In this episode, Rosemary and Allen discuss their experiences at WindEurope 2025 in Copenhagen, covering exhibitor highlights, offshore wind projects, industry challenges, and the evolving focus on quality and technology in wind energy. Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar!
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Rosemary Barnes and I are in Copenhagen at Wind Europe 2025 at the Bella Center, which is a full with about 15,000 visitors and 350 exhibitors. This is a massive show. It's the second largest, I would say, in Europe typically. Right? So Hamburg is bigger, but this is, this is. Still massive.
Rosemary: I haven't been to Hamburg.
This is the biggest probably conference that I've been to. I think probably, 'cause I used to go to, I used to go to a lot of European conferences, but like niche ones, you know, on specific topics like winter wind or, I don't know, various types of manufacturing. But this is, yeah. All wind and you say 350 exhibitors.
If you had told me three and a half thousand, I, I would've believed you because I feel like I have seen so, so few. I mean, I've seen so many good exhibits, but not, I haven't scratched the surface of what's here. And we've only got, I've only got one day left. You're going home, so yeah, your time's over.
We've [00:01:00] just
Allen Hall: walked. Through the hallways quite a bit and the highways to see what is here. It's a different vibe than what you would see in Australia or see in the United States. It is much more focused on offshore.
Rosemary: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And big scale offshore wind projects.
Rosemary: Yeah. But you know what the Australian NCES are all about offshore wind as well.
It's like a, a, a weird thing that those of us. Working in the industry, you know, in operations. Can't quite get our head around how little people talk about the kind of wind energy that we actually have. Um, but here in Europe, obviously they do actually have offshore and a lot of the future development will be in offshore.
So it makes sense here.
Allen Hall: Bristol's here. R B's here. Ge Renova. Vestus. Of course, they all have massive displays.
Rosemary: Za not a lot. Nordic
Allen Hall: had some. Yeah. New, new items.
Rosemary: I haven't seen much, um, Chinese presence here, like
Allen Hall: almost none. Yeah.
Rosemary: Which this time, time surpris me a little bit. [00:02:00] Yeah.
Allen Hall: And there's not a lot of American presence here either, besides ge Renova as the American, but they're sort of split, right?
They're all over the world.
Rosemary: Americans are busy right now. There's stuff going on at home
Allen Hall: just a little bit. Sure. Uh, but I, uh, I think some perspective there would be good as we get going, because I'm gonna, I'm bringing the American perspective, Rosie, you're bringing the Australian perspective a lot of.
Uncertainty about the United States at the minute. Uh, much talk of aren't you super concerned about what's happening in America? And I said, it's just another day in America really. And uh, what you read in the papers is not necessarily what's happening on the ground, uh, but I think other, and Europeans have a different perspective and that's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Allen Hall: Uh, but it does lead to some weird discussions and maybe Australia, well, you, Australia has a similar problem with America at the moment, but. It, it's, it's still, it's, it feels real. But in the United States, I can just tell you it doesn't, if you talk to the average citizen, [00:03:00] nothing happened yet. No.
You're much
Rosemary: more relaxed. Everyone else is, um, is panicking out much, much more. Yeah. Other than cutting the
Allen Hall: vacations and yeah,
Rosemary: I don't think we're panicking in Australia. Um, but because we're probably amongst the least affected outta the rest of the world, but it's just like, I'm still like refreshing news.
Speeds to see, oh, what else? What else has happened? 'cause you know, the global implications could, is an interesting experiment, is the way someone put it to me recently.
Allen Hall: Yeah. The experiment will probably be short. The issue about, uh, procurement of parts and crossing borders has come up during the show quite a bit.
Yeah. If you're gonna be selling things in the United States, do we need to be having an office in the United States or do we even think about it because two days later it's all gonna stop. I'm gonna have spent all that money. Uh, I'm not sure there's a good answer for that. I gotta ask that quite a bit.
Yeah. Should we, moving to America,
Rosemary: if I was a manufacturer that was worried about, um, yeah. My just [00:04:00] manufacturing facility isn't in the US and I was worried about tariffs, I would. Find it really hard to say, yeah, let's make a manufacturing facility in the US because like you said, no one knows is this, how long are these tariffs gonna stick around for?
Yeah, I mean, it's still at least 50% chance that the real purpose was to bring people to the negotiation table, right? Maybe they'll be over soon. You can't really invest in like, you know, like physical manufacturing facilities in that sort of uncertainty. So I, I. Don't think that it's going to, in the near term, attract a lot of, uh, yeah.
Outside companies to manufacture in the US if they weren't before.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I, I agree with you wholly on that. The, the style of show we were here two years ago. We had a wonderful time in Copenhagen, uh, what we noticed two years ago. Was a lot more technology companies. I would say there were more robotics companies, inspection [00:05:00] companies, more on the operations and maintenance side.
There was still obviously the, the shield builders and the, uh, model pile installers and all of that. Uh, but there was much more new technology things happening. Very little of it this time. Hmm. Uh, notice the same thing at American Clean Power O and m or OM and S in Nashville a couple of weeks ago. Uh, much more.
Uh, about keeping the turbines either operating at peak efficiency or on the development side, like we need to get to turbines in the ground now. And this show is, I think, representative of that in the sense that Europeans are more offshore than onshore, but the deployment, deployment, deployment, we're just trying to rapidly Europe's, trying to rapidly deploy gigawatts out in the ocean.
Which is one of the most complicated ways to build a turbine, but Europe has the, the capability to do it. Look, walking around this show, it's, it's evident like the [00:06:00] process is in place, the tools are in place, that people are in place to make offshore wind extremely successful.
Rosemary: Yeah, it's really interesting, the contrast between Europe, it was just.
Doing it versus the US who seem convinced that it's impossible to do offshore wind. It's like, well, hello. Like, look across the, at the ocean and you can see that it's possible and can be cost effective in the right, um, circumstances. So, yeah. Uh, interesting contrast. Mm-hmm.
Allen Hall: And, uh, just, uh, walking around some of the things that I noticed were on, on the building and the deployment, uh, tools to make it faster, shorter times to assemble some of these turbines to, to get more gigawatts in with less cost.
That is a huge emphasis too, so that the tools are better, the technology's better, the quality systems are better, the reporting is better. All the pieces that were just kind of left. On the sidelines for a while are now coming back into focus and you see an emphasis on the quality of the turbines. It's one of the discussion points on the floor was, [00:07:00] Hey, let's, let's get the turbine development cycle down.
We're not building so many new turbines, but we're making the ones we have much more efficient and much more reliable.
Rosemary: Yeah, no, I think that's a. Correction that needed to happen. It was the technology. I love technology development. It's my thing, right? But it was happening too fast to, you know, rushing, rushing through new technologies and you know, making them bigger and bigger before the previous one had been fully understood.
And so you kind of like get ahead of yourself. And we have got lots of, uh, quality problems, warranty costs blowing out. So it makes sense that you would see less emphasis on new technology and more emphasis on, you know, incrementally and, um, just categorically removing quality problems and risks from the existing.
Uh, yeah. That what we've already got.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And the weather in Copenhagen has been,
Rosemary: it's ridiculous. It's so dated. It makes me hear like, why did I, why did I ever struggle to with the weather when I lived here? It's, uh, [00:08:00] it's insane. Yeah.
Allen Hall: I don't know what it is in south. Here, it's about 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Rosemary: Yeah. It's been, uh, 10 degrees, no, like thir 13, 15 degree maximums. Um, just beautiful, clear skies. Haven't seen a drop of rain. No
Allen Hall: rain. Yeah. Crazy.
Rosemary: Yeah, it's, it's been lovely.
Allen Hall: It's been great. And one of the things I thought I would see more of here, because it's a little cooler here than it is in the states at the moment, is, uh, many, many more companies looking at deicing systems because that seems to be where a lot of power is lost.
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