The Uptime hosts examine Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's federal oversight mandate, the administration's plan to replace Idaho's cancelled Lava Ridge Wind Farm with six nuclear reactors, and critique a recent wind conference in Australia. The discussion also covers French utility EDF's plan to sell 50% of its North American wind portfolio to raise 2 billion euros for nuclear upgrades in France. Sign up for the next SkySpecs webinar! Register for  UK Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight 2025!

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

Allen Hall: [00:00:00] Mark your calendars December 11th at the Royal Highland Center in Edinburgh, because you'll want to be at the UK offshore wind supply chain Spotlight 2025. This isn't just another conference. It's where the UK's offshore wind supply chain comes together. Co-hosted by ORE Catapult and the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership.

Spotlight 2025 is where developers connect with suppliers and where the next breakthrough in offshore wind technology gets its moment to shine. So whether you're looking to forge new partnerships, secure critical investments, or simply stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving sector, you'll need to register for this event.

Remember December 11th in Edinburg for Spotlight 2025. Just Google. Edinburgh Supply Chain Spotlight 2025. You can register today.

You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by bill turbines.com. Learn train and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. [00:01:00] Visit build turbines.com today. Now here's your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Tartaro, and Rosemary Barnes. 

Allen Hall: Well, greetings from Charlotte, North Carolina to the Queen City.

I'm Alan Hall and I'm here with Phil Tartaro from the Golden State of California. And Joel Saxon is at an undisclosed location in a secure bunker, so that's not gonna leak out where he is. And Rosemary is enjoying the winter months in beautiful Australia. And we have some interesting topics this week, but I wanna lead off with Rosemary.

Went to another WIN conference, WIN plus conference in Australia. Rosemary. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, actually I, I feel petty, um, dissing this conference now because this is the one that Alan, you and I did a whole episode on how bad this conference was last year and, um. That's what caused us to feel like we needed to organize our own wind energy conference.

Uh, that covered some technical topics, but you're walking around the conference, like, why is there so much hydrogen stuff at a wind energy conference? And I'm like, okay, well maybe that's like what they perceive that, you know, most of the [00:02:00] new projects in Australia, all the big ones say that they're associated with hydrogen.

So maybe that's it. And then I started seeing a lot of, um, carbon capture things and, you know, like eels and all sorts of, all sorts of things related to. CO2. Um, so that confused me. Um, and then I saw that it was also a carbon capture conference too. So yeah, the exhibition was, was not, not too bad. I had definitely had lots of good conversations with people.

Um, some interesting things like, um, the drone, uh, yeah, drone inspections, a few new capabilities coming up. There were a couple of people with good drones, um, that can. Test the resistance of an LPS and say that they can do a whole turbine in an hour and a half. So, um, that's, that's pretty good. There was also some cool NDT, uh, non-destructive testing stuff and a really small portable ultrasound machine, and they wouldn't give me a price,