Avient and Tight Line Composites have developed a carbon pultrusion technology without the need for peel ply. This method improves bond strength by 8%, cuts waste, reduces labor costs, and simplifies manufacturing.

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!

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

Allen Hall: Andrew and Brad, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Well, we’re gonna start off by talking about carbon protrusions, because that’s the focus of your technology, title IX composites, and there’s been some recent advancements that are really fascinating, but I, I kind of wanna go back a minute because carbon pull protrusions are the future, even though we’re still making some fiberglass blades that’ll have a limited lifespan.

We’re gonna be moving to carbon protrusions because the strength and the weight. And the cost, simplicity of it, uh, just makes carbon protrusions the future. And Tightline Composites has been key in that mold of making these, uh, carbon planks and getting ’em out to industry. I. But one of the big problems with any sort of carbon plank product is it [00:01:00] usually has a peel ply.

And Andrew, you wanna talk about what that peel ply does and why it’s used and why we need it. 

Andrew Davis: You really need that surface energy created by removing the peel ply to, to get an effective bond as you’re building your spark cap. And so for years, this has just been considered a necessary evil. Uh, in terms of creating, creating that effective bond.

And, and that’s, that’s the world we’ve lived in for the last 10 years. 

Allen Hall: And a peel ply for those who are not deep into the composite industry. Peel, ply is a removable. Ply a fabric that’s that’s applied over the carbon on the outside and it’s kind of thicker and it has, uh, this kind of rough and surface.

So when you build the protrusion, you got these two layers of this peel ply on either side, and it travels with the product. So as, uh, tight line sends out product, these, these peel plys go with it. [00:02:00] And ideally when they get to the factory, the, the people on the floor. Pull this peel play off and it’s not fun to peel off one and two, it’s kind of invisible.

So you can forget that it’s there and install it in ablaze. And Joel, you have seen that in the field. You’ve seen protrusions where they have the ply still attached. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s, it’s like, um, Alan, we saw one of the other day too, where it was like there was still a coating on a down conductor, right? So like, if you.

If you try to embed this product, the, the idea behind peel and the peel ply is you peel the peel ply, and now you have a prepped surface that can be chemically and mechanically bonded to easier or in, in, in, in a much better way, as designed. So if you forget to pull that off, now you have a structural element inside the PLA or inside of whatever you may be building in composites.

That doesn’t have the ability to bond properly to that protrusion, to that carbon plank or to that glass plank. Uh, and if that’s the case, you lose, I can’t [00:03:00] put a number to it. Right. But you lose an immense 

Andrew Davis: amount of structural strength. And Joel, just to underline your point, we’ve heard from customers who will remain nameless that it is, it, it happens that, that this will get caught on scan.

Uh, when the blade is completely done, and then the entire blade has to be scrapped. There’s no, there’s no fixing it. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. That, that, that gets expensive. Real quick, you’re talking about a hundred thousand dollars blades for onshore. Forget about offshore for a minute. An offshore blade, multi times, is that three or four?

Uh, so the, the, the, the engineering is right. The protrusion is the right answer and carbon is the right answer for blades, but it’s really comes down to getting. The peel ply and what, what do you wanna deal with that? ’cause the other part of the peel ply is you just create this waste cycle that peel ply gets just tossed into the garbage.

It’s not a recyclable thing, it’s one use and it’s done. So the, in the carbon protrusion world, if we can remove that peel ply, that is huge, [00:04:00]gigantic. However, it is been really hard to do that because there hasn’t been any technology to remove it, and we’ve been using it. Forever in aerospace and wind, and that’s where Brad comes in.

And Brad’s company has developed a way to eliminate the Peel ply, which is a huge cost savings and a labor savings and a, you know, a downstream savings. Brad, you wanna under describe the, what you’re bringing to Tightline and, and how this technology works. 

Brad Schmidt: So we do protrusion within Aviant as well, and we’ve developed this over the last four or five years and have been using it internally.

For our own glass profiles, um, in, in various markets, including wind. Um, but essentially, yes, have eliminated the need for these glass protrusions to, uh, you know, require peel, ply or alternatively sanding or some sort of grinding process prior to, um, adhesion. So the, it is, it is actually in the chemistry of the [00:05:00] resin system.

It’s not a surface treatment and it is throughout the part. Um, so if you cut the, you know, through apart that same adhesion, uh, you know, or bond strength will be realized throughout the, the Matrix. It’s not just on the surface. Um, so again, we’ve been using this in-house for a number of years. We’ve known the Tightline team for some time, and we approach them.

Late last year, uh, about six months ago, let’s say. And um, obviously there was a lot of interest in tightline. There was a lot of skepticism at first in that, uh, this would even work, but they were willing to give it a try. So we sent them a small batch of resin with this, call it an additive in it. They ran some trials and then we tested in our lab, uh, did the lap shear testing on a traditional, uh, carbon plank with peel ply.

And then a protruded plank without peel ply. With this new chemistry, we saw on average about an 8% [00:06:00] improved improvement in bond strength in the, with the chemistry versus the traditional peel ply, and a much tighter standard deviation in that bond strength. 

Joel Saxum: So let me, let me, let me get this straight. So you not only have removed waste, removed the cost of those, the procuring of the PO ply materials.

Increase the ability for manufacturing processes to be correct and at the same time have improved the strength of the bond. That’s right. 

Brad Schmidt: Yeah. I mean, um, and seems too good to be true, right? And we’re trying to find out where this doesn’t work, but, but we haven’t, yeah, we have not been able to poke holes in it yet.

Um, and then on the mechanical property side, uh, they’ve actually seen a slight improvement. Um, and in theory now without Peel ply, you can add a bit more carbon. Where the PO ply would’ve previously taken up space in the dye. Right. Um, and the additive is, is at a very low concentration, so it’s had no detrimental effects on any of the mechanical.

Properties. 

Allen Hall: That is amazing. So [00:07:00] obviously the first question that any composite engineer is gonna ask is, well, it, it’s a resin change, right? So I gotta requalify the material. But it’s not really a resin change are you’re still using the same resin system. Correct. So it is, it is it. Is it a magic powder or a chemical treatment to the existing resin system?

And I, you know, composite engineers are always weary of change, right? If they have something they, that they know, they tested, it’s been through all the processes and all the approvals, and now you wanna make a change. So the, the always the answer is no, which is crazy because if, if you’re improving it and you can show it and you have the data to back it up, and Ian’s gonna do that.

You can use the same resin system, just add a little bit of technology to it to remove peel ply, and, and that’s the approach. So it’s not a, um, it’s not a wholesale change in the resin system or the strength of the system. It is in the, the surface energy piece. That technology is pretty transferrable, right?

I mean, [00:08:00] pretty much anybody with an existing resin system can use this technology, right? 

Brad Schmidt: Yeah, absolutely. So we developed this originally in a vinyl Lester system. We’ve since proven it out in, um, developed it in polyester as well as epoxy, which is used in the, uh, the carbon poulation process for the planks.

Um. So it’s absolutely transferrable. Like I said, it’s at a very low concentration, so it is the same base resin system just with our, uh, you know, magic powder as you referred to. And I think 

Joel Saxum: I ask you a, a, a question that’s a little bit. Um, so we were talking about carbon protrusions and other kind of protrusion, cla protrusions and different vinyl es the things that you’ve done in the pultrusion space.

This is fantastic. However, let me ask you another question. If this is mixed with a resin system, where else can it be used? Can it be used in repairs? Could it be used in, I know like one of the things that happens in wind right now, Alan and I talked too about it regularly, is these root bushing pullout things and there’s a couple companies working on Gulf wind [00:09:00] technology.

We foresee there’s some people working on fixes for these. Could this be added to whatever resin systems they’re using and increase? And I’m thinking about that 8% strength in bond number. Can that be used as a repair methodology too? Yeah, without a doubt. 

Brad Schmidt: Um, and actually I say 8% that’s in the epoxy system.

In our vinyl ester and polyester, we see upwards of 10 to almost 15% in a lot of cases. So yes, for repair, and I think where it gets more exciting is, um, in blade infusion. Uh, and, and there’s, we are working through some infusion trials right now. We’ve only applied this to protrusion thus far, but in theory, there’s no reason this also doesn’t work in an infusion process.

Um, and not just for wind, I think about the marine industry too, where you’re infusing a boat haul and then going back and standing the entire inside of a hu before any adhesion. So, uh, yeah, we’re really excited about the potential here. Um, this is a trade secret, so we’ve been very selective with, you know, who we partner with and we’ve [00:10:00] known the tight line team for a number of years, and there’s a high degree of trust there.

And, um, but, but yes, to answer your question, repair. Infusion, you know, we, we wanna eliminate any secondary prep, peel, ply, grinding, et cetera, prior to, uh, bonding. 

Allen Hall: And Andrew, that’s gonna be great for Tightline. If you have an improved adhesion system with less stuff and less waste downstream, that’s a major advantage for Tightline.

Andrew Davis: It’s amazing. And, and I, I, you know, I don’t wanna say that we were skeptical, but, uh, the, the results were surprising and amazing in a, in a very happy way. And, um. I, you know, I, I think you hit the nail on the head, Joel, with the, you know, waste is obviously a big thing from a cost standpoint, from an environmental footprint standpoint.

There’s obviously labor cost improvements here. When you think about what one of these factories looks like, the, the peel ply is largely removed and automated process by a [00:11:00] machine that might at the same time also be chaing or whatever. Um. That’s not a hundred percent foolproof. And so you’ll have bits of peel ply that, that get stuck in there.

The machine will get gummed up and the peel ply will go everywhere. Those machines need to be maintained. You know, there’s, when you sort of add it up, there’s rework that’s caused by problems that are caused by peel, ply, and, and, and in extreme cases, scrap, um, you know, all that adds up to labor and, um. I and, and quality, right?

When you, when you sort of think about the scrap things, um, environmental e eventually you won’t need to. We, we talked to a customer who said, man, we just bought a bunch of machines to fuel ply. Like, why couldn’t you have told me this last month? Right? Um, but you know, you won’t have to buy those machines.

Um. I, you know, there’s some little subtle things like the nylon six six, that’s [00:12:00] the material that Peel ply is made out of. Um, there’s a couple things about that. It, it’s cut for each profile. There’s a fair bit of waste on our end of, oh, well we’re done with this profile. We now we need different one and this doesn’t fit.

Or We’re, we’re moving to different lengths and so these lengths don’t work anymore. We, we, on our end, throw out a fair bit of peel, ply as well. Really the historically, the only cost-effective source of Peel ply has been China. And so there’s a little bit of, you know, in the crazy world that we live in today, you know, geopolitical tariffs, all that kind of trade issues that come into play that, of course there’s peel ply in the United States for, for example, the aerospace industry.

But that’s a. Exponentially different price point. Um, so you know, all of this, when you sort of put this into the stew, it, it’s, it’s lower cost, higher quality, better manufacturability. And, and [00:13:00] for us that’s, that’s such a big deal because I, I mean, we’re the blast man standing in the independent carbon fiber plank protrusion game.

Everyone else who protrudes outside of China. Is a carbon fiber manufacturer, and we think, we continue to believe that there’s some value in, in, in that independence. But, um, it, and from, from our standpoint, we need to show, we need to show value to the OEM and everyone, everyone knows the, the financial pressures that the OEMs are under.

Um, in our corner of the universe, an enormous amount of carbon fiber supply has come online in China. That’s being protruded in China. And you know, that’s a very, that’s for the carbon blades, to your point, that being the future, that’s 40% of the cost of some of these blades. And so if you, if you’re in cost reduction mode, where are you gonna look?

[00:14:00] Well, this is by far the biggest single cost point in a blade. China looks pretty tempting. And, um, from a conversion cost, turning that fiber into plank, we are absolutely competitive with anywhere in the world because there’s just not much labor cost in it. Um, and in what we do, um, however, you know, we’re kind of in the game of TA taking all of the non-China fiber and turning it into, you know, we.

We, we continue to believe that that OEMs will not go 100% all in on a China supply chain, and they’re gonna need someone to produce that plank. You know, that’s, that’s great. But we still, we still have to be at a competitive point from a total value standpoint. And I think that’s what the partnership with Avian, why that’s amazing is because all these things that.

We’re talking about really add up to, you know, value for [00:15:00] the OEM, the lowering cost increase in quality. Those are. You know, there’s, there’s plenty of, been plenty of quality issues that, you know, add up to cost. Uh, and, um, and I think we hit both of those hot button issues with this. So I we’re really excited.

Joel Saxum: I think this is a really timely discussion. Um, Andrew, Alan, Brad, we’re sitting here talking about this because last night Alan and I had a conversation about innovation in wind in the United States, and there’s a certain OEM, uh, rhymes with, uh, shmi. Uh, that, that gave $50 million to MIT for wind based or for renewables based research.

Right. So we were thinking about what could we do with $50 million? Where does this money in research and US based wind innovation that can be actioned now? Right? That can be something that’s not. Pie in the sky, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years into future research. While that stuff is good, we know that we need things that can change the way the [00:16:00] wind industry works today.

And that is lowering costs, making things more efficient, making things better, which is what this is. So it’s really, it’s ah. I’m excited about this conversation and you can kind of hear it, my voice right now, just simply because we’re seeing innovation happen in the United States with US-based companies that can change, uh, the competitiveness of US-based product in the wind market, but also lift that whole wind market, right?

Like this is something that can change the way things are done, that can make more us more competitive in the way we, uh, build blades and make them, and, you know. Ideally, right? We have a better, better product in the field, less RCAs for, for, uh, liberated blades and such in the field. Um, so I guess my, my next question for you guys is you’ve been, you, you, you have this partnership, avian developing the technology.

Tight line, putting it out into the field or putting it, you know, in front of clients in the field. What have you [00:17:00] received from feedback, from your, you know, basically market entry process? Like, have you been talking with blade manufacturers or OEMs and what are they saying back to you guys about the product?

Andrew Davis: I would 

Joel Saxum: say 

Andrew Davis: I, you know, it’s impossible to, these guys live the world of peel ply every day. It’s impossible to, to, to, to not. Uh, simultaneously be really excited to know more, but also really skeptical. Right? And, uh, so, uh, we had some, Brad and I, and, and our colleagues had some great meetings at JEC. Um, we’ve had some follow up since then.

We’ve got samples in the hands of, uh, a number of customers. They’re gonna go through the same testing that we’ve gone through, and I, you know, our. Our point of view on this, ultimately it’s, it’s the, the OEM’s decision. But is that you, you look at what this spark cap without peel [00:18:00] ply looks like, and you look at what the spark cap with, you know, made with peel ply looks like.

And I, I think you’re gonna see certainly not a worst part, but you know, probably a little bit better part. Um, and, and. Way easier to manufacture, um, you know, with lower total cost, better value. And I, you know, that’s, um, you know, I, I think, you know, that leads to a, this is a like, for like drop in kind of replacement and, um.

But, but that’s their call. And, and they’ll go through that testing and, um, and so that, that’s the phase we’re in now. Um, but I I, it, it, it was fun. I mean, you know, these meetings, if, if you’re in our position and you have these meetings with OEMs, it’s it, we’re talking about price and competitiveness and.[00:19:00]

This kind of stuff and to be able to talk about something that really sort of adds, adds a lot of value as something new and innovative was, I, it, it was a real personal highlight, I think, for everyone in the room. 

Allen Hall: So let me hit you with the three F’s form, fit and function. Every engineer when they make a change like this, wants to know if any of those have changed.

Is there any change to the form, fit or function because you, the peel ply has been removed. I guess you can add a little bit more carbon to it, make it stronger. To cover up the difference. 

Andrew Davis: It’s super small, but yes, you, you, if you, if you want the same properties in a slightly smaller form, that, that’s obviously what, what you’d get if you just use the same mold.

Um, if, if you want something with slightly higher properties, a little beefier, um, fill up that mold that you know and, and. Uh, that, that’s doable too. Right? So I, it’s really, uh, I, I think it’s [00:20:00] gonna be their call, but I assume they’re gonna want something that’s. More or less the same thing. 

Allen Hall: So then what are the next steps here are, are we going to be going through a, a certification like with DNV?

Is that where the OEMs are headed to, to get a, a stamp on it for the product? Or is it OEM by OEM or even operator by operator? I know operators would be really interested in this technology. 

Andrew Davis: I think it’s gonna be OEM by OEM. Um, and I think I, I, I, I, I, I think it will depend on their particular view of how.

How much of a drop in is this right? And, um, uh, but the, the testing, the standard testing that, you know, we’re all able to do, um, I, I think will give them enough to go on to say, Hey, you know, there may be some other confirm confirming things we want to do, but wow, this is a, this is a big difference. 

Joel Saxum: I see it in that build to spec market.

I. [00:21:00] The built to print. Yes. Then you have to go through the OEM and all these things and that’s, that’s fantastic. But that built to spec market where every one of these blade manufacturers is looking for that little leg up to make them more profitable, better margins, better product, those guys are gonna jump on this thing.

I would imagine. So I 

Brad Schmidt: think one other thing, you know, I didn’t mention earlier, but has come up is shelf life. Um, and we have done testing on, uh, glass protrusions, like I said, that we’ve been making for years with this technology. And, and after 12 months, there’s no fall off in properties and adhesive properties.

We’re working toward 24 months. But, uh, we don’t expect any change. 

Andrew Davis: I, I think on the, on the finer points, uh, you know, just to emphasize another point Brad made earlier is there’s, there’s way less variability. In the, um, you know, with Peel ply, you there, there’s a lot of variability when you rip that peel, ply off.[00:22:00]

Um, this, this really cuts it down by or order of magnitude. 

Allen Hall: Well, that’s the trouble now is that we’ve reduced the margins that you’ve talked to blade designers, the margins that come down considerably, and they’re really relying upon that carbon to do majority of the work. So improving that adhesion into the blade itself.

Gets rid of some of those margin concerns. Now you have a consistency, which is where everybody’s driving to right now. All the blade manufacturers are really trying to get the process honed in so that blades are repeatable. Time after time. This is where Tightline comes in and Ian’s technology to make this easier on blade manufacturers.

Now, if you’re a blade manufacturer, you need to get a hold of Tightline and Andrew that I guess they’ll be calling you. How did they do that? And even operators for that sense. How do operators get ahold of you to find out about the technology? 

Andrew Davis: I, you, you can find us at, at tightline composites.com and, uh, call, call our office in St.

Louis, Missouri. We’re, uh, you know, right, right in the middle of the country, uh, doing business with our, our [00:23:00] fellow domestic partner here. And, uh, it’s, um, uh, I. You know, we, we, we would love to have those conversations. Um, and I think, you know, to, to, to toot Brad sworn a little bit that I, you know, we are over the moon about this opportunity at Tightline, but I, I, our heads spin when you think about all the other applications that you could apply this to.

I mean, we we’re a little bit of a one trick pony at our, at, at tight. We’re very, we’re very focused. Um, but, uh. Boy, um, you know, infusion, uh, in wind and, and everything else is, is. Unbelievable. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. Brad, is your phone ringing off the hook and how do people get ahold of you? 

Andrew Davis: I 

Brad Schmidt: silenced it for the podcast, so not yet, but 

Allen Hall: good move.

Brad Schmidt: Um, yeah, I mean, so avian.com Avian is a, you know, material science innovation company, global, global company, uh, headquartered near [00:24:00] Cleveland, Ohio. The, uh, our protrusion business called Glass Forms is in Birmingham, Alabama. Um, but you can navigate to our composites division, um, you know, at, within the website.

I’m also on LinkedIn and so, uh, connect to a lot of people through LinkedIn. But, uh, we’d love to talk about whether it’s, you know, protrusions aside from the carbon plank. We do, you know, and have pretty extensive pultrusion capability there in Alabama, or if it’s the resin chemistry itself and how it could be applied to other processes.

We’re, uh. Looking forward to having those conversations. 

Allen Hall: Wow. This has been a tremendous discussion. I’ve learned a lot and protrusions are definitely the future. We just need to make them simpler, less labor intensive, and we need to move forward. So this is exciting. And Brad and Andrew, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Thank you for having us. Thank you. It’s [00:25:00] fun.

Blade Repair Academy in Tennessee offers comprehensive blade repair training programs for technicians. Alfred Crabtree, Founder and CEO, and Sheryl Weinstein from SkySpecs highlight the importance of technician competency, hands-on experience, and standardization in the wind industry.

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!

Allen Hall: Alfred and Sheryl, welcome to the program.

Sheryl Weinstein: Thanks.

Allen Hall: So we’re in Dunlap, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, uh, and also close to. Chattanooga Chattanooga, and we’re in the Smoky Mountains ish region.

We’re

Alfred Crabtree: no, we’re, we’re, you could consider it Appalachia for sure. Sure. Okay. Uh, we’re on the, in the valley called the Seche Valley, uh, which splits the Cumberland Plateau. So we’re, we’re in a valley and we have hills a thousand feet above us here. Yeah. Either way. It’s beautiful.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s a great drive in here.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. It’s a unique place. Yeah.

Allen Hall: And we’re at Blade Repair Academy, which, uh, if you’re not familiar with Blade Repair Academy, you should be. Uh, because a lot of the good training that happens in the United States actually happens to play repair, repair Care blade, repair academy. Uh, yeah, it’s been a long week at uh, OMS this week and we got the introduction today.

This is the first time we’ve been on site. That’s right. And, uh, we wanted to see all the cool things that are happening [00:01:00] here. And it really comes down to technician training competency. Working with blades, working with tools, knowing what you’re doing up tower when you’re on the blade, which is hard to train.

It’s really hard to train, and both you and Cheryl have a ton of experience being up on blades and repairing blades and scarfing and doing all the critical features that have to happen to make blades work today. It’s a tough training regimen. There’s a lot to it and a lot of subtleties that don’t always get transferred over from teachers to students unless you have.

Done it for a number of years. You wanna kind of just walk through the philosophy of Blade Repair Academy?

Alfred Crabtree: Yes. The, uh, you’ve, you’ve outlined quite well some of the issues. The environment where we work is very hard to take a ti the time to put somebody through a training regimen. We’re so constrained by weather windows and then.

You know, even if the weather’s nice, lightning can come, wind [00:02:00] speeds can cut off your workday. So production, production, production is what’s important. And Cheryl and I both come from the rope access method. And in the rope access method, 95% of the time you’re up there alone. And if you’re up there and you’re producing, you’ve got your blinders on.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: And you’re not ready to share with somebody else what to do.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: With the basket or platform, you can have two even three people up on Blade, but it still has all these constraints of get the job done, get the job done. There’s a lot of stress up there. And having the bandwidth to take on new information or to challenge some preconceived notions or try, that’s not the place to do it.

So knowing that. Blade Repair Academy is built so that we have an environment that simulates all of the up tower stuff without being up tower. And you’re gonna have the time you need to invest in your learning without consequences. Right. So it’s a very much a [00:03:00] about creating the right environment to uptake the new information.

And we have found a lot of help from. Manufacturers and suppliers in the industry to sponsor us because obviously it behooves them to have their materials in the hands of trainees. So we’re also able to help companies come up with, uh, new solutions, try new products.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: New, uh, you know, what’s the best practice.

For this, if you’re up on Blade and you have a way of top coating and you get a new product and your way of top coating doesn’t suit that product, well chuck it down. I’ll never touch it again. Yeah. Because I did not perform well here we can, we can give you training. We have, of course, been trained by the suppliers about what’s the best product to use, what’s the best way to go about things, and then, and then we can disseminate it.

So that’s the fundamental reason why the space is. Is [00:04:00] what it is.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I think that that’s, that’s a good segue to be honest with you, right here, right behind these doors you have a classroom. That’s right. Right. So in this facility, all composed in one, we have a classroom here we have your additive and subtractive.

I liked how you said that to us when you’re giving us the tour. Uh, but we’ve got a, a grinding booth basically over here and we’ve got, um, a layup area here where you can teach. 16 people at a time.

Alfred Crabtree: That’s right. Yeah. That would be max

Joel Saxum: for sure.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah.

Sheryl Weinstein: And in a vertical surface, so, ’cause all the stuff that you’re doing in the field, right, is always in a vertical surface.

Mm-hmm. So there’s a, there is a big difference between working where gravity is sort of against you, especially with larger laminations and things like that. So being able to do your training and simulate the same, a similar way that you would work in the field is pretty critical, I would think.

Allen Hall: And actually working on.

Actual repairs. Simulated repairs, yeah. Mm-hmm. Now, don’t explain how you created them, because I know secret sauce. It’s a secret sauce. Yes. But I did look at the blade [00:05:00] damage. It, it looks exactly like a lightly strike. Yeah. Which a predominant amount of repairs are about, unless there’s, you know, serial defects, as Cheryl has pointed out numerous times, but.

Being able to repair something that’s quasi real is critical because we’ve been to other places and the repairs are, well, I’ll take a hammer and I’ll hit this and, okay, sure you got a DA, you gotta repair that. But that’s not real. And getting, getting the people to use the tools in the right way, vertically

Speaker 2: mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: Is the key. Because although the, the, the article, the test sample isn’t moving around like you are up on a blade, it’s still difficult. And unless you have the proper techniques and the approaches, yeah, it’s gonna be dang near impossible. We explain some of the blade repairs that Joel and I have seen more recently is like.

It’s a little rough and it shouldn’t have to be so rough because it is a skill that you have to learn and acquire over time. But you have to know the fundamentals. That’s what Blade Repair Academy is here to teach you those [00:06:00] fundamentals. Like, yes, it’s gonna take time, but if you work it this way, at least you’re gonna be successful.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. And if you’re managing a team of employees who are doing this, it, it would be great to have the insight of what your teams. Strengths and weaknesses are, yeah, you can figure out how to deploy people, but also how to, you know, maybe fix some of those problems. Mm-hmm. Our panels that you brought up are standardized.

Everyone looks exactly the same. It’s the exact same makeup, and we standardize the damage. So when somebody has to repair damage here, the core removal size is the same on everyone. That way when we’re comparing the reports, you can actually have a apples to apples comparison of the, the trainees. Outcome.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: And now you, you know, in, in the model that you talked about where people will go to a, you know, their junkyard of blades and they’ll find spots on blades to put their eight guys on. Those eight people are not gonna be doing the same repair. And even if they are collecting data, what are you [00:07:00] comparing?

It’s not

Joel Saxum: apples to apples. Yeah. It’s not.

Alfred Crabtree: So we really tried to start from the beginning, fresh with a whole new idea of how to approach this. Mm-hmm. By not being attached to an ISP, we don’t have to deal with. Oh, here, use all our leftovers. Yeah. Yeah. That’s your training budget. Yeah. Yeah. And oh yeah. We, you know, we’re an, we’re a owner operator, so yeah.

Go work on that blade in the grass. Mm-hmm. That those limit what precious time we have available to train. Yeah. So this thing from the ground up is about. Making as much advance in the skillset and understanding that technician in the, in the week that they’re here.

Joel Saxum: I think that was a really cool thing we touched on as well.

Your, your team here as well, Cheryl. Thanks for traveling up to, to hang out with us. Offer some insights too. But you guys, because you’ve been in the people that have developed a curriculum yourself, Cheryl, your, some of your team sitting over here, uh, and, and people around the industry that have helped out with the place, you have the ability of like, okay, we have.

Eight brand new technicians. Let’s make [00:08:00] sure we walk through how to measure from the trailing edge to the blade center up, mark this thing out, these kind of things all the way to some stuff that I didn’t really think about that much. Like I’ve used an angle grinder before, right? But I’ve never looked at five different ones and decided which one would be the best for my hands.

Thinking about it up on the blade, how you’d handle it with your fingers, these kind of things like, I was like, man, that’s, those are real insights that you’re not gonna get to learn. Like why put someone up to let them have a whole season or a whole summer, two summers figuring out how to hold a grinder?

Well, when they can learn from someone that’s been doing it for years and years and years and can teach them these things. So from advanced or from very beginners learning fundamentals to advanced training, you guys have gotta cover here.

Alfred Crabtree: There’s something here to glean for everybody, and even if you are a well experienced technician, maybe what you’re gonna get most is learning how to talk the language of the new techs and the new hires who are getting the.

Introductory course training. You know, our, our el our basic course is called support. It’s 40 hours [00:09:00] and it’s really about making, uh, an employee who can support a lead. And then if that person follows up with the lead training in a whatever interval of time of their choice, which is kind of another benefit here, we can train you any week of the year.

That is where we start to really get this, we call it the retention vortex. Right where we layer up technician training and somebody who’s had level two now gets a level one with them. Now there’s some synergies. Now they’re getting some really efficiencies. A commonality of language, a commonality of process, you know, eliminating variables.

Uh, and that’s how you’re gonna have to build new net capacity and build new teams

Allen Hall: and that common language. Is really unique, but that comes from your experience in the field, mostly at rope partner, where you both really got your teeth in this industry.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: But communicating to one another correctly so you can pass along to the next crew or even explain what you did to the engineer, the.

Properly [00:10:00] there is. There is a culture to it. There is a language to it, and you just don’t pick that up. By going from wind turbine to wind turbine. You pick it up in training from someone who knows how to do it. It’s really critical.

Sheryl Weinstein: It’s pretty critical to have baseline training. I think it is also very important to follow it up with field experience and skills building because every blade model is different.

Every repair is different. You’re always gonna encounter something that deviates from that like standard approach to your repair. You have to kind of know how to problem solve, and that kind of only comes with the field experience, but having a more standardized training to start with, it’s something that industry doesn’t really have and is really needed.

I think across the board it also helps, you know. Owner operators or even OEMs kind of track their ISPs and understand what level of text do you have, what experience do they have and how, how does that differ across their different [00:11:00] levels? If we have one ISP training one way over here and another one training another way over here, and they have different sets of certifications.

It’s really hard to keep that all together and evaluate it as an owner operator or an OEM, you know, using a vendor. So I think having a place like Blade Academy that’s agnostic and separate from like, you know, the actual ISP really helps to standardize that a bit more.

Allen Hall: Yeah, because the key is we’re getting to, well, we’re gonna cross a hundred thousand turbines in the United States pretty quickly.

Yep.

Joel Saxum: Before 2030, or probably rated about 2030.

Allen Hall: Right. That’s. Soon. Mm-hmm. How are we gonna manage that? And there’s a lot of new people coming into the industry, obviously. How are we gonna train ’em up properly? How are we gonna communicate to one another? And there’s just so much movement in the industry. I.

It makes it hard, I think, because weirdly enough, I think ISPs develop their own little culture about how to deal with things, and then they hop to the next company and it’s a different language. Exactly. And that needs to go away. Yeah. There’s a,

Alfred Crabtree: there’s a branch of business that’s [00:12:00] OEM centric and there’s a branch of business that’s asset owner.

Yeah. Post warranty. And those are really two different things. And, and there’s a veil of secrecy between one and the other. Yeah. And we kind of feel here at Blade Repair Academy that we’re like this polyglot that can talk to everybody because we don’t have, we’re not an ip You’re not competing, we’re not an O You’re not competing.

Yeah, we’re not competing. But we, we, you know, we have the, we wanna provide this data as a clearinghouse. You know, we talk about certification in the non standards. Well, the way we deal with it is we’ll give you a certificate. And it’s got our brand on it. But you know, what does that mean? Yeah. What? That And $4 will get you a Starbucks the way we do it, maybe not even then.

Right? The way, the way we, not four bucks

Sheryl Weinstein: for Starbucks, maybe 10

Alfred Crabtree: and a half hour wait in the line. But the way you know, what we do is we provide you with a deliverable. We knew, we knew that. Okay. Our certification is, you know, ether.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: But [00:13:00] this report. That everybody who comes through here generates that you can compare.

Now you’re gonna have to go to work and study these reports when you get ’em as a deliverable.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: As a, you know, an employer, but we we’re giving you what you need. Mm-hmm. To make some decisions about what do I have to work on, what else do we need to improve upon?

Allen Hall: Yeah. Not everybody’s built for this job, but you wanna be able to suss that out.

Earlier rather than later. Yeah. Right. I mean, there’s other things to do with wind turbines that don’t evolve blade repair. And if they don’t necessarily have the skillset or the comprehension to do some of these more complex things, maybe blade repair is not it. Right. But rather know that now. Yeah.

Right. And the Blade Repair Academy is a place to do that because there’s a standard there, right? Mm-hmm. And I, I, as Joel has pointed out, yeah, there’s a lot of erratic training that goes on. Mm-hmm. You can’t compare student A to student Z. Blade repair academy. You can.

Alfred Crabtree: We can. Mm-hmm. Right.

Allen Hall: And if, if I’m an ISP, I want that.

Sure. I want you to tell me [00:14:00] who’s on top and who’s kind of the middle so I can make decisions about where to deploy ’em and who and who to put ’em with.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. ’cause at the end of the day, every ISP, uh, every ISP that’s trying to grow and scale effectively is trying to do that at the end of the year, right?

Yeah. They’re looking through, they’re grading their technicians, finding out who’s the next lead, who’s this, who’s that? But this is a great way to do that, sort them through in a controlled setting. I mean, we sat in, in your training facility in the actual classroom here, and you walked us through some of the online, the online training platform that you have built.

Some of the things the students have to do before they get here, and then kind of how you walk ’em through things, and it’s impressive. It’s good stuff, right? So when you have that combined with the both sides of blade repair, subtractive, additive, right? You get to get this, this holistic view of what that blade technician can do.

Yeah. Right? And that’s, that’s one of the things you guys offer here, which I think is fantastic.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. And we’re trying to constantly improve, you know, we’re talking with OEMs about dissemination of operating procedures or work instructions, share with us [00:15:00] work instructions. We’ll build analogs. That we can train to.

Mm-hmm. And we can test off of it. We can verify skill sets. You know, we have a lot of serial flaw campaigns out there that are critical. And do we wanna unleash anybody on it or do we want to know that those people can do it? I think everybody wants to know that they can do it, whether they’re the.

Technician themselves, or the person writing the checks.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: Everywhere in that loop wants to Now not everybody wants to pay for it. Yeah. But we all need it.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Alfred Crabtree: And so somewhere along the line, you’re paying for it in the forms of our favorite acronym, COPQ. That’s

Joel Saxum: right. Cost support, quality. You know, speaking about the idea of serial defects or known problems in the industry and how to prepare people for those, how do you prepare people for those?

Well, they gotta get the experience by just. Grinding away Top coat and getting into him. I walked in here and I looked at this blade sample we have here, and I was looking at it and I go, it looks like a 48.7 C Oh yeah. Buddy walks over you like our 48.7 C I’m like, [00:16:00] man, you guys did a good job on, you know, like, so, so I made a lot of money on 48.7, you know, so to walk in here and see these different tickets that you guys have built, you know, carbon plank and different things with carbon spars and hey, we’re gonna do a carbon spa repair.

We have this boom, now we can work on it. Mm-hmm. You know, and we’ll

Alfred Crabtree: work with you to solve your problem in a really quick, efficient manner. Mm-hmm. You know, I think one of the things that we have is operational readiness. Most people who are training in-house flip their hat around for a couple weeks and train composites.

Mm-hmm. In a limited capacity in the warehouse or at the dock at the truck during January. During January, whatever. And then they flip their hat back on and they go deal with it. And I think the hiring situation is so tough. Like working at Height, you probably need to make sure somebody can tolerate working at height.

Yeah. Before you invest in composite training, I mean. You have so many things you have to juggle in your particular situation. When do I put money in this person? We get that. [00:17:00] And so we’re open all the weeks of the year. So we can do this at any time. Of course, everyone wants it in the end of first quarter.

Mm-hmm. You know, right before the season starts. So we have a, you know, you have to, you gotta schedule with us, but we can really do this anytime. And so you don’t have to one and done and live with it.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Alfred Crabtree: You know, it. You can fit the training into your hiring schema wherever you feel fit, and you can hire people.

And if there are stars, bring them in for their secondary, they’re execute their lead training whenever you want. You know, so you can, we can be very flexible and in the advanced stages we will make what you need, you know, obviously has to make business sense for us, but we’ll make blades to replicate the problems you’re facing.

Sheryl Weinstein: And I think in terms of like what you were saying when you’re working on, you knows whether we wanna call them recurring issues or serial defects. A lot of it is awareness, right? It’s awareness [00:18:00] of understanding the blade structure, at least at a basic level. It’s awareness of understanding what you’re looking at.

It’s, you know, we’re only gonna better inform the industry and the OEM if our technicians have a level of awareness to sort of bring up things that they see as they’re doing repairs. So if they notice that, for example, the, the fibers are misaligned, right? That could indicate that that was a wrinkle, and them having that level of communication or documentation will only help then inform the OEM.

Like, is this the reason behind that problem? And so I think like. You know, with Alfred and, and the curriculum here at Blade Academy, them kind of, you know, setting a standard for how, how you know, the structure of the blade, the different types of blades you may see, whether they have carbon fiber in them, or you know, fiberglass, UD spars.

Where those things are located, [00:19:00] what to be aware of as you’re removing damaged material. It’s really critical to the overall quality and just the awareness of the tech on the blade and that feedback loop that we’re lacking so much in this industry.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and we have our boilerplate products that come from, you know, like, uh, Cheryl was my mentor at RP and wrote partner, and she taught me a lot and a lot of the.

The, the way we do things here comes from the rope, a rope access paradigm, which, you know, actually is backward compatible because if with rope access, you’re doing things alone.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Alfred Crabtree: So if we’ve have ways and, and processes that allow that to happen alone, then when you’re on a basket or a platform with an extra person, you can only benefit Yeah.

That much easier. Yeah. Um, it’s where we come from, you

Joel Saxum: know, and, and that’s a good point, right? Like when we’re sitting here, rip Blade Repair Academy. Alfred, you’re here. Cheryll, you’re joining us today. These are two X blade technicians that have been on all kinds of blades. They have been up and down on ropes.

So it’s training by [00:20:00] trainers who have been the technicians that’s important. Who have seen the problems. Yeah, yeah. You know, who have lived, have lived that road life. We talked, you’re joking about living in hotels, right? Mm-hmm. Like that have done, gone through that, right? So you’re learning from people that aren’t just like, oh, I hate the idea of going to a university and learning HR or something, whatever, from someone who’s never done it in the real world.

Yeah. You know, uh, the trainers here have done it in the real world, um, and it shows.

Alfred Crabtree: Thanks, man. And you know, the other thing too is our tagline is practical and contemporary. And the thing is, I’m no longer contemporary. Like I left the field years ago. I rely on folks like Cheryl, who’s still in the, in the Blade Services game over there at Skys Specs.

She’s on, she’s got a full subscription to the cereal floss that are out there.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Probably the best one in the industry, to be honest with you.

Alfred Crabtree: Well, you know. Uh, I think so. I don’t know anything about serial flaw, but it’s, it’s input from the rest of the industry that’s gonna allow this to continue.

Otherwise, we’re gonna be, you know, [00:21:00] a 10-year-old standard that isn’t relevant anymore and that’s not what we want to do. So, outreach like Cheryl and I are talking about, Hey, what is it in your product line that should be in our product line? And I want to talk to OEMs and, uh. Owner operators, you know, what is it?

What are your pain points? What in your fleet is needing attention? And of course, we’re gonna do all this with the business case, right? Mm-hmm. Like we wanna take LEP products and place them head to head and give a two day clinic or seminar to stakeholders, to purchasers. You know, we wanna give our, our two, our five day course condensed into two days.

Where people who are stakeholders who are making decisions about where to place technicians, they should get out here and gr and grind a little bit and get a little empathy for their position. Hard work. The hard work of the

Sheryl Weinstein: hard work that it is. Yeah. And then kind of understand

Alfred Crabtree: from another side where the [00:22:00] communication breakdown is.

’cause it’s, it’s not all the texts, right? Mm-hmm. You know, they have a, you gotta understand how heavily loaded they are, you know, when they’re in the field. Mm-hmm. Um, so we’re, we’re at the place now where we’re really looking to do some outreach and talk to, uh, regulatory bodies that are starting to come up with standards, right?

Like the IEC group met and pro produce a draft standard and they’re gonna work on the repair standard. And that’s a, a little bit of a ways away, but I can’t sit around and wait for, for standards to come to me. So we got this thing started. If you build it, they will come. You guys came, you know, Cheryl came and, um.

We we’re really proud of where we’re at, but at the same time, it’s like, okay guys, the rest of the industry, now we’re here. Now you need to know, now you need to take advantage of us. Mm-hmm. And help tell us what you need. So I think the

Sheryl Weinstein: LEP thing is a really good call out because I do see a lot of customers questioning what do I choose?

How do I know [00:23:00] what to choose? Absolutely. Should my vendor be telling me what to choose? And that’s what happens in many cases, is that the ISP just kind of tells the owner operator. This is what you should use. Well, why, and, and what, you know, how have we ever really sized up like one against the other?

Like in any true, I don’t know, study? No. And a lot of the, a lot of the like. Those different types of LEP, the, the companies that you know have these, they don’t have a lot of good documentation on showing like how their products stand up. I mean, it’s kind of, it’s more theory based than anything. I mean, they put ’em through rain erosion tests and whatever, but.

It’s, I feel like that’s a tough space. It’s also a very, like, um, a very tough scope of work to have high quality at. So more training around it is necessary. You know, repair companies don’t wanna use their high skilled repair techs for the LEP because they need them for the more complex repairs [00:24:00] yet. The LEP is so susceptible to quality issues, and if you’re gonna pay an extreme amount of money to, you know, put the LEP to fix your erosion, put the LEP on blades, hope for a performance improvement, and then it fails in a year.

I. That’s no help to anybody. So these different products, they also come with different price points. Like, can we really value the shell over the coating? I, I just find that this is a tough space. And so doing something like that and doing more training around LEPI think is probably pretty important. Yes.

You know, unless the robots are gonna take it over and then, well, even then, I think it’s the only app.

Allen Hall: The application, that’s the variable there. And not having people trained up for that particular LEP product is a huge problem because it’s super risky. You’re risking all that money and time and having to do it all over again and removing LEP that has been improperly applied.

It’s a nightmare. [00:25:00] Nightmare. Total nightmare. You don’t want that to happen. And I’ve seen sites where that’s happened, getting technicians. Trained properly for the right material and doing that here up in Tennessee is, is the right approach. It’s risk reduction, which is what the industry is in right now.

Risk reduction.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. Yeah, we, we’ve beliefs. That’s a great way to put it. You know, if you hire somebody. We were talking earlier how there are like two models. One is like the New York Yankees, where you’re going to be buying all the expensive free agents. You can poaching people from other, you know, trying to get experienced talent.

You’re paying a premium for them, but you aren’t gonna know until halfway through that season how that person is performing. Yeah. You know, that is a lot of. That was, that is a lot of variability that you could control. Mm-hmm. And in a seasonal business, those weeks are really multiplied by two or three.

Right. In terms of like the impact on your revenue and your opportunity to make money. It’s risk reduction, like Alan was saying. Yeah. It’s

Allen Hall: all risk, right? Yeah. And the, [00:26:00] the way that the industry is moving and the pace at which is moving right now, risk reduction starts to move to the top five years ago.

We do a lot of risky things because we’re making money. Interest rates are low and, but today we cannot afford to do that. And if you watch the industry change right now, it is gonna be more focused than ever in having proper technicians on site that they complete the job that they were intended to do.

Precisely, accurately, and once, not twice. Once. Yeah. And that is gonna be the marker of the, whether this industry grows or not. Mm-hmm. And that’s why Blade Repair Academy is needed so much. Now, Alfred, how do you interface with the ISPs, OEMs, and the operators in terms of getting people out here? How do they, how do they push that button and say, Alfred, I’m gonna send you 40 technicians next week.

How does that, how does that go? I don’t quite have that down

Alfred Crabtree: yet. But, uh, you know, it, we talked earlier, it’s a small world. You know, blade repair is small. There [00:27:00] we mentioned if you, there’s a hundred people in the industry you need to know and then you’ve covered it. Um, our, I think we’ve been, we’ve been kind of riding this new wave of like, oh, who’s this new kid on the block?

And, and we can kind of be quiet and still are mysterious. And I pop up at a conference and host a round table or whatever. Uh, so far. It’s mainly been our personal network, which is large enough in this gig to, to get people in. ISPs are much more likely to do it small is ISPs are much more likely to do it.

Owner operators, they’re trying to build their training centers. They have a little different, that’s a different model though. It’s a different model. Um, they’re, they’re tougher to get. So primarily it’s been ISPs. We have definitely a, a, a curriculum for new hires, right? We call it support, but we’re [00:28:00] reluctant to go sell that to the street or to the public.

Like, Hey, enter the industry here, because we don’t quite yet have that, you know, guarantee that people will recognize our certificate and. Use it to hire people. I don’t quite have that system in place. However, I have so much interest from the Department of Labor to support us in creating an occupation.

They want us to build apprenticeship programs. We need corporate sponsor, we need a big employer or to to buy in, and then we can create an apprenticeship program. Then we can find public money for people to get some support to get into a new, a new industry. So, well, they

Allen Hall: need to come out here. They need to come out to Dunlap.

And visit the facilities, talk with you, understand what the philosophy is, see it up close. There’s a lot of them have been to other places. Sure. And see what the differences are here. And, and that’s gonna be the decision maker. They’re gonna see what the product walking out the door is and [00:29:00] go into the classroom and, and get the grinder, right?

Yes. Get, get your hands dirty a little bit. Yeah. And realize, yes, this is what I was looking for to begin with. I just couldn’t find it. And I found it here in Tennessee.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, I, I think you’re right. And, and we, we are slowly, you know, bringing people in that we know, like the reason why y’all are here and some other folks have visited us this week is because o and m was in Nashville.

And I was like, come on, come on. We’re only two hours away. We’ll buy you lunch. Come on. Pretty place. Yeah. You have to see this place to understand it because we are sort of, you know, outsiders, right? I mean, we’re, we’re from the, the industry, but we’re not. We’re not a spinoff of any company. We’re not a division of an ISP.

We’re totally organic and unique in a, in a part of the world that doesn’t have any wind. So, yeah. Uh, but once you get here, you get it. The economics make sense. You know, we couldn’t do what we’ve done anywhere else as cheaply as we’ve done, which means we feel like we’re super value rich for what you’re paying and for the amount of time that you’re spending [00:30:00] here.

Allen Hall: Oh, 100%. Uh. Let’s give the ISPs, the OEMs and the operators, uh, where to go. What’s the website? Where can they find you on LinkedIn?

Alfred Crabtree: We’re at blade repair academy.com. Uh, we’re located in Dunlap, Tennessee. We’re on Blade Repair Academy at LinkedIn. I’m Alfred Crabtree. You can find me there. Uh.

Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s where you need to go because that’s how the process starts.

If you want to have high level technicians that really know how to work on composites and are working with real materials on simulated, but. Pretty realistic damage. Yeah. Weirdly realistic. Yeah. Secret sauce. And to get some sort of validation and to kind of get graded. Mm-hmm. And so you have a, a, a sense of how they’re doing.

You’re going to have to go to Blade Repair Academy. You need to get out to Tennessee and you better check it out because I, Alfred, I gotta be honest, this place is gonna get crazy busy [00:31:00] and I’m gonna have. ISPs calling me saying, can you get a hold of Alfred and get me inside? Can you get me in? No, I can’t because it’s Alfred’s deal and Alfred’s gonna run this thing.

We’re very approachable and, but very approachable. Keep calling, he’ll answer and take care of you, but it’s gonna get busy because the philosophy here is the right one. Thanks. So congratulations for putting this together and thank you for the invite. Uh, it is been a pleasure to see it. It’s uh, it, it’s great to know that you are around and you’re helping the industry.

Alfred Crabtree: Thank you. We appreciate it and you guys are a great clarion for the industry. A great voice. So, uh, those words, uh, right in the fields. And I wanna thank Cheryl too for coming out. I haven’t seen her for a while. It’s funny ’cause today I, on my phone, you know, five years ago today, she and I were here before this business existed as rope partner employees working on r and d week doing infusions.

So, uh,

Sheryl Weinstein: the space has transformed. It’s amazing. Yeah. You guys have done a, a [00:32:00] really great job. Like I, yeah, I think you’re definitely pushing the industry into a, like a new realm. Bringing something that, that it really needs, you know, that we don’t have at the moment or that we didn’t have.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, well hopefully, uh, it improves everybody’s quality of product and the bottom line.

’cause uh, you know, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll affect your bottom line for sure.

Allen Hall: So Sheryl and Alfred, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thanks guys. Right,

Sheryl Weinstein: thank you.

This week we discuss uncertainty surrounding the IRA bill, GEV Wind Power’s acquisition by Certek, and the sale of an LM Wind Power factory to Vestas. Plus Blackstone is in talks to acquire TXNM Energy, pointing to increase data center demand. Register for the next SkySpecs webinar!

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 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, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, Joel and Rosemary.

It’s been an exciting week. A lot going on in a, in America in regards to what’s gonna happen with the IRA bill. Nobody knows the, it’s like, uh, as tense, as tense can be. You, you don’t even really see a lot of articles about it at the moment. Everybody’s just in, in kind of hold mode, like, hold your breath and hope something bad doesn’t happen.

Joel Saxum: I think the interesting thing there is when something like this pops up, you would tend to see a lot of LinkedIn opinions and you’re not. I think a lot of, a lot of people are kind of moved. They’re kind of, [00:01:00] nobody’s really saying too much. We’re kind of waiting to see, 

Allen Hall: yeah, waiting for that spicy take.

Usually from Rosemary, but she hasn’t written that article yet. It must be coming. Rosemary. 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, I haven’t been writing a lot of anything on LinkedIn recently. Um, yeah, a bit, I’m bit busy. I got, I got really sick of, uh, LinkedIn as well when I, I over posted for a few months and. I got over it. Started, started to hate it when people would, would write a comment on my post.

Yeah. And I’m like, just stop talking to me. Go away. And I’m like, yeah, you were the one who made this post. So you That was my, that was my sign to, um, yeah, to, to move away for a little while. Yeah. But it’s also, uh, I mean, you know, like I, it’s not a topic that I am an expert in. ’cause obviously I’m, you know, I don’t live there, so I’m not, yeah.

I have. I have heard a few podcasts talking about it. Um, there’s that one. Um, uh, do you guys listen to that podcast? That’s, it’s like [00:02:00] the original Energy gang crew, but none of them are on the Energy Gang anymore. Now they’ve got their own new podcast. It’s like Dig Ashore. And, um, the other two, sorry, I don’t, I don’t remember their, their names.

Joel Saxum: They just started 

Allen Hall: that one. 

Rosemary Barnes: It’s called, maybe it’s called Open Circuit. 

Allen Hall: Oh, maybe I have, yes, I know what you’re talking about. 

Rosemary Barnes: It, it’s really good. It’s very, uh, it’s too American Central for me to listen to every episode, but for, you know, Americans then, I’m sure that that’s, uh, that’s good. Um, they, they speculate a fair bit about it.

Um, and also the, um, podcast that has Jesse Jenkins on it, which is called Shift Key, um, they talk about it a bit as well. So I have, I have heard a fair few takes on it, but, um. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m, I’m waiting to see, to, to be honest, as a non-American, I’ve just written off American Wind Power for the next few years and, uh, you know, just like, wait, wait, wait a little while to like, uh, get started again.

But it, you know, it doesn’t affect me so much. I don’t, I, I don’t have [00:03:00]projects in America. Um, so I. Not affected day to day, 

Joel Saxum: a and a half a dozen part load leads that I was in a hand, but now I’m not gonna 

Rosemary Barnes: do. You know what though? I, it is actually incredibly challenging for me too because, um, Australians and probably every non-American, like I, my business insurance will not cover me in the us They just absolutely not.

There is not, it is not possible for me to get insurance. To do projects in the us Um, and it would only be possible if I actually started an American company. That would be the only way to do it. So, um, that is a big disincentive for me to expand into America. Um, just ’cause your legal system is very, very different to the rest of the world and um, yeah, insurance companies won’t take that risk so.

That’s why that, that’s why I’m not expending to America. But you know, the rest of the world is a big place. So, 

Allen Hall: well, if you don’t spend all your time on LinkedIn, then maybe you can then join us on the webinar. We have an up on Wednesday, May 28th at 11:00 AM East Coast, US and it’s about lightning damage and lightning [00:04:00] strikes and it’s one of another, one of the monthly Sky Specs webinars with uh, PES Wind and the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

We have some really interesting guests. In this one, Matthew Stead from eLog Ping and Matt Segal from EDF. So if you know Matt Segal, uh, he knows his way around blades and blade repair and he has a really solid approaches on how to deal with the damage, that’s gonna be a great discussion. So if you have lightning damage and pretty much every operator that I’ve talked to has some lightning damage at the moment, uh, you’re gonna want to attend that.

Webinars free. So it’s Wednesday, May 28th, 11:00 AM. East Coast and you just sign up in the show notes below. Really simple 

Joel Saxum: as busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. I. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert [00:05:00] 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 PS wind.com today. 

Allen Hall: So the big news of the week, well there’s actually a couple, uh, big news articles this week. Uh, GEV, wind Power, which is a large repair company. Based in the uk, but they have a lot of their business in the United States.

Uh, was acquired by a company called CEC and Joel just doing some research on cec. It looks like a holding company. That’s what it seems like to me. It’s owned by David Harrison, who is based in the uk and it just looks like they’re gonna continue to, uh, try to grow GEV, but it also includes Wind Power Lab from Denmark and rig com.

Joel Saxum: From Australia. Yeah, they group their ctec. Um, I know that GEV Wind Power is, um, they, they have huge plans for growth, right? They’ve got the office in Dallas office in [00:06:00] Poland, the Wind Power Lab office in Copenhagen. Rig com office, I believe is in Melbourne, down in Australia, down by Rosemary. And then they have of course the big office for the UK and Hull and that’s for offshore and onshore.

Uh, but they’ve also just not opened another office up in Canada. So big, big expansion plans for GE v windpower. This CEC capital injection, uh, is gonna help for sure, right? They’ve got a, they’ve got a existing our infrastructure, uh, for the GEV WINDPOWER group. Uh, and they’re gonna keep ’em all in place and they’re just gonna con continue to grow.

So, uh, look to see some more things coming out of the, uh, GEV group. Put this injection to cash. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, because GEV, when Power Lab and Rcom were part of the Bridges Fund, which was owned by Hojo 

Joel Saxum: Well Bridge, so Bridges was a technically a think minority shareholder in the GEV group. Uh, but that was Goldman Sachs money, uh, bridges was right.

So now, now we’re going, CTEC is Macquarie money, so [00:07:00] Australian money. Being injected in. Well, 

Allen Hall: that does make a little bit of sense though. Australia is gonna be a huge renewable powerhouse. It already is. So it makes sense that a Australian money would be involved in this because, uh, yeah, there’s gonna be a lot more wind turbines in solar activity in Australia.

It’s gonna pick up pretty well, so might as well grab a company early while you can and, and continue to grow it. The other thing that that happened today was LM wind power. Selling a factory up in Poland to Vestus. Now, we’ve all talked internally about what is happening at LM Wind Power because they’ve had a a number of staff reductions over the last year or so, and then they had the blade problem up in Canada.

It does seem like a lot of the design activities are moving towards the United States from GEs point of view. [00:08:00] That leaves a lot of LM factories with that are making blades for somebody else. Rosemary, when you were there, uh, LM did make blades for almost everybody for quite a while. It looks like they still do, but now they’re selling off the non GE factories.

Is that the plan? 

Rosemary Barnes: I, I don’t know what the plan is. Uh, um, yeah, not inside anymore, so I don’t have any insider info, but, uh, I did spend. Quite a lot of time actually at that factory in Glen. And it’s definitely one of my favorite, favorite wind turbine blade manufacturing facilities that I ever visited. Um, they get a lot, they get a lot done there.

That is like what I could say. The team there is amazing. They, the amount of stuff they can get through in, you know, one shift is like. Double what it is in some other factories. So I think, you know, from, from that perspective, without knowing what best has paid for it, I think it’s a, um, a good call if they get to keep the personnel.

Um, so yeah, [00:09:00] it, um, good for Besters. I was actually looking at some information recently, something unrelated, but I, I came across some, um, research reports. Actually. There were academic papers and it had, um, they had gone through all Vista’s recent, um. Like, uh, all of their annual reports and also all the other listed companies.

So there’s, you know, there’s a few listed wind, turbine blade manufacturer, wind turbine manufacturers, um, where they will give, you know, a breakdown, public information, a breakdown of how their money is spent in profits and that sort of thing. Um, and they had this little chart that showed how much, um, the different manufacturers that they looked at, how much they were spending on their staff, and how much they were spending on research and development.

Vest, uh, staff were paid far more than the other, um, manufacturers that were on there. 

Joel Saxum: That’s geopolitical though, right? Like Siemens, Siemens Committee said a lot of employees in Spain, they just, they’re cheaper employees, a cheaper labor force than it is in Denmark or Germany. 

Rosemary Barnes: But also, so that, but also, [00:10:00] um, investors spent way more on research and development than, than the others.

And that’s like, I have gotten that impression, you know, ’cause like a lot of what I do with my YouTube channel is. Looking at new, new kinds of things that people are doing. And time after time, it was vest that had investigated this interesting thing. You know, like vesters are the one that have the, um, have tried a multi rotor design out and like actually to the point of making a prototype and, um, installing it.

Vesters are the ones that have done the in cable stayed, um, tower and, yeah, like again, put it up the, you know, like over and over again. There were these things where they maybe didn’t even believe that there was an imminent commercial case for this technology, but they were doing it to, to learn and just improve their general knowledge and to also.

Um, be ahead of the curve when things changed enough to make this new technology maybe make sense now they would have the information they needed to move, move fast on that. Well, that’s my, my take on why that makes sense to them. So, yeah, I, I, I do, I am starting to get the impression, and I’ve never worked at [00:11:00] Vestas or even, I never even did a blade project for Vestas while I was working at lm, but that’s definitely the impression that I’m getting, that the, you know, they’re kind of retaining more of the essence of the original.

Danish wind turbine companies, then the others have more become globalized, Americanized or yeah, like, um, Spain fight or you know, like what, whatever. From all the mergers that have happened, um, the culture has been diluted, but, but festers, I still, still see pushing the envelope. I mean, they haven’t always been profitable, so, um, you know, is the strategy right or not?

But then, you know, every western manufacturer and every. Every, every wind turbine manufacturer, no matter where they are in the world, including China, um, have had periods of unprofitability. That’s for sure. So, yeah. Um, I, I just think it’s interesting that they’re taking a real different approach. 

Joel Saxum: Well, that’s what I was gonna say, uh, kind of rosemary before you jumped, said it’s cultural thing, right?

Like, they’re vestas, they’re Denmark, they’re the, the, you know, I guess you can, you could have this argument [00:12:00] between the Danish and the Dutch about who wind power kind of. First, there’s a cultural thing there too, right? Like you have DTU right there, you have the university at our, I wanna say it, right, orus.

Uh, but you have, you have all of these different facilities there that are also lending to that research, right? There’s a lot of grant money that gets funneled through DTU. And if you look at those projects with those couple of universities there in Denmark, you see a lot of times Vesta is tanked. On those projects.

There may be some other, um, third party companies or a lot of it being sponsored by the university, but you see Vestas in a lot of those. So I think it’s a, I’d like you said, I think it’s a cultural thing that the Danish still haven’t be, that still haven’t, that it’s a good thing that they’re doing what they’re doing.

I, in my opinion, but that they haven’t become. This larger global fired thing, right? Where they’re still kind of sticking to their roots? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, I like it as an engineer and I will say that a lot of, um, my best ex colleagues from LM have ended up at Vestas. Um, so, you know, I think that they are, they do, they do [00:13:00] attract, you know, like people who like to work on really interesting problems.

But I also have been around long enough to know that, um. The most interesting engineering problems are not always the most business savvy things to be working on. So that’s why I don’t wanna comment about it, you know, as a business strategy or, you know, suggest that, you know, investors are definitely going to, you know, remain dominant in the future.

Um, because a lot of the times the, you know, like over engineering is a thing and, uh, you can’t be competitive if you have you, you know, like a good, good engineering is really about. Doing the minimum that you, that you need to make the product that succeeds in the, in the market. Uh, doing any more than that is very satisfying to an engineer, but, um, it is not the, not usually the smartest thing to do for, you know, making a profitable business.

So 

Allen Hall: good engineering is knowing when to stop. Which is the hardest part of engineering. ’cause you never wanna stop. You need to stop and make some money. Yeah. [00:14:00] Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks.

OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. So private equity, giant Blackstone’s infrastructure arm is reportedly and talks to acquire TX and M Energy, which is Texas and New Mexico.

And so utility companies serving about 800,000 homes and businesses across the New Mexico, Texas area. Uh, the discussions are still fluid. There’s not a lot of details. However, it does seem like this is a play by Blackstone to maybe set up some data centers and to get. In line to get a data center set up is really hard to do right now because you have to talk to an existing operator and [00:15:00]get them to get approvals and there’s paperwork and there’s applications.

Once you buy, uh, a large energy producer, you can kind of control that a little bit and there’s reasons to do it because Texas and New Mexico, there’s a lot of real estate there. Renewables are really easy to install. It makes this acquisition. Much more desirable, I think just because of where it is now.

TX and M was going to be acquired a couple months ago, Joel, by Avan Grid, except that got stopped by the administration. Uh, that was about a year ago, right? Where that deal got canceled for. Was it competitive reasons or was it because it was. Avant grid, which is not a US entity is, is that what the deal was?

I don’t remember 

Joel Saxum: exactly why it got canceled. I just know that it was a regulatory approval thing. It wasn’t a, it wasn’t a due diligence problem or anything like that. It was just regulatory approval, [00:16:00]

but. 

When I, when I read this article, I thought immediately, have you guys ever, have you guys ever seen the movie Inception?

No. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, you gotta say Inception. What’s wrong with you, Alan? Oh my God. 

Joel Saxum: In the movie Inception, they, they have an issue where they’re like, we need to convince the pilot of the plane to do this, and we need to convince the stewardesses to do this, and we need to convince the, the, this person to do this. And they have a really rich fellow with them.

And they’re like, how are we going to get past these problems? And he’s like, I’ll just buy the airline. So in the movie, the guy just buys the airline and then he gets to do whatever he wants with the airplane and, and how they do their inception tricks, whatever. That’s exactly what I thought about when I saw Blackstone do this, right?

We wanna get these data centers on, we wanna do this, we wanna do this. It’s like, man, this is gonna be, this is gonna be difficult. We’re gonna have to convince all these people. We’re gonna have to do this regulatory approvals and get in line and queues. It’s like, what if we just buy the power company?

Okay. Just do that and you can do whatever you want 

like 

that. That [00:17:00] makes sense. I think it’s a genius thing and I think it, I’m surprised that it’s taken this long to do it and there hasn’t been some other larger players that have tried it. So I just just saw a thing yesterday, a chart that said there’s over 5,300 data centers in the United States right now.

It’s like 5,386 or something, which is Corey way, way larger than I thought it was. And we’re, and if you look at a global scale, we’re way in front of the next person. And I don’t remember exactly what it was, but everybody you talk to in the energy world is going, Hey, more data centers, more data centers, more data centers.

And it is, it’s, it’s, I listened to a podcast theater. They’re talking about wait until you see the next six months. What’s gonna happen with data centers? As, as you see, Google searches declining for chat GT requests. It’s gonna be all data centers. 

Allen Hall: So EPRI is saying 48% of utilities nationwide are now receiving data center requests exceeding one gigawatt with almost half facing requests that exceed [00:18:00] 50% of the system peak demand.

Wow. That’s a lot of energy to be requesting. 

Joel Saxum: So last summer, peak demand in Ercot, and I’m gonna talk Texas right now, right? ’cause this is where a lot of these data centers are going. ’cause Ercot is gonna, the Wild West. T’S peak demand last summer was 87 gigawatts at one point in time. They have it projected by, I think it was like 2031.

That peak demand is gonna be 213 gigawatts. And 

Allen Hall: is that based on population or is that based on data center growth, 

Joel Saxum: data center growth. That’s only five years away, six years away, and you’re talking almost triple the demand. 

Allen Hall: Can, can we veer off just slightly on this discussion, which is the existing talk about the IRA bill and how they wanna change it.

So it’s gonna be harder for renewable companies to apply for the tax credits and production tax credits and all these little nuances that add up to something much more massive. They’re, [00:19:00] if the administration does that. And Congress passes it and whatever else happens, okay, fine. But in this data center demand, you cannot get enough gas turbines built to support that.

You can’t order one 

Joel Saxum: and receive it before 2030. Right. So what are we talking about? You have to put solar and wind on the grid right now. ’cause it’s the only energy generating facility that’s, that’s that’s timely enough to get to meet demand. Right. 

Allen Hall: Those, we just do not have the infrastructure right now in the United States or elsewhere.

Like a Siemens who makes a lot of gas turbines, can’t supply the demand. That’s about to happen. So the demand is gonna get so dang high. You’re gonna, you’re gonna go from 20 29, 20 30, uh, order book to 2035 order book probably in the next six months, the way it sounds. What are they 

Joel Saxum: gonna do? Could you see a player that doesn’t, that knows turbines but doesn’t [00:20:00] do gas fired turbines coming in?

I don’t know who all the players are, right? I know GE sells ’em. I know a couple others, but like, like a steam, like a Rolls Royce is Rolls Royce sell gas turbine power plant turbines. They know. They know turbine technology couldn’t. Why? If you were them, wouldn’t you look at this demand and go. We should start building these things.

Allen Hall: Joel, to build a gas turbine is really difficult. It’s like building a jet engine. On steroids, it’s, and to make it something that’s really reliable, it is not easy. That’s why it takes so long to build these things. It’s not just a startup. Well, yeah, what are you gonna do? Build a second factory next door to the one you have and spend a billion dollars to set this thing up.

But you’re not gonna be able to make the first turbine for at least five or six years. That makes zero sense, because all of a sudden if the data center, uh, compute goes away, like some software engineer figures out how to do this a lot with less power, basically a lot less power to do it. Then poof, all their order book disappears and all that money they spend on a [00:21:00] factory disappears and no one’s willing to take that risk.

So who’s steps in the middle of this besides wind and solar and some batteries? Wind and solar betters right to, that’s the fastest way to get power onto the grid, even if it’s disconnected from the main grid, right? Even if you go geothermal, 

Joel Saxum: you still need turbines. You still need turbines. Turbines are not quick to make.

And you can’t build a nuclear plant in about 10 

Allen Hall: years. No. So what are we, Rosemary? What are we doing? And here’s my thought this morning. I woke up this morning like, this is a huge problem. What are we gonna do? My first thought was like, well, everybody’s gonna go to Australia because the power is plentiful and it’s only a data cable to America.

That’s what’ll happen. Rosemary? 

Rosemary Barnes: Uh, I don’t, I don’t think data centers, I think data centers is primarily a US problem, and then there’ll be a few, and not even like, it’s, it’s localized within the US as well. People aren’t just like, people think with this, you know, data center growth that it’s like.

Everyone’s gonna worry about it. But you need data [00:22:00] centers, um, near where the, you know, the tech companies, the AI companies are, because they don’t, you know, they can’t be located on the other side of the world from where their data center is, if they’re gonna be, you know, running all these, um, these learning models.

And then you need them near population centers as well for, um, you know, so that they have them, them close by. I think the biggest thing with data centers that’s gonna be different to what everybody’s panicking about is that it is not gonna be the, um, the, the demand people are predicting is not going to come, come true to anything.

Like the extent, extent that what has been predicted. I think it will grow and it will grow a lot, but I, I, you know, like the growth that people are predicted is, um. Well, IM implausible for a start to actually achieve it. But I think also, like if you look back through history, I mean, you know, people always predict, you know, that you get a big amount of growth early on and people don’t really know what the, you know, the size of the exponent is.

And so when they project out into the future, you can get things wildly wrong and we have a history of you, you know, look back through the predicted energy use of all sorts of new [00:23:00] technologies over the, um, decades or, you know, centuries. Then you’ll see predictions that were just crazy in hindsight.

We’re really early in the AI thing, so algorithms are gonna be refined. Um, chip designs are gonna be refined. Even, you know, like everything else around data center’s gonna be refined. Maybe quantum computing is gonna make a difference in a few years. You know, like maybe something that hasn’t been invented yet.

You know, like five years ago people didn’t think AI would be doing what it is today. There’ll be some other technology in five years that’s doing something that we couldn’t foresee. Um, so I, you know, I think that it’s more likely that the. Unexpected technology developments are on the side of bringing down the amount of power.

Allen Hall: Yeah. But the way that tends to go in industry is once you’re on a pathway, there’s very little that’s gonna deter you off that pathway. So even if there are significant improvements, you’ll see the main path still be followed. And that’s gonna be the trouble with these AI data centers, is that they’re gonna [00:24:00] project out, they’re gonna get their.

Mindset about doing it a certain way, and they’re gonna go, and if you talk about saving 10% here or there, they’re like, if it’s gonna take 10 more weeks to get that done, we’re not gonna do it. We’re gonna continue down this pathway. 

Rosemary Barnes: No, but they’re doing it all the time. They heard about a, a data center, it was designed and, um, you know, planned for a certain amount of compute, and then the chip designs improved and they totally changed it.

And so now it, you know, it’s the same power, but it, um, processes much more. And we’re gonna. We’re gonna say a lot. A lot of that I think. 

Allen Hall: I think the chat GPT usage and the AI usage is relatively low, and I know US engineers like to use those services because we like the new tech and we want to be involving our fingers in it and see what it’s all about.

I think the vast majority of humanity really hasn’t touched it yet. When they do, it’s gonna go 

Joel Saxum: crazy. Did you see that Google’s alphabet stock? When they, they just released a, they did, it was an earnings report, but they released the end. This is the first time that their number of search engine [00:25:00] entries, whatever requests.

Dropped and it’s because, because, and their stock dropped by 10% that day that happened. Yeah. Like that’s, and and, and like you said, we, people that are in the know are using, I use it all day long. Right. My, uh, my partner uses it all day long, but the general populace hasn’t gotten into it yet. But once they do, it’s.

It’s so much better than Google, so much better than Google. Like you don’t have to know how to Google things anymore. You could just like ask a question that you’re talking to a person and it just gives you the answer, 

Allen Hall: right? It is much more, uh, interactive, human, interactive, uh, interface than what Google ever was, and you still have to have little tricks to get Google to give you the right answer at times.

This is much more intuitive and if you think about your phone and how you try to Google things on your phone, it’s that interface is terrible. Absolutely terrible. It’s been terrible for five plus years. This AI interface, all of them, perplexity is the one that [00:26:00] I like at the minute, is really simple. It’s like asking somebody a question, like asking a librarian in the old days, where can I find this information?

Tell me what’s going on. Poof. There it is. And it provides justification, rationale behind it, all those kind of things you like to have as an engineer. But I do think the growth of this, if it is as powerful as it is today, the growth is gonna be phenomenal. And the power usage is gonna be nuts, 

Rosemary Barnes: but I’m not sure that you are, um, aware of how much growth is baked into the forecast currently.

I’ve just brought up, um, an article that Michael Lere wrote on Bloomberg, NEF, um, about ai. And it, it’s interesting there because he goes through the economics of it, um, and he draws on some, uh. Questions that a guy David Kahn made, um, from Sequoia Capital that he says, David Kahn says that to justify the capital expenditures applied by NVIDIA’s [00:27:00] near term revenue pipeline, they would need to generate annual revenue from AI services of 200 billion.

And then, um, with their new updated NVIDIA sales forecast storing it, it’s been updated to 600 billion. Um, and that is, uh, yeah, like half of the aggregate revenue of Amazon, Microsoft Meta and Google Parent Alpha. So if you assume 600 billions will be, um, uh, it’ll be the world’s 100 million wealthiest people, then that’s $6,000 a year.

Um, and then, you know, like, obviously you can go a bit further down, but it, it’s um, like not impossible, but it’s also, that is a massive amount of growth that is already. Factored into the, that pipeline. So I think, I just think it’s more evidence that that is a, like a, that is a pretty optimistic take on, you know, immense growth and that it’s far more likely we’re gonna see less, less growth than that.

I still think we’re gonna see crazy growth, but. I think that the, [00:28:00] that the, the current pipeline that the, you know, current investments, if you, um, sorry, not investments, but the current plans for, for growth of companies like nvidia, they don’t just factor in incredible growth. It’s like incredible squared, incredible cubed growth that’s factored into their pipeline and it is gonna.

Scale, scale back again that I, I don’t think anyone can know, but that’s, that’s, I really think that that’s the most likely thing to happen. 

Allen Hall: Building chips and building power plants are two wildly different things in terms of the time it takes to do it. Building a gigawatt of energy production takes time.

Building another chip is just clunk. There’s another one. It doesn’t take that much time. So I think the ability to create the chips is gonna far exceed the ability to power them. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and that’s why you see like that project I talked about where they um, you know, the chip capability changed so much in between when they started the project and by the time they went to actually put the chips inside the building.

Um. You still see the power [00:29:00] stayed the same, but just the compute in increased. Um, so yeah, I think you’re right. 

Joel Saxum: I still think that the, the good play is investing in a cable lay vessel. I’m telling you the the, the s the SF uptime cable lay vessel. 

Allen Hall: This is my wild conspiracy theory at the moment, is that Elon with his satellite network, SpaceX and starlink and all that, allows you to put an AI center anywhere on the planet that it is cheap to power it.

Joel Saxum: A handful of geostationary satellites. Is and And if you devote them to one data center or to a family of data centers, somewhere that has to be cheaper than laying cables across the OS. Ocean. 

Allen Hall: Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Elon’s gonna buy the center of Australia, lay out solar panels. Too hot. It’s gotta go somewhere cold.

I’m talking 

Joel Saxum: Canada Green. Greenland. Greenland, 

Allen Hall: [00:30:00] Greenland. Greenland. There you go. There’s a perfect conspiracy case right there, Joel. You hit all the triggers at one time. Well, well, we’re, we’re not gonna solve this this week. Uh, but it is an important issue and it is coming up a lot. And I know that it is not gonna stop the discussion.

It is ramping up and there’s a lot of energy being spent trying to figure out, can we even solve this problem? What’s happening with the IRA bill or the potential changes to the IRA bill can aggravate this and make it a lot harder. Uh, be prepared. Very interesting times. Joel Rosemary. Another great episode 

Rosemary Barnes: and un unsupervised today.

I often wonder if these ones where we don’t have producer Claire here, um, you know, reigning us in, do we lose subscribers on these episodes or are people, you know, like really attracted to our tell it like it is, uh, kind of rambling, rambling style on these ones. 

Allen Hall: Stay tuned and we’ll see you all here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:31:00] Podcast.

This week Allen discusses the European Investment Bank’s major wind farm investment in Romania, the financial performance of German energy giant RWE, and the potential cancellation of Equinor’s Empire Wind Project due to regulatory challenges.

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!

Welcome to Uptime News. Flash Industry News Lightning fast. Your host, Allen Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed.

Allen Hall: Okay, starting off the week over in Romania, the European investment bank is investing 30 million euros in a major wind farm project in Romania. The poster two project located near the Black Sea, will have a capacity of up to 400 megawatts.

That’s enough to supply over 1.4 million Romanian households for an entire year. The EIB is partnering with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners on the project with the total investment expected to be in excess of 500 million Euros.

Construction is due to start later this year and it will bolster the European Union’s push for climate neutrality by mid-century.

German energy Giant RWE, reported an adjusted EBITDA of 1.3 billion euros [00:01:00] for the first three months of 2025. Adjusted net income amounted to 0.5 billion euros as expected earnings were below the level of the same quarter last year.

This decline was primarily attributable to normalization of income in the flexible generation segment and a weaker start to the year in the trading business. The commissioning of new offshore wind farms, solar plants, and battery storage facilities had a positive impact on the company’s performance.

RWE commissioned 600 megawatts of new generation capacity in the first quarter alone. The company, currently has new plants with a combined capacity of 11.2 gigawatts under construction. Michael Mueller, chief financial officer of RWE, stated that they were reaffirming their full year earnings forecast after a solid start to the year.

He noted, that the company is making great progress in expanding its portfolio in a value accretive manner. Construction projects remain on schedule [00:02:00] and on budget.

Over in Norway, Equinor is warning it may cancel its Empire Wind Project off New York’s coast.

Following a Trump administration stop work order, the company is spending $50 million weekly to keep the project afloat while awaiting resolution. Molly Morris, president of Equinor’s US renewable energy arm, describe the situation as unsustainable. The Interior Department led by Secretary Doug Bergham ordered Equinor to halt construction

on April 17th. The order cited information suggesting the Biden administration may have approved the project without a thorough environmental analysis. The stop work order stemmed from a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

However, Equinor says it has not seen the report and is not aware of the specific concerns raised. The project represents a significant investment for Equinor. The company has already invested $2.7 billion in the [00:03:00] Empire Wind Facility.

Currently, 11 vessels with 100 workers remain on board, sitting on the water, waiting for an order to resume work. That’s this week’s top. New stories. Stay tuned tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Will Howell discusses Armor Edge’s thermoformed polycarbonate leading edge protection for wind turbine blades. Their solution helps to mitigate erosion, enhance aerodynamic performance, and extend blade life.

Allen Hall: Will welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. So Joel and I have heard about Armor Edge for a couple, couple of years. Yeah. You’re based in Scotland. Yeah. And we haven’t seen you much in the United States and I haven’t physically touched it.

And of course we’re sort of tangible. We gotta play with the the product. So this is the first time now we’re here. Gotten to see the product. Yeah. Yeah. You wanna describe really what this product is for a leading edge protection? 

Will Howell: Yeah, absolutely. So we are different to other LEPs out there on the market.

And really that was the whole point of our design evolution, was to try to overcome some of the traditional downfalls of some of the other LEDs that have been prevalent on blades. So. Um, yeah, we’ve been around since, um, well about eight, eight years now. And we’ve been out in the market installed since 2020.

So we’re, as you mentioned, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland is a kind of a base. So our first installs were all offshore, north North Sea, so offshore, Denmark, offshore [00:01:00] Germany. Very harsh, harsh environments. But we wanted to, to design an an LEP that was, um, really. Overcoming some of the traditional pitfalls.

So for us, that is the ease of installation, the longevity of the material, and also the a EP benefits that we, that we see. Um, as you see for the sample we have in front of us here today, it’s uh, only a small piece that we take to show just to, to, to show our clients and customers. Um, but typically the shields are 850 mil mil long.

Uh, they’re made of a, a custom thermoformed, um, polycarbonate, a SA blend. We get the material formed into sheets, and then we drape that sheet over custom design molds that are tailored for the specific blade types. And that’s how we get this perfect fit on every different blade that we’re, that we’re, um, that we have out, out there.

So let’s talk about the installation. Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: Because that’s [00:02:00] a, that’s a really important one for me because on the podcast we always wanna talk about what problems we’re, what problems we’re solving. Sure. What problems you guys are helping the industry with. And one of the biggest ones with LAP, and it doesn’t matter what the product really is, if it’s tapes, if it’s coatings, if if it’s installed wrong, it’s not gonna last.

Yep. Yep. That’s, that’s the thing. So what have you guys done with this to help the technicians in the field to make it easier to make it. Last I want you to put on the line. 

Will Howell: Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s a lot of technology in terms of the performance of the, of the product. Um, both the adhesive and the material itself.

But predominantly this was designed for rope access in the North Sea, so it had to be a product that the guys were. Able to handle up on, up on rope. Um, it wasn’t gonna be affected by climatic conditions as much, um, and would really lead to a faster, but also therefore, a higher quality installation because of the way that it’s put on, it’s not so much of a artisanal process that some of these other LEPs seem to [00:03:00] suffer from.

We want to. Train our technicians to deliver a high quality installation, but really you don’t have to be a master LEP installer to get our, to get our kit on, our kit on Blade. And that’s the feedback we’ve been getting from the technicians is that they find it, uh, easy to handle, easy to apply process, uh, in the field.

Joel Saxum: What does Blade Prep look like before you put it on? 

Will Howell: Well, another unique. Facet of the system is because the shields themselves are custom formed from a a semi-rigid material. The leading edge of the shields themselves doesn’t conform to the existing erosion on the blade. So in terms of applying this to the blade surface, if you have existing cat one, two, or three erosion.

You don’t need to repair that and bring it back up to the original design intent. Air Aerofoil. In fact, you just need to remove the loose or flaking material. Do a final clean with an with an IPA. Then you’re ready to apply the adhesive into the target area. I. Draw the adhesive down with our custom tooth [00:04:00]spreader and then apply the shield straight on top.

So you’re actually using the, the high performance MMA as a high build filler behind the shield itself, 

Joel Saxum: basically like, uh, like if you’re setting tile. 

Will Howell: Yeah, very similar. Very similar. You scrape the mud down and it 

Joel Saxum: creates a couple paths 

Will Howell: and, exactly, exactly. The adhesive itself is very high performance, so the

MMA that we use has got a very high gap fill. Indeed. It can gap fill up to an inch if you had some severe holes on there without overheating. Um, but it can also be installed within. Any humidity, any dew point is indifferent to those conditions, as well as from freezing point right up to very high temperatures, kind of 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Um, and we’ve, we’ve seen those conditions we’re installed across four different continents now, majority starting over in Europe, offshore, and now we’re. Some North India. We’ve got some in Southern Australia, and now the states, the past couple of couple of seasons where Iowa, Wisconsin, [00:05:00]Michigan, up in the north are kind of colder climbs as well as the southern states, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico.

The polycarbonate is slippery. It is. Yeah. Yeah. So does it accumulate ice? We haven’t had any specific testing on that, but we haven’t had any negative reports either. We’ve been less, we’ve been, we’ve been, we’ve been out there in the field now for five years. We’ve never lost a shields due to de bonding, we’ve never had any damage to any shields reported to us.

It’s a very resilient product, so we don’t believe that I. Has a particular attraction to the material, no worse than a traditional top coat. Um, we’ve actually been speaking to the guys from phase break who, who you’ll know with their nine ice products and they’re happy that you can apply nine ice over the top of this if you wanted to kind of double up that protection.

Allen Hall: Yeah, because that, that does make a lot of sense. If, if we’re talking North Sea and Iowa, those are two wildly in different environments. But the research I’ve done on your [00:06:00] material. I, I, I probably saw your early 2020 is when I first, I remember seeing Armor Edge and thinking, okay, these guys are onto something.

Knowing a little bit about leading edge rosn on aircraft and how we deal with it there. Mm-hmm. The technical details made sense to me. I hadn’t seen it in a shell form. Oh, there we go. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this, this makes a lot more sense now. So then when you actually get on a blade offshore, which would be the probably the ideal case because the return on investment is like instantaneous on these bigger turbines that you’re just, you’re just doing very little prep at all.

Then you’re just basically knocking off the little particles that are maybe hanging on applying MNA and then just. Starting where from the root working down, if we go from the tip up, we actually work 

Will Howell: from the, uh, tip. Yeah. So one of the facets of our system, compared to the traditional soft shells or the tapes, you don’t have to manipulate and stretch the material over the nose of the, of the, uh, [00:07:00] blades.

The first shield is actually a, a section with a pressure suction side and a closed end. So it simply fits over the top of the tip. Like a suck gives you a very Exactly. It gives you a very. Solid boot to kind of start from, and then you work in series from, from there in sections around 850 mil long, working in the direction of the of, of the route.

Our customers have different lengths of application that they like to work to. We work in sections, but typically around 20% of the blade is, is kind of what we cover. Okay. Yeah. I, I 

Allen Hall: wonder how far they were gonna go inboard, because I’ve seen some where they go really far inboard, like six to 

Joel Saxum: eight meters.

Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. So you’re, you’re not going all that far. Yeah. Typically. 

Will Howell: You know, on the onshore machines here, some of the typical GE blades, the 56.962 point twos up at the 10, 12 meters or so. Okay. It’s, it’s just kind of a typical Okay. That 

Allen Hall: makes, that makes sense. Then, so the, the process goes clean the blade apply MMA, put these [00:08:00] sections on, do the interlock, and what do you do with the trailing edge?

Will Howell: Yeah, absolutely. So again, it’s a. An issue that we’ve seen on other, on, on other systems of either one really long piece, which is almost impossible to handle with a pair, a pair of texts, or having many separate pieces with a complicated join that leaves it very exposed. Our sections are formed and then they’re very accurately CNC cuts, and we have male and female features on either end that interlock with, um, on, on two sides of the, uh, of the leading edge cord.

And so the technicians can’t get them the wrong way round. They made up completely butting against each other, leading to a very flush flash. Fit over that leading edge. Leading edge section. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. ’cause I could, I could picture like if something like this wasn’t here and they were just flat, like they’re kind of like it walking off Yeah.

Kind of getting wonky on the late edge. But this is gonna keep ’em locked in. 

Will Howell: Exactly. This is alley. And so that just, you just working, working sections towards the, towards the roots, the adhesive that we use. Even though it’s an MMA, which [00:09:00] traditionally there have been some quite brittle MMAs on, on the market, we’ve, we’ve worked to find a very flexible and com and compliant that actually works as the sealants as well.

So you apply the shield, you apply pressure to the shields from the, from the leading edge, working down the pressure and suction side. You’re expelling adhesive down the trailing edges, and it’s that you are then fairing off to seal and also give you a weatherproof seal. And a aerodynamic chamfer as well, or just on that trailing edge.

The material on the leading edge typically starts around two mil, and it naturally tapers to about one mil on that, on that trailing edge. But we’re trying to minimize that as much as possible during the installation process. Sure. So 80 thousandths of an inch to under 40 thousandths. That’s pretty good.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yep. Ly ly. You mentioned at the beginning of kind of the, of us chatting here that also it’s creating a great aerodynamic edge. So have you guys actually validated like a EP increases from eroded blades? 

Will Howell: Absolutely. [00:10:00] So, um, I mean, typically in terms of. The standard repair categories, we would consider anything that’s category one could be anything from zero to 1%.

Loss of a ap. Category two could be one to 2%, and category three could be up to three to 4% of AP loss. So you could really be losing significant amounts of power if you let your blades get up, get up to there. So we’re trying to educate our customer base to say leading edge protection is not just to protect the structural integrity of your blades.

You are, you are actually losing generation here, so. Applying an LEPI think the industry has maybe been a little bit kind of, uh, overzealous in their, in their claims. I would say if you are sticking anything to an air of foil, there may be some form of negative impact, and we have to accept that. We’ve conducted our studies though, both CFD and wind tunnel testing, and we can provide a report to any of our, any of our customers, showing an expected loss of half percent, so about negative 0.8% or so of a, of AP loss [00:11:00] when you apply it to a Virgin Blade.

However, when we see in field installations, you’re applying to an already eroded blade. So in fact, we typically see an AP uplift, and that’s what our customers see. Um, and it’s not only that initial day one increase that they’re seeing, but because we’re working with a polycarbonate instead of the traditional coatings or TPU tapes, the TPU tapes, tear and fisure, and they get that really rough surface, which has got a huge impact on a p.

Can even lead to noise complaints and flapping and all those sort of bad things that we don’t want on our blades. And so when a polycarbonate erodes, it’s more just like a, a smooth surface. Um, it doesn’t have those fis, those gaps that pitting. And so even during the life cycle of the erosion on a piece of arm edge material, you’re not seeing that same.

A EP hit. 

Joel Saxum: So, I mean, a really important thing in LEP, like we’re in the states now, we’ve got 10, basically 10, 11 year life of a turbine. Yep. So we want all of our products to last that long. Right. Absolutely. With [00:12:00] PTC credit stuff, but offshore not the same story over, like in the North Sea, they want those turbines to last as long as possible.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. What I mean this, when I look at this, I go, I don’t. See this? I don’t see this wearing out. Well, what are you, uh, what’s the, what’s the expected lifetime of something like that? 

Will Howell: So we’ve conducted brain erosion testing both within the UK and, uh, with our partners over in Denmark and.

The rain erosion testing produces a VN curve. You then apply a, uh, traditional North sea conditions, weather conditions to that VN curve, and we’ve seen the calculations there. Give us just over a 50 year lifespan, 5, 0, 50, 53 years. Yeah. Yeah. Um. You know, that’s on just a very basic rain erosion test test data.

So your mileage may vary as they say. Yeah, yeah, of course. But look, that gives us the confidence to go out into the market and say, we are selling a products that we expect to last a lifetime of the, of the blades. Yeah. So what, it’s one fit product. 

Allen Hall: What turbines do you have molds for right now to, to make these pieces?

Uh, we’ve got, 

Will Howell: I [00:13:00] think over, over 40 designs in our, uh, library. Library now. So we’ve, we’ve gone out and scanned as many blades as we can. We. Conduct a, a laser scan, um, to capture the geometry. We then work with a, a tool maker to, to create the tooling and then we mold the parts from there. So yeah, over 40 different models.

Predominantly the Siemens vest as now roving the state is a lot of, of the big GG blades. So anything from the kind of. Yeah, one x and two x PLA platforms we, uh, cover. So we’ve done I think over a thousand blades now. We’re, um, getting really good, really good feedback. So yeah, we can produce parts within a few weeks for the majority of the popular machines out there.

Allen Hall: Wow. Alright. That’s great. For operators, that is particularly offshore. And back to Joel’s point, if you need a turbine to be operating 20, 30 years, you need those blades to be there working. It is time to invest. You don’t do it at year 15 trying to get to 20. You wanna do it at year four, early. 

Will Howell: [00:14:00] Exactly.

Early. And look, I mean, we’re, we’re actually already in conversations with the, a few of the bigger O OEMs about, um, about factory fit trials, because that’s the, that’s the, the perfect opportunity to get your blades fully protected before they even, they even fly. We have our first. Factory fit trial, um, should be next, next month, starting, starting now with one of the, one of the bigger OEMs.

Um, and we’ve got a couple others who are really interested in that, so it may actually be even a, a revised process when it comes to factory fit and we can discuss how to optimize that further to improve their, their workflow. But they can then still benefit from the performance of the Armor edge system.

If I am 

Joel Saxum: a wind turbine operator owner, I’m doing that. I’m putting LEP on in the factory. I mean, if, if someone goes, if, if I go to the. My, my local friendly turbine salesperson and I say I want LEP in the fa. I want all the options given to me. I want an upgraded LPS system. I want [00:15:00] LEP put on in the factory.

I want all the bells and whistles ’cause I don’t want to deal with it. Right. I think that’s why you start to see, okay, like a product like this and you mentioning like Iowa, not usually, you wouldn’t think of Iowa being a crazy leading edge erosion place, but it is. We see it all the time, but for me, this is like, I’m going right to something like this.

’cause I want it to be done. I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I don’t want no more phone calls. I don’t wanna deal with any LEP issues. 

Will Howell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even on, even on day one of the install, we feel that. We’re already offering a better value proposition, even compared to the traditionally very cheap coatings, for instance, where you can pi pay a relatively low price per meter for the materials, but even then you might have to do a few coats and it takes quite a long time.

It takes a long time to to cure.

Allen Hall: As an operator. It makes total sense. Yeah, yeah. To do that. Yeah. Do it. 

Will Howell: You know, you’re, you’re talking protection of the blade from structural damage at that point.

Your improvements of the a EP, um, we’re the. OMO and m and s conference here today. [00:16:00] You’ve got less guys having to go up on blades, risking themselves to actually do these repairs, and the just the repeated cycles of intervention that we see in the industry for LEP and blade repairs on the, on the, on the leading edges.

Hopefully we can help to mitigate some of that. 

Even if you have maybe some. Um, OEM specified, LEP from the factory. That maybe doesn’t last very long, but you are tied into a five year warranty period, or a service contract then. Yeah. We’ve been dealing with, with lots of, um, owners who are coming to the end of that period and thinking right now’s the time to get a, a high performance LLEP on.

They can specify arm reg from a, a basket access, which I think is the fastest we’ve measured so far. You can get a machine completed by a two man basket. 10 meters per blade in about a day, a day and a half per machine. So it’s really quite a rapid install. And of course that’s taking into account the benefits of.

Not having to repair that blade leading edge, not having to [00:17:00]manipulate difficult materials when you’re up on rope board basket. 

Allen Hall: So where would an operator or an OEM go to learn more about 

Will Howell: Armor 

Allen Hall: Edge? 

Will Howell: Well, um, our website has plenty of information, so that’s just armor edge.com. Um, where. Yeah, based over in Edinburgh, Scotland, if you’re ever over there and want to come, want to come say hey.

Um, we also do a lot of work now in the states with a number of different, um, I ISPs over here and we are happy just to try and get the name out out there more. I mean, you guys alluded to it, we’re not as well known, uh, kind of brands over here, but. We are very well established in terms of the supply base already and it’s about informing the owner, owner operators and informing the installers who are working with materials.

Um, and yeah, we’re getting really positive feedback to anyone that we’ve been dealing with. We gotta remember that they’re in Scotland. So Armor Edge 

Joel Saxum: is AR MOUR. That’s 

Will Howell: right. I have had it mentioned a few times this week. Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah, so check out Armor Edge online, learn about [00:18:00] more, learn more about their products, and if you need more information, you can get a hold of Will via LinkedIn.

Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks, will. Great. Cool. Easy. Nice. Done. That was good. 

Allen Hall: Nice. Okay. That’s good. That was great. Good ton of information given away there. I hope that wasn’t.

ONYX Insight‘s ecoPITCH system prevents catastrophic wind turbine blade failures caused by pitch bearing issues. Forrest French and Martin McLarnon reveal how continuous monitoring and early detection can save wind farms millions.

Contact Martin McLarnon: [email protected]

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!

Allen Hall: ONYX Insight’s ecoPITCH monitoring system has become crucial for wind farm operators facing blade root insert failures. These failures start invisibly but can end catastrophically with blades detaching completely. This week we speak with Forrest French Senior Project Engineer, and Martin McLarnon, sales Director for North America at ONYX Insight.

Their ecoPITCH system detects dangerous movements before visible signs appear as Forest notes in the interview. By the time you can get a feeler gauge measurement, it’s probably too late. So join us to discover how data-driven monitoring is helping operators make smarter maintenance decisions preventing million dollar disasters and keeping turbines spinning safely.

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

Allen Hall: Martin and Forest. Welcome to the [00:01:00] show. Hello. How’s it going? Thanks for letting us. Yeah, we’re really interested to, to talk to you today just because there’s so many blade root issues from pitch bearings and blade bushings or inserts as they’re called sometimes, and a number of other issues. And when we talk to operators, what they tell us is, oh, we, you use ecoPITCH.

And they love that system. But I want to, I wanna back up first and talk about what are some of the operators experiencing out there in the field And ecoPITCH system was originally developed to look at pitch bearing problems and forests. What are some of those pitch bearing problems you’re seeing out in the field today?

Forrest French: Yeah, so it, it, it’s a funny story. It was originally developed for pitch bearing, uh, applications. Um, the industry as a whole started experiencing this root insert issue, so we were able to, we were kind of in a perfect position, right? It was, it was a, it was a [00:02:00] really serendipitous thing that we, we had just developed this product and we could easily pivot.

To measure both the pitch bearing and this root insert issue. Uh, the, the pitch bearing issues are admittedly the, the more difficult, uh, issue, right? To measure. Um, there’s, there’s some, some great opportunities for value and there’s also some really good challenges to come along with that. Um, pitch bearings, uh, they, they don’t rotate quickly.

Right. Uh, when, when we talk about typical CMS typical vibration monitoring, you’re looking at a very, very fast rotating, uh, shaft or bearing, et cetera, and you’re able to pick up on those frequencies as they revolve. You don’t get that with a pitch bearing. It’s a very slow moving, uh, slewing bearing. Um, so picking up.

Noise through vibration can be very difficult, uh, because again, you don’t get that frequency of that [00:03:00] rotation, so you’re left with nothing but uh, a bunch of noise. Right. And you’re hoping that that noise floor is low enough that you might capture a bit of crunching of cage material or anything like that?

Right. The alternative in what, in what we use ecoPITCH for is it’s very simple. We, we point a an inductive displacement sensor right at the pitch bearing itself. Typically the inner ring, depending on the type of turbine. And what we’re looking for is any kind of slop or displacement between the inner and outer ring.

And there’s always gonna be some, right. Uh, but, but what we’re looking for is. Is a change in the amount of, of movement between those two rings, which may indicate falling or, or other failure modes within the raceways. The challenges come along when you have failure modes that maybe, maybe don’t show themselves right through that displacement because it’s absolutely possible to, to completely lock [00:04:00] up a bearing while, while showing almost no displacement.

So there’s, there’s, there are challenges to come along with this, so, so. ecoPITCH is great for pitch bearings, but it really needs to be coupled with good visual inspections by the sites to make sure that that bearing’s not spitting out cage material right. And something that, that maybe isn’t being seen in the data.

Allen Hall: So those measurements are important.

Right? And it’s very difficult to go up there every month or two and try to take those measurements. Are there signs on the outside that everybody should be watching for? I know when we were on site a number of times. If there’s a pitch bearing problem, you typically see grease on the outside of the blade, near the root area.

Is that the, the main source of detection at the moment? 

Forrest French: Yeah. And, and you know, I think, I think every operator’s gonna have a different way of looking for this stuff. It’s, it’s not there, there’s not a, uh, a very uniform strategy, I would say. Um, but really what they’re gonna be [00:05:00] looking for yeah. Is, is exactly that.

It’s gonna be grease purging out of the seals. Um, it’s gonna be the seals themselves blowing out. Right. Um, that’s, uh, cage material. Coming out of the seals is a, is obviously gonna tell you that you’ve got some, some, uh, some balls inside your bearing that are getting locked up and pulling the cage to bits, right?

And that’s what’s gonna happen when that displacement I was talking about gets severe. So you get severe displacement. It jams up a ball, but you continue to pitch. So other balls continue to move and you kind of shred that cage and it starts spitting that material out, damaging the seal. Um, so it’s, it’s a whole process.

Yeah. 

Allen Hall: So if you see grease on the outside, the seal is blown. And more than likely, if you look on the ground, you’re gonna see metal shards. 

Forrest French: Potentially, yeah. Depending on what kind of collars and stuff you have. Uh, but, but yeah, usually a lot of those, a lot of those shards and, and that, that metal material is gonna get captured in a lot of that grease.

Um, so really it’s just gonna turn your [00:06:00] hub into a greasy metal mess. Right. It’s, it’s still fun to be in those, those hubs. For sure. Well, 

Allen Hall: let’s talk blade uh, inserts or bushings. What do you typically see if you’re walking around a farm? When a blade bushing is starting to fail, what’s the indicator from the ground?

Forrest French: From the ground? It’s difficult. Um, what, what we’ve seen typically is you’re gonna see a, uh, and, and again, this, this depends on the turbine, uh, whether it’s an electrically driven turbine or a hydraulically driven, uh, pitch bearing, sorry. Um, with the electrically driven pitch bearings, it’s a little bit easier to spot these issues.

You’ve, you’ve got. Uh, when, when the bushing starts to fail, it will basically spit out some of this, they call it dust, like a metal dust basically. And that dust will kind of make its way out onto the outside of the blade usually. So. From the Nelle, for example, you might pop your head out the hatch, do a visual inspection of the outside of the root, [00:07:00] and you might see some of that dusting heading down, down the blade.

That’s a good indicator that, that you’ve potentially got an issue. It’s, it’s not a, a, a, a sure thing at that point. Right. Um, because there’s a lot of places where metal can can make its way into the system with the hydraulically driven turbines that. Indicator gets a lot more difficult. Um, if anybody, you know, and I’m sure a lot of the folks on the call have some of these turbines, they’re a mess usually, right?

Um, if, if, if any bit of debris gets loose, it’s gonna knock off a bunch of hydraulic lines and it’s gonna make an absolute mess. And any material that’s being spit out by those bushings, it’s just gonna get. Caught up in all that hydraulic oil, and again, it’s just gonna turn into a mess and you’re not really gonna know one from the other at that point.

You’re really just left with, with uh, uh, kind of your more rudimentary ways of looking for this and some of your [00:08:00] more labor intensive ways of looking for this 

Allen Hall: force. There’s a lot of ways to inspect the blade root insert. Bushing issue as the blade moves around and I, I’ve seen some of these, uh, sites where they got a technician who climbs up in there and he is got a feeler gauge of some sort.

Is that really an effective way to, to even measure that problem? 

Forrest French: Yeah. The, the feeler gauge method is. Is better than nothing. Right? You’re, you’re doing something at that point. What, what we’ve found historically is that by the time you can really get a feeler gauge measurement, uh, it’s probably too late.

At that point, you, you’re seeing a significant enough gap that you can get material in there. It’s, it’s a, you’ve got a big problem on your hands. We also see paired with that, um. We see folks doing a dial indicator measurement, right? Where you’re taking sta uh, dial indicators, you’re placing them around the circumference of the blade, and that usually involves pitching the blade out, cantilever, and then you, you just rotate the blade, and that’s in that [00:09:00]static position.

You’re not actually rotating the hub. That is, is definitely better than something like a feeler gauge methodology. The, the, the, the good thing about that is you get higher resolution and you can track that over time as you use that, that methodology. The problem with both of those though, is they’re, they’re offline measurements.

I. You’re not seeing any of the loading due to the rotation of the hub, none of the arrow loads on the blades. So what you’re gonna see is if you place a continuous monitoring system, or, or even a, a, a, a portable monitoring system on this, and you rotate that turbine, you’re gonna see a significant increase in displacement value.

So you’re getting the real picture of what’s actually happening when this turbine is operating. Right? That’s gonna give you. A lot more insight into when you need to make a decision to shut this thing down. 

Allen Hall: So how far off are the feeler gauge measurements compared to the ecoPITCH system? 

Forrest French: It varies. Uh, it, that’s, that’s the issue with the feeler gauge is that depending on [00:10:00] which technician, on which day.

In which position, you know, how they’re feeling that day. They’ll get a different measurement every time. Um, and that’s nothing against the technicians themselves. They’re, it doesn’t matter how perfect, how perfect you do it, you’re gonna get a different measurement every time because that, that blade is shifting and moving around and it might just sit somewhere new one day when you go up to check it.

Um, but on average, I could say easily that you could see up to. A, a difference of, I mean, two, three millimeter I’ve seen before, a difference between a feeler gauge and an actual live measurement when operating the turbine. So very significant. 

Allen Hall: Well, yeah. Well, what I want to talk to then is what happens if we don’t catch these, uh, these indicators early enough?

What is the downstream effect and sort of how expensive does that get 

Forrest French: The final failure is, is catastrophic. Right. The final failure is that the [00:11:00] blade falls off. It, it liberates, right? That’s the, the correct term is a liberation. Um, but nobody wants to end up with a blade in on the ground. Um, and so you, you generally have a lot of signs leading up to that.

Um, that again, you, you need some type of system to measure those. Whether that’s a manual measurement, um, using feeler gauges or dial indicators, and I have my opinions on those and we will get into that. But, or, or, or a continuous monitoring system, whether that’s permanent or a portable system, uh, such as a, a sweep.

Um, but you need to be looking out for these items in some way, shape, or form. There’s, there’s a particular subset of turbines, of blade types that are, that are known to be seeing this failure more. And it’s highly likely that if you’re listening to this, you probably know whether you have those, those blades.

You’ve probably been notified one way or another. [00:12:00] Um, but if not, we can help, we can help make that call. 

Martin McLarnon: Yeah. And just, just add to that, you know, there’s other, um, owners, you know, the blade liberation potentially if it strikes the tower. Could you get tower collapse as well? So that’s like obviously, uh, huge increases.

Um, and then when that happens, you know, what are the options? You know, um, you know, what damage does that do? How long does it take to get a new blade in an expedited fashion can be even more expensive. And then the whole time you’ve got, um, the turbine is offline. And depending on what time of year that happens, you may not be able to kinda get it all, all lined up, um, for several months.

Um, so, so yeah, definitely. It’s, it’s extremely, we’d say high risk. So the, the cost impacts are, are, are really big.

Joel Saxum: I’ve, I’ve heard of, uh, touching the insurance world, right? Like farms where, and this is where the ecoPITCH system comes into play.

Wind farms that have been shut down and they haven’t been turned back on for months, entire wind farms because they don’t know how to monitor for this, or they don’t know if it’s safe to go back on. Once [00:13:00] they’ve discovered a problem, they don’t know what that, um, you know, what is our safety margin here?

What. Can we play with, how can we get this thing back running? So you guys as eco with the ecoPITCH system, have walked into that, right? You’ve been able to get these things up and running. How does that work? How does that process work with you guys? 

Forrest French: So, so a situation like that, and we’ve seen this, right?

Uh, customer has a blade liberate they shut down their entire fleet because to your point, they don’t know. They don’t know, right? They don’t know what’s out there. Now, what, what other insidious failures are just waiting for them. So. What we can provide in that case is, is our, our ecoPITCH system. We have a portable.

Portion or a portable version of this where we go up tower, it’s a real quick and dirty type thing, right? We’re using magnets and Velcro, whatever we can right to crudely get this stuff into the turbine safely. Obviously it’s not going anywhere, um, but whatever it takes to quickly [00:14:00] get this system installed, what we’ll do is we’ll run the turbine for about 10 minutes, right?

We’re gonna. Take our measurements, we’re gonna get outta there, we’re gonna yank our equipment out, and we’re gonna move on to the next turbine. Generally speaking, with that system, and this depends on the turbine, you’re looking at about two turbines per day. Certain certain blade types, we have to get in the blade itself.

That can push us back to, you know, one turbine per day for confined space reasons and things like that. Um, but what that does is it provides you with. Your full population. Now you know what every blade looks like compared to the rest of the population. And what we’re doing with that data is we’re, again, we’re taking all these 10 minute data samples and we’re just saying, Hey, these, this subset of turbines needs further analysis, right?

You need to be watching these. The rest of these though are baseline. They’re all right where we expect them to be. They’re all [00:15:00] the same. The operator can quickly just go and fire those turbines back up and get back to business. 

Allen Hall: And what does that data look like for us? Is it just a, a measurement or? Do you see the movement of the root and the, the pitch bearing as the turbine spins?

What, what is that data? 

Forrest French: The data is, is really rudimentary. It’s very, it’s very cool and, and there’s a lot of information that you can take away from it, but at the end of the day, it’s just a sine wave. And I’m sure we’ll, we’ll provide some, some examples of that that you guys can toss up on the screen.

Um, but really what you’re seeing, and generally in a simple system, we’re gonna put a sensor up near the leading edge. Near the trailing edge, right? And if you put those two, uh, sign waves on a graph, what you’ll typically see is they’re, they’re out of phase by about 90 degrees. That’s expected as the turbine is rotating.

One side, you know, one side of the blade’s gonna go into compression, one’s gonna go into detention, and then as it swings around, it’s gonna reverse, right? So you get that 90 degree phase [00:16:00] where it starts to get fun is, uh, or fun, fun for me as the engineer looking at the data. Maybe not fun for the, the person who owns a turbine, but, uh, where it starts to get interesting is when these failures get.

Very severe. We’ve seen that that phasing actually start to line up. And what that means to me is that the blade is no longer wobbling. It’s literally pulling away all at one time and dropping back down all at once, right? So you have the entire blade system plunking up and then falling back on the bearing.

So at that point, that means that likely you’ve, you’ve lost. Enough bushings around the circumference of that blade that the entire blade is moving at the same time rather than flexing in and out. That’s a little more rare, but it’s just an example of some of the cool, uh, bits of information that we can take away from this 

Allen Hall: for us, when you see these kinds of large measurements, uh, displacement happening [00:17:00] as the hub spins, putting a permanent system in, I think makes sense because you want to be able to project.

Ideally where this growth is or if it starts to vary wildly uh, or grow rapidly, you wanna be able to understand how soon to shut the turbine off. Explain to me what the logic is that goes into that, because there’s a lot of engineering that looks at that data. 

Forrest French: Yeah, and this is, this is the key difference between something like a portable system that we talked about where you go up, you take 10 minutes of data and you yank it out.

The key difference between that and a continuous monitoring and a permanent system. The portable system is gonna tell you on this day at this time, what was your displacement? And that’s great information. You can absolutely action that information, but what you’re lacking is the full story, right? What, okay, it was here today, what is it tomorrow?

What is it? The next day? I’ve seen examples where, uh, I’ve put a permanent system in place and the [00:18:00] displacement value is, we’ll call it elevated. It’s maybe not in like emergency status, but it’s elevated. It stayed there. For as long as we’ve monitored this turbine, it stayed. What that means is that had you just gone and done dial indicator measurements or even a portable suite, you might end up thinking, we need to, we need to action this.

We need to replace this blade. However, with a permanent system, you’re now armed with that knowledge to say, no, let’s monitor. Let’s keep watching it and wait until it does actually grow. And that’s the full picture, right? If I go and put a system in place, and I’m seeing that gross pattern, and, and Martin used the term peak to peak earlier, and what that’s referring to is that sine wave that we’re talking about.

The distance that the target is moving away from the sensor, the top minus the bottom of that waveform, gives you your full displacement, your peak to peak, as that peak to peak grows. What we generally see is a, an an [00:19:00]exponential growth. Once it starts to go, once you get a, a significant number of these bushings that start to fail, the rest of the bushings that are already prone to failure continue to fail, and then you have a cascading effect where you just start to release.

Um, so being able to watch for that and being able to make a risk-based decision with that data. Is crucial. 

Joel Saxum: So for, with that being said, when an, when you guys are dealing with an operator, do you have a set metric or is it case by case? When you know like, hey, this thing is starting to unzip itself. What does that look like?

What’s the time look like? Do they have an hour? Do they have a month? What does, what are they thinking? 

Forrest French: The timing can change depending on the, the type of blade, the environment right. That it’s in, how it was installed. Um. How many, how many blade bolts have broken over time, right? That, that time can change significantly.

On average, I would say that we go [00:20:00] from making a call to notify a customer that you have an issue that is starting to reveal itself to, we probably need to consider shutting this thing down is usually on the order of two months, on average, probably. Um, so. Not, we’re not talking days. Right. It, it, it can be though.

Allen Hall: Maybe give us a picture of what the system looks like when it’s installed in, at the base of Blade or in the hub.

Well, 

Forrest French: I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll start with the root insert. Um, it’s the one that’s a little more interesting as far as the installation goes, but. Typically what we’re gonna have is we’re gonna have our CMS boxes, right? There’s two of them. Um, they’re about, yeah, I mean about a foot, foot by foot, maybe. Um, you’ve got two of those guys depending on the turbine.

And this is the fun of my job as, as the ecoPITCH application lead. Every turbine I get to go up and make a custom installation design, right? We have to find somewhere to put these boxes, and, and we’ve talked about it. These, these turbines, these hubs [00:21:00] are not designed to be, uh, retrofit friendly, right?

There’s nowhere to put this stuff. They don’t, they don’t leave bolt holes for you to put things. So we have to get really creative in order to design a robust system that’s gonna survive in this environment. But I digress. Generally you’re gonna have your two CMS boxes mounted somewhere in the hub, um, on a, a mounting plate of some kind.

Uh, and then from there, at most you’re gonna have about nine displacement sensors. So three sensors in each blade. Those sensors are wired. Uh, so what, we’ll, what we’ll typically do is I’ll have, uh, for example, a, an anchor of some kind. Dead center or in the center of rotation inside the blade itself. And I’ll typically have a, a.

Some kind of, uh, I’ve used very fancy, uh, uh, industry grade bungee cable, basically. Uh, or, or [00:22:00] similar, uh, metal, cable, whatever it may be. Um, it’s something with some stretch and some give because we have a rotating component, but the cables will then drop down onto that anchor. They’ll come up that, that fancy bungee cord right from there.

They’ll be routed along existing cable lines to the boxes themselves. Um, the sensors are mounted. It’s a pretty simple thing. The sensors are mounted using a combination typically of a, of a, of a double-sided tape and a liquid epoxy. The double-sided tape is there for installation efficiency, uh, because it’s very difficult to install a liquid epoxy overhead.

But we’ve never had any, any, any, any issues with that design so far.

Joel Saxum: And I’m gonna throw one more at you here because this is something that Alan and I run into almost everywhere. We, we end up when we’re talking I, iot or anything else. Cybersecurity. Right? Because at the end of the day, this is the conversation we have.

Oh, you can solve a problem. Great. I’m gonna pass it. Oh wait, cybersecurity. We gotta make sure this is, [00:23:00] that we can get these things actually installed in our turbine. So how does, uh, ONYX Insight handle that with this system? 

Forrest French: Sure. So I, I think a couple key things, right. First and foremost, I think a lot of people jump for joy when we tell them that our system is run off of a 4G router.

It does not connect to the turbine operating, so it does not connect to the turbine at all. Right. It runs fully on its own. Um, there are, you know, there are still, those questions absolutely come up still. Right. Even though it’s, it’s just taking data from our system. It’s not getting any kind of operating data from the turbine itself.

We still get that question right, and I think it’s perfectly fair. However, um, we’ve had multiple success stories up to this point, right? We’ve, we’ve, we’ve, uh, we’ve been able to work through those. We have a dedicated IT team. We’re up to date on cybersecurity, uh, certifications and those items. I’m not an IT guy, but we have a whole IT group that takes care of this, right?

So when those [00:24:00] concerns do come up. We’re locked and loaded. We’re ready to get them chatting with the people who they need to chat to, to make sure that whatever cybersecurity questionnaires or, uh, you know, confirmations need to be done, it can be done and it, and it does get done. So that, that’s, that’s, I think, I think the best news is just, it’s, it’s fully standalone, right?

There’s no ethernet connection to the tower itself. 

Allen Hall: All right, so that sounds really simple and easy to do, and you can do it in a temporary fashion and get yourself some data across the whole fleet. Or if in some cases when you triage these, you’ll want to keep the system in there longer term to help you understand when repairs need to take place.

And this is where the money comes in because it’s all at the end of the day, is about using your resources wisely as an operations. And your o and m budget is limited and is. Tends to get limited more and more every year. So you want to be spending the money wisely, which is what ecoPITCH System does.

How does, how do you project then, when you have that data [00:25:00] and you’re starting to get that streaming coming in, you’re seeing the, the blade movement play out. How are you spending your budgets there? How do you appropriate the right amount of funds for the right size of problem? 

Martin McLarnon: Yeah, so we’ve got, um, um, a good case study with a customer who had installed ecoPitch permanent, uh, for insert issue. And they had quite a lot of historical issues with this, um, and, and really trying to manage this, this problem. Um, and like how do they keep operating the turbine, uh, wind farm safely while, while these, uh, issues are ongoing? So really legal pitch was really unique and enable enabling them to do that.

They get this peak to peak measurement that, that we’re measuring, you know, all the time. And seeing how that, um, changes over time. So gives ’em the benefit of an early stage indicator. And as far said, it’s a, it’s a direct measurement and it’s, um, you know, through the actual operation of the, the turbine rotation.

Like some of these other, you know, [00:26:00] one off measurements are very, you know, it’s whenever the, the, the blades are static, it doesn’t show that true, um, garbing throughout the whole rotation. So. Um, that we were able to see that whole progress from really early stage. So things that we talked about, getting a new blade or looking at some engineering, uh, solutions, gives them time to plan that out, but also in the right way so they can wait until it gets to a point, um, where they’re, um, you know, saying that this needs to be switched off.

We’re not comfortable anymore with the level of the gabbing. Um, and even to that point when even the, the blade itself is, is switched off, turbine, switched off, there could be still a chance of slippage and the blade continuing to, to fall off. They need to know that as well, for safety reasons. So until that blade gets replaced or repaired, they need to have really good visibility on, on what that condition is.

But effectively, you know, across a large wind farm, it really helps them manage things rather than, uh, you know, switching everything off when just, you know, [00:27:00] until they replace all the blades, which isn’t really. Realistically an option anyway. So they have to really help some manage that. Loose budgets, excuse me.

And uh, yeah, supply chain, um, lead times, things like that. You have, that all has to be managed. Um. So it’s been a really good success story.

Allen Hall: And all this is backed by all the engineers and scientists that are at ONYX Insight.

And Martin, maybe you can provide a little summary of that because if you haven’t worked with ONYX Insight, you may not realize the power and the capability that exists within in that building. 

Martin McLarnon: Yeah, yeah. And it’s great, you know, here in Forest talk through the, uh. The application for, for ecoPITCH. So, you know, obviously, you know, we’ve got a really talented bunch of engineers that can, you know, really explain, uh, the issues and under, you know, we really are understanding, um, the problems customers have, which is unique, uh, depending on the turbine type, um, or, or the specific issue.

And, and that’s really how, you know, ONYX is, um, business has really grown over the [00:28:00] years. Is that continuous, um, collaboration with customers. What sorts of issues are coming up like for said. This root insert issue has just kind of emerged in the last couple of years. It wasn’t something people were, uh, necessarily expecting.

And, um, we were always trying to drive to have those, those discussions. So for us, we, um, you know, background is in, uh, a lot of me, mechanical engineering and gearbox design was our original, uh, how we started out. But then getting into drive, train, uh, monitoring, vibration monitoring, CMS hardware, um, um, with, you know.

Principal engineers with decades of experience, like, you know, global team, uh, different data analysts as well. So we, um, yeah, really have expanded that from drive chain, uh, skid analytics, um, foundation monitoring, uh, pitch bearing, um, and, uh, and this route insert blade monitoring as well. So, um, yeah, we really, whenever customers have have those issues, we like to [00:29:00]discuss it, figure out what, what the potential solutions are, and.

Uh, it could be a new, a new product for us. Um. E eventually, if that’s, if that’s something we can, uh, kinda get a good solution for or release. Provide advice to the customer. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. If you have blade root insert issues or pitch bearing issues, you do not wanna mess with them. Or even blade bolts because blade liberation is so expensive.

And when you have those issues, you want to go to accompany. Like ONYX Insight because they have the expertise. They’ve been around a long time. They’re a part of some OEMs equipment and they understand the variations between all those different blade models and turbine types. That’s where you wanna start because you’re gonna save your company.

I. Millions of dollars in losses in downtime. And Martin, how do people who are not familiar with On Insight get ahold of you and talk about ecoPITCH to see how they can get it installed in their turbines? 

Martin McLarnon: Yeah, I, um, we confirm my, uh, email address in the chat. Um, I’m a [00:30:00] cover the North American region, so hobby to, um, you know, get, get involved in that discussion.

And we’ve got global, uh, commercial folks, so I will get. Get the, you connected to them and I’d love to have a conversation. 

Allen Hall: And you can always visit ONYX Insight ONYXinsight.com. Great website, and you can learn more about ecoPITCH on that site. There’s a good PDF download there if you wanna learn more.

And yes, reach out to ONYX Insight. Reach out to to Martin, reach out to, for. Get your questions answered now, because as the season progresses, it’s only gonna be more expensive and at the right time to do this kind of inspection and data acquisition is now so. Martin and Forrest, thank you so much for appearing on the show.

I really appreciate all of the information. Absolutely. 

Forrest French: Thanks 

Allen Hall: for having us. 

Martin McLarnon: Thanks Al Joel. Appreciate [00:31:00] it.

Legal battles in Oklahoma continue between the Osage Nation and Enel. Equinor faces offshore wind project hurdles amidst U.S. offshore wind regulatory issues. Plus a rebranding announcement from Deutsche Windtechnik to DWT and a new study painting wind blades red to prevent bird strikes.

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 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: There’s more news out of Oklahoma. The state of Oklahoma has.

Entered the legal ballot between the wind developer in EL and the Osage nation. It, we all recall on the podcast probably a year ago where the Osage Nation had won a lawsuit with the help of the federal government to take down a big wind farm in north central Oklahoma. The state of Oklahoma has filed an amicus brief opposing the immediate removal of the 84 turbines in Osage County.

Now, this is a big deal [00:01:00] because pretty much the last I saw, which is a while ago, the order was that they needed to take down all the turbines and reclaim the land, basically put it back to where it was before the turbines were placed in it. Now the state of Oklahoma is stepping into the mix and they’re citing a couple of things.

They’re saying that the state of Oklahoma has an interest in property laws and protecting tax revenue. However, Osage doesn’t fit into Oklahoma laws. It’s not their territory. And meanwhile, the Osage tribe is saying, Hey, this is over and we have mineral rights, and these turbines need to come down.

So this is a kind of a weird spot because Anelle’s in the middle of this, now that the state’s gotten involved against the federal government, is there a missing link here? Is, this is certain more to this story because it does seem like some wheels are turning at the moment. I think, 

Joel Saxum: Phil Allen.[00:02:00]

You guys are very smart, right? But I think we need someone smarter than us to decode this whole thing as far as like maybe a lawyer that can get in there, because Alan, you hit it on the head, Osage tribe and Osage tribe lands do not actually fall under Oklahoma law. They have their own sets of laws, so you have a federal ruling saying that something must happen within, of course, the outlines of the state of Oklahoma, but within the greater outlines of the United States.

But now the state wants to be able to go against the federal ruling to have their own rights recounted for while this, the Oage tribe is saying no, like we’ve already passed and I think the total bill that NL is gonna was supposed to get stamped, it was like $300 million, which is crazy ’cause it doesn’t cost $300 million to remediate 84 turbines.

However. This isn’t necessarily a wind turbine take down exercise. This is a mining reclamation exercise after you take the wind turbines down. That’s why it costs so much. [00:03:00] So there’s a lot of money on the table for nl and now you have the Oklahoma Solicitor General Jerry Gary Gaskins stepping in and saying Hey, we’re also getting some kind of tax revenues to the state and things like that from the wind farm.

But I wouldn’t think that would go to the state in this case. I would think it would go to the Osage tribe. So I don’t understand the state’s. The state’s position in this. 

Phil Totaro: But Phil, do you have any insights on that? Unfortunately, I do not. But what’s interesting about it is that you had, the federal government stepped into this whole thing because they.

Felt like the tribe wasn’t being adequately represented basically, or if they were representing themselves or they had, attorneys representing them. The federal government stepped in because of the nature of the case and how the high profile would’ve been to, to say that yes, the tribe actually has these these mineral rights on what is effectively there.

They’re a chunk [00:04:00] of the United States as you’re saying, it’s, they’re physically located within the confines of Oklahoma, but they are their own little thing, so I. Yeah I, unfortunately I don’t, and you’re right, we probably need somebody smarter than any of us to figure out what is really going on with this other than obviously the state.

Whatever money the state gets from any kind of tax revenue, they don’t want to ever see it go away. So it can be a nickel and they’ll still chase after you for it. 

Joel Saxum: But here’s the other thing and Alan, I wanna get your 2 cents on what my thought is here. This is my theory, my working theory. NL has a removal order on hold pending their appeals to the federal court.

I think that as soon as 10 years and one day from commissioning date comes up, this whole thing’s gonna get dropped. And they’re gonna, they’re gonna take this wind farm down. 

Allen Hall: That’s what I was wondering. Is it a repowering play that once they get to the end of the PPA life or the PTC life. Does this thing not matter [00:05:00] anymore and they’re just trying to delay it and maybe the state of Oklahoma is helping anelle with that.

It is odd. When did this farm go in, Joel? It went in 20 16, 

Joel Saxum: 17. It started in 2013, but it wasn’t. Commissioning until 2015. But that was the initial, that was the initial thing. So PTC does a start until commission day. So that’s, it’s it’s this year, like it’s 10 years is up this year sometime.

So what is the play here? It’s push off until PTC revenues are pulled. And then once PTC revenues are pulled, dcom, you know what I, Joel, I like that theory. I’m gonna 

Phil Totaro: go with that. 

Joel Saxum: I think that’s what it is. Because they’re not gonna let ’em repower it. I can guarantee you that’s not gonna happen. 

Phil Totaro: I think it’s, it makes sense to me that they would just be trying to stretch it out because what else is the play here?

Because if, ’cause again, if the state’s taking some kind of tax revenue, it’s probably tax off the sale of the power, which probably goes to the utility, which has nothing to do with the Osage nation, which make would make even more sense. And then. Because of the production tax credit, [00:06:00] they get to take extra tax revenue off the power sales.

So that’s probably a reason why the state would wanna step in and try to, stretch this thing out until the end of that PTC period. I gotta tell you, this is the, this is armchair 

Joel Saxum: math and I’m saying PTC credits are like 26 bucks. A megawatt hour, 26 bucks, a megawatt hour, 84 turbines at 1.79 megawatts, which is what these are.

Is 150.4 megawatts, I’m gonna give them a 40% capacity factor, which is being a little bit generous. That equates to $1.126 million per month in PTC credits. So you extend this thing for six months, that’s 7 million, seven and a half million dollars in L’S pocket. If they can stretch this thing for seven months just of PTC credits, it’ll help pay for the decommissioning.

Allen Hall: Because that’s where it’s headed. Yeah. And the federal court system is not [00:07:00] something to play around with, so you gotta tread lightly here because if the federal court feels like this is just being a delay tactic to increase revenue, that will come with penalties, typically, that $7 million will go right back.

You go right into the Osage nations. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting developing. Gotta keep track of it now because it’s moved into a really unique phase beyond what I thought was possible. I didn’t think the state of Oklahoma’s gonna wade into this, but here we are Deutsche Wind Technique, which if you don’t know Deutche wind technique, where have you been?

They have announced a strategic rebranding. To DWT, which is what everybody calls Deutsche Wind Technique in the states. It’s DWT. We never used Deutsche Wind Technique and it’s going to take effect in what, five different places? United States, Poland, which is odd, but, okay. France, I get United Kingdom obvious in Taiwan.[00:08:00]

And the company employs about 2,400 people at the minute, and they service about 8,000 wind turbines across 10 countries. So this is trying to address the whole pronunciation, spelling of Deutsche Wind. And, but at least in this states, because our spelling’s atrocious, let’s just admit it. But they’re gonna keep the dornell wind technique the same and not changing it in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

Which again makes sense. That’s why Poland is in that weird offset one. Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: But why just do it, just change it to DWT across the board? Maybe. Yeah. You can leave Deutsche Wind Technique in their summer, but Brandon has DWT across the board. It’ll be 

Allen Hall: easier. Oh, you think so? The swag is gonna be great.

The DWT swag is perfect, right? The three letter acronym that fits right on a hat. Come on, 

Joel Saxum: by the way. DWT if you guys are looking to send swag anywhere, we can give you all of our addresses. We will take it and wear it on the shelf. I got no problem with that, right? I think this is [00:09:00] great, right? Deutsche Wind Technique, technique.

Technique, doche, like wherever you go, right? You hear someone say it differently. Yeah, I think it’s gonna be it’s good for the brand. Even the, I hope they change their emails. Please, if someone’s listening, change your email aliases to just DDWT instead of having to type that off. But yeah, good move.

Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off Guard the logics. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming problems. From ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late.

Visit og ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Sted today as we record announced the discontinuation of its 2,400 megawatt horn C four offshore wind farm in the uk. And despite securing the CFD last September, the [00:10:00] project has fallen victim to escalating prices and financial pressure.

It raises some interesting and important questions about the future of offshore wind in the UK because there’s just a lot of CFDs that are happening there, and they’re, the UK is really dependent upon the projects going to completion. Let’s talk about from the OR standpoint for a minute. So this is gonna be a financial impact.

It’s gonna hit them for about $500 million in Q2 of this year because of write downs and. All the equipment that was being built for this project, and there was another, about a hundred million US dollars on capitalized construction. That’s gonna be in an impairment. Now I think stead is totally fine with that because at the same time they announced the horn C four discontinuation and the company released its Q1 financial results.

So it’s the good with the not so good. But, stead is doing pretty well, right? So the EBITDA went up about 18% versus [00:11:00] Q1 in 2024. Now, there’s a lot of companies that would dream to have those kind of numbers, and obviously, last year was not a great year because of some of the right downs that they had to go take.

But there’s, they’re going to, it’s what they’re at 10 gigawatts of installed offshore wind capacity at the moment. That’s crazy. That’s an amazing amount. And the total installed capacity for renewables is at 18 and a half gigawatts. That’s amazing. So although some of these projects don’t have the financial numbers that Osted would wish to continue with them, it does seem like Ted itself is doing fairly well.

If you look at some of the details on the CFDs in the uk. And Phil, correct me if I’m wrong here, it does look like the price is going to jump quite substantially. It was in the 65 pounds per megawatt hour that’s gonna be heading [00:12:00] up to north of 90 pounds per megawatt hour and some of the CFDs. So it makes sense if Ted can just hold and they still have rights to the plot.

Maybe they can restructure the CFD to get into the 95, maybe a hundred. Maybe even more because it’s based on like 2015 numbers, right? The, all these are based on a years ago now you’re really talking about maybe 120 pounds per megawatt hour, which is an incredible. Number to get as a producer of power offshore?

Phil Totaro: Yes. At the moment, those are, that’s how the CFD system is structured. They’re looking at making some changes. We’re probably not gonna have time to go into what all the details of ’em are, but effectively they’re going into a scenario where they’re gonna have sealed bids but. The, which they already do today.

But the Energy Secretary in the UK is actually gonna be able to look at sealed bids anonymously. So what the [00:13:00] independent power producers in the uk of which ORs, Ted’s one of ’em, what they all want is to be able to have. A hundred percent of their power generation guaranteed and basically underwritten by this CFD structure.

All of these little things that at a government will try to put in place to protect consumers are things that can also create a significant amount of risk and uncertainty for businesses and the independent power producers in particular. So it’s just a balancing act that, that everybody has to go through.

And for a company like Sted to pull the. Plug on active development for the ho C phase four at this point. It would seem to make a lot of sense that they think they can get a better deal later. All of these factors are gonna come together to suggest a positive outcome for a company like Sted with with this kind of a decision.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying is 2.4 gigawatts is a lot. What does that do to, and I would guess I was assuming that was, they were Siemens turbines, but [00:14:00] what does that do to the, that’s a hateful bottom line hit for any OEM Duple four gigawatts, even at your big turbines.

That’s 175 turbines ish, something like that. 

Phil Totaro: Yes. 2.4 gigawatts is a significant chunk bigger, so if it is actually vestus but it’s a big chunk for either Siemens or Vestus to have to put on hold. Because keep in mind, again, when. Somebody signs a turbine supply contract, they’ll give an OE emm a deposit of maybe five to 10% of the total contract value.

You don’t get paid if you’re the OE em, you don’t get paid until commissioning. The fact that commissioning can be delayed is obviously quite problematic to anybody’s bottom line. Absolutely. Joel you’re spot on. 

Allen Hall: My understanding was for horn C four, there are termination fees involved.

And that my read on it was that, that there were going to be payments made to close out the projects for now, which I [00:15:00] as immediately assume was Siemens. Mea could be wrong, but it’ll show up in the quarterly reports here in the next couple of months. Phil? You’ll see it. 

Phil Totaro: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Okay. So we’ll know who the turbine provider was and 2.4 gigawatts worth of turbines.

You’ll, that’s a bump in somebody’s pocketbook. 

Joel Saxum: What do we always say? 10 million. A megawatt. We know that it’s a little bit higher for offshore 1.1. So you’re talking two and a half billion to 3 billion. $3 billion. 

Phil Totaro: Oh, that’s, yeah, it’s two. 2 million a megawatt for offshore, Joel. 

Joel Saxum: Okay, so fi 5 billion.

Yeah, so $5 billion, 10% is 500 million, which it says here, the decision will impact Q2 2025 earnings by up to 506 million, including write downs of offshore transmission assets and contract cancellation fees. So it’s in 

Allen Hall: there somewhere. Hard to hide that in the quarterly report.

Speaker 5 (2): Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not, actually, is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system upgrade [00:16:00] for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

Visit weather guard wind.com to learn more. Read a case study and schedule a call today. 

Allen Hall: EOR has announced it may pursue legal actions against the Trump administration over the order to halt work at its empire win one project off the coast of New York. The company described the directive as quote unquote unlawful and quote unquote.

Unprecedented as developers across the us continue to raise to get their projects done. Now this is a unique situation, of course, just because it has focused attention on one WIN site while others are quickly trying to get to completion. Vineyard Wind one, coastal Virginia offshore wind, or continuing on and.

Ecuador. It just isn’t a weird spot and a lawsuit doesn’t really make sense [00:17:00] here. Everybody. I say don’t think that’s the right approach. There is existing regulatory ways to appeal this. They’re gonna have to go through that process first and can’t necessarily bypass it. You could do things in parallel in terms of a lawsuit, but you’re gonna have to play by the federal rules at the moment, and that’ll be an appeals process through multiple.

Governmental agencies, I think, but nothing’s gonna happen, Phil, this summer, right? I think Ecuador’s in trouble in terms of deployment. They will not be able to do any work when the weather is good, which is right now. Try to get the production tax credits and all that up and running, it’s just gonna delay it no 

Phil Totaro: matter what.

Yeah. And this is what kind of confounds me about this is the, look at the end of the day, this is ultimately a power play kind of a thing. And it comes down to, alright, if you’re gonna still respect the US Federal government and comply with orders that they give you, [00:18:00] then.

They took the right decision to stop construction. However, it seems like they took that decision a little too hastily without talking to their lawyers first, because why would you stop construction and then talk to your lawyers and then go with the lawsuit saying, we don’t think this was a fair and lawful decision to, to order us to stop.

You what they should have done if you ask me. Is just keep building because as you both just said, you’ve got a scenario where you’ve got. Climatic conditions in the summer that are gonna allow for construction to continue and flourish. And, why not just take advantage of this and then if there’s a fine to be paid for defying government order, just pay it later.

And because you’re gonna be. Screwed if you do, or it’s screwed if you don’t. So if it’s me, I’m just gonna keep building and like Charlton Heston used to say they can [00:19:00] come take my wind farm outta my cold dead hand. I’m paraphrasing him, so it’s like, what? Like what?

What’s the alternative now? ’cause now like Alan, you’re saying they’re stuck in court. Like how does that do anything good for anybody? It’s wasting time in resources of eor. It’s wasting time in resources of the government when there’s gonna be, whether it’s a legal appeal or a regulatory appeal, there’s gonna be an appeal anyway and.

I it just seems like EOR just absolutely did not respond the right way to this at all. If you ask me, 

Joel Saxum: Einor is a global company, of course, but they’re a Norwegian company and they’re playing in an American realm where the culture change. If you ask Norwegians, they listen to no matter what the authorities say.

They don’t fight back. You don’t see a whole lot of protests going on in Stockholm, or, sorry, not Stockholm. That’s Sweden, my bad. Oslo. Yeah. Greta Gre. Greta Thunberg. Sorry. Yeah. So nor the Norwegians, it’s a cultural thing. They [00:20:00] get an order. They just they’re gonna, they’re usually gonna.

Comply with it. Also congratulations and I think the first Charlton Heston reference on the podcast over five years. Maybe the last hopefully. 

Phil Totaro: But here’s the here’s the thing though, that, that may be the case, Joel, but what I actually think it was about is I. Obviously Ecuador also does a lot of oil and gas business, globally and in the US that’s their bread and butter.

That’s what they don’t really wanna jeopardize. This whole foray into offshore wind is all very well and good and it might give them some revenue, but it’s you know what, like 3% of their total revenue for the entire, EOR Corporation is like wind or renewables related in general versus.

The 97 or whatever percent it is. I’m just making those numbers up. But it’s probably in that kind of a ballpark. It, it might also be because it’s like, it’s a project in New York, near where, obviously Trump’s got some interest vested interests. It’s a foreign company.

As opposed to, a US based entity. There’s [00:21:00] probably, any number of reasons that are behind why this is really happening. But, again, at the end of the day, how a company chooses to respond to it is going to have a massive financial impact on them one, one way or another.

Joel Saxum: Here’s your last reason. EOR is the top five producer in the Gulf of Mexico. 120,000 barrels a day. They’re putting out, they don’t wanna jeopardize that, so they’re not gonna piss anybody off at the federal level to jeopardize 120,000 barrels a day and a hundred leases in the Gulf. 

Allen Hall: The part that’s confusing is to me, is that there’s a long track record of questions about the environmental impact studies that were done, and that’s all public record.

You, you can see that on the bone site. You can walk through the. Transactions that happened and the reports that were issued between Noah and Boem. And I think this comes down to six turbines. I really do, and maybe I’m wrong, but I did a little bit of research into it and it looks like that’s the holdup is there’s six [00:22:00] turbines on the western edge of empire in one that are in a sensitive area on the seabed and.

If those six turbines had been moved or could be readjusted somewhere else, this may go away. However, the really no place to put those six turbines and nyserda needs all the power and they’re gonna need those six turbines to meet the offtake. So Ecuador’s kind of stuck on that level, but you would think that the attorneys and the people reviewing that paperwork over the last three fourish years would’ve flagged it.

Hey, we’re gonna be at risk here. We need to be prepared for it. Something bad to happen. 

Joel Saxum: Alan, are those, is that the kind of situation though, where it’s it’s not just a change order to change it, like you have to resubmit everything once you change the plan? 

Allen Hall: Obviously they would, right?

But there’s no place to put those six turbines. If you look at where they are at right now and where the prevail league winds are the farm is set up to pick up as much wind as they can, and moving those six turbines in the front of the farm in the clean air [00:23:00] are a problem. 

Joel Saxum: So they need a couple, couple more megawatts across the whole wind farm.

On each turbine. 

Phil Totaro: It’s basically there’s, if you moved the turbines, there’s shipping lanes that you’re running into and fishing that would be more impacted versus where the turbines were eventually, as they are right now they’ve been cited, anytime you do a project development, whether it’s offshore, onshore, solar, wind, batteries, I don’t care.

You’re always on the lookout for some little, a critter running around that, that you don’t want to step on their environment and or, you’re looking at the fishermen offshore. You don’t want to impede their ability to be able to go and fish and at the end of the day, everything, what I’m getting at is everything’s compromises.

You can’t violate, you can’t violate the law. They knew all this and there were compromises made. But the issue, the permit was issued, 

Allen Hall: right? But the federal law requires Noah and to do certain things, and it requires BM to do other things. But the B, [00:24:00] if you look at the list of things that BM was responsible for is the environment.

Phil Totaro: But nobody’s other than Trump’s administration, nobody’s saying that they didn’t do their job. That’s the whole point. They’re using that as a nitpicky little excuse to go back and open up a can of worms that was already decided upon. 

Allen Hall: That’s not what the federal record shows, Phil.

The federal record is very clear about Noah being super concerned about and providing a list of 37 items that needed to be addressed before Boeing should be afforded, and Bowen addressed. Almost 

Phil Totaro: none of them. Everybody’s else is being reviewed. Nobody’s gotten a letter saying Stop construction, but everybody else is having their permits re-reviewed.

And my point is, there’s probably legitimate, according to what you’re suggesting, there’s legitimate reasons to go stop every single one of these projects. That’s exactly what the government’s trying to do. 

Allen Hall: I’ve looked at other ones. They see. If you look at vineyard wind, you could look at the time that they went back and did the environmental review.

It took ’em a long time to do that. Now, from what I can tell mean vineyard’s an easy one, right? Vineyard’s an easy target [00:25:00] today because of all the problems they had with the turbines themselves. However, looking on the environmental side that they went through a lot of effort to clear the deck of all the questions and did all the work.

Empire did also. But Noah had concerns about a particular part of that plot. In fact they, the b reduced the size of the area by 1700 acres to remove some of the environmentally sensitive area, which they thought was going to be enough. It isn’t like Boem sat there and said, oh, Noah, we don’t care.

That’s not what happened. Bowen made an adjustment, but Noah persisted as they are obligated to do. By federal law. 

Phil Totaro: So they wrote the letter. But the point is that you could do that with every pro. You can do that with any project. It might not be to the same degree. I get that. But you could nitpick any single project at every single project.

Allen Hall: When they write down the code of federal regulations that are potentially in [00:26:00] violation of that is not just willy-nilly that is. You 

Phil Totaro: pointing out where there may be deficiencies and maybe every other project doesn’t have 37 things, they’ve only got 15. But again, a decision was taken to say that we understand that those 37 things or those 15 things, or those three things are that one thing is important, but we’re going to say, you know what?

We’re making an exception and we’re issuing the permit regardless of what those concerns are. A decision was taken and it was, when you issue a permit, there’s certainty, and when you take that certainty away, it drives away money, it drives away investment 

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 [00:27:00] wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out.

Visit PES wind.com today. Finally, somebody at Vestus is taking the lead about painting these turban blades a different color. As much as we’ve seen about painting a turban blade black. Meyer always says, did anybody talk to a structural person? Because painting a blade black is not good for the structure ’cause it makes it hot, which is the right approach.

But Vestus is partnering with ACO vent to test blades that are painted red, which I evidently Vestus looked at this and said, okay, we can live with red in terms of the temperature rise and the effects on the blade performance. This makes a lot of sense. Now. They are gonna be putting it on just a couple of blades at the Hollands Coast West Project and just to test it out to see if it actually works, because Rosemary birds can see color.

[00:28:00] So black and white may make sense, but painting it a less intensive color. It could have the same effect, right? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It could. And it is a little bit less dark than black, so probably will heat up less. Yeah. ’cause that’s the issue is that if you have one blade, a different color, that it’s, the blades will heat up differently and the stiffness of the blade is related to the temperature.

So if they’re all different temperatures, then they’re gonna be different stiffnesses, and then you’re gonna get. Wobbling happening in your rotor as the the different blades pass yeah. Makes sense. I’m not sure how they arrived at this particular configuration. And have you seen, is it just, is it still one hole blade red or is it every tip red?

Joel Saxum: I think it’s one whole blade, one blade red, the rest of ’em, the other two, white or gray, whatever you call it. 

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t even know if anybody’s even tested. All three blades the same color. 

Joel Saxum: I’ve seen ’em all red 

Rosemary Barnes: for birding purposes. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. I wanna dispel a rumor or [00:29:00] confirm, or not a rumor, sorry, a dispel a wives tale or confirm a wives tale.

This is a question for you, Alan Red, and I’m talking about red and black. So black of course gonna get hot change, temperature, whatever. But when I talk to blade technicians and you’re talking about marking things out on a blade, and if you ever looked at a blade, you see everything in red and blue pen.

They don’t use black pens because the thought process is black pens contain carbon and that’s attractive to lightning. Is that true? 

Allen Hall: Pencils? Yes. Ink, pens, no. Like sharpies. Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: But if we wanna relate this back to the bird thing yeah. And I don’t know if we gave any background, but it’s because there was some trials done in, it was Norway, I think recently.

Not recently. Years ago. I think the initial study was done by a. A bird scientist or some kind of ecologist about whether if you paint one blade on each road of black, then that trial found that in that area that the number of bird collisions was reduced. It was a small trial. It was in only one area.

I [00:30:00] talked to the researcher who did that project, and he was really careful to say that. This is not something that you can just roll out everywhere and assume it will work everywhere. And in fact, there’s a high chance that in some locations it would actually cause harm to the bird population in question.

He did say it’s not it’s not a silver bullet kind of thing. And that’s what, like with the reporting of it, similar to the issue with black markers and lightning, it’s just not that hard. It’s, it, or the general vibe of the reporting was, it’s not so hard, let’s just do it. Like what’s the problem?

And then, what I said when we talked about that story before was, actually there are some issues for why you wouldn’t do that. In terms of, some of the like, logistics of matching sets of blades coming outta the factory. So you’d have to paint them later. And then black gets hot and the stiffness changes.

So now we’ve arrived at a trial of, I think it’s seven turbines vests. Turbines are gonna have one red blade each. And I believe that color was chosen because they didn’t think that the [00:31:00] temperature difference would be so bad between the. Between the blades that you would see a structural different leading to instabilities.

So we’ll see how it goes. 

Joel Saxum: What if we painted one like a, like the Twilight Zone thing? 

That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. And thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, or our weekly newsletter, which is on Substack.

And I just published an article about Empire Wind One, so you gotta go there and check it out, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

This episode covers India’s ambitious plans to double its wind energy capacity by 2030, the UK’s expansion of offshore wind farms, and the US states’ legal challenge against President Trump’s executive order halting wind energy development.

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!

Allen Hall: Starting the week off in India, India’s wind energy sector is investing heavily in capacity and workforce development to double its current 50 gigawatt capacity by 2030. The Indian Wind Turbine Manufacturers Association says they’re focusing on technology innovations while advancing the Make in India mission to achieve this ambitious target.

The country already has 18 gigawatts of annual manufacturing capacity for turbines and components. Companies like LAN and zf Windpower produce critical parts locally. Positioning India as a potential global export hub. Renewable sector hiring is expected to grow by 19% this year in India with most workers being young [00:01:00] Indians between 26 and 35 years old.

Over in the uk the UK’s Crown estate has approved expansion of high density wind farms on existing seabed leases to support the country’s energy transition. Seven projects will increase capacity by 4.7 gigawatts helping Britain towards its target of 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

Up from the current 15 gigawatts projects include RWE’s Ramon two and SSE’s and Equinor’s Dogger Bank D. The Crown Estate’s Marine director Gus Jasper says, this capacity increase program will provide up to 4 million homes with clean energy and decrease the UK’s reliance on internationally sourced fossil fuels.

Britain is already the world’s second largest offshore wind market after China, though inflation and supply chain issues have challenged the sector recently.

Over in the United States, a coalition of 17 states and Washington [00:02:00]DC has filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s executive order halting wind energy development. The order signed on his first day in office, pauses, approvals, permits, and loans for all wind projects, both offshore and onshore.

New York Attorney General Letitia James leading the coalition argues the directive threatens thousands of good paying jobs and billions in investment while delaying the transition away from fossil fuels. The administration recently ordered Norwegian company Ecuador to halt construction on Empire Wind, one near Long Island, despite the project being 30% complete after a seven year permitting process.

Wind currently provides about 10% of US electricity, making it the nation’s largest renewable energy source. The states argued Trump’s order contradicts years of bipartisan support for wind energy and his own declaration of quote, a national energy emergency unquote calling for expanded domestic energy production.[00:03:00]

The administration has also suspended funding for floating offshore wind research in Maine and revoked permits for a project in New Jersey. Internationally, other nations are accelerating wind investments with the UK and Canada’s Nova Scotia recently announcing major offshore expansion plans. That’s this week’s top News stories. Tune in tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Nicholas Gaudern, CTO at PowerCurve, discusses the growing focus on data-driven insights in wind turbine operations, emphasizing the importance of laser scans, digital twins, and aerodynamic add-ons for enhancing efficiency and performance.

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!

Allen Hall: Nicholas, welcome back to the podcast. Hi. Thanks Allen. Good to see you again. There’s a lot going on in wind right now. Obviously the elections that happy the United States are changing the way that a lot of US based operators are thinking about their turbines and, and particularly their blades.

I’ve noticed over the last, even just couple of weeks that. Operators and the engineers are paying more attention to what they’re actually getting on site.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.

Allen Hall: Instead of, uh, the sort of the full service agreement where, hey, they’re under warranty for two years, I don’t really need to do anything for a little while approach.

That’s changing into, I want to know what arrives on site, what am I getting and what problems are there with these particular blades that I may not know about because they’re new to me. Even though these blades, there may be thousands of these blades out in service. Mm-hmm. Me, my company doesn’t know.

Yep. How they operate. How they perform, particularly at this, this new site, I’m Repowering or, [00:01:00] or building new. That is a complete shift. From where it was a year ago, two years ago, five years ago. Yeah. And I think the biggest performance piece that people are looking at is aerodynamics, and I’m trying to understand how these blades perform, how they move.

Yes. What kind of loads there are, what kind I expect over the next year or two. And I think they’re just becoming now aware of maybe I need to have a game plan.

Nicholas Gaudern: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: And I, and that’s where power curve comes in, is like in the sense of have a king plan. Understand what these plates are all about. Yeah, yeah.

And try to characterize ’em early rather than later.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. I think there’s been an increased focus on, on data and for operators, as you say, to understand more what they’re getting and not necessarily relying on just what they’re told. So, uh, I think a nice case study of that is last year we were helping a customer to build a, a digital twin.

Uh, of one of their turbine models that they, that they purchased. So what that involved [00:02:00] is, uh, going to site, doing a laser scan of a blade, understanding geometry, helping them to build up some aerodynamic and structural models of that blade. So then that customer was going to build an AEL model themselves of that turbine so that they could run load calculations.

They could look at, uh, site specific, uh, changes that could be relevant to that turbine’s configuration or how they operated it. And this isn’t really something that you saw a lot of, uh, a few years ago, but I think it’s great that operators, particularly when they have a larger engineering capacity, are starting to get into that game.

Uh, and it’s tough because it’s a lot of what the OEMs do, it’s their kind of specialist knowledge, but there’s a lot of smart people out there. Uh, there’s a lot of companies you can work with to help gather that data and build these products up.

Allen Hall: The OEMs right now are. Lowering the number of engineers.

Nicholas Gaudern: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: Staff reductions. Yeah. Uh, so getting a hold of somebody on the engineering staff, particularly with aerodynamics, can be quite hard. Yes. And in fact, I’ve talked to [00:03:00] some smaller operators that can’t get access to those people at all.

Nicholas Gaudern: No, no. We, we get told that a lot that, um, there’s, there’s customers calling OEMs and they, yeah.

They can’t, they can’t speak to anyone who really understands that the issues that they’re facing. But free now we, we have contact with a lot of OEMs. I would say that we have more aerodynamicists and power curve than some OEMs have now. Oh, that’s true. And that’s quite, that’s true. Surprising. You know.

Um, so it does mean that I think from a customer support perspective, it is harder for the OEMs to take on some of those really detailed or nuanced questions that an operator may have.

Allen Hall: Right. Operators are getting smarter.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.

Allen Hall: And asking more pointed questions, not generic questions anymore. Uh, we’ve had, uh, junker on the podcast and I, when I ran into her last summer, she was basically saying that like you, you’re talking to operators now that are getting smarter about what they’re doing.

Yes. They’re asking more pointed questions. The OEMs can’t respond. So now what do you do? Yeah, that’s, that’s the Global Blade Group.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.

Allen Hall: [00:04:00] Perspective, right? Where everybody’s starting to pool the resources together. I think that’s an

Nicholas Gaudern: absolutely great initiative. I mean, it’s something that’s been going along in various forms for a few years now, but um, now big it has joined Stack rt.

It’s kind of been relaunched in, in this new form that you were discussing with us. So, um, we are really excited to be part of that, I think kind of the way, uh. Our role sits within the group. We’re still working on, on the details, but we’re definitely gonna be part of that group in helping to, to share knowledge.

So the aim is that we will help, uh, educate basically to, to raise discussion points, to, to lead forums with operators about how they can understand their aerodynamics better, how they can ask more relevant questions of the OEM. So I think that’s what a lot this is about, just asking the right questions.

I think sometimes operators can feel a little bit, uh, blind. Uh, as to the best way to navigate a problem, but by knowledge sharing within the Blades group with other forums, um, I think that’s gonna make that a lot easier for everyone.

Allen Hall: And you’ve been tapped as [00:05:00] the lead of the aerodynamics group within the Global Blade

Nicholas Gaudern: Group?

Yes. Yep, yep, that’s, that’s correct. Um, we haven’t had a, a kickoff yet as such, but that will hopefully happen in the next couple of months. But yeah, the idea is that power curve will kind of. Lead that knowledge sharing around the aerodynamic subject.

Allen Hall: Yes. So if you haven’t joined the Global Blade Group, it’s free.

Yep. If you work for an operator, you can just join it and you should. So get somebody on your staff to sign up to get ahold of Burger and get going with that, because then you can tap into all the resources that they have. Them being, uh, the most recent one is the leading edge protection campaign that was just summarized, uh, a couple of weeks ago.

So that data set is out there and you want to have access to that. Mm-hmm. But I think more importantly, as the group goes forward now and has been emboldened again, the aerodynamic piece is the missing link for most operators. Yeah, it is.

Nicholas Gaudern: And it’s, it’s often an area that is, um, hasn’t had as much attention historically.

Uh, there’s just not so many engineers out there with that background. You know, it’s, um, [00:06:00] I wouldn’t say it’s any more or less hard than lots of other of the complex subjects within a wind turbine. There’s just, there’s fewer people, uh, who, who know the same, uh, level of, um, stuff.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And there’re being, those resources are being, uh, taxed quite heavily at the minute, uh, with all the activity it happen in the OEMs.

Now, as operators, uh, start to receive newer blades and you see. OEMs obviously moving to bigger turbines and to specific models, so there’s actually fewer varieties of blades than there were a couple years ago, but there’s still quite a number of blades out there. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So you, you’re going to get generally a more generic blade type at your specific wind site?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, quite possibly.

Allen Hall: Yeah. I, I think especially ge renova is, is gonna be driving down to a, a limited set of blades and a limited set of turbines. So they’re gonna be trying to apply that turbine. More globally than they have in the past, instead of tailoring a specific set of blades vest is, it’s gonna do something very similar, I think.

Mm-hmm. Uh, and in that mode, [00:07:00] if you’re an operator and you’re receiving these blades, you don’t really understand what’s about to happen unless you do your homework ahead of time. And I think that’s where the opportunity lies today to do something really inexpensive and smart up front. To understand what’s likely to happen.

Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. And I think that all starts with, um, as we talked about, gathering good data, whether that be a laser scan or detailed photographs or measurements or NDT, uh, putting some sensors in the blade, some CMS equipment. I think all of that stuff to help really build up that knowledge base early.

To help start planning for future o and m, uh, operations? Yeah,

Allen Hall: so the simple one as blades come on site is to do a laser scan.

Nicholas Gaudern: Mm. Yep. And that takes how long? A few hours. And, and it’s much easier on the ground than it is a tower as well. And then you can use that full kinds of things. Yes. It’s very useful to do aerodynamic studies on.

But then, uh, other stuff that might not seem so [00:08:00] exciting, but is super important. How do you move blades around a, uh, handling yard if you have a CAD model that’s much easier to plan? How do you, uh, look at a new stacking frame or a, a lifting device that you might need to purchase? Well, it all comes back to having that initial data.

And I think what we see, uh, at Power Curve is there’s a huge variety of aerodynamic upgrades that are shipped with blades. And even though, um. Two customers might buy the same blade. They might not necessarily have the same upgrade pack on from the, uh, from the OEM. So really understanding what’s in your fleet from the start.

Where are those VGs? Where are the serrations, where are the spoilers? That’s critical going forward to understand how to manage those blades. And we talk to a lot of operators, uh, about VGs and other upgrades. It’s, uh, surprising to us how few know what is on their blades. They just don’t know. They don’t have that information.

They just arrive. Yeah. So, so what happens if some of those add-ons need replacing? What happens if you are missing [00:09:00] potential? Well, you don’t have a good data set to go back to, to really understand the problem. So yeah, we’d really encourage that from the get go to, to document that.

Allen Hall: The, the discussion I’ve seen at operators about trying to get a blade model out of the OEM goes like this, Hey, OEM, uh.

I would like to have the blade model so I can do some analysis and we can operate this thing once it comes off warranty, obviously. And the OM says no.

Nicholas Gaudern: Hmm.

Allen Hall: All right. Well, can I scan it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, you own the blade at the end of the day. I own the blade so I I can scan it all day. Yeah. But they will not give you the model, but you can scan it.

And scanning’s not expensive. I get it. If they sent you the model, it’d be less expensive. Yeah. But that’s not going to happen. And you can’t even contractually get it because it’s ip. Yeah. Even though you can go scan the same blade.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: It doesn’t make any sense why you’re not scanning the blade at this point.

It’s so easy. Five years ago. Yes. Difficult

Nicholas Gaudern: today. Simple. Yeah. The scanning process [00:10:00] itself, I think where the real, uh, complexity comes in is then how do you convert that scan? Into a usable CAD model. I think that’s where the, the experience and um, and the skill of a, a good CAD engineer is really important.

So within, uh, power curve, we’ve been drawing blades for years and years and years now. So 30, 40 different blades we’ve scan, we’ve drawn, we’ve analyzed, and um, even the best laser scan may still have a few question marks around how you should interpret the data. So I’d encourage you that if you are going to go down that path.

Then, then call someone who’s done it a few times before and, and understand what’s going on.

Allen Hall: And then getting the details about the aerodynamic upgrades. I’ll call them quote unquote upgrades because sometimes I wonder if there are upgrades or not. Yeah. Uh, especially VGs getting those identified. It’s exactly where they are on the blade matters.

Trailing ulcerations, the kind of trailing ulceration you have, the sizes of them because they all vary in size [00:11:00] as you go up and down the blade, knowing where those are exactly out on the blade. And to me, when I see a variety of blade, a variety of blades made the same blade model, same blade revision.

Yep. But you start looking at ’em and you see those manufacturing tolerances move around quite a bit. It makes sense not to scan just one blade, but I’m probably gonna scan a variety of blades once they come outside. Yeah. Maybe they,

Nicholas Gaudern: maybe the OEM changes the philosophy about what they wanna do and I think with add-ons, um, there is a lot of, um, design philosophy involved.

With aerodynamics, as with lots of other disciplines, there’s a few ways you can skin the cat, right? There’s different ways that you can have a very similar effect with different products or different configurations, and I think you see that with aerodynamic upgrades quite clearly. So from some manufacturers we see, they’ll ship blades with bgs almost from root to tip.

From from the get go. You’ll see some OEMs that just have them in the route. You’ll have some that have none at all, and that that is still quite surprising, I think, because. Vortex [00:12:00] generators, particularly down in the root region of a blade to me, are, are kind of obvious now they’re proven. Uh, there’s a big stall zone in the root of the blade.

A VG array will help reduce that level of stall. Now you still have to engineer that solution. So perhaps one of the reason we don’t see all blades with them is the OEM didn’t have the capacity to engineer that solution because they didn’t have enough aerodynamics. Or they were too busy working on the next blade or whatever.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from those products being there. So this is why it’s important to, to understand what you’re getting and to ask the questions, well, why, why doesn’t the root of my blade have VGs on? Have you done a calculation that shows that they didn’t work? Uh, and if you didn’t, well maybe, maybe you could, or maybe you could talk to someone else.

Um,

Allen Hall: yeah, because you do see the offerings today. And the two obvious ones we see mostly in the states, particularly with VGs and add-ons, is Siemens VGs and trailing inspirations are everywhere. Yeah, all [00:13:00] over those blades.

Nicholas Gaudern: I think Siemens have been for a long time now, uh, very keen on add-ons. And I like that philosophy personally.

I, I think there’s, there’s a school of thought that says if you put an add-on on a blade, you’ve kind of, you’ve kind of failed. You know, you should have addressed in the design that problem, and therefore you don’t need to put an add-on on, but I would make an argument that there are so many things that an add-on product can do that are incredibly hard to achieve in a molded, uh, product.

So even if you think you could include everything in the mold, maybe the cost or the complexity of doing that. Is much harder than just sticking something on afterwards. So I, I don’t think there should be any discussion around it being like a bandaid or a cheat or a fix, or there should be an integrated part of a design process.

A VG will give you more stall margin. So if you design with VGs, maybe you can design your blade, uh, twist distribution a little bit differently. Uh, if you integrate serrations into your design [00:14:00] process, maybe you can change the type of error fo you use or the tip speed ratio that you run at, because the serrations can help reduce the noise.

So if you’re considering all of that from the get go, there’s a lot of power in these devices that are, as I say, are very difficult to achieve in just, uh, out of the mold product. Um, I, I think a lot of operators

Allen Hall: don’t realize how much impact those little plastic devices. Yeah. Can have on, on power production and which is revenue.

Yes. Straight revenue. That’s all that it is. Exactly. And they sort of discount them on some level because they made out of plastic. I don’t know why that is. It’s the, all the engineering and the literally thousands of hours of engineering and being in the wind tunnel, which is super expensive. Yes. To go figure these things out because you can’t calculate them with excel.

No, it’s, it’s way more complicated of a problem than that. You need,

Nicholas Gaudern: you need some higher fidelity tools. And again, I think that’s why there’s been, uh, differing levels of uptake among the OEMs, among different operators because it does require some, [00:15:00] some hard calculations to be done. Maybe some full rotor CFD calculations, but that is all within the grass.

Of what you can do quite economically today. You know, huge increases in computing, power cloud computing services. You can do this stuff

Allen Hall: Well. That’s the thing that I bring up to the operators quite often is I said, you use Chap GPT, right? Yeah. Yeah. And they go, well, yeah, yeah. Well, you realize the amount of compute power that exists behind those, that amount of compute that’s being built today is also gonna do CFD.

Yes. Is also gonna do all those complicated aerodynamic problems and solution sets. That we weren’t really able to do 10 years ago will be instantaneous to us in a couple of months. Yeah,

Nicholas Gaudern: I mean, we work with a, a cloud computing, uh, service, uh, at North. So they’re, they’ve been our cloud computing provider for, for a number of years now to run CFD on.

They’re just building some new data centers now in Denmark, and I believe they said one of them had a rate of power of 250 megawatts.

Allen Hall: Right. [00:16:00] Yeah. They’re having

Nicholas Gaudern: to build, imagine the, imagine the computing power behind 250 megawatts. Right?

Allen Hall: Because as GE Renova has mentioned in a couple of their more recent public, uh, notices, is that gas turbines are a big business for GE Renova for data centers.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: And how much data center can you build in a year? Well, evidently about 20 gigawatts worth. Yeah. Quite a lot. Yeah. That’s a lot of compute power. Way more than the planet has ever had before. Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: So I think there’s, there’s some, I mean. The work we do, we think we’re quite innovative. We think we’re kind of, uh, leading the way in, in some fields, but we have to be very careful to, to stay on the train because very soon, uh, the computing power that’s gonna be available.

Might blow some of the stuff we are doing now out of the water. Sure will. So we, you know, we need to keep our eye on this fidelity. Yeah. The Fidelity’s gonna go

Allen Hall: way up, but the engineering that goes behind it still has to be there because garbage N equals garbage out. Exactly. You, you have to have people with

Nicholas Gaudern: the experience and the knowledge and the fundamentals because [00:17:00] even with things like vortex generators, there’s so many different ways you can use them.

And I think the two, the two biggest ways, uh, you know, going back to that comment about Blaze being shipped with VGs from root to tip. If you have VGs in the root, they’re fundamentally addressing stall from thick aerofoils. If they’re towards the tip, it’s more about robustness of the power curve, so helping the turbine deal with sub, uh, standard surface conditions, whether that be dirt, bugs, ice, fungus, erosion, whatever.

So even though you may be able to compute all this stuff, some of these fundamental nuggets of knowledge about how these add-ons should work or could work. It’s critical to help set up the problem. And, um, that’s, that’s where we come in hopefully.

Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk leading edge for a minute, just because there’s been a lot of data.

The Global Blade Group has published some five year study from a variety of operators that are trying different kinds of coatings and solutions. One of the things that I get asked weirdly enough is how much can I [00:18:00] possibly lose in a EP due to leading edge? And the numbers that are thrown at me are crazy.

Yes, people will tell me they’re losing 10%. There is no way you’re losing 10%. And

Nicholas Gaudern: that’s, that’s because they’re not using an engineering driven approach. Right. So we’ve, we’ve talked about data capture and, and sensible engineering. It applies to everything. And I think leading edge erosion is an example of something that just has too many reckons involved.

Well, you can actually work it out. Um, you can go to a wind tunnel, you can do CFD simulation, you can do our elastic simulations, and you can come up with a much more, uh, engineering driven and consistent, uh, loss number. So something that we’ve been working on for a long time now in power covers. How do you understand those losses?

And, uh, a year or two ago, we launched our ERA Vista tool, and that is. Uh, designed to take data from the field that real data we’ve been talking about, and combine it with the best engineering knowledge we can [00:19:00] to come up with that loss number. So, uh, a real blade model taken from a real laser scan, CFD simulation, scarda data, coupled into a, uh, a model of a turbine in, uh, in a blade element momentum form.

That is how the turbine would’ve been designed in the first place. So kinda this consistent tool chain. And what we find with leading a ros after analyzing a couple of thousand turbines now with a vista is losses one and a half, 2%. Something in that that’s, that’s a bit more realistic as a loss number.

Those are still significant numbers, but that’s, you should be worried about that number should. You don’t need to have it at 10% to be worried. No 1% on a big turbine is plenty enough to worry about. Right. Especially when you have a hundred of them. Yeah. So, so we don’t need the scaremongering, you just need that consistency and that, um, and that focus on what, what is actually happening and, and can I justify it?

So

Allen Hall: this goes back to a discussion you and I had a, a couple of months ago [00:20:00] about the spreadsheet that’s being shared around that was created at a university that supposedly. Tells us what the, the a EP loss is in an Excel like form. Yeah. That is being used so incorrectly right now.

Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, and it is like any tool, if you, if you use it in a smart way, then maybe you can get a sense of answer.

But trying to do something consistently and to see any kind of real difference between turbine models will be. Very challenging. Yes. Um, so what I like about some of these simple tools is it can help put you in a ballpark, right? That stops us having these silly conversations about 10% losses or 0% losses.

You know, it helps to kind of narrow the band, but if you then want to really understand, uh, what the answer is, much, much closer to reality. Then you have to have the blade data. Yes. Because every blade is different. Every turbine model is different. [00:21:00] You can’t have that generic setup if you want to have that, that subtlety so you can actually spend your money wisely.

Allen Hall: That’s the problem is that that tool’s being used sort of globally across a farm and everybody that’s involved on the engineering side and particularly on the finance side of the operators realizes I’m probably not gonna fix all of these. Yeah. Turbines. A hundred turbine farm, very common in the United States.

200, 300 plus. Now I need to know what turbines I need to go after based on real data. If I have a hundred turbine farm, I really want to pick out the 20 turbines that I’m gonna go put. Leaning as protection on. Yeah. I need to know that, but only when I really know it is to run it through Arab Vista.

And then it does give me the Yeah. The top 20

Nicholas Gaudern: EE Exactly. And that, and that’s exactly what it’s designed to do, to take, to give confident analysis that you can then base business decisions on. Yeah. Um, because there’s a lot of operators out there who would love to optimize how [00:22:00] they’re spending their, their own m budget.

And this tool will allow them to do that. Right. And I,

Allen Hall: I just, I’m starting to see more adoptions at Vista because that accounting

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. Is starting to take place and then you can start planning for the future as well. Right. So, so let’s say you have five years worth of inspection data that you can run through the system.

You can then see how the AP loss has progressed over five years. Yes. Where’s it going in the future? Uh, maybe I’m finding that my turbines from one OEM are performing way worse than turbines from another OEM. Sure, and that’s just useful information.

Allen Hall: Well, even on the a EP loss from existing leading edge protection systems, some of the more draggy lossy, uh, leading edge protection systems.

Are still being applied today. So as those systems fail, the amount of drag, a lawsuit that is created when the system eventually wear out is way more than just leaving the, the turbine alone, honestly. Yeah. So it’s not, you [00:23:00] need to think of it as a, a, a larger problem. You

Nicholas Gaudern: have, you have to take that system level approach for sure.

Right? You need to think

Allen Hall: about, yes. Okay. Then my blade has say it’s 1% right now I’m gonna put this coating on, but the coating’s gonna last three years roughly generally. What happens at year three? Well, I’m gonna have a 3% loss break.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. May maybe the l break in some, in some cases might make the situation worse.

Right. So, you know, it’s about just choosing the right, the right tool for the problem, isn’t it? It is. When should I put, uh, protection on? When should I not, when should I clean a blade? When should I not? When should I apply VGs? When should I not? But unless you have the data coming in and you have that, uh, setup that we’ve been talking about earlier in the, in the discussion here, that’s really hard to do.

It is. So it’s,

Allen Hall: it’s really hard to do. And even the discussion about leading edge protection, the, the, the issue I have with a lot of them is that they do leave a significant lip Yeah. Right. In a croker area.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: Some of [00:24:00] the providers of those systems are, are like, well, it doesn’t really make that much difference.

And they don’t have any aerodynamic data. And I’ve talked to a person that doesn’t know that much about aerodynamics obviously. ’cause there’s only a few handful of people mm-hmm In wind that know that much, but. I think, okay, yes, you’re gonna recover the 1% a EP loss that the blade roughness did have, but you’re not really recovering all that.

No, not necessarily necessarily what a vista will help also tell you, it helps, it

Nicholas Gaudern: helps make a good decision around that,

Allen Hall: right? So you may have a, a preferred LEP solution, but if it really doesn’t change your a EP, then what are we doing?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. And perhaps the structural implications weren’t that big on that turbine.

Right. So, so yeah, again, having that balance of the structural risk, the aerodynamic risk, I think, um, as you start gathering more and more inspection data as operators are having now that kind of risk, a score based approach where you’re bringing together structural risk, aerodynamic risk, financial risk, um, [00:25:00] and bringing all those things together, that’s, that’s where the money lies.

Allen Hall: The industry is getting smarter. About the way they spend money, which once interest rates went up and they know filter tower on the program. Every episode talks about interest rates and what effect it as. Yes, it does have an effect, but on an engineering group it has a really significant effect because you need to have a better model.

You need to have a better approach. You just don’t throw money at these problems anymore. You need to have an ROI based solution. That’s where Aero Vista comes in. That’s a real solution that’s been validated and has proven itself, and it’s gonna get you to the proper solution, the most cost efficient solution, the fastest way.

I haven’t seen a product out there, and I’ve been around quite a bit. I haven’t seen another product that even approaches that. No, no,

Nicholas Gaudern: I’m, I’m,

Allen Hall: I’m glad to

Nicholas Gaudern: hear

Allen Hall: that one. And it’s not gonna be on the spreadsheet, so if you’re working on a spreadsheet today, stop, pick up the phone, get on the internet. [00:26:00] Look up power curve.

They’re based in Denmark, but they’re worldwide. You guys are everywhere right now and start talking about cost effective solutions. Yes. Start looking at how to spend your money more wisely.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. Exactly.

Allen Hall: Now’s the time to do that. How do people get ahold of you, Nicholas? How do I get people get ahold of power crew.

Nicholas Gaudern: So they can check at our website. That’s, that’s power curve. Uh, dk, we have all our contact details on there. You can look up myself, uh, on LinkedIn. Also our CEO, Neil’s Business Development. Emil, we’re all on LinkedIn. You can reach out there through the website. Yeah, we’d love to talk to you.

Allen Hall: Absolutely. So this year is the year to get your a EP figured out and to get all your add-ons figured out and to get your LEP approach, uh, aligned with the cost.

And I, I think this is the time that Power Curve will be in the lead of this. And hopefully your phone starts ringing a little bit more because we, we’d love to help them do [00:27:00] that. Absolutely. Because I do, I think there’s so much opportunity for operators to save money Yes. And, and to have more production.

Yep. Which is what we need. We need the industry, particularly the United States, need to be able to prove itself more than ever.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Just use, use the data, use the expertise that’s out there and Uh, absolutely. And uh, yeah, give us a call. Nicholas, thanks for being back on the podcast. It’s been great.

Thanks, Allen.

In this insightful episode of Uptime Spotlight, Allen Hall and Joel Saxum welcome back Armando Costa Rego, CEO of ArthWind, to discuss their groundbreaking new software platform, ArthNex. This data-driven solution transforms wind turbine blade management by connecting field technicians directly with engineers in real-time, dramatically reducing downtime and optimizing repairs.

Visit ArthWind at https://arthwind.com.br

Connect with Armando on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/armandocostarego/

Allen Hall: Alright, Armando, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you guys. It’s a pleasure to be here again. Yeah. It’s been a couple of months since we’ve last had you on the podcast. But a lot has happened since then. Earth, wind, obviously huge Brazilian presence. You guys are working with most of the operators or much of most of the installed base in Brazil, and you’re expanding out into the United States and other places.

But the product offerings you have created over that short time span since we last talked are quite amazing and you want to announce this new software product. It’s called what? ArthNex.

Armando Costa Rego: Art Next, yeah. Yes. Yeah. This predator came from the idea to, to go deep in the value chain of the hippers, you know, everybody in the march, I think since 2017, the industry has experienced, uh, a fast improvement in the drone solution, the rover that we started like four years ago, and everybody’s talking about how long it takes an inspection and how long pressure to produce in minutes.

So we are talk 30, 20, 25. For me, what matters if we, we create data to hipper, so the, the discussion of the architect is, okay, we jump into this phase of, to discuss how fast an inspection we are now, uh, uh, using this data to provide it to the owners in operators, OEME, whatever, in the player in the market would be interested to use our.

Maybe he pair knowledge capabilities to go direct to actions that can prioritize what to do, how to do, and sometimes why to do. Yeah, that’s the question. Nobody do this question why to do that. Yeah. Those make sense or not? So the data will tell you what makes sense or those not make sense.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So what, like when we look at most platforms out there, asset management blade inspection platforms, it’s here’s your inspections, here’s the findings from them.

Here’s a

Allen Hall: spreadsheet.

Joel Saxum: [00:02:00] Stop. Yeah, that’s it, right? There’s that. There’s no just looking at the earth Next platform. When Alan and I were peeking at it yesterday, it was like. Here’s a dashboard that shows you where your leading edge erosion status is on, on all your whole fleet. And this like, oh, that’s great.

Like, oh, your overall risk score is this, oh, this turbine has a risk score of that. Like, oh, what’s going on here? These are the ones that you need to stop now. Look at in two weeks, look at in 12 weeks, like. There was actionable data and that’s before we even get into the operational part of repairs, but actionable data that you can look at dashboard.

Now I know what decisions I need to make today.

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So it is a clean data, it’s clear data. We can interact with the image. We are not focused in show, like the entire blade in the platform because that consumes a lot of dev time of development, you know, so, and we note that only 4% of the emails have something to tell you.

Yeah, right. So some point of internet. So we work exclusively. And that information that’s really useful to the operator.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and I think that’s the problem, right? Is that when we get drone images or internal inspections, there’s a lot of data. Yeah. That then as we’ve talked to operators in the United States, we have engineers, usually junior engineers, going through all that data, trying to pick out what’s important and what’s not important so that they can develop a plan themselves internally, but they’re wasting.

Thousands of engineering hours doing it. Yes.

Joel Saxum: And the tr one of the troubles that we talk about regularly on, on the show is lack of technicians, but also the lack of engineering knowledge and support. So when you have a blade engineer that’s, this regularly happens in the states, I’m in charge, I’m the blade engineer, I’m in charge of a thousand turbines.

What? So they don’t have the bandwidth to take care of, to look through all of these different things, and that’s where the earth wind. Team with the Arthrex platform and all the engineering expertise you guys have in the background can help operators like that out a lot because they become their, you know, turn the tap on, turn the tap off blade engineering team that they can use.

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah. You know, in ArthWind we combining, we have a tried that we involve right people, we are talking about knowledge. And the experience of these people. Out of the 140 people that work for art in Brazil now have experienced some parts of the value chain, or in blade design, or in blade manufacturing, or in the OEME or make root cause analysis in broken blades.

You know, so we cover all life cycle. And the second pilot is technology. So we were the first company, maybe the, the South hemisphere in the world. To make an inspection with autonomous drone back in 2017. So in Brazil there nobody was talking about drone. And the last one is methodology. We are. Very confident that we cannot change the methodology, otherwise we will have a mess with data.

So since 2017, we created our own blade book, just to be straight to what this data does means. Yeah. Okay. If there is another, uh, categorization, for example, everybody’s talk about categorization, that’s a huge discussion. I disagree that we need to categorize from one after five. You know, I think that blade can talk much more than five levels.

Uh, but when you have our own methodology, we can combine the data from the inspection that we did from the ground, from in the manufacturing, and we can have a much more clear view during a root cause analysis when you will go to the blade, the data book and check the results. Yeah, that is no confusion.

If you crack, if the elimination, if the a Cat 5 is a Cat 3, we tell the history of each damage and the cause, the potential cause of those damage because our engineering is backed by blade designer. So they know what they are looking and what it, it can make this damage happens in the field, you know?

Allen Hall: Absolutely. And I think, uh, something that’s missed for American operators is realizing the talent that sits in Brazil, because Brazil was a blade manufacturer. That’s right. Long before America really started ramping up in blades and then even after America slowly stopped making blades. They were still being made in Brazil.

Yeah, so the, the manufacturing technology is in Brazil. The engineers who design blades and know all the inner structures of the blades and how to repair the blades and why certain blades performs this way and other, and others that way, that knowledge base is in Brazil, which makes art wind so. Valuable because you have just a huge people resource that doesn’t really exist in other parts of the world.

Maybe the only a place I would assume is like Denmark is where you have that kind of relationship between people that worked in the factory and understand how the bill blades then moved up to engineering and then moved up to management. That’s kind of there. But your people are hard to find in the states.

Yeah. And that and that thought process that goes along with it because you had to suffer through all the things that happened in the blade factory and then out in the real world. You develop some of these systems long before United States operators have. So that gives you like. Literally a 15 to 20 year jump of what’s out there otherwise, which is why Earth Wind is so valuable and whatnot, which I don’t understand why American operators aren’t using your resources as much just because you have the technology, you have the knowledge

Joel Saxum: and that, and now, like today, we wanted to make sure we talked about Earth Next, the new platform.

Yes. And that knowledge base is what built that platform. Absolutely, it did. It’s people that understand the whole value chain from manufacturing. I guess this, this sounds like a sales pitch for you, but we liked it so much when we saw I was blown away a lot,

Armando Costa Rego: you know? You know, yes. Back into 13 x we, we spent the last, the last seven years only processing data from the inspection, but we, all of us came from the Heary industry.

Yeah. Yeah. I started the business of in Europe in 2009. Yeah. Yeah. So I was dispatching two technicians for 23 countries like pizza, you know, 48 hours with, yeah.

Armando Costa Rego: And I, I thought that the way that we was managing repair 15 years ago. It’s not the way that we can accept anymore with modern blades, because if you see the margins, the uh, uh, the safety margin of the blades do not allow lack of no less during the hip air.

So that point that a x will play a crucial value in this field, because if you go to the hipper, everybody talk, uh, how long takes your inspection, doesn’t matter how long are you, save you in downtime with my data because. The new feature of the architect, we are going through the hip air value chain and we are broken in pieces, each task, and connecting the field technician direct with engineering.

Yes. What happens in the industry today after your technicians go? With a standard procedure, they start to grind. So it take three hours maybe to access the damage. They start to grind, Hey, I found a wave here. There was nothing procedure. So they climb down. They full stop. Yeah, let the turbine stop it. Go to the engineering by WhatsApp or whatever else saying the engineer, start to prepare the word documentation and send back to the, to the selected.

This is if you’re lucky.

Joel Saxum: Usually this is like a 24 hour delay in process. Oh, easy.

Armando Costa Rego: You know that it can take like 48 hours in downtime. So we are very focusing in reducing inspection time. But what is looking how to help this parts of the value chain and the aex? We do, we connect the technicians through the app with the standard procedure and if they, uh, found something different, they immediately in the tab, they press the button.

That it will be a pushup in the mobile, the engineering that you will start to work to the hip air. Yeah, no, you’ll not wait till overnight process. For tomorrow day, you solve the doubts of the technician not preparing a word. Give instruction because they know what to do and they just need to redact and say the instructions and pictures.

Send mockups, send the drafts, handmade drafts, you know, just to give you more research to the technician. Take decisions. You [00:10:00] know, and it, we are looking that we are already saving a lot of downtime in Brazil with this technology that we have for a customer applying, and the, the data that we are collecting is a good feedback from the blade repair companies.

Because it’s making the life of the bladed technicians much more easy. Yeah. They do not need to arrive in the hotel tired and prepare the reports. No, the work is done.

Allen Hall: The back office work is being done. Which is need in real time. In real time. Yeah. That, that’s the beauty of what Art Next is doing because you.

Been through the other way of doing it. Yeah. And you’ve seen how lossy it is and expensive it is. And the delays and the technicians you’ve created the platform though, that is easy to access. And I think that’s the, the hard part for a, a lot of people to grasp about Artex is you’re putting all that knowledge in a mobile phone.

It also appears on a desktop for the engineers to go through the, the communication interface is so much better than the WhatsApp we’ve been doing. Yeah. Text message, text messages, and also the track and

Armando Costa Rego: the data, the history of the, the story line of defect because when we broke the value chain of the hip air, there is a complex tasks.

Yes. Maybe a simple prepared 12 tasks. Right. Grinding, cleaning, et cetera, et cetera. So when we transform this offline data is online data. We generate gorgeous metadata, you know, because we can, uh, measure the fishings of the campaign, right. And also, uh, a second point of our tool that we control the quality assurance.

What kind of materials being employed, right? What’s the calibration certificates?

Joel Saxum: Yeah.

Armando Costa Rego: So we, we provide a, a full quality assurance services digital to the customer. For one year later, if there something is happening, you have all documentation of the damage. So you can use that with insurance companies to score qualified new suppliers for sure.

Yep. ’cause we are raising the bar of the quality controls of the industry.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and that’s the big problem I see mostly in the states, is that when they have an ISP show up on site. They don’t have discreet hours of how long it took to do this repair. They don’t know why it took longer than it did. They haven’t looked at how long should this repair really take and how do I budget this properly?

On top of it, I’m just getting a PDF after it’s done. I don’t see anything live. Yeah. So to speak, which is a huge problem because I think US operators don’t, can’t realize how much money and time they’re losing in that. Space. It’s millions. Millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. Easily, easily, easily. And that’s where Artex comes in because now you’re tracking ISPs, you’re tracking almost to a technician level the quality of the work engineering consisting of the work, the engineering of the work.

Right? Exactly. So now what? When I’m starting to do repairs, I come, I come in much more knowledgeable. And I have much better cost control measures in [00:13:00] place when I do it. So I can watch it go. I get alerts when the budget is running out. Yeah. Right. So that the, something happened, I, I got assigned budget to this.

I can’t go over, I need to know that our next provides me that, that look real time as the repair is happening. Um,

Armando Costa Rego: those are huge advantages. Uh, you know, I, I think that. Okay. We need to agree that to, to make bleed he air in the environment, in this environmental that we are living now with climate change, et et cetera.

That storm, we never have been some storm is knowing we’re so people is not ready how to plan. Right. So, uh, it’s very difficult to forecast how long you’ll take the repair today.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Armando Costa Rego: So if you have more data. We can, uh, uh, learn a little bit more about that location to schedule or to make the, a better strategy, not changing the hip repair methodology, but change the chron, the, the timing.

Yeah. When to do that because, you know, sometimes I recommend to my customer to inspect the blade, the high wind season. That’s crazy. You lost production. No, you lost like. 30 minutes, but you, you prepare your campaign that that is the point. You know, you lose a lot of money, you know? Right. I think you, you’re touching

Joel Saxum: people on all sides of the value chain with the Earth Next platform.

So you’re making engineers happy by giving them qa, qc. Yeah. You’re making the procurement and the finance people happier because you’re optimizing the repairs themselves. You’re saving money there. Material. Material control. Material control. The asset managers like so from, I put my asset manager hat on when we were looking at the platform yesterday, and I see this.

Basically this entire health timeline of the blade, like from the factory inspections we did to the post commissioning end of warranty, all through the whole thing. It was like, on this date, we did this. On this date, we did that. And you’re able to see it in a flash

Allen Hall: in, in a graphical form. Yeah. Easy to digest.

It’s not images where I have to keep clicking the image to see the thing, and then I gotta figure out how a crack is progressing. It’s broken down, so it, it is visually easy to scan, which is what engineers have been asking for for the last five years, is I need to go in and scan a thousand blades. I need to know which 20 I’m gonna go look at today.

But I don’t wanna spend eight hours on each of these blades because I’m wasting my time. Going to Armando’s system and ArthNex, I can scan it. I know what my top priorities are for the day. That is an important feature as we get more cost conscious. And over the last, well, we had an election in the United States.

You may have heard about it, but we’re getting very cost conscious about how we spend our money. Are we spending the money wisely? The way that we’re gonna do that is with systems like Artex that’s gonna help us save money, be more efficient, get the repairs done, and extend the life of these turbines and produce more power.

So it ultimately comes to power?

Armando Costa Rego: Yes. Because we are connecting engineering. Yes. So the field. Yes. Without going to the building. So, uh, I have had some situation with field technician that where there, I don’t know what to do here. You know, and they do wrong tasks. No, it, we will, the damage will be still there.

So we go, okay, we can make a good finishing. Okay, but three months later we will, the crack will be still there. So I think that uh, uh, uh, one of the main points differential of our snacks, uh, people is asking, Hey, how fast did you do develop data? Two years, but there is a knowledge of 20 years of experie of my team.

So, and the, the best parts of that job, product owner, for example, he came from the field, he was a field inspector, so he started to. Creating small, uh, uh, uh, uh, programs to make his life better, you know, to make automated report. And you saw, hey, I think that we can create our own technology on that. So when you have the, the, the both of the developers that have been the field and really smart guy, I think that’s very [00:17:00] quickly to digitize the industry.

Uh, if you go to the positive, for example, if you are only a tech company and you try to figure out. What to develop. It’ll take longer. You’ll need much more trial, you need much more feedback. But when we know that we’re digitizing from fields. To the office much more fast. The, yeah, so,

Allen Hall: and the, uh, one of the advantages to the Earth next system is a lot of operators have 3, 4, 5 years of drone images, external, internal plus repair, PDFs, generally speaking their PDFs.

And if they wanted to implement the Arthrex system, it would be easy to do. You’re just gonna import that into the system. Arthrex is gonna. Digitize it, digitize it, and then analyze it so that you can see those trend lines almost within a couple of days. I think you could be up and running with the our next system for a lot of operators in the United States or globally Australia, I think in another place.

Yeah, they could use it. You’re gonna be busy. Armando, I you’re gonna be on an airplane quite a bit. Yeah,

Armando Costa Rego: we do. We actually do that. Uh, we have like customer, I, I think that we are achieving four gigawatts of contracting. Yeah. That’s Wow. But we feed three years contract, but we inspect more than 20 gigawatts per year in Brazil.

Right. For the spot inspection. Yeah. Which,

Allen Hall: which is important for everybody to understand. So what earth wind is doing in Brazil is. Gigawatts after gigawatts after gigawatts of inspection, which doesn’t really happen in the state and historic call. Historical year by year. By year. Yeah. Right.

Joel Saxum: That’s the trust, right?

Allen Hall: That’s the difference. There’s the trust

Joel Saxum: that that market has in you guys to get the solutions, right. Um, we want to export that. Yes. Let’s use that trust. Let’s use that track record to help. ’cause I mean, we talked about some of the successes that you’ve had, of course with Earth Wind, but with just the art Next platform guys have like four gigawatts you’ve onboarded here and then.

Yeah, on multiyear contracts, like great. Yeah.

Armando Costa Rego: And plus for megawatt wind turbine, so it’s modern turbine, auto turbine. We have a mix of technologies there. And also, uh, looking to what is the next, I think that we need to be much more concerned. Everybody’s talking about the standardization inspection, but we can go through the hipper as well.

How to communicate a hip pair, how to report. So if you go to the ax now where you press the bottle automatically, you have a beautiful report of five page.

Joel Saxum: Yeah.

Armando Costa Rego: Wow. We are receiving not 60 pages. Oh yeah. 60. No, it doesn’t matter. Not a photograph album for the wedding, you know, so it’s, uh, we need to have a registered to be used technically in the future with insurance company, with some discussion, technical discussion with OEMs, owner, et cetera.

Uh, but I think that the most beautiful is really to digitize this knowledge, you know, and put in the front line because our, we are very obsessed with the front line. We are always thinking how Aex can be better to the field technician because they are our customer. If they don’t like nobody use, so we are collecting this experience.

We are talking with technician. What’s the challenge of language? What the challenge of technical information doesn’t make any sense. To make a high technical procedure for someone that just need to understand, hey, how kind of layer. How is the size of the, the scarfing and how much product I need to prepare.

So we don’t need to complicate the terminology to the field operation. You need to make it easy, and I think that ArthNex will cross this bridge. Yeah. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Well, I, I want to touch on the insurance part of this. Yeah. Because insurance companies, as Joel has mentioned a number of times, run the world. So whatever insurance companies will pay for is what the industry will do.

What they won’t pay for, uh, is not gonna happen. And, but getting insurance buy-in into a system like ArthNex is really critical because they see the consistency of the repairs, they see the quality of the product. They can track it. They can also see where maybe an ISP is not doing the right thing and say, Hey, all right, you know, we need, we need to get address that.

The insurance industry is, is overseeing all of this at a tight level and they would love to have access to Aex to understand general trends that are happening in the industry. In

Joel Saxum: terms of blades. Exactly. I’m saying that dashboard, that quick look at a wind farm. If I’m a, if I’m an engineer, a renewables engineer from an insurance company.

And it’s renewal season and now I have to look at a hundred wind farms and some of them are printing out our next reports that are just like, risk score. Here’s this, here’s the top five, this is what we did this year, here’s my timeline. Boom. Check. They’re good, right? Boom. Reduce deductible. You’re gonna reduce the for

Armando Costa Rego: record that I have two keys to talk about.

Uh, you know, I think the info information. Affect the valuation of the wind farm. Yeah. We cannot forget that we are in m and A market in Brazil, for example. A lot of position in Brazil. Big companies are quite a big one. Right? You know, and the way we have the information organized, we have all technical details.

And the buyer will see this information, Hey, I can buy this risk. Yeah, yeah. Right. So you increase your valuation. But when we hide information, okay. Nobody buy. So decrease the valuation. Yeah. Due diligence becomes quick. We do a lot of due diligence. Brazil. Yeah. And when? When the buyers see our documentation.

Okay. It’s very well, I know that there’s a methodology that people, who knows what is saying. Okay. That is the documentation. And also a second point of insurance. I have a good case now we have good relation with insurance company. We do not work directly. But they told me sometimes, Hey, if I see this kind of dashboard, I can buy this risk.

’cause the problem is buy a risk that I do not know. Yeah. So if this li of management, I can reduce the premium and they can do more inspection. They can do more repair, they can be more proactive, you know? So I think that we need to join this mines to create value to the market, the industry, you know,

Joel Saxum: for that, that, that, that process.

Think about this, we’re gonna go buy a truck, right? And I’ve got two of them sitting there, but one of ’em. Has maintenance booked every record, every oil change, every tire rotation. What do rotation you do? Yeah. Yeah. And then it has a platform that I can look at it in. I’m like, I’m gonna buy that one. ’cause it’s reducing my risk.

Yeah. It, it gets rid of the worry. The one with all the details and everything organized well for me. That’s what I’m buying.

Allen Hall: Right. So Aex has sort of broken that barrier. Yeah. That we’ve been up against for the last couple of years in terms of understanding globally what is happening to Blades, how we can more efficiently take care of them, update them, keep them in good repair for a longer time without spending so much money and so much engineering time.

Spending around that is a huge value to the industry, and I know. I just saw Artex for the first time last week and were just blown away by it. ’cause I’ve seen a lot of operator inside monitoring systems and the spreadsheets and the picture and yeah, they’re kind of the same. They’re roughly the same.

The ui ux is different, but what the data you’re getting out of

Joel Saxum: is basically the same. It

Allen Hall: is. And it’s, it’s not super scannable. Yeah. And then the RX comes up. Mano says, look at this. But you know, I, even, I electrical engineer

Armando Costa Rego: understood what to do with those blades. You know, uh, we are a good threat company.

We are not selling product to investors or vc, et cetera. So we are selling product to the market, you know, that solve the problem of the industry today. Not tomorrow. So we need to solve the problem in the industry today. Okay. Right. Uh uh, what I see on that is everybody’s looking for a SaaS.

Yeah. SaaS doesn’t work without people.

Armando Costa Rego: Right. So our business model engineering as a service, the software is only the communication channel. That’s the problem. So we have people, we have an hour in Brazil, 25 people giving instruction to the customer through the platform. Wow. Have the AI in the platform. The ArthNex now brings the AI for this typical question, Hey, how many blades I affected with seven, five in two seconds.

It’s faster than to go to download the hip or call someone. The AI will tell. So for basic question, the AI is there for, even for, uh, people that don’t know nothing about Blades. Yeah, just it’s channel system, you know? Yeah. We’re having the hipper, uh, environment of the artex. We have a chat that we can send message, general message to the field.

For example, imagine that you are loud. Managing hundred drills that are more than 200 technicians. Yeah. And need to communicate something. Yeah. Now that’s important. So when you go in the shed, you select the work orders where you need that, this communication go through and you’ll send a note Now. Hey everyone, stop the work today for a safety induction.

So for project manager to have this level of communication and log in the platform that that is historical is very powerful because it’s very difficult to put everybody in the same page. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Fragmented also for safety conditions. Yeah, yeah, for sure. To have the finding, Hey, everybody, stop their work.

Lightning. Yeah. The same time, right?

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Armando Costa Rego: You know? Yeah. So. If you are talking that the industry is paying like, I dunno, a hundred, $120 per hour per technician, why not you pay $40 per for a starlink to have this kind of connection that you save a lot of money in the

Joel Saxum: states and safety. This works at almost every window everywhere.

You’re not everybody. Not so much for you guys. Yeah. Well,

Allen Hall: yeah, we’re working on that. Elon’s working on that. So as an operator and a lot of operators listening to the podcast, in fact pretty much all of them do worldwide. How do they contact you to learn about Aex and get that demo so they can see this thing live?

How do they go about doing that? Do they just Google ArthNex, A-R-T-H-N-E-X and then it pops up or they go

Armando Costa Rego: to your website? Uh, they’ll go, they’ll find more details. Direct refers. So they can go to the [email protected] gear or like to me. I’m very pleased to talk about ArthNext with everyone. No, because I can solve a lot of doubts.

I’m very, to talk with people is a product that I, we really believe that’s changed the industry, you know, so, yeah. So they can reach me out in Armando Costa at. Our twins.com. Do beer w beer.

Armando Costa Rego: Don’t not forget the beer com.

Allen Hall: And we’ll put Armando’s LinkedIn information please to the show notes so everybody can follow you and, uh, follow our next.

It’s a truly remarkable product. I know you’ve spent a lot of time developing it and it’s been vetted out. Now’s the time to get it globally out there. Yeah. Armando, I love having you on your podcast just. Such a resource for the wind industry. So thank you for appearing. Thank you guys. Thank you.

Armando Costa Rego: Thanks, buddy.