In this episode, Glenn Aiken and Eelko May from LiftWerx share how their pioneering, crane-less wind turbine repair solutions are transforming the industry with cost-effective, eco-friendly, and efficient approaches to major component exchanges and offshore wind maintenance. Visit https://liftwerx.com/ for more!

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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're joined by Glenn Aiken, president and co founder at LiftWerx, and Elke May, managing director at LiftWerx. Based in Canada, LiftWerx is leading the way in developing craneless wind turbine repair systems.

As many of Turbine repairs have traditionally depended upon large cranes that are difficult to transport and are vulnerable to wind delays. And this is where LiftWork comes in because they are disrupting the status quo. They have pioneered ingenious smaller lifting solutions that are cost effective, efficient, and eco friendly.

Glenn and Eelko welcome to the program. Thanks, Al. Yeah, thanks very much, Al. So as we all know doing major component exchanges is a difficult task. And, or doing a rotor removing the rotor, those kinds of things usually involves massive cranes. And in the United States, and even in Europe times getting a hold of a crane big enough to do the job is one expensive and two, usually there's a narrow window when you can actually get access to that crane.

This is where LiftWerx comes in and I really want to hear about, it's really a couple of different things you're working on. Obviously the gen hook and the rotor hook, but now you're into offshore. So I think that's a cool offering because there's going to be a, not a lot of work offshore in the United States coming up in which is going to need help.

So I want to hear about what you guys are seeing out in the world and how LiftWerx fills that void.

Glen Aitken: If I look back 10 years. Because I've been working in wind energy for around 20 years we've seen a massive rapid growth in the size and weight of wind turbine components we've also seen just a huge volume of wind turbines installed over the last decade and quite frankly, crane requirements have also, You're you know, increase just to meet the demand.

Both, both the, demands in height and weight, but also just the volume demand. Um, myself I came out of the heavy crane industry. I worked there since the early 90s. And, Really started to see customers were in a lot of pain over, over crane costs and also crane logistics.

And so we, we tried to come up with a solution that would solve a lot of that pain. And what we're seeing now is that there's a huge transition going on especially in North America at the moment where we're seeing that probably 50 percent now of major component replacements are being done with uptower cranes as compared to traditional cranes.

Joel Saxum: It makes absolute sense, right? So you guys have developed this technology based on seeing the struggles of asset owners and other, ISPs and stuff in the world, because, hey, we've got to swap this one component out. We've got a crane, over here, it may cost you 50 or 75.

I've seen insurance cases where it's a hundred thousand dollars to mobilize a crane, right? And that's just to get it there. And once you get it there, then it's day rate after day rate. And then if you get a little bit of wind and it's stand down. And so those are things are painful, but it also affects, the business interruption and getting those assets back up in order, getting that energy onto the grid.

So it affects all of us. It's not just a, a little bit of a money problem for one person. You guys have developed your own solutions in house. If you need to make adjustments, someone has a specific problem, there's a new model out or something of that sort. You're engineering it yourselves.

But the way you guys got to being a company like this is you Seeing the pain points of the wind industry and adjusting to it.

Glen Aitken: Yeah, that, that's correct. For me personally, I before starting Lift works I I met a customer that was in a tremendous amount of pain having just exchanged a gearbox on a GE turbine.

Something that's being done every day. But it walked me through the woes of this particular gearbox exchange where. It wasn't just, winter time. He was on a wind farm where they had like close to 20 feet of snow accumulation over the course of the winter. So it's not just the getting the crane mobilized.

It was also blowing about a quarter million dollars worth of snow. Just to get the crane in there. And it goes on and on. And at the time I was the R& D director at Mammoet, which is a, Dutch global heavy lift contractor. And he said to me, he says, Glenn, he says, can't you figure out a way to exchange a gearbox without a big crane?

And that, that question really had a huge effect on me. Yeah. Why not? This customer clearly wanted that and needed that. And. Just thought about the scalability of that. If it can solve his problem, it could solve the problems of a lot of other people as well.

Joel Saxum: Your technology, you guys are using it onshore, offshore, and Eelko will touch on the offshore side of things as well.

But, you're designed to solve problems. One of the ones that always comes to my mind, and this is the exact thing you talked about. I'm from the northern part of the United States, up in Wisconsin. I deal with road bans and freeze and all these different things, right? And or, you get into the western states, like in the BLM territory, where you have certain bird species that you can't, or raptor seasons, you can't go on, you can't leave the pad.

I don't need to leave the pad with the LiftWerx crane. I can roll up with just a couple pickups, or pickups, bigger trucks. But I don't have a, to put crane mats out and all these different things. So you guys are solving a lot of problems here. In the onshore world, this is a curiosity for people listening as well.

When you show up with a crane, a big crane, you show up with sometimes 10, 12 truckloads of stuff and moving materials and mats and you have to sometimes mobilize other equipment just to build the equipment. When you guys show up onshore, what does that look like? Hey, LiftWerx is here. They're rolling into site.

What kind of equipment do you show up with? How many trucks does it take?

Glen Aitken: It also varies. Small repairs require less equipment, larger repairs require more equipment. I think our smallest footprint is if we're just doing something as simple as a generator exchange for generator changes, it's one truck.

And it's a truck 40 foot container on the back. And in that container, we've got all the tools all the interface equipment and all the crane equipment to exchange a generator. You don't need any permits because it's, nothing's oversized, nothing's overweight. So we can just mobilize and go.

And for customers, they can just call us up and if they want that service, it's like ordering pizza. It really is that simple. We just have to get in. In a driver and hop in the truck and drive to that site. And what's interesting, when it's that minimalistic, we can drive from Massachusetts to California in four days and we can still do the job more cost effectively and more timely than local contractors can do in California.

Just because we're coming with so little equipment and we're so nimble for bigger repairs. If you're doing something like pitch bearings where the rotor has to come down, we still need a small tailing crane. Cause you have to, you have to trip the rotor.

So you are coming with a small crane but that small crane is usually just a couple of trucks. We're coming with a lot of other ground tooling, like hub stands, et cetera. So I think. At the very most, like all the crane equipment up tower and down tower, it might be about 10 trucks. But by comparison, if you're doing it traditionally, you would be there with maybe 25 trucks.

Or more like what we're seeing on really big turbines now, it could be 50 trucks. If you see some of these big roller cranes coming with all kinds of superlift, canoe weight and everything else, like it's for big turbines that the repairs require big cranes.

Eelko May: And I think That's a key pillar of our business that we show up with maybe a fifth or even a 10th of the equipment that you would need with traditional cranes.

And that's true for both onshore and offshore where, you need to mobilize huge vessels, huge jackups, huge cranes to change a really small part. And yeah, but in, That's just not right. If you can minimize that, then there's always a good business case behind it.

Joel Saxum: Okay, Eelko, so let's talk about that offshore game a little bit now.

We're sitting in North America. Glenn, you're in North America as well. So our offshore industry is very early game, right? I know I've just seen some videos from South Fork, and you look at it, and you're like, Oh, fantastic, we've got some utility scale wind farms out there. But it's just one right now, right?

They're coming. Now, you guys over in the North Atlantic, Northern Europe, you've been doing offshore wind for a long time, so you guys have got quite a bit of experience over there. There's a big,

Thorbjørn Rasmussen and Michael Drachmann Haag of Polytech discuss the company's new onshore leading edge protection (LEP) product, designed to be more flexible and easier to install than their previous offshore version. Get an inside look at the technical details and customer-focused approach behind Polytech's latest wind industry innovation. Visit https://www.polytech.com/ for more!

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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com

Joel Saxum: Okay, guys, we're recording here. We're live right now at blades USA 24. We're sitting in the area where there's some coffee and some conversations, ISPs, asset owners, some blade design engineers, and of course, a lot of solution providers. I'm here with Polytech came over from Denmark on a world tour.

You're heading back to Denmark. You're going to OMS in San Diego, so we'll be over there. Okay. So I've got Thorbjørn Rasmussen, chief commercial officer over at Polytech and also Michael Drakmann Haag. I got it, right? Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. So chief technical officer. So we have two of the great minds from the Polytech team here right now.

Polytech, while they do a lot of different solutions they have some lightning protection things, they sell to OEMs, sell to asset owners, all the above, out of Denmark. They're really known for the L shells. L shells is a product that if you're dealing in wind turbine maintenance at all, you know that the leading edge is a problem and the L shells were developed for offshore use originally, correct?

And they have been installed some onshore turbines, some high erosion areas, or even people that are like, you know what? I think this is the solution. I don't have to touch my leading edges for 10, 15, 20 years. I'm putting the big stuff in. So you guys have been behind the scenes, behind the curtain, working on another kind of version of that, but adjusted specifically for onshore.

Yes, tell us about that.

Michael Drachmann Haag: Yeah, so we've taken all of the great learnings that we've had on the yellow onshore, offshore products, and then we've taken and built. On those innovations. And then we designed a product that then is easier to install comes at a lower price point as well. And really sets aside from the more, you could say more complicated stuff that you get out in the industry.

But while still having the the great performance and also then we don't need the material to cure at site, which we often see with coatings and other products. So I think we really try to say that. All of the good things we have from the offshore, we build in that, that into an offshore product.

And yeah.

Joel Saxum: So I would say, as you thought, so driving this market, primary market research, as we call it, of course, in the commercial world, did you have asset owners come to you and say, hey, this is great, but we'd like this?

Thorbjørn Rasmussen: Absolutely. We have been cooperating a lot with the ISP out there, getting feedback for installation method and and what was actually difficult or less easy for the, let's say the premium version.

And then asset owners is when they, Take the decision very shortly sometimes they want to run a campaign So it should be easy accessible and so forth and all that feedback has gone back to Michael and the department and try to make sure that was incorporated in the solution And we can elaborate more on this one.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah, but I would say that it's feedback from the last five years from the field all over the world. Yeah, the best kind of feedback. X. What's happening. Empirical data from the field is what we want to change things on. Exactly. We could test in a lab all day, and that's great. We need to do that.

But when we get results back from the field, that's what we want. So let's talk a little bit about the differences between the new Onshore product and what the L looks like. Offshore product was or is still, of course it's still offered.

Michael Drachmann Haag: I think that the primary part that really sets it aside is the thickness of the material itself.

So the thickness of the material on the offshore product is thicker and thereby also having high performance, but it also entails that we need to tailor make that product into the specific blade. So it really provides a high performance, the highest performance in the industry. But it had to be tailor made to a specific blades.

Now we set aside with a thinner product that is more flexible and can be installed faster and can actually also be installed. Let's say it's a more, it's not going to be tailor made to the specific blade, meaning it can be installed on all blades directly out of the box.

Joel Saxum: Oh, that's fantastic.

Michael Drachmann Haag: And that's, I think that's really is one of the things that sets aside.

What we then took as innovations as well is that we have the split liner on LA offshore. And we took that great innovation and then we transferred that to a lawn show for ease of installation as well. That's huge.

Joel Saxum: I want to touch back on the point of being able to install on different parts of a fleet.

So in the United States, of course, we have large wind farms. That's a hallmark of kind of the market over here. And in those large wind farms, you'll see sometimes, we deal with it at WeatherGuard quite often, you'll see sometimes, four different manufacturers of blades and two or three different subtypes of blades in a specific wind farm.

And we just dealt with this one in an on one product. So if you have say let's take an example of GE, the new GE generation turbines, the two Xs, right? Two five, two eight twos. They're regularly come with 116 meter blades and 100 or 116 meter rotors, not blades, sorry, and 127. And Within those two sub models, you also have TPI can make your blades, LM can make your blades.

There's a bunch of different manufacturers and there is little discrepancies between them. So if you had to have a custom made solution such as the L shells, the or the offshore shells, it would be a little bit more difficult. Now with the onshore version, you're saying, Hey guys, you want to do a capital campaign?

You want to install on a hundred turbines? Here's the product. It'll work on every one of them. Yeah.

Michael Drachmann Haag: You just need to order the number of meters you need. And then the final adjustment right at the tip where there's a big curvature on the blade. Yeah. That's the point where you do a small modification, but that modification can be done on site.

Perfect. So perfect. That really either blade make or turbine model. It really just can be fixed on anything.

Joel Saxum: So let's talk a little bit more about the technical details of leading edge protection. From an expert's standpoint, we regularly hear, you should put on four meters, you should put on six meters, you should put on 10 meters.

You could do two meters of shells or three meters of shells and this much of a tape or this much of a coating. If you were, if you had a wind farm, and I know every one of them is different, say I'm going to put you in the middle of Texas. How many meters of this new product do you think you'd put on?

Michael Drachmann Haag: It really depends on your specific turbine, right? So the bigger turbines will also require more, a bigger length, a longer length of protection. But what we typically do, and we can do that for any site in the world, we can offer a calculation, a specific calculation for that specific site, that specific turbine, that allows you to exactly predict What do you need?

And we will then be able to sell you exactly what you need. No more, no less. Then there might be some some campaigns where you fix it, fix the number to installing 10 meters, because that fits within a day of working day. And then it might be that is the right option for that specific site. It really depends based on the customer.

But I think we try to deliver the calculations behind, but also the product that can then fulfill that.

Joel Saxum: So if an asset owner or an ISP or an asset owner and ISP in conjunction, contact Polytech to say, Hey, we're looking at your leading edge protection solutions. You guys can also offer the customer success first support part of that too.

Hey guys, we believe through calculation that this is how much you need. So when you're contacting you guys, you're contacting experts in LEP.

Michael Drachmann Haag: Yes. They'll get a report that then says what is the expected length you need, but also what is the expected repairance was. If there are any repair intervals.

So that means that they can already now plan the predicted maintenance. Yeah. So when do you need to go and look at the blade again?

Joel Saxum: Yeah.

Michael Drachmann Haag: And when do you then need to maybe plan for repair?

Thorbjørn Rasmussen: Okay.

Michael Drachmann Haag: Again, depending on site conditions and terminal conditions.

Thorbjørn Rasmussen: Just a little caveat to this calculator. It's based upon two heavy input.

The one is 20 years of weather data from NASA. Simply put into a database. And then correlate it with many hours in the wind erosion tester, sorry, the rain erosion tester. And then combining, of course, with verification on let's do this.

A 107-meter mold at the LM factory in Sherbrooke, France has been damaged and LM in Denmark faces significant layoffs. Researchers at TU Delft develop noise-reducing "Muteskin" technology. The U.S wind industry suffers from shortage of skilled welders.

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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: Alright, Joel, so we seem to have eaten our weight in barbecue in the last three days.

Joel Saxum: Yes.

Allen Hall: That is a literal fact.

Joel Saxum: Now should I tell you the perfect barbecue plate order? If you're in Texas and you're getting barbecued, this is what you want. You want a two meat plate, you want brisket, you want a jalapeno cheese sausage, you want fried okra, and some mac and cheese.

That's it.

Allen Hall: We were sitting with some Danish folks last night and trying to explain what okra was or is. And then I thought, I betcha Rosemary doesn't know what okra is either. Have you had okra before, Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, we have it. Yeah, I haven't eaten it a lot, but you can, yeah, it's in the supermarkets, usually.

Yeah.

Allen Hall: Does it have a taste? Can you describe what the taste of okra is for those who have been uninitiated?

Rosemary Barnes: It's not something that I eat often. I've tasted it, but I I don't even really remember. I know that it gets if you don't do it well, it gets slimy. That's its biggest crime. It has to be well cooked, otherwise it's a slimy mess.

Allen Hall: Now. So we went to our restaurant and Joel and I didn't say anything to our waitress. It was a nice restaurant. It was a barbecue restaurant, of course. We're in Texas. But the waitress came up and immediately associated Joel with Texas, even though he's from Wisconsin and then associated me with being an outsider.

Now, I was born in Nebraska. I'm a lot closer to Texas than Joel, but I was seen as being an East Coast person. Immediately, I thought, oh my gosh, I think the Massachusetts is starting to show on me.

Joel Saxum: It's the glasses. I think.

Allen Hall: Is it the glasses? You think that makes me look Danish?

Rosemary Barnes: Don't you have glasses too, Joel?

I'm looking at you both.

Joel Saxum: Allen's looks way too smart. That's what it is. Or they can smell the east coast on you. I don't know what it was, but she knew right away. She's like, where are you from? Northerner. Yankee.

Allen Hall: Rosemary has been jet setting all over the world, and, which is awesome, but When she's gone, then we have all these questions. We just hold, hold until she comes back. And meanwhile everything had happened at LM at the same time, and Rosemary wasn't even around to, to ask what's going on.

But let's talk about the most important one first right now, which is that in Sherbrooke, France, the LM factory 107 meter mold was broken somehow. And it's really thrown a kink into the works over at Sherbrooke, because There's not that many mulches like you can pull out a spare mold and start making blades Do you have you heard what actually happened in Sherberg?

Did they? How do they damage this mold? And how would you damage a mold? Maybe importantly is like, how could you damage a mold like this?

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, there's all sorts of ways that you can damage a mold. Obviously you can drop something heavy on it or drive something into it or that they do eventually wear out though.

It doesn't sound like that. That's what's happened here. So yeah, obviously, I would say, yeah, it's obvious that there was an accident of some sort that involved some sort of blunt force trauma to the mold. And maybe not blunt, maybe it was sharp. I don't know. But anyway, the mold is damaged enough that it's It's going to take some time to repair and when you only have, one or a small number of lines of manufacturing, then that has a significant impact.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And it's interesting too, because it doesn't just impact the LM factory. People think, Oh, the LM factory. I've actually seen on LinkedIn a ton of the technicians from Dogger Bank where they were supplying a lot of these blades looking for jobs because yes, they were furloughed. So a lot of them will come back, but some of these guys are subcontractors and technicians out there that.

They don't know if they'll come back and it's getting to be busy season for anybody offshore that's a contract worker. So they're looking for projects.

Rosemary Barnes: Is it plausible that this is the only thing that has caused that? It's just it's wild that, like they were just. a blade was coming off the line and then being driven straight out to the wind farm to be installed.

It's not normally that tight, so maybe this was the straw that broke the camel's back, but it would be surprising to me if the blame rested solely on the shoulders of whoever, whoever damaged this mold.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, no, you're a hundred percent correct. They had vessel issues and some other things out there, but as those things started to spool up and snowball.

On that project. There's a lot of people out there that are looking for work.

Allen Hall: How do you build a mold quickly? Rosemary, is there a way, or do you just say, you know what, it's going to be 90 days.

Rosemary Barnes: There have actually been a lot of improvements in the mold manufacturer because, for a long time, the design, the building of the mold, the procuring of the mold was basically the critical path for a new blade designer.

It used to take. say roughly six months, maybe longer for such a big mold to get the mold made. And so it was always, yeah, like I said, the critical part, you had to lock in the blade geometry quite early on so that you could get the mold made. But now they are starting to use 3d printing and composites.

So instead of, machining the entire mold, they can 3d print a framework and then. Lay composites in it, and then I think that they use 3D yeah, manufacturing to to, make the surface perfect and that's a lot faster, but it's a huge mold. So I don't think that, it's going to happen instantly.

And usually the molds are not manufactured in the same place that they're needed. I, for example, worked on a project where we were. Desperately waiting on our mold to arrive so that we could get started making our blades and then it just fell off a ship in the ocean. And and then, like it was a big, it was a big deal that caused some problems.

So yeah, stuff can happen and it takes a long time.

Allen Hall: Wait a minute. Timeout, timeout. Did that really happen?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I was only peripherally involved with that one. So there was definitely, project managers who were more, more bothered by that occurrence than I was.

But there was, the number of times that my blades on the way to site would get, the truck would roll over and the blade would end up in a ditch and you're like, okay so it's one thing. We've got to get the blade out of the ditch, which is not that easy. Always in the middle of winter, of course, because I worked in de icing.

And then you gotta figure out is it broken as well. And, like when you're working with prototypes, you only have three blades.

Allen Hall: So what happens to the mold that falls off the ship, Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: It's bobbing around somewhere in the Atlantic, that's my assumption.

Joel Saxum: That's what happens. That happens all the time.

Container ships lose containers all the time. They just bloop.

Philip Totaro: If they can salvage it, they do, but most of the time they can't salvage it, it's too deep.

Allen Hall: So they just let it go?

Rosemary Barnes: It wouldn't have been in a container, obviously, but.

Allen Hall: How much is it going to cost to make another 107 meter Mold?

Philip Totaro: Several millions.

Allen Hall: Yeah, one million, five million.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, quite a few, but bear in mind, they are like a wear, wear part, right? You do expect to replace them. So they would have brought forward the replacement of this one. I don't know by how much, I've got no idea where they're, where they're at in their cycle, but it's not like you just buy one set of molds and use that for the entire lifetime of the blade when it's something that they're, making so many others as this one.

So yeah, it's impossible to say if it was. small deal or a big deal. Obviously it's not a small deal. Otherwise if they were just about ready to replace it, then they would have the next one ready to go. So obviously they weren't expecting it's life to be up just yet, but.

Allen Hall: It's life is over now.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It is interesting to think like what's happened to it, that they couldn't repair it. Cause if you just dropped a hammer on it and bash the hole, you'd obviously be able to repair it pretty well. It's not like totally straightforward cause you do need to make sure that the surface is perfect.

But yeah. Yeah I'm wondering if maybe Gantry just, smashed down, dropped on it, and bent the whole thing in half, or, it's got total speculation, obviously, but it is amusing to wonder what happened, and what happened. The vibe in the factory was like, as that was happening and afterwards, it yeah.

Joel Saxum: The person who did it.

Can you come to the office, please?

Allen Hall: Just walk out.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. You might as well. No, not in France and France.

Ørsted forms long-term charter with Cadeler for a new wind turbine installation vessel, Quinnbrook Infrastructure Partners successfully closes of its $600 million Quinnbrook Valley of Fire Fund, and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board consolidates its offshore wind holdings into its dedicated global offshore wind platform, Reventus Power.

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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com.

Offshore wind developer, Ørsted, has signed a long term charter with Cadeler for a new A class wind turbine installation in Vessel, the hybrid vessel can transport and install both turbine foundations and the turbines themselves and has a capacity for six double XL monopile foundations or seven complete 15 megawatt turbine setups per trip.

The partnership extends Ørsted and Cadeler's collaboration as the offshore wind industry scales up to meet ambitious targets. Now, Phil offshore developers and ship developers make a lot of sense here just because of the lack of ships and the, all the pressure to try to lock in ship time.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, absolutely.

And given some of the past experience Ørsted's had with lack of vessel availability, it was part of what they claimed was the rationale for pulling out of some of the projects in the U. S. as well. Was lack of vessel availability. So this gives them something dedicated and assumes that they're obviously also going to have a big pipeline of projects to be able to go justify, spending, I'm conservatively thinking about 225 million on an installation vessel of that size.

So, this is it's a great deal and it helps certainly provides certainty for Kettler as well who, Also, I just got through their merger last year with Anetti. So this, it's I think this is a great thing that that both companies are going to be able to benefit from.

And it certainly brings Ørsted some certainty on a vessel capable of deploying, what is currently the latest generation of Western developed technology.

Joel Saxum: So Cadeler has four existing vessels and six next gen new builds on order, right? That makes them the world's largest wind turbine installation vessel operator.

And what this does by Ørsted saying, we will put a charter on one of them from 27 to 2030. So that's a four year long charter. You see this in the SOV market as well, but a lot of times the SOV market, they're a little bit more extended because they're going to say we own this wind farm. We're going to be operating it for the next 10, 15 years.

Sometimes you see SOV contracts like that for 10, 15 years. I've seen them through a couple of years ago. I saw some through 2038. That we're on contract, right? So that's enough money or promise for a company like Cadeler to build something, right? SVACT has done a bunch of things in that sort. Ørsted coming, of course, off the tail end of a lot of the installation projects that they've done.

Struggling, scrambling to find these vessels, saying, you know what, no, we're just going to sign an agreement. We want one, we're going to have it for four years,

Allen and Joel speak with Jatin Sharma from NARDAC, an insurance broker specializing in complex renewable projects. As a boutique firm, NARDAC aims to bridge knowledge gaps between insurance capital providers and renewable companies to facilitate optimal coverage terms amidst the market's rapid evolution and emerging risks. Visit https://nardac.com/ for more!

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!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with my co host, Joel Saxum. Our guest today is Jatin Sharma, a managing partner at NARDAC. NARDAC is an independent wholesale broker, which navigates the relationship between insurance carriers and retail brokers.

And as the turbulent as the insurance market is at the moment, NARDAC may be your key to getting there. Success weathering the insurance storm. NARNAC is a specialist for large, complex projects that includes a focus on renewable energy. Whether you're an original equipment manufacturer, a developer building a wind farm, or an asset owner, NARNAC helps the industry understand the risks.

Jatin, welcome to the program.

Jatin Sharma: Thanks for having me.

Joel Saxum: So Allen and I of course in the lightning world and wind and with the podcast and the networks that we have, we talk to people about failures and fires and gearboxes and all these different things. Do you see the like macro changes, right? So I say this because I've talked with people in the insurance world or in the, on the risk world on the IPP side that say, yeah, our premium is going up on this site.

Or our deductibles are starting to increase here for this reason. And to me, it seems like that's more of a, like a micro okay, that's specific to this project, this technology, this site, mostly it's this site but with better communication strategies in a more I would say a more integrated insurance market.

Do you see the premiums or the deductibles starting to change? And let's just, it's for ease of use. Let's focus on like the U S onshore market.

Jatin Sharma: If we did like a. a three to five year time horizon with today versus, three to five years ago. I'd say that we've probably seen an increase of about 40 percent on the price paid per megawatt for wind operators in the US.

And that, that would be my kind of average number, across a portfolio and that's on a risk adjusted basis. And you might say, wow, 40%, that's a lot. That's pretty material. What does that do to your OPEX? What does that do to valuations? I think it's important to put it in context that insurance is directly linked to the cost of capital.

So in the same way that, five years ago, if you told me you had a million dollars and you're going to put it in the bank account, you probably got to get a quarter percent interest, maybe half a percent, on lowest risk opportunity. Now you go and put it in, maybe you can get 5. 5%. In the same way, insurance will have turned around and said if five years ago, for every 100 you were giving me, and I was giving you back 55 to 65 in claims, payments, let's say loose numbers here, that is no longer an acceptable return, I want to be giving you, I want to be getting 150 and I want to, not give back more than 50 to 75.

Fives. In that sort of ratio and it's the law of large numbers. So there are many sites that have zero claims and every now and again,

Allen and Joel talk to Laurent Zimmerli, Vice President of Customer Experience at Voliro. Voliro is a Swiss company that creates drones and robotics to transform the industrial inspection and maintenance processes. Their flagship "Voliro T" drone is designed for stable and controlled contact with surfaces, enabling efficient inspection of wind turbines including non-destructive testing and lightning protection system testing. Visit https://voliro.com/ for more!

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!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Laurent Zimmerli, Vice President of Customer Experience at Voliro. And Voliro is a pioneering Swiss company applying drones and robotics to transform inspection and maintenance processes.

Founded in 2016 out of ETH Zurich's Autonomous Systems Lab, Voliro has quickly become a leader in industrial inspections and non destructive. Testing their flagship offering is the Voliro T drone known for its stability and reliability in confined spaces. Thanks to its omni directional control. We're all welcome to the program.

Laurent Zimmerli: Thanks Allen. Thanks for having me. It's great to be on the show today.

Joel Saxum: We had this conversation. Okay. We're fresh off of OMS and blades and people talking. Lightning protection has been. Huge. Everybody's talking about it. Lightning protectionist. Weather Guard lightning tech, that's what we do, right?

We're talking StrikeTape to people all the time. The first thing we ask them is, when was the last time you got your lightning protection systems tested? And a lot of times we get this glassy eyed look. Do we do that? They look at someone else and pull their phone out Do we do that? This is, this, and this is one of the reasons we want to talk to you.

We want to touch on Voliro and all of the offerings you guys offer, because I know you're working on NDT things. You're working on a lot of cool stuff, because you've solved a base root problem. So let's jump into that. The base root problem of flying drones and being in contact with surfaces.

Laurent Zimmerli: Yeah, that's exactly, that's actually how it started back in 2016 at ETH Zurich as a research project.

So we definitely didn't think about testing lightning protection systems of wind turn turbines back then, because it was mainly about what you just explained. It was how can we create a drone that can establish contact in a stable and controlled way with a surface or an object? If you're looking at a, like a conventional multi copter drone, whenever it moves sideways or forwards or backwards, the whole drone tilts in the direction of the movement.

That's basically how it works. The, like the back prop spin, spin harder and then it tilts and then it moves, which completely, which is the perfect way of moving. That's how a helicopter works as well, right? Now, if you're in motion it's not a problem in terms of stability because you're in motion.

However. If you want to push against the surface, or if you want to apply force against an object, the vehicle will not move. And if it tilts, it becomes unstable. And at some point, if you push too hard, it just basically falls over.

Joel Saxum: It'll flip over.

Laurent Zimmerli: Yeah, yeah. So basically the question back then is,

A collaborative approach is being taken by Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts to procure offshore wind projects in the region. Dan-Bunkering is providing a solution to challenges posed by the Jones Act. And GE Vernova is cutting tons of employees at LM Wind Power.

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Allen Hall: All right, Joel, I have instructions from above that I am to mention the Uptime Tech News newsletter. So I am mentioning it right now. If you have not subscribed to Uptime Tech News it contains all the stories and all the research that we've done and we're talking about on the podcast. If you wanna read more in depth about those stories, we're gonna give you all those links and details there.

Plus we include all the weekly stock updates and the whole thing is free. So if you go to weatherguardwind.com and subscribe there, or you can click the link in the show notes, you can belong to Uptime Tech News, our wonderful newsletter. Joel, now my conscience is clear.

Joel: You can sleep well tonight knowing that you did your part to spread the uptime tickets.

So here's the other thing too, guys, is if you subscribe to that newsletter, when you get into it, all of the companies that we mentioned, Hey, what about this new solution here? These guys are doing this thing. That's cool. Are these ladies over here designing this or blah, blah, blah. Like all of those companies.

Are hyperlinked right in there. So you can go find them real quick. If you want to research basically what we're talking about.

Allen Hall: Because it does give you a focus for the week on what to be looking at, what's moving, what's trending without you having to go search the internet. And I am a recipient of other newsletters.

I get it. We created our own because there was just, there was a lot of fluff and a lot of these newsletters and things that didn't matter to us as a business and to, I think the larger industry. Particularly in North America. And so we felt Hey, let's just do it ourselves. Let's just make it free.

And we're doing the work anyway. So we'll just open up to all our listeners for free. So go to weatherguardwind. com sign up for Uptime Tech News. Click in the show notes below, sign up for that thing. And that will make everybody on my team very happy.

Up along the East coast, there has been four developers submitting bids for a total of a little over six gigawatts of offshore wind. Along the sort of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, offshore area. The bidders were Avangrid Ørsted, South Coast Wind Energy, and Vineyard Offshore. Back in late last year Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts had signed a MOU to collaborate together on offshore wind procurement, because they were all doing it separately and competing against one another, and they all had slightly different wording and contracts, and it made all the bidders confused and upset about it.

So they decided to combine them. Finally, the Massachusetts is looking for about 3. 6 gigawatts, Rhode Island about 1. 2, and Connecticut is headed for about 2 gigawatts. So Massachusetts received bids from Avangrid, South Coast Wind Energy, and Vineyard Offshore. And the final decisions on project will be decided in August, which seems like an eternity, everybody.

Rhode Island will evaluate proposals from all four bidders with a decision expected in about three months. Makes a little more sense.

General Electric splits into GE Vernova, GE Aerospace, and GE Healthcare, Macquarie Asset Management's Corio Generation invests $50 billion in offshore wind, Mingyang plans a turbine manufacturing facility in Scotland, Avangrid's offshore wind project is approved by the U.S. Interior Department.

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Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. And if you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor.com.

Macquarie Asset Management, through its fully owned offshore wind unit, Corio Generation, is making a fantastic investment. 50 billion investment in offshore wind over the next seven years. Corio generation, along with partners like TotalEnergies plans to invest in markets, including New York, New Jersey, Scotland, England, Taiwan, and Ireland.

Phil, they've hit all the hotspots for offshore wind, but putting 50 billion into that marketplace is massive.

Philip Totaro: Yeah. And keep in mind that, we're talking about a market that is likely to be several trillion dollars over the next five to seven years. They're certainly doing their part but also keep in mind that Corio has only really existed, obviously backed by Macquarie Group, but has only really existed for about the past year.

I think they just celebrated their one year anniversary very recently. They've come quite far in a short period of time with the deployment of the capital that they've got and the markets that they're looking at are absolutely, the places You want to be, now that the U S has gotten through most of its nonsense and we're getting back on track this is a good market to be in Taiwan's relatively stable.

There's a few kind of concerning signals out of there. But for the most part, that's going to still continue to grow and then England and Ireland are absolutely growth markets with a huge pipeline of projects in both those countries.

Joel Saxum: 50 billion over the next seven years is their plan.

Right now, and correct me if I'm wrong, Phil, but a gigawatt offshore wind farm, fixed bottom, costs between 3 and 5 billion to build, probably about 4 billion. Does that sound about right?

Philip Totaro: CapEx costs on an offshore fixed bottom is probably somewhere between 2. 5 and 3 million per megawatt. You can, But yeah, your typical sized project at this point, if it's around a gigawatt in size you're talking about, 3 billion.

Joel Saxum: Okay, so we're looking at 15 gigawatts of generation that they could get installed with that 50 billion or something around that. That's huge. That's that will help some countries in some areas hit some generation goals for offshore wind, definitely. And another one to mention here as well, we mentioned on the podcast the other day, but Onyx Insight recently purchased by Macri as a whole.

They're also bringing in advanced analytics and tools to the Wind farms that they're installing.

Allen Hall: The Scottish Offshore Wind Energy Council added seven new projects, including a Mingyang facility, to the Stage 2 Strategic Investment Model list, which aligns supply chain with developers plans for the ScotWind leasing round.

LM Wind Power announced the closure of their blade production factory in Turkey that employed 700 people. In Denmark, LM Wind Power appears to be cutting highly-qualified engineering and support staff. This news comes just days after their parent company, GE Vernova, became a stand-alone company.

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Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. And I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com.

A lot of news coming out of LM Wind Power. today. This is Friday, April 5th. All news reports indicate that the facility in Turkey is being closed and has been closed for a couple of days, evidently. And there is a massive shift happening, layoffs, at least 700 in Turkey. It sounds like up to a couple hundred, mostly focused in Denmark at the moment.

Phil, what is happening behind the scenes here?

Philip Totaro: There's quite a bit. Obviously what G. E. Vernova has said publicly about this and LM for that matter, is that they want to focus on profitability. And simply put, they just didn't seem to have enough order book to justify continuing the factory in Turkey.

Now we've talked before on the show about the fact that Turkey has one thing going for it as a market, which is not just the domestic demand that they've got which is reasonable, although not entirely robust but they have a favorable currency trade against the U. S. dollar, which means that if you're using Turkey as an export market, it's theoretically is a great place.

TPI's there. There are a few other companies that have manufacturing facilities there. But the issue for LM is they weren't for the blade lines that they have in Turkey. They weren't getting enough orders for those blade lines that they have set up. And so I guess for them, it makes more sense to consolidate into their production facilities in Spain and Denmark.

As well as what they have currently in, in North America. And India and China for that matter.

Allen Hall: Several months ago, LM Wind Power was headed a direction of essentially separating Europe from the Americas, and running it as two separate businesses. And now this happens. Now there's some significant layoffs happening in Denmark.

You still think they're headed in that direction, trying to grab separate marketplaces and maybe react differently to those changing economics?

Philip Totaro: Yes, there, nothing seems to have changed based on, some of the internal memos and things like that, that have leaked out the where they suggested that they're going to be doing this reorg.

But the reality is that again with the focus on profitability I believe that it makes sense for them to to do something that's regionally segregated. Depending on how they want to proceed with the business moving forward, whether it's divesting factories or acquiring factories, there, there's any number of things they could do that is theoretically made easier by regionally grouping assets together.

Allen Hall: The people that are being laid off in Denmark, from what I can tell at the moment seem focused in engineering, maybe support engineering too, high level. paid long term employees that they're are laying off.

Rocky, a cloud-based software developed by Wind Power LAB is helping to standardize the analysis of rain erosion test data for wind turbine coatings. By precisely annotating damage progression in test photos, Rocky eliminates human variability in interpreting results and generating accurate velocity vs. impact (V-N) curves. This innovative tool promises to improve coating durability predictions, reduce operational costs, and accelerate rain erosion solutions for the wind industry. Visit https://windpowerlab.com/ for more info!

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!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, and I'm in San Diego, warm San Diego with at ACP OM&S and I'm here with Anders Røpke, who is this founding partner and CEO of Wind Power LAB based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Welcome to the show.

Anders Røpke: Thank for the invitation.

Allen Hall: So we're gonna have a really technical discussion, but a really timely discussion. Yeah, about rain erosion and rain erosion testing. I was just over in Denmark, went to DTU, saw the Leading Edge Erosion Conference. Fascinated, great speakers, a lot of great data. One of the main discussion points was when you run a rain erosion test on a particular coating for a wind turbine, there's a lot of variability.

And the holy grail is to get what they call a V N curve for a coating. That's the velocity versus the number of impacts. You should be able to draw roughly a straight line. Okay. When I was over at Copenhagen, and watching all this go on, there's a lot of slides up about V in curves where the V in curve was up and down.

The tilt of it was all over the place. When they had done testing at different rain erosion facilities, or had tested in the same erosion facility on the same kind of sample. Getting what they thought was a different result. Now, that seems to be driven by in part, the human element. Exactly. Everything about that test is pretty well controlled and the people at R&D test systems, which designed those rain erosion rigs have made a really nice machine.

Let's just be honest. It's a really good machine. But as when PowerLab is determining, the issue is looking at the photos of the damage and then saying, Oh, here's where damage starts. And this is how it propagates. That's a human element problem that's added to this very technical decision making. We're making errors there.

And that's where Wind Power LAB comes in. And at Wind Power LAB, you guys are blade experts, right?

Anders Røpke: We are blade experts. So we are actually coming from the field observation side, if you like. So we see the products when they fail. Sorry to bring the bad news, but we see leading edge erosion out there still, even though we have big LEP campaigns.

Yeah. And one thing is the application, it's a hard environment to turn out offshore, for instance. But we also see coatings fail earlier than anticipated. And the long term effect is a lot of unnecessary cost for these wind farm owners. Because then they're looking into yet one more LEP campaign.

Through the end of, before the end of life of this wind farm. That's extremely expensive. Onshore, but it's maybe 20 times more expensive offshore. It is. So if we should fix this. We should. We should. Then why don't we try to test our products a little bit better?

And that's where the Leading Edge Erosion Symposium you visited.

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