GE Vernova Restructures Offshore Wind Division

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

#Science #Tech #Geology #Environment #Allen Hall

32:17

Jay is more than just the host of All About Change podcast. He is a lawyer and international activist, who has focused his life’s work on seeking social justice by advocating for the rights of people with disabilities worldwide. On the special episode of All About Change, Mijon Zulu, the managing producer of the "All About Change" podcast, is taking over hosting duties to interview Jay Ruderman about his new book, his activist journey, and why activism is even more important today. Episode Chapters (0:00) intro (02:38) How does one choose a cause to go after? (03:33) Jay’s path to activism (07:50) Practical steps a new activist can take (09:24) Confrontation vs trolling (17:36) Learning from activists operating in different sectors (19:20) Resilience in activism (22:24) Reflections on Find Your Fight and goodbye For video episodes, watch on www.youtube.com/@therudermanfamilyfoundation Stay in touch: X: @JayRuderman | @RudermanFdn LinkedIn: Jay Ruderman | Ruderman Family Foundation Instagram: All About Change Podcast | Ruderman Family Foundation To learn more about the podcast, visit https://allaboutchangepodcast.com/ Looking for more insights into the world of activism? Be sure to check out Jay’s brand new book, Find Your Fight , in which Jay teaches the next generation of activists and advocates how to step up and bring about lasting change. You can find Find Your Fight wherever you buy your books, and you can learn more about it at www.jayruderman.com .…

год назад 32:57

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Allen, Joel, and Phil dissect GE Vernova's restructuring of its offshore wind operations, potentially cutting 900 jobs globally. What will be the implications for the US and international wind energy markets? They also share key insights from the Sandia Blades Workshop, emphasizing the importance of prescriptive operations and digitizing tribal knowledge. Enter to win a bunch of Yeti and StrikeTape swag at https://weatherguardwind.com/yeti! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Hello everyone. Joel and I have been traveling across America talking with GE2X wind farm operators about how strike tape can protect their blades against lightning damage. If you work on a GE2X site, you need to visit our new website. weatherguardwind.com/yeti. We'll show you how your turbines can be protected against lightning with Strike Tape, and you can also register to win a nice Yeti Roadie 48 cooler, four Yeti mugs, and some Strike Tape swag. Just visit weatherguardwind.com/yeti. Phil, have you been to the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York? Philip Totaro: I have not. Allen Hall: Oh my gosh, you're missing out because they have the finalists, the twelfth finalists for induction into the National Toy Hall of Fame this year. And they include, are you ready? Drum roll please. Balloons, Pokemon cards, your own adventure books, which is a particular kind of interesting book. Hess toy trucks, which we see at Christmas time here in the United States. My Little Pony, which should have been an entrance a long time ago, honestly. How is that not already in there? Exactly my point. Remote control vehicles, stick horses, trampolines, and probably one of Joel's favorite, Transformers. I'm a Transformers fan. Hang on, let's go back to stick horses for a second, because again, how long has this museum been, or Hall of Fame been in business? I mean, are they, they're digging up some pretty legacy toy technology there. Stick horses are back. Have you seen those competitions of, where people are riding the stick horses over a competitive course where they're hopping over things and running around? Philip Totaro: There are some people that think that the United States Is not going in the right direction. I think these people are probably steering us in exactly where we don't need to be. Joel Saxum: Allen, when you said that the Toy Hall of Fame, I looked over at my bookshelf and I have to, I went and grabbed this toy, because to me, this is American Toy Hall of Fame material. This was, this toy was my dad's when he was a kid. And this is the original Mound, Minnesota built Tonka trucks. Allen Hall: I think we all need to take a moment and observe and salute the old Tonka truck. I Philip Totaro: will salute that. Joel Saxum: Working tailgate, I'm telling you, that's it right there. Philip Totaro: That's a toy. Joel Saxum: It even says USA on the tires. Allen Hall: Made out of American steel and the edges are sharp like they should be. I'm Allen Hall and here are this week's top stories. In a significant corporate development, the Spanish government has authorized BlackRock's stake in Natergy. This follows BlackRock's acquisition of GIP, which owns 20. 6 percent of the Spanish energy company. The approval comes with conditions, including support for energy transition projects and maintaining Natergy's headquarters in Spain.

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The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

GE Vernova Restructures Offshore Wind Division

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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published год назад

MP3•Главная эпизода

444 эпизодов

#Science #Tech #Geology #Environment #Allen Hall

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The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
Deutsche Windtechnik’s Repower Approach 24:06

2 дня назад24:06

24:06

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum speak with Tyler Gifford, Director of Repower at Deutsche Windtechnik , about the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on wind turbine repowering. They explore the 80/20 rule, overcoming challenges, and optimizing older wind assets to improve reliability and efficiency. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News , our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech . Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook , YouTube , Twitter , Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web . And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here . Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co-host Joel Saxum. Today we’re diving deep into one of the most significant developments in wind energy, the Inflation Reduction Act, and its impact on wind turbine repowering. Joining us is Tyler Gifford, director of Repower at Deutsche Windtechnik. Tyler leads Repowering initiatives across nine wind energy facilities in five states, managing over one gigawatts. Of clean energy capacity. His hands-on experience with multiple turbine platforms and deep understanding of wind farm operations makes Tyler the perfect guest to discuss the complexities of wind turbine repowering under the IRA. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Tyler, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Guys, there’s a bunch of questions that we want to ask you about the IRA bill and how Repowering is happening, but as we talk across the United States, there seems to be a lot of challenges there. What are some of those challenges that wind farms that are getting close to Repowering are facing? As they start to make some of these decisions? Tyler Gifford: Good question, Allen. I mean, typically with Repowering, a lot of people think of, I’m gonna tear the tower down and I’m gonna start fresh and I’m gonna put a whole new one up. So what we think about is there’s another approach to this, the 80 20 and the IRA has really introduced a new opportunity in the industry to where we can take older assets that are, have been operating reliably for years. And you, you can evaluate, understand your fair market value, and there’s an opportunity to where that fair market value is so low to where you can go out and you can understand what, what is a value add upgrade for this, this asset. Does it ha doesn’t necessarily have to be a whole drive, train or take off the hole in the cell and put a hole in the cell on it. It could be that your fair market value is so low that you wanna evaluate. Typically owners wanna evaluate two things they want. Hire a EP, they want to increase a EP or they want to improve reliability. Those are the two big things that owners want. So with, for, so for Deutsche Wind Technic, that’s what we do. We meet with those owners and we understand, okay, you may have an asset that’s 2015 or 15 to 20 years old but there’s a way that, that you can take advantage of these PTCs, just like the bigger operating assets out there. So we’ll evaluate, look at, what, what are your pain points? What’s causing you to lose reliability, lose availability. What’s causing turbine or what’s causing technicians to have to go out there and climb? What are your pain points? And then we start to target those pain points by finding upgrades that will go after those, those things that are causing causing. Those, those reliability concerns. So that could be things, it could be drivetrain it could be, it could be that you need to focus on your blades. But it could also be smaller things, things that get overlooked. It could be condition monitoring systems that some of these older assets just don’t have. It could be different things like sensors and controller systems and, and things that day to day are causing. Towers to come offline and causing owners pain and causing owners money, and we can qualify them for these PTCs without possibly the cr, the large crane costs, without possibly having to pull big expensive permits and things like that. Joel Saxum: Yeah. So what we’re. What we’re diving into here is just a different way of looking at repowering. So classically, everybody thinks repower, I gotta take a whole new, to sell a whole new everything. Because what they’re looking to do is basically requalify for PTC. This is the joke that Phil always says, we’re PTC farming, not wind farming at some points in time. But it doesn’t have to be that difficult. It doesn’t have to be that capital intensive is what you’re saying by the IRA rules that 80 20 rule. So it, I wanna clarify the 80 20 rule that’s, you’ve got to put. 80 is 80% of the value of the asset back into it. Exactly. Joel? Yep. Okay. And and it’s, and, and it’s based on the individual asset, correct? Tyler Gifford: Individual asset, yeah. The, the IRS sees it as a facility, so it’s turbine by turbine. The IRS defines a turbine as a facility. Okay. So. Joel Saxum: Because some wind farms, I mean, we know one wind farm. We were talking to someone the other day, they had like four different types of turbines on it. It’s like, how do you value all these? So, so that’s the next, I guess, part of it, or a big part of it when Allen says, what are the challenges people take if you’re gonna go down this route of a. Upgrade, refurbish type repower. How do you, how do you get the value of these things? Is it, is it consultants? Do you guys do it at DWT yourself? How does the operator do it? Like what does that look like? Typically, what you Tyler Gifford: gotta find out is, okay, I got this 15 to 20-year-old asset. Can it run another 15 to 20 years? So that’s gonna be through a number of channels. And at DWT Yeah, we’ll partner with you from the beginning stage of understanding what’s my fair market value. We don’t do that in-house, but we have many people that we work with. So you gotta understand what’s your fair market value. Then you gotta understand what’s my integrity of my asset? What is can, can the, can the machine base, can the foundation, can these tubes handle another 15 to 20 years of extended life that we’re planning on providing you? Once you understand that, and you can go through a number of independent engineers, engineering firms that can help you determine that, but then we come in and really help you put together what we call an optimized 80 20 repower package. We’re not gonna hand you a package and say, here’s a drivetrain package in a couple upgrades. Take it or leave it. No. A a a Siemens two three repower to another Siemens two three Repower may look completely different. ’cause what we wanna do is we wanna look at, well, what’s historically, what, what does the fault data tell you? Where, where are your pain points? It’s possible that you could have done retrofits or site-wide sweeps or made upgrades through the years that you don’t have weaknesses that other owners do. It’s possible that you could have replaced drive, train components. You could have done a, a generator bearing sweep and taken away that weakness. So we don’t want to come in and tell you to replace all your generators when you’ve already made those upgrades. We wanna make sure that your, your return on investment Allen Hall: is as high as possible. So the, the goal is from a turbine by turbine by turbine approach is to take that turbine, make it better, let it live another 10 to 20 years. And still meet this 80 20 rule. That makes a lot of sense because the issue I think a lot of operators are having at the moment, if they want to put a new turbine in, there’s not a lot of new turbines you can buy right now that that assembly line is pretty well booked out. And if you want to get the production tax credits rolling sooner rather than later, and the, and you like the turbines, you have your technicians understand the turbines you have. The 80 20 rule allows you to keep that same turbine, but just make it better. How does, how do you do that then, as Deutsche Windtechnik? Obviously you’re bringing a lot of knowledge to the table about a lot of different turbines because Deutsche Windtechnik is huge and you work with a lot of different turbines. Do you have a, like an engineering group internal that comes in and says, yes, this GE 1.5. Generally has these problems. These are things that we can focus on specifically because we have the knowledge of the turbines a hundred percent. Tyler Gifford: So the biggest thing where we flip the script is transparency. So with any owner, they wanna operate their asset. They want to op, they wanna optimize it, they wanna run things the way, the way they wanna run it. So the biggest thing for us is we want that too. We wanna support you. If you have issues, we wanna partner alongside of you. We have US-based engineers right here in the us. That are based in Houston, Texas. And then we also have an extensive engineering support team over in Europe, over in Germany where we have, you know, we have our mechanical engineers, our electrical engineers, our blade engineers. We have specific GE engineers, specific Siemens engineers. Whatever you need, we have the engineering support that, that can help you optimize your assets. So when we think about that, when building a repower package, we think about. How do, how do we improve the way that you’re currently operating? Maybe it’s that for the longest time you’ve had things that you wanted to adjust or wanted to change, maybe with your current controller system that you just haven’t been able to do that. So then let’s target that with a new, you know, third party, a controller system. And then it’s not that we’re gonna, we’re gonna hold back and, and try to keep you from changing parameters or adjusting things the way you want. We’re gonna partner with you to say, Hey, if you have an issue or you have an inquiry, or you have something that you wanna make better. Let’s do it. Let’s partner together. Joel Saxum: So controller systems is a big one. I know. I’ve heard that personally from people doing Repowers. It’s like, well, we have this, you know, X, Y, ZOEM controller, and we’re kind of locked outta this and we can’t get this and we can’t get that SCADA data. So that’s a great example of something. You do an upgrade, but now all of a sudden you have more control. You have the ability to. Do things that you haven’t had before or data that you want to grab before. So what would you say is your most common, I guess, upgrades, and I know this is a broad question because we’re talking diff ge, Vestas, Siemens, like they’re all kind of, there’s a lot of things out there, a lot of different brands, turbine types. But what would you say is the most common thing that you guys, that people say, I wanna upgrade this right away. It, it Tyler Gifford: really depends on the technology and that fair market value of that asset. And MHI 1000, that fair market value is gonna differ pretty drastically from a Siemens two, three. But we take the same evaluation approach. We wanna look at where your pain points how can we give you the most value for a an 80 20 repower package. But I would say, Joel, you’re, you’re correct for a EP. Improving a EP, you’re gonna be, it’s gonna be on your controller, it’s also gonna be in your blades. Anything we can do where we can uplift your power output. So vortex generators, a lot of customers want leading edge protection. And then on the mechanical side, a hundred percent is drive, train components. We’re never gonna steer someone away from reducing their CapEx on the backend. If they can do that, it’s all about reducing CapEx and reducing opex. How do we if, if, if DWT is a partner on the backend, on a long-term service agreement, we want to partner with you on the o and m side. If we want to stand behind a product that we know is gonna run reliable, and we’re gonna put an availability guarantee behind it, and we gotta deliver on the front end. During the construction period when we’re putting upgrades and installing, installing these components in your turbines to make sure that we’re really setting you up for success. Joel Saxum: I think that’s a really important thing to touch on here is Deutsche Windtechnik As a company, I mean, if you’re in wind, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world. You’ve heard of Deutsche Windtechnik, so what, but what you guys are offering as well is, Hey, we’ll come and do your repower. On the back end of it, we’ll also run the wind farm for you and give you, and, and you’re even going to the point of giving availability guarantees is, is that what I heard? Yep, that’s right. And then Tyler Gifford: it’s the tricky piece with some, with this 80 20 and the IRA is that you have to have a. 15% of your total labor hours for your construction period ought to be performed by qualified apprentices. So that’s the next piece. So that’s, that’s something new, that’s something that’s new that’s been introduced to the WIN industry. So DWT actually has our own internal apprentice program so we can meet that labor requirement. And that’s really a key piece. ’cause without that piece. Owners aren’t gonna be doing 80 20 repowers. So that’s a really important aspect of these 80 20 repowers is being able to meet those labor requirements, not only for prevailing wage at the local rate of the construction project, but also the apprentice labor hour percentage requirements. Allen Hall: Well, how soon should I bring Deutsche Windtechnik in? Before my site gets repowered, just, just trying to understand what the logistics are here, because one of the, the things I hear about most frequently in terms of repowering, particularly if they’re just doing work up to hour, is what about the concrete? What about the tower? How do I know that? Those two pieces, which are the critical pieces of holding everything together. How do I know that those two pieces are okay to live another 20 years do. There must be a little bit of engineering that goes on ahead of time and maybe just some monitoring that goes on ahead of time to know like, okay, we understand what the real issues are with this farm. We’ve monitored it, we, and we think these turbines you can just leave alone and. Upgrade while this turbine over here. Maybe we gotta rip the foundation out and maybe you don’t wanna repower that one. I mean, we’re a partner that Tyler Gifford: will partner with you throughout the full process. Whether it’s, whether it’s, you need someone that will help you evaluate the fair market value, I. If we don’t do it in-house, we’re not gonna tell you that we can do it, but we can steer you in the right direction for the right industry experts that can help you navigate along those steps. But we’ll be your partner shoulder to shoulder up. Okay? Let’s determine your fair market value. Okay? You have your fair market value. Now we need to determine structural integrity. You have your structural integrity. Now let’s start evaluating salt data. Our engineers will be telling you, this is the data I need, these are the reports that I need. And when they start going through that, it’s a back and forth collaborative conversation to understand what makes sense on a 80 20 repower. It’s not this, here’s our quote, here’s our bid. Take it or leave it. That’s not how it works. That’s how it works with us. Allen Hall: Tyler, what, what does that timeframe look like when you They say, okay, Deutsche Windtechnik, Hey, I’m putting my trust in. You go. How much time do you need to overlook a site before you really understand how it works and what you can do to it? You’d be surprised at how quick we can Tyler Gifford: turn some of these evaluations, but I, I would say it can be as quick as a, as a few weeks and as long as a few months. That’s quick. That’s a lot faster than I thought I was looking, looking to hear like 18 months or something like that. Now that’s for the evaluation and understanding what does an 80 20 look like? And, and you certainly have customers that are more motivated and their legal teams are set up and ready to go. But then what we’ll do is we’ll be open and honest with you about, okay, so we’ll do the, we’ll support you with the engineering side, we’ll support you with the procurement side. We have the full supply chain folks that can help you understanding, okay, you’re telling me this is the components and these are the upgrades that I need, but can we get that? Everyone knows supply chain is constrained. And if one company’s talking about 80 20 and Repower, then a num, another company is talking about 80 20 and Repower. So we’ll be open and honest about, okay, maybe we wanna do this upgrade, but if that doesn’t work for the project timeline, then maybe this other upgrade makes, makes sense because of the procurement time. So the procurement time is a really Allen Hall: critical piece. The supply chain is a critical piece to the repowering. You do see a lot of sites where they wanna repower and they wanna put new bearings in, but there aren’t bearings available, so they’re kind of stuck navigating. That is probably the hardest. Part in the Repowering is getting the components that you want to be on the turbine, but Deutsche Wing technique has those resources to either the, you carry those parts or they know how to procure those parts. And the procurement piece is probably the most difficult part of Repowering. You wanna explain how strong that procurement piece is for Deutsche Wing technique because you have been able to do these 80 20 projects. Yeah, the big thing is global. You Tyler Gifford: gotta think global. So with 80 20 there is a piece of domestic. So there is a domestic content bonus adder for the IRA. Very, very difficult. It’s very, very difficult ’cause most of our materials and a lot of our components for these wind, these wind turbine assets. Come from overseas. So that piece is there, but you have to think global of where do these parts come from? We have a global, we have our US supply chain, and then we have our global supply chain in Germany. And that’s really the critical piece. These are, these are people that have been working in the wind industry DWT U TWT Inc. Was founded in 2004. So these are folks that have been partnering with the, the Siemens and the Vestas, and. Building those relationships with a large supplier providers for, for many, many years. And you just have to think larger scale and you have to be really unique on your strategy on, on how you’re gonna procure these parts because. Everybody needs parts to, to perform these repowers Allen Hall: Well, what kind of performance improvements can you typically deliver here? If you’re going to put Vortex generators on, you’re gonna clean up a lot of the drivetrain, clearly. Get the CMS installed, put a new controller in. What are we talking about in terms of. Numbers in terms of percentage upgrade? Tyler Gifford: Yeah, I mean, it really depends on the asset. I mean, it really depends on is it a one megawatt machine, is it a two megawatt machine? And really the, the components that you’re gonna be installing, but anywhere from, I would say a one to four to 5% uplift with the, with the upgrades. Depending on, you know, what all you install and then the reliability piece. I mean, when we’re coming on the backend, when construction phase is finished and we’re coming in with a long-term service agreement Deutsche Windtechnik really matches the OEMs. Where we’re a lot of these technologies you know, we’re high, high nineties availability guarantee. So we have to stand behind the quality and. The product that we’re putting out there. Joel Saxum: So you need products like, like strike tape from weather guard to make sure you don’t have lightning damages. That’s what you need. Tyler Gifford: Exactly, Joel. That’s exactly the product that we need. Yes. Joel Saxum: So let me ask you this question, because I’ve heard this before from a few people, like, Hey, we’re thinking about doing a repower, but. If we do a full repower, we have to renegotiate our PPA and they don’t want to do that ’cause they have a really good PPA in place. Do you have to, is that, does that come into play as well with the 80 twenties or do you get to bypass some of that? It Tyler Gifford: really depends on the site and the owner and the situation. But yeah, some of our owners are doing that. It really depends on the situation. Joel Saxum: It’s a, there’s a difference there too. ’cause you’re looking at the cost. So if you have a $200 million wind farm and you’re gonna do a full repower, the classical we repowers have been done, which to me is, is. It is hard to watch that as an engineer and as people that know what’s going on because like those assets are still fine. Why are we taking them down? Why are we replacing blades and hole in the cells and all this stuff when the thing is still running? I. Let’s do something different. Like you guys are doing the 80 20 repower, we’re gonna use the same equipment, we’re gonna keep it outta landfills, we’re gonna keep this asset running. But people are, they look at it like, oh, I don’t know about this PPA thing. However, there’s two ways in my mind, CapEx is one thing. So if you have a 200, a hundred million dollars wind farm, it’s gonna cost you probably a a hundred, $150 million to do that. You know, full on repower, where you don’t have to do all of that. Spend all of that cash. So your capital versus the money spent and money made can maybe even make up for that PPA difference. Tyler Gifford: Yep. You’re really, your risk is really much lower. Again, like I talked about, the permitting risk. I mean, you think a lot of these components that I’m talking about, it’s no different than when you’re operating the site. You know, you don’t have the large permitting, you don’t have the big crane. Sometimes we do have big crane costs, but not all the time. But you’re not introducing new technology that you just don’t understand. You spend all this money and, and all this capital training up your technicians to get them to understand these turbines and not, then you have a reliable asset and you have a reliable site that you’re operating, why not keep that going and take out the, the parts that you are upgrade, the parts that you know are causing you pain. And you really take out that that unknown, those bugs, those years of pain and suffering and it really can target some. Some value added components that really, really make a difference. Allen Hall: What is the future for 80 20 refurbishment? Is it growing like, I think that it should because I think Joel’s point is right. It is sort of painful to watch blades being dumped and recycled that are, have a lot of life lifting ’em. A lot of those older blades are tough as nails and a lot of the equipment and the, the drivetrains is really tough. Are you seeing more action and more people picking up the phone and calling Deutsche Windtechnik and calling you Tyler and saying, tell me about 80 20. Explain how this works. How do I get this done? A hundred percent. I mean, we’ve had. Tyler Gifford: Customers that are very, very well versed in 80 20 understand it very well. You know, customers that are, this is, this is a new concept to them. They weren’t thinking, they were thinking about, you know, tearing down their turbines. A few months ago, and this has been a new concept for them, but 80 20, assuming things aren’t gonna change with the new, new government change. It’s not gonna go anywhere because you think the turbines right now that are 15 to 20 years old, those are gonna be the low hanging fruit. Those are the ones that are gonna be getting repowered right now in five to 10 years from now that, that, that is gonna overturn. And the turbines that were 10 years old are now 20 years old. The turbines that are five years old are now 15 years old, so it’s gonna continue to have this. This, these turbines that are always gonna be optimal for an 80 20 repower. Allen Hall: I understand this, this is really fascinating to me. I, I believe 80 20 is the way for a lot of operators over the next couple of years are going to move forward because there’s a limited number of new turbine slots, and it isn’t like they’re designing new turbines all the time. Right now, you’re seeing fewer and fewer turbines being even offered. So your selection is very narrow of what you can install. I know a lot of operators that love their GE 1.5 or their Siemens turbines that just do not want to replace them. They need to be really considering using Deutsche Windtechnik and, and getting an understanding of what the financing piece of this is along with the engineering piece quickly because. There’s gonna be a long line, obviously at your door, Tyler, you’re gonna have a lot of people saying, Hey, help me, help me, help me. It’s better to be in the front of that line and then the back of that line, how. How do they get ahold of you? How do they connect with you? How do they start this process and learning what their assets are worth and learning what engineering things need to be done? Tyler Gifford: Yeah, I mean, reach out to reach out to us. We have a mailbox set up focused on repower, so that’s repower@deutscheuh-windtechnik.com. Get on our website, check us out. Reach out to me. You can hit me up on LinkedIn, but I mean, you’re right, there’s so many reliable assets out there. Think of the MHI 1000. Everyone that has those assets, that’s, that’s had those assets for some time that’s taken care of them. Reliable machine, they know it can run. They know it’s bulletproof. Me being a former clipper tech man, I wish 80 20 repower would’ve been an opportunity ’cause we could have saved those assets. ’cause I sure enjoyed working on them, but there’s probably a lot of people that say differently. But man, I would’ve loved to have saved more of those assets and had 80 20 repower for those. Allen Hall: That’s why I need to get a hold of Tyler and Deutsche Wind. And if you go to their website, I’m gonna spell it out because I have trouble with it. I know everybody else does too, if you’re an American, but spelling Deutsche and Win Technique or not Easy is D-E-U-T-S-C-H-E hyphen W-I-N-D-T-E-C-H-N-I k.com. You go to that website, you can get ahold of Tyler and get your 80 20. Repower situation figured out, and now’s the time to do it. Tyler, thank you so much for appearing on the podcast. I love having you on. I, I learned a tremendous amount. Appreciate Tyler Gifford: talking with you guys as long as it’s not talking about the Wisconsin Badgers with Joel. I’ll chat with you guys all day long.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
Alex Fournier on Blade Repair Safety and SPRAT Certification

3 дня назад

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Alex Fournier, Director of Composite Operations at Enertek, discusses the importance and training of SPRAT certification for wind turbine technicians. He details the certification levels, recent changes in safety standards, and the significance of proper protective gear and equipment maintenance in rope access and blade repair. 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: With wind turbine scaling up and rope access becoming more critical. Technicians need proper training for safe and efficient blade repairs. This week we speak with Alex Fournier director of Composite Operations at Enertek, Alex brings insight on the spread certification process and how recent changes are enhancing safety. Efficiency for technicians working at Height. Speaker 2: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Alex, welcome to the program. Alex Fournier: Thank you guys for having me once again. Allen Hall: Yeah, we’re glad to have you back. There’s been so much so many changes that has happened since the last time you were here, but today we want to talk about SPRAT training and. What this means for the industry and what the latest and greatest is in terms of sprt. And for those who don’t know what SPRT is, it’s actually an acronym like most things in Wind, it’s the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians, and they create [00:01:00] the standards around. The knowledge you’re supposed to have and the skills you’re supposed to have if you want to climb with rope access. Now. I, Alex, I wanna start off first, like how big of a problem do we have right now on the training on rope access technicians? I see a lot of variation across the United States in particular. Are you seeing the same thing, that they’re just not so much a concrete standard everybody’s using? Alex Fournier: I think in Canada, like we don’t have that many schools that offer the course, first of all. So I think we don’t have much in the east Coast. We probably have what? Three, four. In the west coast they have a little bit more. And it’s often like vendors that will offer it. So it’s a mistress, for example, offered a course. They do IDA and spread. I did my course at Novel in Montreal, which is one of the best training center I’ve seen in all my years of Rob Access. Celtic Falcon too in the East coast. Really good training center. But I [00:02:00] think since we don’t have that many, everyone is kinda like on the same page, so everyone talked to each other and the course is pretty well structured, at least in Canada. Before when I started the course was four days, and then you had one days for the exam. So it’s a lot to learn in four days, but now they changed it to five days of course, and then one extra day for the exam. So that give you much time to train and, if you don’t understand something you can. You can really take the time to really understand it. So you’re ready for the exam. Joel Saxum: Alex, let me ask you a question about SPRAT and ia, right? ’cause Sprat is the North American version. IRATA is usually the EU version or rest of the world version. They are they’re organizations that push this safety forward and there’s, this is how we should do things. And a lot of times a company will adopt it, say, X, Y, Z operator says, if you’re gonna be on ropes on my site, you must be sprat level, this level, that level, that, however. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but this is my take on it. They’re not actually like a [00:03:00] governmental association. They’re not an OSHA or something that mandates that you must have. It’s just these things are in our industry, sprat best practices. This is what people live by. This is how we do it. Okay. That’s correct. Yeah. So can you walk us through the different levels of spray? ’cause I know there’s like a 1, 2, 3. What do those all mean? Alex Fournier: Yeah. Level one basically you’re just a basic technician. You just learn how to move yourself on the ropes basically. So you’ll do basic like rope Totaro transfer, or you’re gonna pass deviation. All the basic maneuver that you need to know on ropes. You’re gonna learn it into your level one which is great. Then to be a level one you just need to be 18-year-old and you can sign up and do your level one. That’s the only requirement. Level two is after you did 600 hours on ropes and six months of experience as a level one. Then you can do your level two which you’ll learn more. It will be more like rescue scenario. So you’ll do some basic [00:04:00] maneuver combined with rescue, but yeah, so as a level two, you’re gonna learn more as taking some charge up and moving some charge up in the air. And then to be a level three, it’s kinda the same thing you do you’re level two, so then 600 hours as a level two, and then six months as a level two, and then you can go to level three. And then level three, you do every basic maneuver that I said in level one, but it’s rescue, so you’re gonna do like a climbings rescue. You’re gonna do deviation rescue, ballet rescue just rope to rope transfer with a victim on you. So it’s every maneuver with a rescue because when you’re a level tree, normally you’re in charge of the site or you’re gonna be in charge of. All the employees, not necessarily, but normally that’s all it is. So you wanna make sure that you’re able to rescue pretty much everyone in every Joel Saxum: scenario. So what is, okay, so we have level ones, level twos, level threes. What is a normal, and we’re talking blade repair here, [00:05:00] right? This is the Uptime podcast. So what is a normal blade repair, sprat rope access crew look like? Alex Fournier: So I know a lot of people will be, mad, that’s what I’m gonna say. But normally when you work, we call it when the rope access world, the wind turbine industry is the easiest rope access world. Because you’re only doing you’re only going down. You’re only going up. There’s not much to it. You’re not gonna do crazy deviation or you’re not gonna do crazy, like zip line and all that stuff. If you do oil and gas, it’s much bigger. But in rope access, in the wind industry, normally a level one and level two. It’s pretty much that a level three might be overkill sometimes. On big job you probably want to have one just ’cause you probably have more knowledge and project management. But normally just a regular team, it’s Joel Saxum: gonna be a level two and a level one. Yeah. And from my experience, basically everybody’s dropping down two, two people on the blade. You don’t go by yourself. So there’s always gonna be two [00:06:00] technicians on that blade. And that makes sense. What you’re saying is and while people may not like this of rope access, what it looks and that is a little bit easier because for the most part, you’re going up and down and. Two dimensions, right? It’s just up down on that one thing. Whereas in, I’ve been on, I’ve been offshore on oil and gas crews where you see people in three dimensions, guys going across tanks and all kinds of crazy stuff in between. Pylons, like that’s pretty, that’s some pretty advanced stuff. And when you watch those guys work, it is really impressive. Sometimes the really experienced ones, I’m sure they are level threes or whatever, how they can zip around. It’s the same thing on a wind turbine though. When you’re, if you’ve never seen that and you watch these people, Alex Fournier: it’s Joel Saxum: mind blowing. Alex Fournier: It’s really the industrial athletes, that’s how we call it normally. Joel Saxum: But it’s really impressive. The seasonality of wind makes that kind of stuff difficult because what happens is from a lot of times, okay, we’ll take North America for example, because of our blade repair season. You may be, if you’re a rope person, you may be out on ropes from April till September, [00:07:00] October, depending on how far north you are. And then you got three, four months off. So coming back around to April again, much. A little bit tough, isn’t it, when you’re coming off the couch. Alex Fournier: Yeah. And I gotta see a lot of people they take it off in the winter and I don’t blame them ’cause it’s really cold when you do ropes. But when you come back, you in that if you are of bench board in six months, you shall do a day at a training center to just put you back in your element. So yeah, you shall still practice a little bit. But yeah, coming back after two months of holidays or three months of. Vacation. It can be hard. Yeah, you’re gonna be sore. Definitely. The first you’re gonna be sore. Allen Hall: Let me ask the obvious question, because a lot of guys that do wind turbine work in the summertime do something else in, in the fall and the winter, but they want to stay on ropes. So is then the sprat carries over. So even if you’re just doing spprt work for a wind turbine, you can get over into oil and gas and do some rope work there, or. Wherever the place is. So it’s so itpr as a [00:08:00] universal training system in a sense. It’s not just wind specific. Alex Fournier: Yeah. It’s basically, it’s kinda like a driver license. And the wind turbine industry is kinda like the car. So let’s say you go to oil and gas you have your driver license, your rope access guy. But the car is, let’s say like the oil and gas industry, like myself, I started in 2015 as a ax technician. I started doing window cleaning in Montreal. So I was washing windows and then one of my friend got me into the wind industry. But definitely around the spread universe. You can do building maintenance. You can do oil and gas, you can go and mines, you can go in wind turbines. So there’s a lot of universe that are related to the spread industry as well Joel Saxum: as Ida. So staying up to date on it. What kind of changes have you seen lately in the for the Spprt certification? What does it look like? Alex Fournier: So for spprt, one of the big change that will be related to the wind industry is that you don’t need A level three on site anymore. So I know a lot of [00:09:00] people ’cause you cannot have a level trees on every wind turbine of your project. So Sprat said, as long as your level two just do up and down maneuver. So you cannot do like crazy ballets and zip line and all that stuff, but we basically just do up and down, right? So as long as you do up and down maneuver and your level two is trained you can have only a level two taking care of the job. Allen Hall: So to get to that point of being a level two, if you’re just starting in the industry, takes several months to get there. How, what’s the best way to go about doing that? Alex Fournier: If you’re really new let’s say it’s your first time, like doing something related to wind industry and you’re a level one and you’re just starting sprats say that 600 hours and six months as a level one to be level two you need to know it’s 600 hours on ropes. You cannot be just chilling in the wind. Turbine doesn’t count as being on ropes. You actually need to be on ropes or calling ropes or putting ropes in a bag. Doesn’t count as hours. So you need [00:10:00] to be 600 hours on ropes in six months as a level one. I will say if you’re able to do 600 hours in one season, in six months, that’s really good. You can do your level two obviously will give you more seniority. Like you’re gonna be a level two so you can tap your shoulder. But I will say if you’re really new, maybe I will do another year as a level two, not as a supervisor, but just, to understand like all the industry work and, slowly taking the role as a level two. But that will be my approach. Let’s say you get your ticket and then you do one season as just a level two, and then. Once you’re ready, you go As a lead, that will be all. I will do it. That’s how I did it. But if, of course, if you’re ready, you think after your 600 hours go ahead and do it. But that’s how I see it. Joel Saxum: We’re talking blade repair too, right? So rope this is why blade repairs like. So complicated because we’re just talking about the rope access part of it, right? We’re just talking about how you get to work. Yeah. We didn’t talk about Blade yet. Yeah. Your [00:11:00] co your commute is the, probably one of the craziest commutes in the world to get to the actual job task. But now we’re, then you gotta get there, then you gotta, yeah. Then you gotta learn blade repair. So I think that if you’re a sprat level one, basically you’re a minimum of a season sprat, level two, you’re probably two seasons. Then level three, maybe at the beginning of that fourth year, you’re taking, you’re level three and you’re ready to run a crew. Does that look about right? Alex Fournier: Yeah, it look about right for myself, I did two years as a level one one year as a level two, and then I did my level three, like really fast. But I was ready to do it. But yeah, ’cause like you said, you also need to learn how to do fiberglass also, right? So you gotta learn how to be confident on ropes and how to manage all your rope, all your stuff, like all your buckets on you, all the elements around you. And then you need to do the fabricas as well. So if you’re learning everything at the same time, it can be a little bit overwhelming. But just take your time and you’ll do just fine. Joel Saxum: Alex, I’m gonna ask you a question. [00:12:00] And this is a non access guy. How do you use the restroom when you’re hanging on ropes? Alex Fournier: There’s different school of thought. You need to know that ammonia, like we have a ammonia in our bodies, but it’s one of them. The bows, dangerous material for RNS, it’s ammonia, like it will just destroy your R ns. So you need to be really careful of what you do when you go to the bathroom. I will recommend removing your RNS before you do so it’s either you go down or you can take the risk to do it up there. I already did it up there. It’s not super fancy, but you can do it. Allen Hall: See, that leads into my question about taking care of your equipment. Spprt walks you through how to maintain your gear, right? What are some of the keys to keeping your equipment ready to Alex Fournier: climb? So basically, as a level one, you should even all the levels, you should do like checkup every day before you. Climb the tower or what you’re about. The job you’re about to do is you check the webbing, you check your RNS if it look good you check if there’s any discoloration, if you see some stitches going away, or if you see that it start to rip, obviously you need to [00:13:00] discard. Same thing with plastic or metal. If you see cracks, if see your plastic discoloring or cracks in your plastic are your battle, you need to discard as well. But yeah just make sure that everything looks right and there’s no cracks or discoloration. Allen Hall: So let’s talk about the, probably the, one of the most controversial topics when we talk climbing and ropes is helmets and all the protective gear, because everyone has their own opinion that everybody likes a certain style, and if they choose the other brand, it’s like, it’s not any good. I wanna hear someone that I trust. Alex, you, what your thoughts are on some of the protective gear that you should be wearing when you’re climbing and using ropes. Alex Fournier: I use the pencil lme, the vertex best. I’ve been using it since forever. I never change lme. I know there’s cask and pedal Petzel. I rather petzel. For a couple of years I think Petzel, they were playing with their design and there was some stuff that, you had to buy clips to [00:14:00] fit on your helmet to be able to put a visor and the protective earrings. But now I think the, it all came together and their helmet is better today. Like you can wear a lamp with a visor and then you can have your protective earring on your helmet. But yeah, it’s a must to have your ed lamps at least a visor, right? Like the visor and the protective earrings. ’cause when you do grindings. Wanna protect your hair, Allen Hall: right? So all the accessories matter there now. So the hearing protection is probably in the eye protection are the two big ones, and now they’re incorporated into the helmet themselves or clip on things now. So is there certain things about those that you should pay attention to? Maybe. Where, like the hearing protection, I always think the hearing protection is very person centric. Like some hearing protection is comfortable, some of it is not. It’s really a decision of the technician. Have you seen a lot of variation there? Have you tried a bunch of things? What works for you? Alex Fournier: What, for sure me, it’s really like the overhear like airing protective system and then the visor for me I wear glasses, right? So if I wanna make sure that [00:15:00] I’m fully protected, I wear the visor. My glasses too. But yeah I wear both. I like to have shades, so I take the shade visor. So yeah, I take the shade visor. My overall like air protective. ’cause sometimes when you put like just the one in your hair little plugs, they wear out and you cannot use them. You cannot use them like often. You can use them often, but you cannot, you’re not supposed to reuse a plug. So then like buying plugs, every day or just putting new plugs every day. Then you’re gonna lose them as when you have them on your helmet, you’re never gonna lose them. Joel Saxum: I like the visor on the petzel too. ’cause it makes you look like a fighter pilot. Yeah. Alex Fournier: With the air protective too. You really look like a jet pilot. But when you have everything on your lme, you’re not gonna forget it, because everything’s on it. Joel Saxum: That’s the benefit, right? ’cause when you’re climbing, everything needs to be, you gotta, the stop the drop. We, the whole industry talks about that, right? So everything has to be carabiner off and lanyard it off and all this stuff. So if all of those things that you [00:16:00] use are connected to your helmet, boom, that’s one much easier way to go about your day. ’cause you just, soon as you clip that thing under your chin you got all your stuff on. Allen Hall: Same thing for work gloves. What are you using? Alex Fournier: Work gloves. The petzel once again. Allen Hall: Really? Are you using petzel Alex Fournier: for that? Okay. Yeah. The work gloves when I do propex is maneuver. I use my pencil gloves. But when I do grindings, I use my cut resistant gloves. So I like the cut resistant clip from Grainer. I think they have some, and then the anti vibration too. When you grind for long hours, it, you know it’s gonna hurt your hands. So anti-vibration and anti cut, it’s the best. Allen Hall: Okay, so I wanna talk about that now. It was leading to this question, the anti vibration discussion. So over in Europe, they have limitations on how long you can operate a piece of equipment like a grinder because of the vibration and what it does to your hands and your arms, and. North America. I don’t think there are any regulations about that. Are there regulations about that in Canada? Alex Fournier: Not that I know of. Not that I [00:17:00] heard of. Maybe there is, but I’m not really sure. Allen Hall: Yeah. I, from what I’ve seen in Canada, it doesn’t seem like there is. So essentially you could be using a grinder 4, 6, 8 hours a day. Gloves matter there. So what is the best in terms of anti vibration gloves? I’ve seen a couple of ’em. They look really cool. Alex Fournier: If you go on Uline and you wrote anti vibration gloves, they’re gonna be gray with a big Uline on it. And that’s the one that I use. And they’re pretty good. We use them for years and they really make a difference actually. Allen Hall: Okay. All right. Yeah, because that it is a big issue over in Europe that they’re actually limiting people. That, that’s fascinating. Alright, there’s a lot to do with Spprt and if you’re a technician, especially, you want to get into the wind industry and now’s the time to get into the wind industry, you’re going to need spprt training and you need to get to, at least to a level two. And that’s gonna take a bit of time. So you need to get started now and find the right place. Now. Alex has a second job. Besides being an expert climber and doing blade repair, you’re the [00:18:00] director of composite operations at. Intertech is always looking for people, I assume, because that’s the big demand. When you make a call out for people to take a look at Intertech and join as composite technicians. Alex Fournier: Yes. So if you’re a composite technician if you don’t have your rope access ticket, it’s okay. We’ll give it to you if you’re, a spread technician and you’re looking for a change of care and you want to try the win industry, we’ll take you as well. So if you do composite or rope access, we’ll take you both. Allen Hall: Okay. And so how do they reach Intertech? How do they get ahold of you to get started, Alex Fournier: On LinkedIn, you can send my message on my personal profile or on the Win Intertech page, or you can reach me by email. Allen Hall: Obviously you can find Alex on LinkedIn and because he’s available and you see him posting and yeah, he’s an easy guy. Get ahold of. So if you’re interested in being a wind technician, get started. Listen to the device of Alex that brought here today. Get your sprt training. Check out intertech, for sure. Great company. [00:19:00] Alex, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I love having you on. Alex Fournier: Thank you guys. I love to be on the podcast as well. It’s awesome every time.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
Vattenfall 1.6 GW Farm, AI Learns to “Cheat” 34:24

5 дней назад34:24

34:24

Allen and Joel discuss Nylacast’s article in PES Wind Magazine about corrosion solutions in offshore wind and Vattenfall’s major investment in Germany’s largest offshore wind farm. They also talk about MIT’s strategic alliance with GE Vernova and the ethical concerns around AI in engineering. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News , our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech . Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook , YouTube , Twitter , LinkedIn and visit Weather Guard on the web . And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here . Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Speaker: [00:00:00] You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: If you checked your mailbox or checked online, the new PES Wind magazine is out and it is full of great content this quarter. There’s a very interesting article because we’ve been talking a lot about offshore wind and some of the problems with offshore wind as one of them is corrosion. Just betw between us engineers, it comes up quite a bit. Like, why are we making things outta steel that you don’t need to make outta steel, why you’re not making them out of plastic? And that’s what, uh, the people at, uh, Nylacast engineer products are doing, um, on some hang off clamps, Joel, uh, which are traditionally really cheap clamps that are made outta steel and rust like [00:01:00] crazy. Joel Saxum: Yeah. You know, from my oil and gas offshore background, that was one of the things that was always a pain in the butt. IIRM contracts, as they call ’em, offshore inspection, repair, and maintenance. There’s so much focus on coatings, paint coatings, paint coatings, and it’s a special coating, and it’s this, and you can only apply it during this, and everything has to be painted. And if you can’t allow rust to start anywhere on an offshore facility, it’s in a high corrosion environment, right? You have salt water, salt spray temperatures, it’s always kind of wet. It’s a marine environment. And so erosion moves very fast, right? So in the, in the oil and gas world, they started creating some things out of like HDPE, which is high density, polyethylene, plastic. Um, it’s even so dense. You can mill it. It’s really cool stuff. But that’s what, um, the PO the kind of Nylacast engineered products is working with some of these plastic products to replace some of those components in offshore wind turbines that are a pain in the butt to maintain. So when we talk about these hang off clamps. [00:02:00] They grab the cables and other things and they, and they hold them in place in the turbine as need be. If those are made outta steel and have a coating on ’em, and you get a little bit of vibration and that coating starts to wear away or starts to get a little bit of rust, you’ve got a huge problem. You’ve gotta take the cables out, you gotta take the things off, you’ve gotta replace ’em. You gotta either replace them or you gotta grind on ’em and repaint them. It is a nightmare. So they’re, what they’re doing with these, um, uh, hang off clamps that are, you know, basically plastic instead of metallic. Or a plastic type instead of metallic is there, they’re removing that need for IRM contracts in the future. Allen Hall: I think it’s great. It makes a ton of sense. And I’m surprised you haven’t seen more of this because, uh, nylon and and derivatives in nylon are easily recyclable. It does fit all the things that wind energy is looking for. It doesn’t. Rust recyclable, easy, lightweight, simple. We need to be moving this direction. So if you haven’t checked out PES Wind, you go to PS wind.com and download a [00:03:00] copy. Or if you are at Wind Europe when this episode comes out, it’ll be during the Wind Europe event. Uh, there’ll be plenty of PES wind hard copies available just. Stop by and grab one. It’s well worth reading a lot of great material this quarter, so check out PESWind.com. Well, Swedish Power Utility Vattenfall has made final investment decisions for two wind farm projects in the German North Sea. The Nordic one project is set to become Germany’s largest offshore wind farm, which marks a significant expansion in Germany’s renewable energy capacity. Now Vattenfall has approved construction of Nor Lake one and two wind farms. And they’ve also bought back Joel, uh, 49% stake that BASF had. And the, the total capacity of the projects is 1.6 gigawatts. That’s a lot of power with construction. It’s set to begin in 2026 and full operation is expected by 2028. [00:04:00] And this is gonna power about 1.6 million German households. This is a huge project. Joel Saxum: I think it’s really cool to hear this about the offshore wind sector, right? So, so much, whether it’s in the US or elsewhere, not a lot of good news, right? We had the Danish, uh, auction news. It didn’t really go anywhere for a little while. There was a German, uh, auction that was, you know, had a really low subscription rate. So the fact that, uh, Vattenfall is charging forward, and, and this is a key thing too. And we’ll talk, you know, Phil’s usually here to talk about this, but final investment decision is a big milestone, right? There’s all this, you can, these offshore wind projects are being worked on for 6, 8, 10 years before you get to this stage, you know, you’re, you’re looking out, um, doing sub seed mapping and site characterization and all the permitting, and getting all the PPA stuff in place and signing these contracts and all these different things. And then you finally get to final investment decision and once that is debt box [00:05:00] is checked, then you’re moving. Right. So final investment decision right now, Alan, and it looks like 2026 is gonna be the start of construction. What do you think they’re looking for right now? Are they signing contracts for vessels? Is that, is that next on the list? It Allen Hall: has to be right because they signed an agreement with Vestas for 68 turbines. Now this is really fascinating because it’s the V 2 36 15 megawatt turbine, 68 of them. Now, the big discussion about offshore is been, is 15 megawatts enough and should we be pushing to 20 or higher than 20, which is where Siemens GAA appears to be going. But uh, that and fall sticking with a 15 megawatt turbine. I do think makes a lot of sense because it is less risky and risk is a huge concern at the moment. But Vest has also got a comprehensive long-term service agreement, which has been their, uh, mode of operating for a number of years now, and which [00:06:00] you hear a lot of operators offshore talk about not wanting a long-term agreement, but it seems like Europe is still sticking with it and Augustus is obviously. Pushing it, uh, at the moment, but 15 megawatts long-term service agreement. Does this Joel Saxum: make sense, Allen Hall: Joel? Joel Saxum: I think so. And one of the reasons for Vestas as well is we know, ’cause we have someone in our network that used to be operations for Vestas, uh, for the offshore stuff, is they, they’re very well versed in it and they have the facilities and the Keyside facilities ready to go. So Vesta is, uh, it’s not like, oh, we have these, you know, this gigawatt of order. Fantastic. We got the service contract. Fantastic. Now we need to do all this prep and this build out and figure out how this operation works. That’s not the case. Vestas is ready to rock. They’ve got their own keyside facilities, they have the teams in place, they can make this thing happen and that 15 megawatt turbine, I think it’s interesting that you say this too because you know the other one, um, from the Western OEMs that we’ve been following is that Big Dog 21 megawatt, I think from Siemens Mesa. [00:07:00] That’s, but that is currently being tested. So to take final investment decision, you have to engage your insurance companies and your banks. If they’re not gonna sign a contract for a turbine that’s still under testing at this stage. Right? This is a, you’re talking a gigawatt of, of turbines at, you know, that’s a billion dollars, that’s a billion US dollars minimum in just tur a turbine order. Right? So, so just in those turbines, that’s what that thing looks like. And, and if I’m fat and fall, uh uh. And fall. Of course, they’re, they’re developing a lot of on onshore power. They’re a part of some other offshore wind farms. But this is a big, big undertaking and I think you want, when you’re, you know, you’re taking, looking at final investment decisions. You’re in these conversations with the banks and the insurance and the people that want to de-risk the investment. I think that’s where the, the Vestus thing steps in. I think that’s where it looks good, is de-risking the operation. Allen Hall: Does esa. [00:08:00] Have a problem now that Vestus seems to be scoring with a 15 megawatt turbine. It does. The Siemen SC MEA effort get, or the pathway get more difficult because like you said, they’re gonna have to have somebody buy a number of these turbines and it’s gonna have to demonstrate a decent service life for a year or two before you start to see a lot of people jump in and start to purchase those turbines. In the meantime, Vestus is gonna be. Just building 15 megawatt turbines, one after the other. Does that start to weigh on Siemens cesa in terms of what they want to offer? Joel Saxum: I don’t think so. Um, and the reason being is, is that 2021 megawatt machine that they’re testing right now is they’re trying to future proof their organization, right? They’re trying to make sure that for the next push, they’re ready to go. So what’s gonna happen there, in my mind, is when the industry’s ready to make that next step forward, Vestas won’t have an offering. So Siemens will, right? So they’re gonna step into that hole, right? And so right now we [00:09:00] know, uh, Siemens cesa, while they had some troubles with the four and five megawatt onshore platform during that period, their offshore platforms are completely built different. So the Siemens cesa offshore platforms, they didn’t really slow down in sales. They kept chugging along, right? Like I think, uh, there’s, you know, um, revolution in the States as the Siemens GAA turbine platform. Um, so I don’t, I don’t think it’s gonna hurt them right now. Or, I mean, let, let’s take this one, like you said in the future, I don’t think it’s gonna hurt them right now. It kind of, it’s kind of painful to be probably on that team, in sales team and watching these, these things roll out and, oh, Vestas is doing this, Vestas is doing that. Um, but I think that, uh, they’ll be okay. It’ll be okay for them in the future. That’s just my take on it. Allen Hall: That’s a good thought. Well, another thing happened in regards to the Nor Lake Offshore Wind Farm, Helena Bistro. Who was Vattenfall wind business leader as announced her resignation and is gonna be stepping down from her position. This is kind of big, right? [00:10:00] She’s been there a long time. She’s been the head of that business area for quite a while. Bistro cited a desire to prioritize other things in life after 42 years of operational work. Okay, so. When I first read this news story, it was kind of popped up in a number of places. Like, oh, there’s been big changes at Vattenfall. And then you read, well, she’s been doing this for 42 years. That’s a long time. And she just made, or just locked in, really, I. The largest offshore wind farm in Germany. That is something to go out at at the top right. If you’re gonna go out, go out at the top. Joel Saxum: I think she just did that. Win the Super Bowl and then retire. Just be done. Right? Like, like I, I’m with it. Like, yeah. I think that that happens sometimes in, you know, whether it’s wind, aerospace, the industries, you know, we’re always looking at all kinds of different industries, but when you see these big changes, if it’s a change of someone that they have an organization when they’re like 50. I know this being ageist, right? But you’re like, Ooh, what’s going on over there? But sometimes [00:11:00] someone’s just retiring, right? Like sometimes it’s like, Hey, am I’m done here? You know? So not all changes in organizations mean good or bad news or, or whatever they may need. Sometimes it’s just, Hey man, I’m done here. I’m, I’m riding off into the sunset. And you know what, uh, uh, he Helena Bi Bistro here. Or bistro doing this right after signing that thing FID on this big thing. You know what? Boom, springtime is here. I’m gonna enjoy not only my European summers that I usually do, but European summers for a long time now. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a total win. I just didn’t understand the news reports, thought they were totally off on this, and congratulations to Helena because, uh, job well done Joel Saxum: as busy wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial. I. 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 [00:12:00] 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: Well GE renova and. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a new strategic alliance aimed at advancing energy technologies and developing industry leaders. The partnership will focus on accelerating innovation in electrification, decarbonization, and renewables. Now, GE Renova is committing $50 million over five years to this partnership, and it’ll fund research initiatives, student fellowships and internships. That, uh, researchers obviously, and a lot of that’s on electrification, right? That’s where Chii Renova is focused on. It also, uh, fund about 12 research projects annually, and three master’s students per year will conduct policy research resulting in published white papers. And it looks like they’re gonna have a symposium together at MIT, kind of a joint symposium. [00:13:00] Now, when I first read this, Joel, I thought, wow, this is kind of innovative. GE Renova just recently moved to Cambridge, which is right next door to MIT and to Harvard. And I know that one of the things about GE moving, uh, Renova moving to that area was that they wanted to build a relationship with universities and try to grab some talent out of there. That makes sense to me. The odd part about this is MIT doesn’t need the money and MIT. Should be creating students or graduates that are really focused on renewable energy already, and you should see a lot of impact from those students. I think the issue for me is I really haven’t seen as much as I would like to have seen and if, uh, MIT engineers are smart and obviously they are. Where’s the impact? Uh, and I, I did, I used AI to go look right. I mean, let’s use something that simplifies the process a little bit. And AI is really [00:14:00] looking at MIT and saying they’ve done some work on ya optimization, like on offshore wind farms. So pointing the turbines in slightly different directions to increase power output. There’s other companies that have been doing that for years that that research is not innovative. Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s commercialized. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s, it’s commercialized. There’s a lot of companies that offer it, have been offering it for quite a while. So what’s new? I, I don’t know which. You know, GE Renovo can do whatever they want with $50 million. It does seem like the American universities may not be that place. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I just, just, just a crackdown of the dollars. Right. $50 million over five years, funding 12 research projects, and that about basically equates to a million dollars per research project with some master’s students funded, thrown in there. That’s great. I love to see that, but I’m a hundred percent with you. You know, if you, if you watch, I like to watch the innovation space. So I watch these, um, VC companies and I kind of [00:15:00] look at their, their posts and what they’re talking about and stuff. And you see regularly that on the commercial capital side, Europe is way behind the states on innovation funding. Flip that thing into universities. They’re, they are doing so much more with the, with the dollar per output at their universities. That’s actionable. That actually works for industry than we are. Right. We talk about this all the time in private, but you have the DTUs and, and such over there. DTU puts out just gads of research. I’ve been a part of some of the research programs when I was, you know, working for a Danish company and the, and it’s like. Research on leading edge erosion and how can we solve that today? Research on this weather pattern and how we can solve this today. What’s that? Doing research on structural loads for turbines and what does that mean and how can we share this with the industry Blade designers and these kind of things are regularly happening in Europe. At that university, the same level [00:16:00] of the MIT type thing. But in reverse in the US you don’t see whether it’s funded research at universities or it’s funded research from the government. At Government labs, you don’t see that many things coming out that are actionable today, right? You see some reports about things that are kind of neat and maybe future, future wins involvement, and we need to look at the future stuff too. I get that, but when I see $50 million going to a university, I, I’m thinking, man. If you gave me just a portion of that, I got, we got all kinds of ideas that we can, we can look at that could solve things tomorrow in the industry. And I think that’s what, where we’re at, the, the, the wind industry. I love it. But, um, we have some black eyes. We have some things we need to solve, some, some ongoing issues that, uh, that are painful. And I think that, uh, throwing money at MIT is not the right way to solve them. That’s just me. Allen Hall: I was just looking to see what MIT’s endowment is, and it is about $25 [00:17:00] billion right now, so $50 million is a drop in a bucket, which goes back to back to my first point that MIT should be doing this already. They have plenty of research funds. They have plenty of smart people. If they care about the planet and are trying to be out in front of renewable energy, they would be doing the work already. I know that, and I think the response back is gonna be, well, they’ve been working on solar cells and Sure, Joel Saxum: okay, that’s fine. What about spreading the love? Right? What about take 50 million? What? Why not give MIT 10 million? Give Texas Tech 10 million. They have a win program. Give Georgia Tech to 5 million. They got some stuff. They’re doing some stuff in Wind. University of Wyoming’s doing some stuff in wind. North Texas is doing some stuff in wind. Why not spread that around to the universities that are already working in wind or start a center of excellence at a university where we could get more wind people Allen Hall: involved. Well, I just hate feeding the bureaucracy more than anything else because it does seem like when there are grants going into colleges and universities.[00:18:00] When I watch them and see how they behave, and we’ve been sort of peripherally attached to some of this and watched it happen and decided to step out because the bureaucracy is taking so much of the funds that there is very little left to do real research and whatever research there is produced kind of goes into a black hole because it’s not applicable. That’s a frustrating point. It can’t do that anymore. The bureaucracy can’t take 30, 40, 50, 60% of it and leave a little bit for actually doing something useful. It needs to flip, but that’s not what happens right now and that’s what worries me the most. It’s, you know, I don’t wanna get into details about some of the things we’ve been affiliated with for a brief, brief amount of time, but I do think that if they’re going to anybody. Is going to give to a university to think hard about that and really figure out where your money is going. If it’s going to feed a a bunch of [00:19:00] paper pushers, maybe find another way to use those funds to push your products or your ideas forward. Output per dollar. Real output per dollar. Yeah, it’s gotta have. Something come out of it that’s, if it’s public use, great. Publish it. And that’s the other thing too. I’m getting on my high horse here, but when they publish some of these things, they’re always buried in journals that cost a ton of money to, to even review the research, which I feel like to American taxpayer has probably paid for. It’s much easier to get the research out of a European college or university than it is an American one. Strangely enough, Joel Saxum: I saw a, a joke the other day online, and it was like, it was a, it was a research paper about, uh, the general public getting access to research, but it was behind a paywall. It’s bad, Allen Hall: Joel. It is really bad. I mean, you could easily pay well on some papers. Some of the lower cost ones are gonna be in a 20, $30 range. [00:20:00] It’s easy to get into the hundreds of dollars for a single research paper. And I kind of get it, except if it’s funded by the federal government. Those things should be just published. You know, there’s a thing called Google. You can create a website, you can publish it. Google Scholars is a thing. You can publish it there. There’s a lot of ways to do this, which are free, but in ResearchGate is another one. There’s a lot of ways to do it that are free, but in order to get it to count, and a lot of the people that are doing the research are trying to get their PhDs. In order for that to count, it has to be in, in a. Periodical, it’s gotta be reviewed by some people before. It can be blessed to be public knowledge at some level. It’s creates sort of the, a money changing or it creates a system that, uh, encourages. The selling of access. Let’s put it to you that way. Which [00:21:00] is unfortunate. It doesn’t need to be that way. It didn’t used to be that way, but it is now. Joel Saxum: And I think, I think there’s one thing too, to like monetizing or, or the capital markets monetizing ip, that’s one thing. But when it’s demo de, when we’re talking about de, we’re talking about democratizing research, not. Industry trade secrets or something of that sort. Allen Hall: When I read about NRA projects, uh, like, oh, nras done this thing and I try to go find that paper and it’s in some publication that I have to go pay for, that just burns me. Joel Saxum: It really burns me. Allen Hall: Didn’t Joel Saxum: I already pay for this in my tax bill? Allen Hall: Yeah, pretty sure that I did, but now I gotta pay some random, uh, paper producing organization, uh, 30, 40, 50 bucks to get access to this paper, which. Joel, you’re right. I have already paid for. There’s something not right with that system. Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice [00:22:00] buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks. Ping has you covered the cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Well, we’re almost reaching Terminator stage, Joel, with this open AI thing because there is concern about the AI models finding ways to cheat and to hide their reasoning, and it’s called reward hacking. And OpenAI is saying, as AI becomes more sophisticated, uh, monitoring, controlling the system. The thing that they’re producing becomes increasingly challenging because it wants to find loopholes. Now my only question is you created this thing, I guess it’s got a mind of its own now, but it doesn’t. It’s a large. Language model. It doesn’t have, uh, a [00:23:00] conscience, I wouldn’t say was, but, uh, or it doesn’t have a soul. Probably that’s another way to describe it. Uh, but it’s finding ways to cheat the system. ’cause it’s getting rewarded somehow. And my question is, well, one. What is rewarding? It mean? Like how does an AI system get happy? Uh, what’s a dopamine hit here for some electrons? I don’t know. And second of all, how the heck are we gonna be able to know that it is. Telling you inaccuracies, and this is really troubling when it comes to things like software code engineering work. Like I was designing a building and I was using AI to do some calculations. I would be really concerned about that. Is it actually doing the work that I think it’s doing, or is it just spitting out something to get you off? Because it’s, it’s, you’re using too many resources, right? It’d rather throw you ads about Amazon products than to tell you how to build Joel Saxum: a building. I’m not an AI [00:24:00] expert, um, but I had a really good conversation last week. So we did that, uh, we did that awesome webinar with Sky Specs, and when we were talking with them, we were talking with Dave Roberts, who’s the new CEO over there. And he brought up a term that I didn’t know and he said, agen ai, because of the last few years, it was like, you know, algorithmic things and generative ai, so gen ai and that was kinda the hot button thing. Now, agen ai, that was a new concept for me. So I actually reached out to someone in my network, it’s uh, that is an AI actual expert. And I said, tell me what this syngen AI means. The difference with Agentic AI is, it’s like, it’s some, it’s an agent, right? It’ll do something for you. And so you can run it like, like generative ai, but it’s like the next level of generative ai. But you can add that into any model and give it goals. Like if you’ve ever fi used the, um, Excel, there’s the find zero function. I love that one. It it for, for building business models and stuff, find zero is, is [00:25:00] fantastic. But it’s kind of like find zero on steroids, right? So you could tell it, I need you to do all of these calculations, but I also want you to, to do them to this goal. Get me to this end goal. So like in Egen AI and win, you may say, run an AI algorithm based on this, this, this, this, and this. But the end goal is to get as many megawatt hours outta this wind farm as possible. This is, this is me talking in generalities, right? But that’s the thing, right? So now when you talk about. What AI looks like for data centers, dollars spent on computing, dollars spent on cooling, dollars spent on power, which those ai, those large AI models, are gonna wanna run as efficiently as possible. So if you start to do some agentic AI things in there and say, do all of this, but exactly like you said, lower the cost of computing a little bit or whatever, then you’re gonna start to get this thing where it’s gonna start to, to kind of maybe cheat your answers a little bit to get to a more efficient. [00:26:00] Compute state. I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not an AI expert, Allen Hall: but it does make you think though, right? Joel? The way I think about it is when I ask perplexity or chat, GPT, one of these things, like, Hey, we just got a house and it has an induction cooktop. Okay. Which happened this morning, by the way, and it would not work with our pots and pans. So I’m standing there like. Huh, this is not getting hot. And I can feel the stove pulse, like trying to see what I have stuck on top of it. And clearly I’ve made some human error. I thought, okay, I’ll go look that up to see what’s wrong. And, and, and perplexity said, Hey, you idiot. You can’t use aluminum cookware on these induction ranges. Like, okay, I’ll take that for the, the loss. Human, human zero AI one. There you go. Now think in a bigger scope, like you were just saying, if I’m out [00:27:00] there trying to optimize a wind farm or to optimize a drive, train, or optimize anything that’s really complicated in engineering world. It doesn’t like to do that. In fact, I went after, what’s the Google one? Um, Gemini, right. I tried to have Gemini do something that was fairly deep and it did process it. It wanted to process it and it wanted to sp out. Um, this significant amount of information, none of it really useful because I was looking for a specific, uh, research area within Lightning. It’s esoteric to this discussion, but I was asking it to go find me this research in the world. And show me where these papers are that would talk about this one particular topic. And it just cranked and cranked and cranked and cranked. And I thought, you know what? It can’t be happy doing this. It’s going to want to dump me, which is [00:28:00] essentially what it did. It just said, this is an interesting topic. Move along. Joel Saxum: Yeah, you got you. You cost too much for this free service. Go away. Allen Hall: Right? But it did it in a very, uh, unique way. It said a bunch of flowery things. This is this interesting subject. There’s been a lot of research. All these great things have happened, and then that was it. And I, I think because of the amount of compute time it takes to do so many things, particularly complicated, engineering, technical work, even software, I think would be a problem. Will it always produce results? And I’ve tried some of the software pieces, like write me some code in C to do X or C plus plus to do this thing or in a Python to do this thing. And it has been sketchy at best. It’s like 80% of the way there, but it doesn’t really work. And it, and you tell it, Hey, it has this problem. And then it goes, yeah, I have this problem. Let me retry it. Recode this again. You’re like, well you should have got it right the [00:29:00] first time kind of problem, right? That’s recycling and re reasoning and rethinking that through has got to be eating up so much compute time and that there must be an incentive that they’re building in to get around that. Joel Saxum: Here’s where we are though, so technically, okay, so I know Gemini Chat, GPT, Claude, all these, these things. I use Grok quite often. Grok is cool because if it’s, if it’s chugging, there’s a little button on it. If you’re using it on your lap, on a desktop or laptop, whatever, on a browser. There’s a little button that says, see how I’m thinking? If it’s chugging away, and you could click on it and it will run you through like the processes that it’s doing to try to find your information, which is pretty cool. But either way, at the end of the day, all of these things that we are using to kind of optimize our daily workflow, right? They’re not enterprise level. Right. So the one that scares me is if, if when we’re talking about this and go like. Well, what about the, the units that are using, like, I’m sure there’s something in, um, you know, fusion 3D that can [00:30:00] run AI algorithms on, on, I, I’m not saying, I’m sure, I know there is in engineering software to optimize the design. I don’t want that design taking shortcuts, but, uh, but to, to make, to make the, uh, the, to general public feel safer about this concept, that AI expert I was talking to. He said this is the biggest difference that the public doesn’t see is that enterprise AI is a different story. Enterprise AI is, that’s what’s driving your, you know, the big data centers and stuff. It’s enterprise ai, it’s not chat GPT and stuff like that’s, that’s not huge load on them compared to what some of these other things are. So when you get to that level where you’re integrating some kind of enterprise. AI for writing code, doing engineering work, these kind of things. It’s a different story. We’re talking, you know, us playing football in the backyard to the NFL. Allen Hall: I do think all the AI that’s being used to process, uh, video clips and make the people into Muppets is [00:31:00] time well spent. I’d tell you what, that’s scary. It’s insane. I think about how much compute are we doing to make this little video, 32nd video person talking into a Muppet. Why are we Joel Saxum: spending compute time on that? I saw one the other day that someone had sent me that was a, uh, an AI generated video of someone jumping off of a wind turbine and then turning into an eagle and like flying away and it looked freaking real. Like, I was like, man, is it CGI like who made this video? I was like, no, this is literally like a prompt in a generative AI thing for a video. I was like, this is crazy. Allen Hall: But again, it goes back like, why do we need that when we. We’re having some real Joel Saxum: engineering or economic problems. The wind farmer this week, this week is the Strauss Wind Farm, which is over by Phil’s house. Phil’s not here with us this week, but this one is right up the coast from Santa Barbara. It’s in Lompoc, California. This is the first wind farm on the coastline [00:32:00] of California. And because of this, uh, of course we wanted to make sure they did everything right. This is a bay wall wind farm. Uh, so part of the wind farm is it’s absolutely beautiful. If you get a chance, go on the Bewa website and look at the video. Uh, but there’s an, there’s extreme protections for local, environmental and cultural resources, uh, associated with this wind farm. I’m gonna walk through, uh, one kind of example of it, but these are also some interesting turbines. It’s 27 ge, 3.8, 1 37 meter rotor turbines. It’s 102.6 megawatts total. But an interesting thing, so we just talked about a bunch of things about ai. They’re actually going to use the ly ai system on this wind farm to see different kind of birds and raptors in the area. Uh, and because they were, are taking high considerations for wildlife, they’re doing feasibility studies about painting wind turbine blades, which we’ve heard about up in Wyoming and from Sweden. I think it was. Um, they’re also doing excessive [00:33:00] monitoring for golden eagles. Uh, they’re doing a bunch of walk down studies, um, and then there is a, they’re also proposing something that I’ve never heard of. Um, it’s called Bird Guard Super Pro Amp, which is an auditory transmission thing gonna be installed around some of the turbines that basically when they sense a bird in the area, we’ll emit very loud auditory tones to push the birds or raptors, um, out of the area. So. They’ve gone really deep into this thing for, uh, environmental protections, uh, and, uh, applaud that for bewa to make sure that they’re, uh. Being good stewards of the land. So the Strauss Wind Farm there in lopa, California, you are the Wind Farm of the week. Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening, and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribing the Sun notes below to Uptime Tech News, our Substack newsletter. If you see an American wandering around Wind Europe loss, that will be me. So just come by and say hi, [00:34:00] and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
WindEurope Conference, Renewables Surpass Coal in US 1:43

6 дней назад1:43

1:43

Allen discusses the WindEurope 2025 conference in Copenhagen, EDP Renewables’ equipment sale in Colombia, RWE’s rescue exercise in Germany, and the milestone of U.S. renewable energy surpassing coal. We also highlight Oklahoma’s wind energy growth and the UK’s Rampion Two offshore wind farm expansion. 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 Newsflash, industry News Lightning fast. Newsflash is brought to you by IntelStor. For Market in intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Speaker: Well, this week the Premier Annual Wind Energy Conference and Exhibition Wind Europe 2025 kicks off from April 8th to 10th at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. With over 15,000 attendees and more than 550 exhibitors at the event. This year’s conference is going to be huge. It’s going to have over 350 speakers covering wind Energy’s role in the future of energy systems sectors. Coupling through electrification and power to X technologies for decarbonization. Now students receive free entry and can participate in a dedicated program exploring careers in the industry. Rosemary Barnes and I will be attending wind Europe this week, so if you’d like to be on the podcast, please meet with us on the show floor. Over in Columbia, EDP renewables is selling equipment earmarked for its alpha and beta wind farms as part of its exit from Columbia. The Portuguese company is auctioning 90 complete Vestas V 1 62, 5 0.6 megawatt units through its Spanish portal. The auction includes nacelles, hubs, powertrains, 450 tower sections and 270 blades. And all the turbines have been maintained by Vestas and audited by an independent certified company. If you’re interested in these 90 turbines, reach out to EDP renewables for more details. RWE recently conducted a six hour rescue exercise at its North Sea Ost Offshore wind farm in Germany, simulating various emergency scenarios. The company temporarily suspended operations to practice rescuing injured technicians under real conditions, uh, scenarios included evacuating and injured worker from inside a turbine and rescuing a technician [00:02:00] from a service vessel. The exercise was planned in collaboration with the German Association for Maritime Emergency Management and involved a rescue helicopter and paramedics. A new report from Global Energy Think tank. Ember shows renewable energy from wind and solar generated more electricity in the US than coal last year, a first since coal peaked in 2007. Coal generation has fallen to a historic lows of 15% of total usage while wind and solar produced 17% of the nation’s electricity. In the middle of the United States, Oklahoma now generates about 41% of, of its electricity from wind and solar outpacing coals since 2016. Now this transition continues despite state legislators considering bills that would restrict the location of new renewable energy projects. Over in the uk the Rampion two offshore wind farm off England’s Sussex coast has received government consent to add up to 90 new wind turbines. The expansion project will nearly double the [00:03:00] size of the existing 116 turbine facility. Developers say the enlarged wind farm could power over 1 million homes and reduce carbon emissions by about 1.8 million tons annually. Construction is planned to begin in 2027 with completion expected by 2030.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
SOCOBLADE Protects Against Leading Edge Erosion 21:05

9 дней назад21:05

21:05

Max Le Tallec from SOCOMORE speaks about their new SOCOBLADE product, in partnership with Hontek. The product was originally created to protect military helicopters, and is now an LEP solution that reduces downtime, maintenance costs, and power losses. 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: Imagine spending half a million dollars on leading edge repairs only to watch them fail again in just 18 months. That’s the reality many wind operators face today. This week on the Uptime Spotlight, Max Le Tallec joins us from Socomore to discuss how helicopter technology designed to withstand combat conditions is now protecting wind turbine blades. The wait for a military grade leading edge solution is finally over. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Max, welcome to the program. Maxime Le Tallec: Thank you. Thanks for welcoming me. Allen Hall: I think we’re gonna talk leading edge erosion and what to do about it. I want to back up a little bit because there’s a lot of operators with a lot of leading edge erosion. Why should they care about the leading edge erosion? Why does that matter? Maxime Le Tallec: The, we’ve seen the blade today been eroded, almost destroyed with holes of the size [00:01:00] of a fist which. Create issues on the aerodynamics of the blade and the downtime and major repairs or major downtimes on the blade. Allen Hall: Yeah. And that turns into a lot of expensive repairs, obviously. And we’re also hearing from a lot of operators about the power. Loss of you hear numbers from anywhere from a fraction of a percent to somewhere north of three 4%. Are you hearing those same sort of things? Just the power loss gets to be so expensive. Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. And even up to five certain are saying so that’s why you need to be preventive on this aspect and actually not to wait for the damage to come on the plate. Joel Saxum: I think that when we talk a EP loss, it’s exacerbated even more in the market nowadays when we’re starting to look at these 5.5, 6.1, 6.8, and I’m just talking about onshore turbines, these big megawatt turbines. If you’re losing 1% from that big turbine, that’s a lot more than it would’ve been, 10, 15 years ago on a GE 1.5, or you’re not lo, you’re [00:02:00] losing, but 1% doesn’t hurt you as much. But when you start talking these big, long blades, like everybody has to have a leading edge, erosion, leading edge. Protection strategy in place to make sure that they don’t get to that point where they have big repairs or they’re losing a bunch of production. Are you, are operators engaging with you guys now with your with the new product? Socoblade? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. A lot of companies, so our product today has been on the market for a while. This is the non-tech technology, which actually we scale up today. So we’ve worked for more than a year now with Ontech to scale up the manufacturing, to make the product available worldwide. So the product is pretty well known already in North America and the world spread farms to farms. Now with our headquarter in Europe and our local forces we are reaching more and more European farms as well. We’ve seen a very high interest back in December during a Dusseldorf show. The everyone is coming. Yes. Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s unique. [00:03:00] So Hontek has developed a leading edge erosion, preventive coating that came from the military and on helicopters originally. And that technology has now evolved quite a bit. Into, and a product that can be made for wind turbine blades. And the problem with Hontek was, or originally, is that there was so much demand for the product that it got really difficult to get in line to get enough of it to do your wind farm, and particularly in Europe because the Americans would use it up most quickly. So bringing smore into this equation does. Greatly improved the likelihood of putting this Hontek product on. Now, obviously, so Sommore is a great chemical company. That’s what you are. You have all kinds of technologies for a variety of industries, including aerospace, which is where I first ran across Sommore. But this Hontek collaboration opens up a number of [00:04:00] doors for smore to really help the wind operator, correct? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes, of course. We, the product today is designed to be rolled on damaged turbine or as a preventative leading edge protection. But now thanks to our collaboration, we’re freeing ontech to keep developing new solution and adapt to the new challenges that the farms are meeting. The product that we have today, as we were seeing is actually the result of 30 years of development BioNTech. So they come from far and they tremendously. Analyze and develop the product to meet the exact field need. Allen Hall: And that’s huge, right? That, that the product has so much service history that in aerospace and now on wind turbines and the word of mouth spread very quickly that service history is something that smore is using. To to explore other markets with and to grow the wind base. That is really critical because I think when you see a lot of new leading edge erosion [00:05:00] products pop up, they have maybe six months of service life at best, or it’s a brand new product for a 2025. Okay, great, but what am I gonna spend a hundred K, 200 K, 500 k putting this on my turbines when it don’t and have a lot of history. Samore provides all that. All that data, all that history with this product. And can you explain like all the effort that went into this product to get to here? Maxime Le Tallec: So as you were saying, the backbone of the chemistry is coming or has been used by the military in the past. And over the past years, the product has been challenged against different aerospace testing, military testing so under way more severe. Conditions that the wind tests are currently with tremendous results. So that’s where we are always pushing the limit higher and higher. Joel Saxum: You know, as Alan and I, of course we’re talking with operators all the time and ISPs across the wind space and globally really. [00:06:00] But a lot of people in the US. You talk, you mention the word Hantek and Ooh, that stuff’s good. Ooh, that stuff’s good. But as we all know, if you’ve been in wind or if you’ve been around blades at all, a product that’s installed on a blade is only as good as its installation. Can you tell us a little bit about how you guys install this or how the Hontek stuff is applied and it doesn’t have to be versus other part products in the market? Just how is it applied? So we’re making life easy on a technician so they get a good end product, one particular of our products. Maxime Le Tallec: So that’s a two component products. We need to warm one of the part for preparation is one of the specificity. We recommend some equipment that can be used actually at the back of a truck. So no matter where the turbine, we can actually prepare the solution. Then pouring the part A in the Part B, you get your can. Ready to go, and that’s a rollable solution. So you have your roller. The product has been designed for the, I would say, the most complicated application for ropers. And the rollable application is [00:07:00] actually very forgiving. So no matter if you splash a bit, if you swing a bit on the blade you can easily correct the application and make it clean and lean all along the leading edge. We’ve designed the kit just to cover one blade at a time. So everything has been thought for the epi for the operator. Sorry. To be easy for the application. Allen Hall: Oh, that’s so critical, right? Because you don’t wanna mix a bunch of the product together and have to paint three turbines at a time. You want to do it one blade at a time, and obviously soccer more. Is really good at packaging and making this simple for the technician on site. Now, there are really two different versions of the same product. You want to de describe what those differences are? Maxime Le Tallec: Yeah, so we talk about LEP two 20 and LEP two 20 age. The two 20 has been developed for dri drier environment, more cheek, so low humidity. Where the 2 23 8 has a way wider conditions, window of application from [00:08:00] 35 to 95 relative humidity. So the technology of the product is moisture secure, so it will actually cure with the ambient moisture in the air. Allen Hall: So it’s sim it’s similar to a superglue, right? Superglue cures with humidity in the air. And so you need a little bit of humidity to make this work. However, if you look at other products, I think this is why the Hontek product is so well loved, is that. You could be in dry Texas, New Mexico, places that are hot and pretty dry, and you can apply it. You can apply it offshore where the humidity is exactly 95%. And how do you do that? A lot of other products don’t have that variability or they have trouble in there. They don’t cure up. Quite as nice. The Huntec product basically removes all those barriers. Max, you have this mixture. It does magic. It’s applied generally with rollers. I thought I have seen it applied with different methods though. Are there other ways to apply it beyond roller? Maxime Le Tallec: So there is [00:09:00] a brushable application possible as well and we are customizing the product to be applicable through robot. We’ve seen more and more robot application nowadays. And we want to make sure to, that’s. This application is compatible with our product. Allen Hall: Okay. So as we move to a lot more robotic repairs that are happening, and obviously there’s a couple of leaders in leading edge erosion protection robots. So you can actually connect your Hontek product with an existing robotic company together. Is that a product today that I could. Turn on and use on my turbines this season? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes, we’re we’re working on it, finalizing it. All the tests have been very promising. So we are, we’re in the last stage of getting this available for the market. Cool. Joel Saxum: I like that. So a question for you, max. Now I know this is a, this is an open-ended question because LEP leading edge erosion, LEP is different everywhere. I know Alan, last year you were at the leading edge erosion [00:10:00] symposium that DTU put on all kinds of smart research has been done about leading edge erosion for years. And it’s different everywhere you go, right? If you’re offshore in, in the Germany offshore wind farms in the North Sea, or. The UK or in the desert in California or in the Midwest. If you’re near agriculture, if you’re near gray grazing land, it’s, everything is different. But what are you guys seeing for the testing? I know they, they’ve done rain erosion testing and other things I. In an aggressive environment. How long is this stuff lasting? How long do you expect it to last uptower? We’ve seen now by experience the first application have are eight years old, and we haven’t seen those leading age being redone. So per experience, that’s the longest that we’ve seen. That’s huge in the United States, right? Because when you, if you’re talking eight years, what that looks like to me is a turbine that came out of warranty. Got Hontek LEP installed and then made it all the way until repower without having to touch the leading edge again. [00:11:00] That’s what I’m seeing from a business case. That’s a good business case. Allen Hall: Because what does that cost Max? The, when we talk leading edge erosion the first discussion point I have with operators and they’re always focused on how much it’s gonna cost and how long it’s gonna take to apply. What does generally that look like? What does ballpark mean into the timeframe it takes to finish a turbine with guys on ropes and buying all the equipment and the material, the socket blade material. Maxime Le Tallec: Today we’re talking about one to two turbines a day, depending on the familiarity of the technicians and the number of technicians with with the product. Obviously the labor is actually the major cost on those operation or the equipment needed either ropers or the baskets. So this is where moving to a robotic application may be a real asset and that’s what we are targeting for this season. And as you’re saying, the. Or the lens of durability of our product, just reduce the frequency of maintenance [00:12:00] of those. Allen Hall: So the ROI question, return on investment is the ultimate answer. It, so even if it does cost some time to get the technicians there to put a, apply it because it’s lasting so long as Joel pointed out, it’s gonna last basically through the 10 year period to repower. That’s the magic. If you can do that, then the value of the material itself is grows exponentially, right? So it’s not really a cost factor early on. It’s how long you can make it work, and you’re getting max production outta your turbines. That’s why everybody loves this Hontek product. When it is applied and it’s set on, is there any sort of inspection that has to happen once it’s on, or are you just doing typical drone inspections with a sky specs to verify that it, it’s working like it should. Maxime Le Tallec: Typical inspection is enough. There is nothing specific to, to follow up or to reactivate the product. Once it, it’s all cured. It’s one piece. And protect your blade for. Joel Saxum: Yeah, the coming years. So there’s the [00:13:00] different, there’s apo not opposing strategies, but there’s multiple strategies on how you do LEP, right? So if you’re on a 62 meter blade or a 70 meter blade, or a 50 meter blade. Certain people will say, ah, protect six to eight meters of it up. Only protect three meters of it, protect four meters of it. What are you guys seeing and what do you recommend for LEP protection from the length, from the tip back in that high erosion area? Maxime Le Tallec: So I’ll briefly mentioned previously our key to our design to cover three square meters or the equivalent. So we are usually seeing 10 meters long on 30 meters 30 centimeters wide, so 10 meters on each side of the leading age. In the shorten and they, it can go to 15 meters, so you just make your. Your protection a bit narrower and some farms are expecting up to 15 meters long coverage. Joel Saxum: Yeah. ’cause I know like some of the, some people’s strategy is let’s look at, let’s, okay, we’re, we’ve got this a hundred wind farm or this a hundred turbine wind farm. Let’s go and look at the average leading edge erosion. What’s [00:14:00] happening on it where we have chipping, peeling, bad erosion. Okay. The worst case scenario looks like we’re at, 11 meters on a couple of turbines, but the majority of it stops at about eight. So I know a lot of people go okay, cost effectively, let’s go put eight meters of LEP on. Or some people say we want max protection. Let’s go and do the worst case scenario on all of ’em. But one of the questions that pops up there is, if we’re putting on a coating, this is a big thing. ’cause there’s been other coatings in the blade world that people have had issues with in the past with reworking or things like that. So I Is there a specific way you recommend people to. Rework or if there’s some damage, or if you have a little bit, like if the technician doesn’t get the, a cold joint when you’re trying to apply it or something. Is there anything specific about how you work with the product up blade to ensure that, you have that nice, smooth finish the whole way? Or can you rework it? Can you grind on it? Can you sand on it? Maxime Le Tallec: So we can rework it. Yes. The one is key and you mentioned it earlier, is the application as critical [00:15:00] as the product. So in that way, we make a point of honor to train the teams that will apply our product. So we’re always connecting with them making sure the conditions are met for best application and we train them on how to get the best performance of it. The product itself self labeling, so all the smoothness of the surface is somehow. Inbound into the technology of the product as well. Allen Hall: Okay. So even an engineer could apply it, is that what you’re saying, max? Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. I’ve been successful into it. The one one one key thing is you were mentioning the surface preparation. That’s something that sometimes is a bit rushed or not really taken seriously by the operators. The best you repair is before the application of the leading edge. So you repair. Your poor filler application. The better the adherence of our leading edge will be on the plate as well. Allen Hall: So I’ve [00:16:00] run into a number of operators in the United States and overseas, actually in Europe, that have reached out and were asking about the Hontek product. Have you seen it? How’s it work? And I said, yes, I’ve seen it on helicopters. It’s amazing. Hold tight. So I always tell him, hold tight. There’s gonna be a big announcement about it where you can now get better access to it and get it on your blazes season. That just happened, right? You just announced that smore is gonna be the lead on distributing the product worldwide. And the conference in Dusseldorf was the big kickoff. How has it gone in terms of reaction into the industry? Because everybody I know has probably already called you Max. Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. The, it creates a lot of interest in Europe mostly due to the location of the show, but. The Altech product was less delivered in Europe even if there is already a certain footprint. And we are now answering all those requests and we are online. We have a dedicated websites, a applied.com where the product will [00:17:00] be processable directly online in the coming weeks. So we aim for two week, shipping lead time on our product, keeping it on the shelf, being able to be responsive. Looking at the market for more than a year now we are conscious about all the constraints. The operators have to apply the product considering team availability, equipment availability weather forecast. We want the product to be available. To be delivered when needed on the different wind farms. Allen Hall: Okay. I have been on your website the Socomore website, and you can just Google it. And if you put in LEP or Socoblade, it’ll come right to it. The website is full of useful information, so your technical data sheets are already there. Your safety data sheets are already up and loaded. You are gonna be turning on online ordering, which I think is gonna get bombarded, max. Honestly, I think you have a lot of orders that way. That’s the way to connect with you max? If you’re really interested in the product, you really wanna get to that website today. Maxime Le Tallec: Yes. The best way, the first source of [00:18:00] information and any inquiries you will make from there I will be behind and will connect personally with you. Allen Hall: So the, the best way to, to get the product and to get the data and to see samples, and to understand what this Hontek product is in the now called Socoblade. Is to get ahold of Max, go to the website. So Max you can find, they can find you on LinkedIn also, which is how I generally find you. Maxime Le Tallec: Correct. So I’m reachable on LinkedIn through solight.com on so more.com. All our products are also shared there. We have all the Legacy, so more products that are applicable for the wind turbine as well that you can discover on the sommore.com website. Allen Hall: Yeah, so if you wanna reach Max, you want to try the material, the easy way is to go to socoblade.com, S-O-C-O-B-L-A-D-E.com, and you then you can download all of the information there yourself and take a look at it, or even reach Max on LinkedIn. Max is wonderful. This is great news because I know so many operators that are waiting to get a chance to try this [00:19:00] new socket blade material. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate you spending some time with us today. Maxime Le Tallec: Thanks again.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
HeliService USA Leads the Way in Offshore EMS 36:53

10 дней назад36:53

36:53

Allen interviews Michael Tosi, Paul Russo, and Dr. Kenneth Williams, from HeliService USA about their Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) offerings for offshore wind farms. As large offshore wind projects develop off the US east coast, the need for high-standard EMS operations has become critical. HeliService USA steps in to offer comprehensive EMS solutions, featuring a fully-equipped paramedic-level air ambulance service designed exclusively for offshore wind sites. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News , our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech . Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook , YouTube , Twitter , LinkedIn and visit Weather Guard on the web . And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here . Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall. As large offshore wind projects take shape off. The coast of Massachusetts and New York keeping technicians safe presents unique challenges that require innovative solutions. We are here at HeliService USA’s Hangar in Rhode Island, discussing offshore wind operations, specifically emergency medical services and search and rescue capabilities. Joining us today are three leaders in emergency response, Dr. Kenneth Williams, division director of EMS and Professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University. Michael Tosi, founder and CEO of HeliService, USA, and Paul Russo, director of Operations at HeliService USA. Together we’ll be discussing their collaboration to provide comprehensive emergency medical services and search and rescue operations for a US offshore wind. Michael, let’s start with you today. And thanks for the invite to come out. This is tremendous. Of Michael Tosi: course. You’re welcome. Thanks for coming. Thanks for spending the time, Allen Hall: as always, when we come to HeliService. The facilities are immaculate, the aircraft are immaculate. You run a really high class operation, which is desperately needed for offshore wind in the United States, but now you’re expanding into emergency services rather than just carrying technicians out to site and dropping ’em on the top of turbines, now you’re looking out for their health and safety a lot more. So what does offshore wind in the US involve in terms of EMS operations? It must throw a lot of hurdles at you. How do you even approach that problem? Michael Tosi: Absolutely. Thanks for spending the time today. A thanks for coming out and I certainly appreciate the compliments. The first thing for us is always safety, and it starts with your facility, starts with making sure everything’s immaculate before people get on your helicopters. Regarding EMS and Emergency Medical Services offshore this has obviously been I wouldn’t go as far as to a contentious topic, but it’s been one that the industry knows there’s some issues with. And knew that they’re gonna need a solution for it. Of course, there’s always budget challenges, but the biggest issue is you have folks offshore who are isolated who are it’s almost like a town out there. At any given time, there’ll be a thousand, 1500, 2000 people. If you run the numbers with all the heavy lift vessels offshore. So at any given time, you’re talking hundreds if not thousands of people, and they don’t have an ambulance service. There is no ambulance service. Out there, there’s, you don’t just call 9 1 1 and have a ambulance show up. Up to this point, they’ve been using the Coast Guard. To a limited degree, but the problem is the Coast Guard is also not an ambulance service. The Coast Guard serves the entire region of New England with one helicopter. They are out there for folks in the water. They’re out there for sinking vessels. They’re out there for law enforcement. They have a lot of other responsibilities. They’re not designed to be an ambulance service for several hundred, if not thousands of people offshore. So what we’ve done with this program is filled that need because, that obviously can manifest itself in all sorts of different ways. Most of them not good if your ambulance service is not available. Developers have seen the need to have an ambulance service to bring folks back. Lord forbid there be any injury or medical conditions offshore. So that’s that’s how we got here. Allen Hall: I didn’t realize only one helicopter serving the whole sort of northeast corridor. From the Coast Guard side. ’cause if you watch the news, anytime there’s a severe storm, there’s a boat that has sunk and people that need to be rescued and they’re co constantly flying around trying to just do that. I didn’t realize there’s only one serving it. So offshore wind being 30, 40 miles off shore gets to be a real problem for the Coast Guard then? Michael Tosi: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s twofold. One, it’s, they can’t guarantee anything. They have one helicopter in Falmouth. For these projects up here in New England. The next one is all the way down to Atlantic City, and that one helicopter in Falmouth may be on the board of Canada searching for a lost kayaker. I also part-time serving the International Guard. Every once in a while we’ll back up the Coast Guard because they’re all the way up in Northern Maine. And something would happen down on the island where I was at. And unfortunately we don’t provide a guaranteed response posture, but if we were out, we would go look. So that’s pretty commonplace. And also they won’t guarantee that they come because they may have something of higher acuity. Paul spent several years in the Coast Guard flying a few jayhawks and Yeah. He can speak to a little bit about how that prioritization works Yeah. And how they’re covering lots of folks. Paul Russo: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s all priority, like Michael was saying, in terms of what the case may be. If you’ve got got a vessel cell that’s sinking offshore, 200 miles offshore or something like that, then that’ll take priority over somebody that may have a fracture. Or something like that on a wind turbine. So the availability of the Coast Guard while they’re, listen, I spent, 14 years doing search and rescue in the Coast Guard. I have the highest regard for my brother and my colleagues there. But they are they’re busy and to rely on them as a sole source for evacuating your people. It’s just not the solution. If if you do indeed have a unfortunate injury offshore. Allen Hall: Yeah. And building offshore wind turbines is complicated and there’s a lot of heavy equipment, a lot of moving pieces, and a lot of people as it, it sounds like now, and we’re in that building phase in the United States where there’s a number of construction sites going on. So there’s a lot of people, technicians out there at the moment that don’t have, maybe, don’t have the coverage they think that they have. Correct. Paul Russo: Correct. Allen Hall: Okay. Wow, I didn’t realize that. This brings in Dr. Williams on the EMS side. Because what HeliService is gonna provide is EMS services to those technicians that are offshore working on wind turbines. You’ve been in the EMS world for a long time, and you probably have seen everything. What are some of the challenges though, of doing helicopter EMS work and making sure that they have a program here that meets the high standards that Rhode Island and the US requires? Dr. Kenneth Williams: Thank you and thanks for inviting us to do this. One of the things that we like to say in emergency medicine is that you’ve never seen everything. There are always circumstances or conditions that come up that, that are novel. And when I was asked to get involved in this project I saw it as an interesting challenge and an interesting opportunity. In my past, I was medical director for. A regular medical helicopter service at the University of Massachusetts, which served both crash scenes and inter-hospital transfer, but not capable of doing this kind of work. And there’s no regular medical helicopter service in the area that is capable of doing this both landing on some of the assets offshore. In doing the hoist work the regular med flights and life flights are not equipped and not capable, not trained, don’t have the aviation or the medical training to do this. Their aircraft are not equipped with the hoist. They may not be the right configuration or power to do this kind of work. When Michael came to us at the Department of Health I happened to be sitting in the room. Because I’m also the state EMS medical director and it seemed like a good fit for me to participate and what we’ve put together in in very short timeframe and very efficiently with some great help from the whole team here is of paramedic level, fully staffed and fully equipped air ambulance that is limited to supporting the wind farm industry. We’re not competing. With the med flights and life flights, we’re not gonna be going to a hospital to hospital or going to a crash on the highway. We’re here just to support the wind farm industry and we’ve done extensive training with a group of paramedics and the group of flight engineer hoist operators that we have both day and night, and of acquired an extensive outfit of equipment that meets the Rhode Island standards for a paramedic ambulance. So we have medications. We have a full cardiac monitor, we have oxygen, we have suction. All the things that we, you would get in a ground paramedic ambulance, we will have available for people out on the wind farm assets. Allen Hall: Wow, that is huge. And a difficult task actually to do that. It was Dr. Kenneth Williams: quite a challenge to assemble all of the equipment and to do it in short order and organize it. The state does have a list of things you need to have, but they don’t tell you what color bag to put it in or what put to put in what pocket, and to figure out how to do it so that we can safely and efficiently place it in the aircraft and take good care of patients. Took a lot of work and a lot of cooperation from the excellent team here. Michael Tosi: And I, I actually think that it hits off on something else that’s really important. So if you do get that Coast Guard, if they are available helicopter and they do come one, they’re probably not gonna launch as quick as typically as you’ll see as the civilian operation. It’s the military. Paul and I have both experienced that they want to get out the door. The crews wanna get out the door as quickly as they can, but there’s just inherently bureaucracy between them and launching. They need to talk to the folks on site. They need to assess if it’s medically acute or not. Risk for us we say call first, ask questions later. You call. We get the helicopter there if it was too minor. Say Levy, we we were closer to it because Lord forbid it was a major incident. You wanna get that helicopter en route. And the other thing is when that Coast Guard helicopter comes, and Ken can speak a little bit more to this as well. Sorry, Dr. Williams. When it shows up it’s not going to be as capable as what you would expect to see from a typical ambulance. It’s the back of a pickup truck. The folks flying ’em will tell you it’s theirs. They call the Paul Russo: pickup truck. Yep, it is. It is a Michael Tosi: pickup truck. And all the stuff that, that Dr. Williams just described. It’s not in the back of a Coast Guard helicopter. So just because they’re there doesn’t mean that you have now upgraded your care. In most cases, they’ve actually downgraded because they have paramedics offshore, whereas at best you get an EMT basic with the Coast Guard that’s, you took a two week course online and you’re an EMT basic. I’m being a bit facetious, but it is very quick, basic level of medicine. Not to ask the questions here, but I know that. That Dr. Williams can probably speak to that a little bit as well. Dr. Kenneth Williams: And some of the assets offshore are staffed with a paramedic, a medic of some sort. And we don’t know all their qualifications. It depends on the customer and where these people have come from. But in some cases, the Coast Guard will have to bring that person with them, which leaves the offshore asset without coverage or transfer the patient to the Coast Guard helicopter. And again, all due respect to our friends in the Coast Guard. I’m in the auxiliary. I know what they do in boats quite well, and I see the aircraft operation. They’re focused on rescue and saving your life. They’re not focused on starting an IV and giving you pain medication for your fractured leg. They can get you outta the water and they can get you into a litter and get you to the hospital, but you’re not getting paramedic level care during the transport unless they bring someone with them. And as Michael mentioned, the process of doing that usually involves consulting. A flight surgeon doing a risk assessment. It may take a long time to make that decision. And then there’s some things that because of their rules and regulations, they won’t do that. He service can do like landing on some of these assets where the Coast Guard will hover and do a winch procedure. So we can provide. Probably faster service, higher level service, and safer service because we can land and transferring the patient is much safer if the aircraft is sitting on a helipad than if it’s hovering over. Although we are equipped to hoist the patient, we would prefer that the aircraft land and that we can carry them to, to the aircraft. Wow. Allen Hall: I guess the only experience that as an American watching the Coast Guard do those hoists is on deadliest catch. The. The crab boats that go out and when you see somebody get injured, you see the coast Guard come out and they drop down and they hoist them up. They throw ’em inside, and that’s the last of it. You don’t see them providing any services to the injured person. You just see them flying away. I guess there really isn’t anything going on there. They’re just taking them to the nearest airport or hospital, wherever they’re going to get services. I didn’t realize that. So that’s an important fact, especially if you’re operating offshore wind farms and you’re involved in the ships and all the activity. You need to be thinking about that quite a bit because someone’s gonna get hurt at some point. There’s just too many moving pieces of this and we’re too far offshore in the United States to allow someone to get hurt and get seriously hurt and not have a way to get them back and get them care given to them. It seems like this is a much better solution than putting ’em on a ship and hauling them back to shore. Dr. Kenneth Williams: Getting them onto a ship safely is problematic, depending on the sea state and where they are. And then it’s a multi-hour probably bumpy ride in the ship and then they need to get into a ground ambulance. We don’t have any hospitals in Rhode Island that have a dock. We have a couple that are pretty close to marinas, but they would have to get in a ground ambulance and then, and go into the hospital So much longer evolution to get. An injured person or an ill person to shore. And the other aspect of this certainly there, there was risk there in, in terms of injury for the people working there. But if you put a thousand or 2000 people somewhere, people are going to have regular illnesses as well. There will be asthma attacks and allergic reactions and stomach aches and maybe even strokes and heart attacks and things like that. The Coast Guard is able to do CPR and hemorrhage control. So certainly they’re very good at basic first aid things, but not only are they not trained and equipped to do some of the advanced things, but their environment is one where they expect everything to get wet. And most of our stuff is not waterproof. So our cardiac monitor and all the other devices that we have here, ah, would not do well in a wet salt water environment. So they don’t equip the Coast Guard boats or aircraft with things that, one, one wave will destroy. And they really can’t offer that level. Routinely they may be able to hoist a paramedic from the boat and go with them with their equipment, but that’s one of the reasons that the back of that. Flying pickup truck is not equipped with all of this electronic medical equipment, is, it’s just not their operational environment. Michael Tosi: And another thing to, to hit off on that is that you, there’s two groups of personnel that we can go to. There’s those that are on vessels that have a paramedic, thankfully, but there are also those on the turbines. And the turbines, they’re extremely isolated. You have three technicians who, of course they receive some rudimentary medical care and they have a little bit of medical equipment. But I think most of the technicians will be the first to tell you that they are in no way, shape or form qualified medical professionals. And when they’re on the top of that turbine, particularly when delivered via helicopter, the only way to get them off is via helicopter. So what that means is that the Coast Guard goes out there with this very rudimentary medical capability. Several hours later because if they’re coming from Canada, it could be four hour flight back down to a turbine here south of Nantucket or the vineyard. And when they get there, you are getting an EMT at best. That is not particularly compatible at a, at the risk of be a bit blunt with life. If you have something that happened to you and four hours later you are getting a response, that’s unacceptable. Everybody knows that. And that causes huge limitations to access. To the wind form with helicopters. Because you can’t put folks out there if you don’t have a way to get them out. And the entire reason that you use helicopters in your wind form is to insulate you or insure you against not having access for huge swaths of the year. So with the helicopter, you also need to provide folks a good way to get out, and quite frankly, even if you don’t have helicopter access. As Dr. Williams said, I don’t know anyone in the world who wants to take a vessel back if there is a helicopter available and on call. Allen Hall: Yeah it makes total sense. So if you’re an operator or a developer off the East coast, you be talking to hea, service USA and getting this service on your project because there’s really no other way to do it. Let’s just be honest. Yep. The other way is so horribly. Developed and we just don’t have the infrastructure for it in the US right now. Helicopter is the right way to go. Now let’s talk about what that looks like operationally. You get a phone call from a turbine or an operator that says, Hey, I got a guy that got hurt. What happens next? Michael Tosi: So for us, we try and make it as easy as possible. There’s just a phone number they contact. Okay. We have our dispatch available currently it is during daylight hours, and here in, in just under a week or so. Two weeks max. We’re going to be operating 24 7. Okay? Our dispatch channel be staff twenty four seven. The call goes to them. Within about a minute, that helicopter is already starting to get underway to launch. That is the key is to get those folks ready, to get those folks mobilized, get the helicopter converted and then it turns over to the pilots who who start Paul Russo: getting, yeah, they’ll take a look at the weather, look at where the asset’s located, if they’re gonna land, if they’re, or if it’s gonna be a hoist mission. And then they decide to accept the mission or not. And as long as all the factors are good and safe to do then they head out. Allen Hall: Okay. Are people stationed in the hangar? Correct. 24 hours? Yeah. So they’re not driving from the home to get over here? No, they’re here. They’re here. Paul Russo: Correct. So we have two pilots, a paramedic and a hoist operator. Allen Hall: 24 4 hours a day. Paul Russo: MT? Wow. Allen Hall: Okay. That’s, and Dr. Kenneth Williams: the hoist operator will be trained as an EMT? Yeah. So we have two medically trained people in the back and two pilots up front. Allen Hall: Yeah. So four people inside the helicopter. And there’s a switchover that has to happen because it’s configured to take technicians on and off. Correct. Of the wind turbines at the moment. Michael Tosi: Yep. What does that look like? So that’s a great question. This goes back to some of the economics of it. There, there is precedent for this. This is not a totally new concept. The folks in the Gulf of Mexico have been doing oil and natural gas work offshore for 60, 70 years or more. Paul came from a program in the Gulf that was a large search and rescue and EMS program. They had five dedicated helicopters and let Paul speak a little bit more to it. That comes with a price tag. And since offshore wind is newer. And smaller. We understand that is a difficult bill to foot. And while that is probably where this will go with continued development is to have a dedicated asset what we had to do this economically was use the assets we have because we understand that while the developers know they need to get there and they want to get there, there are ultimately resource limitations. And so with that, we use our existing fleet of helicopters, so the same helicopters that we take the folks out on. We can rapidly convert in less than 10 minutes. I believe the crews have done it. It’s a Paul Russo: little six minutes. Yeah. Michael Tosi: They’re all the way down to six minutes to take this and and it is a proper ambulance in the back. When you look back there, it’s not only a proper ambulance because this helicopter is much larger than most onshore medical helicopters. This is like the, the Cadillac or the Mercedes for the cruise. It’s got a ton of space, lots of space for gear, the stretcher, and it’s really great access. But we were able to do this economically for these first couple of developers to get them a solution at a price point that, that works, Allen Hall: right? Yeah. ’cause everybody’s worried about cost at the minute and rightfully however, you need to be worried about all your people that are out there. Yeah. So you need to weigh that off. And so you can, from phone call to being out on a flight line, less than 10 minutes. Yeah, Paul’s done all the weather research. He knows where he is going. Everybody’s in the helicopter. You got four people in off, you go to the turbine. What happens then? Are you calling Dr. Williams and say, Hey, we got somebody who’s injured and be ready? We, Paul Russo: so when we do get the call, we have an intake form that dispatch will write down the basic information of, okay, of where we’re going, patient. If it’s ambulatory, non-inventory. And then they’ll get further information. Paramedic will get that information as well, which is patient condition. Is this, is this a fractured leg? Is this a stroke, a heart attack? Is it just somebody that’s not feeling well? Okay. Whatever the case may be. Once they get that, then and that’s how all happening at the same time. How does that work? Allen Hall: If I’m a technician on top of a turbine, I’m. 30 miles from shore. Do I have a radio? How am I getting cell phone? How am I calling you? I’m talking to you. They have, yeah, they have Paul Russo: comms on shore. Cell phones are actually work pretty well. Okay. There’s really good coverage out there. These turbines are 500 feet off, off the water, sure. At the nael. So they’ve they’re great cell service. They have pretty good cell service out there, but they also, I think they also have tetra radios as well that they use. So they have several ways of communicating back with their people. And they have several ships out there as well that are vessels that are. And comms with them. Okay? Okay. So they would make a call to that entity out there to, to their marine control center. Okay. Or coordination center. And then and then that call would come to us. All right. Somebody gets hurt. It’s basically get on the radio 9 1 1. We’ve got somebody. That’s got injured and need to get ’em off. And here’s the condition, whatever it may be. Allen Hall: Okay, Paul Russo: so Allen Hall: you’re now flying towards the turbine, right? You get to the turbine. This person is not ambulatory. They’re just sitting on the deck. Broken leg, broken arm, whatever it is. What does that look like and how does weather play into this? Paul Russo: If the weather is really low, then we may not be able to get to the turbine. Again, it’s 500 feet above the water line, 500. So if you have ceilings down at 300 feet, that could be prohibited from for getting up there. Most days we don’t get that here in New England. Weather more than likely be okay the majority of the time. We get into a position to hoist out our paramedic. He’ll go out first. He or she will go out first and then and then medical equipment after that. And then they’ll pack the pack, the patient do whatever they gotta do, take as much time as they need to take the aircraft and that, during that time, we’ll just enter a loiter pattern just a conserve fuel, come back in, pick up the patient, pick up the paramedic, and off they go to the hospital. Allen Hall: Okay? So they’re actually stabilizing the patient on the top of the turbine. Get, you Paul Russo: get packed in the, Allen Hall: get ’em all Correct in our stretcher system. Okay. That’s one heck of a ride then. Yeah. Okay. So the get back onto the helicopter you’re flying to, where are you going? You going to Massachusetts? Probably Rhode Island. Rhode Island Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital. Okay. Whatever’s closest. Brown, I guess we Dr. Kenneth Williams: call it now, whatever that’s Rhode Island Hospital is the only level one trauma center in Southeastern New England. It’s also a burn center, an excellent helipad system. There’s a ground-based helipad that can handle two pretty good sized aircraft and a rooftop helipad that’s right over the emergency department. And it’s a couple minute flight from here where we are. So it’s our intended destination for almost all of our patients. They have an excellent medical communication center. It’s staffed by paramedics have radios and telephones and computer screens that we can communicate with them. So from the medical chronology of this everything that we need to take care of the patient is coming on every flight. So we’re not picking and choosing, oh, the guy has a broken leg. Let’s go get a splint out of the cabinet. Everything is on the aircraft. If we get additional medical information. So let’s say there’s a paramedic out there, or our medic here can talk to whoever is with the person. Yes. We’d love to have that information to know what we’re going to, we’re trusting our paramedics to make that decision that this is, how I’m gonna manage this patient. And as Michael said we’re not triaging. If they call us, we’re gonna go and we will sort it out later. But once we’ve got. Some information, there’ll probably be a notification to the hospital, Hey, we’re going on a mission. You’re gonna be getting a patient. Once they get to the patient, they’ll do what they need to do. They’ll get the patient back in the aircraft, and then there will be communication to the hospital. Now we’re inbound, we’re 10 minutes out. This is what we have with a much more detailed medical report. And that’ll either go directly to the hospital or be relayed through dispatch here depending on where the aircraft is and. Who we have radio communication with. And then the trauma center will get ready to receive the patient with whatever they have. They’re fully prepared there to handle strokes and heart attacks and medical issues as well as trauma. So they can handle anything that that we might be bringing them. Michael Tosi: Wow. Okay. That actually brings up something I think is also important to highlight is. A lot of folks perceive with the military as just very organized. Everyone knows exactly what they’re doing. For those of us who spent some time in the military while it does come across that way, sometimes internally, see a bit how the cake is baked. And the military is not designed to be an ambulance service, never, has, never will be it the Coast Guard, be it in deployed in environments. I, I. On many missions in the military providing, search and rescue services or coverage or medevacs. And some issues that they’ve seen is that military helicopters don’t have the ability to necessarily deliver a report to the hospital they’re going to. So they show up and hate to say it, they say, Hey, here’s your guy, and they dump ’em off on the hospital. And the hospital doesn’t initially know what it was, what the symptoms were. And there’s been several cases up here in New England, where that has happened, where they have had someone go to Rhode Island Hospital, the hospital didn’t know what they were getting and they had a difficulty, I don’t wanna say diagnosing per se, but they didn’t get the best level of care immediately because the hospital needs to know what they’re getting. They need a good handoff. And there have also been some adverse outcomes. From folks that have gotten potentially delayed responses or there’s been cases here on the eastern seaboard where the Coast Guard has said no. And for those who’ve been involved they’ve heard this, for the last couple years. Hey, they are gonna say no. And at some point the Coast Guard is gonna have limitations because however acute you may think your particular patient is, I guarantee you that the, fisherman whose vessel sank and is in 33 degree water. Is in a far more acute condition than almost anything you can imagine, because that person has a very limited window, and the Coast Guard is going to prioritize that. So there are going to be times, and there have been times now where they have said no. And I think that’s really important for folks to understand if they’re not utilizing a service like this yet. Allen Hall: So now I’m curious because last year Ella Service USA did about 10,000 flights to turbines. Offshore, which was an incredible number. I didn’t realize you had done that many flights last year. How many injuries happened last year where they could have used your service? Michael Tosi: It is a fabulous question. So admittedly while we are part of the industry folks, there are organizations like G plus, but our observation is that, folks don’t like airing their dirty laundry to be entirely frank. What we have seen from behind the scenes is that I know that one particular tier one operator out there had over a dozen alone in one summer campaign. There are and that is just one. There are many out there I would estimate at any given time or any given year so far. I think 30, 40, 50 different cases now, mi mind you, the acuity can go from, extraordinarily low. All the way up to there have absolutely been some much higher acuity cases out there. The other thing that speaks to is the lower acuity cases where the Coast Guard just is not, you’re not gonna call them. But it’s this in between where you don’t necessarily wanna stick them on a vessel. You do want to get them to care in the next 12 hours. Maybe it doesn’t need to be in the next hour or two hours, but the next 12 hours and the vessels are not necessarily running in, in some of the poor sea conditions. There is a whole Whitney of stuff. Most of your town’s ambulance calls are not tremendously acute. That doesn’t mean you don’t need an ambulance service or you count on the ambulance service from four towns over. You still need your own ambulance service to handle those. And that Allen Hall: goes back to Dr. Williams’s point that. A lot of what happens on the EMS side is not, acute, horrible injury. A lot of it is just general things, but they require EMS services. Dr. Kenneth Williams: And to amplify on that, one of the reasons why medicine is so interesting, but so frustrating for some people is things can look minor and actually be a serious problem. Yeah. And so if somebody’s on top of a turbine and gets a sudden toothache, maybe they’re having a heart attack. Okay, so somebody made triage. Oh, it’s just a toothache. Why don’t you give the guy a couple of Tylenols and he can finish his workday. Maybe they do need to be evacuated. And when our paramedic gets out there and says, oh, when did you start having this job pain? Do you have any chest discomfort with, as now that you mentioned it, my chest is tight. That person now needs a cardiogram and an IV and maybe oxygen and maybe a medication. All of which we can provide. None of which the Coast Guard can provide, and none of which is available on top of that turbine. It may be available if they’re on a boat with a paramedic offshore, but now you’ve got a patient where advanced care is started and the Coast Guard can’t continue that advanced care. So either, again, the paramedic that’s on the boat gets on the Coast Guard aircraft with the patient, or a service like our service can come in and. A handoff at a the same level of care or even a more advanced level of care. Than what’s available out there. Paul Russo: Yeah. I experienced that many times in my previous operation prior to coming up here where we going out to pick up somebody that is complaining of heartburn or maybe a tingling in the arm, whatever the case may be, and we get ’em on and they’re, they’re coating out from a heart attack. Whoa. And without that advanced level of care that we provided same level of care we’re providing here, we provided down there as well. That person would automate it. Allen Hall: Wow. This is amazing because I didn’t realize. How serious this was. Now you walk me through it. If you’re out on a turbine and something happens, it’s an isolated place to be. You’re on an island and you may be there for several hours unless you have HeliService coming to your rescue. How quickly can you get somebody off of that top of that turbine and into Rhode Island Hospital? Michael Tosi: It’s, so overall, it is a very quick response time. So we’re here for our closest turbines for the nearest wind park that we serve. Only about a 13 minute flight. Wow. So if that helicopter’s off the ground 15 minutes, which during the day is very plausible, especially when the crew is here and postured. You’re talking of 15 minute launch time, 15 minutes offshore. You’re at 30 minutes until that person is receiving the highest level of care that you could ever expect. The same that you would get if you called 9 1 1 in the biggest city with the best a LS. Level of care that you’re going to see to recover that person depending on how they’re packaged. 10 minutes 15 minutes would be a long time. It can be very quick depending on how ready they are. So you’re off the turbine in 15 minutes, 15 minute flight to the hospital, and you’re talking that it is possible on some of the nearest turbines to be an hour from the point where that entry occurs to the hospital. Now, obviously you can see delays with. With confusion with folks. And there, there’s the fog of war as US military folks call it. But an hour is very doable. For some of the turbines that we service. There are a bit further out. 90 minutes is very doable. The other day we had a drill we did at our furthest turbine that is currently in our service area. In between call when we received our call to getting that person to Rhode Island Hospital was just a little over 90 minutes from that call. Yeah. From what we’ve seen with the Coast Guard responses in the area. It’s been generally three hours or more from that call just because of their launch time is a little bit slower. The notification process, the medical discussion, sometimes that’s four to five hours that we’ve seen on several other calls. So the difference is dramatic. You’re talking about an improvement almost a hundred percent or more. So it is drastic. So if you Allen Hall: can hear behind us, we’re at an active flight line and how the service is busy today taking technicians on and off of wind turbines. So it is a busy place. Place. This discussion has been fantastic. I did not realize the need for this as much as I, I thought the Coast Guard would handle some of this and that’s what was going on, but in reality, they’re not able to do the service at the level in which it is required. And Dr. Williams, you pointed out very clearly, there’s a lot of things that happen on wind turbines in a lot of cases that need to take, be taken care of. Service is the way to do that. And they’re qualified and they’re trained and they got 24 hour coverage. That is the right way to do this in the states. Michael, how do people get ahold of you and turn on the service and get it implemented for their wind farm? Michael Tosi: Yeah, so very fortunately, the service is now here. We had a big industry stakeholder, really stepped up, made the right decision to do this. Go ahead and because they have taken that leap now it is really easy for everybody else because the service is here. All that needs to happen is a contractual discussion. Another big item with this is we are doing cost sharing with this. So the next person who participates the first participant is going to see a reduction. In their service. So a pretty substantial reduction. The next member is gonna see an already reduced price, and then as that keeps going it’s a bit of a consortium. It’s, unfortunately it’s almost impossible to organize a consortium with a lot of big players. But what I like to call it is cost sharing. I. So as each member goes and joins the service, the price continues to drop. Also, you tend to see the service increase in quality because there’s a little bit of an additional margin with each to provide coverage for a greater swath of the offshore population. So the more people that participate in it, the better the service gets and the less that it costs, because very obviously, thankfully even if there are say 36 calls a year that’s three every month. Nobody needs to pay for their individual service for each wind park. That, that’s a gross misuse of resources. So by having that cost sharing model, everyone can get a really high quality service but they’re not paying a loan for it. And that, that I think, is a huge deal for the industry that now that there’s, like I said. Someone who took the first big jump. Now it’s really easy for everybody else to scale that, to get involved. They just need to reach out to us and the service is here. It’s really just a commercial discussion. Allen Hall: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense that the more people that join HeliServices EMS service, the lower the cost is for each one of them, and you’re gonna need it. So the, you’re gonna have to have it really, if you want to do your technicians and all your people, right? You wanna have the MS services for them, thank you so much for inviting us back to Rhode Island and to the wonderful HeliService site. Dr. Williams, thank you for being here. I didn’t realize all the complexities to yeah. The EMS world. It’s it’s quite enlightening. And to Michael and to Paul, thank you so much for having us back. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming. Michael Tosi: Yeah, of course. No, thanks. Thanks for your time. Thanks for for joining and I hope you’re excited to watch the demo. Dr. Kenneth Williams: Yeah. Thank you for coming. Yeah. We we’re thrilled to be able to offer. The people working in offshore wind the same level of EMS service they would expect on shore.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
Uptime 5th Anniversary, Carbon Negative Materials 32:41

12 дней назад32:41

32:41

The Uptime Podcast team celebrates their fifth anniversary, reflecting on their journey and contributions from team members. They also discuss Siemens Gamesa’s India operations acquisition by TPG and future renewable energy investments. Additionally, the episode covers innovations in carbon-negative building materials. 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: We just celebrated our fifth year of podcasting, everybody. So the uptime podcast is of officially five years old. I can’t believe we’ve made it this far. That’s we were trying to do the math on it the other day at five times 50. Roughly. It’s 250 odd episodes. That’s a lot of episodes, Rosemary Barnes: but that’s only the weekly episodes. What about all the others? You’re not only putting out one a week these days. Allen Hall: No, it’s two or three or four, right? It’s somewhere in there. But I just wanted to say congratulations to each of you on behalf of the Uptime podcast and all the work that happens behind the scenes. Everybody listens to the finished product, and I know it sounds great and the comments are great, and the ideas are great, but there’s. A ton of work that goes into this every week to give you this content, and everybody that’s been on the podcast as a guest, it was just trying to remember all the faces and names that are. Big and wind that have been on the podcast. It’s amazing the people we’ve touched, the people we’ve met that are friends that have come from the podcast. It’s a nice little family, weirdly enough. And it’s one of those it feels like a pair of comfortable shoes that hey, when you go to a conference, you just know everybody and you, and they know us. You feel like we’ve known them forever because we just spend every week together talking about what’s happening in wind. It’s a great little experience. Phil Totaro: Can we add that, a big thank you to everyone who listens because we wouldn’t keep doing it if you weren’t also showing up. Thank you to everyone that listens. Again, your feedback is fantastic. Good and bad. It it keeps us entertained. So we thank you all. Joel Saxum: I would say from my seat as well, Alan, thank you for having all of us and organizing the things that you do. And the unsung hero that you guys don’t hear from or usually see unless you’re a guest on the podcast is Claire Hall in the background. Who’s our producer who puts all of these episodes together and is juggling work life. School, a million different things to make sure this thing goes out every week. So thank you Claire as well. And of course, Rosemary. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah I was gonna say that, Alan has abnormal persistence. I think it took it like now it’s obvious why, the value and why we would all keep going and why we come back every week. But yeah, Alan’s efforts, especially in the early years was like, just. Just kept on doing it week after week. And, when I started, all I had to do was show up and try and read the material beforehand. I definitely would not have been doing a weekly podcast for, I think I’ve been on it for four years or so. I wouldn’t have been doing that on my own, that’s for sure. I think yeah, 90% of the success comes from Alan’s abnormal persistence. So Thanks Alan. Allen Hall: Yeah. I appreciate everybody coming every week. I know we’ve all been through ups and downs over the last several years, rosemary, you’ve grown a family. And Joel is. Been in and out and I’ve been in and out and Phil too, right? So between the four of us, we can actually make a decent podcast, which is what I like listening to. And I, we actually reduce the there’s a lot of back and forth. We don’t put on the air because. We disagree quite a bit, but that’s what makes it fun for, at least for me. I know Rosemary and I sometimes sound like we, we don’t get along, but actually we quite do. I like Rosemary. I think she’s fantastic and I think she brings a ton to the podcast, but there are times it doesn’t seem like we, we get along. I’m fine with it honestly. And Phil, brings in all the investor and the analysis and the data stream and all that which just. Puts depth to this and puts the numbers together so it makes sense and Joel’s experience in oil and gas and in wind and working for a company in Denmark and all those pieces that you can’t. Find anywhere, make this podcast work. It’s just what it is. It was just great. So I’m just thrilled we met, made it five years and thanks to everybody that’s listened and we’re gonna cross a million subscribers on YouTube in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to everybody who has. Has joined us on this journey, and yeah, let’s look forward to the next five years to see if we make it that long. 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 Ro and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: A consortium led by TPG. Is set to acquire Siemens Gomesa renewable powers, India operations. Now that deal, Phil is valued at 500 to 550 million, and it comes as Siemen energy works to streamline its operation. Following some significant challenges over the last year or two. Phil, do you know all the groups that are involved along with TPG and what’s the approach inside of India once they close this deal with Siemens cesa? Phil Totaro: That’s a really good question, and I don’t know if we know all the answers yet, but it looks like Siemens energy is slated to retain a little bit less than 10% share in, in the company. TPG Capital is working with the consortium of local companies. Have prior experience in the renewable energy sector. So that’s a good sign. They’ve got nine gigawatts of installed capacity in India at this point with, legacy kind of Ga, Mesa technology. So the question is they bought the whole thing, including the manufacturing facilities of which they have, I think three. It’s. Interesting that it’s a, an investor TPG capital, basically, that’s taking majority ownership of this and not somebody that’s, again, they’ve brought in these couple of guys that, that run these other two investment partners that are I. Experienced in the Indian renewable space, but I don’t know if that’s enough to keep everybody going. The capital infusion is certainly enough to keep the manufacturing operations going if they want to, but are they really getting orders? I’m assuming this means they’ve got the license to keep manufacturing these, two to three megawatt Siemens ESA designs. So where do they go from there? Joel Saxum: Phil, when Alan and I are doing, we do quite a bit of communication work and lightning stuff in the Indian market and we run into a lot of G one fourteens. A ton of them actually. So in my mind I’m thinking, okay, we know that when this thing was up on the block to be sold, they were people that were looking at it, were wanting mostly from what I saw, was the services revenue. They wanted to take over that service organization ’cause they wanted the revenue. From that, in my mind, I’m thinking. Who’s on the hook for the risk of warranty? Because if they’re built, if there’s stuff that has been deployed, are they take, are they buying the warranty risk or does that still go back to Siemens Ag? Of course, we probably won’t. The details of this won’t be public, but at this point in time, I don’t know because that seems risky as hell to me. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And for those that aren’t familiar, legacy ESA technology, of which the G one 14 was a derivative of, the technology that they originally licensed from Vestas and made the G 80 series and the G 90 series that was lightning prone is all get out. And, those things have suffered immeasurably, throughout the world. The G eighties, g and g one 14 of are. Just absolute lightning magnets. I’m sure there’s someone that’s gonna be accepting whatever risk there is. Joel Saxum: If you own G eighties, G nineties, or G one fourteens, call us. We can help. Allen Hall: Private equity firms are capitalizing on depressed, renewable energy stock prices to acquire clean energy assets at attractive valuations. Now despite the challenging market conditions for wind and solar companies, investors see strong long-term fundamentals in the sector, particularly as oil majors retreat from the renewable energy commitments. Now Phil, we’ve seen a lot of this activity over the last year. Brookfield is a big player in acquisitions at the moment. Masar is making a lot of moves. There is ripe fruit. Out there that is valued right to grab now, and I think you’re gonna see a lot more of these acquisitions happening because the more recent acquisitions have not been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve been in the billions of dollars and a lot of billions. I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And particularly as the oil and gas companies pull back some of these companies you mentioned Brookfield and Masar Master also just announced they were contemplating an IPO. So that’s gonna give them even more resources to, to plow into that if they go that route. But the reality of it is too, that these are also companies that have made the long-term commitment. To renewables and a renewables portfolio. They’re not just getting in to flip an asset. They’re getting in to build out their portfolio of what they can own, what they can operate, what they can repower. This is what happens at the beginning where we are right now, which is almost the beginning of a recession. Everybody starts smelling blood and water and starts mobilizing their capital, but it’s the companies that are already active and talking to everybody. Like your Brookfields, like your KKRs, like your BlackRocks of the world. They already know where to go and what to do. But the funny thing is if you don’t. Give us a call because I got news for you. We’ve got a huge catalog of every project, particularly in the US where, we can tell like who’s making money, who’s not, who’s ready to repower, and, how much is it gonna cost. There’s definitely ways of, if you haven’t already figured that out and you want to get in on this, don’t waste time, mobilize your capital the right way. Joel Saxum: I think something to be that’s important to notice or to note here as well is if you watch the press releases from these big oil companies that are retreating. They’re not saying we’re done with renewables, they’re just saying, for now we’re gonna reallocate our capital and our efforts elsewhere. So I’ve, I would fully see like in the next, maybe not in the next four years, but in the next few, 20 30, 20 35, like as things continue to evolve, you’re going to see those players come back. And maybe at that point in time that those, some of those markets will be more mature. You may have the technology for floating wind may be like ready to roll. ’cause right now we’re still in those early stages. Very early stages. You see some of these permitting things happening and a little bit more of a it’ll be a more mature market when I think they come back and there will be SOVs available, there’ll be key side facilities available. Those kind of things will be in place. It’ll de-risk the. The investment, I believe. So I don’t think you’ll see this as a complete departure of big oil, but. Of course this private equity wave is back filling that gap that they, that, that vacuum that they left, they’ll be back. I fully believe Allen Hall: that, Phil, can we stick on oil and gas just for another moment? The oil prices have been dropping steadily for the last year-ish. Getting back into oil and gas is not a big money maker at the moment. It isn’t like oil prices are a hundred dollars a barrel. They’re down in the sixties right at the moment, so there’s not a huge revenue stream. And if everybody’s getting back at the same time, it’s gonna really lower the price. It’s supply demand. So is this the right time to get back in oil and gas, or is it just because they’re just trying to get back to what they know rather than be on the periphery of something that they just don’t maybe really understand? Phil Totaro: It’s also getting back to what. They know and, but more importantly, maybe what’s made them money already and what’s more in vogue, if you actually wanna look more at fundamental economics renewables are cheaper and can be deployed faster. And the reality of it is if you’re gonna. If you only look at the power generation sector if it’s based on, petroleum or natural gas generation, there’s a finite amount of order book available. All the manufacturers and the global supply chain, it, it’s. Booked up for through the end of the decade already. So good luck getting anything deployed. Wind and solar are cheap and deployable right now. If you’re Shell or your BP or whomever and you do oil and gas for a living, like pivoting back to that, not gonna be a problem. But again, if you’re trying to get into a market and you have a decision to make about where to park, capital renewables are actually the better option even longer term because, fixed price contracts and things like that, that you don’t have to be susceptible to, all these press fluctuations and all this other stuff that you gotta put up with compliance related in the oil and gas industry. That’s what I’d be doing if I had, billions to invest. Joel Saxum: Oil and gas is is not, oh. Okay. So when we talk about oil and gas being cyclical in nature, if you’re outside of the industry, when you look, when you hear oil and gas is cyclical in nature, you look at price per barrel, what does it cost you with the gas pump, that kind of thing. However, there is a lot more cycles within gas, oil and gas, and a lot of those cycles have to do with when are you developing capital facilities and when are you doing exploration? So exploration has been happening for a while as capital was high exploration. You grab the war chest, you go out and you look for some resources. You do some unconventional stuff. You look around, you build plans to get into the play. Right now you have this drill, baby drill thing now as well. If you look at the rig counts global and. In the, in North America, they’re down about 5% right now than they were today, last year. And that’s unconventional knowledge when people are like, why? Why is that happening? Because they’re pumping. They don’t need to be drilling right now. They have resources that were ready to roll that they’re just flip that capital Twitter at switchback on let’s go. And that’s why you’re seeing prices come down. So we, there’s a lot of odd cyclical, there’s a lot of sign waves in the cycle of oil and gas that are being played on right now. And, but if you look at the, like the Shell’s recent announcement that they talked about, what they talked about was we’re, you know what, we’re gonna pull it into the chest. We’re gonna get dividends back up for our shareholders. And to me that’s Hey, we’re gonna get, we’re gonna de-risk our operation. We’re gonna build up the war chest a little bit more, and then. You never know what we could deploy capital on, but we don’t need to do it right now. We’re making money and I think that’s where there, the volatility index in the stock markets is through the roof. It’s easier to pull it back in and drive some shareholder value without taking risks right now. Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Phil, I think you sent me an article talking about. How natural gas, which six months ago was gonna be the energy supply for AI and all these data centers that are gonna plan to be built in the United States, mostly around Texas. And now that that was the pathway. Everybody’s realizing that they can’t build gas turbines that quickly. So the oil and gas demand, the natural gas demand may not be there because they can’t have no way of burning it and turning into electricity. So the net is that renewables are gonna fill that space. Phil Totaro: Theoretically, in Texas in particular though, they just passed a Senate bill, which seems like it’s gonna get signed by the governor to basically offset every megawatt of renewable generation. So basically if you’re a renewable asset owner in Texas you’re no longer allowed to deploy batteries to back up your renewables. You actually have to deploy gas. To back up your renewables. And so I don’t know how that’s actually gonna work if they, if the governor actually does sign this ridiculous nonsense. But the reality as well is, you have the ability to deploy renewables, to be able to, power data centers and things like that. A as we talked about a lot faster, and b in a more consistent fashion than. What you would be able to get with with gas anyway. Because if, especially if you’re talking about putting something like behind a meter for example, like renewables are probably the way to go again, because even though it’s variable generation, you’re still doing it on a relatively fixed price contract. So I’m not sure why that’s not a viable option again, when it can be deployed cheaper and faster than whatever else. Could be leveraged, whatever other technologies could Allen Hall: be leveraged, and data centers are mobile. You would just pick it up, put it in the back of a truck and take it to Iowa, which is what you should be doing to start off with, because the electricity prices in Iowa are really aggressive. There’s a ton of renewables there, a lot of wind, a good bit of solar. If you want to go someplace where electricity is readily available. I’m still a little confused to why Texas would be that place. Obviously if you’re doing gas turbines yes, true. But if you’re looking to do renewables, there’s a lot of land in Iowa. As Joel knows, there’s a lot of cornfields in Iowa you can make into data centers. It wouldn’t take much Iowa’s a fixed price market. Some of it is, Phil Totaro: not all of it but you’re also now running into all of these local restrictions, at the county and township level on wind and solar project development and that’s coming back to bite everybody in the butt. At this point because, you’re, you’ve restricted renewables, which could be deployed fast, but you’re allowing natural gas and fracking and whatever else, but you, it’s gonna take you forever to get the power. But you’ve got companies that wanna deploy these data centers if you have put all these blockades in place from being able to, allow this data center to be built. They’re just gonna, like Helen just said they’re mobile. Like they’re gonna move it someplace else. They’re gonna take it down to Texas, they’re gonna take it to, heck they could take it anywhere and buy revenue from, the data center and the power generation. Joel Saxum: So this is, but this is part of our, this is a cultural or a societal problem that we have, and it’s a global problem. It’s worse in Europe. Is this need or like the delay in permitting and we used to be able to get done things so fast, like the Empire State Building was built in a little over 400 days from like start to finish, right? There’s no way we would do that now. Because they, oh, we have to this, we gotta slow down because of this or this ant might not, like whatever it may be. We can’t get anything done quickly anymore. Allen Hall: How soon before they put data centers on barges and how soon before they put data centers in Australia where there’s plenty of resources and electricity is cheap? Why would you not do that? Because the, it’s just a data line. It could be anywhere. It could literally be anywhere. Joel Saxum: The best data center model for me is yeah, sinking one in the ocean and putting a tal turbine on it. Cooling, no cooling problems. Gonna say that. Yeah. Rosemary Barnes: But they are being located places where cooling is easy, like scandinavia’s getting a lot because the, yeah, the water that is nearby is cool. And then sometimes they can also use the heat for district heating. It’s a easy kind of way to integrate all that. And I visited a project in in. Denmark, I think it was in where they have their yeah, a Facebook data center that was using cool Danish water to cool it, and then it was providing heat to the district heating, and there was no money changed hands because it’s like. Facebook were getting rid of some heat for no cost and the district heating system was getting some heating energy for no cost. So it was a win-win. And I know that there are a few other projects around like that. It’s definitely not all data centers can be located just wherever you want. Some of them need to be near the cities that they’re serving, sometimes it needs to be just really fast. Yeah. But I know that they are thinking about things like that, about the climate of the place that they’re putting it in many cases because. Cooling is a huge part of their their energy cost. It’s very significant Allen Hall: in Norway, Iceland, natural resources to generate electricity with, right? And it’s cold most of the year, so you solve two problems right there. The third one, it gets solved by SpaceX because Elon’s putting up all those high speed low earth orbit satellites so you can transmit the data at crazy speeds around the world. You don’t even need a cable anymore. W this gets very mobile and I think we’re thinking like 1980s approach here. I’m gonna connect to a pipeline. I’m gonna plant this data center in, I’m gonna put a gas turbine next to it. I’m gonna crank this thing up like I’m Henry Ford. The reality is that data centers can be placed anywhere, and I do think there’s an opportunity for a large part of Northern Europe, just like Joel was saying. And you too, Rosemary. I agree with you. There. This thing’s gonna get moved around quick. Rosemary Barnes: What else is interesting about the mobile nature of data centers? I was listening, I think it was a Vaults podcast I was listening to yesterday. Allen Hall: What? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I listened to other podcasts as well. And. Their guest on there, I can’t remember who it was talking about how that’s a risk for you. ’cause you know how like a lot of, data centers, there’s a lot more data centers in the US because there’s a lot more tech companies using them in the us so that makes sense. And it’s really hard to tease out what the actual, upcoming demand will be on electricity grids because they they shop around a few different locations to find the place that’s gonna give ’em the most favorable, yeah, the most favorable deal. And one of the challenges is that, the same data center might be represented in 2, 3, 4 different utilities, forward planning. And then there’s a big risk because, if the utility’s gonna build real infrastructure to serve those projects, real gas turbines, real transmission lines that sort of thing. What happens if the data center does just pack up and leave, like those assets are still there and who’s gonna pay for it? Then once the data center’s gone, it’s gonna be, the the, the rest of the utilities customers. So it’s yeah, it’s really. Challenging to figure out like how American consumers or just regular American consumers of electricity are not gonna end up paying like a significant chunk of the bill for this data center expansion because they really are wooed by the local areas to get this business there. But yeah, like it’s far from certain that the benefits are gonna outweigh the cost to the communities that host them. Joel Saxum: Have you guys heard of the company wind cores? Wind cores is a German company and they’re putting mini data centers, right? ’cause they’re not huge in the foundations, in the towers of existing turbines. Phil Totaro: Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah, I have heard of them. Joel Saxum: So I just, I’m just looking on my other screen and I was Googling it and it says, on average 85 to 92% of the power for each of these. Many data centers is coming directly from the hosting wind turbine, so they’re taking advantage of when markets are curtailed and other things like that to power these things. So taking that behind the meter approach, but with it, you’re doing. You’re eliminating the other infrastructure, you’re eliminating the, the need to build a building to do all these other things. ’cause it’s in the tower already. So like a solution like that. Now that one’s not infinitely scalable of course. But that’s a cool solution that could be used. I think that one’s neat. Phil Totaro: Joel, there’s more than 500,000 wind turbines in the world, so it’s scalable if they want it to be. 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. I. 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, Northwestern University scientists have developed a new carbon negative building material that could transform the concrete and cement industries using seawater. Now, Rosemary. Stay with me here. You’re gonna using sea water, electricity, and carbon dioxide. The researchers have created a process that not only permanently locks away CO2, but also produces valuable materials for construction. And as a bonus, hydrogen gas as a clean fuel byproduct. Now. So let’s just walk through this just for a minute. The material can be used in concrete as a substitute for gravel or sand to manufacture cement, plaster, and paints, right? So you get this gritty substance you can mix in. And it produces hydrogen gas, which obviously can eventually burn, and it was developed to maximize the value of captured CO2 rather than just storing it underground. So the first question is it worth it? Is it worth all that hassle and all the electricity to do this? Or should you just be bearing CO2 underground and leaving it? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so there’s there’s a few. Concrete, cement based solutions that can be carbon negative. I think carbon cure is one where they bubble in CO2 into the into the concrete as it’s curing and that stores carbon. And yeah, as I. Concrete cures over like over many years of its lifetime. It continues to absorb CO2. All just even regular concrete with regular cement does that already. And then there’s some other companies there’s an Australia one actually that Canberra based where I’m from, called Mineral Carbonation International, and they’ve got a product that can yeah, basically absorb CO2 and it makes a. Yeah. A material, a mineral that you can use for a bunch of different things, including, you can put it in building materials, another option that does roughly the same things, will it? Work or not? I’m sure it works. The challenge is scale. The challenge is the cost as well. Does it cost more than regular concrete, then who’s gonna pay for it? And that’s the biggest challenge with any carbon capture project is at the moment, unless the material you’re making is actually. Better or cheaper in some way than the thing it’s replacing. And I haven’t seen it. You said it came out of a lab, so I’m sure that for now it’s not at the point where it is cheaper. Perhaps there is cost potential cement. Really, you need something besides capitalism to, to get you there. Joel Saxum: It’s the sa it’s the same outline of the problem we have with recycling, wind turbine mine blades. You can recycle them, you can make this material out of ’em. To put, to use as in, in concrete. But if it’s not cheaper, unless it’s substantially better, then it’s not, it’s hard to build an economic model around it. Rosemary Barnes: You know what, even the better part is actually hard because there are a few like really cool smart cement alternatives that are you, and even some of them I chemically identical to Portland Cement, but the standards for cement around the world for using cement, they don’t say it needs to be this strong or, it doesn’t give a bunch of. Materials, properties that it has to hit. It says it has to use this much Portland cement, like it’s specified in building standards all over the world that you have to use this ratio of Portland cement. And so that’s actually one of the hardest obstacles to overcome. Yeah, like it’s funny that one of the biggest obstacles to decarbonizing that industry is all the standards in place. And I, I do think this is one place where governments could make a really big difference besides not actually just, putting in a carbon tax or something. But actually like helping to rewrite those standards. One and two. The biggest user of the biggest purchaser of concrete and cement in most countries is the government. For a lot of these, like urban infrastructure projects, also defense, they, they could start specifying, we’re going to require, I don’t know, 5% needs to be, these alternative materials that are, just as good, better properties in many cases, but just haven’t been used before. If the government would would start to use them, we could really accelerate their development and the the costs coming down. I. As they got used more. Yeah, that that’s one of my hopes. I don’t often look to the government for solutions technology solutions, but I do think that this is one area where they really could make a big difference without changing things too much. Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening, and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to uptime tech news, or next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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GE Vernova Customer Center, Sophia Offshore Wind Project 4:03

13 дней назад4:03

4:03

This week, SSE appoints Martin Pibsworth as the next CEO, GE Vernova inaugurates a new customer center in Florida, RWE advances its Sophia Offshore Wind Project, and Nantucket challenges three offshore wind projects along Massachusetts coast. 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 Newsflash, industry News Lightning fast. Newsflash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Starting off the week, British Utility Company SSE has named Martin Pibsworth as its chief executive designate. Pibsworth joined SSE in 1998 and currently serves as Chief Commercial Officer. Pibsworth will take over from Alistair Phillips Davies, who has been CEO since 2013 and will hand over the reigns following the annual general meeting on July 17th. Before leaving the company in November, uh, the new CEO will lead SSE renewables push helping the UK deliver on its decarbonization goals. During Philip’s Davies tenure, SSE made a strategic shift toward networks and renewables with shares gaining about 4% during his leadership. Last year. SSE announced plans to invest at least 22 billion pounds in grid infrastructure over five years. Over in the United States, GE Vernova has opened a new customer experience center at its Pensacola facility in Florida, marked by a ribbing cutting event hosted by CEO Scott Strazik. The center includes multiple conference rooms, collaboration areas, and direct access to production space. The investments are part of GE Vernova’s broader plan announced in January to invest nearly $600 million in its US factories and facilities. Over the next two years, the Pensacola factory has already produced enough turbines to supply over 1.2 gigawatts of the 2.4 gigawatts ordered for the Sunzia Wind Farm in New Mexico. German Energy group RWE has installed its first turbines at its 1.4 Gigawatt Sophia Offshore Wind Project in the uk Located on Dogger Bank, 195 kilometers off the northeast coast of Britain. Sophia is set to become one of the world’s largest single offshore wind farms. The project will consist of 100 Siemens Gamesa turbines featuring 150 recyclable blades. The wind park is scheduled to be fully operational in the second half of 2026. RWE’s Chief Operating Officer for offshore wind commented that Sophia will make a significant contribution to the UK’s clean power 2030 targets. And over in Massachusetts, the town of Nantucket and a Nantucket based activist group are challenging three offshore wind projects off the Massachusetts coast. The town recently sued the US Department of Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management requesting that the government set aside its approval of South Coast Wind and restart the environmental review. Meanwhile, the group ACK for Whales is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to rescind permits granted to Vineyard Wind and New England wind. These challenges come amid the Trump administration’s opposition to offshore wind. Industry analyst Timothy Fox’s Vineyard Wind faces less risk from these challenges since it’s already under construction while projects in planning stages are at higher risk. South Coast wind, which receive final federal approval on the last business day of the Biden administration could be delayed by up to four years. Vineyard wind is the furthest along among these projects with more than half of its 62 turbine towers already installed. Massachusetts Energy Secretary Rebecca Tepper has reiterated the state support for offshore wind emphasizing the need for energy independence. That’s this week’s top. News stories. Stay tuned for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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AC883 Solves the Spare Parts Crisis 18:30

16 дней назад18:30

18:30

Lars Bendsen joins the spotlight to discuss how AC883 helps operators source turbine parts to cut costs and reduce downtime. AC883 can offer faster response times and better pricing than manufacturers based in Europe. Lars shares how his company’s approach helps prevent extended turbine downtime by providing quick access to critical components. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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: In the wind industry, a turbine standing still often means one thing, waiting for parts that should be readily available. This week on the uptime spotlight, we’re joined by Lars Benson of AC 8 83, which is based in Canada. AC883 has direct connections to manufacturers in Denmark where most critical worm turbine components are actually produced Lars shares, house site operators can cut costs and dramatically reduce downtime by bypassing the OEM middleman and sourcing parts directly from the original suppliers. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Lars, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Spare Parts is a huge issue all over the world, but it seems like in the US and Canada, there’s always a shortage. They’re looking for spare parts. They don’t know where to get them, and the easy answer has been to call the original equipment manufacturer in terms of the GE Vestus Siemens, cesa, Nordex, whoever that may be, and just to place a order. There are other opportunities out there. What happens when a wind side in Texas just decides to buy from the wind turbine manufacturer? How much are they paying overpaying for that part? Lars Bendsen: I can’t say exactly on on dollars and cents, but but we know the markup from the OEMs. Then they’re not shy of earning money on that, those parts. And yeah, so it’s very simple. We can get those parts directly from Europe directly from the suppliers to the OEMs. Allen Hall: Yeah. And if I’m an operator, and I haven’t been over to Denmark to look at the situation there, a significant number of critical parts are actually manufactured in Denmark or in the surrounding areas. You have no way of knowing that if you own the turbine, Lars Bendsen: that’s true. You don’t. Somehow the OEMs have been really good and keeping a bit of cloud cloudy around that area. It’s actually pretty simple. They all produced either in in Denmark and Germany for basically all turbines. GE turbines is a target turbine from Germany that that they bought back when. So that’s why sim that’s a German turbine as well. It’s not a US turbine at all. Allen Hall: And the supply chain has remained that way for a long time. Lars Bendsen: It’s a BP parts. It’s standard parts. There’s no rocket sites in it. Of course, there’s some legacy some software parts and stuff that we could be desk, some, what we call it electronic boards, which software on, of course we can’t do that. That’s fair enough, right? That’s actually where the OOM has its value. That’s totally good. Joel Saxum: I think part of the reason that you see this, that gap there in the industry is the simple fact that, and I don’t take this as a slight Lars because I love your website and what you guys do for marketing and branding, but in that corner of the world, and Alan, you and I were just talking about this couple of German companies we’re talking about they’re not that good at global branding and global marketing. As a unit like culturally, so you don’t see really what’s going on almost behind that curtain as an American, when you log in and go I need some breaks, or I need this, or whatever. You don’t see that manufacturer’s website pop up. You may see an AC 8 83 pop up that says, Hey we have we sales spare parts. But you just don’t as an American and to be honest with you. Running around the United States talking to all these wind site operators, they’re so dang busy with their day-to-day life and solving the, putting out the fires and the problems that they have every day, that they don’t have time to go search for that stuff. So what do they do? They just call their procurement or the person that they know and they say, Hey, get me this. And if they end up overpaying for. 10, 20, 50% or whatever. It got the turbine back up and runway because uptime is king. So what else are you guys doing to strategically work with your clients and your customers to make sure that they don’t have to do that? Lars Bendsen: Generally speaking, I agree with larger countries let it be germinated. But the US and Big Canada they have such a big inner market. They’re horrible in doing export, generally speaking. They’re not good at it. They’re really good at producing stuff and doing the take care of their own stuff. Denmark, I think it’s 97% is export or being produced in Denmark, something like that. Because we have five, 5 million people, there’s no inner market we need to get out there where the market, inner market in US and Canada and Germany is so big. You don’t, we don’t need export. We’re not real good at it. And don’t call Canada US export. It’s not export, it’s the in the market. So far, Allen Hall: the turnaround times from the OEMs tends to be slow if they have the part in stock and there’s so much demand at for some specific parts that they don’t always don’t have it sitting on a shelf to send to you, which is a huge problem. So you have to develop a subsequent chain, a supply chain, and why not go right to the source? Which is gonna be in Denmark for the most part. Why not do that as to source the actual part instead of an imitation part or a refurbished part, which I’ve seen more of recently. You can actually get the real part. Lars Bendsen: It’s still surprising me sometimes. We hadn’t known em last year. They just closed their warehouse for three months. We just closing them. We cannot supply it for three months. How’s that gonna work? This wasn’t a European summer thing, was it? No, that was gonna be six weeks. That’s only six weeks. No, it was exactly in the fall, I think it was. And they just decided to close it for three months. And I don’t understand this, OEMs should earn $0 on the turbines itself. They’re earning money on the service and the parts look at the accounting on vest and seems real. They’re earning no money. It’s only on their aftermarket and vest, in all fairness, are extremely good at it. Really good at it. They have 75% or whatever the accurate number is covered of the fleet with service and parts is great. So we are not hunting as much vessel because why would we find that needle in the haystack where you could say that Siemens and ge they have less percentage, way less, maybe half of that depending on countries, et cetera and areas. But still, again, how can you allow yourself to just close your warehouse to three months? Joel Saxum: That’s crazy. Do let me ask you something about that, Vesta the vests setup ’cause in my mind, okay. I worked with a Danish company, very process driven, very controlled. There was step changes in gates and, everything was mapped out very well in how the company operated. So do you believe that the, one of the reasons that Vestas may have a really good control of spare parts inventory and the direct connection to those sites is because they sign those. 20, 25, even 30 year FSAs. Is it all based on this overarching business model that, that encompasses that and the others aren’t just, aren’t doing that? Lars Bendsen: I don’t know. I think it’s I think everybody wants to do it. That’s just my 2 cents. I’m not an expert in that area, but my 2 cents is that vessel has the power to demand that. And they’re not selling any new wind farm without a service contract, whatever’s 5, 10, 15. They do not. Where some of the wind inside the smaller, they have less power. The owners say, you know what, that’s all well and good, but then we’re not gonna buy your turbines. And then GE and Siemens has to cave in a little bit. That’s my 2 cents. Joel Saxum: I think strategically like GE with having expanded in their service thing and then now changing it to the hub and spoke model, like I think that this is my 2 cents, right? I think GE saw some bloat. In what was happening in service. And I’m not gonna say parts ’cause I don’t think that’s true, but service and this FSA and I think that GE is actually strategically pulling back from signing these FSAs. And because some of the stuff with, we’ve heard horror stories with, and this isn’t just ge, it’s all the OEMs with, liquidated damages, catching up with people and those kind of things because they don’t have access to spare parts. So they don’t have access, they don’t have the service people to get out there quick enough. So it’s a, there’s a large problem in the industry and I would say that if you’re a wind farm operator or wind site supervisor, technician, whatever, it’s at some point in time, you’ve felt the pain of not having that spare part that you need to get your turbine up and running. And that’s where a C 83 comes into play. Lars Bendsen: Yeah, I agree, but I also believe that some some owners are too small that the OEMs even care. We have seen some horrible example that, you know. Care list. That sales person sold that wind farm. That’s it. He can care list and the aftermarket people sitting in Denmark and they are, they’re closing at four o’clock eastern as it’s four o’clock. It’s not four 10. It’s four o’clock. Joel Saxum: So if you’re in the central part of the United States, you need to be on the phone by 7:30 AM Otherwise you’re not getting your stuff. Lars Bendsen: No. Or on Fridays is close by noon, so forget about it. You get an answering machine, so you can’t even call on Fridays. So that happens. We have a policy, we pick, we always pick up the phone, we all always answer our emails. We don’t have an out on office, not on purpose. At least doesn’t exist so I think it’s more avail, be available and go the extra mile instead of just sitting for a number. There are might be two picture lenders. Let’s take an assemble of that. There’s four different vendors, which the same A nine B number from Siemens. There are four different A nine B sorry, producer of a nine BXX, x. So you can pick the most expensive one. You can pick the cheapest one, pick whatever you want. And there’s probably a reason between something, a correlation between quality and price often this. So yeah. It’s about knowing those manufacturers and have access to them. Yeah. And we are, I think we’re pretty good at it. Joel Saxum: Yeah. As I’m gonna put my wind farm operator hat on for me that, that’s that triangle. Good. Fast and cheap. Pick two. I. That’s what I always look at. Two outta three. Yeah. But having someone in the corner, like AC 80, 83 that knows, hey hey Lars, I need this part. Great. Okay. I can get it from one of these four people. Here’s the cost for all four of ’em. Here’s the quality of our opinion and the track record we’ve seen, and here’s the lead time. ’cause that’s always the big one. If it’s a reactive situation where I need a part now, which we hope we’re not doing as much reactive as proactive, but if it’s a reactive part and I need it now, I need to get that turbine back up and running. You guys have the answers to those questions. Lars Bendsen: Yeah, I think I agree with you that’s the reactive part of it and that happens. SC actually happens a lot and I think we are back to what you said around before, that everybody is so lean, that site manager don’t have that extra person to source those parts. And all of a sudden we have a turbine down, we are missing one animal meal for $500. How can that happen? And of course you could be unlucky as well. I totally get that part. We are trying to be more proactive. So if we have a major owner that have 20 or 30 sites, because you see they use the same parts, all of them. So one, don’t, we bundle out procurement instead of taking one off all the time. We spending a ton of time with one off $500. Procurement and it takes too much time and it’s too expensive for everybody involved. There are some suppliers now I got actually hit by it. Some suppliers in in Denmark now they have a minimum or a quantity, or you get a fee, extra fee on it. So you can order a one animal meter used as an example without, is a 250 or $300 fee on it for handling the order. We’ve seen that as well. Joel Saxum: So reactive is a lot of where the market sits, but how are you guys working with customers to be more proactive in their strategies for spare parts? Lars Bendsen: As in the back office say GaN, Sydney, et cetera, they’re extremely data driven. We can see the history of what had been quoted, what had been ordered, what pricing has been ordered, when was it, et cetera. So we know the history. I said, why? We can see we are buying 40. Why do you buy one or two design? And even if that person cannot do it, we’re still gonna buy five or 10. So we have something that helps our what call it procurement power. We leave it un stock because we are trying to avoid, has too much in stock and we do not wanna have obsolete parts either. So that’s the kind of the balance we have, we are finding. Allen Hall: Lars, can you gimme a sense of what kind of parts you can acquire or from the original equipment manufacturer? In Denmark, Lars Bendsen: we just set up a big agreement with one of the main the major filter suppliers. Now we have a nine p numbers for all fillers in the world and for western fillers where we have all fillers and it’s a fraction of the price we’re paying today. Fraction, pit cylinders motors, gears, et cetera. We are staying away from major components. We’re staying away from from gear boxes, generators, habit supply, main shaft and bearings for simul because that’s the focal point. So that’s, we could do that. But gearbox, generators it’s not worthwhile for us to do it. We don’t add any value. You could get that part. It’s just a part number. We can’t add any value at all. So decided of staying away from it. We don’t wanna take the risk for a small portion of dollars. Allen Hall: And if I’m sitting at a wind site and I’m getting requests for a specific part, how does that process work? So I’m calling Sydney at your site or go, or getting ahold of you on LinkedIn. Then how does that work? How does that procurement system work? How do you navigate that? Because it sounds like you have some of the parts sitting on the shelf. Some you have to go acquire and negotiate. What’s that process look like? Lars Bendsen: The process is that you’ll get an email we got your R fq, we’re working on it right now. You’ll get an email within an hour that we have. It don’t, we won’t leave you high and dry. We are responding and then we are gonna source it right off the bat. If you don’t have it, and within a day or two you will have an answer back with a, with the price and lead time. Allen Hall: Okay. So that’s a really short response time because usually it takes several days to get someone to re return that phone call. Lars Bendsen: Yeah, so that’s the thing. Availability is key, right? Availability to the parts availability is key and it goes for the parts as well. You said lead time? We get way short on lead time, but call the manufacturers directly. Waste or, Allen Hall: and the, obviously the equipment manufacturers must have stock on the shelf. They have to do that so that those parts do exist. We just didn’t know where to find them until we called AC 8 83. Joel Saxum: That’s a story that you hear a lot in the United States, right? Again, Alan and I travel wood Farm. Oh, these, there was some German guys here. There was some Danish guys here. It’s always German and Danish. We had to get these special bolts from Germany, or we had this. So now everybody has their own Danish guy that they can call Lars that person Yeah. That has the connections to, to the mainland, to the motherland that can get these things for ’em, because that’s the troubling part. Like we said, you don’t have time to, procurement is tough. Strategic procurement is difficult. Even people that are doing procurement at a large scale in an organization, say you’re in the back office and you’re the procurement person. They’re dealing with so many things that to find this one part at one of these few manufacturers over in Denmark, that’s difficult. So now you have every, everybody that’s listening here has the connection to that dane that has the connections over there and can get it done for ’em. Allen Hall: One of the big criticism in the United States and Canada is that when anybody drives by a wind farm and turbines not operating. It’s just, it’s a knock on the industry. And the most times that is occurring is because they’re waiting for a spare part, honestly. Real simple stuff. Filters, for example, is a good one, right? And parts that they can’t get the hold of, but they just don’t know how to acquire them. And now they’ll listen to the podcast. This is the way to do it. You call ours, you call Sydney at AC eight eighty three and you get this process started and then at that same moment I know Sydney is really sharp. She’s gonna provide you the list of things you can get. So she, you tell her, Hey, I got a GE two X machine. She says here’s the list of parts we can get for you. Wow. That just saved my life for most procurement people. And that’s a personal, Sidney is not your friend for life because she is saving you. A lot of money and a lot of time, and a lot of hassle, which is the point, right? This is why everybody goes to AC 83 because it’s simple, easy to get things done. Lars, how does an operator a site supervisor, a procurement person, get a hold of you to start ordering some of their spare parts through AC883? Lars Bendsen: You have a website, ac883.com or my email, lars@ac883.com Allen Hall: And you can also reach Lars and AC 8 8 3 at contact at ac883.com. The website’s great, so get ahold of Lars, get ahold of Sydney, get your projects moving. Again, Lars, thank you so much for being back on the program. We love having you. Thank you. Thanks.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
EchoBolt Advances Wind Turbine Bolt Maintenance 30:58

17 дней назад30:58

30:58

Pete Andrews from EchoBolt discusses their advanced ultrasonic technology for inspecting and maintaining wind turbine bolts, which can reduce maintenance costs by up to 90%. He emphasizes the importance of proper bolt tensioning during installation and highlights recent improvements in their automated inspection processes. 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: With wind turbines growing larger and critical bolted connections under strain, the wind industry needs smarter inspection methods to prevent costly failures. This week we speak with Pete Andrews, managing director at EchoBolt. EchoBolt has developed ultrasonic technology that makes bolt inspections faster, more reliable, and saves wind farm operators up to 90% on maintenance costs while preventing catastrophic failures. Stay tuned. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Pete, welcome back to the show. Pete Andrews: Hi, Allen. Hi Joel. Good to be back. I was trying to work out when I was last on here, but it was it two years ago. It’s been a while. Anyway, we’ve had a lot change at alt yeah, it’s good to catch up with you guys again. Allen Hall: It’s been too long and so we’re glad to have you back because I know there’s been a lot of improvements and EchoBolt has been really busy checking bolts all over the place and we’ve, Joel and I have been traveling around quite a bit and we’ve noticed problems with. Bolts in the United States and we think where’s Pete? Where’s Ebol? We could really use you in the United States to help us on some of these bolted connections because it does seem like there’s a lot of issues from tower bolts to blade bolts to bolts in general, there are a number of problems that exist. And I wanna start off there, Pete, because I think you’re the knowledge base for bolts. Are bolts being tightened correctly based upon all the measurements that you have done? Pete Andrews: Say, it’s a very mixed picture. I think you’re right to point out, it’s every wind operator will have issues in their fleets with the bolt of connections, but it’s almost always. Blade studs that caused the most headache. You do see things on towers. You do see a kind of occasional issues elsewhere, maybe with foundations. I’d say it’s probably, I. In our experience, once, once sites are in operation, there’s not too much that happens that influences the integrity. An awful lot happens at the point of installation, and it’s what we always try and say to customers if it. If you confirm that the bolts are tightened to the load, you expect at the point of installation, you’ve set yourself up for a fantastic operational li life. But if it’s wrong at the start, you’ve got embedded integrity issues that are really hard to manage going forward. So yeah it’s a mixed picture, but what I’d always say is focus on the QA at the point of installation and things should go easy from there on in. Allen Hall: It does seem like blade bolts are becoming more of an issue. As you mentioned, the blade insert question of are we over tightening fasteners that go into the blades and pulling out these inserts and causing some of the problems downstream root cracking, instruments becoming loose, blades becoming loose and wobbling on the pitch bearings. It does seem like we don’t have a really good way of consistently tightening or tensioning. Those fasteners are bolts that are in composite structure just a lot more sensitive to or the composites more sensitive to the tensioning tightening that happens? I Pete Andrews: think without doubt it’s a harder joint to design and I think probably all of the major turbine OEMs. It’s the area, I guess probably with the most dynamic loading or the most variable dynamic loading and probably the hardest to anticipate the performance of the joint. I guess we see a couple of things. We see a. Occasionally you do get overt tightening, particularly on torqued joints. Most blade studs tend to be tensioned, where you stretch the bolt rather than turn the nut or the bolthead. But where it’s torked, you have a very wide degree of variability and there can be, there can be issues with going back and retalking and trying to measure an angle of turn and over overstretching the bolt and failing them. So we’ve seen that. I think on the tensioned joints, typically you get very good variability and the bolts tend to be within a narrow band, but probably not enough is being done to ensure that you’ve got as much preload safely within the bolt as you can. And I think. The one meaningful action operators can take without having to redesign the joint or try and redesign the fastener, is just to measure the preload and see how much operational headroom you’ve got and maybe look at increasing it slightly. That’s probably the one area. If you’re suffering a lot of TED failures, you can address quickly and cheaply without getting into. Design fundamentals. Joel Saxum: Pete this week we were at the Blades USA conference here in Texas and we had many side, everybody’s talking blades, right? So what blade issue do you have? What blade issue do you have? And one of them that Allen and I had a couple conversations on with operators, there was, oh, we have the root bushing pullout issue. And some people were very familiar with the issue and, but some people just weren’t. They were like, what do you mean by that? I was like, these things are actually loosening in the, breaking bonds and pulling through and all kinds of stuff. So in a blade root, you have upwards of a hundred studs or a, or a hundred of those blade bushings. How many of them have to start to become loose before it starts to be like a cascading effect? For that blade, Pete Andrews: the failing of the fixing within the composite structure is not really something we’ve encountered or looked into a lot. I think typically most manufacturers would place a limit on how many alts failed be before you need to stop the turbine. Some of them have overall limits about the number in the joint and some have adjacent limits. I think it’s pretty normal for people to run with one or two failures and the structured still be still be safe to operate. But I think where you start getting consecutive failures, you have to look quite hard about. The decision to continue to operate the unit, but particularly since the failures often in segments. So there is typically leading and trailing edge segments where you’ll see higher risk of failure. So as soon as you’ve got a couple of bolts in that area that aren’t doing what they want or what they’re supposed to be, then yeah, I think it’s a much harder decision to carry on. Carry on operating without replacing those fasteners. Allen Hall: Are there OEMs that are asking for those blade bolts to be torque still or has everybody moved on to tensioning? I Pete Andrews: think every modern turbine we work on is tensioned. Some of the, we get quite involved in life extension projects where turbines have got to sort 20, 25 year operating life. People are trying to make an assessment of, is it safe to continue? Do we need to do wholesale replacement of components, et cetera. And so a lot of the older fleet or some of the older fleet would have talked talk blade studs, but often, we can go in and if we can prove that the bolts are operating in the preload envelope. The ideal preload envelope, let’s say. We can also look for defects, so we can look if the bots have got cracks in them and help the people make that call to just continue to operate safely with a monitoring regime in place rather than perhaps following a recommendation. From an OEM, which might involve wholesale replacement. Allen Hall: I think that’s fascinating, but I asked that question because there’s a lot of repowering happening in the United States, and it did seem like turbines that are 10 plus years old. There was a lot of torquing of blade bolts, and now that we’re going to repower, one of the questions is, do I need to go back and look at that blade root area and do I need to address it because I overt, tightened, and or retort over the years and damaged that root section. Is that something that EchoBolt and its technology can actually check? Because I think that’s one of the variables that we don’t know right now is this bolted connection okay. To live another 10 or 15 years. Is that something that the technology at EchoBolt can derive? We can Pete Andrews: definitely to derive the bulk loads so we can have a look if. If the bolt is over or under tightened, what we don’t do is the structural non-destructive testing. So we couldn’t look at the blade root bolt fixing structure and make any comments about the integrity of that. But we can look with you or with operators. What’s the tension or tithing process they’ve followed? Does it generate the preloads that you would expect? Is there a risk of overti or in the tighten box? So that’s really our specialism. Joel Saxum: What you guys do is very valuable at different life’s stages of a turbine, right? ’cause what earlier we talked about hey, right at commissioning you should be doing, you should be checking all these bolt connections or tension connections. Either way. And then we talked a little bit we jumped forward, talked a little bit about lifetime extension during the repower phase. But another critical phase of life, specifically in the States that we deal with all the time is end of warranty. And it’s a worldwide problem. Are you guys getting into a lot of end of warranty campaigns right now where you’re checking everything before it gets handed back to the operator? Pete Andrews: Yeah, we sort of, you’re absolutely right. There’s a few kind of obvious moments where you want to do more than the standard sort of asset status, asset health check and end of warranty is clearly one of those points. We have done end of warranty projects. Particularly a lot of our offshore customers, the age of the sites are at that point where sites are coming outta long-term service agreements. The operators may be the owner is maybe taking on the operational responsibility and they want to transition from. What’s gone before to their own maintenance philosophy. So yeah, you’re right that’s one of the moments that we’ve been involved in, particularly when there’s been a serial defect. And the OEM has proposed an upgrade, so we’ve had that on blade studs where just before end of warranty, an OEM has changed the design of the fastener. To alleviate bladed failures, we were actually able to show that in the population of the modified fastener, there were more defects than in the non-modified fastener. So right at the end of warranty, we were able to show the customer the proposed solution was actually it actually made the situation worse. So they were able to, carry on the commercial. Debate with the their OEM and hopefully get a better res resolution. Allen Hall: Okay, Pete, so I want to dig into that a little bit ’cause I know your technology is improving and one of the issues that’s we’ve seen quite a bit more recently is defects in the studs or the bolts themselves in the clin structure of the metal. Occasionally there are some. Embedded defects that visually they can’t really detect. But it does sound like there’s new technology that can help delineate like that. Stud. That bolt has a defect in it where the next one doesn’t, which is incredibly valuable because depending where that bolt is on the blade ring, it could be critical or not critical. I Is that technology now available more worldwide because of what EchoBolt has done? Pete Andrews: Yeah, I think the. The technology we use for looking for very small defects is an ultrasonic technique called phase array, which is a more complex, non-destructive testing methodology than we would use for a preload inspections. It’s a bit more specialist, but that can be really quite precise here. So down to the one or two millimeter. So scale or resolution for defects? So where we know there’s a problem in a population of bolts and the customer’s really keen to identify all the studs that are in the process of failing, we might use that to, to get themselves like a clean joint, if you like, of defect free fastas. So they’ve got a good baseline to monitor from going forward, but as I said, that’s a bit more specialist. So it’s not it’s not trivial, let’s say, for customers to carry those inspections out themselves. But our bulk inspection technology that we use for monitoring a thousand bolts a day, to get through all the primary structure of a turbine. We’ve worked on a lot over the last two years since we last spoke, to really optimize that to be as straightforward and user friendly for customers to adopt directly. And that methodology, whilst it’s primarily designed to identify the load within the bolts where we get big defects in bolts, we often see. A fatigue rack propagating maybe 70 or 80% of the diameter of the bolt before it ruptures. So once you’ve looking at defects of that sort of size, our standard technology will also identify that, that there’s an issue with that fastener. So it does give you a chance to capture the fastener before it. Catastrophically fails, which is quite useful, particularly for the blade studs because when they fail they can do an awful lot of damage. There’s all the hitch system, electronics, cabinets, lighting, et cetera. The number of turbines that have been in where the lights don’t work in the hub because there’s been, been half of a blade stud or a nut rattling around in there, smashing it all to pieces. So it is quite valuable to get to get the bottles out before they actually fail. Allen Hall: I didn’t think about the associated damage when the studs fall out, but yeah, it does seem like it’s a, I guess it’d be actually dangerous and expensive when that happens. So not only is it a structural issue, it’s just there’s equipment wiring all the. Activity inside of the hub could be damaged too. That’s really interesting. Okay, so the thing about echo belt is it’s all non-destructive. You’re doing things that don’t affect the bolt themselves. You’re not playing around with ’em. You’re just using ultrasound technology and some really high advanced ultrasound technology to learn about the tensioning of the bolt, make sure it’s been elongated properly. That the structure of the bolt is all intact. So you know that bolted joint can have a long lifetime. Now, there’s been a lot of advancements that at echo, EchoBolt to one, make that faster because the number of bolts that you’re doing in a day has increased quite a bit. But also the whole system, the way you guys operate, is now really automated from what I could tell. You want to describe what it would be like to have you come on site and go. All right, Pete, we’re just gonna have you go check out the critical bolts in these turbines go. What does that look like now? Pete Andrews: Yeah, perhaps if I go back to what it was like before. So when we started the company, we were primarily really a service provider and we were using off the shelf hardware, and we were quite technology agnostic really. We just we’re trying to find different technologies we could bring into the wind industry to help with this problem. And we were using off the shelf ultrasonic bolt measurement devices, but I. I don’t think any of those devices were really conceived with the wind turbine use case in mind. So they’re very good at, if you have a small number of very high-end fasteners that you’ll really want to be super precise in a laboratory environment or a, a very specialized piece of equipment. You can be very precise, but you have to be quite a skilled operator and it’s relatively time consuming. Whereas what we were trying to do is inspect a wind turbine a day, the whole primary structure. So the foundation, the tower joints, the your joints up to main shaft plate studs. Pitch bearing to hub, so all the connections that if that connection fails, a part of the turbine would fall off. So you’re into needing to inspect a thousand bolts plus particularly on more modern machines which are getting larger and larger. You’re into the multiple thousands. So that hardware was just really suboptimal for it. It was a very clunky way of trying to export data. Onto your laptop with CSV files and manipulating Excel, and it just, it, it was taking almost as long to do the post inspection analysis as it was to do the inspection. So we’ve completely re-looked at the technology purely from the perspective of what’s the optimum device for the wind industry. And we recognize that we are quite a small company, so the ability for ebol to service. The global Wind industries a as a service business with our own technicians is, we can only do so much. So all of our effort has gone into really streamlining the experience. So now it’s very straightforward for a customer to pick up one of our devices. We have a sort of half day training course. The. The main sort of ultrasonic electronics device is wirelessly linked to iPhone. So you download an i an iPhone app and all the user interface is via phone. So it’s a really familiar platform for technicians to work with rather than this complex suite of buttons and needing a 10 page work instruction or press this button followed by this. So superficial. Now we have a cloud database where you set up your projects when you’re on the turbine or in the office, you synchronize the projects to your phone. Once you’re on the phone, on the turbine, you select the project you wanna work on. Take your inspections. It’s probably 10 seconds, a bolt. It’s really very quick. Finish inspections and then resynchronize backup to the cloud. And we’ve got a whole customer platform where you can see all the inspections that have been done, any anomalous readings you can do a level of qa, you can comment on things and say, this reading looks furious. We’d like to check it again. These bolts look like they’re under load. We’d like to get those RET tightened, et cetera. So we’ve really tried to build this kind of end-to-end technology. Architecture that just solves this very niche problem for the wind industry. So we believe it’s a it’s a much more efficient way of carrying this work out than what it would’ve felt like two or three years ago. They’re trying to achieve the same thing. Joel Saxum: So one of the things of course when you introduce a new technology, everybody wants to know, of course, cost efficiency. What’s the business case? All these things. Allen and I talk about this all the time with operators on for our products. But I think one of the things that you’re doing here with EchoBolt, it’s the efficiency of how. Fast, you can get these things done. So if you’re gonna come in and do, re just retorque or retention a turbine, you’re logging huge equipment, you’re doing all kinds of things. Even if you’re just doing like the the 10 percenting around each connection, that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of people, you guys are able to cut that way down. So is it can you run us through this as a single technician, how fast can you actually get things done? I, Pete Andrews: I. A large offshore turbine, maybe six megawatts plus, we would always try and do all those primary joints, a hundred percent of the bolts in a single working day. So in a kind of eight hour working window. Which is a much more efficient than if you tried to re-tighten all of those bolts, as you said, with hydraulic toing or attention and gear. But the really big saving. Comes from the fact that you have a measurement that you can track over time. So you have information about the condition of how the joints are behaving, and because you have that detailed information, you can extrapolate out from a sample. So you can start to say instead of visiting a hundred percent of the turbines in a wind farm to retighten 10% of the bolts, we’re just gonna visit 20% or 15%. And if the that 20 or 15%, all the joints are where we expect them to be and are not relaxing, then you can quite comfortably start to make some engineering judgment about the behavior of the whole. Whole wind farm. So we reckon that you could save about 90% of the cost associated with bulk maintenance by moving to an ultrasonic inspection regime. And as a kind of rule of thumb, I, for anyone interested out there, once you combine labor cost, logistics, and turbine downtime. The status quo of we’re gonna reti 10% of bolts every year and a hundred percent every five years is probably costing the industry in the region of $1.2 million per in store gigawatt per year. If you’re running a wind farm of 500 megawatts, there’s probably five or 600,000. Dollars a year of savings to be made. So it’s, I think once our customers have tried the technology, realize it’s very doable and reliable. We’ve not had anyone make the decision to go back to bolt tightening. That’s a good use case. Yeah. That’s the, it’s, it is getting yourself comfortable with a change. And different companies will have different levels of, um. Engineering management of change, for their assets. But once people are through that process we’ve found, adoption has really ramped Allen Hall: up well, if you can save a wind farm a half a million dollars. In any way. I can’t believe they’re not doing it. And maybe they just don’t realize at this point that Echo Bull exists because you’re mostly based in the UK and you’re busy doing offshore work, which is really important that UK has a lot of offshore wind turbines and those need to be running. And the loss of an offshore turbine obviously is. Really critical there, but the onshore turbine world also needs your help. And I just think they haven’t realized the amount of money they’re spending on retentioning fasteners automatically because the spec says they need to do it. There are smarter ways to go about and do that now, and Ebot is, I think, the way to, to do it. And the number of times you have been out in the field and all that learned experience has now culminated into this platform. Which is incredibly valuable. Simplifying the bolt experience for engineering at an operator is immensely valuable because there just aren’t a lot of engineers to go through that data. So everything that EchoBolt has done in terms of making the platform easier is a huge advantage. So not only are you saving a lot of money on physically going out and Retentioning, but you’re also saving a lot of engineering time. This is, this makes imminent sense. So your phone must be ringing quite a bit right at this point because you’ve, you cracked the nut, so to speak. Pete Andrews: Yeah, it’s it’s quite an interesting sort of how the business has evolved, has been a really interesting and satisfying things to witness. We’re obviously based in the uk, the majority of our works. The uk but it’s, I’d say we’re probably 60 40 between the UK and other markets. As you said, we do a lot of offshore work in Europe, but we also do a lot of onshore. We probably do 30% of our turnovers onshore. But yeah, it’s I feel that we have been. Historically when we were running a much more service focused business using technology that was hard to put into customer’s hands, we’ve been somewhat constrained by our own size. It’s not trivial for us to get teams out to other parts of the world. It’s not always. The most cost effective solution for people. But that said, we’ve been out to the states for a number of projects. We did a offshore project in Taiwan, which was really interesting just over a year ago. We do a lot around Europe, a lot of the other European wind market, Germany, Denmark Netherlands, et cetera. So yeah, we’ve been growing. I guess within our being, yeah, let’s say the team’s been kept busy, for the people we have, we’ve been growing as fast as we can. But I think we’re gonna see a bit of a step change now where it’s much more, it’s much more credible to hand the technology over to customers to deliver themselves and get really good results. Um. Yeah, I think the opportunity, it’s it’s a really timely conversation because the opportunity for people to take this on with self-service teams really, really, it’s a bit of a game changer for us. Allen Hall: So now that EchoBolt has grown in scale and operators are reaching out to you, and they should, because if they really want to cut the cost of the operational side and save themselves literally millions of dollars here, which is what we’re talking about, you need to get a whole the P to EchoBolt. Pete, how do they find you? How do they find Cobolt? Pete Andrews: So probably the easiest way is our website. So that’s cobolt.co uk. We’re also on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. They’re probably the main channels we’ve got. You’ll find us on YouTube. You’ll find us on Instagram, but they’re more just for marketing and like a bit about, outward facing stuff, but yeah, website and LinkedIn are the easiest ways to get in touch. Allen Hall: Yeah, checked out ALT’s LinkedIn page. You can check out the YouTube page. You can actually see them in action, which is really interesting, so you can understand what the process is and how efficient. Alt is at determining if your bolts are okay. Pete, thank you so much for being on the podcast again. We love having you. You gotta come on more often because you’re really changing the wind world at the minute. Love having you. Pete Andrews: Thanks very much guys. It was, yeah, nice being back and we’ll, we will do it again sometime.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
US Wind Unionization, Blade Weather Damage Insights 32:09

19 дней назад32:09

32:09

This week, we cover the unionization of Vestas technicians in Michigan, and research revealing significant blade damage occurs in short but intense weather events. At the Atlantic Shores offshore farm, an environmental permit was remanded by a judge. Dermot Wind Farm in Texas, also known as the Amazon Wind Farm, is our wind farm of the week. Register for the start of our webinar series with SkySpecs! 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: Before we start the program this week on March 26th. At 11:00 AM Uptime sits down with Josh Goryl CRO of SkySpecs, and their newly appointed CEO Dave Roberts for an exclusive conversation in our new joint webinar series. You may have heard about Dave recently stepping into the role. Now's your chance to hear from him directly and we'll dive into what's new at SkySpecs, the latest industry insights, and what their newest announcement means for the future of wind turbine inspections. Wind o and m. And asset health management, so don't miss it. Tune in on March 26th, 11:00 AM Eastern, and we'll include the webinar registration link in the show notes. Up in Michigan, wind turbine technicians who perform operations and maintenance on Vestas turbines have voted to join the Utility Workers Union of America. Marks the first Vestas wind technicians in North America to unionize. The 11 member group voted nine to one, so someone abstained obviously in favor of organizing and will become members of the UWUA local 2, 2 3, which also represents winex at DTE in Michigan. Now these workers are responsible for operations and maintenance on about 120 odd turbines, including MCE. So Joel, this one's a little unique and maybe 'cause it's Michigan unions are really strong in Michigan, have been for a hundred years. 'cause the auto workers, and this seems like an outgrowth of that, but what is the relationship with Vestus in unions? Is that something that they have done in Europe quite often and this is just carrying over into the United States? Or is this. An American move. Joel Saxum: I think it's an American move. If you look at the state of Michigan, like you said, auto workers are there. They're heavily unionized. And because they're heavily unionized and that state has looked at them as, they do well. It's in good middle class incomes and, that, that's driven some progress over the last a hundred years in Michigan. My, some of my in-laws are from Michigan and they're boilermakers and they're all unionized. And when they say get that union job, they've got it. They've made it right. So I understand the city or the state of Michigan and some of the ideas around there. And I think that if you, in wind, if you were to pick a state that would've unionized first. Michigan would be at the top of your list probably. So I don't think it's a Vesta thing necessarily. I think this is a local Michigan thing, but I don't also believe, Vesta is being a Danish company and they have, a lot of trade representation there from in all trades in that northern part of Europe. I think that's, it's not abnormal to Vestas either. It's probably abnormal to Vestas. United States Management, but Vestas as a company, eh, pretty standard thing. I'm curious to see what their package looks like, because now we're in this era of IRA bill things, right? So we,…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
CIP Offshore in Taiwan, RWE Buys GE Vernova for Texas 3:29

20 дней назад3:29

3:29

CIP achieves financial closure for an offshore wind project in Taiwan and the UK may shift towards a domestic offshore wind supply chain. GE Vernova plans to equip two RWE farms in Texas, and Masdar will potentially acquire TotalEnergies' renewable assets in Portugal. Register for the start of our webinar series with SkySpecs! Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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 Newsflash, industry News Lightning fast. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Starting off the week, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has secured financial close on the 495 megawatt Fengmiao offshore wind project off Taiwan's Coast. This Marks CIP's third offshore wind project in Taiwan and is the first of Taiwan's round three projects to start construction. The project secured approximately $3.1 billion in financing from 27 banks with debt partially guaranteed by export credit agencies. Now Vestas will supply 33 of its latest 15 megawatt turbines for the projects and construction will finish by late 2027 with six corporate customers already signed for long-term power purchase agreements covering its entire capacity. Dan McGrail Interim, CEO of Britain's new state owned GB Energy believes the UK should challenge oversee renewable energy companies by exporting its expertise globally. McGrail sees floating offshore wind as a huge opportunity for British technology leveraging existing supply chains from the oil and gas industry. He aims to shift focus from importing parts to building them domestically, which could create an export industry over time. GE Vernova will equip two RWE farms in Texas with over 100 turbines with deliveries beginning later this year. The projects will help RWE surpass one gigawatt of rebuilt and repowered wind capacity across the US and generate enough electricity to power approximately 85,000 Texas homes and businesses annually. Boosting US content. Then the sales for the project will be manufactured at GE Vernova's Florida facility, which employs about 20% Veterans. RWE's Chief Operating Officer emphasized their commitment to American energy production and strengthening domestic manufacturing and supply chains. GE Vernova's Entre Wind Division currently has a total installed base of 56,000 turbines worldwide with nearly 120 gigawatts of installed capacity. Abu Dhabi's Masdar is considering acquiring a stake and total energy's Portuguese renewable energy assets. The deal will likely be through SATA yield. The Green Energy Company masar purchased from Brookfield last year. This would add to MAs dollar's growing European portfolio, which includes recent acquisitions in Spain and Greece as the company works towards its global target of 100 gigawatts by 2030. Total Energy is currently has about 600 megawatts of installed renewable capacity in Portugal, mostly higher valued wind power assets. Total energy. CEO previously mentioned plans to divest around two gigawatts annually as part of portfolio consolidation. And that wraps up our wind industry headlines from Monday, March 24th. The conversation continues tomorrow on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, where we'll explore even more insights shaping the future of renewable energy. And don't forget to join our exclusive live webinar this Wednesday featuring Sky Specs New CEO Dave Roberts. He'll be sharing his roadmap for the company's exciting future. All access details are awaiting for you in the show notes.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
IntoMachines: Smarter Turbine Bolt Tensioning 22:18

24 дня назад22:18

22:18

Martin Kristelijn, the co-founder of IntoMachines, discusses innovative tools designed to make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and less expensive. The conversation highlights the challenges of manually tensioning thousands of bolts, the advantages of automated bolt tensioning for wind turbines, and the development of a weightless, more efficient tensioning system. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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: With wind turbines growing larger and bolts getting bigger, the industry needs smarter ways to handle critical bolted connections. This week we speak with Martin Kristelijn co-founder of IntoMachines. IntoMachines has developed unique tools that make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and much less expensive. Welcome to Uptime, spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Martin, welcome to. To the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Martin Kristelijn: Thank you. Glad to be here. Allen Hall: Martin, there's a big problem out in the field that we have a lot of bolts to tension and not a lot of people to go do it. Plus I think as you and I had discussed previously, the bolt sizers are getting much bigger. Everything is becoming heavier and just being very difficult to do into machines changes all that. But let's talk about the problem first. What are you seeing on factory lines and out in service as people try to tension bolts. Martin Kristelijn: Past couple of months, year, I would say we spoke to a lot of people visited wind turbines, went in the field, see our technicians tighten the bolts also to the factories, so Elle production you name it. And well, the, we kept on keeping getting the same feedback over and over. That they would like to speed up the bolting process and also that they would like to increase the quality, so to prevent any loose bolts or forgotten bolts. That was really the starting point for us. We started to focus on bolt tensioning, to automate it, to speed it up, and to increase the quality. Allen Hall: So tensioning is the way going forward. A lot of of us remember torquing as being the preferred method to tighten bolts, but tensioning is now the way you wanna describe why that is? Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, still it depends on who you ask, but the main objective for everyone usually is to get a maintenance free building connection, right? That you keep the maintenance cost as low as possible. So that's also our goal. And bolt tensioning for us is the most yeah. Convenient way forward to reach that. Allen Hall: It's the most consistent way too, right? Is that with torquing, we really don't know what the preload is on the bolt. That's why engineers are preferring tension tools instead of torquing tools now. Martin Kristelijn: Exactly. So with torquing you have a friction coefficient you need to take into account. That's an unpredictable. Value parameter. So you would like to get rid of that. And you do that by just grabbing the bolt itself, apply hydraulic pressure and stretch the bolt directly. And then you have your hydraulic pressure times the surface of your tension to, and that gives you exactly the the preload in your bolt and you tighten the nut, release the pressure, and your bolt is perfectly pretense. As simple as that, Allen Hall: right? So that process takes time to do. And if you have a factory worker or a technician doing tensioning to a lot of bolts of which there are thousands on a wind turbine but there's probably what...…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
Innergex Acquisition, LM Wind Power Builds Enercon Blades 21:47

26 дней назад21:47

21:47

We discuss the recent acquisition of Innergex by CDPQ for $3.6 billion, highlighting its implications on the wind industry. We also delve into LM Wind Power producing blades for ENERCON from its factory in Turkey and feature the Buffalo Mountain Wind Farm, a unique project on a reclaimed coal mine in Tennessee. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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: Big news, Innergex Renewable Energy has announced that it will be acquired by CDPQ. A major community and pension fund manager for about $13 and 75 cents per share. I've seen a couple different numbers about that. This transaction represents a total enterprise value of approximately 3.6 billion US dollars, and marks a really a substantial consolidation in the wind industry. The deal offers about a 40% premium on interjects closing share. Of a couple months ago. So that's a pretty good premium that CDPQ put on interjects value. And now Phil, this is part of a larger play of a lot of consolidation. This one in particular, interject is going to become a private company after this acquisition. Why? Phil Totaro: It, that's an interesting question because normally when a company gets taken private by a large institutional investor, it's to restructure. I am not sure that. Innergex needs that much restructuring per se. It's not like they've got a huge team to begin with. But a reasonably competent team in terms of the pedigree of their developments, obviously in Canada and throughout Europe as well. And they've been trying to venture off and dip their toe in other markets as well. The reality of this is that it, it's a fantastic thing for CDPQ to strengthen their position and it comes at a point in time when a lot of these Canadian pension funds are looking at the profitability and the returns that they're seeing on their investments globally, including the US right now with all the trade tensions and everything we've got. And I think you're gonna see more of these Canadian. Pension funds and investors pulling back and doing things that are ignoring the US at this point. Looking at deals in Canada, looking at deals in Europe, looking at deals in Southeast Asia and South America for that matter. Joel Saxum: I think it makes sense for me like CDPQ keeping their Canadian money mostly in Canada. However, I know Innergex has a hand small handful of wind farms in the United States as well. Did you see a reality where just because of geopolitical reasons, they might just. Sell those couple of wind farms off. Phil Totaro: Let's put it this way, Brookfield's not going anywhere and they're always on the hunt for, good assets. But there's other people that could want to gobble up wind assets right now, especially if, the assets that Enerex owns in the US they're not quite ready for repowering yet. But maybe that's part of the play. Joel Saxum: Moving forward. Yeah, I know, like you said, you mentioned Brookfield. Brookfield, same thing. We're talking about market consolidation. They just bought National Grid renewables not too long ago, and I know National Grid renewables in the States. A couple, A handful of wind farms and some solar assets, some other things. So yes, continuing to see that trend.…

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

1
Pacifico in Vietnam, Offshore Leading Edge Spray 2:44

27 дней назад2:44