Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Allen covers record bank financing for clean energy, Oracle’s 1.7 GW Texas wind deal, RWE’s German auction win, Denmark scrapping its turbine cap, and Revolution Wind finishing off Rhode Island.
The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Episode Transcript
September 18, 2026
Happy Monday, everyone.
Off the coast of Rhode Island this past week, the last turbine went up. Hold that thought. First, the banks.
BloombergNEF says global banks put one-point-one-five trillion dollars behind low-carbon energy last year. A record. For every dollar banks lent to fossil fuels, they lent ninety-seven cents to clean energy. Five years ago, that ratio was seventy-nine cents. Wind project finance in Europe grew seventy-five percent in a single year. The money is moving. And here is where it lands.
In Texas, Oracle just signed wind energy deals across ten projects. One-point-seven gigawatts. Partners include RWE, Engie, Clearway Energy, and Scout Clean Energy. All feeding the ERCOT grid. All powering Oracle’s data center campus in Abilene. Oracle wants one hundred percent of its AI data center electricity matched with carbon-free power by twenty thirty-five. Big tech needs big power. Wind is answering.
Now cross the Atlantic. RWE won one hundred and nineteen megawatts of onshore wind in Germany’s latest federal auction. Two projects. The first, Juchen Three. Eighty-four megawatts on reclaimed land at the former Garzweiler coal mine in North Rhine-Westphalia. Wind turbines, on a former coal mine. The second, Seedorf in Lower Saxony. Five old turbines totaling nine megawatts, replaced by five modern machines at thirty-five. Nearly four times the power. Same number of towers. Both projects target twenty twenty-eight.
And just north of Germany, Denmark just made a move. The Danish government scrapped its cap on onshore wind turbines. That cap was set in twenty eighteen: eighteen hundred and fifty turbines by twenty forty. The government’s own forecast says Denmark will need thirty-three hundred. Climate Minister Samira Nawa said tearing down working turbines because of an old cap would be outrageous. But the Danish Chamber of Commerce warns: more turbines need more grid.
Now, back to Rhode Island. Ørsted’s Revolution Wind has installed its sixty-fifth and final turbine. Seven hundred and four megawatts. Six-point-two billion dollars. The federal government issued two stop-work orders against this project. Federal judges threw them both out. Revolution Wind kept building. It joins South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind as the third completed large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States. During Winter Storm Fern, Vineyard Wind showed up big for New England. During the July heat wave, offshore wind kept oil-burning peakers quiet.
So here is what matters. Banks are lending at near parity with fossil fuels. Big tech is signing gigawatt-scale wind deals. Turbines are going up despite political headwinds. The constraint now is the grid behind them. Denmark said it this week. Germany’s offshore foundation said it last month. The next decade of wind energy growth will be won or lost on transmission and interconnection. Not turbines. Not money. Wires.
And that is the state of the wind industry for the 21st of September 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
Sources:
BloombergNEF — Low-Carbon Bank Financing Tops One Trillion
Canary Media — Major US Offshore Wind Farm Installs Its Last Turbine
DCD — Oracle Signs 1.7GW of Wind Energy Supply Agreements in Texas
RWE — RWE Secures 119 MW of Onshore Wind in Latest German Auction
EnergyWatch — Denmark Scraps Onshore Wind Turbine Cap
