The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Nicholas Gaudern from PowerCurve joins to discuss SilentEdge serrations with up to 5 dB noise reduction, Dragon Scale VGs for AEP recovery, and their approach to products that actually perform in the field. Contact PowerCurve on LinkedIn for more information.

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

Allen Hall: Nicholas, welcome back to the show. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Always a pleasure. 

Allen Hall: Well, there’s a lot of new products coming outta PowerCurve. And PowerCurve is the aerodynamic leader in add-ons and making your turbines perform at higher efficiency with less loss. Uh, so basically taking that standard OEM blade and making it work the way it was intended to work.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. We 

Allen Hall: like to 

Nicholas Gaudern: think so. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: And there’s a, there’s a lot of new technology that you’ve been working on in the lab that you haven’t been able to explore to the, introduce to the world, so to speak. Yeah. And we’ve seen some of it from the inside of, you know, you’re working behind the scenes or working really hard to get this done, but now that technology has been released to the world, and we’re gonna introduce it today, some new trailing edge.

[00:01:00] Components. Yeah. That really, really reduce the noise. But they, they look a little bit odd. Yes. There’s a lot of ADON dams going on with 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: With these. So what, what do you call these new trailing edge parts? 

Nicholas Gaudern: So, so what you have in your hand here? This is the Silence edge, uh, serration. So this is our new trailing Edge Serration products.

Now, most people, when they think of training restorations, they are thinking of triangles. 

Allen Hall: Exactly. 

Nicholas Gaudern: These Dino tails. Dino Tails, that’s the Siemens, Siemens name for them. Pretty, pretty standard. You see ’em on a lot of turbines now. Sure. And they work, you know, they do do a job. They do a job. They reduce noise.

But like with lots of things in, in aerodynamics, there’s lots of different ways that you can solve a problem and some are better than others. So we’ve worked for a long, long time in the wind tunnel, uh, in the CFD simulations, and we’ve come up with this pretty unique shape. We think, 

Allen Hall: well, the, the, the shape is unique and if you, if you look at it, there’s actually different heights to the, the triangle, so to speak.

To mix the air from the pressure and the [00:02:00] suction side to reduce the, the level of noise coming off the blade 

Nicholas Gaudern: e Exactly. So we have, uh, we have an asymmetry to the part. We have these different tooth lengths. We have, uh, a lot of changes in thickness going on across the part. So it may be a little bit difficult to see on the camera, but these are quite sculpted 3D components.

They’re not, they’re not flat stock white triangles. No, no. There’s a lot of thickness detail going on here. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the edges. We’ve paid a lot of attention to these gaps between the teeth as well. So all of this is about trying to figure out what is the best way to reduce noise.

And something that not a lot of people will, will admit, but it’s true, is that as an industry we don’t really understand the fundamentals of how serrations work. 

Allen Hall: It’s a complicated 

Nicholas Gaudern: problem. It’s a really complicated thing. Problem, yeah. Yes. So trying to simulate it in CFD is an absolute nightmare. The, the mesh sizes required, the physics models required are really, really difficult.

So what we found is that you’re probably better off spending [00:03:00] most of your time and money in the wind tunnel. Yes. So, so we go to DTU, they have this wonderful, uh, air acoustic wind tunnel, the pool of core tunnel. It’s one the best tunnels in the industry for doing this kind of work. It 

Allen Hall: is 

Nicholas Gaudern: because you can measure acoustics and aerodynamics at the same time.

So this allows us to do a lot of very cost effective iteration for this kind of design work. So we know what’s important. You know, we’ve, we’ve studied all the different parameters of serrations lengths, aspect ratios, angles, thicknesses, all this kind of stuff. And it’s about bringing them together into a, into a coherent product.

So this is, this is a result of a lot of design of experiments, a lot of iteration, and combining wind tunnel and CFD to kind of get the best of both of those tools. So, 

Allen Hall: so what’s the. Noise reduction compared to those standard triangular trailing aerations. Yeah. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So there’s lots of different ways of, of thinking about noise reduction, but I think probably the most useful is the O-A-S-P-L.

So this is the overall sound pressure level. Right. Is kind of what [00:04:00]typically you’ll be measuring in an IEC test. 

Allen Hall: Right. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s measured in decibels, but a way to decibels because it’s important that we’re waiting to what the human ear can actually hear. Right. Perceive. Exactly. So that’s the numbers we report.

For the field test we’ve recently completed with Silent Edge, we’re seeing up to five decibels of O-A-S-P-L noise reduction. 

Allen Hall: Okay. So what’s that mean in terms of what I hear on the ground? 

Nicholas Gaudern: So that is an absolutely huge reduction. It’s multiple times of reduction because you know, decibels on a log scale, 

Allen Hall: right?

Nicholas Gaudern: So five DB is is enormous. It’s 

Allen Hall: a lot. Yeah. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really interesting is that if you have a turbine that’s running in a noise mode, just one decibel reduction. Of power, sound, sound, power level might be three or 4% P loss. I mean, that, that’s, that’s huge. Think about that loss. So if you need to reduce noise by five decibels to get within a regulation, imagine how much a EP you have to throw away by basically turning down the [00:05:00] turbine to do that.

Allen Hall: That’s right. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So that’s really what the, the business case for these kind of products is. It means you can escape noise modes because as soon as you use a noise mode. You are throwing away energy. 

Allen Hall: You’re throwing well you’re throwing away profits. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. 

Allen Hall: So you’re just losing money to reduce the noise.

Now you can operate at peak. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. 

Allen Hall: Power output without the creating the noise where you have that risk. Right. So, and particularly in a lot of countries now, there are noise regulations. Yes. And they are very well monitored. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. 

Allen Hall: We’re seeing it more and more where, uh, government agencies are coming out and checking.

Yes. ’cause they have a complaint and so you get a complaint. Oh, that’s fine. Or someone can complain. Yeah. You know, you need to be making your numbers. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And, and the industry needs to be good neighbors, you know? It 

Allen Hall: certainly does. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, we have to make sure that people are, you know, approving and comfortable with having wind turbines in their backyard.

Sure. And noise is a big part of that. 

Allen Hall: It is. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah. Ap sure. That’s really important. Being a good [00:06:00] neighbor also important. 

Allen Hall: Right. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Meeting the regulations. Obviously you have to meet the regulations. So this product, um, has been through a really long development cycle, and we’re now putting the final touches to the, to the tooling.

So this is available now. 

Allen Hall: Oh, wow. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Okay. Great. Um, and we’re hoping that in the next uh, few months we’ll be getting even more turbines equipped out in the field with, with the technology. 

Allen Hall: So, oh, sure. There’s a, you think about the number of turbines that are in service, hundreds of thousands total worldwide.

A lot of them have no noise reduction at all. 

Nicholas Gaudern: No. No. 

Allen Hall: And they have a lot of complaints from the neighbors. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. 

Allen Hall: Trying to expand wind into new areas, uh, is hard because the, the experience of the previous Yes. Neighbor 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. 

Allen Hall: Grows into future neighbors. So fixing the turbines you have out in sight today helps you get the next site.

I know we don’t always think about that, but that’s exactly how it works. Yeah, of course. Uh, we need to be conscientious of the people of the turbines we have in service right now. So that we can continue to grow wind [00:07:00] globally and more regulations on noise are gonna come unless we start taking care of the problem ourselves.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And another really important thing with Serrations is that you have to design them so that they don’t impact the loads on the rest of the turbine. 

Allen Hall: Right. And people forget about that. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. 

Allen Hall: Can you just, can’t just throw up any device up there. And think, well, my blade’s gonna be happy with it. It may not be happy with that device.

Nicholas Gaudern: You have to really carefully understand what the existing blade aerodynamic signature is. 

Allen Hall: Sure. 

Nicholas Gaudern: How is that blade performing? What is the lift distribution across the span? Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Right. Yeah. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So what we do, and we, we’ve talked about it before we go and laser scan blades. We build CAD models, we build CFD models so we can actually understand how much lift a blade can take and what’s the benefit or the penalty of doing so.

So these serrations are designed by default to be load neutral. They won’t increase lift. They won’t reduce lift. That’s what 

Allen Hall: it should 

Nicholas Gaudern: be. That’s where you should start, 

Allen Hall: right? 

Nicholas Gaudern: And maybe there’s some scope to do something else [00:08:00] on certain turbines, but you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t guess. You, you need to calculate, you need to simulate, you need to think very carefully about that.

So that’s what we do with these, uh, with these serrations, we go through this very careful aerodynamic design process to make sure that they reduce noise and that’s it. They don’t increase loads, they don’t reduce AP by killing lift. And that’s, that’s an important aspect. 

Allen Hall: Well, that’s the goal. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes, 

Allen Hall: exactly.

I don’t necessarily want to increase power. I don’t wanna put more load in my blade, but people do that. I’ve seen that happen and man, they regret it. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, regret it. There’s, there’s some pretty wild claims out there as well about observations can and can’t do. And uh, like with lots of things, it’s important to just do the simulations, speak to some experts and, um.

Yeah, maybe take the, the less exciting path, you know, sometimes, 

Allen Hall: well, no. Yeah. Well, less exciting path where I don’t have a broken blade. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s a lot less exciting. It’s, it’s definitely more profitable. Now, the Dragon Scale Vortex generator has been [00:09:00] around about a year or so. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep, yep. 

Allen Hall: And the thing about these devices, and they’re so unique, interesting to think about because you typically think of a vortex generator as this being this little bit of a fence.

Where you are tripping the air and making it fall back down onto the blade. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. 

Allen Hall: A really, it works. 

Nicholas Gaudern: It works. 

Allen Hall: But it’s it’s 

Nicholas Gaudern: been around a long time. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It, it does, it does do this thing. And they, they were, they came outta the aviation business. We use ’em on airplanes to keep air flow over the control surfaces so we can continue to fly even in close to stall conditions.

All that makes sense. And airplanes are not a wind turbine. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. 

Allen Hall: So there’s different things happening there. So although they work great on on aircraft, they’re not necessarily the most efficient thing for a wind turbine where you’re trying to generate power and revenue from the rotation of the blades.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. 

Allen Hall: So this is a completely different way of thinking about getting the airflow back onto the blade where it produces [00:10:00] revenue. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really nice is to actually see this together with silent edge, because historically, and maybe not even historically. Serrations VGs, they’re triangles. They work, they do a job.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it in a different way. In a better way. 

Allen Hall: Right. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s the same principles from applying with Silence Edge and Dragon Scale. We want to work the flow in the most efficient way possible. 

Allen Hall: Right. You’re trying to get to an 

outcome. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. 

Allen Hall: Efficiently. 

Nicholas Gaudern: We want to, we want to target very specific things on the blade, and that’s where you can see there’s a few different styles of Dragon Scale that we have on the table here.

We have some that are two fins. We have some that are three fins. We have different sizes, and this is because they’re tailored to different parts of the blade. So these three Fin Dragon scales, their focus is ultimate lift. We are creating a really powerful vortex through this combination of three air foils, if you imagine, um, the inside of a Turbo fan.

You have these cascading air force. [00:11:00] You look at the leading edge slacks on an aircraft. You look at the front wing of a Formula one car. It’s that kind of concept. 

Allen Hall: It’s like that, 

Nicholas Gaudern: and it’s these air force that are cooperating with each other. 

Allen Hall: Right. 

Nicholas Gaudern: To end up with a more beneficial result. ‘

Allen Hall: cause an air force by itself does a function, but when you combine airflows together in the right way 

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.

Allen Hall: You can really control airflow efficiently, less losses. More of what you want out the backside. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s the backside you’re trying to work on, on a VG or, or dragon scales. You’re trying to create this flow which gets the airflow back onto the blade to create power. We, 

Nicholas Gaudern: we want as much attached flow as possible and down exactly down in the roots of a blade.

We have to have really thick aerofoils, you know, blades about round. They’re basically cylinders. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And that, that’s essential, right? We have to have the blade take a lot of load into the root aerodynamically. They’re horrible. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So this is where these, uh, these powerful Dragon Scale VGs come into play because what they do is they’re [00:12:00] reenergizing the flow over the aerofoils, and they’re ensuring that that flow remains attached for much, much longer than if those bgs weren’t there.

So down in the root, you’ll get significant boosts to the lift that those sections can generate. And what’s more lift? It goes to more torque, it goes to more power, goes to more a EP. So these dragon scale VGs in the root are there to boost, lift, and boost EP out on the tip of the blade. Things are actually a little bit different because it’s way different.

You shouldn’t really have stall there to begin with if your blade’s been designed well. 

Allen Hall: But if you have leading edge erosion exactly. Or some other things that are happening, you can have real aerodynamic problems. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah, as soon as you have erosion, uh, maybe your stall margin is not as big as you thought it was.

You’re starting to get some significant losses of lift Yes out towards the tip of the blade. So that’s where these, uh, TwoFin uh, variants come in. So it’s still a dragon scale vg, it’s still the same concept of these cascading error foils. Yeah, but these are [00:13:00] designed for basically ultimate lift to drag ratio.

Mm-hmm. So we don’t really want more maximum lift outta the tip. We kind of have enough, but what we do want is to keep stable attached flow and we want to do it for the less, uh, least drag penalty possible. So basically we want to get rid of as much parasitic drag as we can. These two fin dragon scales, we are seeing 25 plus percent improvements in lift to drag ratio.

Compared to a standard triangle vg. I mean that’s huge. 

Allen Hall: That that is really 

Nicholas Gaudern: huge. 

Allen Hall: That’s huge, right? Because people have seen these, uh, triangular VGs in a lot of places. And one thing I’m noticing more recently is that those VGs, because they’re so draggy, they tend to flutter and they tend to break in just off.

Nicholas Gaudern: Interesting. 

Allen Hall: So you’re having this failure mode because this thing is just blocking the air, getting the air to trip. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: It’s not efficient. It does have its downsides ’cause it is. D definitely drag. Just face it, it’s it, is it a draggy [00:14:00] 1940s technology? That’s what it is. Where with the dragon scales, now we’re doing things a lot more efficiently and thinking about how do I get the airflow that the blade designer originally wanted?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes, 

Allen Hall: because the blade designer, they’re really intelligent people. They’re, they’re sitting designing blades. But the reality is what you design is on an ideal airflow, and what you have out in service are totally different things. As, as it turns out, the shape of the airflow is not what you think it is because it comes out of the tool and there’s a lot of touching with by humans that are grinding on the leading edges and doing the things that have to be done to manufacture it.

So you don’t really have an ideal blade when it comes out of the 

Nicholas Gaudern: No. You 

Allen Hall: never do factory. No, you never do. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And it’s not polished either. 

Allen Hall: It’s not polished. Right. So 

Nicholas Gaudern: when you go to the wind tunnel, you have a perfect profile. Yes. And it’s polished. And it works basically. It 

Allen Hall: works great. It 

Nicholas Gaudern: works great. 

Allen Hall: The theoretical and the actual match.

Yeah. In reality they do. I think a lot of operators are not [00:15:00] connected with that reality of, Hey, that Blade should be producing this amount of revenue for me, and it’s not. And you hear that discussion all the time, particularly in the us. It should be producing this amount of power. I’m doing all the calculations.

We are not producing that power. Why? The blade length’s saying, but the power’s not coming out of it. Well take a look at your leading edge, take a look at your yard full of shape and realize you’re going to have to do something like dragon scales to get that E energy. Exactly. Revenue back. 

Nicholas Gaudern: You need to do a full aerodynamic health check.

Basically you do. And see what are all the possibilities to improve my blade performance. And some of it is down to the fundamental shape of the blade, 

Allen Hall: right? 

Nicholas Gaudern: But some of it is down to blade condition. Yes. Blade Blade manufacturing quality. 

Allen Hall: Yes. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, what kind of paint did they put on it? What day of the week was it made?

And all these things can be compensated for by VGs and you’ll get more revenue out at the end. 

Allen Hall: You say? ’cause what happens? The, the, the scenario which is hard to visualize unless [00:16:00] you’re an A and emesis, is that there comes on the suction side, and it should be, in a ideal sense, rolling all the way to the back edge of the blade and coming off.

What happens is though, is that. When you get leading edge erosion is that the air flow actually separates. Yeah. 

Nicholas Gaudern: It 

Allen Hall: doesn’t 

Nicholas Gaudern: always make it, yeah. 

Allen Hall: Doesn’t make it to the back edge. Yeah. And so you can see that, especially if, if there’s dirt in the air, you can look on dirty blades, you can see where that separation line is, and a lot of operators have sky specs, images or Zeit view images, and then go back and look at the blades.

It takes two minutes to go. I have 

Nicholas Gaudern: particularly down in the root, you’ll see it. 

Allen Hall: Oh, in the root all the time. You, you 

Nicholas Gaudern: see it really clearly that that separation line 

Allen Hall: all the time, you really see that separation line. I’m seeing it more and more up towards the tip. Interesting. That’s where the lightning protection, yeah.

Systems sit. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: I see a lot of airflow that is not front to back on the suc. Well, you 

Nicholas Gaudern: have a lot of three dimensional flow out there. 

Allen Hall: You do towards the tip you do. And you realize how much power you’re losing there. And I think operators are just throwing away money. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. 

Allen Hall: So you could [00:17:00] put dragon skills on it very efficiently, very quickly.

Get that revenue back into your system and it’s gonna stay. So even if leading edge erosion happens, the dragon scales are gonna compensate for it. It’s gonna get the airflow back where it should be. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. And the nice thing about this is, you know, we are building on well over a decade of upgrading turbines with aerodynamic components.

Oh yes. So this technology stands on the foundations of all of that work. In terms of the materials, the work instructions. Um, the fatigue calculate, you know, everything 

Allen Hall: Yes. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Is built on thousands of installations that we’ve done. Yes. So, although it’s a new technology aerodynamically, it’s not really new in lots of sensors.

Allen Hall: Well, I look at it this way. If you turn on Formula One today and look at what the new generation of cars running around as you look at the, that front. Yes. Uh. Fin. Yeah. What do I call it? Air foil shape in the front. It’s super complicated. 

Nicholas Gaudern: The sculpting of the [00:18:00] surfaces is really impressive, 

Allen Hall: right? There’s a lot of thought going into those surfaces versus you turn on a Formula One race or go on YouTube and look at a Formula One race from the 1980s.

Yeah, it’s basically a piece. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: To provide down downforce. That’s it. The aerodynamics wasn’t really there, so we come a long way and a lot of that technology that happens in Formula One that happens in aviation eventually rolls down into. Yeah. Wind. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly 

Allen Hall: right. So we, we, although we are not designing Formula One style blaze today, we’re taking that same knowledge and information and we’re applying that back in.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. We’re 

Allen Hall: secondarily we, 

Nicholas Gaudern: which is a right thing to do. We’re taking, taking inspiration from all these different aerodynamic fields and, you know, picking the best 

Allen Hall: Yes. 

Nicholas Gaudern: From what’s available and just allowing ourselves to be a little bit more creative. 

Allen Hall: Yes. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And thinking outside the box a bit. There’s so many ways to do this as we’ve been saying.

And the import. And the 

Allen Hall: data’s there. 

Nicholas Gaudern: The data’s there. Exactly. 

Allen Hall: The data’s there because you’ve been at the DTU Yep. Uh, wind Tunnel, which also has the acoustic piece to it. Yeah. So you have measured data from a reliable source. [00:19:00] You have field data, and you know, you put all these together, you’re gonna get that improvement back.

You’re gonna get your invest back, you’ll be more profitable. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So Dragon Scale, focus on the AP. And that a EP will, uh, vary depending on the turbine. 

Allen Hall: Sure. 

Nicholas Gaudern: But we’ll assess the turbine and, and decide the best configuration, and then say silent edge. That’s the focus on the noise reduction. And we’re seeing up to five decibels OASP on the field.

It’s, which 

Allen Hall: is crazy. 

Nicholas Gaudern: It’s even more That’s really good that we were hoping for, you know? 

Allen Hall: Yeah. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So we, we know this is gonna be a, a great product. 

Allen Hall: It looks very interesting. 

Nicholas Gaudern: It does. 

Allen Hall: It does it. It looks complicated and you think air airflow is complicated. It’s a compressible fluid. It’s not easy to, to just assume it’s gonna do what you think it is.

Yeah. You need to get into the tunnel. You need to replicate, you need to do all that work, which is expensive in time consuming. That’s why you go to someone like Power. Curver knows what they’re doing in the wind tunnel, knows how to measure those things and know when they’re getting nonsense. Out of their computer.

I 

Nicholas Gaudern: mean, you, you’ll pay thousands and thousands of [00:20:00] Euros dollars a day to run a wind tunnel. 

Allen Hall: You will. 

Nicholas Gaudern: You’ve gotta Absolutely. You’ve gotta turn up with your plan in hand, that’s for sure. 

Allen Hall: Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there’s a lot of assumptions because it, aerodynamics is hard. You know, you watch these blade spin around, you don’t realize how complicated these devices are.

They are complicated. Those air force shapes we are running today have been through a lot of history, a lot of history to get to where we are now. Now we’re just gonna take him into the next generation. This, we’re bringing ’em into the two thousands. In sort of a 

Nicholas Gaudern: sense, what I’m hoping to see is, you know, with the OEMs, some OEMs do it already, but it’s important to think about these components when you’re designing new blades as well, you should because then that will allow you a much bigger design space to work in.

And 

Allen Hall: a lot less customer complaints. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. 

Allen Hall: Where’s my power? 

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, these products, particularly the VGs, are really important tools for PowerCurve robustness. And some OEMs have known this for a long, long time. 

Allen Hall: Yep. 

Nicholas Gaudern: And you’ll see VGs on most of their blades. Mm-hmm. Others not so much. And that’s a design choice.

It’s a design philosophy. Um, and I think it may not [00:21:00] be the right one, you know? 

Allen Hall: Well, I think the operators are asking to get the most out of their turbines. Yeah. Why shouldn’t they? They should be asking for that. 

Nicholas Gaudern: I think for a, for a long time, and it’s not just in wind devices, like these have been considered, you know, band-aids fixes when you’ve, you’ve messed something up.

But I feel that’s a really negative way to think about products like this. They’re doing something that the kind of raw air fall shape on its own cannot achieve. Sure. Oh no. Right. You know, you might be able to mold some interesting stuff. Uh, as part of the blade, it’s very difficult to, to recreate the kind of aerodynamic effects that these products, uh, have.

Allen Hall: Right. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So they shouldn’t be considered bandaids or fixes. No. They should be considered opportunities. And ways that you can maximize performance and unlock areas of the design space that previously weren’t accessible to. 

Allen Hall: Sure. Every possible component that deals with fluid air is moving this way. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. 

Allen Hall: Jet engines, you look at jet engine, how much more is going into those jet engines today in terms of this kind of [00:22:00] technology?

Yeah. All the race colors, doesn’t matter what class, where it is, is all looking at this anything to do with aircraft, it’s all over this. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, 

Allen Hall: exactly. Or, or doing this today. It’s just wind that’s behind 

Nicholas Gaudern: wind. Wind is 

Allen Hall: significantly 

Nicholas Gaudern: behind. No, 

Allen Hall: it’s not magic. It’s proven technology. It’s 

Nicholas Gaudern: just good engineering.

Allen Hall: Well, it’s good engineering and if you call PowerCurve, they’re gonna help you under to to, to understand what you have today and what you could have tomorrow. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. 

Allen Hall: And how this, these devices will improve your revenue stream. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, we will look at your blades, we’ll give you some good advice and maybe that advice will be that.

You know, a certain product isn’t right for your blade. Right. That’s fine. 

Allen Hall: That’s an answer. 

Nicholas Gaudern: That’s an answer. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, it is. 

Nicholas Gaudern: But let’s, let’s look at the blade. Let’s see what’s possible, and let’s just have a, have a proper conversation about it over some real data, some real 

Allen Hall: facts. Right. I think that’s the key, and a lot of operators are afraid to talk about aerodynamics is it’s, it’s a difficult area to, to start the conversation on, right?

Yeah. But I think at the end of the day, when I work with PowerCurve, and I’ve worked with you guys for a [00:23:00] number of years, the answers I get back are intelligent and they’re not. Super complicated. This is what you’re gonna see. This is the improvement. And then we can, this is how we’re going to show you can get that improvement.

It’s not magic, 

Nicholas Gaudern: no 

Allen Hall: power crews backing up with data, which I think is the key, right? Because you’re the, you do hear a lot of noise in this industry about magical products that’ll do all these things. Particularly aerodynamic ones. Yes. PowerCurves, the ones really bringing the data. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And we have, we have the track record now.

We have like we do 17, 1800 turbines. Should be over 2000 very soon with our products on. Yeah. So we have a lot, we have a lot of data to draw on to know that we’re doing a good thing. 

Allen Hall: Well, and speaking of that, because one of the questions that always pops up is, well, we have put these new VGs or trailing edges on, are they gonna stay on?

How durable are they? 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And that’s a, that’s a really important question to ask was it doesn’t matter how fancy aerodynamic product is, if it falls off the blade. 

Allen Hall: Right. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, we’ve spent a lot of, uh, time and effort looking at how we should be fixing these products on. [00:24:00] So we use a, uh, a wet adhesive.

We specify a plexus adhesive to put our products in place. Really good adhesive. It’s a great adhesive and it means that they are not going anywhere. Basically. It’s a very, uh, forgiving adhesive. Uh, and it’s a very high spec. So we, we don’t use, uh, sided tape. We might have some of our products for some initial tack to help, you know, get the clear, the clear outta the line exactly.

But in terms of the bond itself, that is with a, a proper structural adhesive. So one thing that we are really proud of is that we haven’t got any, uh, reported failures of our panels over all the installations we’ve made. And that’s a combination of materials, but also geometry, work, instructions, adhesive.

It’s, it’s the full package. So it’s something that, um, yes, say we’re very proud of. And I think it’s, it’s a big part of what we do at PowerCurve, making sure the product is the right shape. Sure. But also making sure it stays on the blade. 

Allen Hall: Well, you see it [00:25:00] from OEMs who have all kinds of aerodynamic treatments on there, and they’ll double set a tape to the blade, and then those parts are on the ground.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And double-sided tape. You can get some really nice spec tape. Sure. 

Allen Hall: You, 

Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. But it’s not 

a 

Allen Hall: 20 year device. 

Nicholas Gaudern: No. And the installation tolerance required on surface prep is really, really high. So it’s possible. It’s just harder. I think it’s riskier, 

Allen Hall: it’s risky. 

Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, I think for us, the adhesive is, is the way to go.

And, and it’s been proven out by the, by the track record. 

Allen Hall: And some of the things we’ve seen over in Australia is when trailing ulcerations have come off, it’s been a safety concern. So now you got 

Nicholas Gaudern: absolutely 

Allen Hall: government officials involved in safety because parts are coming up. Turbine. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: You 

Nicholas Gaudern: can’t have these components flying, flying through the air.

That’s, that’s not safe. 

Allen Hall: That’s because PowerCurve has done the homework. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. 

Allen Hall: And has the track record. That’s why you wanna choose PowerCurve. So how do people get a hold of PowerCurve? How do they get a hold of you, Nicholas, to start the process? 

Nicholas Gaudern: So, um, you’re welcome to reach out to us in lots of different ways.

We’re on LinkedIn. Uh, we have our website, [00:26:00] PowerCurve, dk, um, so yeah, LinkedIn websites. There’ll probably some links on this podcast as well to get in touch. But, um, yeah, whatever way works best for you. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s gonna be a busy season. So if you’re interested in doing anything with PowerCurve this year, you need to get on the website, get ahold of Nicholas.

And get started, uh, because now’s the time to maximize your revenue. 

Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks a lot and great to talk to you, 

Allen Hall: Nicholas. Thanks so much for being back on the podcast.

Vineyard Wind sues GE Renewables to block a walkout over $300M in withheld payments and defective blades. Plus Ørsted posts a $262M quarterly loss and shakes up its board.

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!

Uptime316

Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com And now your hosts.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall, and I’m here with Matthew Stead and Rosemary Barnes who are in Australia. Before we get too far into this episode, I would like to mention that the UK US relationship has been very tense recently, as you have seen in the, in the news articles and on television.

But there was one good news piece that just happened, which is the band Oasis just got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So that is trying to mend those relationships, bring the UK and US back together. In at least a musical sense. So I know Rosemary was watching that closely as the votes were counted.

But, [00:01:00] uh, everybody in the UK is super thrilled about it as they should be. And all us Oasis fans can’t wait for the induction ceremony. In fact, we’re planning to go to Cleveland. They’ll go watch it if we can. We shall see now onto more important information this week. Vineyard, wind and GE are not getting along.

And if you have been paying attention for the last two years, you would’ve noticed that there’s been a couple of tense moments. Well, uh, that wind project is a little bit up in the air because vineyard wind has filed suit against GE renewables to stop the turbine maker from walking away after GE sent a termination notice.

Over a $300 million ish, uh, disagreement in unpaid bills. At the center of this dispute are defective blades, of course, that, uh, broke off in 2024 and caused a number of problems, uh, for GE and vineyard Wind is particularly a delay in the [00:02:00] project and ge having to fix pull blades off of turbines that were already installed and I think they ended up sending those back to France.

Reading the lawsuit, it seems like GE did not repair those blades. They replaced those blades because, uh, they may not have been able to repair them or maybe is the amount of time it’s gonna take to repair them. You can repair almost anything made out of. Composite. Uh, but this is a big problem because, uh, if GE does walk away and they’re talking about walking away from this project at the end of April, vineyard, wind believes that the turbines are not ready to be operated, and they don’t have a way to operate those turbines.

They don’t have the knowledge or the people because the people belong to GE that need to make some of these turbines operate. Even there’s even some question about if all the turbines are operating at the required [00:03:00]handover requirements. This is unique because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wind turbine manufacturer leave before a wind site is finished.

It must have happened before, but. It does put both sides in quite a pinch. Right. 

Rosemary Barnes: Can I just jump, jump back to, to something that you said, um, that you can repair almost anything when it comes to composites? I would say that that doesn’t necessarily apply if your design was insufficient in the first place.

And I mean the design for manufacturing in this case, I think that the, like computer model design worked fine, but obviously it was not as easy to manufacture or as possible to manufacture. With the correct quality as what they expected. It can’t have been so simple to just, just repair. That’s, um, that’s what I want to say.

Like it, it’s obvious to me that if it was possible to repair, that would’ve been much easier than what they’ve ended up with, which I think is pretty foreseeable. Or most [00:04:00] engineers would probably have foreseen that if you, you know, put blades out there that, um, don’t meet your. Standard, um, quality control acceptance criteria that, you know, the consequence of that would be that it would be more likely to fail.

So yeah, I think you can repair nearly anything on a standard blade that is possible to make correctly. But if you’ve got big quality problems, then it’s not, it’s, it’s not easy and it’s possibly not possible to, you know, just get, um, just get onto that in repair. 

Matthew Stead: I, I think you’re both right. Because it all comes down to economics.

So I think Alan’s statement, you know, things can be repaired. It just comes back to economics, doesn’t it? 

Rosemary Barnes: U usually, yes. And like for your average, like if you’ve got a wind farm and you’ve got a blade with a big, a big repair, or you know, like a big defect right on the main laminate, that’s gonna require, you know, like a huge repair, taking the blade down and keeping it down for, you know, like three months while you rebuild like 20 meters [00:05:00] of laminate.

Yes, that would be technically possible, but you wouldn’t because it would be so expensive. So us usually, like in 99% of cases, that would be it. That it’s not actually impossible to repair. It’s just very hard. But, you know, in these really huge blades and, you know, um, bearing in mind that I don’t, I don’t know the specific quality problems that they face, but, you know, just from my knowledge of composites, you can say what the challenging areas would be, but you know, a really big blade is gonna have a really thick laminate and, um, composites don’t like to have really thick laminates.

When they cure, it’s usually an, an exothermic reaction, puts off heat, you know, like the temperature is changing and um, it works fine for thin laminates, but when it’s really thick you can get hot spots and cold spots and maybe it’s hard to get the resin to go all the way through evenly. But you know, imagine if you’ve got a really thick laminate and there’s a chunk of it that just didn’t get any resin in it.

How are you gonna repair that? Like, I wouldn’t say impossible. I’m sure if the fate of the human race depended on it, then you would, you would make it work. But it’s [00:06:00] certainly very close to impossible. 

Matthew Stead: Economically, it does not make sense. 

Rosemary Barnes: You would probably have to make a few inventions. Along the way to be able to make it work as well.

I think, 

Allen Hall: I think I should read part of, and I don’t like reading these lawsuits, but this is informative in a sense that it provides some relative background as to what Vineyard Wind is thinking in some of the contract details that are involved here. So in June 4th, 2021, this is directly from the lawsuit, uh, vineyard Wind entered into A TSA with GE renewables in which.

GE Renewables agreed to design, manufacture supply, install commission, and test the wind turbine generators for the vineyard wind project at a contract price of more than $1.3 billion. There you go. On the same day as an integral part of the commercial agreement, the parties entered into an SMA, uh, by which GE renewables agreed to maintain and service that wind turbine [00:07:00]generators for the first five years.

Of operations of the project and guarantee that all wind turbine generators will operate at a 97% of production availability. Uh, this guarantee is central, is a central component of the commercial viability of the Vineyard Wind Project. So I would say so, right. Uh, at present, all of the wind turbine generators on the project have been installed.

However, the wind turbine generators are not yet fully operational and are. Able to reduce power at only levels well below those intended under the contracts fundamental to the project’s commitment to Massachusetts to achieve full commercial operation. The project requires repair, commissioning, and maintenance of GE renewables, 62 proprietary wind turbine generators, and their component parts work that only GE renewables knows how to perform.

So it sounds like Vineyard Wind has a five-year contract that GE ISS gonna operate these [00:08:00] turbines, and if they leave in a couple of weeks, vineyard wind really doesn’t have a backup plan. They may have. Were planning on a plan five years down the road where they could operate ’em, but to operate those turbines immediately when they haven’t, at least as.

Indicated here may not be fully commissioned to providing the right amount of availability. That’s a huge problem for Vineyard. Huge. 

Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting to me that they’ve decided to withhold some money that I think everyone agrees that they owe that money to ge. But then there’s a dispute because Vineyard when says that GE owes them money for some other stuff That sounds like GE disputes.

Um, it’s like if you have a problem. With your landlord, they always tell you, don’t, don’t withhold rent, because then they can, you know, that’s, that’s their out of the contract. Right? So it seems weird, like it’s a relatively small amount compared to what vineyard wind is risking. So. It seems to me like, are they, is this a mistake from them?

Are they giving ge an out from this contract that’s gonna be [00:09:00] really hard for them to meet? It might be that GE knows what it would cost to entirely fix the wind farm and have it producing the way that it should. But, you know, let’s say in a worst case scenario, that means remaking every single blade in the um, in the wind farm.

At the, at the French factory, you know, like that could be your, your worst case scenario. GE knows that that’s gonna cost more than what they’re ever gonna pay over the five years of, um, you know, the, uh, of missing the availability guarantee. So then it is worth, for them, the cost effective thing to do is to just walk away and they’re kind of, the amount that they’ll have to pay is limited.

If I’m thinking fairness, it’s so unfair that vineyard wind would be stuck with this wind farm that they can’t really get to do anything. But if I think about how I see these disputes work out in the smaller versions of them that I’ve seen, it seems like vineyard wind actually probably is the one more likely to come out with a bad outcome from the way that they’re [00:10:00] choosing to play this right.

Uh, because they, they risk not being able to operate at all. And they have potentially, like, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t, I don’t know about, you know, how likely it is that the 300 million, that their withholding will be enough for GE to walk away with without having to pay anything for, um, you know, not operating, uh, correctly over the next five years.

But, um, you know, it just seems like it’s not so much money compared to the billions that are at stake. To risk that they will be left unable to operate the wind farm at all. You know, it’s just, uh, I don’t know. It seems risky. 

Allen Hall: Let’s start with the kickoff of what happened and what vineyard wind is alleging happened from these, their perspective on it.

It does provide some insight into all the things we talked about on the podcast for the last two years. We, we saw bits and pieces of it. According to vineyard wind, uh, GE Renewable [00:11:00] claims that it is owed quote amounts due unquote for milestone payments is, is contrary in in language to the TSA, so the turbine supply agreement put simply vineyard wind owes nothing to GE renewables because the TSA turbine supply agreement allows vineyard wind to withhold amounts.

The project engineer determines that GE Renewable owes vineyard wind from milestone payments otherwise due under the contract. So what they’re saying is GE owes is a bunch of money. Yes, we do owe GE renewables money, but it’s in Vineyard Wind’s favor. So why would they send GE money? Um, those set off amounts are substantial because GE renewables caused catastrophic injury to vineyard wind by installing 68 defective blades on 24.

Wind turbine generators resulting in two years of delay and over a billion dollars of damages. In July, 2024, one of the GE renewable offshore blades collapsed and fell into the waters off Nantucket resuscitating a massive environmental cleanup and requiring a six month [00:12:00] construction hiatus during which GE Renewable performed a root cause analysis, concluding that 68 of the 72 GE renewable.

Blades installed at the project, nearly all manufactured by GE Renewable in Gaspay Canada, and they say nearly all, not all, nearly all were also defected because they were inadequately bonded together, the original blades were so poorly made that they were beyond repair. Indeed, the federal government required GE renewable to remove all the blades and to replace all gas bay blades with others manufactured at a different facility in Sherbrook, France.

So that’s really the kickoff to all of this disagreement was the quality issues from Gas Bay. Uh, vineyard Wind goes on to say that GE Renewables and, and their CEO, Scott Straza, basically admitted to, uh, a, a serious, um. Overlook or quality issue? Quality escape, something of the [00:13:00] sort, uh, in some of the statements, which I, I remember him talking about 

Rosemary Barnes: allegedly, in your opinion.

Allen Hall: Well, and Scott Streek did say it. In fact, here’s, here’s what Scott Streek did say. Streek, uh, acknowledged that the blade failure and said, quote, we have identified a material deviation or a manufacturing deviation. In one of our factories that through the inspection or quality assurance process we should have identified.

Because of that, we’re going to use our existing data and reinspect all of the blades that we have made for offshore wind and for context in this factory in Gus Bay, Canada, where the material deviation existed. That’s a quote. What happens now, 

Rosemary Barnes: obviously I’ve never worked on anything that’s, this is the biggest example of, um, a, you know, a blade quality problem, a serial issue probably that’s ever happened in the wind industry.

I’ve never worked on something this big, but I have worked on probably half a dozen small, small versions that are quite similar. Um. To this, but just on a, you know, a much, much smaller scale. And I will say that it never [00:14:00] feels fair what the owner of the wind farm, like, what the outcome is, never feels fair to the owner of the wind farm.

Like when you’ve got a serial defect in, um, in play it like, and everyone suffers. It costs, it’s gonna cost the, um, you know, the manufacturer a lot of money. But I think that proportionally it is. Affects the owners more in nearly every case. It’s just there are some contractual things that you don’t end up with outcomes that feel, feel fair to anybody that, um, you know, would take a casual look at it.

So I don’t think that an outcome that feels fair is probably likely for, for vineyard wind. Um, and I guess it all just comes down to whether or not GE agree that they owe that 800 million or whatever the figure is. Um, or if a court finds that they owe it. Because surely the contract doesn’t say that Vineyard wins engineer at any time can just, or project manager can at any time decide [00:15:00] that, um, GE owes the money and so they don’t have to pay.

That obviously wouldn’t be a very, um, nice contract for GE to sign. So there’s gotta be some more nuance to it other than. That our project manager says, you owe us money so we’re not paying. And then, you know, you have to continue. Like, I, it’s probably impossible for us to, without, um, you know, having access to all of, all of the documents and the legal degree to understand it.

Probably, probably hard for us to Yeah. Come up with a, a reasonable conclusion. 

Allen Hall: It does make you think, usually the progression is dispute. Whatever contractually is obligated in the beginning happens. And so if there’s someone who decides what pot of money goes where, that, that’s usually the first step.

Second step is usually arbitration in the us. I’d be surprised if they haven’t gone through at least an attempt at arbitration. And then once arbitration breaks down, then you go into the courts, which is clearly where they’re at now you’re, you’re at the highest level that you can be in terms of legal proceedings to try to sort this matter out.

And I’m sure both sides. Do not want to be in front of a [00:16:00] courtroom if they can avoid it. So there’s a much more to come about this. I, I think the other operators, uh, GEs this is, is this GEs only? Yeah. This is GEs only wind farm offshore in the us So this is it. But I would imagine that the other, uh, operators in offshore wind in the US or.

Being very careful word through contracts and how this is proceeding. 

Rosemary Barnes: That’s something else I think about this case is that it’s going to be like the GE are the ones who have more at stake in terms of reputational harm. I would’ve thought then. Um, so. Yeah, that’s obviously a consideration that they’ve, they’ve gotta have, it isn’t, regardless of where the facts are, it’s not a good look.

Right. Um, to be seen, to be walking away from a wind farm. And it probably would make other people considering big expensive GE wind farms to be like, oh, you know, are we actually gonna get across the line with this? Or is there a risk that they just, you know, throw a tantrum towards the end and threaten to walk away and we have to renegotiate [00:17:00] everything.

So, um, I guess that there’s a, yeah, there’s always just the perception. Is as important in a lot of ways to what the actual facts are. 

Matthew Stead: The thing I find is, um, I mean this is largely a legal thing, isn’t it? You know, we, we’ve agreed that it’s, with the lawyers, it’s a largely a legal thing. The, the sort of topic that I’m interested in is, um, like the example of you buy a car, you know, you buy a Toyota, um, you expect to be able to maintain it.

You expect to be able to run it and get a serviced by a Toyota, you don’t expect in the first year to take your Toyota to Ford and get them to fix it in the first year. The bigger issue is the turbine supplier agreement does not actually allow the turbine to be operated without the OEM, so no one knows.

No one knows how to run it. So for me, it’s a massive industry challenge, access of data, access of how to run a turbine. If the OEM is no longer there, so I think hopefully [00:18:00] this can have rama bigger ramifications for the industry that operators and owners can actually run the assets they own. 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, there are companies that will come in and pull out your control system of your, you know, your turbine.

If it, you know, if you, um, if you don’t wanna work with them anymore or if the company went bankrupt, then there are companies that will rip it out and put a new one in. It’s not, not saying that that’s like an easy, cost effective thing to do and probably not gonna get the same, um, performance as, as you originally did.

But that’s what happens if you are, um, you know, your turbine manufacturer goes bankrupt and they just don’t exist to support anymore. Sometimes people have to resort to literally pulling out the whole control system and starting again. Not easy. When it’s something as big and new as this one obviously 

Matthew Stead: isn’t the better answer that when you buy something, you actually buy the information to actually run it.

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t fully agree [00:19:00] though, because. It’s like, um, o often what you say, oh, you know, like this would be good. Like the one common thing is people say, oh, you know, like it’s planned obsolescence. People, engineers plan design things to fail so that you’ll need to replace them. And I think that that does, that does happen again in like consumer, consumer products.

Like, um, yeah, like your, your battery isn’t really designed to last for 10 years in your, your phone the same way that it is in an electric car. Um, more than 10 years in the case of an electric car. Um. But it’s not. It’s not what happens in industrial scale equipment. You are mostly worried about getting the price point right.

And if you want something to last longer, if you want something that anybody can come in and fix it easily, it costs more to engineer like that and usually like a a lot more. So it’s not just people like evil engineers or evil. Um. Evil management at these, at these companies. 

Allen Hall: I already get to evil engineers.

Rosemary Barnes: No, people think it is. People think it’s evil. Engineers like purposely designing bad products to [00:20:00] um, make money, which I actually do think that they do with consumer products. Some of the time. Um, but when it comes to like industrial equipment, I, I don’t think that that’s the main, the main thing that planned obsolescence is not, is not a major factor here.

It’s about trying to get the price point competitive to make sales. And if you want to get better engineering, you, you will, you will pay for it. 

Matthew Stead: I got a call with someone today that, which is on this topic. So, you know, we, we are a sensor company and, um, we pro we provide results, okay? So if we actually provided the raw data that we measure, it actually allows people, other people to reverse engineer our products.

So we don’t generally provide the raw data, so we provide the end outcome. Because it means that people can’t copy what we do. It means we can actually charge a lower price. So actually there’s a lot of logic to, you know, having, you know, [00:21:00] all these ways of engineering a product to, you know, give a better outcome to the end customer.

Allen Hall: I know Rosie doesn’t like Elon Musk, but this one of the things that Elon Musk did with Tesla at least, I don’t know about the other companies that he runs, but with Tesla, they went off and. Made patents, right? So they applied for a bunch of patents and received them and then just made them open use. And the reason they did that was so somebody couldn’t jump the patent line, create a patent about some car related electric thing, and prohibit Tesla from doing.

And so Tesla has always had the need to create patents that cost them, I’m sure, a, a pretty penny, just so they can avoid. Patent conflicts and lawsuits going forward. And it’s sort of the same thing, right? That the evil engineer bit, that’s the evil engineer bit I, that I don’t like is that when you get these crazy patent things happening out there that are just there to collect money and not do any of the work, 

Rosemary Barnes: and some of the patents are.

Absolutely crazy. Like when you do a patent search and it’s like you’re [00:22:00] reading the language and like it sounds like they’ve just patented the concept of a wheel, you know? And then you’ve gotta try and figure out like what’s actually going on. Yeah. In 

Matthew Stead: our world, someone has a patent around the Doppler shift.

Allen Hall: How can you have a patent on Doppler shift? That’s crazy. 

Matthew Stead: It’s fundamental physical. You know, there’s a shift in frequency of a sound, um, 

Allen Hall: based on speed 

Matthew Stead: and yes, sound comes from a blade and there’s a doppler shift. 

Allen Hall: That’s real. I, I, I guess, uh, see, that’s, that’s, that’s the craziness of that. See, you should have thought about.

The idiots that were gonna do that and then write a patent about Doppler shift. 

Rosemary Barnes: It’s really annoying because it’s like, you know that it’s not gonna be, I mean, a lot of them you are like 99% sure it’s not gonna be possible for them to defend that if it gets challenged. But it’s like, to what extent do we trust that, you know?

Um, so you still usually end up steering around it anyway, but it, it really gets in the way of elegant engineering solutions. All these. Bizaro patents that are out there like clogging up [00:23:00] the design landscape. 

Allen Hall: That happened recently. Right? Rosa? You had and I were talking about a particular patent. I thought had it existed and it did at one point exist and I.

Rosie said, I don’t, I don’t see it anymore. So I did some search on it. Yeah, it got pulled off. Uh, the list of valid patents. It was a lightning related thing. 

Rosemary Barnes: And you were complaining that it was so obvious that they should never have been able to patent it, but yeah, and somebody obviously said, said something at some.

I don’t think patents are not the best way to protect an idea anyway. Right? Like nobody, if you, if you’ve got a new technology idea and you’re relying on a patent to protect other people from copying it, it’s not the best idea. I do work with a lot of small inventors who are like, oh, I’ve got a patent application, and they think it means something, that it doesn’t.

They think, oh, you know, patent was approved. That means it works. It means it’s a good idea. It doesn’t mean any of those things for like small, outside of big companies. I, I think it’s super rare that you would get more. You would get a positive return [00:24:00] on. On filing and maintaining a patent in all the countries that, um, are relevant 

Allen Hall: as wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult.

That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out.

Visit PES wind.com today. Sted posted a net loss of 1.7 billion Danish groner, roughly $262 million for the third quarter, as the cost of battling us anti win policies continues to mount the CEO. Rasmus abo, uh, says the company is about. One year into a turnaround plan, uh, that’s set to [00:25:00] run through beginning of 2028, and that the medicine is starting to work.

Uh, one major strategic change. Ted will enter partnerships on new projects far earlier, and so it will never again, uh, be forced into damaging late stage divestments The company maintained its full year EBITDA and, uh, guidance of, of, of. 24 to 27 billion Danish kroner. That’s a good bit of money. And the sale of a 50% stake in the horn, C3 to Apollo Global Management for a billion dollars is already under.

Well, at least in progress, but there’s a lot more behind the scenes here. Sted had an basically an investor meeting and a shareholder meeting, and, uh, they have three new board members. They let go of, if I remember correctly, three board members that were [00:26:00] employees that they just, uh, had reductions in forces that happen to affect board members, which is very odd.

Very, very odd in my. Humble opinion, having watched number of boards for a long time, usually don’t remove board members in that fashion, but there does seem to be a, a, a more emphasis on the board to help, uh, the CEO of stead get through some of these tumultuous times and maybe a little bit of concern about the, the, the way the board was constructed to get or sit back into profitability sooner rather than later.

This is a big deal up in Denmark. Of course, stead is the power company for Denmark. This has implications worldwide, though, uh, what stead does everybody else follows. And the one thing that, uh, that was sort of in dispute before the shareholder meeting was EOR at one point, was. At least contemplating a board seat.

And then right [00:27:00] before the meeting they backed off and said, no, it’s fine. We don’t want a board seat. Maybe they had some sense of what the changes were gonna be made to the board, so they felt better about it. But orsa is not out of the rough seas at the moment. There’s a couple more years of, of growing pains and learning some lessons that they wish they didn’t have to learn.

I guess that’s the way I would look at it. What implications does this have on the greater offshore wind community? Is stead taking basically a step back and, and trying to focus. Herding offshore wind, or is it just other, another companies are gonna step into that, that space that Sted may have previously occupied?

Matthew Stead: I think what you’re talking about, um, Alan, is, is all logical. I mean, you know, you can’t have everything. So, um, as in you can’t, you know, getting late to a project and expect it to go well, um, spreading risk is a good thing, you know, so the whole, you know, [00:28:00] doing it fast. Doing it cheap and doing it well. Um, you, you, you can’t have all of those things at once.

So actually what they’re talking about, I think is entirely logical. Um, so yeah, I think if they can lead the way that way and, and you know, I’ve come from, um, some other industries like construction and they, they spread the risk across multiple. Organizations that know what they’re doing. So the idea of joint ventures where you get the best of both worlds makes complete sense to me.

Allen Hall: Do they start making different decisions on projects based upon their financial stake at the moment? A And more importantly, when they start looking for offshore wind projects, are they likely to hook up with Vestas? Because I, I think that’s where this is all going. 

Matthew Stead: Pick a horse. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re gonna pick a horse.

I, I mean, that’s the best, best way to think about it. They’re gonna pick a horse and gonna stick with them. Instead of having, uh, a lot of options and playing one against the other, I could see alignment happening, uh, versus being the [00:29:00] one offshore, of course. And or instead being a big player. There is, is that the combo that’s gonna push the industry forward?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think it’s more similar to what Chinese manufacturers are doing, a lot more vertical integration. You can, um, yeah, save, save a lot of money by doing that. It is. Uh, you know, not always ideal from other points of view. And it might be nice to have a, you know, a thriving technology ecosystem of, you know, different manufacturers competing with each other and, you know, making better products.

So, um, yeah, I don’t know, uh, have sit on the fence on this one for what’s good. I do feel really bad for osted though, like in terms of the, the. Shocks that they’ve had over the last couple of years. I, I don’t think most people would’ve foreseen that it would be so risky to try and expand into the US like everybody.

A few years ago, everybody thought that that was the next big profitable frontier in offshore wind. And [00:30:00] I don’t think that many people would’ve foreseen things going the way that they did. 

Allen Hall: Is it the result of large industrial projects take time and that in that timeframe, five, 10 years, that the world changes so much?

You can’t. Accurately predict what the outcome will be and or it just got caught up in it. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that’s actually one of the themes you guys have read, um, how big things get Done Right by Ben. Um, that’s one of the things that he mentions that the quicker that you can do the execution phase of your project, like spend plenty of time planning it, but when you’re actually committed, work super fast because the longer that you’re working, the more your chance of a, a black swan.

Um, a Black Swan event be, you know, a government that turns out to, you know, want to, you know, tear up contracts and you know, do all these other unprecedented stuff. You know, if you’ve got projects that take 10 or more years to build, then there’s just like a lot more risk of something like that happening.

And I think that, um, you know, like in some ways that’s just one of the inherent weaknesses of [00:31:00] wind energy in general, but offshore wind especially is that it does actually take a long time to get through all of the things that you need to do to. Um, to complete a project. And so it’s just, yeah, a lot more chance for, you know, the government will change two or three times probably in, um, you know, during a project.

How many wars can start, how many, you know, pandemics. Can there be you? Like, the longer that you’re going, you might think none of those things could be predicted and that can’t, but you can predict that those sorts of big things happen. And the longer that you, um, are exposed and the more of them that you’re probably gonna face.

And I think that, yeah, like something like a solar farm is much quicker to roll out. Um, battery projects are much quicker to roll out. So it’s just like that, those are benefits of those technologies compared to wind. You just have to kind of accept that that’s one of the weaknesses of this, this industry that we’re in.

Allen Hall: Is it a benefit to have solar because it can deploy very quickly, or, or is it just [00:32:00] smarter to have. More wind turbines of smaller megawatt outputs because you can manufacture ’em at scale quicker, and so the economies of scale don’t really matter so much. This is an argument we’ve been making for months now, that when you start selecting a single turbine, which doesn’t have any history, and it’s a big one, and it takes a long time to produce, you are really setting up yourself to fall into that window where something can go wrong.

Versus just stamping out two or three megawatt turbines and going like crazy. It just seems so much less risky. 

Rosemary Barnes: I think that I definitely agree with you for onshore and then for offshore. Probably also, like I don’t think it’s necessarily go for a smaller turbine. It’s just don’t go for the brand new one.

Like that’s why I don’t understand how many people are like so obsessed with this, you know, small, small amount of improvement that they get from the very biggest. Turbine, but I don’t think that they realize the amount of technical risk. And I think that it gets, it’s getting [00:33:00] more and more like the, um, technology increment is getting more and more the bigger that we go.

It’s not that like, oh, we’re learning how to do this, this, well, it’s, it’s the opposite that, you know, like every, um, increment up in size as an exponentially more like larger number of problems, technical problems that have to be solved. And, um, I think that, yeah, that’s. That’s something people don’t factor in.

Allen Hall: Is it the gold rush problem where the miners were trying to hit that pocket of gold and spending all their time trying to find this gold, find this gold. In the meantime, a lot of them obviously broke, and the people that made money in the gold rush or the stores that sold the pickaxes, if you, you making a pickaxes, you have a customer page, you can just sell those things in.

Levi’s, be the other one, right? So they’re selling genes of pickaxes to the miners. Guess who won in that battle, right? Levi’s. 

Rosemary Barnes: But what’s the analogy with win two of the pickax manufacturers, 

Allen Hall: the people that make the two megawatt machines? In my opinion, that’s gonna be who the pickaxes are because you don’t have to think about it.

If [00:34:00] you can talk to operators of the United States today and you say, what turbine would you like to buy over again? And they will almost all tell you, GE one point fives. Almost all of them. And you go, yeah. Oh, okay. I understand it because it’s a machine. It’s pretty simple. But it does work. And it is, it is a true warhorse turbine.

And some of the vested ones are the same. Simpson Siemens turbines are very similar, right? Uh, but in today’s world, when we’re talking about 15, 20 megawatt turbines, I just think, man, you gotta be careful doing that just because of the time it takes to develop it and produce it, and. Work at all the kinks?

Uh, Rosemary, I think you’re right about that. 

Rosemary Barnes: I think the issue is that, um, when you’re deciding whether to develop a project or not, it really depends a lot on what the spreadsheet tells you your return is going to be. And, um, you know, a bigger turbine with, uh, you know, like larger output over its lifetime, longer lifetime.

Those are all gonna give you really good. Spreadsheet numbers, but what’s not in the spreadsheet [00:35:00] is, oh, you know, you’ve actually increased your risk of having to wait two years while they replace every single blade in this, um, in this wind farm. Oh, by the way, yeah, you’re gonna be dealing with, um, you know, twice as many repairs and your, um, downtime is not gonna be 2%, it’s gonna be 3.5% or, or something.

You know, those, those sorts of things, I don’t think, uh, adequately captured in the, the spreadsheets whe say when you, whether you should or shouldn’t develop a new project. 

Matthew Stead: So, so the evil engineering should be making decisions, not the evil lawyers. 

Allen Hall: The financial people always make the decisions, right?

The insurance companies make the decisions. 

Rosemary Barnes: Don’t think there’s a lot of engineering into, um, input in the, the very first stages. But I also think that if you put in the reality, like most engineers, I think are a little bit pessimistic because our job is to see what problems exist at, you know, and then solve them ideally.

Um, but at least part of it, like our brains are wired to look for problems, right? That’s, um, that’s a necessary part of the job, in my opinion. But if you were, you know, like pessimistic in your assumptions in the [00:36:00] spreadsheet, you would probably the majority of the time say, don’t make this project. The return is not very good.

Allen Hall: Well, that would be a smart move, right? Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So I don’t actually think you probably should have too many engineers in in involved. 

Matthew Stead: Yeah. But what is the CEO incentivized by is the, yeah, so it, it comes back to, you know, what, what, what drives the project And it’s not just engineering. 

Allen Hall: 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. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode and if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps. For Rosie and Matthew, I am Allen Hall and we’ll see you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:37:00] Podcast.

Allen covers Ørsted’s first turbine install at Sunrise Wind, Cadeler’s fleet expansion, the Pentagon’s 7.5 GW onshore backlog, and the UK’s £154B onshore wind opportunity.

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

Happy Monday, everyone.

While headlines this week captured courtrooms and bankruptcy filings and permitting backlogs, out on the open water and deep inside factory order books, the wind turbines kept getting built.

Let us start off the coast of New York. Friday morning, April seventeenth, Ørsted installed the first wind turbine generator at Sunrise Wind — a 924-megawatt project, 84 turbines when complete. This is the same Sunrise Wind that was shut down just four months ago. The same Sunrise Wind that won a preliminary injunction in February. The same Sunrise Wind the Trump Administration chose not to appeal. And now the first turbine stands above the water. Cadeler’s wind turbine installation vessel Wind Scylla is doing the work. She just finished the same job at Revolution Wind. Ørsted says first power flows to New York later this year. Commercial operation the second half of 2027. Six hundred thousand homes on the grid.

Now follow us across the Atlantic. In the Polish Baltic Sea, another Cadeler vessel just began her maiden campaign. Her name: Wind Mover. Delivered last November from Hanwha Ocean in Korea, ahead of schedule. This new M-class installation vessel now sits at the 1.2-gigawatt Baltic Power offshore wind farm, installing Vestas V236 turbines — 15 megawatts apiece. Wind Mover’s sister vessel, Wind Osprey, is moving to the United Kingdom to start work at East Anglia Three. Cadeler has doubled its fleet in twelve months. By mid-2027, twelve vessels — the largest offshore wind installation fleet in the industry.

While turbines go up on the eastern side of the Atlantic, on the western side a different kind of wait is setting in. Bloomberg reported last week that the Pentagon is sitting on a backlog of at least 30 proposed American wind farms — 7.5 gigawatts of onshore capacity. Paperwork stalled. The issue is Section 10-32, the Defense Department’s review to ensure turbines do not interfere with military radar or aviation. Jason Grumet, head of the American Clean Power Association, calls it direct obstruction. His group sent a letter to the Pentagon earlier this month. The deadline for a response was April eighth. That deadline came and went. Seven point five gigawatts, waiting.

Now turn to the United Kingdom, where the direction could not be more different. A new report commissioned by Renewable UK and written by consultants at Everoze says expanding Britain’s onshore wind supply chain between now and 2050 could add £56 billion in economic value. That is on top of another £98 billion already expected — a total of £154 billion. UK onshore capacity is set to grow from 16 gigawatts today to more than 50 gigawatts by 2050. Seventy percent of lifecycle spend already stays in the UK. The report points to blades, towers, nacelles, drivetrains, and electrical gear for substations as the highest-value opportunities.

So let us step back. One turbine above the water off Long Island. A new vessel installing 15-megawatt machines in the Polish Baltic. Seven point five gigawatts of American onshore wind held up in Washington. And £56 billion staked on British onshore.

The policy fights are loud. The legal fights are louder. But this past week, the turbines went up.

That is the state of the wind industry for the 20th of April, 2026.

Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Nicole Johnson Murphy, CEO of ECO TLP, and Gordon Jackson join to discuss concrete floating wind foundations, production-line construction, and markets from Hawaii to Japan.

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: Offshore wind obviously is a big deal right now. There’s a lot of, countries looking at it and investigating it, doing it, but not really at scale yet. And this is where ECO TLP comes in and. Nicole, let’s just start there with a background. What problem were you trying to solve when you started ECO TLP?

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, so, we were designing for, a site off of Hawaii in 2011, for the HECO RFP. And so we were designing for 300 meter water depth from the beginning. so we were always trying to find a way to work with the ports, with the vessel, with the infrastructure that was existing off Hawaii. And with, and that worked with Jones Act vessels.

So we were always trying to meet that [00:01:00] requirement with, and meet the cost, try to, we saw there were much tighter margins in offshore wind than in oil and gas, for example, at that water depth. So we’re trying to find something that was cost effective. 

Allen Hall: Next question, obviously is what makes those deep water foundations so difficult?

Gordon Jackson: It’s the water depth, primarily, you need to put foundations down in, extremely deep water. and they’re gonna be pretty flexible. so you’re trying to control the amount of motion that you get at the surface through your, your deep water, facility. it’s really.

Really that challenge, and, the weight of components through the water depth, likes of chain would be completely impossible. in 300 meters of water. you need to use something that’s a little bit lighter. Yeah, to mow you to the, to the seabed.

Allen Hall: [00:02:00] Because it does seem a little odd just not to make the foundations taller, basically.

More steel drive it down in, we know that process, we understand that process. It works offshore, near shore in a, lot of locations. But once you get to what depth as it becomes financially or engineering wise, impossible. 

Gordon Jackson: For offshore wind, fixed, structures in, maybe a hundred meters of water are gonna be.

Economic. they’ll be costly compared to what’s been done now because, of all the extra structure you need for the, for the deeper water. But, I think you’ll see, a crossover between fixed and floating, around the, 70 to a hundred meter water mark.

that’s sort the range.

Allen Hall: And that leads to the next question, which is. It’s all financial, right? At some point, the numbers [00:03:00] don’t work. If the cost of foundations don’t come down, especially in fixed bottom offshore or floating offshore, we lose a lot of offshore wind resource. Nicole can you gimme a scale at what we’re missing if we don’t get to a more economical solution for floating offshore?

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So we’ve estimated for our market for, a very deep water market. So we now actually have a solution that goes across all water depths. So we’re starting with, this, gravity based structure now with, and, Gordon’s team has been really involved in that, development. And then now we can take that same slip form, concrete cylinder.

Format and take it across all the water depths. so we basically can hit every water depth now for a very low cost. It’s a very simple, just, local, regionally designed and built, system. We, crowdsource the labor and the inputs. and so we [00:04:00] try to, and we also try to give the procurement team of our clients their, an ability to do their job and, be able to bid out aspects of our design, across.

Different vendors. So you always wanna give, in construction, you always wanna give, the procurement team a job to do so they can actually get that price, keep that price down on the installation. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s a unique look that ECO TLP is putting to this problem. Which is moving away from steel, which is expensive obviously, and it’s difficult to transport at times to a more localized solution, which is concrete.

And thinking about the problem a little bit differently, does that open up a number of doors then in terms of the countries that can get involved in, floating or near shore, wind projects, but just because you’re driving the cost down? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. And I’ll let Gordon speak to that.. He’s worked. His whole career in offshore concrete.

But I think it’s, I think it’s a, great, it’s the only way we would do it. We actually have shipyards in our companies, our partners own [00:05:00] shipyards, and we, just would never probably ex try to create this many units across the world and scale and steel. We’d only do concrete. 

Gordon Jackson: Yeah. My first concrete project broke the mold of how you do, construction of concrete offshore structures.

it was entirely built within a dry dock and, After we’d gone on and delivered that project, that was in the late eighties. I spent the next 10 years, working on projects all around the world, looking at doing the same sort of thing in different countries. because you only needed, 10, 12 meters of water, at the shore and you could, build a structure and get it out there in the water.

It really opened up the market for offshore concrete structures that, that, first project that we did. 

Allen Hall: So using that first project as leverage and knowledge of how to do these things, how much advantage [00:06:00] does concrete give you over steel?

Gordon Jackson: It’s difficult to say because it bends country to country. And, quite often you’re competing against, steel built in some, very low cost fabrication countries. so if you’re in a high cost, high labor cost country, I worked in Australia, and the labor cost there was extremely high. So concrete wasn’t particularly cheap, but the overall solutions that we came up with, were cheap.

Allen Hall: So does that involve basically like slip forms or how are you, thinking about that problem? Because it’s a huge engineering task and you only learn. By doing it on some level because all great plans, always run into trouble as soon as you try to implement them. So you took all that previous knowledge and then applied it to this problem, and now you have, basically [00:07:00]trimmed or, slimmed, the design down into, you have a, very economical model, even in more uneconomical economies because of labor laws and cost of labor and access and those kind of things.

What does that look like now? And what’s your thought process on, Hey, this is what it’s gonna look like? Can we get, quayside how do we do this and how do we keep this thing simple?

Gordon Jackson: The key thing is we’re looking at, a production line approach, which has been, it’s tried and tested for, for marine, concrete construction, construction of quay walls and and the we’re using exactly that same system.

We’ve just been tried and tested to create a production line of, ECO TLP units or ECO GBS units where we’re building, onshore and where we’re going from station to station, doing a task at each station. [00:08:00] So it’s exactly like a production line, that you’re be familiar with and, you load out the completed structure onto a barge, and then you.

Submerge that barge and your structure floats off and that’s, the real key to getting the, the economy from the concrete basis. 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, and I’ll say that the OpEX is really something we focus a lot on because it’s not just what you’re doing on the CapEx and the development and the port, it’s actually that 30 year lifetime maintenance.

And this is a, when you, we fully submerge our floater, which is basically inert in the ocean. It’s, very eco-friendly with the ocean. There’s no paint, there’s no, maintenance on the floater over the lifespan. You’re, monitoring those, the moorings and the, weight of any marine, buildup on those moorings and things like that.

But generally it’s a very low maintenance solution and it’s very heavy and a comfortable car [00:09:00] ride for the turbine. It really has slow motions. it’s, almost like a, a high skyscraper in the water. you’re just the top of that skyscraper is moving a little bit. But you’re, you’re really giving it that comfortable, slow ride over its lifetime.

It’s not hitting a lot of turbulence, like a different type of floater. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. It is a different concept, really, right? That you have this mass at the bottom and you have this mass at the top, which is the, cell on the wind turbine. And if you can design it just right, everything dampens becomes stable.

Even in turbulent water. How long did it take you to figure out that aspect of the design? Because it does seem like a lot of projects hit a, an end point right there because the motion of the turbine is not good for the lifetime of the turbine. 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: We, look at it as a, kind of hybrid spar, TLP so, the original design came from my late father who was, who had designed Ekofisk for Phillips [00:10:00] petroleum in the early.

Late sixties, And, so he’d come from oil and gas and he’d come from that concrete, construction background. And, he is very comfortable with it. And I think, Gordon, that’s part of why I like working with Gordon ’cause Gordon has that same, long-term view on, these construction principles.

And I think that, what we saw though is the margins are so different from oil and gas, and so you have to have almost a poor man’s TLP is what we would call it because it’s. It’s gotta be a very simple version of a TLP that can roll out in mass quantities. And, as coming up with a company that, business plan, you’d wanna be able to really scale the business.

And so we had to come up with something that you can make. In different parts of the world at the same time, you’re not tied to one shipyard or one construction. \

Allen Hall: Even in terms of ship usage, you’re going to reduce the size of the ship considerably. You’re not using big dedicated ships that are really [00:11:00]expensive to operate or to keep in the area, even just to have them there as a lot of money.

You’re thinking about, a different design in terms of. Simple ships that you can find locally. How much does that really lower the cost of deployment? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Quite a lot actually. it depends on, so the other, there’s this other, aspect of installing the wind turbine on the foundation. So we have this fixed to fixed platform concept where you come further, a little bit further offshore and, give you that, draft depth that we need.

And then we have a fixed platform that just stays in place and, we bring the turbines to it and, float them out. It’s all a self floating unit, whether it’s the GBS that, Gordon’s been working with us and or the ECO TLP. So we’re really independent of those large vessels. for the most part, we’re, really try and then you, once you install the turbine, you can tow the entire unit out with two tugs.

Two to three tugs. 

Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. So essentially because you [00:12:00] used a basic henry Ford type process to, to create these foundations and to think about the problem differently. Not only can you deploy it, easier than a lot of things we’re doing right now on top of it, it works over a variety of depths and I think that’s a the hard thing for people to grasp because when we talk about offshore particularly start getting off the continental shelves here, you’re talking about.

More than a hundred meters typically of water. But you also have a, the gravity based system and the TLP system are all interconnected into the basic philosophy. can you explain like the, backbone of how that engineering works?

Gordon Jackson: It’s essentially, it’s, we’re using the same structural form in both, fixed and floating.

It’s basically, it’s two cylinders, one inside the other. A little bit of structure, which joins the two cylinders together. that’s it. 

Allen Hall: Gordon, you make it sound so simple, but the, [00:13:00]engineering is complicated to get to that point. And once you get to that level of, oh, that design actually works in a variety of depths, that opens up your customer base quite a bit.

Have you had inquiries from nearshore people? Or fixed bottom people thinking whoa, I could actually save myself a bunch of time and money, which is the real limiting factor on offshore wind at the moment. Are you starting to see some momentum there that, operators, developers are starting to rethink this problem and not just do what they did last week?

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. one of the ways we came about the g you know, taking the ECO TLP and transforming it to the ECO GBS was, recommended by a client, was, that was their ask actions. That’s always the best way to start a product development cycle because, somebody’s interested.

and I think, and part of the reason I found Gordon to work with early on in our, the life of our company is, his background in, in GBS development. He did, he developed the Gravitas GBS [00:14:00] 10 years ago. So I think we, we got lucky that our, civil structural engineering partner with ARUP was, already really comfortable with, looking at this.

So I think that’s, part of, you always want the clients to be interested, before you start investing. You don’t wanna design a product that’s in your head or your, in your company lunchroom without a real ask for it. 

Allen Hall: And I, think also you have a, once you have the engineering pretty well done and.

Obviously do now you’re trying to touch a number of countries and every culture has its own way of, one of the construction business to do it slightly differently. South Korea does it different than Scotland, for example. You are working across cultures and trying to make the same design. apply to all those different areas.

Are, have you learned [00:15:00] some things from that? Is it, are you able to basically set the same assembly line in every place? or are there different, kinds of concrete, different kinds of access, different kinds of ports that you have to deal with? What are those variables there that, that change the way you do business?

Gordon Jackson: All the characteristics, ports are, obviously different. Really you just need space. And access to reasonably deep water from, that, from that space. And, it can get surprisingly difficult to find that, certainly in the UK and, in Northern Europe, people wanna build marines and, waterfront living, rather than having, an industrial facility, on the doorsteps.

In, developed countries it can be hard to find that space. But, in some, parts of the world, there’s lots of [00:16:00] space, available. some good port facilities that can be utilized. and then it’s just in, in all civil engineering works, you go to do the job, you go wherever the job is, you mobilize there.

You put in the systems, and equipment that you need to build, a structure, and then normally you go away at the end of the job, you hand it over to the client. you know what, what, would be good here is if we could set up some regional centers where you’ve done the, investment in the yard, and then you can, you can amortize those costs of development over a number of projects.

Then you should start to see, real, real good cost savings. 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Just one thing, our footprint of our, cylinders is about a third of the footprint of a semi-sub, for example. [00:17:00] So, our footprint on the land port is very small. 

Allen Hall: I think that makes sense because if you watch the fixed bottom projects, particularly in the United States.

The first thing they had to do is rebuild the ports. The ports weren’t set for the scale and so they needed to expand the ports. That means you have to acquire land, you’ve gotta develop it. There’s a lot of processes involved. ’cause you’re talking about city, state, and federal government being involved.

Obviously federal in the United States is a problem. so just getting the port developed was a huge process for fixed bottom. You’re thinking about that differently though, because the reduced amount of space, the, you don’t have to be in a huge industrial area, but all obviously it would be nice, but you do run against that problem.

Are you thinking, when you talk about regional centers, are you thinking kind of Mediterranean, west Coast, us, Australia, one in Japan? How do you think about that problem? Because [00:18:00] once you get a site established, it does seem like because of the, how fast you can move these things around that it’ll become a pretty good job center for a lot of people.

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah. There’s a long-term maintenance, crew that needs to be developed while we build these. Yeah, I think, it’s been a moving target of what’s really gonna develop in offshore wind. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown with football. I think we, constantly try to, get lined up to, to kick football and then it falls.

It’s more of the developers I, I feel for on that ’cause they’re these investing tremendous amount of money for these, development sites. We are open to any, we’ve been, we’ve looked at, some developers are looking at steel production and concrete production, two different reports servicing.

An array and we’re really flexible. It doesn’t, matter. When we first started on that Hawaii project, we were gonna do floating barges to slipform. [00:19:00]And we talked about that with ARUP. Some still this floating dock idea and submerging that dock. And it’s just a matter of finding the right, a large enough, dock for that type of, so then you’re not even using the land base port.

You’re learn, you’re using just to. Maybe a 400 foot frontage on the, along the port.

Allen Hall: That’s amazingly small, right? Because if you look at some of these ports right now that are doing, fixed bottom offshore, they’re massive, they’re huge sites. You’re talking about something roughly a 10th of the scale to get the same end result, which is turbines in the water.

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: For our part of it. We still, you still have the components and those are, that’s a, it’s another logistical challenge, and so I understand why the ports are. Looking at a lot more lay down space and things, maybe at a certain point these components are so large that they just stay on a vessel and they, and we take them off of a vessel directly and load them in.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s one of the considerations [00:20:00] is do you really tie it to land in, terms of needing a, massive amount of space, acres of space, thousands of square meters of space. Do you need that or is this, or can you do it much more efficiently because that overhead adds up over time. Not only are you trying to save on, the ships and the, especially the dedicated ships, you’re also looking at smaller footprints on shore and doing it a lot more economically.

What does that future look like now, because it does seem like we’re at a precipice where floating wind is no longer just being discussed. In theory, it’s, going to be implemented. What are those next steps here for ECO TLP? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So next week we’re headed to Tokyo, to Japan for the wind expo. And, ARUP is also presenting at the Asia Wind Offshore Show.

I think we’re, we’re, good to learn. There’s just so much to learn about each culture, and I think this is something that, Gordon and I’ve talked about in terms of these international [00:21:00] projects, you’ve, gotta understand your culture that you’re moving into and you’ve gotta understand how to mediate across those different companies that come in.

Our company has seven different. Countries represented in our team. So right now, so, we’re, a US company, but we’re barely, we’re just by name, but I think most of our team members are not in the us and that’s international collaboration is something, I, really, loved working on it.

And I think, so when we go to Japan next week, it’s really mainly just to learn. we don’t. We have a lot to learn about Japan, and that’s what’s fun about each of these regions. 

Gordon Jackson: And that’s where we can help because, we’ve got a presence in Japan. We’ve been doing offshore wind in Japan, so we’re there, to help eight to ECO TLP with our, those little contacts and h do business, in Japan and things like that.[00:22:00]

We have a big international network, so you know, it can help. Some, in some areas, open some doors and, forge some, some friendships between, count companies. 

Allen Hall: Gordon you did a big project out in Perth, Australia, which is a difficult place, Australia is a very difficult place to manufacture things.

What are some of the lessons learned and what was that process like? 

Gordon Jackson: So he had a, client, a very small client who was prepared to. Seed responsibility for delivering his project to a, team, an alliance team. And he just, interviewed a number of teams and, we were lucky enough to be selected, as the team to deliver their project.

There was no tendering, it was just done on, how the, client felt about the, individuals that he met. And that, that was [00:23:00] very new to me. And, the whole project was delivered, by companies from the uk, from Australia, from Singapore, from be Netherlands, the Marine, the marine, vessels. A lot of ’em are coming from, from, Northern Europe, even though you’re in Australia. And, every company wants to do things differently and they all want to look after their interests, but the big thing about this alliance project was that, you were focused on one particular project and we were, we were coached and, facilitated, and trained to, to throw away our, our company affiliations and work together.

And, to collaborate together. And, [00:24:00] we’re all working towards the, end goal of delivering a particular product. And I think that’s, I think it’s got a lot of, lot of potential to be used in the offshore wind sector. This, was, an oil platform that we were gonna build on the, the northwest shelf of Australia, which happened to be built in concrete, because the client.

The client came to us with a notion of, doing something in concrete, which we, took his idea, decided we could do something a little bit cheaper and more straightforward and, went on to deliver it. We were given the opportunity to deliver it. And, yeah, I, it was my best project.

it was a tremendous experience for all the companies involved. And everyone made money so everyone’s happy. 

Allen Hall: That is difficult, right? You do see on these offshore projects, people coming from around the world to [00:25:00] work on this one big effort, a lot of money, and at times, thousands of people involved. Companies stu stumble there, obviously because you’re trying to tie cultures, you’re trying to tie companies together, but at the end of the day, you have to get this project done. Are, there some top level lessons learned from that of, how to bridge those differences? 

Gordon Jackson: I did another project, this was a steel project, where we had a US oil company.

And, The successful contractor was Hyundai in Korea. And they said to, me over the course of the project,

we always lose money with, with American oil companies. Why are we doing business with them? And it, all came down to the, the approach to the [00:26:00] contract.

Hyundai used to working in a more collaborative way with our clients. Whereas, this project, this is what the contract says, this is what you’ve taken on to do, there’s no negotiation, you’ll do it and that’s how much money you’re getting. And, but they find that very difficult.

And, it was at the time when they were opening up their business more internationally. And I think it was a big learning experience for them. Yeah I think a lot of the offshore wind tried to follow the same path and, yeah, I think more collaborative working is to be encouraged for me.

More talking to each other and negotiating rather than, imposing. 

Allen Hall: Where should developers go to find out more about ECO TLP? [00:27:00] Because you have a gravity based system. You got the tension leg platform, there’s a lot inside of the company. What’s the first stop? Should they visit your website?

Should they connect with you on LinkedIn? Where do they go? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: The LinkedIn where website is great. 

Allen Hall: So go visit ECO TLP. It’s ecotlp.com. Nicole and Gordon, this has been a great discussion. I’ve learned a lot. It’s very exciting because I think you’re on the precipice of something great. So thank you for joining me today.

Gordon Jackson: Thank you. Thank you.

The crew discusses the White House missing its offshore wind appeal deadline, France’s 12 GW tender with restrictions on Chinese permanent magnets, and WOMA 2027 planning.

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

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, who is in Australia, and our newest guest is Nikki Briggs, who is the new CCO of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Welcome to the show, Nikki. 

Nikki Briggs: Thank you. Nice to, nice to be here. 

Allen Hall: So there’s the full docket, and Nikki’s gonna get indoctrinated today to the podcast, and she’s gonna be holding on tight because we have a really, uh, very controversial podcast.

I think once Rosemary gets in here and starts talking about. Offshore wind. And I wanna lead off this week ’cause it is a big deal, although not many people are talking about it, that, uh, the White House missed a deadline to file an [00:01:00] appeal against all the offshore wind farms in the United States. And the feeling was, is that there was gonna be an appeal and they’re gonna push to slow down those projects or cancel those projects.

And obviously, uh, one of the purchasers of one of the sites decided to sell it back to the US for about a. Billion US dollars, but the administration missed a key deadline for appeals, uh, which may indicate that they have other things to do besides fight offshore wind Now. The question really remains is, is this going to continue on that nothing is going to happen.

Uh, hopefully all the wind projects that are being built at the moment will complete and we’ll be providing power to all the onshore locations, particularly up and down along the East coast. But, uh, there’s still a long way to go here. Rosemary, I know there’s been a lot of concern about what’s happened in the United States on offshore [00:02:00] wind for several months now.

You think this is gonna be just a change of direction because there’s other things happening in the world. 

Rosemary Barnes: To me, it just sounded like too hard to, unlikely to actually succeed and kind of keeps on drawing attention back to the issue. So better to just kind of let it quietly fade away and not talk about it anymore.

Allen Hall: And there is a financial emphasis for those companies that have these wind farms because if they can get their projects done. They get paid sooner. They can produce power, obviously they’re gonna get paid sooner. So there is a big incentive to push, push, push, push. And a lot of the projects are delivering power right now.

And I think the, the biggest one, which is uh, dominion Energy’s Project of Coastal Virginia, offshore Wind is doing that. So. All these wind projects that are kinder in a way I think are going to finish, which is gonna be a, a big relief to a lot of the states. 

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t wanna talk about us, um, politics because I am not living there.

But don’t you have midterms coming up and potential [00:03:00] for the situation to dramatically change? Like, my understanding is that the expectation is that there will be. More, um, democratic involvement in, in decision making after the midterms. And so surely, you know, like if they don’t, if they’re not acting now, then things are likely to be easier from here on out.

Is that, is that a correct interpretation of what’s going on over there? 

Allen Hall: Not correct. And Nikki, you can jump in here too. Congress can change and does every two years there’s elections in the US and so the full House of Representatives is voted in or out. So all 435 members of the House of Representatives have an election, but about a third of the Senate has an election.

So the Senate doesn’t change as dramatically as the House does, but, uh, for everything that’s been codified into law, which happened a year and a half ago, uh, the executive branch can kind of do what they [00:04:00] want there. So there will be very little that Congress can do. Once a law is a pass and the executive branch can continue on, 

Rosemary Barnes: it’s two year terms for your house of reps.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s two years terms. Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: That’s not very long. That’s not very good job security. 

Allen Hall: It was never meant to be 

Rosemary Barnes: in school. About a thousand years ago, I learned that, um, the Australian government is, is, is largely based on a combination of um, UK and. US government basically. But I think it’s a lot closer to the us.

Um, and yeah, we have, I, I think we have not, we haven’t got fixed terms, but it’s usually about every three years and yeah, you lose a few, a few months, but we don’t, we don’t do the big song and dance about it that you do with all of the, um, pre-selection and all that stuff. We don’t do that. So our, our system is a lot quicker.

Um, so yeah, I just wonder like how, how do you actually govern when you have to spend half of your time worried about, um, getting in and then you can only make plans for basically one year [00:05:00] ahead or two years ahead, like at the absolute maximum. 

Allen Hall: That’s the problem with House of Representative is you nailed it right on the head, which is they’re constantly fundraising and trying to get to the next election.

Two years is a short amount of time anymore. They didn’t used to do it like that, where the last six months, maybe a year were campaign time, but pretty much once they get an election over, which happens in November, they’re already campaigning for the next one. So it does lead to a lot of chaos where things don’t happen in the House of Representatives like.

They used to maybe 20, 25 years ago. It’s changed dramatically and I don’t think Australia has that same issue weirdly enough. Although I would say you’re becoming more like the US in a lot of ways. That’s not one of them. 

Rosemary Barnes: We’ve got some, there’s some things in place, like one of the advantages of basing our system on other countries as we could take.

Take the bits that worked and see what, what we could already see what didn’t really work and um, you know, try to, try to take it, um, try to take care of that, ensure that it couldn’t happen. [00:06:00] So 

Allen Hall: the offshore wind piece in America rolls into other offshore wind, uh, across Europe in that, uh, although US is reconsidering offshore wind in some sense.

Europe is not. In fact, uh, France is getting very active. So you remember the France has been trying to launch, uh, offshore wind tenders for about two years. So you keep hearing France is gonna go to offshore wind, and then it didn’t really happen. Well, that political gridlock is, uh, over really how to pay for the renewables, uh, and how they’re gonna try to finance this thing.

Meanwhile, uh, France has, uh. Less than what? Two gigawatts of offshore wind operating against a, a national target of about 15 gigawatts by 2035. Uh, so there’s a lot of catching up to do the 12. They just had a 12 gigawatt package. They announced where, uh, they, they’re [00:07:00] attempting to really catch up all at once, uh, but buried inside of this tender.

Is a supply chain rule, which is very unique. So coming outta Scotland and all the things that happen with Ming Yang in Scotland, France is doing something very similar. France is limiting the percentage or the quantity of permanent magnets that can come from China. So France is saying, Hey, they don’t wanna get locked into an offshore, offshore wind supply chain that involves China specifically for, but they’re probably the most important ingredient, which is.

Permanent magnets. The Netherlands is moving ahead also and has offered two one gigawatt offshore wind farms, and it’ll be permitting those pretty quickly. So all of a sudden, the offshore wind effort for some of the countries that have been quiet in Netherlands in particular, and then France, all of a sudden probably ’cause of what’s happening in the.

The straight in the Middle East have decided to speed up their offshore wind [00:08:00] projects. Is this gonna be the right move? Do you think they’re gonna stick with this process of, of completing these projects or is this a spur of the moment decision that they’re gonna change their minds later on in the next year or two once things calm down to the Middle East?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, if it is a, a knee jerk response to the. Specific right now problem and doesn’t seem very well advised because it’s gonna be years before they actually see any electricity entering their grid. I mean, France is a bit different to other European countries ’cause they’ve got so much nuclear and in general, uh, I think with the exception of like the year before last, they had that summer where it was really hot.

They had heat waves and they had to shut down a lot of. Nuclear power plants because the cooling water was too hot. They, they couldn’t, they couldn’t put it back into the river. And, um, yeah, uh, river levels were too low in some cases. So in, in that year, they did have to import energy. Um, but in general, their energy exporters.

So I don’t, I, I would be surprised if this [00:09:00] was in direct response to, you know, that I don’t think they have an electricity crisis right now. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think it’s probably more of a long-term plan. 

Allen Hall: Are they gonna force the OEMs to build product in country? GE already has an offshore wind blade factory in France.

And, uh, they can get a lot of components in Europe for sure. You could actually dictate what percentage of the wind turbine is built in France and what is built in Europe and what’s gonna be left to be imported in from China. You think this is where everybody is headed? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, I think it is. Smart move to make sure that you don’t have one single country locking down any critical part of your supply chain.

So I’ll agree with that. I haven’t seen the exact wording, but it’s not like it’s just banned that anything comes from China. I mean, that would be a good way to make sure that you didn’t ever get a timely, uh, a project completed in time. Um. So, you know, that makes sense. But, you know, if no one [00:10:00] project can use a hundred percent Chinese magnets or I, I don’t know the wording, maybe they’re allowed to buy, um, the rare Earth materials from China and then turn them into magnets locally.

I don’t, I don’t know what the wording is, but, um, it is going to require that, you know, some new manufacturers start up and I just wonder what kind of support they’re gonna provide for that and what kind of guarantees, because it’s not, um. So straightforward to just start up a new manufacturing facility for something that has never been made in that, in that area before.

Um, you know, there’s a lot of risk and hard to get financing. They’re gonna want to have some, um, guarantees from the government or some support to, you know, make sure that the risk benefit is worth it. 

Allen Hall: I think that’s probably the most important part of this, is the business aspect. You can’t spool up a 20 year business.

In a year that’s hard to do and you’re not gonna do it if the supply chain can willy-nilly switch to an external supply chain to China, for example. So if you do set up [00:11:00] something complicated in France, I would almost bet that they would have to pass something in law and lock it in before you see a lot of investment happening that way.

Similar things happen in the UK really is uh, with all the offshore wind growth and wanting to build turbines in the country. They’re gonna have to put some barriers in to keep the Chinese out, which they’re obviously doing 

Rosemary Barnes: or provide direct support. They don’t necessarily need to make it a law. I think like the way we would do it in Australia is that the government would either co-invest or they would, you know, underride a loan or um, you know, guarantee revenue or something, something like that, to make all the pieces fall into place.

I don’t think, um, law is the only way to do it. 

Allen Hall: France obviously is gonna be able to choose from a couple of wind OEMs. Where do you think they’ll go is It’s pretty much right now, I guess it’s Siemens and Vestas for sure. I’m not even sure GE is offering a offshore wind turbine at the moment. Does France [00:12:00] have a Siemens or Vestas stake at the minute?

Rosemary Barnes: Not that I know of, but what’s happening to the um, Bel Factory? The GE Blade Factory? That was. They were making blades for hall aids, which is the troubled platform that kind of turned them off. Offshore wind altogether. Um, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know what’s happened to that one. 

Allen Hall: Remember that GE sold the LM factory, what up in Poland and Vestas ended up buying that?

I wonder if something similar happened here. 

Rosemary Barnes: Uh, yeah. I dunno. I need to, we should have, we should have looked it up before we started recording. 

Allen Hall: The thing about this podcast is that we start putting the puzzle pieces together. Before the, the pieces are out on the table. And when you see the way that GE has really slowed down offshore, obviously they talked about it a number of times that they don’t like the offshore business and would like to finish vineyard wind and all the commitments they have and then pause until they can make sure they’re gonna make money on offshore wind.

Vestas is going crazy and has made a lot of sales, [00:13:00] and I know Siemens is trying to get back into that offshore market. So you really have two players. If you are not gonna choose a Chinese turbine, you see image and you have Vestas. But onshoring, that work is an obvious, uh, French move, I think just like it was in the uk.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, assuming that they are not gonna be choosing, uh, Chinese manufacturers, given that they’re trying to move away from that, um, yeah. Complete dominance, but I mean, why couldn’t Ming Yang or someone supply turbines but just, you know, get their, their magnets from a local supplier instead? I mean, it’s very common that, you know, like European manufacturers, if they wanna sell in India, then they have to have a certain local, um, you know, amount of local manufacturing.

So. Why wouldn’t a, a Chinese company do the same thing? So, yeah, I don’t think they’ve only got two choices, but. Those will be the obvious ones. 

Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast [00:14:00] recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future.

Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. So Rosemary, after the successful WMA 2026 event in Melbourne, in which I know I mispronounced, but you’re just gonna have to let it go. There’s been a a ton of inquiries about WMA 2027 and I.

I’m thinking, man, we just finished moment 2026. You ready for 2027? The answer is yes, we need to go. 

Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s because the, um, certain other Australian wind energy events are spamming everyone’s inboxes with like multiple emails a day, months out. It’s got everyone thinking, gee, this conference is super annoying.

Thought about that [00:15:00] non annoying conference that I went to. 

Nikki Briggs: Yeah. Well I’m not pestering people, but if anybody wants to, you know, get signed up to be a sponsor for WMA 2027, reach out to me because, you know, we’re that not annoying conference. So, um, we gotta have good sponsors. And 

Rosemary Barnes: that is true. That is one thing about, about Wilmar is we keep it really cheap for attendees, but it is still a high quality conference.

And the main way that we’re able to do that is because we have really good sponsors that. Um, yeah, they, they provide money obviously, to pay for, uh, a large chunk of the event, but they also don’t expect to be allowed to get up and sell at people. Um, yeah, I, I don’t even know how we managed to get such great sponsors that are, you know, happy with that trade off, but I guess that, yeah, they’ve figured out that it isn’t actually that beneficial to get up and give a sales pitch to people who.

Receptive to it. It is much better to just get up and talk about all the things that you know, and then the people who have problems that can be solved by what you [00:16:00] do will naturally get in touch with you. I mean. I think it works better. That’s, that’s my entire sales sales approach. And I guess everybody at the, at the conference, that’s what, yeah, that’s what we’re relying on.

I think it’s a better way 

Nikki Briggs: and we’re here to help and save you money. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. And the Woma 2027 website is up. Just Google. It’s, and we’re looking for sponsors, although a number of sponsors, pretty much everybody from 26 who wants to be back into twenties. 27. So we’ll be, uh, reaching out to all of you and making sure that happens.

But the conference is probably gonna get bigger in 2027 just because of the demand. So we’ll be looking for a, a couple of more key sponsors. We want you to get involved as soon as possible. You should do that by, in the us. You can do that by getting a hold of, of Nikki. It’s Nikki, N-I-K-K-I dot Briggs, B-R-I-G-G [email protected].

Or you can just go to Nikki’s LinkedIn page and send her an InMail and, uh, get ahold of her that way or [00:17:00] connect with her on LinkedIn and she’d be glad to help you. Now, Rosemary, I know one of the things we talked about was, uh, some of the expansion of topics for 2027. There was a lot of feedback and we are paying close attention.

And thanks to everybody who sent us feedback on the conference, uh, the number of five star reviews are really high, and I, I’m, I’m still a little shocked and um, maybe embarrassed by like, wow. Uh, that’s awesome. But we wanna expand on some of the topics for next year, and we’re talking about doing a blade masterclass and that which would involve rosemary.

Maybe some others talking about some of the blade issues that exist around the world. And Rosemary, what are you thinking about? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, describing how the process works. ’cause that’s the, that’s probably one of the main things, or the main value that I bring to Australia is the time that I spent working at a, um, um.

Wind turbine blade manufacturer, and you know, how does the design process work? What kind of testing do they do? What [00:18:00] does certification mean? Um, all those sorts of things. Uh, they, you might think, oh, I don’t really care about that ’cause I just use the blade once I’ve got it. But anytime you run into a problem, you do need to kind of know how all that stuff works, basically.

So, um, yeah, we’ll give a, a masterclass on that topic and so you can come and get. You know, a bit of an understanding about how that works. Ask whatever questions that you’ve got that relate to your specific problems, but then, you know, even if you don’t have a problem now in the future when something comes up, you’ll have that knowledge to fall back on.

And it just really helps to be able to know when something’s not right, um, when something wasn’t done right. Um, yeah, I mean there are always at some point an argument about, you know, who’s gonna pay. So it is really helpful to know if things have been done the way that they said that they would be. The way they should be.

Um, yeah, but I’m also. I’m really keen to hear about what to include in the main conference. ’cause you know, it can’t be the same every year. Um, I’m super focused on, on blades and I, I think we, I [00:19:00] mean, blades is the biggest, the biggest topic in wind turbine o and m, so it makes sense that we would be focused on that and we’re, we will, but I have less of, um, yeah, in depth knowledge about what non blade issues people are really struggling with at the moment.

So definitely be keen to hear from. Viewers about, um, sorry, I’ll say that again. Definitely be keen to hear about potential attendees about what topics they would wanna see covered to make sure that, yeah, it’s interesting and fresh every year. 

Allen Hall: Can I circle back on the masterclass a little bit because I had my own little, little mini masterclass this past week looking at the IE specification for wind turbine blades, and I don’t know what prompted me to read that document.

I thought it was gonna be a lot thicker than it was, and I was shocked at the lack of detail that on the requirement side, I always think the blade people must have millions of requirements to go [00:20:00] do. And it’s gonna be very technical and a lot of check boxes there, but turns out maybe not as many as I thought there would be.

Rosemary Barnes: Oh yeah. That’s interesting that you’re, you’re surprised. Um. I mean, I haven’t worked with it closely since when I was doing my PhD, uh, the PhD was on, there was a, yeah, design of a family, family of wind turbine blades. And so, you know, I was looking at the standard to see what, um, load cases that you had to consider, you know, like the 50 year extreme gust is one of the big ones.

And then, you know, various operational loads and that sort of thing. Um, it’s never gonna cover absolutely everything. But I, yeah. What, what, what issues do you see that are, are missing from it? 

Allen Hall: Well, when, when I look at the airplane world and we qualify an airplane with the Federal Authority, whoever that could be, it could be Yasa in Europe, could be the FAA in the United States, there’s a pages, there are books of requirements and [00:21:00] guidance materials and details of things you must do to show that the airplane is.

Safe to go fly. I figured the wind turbine world would’ve adapted that to some level to have very specific requirements on design margins and, and maybe they’re there as an electrical engineer. I can’t suss all that out, but I can usually tell how rigorous the requirements are by the weight of the document.

Usually those documents make a lot of noise when you drop ’em on the desk. This was, uh, a very soft whimper. I thought, well, okay, maybe there’s a lot here I’m missing. I’m sure that I am. I’m an electrical guy. I’m gonna admit it. Right now, I don’t understand all the structural things, but on the airplane side, I know that the airplanes have a lot to do and the requirements are crazy hard, but maybe there’s a lot more tolerance in wind.

Rosemary Barnes: They do include safety margins, and there is, uh. A lot more, a lot more tolerance in wind as [00:22:00] there should be because people aren’t flying and wind turbines. You know, like if there was somebody like physically seated inside every blade 24 7, then I think that you would see that the, the standard would be, would be tightened up because you know, like every tightening of the standard is going to result in an increase in cost.

So I mean, the biggest difference that I. I I see between, um, arrow and wind, aside from the, the safety issue is the maintenance. There is annual maintenance and they are maintained more than that. They’re, they’re constantly doing stuff, but like if it’s possible to design it to last for 20 or 30 years without needing maintenance, and that’s the way that you want it to be.

In general, blades are not supposed to be maintained until there’s a problem. Um, you know, it’s not like. Places where you know that you’re gonna be replacing grease or, um, you know, anything, anything like that that’s built for accessibility. The blades are certainly, certainly not. So yeah, I mean, [00:23:00]you’re definitely not maintaining in the same way as you are with, um, aerospace or Yeah, just aviation.

Allen Hall: Howard Pinrose has the, for motor dock, has the Chaos and Caffeine podcast. Which is on YouTube and I watch that. Typically Saturday morning, I think that’s when it comes out. It’s on the weekend. And his last, uh, podcast was about the studies about general maintenance. Back to Rosemary, your point that performing general maintenance, regardless of how much there is, is less costly than trying to fix it on the fly.

And that if you devote. Sufficient resources to keeping the equipment maintained in the, in the way it was intended to. You’re gonna have significantly less problems. Uh, and lower costs, but it’s surprising. Wind doesn’t do that 

Rosemary Barnes: well, but I mean, the difference is that wind is designed to not be maintained.

So it’s, it’s not easier engineering, or not [00:24:00] engineering. It’s not like lazy. It’s actually the opposite. It’s actually really hard to design something that won’t need to be maintained for 30 years. I mean, think about another machine that is not supposed to be looked at for 30 years and you know, that will go through the stress that a wind turbine blade does.

But you know, if you think of. Yeah, anything that’s inside your blade, like think about, um, the lightning cable in a blade. Um, you know, like the, if it, if it breaks, you have to cut open the blade to get into it. And, um, most of the length of the blade, that would be, that would be what you would do. It’s huge, huge, huge repair.

Um, so, you know, you design it so that that will very rarely happen in theory, you know, if everything’s working well, maybe the lightning cable is a bad example because, um, the lightning protection system is. Almost certainly the, the least well-functioning part of a, a wind turbine, I’d say. But you know, like you think about in every other part of the blade structure, you know, you design it so that it will last for 30 years easily.

Um, and then [00:25:00] it’s only when several things go wrong that you would end up having to go in and do that. Um, that maintenance. 

Allen Hall: This should be kind of a woma topic actually, because is it even conceivable that you could have minimal maintenance on such a. Heavy industrial piece of equipment for 30 years versus every other machine in human operation that can’t do that.

What other machine, I’m sure somebody will write in about that. And if you, if you know what, a machine will operate for 30 years with no maintenance, please send us a note because I don’t know what that is. 

Rosemary Barnes: No, I, I think Brent turbines are really, are really special and I think that it is, uh, like commonly misunderstood that, um, you know.

Not maintaining for 30 years is, you know, somehow not in engineering correctly or making the engineering easier, but it’s the opposite. You’re making the engineering harder. The same with manufacturing of, um, the blades specifically or anything made out of composite materials. Like the tolerances are huge, but the fact is that that makes the engineering harder, not easier because it has to work at [00:26:00] any, you know, if the web is here or if it’s a hundred millimeters this way, it’s still has to work exactly the same for the exact same amount of time.

So to make it low cost and reliable for that amount of time with that little maintenance is a huge job. Um, and you know, one world record that I know that wind turbines have is that the blades are the largest, like single piece component of any human made structure. There is nothing, there’s nothing bigger than, um, a wind turbine blade.

Like a bridge is made of multiple different members and a airplane. Has, you know, two, two wings that don’t even, even the span of most airplanes isn’t, um, both wings together isn’t the same as the longest wind turbine blades. Like, there’s not, there’s no one big single component that’s bigger than a wind turbine blade.

Not to mention the strain. Um, they bend a lot that they, they really, they really bend a lot. That’s a very. Difficult operating environment. They do millions of, of fatigue cycles in their [00:27:00] lifetime. Uh, it’s just like, you know, they’re, they’re breaking records all over the place. It’s a, it’s a super cool thing to mark on as an engineer, to be honest.

Allen Hall: Okay. So at Walmart 2026, I know that was one of the discussions that popped up, uh, on the panel, was what should we expect for a lifetime? Or sort of a less re a reduced level of maintenance on a wind turbine. And the answer was maybe a year. And I thought that was a very Australian way of answering that question.

It’s, it’s a real answer. I think, uh, the people that operate wind turbines know that that probably is true. You got about a year and then you gotta get on it. But financial investors don’t necessarily have that opinion about it. They think you just turn it on, let it run 30 years and collect all this money and.

What we’re learning is it’s, it’s a complicated problem. And Rosemary, I think you’re 100% right. All the variables that happen during the manufacturing and the design of a wind turbine have to incorporate safety features that keep that operating for 30 years. That’s really hard to do, [00:28:00] and you’d have no way to really verify it once you shove it out the door, especially the first thousand you make.

It’s almost an impossible task. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean there obviously there is heaps of maintenance that needs to be done to, to wind turbines, even if it is incredibly low maintenance compared to other kinds of machines. And if you are skipping that kind of maintenance or doing it incorrectly, then that is definitely a very um, Australia relevant issue.

You know, everyone’s on these full service agreements. Sometimes not for the full lifetime of the the turbine. So you can imagine if you’re kind of like half-assing your maintenance for the, those first 10 years, then you’re just sending a, you know, time bomb to the next person to take over that contract.

So. That’s a real challenge, but I’d see it with blades where it’s like, oh, they’re just quietly fixing, um, damages. They get the same damage over and over again and they just quietly fix it and not say anything and, or, you know, not really raise it like maybe you’re technically getting the reports, but it’s never flagged that, you know, Hey, this is a serial issue and no one’s ever investigating.

What’s the [00:29:00] real root cause of this? It might be that, you know, they’re fixing it well enough to last to the end of the FSA period. And then, yeah. Oh hey. Turns out your whole fleet has a serial issue that you need to take care of now with, without the backing of the manufacturer, which, um, you know, obviously makes it about 10 times harder.

Allen Hall: And that’s why you want to go to Wilma 2027 because we’re gonna to talk about that issue in a. About 20 others during the two day event. At least that’s what it’s scheduled for right now. Maybe it’ll go to a third day. Rosemary, maybe we need to add a third day because of all the topics 

Rosemary Barnes: we need to move to a beach location.

If we’re gonna start going for multiple days, 

Allen Hall: Rosemary wants to have it in Fiji or was it Tahiti? What was the other place you were saying you would like to go to? 

Rosemary Barnes: Tahiti would be fine. Um, Maldives is what I was saying, but yeah, I will accept that. It’s not that. Logical to run Australia. Um, win o and m event offshore.

Allen Hall: We wanna send a congratulations to Yolanda and [00:30:00]Manuel as they have gotten married down in Mexico, uh, with all friends and family, several hundred attendees as I have learned. So congratulations to those two. And Yolanda will be back on the podcast. In the next week or two, that wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love for to hear from you, just reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It helps other wind energy professionals discover the show.

For Rosie and Nikki, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:31:00] Podcast.