Rosemary and Allen are shocked by the EU stopping over 30 offshore wind projects in Denmark. In the UK, a variety of policy decisions exasperates wind developers. The new US green policy tsar unloads on Europe and creates chaos. Edge Solutions’ new leading edge protection solution (Armour Edge) may change the industry. SGRE reopens their Kansas nacelle plant and Arcosa wins $750M in new orders. Zeitview (formerly DroneBase) raises $55M. And, our Wind Farm of the Week is the Sweetland Wind Farm in South Dakota!
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Uptime 157
Allen Hall: Rosemary, you just got back from fully charged live in Australia, in Sydney, in the, in the big. How did that go?
Rosemary Barnes: I think there were like 15,000 people-ish there. And yeah, the live sessions were mostly packed with all seats filled and a few rows deep of, of standing people for, for most of the sessions that I did.
And it was actually, it was. Time that I got a chance to, you know, meet a lot of the, the viewers of YouTube channel. And it’s funny because, you know, like YouTube attracts a, attracts quite introverted people I think because you just, you know, like I just sit in my office and make videos on my smartphone and I was a bit surprised that you know, that can lead to people.
Interested enough to, you know, stand in line and, and wait to talk to me. Enjoyed the show and I’m looking forward to next year. They’ve already, yeah, already announced that they’re coming
Allen Hall: back next year. Wow, that’s fantastic. Well, just like the fully charged live event, it was packed full of people.
This week’s uptime is packed full of news. And a, a couple of different things here. And we we’re getting a lot of requests to do more news from the European Union. So we have today is your day. And some of those top items are Denmark is being stopped by the EU on about 30 wind farms because it’s possibly violated some EU law.
So it’s putting a. Denmark offshore, wind on hold for the moment. And, and in the UK there’s a lot of concerns about funding an investment for a number of offshore wind projects and onshore solar projects because the economy is just a little bit in chaos and, and there’s too many forces at play at the moment.
And meanwhile, the United States, cause this has to do with the eu, the Clean Energy Czar in the United States is sort of telling off the eu. And I’m not sure that’s a good idea because I thought we were all partners in.
Rosemary Barnes: And then we’re gonna talk about maybe a consequence of ira, which is a Siemens CESA wind farm opening or, you know, coming out from its moth balling in the US and at the same time closing one in Brazil.
And then we’re gonna talk about our leading edge protection solution, which is just finished a, a big rollout on a wind farm in Europe.
Allen Hall: And we take a look down in New Mexico where Aosa is announced a $750 million. Order. For Towers down in the southwest of the United States. And then we also take a, a quick look back at Drone Base, which is now Zeit View and the 55 million they received in funding our Wind Farm of the week.
You have to listen to the end of the program and hear it, but it’s based in South Dakota. So if you’re in South Dakota listening, make sure you listen because you may be the wind farmer of the week. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard, lightning Tech, and. Here with Australian Blade Guru Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Rosemary over in the eu. There’s a lot of going back and forth in regards to new wind energy projects offshore in particular. That’s where the activity is at the moment. And Denmark’s gotten caught up into some new EU role, and Denmark holds what they call open door projects. And that’s a little bit different than here in the United States and probably Australia.
If you have an idea for a project, you propose it to the government. If they say it looks good, you’re allowed to go do it. Which is a lot different than the states where it’s more top down, not bottom up. But that has run afoul of the eu and the, the Danish Energy Agency is putting a number of projects on hold.
There were 33 in the. There’s two being allowed to process through at the moment. The Ministry of Climate Energy and Utilities is digging into a number of these projects and essentially everything else is on hold. Now, this has upset all kinds of groups in Europe when Europe has replied to what the EU has done and what Denmark is allowing them to do.
In saying, this decision is completely. Especially at a time when the EU is determined to facilitate rather than obstruct the buildout of renewables and is seeking a more flexible approach of to what governments can and cannot do to support this. The current Danish approach to offshore wind is perfectly workable and delivers exactly what citizens and companies all over Europe urgent urgently need.
More renewable electricity at low cost . I think that’s a pretty reasonable statement, but they’re certainly calling out the EU for stopping a number of offshore projects at which are primarily to help Denmark and maybe the surrounding countries. It’s a little insane. So the, the, the other piece of this is that while all this is going on in den, De just approved 2 billion euros in state aid for France, for the, from, from France in terms of French offshore wind efforts.
So they, they given France the thumbs up and they told Denmark to put the brakes on. Is, is this typical EU behavior at the moment or what?
Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s a little bit typical. I mean, it’s basically like, yeah, Denmark’s gotten too good at at offshore wind, and it’s not fair to everybody else who needs a chance to catch up.
That’s the kind of the, the vibe that I get. From it. Maybe not like, you know, a technical legal interpretation, but certainly that’s a vibe it’s giving off. And yeah, I mean if Europe was the whole world, then maybe that would be fair enough. That’s kind of how Europe likes to, you know, organize things based on, on fairness in every member country, getting a, getting a fair go.
Europe isn’t the whole world. There’s other countries you know, outside of the EU that that Europe is competing with as well for resources. So it’s like, okay, so Europe wants heaps of green energy installed. Denmark has got huge. Chunk of the, the projects that are, you know, most ready to deliver that, and you’re like, no, we have to wait for other countries who are less good to you, you know, to get in like all the, you know, wind turbines and the rest of the supply chain is just kind of gonna wait around for that to happen.
It’s, you know, it’s a bit. A bit disruptive for the industry in Europe and other countries around the world will be thrilled to be able to get you know, to, to take up that, that slack that’s that’s gonna be there now. So I do think it’s a little bit of a, , you know, insular sort of perspective, not considering the, the broader perspective of one Europe within the world, but two, you know, there’s problem of, of climate change and also energy independence.
It really seems like Europe’s gonna get perverse outcomes that are probably not worth it. Like, it is nice if everybody gets good at building offshore wind farms, but it’s surely not as important as the fact that they get built at all. So, yeah, I am, I’m pretty surprised and disapp. In this decision.
Allen Hall: It’s just a very odd thing to pop up.
In fact, when the, the news first broke on this, the, the news articles were very descriptive as to what the EU law was, but it sounds like it’s just trying to balance out where projects are going to be taken up at. And if I’m Denmark and I’m, I have 33 projects in the queue, I assume some of those projects are going to feed.
The rest of Europe. Right. And that, that would make sense to me that, that there’s a huge amount of energy there that Denmark can’t use all of that. So they’re gonna ship some of that up, up to Sweden and Norway and maybe down south to the uk. Sure, that makes a great sense. But they use really putting the brakes on that and because it’d be an imbalance, a weird, an an imbalance of power in electricity market.
That doesn’t make any sense, but that, that , that is not unusual. Cuz there’s a lot of other things happening in the EU area. I mean, particularly in the uk. So there are five trade groups in the UK that are, are asking the government for a clear. Government plan to deliver green energy and the UK is, is kind of in a pinch because they’re not part of the EU, obviously, and they’re not supremely tied or directly tied to the us So they’re, they’re their own island, literally speaking here in terms of renewable energy.
And they’re having a, a difficult time because they’re tr they’re gonna have to have a lot of investments locally to get some of these projects off the ground and, There’s the excess the taxation for excess profits that are happening in the, in the UK at the moment. So the money’s being pulled out of these companies when they’re trying to invest in the uk it’s a very, and plus there’s inflation and plus there’s supply chain issues.
UK is really caught in the middle of a number of tsunamis and the industry’s saying, Hey, we need to figure out a path to put offshore wind in. Is there a. Path are, there’s just, are there just so many different problems they’re facing? Is it gonna be possible to do anything big in the UK over the next five years?
Rosemary Barnes: I mean there is a lot of big stuff planned in, in the uk so I’m sure stuff will happen, but it’s just being, being made harder. And again, it just does seem kind of needless. I, I think it’s really weird how some countries are dealing with this, you know, energy price crisis where, you know, you’ve got an electricity market set up.
And I mean, the whole point of having a market is that you have variations in price when supply and demand are mismatched and you know, when demand is higher than supply, prices go up and then that gives. Signal to people, Hey, this is an attractive thing to invest in. So yeah, you bring on more investment prices, go down and you know, if you ever listen to, you know, a finance person talk about this, will always say the solution to high prices is high prices.
But it’s like as soon as, oh, and the other side of that is that there’s also a signal to people to reduce demand to the extent that they can because y you know it’s very expensive, so you should use less. And in the case of energy, that should mean that people are really strongly incentivized to start insulating their houses properly.
And you know, sitting there thermostats at a, you know, reasonable setting and all those sorts of really easy, easy things that that can be done to reduce electric. Consumption that you don’t bother to do when electricity is really cheap. So those, that’s the way that you would, you know, expect that the market would deal with a situation like this.
And it’s. That kind of event. It’s kind of the point of why you would bother having a market at all, right? It would be so that you, you know, those sorts of rational signals are sent and you know, it drives investment in the right places and makes everything work efficiently. But what you see, not just in the UK but a lots of places around the world, as soon as electricity prices get high, because that, you know, is something that everybody notices, every voter notices, then they.
Interfering and, you know, putting price caps so that there is no longer any incentive to insulate your home or, or whatever. And so, you know, that means that there’s no chance to respond in a way that would make it easier next time this happens. And then, yeah, also this idea of a super profit. Kind of tax or you, you know, some way to claw back additional revenue from energy assets, which, you know, it, it makes, definitely makes some sort of sense with the fossil fuels that we’re trying to, to get off.
But it’s, it’s crazy counterproductive for doing that to renewables companies that had, you know, banked on the good times. Providing them with enough revenue to then go and invest that in, in more renewable energy assets, which everybody agrees that we need more of. But you only end up with the downsides of a electricity market and not the upsides if you don’t, you know, let it, let it do its thing.
And I just feel like if you want an electricity market, then This kind of situation is very easily foreseeable and would’ve been foreseen when they were setting up the market. It’s not like it was, you know, oh, we never knew prices would go up. So we didn’t design the market to account for that. So it’s just that, you know, people don’t hold their nerve when it comes to you know, the, the actual event playing out.
You’re better off just having your old school, old-fashioned central command and control electricity market if you are oh, electricity system. If you’re not, if you’re not gonna let the market do its thing, then you and your government is gonna, you know, politicians gonna step in in a crisis and decide that they know how best to manage it going forward despite not, you know, not being involved in the market at any other time.
Why not just have a big government bureaucracy set up to decide what wind farms to build and where and what to charge. You know, that’s we can go back to those days if, if you’re not gonna let the market do its thing when it needs to the most. Yeah.
Allen Hall: That’s a one of the pushes also from some of these, these industry leaders over in the UK is saying the, the.
Projects getting approved by the government are taking way too long to happen that there’s not enough investment money, and that the IRA bill in the United States is basically pulling money to the United States and away from Europe, and particularly away from the uk. So if you’re gonna have money and a project, where are you gonna do it at?
It’s probably more advantageous to actually do the project in the United States than the uk. So they’re, they’re in a weird space at the moment. Get the latest on wind industry, news, business, and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter@weatherguardwind.com slash news.
Well, the United States is not gonna play along with Europe clearly, and it obviously the UK is having a lot of issues. Trying to find a market and investment in renewable energy. In the meanwhile, obviously, the United States passed the RA bill, which is gonna pump about 400 million into the industry.
Well, that has a real effect on the rest of the green energy economy because it’s such a pulling force into the United States. Other countries just can’t keep up with that. And in the United States, the focal point for Administration’s clean energy effort is John Podesta and he, in a recent article, he said the US will make no apologies for a prioritizing American Jobs from the I R A bill, and that he argued that the European allies, the uk who have.
Against the ira. Bill should welcome us leadership. Yeah. This guy’s a zinger. I don’t know if you followed John Podesta and I, you know, obviously people have different opinions about him, but there’s one thing about him. He, he is not subtle. Okay. Quote, we make no apologies for the fact that American taxpayer dollars ought to go to American investments in American jobs, Podesta.
Calling on Europe to take responsibility for developing its own clean energy sector. Well, you know, Europe has developed its own clean energy sector. It’s the United States that’s behind a little perspective
Rosemary Barnes: here, right? Yeah. I think it is a bit a, a little, little bit delusional to try and pretend that Europe is jealous of America being clean energy leaders.
I mean, the only 20 ish years, too late to become that. Yeah, I, I mean, I think it’s fine if you wanna say we’re going to, you know, invest so much money that every company only wants to do US projects. You know, it’s a bit, things are constrained at the moment. Everybody around the world can’t do every green project that they wanna do.
And definitely the ira program has, you know, it’s a big enough of a, a carrot that pretty much everyone wants to. Play there in America instead of anywhere else. That’s, that’s fine. It, you know, like, I’m not an economist or anything like that, but my understanding was that you didn’t do that sort of distorting thing to countries you had free trade agreements with.
And I know that there is in, in a lot of the, you know, individual aspects of, of Ira, it, it is about either American made or from fair trade. A. Country. So I, I think overall for a country like Australia, you know, like it’s, it’s good, good for us because all of a sudden our, I don’t know, battery minerals and you know, a bunch of other stuff like that becomes a lot more valuable.
There is a, you know, something. To say you should pay more for these Australian minerals than for Chinese ones. But it’s no surprise that you’re going to piss off the countries that have companies moving from their country to the US because of this bill. I mean, yeah, it’s a, it’s cause and effect.
Allen Hall: Emmanuel Macron, president of France had some words about this. He is saying that the IRA bill could fragment the. Because of the pull of green investment dollars going to the United States. Like you said, there’s definitely a carrot in the United States at the moment and there’s only so many manufacturers of wind equipment and solar equipment they can’t produce for the entire world at the moment.
So it’s gonna pull resources to the United States where France, and Germany and Denmark and all those countries will are wanting to do their their own thing, but they’re gonna have a hard time competing. When it’s just more profitable to be in the United States, and you see that happening at the moment.
Evidently, the administration of the United States does not care. , it’s, it’s just a mystery to me as to why we are doing this. When I say we, I mean the, I guess I’m representing America on this podcast at the moment, , but in other areas, Rosemary, we, we don’t do this in the United States, Australia and, and the UK are working together on a nuclear submarine that was just announced the president of the United States was just there with the leaders of those two countries.
And saying, Hey we have an agreement to go off and make these nuclear subs great. If we’re able to make nuclear subs together, then why are we not able to work together to get the green energy business running at max capacity? It just doesn’t happen. And I, and why is America I be a leader in that?
Instead of just sucking it all to America, why are we not saying, Hey, we can stand up a lot of different places in the world and we need to, if, if, if clean energy is such a catastrophic, the lack of clean energy is such a catastrophic failure for the world, which is what the administration would say, then why are you not standing up?
Rosemary Barnes: Germany, France. I’ve been a bit surprised by how aggressive it, it, it is. And also it’s, it’s a little bit funny because, I mean, like we were saying a minute ago, the US is, is not actually renewable energy leaders. All the good know, ha know-how and technology is actually in Europe, so they’ve kind of, I don’t know you in America, they.
They’ve incentivized all that, know-how to come over, I guess. But in a, yeah, in, in quite an aggressive way. Definitely creates some distortion and probably, you know, if you’re thinking globally, it, I don’t know if it will be a force for, for good or bad overall because certainly it is, it is really nice to have such a incentive for for renewable.
So that, so that’s good. One thing that I worry about more than that though, with the, the IRA is how it’s got the potential to distort the technologies that are gonna play out. And specifically the, the subsidies, the production tax credits for or the production, some kind of tax credit for hydrogen.
Are huge. You know, it’s, I think it’s up to $3 per kilo of, of hydrogen tax credit. When hydrogen is supposed to in, you know, in 10 or 20 years time, green hydrogen is supposed to get down to a dollar or $2 a kilo. So it’s like you’ll have more tax credit than what it’s actually you know, supposed to.
To cost. It’s, it is like, you know, then it’ll be irrelevant the merits of hydrogen because it’ll be free. So, you know, all of our resources are gonna go into making hydrogen, which is very inefficient to use hydrogen when you could use something else. And so that definitely has a potential to, you know, put a bit of a hand break on the energy transition as a whole, because whilst you, you can do nearly anything with hydrogen.
You shouldn’t when you can do it with direct electrification because it’s, you know, a third of the electricity needed in, depending on the technology that you’re talking about, half to a third of the electricity or sometimes even worse. That to me is, you know, at least as concerning as these you know, inter intercountry TIFs that are, are going on.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Well that explains why BP is interested in green hydrogen, right? Because there’s an incentive to do it. So it does skew the marketplace. And, and if America’s basically saying, oh, it’s not gonna ski the marketplace, it already is skewing the marketplace. It’s been like six months since it’s been passed.
It’s, it’s, it’s obvious it’s skewing the marketplace and is it skewing the marketplace in a good direction? I think at the moment. If you’re outside the United States, the answer is no. It’s not doing that. It’s actually making things a lot worse in, in places where need to be working hard on getting more solar and wind going.
Edge Solutions, which is a company based in Scotland and they make leading edge protection and, and new style of leading edge protection has just completed the second installation of its protection systems at the RIF Gott offshore wind farm in Germany. And I’m, I’m sure I have mispronounced. So Rifka has a fleet of 30 Siemens 3.61 20 machines 15 kilometers off the island of Borkum, and it was commissioned in 2014.
So those wind turbines I’m sure are in need of some leading edge protection. And if you haven’t followed, Edge solutions, and you can look ’em up on Google. They, they’re, they’re bringing a little bit of different technology into the leading edge protection market. They developed a thermoplastic material with a, an thermoplastic company, so it’s called the ran sc.
And it’s specifically designed for wind tur blades. So they are putting on what, I guess in the industry we call shells, they, they sound like hard pieces that are fit formed to the leading edge and are glued on. And I’ve heard good things about this at, at the American Clean Power Conference down in Orlando.
There was a, a couple people were talking to me about this material and how well that it works now. Orry Catapult did a study back in 2022 on these leading edge shells, and they said that the operational lifetime was gonna be in excess of 50 years . So that’s a long time for a leading edge protection system to work.
And it’s coming out of, obviously it’s coming outta Scotland, not a place you would normally assume as being a a, a wind turbine mecca, but there are a lot of wind turbines off the coast of Scotland and. Well, there’s a problem, there’s a solution. So there’s a lot of wind turbines up there that are sitting in the water getting beat up pretty bad.
So armor edge from the edge solutions is, is really interesting concept and not even a concept. Interesting product. And I think you’re gonna start seeing it in more places. It says they’ve taken some orders or in shipping some orders to wind farms in the uk, us and. and rolling out training for technicians, which is probably the biggest hurdle.
one of the things, Rosemary, one of the things we hear about on these leading edge shells and Polytech makes Swan, I think Siemens has their own, and then Edge solutions has this Armor Edge piece is the training that if you don’t get them installed properly, they can pop off, which is a problem. So training is probably the right way to go.
And the, the other little piece about this is that they’re making. Shorter sections. It looks like they’re making the one meter long pieces, so you’re just, you’re sticking on one meter at a time. If you gotta do 30 meters or blade, it’s gonna be there a while. But it’s an interesting concept that when I’ve looked into the technical aspects of it, it does make sense.
I haven’t tried this material. I’m interesting trying this material. We do some rain erosion testing here at Weather Guard, but Rosemary, you know a lot about leading edge erosion and and how treacherous that problem is. Is this one of the maybe a new solution, a thermoplastic solution? Cause everything else we’ve seen has been sort of polyurethane based.
Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Well, I think well first of all, I think it, it makes sense that it would you know, come outta Scotland because they do have a lot of wind and they have really excellent conditions for accelerating, leading edge erosion with leading edge erosion. It’s kind of like two paths that technologies are going down.
It’s path of the, the solid. Solid component that is manufactured to the precise geometry of the blade that you’re putting it on which is what these guys are doing. And solid has the benefit of, you know, lasting for a long time. But then it has the downsides of, you know, like it’s a lot more complicated to make a, you know, every one meter section needs to be made to the right geometry.
You’re not, you’re not just making, you know, like a. A bucket of, of paint that can go anywhere and you just make that exact same product over and over again. You’ve gotta make, you know, like 30 different pieces for every different kind of blade type that you’re gonna go on. It’s it’s complicated and, you know, the logistics are a bit tricky.
And then, as you said, the, the training and installation is, is critical and A paint compared to something that you can just paint on. But you are, you are hoping that that’s all worthwhile because it lasts so much longer than a paint can. And then the other direction that we see people going is kind of, yeah, like totally away from that and having material that, I mean, ideally it would also last.
But more focus on it being really easy to install so that hopefully you can get a drone doing it, and then it’s not such a big deal. Even if it had to be reapplied every you know, couple of years or even every year. If you can automate it with just a drone, then it’s, it’s not such a big deal. So I wonder if there’s space for both of those technologies in the market or if we’re going to see one or the other win out.
But yeah, definitely this product, I mean, they have. The recent rollout where they’ve installed it on a, you know, a, a large wind farm that’s, you know, good proof of concept for the installation method. But they have also got some that have been on wind turbine blades for the last, was it 2014?
They were installed, so that’s like nine years. So that, that, you know, that’s a decent chunk of time if it’s a you know, if it was an area. Was affected by, you know, pretty rapid leading edge erosion. Then nine years is definitely long enough to you know, prove that it’s, it’s gonna be durable. So they’ve kind of taken off, taken care of both of the, the big risks, I guess, that they would be immediately obvious with their.
Product. So let’s see where it goes from here. And I think we’ll just have to wait and see how, how things play out. Cause it will depend one on how durable new materials prove to be and how quickly the drone technology advances. Cuz you know, at the moment it’s still pretty early days for like, drone inspections are going really, really well.
But for drones that actually need to like, you know, grab onto the blade and crawl up and down like a, like a crab doing things along the way they, they. But I don’t think that it’s quite as robust as you know, drone inspections, but I would anticipate that they would get very good at that. So, you know, maybe, maybe in 20 years that’ll be how everything’s just done with.
Yeah. Drone crab, robot things crawling all over the Wind turbines to do everything. Yeah. Well, blade
Allen Hall: Bug has made a number of improvements in the, in their crawling robot and it, they just got through a, a trial down in France I believe, and that went extremely well. So the crawling robot is coming very quickly and you’re starting to see more of them pop up now.
The ED solution piece. Makes sense to me and we need more ideas out there because there isn’t one solution for the world at the moment. And I doubt that there will ever be. Everybody’s got their own problem, right? So you got to find a solution for the problem you have in front of you. But I would be interested in having edge solutions on the podcast cause I want to hear more about this material, kind of how it’s installed and where they’re trying to go with it.
Because it’s a lot of wind turbines in the United States that have horrible leading edge problems and getting a. Solution that’s gonna last as long as the blade lasts would, would make a lot of sense to a lot of operator. 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. PS Wind, PS wind.com.
So Siemens ESA down in Kansas is getting ready to open up their nael plant. Now you remember about a year or so ago, they put that same plant in Hutchson, Kansas on in mothballs called it hibernation. But it company spokesman Andrew Luther says the facility is ramping back up for production, and that’s good.
Hiring production will be done in phases as required by the manufacturing process. That’s a sort of a non-denial, denial about how fast it gonna ramp up. But the company will obviously, which manufactures a whole bunch of components in the United States. Is starting to pull things outta hibernation and, and get rolling again.
So it looks like they’re gonna try to have initial production begin sometime before July of this year. and they’re calling back the workers that were laid off and they probably can’t get back to the same staff they had preh hibernation, but it was, I think they had about a hundred employees there.
So a number. They’re gonna be back. I know the labor market in Kansas is getting really tight also, so they may have a hard time getting some of those employees back and but at least there’s some activity in contrast. You know, the I R A bill has been playing into a lot of decisions in terms of the wind turbine companies.
The Siemens ESA plant opens up again in Kansas, and I was noticing in an article from Brazil that Siemens ESSA is actually gonna close one of the plants in Brazil. And the, obviously the thought occurred, they’re not directly related, but they’re kind of related that they’re go, the Siemens ESAs is gonna go where the money is and where the carrots are, as Rosemary puts it.
Probably the IRA bill has a lot to, to do with that. In fact, the article, it was written in Portuguese, so I had to translate it, but it sounded like a lot of the winter manufacturers are gonna be shipping components into Brazil instead of making them in country, which is very odd, I think.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, obviously there’s some sort of price difference in the, the cost of labor between the two countries.
So the, the IRA carrot is large enough to make up for, for that. I wonder if Siemens EZ. Had an inkling that this was coming and that’s why they only mothballed their factory rather than closing it. Or if it was more just the general awareness that there was a big, a big potential pipeline in, in the US that, you know, they would definitely wanna be a part of if it, if it eventuated.
Allen Hall: Mm. Well, it, it’s probably true. I think that covid was a big part of it for sure. But also, you know, when they change administration in the United States, you had to figure there’s a lot of noise since 2020 that there was gonna be a bill like the IRA bill. So if, if you’re a Siemens commander or an LM wind power or pick ’em, it would be in your best interest to just kind of hold off as long as you can on actually closing a facility.
And they did. It looks like most of them did. So there’s another plant opening that was announced this week, Arosa, who manufactures the wind turbine towers. Now, I, I don’t know much about this company, so when I started digging into it, it’s like, wow, they actually make a lot of wind turine towers they’re gonna open a new plant.
down in New Mexico. So they and Arosa announced that it had received tower orders of approximately 750 million for delivery beginning in 2024 and continuing through 2028. That’s a nice little run. The, the majority of the orders will be down in sort of the Texas, New Mexico, Colorado region. From what it sounds like maybe even in.
And as as part of this, they’re gonna open a new plant in Bellon, New Mexico, which is close to Albuquerque, New Mexico. If you ever been to Albuquerque the 750 million in new orders are expected to be eligible for the advanced manufacturing production tax credit. Included in the IRA bill and our cost coastal plans to invest about 60 million to purchase property, modify.
An existing plant and get the necessary equipment in the facility to start making these towers, that’s a big deal. If you’re in the town of Bellon, New Mexico, that is a big deal and I I, you’re gonna start seeing more and more of this. I think the IRA bill is bringing more American manufacturing online, and it doesn’t say Rosemary, who these towers are going to, you know, we just talked about Keystone and the spiral towers getting connected with ge.
Is Arosa tied to Siemens esa? I couldn’t tell. Do, do you happen to know who they’re tied to in terms, or maybe they make towers for everybody?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I don’t know, but I assume they’re making ’em for everywhere. E everyone. I’m just on their website now and it says that since 2000 they’ve delivered 12,000 towers for installations in a multitude of wind farms across the United States.
It seems too big to be tied to just one. Yeah. So yeah, it’s a, yeah, it’s a lot, a lot of towers. It’s just, and it’s just a normal kind of tower that we’re all used to seeing. It’s yeah, no, nothing crazy. It’s, yeah technology that, you know, every people are already making around the world and now there’s a big incentive to.
To make ’em all in the us So that’s what’s happening. It’s definitely, you definitely couldn’t say that Ira isn’t, isn’t doing what they intended it to do. .
Allen Hall: Well, they have another factory. I, I was looking online. I think they had a factory in Iowa, whether they slowed down recently because of covid and, and not having any tax investment into renewable energy that really damp put a damper on the American market.
But opening up in sort of the New Mexico area. It is interesting cause that’s kind of where Keystone is, right? So if you start thinking about where these plants are being located, where do you think the future of onshore wind’s gonna be? It’s gonna be sort of Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma region.
It looks like maybe in Arizona, not in necessarily because it’s already plants there, I guess. But I mean, it’s not gonna be necessarily in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana. Maybe there’s saturated marketplaces and all the, all the movements gonna be down. South, that’s what it looks like. Just based on factories.
Yep. It’ll be interesting
Rosemary Barnes: to see where it
Allen Hall: guys, Rosemary, we haven’t talked about the drone base series E funding round and it, it happened a couple weeks ago and it’s just been in the back of my head to talk about it. But they closed 55 million of a series E to expand its inspection analytic services for energy assets.
And as part of drone based now renamed itself into Zeit View. And they are really becoming a huge inspection company, not in just drones, obviously that’s why they changed the name. But they’re doing office airborne measurements and view over, over Overflying Solar Farms and looking at all kinds of different applications for the technology that they have.
So they’re more than just a drone company. So that, that makes sense, right? And Zeit view obviously means in German time view, , which again, maybe not necessarily easy for the American market, but hey they had a whole bunch of investors union Square Ventures, upfront Ventures, Euclid Capital Energy Transition Ventures and Hurst Ventures all participated in that series E funding.
Zeitview last year inspected about 43 gigawatts of solar. That’s roughly 30% of the solar US solar capacity. So they’re a huge player in that market. And I I, with this funding, it’s just gonna propel them. It has to and congratulations to Zeitview, formerly DroneBase. If you looked on their LinkedIn page, it, everybody’s LinkedIn that works at worked at DroneBase.
It says Zeit View, formerly drone. because everybody’s still kinda getting used to the name, but it’s actually a pretty smart idea to do that on LinkedIn. So everybody remembers to call it Zeit View from your own out. But congratulations, everybody there. That’s really, that’s really exciting and we’re looking forward forward from more from Zeit View.
Our wind farm of the week is Sweetland Wind Farm in South Dakota. Sweetland Wind Farm is being built by Scout clean energy in sort of Central South Dakota and Scout Clean Energy is a portfolio company of Brookfield Renewable and. At Sweetland, they just received 71 2 0.8 megawatt, 1 27 wind turbines from ge.
So there’s a big yard out there, full of wind, turbine parts. The site will be commissioned later this year and expected to power 82,000 homes. And Sweetland is expected to support about 200 temporary construction jobs and 10 permanent full-time positions. Once everything. It goes into operations. So congratulations to Sweetland Wind Farm in South Dakota.
You are our wind farm of the. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News or our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime
Wind Energy Podcast.
