The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen and Joel are joined by Mathieu Cōté from CanREA to preview the upcoming Operators Summit in Toronto. With many Canadian wind projects reaching 17-20 years old, the industry faces critical decisions about extending, repowering, or decommissioning assets. Register now!

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Matt, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Well, the theme of this Year’s Operator Summit is coming of age and. There’s a lot of things happening in the renewable side up in Canada. What does that mean for Canadian renewable energy operators right now? 

Mathieu Cōté: Well, we came up with coming of age because, um, the fleet in Canada is in a bit of a different space than it is in the States where, uh, right now we’ve got a lot of projects that are on the cusp of coming to their end of initial lifetime.

Right. They’re in that. 17 to 20 year range. There’s some that are a little bit past, and so you, as an operator, you gotta be asking yourself, is this the time to extend this project? What do I have to do [00:01:00] if I need to extend? Um, or am I repowering, am I taking things down, putting them up? And I mean, there’s a lot of different variables there.

Sometimes it’s just a re topping, sometimes it’s everything down to ground level and go again. Or it’s, maybe it’s a decommissioning and those decisions are on the cusp of being made in the operation space in Canada. So that’s, that’s a super important part of it. But the other side of it, and the reason we liked, uh, coming of age is from the industry perspective itself.

We are no longer the new kid on the block, right? We are now a reliable, uh, professional industry that can deliver power when you need it. Uh, so that’s what we’re trying to, to convey with this coming of age. And, and we’ve got some really good speakers who are gonna talk about that, uh, from. The grid operator’s perspective saying, why is it that renewables are one of the first things they reach for now when they realize they need more power?

Joel Saxum: I think it’s an interesting space and I think to, to [00:02:00]comment more deeply on that, right? That you guys are in that, you 

Mathieu Cōté: know, 

Joel Saxum: 2005, six you started installing a 

Mathieu Cōté: lot of the, a lot of wind assets. There was a curve of, as it as every year you get more and more. Trickle and then becomes a flood quite quickly.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And, and, and you know, from, from the operation standpoint, we deal with some of the wind farms in Canada. We love working with, uh, the operators up there because they do exude that professionalism. They’re on top of their game. They know they’ve gotta maintain these things. Whereas in the states, we’ve been a little bit nascent sometimes and, oh, we got PTC coming so we don’t have to do these certain things.

Little bit more cowboy. Yeah. Yeah. And up in Canada, they’re, they’re, they’ve been doing the right things for a long time. Um, and I think it’s a good, good model to follow, but you’re a hundred percent correct. We’re coming to that time when it’s like decision time to be made here. And I think we, in our, in our uh, kind of off air chat, you had mentioned that, you know, repower in Canada is.

Pretty early stages. I 

Mathieu Cōté: only know about 

Joel Saxum: one, 

Mathieu Cōté: to [00:03:00] be honest, and I try and keep track of these things, 

Joel Saxum: but that’s coming down the pipeline, 

Mathieu Cōté: right? So there’s gonna be more and more of these happening. And I mean, there are a lot of operators that have one foot on either side of the border, so some people have some operational experience on what steps you need to take, but it’s also from the regulatory side, like what is your grid operator gonna insist on?

So on and so on. But, uh, so we’ve got some panels to talk about things like, one of my favorites is, uh, how much life is left in your machine? And that’s sort of a deeper dive from an engineering standpoint. Like what math do the engineers do to assess, is this foundation good to go for another 10 years?

Is this tower gonna stand up to whatever? Should we replace the blades and all those components? We, we’ve got a foundation expert, uh, someone who does. Digital twin sort of things as well as, um, a panelist from, uh, Nordex, so the OEM sort of perspective as well, and how they assess how much [00:04:00] life is left in a machine.

So like that’s the sort of panels that we’re trying to put together that we’re pretty excited about. 

Joel Saxum: Well, I think that’s a good one too, because I know Alan and I we’re talking around the industry globally. A lot of it is around CMS. And when we say CMS, we’re not just talking drive train anymore, we’re talking everything you can in the turbine, right?

So the, the concept of remaining useful life, r ul, that always comes up, where are we at with this, right? Because from a global perspective in Europe, they have, you know, in Spanish wind farms are all, a lot of ’em are at that 25 year mark. What are we doing here? So you guys are bringing that conversation to the Canadian market at this operator summit in Toronto here in February.

It’s, it’s timely, right? Because it’s February and everybody’s getting ready for spring, so you got a little bit of time to come to the conference. 

Mathieu Cōté: Well, and that’s one of the things that we actually used to do is show in April and we’ve moved it back after hearing feedback from our, from our audience that April’s almost too late, right?

Like, if you’re doing your assessments for your [00:05:00] blades, it where? Where’s your manpower coming up? Coming from in the summertime? Those contracts are already signed. By the time you hit April, February, you’ve still got time. Your RFP might be out so you can meet all the proponents on site at once. It, it just makes a lot more sense for us to do it in February.

Allen Hall: Well, there’s a wide range of technology in Canada in regards to wind to energy. That adds to the complexity where a lot of turbines, unlike the United States, are maybe even sub one megawatt, and with new turbines coming online, they’re gonna be in the five, six, maybe even seven megawatt range. That’s a huge dispersed.

Industry to try to maintain massive range. Yeah. Right. And I, and, and I think one of the dilemmas about that is trying to find people who understand that tho all those different kinds of machines and the intricacies of each one of them and how to operate them more efficiently, which is where Canada is.

Quite honestly. The, the thing [00:06:00] about that and the challenge for Canada Head, and this is why the conference is so important, is. If there’s someone in Canada that has the answer, as Joel and I have talked to a number of Canadian operators, you may not know them. I know it’s a smaller marketplace in general, but unless you’re talking to one another, you probably, uh, don’t realize there’s, there’s help within Canada.

And these conferences really highlight that quite a bit. Wanna talk about some of the, sort of the interactions you guys create at the conference? 

Mathieu Cōté: Yeah. Oh, well, it’s one of the things that can RIA tries to do is play that connector role, right? Like, we don’t know everything, but like you say, we know someone who knows something and we can put you in touch with all.

I know a guy who knows a guy. Um, but we’re, we’re always able to, to, to connect those dots. And I mean, we, we do a lot of, uh. Things like working groups and uh, regional meetings. And, uh, we’ve even got, uh, different summits for different things. Getting a little bit outside of operations, but like we [00:07:00] have an Atlantic operators group that gathers together and has a chat just sometimes, usually there’s a focus topic, but then we have, oh, how do you guys deal with the storm that came through?

Or that sort of thing, or what, what do you do for if you need a new blade or has anyone got a good vendor for this thing or that thing? Those sorts of things always happen in the margins. And I mean, the ops summit is the, the best one of those because it’s the entire Canadian industry that gets together.

We’ve got folks from bc, we’ve got folks from Atlantic Canada, there’s gonna be people from Quebec, and there’s vendors from all those places as well. Right? So. It’s covering all your bases and it’s the one place that you can talk to everybody and meet everybody in like a 48 hour period. 

Joel Saxum: Well, I think that if, you know, just doing a little bit of deep dive into the agenda and the program here, that’s one of the things that you guys are focusing on.

Targeted networking. So morning breakfasts, evening receptions, there, you know, structured and informal, uh, opportunities to actually connect with the o and m [00:08:00] community. Um, one of them that you had mentioned was kind of, um. Hands-on demonstrations and, and for me, when, when I see these things, ’cause I’ve seen them kind of slightly not, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody do it perfectly well.

I’m excited to see what you guys do. But you get, you get a group of people standing around, like you get people kind of standing around. Rubbing elbows going, like, what do you think about that? What is, does this, is this gonna work? And, and those to me are great, great conversations for networking and kind of figuring things out together.

The collaboration part. 

Mathieu Cōté: Absolutely. Uh, well on those two points, the, the networking has always been a huge part of this show, and we’ve always built into the program. Okay. There’s some stuff on stage, but then there’s a break. And I mean, you can wander around the showroom floor and you can, but you can talk to the other people.

And, uh, that’s a big part of this. That’s an important part of this. And then on the, the demonstrations and so on, we used to have what we called, uh, elevator pitches, uh, where, and we’ve done it various different ways where people get five minutes, one slide, you’re on [00:09:00] stage, you say your piece, you give us your elevator pitch, and then you get off and someone else gets up and talks.

And we found that, that, and the feedback we got was that that was good because that condensed all of the salesy parts and kept it away from the panels. ’cause the panels, we want them to be informative, not. Selling you something. We want you to learn something. But the sales pitch is, there is some sense of like someone’s trying to sell you a thing.

But we’re evolving that a little bit this year where we’re going towards demonstrations. So on the showroom floor, there will be someone who will have a tangible thing, whether it’s here’s the new fireproof coat that we’ve come up with, or here’s how this, uh, sling works, or here’s this piece of kit that fits on your machine that catches bolts when they break, or whatever it is.

Here’s how it actually works, and they’ve got it in their hands and they can play with the go until it, uh, really, like you say, gets that light bulb moment that gets you to see how it works. And you can see that ROI [00:10:00] right away going, oh, okay. That if it catches the bolts when they break, then it doesn’t rattle around.

And then I’ve gotta spend X amount less time fixing, missed out. Or the other thing, like it’s, it, it’s a, it’s a better way of doing it is, uh, what we feel. And like you say, then you get. Being on the showroom floor, it’s in amongst the booths. So people who are on the showroom floor can just sort of look over their shoulder, see that, okay, I really gotta go check out that guy.

Joel Saxum: I like the idea of the format and there’s a couple other things like lessons learned track we talked about a little bit too. But one of the things for me for trade shows is when Alan and I went to ETC in Calgary a few years ago, two years ago I think. Yep. You actually had the. The conversations, the panel conversations, the discussions, the knowledge sharing happening on the showroom floor.

I don’t like going to a conference where I have to go in, like I’m talking with some people, but, oh, I gotta run across this thing across over here, a mile away into some back room to listen to someone talk about something. I like, I like being where the information is [00:11:00] happening and sharing, and I can stand off to the side and listen a bit and, and still engage.

Um, and you guys are doing some more of that too through the lessons learned track. Um, can you explain that a little bit to us? 

Mathieu Cōté: Well, we’ve always had, uh, like a, some split in concurrent sessions and so on. But to your point of not running off to the other end, we’re in a pretty intimate space where we’ve got like a room for lunch and the plenaries, we’ve got a room for the exhibit hall, and then right next to it is any of the, uh, off to the side stuff.

It’s all within a one minute walk of, of itself, which is much better. So we’ve got the concurrent, uh, sessions and. This year we split them instead of into two. We split ’em into three though that then we’ve got one for specific to wind. We’ve got one specific to solar and storage. ’cause we are renewable energy, not just wind.

And then we’ve got one, uh, that’s a bit of a grab bag and it’s a bit of a different format. So instead of your traditional three [00:12:00] panelists plus a moderator, everyone’s got a slide, everyone’s gotta talk, blah, blah, blah. This thing, it, it’s much more focused. You’ve got one person who’s got a real important thing to say, whether it’s, here’s, uh, lessons learned on how our hub fell off and here’s what we learned from it.

Here’s our root cause analysis, or here’s, uh, a much better way of doing, uh, our health and safety program has worked much better for us. Here’s what we gain from it, or whatever happens to be. And then one moderator to ask them some questions, pick apart. So this part, how to, uh, and get a bit of a, a flow there.

So, and it’s much shorter. Instead of an hour long, it’s only a half hour. So then you don’t have to sit through two people. You don’t care about to listen to the one person that you do is the intent of these, uh, lessons learned? I, 

Joel Saxum: I do really like the concept simply because when I go to an event or like, um, putting something together, I want people to be able to go.

Learn something, take it back to their respective [00:13:00] organization, be able to implement it tomorrow. And it sounds like you guys are really moving towards that with the lessons learned, the collaboration and the knowledge sharing. 

Mathieu Cōté: That’s, that’s the intent. And that, and that’s really what it is, is I, I’m, I think I’m a smart guy, but I don’t have all the answers.

So we’re really trying to shine a light on the people who do, and like, here’s a thing that the industry as a whole should learn about. And give them some time to talk about it. And like you say, then you’ll get some of those conversations in the margins and in in between going, yeah, this guy had this thing to say.

We get that sort of dialogue going. That’s, that’s the intent. It’s all about, uh, discussions and learning from each other. 

Joel Saxum: To me, it sounds like even, um, for lack of a, maybe a trip to get some poutine and maybe an American, American should go out there and listen to some of the stuff you guys have to say as well.

Mathieu Cōté: Honestly, it’s, it’s worth it for, uh, Americans to come by and we do have a significant number, proportion of the, the audience comes from the states as well. Because like you say, it’s, it’s worth it and it’s good information and it’s a good [00:14:00] portion of the thing. And it’s really not that far. And I mean, um, not to put it lightly, we do tend to lean a little heavier on some of the more, uh, Canadian elements like weather.

Like we do have a panel this year, um, on the solar side, solar operations and adverse conditions. And that one, um. Because that one came from, uh, I know a guy at, uh, natural Resources Canada, who was part of a working group at the International Energy Agency in their photovoltaic power systems group, where they came up with, uh, a report on operations in all kinds of adverse conditions around the world.

So he’s gonna present that report and we’ll have a panel discussion. The other panelists there, we’ve got, um. Ben Power, the CEO of ves, who is the number one installer of solar in the Yukon, right next to Alaska. So they know a lot about adverse conditions and then, uh, polar racking, they’ve got a lot of experience, uh, with that sort of thing too.

And they’ve got some data that they’re gonna bring to the [00:15:00] panel as well. So it should be a really good discussion about how do we deal with bad things happening in solar specifically. 

Allen Hall: Well, sure. Uh, Canada’s been running assets a lot longer than we have been in the States. In fact, to Joel’s earlier point, we’re repairing.

Disassembling putting new stuff up all the time. Canada has been more focused on keeping existing equipment running in some crazy, harsh conditions. The US is moving that way. You wanna know about ice? We could tell you about ice. Exactly. Like how many times has the US run into trouble with icing on wind turbines and we should have been talking to, or her neighbors through the north, but in a lot of cases, yeah.

The I, I find that the time I went. I learned a whole bunch about Canadian operations, how to think about some of these problems differently. That was the beauty of a attending a Kria event, and I know there’s gonna be a lot of people attending this event. Who is it for in general? Obviously [00:16:00] it’s for operators, but is there some value here for like asset managers?

Some of the engineers, some of the service providers, 

Mathieu Cōté: yeah. That our, our core market, if you want, is your site managers and your technical people, but engineers, 100%, they will learn something. Your asset managers will definitely have some value in it, whether it’s learning about the technology or learning about, uh, the, the latest things coming out or even just.

Best practices from other folks, right? We’ve also got, uh, more and more we’re getting people from the insurance industry getting involved because some of these, uh, lessons learned and so on, is really valuable to them. And we’re even running, um, if, if people are in insurance, we have a special meeting for insurance.

The, the day before where we’ll be having a, a dialogue between the insurance industry and the operators and like, here’s how we deal with this. This is why the prices are that. And, uh, talk about that risk transfer type stuff. There are the odd developer who comes out. Um, but it’s more for the, [00:17:00] like, once it’s in the ground, the technical people, uh, the tooling manufacturers, the service providers, the, all, all of those folks.

Joel Saxum: What about ISPs? Oh, a hundred percent. We know quite a few ISPs up in Canada. Every one of them that I’ve talked to is coming. So ev I’ve had the conversations and like I, you know, we’re, we’re doing some other things in February as well around here, and I was, Hey, what are you guys? Oh, we’re all going to the Candry Ops summit.

We’re going to the Candry Ops summit, so to Toronto and February. Um, bring your warm jacket. I suppose it could be cold. Yeah, the, the ISPs will be there in, in full force. And so I think that. To me, it’s like the, the, the cousin to the A-C-P-O-M-S. We like OMS in the states because that’s where the real discussions happen around operations and maintenance.

Mathieu Cōté: The technical stuff happens. Yeah. And it, I like to say it’s the, the, the younger cousin, if you will, and the maple syrup cousin. 

Allen Hall: Well, I do think though, that when we’re at, uh, o, M and S Joel, that [00:18:00] those discussions are a little bit different than what I see up at Kria. Like Kria is a. Community OMS is, yeah, we, we all know one another and maybe it’s just there’s this, a bigger event or more people, but it, I don’t feel the sort of connection I do when I’m at Kria.

Like I know the people, I understand what’s going on at Kria. That’s what makes it fun that I get to see people that I, I know once in a while, but at the same time there is a huge, massive amount of. Sharing 

Mathieu Cōté: that community that you speak to, that that’s really what we’re trying to, to gather in. And there’s a difference of scale too.

I mean, uh, the OMS is like 3000 people and we’re three to 400. So there, there’s a difference there. But that sort of intimacy leads to a fair bit more of that sharing that you’re talking about and like that Oh yeah, there’s that guy. Oh, there’s Derek from Capstone, or there’s Dan from EDF or there, you know, and then you.

You run into them and then you, you catch [00:19:00] up on all the latest and, um, what’s going on, how are things going? And so on and so on. And there’s time for all of that in the, in the two day show that we have. 

Joel Saxum: Well, I think collaboration in a smaller, like the right size group is, is much easier and flows better.

Right? Once you get to that thousand two, three, 4,000, it’s like, yeah, you’re there, you’re seeing the people, but like it’s just not the same. 

Mathieu Cōté: Et c is somewhere around 3000 people and it, it, it’s got that heft. It’s a different audience as well. Right? The o and m crowd isn’t there as much. It’s not quite as technical, so it it, it’s a speaking to a different group of people.

Allen Hall: Well, Canada is on a growth spurt for renewables. There’s a lot of wind energy 

Mathieu Cōté: headed up towards Quebec. There are procurement’s open right now in Quebec, Nova Scotia, new Brunswick. Uh, Ontario, BC and Manitoba 

Joel Saxum: Plus, what was it? Fi what was it? Five offshore lease areas off of Nova Scotia. 

Mathieu Cōté: Yeah, they’re looking at up to five gigawatts offshore in Nova Scotia.

We don’t have [00:20:00] any yet in Nova in, uh, offshore. And there’s some, they need to figure out what the offtake is and where the transmission goes. Uh, but there’s a lot of people working in the background on MA putting that together. So it’s growing. Oh, a hundred percent. It’s growing and across the board, right.

And the. Wind or solar or storage or all three. And that, that a lot of the, the procurements these days are starting to move in a direction of, uh, sort of a technology agnostic where they say, we need megawatts. We don’t care how you make them. We just want electricity. Well, electricity, uh, but also electricity capacity.

So in the one case we figure wind and solar will do quite well, and in the other we’ll figure the battery storage will do quite well. So no matter what and in the timelines that they’re asking for, we’re looking at if you want it in the next five years, it’s probably gonna be wind and solar because anything else is gonna be a seven plus year timeline to get into the ground.

So [00:21:00] there, there’s a lot. There’s a lot coming. 

Allen Hall: Well, up to 20% of the energy, electricity in Canada nationally is gonna be generated by renewables in less than 10 years. 

Mathieu Cōté: Canada’s split up a lot, remember like, and Quebec is already at 90 plus with their hydro and bc same thing. 

Joel Saxum: And I, and I think that that’s something to be, to be shared as well here is from an o and m standpoint.

The, the varied geographies of Canada and how spread apart it is, there’s specialized knowledge up there to, to, to, you know, till the cow come home. So it’s a great place to go and learn. I would encourage people, hey, if you’re, if you’re in anywhere around Michigan, the Great Lakes Toronto’s a three hour drive.

Go there, do the conference and learn something, 

Mathieu Cōté: and hey, we’re right next to the airport. It’s quick flight. Almost anywhere from North America, right? So Toronto’s easy to get in and 

Allen Hall: out of, and this is gonna be a great event. The Can Operators Summit. It’s February 11th and 12th at the Delta Hotel by [00:22:00] Marriott, Toronto, right at the airport.

So you, you can’t miss it. It’s easy to get in, easy to get out. You’re gonna have a great time. Matt, how do they connect and register for this event? 

Mathieu Cōté: We have a registration link that I’m sure we’ll put somewhere. Um, or come to our website, kenia.ca? 

Allen Hall: Yeah, just Google Can Operator Summit. That’s what I did.

And that takes you right to the registration. Get signed up there. It’s inexpensive in Toronto is a really cool city. February 11th and 12th. At the Delta Hotels by Marriott, right at the airport. The Canary Operator Summer is going to be a lot of fun. Matt, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Really enjoyed having you. Well, thanks for having [00:23:00] me.

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda cover major offshore wind developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, Ørsted’s Revolution Wind won a court victory allowing construction to resume after the Trump administration’s suspension. Meanwhile, the UK awarded contracts for 8.4 gigawatts of new offshore capacity in the largest auction in European history, with RWE securing nearly 7 gigawatts. Plus Canada’s Nova Scotia announces ambitious 40 gigawatt offshore wind plans, and the crew discusses the ongoing Denmark-Greenland tensions with the US administration.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Alan Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, along with Yolanda, Joel and Rosie.

Boy, a lot of action in the US courts. And as you know, for weeks, American offshore wind has been holding its breath and a lot of people’s jobs are at stake right now. The Trump administration suspended, uh, five major projects on December 22nd, and still they’re still citing national security concerns.

Billions of dollars are really in balance here. Construction vessels for most of these. Sites are just doing nothing at the minute, but the courts are stepping in and Sted won a [00:01:00] key victory when the federal judge allowed its revolution wind project off the coast of Rhode Island to resume construction immediately.

So everybody’s excited there and it does sound like Osted is trying to finish that project as fast as they can. And Ecuador and Dominion Energy, which are two of the other bigger projects, are fighting similar battles. Ecuador is supposed to hear in the next couple of days as we’re recording. Uh, but the message is pretty clear from developers.

They have invested too much to walk away, and if they get an opportunity to wrap these projects up quickly. They are going to do it now. Joel, before the show, we were talking about vineyard wind and vineyard. Wind was on hold, and I think it, it may not even be on hold right now, I have to go back and look.

But when they were put on hold, uh, the question was, the turbines that were operating, were they able to continue operating? And the answer initially I thought was no. But it was yes, the, the turbines that were [00:02:00] producing power. We’re allowed to continue to produce powers. What was in the balance were the remaining turbines that were still being installed or, uh, being upgraded.

So there’s, there’s a lot going on right now, but it does seem like, and back to your earlier point, Joel, before we start talking and maybe you can discuss this, we, there is an offshore wind farm called Block Island really closely all these other wind farms, and it’s been there for four or five years at this point.

No one’s said anything about that wind farm. 

Speaker: I think it’s been there, to be honest with you, since like 2016 or 17. It’s been there a long time. Is it that old? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we were talk, when we’ve been talking through and it gets lost in the shuffle and it shouldn’t, because that’s really the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

We keep talking about all these big, you know, utility scale massive things, but that is a utility scale wind farm as well. There’s fi, correct me if I’m wrong, Yolanda, is it five turbos or six? It’s five. Their decent sized turbines are sitting on jackets. They’re just, uh, they’re, they’re only a couple miles offshore.

They’re not way offshore. But throughout all of these issues that we’ve had, um, with [00:03:00] these injunctions and stopping construction and stopping this and reviewing permits and all these things, block Island has just been spinning, producing power, uh, for the locals there off the coast of Rhode Island. So we.

What were our, the question was is, okay, all these other wind farms that are partially constructed, have they been spinning? Are they producing power? And my mind goes to this, um, as a risk reduction effort. I wonder if, uh, the cable, if the cable lay timelines were what they were. Right. So would you now, I guess as a risk reduction effort, and this seems really silly to have to think about this.

If you have your offshore substation, was the, was the main export cable connected to some of these like revolution wind where they have the injunction right now? Was that export cable connected and were the inter array cables regularly connected to turbines and them coming online? Do, do, do, do, do. Like, it wasn’t like a COD, we turned the switch and we had to wait for all 62 turbines.

Right. So to our [00:04:00] knowledge and, and, uh, please reach out to any of us on LinkedIn or an email or whatever to our knowledge. The turbines that are in production have still have been spinning. It’s the construction activities that have been stopped, but now. Hey, revolution wind is 90% complete and they’re back out and running, uh, on construction activities as of today.

Speaker 2: It was in the last 48 hours. So this, this is a good sign because I think as the other wind farms go through the courts, they’re gonna essentially run through this, this same judge I that. Tends to happen because they have done all the research already. So you, you likely get the same outcome for all the other wind farms, although they have to go through the process.

You can’t do like a class action, at least that’s doesn’t appear to be in play at the minute. Uh, they’re all gonna have to go through this little bit of a process. But what the judge is saying essentially is the concern from the Department of War, and then the Department of Interior is. [00:05:00] Make believe. I, I don’t wanna frame it.

It’s not framed that way, the way it’s written. There’s a lot more legalistic terms about it. But it basically, they’re saying they tried to stop it before they didn’t get the result they wanted. The Trump administration didn’t get the result they wanted. So the Trump administration ramped it up by saying it was something that was classified in, in part of the Department of War.

The judge isn’t buying it. So the, the, the early action. I think what we initially talked about this, everybody, I think the early feeling was they’re trying to stop it, but the fact that they’re trying to stop it just because, and just start pulling permits is not gonna stand outta the court. And when they want to come back and do it again, they’re not likely to win.

If they would. Kept their ammunition dry and just from the beginning said it’s something classified as something defense related that Trump administration probably would’ve had a better shot at this. But now it just seems like everything’s just gonna lead down the pathway where all these projects get finished.

Speaker: Yeah, I think that specific judge probably was listening to the [00:06:00] Uptime podcast last week for his research. Um, listen to, to our opinions that we talked about here, saying that this is kind of all bs. It’s not gonna fly. Uh, but what we’re sitting at here is like Revolution Wind was, had the injunction against it.

Uh, empire Wind had an injunction again, but they were awaiting a similar ruling. So hopefully that’s actually supposed to go down today. That’s Wednesday. Uh, this is, so we’re recording this on Wednesday. Um, and then Dominion is, has, is suing as well, and their, uh, hearing is on Friday. In two, two days from now.

And I would expect, I mean, it’s the same, same judge, same piece of papers, like it’s going to be the same result. Some numbers to throw at this thing. Now, just so the listeners know the impact of this, uh, dominion for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, they say that their pause in construction is costing them $5 million a day, and that is.

That’s a pretty round number. It’s a conservative number to be honest with you. For officer operations, how many vessels and how much stuff is out there? That makes sense. Yep. [00:07:00] 5 million. So $5 million a day. And that’s one of the wind farms. Uh, coastal, Virginia Wind Farm is an $11 billion project. With, uh, it’s like 176 turbines.

I think something to that, like it’s, it’s got enough power, it’s gonna have enough production out there to power up, like, uh, like 650,000 homes when it’s done. So there’s five projects suspended right now. I’m continuing with the numbers. Um, well, five, there’s four now. Revolution’s back running, right? So five and there’s four.

Uh, four still stopped. And of those five is 28. Billion dollars in combined capital at risk, right? So you can understand why some of these companies are worried, right? They’re this is, this is not peanuts. Um, so you saw a little bump in like Ted stock in the markets when this, this, uh, revolution wind, uh, injunction was stopped.

Uh, but. You also see that, uh, Moody’s is a credit [00:08:00] rating. They’ve lowered ORs, Ted’s um, rating from stable to negative, given that political risk. 

Speaker 2: Well, if you haven’t been paying attention, wind energy O and m Australia 2026 is happening relatively soon. It’s gonna be February 17th and 18th. It’s gonna be at the Pullman Hotel downtown Melbourne.

And we are all looking forward to it. The, the roster and the agenda is, is nearly assembled at this point. Uh, we have a, a couple of last minute speakers, but uh, I’m looking at the agenda and like, wow, if you work in o and m or even are around wind turbines, this is the place to be in February. From my 

Speaker: seat.

It’s pretty, it’s, it’s, it’s shaping up for pretty fun. My phone has just been inundated with text message and WhatsApp of when are you traveling? What are your dates looking forward to, and I wanna say this right, Rosie. Looking forward to Melvin. Did I get it? Did I do it okay. 

Speaker 3: You know how to say it. 

Speaker: So, so we’re, we’re really looking forward to, we’ve got a bunch of people traveling from around the [00:09:00] world, uh, to come and share their collective knowledge, uh, and learn from the Australians about how they’re doing things, what the, what the risks are, what the problems are, uh, really looking forward to the environment down there, like we had last year was very.

Collaborative, the conversations are flowing. Um, so we’re looking forward to it, uh, in a big way from our seats. Over here, 

Speaker 2: we are announcing a lightning workshop, and that workshop will be answering all your lightning questions in regards to your turbines Now. Typically when we do this, it’s about $10,000 per seat, and this will be free as part of WMA 2026.

We’re gonna talk about some of the lightning physics, what’s actually happening in the field versus what the OEMs are saying and what the IEC specification indicates. And the big one is force majeure. A lot of operators are paying for damages that are well within the IEC specification, and we’ll explain.[00:10:00]

What that is all about and what you can do to save yourself literally millions of dollars. But that is only possible if you go to Woma 2020 six.com and register today because we’re running outta seats. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. But this is a great opportunity to get your lightning questions answered.

And Rosemary promised me that we’re gonna talk about Vestus turbines. Siemens turbines. GE Renova turbines. Nordex turbines. So if you have Nordex turbines, Sulan turbines, bring the turbine. Type, we’ll talk about it. We’ll get your questions answered, and the goal is that everybody at at Wilma 2026 is gonna go home and save themselves millions of dollars in 26 and millions of dollars in 27 and all the years after, because this Lightning workshop is going to take care of those really frustrating lightning questions that just don’t get answered.

We’re gonna do it right there. Sign up today. 

Speaker 3: [00:11:00] You know what, I’m really looking forward to that session and especially ’cause I’ve got a couple of new staff or new-ish staff at, it’s a great way to get them up to speed on lightning. And I think that actually like the majority of people, even if you are struggling with lightning problems every day, I bet that there is a whole bunch that you could learn about the underlying physics of lightning.

And there’s not so many places to find that in the world. I have looked, um, for my staff training, where is the course that I can send them to, to understand all about lightning? I know when I started atm, I had a, an intro session, one-on-one with the, you know, chief Lightning guy there. That’s not so easy to come by, and this is the opportunity where you can get that and better because it’s information about every, every OEM and a bit of a better understanding about how it works so that you can, you know, one of the things that I find working with Lightning is a lot of force MA mature claims.

And then, um, the OEMs, they try and bamboozle you with this like scientific sounding talk. If you understand better, then you’ll be able to do better in those discussions. [00:12:00] So I would highly recommend attending if you can swing the Monday as well. 

Speaker: If you wanna attend now and you’re coming to the events.

Reach out to, you can reach out to me directly because what we want to do now is collect, uh, as much information as possible about the specific turbine types of the, that the people in the room are gonna be responsible for. So we can tailor those messages, um, to help you out directly. So feel free to reach out to me, joel.saxo, SAXU [email protected] and uh, we’ll be squared away and ready to roll on Monday.

I think that’s Monday the 16th. 

Speaker 2: So while American offshore wind fights for survival in the courts, British offshore wind just had its biggest day ever. The United Kingdom awarded contracts for 8.4 gigawatts. That’s right. 8.4 gigawatts of new offshore wind capacity, the largest auction in European history.

Holy smokes guys. The price came in at about 91 pounds per megawatt hour, and that’s 2024 pounds. [00:13:00] Uh, and that’s roughly 40% cheaper than building a new. Gas plant Energy Secretary Ed Milliband called it a monumental step towards the country’s 2030 clean power goals and that it is, uh, critics say that prices are still higher than previous auctions, and one that the government faces challenges connecting all this new capacity to the grid, and they do, uh, transmission is a limiting factor here, but in terms of where the UK is headed.

Putting in gigawatts of offshore wind is going to disconnect them from a lot of need on the gas supply and other energy sources. It’s a massive auction round. This was way above what I remember being, uh. Talked about when we were in Scotland just a couple of weeks ago, Joel. 

Speaker: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say.

You know, when we were, when we were up with the, or E Catapult event, and we talked to a lot of the different organizations of their OWGP and um, you know, the course, the or e Catapult folks and, and, and a [00:14:00] few others, they were really excited about AR seven. They were like, oh, we’re, we’re so excited. It’s gonna come down, it’s gonna be great.

I didn’t expect these kind of numbers to come out of this thing. Right? ’cause we know that, um, they’ve got about, uh, the UK currently has about. 16 and a half or so gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, um, with, you know, they got a bunch under construction, it’s like 11 under construction, but their goal is to have 43 gigawatts by 2030.

So, 

Speaker 2: man. 

Speaker: Yeah. And, and when 2030, put this into Conte Con context now. This is one of our first podcasts of the new year. That’s only four years away. Right. It’s soon. And, and to, to be able to do that. So you’re saying they got 16, they go some round numbers. They got 16 now. Pro producing 11 in the pipe, 11 being constructed.

So get that to 27. That’s another 16 gigawatts of wind. They want, they that are not under construction today that they want to have completed in the next four years. That is a monumental effort now. We know that there’s some grid grid complications and connection [00:15:00] requirements and things that will slow that down, but just thinking about remove the grid idea, just thinking about the amount of effort to get those kind of large capital projects done in that short of timeline.

Kudos to the UK ’cause they’re unlocking a lot of, um, a lot of private investment, a lot of effort to get these things, but they’re literally doing the inverse of what we’re doing in the United States right now. 

Speaker 2: There would be about a total of 550, 615 ish megawatt turbines in the water. That does seem doable though.

The big question is who’s gonna be providing those turbines? That’s a. Massive order. Whoever the salesperson is involved in that transaction is gonna be very happy. Well, the interesting thing here 

Speaker: too is the global context of assets to be able to deliver this. We just got done talking about the troubles at these wind farms in the United States.

As soon as these. Wind farms are finished. There’s not more of them coming to construction phase shortly, right? So all of these assets, all these jack up vessels, these installation vessels, these specialized cable lay vessels, they [00:16:00]can, they can fuel up and freaking head right across, back across the Atlantic and start working on these things.

If the pre all of the engineering and, and the turbine deliveries are ready to roll the vessels, uh, ’cause that you, that, you know, two years ago that was a problem. We were all. Forecasting. Oh, we have this forecasted problem of a shortage of vessels and assets to be able to do installs. And now with the US kind of, basically, once we’re done with the wind farms, we’re working on offshore, now we’re shutting it down.

It frees those back up, right? So the vessels will be there, be ready to roll. You’ll have people coming off of construction projects that know what’s going on, right? That, that know how to, to work these things. So the, the people, the vessels that will be ready to roll it is just, can we get the cables, the mono piles, the turbines and the cells, the blades, all done in time, uh, to make this happen And, and.

I know I’m rambling now, but after leaving that or e Catapult event and talking to some of the people, um, that are supporting those [00:17:00] funds over there, uh, being injected from the, uh, the government, I think that they’ve got 

Speaker 2: the, the money flowing over there to get it done too. The big winner in the auction round was RWE and they.

Almost seven gigawatts. So that was a larger share of the 8.4 gigawatts. RWE obviously has a relationship with Vestus. Is that where this is gonna go? They’re gonna be, uh, installing vestus turbines. And where were those tur turbines? As I was informed by Scottish gentlemen, I won’t name names. Uh, will those turbines be built in the uk?

Speaker 3: It’s a lot. It’s a, it’s one of the biggest challenges with, um, the supply chain for wind energy is that it just is so lumpy. So, you know, you get, um, uh. You get huge eight gigawatts all at once and then you have years of, you know, just not much. Not much, not much going on. I mean, for sure they’re not gonna be just building [00:18:00] eight gigawatts worth of, um, wind turbines in the UK in the next couple of years because they would also have to build the capacity to manufacture that and, and then would wanna be building cocks every couple of years for, you know, the next 10 or 20 years.

So, yeah, of course they’re gonna be manufacturing. At facilities around the world and, and transporting them. But, um, yeah, I just, I don’t know. It’s one of the things that I just. Constantly shake my head about is like, how come, especially when projects are government supported, when plans are government supported, why, why can’t we do a better job of smoothing things out so that you can have, you know, for example, local manufacturing because everyone knows that they’ve got a secure pipeline.

It’s just when the government’s involved, it should be possible. 

Speaker 2: At least the UK has been putting forth some. Pretty big numbers to support a local supply chain. When we were over in Scotland, they announced 300 million pounds, and that was just one of several. That’s gonna happen over the next year. There will be a [00:19:00] near a billion pounds be put into the supply chain, which will make a dramatic difference.

But I think you’re right. Also, it’s, they’re gonna ramp up and then they, it’s gonna ramp down. They have to find a way to feed the global marketplace at some point, be because the technology and the people are there. It’s a question of. How do you sustain it for a 20, 30 year period? That’s a different question.

Speaker 3: I do agree that the UK is doing a better job than probably anybody else. Um, it it’s just that they, the way that they have chosen to organize these auctions and the government support and the planning just means that they have that, that this is the perfect conditions to, you know. Make a smooth rollout and you know, take care of all this.

And so I just a bit frustrated that they’re not doing more. But you are right that they’re doing the best probably 

Speaker 4: once all of these are in service though, aren’t there quite a bit of aftermarket products that are available in the UK 

Speaker: on the service then? I think there’s more. 

Speaker 4: Which, I mean, that’s good. A good part of it, right?

Speaker: If we’re talking Vestas, so, so let’s just round this [00:20:00] up too. If we’re talking vest’s production for blades in Europe, you have two facilities in Denmark that build V 2 36 blades. You have one facility in Italy that builds V 2 36 blades, Taiwan, but they build them for the APAC market. Of course. Um, Poland had a, has one on hold right now, V 2 36 as well.

Well, they just bought that factory from LM up in Poland also. That’s, but I think that’s for onshore term, onshore blades. Oh, yes, sure. And then Scotland has, they have the proposed facility in, in Laith. That there, that’s kind of on hold as well. So if that one’s proposed, I’m sure, hey, if we get a big order, they’ll spin that up quick because they’ll get, I am, I would imagine someone o you know, one of the, one of the funds to spool up a little bit of money, boom, boom, boom.

’cause they’re turning into local jobs. Local supply 

Speaker 2: chain does this then create the condition where a lot of wind turbines, like when we were in Scotland, a lot of those wind turbines are. Gonna reach 20 years old, maybe a little bit older here over the next five years where they will [00:21:00] need to be repowered upgraded, whatever’s gonna happen there.

If you had internal manufacturing. In country that would, you’d think lower the price to go do that. That will be a big effort just like it is in Spain right now. 

Speaker: The trouble there though too, is if you’re using local content in, in the uk, the labor prices are so much 

Speaker 2: higher. I’m gonna go back to Rosie’s point about sort of the way energy is sold worldwide.

UK has high energy prices, mostly because they are buying energy from other countries and it’s expensive to get it in country. So yes, they can have higher labor prices and still be lower cost compared to the alternatives. It, it’s not the same equation in the US versus uk. It’s, it’s totally different economics, but.

If they get enough power generation, which I think the UK will, they’re gonna offload that and they’re already doing it now. So you can send power to France, send power up [00:22:00] north. There’s ways to sell that extra power and help pay for the system you built. That would make a a lot of sense. It’s very similar to what the Saudis have done for.

Dang near 80 years, which is fill tankers full of oil and sell it. This is a little bit different that we’re just sending electrons through the water to adjacent European countries. It does seem like a plan. I hope they’re sending ’em through a cable in the water and not just into the water. Well, here’s the thing that was concerning early on.

They’re gonna turn it into hydrogen and put it on a ship and send it over to France. Like that didn’t make any sense at all. Uh. Cable’s on the way to do it. Right. 

Speaker: And actually, Alan, you and I did have a conversation with someone not too long ago about that triage market and how the project where they put that, that that trans, that HVDC cable next to the tunnel it, and it made and it like paid for itself in a year or something.

Was that like, that they didn’t wanna really tell us like, yeah, it paid for itself in a year. Like it was a, the ROI was like on a, like a $500 million [00:23:00]project or something. That’s crazy. Um, but yeah, that’s the same. That’s, that is, I would say part of the big push in the uk there is, uh, then they can triage that power and send it, send it back across.

Um, like I think Nord Link is the, the cable between Peterhead and Norway, right? So you have, you have a triage market going across to the Scandinavian countries. You have the triage market going to mainland eu. Um, and in when they have big time wind, they’re gonna be able to do it. So when you have an RWE.

Looking at seven gigawatts of, uh, possibility that they just, uh, just procured. Game on. I love it. I think it’s gonna be cool. I’m, I’m happy to see it blow 

Speaker 2: up. Canada is getting serious about offshore wind and international developers are paying attention. Q Energy, France and its South Korean partner. Hawa Ocean have submitted applications to develop wind projects off Nova Scotia’s Coast.

The province has big ambitions. Premier, Tim Houston wants to license enough. Offshore [00:24:00] wind to produce 40 gigawatts of power far more than Nova Scotia would ever need. Uh, the extra electricity could supply more than a quarter of Canada’s total demand. If all goes according to plan, the first turbines could be spinning by 2035.

Now, Joel. Yeah, some of this power will go to Canada, but there’s a huge market in the United States also for this power and the capacity factor up in Nova Scotia offshore is really good. Yeah. It’s uh, it 

Speaker: is simply, it’s stellar, right? Uh, that whole No, Nova Scotia, new Brunswick, Newfoundland, that whole e even Maritimes of Canada.

The wind, the wind never stops blowing, right? Like I, I go up there every once in a while ’cause my wife is from up there and, uh, it’s miserable sometimes even in the middle of summer. Um, so the, the wind resource is fantastic. The, it, it is a boom or will be a boom for the Canadian market, right? There’re always [00:25:00] that maritime community, they’re always looking for, for, uh, new jobs.

New jobs, new jobs. And this is gonna bring them to them. Um, one thing I wanna flag here is when I know this, when this announcement came out. And I reached out to Tim Houston’s office to try to get him on the podcast, and I haven’t gotten a response yet. Nova Scotia. So if someone that’s listening can get ahold of Tim Houston, we’d love to talk to him about the plans for Nova Scotia.

Um, but, but we see that just like we see over overseas, the triage market of we’re making power, we can sell it. You know, we balance out the prices, we can sell it to other places. From our seats here we’ve been talking about. The electricity demand on the east coast of the United States for, for years and how it is just climbing, climbing, climbing, especially AI data centers.

Virginia is a hub of this, right? They need power and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, foot for offshore wind, plus also canceling pipelines and like there’s no extra generation going on there except for some solar plants where you can squeeze ’em in down in the Carolinas and whatnot. [00:26:00] There is a massive play here for the Canadians to be able to HVD see some power down to us.

Speaker 2: The offshore conditions off the coast of Nova Scotia are pretty rough, and the capacity factor being so high makes me think of some of the Brazilian wind farms where the capacity factor is over 50%. It’s amazing down there, but one of the outcomes of that has been early turbine problems. And I’m wondering if the Nova Scotia market is going to demand a different kind of turbine that is specifically built for those conditions.

It’s cold, really cold. It’s really windy. There’s a lot of moisture in the air, right? So the salt is gonna be bad. Uh, and then the sea life too, right? There’s a lot of, uh, sea life off the coast of the Nova Scotia, which everybody’s gonna be concerned about. Obviously, as this gets rolling. How do we think about this?

And who’s gonna be the manufacturer of turbines for Canada? Is it gonna be Nordics? Well, 

Speaker: let’s start from the ground up there. So from the or ground up, it’s, how about sea [00:27:00] floor up? Let’s start from there. There is a lot of really, really, if you’ve ever worked in the offshore world, the o offshore, maritime Canadian universities that focus on the, on offshore construction, they produce some of the best engineers for those markets, right?

So if you go down to Houston, Texas where there’s offshore oil and gas companies and engineering companies everywhere, you run into Canadians from the Maritimes all over the place ’cause they’re really good at what they do. Um, they are developing or they have developed offshore oil and gas platforms.

Off of the coast of Newfoundland and up, up in that area. And there’s some crazy stuff you have to compete with, right? So you have icebergs up there. There’s no icebergs in the North Atlantic that like, you know, horn seats, internet cruising through horn C3 with icebergs. So they’ve, they’ve engineered and created foundations and things that can deal with that, those situations up there.

But you also have to remember that you’re in the Canadian Shield, which is, um, the Canadian Shield is a geotechnical formation, right? So it’s very rocky. Um, and it’s not [00:28:00] like, uh, the other places where we’re putting fixed bottom wind in where you just pound the piles into the sand. That’s not how it’s going to go, uh, up in Canada there.

So there’s some different engineering that’s going to have to take place for the foundations, but like you said, Alan Turbine specific. It blows up there. Right. And we have seen onshore, even in the United States, when you get to areas that have high capacity burning out main bearings, burning out generators prematurely because the capacity factor is so high and those turbines are just churning.

Um, I, I don’t know if any of the offshore wind turbine manufacturers are adjusting any designs specifically for any markets. I, I just don’t know that. Um, but they may run into some. Some tough stuff up there, right? You might run into some, some overspeeding main bearings and some maintenance issues, specifically in the wintertime ’cause it is nasty up there.

Speaker 2: Well, if you have 40 gigawatts of capacity, you have several thousand turbines, you wanna make sure really [00:29:00] sure that the blade design is right, that the gearbox is right if you have a gearbox, and that everything is essentially over-designed, heated. You can have deicing systems on it, I would assume that would be something you would be thinking about.

You do the same thing for the monopoles. The whole assembly’s gotta be, have a, just a different thought process than a turbine. You would stick off the coast of Germany. Still rough conditions at times, but not like Nova Scotia. 

Speaker: One, one other thing there to think about too that we haven’t dealt with, um.

In such extreme levels is the, the off the coast of No. Nova Scotia is the Bay of Fundee. If you know anything about the Bay of Fundee, it is the highest tide swings in the world. So the tide swings at certain times of the year, can be upwards of 10 meters in a 12 hour period in this area of, of the ocean.

And that comes with it. Different time, different types of, um, one of the difficult things for tide swings is it creates subsid currents. [00:30:00] Subsid currents are, are really, really, really bad, nasty. Against rocks and for any kind of cable lay activities and longevity of cable lay scour protection around turbines and stuff like that.

So that’s another thing that subsea that we really haven’t spoke about. 

Speaker 3: You know, I knew when you say Bay Bay of funding, I’m like, I know that I have heard that place before and it’s when I was researching for. Tidal power videos for Tidal Stream. It’s like the best place to, to generate electricity from.

Yeah, from Tidal Stream. So I guess if you are gonna be whacking wind turbines in there anyway, maybe you can share some infrastructure and Yeah. Eca a little bit, a little bit more from your, your project. 

Speaker 2: that wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas. We’d love to hear from you. Just 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 a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show For Rosie, Yolanda and Joel, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime [00:36:00] Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen covers court victories allowing Empire Wind and Revolution Wind construction to resume, while Vineyard Wind joins the legal fight. In the UK, EnBW walks away from Mona and Morgan with a $1.4B write-off, even as KKR and RWE announce a $15B partnership for Norfolk Vanguard. Plus Ørsted’s leaked “Project Dragon” reveals the offshore giant is considering Chinese turbines, and Fortescue breaks ground on Australia’s Nullagine Wind Project using Nabrawind’s self-erecting tower technology.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Last week I told you about Equinor’s ultimatum. Resume construction by January sixteenth… or cancel Empire Wind forever. Well… the courts have spoken.

Last Thursday, Judge Carl Nichols issued his ruling. Empire Wind can resume construction. The harm from stopping, he said, outweighs the government’s concerns. One day earlier, Ørsted won the same relief for Revolution Wind. And now Vineyard Wind has joined the fight in Massachusetts. Three projects. Three courtrooms. Two victories and one victory yet to come.

Meanwhile in Britain… a different kind of drama. German utility EnBW announced Thursday it is walking away from two major UK projects. Mona and Morgan. Three gigawatts of potential capacity. The cost of leaving? One point four billion dollars in write-offs. Eight hundred forty million pounds already paid… gone. Rising costs. Lower electricity prices. Higher interest rates. Their partner, Jera Nex BP, says they still see good pathways forward. But EnBW has had enough.

Yet in the very same week… Investment giant KKR and German utility RWE announced a fifteen billion dollar partnership. Norfolk Vanguard East and West. Three gigawatts. One hundred eighty-four turbines. Power for three million British homes. Big winners and losers. In the same market. In the same week.

Danish media outlet Berlingske obtained a confidential report from Ørsted’s procurement department. The world’s largest offshore wind developer… is exploring whether to buy turbines from China. They call it Project Dragon. The plan covers twenty-twenty-six through twenty-twenty-eight. CEO Rasmus Errboe told reporters they continuously evaluate all technologies and suppliers. Quality. Technical capabilities. Commercial conditions. He did not deny the report. For years, European developers have resisted Chinese turbines. Fear of losing their industry to China… just like they lost solar manufacturing a decade ago. But Ørsted is under pressure.

In Australia, Fortescue has broken ground on its first wind project in the Pilbara. The Nullagine Wind Project. One hundred thirty-three megawatts. Seventeen turbines. But here is what makes it special. Nabrawind’s self-erecting tower technology. Hub height of one hundred eighty-eight meters. A new global benchmark for onshore wind. No giant cranes required. Fortescue plans two to three gigawatts of renewable energy across the Pilbara by twenty-thirty. Wind. Solar. Batteries. To power their mining trucks. Their drills. Their processing plants.

Last week we talked about Equinor’s deadline. About Ørsted losing one and a half million euros every single day. About billions in limbo. This week… the courts stepped in. Empire Wind resumes. Revolution Wind continues. Vineyard Wind fights on. All while the North Sea quietly crossed a milestone. One hundred one operational wind farms. Thirty gigawatts of clean power. More than any body of water on Earth. Some companies are walking away. Others are doubling down with fifteen billion dollar bets. The wind industry is evolving very quickly.

And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 19th of January 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen and Joel are joined by Pete Andrews, Managing Director at EchoBolt. They discuss the company’s new BoltWave inspection device, the shift from routine retightening to condition-based monitoring, and how ultrasonic technology helps operators manage blade stud and tower bolt integrity throughout the turbine lifecycle.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It’s a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it’s, yeah, really nice to be here. 

Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah.

Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who’s Pete? Give me Pete’s phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we’re here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00]

You’re a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it’s a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today’s world. 

Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we’re a uk, um, SME, there’s a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe.

Yeah. But increasingly we’ve done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then.

Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they’re static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it’s a real big efficiency boost for wind operators. 

Joel Saxum: Well, you’re doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we’re gonna do all of this. It’s like, let’s work on the ones that actually need to be worked on.

Let’s do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we’re looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems.

So I know that you guys said you’re, you’re focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It’s you’re transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces.

Like there’s so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well. 

Pete Andrews: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, as as you said, that there’s really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on.

The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts, 

Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely. 

Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people.

If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor.

So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don’t have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you’d have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there’s something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving.

By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology 

Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is.

And I’m watching this go on. I’m like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we’re tighten 10% this year, and they’ll come back and see how it’s going. That’s a little insane, right, because you’re just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we’re wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago.

You don’t need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I’ll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it’s shrunk, that probably means it’s not tensioned properly.

That’s a huge advantage because you can’t physically see it. And I know I’ve seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that’s where equitable comes in because you’re actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big.

Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that’s been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we’re based on a non-destructive testing technique. It’s an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it’s crack detection, people have time, they can be, it’s a very precision measurement.

People have to be trained in the wind industry. We’re trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It’s a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn’t delivered on the, on the speed that’s needed to be efficient in wind.

And that’s where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we’ve, that we’ve developed over the last. 18 months, let’s say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It’s through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it’s a bit like using the camera app on your phone.

You know, you’re just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened.

They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it’s sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They’re bolted joints. 

Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right?

Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn’t, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you’re in. Use are short of technicians. But we’re seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well.

Right. You don’t need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. ’cause there’s a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that’s a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course.

Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you’re getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that’s looking at it and you don’t have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things.

They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that’s the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you’re making it happen. 

Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it’s a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware.

Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn’t really something 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.