Uptime Podcast – Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Allen covers EEW American Offshore Structures’ Chapter 11 filing, Vineyard Wind suing GE Vernova for $545 million, Europe’s exit from Korea, and wind project wins in Australia and Canada.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

There is a story unfolding across this industry right now. It is a story of two worlds. One world is closing its doors. The other is throwing them wide open.

Let us start in New Jersey. EEW American Offshore Structures filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy on April eighth. This was the first monopile manufacturing facility ever built in the United States. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced a two hundred fifty million dollar investment in the Paulsboro Marine Terminal back in twenty twenty. It was called the largest industrial offshore wind investment in the country at the time. At full buildout… five hundred thousand square feet of production space. More than one hundred monopiles per year. Five hundred workers. They even built the first American-made monopile… for Orsted’s Ocean Wind project. It weighed three million pounds. It measured three hundred feet long.

Then Orsted canceled Ocean Wind One and Two. Then Shell pulled out of Atlantic Shores. Without contracted work… workers disassembled and recycled finished monopiles for scrap. Federal policy shifts removed the pipeline of future projects. A landlord eviction filing followed. And then… Chapter Eleven. That is a two hundred fifty million dollar facility… with nowhere left to go.

Now stay with us. Because just offshore… another American offshore wind story is fighting for its life. Vineyard Wind… the sixty-two turbine project fifteen miles south of Martha’s Vineyard… filed suit in Massachusetts against GE Renewables. GE Vernova says Vineyard Wind owes it three hundred million dollars for work already performed… and it wants to walk away at the end of April. Vineyard Wind says not so fast.

The developer says GE still owes five hundred forty-five million dollars for what it calls inexcusably poor performance after a catastrophic turbine blade collapse in July of twenty twenty-four. Fiberglass blade fragments washed onto Nantucket beaches during peak tourist season. Sixty-eight of seventy-two blades had to be removed and replaced. That set the project back nearly two years. Construction did reach completion in March… making Vineyard Wind the first offshore project to finish under the current administration. But now the only contractor capable of completing the remaining work… wants out. A court hearing was scheduled for Thursday.

And now… look eastward. Something similar is playing out in Korea. European offshore wind companies are exiting the Korean market one by one. Corio Generation, a British firm owned by Macquarie, disbanded its Korean unit and pulled out of joint projects in Busan and Ulsan. Germany’s RWE quit offshore wind projects in Taean and Sinan counties. Vestas postponed its turbine factory in Mokpo… indefinitely. Equinor began reducing its Korean workforce. Shell exited the Korean offshore market entirely in twenty twenty-four.

These companies point to worsening global profitability… and Korean government policies they say favor domestic companies over firms with greater experience. Korea had a target of three gigawatts of offshore wind by twenty thirty. That goal is now in serious doubt.

But here is where the story turns. Not every market is closing its door. Eight thousand miles from New Jersey… in the Sunshine State of Queensland, Australia… the final forty-one turbines just arrived at the Wambo wind project. Cubico Sustainable Investments and Stanwell are building a five hundred six megawatt project on the Darling Downs. Stage One… two hundred fifty-two megawatts… already feeding the Queensland grid. Stage Two deliveries are now complete. Commissioning and full operations are on track for the end of twenty twenty-six.

And up in Ontario, Canada… the province just approved fourteen new wind and solar projects totaling more than thirteen hundred megawatts. The average price… eight point eight cents per kilowatt hour. Compare that to twenty-one point four cents for some proposed nuclear projects… and more than thirty-two cents for certain new reactor designs. Contracts run for twenty years, with all projects online before twenty thirty.

So let us step back. In New Jersey… the first American monopile factory files for bankruptcy. Off Massachusetts… a completed offshore wind farm fights to keep its contractor. In Korea… European developers pack their bags. But in Australia… turbines arrive on schedule. And in Canada… wind power undercuts nuclear at the meter.

The wind energy industry is not in retreat. It is choosing its battlegrounds. And where the conditions are right… the blades are turning.

And now you know… the rest of the story.

That is the state of the wind industry for the 13th of April, twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Dr. Liz Beavis, Asset Manager at Tilt Renewables, joins to discuss O&M contracts, balance of plant, and lessons from Australia’s biggest and oldest wind farms. Contact Liz on LinkedIn or by email.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Liz, welcome to the program. Thanks, 

Liz Beavis: Alan. I feel I’m a long time listener. First time caller, so it’s exciting. 

Allen Hall: You are a long time listener and thanks for doing that. Uh, and Liz, I just find you to be a wealth of knowledge and, uh, we met on a couple occasions since I’ve been in Australia and it’s just, uh, a fun to connect here because I think a lot of the things that are happening in Australia need to be spread around the world.

A lot of, uh, good o and m practices happening in Australia, uh, from hard lessons learned. So that’s what I want to dive into today. And then the first one is, I don’t think many people realize this, that you went. From commissioning, Australia’s largest wind farm, Cooper’s gap to managing seven [00:01:00] of the 10 oldest operational wind farms in the country.

So you got some of the biggest, newest to some of the oldest assets. Uh. Uh, my question is like, when you started that, did you just kind of assume like wind, wind farms or wind farms or wind turbines or wind turbines and you could just basically own and end them the same, or do, or did it just occur to you immediately like, I need to take a different plan of attack here?

Liz Beavis: I think I, I knew nothing about wind farms when I turned up at Cooper’s Gap, so, so yeah, I got my, well, okay, we’ll go right back to the start. So I was working at a thermal power station and I was just thinking. There’s no future in coal. How do I get into renewables? And then a wind farm got built like 50 kilometers from my house.

I can, I can see it in the horizon. Um, and I thought, oh, they’re not gonna need a chemical engineer there, but I wonder if they need a site manager or something. And then the site manager role came up, I applied for it. So the services site manager. So, [00:02:00] um. That was July, 2020. That’s when I first started listening to the podcast.

’cause I thought I better find out something about this industry before I do my job interview. And so I’ve been listening ever since. But, um, yeah, so I don’t know. I was just lucky to get that role. And I turned up and, um, I think it was the end of September, 2020 first time I’d ever set foot on a wind farm ’cause of COVID and everything.

I didn’t, I didn’t go there for the interview. My manager was in Thailand. I just turned up. And, um, so they, they’d finished construc, they’d built all the towers where they hadn’t finished commissioning. And so we’re still working out of construction, dongas, you know, temporary buildings and um, and there was hundreds of people on site and it was just the absolute chaos of.

Constructing a two hundred, a hundred and twenty three turbines. You know, like there’s just people everywhere. And I thought, wow, I’ve just gotta figure out what I’m supposed to be doing here. There were a few technicians. I found out how many technicians I supposed to have. Just started recruiting, started figuring out what I was supposed to be doing there, and I just [00:03:00] learned so much.

In the two years we took over the new r and m building. We had failed gear, boxes, generators, transformers, overhead line, underground line, pretty much. Anything that could fail failed, and I got to see what we needed to do. Um, but through all of that, I was also thinking, oh, how do I manage this wind farm better?

I don’t know anything about wind farms, and I’m reaching out to the other GE sites, but the, the next biggest site was 75 turbines, and all of the rest of them are 30 and 40. So they’re saying to me, oh, you just get a team to go around. And I’m thinking. Well, that’s six weeks of work. You know, like, like everything is so much bigger on a bigger wind farm.

And then I’d reach out to the, the American sites. That had big wind farms, but their contracts were so different, and I didn’t understand at first, I started to realize, well, their contracts are completely different and their focus is different, and so they’re not facing the same issues that I’m facing.

Um, and then, you know, even speaking to a wind farm in [00:04:00] Sweden that was a similar size, but they, you know, they. They have to think about climate and what work they can do in winter. So I started to, as you said, you start to think, well actually everyone farms very different. And it’s, um, you know, you can learn from others, but you really need to understand how your conditions are affecting what you can and can’t do.

Um, and then, so then I got the job at Wally Power Services with as a portfolio manager for the renewables, um, fleet There. And yeah, a whole lot of really old turbines. And it was just so interesting to see that contrast between the new turbines and the old ones and um, and also being a independent service provider, what we could do and what the technicians.

So many clever technicians out there on wind farms, just figuring stuff out and, and fixing things that if you tried to do that within the OEM, you get really hamstring Engineers say, oh no, you can’t. You can’t do that. You can’t fiddle with that. Whereas once you’re released from that, for better or worse, [00:05:00] the technicians are just off sorting things out.

So that was really interesting to see that contrast. And now I’m with, um, tilt Renewables. So I’m the asset manager for Cooper’s Gap and Silverton Wind Farms. So I’m, I’m now seeing from the owner’s point of view how we actually manage these contracts with the OEMs and with ISPs and how we, how can we do r and m better?

Matthew Stead: And from the, um, from the ISP, um, experience, um, compared to your experience now, what are some of the biggest differences that you’ve observed between the old, the other sites and the, and the new site? 

Liz Beavis: Yeah, I think it, it’s really just that you’re on your own. Um, so you’re relying on good technicians. To figure things out, you can, you need a parts and service agreement with the OEM, um, so you can reach out to them and ask for support, but they’re, you are the lowest priority.

So yeah, you don’t always get information, [00:06:00] so you just gotta be set up to figure things out. But then that does give you the freedom to make changes and to, to fix the things that you’re saying, whereas. Often the OEMs are so, uh, stuck with that mindset of, oh, we, we don’t want people to know we’ve got a serial defect.

So we’ll just keep kind of patching things up and hopefully, hopefully no other sites find out about this. You know, instead of just saying, Hey, we know this is an issue, here’s a good way of fixing it. ’cause just all I understand, all of the liability that throws, that, that flows from that, uh, you know. You can’t handle it.

Allen Hall: Does that change your perspective, knowing all those things? Do you have a, just a unique background in so many ways where you’ve seen, uh, pretty much all sides of wind operations. How do you think about that now? How are you, are you are addressing contracts differently or are you thinking about the way you staff differently just from your experience?[00:07:00]

How does that play into it? 

Liz Beavis: Yeah, so definitely from a owner’s point of view. I understand what the limitations are of the OEMs and the ISPs, and so I know, I know what I can push them to do and what I can’t push them to do. And even though you’ve got the contract in front of you and you know it, it says you’re gonna do this, there’s certain things where you, you know, that you need to let it slide because it’s just not reasonable to push it.

You just, you just know that they can’t achieve things. Um. But then also going into new r and m contracts, you kind of know what’s critical, what to ask for, what, you know, what, what we need to make sure that we’re getting right from the start. 

Allen Hall: How do you sort that out? Because I’ve heard, uh, I’ve talked to many operators.

that are doing O&M and they look at the contract much like you, and then they, they look at the contract and go, okay, here’s are the things I can probably get. Here’s the things I can’t get. How did you come to that determination is just because you’ve been so close at all this time? Because I think a [00:08:00] lot of people in wind that are new look at that contract, as the rule of law and you’re gonna get everything in there.

But I think the more experienced people realize it’s more of a negotiation or starting point, even 

Liz Beavis: particularly, uh, like Comparing construction to O&M I say, construction’s the. sprint and O&M’s the marathon, and you’re in a relationship with this O&M provider for 10, 15, 25, 30 years, depending on your contract terms.

So you can’t go in at year three and just have a big fight with each other And you know you, need to, You need to be able to work together. So it’s understanding what the value drivers are on both sides and, um. And focusing on that. So, you know, for us as the owner, we, we just want generation.

So even though availability is what’s in the contract, really what we want is generation. So if we can figure things out together to get the maximum generation, and maybe that helps the O&M [00:09:00] provider save some costs because, they’re not just doing what’s in the contract, but they’re doing what actually helps us get generation.

That’s, that’s kind of the. That’s how we work. And then the contracts there. If, everything falls apart, you’ve got a legal document underpinning where you can say, hold on, you were supposed to do this. This is the damages we can claim. And this is where we can go with it.

But you’re not just enforcing every, clause. Because some of it’s been written so long ago, it’s not even relevant. 

Allen Hall: Does that lead you down the path of shadow monitoring then? 

Liz Beavis: My view is I would rather have, I would rather be at a point where I have a relationship with the OEM where we can agree that there’s no point me spending money that they’ve already spent and that.

That we get access to their data. Even if I pay half of what I would spend on shadow monitoring as an additional fee to the OM provider, so they get some revenue and they provide me with the data, I think that’s a better outcome for both parties than to [00:10:00] feel like I’m there looking over their shoulder monitoring what they’re doing.

So, I mean, it depends on what your relationship is, but our, our preference would be. That we’re working together and that we’re both benefiting from something rather than spending more money than we need to on doing something twice. 

Matthew Stead: Maybe a question, Liz, in terms of your, you know, former, you know, thermal, uh, background, what, what sort of lessons learned or, or things did you sort of bring across from that, that previous um, experience?

You know, although six years ago, 

Liz Beavis: I think that the first thing was safety. There was, um. There’s a big difference and, and particularly coming into a construction site, that’s, it’s always a challenge because there’s just this time crunch and cost crunch and, and it’s all just, we need to just jump in and get everything done.

We can’t stop and make sure we’re doing this safely or properly. Um, so getting my [00:11:00] team to stop thinking like that. We are here, we’re doing o and m. We’re here for the long term. If we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it properly. If we need to wait a couple of days to have the right tooling, that’s what we’re gonna do.

And just kind of slow everyone down and then, and get the right procedures and the equipment and, and everything. Uh, so we did that. Um, and then. I think the other thing I’ve probably just brought across is understanding of the market. So I was quite involved, um, with thermal generation and, um, market and bidding and um, and I think if you come into Wind Farm o and m, you’re kind of separated from that because you are just there to maintain the turbines and you, you don’t care what the market’s doing, but your owner cares what the market’s doing.

So being able to, to think about, well, what. What does my owner actually need? Um, and, and do that, you know, support that as well. Then you, you’re better at [00:12:00] delivering the o and m, 

Allen Hall: right? Because it does add a little bit of perspective to it. I see a lot of operations and maintenance where availability is a thing, but it’s not like the top priority.

It’s, it’s odd how they think about it. At the end of the day, you’re producing power, and I know Tilt Renewable, having been to your offices there. Is focused on availability. You’re selling power to the grid. You need to be looking at what the prices are. You’re actually monitoring that. There’s, it’s a complicated enterprise.

It’s much more complex than I think, uh, you would think of a old power company, uh, particularly in the states where everything just kind of runs and it’s, it just happens in Australia. It’s a lot more freewheeling, I would say, and there’s more emphasis on. Making sure the assets are running, that they’re available and they are producing power.

That must change the way you think about managing the assets and particularly. You, you, there will be problems, right? There’s always problems. Are you, are you trying to then categorize [00:13:00] problems and trying to assess when you’re gonna take turbines out? Or you’re just saying, Hey, we just can’t fix this thing until next year.

There must be some sort of organization going on there. How do you think about that in terms of keeping your availability so high? 

Liz Beavis: That’s one thing that I had to change my mindset. From thermal to wind because there’s a lot of work you can do on a thermal power station while it’s running. Whereas anything, anything you wanna fix on a wind turbine, you’re taking it down.

And then on a thermal power station, you have a six or eight week outage where everything’s shut down, 200 people turn up, everything gets fixed. And then you run it back up again and then you hope that it doesn’t come back down. Yeah. Whereas the wind turbine, it’s like, it’s, the way I see it is just if it’s running, it’s running.

You don’t go and stop it for any reason. You know, so it’s you, you only, you’re going there to do reactive work. When it stops and you’re going to do proactive annual maintenance work every 12 months, [00:14:00] and it’s really about getting the scope of your annual maintenance, right, so that you’re addressing everything.

And you know, the goal is like, this is what was drilled into me with GE was the goal is you go to that turbine once a year or twice a year if it has a semi-annual. Maintenance requirement, but that’s, that’s what you’re trying to achieve. So you’re trying to get the reliability to a point where you only need to go there when it breaks, and Oh, so you only need to go there for the annual maintenance and it shouldn’t be breaking down in between.

Unfortunately, that’s. Very difficult to achieve. I think. I think what it was interesting to see the older turbines, um, have a lot more engineering, uh, margin in them. Everything sort of does perform better. 

Allen Hall: Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you because I do think there’s a difference between a slightly older turbine, even a turbine that was manufactured 20 years ago versus today.

It does seem like there’s a lot more knowledge about those turbines. Maybe it’s just, uh, tribal knowledge. Over time you’re gonna learn more about them, but there, there is a huge knowledge [00:15:00] gap. Between on a new turbine, you just, you just don’t know what you don’t know. How are you trying to address that?

Are, are you getting involved in RCAs or are you, are you trying to be proactive monitoring scada, the, it’s just a lot of your plate here. How do you try to manage all that and what’s your process there? 

Liz Beavis: So the way the contract is structured, that’s all the OEM’s responsibility. Uh, but what, what we’re trying to do is say, well, we’ve got a lot of expertise in our asset management team.

Involve us. Like, we’d like to help. We can ask the questions, we can tell you what we’ve seen on other sites. We can, you know, we, we can actually help with this. Um, it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s kind of awkward that, um. There’s no requirement in the RM phase for them to provide us with an RCA under this contract. So, you know, there’s some, there’s some contracts where they may have to, but, um, yeah, [00:16:00] I think that’s an oversight because we’re kind of guessing or we’re, we’re getting given.

Part of the information, but we don’t necessarily have the whole story. And I think the advantage that the OEM has is that they’ve got hundreds of thousands of turbines out there and they, they’re monitoring all of them. They, they should be able to figure out what’s going on a lot easier than I can. I’m looking at two sites and saying, oh, hey, is, is that an issue?

Or is, you know, they’ve got all that data. And, and that was the challenge with an RSP is that you, you’re only looking at a limited. Subset of sites, you’re not necessarily being able to put everything together, but I’m not sure that we all get the value of that knowledge, whether, whether they’re actually crunching the data or whether they’re keeping it to themselves because they don’t want us to know about serial issues.

Um, but yeah, I, I feel like the OEMs could be leveraging that more. 

Allen Hall: Are you able to bridge that gap sometimes with the [00:17:00]OEMs? I do feel like the OEMs have. Pretty good. Uh, at a minimum. I mean, I think a lot of times they’re really good on the back offices, on the engineering side of the technical expertise and the subject matter experts do exist there, and they are pretty quick to get to the root cause of a problem.

But are you able to get to those back offices, to those engineering experts and to talk to them? Have you found a way to do that, that that kind of works for, for both sides of that, of that business? 

Liz Beavis: Something I found really helpful is, um. We’ve joined some international groups. There’s a few groups around that say the O2 O, they’ve, they were O2 O wind, they’re now O2 O renewables and also epr, um, electric Power Research Institute.

So we’ve joined them. We are sharing sort of general, um, breakdown information and issues. Um. Within those groups. And so then we are hearing from, you know, there’s a wind farm in Scotland that says, oh yeah, we’ve got the same [00:18:00] component. We are seeing this issue. And then I say, oh, well I better go check if we’ve got that problem.

And then, you know, so, so we’re, we’re kind of owner to owner learning things, so that’s quite helpful. 

Allen Hall: So you’re leveraging the other, uh, operators of the same turbines or, or really something similar to what you’re operating globally? That’s a, that’s a smart move and a lot of operators do not do that. I mean, and maybe in the States there’s a couple of, of organizations in the states, EPRI being one of them.

O2 O is, I think, uh, definitely popular in Europe. They’re both very effective. So in instead of having to rely on the OM all the time, you’re basically word of mouth with other operators saying, I have this problem. Does anybody else have this problem? Have you solved it? Or maybe what the OEM has said, maybe the OEM has has told another operator what the answer is.

Uh, is that the way you’re kind of thinking about attacking that problem? 

Liz Beavis: Yes, but we’re not sharing any confidential information [00:19:00]through those forums. 

Allen Hall: Never gonna do that. However, it does, I mean, if you get some heads nodding in those discussions, like an oh two, oh, uh, uh, meeting or even an EPRI meeting, uh, or e-cig in the United States.

Basically doing something very similar. A lot of times I don’t think operators use them, the, maybe the way that they should, they, they, they turn into kind of complaint sessions instead of solutions, uh, that could be shared. Are you finding that you’re able to get to some solutions through those organizations?

Liz Beavis: I probably found out more about failure modes and things to look out for. Necessarily then solutions. But yeah, it, it’s definitely, it’s definitely been valuable. 

Matthew Stead: Um, and Liz, we went for a bit of a drive around your site. Once 

Liz Beavis: I be how many days, Matt? You’re like, oh, come up for a day. And then I said, you’re gonna need to come for longer.

Matthew Stead: The one day turned into three days. It was a wonderful time. Um, um, however, I think a part of our conversation was about. All the extra balance [00:20:00] of plant. And, um, I know you’ve got a few te uh, pet topics around balance of plant, including, um, toilet facilities. So maybe you could, uh, share your thoughts on, you know, the, the forgotten part of the, the site.

Liz Beavis: Okay. Well, I can talk about toilets. Um, I think, I think we got away with. Um, small wind farms with just an o and m building and, um, technicians could drive back to the toilet pretty easily. Now. Cooper’s Gap Wind Farm is um, uh, 123 turbines. The furthest turbine is an hour’s drive. No one’s driving, you know.

Back from the turbine and then to the r and m building and then back to their work site. So, um, we need to, we need to consider that in the design phase, but also I’ve just been talking about it every opportunity ’cause um, people just aren’t aware and that we need to think about what facilities we’re providing to our technicians.

And particularly in Australia, we’ve got a big [00:21:00] energy transition we’re trying to deliver and we’re not gonna get the workforce. If people think that wind farms aren’t nice places to work, so I, I think it’s really important. So I’ve, um, I have purchased a demountable containerized toilet facility that’s gonna go out into one of our furthest corners of the wind farm.

Um, so I’m gonna establish that and then look at where else we need to put them. And that was, um, $50,000 Australian delivered. So it’s really. A small cost considering everything else we spend on that one farm. Um, just to provide suitable facilities for our workforce. So, uh, I’m encouraging people to think about that and I’ve had some good conversations since I brought it up at wma, so it’s been good.

Matthew Stead: Yeah, it also struck me several, um, several challenges were a much bigger issue than you may have thought them to be at the start. 

Liz Beavis: I think what I found interesting is, uh, o over all the different wind farms is, um, it’s [00:22:00] really difficult to predict what the civil cost is gonna be. You, you can have some wind farms that are just dead flat and have very minimal civil costs, but as soon as you build a wind farm.

On a ridge, you know, ridge line and you’ve got lots of bridges and steep roads and drainage issues. Yeah. And then depending on the erod ability of the soil and the rainfall, suddenly you’re out there grading pretty regularly. Um, I have now learned way too much about civil engineering, and it’s not my area of interest, but, um, I think there’s, there’s better decisions that can be made during construction and.

Design stage of the wind farm. There’s, you know, there’s some roads, uh, I’ve driven around as a civil contractor at one of my sites and, um, he was involved during construction and he’s also a landholder and he said, well, I told them to put the road over there where it would’ve been sort of gentle slope up the hill, but they wanted to just build a shorter road.

So they [00:23:00] just put a straight up the hill and then they had to bring, um, extra machines in to tow all the components up the hill. ’cause they made it too steep. But that’s then what they’ve left us. For RM to maintain, you know, so that it’s just bad decisions and, and I think it’s, yeah, it gets very fraught during construction.

And then, um, you know, towards the end you’re just trying to get the project finished and you’re trying to get handover and you’re just worried about the turbines, you know, like what’s happening with these generators. And all of that becomes a focus. And meanwhile, the, the civil work hasn’t been finished to the standard and the drains haven’t been built to the drawing.

And, and that’s just. The last thing on anyone’s list. ’cause we’re trying to get the turbines right. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s a cost that you then wear for the rest of the project, so it’s worth thinking about. Um, and in Australia we’ve also, it’s quite common for the electrical balancer plant to be maintained by the OEM.

Um, and we’re starting to find it’s not really their area of [00:24:00] expertise. They’re not really set up for it. You know, there’s sort of a question mark whether that’s. The best approach or whether, uh, as an owner, we are better to split that out and look after it ourselves, but then that complicates availability guarantees.

And who’s responsible for the underground cable? Yes. And there’s, there’s a lot to think about. 

Allen Hall: I was gonna ask you about that because that is an important difference, uh, in Australia where the BOP seems to be, uh, more, or the responsibility of the operator than the OEM, and that must be at least somewhat Australian specific because of the nature of the country and the difficulties that are involved there, but.

Does that mean that as you, as the operator need to be bringing on people that know, uh, substation, architecture, underground cables, transformers, pads, uh, roads, all that, is that something that you just have decided that it makes more sense to do and we can probably do it [00:25:00] better, uh, as a, to make availability better and make the site more accessible?

Is that, is that the thought process that went into that? 

Liz Beavis: I think the driver was, um. The lenders. So, so finance, um, they, and that’s, that’s why that there was a real trend for the fully wrapped contract. So a, a 25 year fully wrapped contract and, and the finance world is de-risked, you know, it’s magically de-risked because, because you’ve locked it in and it’s all just gonna get done.

And it’s, and now I think everyone’s realizing, well, it’s not actually DeRoot. Like there’s, there’s a lot. That we need to manage and, and now we’ve lost control over it. And actually maybe we’d like to pull that back, but it, it’s, it’s site specific. You know what you. What makes sense to, to give to the o and m contractor versus separating it out and managing it 

Allen Hall: Well then let’s talk about the two wind farms you are involved with day to day, Silverton [00:26:00] and Cooper’s Gap, and now they are not next door to one another.

Silverton’s in New South Wales, far west. Right. And then, uh, Cooper’s Gap is up in Queensland, way up north Counter by Brisbane. Uh, those are what, 500,000 miles apart from one another. They’re a long ways away. 

Liz Beavis: Yeah, I haven’t looked at how far they’re, but um, so I live near Cooper’s Gap, so everyone in Melbourne’s quite pleased with that because it’s a pain for them to get here.

’cause it, I, it’s a three hours, I’m three hours drive from Brisbane. That’s not even North Queensland. That’s, I’m still in Southeast Queensland. Really. 

Allen Hall: Right. True. Yeah. 

Liz Beavis: So then for me to get to Broken Hill, I have to drive to Brisbane and then fly to Sydney or fly to Adelaide and then fly into Broken Hill.

So it’s two flies. So we did have, we’ve got another asset manager who was very involved with Silverton, uh, for a long time, and she lives in Sydney. And so I. When I came in, because I lived near Cooper’s Gap, obviously I took Cooper’s Gap and then it made sense for me to also have Silverton because it’s another [00:27:00] GE three X site.

So that’s why I’ve got those two. Yeah. Uh, even though it’s not my closest site, so I go out to Silverton about four times a year. Um. I make sure I spend a week there and I drive around and look at everything, and I go up tower and I spend time with the team and I, I do feel like I don’t have as much control over that site as Cooper’s Gap.

I’m here most days and I’m, and I’m in the pre-start and I see where all the teams are going, and I go and talk to them. Yeah, so I, I get a lot more information and I think as an asset manager, it’s really important to be on site and to be up tower and to be talking to everyone. Um, so when I do go to Silverton, I make sure I go there for a long time, or I see some owners will just pop in for the day, or they, they’ll sort of come in at 10 o’clock in the morning and, and then leave.

So they don’t even see preset. You can’t really get a feel for what’s going on in site if you’re not. Um, so I would like to be at Silverton more often, but [00:28:00] I just don’t like the 12 hours of traveling it takes me to get there. Um, but um, we have, so teams is amazing, right? Like what we can do remotely now.

Um, I have a fortnightly call with the site manager and we go through what turbines are on and what’s off and what’s he working on and what issues. And, um, so I do get a lot of information. Um, not being on site and, and all the systems that we have access to, I’m constantly spying on them. They all know that.

But also I’m there to help. Like, I’ll, I’ll read the fault code and go, what does this fault code mean? That sounds really bad. And they’re like, oh yeah, we better go check that. So, um, yeah, we we’re working together. Um. And it’s really just, yeah, they know that we’re, we just wanna try and get the availability up.

We don’t wanna be charging them damages all the time. We, it, it doesn’t really cover our costs. So it’s better for all of us that we just improve the availability and it doesn’t matter who’s doing it, we just need to figure it out. [00:29:00]

Allen Hall: Well, Liz, you’re a busy person and in your off time you co-founded an organization called Power Up Queensland and you mentor female engineers.

Uh, and you have done that for a while throughout your career. What’s your message to women that are considering entering the wind energy sector? 

Liz Beavis: Oh, we need more women in wind. Onsite, not just in the, in the head office. And, um, I’m fixing the toilet situation, so I’ve got it under control. Um, yeah, it’s, it’s really sad when I sort of look around at preset and there’s, I’m, I’m the only woman in the room usually.

Um, but yeah, I, like, I go up tower and, um. I think it’s, it’s a lot of fun if you’re, if you’re someone that likes heights and doing something a bit more physical. And I think also the, um, for the, from the trade point of view, you get to work across mechanical and electrical. So if you’re not, uh, you know, if you’re interested in sort of working across your trade instead [00:30:00] of just a purely being a mechanic or an electrician, I think it’s a really interesting, um, uh, workplace to be in.

You get. And, and there’s lots of civil work to do and, um. And then as an asset manager, you know, you can, you can come into that from a, from a mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or mechanical engineer. There’s, there’s lots of civil work to do, but even in our team, we’ve got people from finance and accounting backgrounds and, um, trade backgrounds.

So it’s, it’s, um, something that you can come. From a broad range of, um, disciplines. Um, and I just, I love being out and about this morning before I came on the call, I had to go out and put some signs out for a biosecurity issue. So, so I like, that’s the kind of thing, like I, I’m not stuck in the office. I just go for a drive and put some signs on the gate and yeah.

So it’s, you’re not stuck in the office. I think it’s, it’s really. It’s, it’s a really awesome job. [00:31:00] So I encourage, yeah, people that want, don’t wanna be in the office and actually be outdoors and involved and doing some physical stuff. It’s a good job. 

Allen Hall: Well, Liz, you’re a wealth of knowledge and uh, it’s always great to see you in Australia and thanks for coming to the Woma event.

If people wanna reach out to you and connect about o and m issues or entering the wind industry, how can they do that? 

Liz Beavis: Um, so I’m on LinkedIn. Maybe I can just put my email in the show notes because I get, I get a lot of LinkedIn connection requests and I sort of don’t know who’s who. 

Allen Hall: We’ll definitely put your email in the show notes, and I know we’ve had a lot of discussions of, of getting you on this podcast.

I’ve been really looking forward to this discussion, and this has been great. We need to have you on more often. So, Liz, the invitation is. Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast and yeah, we’ll see you soon. 

Liz Beavis: Thanks [00:32:00] El.

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Vestas hasn’t shared SCADA data after a South Korea turbine collapse, citing an expired warranty. Plus workers at Nordex in Iowa are concerned about tariffs.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Allen covers Quebec’s record wind project, Madawaska’s financial close, Nova Scotia’s first direct-to-consumer wind sales, PEI’s retiring wind farm, and Aikido’s floating offshore AI data center.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Michael Henriksen, CEO at Wavepiston, joins to discuss wave energy’s advantages for island communities, the company’s hydraulic piston system, offshore wind co-location, and the Barbados pilot project.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

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

Allen Hall: Michael, welcome to the program. 

Thanks, Allen. A pleasure. 

Allen Hall: Well, this is gonna be a, a really interesting discussion today because, uh, I don’t know a lot about wave power, but. Obviously the world has made some substantial progress in wind and solar, but the ocean energy is still relatively unknown and. I want you to, just to paint the picture of the problem, what gap exists in renewable energy today that wave energy can fill?

Michael Henriksen: Thanks. Thanks. A yes. Uh, that’s right. So ocean energy as such. And we have, um, we are working with the wave energy side of the other things here in Wave Piston has a very large potential because there’s a lot of waves around us. We all feel it when we are out in the sea, when we’re out swimming or whatever.[00:01:00]

So what can it fill out that is that, that the, the interesting thing about wave energy is that is, um, timewise shift compared to wind. You know, it’s the wind that builds up the waves. The waves come, uh, the wind comes and goes, but the waves that keep rolling also afterwards. Yeah. So this timewise shift that gives some extra value.

Of the energy that you can actually produce at the same time, it’s actually also, it’s a more of stable resource. So you, you don’t have these large fluctuation, it, it, it comes slowly and then dies away slowly depending on where you are in the world, of course. And then the last for the least is it’s very predictable.

So stable days advantage, you can actually very precise predict what sort of your energy production profile. So by adding an extra renewable energy source, you can actually sort of, it gives extra value to both have sort as much solar PV as possible, as much wind as possible, but also have wave energy there to have sort of a better, uh, in the end, uh, [00:02:00] uh, energy production.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And that, and the technology is really applicable to, uh, a lot of regions, uh, around just like island communities and places of a little more remote. Uh, because the cost of electricity on islands is incredibly high. They’re buying diesel usually, and they have a kind of a, a double problem in that they have to buy diesel to run electricity plants, and then at the same time they’re, they’re having to make fresh water all the time ’cause fresh water’s a problem.

Wave Piston solves both of these problems together. But why are we in this? Space right now. I, I just wanna back up a minute. I mean, there, there does seem like for the last 30, 40 years that I can remember, the island communities have been really stuck. Solar hasn’t really filled the void. Wind has been intermittent option at times.

Why waves? 

Michael Henriksen: Yeah. But that’s actually, uh, where we see our, like our step to, uh, [00:03:00] you know, uh, go to market strategy, so to speak. See, that is the first step because as you mentioned, all the island communities, I would also say remote coastal communities still have this, this challenge of being dependent on fossil fuels.

And as you know, it’s, it’s mainly because of course you have limited, uh, uh, uh, land space. Uh, of course they should have as much solar PB as wind as possible, but you still have this, you know, you don’t wanna have it in your backyard. It’s difficult to have, you know, spatial beautiful islands where you have, uh, tourism, et cetera.

And then you have, uh, solar PB and winter turbines all over the place. It’s not gonna happen. So they’re looking at to go to, of course, offshore. What they have a lot of us is they have ocean. Yeah. And the challenge there again, is. Most places when you go just a few kilometers from shore get very, very deep.

Yeah. So you need to find something that is sustainable, something that it will not spoil the view. Something that is actually, uh, uh, an [00:04:00]environmental friendly way, you know, of harnessing the energy that that is where wave energy come into the picture because. It’s happening below the sea. So the, the surface and, and, and the, it can sort of coexist with other things happening there.

Of course, you need to have an area where just say this is for wave minute. Yeah. But you don’t, so sort of spoil view. You don’t have this issue with the, not in my background as such. So, so, so by coming in, of course we will be at another cost level to begin with. Yeah. By coming in, taking that part of it, then we can actually be a part of solutions for these remote islands and the coastal communities.

Allen Hall: Well, because some of these islands are spending more than 10% of the GDP just on energy to import it. That’s. Really high and a, on a big burden on the economy is how do you see wave piston affecting that? 

Michael Henriksen: But it’s just actually that is this, uh, it’s, it’s both, you know, in the first phase, of course, the islands in milk richi, but also you can say [00:05:00] countries as such that are dependent on fossil.

Because you can just reduce your dependency and also these volatility of the price. Uh, but, but go coming back to wave piece, of course we, uh, the special thing about our system is that we actually, we can both produce electricity and we can also desalinate sea water ’cause it’s hydraulic system. So this about coming into an island community where they have both these challenges.

We can actually come with a double. Sort of a, uh, solution and then, uh, work with how much energy you need, how much water you need at a given time. It could be an off grid solution or an on grid or micro grid, whatever, where, where, where. That makes sense. Yeah. So coming in and that’s actually why there is a big uh, uh, sort of.

Focus on wave, not only on us, but also others in the sector, that we can be a part of the solution, which is actually when you come with a new thing, you need to sort of to say, okay, this is new, this is fantastic. But you also need to say, okay, we are part of the solution now. We are solving some of the problems you have.

We’re not [00:06:00] creating new ones. Or maybe you not, not, there’s always some challenges, but we are not creating that many of big ones. You know? We are solving things. Yeah, we’re solving. Your challenges? 

Allen Hall: Well, e even if you look beyond the island, island economies, uh, there’s a bigger picture here about renewable energy sector that is not really considered wave energy too much, especially for offshore wind, right?

There’s, uh, uh, offshore wind, particularly in the North Sea and off the coast of England and other places where there’s our massive wave resources. We haven’t really addressed that at all. Are we missing out on a, on a lot of energy production? That would be relatively easy to go get. 

Michael Henriksen: We are missing out.

That’s the, the, the short, the short, uh, uh, answers there. Of course, we see relatively easy need to look at the relatively side of it because it is difficult going offshore. You know why? But it’s also why I’m asking. It’s actually why it hasn’t wave energy succeeded so far. Well, that’s simply because it’s [00:07:00]not the low hanging fruit.

Now being able to take a wind turbine. You know, in Denmark it was the farmer. You could just go, or the local Smith blacksmith go, go and fix things. Now we need to go offshore immediately. You didn’t throw the wind turbines in the middle of the North Sea in the first place? No. So this of course, solving the issue with.

The survivability someplace. Sometimes you have really extreme large weight, large, uh, forces you need to work with. You have your ability, you know, you have this, that, that there are millions of cycles in the corrosive, uh, environment. So all that of course you need to, uh, design the system to handle and still being able to, you can see through cost trajectory will get you down to, to a competitive cost limit.

So of course, yes, we’re missing out. Uh. There is a large, uh, uh, sea space, especially in the, all the newer, uh, offshore wind turbine areas because they take up a lot of space. They have very large, beautiful wind turbines, but you have a large sea [00:08:00] space in between where you can actually use that for energy production.

So, so yes. That’s, uh, definitely a large of opportunity. 

Allen Hall: Well, so let’s talk about what Wave Piston has built. Can you walk us through what the Wave Energy system does, kind of how it works in simple terms and what makes it different from some of the earlier Wave energy devices that have been tried over the years?

Michael Henriksen: So, so we, uh, in Wave Piston is actually going a bit back to the, the whole old style. It was not me actually, that’s the clever one There is by colleagues in, in, in, in Wave Piston. So, uh, but they, they was general analyzing. What are the, the challenges, you know, or has been the challenges, uh, on, on Wave 80.

Why haven’t we succeeded so far? And it, what they came up with is actually this brilliant concept we have now that is so hard so far, not so. Put it in a, in a labor perspective. Something also I understand, I understand. Even, I understand that is, you know, we’re not, you know, fighting the forces. We’re just working together with the forces of the ocean, and that’s what it came up with, this [00:09:00] concept where we have many of these.

Sail that are put in the water. They are like vertical sail. And when you put a sail in the water like that, it will move back and forth with a wave pass by and the breed thing, they say, okay, but what happens then? If you have many of these in the same structure, then actually they work together the the way together.

And that way they each can convert the energy in the waves to what we, we converted to high prices seawater. But the, the Im the way, the impact on the structure of the things that hold it together, they, that’s actually reduced. So we have forced cancellation because any of these are moving in different, you know, uh, uh, timings compared to where the waves comes by.

Yeah. So there are things, so to speak, so we can reduce the mooring loads. So the, the loads should keep things in place to less than a 10 compared to having, you know, individual wave in conversions out there. So that’s sort of the main thing. That’s our main concept. Uh, that’s our also made, made ip. And you can just a back to me, that’s one of our, that’s our actually test in the North Sea.

We did [00:10:00] in 20 18, 20 19, um, of, of string there was only four energy collectors on. So what we see is that we, we will go plus 20 on these sales that are on the same structure and then up to 30 in the, in the thirties on each of these strings. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. So the, the concept is you have a string of sales that are tied together that are.

Pumps, basically water pumps, and instead of trying to create electricity in each of the pistons themselves, what the pistons are pushing water to another location, typically on shore, which is then spinning a turbine, which creates electricity. So it’s more of a. High pressure water pump system instead of something more complex.

The, the, the simplicity of it, I, I like because it, it is not a lot of moving parts here. Pumps are very well known, but one of the questions I think that comes up a lot about anything in the water is survivability because the ocean can get a little [00:11:00] crazy at times. How have you designed this system to handle some of the loads from the ocean?

Michael Henriksen: So how do we handle the loads? There are two things, the survivability of these extremes. We both have this, as I tried to explain before, that we that, that by having all these energy collectors, we call ’em these sails on the same structure. With the prob, we can reduce the total loads of the full system or the boring low.

To, to, to less than than 10%. So one 10th of what is needed normally, and then the local low that, so these sales, they are actually built away. So if I look at what my hand said, that’s a good way of showing it, that, that, uh, when the wage gets too large, they move back and forth. Then actually it’s just like spreading the fingers on, on, on, on, on, on the, the, the sails where they do the AC CJC pitch, a bit like the wind turbine blades, but it’s actually the, the.

The material in itself. Off the, the, the sail. So it’s, they consist of simple blades like my fingers, and they, they, they, uh, they, [00:12:00] um, flex out when the weight gets too high. So the material in itself is bending and opening up just like my fingers. So when you go swimming, if you open your fingers like this, you don’t get very far.

But if you do it like this, you get very far. So by, just by doing that, we reduce the load dramatically. That’s a sub variability mode, so to speak, but they keep working. We don’t, it’s a passage system. There’s no active control, so it’s the material in itself that takes off the loads. 

Allen Hall: You’ve been through quite the journey on the design of way Piston, and you’ve gone from like a one 30 ish scale.

Lab model all the way out to full scale ocean testing. What were some of the critical milestones there? What did you learn from all that testing? 

Michael Henriksen: Yeah. Uh, yeah. First of all, this about just sitting and, and, uh, and, uh, uh, you know, you’re designing, you doing or onshore, you think about what, what you need to think about, what can go wrong, whatever.

Not, you can’t compare with this by just going on and also trying it offshore because a lot of things happened out there, which [00:13:00] you did think about. Of course, we try to build in the learnings from oil and gas, from offshore wind for everything else, and have people that have experience with this. But still, this is a, this is a different system, you know, of course it has moorings.

We have different, uh, pipes, et cetera, we need to install, but there’s always this, you know. How do you install this the most efficient way? How do you operate these systems? How do you sort of, what will, how will they behave? Depend, you know, when you go from smaller scale to the larger scale, then there is this.

It is important to do. On short, it is important to do wave, wave tank. We still do that, go back, you know, and do when we do some tests and then see how would the behave with these situations, which gives a lot of input and then getting offshore that that is when you really. Uh, sort of gets the, the, the, the punches in the stomach where you see, okay, uh, you really, prince is like there, there’s also the human factor.

Yeah. When you [00:14:00] get out, you do some operation. You tell the, the crew on the vessel, you do this and this, and suddenly they don’t do it as you propose because they’re not used to these things. So you really need to be very. Uh, focused on following, these are the procedures, these are the quality check. These are the things we do.

So because we have had something water, they put on a wrong shackle that this broke or whatever things, and you need to go back. You need to do things again. So all this is just, is the sign, it’s the, it’s the procedures and, and that and that being able sort of to. Get that learning into the next versions and the next versions, et cetera, to where we are now.

Allen Hall: Well, you’ve come a long way because earlier this year, uh, Wade Piston signed a MOU with the government of Barbados. Can you tell us about that partnership and what it means moving forward and, and some of, take some of these studies into. Full scale. 

Michael Henriksen: Yes, yes, yes. Because that, that’s of course important as you know, uh, we can create the most beautiful product if, if the market is not there.

One is, is not, you know, [00:15:00] uh, demanding or want to do this, uh, not having mentioned like, uh, hydrogen project, et cetera, which has issues with that. Yeah. So of course it’s very important to see, you know, are they, are there the cause of this? So the user import. Both. That is they, they would like this project and they, they are like an island and remote community.

So just right down our lane of where we wanna go in the step one. And they also want to co-invest in the beginning for the first projects where there’s still risk, you know, these pilot projects, the farms, of course there are still some risk here because you need to take the first, uh, farms in the water.

There’ll be learnings around this and that. Having customers that want to co-invest in this, in getting it out from a few megawatts and they want to have up to, uh, a mean 50 megawatt in the water. That’s of course very important both for us to show is as demand. There is are customers, there are someone who wants to pay for this and want to do it together with us, and also getting the first sales.[00:16:00]

Within a reasonably short time. Uh, and that is also sort of a good signal for getting a business on board. Yeah. Because they’re looking at, they say, okay, this looks very nice. You have a nice concept, but, but anyone wants to buy this. Uh, because you start at a higher price, it’s still a bit risky, and then you need to take it down.

Yeah. Because we’ve not been out there for more than 20 years lying like, uh, in the water, like offshore wind. We need to start, you know, a place where we get the first sch in the water. So that’s the way it’s. 

Allen Hall: Well, let’s look forward then, if the Wave Pistons, Barbados projects is a success, which it is really headed in that direction right at the moment.

What does it look like for other Caribbean Island communities, uh, using Wave Piston? Is it just then taking the Barbados example on just carrying it over, or is it more of a bespoke solution for each of the different locations? 

Michael Henriksen: Oh, let’s says we, we see that this is. This is, uh, I wouldn’t say one size fits all, but it is a modular system, [00:17:00] so you put in.

The system, the size of the system that you need at that game location. And we are not, it’s not with the wind turbines that we just, we go, when we scale, it has to be larger and larger sails. We actually see, especially the first number of years, it’s number of units that you put out. So it giving location, how much maker, what do you need?

Okay, what’s the wave climate? And then say, okay, then we put these number of units down and we can start with a smaller number, you know, and then we can just expand over time. So you go from. From, from any scale needed. And then you see, okay, this is fine. We need more, then we can just expand, uh, these, these wave farms.

Yeah. So that’s the modular approach that we’re working with, 

Allen Hall: right? Because the wave piston actually comes in these chains, and then you can make them into array. So subsequent chains, so you, you start out, you could start out relatively small, see how it goes, and then keep expanding and expanding, expanding.

You can go from kilowatts to megawatts pretty easily from what I’ve seen from your technical information. So in, [00:18:00] in terms of, hey, let’s get, uh, an example in the water to, I’m using the energy as, uh, as part of my electricity grid. That step is very small. Basically, you’re just adding more units to an existing array.

Michael Henriksen: Exactly, so, so the main thing is because we have, we work as you, as we always talked about earlier, so we are out at sea because to keep it as similar as possible, we generate pressure as sea water. So if we are within a few kilometers from shore, that will be taken to an on shore. Conversion station. Yeah.

So this is just adding more modules. Then we will add more in the end. Uh, if you have the piping to, to, to show, you’ll add more modules to this or you add more pipes. Also over the time you can need that depending on the size of the system. Yeah. So this. Starting small, going larger, preparing the infrastructure and that we just get going to any size that’s needed.

Of course, giving the c space that they have availability available for this because we don’t want to go, you [00:19:00] know, where a la the, where the good servers are. We don’t wanna fight with the servers. I lost server so they can do surfing. The ways that we go, other places where you don’t wanna serve. Or, uh, with a fisherman that goes fishing some places.

But, but, so, but, but that’s actually also, I think it’s something we, it’s important about this having these, these, uh, sea space that you use for, for energy. Uh, or yeah, for either energy, water, and water. That actually they also become like a, um, a sealed area where we can see that marine life is actually thriving around this because, because like arts and fisheries.

So it almost becomes like a nature of the surf because you have a lot of life around it. So, so, so this is actually the, the, the benefit we see also for putting like these structures in and then at the same time being able to harvest the energy of the waves. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Oh, that all makes sense. So. Beyond the Caribbean, what is your vision for wave piston and wave [00:20:00] energy in the next five to 10 years?

Where do you think this technology ends up at? 

Michael Henriksen: We see this as a, again, you know, um, if we look at this go to market, we have step one, step two. Step one are islands, remote, commun Caribbean, we are the Canary Islands. Uh, we can see things in the Pacific now also in the west of Atlantic. So there are a lot, there’s a lot of potential there.

Indian Ocean, we also talk with the potential or. Customer slash islands there. So that’s the step one. That’s actually the foundation that will continue the whole time. And then we can add on step two, which is the utility scale market. And that’s especially what we talked about earlier with about this co-location.

Wind and Wave has a very large uh, uh, uh. Opportunity here because you have these large areas. You have one giga lott of wind. You get there, let’s get the waves in there as well, and the wave energy devices within, between the, the turbine wind turbine, ensuring of course you have access to the wind turbines, et cetera, et cetera.

But, but the, and it is go for our type of technology and others in the sector that [00:21:00] that needs to be going. I think I call this a no brainer when I talk. Uh, and I when talk with the offshore wind developer, but they don’t want to, oh, don’t, don’t, Michael don’t come with any, you know, uncertainty now. No, no innovation.

We just want to get these offshore with the turbines out there and then we need to talk a bit with the politicians and others saying, okay, that’s fine, but please, you know, think a bit hits, be a bit more, you know, uh, look, what do we do in the next five to 10 years about this? And can we even get more out of the sea space?

And sea space will also be limited. Yeah. There’s a lot of things happening out there, so of course let’s try to use this as much as possible, as sustainable as possible, and then we can actually get more energy out of the systems or the same area and actually also more sustainable way. And then actually the last thing that’s this about when you have wind and wave, this is this about, you know, getting good quality energy, energy production to the.

And the impact on the grids that is this, this positive thing. That’s also, there’s been several studies about this that, uh, to balance in the grids, if you have [00:22:00] these different resources, especially wind the wave, you can actually reduce your, uh, grid balancing cost considerably. 

Allen Hall: Well, Michael, final question.

What would you say to a wind energy professional or investor right now who is just curious and doesn’t know a lot about wave energy or hasn’t paid much attention to it? Why should they care? What should they do next? 

Michael Henriksen: Well, they should, you know, of course, let’s get so much Austria wind going as possible.

The next thing will be that we have these co-location project that we have wind and wave, that we get, you know, more energy out of the same, same areas or even some areas where wind is not a good option. There are several areas where you can inspect up with the waves is, but we also talk about these locations where you have get very.

A deep. Now most of the oceans, you get very deep waters within a few kilometers, so you start having explosion offshore. Of course, it’s very good. You get that different areas, but it also gets very expensive when it gets, yeah, so then some places makes sense to wind. Some places wave, and a lot of [00:23:00] places wind and wave combined will be.

Allen Hall: Michael, how do people find out about Wave Piston? Where should they go look and how do they get ahold of you? 

Michael Henriksen: They call my number. Uh, it’s on my website, wave Piston, dk. Uh, and then they all, of course, always, uh, welcome to reach out. Um, and, and we are. Open to talk, of course, with anyone that wants to, uh, do something together with us that are just as excited about wave energy and, and wave business such as, as we are.

And if there any investors out there, we are also open to discussing, you know, uh, potential investments here. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. So the website is wave piston.dk up in Denmark. And check out the website ’cause the website is really good. It’s a a ton of resources there. So if you’re interested in Wave Energy, that’s where you should check First Wave piston.dk.

Michael, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate this discussion. Very insightful. 

Michael Henriksen: Well, thanks a lot Emily. It’s. Truly a pleasure and I’m looking very much forward to keeping in touch over the [00:24:00] next period of time. And then maybe next time we’ll do one with a large system in the water or we go to Barbados together, maybe even.

Yeah, to check the things out. 

Allen Hall: You got a deal. Thank you, Michael. 

Michael Henriksen: Thank you.

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

The UK bars Ming Yang on security grounds while Vestas announces a €250M nacelle factory in Scotland. Also, Nordex reaches a 199-meter hub height milestone and male bats use turbines as courtship song perches.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

[00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And. The hot news this week is Scotland, and Scotland is gonna be a major hub for manufacturing for all the offshore wind that is happening in the UK and around Europe.

Well, the UK government ruled that Chinese turbine maker Ming Yang poses a national security threat and blocked its products from UK offshore wind projects, which in turn killed a plan for a one and a half billion pound Scottish factory. And then a couple of hours later, Dana Danish Giant Vestus announced plans to build its own cell [00:01:00] and hub factory in Scotland with an investment of about 250 million euros and up to about 500 jobs.

Uh, but there is still a catch. Vestus is only going to move forward if it wins enough orders from the UK’s offshore wind. Auction program and allocation round eight was announced recently, so that’s gonna happen. So obviously Vestus would like to win a number of turbine orders from that, but that’s a pretty major announcement by the UK and by Vestus.

It does seem like Vestus will be the leader in offshore winds in the uk. Is that the long term play now? Is that there’ll be a primary. Wind turbine source for the uk and that would be Vestas. 

Rosemary Barnes: Weren’t we just covering, didn’t we just cover last week about another Danish manufacturer who just closed in a cell, uh, manufacturing facility in Denmark?

Allen Hall: Siemens did. 

Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, one week [00:02:00] Siemens is closing a factory in Denmark and the next week. As Bestus is opening similar factory in the uk. So that’s a interesting little geographic, uh, bit of information, 

Matthew Stead: isn’t it? Thanks to our friends, the royal family in the uk, that they’re really promoting offshore wind.

Matthew Stead: Uh, my understanding is they own the rights to the offshore water.

Uh, well, obviously the offshore, offshore area, and they, they have promoted, um, the use of leases. And I, I understand, I might be cor incorrect, that the royal family is the one that may gain the, the benefit from the leases. 

Allen Hall: It’s the crown of state in the UK that. Manages the royal family’s holdings. [00:03:00] Some part of the awarded amount or the, the leases are going to go to the royal family.

I forget what that number is. Maybe 10% of ’em. And the rest basically are the treasury of the uk. 

Matthew Stead: Oh, not all of it. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, not all of it. But yeah, I mean it definitely benefits the royal family. 

Matthew Stead: Yeah. So kiosk to the royal family for promoting it. 

Allen Hall: Well, the price of petroleum in oil products recently has skyrocketed, of course.

And, uh. The push to get renewables as the leading source of electricity generation in the UK is a massive move, which will. Promulgate all through Europe, everybody’s gonna be on that same pathway, I would think. Right now, the, the, the unique part about the UK and these, these Scottish efforts is that the speed at which the UK and Scotland in particular are going after it, you see some commitment by the Scandinavians in Germany to get to some of these numbers.

But, uh, the UK is putting in an action. And they have a in, uh, industrial growth plan, which [00:04:00] is a little bit unique that this is part of the growth strategy of the UK is they’re trying to grow jobs, they’re trying to get higher paying jobs into the uk and this is the, the one way they’re trying to accomplish it.

I was listening to a podcast today talking about this. It was someone representing, I think it was great British energy, but they are at least the, as the discussion points, they were trying to show comparisons. To what will happen and when to What has happened in the past with aerospace that the UK realized it’s good at composites, manufacturing wings, doing power plants, rolls Royce is there, right?

So there’s a number of parallel. Tracks that the UK is going to to try to do through, um, their knowledge of aerospace into the wind turbine market. We’ll see if that comes to fruition. I’m not sure where these vestus turbine blades are gonna be built. They’re gonna be V 2 36 turbines, 15 megawatt machines out in the water.

I, I assume that the turbine blades are gonna be coming from outside the [00:05:00] uk, but maybe the UK is working on something with Vestus about that. 

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know, but, but the UK government with their auctions has definitely laid the framework that would enable manufacturers to make that sort of investment or that, that sort of investment decision.

So it wouldn’t, wouldn’t surprise me if we saw more manufacturing there. They’ve got, you know, the most secure, uh, and long, long term pipeline, more the most visibility around. Future projects. So if I was a company looking for, you know, where am I gonna open another factory, that would probably be quite appealing.

That security really helps when you’re planning out a factory to know that you’re highly likely to have orders filling it for, you know, the lifetime of the factory. Even if costs are a little bit higher, I think that it would be, you know, you can offset a certain amount of cost by. The certainty. 

Allen Hall: What are the short term ramifications for Chinese wind turbine manufacturers in Europe?

Are you gonna see [00:06:00] more of these type of moves like the UK just did today, where they’re gonna put some prohibitions in? Or will there be some places that, uh, Chinese manufacturers can set up base? 

Rosemary Barnes: To me, it’s really strange because it’s, it’s like you’re worried about security, so you don’t let them come bring their technology to your country.

It’s. Like the, to me, the obvious thing is the other way around. If they’re worried about, um, technology transfer and IP theft, that they, um, should have prevented European wind turbine manufacturers from sitting up factories in China, because surely that’s how the big transfer of knowledge happened. Now China, you know that that’s where, that’s where they learn how to make win winter turbines 10, 20 years ago.

Um, and what they’re doing today in China is, is not, it’s not like static from that. They have also developed their own, you know, their own ideas and taken the technology in a different direction. Why don’t we take the opportunity to learn from that? I, I find it a bit, [00:07:00] a bit funny that, um. Yeah, that you would ban a manufacturer from coming to your country because you’re concerned that they have, um, you know, copied or stolen your technology in the past and can’t see how they’re gonna do that by bringing their tech to your country.

Matthew Stead: And how does that tie in with the discussion we had the other week about the tariffs and removal of tariffs on certain components? Um, Alan, do you know if that’s linked at all? 

Allen Hall: I don’t think it’s linked. There hasn’t been any news articles about it. However, there’s gonna be a lot of hard choices made about where components do come from.

That does seem like the UK government is thinking about what components can be made in the uk where UK engineering and technology can be applied to, to change the marketplace and where they want to go buy components. Uh, are they gonna buy them from China or are they gonna buy them from Poland or somewhere in Eastern Europe or somewhere in South America?

There’s a lot of places to buy components today. Or India. I think India is obviously, uh, one of the top choices, [00:08:00] right? Just because it was a colony years ago. And there’s a relationship there between the UK and India. Is that where the technology transfer begins? Uh, instead of it with China? Probably so

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Alright, how tall is too tall? Well, for onshore wind, the answer keeps changing with. Nordics group just receiving its first order for a turbine with a hub height of. Drum roll please. 199 meters. So there must be some sort of limitation at 200 meters is where the limit is. So they came in one meter below it.

It’s what it smells like. 

Rosemary Barnes: The limitation would be on the tip height, not the hub height. 

Matthew Stead: Should have been 200, 

Allen Hall: just routed up to 200. See? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But this is Germany, right? Where it’s like you, the number is what engineering says it should be, not what looks nice on a marketing brochure or in a press release.

You know, if, if the tower should be 199.2 meters, then that’s what it will be. 

Allen Hall: Well, three of these 199 meter towers rise up in a project in the North Rhine with Flia area of Germany, and it’s gonna drink power in a very [00:10:00] low wind speed region. Uh, the. Towers are gonna be constructed in typical Nordic fashion, and the, the top portion of the tower will be steel.

The, the lower portion will be concrete. So you may be talking about what height for concrete are you talking about a 50 or a hundred meters of a concrete tower? That seems amazingly high because Nordex does a unique thing where they, they kind of jigsaw piece together and erected that way. I don’t. I think I’ve seen them do anything nearly that high.

But, uh, there are other ways to get to that hub height, but it does seem like concrete and steel are gonna be the pathway. Are we gonna see more of this? Uh, as wind turbines move off the prime spots where the wind speeds are high, that instead of looking, putting more turbines where the wind speeds are high, you’re just gonna put.

Really, really tall turbines up with massive rotor diameters to keep them spinning. 

Rosemary Barnes: [00:11:00] Yeah. But I think it kind of makes sense in Europe, like this project, it’s three turbines, right? So if you had smaller turbines, like a smaller turbine might be cheaper per megawatt. Um, in terms of like if you have a really large wind farm with just a lot of them.

But this site, you know, imagine they’ve got a triangular plot and they can put one turbine at each corner. They’ve really, really wanna maximize the amount of power that they can get from each, each turbine because it, you know, like on a small site, the area it’s capturing, it kind of extends past the, the edges of the land footprint, right?

Because they’ve got, you know, such huge, huge turbines. So for those really small projects, I think that it is a different, um, equation that they’re calculating. For what the optimal turbine size is. And it, it does make sense to really go after every what that you can get from that site. Since you, you’ve got so few turbines that you can work with.

Allen Hall: Well, they need unique construction methods to get the [00:12:00]blades that high and to get them the cell on top of the tower. 

Rosemary Barnes: I guess a crane, a specialized crane will be the, a tricky thing. 

Matthew Stead: And then how do you repair it? You know when, when you need to change a blade out, how you gonna get it? That crane bag. Uh, how, how, how are you gonna get up and down?

I mean, it’s gonna take you half an hour to, in a little lift to get up. And what if you need to go to the toilet? 

Allen Hall: Let’s get to the heart of the matter. 

Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I mean, at least it’s only three, right? 

Allen Hall: But it’s gonna take you how long to get up that tower if you’re in the lift. Those lifts don’t move that fast.

And it isn’t like you’re in, you know, a modern office building where the elevators move very quickly. It’s gonna take a little bit of time. Uh, I guess things, things we’re gonna have to figure out, uh, because we have seen a number of technologies that, they talked about installing blades, using cables, and you see some of that more recently, but 200, roughly 200 meters high is a long way to go.

So they must have a plan on how they’re going to do it. 

Rosemary Barnes: So a co Google says that wind turbine [00:13:00] lifts slash elevators range from 0.3 meters per second to one meters per second. Um, I guess at your fast 

Allen Hall: 200 seconds. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So at at best, it’ll take you three and a half minutes to get up there and at worst. 10 minutes.

Matthew Stead: So definitely a toilet up 

Rosemary Barnes: there. There’s no way there’s a toilet up there. Kept real, Matt, they put toilets up in wind turbines, you hold it or you know, if you’re a gross man, then you just, you, you go off the side and they will tell you, you know, like when you. When you’re doing site, your site inductions, it’s like, oh, don’t park in this location because people pee there.

Allen Hall: Are you downwind? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, your car could get hit. 

Allen Hall: Do they have a wind sock at the bottom of each of the towers? Is that what’s going on? 

Yolanda Padron: I mean, at least like 10 minutes isn’t too bad compared to like when you’re free climbing the smaller towers that didn’t have the lifts in them yet. Like that take, I mean, I might be slow.

It took me like half an hour at least 

Rosemary Barnes: Last [00:14:00] time I was on site, some of the team were climbing. ’cause that’s just the exercise that they get. And they climbed the same speed as the um, as the lift roughly. Um, but I don’t think they would do that over 200 meters. You know, I think, you know, there’s a difference at a hundred meters versus 200 meters of, of climbing like that.

I mean, it makes sense. You don’t need a gym membership, you don’t need to go for a run after work ’cause you’ve got your exercise during the day. 

Yolanda Padron: That’s after that. 

Matthew Stead: I’m just wondering about how much it would actually be moving around, like when it’s, when it’s under maintenance, how much, um, horizontal sway you’d actually get.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, already when you stand at the top of a, um, a wind turbine tower, you definitely feel it. 

Matthew Stead: You’re getting sway. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So. More than that, but it is, I mean, it’s, it’s evolution not revolution, right? Like, we’ve already got towers that are 160, 180 meters tall, so it’s a, a little bit more than that.

It’s let’s not, let’s not get too crazy. It’s not changing the world, it’s just, [00:15:00] you know, we, we know all the bad problems for tall towers and these are a little bit worse, 

Yolanda Padron: but it’s only pre, so it’s not a hundred big, big, big towers, right? 

Allen Hall: I think you gotta be careful because it, when you get to these hub heights.

Everybody on the ground in the neighborhood can see it forever. Uh, it does raise concerns. I know it will in the states. I don’t think you’ll ever see a hub height that high. It could be wrong on shore, but it, it wouldn’t seem like that would be a smart move for a lot of operators. ’cause there’s a lot more ground.

Right. And the winds are pretty good in America, so you can just spread it out. But making taller turbines would be a big pushback I think, from society. 

Rosemary Barnes: Then, which who, whose record are they breaking? I thought that they, this, yeah, this is the tallest hub height on shore. 

Allen Hall: Their own. 

Rosemary Barnes: But don’t we also have that announced project from Fortescue?

What are their Tower Heights gonna be using the NRA lift technology a hundred, 180. Those are in the absolute middle of nowhere. There’s definitely no neighbors there that are [00:16:00] complaining about heights, but there’s also absolutely no shortage of land there. You know, have as many turbines as you want, so they’re.

Doing it. Yeah. Like a totally different calculation to figure out what’s the optimal tower height. And they’ve come to similar conclusions. So that’s kind of interesting. 

Yolanda Padron: Going back to the, the, you know, people complaining issue. I know of some communities who have benefited a lot from wind turbines in the states and like seeing them just because they know like, oh.

Every time that’s spinning, like, I’m getting more this quarter. You know, like that, that’ll be my nice little bonus. It’s like, it’s a nice passive income. ’cause all they have to do is just have him there. Um, and so I think it, I mean it really depends on what the community is like over there and with regards to.

How they would like, like whether or not they would like to see these huge things in their backyards or to Rosie’s point, if they’ll see them in their backyards. Right. Like it’s, it could just be like the middle of nowhere. [00:17:00]

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I know in some parts of Europe people don’t mind too much. Like in Denmark, you’re never very far away.

Or in Jutland, at least where I live, you’re never very far away from wind turbine. Like, I couldn’t see them. I probably could see one old one from my house, but, um, you know, like they’re, they’re not like looming over you. But people aren’t, aren’t so bothered as they would be in Australian suburbs or in parts of the us and also other parts of, like, Southern Germany is not so fond on wind turbines.

So, you know, I think it, it just totally depends on where the area is as to how, how, how happy people are gonna be to, to see them in their daily life 

Matthew Stead: or offshore Japan. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think the key is that you make them, you don’t want ’em to be so tall that someone can look at it, that isn’t benefiting from it.

So. Like in the us if people are getting payments for the turbines, I’m sure they’re happy to look at them and just see dollar signs. But if you are the neighbor whose site was supposed to have a turbine and then they redrew the wind farm and now it doesn’t have a turbine, if you can still see them, they’re gonna piss you off every time you, you [00:18:00] see them.

I think so probably really depends. 

Allen Hall: The Tavis billing in Germany is the Commerce Bank at 259 meters. So these turbines will be bigger than that, or taller than that? Yeah, 

Matthew Stead: the whole of Germany. Wow. 

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

PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS win.com today. While wind turbines and bats have always had an uneasy relationship, now researchers in Germany have found a surprising reason why bats keep flying into the danger zone.

Male bats are using wind turbines as song purs, circling the the cells while [00:19:00] singing courtship calls to attract female bats. A study from the Museum of Nature and in Germany analyze more than. 80,000 audio recordings from its six German turbine sites and found bat songs right in the rotor web zone. The songs draw females tore the turbines, which helps explain why more females than males are found hurt underneath the turbines.

During mating season, uh, researchers say smarter curtailment strategies based on the behavior. It could reduce fatalities and without sacrificing too much energy production. So this is a unique, uh, aspect of bats. I guess there’s a mating process that happens where the bats are chirping and the females come together, but the, the, it’s not a very successful strategy if you run your mate into a winter turbine plate that’s not really accomplishing the goal.

[00:20:00] However, the, the turbine curtailment. Period would actually be limited. Right. So you would know when the bats are out doing this little disco dance or whatever they’re going doing out in Germany. What kind of, what kind of dance does Germany do right now?

What, what’s, what’s the end dance in Germany? Rosemary must know, 

Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s still, still pretty, pretty electronic and um, in Berlin the last time I was there anyway, 

Allen Hall: so electronic music. Okay. Well, maybe they can play some electronic music and push the male bats away ’cause that’s probably what it’ll do.

But the, this leads back to a lot of discussions about birds and bats in the United States and around the world where there’s just different things happening in every site and we, we tend to wanna have one engineering answer for the worldwide bat and bird community. And that’s not going to be the answer.

You’re gonna have to do a little bit of homework. And Rosemary has pointed this out numbers of times in regards to painting one blade. Black and that that was one experiment and one place, and it’s not transferrable. This could als this, uh, [00:21:00] bat dance span song issue. Could be very local. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that’s right.

I, I think it’s a, at least a second project with the one blade black thing. But thanks for. Preemptively raising that? I guess so. No, I see everywhere. All over social media. Oh, all you need to do is paint one blade black. Anyway, moving on from that. I, I think you’re right that it’s gonna be highly localized.

It’s gonna depend on the specific kind of bat. Um, and, you know, probably a specific population of bat as well. I know, um, in the US at least, and it’s probably true around the world. There has been a, a massive increase in the amount of funding available for bat scientists, uh, since wind farms started being built and people realized that they affect bats.

So I bet that there’s some, some bat scientists who is just, you know, geeking out over. Just, you know, this new information that they have about the way that, um, bat mating rituals happen. So that’s pretty interesting. It does make me [00:22:00] sad though that, um, yeah, these, these poor bats just trying to fall in love and find a partner and.

Make baby bats and instead they’re getting whacked by a wind turbine. That, yeah, that, that’s not great. I hope that they’re able to pretty, pretty promptly learn enough to be able to at least, you know, stop the turbines and then, you know, they can work on refining it so that they reduce the, um, the losses, um, in order to do that over time.

Allen Hall: Yolanda, you live in one of the back capitals of the world? 

Yolanda Padron: I do, yeah. 

Allen Hall: I mean. 

Yolanda Padron: I’m, I’m not, I cannot say I’m a bad expert at all, but I am really curious to see exactly like. Whether these bats would, or this type of bat would do a similar thing to other tall structures, or if it’s just dependent on structures that move like turbines or have some component that moves.

Or is it just a turbine specific thing? Because I mean, we have bat season right now [00:23:00] in Austin, so like you have all the bats coming out at Sunset, and it’s this huge. Thing and you’ll see them in like tall buildings, but they’ve, not one bat has ever hit my window in my apartment in the whole like four years that I’ve been here.

And a lot of birds have hit it because, I mean, I think birds are slightly dumber than bats, some of them at least. 

Allen Hall: Whoa, easy 

Rosemary Barnes: bats are amazing though. Like, think, think about it. They have developed sonar capabilities. They’re mammals just like us. They can fly. We had to develop fighter jets, basically like billions of dollars spent on defense programs to develop the capabilities that bats have just evolved for themselves.

So I think that you do have to give bats a whole lot of credit. I think you have to give birds a lot of credit too. There’s a lot of very smart birds, but birds do fly into stationary things in a way. Bats don’t seem as likely to. What you do see in Australia is a lot of bats, um, electrocute themselves on power [00:24:00] lines if they, ’cause our bats are quite big here.

Matthew Stead: Um, but I was thinking, um, you know, like, uh, a way of keeping away males from shopping malls is to play elevator music, so maybe they could change the sound that. Around the turbine, and maybe they could play like elevator music rather than disco music. 

Allen Hall: I, I, I, I like you a lot. This question like, why are they there?

Like what’s, what’s attracting the bats to the turbines to begin with? Why are the male bats there? What’s their echolocation something? 

Rosemary Barnes: But I mean, these are questions, I’m sure bat scientists asking these questions, and now they’ll probably have funding open up to them to know the answer. So I like, I, I think.

There’s, there’s pluses and minuses. There’s obviously minuses for the bats that are being affected right now, but in the long term I think that it’s, you know, it’s good for the field of bat science. I’m sure that there’s like some, um, technical name for a bat scientist, and I’m sorry, I dunno it. Chiro neurologist.

Chiro neurologist. [00:25:00] I. 

Allen Hall: If that another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show For Rosie, Yolanda and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Allen covers the UK’s all-time wind record, the Crown Estate’s new 6 GW leasing round, Port Talbot’s floating wind assembly port, and Ørsted and BlueFloat’s exit from the Stromar project.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Good Monday everyone!

Last Wednesday, the British Isles did something remarkable. Wind turbines across the United Kingdom generated twenty-three thousand eight hundred and eighty megawatts of electricity — an all-time national record. That is enough to power twenty-three million homes at the same moment. And while wind was hitting its record high, natural gas fell to just two-point-three percent of total British supply. A two-year low for gas. In a single day.

Britain is not stopping there. The Crown Estate has announced a new offshore wind leasing round, targeting six gigawatts of new capacity off the northeast coast of England — enough to power six million more homes. And now the United Kingdom is building the physical infrastructure to match that ambition. Ministers have committed up to sixty-four million pounds in support for Port Talbot in South Wales. The plan: the UK’s first dedicated assembly port for floating offshore wind. Associated British Ports says total investment could exceed five hundred million pounds once fully built out. The goal is the Celtic Sea, where developers are targeting four gigawatts of floating wind. Four gigawatts. Floating. In open ocean.

Floating offshore wind is the industry’s next frontier. But it is also the industry’s most expensive and complicated technology. Consider what happened quietly this last week off the coast of Caithness, Scotland. Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, and BlueFloat Energy have both walked away from the Stromar floating wind project. Stromar is a one-point-five gigawatt floating wind farm — sixty to one hundred meters of water depth, fifty kilometers offshore, enough power for one-point-five million homes. Construction was not expected to begin until twenty twenty-eight. Now Nadara, the project’s remaining partner, holds one hundred percent of Stromar alone. For Ørsted, the exit signals tighter capital discipline. For floating wind, it signals just how difficult the economics remain.

And yet, across the North Sea, a solution is taking shape. The University of Strathclyde and Japan Marine United signed a Memorandum of Understanding last week. Their mission: standardise and mass-produce floating offshore wind turbines. Japan Marine United has been developing floating wind technology since 1999. Their Jade Wind floater is headed for large-scale government-led deployment in Japan. Standardisation — the same answer that made fixed-bottom offshore wind competitive.

So here is where we are. Britain just broke its wind generation record. The Crown Estate is opening new ocean for development. Port Talbot is becoming a floating wind assembly hub. And Strathclyde and Japan Marine United are building the engineering knowledge to make it all affordable. Two companies stepped back from Stromar. But the Celtic Sea is still waiting.

And that’s the state of the wind industry on the 30th of March 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Dainis Kruze and Janis Putrams, co-founders of Aerones, welcome Allen to their new Denton, Texas facility to discuss robotic spray-coat LEP repairs, third-generation internal blade crawlers, and their US-made inspection drone that eliminates Chinese components.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

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

Allen Hall: Dainis and Janis, welcome back to the program. 

Dainis Kruze: Thank you, Alan, for visiting us, uh, in, in our new facility. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. Is a great new facility. We’re in Denton, Texas, which is just north of Dallas. Uh, and you move from. Lake Dallas area. Mm-hmm. And we had visited that facility a year or so ago. This new facility is amazing.

It’s what, probably four times the size. Yeah. Maybe a little bit bigger. And it is, uh, indicative of the growing business that Aeros has in the United States. And that’s wonderful. Uh, and I’m glad I could catch you in Texas ’cause I know you, you guys are running around the world all the time. Uh, I think the last time I was at.

A facility with both of you was over in Riga? 

Dainis Kruze: Yes. 

Allen Hall: Uh, probably two years ago now. Oh, 

Dainis Kruze: yeah. 

Allen Hall: So I saw the Riga operation and, and now we’re seeing [00:01:00]the, the Denton US operation. You have facilities in other places too, right? 

Dainis Kruze: A small one in Australia, but, but yeah, the main facilities in Riga and the second biggest one here in, in Dallas.

Allen Hall: A lot of technology changes since Rose Riga. Uh. Leading edge being the big one, leading edge protection materials. And when I talk to US operators, even operators in Australia, we’re just there. They love the idea and the application of a robot for leading edge repairs. 

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah, 

Allen Hall: it makes total sense. It’s one of those areas that, uh, Rons has shown you can do this with a robot much more consistently.

Has that business grown quite a bit since you first started it? 

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We did more than 500 turbines last year, so we. The plan for this season is about one and a half thousand turbines, so it is growing quite a lot. 

Allen Hall: So the, the speed and the quantity of robots here in the United States is must have grown considerably.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Uh, one team now gets [00:02:00] up to 15 turbines a month. So if it’s category one or two turbine, uh, leading edge, uh, erosion, it’s about one day to do one turbine category three. Uh, one turbine is being done in two days, and we are talking about like 12 meter repair. It’s not a spot repair, it’s a full repair, like 

Allen Hall: full repair.

Okay. 

Dainis Kruze: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: And the robot technology and the, the amount of technology on the robot is behind us has grown quite a bit. Uh oh. Yeah. You’re learning as you’re going. Obviously. I looked at a number of robots in at the Denton facility. Smarter robots. More data, more consistency. Particularly because the leading edge protection materials require a lot more care than rope technicians can generally create on site.

Right. Walk us through what this robot is doing, why it’s doing what it’s doing, and, and like the, the quality you get coming out of it. ’cause what I see behind me is really nice. Better than, than [00:03:00] what I’ve seen typically coming out of a factory. 

Janis Putrams: Yeah. So multiple things actually we’ve been. Kind of what we’ve been hearing sometimes is that, um, that material’s good, the application seems good, but then it comes off after some time and you don’t understand what’s what happened, right?

Yeah. So we understood to, to make it right. We need to make sure that both the kind of, we take the full ownership for the, for the whole process, for the application. And so we’ve been investing quite a lot in our lab to, to actually understand what the material needs, how the surface needs to be, be prepared.

How do we measure it? How do we make sure the process is right? So actually what we saw is that, yeah, making sure adhesion, uh, is, is right, is is very important part. Also, when you go out there, there’s a quite a spectrum of the weather forecast, like information. You have humidity, you have temperatures, and you need to be able to guarantee the, the, yeah, the output in all of that spectrum.

So yeah, we’ve done quite a lot on, [00:04:00] uh, on those. And 

Allen Hall: so from a technology perspective, you’re incorporating all those measurements actually into the robot. So you know what the temperature was when the application was made, you know what the humidity was, you know what the mixture was exactly. Remember the temperature of the, the ingredients that went into make the, the LEP material.

That’s remarkable. And now it’s, uh, I think a lot of people think of LEP as being something you would apply with a, you see it still, you see it with rollers and sort of. Basic human tools. You’re spray coating today. Yes. 

Janis Putrams: Yes. 

Allen Hall: And the, the smoothness of that coating is remarkable. 

Janis Putrams: Yeah. For example, I dunno if you, if you know in factories where the cars are made Yeah.

You don’t see people rolling the car. Yeah. So, because the, the spraying technology, it enables us to actually guarantee the robot when it moves, it moves in a constant speed. It’s not manually, it’s kind of on a cruise control. So it’s, it’s moving in a constant speed [00:05:00] and the spraying is constant. And so yeah, the, the thickness is, is, is always the same.

And also it kind of nicely tempers off on the, on the sides. So there’s no vortexes, kind of, no aerodynamics loss. Uh, so yeah, it, it comes out very, very nice and 

well. 

Allen Hall: That’s the thing about when you put a leading edge coating on, a lot of times there’s a taped edge or a hard edge there. And then they gotta come back and try to fill it.

Or maybe they don’t fill it and the filler doesn’t stay. It may. I’ve seen all varieties of that. So when you spray coat it, not only do you get a very smooth finish, aerodynamically, you lose the step on the backside. Right. So the, the entire assembly is, is just more aerodynamic. And that’s the reason you’re doing in the first place.

Mm-hmm. It’s not just we’re recovering this shape. Yes, you’re recovering the shape, but you’d like to get some more power outta your, your turbines. That makes sense to me. When you’re, uh, cleaning the blade too. There’s a lot of technology about just getting the blade prepped because we’ve seen so many times where a leading edge coating’s been applied to a very [00:06:00] poorly prepped blade surface, and it just doesn’t stick.

A year later, you’re out doing it again. Describe what you’re doing on the prep side. 

Janis Putrams: Yeah, so what we also see, uh, saw that, um, if there’s some damaged material, it’s very important to get it off. If you put it on top of the damaged material, it’s just not gonna hold. So we have one of those robots, it has quite a powerful kind of belt sanding tool, uh, where you can truly take it off.

And then the second tool prepares the surface and also the tool kind of makes sure that it’s not up to the, to the operator to choose which point to, to prepare, but just the tool goes in, in a single step and prepares all of it so we can kind of. Be sure that nothing’s missed. And then when you, when you put it on, uh, then, then what’s gonna, it’s gonna hold.

Dainis Kruze: And to develop that tool. We have a laboratory where two chemical engineers are actually working and testing and doing pulley tests and surface, uh, adhesion tests [00:07:00] and, uh, to get the result, the best result possible. Because, as Ian said, we’re taking, we, we are giving guarantee, uh, of our work. Uh, and we don’t do that.

Oh yeah, it peeled off because the material was bad. We, we, we take the guarantee of application and materials that it’s gonna be stick, uh, is gonna stick and it’s gonna stay there. 

Allen Hall: I think there’s a lot into that. And having been to the Riga facility, I understand you have a lot of capabilities there.

When we talk to. Independent service providers and they’re applying materials. They’re not doing all the research. Oh, yeah. That aone is doing. You, you are actually looking at material properties, you’re looking at surface conditions, you’re looking at the chemical reactions that are happening. You’re doing the mechanical pull test.

You’re putting engineering behind it. Oh, yeah. Which, which has to happen. We’re still early in this leading edge protection world. We have, we don’t have 50 years of experience. We have two or three really good years, and we’re still learning and there’s a lot of different materials being proposed right now.

That mechanical testing and evaluation [00:08:00] laboratory really raises the bar. 

Dainis Kruze: Oh 

Allen Hall: yeah. I think in terms of just what you’re expecting to get out and, and EC saying, you back up what you do. Oh yeah. Which is completely different than the rest of the industry. De describe what that means to an operator that chooses their owns to do leading edge protection.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s a turnkey, uh, solution, right? So, uh, you won’t get in a situation when, um, somebody comes, supplies the material and after a year it peels off and then you, um, have months and months of debating and negotiating, right? Uh, whom to blame, right? So who will take care of that? Um, and in the end, basically, you don’t know either that was a material or that was a applicator.

Um, that’s it, but. The result is not met. Right. So the the, yeah, the the still, the, the blade is not protected. In our case, we take full responsibility, full accountability. If the material is gonna put peel, uh, peel off, we are gonna come and fix it. 

Allen Hall: Because I think a EP loss from leading edge erosion is one thing.[00:09:00]

A EP loss from a bad leading edge protection material that’s peeling off is exponentially worse from what I have seen. It just gets very draggy. Yes. And that material just starts to. Actually create massive drag. So you need to get that bad material off. And I think a lot of operators that have used other services probably won’t be calling you this year to go, we need to sand that off and put on something with robot.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah. 

Allen Hall: Does that then change the dynamic because of the, the amount of robotics, uh, applications you can do in a year where before when we talked to operators, us Europe, robots are nice. But we don’t see the ROI. 

Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm. 

Allen Hall: Has that flipped on its head now where the robots are just so much faster than rope technicians, that it just makes sense to do it with robots?

Dainis Kruze: I still, we even have systems in our portal where customers can see, um, at which category, how much of efficiency they’re losing, uh, during the year. Yeah. So what is the a a p loss and roughly speaking, it’s like three, four years of return of investment just [00:10:00] on AP loss. If you’re not fixing it at category three, you’re gonna lose in two, three years.

Same amount of money as on investing on, on repairing that. Yeah. So the return of investment is two, three years, uh, worst cases for four years. Um, as we see, um, and not even speaking about, uh, when the erosion happens to, to category four and five, your repair cost is just like at least double or triple. So you don’t want to do that in category fours and fives.

It’s lot smarter to do that at category two, three. 

Allen Hall: Oh, that makes a lot of sense. However, I would say that a lot of operators worldwide let it get to three plus. Mm-hmm. Before they start to worry about it. Alright, so the, then the question becomes, am I gonna put a bunch of technicians up on ropes anyway to go fix this?

Or is there a robotic solution that I can fix those leading edge, uh, where the, the, the glue has been eaten away by leading a rosn. Can I fix that without putting technicians on ropes? 

Janis Putrams: Right. So currently we are [00:11:00] doing categories like 1, 2, 3. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. 

Janis Putrams: Um, if we have category four repair, we would cooperate with a rope technicians.

They come and laminate, and then the robot does, does everything else. But there’s a, yeah, there’s a new, uh, new technology that we are working on, which is kind of a reinforced, uh, yeah. Application on the leading edge, uh, where we can be able to actually repair category for. Uh, for as well. 

Intro: Mm-hmm. 

Janis Putrams: Yeah. This, and it’s, um, it’s a uv uh, UV curable solution, uh, which is also great because you can apply it in, in, in, in, in humid environments, in, in colder environments.

Um, and then, and then of course the, the, yeah, the, the leading kind of protection that we put on would go, go on there as well. And, and this is actually quite a, um, amazing, uh, uh, yeah, sample. So for those who don’t know this, this goes into rain erosion, uh, kind of machine test machine. And [00:12:00] uh, and then they get kind of the spin and, and, and rain droplets are, are falling.

And, and, and then you measure how long it lasts. And, and this has been in there for 200 hours and we actually had to stop the test because it was becoming just outrageously expensive. But it’s, it’s like a lifetime, like the, the turbine would not experience this amount of erosion in lifetime, so we thought it was 

Dainis Kruze: 130 meters, uh, per second.

Uh, speed. Speed. Um, but, and yeah, as Ian said, like we also have a system in our portal where you can look up your, any wind park in us, and it’ll tell how many hours per year you have this severe, uh, rain, which would be like compatible with, uh. Close to this, uh, speed tip speed and, and the rain. And basically there is no wind park in the world, uh, where the erosion would happen, uh, where the rain would be like 200 hours, like, uh, in, in, in lifetime of the turbine in 25 years.

Hmm. So basically [00:13:00] it’s in most of the cases it’s like four or 5, 6, 7 hours a year, which means like basically it’s gonna last for 30 years, um, like in, in a, on the rain erosion test, 

Allen Hall: but really only if the application is good. 

Dainis Kruze: Only if the application is good. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: That which is the key, right? Yeah. So you can have the best material in the world, you can have the best lab results in the world, but if you can’t repeat it out of the world Yeah.

Then it’s just a waste of time. 

Dainis Kruze: Yeah. 

Janis Putrams: Yeah, 

Dainis Kruze: exactly. 

Janis Putrams: There’s another interesting aspect that we, we saw when we, because we, we did a lot of those tests and what we noticed is that the surface smooth smoothness, uh, actually is also very important because like if it’s more like an orange peel, you get those cavities and when the rain droplets hit.

They kind of, they, they creates more like a stress concentrations there just 

Allen Hall: a 

Janis Putrams: pull. We’ve seen like, like about the performance kind of getting into half. If the, if the surface is not, not, not smooth. 

Allen Hall: And that’s what you see in the field when they apply it by hand. It’s not nearly as smooth as what I see on the spray version here with the robot.

Janis Putrams: Mm-hmm. And [00:14:00] once it finds a place where the erosion can start, then it just grows. 

Allen Hall: That’s the magic. Right. I, I know a lot of operators don’t think about all those little details. Mm-hmm. But because roads has the ability to do the work, to do the manual motion testing, to do the lab testing, to look at the materials and apply it.

Like it should be that that’s a game changer. 

Dainis Kruze: Yeah. And, and scale it. Right. So when we do this with robots, like, uh, like most of the job is done by the semi-autonomous robot. So it’s not again, um, a bottleneck of how many good technicians you have, 

Allen Hall: right? 

Dainis Kruze: Like it’s, it’s, uh, it’s about technology which is doing the job.

And you will have a consistent result, whether it’s Australia, US, or Europe, you will have exactly the same result, uh, because it was done by exactly the same robot. 

Allen Hall: Well, speaking of robots, uh, the latest gen three internal crawler is remarkable. Uh, Yana should give me the details of all the cool features that are on it.

I’ve seen it in video. I haven’t seen it out in the world live [00:15:00] inside of a blade yet, but I will this year. I think there’s a lot of technology in there from your first gen robot to, uh, this third gen. The pictures that I’ve seen downstream are really good. Because it matters and, and because there’s lot of the defects you can’t see on the outside.

You need to be on the inside. 

Janis Putrams: Mm-hmm. 

Allen Hall: Uh, core, uh, bonding, most of them. Well, that’s true then. That’s totally true. No, the industry, you’re right. I do, I do think we started off on the outside because that’s what we could do. Mm-hmm. Not realizing that probably we should be on the inside should sort of started there first.

But the robot now is so much better at taking pictures. And if you, if you can take pictures, but the pictures are not so good, why are you wasting your time even taking them? 

Janis Putrams: Right. 

Allen Hall: Explain what’s all in that robot to take high quality images and to focus on the defects that you find. 

Janis Putrams: Right. So kind of, we’ve done a lot of inspections with our previous generation crawler and, and then we, we got a lot of feedback also, and we, we do [00:16:00] ourselves the, the inspections of the, the data, uh, and give, give information to customers.

So we worked our way back. And also not just that, uh, when you go out and do it on a big scale. You get feedback, like, for example, from the technicians, uh, what’s easy for them, like different blade models, maybe some specific blade models have some obstruction in there that you need to drive around. So, so those kind of small details when, when you gather and, and, and, and even just manufacturability to make sure that, uh, yeah, it’s easy and faster to manufacture, easy to maintain.

Um, so, but that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s the kind of, uh, the part on. On the, on the inspection itself, uh, of course it has a improved 360, uh, kind of inspection. So we gather everything. Uh, there’s additional camera for, uh, much detailed kind of areas. For example, the, the root zone, you would want to, to have the kind of the top part inspected [00:17:00] in higher resolution, but also it has like a smart feature where you can tell that, for example, particular area in the blade, if you want that in a higher resolution.

So when it gets there, it, it would point and, and, and take that particular area because maybe there’s a serial defect and you would want it in a much, much higher, uh, higher resolution. Also, what we got feedback from, from customers is that for them, it’s very important that, for example, if there’s a defect, you want to know exactly the size of the defect, and you want to know exactly the distance to the root.

And maybe you want to, you might need to open the blade from the outside and you don’t want to be off by even a half meter. So we’ve been working a lot to, to improve that. But it’s like centimeter precision 

Allen Hall: because a lot of the defects are actually happening closer to the root. I, I think lightning company, which is what we are, we get a lot of defects kind of further towards the tip, but the manufacturing defects that really matter are closer to the root [00:18:00] and they tend to, if you think about the root that’s.

The largest diameter part of the blade. So you need to be able to take really good images where the rover is not right next to the damage that matters. Mm-hmm. So you’re looking for megapixels, you’re looking for light intensity, you’re looking for exposures right to be right so that you can actually measure it, track it.

So even if you notice there’s a crack talking to operators, there’s a crack. Okay. But is it propagating yes or no? If you can’t measure it, actually, you can’t tell if it’s growing or not, which is ultimately. What you need. So those improvements are gonna be a, a massive improvement in terms of the operators buying in because we talk to operators all the time, you need to be doing internal inspections.

And they say, yeah, sure. Like, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand. You need to do a set up internal inspections so you understand what’s going on inside your blades because there are a lot of like kind of serial defect things or uniqueness things that happening, or wind, wind specific events that are happening and are causing issues with your [00:19:00] blade.

And that gets me to outside the blade. So, uh, once you’ve done the internal inspections and you should be doing some external inspections, particularly for lightning and some other issues. Question in America right now is you can’t use a drone that has Chinese components in it. There owns drone image.

Those are all Chinese free, ready to go right now to take high resolution images. And there’s actually more technology. Yeah. And this drone that I’ve seen in, in previous versions. 

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah. 

Allen Hall: Tell me about that. 

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s us made, uh, so we, uh, are, are compliant, um, with, with the rule, uh, regulations that you can’t use the Chinese, uh, parts.

That’s one thing. Another thing is like how the technology works. So, um, we have very sophisticated system how the drone flies and scans the blade, uh, the blades and the turbine itself. So we don’t need to put the blades in particular angles like you. [00:20:00] Whatever the blades are being stopped, the drone is gonna be capable of doing that inspection.

Um, that saves time, uh, time and makes it easier. Also, you don’t need to navigate, like if you take the drone and do the inspections yourself, you just push start and the drone does, uh, all the jobs. So you don’t need to fly to point it at the tip of the blade or whatever it’s gonna do. 100% of the jobs is gonna be by, by, by itself.

Um, and also like we have, um, a. Bigger angle, like variety, how we can put the camera. So we always will take the picture from the best angle. It’s not gonna be, look, you’re not gonna look at the crack under an angle. You will look at the, uh, crack directly, uh, onto it and it actually, it actually moves the needle.

It, it, it’s very, very important when you’re reviewing the data. 

Janis Putrams: Yeah. So basically what you want to do is like, if you want to take a picture of this. You want to be looking perpendicular to it. 

Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm. 

Janis Putrams: And, and if the turbine is like this, you, you want like, you want want to look like this and if the blade kind of, you go from the top, you [00:21:00] want to look like this.

So this drone was built, it wasn’t adapted, it was built particularly for wind turbine inspection. So the kind of, it was taken account that it can do all these angles Exactly as, as they need for, for, for blades. So to, to get the, the, the best, uh, inspection data. 

Allen Hall: I’m always surprised at the lack of quality of inspection images for cracks.

I see a lot of them because we get sent a lot of lightning damage mm-hmm. Inspections to go through and, but we see the cracks. Also, when I look at the crack, it’s always at an angle and I think, how do those engineers even have a sense of what the scale of that is? Because I can barely see it in this really poor drone image.

Having something that’s actually 90 degrees to the damage is. A game changer because now again, going back to there’s a crack, but what do I do about it? If it’s not growing, I may just live with it. Mm-hmm. But you can’t measure it if you don’t have a good, consistent image of it, which everyone’s thinks about.

Right. 

Dainis Kruze: Not only image, but also a 3D model of the blade. So because we are scanning [00:22:00] it with the lighters, we actually have a 3D model of that blade. So we can actually physically measure, we understand what we are seeing, uh, and we can measure, uh, with high precision. So both the internal crawlers and the drones are by far the best, uh, robotic technology for wind turbine inspections, uh, in the industry by far.

Like, uh, yeah. Uh, nothing comparable in the, in, in the industry. 

Janis Putrams: Yeah. What Dyna says, it’s that the precision is also important for another aspect, because when you have a drone inspection from the outside, an internal inspection on the inside, and you have this precision, what you get is that, for example, there’s something on the inside of Blade.

And you want to see what’s on the outside. You can flip in, in our portal, you can just flip and look at it from the outside and you say, oh yeah, there’s something on the outside and what’s on the inside. It gives you much better understanding what the defect to release. Is it just on the inside or is it already propagating on the outside?

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, and it’s one click. It’s not reviewing two reports, uh, trying to understand, uh, going back [00:23:00] and forth. It’s just one click you and you get outside. 

Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the software platform. There is a software platform. It is called the 

Dainis Kruze: your Owns platform. Okay. 

Allen Hall: You guys gotta 

Dainis Kruze: work 

Allen Hall: on a name? 

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, we, we haven’t blocked on, on the name.

Yeah, we should. We should. 

Allen Hall: But the, the Eros platform is a useful platform because you can have all the images you want, but they’re not really useful unless you can correlate it back to what the blade design is and then figure out where. The the crack or the DA or whatever this is going on. Where it is on the blade.

Exactly. So then you can assess whether you need to have a response to it. Do you need to derate the turbine, shut down the turbine, or just let her run? Those are big, important decisions to make because it has to do with profits at the end of the day. That platform allows every the engineers to do that.

You’re seeing more adoption of that platform by the Oh yeah, by the operators. 

Dainis Kruze: We are stepping up. Me and Jans, we actually graduated, uh, computer science. So we are software developers by [00:24:00] education, not the mechanical engineers. Uh, uh, and we, we, for, for all of these years, we, we’ve worked more on the robotic technology, how to get the data, how to get the best quality picture, how to, uh, get the, uh, best quality data.

Um, and now we have stepped up on the portal development and, uh, again, uh, in, in, we’ve built the best portal in the industry, like seamless review of the data of internals and externals and lightning protection system tests. Um, and, uh, yeah, the easiness, how to you, you can use the, the system, uh, review the data, uh, navigate, see the.

Um, different kind of analytics and, and help from our blade engineers on decision making, um, is again, the best in the industry now. 

Allen Hall: Well, you mentioned lightning protection resistance measurements because it’s something you’ve done for a number of years now, and I run into a lot of operators that say we’ve, we’ve had our drones do the LPS resistance measurements.

They should still be doing those. I think there’s, because Aeros has done it [00:25:00] so well and has a, a nice data set with it. Operators are thinking, I don’t I need to do it anymore. 

Dainis Kruze: Yeah. It’s a, uh, it’s 

Allen Hall: a conflict, isn’t it? It, it, it’s, you get so good at one thing that, that it changes the dynamic of the industry.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. I, I think, I think that we are a bit, we, we need a bit more data on understanding, um, how much these lightning damages actually cost. Yep. Comparing to what would cost, uh, like a proper inspection campaign. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. 

Dainis Kruze: So kind of in a, in a way, you know, like these lighting damages are not there yet. 

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Dainis Kruze: Why should I test anything? Yeah. And when you get that lighting damage and you lose a blade and it have a fire it to fire. Yeah. Or have a fire and you have, uh, hundreds of thousands, if not millions in losses, it’s already too late. It is. Yeah. It’s, uh, and, and that’s, and that’s an issue of the. Chicken and egg.

Uh, yeah, I think in the industry. Uh, but, but I see that the industry [00:26:00]is improving and we do more and more of these lighting protection system tests. Um, customers are becoming smarter on this and, and, uh, I hope, uh, that it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s gonna, and it’s gonna get to the right place. 

Janis Putrams: Also, what we saw is that sometimes we, we would give reports to the customer that, for example, for this Blade lightning protection is not working.

So they are asking like, okay, what’s next? Yeah, what do I do with this data? Right, right. So we developed a kind of a tool which helps to actually track exactly where that damage is, where that cable is, is kind of connection is lost. Uh, so it’s kind of like a, I dunno, same as you would kind of, uh, look for, I dunno, golden coins or something.

So it’s kind of a similar technology. The robot goes up and it kind of, uh, slides, kind of scans, uh, very closely to the blade. And when you find the, where the cable problem is, it has actually like a red marker and it can make a mark on the blade. Uh, so [00:27:00] actually if the rob guys, if they need to go up and, and open up the blade to fix the cable, they know exactly where, where to look.

So it’s not, again, you’re not doing it half a meter away or, or you can open up and then fix it. 

Dainis Kruze: We call it open circuit finder. For, at least for that, we have the name.

Allen Hall: It’s a very useful thing though. I think the, the more that you get out to site, the more you realize what the problems are, what the priorities are, and design solutions around those. The linet protection one is obviously, is massive, right? Mm-hmm. You just kind of see it everywhere in, uh, particularly United States and Southern United States.

You see leading erosion being the, the number one. And then lightning damage being number two, when you see a lot of operators going after both of those things simultaneously to save money, that’s a massive improvement than five years ago. The, you guys have really changed the industry. There’s, everybody’s starting to think a little bit differently about how they approach the repair [00:28:00] season that, uh, owns, has extended the repair season.

So a lot wider window than it was. It’s not just March to October. Yeah, almost a full year at this point because of the technology the robot brings and the amount of data. 

Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm. 

Allen Hall: Now everybody can react because they have something to base their decisions on. That’s, oh yeah. That’s impressive. It’s hard. I know you guys have a hard time seeing that because you’re in the day-to-day of Yeah.

Of trying to run a company has paced in, in Riga and you got places in Australia and America, so it’s a lot. But I do think deep breath, take a look back. You really have influenced the industry in the positive in a lot of ways. Thank you. Congratulations on that. It’s impressive. It really is. And uh, you know, when we talk next time in a year from now, probably you’ll have more done out in the field and you’ll have done several thousand turbines leading edge protection and you’ll have that history and you’ll have that data.

That’s [00:29:00] remarkable. Now your season. Your calendar is getting pretty full with a lot of operators calling you, saying, I need you out here to do leading edge protection and a variety of other tasks. Is there any room in your schedule right now to get on it and, and how do they, how do they get on your schedule?

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah, there is room because we are building 30 additional, uh, leading edge repair robots. So it’s, it’s quite a lot. Like one robot is actually doing, um, up to 150 repairs a year. So it’s, it’s, it’s quite a big capacity. So yeah, we’re building more and more robots. Demand is there. Um, and, and the wind industry is gonna generate more clean energy because of that.

Right. So because bleeding edge erosion affects the efficiency and, and we are fixing that. 

Allen Hall: Improving the profitability of all these operators. 

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah. 

Allen Hall: Which is what we should be doing. So if you haven’t contacted our owns, just Google our own’s website and go to it. There’s a a lot of information there.

You can get a hold of Dyna, you can get ahold of Giannis via LinkedIn. It’s [00:30:00] really easy to get a hold of these guys and at least start the process. Start thinking about how robots can improve your operation, how it can save you money. Generate more revenue on the production side. Save money on the repair side.

So at the end of the day, uh, your management is happy. 

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. We even help to do the calculations of return of investment, so it’s easier to justify, uh, with the management and so on. 

Allen Hall: Oh, it’s wonderful. Wonderful. Well, Dynas and Giannis, thank you so much for spending some time with me today and showing us around this Denton facility is quite oppressive and congratulations.

And yeah, we’ll, we’ll see you on the road at some point. 

Dainis Kruze: Thank you for stopping by.

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Denmark’s royal trade mission brings 54 companies to Australia’s renewables market. Plus the UK opens CFD allocation round eight for up to 18 offshore wind farms, and wind tech startups weigh focus against diversification into defense.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

 The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com And now your hosts.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m here with Yolanda Padron, Rosemary Barnes at Matthews Stead, and we start off. On the Danish trip to Australia, 54 Danish companies traveled to Australia alongside King Frederick II and Queen Mary. Uh, over the past week, most work in the renewable energy and green construction businesses that traveled along several signed agreements during the trip.

Denmark sees Australia as a growth market, and Rosemary is tied to royalty here. Loosely that Queen Mary is actually from Tasmania, much like Rosemary. [00:01:00] So there is possibly a line to the throne, the Danish throne for Rosemary. 

Rosemary Barnes: My dad’s from Tasmania. I, I live in Canberra, but I was, the whole five years I was living in Denmark, I kept waiting for Princess.

She was Princess Mary at that point, but Princess Mary to get in touch with her phone number, catch up. You know, Australians have moved to Denmark. Never happened. And now I see that they’ve come to Australia. And do you think that Mary reached out and got in touch with me? No, she didn’t. So I continue, continue to be disappointed in, in Queen Mary.

Matthew Stead: Maybe she’s waiting for you, Rosie. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, she could be waiting for me to reach out. That’s true. 

Allen Hall: But I clearly, Australia is a growth market. Denmark sees it. I know there’s been a number of Danish companies in Australia over the last two, three years, or con companies from all over the world have been down to Australia, realizing that the growth of renewables is gonna be big because Australia is targeting 82% renewables by 2030.

Uh, and right now it’s about 50% renewables, which is [00:02:00] remarkable by the way, that connection to Denmark. Is only going to grow, especially with the relationship with Queen Mary to the area. What are some of the growth areas that Denmark can walk into in Australia right now, Matthew? 

Matthew Stead: I mean, obviously the proposed offshore wind is a, is a big thing.

So, um, once that gets up and running, obviously the Danish technology will come in there. Um, but, but also, you know, through vest have been here forever. Uh, Siemens, gaa, you know, there’s a strong Danish connection there. Um, so. Yeah, I, I think it’s already, already, already really strong. And, um, obviously having the, the queen, the Danish queen, um, yeah.

Ties in with all of that. 

Allen Hall: Is it a reciprocal agreement that Australians can do work in Denmark? 

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think, it’s not any sort of like free trade agreement, is it? It’s just some individual, I dunno how much we’ve, we’ve got to [00:03:00]teach Denmark, although there are some good Australian technologies, like maybe not building wind turbines themselves, but there are some good technologies like here, logic’s Ping, uh, Australian developed the ping part of it anyway.

And then also, you know, I think some, some future manufacturing methods, uh, doing some exciting things here in Australia. Also, it’s not that hard to move to Denmark if you, um, like when I moved there, all I needed to get a Visa was a, a job offer. That was a certain, I, I don’t think it, I don’t, I don’t remember exactly if it was the type of job or if it was the salary, but you know, like you’re not gonna get a job offer.

Like working part-time at a bar isn’t gonna be enough to get you a, a working visa in Denmark. But certainly. Any engineers, um, you can, if you get a good engineering position offered to you in Denmark, it’s not hard for the company to make that happen. So I don’t know that we need, we don’t, we don’t really need it made that much easier for us [00:04:00] to get over there.

Allen Hall: Is it difficult to get a work permit in Australia if you’re from Denmark? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yes and no. It’s not like I would so love to be hiring my XLM colleagues to come. I know that I’d moved to Australia too. Some of them, it’s, it’s not super duper easy. Um. It’s not impossible. And uh, if people are young enough, it’s a bit easier.

But, um, it’s, it’s definitely possible, but it’s not, it’s not straightforward. It’s quite expensive and lengthy process. 

Matthew Stead: You know, if they can fund a fund, um, themselves with a couple of million dollars, that’ll make it easier. 

Rosemary Barnes: It’s definitely beyond my capabilities as a small company of like four, four people to be able to, um, sponsor someone.

But I have had, um, actually. Most, maybe. Yeah. Every single employee actually that I’ve had has been, has non, not an Australian citizen, but they’ve all had visas for other reasons. You know, either because they came over with a partner who, um, was an unskilled working visa or because they did a master’s [00:05:00] here and then got a, um, a, yeah, after that got permanent residency through the, you know, the, there’s a pretty established pathway after studying to be able to get permanent residency.

Definitely appreciate that there is so much, um, international talent that’s willing to come to Australia, but just yeah, unfortunately any, any random skilled person, you, it’s not, it’s not easy for a small company to bring them over. 

Matthew Stead: Rosie, would you recommend Australians to go to Denmark to learn about the wind industry and then, and come back again like you did?

Rosemary Barnes: I recommend that they do that in 2016 when I did it. Um, so everyone who’s got a time machine. Hop, hop in, hop in your time machine and go, go do that. I mean, it’s, uh, I was looking back through, um, photos, uh, of my time there recently and was just, uh, like thinking about how much work I did and the amount of time that I spent like in, in production is like I got in my.

Four years that I was working for lm, I had at least 10 years worth of experience. And I mean there were [00:06:00] some long, long weeks, but I’m not sure that Denmark’s the right place now because for LM there’s nearly no engineering left in Denmark and certainly not doing the cool, new, exciting technologies that they were while I was there.

So that’s not the go Vestas is still doing a fair bit. But you know, we talked recently about the Vestas CO wanting to, wanting to move somewhere with more favorable. Taxation of CEOs salaries. So, you know, maybe that’s not continuing. So I definitely recommend moving to another part of the world early on in your career while you’ve still got enough energy to, to, to like really, really hard work.

Um, but I dunno that Denmark is, is the right place anymore. There’s not that much manufacturing left Now. 

Based on your experience in both Denmark and Australia, how likely do you think that any of these companies that are coming in. To Australia will do any r and d with data from Australia for all of these wind technologies that they’re bringing.

Rosemary Barnes: I, I think that there’s some interest in that. I haven’t heard [00:07:00] Danish companies specifically. I have heard a few little inklings of US companies who are interested and I think that that makes a lot of sense because the US was a much more attractive environment for wind energy technologies until a couple of years ago.

So there’s a lot of companies that got partway and now are frustrated and I think that Australia seems quite attractive to them. So that’s where I’ve heard people interested, maybe British as well. Um, the Denmark Danish companies would do well. Like any company, um, that’s trying to develop a technology related to wind energy would, um, do really well to come try and develop in Australia because, you know, like, um, we’re so short staffed or like for expert staff.

Things are really spread out. Costs are very high. Um, things wear out faster. Like we just have more operational problems here. So, you know, when you’re putting a business case together, you need to, um, you know, an environment where you are. The alternative of just doing everything manually is [00:08:00]far more expensive here, and it takes far longer so you can get a much more positive business case, um, in Australia, like earlier than you could somewhere else.

So I think that that makes it really. Really like perfect place to develop technologies. Um, yeah, but I don’t think everybody realizes that yet. But I do see some, some people starting to, 

Matthew Stead: and I’m adding to what you’re saying, Rosie, when I first started in wind, um, back in 2012, um, I got great reception from Denmark.

Actually, I probably got the most. Positive responses to my outreach from Denmark. So, um, I, at that point in time, you know, it is a little bit before 2016, but, um, um, um, I, you know, I found really positive engagement and willingness to be open to new technologies. So that was my experience 

Allen Hall: as Wind energy professionals.

Staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. [00:09:00] PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need.

Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. The UK government announced contracts for difference allocation round eight, which will open in July of this year. This follows AR seven in January, which secured 8.4 gigawatts of offshore wind. The largest UK CFD procurement ever and renewable UK says up to 18 offshore wind farms could compete for this AR eight round now.

The amount of wind going in offshore in the UK is astonishing. Uh, AR eight. I haven’t seen any numbers yet of what they think the total gigawatts will be, but it has to be somewhere around the eight range just to keep up with the [00:10:00] expected rate, uh, to meet their environmental targets and electricity targets in the uk.

This is changing the way wind is developed in Europe, especially with the UK changing its tariffs and eliminating tariffs on wind turbine parts and components that come into the country. That is going to really improve the economics of wind turbines in the uk. Plus turn out a lot of European countries and companies to to feed the UK energy goals.

Is this the right move in, in terms of the government approach? Because a lot of, uh, other auctions that have happened up in Germany all the way up into Scandinavia have not had such success as this recent UK round. Is their model just a little bit different? And maybe the UK approach is, is the winning method with the the CFDs.

Rosemary Barnes: We have some in Australia too. The A [00:11:00] CT Australian Capital Territory where I live has the same thing and, um, for at least several years. Recently, I think most years recently we’ve had our electricity prices in Canberra have been reduced while in the rest of Australia they’ve gone up. It doesn’t always happen that way.

Um, it depends on, yeah, how expensive. Electricity was compared to normal. But you know, like when the gas, uh, shock was happening and pushing up electricity prices everywhere, it didn’t affect Canberra very much because we already have PPAs for a hundred percent of our electricity from clean sources. So, 

Allen Hall: but isn’t that the goal at the end of the day to get.

Some levelized pricing, which is the allocation rounds are doing, is they’re getting levelized pricing over a fixed period, so you know what your electricity is going to cost you. None of this up and down, like with the gas market in the United States and elsewhere. 

Rosemary Barnes: My understanding is that it’s the most crucial aspect of that is certainty, so that new projects can get financing.[00:12:00]

It’s not actually about it being a, like, whether it’s a subsidy or a payment is not as important as, like, it’s not that that renewable electricity is too expensive and the government needs to subsidize it. It’s that the bank needs to know how, how much you’re gonna get for the electricity that you generate, um, in order to fuel Okay, to lend it to you.

And I mean, you can understand why, like, think about. As, um, batteries enter the electricity grid, you, you know, the pricing, the market movements throughout a day are really starting to change. We used to have, you know, like big spikes in price every evening as a lot of gas generators came on. ’cause they’re expensive to run.

But now we’re needing less and less of that as we add more batteries. And, you know, people know these. Trends are generally happening, but not exactly. So how can you forecast what your revenue is going to be? Um, if you’re lending billions of dollars to a project, then you want to know that your person you’re lending to is gonna be able to, to pay you back, which they, they can’t if the revenue goes through the floor.

So, yeah, my [00:13:00] understanding is that’s, that’s what it’s really for, is to provide the certainty. It’s, it’s like a bit outdated to refer to it as a subsidy. Um, ’cause it’s not always a subsidy. Sometimes it’s the opposite. But what’s really needed is like knowing how much you’re gonna get for the product that you are delivering.

I think it makes sense. I just think that like if there’s all this, all the changes that are coming down the pipeline for the uk, it’s a little bit difficult to actually pinpoint where that price is gonna be. Like a sweet spot for all parties involved. Um. Which I think is something that we saw on the PPA side a lot in the US a few years ago.

Rosemary Barnes: They had issues in the UK as well, like a couple of auctions ago. Um, they set the price way too low and I mean, they were told leading up to it, no one can deliver a project at this cost and then nobody bid. And it was, it was a real shame because, you know, like it set them back on, you know, that there’s no projects entered the pipeline, um, in that year as a result.

But it’s also what’s interesting to [00:14:00] me is that it’s a different price for different. Types of project. So, you know, onshore wind has a, a different safety price than a, um, offshore wind. And fixed offshore wind has a very different price from floating offshore. Solar’s different. They also have special, uh, price for tidal energy.

And that to me is a really interesting thing because who is looking at the UK’s energy mix and saying, yep, title energy needs to be part of this, and we we’re happy to pay, you know, 2, 3, 4 times whatever it is, more. For that than for offshore wind. It’s, um, that, that’s interesting to me. How, how they’ve come up with, with the Yeah, like how the mix is going to look.

I mean, they don’t control it precisely. It’s not like they say we are gonna have exactly this many gigawatts for offshore wind and exactly this many gigawatts for solar farms. But they do have, um, different prices and different technologies that are targeted. 

Matthew Stead: Seems like it really relates really well to the energy [00:15:00]security as well.

You know, an extra eight gigawatt here, extra eight gigawatt there. I mean, that can only help with energy security, which is obviously a massive topic. I’m not sure how the newspapers has been coping in the last week or so in the us but over here it’s all about rationing of fuel. It’s all about queues at the pump.

So energy security is, is definitely a huge topic. 

Rosemary Barnes: You wanna know where there isn’t a queue. In my driveway when I plug my car into the, the outlet in my garage. It’s been a really, really fun time to be a smug EV owner. I’ve been, um, reveling in it. Yeah. Really, really, really enjoying, uh. And Joan, but I also do think like it’s gonna last, like we, because we still talk about the oil crisis in the 1970s, right?

Like that, uh, we, uh, people overreacted and then reverted for the most part pretty quickly after that. With Denmark being one exception, they, they went all in on when consistently after that. Um, but [00:16:00] you know, like this, even if it’s only a few weeks long, this little shock is going to. Make people think, okay, oh, I was super worried that I might have to spend 20 minutes refueling on a road trip instead of 10 minutes.

Um, but actually remember that time when I couldn’t even get petrol at all and I had to spend yeah, like half an hour lining up because everyone was freaking out and. Uh, I wasn’t sure if I was even gonna be able to get to work the next week because the Australian government only thinks we need 30 days worth of, um, of oil in reserve.

Uh, I, I think that it’s, it’s got to help EV sales and then. The EV sales is only one part of it because you need then also, you know, security of electricity generation. And I mean, in Australia we’ve got our own coal, so we’re not, um, probably ever going to be able to not generate electricity. But, um, renewables is a, is a huge part of that as well, being able to, you know, have cheap, cheap electricity all the time.

So I, I do think that. It, it’s got to be, you [00:17:00] know, helping some of these technologies move, move ahead a little bit faster now. 

Matthew Stead: Yeah, and I also heard that, uh, the UK is sort of patting themselves on the bat for, uh, actually, you know, transitioning and, you know, securing their own, um, energy supply and not being as reliant as some other countries on imports of, of energy.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, we’ve had so many opportunities to learn that lesson over the last few years. Right. So. Anybody that just, um, relaxes after this and says, yep, okay, we’re all good. To go back to relying a hundred percent on, on gas is, you know, like, really. Really going to big lengths to nod to not futureproof themselves from the next one.

I do. Do we could, would anybody believe that this is the last time that we’re gonna see, uh, a shock like this? I mean, it will happen definitely. Again, 

Matthew Stead: rather embarrassing, but actually currently I own approximately six EVs. 

Allen Hall: It sounds like a lot. Matthew, 

Rosemary Barnes: you’ll have people beating down your door. Share.

Share the love around. We need, it 

Allen Hall: should give taxi rides. [00:18:00] Ubers 

Matthew Stead: in 2026. I wanna sell, I wanna sell three of them. So this is just. I’m just so happy. 

Rosemary Barnes: So message ’em on LinkedIn if you need an ev. Now we’re running classified ads in the uptime When new podcast 

Allen Hall: are they? BMW electrified? BMWs 

Matthew Stead: no one’s. One’s BMW.

Um, another one is, uh, Austin 10. From 1947, 

Allen Hall: this is an ad. 

Matthew Stead: The other one’s in Nissan Leaf, uh, NISO leaf with about 16,000 Ks on the clock. 

Rosemary Barnes: But the first two you converted yourself. 

Matthew Stead: Yeah, 

Allen Hall: we can reach out to Matthew on LinkedIn and he will sell you an electric vehicle. He’s in Adelaide and there’s plenty of people listening to the podcast in Adelaide and all around Australia.

Honestly, he, he will deliver. If asked, so Matthew Stead, S-T-E-A-D on LinkedIn. 

Matthew Stead: The BMW that I converted is a 2 0 2, um, from 19 in the the seventies. And, uh, actually BMW um, converted the same car to an electric vehicle for the Munich [00:19:00] Olympics. So yeah, all I did was, um, recreated what. BMW had done back in 1972.

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Well, south Korean Drone Company Earth Lab built its vision AI [00:20:00]through wind turbine inspections, and I’ve seen hundreds of those in the states. A $10 million defense export deal in 2025 shifted revenue from 80% inspections to. A much larger defense share. Now they have a, a pretty sizable deal, obviously in the Middle East right now, where they’re using their drone technology to be involved in the defense sector.

And North Lab I think got driven to that just because, uh, some of their business in the United States didn’t turn out properly the way they expected it to, although they had. Really great technology. In every conference I would attend with Ner lab, like, uh, and they would explain what they were doing. At one point, they were probably three or four years ahead on the, doing your own drone inspections with the little drone and you just buy their software and it would just, it would go up and take pictures of your wind turbine.

Didn’t need a separate [00:21:00] pilot. It, it made all things a lot simpler, but that did never seem to catch on. But the technology is there and North Lab does have good engineering teams to develop drone technology. One of the things about this article, which I, I saw the other day, is that North Labs is thinking about their technology in a broader sense.

That they’re not just focused on wind turbine inspections. And we see companies that are only tied to wind quite often. The struggle when wind slows down like it’s doing right now, where an Earth Lab is thinking about the problem a little bit differently and saying, I have this technology. It solves a bunch of problems.

Maybe we ought to explore those other problem areas and see if we could generate some revenue. And clearly they have. Is that good advice for the wind industry in terms of technology companies is not to just focus on wind, but to think about solutions for adjacent industries? Does that just broaden the portfolio enough where?

It keeps your, [00:22:00] it keeps your company viable for longer periods of time. 

Matthew Stead: This is a huge topic for us because, um, you know, our technologies can be applied to, you know, rail mining defense, you know, so we’ve, we’ve got sensors which can instrument a whole range of things. Like, you know, we can listen for a conveyor belt when it’s failing.

We can measure the ice. On the platform next to a railway line, we can measure ice on an aircraft. Um, you know, with our sensors we can do so much. Um, and um, what we’ve decided is that we need to really conquer. Wind in a nice way, as in, you know, actually help the wind industry first. So we really need to, um, you know, focus there.

But, you know, we, we’ve all always been sort of dragged into other industries. Um, but, you know, I think being a technology startup is all about focus. Um, but, you know, revenue is hard. Um, you know, gaining traction is hard. The industry [00:23:00] is hard. Um, so I can see why it might be attractive to, to look at other, other verticals.

Um, yeah, so it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s a reality of a technology startup, unfortunately, that you need to look for other applications for your tech. And, and the other thing is, you know, obviously if we can sell our sensors. Into say, mining or, or rail or whatever. Then it can lower the cost and then, you know, that benefits wind as well.

Allen Hall: Well, there’s other technology developments can happen in those other industries you could bring into wind makes both avenues possible. Yeah. A lot of industries are gonna benefit from the technology that has been evolved from wind turbines growth into other industries. But it works both ways and it just adds complexity to the business.

But to me it’s complexity you have to take on. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’ve worked with a bunch of startups through my career and I’m trying to think of even one that hasn’t had a defense project at some point. It’s very, very common for development, like, um, [00:24:00]technologies that are in development. Is a very appealing avenue to get funds because, you know, defense spends a lot of, a lot of money on developing new technologies.

I’m sure that’s true in every country, not just Australia. Um, and they’re also prepared to, like, if you’ve got a capability that they want, they are like, you don’t, it’s not so commercially cutthroat, you know, like they are prepared to pay a lot for something that, um, has unique capabilities. So I do see that that is incredibly attractive to startups, but I really like what Matt said when he said that as a startup you’ve gotta stay focused because that is what the startups that I have worked with in the past nine, outta 10 of them have done the opposite.

They’re just like trying to grab any grant that they think that they could possibly, you know, um, apply for. Then they win it and then now all of a sudden they’ve got a project in a direction that is not. Taking them to their actual business. It’s, you know, it’s not step on the way towards their bus achieving their business goals.

Um, and it’s like, [00:25:00] what is the startup for? Are you trying to commercialize a technology or find out if, if it’s not possible and stop? Or are you trying to just keep on working on this as long as possible? And I think that, like, honestly, nine outta 10 of the startups that I’ve worked with, it’s the the latter where they just want to keep on doing cool stuff.

Then yeah. Grabbing any, any grant that you can to continue working on that. And a lot of them are defense. Um, makes a lot of sense. But I, I do think that, you know, you’ve got to be goal oriented, keep your eyes on the prize and, um, yeah, like Matt said, say focus if you wanna succeed as a startup, 

Allen Hall: you think that’s a difference between grants and actual business?

I agree with you, Rosemary. When you get hooked into a grant that has a particular outcome and you tend to deviate from what the market. Once, because you’re not listening to the market when you’re going through this grant process, but if you’re in a second business area, it may make sense just because you have a customer, you’re learning from that experience.

A lot of things between wind and the other industries are similar in [00:26:00]terms of the way they’re structured, the demands, the expectations, the. It’s, it’s close. 

Rosemary Barnes: Grants are amazing when it’s the right grant, and you shouldn’t choose a grant for the sake of getting the money. You should choose it because it helps you achieve something that you wanted to achieve anyway.

Um, I think that that’s what you’ve gotta, gotta consider. Um, and yeah, definitely don’t turn down free money if it’s available to help you, you know, get to where you need to get, but don’t deviate on. A bunch of side quests just because you can get funding for that. 

Matthew Stead: I think half the battle is that, uh, half the challenge of commercialization is actually the industry.

So half, half the challenge is the technology and r and d and making stuff, but the other half is actually knowing the industry, knowing how to price it, knowing the people, knowing where to sell it, you know, knowing the return on investment. So every time you go into a new market, you might think, oh yeah, I’ll just reapply what I’ve already learned.

But that’s, that’s. Definitely not true. So your rail is completely different from [00:27:00] wind. Um, in terms of the actual market, the tech, the tech might be the same, the same for, you know, aerospace. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I see that a lot with companies that are trying to take a, a technology that they have from another area and try and bring it into wind.

And people are always shocked at. At how different, um, wind energy is. I mean, in terms of the physical operating environment, that’s a, a shock for most companies to start with. It’s like, like in several aspects, it wouldn’t be a more harsh operating environment than, you know, sticking something in or on a wind turbine blade and expecting it to last without maintenance for 20, 30 years.

Um, but then also just the way that the, the market works. But it’s interesting that you say 50 50, it’s half about the technology. Do you reckon it’s even half? I, I have come to believe that the technology is like, yeah, like really understanding the problem is and, and knowing that there is a need for a solution.

Is the vast majority of the way there, there are so many good engineers in the world that they will find, find the solution if they know exactly what problem they should be solving. [00:28:00] I, I reckon it’s less than 50%. I don’t know about 10%, but, um, certainly I don’t think it’s 50 50. 

Matthew Stead: Yeah. Maybe it depends on what, what stage of development it is and, you know, what, what maturity level you’re at, perhaps.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, your company started. From a, um, you, you didn’t just think, Hey, I want, you know, I know a lot about noise. I wonder what technology I can develop with this. You, you started from, Hey, we’ve got a, a, a problem that, uh, I don’t wanna, you know, um, tell your origin story for you, but you started with a, a problem and a potential solution and then, you know, went from there.

Right? So, 

Matthew Stead: yeah, Bre, you know, I, I think B would be happy for me to say his name, Bre, basically throughout a challenge saying. But, you know, technicians can hear, um, blade damage. So, you know, it should be really simple and easy to make a machine to do the same as what a human can do. 

Rosemary Barnes: And it was simple and easy, right?

Matthew Stead: Ah, yeah. It was so easy. Look, look at all that, all that gray hair. 

Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s the trouble, right? Is that [00:29:00] if you want to be tied to an industry, hopefully you hit it during a peak time. Because there are ebbs and flows to every economy about every seven years. There’s always something cataclysmic that happens.

You just don’t wanna be in that down cycle. You want to be in the upcycle and have something ready to go. When the upcycle hits, you’ll see a lot of businesses do that. In the aerospace, you see it quite a bit that they’ll kind of go dormant and then when they feel like the, the economy is going to boom, they’ll ramp up operations real quick and, and try to make their money while the kidding is good.

Then slow it down when it’s not. They have taken a, a more longer term perspective on it. Large businesses can do that. ’cause usually they’re stockpiling cash to, to manage that. Small businesses don’t usually have the cash flow to get over those, uh, lean times. And that’s the trouble. I, I think a lot of companies that I know, in fact.

Rosemary and I are working on a project and a couple of names of companies that were in [00:30:00] Wind two, three years ago popped up and I thought they had such great technology and the business model was right. It just hit a rough patch. That’s all it was, and that if you revive that technology a year from now, it would still be applicable.

You could still sell that product. It’s just trying to manage the cash flow. It’s hard because I, and back to Rosemary’s point. How much of it is the technology? Uh, and I, I say 10%, and I think that’s roughly right from my experience. A lot of it is everything else. Managing the books, managing your risks, people, uh, all that manufacturing, right, all quality, all every, all that’s involved.

And it’s, unless you do it, you don’t realize it. It’s hard to see it unless you’re on the inside. You know, the inside. You think every minute is some other. Major calamity that you have to manage. If you don’t manage it right, you may not make it out the other [00:31:00] side. That’s what small businesses are all about.

But it’s, that’s what makes it so hard. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I know that at Parlo we’re spending a lot more effort on understanding the problems that people need solved, um, rather than developing solutions, which has been a bit of a tough thing for me to. Kind of, uh, stick to because, uh, you know, I’m an engineer. I’ve developed products my whole career and that I, I love tinkering and, you know, like making things work and doing things that haven’t been done before.

But I, I, I do think that there is a real, real need for, um, understanding the problem really well, understanding, um, what solutions are available and, and fitting them together. I think that that is actually a really, um, a, a really needed part of the, you know, the whole wind energy ecosystem. 

Allen Hall: We had a listener reach out from Japan, Sini Kajima, who was a city counselor in one of the cities, in obviously in Japan, who was a regular listener and.

He wrote in [00:32:00] about some of the wind turbine installations that are going on in sort of northern western Japan. They’ve installed some eight megawatt turbines about a mile, 1.6 kilometers offshore, and that’s creating a lot of concern for the local residents there. Those are big turbines, and they’re talking about using 15 megawatt turbines to do something similar and.

As, uh, advocate for, uh, the, the city he’s advocating, uh, a 10 kilometer minimum setback in the national diet in Japan. You’re gonna see a lot more of this come up, I think. And the pictures that was sent along with it is pretty, um, eye-opening in that you got this really big turbine, really close to shore.

Are we going to put setbacks [00:33:00] in as, uh, a regulation or law in some of these territories, like especially Northern Japan where there is great wind resources, amazing wind resources, but at the same time, there’s a lot of people who live there that will like to have some view of the ocean, not just turbines in the water right off the coastline.

This is not just a Japanese problem, but it does seem to be a, a big problem ’cause of the, the way the Continental shelf is around Japan, it drops up pretty quick. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, exactly. It’s not a specific Japanese problem, and I mean, in most cases there’s development approvals and people have plenty of opportunity to express their displeasure at where turbines are cited.

But for Japan, it wouldn’t be as simple as saying, okay, we just increase the offset dis distance by a little bit because you increase the, I’m assuming these turbines are cited already as far out as they can be while still being fixed bottom. And if you wanted to push them further away, then you move to floating and you double or triple the cost, [00:34:00] which Japan is looking into floating offshore wind a lot.

Um, but Japan. Has no, has no easy options. I mean, Japan likes electricity as much as every other country does. They don’t want to rely on nuclear as much as they have been, which is, you know, probably, at least to a certain extent, understandable. They don’t have great solar resources. I mean, they have some, um, and they could do more.

They don’t have good onshore wind opportunities. They have geothermal potential, but they don’t like that so much because their, um, NAL hot springs are, you know, a very important tourism industry and very important culturally. So they’re worried about doing anything that would mess that up. The offshore wind solution, this particular environment haven’t seen, it doesn’t sound like the best situated project, but take any other option that they’ve got for generating electricity in Japan and it has.

Probably equal disadvantages. I just think that they have a, a hard problem and [00:35:00] have to choose which compromise they wanna make. 

Allen Hall: Mr. Kuma brings up a couple of points here that. There’s about 150 residents that are at risk of insomnia from the wind turbine noise, and they’re concerned about the migratory zones for protected wildlife.

In this case, geese about five kilometers offshore. 

Rosemary Barnes: Then there might be birds that are affected, and if they are, they can use technologies to spot the birds. Stop the turbines. Like there’s, there’s, you know. Dozens of success stories, um, related to birds and wind turbines. That’s, that’s a solved problem.

The noise, I mean, how far away are they? Matt’s the noise expert. Like how, how far away from a wind turbine do you have to be before you can even hear it over the wind noise? 

Matthew Stead: Uh, the wind turbine noise is not gonna be an issue. 

Allen Hall: So then it comes down to sight lines. And Japan has some of the most beautiful coastline in the world.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, I’m not gonna tell someone that they should, like looking at wind turbines, like I would also rather not look at a wind turbine if I could be looking at an ocean view or a mountain view or whatever. But any energy project would [00:36:00] be nicer if it wasn’t there in the first place. Like, you know, there’s not like a beautiful coal power plant to look at.

There’s not a beautiful transmission line to look at. There’s not a beautiful petrol pump, um, to look at. Like, none of none. None of these things are like beautiful technologies that we enjoy interacting with on our daily lives, but we prefer to, you know, have the trade off of having that infrastructure.

And trade off for the, the benefits that it brings. And, um, you know, there’s, in that sense, there’s nothing different about renewable energy technologies. It’s different, different trade offs, but they’re always gonna be there. 

Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you.

Reach out to us on Linked. And don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode. And if you’ve found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show for Rosie, Yolanda and Matthew, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:37:00] Podcast.

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Allen covers Britain’s radar fix unlocking 10 GW of offshore wind, Revolution Wind delivering first power off Rhode Island, typhoon-proof turbines rising in the Philippines, and an Iowa bill to dim turbine lights at night.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

This is Uptime News Flash. I’m Allen Hall. Here’s the wind energy stories you need to know.

For years, offshore wind developers in the United Kingdom ran into an invisible wall. Not weather. Not financing. Radar. Military air defence radars could not distinguish a wind turbine from an aircraft. So certain stretches of British waters were simply off-limits to offshore development. Not anymore. The UK government has purchased specially designed air defence radars built to coexist with offshore wind farms. Installation begins in early 2029. Ten gigawatts of previously blocked offshore wind capacity, now unlocked. That follows the largest single offshore wind procurement in British and European history — 8.4 gigawatts, at a price forty percent lower than new gas. Enough to power twelve million homes.

And the UK is not stopping at the water’s edge. The government has also proposed removing planning permission requirements for small onshore turbines up to thirty meters tall, no bigger than an oak tree. Farmers. Schools. Factories. All of them able to generate their own clean power on site. No planning application required.

Now, let us cross the Atlantic. Off the coast of Rhode Island, the Revolution Wind project is delivering on a promise that once seemed very much in doubt. On March thirteenth of this year, Revolution Wind delivered its first power to the New England grid. The project is led by Ørsted, the Danish offshore wind leader, alongside Skyborn Renewables. As of March sixteenth, the project stood ninety-three percent complete. Sixty-five turbines, each one eleven megawatts, manufactured by Siemens Gamesa. When fully operational, Revolution Wind will power more than three hundred and fifty thousand homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Let us go somewhere you might not expect to find wind energy news today. The Philippines. Spanish firm Acciona Energia has installed the first turbine for its Kalayaan 2 wind farm in Laguna province, in the Philippines. One hundred and one megawatts. Seventeen turbines, Goldwind GW 165 units, each one six megawatts, with blades spanning one hundred and sixty-five meters. Every one of them designed specifically to survive typhoons. Structural reinforcement. Smart control algorithms. Advanced sensors to protect infrastructure during storms. Commercial operations are scheduled for December of this year. When that happens, roughly two hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide will not enter the atmosphere, every single year.

And finally, back home in Iowa, a bill is moving through the statehouse that has nothing to do with megawatts. It is about sleep. Iowa House File 2081 would require wind turbines across the state to use aircraft detection lighting systems. Instead of blinking red lights all night long, the lights would only activate when radar detects an approaching aircraft. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Dean Fisher of Montour, put it simply. His constituents used to enjoy a quiet sunset view. Now they stare at rows of flashing red lights through the night. About twenty-seven percent of Iowa’s turbines already have the sensor-based lights. The rest are being upgraded, year by year. The American Clean Power Association registered undecided. New projects, they said, are already planning to use the sensor lights. But retrofitting existing turbines? That cost goes straight to the customer. No groups registered in opposition. Even the environmental advocates said yes.

And now you know the rest of the story. From British radar systems finally making room in the sky for offshore wind, to a court-rescued project delivering first power off Rhode Island, to typhoon-proof turbines rising in the Philippines, to an Iowa lawmaker who just wants his neighbors to sleep — wind energy in 2026 keeps moving forward.

And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 23rd of March 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast for more.