This week we discuss the Danish government's permit extensions for two offshore wind farms, the U.S. Senate's new renewable energy bill, the Belgian government's halted wind farm tender, and the complexities of laying seabed cables for wind farms.

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

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

Allen Hall 2025: Well welcome back to Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

I have Rosemary Barnes down in Canberra Australia. Phil's in California, and evidently he lives next door to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and I, I had no idea, Phil, like you're that close to royalty. 

Phil Totaro: I'm not. You're 

Allen Hall 2025: making that up. Joel's up in Wisconsin somewhere in the northern wilds of Wisconsin. Next to a cheese factory, and here I sit in Charlotte, North Carolina.

If we've been paying attention or if you've been paying attention to the news over the last, uh, 48 hours in America has been complete chaos as we are recording this and the US Senate has [00:01:00] passed a bill regarding renewable energy and it's back to the house. Supposedly this is all gonna get signed off by the 4th of July.

So we're recording it. Today is July 2nd. Um. So by the time you hear this, something may or may not have happened, and we're trying to keep abreast of the latest, but I think there's some other news going on around the world. And, uh, one of the stories we found interesting was the Danish Offshore, uh, agency Energy Agency has approved permit extensions for two of Denmark's oldest offshore wind farms, which marks a major milestone for.

Wind energy longevity. The middle Gruden and Newstead offshore wind farms have received permission to operate for an additional 25 years and 10 years respectively. That is massive extension. Uh, the middle Gruden facility, which is built in 2001, has about 20 turbines and about 40 megawatts of capacity, and it's owned by a community cooperative.

[00:02:00] And the Danes being on top of all these things, uh, allowed the extension after doing an engineering analysis showing that the infrastructure has more life. This is unusual. Is this just a artifact of early designs being overly conservative? And these wind farms can practically live forever? I think so. I, uh, 

Joel Saxum: I like it.

Alright. I wish that all these wind turbines are built this way because it's then you can get more longevity of, I think now of course when everybody has a repower now or tries to extend life, they're trying to really do it. So they're trying to, if we're gonna put money, we'll try to, you know, up the kilowatt, we'll try to up the capacity, well then the foundations don't hold and these kind of things.

So it's kind of like if you look at, um. I'm up here in northern Wisconsin, not too far from my house. There's a bridge that was built by the CCC, uh, the civilian Conservation Corps in like the, um, at the Great Depression. So like in the 1930s, late, [00:03:00] late 1920s. And that bridge is fine. Like it's golden. It's still good, right?

But it was overbuilt, super built to be heavy duty construction. And there's another bridge just down the road from that same one over the same river that was done in the seventies that needs a complete replacement. Because it was done, it was done with like, you know, di different design functions, not as robust.

And, and it's kind of like, oh, some of this first generation of older stuff is overbuilt, is toughly built. It's the same thing. We talk about shorter blades, like a, you know, a V 47 or a GE one X, like those blades just last and, but you don't see it as much anymore. So I, I, I'm happy to see this. I think it's cool, uh, to see these things getting basically refurbished and.

Gonna have a life extension. 

Allen Hall 2025: I don't even know what the refurbishment process or the extension process looks like. Rosemary on something that is that old that's made out of fiberglass and resin. How do you even evaluate something like that? 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, what they [00:04:00] do is they, um, if, if you wanna do it properly, then you go back to the original, um, blade design files, um, and you basically, you rerun it, you can, and so you get a different result for two reasons.

Or two possible reasons. One could be that it didn't see as hard of a life as what they designed for. So, um, you know, you can rerun with the actual loads that it saw if you have those available. And then the second thing is that, you know, these wind farms came on around the turn of the millennium, right?

Um, and so we've learned a lot, especially about, um, um, like how strong materials actually are. There are still gonna be some, some, you know, defects in some blades. That will see them fail before others. So you, you know, the blades are getting older. I would expect they will see more, more failures, but, um, there's a lot better ways that you can monitor that sort of thing.

Now, you don't just have to wait for a, a blade to break in half and fly off. Um, anymore. You can, uh, you know, install monitoring [00:05:00] stuff and, uh. Inspect them more frequently. You know, drone inspections are so much faster than, uh, if you would've had to get up on ropes and have a look at every, you know, square centimeter of blade surface.

So I think that there's just, you know, that so many technologies have come so far since these, um, blades were designed, that there is a lot of scope to keep them going, if that makes sense. You know, a lot of times a turbine that was installed 25 years ago is gonna be tiny compared to today. So a lot of times people might not want to, um, they might wanna.

You put in new, new, bigger turbines instead. 

Joel Saxum: Do you see, because, okay, so we talked about blades here for a second, right? But we have all kinds of rotating mechanical equipment, foundations, bolting all this. Do you see in my mind, in my mind, for something this old and wanting to extend that one, I see a massive NDT campaign.

I see checking bond lines on blades, looking at some metallurgical things, looking at some connection points offshore, looking at the foundations. I mean, of course you're gonna do some seabed stuff, but that's usually done in maintenance too. That's a weird one there, because. [00:06:00] When you talk about maintenance, inspection, repair, and maintenance campaigns for offshore wind farms, there's things that you don't do onshore that you do complete offshore regularly, like scour inspections and some of the characterization site surveys, that stuff goes on regularly.

So that's not something that you need to, oh, we gotta take this big campaign on. Should have regular every year bi-yearly data on that. So that's cool, but I would see a big NNDT campaign in my mind. Um. I dunno. Maybe that's Jeremy Hanks question. 

Allen Hall 2025: Well, is this useful data that would help the industry just to know how these are performing?

Rosemary Barnes: I think it would be quite specific to the individual components. 'cause you, you know, if the wind farm had an initial life of what, 25 years, um, everything would've been designed to last 25 years. You don't like, good engineering isn't just making something as strong as you can because it's gonna be much more expensive than it needed to be.

And what's the point in having a. I don't know, a tower that lasts for a a thousand years, but the blades only last for 30 years. There's no, there's no [00:07:00] point. Right. So, um, it would just be a matter of how, how excessively conservative the designers were in each case. It won't be exactly the same for all of them.

I'm sure they'll be exchanging many components probably. Um. Some components will just be preemptively, like we know that most of these are gonna fail, so we're gonna do a site-wide, um, campaign to replace, you know, all these bearings or all these, you know, whatever component and then some other ones. It would be a matter of yeah, like waiting and seeing when they fail.

And I think that you're right, Joel, that I. There's so many good NDT technologies around now. Um, and, you know, predictive maintenance can, there's a lot of sensors you can put in that will give you an early warning sign that things, you know, bearings don't have a lot of life left in them or, or something like that.

And so then you can get really smart about your campaigns to, you know, keep it going. 

Allen Hall 2025: Don't let blade damage catch you off guard. eLog Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming [00:08:00] problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks.

OG Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it's too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine's health today. Belgium's Federal government has unexpectedly halted the long plan tender for the Princess Elizabeth Offshore wind zone.

Just two months before bids were scheduled and the two gigawatt auction was set to launch in November, 2025. After four years of prep work and industry groups are calling the decision a violation of the coalition agreements and warn. It undermines investment certainty in Belgian offshore wind development.

Now, the,...

Nordex USA has reopened its wind turbine plant in Iowa, while Alliant Energy plans to add up to one gigawatt of wind generation in the state. GE Vernova's 18 megawatt turbine has been approved for testing and the UK has greenlit the 1.5 gigawatt Mona Offshore Wind Farm.

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!

Good news for Iowa's clean energy sector.

Nordex USA celebrated the reopening of its wind turbine plant in West Branch, Iowa on Tuesday. The plant now employs more than one hundred workers. They're producing the company's first U.S.-made turbines.

Manav Sharma is Nordex's North American C.E.O. He says the company is committed to Iowa for the long term.

The plant had been closed since twenty thirteen. Nordex bought the facility in twenty sixteen and spent months retrofitting it. The plant will produce parts for five-megawatt turbines. Production capacity is planned to exceed two point five gigawatts annually.

The reopening comes despite federal debates about renewable energy tax credits.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds noted that sixty six percent of Iowa's power comes from renewable energy. That's the highest percentage in the US.

Alliant Energy also has big plans for wind power in Iowa.

The company filed a plan with the Iowa Utilities Commission to add up to one gigwatt of wind generation.

Mayuri Farlinger is president of Alliant's Iowa energy company. She says expanding wind energy will help them deliver reliable and cost-effective power to customers.

Alliant plans to own and operate the new wind projects. The company expects the projects to create construction jobs and provide payments to landowners. They'll also generate new tax revenue for counties where the turbines are built.

The Iowa Utilities Commission is expected to make a decision in the first quarter of twenty twenty six.

Norway is testing the one of world's biggest wind turbine.

Norwegian regulator N.V.E. approved GE Vernova subsidiary Georgine Wind plans for an eighteen-megawatt turbine in the municipality of Gulen.

NVE says this is the largest wind turbine ever approved in Norway. It's also the first to be licensed inside an existing industrial area.

The turbine will have a rotor diameter of up to two hundred fifty meters. The maximum tip height will be two hundred seventy five meters.

The turbine will undergo testing for five years before switching to standard commercial operation for another twenty five years.

The United Kingdom has approved its largest Irish Sea wind farm.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband granted planning consent for the Mona offshore wind farm. The project is owned by B.P. and EnBW. It will feature ninety six turbines off northwest England.

The one point five gigawatt project could power more than one million homes with clean energy. It's expected to begin production between twenty twenty eight and twenty twenty nine.

Miliband says this shows the government is backing builders, not blockers.

B.P. and EnBW are also waiting for approval of a neighboring wind farm called Morgan. That decision is due by September tenth.

The developers have been paying option fees of one hundred fifty four thousand pounds per megawatt per year since January twenty twenty three.

Richard Sandford is B.P.'s Vice President of Offshore Wind. He says this approval brings them closer to delivering large-scale, low-carbon energy critical to the U.K.'s net zero goals.

That's this week's top news story.

Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Jason Moody from GreenSpur discusses their innovative axial flux generator technology, which promises to reduce weight and complexity in wind turbines, offering greater efficiency and lower maintenance costs.

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!

Today we're excited to have Jason Moody, chairman of GreenSpur, joining us to discuss a generator technology that could fundamentally alter the path of wind energy. While the wind industry has been scaling up turbine sizes, we've hit a critical challenge. Generators are becoming massively heavy, complex, and expensive to maintain.

GreenSpur is taking a different approach entirely. They perfected axial flux generator technology that can dramatically reduce weight, eliminate cooling systems. And use any type of magnet from simple faite to rare earth materials. This isn't just another incremental improvement. It's a completely different way of generating power that could solve some of offshore wind's biggest headaches.

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

Jason, welcome to the program. Thank [00:01:00] you. Thanks a. Hi Joel. Well, let's start off with the elephant in the room for offshore wind turbines manufacturing. Uh, there's some fundamental challenges that are facing them as we approach sort of the 20 megawatt stage and getting further offshore. Weight becomes a big problem.

Jason Moody: Yeah, it does. For, for years they've been getting bigger and bigger, and you can see that the industry just wants to push for that next size. But with that, the generators are getting very, very heavy. So the last direct drive generator that we evaluated was in excess of 150 tons. Now, that's not a, not a small machine anymore, but what what we're trying to do is introduce a new technology.

That can hopefully address that problem and some others as well. 

Allen Hall (2): So when you put a very heavy generator on top of a tower, that increases everything underneath of it, right? 

Jason Moody: Yeah. The foundations grow exponentially. The [00:02:00]steelwork and the structure has to grow. Then the cell itself, just based on size, lot more composite parts.

Everything's bigger. 

Joel Saxum: So we're talking like here, kind of traditional offshore wind fixed bottom right. That's an issue. The foundations have to grow, uh, exponentially to get these, to hold up this weight. But when another thing that's happening globally, right? The big push for floating offshore wind. So if now you're talking about putting more and more and more weight on something that's actually dynamic, right?

So that kind of, uh, what does that do to the, the whole system. 

Jason Moody: That's a, it's a different, um, engineering challenge, but it's mainly in the steel structure and the ballast in, in those, uh, in those systems. So the street, the steel pylon becomes very thick, becomes very heavy, uh, to hold that weight on top.

But most of the time what you found in these newer next gen floating systems is they've gone to geared systems, which is a big move in the whole industry for both onshore, offshore, and, and everything in between. Everyone's moving to hybrid [00:03:00] and geared systems, 

Allen Hall (2): and hybrid and geared systems get even more complicated, which is the problem, right?

Is that we're, we're trying to lower the cost of energy, but as we go bigger in scale, we sort of lose those efficiencies. It, it doesn't scale up with the efficiencies. It actually, you start getting more complicated because the generator itself is a limitation. 

Jason Moody: It is not just on electrical efficiency either.

It's, it's limited because a lot of these generators, as they spin faster, they get hotter. And then with hotter generators, you need fancier and, and more high tech cooling systems and, and there's another point of failure. So the LCUE really does start to suffer in these more complex advanced systems. 

Joel Saxum: The size of these things too, like as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, we're trying to scale up like.

The idea of working on something, like, I think about this like working on a truck, right? You go from working on a truck or working on a car to working on, uh, a semi go from that to working on, you know, a big boat engine or [00:04:00] something of that sort. And now we're still talking at small scale, but the tools, you need, the ability to handle and move things like it becomes exponentially more difficult.

So as we get to, I know like we were talking earlier off air, Siemens has their 21 and a half megawatt machine installed. I can't imagine the amount, the, the types of tooling, lifting mechanisms and stuff just to be able to work on the things. So that's, that becomes even more of an impasse, especially in offshore operations as we're trying to keep these things running.

Jason Moody: Yeah. There's a whole booming and emerging industry on the infrastructure just to move and install these parts, uh, offshore. It's, uh, just to hoist some of this big heavy equipment up into the na cell. It's, uh, it's. Really quite difficult, but getting even more difficult as time goes on 

Allen Hall (2): and there's more components up tower than ever before.

As we get to these bigger generators, cooling is a massive issue and if you follow, uh, all the patents by all the OEMs right now, you'll see that they're trying to figure out ways [00:05:00] to provide cooling up tower to the generator and all the gears and everything else moving up top. And it, it becomes a massive problem.

So not only do you have a very heavy generator and relatively complex generator, now you're adding a coolant system, which is another complicated, heavy system on top of it. 

Jason Moody: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Alan. It, it is getting more complicated and the thermal management in the new cell, it is, it's only going to get worse.

Allen Hall (2): Greens spur is doing something radically different. And I've been following Greensboro for, for a number of years now because, uh, you have been based in part of, been supported by ORE Catapult and you have a different generator design. It's actually not a new concept, but maybe the implementation I would describe as new.

But moving from a standard sort of two cylinder design, you have a rotor. And you have a stator on the outside, which we see in cars and everywhere. It's basically every [00:06:00] generator or motor in the world has these two rotating, these two cylindrical pieces. Moving from that into an actual flux design. And when we talk about flux, we're talking about the magnetic fields that are generated to make these things spin or to create power, actual has a lot of advantages that haven't been.

Taken, taken into consideration when we're building massive wind turbines. 

Jason Moody: Yeah, precisely. And thanks. Um, the, the way that Greensboro has approached this isn't using a brand new technology. It's, the way to describe it is to perfect it in a new application. So axial flux as a generator. Um, it's been around a long time and the advantages of using axial flux as a generator have been well documented and known.

Uh, for, for, again, a long time. But what we've managed to do is we've scaled it from what might be a desktop size, um, unit up into the multi megawatt sizes. Now we've [00:07:00] got, um, uh, a generator that's, um, been tested at the ORE Catapult, and, and that's three meters in diameter. It's, it's a huge machine. Um, and, and that's some of the benefits of Axial Flux can be seen in how you control and how you can manage the, the magnets being on the tire face instead of the tire tread, 

Allen Hall (2): right?

And so now you have a series of discs. You have a what call a state or disc and a rotor disc, and they kind of, you can stack them together. So as you want to add more power production, you just add more discs, which, uh, is a really simple way of changing the size of a generator. But the, the key is, is that you have, uh, the coils stationary.

You have the magnets on another disc, and they're spinning around, which is what's creating the power. You can use a lot of different magnets in this particular design. You can use [00:08:00] standard, simple off the shelf magnets or rare earth magnets. It's sort, and it, your, the actual design is sort of ambivalent to it.

Jason Moody: Absolutely. One of our, uh, one of our taglines, one of our USPS and how we've, um, adopted the design methodology is to be magnet agnostic. Drivetrain agnostic, which means we can be geared or direct drive even down to the, the coil material. We're completely adaptable and scalable to whatever our clients might need.

The key is it's very quick to, to change these parameters in our modeling software so we can easily design the most optimized, uh, generator. 

Allen Hall (2): You can really drive the weight down in sort of two ways. You can use rare earth magnets, much more powerful, and you can also remove the copper and put in aluminum for the coils, which drives weight down.

So at the end of the day, you have and. You have a very efficient design, but you can also dump the cooling system. You don't need a [00:09:00] fluid cooling system to create, for this generator to maintain its power output. 

Jason Moody: Yeah, so if we were to go tor to toe with a traditional radial system of, let's just pick 15 megawatt, we would expect to be 25% lighter,...

We discuss Statkraft's withdrawal from floating wind projects in Norway, Valero's $23 million Series A funding, and the varying quality of blade repairs in the field. The Babbitt Ranch wind farm is this week's Wind Farm of the Week.

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

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

Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

I have Phil Totaro from California and Joel Saxum down in Austin, Texas. And Rosemary Barnes will join us shortly from the Southern Hemisphere. Uh, a number of news articles this week that we want to talk about Stack Craft. Let's lead off there, up in Norway. So Norwegian energy giant Stack Craft has announced it will withdraw from the upcoming floating wind tenor for the U Sierra North area as part of a broader cost cutting strategy.

Uh, the company, which is Europe's largest renewable energy operator, we're also halt new offshore wind project [00:01:00] development to focus on what CEO, uh, Bergit Ringsted AL calls near term profitable. Strategies unquote. Like solar? No. Come on, solar, wind. There we go. And batteries In fewer markets the decision follows.

Stack craft's early announcement and may stop New green Hydrogen developments signaling a strategic shift toward more immediately profitable renewable energy investments fill. Does this slow down some of the offshore wind work, particularly up in Norway, and it does seem like. Floating will be the future here, but if Stack craft's not gonna be involved and it's right in their backyard, uh, what does this say to the industry?

Phil Totaro: It doesn't send the best signal, but it's also coming in a time when, you know, as we record this, the, the Norwegians just released, uh, four new, uh, wind lease areas with potentially up to 20 different, uh, project [00:02:00] sites. So. It seems like there's a lot of enthusiasm and obviously they've got the wind resource up there to be able to do a lot of floating offshore wind.

If they can work out with their military, you know, the radar interference and all that, uh, there's no reason they shouldn't want this capacity because it's, you know, power that they can use to balance their hydro and power that they can offload to, you know, other Scandinavian countries because there's plenty of transmission already and they're, they're already.

Planning on building more. So, um, it's just whether or not they have the appetite to put the market mechanisms in place to, to actually support these, uh, you know, these, these tenders. 

Joel Saxum: I think appetite's the right term here, Phil, when you say that because, uh, you know, and as the CEO is saying in this, in this article we're getting, we're gonna focus more on near term profitable technologies.

So doing things that they know make money, that are proven to make money. You know, we all love the idea of floating [00:03:00] wind, which is, you know, what they're, they're pulling out of this project, your floating wind project. However, nothing's really so sussed out yet. Nothing's really sorted. There's not a specific foundation that works best.

There's not, uh, a, you know, an interconnect that works best. There's not a turbine model that's out there that this is the one, this is what we run with. You don't have support from major OEMs like, you know, oh, do we pick a Siemens one or a Vestas one, a GE one for offshore? Like we have for fixed bottom offshore.

So I get it like in, in, you know, we're in a stress capital market where we're still sitting on high interest rates and, and everybody wants to do something that's more profitable for them. That's proven right now, um, in my mind is a good strategy. You know, it would be, you don't want 'em to pull out of it.

You would love to see some of the, the big guys put some of their r and d budgets and keep this floating thing moving. 'cause that's a good move for the future. But. I mean, it's all about making money and, and, and de-risking yourself. So like it's understandable. 

Allen Hall: Well, is [00:04:00] still involved in that URA North effort and they're working on one of the larger float taste floated wind turbine projects off the coast of Scotland.

Green Volt, right? Yeah. Green Volt. Right. And I'm wondering if CRA feels. Like the technology isn't developed as far as they would like it to be, and companies like Farrun, which are really heavily involved in floating, are going to do the dirty work and then everybody else is gonna follow behind their lead.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, that could be right. Because that's what, that's what's needed. Someone needs to go and put the money in this and, but it's going to be risky. Right? So it's what's your, what's your risk appetite? Um, and if we're talking about risk and offshore wind, I mean, we've seen what's happened in the last six months, a year, so someone has to really.

Uh, I, I guess the, the joke term in Wisconsin, we says, pull, pull up your big boy pants and, and go and go make this happen. So maybe that is, that is of, of our gro We've, you know, we've spoke with them on the podcast and that's what they're focusing on. So maybe it takes someone like them to [00:05:00] really make this thing happen.

Allen Hall: Well, Gros at the minute is it's discussing what type of term they wanna put offshore. This is where the Ing Yang discussion comes into play, because rag is. I don't know if they've selected them or down selected Bing Yang as one of the potential providers of turbines, but that's created a lot of chaos, at least temporarily in the UK because the United States is super concerned about a Chinese wind turbine off the 

Phil Totaro: coastline of the uk.

Joel was talking about de-risking, uh, and originally for this project, stat Craft was partnered with uh, ocean Winds, which is, um. Uh, EDPR and Eng g and Acre, uh, which was originally mainstream offshore when they originally, um, started making the, the bids and those two, uh, other groups or three technically, if you know, um, Eng G and, and EDPR.

As well as Acre. They had [00:06:00] already previously pulled out of this partnership, so you didn't have, you don't have this, this de-risking capability anymore. Stat Craft was basically having to take this whole thing on by themselves, and they probably weren't finding any other partners that were particularly interested in diving in.

With them at that point. So I think, you know, them pulling the plug, it's, it's almost like what happened. Um, you know, when, uh, with the Atlantic Shores project in the United States, you know, when, when one partner pulls out, the other partner can't really make it a go, so the other partner is gonna pull the plug and then the whole project is basically dead.

So. That's just what happens. Unfortunately, when you're not able to de-risk the project 

Allen Hall: Over in the uk, they're de-risking a couple of larger projects. The Crown of State has selected Ecuador and Gwent Glass, which is a joint venture between EDF and ESB. Uh, they've been selected as the preferred bidders for floating wind projects in the Celtic Sea.[00:07:00]

Now, each developer was awarded 1.5 gigawatts of capacity. Which is quite a bit in their respective development areas for an annual option fee of 350 pounds per megawatt. And the Crown Estate launched this fifth offshore wind leasing round in February of last year. Originally offering three areas with up to 4.5 gigawatts total capacity.

This is a big deal because you're bringing in Ecuador and E-D-F-E-S-B. And it's going to really expand the amount of energy produced from Floating Winds. So, although, um, stack Craft is not gonna be involved up north off the coast of Norway, a bunch of developers are gonna be really involved off the coast of the uk.

This has implications. I think the, the floating wind difficulty, at least the engineering difficulty is gonna be solved by the United Kingdom and maybe France, [00:08:00] don't you think, Phil? 

Phil Totaro: Yeah, I mean, France has had, you know, a couple of demonstration projects now, um, for a little while, and they just got their first kind of, people still refer to it as kind of pre-commercial.

It's like 30 megawatts worth of, uh, floating offshore capacity now with, uh. A small, small project. Um, and the second one's on the way, uh, Japan's been investigating floating foundation technology. We've even had some, some stuff here in the States with the University of Maine looking at this. I mean, everybody's been looking at floating for 15 years.

Um, but the reality of it is, it's. There's plenty of technical solutions out there. None of them have achieved commercial viability yet because nobody's been willing to invest in scaling it up. Um, and the fact that we haven't really directly involved the oil and gas companies who have, you know, abundant experience with tension like platforms, uh.

Bill confounds [00:09:00] me because, you know, if you, if you leverage the capabilities that they already have, you're gonna get them more interested because it's gonna give them an opportunity to leverage the technology that they already have heavily invested in, um, that we can use for, for, you know, a floating offshore wind platform.

So it, it's always been a bit head scratching the way that the industry's

Allen discusses the appointment of Pedro Azagra as the new CEO of Iberdrola, Pete Bierden as the new President of TAKKION, and Nicolaj Mensberg as the new CEO of PEAK Wind, along with the acquisition of the Northconnect Interconnector project by Flotation Energy and Vargronn.

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!

Takkion, a renewable energy services company, has appointed Pete Bierden as President.

Bierden will be based at Takkion's headquarters in Centennial, Colorado. He will work closely with CEO Jim Orr to lead the company's growth strategy.

Bierden brings more than twenty years of experience. He previously served as a submarine officer and Certified Naval Nuclear Engineer. He spent twenty years at General Electric, where he helped build the company's wind energy business from the ground up.

Most recently, Bierden was CEO of Driver Industrial Safety. He also held senior positions at Amteck and Keystone Tower Systems.

CEO Jim Orr says Bierden's leadership style and operational expertise make him an outstanding fit for the company.

Bierden says he's honored to join a team that's making a real impact on the energy transition.

Spanish energy giant Iberdrola has named Pedro Azagra as its new group CEO.

Azagra replaces Armando Martinez. He has been with Iberdrola for twenty-five years.

Azagra started as executive director of development, leading the company's international expansion. For the past three years, he served as CEO of Iberdrola's United States subsidiary.

He earned degrees in law and business administration from Icade in Madrid. He also has a master's degree from the University of Chicago.

Before joining Iberdrola, Azagra worked in the investment banking division of Morgan Stanley.

Jose Antonio Miranda will take over as CEO of Iberdrola's US operations. He previously served as CEO of Gamesa in China and the United States.

Peak Wind has appointed Nicolaj Mensberg as its new CEO, effective August first.

Mensberg succeeds current CEO and co-founder Michael Rask Andersen, who will remain as Chair of the Board of Directors.

Mensberg brings deep industry experience across the renewable energy value chain. His background aligns with Peak Wind's core services in operations and asset management.

Andersen led Peak Wind as CEO since co-founding the company in twenty seventeen. Under his leadership, the company evolved from a startup into a global market leader.

Andersen says he believes now is the right time to welcome fresh perspectives and leadership for the company's next growth phase.

Mensberg says he's honored to join Peak Wind during this pivotal time in the renewable energy transition.

Flotation Energy and Vargronn have completed their acquisition of the Northconnect interconnector project between Scotland and Norway.

The deal followed close collaboration on shared transmission infrastructure for the interconnector and the proposed one point four gigawatt Cenos floating wind farm off east Scotland.

Northconnect already has consent for offshore and onshore cable routes to a substation near Boddam, Aberdeenshire.

Flotation Energy and Vargronn are targeting twenty thirty-one to twenty thirty-two for first power from the ninety-five turbine Cenos project.

Project director Christopher Pearson says when operational, Cenos will be one of the largest floating wind farms in the world. It will supply clean electricity to the grid and offer a multi-point interconnector for future offshore developments.

Antoine Larvol, CTO of Windar Photonics, discusses how their continuous wave LiDAR technology enhances wind turbine performance through optimization and monitoring, increasing AEP and reducing loads, particularly for legacy turbines.

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

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow.

Alright, we're here in Phoenix, a CP, clean power, uh, 2025. So I'm, uh. Sitting with Antoine Larvol from, he's a CTO from Windar. Yep. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Uh, we've been, uh, happy enough to get actually to sit inside your booth where it's nice and qui. Quiet and isn't it nice? Yeah. We got glass behind the camera here and people are walking by, walking by, walking by.

Um, so this morning, uh, we, we talked yesterday a little bit about what wind photonics does. Yep. Of course, from our, uh, some of our other friends around the world. We've heard about some, some campaigns you've done in the United States, which have been. Really successful. So yeah, congrat good. Congratulations there.

Yeah, thank you. Um, and, and as, as a lot of things in the wind industry, Windar, photonics based in Denmark. 

Antoine Larvol: Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: So you guys, uh, bring it, bring in that Danish [00:01:00]technology. We're here, of course, bringing it to the US market at a CP, the American Clean Power Show. So welcome to the States. Thank you. Um, it's a short one, but a 

Antoine Larvol: good one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Joel Saxum: exactly. So, so I want to talk a little bit about what Windar photonics and, and it is a LIDAR based sensor, correct? 

Antoine Larvol: Yes. Right. So. We do continuous wave base, uh, lidar. Yep. Uh, main product is a two beam version mm-hmm. Where you shoot, uh, at 80 meters in front of the turbine. Mm-hmm. And you basically alternate from one beam to the other.

And measure wind speed and direction upfront, the, the turbine among others. 

Joel Saxum: Right. So we're talking about, uh, if you, if you're in the wind industry, you've ever seen these lidar units that are put actually, you're the cell mounted, correct? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So, and, and, uh, we're looking more on the optimization, retrofit monitoring side of things.

Yeah, 

Antoine Larvol: exactly. So we've never been a resource assessment company. Yeah. Or we don't look at power curve verification and stuff like that. We really [00:02:00] focus on. Retrofitting those, existing turbines. And then add value to In terms of information to, the customer, Yeah. With the mon monitoring side of things.

Yeah. And, from day one, that's been the goal of Windar Making something cheap, robust. That can just stay there and measure with good availability, wind speed, and direction coming to your turbine. 

Joel Saxum: I love it. so we wanna squeeze as much as we can outta these turbines. And you guys are increasing AEP that's, the name of the game.

Yeah. Right. 

Increasing AEP below rated. and then above rated you decrease loads. Increase uptime. and we basically do that by going on the line of the wind direction. that you then feed to the turbine controller and then we can actually adjust the, yaw position of the turbine according to our information.

So I want to talk a little bit, we, we chatted a little bit offline about the, technology behind it, right? Yep. And people in the wind industry, if you're around the wind industry around resourcing or you're around optimization, you've heard [00:03:00] lidar. Yep. You know what I mean? And, but I don't think.

A lot of people know exactly what lidar, what it does, how it does it. Yeah. What is the technical, where's the magic coming from? Exactly. It's just a black box. It's just a, technically, I guess it's just a white box. Yeah. For the wind photonics. But how do, how does the lidar work to measure actual wind speed coming into the turbine?

Antoine Larvol: Yeah, 

Joel Saxum: so 

Antoine Larvol: we basically focus laser light, and we do a focus point at 80 meters in front of the turbine. And basically there where your light concentrates on a specific location, then you hit particles in the air, pollen, water droplets, dust, whatever. Dust. Yeah. Okay. Whatever is there. And then you will, have a certain frequency of the light you emit, and that will just bounce on those particles and come back with a slight shift in frequency.

And that's doppler shift. And then. Analyzing this shift, then you can derive a wind speed along the beam Of, the, [00:04:00] lidar. 

Joel Saxum: So 

Antoine Larvol: we're 

Joel Saxum: talking about like a bunch of really, really smart trigonometry kind of 

Antoine Larvol: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have a bit of optics. Yeah. Trigonometry. Uh, and, uh, yeah, it's a bunch of optics.

Hardware, uh, software. A lot of software. A lot of software, yeah. Uh, to analyze that and squeeze as much info out of this. Right. We do, uh, you can derive wind speed, wind direction. You can look at turbulence. Mm-hmm. You can, uh, detect our wake, uh, is going on. So you can actually detect whether or not your turbine is in the wake.

Uh, and then based on that, then you will do different ing strategy in order to make the most of your turbine. Right. Decrease loads or increase, uh, outputs. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So and mean. That's what, uh, the uptime podcast we're here about. When we bring technology, we talk to. Smart people like yourself, Antoine. Thank you.

We, we want to pick the, pick out the solutions, right? Like what, how are you guys helping the wind industry? And that's the important thing here. So we've [00:05:00] talked about two, basically, kind of two tracks that you guys go down and one of 'em is optimization. Yep. And one of 'em is monitoring. 

Antoine Larvol: Yep. 

Joel Saxum: So let's, let's start with optimization.

What does that look like from wind? 

Antoine Larvol: Yeah, I mean that's a bit the unique part of wind. Uh, so we do lidar, uh, but actually the. Like this good selling product is this, uh, wind technology. So basically what it does is that we go on the line of the wind direction, uh, of the sensors from the primary secondary sensor from the turbine, and then we go on that line, read this info that they are measuring, and then, uh, correct this info according to our measurements.

Ah, okay. What's going on out there is that, you know, those, uh, devices are placed behind the rotr. So they're basically, uh, biased by the blades, basically turning in front and creating a lot of turbulence. You also, you have some effects depending on the, your misalignment of the turbine. And so basically you don't have a great [00:06:00] measurement from, from those devices.

So what we bring is that, right. We measure upfront, so we are unbiased and then modify, the information, the wind direction information, and then feed that to the turbine controller so we can actually, yo. The turbine the way we want. 

Joel Saxum: So in a really simple way, you guys are creating what is an amazing wind speed and direction sensor.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So for this WindTIMIZER we only use wind direction information. And then basically improve what the turbine is given as information about. Relative wind direction of the nacelle Right. So yaw error. and then we correct that. So we increase, energy production below rated wind speed.

And then we have different strategies above rated wind speeds, aiming at reducing loads and increasing uptime. So the way we do that is actually we introduce small yaw misalignment, depending on wind [00:07:00] speed, in order to achieve that. Especially decreased loads on, blades.

Yeah. and the drive train rate. 

Joel Saxum: So in, let's, talk a case study, right? We wanna, we always want to give examples, right? Yeah. So, so in the states we had, we talked about you guys are focusing on more, well not globally really, but you're focusing on more of like the last generation of turbines, not the brand new ones.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So we are like really focusing at the moment on all this generation of. G 1, 15, 16. Two three. Yeah. 87 97 V 80, V 82. V 90, uh, seven, uh, maybe 2 92. Okay. Like this kind of turbines. Yeah. Uh, that's been not there for, for a while. And basically where you don't have a lot of offering on how to squeeze more power.

And they're not supported anymore by manufacturers, right? Yeah. Uh, so that's where we come in and offer that to. To be able [00:08:00] to, to produce more power, decrease load. Right. So the way we do that, usually when, uh, a new customer approach us is that you will do a deployment of like five units in a, in the farm.

Mm-hmm. Uh, basically pick randomly, uh, if, uh, five turbines and then we will install, uh, technology. You install like in three, four hours you're done with installing the system. Oh, nice. On the tripod. Uh, wire that to the turbine controller. And then, uh, you will start this toggling campaign. So what we do is that we turn on the technology for 70 minutes and then turn it off 70 minutes.

This way you have a slight shift over of the period over the day. Mm-hmm. So you don't always hit exactly the same time. So in case there's, you know, any effect, recurring effect, and you go away from that, and then you will do this toggling on and off for like a period of like three, four months, depending on wind conditions.

And once you have like enough data on every wind, wind. You will analyze, uh,...

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the time explains all the wind turbines. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosemary Barnes: What's weather guard at? 

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

Rosemary Barnes: Whew. An institution. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transport 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen discusses US-UK tension over Chinese company Ming Yang's wind energy investment in Scotland, key offshore wind projects from HSM Offshore Energy and Great British Energy, Turkey's ambitious wind energy goals, and new leadership at the Global Wind Energy Council.

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!

There's tension between the US and UK over Chinese wind energy investment.

The US government has raised security concerns about plans by Chinese company Mingyang to build a wind turbine factory in Scotland.

Trump administration officials warned the UK about what they call national security risks. The factory would supply wind farms in the North Sea.

UK ministers are now reviewing whether to block the project. They're worried about cybersecurity and being too dependent on Chinese technology.

Security officials say Chinese wind turbines could contain electronic surveillance equipment. Mingyang is not state-owned, but critics worry the Chinese government could interfere.

Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes had said Scotland was open to the factory. But the Scottish Government is waiting for security guidance from Westminster.

A UK Government spokesperson said they would never let anything threaten national security. All energy investments face the highest security checks.

Construction has officially started on Belgium's major offshore energy project.

Workers cut the first steel this week at a factory in the Netherlands. They're building parts for the Princess Elisabeth hub. The artificial island will sit twenty-eight miles off the Belgian coast.

The project will transport at least two point one gigawatts of wind energy to the mainland. That's enough power for millions of homes.

HSM Offshore Energy is making high-voltage equipment at their Schiedam yard. Commercial director Hans Leerdam says this marks a key moment for European energy security.

The island will also connect Belgium to other European countries, including the UK. Final assembly will happen in Schiedam and Vlissingen.

Leerdam calls it one of Europe's most strategic energy projects moving from plan to reality.

The UK government has announced a massive boost for offshore wind energy.

Great British Energy is leading a one billion pound investment package. The money will fund wind turbine manufacturing, floating platforms, and port upgrades.

Three hundred million pounds comes from Great British Energy. The Crown Estate and private companies are adding another seven hundred million pounds.

The investment targets key regions including Teesside, South Wales, East Anglia, and Scotland. Officials say it will create thousands of skilled jobs.

The government is also offering up to five hundred forty-four million pounds through its Clean Industry Bonus. This encourages developers to invest in deprived areas.

The North East of England could receive up to two hundred million pounds. That might unlock four billion pounds in private investment.

Scotland gets up to one hundred eighty-five million pounds for ports and high-tech components.

The offshore wind expansion should support fourteen thousand new jobs over four years. Industry leaders believe this could boost the UK economy by twenty-five billion pounds by twenty thirty-five.

Turkey is planning a major expansion of its wind energy capacity.

The country aims to reach forty-eight gigawatts of wind power by twenty thirty-five.

Turkey currently has nearly fourteen gigawatts installed. That makes it the sixth largest wind power producer in Europe and twelfth in the world.

Wind energy now provides more than eleven percent of Turkey's electricity. It's the country's second-largest renewable source after hydropower.

The Turkish Wind Energy Association President says Turkey has become one of Europe's top five manufacturing hubs for wind equipment.

Turkey has already allocated an additional twenty-three gigawatts of future capacity.

The Global Wind Energy Council has appointed a new chairman.

Michael Hannibal takes over as chair for two years. He's a partner at Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Chief Commercial Officer at Stiesdal Offshore.

Hannibal says the wind industry has been delivering record growth. He wants to focus on accelerating that growth in new markets worldwide.

The Global Wind Energy Council has represented the wind industry for twenty years. Hannibal says new markets are developing on every continent.

He replaces Jonathan Cole, who led the council through a period of strong growth.

Hannibal has more than twenty years of renewable energy experience. He was previously CEO of Siemens Offshore Wind for seven years. He helped establish the world's first floating offshore wind turbine in two thousand nine.

One of Hannibal's first duties will be leading celebrations of the council's twentieth anniversary in Lisbon.

Alejandro Cabrera Muñoz, CEO and founder of Green Eagle Solutions, discusses their ARSOS platform and how it helps wind farm operators manage technical complexities, market volatility, and regulatory changes by automating turbine issue responses for increased productivity and revenue.

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!

Wind Farm operators face mounting challenges from managing thousands of diverse turbines to navigating the energy markets and constant regulatory changes. This week we speak with Alejandro Cabrera Munoz, CEO, and founder of Green Eagle Solutions. Green Eagle's ARSOS platform gives control rooms immediate responses to turbine issues, which dramatically increases productivity and captures more revenue from their turbines.

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

Allen Hall: Alejandro, welcome to the show. 

Speaker 3: Thank you, Allen. Thank you for having me here today. 

Allen Hall: so Green Eagle Solutions is in a unique space of the renewable energy marketplace, and you saw a problem several years ago, particularly in the control rooms of [00:01:00] wind operators. What is that problem that you identified?

Speaker 3: Yeah, Allen, I think it, it's, It's a challenge that, most of our customers, which are generally large operators, are facing today. But it's a challenge that have been, growing, in the past years. So first of all, it's, it goes along with the penetration of renewables in the industry, right?

So we have, due to all these many years of aggregating new wind farms and solar plants, We are seeing how the complexity, the technical complexity of operating and supervising these assets is growing exponentially, right? So we now have customers with thousands of wind turbines that have, different models, different versions of, controllers, And also different healthcare issues that they have to take care of. So the technical complexity is a fair, the first [00:02:00] factor that, it's has to be tackled from a control room, And, makes, operations quite, challenging. Along with this, we have market volatility. So in the recent years especially, we are seeing how, Negative pricing and optional markets are now affecting operations in a daily, basis. Basically in every 15 minutes you dunno if you're gonna produce or not. Up until recently it was as simple as if you had wind resource, you would produce energy from wind farms. If you had solar, you produce energy from solar plants.

It's not like that anymore. So the market is quite, volatile. that adds a lot of complexity from the commercial point of view of, Of the assets. And the last, factor that is actually becoming, an increasing challenge for everyone is the regulatory changes. So basically due to the penetration of renewable energies, what we see is that all governments, all grid operators and our market operators are constantly issuing [00:03:00] new adapt, new regulatory changes, that everyone has to adapt to no matter what.

it doesn't matter if you have an all wind farm or a newer wind farm. Or you prepared or not, like everyone has to be adapted to, to the new regulatory, changes. the three things are actually affecting, our customers and we are trying to solve all these issues, the way, the, best way that we can, right?

So most of our customers, we just have a control room full of people. they will do their best effort to accommodate these challenges. The reality is that we have to. Deal with, people, procedures, and, systems, and we, if we don't put these three things in place, it's impossible to cope up. With the complexity that we are dealing with, and that's where we come in.

Joel Saxum: I think you painted the picture of a really good problem that's not just like local to the eu, local to India, local to South America, whatever. it's a global issue, right? You have the, massive build out of different kinds of [00:04:00] technologies that need to be managed in different ways that, bring their own issues, their own delivery to the grid, those kind of things.

and then you, and as Green Eagle has, painted the picture like, Hey, we saw these issues. This is where we come in, this is where we step in. So in that, what kind of inefficiencies are you seeing in the traditional wind farm operations versus what you guys are bringing to the table now?

Speaker 3: So just to give a few examples, and I think I, I can be quite, precise on this. let's say that a wind turbine gets some fault because of, high temperature on the gearbox, and it's a. It's an automated response from the manufacturer that the ban is gonna stop for safety measures, right?

So in many cases. This is solved from the control room point. from the control room by waiting for an operator to just, follow a procedure, right? So this procedure takes a lot of time. Why? Because you are not only paying attention to one winter turbine band, you may have 2000 winter turbines, right?

[00:05:00] So you have to first identify, which is a model of winter turbine band that is affected by this issue. Then you have to go through the manual, then you have to check what are the parameters, and the whole process takes minimum half an hour if you wanna do it properly. The problem is when you have other issues like high wind speed, right?

So normally when you have high wind resource, which is basically when you can produce more energy, is when your assets suffer the most. And so they're more prone to errors, they're more prone to go get on fault. So if you take a look at these times, the country room, response time is actually gonna go up in hours, right?

So this one of the one simple example is a end-to-end full haling procedure that takes between. 20 minutes, two hours, depending on how you have a structure, your systems, people, and procedures, right? So this is the first thing that we can tackle. Like just as an example with our software, we can automate the whole process end to end.

That means that this problem is never gonna be dealt with. From an operator, This is gonna be [00:06:00] automated. This is an, this is never gonna become an issue for an operator ever again. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. And I think this lends itself to software obviously, that there's, if you look at these control rooms, if you, or especially if you looked 3, 4, 5 years ago.

It's pretty chaotic in there. And if you are on the market for electricity and the price is fluctuating and you have turbines popping on and off, you have a crisis and it's very hard to sort that out and to get the turbines up and running if you need them to be, to produce power so you can make money.

'cause ultimately we're trying to maximize the revenue to our company. And that cannot be a human response. We're too slow. Humans are too slow to respond to all this. And because we'd have to know every nuance to every turbine or solar farm makes the problem immensely impossible. So that's where you have developed a piece of software called.

ARSOS and it's a system approach to a very complicated problem. So you want to explain what ARSOS does 

Speaker 3: [00:07:00] effectively, what, what ARSOS does is to provide immediate response to whatever issue you have already a procedure to deal with, right? So let's take into account the, previous example that, that we were using, in this case.

And, there are hundreds of different cases where a wind turbine is gonna stop. Every wind turbine is gonna, can have potentially hundreds of different. Scenarios where it's gonna go on fault and require human attention or attention from remote. So the first thing that we can, provide is, immediate response time.

I think all the investment funds, IPPs or utilities, can now rely on a system instead of, relying on people. They can rely on a system that is gonna do effectively. The first phase actually is gonna do exactly the same. With immediate response time, this is what our source is all about. according to our experience, we have identified if you, could take 100% of the issues or incidents that can impact, the availability of the assets.

We have identified that at least [00:08:00] 80% of those incidents can be managed autonomously. Among that 80%, almost 75% of them can be resolved autonomously, and the other 20%. It can be just dispatched to, technicians on site so they can actually go on the turbine and fix the issue on site. So this, this is, this is our goal.

We can multiply by five the operational capacity of our customers. but along with that comes many other benefits. So the, main one, we already tackling that, right? So immediate response time with that comes, increase of productivity because we don't need operators to be doing repetitive tasks anymore, so they can actually do other.

Added value activities, but immediate response also provide with an increase of availability, which also translate into an increase of production and again, translate into additional revenue. So effectively what we're doing is to transform a traditionally thought of, center of cost, like the, it is a [00:09:00] control room.

We can optimize the control room to a point where it's no longer a center of cost. Actually an opportunity to turn that into a center of revenue. We can actually improve the operations. We can actually capture more revenue from our assets. But we can only do that through automation. 

Joel Saxum: So when you're talking with operators, okay, so I'm, right now I'm imagining Alejandro on a sales call and you're talki

Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar! We discuss China's new 20MW floating turbine by CRRC, and Nordex's patent application for modular blade assembly. Plus HeliService USA's offshore ambulance service and the recent construction delays at Atlantic Shores and Vineyard Wind.

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

Allen Hall: Our next SkySpecs webinar, if you missed the last one, about lightning protection and how to use SkySpecs, drone imaging and data, and the EOLOGIX-PING Lightning sensor to help yourself on the lightning side. You can actually watch that on the SkySpecs. Just go to SkySpecs and you can see that webinar.

It's free. All this stuff is free. It's all great stuff. All you need to do is register. You can get all this information. The next one is coming up on June 25th, 11:00 AM Eastern Time. And this next, webinar is gonna have Liam McGrath from RWE, who's a blade engineer there, and Tom Brady from SkySpecs, who handles all the cool drone technologies.

So if you haven't met Tom, you need to go to this webinar and find out what's going on. And Michael McQueenie from SkySpecs. It's the rule. Subject is when should you be scheduling your drone inspections and you shouldn't be doing it in the spring. That's really important. If you wanna save some money on your operational aspects, your [00:01:00] o and m budget, you need to be thinking about how to get your inspections done, when to get your inspections done, and what tools are available to you at different times a year.

So there's optimal times to get your drones inspected and there's suboptimal times. Suboptimal times is like March. Don't do it, then do it the previous fall. and so Joel will be there. I will be there. Don't miss it. It is June 25th. 11:00 AM and you can sign up in the show notes below. 

Speaker 2: You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by build turbines.com.

Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here's your hosts. Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. 

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Joel Saxo along and Rosemary Barnes from Australia and I've. Just been digging through all the news over the last several days.

Really disappointing news to the United States, but over [00:02:00] in China. TRRC has unveiled a 20 megawatt floating wind turbine, and it's, has a rotor diameter of 260 meters, which is not really outrageous. The CRRC press release, which is a little outrageous, let, me read you some of this, and it's called The Key Hung.

wind turbine, the key Hung, integrates multiple innovative control technologies offering four core advantages. High intelligence system, modularization, full chain collaboration. And Joel, don't we all want that? And exceptional stability. It incorporates various intelligent controls, sensing and detection technologies that design further enhances the unit's flexibility and efficiency by modularizing key system interfaces and structural components.

So there are a lot of words in this press release, but they don't say, actually say anything at all. So that's why we have Rosemary here to suss 

Joel Saxum: out. 

Allen Hall: What is happening with CRRC and a [00:03:00] 20 megawatt floating turbine? Is it really needed, Rosemary? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think I've made my thoughts clear about the, like bigger, kind of pursuit of, offshore wind turbines.

And I think that a lot of it is about prestige to be the, first with the biggest. and so I guess that this is the, first with the biggest, floating offshore wind turbine. I, yeah, I don't think that we're really ready for, that with floating offshore wind. Floating offshore wind is still in the period where we're trying to figure out what are the really important design requirements.

How are we gonna deal with some special, issues that floating offshore wind finds. So if you combine all of that with floating offshore wind, or there's all the, like the, yeah, the floating platform, the mooring mechanisms, control systems, any weird aerodynamics that are happening because of slight tilting or whatever.

There's all that sort of stuff. It's still being, learned about. [00:04:00] And at the same time, you're gonna combine that with all of the really huge blade, really huge turbine problems. I, think that. It's a little bit crazy if this is intended as, being a commercial offering, it's probably not, it's probably a learning exercise and a publicity exercise more than that.

And, maybe from that point of view, like if you go into it trying to learn everything that you can about what would happen if we, eventually go this big, then I guess that there's some value in that. but yeah, I, don't think that we're ready for, just rolling out thousands of these off the end of a production line.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you, I'm of course not an expert in Chinese maritime, GE geology. Sorry. But, there's not a whole lot of super deep water right off of the Chinese coast. The Chinese coast is all 200 meters, like in every place that you'd put like a max step in every place that you'd put a wind turbine.

So if this was to be built for a, a [00:05:00] larger. Rollout. Where is it to sell to? Brazil? Oh, Brazil. Sure. Brazil. That would make sense. That could be right. but I don't think, like if, China has very ambitious wind goals. And of course if you watch the. Any kind of news, you can see them rolling out large wind farms, left and right, onshore, offshore, all kinds of stuff.

But I don't think they actually need the floating technology to be honest with you. So it might just be a show of force. 

Rosemary Barnes: And also depths of 200 meters, that is challenging or maybe that's, I think that exceeds the current, maximum depth of fixed bottom, you could get there, but it, uses heaps of steel, the fixed, bottom, Yeah, design compared to what we assume that floating is gonna eventually achieve it. It should use less steel. But it's funny because that's one constraint that probably China of all countries doesn't really have because they have this, like glut of, steel in China or they're winding down with their, their construction.

[00:06:00] industry. So they have an oversupply of steel. a lot of countries are experiencing China, selling their steel, into those countries at really cheap prices as tariffs around the, world, not, just from the us. and in fact, the US tariffs on Chinese steel predate the Trump administration.

yeah, I, think that. Steel is one thing that China doesn't have a huge short supply of. I would agree with you that this probably isn't primarily aimed at their own domestic market. It's probably more to do with the fact that China has dominance in, every, or at least nearly every energy technology at the moment.

And looking forward if floating offshore wind is gonna grow, then they probably wanna maintain, wanna be dominant in that as well. But I think the main markets that you see talked about for floating offshore wind, yeah, South Korea and Japan, some other, places around that area where they don't [00:07:00] have a lot of good, renewable resources they can exploit.

And then there's quite a lot of interest in Europe as well, probably as much because they're just, really aggressive with their, renewable plans in general. 

Joel Saxum: Just to highlight the difference between Western countries and how China operates. One of the things they brag about in this press release is the fact that CRCC, the China Railway Construction Corporation, that single entity is saying, we have a complete wind power equipment supply chain, as in we don't need anybody else.

We've got it all solved ourself, and that's. Very unique 'cause you're just simply not gonna have that el elsewhere in the world. now can they execute on that? I don't know. But it's an interesting, it's an interesting take 

Allen Hall: and talking of offshore, if you haven't received your latest PES Wind Magazine, the new edition is out and on the cover is hella service, USA, talking about their ambulance service that they're offering on the east [00:08:00]coast of the United States.

And we were up there a couple of months ago when we met with everybody. Michael to Paul Russo, Dr. Kenneth Williams, who was with Brown University and had done all their ambulance work there. And obviously Sophie Crane. If you don't know Sophie, you're missing out. She's, she's really good, with, hella service USA, but they're offering an ambulance service.

And the thing that Joel, that blew our mind when we were there, and if you can read about it in the article, it says there's essentially two helicopters that service. The northeast of the United States from the US Coast Guard. So if you flip over your kayak in the ocean, rosemary off the, the coast, New Jersey, it may be a while, it may be several hours where someone can, help you and the US Coast Guard is just gonna pick up your carcass and take it and leave it at the front door of the hospital.

They are not skilled to provide any role paramedic services at all [00:09:00]besides just first aid care. but hella service USA is, it's a completely different model and it's, it is still shocking. At Rosemary, we were talking about. Australia, how those helicopters everywhere off the coast of Australia. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. any nice day when you could be at the beach in any part of the country, even where I go is the South coast and a lot of people there.

and yeah,...