The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen, Phil, and Rosemary continue the discussion from Tuesday’s episode, diving into renewables opposition and TPI’s financial situation. 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: So what we’re talking to energy, everything is difficult, so we wind and solar can be difficult to make money in. But some of the discussion about moving back to coal or, or moving back to older sources of electricity generation, their money losers too.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, probably even more efficient money losers. And on a larger scale, you know, at least wind and solar, you could lose, lose money a little bit at a time and you don’t lose money on the operation. Um, you know, it’s, it’s all in the, the, the capital cost. Whereas coal can lose money ev every single, every single day that the plane operates. So I [00:01:00]guess that that’s, uh, yeah, that’s true. It’s not as, not as bad as that.  Allen Hall: So is there a industry fix or is there a hope for the future? Right now, I don’t see it. Rosemary Barnes: I was reading this book for a little while and I stopped reading ’cause I, um, it had some good ideas, but it wasn’t like totally rigorous in its, um, exploration of all the ideas. I think it’s called The Price is Wrong, or something like that. And it’s about how like, it’s not possible to have a renewables industry that isn’t subsidized by the government. And, um, there’s some, I I, I think that there’s some truth to that, but I would replace. That there’s, it’s impossible to have a renewables industry if that’s not subsidized. Rather say it’s impossible to have an electricity system that’s not subsidized in some way by the government. Um, and yeah, I mean, just rec recognize that and maybe we don’t need to to fight that, but, um, it, it is always turns like so tribal that everyone’s arguing over who’s got the more subsidies or who’s. More dependent on subsidies. Um, yeah, it’d be easier [00:02:00] if we could all, you know, get on the same page about climate change and just acknowledge what we needed to do. But, you know, if, if wind and solar power never came along and we didn’t care about climate change, then we’d still be subsidizing, uh, yeah, like coal and, and gas and, uh, all the transmission and, uh, I don’t know, infrastructure. You need to transport those fossil fuels around. Like, you know, we’d, we’d still be subsidizing because people still need electricity and still get upset if it’s, um, you know. So expensive that you are stuck, you know, choosing whether you want to eat this week or heat your home this week. So,  Allen Hall: well, is it because electricity was late to the game? The railroads sort of blew through the United States and everywhere else in the world because it was easy.  It missed Australia, but yeah, would would’ve been nice.  Allen Hall: But here, here in America, the railroads pretty much owned most of America very quickly. Uh, and got it done before there was any real. Feedback like they would be today, as soon as you wanna put a transmission tower in somebody’s farm field.[00:03:00] Huge, huge uproar. States are involved, senators are involved. The government’s all over it. There’s committee meetings. Everything gets really slowed down versus 1860s. It just happened.  Rosemary Barnes: But I think the difference as well, like it’s not like transmission didn’t have these obstacles the first time around, right? When cities or towns were getting electricity for the first time because there were transmission lines going to them, then it was more obvious what the need was. Whereas now people, they’re like, I already have electricity. And um, you know, they don’t, they don’t wanna be disturbed further when the. Yeah, the case isn’t as obvious to them for what the benefit will be to them. Allen Hall: Is it such that the general public doesn’t realize that their survival depends upon electricity? On some measure, we were just driving and Claire and I, our producer, were just driving through a certain part of the Midwest and we were noticing there were no houses, and then it became obvious, well, there’s [00:04:00] no power. To this part of the country. There are no transmission lines. There are roads, but there are no transmission lines until you get to a railroad track. And then there are power lines running alongside the railroad tracks, so the railroad and electricity go together. And whenever those two sort of meet, there is a little town, but outside of that zero, that happens on a bigger scale, if you don’t have electricity to power your industry, your cities, your communities. You’re really in a world of hurt competing against the rest of the world. When do we realize that? Isn’t that why China is going so fast, so hard to electrify? Because it brings civilization, advanced civilization? India’s trying to do the same thing. It seems like in some aspects we just go, well, I don’t need it. You do need it. Your kids need it, your grandkids need it.  Rosemary Barnes: But there’s a different, um, argument you’re trying to make because, I mean, I [00:05:00] doubt that there’s many towns in the US that aren’t connected to the electricity grid. There’s at least there’s some, there’s, there’s quite a few in Australia, but, um, you know, with microgrids and, and stuff like that. So maybe that’s a, a bit of a special case. Um, but what you’re talking about in most. Yeah. Places like Australia and the US you’re not talking about getting electricity to places for the first time, which is what they are doing in, um, in China and in India when they’re rolling out, um, new renewables infrastructure, um, you know, like big transmission lines to connect up. Good. Uh, yeah. Both those countries have, um, high voltage DC. Uh, long, long connections that are, yeah, electrifying parts of the country that haven’t, um, been connected to the grid before. So they’re more, the, the people there are gonna be more like people were a hundred years ago when they were getting connected for the first time in America, or, um, Australia or, or wherever. Um, their, you know, [00:06:00] the, the benefit to them is obvious. I do think that it’s like with most new technologies where you gotta find the niches where people, like, it’s a, it’s a real solution for them. That’s the first place to roll it out. And people who aren’t really suffering don’t see as much need to change until the technology gets like, so much better. Allen Hall: Who are the proponents, the loud vocal proponents to bring more electricity to New York City or to Los Angeles or to Houston? I don’t hear them though those voices aren’t nearly as loud as the voices that are saying, we don’t need wind, we don’t need solar. We’re totally fine the way that we are. What am there? There is a, a very quiet opposition or proponents of electricity, I would say, uh, versus the opposition, which are very vocal about. We don’t need wind and solar. I think they totally do. I don’t understand where they’re even coming from in terms of big picture  Rosemary Barnes: in the big [00:07:00] cities, you kind of maybe hit from two ends because there’s this one kind of, um, one group of people who are climate concerned. Um, and so they do want renewable energy. However, they think that the solution is that you just need to use less electricity. And so, uh, I think there’s like a really large proportion of city populations of people who. Who are cared about climate change that think that you can solve it by, um, consuming less. All the things that are left over are, you know, like little incremental things that don’t add up to anything. Like what we’re gonna need to have everyone move to electric vehicles and have everyone move off the gas network and onto heat pumps for heating. Um, you know, there’s so many huge chunks of load that need to be added in order to. Decarbonize and I don’t think that, I think that, yeah, like the half of the general population, like non-expert population, that should be on the side of the energy transition. I don’t think they realize that. We’ve been really, really conditioned to believe [00:08:00] that if it’s not, you know, if it’s not hurting, it’s not working. So like it’s like you have to. You have to suffer as a condition for a solution to be plausible. So I think that, yeah, there, um, there’s a lot of, a lot of people that are really obsessed with individual action and how we’ve just gotta convince people that they should, you know, do all those little things. Um, and I’m not sure they’re aware of just, yeah. Extent of the problem. I  Allen Hall: think you’re right about that. And been listening to a couple of podcasts while working that are still focused on the climate action slant, I’ll call it, to drive, uh, people to do something about their electricity or the coal factory or whatever they got going that. But that argument is just a losing argument today in the climate we’re in. [00:09:00] You’re not competing against, uh, someone who’s gonna have a discussion with you about climate. You’re competing about someone who is trying to have an economic argument, a strength argument versus a weakness argument. Uh, so the. You’re talking on the sidelines about climate. When your world economies are colliding, it just seems like the language needs to shift a little bit to focus in on what is gonna move people to some sort of consensus.  Phil Totaro: This, this also goes back to my whole thing with, you know, industry trade associations or lobby groups, because they are very much focused on politics and making everything into a political argument as opposed to leveraging the people that actually have the economic focused argument and data to be able to support [00:10:00] the position. And it, it’s, we’re just not hearing from the right people. That have the right knowledge and information and, and it’s not just exclusive to the us this, you know, has happened in Europe. Um, I’m sure it, you know, Rosie can speak to how the degree to which this has happened in Australia as well. But the, the reality is you, you, the people with the real. Knowledge and information that people actually need to be able to meaningfully change their argument and change habits, and change behavior and thought patterns. They get drowned out by the people who shout the loudest or who are politically connected.  Allen Hall: Sure. But that’s been true for time immemorial. What, what I think is happening at the minute is if everybody wants to talk about power is electricity is power. Basically, it’s what we’re saying. Electricity is economic power. Then you want as much electricity as you could possibly generate. Are you gonna spend [00:11:00] twice as much to do it or are you gonna do it as cost efficiently as you can? Wind and solar are gonna be those two answers. Plus battery being the third. That’s gonna be the lowest cost way to do it. If you’re trying to grow your economic power relative to all your economic neighbors, that’s the way to do it. So why are we having a discussion about. We’re gonna go back to coal in the United States and we just drove through coal country a couple days ago. Why are we having a discussion about going back to coal? ’cause it’s so expensive. Why would we do that?  Rosemary Barnes: It’s really weird. ’cause I mean, renewables didn’t kill coal in the US right? It was gas. Gas killed coal.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Oh yeah. Gas killed coal for sure. Well, coal killed coal because you don’t wanna live next to a coal generation plant. You really don’t. Especially 30, 40 years ago, you totally didn’t before the emission equipment was installed. Not nice. Does that make sense? Like we’re, we’re just not pushing if, if, if the, everybody’s [00:12:00] talking power. Let’s talk power. Let’s talk cheap power. Let’s go,  Rosemary Barnes: let’s buy TPI. Come on Rosemary, let’s go. I’ve got about $2 50 spare at the moment. So if you think that when it kinda gets to the point where that Yeah, that can give me a, a stake then happy to, to jump in, Allen Hall: what kind of management, Rosemary, would you put into a TPI? Would you put in a engineering focused management team, or are you putting in a development team? Are you putting in just a pure, raw, old school manufacturing sort of management and system? What does that type of business require?  Rosemary Barnes: I think that there’s a real tension that makes that like an unanswerable question and why it’s the whole industry is struggling and not just one or two companies based on their decisions because. You need in the long term, you need a good product. It means you need a good engineering team to design it and, um, you know, maintain a whole lot of, uh, institutional knowledge in, in [00:13:00] house. Um, and to be able to maintain, you know, deal with warranty claims and make sure that you don’t have more in the future. But that’s super expensive. And the reality of today is that the cost, like the, what you can charge for a wind turbine blade is just, it’s, it’s too low to support that the kind of engineering that it actually needs. And so, um, yeah, that’s why, that’s why no one, no one can make the equation work, you know, to have the product sufficient and to make enough money to stay in business. I, I don’t know, I kind of, and the way I’ve seen it, probably like the last. Nearly decade that I’ve been saying this is I, I just feel like a bunch of companies are going to go bankrupt, um, over not being able to, you know, whoever has the first, you know, huge warranty claim that they, they just can’t support and they go bankrupt. Few of them happen and probably people will start, um, you know, some Chinese companies will kind of rush in to fill the void as well, but at the end of the day, you’re still gonna end up, um, you know, like having to move through this [00:14:00] and, and. Pay for the engineering. You, you just like in 20 years time, you can’t be anywhere else. Um, unless we just didn’t have a whole lot of wind energy growth.  Allen Hall: Let’s talk about wind energy growth for a minute. With the shift, uh, in terms of production tax credits going away in the United States and wind has to stand on its own two feet discussion that’s happening at the moment. When you remove those. Production tax credits and investment tax credits. Wind is still cheaper. Solar is still cheaper than pretty much any other, well, no, it is cheaper than any other, uh, power Source does that Then when they do that comparison, when you start to say, oh, well I’m gonna put a, a gas fired system in five years from now, I’m gonna pay a fortune for it because everybody wants to do that, versus just buying some wind turbines and solar panels and getting the same result. Does that allow wind and solar then to raise prices where? They can become more [00:15:00] profitable, more stable over time.  Rosemary Barnes: I, I actually think no, because there’s too, there’s so many companies that are so used to, you know, just slashing costs so much. I just think there’s just too many, there’s too many companies. Allen Hall: Too many companies in it.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And, um, some. Uh, can go for at least a period of time making a loss on every product they sell. But, you know, there’s so many companies, and especially if you include China in, in that, they’re just, uh, I don’t know. It’s, it’s just not, um, viable to me to see how, like, which company is gonna be the one that starts charging more. Um,  Allen Hall: are you able to have an independent blade company anymore, or do you need to be attached to an OEM?  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t see why that it, you know, the reason why that there were. Independent blade companies to start with was, was ’cause people wanted to have more, a more secure supply chain so that, you know, if something happened with one of the, the factories and they’ve still got another option to fulfill all the orders that they’ve got for a certain [00:16:00] platform. And I don’t see that changing, um, you know, the fundamental reason for it. So, um, yeah, I, I, I, I don’t think anything’s changed there.  Phil Totaro: This also goes back to the argument of, does an industry. Flourish when it’s vertically integrated, or does an industry flourish when you’ve got all these separate little companies? Allen Hall: It’s more distributed.  Phil Totaro: Exactly. Uh, a distributed model for supply chain, and right now we’re in. That phase of an industry growth where if you wanna be profitable, vertical integration’s, pretty much the way to go. Um, it’s also why it’s slightly confounding. Why ge? Bought LM in the first place because they, you know, brought them in because they wanted Yeah. To vertically integrate it. But then they said, oh, but you’re, you’re gonna keep selling blades to everybody else and [00:17:00] then we’re gonna go use TPI and maybe some other companies to, you know, source blade designs and, and blades for specific. Makes and models of turbines. So why would you, why would you vertically integrate a, a capability like Blade Manufacturing and then not fully leverage it? Rosemary Barnes: You know what, at the time that they were purchasing LM and I was working there, no one could understand it. And we kind of came to the conclusion, well, we’re engineers, not business people. So, you know, um, presumably. Presumably makes sense to, uh, a team of MBAs from ge. But now I, I kind of think that it, it, it did, it wasn’t that we didn’t understand, it’s that it didn’t really make sense the, the way that they did it, at, at least, um. Yeah. I, I, I don’t think that they, I think that the team at the time really did intend to keep LM doing basically what it did, and they didn’t quite realize how much OEMs wouldn’t really like it. Um, like they didn’t like the vibe, even though, [00:18:00] like I can tell you, it really, really, things didn’t change so much at LM in the first few years, but, um, to an external OEMs. Perspective now they’re buying blades from their competitor. So it doesn’t really feel like as much diversification as it feels like giving away all of your trade secrets to a, a competitor. So I think that they underestimated how much that that vibe would, um, would exist.  Allen Hall: What was the GE drive to change management and change culture at lm At other acquisitions that I’ve been around with ge. Instantaneously. The old company is over, the new company is here, management changes, structure changes. They’re relatively quick at doing it, and then you’re part of the larger GE almost immediately. At lm, it never seemed to kick in that way. Even though they were selling blades to other companies besides obviously ge, but that hadn’t changed GE at other facilities, they would [00:19:00] still just take it over and call it ge, change the name on the building, and boom, it is now a GE facility and run with it. Why did they not do that at lm? And was it more of a just cultural difference or was it a financially driven. Decision, I would  Phil Totaro: suggest it was cultural. You think it’s cultural? I, I think so, to be honest, because they, they, with the Danish management, I don’t think they wanted to. Uh, you know, immediately make a significant amount of changes because they knew that LM would lose customers if they immediately kind of vertically integrated LM as now a GE company. I, I think they wanted to maintain that brand identity. And so more than a financial thing, I think it was a cultural thing and a brand thing to start with. But I think that [00:20:00] ultimately ended up being potentially the wrong thing. Either they could have bought and owned it and operated it as a separate, you know, uh, literally separate, you know, just an owned entity of GE Renova. But it maintained the brand and, and the, you know, operational philosophy forever. But they, they. Owned it, and then it was like, well, we’re gonna integrate it. We’re not gonna integrate it. They started exchanging all this ip, you know, all the GE Renova Blade technology IP got assigned to LM and then got assigned back to GE Renova. I mean, they, yeah, I, they, so I don’t think they, they really manage that well.  Allen Hall: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to know, right? It’s, you can’t predict that. But I’m now curious, Rosemary, because I’ve. Listen to you describe LM quite a bit, and now I know a lot more about Danish culture and Danish companies than five years ago. Clearly, [00:21:00] if GE had come in and had been, we’re clearinghouse, we’re gonna vertically integrate this company into the greater ge. The employees revolted, would they have lost the critical staff that they needed to run the place?  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think so. Um, where are they? Where are they gonna go?  Allen Hall: No. Well then there’s vest, there’s other, at the time there were a lot of places to go. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I mean, people were moving, moving around. But you know, it’s, you’re talking about hundreds of engineers all at once in, um, the town Coaling that most of LM engineers work in is, um. 60,000 or something. In that area. In that area. Um, so yeah, uh, it’s not end Danish. People hate to move house,  Allen Hall: but it’s an American company coming into Denmark. There’s that label that goes along with it. Besides the culture aspects, just having the moniker, the big meatball on the [00:22:00] side of the building would mean something. To Denmark.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. But I, I don’t think that they would’ve seen, um, a sudden rush. I think that they would’ve seen a little bit higher than normal at attrition. That’s, that’s my gut feeling. Okay. ’cause I just  Allen Hall: feel like in some aspects, GE did try to. Set things up in certain ways to make it run in a certain fashion. In other ways they didn’t, they just left it alone.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no, I think that they took over with one idea and then their GE management changed and had a different idea because it doesn’t make any sense that they, they came in, um, this huge company of 300,000 plus global employees bought a company of about 10, 15,000 at the time. Um, and then for all of the stuff where it was duplicated between, I mean, except for some, some corporate stuff, I’m sure that some corporate stuff got, you know, LMS version of it got slashed and, um, GE took [00:23:00] over. But for, for the bulk of the stuff that mattered to the company, um, it was the Tony Company whose. Team stayed. And the GE one left, like there wasn’t a GE Blade team anymore after they bought lm. That was, they now worked for lm. Um, and, you know, across, across the board for everything. Technical, technical, um, that’s how it was. And then they, five years later, they’re like, actually no. Now we’re gonna get rid of the LM team and have the GE one. I mean, why would you do that? To get rid of the. Small amount of in-house expertise you had, uh, um, one day and then a few years later just flip and like, no, we’re going back to our, like, they didn’t, didn’t retain you. You can’t just slash uh, get rid of a team and then five years later be like, okay, now the team starts up again. Like, everyone wasn’t just like there hibernating waiting for, um, g to tell them that they could work for them again. So it obviously you would never go into that without your long being, your long-term plan. So that’s why I’m [00:24:00]pretty sure that they changed their mind.  Allen Hall: You could do that. If TPI exists without TPI, I don’t think they make the moves with LM like they’ve done  Rosemary Barnes: because they’ve got the backup. Allen Hall: Yes. And now that TPI is on the rocks now I wonder if they’re rethinking the lm.  Rosemary Barnes: I mean, gee, I’ll buy T-P-I-T-P-I and uh, re rinse and repeat.  Allen Hall: Well, I don’t think they’re gonna, I you may, they, they may be forced into doing it just to keep the production line going. That happens quite a bit in business where you’re. Buy your suppliers to keep the supply chain going. But the lm, it felt like for probably a year now, that GE was going to try to sell LM off in pieces or whatever they were gonna do. Does that stop, does GE think No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t wanna do that because I want, I need a factory in North Dakota that makes blades. I need, I need blade factories. I own blade factories. I don’t wanna lose blade factories, I don’t wanna sell ’em off right now because I’m concerned about my other supplier, [00:25:00] TPI, not being here in a year,  Rosemary Barnes: but it’s too late. They’ve already, LM has like one or two factories left. I mean, some of them are GE factories, but some of them have been just closed or um, sold to competitors. So. Um, it’s, it’s too, it’s too late for that. That’s why I, I, I, um, yeah. Like I said, you know, when the sale happened, we all assumed that these, you know, you learn something in an MBA and that gives you kind of an insight into how, how to manage these things because like, it obviously is not it, like to the average worker on the floor, it doesn’t make any sense how that you can close something and then realize it was a bad idea and then just open it again. Like it doesn’t, it’s obvious that it can’t work like that. But that’s just what we see continuing to happen. So I’m questioning if an MBA is even makes you the smartest person in the company.  Phil Totaro: So here’s a message to all of our listeners. By the way, if you’re, particularly if you’re an engineer, if somebody’s making a business move and they can’t explain it to you in a way that you as an [00:26:00] engineer understand it, like Rosie just explained, then they are making a really bad business decision and you need to get. Outta that ship.

The crew discusses TPI Composites’ chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and Ørsted’s $9 billion fundraising amid financial challenges. Joel gives an update about the 2026 Melbourne Wind O&M Conference. 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, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, Joel Saxon. Is in Australia. You want to tell everybody where you’re at at the moment?  Joel Saxum: Yeah, we’re down in Melbourne. I’m here with Matthew Stead from Ping as well. Uh, Rosemary was supposed to join us, but uh, of course she’s under the weather. Uh, but we are down here doing basically a, a tour to Melbourne, uh, I guess you could say, of the wind industry. So if you don’t know in Australia, a lot of the wind operators, uh, and ISPs, uh, and OEMs, to be honest with you. Are located here in Melbourne, uh, and we are talking to them all about the conference that we’re gonna put on this February. Uh, it is a, the, the new and improved version of the, [00:01:00] uh, successful one we did last year. So we’re taking the feedback that we got right after the event last year, uh, connecting with these, uh, all the stakeholders down here and seeing what do they, what do they want to hear for the next one? What did we do well? What could be better? Uh, we’re looking at venues, we’re doing kind of all the above to get this, uh. Conference up and running, and I know, uh, Matthew and I, I think we’ve had four to five meetings a day, every day. Um, thank you to the people that we’ve met with, if you’re listening, because it’s been really good for us, uh, very engaging, lots of feedback. So I think we’ve got a, we’ve got a good list of speakers lined up and then also, um, content for next year. That’s great. So what we’re looking at right now as well, uh, if you’re inking this on your calendar. For the, uh, wind energy o and m 2026 conference here in Melbourne is February 17th and 18th. This year we’re gonna do two full days of, uh, panel discussions, round tables, and all kinds of information sharing. [00:02:00] Uh, the goal, of course, just like last year, gather up some of the smartest people in wind and share strategies that you can take back, uh, for operations and maintenance and, and action within your company.  Allen Hall: And Phil Tarro of Intel stores out in California. And Phil, this has to be one of the. Busiest weeks in wind on the investor side. So much happening. Osted, uh, is going to issue a $9 billion emergency fundraising round. And I want you to frame this a little bit. I, I, I’ve heard so much on the news and been reading a lot about this, but there’s several undertones, several things happening at the same time and there really hasn’t been a clear path as to why. Osted has decided to go forward on this fundraising round?  Phil Totaro: Well, effectively it stems from two big things. One is obviously they had shown some financial losses, uh, recently, and this is going back a couple of [00:03:00] years now that had necessitated. You know, companies like EOR coming in and taking a 10% stake, um, just to bolster them again, we, we talked on the show before about the fact that they’re not necessarily wanting to take over, although now there’s some people in, you know, Denmark, that are kind of pushing the Danish government to sell off their chunk. And the presumption is that it would be sold to, to somebody like eor. So we’ll still see if that’s possible or even. You know, uh, likely to happen, but there’s a project here in the United States called Sunrise Wind, which Ted was hoping to sell off a chunk of to a co-investor and. Because of some of the rule changes around, um, tax credit qualification, they’re probably not going to be able to move forward in the way that they had hoped to, um, with that stake sale. And as a result, [00:04:00] it’s leading them to absorb a lot of the, um. You know, financial losses from, you know, some of the delays and, and other issues that they’ve had with getting a lot of these offshore projects, you know, uh, up and running. Uh, it’s, it’s kind of forcing them to do this capital raise to be able to provide themselves with enough cash to be able to continue operating. The  Allen Hall: Sunrise Wind Project was a partnership between Orit and Eversource, and Eversource pulled out of that roughly a year ago. And the other one, which had a partner that, uh, Ted had who pulled out was for Ocean Wind one and two, which was PSEG, which is a New Jersey power company. Eversource being a northeastern power company, essentially those two pulled out like in 2023 and 2024 when the price of steel went up, inflation was high, the cost of the projects went up. So they’ve been out for a little while still. [00:05:00] It was in that interim that Osted just wasn’t able to find anybody to join in on those projects. And it does seem strange, and again, I want to get to this point. All the US investment and offshore, all the US companies are all out. Basically you have EOR and you have Osted Dominion. Dominion. Okay, that’s true. But Di Dominion is sort of a different animal.  Phil Totaro: The the reality is, yes, is the short answer to your question, Ellen, that they, they had tried to find another co-investor after, um, Eversource pulled out. The challenge with that was that there. Has has also been, um, an effort by the project developers to try and renegotiate the PPA prices. Eversource was gonna be one of the main off takers for this. They don’t wanna have to absorb a significantly higher price. And then have to find ways of passing [00:06:00] that on to to customers. And it’s also what led to this challenge of sted not being able to find a new co-investor after Eversource pulled out. Um, you know, with interest rates being so high. And not being able to renegotiate the PPA anymore. Y you know, the developers that are still, you know, have their lease areas and, and are pursuing their projects. They’re locked in to whatever they’ve got at this point. If nobody else wants to come on board, then it’s up to Ted to basically eat the entire cost of this thing and thus, you know, a major contributor to the capital raise. Allen Hall: So the discussion online is that the Trump. Administration sort of forced this to happen. That isn’t necessarily correct. I think a lot of this has started a year or two ago. You remember also. Phil with Ocean Wind one and two, the exit fees with the state of New Jersey. I think that Osted was [00:07:00]going to have to pay somewhere around $300 million to the state of New Jersey, and I think they ended up paying less than half of that at the end. But it’s still a lot of money. There’s a lot of money in exit fees that Osted has paid over the last two years roughly, or, or buybacks. They, they paid Eversource to get  Phil Totaro: out. Essentially just to also clarify, you know, what, what the administration’s done has not helped. I think we can all agree on that. The, but the reality of it is that yes, they, they were already in a bad situation that got made even worse by. Increasing the risk of, you know, particularly a foreign investor coming in and, and being a co-investor in, in this project. Obviously there are any number of utility companies in the United States that could have, you know, uh. Co-invested in, in this project along with Sted. They chose not to because they don’t like the economics of offshore wind.[00:08:00] Uh, and that’s just the, the reality at this point in time. Uh, I mean, duke Energy this week, or I guess last week as, as this episode airs also just announced that they’re gonna cancel their two North Carolina projects because of the same thing. It’s, it’s basically down to the economics of the project. And at the end of the day. If you’ve got somebody in the administration that’s making, you know the, the investment environment look even worse than what it already was before he even came into office, then it’s going to necessarily, you know, take more options off the table for. Potential investors that could have come in and at least helped, uh, kind of share the, the risk and, and, you know, reduce the amount of, of capital outlay that OSTED would’ve had to make just by themselves. In my  Joel Saxum: mind, with this new kind of like P-T-C-I-T-C cliff coming, there’s no [00:09:00] reality where, uh, capital gets cheap enough, interest rates get low enough in time for any of that to change like that, that’s just not gonna happen. We’ve got 18 months and we need to, it would have to come down by percentage points, not basis points. And I don’t think that’s going to, there’s no reality of that happening. I think  Allen Hall: that’s true, generally speaking. Right? But I think the problem is, is where are the New York’s and the Massachusetts of the world gonna be able to get power from? They need this, they really do need offshore wind. The prices of electricity there, uh, if you’re a consumer, is about $300 a megawatt hour. That’s what I was paying in Massachusetts to buy power on the grid. So $150 a megawatt hour coming off of the, uh, you know, offshore wind farm. Yeah, wholesale still is, is high compared to other parts of the United [00:10:00]States, but as it’s half of what I was paying as the consumer. So there  Phil Totaro: is, uh, a dichotomy there, right? Yes. But keep in mind, that’s only for the generation cost. So where, where I am in California, I pay basically $380 a megawatt hour for electricity as a consumer. Now half of that. Is generation. The other half is, uh, split between the transmission and distribution cost plus the overhead to Southern California Edison as the utility. The reality is that yes, the, the generation cost may be 150 bucks, but they’re still gonna have to raise prices for consumers to be able to sell them the power because you have to factor in the transmission and generation cost, and they’re gonna wanna maintain at least a 20% overhead on all that. And because that’s literally their profit margin. Allen Hall: Well, Phil, what I’m trying to get at is the other half of the equation, the [00:11:00] transmission distribution piece is not cheap. So we, we force all the, the generation side to be as low as possible, but the people in the middle, it’s the middlemen, as they would call it, are taking a substantial amount of the money that you’re paying for electricity today. So yes, offshore wind is expensive. So is transmission and distribution. And you would think something has been around for 30, 40, 50 years, transmission and distribution, most of it in the United States has been around at least that long. You think that the cost of that would come down over time and it really hasn’t. Uh, which the economics doesn’t make any sense about that. So when it’s, when we’re talking about Ted, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, all this is not great for Ted, but there is something wrong with the system  Phil Totaro: where Ted can’t make this work. Which is also why we probably shouldn’t have the government canceling transmission projects because we need them and taking, you know, 700 million plus [00:12:00] dollars out of the, um, you know, department of Energy’s grant budget for transmission projects. I mean, this is a time when we need a lot of that technology, but because it has any association with wind and solar, it’s getting pulled. So, uh, you know, uh, that’s a, that’s a decision that’s been made by the DOE  Joel Saxum: Phil and I, and I back this one up. I saw this just, uh, yesterday. I think there was like a, a double digits coal projects pushed forward. I don’t know if you saw that. There was like a, there was a pre, there was a press release where there was like something like 11 coal projects or something like approved to move forward and it’s like. This is, this is yesterday. This is yesterday’s technology. We’re moving forward. Why are we pushing coal? And there was a guy on Fox News talking about it, and he was saying. They were saying like, well, have you made strides for coal to be cleaner? Because of course you have. And he was like, no, there’s always gonna be a footprint. [00:13:00] Like there was no, there was no like, yeah, we’ve done this clean coal thing. He’s like, ’cause Trump deal talked about it as clean coal. And uh, they were like, well, you know, it’s coal. There’s always gonna be a footprint with mining. So  Allen Hall: yeah, that’s our re that’s our reality. Are we still gonna dig rocks and then burn them? Is that the plan? Because it does seem a little bit easier to take the wind and turn it directly into electricity. Same for solar. Turn the sun into electricity without having people digging rocks and moving rocks and transporting rocks and trails to rain and fires and the whole bit. It’s insane  Phil Totaro: right now. Well, for those that also don’t understand wind and solar, by the way, contribute $3.5 billion annually to. Lease payments to landowners directly and to state and federal tax coffers. So, you know, you, you wanna explain why that’s not [00:14:00] worth something. I’m, I’m prepared to hear it as an American citizen. You can also explain to me, if you’re the government, why you’re canceling lease auctions at Boem, that would’ve generated $1.8 billion for the federal government. That’s revenue that you’re literally throwing away. Even if you don’t like wind, you don’t wanna see it. It wasn’t not like it, it’s not like it was gonna get built during, you know, his presidency anyway. Why not at least take the money? And then the project developers can go build it, which by the way, they’re gonna do anyway. They can just go build the projects after you leave office. So you know what? You can’t paint yourself as being pro-business when you actively turn away money.  Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs, ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit [00:15:00] eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. So Joel watching the Osted stock price. Once they announced this new stock offering, it plummeted about 30% and plummet is probably a pretty good word. I’ve used the word cliff to describe the drop off to rosemary the other day. It dropped a ton. It hasn’t. If you, I went back and looked at like the 10 year on Sted stock. It was doing great in like 20 20, 20 21 just after COVID, and it’s come down quite a bit since then. But Sted, as an organization is still making money now, not making money as fast as they were before, but they’re still making money. What? Does this really mean in terms of the long-term outlook for Ted?  Joel Saxum: Well, I know it’s, it’s got the industry of buzz, right? I think I, I woke up, uh, of course I’m in Australia right now, so the time zone’s a little weird, but I woke up with a large handful of [00:16:00] messages from friends around the world. Did you see Orid stock price? Did you see, or stock price? Um. I think that, uh, I mean, we’ve kind of, we know the situation we’ve talked about on the podcast a lot about what’s going on in offshore wind and the, you know, the impairments on projects and the difficulty in financing and kind of the headwinds that they’ve been facing or as a whole. Um, at the end of the day, you can see, because I, this is my take, you know, I’m not an economist, but when I looked at, um, how the stock price fell and then it flattened right off. It was like, well, cliff, and then straight off I was thinking, okay, this is institutionalized money that understands what’s going on here and you lower that price than there’s the stock offering, so there’s a cheaper way to get into, or Ted here. I don’t think it’s gonna affect the long, long term outlook of the company. Like the immediate stock share pricing dropped like a third. That sucks. Right? But it’ll come back, I think, and if you look at, like what you said, the 2020 on [00:17:00] trend, that trend follows a lot of other pure play wind companies as well. I mean, I guess I, I, I would, I would consider or set a pure play wind company, even though they’re probably 90%. Because they dabble in some battery stuff and V two X stuff and some hydrogen, whatever, but they’re a wind company. Um, and if you watch the trend of other companies in the same space, like they’ve been getting beat up for the last four or five years, uh, during this COVID play, um, or since then. So I think that, again, the long term run for them, they’ll, they’ll be healthy. They’ll come outta this, they’ll raise some money, um, make some moves so that, I don’t think it’s gonna be a big issue.  Allen Hall: Phil, same thought. Is it gonna be a big setback for Ted or are they gonna need to. Try to sell off some assets because that’s the talk around the industry is that. They’re gonna do this fundraising effort, but at the same time, they’re gonna try to offload a couple of projects or things that have value today to improve their long-term forecast.  Phil Totaro: Yes. And I [00:18:00] would concur that that’s likely, but that’s also not to freak anybody out because Yeah, I mean, companies normally do this kind of an what they call an asset rotation. Up until now, particularly with their offshore portfolio, they’ve owned. Almost a hundred percent of most of their projects and only, it’s only been in the past, like five years that they’ve even been adopting the philosophy of going in and getting, um, investment partners to come along with them. Um, and it’s, it’s also, uh, you know, it’s something. That, that’s been possible through the capital markets as well. The, the problem for them is that they negotiated poorly probably about three, four years ago on some of these contracts that they worked out, particularly for the power offtake in places like New York or New Jersey, et cetera, that led them to these, um, you know, big. You know, fees for pulling out of [00:19:00] projects and, and cancellation fees, et cetera, et cetera, that, um. It, you know, left them with a lot of, uh, debt and other kind of cash related liability on their books. So the capital raise is necessary. The, the project, um, you know, asset sales and, and things like that, the asset rotation that they can undertake, that’s also necessary in all likelihood. My concern for Sted, the bigger concern here is. Whether or not they are really going to. Keep flowing cash into potentially unprofitable ventures. Allen Hall: 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 is state-of-the-art sensor tracks blade root movement in real time, delivering continuous data to keep [00:20:00] 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 TPI composites, which controls about 25% of the global wind blade market, excluding China, of course, uh, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy with liabilities somewhere between one and $10 billion that they weren’t very specific in the filing. Uh, there is a lot of questions about TPI at the minute. They have an order book and they push out like 6,000 blades a year, something around that number. Oaktree capitals come in, it has backed them. [00:21:00] Chapter 11, if you’re not familiar with bankruptcy Methods, chapter 11, it allows you to continue to operate and reorganize and restructure your debt. Chapter seven and some of the other ones are pretty much an immediate shutdown. So TPI is going to continue making blades or getting some funding. But Joel, this is actually a big hit to the GEs of the world who rely on TPI to produce blades. Is it though, right,  Joel Saxum: because you usually, in chapter 11, you usually have like a tiered, a tiered debt structure too, right? There’s like, there’s Class A, class B, class C, right? So their debt to A TPI is normally gonna be. Raw materials, uh, logistics, those kind of things. Unless, and I don’t know how they do their business. Right. There may be a case where you’re like, ’cause TPI does a lot of work with ge, right? They may have ge, GE may be doing the logistics on their end, so that might not even be on TPIs side of things. So it’s like. Building rent, [00:22:00] um, you know, uh, capital assets. So if they have loans out against buildings or some things like that, right. Those are usually class A type things where they get paid off first. It’s a little bit rocky, but they’re, they’re able to continue to work, right. So it’ll be, they’ll, they’ll be some changes, but it, they, it shouldn’t upset the wind industry. Like it shouldn’t have set the supply chain.  Allen Hall: Well, it does introduce another layer of bureaucracy because once you enter into chapter 11, you can’t. Buy supplies, you can’t sell things as easily. It, it becomes much more transactional. You have to have approvals to, so you can’t start selling off assets behind the scene. Chapter 11 is a very structured environment that you have to operate in. You don’t want to be there if you can avoid it because it just makes things harder to do. But at the, at the same token, and Phil, maybe this is where part of the problem is, they have plenty of orders. But are they getting paid on time? Which is my first question. Had they been getting paid when they should be getting paid? [00:23:00] And then second has quality issues, uh, about a year or two ago, sort of stacked up where they’ve had to do warranty claims and spend a bunch of money that they weren’t expecting to. Is that what led to this, uh, eventual chapter 11 filing? Phil Totaro: Yes, all those did contribute. They also had issues, uh, and unexpected costs associated with their expansion. They had some strikes in Turkey where people wanted more money. Um, you know, there were any number of things that that occurred. But I, I wanna go back to this notion that they have up to $10 billion in liability on. You know, uh, a company valuation of, what did you say before, Alan? It’s like a few million dollars market cap right now for TPI is $7 million and that’s down from a hundred million a couple months ago. That’s extremely concerning, uh, considering the fact. That a, they have such a wide range, you know, between 1 billion and 10 billion. And [00:24:00] secondly, that obviously stems from the quality issues that go back a number of years. So, I mean, I remember us talking about it a year or two ago on the show about how they’ve brought, you know, uh, quality experts in and, uh, you know. Manufacturing head chief Technology officer, uh, even the CEO got replaced, uh, at one point because of, um, some of the quality issues that they had and how it was being handled by the previous management. So presumably this is part of a strategy to, you know, again, restructured the debt certainly, but it. You know, these, the liability issues could still persist. Um, because even though, you know, you’re getting bankruptcy protection in chapter 11, um, nobody’s gonna want to come in and buy the company anyway. You know, they, if they had entered chapter seven where it was a liquidation, then that’s [00:25:00] a scenario where you could have, you know, I, I wouldn’t necessarily. Necessarily say it would’ve been GE Renova comes in and, and buys them. But, um, it could have even opened up the opportunity for, you know, a foreign company to come in because their factories already have, uh, tax credit qualification. Um, and so somebody could have stepped in and, and, you know, taking that over, but. This is, uh, uh, just the recognition that, okay, if they’re in chapter 11 and they’re restructuring their debt, it doesn’t mean that the debt goes away. It might get reduced. Um, and hopefully it gets reduced if it’s $10 billion. Um, but because that’s, I mean, that’s literally almost their entire fleet of blades needs to be, yeah. Would need to be replaced.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And, and Joel, I think this is the real crux of this is. You can’t have a billion dollars in debt and operate a blade factory. [00:26:00] That doesn’t make any sense. Do they eventually clear this out? What do you think is going to happen to TPI do. They just continue to operate. No one has any interest in it. They just continue to make blades and bring in some revenue and restructure the debt. I, I don’t see this ending  Joel Saxum: ending. Well, chapter 11 sometimes is a gateway drug to. Shutting the doors. Yeah. That could be happening. And then, and then it’s fire sale because then the lawyers step in and you know, there, there’s oversight there. And someone could pick up the assets or the assets get parted out to try to pay back the debtors or the creditors, sorry. Uh, so you could see other blade companies, you could see some something odd or Sonoma and Aris, or of course, I don’t have the insight into those as much as. Maybe Phil does, but you could see someone else buying this assets.  Phil Totaro: Yeah, it wouldn’t be Sonoma right [00:27:00] now because of the foreign ownership thing for the tax credit qualification, Joel. Um, but there are, you know, you mentioned one company that, that could be interested and has expressed interest in, you know, getting a, a footprint in the us but there’s also companies, you know, in, uh, other parts of the world that. You don’t want to have a presence here in the States, uh, that wouldn’t necessarily be subject to, you know, the, the foreign entity qualification, uh, restrictions to qualify for tax credits. So there are possibilities for this long term. Does  Allen Hall: it leave a door open for a company to come in and clear the books, settle the debts on some level, and then you continue on as a restructured company? Joel Saxum: Or this, or think about this one. And, and this is, this is a long shot, right? But does it leave a door open for someone to watch TPI fall on their face and start [00:28:00] up a blade company?  Allen Hall: I don’t think so. That’d be hard because there’s so much, there’s so much momentum right now with TPI. It’d be really hard to do that, be like, I’m gonna use an aerospace equivalent. It would be like Boeing Aircraft and Spirit. And Spirit was Boeing at one point, then broke off and set up their own company and was supplying pretty much all Boeing. Uh, parts, but Boeing has reacquired it because it came in in trouble, very similar to the TPI situation. Not that TPI was owned by an OEM, but it does sort of lend itself to ge. Renova designs are coming through TPI all the time in a couple of the manufacturers, for that matter. Somebody’s gotta do something. They need parts.  Phil Totaro: Yes, but here’s, here’s the reality and ’cause I’ve actually studied a bunch of the different m and a deals that have happened in wind energy over the years. What happens in most industries with m and a is healthy company buys smaller, healthy, but growing company. In [00:29:00] wind energy, we don’t really have that. When m and a happens, it’s usually healthy company gobbles up assets of, you know, unhealthy company that are still valuable and then leaves the debt to somebody else like, and that’s why. The chapter 11 thing is interesting because if they’re restructuring the debt, it means they can reduce it a little, but the debt is still gonna be there. If I’m going in and saying that the company’s worth 7 million in a valuation, but they have a billion dollars in debt even after, or during chapter 11, I’m not buying it. Um, because who wants to absorb that? Nobody, nobody wants to do that. So the reality is, what Joel mentioned is are people gonna watch while this thing falls on his face? And then out of the ashes of, of this something new, uh, arises? Yes, I will actually agree with and support that notion. Not that I’m hoping TPI fails, but. That’s [00:30:00] more likely to happen if the worst transpires and TPI can’t pull themselves out of this. That is more likely to happen than some, you know, angel investor, uh, or angel of an investor, uh, swoops in and, and grabs them up and, and says, you know what? We’re, we’re gonna. You know, keep you healthy and keep you going because you’ve got this $1.6 billion order book. What, what we have in the wind industry are vultures who come in and they start plucking away at that $1.6 billion worth of order book and taking it for themselves. And, you know, the remnants of that carcass can go, you know, die in the desert somewhere.  Allen Hall: No, I, here’s, here’s my. 30,000 foot view of TPII hope they can make this work. There’s a lot of workers and a lot of the wind industry that relies upon them. They cannot close. They need to keep producing and, and everything that’s happening in the world right now, uh, with Sted [00:31:00] is not great. But TPI has a bigger impact I think. In terms of where we’re going over the next five to 10 years, we need blades. TPI makes a lot of blades. They’re pretty good at it, but the financial situation is just not good at  Phil Totaro: the moment. And keep in mind too that because of these changes in the law for production tax credits and investment tax credits, TPI needs to keep producing blades for now. Uh, which is one reason they were probably able to get this, uh, Oak Tree Capital. Um, you know, financing, uh, to help them continue operating because they have to make deliveries for anybody that’s got, uh, turbines that they wanna safe harbor before the IRS rules change again, presumably at the end of this calendar year, we’re about. You know, another what, 15 to 20, 20 days away from seeing the first draft of whatever these IRS rules are gonna [00:32:00] be. I’ve already covered, you know, ad nauseum. I think it’s the 18th or 20th. It’s soon. That’s what I mean. It’s supposed to be, you know, in, within the next few days here, um, that we see a first draft. But just keep in mind that a first draft is not the adoption of the rules. So we’re. We’re expecting that the final rules will be fully adopted by the end of the year. If you haven’t safe harbored under the current rules, you need to do it now. That’s by the way, why Vestas just announced a 950 megawatt project in the us. Uh, they didn’t say who. Although if you want the details, contact us, uh, Intel store. We know. Uh. So, you know, the, but the reality is anybody that needs to safe harbor turbines needs TPI, particularly ge or even Nordex if they’re, if they’re, you know, getting some of these blades from Mexico, uh, now that most of their, their quality issues I think have been worked out. Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for joining us. Check out [00:33:00] our uptime tech news where we talk about these subjects and a whole bunch more every week. It’s free. Just Google uptime tech news and you’ll get there. So we will see you next week here on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright visits Iowa to announce plans to end wind energy subsidies, despite Iowa generating 60% of its electricity from wind power that has become cheaper than fossil fuels. While the Trump administration pushes to revive coal and reduce renewable research funding, market forces continue driving utilities toward wind and solar. 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! This week’s news flash is about power and politics. And the two collided in Iowa of all places. Iowa is farm state in the middle of America’s heartland crucial for presidential hopefuls. It’s the first major contest where candidates rise or fall. Smart politicians know: upset Iowa voters at your own peril. But here’s what makes this interesting. Iowa generates more electricity from wind than any other state. Sixty percent of their power comes from those spinning turbines. Wind energy has become Iowa’s economic engine. The irony? US Energy Secretary Chris Wright just visited Ames National Laboratory in Iowa. He praised the lab as a premier scientific institution. Then he dropped a bombshell: it’s time to end government support for wind energy. Wright says wind power has been subsidized for thirty-three years. Time to compete without training wheels. But here’s what he didn’t mention: wind energy is now one of the cheapest sources of electricity in America. Even without subsidies, renewables cost less than oil, gas, and coal. Energy costs are everything in America. What we pay for electricity determines what we pay for everything else. Manufacturing, artificial intelligence, keeping the lights on at home. Energy Secretary Wright talks about reindustrializing America. He wants to win the race on artificial intelligence. Stop upward pressure on electricity prices. Those are noble goals. But here’s the twist: the cheapest electricity in America comes from wind and solar power. Not oil. Not gas. Not coal. The Lazard LCOE analysis proves it year after year. Renewable energy costs have plummeted while fossil fuel prices remain volatile. Iowa figured this out years ago. They didn’t choose wind power because they love polar bears. They chose it because it’s cheap, reliable, and keeps electricity bills low. Wright’s DOE budget would slash renewable energy research by more than fifty percent. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory would lose half its funding. But markets don’t care about politics. They care about profits. And the lowest-cost energy wins every time. Here’s where the story gets complicated. Wright is absolutely right about one thing: America depends too heavily on China for critical minerals. Sixty percent of rare earth elements. Ninety percent of processing. These materials power our phones, electric cars, and military equipment. China’s grip on this supply chain threatens national security. The Energy Department will invest one billion dollars to bring mining and processing home. Smart move. But here’s the irony: many of these critical minerals are essential for wind turbines and solar panels. The very technologies Wright wants to defund. Alaska holds forty-nine critical minerals. Refining them increases their value by six hundred fifty percent. So which is it? Do we want energy independence through domestic mining? Or do we want to slow the industries that need those materials most? Wind turbines do need rare earth magnets. Solar panels need refined silicon. Energy storage needs lithium and cobalt. You can’t have domestic energy security without domestic renewable energy. They’re the same fight, they are just wearing different uniforms. Recently, Secretary Wright commissioned five scientists to review climate assessments. Their conclusion: carbon dioxide warming appears less economically damaging than believed. Climate activists call this science denial. Wright calls it getting discourse back to facts. But here’s what both sides miss: the economics have already decided. Wind power in Iowa didn’t grow because of climate regulations. It grew because Iowa farmers could lease their land for guaranteed income. Because utilities could buy cheap electricity. Because manufacturers wanted stable energy costs. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says human influence on warming is established fact. Wright says climate change isn’t the world’s greatest problem. Meanwhile, Iowa keeps building wind farms. To save money on electric bills. The beauty of market economics? You don’t need to agree on the problem to agree on the solution. Cheap energy is cheap energy. Whether you’re a climate scientist or a climate skeptic. Mother Nature doesn’t vote. But she does send the bill. Solar and wind stocks soared after a leaked Treasury document revealed the Trump administration’s plans for safe harboring of renewable projects. Instead of killing renewable tax credits, they’re preserving most of them. The guidance requires actual construction to start, not just spending five percent of costs. But it allows work to begin offsite and maintains four-year completion windows. NextEra Energy stock jumped about 5% on the news. First Solar surged around 13% Why the market optimism? Because investors understand something politicians sometimes forget: cheap energy creates wealth. Iowa’s wind industry will survive these changes. Why? Because wind power in Iowa is profitable with or without tax credits. The economics work. That’s the difference between subsidizing infant industries and supporting mature technologies that already win on price. The market has spoken. Here’s the final chapter in our energy story. Secretary Wright renewed the National Coal Council charter, terminated under President Biden. Coal supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, he says. Adds tens of billions to the economy. True enough. Coal built industrial America. Coal powers steel mills. Coal byproducts build roads and fertilize crops. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: even with government support, coal can’t compete with wind on price. Utility companies know this. They’re retiring coal plants and building wind farms. Not because bureaucrats order them to. Because shareholders demand profits. Iowa proves the point. This state didn’t abandon coal for environmental virtue. They embraced wind for economic advantage. Coal will always have a role in steelmaking and chemical production. But for electricity generation? The future is blowing in the wind. Literally. You’ve heard six stories about America’s energy future. They seem disconnected. Politics and science. Markets and ideology. Iowa and Washington. But they’re really one story wearing six different masks. The story is this: energy costs drive everything else. The cheapest energy source wins. Not eventually. Not after government picks winners and losers. Now. Wind power generates more electricity in Iowa than any other source. Not because politicians mandated it. Because Iowa farmers, utilities, and businesses chose it. They chose it because wind power in Iowa costs less than coal. Less than natural gas. Less than anything else that plugs into the grid. Secretary Wright can defund renewable research. President Trump can eliminate tax credits. Congress can support coal. But they can’t repeal the law of supply and demand. Iowa will keep building wind farms. Iowa will continue to build solar farms. The wind blows free. The sun shines free. Coal must be dug. Oil must be drilled. Gas must be fracked. Which would you choose if you were paying the bills? The future is renewable because the future is profitable.

Alex Øbell Nielsen, CEO of Danish Wind Power Academy, discusses their customized, on-site, hands-on training programs for wind turbine technicians. The academy’s comprehensive approach improves wind farm efficiency and technician retention through targeted assessments and real-world problem-solving. 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: Alex, welcome to the show.  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Thank you. Good to be on the show.  Allen Hall: You’ve been in wind about 20 years, and, uh, when we had talked a couple of weeks ago now, uh, you were highlighting some of the challenges that exist in wind energy, especially on the training side. What are those challenges? What do you see as, uh, Danish Wind Power Academy as challenges out in the world  Alex Øbell Nielsen: from a training provider perspective? Uh, of course, uh, the. The, the great demand for technicians, not only now, but also in the future, and not having a formal training, if you like, for wind turbine technicians. Um, we see that as a challenge. Uh, but of course it’s also an opportunity for us as a training provider. [00:01:00] Um, but, um, I mean, as you mentioned, Danish Wind Power Academy has delivered training for more than 20 years. Uh, we do so globally, um, headquartered in Denmark, but, um. Before I, you know, deep dive into all our, our trainings, uh, as an example, we deliver troubleshooting training. Uh, a lot of customers are asking for that, but we quickly learned that many of the participants didn’t have the skillset to enter or join a troubleshooting training. So what we begun doing two and a half years ago is to assess, uh, technicians before they actually go on one of our trainings to make sure that they have the right skillset. From that, then we’ve learned, uh, assessing more than I think 1500, maybe two, uh, yeah, more than 1500 technicians. Now that we see two or or more challenges. One is hydraulics. They always score low on hydraulics and the others and controls where they also score low. So those are some of the challenges we see and we do [00:02:00] these assessments globally  Joel Saxum: and I think that’s an important point there globally, right? Because Danish Wind Power Academy of course, like when you think wind, you think the Danes, right? The Danes know what they’re doing, right? Uh, we’re, we’re over here on uh, wind sites in the US all the time and they’re like, yeah, some Danish guy was here last week fixing this. Like that happens all the time. But I, I, I wanna focus on that a little bit, saying like, we talk about, okay. The, the, the, the podcast here, of course, we’re based in the states. You can hear it by our voices, but we cover things globally, right? So we cover from the eu what’s going on offshore, onshore, India, Australia, apac, down in Brazil, Mexico, you name it. We’re, we’re covering it. We’re talking to people. The, the tech, the global technician problem in wind. Is not localized. It is everywhere. It doesn’t matter what locale you’re in, where there’s wind turbines, there is a shortage of qualified, trained, and good people. And I think, um, kudos to you guys for, you know, exporting your knowledge around the world. But that’s something to focus on here, is that this [00:03:00] is a global issue and you guys are working to solve that. Alex Øbell Nielsen: We try to at least, but, but as you said, it is global and we have done these assessments, uh, globally in 2024. We delivered training in more than 19 countries. Uh, the assessments we’ve done for technicians that work both in North North America, uh, Europe and, and, and the APAC region. Uh, so, so we do get, uh, you know, uh, assessments from around the world, uh, covering all these technicians and yeah, repeating myself, hydraulics and controls are big challenges for sure. Joel Saxum: What’s the, what’s the best region? Who’s got the best text?  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Yeah, it, I’m not gonna go into that. What I can say though is that, uh, I mean, just briefly the assessment, it’s one hour. We ask 40 questions, uh, and, uh, whoever participates has a link where they, they can spend this one hour. We asked 40 questions within hydraulics, controls, mechanics, and electrics. Uh, and, and based on this, uh, we do see some patterns, uh, also on we ask how many years of, uh, industry [00:04:00] experience do these participants have? And, and funnily enough, or maybe not, uh, but those, uh, with more than 15 years experience score the lowest. So, and there could be a wide range of, uh, reasons for that, but they score the lowest. Uh, usually we see the technicians that have between two and four years experience. They score the best. So, so we, we, we can see, and I’m sure we can deep dive into the regions, but I don’t have those numbers in front of me, so, um, maybe not, but what I can say is it’s the same challenge. It doesn’t matter North America, Europe, far east. Hydraulics and controls.  Allen Hall: So what are some of the real world consequences when, uh, wind farm operators don’t invest in training for their people?  Alex Øbell Nielsen: I’m sure there are multiple, but at least from our point of view, what we want to do is help asset owners improve performance of their turbines, of their wind farms, and we believe you can do so by training. And we have data to back that up, that between. Point four and one [00:05:00]point per, uh, 2%, uh, uh, performance increase you can expect from following training. And, and what we do is that we, um, we look at performance data before we enter training. We provide training over X amount of time. Uh, and then of course we look at performance data from the wind farms following the training, and we can see a drop in again, let’s say it’s hydraulics or any other. Areas that we’ve focused on, and then we can see an increase in performance. So I think as an asset owner, you want performance out of your turbines, out of your assets, and, and if you do not train your technicians, if they don’t have the right skills, um, yeah, then you, then you potentially will lack performance and. I also think there’s a lot of talk about troubleshooting being a good troubleshooter, which is great, but in our point of view, maintenance is where you need to excel. If you’re good at maintaining your turbines, if you’re good at maintaining your assets, then you will require less troubleshooting, of course. [00:06:00] So maintenance is very much where we would like to focus. So if you’re good at that. You have less spare parts consumptions. You spend less downtime if you have, uh, malfunctions or what whatnot and whatnot on your turbine, and then you increase performance away.  Joel Saxum: I think that’s something that Alan and I both, we talk about regularly and we can get on board with, and we want to talk to the uptime listeners and the uptime family uptime network about this back your business up with a good business case. And that’s what Danish Wind Power Academy has done here, right? They’ve taken the performance data, looked at training, and then showed the increase, boom, business case built. Uh, I love to hear that and I know a Alan does too. ’cause we, we harp on people about that all the time.  Allen Hall: Well, there’s an performance improvement aspect, right? That you can get the turbines operating, uh, more efficiently and have more uptime. There’s also, I think what I see a lot of times in the United States is you don’t see the, uh, ohs and the cost of the U lows. A hydraulic lines are [00:07:00] leaking down all over the place onto the tower, right? So now you gotta clean up, you gotta do the same thing for like, uh, some pitch motors or hydraulic pitch motors where there’s just hydraulic fluid down the blade. Uh, and some of the more. Catastrophic ones. If you can get more uptime, yes, but there’s also stopping some of the more expensive downtime events that occur because of maintenance issues.  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Exactly.  Allen Hall: From a training standpoint, then you’re going deep into how turbines operate and there is that quiz or test that you provide to potential trainees before you get into the the details of training. I am not sure that we have seen a lot of that in the United States at all. Uh, like if you have basic, fundamental skills, you know how to repair cars, you’ve, you’ve welded before, you’ve played around in hydraulics in a previous job. That usually is the qualifications to get started in the United States, but that doesn’t really trend out too well as you [00:08:00] get further down the line because wind turbines 10 years ago, pretty standard. You can move between turbines. I think today when we’re talking about. Six and seven megawatts being the platforms. Those turbine are a lot more complicated than 10 years ago. And the challenges that brings to technicians and maybe wanna explain. How much more a technician needs to know now than even maybe even five years ago. Alex Øbell Nielsen: Yeah, uh, for sure. And yes, the, the machines are getting bigger and they’re definitely getting more complicated as well. Um, I have a commercial background, so I can’t go into, uh, specific details, but what I can tell you is that the course curriculum that we develop over time is getting. Uh, just by the number of pages they need to go through. Um, on the latest, uh, eight megawatt turbine that we’ve developed training for is an offshore turbine. They need to go through, uh, just over 400 pages in one week. So if they don’t have the fundamentals to [00:09:00] go into that training, then uh, then, uh, yeah, then, then they fall behind. Right? And we don’t want that. Joel Saxum: You’re gonna struggle.  Alex Øbell Nielsen: But we know these technicians, right? They are used to working outside, uh, up in the l you know, outdoors. And for him, for them to sit in a classroom for, for a full week can be a challenge of course. So we as a training provider also invest a lot of. Time and money and, uh, in, in our trainers, putting them through Train the Trainer program so they can actually share this knowledge and knowhow that they have. And, and we try to, for all our trainings, have more than 50%, uh, in the training as as active teaching methods. So where the delegates or the participants. Are taking part of the training so we’re not just using PowerPoint slides and whatnot. Um, we spend a lot of time and focus on that because just for, you know, having an engagement from the participants, but also for learning retention. We know that if they are part of the training, then they will remember and then they can actually start using these, [00:10:00] uh, the, the learning when they go back and work on these turbines.  Joel Saxum: I think too much industrial training, and this is wind, you name it, whatever. Is delivered by PowerPoint. It’s delivered by stuff that bores people sit in a classroom for eight hours and that’s, I mean, regardless of who’s sitting in there. Like, if you’re not, if that’s not your normal job to digest this stuff, like it, it doesn’t soak in, it doesn’t take like, it’s kind of, eh, you check the box. Yeah. You might have that certificate, you might have that training. I mean, I, I’ve learned from people, I’ve seen this happen. I saw this happen last summer. Someone who went to lotto training for a week. And on left there on Friday on a plane, showed up on site on Monday and couldn’t lotto the turbine like that. What’s the point? Right? And that what it was is they sat in the classroom for how many days in a row learning this theory, uh, and not actually activating it. That, and that that’s a problem. Right. And I, but I think that, so, so, but Danish Wind Power Academy, you guys focusing on, hey, as a use case, right. Alan and Joel, uh, wind Farm Company, we have just bought a [00:11:00] Siemens G Mesa, G nine x site. Hey, Danish Wind Power Academy. Can you send someone here and get these, these guys up to speed on everything that you know about the G nine X platform? Is that, is that, is that the calls you get?  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Yeah, it is for sure. Um, we are very, um, uh, we have outlined a pathway that we use, uh, and where we start with the assessment and get an understanding of, of the, of the skills and, and, and lack of skills or lack of competencies from the technicians. And from that, we can build an individual training plan for each of them. So depending on how you want to put your team together, uh, and then, uh, following this pathway, I mean the, the, the beginning of it is, is generic. It’s theory where we either come to you and sit in a meeting room or in a classroom or actually use one of our studios. I’m standing in one of our studios now. But then when once we pass that and the technicians have the fundamentals in place, that they have passed the assessment there. Then we deep dive into specific turbines, and that could be very specific turbines from GE or [00:12:00]Siemen esa or vistas, uh, and, and a wide range of other turbines. And, and we can do so because we have a good collaboration with asset owners, of course, that, that own these turbines. Um, and, and our trainers on average have 17 years experience from the industry. So not only are they various skills, I mean, they’ve done this for many years, um, but again. Coming back to our own Train the Trainer program where we teach them how to teach, uh, basic skills as using whiteboards or overhead, uh, what do you call ’em, flip over charts and whatnot. And also having their participants being engaged and spent, you know, more than 50% in the training being active. Um, so, so yes, if you have a specific GE turbine, we can come train your technician and. We’re not biased either, so we tell it as we see it  Allen Hall: in the training program, it does seem like there’s a little bit of feedback of what’s happening in the field and some of the issues that are occurring on particular [00:13:00] turbines do get incorporated into your training because it’s gonna be a routine issue for technicians to, to manage that. I, I don’t see that in a lot of training programs. They’re very specific. They’re coming. Coming right from the book from GE or Vestas, like This is how you operate the turbine. Anything that’s outside of that isn’t covered. But the vast majority of the time that I’ve seen, they’re dealing with the outside of the textbook problems. How do you incorporate that into your training? Is that just because you have so many people with a lot of experience in the field that are coming back and are really tied to industry? Is that the differentiator? Maybe. And maybe,  Alex Øbell Nielsen: I, I, I, I think I thank you for the question and, and it, the way we, we approach training is that, um, if you are looking for maintenance or let’s say troubleshooting on a specific turbine, then we would ask our customer for the performance data. Over the past 12 months. Then we look at the 10 most common faults and issues they have on these turbines. And that varies from, of course, turbine, from turbine, but also wind farm and so on. And then we incorporate that, those [00:14:00] faults and issues into the training. And when we deliver maintenance training or troubleshooting, then we come to you, we come to our client, uh, day one, and day two is usually in a classroom. And then day two or three and four is in the turbine itself. So not only are we working with the faults and issues that they. They work on a daily basis on this wind farm, but we actually train them on them as well, so they improve performance of these assets  Allen Hall: with the training happening on site. Then they’re actually debugging or learning hands on onto their particular turbines, which I think is remarkable because a lot of times, as Joel’s pointed out, a lot of this training happens. Maybe I Schenectady, where there’s not a lot of turbines, honestly, or onsite for some of the OEMs where they’re not near a turbine. Danish Wind Power Academy has flipped this model where you are on site training the folks on site with their own turbines, with their own problems. That has gotta have a [00:15:00] remarkable return on investment,  Alex Øbell Nielsen: and it shows, as I said before, between 0.4 and 1 performance increase. We see that on these wind farms. and, the training we’re delivering is not compliant, so our customers come to us because they see value in what we deliver and this approach. is, definitely maybe a different approach. We don’t see many out there doing the, same, and we don’t have training centers. we have offices and studios like this where we can do some online training if needed. But other than that, we always come to our customers, again, just repeating myself, but using their nacelles their turbines, where we also deliver part of the training. we believe that hands-on approach is much better for learning retention. and, we’ve done it for more than 20 years now, and, have a profitable business, so we know it’s working. Of course.  Joel Saxum: Alex, I’ve gotta ask you a question about value here. and because this is what’s coming into my, head, is [00:16:00] the value that you guys can provide for clients in training, training on site. Like, to me, that’s, I’d pay for that all day. Boom. Done. However you guys are training for 20 years understanding the serial problems that may not be in the notebook, in the maintenance manual from the OEM and all these different things. You, you, I think you rest on the capability of having a ton of really smart troubleshooters maintenance people as your trainers. Do you ever get people that call and say, Hey, we’ve got this problem out here. Can you help us solve the problem?  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Yeah, we do that and we do, we get those questions. Um, and, and we stick to the business of training. So, so if, if you are looking at the installation, quality inspection or in the warranty, uh, that all is also training that we provide. So, so, so we want to be the, the, the training provider. So, but again, if you have bought X amount of turbines, they’re coming out of warranty. How can you [00:17:00] challenge the OEM, uh, on, on what they are telling you? If you do not have that expertise in house, we can, we also have trainings to, to, to, to mitigate that challenge for these asset owners. So again, if you’re coming, if you’re looking, you know, at an end warranty. Or if it’s the before that with installation, we also have trading programs to, to cover those areas as well. So we, we put our customers in a much, you know, better position to ask the OEM, the right questions and to make sure that they hand over the turbines in the best possible condition to them. Of course.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. You’re, you’re enabling success at that, at that level. Right. So. Like you answered my question there is instead of sending out, for lack of a better term, sending out mercenaries to figure out problems, you’re sending them out to team, to team up with the actual operator or the asset owner, the whoever that may be. Maybe it’s an ISP, I don’t know.  Alex Øbell Nielsen: We teach a utility company or an asset owner on how to do it yourself. Right. That’s, that’s the method we prefer. I mean, again, our, our trainers with this, uh, long [00:18:00] experience could do the work, but that’s not why we are here. We are here to train. Our customers so they can do the work themselves. Allen Hall: So who are your typical clients and when do they tend to call you in the lifetime of their wind farm?  Alex Øbell Nielsen: I would say 80% of our clients are asset owners. So the big utility companies, those that are out of a service agreement within OEM, there is usually, that’s where we provide most of our business. So if you are looking at a brand new offshore turbine on the US East Coast. That’s not us. We usually come in after they’re out of these service agreements. So, um, so, so those are typically our customers. Um, we do work with ISPs, um, um, but often they tend to stick to the training matrix they get from an OEM. But we do see some variations in the us, uh, with EPCs and ISPs where we get more work there than we do in Europe. And I think it’s the nature of business in the us. Uh, but I would say roughly 80% is with asset owners, has  Allen Hall: a change in the IRA bill. Increase the [00:19:00] number of phone calls that you’re getting just because the repowering may be limited. So if a wind farm that’s five years old that they’re planning to take to 10, and then repower now has to live to 20 to 25 years old. Is that changing the marketplace for the, for training like yours?  Alex Øbell Nielsen: We haven’t seen that impact yet. Uh, there may be, uh, an impact on our business, but we, we expect not to. We are still a small company, so for us it’s still a big world out there. So, so we see opportunities in that. And if it’s in, in Repowering or any other projects, I mean, we definitely see some opportunities there. These turbines are, you know, they, they will operate for 20, maybe 30 years. Uh, and, and they continue to want to get the most out of these assets. And, and, uh, I’m certain we can, uh, help our customers and improve that. Not only, you know, asset performance, but also another subject that we didn’t really cover is retention of your technicians. Uh, we see a lot of movement from technicians moving from maybe one ISP to another, but we truly believe that if you, if you invest in your. [00:20:00]Technicians, they get better at what they do. They get a greater job satisfaction. I mean, then, then we see that they want to stay as well. Of course. So, so that’s another, uh, you know, I mean, that goes for me as well. I continuously want to learn and be better at what I do. And if my company is investing me, great. I mean, I, I want to give back on that, of course. But, uh, but for now, we don’t see an impact on the IRA for us.  Joel Saxum: Well, one of, one of the things I think we’ll we’re gonna start to see here in the US because of this, is you’re going to see, there’s a, there’s an ISP boom right now, right? Like if you’re an ISP and you’re established, like you’re, you’ve got requests coming in the door left and right, and we’ve heard this across the market just ’cause of what’s happening. Um, so you’re going to see, like I know right now there’s multiple competitive RFPs out in the US world for ISPs to come and run wind farms. So if I’m doing that, if I am again, Joel, Joel and Alan Wind, ISP, and I’m in a competitive [00:21:00] RFP for a couple of wind farms for an operator, and I know what technology’s on those, of course I do. I’m gonna include this in my bid. I’m gonna say, Hey, if we, if we’re awarded this bid, we’re bringing DWPA in here, we’re training up our guys and we’re gonna come in there day one with some of the best knowledge in the industry to make sure that this thing is running at a high, at peak performance. Uh, because when you do have technicians shifting around and new, because it’s always gonna be new people, right? That happens even at the OEMs, the new, new people going from Wind Farm to wind farm. If you can go in there and say, here’s, here’s our competitive edge. This is our value add to you guys. I’m bringing in some of the best to train our people up. I would be doing that and, and, and the same, at the same course. If I’m an O operator in the United States and I’m starting to take over from some of the OEM FSAs and I’m looking at this timeline going, you know what? PTCs are running out. Uh, I need to make sure that I’m running at peak performance on this wind farm. [00:22:00] What are some levers I can pull? Um, Alan and I’ve talked about this for the last two months, right? Since this stuff’s been shaken out in the states. Well, he, there’s certain things, there’s hardware you can add to your blades. There’s CMS things you can do here. There’s digitization strategies. However, a foundational thing is make sure the guys and the ladies in the field know what the hell they’re doing to make sure these things are running right. So to me that is, um, you know. That would be a, a lever I would pull, I would be calling it the Danish Wind Power Academy.  Alex Øbell Nielsen: And, and we are working with ISPs and asset owners where we provide training to both their crews. And we know they have won business with asset owners because they, because they’ve done training with us because. I believe it’s because they’ve done it with us, of course, but they actually went to the asset owner, the utility, and said, we know our technicians don’t have the right skillset. We have a system with Danish Wind Power Academy. We are putting them on a training pathway, uh, with Danish Wind Power Academy on this specific turbine that we want to. Service and [00:23:00] maintain on your behalf. And that was one of the reasons why they won the bid. So if they are moving in that direction, that is definitely something we, uh, we can help ISPs with. And as you mentioned before, with asset owners, when they’re stepping out, if they want to operate on their own and not on operate under a service agreement within an OEM. We also have the right tools to help them with the end of warranty and also training their technicians so they have the right skillset to maintain these turbines. I’m really impressed by this  Allen Hall: because this doesn’t really exist all that often in terms of training. If you have to get specific training on a turbine, you’re essentially calling the OEM and begging to have that happen. And we don’t have time to do that. They’re not in the business of doing that globally at the scale that is needed at the minute. And, and that’s where the Danish Wind Power Academy comes in.  Joel Saxum: If you’re, if you’re calling the OEM for support, the problem they, they’re gonna run into there is they, they don’t have enough bandwidth to even train their own people, let alone bring others in and get them up to [00:24:00]speed. And, and at the end of the day. The, the things that Danish Wind Power Academy has uncovered about specific models through experience, through field trials, through, you know, time soaking in, in, out, in production. The OEM isn’t gonna give you that. They’re not gonna, they’re not gonna lift the bonnet on the problems that they know are serial problems with these machines. Which, like we, we hear about, we know about like after a while, people, but you guys are the aggregate of that, right? So you’re aggregating this specific model X, y, Z from X 1, 2, 3, OEM, from around the world. All the knowledge that you’ve gained there, boom. Now it’s in a package to deliver to.  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Exactly. Exactly. And also, I mean, from previous meetings in, in Japan, it could have been anywhere speaking with the utility or an asset owner. Um, they wanted to go in and, and self perform on their assets. Uh, but the OEM would not teach them how to troubleshoot. And the challenge they then had was that the lender would ask them questions on, but if you can’t troubleshoot your own turbines.[00:25:00] I, I, I, you are putting us in a difficult position as lender. Right. So then they had an opportunity to work with us and they, they had a, they had a, a means to overcome that challenge. Of course. What countries have you trained in, Alex? So again, far east, uh, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, uh, quite a bit. Um, New Zealand. Um, we’ve been to Sri Lanka of all places. We didn’t see that coming. Um, of course, uh, most of the countries in Europe, uh, north America, and then we also get requests from South America. Again, we are a fairly small company, so, so we focus our efforts on, on, on Europe, north America, and Far East. I mean, we are headquartered in Denmark, but we do have offices in Italy and Portugal. We are also in Atlanta and the us So that’s from where we sort of cover, uh, cover, you know, a big world of, of wind turbines.  Allen Hall: If you’re an experienced trainer, how do you reach out to the Danage Wind Power Academy?  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Go on our website. But again, I mean, um, the, [00:26:00]the network is pretty big. I mean, of course our, our trainers come from the industry, right? And they’ve done it for many years, so they know a lot of people in the industry. And, and I think it takes a, a special mindset to, to step out of this, uh, technician role where you are a troubleshooter or a commissioner and you’re very good at what you do. But I think the guys and girls we have as trainers, they really enjoy standing in front of a classroom and, and sharing their knowledge and, and, and, and, and having a good conversation with the participants and then, you know, come back to them. I mean, uh, a lot of our clients have the, the same trainer coming back, you know, with three or six months in between and they pick up that conversation and I know they really enjoy that. So, so if you like to. Teach or be a teacher and share your knowledge, uh, we’re a good place to be and you will have to like to travel as well. So, but I think most of the guys and girls in the industry, I mean, they’re traveling as it is anyways.  Allen Hall: And if you’re an operator anywhere around the world and you want to train up your group of technicians and local [00:27:00] experts. How do they get ahold of Danish Wind Power Academy? How do they find you? Danish wpa.com. Alex Øbell Nielsen: That’s our website.  Allen Hall: Thanks Alex for being on the podcast. And if you wanna reach out to the Danish Wind Power Academy, go to the website, danish wpa.com, or you can find them on LinkedIn. Just look up Danish Wind Power Academy. Alex, thank you so much for being on the program.  Alex Øbell Nielsen: Love having you on. Thank you for inviting me and, uh, I’m happy to share about what we do and, and, and thanks a lot.

Allen, Joel and Phil discuss Germany’s failed offshore wind auction, India’s new regulations for domestic wind turbine components, and the need for renewable energy in the US to meet AI data center demands. They also highlight Ohio’s efforts to plug abandoned oil and gas wells and feature Quebec’s Rivière-du-Moulin 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! 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: Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall from the Queen City, Charlotte, North Carolina. Joel Saxum is down in Texas, and Phil Totaro of IntelStor is in Cali. Phil, you had a tsunami alert just recently. Did you see any waves in your neighborhood?  Phil Totaro: No ’cause it didn’t actually amount to anything. And that’s good, right?  Phil Totaro: It it, have you had tsunami warnings like that in the past? Y yes. And actually more serious ones from earthquakes that are smaller than the 8.8 that was in Russia that caused this one. [00:01:00] Um, but we’ve had earthquakes off the coast of. California where, you know, they’re like four point something or five something, and that actually triggers a tsunami warning that’s potentially more serious because of the close proximity. Uh, so we actually developed, uh, in California an early detection and warning system that is triggered, um, you know, mobile phone, uh, alerts and updates based on the, the detection of the P waves from an earthquake.  Allen Hall: What’s a P wave? Joel Saxum: P Wave is down, ShearWave is left and right. So sheer wave would be moving this way. P wave would be moving up and down.  Phil Totaro: The P waves, um, are the first indication on, you know, like for the US geological survey, they’ve got those things that, you know, monitor the, the, um, vibration of the earth or whatever it is that they’re monitoring. Um, a P wave will be the first thing triggered when there’s an actual earthquake. [00:02:00] That’s the thing that happens fast, like super fast, and they can detect it. Anyway, so we’ve de we’ve developed an early warning system when, when we have issues and inclusive of, uh, you know, tsunami warnings. But I’m, I’m kind of, you know, 300 feet up, so I have less to worry about.  Allen Hall: It’s a good place to be. Well, there’s some offshore warnings off the coast of Germany because, uh, they held their latest offshore wind auction. And it was for about two and a half gigawatts of capacity in about 180 square kilometers of water. And they didn’t have any bidders at all. Zero bidders and the industry from wind Europe to the, uh, German Offshore Wind Association or, or saying like, yeah, no one’s gonna bid on these things because there’s too much risk and there’s negative bidding, quote unquote negative bidding, which means that you have to. Pay money for the rights [00:03:00] to build out the wind farm and everybody in at least Germany. And when Europe is saying that CFD contract for difference is, is the way to go. And until Germany switches over to a CFD model, you’re gonna continue to have no bidders. Now Phil, this is a big problem because Germany is planning to develop a, a. Significant amount of offshore wind gigawatts worth many gigawatts worth by 2030. Is there gonna be a change into the German auction system? Will they move to A  Phil Totaro: CFD? We certainly hope so, because what they’ve been doing up to this point with, you know, trying to attract like zero subsidy bids is clearly not working. Germany’s economy minister, uh, came out after the, the auction result and said, um, well, we’ll have to look at this and why that happened. Um, you know, were the designed areas actually appropriate and did we. Consider the potential risks for [00:04:00] developers? Were they underestimated? Um, well, yes, they were, uh, first of all, and there was nothing wrong with the design areas of the, you know, the 10.1 and 10.2 that they were trying to auction off. It’s the fact that. You know, in a high interest rate environment, nobody’s gonna wanna make, uh, a zero subsidy bid on something where they’re not gonna necessarily be guaranteed the, the PPA that they need. Um, and when you’re not willing to, to guarantee them the PPA in advance of the auction, that’s, that’s one part of it. Um, the other part is that, you know, with uncertainty and, and risk associated with, um, you know. Access to supply chain components and things like that. Um, you know, you’ve got countries like Germany and the EU in general saying that they wanna wean themselves off of China and, and Chinese parts. Well, good luck with that, first of all. Second, second. If you’re gonna domesticate everything that’s [00:05:00]necessarily gonna raise the cost. So you’ve gotta be in a position to, you know, accept, uh, a higher price and, and give, you know, if you’re the government, you have to be able to give some kind of certainty.  Joel Saxum: I’d love for someone from, from that, uh, how do I say this? Like, not organization, but from that area, from who’s been involved in this to reach out to the podcast. ’cause uh, what I’d like to be a fly on the wall. ’cause this is what I don’t understand, Germany. Big wind market onshore, big wind market, offshore, large player, and wind in general, right? Big companies over there. We got RWE over there. That has done a lot of offshore things like where was the consultation between the government and trade groups, organizations, because you know, like there should be a feedback mechanism in the early stages of planning this that says, Hey, potential suitors, what do you think about this process? Will it work? And I have to imagine that they all emailed back and said. This isn’t gonna work for me. Um, I don’t know though. Right? So I’d love to hear from someone involved in that process to be able to kind of share with [00:06:00] us this is how it went, because we’ve watched it happen now time and time again. There was another one of these not too long ago, Denmark had the one that was, had basically zero subscribers, right? So, hey, governments, uh, you have a great trade organization over there. Wind Europe, you have, um, a lot of players local to you. It’s not like you’re trying to figure this out, uh, blindly. Why not  Allen Hall: collaborate? Oh yeah, that’s totally true. We had just had MAD and Andres Nash on, uh, who were talking about the Nord project up in Norway, and that’s going through a bidding process sort of starting now. It’s in September. It really gets serious. But even there, there’s a significant number of changes that are happening in companies that are dropping out because they’re raising the stakes and trying to get companies that have a lot of offshore wind experience and not. Bring somebody new into the game where they were gonna make mistakes. They, they figure if you have developed a, was it 200 megawatts or 500 megawatts [00:07:00] Joel Offshore already? It was some significant number. I think it was 500.  Phil Totaro: I mean, if, if there was any way that they could try and like, make this about like, we only wanna work with eor. Like that’s basically what they’re trying to do. I mean, like, I mean, you know, I mean, yeah, sure. But like if Simply Blue Group comes in there and says that they wanna be able to develop if Stat Craft who had previously been involved in that, was in there and then pulled out because they weren’t getting the, the, you know, guarantees from the Norwegian government either. I mean, this is, this is kind of the, the systematic. Uh, issue within Europe at the moment anyway, because they’re the ones talking about, well, we wanna wean ourselves off of Russian gas. Well then do it. Like, don’t sit there and say, you can only do it if you’re doing it with, you know, 18,000 criteria in place. Like, make it easy for the developers. Um, the money will flow, like investors will want to plow money into, you know, the development of these [00:08:00]projects, but get outta your own way and, and make it happen.  Joel Saxum: It’s kind of reminiscent to me. I guess this is for our US listeners. I was reading an article today about the, the, uh, no offense Phil, but the flight out of California. It was the amount of people leaving there and there, and it was a, it was a, it was a, uh, letter written from a CEO of a development company that was saying basically like. It’s the hardest place in the United States to do business, and businesses are leaving in droves. People are leaving in droves. It’s like last year, 920,000 people left the state of California like a net loss. Wow. Yeah. It was crazy. Like there’s 52, 50 5 million people there. But to lose. Basically 2% of your population in one year. That’s crazy. But the reason being is, is it’s the hardest place to do business in the United States. There’s barriers all the time. There’s, there’s permitting issues, there’s this, there’s that. For real estate development companies, taxes, all this stuff that makes things difficult. Taxes is a big one. Right. But, but that’s what this, that’s what this to me looks like over in the, the EU right now is like you’re making it difficult for people to [00:09:00] do. And no wonder why people don’t want to do it. They’re gonna look for the easiest place to stick their capital, or the easiest and safest place to stick their capital.  Allen Hall: 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? Well, India has implemented new sweeping regulations that will shape the global wind turbine supply chain for at least a little while. The [00:10:00]ministry of New and renewable energy now requires all wind turbine manufacturers to source key components including blades, towers, generators, gear boxes, and some of the bearings from. Government approved domestic suppliers. Now, I talked about this in newsflash a couple of days ago. Uh, but more information is coming out as we learn about it. The rules also mandate that all turbine performance and operational data must be stored on servers within India, uh, prohibiting real-time data transfers abroad. So that forces Phil remote operation centers to be. Within India and they’re also talking about research centers that they must be within the country also. So, um, Sulan couldn’t have their research center in Pakistan. Not that that would happen, but they would have to have  Phil Totaro: it in India. But they actually have one in Germany. Um, for those that don’t know, uh, and you know, there are several. There are several other, [00:11:00] um, Indian OEMs that, or who have licensed, uh, technology from Western companies that you could argue that they would have to domesticate, including, you know, a Donny group, which license and. Licenses, uh, a wind turbine design from, uh, wind to energy based in Rostock, Germany. So you, you’ve got a situation there where what they’re really trying to do is kind of curb the rise of the Chinese in the market. Um, because at the end of the day, what a lot of those things are geared towards is precluding, um, China from just dumping. Um, goods in, into India. The data thing is interesting though because as you mentioned, they have to have, uh, everything kind of, um, co-located within India and that’s to prevent the realtime data flowing back to China, um, for these Chinese OEMs to be able to analyze it or, you know, remote operate and [00:12:00] control, uh, turbines from China. Um, they want that, um, within India so that the people who are performing those kind of remote, you know, working in the remote operations center are, you know, either Indian nationals or would be subject to Indian law.  Joel Saxum: I think there’s, there’s something to be aware of here though, too. And, and Phil, we’ve had, this is a much larger macro conversation. We’ve had this one before, but it’s about, uh, protectionism and growth. Because, you know, there has been countries that have been taken advantage of in the, in the history, and India’s definitely one of them that has been taken advantage of in the past, over the last 300 years, um, that we know that to be true. Um, but sometimes when the pendulum swings and you start putting regulations and things like that, you can actually hurt yourself a little bit. And I’m just thinking about like, you know, we, you talk about like wanting to preclude some of the Chinese involvement. Okay. But there is West, there’s a lot of Western stuff there. There is like say, even in, does it go this far? Envision in Vision has a presence in India, big time. [00:13:00] Envisions blades are designed in Boulder, Colorado. Right. So does that affect that? And, and they’re built, a lot of ’em are built by LM and lm, but LM has factories in India, so there’s a little bit of a change there. Um, we did see in, and I don’t know if it’s a maybe leading up to the, the, the, this Siemens GAA sold their services unit in India couple, 4, 5, 6 months ago. So maybe they heard some whispers in the, in the waiting in the wings going like, well, we’re gonna have to relocate there anyways. We might as well sell this thing. Well, they, they  Phil Totaro: had to, but that was, yeah, I, I, your, your point is made. But yeah, I, the, the reality of this is what it, what it does is it necessitates. A CapEx investment in the country, and the only way that somebody justifies making a CapEx investment in the country, any country, it doesn’t matter if it’s India, Brazil, the us, anywhere, people need to see visibility to a return. This actually kind of ties in to what we were talking about with with the German [00:14:00] offshore wind auction. If anybody that wants to invest money, they need to be given a certain amount of EE. Even if you’re not gonna give ’em a guarantee, you have to give ’em a certain amount of, uh, credibility that they’re going to get some kind of a return on the investment they’re making because you’re asking people to spend hundreds of millions on domesticating production If you wanna create a domestic. Market, you still have to facilitate the technology transfer, the knowledge transfer and the investment, the, the foreign investment that’s necessarily going to facilitate that. If, if you don’t have domestic companies that are competent enough and capable enough to, to build something themselves, so whether it’s wind turbines or solar or battery storage or whatever, then you’re necessarily trying to attract. That capability from someplace else.  Joel Saxum: I’ve, I’ve, I’ve watched this in, uh, oil and gas in Africa. Oil and gas Africa, early [00:15:00] years, man, it came in and, and all of the majors came down, their Exxon, bp, shell, like, they, but they came from abroad because they, the expertise was not in country to do it. And then once it was like kind of pseudo established, you saw all of these governments, which there’s, there’s they, there’s this own problem in government relations in, in Africa anyways, but, um, you saw these governments set up all this, these barriers and these things to, to try to. Benefit for the people that corruption got brought into it and all kinds of things. And after a while, a lot of these players like you see over there, like you see small players and local players. You don’t see. Exxon and Chevron and stuff making big splashes down in Africa anymore. They’re just not playing in it. They have their existing assets. They’ve sold a lot of ’em to smaller companies. They’re running ’em. That’s, that’s still being, and they’ve moved on. They’re in Guyana, they’re in Brazil because they don’t have to deal with the stuff that they got barriers put in place over there.  Allen Hall: What will Europe think about the India supply chain if it does get up and running to the level they want it [00:16:00] to? In relationship to leaving China and the components that come from China, would India be that source then? I think they kind of already are, aren’t they? I mean, there’s a lot of stuff comes from India.  Phil Totaro: A little bit, not as much as they want to be. It. That’s your next best option in terms of affordability and certainly India wants to be a major export hub, but this whole concept of that they’ve put in place of make it India is really to support their, their domestic growth in their domestic industry. Basically, if you’re not already in India as a western company or even a Chinese company, the barrier to entry in the market is going up. As I mentioned, you know, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in CapEx and investment, and the only way you’re going to pull the trigger on that is if you’re seeing a trillion dollar return because you, you know, a lot of these companies want like at least a five x [00:17:00] multiple on whatever CapEx they’re plunking down. Again, especially in this kind of an interest rate environment. Now, if interest rates go down, their threshold goes down.  Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Well over in Pennsylvania, a wind farm upgrade is demonstrating how renewable energy is responding to. AI data center demands excess renewables. North America received over $158 million in financing to upgrade the Twin Ridges wind farm in Somerset County. I know where that is. Uh, boosting capacity to a hundred. 70 [00:18:00] megawatts, that’s a 30% capacity increase. And comes as data centers nationwide are looking for power and that that tends to be the area where a lot of data centers are located or will be located. Uh, president Trump was just there in Pennsylvania and said, uh, wind energy in particular is not gonna power these data centers, these AI centers. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping anybody. Uh, excess renewables. CEO Jim Spencer reports strong demand from data centers across North America for wind and solar power. Uh, so even if President Trump is in the neighborhood complaining about wind turbines, what is actually happening on the ground is wind and solar are gonna be powering a lot of those data centers because it’s lower cost and easier to install.  Phil Totaro: And it’s available electrons. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, do you really care what electrons are feeding? You know, your refrigerator.  Joel Saxum: At the end of the day, this is just gonna be business cases that are gonna win [00:19:00] out, right? You want an AI data center online, you need power. Where are you gonna get it? So your business case, like do you want it built in the next six to nine months or do you wanna wait five years? Okay. Business case wins out. We want  Phil Totaro: it now. You’d be lucky to get it in 2031. We’re gonna have a nuclear power station on the moon before we get gas powered, you know, AI data centers.  Allen Hall: Why are we doing that? Why are we, why are we spending money for nuclear power on the moon space, race, Allen space race, with whom? China, because China’s gonna put a nuclear reactor on the moon. Is that what’s  Joel Saxum: gonna happen? Maybe we’ll figure out how to beam it back, shoot electrons through. Vacuum space back to earth or something.  Phil Totaro: But it, it actually, let, let’s tie this back in because that’s kind of the point. You, you can, you can say that you’re gonna go build something and, and it might be a pie in the sky thing, but you’re gonna be out of office by the time somebody wants to even start building that. Because once you’ve figured out all the technical requirements to be able to even go do that. The administration’s gonna change, and then that’s just gonna be on the scrap [00:20:00] heap. So it, and it’s the same thing. It’s like, you know, like Joel just said, you want your power and you want it fast. You’re gonna go with wind and solar. You’re gonna go with whatever electrons are available to you. You know, you’re, you’re not gonna be picky. You’re not gonna wait six or seven years for gas.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. When we’re talking gas plants for six or 7, 5, 6, 7 years down the line, we’re talking about these big ge big, big, you know, like the 500 megawatt machines, right? Yeah. The nine nine series. I read an article the other day about, uh, a data center in, I think it was Ohio, Alan, we’ve been talking a lot about data centers in Ohio lately, on and on and off there, but I think it was in Ohio and it was, it was fired by like. 28 of these little gas turbines. Like they were little ones, right? They were little like the si, like I looked, I saw the picture. It was like a drone flying over and like each of these little gas turbines was like the size of my pickup. Where are those coming from? [00:21:00] A  Allen Hall: DIY  Joel Saxum: project? No, no. They were bigger than that. They weren’t a Generac, it wasn’t a Honda Whisper. Quiet. Yeah. They’re, they’re aero derivative generators. So what’s the, who’s building those? What’s the capacity on those? Like where is that gonna be a thing? GE builds those and Siemens, so you can get those. What’s the timeline on one of them? What’s the, what’s the wait time on. A queue list for that.  Phil Totaro: It’s shorter than, you know, the bigger units like a ge you know, seven FA or seven F whatever now. Uh, or a nine FA or nine F whatever. Now, um, those are the ones that are like five, six years. Um, you know, wait list. The, a derivative engines are cheaper, less complex, easier. To make and faster to deploy, but then we get into the same, I mean, Joel, like, if you were gonna build a wind farm, do you build it with one, you know, five megawatt turbine, or do you build it with, you know, 25, you know, kilowatt size things,  Joel Saxum: but I think [00:22:00] you’re just, you’re, you’re up against the supply chain problem, right? So like it’s, if you want to do this quick, like you can do that, but at the end of the day, does it really make. Does it make sense or should you just put, I mean, okay. In Ohio you’re not, there’s not a whole lot of wind farms. There’s a whole lot of wind resource. So if you’re gonna build ’em there, you need some kind of power. Phil Totaro: But also the reason why we, we chase economies of scale and wind energy with, with turbine size is that. It’s less footprint and less to maintain. It’s, yes, it’s a single point of failure, so you need higher reliability with the one turbine instead of, you know, 25 smaller turbines. But you’re, you’re talking about, you know, the, the trade off between redundancy versus, you know, o and m complexity. And cost.  Joel Saxum: Well, I, I completely agree with you, but I’m just thinking at the end of the day where the majority of data centers are going in the United States, Virginia, that kind of place, like Ohio, you need power. Your, your option right now is like [00:23:00] solar and batteries over there. Right? Or aero derivative engines where you’re gonna be burning fuel like bastard. Do they sound like an airplane?  Phil Totaro: Sort of, yeah. I mean. They’re loud. They’re all loud anyway.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s true.  Phil Totaro: That’s how, I mean, that’s how they came into being was they, they basically adapted an aircraft engine for power gen, you know, static land-based power generation use. Well, speaking of  Allen Hall: Ohio, Ohio’s Orphan Well program has dramatically increased its cleanup efforts from our friends over in the oil and gas business. Uh, there are a lot of abandoned wells. Ohio and in the last five years they plugged about 1200 holes from oil and gas and about 2300 since 1977. So every year, Ohio is plugging several hundred oil and gas holes. And Joel, I guess I didn’t [00:24:00] think of Ohio as an oil and gas center. If you move a little bit to the East Pennsylvania. Obviously oil and gas central for a long time in the United States, but there’s a lot of abandoned oil and gas wells in Ohio. To the point where, uh, they received about $80 million in federal funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law, uh, with up to about $300 million available through 2030 to help fill some of these wells. And they’re still looking for them because they’re long abandoned. It could be under buildings, they could be covered with trees at this point. Who knows where they are, except from the emissions. That’s the only way they’re gonna be able to find them.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, the trouble here, and this is something that a lot of people don’t think about, um, okay, so Ohio is on the edge of the Marcellus Shale, right? It’s the same shale play that’s in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Southern New York. It’s just that same edge, right? So when they found in the early ages of the United States and we started getting petroleum from [00:25:00] onshore resources, Pennsylvania was ground zero and it kind of flowed over into there. So you end up with this situation where you have rugged. Remote terrain hills, uh, you know, tough to get to where they, these, some of these wells are, you know, a hundred years old where there’s no, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s terracotta pipe and stuff. Like, there’s not good metal pipe in those things. So then, and they are leaking because they were not plugged, right? The companies have dissolved. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s just gone, right? There’s no records. Uh, we didn’t do a good job of record keeping in the early days. So how you find most of these. Is there’s a two to take a two stage approach. You look, you can look at classical maps and stuff, but that’s only gonna get you so far. But you look at satellite imagery for methane gas detection, and you can find methane gas plumes from satellite imagery, the US government can, and they’ll get you narrowed down to like a, uh, depending on how bad the plume is, a one to 40 acre chunk. Then [00:26:00] you take a drone that has a methane sniffer on it, and you fly around with a methane sniffer until you kind of narrow in on the plume. Then you use a metal detector and you find the area that’s time consuming, right? But the risk reward here is, and this is what people don’t understand when we talk about why we’re plugging these wells, it’s because we’re plugging them to get rid of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases leak into the environment. Climate change, all this bad stuff, right? So we always think about CO2, CO2, CO2, but what’s coming outta these wells, because of the way that oil and gas wells work, they are co-located with natural gas and coal beds, coal bed methane. When methane leaks outta the ground, methane comes outta the ground and it’s about 30 times worse than CO2 30 times worse than CO2 per unit. For as a greenhouse gas for, uh,  Phil Totaro: atmospheric problems. And when we deorbit that satellite that tracks the methane emissions, I think it’s gonna make things a lot harder to do. Are [00:27:00] we doing that, Phil? Apparently. I mean, that was one of the other little rants that he went on the other day. He was like, we’re gonna blow up this satellite that’s for tracking climate change, but it’s actually tracking like the methane emissions from oil and gas. Allen Hall: I thought Google. Posted those emissions, right. Didn’t Google open up the satellite imagery to see where, uh, methane or as Rosie calls it, methane originated from  Joel Saxum: uh, uh, CH four plus? I know that there’s resources online where you can go look. Uh, and why I know that is because I was actually a part of a research project that was a really cool laser interferometer on a fixed wing drone to find methane concentrations and then automatically map them with a fixed wing drone down to the source. Um, and while we were in the middle of that project is when they, the government released the ability for this satellite to do it. And I was like, well, there goes that. We don’t need this thing anymore.  Allen Hall: Well, why wouldn’t these billion dollar oil and gas companies take responsibility for the holes they previously dug, or at least be [00:28:00]responsible and say, all right, there’s some abandoned wells in my general vicinity. Why wouldn’t I plug those as a service to humanity?  Joel Saxum: I think there is a few players that do that. But the gov, because they’re not forced to do it. They’re not spending the money outrightly. Right. There is a couple of like, uh, grassroots organizations. There’s one up in Montana, I can’t remember the name of it, that has taken this on, and they will take donations from some of these oil and gas companies, and they’re like, we’re doing good, and we’re plugging these wells. And this guy, this guy, and his team goes and does it. But I mean, you can’t, you can’t put a dent in what’s out there.  Allen Hall: Well, just think about the Ohio numbers. $82 million. It is plugged about 1200 wells. So do the math. It’s not that much money per Well, I think, uh. Pick your oil and gas company throwing $80 million to help a state out plug these wells is nothing. It’s a drop in the bucket.  Joel Saxum: That’s how much money in federal funding they’ve received. They’ve, they’re, it costs way more, costs way more [00:29:00] than $82 million to plug 1200 wells.  Allen Hall: Right. But you see what was done though, right? I, I assume the state of Ohio is pitching it a bunch of money to, to do this also, but I, I, I don’t understand. If oil and gas is gonna be the responsible party, why they’re not responsible for the cleanup of the things they’ve left behind and on purpose, bankrupt and ll seeded and buried. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: And I think for the most part, like the, the, the players that had have control or do this, it’s a lot of Permian awesome cat drilling company. Like it’s not Chevron and bp, right. It’s  Allen Hall: Oh sure. But eventually those wells ended up in a bigger player. They all do at some point. Unless they’re completely dry. I super frustrating watching that. Go on  Joel Saxum: this week’s Wind Farm of the Week is Reviere de Mulloon in Quebec. I probably got that wrong, sorry, to my EDF friends up there in Canada. Um, but this [00:30:00] wind farm is near the town of Sine and Charlevoix in Ana, Las San John in re in, uh, Northern Quebec. So this. Wind farm. It was uh, two phases, 2014 and 2015, phase one and phase two built by EDF and at the time biggest wind farm in Canada and one of the largest in the United States. It was 175 GE 2.0107 meter rotor machines, which you don’t hear about that often. Uh, so this was again built by EDF and it’s an interesting project ’cause it was built across rugged terrain. I’ve actually driven through this wind farm. And it is timber, it is hills. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful country. But to be thinking about that project and how they built it, amazing. Uh, so they did, uh, this is cold climate, right? So GE put, uh, all, all the turbines are equipped with low temperature packages, reliable for operation in Quebec winters. Including ice detection, icing systems and de-icing systems. So that being said, we are having a webinar, uh, shortly, I think in the [00:31:00] next few weeks. Correct me if I’m wrong, Alan, about de-icing systems. Yes, we are with the OG ping. All right. So, um, in, in other interesting things about this wind farm, the extensive wildlife studies, because this is I think one of the only wind farms I know of that, uh, had a caribou migration path through the middle of it. So they, uh, not only monitored that for before construction, but they’re monitoring it through construction to make sure that don’t. Um, affect any of those local populations of animals. Uh, but, uh, despite remote access and severe winters, uh, proactive o and m planning all the way to down to crazy things like specialized vehicles and track vehicles and covers over the top of trucks to watch for falling ice and using helicopters for inspections and access. Um, really, really neat, uh, o and m planning up there. Uh, this wind farm actually has a really high availability rate. So, uh, the Riviere de mu lane is a rare combination of large scale engineering complexity and ecological responsibility. Congrats to our friends up at EDF in Quebec. [00:32:00] You are the Wind Farm of the Week. Allen Hall: Well, that wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us as we explore the latest in wind energy technology and industry insights. And if today’s discussion has sparked any question or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us. On LinkedIn and we’re always on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. So we’ll catch you here. Next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen discusses Australia’s ‘Marinus Link’ power grid connection, a $990 million wind and battery project by Acciona, and the Bank of Ireland’s major green investment in East Anglia Three. Plus Ørsted’s strategic changes and Germany’s initiative to reduce dependency on Chinese permanent magnets. 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! Good day, this is your friend with a look at the winds of change sweeping across our world. From the waters around Australia to the boardrooms of Europe, the clean energy revolution is picking up speed. These aren’t just stories about wind turbines and power cables. They’re stories about nations and companies making billion dollar bets on a cleaner tomorrow. There’s good news from Down Under today. Australia and Tasmania are officially connecting their power grids with a massive underwater cable project called the Marinus Link. The project just got final approval from shareholders including the Commonwealth of Australia, the State of Tasmania, and the State of Victoria. Construction begins in twenty twenty six, with completion set for twenty thirty. This isn’t just any cable. When finished, it will help deliver clean renewable energy from Tasmania to millions of homes on the mainland. The project promises to reduce electricity prices for consumers across the region. Stephanie McGregor, the project’s chief executive, says this will change the course of a nation. She’s right. When you connect clean energy sources across vast distances, everyone wins. The Marinus Link will cement Australia’s position as a leader in the global energy transition. But this is just the beginning of our story from the land Down Under. Here’s a story about big money backing clean energy. Spanish renewable developer Acciona is moving forward with a nine hundred ninety million dollar wind and battery project in central Victoria, Australia. The Tall Tree project will include fifty three wind turbines and a massive battery storage system. Construction starts in twenty twenty seven, with operations beginning in twenty twenty nine. But here’s what makes this special. The project has been carefully designed to protect local wildlife. Acciona surveyed eighty two threatened plant species and fifty six animal species near the site. They’ve already reduced the project footprint by more than twenty four square kilometers to protect high value vegetation areas. This massive investment will create construction jobs and long term maintenance positions in the region. It will also provide clean electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes while reducing reliance on fossil fuels. When companies invest nearly a billion dollars in clean energy, they’re betting on a cleaner future. And Australia isn’t the only place where that smart money is flowing. The Bank of Ireland is making headlines today with its largest green investment ever. The bank has committed eighty million pounds to East Anglia Three, an offshore wind farm that will become the world’s second largest when it begins operating next year. Located seventy miles off England’s east coast, East Anglia Three will generate enough clean electricity to power more than one point three million homes. John Feeney, chief executive of the bank’s corporate division, calls this exactly the kind of transformative investment that drives innovation and accelerates the energy transition. This follows the bank’s earlier ninety eight million pound commitment to Inch Cape wind farm off Scotland’s coast. The Bank of Ireland has set a target of thirty billion euros in sustainability related lending by twenty thirty. They’ve already reached fifteen billion in the first quarter of this year. When major financial institutions back clean energy this aggressively, they’re signaling where the smart money is going. But what happens when even the biggest players need to adjust their sails? Denmark’s Orsted is recalibrating its strategy amid changing market conditions. The company is considering raising up to five billion euros to strengthen its financial position while scaling back some expansion plans. Orsted has reduced its twenty thirty installation targets from fifty gigawatts to between thirty five to thirty eight gigawatts. But don’t mistake this for retreat. The company is focusing on high margin, high quality projects while maintaining its leadership in offshore wind. The company’s Revolution Wind project in Rhode Island and Sunrise Wind in New York remain on track for completion in twenty twenty six and twenty twenty seven. These projects will deliver clean electricity to millions of Americans. CEO Rasmus Errboe is implementing aggressive cost cutting measures, including reducing fixed costs by one billion Danish kroner by twenty twenty six. The company plans to divest one hundred fifteen billion kroner worth of assets to free capital for core projects. Sometimes the smartest strategy is knowing when to consolidate and focus on what you do best. For Orsted, that’s building the world’s most efficient offshore wind farms. And speaking of strategic thinking, Europe is planning ahead for energy independence. Germany is leading a European push to reduce dependence on Chinese permanent magnets. The German wind industry has proposed that Europe source thirty percent of its permanent magnets from non Chinese suppliers by twenty thirty, rising to fifty percent by twenty thirty five. Currently, more than ninety percent of these vital rare earth magnets come from China. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is backing this diversification effort, working with industry associations to identify alternative suppliers. The roadmap calls for turbine manufacturers to establish contacts with new suppliers by mid twenty twenty five, with production facilities potentially operational by twenty twenty nine. Karina Wurtz, Managing Director of the Offshore Wind Energy Foundation, calls this a strong signal toward a new industrial policy that addresses geopolitical risks. This isn’t just about reducing dependence on one country. It’s about building resilient supply chains that ensure the continued growth of clean energy. When an industry plans this thoughtfully for its future, that future looks very bright indeed. You see, the news stories this week tell us something important. From Australia’s underwater cables to Germany’s supply chain strategy, the world is building the infrastructure for a clean energy future. Billions of dollars are flowing toward wind power. Major banks are making their largest green investments ever. Even when companies face challenges, they’re doubling down on what works. The wind energy industry isn’t just growing. It’s maturing. It’s getting smarter about where to invest and how to build sustainably. And that means the winds of change aren’t just blowing… they’re here to stay. And now you know… the rest of the story.

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

The crew discusses Vattenfall’s ad featuring Samuel L. Jackson and explore NextEra Energy’s strategies amid regulatory changes. They also highlight the importance of inspections and CMS and Rosemary’s takeaway from an Australian wind conference. 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 Saxu,, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast from the Queen City, Charlotte. North Carolina. I have Phil Totaro in California, Joel Saxum’s back in Texas, and Rosemary Barnes is here from the great country of Australia where Joel and Rosemary, along with Matthew Stead, will be rolling along the countryside visiting with. Wind turbine operators here soon, right Speaker 3: Yeah, so the, the 11th through the 14th, uh, we’re gonna be jumping down to Melbourne because of course that’s, that’s wind central for operators and, uh, ISPs in Australia. And we’re gonna be talking about all kinds of stuff with, uh, anybody that listen to us talk. So if you’re listening here, uh, and you’re in [00:01:00] Australia, connect up, uh, joel.saxo at uh, wg lightning.com. Uh, we’ll get some meetings set ’cause we want to, we want to hear what issues are happening down there, right? What can we help with? What can we solve? Of course, Alan and I on the lightning side here, Rosemary is an independent expert engineer for you name it, in turbines. Uh, and our friend Matthew Stat over at iLogic Ping in the CMS space. And amongst the three of us, we also have a huge network, right? So if we’re, if we’re, if we getting into conversation, getting a chance to chat, tell us what. You got for problems and we’ll help you solve ’em. So we’ll be down there the 11th or the 14th of August. Uh, reach out.  Speaker 2: Yeah, so there’s a lot happening in Australia at the minute. It’s starting to come out a winter, getting into blade repair season that is, uh, about to fire up in Australia. A lot going on around the world. And today is Wednesday when we’re recording. And this is the day where Vattenfall released their Samuel L. Jackson. Add, it’s about a minute long [00:02:00] and you see Samuel L out on the shoreline with a bag of what? Seaweed chips. Joel, is that what they are? Or crackers of some sort?  Speaker 3: Yeah, a hundred percent. I gotta be, I’ll be a little bit, little honest with you. I had some of those, not the same ones, not the Vattenfall ones, but I had some the other day just to try ’em out. They’re not my flavor. I’m gonna be honest with you. Don’t they just taste like sea salt? They taste like seaweed.  Speaker 2: That’s what it is.  Speaker 3: I know, but they’re, they’re not that awesome.  Speaker 2: But these, uh, crackers were the output of the seaweed and all the things growing around the offshore wind turbines. I, I assume it’s just seaweed, right, Joel? It’s not anything else but seaweed. There’s no fish involved in that. It’s kelp. But see, like kelp, so  Speaker 3: like offshore kelp farming is a complete industry. Right. It’s just like offshore fish farming. They put these lines out, it grows on the lines, and then they pull it in and they harvest it. This is a regular thing, however, having infrastructure out in the water, IE turbine foundations helps with all of these things. It’s structure there that protects ’em from, um, [00:03:00] currents and it, and it’s also things to hook lines too. So there’s a. There’s a symbiosis of offshore wind farms and the kelp farming community, and they’re showcasing this in the VA Vattenfall ad, kind of showing the value add of turbines of outside of all of the decarbonization of the grid and things we’re doing for renewable energies. There’s also things in the, uh, blue economy, blue economy is the term for like ocean.  Speaker 2: There was a lot blue with that ad and it had nothing to do with the ocean. We just played it for rosemary, the unedited version or the un bleep version. Rosemary, what did you think of that ad?  Speaker 4: I really liked the video and what made, what was most amusing to me was imagining the pitch meeting at, you know, like a, some boardroom in Sweden. Somebody had to pitch that video. Not only selecting Samuel Jackson, I, it’s not, doesn’t immediately come to mind when I think of wind energy and yeah, I mean, people will have to watch a video for themselves to see why I think that’s so funny. But definitely well [00:04:00] worth that minute or so of your life that that will take up. Speaker 2: Well, is it, is it something that American Clean power should have done about six weeks ago? I just thought it was odd that Vattenfall was the one to pick up the baton and run with it instead of who, who we would normally think as being the thought leader in the United States. American clean power.  Speaker 3: I was thinking about a CP back when that was happening, and I, and I thought, what, what’s, what’s their response gonna be? And their response was, we put out a statement. Okay. What does that do? Like, what’s the point here? Like you’re putting out a statement like, I, I don’t know. What’s that gonna accomplish? What are you gonna do with this? What is the action out of it? What is the, where are you, uh, standing up on a soapbox or like trying to get something changed? Like, it, it does nothing for me.  Speaker 4: Yeah. I, I imagine a CP would be too worried about offending somebody with that ad. I, I would find it actually more surprising to come from them than, than from Sweden or, um, yeah, any other country. [00:05:00] But also, I don’t know, I don’t, uh, I don’t see a lot of impact from a CP and maybe it’s just, you know, obviously they’re not my organization. I’m not, I’m not in the us I’m not doing a lot of work in the US so, um, I’m probably out of the loop. But, you know, the events don’t seem particularly, uh, I don’t know, I don’t come away energized like I do when I go to a lot of European events and our own events that we do in, in Melbourne. I was also at another really great one in Australia last week, uh, about renewables and agriculture, and that was fantastically energizing with a totally, uh, diverse group of people from all kinds of backgrounds, sharing ideas and actually, um, you know, like raising problems that need to be solved and figuring out the ideas to do it. People sharing success stories. It was, you know, like a, it was a conference that is. Like, that’s the reason why conferences should exist for that sort of thing. I met so many interesting people, some of [00:06:00] who I really want to get on the show to talk about things like, you know, what’s it actually like to have a wind farm built in, um, built through your property or transmission. Um, and then yeah, as well as. You know, there was a dairy farmer who had a couple of micro wind turbines on her site, uh, for example, along with lots of people with solar power and batteries. And, um, yeah, I even visited a, a piggery that’s got biogas recovery and, uh, using that to power the, um, the pig sheds. So it’s kind of like circular. Um, so much cool  Speaker 3: stuff there. Did you refer to the pig farm as a piggery?  Speaker 4: Yeah.  Speaker 3: I wanna make sure I got that correct.  Speaker 4: Is it  Speaker 3: what, not what do you call pig farms? What do you call pig farms? Pig farm. That you bring up. A good point there, because this, this happens to us in the states sometimes, like if you go to the same conferences, for the most part you see the same people at the same conferences. You have a lot of the same conversations. It’s of course great to catch up. I’m talking, I’m talking from the. From, you know, the, the, the, the commercial role. It’s of course great [00:07:00] to catch up with people and have touch points and have your meetings ’cause everybody’s in the same spot. But it’s pretty rare anymore, like say in the wind industry, at least in the United States, that you go to an event and you leave there and you’re like, oh, I got all these. These new people to talk to and I got all this new information and like this new technology, this new innovation, like that doesn’t happen that much. But I will, I’m gonna go back to what you said. When I go to win Europe and when I go to Hamburg, like I do leave those events feeling a little bit more like that because more it seems like more things, new people, new ideas, different ideas, different people. Um, I don’t know. I, I mean, Alan, do you feel the same way?  Speaker 2: I enjoyed the event up in Canada. I went about a year and a half ago, just because it was different. New people, new concepts, new ideas, different approaches. Hamburg was the same way. And the Australia event was very similar to that, just really different approaches to a difficult problem as an engineer. I love to hear that. And Rosemary, [00:08:00] I know you like to pick up all those new technology pieces. Was there anything good on the technology front at that conference?  Speaker 4: Uh, there wasn’t so much, uh, like new technology, but people using technology definitely. And just some, um, like annoying obstacles to using it well, but the most interesting thing for me and what I think that other. Conferences can learn from. It’s like you, you guys are probably the same as me, where every conference you go to these days, they talk a lot, a lot, a lot about social license, community acceptance for new projects, and everybody is very sincere in believing that this is an important problem that the industry needs to solve. Especially, you know, we’re developing new wind farms and also transmission, but I just hear the same, you know, the same executives saying over and over again how important it is. I don’t hear anything new ever. At this conference? Yeah. It just actually included people who have been through this process. Like I talked to one guy who has five wind farms on his side. He’s like, it’s great. I love having the wind [00:09:00] farms, but gee, the construction process was a, a pain and they did some really annoying things. And you know, that’s the, that’s the people that we need to get, um, into the other kinds of conferences where the executives go to. Like you don’t, you can bring the right people that you want to your conferences. You know, you don’t just have to just see who comes based on ticket sales. You can say, Hey, we wanna talk about community acceptance. We need to bring some people from rural communities that express, you know, all sorts of different problems so that executives and professionals can hear those problems. And then, you know, like. We’re engineers. We’d love nothing more than to know about a problem and then solve it.  Speaker 3: I think it’s, that’s interesting too, Rosemary, when I went down to the Texas Senate and, uh, testified here back two, three months ago, I got to connect with a lot of people that I normally would never run into. Some of them were landowners from out in West Texas and stuff, and they were talking about the benefits and like how things actually happen as a landowner and from our, from [00:10:00] basically most people in the industry, unless you’re a psych supervisor or a wind tech. You don’t actually run into these people that are, you know, regularly affected or regularly deal with these things day to day. So I think it’s important to get their, their opinions, their thoughts on, you know, as affected landowners or non-affected landowners, right? To, to hear these people out. But it’s hard to get that, um. That audience? Correct? Like a, from an industry standpoint,  Speaker 2: 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, setting 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 [00:11:00] Onyx Insight today to schedule your demo of Eco Pitch and experience the future of blade monitoring. Well some recent news from Next era. And as we all know, next era is the largest player in renewable energy in the United States. And despite widespread. Industry concerns, uh, NextEra’s Energy’s executives, uh, are talking pretty optimistically about the next couple of years. On their second quarter earnings call, CEO. John Ketchum described the Trump administration’s one big, beautiful bill as tough but constructive for renewables. Noting also that they have safe harbored enough equipment to get through about 2029. And I think Joel, what NextEra is planning to do is to meet the minimum criteria like Phil was talking about last week and. Qualify for PTC on some level. Maybe not at maximum, but at least in in part, which would [00:12:00]keep the projects rolling. The safe harboring NextEra may be a little bit different than a lot of other operators. We have talked to operators that do have safe harbored turbines. There’s also a lot of operators that don’t, or that are just receiving turbines that are gonna be a little bit in trouble. The big players can win out because they can drive the demand for cranes and all the construction crews to help them first, the middle tier and the lower tier. In terms of size, you’re gonna have trouble, right?  Speaker 3: Yeah. Basically, what you’re looking at here is NextEra, and this is not a new strategy for them. This is a NextEra regular. Operations as usual, right? They’re, if you look at their development and construction timelines as a Gantt chart across all projects, it is a lot of simultaneous operations, right? So they’re starting one here. That one’s gonna start here and run to here. This one’s gonna start here, run to here. So like there’s, there’s not just one construction project going, because NextEra has the, the finances, the horsepower, the people, the [00:13:00] project managers, the, you know, and they have because they are who they are. They have. The right hand of ge, they sell, they use a lot of GE turbines, so they have the forceful thing on ge and they have, like you said, down the ability to lock up EPC contractors for a long time and lock up cranes for a long time. So when everybody now here is with these new regulations coming into place, is scrambling to get things done. The big boys, the, the next heirs in the room, they’re sitting in a pretty good spot because, um, if you’re looking at, you know, 2029 as the next possible administration change, like they’re gonna be good through 2029 here in, in the bullet points of what we’re talking about, they’ve signed 3.2 gig gigawatts of new contracts since April. Now that’s probably across renewables. That’s not just wind. But 3.2 gigawatts. That is a massive amount of projects, right? That’s 3 30, 200 megawatts. Like if that was just turbines, that’s 1500 turbines, 1400 turbines. So, and that’s since April, right? We’re talking in the last three [00:14:00] months. It is going to be a squeeze for resources, especially with a, like the next of the world is gobbling up what they can, um. I believe that you’ll see a very, it’s gonna be very hard to find a crane come October, November of this year.  Speaker 2: Phil, what are they doing on the financial side to hedge their bets a little bit? Are they, uh, planning projects a little bit differently? Are they, uh, going to be looking for a little investment to come in to. Back fund, uh, the construction projects to provide additional funding to, to get the cranes on site. Cranes are gonna become a premium product here in a a couple of weeks. It seems like NextEra does have the way to do it, but they also are trying to de-risk projects from what I’ve seen lately.  Speaker 5: Is, is that the move? Yes. And they’ve, they’ve already done a few things that are smart, as Joel talked about. One is that they’ve already safe harbored a lot, and the reason that that’s important is with the proposed changes to Safe Harbor. Uh. [00:15:00] It’s necessarily going to make it harder for developers to comply with startup construction. So next era is ahead of the curve. With this, everybody else is gonna be scrambling to catch up. And not only are cranes gonna be in demand, but the OEMs are all gonna be, you know, in demand with pretty full order books here for the next few years, uh, assuming they can actually deliver turbines. To be safe harbored before the IRS rules change. The problem with that now is we probably have less than six months because these IRS rules are gonna be changed probably by the end of the year. If you haven’t gotten your safe harbor in place already and you can’t guarantee that you’re gonna be able to physically receive the turbines. ’cause normally the safe harbor kicks in. You spend, you know, the 5% of the total project CapEx, you actually have to receive the equipment. And if you can’t do that, if, if the OEMs can’t, [00:16:00]uh, supply you with equipment by the end of this year, which again is when we’re expecting these IRS rules to change, you’re, you’re pretty much done. And it goes back to what you’re saying before about, you know, what the heck is a CP doing? This is supposed to be the lobby group that’s supposed to be facilitating the growth of the industry, or at least the, the stability of the industry and prevention of, of our decline. Um, you know, a rising tide is not lifting all boats here. They’re, I don’t know what the hell they’re doing while the rest of us are out here in the field trying to. You know, steel in the ground.  Speaker 2: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs, ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks. OG Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog [00:17:00] ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Joel and I just concluded another webinar with Skys specs, and we’ve been doing monthly webinars for, what, five or six months at this point, Joel. They’re really interesting changing subjects, all about how operators can save a ton of cash and o and m as we talked  Speaker 3: about in the last few weeks with regulation changes and stuff here, we’re gonna have a different reality in, in what the wind world is here in the United States shortly. Um. Of course globally it’s, everything’s changing as well, but we have something massive coming towards us. So you need to change your o and m attitudes, your o and m thought processes, uh, whether it’s innovation, whether it is a different way of looking at things. Like the old idea of just kinda like, ah, we’ll just manage these things and we’ll kind of do it. This is status quo and it’s not gonna work anymore. Uh, and that’s one of the cool things that we’ve had on those skys specs, webinars, we’ve had a lot of. Guests from the industry, right? So people that [00:18:00] are from operators, we’ve had subject matter experts. Of course, some internal skys specs, people that know their solutions really well. Uh, but I think one of the differences there with the Skys specs team is, uh, people know them as the inspection. Gurus, right? Uh, and they do have massive market penetration for inspections. However, there’s a lot of other things that they do there with repair vendor management. So they have their hands in with the ISPs helping, helping customers out. They also have, um, you know, CMS monitoring and SCADA monitoring, performance monitoring. Now you’re looking at financial asset modeling. Um, so there’s a lot of intelligent ways, uh, that they’re helping customers. Cut their o and m budgets down.  Speaker 2: And we referenced Phil today during that webinar because the price point came up about what the average spend is per turbine for maintenance. I, I, Joel, it’s roughly, or Phil, it’s roughly 50,000. Dollars per turbine per year. That was a rough number that I remember.  Speaker 5: It’s, [00:19:00] yeah, it’s a little bit up from that now. It’s now at around, um, 54,500, let’s call it. Um, but there, the, the thing that concerns. Us at Intel store with that kind of data is that you’re seeing more projects have significant overages, um, because they’ve, they may have budgeted, let’s say seven or eight or 10 million a year, and they’re having to spend more than what they thought just to get, um, you know, cat four and five repairs done and all the other mechanical systems and, and whatever else they need to do. Um. Particularly in light of this whole change in the PTC, you’re, you’re now gonna see everybody having to be more, um, resource efficient, time efficient, cost efficient with what they have and the budget that they have for maintenance. If they’re not gonna be able to be as dependent on P TT C revenue as, as they have [00:20:00] been in the past, so. There, everybody’s gonna have to, you know, really be on point and, and potentially slim down some of these budgets and, and some of these big overages. And if inspection is, is gonna help facilitate, you know, early detection. Um, if CMS is gonna help facilitate early detection of an issue before it escalates into a CAT four or five. You need to take advantage of that.  Speaker 3: Yeah. I think this, this is a, so it’s a nasty little storm, right? Because a year and a half, two years ago, we were talking about this trend that we were starting to see of the operators taking, like the, taking management of the turbines in-house, right? Doing things in-house or, or getting an ISP. They’re getting rid of the OEMs and the reason they’re getting rid of the OEMs, partially, even some of some places we hear about the OEMs are like, Hey, we don’t want this one anymore. We’re done. What we’re seeing now is this. This is why, what. Where these overages are coming from, that Phil’s talking about. Some of these, not all, of course, this is, none of these are hard, fast rules, but [00:21:00] some of them are coming from the fact that you had an OEM that was managing, or pseudo managing this thing, you know, up against a contract to just barely try to avoid paying lds. And then all of a sudden that end of warranty, end of FSA, it got handed back to the owner and the owner’s like, what the, what did I just inherit? What do I got going on here? And I, and then they had to fix all these problems and get this thing back up to snuff. So the o and m costs are skyrocketing ’cause they’re trying to get back in front of ’em. They realized that they want to be proactive, but they can’t even be proactive ’cause they have to fix the reactive stuff first. And. And now like, like you said, like doing those webinars with Skyspace, we’re trying to introduce people to tools to help them out as they go along, to be resource efficient. Plan your inspection, uh, inspection and repair and maintenance seasons holistically across your fleet with real data. Like do these things ’cause there’s, there’s digital ways and innovative ways to do this stuff better than managing things on spreadsheets. Speaker 2: No, and I think as we go forward over the next [00:22:00] six months to a year. There’s gonna be a lot of, uh, controls on o and m. Budgets and asset managers are gonna be asked to constrict their budgets. If you start running Phil’s number here on a hundred turbine farm it, you’re spending a little over $5 million a year on general o and m. If you can cut that by 10%, that’s a half million dollars in savings. That’s a huge amount, and I think a lot of operators today. Can get to that 10% number, but they’re gonna need to bring in a couple of the tools, the Horizon CMS system, a, a lot of the smarter technology that is out there that hasn’t been implemented so much because things were good. Are now gonna get a second look. And the, the list of attendees during the Sky Specs webinar today was. Eye-opening. Like I know that person, I know that person, site supervisor, asset manager. They are [00:23:00] actively engaging now with solutions. Strike tape being one of ’em, talking to in store, being in another, that is going to change the game. So we’re gonna get leaner and meaner clearly. But at that’s, I think a lot of operations are just starting to figure this out, that they, they need to get a hold of some help. And that help is there. That help has been there for the last couple of years and has been honed and it’s ready to go into action. I, I think that was one of the, the leading points today with the Horizon CMS system was that system is actively working and actively saving operators a ton of money. And if you’re not onto that train yet, you need to hop on. Now  Speaker 3: we were talking with, uh, Ben Rie from Sky Specs. One of, one of their products has got 20 gigawatts underneath it already. That’s just one of their monitoring  Speaker 2: products. Like they, it, it’s there. It’s not new. It’s been there, it’s been vetted. You may not be familiar with it, but that’s [00:24:00] the point of the Sky Spec webinars. That’s the point of the podcast. And we were just talking to Jeremy Hanks with C-I-C-N-D-T, who was in Australia at the conference and is a great person. I love talking to him ’cause he’s so full of technology and knowledge. He was also saying he’s getting flooded with requests to start looking at blades from an ultrasonic test standpoint to do NDT work because a lot of operators are starting to realize I need to validate a repair that’s been done. I don’t want to pay for this twice. I need to take a quick look at a blade that’s on the ground before I install it. ’cause his point, and you’ll see this in the, in the podcast that comes out, which is there’s a lot of safe harbor blades that are broken. That have been under floods or been damaged in transport, that need to be looked at before you hang them to save yourself millions of dollars on a new installation. I know we’re all gonna go crazy on installs, but boy, there’s a lot of money on the table that could be saved right now. Joel,  Speaker 3: this is a full circle conversation because why does, why does the [00:25:00] podcast exist? Why does the Uptime podcast exist? I don’t know, Rosemary, maybe Rosemary knows, but the idea here is, is that we can, we can become a hub. We have become a hub for solutions innovation, lowering LCOE, lowering budgets and incre. Like that’s what we want to do here. We wanna help this industry thrive. And it we, we we’re really lucky to be honest with you, to have the conversations that we get to have with people all around the world about what are your problems for one, and then the people that have the solutions, what are your solutions? What do you got going on? Like when we do our. Uptime spotlights. We have some of the best and brightest people on to solve these problems. Like a Jeremy Hanks that’s gonna be on next week. He’s the best guy in NDT in composites I’ve ever met. I mean, he’s worked on spaceships and fighter jets and race teams and F1 cars and all kinds of stuff. So the horsepower and the skills and the innovation, the technology, it’s here. You just need to engage, right? If you’ve got [00:26:00] problems, call us. We’ll help you point you the right way. Hey, we have this issue,  Speaker 2: and that’s the point of of this discussion is, uh, if you don’t know where to go. Reach out to the podcast. That is the whole point. It’s a totally free service. We do not charge for this. You can call Phil anytime. He’ll give you some insight. If you call Joel up, he will connect you. If you get Rosemary on the horn, she’ll do you blade analysis probably for free, right Rosemary? So it, it is a huge family that we put together over time, over time. We do know who’s doing what and why they’re doing it, and who has the technology. There is a lot of savings to be had, and I think this is the moment everybody to go after it and grow this industry. Screw what Trump’s talking about. This industry’s gonna be here long after he’s gone. Focus everybody. Deep breath and focus. I think that’s the important takeaway from, at least from this week for me,  Speaker 3: mother Farms. This is, um, this is actually time. Okay. So [00:27:00] the wind farm of the week, this week is actually a wind farm cluster of the week, the Tofa wind cluster. And it’s interesting that this, this, ’cause this was planned before the last conversation we just had. Um, but this is a wind cluster in southern Spain, so near the Iberian Peninsula there. And why it became the Wind Farm of the Week is a little bit different than I normally am looking at things in kind of a community impact way and stuff, but I wanted to look at a technical issue. Um, and the technical issue there. This wind farm cluster has been there for a long time, but they’re in the process of taking a whole bunch of old turbines, repowering them with new turbines, uh, that are much larger, right? Because some of these turbines are only like 300 kilowatts at this existing wind farm in the, in the, uh, the tar wind cluster. And they’re repowering it with. These massive Nordics, N one 50 fives and N one 30 threes that are 4.8, 5.5, 5.7 megawatts. I love it. Exactly. So this is where the cool repower, um, innovation and technology [00:28:00] thing comes into play because Southern Spain, if you don’t know about Southern Spain, bad light. So they, those turbines that are there have been getting beat up by lightning. They have a compounding effect with the sea salt spray and the fog and then, and the moisture on the blades and storms rolling through. But what they’ve done is they, they, this has been a testing ground for all kinds of different LPS systems, um, in these smaller turbines. But now they’re replacing these smaller ones with beasts, right? With 120 meter rotor monsters that are 200 meters up in the air. So they’re in this wind farm, they’re being smart, and they’re with these nordex turbines. They’re actually putting advanced LPS systems on them. Um. Before they get them up in the sky. And this is what we were talking about here in the States, we’re working on a bunch of repower projects and people are calling us to put strike tape on before they go up. So it’s, it’s an intelligent way to do things. Um, so the wind farm of the week this week is that Rifa Wind cluster. It’s Axion Energy is a big part [00:29:00] of it. And there’s even some crazy old names in there. Alstom still owns some turbines in there, uh, which I don’t if you, if you’re not a wind turbine vet, you don’t, haven’t heard of Alstom in a while. Uh, but it’s an interesting little place where the climate and geography drive innovation. Uh, this is a lightning prone zone, but of course there’s other areas in the world that are LEP issues, erosion problems, these kind of things that we can learn from, we can learn from each other, uh, and we can do better for the industry. Just connect up, um, and we’ve got the technology. So the Tofa wind cluster in southern Spain, right down there in the Iberian Peninsula. You are the Wind Farm of the week.  Speaker 2: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Join us next week where we’ll get updates on the latest in wind energy developments and properly President Trump. So we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:30:00]Podcast.

Allen discusses Trump’s offshore wind cancellations, Dominion Energy’s tariff troubles in Virginia, and India’s new wind manufacturing rules helping Suzlon Energy. He also mentions Scotland’s massive Berwick Bank approval and Colorado company Radia’s ambitious Wind Runner cargo plane project. 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! I’m about to tell you about the biggest airplane you’ve never heard of. A Colorado company called Radia is building what could be the world’s largest aircraft. They call it the Wind Runner. And if it is completed it’s going to change everything about clean energy. Mark Lundstrom, an aerospace engineer from Boulder, has a simple problem to solve. Wind turbines keep getting bigger and more powerful, but we can’t get them where they need to go. Here’s why. Offshore wind farms can use turbine blades longer than 105m. But land-based turbines? They’re stuck at about 80m. Not because of engineering limits – because of bridges, tunnels, and highway curves. The turbines are simply too big to get under bridges, through tunnels, or around curves, Lundstrom explains. So he’s building a monster. The Wind Runner will be three hundred sixty-five feet long with a two hundred sixty-one foot wingspan. That’s bigger than a Boeing 747. Much bigger. The payload volume? Twelve times greater than that famous jumbo jet. It’ll run on sustainable aviation fuel and land on dirt strips right inside wind farms. Radia aims to complete the first Wind Runner in 2028. By doing this, Lundstrom says, we’ll create the path to the cheapest energy in the world. Keep that plane in mind. Because everything else I’m about to tell you connects to that story. Now, let me tell you what’s really happening with wind power. It’s a story of global momentum meeting American resistance. President Trump just canceled plans to develop new offshore wind projects in federal waters. More than 3.5 million acres had been designated as wind energy areas. Gone. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is rescinding all designated wind energy areas. They’re ending what they call speculative wind development. Offshore wind projects planned for Texas, Louisiana, Maine, New York, California, and Oregon? Canceled. The Biden administration’s five-year schedule to lease federal offshore tracts? History. But here’s the twist. While America pulls back, the rest of the world doubles down. Just days after Trump called wind turbines a con job during his visit to Scotland, the Scottish Government approved the world’s biggest offshore wind farm project. The Berwick Bank project will power six million homes when finished. Trump said those turbines were some of the ugliest you’ve ever seen. Scotland said, “We’ll take six million homes’ worth of ugly, thank you very much.” The message from Scotland? We’re moving forward with wind power, regardless of what President Trump thinks. Now here’s where policy meets your pocketbook. Dominion Energy’s offshore wind project in Virginia just got over a $500 million price increase. The culprit? Trump’s new tariffs on imported goods. The project features 176 giant wind turbines, 27 miles off Virginia Beach. It will power 660,000 homes next year. But those European Union tariffs, possible additional Mexican duties, and current taxes on Canadian and Mexican goods? They’re adding up to $640 million to the project cost. Here’s the kicker: Virginia customers will pay between $253 million and $320 million to cover those import taxes. Company chairman Bob Blue says the project is still the most affordable source of energy for customers. Even with the tariff hit. Dominion’s installation ship – a $715 million floating giant – arrives this month. First turbine goes up in September. Virginia ratepayers are learning that trade wars have a price. And they’re paying it. While America debates wind power, India is seizing control of it. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy just introduced strict new rules. Wind turbine makers must now buy key components from government-approved domestic vendors only. Blades, towers, generators, gearboxes, special bearings – all must come from India’s approved supplier list. But there’s more. All wind turbine data must stay in India. No real-time operational data can leave the country. Companies must set up their control centers and research facilities in India within one year. The goal? Boost India’s domestic wind turbine manufacturing from 20 gigawatts to 500 gigawatts by 2030. This helps Indian companies like Suzlon Energy and hurts Chinese companies like Envision Group. India isn’t just buying wind power. They’re taking ownership of the entire supply chain. And that’s paying off already. Suzlon Energy just landed a massive order from Zelestra India. 381 megawatts of wind power equipment across three Indian states. 127 wind turbines will provide clean energy for millions of homes. It’s Zelestra’s first FDRE project – Firm and Dispatchable Renewable Energy. That means power you can count on 24 hours a day. Girish Tanti, Suzlon’s Vice Chairman, says India’s energy transition is at a pivotal moment. The country is pursuing reliable, round-the-clock renewable power. This landmark partnership signals India’s shift toward energy independence through wind power. So here’s what we have: America stepping back while the world steps forward. Trump’s administration calls wind and solar unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources. They’re betting on oil, gas, and coal. Meanwhile, India is building domestic wind manufacturing. Scotland is approving massive offshore projects. And a Colorado company is building the world’s biggest cargo plane to make land-based wind farms more efficient. The Wind Runner isn’t just about moving turbine blades. It’s about moving the entire clean energy industry forward while America watches from the sidelines. Mark Lundstrom in Boulder thinks he can create the cheapest energy in the world. Trump in Washington thinks wind power is a con job. Only one of them is going to be right. Seventeen state attorneys general are suing to challenge Trump’s wind energy halt. The Sierra Club says the administration is obstructing affordable, reliable energy for everyday Americans. But Robin Shaffer of Protect Our Coast New Jersey applauds the administration. He says these projects are too expensive compared to cheap onshore power. The wind industry faces strong headwinds from the current administration. But the rest of the world? They’re catching wind. That Wind Runner cargo plane launching in 2028 might be carrying more than just turbine blades. It might be carrying America’s energy future to countries that want it more than we do.

Jeremy Heinks, owner of CICNDT, joins the show to discuss the benefits of non-destructive testing (NDT). The conversation covers the impact of storage conditions, transportation damages, and emphasizes the importance of proactive inspection practice for ensuring blade quality. 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: Jeremy, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Well, the recent changes in the IRA bill are. Pushing a lot of projects forward very quickly at the moment, and as we’re learning, there’s a number of safe harbor blades sitting in yards and a rush to manufacture blades to get them up and meet the, uh, treasury department’s criteria for, for being started, whatever that means. At the moment, I think we’re gonna see a big question about the quality of the blades, and it seems to me. The cheapest time to quickly [00:01:00] look at your blaze before you start to hang them is while they’re still on the ground. And to get some n DT experience out there to make sure that what you’re hanging is appropriate. Are you starting to see that push quite yet? No, not not at  Jeremy Heinks: the level we’d like to see it. Um, as far as getting the inspections in, yeah, we have been seeing the push to get the, get these blades out. Uh, but, uh, the, the, the few that we have been able to get our eyes on aren’t looking good. The quality definitely down. And we’ve just had a customer site come back with some, some findings that were surprising for a brand new blade that hasn’t been the up tower yet and in use. So, um, it is much easier for us to get the, uh, technology and the personnel to a blade that’s on the ground. It’s cheaper, it’s quicker. We can go through many, many more blades, uh, with inspections. Uh, it’s just access is just easier. Always comes down to access.  Joel Saxum: That customer that you had there, like what was their [00:02:00]driver? Right? Did they feel the pain at some point in time? Did they, did they have suspicions of something not right? New factory? Like, I don’t know. Why would some, why is someone picking that over someone? Not because like you said, overwhelmingly. The industry doesn’t really do this. You know, even just getting visual inspections of blades on the ground before they get hung is tough sometimes with construction schedules and all these different things, moving parts. So you had someone that actually said, Hey, we want to NDT these blades. What was their driver behind that?  Jeremy Heinks: So we, uh, we had done a previous, uh, route of inspections on some older ative of theirs that were,  Speaker 5: um,  Jeremy Heinks: getting. Kinda along in the tooth, if you will. Uh, so they’ve added some experience. They saw what we could bring to the table as far as results and, and, and information and data on those blades. Uh, and it all turned out to be, um, pretty reliable. So, um, you know, we educated them on, you know, if you have new blades coming in or even use the blades coming in for replacement, that it’s not a bad idea to get at least a, a sample it. And, uh, [00:03:00] basically that’s what they call us in to do. They had some brand new blades come in. For some new turbines they’re putting up. And, uh, they wanted the sampling. We did a sampling and the sample showed that, uh, they have an issue of these, these brand new blades.  Joel Saxum: So, okay, so what happens then? Right? Because I’ve been a part of some of these factory audits and stuff, and when you catch these things in the factory, you’re like, Hey, where we got these 30 defects? And then the factory goes back against their form, their form, you know, their forms and they go, okay, material checklist is a, we’ll fix 24 of ’em. The other six are on you or whatever that may be. What happens when you find these things in the field at a construction site right? Then does that kick off a battle between the, the new operator and that OEM or, or what’s the action there? Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, so we’ve been on the OEM side and been through what you just explained, um, multiple times and helped a bunch of the OEMs on that stuff, that stuff. But unfortunately, when you’re in the field and you find the same thing, it’s, it’s a whole different ball game. Um, they typically. We won’t see any of that. We don’t, we won’t be able to [00:04:00] see what the OEM actually does unless we have informa, you know, information or channels that, that are a little bit different, uh, than normal to, uh, get that information. So, um, but yeah, so we, we’ll give this information over to the customer. Uh, they’ll go to their supplier and then that’ll turn into a. To a dance and, uh, where everybody’s trying to pass the buck, basically, right? So, um, unfortunately that’s the way it’s been. We will see how this one turns out. It, it all depends on, on the relationship between that OEM and the customer and the end user.  Joel Saxum: So, so this is my, my last question about this and, and then I want to, of course, jump topics we have a lot of talk about here today. But the question being, okay, so say they do repairs. Is it then a good idea to bring you guys back in after those repairs are done to say NDT? Everything looks good here. Um, basically clear to fly.  Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. [00:05:00] So, uh, post inspection on repairs is always a good idea. Um, the aviation side is, it’s commonplace to, uh, post in inspect repair. So yeah, definitely, uh, we’d wanna come back. Um, you know, and that’s something we’re working on too in-house as a, uh, working on a new training. Syllabus to where we can give some of the basic NDT tools to, uh, end users so that if a repair company would come in, they would be able to have their technicians do a quick, you know, quick test. Uh, it’s what we used to call like an operator level inspection. And then if they saw some of the stuff we trained ’em to that we could come back and, and bring in a level three or a level two and look at their information and then maybe do a reinspection if they thought they saw something that was bad. Allen Hall 2025: Joel, you and I had discussed a couple of months ago with an operator in the United States and the Midwest that was gonna be building a repowering, a wind farm with turbines, uh, that were a couple of years old. Remember that discussion about what version of [00:06:00] the blade are those? And it was an early version. I was surprised how long those blades had been sitting in the yard, and we said, well, it’s gonna have a B and C problem. You need to get somebody out there to inspect those blades before you hang them. That’s the perfect case for NDT to get out there and look because it wasn’t like every blade had a serial defect. It was just kind of a random thing that was happening. Do you remember that situation?  Joel Saxum: Yeah, and it was really interesting too because you know, we’re on like that specific blade. We’re on like version nine of it out in the field right now. But since I think those were like in 20 19, 20 20, they had been safe harbored from they, those blades have the advantage of now having 3, 4, 5, 6 years of. History within the market of all of the issues that pop up. So we were able to tell that operator, Hey, since these things haven’t flown yet, we know it’s this, this, this, and this. You should have NDT come out here and do this. You should do this. This basically preemptive repair, this proactive measure before you fly these [00:07:00] things. Um, and I think what we see right now, Alan, like you said, just to open the episode with IRA bill changes and. And these new legislation coming up, there’s a lot of stuff coming out of Safe Harbor that’s gonna get flown.  Allen Hall 2025: Oh, it’s gonna have a huge, uh, amount of blades that have been sitting there for a couple of years. And, but if you, the operator haven’t used those blades or don’t know the service history of those blades, it’s kind of a mystery and you better be calling other operators that are using them. But ultimately, when it gets down to it, before you hang those blades, and I know everybody’s in a rush to hang blades. You better take a look at ’em with NDT, especially if there are known issues with those blades. And the the problem is you can’t just do a walk down, which is what I think a lot of operators are doing right now. Send a technician down to make a look. Make sure the blade’s all in one piece, like I guess that’s where they’re at. Or we’ll walk inside and kick the tires and make sure all the bond lines are there. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and particularly if you know there’s a source of problem on a particular [00:08:00] blade, you can’t see it. It can be buried deep inside. How are you gonna know without having somebody with NDT experience? Joel Saxum: This is the interesting thing too, here with that specific case that that developer will call ’em. They said, I talked with the OEM. They said there’s nothing wrong with these blades. And they like, that was like, they’re like, they’re like, yeah, we checked with them. They said, there’s no issues. I said, you must have been talking to a sales guy because anybody from that engineering team is gonna tell you that. Or maybe they don’t want to, right? They, of course they don’t want to come clean with this, but that’s why we, that’s why we have the, like the uptime network and people that you can talk to and things of these sort out there and experts like Jeremy, right? The C-I-C-N-D-T guys, because they’ve seen the worst of the worst,  Jeremy Heinks: right? We typically only get called in when it’s the worst of the worst, but to, uh, toss ’em with more wrinkle. Toss one more wrinkle into the whole storage thing. Uh, we got a project a few years back where the storage site, like, ’cause the blades had been stored for like 15 years, like seven years prior. The storage [00:09:00]site was underwater for like three weeks, like 20 feet. Like it was a massive flood, 20 feet of water or 10 feet of water, whatever it was. So the, it was a lot of water anyway. The bottom two thirds of these blades were. Rotted because of water logs being sitting in the water. And of course over the last seven years they got cleaned up. They looked good ’cause of the rain and everything and it looked bad. So we get out there, we’re scanning laminates and you get like halfway down the blade and it just with the, you know, terrible signal. And so we look back on the history and sure enough there was floods in the area. So those are things you gotta look at too. These blades are coming out of these long-term storage. I mean, how were they stored? How what has gone, what weather has been through that storage area in the last whatever years? Uh, because all that affects these blades when they’re on the ground. I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re fairly secure when they’re up tur up turbine and they’re meant to be in that environment. They’re not really meant to be getting just hit hard with weather when they’re on the ground. ’cause they’re [00:10:00] not sealed up. They’re not, you know, you know, a lot of different things there.  Joel Saxum: Another ground issue, and I, I’ve, I’ve heard of this one through my insurance connections and stuff like that, is, um, when blades are on the ground, there’s, this is not an abnormal thing. It happens quite regularly that it shouldn’t, but it does. That heavy, strong winds will come through and can blow the blades over when they’re sitting in their chairs, right at the, or they’ll start, yeah, they’ll start fluttering in ways that they’re not designed to flutter. Right? They’re designed to take the gravity loads and take the force loads the way they are up tower when they’re sitting on the ground, it’s a completely different game. So if they’ve been there, if they’ve experienced an extreme weather event or something of that sort, NDT is the only way you’re gonna figure out if something is really wrong with ’em.  Jeremy Heinks: Right. And that rolls into handling as well. So shipping, handling at the plant, handling from, you know, in between. Different movements. Uh, like you said, they, they’re designed to be in an environment that’s hung from a turbine and, uh, get those types of, you know, elements and the winds and everything on. That’s not everything we do to when on [00:11:00] the ground. So  Allen Hall 2025: turbines, a lot of times, even at the blades are in storage. They get moved around a good bit. And what we’re finding, talking to operators is that a lot of the damage we’re seeing later on in some of these blades. Was most likely due to transportation. So maybe it was on the ship on the way over, or maybe when they got trucked to the, uh, storage site or they got bumped into. It does seem to be a lot more of that. And the lift points seem to be another area where, you know, you know, I think there’s some, uh, need to be taken a deeper look at. Obviously the root bushings are a problem area for almost everybody at the moment, but also further out on the blade. There seems to be. Uh, repeatable damage areas that you see that you wouldn’t be able to detect until you got the blade spin. And, and then you see these cracks develop. But a lot of that can be sussed out on the ground, especially with knowledgeable people.  Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. So that’s just another reason for, you know, pre-installation inspection. Um, you know, a lot [00:12:00] of places you’ve got experts moving these things, you know, experts lifting ’em, whatnot. But when they’re in a, they’re on a ship or they’re in a yard. A lot of times the guys that are professionals at moving them aren’t there. So it’s gonna get moved by somebody and they’re not gonna know exactly what they’re doing, even if they’re trying their best to be, make sure they’re following procedure or whatnot. But, um, you never know who’s moving on, who’s, you know, what, what, what kind of skills or the experience they have.  Joel Saxum: So, so that brings me into another question here, Jeremy. Right? We’re talking about skills and tools and these kind of things in the industry. When we say NDT, I would like everybody listening to know that when we say NDT, we’re talking about a wide gamut of technologies, of solutions, of products, of, uh, you know, methodologies for inspection here. NDT is just a broad scheme for non-destructive testing. We wanna see inside of something without cutting it, breaking it, whatever we have to do. [00:13:00]So, can you, can you walk us through the approach that kind of CIC will use? So, hey, customer comes to me, we have this issue. Okay. You guys have, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40, 50 different ways of doing things. Um, but how does that conversation usually start? What does that process look like for an operation?  Jeremy Heinks: So it, I mean, it all depends on it’s case by case with what kind of issue they’re looking for. But, uh, we recently had our. Our, our lab opened up in, in Ogden, Utah, where we’ve got, um, a lot of in-house technologies now, like robotic ct, uh, laser ultrasound, um, and then urography, all the normal stuff. We typically throw out these things, but deposit focus, but we’re able to do just about anything. A lot of advanced materials, and of course a lot of that came from us servicing the DOD, the defense and the, the aviation, it’s space side of the house. But now that we have them all in one place. If a wind customer has an, let’s say they have, um, a root issue or they have a bottom line issue, or they’ve got, um, you know, or these, uh, carbon fiber [00:14:00] main spars, you know, you’ve got some new types of defects to out of these. Typically what would happen was you cut into these things to see what’s wrong. And of course, we’ve all seen what cutting composites does it, you know, it can be kind of messy and it can damage a defect that’s existing so you don’t have a good look at it. With these technologies we have in house now, especially with the CT part of it, we can do a inspection. We can see everything of a area that is unmolested, right? So we can, let’s say you find something and you’re scanning, let’s say you are an OEM and you’re doing ultrasonic inspection or thermography, and you find something in house, well, you can cut around that, send it to us, we can scan it and get a 3D image, you know, of the full material thickness. Really break that down without having the damage, the defect. Uh, and this is stuff that hasn’t been really gone into on the wind side yet. We do it on aviation and space all the time, um, for defect characterization. And then, you know, we have a really good picture of what’s going on there. [00:15:00] Uh, we characterize defects that way and we can also come up with better inspection solutions that way. Allen Hall 2025: Well, that’s interesting because I’ve seen it in aviation all the time. I assume they were doing it in wind. You have to have a way to understand what the defects are and when you see one, or especially if you don’t understand what is causing it, you just can’t cross section that you want to take a large section out and then scan it. Understand what is likely the source of that problem that’s not being done. And when, too much at the moment, I think it is, but it’s,  Jeremy Heinks: it’s finally getting cheap enough that, uh, it’s. It’s an option, right? So it’s, it’s always been kind of expensive, but the equipment has come, is coming down in cost and we have a very unique system in-house. It’s not typical to your normal CT system. So we use, uh, a robotic system, a cobots, so we can, we do very large, very large parts, uh, and, uh, composites of course are typically lower energy. So [00:16:00] it’s, um, pretty much tailored for that type of part. Where other CT systems may, might be tailored to other, other types of parts. Allen Hall 2025: So then you can actually take some significantly large size pieces. Then what’s the, what’s the biggest size part you can take and, and get some data out of?  Jeremy Heinks: I mean, again, comes outta the time and money. Uh, right now our largest piece is probably, um. Probably like a 10 foot by six foot section.  Allen Hall 2025: Whoa.  Jeremy Heinks: I mean, in theory we could do a, we could do a whole wing in theory, you know, um, which could be a, you know, a decent sized blade even. But, uh, that would require specialized bay, um, and some extra tooling. But, uh, right now in-house, yeah, we could do, uh, fairly large sample.  Joel Saxum: The first time I ran into you, uh, Jeremy in the wind industry was probably three, four years ago. I think, and you may not even have known this, but it was on an, it was on an RCA case for an insurance company, and they’re like, we, [00:17:00] we did the, our, our initial, where the team I was with at the time, our initial RFI, Hey, we need this data, this data, this data. And they sent, they sent us this just library of stuff and they were like. Can you use this? What is this? And it was all NDT data from, from the issue that we were inspecting. It was like, this is the most amazing batch of data we have ever received on an RCA. Who are these people? Where did this come from? Um, and I think that, that, that was my first, ’cause, you know, from the oil and gas side, NDT, that’s just regular. You’re doing it all offshore platforms, like you’re always doing NDT. It’s just, it’s just an accepted thing. Uh, you know, and the, the, of course the offshore technicians for NDT, the, the rates are a lot different. Um, and so I was like, okay, yeah, we we’re using nd this is when I first was really getting going and win. I was like, oh, great, we’re using NDT and Win. But since then, it’s still, it’s been. Very specialized use, you know, RCAs or like a special repair or something like that. You just don’t see it very widespread. And, and it’s, it’s frustrating because, you know, from, I guess from my past, like you can see the value of this [00:18:00] tool and you see some tertiary kind of things out there where people are doing little NDT with robotics and this and that, but like, it’s like the industry hasn’t grasped onto it. Like, I don’t know if the engineers just don’t, just don’t know that it’s available or know the value of it or why they’re missing it. Because you go back to the idea of, um. You go to your general practitioner or the doctor and say like, okay, yeah, you got your knee hurts. Okay. Yeah. Shake it around a little bit. Like, okay, we’re gonna, we need to prob maybe do surgery here and before we do that, let’s go get an X-ray or a MRI. So we know exactly what we’re supposed to do. When we get in there, we make it efficient. We make bang, bang, bang, clean cut and all, and we’re done. That’s the same thing as like, uh, to me, a really deep lightning repair. You know what I mean? We hear these war stories all the time of people saying like, oh yeah, they quoted us 20,000. And this team quoted us 50,000, and then the $20,000 team, we gave the project to them, they got in there and it ended up being a hundred thousand. Well, if you would’ve spent 15 grand or 10 grand, or five grand or whatever it may be to get some NDT work done on this thing before [00:19:00] you opened it all up, you might know what you were getting into and be more efficient. Come with the right kit, less standby time, the right technicians on the job, all this stuff, just like your surgery on your knee. I mean, have you seen anybody picking up that idea in the wind industry?  Jeremy Heinks: Not as, not as much as I’d like. Um, there’s been a coup, there’s some of the OEMs have tried to automate, tried to bring it in. Um, most of ’em do some inspection. Um, and it really is the plant by plant, depending on what kind of support they have. We all know whenever things are times are tight or, uh, or you need to have the cycle time as the most important thing. You know, quality is the first one to get cut. So, you know, that’s, that makes it a tough. A tough sell in a lot of people’s books ’cause we add cycle time and we add costs, uh, at the manufacturer. Um, but, um, you know, the other thing I’ve seen is, you know, when they do try and implement something where, let’s say some automation where they could do this stuff quickly and, [00:20:00] you know, over the mass produced parts that they have, um, you know, they, they go to an automation company that doesn’t know much about NDT. If they do know about NDT, it’s, it’s not wind. NDT. So. Um, you know, the, they would be better off if they would contact, you know, a company like ours or there’s a few of us out there where all we, like a majority of our work is in the wind industry. Um, there’s a, there’s a couple in Europe, there’s a couple over here. Get those guys in first. It doesn’t have to be us. Um, but get somebody with practical Yeah. You know, experience and that practical part is the most important part, and have them help you with a practical approach. To the inspection with automation. I mean, that’s, there’s simple and easy ways to do this that just haven’t been done yet. Allen Hall 2025: Um,  Jeremy Heinks: not gonna say it’s gonna be cheap, but it should be, um, usable. It’s not gonna end up on a shelf. Like I always keep telling everybody, all these systems, just they, I’ve seen millions of dollars spent and it just sits on a shelf [00:21:00] collecting dust. Happens all the time. Um, and that’s in the field as well. Uh, we see a lot of really cool robotics sink coming out. A lot of, uh, drone. Interior drone stuff, exterior, drone stuff, uh, and just looking for a practical approach. You know, these guys, a lot of ’em come at it with, um, really good intentions, but, uh, they don’t have the experience needed to, uh, know what they’re gonna run into when they do these, these types of applications and therefore, kind of missed the mark. Allen Hall 2025: Jeremy, I’ve been to a site recently and noticed up on the whiteboard. Blade bolts were their particular issue. And I saw a couple of the blade bolts sitting in the shop there and they had cracks, big cracks and broken blade bolts. And I thought, man, that’s a huge problem. And the number of turbines that were listed was incredible. It’s not technicians and mechanics are out there all day fixing these blade bolts ’cause there’s so many bolts per blade. You just multiply the numbers like wow, they have a huge [00:22:00] problem. The issue is you can’t really tell which Blade Bolt has a crack in it while it’s installed, unless it falls out, and they were having that problem too. How can you attack that problem from an NDT standpoint? Can you suss out what bolts are likely to fail or, or in the process of failing?  Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, so in bolt inspection is isn’t new. Um, it’s gonna, sounds kind of new to the wind industry, but uh, oil and gas aviation. We’ve all done, we’ve been doing bolt inspection on those for quite a long time. So even in, uh, on marine with the, you know, sail sailing vessels with the mask bolts. Uh, so, uh, these are things that we can do ultrasonically, um, you know, whether it’s stalled and look for cracks at different, uh, lengths. Um, of course we need a little bit of information about the bolt itself, the material, um, design length, all that stuff. But, uh, no, we can definitely do a, a, uh, inspection. Whether it installed or not installed on the bolts? Uh, you mean it wouldn’t even be a [00:23:00] bad idea to get the bolts inspected before they get used for installation? You know, that could be done with, uh, a few different methods that are pretty quick. Uh, but, uh, the other thing we’re working on, uh, actively is a monitoring system also where, uh, we’ll be able to attach the sensors to the end of the bolt and, uh, it’ll be able to, uh. Monitor the, the health of the individual bolts over time.  Allen Hall 2025: Can you see inclusions, or what is the defect that’s causing these bolts to start to crack? Is it something in the casting of the bolts themselves or the machining? Are they overheating them when they’re getting machined or not tempering them correctly? All the  Jeremy Heinks: above. So we can definitely see that, um, you know, on new bolts you’ll, you’ll be able to see if there’s manufacturing defects or if there’s material defects, um, that maybe didn’t get caught during manufacturing. Or, um, you know, receiving inspection.  Allen Hall 2025: I have one of these bolts that’s like two and a half feet long you can actually see inside and tell me where that defect lies. ’cause you cannot see it on the outside when they’re all [00:24:00] finished.  Jeremy Heinks: Right. Typically we use ultrasound, uh, for, uh, quick inspection on that. Um, I mean, if it’s out of the, the turbine, you know, first year x-ray and make particle, that kind of trend, you know, everything gets your to outta, but the ut seems to be pretty, pretty straightforward on those. We’d even signed the cracks that are in the threads if we had the right, um, bit jangle to the, uh, the beam.  Allen Hall 2025: Okay. So if you just received a whole truckload of these bolts, which is sort of the quality that you’re coming in right now, you could ut inspect each one of those before you took ’em up tower and, and spent all the money to install ’em and make sure that the manufacturer actually is delivering a proper product. Are  Joel Saxum: they doing that at the factory? Why are they not doing that at the factory?  Jeremy Heinks: Because  Allen Hall 2025: they’re told they’re  Jeremy Heinks: good when they get ’em from a supplier.  Allen Hall 2025: That seems like a huge, if I’m the attorney at Blade Bulk Company, China Limited, I would want to make sure that I won’t gonna kill somebody because, ’cause those things are falling out and they’re just gonna [00:25:00] lawn daughter it underneath the turbine. Joel Saxum: And a hard hat’s not gonna save you from a bolt coming down.  Allen Hall 2025: Well, you could tell by the number of problems that they were having that they had replaced some of these bolts. The new bolts had also had problems. So as a, a sequence of replacements, at some point you have to stop that process. You have to validate the part. You’re putting in the turbine is correct, right? I mean, when you have to do that  Jeremy Heinks: on my side, you, you get what you pay for. And if you’re gonna go for cheap, you should probably spend a little bit to make sure what you’re getting is  Allen Hall 2025: somewhat decent. So how, what would that entail to check them in the o and m building and say, you got a hundred bolts show up on site. What are we talking about in terms of time to make sure that at least the, the sanity check is being done before you spend the money to install these bolts? I mean, if we put together something, it could be done a few minutes per bolt. Throw me a, throw me a time and a dollar amount. Are we talking about millions of dollars or thousands of dollars for this? Thousands of dollars [00:26:00] Strong.  Jeremy Heinks: We could probably get a system together that would be extremely cheap and effective. So I mean, if there’s, if that’s something that needs to exist in the industry, then we can definitely put together something that we can sell.  Allen Hall 2025: I think people don’t realize that that is a thing. They don’t know that that’s possible. You can’t go to Amazon and buy a blade, bolt checker that’s not there. You can buy a lot of things on  Joel Saxum: Amazon though.  Allen Hall 2025: Let me ask you about the thing. I’ve seen the sort of the unscientific blade bolt check. Where they, have you seen this Jeremy, where they hang the bolt on one end and they tap it in the other and it, and it rings right? It makes this kind of a bell noise and they think they can hear if there’s a defect inside of there. Can you hear if there’s an inclusion or some sort of crystalline defect inside this blade bolt by tapping it? That’s, it’s a resonance test and  Jeremy Heinks: I, I think you could definitely tell, you can definitely tell if there’s something going on. I think you would have to have a good control though. So if you, you have to have, you’d have to have one bid [00:27:00] vote. To balance against, I would imagine, and someone with good hearing. Yeah, I, it’s tap testing with anything is always subject to so many things. So it’s, uh, it’s better than,  Allen Hall 2025: better than nothing probably. But, uh, how much better than nothing? Is it just slightly better or is it like, well you get, at least you’re getting the worst ones out of the lot. Uh, would it even do that? Unless I had it announced to, to try it, um, I would wanna. Say either way, but you see the little tap hammers, I’ve been on site and seen the little tap hammers sitting on guys’ desks that are the, you know, the, uh, calibrated tap test tool to see for DAS, that is not an easy tool to use. And it’s not even right for all the applications because it only, it’ll see something on the surface, but where, what can’t it see?  Jeremy Heinks: So there is a regulated. Way to do tap tests. There’s, [00:28:00]it’s, as you have a certified tap test that you have to have, uh, noise levels and the environment have to be at below a certain amount, your, your guy doing, the person doing the test has to have a hearing check annually, and it has to be at a certain level. Um, the tap hammer has to be, is proportional to the thickness of material you’re looking at. ’cause if you’re looking at some, I mean, it’s only good for so, so thick. Like if you’re looking at. 10 millimeters, 15 millimeters fine. But once you get past 20, you’re gonna use a heavy hammer. And I’ve seen hammers in some plants that were probably causing damage, you know, ’cause they were so heavy, like, and they’re just, it was a piece of rebar with a ball bearing welded on the end of it, and they’re just hammering away. And it was so loud in the bay that even when they got lucky, when it crossed the dry glass area, they didn’t hear it. They just kept on rolling.  Joel Saxum: Man, I thought, I thought a tap test was literally like a technician with a, with a, like a one euro coin in their hand or something. Just like ding ding [00:29:00] d ding, ding, ding. Like, that’s my tap test. Like you got a quarter.  Jeremy Heinks: I have done a lot of tap tests, but it was like on radars where you had like two layers of carbon fiber and it was super thin and you could really hear, it works sometimes, but you just have, it’s got limitations just like any other method of inspection. So, and if people just. Allen Hall 2025: Don’t abide  Jeremy Heinks: by  Allen Hall 2025: this. If you have a technician roll into the o and m building, listen to Def Leppard on 11, then you’re probably not picking the right guy to do the tap test because it does take a lot of sensitivity to hear these minor changes. It’s not easy. Or the Lake Green, Ozzy Osborne. Yeah, right. If you see a, an Ozzy sticker on the guy’s pickup truck, probably not the right choice for the uh, tap test expert. The funniest thing ever.  Jeremy Heinks: On the aviation side, we’ve gone to so many aviation or space group areas that use tap test and it’s always the oldest guy that has the hardest hearing, that’s doing the test every time, every  Allen Hall 2025: time [00:30:00] they pass the most stuff. That’s why production doesn’t slow down. You said it, not me. I wanna expand the scope just for a minute. Uh, there’s gonna be a lot of, a lot of sites right now because of the changes in the IRA bill that are not going to be able to. Uh, get their next round of production tax credits and reapply because they’re gonna miss this window, right? So you have blades that are seven and eight years old, or turbines eight, seven, or eight years old. You’re not gonna be in that window of opportunity pretty much depending on what happens with the treasury rules. That thing is like it’s going to force operators into taking a deeper look at the health status of their turbines, maybe more than they have in the past to know, am I good for another 10 years, or if I do a little bit of preemptive maintenance on my existing fleet, can I get ’em 10 years, maybe 15 years? That’s the look I think that everybody’s trying to evaluate right now, and I think the [00:31:00] key to all of that is to actually have some NDT data. To actually look inside and to see, do I have a blade root issue that’s still early, that it’s gonna pop up at year 12? Do I have a cracking issue that I need to go take a look at? How does that factor into the planning over the next year, 18 months? For me, it was a little eyeopening when we went  Jeremy Heinks: down that and visited our friends in Australia, and that’s kind of how they live, right? With their, their wind farms. They, they have to make ’em last. And it was, it was eye-opening and I, I just had a conversation with one last week. One of the people we met down there and they were looking into, uh, main bearings, a pitch bearing, and they’re cracking, right? So these are things that can be inspected with ultrasound or other things, and we can find these cracks internally. Like this is stuff that we don’t get to see much in the US or, or, you know, markets like ours because they get replaced, right? Everything gets just, we have a throwaway attitude when it comes to blades because of, you know, repowering and other things. Um, [00:32:00] where. Places like Australia or like in the islands where we’ve got a customer, that’s not how they look at it. These things have to last 30 years, you know, or longer, you know. So, uh, inspection and preventive maintenance is, is is, uh, the way to look, way to go. It. I mean, again, oil and gas, the stuff they have has to last a long damn time. A lot. You know, they do preventative maintenance. They have repair schedules or replacement schedules, all this stuff. And maybe we gotta start looking at that stuff a little more smartly on our side. Um, and, uh, budget for more inspection on these things that we know will go bad over time. And it’s not necessarily just the blade, but other parts of the turbine as well. You know, we’ve got a a yup. Bearing we’re looking at too. And that’s, that’s a pretty large. Part you have a crack in it, but  Joel Saxum: ha bearing.  Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. So these are things that didn’t crack. So we’re looking at, uh, with different inspection methods as well. [00:33:00] So,  Allen Hall 2025: so do you think the roles of reversing that the Australian European methodology to keep turbines up and running is going to be applied to the states, and how is that going to transfer that knowledge transfer gonna work because it. The staffs in. A lot of us operators are set up for that 10 year period. Like they, they don’t really think about year 11 anymore. They haven’t for a number of years. How do they get spooled up on that and what resources are they going to need to get to year 15 and 20? If I was them, I would be reaching out to  Jeremy Heinks: our partners in Australia or Europe and ask those questions. And a lot of these comp, a lot of these large energy companies are not just us. They’re. Multiple, you know, areas of the world that they, they brought in. So they have, they should have the knowledge and the leverage in house. They’re just gonna have to connect those people or, you know, people, people, people like you guys are gonna be able to, you know, bring that knowledge and connect those people. ’cause I mean, you guys are great at connecting people for [00:34:00] sure.  Joel Saxum: That’s what we, we try to say that to everybody though, too. Every time we go to, like, Hamburg is next year, right? The, the Hamburg is to me is the best wind show in the world. Hamburgers next year. Wind Europe is coming up. Like if you’re a US operator, if you, if you’re, you name it, one of the big conglomerates that has people on both sides of the pond. Yeah. Connect up internally. Come on. Get your act together. But the other side of it is, is there’s a lot of people here that aren’t, they just don’t know. You know, there’s a lot of operators that are very large here. They don’t have anything else anywhere else. Go to Hamburg, go to Wind Europe, go, go over there, just go to the conference, see the technology, see the innovations, talk to the people, have some conversations because it will be eye-opening and you know, and, and there is another one too that I think is a very important, um, there’s some ISPs that go across the pond, back and forth, and some of these good ISPs have a lot of really good knowledge about what goes on back and forth because there’s a different operating model over there as well. There’s a lot of the. Financial asset owners that [00:35:00] just have the plants and they entrust someone later on in life to manage it for ’em. Where these ISPs have 20 vestas engineers and 20 Siemens engineers and 20 SGRE engineer or you know, all these people there. So there’s, there is a way to get this information back and forth, but you’re a hundred percent correct here in this conversation. I guess the, all the three of us here. We’re staring at, uh, a cliff that we need to figure out how to get wings on before we, we don’t want it to be like the red, the red Bull thing, where every, just into the water. We don’t wanna do that. We wanna fly up the cliff.  Jeremy Heinks: But we’ve seen, we’ve seen this too, at some of the, the o and m focused, you know, show or conferences or gatherings. The ISPs aren’t, aren’t brought in ’cause they’re scared. It turns into a sales pitch. Um, but again, I like the one we had in Australia last year. That was great. It was, hey. This isn’t a sales pitch, just tell ’em. I mean, most of us know, I mean, I, I’m gonna be up there speaking. I’m not, I don’t have to do a sales pitch. If I, if what I’m saying is valuable to somebody, they’re gonna come find me, [00:36:00] which is what happened after that. You know, people reach out, you know that they’re gonna be like, oh, that I have that issue. I’m gonna go talk to this guy. You don’t have to do a sales pitch, just say, Hey, this is what we, what we found. These are the things we ran into as we do these things. And just keep it about the, uh, about the, about the problems. That we’re facing?  Allen Hall 2025: Well, yeah, that’s gonna be the key for the next couple of years, just because a lot of the engineers and staff on the United States, uh, have not been to a lot of conferences and talk to technical people because they haven’t needed to. It’s more of, Hey, I need to keep the blade running a couple more months and then we’re gonna move on to the next project. We got a Repowering project going on. It’s been in that sort of build mode for a number of years, and that whole. Logistics, uh, internal workflow is going to change where they need to be bringing outside resources in to help them understand what they’re missing or what key components do they have over in Denmark or Germany or France that we don’t have on staff at the minute, and why do [00:37:00] they have it? One of those is going to be NDT and a lot of it, I think just because of the age of the turbines and the. I would say the era in which they were built, it’s gonna lead themselves into more inspection. That’s, I think, an avenue for C-I-C-N-D-T to explore, obviously. But I think the key is to get the engineers and the sort of the maintenance staff out into the world again, and to come to some of these conferences. Like j when Jeremy speaks, you should be there listening because he’s gonna give you all the answers in about 30 minutes of what you need to go do. That’s the key. Right?  Jeremy Heinks: Right, right. And I mean, not just myself, but anybody in a position where you’ve got knowledge and experience that would benefit the whole industry, um, you know, certain volunteering, get, get out there and uh, and pass the, you know, pass the word out. You know, it’s like, you know, we had this thing in the NDT industry where. A certain generation of the, the older guys that had all this experience, all our senior level threes, you know, back then it was, you [00:38:00] wanted to hold everything in because that was your key, that was your ticket to getting a payday. Right. But ended up is when those feasible people all retired or, or worse. Um, then though that knowledge got passed down and uh, it was all kept up. And you look at, look at the aviation industry, the fumbles they’ve had lately with quality. And that’s because of that. ’cause they don’t talk to each other, none of that. They, they this year, all these problems they’re having right now in aviation stuff that they took care of in the fifties, right. And they just forgot. So now we get, have a chance to try and not do that in the wind industry. Um, you know, if you’re an expert in something, get out there. And, I mean, it’s tough. Like I don’t like talking in front of big crowds or anything, but. It’s, uh, once you get rolling and people get engaged and with guys like you to help out, you know, it’s, it’s not a bad type. Just set the ball in the tee and let you take a whack at it. But you could be in the difference between somebody having a whole farm, uh, a wind farm, go, go down, or they have a, like we’ve come across people that have had [00:39:00] blades or turbines offline for weeks, if not months, because they have an issue they don’t know they can do anything about. And then they bring us in and like, Hey, we did the inspection. This is repairable. Or we did the inspection. You should just get rid of this blade or, or whatever. It’s just they’ve been paralyzed and that, I don’t think that’s, you know, something that needs to happen  Allen Hall 2025: either. Well, they shouldn’t be paralyzed. They should be calling C-I-C-N-D-T or going to the website, cic ndt.com. Get ahold of Jeremy, get ahold of the staff because they have a, a tremendous amount of knowledge about blades, about how to inspect them and how to keep the turbines running. Quickly, yes, it costs a little bit of money, but it’s well worth it when you have these turbines down for months on end, and I’ve seen that this year. It’s insane. They should have called. C-I-C-N-D-T and gotten their turbines back up and running. Jeremy, how can people reach you directly? Can they get ahold of you on LinkedIn?  Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, get on uh LinkedIn and just search Jeremy Hikes or you can go to our website, uh, ct.com and [00:40:00] we’ve  Allen Hall 2025: got links to uh, get ahold of us there and go to some of the wind conferences because Jeremy’s gonna be there laying down the knowledge on NDT and you won’t want to miss it. So, Jeremy, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We love having you. Thanks for having me.