This episode covers the UK's Crown Estate's offshore wind investments, drone threats to wind turbines, and Nordex's 40th anniversary. It also highlights TotalEnergies winning a German offshore wind auction and Pemamek's advanced welding capabilities.

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You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here's your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. 

Allen Hall: Well, we're back with another edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

I got Rosemary Barnes in Australia, Phil Totaro in Warm and sunny California, and Joel Saxon in practically hell in temperature in Austin, Texas. I was just down in Dallas, Texas a day ago, and man, is that hot. There's just like a, a certain kind of heat, you know, you need to get indoors pretty quick. Texas heat is really bad right now.

Joel Saxum: You know, one thing I didn't know about this area out here west of Austin, like in the Hill country, it's actually really windy out here. Like there's a steady wind all the time that, and you don't hit [00:01:00] wind farms for another like three hours when you had West, like the first ones. But it's like, I lived in Houston and Texas and it was pretty dormant most of the time, but it, there's constant wind here as the temperatures change throughout the day.

All the time explains all the wind turbines. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, you sound like me when I moved to Denmark and I'm like, why do I have to live in this windy place? 

Allen Hall: So we have a birthday to celebrate and no, it's not Rosie's birthday. It's Nord Deck's birthday and it's celebrating their 40th anniversary and they've been around since 1985.

And some facts about Nordex that they published really interesting. They have developed 46 different onshore turbine types. Across the two companies, which was Nordex, SE, and Acciona. And That's amazing. So in 40 years, did those two companies now merge together A couple of years ago? Uh, is they have 46 different onshore term designs from 250 kilowatts up to seven megawatt machines.

Now Rosemary, I think this kind of high, [00:02:00] and congratulations to Nordex by the way. That's quite an achievement. It does highlight the rate of pace. For wind turbines from the mid eighties up till now. One new turbine a year is a lot. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And it's not the hugest company, right. It's not like they've got a hundred thousand employees developing those, uh, that one new turbine every year.

So, yeah. Um. Nobody's been sitting around on their hands at that company. 

Joel Saxum: They made it past the, is it, isn't it the rule of thumb, Alan? We talk about businesses like in the states, like if you make it past five years, you're, you're good 

Allen Hall: al almost right? So most companies fail within the first year to three years.

It's, it's hard to make it to three, then five, then 10. If you can make it across 10, you have something worthwhile. It's gonna stick around for a little bit. And, and Nordics has. 

Rosemary Barnes: What's weather guard at? 

Allen Hall: Uh, we're at. Almost 2020. 

Rosemary Barnes: Whew. An institution. 

Allen Hall: An institution. Yeah. We need to beat an institution at this point.

And over in the uk, uh, the [00:03:00] UK's Crown Estate. Now this is an important story everyone. The UK's Crown Estate is making major investment commitments, uh, to offshore wind with a 400 million pound. Funding Boost. And that's due to new legislation allowing, uh, the crown of state to borrow from the Treasury for the first time.

And so now the crown of State, which has its own money, used to be spending its own money on some of these projects. And of course there's some money coming into the crown of state for the plots of ocean where they're developing offshore winds. So there's money coming in, money coming out, uh, but. This is a big driver, right?

If the crowd of state can help fund some of these, uh, what they're talking about funding is some of the ports and infrastructure and making sure that the country is ready to develop, uh, offshore wind even faster than they are right now. Uh, it because they're really headed towards 20 to 30 additional gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, right?

So their thinking was they could power, what, 28 [00:04:00] million roughly UK homes. That is a enormous effort that in the United States you hear discussions about sovereign wealth funds and, uh, we mostly, and I were talking before the podcast, the United States doesn't have a sovereign, doesn't have wealth and surely doesn't have any funding to do that.

But it, it is a unique perspective that the crown of state can. Do this kind of effort and the impact it will have on the future of the uk. 

Rosemary Barnes: Why don't you have one? You've got lots of natural resources. That's usually how these sovereign wealth funds get stacked. Like Norway's is famous, even Australia's got a, a small one.

Not as big as it should be considering, um, how many resources we've got. Um, yeah, no. You know, the oil producing countries across the Middle East have them. Uh, yeah. The US is a net exporter of. Of, um, energy resources. So what are you doing with the royalties from that or, or [00:05:00] whatever. 

Joel Saxum: We spend all of our other money too quickly, so we don't even get, we burn through it too fast.

Rosemary Barnes: Do you even get, um, royalties from that? 'cause isn't it in the case, like, you know, based on my research I've done from watching say like Beverly Hillbillies, that's, you know, I understand the issue pretty, pretty deeply and on a, a serious, um, serious level, but. If you discover oil on your land, you own that oil, right?

It's not that like in Australia, if you were to discover oil on your land that you like, you, if you own land, you own from the surface up kind of. Um, whereas in. The, uh, yeah. And yeah, Australia owns everything, everything below it, so it wouldn't, you'd never be, you'd never get the, the Beverly Hill Billies couldn't have been set in Australia because they wouldn't have gotten that rich.

Joel Saxum: So the, the diff the diff like difference in the states is we, we treat mineral rights, which as we call 'em, as fee simple property. So you can, you can sell, like if I own this piece of land I sit on, I can sell the land, but I can also retain [00:06:00] the mineral rights as my property. Now the diff the difference is, is like, so in Canada the crown owns the, the subsurface.

So you would go through them to do things. But in the states, the only caveat to that is if it is actual federal land. So if it's bureau of land management owned land, or federally owned land and you're drilling on it, or you somehow got permission to drill on it then or stuff out off the continental shelf, like off offshore, right?

Then the government will get a percentage of it. But that stuff, I don't know where it goes, to be honest. It might go in the general fund, but there's a couple of, like the state of Alaska has its own sovereign fund. They have a thing called the permanent fund, and all of the oil and gas that gets done, work gets gun in Alaska.

It gets put into that permanent fund. And if you're a resident, then every tax season, the residents, depending on how that fund is doing, get a draw. And sometimes that draw is like. Man, it can be two to $6,000 a person. 

Rosemary Barnes: Your life's probably pretty, pretty [00:07:00] tough up there. They can probably use the help with their energy bills and stuff.

Transport 

Allen Hall: the latest numbers I've heard about the federal property or what, what the valuation of all this land is and what could be mined and drilled out of it is a hundred to $200 trillion. Does everybody hear similar numbers to that? It's a lot of money. That's, that's, that's a lot of money. So when the national debt comes up, you hear this discussion of, well, the US could sell a hundred trillion dollars worth of mineral rights and Sure.

Possibly, but it, it is, uh, a different proposition that if the US is gonna remain competitive with the world, things like what the UK are doing, gonna pull a lot of investment over there and. The UK is only second to China right now on offshore wind. That is remarkable. 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, they were first until recently, right?

It was China. China caught, caught up to them, not the other way around. 

Joel Saxum: And, and these investments like the crown investment here, that's not going like [00:08:00] into a wind farm that's going into supply chain build out, correct. 

Allen Hall: Right. It's going to do the infrastructure. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Is it grants or is it like a loan program or do we know that, or is it just kinda like, Hey, we have this fund available?

Phil Totaro: Well, so just, just to also clarify how the Crown Estate works, basically, they, they normally get money from, um, you know, they, as you said, they own, you know, seabed and, and certain rights in, throughout the uk. But what happens is the money that anybody gets, anybody pays for the leasing of that goes into a trust effectively.

The Crown estate and the government together kind of coadminister this trust. And then the crown estate, um, which is basically, you know, the royal family gets paid out of that trust fund on an annual basis. They get, they get a stipend.