The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Peter Giddings of the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership joins to discuss the UK’s industrial growth plan for offshore wind, the five priority supply chain areas being targeted, and how OWGP helps businesses scale from small suppliers into globally competitive manufacturers. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” 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: Peter, welcome to the program.  Peter Giddings: Thanks for having me out.  Allen Hall: The UK right now is just a global leader in offshore wind, which I think a, a lot of us in the United States don’t even realize that, but the UK is a. Giant leader in offshore wind. Uh, but we keep hearing about the supply chain constraints that are threatening some of the timelines here. What are some of the fundamental problems that the UK offshore wind supply chain has today?  Peter Giddings: We are in a great situation for supply chain, but the 2000 companies, some of them with 25 years experience. At the scale where we can deliver the four gigawatts a year for the next five years that we need to hit our 2030 deployment targets and to keep that deployment rolling. So we are [00:01:00] brilliant at the UK of planning, developing and deploying wind farms. We have a really strong maintenance base. We do some great supply chain work, and IWGP Offshore Wind Growth Partnership has helped those businesses grow, but we don’t have as much capacity as we would like. For the major items. So we have a great set of facilities making blades. We have good facilities, uh, great facilities in JDR making cables, but we don’t capture as much of the manufacturing value of our deployment as we would like. That means we create fewer jobs, we create less economic benefit, and those developers are exposed to more supply chain risk. Specifically, we want to build globally competitive supply chain capacity. We, we we’re, we’re not a charity. We are building businesses that can win contracts. They are attractive to the procurement teams and they’re sustainable, they grow, right? Competitive capacity is what we’re after. Um, and that’s, that’s really what [00:02:00] we’re after. Allen Hall: And if the UK doesn’t really address these problems now, what does that look like for the supply chain? Because you’re talking about moving from roughly 16. Gigawatts in the water to approximately 50 gigawatts, 45, 50 gigawatts by 2030 and beyond. So that’s, you know, it’s roughly a tripling of the amount of capacity in the water supply chain becomes then really critical to that and in order to feed that. But what happens here, if the supply chain has not grown locally,  Peter Giddings: it’s a missed opportunity. I mean, the businesses that are here today would be an incremental growth. And that’s not bad. That’s an okay outcome. But if your deployment is a huge opportunity and you get an okay outcome, that’s not acceptable. That’s not a way to run an industry, right? We have this massive opportunity in front of us. There’s a huge amount that we could do that the UK is great at that the opportunity is to stretch [00:03:00] and help communities all around the coast have. Hundreds, thousands of jobs that are there. They’re stable, they’re good quality, and they are prosperous. It’s a real community initiative. Those towns, which are probably seeing a decline in oil and gas revenue or are strapped to tourism or kind of don’t have an industry, those towns, those people as humans are gonna have a much better future. There’s a, actually a really nice exemplar, um, it’s not. The biggest component, but Cable protection Systems is something that the UK is already globally renowned for. If you open up a tender pack, if you’re allowed to in other markets kind of anywhere, and you look to the CPS package, you would more than likely see a couple of, if not all four of CRP techmark, sub C and Balmoral, right? They, they serve the UK market real well, but they are globally renowned. [00:04:00]That’s, that’s one example. We are looking to do that for the priority sections of the industrial growth plan. You know, we’re going to pick and are picking the areas of the supply chain where we think the UK can be genuinely competitive and we have something to offer. A developer is not gonna choose a substandard product that’s a bit more expensive, but we can build up supply chains that offer fantastic products. Cable protection systems, and we can capture big market share there. Develop a product that can be exported, or if it’s a bit too far to ship, develop a business which can open up a new base. You know, so we, we get that, um, combination of local demand being served. And when I say local, I mean like the North Sea in Baltic and that global opportunity. So it’s, but it’s not gonna be everything. You know, people might. I might get a little bit heat for this, but [00:05:00] if you spread the jam too thin, it doesn’t taste very good. You haven’t committed to win a few things rather than come second and third everywhere. We have to choose what we win at.  Allen Hall: Let’s get into the industrial growth plan, ’cause I wanna understand that a little bit better and how OWGP. Fits in that as the delivery body. Right? So you have this industrial growth plan, OWGP is, is sort of administering it and, and taking action on it. How does this system work and, and why is it different than other attempts at supply chain development?  Peter Giddings: Uh, a couple of years ago, 2023, um, most of the major institutional stakeholders came together and said, oh, that we see this big opportunity coming. We want to make sure that the UK benefits from having all that deployment. So if you’ve got a bunch of demand and you [00:06:00] don’t have much supply, you don’t have as much supply as you want, that’s an obvious gap to fill. And the Crown of State, the Crown of State Scotland, the departments from government, the Offshore Wind Industry Council, a consortium of developers in the uk, uh, came together. Um. And funded a piece of work that allowed, um, a team to bring in lots of industry input. Look at what the big opportunities were in the market. So where is there substantial value? Where is there substantial demand? And match that up to where does the UK have capability and where could we grow a competitive advantage? So. What prizes are worth winning? What prizes can we win? And we’ve matched those up and there’s kind of five priority areas that we’ve selected. Um, it’s kind of the first things we’re gonna go after. Um, [00:07:00] they’re, they’re quite broad, those five. It’s advanced turbine technologies, deep water foundations, cable and electrical systems, uh, smart environmental services, and, uh, smart operations and maintenance. If you kind of open those boxes up, there are some very specific supply chains that are prioritized. So I’ll take the one that, uh, is the first one that we’re looking at. Advanced turbine technology. Uh, we talked just before we started recording, um, that the UK has real strength in blades. Blades is a big opportunity. We have a really well established composite industry. We have a great facility up in Hull. We have an r and d base and an onshore, um, factory on the isle of White with Vestas. And I think the thing we don’t really say is we have chief engineer for blades of Vestas in the UK structures lead. The r and d team is 140 strong down on the island [00:08:00] and we have a really productive facility in Hull. Um. That is putting product out, has been making, um, recyclable blades, is making the one 15. We have depth, so it’s a good opportunity. We have strength, we have a massive innovation ecosystem, so that’s a really obvious win. And we’ve been through the rest of the supply chain taking cables, good capacity, excellent experience from oil and gas, and so that’s a priority area. Okay. Going through those supply chains, finding big opportunities that the UK has, the ability to win contracts in, and then mapping out what do you need to do to make that capacity happen? How much capacity, at what cost, with what performance? And that’s, that’s kind of the OWGP role is owning that plan, bringing input from industry, [00:09:00] bringing input from experts. Turning the ambition of we want to have the ability to supply 50% of UK demand and export into a tangible plan of, cool, these businesses need this investment by this time to stand up a facility so they’re ready. It’s not just a blade factory. Right. That’s, um, that’s important. It’s the 20 businesses that sell product, that sell services into that. We talk about pyramids, right? You’ve got one facility at the top and a big wide base with lots of people who are employed in that big wide base. And I think, you know, it’s natural. Everybody looks to the top of the mountain. We’re looking to build the whole thing, and that’s a really powerful reason for industries to stay for the long term. So I think tracking back to your [00:10:00] question. What’s our role? We own that plan. We bring together the expertise and convert it into a set of measurable steps really. And that kind of second part is coordinate. Everybody needs to be playing the same game, aiming at the same targets. And that’s a really important part. Allen Hall: Well, I think for a lot of people outside the UK, it’s hard to envision the amount of industry that exists. In the UK you’re about 70 million people, so you’re roughly maybe a quarter of the population size of the United States roughly. But you’re, you, you have internal industrie

Allen, Rosemary, Yolanda, and Matthew discuss highlights from Blades USA including the carbon blade debate. Plus TPI Composites’ bankruptcy sale hits major obstacles as partners dispute over $100M in claims. And Europe’s offshore and onshore wind developers clash over state aid, with WindEurope’s new CEO urging unity. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts.  Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Alan Hall, and I’m here with Yolanda Padron, Rosemary Barnes and Matthew Stead. Yolanda and Matthew have just wrapped up a couple of days at the Blade USA forum in Austin, Texas. Maybe we should start there. Thoughts on the forum this year? Things that were highlights?  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Lightning Root de bond. One positive was that, um, there are a couple of startups there, so, you know, kudos to them for, you know, making the investment. There was a. There was a startup around, you know, data analytics and, you know, bringing machine learning in. And then there was also another startup looking at recycling. [00:01:00] Um, really trying to get that, that food chain through of, um, you know, grinding and then turning into some sort of valuable product. Um, yeah. However, I think someone also from EPRI said that, you know, at the moment, you know, the recycling path is, you know, eight times more expensive than the, um, the landfill path. There was a lot of carbon discussion actually. So, and, um, yeah, a lot of discussion about repairs, a lot of discussion about testing, uh, a lot of discussion about, you know, how maybe a carbon blade can last 40 years. Um, so a lot of discussion about lifetime extensions around carbon. Um, but, but, but, but, you know, really, really hard to repair.  Allen Hall 2025: That goes back to the comments Rosemary and Morton Hanberg made about carbon blades. Should we be making. Carbon blades are not. And I think Morton’s opinion, and maybe Rosemary’s, I don’t wanna speak for her, was carbon blades are okay, but they are really difficult to repair. Almost impossible to repair. And is it [00:02:00] worth even building them?  Rosemary Barnes: I think if you consider the blade in isolation, then it probably is adding more headaches than it’s worth. But carbon fiber is a bit of an enabler for improvements across the whole system of a, a wind turbine. ’cause when you take, like you can take a lot of weight out of a blade by using carbon fiber. I mean, it’s never been cheaper to make a blade with carbon fiber than an equivalent blade with glass. You do, you buy the more expensive carbon fiber blade because it’s lighter, a like, a lot lighter, and then you can take, um, weight. It, it reduces the requirements for basically every other component in the wind turbine, but especially stuff like the pitch bearings. Um, so you solve a lot of other problems, but you create blade problems. So. I think if you ask some of the only works on maintaining blades, then you’re gonna be like, why would you make a carbon fiber blade? It is so much headache. Um, but that’s not the reason why they were ever made in the first place. [00:03:00] So you’d need to talk to, you know, somebody on, uh, I dunno, front end engineering. Someone from the sales team about why it is that they are going with a more expensive carbon fiber blade. Even acknowledging that they probably underestimate how many problems there are with o and m with, uh, carbon fiber blades. But even so, like they’re already aware that there are trade offs. Um, and yeah, there’s non blade reasons for, for taking, taking that pain.  Allen Hall 2025: Are there other fibers that could be substituted besides carbon? There, I, I know fiberglass. A, a good, relatively strong fiber and carbon obviously is much stronger. But are there things in the middle that could be substituted that are non-conductive? Rosemary Barnes: Uh, y yeah, there are, but carbon fibers, it’s not just strong. It’s really stiff. And that’s what its benefit is. Um, like there’s Kevlar but it’s not very stiff. So you would, we would make a really heavy blade if you used Kevlar. It would be probably bulletproof though. So I guess that would be a plus. I, I haven’t looked into it recently, but nothing is [00:04:00] at the, um, like got the performance specs and the cost specs that you would need to, um, make it replace carbon fiber. Matthew Stead: So one thing that I picked up I thought was pretty, uh, interesting was that by having a stronger, you know, carbon protrusion, you know, the, you know, the backbone of the blade, um, it took a little bit of pressure off the skin. And so therefore, um, you know, the life, life of the blade, um, and the ability to keep running it ’cause the skin is not so critical. Those seem to be a real, a real plus as well.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know, people talk about this in like absolutes, but everything is just a con continuum, right? Like you can make an all glass blade that would last a thousand years if you really wanted to. You just, you know, you just have to make it very, very strong. ’cause it’s, you know, it’s all based on fatigue lifetime. And the smaller that your, um, strain on every component in the blade is, then the less, um, the less fatigue damage is gonna accumulate. Making it a little bit stiffer will actually increase the lifetime by [00:05:00] a a lot. I think the main benefit to protrusions is just that you avoid all of the um, or you avoid a lot of the possibilities for manufacturing defects. It’s easy to control the manufacture ’cause carbon fiber, like much more so than glass fiber. It’s so, um, it’s so dependent on the fibers being perfectly straight. If you have a little wrinkle, like a little wrinkle is bad in glass fiber, but it’s like really bad in carbon fiber. So protrusions mean that you won’t get wrinkles. Uh, and you can, you know, control the manufacturing process a lot better, but they are barely repairable, right? So that’s the trade off. You can do some small repairs, but you’re not gonna be just. Um, if you’ve got a, a, a full thickness crack or something, it’s, you know, it’s gonna be game over. You’re not gonna be building that up again. Allen Hall 2025: Delamination and bottomline failures and blades are difficult problems to [00:06:00] detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep to blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections, completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades. Back in service, so visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early  Yolanda Padron: will save you millions.  Allen Hall 2025: Well keep going on the, the subject of blades. Imagine if you were selling your house and you told the bank you owe nothing on it. Then the bank shows up with a bill for over a hundred million dollars. That is essentially what’s happening right now in the TPI composites bankruptcy. Uh, the wind blade manufacturer canceled its [00:07:00] February 17th asset auction after only one bidder came forward. A firm called ECP five LLC, which is, uh, part of Energy Capital Partners, which is based in New Jersey. Uh, but before TPI. Can hand over the keys. It has to settle up with its business partners. TPI told the court many of those partners were owed little or nothing. Uh, the partners check their books. Strongly disagree. Now, the judge has a mountain of competing claims to sort through before the sale can close. And everyone, I mean, the, the claims are big. Uh, there are several large names listed, and if you go through the filings, uh, Siemens C Mesa is probably the largest one, and it, it claims TPI owes about 84 million plus an unpaid inspection, repair, and replacement costs. Plus under 22 million [00:08:00]under apparent guarantee. Others include Aurora Energy Services stating it is owned about $5 million, uh, for post-bankruptcy services, plus 38,000, uh, for before the filing of bankruptcy. The landlord up in Iowa for the TPI facility there is objecting because they’re owed some rent. Some other ones include, uh. Oracle, uh, which is, uh, has a lot of software licenses that TPI currently has, and they’re saying those licenses will not swap over to the new owner. So there, this is a series of these filings going on at the minute, and they’re pushing back the closing of the, uh, sale hearing until March 9th. So they got about another two weeks as we record right now. This is a big deal and, and although I have seen almost nothing about it in the press. Because it’s hard. One, it’s hard to find, and two, it’s really [00:09:00] difficult to sort through. Uh, but it is a major milestone for TPI that they’re gonna be able to sell the, or at least transfer ownership to, uh, energy capital partners. And the none of the buyers investors had bought part of the facilities. But GE Renova or Siemens cesa, for that matter, are not involved, at least at the top level. Which is really to, in my opinion, odd. I thought GE Renova would’ve been involved, at least at some level. They have been supporting TPI through this process. But in terms of going forward, doesn’t look like too much is going on with Renova or Siemens Ga Mesa in, in terms o

Allen covers Nova Scotia’s ambitious 60 GW Wind West offshore plan and the standoff between Ottawa and developers over who invests first. Plus a scaled-back English onshore project faces local opposition, Blue Elephant Energy triples its German wind portfolio, Adani prepares to build India’s longest onshore blade, and Rivian signs a wind PPA to power its Illinois factory. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! There is something happening in the wind business right now. Something big … and something small. Let us start with big. In Nova Scotia … Premier Tim Houston has a dream. He calls it Wind West. Sixty gigawatts of offshore wind turbines. A transmission line to move that power across Canada and into the United States. The price tag … sixty billion dollars. Forty billion for the turbines. Twenty billion for the cables. But Ottawa says … not so fast. Federal Energy Minister Tim Hodgson told reporters the Major Projects Office needs to see private industry commit first. No private partners … no national interest designation. And here is the catch. The developers want to see transmission infrastructure before they invest. Ottawa wants to see developers before it invests. Everybody is waiting for everybody else. Still … Houston is not worried. He says the response from developers has been … through the roof. French firm Q Energy has already applied to pre-qualify. And Natural Resources Canada just put up nearly five million dollars for a feasibility study. Houston says the wind is there. It blows … a lot. The only question is where the power goes. Now … across the Atlantic. In England … a developer is learning that sometimes bigger is not better. Calderdale Energy Park wanted to build sixty-five turbines on Walshaw Moor near Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. That would have made it the largest onshore wind farm in England. Last April they cut it to forty-one. Now … thirty-four. That would match the current largest site at Keadby in Lincolnshire. Campaigners say it will still damage the peat bogs and threaten ground-nesting birds. A local parish council survey found ninety-three percent of residents opposed. The developer says it could power a quarter million homes. That application goes to the Planning Inspectorate in November. Meanwhile … in Hamburg, Germany … Blue Elephant Energy is doing some shopping. The company just acquired a three hundred eighty-one megawatt wind portfolio from Wind-Projekt. That is thirty-seven operating wind farms in northern Germany. Two hundred sixty megawatts already feeding the grid. Another forty-six megawatts under construction … coming online this year. And seventy-five more megawatts in the pipeline for twenty twenty-seven. This deal will triple their German wind capacity … from one hundred seventy-three to five hundred thirty-three megawatts. It still needs approval from the German Federal Cartel Office. Now … to India. The Adani Group is about to build the longest onshore wind turbine blade in the country. Ninety-one-point-two meters. That is the length of a football field. Those blades will create a rotor diameter of one hundred eighty-five meters. Each rotation sweeps an area larger than three football fields combined. The factory is at Mundra in the state of Gujarat. Current capacity … two-point-two-five gigawatts per year. They plan to double that to five … and eventually reach ten. India added six-point-three gigawatts of wind last year alone. That was an eighty-five percent jump over the year before. And finally … back home in the American heartland. Rivian … the electric vehicle maker … just signed a power purchase agreement with Apex Clean Energy. Fifty megawatts from the proposed Goose Creek wind farm in Piatt County, Illinois. That wind farm sits within an hour of Rivian’s flagship plant in Normal, Illinois. With this deal … Rivian could power up to seventy-five percent of its factory with carbon-free energy. An electric truck company … powered by wind. So let us step back. Nova Scotia dreams of sixty gigawatts off its coast. An English moor fights over thirty-four turbines. A German company triples its wind portfolio overnight. India builds blades as long as football fields. And an American truck maker turns to the prairie wind to build its future. From the North Atlantic to the plains of Illinois … from the moors of Yorkshire to the coast of Gujarat … the wind keeps blowing. And people … keep building. And that is the state of the wind industry for the first of March twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Chris Cieslak, CEO of BladeBug, joins the show to discuss how their walking robot is making ultrasonic blade inspections faster and more accessible. They cover new horizontal scanning capabilities for lay down yards, blade root inspections for bushing defects, and plans to expand into North America in 2026. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” 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: Chris, welcome back to the show.  Chris Cieslak: It’s great to be back. Thank you very much for having me on again.  Allen Hall: It’s great to see you in person, and a lot has been happening at Blade Bugs since the last time I saw Blade Bug in person. Yeah, the robot. It looks a lot different and it has really new capabilities.  Chris Cieslak: So we’ve continued to develop our ultrasonic, non-destructive testing capabilities of the blade bug robot. Um, but what we’ve now added to its capabilities is to do horizontal blade scans as well. So we’re able to do blades that are in lay down yards or blades that have come down for inspections as well as up tower. So we can do up tower, down tower inspections. We’re trying to capture. I guess the opportunity to inspect blades after transportation when they get delivered to site, to look [00:01:00] for any transport damage or anything that might have been missed in the factory inspections. And then we can do subsequent installation inspections as well to make sure there’s no mishandling damage on those blades. So yeah, we’ve been just refining what we can do with the NDT side of things and improving its capabilities  Joel Saxum: was that need driven from like market response and people say, Hey, we need, we need. We like the blade blood product. We like what you’re doing, but we need it here. Or do you guys just say like, Hey, this is the next, this is the next thing we can do. Why not?  Chris Cieslak: It was very much market response. We had a lot of inquiries this year from, um, OEMs, blade manufacturers across the board with issues within their blades that need to be inspected on the ground, up the tap, any which way they can. There there was no, um, rhyme or reason, which was better, but the fact that he wanted to improve the ability of it horizontally has led the. Sort of modifications that you’ve seen and now we’re doing like down tower, right? Blade scans. Yeah. A really fast breed. So  Joel Saxum: I think the, the important thing there is too is that because of the way the robot is built [00:02:00] now, when you see NDT in a factory, it’s this robot rolls along this perfectly flat concrete floor and it does this and it does that. But the way the robot is built, if a blade is sitting in a chair trailing edge up, or if it’s flap wise, any which way the robot can adapt to, right? And the idea is. We, we looked at it today and kind of the new cage and the new things you have around it with all the different encoders and for the heads and everything is you can collect data however is needed. If it’s rasterized, if there’s a vector, if there’s a line, if we go down a bond line, if we need to scan a two foot wide path down the middle of the top of the spa cap, we can do all those different things and all kinds of orientations. That’s a fantastic capability.  Chris Cieslak: Yeah, absolutely. And it, that’s again for the market needs. So we are able to scan maybe a meter wide in one sort of cord wise. Pass of that probe whilst walking in the span-wise direction. So we’re able to do that raster scan at various spacing. So if you’ve got a defect that you wanna find that maximum 20 mil, we’ll just have a 20 mil step [00:03:00] size between each scan. If you’ve got a bigger tolerance, we can have 50 mil, a hundred mil it, it’s so tuneable and it removes any of the variability that you get from a human to human operator doing that scanning. And this is all about. Repeatable, consistent high quality data that you can then use to make real informed decisions about the state of those blades and act upon it. So this is not about, um, an alternative to humans. It’s just a better, it’s just an evolution of how humans do it. We can just do it really quick and it’s probably, we, we say it’s like six times faster than a human, but actually we’re 10 times faster. We don’t need to do any of the mapping out of the blade, but it’s all encoded all that data. We know where the robot is as we walk. That’s all captured. And then you end up with really. Consistent data. It doesn’t matter who’s operating a robot, the robot will have those settings preset and you just walk down the blade, get that data, and then our subject matter experts, they’re offline, you know, they are in their offices, warm, cozy offices, reviewing data from multiple sources of robots. And it’s about, you know, improving that [00:04:00] efficiency of getting that report out to the customer and letting ’em know what’s wrong with their blades, actually,  Allen Hall: because that’s always been the drawback of, with NDT. Is that I think the engineers have always wanted to go do it. There’s been crush core transportation damage, which is sometimes hard to see. You can maybe see a little bit of a wobble on the blade service, but you’re not sure what’s underneath. Bond line’s always an issue for engineering, but the cost to take a person, fly them out to look at a spot on a blade is really expensive, especially someone who is qualified. Yeah, so the, the difference now with play bug is you can have the technology to do the scan. Much faster and do a lot of blades, which is what the de market demand is right now to do a lot of blades simultaneously and get the same level of data by the review, by the same expert just sitting somewhere else.  Chris Cieslak: Absolutely.  Joel Saxum: I think that the quality of data is a, it’s something to touch on here because when you send someone out to the field, it’s like if, if, if I go, if I go to the wall here and you go to the wall here and we both take a paintbrush, we paint a little bit [00:05:00] different, you’re probably gonna be better. You’re gonna be able to reach higher spots than I can.  Allen Hall: This is true.  Joel Saxum: That’s true. It’s the same thing with like an NDT process. Now you’re taking the variability of the technician out of it as well. So the data quality collection at the source, that’s what played bug ducts.  Allen Hall: Yeah,  Joel Saxum: that’s the robotic processes. That is making sure that if I scan this, whatever it may be, LM 48.7 and I do another one and another one and another one, I’m gonna get a consistent set of quality data and then it’s goes to analysis. We can make real decisions off.  Allen Hall: Well, I, I think in today’s world now, especially with transportation damage and warranties, that they’re trying to pick up a lot of things at two years in that they could have picked up free installation. Yeah. Or lifting of the blades. That world is changing very rapidly. I think a lot of operators are getting smarter about this, but they haven’t thought about where do we go find the tool.  Speaker: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And, and I know Joel knows that, Hey, it, it’s Chris at Blade Bug. You need to call him and get to the technology. But I think for a lot of [00:06:00] operators around the world, they haven’t thought about the cost They’re paying the warranty costs, they’re paying the insurance costs they’re paying because they don’t have the set of data. And it’s not tremendously expensive to go do. But now the capability is here. What is the market saying? Is it, is it coming back to you now and saying, okay, let’s go. We gotta, we gotta mobilize. We need 10 of these blade bugs out here to go, go take a scan. Where, where, where are we at today?  Chris Cieslak: We’ve hads. Validation this year that this is needed. And it’s a case of we just need to be around for when they come back round for that because the, the issues that we’re looking for, you know, it solves the problem of these new big 80 a hundred meter plus blades that have issues, which shouldn’t. Frankly exist like process manufacturer issues, but they are there. They need to be investigated. If you’re an asset only, you wanna know that. Do I have a blade that’s likely to fail compared to one which is, which is okay? And sort of focus on that and not essentially remove any uncertainty or worry that you have about your assets. ’cause you can see other [00:07:00] turbine blades falling. Um, so we are trying to solve that problem. But at the same time, end of warranty claims, if you’re gonna be taken over these blades and doing the maintenance yourself, you wanna know that what you are being given. It hasn’t gotten any nasties lurking inside that’s gonna bite you. Joel Saxum: Yeah.  Chris Cieslak: Very expensively in a few years down the line. And so you wanna be able to, you know, tick a box, go, actually these are fine. Well actually these are problems. I, you need to give me some money so I can perform remedial work on these blades. And then you end of life, you know, how hard have they lived? Can you do an assessment to go, actually you can sweat these assets for longer. So we, we kind of see ourselves being, you know, useful right now for the new blades, but actually throughout the value chain of a life of a blade. People need to start seeing that NDT ultrasonic being one of them. We are working on other forms of NDT as well, but there are ways of using it to just really remove a lot of uncertainty and potential risk for that. You’re gonna end u

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda, joined by Morten Handberg from Wind Power LAB, recap WOMA 2026 live from Melbourne. The crew discusses leading edge erosion challenges unique to Australia, the frustration operators face getting data from full service agreements, and the push for better documentation during project handovers. Plus the birds and bats management debate, why several operators said they’d choose smaller glass fiber blades over bigger carbon fiber ones, and what topics WOMA 2027 should tackle next year. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com and now your hosts. Welcome to the Uptime Winner Energy podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Pone, Rosemary Barnes, and the Blade Whisperer, Morton Hamburg. And we’re all in Melbourne at the Pullman on the park. We just finished up Woma 2026. Massive event. Over 200 people, two days, and a ton of knowledge. Rosemary, what did you think? Yeah, I mean it was a, a really good event. It was really nice ’cause we had event organization, um, taken care of by an external company this time. So that saved us some headaches, I think. Um. But yeah, it was, it was really good. It was different than last year, and I think next year will be different again because yeah, we don’t need to talk about the same topics every single year. But, um, yeah, I got really great [00:01:00] feedback. So that’s shows we’re doing something right? Yeah, a lot of the, the sessions were based upon feedback from Australian industry and, uh, so we did AI rotating bits, the, the drive train blades. Uh, we had a. Master class on lightning to start off. Uh, a number of discussions about BOP and electrical, BOP. All those were really good. Mm-hmm. Uh, the, the content was there, the expertise was there. We had worldwide representation. Morton, you, you talked about blades a good bit and what the Danish and Worldwide experience was. You know, talked about the American experience on Blades. That opened up a lot of discussions because I’m never really sure where Australia is in the, uh, operations side, because a lot of it is full service agreements still. But it does seem like from last year to this year. There’s more onboarding of the technical expertise internally at the operators. Martin, [00:02:00] you saw, uh, a good bit of it. This is your first time mm-hmm. At this conference. What were your impressions of the, the content and the approach, which is a little bit different than any other conference? I see an industry that really wants to learn, uh, Australia, they really want to learn how to do this. Uh, and they’re willing to listen to us, uh, whether you live in Australia, in the US or in Europe. You know, they want to lean on our experiences, but they wanna, you know, they want to take it out to their wind farms and they ga then gain their own knowledge with it, which I think is really amicable. You know, something that, you know, we should actually try and think about how we can copy that in Europe and the US. Because they, they are, they’re listening to us and they’re taking in our input, and then they try and go out. They go out and then they, they try and implement it. Um, so I think really that is something, uh, I’ve learned, you know, and, and really, um, yeah, really impressed by, from this conference. Yeah. Yolanda, you were on several panels over the, the two days. What were your impressions of the conference and what were your thoughts [00:03:00] on the Australia marketplace? I think the conference itself is very refreshing or I think we all feel that way being on the, on the circuit sometimes going on a lot of different conferences. It was really sweet to see everybody be very collaborative, as Morton was saying. Um, and it was, it was just really great about everybody. Yes, they were really willing to listen to us, but they were also really willing to share with each other, which is nice. Uh, I did hear about a few trials that we’re doing in other places. From other people, just kind of, everybody wants to learn from each other and everybody wants to, to make sure they’re in as best a spot as they can. Yeah, and the, the, probably the noisiest part of the conferences were at the coffees and the lunch. Uh, the, the collaboration was really good. A lot of noise in the hallways. Uh, just people getting together and then talking about problems, talking about solutions, trying to connect up with someone they may have seen [00:04:00]somewhere else in the part of the world that they were here. It’s a different kind of conference. And Rosemary, I know when, uh, you came up to with a suggestion like, Hey. If there’s not gonna be any sales talks, we’re not gonna sit and watch a 30 minute presentation about what you do. We’re gonna talk about solutions. That did play a a different dynamic because. It allowed people to ingest at their own rate and, and not just sit through another presentation. Yeah. It was made it more engaging, I think. Yeah, and I mean, anyway, the approach that I take for sales for my company that I think works best is not to do the hard sell. It’s to talk about smart things. Um, and if you are talking about describing a problem or a solution that somebody in the audience has that problem or solution, then they’re gonna seek you out afterwards. And so. There’s plenty of sales happening in an event like this, but you’re just not like, you know, subjecting people to sales. It’s more presenting them with the information that they need. And then I, I think also the size of the conference really [00:05:00] helps ’cause yeah, about 200 people. Any, everybody is here for the same technical kind. Content. So it’s like if you just randomly start talking to somebody while you’re waiting for a coffee or whatever, you have gonna have heaps to talk about with them, with ev every single other person there. And so I think that that’s why, yeah, there was so much talking happening and you know, we had social events, um, the first two evenings and so. Mo like I was surprised actually. So many people stayed. Most people, maybe everybody stayed for those events and so just so much talking and yeah, we did try to have quite long breaks, um, and quite a lot of them and, you know, good enough food and coffee to keep people here. And I think that that’s as important as, you know, just sitting and listening. Well, that was part of the trouble, some of the conference that you and I have been at, it’s just like six hours of sitting down listening to sort of a droning mm-hmm. Presenter trying to sell you something. Here we were. It was back and forth. A lot more panel talk with experts from around the world and then.[00:06:00] Break because you just can’t absorb all that without having a little bit of a brain rest, some coffee and just trying to get to the next session. I, I think that made it, uh, a, a, a more of a takeaway than I would say a lot of other conferences are, where there’s spender booze, and. Brochures and samples being handed out and all that. We didn’t have any of that. No vendor booze, no, uh, upfront sales going on and even into the workshop. So there was specific, uh, topics provided by people that. Provide services mostly, uh, speaking about what they do, but more on a case study, uh, side. And Rosie, you and I sat in on one that was about, uh, birds and bats, birds and bats in Australia. That one was really good. Yeah, that was great. I learned, I learned a lot. Your mind was blown, but Totally. Yeah. It is crazy how much, how much you have to manage, um, bird and wildlife deaths related to wind farms in Australia. Like compared to, I mean, ’cause you see. Dead birds all the time, right? Cars hit [00:07:00] birds, birds hit buildings, power lines kill birds, and no one cares about those birds. But if a bird is injured near a wind farm, then you know, everybody has to stop. We have to make sure that you can do a positive id. If you’re not sure, send it away for a DNA analysis. Keep the bird in a freezer for a year and make sure that it’s logged by the, you know, appropriate people. It’s, it’s really a lot. And I mean, on the one hand, like I’m a real bird lover, so I am, I’m glad that birds are being taken seriously, but on the other hand, I. I think that it is maybe a little bit over the top, like I don’t see extra birds being saved because of that level of, of watching throughout the entire life of the wind farm. It feels more like something for the pre-study and the first couple of years of operation, and then you can chill after that if everything’s under control. But I, I guess it’s quite a political issue because people do. Do worry about, about beds and bats? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I thought the output of that was more technology, a little or a little more technology. Not a lot of technology in today’s world [00:08:00] because we could definitely monitor for where birds are and where bats are and, uh, you know. Slow down the turbines or whatever we’re gonna do. Yeah. And they are doing that in, in sites where there is a problem. But, um, yeah, the sites we’re talking about with that monitoring, that’s not sites that have a big, big problem at sites that are just Yeah, a few, a few birds dying every year. Um, yeah. So it’s interesting. And some of the blade issues in Australia, or a little unique, I thought, uh, the leading edge erosion. Being a big one. Uh, I’ve seen a lot of leading edge erosion over the last couple of weeks from

Allen covers Vestas’ turbine supply deal with RWE for the 1.4 GW Vanguard West offshore project in England and its bid for TPI Composites’ blade factories in bankruptcy court. Plus Germany’s Nordlicht One foundations arrive ahead of schedule and Enel buys $1 billion in US wind and solar assets. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! You know … there is a company in Denmark that makes wind turbines. Vestas. And this week … Vestas had itself quite a week. On one hand … the Danish giant just locked in a deal to supply ninety-two of its massive V236 turbines to RWE’s Vanguard West project off the east coast of England. One-point-four gigawatts of offshore wind. Each turbine … fifteen megawatts. That project just won a Contract for Difference in the UK’s Allocation Round Seven. RWE and its partner KKR want a final investment decision by this summer … and power flowing by twenty twenty-nine. And this is part of something bigger. RWE signed preferred supplier agreements with Vestas back in December of twenty twenty-three for the entire four-point-two gigawatt Norfolk Wind Zone. That is three massive projects … off one English coast. So Vestas is building turbines for the British. But here is where it gets interesting. Over in a Houston bankruptcy court … wind blade maker TPI Composites has been carving up its assets since filing Chapter Eleven last August. A firm called ECP V acquired the bulk of TPI’s remaining operations. They were the only bidder. The auction … canceled. But certain facilities in Mexico and India? Those were carved out of the deal entirely. And the company circling those assets? Vestas. The very same Vestas building turbines for England has put in its own qualified bid for the blade-making plants that once served it as a customer. So while one hand signs turbine contracts … the other reaches into bankruptcy court to secure its own supply chain. Now … across the North Sea in Germany … the Nordlicht offshore wind cluster just hit a milestone of its own. The first monopiles and transition pieces for Nordlicht One … finished ahead of schedule. Sixty-eight foundations. Each monopile … eighty meters long. Nearly thirteen hundred tonnes of steel. When complete … Nordlicht One will be Germany’s largest offshore wind farm at nine hundred and eighty megawatts. Combined with Nordlicht Two … the cluster will generate six terawatt-hours of clean electricity every year. And then there is Italy’s Enel. The power giant announced it is buying eight hundred and thirty megawatts of American wind and solar assets from Excelsior Energy Capital … for one billion dollars. That deal closes later this year. And it will push Enel’s North American renewable capacity to thirteen gigawatts. Globally … Enel Green Power now commands sixty-eight gigawatts of clean energy. So let us step back and look at the picture. A Danish turbine maker wins a massive English contract … while quietly bidding on bankrupt blade factories to protect its own supply chain. German foundations arrive ahead of schedule. And an Italian energy giant bets one billion dollars on American renewables. From the North Sea to the Gulf of Mexico … from English coastlines to Houston courtrooms … wind energy is not slowing down. It is building … faster. And now you know … the rest of the story. Good day!

Recorded live at the Wind Operation and Maintenance Australia 2026 conference, Allen, Rosemary, Matthew, and Yolanda are joined by Thomas Schlegl for a panel discussion on where the Australian wind industry is headed over the next five years. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Alright, let’s get started. This is the, the final event of this three day marathon. Uh, where will we be in five years? And I have, uh, pretty much everybody from the Uptime podcast and Thomas Schlagel from eLog Ping. Uh. Uh, Rosie and I had a big argument before we all came about what we were going to be in five years, and Rosie’s and my opinion differed quite a bit just on, that’s, uh, that’s what led to me suggesting the personality test because yes, and that was, that’s actually a really good suggestion. So I know something about myself now, but, uh, I, I think talking to people here, watching the presentations. And having an American slash European perspective on it. I think every, everybody can chime in here. Australia’s probably on a better pathway than a lot of places. Yeah. Well, I know I’ve been back in Australia for about [00:01:00] five years, five years. Before that I was in Denmark. I left Australia. Because I was so like in despair about the state of renewables and also manufacturing and just doing smart engineering in Australia. Um, so yeah, when I came back five years ago, I was a bit shocked at how different things were in Australia. And I was also, you know, like I will say that it, we were, we were behind like way less mature than other, um, markets in terms of how we operated our wind energy assets. Um, and it’s changed so much in five years, so like a half day, if I’m making predictions for where we’ll be in five years time, I have to, you know, like use that as a, it, it’s probably gonna be more than you would think in five years, just based on how far we’ve already come in, in five years. Um, so yeah, I think that five years ago people were trusting a lot more in the full service agreements. Um, definitely there’s very few people who are still naive that that’s just, you know, um, a set and forget kind of thing that you [00:02:00] can do and not worry about it. Everybody’s now aware that you need to know, um, about your assets and we’re already to the point where there are like a lot of asset managers know so much, um, and, you know, have become real experts and really wasn’t, wasn’t the case five years ago. So. I’m hopeful for that. Um, you know, that it, it will continue and yeah, probably at a faster pace than, um, what we see elsewhere. I think Australia is a really attractive market, not just for developing new wind projects, but also for developing all of the kinds of supporting technologies, which is, you know, like a lot of the people here either using or developing those kind of technologies. And some of our challenges here make it the perfect place to, yeah, develop new text because. Things are, it’s really expensive to do repairs here. Um, the operating conditions are harsh and so things wear out and it just means that it’s, you can put together a positive business case for a new tech here much sooner than you could overseas. So I’m really [00:03:00] hopeful that we see, you know, like a whole lot of innovation, um, in, in those kinds of technologies that are gonna help wind energy get a lot more mature. And even hearing some of the answers from last year to this year, you see that shift. Uh, I was really shocked last year how much reliance there was on. The FSA and now I hearing a lot more discussion about, all right, we need to be shadow monitoring. We need to be looking at the, the, the data coming off, trying to hack, break into the passwords to get to the SCADA system, which was new, but I feel like very Australian thing to do. Matthew, you’ve been in the small business in Australia for, for several years in the wind business. What do you see? I mean, you’ve been in it like for five years now. Plus actually more than that, uh, I actually did my first wind farm around 20 oh 2001. Okay. Or 2002. Um, that was from a noise perspective. So I, I’ve seen things, you know, the full cycle. Um, you know, there were many years of [00:04:00]despair, the whole, um, stop these, stop these things. I’m actually featured, I was featured on Stop these things. So, um, don’t, don’t Google it. It was pretty horrible. So, um, we did a lot of work around infrasound and noise impacts and so there was many years which were, were pretty horrible. Um. Over that time, I sort of relate to my daughter. My daughter’s turning 21 soon. She is a beautiful girl, turning into an adult, a wonderful adult, and it’s, I think the wind industry is really growing, maturing, growing up, and you know, is wonderful to see. And I think we are, we’re only gonna get better, stronger. And I think one may, one note I made here is that now they’ve got wind, solar batteries. I just think it’s unstoppable, so I’m super optimistic that we’re only gonna keep, you know, raising that bar. Well, if you look at where Australia is compared to a lot of the places on the [00:05:00] planet, way ahead, in terms of renewable energy. I mean, you’ve got basically $0 in electricity for, because of how much solar there is, plus the batteries are coming in and, and the transmission’s coming online. And I’m talking to some people about, uh, what these new developments look like. If you’re trying to develop some of these projects in the United States, you’re not gonna be able to do them. There’s, there’s too many regulatory hurdles, and it seems like Australia has at least opened some of the doors to explore. Uh, people in America, the companies in Europe are gonna be watching Australia, I think in, in terms of where we go next. Because if Australia can pull off pretty much a renewable grid, which is where you’re headed, others will follow because it’s just a lower cost way of running a, running an electricity grid system. Yeah. Now I need to perform my, um, regular role of being a Debbie Downer. Um, I, I think that there’s, there’s big challenges and it’s definitely not, um, a case of [00:06:00] the status quo now is good enough to carry us through to a hundred percent renewables. Um, there are some big, big problems that need to be solved. Like, uh, solar plus batteries in Australia is, is going amazing and it’s gonna do a lot. It’s not gonna, it will be incredibly hard to get to, you know, a fully renewable grid that way. The problem with wind is at the moment, I mean, it’s getting more expensive to install wind now and we don’t only need to install new wind farms, we’ve also got existing wind farms that are retiring. So we need to either extend those or we need to, um, you know, build new wind farms in their place. So we do need to get better there. And then I think that the new technologies, like, you know, I’m the blades person and the bigger blades are bigger problems like, like dramatically. I don’t think that your average, um, wind farm owner or wannabe wind farm owner is aware, like actually how many more problems there are with big blades compared to smaller ones and. I think that, like I said earlier, I [00:07:00] think Australia’s a great place to get those technologies, um, you know, developed. But we, we need to do that. That’s not like a nice to have and oh, everything will be a little bit better, but if we can’t maintain our assets better and get more out of them, um, we also need improvements with manufacturing. But it’s not really an o and m thing. I won’t talk too much about it. But yeah, I think that like we can’t be remotely complacent. Well, I think in, in Europe, uh, Thomas, you actually spent several months in Australia, and you’re obviously from Austria, so it’s an Austria Australian connection. Do you see the differences between the Austrian market, the German market, and what’s happening here in Australia? What, what do you think of the comparison between the two? So, what I, what really was fascinating from was the speed of, um, improvements we see here in Australia. It. Um, just for me, wind industry in my young industry, sorry, was always rather slow in Europe and [00:08:00] like not really adopting. Um, and here, sorry. For example, last year you asked the question how many. Of the audience to use sensors for shadow monitoring and no hand was raised right. It was zero silence. And uh, this year we even had a few percentage on, on sensors on the, on the cido. So you see only within a year like this gradually graduated, improvements are happening and I think that makes such a, um, speed in, in improvements and that will. Close to the rescue again. Thank you. And that, um, that will bring Australia to a big advantage. Um, especially I think overtaking, uh, at a certain point, and it would be great to see in five years from now, um, maybe Europeans, Austrians, uh, coming to Australia to. [00:09:00] To learn and not the other way around. Yeah, and, and especially with Yolanda working for the biggest energy company in Denmark, uh, in America, you see how Americans react to change and, and the reluctance to move forward on some of the things we talked about this week, which are, do seem to be moving a little bit quicker. There is more an acceptance of CMS systems here. And on in the States, it seems like you have to really fight. A lot of times to get anybody to listen, to do something because it’s all, it’s financially driven in some aspects, but it’s sort of like, we don’t do that here, so we’re not gonna listen to it. What’s been your experience being on a, this

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss Ming Yang’s proposed $1.5 billion factory in Scotland and why the UK government is hesitating. Plus the challenges of reviving wind turbine manufacturing in Australia, how quickly a blade factory can be stood up, and whether advanced manufacturing methods could give Australia a competitive edge in the next generation of wind energy. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com And now your hosts.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall, and I’m here with Yolanda Padron and Rosemary Barnes, and we’re all in Australia at the same time. We’re getting ready for Woma 2026, which is going to happen when this release is, will be through the first day. Uh, it’ll, it’s gonna be a big conference and right now. We’re so close to, to selling it out within a couple of people, so it’ll be a great event. So those of you listening to this podcast, hopefully you’re at Wilma 2026 and we’ll see, see you there. Uh, the news for this week, there’s a number of, of big, uh, country versus country situations going on. Uh, the one at the moment is [00:01:00] ING Yang in Scotland, and as we know, uh, Scotland. It has been offered by Ming Yang, uh, to build a factory there. They’re put about one and a half billion pounds into Scotland, uh, that is not going so well. So, so they’re talking about 3000 jobs, 1.5 billion in investment and then. Building, uh, offshore turbines for Britain and the larger Europe, but the UK government is hesitating and they have not approved it yet. And Scotland’s kind of caught in the middle. Ming Yang is supposedly looking elsewhere that they’re tired of waiting and figure they can probably get another factory somewhere in Europe. I don’t think this is gonna end well. Everyone. I think Bing Yang is obviously being pushed by the Chinese, uh, government to, to explore Scotland and try to get into Scotland and the Scottish government and leaders in the Scottish government have been meeting with, uh, [00:02:00] Chinese officials for a year or two. From what I can tell, if this doesn’t end with the factory in Scotland. Is China gonna take it out on the uk? And are they gonna build, is is me gonna be able to build a factory in Europe? Europe at the minute is looking into the Chinese investments into their wind turbine infrastructure in, in terms of basically tax support and, and funding and grants of that, uh, uh, aspect to, to see if China is undercutting prices artificially. Uh, which I think the answer is gonna be. Yes. So where does this go? It seems like a real impasse. At a moment when the UK in particular, and Europe, uh, the greater Europe are talking about more than a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind,  Yolanda Padron: I mean, just with the, the business that you mentioned that’s coming into to the uk, right? Will they have without Min Yang the ability to, to reach their goals?  Allen Hall: So you have the Siemens [00:03:00] factory in hall. They have a Vestus factory in Hollow White on the sort of the bottom of the country. Right. Then Vestus has had a facility there for a long time and the UK just threw about 20 million pounds into reopening the onshore blade portion of that factory ’cause it had been mothballed several months ago. It does seem like maybe there’s an alternative plan within the UK to stand up its own blade manufacturing and turbine manufacturing facilities, uh, to do a lot of things in country. Who I don’t think we know. Is it Siemens? Is it ge? Is it Vestus or is it something completely British? Maybe all the above. Rosemary. You know, being inside of a Blade factory for a long time with lm, it’s pretty hard to stand up a Blade factory quickly. How many years would it take you if you wanted to start today? Before you would actually produce a a hundred meter long offshore blade,  Rosemary Barnes: I reckon you could do it in a year if you had like real, real strong motivation [00:04:00] Allen Hall: really. Rosemary Barnes: I think so. I mean, it’s a big shed and like, it, it would be, most of the delays would be like regulatory and, you know, hiring, getting enough people hired and trained and that sort of thing. But, um, if you had good. Support from the, the government and not too much red tape to deal with. Then, uh, you know, if you’ve got lots of manufacturing capability elsewhere, then you can move people. Like usually when, um, when I worked at LM there were a few new factories opened while I was working there, and I’m sure that they took longer than, than a year in terms of like when it was first thought of. But, um, you know, once the decision was made, I, I actually dunno how long, how long it took. So it is a guess, but it didn’t, it didn’t take. As long as you would think it wasn’t. It wasn’t years and years, that’s for sure. Um, and what they would do is they don’t, you know, hire a whole new workforce and train them up right from the start. And then once they’re ready to go, then they start operating. What they’ll do to start with is they’ve got, you know, like a bunch [00:05:00] of really good people from the global factories, like all around, um, who will go, um, you know, from all roles. And I’m not talking just management at all, like it will include technicians, um, you know, every, every role in the factory, they’ll get people from another factory to go over. And, um, you know, they do some of the work. They’re training up local people so you know, there’s more of a gradual handover. And also so that you know, the best practices, um, get spread from factory to factory and make a good global culture. ’cause obviously like you’ve got the same design everywhere. You want the same quality coming out everywhere. Um, there is, as much as you try and document everything should be documented in work instructions. That should make it, you know, impossible to do things wrong. However, you never quite get to that standard and, um. There is a lot, a lot to be said for just the know-how and the culture of the people doing the um, yeah, doing the work.  Allen Hall: So the infrastructure would take about a year to build, but the people would have to come from the broader Europe then at [00:06:00] least temporarily.  Rosemary Barnes: That, that would be the fastest and safest way to do it. Like if it’s a brand new company that has never made a wind turbine before and someone just got a few, you know, I don’t know, a billion dollars, and um, said, let’s start a wind turbine factory, then I think it’s gonna be a few years and there’s gonna be some learning curve before it starts making blades fast enough. And. With the correct quality. Um, yeah. But if you’re just talking about one more factory from a company that already has half a dozen or a dozen wind turbine blade factories elsewhere in the world, then that’s where I think it can be done fast.  Allen Hall: This, uh, type of situation actually pops up a lot in aerospace, uh, power plants, engines. The jet engines on a lot of aircraft are kind of a combined effort from. Big multinational companies. So if they want to build something in country, they’ll hook up with a GE or a, a Honeywell or somebody who makes Jet engines and they’ll create this division and they’ll [00:07:00] stand this, this, uh, plant up. Maybe it’s gonna be something like that where GB energy is in the middle, uh, providing the funding and some of the resources, but they bring in another company, like a Siemens, like a Vestas, like a GE or a Nordex even to come in and to. Do the operational aspects and maybe some of the training pieces. But, uh, there’s a, there’s a funding arm and a technical arm, and they create a standalone, uh, British company to go manufacture towers to go manufacture in the cells to manufacture blades. Is that where you think this goes?  Rosemary Barnes: It depends also what kind of, um, component you’re talking about. Like if you’re talking about, I, I was talking a specific example of wind turbine blades, which are a mediumly complex thing to make, I would say, um. Yeah. And then if you go on the simpler side, when turbine towers, most countries would have the. Rough expertise needed, um, to, to do that. Nearly all towers at the moment come out of [00:08:00] China, um, or out of Asia. And with China being the, the vast bulk of those. Um, and it’s because they’ve got, aside from having very, very cheap steel, um, they also have just got huge factories that are set up with assembly lines so that, you know, there’s not very much moving of things back and forth. So they have the exact right bit of equipment to do. The exact right kind of, you know, like rolling and welding and they’re not moving tower sections around a lot. That makes it really hard for, um, for other countries to compete. But it’s not because they couldn’t make towers, it’s because they would struggle to make them cheap enough. Um, so yeah, if you set up a factory, you know, say you set up a wind turbine, um, factory in, uh, wind turbine tower factory in Australia, you, you could buy the equipment that you needed for, you know, a few hundred million dollars and, um. You could make it, but unless you have enough orders to keep that factory busy, you know, with the, the volume that you need to keep all of that [00:09:00] modern equipment, uh, operating just absolutely around the clock, your towers are gonna be expensive out of that facility. So that’s kind of the, that it’s cost is

Allen covers the world’s first 20 MW offshore wind turbine now grid-connected in China, a European breakthrough in recyclable blade composites, Nova Scotia’s push to become Canada’s offshore wind leader, Great British Energy’s new headquarters in Aberdeen, and South Dakota’s largest wind farm approval. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Happy Monday, everyone. You know what they say about records? They’re made to be broken. Well, off the coast of the Virginian Province in China, a new machine is spinning China three. Gorges and Goldwin have connected the world’s first 20 megawatt offshore wind turbine to the electrical grid. 20 megawatts from a single turbine. It’s blade stretched 147 meters long. That’s nearly 500 feet. The rotor sweeps an area equal to about 10 football fields. The hub sits 174 meters above the waves, a 58 story building floating its sea. This one wind [00:01:00] turbine will power 44,000 homes. And here’s what makes it interesting. This is the same wind farm where the world’s first 16 megawatt turbine went in. That record lasted barely two years. Meanwhile, Chinese turbine exports hit a record, 8 million kilowatts in 2025, a 50% from the year before. Chinese companies now operate in more than 60 countries. Uh. Across the Atlantic, a different kind of milestone. Nova Scotia has quietly become Canada’s leader in corporate clean energy deals while Alberta fumbled through policy moratoriums, the maritime province signed agreements that drew renewable investment northward The $60 billion Wind West project aims to unlock 62 gigawatts of offshore capacity. That’s a quarter of Canada’s total energy needs. Premier, Tim Houston traveled to New York this past month for the [00:02:00] International Partnering Forum. He signed a deal with Massachusetts to collaborate on offshore wind development . Lisa Engler from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center put it simply worked together lower costs, build the Atlantic Wind Industry. Nova Scotia’s first offshore lease auction comes later this year. And in Scotland, great British energy, announced its permanent headquarters. Location. Marshall Square. In Aberdeen, CEO, Dan McGrail called Aberdeen the perfect home for Britain’s publicly owned energy company. Thousands of engineers and technicians already call the city home Energy Minister Michael Shanks noted that Aberdeen has powered Britain for decades. First with oil and gas. Now with clean energy and on the American Prairie, South Dakota, regulators approved the state’s largest wind farm. Philip Wind Partners, a subsidiary of Chicago based Invenergy will build [00:03:00] 87 turbines across 110 square miles of private land north of Phillip. The price tag $750 million. The capacity. 333 megawatts enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and in laboratories across Europe. Researchers announced a breakthrough that could solve when energy’s most stubborn problem. What happens when turbine blades were out The Oleum project has produced the first bal salt fiber reinforced vier composite laminate through a new infusion technique in plain English. Its recyclable blades made from volcanic rock fiber. The goal blades that last 20% longer repair 40% faster and costs 15% less over the lifetime. So there you have it from China’s colossal machines to Nova Scotia’s Bold Ambitions from [00:04:00] Aberdeen’s new energy company to South Dakota’s Prairie Wind Farm from European laboratories working on the recycling puzzle. The wind industry just keeps moving forward, and that’s a state of the wind industry on the 16th of February. 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen and Joel are joined by Will Howell from Armour Edge in Edinburgh, Scotland. They discuss how Armour Edge’s semi-rigid polymer shields protect against leading edge erosion in harsh environments, the simplified installation process designed for rope access technicians, and the company’s expansion into North American manufacturing ahead of the 2026 blade season. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Will welcome back to the program.  Will Howell: Thanks so much for having me guys. Nice to see you.  Allen Hall: So Edinborough is the home of Armor Edge.  Will Howell: Yes, indeed.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And we went to visit your facility a couple of days ago. Really impressive. There’s a lot going on there. Will Howell: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So the, we’ve been in the facility for, um, a couple of years now, and it’s really just all part of our expansion as we continue to. To, uh, grow as a business?  Allen Hall: Uh, well the thing that struck me first was efficiency. If you’re gonna be in wind, do you need to be efficient?  Will Howell: Yeah,  Allen Hall: exactly. You have  Will Howell: to  be,  Will Howell: look, we know that we are a, a relatively small team, but we’re, we are, we are very reactive and we are gonna be always responding to the, the requests. The, the market drive for us internationally now is where we are really focusing. And even though we’ve got our small base from there, we’re exporting internationally around the world. And so. Yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m glad you guys came by and kind of saw what we’re up to.  Joel Saxum: If we could ask one thing, this is what we would ask. Turn up the heat. Turn down the wind. Turn off the rain.  Will Howell: Yeah, I’m [00:01:00] sorry about that. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, uh, there’s not much we can do about that at the moment.  Joel Saxum: Well, I’ll tell you what, if, if you’re talking leading Edge protection products, leading edge protection shield. Born from an area that’s rainy, that has heavy rain erosion, that understands,  Will Howell: we know, we know rain. We know rain. Yes. Look, we’ve been out in the North Sea now for over, over, over five years. These things are just being abused by Mother Nature out there and, you know, but we’ve, we are, we’re getting really good results consistently. Um, the products lasting really well against that, against that weather. And I think what’s interesting for us as well is it’s, it’s not just the Scottish rain and the ice and the snow. We’re, we’re getting good results out in the. The planes in the Midwest as well now. Yeah. And yeah, so yeah, very uh, universal products, we hope,  Joel Saxum: I mean, so this is one of the things we always talk about. When you talk wind turbine blades and you listen to the manufacturers, a lot of them sit in Denmark where the problem is mist in the air, it is rain, it is droplet size. It’s all the conversation you hear. But where we [00:02:00] see wind is dust, bugs, those kind of things. Like, it’s, it’s different stuff, right? So like I’m, I live in Texas. One of the things that’s beautiful about my home in Austin is when I look to the west in the, at, in the evening, it’s bright red skies all the time. Well, that means there’s dust in the air.  Will Howell: Yeah.  Joel Saxum: Right. And that’s, and when I look west, what am I looking at? 23,000 turbines out in West Texas. Right. So everything out there is getting beat up where we look at, um, inspections of turbines and we see turbines that are 1, 2, 3 years old that look like they’ve been in operation for 15 years. Will Howell: Yeah. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: There’s nothing left of them.  Will Howell: I know. And. You know, people use analogies like, oh, it looks like it’s been sand sandblasted. But it it has, it has, it is sandblasted, you know, we’ve, we’ve now conducted testing where we have literally taken kind of aerospace level testing and blasted sand at these shields, and they’re super resilient. But it has to be that universal products of resisting the water droplet that the mist, that side [00:03:00] of the, of the erosion problem, but also the particulate matter in the air. And there’ve been some of the. Places that we’ve installed. There was actually one site where they had a local, um, open cast mining nearby, and there was like marble particulate matter in the air. And these machines were getting trash in a couple couple of seasons. And again, we’ve been on there now for, I think now is our third year in that particular site. And again, really good results.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think, um, I mean, we did take some B roll when we were at your facility. And again, thanks for welcoming Sam. We love doing those. It’s, uh, but you showed us your installation methodology, and maybe we’ll show some of that with our producer Claire on mm-hmm. On this video. Uh, but the, the way you guys design your installation methodology to be simple and robust, easy for the technicians to make sure they can’t get it wrong in the field because they got enough other things to worry about. Will Howell: Uh, you know, I think, I think that’s been a big part of our, of our kind of design ethos since the, since the early days in the, in the r and d phase, it wasn’t only finding a robust material for the LEP Shields, a robust. [00:04:00]Adhesive to bond them on, but it’s the, it’s the kind of higher level. How do you actually get that onto a blade in the field by a rope or standing in a platform up in the, up in the winds And so, yeah, understanding what the technicians are having to go through in order to install this stuff. And that then feeds into your quality. ’cause you can have the best lab results in the world from your perfect installation sitting in a factory somewhere. But actually it’s the guys on ropes that are doing the, doing the hard work out there.  Joel Saxum: We see that all the time with our, like with our lightning protection products like. People, can you give us this lab test? Like we can, we’ll stack you up with lab tests. Mm-hmm. But what we really wanna show you is the test from the field.  Will Howell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Joel Saxum: The test that where it’s been sitting, soaking, getting hit by lightning. Mm-hmm. All of these things for years and years and years. Yeah. That’s the results we wanna show you. ’cause those are real.  Will Howell: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes  Allen Hall: the demo you gave us to install the shields and it’s basically a series of shields that go along the leading edge of the blade, sort of two parts of that one. Obviously you’re trying to recover the lost power, the a EP, that’s, that tends to be the big thing, [00:05:00] except in some locations, like Joel’s pointed out, it’s not that the leading edge is just kind of lightly beat up. It’s really beat up.  Will Howell: Yeah. Yeah.  Allen Hall: And you’re trying to prevent that from happening or to just to provide some protection, uh, if you’re just sort of category three, and I, I wanna walk through that for a minute because the demo you did was really interesting and I. It, it made sense once you watch the process happen. Mm-hmm. It’s really clear, but you’re able to take sort of cat three damage on the leading edge and not have to go back and do a lot of repair to it, which is where the vast majority of the funds are used to sort of get the blade to a point you can apply leading product. Oh yeah. Yeah. With Armor Edge, you don’t really need to do that. Will Howell: Yeah. And I think that that that really comes into the. Into the value proposition of the, of the whole, of the whole process. If the labor costs and the downtime of the machines, there’s so much value in that. And so if you can reduce the repair time or just remove it completely, because you can install [00:06:00] directly on top of existing erosion, you’ve really saved some significant cost out of the, out of the job. And that’s really only just by function of the design of the shields. We are a, a semi rigid polymer material, so we don’t conform to the existing erosion that’s on the surface. So. Yes. If you, if you have a cap four or five and you have some structural glass repair that needs to happen to maintain the integrity of the blades, you still need to complete that repair. You don’t need to go any further. So if you’ve only got a one, two, or three, you’re talking the fillers, the putties on, on the surface. You don’t need to, to replace those. Just apply our high build adhesive, get the shield on top, and you’re finished.  Allen Hall: And so you start at the tip with a, a tip. Shield and then you work your way, kind of Lego wise up up the leading edge of the blade. Yeah,  Will Howell: yeah, yeah.  Allen Hall: It’s really straightforward and, and the, the system you’re using, the adhesives you’re using, and the techniques are really adapted for the technician. What I watched you do, I’m like, oh, wow, this is really [00:07:00] slick because there’s been a lot of thought going into this. You have done this. Hundreds of times yourself before you’ve shipped it out to  Will Howell: the world. Yeah, exactly. And, and that was, that was a big part of the, part of the r and d process is to, again, as I said, it’s, it’s not just affecting these applications in a lab environment. It’s saying, how does this feel up on a rope? How does it feel strapped into your work, into your work position? You’re handling stuff with your gear off your belt, and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a very difficult position to be installing any bit of, any bit of kit on. And if we can. Make that as an intuitive and as simpler

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda, joined by Matthew Stead, discuss Vestas’ Q4 earnings beating competitors but disappointing investors, and the latest on the Wind Energy O&M Australia 2026 conference in Melbourne. Plus the European Commission opens a subsidy investigation into Goldwind, Texas sues over 3,000 dumped wind turbine blades, and Muehlhan Wind Service acquires Canadian AC883. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Alan Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron. Matthew Stead down in Australia. So welcome Matthew.  Matthew Stead: Great to be here. Thank you, Alan.  Allen Hall: We have a number of articles and interesting topics this week. Top of the list is Vestus. Vestus announced their Q4 numbers, and although the the revenue is great, uh, they, they had a profit of about 580 million euros. It was below what analysts expected, so the shares dropped about 6% on the news. But the CEO of Vestus is saying, uh, full speed ahead. They’re, they’re willing to make some concessions. Vestus, as it sounds like, in terms [00:01:00] of thinning out the company a little bit, which I, that’s been a, a, a complaint from investors for a little while. But in, in terms of, uh, going forward in renewable energy, Vestus is still going to pursue that. The offshore wind business looks like it’s gonna be profitable in 2027. And as we all know, and we, we see wind turbine prices, uh, quite a bit in each of our positions. Vestas is the most expensive one on the block, but they’re still winning a whole bunch of orders. And, and Matthew, uh, Vestas globally. I would say is the leader right now, if you look at Siemens GAA and GE Vestas is really winning a lot of the orders. Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think a very strong reputation for quality. Um, I have to say, I’ve got some Vestas turbines behind me, so, um, all paid for by myself. They’ve always been well regarded for their, um, you know, quality of [00:02:00] product. And when I first got into wind, um, you know, probably 15 years ago, you know, they were, they were the leaders at that point in time. And so, you know, quality. Reduces future o and m cost. I think  Rosemary Barnes: it’s not just about like the simple o and m, either it’s the risk that something really bad goes wrong and you’re just stuck with, you know, like a, a whole a hundred turbines that can’t be fixed or, you know, at least a large, a large chunk of them. The more that I work in, in o and m, the more you see, like on occasion when you do have those serial issues that mean, you know, like. Sometimes all the blades in the wind farm have to be replaced or sometimes all the generators or you know, even if it’s not replaced, if you’ve gotta take them all out and do something and put ’em back in, it is just such a massive cost. And, um, reducing the chance that that’s gonna happen is actually really valuable for insurance. And yeah, all sorts of other financial reasons.  Yolanda Padron: And even as an FSA customer, I feel like Vestus has a lot more transparency as to what actually is going on, [00:03:00] on site and more able to, to collaborate on, on like a site to site basis, which is very obviously helping them in getting a lot of return customers. Allen Hall: Yeah. One of the key revenues for Vestus has been the FSA, where almost every project I’ve seen over the last couple of years has had a 2030 year FSA attached to it. Rarely do you see. Order without that, and that’s a long-term revenue stream. The, the thing about Vestus and the complaints that are happening, uh, around vestus are odd because if you look at Siemens Cab Mesa, they’re really struggling to be profitable. And then GE Renova, which is really, really struggling to be profitable and they’re losing several hundred millions of dollars a year. Vestas is bringing in a profit, and, and yet the investors are wanting even more. I, I guess, is, is this just a relationship to the. Where you can invest money today. The stock market going up so high, gold and silver prices are at record highs. Rosemary Barnes: Haven’t they just [00:04:00] crushed?  Allen Hall: They have a little bit. They’ve, they’ve rescinded some, but they’re still at really high numbers, right? So Gold Cross, what? $5,000 and ounce and then, uh, it was it 2000 a year ago? So the, the rise in the value of, of, uh, rear metals is crazy. Is there a plan you think Vestas is changing the way they’re gonna operate? ’cause uh, they’re talking about thinning out the ranks and they do seem to be becoming more vertically integrated with the acquisition of the TPI factories down in Mexico. GPI in India  Rosemary Barnes: before we make it sound too much like a paid segment from investors, I have to say I disagree that they’re like just crushing it with the, the FSAs. I think that the full service agreements are across the board. Perform badly in Australia, at least I think it’s different elsewhere. Um, maybe it’s a good segue into, uh, talk about our event that we’ve got coming up to talk [00:05:00] about, um, the difficult operating conditions in Australia. But I, I think that best as, like everybody else has been surprised at how many things can go wrong in an Australia and wind farm. And, um, I don’t, I I would’ve put them up on a pedestal for. Particularly noteworthy, um, brilliant service with the FSAs. I think, yeah, across the board everyone’s doing a little bit less than they should be, and I have no doubt that they’re also making a whole lot less money on those agreements than what they spent or spending a lot more than what they’re expecting. So I don’t wanna be too harsh in my judgment.  Yolanda Padron: That’s fair. The bar is very low.  Rosemary Barnes: But what I do notice when I go to international events, um, and I, you know, I talk to, I’ve got a lot of ex-colleagues that’s still working in the industry and vest. Stands out as still investing a lot in r and d. And that doesn’t mean like crushing out a new platform every single year or every two years. It’s not that. But they are investing in a lot of new technologies that are more incremental. They’re [00:06:00] looking at bigger technology leaps and um, you know, still investigating stuff like that. Like I think if I was to go back working for an OEM, that’s the kind of work I’d like to do. And investors does seem like it’s the main company that’s still doing a whole lot of that. With the exception of, of the Chinese manufacturers, which are obviously doing like tons and tons of new development. But, um, I don’t have the insight into them like I do with the European ones.  Allen Hall: As you’re listening to this podcast, most of the people on this podcast are traveling to Melbourne, Australia for Woma 26. That’s Wind Energy and M Australia. Big event. Matthew, the numbers are impressive. I’m getting a little bit scared. Run out of food and uh, seats because there is a massive influx in the last 24, 48 hours, which is great to see, but wind energy in Australia. Is huge, and the o and m aspect is one of those key pain points. Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think, uh, thanks to Rosie and Alan, your argument, [00:07:00] um, a little while ago, your argument, which spurred the whole, um, the reason for the conference. Um, you know, the, the lack of, uh, Australian content, the lack of, um, poor. Conferences in Australia. I think unless you’d have that argument, um, this event wouldn’t, wouldn’t be there. Allen Hall: Rosie did bring up that she had been to a number of conferences and so had I that were pretty much useless in terms of take home. What could we be able to use in the world and, and make the world just slightly better from our knowledge and. With all the policy talk and uh, discussion about sort of global warming things that it’s not really useful necessarily in making your operations run more efficiently. And this was what Woma is all about is. Sharing information. Not everybody runs their operations the same. And you can learn from that of the way, uh, others do it. And at the same time, we’re bringing in experts from around the world to talk about some of [00:08:00] those really critical issues. One of them being leading edge erosion. And Rosie’s been doing a lot of work in Australia on leading edge erosion and the complexities around that. Rosie, the leading edge erosion discussion and the panel involved in the people are gonna be on the panel are impressive. What are you looking forward to?  Rosemary Barnes: I’m looking forward to, um, getting the international perspective because leading edge erosion, I mean, there’s heaps of aspects of wind turbine operation that I think are just dramatically different in Australia, but I think leading edge erosion is the one that like really, really jumped out at me. When I was, um, when I moved back to Australia and started looking at inspection reports for wind farms that were like one or two years old, and you see 90, 99% of turbines that have significant erosion like within a couple of years. It’s like, this is, this is not. Like, I’ve never, I’ve never seen this before. It’s clear that no one is designing these products that are gonna peel off [00:09:00] within a couple of years. Um, and so that was what kind of got me thinking, you know what, like Australia is really different. Climatically and in terms of the weather. Um, and so we need to start not just gettin

Allen covers Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen’s optimism on European auction reforms and bilateral CfDs, Australia’s Warradarge wind farm expansion paired with major grid upgrades, New Zealand’s wind-to-hydrogen project, South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean building a new installation vessel, and Siemens Energy’s debate over spinning off Gamesa. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday everyone Henrik Andersen has seen a lot of failed auctions. The Vestas chief executive watched subsidy-free tenders collapse in Germany… France… the Netherlands… even his home country of Denmark. Developers wouldn’t bid. The risk was too high. But this week… Andersen stood before investors with different news. The UK’s AR7 delivered eight point four gigawatts. A record. Eight projects approved… including two floaters. Denmark and eight North Sea nations committed to one hundred gigawatts. And Germany’s onshore auction pipeline… is finally moving. Andersen sent thanks directly to Ed Miliband… Britain’s Energy Minister. “Now it’s starting to work.” … The difference? Bilateral CfDs. After watching zero-subsidy models fail across Europe… governments returned to revenue stabilization. Strike prices developers can actually finance. Andersen believes the industry should learn from these auction designs… before repeating old mistakes. Steen Brødbæk at Semco Maritime agrees. Projects are maturing. Suppliers… can finally earn a living. … Vestas identified three priority markets in their annual report. Germany for onshore. North America. And Australia. The drivers? Energy security concerns. Data center load growth. And the AI electricity surge that every grid operator is scrambling to model. As for Chinese OEMs entering European tenders? Andersen would be surprised. “You should never be surprised by anything these days,” he said. “But in this case… I would actually be surprised.” … Down in Western Australia… Warradarge is proving his point about mature markets. Four of thirty additional turbines are now vertical. When the expansion completes… eighty-one machines will generate two hundred eighty-three megawatts. The state’s largest wind farm. Owned by Bright Energy Investments… a joint venture between Synergy and Potentia. One hundred twenty workers at peak construction. And critically… the state is building transmission to match. Clean Energy Link North… the largest grid upgrade in Western Australia in more than a decade… will unlock capacity in the South West Interconnected System. Generation AND grid… moving together. That’s how you hit a 2030 coal exit. … Meanwhile in Taranaki… New Zealand… Vestas secured a twenty-six megawatt order with a twenty-year service agreement. Hiringa Energy is integrating wind with green hydrogen production at scale… serving transport… industry… and agriculture. Turbine delivery begins Q1 this year. Commissioning… Q2 twenty-twenty-seven. One of New Zealand’s first large-scale wind-to-hydrogen projects. The electrolyzer economics are finally penciling. … But you can’t install offshore turbines without vessels. And South Korea just solved a bottleneck. Hanwha Ocean won a three hundred eighty-five million pound contract… to build a WTIV capable of fifteen-megawatt class installations. Korea’s first vessel at that scale. Delivery… early twenty-twenty-eight. Korea expects twenty-five gigawatts of offshore capacity by 2035. They’re not waiting for European vessel contractors. They’re building their own supply chain. Hanwha has now delivered four WTIVs globally. … Not everyone is celebrating. At Siemens Energy… activist investor Ananym Capital is pushing to spin off Siemens Gamesa. CEO Christian Bruch calls the idea reasonable. But timing matters. The wind division must stabilize first. Bruch believes offshore wind can follow the same recovery path as the grid business… which went from crisis… to profitability. Turnaround before transaction. … So, last week we had: CfDs reviving European auctions. Australia building generation AND transmission together. New Zealand coupling wind with hydrogen. Korea investing in installation vessel capacity. And Siemens… working to fix its turbine business before any restructuring. Different geographies. Same lesson. The projects that succeed… are the ones where policy… supply chain… and capital… finally align. … And that is the state of the wind industry for the 9th of February 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime wind energy podcast.

Morten Handberg, Uptime’s blade whisperer, returns to the show to tackle leading edge erosion. He covers the fatigue physics behind rain erosion, why OEMs offer no warranty coverage for it, how operators should time repairs before costs multiply, and what LEP solutions are working in the field. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” 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: Morten, welcome back to the program.  Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen. It’s fantastic to be back on on, on the podcast. Really excited to, uh, record an episode on Erosion Today.  Allen Hall: Wow. Leading as erosion is such a huge worldwide issue and. Operators are having big problems with it right now. It does seem like there’s not a lot of information readily available to operators to understand the issue quite yet. Morten Handberg: Well, it, I mean, it’s something that we’ve been looking at for the, at least the past 10 years. We started looking at it when I was in in DONG or as it back in 2014. But we also saw it very early on because we were in offshore environment, much harsher. Uh, rain erosion conditions, and you were also starting to change the way that the, the, uh, the coatings [00:01:00]that were applied. So there was sort of a, there was several things at play that meant that we saw very early on, early on offshore.  Allen Hall: Well, let’s get to the basics of rain erosion and leading edge erosion. What is the physics behind it? What, what happens to the leading edges of these blades as rain? Impacts them.  Morten Handberg: Well, you should see it as um, millions of, of small fat, uh, small fatigue loads on the coating because each raindrop, it creates a small impact load on the blade. It creates a rail wave that sort of creates a. Uh, share, share loads out on, uh, into the coating that is then absorbed by the coating, by the filler and and so on. And the more absorbent that your substrate is, the longer survivability you, you’re leading into coating will have, uh, if you have manufacturing defects in the coating, that will accelerate the erosion. But it is a fatigue effect that is then accelerated or decelerate depending on, uh, local blade conditions.  Allen Hall: Yeah, what I’ve seen in the [00:02:00] field is the blades look great. Nothing. Nothing. You don’t see anything happening and then all of a sudden it’s like instantaneous, like a fatigue failure.  Morten Handberg: I mean, a lot of things is going on. Uh, actually you start out by, uh, by having it’s, they call, it’s called mass loss and it’s actually where the erosion is starting to change the material characteristics of the coating. And that is just the first step. So you don’t see that. You can measure it in a, um, in the laboratory setting, you can actually see that there is a changing in, in the coating condition. You just can’t see it yet. Then you start to get pitting, and that is these very, very, very small, almost microscopic chippings of the coating. They will then accelerate and then you start to actually see the first sign, which is like a slight, a braided surface. It’s like someone took a, a fine grain sandpaper across the surface of the plate, but you only see it on the leading edge. If it’s erosion, it’s only on the center of the leading edge. That’s very important. If you see it on the sides and further down, then it’s, it’s [00:03:00] something else. Uh, it’s not pure erosion, but then you see this fine grain. Then as that progresses, you see more and more and more chipping, more and more degradation across the, the leading edge of the blade. Worse in the tip of it, less so into the inner third of the blade, but it is a gradual process that you see over the leading edge. Finally, you’ll then start to see the, uh, the coating coming off and you’ll start to see exposed laminate. Um, and from there it can, it can accelerate or exposed filler or laminate. From there, it can accelerate because. Neither of those are actually designed to handle any kind of erosion.  Allen Hall: What are the critical variables in relation to leading edge erosion? Which variables seem to matter most? Is it raindrop size? Is it tip speed? What factors should we be looking for?  Morten Handberg: Tip speeds and rain intensity. Uh, obviously droplet size have an impact, but. But what is an operator you can actually see and monitor for is, well, you know, your tip speed of the blade that matters. Uh, but it is really the rain intensity. So if you have [00:04:00] sort of a, an average drizzle over the year, that’s a much better condition than if you have like, you know, showers in, in, in, in a, in a few hour sessions at certain points of time. Because then, then it becomes an aggressive erosion. It’s not, it’s, you don’t, you get much higher up on the. On the, on the fatigue curve, uh, then if it’s just an average baseline load over long periods of time,  Allen Hall: yeah, that fatigue curve really does matter. And today we’re looking at what generally is called VN curves, velocity versus number of impacts, and. The rain erosion facilities I’ve seen, I’ve been able to, to give some parameters to, uh, provide a baseline or a comparison between different kinds of coatings. Is is that the, the standard as everybody sees it today, the sort of the VN curve  Morten Handberg: that is what’s been developed by this scientific, uh, community, these VN curve, that that gives you some level of measure. I would still say, you know, from what we can do in a rain erosion tester to what is then actually going on [00:05:00] the field is still very two very, very, very different things you can say. If you can survive a thousand hours in a rain erosion tester, then it’s the similar in the field that doesn’t really work like that. But there are comparisons so you can do, you know, uh, a relationship study, uh, between them. And you can use the VN curves to determine the ERO erosion aggressiveness. Field. We did that in the bait defect forecasting that we did in wind pile up with DCU back in 2019, uh, where we actually looked at rain erosion across Europe. Uh, and then the, uh, the actual erosion propagation that we saw within these different sites, both for offshore and for onshore, where we actually mapped out, um, across Europe, you know, which areas will be the most erosion prone. And then utilize that to, to then mo then, then to determine what would be the red, the best maintenance strategy and also, uh, erosion, uh, LEP, uh, solution for that wind farm. Allen Hall: Oh, okay. Uh, is it raindrop size then, or just [00:06:00] quantity of raindrops? Obviously drizzle has smaller impact. There’s less mass there, but larger raindrops, more frequent rain.  Morten Handberg: If you have showers, it tends to be larger drops. Right. So, so they kind of follow each other. And if it’s more of a drizzle. It will be smaller raindrops. They typically follow each other. You know, if you’ve been outside in a rainstorm before we just showered, you would have sense that these are, these are much higher, you know, raindrop sizes. So, so there is typically an a relation between raindrop size and then showers versus a drizzle. It’s typically more fine, fine grain rain drops. Allen Hall: And what impact does dirt and debris mixed in with the rain, uh, affect leading edge erosion? I know a lot of, there’s a lot of concern. And farm fields and places where there’s a lot of plowing and turnover of the dirt that it, it, it does seem like there’s more leading edge erosion and I, I think there’s a little bit of an unknown about it, uh, just because they see leading edge [00:07:00]erosion close to these areas where there’s a lot of tilling going on. Is it just dirt impact worth a blade or is it a combination of dirt plus rain and, and those two come combining together to make a worse case. Uh, damage scenario.  Morten Handberg: Technically it would be slightly worse than if it were, if there is some soil or, or sand, or sand contamination in the raindrops. But I mean, logically rain typically, you know, comes down from the sky. It doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t mix in with the dirt then, you know, it would be more if you have dirt on the blades. It’s typically during a dry season where it would get mixed up and then blown onto the blades. Honestly, I don’t think that that is really what’s having an impact, because having contamination in the blade is not something that is, that would drive erosion. I think that that is, I think that is, that is a misunderstanding. We do see sand, sand erosion in some part of the world where you have massive, uh, sand, uh, how do you say, sandstorms [00:08:00] coming through and, and that actually creates an, an abrasive wear on the plate. It looks different from rain erosion because it’s two different mechanisms. Uh, where the sand is actually like a sandpaper just blowing across the surface, so you can see that. Whereas rain is more of this fatigue effect. So I think in the, theoretically if you had soil mixed in with rain, yes that could have an impact because you would have an a, a hardened particle. But I do, I don’t think it’s what’s driving erosion, to be honest. Allen Hall: Okay, so then there’s really two different kinds of failure modes. A particle erosion, which is more of an abrasive erosion, which I would assume be a maybe a little wider, spread along the leading edge of the blade versus a fatigue impact from a raindrop collision. They just look different, right?  Morten Handberg: Yeah, so, so sand erosion you cou

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda discuss the North Sea Summit where nine European countries committed to 100 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity and the massive economic impact that comes with it. They also break down the federal court ruling that allows Vineyard Wind to resume construction with a tight 45-day window before installation vessels leave. Plus GE Vernova’s Q4 results show $600 million in wind losses and Wind Power Lab CEO Lene Helstern raises concerns about blade quality across the industry. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum, and Yolanda Padron.  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alln Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxum. Rosemary Barnes is snorkeling at the Greek Barrier Reef this week, uh, big news out of Northern Europe. Uh, the Northeast Summit, which happened in Hamburg, uh, about a week or so ago, nine European countries are. Making a huge commitment for offshore wind. So it’s the, the countries involved are Britain, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, question Mark Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Norway. That together they want to develop [00:01:00] 100 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity in shared waters. Uh, that’s enough to power about. 85 million households and the PAC comes as Europe is trying to wean itself from natural gas from where they had it previously and the United States. Uh, so they, they would become electricity in independent. Uh, and this is one way to do it. Two big happy, uh, companies. At the moment, Vattenfall who develops s lot offshore and Siemens gaa of course, are really excited by the news. If you run the numbers and you, you, you have a hundred gigawatts out in the water and you’re using 20 megawatt turbines, then you’re talking about 5,000 turbines in the water total. That is a huge offshore wind order, and I, I think this would be great news for. Obviously Vestas and [00:02:00] Siemens cesa. Uh, the, the question is there’s a lot of political maneuvering that is happening. It looks like Belgium, uh, as a country is not super active and offshore and is rethinking it and trying to figure out where they want to go. But I think the big names will stay, right? France and Germany, all in on offshore. Denmark will be Britain already is. So the question really is at the moment then. Can Siemens get back into the win game and start making money because they have projected themselves to be very profitable coming this year, into this year. This may be the, the stepping stone, Joel.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think that, yeah, we talked about last week their 21 megawatt, or 21 and a half megawatt. I believe it is. Big new flagship going to be ready to roll, uh, with the big auctions happening like AR seven in the uk. Uh, and you know, that’s eight gigawatts, 8.4 gigawatts there. People are gonna be, the, the order book’s gonna start to fill up, like [00:03:00]Siemens is, this is a possibility of a big turnaround. And to put some of these numbers in perspective, um, a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind. So what does that really mean? Right? Um, what it means is if you, if you take the, if you take two of the industrial big industrial powerhouses that are a part of this pact, the UK and Germany combine their total demand. That’s a hundred gigawatt. That’s what they, that’s what their demand is basically on a, you know, today. Right? So that’s gonna continue to grow, right? As, uh, we electrify a lot of things. And the indus, you know, the, the next, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 or whatever we’re calling it now is happening. Um, that’s, that’s a possibility, right? So this a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind. Is gonna drive jobs all up all over Europe. Right. This isn’t just a jobs at the port in Rotterdam or wherever it may be. Right? This is, this is manufacturing jobs, supply chain jobs, the same stuff we’ve been talking about on the podcast for a while here with [00:04:00] what the UK is doing with OWGP and the, or e Catapult and all the kind of the monies that the, the, the Crown and, and other, uh, private entities are putting in there. They’re starting to really, they’re, or this a hundred gigawatts is really gonna look like building out that local supply chain. Jobs, all these different things. ’cause Alan, like you, you mentioned off air. If you look at a hundred gigawatts of offshore wind, that’s $200 billion or was to put it in Euros, 175 billion euros, 170 billion euros, just in turbine orders. Right. That doesn’t mean, or that doesn’t cover ships, lodging, food, like, you know, everything around the ports like tools, PPE, all of the stuff that’s needed by this industry. I mean, there’s a, there’s a trillion dollar impact here.  Speaker 2: Oh, it’s close. Yeah. It’s at least 500 billion, I would say. And Yolanda, from the asset management side, have we seen anything of this scale to manage? It does seem like there’d be a lot of [00:05:00] turbines in the water. A whole bunch of moving pieces, ships, turbines, cables, transformers, substations, going different directions. How, what kind of infrastructure is that going to take?  Yolanda Padron: You know, a lot of the teams that are there, they’re used to doing this on a grand scale, but globally, right? And so having this be all at once in the UK is definitely gonna be interesting. It’ll be a good opportunity for everybody to take all of the lessons learned to, to just try to make sure that they don’t come across any issues that they might have seen in the past, in other sites, in other countries. They just bring everything back home to their countries and then just make sure that everything’s fine. Um, from like development, construction, and, and operations.  Joel Saxum: I was thinking about that. Just thinking about development, construction, operations, right? So some of [00:06:00] these sites we’re thinking about like how, you know, that, that, that map of offshore wind in, in the Northern Atlantic, right? So if this is gonna go and we’re talking about the countries involved here, Norway, Germany, Denmark, France, Belgium, you’re gonna have it all over. So into the Baltic Sea. Around Denmark, into the Norwegian waters, uk, Ireland all the way over, and Iceland is there. I don’t think there’s gonna be any development there. I think maybe they’re just there as a, as cheerleaders. Um, offtake, possibly, yes. Some cables running over there. But you’re going to need to repurpose some of the existing infrastructure, or you’re not, not, you’re going to need to, you’re going to get the opportunity to, and this hasn’t happened in offshore wind yet, right? So. Basically repowering offshore wind, and you’re going to be able to look at, you know, you’re not doing, um, greenfield geotechnical work and greenfield, um, sub c mapping. Like, some of those things are done right, or most of those things are done. So there, I know there’s a lot of, like, there’s a, there’s two and [00:07:00] three and six and seven megawatt turbines all over the North Atlantic, so we’re gonna be able to pop some of those up. Put some 15 and 20 megawatt machines in place there. I mean, of course you’re not gonna be able to reuse the same mono piles, but when it comes to Yolanda, like you said, the lessons learned, Hey, the vessel plans for this area are done. The how, how, how we change crews out here, the CTVs and now and SOVs into port and that stuff, that those learnings are done. How do we maintain export cables and inter array cables with the geotechnic here, you’re not in a green field, you’re in a brown field. That, that, that work. A lot of those lessons learned. They’re done, right? You’ve, you’ve stumbled through them, you’ve made those mistakes. You’ve had to learn on the fly and go ahead here. But when you go to the next phase of Repowering, an offshore wind farm, the the Dev X cost is gonna go way down, in my opinion. Now, someone, someone may fight back on that and say, well, we have to go do some demolition or something of that sort. I’m not sure, but [00:08:00] Yolanda Padron: yeah. But I think, you know. We like to complain sometimes in the US about how some of the studies just aren’t catered toward us, right? And so we’ve seen it a lot and it’s a lot of the studies that are made are just made in Europe where, where this is all taking place. So it’s gonna be really, really interesting to see such a massive growth where everything’s being developed and where the studies are localized from where. You have this very niche area and they can, they’ve studied it. They know exactly what’s going on there. And to your point, they’ve seen a lot of, they’ve minimized the risk, like the environmental risks as much as they could. Right. And so it’s, it’s going to be really, really interesting to have them  Joel Saxum: ensuring and financing these projects should be way easier  Speaker 2: when Europe is saying that the industry has pledged to cut costs by 30% between. 20, 25 and 2040. So you would think that the turbine [00:09:00] costs and the installation costs would have to be really cost conscious on the supply chain and, uh, taking lessons learned from the previous generations of offshore wind. I think that makes sense. 30% is still a lot, and I, I think the, the feeling I’m getting from this is, Hey, we’re making a hundred gigawatt commitment to this industry. You have to work really hard to deliver a

Allen covers four US offshore wind projects winning injunctions to resume construction, including major updates from Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia project. Plus Ming Yang’s proposed UK manufacturing facility faces security review delays, Seaway 7 lands the Gennaker contract in Germany, and Taiwan’s Fengmiao project hits a milestone. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday everyone! Four offshore wind projects have secured preliminary injunctions blocking the Trump administration’s stop-work order. Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. Avangrid’s Vineyard Wind 1. Equinor’s Empire Wind. And Ørsted’s Revolution Wind. All four argued they were at critical stages of construction. The courts agreed. Work has resumed. A fifth project… Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind… has a hearing scheduled for today. Now… within days of getting back to work… milestones are being reached. Dominion Energy reported seventy-one percent completion on Coastal Virginia. The first turbine… installed in January. The Charybdis… America’s only U.S.-flagged wind turbine installation vessel… is finally at work. Fifty-four towers, thirty nacelles, and twenty-six blade sets now staged at Portsmouth Marine Terminal. The third offshore substation has arrived. But here is where the numbers tell the real story. The month-long delay fighting the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management? Two hundred twenty-eight million dollars. New tariffs? Another five hundred eighty million. The project budget now stands at eleven-point-five billion dollars. Nine-point-three billion already invested by end of 2025. Dominion and partner Stonepeak are sharing the cost. Dominion insists offshore wind remains the fastest and most economical way to deliver nearly three gigawatts to Virginia’s grid. A grid that powers military installations… naval shipbuilding… and America’s growing AI and cyber capabilities. First power expected this quarter. Full completion… now pushed to early 2027. Up in New England… Vineyard Wind 1 also resumed work. The sixty-second and final turbine tower shipped from New Bedford this week. Ten blade sets remain at the staging site. The installation vessel is scheduled to depart by end of March. The turbines are going up. But eight hundred eight million dollars in delays and tariffs… That is a price the entire industry is watching. ═══ Scotland Waits on Ming Yang Decision ═══ In Scotland… a decision that could reshape European supply chains… hangs in the balance. Chinese manufacturer Ming Yang wants to build the UK’s largest wind turbine manufacturing facility. The site… Ardersier… near Inverness. The investment… one-point-five billion pounds. The jobs… fifteen hundred. Trade Minister Chris Bryant says the government must weigh security. Critical national infrastructure must be safe and secure. Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney is losing patience. He told reporters this week the decision has taken too long. He called it pivotal to Scotland’s renewable energy potential… and a crucial component of the nation’s just transition. Meanwhile… Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with President Xi Jinping in Beijing this week. He spoke of building a more sophisticated relationship between the two nations. Whisky tariffs… halved to five percent. Wind turbine factories? Still under review. Bryant says they want a steady, eyes-wide-open relationship with China. Drive up trade where possible. Challenge where necessary. But no flip-flopping. For now… Scotland waits. And so does the UK supply chain. ═══ Seaway 7 Lands Gennaker Contract ═══ In the German Baltic Sea… a major contract award. Seaway 7, part of the Subsea 7 Group, will transport and install sixty-three monopiles and transition pieces for the Gennaker offshore wind farm. The contract value… one hundred fifty to three hundred million dollars. Subsea 7 calls it substantial. The client is Skyborn Renewables… a portfolio company of BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners. Nine hundred seventy-six megawatts of capacity. Sixty-three Siemens Gamesa turbines. Four terawatt-hours of annual generation. Enough to power roughly one million German homes. Seaway 7’s work begins next year. ═══ Taiwan’s Fengmiao Hits Milestone ═══ In Taiwan… Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners completed the first batch of jacket foundations for the Fengmiao offshore wind farm. Five hundred megawatts. On schedule for late 2027 completion. Offshore installation begins later this year. The jackets were built by Century Wind Power… a local Taiwanese supplier. CIP called it a sign of strong execution capabilities and proof they can deliver large-scale, complex energy projects. But they are not stopping there. Fengmiao 2… six hundred megawatts… is already in development. Taiwan is aiming for a major boost in large-scale renewable energy by 2030. And that is the state of the wind industry for February 2, 2026 Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen visits the Faskally Safety Leadership Centre with Mark Patterson, Director of Safety, Health, and Environment at SSE, and Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-Founder of Active Training Team. They discuss how SSE has put over 9,000 employees and 2,000 contract partners through ATT’s innovative training program, which uses actors and realistic scenarios to create lasting behavioral change across the entire workforce chain, from executives to technicians. Reach out to SSE and ATT to learn more! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” 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: Mark and Turnt. Welcome to the show. Thank you.  Mark Patterson: Thank you.  Allen Hall: We’re in Scotland, present Scotland and per Scotland, which is a place most people probably haven’t ventured to in the United States, but it is quite lovely, although chilly and rainy. It’s Scotland. We’re in December. Uh, and we’re here to take a look at the SSE Training Center. And the remarkable things that active training team is doing here, because we had seen this in Boston in a smaller format, uh, about a year ago almost now.  Dermot Kerrigan: Just Yeah,  Allen Hall: yeah. Six months  Dermot Kerrigan: ago.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It hasn’t been that long ago. Uh, but IC was on me to say, you gotta come over. You gotta come over. You gotta see the, the whole, uh, environment where we put you into the police room and some of the things we wanna talk about, uh, because it, [00:01:00] it does play different. And you’re right, it does play different. It is very impactful. And it, and maybe we should start off first of Mark, you’re the head of basically health and safety and environment for SSE here in Perth. This is a remarkable facility. It is unlike anything I have seen in the States by far. And SSE has made the commitment to do this sort of training for. Everybody in your employment and outside of your employment, even contractors.  Mark Patterson: We have been looking at some quite basic things in safety as everybody does. And there’s a fundamental thing we want to do is get everybody home safe. And uh, it’s easier said than done because you’ve gotta get it right for every single task, every single day. And that’s a massive challenge. And we have like 15,000. 15,000 people in SSE, we probably work with about 50,000 contract [00:02:00] partners and we’re heavily dependent, uh, on get our contract partners to get our activities done. And they’re crucial.  Speaker: Mm-hmm.  Mark Patterson: And in that it’s one community and we need to make sure everybody there gets home safe. And that’s what drove us to think about adding more rules isn’t gonna do it. Um, you need to give people that sense of a feeling, uh, when a really serious sense of cars and then equip them with tools to, to deal with it. So. We’ve all probably seen training that gives that sense of doom and dread when something goes badly wrong, but actually that needs to be. Coupled with something which is quite powerful, is what are the tools that help people have the conversations that gets everybody home safe. So kind of trying to do two things.  Allen Hall: Well, SSC is involved in a number of large projects. You have three offshore wind farms, about a more than a thousand turbines right now. Wind turbines onshore, offshore, and those offshore projects are not easy. There’s a lot of complexity to them.  Mark Patterson: Absolutely. So look, I I think [00:03:00] that’s, that’s something that. You’ve gotta partner with the right people. If you wanna be successful, you need to make it easy for people to do the right thing. Yeah, as best you possibly can. You need to partner with the right people, and you need to get people that you need to have a sense that you need to keep checking that as you’re growing your business. The chinks in your armor don’t grow too. But fundamentally there’s something else, which is a sense of community. When people come together to, to do a task, there is a sense of community and people work, put a lot of discretionary effort into to get, uh, big projects done. And in that, um, it’s a sense of community and you wanna make sure everybody there gets home safe to their friends and family. ’cause if we’re all being honest about it, you know, SSE is a brilliant company. What we do is absolutely worth doing. I love SC. But I love my family a fair amount more. And if you bought into that, you probably bought into the strategy that we’re trying to adopt in terms of safety. Uh, it’s really simple messaging. Um,  Allen Hall: yeah. That, that is very clear. Yeah. And it should be [00:04:00]well communicated outside of SSEI hope because it is a tremendous, uh, value to SSE to do that. And I’m sure the employees appreciate it because you have a culture of safety. What. Trigger that. How long ago was that trigger? Is this, this is not something you thought up yesterday for sure.  Mark Patterson: No, look, this, the, the, what we’ve done in the immersive training center, um, really reinforces a lot of things that we’ve had in place for a while, and it, it takes it to the, the next level. So we’ve been working probably more than 10 years, but, uh, certainly the. Seven years we’ve been talking very much about our safety family, that’s the community and SSE with our contract partners and what we need to do. And part of that is really clear language about getting people home safe. Uh, a sense that you’ve, everybody in it that works with us has a safety license. And that license is, if it’s not safe, we don’t do it. It’s not a rural based thing. It’s how we roll. It’s part of the culture. We’d, we, uh, have a culture where, and certainly trying to instill for everybody a culture. Where [00:05:00] they’ve got that license. If, if they think something’s not right, we’ll stop the job and get it right. And even if they’re wrong, we’ll still listen to them because ultimately we need to work our way through, right? So we’ve been, we’ve thought hard about the language we wanted to use to reinforce that. So the importance of plan, scan and adapt. So planning our work well, thinking through what we need to do. Not just stopping there though, keeping scanning for what could go wrong. That sense that you can’t remember everything. So you need to have immediate corrective actions and that immediate sort of see it, sort of report it. If you see something that isn’t right, do something about it. And that sense of community caring for the community that you work with. And those are the essence of our, our language on safety and the immersive training. Uh, is not trying to shove that language down everybody’s throats again, particularly our contract partners, but it’s, it’s helping people see some really clear things. One is if a [00:06:00] really serious incident occurs at what, what it feels like here. And I’ve spent a lot of time in various industries and people are different when they’ve been on a site or involved when there’s been a really serious incident and you need to do something to. Get that sense of a feeling of what it feels like and actually make people feel slightly uncomfortable in the process. ’cause that’s part of it,  Allen Hall: right? Yes.  Mark Patterson: Because you know,  Allen Hall: you remember that.  Mark Patterson: You remember that. Yeah. We’ve had, you know, we’ve had people say, well, I felt very uncomfortable in that bit of the training. It was okay. But was, I felt very uncomfortable. And you know, we’ve talked about that a lot.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Mark Patterson: We know you kinda should because if there’s something wrong with you, if you don’t feel uncomfortable about that. But what’s super powerful on the guys in at TT do brilliantly. Is have facilitators that allow you to have that conversation and understand what do you need to do differently? How do you influence somebody who’s more senior? How do you, how do you bring people with you so that they’re gonna [00:07:00] do what you want ’em to do after you’ve left the building? And. Just pointing the finger at people and shouting at them. Never does that. Right? Uh, rarely does that. You’ve gotta get that sense of how do you get people to have a common belief? And,  Allen Hall: and I think that’s important in the way that SSE addresses that, is that you’re not just addressing technicians, it’s the whole chain. It’s everybody is involved in this action. And you can break the link anywhere in there. I wanna get through the description of why that. Process went through ATTs head to go. We need to broaden the scope a little bit. We need to think about the full chain from the lowest entry worker just getting started to the career senior executive. Why chain them all together? Why put them in the same room together? Yeah. Why do you do that?  Dermot Kerrigan: Well, behavioral safety or behavioral base safety kind of got a bad rep because it was all about. If we could just [00:08:00] make those guys at the front line behave themselves,  Allen Hall: then everything’s fine,  Dermot Kerrigan: then everything’s fine.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Dermot Kerrigan: But actually that’s kind of a, the wrong way of thinking. It didn’t work. I, I think,  Allen Hall: yeah, it didn’t work.  Dermot Kerrigan: What the mess, the central message we’re trying to get across is that actually operational safety is not just the business of operational people. It’s everybody’s business.  Allen Hall: Right.  Dermot Kerrigan: You know? Um, and. Yeah, everybody has a role to p play in that, y

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda discuss Siemens Energy’s decision to keep their wind business despite pressure from hedge funds, with the CEO projecting profitability by 2026. They cover the company’s 21 megawatt offshore turbine now in testing and why it could be a game changer. Plus, Danish startup Quali Drone demonstrates thermal imaging of spinning blades at an offshore wind farm, and Alliant Energy moves forward with a 270 MW wind project in Wisconsin using next-generation Nordex turbines. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Alan Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon, and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the  Allen Hall: Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxon. Rosemary Burns is climbing the Himalayas this week, and our top story is Semen’s Energy is rejecting the sail of their wind business, which is a very interesting take because obviously Siemens CESA has struggled. Recently due to some quality issues a couple of years ago, and, and back in 2024 to 25, that fiscal year, they lost a little over 1 billion euros. But the CEO of Siemens energy says they’re gonna stick with the business and that they’re getting a lot of pressure, obviously, from hedge funds to do something with that business to, to raise the [00:01:00] valuations of Siemens energy. But, uh, the CEO is saying, uh, that. They’re not gonna spin it off and that would not solve any of the problems. And they’re, they’re going to, uh, remain with the technology, uh, for the time being. And they think right now that Siemens Gomesa will be profitable in 2026. That’s an interesting take, uh, Joel, because we haven’t seen a lot of sales onshore or offshore from Siemens lately.  Joel Saxum: I think they’re crazy to lose. I don’t wanna put this in US dollars ’cause it resonates with my mind more, but 1.36 billion euros is probably what, 1.8 million or 1.8. Billion dollars.  Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s, it’s about that. Yeah.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. So, so it’s compounding issues. We see this with a lot of the OEMs and blade manufacturers and stuff, right? They, they didn’t do any sales of their four x five x platform for like a year while they’re trying to reset the issues they had there. And now we know that they’re in the midst of some blade issues where they’re swapping blades at certain wind farms and those kind of things.[00:02:00] But when they went to basically say, Hey, we’re back in the market, restarting, uh, sales. Yolanda, have you heard from any of your blade network of people buying those turbines?  Yolanda Padron: No, and I think, I mean, we’ve seen with other OEMs when they try to go back into getting more sales, they focus a lot on making their current customers happy, and I’m not sure that I’ve seen that with the, this group. So it’s, it’s just a little bit of lose lose on both sides.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. And if you’re, if you’re trying to, if you’re having to go back and basically patch up relationships to make them happy. Uh, that four x five x was quite the flop, uh, I would say, uh, with the issues that it had. So, um, there’s, that’d be a lot of, a lot of, a lot of nice dinners and a lot of hand kissing and, and all kinds of stuff to make those relationships back to what they were. Allen Hall: But at the time, Joel, that turbine fit a specific set of the marketplace, they had basically complete control of that when the four x five [00:03:00] x. Was an option and and early on it did seem to have pretty wide adoption. They were making good progress and then the quality issues popped up. What have we seen since and more recently in terms of. The way that, uh, Siemens Ga Mesa has restructured their business. What have we heard?  Joel Saxum: Well, they, they leaned more and pointed more towards offshore, right? They wanted to be healthy in, they had offshore realm and make sales there. Um, and that portion, because it was a completely different turbine model, that portion went, went along well, but in the meantime, right, they fit that four x five x and when I say four x five x, of course, I mean four megawatt, five megawatt slot, right? And if you look at, uh, the models that are out there for the onshore side of things. That, that’s kind of how they all fit. There was like, you know, GE was in that two x and, and, uh, uh, you know, mid two X range investors had the two point ohs, and there’s more turbine models coming into that space. And in the US when you go above basically 500 foot [00:04:00] above ground level, right? So if your elevation is a thousand, once you hit 1500 for tip height on a turbine, you get into the next category of FAA, uh, airplane problems. So if you’re going to put in a. If you were gonna put in a four x or five x machine and you’re gonna have to deal with those problems anyways, why not put a five and a half, a six, a 6.8, which we’ve been seeing, right? So the GE Cypress at 6.8, um, we’re hearing of um, not necessarily the United States, but envision putting in some seven, uh, plus megawatt machines out there on shore. So I think that people are making the leap past. Two x three x, and they’re saying like, oh, we could do a four x or five x, but if we’re gonna do that, why don’t we just put a six x in? Allen Hall: Well, Siemens has set itself apart now with a 21 megawatt, uh, offshore turbine, which is in trials at the moment. That could be a real game changer, particularly because the amount of offshore wind that’ll happen around Europe. Does that then if you’re looking at the [00:05:00] order book for Siemens, when you saw a 21 Mega Hut turbine, that’s a lot of euros per turbine. Somebody’s projecting within Siemens, uh, that they’re gonna break even in 2026. I think the way that they do that, it has to be some really nice offshore sales. Isn’t that the pathway?  Joel Saxum: Yeah. You look at the megawatt class and what happened there, right? So what was it two years ago? Vestas? Chief said, we are not building anything past the 15 megawatt right now. So they have their, their V 2 36 15 megawatt dark drive model that they’re selling into the market, that they’re kind of like, this is the cap, like we’re working on this one now we’re gonna get this right. Which to be honest with you, that’s an approach that I like. Um, and then you have the ge So in this market, right, the, the big megawatt offshore ones for the Western OEMs, you have the GE 15 megawatt, Hayley IX, and GE. ISS not selling more of those right now. So you have Vestas sitting at 15, GE at 15, but not doing anymore. [00:06:00] And GE was looking at developing an 18, but they have recently said we are not doing the 18 anymore. So now from western OEMs, the only big dog offshore turbine there is, is a 21. And again, if you were now that now this is working out opposite inverse in their favor, if you were going to put a 15 in, it’s not that much of a stretch engineering wise to put a 21 in right When it comes to. The geotechnical investigations and how we need to make the foundations and the shipping and the this and the, that, 15 to 21, not that big of a deal, but 21 makes you that much, uh, more attractive, uh, offshore.  Allen Hall: Sure if fewer cables, fewer mono piles, everything gets a little bit simpler. Maybe that’s where Siemens sees the future. That would, to me, is the only slot where Siemens can really gain ground quickly. Onshore is still gonna be a battle. It always is. Offshore is a little more, uh, difficult space, obviously, just because it’s really [00:07:00] Chinese turbines offshore, big Chinese turbines, 25 plus megawatt is what we’re talking about coming outta China or something. European, 21 megawatt from Siemens.  Joel Saxum: Do the math right? That, uh, if, if you have, if you have won an offshore auction and you need to backfill into a megawatts or gigawatts of. Of demand for every three turbines that you would build at 15 or every four turbines you build at 15, you only need three at 21. Right? And you’re still a little bit above capacity. So the big, one of the big cost drivers we know offshore is cables. You hit it on the head when you’re like, cables, cables, cables, inter array cables are freaking expensive. They’re not only expensive to build and lay, they’re expensive to ensure, they’re expensive to maintain. There’s a lot of things here, so. When you talk about saving costs offshore, if you look at any of those cool models in the startup companies that are optimizing layouts and all these great things, a lot of [00:08:00] them are focusing on reducing cables because that’s a big, huge cost saver. Um, I, I think that’s, I mean, if I was building one and, and had the option right now, that’s where I would stare at offshore. Allen Hall: Does anybody know when that Siemens 21 megawatt machine, which is being evaluated at a test site right now, when that will wrap up testing, is it gonna be in the next couple of months?  Joel Saxum: I think it’s at Estro.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it is, but I don’t remember when it was started. It was sometime during the fall of last year, so it’s probably been operational three, four months at this point. Something like that.  Joel Saxum: If you trust Google, it says full commercial availability towards the end, uh, of 28.  Allen Hall: 28. Do you think that the, uh, that Siemens internally is trying to push that to the left on the schedule, bringing from 2028 back into maybe early 27? Remember, AR seven, uh, fo

Allen covers Equinor’s Hywind Tampen floating wind farm achieving an impressive 51.6% capacity factor in 2025. Plus nine nations commit to 100 GW of offshore wind at the North Sea Summit, Dominion Energy installs its first turbine tower off Virginia, Hawaii renews the Kaheawa Wind Farm lease for 25 years, and India improves its repowering policies. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! There’s a remarkable sight in the North Sea right now. Eleven wind turbines, each one floating on water like enormous ships, generating electricity in some of the roughest seas on Earth. Norwegian oil giant Equinor operates the Hywind Tampen floating wind farm, and the results from twenty twenty-five are nothing short of extraordinary. These floating giants achieved a capacity factor of fifty-one point six percent throughout the entire year. That means they produced power more than half the time, every single day, despite ocean storms and harsh conditions. The numbers tell the story. Four hundred twelve gigawatt hours of electricity, enough to power seventeen thousand homes. And perhaps most importantly, the wind farm reduced carbon emissions by more than two hundred thousand tons from nearby oil and gas fields. Production manager Arild Lithun said he was especially pleased that they achieved these results without any damage or incidents. Not a single one. But Norway’s success is just one chapter in a much larger story unfolding across the North Sea. Last week, nine countries gathered in Hamburg, Germany for the North Sea Summit. Belgium, Denmark, France, Britain, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and their host Germany came together with a shared purpose. They committed to building one hundred gigawatts of collaborative offshore wind projects and pledged to protect their energy infrastructure from sabotage by sharing security data and conducting stress tests on wind turbine components. Andrew Mitchell, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, explained why this matters now more than ever. Recent geopolitical events, particularly Russia’s weaponization of energy supplies during the Ukraine invasion, have sharpened rather than weakened the case for offshore wind. He said expanding offshore wind enhances long-term security while reducing exposure to volatile global fossil fuel markets. Mitchell added something that resonates across the entire industry. The more offshore wind capacity these countries build, the more often clean power sets wholesale electricity prices instead of natural gas. The result is lower bills, greater security, and long-term economic stability. Now let’s cross the Atlantic to Virginia Beach, where Dominion Energy reached a major milestone last week. They installed the first turbine tower at their massive offshore wind farm. It’s the first of one hundred seventy-six turbines that will stand twenty-seven miles off the Virginia coast. The eleven point two billion dollar project is already seventy percent complete and will generate two hundred ten million dollars in annual economic output. Meanwhile, halfway across the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii is doubling down on wind energy. The state just renewed the lease for the Kaheawa Wind Farm on Maui for another twenty-five years. Those twenty turbines have been generating electricity for two decades, powering seventeen thousand island homes each year. The new lease requires the operator to pay three hundred thousand dollars annually or three point five percent of gross revenue, whichever is higher. And here’s something smart: the state is requiring a thirty-three million dollar bond to ensure taxpayers never get stuck with the bill for removing those turbines when they’re finally decommissioned. Even India is accelerating its wind energy development. The Indian Wind Power Association welcomed major amendments to Tamil Nadu’s Repowering Policy last week. The Indian Wind Power Association thanked the government for addressing critical industry concerns. The changes make it significantly easier and cheaper to replace aging turbines with modern, more efficient ones. So from floating turbines in the North Sea to coastal giants off Virginia, from island power in Hawaii to policy improvements in India, the wind energy revolution is gaining momentum around the world. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 26th of January 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Industry Podcast.

Allen and Joel are joined by Mathieu Cōté from CanREA to preview the upcoming Operators Summit in Toronto. With many Canadian wind projects reaching 17-20 years old, the industry faces critical decisions about extending, repowering, or decommissioning assets. Register now! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” 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: Matt, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Well, the theme of this Year’s Operator Summit is coming of age and. There’s a lot of things happening in the renewable side up in Canada. What does that mean for Canadian renewable energy operators right now?  Mathieu Cōté: Well, we came up with coming of age because, um, the fleet in Canada is in a bit of a different space than it is in the States where, uh, right now we’ve got a lot of projects that are on the cusp of coming to their end of initial lifetime. Right. They’re in that. 17 to 20 year range. There’s some that are a little bit past, and so you, as an operator, you gotta be asking yourself, is this the time to extend this project? What do I have to do [00:01:00] if I need to extend? Um, or am I repowering, am I taking things down, putting them up? And I mean, there’s a lot of different variables there. Sometimes it’s just a re topping, sometimes it’s everything down to ground level and go again. Or it’s, maybe it’s a decommissioning and those decisions are on the cusp of being made in the operation space in Canada. So that’s, that’s a super important part of it. But the other side of it, and the reason we liked, uh, coming of age is from the industry perspective itself. We are no longer the new kid on the block, right? We are now a reliable, uh, professional industry that can deliver power when you need it. Uh, so that’s what we’re trying to, to convey with this coming of age. And, and we’ve got some really good speakers who are gonna talk about that, uh, from. The grid operator’s perspective saying, why is it that renewables are one of the first things they reach for now when they realize they need more power? Joel Saxum: I think it’s an interesting space and I think to, to [00:02:00]comment more deeply on that, right? That you guys are in that, you  Mathieu Cōté: know,  Joel Saxum: 2005, six you started installing a  Mathieu Cōté: lot of the, a lot of wind assets. There was a curve of, as it as every year you get more and more. Trickle and then becomes a flood quite quickly. Joel Saxum: Yeah. And, and, and you know, from, from the operation standpoint, we deal with some of the wind farms in Canada. We love working with, uh, the operators up there because they do exude that professionalism. They’re on top of their game. They know they’ve gotta maintain these things. Whereas in the states, we’ve been a little bit nascent sometimes and, oh, we got PTC coming so we don’t have to do these certain things. Little bit more cowboy. Yeah. Yeah. And up in Canada, they’re, they’re, they’ve been doing the right things for a long time. Um, and I think it’s a good, good model to follow, but you’re a hundred percent correct. We’re coming to that time when it’s like decision time to be made here. And I think we, in our, in our uh, kind of off air chat, you had mentioned that, you know, repower in Canada is. Pretty early stages. I  Mathieu Cōté: only know about  Joel Saxum: one,  Mathieu Cōté: to [00:03:00] be honest, and I try and keep track of these things,  Joel Saxum: but that’s coming down the pipeline,  Mathieu Cōté: right? So there’s gonna be more and more of these happening. And I mean, there are a lot of operators that have one foot on either side of the border, so some people have some operational experience on what steps you need to take, but it’s also from the regulatory side, like what is your grid operator gonna insist on? So on and so on. But, uh, so we’ve got some panels to talk about things like, one of my favorites is, uh, how much life is left in your machine? And that’s sort of a deeper dive from an engineering standpoint. Like what math do the engineers do to assess, is this foundation good to go for another 10 years? Is this tower gonna stand up to whatever? Should we replace the blades and all those components? We, we’ve got a foundation expert, uh, someone who does. Digital twin sort of things as well as, um, a panelist from, uh, Nordex, so the OEM sort of perspective as well, and how they assess how much [00:04:00] life is left in a machine. So like that’s the sort of panels that we’re trying to put together that we’re pretty excited about.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think that’s a good one too, because I know Alan and I we’re talking around the industry globally. A lot of it is around CMS. And when we say CMS, we’re not just talking drive train anymore, we’re talking everything you can in the turbine, right? So the, the concept of remaining useful life, r ul, that always comes up, where are we at with this, right? Because from a global perspective in Europe, they have, you know, in Spanish wind farms are all, a lot of ’em are at that 25 year mark. What are we doing here? So you guys are bringing that conversation to the Canadian market at this operator summit in Toronto here in February. It’s, it’s timely, right? Because it’s February and everybody’s getting ready for spring, so you got a little bit of time to come to the conference.  Mathieu Cōté: Well, and that’s one of the things that we actually used to do is show in April and we’ve moved it back after hearing feedback from our, from our audience that April’s almost too late, right? Like, if you’re doing your assessments for your [00:05:00] blades, it where? Where’s your manpower coming up? Coming from in the summertime? Those contracts are already signed. By the time you hit April, February, you’ve still got time. Your RFP might be out so you can meet all the proponents on site at once. It, it just makes a lot more sense for us to do it in February. Allen Hall: Well, there’s a wide range of technology in Canada in regards to wind to energy. That adds to the complexity where a lot of turbines, unlike the United States, are maybe even sub one megawatt, and with new turbines coming online, they’re gonna be in the five, six, maybe even seven megawatt range. That’s a huge dispersed. Industry to try to maintain massive range. Yeah. Right. And I, and, and I think one of the dilemmas about that is trying to find people who understand that tho all those different kinds of machines and the intricacies of each one of them and how to operate them more efficiently, which is where Canada is. Quite honestly. The, the thing [00:06:00] about that and the challenge for Canada Head, and this is why the conference is so important, is. If there’s someone in Canada that has the answer, as Joel and I have talked to a number of Canadian operators, you may not know them. I know it’s a smaller marketplace in general, but unless you’re talking to one another, you probably, uh, don’t realize there’s, there’s help within Canada. And these conferences really highlight that quite a bit. Wanna talk about some of the, sort of the interactions you guys create at the conference?  Mathieu Cōté: Yeah. Oh, well, it’s one of the things that can RIA tries to do is play that connector role, right? Like, we don’t know everything, but like you say, we know someone who knows something and we can put you in touch with all. I know a guy who knows a guy. Um, but we’re, we’re always able to, to, to connect those dots. And I mean, we, we do a lot of, uh. Things like working groups and uh, regional meetings. And, uh, we’ve even got, uh, different summits for different things. Getting a little bit outside of operations, but like we [00:07:00] have an Atlantic operators group that gathers together and has a chat just sometimes, usually there’s a focus topic, but then we have, oh, how do you guys deal with the storm that came through? Or that sort of thing, or what, what do you do for if you need a new blade or has anyone got a good vendor for this thing or that thing? Those sorts of things always happen in the margins. And I mean, the ops summit is the, the best one of those because it’s the entire Canadian industry that gets together. We’ve got folks from bc, we’ve got folks from Atlantic Canada, there’s gonna be people from Quebec, and there’s vendors from all those places as well. Right? So. It’s covering all your bases and it’s the one place that you can talk to everybody and meet everybody in like a 48 hour period.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think that if, you know, just doing a little bit of deep dive into the agenda and the program here, that’s one of the things that you guys are focusing on. Targeted networking. So morning breakfasts, evening receptions, there, you know, structured and informal, uh, opportunities to actually connect with the o and m [00:08:00] community. Um, one of them that you had mentioned was kind of, um. Hands-on demonstrations and, and for me, when, when I see these things, ’cause I’ve seen them kind of slightly not, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody do it perfectly well. I’m excited to see what you guys do. But you get, you get a group of people standing around, like you get people kind of standing around. Rubbing elbows going, like, what do you think about that? What is, does this, is this gonna work? And, and those to me are great, great conversations for networking and kind of figuring things out together. The collaboration part.  Mathieu Cōté: Absolutely. Uh, well on those two points, the, the n

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda cover major offshore wind developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, Ørsted’s Revolution Wind won a court victory allowing construction to resume after the Trump administration’s suspension. Meanwhile, the UK awarded contracts for 8.4 gigawatts of new offshore capacity in the largest auction in European history, with RWE securing nearly 7 gigawatts. Plus Canada’s Nova Scotia announces ambitious 40 gigawatt offshore wind plans, and the crew discusses the ongoing Denmark-Greenland tensions with the US administration. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Alan Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, along with Yolanda, Joel and Rosie. Boy, a lot of action in the US courts. And as you know, for weeks, American offshore wind has been holding its breath and a lot of people’s jobs are at stake right now. The Trump administration suspended, uh, five major projects on December 22nd, and still they’re still citing national security concerns. Billions of dollars are really in balance here. Construction vessels for most of these. Sites are just doing nothing at the minute, but the courts are stepping in and Sted won a [00:01:00] key victory when the federal judge allowed its revolution wind project off the coast of Rhode Island to resume construction immediately. So everybody’s excited there and it does sound like Osted is trying to finish that project as fast as they can. And Ecuador and Dominion Energy, which are two of the other bigger projects, are fighting similar battles. Ecuador is supposed to hear in the next couple of days as we’re recording. Uh, but the message is pretty clear from developers. They have invested too much to walk away, and if they get an opportunity to wrap these projects up quickly. They are going to do it now. Joel, before the show, we were talking about vineyard wind and vineyard. Wind was on hold, and I think it, it may not even be on hold right now, I have to go back and look. But when they were put on hold, uh, the question was, the turbines that were operating, were they able to continue operating? And the answer initially I thought was no. But it was yes, the, the turbines that were [00:02:00] producing power. We’re allowed to continue to produce powers. What was in the balance were the remaining turbines that were still being installed or, uh, being upgraded. So there’s, there’s a lot going on right now, but it does seem like, and back to your earlier point, Joel, before we start talking and maybe you can discuss this, we, there is an offshore wind farm called Block Island really closely all these other wind farms, and it’s been there for four or five years at this point. No one’s said anything about that wind farm.  Speaker: I think it’s been there, to be honest with you, since like 2016 or 17. It’s been there a long time. Is it that old? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we were talk, when we’ve been talking through and it gets lost in the shuffle and it shouldn’t, because that’s really the first offshore wind farm in the United States. We keep talking about all these big, you know, utility scale massive things, but that is a utility scale wind farm as well. There’s fi, correct me if I’m wrong, Yolanda, is it five turbos or six? It’s five. Their decent sized turbines are sitting on jackets. They’re just, uh, they’re, they’re only a couple miles offshore. They’re not way offshore. But throughout all of these issues that we’ve had, um, with [00:03:00] these injunctions and stopping construction and stopping this and reviewing permits and all these things, block Island has just been spinning, producing power, uh, for the locals there off the coast of Rhode Island. So we. What were our, the question was is, okay, all these other wind farms that are partially constructed, have they been spinning? Are they producing power? And my mind goes to this, um, as a risk reduction effort. I wonder if, uh, the cable, if the cable lay timelines were what they were. Right. So would you now, I guess as a risk reduction effort, and this seems really silly to have to think about this. If you have your offshore substation, was the, was the main export cable connected to some of these like revolution wind where they have the injunction right now? Was that export cable connected and were the inter array cables regularly connected to turbines and them coming online? Do, do, do, do, do. Like, it wasn’t like a COD, we turned the switch and we had to wait for all 62 turbines. Right. So to our [00:04:00] knowledge and, and, uh, please reach out to any of us on LinkedIn or an email or whatever to our knowledge. The turbines that are in production have still have been spinning. It’s the construction activities that have been stopped, but now. Hey, revolution wind is 90% complete and they’re back out and running, uh, on construction activities as of today. Speaker 2: It was in the last 48 hours. So this, this is a good sign because I think as the other wind farms go through the courts, they’re gonna essentially run through this, this same judge I that. Tends to happen because they have done all the research already. So you, you likely get the same outcome for all the other wind farms, although they have to go through the process. You can’t do like a class action, at least that’s doesn’t appear to be in play at the minute. Uh, they’re all gonna have to go through this little bit of a process. But what the judge is saying essentially is the concern from the Department of War, and then the Department of Interior is. [00:05:00] Make believe. I, I don’t wanna frame it. It’s not framed that way, the way it’s written. There’s a lot more legalistic terms about it. But it basically, they’re saying they tried to stop it before they didn’t get the result they wanted. The Trump administration didn’t get the result they wanted. So the Trump administration ramped it up by saying it was something that was classified in, in part of the Department of War. The judge isn’t buying it. So the, the, the early action. I think what we initially talked about this, everybody, I think the early feeling was they’re trying to stop it, but the fact that they’re trying to stop it just because, and just start pulling permits is not gonna stand outta the court. And when they want to come back and do it again, they’re not likely to win. If they would. Kept their ammunition dry and just from the beginning said it’s something classified as something defense related that Trump administration probably would’ve had a better shot at this. But now it just seems like everything’s just gonna lead down the pathway where all these projects get finished. Speaker: Yeah, I think that specific judge probably was listening to the [00:06:00] Uptime podcast last week for his research. Um, listen to, to our opinions that we talked about here, saying that this is kind of all bs. It’s not gonna fly. Uh, but what we’re sitting at here is like Revolution Wind was, had the injunction against it. Uh, empire Wind had an injunction again, but they were awaiting a similar ruling. So hopefully that’s actually supposed to go down today. That’s Wednesday. Uh, this is, so we’re recording this on Wednesday. Um, and then Dominion is, has, is suing as well, and their, uh, hearing is on Friday. In two, two days from now. And I would expect, I mean, it’s the same, same judge, same piece of papers, like it’s going to be the same result. Some numbers to throw at this thing. Now, just so the listeners know the impact of this, uh, dominion for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, they say that their pause in construction is costing them $5 million a day, and that is. That’s a pretty round number. It’s a conservative number to be honest with you. For officer operations, how many vessels and how much stuff is out there? That makes sense. Yep. [00:07:00] 5 million. So $5 million a day. And that’s one of the wind farms. Uh, coastal, Virginia Wind Farm is an $11 billion project. With, uh, it’s like 176 turbines. I think something to that, like it’s, it’s got enough power, it’s gonna have enough production out there to power up, like, uh, like 650,000 homes when it’s done. So there’s five projects suspended right now. I’m continuing with the numbers. Um, well, five, there’s four now. Revolution’s back running, right? So five and there’s four. Uh, four still stopped. And of those five is 28. Billion dollars in combined capital at risk, right? So you can understand why some of these companies are worried, right? They’re this is, this is not peanuts. Um, so you saw a little bump in like Ted stock in the markets when this, this, uh, revolution wind, uh, injunction was stopped. Uh, but. You also see that, uh, Moody’s is a credit [00:08:00] rating. They’ve lowered ORs, Ted’s um, rating from stable to negative, given that political risk.  Speaker 2: Well, if you haven’t been paying attention, wind energy O and m Australia 2026 is happening relatively soon. It’s gonna be February 17th and 18th. It’s gonna be at the Pullman Hotel downtown Melbourne. And we are all looking forward to it. The, the roster and the agenda is, is nearly assembled at this point. Uh, we have a, a couple of last minute speakers, but uh, I’m looking at the agenda and like, wow, if you work in o and m or even are around wind turbines, this is the place to be in Fe