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

Allen covers court victories allowing Empire Wind and Revolution Wind construction to resume, while Vineyard Wind joins the legal fight. In the UK, EnBW walks away from Mona and Morgan with a $1.4B write-off, even as KKR and RWE announce a $15B partnership for Norfolk Vanguard. Plus Ørsted’s leaked “Project Dragon” reveals the offshore giant is considering Chinese turbines, and Fortescue breaks ground on Australia’s Nullagine Wind Project using Nabrawind’s self-erecting tower technology. 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! Last week I told you about Equinor’s ultimatum. Resume construction by January sixteenth… or cancel Empire Wind forever. Well… the courts have spoken. Last Thursday, Judge Carl Nichols issued his ruling. Empire Wind can resume construction. The harm from stopping, he said, outweighs the government’s concerns. One day earlier, Ørsted won the same relief for Revolution Wind. And now Vineyard Wind has joined the fight in Massachusetts. Three projects. Three courtrooms. Two victories and one victory yet to come. Meanwhile in Britain… a different kind of drama. German utility EnBW announced Thursday it is walking away from two major UK projects. Mona and Morgan. Three gigawatts of potential capacity. The cost of leaving? One point four billion dollars in write-offs. Eight hundred forty million pounds already paid… gone. Rising costs. Lower electricity prices. Higher interest rates. Their partner, Jera Nex BP, says they still see good pathways forward. But EnBW has had enough. Yet in the very same week… Investment giant KKR and German utility RWE announced a fifteen billion dollar partnership. Norfolk Vanguard East and West. Three gigawatts. One hundred eighty-four turbines. Power for three million British homes. Big winners and losers. In the same market. In the same week. Danish media outlet Berlingske obtained a confidential report from Ørsted’s procurement department. The world’s largest offshore wind developer… is exploring whether to buy turbines from China. They call it Project Dragon. The plan covers twenty-twenty-six through twenty-twenty-eight. CEO Rasmus Errboe told reporters they continuously evaluate all technologies and suppliers. Quality. Technical capabilities. Commercial conditions. He did not deny the report. For years, European developers have resisted Chinese turbines. Fear of losing their industry to China… just like they lost solar manufacturing a decade ago. But Ørsted is under pressure. In Australia, Fortescue has broken ground on its first wind project in the Pilbara. The Nullagine Wind Project. One hundred thirty-three megawatts. Seventeen turbines. But here is what makes it special. Nabrawind’s self-erecting tower technology. Hub height of one hundred eighty-eight meters. A new global benchmark for onshore wind. No giant cranes required. Fortescue plans two to three gigawatts of renewable energy across the Pilbara by twenty-thirty. Wind. Solar. Batteries. To power their mining trucks. Their drills. Their processing plants. Last week we talked about Equinor’s deadline. About Ørsted losing one and a half million euros every single day. About billions in limbo. This week… the courts stepped in. Empire Wind resumes. Revolution Wind continues. Vineyard Wind fights on. All while the North Sea quietly crossed a milestone. One hundred one operational wind farms. Thirty gigawatts of clean power. More than any body of water on Earth. Some companies are walking away. Others are doubling down with fifteen billion dollar bets. The wind industry is evolving very quickly. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 19th of January 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen and Joel are joined by Pete Andrews, Managing Director at EchoBolt. They discuss the company’s new BoltWave inspection device, the shift from routine retightening to condition-based monitoring, and how ultrasonic technology helps operators manage blade stud and tower bolt integrity throughout the turbine lifecycle. 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. Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It’s a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it’s, yeah, really nice to be here.  Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah. Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who’s Pete? Give me Pete’s phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we’re here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00] You’re a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it’s a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today’s world.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we’re a uk, um, SME, there’s a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe. Yeah. But increasingly we’ve done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then. Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they’re static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it’s a real big efficiency boost for wind operators.  Joel Saxum: Well, you’re doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we’re gonna do all of this. It’s like, let’s work on the ones that actually need to be worked on. Let’s do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we’re looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems. So I know that you guys said you’re, you’re focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It’s you’re transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces. Like there’s so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, as as you said, that there’s really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on. The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts,  Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely.  Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people. If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor. So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don’t have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you’d have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there’s something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving. By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology  Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is. And I’m watching this go on. I’m like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we’re tighten 10% this year, and they’ll come back and see how it’s going. That’s a little insane, right, because you’re just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we’re wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago. You don’t need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I’ll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it’s shrunk, that probably means it’s not tensioned properly. That’s a huge advantage because you can’t physically see it. And I know I’ve seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that’s where equitable comes in because you’re actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big. Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that’s been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we’re based on a non-destructive testing technique. It’s an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it’s crack detection, people have time, they can be, it’s a very precision measurement. People have to be trained in the wind industry. We’re trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It’s a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn’t delivered on the, on the speed that’s needed to be efficient in wind. And that’s where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we’ve, that we’ve developed over the last. 18 months, let’s say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It’s through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it’s a bit like using the camera app on your phone. You know, you’re just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened. They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it’s sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They’re bolted joints.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right? Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn’t, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you’re in. Use are short of technicians. But we’re seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well. Right. You don’t need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. ’cause there’s a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that’s a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course. Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you’re getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that’s looking at it and you don’t have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things. They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that’s the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you’re making it happen.  Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it’s a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware. Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn’t really something

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss the ongoing federal halt on US offshore wind projects and mounting lawsuits from Equinor, Ørsted, and Dominion Energy. Plus Japan’s Goto floating wind farm begins commercial operation with eight Hitachi turbines on hybrid SPAR-type foundations, and Finnish investigators seize a vessel suspected of severing Baltic Sea cables. 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 striketape.com. And now your hosts, Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the  Allen Hall: Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Rosie Barnes, Joel Saxum, and Yolanda Padron. Many things on the docket this week. The, the big one is the five US offshore wind projects that are facing cancellation after the federal halt. And on December 22nd, as we all know, the US Department of Interior ordered construction halted on every offshore wind project in American waters. Uh, the recent given and still given is national security. Uh, developers see it way differently and they’ve been going to court to try to. Get this issue resolved. Ecuador, Ted and Dominion Energy have all filed lawsuits at this point. EOR says [00:01:00] a 90 day pause, which is what this is right now, will likely mean cancellation of their empire. Project Dominion is losing more than about $5 million a day, and everybody is watching to see what happens. Orton’s also talking about taking some action here. Uh, there’s a, a lot of moving pieces. Essentially, as it stands right now, a lot of lawsuits, nothing happening in the water, and now talks mostly Ecuador of just completely canceling the project. That will have big implications to US. Electricity along the east coast,  Joel Saxum: right Joel? Yeah. We need it. Right? So I, I hate to beat a dead horse here because we’ve been talking about this for so long. Um, but. We’ve got energy demand growth, right? We’re sitting at three to 5% year on year demand growth in the United States, uh, which is unprecedented. Since, since, and this is a crazy thing. Since air [00:02:00] conditioning was invented for residential homes, we have not had this much demand for electricity growth. We’ve been pretty flat for the last 20 years. Uh, so we need it, right? We wanna be the AI data center superpower. We wanna do all this stuff. So we need electrons. Uh, these electrons are literally the quickest thing gonna be on the grid. Uh, up and down that whole eastern seaboard, which is a massive population center, a massive industrial and commercial center of the United States, and now we’re cutting the cord on ’em. Uh, so it is going to drive prices up for all consumers. That is a reality, right? Um, so we, we hear campaign promises up and down the things about making life more affordable for the. Joe Schmo on the street. Um, this is gonna hurt that big time. We’re already seeing. I think it was, um, we, Alan, you and I talked with some people from PGM not too long ago, and they were saying 20 to 30% increases already early this year. Allen Hall: Yeah. The, the increases in electricity rates are not being driven by [00:03:00] offshore wind. You see that in the press constantly or in commentary. The reason electricity rates are going up along the east coast is because they’re paying for. The early shutdown of cold fire generation, older generation, uh, petroleum based, uh, dirty, what I’ll call dirty electricity generation, they’re paying to shut those sites down early. So that’s why your rates are going up. Putting offshore wind into the equation will help lower some of those costs, and onshore wind and solar will help lower those costs. But. The East Coast, especially the Northeast, doesn’t have a lot of that to speak of at the minute. So, uh, Joel, my question is right now, what do you think the likelihood is of the lawsuits that are being filed moving within the next 90 days? Joel Saxum: I mean, it takes a long time to put anything through any kind of, um, judicial process in the United States, however. There’s enough money, power [00:04:00] in play here that what I see this as is just like the last time we saw an injunction happen like this is, it’s more of a posturing move. I have the power to do this, or we have the power to do this. It’s, it’s, uh, the, it’s to get power. Over some kind of decision making process. So once, once people come to the table and start talking, I think these things will be let, let back loose. Uh, I don’t, I don’t think it will go all the way to, we need to have lawsuits and stuff. It’ll just be the threat of lawsuits. There’ll be a little bit of arbitration. They’ll go back to work. Um, the problem that I see. One of the problems, I guess, is if we get to the point where people, companies start saying like, you know what, we can’t do this anymore. Like, we can’t keep having these breaks, these pauses, these, this, you know, if it’s 90 days at $5 million a day, I mean that’s 450 million bucks. That’s crazy. But that nobody, nobody could absorb that.  Allen Hall: Will they leave the mono piles and transition pieces and some [00:05:00] towers just sitting in the water. That’s what  Joel Saxum: I was gonna say next is. What happens to all of the assets, all of the steel that’s in the water, all the, all the, if there’s cable, it lays if there’s been rock dumps or the companies liable to go pick them up. I don’t know what the contracts look like, right? I don’t know what the Boem leases say. I don’t know about those kind of things, but most of that stuff is because they go back to the oil field side of things, right? You have a 20 year lease at the end of your 20 year lease. You gotta clean it up. So if you put the things in the water, do they have 20 years to leave ’em out there before they plan on how they’re gonna pull ’em out or they gotta pull ’em out now? I don’t know.  Allen Hall: Would just bankrupt the LLCs that they formed to create these, uh, wind  Joel Saxum: farms. That’s how the oil field does it bankrupt. The LC move on. You’ve, you’ve more than likely paid a bond when you, you signed that lease and that, but that bond in like in a lot of. Things is not enough. Right. A bond to pull mono piles out would have to be, [00:06:00] I mean, you’re already at billions of dollars there, right? So, and, and if you look again to the oil and gas world, which is our nearest mirror to what happens here, when you go and decommission an old oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, you don’t pull the mono piles out. You go down to as close to the sea floor as you can get, and you just cut ’em off with a diamond saw. So it’s just like a big clamp that goes around. It’s like a big band saw. And you cut the foundations off and then pull the steel back to shore, so that can be done. Um, it’s not cheap.  Allen Hall: You know what I would, what I would do is the model piles are in, the towers are up, and depending on what’s on top of them, whether it’s in the cell or whatever, I would sure as hell put the red flashing lights on top and I would turn those things on and let ’em run just so everybody along the East coast would know that there could be power coming out of these things. But there’s not. So if you’re gonna look at their red flashy lights, you might as well get some, uh, megawatts out of them. That’s what I would do.  Joel Saxum: You’d have to wonder if the contracts, what, what, what it says in the contracts about. [00:07:00] Uh, utilization of this stuff, right? So if there’s something out there, does the FAA say, if you got a tower out there, it’s gotta have a light on it anyways. Allen Hall: It has to or a certain height. So where’s the power coming from? I don’t know. Solar panel. Solar panel. That’s what it have to be, right? Yeah. This is ridiculous. But this is the world we live in today.  Speaker 4: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Pullman on the park for Wind energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals. Because this industry needs solutions, not speeches, [00:08:00] Allen Hall: the dominoes keep falling. In American offshore wind, last year it was construction halts this year, contract delays. Massachusetts has pushed back the signing of two offshore wind agreements that were supposed to be done. Months ago, ocean Winds and Berroa won their bids in September of 2024. The paperwork is still unsigned more than a year later, a year and a half later. State officials blame Federal uncertainty. Uh, the new target is June and offshore wind for these delays are really becoming a huge problem, especially if you don’t have an offtake agreements signed, Joel.  Joel Saxum: I don’t see how the, I mean, again, I’m not sitting in those rooms. I’m not a fly on the wall there, but I don’t see how you can have something sitting out there for, it’s just say September 24. Yeah. Yeah. You’re at 18 months now, right? 17, 18 months without an agreement signed. Why is, why is Massachusetts doing this? What’s, what’s the, what’s the thing there? I mean, you’re an, [00:09:00] you are, uh, an ex Massachusetts, Massachusett

Allen covers the deepening US offshore wind crisis as Ørsted reports losing €1.5 million daily on American projects and Equinor sets a January 16 deadline to resume or cancel Empire Wind. Meanwhile, onshore wind thrives with Invenergy’s 2GW Oklahoma project and AES repowering Buffalo Gap in Texas with Vestas 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! Danish energy giant Ørsted said it is losing one and a half million euros on US offshore projects. Every. Single. Day. Norwegian company Equinor has drawn a line in the sand. January sixteenth. Resume construction on Empire Wind… or cancel the whole thing. 3.5 billion euros invested. Sixty percent complete. And now… a deadline. As we all know, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued stop-work orders on December twenty-second. Just before Christmas. A gift nobody wanted. Ørsted has filed complaints. First on Revolution Wind. Then Sunrise Wind. Court documents reveal the Danish company stands to lose more than 5 billion euros if forced to abandon both projects. Meanwhile… President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing America from sixty-six international organizations. Many focused on energy cooperation. On climate. Ole Rydahl Svensson of Green Power Denmark calls it a sad development. But not surprising. Ole says America is abdicating from renewable energy… in favor of energy forms of the past. The empty seats will be filled quickly, he predicts. By China. By Europe. I personally get asked every week by my European friends, is US onshore wind also under attack?? I think the answer is not yet. While offshore wind projects sit paralyzed by federal orders… Out in the Oklahoma Panhandle… something different is happening. Invenergy is planning a three hundred wind turbine wind farm. Two gigawatts of power. Enough electricity for eight hundred fifty thousand American homes. According to recent filings the turbines will be supplied by GE Vernova. Invenergy already operates wind farms in ten Oklahoma counties. They’ve already built the largest single-phase wind park in North America outside of Oklahoma City. Four billion dollars of investment. Five hundred construction jobs. Thirty permanent positions. No stop-work orders. No court battles. No international incidents. And down near Abilene Texas, AES is repowering its Buffalo Gap wind farm – the existing 282 turbines will be replaced with 117 new Vestas V150 4.5MW turbines. $94 million in tax revenue for local counties and schools over its lifetime. It will also create 300 jobs during peak construction and 17 long-term operations jobs. So while the US oceans remain off-limits… While billions evaporate in legal fees and idle vessels… The wind industry continues to move forward. And that’s the state of the wind industry for January 12, 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Allen and Joel are joined by Nathan Davies from Lloyd Warwick to discuss the world of wind energy insurance. Topics include market cycles, the risks of insuring larger turbines, how critical spares can reduce downtime and costs, why lightning claims often end up with insurers rather than OEMs, and how AI may transform claims data analysis. 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: Nathan, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So you are, you’re our link to the insurance world, Nathan, and there’s been so many changes over the past 12, 24 months, uh, not just in the United States but worldwide. Before we get too deep into any one subject, can you just give us a top level like, Hey, this is what’s happening in the insurance world that we need to know. So there’s  Nathan Davies: obviously a lot of scope, a lot of development, um, in the wind world. Um, you know, there’s the race to scale. Um, and from an insurance perspective, I think everybody’s pretty tentative about where that’s going. Um. You know, the, the theory that are we trying to [00:01:00] run before we can walk? Um, what’s gonna happen when these things inevitably go wrong? Uh, and what are the costs gonna be that are associated with that? ’cause, you know, at the moment we are used to, to claims on turbines that are circa five megawatts. But when we start seeing 15 megawatt turbines falling over. Yeah, it’s, it’s not gonna be a good day at the office. So, um, in the insurance world, that’s the big concern. Certainly from a win perspective at least.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think it’s, it’s a valid, uh, I don’t know, valid bad, dream. Valid, valid risk to be worried about. Well, just simply because of like the, the way, uh, so I’ve been following or been a part of the, that side of the industry for a little while here the last five, six years. Um. You’ve seen The insurance world is young in renewables, to be honest with you. Right. Compared to a lot of other places that like say the Lord Lloyd’s market, they’ve been writing insurance for hundreds of years on certain [00:02:00] things that have, like, we kind of know, we know what the risks are. We, and if it develops something new, it’s not crazily new, but renewables and in wind in specific haven’t been around that long. And the early stuff was like, like you said, right? If a one megawatt turbine goes down, like. That sucks. Yeah. For everybody, right? But it’s not the end of the world. We can, we can make this thing happen. You’re talking, you know, you may have a, you know, your million, million and a half dollars here, $2 million here for a complete failure. And then the business interruption costs as a, you know, with a one megawatt producing machine isn’t, again, it’s not awesome, but it’s not like it, uh, it doesn’t break the books. Right. But then when we’re talking 3, 4, 5, 6. Seven megawatts. We just saw Siemens cesa sell the first of their seven megawatt onshore platforms the other day. Um, that is kind of changing the game and heightening the risk and makes things a little bit more worrisome, especially in light of, I mean, as we scaled just the last five, [00:03:00] 10 years, the amount of. Failures that have been happening. So if you look at that and you start expanding it, that, that, that hockey stick starts to grow. Nathan Davies: Yeah, yeah, of course. And you know, we, we all know that these things sort of happen in cycles, right? It’s, you go, I mean, in, in the insurance world, we go through soft markets. We go through hard markets, um, you know, deductibles come up, the, the clauses, the restrictions, all those things get tighter. Claims reduce. Um, and then you get sort of disruptors come into the market and they start bringing in, you know, challenging rates and they start challenging the big players on deductibles and preferential rates and stuff like that. And, and then you get a softening of the market, um, and then you start seeing the claims around up again. But when you twin that with the rate of development that we see in the renewables worlds, it’s, it’s fraught for all sorts of. Weird and wonderful things happening, and most of them are quite expensive.  Joel Saxum: Where in that cycle are we, in [00:04:00] your opinion right now? So we, like when I first came into the market and I started dealing with insurance, it was very, we kept hearing hardening, market hardening, market hardening market. But not too long ago, I heard from someone else that was like, Hey, the market’s actually getting kind of soft right now. What are your thoughts on that? And, and or may, and maybe we let, let’s precursor that there’s a lot of people that are listening right now that don’t know the difference. What is a hard market? What is a soft market? Can you give us that first?  Nathan Davies: When you’re going through a soft market, it’s, it’s a period where they’ve either been, um, a limited volume of claims or the claim values have been quite small. Um, so, you know, everybody gets. It’s almost like becoming complacent with it, right? It’s like, oh, you know, things are going pretty well. We’re having it. It looks like the operators, it looks like the maintainers are, are doing a pretty good job and they know all of the issues that are gonna be working through in the lifetime of these products. So for the next however many years, we can anticipate that things are gonna gonna go pretty well. But as you see those [00:05:00] deductibles come down, you start getting more of the attritional claims, like the smaller values, um, the smaller downtime periods, all that sort of thing, start coming in as claims. And all of a sudden insurers are like, well, hang on a second. All of a sudden we’ve got loads and loads of claims coming in. Um. All of the premium that we were taking as being bled dry by, by these, these attritional claim. Um, and then you get like a big claim coming. You get a major issue come through, whether it’s, you know, a, a serial issue with a gearbox or a generator or a specific blade manufacturer, and all of a sudden the market starts to change. Um, and insurers are like, well, hang on a second. We’ve got a major problem on our hands here. We’re starting to see more of this, this specific piece of technology being rolled out, um, worldwide. Um, we are in for a lot of potential claims on this specific matter in the future, and therefore we need to protect ourselves. And the way that insurers do that is by [00:06:00] increasing or deductibles, um, increasing their premiums, all that sort of thing. So it’s basically that. Uh, raises the threshold at which a claim can be presented and therefore minimizes the, the outlay for insurers. So that’s sort of this, this cycle that we see. Um, I mean, I can’t, I’ve, I’ve only been in loss adjusting for six years, so I can’t say that I’ve seen, you know, um, multiple cycles. I’ve, I’m probably at the end of my first cycle from a hardening to a softening market. Um. But also, again, I’m not in the underwriting side of things. I’m on the claims side of things, so I own, I’m only seeing it when it’s gone wrong. I don’t know about everything else that the insurance market sees.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, the, the softening part, I think as well from a macro perspective, when there’s a softening market, it tends to bring in more capital. Right. You start to see more, more and more companies coming in saying, Hey, I’ve got, [00:07:00] and when I say companies, I mean other capital holders to beat for insurance, right? Like these, the big ones you see, the big Swiss and German guys come in and going, like, I got, I got $500 million I’ll throw into renewables. It seems like to be a good, pretty good bet right now. And then the market starts to change and then they go, uh, oops. Yeah.  Nathan Davies: And that’s it. You know, you’ve got the, the StoreWatch of the renewable insurance market like your G cubes and, and companies like that who’ve been in the game for a very long time. They’ve got a lot of experience. They’ve been burned. Um, they know what they want to touch and what they don’t want to touch. And then you get. Renewables, everybody wants to be involved. It covers their ESG targets. It’s, it’s a good look to move away from, you know, your, your oil and your coal and all the rest of it. So, of course, companies are gonna come into it. Um, and if they’re not experienced.  Allen Hall: They will get banned. How much reliance do operators have at the moment on insurance? Because it does seem like, uh, Joel and I talk [00:08:00]to a lot of operators that insurance is part of their annual revenue. They depend upon getting paid a certain amount, which then opens up the door to how sort of nitpicky I’ll describe it as the claim. They’ll file. Are you seeing more and more of that as, uh, some of the operators are struggling for cash flow, that there are going after more kind of questionable claims? Um, I think it depends on  Nathan Davies: the size of the operator. So you’ve, you’ve obviously got your, your big players, you’ve got your alls and your rws and all of those sort of guys who, the way that they manage their insurance, they’ve probably got, you know, special purpose vehicles. They’ve got, um, sites or clusters of sites that they manage finances independently. They don’t just have the one big or pot. It’s, it’s, it’s managed sort of subdivisions. Um. Those, those guys, we don’t typically tend to see like a big push for a [00:09:00] paymen

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda examine TPI Composites’ Chapter 11 proceedings, including the Oaktree Capital secured debt controversy and Vestas’ acquisition of two Mexican factories. With remaining assets heading to auction in January, they discuss what operators should consider as blade supply uncertainty grows. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 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. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy  Allen Hall: Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxum. Rosemary Barnes is on holiday. We’re here to talk about the TPI composites, uh, bankruptcy hearings, and there’s been so much happening there behind the scenes. It’s hard to keep track of, but we’ve done a deep dive and wanted to give everybody at least a highlight of what has happened over the last couple of months. So, uh, if you do own vessels or GE turbines, you understand what the situation is. As we all know, TPI composites, gee, was the world’s largest independent of wind blade manufacturing. Uh, they [00:01:00] were, it, they built blades for renova, Vestas, Nordex. They built blades for almost everybody, uh, names that basically power the global energy transition. And then, uh, if, and a lot of people don’t know this, but back in December of 2023, uh, TPI struck a deal that is drawing some fire. Right now, TPI swapped $436 million in preferred stock for. $393 million in secure debt held by Oak Tree Capital and by August of last year, just a couple of months ago, TPI filed for Chapter 11. Now the Blade Makers assets are being carved up and sold, and two of wind energy’s biggest players are stepping in to keep production running while the bankruptcy plays out. Now, Joel and Yolanda, I, I think the bankruptcy of. TPI sort of came to the industry as a little bit of a shock. Obviously [00:02:00] the, the price had fallen quite a bit. Uh, if you’ve watched the stock price of TPI composites had been dropping for a while and didn’t have a lot of of market value. However, uh, GE and Vestas both have manufacturing facilities basically with uh, TPI composites and, and needs them to produce those blades. So the filing of the bankruptcy, I’m sure was a nervous point for Vestus and GE being really the, the two main ones. Joel Saxum: Well, I think we talked about this a little bit off air. Is it, it shouldn’t just be Vestus and GE nervous about this now. It should be every operator that’s in either in development or still has blades under warranty. Uh, so, and this is a not a US problem, this is a global problem. ’cause TPI is a global company that serves, uh, global industry all over the place, right? We know that a large percentage of their throughput was GE and Vestas, but also Siemens ESAs in there, you name it, right? The, any major operator’s gonna have some blades built [00:03:00] by TPI or op major, OEM. So. There isn’t gonna be much of a, uh, dark corner of the wind industry that this issue doesn’t touch. So I think they, the, one of the issues here is, um, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve heard about some issues going on with TPI, but it was almost like a, ah, they’re not, they’ll, they’ll be okay. They, so, so something will happen. I mean, Yolanda, you had said. What was it that you said ear earlier? Like, uh, the kind of the, the, the feeling about it.  Yolanda Padron: They’ll take care of it. You know, OEMs will take care of it and we’ll be fine.  Joel Saxum: Someone’s gonna support this thing.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I, I think teams, you’re, you’re definitely right. Teams really do need to at least think of a, of a plan B or a plan C to have when the dust settles so you’re not scrambling.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And it hasn’t really played out that way. Uh, Vestas has stepped in a little bit and GE has stepped in. Not in terms of acquiring any of the major assets, but I think the first question is what is Oaktree Capital’s, [00:04:00] uh, role in all this? And that is being played out right now in front of the bankruptcy court. Uh, so when you go to bankruptcy, there’s obviously a lot of oversight that happens there, uh, and. When TPI composites entered bankruptcy, the accreditors committee had a bunch of questions about that transaction. Uh, they pointed to a December, 2023 refin refinancing deal with Oaktree and in which creditors were really suspicious of basically saying that TPI was already insolvent in 2023 and Oaktree exchanged equity for secure debt jumping ahead of everybody else in line to get paid. So because they Oaktree has secured debt, they’re first in line to get paid. If, uh, weather Guard was involved selling parts to TPI, which thank goodness we weren’t, we would be unsecured. They wouldn’t have to pay us. So Oaktree would get paid first and everybody else is unsecured, gets paid [00:05:00] later. Uh, that’s okay. I mean, that’s the way they, uh, they structured it. But this has led to a problem, right? So that oak tree. Uh, was supposed to release about $20 million in funding to keep the factories open, and that, that happened just a couple of weeks ago, and Oaktree refused to do it. So the amount of cash flow to keep the factories open was a real issue. TPI was in front of the court saying, we’re in trouble. We’re gonna become insolvent. We don’t have cash flow to keep the doors open. So the blade factories nearly shut down a couple of weeks ago. However, there was a, the settlement, uh, just after that, uh, in regards to Oaktree about when the payouts happen, what Oaktree will receive, and which basically it’s, most of whatever’s gonna happen here. So whatever, uh, TPI decides to sell or can sell, Oaktree is gonna be the recipient of those funds for most of it. I think the  Joel Saxum: difficult thing here for. The [00:06:00] general listener, me included, is understanding that this is a very complicated legal process that’s governed and it’s global, right? So it’s governed in certain court systems in different places. And because there is also the idea of like say in the, in the United States, the SEC Securities Exchanges Commission, that kind of regulates these. Publicly traded companies. There’s a lot of lights and there’s a lot of lawyers and there’s a lot of jargon involved in this thing. And, but basically what what we’re saying is, is the way the process works when you have a, uh, a bankruptcy and insolvency, if a company has debt to certain people, there may be a list of a hundred people. There may be a list of two, doesn’t matter. There’s certain classes of debt, right? And Oaktree has secured debt, which means. If they get paid first, if there’s anything, right? If this bankruptcy goes and, and gets, sell this, sell that, sell this, whatever’s left, goes to the secured debt and then it goes to unsecured debt. And [00:07:00] there’s sometimes there can be different classes of unsecured debt as well. And, but if there’s not, some of it just goes by like date or value or everybody gets a percentage, it just kind of all depends on how it works out in the specific court system that the stuff takes care of. But that person. That is the top. Um, in this case, Oaktree Capital, right? Based out of la but offices all over the world, they got about $200 billion in real estate equity and debt assets or, uh, I guess valuation. I wouldn’t say assets. Um, they are the debtor in possession, so they’re the one that’s kind of like top of the heap. They’re kind of controlling how the. The restructuring and or sale goes alongside the court system.  Allen Hall: And the trouble is, is that when you have unsecured and secured debt, everybody that’s unsecured wants to get paid. So any material supplier that has been for in selling product to TPI over the years [00:08:00] usually has a 30, 60, 90, maybe 120 days of, of after they deliver the product to they get paid. In that timeframe, if bankruptcy happens, all that product that’s sitting on the floor at TPI, you sort of lost it. You know, you can’t get it back and you’re not gonna get paid for it for if, if, if ever, what do you do? And so you start, you know, you start filing claims, but those, those claims most likely will never get paid. Or if they will, they’re going to get pennies on the dollar.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I would imagine like, so, you know, when we, when we sit here and say from the weather guard hat, right? We put a. They go to a client, net 15, net 30, we expect to get paid in that amount of time. That’s kind of how our, basically US forwarding credit to someone else. That’s how it works. And if you work within the wind industry, you know that the OEMs, because they are the OEMs, they have a heavier hand. Sometimes they’re net 90, net one 20. Um, once they, once they’re cool with your invoice. So you could see that some of these people that have, [00:09:00] uh, and TPI falls within that OEM category, right? Um, you can see that they more than likely will have had longer, more favorable terms for themselves with some of these sub-suppliers. And the sub-suppliers are, think about TPI blades. It is composites, it is fabric, it’s resins, it’s all of those supply companies. Um, and you know, there may be, uh, some other. Dead in there that you’re not, we’re not sure of. We saw some stuff with some OEMs, maybe they have some exchange agreements you paid up front for some blades or something of that sort. You didn’t get ’em. I don’t know. But there is also, and this is the

Allen covers the Trump administration’s suspension of five East Coast offshore wind leases on national security grounds, and the wave of lawsuits from developers like Equinor and Ørsted calling the reasoning pretextual. Plus Bill Gates-backed startup Airloom showcases its low-profile turbine design at CES 2026, and Brazil opens consultation on curtailment compensation for renewables. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Five major offshore wind projects sit idle today. Billions of dollars in equipment. Thousands of workers. All waiting. President Trump has made no secret of his feelings about wind power. He has called offshore wind a scam. He has said these projects cost too much. He has compared them unfavorably to natural gas. Big ugly windmills, he calls them. His administration has moved aggressively to stop them. First came executive orders suspending federal approvals. Then stop-work orders on projects already under construction. In December, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management took the boldest step yet. It suspended the federal leases for five East Coast projects. The reason given: national security risks identified by the Department of War in recently classified reports. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum explained that wind turbine blade movement can interfere with radar systems. He pointed to vulnerabilities created by large-scale projects near population centers. The companies building these projects see it differently. Empire Wind called the reasoning hollow and pretextual. In court filings, the company pointed to statements from the Secretary of Interior and the White House. The real motivation, they argued, relates to the administration’s opposition to offshore wind energy. Not national security. Politics. These are not small projects. Empire Wind is sixty percent complete. Four billion dollars invested. Nearly four thousand workers employed during construction. When finished, it would power half a million New York homes. Its parent company, Norwegian energy giant Equinor, says it has coordinated closely with federal officials on national security reviews since twenty-seventeen. It has complied with every requirement. Revolution Wind is eighty-seven percent finished. A five billion dollar venture between Danish company Ørsted and Global Infrastructure Partners. The project went through more than nine years of federal review before approval in twenty-twenty-three. National security considerations were comprehensively addressed, the company says. Workers sat waiting on the water when construction was halted in August. A federal judge allowed them to resume in September. Now they’re stopped again. Both companies warn that the ninety-day suspension will likely result in cancellation. Offshore wind construction depends on highly choreographed specialized vessels. Complex sequencing. Narrow weather windows. You cannot simply pause and restart. Dominion Energy has also filed suit over its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. The company calls the suspension arbitrary and capricious. The legal battles are piling up. In December, a federal judge in Massachusetts declared an earlier stop-work order illegal. Seventeen states had sued. New York Attorney General Letitia James led the coalition. As New Yorkers face rising energy costs, she said, we need more energy sources, not fewer. Wind energy is good for our environment, our economy, and our communities. She called the administration’s actions a reckless and unlawful crusade against clean energy. Four East Coast governors issued a joint statement. New York’s Kathy Hochul. Massachusetts’ Maura Healey. Connecticut’s Ned Lamont. Rhode Island’s Daniel McKee. Coastal states are working hard to build more energy, they said. These projects have created thousands of jobs. They have injected billions in economic activity into our communities. The National Ocean Industries Association is calling for an end to the pause. Offshore wind improves national security, says president Erik Milito. It shifts economic, infrastructure, and geopolitical advantages to the United States. The Interior Department has declined to comment on the lawsuits. Meanwhile, at CES twenty-twenty-six in Las Vegas, a different kind of wind power is making news. A startup called Airloom is showcasing a radical new turbine design. Backed by Bill Gates. No towering blades reaching for the sky. Instead, a low-profile system about sixty-six to ninety-eight feet high. Picture a loop of adjustable wings traveling along a track. More roller coaster than windmill. The company claims forty percent less material. Forty-seven percent lower cost. Eighty-five percent faster deployment. They say projects can be built in under a year instead of five. And unlike traditional turbines, these can go places conventional wind farms cannot. Remote islands. Mountainous terrain. Near airports. Even military bases. Places where spinning blades would be impractical. The company broke ground on a pilot site last June. Commercial demonstrations are planned for twenty-twenty-seven. Down in Brazil, the government is tackling a different wind energy challenge. What happens when you generate more power than the grid can handle? Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy has opened a public consultation. The question: how should wind and solar generators be compensated when their output gets curtailed? The government wants to balance legal certainty for investors against excessive costs for electricity consumers. Stakeholders have until January sixteenth to weigh in. So there you have it. The near future of US offshore wind will be decided in court rooms over the next few weeks. The curtailment of Brazilian renewables will be bandied about in January. And a Bill Gates supported wind company is going to try it’s hand at power remote locations. I hope you had new year’s celebration. 2026 is going to be an interesting ride. And that’s the wind energy news for the 5th of January, 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen and Joel are joined by Jeremy Heinks of CICNDT to discuss the critical need for pre-installation blade inspections, especially as safe-harbored blades from years past are rushed into service. They cover advanced NDT technologies including robotic CT scanning, blade bolt inspection for cracking issues, and how operators can extend turbine life beyond the typical 10-year repower cycle. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Jeremy, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Well, the recent changes in the IRA bill are. Pushing a lot of projects forward very quickly at the moment, and as we’re learning, there’s a number of safe harbor blades sitting in yards and a rush to manufacture blades to get them up and meet the, uh, treasury department’s criteria for, for being started, whatever that means. At the moment, I think we’re gonna see a big question about the quality of the blades, and it seems to me. The cheapest time to quickly [00:01:00] look at your blaze before you start to hang them is while they’re still on the ground. And to get some n DT experience out there to make sure that what you’re hanging is appropriate. Are you starting to see that push quite yet? No, not not at  Jeremy Heinks: the level we’d like to see it. Um, as far as getting the inspections in, yeah, we have been seeing the push to get the, get these blades out. Uh, but, uh, the, the, the few that we have been able to get our eyes on aren’t looking good. The quality definitely down. And we’ve just had a customer site come back with some, some findings that were surprising for a brand new blade that hasn’t been the up tower yet and in use. So, um, it is much easier for us to get the, uh, technology and the personnel to a blade that’s on the ground. It’s cheaper, it’s quicker. We can go through many, many more blades, uh, with inspections. Uh, it’s just access is just easier. Always comes down to access.  Joel Saxum: That customer that you had there, like what was their [00:02:00]driver? Right? Did they feel the pain at some point in time? Did they, did they have suspicions of something not right? New factory? Like, I don’t know. Why would some, why is someone picking that over someone? Not because like you said, overwhelmingly. The industry doesn’t really do this. You know, even just getting visual inspections of blades on the ground before they get hung is tough sometimes with construction schedules and all these different things, moving parts. So you had someone that actually said, Hey, we want to NDT these blades. What was their driver behind that?  Jeremy Heinks: So we, uh, we had done a previous, uh, route of inspections on some older ative of theirs that were,  Speaker 5: um,  Jeremy Heinks: getting. Kinda along in the tooth, if you will. Uh, so they’ve added some experience. They saw what we could bring to the table as far as results and, and, and information and data on those blades. Uh, and it all turned out to be, um, pretty reliable. So, um, you know, we educated them on, you know, if you have new blades coming in or even use the blades coming in for replacement, that it’s not a bad idea to get at least a, a sample it. And, uh, [00:03:00] basically that’s what they call us in to do. They had some brand new blades come in. For some new turbines they’re putting up. And, uh, they wanted the sampling. We did a sampling and the sample showed that, uh, they have an issue of these, these brand new blades.  Joel Saxum: So, okay, so what happens then? Right? Because I’ve been a part of some of these factory audits and stuff, and when you catch these things in the factory, you’re like, Hey, where we got these 30 defects? And then the factory goes back against their form, their form, you know, their forms and they go, okay, material checklist is a, we’ll fix 24 of ’em. The other six are on you or whatever that may be. What happens when you find these things in the field at a construction site right? Then does that kick off a battle between the, the new operator and that OEM or, or what’s the action there? Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, so we’ve been on the OEM side and been through what you just explained, um, multiple times and helped a bunch of the OEMs on that stuff, that stuff. But unfortunately, when you’re in the field and you find the same thing, it’s, it’s a whole different ball game. Um, they typically. We won’t see any of that. We don’t, we won’t be able to [00:04:00] see what the OEM actually does unless we have informa, you know, information or channels that, that are a little bit different, uh, than normal to, uh, get that information. So, um, but yeah, so we, we’ll give this information over to the customer. Uh, they’ll go to their supplier and then that’ll turn into a. To a dance and, uh, where everybody’s trying to pass the buck, basically, right? So, um, unfortunately that’s the way it’s been. We will see how this one turns out. It, it all depends on, on the relationship between that OEM and the customer and the end user.  Joel Saxum: So, so this is my, my last question about this and, and then I want to, of course, jump topics we have a lot of talk about here today. But the question being, okay, so say they do repairs. Is it then a good idea to bring you guys back in after those repairs are done to say NDT? Everything looks good here. Um, basically clear to fly.  Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. [00:05:00] So, uh, post inspection on repairs is always a good idea. Um, the aviation side is, it’s commonplace to, uh, post in inspect repair. So yeah, definitely, uh, we’d wanna come back. Um, you know, and that’s something we’re working on too in-house as a, uh, working on a new training. Syllabus to where we can give some of the basic NDT tools to, uh, end users so that if a repair company would come in, they would be able to have their technicians do a quick, you know, quick test. Uh, it’s what we used to call like an operator level inspection. And then if they saw some of the stuff we trained ’em to that we could come back and, and bring in a level three or a level two and look at their information and then maybe do a reinspection if they thought they saw something that was bad. Allen Hall 2025: Joel, you and I had discussed a couple of months ago with an operator in the United States and the Midwest that was gonna be building a repowering, a wind farm with turbines, uh, that were a couple of years old. Remember that discussion about what version of [00:06:00] the blade are those? And it was an early version. I was surprised how long those blades had been sitting in the yard, and we said, well, it’s gonna have a B and C problem. You need to get somebody out there to inspect those blades before you hang them. That’s the perfect case for NDT to get out there and look because it wasn’t like every blade had a serial defect. It was just kind of a random thing that was happening. Do you remember that situation?  Joel Saxum: Yeah, and it was really interesting too because you know, we’re on like that specific blade. We’re on like version nine of it out in the field right now. But since I think those were like in 20 19, 20 20, they had been safe harbored from they, those blades have the advantage of now having 3, 4, 5, 6 years of. History within the market of all of the issues that pop up. So we were able to tell that operator, Hey, since these things haven’t flown yet, we know it’s this, this, this, and this. You should have NDT come out here and do this. You should do this. This basically preemptive repair, this proactive measure before you fly these [00:07:00] things. Um, and I think what we see right now, Alan, like you said, just to open the episode with IRA bill changes and. And these new legislation coming up, there’s a lot of stuff coming out of Safe Harbor that’s gonna get flown.  Allen Hall 2025: Oh, it’s gonna have a huge, uh, amount of blades that have been sitting there for a couple of years. And, but if you, the operator haven’t used those blades or don’t know the service history of those blades, it’s kind of a mystery and you better be calling other operators that are using them. But ultimately, when it gets down to it, before you hang those blades, and I know everybody’s in a rush to hang blades. You better take a look at ’em with NDT, especially if there are known issues with those blades. And the the problem is you can’t just do a walk down, which is what I think a lot of operators are doing right now. Send a technician down to make a look. Make sure the blade’s all in one piece, like I guess that’s where they’re at. Or we’ll walk inside and kick the tires and make sure all the bond lines are there. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and particularly if you know there’s a source of problem on a particular [00:08:00] blade, you can’t see it. It can be buried deep inside. How are you gonna know without having somebody with NDT experience? Joel Saxum: This is the interesting thing too, here with that specific case that that developer will call ’em. They said, I talked with the OEM. They said there’s nothing wrong with these blades. And they like, that was like, they’re like, they’re like, yeah, we checked with them. They said, there’s no issues. I said, you must have been talking to a sales guy because anybody from that engineering team is gonna tell you that. Or maybe they don’t want to, right? They, of course they don’t want to come clean with this, but that’s why we, that’s why we have the, like the uptime network an

Allen, Joel, and Rosemary break down the Trump administration’s sudden halt of five major offshore wind projects, including Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and parts of Vineyard Wind, over national security claims the hosts find questionable. They also cover the FCC’s ban on new DJI drone imports and what operators should do now, plus Fraunhofer’s latest wind research featured in PES Wind Magazine. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 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  Allen Hall: Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, and I’m here with. Rosemary Barnes in Australia and Joel Saxon is down in Austin, Texas. Yolanda Padron is on holiday, and well, there’s been a lot happening in the past 24 hours as we’re recording this today. If you thought the battle over offshore wind was over based on some recent court cases, well think again. The Trump administration just dropped the hammer on five major offshore wind projects. Exciting. National security concerns. The Secretary of the Interior, Doug Bergham announced. The immediate pause affecting projects from Ted Eor, CIP and Dominion Energy. So Coastal [00:01:00] Virginia, offshore wind down in Virginia, right? Which is the one we thought was never gonna be touched. Uh, the Department of War claims classified reports show these giant turbines create radar interference that could blind America’s defenses. Half of vineyard winds, turbines are already up and running, producing power, by the way. Uh, and. I guess they, it sounds like from what I can see in more recent news articles that they turn the power off. They just shut the turbines off even though those turbines are fully functioning and delivering power to shore. Uh, so now the question is what happens? Where does this go? And I know Osted is royally upset about it, and Eor obviously along with them, why not? But the whole Denmark us, uh, relationship is going nuclear right now.  Joel Saxum: I think here’s a, here’s a technical thing that a lot of people might not know. If you’re in the wind industry in the United States, you may know this. There’s a a few sites in the northern corner of Colorado that are right next to Nebraska, [00:02:00] and that is where there is a strategic military installations of subsurface, basically rocket launches and. And in that entire area, there is heavy radar presence to be able to make sure that we’re watching over these things and there are turbines hundreds of meters away from these launch sites at like, I’ve driven past them. Right? So that is a te to me, the, the radar argument is a technical mute point. Um, Alan, you and I have been kind of back and forth in Slack. Uh, you and I and the team here, Rosemary’s been in it too, like just kind of talking through. Of course none of us were happy. Right. But talking through some of the points of, of some of these things and it’s just like basically you can debunk almost every one of them and you get down to the level where it is a, what is the real reasoning here? It’s a tit for tat. Like someone doesn’t like offshore wind turbines. Is it a political, uh, move towards being able to strengthen other interests and energy or what? I don’t know. ’cause I can’t, I’m not sitting in the Oval Office, but. [00:03:00] At the end of the day, we need these electrons. And what you’re doing is, is, is you’re hindering national security or because national security is energy security is national security, my opinion, and a lot of people’s opinions, you’re hindering that going forward. Allen Hall: Well, let’s look at the defense argument at the minute, which is it’s, it’s somehow deterring, reducing the effectiveness of ground radars, protecting the shoreline. That is a bogus argument. There’s all kinds of objects out on the water right now. There’s a ton of ships out there. They’re constantly moving around. To know where a fixed object is out in the water is easy, easy, and it has been talked about for more than 15 years. If you go back and pull the information that exists on the internet today from the Department of Defense at the time, plus Department of Interior and everybody else, they’ve been looking at this forever. The only way these turbines get placed where they are is with approval from the Department of Defense. So it isn’t like it didn’t go through a review. It totally did. They’ve known about this for a long, long time. So now to bring up this [00:04:00] specious argument, like, well, all of a sudden the radar is a problem. No, no. It’s not anybody’s telling you it’s a classified. Piece of information that is also gonna be a bogus argument because what is going along with that are these arguments as well, the Defense Department or Department of War says it’s gonna cause interference or, or some degradation of some sort of national defense. Then the words used after it have nothing to do with that. It is, the turbines are ugly, the turbines are too tall. It may interfere, interfere with the whales, it may interfere with fishing, and I don’t like it. Or a, a gas pipeline could produce more power than the turbines can. That that has nothing to do with the core argument. If the core argument is, is some sort of defense related. Security issue, then say it because it, it can’t be that complicated. Now, if you, if you knew anything about the defense department and how it operates, and also the defenses around the United States, of which I know a little bit about, [00:05:00] having been in aerospace for 30 freaking years, I can tell you that there are all kinds of ways to detect all kinds of threats that are approaching our shoreline. Putting a wind turbine out there is not  Joel Saxum: gonna stop it. So the, at the end of the day, there is a bunch, there’s like, there’s single, I call them metric and intrinsic, right? Metric being like, I can put data to this. There’s a point here, there’s numbers, whatever it may be. And intrinsic being, I don’t like them, they don’t look that good. A pipeline can supply more energy. Those things are not necessarily set in stone. They’re not black and white. They’re, they’re getting this gray emotional area instead of practical. Right. So, okay. What, what’s the outcome here? You do this, you say that we have radar issues. Do we do, does, does the offshore substation have a radar station on it for the military or, or what does that, what does that look like? Allen Hall: Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but if the threat is what I think it is, none of this matters. None of this matters. It’s already been discussed a hundred times with the defense [00:06:00] department and everybody else is knowledgeable in this, in this space. There is no way that they started planted turbines and approve them two, three years ago. If it was a national security risk, there is no chance that that happened. So it really is frustrating when you, when you know some of the things that go on behind the scenes and you know what, the technical rationales could be about a problem. And that’s not what’s being talked about right now that I don’t like being lied to. Like, if you want to have a, a political argument, have a political argument, and the, if the political argument is America wants Greenland from Denmark, then just freaking say it. Just say it. Don’t tie Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, new J, all, all these states up until this nonsense, Virginia, what are we doing? What are we doing? Because all those states approved all those projects knowing full well what the costs were, knowing how tall the turbines were, knowing how long it was gonna take to get it done, and they all approved them. This [00:07:00] is not done in a vacuum. These states approve these projects and these states are going to buy that power. Let them, you wanna put in a a, a big gas pipeline. Great. How many years is that gonna take, Doug? How many years is that gonna take? Doug Bergham? Does anybody know? He, he doesn’t know anything about that.  Joel Saxum: You’re not getting a gas pipeline into the east coast anytime soon whatsoever. Because the, the east, the east coast is a home of Nimbyism. Allen Hall: Sure, sir. Like Massachusetts. It’s pretty much prohibited new gas pipelines for a long time. Okay. That’s their choice. That is their choice. They made that choice. Let them live with it. Why are you then trying to, to double dip? I don’t get it. I don’t get it. And, but I do think, Joel, I think the reason. This is getting to the level it is. It has to do something to do with Greenland. It has something to do with the Danish, um, uh, ambassador or whoever it was running to talk to, to California and Newsom about offshore tournaments. Like that was not a smart move, my opinion, but [00:08:00] I don’t run international relations with for Denmark. But stop poking one another and somebody’s gotta cut this off. The, the thing I think that the Trump administration is at risk at is that. Or instead, Ecuador has plenty of cash. They’re gonna go to court, and they are most likely going to win, and they’re going to really handcuff the Trump administration to do anything because when you throw bull crap in front of a judge and they smell it, the the pushback gets really strong. Well, they’re gonna force all the discussion about anything to do with offshore to go through a judge, and they’re gonna decide, and I don’t think that’s what the Trump administrati