The USDA has announced $4.37 B in funding for the Empowering Rural America program, Brookfield Asset Management has acquired a 53% stake in Neoen, and European Energy and Nova Holdings will upgrade 17 aging German wind farms.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com.

Allen Hall: Right, first up, the U. S. Department of Agriculture has announced a 4. 37 billion dollars in funding through their Empowering Rural America program. This historic investment, the largest in rural electrification since 1936, will support clean energy development across seven states. Now the program aims 5, 000 jobs, reduce electricity costs, and cut climate pollution by about 1.

1 million tons annually. 4. 37 billion as the Biden administration exits the executive branch is a lot of money. Does this have a chance of, of existing once the new administration comes in?

Phil Totaro: Yeah, I actually think so because this, this program is done through the Department of Agriculture interestingly enough, not the Department of Energy, and the reason that they’re doing it is because the co ops are actually, outside of kind of the, the organized utilities coordinating like corporate power buying. The co ops are actually one of the biggest You know, in aggregate power buyers in, in the United States, especially when you start talking about all the co ops, we’re getting kind of gobbled up by Touchstone and, you know, most co ops in the United States are now organized under, you know, a parent kind of umbrella corporation.

So this is a lot of money that’s going into, you know, basically subsidizing renewable energy power buying or the development of distributed power generation facilities. That are gonna be adjacent to these these rural communities that are able to take advantage of this this bunny. So, this is one where I really do hope that they don’t try and cut it because this is actually, like, Putting money in the pockets of people that are doing clean energy power buying, and it’s actually helping get wind and solar and storage deployed on the grid.

So I, this is actually a great program. Great for the department of agriculture to be doing it. Not sure why the department of energy wasn’t previously on board with something like this.

Joel Saxum: Coming from someone who has co op power now and grew up with co op power up in Northern Wisconsin in a rural area, injection of capital into rural environments anywhere makes me smile.

So, because they usually don’t see as much, right? So when a big project comes through or something gets announced like this, everybody gets a little bit happy in those areas. And so, weird to see it. Not weird, I suppose, in a lame duck situation from the federal government, but yeah, I hope this one continues to, to roll forward in these projects to get some ink behind them before January 20th.

Allen Hall: In our next story, Brookfield Asset Management has completed its acquisition of 53 percent stake in French renewable power producer Neoen SA. The deal valuing Neoen at 6. 1 billion euros will be followed by a tender offer for the remaining shares at about 39 euros each. And as part of the regulatory requirement, and there’s always regulatory requirements, Neoen has divested of its Australian portfolio, including a 652 megawatts of operational assets and 2.

8 gigawatts of project pipeline Phil obviously Brookfield. Asset management is a big player in energy in general and renewable energy. Neoen move in kind of getting out of this market, being acquired. What is the outcome of this? Where is this all going?

Phil Totaro: Well, it’s interesting because besides the, the divestment of their, you know, assets in Victoria, Australia, they also own obviously a substantial portfolio in France being a French company.

And Substantial Portfolio in Brazil. Ultimately, even with the divestment of their Australian portfolio, it gives Brookfield access to more markets where they didn’t necessarily have a presence before. Like France and Brazil where Brookfield was kind of, you know, You know, poking around and dipping their toe in the water a little bit, but they never actually had a substantial portfolio down there.

And France is a market within Europe where Brookfield also wasn’t particularly strong. It’s similar to Germany. It’s kind of a highly fragmented market in terms of a ton of small projects. And so, you know, the, the fact that somebody like Brookfield can come in take a chunk of portfolio and then get access to the market, learn how it’s all going, and hopefully anticipate what is expected to be a repowering market in France in a few years here.

You know, if Brookfield wants to have that kind of presence in Western Europe, this is a, this is a great move for them to to kind of kickstart that.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, Brookfield, we’ve seen them make some big investments in some companies you know, the Deriva one here in the States, which was Duke Energy they’ve done some other ones around the world, but the Neoen buy in, Neoen size, just so you understand, 500 plus million dollars or million euros in revenue last year.

8. 7 gigawatts in operation or under construction of renewable energies. They’re in 15 countries and they’ve got big targets of over 10 gigawatts for 10, for, to be in the pipeline or operating in 2025. So Brookfield buying into a big player here looking to maximize their footprint around the world.

Allen Hall: And finally, European Energy and Nova Holdings have joined forces to upgrade 17 aging German wind farms. The project will replace outdated turbines installed between 2002 and 2008 with modern, efficient equipment, tripling the current 151. 9 megawatt capacity. Once operational between 2027 and 2030, the modernized facility will generate 1, 100 gigawatt hours annually, powering 290, 000 European households.

Now, Phil. This is totally different in Germany, the repowering situation versus the United States, where in the United States of a repower, they’re putting out the same amount of power onto the grid. In Germany, they’re tripling it. How are they doing that?

Phil Totaro: It’s basically taking down turbines that are, you know, kilowatt size or maybe, you know, up to one, one and a half megawatts and just repowering it with something that’s, you know.

Six, seven, maybe close to eight megawatts. They’re, they’re building a rather substantial amount of new transmission in Germany to be able to do this. Keep in mind that the majority of electricity consumption, particularly industrial and corporate power offtake, is down in the southern part of Germany, which is more the industrial region and that zone.

So this partnership between European Energy and Nova Holdings is great for Germany, and it builds on what they’ve already done and demonstrated in Denmark and Sweden

Joel Saxum: European Energy got an investment last year, and they’ve been working, if you look through any of the internal news on their investment pages and portfolios, they’ve been raising cash, they’ve been making some, some funding moves.

Over the last few years and they have come from a smaller, relatively relatively small player to a much larger player, making a large impact all across the European renewable energy space. So kudos to European energy for getting in on this one as well.

From mysterious white etching cracks to cutting-edge material innovations, Malloy Wind‘s expert Cory Mittleider reveals the complex world of gearbox bearing failures that plague wind turbines. Learn why traditional monitoring may not be enough and what operators need to know about the latest solutions to keep their gearboxes running reliably. Read the EPRI article Cory references: https://restservice.epri.com/publicdownload/000000003002021422/0/Product

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

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

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight, where we tackle the technical challenges and innovations in wind energy. I’m your host, Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum.

We’re excited to welcome back one of our most popular guests, Cory Mittleider from Malloy Wind. In his previous appearance, Cory shared his expertise on main bearing failures. And many of you reached out asking for a deep dive into gearbox bearings. Today, Cory returns to do exactly that. As Malloy’s business unit manager, he and his team have diagnosed and solved countless gearbox bearing issues across different turbine platforms.

Having spent over 15 years in power transmission, Cory has become a specialist in understanding why these critical components fail and, more importantly, how to prevent those failures through better bearing selection and maintenance practices. Cory, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.

Thanks for having me again. All right, so we’ve got a lot of requests to hear about gearbox, bearing, and what the issues are with those bearings. Gearboxes is something I know a little bit about. But you’re the expert. I hear a lot of complaining from the field. What is happening to gearbox bearings at the minute?

Cory Mittleider: Sure. Gearbox bearings has been an interesting one for me. So when I started in wind in 2011, it was generator bearings and gearbox bearings is where I started learning about this stuff. A lot of the generator stuff was electrical fluting damage. That’s pretty well figured out how to avoid that.

The gearbox one was a little more complex than that. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of. NREL’s Drivetrain Reliability Conference that’s happened for the last 12 plus years now. That’s a recurring topic for the last every single year, right? Is gearbox bearing failures. A lot of the conversation that started back in the day and is still going on is around what they call white etching cracking or white etching failures.

And back, in say, 11 and 12, A lot of the conversation was around was around that. It was around, the oils in the gearboxes. It was around coatings and bearing types and how they could affect the bearing itself to improve the life. And, specifically when it comes to gearbox bearings That was really hard back in the, the service providers and the operators themselves weren’t used to having to replace gearbox bearings.

They maybe weren’t even planning on having to replace gearbox bearings, right? But they started to see these problems. They started to get their head around the scope and how to identify them early and started to dig into it. There’s been a lot of investigations from bearing manufacturers, from third parties, from operators.

into those failures for over a decade now.

Allen Hall: I remember looking into some of the early gearbox issues and you’re talking about some of the failures I am actually familiar with. Those had a lot to do with just sort of basic fundamentals of like lubrication and loading, which were not obvious at the time.

Have we overcome some of those sort of basic bearing issues, or do they still exist out in the field?

Cory Mittleider: I started going to this drivetrain reliability conference in 2015. So I was a couple years later than the initials. But some of the earliest things I remember was slip occurring, right?

From typically I think the scenario that was presented on was high speed low load scenario. Yep. Such as bringing a turbine online, and I remember a chart very vividly from NREL’s outfitting of the high speed bearings on their test 1 5, right? The rollers should be rolling at 400 RPM, but their only roll, or the cajun roller assembly should have been going 400 RPM.

But it was only going 100 RPM meaning there was a ton of slip, a differential speed between the rollers and the inner ring raceway surface. There was some, oils that got fingers pointed at them for essentially being readily available to, to release hydrogen ions. And as we look back at wet etching cracking and the information that’s been collected over the years and investigated I think most people agree that hydrogen embrittlement is a big factor in that, um, there’s certainly components of material cleanliness that are involved in that conversation as well.

It’s a lot of investigation there. And to answer your question, is it still happening? I’ve got this report from an organization called EPRI. I found it on their website. It’s called Wind Turbine Gearbox Reliability Assessment. And they have listed what is it, seven points that lead to most of the gearbox related issues.

related failures and I’ll just read them off. It’s high contract stresses leading to pitting and spalling, bearing race slippage, macro pitting due to skidding and bearing slippage, wear due to inadequate lubrication, race cracking due to white etching formation, low quality materials and material defects or inclusions.

and improper bearing design leading to non uniform stresses or loads. And this was published December of 2021, right? So this is a couple years old, but it’s pretty, pretty recent from an accumulation of data, having time to digest and put out a report. This is pretty recent. And when I look at some other things in here that are really interesting 42 percent of gearbox related downtime is from high speed and intermediate bearings.

The other 58 percent is gearing related or maybe some of the other stages, but 42 percent are from high speed and intermediate bearings from those failure modes that I described. So the takeaway in my mind, as much as that’s something to be aware of and watch out for if it’s high speed and intermediate bearings, those often are replaced up tower.

So you can do that scopal work up tower. Another thing that’s also in the report they’re talking about that uptower scope of work costs somewhere between 15, 000 and 70, 000, right? So you can guess the sooner you catch that, you’re monitoring your CMS, you’re looking for inner ring defects or cracked inner ring or whatever, maybe sometimes outer rings falling as well.

If you can catch that sooner, get that replaced sooner, there’s less debris generated, there’s less additional ancillary components that need to be replaced or serviced. And that keeps it closer to that 15, 000 Scope of work,

Joel Saxum: of course, right? Let me ask you a question about that then. So to find that early enough, we’re usually always talking CMS, right?

And we know there’s a CMS usually from the factory. If it’s a Vesta, whatever they, if they’re doing an FSA, they’re monitoring that from afar. But there is aftermarket CMS for drivetrain monitoring that, like Onyx Insight comes to mind and there’s a couple of other brands out there, of course, would you recommend?

Cause this is a conversation we just had not too long ago with a bunch of people about blades and other reliability things. Would you recommend someone to shadow monitor a like a drivetrain CMS, even though they’re maybe they’re. Full service, agreement already has one. Do you think that’s smart?

Do you think that’s a good spend on money?

Cory Mittleider: Unfortunately what I’ve heard is it seems like no matter the application, gearbox, blade bearings, anything I’ve heard quite a few operators say that when they got to the end of warranty period or end of service agreement periods, they didn’t know what happened.

They didn’t know if X component had been replaced at all, or if it had been replaced five times. I guess I would certainly encourage operators to do everything they can to understand their own equipment. Is that making sure they get the reports from the people that are currently hired to service that?

Maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe those are behind the wall, and they don’t get access to those. And there probably is some merit in understanding or maybe even say, shadow monitoring or double checking some things on their own to understand their asset. Ultimately it’s their asset.

And They’d be best off to know what’s going on with it. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: So let me ask you another question. With all of the, and this is monitoring inspection related. So to, to catch problems early. So CMS is one tool, right? Another tool is like an Uptower Borescope inspection. Of course, to me, end of warranty is an absolute must to have a third party come in and look at the, do a bore scope inspections, end of warranty.

Is there any other times that you recommend that, or do you recommend that to do every year like we do blade inspections, or what does that look like for you?

Cory Mittleider: The nice thing about gearbox bearings, especially in these high speed and intermediate positions that we’re talking about. The tried and true CMS tools really do a good job, is my understanding.

You can see those, the signatures are well developed they’re high speed enough to stand out. It’s not like main bearings where it’s tougher because it’s such a low speed, right? They blend into the floor on low speeds like that. So my understanding of what most operators do is they watch the CMS, they’ll look at other clues, they’ll look at temperature sometimes they have the the oil particle counting stuff to compliment that as well which the more ways you can monitor your equipment, the better, right?

So that makes sense. And usually what I understand is they’ll see some alarms, whether it’s any of that, or maybe the technician reporting noise, right? Those happen from time to time too. And then they’ll call in that bore scope. They’ll call in that physical inspection. The signature says it’s an inner ring on the high speed, but let’s look around.

It’s just double check and see if we’re, here. There’s a little more to it than just trust in that. Let’s get some eyes on it and figure it out, establish the scope of work. You might see some more stuff to be prepared for when you call in that crew to do a high speed

Joel Saxum: a high speed job. I remember talking to some people over in Denmark and they had an uptower kit that was like, they carried it up tower in a Pelican case.

And when they popped it open, it was a whole set of testing gear for testing oils. oils and lubes and greases and different things up tower where they could just take a small sample out of what was existing there and tell you the particulate levels and tell you if it’s been overheated or burnt up or what kind of life is left in it.

Does that service, have you heard of that service existing in the states? I’m

Cory Mittleider: not familiar with the, called the mobile oil lab type of thing. But it probably has some merit in spot checking. I think one of the things that’s been learned in the last decade, as we talked about WEC failures and gearbox.

Gearbox maintenance, essentially. I think there’s been a better job at paying attention at stuff like that. So I think there’s been an improvement, not just in the bearing technology and how they service it, but just staying on top of things, taking them seriously and doing it preventatively.

Allen Hall: From the design standpoint, Cory, the white edge cracking seems like something that could be designed out, but there maybe was a misunderstanding of how the lubrication, specific lubrication work with specific bearing sets and the loading that was there causing that slipping to occur.

And then which doesn’t seem obvious at first, but when you start thinking about it, like slippage is bad, it creates stress points in these bearings and then. Basically cracks them until they fail catastrophically. Are there more constraints on what the lubrication is and how often it needs to be checked if it becomes a critical piece to the success of a bearing?

Cory Mittleider: Oh we’ve had some conversations about lubrication on different bearing applications and ultimately confidence in lubrication is critical. To Perry Life. Absolutely. Debris can’t, minimize that water, minimize that presence of lubrication. The thing that makes wind turbines so difficult though is the environment and the variable load, right?

When we live in our industrial side of the business, you’ve got a processing plant, a production facility. A lot of times that gearbox, for example, is under more or less constant load. It’s probably in a building. That’s moderately environmentally controlled. Neither of which you have in a wind turbine, right?

You’ve got gusts. You’ve got, South Dakota, January last year, it was negative, 19 degrees, negative 44 wind chill. Now the turbines have a low limit cutoff, right? But even that’s pretty low, right? So you’ve got that and then we’ll get up to 110. And that’s the South Dakota environment.

You’ve got dry environments, you’ve got wet environments. There’s a lot of things that make it tough to have one thing work all the time, right? With that oil having to work for high speed bearings, low speed bearings. Ball bearings, roller type bearings, all inside one gearbox.

Allen Hall: I remember not long ago where additives were the thing.

There was a lot of sales of additives being sold. put into gearboxes to improve the lifetime of the gearbox. But it turns out from what I remember that some of those additives were actually causing some of the failures because it was not working the way that it in theory should have worked.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah, I think some of the early additive packages were pointed at as being more readily available to shed the hydrogen.

And generally, from a hydrogen embrittlement point of view for those that aren’t familiar essentially, you’re stripping off because you have the slipping and this kind of localized high pressure. It can generate localized high heat. It can essentially strip a hydrogen ion off of the chain of this additive, for example, and then coincidentally, when you take the two surfaces, a roller and a raceway, that’s that, that if lubrication isn’t present, separating them and they touch, the asperities touch and rub, that’ll create a negatively charged surface.

So you don’t have your positively charged hydrogen ion right next to your scar, your fresh surface that’s negatively charged. And then it attaches. And when that hydrogen ion attaches there, it weakens the bonds within that’s that steel structure, that alloy structure, and then your same stress cycles that Barry is built to last with it not being as strong, those bonds will break down sooner and sooner.

And essentially you end up with iron sand under the surface, these little pockets of copper. You know what I like to call iron sand under the surface. Now you have this discontinuity of material and it doesn’t carry the load and then it cracks and that’s A really short description of what leads to the white etching cracking phenomenon that’s been seen.

There’s some talk about even potentially electricity playing a contribution in the gearbox. Now an operator was telling me that about that maybe about a month ago. And then those hydrogen ions there’s also some observations that I’ve been seeing that they may want to collect, essentially.

near the impurities, near the inclusions within a steel alloy too, right? No steel is perfectly clean. There’s always something going on in there. Manufacturers do everything they can to minimize that and make them a rounded type instead of sharp edge type. But those are some of the factors that are currently still being talked about when it comes to WEC.

So to battle that, is there a specific oil that you recommend as being a bearing expert? We don’t deal a ton with the lubrication itself. Dealing with the bearings working with the manufacturers, we can tell you what characteristics we want the oil to have our viscosity at temperature, things like that.

But there’s a lot going on there. And I guess put it this way, I’m not well versed enough in oils. We could talk to the engineers at the bearing manufacturers to get some of those lists, but what we found in the last several years, specifically against this list of seven bullet points from this EPRI report, for example, is we’ve seen, we’re, like I said, this started in 2011 ish.

When I started to get involved. So your regular bearing that most items ship with, whether it’s your electric motor on your vacuum cleaner at home, the ball bearings in your wheel hub of your car, or wind turbines. They’re through hardened steel alloy. No coatings, no nothing on them typically.

That’s entry level. and they’re designed for raceway fatigue. And just like the other bearing applications we’ve talked about, all these things aren’t raceway raceway rolling contact fatigue. These are the other things that happen, right? So as the WEC thing started to come to life, one of the first responses from bearing manufacturers, from turbine OEMs, from gearbox OEMs was black oxide.

You guys are familiar with black oxide, I think, right? We even talked about it on our talked about main bearings a bit and Allen, I think it was you that brought up we call it a coating, but I don’t like that word as it pertains to black oxide specifically because it’s converted material, right?

It’s not applied afterwards. That’s what I would call a coating. Black oxide is actually converted material. steel alloy. The surface, again, that’s about two, three microns thick, really thin layer. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s oxide. It’s oxidized steel, right? So it does have some benefits.

It essentially makes the the, surface of the raceways and the rollers fuzzier improving oil adhesion, trying to build up that, that oil layer, increasing your lambda to avoid the smearing, to avoid that contact, to avoid the the asperities touching leading to that scar, that negatively charged surface.

It can only do so much.

Allen Hall: But that’s so true though, because we, when we think of bearings, we think of everything being really smooth and rolling so easily. But when you talk about lubrication you need to have a surface to attach to, to provide that little thin layer of oil so that it does operate for a long period of time and removing that surface is going to be catastrophic in a lot of cases.

Cory Mittleider: And you’re right, you look at a ball bearing on your table, on your bench or something it looks, and they’re polished, they look incredibly smooth. But just like anything, you put it under a microscope and you start to see little peaks and valleys. I call them asperities, right? The roller has those asperities, the raceways have those asperities and it’s something that different bearing manufacturers control in different ways.

It’s something, it’s each manufacturer’s secret sauce on how they do those things a little bit, right? They put as Different effort into different places. But the whole goal with bearings and lubrication is to make sure those asperities don’t touch.

Allen Hall: Exactly. It’s much like a cylinder wall in a, in an engine.

When you watch them build an engine on these high end engines, everything’s so smooth and looks so great. Except for that cylinder wall, which they intentionally brush so that oil remains in that cylinder to lubricate that piston as it goes up and down. The same thing happens in a bearing. Just at a smaller level, it’s not as gross as scratching, but there is a surface there to hold oil properly and lubricant properly.

Losing that surface is really a delicate matter. I think people don’t understand that’s where the magic is. It’s right at that surface level because that white edge cracking was a result of slippage due to lubrication and the surfaces of the mating surfaces not being quite right. Boom.

Now we got a huge problem. And Cory, I think you’re right. A lot of the wind turbine world is so different than most bearing applications. You’re really putting a lot of stress on that. Are there more updated bearings that can handle the tough environment like South Dakota?

Cory Mittleider: Yeah. So something that progressed as the white etching cracking conversation progressed, and this isn’t unique to wind.

When you look at any bearing manufacturer has a catalog of different, uh, materials, heat treatments, coatings, things like that, that they can apply depending on the application. And one of the first upgrades often used for bearings in demanding applications is case carburizing, right? So instead of using a higher carbon content alloy, and through hardening it, Where it’s the same hardness throughout the cross section of the ring.

You use a low carbon alloy base material. And then you put it in a atmosphere with a high carbon atmosphere. You heat treat it for a period of time and you have a shell. Almost imagine cutting an M& M in half, right? You have a harder shell and a little bit of a kind of springy shock absorber type core.

Like a golf ball, yeah, so there’s that, and that’s, like I say, that’s pretty well known. That’s in a lot of different industries, a lot of different applications where our case hardened bearings are the next upgrade often. Something that in my experience going back to 2012, 2013 is there’s actually different versions of case hardening though.

So case carburized is the one that, that typically people are familiar with. It’s the. The standard case hardened version but one that we’ve had a lot of success with specifically in the last 10, 11, almost 12 years now is one that’s case carbon nitrided. So in addition to the carbon in the atmosphere being deposited in the part there’s also nitrogen that’s ends up getting added to the part.

And. Also, the, even the steel alloy is different. So now that’d be probably more what I’d call a medium carbon alloy steel. So it’s not the low carbon alloy steel. It’s not the high carbon alloy steel. It’s a little bit in the middle. Specifically there’s one manufacturer that we’ve worked with a lot on this and that’s NSK and they, what they call it is super tough.

They have a whole family of different materials, different alloys and heat treatments. And this is the one that’s found, we found to work really well in wind. Gearbox bearing applications and one of my my earliest example with a success story on the super tough bearings was actually the Getz.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the Getz gearbox. It had a little bit of a reputation for chewing up and spitting out planet bearings. The first one that I remember was I think it was late 2012. I got installed up tower in March of 2013 after the site was online for about three and a half, four years.

It had already failed a set of planet bearings, and that gets Gearbox. But they were able to do an uptower repair to replace that. And after doing that, the site, we talked about different monitoring methods. I don’t think that site had CMS on their Gearboxes. And never mind, planets are a little trickier because you can’t directly touch them right with the probe through the housing.

They’re floating around. One of the things that they did is they checked the filters. On a six month basis. Just look for some metal particles. That’s how they found it the first time. That’s how they probably find it again. So last update I got from them before they did some other work on the turbine, was that seven years later, so 2020 that when they looked at the Berry Raceways, they still looked brand new.

They still looked great. And the gets with its reputation was one that really stood out to me as successful. Now, between that seven year window we’ve sent a lot more to the field. We’ve done a lot more follow up and other things too, but that’s probably the longest and maybe biggest wow. Realization when it comes to the benefits of different materials, alloys, and heat treatments.

The other thing about bearing technology, ISO dictates that they have to have certain level of cleanliness and minimize particle size and count and type in the alloy. But again, that’s another thing that’s secret sauce on a per manufacturer basis per bearing manufacturer.

And what I’ve learned that NSK does in particular is they just publicized this maybe a year and a half ago now. They do what they call micro UT. So they’re essentially using a an in house developed ultrasonic testing on the bar stock. before the ring is even formed. So that allows them not to look at a sample and cut off a sample, polish it, put it under the microscope and say the sample was good.

So we qualify the whole bar or the sample was bad. So we scrapped the whole bar. They’re able to do that as a non destructive. type of test. So even if there is theoretically a bad spot in a bar, they can cut out this spot of the bar and then continue to keep using the rest as they make the forging.

So that’s another area that as we continue to have deeper and deeper conversations with operators right now that level of design intent and manufacturing diligence is really starting to be observed just now, in my opinion It was important the whole time. We’re just getting to that level.

We’re getting caught up to all the tiny little pieces, the less visible pieces, that can be impactful.

Allen Hall: Now, this is why we need you on the podcast, Cory, because you can explain all of this great bearing issue and resolutions to us, non bearing people. And I know we went across a lot of non bearing people out in the field that just need a little bit of advice.

And if you do need advice, you need to go to Molloy Wind. And check out their website. And Cory, how do they do that?

Cory Mittleider: Yeah, our our website’s at molloywind. com. One of the places that I like to point people is there is a I think it’s called resources tab with some tech articles that we’ve written largely around bearings there’s some gearbox bearing stuff main bearing, blade bearing stuff on there usually around what we’ve seen for failures in different applications.

And then when it comes to the gearbox bearing topic, there’s a couple pages with even the typical gearbox bearing configurations for high speed and intermediate. I have some pictures of on there showing how some use tapers and cylindricals, some use ball bearings and cylindricals in those high speed and intermediate positions.

Because they’re not all done the same. They’re not all implemented the same. Um, and then there’s also some pages as it comes to Gearbox Berries outlining the the, call them the coatings and conversion coatings materials information as well, black oxide and super tough, for example there’s some information there showing that.

Allen Hall: Yeah, so check out malloywind.com or you can reach out to Cory via LinkedIn. Cory, thank you so much for being with us again. I learned a tremendous amount. I’m almost, 10 percent of what your knowledge is. Boy the bearing information is so useful in the field. I really appreciate this.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah, thanks for your time.

We discuss Vestas’ anti-oscillation blade tool, which seems to have a dual purpose, Windspider’s self-erecting tower method, and a terrifying way to disguise vaccinations for kids.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here’s your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro.

Allen Hall: Well, Phil, our first idea of the week is from our friends at Vestas, and it’s an anti oscillation tool for wind turbine blades. And how this patent is described, it’s like a sock for your wind turbine blade with a little bit of a covering over the trailing edge serrations, and you slide this device on And it stops oscillations during deployment, when the, when the turbine may be a little more vulnerable, it’s not a full operation, maybe in lockouts, where you really don’t want any lift, and particularly you don’t want any oscillations that could, in theory,

Phil Totaro: Yeah.

And maybe it’s an idea that GE should have come up with or LM should have come up with first considering some of the issues they’ve had this year. But what’s kind of fascinating about this though, is that this isn’t necessarily a new idea from the perspective of putting a little sock on the end of your wind turbine blade to protect the tip during a lift.

Usually it’s for making sure that you don’t damage the serrations or whatever you’ve stuck on the trailing edge of the blade. In this case, Vestas and, and I’m, I’m kind of expressing my opinion or suggestion here that I think Vestas is basically trying to get an extra 20 years of life on a patented concept that, They, are potentially using on a daily basis for that construction purpose.

They found another way to describe that same technology and as an anti oscillation tool.

Allen Hall: You ever seen a device called a slap chopper, Phil? No. It slices and it dices. Oh, that thing. Yeah, I have. I have. So what they’ve To have done, in a sense, is they’ve taken the Slapchopper and got a patent for slicing, and then when that got close to expiring, they came back and said, well, it dices too, which is a separate patent, and thereby you can extend the same device for Covering two areas.

It’s very unique way of patenting and very effective by the way. It’s smart.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, it is. If, if you’re trying to capture and protect your IP, but it also doesn’t say much for the patent examiners we’ve ever had in this industry who can’t seem to recognize that this is what companies are doing because this is not the first time this has happened.

I can recall a few examples in the past where companies had You know, had, their 20 years of patent protection on a concept and then repatented basically the same thing and said, Oh, well, it’s not for cooling. It’s for vibration damping, or it’s not for one thing. It’s for something else. So it looks like that’s what’s happening here.

And, I guess kudos to Vestas for trying and maybe not so many kudos to the U. S. Patent Office for allowing stuff like this to get pushed

Allen Hall: through. Roncopeel made a living doing that. If you’re familiar with Ronco, it’s Christmas time and every Christmas you would have another Ronco product, which slices, dices, cooked a chicken or something.

Phil Totaro: All at the same time?

Allen Hall: So our next idea is from Windspider and it’s a method to basically raise a wind turbine tower with a crane. It’s sort of, an erector set that builds upon itself. So It kind of hoists itself by its own petard in a way, and it lifts itself up. You can put more infrastructure behind it.

You lift it up some more, put more infrastructure behind it, and you can build a turbine tower with it. Really no large external crane. Everything happens right on the tower itself. This has applications, Phil. Particularly offshore, I think this makes a whole bunch of sense. I haven’t seen it implemented though.

And this patent is new within the last couple of months. I expect this one to happen somewhere.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, this is one that if Windspider is going to be able to get enough capital together to do some kind of a prototype demonstration, they might actually catch on with doing this, particularly with larger either onshore machines or certainly offshore machines where Again, minimizing the amount of crane time is going to become important both from crane availability as well as how tall they could theoretically make the towers, because this is basically a method for self erecting a tower where you can actually put and they actually go into some detail about how you can actually install the tower based on staves or segments.

And it can be a tower of either concrete or steel construction or they could even plot this thing to on top of a a concrete base. We talked a couple of weeks ago about Max Bogle, making these hybrid towers. You could use this to then construct the, the steel tube.

portion of a hybrid tower at the top. So, it’s it’s a clever idea. Our

Allen Hall: fun patent of the week isn’t all that fun. And if you’ve ever been a kid or if you have children, you realize that syringes are not your friend. And so when you go visit the doctor for your annual physical, you’re always dreading that, oh, I think you’re ready for another tetanus shot or you need some sort of booster shot, which seems to happen at every checkup until you’re like, 18 years old.

Maybe 21. Maybe until you’re 50 at this point. There always seems to be another booster shot in your medical chart. Well, this inventor, Robert Smetton decided that enough is enough. We need to make needles more friendly. So his invention is to modify the syringe barrel with an attachment that makes it look like a pleasing animal, like a happy bunny.

Or a little puppy dog. So instead of seeing a syringe Headed for your arm or maybe a lower part of your anatomy. Now you’re seeing this fuzzy little bunny coming at you. So thereby permanently associating nice fuzzy animals with pain. And I cannot figure out, Phil, how this patent actually got through the process and thinking somebody was going to buy it, but here’s the

Phil Totaro: thing.

People file patents all the time for stuff that never actually gets built. I hope that this was one of them, because I gotta be honest. Like this is. Probably the most terrifying thing that you could ever do to a child because now it’s, it’s a fuzzy bunny and it’s, it’s not even just like the physical pain associated with the fuzzy bunny.

It’s a bunny with a needle poking out of its mouth and face. Like this is absolutely terrifying. Like I, I don’t like needles in the first place. This would scare the crap out of me. So yeah, I don’t, I don’t like this one at all.

Allen Hall: But what if it’s country specific? Like you’ve done in Australia, you’d have a koala bear, a little baby koala bear with a needle.

Phil Totaro: You’d have a hoop snake with a needle coming out of it. I don’t know.

Allen Hall: There you go, right? It just, it just seems terrorizing, but hey, it’s a patent. There’s all kinds of crazy patents.

This week, we discuss Siemens Gamesa’s MASSIVE 21 MW turbine prototype, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa layoffs in Europe, trade relations between the US and EU in 2025, and the proper out-of-office email etiquette.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: If you want to know why Siemens Gamesa is betting big on a 21 megawatt offshore turbine while others scale back, what Norway’s 25 billion oil and gas investment means for renewables, and how manufacturing challenges are reshaping European wind energy, stick around. Plus, we’ve got big news about Wind Energy O& M Australia and a chance to win an exclusive Uptime Podcast mug in our first ever listener survey.

I’m Allen Hall, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

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

Allen Hall: Just the season of giving, and this year we want to give you a voice in shaping Uptime’s future. As we wrap up another amazing year of wind energy conversations, we’re launching our first in person event. And yes, there’s a special holiday surprise involved. Picture yourself sipping your morning coffee from an exclusive Uptime Podcast mug.

Which could be yours just for participating. All we need is five minutes of your time to tell us what sparks your interest and what you’d love to hear more in 2025. Whether you’ve been with us since day one or just caught your first episode, your thoughts matter to us. So dash over to uptimewindenergy.

com or slay down to the show notes below. And from all of us at Uptime, thank you for making this community possible. Second, wind energy professionals won’t want to miss the premier O& M event in the Asia Pacific region, the Wind Energy O& M Australia conference happening February 11th and 12th in Melbourne.

And we’re thrilled to have industry powerhouses like Tilt Renewables, Worley, Aerones.

Phil Totaro: And we’re pleased to announce Sky Specs is actually going to be joining us as a corporate roundtable sponsor for the event.

Allen Hall: The conference tackles crucial topics that directly impact your operations, leading into erosion, lightning protection, CMS, insurance, and life extension strategies.

This is your chance to connect with the industry leaders and gain practical insights that you can implement immediately. So secure your spot now by visiting And finally, don’t miss out on a game changing opportunity for your safety program. Active training team known for their innovative and immersive safety training methods.

ATT is hosting a free expo in Houston on January 24th, and this isn’t your typical safety presentation by no means. ATT brings safety culture to life through dynamic hands on experiences that have transformed safety programs across the energy sector. So this is a rare chance to experience their methods first hand.

Spacers are filling up fast, so register now by emailing [email protected] or visiting activetrainingteam.us/contact.

Unlock your wind farm’s best performance at Wind Energy O& M Australia, February 11th to 12th, in sunny Melbourne. Join industry leaders as they share practical solutions for maintenance, OEM relations, and asset management.

Discover strategies to cut costs. Keep your assets running smoothly and drive long term success in today’s competitive market. Register today and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com.

Allen Hall: There’s a dynamic story in international trade relations happening at the moment where the president elect of the United States has issued a statement regarding US EU trade dynamics and through a social media post U. S. leadership has called for a European Union to address its trade deficit with the United States through increased purchases.

Of all things, American oil and gas. Now this threat comes in to light with all the tariff discussions that have been happening over the last several weeks. And the EU and the U. S. I think privately behind closed doors have been talking and trying to tap this down a little bit. But this comes in light of, Joel, that Norway is busy drilling away also, that they plan to spend about 25 billion dollars in 2025 drilling a number of holes, looking for more oil and gas, which I assume are headed right to the EU.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing about this that we have to understand is we’re, this is a wind energy podcast, so we’re into renewable energy. We want we’re looking for energy transition. I think the thing that we all need to understand is that the energy transition is not going to be a flick of a switch, right?

We’re oil and gas is in literally everything that you touch every day. Like the mouse, my computer, my cell phone, my coffee cup, like petroleum products are in everything. So until we find out. different source for that, those products, it’s not going to go away. So with that being said, the, you also have to understand that it’s going to play a huge factor on global economics because like we’re talking here, EU in the U S and you have Norway, there.

So Norway being the, one of the largest natural gas producers in the world, I think they’re number four behind like the U S Russia and Qatar, however you want to say it. But we saw this in the last few years, the economics and the political geopolitical strife play out in Eastern Europe with the, the conflict we’re having over there.

And then we had this last Presidential campaign series over here in the United States. One of the big things that president elect Trump said was drill, baby drill. We’re going to continue to push the United States on what we can do for output for natural gas and oil, which we’ve hit records year after year in the last few years.

So it’s a way to balance the books globally, right? So if we want to if the U S wants to flex muscle this is a way to do it, definitely force, force some of our trade partners to take some oil and gas.

Allen Hall: Does this change the dynamic though in terms of renewable energy in Northern Europe or greater EU?

Joel Saxum: I don’t think so as of yet. I think people will continue to push for renewable energy projects. They’re just not happening quick enough, right? You can’t, there’s only so many goods, like spots for wind farms, say like in Germany that have been cited for their wind farms are built there, they’re in operation.

So you’re seeing, instead of all kinds of new field, like we have in the United States, a hundred, 120 turbine wind sites that just not being built. So you still have this gap where the thirst for natural gas for heating and power is very. It’s going to continue to happen. I don’t think it’ll change in the near term a whole lot.

I think you still have, in my opinion, we still have 10, 20 years left of the same kind of hydrocarbon thirst that we have right now.

Allen Hall: Phil, is there going to be a big push in terms of growth in the EU to grab more oil and gas exploration while

Phil Totaro: they can? But let’s keep a couple of things in mind with this conversation.

One is that the trade imbalance between the U. S. and Europe is roughly only about 200 billion. Obviously that’s a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things I don’t know why. This is coming up as a topic when that’s something that could, it could be closed by them buying more, liquefied natural gas from the U.

S., which is what they’re obviously trying to accomplish. But I don’t know why this is a big thing. And in the meantime, Europe has bigger issues with having Norway basically replacing, Norway’s drilling, replacing Russian gas supply when they could also be investing equally as heavily into, repowering repowering in Spain, repowering in France, repowering in Germany.

And Portugal although that’s already happening a little bit but, they’re just not doing what they could be doing to take advantage of renewable energy as power source as opposed to continuing to operate on an oil and gas based infrastructure.

Allen Hall: It just seems like there’s a limited amount of growth in oil and gas in Europe.

I know there’s, they’re trying to deal obviously with a lack of resources coming further from the east, but that won’t last that long. It doesn’t seem like it with all the electricity generation that’s happening. Off the coast of the United Kingdom and other places. There’s going to be a lot of electricity feeding Europe here shortly.

It doesn’t seem like it would be the right time necessarily to put a bunch of money into oil and gas, but Equinor, being one of the players here, is doing it, in which is. Odd also because Equinor is what, the second largest stakeholder in Orsted, which is the renewable energy leader in Europe for the most part.

There is, there’s a lot of dynamics happening here. Do you think that this is going to over the next couple of months as the new administration comes in, do you think this is going to tamper down or is this just going to get elevated even more and more as the discusses about trade deficits and tariffs pick up?

I think it’ll ramp up. To

Joel Saxum: be honest with you, I guess let’s look, let’s go back and look at Norway. Why Norway does what they do in the oil and gas world. Even though they’re touted as, one of the most green societies. They have the highest adoption rate of EVs. They run on a lot of renewable energy themselves.

The majority of it’s renewable, a lot of hydro up there. They’re, they are also like, I believe it is, and Phil correct me if I’m wrong here, but per capita the richest country in the world. Or one of the richest countries, the top three. Because and all of that is based on oil and gas monies in the sovereign wealth fund of the country of Norway.

So they’ve been, they’ve built their economy on oil and gas. They know how to do it. They know how to do it well. And they see that over the next, I think there was a study that came out by 2050. There’s a reserves that they should be exploring internally right now that are worth like 1. 4 trillion.

So they, I think they’re trying to set themselves up for the future. No matter what the future looks like, them, they, themselves, they’re pretty set for renewable energies in that transition. But they’re building as much wealth as they can now

Phil Totaro: for what happens next. To their credit, they have been investing some of that sovereign wealth fund money in but as their pot grows, the percentage that they’re investing in renewables hasn’t necessarily grown.

It’s just that they’re, incrementally as their pie gets bigger, they’re spending more money, as an absolute value, but they’re still spending the bulk of that sovereign wealth fund money and reinvesting in oil and gas exploration and extraction as opposed to, spending more on renewables.

We still need to get them to shift that percentage so that we increase more money flowing to, more capital flowing to to renewable energy projects.

Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine.

PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PESWind. com today. On the tails of our discussion about oil and gas in Norway.

It, there are effects happening downstream, not directly related, but somewhat related. Siemens Gamesa has reached a pre agreement with unions to implement temporary layoffs, affecting a little over 400 workers at several of its wind turbine manufacturing sites in Spain. Now these temporary layoffs, Involve benefits up to 85 percent of the workers salaries.

So the workers get 85 percent of their base salary for the time they’re being laid off. And it requires the workers to agree to this. But you see this kind of ebb and flow within Siemens Gamesa where they’ve had trouble with some of 5X machines that seem to be mostly based in Spain. And the 4X machine just started reselling a couple of months ago.

The 5X, who knows, haven’t heard much about it lately. And meanwhile, Siemens Gamesa is selling offshore turbines that are made elsewhere outside of Spain. And it just seems like Spain and the older Gamesa parts of Siemens Gamesa are going to be impacted over the next couple of months. And similar things are happening up in Vestas in the Isle of Wight.

It’s made of manufacturing facility there. The plan was to shut it all down. There was 600 workers there. But it looks like they’re going to try and negotiate with the UK government to save about 300 manufacturing positions for onshore wind blade projects. Basically they ran out of sales on the offshore blade that was being manufactured there and it was over.

They didn’t have any more orders. So they were just going to close it. That’s a huge problem. Now, remember Vestas and some of the people we. Talk to regularly like Nicholas Goddard and some others. There’s a technology center at the Isle of Wight that is not being affected. So that will remain open and part of their R& D blade development will still exist there, but the manufacturing is in trouble, which leads to the greater discussion of wind turbine manufacturing in Europe is generally in trouble.

You don’t see the amount of growth that you would like to see there at the minute, and with the shifting of resources and the closing of some facilities and temporary layoffs, although they’d be temporary, It’s not indicative of growth over in 2025 or 2026. Is that how you’re reading these tea leaves, Joel?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, a hundred percent. And what I’m seeing is okay, so let’s go let’s dial it back to the Siemens thing we’ve heard for the last year and a half. We were sitting having this same conversation almost last year at this time about the 4X and 5X machines not being sold. And once they do say, you know what, we’ve fixed the problems.

And we’re going to start selling them again. There’s going to be a ramp up period to get those sails back out, to get these, to get wind farms, permitted and sited. And this is going to be our turbine of choice. And in the meantime, there is other 4x and 5x machines out there on the market.

Nordex is out there, I’ve seen some GE 5.5x being installed in the States. So other turbines have backfilled some of that spot. So I think In my mind, I expected this to happen in Spain earlier. I expected this to happen back this past summer. But now that we’re seeing that they’ve gone back to sales of this platform that was manufactured here, and the sales may not look that good or that promising, I think at a certain time you just gotta You got to start trimming the fat.

You got to get back to that what, I guess what GE was saying is going lean.

Allen Hall: Phil, does that bode well? Because we’re not seeing closure in Spain, for example, is not being offset by more factories being built in Brazil or in India. You’re not seeing a shift in manufacturing. You’re just seeing the closing or the reduction of some of the sites.

That can’t be good. And is that just then forcing a real significant play? For European manufacturers, Vestas and Siemens, into offshore. Is that where the money’s going to be?

Phil Totaro: Ultimately, factory closures or even temporary reductions are usually tied to order book. If they’re not getting the order book that those factories normally serve, then it’s just a pay cut.

to ramp down, even though, again, in the case of Siemens Gamesa, they’re going to be paying out 85 percent of the salaries for a period of technically up to two years, according to the agreement they have in place with the the union over there. So You know, I don’t think it’s going to, people are going to be sitting on the sidelines for two years.

At least I certainly hope not their factory workers should be able to get back to work in late 2025, early 2026. But the reality of that is it’s again, as Joel said, it’s predicated on the order book that they’ve got and what they need to be able to do to deliver. Now, in the meantime, as you’ve proposed.

How do they make money? It’s going to be on services for which a lot of the installed capacity in Europe that they’ve deployed, whether it’s Siemens, Vestas, GE, or Nordex, or even Enercon for that matter in the past five or so years, Pretty much, I don’t have a precise number, but I’m going to, I’m going to venture a guess and say it’s got to be 80 to 85 percent of the capacity installed in Europe has an OEM service contract, maybe not a full wrap service contract to go with it, but a lot of it’s, OEM service.

So that is revenue generator for them. And then also, as you mentioned, offshore. Is also a possibility both on the turbine manufacturing and installation as well as services in offshore as well. Talking Vestas

Joel Saxum: in the same thing, downsizing, changing over a facility, what to do with the people.

They’re going to offer the people that lose jobs at theirs. They’re going from 600 people down to 300. They’re going to offer them positions in different places within Vestas greater. So that’s a I like that approach because you keep those employees and you keep some of the knowledge base there.

But on the other side of this, some of the repurposing of that facility that we were talking about with Vestas. is driven by the UK government because they’re going to start making more onshore blades out of what was at a facility for offshore blades. That helps for growth as well. So the Vestas you’re seeing, I don’t want it to be doom and gloom, right?

You’re talking about Siemens layoffs and Vestas cutting jobs and stuff. But some of the Vestas facilities will be repurposed as well.

Allen Hall: Dealing with damaged blades? Don’t let slower repairs keep your turbines down. Blade platforms get you back up and running fast. Blade Platform’s truck mounted platforms reach up to 100 meters, allowing for a quick setup, improved safety, and efficient repairs.

Book soon to secure your spot and experience a difference in blade access, speed, and efficiency. Visit BladePlatforms. com and get started today. That leads into another discussion about Siemens Gamesa, because there’s been photos taken and images shown on the interwebs of Siemens offshore wind turbine prototype headed to Denmark’s Österlund Test Center.

And the unannounced turbine, which is being dubbed the SG21 276DD, features 135 meter blades and a 276 meter rotor diameter, making it that would be the largest wind turbine ever built in Europe. And the specifications include Obviously, in the name, direct drive, DD, and a pitch power output of 21 to 23 megawatts, and a 132 kilovolt output voltage.

So that’s unique. Now, this has got to be a huge risk for Siemens Gamesa, just because of the size of the turbine, with all the things we just saw with Bing Yang, and those blades break that dramatic video, and all the problems that GE’s been, Vernova’s been having, offshore in the UK and off the coast of Massachusetts with blades of a pretty significant size.

Is the Siemens Gamesa 21 megawatt make a lot of sense here now that sort of Vestas and GE have backed off and said 15 is where they’re going to stop and GE Vernova basically saying they’re not going to build any offshore wind turbines for a while so they’re just competing with Vestas. Vestas will sit at 15, Siemens Gamesa will be at 21 with completely in their turbine.

How is Siemens Gamesa going to de risk this and get People to the table to order these turbines.

Phil Totaro: You’ve got a couple of things going on here. One is they wouldn’t be building a turbine unless there was demand. Because it’s, 250 million in non recurring engineering costs to design and build a brand new product, turbine.

So there’s that. At the end of the day, if Siemens doesn’t build. A 21 megawatt wind turbine, and the Chinese have them. Aren’t you going to expect that unless there’s some kind of regulation put in place by the EU that says thou shall not buy Chinese wind turbines that what’s their other option going to be?

Developers are going to, again, want the biggest thing they can get their hands on, so if there’s no Western OEM that’s offering them that option, it almost necessitates them, Taking the Chinese offering, product offering, seriously. We know that GE is stopping,

Joel Saxum: right? We know GE said no, we’re not doing the 18 megawatt machine, we’re not doing offshore, all sales stop, everything there.

Alan, do you believe that Siemens move here will force Vestas into

Allen Hall: making a bigger turbine? Vestas isn’t doing anything. I think they’re gonna hold pat. They’re gonna let Siemens Gamesa head down this 20 plus megawatt turbine route. My question is, if Siemens is gonna go after this, how long will they have to test it at the test site before they give it the green light and decide to get into some sort of production sense?

I think it’ll have to sit there at least a year. Maybe longer before they’ll build confidence in it because everything’s new, right? It’s such a risky thing. If you just watch the internet two weeks ago, it would scare the heck out of you. Anything that was above 15 megawatts.

Phil Totaro: Again, it comes back to.

to the developers wanting a turbine of that size. So how long it gets tested for is ultimately going to be down to if there’s a developer that says they need that thing in 36 months for a commercial project, to be, for it to be manufactured at scale for delivery in 36 months to a commercial project, that’s what they’re going to have to do.

Allen Hall: But that’s a huge risk, Phil. Who’s going to insure that thing? And who’s gonna, who’s gonna backstop it on the downside, on the financing? That’s a big question. It’s particularly for Europe.

Phil Totaro: This has also been the challenge, right? Because the insurance companies are already complaining about the payouts on megawatt turbines.

We haven’t even gotten to the 15 megawatt turbines even operating really yet. And when we get to 20 megawatt turbines, again, we’ve talked about this ad nauseum on the show, we don’t have the vessels to install or service these things. And we don’t have, all these other ancillary things that are going to come into play for deploying anything that large.

So it’s an absolutely enormous risk.

Allen Hall: Wouldn’t the plan be, though, if China’s developing these 20 plus megawatt turbines to use the ships from China and just send them over to France or wherever these things are going to go, Germany, and have them install the turbines

Phil Totaro: there? Works fine for any country that doesn’t have the equivalent of the Jones Act, doesn’t it?

Allen Hall: Yeah, Europe doesn’t have that restriction. So is that then the play that Siemens says, I’m watching all the ship turbines? Building happening in China. So I don’t have to do that infrastructure build here in the EU. I’m just going to tap into the China ship brigade. I’m going to put somebody on a calendar.

I don’t know who that developer is at the minute because there’s been no talk of that at all. I got a couple of guesses, but nothing that’s firm. It does seem like a huge risk, though, that I don’t, it’s not a typical European thing to do. Usually in these new developments, they’re gonna sit there for a year or two and make sure that everything is working just fine and not trying to have the problem that GE is having because Siemens is not in any financial state to take that huge risk at the minute I wouldn’t think.

Joel Saxum: We’ve seen Allen, you and I have talked to people, oh big wind farms, just onshore ones, even. These turbines are getting bought, developed, and everything trucked to site right now and they still don’t have type certificates, right? So we, there’s still, so in my mind, I think if I’m, if I am a certification body or if I’m anybody involved in certifying that turbine to go into a wind farm, whether it’s the person on the hook for insurance, the person on the hook for finance, I’m thinking I’m staring at the third, independent third party that’s supposed to validate this thing.

And if I’m in that person’s shoes, I’m thinking, man, we are need to go through this with a fine tooth comb because the whole ding world in offshore wind is the whole supply chain’s watching. So let’s not get this one

Phil Totaro: wrong. Joel, an independent third party validated LM Wind Power’s blade manufacturing facility in Gaspé, didn’t they?

So I don’t think that certification matters that much.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. I want to think with what has happened lately. In, in the headline news headlines may churn up or spur the, churn the waters up a little bit more, or get someone to stand up and say, Hey, we’ve got to make sure the thing is.

Phil Totaro: But then you’re talking about, now insurance companies are recognizing that maybe the certification body’s not doing their job and they’re going to start raising premiums because there’s more risk exposure for them, which again as we’ve talked about with high insurance rates, high, supply chain limitations and high prices for components, you’re now adding, You know, extra insurance premiums on top of all that, eventually, at some point, that’s got to not make commercial sense to do 21 megawatt wind turbines.

So I, there’s got to be a tipping point here that we haven’t reached yet, but we got to be approaching it.

Joel Saxum: I’m with you, Phil. And I think that at an early stage if deal with the insurance industry quite a bit, there is not a, there is not a. A lot of dedicated engineers there, right?

You’d think at an early stage, you need to get finance and engineering representative for a finance, which would have more likely be a consultant engineering representative for whoever’s going to insure it, or the group that’s going to insure it and more likely a consultant, you would think that you’d want to grab those people and get them involved as early as possible.

And we know that. Unlike industry norms where manufacturers announce turbines at the design stage, Siemens Gamesa has kept this thing very secretive. So that means that more than likely that’s not happening right now.

Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable.

StrikeTape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today.

Allen Hall: A growing trend in workplace communication is emerging as professionals adopt a more direct and assertive out of office message.

If you’ve seen a lot of the out of office messages around the holidays now they range from, I will be out until January 3rd kind of message, or they’re, I’m going to my ski chalet and I will be back in February. Two, I will be out, however, if you need something, here’s the person to contact. So there’s a wide range of them, and some of them are, don’t try emailing me, don’t try calling me, my cell phone is off, you have no contact with anybody, don’t even try it.

Messages, which, guys, I’m not sure that makes any sense at all, but that seems to be where we’re at right now, and it’s getting a lot of pushback.

Joel Saxum: I think it’s like anything else where the pendulum swings, right? In the United States, we’ve been so Available and open to, making business work and those kind of things forever.

That’s part of our culture here. It’s not more like the European culture. They’re like, I’m on vacation, don’t talk to me. We don’t have that. We’re like, you know what? We’ll make it happen. Just shoot me a note. I think the, I didn’t, I never put an out of office reply in an email until I worked for a Danish company.

Because I was just like, I’m actually not gone. If I’m available, I will try to help. So I think that I just think, while we should respect people’s, time off, from a business standpoint, you’ve got, you can’t, don’t be rude, put it in the hey, I, I’m gonna be gone, if you need to talk contracts, call Phil, if you need to talk lightning, call Alan and give the, whoever’s contacting you some kind of call to action that they can actually make

Allen Hall: Have you seen more aggression in those over the years?

Because when it first started with email years ago, when you could have an automated message go out, it was very direct. And a lot of times the corporate overlords would tell you what you could write on those messages. And it was, it came down to, I will be out of the office from here to here. This is who to reach in my absence.

I’ll see you when I get back kind of message. But really now it could be anything. A lot of them are really snarky. Have you noticed that for whatever reason they get a little bit aggressive and I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I’m not sure your management would approve of that message, but I do see them quite often.

We deal with companies all over the world, obviously. So we see a little bit of everything.

Joel Saxum: I think it’s corporate communications, right? It’s the same thing as someone handing you like when you hire on at a company and they’re like, here’s your email signature. Some companies will give you, here’s what your out of office replies are, this is the template, use this.

And I think that’s smart, because then you can drive it from the proper perspective. Especially people that are more external facing than internal.

Phil Totaro: And some of us don’t I don’t think I’ve ever used ever in 20 plus years of working and out of office thing, not just because I’m some American workaholic, but, it also comes back to what Joel was talking about.

Like work life balance means that you’re available when the company needs you to be, but you can also go manage your time however you want. If you’re a salaried employee, you’re not supposed to be chained to a desk nine to five. And especially in today’s Although everybody’s trying to force everybody to come back to an office now.

But after COVID with the hybrid work or remote work possibilities, I don’t, people are paid to get a job done, not drive a desk for 40 hours a week. So let them get the job done for you. If they’re not, they’re out the door. Yeah, don’t create a hostile environment with potential customers by putting up a message that.

Makes it sound like you’re not open for business.

Allen Hall: And when you do come back, make sure you turn that system off. I’ve been around a lot of email where I know the person is back, but they’re still getting the auto reply back. Hey, you know that auto reply is still on? Oh my gosh, I’ve completely forgot.

That explains a lot. That one’s always a funny one. Same thing with the phones, right? Sometimes they forward their phone number to the The person at the next desk over, and they wonder why they don’t get any phone messages while the person down the row is swamped with work. Yeah, when you come back, you may have to make sure you get back into the system and get rowing again with the rest of the team.

Joel Saxum: This week’s Wind Farm of the Week is Timber Mill Wind over in Chowan County, North Carolina. And this is a, if you’re familiar with North Carolina, this is a rural community. A lot of farming and a lot of of course, Timber Harvesting, hence the name Timber Mill. But the project will have a capacity of up to 189 megawatts producing enough power to juice up 47, 000 homes per year.

It’s gonna have about 45 turbines, spaced a quarter to a half mile apart. And it’s planned to be located on managed timberland and open farmland. So the idea behind it was, we’d love to put some wind in here, we’d love to get some renewable energy and some jobs. And a bit of an economic boom to this rural area, but we do not want to affect how the area actually produces and goes about its daily lives.

So they’ve got this thing set up, so it’s not affecting farmland very much. And it’s not affecting timber harvesting, which is a big revenue generator there. So the in Chowin County, I want to focus on that a little bit. It’s a, it’s a good wind resource there. There’s existing onsite transmission lines.

And road infrastructure and they avoided a bunch of sensitive military and environmental areas when they built this thing. So North Carolina, not usually what you think of when you hear of new big wind farms, but the timber mill wind project is just that. So you are our wind farm of the week.

Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. And thanks for listening. And please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribing the show notes below to Uptime Tech News or Substack Newsletter. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Connecticut and Massachusetts have backed out of their portions of the Vineyard Wind 2 offshore project, Avaada Group is investing $12B in renewables for Rajasthan by 2030, and Enersense is selling its onshore wind and solar project development business to Fortum.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news, lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com.

Allen Hall: There’s been a significant setback for offshore wind development from Vineyard Offshore as they announced the withdrawal of its 800 megawatt portion of the Vineyard Wind 2 project from Massachusetts contract negotiations and that decision came after Connecticut opted not to purchase its planned 400 megawatt share of the project.

This development impacts Massachusetts ambitious offshore wind goals, where despite earlier procurement of 3200 megawatts of capacity, only Vineyard Wind 1 remains active in the state’s pipeline. And Phil, this is due to the combination of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island working together to draw from some of these offshore projects.

But now, Connecticut is full stop, not going to be involved in offshore wind, they said, for at least a couple of years.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, not that Connecticut has always been Wind Energy’s biggest well, biggest fan, pardon the pun. Connecticut has, is basically saying that they’re pulling out of this procurement because offshore wind is just too expensive, and that’s entirely true. . Given what the industry has to price the PPA at to be able to pay for the project, given the the cost of money and the cost of equipment these days.

So I can see why they did it, but it does kind of screw Rhode Island and Massachusetts a little bit because, they were counting on that offtake. So the question then becomes, does Massachusetts unilaterally go and sign an agreement 2 at some point?

Is that even something that’s going to be able to move forward, before January 20th, where presumably we’re not going to get, four years worth of BOEM approvals on offshore wind farms? So there’s a lot of uncertainty and unfortunately chaos caused by, Connecticut’s decision here and, and certainly unfortunate for, for vineyard offshore wind.

Joel Saxum: I think one thing to think about here is that like you said, Phil, that there’s a looming deadline that might close the door on some of these wind things or not, not slam the door, but close it a little bit more this offshore wind program that we have going on the East Coast for no matter what state you’re in.

And, and the way I’m looking at some of this is, yes, the PPAs are expensive. I see that. Tech, the technology is expensive. I see that the financing is, has been a bit difficult. It should be hopefully getting easier to see that. However, If your goal is to have renewable energies and you’re in the northeast part of the United States, you don’t have a whole lot of options.

Your options basically are offshore wind and something else that someone dreams up for something because that’s it. So if you have renewable energy goals and you’re those states, rather than canceling things or doing things of this sort, I would just love to see more people at the at the table having transparent conversations.

Allen Hall: India’s renewable energy sector is receiving a massive boost as Avaada Group commits to invest 12 billion U. S. dollars in Rajasthan by 2030. The ambitious plan aims to transform the northwestern state into a global renewable energy center. Energy powerhouse. Now the investment will fund several initiatives including a 1.

2 gigawatt pump storage project, green hydrogen and ammonia facilities and utility scale solar and wind power sites across four cities. Now Phil, the development of renewable energy in India is growing at a massive pace but also some old technology, coal factories, gas burning technology still exists there.

Where is the future for India?

Phil Totaro: They’re actually making a fairly rapid transition to wind and solar that has been accelerating over the past few years and Avada group has a plan to get 30 gigawatts by 2030 just by themselves as a company. That’s a, a lot of like countries or maybe states might have that kind of a target elsewhere in the world, but this is just one company saying, we’re gonna get to 30 gigawatts by 2030 and, and in this case spend, 12 billion plus , to be able to get there, obviously the 12 billion isn’t gonna pay for the whole thing, just to be clear.

It’s, it’s one tranche of money that they’re setting aside for for this, but they already have a portfolio of something around four gigawatts worth of wind and solar and a little, a tiny bit of battery storage. But it’s, it’s going to be a tremendous amount of growth in India that has been talked about for more than a decade and is finally, finally coming to fruition with investments like this.

Joel Saxum: Allen and I kind of live this story every day. We’re talking with a lot of wind operators in India, and you just see growth, growth, growth, new turbines, new turbines, new turbines left and right. To add to that, one of the lar or the largest renewable energy park in the world is going to be in the north of India.

West corner of India as well. It’s called the Kavda Renewable Energy Park. And that thing’s going to be 30 gigawatts just in itself. Now that’s solar and wind combined of course. But that’s, that’s planned. So the plans are there. The, the money’s flowing. We’re seeing development. I think it’s fantastic for India to fast forward their economy that way as well.

So kudos to them.

Allen Hall: Finnish energy services provider Enersense International is selling its onshore wind and solar project development business to Fortum in a strategic shift. The deal valued at 9. 5 million euros with the potential future earn out up to 74 million euros includes a 2. 6 gigawatt onshore wind generator.

Development pipeline. Now this transaction aligned with Intersense’s June decision to abandon its zero emission energy producer ambitions. Phil, what’s behind the Intersense decision to get out of clean energy?

Phil Totaro: Well, they’re not necessarily getting out of clean energy. They’re getting out of the clean energy development project development process. And considering the fact that they’re mostly a financial investment vehicle as, as a company that makes sense. It’s however, a bit confusing. I mean, I can see why they would partner with Fortum.

It’s also a bit curious because Fortum makes somewhat dubious decisions as far as, who they partner with and their investments and whatnot. And yet it Intersense to be able to divest, the, the early stage, particularly project development and portfolio and pipeline and capabilities since it’s not their core competency.

It does give them the opportunity to buy back into projects that, Fortum would build. And then if they want to be the owner and, and hire someone on to be the operator, then they can they can continue to do that. But I think again, this is about alignment with their core competency. I think that’s the general sense I get from this, this deal.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I agree with Phil. I think it’s just smart business, right? If you’re good at one thing, stay being good at it. Stay being that financial advisor or that financial services vehicle to get things going. We see a lot of divestment in pipelines and a lot of divestment in active assets. Doing them at certain stages just makes sense financially.

So, doing this, Enersense gets back to their core competencies, like Phil said, and Fortum gets to, further their goals. One of their goals is to develop at least 800 megawatts of shovel ready onshore wind and solar projects by the end of 2026. And with this deal closing in the first quarter of 2025, it’ll help them out.

This week on Power-Up, Goldwind’s coil pipe system for cooling towers, an idea from Enercon for a predictive model of power output under certain weather conditions, and an interesting alarm clock patent from the 1800s.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

Our first idea is from Goldwind. It is a concept where they have a specialized coil pipe system for liquid cooling in wind turbines, mostly offshore it appears. It is designed to handle the rotation between the nacelle and the tower. So you can think about all this coiled tube in the tower itself and the nacelle is spinning around.

So it Keeps everything organized, so it doesn’t twist, bend, and kink where the fluid flow would stop. Phil, this one’s a little interesting to me because I haven’t seen a lot of cooling happening in towers, but obviously GoldWind wants to proceed with this idea to mostly for their offshore turbines, it looks like.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is designed for larger machines where they’re gonna leverage either using the tower as a heatsink or some other downed tower mechanism where they can dump waste heat and theoretically minimize the size of the radiator that they have on the nacelle. And keep in mind that GoldWind, because they’re using a permanent magnet generator, they have different requirements up tower for for the, the magnet cooling and stator cooling.

So what’s kind of fascinating about this to me is that, you’ve got certainly for, for transmitting, electrical. Current and things like that. You have things like slip rings. You even have kind of hydraulic slip rings when you want to be able to move, from a, from a rotating frame of reference to a fixed frame of reference, you, you can use kind of a, a, an equivalent of a hydraulic slip ring to, to pass fluid that way.

This is literally like a twist loop the same way that we have kind of an electrical cable twist loop in the upper part of a, the tower and nacelle but it’s specifically designed for liquid coolant. And so, kudos to them for kind of creativity and ingenuity. Whether or not this is going to be more efficient than a nacelle mounted radiator, I’m not.

So it’d be interesting to see some feedback or some data on that, but it’s it’s definitely a unique and kind of fascinating way of developing a liquid based cooling system and implementing it in a way that’s going to help them. Address other considerations, design considerations, like wanting to minimize the the volume and the, the size, and frankly, the weight of an uptower radiator or a cell mounted radiator.

Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Waban Properties, and it is a concept for using weather data, in particular, more widespread weather data. coupled with performance of a wind turbine over time to create a predicted model for the power output under certain weather conditions. And this idea seems to be driven, Phil, from grid restoration or black start scenarios where they need to turn The grid on restarting the grid and they need to know what power is going to be delivered with some relative accuracy That’s hard to do for wind turbines unless you have a predictive method, which is what wobbin is talking about

Philip Totaro: Yeah, so just to just to clarify for everybody to woven properties is like an ip holding subsidiary of intercom in germany, so this is the the vehicle that they use to kind of capture and and monetize their intellectual property Now, the, as for the idea itself, what’s a bit interesting and unique about this is the fact that they are taking historical turbine data and park data, which that’s nothing new to be able to develop some kind of forward looking forecast.

Similarly, you can look at, actual global or even local data. weather forecasting data and use that to help develop a power forecast that there’s plenty of people out there doing that sort of work in, in the industry. We know a few of them on, on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

So, the, what’s unique and interesting though about the, this Enercon invention is the fact that they’re combining this both of these kind of methods for developing a A power forecast that allows you to get a narrower confidence interval by leveraging both the historical data combined with the the weather forecasting data from both individual turbines and the global forecast.

Or regionally focused data that kind of surrounds the the entire wind park that they have. So, anything that they can do to try and improve that confidence interval is a good thing. As, as many people who work in power forecasting know, this is a very clever way of approaching. This kind of a technical challenge where you want to be able to improve the, the confidence interval on your weather forecast and your power forecast.

Allen Hall: Our fun patent of the week comes from Samuel Applegate. And this is a, a, a kind of a unique alarm clock idea. Now you may have seen something similar more recently called the Slappy Clock. Which is like this rotating hand that slaps your face when you’re supposed to wake up when your alarm bell goes off and you don’t like waking up.

This is a much calmer system than the, than the slapping hand bit. It’s like a grid of that’s suspended above the sleeper and there’s a bunch of strings hanging down in a grid pattern. At the end of these strings is, are corks. And when you’re allowed to sleep, this cork system lifts off and doesn’t bother you.

As soon as the alarm bell goes off, it sort of lowers down. So it’s kind of like you’re surrounded by a bunch of corks and strings, like you’re being caught in a cobweb. So it’s, it’s trying to wake you up slowly, not to really alarm you up. However, I wonder if this idea was really ever effective because hard sleepers can sleep through anything.

This device seems like it’s not going to be enough to wake up the difficult sleeper.

Philip Totaro: And I’ll tell you what, Alan, this invention was actually conceived of and the patent was granted back in 1882. So, the fact that something that was that kind of unique and original more than a hundred years ago could influence, some of the, some of the IP and the technology of, of today and, and the slappy, which I do not use, by the way.

I, I actually normally wake up with the sun in the morning. It’s, much more pleasant way to do things. But, for those people that might be heavier sleepers, I don’t know, this could work, the slappy could work. But it depends, I guess it depends on how heavy a sleeper you are.

Allen Hall: You’re never gonna beat that rooster in your window. That’s the best.

In this episode, we explore Meta’s shift to natural gas for AI data centers, analyze a major Mingyang offshore turbine blade failure, and discuss Shell’s head of renewables moving to Ørsted’. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug!

Experience Active Training Team’s Thrive USA event in Houston January 24th! Email [email protected] to register!

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: If you want to know why turbine blades are disappearing from social media and why Shell’s Renewables Chief is jumping to worsted and why META is betting big on natural gas, stick around. Plus, we’ve got a special announcement, a chance to win an exclusive Uptime Podcast mug that even I don’t have yet.

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

Allen Hall: We’ve got something new for uptime listeners.

We’re running a quick listener survey to learn more about what you love about the show and how we can make it even better. And there is an exciting part to this. Everyone who completes and leaves an email address will be entered to win an exclusive Uptime podcast mug. Now, I do not have one of these podcast mugs, so whoever wins this, hopefully I get a second hand one or something.

Somebody can throw me a mug. But the survey will take about five minutes of your time, and your feedback is really needed to help shape the future episodes of the show. And whether you’re a long time listener or have just joined us recently, we’d We want to hear from you. So I need you to go to uptimewindenergy.

com or just check the show notes to participate in the survey. So we’d appreciate if you would do that. And we have a couple other things happening. One of which is Wind Energy O& M Australia film where everybody’s going to be on February 11th and 12th in Melbourne. And we have a number of sponsors that we can announce this week.

Joel Saxum: So sponsorships and the people joining us at the show will be from Tilt Renewables, Worley, Aerones and RigCom. We’ve got a bunch of other people signed up too. To date, we’ve got quite a few operators, some ISPs, some cool technology companies, and other people’s that are going to be in attendance along with some speakers.

And we’re going to start releasing. Some agenda points and some of the speakers and panelists and roundtables. So the goal of, one of the goals of the conference is to drive engagement with the crowd because we want everybody to leave there with insights that they can take back and actually do something to their wind farms.

We want to help. We want to help make it more profitable. We want to help make operational decisions and drive some success at the field level. So that’s the goal of the show. And we hope you’ll join us.

Allen Hall: Yeah. The conference is going to tackle crucial topics that directly impact operations, leading edge erosion, lightening protection, CMS, insurance, life extension strategy.

So this is your chance to connect with industry leaders and gain. Some practical experience and insights that you can implement immediately. So you need to secure your spot by visiting windaustralia. com. And down in Houston, Joel, we have Active Training Team. They’re going to be giving a demonstration of their Thrive USA product, which is a safety training seminar, a live interactive.

It’s the most impactful training seminar for safety I have ever been at. You want to Talk about what is all involved in the Thrive USA, Joel.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s a step change in training. It’s experiential. I know that’s a weird word, but Alan and I and Claire, our producer, went through this training in Boston a few months ago.

And we’re sitting in the crowd and we’re at tables with people from all kinds of different companies and levels of the company so that everybody’s intermixed. And then all of a sudden, They’re going through a little bit of a presentation and a few actors, real actors, like Screen Actors Guild, card carrying people come through the door and they’re fighting and yelling at each other and going through the scenario.

And then all stop. There’s someone that maintains the, that would be flow of the event. And they say, okay, what do you think about this? And you’re getting engaged and you’re thinking. And just talking about this right now, it reminded me of what happened while we were there. And I have goosebumps on my arms that are popping up because they’re it’s.

It hit me when we were there internally. I’ve never been through a training where I left in thinking like, wow, that was impactful. I am actually thinking about this. I’d like to action some of these things in my day to day life. We did breakout sessions. We talked through things. It was fantastic. So if you have the opportunity we would love to see you in Houston.

It’s going to be January 24th. Down by the medical center. And if you want some details on it, of course, you can get a hold of us at the show any either Alan or I can point you in the right spot. [email protected] or feel free to reach out to Florence at the active training team. She’s guiding the whole process, so [email protected] can be your contact there, and we hope to see you in January there in Houston.

Allen Hall: Yeah, we’ll see you in Houston and the website for Active Training Team in the U. S. is ActiveTrainingTeam. us, so check that out.

Unlock your wind farm’s best performance at Wind Energy O& M Australia, February 11th to 12th in sunny Melbourne. Join industry leaders as they share practical solutions for maintenance, OEM relations, and asset management.

Discover strategies to cut costs. Keep your assets running smoothly and drive long term success in today’s competitive market. Register today and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com.

Allen Hall: In the latest PES Wind Magazine, it’s Q4 of 2024. You can go online and read it yourself at peswind. com. Interesting article from DSHIP carriers, and DSHIP has designed a new carrier of blades. And it’s really interesting because it’s a new approach on how to move blades around offshore. And Joel, being our offshore expert, you want to explain these fun things about the D500 ship?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that what we need to understand first is that we’ve been doing offshore wind for a long time. And we’re ready for a step change. We’re ready to see things turn over into new innovative techniques that are going to make things better. So when you talk shipping with anything, it’s always about efficiency, fuel burn, how can we get things on offshore better and The the DSHP team has taken all of this into consideration and making a purpose built vessel just for transport, transporting wind turbine parts.

And when you say that offshore, usually that doesn’t happen. A vessel is usually multi purpose because you want to make sure that you have a contract where someone can rent it out and have it on the lease for a long time and use it for multiple kinds of different things and transporting this or transporting that.

But what they’ve done here is made a vessel that’s super efficient, that’s specifically designed and built for optimum use for transporting wind turbine parts. So the hull has been optimized. The way you load things has been optimized. The way you unload things has been optimized even all the way down to how the crew gets around the vessel and what their walk times are in between areas of the vessel that they need to do their jobs.

That’s crazy impressive. The other things that they’ve done is make sure that this thing is future proofed. And future proof means the next generation of fuels, whether we get to the point where we’re using ammonia or hydrogen or some other kind of power the propulsion units in this vessel can be swapped over to what that next generation looks like.

The D Ship team in their new D 500 vessels, this is what they’re calling this, they have taken some really innovative steps to making offshore wind in their part of the supply chain, More efficient and more cost effective.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a really interesting ship design. It’s going to be built in China. But if you want to read more about this ship and all the things that DShip is up to, go to PESWind.

com, download your issue, and read it for yourself. Good stuff in there. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future.

Whether you’re an industry

veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind. com today.

Allen Hall: In a significant shift in data center power strategies, Major technology companies, energy companies are turning to, of all things, natural gas to bridge the power for these growing, power hungry artificial intelligence infrastructures, these data centers.

And Meta is probably the key one at the minute. And they are planning a site in Louisiana that is going to be using natural gas as being provided through Intergy. And they need about two and a half years. gigawatts of electricity over a 15 year period. And Entergy is going to be fast tracked in the construction of three facilities to support this 10 billion data center project.

Now, Joel, first off, and Rosemary, why are we building data centers in Louisiana? What’s driving that? And why natural gas instead of a renewable?

Joel Saxum: It’s historically easy to get large capital projects done in that state because of the way the governments are set up and the way the parishes control things.

It’s pretty easy to get the wheels greased and get a large capital project moving. So that’s one thing in Louisiana. Other thing in Louisiana is energy is fairly cheap. The weather’s decent, like you don’t have to fight a lot of weird things. But if I was to say why gas, I think that’s a different Conversation.

For one, in Louisiana, renewable energy generation is not super prevalent, right? They don’t have wind farms. Solar farms can be built there. Yes. However, in a data center that is going to be a need a 1. 5 gigawatt facility. That means it’s so big. It’s a 10 billion project. That means it’s so big that you can’t afford to have intermittent power.

And, as we are on the show here, we love renewables and we want wind and solar and battery storage and all these great things to happen. At some levels, natural gas, in this case, just makes more sense. Thanks. Because you need that continuous power, you’re going to have continuous power demand.

This thing is going to be built behind the grid. I imagine they’ll still connect it to the grid so they can do some power triaging if they need to. But it will be built, for the most part, behind the grid. So you don’t have as much government oversight, you don’t have as much looking in on it. And in that level, if you just want to have this one data center sitting there by itself, chugging and doing its thing, a 100 percent like kind of steady load power supply is more effective than it is to have inter the intermittency of renewables.

I don’t know. Rosemary, what’s your opinion on that?

Rosemary Barnes: I’ve got a list actually that I’m keeping track of planning a video on AI, maybe a couple, but I’m keeping track of all the announcements about data center and big tech companies and their power purchase agreements or investments that they’re making in energy.

And everything is on there. There’s nuclear, there’s geothermal, a big announcement from Google just a couple of weeks ago about wind and solar being their preference for future plans. Data centers, they’re in a huge period of growth. It’s not necessarily really certain how much energy they’re going to need, but they know that they don’t want to be short because, if you miss out or you don’t have enough capacity, that’s a big loss for them.

Whereas if you. Sign a, or, start looking into a project now, not even signing anything, then it’s not actually that much lost if you realize that you don’t need it. So I think that you can’t use like the number of announcements gives us this idea that this is like the biggest user of energy in the world.

And it is so far from that. We’re not going to see this amount of activity in the next few years. I’m sure it will be a lot. Yeah, but that’s my thought. And I just think it’s, they want energy of any kind, pretty much, preferably clean. And if it can’t be clean, then, like they, they need it, whatever they can get.

Allen Hall: Meta is trying to do a carbon offset while meanwhile ExxonMobil, which is diving into this power generation business is specifically going to use natural gas, Plants with carbon capture to try to remove 90 percent of the emissions. Meta’s not doing that. Meta’s saying, we’ll put in some more solar and wind farms to offset what we’re doing in Louisiana.

Why is the big Oil and gas company doing carbon capture and Meta is not.

Joel Saxum: ExxonMobil knows how to do it too, right? Carbon capture is very much about understanding, underspeak, understanding subsurface geophysics and understanding where you can store this stuff and how you can do it, how you drill for this, how you build a facility that can inject deep underground.

ExxonMobil knows how to do that in spades as well, right? The other side of the thing where ExxonMobil is their headquarters in Houston and around Houston. This is a weird geophysical thing, but you have one of the highest concentrations of salt domes. In the world, in a lot along the Gulf coast and along the Louisiana deltas and stuff.

That’s why there’s a lot of oil and gas in there. One of the reasons, but those are picture perfect for carbon sequestration to capture. And there’s a lot of other things down there, other kinds of formations, subsurface that make Louisiana and Texas prime for all of this carbon sequestration work.

And at the end of the day, ExxonMobil knows how to do it. Meta doesn’t have a clue unless they grab some kind of subcontractor.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, but they would, they would do that anyway, because it’s not their core competency. So they would necessarily partner with somebody and be the capital provider to it, but they could do that with anybody.

I will go back to, there is more than a billion dollars. That the U. S. Department of Energy has allocated towards, carbon capture and sequestration projects just this year alone. As, as far as grant money and other incentives for companies to, to do that sort of thing. If the government’s throwing free money at them to just even try out that technology, they’re gonna do it.

I think at the end of

Joel Saxum: the day, you have to look at what the, what it looks like for ESG stamps, ESG plans, marketing, and PR from some of these companies as well. Nobody cares about ESG anymore. But you still have, they still, there’s still written items on quarterly statements that say this and that, and we’re going to do this.

And we’re going to do that. So maybe sometime along the line, Meta has said, we’re going to do more renewable generation. Whereas Exxon Mobil being an oil and gas company says, we’re going to do it this way.

Allen Hall: Let’s stick in oil and gas for a minute. We’ll Shell’s head of renewables for America, Amanda Dash, will be taking the helm of Orsted’s U.

S. operations starting mid January. That’s a big move. And this transition happens at a pivotal moment for both companies because Shell is trying to get out of renewables and Orsted is trying to survive in it. But picking Amanda Dash for that C suite position is interesting because you’ve got someone who knows a lot about oil and gas and a lot about offshore.

And then renewable. So

Phil Totaro: those people tend to be hard to find, Phil. And somebody who’s got potentially better connections with people in government. Which I think was, yeah, potentially one of Orsted’s challenges coming over here and trying to develop projects in New York, New Jersey offshore. While they still have an onshore wind and solar portfolio as well, it’s relatively small compared to what they’re doing with they’re offshore pipelines, so that’s gonna dominate and somebody with background from Shell will hopefully help them take another step.

At one point,

Allen Hall: Orsted had a larger market cap than Shell, which is now hard to believe. For five minutes. For a little while, yeah, they did, but that actually happened. The world flipped over, right? The polls reversed something. But the, now you’re taking, but you’re, now you’re taking that sort of key person out of Shell.

and plug them in into Orsted. Orsted has a lot of projects going on in the U. S. right now. Obviously there’s a little bit on the offshore, which are problematic, but they also have a ton of onshore projects going on that they’re trying to navigate, which I, which may be their biggest revenue source.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I know Orsted’s got quite a few onshore wind farms and they’re building some new ones as we speak, but one of the other things I want to touch on was the knowledge that may come with. Ms. Dash coming from Shell. Shell did a lot of exploration in the Gulf as far as offshore wind, and they’ve put a lot of money into R& D and some kind of technology development and ideas and information gathering in the background.

She’s coming over there also with some probably new information for the Orsted management team.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I totally agree upon that. It’s a new perspective for sure. It’s a very American perspective in an oil and gas perspective. And now’s the time, right? This is going to be fascinating.

The board meetings will be interesting, I think, because you really have a defined oil and gas person with a lot of knowledge plugged into this sort of Danish infrastructure.

Joel Saxum: I did say something that may be controversial, but this is from someone coming from an oil and gas background. Yeah, But no matter where it is in the world, oil and gas people tend to know how to get stuff done.

Whether that’s through relationships, or through capital engagement, or whatever. You can see that same story playing out over and over and over. No matter where you are in the world. I think that grabbing someone that’s been a part of one of those organizations is a good move.

Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today.

Allen Hall: If you’ve watched social media for that brief moment in time, you saw a Mingyang wind turbine. The Mingyang SE 18. X 20 megawatt turbine have a blade failure. Actually had two blade failures, according to reports. Now this is a big deal cause it has multiple levels to it.

First was the video that showed these blades toppling down and landing on the ground. And then they got quiet for about 24 hours and I couldn’t find any of those videos anymore or photos. It seemed to be a scrub from the internet. But then Ming Yang came back on LinkedIn social media and said that there was an incident of extreme abnormal conditions.

And while the turban had previously survived September’s super typhoon Yagi without issues something happened where it overloaded the blade structure. Now Rosemary is first to point out on LinkedIn to say how could it have been over the threshold of its strength capabilities? How did that happen?

Why didn’t you know that? Why wasn’t it tested? What really happened? I think that’s the question everybody has, is what really happened with that? Turban, was it truly some sort of unique air loading on it? Was it stopped? Was it rotor locked? They had a wind gust? What brought this set of blades down?

Rosemary, do you have any guess on that? Because the information we get out of China is really limited right now.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s really interesting as well. I’m trying to pull up the post cause there’s some really interesting comments in there from people mostly with Western sounding names, but maybe working for some sort of Chinese company or yeah, something their work.

It’s obviously related to China somehow. So the Ming Yang post, I don’t have it with me now. And I will say, I haven’t found any posts that have been deleted or anything. I can still find plenty of examples of the images up there. So

Phil Totaro: On LinkedIn, but not on the web, greater. The source, some of the Chinese sources were removed, but we cataloged it.

So we, we still have it.

Rosemary Barnes: But yeah, the Ming Yang Post was saying, this is a prototype and it faced abnormal conditions, extreme abnormal conditions, I think it said. And so my response was did you make a mistake with your site your site assessment that you were surprised by the conditions?

Because obviously, wind turbines have to exist in the real world, and they also have to exist in places where you didn’t necessarily have the greatest data. There are ways of, extrapolating from, maybe one year’s worth of met data to get like a representative example of what it should experience in its lifetime.

And Ming Yang didn’t reply to me, but lots of other people did telling me that yeah, that the, cause I said, yeah, did you overestimate underestimate the loads that were the blade was going to see? And people said, no, they didn’t say that the loads were exceeded. They said that the conditions were abnormal.

And I thought obviously if you’ve got a mechanical failure, then At some point, there’s been a load that has exceeded a strength. That’s why things break, but I do take the point that it could have been that, like the control system was wrong or responded to August incorrectly or something, but it’s still a mistake.

A lot of people who I don’t think understand how Technology development process works and especially not the wind industry, but people saying, this is a prototype. That’s what’s supposed to happen to prototypes. And I say, absolutely not. You do obviously it’s a prototype because you haven’t ironed out absolutely every single kink in it.

But, like for a major failure, like the blade, you could see in the video, the blade just snapped. It snapped I don’t know, quite close to the root, not at the root, but quite close to the root. And it just broke off and fell away. That is something that for sure should have been ironed out well before the point that turbine.

It’s incredibly dangerous.

Phil Totaro: How dangerous is it though to end up Testing blades to where you have two on a single turban, and they have two turbans there, by the way, so they are still learning something, but they’ve failed two blades on a single turban that could have struck the tower. You can cause the whole thing to come down.

So that’s an incredibly dangerous way to,

Rosemary Barnes: For sure, the tower is damaged now. There’s no way that the rest of it, you’re not just going to wipe two new blades up there and carry on your merry way. And in fact, if the other one is still turning, I don’t think that’s very smart unless they have done a much better root cause analysis than what they have publicized.

And this is not uniquely Chinese, that no one ever tells you the real progress of their root cause analysis until they have really got it dialed in. They know exactly what caused it and they have actions in place to fix it. But that’s the time that Companies tend to want to start talking about it.

Joel Saxum: I think at the end of the day, we’ve seen disinformation come from that end of the world. They didn’t engineer this thing correctly and it failed. They made a mistake. Move on. That’s what that’s the reality. In my opinion, it’s a huge blade. It’s like a, how long is this blade? 143 meter blade.

That’s ridiculous. That 143 meters. That’s a football field and a half or a pitch and a half. Like at some point in time, we’re going to get to the point where materials science is outliving what the reality of what we’re trying to build. And that’s what happened here. In my opinion, this thing failed. And now they’re trying to cover up that it failed.

Dealing with damaged blades. Don’t let slow repairs keep your turbines down. Blade Platforms get you back up and running fast. Blade Platforms truck mounted platforms reach up to 100 meters, allowing for quick setup, improved safety, and efficient repairs. Book soon to secure your spot and experience a difference in blade access, speed, and efficiency.

Visit bladeplatforms. com and get started today.

Allen Hall: Monster. com has published a comprehensive guide on office holiday party etiquette. Offering practical advice for navigating these professional social events. Now, they recommend, and you can chime in here, everybody, arriving 15 to 30 minutes after the party starts, being sociably late, and plan to stay for at least an hour, and follow the dress code.

This is the one that I think gets everybody in at least situations hyped around. Whether it’s ugly sweaters or formal business attire. Try to stick to that general area and use the opportunity to network with colleagues and other people that you don’t necessarily get to see all year. This is just a fun thing to do, and avoid the politics, religion, and workplace complaints.

Now, workplace complaints always seem to pop up. No matter where you are, but the one thing I think has changed over time, and hopefully it continues on this pathway, is the PDAs, the sexist drinking, and the inappropriate dancing. Not that long ago, everybody wow yeah, some really awkward situations would pop up at holiday parties that you wouldn’t see the rest of the year.

And it had consequences. Any recommendations as you go to holiday parties from the group here?

Joel Saxum: I think there’s an important one here that says, get permission before posting any photos or videos on social media. I would switch that one to just don’t. Just don’t do it. The other thing I want to say is because I’ve been I’ve worked for a couple international companies, as everybody on this panel has, The, how things are handled in different countries and different places are very different.

This is a monster. com list of probably what you should do in the United States. A Danish Christmas party is much different than a United States Christmas party. So I think that understanding where you are and the people around you being a little bit of aware and having some introspect on the situation is very important.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, you didn’t go to any LM holiday parties?

Rosemary Barnes: I did. I miss them so much. Danish Christmas party is the best. It’s nearly the best thing about living in Denmark. It might be the best thing. They’re so good.

Joel Saxum: You have to sign an NDA when you walk in. Yeah. They take your phone away from you?

Rosemary Barnes: They should, they didn’t, but they should.

And actually, when you moved to Denmark or at least back when I did, they had a program where they give you language classes and also it’s a bit of a cultural education. And one of the things I remember learning at that class was that be careful of the office Christmas party. There’s usually a peak in divorces shortly after.

It’s because of people cheating on their spouses with their colleagues. I never saw that, so I think that might be an urban myth, but yeah, they do get a bit wild.

Phil Totaro: Alternatively, you, since most people, start a new job in January, you can do whatever you want at the old Christmas party, if you’re leaving the company, like You can tell everybody what you think, exactly what you think before you leave. Yeah, do a Costanza. I’m gonna tell all you people what I think about you.

Allen Hall: Yeah, the one I didn’t like was when people started fighting. That just got to be ridiculous. Not here, not now, but he’s trying to have a nice time.

Take it out to the parking lot. What kind of Christmas

Joel Saxum: parties did you go to? New Jersey. Yeah, that makes sense. This week’s Wind Farm of the Week is the Crocker Wind Farm up in South Dakota that is owned by National Grid Renewables. This wind energy project was built by Wonset Construction using GE 2.

7116 wind turbines. It’s a 200 megawatt project. It has virtual power purchase agreements with Walmart and Cargill. Cargill being really important up in the Upper Midwest because they’re a seed company. They do a lot of stuff with the agricultural side of things. Thanks. But one thing really interesting about this wind farm is when they set it up, of course, there’s the 83 million in direct economic impact and there’s 36 million in new tax revenue and 175 construction and operation jobs.

We see those stats for a lot of wind farms, but what they did here was they put together a community fund it’s a charitable fund. So if you’re in that community, you can apply to get these funds. Every year it reloads. And it’s 40, 000 available every year for the next 20 years from when this wind farm was started.

Adding up to about 800, 000 in charitable funding. So if you want to, put new paint down on the football field in the town, you can apply for a little bit of funding. If you want to do something else for the schools or the four H Club or just the community center or something of that sort.

Groups get together and they can pull from this pool of money that is provided by National Grid Renewables as a part of this wind farm. So I think that’s really cool ’cause it’s direct giving back it’s dollars and cents and people can get on board with it. So kudos to national good Renewables for setting up that $800,000 charitable fund at the Crocker Wind Farm.

All of the men and women that are operating that wind farm this week, you are the Uptime Wind Energy podcast wind farm of the week.

Allen Hall: That’s going to 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 to our Substack Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, and check out Rosie’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

This week on News Flash, Grenergy is selling 23 percent of its Oasis de Atacama project for up to $962M, a consortium led by APG Asset Management NV and Australian Retirement Trust will acquire Riverstone Holdings LLC equity stake in Pattern Energy, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has acquired a majority stake in Toqlukuti’k Wind and Hydrogen.

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: Alright, first up, Grenergy is selling 23 percent of its Oasis del Atacama project. To CONT Global A KKR company for up to $962 million. The sale includes three of the seven phases of what would be the world’s largest energy storage facility, compromising 451 megawatts of solar and two and a half gigawatt hours of storage capacity.

The three phases are already under construction and will generate more than 1.3 terawatt hours of energy annually. Now, Phil, why is Grinergy removing itself from some of these projects? Is it cash constriction?

Philip Totaro: This one’s kind of fascinating because this isn’t just a simple asset rotation.

I think this is more that they have to be able to dump some of their pipeline in order to have some cash on hand to cover operations of existing assets as well as eventually reinvest in their pipeline. But this, normally when you do an asset rotation, you either sell off a small percentage minority stake in your asset portfolio, or you take, some of your projects and sell them off.

This is a fairly large deal for a good chunk of capacity that, Contour Global is is going to have as part of their portfolio now, bolstering what KKR’s doing with their backing as well. KKR wants Contour Global to start expanding more and it’s put them On the hunt for, asset acquisitions like this.

So, it’s a good fit, but it’s an interesting move from Greenergy at this point to really start getting some more cash in the door.

Joel Saxum: Aside from the sale here, we’re talking, M& A here in Newsflash. I want to focus on this Grenergy’s asset rotation target. So they’re looking at, they have a target for 2026 and ensures funding for a 2.

6 billion euro strategic plan. That strategic plan is to become a world leader in energy storage, which, I mean, if you’ve been following anything that we talk about on the podcast, in the last few years, energy storage has become a very important part

Allen Hall: A consortium led by APG Asset Management NV and Australian Retirement Trust will acquire Riverstone Holdings LLC equity stake in Pattern Energy. Now, Pattern Energy is currently developing over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy and transmission projects for nearly 10, 000 megawatts across North America, either operating or under construction.

Phil, Pattern Energy is a privately held company up to this point, but they are seeking a little bit of money to help with these projects that they have going on, Sunzea being one of them.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that Riverstone Holdings is selling out their stake. They were one of the founding partners along with management for Pattern.

It’s a big signal for Pattern to be able to take a next step in terms of their growth plan. But also a big deal where, these two pension companies are investment and an investment fund is coming in alongside the Canadian pension plan investment board that also owns a stake along with the pattern management.

So, all of that combined means a lot more. kind of, retirement money and pension money going into, renewable project development, which whether it’s been through direct investment or in this case, like this deal, the equity stake in pattern you’re seeing, we’ve talked about.

On the show before, there’s a lot more investments coming in from insurance companies, pension plan companies and those type of management companies and investment vehicles. So this is kind of furthering that through, in this case, again, an equity stake as opposed to direct investment in projects, but it’s a, really good deal for Pattern, who, has continued to kind of outperform a lot of their industry peers especially when it comes to being able to raise capital.

Joel Saxum: When you talk about an Australian retirement trust getting involved in this, what I see is long term investment being excited about. wind and renewable projects, but short term we want to make money type of investments not being as interested. So you can see that like the black rocks are involved in the Canadian pension funds are involved.

These are very long term stable investments in these infrastructure projects, but the people that want to make money quick are getting out of renewables. So see that as a trend.

Allen Hall: Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has acquired a majority stake in Toqlukuti’k Wind and Hydrogen, a large scale project in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, from ABO Energy.

The project is expected to produce competitive green hydrogen and ammonia, leveraging exceptional wind resources and existing infrastructure. Now that project will create over 4, 000 construction jobs and 400, 000 jobs.

And Phil, is this the first Green Hydrogen and Ammonia project for CIP?

Philip Totaro: It is for CIP which is kind of an interesting move. We’ve talked before on both the Uptime Wind Energy podcast and Newsflash here about Whether or not we need, tons and tons of hydrogen, this project has the potential to be upwards of five gigawatts of wind or other power generation that would feed into, this hydrogen and ammonia production.

Whether or not they’re going to actually build it that big, we don’t know yet because this is still in a fairly early stage of development, so it gives CIP a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor or something. We’ll see how this goes. Canada does seem very enthusiastic about the hydrogen projects though, because they have Well, except for the locals, I guess, but Canada in general, the Canadian government certainly And the provincial governments are a lot more excited about getting some of these projects built.

So I think they will welcome CIP’s acquisition and we’ll see where projects like this go in the future.

Joel Saxum: Newfoundland and Labrador have some of the best wind resources in North America. So that’s a thing, right? But the other side of it is the energy mix in Newfoundland and Labrador is very heavily renewables already.

There’s a lot of hydro. They’re flush with renewable generation. So adding these on is of course going to go secondary market, hydrogen, ammonia. But the big thing here for the locals is 4, 000 construction jobs, 400 long term operational positions. Jobs and good paying jobs are scarce in that corner of the world, so this will be a great boom for the economy up in the Maritimes in Canada.

The spotlight today is on Romotioncam, a company with an inspection method that works while blades are in motion. René Harendt, CTO at Romotioncam, and Michael Stamm, a researcher from the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung in Germany, discuss this groundbreaking technology. Learn about innovations at the company, from a new 840 mm focal length camera to thermal imaging data, that will make inspections more helpful for operators.

Check out Michael’s research at BAM! https://zenodo.org/records/14170341, https://www.bam.de/Content/EN/Projects/KI-Visir/KI-Visir.html

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today we have two experts pioneering innovative wind turbine inspection methods. René Harent is the CTO of Romotioncam whose patented technology enables high res photography of operating wind turbines.

And Michael Stamm from Germany’s Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, who specializes in thermographic inspection methods for wind turbines. Together, they’re combining visual and infrared imaging to revolutionize how we detect early stage blade issues. Rene and Michael, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.

Thank you. We have seen Romotioncam a number of times, and the technology is really good, Rene. I like it because the turbine continues to operate. As you take high quality images, the technology has evolved quite a bit from the last time I have seen it. Do you want to explain where you’re at with Romotioncam today?

So

René Harendt: at the moment, we actually build up a fleet to scale up and to provide it to a bigger market. And yeah, I actually have a new prototype with A bigger focal length. So the actual system has a 500 millimeter focal length. The new system has an 840 millimeter, millimeter focal length. So that means that we can, even on higher turbines and bigger blades, because this is related to our distance to the turbines, we can provide GSDs like 0.

06 centimeter per pixel. So something up to 0. pixel.

Allen Hall: So in that kind of imaging resolution, you can detect all kinds of blade abnormalities.

René Harendt: Yes, even little hair cracks and stuff like this.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, because you’re approaching what a drone can do, right? That’s, even a couple of years ago, two millimeters per pixel, three millimeters per pixel is normal.

But now that one millimeter per pixel, a lot of times you’ll see that in an RFP, right? When someone puts out, Hey, we’re, we want inspections and they put it out to the market. One millimeter per pixel will be the standard, but you guys are offering this without actually having to stop the turbine. So your value add goes through the roof because you’re keeping that production going.

René Harendt: That’s true. And if you think about it with that, sometimes we add a distance of 160 meters, something like this and provide that kind of GSD. Yeah, this. Sometimes there are. That’s amazing, yeah.

Allen Hall: So maybe, René, for those uninitiated, who are not familiar with Romotioncam, what are the fundamentals here?

How does this system work?

René Harendt: The easiest way is to go to our website and watch the video. I think this can explain. Everything. So go to romotioncam com and watch it here. But I’ll try to explain it a little bit. So the key thing is that we’re using one camera to track the whole rotor and the blades and a special tracking technology behind it, which is also patented.

Can detect the wingtips and can calculate the rotation speed and the position of the turbine and stuff like this. And then calculators and the kind of movement data for a pan tilt head. And we have the camera integrated into a pan tilt head that can follow the blade all the time. So that means even on high tip speeds, we can follow the Tip.

It’s two fast cars driving next to each other. You literally can shake hands. And this is, this allows us for the camera to use low shutter speeds. And yeah, we can deal also with low light condition because we don’t have to put the ISO too high and stuff like this. It’s also weak. We Yeah, I can eliminate some photographic issues you would normally have if you’re trying to freeze some motions.

Yeah.

Allen Hall: Now, the majority of the work you do is in Europe, but you were in the United States for a short while. Can you explain what kind of work you’re doing

René Harendt: in Europe at the minute? So we are subcontractors, so we have a frame contact with RWE, so we’re running out some inspections and, but we want to open the market a little bit more.

There is a plan for next year to open up an entity in the U. S. To be honest, at the moment, it’s now a political situation. So we have to take a look what happened. And if it’s, it’s not that easy for us yet to come over to the U. S. It’s not that we just saying, okay, we want to open an entity.

There’s a lot of paperwork. We try to clarify now, but at the moment, the political situation is a little bit. Yeah, we don’t really know. I think we have to wait. It could be more complicated, maybe more easier. Let’s see what happens. Yeah, but the goal is to come to the US and open an entity there

Allen Hall: as

René Harendt: well.

Allen Hall: And the latest technology, and we talked several weeks ago now, that Romotioncam has been involved with, is on the thermal imaging side. And the first time I heard about this was a probably a year ago when we were in Amsterdam at one of the blade conferences and I was just blown away. You can take thermal imaging from a Romotioncam cam on the ground.

That’s amazing. One. That’s amazing. And then it was described what that camera and that technology could do. And this is where Michael comes in. Where Michael is our thermal imaging expert. And Michael, can you describe where you work at? Just to make sure I get the right label on it.

Michael Stamm: Yeah. Hi, I’m Michael.

I work at a research institute. So I’m definitely on the research side of this technology. And We are performing thermal imaging of operating wind turbines from the ground. And this is actually also where we met with Romotioncam, because it’s really important to, for a proper interpretation of our thermal images, we really needed high resolution visual images.

And then we were just looking for somebody providing this simultaneously from the same point we were looking at. And then that was like the match with the RamoshiCAM. And now we just had a big measurement campaign where we tried to benchmark what is possible, where are we?

We are working on this, like BAM is working on this since, Something like seven years. And I know even when I have discussions with experts from the field, I know that even 15 years ago, people were already talking about thermal expression of rotor blades. So it’s like not, really inherently new.

I just say like things develop, cameras develop, understanding develops, simulation develop. So we are, we are trying to get it where it’s really useful for the industry.

Joel Saxum: Traditionally, we know in the wind turbine world, visual inspections via drone romotioncam as you guys are doing, it’s fantastic.

Pairing that with Thermal. What exactly can you guys see? Are you trying to image and what, like what value are you trying to bring to the inspections?

Michael Stamm: I want to distinguish two physical phenomena, and I think it’s really important to get this once clarified and then we can go to the. But there are different physical phenomenons that give you a thermal signature on your blade.

And you have to distinguish these signatures. And one of the signatures is flow, air flow. Turbulent flow has a higher heat exchange between air and blade than laminar flow. So you see the difference between laminar and turbulent flow, which for example, Helps you to characterize leading edge defects, which result in turbulent flow patterns.

That’s the first point. And the second point is completely independent of the flow. It’s really like the inner structure of the blade. It’s like just a different thing to look into the things. The sun is rising, you see the entire blade gets warm, and wherever there is, for example, foam, balsa, air, it gets warmer faster.

Why? Because you just don’t have that high heat capacity. Having a big part of CFRP of a few centimeters, it takes time to heat this up. And then, this honeycomb structure is warm already. And that’s like the second physical phenomena. So you really have to distinguish. And then, definitely, You look for the application in this case, for example, with romotioncam we were really looking for this flow visualization.

Joel Saxum: And you’re also can look for, and I think this is an important one, friction creates heat and, or a lack of friction can create a colder spot. And so it’s more like you’re looking on the blade. You’re not looking for a specific temperature, right? We’re not looking for, I want to see the spot. That’s, 21.

2 degrees Celsius. I want to see the spots that are. 21. 2 and 21. 0 in between the two to see the differences because if you can find a delta within this homogenous blade structure then you might be able to pinpoint something. Then if it’s friction you might be seeing a crack or you might be seeing a despond in the shear web where that shear web is moving as the blade moves it creates a little bit of friction, creates a little bit of heat as things move on.

So is that part of the one of the goals and the one of the things that you guys can work with here and how is that working? That’s physics part number

Michael Stamm: three. Okay. I’m ahead of the, I’m ahead of the conversation. Sorry. At this point, best greetings to the DTU, Aquatic Goal Project from Shoushen. They are focusing exactly on this.

It’s a third way to look at things. I just, I don’t know. And here you, I know that 15 years ago people already started to operate the turbine, stop it, and do the inspection. What do you get then? You do not have the flow anymore because you stopped the turbine, but you still have the heat from the friction.

So that’s one way of doing things. We, before meeting in RoamOceanCamp, we were really focusing on these inner defects. The inner defects, the delamination, which not due to friction, you see it due to the air in your system, which is almost like a pillow. It’s like an isolator. Air is a perfect isolator.

So when you have, for example, a deamination between the spar and the web, you might see it if you have a delamination at the trailing edge, you see it very well way before it’s actually open, before it opens up. You already see that there’s like a deamination. We were focusing on this, so that it’s like.

You always use it, the thermal camera, you always look at the temperature of your blade, but you really have to understand to what look for and under which conditions. That’s the main message.

Allen Hall: So then thermal imaging becomes extremely valuable with Romotioncama because now you can, in theory, see structural issues.

You can see thermal changes that way, but you can also see aerodynamic. Differences between the ideal blade and what you actually have without stopping the turbine. So it doesn’t take any lockout tag out. No one’s climbing the turbine. Everything is remote from the turbine. And the big problem I think that exists today is a lot of operators know they have leading edge erosion or some sort of aerodynamic problem.

But it’s very difficult to visualize that. You just can’t walk up to a blade and say to yourself I know this blade is losing 3%. I can’t do that today. It’s too much to process. And then I have to do a CFD analysis or some sort of interpretive engineering effort to determine roughly what that loss is.

You can walk up there today. Put a thermal camera Romotion camera up there and say this is how much energy is being wasted in turbulence. This is where your problems are. These are the areas that you need to focus on. Instantaneously, almost.

René Harendt: Exactly. And this is what we with Romotioncam. So our next step is to integrate both cameras in one system so that we can take a one shot the thermal images.

And then on that part, we also have to separate within a little bit. We have to see the TTP patterns or the turbulent flow patterns the terminal turbulent flow patterns. This is something we can deliver, in one shot with our normal blade inspections, with the normal visual inspections.

Yeah, we can lay over the images and we can see, okay, which damage causes some turbulences. And we also, sometimes we see also turbulences that is not related to to, to damages we’re seeing. So there’s something more we don’t know yet. Yeah. And this is something we can carry out as a normal inspection.

And then we are trying with the same system, but in another way of doing it. Yeah. And this is the more challenging part, what we’re trying to do. Yeah. And then in our next project. So to figure out what conditions we need to look into the blades, because it’s not about to seeing something is.

We, we have to make sure when we’re coming and doing this kind of blade inspections also that we want to look inside a blade. We want to make sure that when we don’t see anything, then there is nothing. And that’s the check. Because it might be that on the one day with everybody can buy a camera and trying to do this.

And it could be that you can come to the toe and on the one day you’re seeing something on the next day you see nothing. And. In the end of the day, when you see Nazi, what is it? Was it a bad day? What is the wrong condition? Or something like this. And this is the challenge, yeah, we were trying to solve.

Joel Saxum: When you’re really looking at, scientific grade thermal images, there’s a lot you can learn from them, but there’s also a lot you need to understand as an expert, like Michael, like yourself. To know that if the sun is hitting this blade surface at a certain angle, how does that possibly interfere with the things that we’re trying to get from it?

And if today is cloudy or, it’s a cold morning versus a hot morning, those kinds of things, that’s where you guys come into play.

Michael Stamm: A good colleague of mine, he always says, You do not only need the fast car to win the race. You also need the driver, you need the maintenance, you need the ground station.

And it’s exactly this, you need more than just a good camera. Yes, with Romotioncam we are absolutely on the edge. This system will be really cool. And still, what we are working on are, for example, finite element simulations. You simulate your structure, you simulate your weather conditions, and then you get an idea of am I actually possible to see on Tuesday morning these defects.

Or is it the wrong weather conditions? So like to exclude these false negatives, false positives, this we are trying to do with simulations. And then you have to combine all this knowledge, you have to know your blades. And then you get way more than the turbulence patterns. The turbulence patterns you almost see in almost all conditions.

It’s like a nice added value. But to look into your blade 10 centimeters deep, you really have to know what you’re doing. And then you must be sure that if you do not see anything, you don’t have a crack. Otherwise, the value is

Allen Hall: Michael, you’ve done a number of tests. You’ve done about 30 turbines worth with the thermal imaging camera.

And that data is available. You can just go look on the internet. You can find it. Those images with their romotioncam are really good. It is shocking to see those images because it just, it’s eye opening like, oh my gosh that leading edge defect is causing turbulence. There it is. It’s remarkable how fast that works.

How good is that technology? Do you expect this to just operators to start implementing this as just a sanity check? Because that’s what I would see. And particularly because Romotioncam doesn’t involve shutting off the turbine, there’s a whole cold season here where the turbines are spinning and no one wants to stop them.

The wintertime’s great time to make power, but you could also learn so much about your turbines and how they’re really performing in a short amount of time. Is that the value

René Harendt: add here? Yeah, from my perspectives, to go back to the data set we’re providing. It does not really represent our normal inspection data, because we had to find a compromise with Michael from the BAM and with their system.

And this is where also the idea was born, okay, to really make it and to really have different angles, different views on the blade, even with film and with the visual images. There’s no way around that putting two cameras in one system. Yeah. And then it’s good. And of course the added value is that we.

doing it with no downtime so we are completely invisible we’re just coming we just tell me okay what’s the size of your turbine what’s the blade length and where is the turbine can i access this by alone or do i have to make some yeah is there a fence on something like this i mean in europe normally the turbines are pretty big Open, you can access that.

So we are pretty much invisible. So we just going there, taking the images and the next contact you will have with me is the report. Yeah. And you don’t know when we have been there, when we did it from the, like this is our normal procedures. So there’s no communication anymore with with our clients.

We don’t need a technician in field. We don’t have to plan in advance. You just give us the locations. We checking everything independently. We see if everything’s accessible and then we plan planning to capture the data completely independent by ourselves. So that’s the thing. And of course the goal for the next year is to put.

Both cameras in one system so that we can deliver on the report, the added value that we can at least show you the turbulences. I don’t think that you can really say you’re losing this percentage of efficiency, but we can give you an overall view compared maybe to the normal flows that we can see.

Okay. These turbine or these blades, if we compare it with other ones is a little bit critical. So we can give the clients a little bit, another viewpoint on, on, on damages. And maybe it helps a little bit to define some repair times because it’s not only related on safety reasons anymore. It’s also that there comes another point here and that’s the efficiency.

Yeah. And it might be that because of the efficiency loss, it’s cheaper to repair it now.

Joel Saxum: I think the important thing to focus on here is that you, the Romotioncam system and the advances that you guys have done, You just talked about an lens coming and the ground basically per pixel on the blade.

The ability to do that and not interrupt field operations. Alan and I were just in the field last week. We talked with multiple places where they’re like, We’ve got so much going on now we’re talking to us for the most part here, right? Where there’s a hundred, 120, 150 turbines in a wind farm.

There’s so many activities going on daily on those things. To find the guy for lotto, to get a, to get another technician to help you, escort you around the field and do all these different things. That takes away from other things that need to be done in the wind farm and site supervisors, it’s a pain in the butt for them.

They’re like oh, the inspection, or the inspection guys are here, this or there. This is here. The fact that you guys can show up on site, do your safety orientation, get a map of the field, and then just say, see you later. We’re not going to affect your production. And we’re going to deliver you results without basically bothering you in the field.

That to me, as a site supervisor would make me smile from ear to ear. And then now you’re getting to the point where, hey, we’re also adding this thermal technology. We’re doing other things that are value add in the field. So when you’re out there, you’re collecting more data, you’re delivering more insights, and you’re not bothering anybody, basically, during your operation.

So I think this is something that definitely, if you haven’t looked into Romotioncam, you need to give these guys a call if you’re in the inspect, if you’re looking for inspections. The

Allen Hall: information from this is remarkable, and I encourage everybody to go online and look for Michael’s data, and we’ll put the link in the show notes so you can see this stuff.

It’s truly revolutionary. I know we use that term a lot in the wind energy industry. To me, engineer, this is magic, and I have to commend both of you. Combining these two technologies, I’m sure, was not easy, and I know there’s a lot of computer software. Behind the scenes to make all these pictures possible, but it is truly remarkable.

And Rene, obviously a lot of people are going to be interested in Romotioncam. How do they reach out to you? How do they

René Harendt: connect? I think they can just go on our website and they can connect. Would link on LinkedIn, of course, just connect on LinkedIn. And we try and to keep you updated also with the progress of developments and stuff like this.

Allen Hall: So just visit romotioncam.com and Michael, you’re a researcher, one of those great scientists over in Germany.

Michael Stamm: How do they connect with you? I’m on LinkedIn and we have a quite nice webpage, I must say, for a governmental institution. And there you find also find some links. We work the scientific way.

So what we do, we put down in scientific papers where it’s described in detail. And these are online, these are available and you can just check them out. You check out the data and then give me a call and we’ll see if we come together. Yeah. Would be happy to, yeah, propose this really new or revolutional technology to some others.

Also in the U. S. by the way.

Allen Hall: Yes. Yeah. You’re welcome in the U. S. anytime. Rene and Michael, thank you so much for being on the podcast Truly Remarkable Technology. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation.

On Power-Up today, a pre-tensioning mechanism for concrete towers, Vestas’ idea for reducing sway in towers, and the patent behind the Smooth Criminal performances.

Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

Allen Hall: Alright, our first idea comes from the brain of Max Boegl Wind AG, and it is a really unique patent. When you deal with concrete towers, like you see on Nordex turbines, some Acciona turbines, where they stack the concrete cylinders on one another. Have you ever asked yourself, how do those keep from tipping over and everything landing on the ground?

Well, there’s a series of tension cables inside of there that keeps those things stacked up properly and provides pressure the whole time. That is a really tricky system. And this patent idea, which is a pretension element, It creates these, this mechanism to provide tension and simply on these concrete towers so they don’t fall over and don’t come apart like kids blocks.

And Phil, this one I think is being used, right? I would assume a this technique, because it’s really unique and simple and effective, has to be out in service already.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and we believe it’s being used on some of their hybrid concrete and steel tube towers. So just for everybody’s benefit too, this is kind of a pretensioned tower anchor concept where you know, the, the benefit of that is, is if you, if you want to be able to control the amount of, of load and deflection pre tensioning can kind of help facilitate that versus post tensioning something where once you’ve already poured concrete and it’s hardened, there’s only so much kind of post tensioning you can do without overstressing either the tendons or the concrete itself, which, which could weaken it.

So pre tensioning this allows you to You know, have the, the correct amount of tension in the tendons and, and the bolt the anchor bolts. And then when you’re laying in your concrete it’s, it’s going to help facilitate the, the strength and reliability of that connection. Now, what’s also kind of fascinating about this is that we haven’t, we’ve seen, kind of pre tensioning and post tensioning used in different areas of, of the turbine before where some of the companies, Vestas, I think, tried a a post tensioned tower with die cables and things like that.

So, there, there have been companies that have tried different arrangements and techniques before but it was never really widely adopted, but Max Bogle, obviously has the, the pedigree in, in wind energy to have this more widely adopted and the hybrid towers that they’ve been deploying.

I believe number more than like three or four hundred at this point that they’ve got deployed mostly throughout Europe, I believe. So, this is fantastic technology and, and again, great to see that somebody’s, capturing IP on a technology that they’re actually rolling out commercially and, and, getting the commercial benefit out of leveraging.

Joel Saxum: I think an important note here, pre tensioning. So just to give example if you’re not familiar with concrete pre tensioning or post tensioning, think of the most, the easiest example of concrete pre tensioning is when they make, when you make a bridge beam. And you see the bridge beams have a little bit of an arc to them, kind of?

How that was made is, You put cables through a form, you pour concrete in the form, and while that form is still wet, you put tension on those cables on the outsides of the form, so they actually, like, they’ll pull on the inside, and then once the concrete sets, you release the form, and now it puts pressure on that concrete, and concrete is always by strength of how well it’s pushed together.

So PSI, the pressure of concrete, is how strong it is usually. So when that, When that pretensioning is done, it makes the connection stronger. It makes the piece stronger. It makes everything stronger. So that’s the technology they’re using here. So switching gears to going, how is this used in the field or what does it look like?

In the United States, we don’t have a whole lot of concrete towers. And in general, concrete towers aren’t that widely used. To my knowledge, I’m not a developer. I haven’t looked into the commercial models or the business case for concrete versus steel, but I know steel is pretty dang easy to just roll to site and boom, boom, boom, put up.

So I think that’s why we see more steel ones than, than concrete. But technology like this may change that in the future.

Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Vestas and they have a patent and really a really strong idea. About the control system and their turbines when the turbine isn’t pointed in the right direction.

So they can get yaw off center from where it needed to be. It’s not really pointed in the wind. And that can cause the tower to sway. And once the tower starts to sway, that can set off an alarm and shut everything down. Which you don’t necessarily want to do. So this patent idea looks at where the yaw error is and derates that switch, the vibration switch on the sway.

They say, Hey, we’re just out of yaw. Let’s get back in the right direction. And that swaying that is happening will go away. So it’s like a temporary way of reducing this control system so that the turbine continues to operate and produce maximum power. It’s a really complicated thing though, because as Phil, as turbines have gotten more instrumentation and more control systems, there’s turbine than there ever used to be.

And tower sway is one of those. This tries to deal with some of the unique situations that pop up with yaw.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and, and what’s kind of interesting about this is you’re, you’re right, because we, we now have, algorithms in the Turbine Controller that you would think would overlap or compete with each other.

You’ve got yaw angle optimization for controlling wake. You’ve got pitch angle optimization for performance or noise. And so there’s all kinds of things that you might be be doing at the same time. And I think this is a solution that they came up with specific to a problem they might’ve had with a specific tower frequency or something like that, where, you were getting this, this oscillation and you want to be able to leverage the, the yaw errors and input to.

This algorithm that, that’s basically going to determine, how do you reduce the amount of wobble? We were talking off air about this is almost like, if you’ve got like high speed wobble on a, on a, well, I get it on my scooter my electric scooter, sometimes you gotta lean forward or throttle back a little bit to be able to, just get out of that oscillation window and then you can get back to, to normal operation.

Joel Saxum: I think that these problems didn’t exist a long time ago, right? If you think about this is a Vestas patent, right? Yes. So if you think about a V47, a V47, it’s stout blades, not a whole lot of flexibility, not a whole lot of movement, not a big tall tower, not 70 meter long blades. So it could handle vibration a bit better.

Whether that’s vortex induced vibration, of the tower with wind going past it, or it’s, Vibration induced by the rotating equipment within the tower. Now as you get, we’re getting bigger and bigger and bigger. This patent’s from 2021. So that was right when Vestas was coming out with like the, the V 150.

Now we’re in the V 163. So these things are getting bigger, taller, longer blades. So they’re a lot more sensitive to, Motion induced or rotational imbalances induced issues within the turbine. So they’re coming up with, controller methodologies to fix some of these problems. I think that’s something we definitely have to be doing as it’s going to get as we get larger and larger.

And I think you’ll see more and more OEMs having to chase this same dragon.

Allen Hall: For our fun patent a week, we go to Hollywood and some of the most famous patents that we actually use today have come from Hollywood. The Marx Brothers were involved in a number of patents and products that are used in aerospace today.

Hedy Lamarr, the famous actress, has a patent for frequency hopping, which is a way that we transmit signals and code today around the world. Well, this one is a little more common usage in that it’s a special pair of shoes that you have seen these shoes, if you’ve watched MTV before, in Michael Jackson, in that video Smooth Criminal.

And when you see Michael Jackson sort of lean forward, you’re like, Oh man, that’s amazing. How did he do that without falling over? Well, he had invented a special shoe and in this shoe is a little slot in the heel is a slot and it picks up a bolt head that’s built into the floor, so you kind of lock yourself into the floor and you can lean forward.

And Michael Jackson is one of the inventors of this system, Phil. It’s quite interesting that they went ahead and patented it. to keep others from copying it.

Philip Totaro: Well, besides that it’s actually something that they ended up using for the live stage performances back in the eighties and nineties. And, it’s funny because when they originally shot the music video, the, the lean.

The famous smooth criminal lean was kind of done with, with just Hollywood tricks. And I forget what the specific system was, but they wanted to be able to do this maneuver with all the dancers, including Michael, at a live stage show. So they had to come up with a system for how to handle this.

I don’t know if even at the time, I don’t remember this back in the 80s, but I don’t know if everybody even knew how. It was being done at the time. I think it was everybody just assumed it was like magic or he was actually like leaning over and, it was just in control of himself that much. Like, it’s just it’s fascinating to see how like IP can can end up kind of popping up in in random places like, the entertainment industry or, how we use, technology in, in wind.

I mean, it’s, it’s a similar kind of thing where the, the dumbest, cleverest little things can, can end up being the most revolutionary.