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This is our 200th episode of Uptime! We kick off with a discussion about the similarities and differences between the blade issues at Siemens Gamesa and Boeing’s recent door issue. Is engineering for aerospace and wind energy held to different standards? In both issues, who’s at fault? Then a review of GE Vernova’s Q4 2023 results–what does this mean for the company’s future?
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: Phil has a confession to make, and I know we talked about this previously, but we didn’t let out in the street because I thought it was too early to shock the world with this, but Phil, would you like to describe who your neighbor was when you were growing up in the Hard Streets of buffalo.
Philip Totaro: I was neighbors with musical performer Rick James. And I say neighbors loosely because I lived in a suburb of Buffalo, New York called East Aurora, where, we had 10 acres and he had an adjacent, I don’t know, 10 or 12 acres. But he had a house up there, and, back in the eighties, that’s where he hung out, and, I don’t know, had parties, or whatever he did.
Joel Saxum: Did Rick James stuff?
Allen Hall: Rosemary, you know who Rick James is, right?
Rosemary Barnes: I had to look it up, because I was initially thinking the guy that sang Never Gonna Give You Up, which would be yeah, cool, cool enough.
Philip Totaro: That’s Rick Astley, not Rick James.
Rosemary Barnes: Rick James is super freak, which is Yeah, nah, that’s a good song.
That that’s cool.
Allen Hall: No, Rick Astley was just a totally different neighbor than Rick James would be. But Rick James had some pretty wild parties.
Philip Totaro: You know what? He had wild parties when he was in LA or New York. I don’t know if he came back to Buffalo to dry out, maybe that’s what it was.
Rosemary Barnes: I think I’d rather go to a Rick James than a Rick Astley party based on the kind of music that might be played. Even though Never Gonna Give You Up is a excellent song.
Allen Hall: Super Freak’s a very popular song, even today. That guy is super talented. Come on, let’s admit it, he’s a super talented guy.
Joel Saxum: The experience could be akin to the Technotrain.
Allen Hall: Rosemary doesn’t seem to remember that either, even though she’s, and she swears she was never on it, but man, I don’t know.
Rosemary Barnes: The Technotrain. I don’t remember going on it.
Allen Hall: Yeah, Rosemary, this is our 200th episode.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, how exciting. Did you think that when you started it?
Allen Hall: No, I thought you told me we would never get to 200.
Rosemary Barnes: I’d never say something like that, but no, you started it before. I came on board after you and Dan had been going for a while. I don’t know, maybe you were up to episode, I don’t know, somewhere in the tens, less than a hundred.
Allen Hall: Less than a hundred. Yeah. I think you were in the fifties or sixties somewhere. Yeah, you’ve been along for the long ride.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I went back and watched some of those early ones. It was heavily lightning focused and very much a means to get your super knowledge on the industry out there and now it’s grown much more into, covering the topics of the day and yeah, the team’s grown four of us here most weeks now that’s, yeah, it’s been really exciting to be part of this whirlwind journey.
Allen Hall: So you think we’re going to make it another 100 episodes, Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: We’ll be hologram podcasting by then.
Allen Hall: Podcasting in orbit, probably. Especially if you live next to Rick James.
Philip Totaro: Not if we’re flying on Boeing, Allen.
Allen Hall: Spanish unions are hopeful following a meeting between Spain’s prime minister and the Siemens Energy CEO over at Davos about a subsidy for Siemens Gamesa. The unions say the Spanish government is negotiating guarantees. And communicating with Siemens Gamesa, but the union is concerned about maintaining jobs and maintaining production.
Siemens Gamesa has about 5, 000 employees in Spain, about 1, 000 in the Basque country, but has not set a date to resume production of the 4X and 5X machines. So the Spanish government is starting to step in and almost guarantee at this point 3 billion euros to keep the jobs in Spain and everybody employed.
Now, this is a little disconcerting because there seems to be a lot of discussion between the Spanish government and Siemens Gamesa, but there hasn’t been any real action. The first number I heard, Phil, was 4 billion euros about 6 weeks ago. Now it’s down to 3 billion euros. And guarantees, the longer this goes on, the more at risk the the Siemens Gamesa employees are, right?
Philip Totaro: Spain loves to fight for their unions until it comes time to pay the bill. At which point they can’t decide whether or not they have any money, and they usually don’t.
Joel Saxum: The thing here as well is, we just heard laying off engineers, right? And the other side of it was, hey, we may actually, this was a couple months ago, we may actually re engineer this entire platform.
Basically push it aside and make a new one. So if these jobs are going to be in the factory building whatever Siemens Gamesa’s new platform is, that might be a year, two? Three years out?
Allen Hall: Yeah, it could be. There’s, they’re saying that there’s about 15, 000 supplier workers that are feeding the Siemens Gamesa system in Spain.
So that’s a lot of employees to not be employed if there’s any sort of real setback. They’re talking about starting up the plants here in the next couple of weeks is what Siemens Gamesa has been saying in first quarter of this year, which is not that far from being complete, everyone. And if that doesn’t happen, what are they going to do?
I don’t know. And it doesn’t seem like there’s been any, and we’ll talk about this in a minute, but there’s, there doesn’t seem to be the continuity there to fire up the production line again.
Philip Totaro: But what orders, they stopped taking orders on these platforms. So what exactly are they producing?
They, we just checked, and there’s about 2, 000 units that were on order or were part of their development pipeline, theoretically, where the developer wanted to be able to use the 4x and 5x, 145, 155 platform, but they never You know, if they aren’t fulfilling those orders and they’re not taking new orders, then I’m slightly confused how they’re going to start up a factory doing anything.
Unless they’re going to just say that a lot of the orders that were deferred from last year are going to be fulfilled, this year and moving forward now. But that can only happen if they actually have a, an engineering and technological fix to both the supply chain issue and the wrinkles.
And has anybody seen them confirm any of that at this point? I haven’t.
Allen Hall: Wasn’t it Rosemary who thought that they were going to try to move the blade design to the Siemens design? That were just a one piece installation? It wasn’t with the bladder and the one piece design instead of the typical Gamesa two piece design?
Didn’t we all agree that was likely to happen?
Joel Saxum: The other side of that is, is it’s not just blade problems, right? There’s other rotating equipment problems and stuff in these turbines, so it’s not just the blades are gonna change over and be all good. The other solution they could have too here is if they had taken, Siemens Gamesis taking kind of a pause, they have the 3. 4, the, the SG3. 4 132, they have the 145, they have some other 3 megawatt turbines that they could build.
Allen Hall: But why are they gonna build them in Spain? Joel, I think that’s the question because a lot of those other blade platforms and nacelle platforms are built elsewhere. I think it’s trouble.
So the discussion among the engineering community over the last week or so has been about what former Siemens CEO Joe Kaiser said in an interview over in Davos. And I had to search the interwebs, Phil. And find the actual interview because it wasn’t a transcript anywhere. And it was just a one on one, like he was just stopped on the road.
And there’s a German interviewer from Welt, W E L T magazine or television, I’m not even sure what that is. So I had to translate the discussion because I wanted to see if they actually said that they had gotten rid of, or fired, or displaced, or whatever they call it, engineers. And it doesn’t look like he said that.
Now, I don’t speak fluent German, but Google Translate does, so I ran it through Google Translate. So this is basically what he said. It’s close, right? So the question was, like why is everybody still in place in leadership with all the problems that seem to come in, so why are those people still in their roles?
And what Kaiser said was essentially, those who designed the machines when the design was happening, and who also were involved in the construction of the 4X and 5X machines, That they had been fired, that the Siemens Energy CEO had fired them for doing the wrong thing. And because there were quality deficiencies and they’re trying to fix that system.
So the, I think from, I think this is probably Rosemary’s point is, if you’re trying to start a factory making blades and all your engineers are fired, there’s no chance you’re going to start anything up this quarter. You’d be lucky to start something up this year, wouldn’t you, Rosemary? It just, they just need engineers.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that makes sense, these sorts of things don’t happen overnight.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, but, they if they’re gonna start the factory, they would have had to have a plan in place already. They also would, okay, I can appreciate the fact that they got rid of the people who were responsible for the design, although, to me, that still sounds like they fired the engineers, even though he might not have explicitly say they fired the engineers.
It’s, the reality of this though is like we were just talking about, You don’t go from, humming along with 13 gigawatts worth of order book for this product platform to we’re going to stop selling, stop fulfilling orders. We’ve got a product quality issue, to, Oh, we fixed it and we’re just going to magically go right back into production now, like that none of that stuff happens overnight.
So presumably, this is, a few weeks or months in advance of, them having resolved the issue. The question, I think, that everyone wants an understanding of is, okay, if you resolved it and you’re ready to go back into production, to what degree of satisfaction, because they’ve done nothing but come out and say, all the negative things about themselves that they possibly could to shoot themselves in the foot.
How about coming out and saying, we’ve got a fix, here’s what it is, and we’re ready to, we’re ready to start selling turbans again. I have, again, I haven’t seen them say or do that.
Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s one thing to have figured out what the problem was, and I think it’s entirely possible that the problem is something that was quick to fix.
It’s not always, but, often a problem, a big problem. Can be caused by, a new design change that was just, a cost out design change and so they already have something proven that they can go back to, or it was somebody not following a, a work instruction that was written incorrectly.
And so they already know, how to fix it. So the fixing of the problem is not. It’s not implausible that could happen quickly, but what I do think is a bit weird is that they have all of this resources and energy to spend on something that isn’t going and fixing all of the huge, population that’s out there with problems.
I know that there are owners of wind farms who are beside themselves about, these problematic blades that they’ve got and are not happy with the the way that this has been taken care of, the way that they’re being taken care of. And I think they might be a little bit surprised to see that apparently Siemens Gamesa do not have every single spare engineering resource every single spare technician working on, fixing the problems for the turbines that they’ve already sold.
I think that’s probably the most surprising thing to me.
Allen Hall: If the problem with the blades was wrinkles. How long would it take to correct that issue and get back in production?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s really impossible to say without having seen the root cause analysis and being able to comment on it publicly.
Because it just depends on what the issue is. Like I said there’s a lot of different things that can cause a blade wrinkle. If they have, if that, whatever the change was that caused the wrinkles, if they can just go back to what they were doing before that change, then that would be simple.
They already know how to do it. The, it’s already validated in the field. Workers already know how to do it. They’ve already, qualified all of the materials involved. That would be easy. But if. The feature that wrinkled is part of a, a new design or a new material that is integral to the blade and the blade certification then that would be harder because then they’re going to have to come up with a solution and then they’re going to have to do enough testing to make sure that their new design can be certified because if it’s not really similar to the old thing, Then it’s not going to be a straightforward process to just say, okay, this is the same design intent as the original design, so no need to recertify.
Yeah, and then they also need to do the same for the repair method also needs to be certified if it’s not something that is, just a normal kind of thing.
Joel Saxum: Would you say if it was a major wrinkle, 10 days per blade for a team? To repair. To repair. Yeah. If it was a big major issue that had to go inside.
Maybe outside, anything like that? Like it takes say we said 10 days per blade.
Rosemary Barnes: It can really vary. It’s probably not going to be less than a week if it’s a major thing, but they can really push out that, what pushes out the repair time is how winter bind blades are made roughly, my Siebel, I’m listening to the podcast, know you’ve got your.
Yeah, composite materials. So you’ve got fiberglass carbon fiber. That’s carrying the load and it carries a load in the direction of the fibers. So if you cut a fiber, then you can’t transmit load across that anymore. So when you repair a wind turbine blade, you can’t just cut out the wrinkle get a hole saw and cut out the wrinkle and then put a circular plug back in there because that plug is not doing anything structurally because there’s no way for the loads to transfer along across the break.
So what they have to do instead is they have to chamfer the cut. So they’ll remove all of the damaged area, but then they have to, and people who are watching on YouTube can see me moving my hands, but I’ll describe it for people listening on the podcast. You come out at a nice shallow angle, right?
So that you yeah you grind a much bigger area on the surface than is at the lower edge of the laminate that you’re fixing. And what that means is that angle means that there is some contact area between every single layer of fiberglass or carbon fiber that overlaps with the repair patch.
And what that means is that you might have a relatively small damage, even if it is small, which it probably isn’t, if it’s a, it’s a major defect, so it’s probably large to start with. So you grind that away, but if it’s in a very thick section of the blade, then you’ve got a lot of layers of material that you have to shamper through.
So that means that the repair actually gets quite big, the thick of the laminate. And then, so that’s, one, one bad thing that causes to longer time because you also wouldn’t likely do the whole laminate in one go. You’d probably do a few layers and then let that cure and then do a few more.
But where it gets complicated is if when you chamfered to for the repair, you might chamfer through some other feature, so you end up cutting into some other material or when it gets really complicated is if your chamfer goes all the way over like the web, say, so you’ve also cut through a glue joint.
Or, some other feature like that’s where you get really complicated repairs. And so then you have to repair that as well. And then you have to chamfer for that repair as well. So then it grows even more. And then, the chamfering for the repaired repair might end up impacting another feature.
So that’s how you can get huge damage. And sometimes it, it takes, weeks or longer whether it’s probably not on their side either, if they have a lot of these turbines in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a terrible time to be to be repairing because, resin only cures at certain temperatures.
So if you’re trying to set up warm tents for things to cure in it, just, adds adds a lot more expense and time to the whole thing.
Allen Hall: So you would think that Siemens Gamesa would be going down the route to repair these things. And Rosemary, I think you’re right. If they’re trying to repair a lot of blades in the northern US or up in Canada, they’re going to be in a world of hurt because of the delay to get that done.
On the certification side, what are you talking about in terms of time, like if they had to go back and recertify a blade, are you talking about a one year delay, a two year delay? What’s that look like?
Rosemary Barnes: Okay, best case scenario is nothing, there’s no recertification required because all of the methods that they’re using in this repair are methods that have already been certified.
You can, you, my clients are constantly surprised at how much you can repair a blade and have it still be the same design intent and everything just like totally normal from the point of view of certification or, engineers don’t even get, need to get involved if you can just use all your standard methods.
Then the technicians just know, okay, this size and this type of material, this many layers over these features that, this is the method we use. And you just go ahead and do that when it’s a little bit out of the ordinary, then you might have to send it to an engineer to get calculations checked to make sure that it’s not in, so maybe you’re reducing the strength or fatigue life a little bit.
And an engineer will check that’s okay for the location because, all of a wind turbine blade isn’t built with the exact same safety factor. A lot of the blade is more safe than it needs to be. And so if you’re, slightly weakening the blade in an area that’s already excessively safe, then that’s okay.
So you’d get an engineer to check that. And then only if you couldn’t use your standard method and end up with your original design and intent. Then you would need to come up with a new repair method and have that new repair method certified, and then. That would take a while. It depends how you can rush things or not, depending on how critical it is to the business, probably a small number of months up to a large number of months, depending on how much you’re rushing.
Allen Hall: Based on where you think Gamesa is right now, what do you think has happened? Do you think they’re in that longer timeframe because the factory hasn’t started up?
Rosemary Barnes: They’re definitely going slower than their customers would like them to be. But that’s probably always true. Is it because they have a complicated repair and they’re scrambling to try to, come up with a good repair method, or is it because they just have so many that they have to do and, they have gone through, made business decisions about which customers to prioritize and the people that are at the bottom of the pecking order might be getting the runaround because, not because there isn’t a method, just because they’re the, the lowest priority and Yeah, you can’t really say one or one or the other.
And it’s not like I’ve spoken to everybody that owns a an affected turbine. So I don’t know that everybody’s upset, but I do know that some people are upset about how slowly it’s going.
Joel Saxum: I’ll give you some really round numbers just from what we’re talking about here. So from Phil’s data at Intelstor, we know that there’s 726 of these 4x and 5x machines out in the field.
So I’m going to take 726, I’m going to multiply it by 3. That’s going to give us 2, 178 blades that need Say they all have the same kind of wrinkle and they need to be fixed.
Allen Hall: 30 30 percent Joel. The number is 30 percent is what Siemens Gamesa has been saying. 30 percent of the blades are affected.
Joel Saxum: So if we’re at 2, 178 times 0. 3, 653 blades then. Is what you’re saying. Okay, so now we’re saying 10 days apiece for each of those blades. We know that’s, it’s a, that’s a hard number to come up with, but that’s something we’re going to use for round. So now we’re at 6, 534 team days to do this. Okay. Team is three people, team is three people in the field.
So now you’re at 19, 600 technician days. And if you were to say you wanted to solve this thing over the course of two years, we’ll divide that by, so that would be, so that if you’re, now you’re at peer two years working 365 days a year, that’s not the case. We’ll divide by five and seven five sevenths just to give it a a working week.
So right now we’re up to thirty, thirty eight technicians working that whole time. And then if we’re going to add in some weather risk, we add weather risk in there to the thirty percent. We’re at 49 technicians working two years straight to solve this problem.
Philip Totaro: The reality is though that there’s going to be more than 49 technicians working across the entire fleet.
Anyway, so that’ll shorten the cycle, but it’s still, this is at least going to take a year to resolve.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, because you think about it from the windfarm owner operator’s perspective, and, they’ve got a windfarm with these blades where they know that 30 percent of them are likely to fail, perhaps catastrophically, so they’re either got them turned off and aren’t generating anything, which yeah, for two years, you can imagine how they’re going to react to that news.
You spent millions and millions on a asset that’s supposed to be productive and it’s just costing you money, not earning any, obviously that’s devastating. And, or. Yeah, even if it’s just one year, still the same or they’ve told them no, you can keep on operating it safe. You just have to, check them every six months or every year or whatever.
And so then it feels probably a bit like a game of Russian roulette where it’s okay, but are my technicians safe, are the general public safe that this is going to be a company ending incident if these blades start breaking off and flinging off, it’s Yeah. It’s not something that you can really apply statistics to that well, especially when, the population is quite small, fracture mechanics of composite materials is it’s impossible to predict with any sort of certainty and the consequences are just so bad as, potentially loss of life and definitely just terrible PR, even if no one is, no human is injured.
Yeah, it’s it’s always. Really hard when you get these serial defects that are across a large population. It never goes fast enough. And yeah, that, it’ll be up to the contracts of every individual wind farm about how, these losses are accounted for. But it’s certainly, I’ve, I’ve never worked on a project like this where the wind farm owner was compensated to the extent that they really didn’t care how long it took for them to get up again.
It’s it’s a limited amount that you can claw back. And it’s incredibly stressful.
Allen Hall: Like the unions at Siemens Gamesa in Spain. We’re all gonna have to wait and see. There’s a lot more to come.
Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry.
That’s why we read P. E. S. Wind magazine. P. E. S. Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And P. E. S. Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, P. E. S. Wind at peswind.com.
We had an interesting Slack conversation, I guess most of our conversations are on slack anymore, which is weird to have. But so we had a discussion about the Boeing max nine and the door plug. I’ll call it that left that Alaska airlines airplane a couple of weeks ago now. And in the United States, there’s a lot of discussion online about the CEO of Boeing should be let go and they should restructure Boeing and do a bunch of changes there.
And my comment is why are we getting rid of the CEO of Boeing for what? Intrinsically was probably one single mechanic that left bolts out or didn’t put nuts on or something of the sort at his station versus a sort of a systemic problem that’s happened at pretty much everything that’s happening in Spain at the moment.
It’s a much broader problem. Whereas Siemens Gamesa hasn’t made any management changes at the highest level, they have evidently made changes at the engineering and some production level and probably some managers. There’s just two different approaches to that system. But the, we’ve seen to go back and forth about Boeing should hold everybody accountable.
Yeah, maybe. But at Siemens the same level of discourse wasn’t there and which was weird. So maybe we can just describe both sides of this situation and being on the engineer. I guess because we’re engineers, we see both sides of it mean that’s part of it.
Philip Totaro: But keep in mind, by the way, the Siemens energy also did get rid of.
The Siemens Gamesa CEO like two or three times before any of this happened. So I think maybe they were just looking for continuity. This wasn’t necessarily because of the blade thing.
Allen Hall: No, but I think as well as Rosemary is going to hopefully point out here. When Siemens Energy acquired the remaining parts of Siemens Gamesa, immediately there were problems.
They got really blindsided by it, and yet, they didn’t make any leadership changes, and that’s their prerogative, they own it. The Boeing situation I don’t think really applies here, but It does seem to be a connection, at least the United States, on the problems.
Rosemary Barnes: And yeah, so I think our Slack discussion started with somebody, I can’t remember who, saying, what’s a CEO got to do with it.
This was just one manufacturing worker who forgot to, put some plugs in. That’s on him. That’s his fault. He didn’t do that. Not he or she. And I said, no, it can never, a problem of this scale. It can’t be possible for that to happen. If it’s possible for one person to have a bad day and, cause a major safety incident like this, then that is a systematic problem that the CEO is ultimately responsible for.
After, a number of other layers. Like with something like this door plug, your first line of defense, is the design it, there should be some redundancy so that even if, something gets left off it, it’s still safe. Then second in your manufacturing process, it shouldn’t be possible to to just forget to do something.
You have a range of ways that you try to make it very hard to do to manufacture incorrectly. So you’d have, written instructions, you’d have training and they’ll also do things like, if you’ve got a certain number of fasteners, then they will be pre kitted.
The number of fasteners, it’s not like the worker goes over to a shelf and pulls out four plugs and puts them in. And it’s Oh, oops, it actually was supposed to have five, but you forgot one. It should, come with every fastener that worker needs for their shift should be pre kitted.
So that would be the second one. Third, you can do things like weighing assemblies to make sure that, they weigh what they’re supposed to because they’ve got all the parts in it. Or you can do other quality testing, at that factory floor level, then, you should have some sort of quality assurance team that is going around and checking that everything is being done right.
So it’s layers and layers. So if they didn’t have that kind of redundancy built in, then, that’s the head of engineering’s fault. And who chose the head of engineering and make sure they’re doing a good job, the CEO. It there’s the worker, there’s the supervisor, there’s a person that was doing the kitting, there’s a QA person there’s the QA person’s supervisor, there’s the, there’s just, there’s so many people that, that should have had to fail for this to happen.
And if they didn’t all fail and it was, a freak occurrence that they will then, change their processes for, but if, the system was designed so that a single person can have a bad day and cause a problem like this, then that is ultimately on the CEO for not making sure that they have that redundancy, throughout such a safety critical thing as an airplane.
So yeah that’s my take on it.
Allen Hall: Okay, that’s a good take, right? So the, you’re saying that there’s from multiple groups within Boeing that should have caught that problem. My take on it is that was done, right? So they had all those people in place, they did, right? It’d be different if they didn’t have a quality organization or if they didn’t have a look at a redundant design, which they did, right?
So they had multiple layers there before the door came off. It didn’t come off on the first flight. It came off on like flight 20 or something, right? So they had, something had changed over time and mechanics and technicians. We’re alerted to the fact because the pilots alerted to the fact they had pressurization losses, so they had people looking at it who didn’t diagnose it properly at the airline.
It’s a lot of people don’t get to an accident situation. There’s usually a lot of people who didn’t catch on to what the real problem was before it happened. I look at it from a different perspective in that like the CEO has nothing to do with that. So obviously a company like Boeing has audits and inspections and auditors and Oversight and the FAA is over there and their internal processes, right?
So there’s, they built in multiple layers to go catch these things. If it didn’t catch this and they obviously need to go back and look. I look at it on the wind turbine side where the failures tend to be more systemic and where are those quality controls in place? And they don’t have those things.
They don’t have the level oversight. They don’t necessarily have all the ISO certificates. They don’t necessarily have the audits like they probably should, like a Boeing would have. But it’s just as critical importance, right? When we had the icing events down in Texas, it told you how important wind or any energy sources that people die.
A lot of people died.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s not as important though. It’s reasonable that there’s a different, a difference.
Allen Hall: No, there’s not really much difference. It’s 70 percent of the energy in Iowa is from electricity and…
Rosemary Barnes: Come on. An airplane dropping out of the sky and killing everyone on board is a worst case scenario than a wind farm icing up and…
Allen Hall: A hundred people, but how many people died in, how many people died in the icing event, Joel?
Joel Saxum: Oh, there was, it was a lot more than that max nine. It was double digits.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. That is not caused by wind turbine quality issues. Come on, we can go back and have a look at, all of the causes of that, but it is not because de icing systems failed. It’s maybe one of the causes is that.
Arguably, they they should have purchased wind turbines with de icing systems. No, the engineers had nothing to do with whether, they don’t choose whether to put an icing system in. That’s a commercial, that’s a commercial decision.
Allen Hall: What do you think Boeing is? Boeing is a commercial company.
Philip Totaro: That was the developers decision not to buy a thing with a an icing system for Texas because it’s, icing in Texas is a once in a whatever event.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s stupid. That’s why I said arguably, but it wasn’t, it’s not an engineer that decides that anyway, it’s, yeah, it’s a commercial decision, not an engineering failure like this Boeing thing is. If we want the same level of quality control in a wind turbine as in an airplane, then it’s going to cost more like an airplane costs and have the same maintenance costs as an airplane costs.
And then we don’t have any wind turbines because they are way too expensive. So you. You can’t you can’t demand the same type of quality.
Allen Hall: If you do that, Rosemary, though then you, and you have problems, Siemens Gamesa, and you have problems because you don’t have that hierarchy there.
You don’t have those structures in place. And when it does go sideways, like it did with Siemens Gamesa, why is then the heads of Siemens Gamesa not responsible for that? I get the Boeing thing. They got plenty of layers of organization. Siemens Gamesa didn’t.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m not saying that they’re, that they shouldn’t be, it’s ultimately leadership in either case.
And I think that in both cases, probably they had the systems in place, but then, when you have the reality of commercial pressures where you’re trying to cut costs and get projects out faster, develop faster than your, your standard procedures would allow you to. Then you get pressure from the top down to, to cut corners, to not quite follow the, like you usually do a technology development process, like a stage gate model where, you do phase one of development.
And then at the end of that, you’re supposed to have met certain criteria, which means that you are given the all clear from, certain gatekeepers. To move through the next phase. And it’s really common if you have a specific end date that you have to reach for commercial reasons that you’ll say, okay we haven’t met this one thing, but we’re going to move through and do that in the next phase as well.
And, that’s quite normal. Fine. But if it ends up being, you’re skipping most of the checks that you’re supposed to have and moving forward before you have fully, eliminated the risks that you were supposed to, it can get too much and you can end up with. With failures, because, like how else could it be that so many different people who should have caught a problem didn’t, it can only be because, there was some systematic thing that’s changed all of their job compared to, how it used to be.
And then in the case of the Siemens Gamesa thing, I also still think that it’s possible that it was just honestly something weird that nobody expected. With likely some sort of weird response to it that was probably like politically or commercially motivated to, maybe sweep, sweep something that seems small at the time under the rug.
And has in hindsight turned out to be a bad decision, but no matter what the company that, the responsibility ends with the CEO and like it. There’s a chain of responsibility all the way down.
Allen Hall: So why did they fire the engineers at Siemens, Gamesa?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s shocking to me. I don’t think that’s the right call.
Any more than you would fire that one that one worker that, forgot something. You could, but…
Allen Hall: I think you should.
Rosemary Barnes: You could fire that person. You could fire that person. But if you think that is the end of your problems, then you deserve to be Also fired and responsible for the next problem that occurs.
Allen Hall: If you repeatedly left the bolts out of a door, cause that, they’re going to, it’s going to be one person. I’ve been telling you before this all comes out, there’ll be one person.
Rosemary Barnes: If the CEO of Boeing looks at this and says, I’m going to fire that worker, that one worker that forgot that bolt. There you go.
End of problem. Boeing is an A plus super duper quality company again, that CEO absolutely deserves to be fired. And for the next problem that happens, he should be personally responsible for, the consequences, because it’s obvious that is not, that is just total negligence to think that you can take the worker at the very bottom of the pile.
File, fire them. If your company is built on your lowest paid workers needing to do the right thing every time, then, everything that’s built above that is, it’s like a, I don’t know, a sandcastle of it’s built on…
Allen Hall: Apply that to Siemens Gamesa.
Joel Saxum: I think that at the end of the day, it’s a cultural thing.
If this, if Siemens Gamesa was not a company in Northern Europe, and that company was headquartered in, I don’t care, Boulder, Colorado, or Arlington, Virginia, whatever, the same calls would be happening. It would be going, that guy is responsible, because we’re more of a capitalistic society, that doesn’t propped up.
When you have The German government going, Oh, we’ll give you some loans. We’ll help you out. We’ll do all this stuff like that. That’s it’s, this is a really stupid and ignorant thing to say, but people in the U S have been saying that about business in the EU for a long time.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m not saying the same thing shouldn’t happen to Siemens Gamesa.
I’m saying what should happen at Boeing and it should be similar at Siemens Gamesa. I’m not saying that there’s no responsibility further up. There is, it’s the same different issues and potentially different causes, but. In both cases, you can’t just say, Oh, it was, imagine if Siemens, Gamesa do their root cause analysis and they find out that okay.
Yeah. On every day that one of these defective blades were built, this one worker was working, fire them. Now our problem’s gone, continue on our merry way without making any changes. That would be. Absolutely nuts also to, to think that you have now solved a problem. You have to look at how that worker was able to make a mistake.
And in fact, anybody who’s done root cause analysis will say, you can’t end your root cause analysis at a person did something wrong. That’s never the root cause. Never, ever.
Allen Hall: It’s multiple people.
Rosemary Barnes: People would never be the issue. It’s so easy. It’s for everybody. Everybody, it has to be a systematic thing.
Otherwise you can’t fix it because if you’re, otherwise you’re saying your solution is, oh, okay evidently. This project team just really sucked. So next time we’ll pick people that don’t suck and then we won’t have any problems anymore. Like you can’t, that’s not a way to ensure quality for your company moving forward.
You have to have, you have to have, yeah, it would help. Maybe one of your things is better employee, a better way to ensure that employees are higher quality. Making sure that their training is better, all of those things to end up with the same, result that you have less sucky employees, but it’s not just, like it’s a system that you’re putting in place to make sure that it has to happen that way.
Yeah, it’s just it’s the way that it always, people always want to go down that way of blaming somebody. A person and thinking, we would never do something so stupid. And of course, with hindsight, you wouldn’t do something so stupid, every mistake that you’ve done, you wouldn’t go back in time and do it again.
Now that you know that’s a possibility.
Allen Hall: Sure, but there’s Rosemary, there’s a difference between doing something that’s on the fringes of technology versus leaving out the bolts. That’s gonna be, I would almost guarantee it’s gonna come down to a person at, in the Boeing situation, it’s not, probably not systemic, it’s a person.
Rosemary Barnes: No, this is my hill to die on a million percent disagree with you there. No . I can’t agree on that or even agree to disagree. I think you’re wrong.
Allen Hall: Oh, okay. It’s a prediction. It’s not a certainty. It’s a prediction. I think what happened at Siemens Gamesa because they’ve basically admitted it, is saying they had a design group and manufacturing group that made a lot of gross errors.
That’s what they’re saying, and this is why they’re probably going to get sued because we’ve seen the lawsuits start to pile up, is essentially admitted that the design group had some sort of catastrophic design. Issue that they should have caught earlier and then before they made a couple thousand blades.
Joel Saxum: Could that same thing be true for this Boeing Max 9 aircraft at the end of the day? In six months, can we hear that? Yeah, engineering group failed and we’re going to get rid of all the engineers? Is that going to happen at Boeing?
Allen Hall: No, because as Rosemary’s pointed out, there should be a belt and suspender approach to design, and she’s right, in aerospace there is.
In that design, there are four bolts to hold it four different ways, and those four bolts evidently were either not in place or the nuts were off of them. Okay. So they had bolts, a nut, a castle nut, and a cotter pin in there to keep the nut from rotating. If assembled properly, that is going nowhere, ever.
So they over designed it clearly, and they put not just a nut and a bolt, they put a nut, bolt, and a pin in it so it wouldn’t rotate off. That’s a design. So from a design standpoint, they did all those things, Rosemary. What I’m saying is that the, somewhere down the line on the manufacturing side, somebody didn’t put that together.
Rosemary Barnes: I feel, I’m starting to feel sorry for this hypothetical worker because you don’t even know that it was. It was the bolt inserter who’s, who failed, bolt inserter Susan might have been called away to work on something else before she ever got to that. And, she told her supervisor.
Allen Hall: Not on every airplane. They’re essentially finding it on like the vast majority of the airplanes.
Joel Saxum: Are they really? I didn’t see that.
Rosemary Barnes: Do you honestly think that, poor Susan just did the wrong thing every time and that’s not a problem with her supervisor, whoever gave her training whoever designed the quality method? Like
Allen Hall: Rosemary. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna call you out on that, but you’ve been in the manufacturing sites as much as I have, and you’ve seen stuff that just boggles your mind, right?
Rosemary Barnes: As a good engineer, someone who makes good designs for manufacture, I don’t design something that relies on the workers doing the exact right thing every time.
Your job doesn’t stop there, making a design that if made perfectly. Is going to do the job correctly. That’s not the end of your designers, your job as a design engineer for manufactured products. The end of your job is to make sure that not only when it’s done perfectly, it works, but in all situations that could ever conceivably happen in the factory, which definitely includes people.
Having a bad day losing the work instruction, getting called away to other things and any conceivable issue, it still needs to be safe. And that is not, that’s not, the responsibility doesn’t end with the manufacturing worker and it’s not even mainly their fault.
Allen Hall: Day one at mechanic school, bolt, nut, twist, right?
That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about anything complicated. It was the world’s most simple thing.
Rosemary Barnes: I didn’t Put them on wrong.
Allen Hall: Yeah. No, that’s why I’m saying that at some point it comes out of the person.
Rosemary Barnes: We’re not going any, we’re not going anywhere here. I can’t think of anything different to say, but I’m convinced like I’ve moved my position absolutely zero percent from where I started.
I’ve not moved at all.
Allen Hall: I’m not asking you to move your position. What I’m saying it is. It does seem weird that we apply two different rules to an, one to an organization that has a lot of hierarchy, a lot of checks and balances, and is intrinsically set up to have the redundancy in it, and we go to the other industry, which should have some of those things in place, and evidently didn’t.
Rosemary Barnes: And it does. I can tell you, I’ve worked with, I’ve worked with Siemens and engineering and manufacturing also.
Allen Hall: The wrinkles, the wrinkles of blades is still happening way too much.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m not saying it’s good, the situation, and I’m not showing that, saying that Siemens executives shouldn’t be ultimately held responsible.
In neither case, it’s the fault of the worker, it’s not the fault of the worker for creating a wrinkle, even if it was possible to make it without a wrinkle, if you were just a bit better at, smoothing the fabric as you put it in the mold. That’s not their fault.
Allen Hall: Quality?
Rosemary Barnes: I’ve said it like a hundred times now. It’s going to be really boring for whoever’s listening to the podcast if we leave this bit in, but it’s a series of steps.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And I’m with you on the series of steps, but there’s, they made a mistake 600 plus times.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And that’s my point is that when it’s systematic, then that implies that it’s not somebody having a bad day.
That implies that there is something happening high up that has caused this pressure to make their systems break down. That’s the, I’m not saying that’s definitely what happened. You’d have to do a root cause analysis to, see what was happening in this specific case. But that is where I would start.
Why were all of these, if you’ve got, one thing that fails, then you can look at, all the different reasons. But when you have got a series of things that cascading failures. Then, you have to look systematically. It’s a logical place to start.
Allen Hall: When you have more than 10 blades that go bad in a production sense, then I think you’re in trouble.
When you get to 600, you’re really in trouble. That’s that seems to be more systemic to me. That’s my point.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s a huge, it’s a huge serial defect. It’s the biggest I’ve probably ever worked with.
Allen Hall: It’s a huge problem.
Joel Saxum: I think at the end of the, at the end of the day, Allen you’re, I think what you’re trying to say is the fact that one, one door issue at Boeing has people calling for the head of Boeing.
is ridiculous compared to the idea that 600 plus blades or issues have things and nobody’s going for the heads of Siemens Gamesa.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think I’m more surprised about the response to Siemens Gamesa than I am to Boeing, because honestly, it’s not just one door at Boeing either. It’s the, the previous failures where plenty of people did actually die and they’re still doing dumb stuff like this.
That’s that says something about a company culture and leadership for sure. But yeah, it’s Siemens Gamesa. How is it possible that, we haven’t yeah, I don’t know. We still need more time for things to come out and I’m sure someone will be.
Allen Hall: Yeah, but I think everybody would agree here, right?
That we want Siemens Gamesa to be successful and it doesn’t seem like they’re making those basic steps that you would see in other organizations to get over this hurdle. It’s continuing the pain.
Rosemary Barnes: From my experience working with the, OEMs, I would say it’s just as likely that they are taking the steps and they’re just doing a terrible job of communication.
I think their communication has been just atrocious. It’s been nearly as designed to harm them as much as possible. It’s yeah, but I see that really commonly. It’s like the bulk of my job working, to help wind farm owners with their blade issues. The bulk of what I do is to help the manufacturers communicate what they’re doing and reassure the.
The asset owners that they’re being, the problem is being taken seriously and things that are happening being done correctly because their instinct is just to hide everything and give these tiny bits of information that just really give off the impression that they’re, that they think that you’re an idiot, that you can just, that they’re taking them for a ride.
So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that’s given that they’re, similar culture throughout the whole wind industry. That’s just the way that they seem to want to communicate to their customers for A reason that I cannot comprehend.
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Allen Hall: All right. So GE Vernova announced its Q4 results just when we’re actually recording this today. So you’ll hear this next week and get GE Renew, Vernova Renewal business lost about 300 million in. Q4 of 2023 for the full year, the renewables business lost about 1. 5 billion. They had, GE Vernova had a large offshore order canceled and Phil, you may know what that is off the top of your head, because I didn’t know when they said it. They did it and they didn’t say during the phone call, but overall revenue is up as almost 20 percent to 4. 2 billion. Onshore, they’re expecting high single digit margins next year with the volume increase in production with the Sunzea project and they think.
That number of orders is going to happen again next year. So they’re not seeing huge growth because the Sun Zia really skewed the numbers offshores looking up slightly and they’re expecting substantial profit in 2024, basically the second half of 2024 is when they think the money is going to start rolling in investor day is in March, they’ll still set your calendars.
And they’re going to divest of one another. So Aerospace and G. E. Vranova are going to break into two separate companies sometime in April, as it sits right now. Scared? Worried? Or thinking that this is, the worst is over?
Philip Totaro: Not any more scared than I was about a year ago, because this was all They did to happen this way, by the way the order that got cancelled was ocean wind, which I don’t know why that’s not at the forefront of your mind, because, we’ve been talking about Orsted quite a bit.
Allen Hall: Well, the vast majority of the debt is the big thing. I think isn’t the debt the big thing? There’s just a lot of debt on the books, and they’re gonna transfer the majority of that over to the aerospace side, not to G. E. Vernova. Vernova’s gonna end up with Less to overcome, right?
Philip Totaro: Yes. Which is good for them.
But this, remember when we were seeing these cancellations, we talked about the fact that, they were getting rid of $6 billion worth of orders that were gonna be unprofitable. And Joel and I had a bit of a disagreement about whether or not that was a good idea, because at the end of the day, yes, you’re reducing unprofitable projects, but you are also reducing your top line.
When you’re about to IPO the company. And so the fact that they had this, 1. 4, 1, closer to maybe closer to 1. 5 billion for the full year in a loss, that’s, it’s a problem. But at the end of the day, this is the remnants of what happened largely before.
They’ve reinstituted this. Let’s get back to what was working for us about 15 years ago. Let’s start producing workhorse turbines again, and go back to the Model T. You can have a wind turbine as long as it’s a 2. 8 127 or apparently now a 3. 6 154. I wouldn’t say the worst is over because it’s always, you can have some type of macroeconomic thing that happens, what we still need to see is the Federal Reserve reduce interest rates.
That’s going to get offshore going for everybody again. And now they’re talking about they’re not going to do that until maybe May is when they’re going to start doing the first rate cut. So that’s delaying things. But as for Vernova itself, they’re not necessarily in a bad position. I, you may have also seen, I was interviewed, last week for a a piece that came out in ReCharge where, at the end of the day GE and Vestas are going to continue dominating the U.
S. market for the foreseeable future. And the reason I said that is, you still have, all these issues that we’ve just been talking about with Siemens Gamesa haven’t really resolved themselves as yet. And if they’re not taking orders now, they’re not going to be in a position to book any revenue from those orders until maybe 2026 or 2027, so good luck on profitability until then.
And Nordex is a turbine that, I don’t know why people don’t like it as much as they don’t seem to, but it, Nordex seems to be getting the table scraps of deals that just don’t go to GE Investors, so Which is unfortunate because to be honest, if you actually look at the performance data, aside from some teething issues with, some of their, the 1 49, the 1 55, and the 1 63, they’ve actually had comparable performance to, to vestus even in the US market.
If you look at the Nordex N 1 49 and the Vestus V one 50, they’ve had the same levels of performance. Yeah, again, going back to the question of ge GE’s in not the best shape, but I guess you could say it could be worse. They’re on the, they’re not quite in the trough anymore they’re on the beginning of the upward slope back to being profitable and being healthy again.
I guess that’s the best way to say it.
Joel Saxum: I think one of the things I hear in the industry actually, and this is a, and a different statement is, investors. And GE versus Nordex. I think people like the support they get from Vestas and GE better in their FSAs. And I think that, and I think that’s the tipper for them because a lot of people are just signing FSAs because they don’t want to go through the pain in the butt of trying to find all these technicians to run their wind farm.
So ah, we’ll just buy them and get an FSA and Vestas and GE happen to have a little bit more horsepower behind them to support that.
Philip Totaro: There is, but again our analysis would suggest that you’re, like an independent service provider isn’t any necessarily worse than the OEM. What makes them quote unquote worse is two things.
One, they don’t have enough information from the OEM to be able to do their job correctly as an ISP. Or two, they end up inheriting a project that’s already seen a decline in performance. Because as we’ve talked about and as Intel Store’s data has shown, after at least ten years in, on average, you’re seeing a drop off in performance.
And that’s, 10 years is usually now the minimum of the expiration of a, an OEM long term service contract. So you’re then talking about as an ISP inheriting a project that’s already. 10 to 15 years old where the degradation’s already happened. What we have seen is that most ISPs are pretty good at what they do and at least help sustain the level of performance for that asset over whatever the remaining 5, 10, 15 years of asset life is and prevent further drop off.
But the OEMs haven’t really done themselves a whole lot of favors either, even the GE Investus with. The quality of service they have actually provided. So I’m not sure why everybody enjoys, yes, it’s an quote unquote, easier thing to do just from a contractual and negotiating standpoint, just to take the OEM service contract.
But you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you do, cause it’s more expensive than what it’s worth.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, are you joining me and saying that Vernova is going to be profitable next year in 2020 for 24, 25? I think the answer to that is yes. And I think. Phil’s nailed it where if Siemens Gamesa is not on the playing field, Vernova is going to score a lot of wins.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think yeah, so 2023 was a year of the big wind energy crisis. And I think it will be mostly contained to that, as an industry hole, obviously the individual companies are the worst problems are going to continue to suffer this year. But I wonder if it actually needed to happen because, like it’s so obvious to say, Oh yeah, they shouldn’t be putting out, a new platform every couple of years, they should just stick to something that works and then get really good at making that and get them cheaper.
And even engineering wise, you also said that people like to think that, engineering says that with economies of scale, you’ll get better by having, a bigger and bigger wind turbine, but actually for the structural stuff, it’s the opposite. And yeah, economies of scale really it’s too vague a term, but usually it means making a lot of them, not making really big ones.
So yeah, the engineering says we should stay the same. And I know, from my time in working in the industry with manufacturers at Yeah, various companies, the engineers never wanted to keep on going bigger. It’s not that, they wanted to keep on bringing out slightly different things that, it’s so inefficient for you to, for your engineering resource to just, constantly churn out things that you know, like not really.
Game changer is like a slightly larger wind turbine and uses all the same technologies as the one before. It’s not a game changer, but it still is a lot of engineering effort to get, all of the designs changed and checked and manufacturing processes done and all those, layers that we just talked about.
Where the pressure came from was a commercial pressure and it was coming from customers. Customers wanted to buy the biggest turbine that they could get approval for on their site. And the biggest one that they could buy. And it was like one manufacturer couldn’t have said two years ago.
We’re stopping at three megawatts or, five years ago or whenever they just wouldn’t have sold anymore after that. And I think I remember saying this when we talked about Vestas has, every net periodically tried to say, things are going too big. We’re going to stay the same.
And at first I was just, like so scathing yeah, you can do that, but you’re not going to sell any turbines. And I think, now everybody is on board with, yeah, we’re, we’re not going to go any bigger now. We’re just going to work on doing better, making one thing and making it cheaper.
But the fact is that no one could have said that a few years ago because they would have used that on years of sales and they wouldn’t be in a position to make that call now. It needed everyone to say it at the same time. And I think that it did need the trigger of this yeah, 2023 crisis.
I, I do join you in being optimistic for yeah, for the profitability of Vernova as well as the other manufacturers. The industry needs it and energy transition needs it too. So I think most people probably want that to happen.
Allen Hall: And never take the financial advice of an engineer, in which we’re all engineers.
So just ignore whatever we say, keep your money wherever you like.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, we’re engineers and business owners, business people, so maybe we can take our financial advice a little bit more than your standard engineer.
Philip Totaro: I’ll take my financial advice over Bill Gates, who has been advising Bill Gates to go invest in some clothesline wind turbine.
Allen Hall: That we can all agree on.
Joel Saxum: Yep, I’m with you, Phil.
Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening, and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform, and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and she’s had some fantastic episodes lately.
And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
