The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen and Joel are joined by Pete Andrews, Managing Director at EchoBolt. They discuss the company’s new BoltWave inspection device, the shift from routine retightening to condition-based monitoring, and how ultrasonic technology helps operators manage blade stud and tower bolt integrity throughout the turbine lifecycle. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It’s a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it’s, yeah, really nice to be here.  Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah. Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who’s Pete? Give me Pete’s phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we’re here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00] You’re a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it’s a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today’s world.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we’re a uk, um, SME, there’s a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe. Yeah. But increasingly we’ve done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then. Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they’re static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it’s a real big efficiency boost for wind operators.  Joel Saxum: Well, you’re doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we’re gonna do all of this. It’s like, let’s work on the ones that actually need to be worked on. Let’s do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we’re looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems. So I know that you guys said you’re, you’re focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It’s you’re transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces. Like there’s so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well.  Pete Andrews: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, as as you said, that there’s really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on. The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts,  Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely.  Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people. If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor. So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don’t have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you’d have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there’s something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving. By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology  Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is. And I’m watching this go on. I’m like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we’re tighten 10% this year, and they’ll come back and see how it’s going. That’s a little insane, right, because you’re just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we’re wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago. You don’t need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I’ll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it’s shrunk, that probably means it’s not tensioned properly. That’s a huge advantage because you can’t physically see it. And I know I’ve seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that’s where equitable comes in because you’re actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big. Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that’s been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we’re based on a non-destructive testing technique. It’s an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it’s crack detection, people have time, they can be, it’s a very precision measurement. People have to be trained in the wind industry. We’re trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It’s a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn’t delivered on the, on the speed that’s needed to be efficient in wind. And that’s where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we’ve, that we’ve developed over the last. 18 months, let’s say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It’s through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it’s a bit like using the camera app on your phone. You know, you’re just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened. They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it’s sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They’re bolted joints.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right? Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn’t, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you’re in. Use are short of technicians. But we’re seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well. Right. You don’t need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. ’cause there’s a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that’s a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course. Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you’re getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that’s looking at it and you don’t have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things. They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that’s the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you’re making it happen.  Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it’s a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware. Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn’t really something we could put in the hands of a customer.  Joel Saxum: Yeah.  Pete Andrews: Which meant Ebot scale was limited to what our own team could go and do, and regionally as well. You know, so we’re UK based. Probably 60% of our customers are uk, but now we have this Northern Europe offshore wind is obviously on our doorstep, but then increasingly we’ve done more and more in North America, so we’ve probably been to five or six sites now in North America and expect that to be a growth market because we can, we can now ship the devices over there, give some virtual training help. Uh, [00:10:00] people set themselves up and then that opens up that market, you know, so it’s been a real change in strategy for us, but has allowed us to have far more impact than we otherwise would just try to be a pure service.  Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the big problem in the states of a minute, which are the root bushing or inserts that are loose in some blades. When you lose that pushing, you also lose the tension on the bolt that can be measured. Is that something you’re getting involved with quite a bit now because of just trying to determine how many bolts are affected and, and where we are on the safety scale of can we run this turbine or not? Is that something that EE bolt’s been looking into? Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I’d say there’s sort of two halves of what we do. There’s the, there’s the bulk wholesale monitoring of. Typically static connections to eliminate this routine retitling where it’s not needed typically, typically. But then we have these edge cases of certain [00:11:00] connections and certain platforms that have known bolt integrity problems, and we are working with clients to really, um, manage those integrity risks. Blade stud is an absolute classic, you know, sort of, I think almost every turbine OEM on some, if not all of their platforms has got. Embedded risk into their blades, pitch bearing connections. Um, so yeah, exactly as you said, our customers are using the technology for two things really. One is to ensure the bolts have been tightened to the preload that was specified or the target window. And quite often we find there is an opportunity to increase the preload and therefore increase the resistance to fatigue failure. So. You know, particularly on older sites where the bolts perhaps not in the condition they were on day one. Well, they definitely won’t be. Um, when people have gone and retti them, they haven’t got back to where they, they should be.[00:12:00] So we can prove that and increase a bit of that resilience, but then also start to look for the segments around the joint where, um, the bolt might start loosening or failures are occurring, and find areas where they can really hone in. And actively manage risk. And that sort of leads to what we’ve decided to do for the next year, particularly with Blade Stud in mind, is evolve this technology. So whilst it’s also measuring the elongation, we will do a defect scan at the same time. So you’ll monitor your blade stu, um, connection and we’re hoping that we can set the device to flag to you there and then. We believe this bulk has got a defect while you’re here, get it changed out before it fails and, and all the knock on problems, um, from there. Joel Saxum: So what you’re just pointing to there is a, is a workflow, right? So to me that is typical [00:13:00] of some of the amazing, innovative companies in the UK that I’ve run into throughout my career. And that is, you’re a group of SMEs, you know, bolted connections. That’s what you do, right? But then you’re like, hey. If there’s a tool, we could make a tool that would make our lives a bit easier, then it’s like, well, we could make the entire industry’s lives a little bit easier as well. So let’s iterate on that. And now you’re able to send these kits around the world to look at these things. Hey, you have a problem with this specific model. We can help you with this because we know the failure mode and we know how to look for it. Let’s do that for you. Also here, you’re doing bolt bulk measurements. We got that for you. But it all kind of flows back to the fact that Echo Bolt is a team. A bolted connection, SMEs that are making tools and being able to also provide consulting if need be. Yeah. Right. Um, to, to an entire industry. And I think that, um, this is my take on it, right? Wind is stop number one. I think you guys are gonna do a fantastic year, but there’s a lot of, uh, opportunity out there in bolted [00:14:00] connections as well. Allen Hall: A tremendous amount blade bolts being broken from defects in the crystalline structure. What appears to be a more. Rapidly developing issue across fleets that I’ve seen. I went to a farm this summer and the number of blade bolts that were there on the table that were broken on the conference room table was And the whiteboard office. Yeah. Yeah. This one,  Joel Saxum: this one.  Allen Hall: Your hard head is not gonna protect you from this one. It’s, it’s, it was this, um, I couldn’t imagine the amount of time they were spending hunting these things down. And of course, the only way they were finding ’em was they were broken. You like to catch ’em before they break because it becomes  Joel Saxum: a safety risk. Just not too long ago we saw an insurance case where there’s an RCA going on and it is pointing at an entire tower came down. Right. And it is pointing at a mid, mid tower section bolted connection. How often do you guys run into those problems? Or are you contacted by insurance companies or anything like that to, to take a peek at those? Pete Andrews: We haven’t done anything directly for insurance [00:15:00]companies, but we have been engaged by. Engineering consultancies that are doing RCA type activities. Okay. Um, things like at the end of defect liability periods mm-hmm. A customer has, has seen, they’ve had a lot of, uh, issues from an OEM, maybe an OE EM has offered a modification or an upgrade, assessing whether that upgrade is actually solved the problem or not. We’ve got involved in, um, but the tower. Issue specifically. It’s actually very rare we find, um, problems with tower connections, but where we do is often where they haven’t achieved good flange flatness, ah, during installation or the bolts have been, let’s say, left out in the elements for a period and lubrication has been, has deteriorated before the bolt’s been installed. So there are cases out there, but what I would say is. [00:16:00] To think about your whole life cycle, so ensure the bolt’s installed correctly and we can help with that with a QA to say, yes, this torque or tightening method has got you to the load that you want. Do some through life monitoring, but often if you install it correctly, it will it’s operational life. You will have very little concern. But then in the UK market, we’re increasingly getting involved again at the end of life, right? Life extension where life extension turbines are 20, 25 years old. How does an operator make a decision to carry on running without replacing all bots? Um, and that’s where increasingly we being asked to use the technologist just to say, actually the joint is fine. The bolts have run in a good, um, operational envelope. Run them on. Don’t replace a hundred percent of them like you might have been recommended to from your, um, yeah. Turbine supplier side. [00:17:00] Allen Hall: So Pete, if someone’s doing a repower where they’re basically putting a new one in the cell on an existing tower, they’re making a lot of assumptions about all the bolts from the ground up that they’re gonna be okay. And I know we’re talking about that. We’re in a lot of installations where. If the turbine has gone through a repowered or two. So now those bolts are 20 years old. Yeah. And trying to get ’em to  Joel Saxum: 30 35. 35  Allen Hall: 40. Yeah. I don’t know what they’re doing. By those bolted connections. Are they just like replacing the bolts? Are they hitting ’em with a hammer again? Is that the, yeah,  Pete Andrews: I mean, they might replace ’em, but you’ve got a problem with the foundation bolts. ’cause they’re obviously often anchor bolts set into concrete, so you have to reuse them and. With the projects, both in wind and in process power industry with the chimney stacks to try and ascertain whether foundation bolts that are set into concrete are still suitable for operations. So look for corrosion losses, look for [00:18:00] defects. Um, so yeah, they’re all things that need thinking about before you just make the snap decision to repower. But I think  Joel Saxum: a lot of that, uh, going back to a couple minutes ago, you were talking about at the commissioning phase, making sure that you have proper qa, QC of how these things were installed day one, and then making sure that before commissioning of a turbine, they’re checked. I think that’s really important. We’re starting to see that in the blade world now too, where we’ve been talking about it for a long time, and now when you talk to operators, they’re like, we’re getting inspections done on the blades before they’re hung. Or at the factory before they’re hung. After they’re hung. Like they want a good foundation baseline. Are you seeing that in the bolted connection world too?  Pete Andrews: Yes. Sort of. It’s just emerging for us. What we’ve found is, so most of our customers are in the operational phase ’cause they are the ones feeling the pain. Yeah. Of the routine retitling work. When they do major components, they sometimes engage us to come and say, can you check [00:19:00] before and after the blade was removed? What was it? Before we took it off from a a bolt load perspective, what is it afterwards? Can you then recheck after 500 hours When we retalk it? And what we’ve seen there often is the initial install hasn’t got them to where they needed to be and they’ve had to go and do the break in maintenance or the 500 hour REIT to get the bolts to the right load. So one of the questions that we have is whether. Some of the defects are actually being initiated very early on in that initial running in period and whether if, if actually you’d taken the time at, at the point of assembly to make sure you were correct, whether that avoids some of the knock on integrity concerns. So yeah, it’s interesting area.  Allen Hall: Well, bolts are what hold wind turbines together and you better know you have the right. Tension and [00:20:00] torque on your bolts to get to the lifetime of the wind turbine and to, and to check it once in a while. And I know there’s a lot of operators I can think of right now in the United States that are sort of doing that job somewhat. I I think they have missed out on opportunities to save a lot of money and to call it echo bolt. How do people get ahold of you? Because that’s one thing I run into all the time. Like, Hey, hey, you gotta talk to Ebol, call Ebol. How do they get ahold of you?  Pete Andrews: So the easiest ways are via our website. Which is echo bolt.com. Um, LinkedIn, you’ll find us at Echo Bolt on LinkedIn. Reach out. Our email would be [email protected]. So any of those route and you’ll, uh, reach me and the team and more than happy to speak to you about any of your faulting concerns or problems. We are, uh, yeah, we’re passionate about your problems.  Allen Hall: Pete, thank you so much for being on this podcast. I, it is great to actually see you in person and see the bolt wave technology. It’s really [00:21:00] impressive. So anybody out there that needs bolt tensioning to checking tools, you need to get ahold of Pete at Echo Bolt and get started today. Thank you Pete. Thanks guys. It’s great to be here.

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss the ongoing federal halt on US offshore wind projects and mounting lawsuits from Equinor, Ørsted, and Dominion Energy. Plus Japan’s Goto floating wind farm begins commercial operation with eight Hitachi turbines on hybrid SPAR-type foundations, and Finnish investigators seize a vessel suspected of severing Baltic Sea cables. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts, Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the  Allen Hall: Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Rosie Barnes, Joel Saxum, and Yolanda Padron. Many things on the docket this week. The, the big one is the five US offshore wind projects that are facing cancellation after the federal halt. And on December 22nd, as we all know, the US Department of Interior ordered construction halted on every offshore wind project in American waters. Uh, the recent given and still given is national security. Uh, developers see it way differently and they’ve been going to court to try to. Get this issue resolved. Ecuador, Ted and Dominion Energy have all filed lawsuits at this point. EOR says [00:01:00] a 90 day pause, which is what this is right now, will likely mean cancellation of their empire. Project Dominion is losing more than about $5 million a day, and everybody is watching to see what happens. Orton’s also talking about taking some action here. Uh, there’s a, a lot of moving pieces. Essentially, as it stands right now, a lot of lawsuits, nothing happening in the water, and now talks mostly Ecuador of just completely canceling the project. That will have big implications to US. Electricity along the east coast,  Joel Saxum: right Joel? Yeah. We need it. Right? So I, I hate to beat a dead horse here because we’ve been talking about this for so long. Um, but. We’ve got energy demand growth, right? We’re sitting at three to 5% year on year demand growth in the United States, uh, which is unprecedented. Since, since, and this is a crazy thing. Since air [00:02:00] conditioning was invented for residential homes, we have not had this much demand for electricity growth. We’ve been pretty flat for the last 20 years. Uh, so we need it, right? We wanna be the AI data center superpower. We wanna do all this stuff. So we need electrons. Uh, these electrons are literally the quickest thing gonna be on the grid. Uh, up and down that whole eastern seaboard, which is a massive population center, a massive industrial and commercial center of the United States, and now we’re cutting the cord on ’em. Uh, so it is going to drive prices up for all consumers. That is a reality, right? Um, so we, we hear campaign promises up and down the things about making life more affordable for the. Joe Schmo on the street. Um, this is gonna hurt that big time. We’re already seeing. I think it was, um, we, Alan, you and I talked with some people from PGM not too long ago, and they were saying 20 to 30% increases already early this year. Allen Hall: Yeah. The, the increases in electricity rates are not being driven by [00:03:00] offshore wind. You see that in the press constantly or in commentary. The reason electricity rates are going up along the east coast is because they’re paying for. The early shutdown of cold fire generation, older generation, uh, petroleum based, uh, dirty, what I’ll call dirty electricity generation, they’re paying to shut those sites down early. So that’s why your rates are going up. Putting offshore wind into the equation will help lower some of those costs, and onshore wind and solar will help lower those costs. But. The East Coast, especially the Northeast, doesn’t have a lot of that to speak of at the minute. So, uh, Joel, my question is right now, what do you think the likelihood is of the lawsuits that are being filed moving within the next 90 days? Joel Saxum: I mean, it takes a long time to put anything through any kind of, um, judicial process in the United States, however. There’s enough money, power [00:04:00] in play here that what I see this as is just like the last time we saw an injunction happen like this is, it’s more of a posturing move. I have the power to do this, or we have the power to do this. It’s, it’s, uh, the, it’s to get power. Over some kind of decision making process. So once, once people come to the table and start talking, I think these things will be let, let back loose. Uh, I don’t, I don’t think it will go all the way to, we need to have lawsuits and stuff. It’ll just be the threat of lawsuits. There’ll be a little bit of arbitration. They’ll go back to work. Um, the problem that I see. One of the problems, I guess, is if we get to the point where people, companies start saying like, you know what, we can’t do this anymore. Like, we can’t keep having these breaks, these pauses, these, this, you know, if it’s 90 days at $5 million a day, I mean that’s 450 million bucks. That’s crazy. But that nobody, nobody could absorb that.  Allen Hall: Will they leave the mono piles and transition pieces and some [00:05:00] towers just sitting in the water. That’s what  Joel Saxum: I was gonna say next is. What happens to all of the assets, all of the steel that’s in the water, all the, all the, if there’s cable, it lays if there’s been rock dumps or the companies liable to go pick them up. I don’t know what the contracts look like, right? I don’t know what the Boem leases say. I don’t know about those kind of things, but most of that stuff is because they go back to the oil field side of things, right? You have a 20 year lease at the end of your 20 year lease. You gotta clean it up. So if you put the things in the water, do they have 20 years to leave ’em out there before they plan on how they’re gonna pull ’em out or they gotta pull ’em out now? I don’t know.  Allen Hall: Would just bankrupt the LLCs that they formed to create these, uh, wind  Joel Saxum: farms. That’s how the oil field does it bankrupt. The LC move on. You’ve, you’ve more than likely paid a bond when you, you signed that lease and that, but that bond in like in a lot of. Things is not enough. Right. A bond to pull mono piles out would have to be, [00:06:00] I mean, you’re already at billions of dollars there, right? So, and, and if you look again to the oil and gas world, which is our nearest mirror to what happens here, when you go and decommission an old oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, you don’t pull the mono piles out. You go down to as close to the sea floor as you can get, and you just cut ’em off with a diamond saw. So it’s just like a big clamp that goes around. It’s like a big band saw. And you cut the foundations off and then pull the steel back to shore, so that can be done. Um, it’s not cheap.  Allen Hall: You know what I would, what I would do is the model piles are in, the towers are up, and depending on what’s on top of them, whether it’s in the cell or whatever, I would sure as hell put the red flashing lights on top and I would turn those things on and let ’em run just so everybody along the East coast would know that there could be power coming out of these things. But there’s not. So if you’re gonna look at their red flashy lights, you might as well get some, uh, megawatts out of them. That’s what I would do.  Joel Saxum: You’d have to wonder if the contracts, what, what, what it says in the contracts about. [00:07:00] Uh, utilization of this stuff, right? So if there’s something out there, does the FAA say, if you got a tower out there, it’s gotta have a light on it anyways. Allen Hall: It has to or a certain height. So where’s the power coming from? I don’t know. Solar panel. Solar panel. That’s what it have to be, right? Yeah. This is ridiculous. But this is the world we live in today.  Speaker 4: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Pullman on the park for Wind energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals. Because this industry needs solutions, not speeches, [00:08:00] Allen Hall: the dominoes keep falling. In American offshore wind, last year it was construction halts this year, contract delays. Massachusetts has pushed back the signing of two offshore wind agreements that were supposed to be done. Months ago, ocean Winds and Berroa won their bids in September of 2024. The paperwork is still unsigned more than a year later, a year and a half later. State officials blame Federal uncertainty. Uh, the new target is June and offshore wind for these delays are really becoming a huge problem, especially if you don’t have an offtake agreements signed, Joel.  Joel Saxum: I don’t see how the, I mean, again, I’m not sitting in those rooms. I’m not a fly on the wall there, but I don’t see how you can have something sitting out there for, it’s just say September 24. Yeah. Yeah. You’re at 18 months now, right? 17, 18 months without an agreement signed. Why is, why is Massachusetts doing this? What’s, what’s the, what’s the thing there? I mean, you’re an, [00:09:00] you are, uh, an ex Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Ian, is that what it’s called?  Allen Hall: Yeah. I, I think they would like to be able to change the pricing for the offtake is most likely what is happening as, uh, the Trump administration changes the agreements or trying to change the agreements, uh, the price can go up or down. So maybe the thing to do is to not sign it and wait this out to see what the courts say. Maybe something will happen in your favor. That’s a real shame. Right. Uh, there’s thousands of employees that have been sidelined. Uh, the last number I saw was around 4,000. That seems on the low end.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think about, um, the, the vessels too. Like you’re the, like the Eco Edison that was just built last year. I think it’s upwards of 500 million bucks or something to build that thing down in Louisiana, being sent up there. And you have all these other specialized, uh, vessels coming over from Europe to do all this construction. Um, you know. Of course if they’re coming over from Europe, those are being hot bunked and being paid standby rates, which [00:10:00] is crazy ’cause the standby rates are insane. Uh, ’cause you still gotta run fuel, you still gotta keep the thing running. You still gotta cook food. You still have all those things that have to happen on that offshore vessel. Uh, but they’re just gonna be sitting out there on DP doing nothing.  Yolanda Padron: You have the vessels, you have people’s jobs. You have. Regular people who are unrelated to energy at all suffering because of their prices going up for energy and just their cost of living overall going up. All because they don’t look pretty.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. The entire, that entire supply chain is suffering. I mean, Yolanda, you’re, you, you used to work with a company involved in offshore wind. How many people have, um, you know, have we seen across LinkedIn losing their jobs? Hey, we’re pivoting away from this. I gotta go find something else. And with that. In the United States, if you’re not from the States, you don’t know this, but there’s not that much wind, onshore wind on the East coast. So many of those families had to relocate out there, uproot your family, go out to Massachusetts, New Jersey, [00:11:00] Virginia, wherever, put roots back down and now you’re what? What happens? You gotta move back.  Yolanda Padron: Good luck to you. Especially, I mean, you know, it’s, it’s a lot of projects, right? So it’s not like you can just move on to the next wind farm. It’s a really unfortunate situation.  Allen Hall: Well, for years the promise of floating wind turbines has dangled just out of reach and the technology works, and the engineers have been saying for quite a while. We just needed someone to prove it at scale. Well, Japan just did the go-to floating wind farm began commercial operation this past week. Eight turbines on hybrid spar foundations anchored in water is too deep for anything fixed. Bottom, uh, it’s the first. Wind farm of his kind in Japan and signals to the rest of Asia that floating wind is possible. Now, uh, Rosemary, their turbines that are being used are Hitachi turbines, 2.1 megawatt machines. I don’t know a lot about this hybrid spark [00:12:00] type floater technology, which looks to be relatively new in terms of application. Is this gonna open up a large part of the Japanese shoreline to offshore wind? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, at the first glance it’s like two megawatt turbine turbines. That’s micro, even for onshore these days, that’s a really small turbine. Um, and for offshore, you know, usually when you hear about offshore announcements, it’s like 20 megawatt, 40 megawatt monstrosities. However, I, I think that if you just look at the size of it, then it really underestimates the significance of it, especially for Japan. Because they, one, don’t have a lot of great space to put turbines on shore or solar power on shore. Um, and two, they don’t have any, any good, um, locations for fixed bottom offshore. So this is not like this floating offshore wind farm. It’s not competing against many onshore um, options at all. For Japan, it’s competing against energy imports. I’m really happy to see [00:13:00] a proper wind farm. Um, in Japan and they’ll learn a lot from this. And I hope that it goes smoothly and that, you know, the next one can be bigger and better. And then it’s also, you know, Japan traditionally has been a really great manufacturing country and not so much with wind energy, but this could be their chance. If they’re the country that’s really on scale developing the floating offshore industry, they will necessarily, you know, like just naturally as a byproduct of that, they’re gonna develop manufacturing, at least supporting manufacturing and probably. Some major components and then bring down the cost. You know, the more that, um, these early projects might start out expensive, but get cheaper, fast. That’s how we hope it’ll go. And then they’ll push out into other areas that could benefit from offshore wind, but um, not at the cost. Somewhere like California, you know, they have the ability to have onshore wind. They’d really like some offshore wind, some floating offshore wind. But it is a hard sell there at the moment because it is so much more expensive. But if it gets cheaper because, you know, projects like [00:14:00] this help push the price down, then I think it will open things up a lot. So yeah, I am, I’m quite excited to see this project.  Allen Hall: Will it get cheaper at the two to six megawatt range instead of the 15 to 20 megawatt range?  Joel Saxum: That’s what I was gonna comment on. Like there’s, there’s a, there’s a key here that the general public misses. For a floating offshore wind farm. So if you’re gonna do this cost effectively, that’s why they did it with the 2.1 megawatts ones because with a, with the spar product that they’re using basically. And, and I was sourcing this off at my desk, so here you go,  Rosemary Barnes: Joel. We need a closed caption version for those listening on the podcast and not watching on YouTube. Joel’s holding like a foam, a foam model of a wind turbine. Looks like it’s got a stubby, stubby holder on the bottom.  Joel Saxum: This is. Turbine. Steel. Steel to a transition piece and then concrete, right? So this is basically a concrete tube like, um, with, with, uh, structural members on the inside of it. And you can float this thing or you can drag these, you can float ’em key side and then drag ’em out, and [00:15:00] then it just fill ’em halfway or three quarters away with ballast sea seawater. So you just open a valve, fill the thing up to three quarters of the way with seawater, and it sinks it down into the water a little bit. Water level sits about. Right at the transition piece and then it’s stable. And that’s a hybrid. Spar product is very simple. So to make this a easy demonstrate project, keyside facility is the key, is the big thing. So your Keyside facility, and you need a deep water keyside facility to make this easy. So if you go up to Alan, like you said, a two to six, to eight to 10 to 15 megawatt machine. You may have to go and take, you may have to barge the spars out and then dump ’em off the spar and then bring the turbines out and put ’em on. That’s not ideal. Right? But if you can do this all keyside, if you can have a crane on shore and you can float the spars and then put the, build the whole turbine, and then drag that out as it sits, that’s a huge cost reduction in the installation operations. So it, it’s all about how big is the subsea portion of the spar? How? How deep is your [00:16:00] deep water keyside port? To make it efficient to build. Right. So they’re looking at 10 gigawatts of floating offshore wind by 2030. Now it’s 2026. That’s only four years away, so 10 gigawatts. You’re gonna have to scale up the size of the turbines. It’ll be interesting how they do it, right? Because to me, flipping spars off of a barge is not that hard. That’s how jackets and spars have been installed in the past. Um, for, um, many industries, construction industries, whether it’s oil and gas or just maritime, construction can be done. Not a problem. Um, it’s just not as efficient. So we’ll see what, we’ll see what they do.  Allen Hall: You would need 5,000 turbines at two megawatts to get to 10 gigawatts, 5,000 turbines. They make 5,000 cars in a day. The, the Japanese manufacturing is really efficient. I wouldn’t put anything by the Japanese capabilities there.  Joel Saxum: The problem with that is the cost of the, the inter array cables and [00:17:00] export cables for 5,000 turbines is extreme. Allen Hall: We also know that. Some of the best technology has come out of Japan for the last 50 years, and then maybe there’s a solution to it. I, I’m really curious to see where this goes, because it’s a Hitachi turbine. It’s a 2.1 megawatt turbine, as Rosemary’s pointed out. That’s really old technology, but it is inexpensive to manufacture and easy to move around. Has benefits.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It also means like they, they’re not gonna be surprised with like, you know, all of. When you make a 20 megawatt offshore wind turbine, you’re not only in the offshore environment, you’re also dealing with, you know, all your blade issues from a blade that long and 2.1 megawatt turbine has blades of the size that, you know, just so mature, reliable, robust. They can at least rule those headaches out of their, um, you know, out of their. Development phase and focus on the, the new stuff.  Joel Saxum: Does anybody know who [00:18:00] makes blades for Hitachi?  Allen Hall: Rosie? Was it lm? I, I, I know we have on a number of Hitachi turbines over time, but I don’t know who makes the blades.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I don’t know. But I mean, also it’s like, um, it doesn’t mean that they’re locked into 2.1 megawatts for forever, right? So, um, if the economics suggest that it is be beneficial to scale up. Presumably there will be a lot that they have learned from the smaller scale that will be de-risking the, the bigger ones as well. So, you know, um, it’s, there’s advantages to doing it both ways. It’s probably a slower, more steady progress from starting small and incrementally increasing compared to the, you know, like big, um, fail fast kind of, um, approach where you just do a big, big, huge turbine and just find out everything wrong with it all at once. Um, but. You know, pros and cons to both.  Allen Hall: Hitachi buys TPI. They got the money. They got the money, and they got the brain power. [00:19:00] Delamination and bottom line. Failures and blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep to blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. The Baltic Sea has become a chessboard under sea. Cables carry data. Pipelines carry energy as we’ve all seen and someone keeps cutting them. Finnish investigators are now saying a cargo ship dragged its anchor [00:20:00] across the seabed for tens of kilometers before severing a telecommunications cable. On New Year’s Eve, special forces seize the vessel. Four crew members are detained, but the questions still remain. Who or what is trying to cut cables and pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.  Joel Saxum: It’s not accidents like it happened on New Year’s Eve and it was, and you drug an anchor for tens of kilometers. That’s on purpose. There’s, there’s no way that this is someone, oh, we forgot to pull the anchor up. You know how much more throttle you have to put on one of these? Have you seen an anchor for an offshore vessel? They’re the size of a fricking house,  Allen Hall: so they’re investigating it right now. And four, the 14 crew members are under detention. Travel restrictions, we’ll see how long that lasts. Crew includes nationals from of all places, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. So there is a, a Russian element to this. [00:21:00] I don’t know if you were all watching, I don’t know, a week or two ago when there’s a YouTube video from and oral, which makes undersea. Equipment and defense, uh, related, uh, products. And Palmer Lucky who runs that company basically said, there are microphones all over the bottom of the ocean, all around the world. Everything is monitored. There’s no way you can drag an anchor for a kilometer without somebody knowing. So I’m a little surprised this took so long to grab hold of, but. Maybe the New Year’s Eve, uh, was a good time to pick because everybody is kind of relaxed and not thinking about a ship, dragging an anchor and breaking telecommunication cables, wind turbines have to be really careful about this. There, there have to be some sort of monitoring, installation sensors that are going on around the, all the wind power that exists up in that region and all [00:22:00] the way down in, in the North Sea. To prevent this from happening, the sabotage is ridiculous. At this point,  Joel Saxum: yeah. I mean, even, even with mattresses over the export cables, or the inter array cables or, or rock bags or rock dumps or, or burials, these anchors are big enough to, to cut those, to drag and cut ’em like it, it’s just a, it’s a reality. It’s a risk. But someone needs to be monitoring these things closer if they’re not yet. ’cause you are a hundred percent correct. There’s, so, there’s, there’s private, there’s public sides of the acoustic monitoring, right? So like the United States military monitors, there’s, there’s acoustic monitoring all up and down. I can’t actually never, I looked into it quite a while ago. There’s a name for the whole system. It’s called the blah, blah, blah, and it monitors our coastline. Like ev, there’s a sensor. Every man, it’s a couple miles. Like all, all around the EEZ of the United States. And that exists everywhere. So like you think like in international waters, guarantee that the United States has got microphones out listening to, [00:23:00] right. So, but if you’re in the Baltic Sea, it’s a little bit different of an, of a confined space. But you have Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, all along the southern and eastern coast and the, and Russia. And then you have the Fins, Swedes, Norwegian, Denmark, Germany. Everybody is Poland. Everybody’s monitoring that for sure. It’s just like a postmortem investigation is, is doable.  Allen Hall: Yolanda, how are they gonna stop this? Should they board the ships, pull the people off and sink them? What is it gonna take for this to end?  Yolanda Padron: I don’t know. In the meantime, I think Joel has a movie going on in his head about how exactly he’s gonna portray this. Um, yeah, it’s. I mean, I’d say better monitoring, but I, I’m not sure. I guess keep a closer eye on it next time. I mean, I really hope it’s, there’s not a next time, but there seems to be a pattern developing. Right.  Allen Hall: I forgot how many of those happened.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. The maritime, this is a, this is a tough reality about the maritime world. [00:24:00] ’cause I, I’ve done some work done in Africa and down there it’s specifically the same thing. There’s say there’s a vessel. Okay, so a vessel is flagged from. S Cy Malta, a lot of vessels are flagged Malta or Cyprus, right? Because of the laws. The local laws there that Cyprus flagged vessel may be owned by a company based in, um, Bermuda that’s owned by a company based in Russia that’s owned by a company based in India. All of these things are this way. There’s shell companies and hidden that you don’t know who owns vessels unless they’re even, even the specific ones. Like if you go to a Maersk vessel. And you’re like, oh, that’s Maersk, they’re Danish. Nope. That thing will be, that thing will be flagged somewhere else, hidden somewhere else. And it’s all about what port you go to and how much taxes you can hide from, and you’ll never be able to chase down the actual parties that own these vessels and that are responsible you, you, it, it’s so [00:25:00] difficult. You’re literally just going to have to deal with the people on board, and you can try to chase the channels to who owns that boat, but you’ll never find them. That’s the, that’s the trouble with it.  Allen Hall: It does seem like a Jean Claude Van Dam situation will need to happen pretty soon. Maybe as Steven Segal, something has to happen. It can’t continue to go on it over the next couple of months with as much attention as being paid to international waters and. Everything that’s happening around the world, you’d think that, uh, ships Defense Department ships from Denmark, Finland, Germany. We will all be watching this really closely UK be watching this and trying to stop these things before they really even happened. Interesting times. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcasts. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas. We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. [00:26:00] And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show for Rosie, Yolanda and Joel. I’m Alan Hall and we’ll catch you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

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

Allen and Joel are joined by Nathan Davies from Lloyd Warwick to discuss the world of wind energy insurance. Topics include market cycles, the risks of insuring larger turbines, how critical spares can reduce downtime and costs, why lightning claims often end up with insurers rather than OEMs, and how AI may transform claims data analysis. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Nathan, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So you are, you’re our link to the insurance world, Nathan, and there’s been so many changes over the past 12, 24 months, uh, not just in the United States but worldwide. Before we get too deep into any one subject, can you just give us a top level like, Hey, this is what’s happening in the insurance world that we need to know. So there’s  Nathan Davies: obviously a lot of scope, a lot of development, um, in the wind world. Um, you know, there’s the race to scale. Um, and from an insurance perspective, I think everybody’s pretty tentative about where that’s going. Um. You know, the, the theory that are we trying to [00:01:00] run before we can walk? Um, what’s gonna happen when these things inevitably go wrong? Uh, and what are the costs gonna be that are associated with that? ’cause, you know, at the moment we are used to, to claims on turbines that are circa five megawatts. But when we start seeing 15 megawatt turbines falling over. Yeah, it’s, it’s not gonna be a good day at the office. So, um, in the insurance world, that’s the big concern. Certainly from a win perspective at least.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think it’s, it’s a valid, uh, I don’t know, valid bad, dream. Valid, valid risk to be worried about. Well, just simply because of like the, the way, uh, so I’ve been following or been a part of the, that side of the industry for a little while here the last five, six years. Um. You’ve seen The insurance world is young in renewables, to be honest with you. Right. Compared to a lot of other places that like say the Lord Lloyd’s market, they’ve been writing insurance for hundreds of years on certain [00:02:00] things that have, like, we kind of know, we know what the risks are. We, and if it develops something new, it’s not crazily new, but renewables and in wind in specific haven’t been around that long. And the early stuff was like, like you said, right? If a one megawatt turbine goes down, like. That sucks. Yeah. For everybody, right? But it’s not the end of the world. We can, we can make this thing happen. You’re talking, you know, you may have a, you know, your million, million and a half dollars here, $2 million here for a complete failure. And then the business interruption costs as a, you know, with a one megawatt producing machine isn’t, again, it’s not awesome, but it’s not like it, uh, it doesn’t break the books. Right. But then when we’re talking 3, 4, 5, 6. Seven megawatts. We just saw Siemens cesa sell the first of their seven megawatt onshore platforms the other day. Um, that is kind of changing the game and heightening the risk and makes things a little bit more worrisome, especially in light of, I mean, as we scaled just the last five, [00:03:00] 10 years, the amount of. Failures that have been happening. So if you look at that and you start expanding it, that, that, that hockey stick starts to grow. Nathan Davies: Yeah, yeah, of course. And you know, we, we all know that these things sort of happen in cycles, right? It’s, you go, I mean, in, in the insurance world, we go through soft markets. We go through hard markets, um, you know, deductibles come up, the, the clauses, the restrictions, all those things get tighter. Claims reduce. Um, and then you get sort of disruptors come into the market and they start bringing in, you know, challenging rates and they start challenging the big players on deductibles and preferential rates and stuff like that. And, and then you get a softening of the market, um, and then you start seeing the claims around up again. But when you twin that with the rate of development that we see in the renewables worlds, it’s, it’s fraught for all sorts of. Weird and wonderful things happening, and most of them are quite expensive.  Joel Saxum: Where in that cycle are we, in [00:04:00] your opinion right now? So we, like when I first came into the market and I started dealing with insurance, it was very, we kept hearing hardening, market hardening, market hardening market. But not too long ago, I heard from someone else that was like, Hey, the market’s actually getting kind of soft right now. What are your thoughts on that? And, and or may, and maybe we let, let’s precursor that there’s a lot of people that are listening right now that don’t know the difference. What is a hard market? What is a soft market? Can you give us that first?  Nathan Davies: When you’re going through a soft market, it’s, it’s a period where they’ve either been, um, a limited volume of claims or the claim values have been quite small. Um, so, you know, everybody gets. It’s almost like becoming complacent with it, right? It’s like, oh, you know, things are going pretty well. We’re having it. It looks like the operators, it looks like the maintainers are, are doing a pretty good job and they know all of the issues that are gonna be working through in the lifetime of these products. So for the next however many years, we can anticipate that things are gonna gonna go pretty well. But as you see those [00:05:00] deductibles come down, you start getting more of the attritional claims, like the smaller values, um, the smaller downtime periods, all that sort of thing, start coming in as claims. And all of a sudden insurers are like, well, hang on a second. All of a sudden we’ve got loads and loads of claims coming in. Um. All of the premium that we were taking as being bled dry by, by these, these attritional claim. Um, and then you get like a big claim coming. You get a major issue come through, whether it’s, you know, a, a serial issue with a gearbox or a generator or a specific blade manufacturer, and all of a sudden the market starts to change. Um, and insurers are like, well, hang on a second. We’ve got a major problem on our hands here. We’re starting to see more of this, this specific piece of technology being rolled out, um, worldwide. Um, we are in for a lot of potential claims on this specific matter in the future, and therefore we need to protect ourselves. And the way that insurers do that is by [00:06:00] increasing or deductibles, um, increasing their premiums, all that sort of thing. So it’s basically that. Uh, raises the threshold at which a claim can be presented and therefore minimizes the, the outlay for insurers. So that’s sort of this, this cycle that we see. Um, I mean, I can’t, I’ve, I’ve only been in loss adjusting for six years, so I can’t say that I’ve seen, you know, um, multiple cycles. I’ve, I’m probably at the end of my first cycle from a hardening to a softening market. Um. But also, again, I’m not in the underwriting side of things. I’m on the claims side of things, so I own, I’m only seeing it when it’s gone wrong. I don’t know about everything else that the insurance market sees.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, the, the softening part, I think as well from a macro perspective, when there’s a softening market, it tends to bring in more capital. Right. You start to see more, more and more companies coming in saying, Hey, I’ve got, [00:07:00] and when I say companies, I mean other capital holders to beat for insurance, right? Like these, the big ones you see, the big Swiss and German guys come in and going, like, I got, I got $500 million I’ll throw into renewables. It seems like to be a good, pretty good bet right now. And then the market starts to change and then they go, uh, oops. Yeah.  Nathan Davies: And that’s it. You know, you’ve got the, the StoreWatch of the renewable insurance market like your G cubes and, and companies like that who’ve been in the game for a very long time. They’ve got a lot of experience. They’ve been burned. Um, they know what they want to touch and what they don’t want to touch. And then you get. Renewables, everybody wants to be involved. It covers their ESG targets. It’s, it’s a good look to move away from, you know, your, your oil and your coal and all the rest of it. So, of course, companies are gonna come into it. Um, and if they’re not experienced.  Allen Hall: They will get banned. How much reliance do operators have at the moment on insurance? Because it does seem like, uh, Joel and I talk [00:08:00]to a lot of operators that insurance is part of their annual revenue. They depend upon getting paid a certain amount, which then opens up the door to how sort of nitpicky I’ll describe it as the claim. They’ll file. Are you seeing more and more of that as, uh, some of the operators are struggling for cash flow, that there are going after more kind of questionable claims? Um, I think it depends on  Nathan Davies: the size of the operator. So you’ve, you’ve obviously got your, your big players, you’ve got your alls and your rws and all of those sort of guys who, the way that they manage their insurance, they’ve probably got, you know, special purpose vehicles. They’ve got, um, sites or clusters of sites that they manage finances independently. They don’t just have the one big or pot. It’s, it’s, it’s managed sort of subdivisions. Um. Those, those guys, we don’t typically tend to see like a big push for a [00:09:00] payment on account partway through a claim. It’s, it’s typically sort of the smaller end of the scale where you might have, um, an operator that manages a handful of smaller, um, assets. The way that we look at it is if you don’t ask, you don’t get, so when we talk to an insured, it’s like. Present your costs, you know, we’ll review them and it’s, it’s better that you present all of your costs and insurers turn around and say, you’re not eligible for this. You know, that that element of it will be adjusted, um, rather than not present something. And it’s like, well, you know, your, your broker then comes further down the line when they say you could have claimed that element of, of the cost. So, um. Typically that’s the approach that we take is, is present everything and we’ll work through and let you know which elements aren’t claimable.  Joel Saxum: When we’re talking insurance policies, there can be, you know, like an operator, an owner of a turbine asset can have them. Then there is construction policies and [00:10:00] there’s the EPC company might have a policy and ISP may have a policy. So, so many policies because at the end of the day, everybody’s trying to protect themselves. Like, we’re trying to protect the bottom line. Tr that’s what insurance us for, that’s why we’re here. Um, but so, so, so, so gimme a couple things. Like in your opinion as, let’s look, well, I wanna stay in the operator camp right now, say, during a non non-commission policy, a actual operating policy, wind farm is in the ground, we’re moving along. What are some of the things that, from an, from a loss adjuster’s perspective, that a operator should be doing to protect themselves? I mean, besides. Signing an insurance contract. Yes. But is it, is it good record keeping? Is it having spares on site? Is it, what does that look like from your perspective when you walk into something,  Nathan Davies: if you were to take the insurer’s dream operator, that would be somebody who, and you, you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head with a lot of those points, Joel, the, the. The golden [00:11:00] operator would have like a stash of critical spares because the last thing they want to be relying on is, um, an OEM who, you know, they, they’ve, they’ve stopped manufacturing that bit of kit three years ago. They now want to sell you the latest and greatest. It’s 18 months lead time or something like that. Oh yeah, absolutely. And so you are now having to look at potentially refurbishment through. Whether that’s through sort of approved, um, processes or not. Um, you might be looking at, um, sort of, um, aftermarket providers. You know, there, there’s, as soon as you are looking at an aged asset, you are, you are in a really complicated position in terms of your repairability. Um, because, you know, a as we know, you get to sort of that three, five year period after you’ve purchased the product, you’re in real jeopardy of whether or not it’s gonna be. Gonna have that continued support from the original equipment manufacturer. So [00:12:00] critical spares is a really good thing to, it’s, it’s just obviously a really good thing to have. Um, and how you can manage that as well is if you have, um, a customer of sites that are all using the, the same equipment, you could sort of share that between you. There, there could be. Um, so we, we’ve sinned that where, um. An umbrella company has multiple sites, multiple SPVs. Um, they were all constructed at the same sort of time. They’ve got the same transformers, you know, the same switchgear, same infrastructure, and they hold a set of spares that cover these, all these sites. ’cause the last thing you want to do is buy a load of individual components for one site. You are then paying to maintain them, to store them to, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of costs that come with. Along with that, that you, you don’t wanna be covering. If that’s just for the one site and it’s the [00:13:00] eventualities, that may never happen. So if you’ve got multiple sites and you can spread those costs, all of a sudden it’s a lot more, um. Could  Joel Saxum: you see a reality where insurers did that? Right? Where like a, like a, like a consortium of insurance companies gets together and buys, uh, half a dozen sets of blades and generators and stuff that they know are failures that come up, or they have a pool to pull from themselves to, to avoid these massive bi claims. Nathan Davies: Yeah. I mean maybe there’s, maybe there’s the potential for a renewables pool. I mean, it’s always. Complicated. As soon as you start trying to bring sort of multiple companies together with an agreement of that sort of scale, it’s gonna be challenging. But, um, I mean, yeah, in an ideal world, that would be be a great place to be. Um, so critical spares is, that’s, that’s a key thing we, we have seen. So we, we’ve got, um, one account that we work with that they’ve actually got a warehouse full of critical spares. [00:14:00] So they, they have a lot of, um, older turbine models, um, sort of typically, um, 2015 through to, well, yeah, from about 2012 to 2015. Um, these sites were commissioned so they knew there was a, a finite lifetime, uh, replacement blades, generators, gear, boxes, what have you, and it’s like we’ve. A huge number of assets. So what we should do is retain certainly a number of gearboxes and generators that you, we can utilize across, um, the fleet. And obviously they then keep a rolling stock of refurbishment and repairs on those. But they, they basically included in their, their premium spreadsheet, they’ve got all of their individual sites. Then they’ve got a warehouse that is full of all their spares, and that is an inuring asset, is their warehouse full of critical spares. Joel Saxum: So what  Nathan Davies: happens to  Joel Saxum: that  Nathan Davies: person then? Does  Joel Saxum: their premiums go [00:15:00] down? Because they have those spares, they’ve got really low deductibles on their bi. So there’s a business case for it probably, right? Like if you’re sitting there, if you’re, if you’re, you’re an accountant, you can figure that out and say like, if we hold these spares for this fleet, like if you’re, if you’re a fleet, if you have a homogenous fleet, say you’ve got a thousand turbines that are basically all the same model. W you should have centrally located amongst those wind farms, a couple of blade sets, a couple of generators, couple of pitch bearings, couple of this, couple of that. And you can use them operationally if you need to, but it’s there as spares, uh, for insurance cases. ’cause you’ll be able to re reduce your insurance premiums or your insurance deductibles. Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. I don’t know a lot of operators in, at least in the United States that have done that, I’m thinking more of like Australia where it’s hard to get. Parts, uh, you, you probably do have a little bit of a warehouse situation. That’s really interesting because I, I know a lot of operators are thinking about trying to reduce their premiums and simple things like that would, I would imagine it make a huge difference [00:16:00] in what they’re paying each year and that that’s a smart move. I, I wanna ask about the IEC and the role of certification in premiums. What does it mean and how do you look at it as an industry? Uh, one of the things that’s happening right now is there’s a number of, I think some of the major IEC documents in, in our world, in the lightning world are going through revision. Does that, how do, how do you assess that risk that the IEC specs or the sort of the gold standard and you have the certification bodies that are using them to show that the turbines are fit for purpose. Is there a reliance upon them? Does, does it help reduce premiums if there’s an I-E-C-I-I, I’m not even sure how the industry, the insurance industry looks at it. Or is it more of how the turbines perform in the first year or two, is how, what’s gonna really gonna drive the premium numbers? I mean, insofar as  Nathan Davies: I eecs, it’s, that’s a really tough question. It’s, it’s [00:17:00]interesting that you ask that. ’cause um, I mean certainly from the lightning perspective, the, the IEC. We look at on that the blades need to withstand a lightning strike of a known value, but even within that, they, within the IEC, there’s an allowance of like 2%, I think, um, for blade strikes that can still cause damage even if they’re within the rate of capacity of the LPS. Um, so in the insurance world, this is a big gray area because each, um, operator has a, a turbine, uh, has a blade failure because of a lightning strike. They’ll then immediately go to the OEM and say, um, you know, we’ve had had a lightning strike, we’ve had a blade failure. Can you come and repair or replace the blade? Sure, no bother. Um, down the line, we have an insurance claim for this repair or replacement. And insurers are like, well, what’s the lightning data? And if that’s within the [00:18:00] LPS standard, it’s like, well, why have. Why is this not covered under warranty? And, you know, you, your OEMs will always turn around and say, force majeure. Um, it’s, it’s that 2%. So the IEC, even though that’s, you know, it’s, it’s best standards, it still has a degree of allowance that, um, the OEMs can slip through and be like, well this, this falls with insurance. And again, I can only speak for what I’ve seen, but that is. We see, I’d say, um, Lloyd Warwick, we probably see 50 plus notifications a year for blade damage from lightning and, um, almost every time if it’s within the capabilities of the LPX, the OEM or say towards majeure and Atlanta with insurers. Allen Hall: Well, is there a force majeure for gearboxes or generators or transformers? [00:19:00] Is, is there a 2% rule for transformers? I don’t, I don’t think so. Maybe there is, but it is, it, it is a little odd, right, that, that there’s so many things that are happening in the insurance world that rely upon the certification of the turbine and the sort of the expected rates of failure. I have not seen an operator go back and say, we have a 3% rate of, of damage of my transformers, so therefore I wanna file a claim. But that, that doesn’t seem to occur nearly as often as on the lightning side where it’s force majeure is used probably daily, worldwide. How do we think about that? How do we, how do we think about the transformer that fails versus the lightning damage? Are they just considered just two separate things and uncontrollable? Is that how the insurance industry looks at it? If we, if we would  Nathan Davies: talk about transformers. So the fact is that we see on those can vary from, you know, it’s, it’s a minor electrical component that that goes, um, [00:20:00] which is relatively easy to pin down. But then at the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a fire where it’s. You know, with all, all the will in the world, you could go in and investigate, but you’re not gonna find the cause of that fire. Um, you know, the damage is so great that you, you could probably say, well, the ignition point is there because that’s where the most damages occurred and it’s spread out. But, but how is that occurred? The know, and we, we do have that, that happens not frequently, but um. You know, as an engineer, I, I want to get to the bottom of what’s caused things, but, but all too often we come away from a claim where it’s like we don’t know exactly what’s caused it, but we can’t confirm that it’s excluded in the policy and therefore it, it must be covered and, you know, the claim is valid. Um, so in, in terms of causation and the standards and all the rest of it.  Joel Saxum: It goes to an extent. So this is a, this is another [00:21:00] one. So Alan was talking about lightning and blades. Then we talked about transformers a little bit. I wanna talk about gear boxes for just a second, because gearbox usually, um, in, in my, my experience in, in the wind world, claims wise, it’s pretty black and white. Was it, did it, did it fail? This is how it failed. Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Did was maintenance done at blah? So I heard the other day from someone who was talking about, uh, using CMS. On their, on their gener, on their, uh, gearbox, sorry. So it was an operator said, Hey, we should be, and, and a company coming to them saying, well, you should be monitoring CMS. This is all the good things it can do for you operationally. And the operator, the owner of the turbine said, I don’t want it, because if I know there’s something wrong, then I can’t claim it on insurance if it fails. Does that ring  Nathan Davies: true to you? Part of our process would be to look at the data. Um, so we know nine times out of 10 there is condition [00:22:00] monitoring, there is start out there, there, all this stuff. The operator, um, assistance tools, and if we can look at a gearbox vibration trend. Um, along with, you know, bearing temperature, uh, monitoring and all that sort of thing. And if you can see a trend where the vibrations are increasing, the temperatures are increasing, um, and there’s no operator maintain maintenance intervention, then, you know, if, if you, if you’ve received an alarm to say, Hey, there’s something wrong with me, you should probably come and have a look and you’ve done nothing about it, then. It’s,  Joel Saxum: it’s not great. Okay. So, so that, so that it rings, it kind of in a sense, rings true, right? That what that operator was saying, like the way their mind was working at that stage. ’cause this is, this is during, again, like, so we, Alan and I from the uptime network and just who we are, like we know a ton of people, we know [00:23:00] solutions that are being sold and, and this her about this. And I was like, man, that seems like really shortsighted, but there’s a reality to it that kind of makes sense, right? If they don’t have. I, it, it just seems unethical, right? It seems like if I don’t have the budget to fix this and I don’t wanna look at it, so I’m just waiting for it to fail. I don’t want the notifications so then I can claim it on insurance. ’cause I don’t wanna spend the money to go fix it. Like, seems, seems not cool.  Nathan Davies: Yeah. So the, I mean the, the process, the process of the insurance claim, if, if you want to look at it in almost an over simplistic way, um, a claim is notified. Um, to trigger an operational policy, there needs to be proof of damage, right? So in this instance, your gearbox has failed, whether that’s gear, teeth have have been pulled off, you’ve had a major bearing failure, whatever it is. So there’s your damage. So insurers are now [00:24:00] engaged. Um, the rules of the game. It’s now on insurers to prove that whatever has caused that damage is an exclusion. So in this instance, um, you know, that might be wear and tear, gradual deterioration, uh, could be rust. Um, and, and part of that is poor workmanship. Um, so if they have knowingly like. Cover their shut, their eyes covered, their ears just ignored this gearbox slowly crunching its way to, its, its inevitable death. You know, it, it’s not reasonably unforeseen. It’s not an unpredictable event. This was going to happen if you can see that, that trend, um, towards the failure, um, and in that light, it would, in theory be an uninsured event. Um, but [00:25:00] we know that. 90 plus percent of owner operators have, at least on their drive train, they have some sort of condition monitoring, whether that’s, you know, temperature sensors, vibration sensors, uh, noise sensors, you know, all that sort of stuff. We know that it’s there, but what’s really interesting in the claims process is. The first thing that we’ll ask is, where’s your proof of damage? Let’s see your alarm data, your scarda data, all this sort of thing.  Joel Saxum: Does the RFI get responded to?  Nathan Davies: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and it’s like, oh no, we, you know, we don’t have the SCARDA data. And we’ve had instances where a company, a company had turned around and said, oh, we don’t have any SCARDA data for the time of this event. It’s like, oh, that’s interesting. And worked our way through the process. And eventually insurers were like, you know what? We’re, we’re gonna deny this one. We’re not. Things aren’t adding up, we are not happy with it. Um, and all of a sudden out the woodwork, we get scar data, we get the, the insured’s, um, failure report, [00:26:00] which I mean, there was computational flow dynamics. There were, there were like all sorts of weird and wonderful data that had been thrown into the, this failure analysis. And it’s like, well, you’ve done our jobs for us. Why did you not just hand this over at the beginning? We know that this stuff exists, so. Just, just playing, playing dumb itch. It’s just a frustration really.  Allen Hall: It does seem like the operators think of loss adjustment in insurance companies as having a warehouse full of actuaries with mechanical calculators and they’re back there punching numbers in and doing these calculations on. I lost this gearbox from this manufacturer at, at this timeframe, and, and I understand all this data. That’s not how it works, but I do think there’s this, uh, assumption that that. Uh, there’s a in wind energy that because of the scale of it, there’s a lot of, of backend research that’s happening. I, I don’t think that’s true, or, I mean, you can tell me if it’s true or not, [00:27:00] but I don’t think so. But now, in the world of AI where I can start to accumulate large sets of data and I have the ability to process it with just a single person sitting in front of a laptop, is it gonna get a little harder for some of these claims that have Mercury, just really shady histories to get? Approved.  Nathan Davies: I, I think that’s inevitable. You know, whenever we go and speak to an insurer, you know, insurers are always interested, are interested in what’s the latest claims data, what are the trends that we’re seeing, all this sort of thing. So we’ll sit down with them for an hour and a half and we’ll say, oh, this was interesting. This is what went well, this is what didn’t go so well. And then they always sort of grab us just as we’re about to leave and we’ve, we’ve said our goodbyes, and they’re like, so you guys have a. Claims database. Right? Every time. Yep. And it’s like, how’d you feel about, about sharing your data? And it’s, it’s every insurer without failure. They’re like, let’s see your claims [00:28:00] database. Okay. Right. So we can share, we can share some information. Obviously it needs to be sanitized. We don’t want to provide identifying information, all that sort of stuff. You’re looking at thousands and thousands of lines of data. And the big problem that we have with any database like this is, it’s only as good as the data that’s been entered, right? So if, if every claims handler, if every loss adjuster is entering their own data into this database, my interpretation of, of a root cause failure, maybe different to somebody else’s. So what we are gonna start seeing in the next year to three years. Is the application of AI to these databases, to to sort of finesse the poor quality data that’s been entered by multiple, you know, it’s, it’s too many cooks. Spoiled broth. All of these people have entered their own interpretation of data, will start to see AI finesse [00:29:00] that, and all of a sudden the output of it will be. Really, really powerful, much better risk models. Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s inevitable in the next two to five years. Um, and I think insurers will, but again, the, we go back to the cyclic thing. So the, the data that we have is the claims that we’ve had over the past however many years, but all the while that the OEMs are manufacturing. New gearboxes, new generators, new blades. We don’t know about the problems that are gonna come out the woodwork. We can tell you about failures that might happen on aged assets, but we can’t tell you about what’s gonna fail in the future. Allen Hall: Well, is there an appetite to do what the automobile world is doing on the automobile insurance? Have basically a plugin to monitor how the driver is doing the State Farm drive safe and [00:30:00] save. Yeah. Your little black box is, is that where eventually this all goes? Is that every turbine’s gonna have a little black box for the insurance company to monitor the asset on some large scale, but then that allows you then to basically to assess properly what the rates should be based on the actual. Data coming from the actual turbines so that you, you can get a better view of what’s happening.  Nathan Davies: I mean, it’s challenging because obviously you can only get so much from, from that monitoring data. So arguably that’s, that’s like the scarda data. But then there’s, there’s the multiple other inputs that we’re looking at. I’d say the vast majority of claims come from some form of human intervention. And how do you record that? Human intervention.  Allen Hall: Right? You, it’s like getting an oil change in your car. If the guy forgets to put the oil plug in. Pretty much you’re, you’re gonna get a mount down the road and engine’s gone. [00:31:00] And that’s, that may be the, that may be ultimately where this all goes. Is that a lot of it’s just human error.  Nathan Davies: Yeah. It’s, you know, we, we can take the, the operating data, you can start to finesse maintenance reports and, and try to plug that into this data stream. But you can guarantee, like you can absolutely bet your bottom dollar, but when there’s an insurance claim and it’s like. That one key document that you need that will answer that question, nobody knows  Allen Hall: where it is. This has been a great discussion and Nathan, we need to have you back on because you provide such great insights as to what’s happening in the insurance world and and the broader wind energy world and. That’s where I like talking to you so much. Nathan, how do people get a hold of you? Can they reach you via LinkedIn?  Nathan Davies: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. Um, you can also find me, um, on the Lloyd Warwick website. Sounds great.  Allen Hall: Nathan, thank you so much for being on  Nathan Davies: the podcast. Right. Appreciate it. Thank you so much [00:32:00] guys.

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda examine TPI Composites’ Chapter 11 proceedings, including the Oaktree Capital secured debt controversy and Vestas’ acquisition of two Mexican factories. With remaining assets heading to auction in January, they discuss what operators should consider as blade supply uncertainty grows. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy  Allen Hall: Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxum. Rosemary Barnes is on holiday. We’re here to talk about the TPI composites, uh, bankruptcy hearings, and there’s been so much happening there behind the scenes. It’s hard to keep track of, but we’ve done a deep dive and wanted to give everybody at least a highlight of what has happened over the last couple of months. So, uh, if you do own vessels or GE turbines, you understand what the situation is. As we all know, TPI composites, gee, was the world’s largest independent of wind blade manufacturing. Uh, they [00:01:00] were, it, they built blades for renova, Vestas, Nordex. They built blades for almost everybody, uh, names that basically power the global energy transition. And then, uh, if, and a lot of people don’t know this, but back in December of 2023, uh, TPI struck a deal that is drawing some fire. Right now, TPI swapped $436 million in preferred stock for. $393 million in secure debt held by Oak Tree Capital and by August of last year, just a couple of months ago, TPI filed for Chapter 11. Now the Blade Makers assets are being carved up and sold, and two of wind energy’s biggest players are stepping in to keep production running while the bankruptcy plays out. Now, Joel and Yolanda, I, I think the bankruptcy of. TPI sort of came to the industry as a little bit of a shock. Obviously [00:02:00] the, the price had fallen quite a bit. Uh, if you’ve watched the stock price of TPI composites had been dropping for a while and didn’t have a lot of of market value. However, uh, GE and Vestas both have manufacturing facilities basically with uh, TPI composites and, and needs them to produce those blades. So the filing of the bankruptcy, I’m sure was a nervous point for Vestus and GE being really the, the two main ones. Joel Saxum: Well, I think we talked about this a little bit off air. Is it, it shouldn’t just be Vestus and GE nervous about this now. It should be every operator that’s in either in development or still has blades under warranty. Uh, so, and this is a not a US problem, this is a global problem. ’cause TPI is a global company that serves, uh, global industry all over the place, right? We know that a large percentage of their throughput was GE and Vestas, but also Siemens ESAs in there, you name it, right? The, any major operator’s gonna have some blades built [00:03:00] by TPI or op major, OEM. So. There isn’t gonna be much of a, uh, dark corner of the wind industry that this issue doesn’t touch. So I think they, the, one of the issues here is, um, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve heard about some issues going on with TPI, but it was almost like a, ah, they’re not, they’ll, they’ll be okay. They, so, so something will happen. I mean, Yolanda, you had said. What was it that you said ear earlier? Like, uh, the kind of the, the, the feeling about it.  Yolanda Padron: They’ll take care of it. You know, OEMs will take care of it and we’ll be fine.  Joel Saxum: Someone’s gonna support this thing.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I, I think teams, you’re, you’re definitely right. Teams really do need to at least think of a, of a plan B or a plan C to have when the dust settles so you’re not scrambling.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And it hasn’t really played out that way. Uh, Vestas has stepped in a little bit and GE has stepped in. Not in terms of acquiring any of the major assets, but I think the first question is what is Oaktree Capital’s, [00:04:00] uh, role in all this? And that is being played out right now in front of the bankruptcy court. Uh, so when you go to bankruptcy, there’s obviously a lot of oversight that happens there, uh, and. When TPI composites entered bankruptcy, the accreditors committee had a bunch of questions about that transaction. Uh, they pointed to a December, 2023 refin refinancing deal with Oaktree and in which creditors were really suspicious of basically saying that TPI was already insolvent in 2023 and Oaktree exchanged equity for secure debt jumping ahead of everybody else in line to get paid. So because they Oaktree has secured debt, they’re first in line to get paid. If, uh, weather Guard was involved selling parts to TPI, which thank goodness we weren’t, we would be unsecured. They wouldn’t have to pay us. So Oaktree would get paid first and everybody else is unsecured, gets paid [00:05:00] later. Uh, that’s okay. I mean, that’s the way they, uh, they structured it. But this has led to a problem, right? So that oak tree. Uh, was supposed to release about $20 million in funding to keep the factories open, and that, that happened just a couple of weeks ago, and Oaktree refused to do it. So the amount of cash flow to keep the factories open was a real issue. TPI was in front of the court saying, we’re in trouble. We’re gonna become insolvent. We don’t have cash flow to keep the doors open. So the blade factories nearly shut down a couple of weeks ago. However, there was a, the settlement, uh, just after that, uh, in regards to Oaktree about when the payouts happen, what Oaktree will receive, and which basically it’s, most of whatever’s gonna happen here. So whatever, uh, TPI decides to sell or can sell, Oaktree is gonna be the recipient of those funds for most of it. I think the  Joel Saxum: difficult thing here for. The [00:06:00] general listener, me included, is understanding that this is a very complicated legal process that’s governed and it’s global, right? So it’s governed in certain court systems in different places. And because there is also the idea of like say in the, in the United States, the SEC Securities Exchanges Commission, that kind of regulates these. Publicly traded companies. There’s a lot of lights and there’s a lot of lawyers and there’s a lot of jargon involved in this thing. And, but basically what what we’re saying is, is the way the process works when you have a, uh, a bankruptcy and insolvency, if a company has debt to certain people, there may be a list of a hundred people. There may be a list of two, doesn’t matter. There’s certain classes of debt, right? And Oaktree has secured debt, which means. If they get paid first, if there’s anything, right? If this bankruptcy goes and, and gets, sell this, sell that, sell this, whatever’s left, goes to the secured debt and then it goes to unsecured debt. And [00:07:00] there’s sometimes there can be different classes of unsecured debt as well. And, but if there’s not, some of it just goes by like date or value or everybody gets a percentage, it just kind of all depends on how it works out in the specific court system that the stuff takes care of. But that person. That is the top. Um, in this case, Oaktree Capital, right? Based out of la but offices all over the world, they got about $200 billion in real estate equity and debt assets or, uh, I guess valuation. I wouldn’t say assets. Um, they are the debtor in possession, so they’re the one that’s kind of like top of the heap. They’re kind of controlling how the. The restructuring and or sale goes alongside the court system.  Allen Hall: And the trouble is, is that when you have unsecured and secured debt, everybody that’s unsecured wants to get paid. So any material supplier that has been for in selling product to TPI over the years [00:08:00] usually has a 30, 60, 90, maybe 120 days of, of after they deliver the product to they get paid. In that timeframe, if bankruptcy happens, all that product that’s sitting on the floor at TPI, you sort of lost it. You know, you can’t get it back and you’re not gonna get paid for it for if, if, if ever, what do you do? And so you start, you know, you start filing claims, but those, those claims most likely will never get paid. Or if they will, they’re going to get pennies on the dollar.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I would imagine like, so, you know, when we, when we sit here and say from the weather guard hat, right? We put a. They go to a client, net 15, net 30, we expect to get paid in that amount of time. That’s kind of how our, basically US forwarding credit to someone else. That’s how it works. And if you work within the wind industry, you know that the OEMs, because they are the OEMs, they have a heavier hand. Sometimes they’re net 90, net one 20. Um, once they, once they’re cool with your invoice. So you could see that some of these people that have, [00:09:00] uh, and TPI falls within that OEM category, right? Um, you can see that they more than likely will have had longer, more favorable terms for themselves with some of these sub-suppliers. And the sub-suppliers are, think about TPI blades. It is composites, it is fabric, it’s resins, it’s all of those supply companies. Um, and you know, there may be, uh, some other. Dead in there that you’re not, we’re not sure of. We saw some stuff with some OEMs, maybe they have some exchange agreements you paid up front for some blades or something of that sort. You didn’t get ’em. I don’t know. But there is also, and this is the one that kind of hits home to some of our listeners, um, not only some of our listeners are those supply chain companies that support them, um, but a lot of them are ISPs. Right? So we were just talking to someone who, you know, just a couple weeks ago that had done some inspection work, uh, for, for TPI that. They’re not gonna get paid for it. Um, we have seen on the creditors list of some ISPs that we know they’re not gonna get paid, and those are people out [00:10:00] doing warranty repairs and those kind of things over a course of time. And they may have had a net 30, net 60, net 90 days payment, but I’m sure that stuff is well and long gone. They probably have invoices due for a year now. Uh, but it, this, the, the, this downfall of TPI, what’s going on with them, it affects a lot of people in the wind industry. Um. Be being, having been on the short end once in my career of an unsecured debt, uh, when a, when the client or the, uh, um, purchaser of services, but went into bankruptcy and losing a whole bunch of cash, and there’s nothing you can do about it, um, except for. Be mad and stew over it and learn from your mistakes. Uh, that’s a tough place to be. Speaker 5: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Poolman on the park for Wind energy o and m Australia [00:11:00] 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions, not speeches,  Allen Hall: the problem. With TPI has been keeping the doors open and they went in front of the court and said, we have a liquidity problem. Uh, Vestus bought those two factories, those two LLCs for $10 million each. That was the agreement During that transaction, TPI asked for another $55 million, uh, and it’s in the transcripts. You can go listen to this dental, listen to it, but obviously the vest representatives were. No [00:12:00] way. We’re not doing that. We are in good faith. De decided to buy, uh, these two pieces. So 10 million bucks a, a factory is. Pretty decent price, but they are still in a liquidity challenge. So GE Renova and Vestus, uh, don’t want the Blades manufacturing to stop. They have customers who need blades and so they need these TPI factories to keep running. GE Renova is providing emergency financing. Uh, through what the court calls, uh, Erna, G-E-R-N-A, it’s a liquidity agreement. Uh, they also signed a long lead materials agreement to keep raw materials moving into the plants. Vestas provided cash advances to keep production going at the Mexico facilities also. So for now, everything continues to be running, but essentially GE and Vestas are pro paying for the materials. To keep the production line going and there’s this, there’s on the back end of this TPI is essentially. Gonna charge, um, [00:13:00] GE vest less for the blades when they roll off the line because they advanced some those funds. So, TPI as an organization is still trying to continue to produce blades and trying to honor their commitments as much as they can, but they need cash and the, the place they’re going to go get it or have been getting it from as Vestas in GE Renova. So you  Joel Saxum: one would expect that either Vestas or GE Renova would eventually just say like, we’ve got to buy you. Is that a reality? Because it doesn’t seem like it from the court documents and stuff. It seems like they’re, they’re kind of, they don’t want to get their hands into back or back into, in GEs case, this blade manufacturing, uh, faculties, right? They’re okay right now providing cash for you guys to keep your operation running and providing us with the things we need. But we don’t actually want to take it over. That’s what it feels  Allen Hall: like. Uh, well, Vestus did, right? So Vestus took over two factories in Mexico. GE has not done [00:14:00] that yet, and there’s no indication from the proceedings that I read on all the documents that GE has made any move to do that. Vestus definitely stepped in and wants to keep the two factories running, uh, with the issues with ge, Renova and LM at the minute, and there was a lot of layoffs at LM just before the new year. It’s a question of what GE will do, and it doesn’t seem like as of right now, GE is going to buy factories. Now that being said, uh, TPI composites has deadlines to meet and some auctions to run. Uh, the remaining assets, the non vestus. Portion and the, the Turkish operations, which were sold way earlier, uh, all of the remaining assets go up for bid on January 26th. And if no outside buyer steps in, which is very possible, Oak Tree Capital can use its debt as currency to take ownership of from what is called a credit bid. [00:15:00] From there, uh, the secure lender could convert that debt into equity and, and so basically what happens is Oak Tree Capital. Would be the holder of the company for whatever remains. But you would think that GE Viva, uh, would want to have some piece of this to keep the blade factories running, but there’s no indication of that. No one from GE has said anything. None of the filings indicate that GE wants to go ahead and or ge. Viva wants to go ahead and buy the factories. Nothing like that has happened. So there may be, uh, some more financial transactions at play here, but as of right now, everything that remains for TPI composites is gonna be in the auction block. Someone could walk up and for several million dollars, obviously, uh, acquire it and  Joel Saxum: in theory run it. So, I mean, Alan, you and I talked about this this morning a little bit. We have seen more [00:16:00] layoffs at lm. Right. We saw more people depart and it sounds like that building is basically a ghost town over in Denmark. GE is basically scuttling LM down to nothing, and they will more than likely either sell off whatever LM has or discontinue whatever that business model is, if that’s where they’re going, blade wise, wind wise. At the same time, they’ve also said, we’re not building any more g offshore turbines.  Allen Hall: What are they  Joel Saxum: doing? I don’t see them having the, the, the, the thirst to go scoop up or put any money into TPI, but it’s like a catch 22. ’cause they need them to fulfill the orders and stuff that they have. Right now what we’re staring at is basically oak tree composites. Allen Hall: There’s no chance of that. The oak tree doesn’t know how to run that business. They’re gonna have to hire somebody to go do that. Even if they did, you still got factories in Iowa, a bunch in Mexico, other [00:17:00] places. You have all these assets kind of spread all over the place. It’s not like running an automotive dealership on the corner, you’re, you’re running a major operation with thousands of employees and producing these massively complex blades. There’s only a handful of companies that would be even possible that we could acquire that and run it with any competency at all right now.  Joel Saxum: So does oak tree being, being that oak tree is the debtor in possession and if, if possible with, or if possible, if it, if it rolls this way with the plan toggle, right. Where they would basically, the cell would convert them into equity holdings and they would own it. Are they the gatekeepers to who can bid? Like do they control ge? You can bid vest as you can bid? Or does the court control that?  Allen Hall: The court controls all of that. So it’s all part of the chapter 11 proceedings. Anybody can walk up and put a bid in. And now whether it qualifies or not is, is a good question, but anybody can walk up and, [00:18:00] and make a claim for what remains. There’s, there is a process that will happen there, but who else would it be? Nordex? I don’t think so. Is is Vesta gonna buy more? I don’t think so. So the concern is obviously for TPI, what is it gonna look like going forward? If you have purchased Vestus turbines or GE Renova turbines, are you gonna have the blades that you have purchased in time? Great questions to ask. I think on the other side is if you do own GE Renova or Vestus turbines and they’re made by TPI, where the technical aspects lie, what do you do where, what should you be thinking about if you’re a large operator of some of these turbines? How I should be planning for the future here? What are you thinking about?  Joel Saxum: So let’s divide it into two categories. One of them is turbine blades on order supply chain, supply [00:19:00] chain, and the other one’s being turbine blades already in production or received order.  Yolanda Padron: I’m not sure that we can fully look at them separately though, right? Because if you have them, if, if they’re yours and they’re under a service agreement or something. Eventually you might be in the queue for a replacement that you need, right? That your OEM would be on the hook for.  Joel Saxum: That raises another question there then does. I don’t, ’cause I don’t know this. Maybe you do. Alan does a bankruptcy qualify as a force majeure event?  Allen Hall: Not in terms of like lightning would be, but, but in terms, yeah, sure.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. But can they claim force majeure and be like, uh, out of our control? So now the turbine supply agreements are, you know, basically have to be rewritten. Timelines have to be rewritten. Yolanda, to your point, if we have a blade that we need for production, am I not responsible for LDS anymore because the blade manufacturer went into, uh, bankruptcy?  Yolanda Padron: I think it’d be more of [00:20:00] either Now you’re not just. In the queue for TPI Blades. But you’re in the queue for whatever we can retrofit there, right? That they could put in.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. The alternative is you need a whole set though, right? So if we say like, I need a blade from TPI, or I need an entire set of LM blades, now you’re triple the cost. Who has to pay for that?  Yolanda Padron: I really would hope that it, they wouldn’t go this route, but I think some OEMs would just hit liquidated damages. And stop.  Allen Hall: That’s what I think too. I mean, we’ve seen that happen with some of the OEMs. Is that the, uh, LDS and that’s it. There is nothing going forward. They’re, they’re fine doing that. That’s the only play that they have. I, I am deeply concerned what GE Renova is about to do in the wind business because of their gas turbine and everything else are so profitable. And they just announced that the wind business in 2026 is not likely to make any. Positive cash flow. [00:21:00] It, the, the discussion inside of GE Renova, at least at the sort of the boardroom level, must be really tense because in, in theory, they could buy TPIs assets in the factories and run them, but they just went through essentially a liquidation process with lm. Do they want to run another company, especially when they’re bleeding cash in that particular business? I think the answer GE historically has been no. If we’re not number one or number two, we’re getting the heck outta that business. That was the Jack Welsh of running ge, and anybody that worked for GE knew that loud and clear because they said it all the time. Those same people that grew up in that GE culture are now in the boardroom, and what are they likely to do? They’re likely to follow that advice. Because it’s just what they know. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the school they went to. Are they gonna change their mind and say, A longer term play is wind [00:22:00] and we wanna stay in it and we’re willing to lose a couple hundred million dollars a year for the next couple of years, and now we’re gonna run a Blade Factory with several thousand employees down in Mexico. I just don’t see it. Uh, not that I could be totally wrong about that. Probably am. Uh, today, sitting at the beginning of January of 2026, I don’t think GE Renova wants to be in the blade manufacturing business if they can at all avoid it.  Yolanda Padron: I think it’s important for owners to start thinking a lot more about educating their internal teams on what they can. So if it’s through, if you know people within your OEM that you can trust and that can help you. Learn how to self-service some of your blades. That would be great if it’s through ISPs that you can trust. If it’s a hodgepodge of items. I think it’s really important for owners right now to start building that up because it will take a while. I. And, and the risk [00:23:00] is there.  Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, and if today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us overview. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. And we will catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.