Ming Yang Eyes 33 MW Turbine, Greenvolt Delays FID

Announcer: The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts.
Allen: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. We were just discussing WOMA 2027, which is in Melbourne, March 3rd to the 5th. Registrations are coming in, and Rosemary was just scolding me about it. We have a lot of registrations in, and there are only 200 seats, so we need to be telling attendees to register now, right, Rosemary?
Rosemary: Absolutely. Don’t do like I do and leave it to the last minute, because you might find yourself missing out. We’ve got a capped venue. Last year we were getting close to the maximum, but this year I think we’re going to have to cap it for sure.
Allen: When we run out of seats, we run out of seats. And when you send me that nasty email saying, “Why can’t I get a seat at WOMA 2027?” I’m going to send it to Rosemary, and she’s going to call you and tell you to register early.
Rosemary: We also have Direct Wind Services as the first sponsor. I’m not sure if you were aware of that.
Allen: Yes. And Direct Wind Services is sponsoring Rosie’s blade course. What are we going to call that, Rosemary?
Rosemary: I’m calling it A Blade Is Born.
Allen: A Blade Is Born. Oh, How a Blade Is Born.
Rosemary: Title TBD. Allen hates that title. That’s what we’ve actually been arguing about before the show. It covers what happens before the blade gets into the turbine and starts being the O&M team’s headache. What happens before then that you need to know about in order to do your O&M properly and make sure of everyone you’re relying on? You need some knowledge of the system to understand whether it’s believable when someone gives you a root cause analysis for a serial defect, for example. It’s all the things you need to understand about how blades are designed and certified, including testing, and then especially manufacturing.
I’ve been fastidiously collecting sources from the internet that show the manufacturing process. It’s quite challenging to describe that process well, because everyone is so secretive. You’re not allowed in any factories anymore. But I put together a good package. It’s also a little bit of a taster for the longer course that Pardalote and Direct Wind Services have been putting on for blade training for asset managers and other wind energy professionals. So you can get a little bit of that for free as part of your WOMA attendance.
Allen: So you can attend Rosie’s A Blade Is Born session on the Friday. But the only way you’ll be able to do that is to register, and you can register at womaaustralia.com. And you’d better do it pretty soon, otherwise you’re going to miss out.
Poland Loosens Onshore Wind Rules
Allen: Our first story is from PES Wind magazine, written by developer RP Global, and its question is who is best placed to build Poland’s next wave of wind. Poland loosened its siting rules in 2023, and it made some revisions to that just recently in 2026. The 2026 changes were about new grid laws, which are hopefully going to open up development.
RP Global argues the winners won’t be the biggest developers, and that’s generally true worldwide. They’ll be the ones with projects that can actually get built, which is a huge problem in the United States and, evidently, in Poland. So Poland may be a really good test case for onshore wind in Europe at scale. If you haven’t seen this article, you should go to peswind.com, where you can download it and read it for yourself.
Poland is one of those areas where they’re trying to do more wind. The legislation is in place, but they’ve had problems. Most recently, in 2025, they rejected something like 40 gigawatts of wind projects for not being suitable or ready to be developed. This is going to be a different approach, and we’re going to watch it happen live.
Yolanda, development is one of your areas. When you’re developing wind, especially in a new location, it does seem like subject matter experts are one of the missing links, especially for Poland, which hasn’t done large-scale projects like we’re talking about now. There’s going to be a big demand for brain power in Poland, right?
Yolanda: Yeah, I think they can definitely benefit from, at the very least, telecommunicating with some experts within Europe and outside of Europe. It was really interesting to see that the setback is ten times the tip height to the closest house. That’s a very big setback compared to the United States.
Allen: They’re shortening those setbacks, Yolanda, so they’re making it much easier to get some projects in. I think that’s what the movement in Poland is.
Yolanda: Which is really good.
Allen: Yeah, that’s fantastic, right?
Yolanda: Yeah. It’s great to see that they’re moving toward progress. Everybody needs more energy, and wind is a really great resource. So it’s good to see a country moving in that direction, especially when you see other countries that seem to be putting more hurdles in front of wind.
Allen: Do you think they’re taking into account the lightning in Poland? My understanding is that there can be some nasty storms and lightning events.
Yolanda: I’d really hope so. Like Allen mentioned, there are a lot of things they really need to take into account, because even if they’re expanding the area, it’s still a pretty confined area they can put things in. So hopefully they’re really pushing for excellence on all of these sites.
Allen: That’s just going to be the key to the growth, right? Having projects that you can develop and connect to the grid. It does sound like they’re also making some rule changes so that if you haven’t complied with all the rules to connect, you can set them aside and fix them as you go along, which is a technique that’s not implemented in many other places. We’re going to have to watch this remotely and see how it goes.
Over the past couple of years, we at WeatherGuard have done a little bit of watching Poland and where it’s going, and it’s been slower than we would have hoped. But that’s changing. Go check out this article by RP Global in PES Wind magazine. You can download it and read it for yourself at peswind.com.
Well, that’s the news from Poland. Next, why China is pulling European technology out of its wind farms.
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China Pulls European Tech From Its Wind Farms
Allen: China is pulling European technology out of its own wind farms. A Polish think tank reviewed about 1,700 Chinese procurement documents, and about 250 of those called for swapping foreign technology for Chinese gear. The focus is mainly on the digital layer: converters, chips, and control software.
At the same time this is going on, Vestas is complaining about not having access to their wind turbines in China, and China is pushing bigger and bigger wind turbines. Ming Yang is said to be developing the world’s largest wind turbine, rated at up to 33 megawatts.
Rosemary, it does seem like a real dichotomy is happening. Chinese manufacturers are trying to enter Europe, and in the meantime they’re ripping European components out of wind farms, and solar farms for that matter, in China. Yet they want to introduce Chinese technology into Europe. There has to be a balance here somewhere, right?
Rosemary: Yeah, I don’t know. Ideally there would be a balance. But I think China is a big enough market that they can behave in a one-sided way. They make things that are way cheaper than what everybody else makes, so there are people that want to use those turbines outside of China. And I can see that it makes sense. China is a country with a really strong industrial strategy, and part of that is going to be relying less and less, and eventually not at all, on any other country’s technologies. So I can kind of understand it from China’s perspective.
Allen: But when the UK wants to do the same thing, or Denmark wants to do the same thing and keep Danish wind turbines Danish, there’s a huge pushback from China. There does seem to be a bit of a problem with that.
Rosemary: Yeah, for sure. It’s hypocritical, but I think everybody is pretty hypocritical in terms of their foreign trade policies. The difference is that they’re big enough to get away with it, I guess.
Allen: Well, why is China interested in pulling European or American technology out of the turbines or solar farms? If you have a fully working product, say a Vestas wind turbine in China, why would you want to take out the converters?
Rosemary: Maybe it’s not paranoia. I mean, everybody is pretty paranoid about data and hacking. There was a Kassel-based IT security firm, Jackaroo. They’re white-hat hackers, hacking in order to expose vulnerabilities rather than to do anything nefarious. They managed to get into one inverter brand. He managed to gain access to the administrative accounts without a valid password, with privileges including starting and stopping solar installations, controlling battery storage systems, and installing new firmware. And just within Germany, that was 7.8 gigawatts that he said he was able to control with the touch of a button.
To be clear, 7.8 gigawatts suddenly turning off, or batteries suddenly discharging when they should be charging, is definitely enough to take down an electricity grid. So it’s quite a big thing. He didn’t do it, obviously. And now that company says they have patched the vulnerability, so it’s not possible anymore. But it’s hard, because you can never stay ahead of the hackers. It’s always going to be a bit of a game of catch-up.
Yolanda: Can I just say, I think this highlights why it’s important to see the real value of the engineers and the IT people in all of these teams. You hear about layoffs a lot of times, and everything in the industry is kind of a pendulum. Sometimes it goes really, really commercial, and sometimes it goes really, really technical. When it goes really commercial, you see a lot of these IT teams being laid off, and then you see a lot of these vulnerabilities being exposed. And it’s like, well, you don’t fully understand what the person was doing.
Rosemary: Especially these days, I think it’s easy to replace your IT team or your coding team with Claude. Well, 90% of them anyway. So it’s definitely something to think about.
Matthew: We’ve got some experience working with a Chinese manufacturer in Europe. They have to comply with all of the cybersecurity requirements, and they’re passing that on to us. So it is definitely being taken seriously. Even Chinese products coming into Europe need to maintain cybersecurity.
Allen: So the Chinese concern is rolling into, in my opinion, a project in Scotland, and we’ll talk about that next.
Allen: As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit peswind.com today.