The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

CIP taps Goldwind for an Australian wind project even as Europe fights Chinese turbines. Plus, Alfanar’s $100 million bet on Senvion, and where laid-off Ørsted staff are landing. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Allen covers Vestas setting the tallest onshore turbine record in Germany, Skyborn’s €3B Baltic wind financing close, Orsted’s UK tax fight win, and the debate over turbines as national security assets. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Michael Tosi and Paul Russo of HeliService USA with Dr. Kenneth Williams discuss their offshore wind air ambulance service and paramedic hoist rescues. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Nordex closes in on Vestas in onshore orders, GE Vernova rebuilds its wind team, Nexxis buys BladeBug, and wooden blades draw doubts. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Siemens Gamesa starts Hornsea 3 blade production in Hull, Germany approves an Offshore Wind Act amendment, and Nexxis buys BladeBUG. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Howard Penrose of MotorDoc joins to discuss the circulating currents killing main bearings and drivetrain checks without a climb. Reach out at info@motordoc.com or on LinkedIn . The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. 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: Howard, welcome back to the program. Howard Penrose: Hey, thanks for having me. Allen Hall: It’s about time everybody realizes what motorDoc can do. There’s so much technology, and I’ve been watching- Yeah … your Chaos and Caffeine podcast on Saturday morning, which are full of really, really good information about the motorDoc as a company, all the things you’re doing out in the field, and how you’re solving real-world problems, not imaginary ones- Yeah real-world problems. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and Howard Penrose: whatever annoys me that week. Exactly. And, and whatever great coffee I’m trying out. Yes. Except for a few. We’ve had the ReliaSquatch down our- Yes … um, a couple of times. Uh, yeah, no, I, I enjoy it, and we gotta get you on there sometime. I don’t do- I, it- … a lot of interviews other than an AI character we put in. Allen Hall: It’s a very interesting show because you’re [00:01:00] getting a little bit of comedy and humor and s- Yeah … and a, and a coffee review, which is very helpful because I’ve tried some of the coffees that you have reviewed, that you’ve given the thumbs up to. But if you’re operating wind turbines and you’re trying to understand what’s happening on the drivetrain side, on the generator, everything out to the blades even, main bearings, gearboxes- Yeah all those rotating heavy, expensive parts, there’s a lot of ways to diagnose them- Howard Penrose: Yes … Allen Hall: that are sort of like we can look at a gear, we can look at a joint, we can look at roller bearings, whatever, but motorDoc has a way to quickly diagnose all of that chain in about- Yeah … 15 seconds. Howard Penrose: Well, a little longer than 15 sec- more like a minute. A minute, okay. It feels like paint drying. But- Uh, in any case, yeah. Uh, uh, and, and what’s kind of funny is, um, back in the ’90s, uh, EPRI actually accidentally steered the technology away from its [00:02:00] core purpose, which was in 1985, um, NAVSEA, the US Navy, had done research on using current signature analysis for looking at pumps, fans, and compressors, the bearings, the belts, the components, all the rotating components using the motor as the sensor. Not too much different than we are now. I mean, mind you, we got better resolution now, we’ve got, uh, more powerful– I mean, I look at my data from the ’90s, and now it’s completely different. Um, and then Oak Ridge National Lab, same thing, bearings and gears in motor-operated valves. So in 2003, we were the first ones to apply electrical and current signature analysis to some wind turbines in the Mojave Desert. Wow. Yeah. So, um, nobody had tried it before. Everybody said it couldn’t be done. And, uh, that was a bad thing to say to me because- … it meant I was gonna get it [00:03:00] done. Right. At that time, um, we were looking at bearing issues and some blatant conditions with the, um, with the, uh, generator using a technology called Altest, ’cause I was with Altest at the time. And, uh, I had taken an EMPath software and blended it with a, a power analyzer, and they still have that tool to this day. I was using that technology all the way through 2015. 2016, I should say. And then- And then switched over to the pure EMPath, which was more of an engineering tool. And then more recently, in 2022, uh, made the decision to ha- to take all the work we’d done on over 6,000 turbines, uh, looking at how we were looking at the data and what we were doing on the industrial side, and took a, uh, created a current signature analyzer that would do one phase of current to analyze the entire powertrain. Allen Hall: So when you tell [00:04:00] operators you can do this magic, I think a lotta times they gotta go, “ Howard Penrose: What?” Oh, yeah, yeah. They don’t understand it because they’re used to vibration- Right … which is a point analysis system. Right. Allen Hall: Vibration at this- Yeah … particular location. Yeah. One spot- Even if it’s- … or a couple Howard Penrose: spots triax, they’re reading through material, up through a transducer. Hopefully, they put it above the bearing and not in the middle of the machine like everybody is now, because everybody’s trying to sell a sensor. Right. True. They’re not selling a- they’re not selling accuracy. They’re just selling sensors. Right. So, um- Yeah … you know, uh, I, I’ll, I’ll even talk about one of the companies here. We’ve got Onyx here, and they do it right. I mean, they’ve been doing it right pretty well because we’ve been doing some of the same towers they’re on, and we can match the data they’re getting. Oh, good. Right? Yeah. Uh, so but they get it in multiple spots, and there’s areas they can’t quite reach, so we’ll detect those areas as well. So it’s a good melding of two technologies. Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Sure, Howard Penrose: sure. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you have electrical signature and you have vibration, but in [00:05:00] cases if you don’t have vibration, we’re a direct replacement. Allen Hall: Because the generator- I Howard Penrose: dare say that. Allen Hall: Yeah. Whichever– Howard Penrose: I dare say that, um, with- Well, the Allen Hall: generator is acting as the sensor. Howard Penrose: The air gap. The air gap in the generator s- specifically, yes. Yeah. Generator, motor, transformer. Right. Allen Hall: Yeah. So any of those- Mm-hmm … you can clamp onto, look at the current that’s on there. Everything that’s happening on the drivetrain, in the gearbox, out on the rotor- Yep … main bearings, all of that creates vibration. Creates a torque. T- a, a torque. Yeah. Yes, more exactly a torque. Yeah. And that’s seen in the generator, in the current coming out of the generator. Yes. So those signals, although minute, are still there. Yes. So if you clamp onto that current coming out of the generator, you’ll see the typical AC sine wave sitting there. But on top of that- Is all the information about how that drivetrain is doing Howard Penrose: Absolutely, and everything else. Anything electrical comes through [00:06:00] that. So what you do is just like vibration, you do a spectral analysis. So every component has a frequency associated with it, just like vibration. It’s, as a matter of fact, I, I keep having to try to explain to people electrical and current signature analysis is no different than vibration analysis. It’s the same concept. We use the same tools. The signature looks just a little different. It’s a little noisier, um, but you need that noise in order to see everything. But we have a time waveform, and instead of, um, inches per second or millimeters per second, whatever, you know, uh, velocity, acceleration, and displacement, uh, what we end up with is decibels is the optimal method. You can look at straight voltage signatures at those points or, or current signatures, but the values are so small that you have to look at it from a logarithmic standpoint. Right. There are some benefits to it versus vibration, and there’s some things that aren’t as good as vibration. [00:07:00] So, you know, we, we do… You have to… Any technology is gonna have their strengths and weaknesses. Sure. So we will see everything all at once. Load doesn’t matter. Right. Speed doesn’t matter. It’s… Only reason speed matters is the location of the frequencies. Uh, so the higher the resolution, meaning the longer you take data, the less chance you have on a lightly lo- loaded machine of blending the peaks together. Right. Um, on the flip side, if I have two bearings turning at the exact same speed, I couldn’t tell you which one it is. Because they’re the same. Right. Allen Hall: And the mechanical features of that bearing is w- what creates the signal that you’re measuring. Exactly. So if a bearing has five rollers versus 10, just imaginary thing. Yeah, yeah. Five rollers versus 10 has a different electrical signature, so you can determine, like, that bearing, that 10 roller bearing- Yes … has the problem, the five is fine. Yes. Yeah. That’s the magic, and I think people don’t translate the mechanical world into the electrical world. That that’s what’s [00:08:00]happening. They, Howard Penrose: they don’t because, because what’s happening is they named it wrong. Allen Hall: Yes. Howard Penrose: A majority of our users are mechanical folks. Sure. Our vibration analysts and stuff like, ’cause they know how to look at the signatures. Right. Everybody tries to force it on their electrical people, and electrical people go, “We don’t know what this is.” Yeah. And it’s, it’s, it’s a matter of that training and, and, you know, in the electrical world, you’re not taught to look at that. Right. Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Mechanical world, you’re taught to look at that. So our intern, we were trying to bring in electrical engineering interns and found out that just wasn’t working. So last year, I brought in my first, uh, intern that’s, you know, he’s been with us now since I brought him in. Okay. Uh, and, uh, Amar, and, uh, you know, he’s helped us develop our vi- uh, vibration software to go along with it. Guess what? It’s the same thing. It’s the exact same sy- system Um, but we just take in a vibration signal instead. But he picked up on it immediately as a [00:09:00] third-year college student. I can take somebody with a decade as an electrical engineer with a PhD and they can’t figure it out. Allen Hall: Well, because you’re, you’re taking real- Because it’s different. Yeah. It’s r- well, it’s real-world components- Howard Penrose: Yeah … Allen Hall: creating electrical signals. That’s hard- Well, you have- … to process for a lot of people. Yeah, Howard Penrose: yeah. It’s Allen Hall: just not Howard Penrose: something that we do every day. But that’s… If they, i- if we sa- i- i- if you’re looking at vibration and you start looking at the sensor, it gets complicated too, ’cause guess what? It’s an electrical signal. Right. It’s, it is technically electrical signature now. It’s converting a Allen Hall: mechanical signal- Right … into an electrical signal, which is what’s happening in the generator anyway. Yeah. Howard Penrose: Whether it’s a piezoelectric cell that’s generating a small signal- Yeah … on top of a small waveform that you then take out, you demodulate, uh, or it’s, uh… So you take that carrier frequency out, or it’s a MEMS sensor, which is the same thing. You know, the, it just sees some slower s- It, it does more of a digital output. So you, you, you know, you have those, or you [00:10:00] have this, which just basically uses a component of the machine to, to, as its own sensor. There is one other difference between them, too, and, uh, I find this very useful when I’m going out troubleshooting something that other people can’t figure out, uh, ’cause we use all the technologies. So in this case, it would be, uh, the structural movement. Okay? So, so say I have a generator and there’s something wrong with the structure, and the whole machine is vibrating. So y- well, if I put a transducer on it, they might think that’s vibration or something else. We don’t see it. Right. We only see directly exactly what’s happening with the machine. Sure. So a lot of times when we go in to troubleshoot something that people have done vibration on and everything else, it’s been pro- a, a problem for them for years. We walk in, and all of a sudden we’re identifying whether it’s the machine or it’s something else right off the bat. Then we can take a look at the vibration data and [00:11:00] say, “Okay, it wasn’t the bearing or the bearing, um, structure. It was, you know, the mounting.” Right. It wasn’t Allen Hall: fastened Howard Penrose: down properly. Yeah, Allen Hall: yeah. Right. Howard Penrose: Go tighten that bolt. Right, exactly. Allen Hall: Well, I mean, that’s the cheap answer. Yeah. I’d rather tighten a bolt than rip apart a motor or a generator- And, and- … every day … Howard Penrose: and that’s the whole point. Now, there are other strengths that go with it. So for instance, on the powertrain of a wind turbine, I can tell you if you’ve lubricated the bearings correctly. Wow. Because part of what we do is we do take those electrical signatures, and we convert those over to watts. Watts is an energy conversion. Sure. So you see that as heat or some type of loss. So whatever, whatever’s being lost there is not being sent to the customer. To the outside. Right. Making money. So, um, if I’m taking a look at, say, a main bearing, I might see watts or kilowatts of losses. So you’re gonna have some ’cause you have friction, right? But when we see it increase on, say, a roller, [00:12:00] or the rollers, or, or the cage, that’s usually an indicator that I have a lubrication issue. Or if we only see it on the outer race, that means that they didn’t clear out all the old grease when they were lubricating it, ’cause the rollers then have to ride across it- Right … ’cause it dries up. Allen Hall: Sure. Howard Penrose: Uh, and will carry contaminants. So if you see that, you go up, clean it up, you’ll extend the life of the bearing. Absolutely you will. Without having to do a lot of work. So, uh, we, we look at our technology as more so early in the, in the stage of a condition. I don’t wanna call it failure, ’cause it’s not a failure. It’s something that’s mitigable. And I made that word up. You can mitigate it. Meaning you can go up and correct it and extend the life of that component. Sure. Uh, in gearboxes we’ll see problems with, um… Well, the, the one we’re talking about here a fair amount is all the circulating currents going on uptower. We did that research. The current signature analyzer we have is a direct result of doing wind turbine [00:13:00] research just on circulating currents uptower, ’cause we conferred everything over to, to sound at 48 kilohertz. And so that gives me a 24-kilohertz signal. That high-frequency stuff, which we’re researching in CGRE, and IEEE, and IEC, is called supra harmonics, which I– we talked about that before. Yes, we have. Yeah. And, uh, so when you start seeing that in the, in, in the current that’s circulating uptower because the ground that goes from the top of the tower down is for- DC lightning protection. And lightning protection, yeah. It’s not meant for, um- Not for Allen Hall: high frequency- Yeah … Howard Penrose: currents. Yeah. Uh, we, when we measured it, when we mapped out dozens of towers of all different manufacturers, we found that the impedance about halfway down the tower is where it ends. Sure. The, the resistance. And then the increased, uh, the high-frequency noise turns any of your shaft brushes into resistors. And at about 15 kilohertz, no current is [00:14:00]passing through them. It’s all passing the bearing, which becomes more conductive the higher the frequency. So with 60% of main bearings failing due to electrical currents, it’s actually currents that are circulating uptower. It’s not static. There is some static up there, but it’s not static. It’s coming from the controls, the, the generator, and everything else. Inverters, Allen Hall: converters. Howard Penrose: And we’ve seen up to 150 amps passing through a, through a bearing. Allen Hall: So I– We run across a lot of operators who have been replacing main bearings, and they don’t know the reason why. Yeah. And I always say, “Well, call Howard at MotorDoc because I would almost bet you you have the f- high frequency running around uptower in the nacelle- And the next main bearing you put in there is gonna go the same way as the- Yeah … first one you put in there. Until you cut off that circulating current and then the cell, you’re just gonna continue with the problem. Then you haven’t eliminated the problem, you’re just fixing the result of that problem. Yes. But it takes- Yeah, you’re, you’re- How, [00:15:00] how, well, how long- You’re replacing Howard Penrose: a fuse. Allen Hall: Right, you’re replacing a fuse. Yeah. How long does it take you to s- to determine- An expensive fuse. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, ’cause you’re taking the rotor down. Yeah. Well, how, how fast can you determine if you have harmonics uptower that are gonna be causing you problems? 120 seconds. Howard Penrose: Okay. Allen Hall: So that’s the thing. I think a lot of- I mean, Howard Penrose: that’s of the actual data collection time. So you clamp on uptower, uh, and then you can… Well, the way we have it set up now, you just tell it you wanna collect data every five s- uh, five minutes, and then you go downtower, let it collect its data, go back up, grab it. Um, it’s like… It’s huge. It’s this size. So, um, and then you connect- It plugs into a laptop. Yeah. Plug it into a laptop or any type of tablet. Um, it, it’s Windows now. I’m trying to get away from Windows. We’re gonna have Linux systems, uh, as well. Uh, and then you use that to, um, just collect that data, and then you press another button. Now it pops up, and it tells you if you’re in danger or not, [00:16:00] the amount of current passing through the bearing, and the frequencies all the way out. Allen Hall: So the ideal is you’re gonna have this kit with you in the truck. Yeah. And as you see these problems pop up, you’re gonna clamp on uptower. Yep. You’re gonna measure these circulating currents, and you’re gonna know immediately if you have another mechanical issue, a, a lubrication issue- Oh, yeah. It’ll look at- … some kind of alignment issue, or- You’ll get all Howard Penrose: of this information at once. So you- Right … if you go on the power side. So certain turbines, like anything that has the transformer downtower, you don’t have to climb. Right. GE. I mean, I don’t climb. So, uh, uh, you know, th- and that was part of the, the concept behind when we started down this path because I’ve been in the wind industry since 1997. So one of the things I always saw was, and, and we talked about even, you know, here when it was called AWEA, and we were talking always on the health and safety side about wearing out the technicians. Um, so we discovered that, you know, what was it? Almost 60% of the [00:17:00] turbines you didn’t have to climb. Right. Oh, yeah. And even the ones you do, you go up, you set it up, and it’ll tell you where you need to focus. The other thing in the powertrain, let alone the generator, when we do a sweep of a site– Now, if we do a straight electrical signature analysis, I’d term that one as a technician’s tool. Sure. That’s more of an engineer’s tool. Uh, a lot more data, a lot harder to set up. But even though I’m saying harder to set up, it’s still pretty easy. It’s still minutes. Right. Yeah. Most technicians will collect data with, like, a couple hours worth of training. Yeah. You g- You basically gather that data, and if you’re getting a site, so we’ll go out– I love going out in the field. So we’ll go out in the field, especially if it’s a tower we don’t have to climb I’ll knock out, uh, well, let’s just say I’ll, I’ll, I’ll name one. Say a GE 1.6. I’ll knock out one of those every eight to 11 minutes, depending on how you get to the tower. Allen Hall: So that’s a full diagnosis of drivetrain- Yeah … plus anything odd happening- Yep with circulating currents and all that [00:18:00] can- Oh, no, no. Circulating- Or just- … current, that’s a- That’s a separate thing at tower … separate study that- Okay … you have to do that uptower. But anything, anythin

<p>India now requires turbine data, control centers, and R&D to sit inside its borders. Plus a study on reverse flow loads in parked blades, Envision's spare parts push across Southeast Asia, and Danish wind employment falling to 32,700.</p> <p>The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!</p>

Allen covers Clearway’s 800 MW wind farm in Maine, the state’s largest ever, along with Suzlon’s $1.2 billion project in India and Masdar’s growing battery pipeline in the UK. Then Mingyang lobbies the UK’s new Prime Minister to reverse its ban from British waters. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Up in Maine this week… they picked a spot for a wind farm. Eight hundred megawatts. The biggest the state has ever seen. Hold that thought. Halfway around the world… India broke ground on something even bigger. And in between… a Chinese company knocked on Britain’s door. Again. Start in Aroostook County, Maine. The woods up there grow timber… and wind. The Maine Public Utilities Commission chose Clearway Energy to build eight hundred megawatts of turbines on commercial timberland in the rural north. Avangrid will string the power line to connect those turbines to the New England grid. Commission Chair Phil Bartlett says the project will save Maine ratepayers at least three hundred and eighty-seven million dollars. Two-point-four billion in economic output. Thousands of construction jobs. Six hundred megawatts stay in Maine. The rest goes to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. Five states… one wind farm… one forest. Now fly east across the Atlantic. In Rochdale, England… Abu Dhabi’s Masdar just flipped the switch on its second battery storage plant in Britain. Thirty-five megawatts. Seventy megawatt-hours. Enough to power thirty-five thousand homes a day. And it responds to grid swings in milliseconds. This is part of Masdar’s one-billion-pound pipeline of battery projects across the UK. Three gigawatt-hours planned. One of the largest storage buildouts in the country. Wind needs a partner. Batteries are volunteering. Now south… to India. Suzlon just broke ground on thirteen hundred and twenty-five megawatts of wind in Ananthapuramu, Andhra Pradesh. The investment… about one-point-two billion dollars. Sixteen hundred new jobs. Suzlon already has a blade factory in the region. Capacity… twelve hundred and sixty megawatts a year. And the company is training twelve thousand young people, including three thousand women, in green energy skills. India’s wind sector just crossed fifty-eight gigawatts. It was twenty-one gigawatts in twenty fourteen. And staying in India… Saudi Arabia’s Alfanar Group just put one hundred million dollars into its Indian turbine subsidiary Senvion. Thirty-four million released this month. The rest in weeks. Senvion builds one-point-five gigawatts of turbines a year. Saudi money. Indian manufacturing. Global ambition. Now… one more item. And this one has an edge. Ming Yang… the Chinese turbine maker banned from British waters on national security grounds… wants back in. The company had plans for a one-point-five-billion-pound factory in Inverness, Scotland. Fifteen hundred direct jobs. Eight thousand in the supply chain. Labour ministers shut it down in March. The Ministry of Defence worried about spying. European rivals complained about Chinese state subsidies. Now Ming Yang is lobbying the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to reverse the ban. The company says it can deliver “growth in every postcode.” That phrase… is Burnham’s own. A government spokesman says there are no plans to review the decision. So what does this week tell us? Supply chains are going local. Saudi capital into Indian turbine factories. Maine insisting on new transmission before new generation. Britain locking the door on Chinese hardware while Abu Dhabi builds its battery network. The message is clear. Countries want wind power. But they want to own the pieces. Watch for this. Permitting… not technology… is the bottleneck now. Maine’s project was authorized in twenty twenty-one. It is twenty twenty-six and they are still years from turning a blade. And storage is no longer a side conversation. Masdar’s billion-pound UK commitment says batteries are becoming infrastructure… not experiments. For professionals in this industry… the work ahead is not just building turbines. It is building trust with governments who are choosing energy security over speed. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 31st of August 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Blade specialist Morten Handberg on when an RCA pays off, what SCADA data can and cannot tell you, and why erosion gets written off as wear and tear. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. 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 so– It’s, it’s so such a great, great pleasure to be back again. Allen Hall: We have a lot to talk about today because of root cause analysis and the number of operators that are really struggling with RCAs, of when to do them or when not to go down the RCA pathway. It, it– There’s a, a ton of confusion in the industry about it, and we thought, well, this would be a great time for Morten to come back and explain when is the right time for an RCA. So Morten, when is the right time for an RCA? What should we look for? Or wh- how big of the problem sh-should it be [00:01:00]before I find somebody to help me do this RCA? Morten Handberg: So the obvious question is typically when something really bad happens, then I think everyone can agree that, you know, we should definitely do an RCA to get to the bottom of this. And that’s also just from a– It’s both from a technical perspective to sort of figure out, you know, why did this happen, and, you know, um, who… Well, what is the, what is the main cause? Is it, is it something that, you know, it was happening while we were operating the asset, be it turbine or whatever? Uh, was it something that was inert in the bla- in the, in the turbine, the blade, the gearbox that was just waiting to happen? So that’s always very important to know. Also because it tells you what is the chance of this happening again, you know, and, and can you prevent it in a meaningful way? Um, and there’s also a, a safety aspect to it because it’s– so it also tells, you know, uh, what if, you know, you don’t want blade falling left and right. You don’t want gearbox ex- [00:02:00] gearboxes exploding. You don’t want towers to collapse. We can all agree on that. Uh, and you don’t want this to happen because you don’t, you don’t want to run the risk that someone gets hurt, uh, hurt by it. So then RCA is a really important tool to investigate and find out, well, what happened here, and how can we prevent it, and what is the chances that it happens another time? So that, that is sort of the– That we can always agree and we would do it when, when something really terrible happens. Then there is the, you know, not so critical ones where, you know, you are just in time, uh, that, that, that you catch it, and then the question is, what is the– when is then the right time for that? Allen Hall: There seems to be a couple of phases in the lifespan of a turbine where the RCA, it becomes a little more critical. In that first year or two, particularly if the turbine is under warranty or you’re getting close to the end of the warranty, there– at least from a lot of operators I have spoken with, that, uh, [00:03:00] they would like to do an RCA as more of a documentation of what has happened on the site to then maybe claim serial defect maybe l- at another point. There’s just like the record-keeping part of RCAs, which I’m not sure is the right level of effort for what you’re trying to accomplish. Is, is the RCA the right approach there if you have a, a gearbox issue or a blade issue early in the life cycle of a turbine? Morten Handberg: There is definitely before the end of warranty, there is a, there is an, there is an aspect, you know, when should you actually do an RCA? And it should, it, it should benefit you in a way where you can– where there is an economical benefit, because it might not be a massive critical issue, but something that will lead to a lot of maintenance down the t- down the line. Um, but if you want to make it successful in the warranty claim, then you really need to know what is the, what is the cost behind it. Is it wear and tear? Is it [00:04:00] a manufacturing defect? Is it, uh, environmental conditions, uh, that are, that are causing it? And these, these becomes really important. That’s also why you can, you, you can, you can do an RCA on erosion, uh, because it, it can be important if you see massive, uh, erosion degradation that you really want to understand, what are my local conditions? Um, and a good example here is Australia, because Australia doesn’t work like Europe. We– You can take all the experiences we have from Europe, but it does not work in Australia. So you might want to do your, your, uh, root cause on that specific issue localized, uh, to really understand it, and that’s when RCA becomes really strong to sort of find out what are the underlying mechanisms, uh, that enables this. But you can also pour in a lot of cost and effort into relatively minor defects, uh, or issues, um, where it does not really benefit you in the long run, and that will always be a challenge before end of warranty because you don’t really know what will, [00:05:00] what will hit you down the long run, and that’s where you, you know, then, then it becomes more of a strategic decision. You know, breaking bolts, if you’ve seen one, maybe you don’t want to do an RCA on it. That does not really seem to matter to you that much. It’s just random occurrence. But if you start to see it, uh, in, in quick succession on multiple turbines, adjacent bolts, then it’s important for several reasons. One, you might– If you’re still within warranty, you really wanna know why is this happening and, and how do you fix it long term so this not– does not become a headache for the next 25 years? Um, so you want to, you want– you really want to understand that. And two You can, you can live with a few broken bolts on the blade, but there, there will become a critical point where the blade will liberate and then, uh, it will, it will col- it will, it will, yeah, leave the turbine or, or collapse on its own, uh, depending on the turbine model. And, and that is really critical to, to, uh, to avoid and, and to, uh, to [00:06:00]understand that. Um, and maybe the outcome of the idea of the RCA is monitoring, but that is a really important knowledge to have. Allen Hall: That’s a good point about the monitoring aspect because I think a lot of times when a operator chooses to go down the RCA path, what they’re expecting is just to get a report of this is the conditions that created the damage or created the unexpected outcome Uh, it, sometimes you may not be able to get to that final answer, and the answer can be, we need to put conditioning monitoring on to have a better understanding of what the fault is. That’s not a invalid RCA. That’s a really useful tool. But a lot of operators don’t think of an RCA as being that sort of outcome. That, that is actually where a lot of the industry problems can be solved, right, is to get the engineering up in upfront to then maybe have a little longer time or maybe instrument another [00:07:00] turbine to see how big this problem is. I- is, is that the approach that which you would, uh, aspire to apply to some of these wind sites today? Morten Handberg: I think that monitoring, uh, understanding the monitoring requirements is a very critical point, uh, outcome of an RCA. Both– And you can use it both during your investigation to sort of find out when you have, you know, uh, to, to find out how do you detect it efficiently, uh, but also what are the right methodologies and what is it actually that you want to achieve, uh, with mitigating this issue, and then what, what kind of, what kind of monitoring do you need. So for instance, if you have, if you have, if you have cracks starting in your laminate, you know, do you need acoustics? Uh, do you need deflection monitoring? Um, is it es- is it vibration monitoring, or is it, um, or is it some kind of, uh, video monitoring, um, that or, or infrared scan that, that, that you need to, to keep, um, to, to, to ca- And again, the essential [00:08:00] part is then how do you catch it in time that it does not become a critical issue? Uh, and, and then by using the RCA to find out, well, what is the best methodology to, to detect this and detect it in a cost-effective way, uh, that, that leaves you in, in good shape to, to maintain your turbines. That is a, you know, that is a really strong value proposition for the RCA. Allen Hall: Morten, when I talk to a lot of operators about doing an RCA, uh, they don’t have access to high-speed scada, scada data. They, they have access to low speed, depending on what their arrangement is with the OEM. Uh It’s really hard to get the high-resolution data, and they do not have the algorithms that maybe be able to tell them something about the turbine. They’ll just have sort of raw data streams. How important is it to get some of that high-speed data and the understanding of how that turbine is working as a, a fault [00:09:00] happens or s- some sort of failure happens? Morten Handberg: It kinda depends on what it is that you’re, that you’re looking for. So for a lot of… for, for, so for SCADA data, it will, it will give you, um, a more holistic view of what, how the turbine is performing. It will give you the power production, wind speeds, wind turbine, uh, the blade pitching. Um, so it kinda gives you an understanding about how it is, how, how it is operating, but it st- does not really give you any specifics about the condition of, of the blades, of the gearbox, of the bearing, of the main shaft, of the tower. So, um, so it does, so you don’t really have any, any detailed sense of that. You do have alarm logs, and they can be quite important. But in order for, uh, to sort of, uh, to tie that in with the failure that you’re seeing, you have, need to have a very, uh, a very strong sense of, you know, have, need to have an accurate sense of when did this actually happen. So establishing the timeline of when the failure occurred, that, that sorta increases [00:10:00] the value of SCADA data. Um, so you can– The, one of the things you can learn from SCADA data is you can see the performance was, were, versus what, how the power production is. And then you can start to see, you can start to see how the, you know, if there’s any deviation, um, uh, that ties up in environmental conditions that, that sort of, that would affect the, the, uh, any of the turbine components. And then SCADA data can be a very, uh, very important tool in addition to your other analysis. But you still need… But SCADA data is only a part of it, and it will only give you a s- a sense of, uh, com- with the alarm logs, it will give you, it will give you, it sorta help you build the timeline of what actually happened here. And I can give you an example. So- If we’re looking at a blade failure, and we sort of know, well, the blade broke in half at a certain point in time. It was, uh, a very rapid occurrence, so it, it was not something that happened over a very long period of time. It was, it was a quick succession. When [00:11:00] did we start to go wrong? Um, then scatter data can be really good to sort of, you know when it failed because the turbine did restart. But was that when things went wrong? Not necessarily. Uh, there could be times before that when you could have had tower oscillation, so shock effects. It can, it can be, um, it can be, uh, alarms from the pitch system that says, you know, the, that there is something with the blade. It does not really behave right or that it can’t really turn right. Um, and/or the, the turbine does not really produce as it should. That can then, that can then help you establish, okay, how far back is this actually? When, when does this really start from when it collapsed and then when does the issue started to occur? Um, so then, then, then scatter data becomes useful, but it’s not something that will tell you it was lightning, it was manufacturing, uh, or otherwise. That scatter data doesn’t really work for that, but it helps you establish the timeline of it. Allen Hall: All right. That’s very interesting, uh, because I think that plays into some of the questions about [00:12:00] insurance and when you have a damage or some situation where you have had exceeded the deductible, right? So you’re, you’re, now you’re into a couple hundred thousand dollars of a claim of some sort. There’s two opposing opinions about RCAs that right there is, one is I’m gonna file a claim. The insurer will perform the RCA and come back to me with what actually happened, and then we can figure out the financial details. The other side is, I wanna have an RCA so when I hear back from the insurer, uh, that they, uh, my RCA aligns with their RCA, that we’re in agreement. And if we’re not in agreement, uh, how do we handle the difference? What is the right approach there? Is there a right approach there? Morten Handberg: Often where you would start is, uh, you would actually a- if, if there is an issue and you’re, as an operator, is concerned, you would often start with going to your OEM and saying, “Hey- We see [00:13:00] this. This does not seem right, or this component failed. We need you to provide an, an RCA and if you have a good contract, then the OEM is obliged, uh, to provide that. But that will state, that will be stated in, in your contract if they are required to do so. So I would, I would use my contract for that. Then if, uh, they don’t are required to perform an RCA, they don’t want to, or you’re unsatisfied with it or, and you have filed an insurance claim, then, uh, then there might be an obligation for you to carry out an RCA. Or there might be a strong desire for you to sort of either find out, well, is the OEM right? Um, or is there something I need to challenge them on here? And then an RCA become– And that, that, that’s when you want to do your own RCA. Uh, and then whether or not you, the insurer, uh, will do an RCA, that, that sort of depends on the, on the process of the claim. Uh, if there’s any, uh, if there’s a [00:14:00] contes- some, some contention, uh, between the parties. Um, more often than not, there is, there is a, there is collaboration between all parties if all are interested in, in seeing things coming to, to the right end, and that they use– sort of let the RCA be the, be the guiding star and that everyone can agree, okay, whatever the outcome of the RCA is, we’ll stand behind that as long as it’s carried out in a professional manner. And these different boxes that we want to have checked, that they are all verified and there’s documentation for it. So it can be an, it can be a good tool to, uh, to sort of, uh, have an alignment on the, um, on, on a, on a claims process, really. Allen Hall: I wanna touch on how the OEMs play into the RCA. So l- let’s use the example which is happening here in the United States quite a bit, and also in Europe offshore, which is leading edge erosion And the question regarding wear and tear versus something that’s a claim, and [00:15:00] if ex- there’s been accelerated leading-edge erosion, trying to put a root cause to that. Is it a manufacturing issue? Is it a location issue? Is it a maintenance issue? It could be all of them or a combination thereof. Uh, how does that work? And is the RCA the right approach there just to put some markers in the ground as to what the issue really is or the underlying causes are? Morten Handberg: Yes, but it has to be an independent RCA. Um, because there, um, if there is invested interest in having one result over the other, then there will always be distrust between the parties. Um, you know as well as me that a lot of leading-edge degradation, I would say, is being marked out, marked out as leading-edge erosion. Uh, but from some of our previous talks then, you know, there is very much difference in leading-edge erosion defects because you can have scratches, you can have voids, you can have, uh, peeling, chipping, and you can have erosion.[00:16:00] Um, but and, and they look very distinct, but often they get thrown into the same category, and they get thrown into the same cause, being wear and tear, which is ridiculous because, um, a lot of it is, uh, uh, uh, you know, some of the key defects they’re manufacturing with, uh, driven. So peeling and voids, that is manufacturing, and they are driving a lot of the erosion. But if that gets masked as erosion, then, well, it’s just an environmental de- effect, so we can’t really tell. And I think also, you know, a lot… there’s a lot of, uh, issues regarding leading-edge protection systems peeling off, and then they don’t work as well, which is also somewhat, you know, we, we talked about this before ear- earlier in the podcast, you know, Australia having their own issues. I think one of the issues that they have is environmental conditions, that’s very obvious, but that leading-edge protection systems are notoriously difficult to install there because of the hot and at times humid conditions, and they don’t work very well with a lot of [00:17:00] leading-edge, uh, products. So that would mean it’s not an environmental effect that caused a leading-edge erosion, uh, systems to fail, to fail. It’s the application. Um, does that mean that Australia need their own product? Yes, but they need systems that are reliable and applicable in their con- in their conditions that will lead to, uh, stronger durability. And again, that’s what you need the RCA to, to, to figure out. And if you have a, an RCA carried out by someone who wants it to be wear and tear, then regard- then unless you can… they, they, they come up with something else than wear and tear, you will always have a, a slight distrust in the result. So that’s why I would always argue, if you have concern for leading-edge erosion, then absolutely go to your O&M, figure out if they have a– if they’ve seen it before, they are keen to, to engage and provide a suitable solution and, and, you know, share actual knowledge. But I would always keep in back of my head that if, if you’re not [00:18:00]100% sure about their– them telling the right– you– they’re, they’re telling you the truth, I would get it sanity checked, and I would carry out my own independent study which is what a lot of O- O&Mers are doing. Allen Hall: That’s a really important bit of information for sure, Morten. When going out to look for an RCA provider, what tends to happen, at least in the United States, and I think, uh, Australia can be this way at times and, and Europe definitely is, is that the chosen supplier of the RCA is one of the acronym companies. We all know who we’re talking about here. Just because they’re large in scale and they have a lot of capabilities, they have a lot of engineers, and, uh, they b- some of these things are pretty routine, and it does seem like they can, can do this job. But I’m seeing more and more independent companies doing RCAs because of the level of detail. Some of the bearing issues that have popped up really require an expert in [00:19:00] bearings. Some of the tower issues require someone, especially foundation, someone who’s knowledgeable about concrete. Uh, same thing for lightning. Usually you need somebody who knows something about lightning to be involved instead of a, a, a larger organization. What are you seeing in that space today? Are you seeing more, uh, narrow focus, uh, independent groups or engineers working on RCAs, or is it still mostly the big companies that we all know? Morten Handberg: I would say that, uh, all of the acronym companies, uh, all have very good, talented engineers employed. I don’t think we need to d- you know, we can all agree on that. But, uh, what I c

Two days of operator meetings in Melbourne shape the WOMA 2027 agenda, from performance upgrades and cable faults to foundations and bolts. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter . And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead and Rosemary Barnes. And Rosemary, where are we? Rosemary Barnes: We’re in Melbourne, and we have been visiting future attendees and sponsors and people interested in, in the event to see what topics that we should be talking about. What are the hot topics of the moment? Allen Hall: Which is a very interesting two days, Matthew, in that, uh, we h- did meet with a number of operators based in Australia, but, uh, they’re also very worldly. They have talked to companies all over about operations and, and maintenance, and there are some really eye-opening topics- Mm that will be- Mm … at WOMA 2027 this year. Matthew Stead: Yeah. The thing that was interesting for me was [00:01:00]that actually the topics have changed each year. So, um, they’re evolving and the industry’s continuing to, to do better, and so that, that was really interesting. Performance upgrades was probably one of the big areas of, of new interest, I think. I think we heard with the pressure on pricing, uh, the market and so forth, you know, that, that 1% or 2% now is becoming more important. Um, so I think, uh, upgrades will definitely feature quite a lot. Um, balance of plant was also a big topic. Um, you just can’t ig- ignore the, um, transmission, you can’t ignore the transformers, you can’t ignore, uh, condensers and all these sorts of things, so yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Cables. Matthew Stead: Cables. Rosemary Barnes: Terminations. Terminations of cables. Specifically raised several times. Allen Hall: Yep. Yeah. It’s all about being more efficient, uh, getting more production, and then with the PPA prices, uh, that are changing- Matthew Stead: Mm … Allen Hall: rapidly, uh, everybody is paying more attention to the bottom line. Matthew Stead: Mm, mm. Allen Hall: Absolutely. There, there’s less cash running around, uh, chasing new development. It’s [00:02:00] more of a focus on making sure your, at least your existing assets are performing as, as well as they can be- Mm … which then opens up the, uh, Pandora’s box of opportunity. Mm. Because there are 1%’s all around a wind turbine. More specifically, uh, all the drive train issues, the blade issues, the generator issues, and even going into the substation. Mm. I, I was really shocked on BOP e- the, the one topic that came up, uh, yesterday and today was buried cables. Mm. Like- Matthew Stead: Faults … Allen Hall: faults. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Junctions. Finding- Yeah … finding faults and what to do about them. Yeah. Yeah. But I think in addition to just wanting more revenue, I think people have, are getting more sophisticated about what actually matters and then the finances. You know, everyone’s focused so much on availability, and now people- Mm … are like, okay, yeah, like once you’re at a certain level of availability, gets harder and harder to get more. And actually, you know, not all availability is equal. Is good. It, it [00:03:00] depends. Yeah. Yeah, like you wanna, um, you wanna focus on how much you’re generating at the times when electricity prices are high specifically, which usually means during lower wind speed periods. Yeah. Which is actually good because that matches really well with what is actually possible. It’s, it’s hard to get more power out of the turbine if it’s at, you know, its rated power, then you’re not g- More efficiency is not gonna get you any more, um, power output, whereas lower in the power curve- Mm … um, when wind speeds are lower, there’s less electricity in the grid and so prices are higher. And so- Mm … yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s why people are really asking to know more about what efficiency upgrades are possible, better ways to operate, scheduled maintenance, um, all those sorts of things. Mm. So that will be really interesting. Matthew Stead: Raising the bar on sophistication. Um, but also life extension Allen Hall: Yes, a lot of discussion about life extension Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, end of life and life extension End of life Yeah, um- Matthew Stead: Foundations, structures Which is Allen Hall: tied to PPA. Mm. A lot of that [00:04:00] discussion I, at least I looked at it as, uh, if I had a PPA and I can continue with that PPA with an existing turbine, I want to do that. Mm, Matthew Stead: mm, Allen Hall: mm. But how do I do that and how do I know that that existing turbine can last another five years? It seemed to go in five-year blocks, like can we get to another five years and then another and then, then another. Wow. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Once you get to 20, 20, 25 years, I think people like, uh, they, you know- It’s getting a little- Their original agreement might have been for 20, then they kind of just assume that there will be another five, and then after that they’re- Yeah … kind of reassessing cyclically and yeah, I know that people make plans for, you know, what components are replaceable, what would they have to get in, and I think that sometimes, uh, people doing those plans aren’t as familiar with the, you know, actual technical issues that are being faced. Like, is a blade a replaceable component? It may be early on in the life it sort of is, not easily, but you know, like a 25-year-old wind turbine, you know, good luck trying to order 10 new blades because you’ve got a, you know, an issue that’s- Allen Hall: Oh, well you, you need to read the news. Did you [00:05:00] see the news today about, uh, the, the wooden wind turbine blades as a replacement for aged blades? That, that’s happening- … in real time, Rosa. Rosemary Barnes: Okay. I know they- Yeah. Yep, yep. Okay. Okay. So that, that’s, that’s good. Making carbon new blade. E- even so, I don’t think that they’re- Okay. … gonna be, like, super-duper cheap, so you’re still gonna wanna be, um, doing a trade-off between y- you know, like, what kind of repairs. You might be able to change the way you’re operating to reduce loads. Um, you might be able to monitor to make sure that your blades are safe. You know, if you know that there’s an issue, um, you just wanna get some advanced warning before blades start falling off your, your tower. Mm. You know, and then you can push it further. Yeah. Whereas if you’ve got no information, then you have to be conservative and shut it down. Yeah. So yeah, I think there’s a whole lot that can be g- can be done there in that area. Matthew Stead: There was a point that came up today, which I think was close to your heart, on, you know, if you’re going to be going for 1% or 2% or 0.5% AEP improvement, how do you actually measure that and how do you set up a proper experiment? So- Rosemary Barnes: Yeah … Matthew Stead: I, I, I love that topic. [00:06:00] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. No, it’s one that I, um, yeah, I deal with m- my clients I, I’m often… It’s one of the things that Pablo really loves to do, is to organize trials of that nature of new technologies and see if they work. But, um, yeah, asset managers are usually very, uh, focused on fast results. You know, they’ve got a, a big problem and they want a solution now, so they wanna just roll out the new technology over an entire wind farm. But if you do that, then it’s almost impossible. Unless you get, like, a huge benefit, like, uh, 10% gains or, you know, like reduce your failures by 50% or more, it’s really hard to actually- Mm pick that out if you just replace everything. Mm. Whereas if you do a really, really good, um, trial plan- Systematic. Yeah … and you match pairs very well so that you have, you know, a control for each turbine and there’s- so many variables in a wind farm. It’s not, it’s not as easy as just, like, randomly choosing 50% to do and not do. Mm. Mm. Mm. Like, you have to, you know, put some work into the trial design, and then, you know, like, do your statistical calculations ahead of time to know how long it’s gonna take you to get s- statistical [00:07:00]significance. So then you don’t just have a gut feeling about- Yep … how something went. You’ve actually got numbers, and then you can take those numbers to, you know, other wind farms that you’ve got- Yeah and, and know what’s going on much better. Matthew Stead: Worst study is an inconclusive study. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Definitely. Allen Hall: Well, that comes back to the data analysis- Mm … which a lot of operators mentioned, and how much data there is and what to do with it, and it did seem like a couple of operators have chosen some AI tools, varying degrees, all the way down from Microsoft Copilot to something much more complicated. Uh, but I think there’s, uh, getting that d- to the last 1, 2, 3%, you’re going to need those tools- Absolutely … because what do you choose? Do you choose a blade? Do you choose a gearbox? Do you choose a generator? Do you go to the substation to get that percentage point or two Without having some really powerful tools- Mm. you may be wasting your time [00:08:00] and money. Matthew Stead: Mm. Allen Hall: Which is a, a, a very interesting, uh, aspect to wind energy because it’s such an industrial business that, uh, we haven’t used heavy computational tools, uh, un- until really now. Matthew Stead: Mm. Allen Hall: And maybe Australia’s at the forefront because of the PPA and negative pricing is that that will, uh, actually lead an industry. Because I haven’t seen a lot of that being used globally. Mm. So this is the first time an operator- Mm … that I’ve talked to has said, “We’re using it.” Matthew Stead: Yeah. It’s quite a different discussion, um, I think, you know, this year compared to previous years in that I think in the past it was getting to know what’s possible, but now it’s like real case studies are coming through. And a few of the people had some really good examples that we can talk about at the conference as to how they’ve actually been helped and how they did this and what the outcome was. I think, yeah, that would be really great content on that. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think it’s gonna be a good mix of people who have used third party tools and have experience with it, people that are doing it in-house and can share- Mm some of the kinds of results- Mm … that, that you can get just from analyzing your own- Mm … [00:09:00] SCADA data. Um, people talking about how they get the data that they want. Mm. ‘Cause it’s not always so easy. You would think that, you know, you own a wind turbine, you have a right to have all of the data that comes through it, but it’s not. Um, even if you do technically have a right, it’s, uh, it, it’s harder to actually get it than you might think. Mm. So yeah, sharing all, all those kinds of things. But I think also, like just as important as talking about the successes is talking about the, the gaps that– people still feel lots of gaps. Like, okay, we’ve got all the data, we’re collecting it. We know that there’s so much potential here- Mm … but we don’t really- Mm … know what we can do, or it’s hard for us to, you know- Mm … make headway in this particular pain point. And that is really useful for companies that are developing tools to know what are the, the problems. Mm. Because then they can e- you know, they’re well placed to fix them. Allen Hall: Mm. Which leads to the discussion we had with the operators and, uh, some of the suppliers for WOMA 2027. There’s a lot of interest. And as we’re sitting in the conference rooms, I’m thinking, we may not have enough room to [00:10:00] seat everybody. Uh, the WOMA 2027 website is up and running, and you can register now. So just go to woma2027.com and get started there. At the same point, we’ve had a lot of contact with, uh, pretty much everybody that wants to sponsor the event, and there’s only a limited number of ways to sponsor. So if you’re interested in doing that, you, you need to go to woma2027.com and look at those, uh, part- particular packages and see what- Mm fits your, your business. Uh- Going back to some of the, the comments we were just discussing downstairs about what we heard at 2026, like, which is only a couple of months ago, right? It’s back in February this year. Uh, there’s, they’re still discussing what happened at WOMA 2026- Mm. Which was very fascinating- Mm because I think Rosemary, you and I have been to conferences that I have not thought an iota … about what happened at those conferences. Just nothing interesting does occur. There’s no new, new information, there’s [00:11:00] no new science, there’s no new operator approaches. Rosemary Barnes: Mm. Allen Hall: But we’re gonna see a number of those- Yeah. Mm … come next March. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, I think it’s partly because I don’t know what other conference organizers do, but, you know, we’ve had a exhausting few days here. You’ve come all the way from America, obviously, and, and Claire as well, also come over, our producer. Um, so, y- you know, like, we’re working really hard to make sure that the topics… Like, it’s not an accident that the topics are ones that people are talking about later, because we come here to make sure that we get the right topics. And it’s not just these meetings as well. People get in touch, and- Mm … anybody watching, listening, who has, you know, something that they wanna talk about, then definitely, you know, send us a message, and yeah, we’re working on the agenda. We’ll, we’ll have a draft agenda in the next couple of weeks based on what we’ve learned here, but then we’ve got the hard job of it’s not just that you have a really interesting topic, you need to have a really great speaker- Yeah … or several really great speakers, usually covering several different aspects of the problem. You know, maybe it’s, uh, yeah, an asset [00:12:00] owner, an OEM, and some, some technology provider, you know, all together giving different, um, yeah, perspectives. That’s, I think, what makes a really great session. Mm. So yeah, we need the ideas for the sessions, and we also need the ideas for great speakers. Matthew Stead: Yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Right. Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think we’ve, we’ve already matched a few of those dots, so- Yeah … I, we’ve heard people asking for certain topics they wanna hear about, and then we’ve heard other operators saying, “Well, this is what we could talk about.” So I think we’ve already- Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah … got some great Matthew Stead: progress. Rosemary Barnes: It was, it was interesting ’cause we, we built up a list of, you know- Matthew Stead: Yeah Rosemary Barnes: frequently raised topics, and then you’d say it to the next person that you went to- Mm … and they’re like, “Oh, that’s not a problem for us because we’ve done X, Y, Z.” And you’re like, “Okay. Well, excellent. You can, you can present the solutions that we know that other people- Yeah. Yes … are, are looking for.” Yeah. So it has been… Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely worthwhile coming, as, as tiring as it is. Yeah. Um, definitely worthwhile, and we’ll get a much better agenda for the- Yeah … for the effort. Matthew Stead: And I think, I mean, it has been tiring. Um, but what, what made it for me was one of the operators said that [00:13:00] this is the only conference they will go to So I think, I think we’re doing the right thing. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think so. I understand too, like, you know, all of us, we kind of are forced to go to events because that’s where our, our clients and customers are, and so you need to see them. And yeah, like I’ve even gone to the extent of some events where I don’t particularly like the event, but I know everyone’s going. Mm. I just go and sit near the event for a couple of days and meet people at a cafe. So yeah, like we can’t get away from it. But if you’re an asset manager or, um, yeah, somebody in that kind of type of work, like you’ve got better things to do than listen to sales pitches aggressively thrown at you that aren’t relevant- Yeah to what you’re doing. So, um, yeah. Like I, I definitely love to hear that kind of feedback- Yeah … and wanna make sure that we get it every, every year. Like that’s- It’s, it’s Matthew Stead: encouraging. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah … yeah, that’s, that’s the point of the conference, so. Matthew Stead: Yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Matthew Stead: The other big topic was we would really love more OEM involvement. Um- Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Everybody wants more- … a lot of the operators- … OEM involvement- Yeah … all of the asset owners. Matthew Stead: Yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Like we want to [00:14:00] hear from OEMs more, have them there. Um, so yeah, we’re, we’ll be trying to To get those sorted Allen Hall: Well, WOMA is a global conference, although it’s Australia-based and there’s a, a number of Australian operators. There are Danish, Americans, uh, plenty of Europeans. Uh, we’re gonna see some from Southeast Asia, I think, this year. Mm-hmm. And, and Japan hopefully will come. Uh, because it’s a, it’s a global conference, there’s global knowledge- Mm … and wind is such a big industry. You may not have the solution in the United States, it may be sitting in Australia, and we need to exchange those ideas. Mm. And that, that’s the point. So w- we are continuing to look for those world experts as we have received all the inputs of these are all the topics we wanna go hear about. Great. Now it’s on us three to go find some of those world experts and, and try to get them to Melbourne. Yeah. And I, I think that’s a great opportunity. So if we do call you and ask you to participate in WOMA [00:15:00] 2027, please take it seriously because- Mm … you will be bombarded with great questions- Mm … and contacts and information. Uh, it’s an event you won’t wanna miss. Yeah. And- But I would- … there’s opportunity there. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I’d say we’re, we’re prioritizing OEMs, um, to, to get more participation, ideally to speak, but at least to be there. And we have heard from multiple asset owners in Australia that they want, they, they want to know what are some of the upgrades that they can do- Yeah … that you’re offering. They wanna know what’s coming next in terms of technology. They wanna know what are some of the non-Western options. So, you know, like it would be great to get some Chinese wind turbine, um, manufacturers as well. Like, they want all this information. They don’t want a slick sales brochure pitch that doesn’t give them any technical information. So we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get, you know, some technical people to speak on, yeah, what are the upgrades you offer and how does it work- Mm-hmm … and show us a case study that demonstrates the improvements. Um, ’cause that [00:16:00] sometimes is really hard to get out of- Mm … out of OEMs. You know, that, “We’ve got this thing, it’s so amazing, you should get it.” Okay, well, what’s the business case for it? “Oh, well, we don’t have any numbers. Just trust us.” Matthew Stead: Yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Um, it’s so common to get a pitch like that. So yeah, any, any OEM that has any- anything like that, either for the next generation of wind turbines or for upgrading the current fleet, yeah, if you’re willing to bring the data, then people, they are desperate to hear this information. Allen Hall: Mm. Matthew Stead: Yeah. That came up so many times. Rosemary Barnes: Mm. Allen Hall: So what were the other, uh, topics that we’re… I’m just not thinking off the top of my head. I know foundations came up quite a bit- Foundations, yeah … which was an odd one, I think, because we haven’t seen t

Allen covers Germany's new offshore wind price guarantee, England's onshore wind revival, wind for Korean chip plants, and Aeris debt trouble. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. Last summer … Germany held an auction for new offshore wind capacity. Not a single company bid. Zero. This week Berlin put forward a new law to fix that. The old system asked developers to pay for the right to build in the North Sea and the Baltic. TotalEnergies and BP bid billions of euros … then walked away. So the new plan introduces contracts for difference. Build the farm … and the government backstops the price of electricity. The offshore wind association wants abandoned projects … up to sixteen gigawatts … put back on the auction block under the new rules. That is fifty billion euros worth of wind farms waiting for a second chance. The cabinet vote could come as early as next week. Stay in Europe but head west. England just posted its highest number of onshore wind applications in a decade. About forty-five proposals. Before Labour lifted the Conservatives' ban two years ago … applications averaged one megawatt a month. Now they are running at thirty-six megawatts a month. But here is the catch. The average English wind farm has just two turbines. Eight megawatts. In Scotland … the average is nine turbines and fifty-nine megawatts. England is back in the game. It is just playing small. Now cross the Pacific. South Korea selected Pacifico Energy Korea to develop the Jindo offshore wind cluster. Two-point-one-three gigawatts. That is the second and third phases of a broader three-point-two-gigawatt project off the southern coast. And here is the connection worth noting. The region is also building the Honam Semiconductor Cluster … a major chip fabrication site. Semiconductor fabs need enormous and reliable power. This wind cluster is being positioned as the energy source to feed it. Wind as baseload for chip manufacturing. That is a new kind of offtaker. Now head to Brazil. Aeris Energy makes wind turbine blades. This week the company told its creditors it needs to restructure again. Roughly three hundred and thirty million dollars in debt. Aeris already restructured last year. But revenue fell forty-eight percent in the first half of this year. The company lost roughly fifty-three million dollars. It tried to find a buyer. No one came forward. Remember TPI Composites filing Chapter Eleven in Houston last year? The independent blade business keeps getting harder. Back to North America. In Nova Scotia … Port Hawkesbury Paper is spending four hundred and fifty million dollars on thirty-one Nordex turbines. They will be the biggest onshore turbines in North America. Each one … six-point-nine megawatts. And they carry electrothermal technology that prevents ice from forming on the blades. They operate down to minus thirty Celsius. Last January … Nova Scotia's existing turbines dropped from three hundred and fifty megawatts to seventy-five in a single evening when the cold hit. For anyone building in northern climates … cold-weather performance is no longer optional. And in Minnesota … Xcel Energy broke ground on two projects this week. A hundred-and-eighty-five-mile transmission line that can carry four thousand megawatts of new wind and solar to the grid. And alongside it … a four-hundred-and-twenty-megawatt natural gas peaking plant in Lyon County for the days when the wind stops. So what does this week tell us? Germany's auction reform is the story to watch. If Berlin gets contracts for difference right … sixteen gigawatts of stalled projects could come back to life. England proves that removing a political ban releases demand … but the scale gap with Scotland shows that planning culture matters as much as planning law. The blade supply chain is still under stress. If you are in procurement … know your supplier's balance sheet. South Korea is tying offshore wind directly to semiconductor manufacturing. That kind of industrial offtaker changes the project finance equation. And from Minnesota to Nova Scotia … the message is the same. Transmission … peaking power … cold-weather reliability. The turbine is the easy part. The system around it is where the money and the risk still live. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 24th of August 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Bret Tollgaard, president at Sunrez, joins to discuss faster UV blade repairs, new leading edge materials, and growing OEM approvals. Reach out to sales@sunrez.com to learn more! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. 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: Brent, welcome back to the program. Bret Tollgaard: Appreciate you having me back on. Allen Hall: There's been so much happening in the world of UV prepregs and UV adhesives over the past year. Particularly on LinkedIn, I've seen numerous repairs which have used your material, SunRes material, to fix some pretty decent, uh, blade problems. Are you seeing, just seeing a, a much wider adoption now that everybody has basically agreed that UV is the way to go? Bret Tollgaard: I, I really do think that it's starting to become one of the go-to standards for a variety of repairs in the wind market. And yeah, it's great to see both our prepregs and lights being used all over LinkedIn, showing the [00:01:00] capabilities of the materials and how happy customers are to use and adopt the materials. Allen Hall: Yeah. The UV materials are, are getting adopted by OEMs. A lot of ISPs, a, a lot of operators now have it as a standard practice to use UV cured materials just because of the speed and the time that is saved. Uh, it's, it's remarkable how much time you're saving, because the, the real kicker right now if you're trying to do a repair, even in the summer months, let's just say it's warm outside and the temperatures are right and it's calm winds, you're saving multiple hours per repair. What generally... How much time are you generally saving on a kind of a, quote unquote, "standard blade repair"? Bret Tollgaard: More and more time, actually, with each session. So we might be saving 50 upwards of 80% of the labor of a traditional epoxy repair. Um, what we've been training companies to do more and more frequently is to actually pre-consolidate the entire repair patch downtower, whether it's in the trailer or inside the tower itself. Um, and so you can pre-consolidate, get [00:02:00] all the air out in between your layers, have the primer pre-applied to the backside. That way, when you're actually uptower, it's simply peel, stick, roll, and then cure it out with our UV light. Sub 10 minutes, uh, will get you a fully cured part. Allen Hall: Wow. That's remarkable. Yeah, when I see those LinkedIn posts from all kinds of operators all around the world using your material I also noticed that the weather conditions may not be pristine like you would have to do with epoxy. So there, there's like a band of temperatures that epoxy systems generally work in. But with the UV material, I'm noticing, I've s- I s- especially over the wintertime, I saw some cold weather repairs going on. Is there any limitation really to the UV cured patches and materials in temperatures? Bret Tollgaard: There, there really aren't for the temperature ranges that people will actually be out and installing these. Some of my favorite photos are when it's negative five Celsius outside and everyone's got the big gloves, the big [00:03:00] scarves, the big warmers and everything, and they're applying our prepreg materials, uh, in below freezing conditions and still curing with the same 10-minute cycle time. Uh, another big advantage of our UV prepregs is everything's already pre-wet out, so you're not uptower with your fiberglass and your resin kicking off an epoxy or even some other, uh, you know, materials out there where it's really hard to impregnate and get that saturation and kick off with UV. And so our prepreg repair patches really lend themselves to efficiency in the field, uh, over a really broad variety of, uh, ambient temperatures. So some of the negative five, negative 10 C installs all the way up to the hot ones in Texas and India and Australia, where you've got these people and it's 100 Fahrenheit or, you know, 35 plus C, and you still cure with the same consistency, the same cure rate, the k- same cure speeds, um, really, really makes it a very versatile system. Allen Hall: It just gets rid of the variation and, and [00:04:00] that's one of the items when we look at repairs. So we're on the lightning side of this business where lightning damage happens, so we see a lot of repairs happen. We also see a lot of repairs that don't look great. They're, I mean, the vast majority do look great, but you get these occasional ones where they've tried to use epoxy in the wintertime and use a heat blanket. It, it's difficult to do. It, it just is because of the material, it's very difficult to do. I'm recommending more and more that they use a UV cure material if they're gonna go off and do it, particularly as they, uh, do what I would consider to be a temporary patch until they get where they can do more in-depth work when it's warmer outside. But it, it does really change the game because the ability to buy the material quickly is amazing. Uh, b- there's no hazardous me- chemi- chemicals in, uh, the Sunrise material at all, so it can be shipped anywhere, anytime, overnight, on a airplane, on a truck, doesn't matter. Does that really open up the marketplaces for the [00:05:00] Sunrise UV cure materials? Bret Tollgaard: 100%. And because of the long shelf life as well, um, we stock and store all of the common, um, materials used for wind. The prepreg, the putties, the surface primers. Fiberglass also does a great job of stocking and storing things. And yeah, because these can ship as unregulated materials, we get calls for next-day air shipping all the time, all over the world. And so whether it's out here domestically, it's going up to Canada, Europe, uh, Asia, Australia, um, it's really, really simplifies the whole process from start to finish. Allen Hall: Are there any special tools you need to use when applying a, a UV cured prepreg patch to a blade, or is it just standard existing tools? Is there anything unique there? Bret Tollgaard: No. It's kind of as simple as it gets. There's no vacuum bag required. There's no heat blanket required. To truly install the materials, you're gonna take off the back, uh, layer of, of the film on the backside of the [00:06:00] prepreg, re-stack and consolidate your materials. Uh, you're gonna consolidate that with a basic three-inch or six-inch bubble buster hand roller. Every technician's gonna know exactly what that is. Uh, it's a simple piece of little rolling metal that, uh, simply rolls out any air between the, the repair patches. And then after that, you're gonna grab a paintbrush, and you're gonna spread some of our surface primer over the backside of the prepreg. So you got a hand roller, and you got a paintbrush That's all you're gonna need to get the material up onto the wind blade. And then of course, to cure the material, you need a UV light to do so. The sunshine, although it will cure the material, you never have consistent sun, light intensity, you're on the shady side of the blade, et cetera. And so we've developed a variety of UV curing devices to help facilitate that. So our standard in the industry right now is what we call our Gen 2 LED lamp. It's about the size of an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper. Um, but it'll, it'll cure several square feet at a time when you're 14 to 20 inches or so away from that [00:07:00] surface. Uh, but in addition to that, we're also working on a patent pending LED array system that is gonna be a broader... Right now, it's about a half meter by one square meter surface area, and it's gonna, um, emit a very, very uniform, uh, amount of light intensity across that entire surface all at once to make it even easier for the installers so they can just strap it to the blade, cure it for five minutes, and then move it over if they have a longer, uh, you know, one to two square meter repair. Allen Hall: Wow, that's remarkable. I, I have one of your lights, and I'm always shocked at how much light intensity there is because I've used other lights and seen other lights, and then they're not nearly as bright or consistent across a, a piece of fabric, for example, where you just see uniformity. Bret Tollgaard: That is certainly one of the challenges that we've actually encountered when people say, "Oh, well, I have a UV light. I bought it on Amazon. I bought it from eBay. I bought it from somewhere where that 200 watt listed on that is not truly 200 watts, or the light intensity, [00:08:00] uh, that they, you know, claim to have. UV cure materials need the correct wavelength. They also need the correct light intensity on that surface to guarantee your depth of cure and to make sure that you're truly bonding to the base substrate behind you. The thicker you go, the more light intensity you're going to need. So a lot of the knockoff materials really just don't do it justice, um, and which is why we've, you know, intentionally built the LED curing systems that we have to cure with our prepregs, uh, and putties and adhesives. So they are all true one, uh, one single system. Allen Hall: We've looked at different light systems here at Weather Guard, and I know we're engineer- we're an engineering group, right? So we're gonna go look to see what these different lights are, and are they really truly putting out the frequency of light which is written down on the ad. It's amazing, like, uh, the variation you get light to light. It really depends on what the source is, but, uh, to test a light, just to test a light to make sure it's putting out the right intensity at [00:09:00] th

Vestas doubles second quarter profit and adds €4.7 billion in market value overnight. Plus EnBW finishes He Dreiht after a V236 blade break, the UK blocks Ming Yang's Scottish factory, and India rules turbines are movable goods. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. 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 StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And three out of the four of us will be in Melbourne Australia talking to a number of operators and interested parties about WOMA 2027. Matthew, where will we be the couple of days we're in Melbourne? Matthew Stead: So, um, first of all, we've got the Pullman, uh, East Melbourne, which is, uh, where the venue will be for, for 2027. Um, so that'll be our home base. Um, we've got around about eight meetings planned already. So what we're doing is we're talking to the operators and a few other industry, um, players about [00:01:00] what we need to talk about, how we're gonna move the industry forward in Australia. Uh, so it's gonna be jam-packed, but there's a little bit of time left on the Friday afternoon if there's any late-minute, um, people that wanna get in contact and catch up with us, um, for next Thursday, Friday, or actually Friday. Uh, so yeah, it's gonna be a, a jam-packed time. I think we're gonna be tired, too many coffees, and talking to all the key, all the key operators, uh, about what they wanna hear about and how we can move the, the industry forward. Allen Hall: And if someone wants to put an input into the WOMA panel about what will be discussed at WOMA 2027, Matthew, how would they do that? How do they get ahold of you? Matthew Stead: Well, we have a wonderful website, and that's got all the details you could ever want. Um, you can also register on the website, so please register. Otherwise, um, I'm sure we're gonna be a sellout this year for sure. So woma2027.com. Rosemary Barnes: I just wanna add that when people talk to [00:02:00] me about the event, they always say how they love that the topics are so relevant, and the reason why that they're so relevant is because we make sure to go around to operators and find out what are the issues that they're really dealing with. So anybody that's thinking of attending, even if you can't, you know, meet us up, meet up with us in Melbourne, get in touch and tell us what are the, yeah, what are the topics that you're struggling with that you're not, um, you're having trouble finding enough information, having trouble finding the people that can help you. And y- yeah, like we take all of that information, and that's how we come up with our agenda each year. And yeah, I mean, for us, that's the, the main thing is that this has to be really relevant, up-to-date information for the industry, and we need your help to make sure it stays that way. I Matthew Stead: mean, that's what we've done the last two years, so this is-- we're just repeating the formula, um, listening to the operators and getting the good topics and the good speakers. Allen Hall: Well, Vestas has had a good quarter. Uh, the, for the last couple of years, honestly, s- [00:03:00] Vestas has been really thin on margins. There was questions about it continuing on. Rising costs mostly, uh, supply chains, especially during COVID, were bad. Uh, and, uh, but for the most part, the shareholders stayed attached. Well, that story is changing rapidly. The world's largest turbine maker posted second quarter operating profits of $400- €46 million, more than double what the analysts had expected, and it's raised its full-year margin guidance alongside half-year results for the first time in a decade. The shares climbed about 20% in Copenhagen, adding roughly €4.7 billion of market value in a single session. Now, the chief executive, uh, Henrik Andersen, ha- put it plainly to, uh, uh, in a couple of news sources that something much bigger is happening and Vestas is gonna be the, the leader in wind. That's how I read it, that everybody [00:04:00]at Vestas was super happy with the, the change in direction and things were moving up steadily. But a 20% jump in a day is remarkable. You don't see that in large industrial businesses like wind energy. Matthew, this has real implications on what happens next for Vestas because success like this usually means more orders. Matthew Stead: Yeah, I wonder what's going on under the hood there. Um, I mean, Vestas is a quality company, although, although can I just do a quick segue? How many turbines were installed in Denmark in the last, uh, two years? Like last year and the year before? Allen Hall: I don't know. How many? Matthew Stead: I believe it was eight turbines installed onshore in Denmark last year, and the year before it was 12. So, you know, maybe, maybe Vestas needs to focus on their own backyard a little bit as well. Allen Hall: I'm not sure there's a lot of opportunity there. Yeah, onshore. Matthew Stead: How can you ever be full? I mean, there's always, um, [00:05:00] uh, you know, um, you know, resiting or, um, you know, upgrades and- Rosemary Barnes: You know what? Allen and I are probably gonna get some time in Jutland, uh, later this year, um, and that area and the old wind turbines there was actually the inspiration for my whole YouTube channel. It just, 'cause there's, you know, there's turbines there from, the earliest one is, um, from the '70s and still going. I think it's one and a half megawatts, actually huge for, for that time. Um, and it was like community made, um, at Tvind. But anyway, I'm interested to revisit the site and have a look and see are these, you know, all these old turbines still there. It's only, like six years since I went through and did the experience but for the most part, they don't seem to be yet pulling down the, the small old ones and putting up big ones. There's a lot of, a lot of them are community owned. Um, and yeah, I mean, Danish people love wind turbines, but there's only so many that you can have onshore. Like, people are happy to live near them by, you know, the standards of people in other countries, but you don't want [00:06:00] one in your literal backyard. I think that there is, there, there is a, a limit to how many more onshore wind turbines that you can get in that area and offshore expansion is the more likely way to go. Um, and also I think it's, it's, it's good to recognize that if you have a domestic only or a domestic first strategy, that will only get you so far and then you have to expand, and I think Denmark did that really well. I think Germany a little bit less. I think that Enercon were a bit surprised, um, by their strategy. It, uh, they had a real hard time anyway when they had to transition away from mostly Germany to getting overseas. And obviously, like if you look at China, they have most of their installations are in China. They are trying so hard to get outside of China because it's not, like even a market as big as China, it's got decades to go before it will be full. Um, you can still recognize that that's not your, like long-term strategy for growth has to involve expansion, I think. Allen Hall: I think Vestas, regardless of what happens in Denmark, is making a play for the United States. That seems to be [00:07:00] where a significant effort is happening at the moment and on offshore. Their-- Vestas seems very excited about the offshore opportunities. Of course, there's a ton of wind turbines gonna be installed in the UK and, and all around Northern Europe. Offshore, the opportunities to buy turbines, there's only a couple that you could get today. Uh, uh, the GE Vernova offerings I, I don't think are gonna fit the mold, and I don't know if GE's even actively selling. So their competitor realistically is Siemens Gamesa, which does seem like the smaller player at the minute versus Vestas, which is heavily pushing the V236 and will fill order books like crazy, I think, uh, just based upon the, the history they've had and everybody knowing who they are. So Also on the move in Australia, right? Vestas is huge in Australia right now. Rosemary Barnes: I think it's really good that their, um, yeah, finances, uh, are [00:08:00] looking a bit better 'cause it's been funny. Like, I tried early on in my wind career to invest in, you know, wind turbine manufacturers knowing that there would be immense growth, and I was right. There, there was immense growth. Not that that was so hard to figure out that there would be, but it did not lead to any kind of, um, return on, on anything, you know. Like, that did not keep pace with the just general market. Um, so I, I stopped trying to, stopped trying to invest to that. But it has been really, really hard for the companies to, you know, raise money or y- you know, do any of the things that they need to do because they've always, like, they're growing, growing, growing, but finances has been so tight that it has been a real constraint on the amount of engineering that they could do, and I really hope that Vestas are gonna take this opportunity that they've got compared to, you know, a lot of the other manufacturers. Vestas do have really strong, um, innovation and, yeah, engineering capabilities for doing-- you know, developing new technologies and improving them, and I really hope that they're taking this opportunity to build that up. There are a lot [00:09:00] of very good engineers with a lot of

A Danish data center will heat a town with its waste heat, Sumitomo buys into Celtic Sea floating wind, and Cadeler orders two more vessels. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. A data center broke ground in Denmark this week ... and the plan is for it to help heat the town. Not a slogan. But a pipe. Let me explain. The project is called Dansk Data Center 1. They put shovels in the ground on August thirteenth at the Port of Esbjerg in southern Denmark. The owners are the pension fund PensionDanmark ... the real estate firm Thylander ... and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. That last name should sound familiar. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has raised about forty-three billion euros across fifteen funds ... and builds energy projects in more than thirty countries. This time it is building a data center. Eleven and a half megawatts. By the standards of this business ... that is small. But watch how they built it. The waste heat will go into the town's district heating system ... in partnership with the local utility ... Din Forsyning. The cooling water runs in a closed loop and gets used again. And the plant can raise or lower its power draw to match whatever the Danish grid has to spare that hour. The chief technology officer put it plainly. The goal is for the data center not to be a burden ... but an active part of a balanced energy system. Commissioning is set for October of twenty twenty-seven. Now ... hold that model in your head. Because on the other side of the world ... they are still doing it the old way. Centuria Industrial is a warehouse landlord. Australia's largest pure-play industrial property trust. This week ... in its full-year results ... it told investors it is chasing more than two hundred and fifty megawatts of data center capacity. Some of that is expansion at sites it already owns. A twelve-megawatt building in Melbourne bought from Telstra back in twenty twenty. A small center in Toowoomba, Queensland. Another in Perth ... leased to Fujitsu. But the rest of that plan is warehouses. Old industrial yards in Victoria and Western Australia that Centuria wants to turn into data halls. And here is the tell. For three of those sites ... the company has already filed power applications. Not planning applications. Power applications. Because in this business ... the grid connection is the product. Centuria's head of funds management says Australian demand is now outpacing supply. He is not wrong. And he is not alone. So ... two continents. Two data center stories. One built as a part of the power system. The other waiting in line for it. Either way ... the load is coming. Which brings us to the people building the supply. Start in the Celtic Sea ... about forty kilometers off the British coast. There is a floating wind project out there called Gwynt Glas. That is Welsh for blue wind. Up to one and a half gigawatts. This week ... Japan's Sumitomo Corporation bought a third of it. The other two thirds are held by EDF ... and by Ireland's Electricity Supply Board. Three equal partners. Now ... Sumitomo has been investing in European offshore wind since twenty fourteen. But this is its first floating project anywhere in the world. And the timeline will test your patience. Consent applications do not even begin until twenty twenty-eight. Commercial operation is targeted for the late twenty thirties. That is a Japanese trading house writing a check today for electricity that shows up in fifteen years. The deal sits under a memorandum signed with the British government last year. Britain wants the Celtic Sea built. Japan just volunteered to help pay for it. Now up to Scotland. Vestas has installed the most powerful onshore wind turbine in Britain. It stands at Sanquhar II ... between Dumfries and Galloway and East Ayrshire. The machine comes off the EnVentus platform ... a bigger rotor married to a higher-rated generator. More energy out of the same wind. That project spent ten years in planning. And Vestas has more than six hundred megawatts of these machines under construction across Britain. But here is the argument going on inside the industry. Everybody is building bigger turbines. And yet a Vestas executive said this week ... quote ... we firmly believe bigger does not automatically mean better. Project economics are under pressure. In Germany and the Netherlands ... you cannot get a blade that size under a bridge or through a village. Scotland is empty enough to try it. Britain now has about thirty-three gigawatts of wind ... split about evenly between onshore and offshore. Onshore space is running out. So every new turbine has to do more work than the one before it. And then ... there are the ships. Cadeler runs the largest fleet of jack-up wind turbine installation vessels in the world. This week ... it ordered two more. The yard is COSCO Shipping Offshore in Qidong, China. The price ... about eight hundred and five million euros. Call it nine hundred and thirty million dollars. Delivery ... twenty thirty and twenty thirty-one. That will bring the fleet to fourteen vessels. And understand what these things are. The current class carries a deck of five thousand six hundred square meters ... a payload over eighteen thousand tonnes ... and a crane that lifts more than three thousand three hundred tonnes. Six extra-large monopile foundations per trip. The new class ... they say ... will be bigger still. Meanwhile the newest ship ... the Wind Ace ... is finishing commissioning right now. Its first job is East Anglia Two for ScottishPower Renewables ... starting in twenty twenty-seven. And here is the number that tells you the most. Cadeler's order backlog stands above three billion dollars. Eighty-two percent of that work is on projects where the customer has already taken a final investment decision. Nobody orders a nine-hundred-million-dollar ship for twenty thirty-one on a hunch. So ... here is what to watch. For years this industry has fought one bottleneck at a time. Permits. Then supply chain. Then vessels. Now the bottleneck is the grid connection itself. Centuria filed power applications before planning applications. Because in twenty twenty-six ... the scarce resource is not land or steel or capital. It is a slot on the transmission network. That changes the game for wind developers. The projects that win will not be the ones with the biggest turbines or the cheapest blades. They will be the ones that show up with a grid solution already in hand. Denmark just showed what that looks like. A data center that flexes its load ... feeds heat back to the community ... and makes the grid operator's job easier. If you are developing a wind farm today ... and you are not thinking about who will consume your electrons and how ... you are already behind. The old pitch was ... we generate clean power. The new pitch is ... we solve a grid problem. That is the difference between a project that gets built and one that sits in a queue for five years. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 18th of August ... twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Lars Bendsen, founder and CEO at AC883, joins to discuss the Muehlhan Wind Service acquisition and Canada's aging turbine fleet. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. 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: Lars, welcome back to the podcast. Lars Bendsen: Thank you so much, Allen. Allen Hall: A lot has happened since I talked to you last. I saw some of the announcements on LinkedIn. I was really excited for you. So AC883 has news. Lars Bendsen: We have news. It was about a month ago now, but yes, things have been going very well. Allen Hall: Muehlhan has acquired AC883, which is a company you started how many years ago? Lars Bendsen: I started AC883 12 years ago. From my dining room table, basically. Allen Hall: Wow. And it's grown to quite the business over time. Lars Bendsen: Yes, we have been expanding, especially the last five years after my son came in. He has been the main driver, so we've been expanding like crazy the last five years. And, well, getting older. Now we are at a point where we should extend, spend more. And then when Muehlhan, one of the biggest companies in the wind industry, looked our way, it was an easy decision to make. Very easy. Allen Hall: Muehlhan is well known for being a leader in the ISP world in Europe, and a little bit in America. They're still making a presence here. That's why they wanted to talk to you, I'm sure, because AC883 has a nice Canadian market. People trust you and rely upon you, because you bring the quality people over, plus you have all the resources to get to parts that you can't acquire in Canada and the United States. You know who to call. It's part of that Danish connection. And that makes a lot of sense, because I do think as we see the industry mature, those quality companies like AC883 are very valuable. They see them as being a huge resource to the industry. Lars Bendsen: As I said, it makes us really proud that a big company is looking our way, and it's been a very smooth transition. As you were talking about earlier, the industry is maturing, meaning also big is getting bigger, and you need more horsepower, you need more muscle. And we also needed that, because we're expanding and there's only so much we can do. And we're all getting older, so at a certain time you have to do something. Allen Hall: Sure, but it comes at a point where you've proven yourself time and time again. How many times have you grown an industry in your lifetime? You've done it many, many times. That's why AC883 has always been the relied-upon source for so many things. Now Muehlhan brings a lot of advantages and a lot of horsepower to the organization. Because as you have gotten larger, you realize there's a lot of back office things that need to happen. Safety, gear, equipment. It's not just putting technicians on ropes out on site. There's all the management of that. That's where size matters. Lars Bendsen: Size matters, and also the whole health and safety perspective. You're putting more staff behind the scenes than actually in front of the scenes. So it's also extremely expensive. And now we're expanding our offering, because under the Muehlhan umbrella we can do everything, including main component changes, which we didn't do before. We decided before that anything we need a crane for, we do not do. Allen Hall: Right, I remember that. Lars Bendsen: Because it's a completely different animal from a health and safety perspective, equipment, et cetera. And now in Canada, the company we're going to be merging with, that's what they do. They're really strong in lifting and really strong in installation of turbines, complete wind farms. Where we are strong on the O&M side. And our primary customer is the asset owners. Allen Hall: Asset owners love you. Lars Bendsen: We hope so. We think so. Allen Hall: I know they do. Lars Bendsen: Where the other company is more focused on the OEM side. So there's actually a really good mix in that. And we don't step on each other's toes, because we are focused on the O&M part and they're focused on installation of turbines. So it's a perfect match in so many ways. Allen Hall: And particularly in Canada, because the Canadian market is poised to put a lot of turbines up in the next couple of years. But at the same time, there's an older fleet there, and spare parts is an issue. Some of the blades and the repairs are a little more complicated just because of the age of the turbine. And there are a lot of spares and components that you have access to and can bring into the Canadian market. You keep those turbines that are 15, 20 years old running. Lars Bendsen: Yes, we're in a sweet spot in that respect, where the turbines are getting older but they're not too old. So we need to keep them alive. And also, many owners still have the high PPA, which also means they want to do it. So there is a growing market for the O&M component, no doubt about it. But also, whatever happens in the US, leave that aside, they have a lot of good stuff happening in Canada on the offshore side, on the East Coast. Allen Hall: Oh, yes. Lars Bendsen: Nova Scotia. There are four big projects going out to bid, I think, within a year or so, and a lot of new projects coming up. So no doubt about it, Canada is a growing market. Where my impression is, and I have to be careful not to say too much, maybe the US is more a stagnating market. It's maybe not growing as fast as it used to be. Of course, I don't know enough to be smart about saying it. I'm just saying my impression is it's more a flat market. Allen Hall: Today. Lars Bendsen: Today, today. Allen Hall: But tomorrow it's something else. Lars Bendsen: That's the charm of the unpredictability. Allen Hall: Exactly. Welcome to wind, right? It's unpredictable. Well, I think that's good, because the Canadian market is one of those pieces that a lot of Americans don't pay attention to, because it's not the same scale. Lars Bendsen: Not yet. But also from the European side, every time we have talked to European vendors or customers, it's “yeah, be in America.” Yes, but I'm talking Canada. Canada has not even been on the radar. They're talking about it as of late, but they had not talked about anything else before. So now it's coming on the radar. And I know the Muehlhan people are smart people. They might be seeing that too. Allen Hall: Oh, I would imagine, yes. Lars Bendsen: So I have no doubt that it makes sense. The other thing that's critical, of course, the US is big as well, but Canada is area-wise extremely big. Allen Hall: Same width as America, roughly. That's a big territory. Lars Bendsen: But that also means it's further between the turbines. That means you can travel like crazy to meet very few clients. And that's why the one company is in western Canada and we are in eastern Canada. That makes sense. There are many reasons why you have to be local in your area. Allen Hall: Part of that is what's happening in the United States at the moment, but it's also on the part of Canada to react to it in a positive way. Like, if America's not going to do it, well, we're here. We have great wind resources in Canada. And that's what the Canadian government is saying to itself, I think. They're realizing the opportunity to go after that wind resource is now. And not only that, because of the way America has situated itself, they can sell a lot of that power that's going to be generated in Canada right down to the East Coast of the United States. Lars Bendsen: Yes. Well, the whole AI, the whole data center stuff. It takes seven to eight years to build a power plant. Normally they put a wind farm up in two years. You can't avoid it, whether you want to or not. I think the Canadians are a little bit optimistic right now, to say, “If you don't want to do it, we will do it.” And I think we are very happy, and we will see by the end of 2028 who's happy where. But it's all good. Allen Hall: Right. Lars Bendsen: It's all good. But again, by that time, well, only now I'm retired officially, so... Allen Hall: What does that mean? What does retired officially mean? Lars Bendsen: I don't know. But I'm retired in the respect that Muehlhan bought the company, and Jannik, my son, who's been running my company— Allen Hall: Jannik is awesome. Lars Bendsen: —he's been running my company anyhow the last three years. So there's no change in personnel, same person, people know the same him. Same place, same locations. Nothing has changed at all. Same reasons as before. We just have more horsepower and more offerings to do, and we're very happy, because we needed that too. Just the whole thing about main component routines. Now we can do it. We couldn't do that before. Allen Hall: There's a lot of need for that. Lars Bendsen: As you said, the aging fleet, they need to do main components. We need to lift a whole rotor down, different stuff. So that's good. Allen Hall: Isn't that exciting, though? Lars Bendsen: It's very exciting. Especially for our team. And I'm so proud and happy sitting on the sideline and following it. It's amazing. Allen Hall: Well, you're not going to sit there and let them do main component exchanges without going and watching that, right? You're going to have to go at least take a look at that. Lars Bendsen: I can't go on site, so I can sit from the highway and look at it. Allen Hall: They'll give you a hard hat, don't worry. Lars Bendsen: Oh, I won't do it. Allen Hall: Safety glasses and steel-toe shoes. Lars Bendsen: Maybe,...

ORE Catapult wants industry blade failure data, Siemens Gamesa posts its first profit since 2022, and Vattenfall sweeps Denmark's offshore auction. Fill out the ORE Catapult survey! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Sted, and Yolanda Padron. And it has been a real interesting week out in the renewable land, uh, if you've been watching some of the news, and we're gonna talk about a number of those stories this week. But I wanna lead off with what ORE Catapult is doing over in the UK. So if, if you haven't followed ORE Catapult, they are a, a research investigative arm and a huge proponent of wind, offshore wind in the United Kingdom, and they've done a, a tre- really tremendous amount of work in some of the, uh, particular problems that exist in wind trying to help [00:01:00] solve them. They have a survey that's out, and if you haven't seen it, you can just Google ORE Catapult and put in survey, and you'll come to either an article or get to their site. And Rosemary and Yolanda, there's a couple of particular items that they're asking questions about. Uh, a lot of it is asking specific questions about torsional stability of blades. Have you seen more difficulty with torsion? Is... Do we need a torsion test? I think that was one of the questions. Uh, also looking at ranking of the different issues that happen with blades in particular. That's what I noticed. Uh, you know, where's lightning? Where's blade connections? Where's structural issues? Where do you rank all those different things? And I, I have not seen a survey like this in quite a while. Is this something that we need to do more of? I know [00:02:00] ORE Catapult will get a huge amount of feedback, at least I hope, over in the UK and, and around Europe. I don't think many Americans are gonna be contributing to that too much since you don't have a lot of offshore wind. But is this going in the right direction? Do we need more of these industry surveys about structural blade issues? Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I think these surveys are a really good idea. Uh, the only thing that scares me from the owner side is that sometimes there's a little bit of, uh- Teams don't really love the idea of sharing information that might seem like it's, um, like intellectual property to their internal teams. Even if as an engineer, of course, you love the idea of sharing and finding out like, um, what everybody else is, is experiencing on their site. Um, and so I really hope that the teams can really look, like their internal teams can really look past that because this would be a really great tool [00:03:00] for everybody to use. I know I looked at the survey myself and some of the questions kind of gave people the, the opportunity to kind of anonymize their data and then just kind of share it and have it. It seemed like it, it would probably be a platform that everybody could look at or everybody that, that shared could look at. And I think that it could be really, really good for operators to be able to know kind of if what they're seeing on site is normal and just to be able to see what they're signing up for when there's a new site coming in. Or if it's a site that's been operational for a while, you can see what's, hopefully, what's happening to a quite older site than yours. So just to, to be able to be a bit more prepared, um, since a lot of these sites are from different own- owners. But I think it's a really good idea. Allen Hall: The survey asked questions about leading edge erosion, torsional loads, root joint integrity, lightning damage, manufacturing defects, which is a big [00:04:00] issue right now, extreme loading events, which also, uh, is, uh, coming about more often, uh, repair performance, and end of life fatigue. So there's a, a series of questions about that and when do you experience these items in the lifetime of a blade. Is it more towards the beginning of the operation or more towards the end? That is important to know 'cause it, how you go about managing blades depends on that. The torsional questions were more specific. Uh, in your experience, how well understood are the effects on blade longevity of torsional loads compared to bending loads? And I think that relates back to some of the, uh, issues that have been seen on some offshore blades where there's no existing test for torsion because it's so hard to do. Whereas bending loads, we pretty well understand that and can do lifetime testing essentially for, for bending loads. So the torsional one I think is gonna raise a lot of question marks to hopefully with people, and we can come up [00:05:00] with a, a better approach to that. Yolanda Padron: Hopefully, yeah. I think this is, I mean, this is just a really good idea to if, if everybody could partake. Um, I would really love to see something similar if people could in, in onshore. And so just something that's, that's shared a, uh, a little bit more widely I think would be really, really great. Uh, the only thing that might stre- or not stress me out, but- you know, I think people need to be careful about is just making sure that you're not, um, that you actually use your data and not just kind of like, "Oh, I know that I remember this terrible lightning damage that I got in this really, really bad area, so I'm gonna mark as though most of my lightning damage happens in that bad area." So just, just make sure you don't use confirmation bias for, for that, but Matthew Stead: I can also add to it as well 'cause, um, we've done a fair bit of work with all Catapult over the years, um, particularly through the new IEC standard for blade O&M. Um, and, uh, [00:06:00] definitely through the new blade O&M standard, the topic of blade twist has come up multiple times. Um- And also adding to that, you know, our organization has done twist on, twist measurements on 100 meter blades, and the twist that we measured was more than the OEM expected. Um, so I think this is a bit of a sleeper topic, um, and I think OR Catapult is doing the right thing by gathering more information. Allen Hall: There is a l- little database that's gonna be put together, at least looking at the questions. Question 12, and everybody hopefully will go in and, and participate in the survey, but it says, "Would you be interested in sharing redacted failure data into a industry-wide database to help inform research agenda for blade development and O&M tools and solutions?" That is a great idea. Having a database so we understand the scale of problems and can put some numbers [00:07:00] to them, and then we can do some more research in those areas, and focus research where we're actually gonna spend money in the right places, which has been my fight for the last five, six years, where we spend a lot of money, but not necessarily where we need to. That's a great question, and hopefully OR Catapult does p- put together a database. Rosemary Barnes: Companies really, really, really struggle to provide access to their data. Like, um, it, y- yeah, it, it's, it's very hard to get it beyond just using for their own specific project. I'll be, I'll be so happy if this database gets up and becomes publicly available so that every- everybody can use it to create the solutions that the industry needs. But I know how hard a challenge it is, so I'm wishing them heaps of, heaps of luck to get it to work. Matthew Stead: And can I also add that, um, OR Catapult also did a wonderful presentation at Blades Europe, where they talked about life extension. They talked about the actual loading on the blades, um, influencing the fatigue life. And so I think, you know, that excellent [00:08:00] database hopefully, as we talked about, gets fed into some of their work about life extension. Allen Hall: Well, OR Catapult is trying to get ahead of blade failures before they cost money. Uh, our next company knows exactly what that costs. Siemens Gamesa is still climbing out of a serial defect problem, and it posted its first profit in four years. So we'll be back to talk about that in a moment. Speaker: Are you overspending on lightning repairs? Most operators are, because solving lightning damage is complicated. Weather Guard Lightning Tech helps operators reduce lightning damage. Our innovative StrikeTape lightning diverter protects over 20,000 blades worldwide. Now, StrikeTape Ultra installs faster than ever. StrikeTape Ultra cures uptower in just 15 minutes, even in cold weather. Visit weatherguardwind.com to schedule a call. Allen Hall: Siemens Gamesa has finally turned a [00:09:00] profit, its first time since 2022. Uh, now comes the hard part. Order intake in the third quarter fell 77% from 4.89 billion euros a year ago to 1.05 billion Chief Executive Christian Bruch, uh, says a lot of the offshore projects that were originally planned are slipping, and as we've seen in the news, and that developers are not willing to make final investment decisions right now. Uh, in Germany, developers are lobbying to hand 16 gigawatts of offshore sites back to the states, and, and Bruch says that the, the capacity is, is not going to be built. Onshore, uh, the relaunched 5.X platform is ramping up slowly after the serial defect shutdown, with approvals still holding some orders back. So Siemens Gamesa is going to make a push, or [00:10:00] Omtera I guess it is called now, w- is going to make a push, uh, into the 5.X machine and continue on on the offshore side. But boy, some of these, uh, auctions and, uh,...

Allen covers a judge lifting the Pentagon's wind freeze, RWE's $1.22B US offshore exit, and TotalEnergies buying Shell's European renewables. 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! Good Monday everyone. You know ... there is an old saying. When one door closes ... another one opens. Well this week in wind energy ... a whole lot of doors were swinging. Let us start in Washington. For months ... the Pentagon had quietly stopped reviewing wind energy project applications. More than a hundred and fifty onshore wind projects ... stuck in limbo. The Defense Department claimed that drones in Ukraine had changed the game. Wind turbines ... they said ... could blind radar to incoming threats. So they hit the brakes. But on Thursday ... a federal judge said ... not so fast. Judge Karin Immergut ... a Trump appointee no less ... issued a preliminary injunction. Resume the reviews ... she ordered. Follow the law Congress wrote. The law gives the Pentagon seventy-five days for a preliminary review. As of late July ... not a single one had been completed since the halt began in May. When government lawyers were asked to name one project they had reviewed ... they could not name a single one. The judge told them plainly. If you want to change the rules ... go ask Congress. Now ... while one arm of the government was being told to do its job ... another arm was writing checks. German energy giant RWE ... handed back its American offshore wind leases. New York. California. Louisiana. In return ... the U.S. Department of the Interior cut RWE a check for one-point-two-two billion dollars. RWE is the fifth developer to walk away from American offshore wind under this administration. The company had spent more than a billion dollars on those leases. Years of planning. Investment. Partnership with federal agencies. But RWE said there is simply no path forward to permit these projects ... for the foreseeable future. So where does the $1.22B go? Nine hundred million dollars into Louisiana LNG. Three hundred million into natural gas turbine reservations. Fifteen gas peaking projects across the country. A company that came to America to build wind farms ... is now building gas plants instead. But here is the thing about RWE. They are not leaving the wind business. They are leaving American offshore wind. Globally ... RWE operates eighteen offshore wind farms. Four more under construction. And nearly seven gigawatts secured in the United Kingdom's latest auction. America said no. The rest of the world said ... come on in. And speaking of Europe ... TotalEnergies ... the French oil major ... just bought Shell's entire onshore renewables business in Europe. Four gigawatts of solar and wind. Five hundred megawatts already running or under construction in Italy and the Netherlands. Three-and-a-half gigawatts more in the pipeline across Italy ... the United Kingdom ... and Spain. And in the same breath ... TotalEnergies sold a fifty percent stake in a one-point-two gigawatt European portfolio to KKR ... for an enterprise value of one-point-eight billion euros. Build it. Sell half. Keep operating it. That is the model. Now let us fly east ... to India. GE Vernova just landed a hundred-and-sixty-three megawatt wind order from American developer Enfinity Global. Forty-three turbines. Three-point-eight megawatts each. Headed for the Fatehgarh wind farm in Rajasthan. Deliveries start late this year. And those turbines will be built at GE Vernova's factory in Pune ... which can turn out fifteen hundred megawatts a year. India is pushing for five hundred gigawatts of renewable energy. Meanwhile ... up in Denmark ... a Danish wind tower maker named Welcon is raising its voice. Swedish utility Vattenfall just won two offshore wind tenders in Denmark. But when asked whether they would use European-made turbines ... Vattenfall would not say. Welcon's chief executive Jens Risvig Pedersen said ... and I quote ... “It would be completely absurd not to buy European products for the two new Danish offshore wind farms. That would simply shut down the European industry.” The Danish trade union Dansk Metal agreed. Chinese turbines ... they said ... should not be financed with Danish taxpayer money. Vattenfall says it has not decided yet. But the debate is on. And finally ... a milestone that happened so quietly ... nobody noticed. The world just crossed three terawatts of installed solar power. It took ten years to build the first terawatt. Less than three years for the second. And not even two more years for the third. Seventy-four countries now have at least one gigawatt of solar installed. That is up from forty-two in twenty-twenty. BloombergNEF expects nine terawatts by twenty thirty-six. But here is the catch. Without batteries ... solar hits a ceiling. Places like Australia and California already have so much solar that electricity prices go negative during the day. You heard that right. They pay people to use power. The answer is battery storage. But batteries are not able to keep up with the pace of solar. Now ... if you step back from all of this ... something interesting emerges. Nobody in these stories is arguing about whether wind works. Not the judge in Oregon. Not RWE. Not even the Pentagon. The debate has moved on. The question is no longer ... can you build a wind farm. The question is ... who gets to decide where one goes. Think about that. A federal judge did not rule that wind turbines are safe or good or necessary. She ruled that the government cannot ignore its own laws. The science was not on trial. The process was. RWE did not surrender its leases because offshore wind failed. It surrendered them because one government made permitting impossible ... while eighteen other wind farms in its global portfolio kept spinning. And TotalEnergies did not buy four gigawatts of European renewables out of charity. It bought them because Shell ... an oil company ... decided those assets no longer fit its strategy. One oil major's exit is another's entrance. The assets did not lose value. They changed hands. That is the story underneath all these headlines. Wind energy has crossed a threshold that most industries never reach. It is no longer competing on technology. It is competing on governance. The turbines work. The economics work. The engineering works. What varies ... country by country ... is whether the rules of the road are clear enough for capital to show up. And capital ... as we saw this week ... will always find the door that is open. That is the state of the wind industry for the 10th of August ... twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Jon Zalar, founder of IWTG Consulting, joins to discuss broken blade bolts, cracked pitch bearings, loose root inserts, and early detection. 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: Jon, welcome back to the program. Jon Zalar: Thanks for having me. Allen Hall: Uh, last time I saw you, we were in Melbourne- Yep ... at WOMA 2026, and that was a huge event. We know we're gonna do it again next year in March three, the 3rd through the 5th, so you're invited back, of course- I can't wait ... if you can make it. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a good time. A lot is happening in the blade world and in the wind turbine world more broadly. A lot of things we're hearing right now are related to blade bolt connection, pitch bearing inserts still. A lot of that still happening in the United States. What is the current status of, uh, the blade connection issues in the US? I, Jon Zalar: I feel like it's a growing [00:01:00] issue, not super, super fast, but it seems to be getting a little worse. There's, you know, more bolts breaking at that joint. Um, pitch bearing cracks are, seem to be pretty common. There's different solutions for it, and then, you know, the root inserts are another thing that we've talked about before that seem to be happening more and more, or maybe more and more people are finding them 'cause they're looking. Allen Hall: What are the first indications that you have a blade bolt or some sort of joint issue at the root of a blade? What can you see? Jon Zalar: A bolt laying in the hub bouncing around. Um, you know, from like a-- looking at it from, like, the sensors on the turbine, it's really hard to tell unless it gets really bad. Uh, some of the OEMs have some analytics developed to kinda start to indicate if there is a aero change because there's missing bolts or root inserts are coming out, and they're using that as a way to go figure out which ones to go inspect first. Allen Hall: Really? Yeah. You think [00:02:00] the SCADA data will give you some indication that you have a, basically a little bit of a loose blade? Jon Zalar: Yeah. I, I, I think because the number of turbines and the number of data points you have, I think there is a pretty good analytic out there right now. Allen Hall: Wow. All right. I think a lot of our operators have not taken advantage of that. Is, is that just b- based on the high-speed data, SCADA data, or is it low-speed data you could see that same effect? Jon Zalar: I believe it's on the low-speed data as well, but I bet the high-speed data was used to kinda develop it. Allen Hall: Wow. All right. So that's a huge help to operators. Yeah. So what are you looking for if you're looking through SCADA data, what would be the couple of markers there that say, "Hey, maybe we ought to go look up at the-- in the hub"? Jon Zalar: I don't know exactly what they're using, but they would basically look for maybe an imbalance or looking for certain components that are being overworked. Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Okay. Jon Zalar: Yeah. Allen Hall: So your pitch actuator may be getting a little bit overworked. It would seem like one of the places- I think that, yeah ... that would get loaded, right? Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm. Allen Hall: Okay. [00:03:00] And any vibration monitoring going on? Because it, it, uh, in some cases you're-- I'm hearing, like, millimeter gaps- Jon Zalar: Correct. Yeah ... Allen Hall: between the blade and the pitch bearing. Jon Zalar: So probably a combination of the ALC sensors, at least on a GE turbine, looking at that. But the PCH box also is looking at the tower vibration, so it could be a combination of all three. I don't know the exact- Okay ... details, but between all of that, I think there are some analytics that kinda say, "Hey, go take a look." And then I think there's some other companies that have- tools that go monitor it. Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. Jon Zalar: Dial indicators remotely or even, you know, people going up there with dial indicators to go kind of rotate the rotor and kind of see if there is gapping between the blade and the pitch bearing. Allen Hall: Is that a safe situation in your-- from the gapping? I've heard this where they've basically took shims and they're trying to measure this gap or some sort of dial indication. Is that a smart thing to do? Is it even reliable to do it that way? [00:04:00] Jon Zalar: I, I, I think there's some reliability there. And like, you know, these are really big parts, right? So like a little bit of gap, it, it's probably expected to a point, but growing gaps is where you should be a little more scared. Allen Hall: So you're-- you would have to go do that quarterly, monthly, weekly? How, how often would you have to do it to see the progression? Because I've heard stories of, uh, a couple of weeks from nothing to hub crack to, "Oh, it took a year or more." Jon Zalar: I think it depends on the issue. I think for-- if you're looking at that, the bolted joint itself between the root inserts and the, uh, bolts breaking itself, I, I think they're doing about quarterly. Now, the pitch bearings inspections are also quarterly. They're al- they're, they're leveraging the drone inspections for the blades, and they're looking at the pitch bearings to see if they're cracked, right? Uh, you guys are doing that too. Allen Hall: Okay. Jon Zalar: I think Coraly is doing a good job mitigating the risk, feels like. Allen Hall: Wow. All right. [00:05:00] Yolanda, looking at pitch bearings, you've looked at a lot of drone images in your lifetime. Mm-hmm. How much can you see on drone images on pitch bearings? Can you see cracks and, or y- or do you see grease, which is a really indication that something is wrong in the bearing? Yolanda Padron: You can see grease. You can see the cracks pretty, pretty well. Yeah. The drone images are, are really high quality. Uh, but you did mention that it's something that you're seeing a lot more. Is it because there's a lot more aging fleets, or is it a problem with a lot of the new turbines that are coming online? Jon Zalar: I, I think it's an, I think it's a more of a fatigue problem, so the aging of the fleet. And also, I think more people are looking at it, right? 'Cause, like, initially the drones that were looking for blade cracks weren't looking at pitch bearings, but then pitch bearings started cracking, so now they added that to whatever they buy off the drone companies, right? Go look at my pitch bearings, for example. Allen Hall: Hmm. Jon Zalar: So I, I think it's a problem of the more you look sometimes, the more you find. Yolanda Padron: Hmm. Jon Zalar: Yeah. Allen Hall: So we [00:06:00] have root insert issues, which are being addressed by a couple of different companies- Yes ... uh, uh, with somewhat similar solutions. OEM is offering one right now also. Jon Zalar: I, I think there's three solutions. There's two uptower that are basically looking at ways to go fill the void between the root insert itself and the blade root. Um, and I-- there's another company that's also more of a downtower solution where they're actually, like, r- drilling out the root inserts and putting new ones in that are gonna last better, longer. Allen Hall: Okay. So the drilling out is, would be CNC onsite. Correct. Jon Zalar: Yeah. Allen Hall: And they're based over in Europe. But th- the drilling out is a take the blade down, set it on the ground sort of- Yeah. Right ... doing really fine machining on the, on the blade itself. So that, that's a different, completely different insert that's going into that- Jon Zalar: Correct Allen Hall: new hole or- Yep ... clean hole, right? So it's a, just a, uh, totally different kind of product versus trying to inject [00:07:00] some s- sort of epoxy or resin into the, the void. Jon Zalar: Right. Yeah. Uh, I mean, you would prefer to do it uptower. It's gonna cost you less money. Allen Hall: Sure. Jon Zalar: But you wanna make sure you do it right, so I think, uh, I do foresee it being a combination of both solutions kinda going forward. Allen Hall: Is it dependent upon, like, how much damage has been already done, or what the fatigue w- uh, an estimate on what the fatigue life is? Jon Zalar: I think it's strictly on measurement perspective right now. So how much gapping you have, um, kinda determines what potential solutions you have. Allen Hall: So the gaps aren't big, right? So the, the gaps I hear are one millimeter is k- kind of sort of start a problem. Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm. Allen Hall: Three millimeters is, "I need to be making decisions." Jon Zalar: Yeah. So- That, that's what I've heard, too. Yes. Allen Hall: Three millimeters is about a eighth of an inch. Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm. Allen Hall: So it's not a lot of m- Jon Zalar: But you can see sunlight through it if you're s- down there. Allen Hall: Okay. That's not... Well, you should see. That's not Jon Zalar: good either. Yeah. Allen Hall: Right. Okay. So in a, in a three millimeter situation then, you're doing what? [00:08:00] Jon Zalar: You're trying to decide if the uptower solutions are something you wanna go try, 'cause they're still in the trial mode from my understanding or- Allen Hall: Okay ... Jon Zalar: people are learning a lot. ...

A V236 blade fails during construction at He Dreiht. Plus a 53 GW US wind forecast, Suzlon's record quarter, and what turbine noise really measures. 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 striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the "Uptime Wind Energy" podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes. And to lead off this week, s- there's been some trouble in the North Sea. On July 22nd, a blade failed on one of the turbines at EnBW's 960-megawatt He Dreiht offshore wind farm. Uh, EnBW spokesperson said there were no injuries, thank goodness, and that the authorities were notified immediately, which is generally the case in Europe. They're very safety conscious, of course. But the machine was a Vestas V236, which is a-- that 15-megawatt offshore turbine that Vestas is offering. And He Dreiht is where the platform [00:01:00] has made its debut. So Vestas and EnBW are working together on an investigation, an RCA, a- along, uh, looking at the environmental impact because parts of the blade landed in the water. And the, the images I saw online were like a sheer web that was being pulled in onto a ship, so big pieces of blade. Uh, there's gonna be 64 of these turbines going into that wind farm, but this is probably a little bit of a weird thing because it does seem like that the wind farm is under construction when the blade broke, which is not the first time this has happened, right? That we've seen blade breaks at, uh, Vineyard Wind and at Dogger Bank on the GE side. Is this just a construction issue, Yolanda, you think? Or is it some sort of, uh, vibration that's happening during construction that's putting extra stress on the blades? Yolanda Padron: We were talking about it a little bit offline and how it might be a loading [00:02:00] issue because it's not, uh, it's not in the optimal operating, uh, conditions, right? Uh, but this is-- It's-- I don't like that it's becoming a trend more than an anomaly from what we've seen on this podcast. Uh, Matt, I know you work a lot in solutions, right? What, what would you recommend people start doing? Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think, um, more and more there's ways of just checking out, you know, pre-construction, um, you know, some of the vibration modes, some of the unusual, um, wind loading when it's in standstill, you know, different yaw angles and so forth. So there, there's more and more ways of, um, checking out what the blade is doing when it's in those unusual, um, sort of pre-con, pre-operation phases. So, um, you know, for instance, um, we do know that there is some sort of sometimes edgewise or flatwise vibration, which, um, you know, maybe is not normal, um, and maybe could be, be [00:03:00] thought about in a bit more detail. Um, certainly I know there are some research organizations which are looking into this and also, you know, things like blade twists. Um, so what is actually happening in terms of the, um, the twisting of the blade along, along its axis. Allen Hall: I think the last time this happened, I remember going back and looking at patents about how to protect the blades during this construction phase. So you wanna prevent the blade from generating lift from sideways winds pretty much. So the designs that I saw were like putting like a, a netting across the blade to disrupt the airflow so that it wouldn't generate lift. But I haven't really seen that implemented. Maybe it is being implemented, but these loads are a little odd, right? I, I, I'm wondering if there's any IEC certification test that looks into them, uh, just because it's, it's happened a couple of times now, more than a handful. Matthew Stead: We, we saw, um, we saw that picture of some blades on the ground. [00:04:00] You remember they were in storage. Um, there was a, a strong wind that came across them when they were in storage, and there was some, some flutter and, you know, some, some damage it caused, uh, even when they were on the ground. Um, yeah, I think just thinking out loud, you know how on some, you know, wind stacks and, or, you know, turbine stacks and, um, you know, poles, you know, exhaust stacks. Sorry, that's the word I'm looking for. Exhaust stacks. They have the, the spiral around it. You know, it's for around vortex shedding. So maybe it's an opportunity for, for Rosie to jump in here and, uh, and comment. But, um, maybe we can put like vortex, uh, spiral vortex, um, you know, dissipators on the, on the blades before they're fully commissioned. Rosemary Barnes: So it's cer- certainly not a, a matter of the design just being a little bit wrong, right? That would mean that it would last for a, for a while and then And then break. But it, it also, it could be several things. It could [00:05:00] have been a manufacturing defect, a bad one. It could have been transport damage. Tho- those are two other things. It could have been, yeah, you know, like a, a new design feature or material that performed massively differently under real loads than what it did, um, you know, in their computer models and in their coupon tests and in their, um, static tests, fatigue tests that they did. It could be any of those things. Sometimes you do see problems where technically you're not supposed to leave the rotor locked out for any period of time because it is not designed for the off, off-axis weird loads that you can get when the blade is oriented in a suboptimal way compared to the wind. And there have been instances where it's like technically, you know, that was in the instruction manual, however, nobody ever followed it, and it's only under extreme circumstances where that actually is severe enough to break it. There, there can be instances like that [00:06:00] where I would say that it- it's pretty difficult/impossible to actually design s- for safety during any conceivable series of events during installation. The way that you would do it would be to make sure that the blade can handle any wind load and, you know, up to the maximum gust at any, at any time in any position. But having, you know, done a little bit of work, um, on blade design in my past, it is massive. That is just a massive, massive load that is y- it will never see in its lifetime. You would have such heavy, expensive blades if you actually designed it like that. Um, and so yeah, the That, that would be probably the most charitable reason for a failure where nobody really did their job wrong. It's just kind of like some bad luck that happens every now and then. Allen Hall: Well, it does seem like there's a trend there between Dogger Bank, Vineyard Wind, [00:07:00] some of the things we've seen in China. During the construction phase, those turbines are very vulnerable and the, the blades can break. Aren't there extra precautions that could be put in place? Like, you, you could obviously do weather forecasting, and I know that that's done, but it does seem like it's, uh, such a consequential problem to have a blade break on a turbine in the North Sea, near Germany. Like, that, that's just bad PR. Even if you have all the engineering precautions in the world there, you would still maybe play it a little bit safer so this wouldn't happen? Rosemary Barnes: It's really hard. Like I said, if you want to design it so that a blade won't break under these, like, really unusual set of operating conditions that happen during construction, not during-- Like, during operation it has to be able to handle whatever is thrown at it, like, no doubt. Um, everybody agrees on that, including, you know, certification bodies. But during installation, yeah, if you want your blade to be able to handle anything that [00:08:00] that area can throw at it, even, you know, one in 50, one in 100 year storm that comes up unexpectedly, I personally think I haven't done the optimization. I wouldn't be surprised if people had. In fact, I would be surprised if they hadn't. But I bet that it will cost more to design every blade to withstand that than it would to lose the occasional one, you know, one out of What is it? Like one out of 500 blades or something this happens to, one out of 1,000? I, I, I don't know, maybe even less, less than that. Um, you know, so it's, I don't know how much these blades cost new, but, you know, say a few hundred thousand. Uh, it's just, it's gonna be it, it'll be more cost-effective to lose the odd one every now and then. And like you say, it's bad PR, but, um, I don't know. Is it that, like- It- ... things, things happen, things break sometimes. Um, yeah, I don't know. Is the PR that bad? I'm not sure. Matthew Stead: So [00:09:00] I, I've got a question and, um, you know, on LinkedIn, you know, you see whenever there's a, um, whenever there's a failure on L- um, e- everyone posts about it. Rosemary Barnes: Condition monitoring would've stopped this. If there had only been condition monitoring that, that turbine, then they wouldn't have had a blade break during construction. That's why I'm so hesitant to, to, you know, make any calls now 'cause I don't wanna sound like one of those Allen Hall: LinkedIn losers. LinkedIn loser. Rosemary Barnes: I learned that the last, um, root cause analysis, like, you know, catastrophic blade failure, um, the last one that I, uh, yeah, got approached to work on,...

Allen covers Dominion's $800M tariff hit, Eversource's 84% profit drop, Nordex's record quarter, and a looming floating wind vessel shortage. 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! Good Monday, everyone. Let us start this week with a number. Eight hundred million dollars. That is what tariffs on steel and aluminum added to Dominion Energy's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. Dominion President Bob Blue shared the damage on a second-quarter earnings call. Two hundred and thirty million dollars … just in the latest quarter alone. That is on top of the five hundred and eighty million from the quarter before. The project is eighty-one percent complete. Thirty-one turbines are already spinning … producing more than four hundred and fifty megawatts. But the finish line just moved. Completion is now expected by the end of twenty twenty-seven. Weather delays. Vessel maintenance. And some particularly complicated turbines to install. Blue says the project will still save customers money. And Dominion expects to pocket more than five hundred million dollars in savings from grid upgrade cost shifts. The total price tag … eleven-point-six billion dollars. Now … if Dominion is feeling the squeeze in Virginia … Eversource up in New England is feeling something worse. The utility's second-quarter profit dropped eighty-four percent. Net income fell to just fifty-three-point-seven million dollars. Why? A one-hundred-and-sixty-four-million-dollar charge tied to the offshore wind projects they already sold. South Fork Wind. Revolution Wind. Eversource got out of offshore wind back in twenty twenty-four … but the bills keep coming. Higher-than-expected payments to Global Infrastructure Partners are dragging down the bottom line. So one company builds through the pain. Another walks away … and still pays for it. But here is some good news. Over in Hamburg, Germany … Nordex just posted a quarter that would make any CEO smile. Sales up sixteen percent. EBITDA … more than doubled … to two hundred and twenty-four million euros. Margins hit ten-point-three percent. Net income … one hundred and eleven million euros. Up from thirty-one million a year ago. And orders? Up thirty-two percent. Three-point-one gigawatts of new turbine orders in just one quarter. Their total order book now stands at eighteen-point-four billion euros. Nordex CEO José Luis Blanco confirmed the full-year guidance. The onshore wind giant is not just surviving. It is thriving. Now … let us go to sea. Classification society ABS says floating offshore wind is about to create a brand-new problem. Not enough ships. A new report says demand for large anchor-handling vessels and multipurpose support vessels will surge as floating wind projects go from small demonstrations to full commercial scale. Here is the number that tells the story. A single one-gigawatt floating wind farm needs about one hundred and ninety-eight anchors … and nearly two hundred kilometers of mooring lines. That is far more than a single deepwater oil and gas platform. ABS says shortages in certain vessel classes could hit as early as twenty twenty-nine. Global floating wind capacity is expected to grow from about two hundred and seventy megawatts today … to fourteen gigawatts by twenty forty. The race for ships … has begun. And speaking of ships … Japan just finished building one. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines held a naming ceremony in Nagasaki for the Wind Whale. Japan's first coastal deck carrier built specifically for offshore wind. One hundred and forty-nine meters long. A flush deck designed so that monopiles, towers, blades and nacelles can roll right on from the stern. It even has dynamic positioning … so it can transfer cargo directly to installation vessels at sea. Built in China by Taizhou Sanfu Ship Engineering … the Wind Whale will carry foundations from a factory in Okayama to construction sites around Japan. A country that once built ships for oil … now builds them for wind. And finally … back home in Iowa. The state Supreme Court ruled that the CEO of Global Fiberglass Solutions can be held personally liable for dumping thirteen hundred used wind turbine blades across the state. CEO Donald Lilly and another executive argued they were never in Iowa. The court disagreed. Lilly signed the contracts. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird put it plainly. They were hired to recycle used wind turbine blades. Instead … they dumped them. Four hundred blades piled up along Interstate 35 near Ellsworth alone. The lesson? You can build an industry on clean energy. But you still have to clean up after yourself. So what does all of this mean … if you work in wind? It means the money is real now. Projects are not getting canceled. They are getting more expensive. And that changes the math for every engineer, every project manager, every supply chain director reading a bid today. Tariffs come and go. But an eleven-billion-dollar project does not stop on a dime. It means the vessels you need may not be there when you need them. If you are planning a floating wind project for the early twenty thirties … your vessel strategy should already be on paper. It means manufacturers who kept their discipline … who held their margins and grew their order books … are the ones writing the next chapter. And it means accountability is coming to every corner of this business. You cannot just build turbines. You have to manage the turbines. This industry asked the world to trust it with the future of energy. That trust comes with responsibility. And that is the state of the wind industry for August 3rd, 2026.