The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Nordex USA has reopened its wind turbine plant in Iowa, while Alliant Energy plans to add up to one gigawatt of wind generation in the state. GE Vernova’s 18 megawatt turbine has been approved for testing and the UK has greenlit the 1.5 gigawatt Mona Offshore Wind Farm. 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 news for Iowa’s clean energy sector. Nordex USA celebrated the reopening of its wind turbine plant in West Branch, Iowa on Tuesday. The plant now employs more than one hundred workers. They’re producing the company’s first U.S.-made turbines. Manav Sharma is Nordex’s North American C.E.O. He says the company is committed to Iowa for the long term. The plant had been closed since twenty thirteen. Nordex bought the facility in twenty sixteen and spent months retrofitting it. The plant will produce parts for five-megawatt turbines. Production capacity is planned to exceed two point five gigawatts annually. The reopening comes despite federal debates about renewable energy tax credits. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds noted that sixty six percent of Iowa’s power comes from renewable energy. That’s the highest percentage in the US. Alliant Energy also has big plans for wind power in Iowa. The company filed a plan with the Iowa Utilities Commission to add up to one gigwatt of wind generation. Mayuri Farlinger is president of Alliant’s Iowa energy company. She says expanding wind energy will help them deliver reliable and cost-effective power to customers. Alliant plans to own and operate the new wind projects. The company expects the projects to create construction jobs and provide payments to landowners. They’ll also generate new tax revenue for counties where the turbines are built. The Iowa Utilities Commission is expected to make a decision in the first quarter of twenty twenty six. Norway is testing the one of world’s biggest wind turbine. Norwegian regulator N.V.E. approved GE Vernova subsidiary Georgine Wind plans for an eighteen-megawatt turbine in the municipality of Gulen. NVE says this is the largest wind turbine ever approved in Norway. It’s also the first to be licensed inside an existing industrial area. The turbine will have a rotor diameter of up to two hundred fifty meters. The maximum tip height will be two hundred seventy five meters. The turbine will undergo testing for five years before switching to standard commercial operation for another twenty five years. The United Kingdom has approved its largest Irish Sea wind farm. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband granted planning consent for the Mona offshore wind farm. The project is owned by B.P. and EnBW. It will feature ninety six turbines off northwest England. The one point five gigawatt project could power more than one million homes with clean energy. It’s expected to begin production between twenty twenty eight and twenty twenty nine. Miliband says this shows the government is backing builders, not blockers. B.P. and EnBW are also waiting for approval of a neighboring wind farm called Morgan. That decision is due by September tenth. The developers have been paying option fees of one hundred fifty four thousand pounds per megawatt per year since January twenty twenty three. Richard Sandford is B.P.’s Vice President of Offshore Wind. He says this approval brings them closer to delivering large-scale, low-carbon energy critical to the U.K.’s net zero goals. That’s this week’s top news story. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Jason Moody from GreenSpur discusses their innovative axial flux generator technology, which promises to reduce weight and complexity in wind turbines, offering greater efficiency and lower maintenance costs. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Today we’re excited to have Jason Moody, chairman of GreenSpur, joining us to discuss a generator technology that could fundamentally alter the path of wind energy. While the wind industry has been scaling up turbine sizes, we’ve hit a critical challenge. Generators are becoming massively heavy, complex, and expensive to maintain. GreenSpur is taking a different approach entirely. They perfected axial flux generator technology that can dramatically reduce weight, eliminate cooling systems. And use any type of magnet from simple faite to rare earth materials. This isn’t just another incremental improvement. It’s a completely different way of generating power that could solve some of offshore wind’s biggest headaches. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Jason, welcome to the program. Thank [00:01:00] you. Thanks a. Hi Joel. Well, let’s start off with the elephant in the room for offshore wind turbines manufacturing. Uh, there’s some fundamental challenges that are facing them as we approach sort of the 20 megawatt stage and getting further offshore. Weight becomes a big problem. Jason Moody: Yeah, it does. For, for years they’ve been getting bigger and bigger, and you can see that the industry just wants to push for that next size. But with that, the generators are getting very, very heavy. So the last direct drive generator that we evaluated was in excess of 150 tons. Now, that’s not a, not a small machine anymore, but what what we’re trying to do is introduce a new technology. That can hopefully address that problem and some others as well.  Allen Hall (2): So when you put a very heavy generator on top of a tower, that increases everything underneath of it, right?  Jason Moody: Yeah. The foundations grow exponentially. The [00:02:00]steelwork and the structure has to grow. Then the cell itself, just based on size, lot more composite parts. Everything’s bigger.  Joel Saxum: So we’re talking like here, kind of traditional offshore wind fixed bottom right. That’s an issue. The foundations have to grow, uh, exponentially to get these, to hold up this weight. But when another thing that’s happening globally, right? The big push for floating offshore wind. So if now you’re talking about putting more and more and more weight on something that’s actually dynamic, right? So that kind of, uh, what does that do to the, the whole system.  Jason Moody: That’s a, it’s a different, um, engineering challenge, but it’s mainly in the steel structure and the ballast in, in those, uh, in those systems. So the street, the steel pylon becomes very thick, becomes very heavy, uh, to hold that weight on top. But most of the time what you found in these newer next gen floating systems is they’ve gone to geared systems, which is a big move in the whole industry for both onshore, offshore, and, and everything in between. Everyone’s moving to hybrid [00:03:00] and geared systems,  Allen Hall (2): and hybrid and geared systems get even more complicated, which is the problem, right? Is that we’re, we’re trying to lower the cost of energy, but as we go bigger in scale, we sort of lose those efficiencies. It, it doesn’t scale up with the efficiencies. It actually, you start getting more complicated because the generator itself is a limitation.  Jason Moody: It is not just on electrical efficiency either. It’s, it’s limited because a lot of these generators, as they spin faster, they get hotter. And then with hotter generators, you need fancier and, and more high tech cooling systems and, and there’s another point of failure. So the LCUE really does start to suffer in these more complex advanced systems.  Joel Saxum: The size of these things too, like as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, we’re trying to scale up like. The idea of working on something, like, I think about this like working on a truck, right? You go from working on a truck or working on a car to working on, uh, a semi go from that to working on, you know, a big boat engine or [00:04:00] something of that sort. And now we’re still talking at small scale, but the tools, you need, the ability to handle and move things like it becomes exponentially more difficult. So as we get to, I know like we were talking earlier off air, Siemens has their 21 and a half megawatt machine installed. I can’t imagine the amount, the, the types of tooling, lifting mechanisms and stuff just to be able to work on the things. So that’s, that becomes even more of an impasse, especially in offshore operations as we’re trying to keep these things running. Jason Moody: Yeah. There’s a whole booming and emerging industry on the infrastructure just to move and install these parts, uh, offshore. It’s, uh, just to hoist some of this big heavy equipment up into the na cell. It’s, uh, it’s. Really quite difficult, but getting even more difficult as time goes on  Allen Hall (2): and there’s more components up tower than ever before. As we get to these bigger generators, cooling is a massive issue and if you follow, uh, all the patents by all the OEMs right now, you’ll see that they’re trying to figure out ways [00:05:00] to provide cooling up tower to the generator and all the gears and everything else moving up top. And it, it becomes a massive problem. So not only do you have a very heavy generator and relatively complex generator, now you’re adding a coolant system, which is another complicated, heavy system on top of it.  Jason Moody: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, Alan. It, it is getting more complicated and the thermal management in the new cell, it is, it’s only going to get worse. Allen Hall (2): Greens spur is doing something radically different. And I’ve been following Greensboro for, for a number of years now because, uh, you have been based in part of, been supported by ORE Catapult and you have a different generator design. It’s actually not a new concept, but maybe the implementation I would describe as new. But moving from a standard sort of two cylinder design, you have a rotor. And you have a stator on the outside, which we see in cars and everywhere. It’s basically every [00:06:00] generator or motor in the world has these two rotating, these two cylindrical pieces. Moving from that into an actual flux design. And when we talk about flux, we’re talking about the magnetic fields that are generated to make these things spin or to create power, actual has a lot of advantages that haven’t been. Taken, taken into consideration when we’re building massive wind turbines.  Jason Moody: Yeah, precisely. And thanks. Um, the, the way that Greensboro has approached this isn’t using a brand new technology. It’s, the way to describe it is to perfect it in a new application. So axial flux as a generator. Um, it’s been around a long time and the advantages of using axial flux as a generator have been well documented and known. Uh, for, for, again, a long time. But what we’ve managed to do is we’ve scaled it from what might be a desktop size, um, unit up into the multi megawatt sizes. Now we’ve [00:07:00] got, um, uh, a generator that’s, um, been tested at the ORE Catapult, and, and that’s three meters in diameter. It’s, it’s a huge machine. Um, and, and that’s some of the benefits of Axial Flux can be seen in how you control and how you can manage the, the magnets being on the tire face instead of the tire tread,  Allen Hall (2): right? And so now you have a series of discs. You have a what call a state or disc and a rotor disc, and they kind of, you can stack them together. So as you want to add more power production, you just add more discs, which, uh, is a really simple way of changing the size of a generator. But the, the key is, is that you have, uh, the coils stationary. You have the magnets on another disc, and they’re spinning around, which is what’s creating the power. You can use a lot of different magnets in this particular design. You can use [00:08:00] standard, simple off the shelf magnets or rare earth magnets. It’s sort, and it, your, the actual design is sort of ambivalent to it. Jason Moody: Absolutely. One of our, uh, one of our taglines, one of our USPS and how we’ve, um, adopted the design methodology is to be magnet agnostic. Drivetrain agnostic, which means we can be geared or direct drive even down to the, the coil material. We’re completely adaptable and scalable to whatever our clients might need. The key is it’s very quick to, to change these parameters in our modeling software so we can easily design the most optimized, uh, generator.  Allen Hall (2): You can really drive the weight down in sort of two ways. You can use rare earth magnets, much more powerful, and you can also remove the copper and put in aluminum for the coils, which drives weight down. So at the end of the day, you have and. You have a very efficient design, but you can also dump the cooling system. You don’t need a [00:09:00] fluid cooling system to create, for this generator to maintain its power output.  Jason Moody: Yeah, so if we were to go tor to toe with a traditional radial system of, let’s just pick 15 megawatt, we would expect to be 25% lighter, 40% smaller physically and nor water cooling system. We would have air cooling, water leak. That is tor to toe with an equivalent existing design out there today.  Joel Saxum: So this, it kind of brings me to a question. You, we’ve been talking of course with you, Jason, fantastic technology, but we’ve been talking about a lot of offshore heavy weight. As we get bigger as we get bigger. But can your designs be optimized? Say I, I think personally, one of the next, uh, frontiers for wind energy is, is low wind applications. Like, um, you know, like look at the United States. We’re talking like the southeast side of the United States where there’s no wind energy now, but we could optimize for its low wind speeds, five meters a second, [00:10:00] seven meters a second, things like that. Can your designs be optimized for like a low wind speed turbine as well?  Jason Moody: Yeah, that’s a great question, Joel. Now over the last sort of five years, we’ve worked with many of the ma I would say, successful vault companies. So the, the vertical access version of, of what’s currently out there and what you might see is a, a traditional turbine, but these vertical access turbines, they spin on the other axis and they’re typically used in much lower level and low or unpredictable winds. And they have a lower startup talk now, axial flux, especially our, that can be optimized. Um, they have a, a low starting talk. They have a higher efficiency, so they are very well suited for those vault applications. The challenge in that market is that there’s not many of those vault companies that have. Entered serial production yet. So we’re still nurturing a kind of nascent market, but we’re very much in there and we’re perfect partners for that type of technology. [00:11:00] Allen Hall (2): And you’ve been working on this, green Spurs been working on this for over 10 years now. Mostly with ORE Catapult. You have a, a ton of intellectual property that’s been derived out of all the work you’ve done. And now, uh, the latest, uh, information I’ve seen is that you are at TRL. Seven, which is a huge milestone. You wanna explain what TRL seven means in terms of a development cycle?  Jason Moody: So, yeah. TRL seven is a scale between one to nine, uh, with TRL one being an idea on the drawing board and TRL nine being serial production to achieve. TL one to six is building, uh, a generator all the way up to, um, kind of testing it. Seven and beyond is when you start getting into the operational environments. Now we’ve just dipped our toe into TL seven by combining all of our build experience with our new simulated experience in real [00:12:00]operational environments that have been submitted to our project, um, by, by partners, so we can then really test what our generator can do in actual turbine conditions. Allen Hall (2): Right? Which is the hardest part of any development cycle is getting real data. And once you have that real data, then you can start scaling it into what a, a full size unit would be. And that’s where everything starts to really roll. Uh, Greensboro’s been doing this a long time, which to me just validates what you’re doing and. Having watched from the outside, I’m an electrical engineer, so when I first ran across Green Spurs, like, oh, they’re doing something different. They’re thinking about the problem differently. They’re addressing the magnet problem, the rare Earth magnet problem. They’re addressing the weight problem, which is going to come up. And Joel, and this is when we were still building like eight megawatt generators. And I thinking, well, the, the future’s only gonna get bigger. This makes total sense now. Now, from a manufacturing standpoint, it [00:13:00]does involve a slightly different process than what we have been doing historically. When we’re winding these coils around these cylinders. Is it something and, and most of that work has gone offshore? Quite honestly, it’s, it’s not in the us it’s not in the uk. It’s mostly not in Europe for, for the most part. Does this open up the door now because of the sort of simplicity of it and the, the elegance of the design to be manufactured in the uk? Jason Moody: Well, a couple of years ago we were focused on direct drive technology as the rest of the industry was as well. Uh, we thought that was the future and in a direct drive configuration, these machines are hundreds of tons. The uk it’s not set up for a hundred ton manufacturing of any rotating equipment. So we never had ambitions and we never thought that it would ever come to fruition if we did. But now, if you were to use, um, the geared configurations or the hybrid drive situation, the machines become much smaller, much lighter. And I mean, [00:14:00] one of our, one of the biggest designs we’ve done is only nine tons. Now that is manufacturable in the UK and any western world. Nine ton generator and we can build that. That changes our thoughts, that changes our strategy.  Joel Saxum: I think this is an, a really important, uh, like a basically keynote from this podcast to take away. Is that what the innovations that you guys are working on that engages the industrial complex in the uk, the industrial complex in, in the eu, in the United States, wherever you want to build these things, it can be done. And one of the big problems that we hear, of course Alan and I go to. Basically every wind conference you can think of, um, you guys just finished up the global offshore wind there in the uk and, and a lot of the conversations over the last few years have been supply chain, supply chain, supply chain. And you don’t just hear it within our industry. You hear it, uh, at high government levels, you hear it, you know, rare earths is a buzzword. All of these things. So you guys have the. The idea that you can manufacture [00:15:00] locally, you can engage, you know, your, your local communities to build these things, but also you’re easing your supply chain constraints by the ability to use rare earths different kind of magnets. Um, it’s something that the rest of the, the industry just hasn’t. It’s like, it’s like they’re stuck, stuck in like the mud in the background of something we’ve been doing for 20, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, you know, the same kind of technology. And there’s something, there’s a, there’s a nice, beautiful, shiny object sitting here and nobody’s grabbed it yet. Um, but, but can you, can you talk to us a little bit about the supply chain, um, and how you guys can basically optimize that to get these things built?  Jason Moody: Yeah. Again, a really great question and one that, um, really goes back to the roots of Greensboro. We were born as a company to try and address the, the rare earth supply chain, the issue around magnet supplies and. Throughout trying to perfect our technology to work with the lowest power [00:16:00] of magnet, which we did do. Um, we stumbled upon, upon perfecting or making very good axial flux technology. So we didn’t just create a rare earth free generator, we created a really good generator, full stop. It just so happens to be magnet agnostic. Now, we’ve only talked about using, uh, rare earth magnets, the top end of the power density and the lowest phite magnets. But there’s a whole world of magnets in between that, uh, that are not explored yet. There’s a lot of development even in the US with narron. Those guys are developing some incredible, uh, new magnets. And we’ve partnered with Nron a few years back and we are one of their conduits into, into wind should they come, come up with a commercial product or available product. So, so there’s a whole lot of gap magnets that would work in our architecture that could not work in the traditional radial flux designs. Allen Hall (2): Well, let’s walk down that pathway just for a moment. Because of the [00:17:00] actual design. It’s a series of discs. So if you wanted to. Check one magnet versus type versus another. You would just be sliding a disc out, putting another disc in. If you think about the way we would make a standard generator today, it would be really complicated. It would take a long time to do that. The actual sets itself up to be a little more developmental, where you can do things on the fly that you wouldn’t be able to do on a standard generator radial design.  Jason Moody: Yeah, you’re right at a conceptual level. Um, in practice it’s not as easy as sliding one out, sliding one in, but on a conceptual level it’s an awful lot easier than, um, than a radio system. Yeah. Because a radio system, you have to change pretty much the whole design. With an axial, you are only changing one plate.  Allen Hall (2): Right. And is there, I assume there’s a, a, a good bit of software that goes along with it, which is where some of the efficiency comes from and from power electronics, I assume both of those. What are [00:18:00] those sort of milestones in terms of software development and maybe even, even on the electronic side that help make an a design more efficient?  Jason Moody: So there are, there are several elements that have helped us unlock the, the, the real power of axial flux in our technology. Uh, one of them is we have the ability to use an adaptation of the whole back rear. For those who don’t know what the Halback Array is, it’s a a special way to place the magnets, to manipulate the flux in the direction that you wanted. So instead of flux from a magnet going in both directions, half of it wasted half of it at your coils. We force it all up. The corals increase the power density where we need it, so we can use that. Whereas you cannot use a haul back effectively in a radial design. So all of a sudden we can use these low powered magnets and any and anything in between. But of course, you can also do the same technique with the the powered markets, with the Neos. End up with an incredibly power dense machine. [00:19:00] Now that’s an, that’s an exploration for a little bit later on. It shows that our roadmap is, is far from over. We can improve even further than where we are now.  Allen Hall (2): And the simulation tools you developed because you were at ORE Catapult and have built a generator of a significant size, how refined have, have those models been over the last year or two? ’cause it sounds like you really have honed in on. What a particular magnet could do, what a particular coil setup could do. How we set this up, what a gearbox would be. How, how, how defined or how high level is that competency on the simulation side Right now,  Jason Moody: we spend a lot of time, uh, developing what we call our multiphysics model. That has the electromagnetic modeling. It has the thermal, it has the structural all embedded into a couple of different tools now that iteratively feeds itself until we come up with the right design. Now, how that correlates with [00:20:00] reality is within a few percentage points. So we simulate, uh, simulated what we did on the test bench in ORE, and it was predicted very, very closely. We have a good degree of confidence that what we see at the computer screen is reality.  Joel Saxum: So I want to ask you a couple questions about like operational things, because. The, the, the idea that you can get rid of cooling systems, that’s amazing because I know, like here, I’m in Texas, right? So that’s a big problem for all of these guys. They’re going up tower just with air compressors to blow out radiators to keep these things cool. Uh, but you’re, you’re reducing the complexity. And in that, my mind goes, that makes operations a lot easier and maintenance a lot easier. What does that look like for the lifetime of, of one of these axial flux generators? As in, you know, a, a serial product in a turbine,  Jason Moody: in an axial flux permanent magnet, iron list generator. ’cause we have no, we have no iron losses and [00:21:00] things we have with iron list status. There are no wear parts, zero. Nothing touches apart from the bearings. The only thing that wears is the bearings. So. Because we’ve designed this axial flux, uh, machine or all of our machines around standard, well-known name, brand bearings that are already used in the industry, the lifetime is tied to the bearing and they are maintainable as well. So when you take away the cooling, uh, failures, that could be as, as associated with quite a large portion of the failures out in there, and you take the already known lifecycle and lifetime of a bearing. It can be, it can be no worse than the existing tech. It can only be better. And the inference is, I mean, we haven’t got one in the field to tell you permanent to tell you exactly, but the inference is it cannot be worse, but it will be better is what we’re, what we’re trying to articulate.  Joel Saxum: I mean, you’re removing [00:22:00] heat, right? And heat is a big failure in any kind of mechanical component. I mean, that’s  Jason Moody: when we got the, the latest report back from the RE Catapult, the fact that it came back so cool. Um, was just amazing to us. We thought it would come back cool, but it’s come back as such a, a thermally efficient machine that, uh, it surprised us. Allen Hall (2): Let, let me take it into the electrical domain. Also on an axial versus a radio design. There’s a lot of radio generator failures that are due really fundamentally to the design. You have to put. Coils in a certain way, do they have these tight bins. They’re going around these sharp corners. The way you have to try to insulate ’em to protect them, and all that eventually fails. Dead stop. We know it’s, that’s where the failure modes are. That’s why there’s a number of companies that are out servicing for those events and why you see a lot of generator repair shops trying to fix those known failures. Aio, from what I’ve seen on [00:23:00] your design. Addresses almost all of those upfront to to increase that lifetime. It’s crazy when you think about how much time and energy we spend fixing generators, because we knew when we bought it, it was gonna fail in this particular way. Get it from the bearings or from the electrical work. It doesn’t really matter. You still have to this generator out and do fixes. Axial removes a lot of that. So from an operation side, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about. Thousands of dollars a year, tens of thousands of dollars a year in terms of reduced maintenance costs. What, what  Jason Moody: realm are we at here? I couldn’t possibly estimate how big it is, but it’s certainly higher than tens of thousands of dollars. It’s uh, it’s a big number. Yeah. Just to flesh out a little bit on that, um, on that comment about the coils. So in traditional radials, you have really complex winding paths, and that’s a lot of the time. That’s where you get your short circuit failures. I. [00:24:00] With what we’ve done, we use flat aluminum bar, and then it’s anodized and then it’s fully potted and encapsulated. This can, it’s fully protected. From both the environment and itself.  Allen Hall (2): That’s a huge thing. I know when we talk, we don’t talk a lot about generators on the show, Joel, and just because we just know that how they perform, they been around over a hundred years. There’s no new innovations. No there. There is none. There is literally none. Right. So we all come in from an o and m perspective on wind turbines operations, knowing I’m going to have to rip out two, three generators maybe a year depending on the size of the farm and like. Get a crane and do all this stuff, and it’s like inherent into the LCOE Greenburg’s attacking that fundamental understanding of how we think about LCOE. You wouldn’t need a rewind in  Jason Moody: the maintenance schedule for this generator.  Allen Hall (2): Well, and, and I think this gets, really, gets down to the core of what, uh, [00:25:00] Greensboro is trying to accomplish now, is that you’re changing the way we think about creating power at the fundamental level, at the generator level. What does this look like? What do you see this in, in 2, 3, 4, 5 years? What do you think Greensboro is doing and where can’t it be implemented? You know, first where, where are we going first? Here  Jason Moody: we’ve taken this technology as far as we can reasonably take it without one of the big players standing up and listening. And now it’s time for them to really help us along the way and put our generator in one of their turbines. We need the help of one of these, uh, one of these industrial partners to come on board, get in touch with us, and, um, we’ll see where it takes us. But I’m quite sure it’s gonna revolutionize the industry  Allen Hall (2): and the UK’s willing to invest in this. If more recently you’ve seen efforts by the government and the crown of state willing to put money where their mouth is and to support companies like Greens Spur, which [00:26:00] is the right thing to do. So you’re not going alone on this mission to create this new. Type of generator, maybe an old type of generator. It’s been around a long time, but to, to put it in, into wind turbines and to implement it the way that it needs to be done. This is remarkable. And, uh, I, I know we, we, we talk to a lot of technology companies and, and they’re, and they’re helping, right? Everybody’s trying to help lower the cost of energy. But when you attack that generator, you are going at the heart of costs. That is where the industry needs to go. And I’m so glad everybody at Greensboro has been dedicated to do this. ’cause it’s not easy.  Jason Moody: It’s been playing in the land of giants, but I think we’ve really got something and that’s what’s driven us for so long. Allen Hall (2): So if you’re a large operator or you’re an OEM and you haven’t looked at axial flux generators, you need to be doing that now. You can always Google Greens Spur that are on the internet. There’s a ton of information on the website, also on the LinkedIn page, so you [00:27:00] can follow the development there. Jason, thank you so much for being on the program. We love what Greens Spur is doing and let’s stay in contact because as things develop, uh, we want to educate the world and make sure that everybody hears all the excited things that are happening at Greens Spur. Jason Moody: Perfect. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much guys.

We discuss Statkraft’s withdrawal from floating wind projects in Norway, Valero’s $23 million Series A funding, and the varying quality of blade repairs in the field. The Babbitt Ranch wind farm is this week’s 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 Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Phil Totaro from California and Joel Saxum down in Austin, Texas. And Rosemary Barnes will join us shortly from the Southern Hemisphere. Uh, a number of news articles this week that we want to talk about Stack Craft. Let’s lead off there, up in Norway. So Norwegian energy giant Stack Craft has announced it will withdraw from the upcoming floating wind tenor for the U Sierra North area as part of a broader cost cutting strategy. Uh, the company, which is Europe’s largest renewable energy operator, we’re also halt new offshore wind project [00:01:00] development to focus on what CEO, uh, Bergit Ringsted AL calls near term profitable. Strategies unquote. Like solar? No. Come on, solar, wind. There we go. And batteries In fewer markets the decision follows. Stack craft’s early announcement and may stop New green Hydrogen developments signaling a strategic shift toward more immediately profitable renewable energy investments fill. Does this slow down some of the offshore wind work, particularly up in Norway, and it does seem like. Floating will be the future here, but if Stack craft’s not gonna be involved and it’s right in their backyard, uh, what does this say to the industry? Phil Totaro: It doesn’t send the best signal, but it’s also coming in a time when, you know, as we record this, the, the Norwegians just released, uh, four new, uh, wind lease areas with potentially up to 20 different, uh, project [00:02:00] sites. So. It seems like there’s a lot of enthusiasm and obviously they’ve got the wind resource up there to be able to do a lot of floating offshore wind. If they can work out with their military, you know, the radar interference and all that, uh, there’s no reason they shouldn’t want this capacity because it’s, you know, power that they can use to balance their hydro and power that they can offload to, you know, other Scandinavian countries because there’s plenty of transmission already and they’re, they’re already. Planning on building more. So, um, it’s just whether or not they have the appetite to put the market mechanisms in place to, to actually support these, uh, you know, these, these tenders.  Joel Saxum: I think appetite’s the right term here, Phil, when you say that because, uh, you know, and as the CEO is saying in this, in this article we’re getting, we’re gonna focus more on near term profitable technologies. So doing things that they know make money, that are proven to make money. You know, we all love the idea of floating [00:03:00] wind, which is, you know, what they’re, they’re pulling out of this project, your floating wind project. However, nothing’s really so sussed out yet. Nothing’s really sorted. There’s not a specific foundation that works best. There’s not, uh, a, you know, an interconnect that works best. There’s not a turbine model that’s out there that this is the one, this is what we run with. You don’t have support from major OEMs like, you know, oh, do we pick a Siemens one or a Vestas one, a GE one for offshore? Like we have for fixed bottom offshore. So I get it like in, in, you know, we’re in a stress capital market where we’re still sitting on high interest rates and, and everybody wants to do something that’s more profitable for them. That’s proven right now, um, in my mind is a good strategy. You know, it would be, you don’t want ’em to pull out of it. You would love to see some of the, the big guys put some of their r and d budgets and keep this floating thing moving. ’cause that’s a good move for the future. But. I mean, it’s all about making money and, and, and de-risking yourself. So like it’s understandable.  Allen Hall: Well, is [00:04:00] still involved in that URA North effort and they’re working on one of the larger float taste floated wind turbine projects off the coast of Scotland. Green Volt, right? Yeah. Green Volt. Right. And I’m wondering if CRA feels. Like the technology isn’t developed as far as they would like it to be, and companies like Farrun, which are really heavily involved in floating, are going to do the dirty work and then everybody else is gonna follow behind their lead. Joel Saxum: Yeah, that could be right. Because that’s what, that’s what’s needed. Someone needs to go and put the money in this and, but it’s going to be risky. Right? So it’s what’s your, what’s your risk appetite? Um, and if we’re talking about risk and offshore wind, I mean, we’ve seen what’s happened in the last six months, a year, so someone has to really. Uh, I, I guess the, the joke term in Wisconsin, we says, pull, pull up your big boy pants and, and go and go make this happen. So maybe that is, that is of, of our gro We’ve, you know, we’ve spoke with them on the podcast and that’s what they’re focusing on. So maybe it takes someone like them to [00:05:00] really make this thing happen. Allen Hall: Well, Gros at the minute is it’s discussing what type of term they wanna put offshore. This is where the Ing Yang discussion comes into play, because rag is. I don’t know if they’ve selected them or down selected Bing Yang as one of the potential providers of turbines, but that’s created a lot of chaos, at least temporarily in the UK because the United States is super concerned about a Chinese wind turbine off the  Phil Totaro: coastline of the uk. Joel was talking about de-risking, uh, and originally for this project, stat Craft was partnered with uh, ocean Winds, which is, um. Uh, EDPR and Eng g and Acre, uh, which was originally mainstream offshore when they originally, um, started making the, the bids and those two, uh, other groups or three technically, if you know, um, Eng G and, and EDPR. As well as Acre. They had [00:06:00] already previously pulled out of this partnership, so you didn’t have, you don’t have this, this de-risking capability anymore. Stat Craft was basically having to take this whole thing on by themselves, and they probably weren’t finding any other partners that were particularly interested in diving in. With them at that point. So I think, you know, them pulling the plug, it’s, it’s almost like what happened. Um, you know, when, uh, with the Atlantic Shores project in the United States, you know, when, when one partner pulls out, the other partner can’t really make it a go, so the other partner is gonna pull the plug and then the whole project is basically dead. So. That’s just what happens. Unfortunately, when you’re not able to de-risk the project  Allen Hall: Over in the uk, they’re de-risking a couple of larger projects. The Crown of State has selected Ecuador and Gwent Glass, which is a joint venture between EDF and ESB. Uh, they’ve been selected as the preferred bidders for floating wind projects in the Celtic Sea.[00:07:00] Now, each developer was awarded 1.5 gigawatts of capacity. Which is quite a bit in their respective development areas for an annual option fee of 350 pounds per megawatt. And the Crown Estate launched this fifth offshore wind leasing round in February of last year. Originally offering three areas with up to 4.5 gigawatts total capacity. This is a big deal because you’re bringing in Ecuador and E-D-F-E-S-B. And it’s going to really expand the amount of energy produced from Floating Winds. So, although, um, stack Craft is not gonna be involved up north off the coast of Norway, a bunch of developers are gonna be really involved off the coast of the uk. This has implications. I think the, the floating wind difficulty, at least the engineering difficulty is gonna be solved by the United Kingdom and maybe France, [00:08:00] don’t you think, Phil?  Phil Totaro: Yeah, I mean, France has had, you know, a couple of demonstration projects now, um, for a little while, and they just got their first kind of, people still refer to it as kind of pre-commercial. It’s like 30 megawatts worth of, uh, floating offshore capacity now with, uh. A small, small project. Um, and the second one’s on the way, uh, Japan’s been investigating floating foundation technology. We’ve even had some, some stuff here in the States with the University of Maine looking at this. I mean, everybody’s been looking at floating for 15 years. Um, but the reality of it is, it’s. There’s plenty of technical solutions out there. None of them have achieved commercial viability yet because nobody’s been willing to invest in scaling it up. Um, and the fact that we haven’t really directly involved the oil and gas companies who have, you know, abundant experience with tension like platforms, uh. Bill confounds [00:09:00] me because, you know, if you, if you leverage the capabilities that they already have, you’re gonna get them more interested because it’s gonna give them an opportunity to leverage the technology that they already have heavily invested in, um, that we can use for, for, you know, a floating offshore wind platform. So it, it’s always been a bit head scratching the way that the industry’s gone about floating, but. Absolutely. You know, the, the uk um, France and Japan are probably the three likeliest candidates to, to do the majority of the risk reduction on, uh, that technology platform that’s gonna allow it to scale up and, and become more useful in the rest of the world. Joel Saxum: Feel like completely agree with you. Uh, we’ve been talking about that for a while, right? Um, why are these, some of these companies not getting involved? And the one that I have seen get involved is French company. I. Technique. Used to be technique FMC, uh, they invested in X one wind. And if you know anything about technique, technique is.[00:10:00] Man, when they were FFMC, they had 50,000 employees worldwide, but they do some of the largest offshore oil and gas installations around the world. Deep water, shallow water, construction, you name it. They even have their own vessels to do construction, like they’re that big. Um, and the engineering power that they have is, it’s massive. And they’re a French company. So French, EDF, the, the Northern France kind of demonstrated projects and what it was technique energy’s invested in. Um. It was X one, wind XX one, like one of the platform things like, hey, about 10 or 20% of that thing. I don’t remember exactly what it was, maybe 15% of it. Um, but I expected some of that, like those plays to continue on some of like, you know, the SI PEs and more of like the acres and that to get involved more heavily on the, on the innovation side because that’s what they’ve done in oil and gas, right? They’ve done the, the pre-feed work to make these things happen in deep water. So. They have the engineering prowess, the experience, and the the know-how to do these things. And it’s just kind of like, [00:11:00] where are they at? Why aren’t they playing? You know, why aren’t they planning at a bigger level? Is that, that’s my question. Allen Hall: Well, is it happening behind the scenes that we just haven’t heard of it yet? Because that’s the feeling for as much money as being poured into these projects, there must be a technical solution. At least validated on the engineering side, you’d think. I  Joel Saxum: did see a press release just the other day. There was a company called en and EN was making a, basically what they described as A-A-U-S-B-C type connection for, for mooring and power connection for floating wind. So it was like an in a universal, like this is how you plug it in, this is how you connect it. It mores it, it sends power controls, all this stuff. Great technology. They just had, they were just. Purchased, I think by, um, Aurora Energy Services, and Aurora is another one of those players that, that does the dev, that does a lot of dev work offshore. So you’re seeing some of these technologies get to a certain level, and I don’t know what that technology was, if it was TRO four, TRO six, I don’t know, [00:12:00] but they were scooped up and that that now that IP rest was in a larger offshore development company that could make a move with some of these things. So. There is some of that stuff, like you said, going on behind the scenes, Alan, I’m sure. Um, we just haven’t seen it that much. If, if anybody wants to talk, call us ’cause we would gladly have you on the podcast.  Allen Hall: It, it does seem like there’s a number of transactions happening that are quiet, that when you piece them all together looks like a solution and I’m glad to hear it as wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS win.com today. If you haven’t downloaded your latest [00:13:00] PES WIN magazine, you need to do that now. It’s free and it’s full of great articles. Uh, I wanna highlight one from FT. Technologies. So if you haven’t heard FT Technologies, and I don’t know you believe, or Rock, uh, Ft. Technologies makes the, uh, the, I wouldn’t call it an ultrasonic. Wind speed sensor, but it uses sort of ultrasound to create a standing wave that that can then detect, uh, wind speeds very accurately. So it doesn’t have the little nanometer spinny piece to it. It, there’s no moving parts, which makes it so elegant and simple and it measures, uh, wind speed very accurately. In fact, it can me measure wind speed’s up to Joel now. Hold on. 200 miles per hour.  Joel Saxum: Wait, I, I hope we’re not seeing those at a wind farm, to be honest with you. Um, but I, but I think that though, there’s something that’s really important here that I would love to see more of. Components in the wind industry go to [00:14:00] classical, an anemometer, and I might say that wrong. Allen Hall: Anemometer,  Joel Saxum: they’re moving, right? It’s a moving part. Like you see ’em, like you can, you could buy the weather station for your house. It looks the same as the old school ones that are on these turbines that sit there and spin. You remove that, that o and m risk by using the FT technology sensors, right? There’s no moving, there’s no moving parts. They’re, you know, they’re not gonna get affected by ice or snow buildup or heavy rains or like dust or like, there’s. There or lightning, there’s no bearings inside of it to go out. Right. So what we’re, what they have done here is something that we should be focusing as an industry on all things wind industry, wind energy is low maintenance, something that just goes out there and works. And that’s what I like to see.  Allen Hall: Well, there are OEMs that don’t use FT. Technologies. Ologies. Anemometer sensors, which is insane. Oh yeah. That would be an, that would be  Joel Saxum: in a turbine, RFP if I was writing one.  Allen Hall: Right, exactly. If it, if it doesn’t come with a turbine, you need to specify it. And if you’re in a repower situation, you [00:15:00] need to dump the spinny anemometer thingy and put Ft technologies on your turbine because who wants bad anemometer? Wind measurements? I, Joel, you and I’ve seen it, and you go to the OM buildings, a lot of times there’s a whole pile of broken anemometers on the, of the spinning kind, because they either fail from lightning or the bearings have gone bad or something has happened. Why would you even mess with it? Just buy the right technology. It’s proven that they’ve been around a long time. Ft. Technologies read the article. Go to PES Wind. Download your copy of PES Wind UH, magazine. You won’t regret it. Swiss Aero Robotics Company, Valero has raised $23 million in series A funding to scale. Its autonomous inspection robots for industrial infrastructure. Now, Joel, you have visited their facilities in Switzerland, correct? Uh, and we’ve had ’em on the podcast. Valero makes the drone that can do ultrasonic measurements, but also can. [00:16:00] Do resistance measurements on your lightning protection system. The robot is pretty cool ’cause it kind of can orient itself in in any direction. And then it can apply force on sensors, which you totally need so it can replace a technician, the. The approach is really slick. $23 million is a lot of money. That, that’s would say there’s, uh, a reasonable growth, a reasonable growth pattern for Valero to receive that kind of funding.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. I visited the team, like you said last, uh, I think it was last spring. I was over in their offices in, in Zurich there. Um, and I’ll tell you what, $23 million is gonna go a long ways for this team. They had, they had a great office, uh, set up with kind of the front office meeting spaces and a lot of tech room, right? A ton of space for developers. A really cool glass enclosed kind of, um, test facility where you could watch the tests real time as a, as a viewer through glass. And they’re flying the drones inside. A lot of really neat things. But [00:17:00]one of the reasons that they’re, they’re of course gonna be able to expand really well, is we like what they do for wind, right? They have the LPS inspection. Uh, technology where they, it’s semi-autonomous. They can go up that once they see the receptor, they can just hit a button and it will semi autonomously, uh, orient the drone in the right way so it gets the right pressure on the blade. Fantastic. They can also do NDT, but we’re just talking about wind ’cause that’s what we like ’em from. They do a lot of things for all kinds of industrial inspections. So oil and gas, uh, traditional power, you name it, manufacturing facilities. Um, they can inspect it all. So, uh, kudos to the team over there. Uh, I know they’ve been making some inroads into the states. We’ve heard a lot about, uh, some of the LPS testing they’ve done in the wind sector. Um, and yeah, like I said, $23 million is a lot of money gonna go a long ways for these guys, so, so congratulations.  Allen Hall: Where do you think the majority of their income is gonna come from now? Is it gonna come from oil and gas and all the measurements they’re doing on steel tanks and, and that sort of. Product.  Joel Saxum: It’s NDT and Oil and [00:18:00] Gas, it’s NDT and oil and Gas. And, and, and the, and the way that they’ve set the Valero, Valero as a company, the Valero t drone, it, it’s really, you set up for NDT Well, because it’s a, it’s a platform, right? So it’s a platform. You can put a phase array unit, you can put a different, you know, single, single phase unit on it. You can put all kinds of different technologies and they are actively integrating all kinds of different technologies because if you know anything in a non-destructive testing space. Um, it’s all about like, Hey, we’ve got this problem. We need this type of kit. We got this problem, we need this type of kit. You know, we need to be able to see through, uh, paint coating. So we need phased array. We need, we’re on bare steel so we can use this. We’re on a composite, so we need this. And they’ve done a really good job at setting that system up to be able to utilize all of those technologies. Um, so yeah, I think that they’ll. And let’s be honest, oil and gas companies pay more. So that’s a good space to be in.  Allen Hall: So let’s put this in perspective with the aeros. Uh, was it series B [00:19:00] with Aeros and then with Valero getting their series A. For the longest time in wind, there wasn’t the last couple of years, there hasn’t been a lot of investment from outside companies into Windish companies, but the robotic sector still seems to be humming quite nicely. Joel Saxum: Don’t forget 20 million for Sky Specs last fall either. Exactly. So you’re seeing Sky Skys specs with new drone technology. They’ve got the new four site drone out. They’ve got their internal crawlers moving. Eros has got internal crawler Gen three I think it is. Plus all the crazy things that they’re doing. Robotics, LEP, blade repair, AI integration, really cool stuff. So Y Combinator, of course, if you’re in the startup space or startup networks, you kind of know Y Combinator, they’re, they’re cream of the crop type platform to launch. They put out a list every year that says, this is what we’d like to see from people applying to the Y Combinator. I think they’re on like Y Combinator, cohort 20 something or whatever. And if you look at that, it was AI and [00:20:00] robotics. Every request, that’s what they wanted. AI and robotics. AI and robotics. So it’s not just AI and robotics in the wind space that we’re seeing the sky specs, the Valero Theones getting the money. That is a larger trend in the investment world. What  Allen Hall: do you think the market cap is for the robotic repair business? In wind alone, it depends who cracks the ability to do cat five repairs first. You think that’s gonna be the marker?  Joel Saxum: I think if you can c if you can, if you can s ’cause right now you can’t do a robot as it sits today. I don’t care whose robot it is, cannot do everything a technician can do. So you still need technicians and that will be a, that, that will be that way for a while. I, I think, um, it’s going to be hard to get to the point where we’re doing cat five robotic repairs. Um, I think it’s gonna happen for sure. I think probably Aeros is the closest. Right? But once you can do that,  Allen Hall: isn’t the aeros approach is to catch. Problems, especially blade repair problems at sort of Cat two and CAT three and [00:21:00] not let it to get to Cat four and five because the robotic solution is so much simpler.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think that’s everybody’s solution, right? Everybody would like to do that. Catch it at Cat two and three.  Allen Hall: The problem with the Cat two, cat three catches that you just don’t have enough technicians to go out and do it, and the the pricing isn’t right. And I, we might as well discuss it because it’s the, um, discussion of Weather Guard at the minute is. How much quality is going into some of these repairs in the states? I, I will leave, I will leave the rest of the world out of it for a minute. I think in the United States the quality varies quite a bit and, and the composite repairs, I’m not supremely confident, uh, that we’re getting the. Best repairs that we could for the money we’re spending. Maybe that’s the way to phrase it. Phil Totaro: Well, but is that because they are triaging? [00:22:00] Allen Hall: I don’t think that’s it, Phil. I, I think it’s a skill level and just a knowledge.  Joel Saxum: I, it’s, so, so that’s what I wanna bring, uh, I’m gonna mention our friend Alfred Crabtree Blade Blade Repair Academy, because he knows a ton of this stuff, right? And he’s told me, you know, basically for someone on ropes or someone in the field. Five years is about max. You see someone that’s been on ropes for seven, eight years, they’re a dinosaur, right? So, but, but now let’s, let’s switch that to, uh, and something simple that we all understand. A car, a car repair technician. So you bring your vehicle in to get fixed. A lot of times that technician’s been wrenching for 15, 20 years. Those are the people that know this stuff right there. There’s a bunch of experience there. They’re not gonna throw someone who’s been, uh, you know, working on cars for a year to switch your engine out or to do a, you know, but that, but that happens, right? Like I, I talked to someone in the field the other day and that was a rope tech, and this was his, his [00:23:00] second summer. This, this gentleman was fantastic. Met him in the field. He walked out out of their, uh, rope access exclusion zone, did a JSA before we even approached it was, he was awesome. However, second year technician and he was doing a CAT four repair. Uh, that to me is like, whew.  Allen Hall: It’s a little scary. And, and in Europe they don’t tend to treat it that way. They’re, it tends to be a much longer cycle of working in wind turbine and blade repair. You see a lot of technicians come over from Europe that have. More than five years, generally speaking, and those are, the technicians get assigned to these more complicated tasks.  Rosemary Barnes: There’s a huge difference in working conditions between the US and Europe. Actually, uh, one time when I was doing a training course in Sweden, I think it was like an advanced hub rescue training course. There was a guy there who had worked, um, as a wind turbine technician in the us and he was upset because he didn’t get enough time with his family. [00:24:00] Basically. He was just on the road all the time. So he took a job in Sweden instead. So he would be able to see his family in America more because he got, you know, six weeks annual leave and a lot of public holidays and, and all that sort of thing. Proper sick leave as well. Um, and you know, they are actually in Europe worried about your, um. Y you, you know, making sure that you don’t wear your body out in, in four or five years doing a hard job. You know, they, um, it’s still hard work there. It’s not like it’s ever gonna be an easy job, but in general, they care more about making sure that you don’t get sick from work and even often that you enjoy your work. You know, like that, that, that’s actually an important, um, thing. So we can argue about, um, where Europe is at relative to the US in terms of, um. Competitiveness and, you know, the hunger to get, uh, you know, innovative startups to work. And so I don’t think it’s like Europe is all better and the US is all worse. But it doesn’t surprise me at all that you would have a short, [00:25:00] short lifespan in a hard job like wind turbine technician in the US compared to compared to Europe. 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.  Phil Totaro: Alan asked the question before, how big is this market? If you’re just talking about inspections, that’s a few hundred million a year. But like Joel mentioned, if you’re talking about being able to do repairs all the way up through Cat four and eventually cat five, that’s gonna end up being worth, you know, several billion. I mean, just blade repair alone in the United States is on an annual basis about 1.2 to 1.3 billion a year. [00:26:00] So, you know, there’s, there’s certainly a market for this.  Joel Saxum: I, I think Alan, you, you started this conversation about, you know, what are we seeing in the field and is it, is it up to snuff? And I got, I gotta say in generally no, from my seat, no. Um, I don’t, I don’t think that, yeah, I don’t think that we’re getting the best quality in the field that we, we should in general,  Allen Hall: which opens up the door to robots.  Rosemary Barnes: I do anecdotally, um, hear people, you know, concerned that the same blade that was repaired a couple of years ago is now having a repair in. A very similar place and, um, you know, but no one’s ever, no one’s ever really sure if that’s the exact same problem or something similar because they don’t document well enough. I don’t think it’s a problem that, you know, someone with two years experience is doing a cat four repair. That, that, to me, there’s nothing wrong with that. If it, the processes are well, well designed and well, um, like the work instructions are all good and the quality control process is appropriate. Uh, [00:27:00] you know, like category four versus category two, it’s only usually, you know, a difference in the number of layers that you’ve gotta remove or just like, how important It’s that you get it right, but honestly, you should be getting it right e every time, no matter what, you know, how severe that the, the damage was. There’s no. There’s no reason not to. It’s not faster really to do a, um, you know, a bad repair than a, a good one. Um, well, I mean, I guess it depends on what kind of bad repair you do. You, you could, you could do, you, you could just whack a bandaid over the top instead of grinding away. I guess that would be a, would be faster. But anyway, that aside, like, I, I don’t, I don’t think that there’s any problem with that per se, but the implementation of it, if it’s not right, then you could see problems. You don’t. Want processes that mean that you have to rely on individual judgment and remembering to do the right thing and, you know, noticing something that you wouldn’t, you know, you’re not told to notice in the work instruction. So I think that it’s probably processes that are to blame if you’ve got problems with, [00:28:00] um, repairs needing to be redone rather than specific repairers.  Joel Saxum: But it’s, it’s the same, it’s the same breath too, Rosemary like, that’s great technician wise, but that means that that engineer who designed the process needs to be properly educated, knowledgeable about it and the process. I can almost guarantee you at these ISPs that there’s not a process engineer reviewing the qa, QC methodology and stuff. It’s kinda like, this is just how we do it.  Rosemary Barnes: The repairs should be certified. What  Joel Saxum: does, what does it, what does that, what does that mean?  Rosemary Barnes: It means that the, yeah, the repair method has been certified to bring the blade back up to design intent. Allen Hall: OEM won’t even share the instructions. Right? They won’t even tell you what the layup is. The materials, it’s definitely not happening.  Rosemary Barnes: And then for, um, small, small repairs, then, you know, you don’t need OEM involvement. There’s just, you know, like there’s standard, uh, you know, like, um, chafer angles and there’s lots of, lots of standards involved in how much you need to overlap and, and all that sort of thing. So [00:29:00] for a, a small standard repair. It, you know, e everything is, is straightforward for something complicated where it’s in, you know, on the main laminate or, um, it’s over a web or it’s really huge. You just, you simply do need engineering to make sure that that’s gonna bring your blade back up to design intent. And if you can’t do that, then, you know, that’s, um, yeah, that’s a big risk you’re taking and I hope people are doing that mindfully, uh, to, you know, the money that they’re saving by going that route is, um, worth the risk that that adds.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, a lot of ’em are basically like, once you get a, a cohort to agree, like, ah, the ISPs engineer says this is how we should do it, and this is how we’ve done it in the past. And someone from the asset owner says, that looks about right. That’s, uh, what I think we could do too. And they go, all right,  Allen Hall: do it. Are we measuring the quality out in the field somehow?  Rosemary Barnes: I would at least wanna see people keeping track of where, like what blade, what span wise and cord wise location was a repair done and when, and then, you know, keep that in [00:30:00] a database and then making sure that the same ones aren’t coming up over and over. I think that would be like a really good step to see if you’ve got a problem. I don’t think that you can really start to tell if you’ve got a problem until you’re at least tracking where the, um. Where the damages are across your fleet and doing Let some, you are gonna need some sort of statistical analysis to see if what you’re seeing is, um, random chance or if something is going on. Allen Hall: Isn’t that what Skys Spec’s Horizon system is doing is tracking repairs and then looking in the future because they’re doing all the inspections, they can see if that repair is held up or not. And I wonder if there’s any numbers. On the amount of repairs that have failed over time.  Joel Saxum: I’m sure I, I think at the bigger operators, the more advanced ones, right? Like your next arrows, your rws, your edfs, they’re tracking this stuff. Um, EDF for sure, we know Segala, they’re definitely doing that. Um, but the, the mechanism that I’ve seen in, I like this one and it’s not directly an engineering one, and this is the difference. [00:31:00] Uh, COPQ cost support quality. So it as an ISP, if you’re tracking the amount of times you have to go back to fix something from a quality issue, um, you know, when a lot of, a lot of ISPs will give a one year, two year warranty against worksmanship on their things. They’re not gonna warranty a failure, but they’ll warranty something in general that when you start to track that, that. That metric of cost, support quality on a commercial side, then you start to see, okay, if we do have an engineering problem or not, you can track it that way. So it’s a, it’s a checks and balances, judicial, legislative kind of thing, right? Where the commercial side can check the engineering side. And if the engineering side hasn’t been checking themselves, um, that COPQ is a good metric to watch it.  Phil Totaro: Everybody has a certain amount of budget that they can spend on operations and maintenance on an annual basis anyway, and so it basically comes down to triage and they’ll decide, you know, I, I [00:32:00] guess what I’m saying is like they’ll do a repair and say that it’s good enough. And it might not be like factory restored and factory certifiable like Rosie’s talking about, but it’ll be good enough to be able to, to get the turbine back up and running because at the end of the day, they care about availability, not about the quality of a repair or, or if they’re comparing the two, that the availability is always gonna win. Allen Hall: Joel and I have been talking to a couple of people about this when the production tax credit finally rolls off and Repowering stops at 10 years. Does that change, that type of repair where they’ll just put a, a bandaid on it to get to the 10 years and replace the blade set?  Phil Totaro: Yeah. ’cause then you need ROI outta your blade, your repairs a hundred percent. And we’re gonna see what, what happens. Although, keep in mind with the PTC, I mean, we’ve been here before where, you know, it goes away, it comes back again and there will be a new administration at some point and a new congress. So just keep that in mind. But in the [00:33:00] meantime, like if they’re talking about ramping it down, that is necessarily gonna reduce the amount of Repowering projects that are commercially viable. Because some Repowering is just, if they don’t have the full value of the PTC, they can’t do the repowering. So that means they’re gonna either have to life extend, they’re gonna end the project either early or you know, at the planned end of asset life. And that’s gonna be about it. Um, and you’re gonna hope that you get something. I, I, I think the reason that we’ll see some life extension is because asset owners are gonna wanna try to wait it out to get to the, another Congress that’s gonna extend the PTC again. And that’s what everybody’s kind of banking on at this point. Let’s just play this out  Allen Hall: just for a minute because I, I wanna go back to the market cap discussion. If PTC rolls off and the repowering rolls off. Does a market cap for robotics then go up significantly?  Joel Saxum: Yeah, [00:34:00] because you’re needed like that. That’s what we’re, we’re, we’re in a bad spot right now. Like we lose PTCs and you can’t all also, you can’t repower and stuff. There’s a lot of, I’m not gonna say distressed assets, but like looking across the bridge at distressed assets out there that have been ran or managed in a certain way that this is just how we do it in the states. That all of a sudden, uh oh, we’re not gonna be able to repower these things and we gotta run ’em for 20 more years. And there’s a couple companies out here that have assets that have been around the, a lot of assets that have been there. Constellation is one. They have a lot of assets that were COD oh 8 0 9 2011 2012. They’ve been running them for a long time without repower. That someone like that may be someone to look at, to say like, what’s the strategy here for the long-term play? Because it could change y.  Phil Totaro: Yeah. Although they also have PPAs that are like 40, 50, 60 bucks a megawatt hour. If you only have like a $20 megawatt hour PPA, then you’re probably not. You’re, you’re freaking out right now because if you don’t have the ability to do a repowering after 10 [00:35:00] years, uh, and replace the blades and refurbish the gearbox and everything, uh, you’re kind of screwed. So that’s, that’s a, a big deal. The wind farmer of  Joel Saxum: the week this week is Babbit Ranch, which is a next era and Salt River project, which is, um, and this is kind of going back to, we were at a CP over in Phoenix. This wind farm is north of Flagstaff. You don’t see a lot of wind farms up there. Um, but it’s got some cool factoids about it, right? So it’s uh, 50 ge, 3.4 megawatt, one 40 ma rotor machines, and it is on a ranch that’s been in a family operation since 1886, which is pretty cool. Uh, the timeline, uh, looks like initial announcement of this farm was in January 22. Construction began in March of 23 and full operation mid 24. So this thing’s about a year old right now. Uh, so that it’s on the Bait Ranch. Uh, it, like I said, it’s been a family operation since 1886. Uh, the families, the fourth [00:36:00]generation leader of the family, his name’s Billy Cordasco, they’ve always been thinking about. Balancing ranching conservation and innovation. So they’ve been looking into wind energy and, uh, renewable energies on this ranch for a while, and they finally pulled the trigger. Um, and part of it is, uh, the, the Salt River Project is the local, uh, power consumption company, but they’re also going to be a Google data center, uh, in the same space. So. Wind center’s gonna make about nine and a half million dollars in tax revenue, uh, along with 250 temporary construction jobs, which is pretty cool. Um, and it’s gonna power some data centers, which helps Google’s, uh, net zero emissions goals as well. So the Babbitt Ranch, wind Farm up in or down in Arizona. You’re the wind farm of the week.  Allen Hall: Oh, that’s a really interesting wind farm. That’s an old farm for Arizona, right? 1886. That’s, that’s a while ago. That’s cool. This is gonna do it for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Uh, we’ll see you here next week for [00:37:00] more Adventures in Wind.

Allen discusses the appointment of Pedro Azagra as the new CEO of Iberdrola, Pete Bierden as the new President of TAKKION, and Nicolaj Mensberg as the new CEO of PEAK Wind, along with the acquisition of the Northconnect Interconnector project by Flotation Energy and Vargronn. 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! Takkion, a renewable energy services company, has appointed Pete Bierden as President. Bierden will be based at Takkion’s headquarters in Centennial, Colorado. He will work closely with CEO Jim Orr to lead the company’s growth strategy. Bierden brings more than twenty years of experience. He previously served as a submarine officer and Certified Naval Nuclear Engineer. He spent twenty years at General Electric, where he helped build the company’s wind energy business from the ground up. Most recently, Bierden was CEO of Driver Industrial Safety. He also held senior positions at Amteck and Keystone Tower Systems. CEO Jim Orr says Bierden’s leadership style and operational expertise make him an outstanding fit for the company. Bierden says he’s honored to join a team that’s making a real impact on the energy transition. Spanish energy giant Iberdrola has named Pedro Azagra as its new group CEO. Azagra replaces Armando Martinez. He has been with Iberdrola for twenty-five years. Azagra started as executive director of development, leading the company’s international expansion. For the past three years, he served as CEO of Iberdrola’s United States subsidiary. He earned degrees in law and business administration from Icade in Madrid. He also has a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Before joining Iberdrola, Azagra worked in the investment banking division of Morgan Stanley. Jose Antonio Miranda will take over as CEO of Iberdrola’s US operations. He previously served as CEO of Gamesa in China and the United States. Peak Wind has appointed Nicolaj Mensberg as its new CEO, effective August first. Mensberg succeeds current CEO and co-founder Michael Rask Andersen, who will remain as Chair of the Board of Directors. Mensberg brings deep industry experience across the renewable energy value chain. His background aligns with Peak Wind’s core services in operations and asset management. Andersen led Peak Wind as CEO since co-founding the company in twenty seventeen. Under his leadership, the company evolved from a startup into a global market leader. Andersen says he believes now is the right time to welcome fresh perspectives and leadership for the company’s next growth phase. Mensberg says he’s honored to join Peak Wind during this pivotal time in the renewable energy transition. Flotation Energy and Vargronn have completed their acquisition of the Northconnect interconnector project between Scotland and Norway. The deal followed close collaboration on shared transmission infrastructure for the interconnector and the proposed one point four gigawatt Cenos floating wind farm off east Scotland. Northconnect already has consent for offshore and onshore cable routes to a substation near Boddam, Aberdeenshire. Flotation Energy and Vargronn are targeting twenty thirty-one to twenty thirty-two for first power from the ninety-five turbine Cenos project. Project director Christopher Pearson says when operational, Cenos will be one of the largest floating wind farms in the world. It will supply clean electricity to the grid and offer a multi-point interconnector for future offshore developments.

Antoine Larvol, CTO of Windar Photonics, discusses how their continuous wave LiDAR technology enhances wind turbine performance through optimization and monitoring, increasing AEP and reducing loads, particularly for legacy turbines. 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. Alright, we’re here in Phoenix, a CP, clean power, uh, 2025. So I’m, uh. Sitting with Antoine Larvol from, he’s a CTO from Windar. Yep. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Uh, we’ve been, uh, happy enough to get actually to sit inside your booth where it’s nice and qui. Quiet and isn’t it nice? Yeah. We got glass behind the camera here and people are walking by, walking by, walking by. Um, so this morning, uh, we, we talked yesterday a little bit about what wind photonics does. Yep. Of course, from our, uh, some of our other friends around the world. We’ve heard about some, some campaigns you’ve done in the United States, which have been. Really successful. So yeah, congrat good. Congratulations there. Yeah, thank you. Um, and, and as, as a lot of things in the wind industry, Windar, photonics based in Denmark.  Antoine Larvol: Yeah.  Joel Saxum: So you guys, uh, bring it, bring in that Danish [00:01:00]technology. We’re here, of course, bringing it to the US market at a CP, the American Clean Power Show. So welcome to the States. Thank you. Um, it’s a short one, but a  Antoine Larvol: good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah,  Joel Saxum: exactly. So, so I want to talk a little bit about what Windar photonics and, and it is a LIDAR based sensor, correct?  Antoine Larvol: Yes. Right. So. We do continuous wave base, uh, lidar. Yep. Uh, main product is a two beam version mm-hmm. Where you shoot, uh, at 80 meters in front of the turbine. Mm-hmm. And you basically alternate from one beam to the other. And measure wind speed and direction upfront, the, the turbine among others.  Joel Saxum: Right. So we’re talking about, uh, if you, if you’re in the wind industry, you’ve ever seen these lidar units that are put actually, you’re the cell mounted, correct? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So, and, and, uh, we’re looking more on the optimization, retrofit monitoring side of things. Yeah,  Antoine Larvol: exactly. So we’ve never been a resource assessment company. Yeah. Or we don’t look at power curve verification and stuff like that. We really [00:02:00] focus on. Retrofitting those, existing turbines. And then add value to In terms of information to, the customer, Yeah. With the mon monitoring side of things. Yeah. And, from day one, that’s been the goal of Windar Making something cheap, robust. That can just stay there and measure with good availability, wind speed, and direction coming to your turbine.  Joel Saxum: I love it. so we wanna squeeze as much as we can outta these turbines. And you guys are increasing AEP that’s, the name of the game. Yeah. Right.  Increasing AEP below rated. and then above rated you decrease loads. Increase uptime. and we basically do that by going on the line of the wind direction. that you then feed to the turbine controller and then we can actually adjust the, yaw position of the turbine according to our information. So I want to talk a little bit, we, we chatted a little bit offline about the, technology behind it, right? Yep. And people in the wind industry, if you’re around the wind industry around resourcing or you’re around optimization, you’ve heard [00:03:00] lidar. Yep. You know what I mean? And, but I don’t think. A lot of people know exactly what lidar, what it does, how it does it. Yeah. What is the technical, where’s the magic coming from? Exactly. It’s just a black box. It’s just a, technically, I guess it’s just a white box. Yeah. For the wind photonics. But how do, how does the lidar work to measure actual wind speed coming into the turbine? Antoine Larvol: Yeah,  Joel Saxum: so  Antoine Larvol: we basically focus laser light, and we do a focus point at 80 meters in front of the turbine. And basically there where your light concentrates on a specific location, then you hit particles in the air, pollen, water droplets, dust, whatever. Dust. Yeah. Okay. Whatever is there. And then you will, have a certain frequency of the light you emit, and that will just bounce on those particles and come back with a slight shift in frequency. And that’s doppler shift. And then. Analyzing this shift, then you can derive a wind speed along the beam Of, the, [00:04:00] lidar.  Joel Saxum: So  Antoine Larvol: we’re  Joel Saxum: talking about like a bunch of really, really smart trigonometry kind of  Antoine Larvol: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have a bit of optics. Yeah. Trigonometry. Uh, and, uh, yeah, it’s a bunch of optics. Hardware, uh, software. A lot of software. A lot of software, yeah. Uh, to analyze that and squeeze as much info out of this. Right. We do, uh, you can derive wind speed, wind direction. You can look at turbulence. Mm-hmm. You can, uh, detect our wake, uh, is going on. So you can actually detect whether or not your turbine is in the wake. Uh, and then based on that, then you will do different ing strategy in order to make the most of your turbine. Right. Decrease loads or increase, uh, outputs.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. So and mean. That’s what, uh, the uptime podcast we’re here about. When we bring technology, we talk to. Smart people like yourself, Antoine. Thank you. We, we want to pick the, pick out the solutions, right? Like what, how are you guys helping the wind industry? And that’s the important thing here. So we’ve [00:05:00] talked about two, basically, kind of two tracks that you guys go down and one of ’em is optimization. Yep. And one of ’em is monitoring.  Antoine Larvol: Yep.  Joel Saxum: So let’s, let’s start with optimization. What does that look like from wind?  Antoine Larvol: Yeah, I mean that’s a bit the unique part of wind. Uh, so we do lidar, uh, but actually the. Like this good selling product is this, uh, wind technology. So basically what it does is that we go on the line of the wind direction, uh, of the sensors from the primary secondary sensor from the turbine, and then we go on that line, read this info that they are measuring, and then, uh, correct this info according to our measurements. Ah, okay. What’s going on out there is that, you know, those, uh, devices are placed behind the rotr. So they’re basically, uh, biased by the blades, basically turning in front and creating a lot of turbulence. You also, you have some effects depending on the, your misalignment of the turbine. And so basically you don’t have a great [00:06:00] measurement from, from those devices. So what we bring is that, right. We measure upfront, so we are unbiased and then modify, the information, the wind direction information, and then feed that to the turbine controller so we can actually, yo. The turbine the way we want.  Joel Saxum: So in a really simple way, you guys are creating what is an amazing wind speed and direction sensor. Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So for this WindTIMIZER we only use wind direction information. And then basically improve what the turbine is given as information about. Relative wind direction of the nacelle Right. So yaw error. and then we correct that. So we increase, energy production below rated wind speed. And then we have different strategies above rated wind speeds, aiming at reducing loads and increasing uptime. So the way we do that is actually we introduce small yaw misalignment, depending on wind [00:07:00] speed, in order to achieve that. Especially decreased loads on, blades. Yeah. and the drive train rate.  Joel Saxum: So in, let’s, talk a case study, right? We wanna, we always want to give examples, right? Yeah. So, so in the states we had, we talked about you guys are focusing on more, well not globally really, but you’re focusing on more of like the last generation of turbines, not the brand new ones. Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So we are like really focusing at the moment on all this generation of. G 1, 15, 16. Two three. Yeah. 87 97 V 80, V 82. V 90, uh, seven, uh, maybe 2 92. Okay. Like this kind of turbines. Yeah. Uh, that’s been not there for, for a while. And basically where you don’t have a lot of offering on how to squeeze more power. And they’re not supported anymore by manufacturers, right? Yeah. Uh, so that’s where we come in and offer that to. To be able [00:08:00] to, to produce more power, decrease load. Right. So the way we do that, usually when, uh, a new customer approach us is that you will do a deployment of like five units in a, in the farm. Mm-hmm. Uh, basically pick randomly, uh, if, uh, five turbines and then we will install, uh, technology. You install like in three, four hours you’re done with installing the system. Oh, nice. On the tripod. Uh, wire that to the turbine controller. And then, uh, you will start this toggling campaign. So what we do is that we turn on the technology for 70 minutes and then turn it off 70 minutes. This way you have a slight shift over of the period over the day. Mm-hmm. So you don’t always hit exactly the same time. So in case there’s, you know, any effect, recurring effect, and you go away from that, and then you will do this toggling on and off for like a period of like three, four months, depending on wind conditions. And once you have like enough data on every wind, wind. You will analyze, uh, [00:09:00] what’s the power production difference when the union, the system is on versus off. Right. Okay. And then, um, yeah, compare that. Hopefully you gain some power. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we know that those turbine out there, uh, actually, uh, arm is aligned, right? So we know what to expect. I mean, we, uh, we did exactly that for some, uh, customers with, uh, V 80 twos. Mm-hmm. Uh, and you usually find like six and a half degree, uh, average. Oh, wow. Uh, your misalignment Wow. That you then correcting it, you, you reach like two, seven, 3%. Yeah. AP gain and uh, and that’s, so what we’ve done a while back with some customer, they verified the data. We did our report at the time Vest was distributing for us. Mm-hmm. So they also did the report. We will agree. That was within 2.73% AP gain, man, I think. Yeah. And then they went to, to roll out the farm. Right.  Joel Saxum: Wow. So they rolled out the whole farm after getting the two. Yeah. Well of course you would. Right. That [00:10:00] that’s the business case. That makes sense.  Antoine Larvol: I mean, you actually prove that you gained something. Yeah. So, hey, go  Joel Saxum: for it. Right. So if I’m sitting on a V, you know, like if I’m just gonna run with that example of V 82, those are mostly probably installed. 2000 man, 2000, five to 2000 around that. Yeah. 10 ish. So I’ve been, I’ve owned a wind farm. Say I’m in the States, I’ve owned a wind farm for. 10, 15, 20 years for whatever reason, I haven’t repowered it or whatnot. And all of a sudden someone comes along and says, I can get you two and a half, 3% more a EP.  Antoine Larvol: Yeah. I mean, we are rolling out all those farms at the moment, right? Yeah. I think we are on 60, 70% of the whole fleet in the US at the moment. Yeah. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: I’m jumping on that if that’s me. Yeah. Um, you know, we had talked, like I said, off air. You guys have over a thousand units out. Yeah. But just in the last year, your, your deployments have ramped up big.  Antoine Larvol: Yeah, we did like more than 500 I think last year. Wow. I think we are doubling that this year. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: Uh,  Antoine Larvol: so  Joel Saxum: good  Antoine Larvol: for you guys. Yeah, it’s going great, doing  Joel Saxum: big things for the industry. I like it. Um, so yeah, I guess we’ll for that moment if you have a V 82 wind farm or something Yeah. We  Antoine Larvol: probably [00:11:00] contacted you already. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. Give these guys a call back. Uh, ’cause they’re gonna get you more power and, uh, more revenue. I guess it’s at the end of the day. So optimization, you’re, you’re adjusting ya, you’re, you’re correcting for loads. You’re, you’re fixing some of these things, but there’s also a monitoring piece to this.  Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So that actually came, uh, from those rollouts we did. Um, there’s like some security concerns when you go and actually install those hundreds of units on the farm. That’s, that’s huge in the United States. Anything you’re putting on right now? Exactly. Cybersecurity. Cybersecurity. So toing campaign, we, we usually do modems. Uh, 3G uh, modem connected to the. To the unit, but that doesn’t fly when you do rollouts. Right? So what we did, uh, is actually then package all our monitoring tool, reporting tool data, graving tool and processing, uh, all kind of, uh, alarm flags in case like something goes wrong with any of those units. So we packaged all this into a an [00:12:00] os. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then we can directly deploy that on customer servers. And then this way they can monitor the lighter fleet. Mm-hmm. Uh, real time and then generate reports, uh, and see that basically those units are, are running fine. Right? Yeah, yeah. Everything on, on premise so that it’s not Yeah, exactly. You’re not worrying. Exactly. So we don’t have access to it. Uh, it’s fuel integrated, integrated in the network, and we just hands off Yeah. Let the unit run, you know? Yeah. Uh, and then as part of that. Then we also developed some new modules that we produce, uh, we propose to the customer and, uh, yeah, one of them, for example, is this, uh, turbine performance monitoring module where, you know, we have very good wind speed data. Uh, we can actually measure also, uh, rotation, rotational, uh, rotational speed of the turbine. And then, uh, mixing those two, having air density. Then you can actually track performance of, of the turbine over time. Okay. Uh, within [00:13:00] plus, minus 0.5%. Wow. Um, and then, yeah, that’s basically that. Right. You will see then, uh, whether, you know, you have some kind of leading edge degradation Yeah. On certain specific units. And then we are looking into, you know, looking at turbines individually, but eventually. In some mirror, whatever. Uh, look at turbines like once against the other as well. Yeah. Um, we integrating, uh, some rotor balance detection, for example. Okay. Uh, so we just trying to add more and more value to the customer so that they have a proper view of the asset. Right. Yeah. Usually what we see that people do in the industry is that, you know, they look at scada, right? Yeah. That’s what you have, that’s what you can do. Uh, so. You do power curve assessment and whatnot with your scada, so you believe in this wind speed, wind direction from those an anemometers. Mm-hmm. But we know by experience that that’s not accurate. Right? Right. So you might end up making, [00:14:00] um, wrong decision because you’re just given wrong information. Right. And you have companies out there, you know, they’re doing ai, machine learning, modeling, whatever. Great. But. You know, if the data is wrong, uh, yeah, you can do whatever you want. You will reach wrong conclusions, right? Yeah. Uh, so that’s what we bring value. We actually have the. The proper wind speed so we can do properly the monitoring. Right.  Joel Saxum: Uh, what are the, the saying, the old saying comes to mind for me? Like, you can’t make chicken soup out of chicken poop. Right. So if you, something like that. So if you don’t have good data coming in, sometimes all the, all the AI models in the world and things, you can make  Antoine Larvol: great modeling, whatever. Yeah. But it may not be true. Right? Yeah.  Joel Saxum: And I don’t wanna to, I don’t wanna like stop that idea ’cause I think it’s great as we move forward. No, no. I mean, we have nothing  Antoine Larvol: against the idea. Joel Saxum: It is just.  Antoine Larvol: You know, you’re using wrong info, right? Yeah. So you’re gonna  Joel Saxum: lead to wrong conclusions and that’s it. Right? So in my mind, I’m thinking about another, another use case for the window, like the windows, the monitoring portion of it. And it is, you talk to all of these [00:15:00] people about when you, when you mentioned erosion monitoring for per performance. When you talk to all these people about, uh, what’s the performance degradation of, of this erosion happening on the leading edge or. If we put LEP on, do we get this performance back and stuff? And I’m thinking, I’m, I’m talking to all the researchers that are listening to this. You guys should be using your sensors to validate a lot of this research that’s going on, on these wind turbines. Yeah. I mean, you, you track,  Antoine Larvol: I mean, since you have the LIDAR out there anyway, you know, yeah. You might as well use the data and then track properly how your asset is doing over time. Right. Um. And that’s the whole idea, right? Squeezing most information from Yep. What we have, right? Yep. And you know, we know turbulence, uh, conditions. We know wind speed. We know, uh, wake, whether it’s wake or not. Mm-hmm. We know air density. We just mm-hmm. Put some module there and then you can just basically track then your performance over time. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then have this done [00:16:00] automatically. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then I just have, go check a dashboard. And be like, okay, past six months, how has this turbine been doing? Mm-hmm. Okay, great. You just stay nice and clean and then suddenly you can pinpoint and target exactly the one that goes wrong in the farm. Right? Yeah. And then, I mean, we are not going to fix your leading edge erosion. Right. You still need to have, go out there, repair it yourself, right? Yeah. But at least we can point out Okay. There’s a problem there. Right? Yeah.  Joel Saxum: You know, and one of the things I wanna make sure we touch on is we brushed past the cybersecurity thing. Yeah. Talking with all of the asset owners that I deal with every day, friends in the industry, CMS companies, you name it. Cybersecurity is becoming more and more of a frontline issue within the wind industry. Yep. Everybody’s concerned about it. Anything you try to put on a turbine, especially if it’s connected to a controller, connected to electronics, it’s over the air, it’s on the cloud. Everybody’s ah, everybody has their hair up on the back of their neck about it. So you guys have taken the risk [00:17:00] out of that thing. By putting everything on premise. Yeah. I  Antoine Larvol: mean we, we’ve, it’s our own tools. yeah. At window we always develop our own tools in the house. we have a great software team doing that, and, and then they basically package the just stuff we’ve been developing for the past 10 years. Yeah. Into an OS and that you can just deploy at the customer. And then this way you have like automatic reporting about your lidars. your turbines. You can, directly interact with those lidars, turn them on, turn them off, start those towing campaign, get some, information about how much AP you gained, stuff like that. Joel Saxum: Fantastic.  Antoine Larvol: Yeah.  Joel Saxum: so message that I want to get out to the wind industry, if you, have some turbines that are legacy turbines that are out there. And you wanna get two point a half to 3% more revenue generated outta those turbines. Yep. You need to call wind photographers and a bit more time, I mean, less loads. Yeah, less [00:18:00] loads. Extend the life of those blades. I mean, we know that those  Antoine Larvol: turbines are, have some issues. Right. So it’s, uh, it’s pretty straightforward to make a business case. Right. Fantastic. So Antoine, how do people get ahold of you? Uh, we have a website. We are online. We are on LinkedIn. Okay. Uh, so yeah, you just go on the window, photonics.com and, uh. And then reach out to us. Right. Fantastic.  Joel Saxum: Well, Antoine, thanks for, uh, joining the Uptime podcast here. Thanks a lot again, live here from, uh, in Phoenix. It’s hot outside, so let’s stay inside. Yes, and I’d read it. Yeah. Thank you.

This episode covers the UK’s Crown Estate’s offshore wind investments, drone threats to wind turbines, and Nordex’s 40th anniversary. It also highlights TotalEnergies winning a German offshore wind auction and Pemamek’s advanced welding capabilities. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Well, we’re back with another edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I got Rosemary Barnes in Australia, Phil Totaro in Warm and sunny California, and Joel Saxon in practically hell in temperature in Austin, Texas. I was just down in Dallas, Texas a day ago, and man, is that hot. There’s just like a, a certain kind of heat, you know, you need to get indoors pretty quick. Texas heat is really bad right now. Joel Saxum: You know, one thing I didn’t know about this area out here west of Austin, like in the Hill country, it’s actually really windy out here. Like there’s a steady wind all the time that, and you don’t hit [00:01:00] wind farms for another like three hours when you had West, like the first ones. But it’s like, I lived in Houston and Texas and it was pretty dormant most of the time, but it, there’s constant wind here as the temperatures change throughout the day. All the time explains all the wind turbines.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, you sound like me when I moved to Denmark and I’m like, why do I have to live in this windy place?  Allen Hall: So we have a birthday to celebrate and no, it’s not Rosie’s birthday. It’s Nord Deck’s birthday and it’s celebrating their 40th anniversary and they’ve been around since 1985. And some facts about Nordex that they published really interesting. They have developed 46 different onshore turbine types. Across the two companies, which was Nordex, SE, and Acciona. And That’s amazing. So in 40 years, did those two companies now merge together A couple of years ago? Uh, is they have 46 different onshore term designs from 250 kilowatts up to seven megawatt machines. Now Rosemary, I think this kind of high, [00:02:00] and congratulations to Nordex by the way. That’s quite an achievement. It does highlight the rate of pace. For wind turbines from the mid eighties up till now. One new turbine a year is a lot.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And it’s not the hugest company, right. It’s not like they’ve got a hundred thousand employees developing those, uh, that one new turbine every year. So, yeah. Um. Nobody’s been sitting around on their hands at that company.  Joel Saxum: They made it past the, is it, isn’t it the rule of thumb, Alan? We talk about businesses like in the states, like if you make it past five years, you’re, you’re good  Allen Hall: al almost right? So most companies fail within the first year to three years. It’s, it’s hard to make it to three, then five, then 10. If you can make it across 10, you have something worthwhile. It’s gonna stick around for a little bit. And, and Nordics has.  Rosemary Barnes: What’s weather guard at?  Allen Hall: Uh, we’re at. Almost 2020.  Rosemary Barnes: Whew. An institution.  Allen Hall: An institution. Yeah. We need to beat an institution at this point. And over in the uk, uh, the [00:03:00] UK’s Crown Estate. Now this is an important story everyone. The UK’s Crown Estate is making major investment commitments, uh, to offshore wind with a 400 million pound. Funding Boost. And that’s due to new legislation allowing, uh, the crown of state to borrow from the Treasury for the first time. And so now the crown of State, which has its own money, used to be spending its own money on some of these projects. And of course there’s some money coming into the crown of state for the plots of ocean where they’re developing offshore winds. So there’s money coming in, money coming out, uh, but. This is a big driver, right? If the crowd of state can help fund some of these, uh, what they’re talking about funding is some of the ports and infrastructure and making sure that the country is ready to develop, uh, offshore wind even faster than they are right now. Uh, it because they’re really headed towards 20 to 30 additional gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, right? So their thinking was they could power, what, 28 [00:04:00] million roughly UK homes. That is a enormous effort that in the United States you hear discussions about sovereign wealth funds and, uh, we mostly, and I were talking before the podcast, the United States doesn’t have a sovereign, doesn’t have wealth and surely doesn’t have any funding to do that. But it, it is a unique perspective that the crown of state can. Do this kind of effort and the impact it will have on the future of the uk.  Rosemary Barnes: Why don’t you have one? You’ve got lots of natural resources. That’s usually how these sovereign wealth funds get stacked. Like Norway’s is famous, even Australia’s got a, a small one. Not as big as it should be considering, um, how many resources we’ve got. Um, yeah, no. You know, the oil producing countries across the Middle East have them. Uh, yeah. The US is a net exporter of. Of, um, energy resources. So what are you doing with the royalties from that or, or [00:05:00] whatever.  Joel Saxum: We spend all of our other money too quickly, so we don’t even get, we burn through it too fast. Rosemary Barnes: Do you even get, um, royalties from that? ’cause isn’t it in the case, like, you know, based on my research I’ve done from watching say like Beverly Hillbillies, that’s, you know, I understand the issue pretty, pretty deeply and on a, a serious, um, serious level, but. If you discover oil on your land, you own that oil, right? It’s not that like in Australia, if you were to discover oil on your land that you like, you, if you own land, you own from the surface up kind of. Um, whereas in. The, uh, yeah. And yeah, Australia owns everything, everything below it, so it wouldn’t, you’d never be, you’d never get the, the Beverly Hill Billies couldn’t have been set in Australia because they wouldn’t have gotten that rich. Joel Saxum: So the, the diff the diff like difference in the states is we, we treat mineral rights, which as we call ’em, as fee simple property. So you can, you can sell, like if I own this piece of land I sit on, I can sell the land, but I can also retain [00:06:00] the mineral rights as my property. Now the diff the difference is, is like, so in Canada the crown owns the, the subsurface. So you would go through them to do things. But in the states, the only caveat to that is if it is actual federal land. So if it’s bureau of land management owned land, or federally owned land and you’re drilling on it, or you somehow got permission to drill on it then or stuff out off the continental shelf, like off offshore, right? Then the government will get a percentage of it. But that stuff, I don’t know where it goes, to be honest. It might go in the general fund, but there’s a couple of, like the state of Alaska has its own sovereign fund. They have a thing called the permanent fund, and all of the oil and gas that gets done, work gets gun in Alaska. It gets put into that permanent fund. And if you’re a resident, then every tax season, the residents, depending on how that fund is doing, get a draw. And sometimes that draw is like. Man, it can be two to $6,000 a person.  Rosemary Barnes: Your life’s probably pretty, pretty [00:07:00] tough up there. They can probably use the help with their energy bills and stuff. Transport  Allen Hall: the latest numbers I’ve heard about the federal property or what, what the valuation of all this land is and what could be mined and drilled out of it is a hundred to $200 trillion. Does everybody hear similar numbers to that? It’s a lot of money. That’s, that’s, that’s a lot of money. So when the national debt comes up, you hear this discussion of, well, the US could sell a hundred trillion dollars worth of mineral rights and Sure. Possibly, but it, it is, uh, a different proposition that if the US is gonna remain competitive with the world, things like what the UK are doing, gonna pull a lot of investment over there and. The UK is only second to China right now on offshore wind. That is remarkable.  Rosemary Barnes: Well, they were first until recently, right? It was China. China caught, caught up to them, not the other way around.  Joel Saxum: And, and these investments like the crown investment here, that’s not going like [00:08:00] into a wind farm that’s going into supply chain build out, correct.  Allen Hall: Right. It’s going to do the infrastructure.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. Is it grants or is it like a loan program or do we know that, or is it just kinda like, Hey, we have this fund available? Phil Totaro: Well, so just, just to also clarify how the Crown Estate works, basically, they, they normally get money from, um, you know, they, as you said, they own, you know, seabed and, and certain rights in, throughout the uk. But what happens is the money that anybody gets, anybody pays for the leasing of that goes into a trust effectively. The Crown estate and the government together kind of coadminister this trust. And then the crown estate, um, which is basically, you know, the royal family gets paid out of that trust fund on an annual basis. They get, they get a stipend. So basically what they’re doing is, this is a small tweak. So that they can take loans against that money that’s being held in the trust. [00:09:00] So it’s not, you know, the fact that they’re able to spend it is important, but they’re not really doing anything particularly revolutionary finance wise. Um, now as, as we just clarified too, they’re only really spending this on. Um, investments in the infrastructure. For instance, port infrastructure. They may provide, um, money in the form of grants for smaller businesses to, to build up certain supply chain capabilities or, um, I’ve also heard that, um, they want to institute more training programs for, you know, apprenticeships and things like that for, uh, folks that wanna do construction or service and repair jobs. Um, so. You know, there’s gonna be money made available as part of this investment fund. Um, and I guess they’ll decide how it gets dolled out  Allen Hall: as wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. [00:10:00] PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS wind.com today. Well, you need to download the latest version of PES Wins. You can do it@pswin.com. Great articles. Uh, the front cover has hella service on it. We were with Hella service not long ago, uh, checking out their capabilities. But the article I wanna highlight this week is from Pem Me and we met with Pem, me at Wind Europe in Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago now. Rosie was there too, and they are a finished manufacturing automation company. They do a lot of the mono pals and they’re helping. Automate X XL mono pile manufacturing. And Joel, when I was there, uh, the EC people were showing me some of the welds that they do, and it’s an automated welding process, [00:11:00] but they’re welding really thick steel steel thicknesses up to in America terms, seven inches thick. That is a complicated weld to do, and I think it could only be done with the robots. Uh. But they’re having a lot of success. Emec is having a lot of success because they have all the technology and it’s a family owned company. This is what they do. They do automation, they make life easier, and they lower the cost of wind turbines in particularly towers because they can do these really complicated tasks. Repeat.  Joel Saxum: I think that’s the the key here as industrial automation moves forward, anything in heavy industry is automation. Automation, automation. We talk about automation in the wind industry with. You know, maintenance being done possibly by robots and these kind of things. You’ve seen it in the auto industry. These large industries churning things out. It needs to happen and the one of the reasons being is, is if you’re doing really complicated stuff like welding, something that thick [00:12:00] or welding anything in over and over and over again. Welding, good welding technicians are hard to find. I will raise my hand and say like, I, I use a grinder more than the welder when I’m welding. So, so that, that’s a pretty, that’s pretty commonplace, right? So to find, and so if we want to be able to scale anything for offshore, uh, infrastructure with large, large components, or onshore for that matter, in wind automation has to be part of the solution as we move forward. And these guys are making it happen. Allen Hall: Yeah. It, it is a area where Piac is driving the industry. The way I look at it, they’re doing things at such a high level and an advanced level that other companies would be following their lead, and I think PME is having a lot of success selling machines and automation because everybody’s trying to lower the cost of their products and they’re trying to simplify the headcount and the talent stack. You have to have, like Joel mentioned, finding welders they can weld seven, seven inch thick steel is [00:13:00] extremely difficult. This is the way we move forward. So the, the guess the question in my mind, Joel, is how big can they go? At what point can you not weld steel anymore? If we’re at seven inches? Good Lord, we’re talking about some really big monopiles. Joel Saxum: At the end of the day, the you’re, you’re not really limited when you go to depth of weld as long as you’re continuing to cham for it correctly, just like repairing composites, right? Um, but. How big do we need to go? Seven inch thick weld. I mean, that’s gonna carry basically anything, you know?  Allen Hall: Yeah. Well they’re, they’re making what, 15 meter diameter tower sections of which it, they can’t get steel big enough when they roll it, which Pemex involved with also. So you can’t roll a ring, you have to weld the sections together, and then you roll the assembly together. It is a lot more complicated and when we watch offshore wind projects go up and think, oh, it’s just another piece of steel that’s going in the water. No, it’s actually a ton of [00:14:00] technology and a lot of engineering time that went into making that part. Joel Saxum: Well, as long as they’re done well, then these offshore wind farms can hold up to these random ships bumping into ’em offshore. So kudos to Pema Mac for helping us out there.  Allen Hall: If you haven’t downloaded the latest edition of PES Wind, go to PS wind.com and do it today. I didn’t talk about this, uh, news story back when it happened, which is several months ago now. But I wanted to bring it up because, uh. I had a LinkedIn discussion with Derek Rutherford about drone sightings, like unauthorized drones being around offshore wind turbines. Now, my first thought when it came up was, well, it’s just some kids screwing around, but honestly, it probably isn’t, and. I went back and looked at some more recent articles of what countries are doing in regards to the drone threat, and the Germans are really on top of it. In fact, uh, German authorities required offshore wind farms along the northern coast of Germany to install [00:15:00] radar facilities as the as escalation of some of the conflicts near them ramped up and that. Put a thought in my head like, oh wow. All right, so the Germans are out putting radar systems on to see what’s flying around. That makes sense to me. I don’t think that has been instituted in other countries, but it would seem like the right thing to do. Because the second part was there was articles about suspicious drones near Germany in places that they should not be like a near critical infrastructure, a defunct nuclear power plant, some chemical facilities and LNG facilities. And the problem is that some of these drones now can move so fast, it’s hard to even track them. And most of the time your standard like aircraft radar systems won’t see them. Because they can make them so compact. That creates quite a threat. If we have all seen on YouTube and on television that the [00:16:00]drone threat is real and the number of drones that are being produced today are exponentially higher than two years ago, which goes to the question of, do we us Europe, all around the world start putting much more technologies on these wind turbines to protect them from. Outside threats,  Joel Saxum: like some of that technology exists today, right? To basically take drones outta the air and usually it is like, ’cause they have ’em when, like when part 1 0 7 became a thing in the states, which is basically was followed on by the CAA authorities and the EU and other things, there was rules that got, or things that got put in place during that time where like to keep drones, consumer drones out of airports to keep consumer drones away from. Um, stadiums Right? During, during sports matches, right? Where people were. Yeah. And then there was, there’s also things for like, um, [00:17:00] tfr, so temporary flight restrictions where you can’t fly them in certain areas, but there’s technology there, like around the outside of airports now, like major, like class A airport airspace. They have basically jamming technology where when a, when a drone crosses a threshold, like you lose the ability to control it and they come down. Like that’s, that’s there, that exists. So, and, and it, and it’s in smaller packages too, and it’s getting more and more commonplace. There was talk at one point in time of almost all consumer drones having to have the equivalent of, in the states at least, of like an A DSB transceiver, which is the same thing as an air, any aircraft that, that fly in FAA airspace. Um, but like you said, right now, it’s so like you can go, I can go, I can go down to. Walmart and I can buy for like 60 bucks a drone that I can fly a kilometer from, from me. And it’s like, uh, it’s consumer grade. It’s easy to use and you could put a camera on it or whatever. But I think that that, I mean, the risk is of [00:18:00] course, critical infrastructure in, in my opinion, we should be looking at this as more of a critical infrastructure risk I think that the Germans are  Allen Hall: doing is right. I guess the question of when, how much and how far do you go? Onshore turbines, would that be included in the risk assessment? Uh, I know there’s a lot of discussion in the United States about using drones with Chinese components in them and, and where that data goes. A lot of the inspection companies are trying to navigate those discussions right now. ’cause I think you’re gonna see a prohibition on drones with Chinese technology if it hasn’t happened already. I think a lot of the operators are requiring it in the United States. I assume that’s gonna happen elsewhere in the world, that they’re gonna be very specific about what kind of drone you can use to image a wind turbine. But then on the protection side. Are we gonna ramp it up? Is it gonna be sort of an industry standard at a point, kind of like an IEC standard for a lot of things? Do wind turbines [00:19:00] have some features to detect for drones?  Joel Saxum: I think you have to eventually because they, like I said, they become energy infrastructure and it’s critical infrastructure and because of their dispersed nature, like if someone starts buzzing around a thermal generation plant with a drone, there’s gonna be a problem. Someone’s gonna say something like, that person’s gonna be found. Like they’re gonna, there’s gonna be an issue. And at the end of the day, a wind farm is the same thing. It’s just dispersed. So like you could cause harm to it.  Allen Hall: This led me to the connection of, I saw Alina Hel Stern talking about being down in France and working on a. A protection system for bats and birds that identified bats and birds and then would slow the wind turbines down where those, uh, creatures are flying. Rosie, is this a thing now where all the, the, the wildlife, uh, identification systems that have been placed on turbines and a lot of them I think are in [00:20:00]Australia. Are those gonna be now sort of mandatory, not necessarily for birds or bats, but for other flying things, manmade things that are getting near turbines?  Rosemary Barnes: Uh, I’m sure that you could use the technology for that. Um, I think it would be pretty easy. And if you’ve got a system in place that’s monitoring birds, then I bet that it’s not, it’s just a couple of extra lines of code probably to, um, add in the drone detection feature. I’m not sure that it’s such a, a huge thing to, to worry about. I mean, like you said, the assets really disperse. There are people around, uh, you know, looking at the turbines monitoring, I don’t think it would actually take that long for a human to see a drone in the area. And I also think that the consequence is a little bit lower. It’s not like a, you know, a coal power plant or, um, something like, or a gas, gas power plant where you could just, you know, with one targeted hit, take out. A gigawatt of power. You know, with wind it would be, you know, turbine by turbine, taking [00:21:00] out a few, few megawatts at a time, and it wouldn’t take long before, before that got noticed, you know, it wouldn’t be more than two turbines. Um, there’s, there’s humans on these sites most of the time. I think it would get noticed. Um, yeah, I’m not sure that it’s a bigger risk for a wind farm than for. Another, another kind of asset and probably a lower risk actually, because it’s so dispersed. So, and like I said, even just a human looking out with their eyeballs, um, wouldn’t be such a bad way to, uh, you know, quickly get a handle on it. Allen Hall: And Joel, the underwater threat seems real offshore to me. That seems like the most likely threat. Uh, if you watch and roll and some of the. Defense companies that are really into drone technology, they are increasingly developing underwater technologies to monitor activity under the water, but also to do some offensive application work. Joel Saxum: Yeah. And, and that stuff is, the oil and gas industry is driven most of that. [00:22:00] Um, but there’s, yeah, I mean, there’s takes cellular robotics up out of burn. Um, in British Columbia, they have a drone, a sub sea drone. Right. That can go 4,500 kilometers from, from where you put it in. So like you can goro there that that thing is designed to do like round trip trips underneath the ice pack, monitor for submarines, go dormant and come back. Like they can deliver munitions or anything anywhere in the world they want to anymore with these unmanned subsea vessels. So there is also a lot of co companies out there. It’s like. Sonardyne and such that are, that have really, really advanced acoustic sensors for subsea. And I think that you’re gonna probably start to see more of those deployed, uh, as well. Especially after we had some of those pipeline issues and things over, um, in Northern Europe that, uh, that, that sensor technology to know what’s happening around your wind farm subsea. ’cause that’s a little bit more difficult than just having someone look or having ai, you know, vision cameras and stuff. Um. [00:23:00] That those technologies are available, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t already deployed. I just, I don’t have any knowledge of it. Right.  Allen Hall: But Joel, you’re a contact to the underwater world,  Joel Saxum: someone from the underwater world. Call me about wind farms. I’d love to talk to you about how much of these things are deployed out there. Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard the 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 og ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Yeah, up in Germany, French energy giant total energies has secured the latest German offshore wind auction for the what they’re calling the N 9.4. I know you all have that marked on your maps. 9.4 up in the North Sea, which is capable of hosting about one gigawatts of wind capacity, which [00:24:00] huge wind farm and, uh, total energies through its subsidiary. Offshore wind won, won the competitive bidding process with a final price of 180 million euros for the 141 square kilometer site. Now, the first thing that. I noticed about this auction was someone was actually paying money. They were not receiving subsidies. They were actually paying cold, hard cash to get into this plot of ocean. When you looked at this specifically, total has a number of plots off the north coast of Germany. This plot, this 9.4, is next to some other plots. They already are working in 9.1 and 9.2, so it just kind of connects ’em all together. But. There is complaints in Europe about this auction that there were, I think there were a total of two, uh, bidders at the end who were willing to pay money for these plots. Total tell energies being the winner [00:25:00] they want to have from all the news articles. And what I can understand, ’cause it’s, this is not the American way of thinking about running things, uh, is that they want to have more companies bid for these plots. Have different energy companies involved. Total has gotta be the largest provider there. And they’re a French based company in German waters. I may not, maybe that’s what the issue is. It’s a a country pride thing. Uh, but I’m not sure they, how they’re gonna change this auction process where they’re gonna get more bidders unless they just say straight out, we’re gonna provide a subsidy. And that brings in. A flood of more German or Northern Europe based  Phil Totaro: companies. Is, is that where this is headed? Potentially. But the, the funny thing about it is, in the United States, we’ve leased, I believe, 18 different areas for offshore wind. And companies have collectively paid the government, uh, more than a billion dollars to, for the privilege of [00:26:00]being able to develop projects. So, you know, the, the Europeans are just not used to these, you know, what they call, you know, negative bids or zero bids. Yeah. Um, but there. You know, they’re, they’re so, they’re not used to that style of, of auction process, but they’re, they’re also, you know, I mean, if they want other companies to, to participate, then tell ’em to get their damn wallet out and, and spend the money so that they can have the lease rights. ’cause there’s only a finite amount of space. So, you know, I, I don’t blame total for diving in and. Spending their money on developing a, a lease area that is going to net them, you know, hundreds of millions of euros in, in profit by the time the project is done. Um, what’s everyone else waiting for? That’s a great question. Allen Hall: One of the issues about this [00:27:00] auction was the requirement for over planting. And it’s a new term to me over planting. I understand what it means. I’m from Nebraska, we. Plant a lot of corn there. Over planting means you kind of creep in the Rose A. Little bit and you over plant, but over planting wind turbines is another level where they’re putting like 10 to 20% more wind turbines on that plot so that this one gigawatt capacity roughly is maintained all the time, even if there’s lower winds or, uh, my thought is that they start planting other wind farms around it and there’s just more turbulence and yeah, there’s losses involved, so they’re gonna be able to. Capture the wind no matter what. So it’s gonna be more like a, uh, consistent provider of energy on high wind days and on low wind days. Rosie, I haven’t seen this a lot. Is this something that’s relatively new or has this been done in the past?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I actually haven’t heard of it either. And I mean, obviously you’re gonna end up, um, with more expensive wind energy from doing that, right? [00:28:00] Because usually a developer just wants to put in. The number of turbines that will give them the best return on however much money it costs. So if you force them to throw out their own optimization, economic optimization and add in a few extra turbines, then you’re necessarily going to end up with some suboptimal amount in terms of the energy produced. I think it’s fine if you say, yeah, you can put in this huge wind farm, but if we’re gonna rely on it, we need to be able to rely on it and you know, require that. That they, um, you know, take that into account in some way, um, and allow them to choose. That seems to me like the smarter way to do it. The whole point of a large distributed electricity grid is that you get a, you get reliability very cost effectively because you have uncorrelated, uh, uh, uh, resources. Um, and so, you know, like if you have. Extra wind turbines on your plant, or if you put a battery on that location still doesn’t stop. If a transmission line goes down and that that whole thing can’t connect to the [00:29:00] grid, you still, you, you know, you, you’re not removing the biggest risk of all that. The whole thing is just down. So to me it sounds like, um, yeah, like an expensive way to not quite achieve what you’re trying to, I think it’s always better to have a look at the problem as a whole. Then allow people to propose solutions to the problem rather than tell them the solution and um, have them figure out the problem that you know, you’re actually trying to get at. Joel Saxum: That’s the same, like that exact concept that you’re saying there, Rosie is the, what they just tried to pass in the Texas legislature this year for the Ercot market. What’s basically like if you’re gonna build something, you bet you have to also build backup for when it goes offline and it. It didn’t pass,  Rosemary Barnes: didn’t you, um, testify or present evidence at that? Joel Saxum: I was against a different one. There was a different one I was against, and it was a more of a, a sighting one  Rosemary Barnes: just full of good proposals in Texas this year.  Joel Saxum: Everybody’s trying to dive into that, uh, the idea that they know what they’re talking about. But, uh, yeah, there’s not a whole lot of knowledge down there in Austin [00:30:00] when we’re talking about co-locating certain assets. Now, I think from a economic standpoint, depending on, of course, what grid you’re in and how it operates, mostly unregulated assets. Co-located wind and batteries is a good thing. That is a good investment to me. Co-located solar batteries, good investment to me. Have we ever heard of any offshore wind farms? ’cause co. ’cause battery temperature is not that big of a problem for battery. Like to the point where you need to cool them, like you don’t like there is, there is companies that make subsea like not utility scale batteries, but subsea large battery packs. ’cause they use ’em in oil and gas. I’ve seen them. So that does happen offshore where you can sink a battery pack and you can use resident ROVs and power off it and all kinds of stuff. But we don’t, nobody’s doing that with offshore wind yet. Or is there any spot? I think there’s one spot in the UK where they have a battery. It’s at a landing. Phil  Phil Totaro: Docker Bank. Joel Saxum: Docker. Okay. So Docker Bank has that big utility [00:31:00]scale battery, like right on shore. So battery. So they’re kind of cook. Technically co-located, right?  Rosemary Barnes: They’re co-locating so that they can get better capacity factors out of stuff like the, you know, the transmission, um, that they, that they have to build. And, um, also, you know, to do a, just a bit of the regular, um, energy arbitrage where if you, you know, they, um, like a dog, dogger bank is generating electricity at the same time as all the rest of the, um, offshore wind in that area. So, um, you know, if they can charge a battery instead of selling it at a cheap electricity price, then that can work out for them. Um, yeah. So in a lot of cases it can work to co-locate, um, and you can yeah, get more out of, you know, um, yeah, even probably stuff like inverters and transformers and all that stuff that is really expensive and has to be there all the time. You can use it more if you’ve got a battery.  Allen Hall: So tower energies, look at this extra turbine requirement as a way to make extra revenue, because the easy thing to do is if you don’t need. If all the turbines running in theory to [00:32:00] provide power, then why wouldn’t you have short-term battery storage? Why wouldn’t you create that power and hold it for when it’s really needed and the prices go higher? It just seems obvious that they’re creating a situation here where total is gonna be using this extra energy and arbitrage it immediately. It’s the right move. It’s a smart financial move. I think it, it’s ’cause you’re forced to do it. Why not make some money off of it?  Phil Totaro: Yeah, they already have, uh, a power sales, you know, an energy arbitrage group, um, through total anyway for, for all the other power generation, you know, forms that they have. So, absolutely. They’re, they’re gonna, they, they are probably, it’s funny because they’re probably the only company that given that requirement for this N 9.4 site or lease area that, you know. It was [00:33:00] either gonna be RW or total. Those are probably gonna be the only two companies that would, would’ve been capable of doing this because they have that. Um, uh, you know, uh, energy, commodities trading capability. But going back to the original premise, which is the Germans are trying to get more people involved. I mean, uh, at the end of the day, yeah, you’ll get more people involved if you provide a subsidy, but if you’re gonna do that, then, then do it. Commit to it. I mean, at the end of the day, everybody complains about like, oh, the Chinese are are subsidizing this or subsidizing that. Well, yeah, they’ve made a choice that that’s how they’re gonna help their companies get a foot play, get a foothold in, in global markets. And at the end of the day, you may not like that. The fact that they’re doing that, you may think it’s, it’s anti-competitive or this, whatever you wanna label it, but their government has made it a point to support their companies in that way. You wanna get out there. And, and compete with the Chinese in a global market, then [00:34:00] you gotta be prepared to go to the same level that, that they’re willing to go to. Don’t half it.  Joel Saxum: Alright. The wind farm of the week. This week we’re going up to Indiana. So it’s a complex and I know if you talk to any kind of traveling wind turbine technicians, a lot of ’em have been to this complex ’cause it’s a big one. Uh, it is the Meadow Lake Wind Farms in Indiana. So it’s across a bunch of counties. White County, Jasper County, Benton County, Indiana. It’s a little over 800 megawatts in capacity between the whole, the whole group, uh, powers about 250,000 homes. So in that group, four over 410 turbines, uh, it’s all visible along Interstate 65. Uh, so you’re in America’s heartland and boom, over 400 turbines there. And the interesting thing is because it is so big and it is so many projects. You have, uh, a mix of turbine models, which you don’t see on all wind farms. You have vestas turbines, you have Siemens GAA turbines, anywhere from 1.5 megawatts to [00:35:00] 2.5 megawatts for any of the different models depending on when they were installed. Um, so like many of the other wind farms that we do for wind farm in the week, we always like to highlight the economic impact. So. Meadow Lakes generating a significant local benefits, of course, about $20 million in economic activity locally. Like I said, those traveling wind techs and all the other people that work on these wind farms, uh, spend a lot of money locally. Um, this wind farm is owned by EDPR, the, the bulk of it. Um, so EDPR is supporting local schools and infrastructure with tax contributions. It’s an estimated about $30 million in, uh, property taxes paid over the project’s life. Uh, so not only are they doing, uh, goodwill and other thing with educational programs about renewable energy in the area, but they’re paying cold, hard cash, uh, to those counties as well. Um, so the wind farm of the week this week is the Meadow Lake Wind Farm in Indiana.  Allen Hall: That is this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for joining us this week, and as always, uh, stay [00:36:00] tuned. There’s a lot more wind energy news coming your way. Uh, and also remember on June 25th, which is a Wednesday at 11:00 AM Eastern, we’ll be holding our next. Skys specs webinar in conjunction with PES Wind Magazine. And this webinar is going to be on when to do drone inspections and what particular tools you want to use when you’re doing inspections. Uh, there’s a lot of technology coming on the market, and Skys specs is leading that way, but you need to be identifying which tools for which problems and particularly. At what time, so sign up for that. The check out the show notes below for the registration link. We will see you are here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:37:00] Podcast.

Allen discusses US-UK tension over Chinese company Ming Yang’s wind energy investment in Scotland, key offshore wind projects from HSM Offshore Energy and Great British Energy, Turkey’s ambitious wind energy goals, and new leadership at the Global Wind Energy Council. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! There’s tension between the US and UK over Chinese wind energy investment. The US government has raised security concerns about plans by Chinese company Mingyang to build a wind turbine factory in Scotland. Trump administration officials warned the UK about what they call national security risks. The factory would supply wind farms in the North Sea. UK ministers are now reviewing whether to block the project. They’re worried about cybersecurity and being too dependent on Chinese technology. Security officials say Chinese wind turbines could contain electronic surveillance equipment. Mingyang is not state-owned, but critics worry the Chinese government could interfere. Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes had said Scotland was open to the factory. But the Scottish Government is waiting for security guidance from Westminster. A UK Government spokesperson said they would never let anything threaten national security. All energy investments face the highest security checks. Construction has officially started on Belgium’s major offshore energy project. Workers cut the first steel this week at a factory in the Netherlands. They’re building parts for the Princess Elisabeth hub. The artificial island will sit twenty-eight miles off the Belgian coast. The project will transport at least two point one gigawatts of wind energy to the mainland. That’s enough power for millions of homes. HSM Offshore Energy is making high-voltage equipment at their Schiedam yard. Commercial director Hans Leerdam says this marks a key moment for European energy security. The island will also connect Belgium to other European countries, including the UK. Final assembly will happen in Schiedam and Vlissingen. Leerdam calls it one of Europe’s most strategic energy projects moving from plan to reality. The UK government has announced a massive boost for offshore wind energy. Great British Energy is leading a one billion pound investment package. The money will fund wind turbine manufacturing, floating platforms, and port upgrades. Three hundred million pounds comes from Great British Energy. The Crown Estate and private companies are adding another seven hundred million pounds. The investment targets key regions including Teesside, South Wales, East Anglia, and Scotland. Officials say it will create thousands of skilled jobs. The government is also offering up to five hundred forty-four million pounds through its Clean Industry Bonus. This encourages developers to invest in deprived areas. The North East of England could receive up to two hundred million pounds. That might unlock four billion pounds in private investment. Scotland gets up to one hundred eighty-five million pounds for ports and high-tech components. The offshore wind expansion should support fourteen thousand new jobs over four years. Industry leaders believe this could boost the UK economy by twenty-five billion pounds by twenty thirty-five. Turkey is planning a major expansion of its wind energy capacity. The country aims to reach forty-eight gigawatts of wind power by twenty thirty-five. Turkey currently has nearly fourteen gigawatts installed. That makes it the sixth largest wind power producer in Europe and twelfth in the world. Wind energy now provides more than eleven percent of Turkey’s electricity. It’s the country’s second-largest renewable source after hydropower. The Turkish Wind Energy Association President says Turkey has become one of Europe’s top five manufacturing hubs for wind equipment. Turkey has already allocated an additional twenty-three gigawatts of future capacity. The Global Wind Energy Council has appointed a new chairman. Michael Hannibal takes over as chair for two years. He’s a partner at Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Chief Commercial Officer at Stiesdal Offshore. Hannibal says the wind industry has been delivering record growth. He wants to focus on accelerating that growth in new markets worldwide. The Global Wind Energy Council has represented the wind industry for twenty years. Hannibal says new markets are developing on every continent. He replaces Jonathan Cole, who led the council through a period of strong growth. Hannibal has more than twenty years of renewable energy experience. He was previously CEO of Siemens Offshore Wind for seven years. He helped establish the world’s first floating offshore wind turbine in two thousand nine. One of Hannibal’s first duties will be leading celebrations of the council’s twentieth anniversary in Lisbon.

Alejandro Cabrera Muñoz, CEO and founder of Green Eagle Solutions, discusses their ARSOS platform and how it helps wind farm operators manage technical complexities, market volatility, and regulatory changes by automating turbine issue responses for increased productivity and revenue. 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! Wind Farm operators face mounting challenges from managing thousands of diverse turbines to navigating the energy markets and constant regulatory changes. This week we speak with Alejandro Cabrera Munoz, CEO, and founder of Green Eagle Solutions. Green Eagle’s ARSOS platform gives control rooms immediate responses to turbine issues, which dramatically increases productivity and captures more revenue from their turbines. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Alejandro, welcome to the show.  Speaker 3: Thank you, Allen. Thank you for having me here today.  Allen Hall: so Green Eagle Solutions is in a unique space of the renewable energy marketplace, and you saw a problem several years ago, particularly in the control rooms of [00:01:00] wind operators. What is that problem that you identified? Speaker 3: Yeah, Allen, I think it, it’s, It’s a challenge that, most of our customers, which are generally large operators, are facing today. But it’s a challenge that have been, growing, in the past years. So first of all, it’s, it goes along with the penetration of renewables in the industry, right? So we have, due to all these many years of aggregating new wind farms and solar plants, We are seeing how the complexity, the technical complexity of operating and supervising these assets is growing exponentially, right? So we now have customers with thousands of wind turbines that have, different models, different versions of, controllers, And also different healthcare issues that they have to take care of. So the technical complexity is a fair, the first [00:02:00] factor that, it’s has to be tackled from a control room, And, makes, operations quite, challenging. Along with this, we have market volatility. So in the recent years especially, we are seeing how, Negative pricing and optional markets are now affecting operations in a daily, basis. Basically in every 15 minutes you dunno if you’re gonna produce or not. Up until recently it was as simple as if you had wind resource, you would produce energy from wind farms. If you had solar, you produce energy from solar plants. It’s not like that anymore. So the market is quite, volatile. that adds a lot of complexity from the commercial point of view of, Of the assets. And the last, factor that is actually becoming, an increasing challenge for everyone is the regulatory changes. So basically due to the penetration of renewable energies, what we see is that all governments, all grid operators and our market operators are constantly issuing [00:03:00] new adapt, new regulatory changes, that everyone has to adapt to no matter what. it doesn’t matter if you have an all wind farm or a newer wind farm. Or you prepared or not, like everyone has to be adapted to, to the new regulatory, changes. the three things are actually affecting, our customers and we are trying to solve all these issues, the way, the, best way that we can, right? So most of our customers, we just have a control room full of people. they will do their best effort to accommodate these challenges. The reality is that we have to. Deal with, people, procedures, and, systems, and we, if we don’t put these three things in place, it’s impossible to cope up. With the complexity that we are dealing with, and that’s where we come in. Joel Saxum: I think you painted the picture of a really good problem that’s not just like local to the eu, local to India, local to South America, whatever. it’s a global issue, right? You have the, massive build out of different kinds of [00:04:00] technologies that need to be managed in different ways that, bring their own issues, their own delivery to the grid, those kind of things. and then you, and as Green Eagle has, painted the picture like, Hey, we saw these issues. This is where we come in, this is where we step in. So in that, what kind of inefficiencies are you seeing in the traditional wind farm operations versus what you guys are bringing to the table now? Speaker 3: So just to give a few examples, and I think I, I can be quite, precise on this. let’s say that a wind turbine gets some fault because of, high temperature on the gearbox, and it’s a. It’s an automated response from the manufacturer that the ban is gonna stop for safety measures, right? So in many cases. This is solved from the control room point. from the control room by waiting for an operator to just, follow a procedure, right? So this procedure takes a lot of time. Why? Because you are not only paying attention to one winter turbine band, you may have 2000 winter turbines, right? [00:05:00] So you have to first identify, which is a model of winter turbine band that is affected by this issue. Then you have to go through the manual, then you have to check what are the parameters, and the whole process takes minimum half an hour if you wanna do it properly. The problem is when you have other issues like high wind speed, right? So normally when you have high wind resource, which is basically when you can produce more energy, is when your assets suffer the most. And so they’re more prone to errors, they’re more prone to go get on fault. So if you take a look at these times, the country room, response time is actually gonna go up in hours, right? So this one of the one simple example is a end-to-end full haling procedure that takes between. 20 minutes, two hours, depending on how you have a structure, your systems, people, and procedures, right? So this is the first thing that we can tackle. Like just as an example with our software, we can automate the whole process end to end. That means that this problem is never gonna be dealt with. From an operator, This is gonna be [00:06:00] automated. This is an, this is never gonna become an issue for an operator ever again.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And I think this lends itself to software obviously, that there’s, if you look at these control rooms, if you, or especially if you looked 3, 4, 5 years ago. It’s pretty chaotic in there. And if you are on the market for electricity and the price is fluctuating and you have turbines popping on and off, you have a crisis and it’s very hard to sort that out and to get the turbines up and running if you need them to be, to produce power so you can make money. ’cause ultimately we’re trying to maximize the revenue to our company. And that cannot be a human response. We’re too slow. Humans are too slow to respond to all this. And because we’d have to know every nuance to every turbine or solar farm makes the problem immensely impossible. So that’s where you have developed a piece of software called. ARSOS and it’s a system approach to a very complicated problem. So you want to explain what ARSOS does  Speaker 3: [00:07:00] effectively, what, what ARSOS does is to provide immediate response to whatever issue you have already a procedure to deal with, right? So let’s take into account the, previous example that, that we were using, in this case. And, there are hundreds of different cases where a wind turbine is gonna stop. Every wind turbine is gonna, can have potentially hundreds of different. Scenarios where it’s gonna go on fault and require human attention or attention from remote. So the first thing that we can, provide is, immediate response time. I think all the investment funds, IPPs or utilities, can now rely on a system instead of, relying on people. They can rely on a system that is gonna do effectively. The first phase actually is gonna do exactly the same. With immediate response time, this is what our source is all about. according to our experience, we have identified if you, could take 100% of the issues or incidents that can impact, the availability of the assets. We have identified that at least [00:08:00] 80% of those incidents can be managed autonomously. Among that 80%, almost 75% of them can be resolved autonomously, and the other 20%. It can be just dispatched to, technicians on site so they can actually go on the turbine and fix the issue on site. So this, this is, this is our goal. We can multiply by five the operational capacity of our customers. but along with that comes many other benefits. So the, main one, we already tackling that, right? So immediate response time with that comes, increase of productivity because we don’t need operators to be doing repetitive tasks anymore, so they can actually do other. Added value activities, but immediate response also provide with an increase of availability, which also translate into an increase of production and again, translate into additional revenue. So effectively what we’re doing is to transform a traditionally thought of, center of cost, like the, it is a [00:09:00] control room. We can optimize the control room to a point where it’s no longer a center of cost. Actually an opportunity to turn that into a center of revenue. We can actually improve the operations. We can actually capture more revenue from our assets. But we can only do that through automation.  Joel Saxum: So when you’re talking with operators, okay, so I’m, right now I’m imagining Alejandro on a sales call and you’re talking with them and you have, you may have in that room, some energy traders. You may have some of the operators from the ROC, you may have. an engineer in charge of it, an asset manager, someone of that sort, and you start talking through the problems that you guys can solve. Which ones make the light bulb go on the most? Is it the revenue? Is it like, Hey, we can actually pull more revenue outta here, or is it, Hey, operators of the control room, we’re going to ease your life. Which, which of these are the breaking points that make people go, yes, we want to use Green Eagle?  Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question, Joel, and unfortunately it’s not that simple to answer. I wish I had the, right answer to that. [00:10:00] But the reality is that every type of customer has different, interest. and I’m gonna give you a few examples. if you’re a trader, what you’re gonna value is the capabilities to participate in advanced, optional markets, right? Especially in Spain, we are the most used, technology to participate in secondary markets and c services, restoration reserves and so on. So we enable our customers, the traders in this case, to participate in all these markets with zero efforts so they can focus on trading. But all the infrastructure, all the communications, all the actual management of curtailments is done automatically. So they can just focus on trading. but that’s what they, see, right? If we were talking to an IP for instance, ISPs are generally, focused on or driven by, service level agreement based on availability, right? So if they say, if they, if their commitment is 97% of availability, they’re [00:11:00] gonna try to reach that, right? So that driven by the availability. but that’s it. they’re not necessarily capturing more if the availability goes higher than 97% or if the site is being operated better, or if the site is being actually producing more. Sometimes they’re not incentivized by that. This is why, the reason, this is the reason why we are not normally focused on large utilities and large operators because, effectively, large utilities and IPPs, they, if they’re large enough, they’re gonna have everything in house. So they’re gonna see the benefits at all levels. They’re gonna increase the productivity, and they’re gonna improve their operational model as a whole. So that’s why, we are targeting, these larger operators.  Allen Hall: I know a lot of the different operators have their own models of how to respond to particular alarms. Everybody does it differently depending upon a lot of it’s where you are in the world, where your wind turbines are and how your wind turbines respond to certain conditions. So they’ve [00:12:00] developed these sort of procedures themselves. Are they able to integrate their existing procedures into the ARSOS platform where. Basically they’re taking the human outta the loop, but just automating it, making it simpler for the control room to run these turbines.  Speaker 3: That’s a great question, Allen. of course, yes. and this is something that, we’ve been, seeing from day one. at the beginning when we thought, let’s, automate all these processes and all these procedures, I, we thought that we were gonna find like a common ground of how to deal with this model of turbines. However, what we see is a complete different way to. To operate a fleet. And it depends on both commercial, and operational strategies. for instance, a utility that is gonna keep their assets for 20 years, they’re gonna have be paying attention of what is the most effective way to operate, taking care of the healthcare, of the assets. So it’s gonna be more conservative, it’s gonna be more long-term thinking.[00:13:00] on the contrary, if, let’s say that you have a portfolio that you’re gonna sell in two years. That may drive, you to a more aggressive protocol. So you may want to, hire the higher the availability, increase the production, even if that comes at a cost of, a little bit more fatigue on the winter turbines. So it all depends on how, what you wanna get for your fleet. what’s important is that we allow, we provide the technology. We don’t tell our customers how to operate. Actually, they have. They have more knowledge than us, to be honest. They know their assets, they know how they behave, and if you ask them, they know exactly that Tar van, three out of 2000 in this wind farm has this issue, and the other one that has a different issue, they already know that stuff. So we’re not gonna tell them how to operate their fleet, but we allow them to do whatever they think is best for turbine. By turbine, I mean with our software, you can actually define different protocols and assign each protocol to one turbine. That means that, for instance, [00:14:00] if you, change the, the gearbox of one tarn out of 2000, right? Normally you, what you would like to do is that the next day everyone is paying attention to the tarn in case something happens, right? but you have 2000, so that’s actually not very realistic. So in that case, what you do is that you configure out protocol that is designed for that specific model of turbine, and that takes into account that the gearbox was replaced recently. So if there’s an alert, on a fault related to a gearbox. Then the response is gonna be taking that, it’s gonna take that into account. So obviously this kind of things can only be done if you’re based on, automation. Otherwise you just, have to rely on a few notebooks that you have in your control room and that they’re static. They never change. they’re the same for 20 years and they never evolve.  Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re the same for every turbine. And that’s just a approach that we need to give up, that we need to move on as an industry to be more efficient in what we do. So how. [00:15:00] Does an operator, and I know you’re working with a lot of large operators and have a lot of turbines under your systems. How does the RSOs implementation take place? What does that look like?  Speaker 3: All right, so it depends on the, I would say on the digital maturity of our customers. So it depends. Some of them already have a very strong network. Secure network. They have a, let’s, say, one of our customers in the, us, right? So they already have a NERC department in place. basically what, first we need to understand what, they have already in place and how we can fit into that, solution in this, in the most, let’s say most, most demanding scenario. We are, gonna deploy your software on premises. So it depends on whatever they have already in place with the, we deploy your software, we provide them with the installers. We provide them with the procedures and they are autonomous to, to install it. Obviously with our support, from remote [00:16:00] in, in other cases, in the other extreme, we have customers that don’t have a large portfolio. They don’t have these large IT and nerc. Department, in place. So in for smaller portfolios, we can actually connect from our cloud. Our cloud, we make sure that it’s cyber security. We have all the certification in place. and this is the solution that we have. So we have, our cloud is connected to an onsite, piece of software that we install on, the edge, and they’re connecting securely. And that’s how we do it. in terms of architecture, I think it’s important, to get deeper into. Why we are, proposing a, we are also establishing a different, way to do things because it also has to do with the architecture itself. if you take into account, the NERC rules in the US but also any cybersecurity policy, it is basically gonna go against any kind of [00:17:00] optimization, in the operations, right? Because when you have so many issues, as we mentioned before. The tendency is gonna be to, okay, so this let’s centralize everything into one place where I can actually manage everything, efficiently, right? So one place centralize. I can control everything from this place. I have a control room here. I. That’s it. Now that goes totally against cyber security policies, philosophy, right? Which they would like to have everything isolated from each other. So you have to actually go to the site and push the button right there. Now we have a, I would say the best solution, that covers this, both worlds, right? So we have a solution that allows you to centralize the configuration. Distribute the autonomous control. That means that instead of relying on a centralized control room where the operators are pushing the button, so in the control room, you actually don’t push the buttons. You have the control room to supervise and to define the protocols itself. Then these protocols are. Sign to each turbines, [00:18:00] the right protocols, but then the control is actually done autonomously on site. So even if your control room gets disconnected from the sites, from the network, you lose connectivity to your control room. You cannot access for whatever reason to your control room, you can be certain that your sites are still being operated in the same way. If you could access your control room. So this is actually compliance with the cyber security policies at the same time that is allow, is providing you with what you were looking for to begin with, which is efficiency in operations.  Allen Hall: When an operator installs the RSO system, what are the typical things that they’ll see immediately? is it just easier to operate the turbines, it just requires less staff? Are they producing more revenue? What are those success stories look like?  Speaker 3: Yeah, success stories look like this. Just like any automation attempt at the beginning, everyone is suffering from a little bit of, control, fism, right? So it is okay, am I losing control of this? So we already have a system to deal with this. So what we do, basically, we install [00:19:00] our software in parallel to your control room. it works as a shadow mode, in a simulation mode. So basically what it does is to say, if this was active, what would it do? Automatically versus what actually, what, are my operators actually doing? So we can actually compare for a few weeks or a few months, the performance of the automation versus the performance of the, current room. So normally when we propose this, customers, I will say in the mindset, it’s okay to test this for two, three months and then. Go ahead and say, okay, let’s activate it. I no longer want to do this manually. It’s a waste of time and resources, right? The reality is that as soon as we put it in place and they see how it works, how it re respond immediately instead of. The delay that comes from operators, it takes, I would say, no more than two weeks until they’re already ready to put it, in production mode. Allen Hall: When they see the lost revenue, [00:20:00] they would immediately turn it on and start making some more money.  Speaker 3: It takes between two weeks, no more than a month for sure.  Joel Saxum: I hear water cooler conversations. That would be like the ro the robot beats you guys again, you  Speaker 3: know. automation has a very interesting effect. It’s that. I would say it’s a vicious cycle. So once you see something working autonomously, the brain works in a very interesting way. It’s you never want to do that manually again. It’s am I doing it? It doesn’t, it does not make any sense anymore. so it triggers, whole, efforts to just more of it, right? More of it. It’s okay, if we’re doing a. POC with 10 sites, but you have 30 sites. You want it in the 30 sites as soon as possible. If you’re doing it to automate a few cases, but you know that you can actually automate more cases. You wanna do it as soon as possible as well. So it triggers, once you start this process, there’s no way back. it triggers this vicious cycle where you are constantly thinking, okay, what’s the next thing [00:21:00] that if possible, I don’t wanna do it again. It’s very exciting.  Joel Saxum: I’m thinking about when I used to write reports in Excel and I learned, I finally learned how to do a macro in Excel, and then I was like, why I’m never writing another basic one of these reports again. I could just push a button and it does it all. and it’s life changing, right? So once you get onto that, there’s just, there’s, people that are wired that way too, right? I used to have a, mentor that was wired. How can we do this better, faster, more efficiently? And it, he was trying to put that into everything we did. Once he figured out a little way to do here, a little way to do here was, how can we make this better? so you guys have been working, really hard to get this system out through the Green Eagle ASO solution out in the marketplace. Based on the success you’re seeing, what does it look like for the future? What’s the next step?  Speaker 3: So I think that the, in the future what we see, at least what we are aiming for is that every wind farm should have a system like ours. I don’t really care if it’s ours or not, but it should work that way. as a, [00:22:00] from a technical point of view, it’s it doesn’t make any sense that not all wind farms are running with a system like ours. So that’s the way we see it. Like it’s, Getting momentum. I think it took a while for us to, take off and to get large customers to use our software, but now that large customers are using it, and the system is more than validated. We already have this running in over 10,000 wind turbine vans. So I think it’s more than proven that it works and that we are solving a problem that no longer exists anymore. This is how we see it, the wind industry in the next, three to five years. All of the wind farms should come with this, and essentially we’re trying to make it come with a software like ours from day one. So even if they’re already still connected to the manufacturer. It only, this can only benefit in the long run, right? but starting from day one. So this is what we are working on and how to get there as soon as possible we can encourage our customers to, [00:23:00] to start using this automation. To enable them to take back control of their assets to their operations, to not rely on someone else to do your, the operations of your site. if you wanna get out of the manufacturer and work with an ISP, you can also make sure that the response time from their control room is also gonna be immediate with the software. So as soon as you have it, you’re gonna see the returns. And actually, we also work with our customers to. To prove the increase of revenue that they experience. And we, the benefits of automation also is that you can measure the impact, right? So we generally work with our customers. We can measure the impact in their operations and we normally capture like a third of what they are gonna receive. So it’s like a no brainer to use our software. And for that reason, we believe that three to five years from now, every wind farm is gonna be running autonomously. Allen Hall: Wow. That would be amazing. And the Green Eagle Solutions website, if you haven’t [00:24:00] visited it, you need to, it’s green eagle solutions.com. There’s a. Great information on that site. If you want to dive in deep or just take a cursory look, that’s the place to start. Alejandro, if they want to connect with you to learn more about ARSOS and what it does, how would they do that? Speaker 3: the most, straightforward way to write an email to sales@greeneaglesolutions.com.  Allen Hall: That’s a good place to start. And you can also find Alejandro, LinkedIn also. Alejandro, thank you so much for being with us today. Tremendous product, very interesting technology. I. Thank you so much for having me today.

Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar! We discuss China’s new 20MW floating turbine by CRRC, and Nordex’s patent application for modular blade assembly. Plus HeliService USA’s offshore ambulance service and the recent construction delays at Atlantic Shores and Vineyard Wind. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Our next SkySpecs webinar, if you missed the last one, about lightning protection and how to use SkySpecs, drone imaging and data, and the EOLOGIX-PING Lightning sensor to help yourself on the lightning side. You can actually watch that on the SkySpecs. Just go to SkySpecs and you can see that webinar. It’s free. All this stuff is free. It’s all great stuff. All you need to do is register. You can get all this information. The next one is coming up on June 25th, 11:00 AM Eastern Time. And this next, webinar is gonna have Liam McGrath from RWE, who’s a blade engineer there, and Tom Brady from SkySpecs, who handles all the cool drone technologies. So if you haven’t met Tom, you need to go to this webinar and find out what’s going on. And Michael McQueenie from SkySpecs. It’s the rule. Subject is when should you be scheduling your drone inspections and you shouldn’t be doing it in the spring. That’s really important. If you wanna save some money on your operational aspects, your [00:01:00] o and m budget, you need to be thinking about how to get your inspections done, when to get your inspections done, and what tools are available to you at different times a year. So there’s optimal times to get your drones inspected and there’s suboptimal times. Suboptimal times is like March. Don’t do it, then do it the previous fall. and so Joel will be there. I will be there. Don’t miss it. It is June 25th. 11:00 AM and you can sign up in the show notes below.  Speaker 2: You’re 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 to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Joel Saxo along and Rosemary Barnes from Australia and I’ve. Just been digging through all the news over the last several days. Really disappointing news to the United States, but over [00:02:00] in China. TRRC has unveiled a 20 megawatt floating wind turbine, and it’s, has a rotor diameter of 260 meters, which is not really outrageous. The CRRC press release, which is a little outrageous, let, me read you some of this, and it’s called The Key Hung. wind turbine, the key Hung, integrates multiple innovative control technologies offering four core advantages. High intelligence system, modularization, full chain collaboration. And Joel, don’t we all want that? And exceptional stability. It incorporates various intelligent controls, sensing and detection technologies that design further enhances the unit’s flexibility and efficiency by modularizing key system interfaces and structural components. So there are a lot of words in this press release, but they don’t say, actually say anything at all. So that’s why we have Rosemary here to suss  Joel Saxum: out.  Allen Hall: What is happening with CRRC and a [00:03:00] 20 megawatt floating turbine? Is it really needed, Rosemary?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think I’ve made my thoughts clear about the, like bigger, kind of pursuit of, offshore wind turbines. And I think that a lot of it is about prestige to be the, first with the biggest. and so I guess that this is the, first with the biggest, floating offshore wind turbine. I, yeah, I don’t think that we’re really ready for, that with floating offshore wind. Floating offshore wind is still in the period where we’re trying to figure out what are the really important design requirements. How are we gonna deal with some special, issues that floating offshore wind finds. So if you combine all of that with floating offshore wind, or there’s all the, like the, yeah, the floating platform, the mooring mechanisms, control systems, any weird aerodynamics that are happening because of slight tilting or whatever. There’s all that sort of stuff. It’s still being, learned about. [00:04:00] And at the same time, you’re gonna combine that with all of the really huge blade, really huge turbine problems. I, think that. It’s a little bit crazy if this is intended as, being a commercial offering, it’s probably not, it’s probably a learning exercise and a publicity exercise more than that. And, maybe from that point of view, like if you go into it trying to learn everything that you can about what would happen if we, eventually go this big, then I guess that there’s some value in that. but yeah, I, don’t think that we’re ready for, just rolling out thousands of these off the end of a production line. Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you, I’m of course not an expert in Chinese maritime, GE geology. Sorry. But, there’s not a whole lot of super deep water right off of the Chinese coast. The Chinese coast is all 200 meters, like in every place that you’d put like a max step in every place that you’d put a wind turbine. So if this was to be built for a, a [00:05:00] larger. Rollout. Where is it to sell to? Brazil? Oh, Brazil. Sure. Brazil. That would make sense. That could be right. but I don’t think, like if, China has very ambitious wind goals. And of course if you watch the. Any kind of news, you can see them rolling out large wind farms, left and right, onshore, offshore, all kinds of stuff. But I don’t think they actually need the floating technology to be honest with you. So it might just be a show of force.  Rosemary Barnes: And also depths of 200 meters, that is challenging or maybe that’s, I think that exceeds the current, maximum depth of fixed bottom, you could get there, but it, uses heaps of steel, the fixed, bottom, Yeah, design compared to what we assume that floating is gonna eventually achieve it. It should use less steel. But it’s funny because that’s one constraint that probably China of all countries doesn’t really have because they have this, like glut of, steel in China or they’re winding down with their, their construction. [00:06:00] industry. So they have an oversupply of steel. a lot of countries are experiencing China, selling their steel, into those countries at really cheap prices as tariffs around the, world, not, just from the us. and in fact, the US tariffs on Chinese steel predate the Trump administration. yeah, I, think that. Steel is one thing that China doesn’t have a huge short supply of. I would agree with you that this probably isn’t primarily aimed at their own domestic market. It’s probably more to do with the fact that China has dominance in, every, or at least nearly every energy technology at the moment. And looking forward if floating offshore wind is gonna grow, then they probably wanna maintain, wanna be dominant in that as well. But I think the main markets that you see talked about for floating offshore wind, yeah, South Korea and Japan, some other, places around that area where they don’t [00:07:00] have a lot of good, renewable resources they can exploit. And then there’s quite a lot of interest in Europe as well, probably as much because they’re just, really aggressive with their, renewable plans in general.  Joel Saxum: Just to highlight the difference between Western countries and how China operates. One of the things they brag about in this press release is the fact that CRCC, the China Railway Construction Corporation, that single entity is saying, we have a complete wind power equipment supply chain, as in we don’t need anybody else. We’ve got it all solved ourself, and that’s. Very unique ’cause you’re just simply not gonna have that el elsewhere in the world. now can they execute on that? I don’t know. But it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting take  Allen Hall: and talking of offshore, if you haven’t received your latest PES Wind Magazine, the new edition is out and on the cover is hella service, USA, talking about their ambulance service that they’re offering on the east [00:08:00]coast of the United States. And we were up there a couple of months ago when we met with everybody. Michael to Paul Russo, Dr. Kenneth Williams, who was with Brown University and had done all their ambulance work there. And obviously Sophie Crane. If you don’t know Sophie, you’re missing out. She’s, she’s really good, with, hella service USA, but they’re offering an ambulance service. And the thing that Joel, that blew our mind when we were there, and if you can read about it in the article, it says there’s essentially two helicopters that service. The northeast of the United States from the US Coast Guard. So if you flip over your kayak in the ocean, rosemary off the, the coast, New Jersey, it may be a while, it may be several hours where someone can, help you and the US Coast Guard is just gonna pick up your carcass and take it and leave it at the front door of the hospital. They are not skilled to provide any role paramedic services at all [00:09:00]besides just first aid care. but hella service USA is, it’s a completely different model and it’s, it is still shocking. At Rosemary, we were talking about. Australia, how those helicopters everywhere off the coast of Australia.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. any nice day when you could be at the beach in any part of the country, even where I go is the South coast and a lot of people there. and yeah, you see a helicopter patrolling up and down, checking for any really big sharks, approaching groups of, big groups of people. So definitely we’ve got more than one helicopter for our entire coastline. yeah, it’s, interesting.  Joel Saxum: I think it’s just crazy. Like it’s not something you would think about from, just a general public safety thing. and or an industrial safety thing, right? Because there’s a whole, there’s a, there’s other stuff going on in the water out there that could be used as okay, I’m gonna switch gears. We’ll go down to the Gulf Coast, F Port Fon out in hoa, [00:10:00]down in Brownsville. Like all of those places that the oil and gas industry has invested in these resources, Boom, that’s there, right? that’s not a problem. it’s a minute phone call. the, it is, however, 180 miles an hour from three minutes from the phone call, you’re gonna be there. And it’s amazing that I would like, I guess I’d like to see the, same thing on the West coast. What is California, Washington, Oregon, what does their resources look like? ’cause it, just doesn’t make sense to me.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I know. We send, helicopters over to help with bush fires when you have them as well. But I don’t think that’s the same kind of helicopter because we have special ones that can carry heaps of water and then dump just a, whole, bunch of water on a, fire at once. Joel Saxum: Like you said, the US Coast Guard, they have what’s their specialty bird called? Allen, the Dolphin. They have those, but yeah, they’re not there to be the world’s paramedic. They’re there for search and rescue.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And when we talked about it with, HEA service USA, it isn’t [00:11:00] the technicians and, my thought was a technician would have a broken limb or something really serious. It could be as simple as appendicitis or an allergic reaction. Peanuts, a peanut allergy where time matters. And before hella service offered this ambulance service, you could end up taking a CTV and it would take a long time for some of these wind farms to get back. To true, healthcare that can really save your life. So hea service USA is doing a tremendous job on the East coast and elsewhere. They’re expanding their reach as it seems. if you are, new to PS Wind, you need to download a copy of PS Wind, and you can do it@pswind.com. This issue is full of good information. You need to be reading it if you’re going to stay up. Abreast of what’s happening in wind, you need to be reading PES. Wind.  Joel Saxum: As Busy Wind Energy Professionals. Staying informed is crucial and let’s face it difficult. [00:12:00] That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS wind.com today.  Allen Hall: some more bad news for us. Offshore wind is Atlantic Shores, which is a partnership between Shell and EDF renewables. North America has filed to cancel its 1.5 gigawatt offshore wind. Project off the coast of New Jersey near Atlantic City, the company cited economic challenges including inflation, supply chain disruptions, and the administration’s federal permitting freeze as a primary reasons. Remember, a couple of months ago, the Environmental Protection Agency pulled the project’s air permit, and we talked about that on the podcast. but it looks like some of these problems are insurmountable, so Shell and [00:13:00] EDF are going to pull the plug. Pulling the plug. Now, Joel doesn’t mean a permanent withdrawal, it just, I think it just means they’re on hold. I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. You still own the lease spot, right? So you still own the plot of ocean. Joel Saxum: But if you’re going to the, basically the interconnect and saying no, we’re done here. I don’t know. They’re not gonna make it easy to, try to reopen that program. I know EDF laid off a bunch of their offshore people in shell’s, all but closed up their offshore arm. So I don’t see, I can see what, I’ll see if this is my take. I see Shell and EDF trying to sell this thing, this the lease rights. I don’t know to who, but they’re, gonna take pennies on the dollar for it. But to get something out of it. If  Allen Hall: you think if they waited four years, they have an opportunity to sell it.  Joel Saxum: Maybe the best we’re gonna get is a, maybe. Is that lease, 20? Is that lease 25 years? What is that lease? Oh, I would assume it’s longer than 25 years. It’d have to [00:14:00] be, but there should be a staged toed construction and then after construction, usually on a federal lease. So I don’t know how long those rights last  Allen Hall: are. Are they still, I guess if they didn’t cancel it, would they still be paying monthly payments to the federal government? That’s a great question.  Joel Saxum: Or did they pay that in a lump sum?  Allen Hall: yeah. I thought the way the process worked is that they were, they paid the lump sum for the lease, the ability to have a lease, but the lease payments had to be made. And then when the construction started, that ramped up the price of the lease. Isn’t that how it was laid  Joel Saxum: out? So you get five years and then 25 more. So you have a total of  Allen Hall: 30 years of that spot. So the average tri in life is 20 years. So you still have a couple years to play around here. Maybe that’s what they’re doing.  Joel Saxum: So it says the le the lessee has a period for site assessment, construction and operational planning, and then an operational term of [00:15:00] 25 years. The initial site assessment period is typically five years, and the lessee must submit progress reports every six months. During this time, after the construction and operations plan is approved, the lessee has an operational term of 25 years.  Allen Hall: So what are our next steps, Joel? Do you think that, It just sits. Joel Saxum: I think it’s gonna sit, I think it’s gonna sit, it’s gonna sit empty and naked and it’s gonna be a sore spot. there’s, there wasn’t anything out there before. But either way, it’s, economic opportunity that’s on the shelf. I. That’s really sad, right? There’s a lot of jobs from that. if you went and we went back, if we go back and look at all the things when offshore windows coming, how excited along the East coast, all these governments and agencies and people got about all the jobs coming in, all the economic, stability coming in. All this money that the, supply chain companies that sprout it up and or built facilities or expanding facilities for. Everything from steel to transport, logistics. [00:16:00] and now it’s just kind of me that’s not a very good American story.  Allen Hall: So moving north a little bit to vineyard wind, vineyard wind has extended its lease of the new Bedford Marine Commerce terminal through June, 2026, suggesting construction delays beyond the original. 2024 Now, 2025 completion date. The, project currently has four turbines sending power to Massachusetts out of the plan, 62 turbines at least, roughly 25 more bar trips are needed to complete construction, not counting the potential trips to remove, blades from, the Canadian factory. The, project has obviously faced some additional challenges lately, but I think. GE was really hoping to finish that project, I thought this year, but it looks like it’s gonna roll in at least in, at least to early 2026. It’d be my guess. But if they [00:17:00] plan it out to June of 2026, like the, winter months in Massachusetts, south coast of Massachusetts are terrible. so I guess it gives them a couple more, more months to, to clean up at the end, right? Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. this is a big project, right? And any large capital project is gonna have delays. The delays for this thing have been very public, right? We know when they had stop works, go on up there, we know when they had some blade issues. and then of course having to dismount some blades, send them over to France, I believe it was to get fixed, send back. yeah. if you follow offshore wind, almost every large project, every offshore wind project has delays, right? They’re usually never on schedule. it’s pretty rare and it’s just the nature of the marine operating environment. Oil and gas projects are the same way. You might, you can get a thing in there, ah, we’ll plan for, 20% weather and then all of a sudden you get two weeks straight of winds where it’s [00:18:00] blowing up the, heat we call, call the heave height, blowing up the waves too high. You can’t operate. And it is as simple as that. Anybody that works in wind, even onshore, knows that, right? You can have a crane sitting on site for two weeks where you’re sitting there with twiddling your thumbs underneath the crane. ’cause, as soon as eight and a half meters per second of 10 minute average wind speed blows up. You can’t move the dang thing. and you’re just stuck. So these things happen. They’re looking forward, 2026, so we should be done. Then  Allen Hall: the positive note is that they didn’t shut down the effort early, right? They would say they were gonna abandon it. They’re not gonna abandon it, they’re gonna complete it, which is great. Massachusetts really needs that energy. 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. Their cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog [00:19:00] ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. I was perusing the patent application database from the US Patent and Trademark Office. And honestly, who doesn’t do that in their spare time. And I noticed that there was a patent application, and that’s where all the cool technology is. Don’t look for patents, look for patent applications, because that’s the latest and greatest. but there was a patent application from Nordics. For a modular blade assembly system, IEA two piece blade. And this approach, is a little bit different than what we’ve seen on the LM side for a two piece blade. The LM design is a hole and a pin approach to connecting two pieces together. So it’s a relatively simple system that, that LM pursued. And I don’t wanna speak for Rosie, but I think Rosie thought. Do I really need it? is, wasn’t that the sort of summary of what the LM two piece blade output was? Rosemary Barnes: Two piece [00:20:00] blades in general? it, it sounds like a very appealing thing because blades are very long, they’re hard to transport. They often require, road closures and choosing route carefully to make sure that you don’t have to, go around any tight corners or anything like that. So it sounds very appealing, but they’re inherently very challenging because. the, a wind turbine blade is basically like a cantilever beam, and they use composite materials which rely like they’re very strong and stiff for their weight because they’ve got these long fibers and loads are transmitted along in the direction of those fibers. Yeah. So if you make a two piece blade, you necessarily cut, those, all those fibers in half in one, in one place. so that’s challenging. And then if you try and look for, solutions to that. You want to, you need to be able to make the joint strong enough, but not add so much extra weight. And basically the way that a wind turbine blade is loaded, [00:21:00] it’s quite lightly loaded towards the tip. But then as you get to the root, all of the The moment forces from, the, the outboard section of the blade, they add up. So the biggest loads are at the root of the blade. So basically, if you wanna make your structural problem easier with a two piece blade, you’ll split it close to the tip. But then what’s the point in that? what you would obviously want to do is split it in the middle or thereabouts. But that means, huge loads have to be transmitted through your pin joint, or whatever kind of joint that you had. And so it’s just inherently very challenging to do that.  Allen Hall: And that’s where the Nordic patent application, takes a different approach than what LM did. They basically have a sleeve design and a bolted design. A hydraulics are used to pretension this joint. The images are a little unclear to me as an electrical engineer having [00:22:00] never built a two piece blade, but it does sound like they’re trying to address certain, mechanical loads in different ways. So like the, sleeve assembly is there, to react to the bending moments, and then the actual loads are handed through this threaded connection. And then the pretension gets rid of any sort of fatigue problem, so they preload it. It’s a different approach, but the, I think the, cost benefit, at least from the application, says it will reduce transportation costs from roughly a hundred k, per blade to about 40,000 because you can put on a, basically a standard truck and, move them around, which is always the. The emphasis on these two piece are now three piece. I guess it could be three pieces, blades from a application standpoint. Rosemary, this is a mechanical joint. It would seem like a lot of mechanical joints have been dealt with, but maybe it’s because it’s such a large [00:23:00] composite structure, this particular kind of mechanical joint have never been conceived of. Is this something that, that, you have seen before, but it has been set aside for other reasons? Cost reasons.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I haven’t seen something exactly like this one. If you look at the sketches in the patent application, then you do see a lot of details that are trying to spread loads over a, a wider distance. So it’s not trying to have, just this one narrow joint where all of the loads need to be transferred. However, there you are adding a whole lot of extra components to, a wind turbine blade and. it is really, it’s very challenging because they’ve got, millions and millions of fatigue cycles that these, blades have to deal with. really high strain compared to any other kind of, structural component in a, different industry, a different application like this. This is really the hardest, the hardest example of, those kinds of [00:24:00] loading conditions. So it’s still, you’re still definitely going to be, either reducing fatigue performance or adding a, weight penalty and probably both. so I, yeah, I, doubt that it’s a, perfect solution. Obviously they’ll develop as far as they can. It’s also worth noting that, so they can put it on a normal truck for, what is this, for three megawatt. Roughly turbines. Yeah, it, the blade length isn’t the only thing making transport of blades expensive. So as you get much bigger than three megawatts, then you start to get a quite a large root diameter. And that is also a, constraint. You then you need to worry about getting under bridges and stuff like that. So it’s not the. It’s not the only thing, and it’s not gonna be like, oh, now we can transport 12 megawatt blades with 12 megawatt turbines on shore easily. it’s definitely not gonna be that. So  Joel Saxum: are you talking about this root diameter [00:25:00] thing from the latest, Australian newspaper article? We saw  Rosemary Barnes: the one, I think there was a turbine, a tower segment. that got stuck under,  Joel Saxum: stuck under a bridge, I thought. Was that a tower segment? I thought it was the, for some reason I thought it was the root end. Rosemary Barnes: The report reporting was terrible. it, like it and mentioned you just need to look at it to be like, oh, there’s a door on there. Okay. Yeah, it’s a, tower segment. and probably the bottom one. Yeah. And I, back to the split blade thing and whether it’s worth it, I guess that’s the thing, like it’s a solution to a problem. Is the problem severe enough that the difficult solution is worth it? That I think is extremely debatable. So in the end, I think with the GE split Blade Cyprus, I don’t think that they sold any additional projects that they wouldn’t have been able to sell without this, split blade. That’s the word on the street. if it’s true that you can reduce the transport cost by that much, then that would be very interesting. But I personally wouldn’t be rushing to be one of the first [00:26:00] people to get this blade because there’s so, much that can go wrong with it. And it is. Not possible to test, act absolutely every, little quirk of the operating environment. You, you can’t test that all in the lab adequately to be totally sure that the first ones out in the field are gonna. Be reliable. yeah, I would wanna see, I would wanna be, like turbine 1000 after a few years experience before I, put, placed an order for my own wind farm, I think.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. One of the things that we saw with that existing two place, two piece model out in the field right now, the Cyprus, is that, there’s a couple of things, right? There’s, the seal hasn’t been sealed quite right, but a lot of it boils down to. The technicians in the field that are putting these things together like they’re Desi, that joint was designed to be put together by high-end engineers in a factory.  Rosemary Barnes: It’s not their, it wasn’t their intention. Certainly everybody knows that you’re not gonna send an engineer around for every single blade that’s gonna be put [00:27:00] together,  Joel Saxum: but they, I’ve talked firsthand at people that are installing ’em in the field and they’re like. We don’t really know how to put these things together. We’re just doing it.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it wasn’t an easy, and that term poke yoke, it’s supposed to be poke yoke, that there’s only one way that you can install it. there’s no chance to get it wrong and it didn’t quite achieve that. and I would suggest that. Yeah, looking at the, complexity in the design in these patents, I don’t think that’s gonna be totally straightforward to, install and, maintain and monitor. ’cause you shouldn’t have to monitor, your, blade to know, oh yeah, these. pins shaking loose and it’s gonna fall apart. are you getting up there on rope every single year or six months to check the talk? that’s, really, you’re gonna burn through your transportation saving pretty quickly. But, if you have to get extra rope access inspections every year, so yeah, I think interesting. I’m actually [00:28:00] not, sure if we’re ever going to see the split blade thing fulfill its potential. ’cause I do think that there’s other solutions to. To the transport issue. we already have them, right? They, cost a little bit more. But then, like I, I could imagine more likely that we’re gonna see, on, on site, manufacturing of blades or, thermoplastic blades that get welded together on site. Or like I, I can see. Other things. Alan’s making airplane wing motions, big airplanes. No way. Come on.  Joel Saxum: Okay, so this week for the Wind Farm of the Week, I may or not, I may, I am gonna get some words wrong here because we’re taking a trip over to the Netherlands. This conversation started with a friend of mine, a friend of the show, Lars Benson, up in Canada, and we were talking about offshore wind in the Great Lakes. Why not? There’s great wind resource. There is a need for renewable energy in places that can’t get a lot of renewable energies. Say like up [00:29:00] in Lake Superior for Wisconsin, the Univer or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and other things like that. So we were talking about fresh water, wind farms. Is there any in the world? What are the challenges they have? Turns out Wind Park Free Salon is the largest freshwater offshore wind farm in the world, and it’s in the Netherlands. so yeah, and it actually has over 380 megawatts in size. I didn’t know this. I didn’t, think any of ’em existed. There’s 89 Siemens Cesa, SWT Direct Drive, one 30 turbine. So they’re 4.3 megawatts a piece, and they’ve laid ’em out in a hexagonal kind of shape. And this was to ease the, view of the eye and some other things for, the local considerations. And they dove in headfirst, local considerations. They did all kinds of things to make this a. A joint effort between the community and the developers. one of the cool things they did was a lot of local sourcing local welding firms for making steel platforms, that [00:30:00] brought in other people that will have work for the lifetime of the wind farm, which is great. 720,000 euro per year for 20 years. Environmental fund that’s gonna be built by this wind farm. another really cool one, a citizen investment. so the Province of Free Salon offered bonds to residents enabling them financial participation in the wind farm, so you could invest in it and take dividends from the wind farm as it produces energy, which I think is a really cool concept. but this one I think is one of the, one of the neatest ones ’cause I haven’t heard of this yet. despite the initial fears of a tourism decline, the Wind farm has introduced new activities like the Windmill Cup. Which is an annual sailing race through the turbines organized by a local water sport association. Really? Yeah. I didn’t, never heard of any of this. Over in the Netherlands. Congrats to our friends there for the, largest fresh water offshore wind farm in the world. And we hope we can draw on that over [00:31:00] here in the States. So for the Wind Farm of the Week, wind Park Free salon over from the Netherlands.  Allen Hall: Wow, that’s amazing. Thanks Lars for that tip. That’s really cool. that, that’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime Wind energy podcast. Rosemary will be back next week, Joel. Are you coming back next week or? I  Joel Saxum: believe so,  Allen Hall: yeah. we’d love to have you. it’s an open invite. You can come and go as you wish, and we’ll see everybody here back next week. and thanks to all the listeners and everybody on YouTube. Our, listenership is just exploding and we appreciate everybody who’s listening and we’re trying to bring you all the latest news and technology around wind industry. Around the wind industry and we appreciate everybody contributing and sending us notes, including Derek Rutherford. So thanks Derek, for sending us a couple notes here about what’s happening in wind and we’ll see you here. Next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:32:00] Podcast.

Australia has approved the 943 MW Valley of the Winds Wind Farm, Bermuda plans to install an offshore wind farm with 17 turbines by 2027, and Nova Scotia proposes an ambitious $10 billion offshore wind 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! Australia has given the green light to a massive wind project. The Independent Planning Commission in New South Wales has approved ACEN Australia’s nine hundred forty-three megawatt Valley of the Winds wind farm. The project also includes a three hundred twenty megawatt battery storage system. The project will create up to four hundred construction jobs and fifty permanent positions. The investment is approximately one point six eight billion Australian dollars. The island nation of Bermuda is making the most of its windy weather. Officials unveiled plans for an offshore wind farm starting with seventeen turbines by twenty twenty-seven. The project aims to help Bermuda reach its twenty thirty-five goal of eighty-five percent renewable energy. The project will begin with a sixty megawatt installation near the north shore. Officials hope to scale up to one hundred twenty megawatts total. Nigel Burgess, head of regulation at Regulatory Authority Bermuda, calls offshore wind a compelling opportunity. The project will lower exposure to fuel price shocks and create space for long-term investment. Currently, Bermuda gets one hundred percent of its power from fuel burning. The project aims to promote energy independence by reducing dependence on imported fuels. The wind farm is expected to be operational by twenty thirty. Nova Scotia has announced an ambitious offshore wind project that could cost up to ten billion dollars. Premier Tim Houston wants to license enough offshore turbines over the next ten years to produce forty gigawatts of electricity. That’s eight times more than originally planned. To put this in perspective, Nova Scotia with just over one million people requires only two point four gigawatts at peak demand. China’s offshore wind turbines were producing just under forty-two gigawatts as of last year. The project would require hundreds of wind turbines built in water about one hundred meters deep, about twenty-five kilometers offshore. Experts say the project would actually need more than four thousand offshore turbines using current fifteen megawatt turbines. The transmission line alone is estimated to cost between five billion and ten billion dollars to connect the wind farms with the rest of the country. The premier calls it a concept to capture the imagination of Nova Scotians. He wants federal help to cover costs, saying the excess electricity could supply twenty-seven percent of Canada’s total demand.