh, they had a guy running around, passing out hot dogs. And I had a eon hotdog.  Joel Saxum: Phil, I wanted to share with you. This was a Deutsche Wind Technique show, San Antonio a CP. They had margaritas with the Deutsche Wind Technique logo in the margarita, like foam, the foam on top of the margarita once, and they were passing those out at an event. I thought that was spot on.  Phil Totaro: The hot dogs [00:03:00] are not branded in any way, although that would’ve been a good idea to like, you know, stamp the button or something.  Joel Saxum: What, how do we do that for weather guy to the next event? How we have like lightning bolt popsicles or something? Oh,  Allen Hall: I’m sure that can happen. Lightning bolt cookies, maybe. Well, cookies. We all love cookies. Who doesn’t love good chocolate chip cookie? You know who told me about Husam first was Lars Benson and at AC 8 83 and he described it as just a. Complete craziness in the middle of a field. You had to go rent a house to stay there. But it was a heck of a lot of fun. And I thought, well, if Lars is having fun, it must be really fun. ’cause  Phil Totaro: Lars likes to have fun. I used to have to take the train on a daily basis from Hamburg because there was no way you could even get a house or a hotel. It was so busy, uh, in, in that little town. Um. So, yeah, it was, it was quite an experience and they’ve eventually worked out all the logistics. ’cause they used to not even have like, shuttle service from the train station to the event. Um, but there were so many people that demanded it that they started [00:04:00] adding these kind of amenities, uh, which, which was nice.  Joel Saxum: I did wanna share this one. Uh, you mentioned, uh, Lars Benton, Alan, um, Lars and the team over at a CA 83. Recently Lars stepped, stepped into the executive chair and handed over the. The main keys to the organization to Yannick, so Yannick Benson, the new CEO at a C 83. So a little bit of a management change up there in Canada. That company growing, selling spare parts, doing blade work, doing service work, all kinds of good things. Allen Hall: Yeah, if you need spare parts, you better be calling Yannick. It’s, it’s spare parts are hard to get at the moment and I know Yannick and Lars have connections and places you can’t get to, so it’s a good place to reach out to AC 8 83. Just in time for a husam. The new PES win magazine is out. This thing is heavy. It’s full of great articles and I’ve been thumbing through it, uh, recognizing a lot of people that I know in the magazine and that’s awesome. Uh, but Joel pointed out that, uh, Amond Costa Rego [00:05:00] is in it from Earth Wind. And, and Arthur Wind is, we’ve, we talked to Armando a couple of months ago, Joel, down in Nashville. That seems like an eternity ago.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, I’ll tell you what, uh, Armando night chat quite regularly. We’re on the WhatsApp telling jokes, talking family stuff off and on, and that man is everywhere. Uh, I talked to him last week. He was in Mexico. He was in Chile. He was in Argentina at all the wind events. He’s got wind, uh, power Brazil coming up. I know he’s doing a big thing with the ARS wind team down there for that. He was at a CP Nashville. He, for OMS, he was at a CP in Phoenix. He’s like every event everywhere. He’s there every, no matter what Europe. South America, it doesn’t matter. Um, but yeah, the article they’re showcasing, of course what Earth Wind does is as a blade consultant, they’re top tier. They’ve got a large team. They have a lot of experience inside the factories, um, auditing blades as they’re coming off the lines. Internal inspections, external inspections, blade expertise. Uh, they’ve got their [00:06:00] own platform, ARS Next, which is kind of, um, it’s, it’s, it’s solid, right? It’s good. Yeah. It’s good stuff for, uh, validating repairers realtime feedback. Um, I know they got some little AI engines for chat bots and stuff in there. They’re doing some, some really cool things. Um, so, and if you haven’t, if you’ve met r Armando, you’ve probably also met our good friend Rodolfo, uh, who is, who is a. A strong right hand for Armando and uh, that team down there is, um, they’re doing big things in Brazil. Allen Hall: Yeah, a lot of great things happening at Earth, wind, and they are worldwide. If you need help with inspections or technology, or blade management or turbine management. Earth Wind is definitely a place to check out, and you also need to check out PES Wind, so if you haven’t downloaded your copy, you can go to PS wind.com and download your copy today. As Wind Energy Professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES [00:07:00] Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. You wanna talk about cables? You wanna talk about storage batteries? I think we should do the, the cables and batteries. You pick the order.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, they relate. I’m sure one will flow into the other.  Allen Hall: Well, if more things could not go wrong, forested at the minute, and I know, uh, we’re watching Orid all the time, watching the stock price, watching them get their feet back underneath of them. Stead has a lot of projects still going on today, and I think everybody forgets about that, that they’re a worldwide company and they’re doing great things all over. Uh, but they had a setback in Taiwan, so an export cable was damaged at the greater Chenwa two B offshore wind project, uh, which is going to push back the completion of that project. To sometime in [00:08:00] late 2026, it’s about a 300 million Danish kroner hit on the, on the revenue chain, uh, which is about $50 million. It’s not a huge deal, but when I read this article, Joel, the first thing I was, I thought about you saying that on offshore, the biggest risk isn’t the actual turbines, it’s the cable, and there’s a lot of damaged cable as they’re deploying ’em. What likely happened here in Taiwan?  Joel Saxum: Well, it’s an in, I think the first off, it’s interesting that they’re taking the hit. I, I don’t, I think that’s the, the headline, but that’s gotta be an insurance policy that’s covering this. There’s no way that Ted’s covering $50 million ’cause they, ’cause this should be under built, under construction policy. So onto the technical side of things. Cables can be damaged in many ways. Um, I mean, you can damage them, loading them onto the ship. You can damage them in offloading of the ship. Failure modes are stretch, stretching, compression, bending if you exceed a certain [00:09:00] radius when you bend it. Um, because remember the export cable is gonna be, I mean, half a meter across at a minimum, right? They’re, they’re huge. So, um, you even go to the point where. There’s a, there’s a concept called touchdown monitoring. So you’ll have the cable lay vessel, and there’s the stinger that sticks out the back, that the cable comes outta the reel and goes down the stinger. When it goes off the stinger, it cannot exceed a certain radius, and when it gets to the ground, it can’t exceed a certain radius, uh, of curvature. So there’ll be an ROV, a remote operated vehicle, that camera down there flying along with the vessel to watch that radius to see how it’s doing. And that’s the touchdown monitoring part of it. So they know a lot of times. If they’re laying, if they have an issue. The trouble here is splicing a cable like that when there’s a break or a problem, like it’s damn near impossible. Now, the Greater UA project is in shallow enough water where you can put divers down. So there’s a possibility of putting a bell, putting an enclosure and splicing something, [00:10:00] but oof, that’s expensive too.  Rosemary Barnes: But is there any suggestion that it was, um, that, was it sabotaged? Was it accidental? Because that’s what my, um, worry is, uh, with this happening in that region. Even if it, it was just, you know, one of those, um, so somewhat mundane failure modes that you described, it probably is gonna bring to everybody, like front of everybody’s mind, um, that. Yeah, sabotage of a cable is a really, a really good way to be able to take out a whole wind farm. Um, and in that region, at least, like they’re really struggling for renewable energy solutions. And if they’re not trusting in subsea cables, then, which is already problematic because a lot of the neighbors in that region don’t want to be trusting, um, trusting each other with something as critical as. Electricity supply. Um, but yeah, I think, you know, if they have to rule out subsea cables because they’re perceived security risk, um, or real one, then, you know, then they’re going down to some of the crazier options like Japan’s [00:11:00] looking at where it’s like, we’re gonna import liquid hydrogen, we’re going to coal-fire ammonia in our coal plants. Uh, you know, all these sorts of things that just get more and more and more expensive than just putting electricity down a, a cable. So, yeah, I, I just wonder if anybody’s talking about, um, about the security aspect of it.  Joel Saxum: It seems that it’s in construction and when you’re under construction, of course there’s gonna be a ton of vessels around there. So there, I wouldn’t suspect it was actual sabotage. I would think this is just a construction thing and there, and another reason behind that is an offshore construction in general, whether it’s p I’m talking pipe and cable lay and pipe and cable lay accidents, incidents. Losses happen quite regularly, really at a kind of a high rate compared to other things. So I don’t think it would be a sabotage problem, uh, right now, but who knows in the future as well.  Allen Hall: Well, I just asked chat GPT, because this is the only place I can actually find some information about it. There’s really nothing online talking about what actually caused the damage in chat. [00:12:00] GPT as Rosemary pointed out. Gotta be careful, but let me just read you what it says right now. Uh, the Chenwa Telecom subsea cable was damaged earlier this year in January, and it looks like a potentially Chinese linked, uh, ship happened to do that damage. So this sounds familiar to some things that have happened over, uh, in near Northern Europe. Sure. Yeah. Oops.  Rosemary Barnes: Ask chat GPT for its source, because if you couldn’t find anything on the internet. How did it, it’s not like it has friends in the industry that are talking to it, you know? Um, so I, yeah. Is that a, a hallucination that’s, you know, gonna start an international incident?  Allen Hall: Yeah. You think this podcast could start an international incident? That would be interesting. That I’d want to hear, but, uh, no. It does seem like a, a, a cable was damaged as, uh, earlier this year, and it wouldn’t be the first time that China was involved in cable damage. And it would be normal not to talk about it if it was sabotaged. So it does [00:13:00] seem a little bit odd that, uh, you don’t hear anything about it. But back to Joel’s point, if it is an insurance claim, the insurance company’s not gonna talk about it. No. Or is not gonna talk about it because it’s under dispute probably. But, um, back to your comments earlier, Joel, about watching all this happen underwater and watching the cable drop. They know what the, the bottom of the sea looks like, where this cable is supposed to go. Have many, haven’t they removed all the big obstacles for the cable to actually lay down or do they have a route that avoids  Joel Saxum: all that? Yes and no. Um, so I’ve been watching some of the geotechnic on that, uh, in that area, and there are very difficult geotechnic. Um, so if you remember a few, maybe last summer there was a jack up rig that, that fell over. Over there. Right? Okay, so that’s difficult. Geotechnic, right? So when you’re running a, when you’re running a geotechnical study on a cable layer route, usually it goes like this. You’ll cruise down it with [00:14:00] multi-beam echo cylinders, so you can see the surface basically. So you can read what’s there, rocks do, sand, whatever, and you do a wide sloth. You have it covered maybe a couple hundred meters wide, the whole route. Then along that route you’ll pick, um, like every kilometer, this will be the spec. Like every kilometer you’re gonna do a core. So you’re gonna do a gravity core or a drilling core to get a core sample of that sediment and be, be able to pull it out and see, okay, what’s actually here? And then every half a kilometer, you’ll do like a simple VIO core or something like that, a CPT push test. But that leaves pockets right in this, in this area. Like when that, um. Jack up rig went over, they had done a bunch of, around a, around a site, around an actual, where you put a mono pile in. You’re gonna do a lot of surveys, you’re gonna do a bunch of CPTs in that area to kind of create a network of what that subsurface looks like. But you can hit gas pockets, you can hit soft soil pockets, compaction, liquification, [00:15:00] different things that you didn’t, because you didn’t test every meter. You can hit these things, right? So there is a possibility that you’re laying this cable or, or in this, in this case, it sounds like this thing may have been a anchor drag or something, but there is a possibility that you’re laying this heavy cable and you’re on sand, sand, sand, and what looks like sand, but it’s actually like a liquified sand. And all of a sudden the cable dives under the surface because that cable’s heavy and a lot of pressure on it. So that can happen without you knowing, and that’s why you’re doing the touchdown monitoring and all those kind of things.  Allen Hall: So is this similar to when you watch LinkedIn and you’re putting in a monopile and it just keeps going? Joel Saxum: Yeah. That’s the exact same thing. When you’re like, do 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, they get through a hard sauce, plump. That’s, and it’s just gone. Yeah.  Phil Totaro: Insurance is obviously gonna be a part of this. The bigger conversation on insurance, however. Uh, that’s triggered by stuff like this is at the end of the day, the developer puts, you know, in this case Ted, they put a, a modest amount of margin, uh, [00:16:00] into their budget when. You know, they, they go and ask for capital. When you get some kind of a delay, whether it’s, you know, induced by a government shutdown, or you know, an incident with a cable, whatever the cause is, the, the reality of that is you’re gonna blow through your management reserve in like a week or maybe a month, and you’ve, you, you know, you’ve got very tight margins already. And you’re setting yourself up for a money losing project if you can’t make sure that you leverage all these technologies. Joel just explained they’ve already started increasing premiums and decreasing terms for. Insurance policies, whereas they might have signed like a three year or five year term on a policy, now they’re only signing a one year term and they’re increasing premiums by at least 20%. From what I’ve understood from, from folks in the insurance industry. So. Things like this, [00:17:00] again, whatever the cause of, of the cable cut, you know, having those kind of challenges makes it definitively, um, more expensive for all of us because at the end of the day, you know, we as electricity rate payers have to buy this electricity from whatever the power generation source is, and we’re the ones that pay off that project. And you know, if a developer’s not able to make money on a project, they’re not gonna build a project.  Joel Saxum: So Rosemary, with that, those kind of things in mind, have you heard of any of the site suitability, subsea, subsurface studies going on in the offshore wind projects in Australia?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, not so much. All I have heard about is, um, just that the water is very deep. For the most part. It drops, drops off. Quickly across most of Australia. So that’s why they’re already even looking at some floating offshore wind projects in Australia, which is kind of crazy because we’ve got so [00:18:00] many, like amazing, uh, onshore sites left, including some with, with potential capacity factors in the high forties. So it’s like, that’s as good as an offshore wind site, but it’s cheap, like an onshore wind site. So yeah, so that’s a bit. A bit crazy. Um, and also just, uh, I’ve been following the progress of the, um, sun cable project, you know, so it’s not offshore wind, but it’s a big cable that they’re planning to put in between, um, Darwin and Singapore, via Indonesia. And, um, I just, just have been looking Yeah. Keep keeping an, an eye on it over the last, I know like. Five more years, probably nearly 10 years by now. And the length of the cable, um, has grown and grown and grown as they understand more and more, um, accurately what the root is actually gonna be. So obviously they have to go around some obstacles and it’s adding, you know, hundreds of kilometers every time that they have to do something like that. So, [00:19:00] um, yeah, I don’t think it’s super easy. Um, yeah. But there are plenty of, uh, plenty of offshore. Gas exploration in parts of Australia. So I am sure that those parts at least, are  Phil Totaro: well understood. And Joel, I’ll answer part of your question. They have only started doing. Uh, any geotechnical and subsurface stuff on, uh, star of the South in Victoria. And I think one other project that it was suppo, well, actually no, they, they were gonna move forward and then they pulled the plug on the Nova Castran project. Um, so there’s one, one project so far that’s getting any underwater work done, uh, at this point. So, uh, the, the challenge frankly, in Australia has been that the developers want to be able to build the projects, but they’re still not really the best regulatory framework in place for this. The approvals have come way too [00:20:00] slow. Um, they. You know, part of, uh, a lot of the projects that were gonna be built in Western Australia was gonna be for powering hydrogen production, but then they’re competing with, you know, the Asian Power Hub or something that was supposed to be like 70 gigawatts of um, you know, onshore renewables, both wind and solar that we’re gonna also. Be leveraged for, for hydrogen production. So, you know, the, the, the challenge for the Australian market is that they, as Rosie’s saying, you know, they have a lot of. Onshore renewables, you know, wind, yes. But also solar resources left in the tank. So you know, unless they’re actually seeing a huge spike in demand or they find somebody that’s going to do a lot of this hydrogen offtake and they can justify building these mega projects for, for doing it, I think they’re gonna have a hard time [00:21:00] with getting offshore in Australia, kind of off the. Off the starting blocks.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think Phil, I’d have to agree with you there a little bit because, uh, my reasoning being in the last year and a half, we’ve done, of course, we’ve been talking about Australia with Rosemary for years, but we’ve done actual work down there. We’ve, we’ve dealt with, um, not dealt with, we’ve engaged with some of the locals. We’ve, we’ve worked with some of the operators. We’ve worked with some of the great people down there that are running wind farms. Uh, they’re the engineers, the asset performance people, the developers, all the above, even OEMs. And you can see some of the struggles that they run into, um, just on land. Um. With permitting and the, uh, local opposition and some things. And so you can hear the, the opposition to a lot of the wind projects there. And I, I gotta think that the permitting they’re gonna have, regardless of technical issues, the just getting through things through the government are gonna be tough. To get offshore wind built,  Allen Hall: are you worried [00:22:00] about unexpected blade root failures and the high cost of repairs? Meet eco Pitch by Onyx Insight, the standard in blade root monitoring Onyx iss state-of-the-art sensor tracks blade root movement in real time, delivering continuous data to keep your wind farm running smoothly and efficiently. With Eco Pitch, you can catch problems early, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Field tested on over 3000 blades. It’s proven reliability at your fingertips. Choose Eco Pitch for peace of mind. Contact Onyx Insight today to schedule your demo of Eagle Pitch and experience the future of blade monitoring. Well as wind progresses in Japan. Offshore is a growing. Concept. Uh, but they’ve had trouble, right? Uh, Mitsubishi pulled out of three projects recently that they had bid on and won. Uh, but Japan is refusing to give up on offshore wind, and they are going to start planning a national floating [00:23:00] wind test center next year, and that is going to help them. Get floating wind into Japan. So the, the Floating Offshore Wind Technology Resource Association, uh, says that they’re gonna conduct verification tests in Japanese waters because their ocean and weather conditions differ from Europe. Obviously, uh, there’s a lot of knowledge in Europe for floating wind. Not so much in Japan. Uh, and I guess from my perspective, just reading these articles about Japan taking on this effort, it does make sense because the way the Continental shelf is right there off the coast of Japan, it pretty much gets into deep water very quickly. Floating wind is gonna be a great opportunity, but there are unique challenges in Japan. Right.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. I, I wanna mirror this one almost in the conversation that we had with the fellows up in, uh, Norway and Denmark there about the Ute Sierra Nord. Right, because we talk to them about, okay, Norway having the capabilities to do this. Do we want to be a net exporter of technology? [00:24:00] Do we wanna bring it, keep it at home, we know how to do stuff offshore, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, great things up there. This is kind of the same case and put around the world, right? Japan is sitting over there, you know, mostly by itself working on floating wind stuff. So. It’s difficult. I mean, a lot of Japanese companies have tried to get into the offshore merge, you know, the MHI Vestas experiment and some of those other things. Um, we, we, you know, we did a big strike take project and a bunch of Mitsubishi turbines onshore in the states this year. So like the Japanese technology’s been around the world, but I think that because of the national interest, right, like they won offshore wind, um, they have good offshore wind resource. We’ve talked with quite a few people over there. Uh, they need. To do something like this. The only other one place that there’s an offshore wind test center, of course we have like high wind Scotland, um, there that did that, did that project. But there is another loading offshore like kind of test center in north, north of France, I think, where they’re doing some, some, some studies and some other things. But them [00:25:00] building this, because Japan has been a follow on technology-wise, for years, they’ve just been using whatever the western world’s been creating. Um, and some Korean turbines, and we’ve run into some weird ones like that too, right? Some small production units. But I think that this one is, is very smart of them from a national interest standpoint to build this floating offshore technology center because they’re gonna need it. If they want offshore wind, it’s going to have to be floating in a big way over in.  Phil Totaro: Port Portugal’s also got the wind Float Atlantic. So there, there are, you know, uh, again, a number of, of pilot projects. Japan was actually the pioneer though with this. They had a two megawatt unit, uh, out on a floating platform since I wanna say 2011 or 2012. Their government needs to get out of their own way. If they really want to move forward with floating offshore in a serious way. The fact that they’re willing to commit some resources to this is good because they’re leveraging expertise as well from, um, you know, commercial [00:26:00] relationships with some of the other, you know, floating research centers around the world, including Norway. Um, according to this, this press release, uh, announcing this. So, you know, in general that’s a good thing, but. You know, all it takes is somebody saying yes at this point. And you know, there’s, there’s been a lot of people pushing for this for a long time, uh, both in Japan and in the West, who wanna be, you know, in Japan, including turbine OEMs, developers, uh, financiers, you name it. Uh, the government needs to. You know, get out of its own way and let some of this start, start to flourish.  Joel Saxum: Alright, the Wind Farm of the week. This week we’re taking a, a plane trip across the Atlantic to Moray West, which is an Ocean Winds project. Ocean winds is EDPR and NG. Uh, so on this offshore wind charm is 60 Siemens esis SG 14. 2, 2, 2 direct drive turbines each rated at 14.7 megawatts. Uh, these things have a big [00:27:00] 108 meter power boost blades on them, which are just massive, 108 meters long for each blade. Uh, so the cool thing about this wind farm and they’re doing something a little bit different ’cause we have spoke about a lot of these offshore wind auctions and how the CFDs are working in the UK and, and some of the interest or disinterest in the Danish auctions and German auctions. You know, support for the actual financing and operators. They did something a little bit different on this one. It’s a hybrid financial structuring model for offtake, which is pretty cool. Um, so unlike most UK offshore wind farms that rely entirely on CFDs, Moray West has 882 megawatts. Uh, it splits it into three buckets, 294 megawatts under a government UK CFD. 573 megawatts are under big tech PPAs with Amazon and Google. And then a and then a little bit of it is, uh, in, in the merchant markets. Um. So that hybrid model had secured them 2 billion pounds in financing. [00:28:00] Uh, so it’s a bit of a different way to do things right when they’re building this up. So they brought a lot of, lot of, uh, support to the local economies there up in, in Scotland, so Port of Nig, uh, the Port of Inver Gordon, uh, the key west there. So they had some marshaling, uh, areas and pre-assembly areas. Uh. Some local North Sea vessels from cattle for, to help install. Uh, and all of this translated, so the cool hybrid model, um, the financing that was there on, uh, the, all of the support locally had some rapid project delivery. So they were able to first secure the consent to 2019 and they dev, they delivered first power in July of 24 and full power output by 25. So for an offshore wind project going con from consent. To full power in under six years. Pretty impressive. Um, so this, this project, local economic impact is expected to inject 800 million pounds [00:29:00] into the Scottish economy with over 1500 full-time employee years of construction jobs and 60 plus long-term operational roles based in Bucky. Uh, so it really demonstrates the offshore wind can support energy transition and regional economic development amid some supply chain and grid infrastructure challenges. So. The Moray West Wind Farm up there in Scotland U are our wind farm of the week.  Allen Hall: Well, that wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind and Jeep Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Uh, we appreciate all the feedback and support we receive from the wind industry. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and please don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For Joel, Rosemary and Phil, I’m Alan Hall and we’ll catch you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:30:00] Podcast.

An offshore wind farm near the island of Bornholm, Denmark shows how international energy sharing creates global energy progress. 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! There’s a little Danish island in the Baltic Sea that’s about to make history. And it all started with a handshake worth seven billion euros. Bornholm. Population: forty thousand souls. About the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma. For eight hundred years, this island has watched the tides of war and peace wash over Northern Europe. But last week, Bornholm became the center of the most ambitious energy project in human history. Here’s what just happened. The European Commission signed the largest energy grant in EU history. Six hundred forty five million euros. Seven hundred fifty six million dollars. All for one little island. But that’s just the beginning. Siemens Energy just won the contract to build four massive converter stations. Two on Bornholm. One on Zealand. One in Germany. The job? Converting three gigawatts of offshore wind power into electricity that can flow between countries. Think about that. Three gigawatts. That’s enough power for four and a half million homes. And the cables to carry all that electricity? NKT, a Danish company, just signed a six hundred fifty million euro contract. They’ll lay two hundred kilometers of underwater cable. That’s one hundred twenty four miles of electrical cord running beneath the Baltic Sea. But here’s where this story gets remarkable. The cable won’t be laid by just any ship. It’ll be installed by the NKT Eleonora. A cable laying vessel currently under construction. When it launches in twenty twenty seven, it’ll be one of the most advanced ships in the world. Powered by renewable energy. Built specifically for this project. They’re not just connecting countries. They’re connecting the future. Thomas Egebo, the Danish project leader, says this is about more than electricity. Quote: We are taking a big step towards a future where offshore wind from the Baltic Sea will supply electricity to millions of consumers. End quote. But let me tell you what makes this story truly extraordinary. This isn’t about one country getting richer. This is about sharing power. Literally. When Denmark has too much wind, Germany gets the surplus. When Germany needs more electricity, Denmark shares theirs. Two gigawatts flow to Germany. One point two gigawatts stay in Denmark. It’s like having the perfect neighbor. The kind who loans you sugar when you’re out, except the sugar is enough electricity to power Berlin. The construction timeline reads like something from science fiction. Construction begins in twenty twenty eight. The island goes operational in twenty thirty. By then, Bornholm will be the electrical heart of Northern Europe. But here’s the part that will give you goosebumps. This project started during the pandemic. June twenty twenty. When the world was falling apart, when nations were closing borders, one hundred seventy one out of one hundred seventy nine Danish parliamentarians voted yes. Democrats and conservatives. Liberals and traditionalists. They all agreed on one thing: the future belongs to cooperation. Stefan Kapferer, the German project leader, calls this efficient offshore cross linking between all countries bordering the North and Baltic Seas. Translation: It’s the birth of a European electrical network. One that shares power, shares security, and shares prosperity. The wind turbines will be built fifteen kilometers offshore. That’s about nine miles from Bornholm’s coast. Far enough to preserve the island’s beauty. Close enough to change everything. And when it’s all finished, when the last cable is laid and the final turbine spins, Bornholm will have accomplished something that seemed impossible just five years ago. They’ll have turned wind into bridges. They’ll have transformed former battlefields into power grids. They’ll have proven that cooperation isn’t just possible, it’s profitable. The total investment? Seven billion euros. Nine billion dollars. The largest construction project in Danish history. But the real investment isn’t money. It’s trust. It’s the belief that former enemies can become partners. That small islands can have big dreams. That sharing power creates more power for everyone. So there you have it. A little island called Bornholm. Population forty thousand. About to become the electrical heartbeat of Northern Europe. Because sometimes, the smallest places teach the biggest lessons about what’s possible when neighbors help neighbors.