This week on Uptime, we discuss Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper stepping down, Shell withdrawing from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, and a study showing only 15% of employees feel their managers are transparent about challenges in the workplace.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug!

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

You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxom, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.

Allen Hall: Danish Renewable Energy Company, Ørsted, announced a leadership change, with CEO Mad Snipper stepping down after four years at the helm.

Rasmus Erbo. Uh, the company's deputy CEO and chief commercial officer will take over as group president and CEO, uh, in February. Uh, the transition comes as Orsted adapts to evolving market conditions in the offshore wind sector. Now this, uh, I guess around the industry was expected news. Uh, if you had talked to somebody, uh, about offshore in the US, uh, they felt like what had happened over the last year or so was really rough on the leadership at Oersted, part of this too, guys, is that some of it is just happenstance, interest rates rising, the supply chain nightmares that were happening and Mads Knipper would just happen to be there at that specific time.

Is, is that the feeling like it was just bad timing, uh, for Mads?

Phil Totaro: Yeah, it's, it's part of it, but the, the reality I think is you, you've got a scenario where he, he was there and the buck stops here and all that sort of stuff, um, if you're the boss, but he also was one kind of overseeing a lot of the deals that got him put in place that led to all those impairments that they ended up having.

It's like, yeah, okay. Interest rates are high, but. It's like he, he, you know, was there signing off on these, these deals with, uh, PSEG in New Jersey and, uh, Eversource in, in Connecticut, uh, and Rhode Island that were just frankly terrible deals. I mean, it just, they, they ended up, Orsted ended up having to pay.

for whatever the utility companies had invested time and money and effort and et cetera, uh, into, you know, the development work on these deals, um, in case they decided to pull out plus, you know, uh, a little extra. And it's like, that's, that's the way it is. You know, you might think that that's typical, but when you get into a deal like this for an offshore wind farm, uh, I mean, we're starting to talk in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it led to this, this multi billion dollar impairment that they had, you know, last year.

So, you know, I think I said on the show six months ago that he was likely to be gone, and guess what? He is.

Allen Hall: My feeling about it is there's just a little bit of happenstance, but that's the problem at being in leadership You don't get to choose the economic times in which you're running the company and you have to play what the cards are dealt right, I Wouldn't say any offshore wind developer in the United States.

This has great numbers at the minute So it isn't like Orsted has is in a different bucket at the minute it but I I I think the, my contention at the time was New Jersey really screwed Orsted. Not the, the government in New Jersey was just negotiating in bad faith. And they wanted to take all the federal tax credits, which Orsted agreed to, and then they needed them back.

And then it just went back and forth there.