Siemens Energy’s latest updates are pushing their quality driven costs closer to €5B! Phil Totaro looks at the public relations roadmap and what may lie ahead. Fabric ply wrinkles appears to be part of the quality issues at Siemens Energy and TPI – Rosemary Barnes explains the root cause and what can be done about them. GE Vernova is still looking to build two new factories in New York along with upgrades several other facilities in the US. GE is also continuing its partnership with ORE Catapult in the UK with a new investment! ERCOT is proposing new rules that may require hardware upgrades to keep the Texas grid stable, while renewable owners are pushing back on the costly update. And discover our featured Wind Farm of the Week: Patton Wind in central Pennsylvania!
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Uptime 178
Allen Hall: Rosemary, Australia may not be the dangerous part of the world. It looks like parts of Texas are. There was a lady just recently who was out mowing her lawn and a snake fell on her from the sky. Just landed on her out of clear blue sky landed on her arm, wrapped around her arm. She starts screaming, help me Jesus, and starts shaking, trying to shake the snake off.
The snake starts attacking her face. Starts hitting, but thank God she had glasses on. So the snake is hitting her glasses and broke her glasses. Meanwhile, a hawk just happens to be by now why the hawk is there. We’ll answer later, but the hawk comes down, sees a snake on this woman’s arm, and attacks this lady’s arm with a snake on it, and after three or four times, eventually gets the snake off the lady.
She and she lived to tell the story about it. But Rosemary, it’s just, I thought this has to be Australia, right? This is not an American situation.
Rosemary Barnes: I assume the hawk, the hawk dropped the snake on her and then went back for it. Is that the, is, is that the conclusion?
Allen Hall: Yeah, I, I think so. Yes. That almost happened to me over the past weekend actually.
We have a lot of hawks in the area, and I’m out, when I’m out mowing the yard. There’s a lot of like scurrying in the yard of what we call volees, little kind of ground mice things. A hawk loves to come watch when I do that. And the other day I noticed there was a hawk had picked up a little critter in the yard and was on top of the telephone pole and decided to fly over me.
And he dropped that, dropped that animal, and I thought, oh my God, I’m gonna get hit by this dead animal because this is right up right over top of me.
Rosemary Barnes: Did you call for Jesus to save you?
Allen Hall: I almost did, but you know what? The hawk did? The hawk dived down and caught that. Dang vole and then flew away. Thank God, because if it had hit me.
Rosemary Barnes: Could’ve been attacked by a vole!
Allen Hall: It would’ve been attacked by a vole and then attacked by this hawk and that that hawk, those hawks are big. Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s amazing, you know, when you’re mowing outside, I was mowing just like this lady was obviously, but man, mowing is a lot more dangerous than I thought it was.
Rosemary Barnes: Glad you survived to tell the tale.
Allen Hall: So we’re always looking for those dangerous things in Australia, right? And we, we, we couldn’t really find one this week, so it actually turned to America to look for the. With a crazy situation last week it was that Chinese bear.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s insane that people are so, so stressed about Australia, like I’ve been to, to Canada and Bears will just, you, you know, you’d be walking along a footpath, a sidewalk and people will be like, oh, there’s a bear there, there’s a bear up ahead.
So, you know, be careful. Nothing in Australia is going to, you know, like come out of the shrubbery and attack you. It’s all you, you know, it’s just animals. If you leave them alone, then they’re gonna leave you alone.
Allen Hall: The emus. That’s what I’m really worried about.
Rosemary Barnes: And, and emu will steal your lunch. That’s true.
And that, that will happen.
Allen Hall: That’s a serious offense.
Rosemary: Their beaks are big, so you’re gonna give it to them.
Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech and I’m here with my good friends Phil Totaro and Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum will be back next week, and this is your Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well talk about someone who’s struggling at the moment. Semens Energy has really had a bad couple of weeks. Latest go around here is they’re talking as of probably 24 hours ago. They anticipate almost a 5 billion euro loss this year due to gaa essentially, and. That has increased dramatically.
When, when this, when this first issue popped up, they were talking about a couple hundred million euro sort of event. They knew they had a problem, they weren’t sure the scope, but it’s multiplied by a factor of more than 10 at this point, and it’s really starting to shake the marketplace. Phil,, have you seen.
Some of these financial discussions that are happening in all the newspapers.
Philip Totaro: Absolutely. And even just this morning, there was a Reuters news piece where they interviewed two financial analysts from JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank that said that they’re not even gonna look for profitability until 2026.
So if, if that, so this, this is a very serious situation for Gamesa. One that I. I think there’s, you know, there’s, there’s something to be said for , but then there’s also being a little too honest. And to be blunt, I think they’re being a little too honest with the market right now about what’s, obviously you want to be able to provide and, you know, visibility to, to what’s going on, but, To come out.
I mean, the company has actually come out and, and said that we basically sold dodgy products, you know, that were un, you know, not tested and proven enough to be actually sold and, and be viable in the marketplace. And this is making their entire situation a lot worse and they’re doing it to themselves.
And I don’t quite understand how their PR and marketing people signed off on this. So that’s, that’s a big open question.
Rosemary Barnes: It must surely be worse than they’re saying. And that’s the why, the reason why they’ve been permission, given permission to say, say this, right? That’s my take on it. That you know, like they’re saying really bad things.
So the reason must be that it’s actually much worse, and this is better, that people think that the, they’ve done this bad, really bad thing compared to what the reality is. I mean, I’ve got nothing to base that on except for just the same as you. Like how on earth did anyone approve this messaging? Unless, you know this is the good, the best case scenario that they could you know, possibly tell.
Allen Hall: Well, usually when companies of this size get involved in a financial problem of this magnitude, they actually will hire PR firms that specialize in these kind of events to give them advice. ’cause it doesn’t sound like is taking that advice at the moment, or they haven’t hired that company to do that because, It takes a certain kind of personality to know how to n navigate those waters.
And if you haven’t done it before, don’t do it for a living. It, it can be quite treacherous because the marketplace is, is super aggressive right now. All the financial analysts are really sharpening their pencils and sometimes sharpening their knives. And it, you have to be careful what you say when you say it, how you say it.
And right now, I think, Phil, I think you’re probably right. They’re, they’re just too honest. They’re, they’re too open at the moment. They need a hold. Steady for a little bit, figure out what’s going on and come back with that plan. It’s gonna be brutal for the next couple, couple of months, but I, I don’t see how you move forward without some sort of PR plan.
Philip Totaro: And, and let’s also talk about the long-term consequences of this for a second. So, if you remember back five years ago when Senvion went under. Intelstor and you know, myself and my colleagues, we spent months and months trying to convince three different companies to buy Senvion to no avail.
No, because frankly nobody wanted to absorb the debt. And the question here is that in spite of the fact that the Siemens energy is said, everything’s on the table, including presumably selling off Siemens Gamesa to someone else. Who would buy it with this much liability exposure? Because again, as I’ve mentioned, I mean the fact they’ve made these public statements, it’s not just, it’s bad for their stock price.
They could be opening themselves up to litigation based on knowingly presenting products in the market that were faulty. And, and there’s, so there’s a whole boatload of consequences that could come from this. So long term we’re gonna, I’m gonna handicap a a little bit and let’s talk about what, what’s likely to happen if they survive.
As the financial analysts have indicated, it’s probably years before they’re back to any kind of decent financial health. If they don’t survive, you could see an asset strip the same way you saw with Senvion, and if that happens, There are actually several Chinese companies, some Indian companies and even, you know, more mainstream Western competitors that might gobble up some of the assets.
Certainly their service portfolio is potentially attractive, especially since they acquired some of those service contracts from Senvion when they, when they did that asset strip a few years back. But this, this could be. The way this goes if they can’t figure out what happened and why it happened.
As you suggested, Allen, I am, I am a little fearful. The other, the other thing I’ll mention real quick too is, you know, if you’re spending, if, if the company is now spending a significant amount of their budget on propping up the manufacturing side of the house, There’s also a risk here to the long-term service contracts on the services side, meaning that if I am an independent service provider right now, you know, I’m gonna first go get a subscription to Intel store and our great biz dev tools, but I’m gonna no really like, I’m gonna start calling every asset owner that has a long-term service contract with Siemens Gamesa.
To figure out whether or not they can break that contract and, and maybe sign up with an ISP, I mean, in, in, you know, kidding aside, like that is a likely outcome of, of this, there, there could be some significant consequences.
Allen Hall: Oh, absolutely. And Rosemary, I saw some numbers here about the quantity of turbines and what the specific issues are.
So they’re saying there’s 2,104 x machines and 805 x models that are out in the field currently. Obviously not all of them have issues, but there seems to be two main focus areas at the moment, which are gonna drive all these numbers, wrinkles in the rotor blades in terms of the ply, layups, and some sort of debris in the bearings.
The wrinkles in the rotor blade. I do not understand how at this point we have the quantity of wrinkles in, in a, in a manufacturing such situation, which Siemens obviously knows about.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Wrinkles are super common defect. It’s probably, yeah, I mean between lightning and wrinkles that would cover the bulk of the the blade issues that I get involved with.
In my work. So I don’t think that the, the fact that wrinkles emerge is uncommon and it is something that can take a, a little while to find out that you’ve got that problem. Because the kinds of quality assurance that they do in the factory, the kinds of testing that they do, doesn’t always pick up the wrinkles.
You can do various kinds of, of scans like ultrasounds or, you know, similar to the kinds of scans that you do on a, a human body. You can, you can do that to find defects in a blade in the factory. But there, it, it depends. You can only do certain tests in certain areas and for wrinkles, you can really only check where the laminate is quite flat, so you can usually catch them over most of the, the really critical parts at the main laminate, the spa cap.
That is pretty flat for the, for the most part. So you should be able to scan those in the factory and pick up wrinkles. But I’ve seen many instances where they’re just not, for whatever reason, it’s not a totally exact science. So they make it out in the field. And because you’ve, you’ve weakened the, the blade strength a a little bit, but the main problem is on its fatigue behavior.
So, you know, it says little loads replied. Repeatedly, that’s the problem. It’s not a matter of, you know, you turn the wind turbine on and the first time that the wind bends it, that it’s gonna snap. It’s not that big of a problem, it’s that it’s just got this weakness, this little stress concentration where the wrinkle is.
And that after a few loads you know, it might be after a day, a week, a month, a year, maybe two years, you’ve had enough bends enough stress concentrations in the same place. That it can cause that failure. So you can imagine if it’s happening after a year, then you’ve already made a lot of blades in the meantime.
And if that wrinkle wasn’t present on their test blade, then that wouldn’t have been picked up in their, their testing ’cause it’s not present on every single. Every single blade.
Allen Hall: Right? Doesn’t Siemens have a unique way of building blades? It’s a little bit different than
Rosemary Barnes: everybody else. They do, but they don’t build all their blades like that.
So their, their unique way is they do have a one shot process where instead of making the blade in two halves and then gluing them together, they can lay everything up. And I think that they use these pressurized bladders to kind of make the second half of the mold and push everything out, and they can actually cure a blade in, in one go.
But yeah, definitely all their blades aren’t made by that. Like, made like that.
Allen Hall: Well, because he’s the latest generation, the 4X and the 5X series, would you, would they not be using that process? I
Rosemary Barnes: think that they don’t necessarily always use it for the really long blades. I, I’m not, not an, an expert and yeah, I wish I, I had checked, checked my, my notes to verify exactly what kinds of blades they do and don’t use that for.
But yeah, I, I’m not, I’m not a hundred percent sure that this. These blades would’ve been produced like that. Yeah. I’ve never heard of worse quality for that, that kind of blade than, than others.
Philip Totaro: I think they’re only using that manufacturing process for the blades that use the carbon protrusions in the spa.
I don’t think they’re using it for the carbon glass hybrid blades that they have. That’s my understanding. Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: And if they’ve got pulled protrusions in the spa, then they shouldn’t be able to get wrinkles. That’s the, the the point, you know, like you’ve already got your carbon kind of laid out into a solid piece and then you put it in a wrinkle happens when.
Usually a wrinkle happens when you lay the fabric in the mold and you know, it’s got a little, a little bump in it. And it could be for a few reasons. It could be ’cause someone, your worker left a, a marker pen in there or something and the glass is going over that. It could be because you put it in kind of sideways a little bit.
Yeah. Skew if. And, and as the vacuum was applied, it kind of pushed it together or yeah. It could be ’cause of a, a vacuum issue or, or something. But basically instead of, like with composite materials, it’s super important that the fibers go in the right direction because. You know, the fibers only transmit the loads along the length of the fiber.
It’s like, you know, imagine if you’re trying to, I, I don’t know, push something along with a piece of spaghetti. If you, if you push it along the, the long axis, then you know that would work. But imagine now trying to do it at 90 degrees and you’re just gonna snap that piece of spaghetti, right. And so when you put a wrinkle into a blade, then instead of having the force the loads going nice along, you know, in the straight direction at some point where there’s the wrinkle, it’s gonna be going on an angle and it’s like that, you know, piece of spaghetti.
It can, it can break, break there where it’s pushing, you know, across Yeah, at a 90 degree angle or, or something smaller than that compared to what it should be. So that’s where you usually see these problems introduced. But the interesting thing I noticed in the reading that I’ve done this week is that they’re saying they’re, they’re blaming the wrinkles on a supplier issue, which is.
Really weird because it should happen in manufacturing unless they’re buying protrusions with wrinkles in them, which is, I’ve never heard of that. That is bizarre. I mean, that’s literally the point of why, of why you, you go with protrusions so that you stop, you know, the cha some of the manufacturing challenges and y y yeah.
I mean, I guess it’s possible, but I, I would be so surprised.
Philip Totaro: And keep in mind they’re, they don’t have any contract manufacturing of the carbon, glass hybrid blades. They’re manufacturing all those in-house at this point. So I am really confused as well as to how this happened.
Rosemary Barnes: I wonder if it’s like a manufac a vacuum supplies.
Issue or mold issue or, you know, like could it be some other supply other than the, but yeah, the, the glass or the carbon fabric itself just seems really strange to blame a wrinkle on the supplier of the fabric. I can’t imagine what would be wrong with that fabric that would cause a wrinkle. I, I mean, I guess it’s possible that there’s something I haven’t, I haven’t seen every, every kind of possible failure ever, but, It’s a weird one.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it is weird, but it does, I read multiple reports about this, that they’re eliminating suppliers from their supply chain at the moment because of quality issues. So if it’s something blade specific, it probably is something like a protrusion or a mold or something of that, a resin system, something, or the way that they’re injecting resins.
Something weird has happened there and they’re trying to figure it out still. But I, like Rosemary said, it’s gonna be very hard to. To figure out exactly what’s the cause is and to eliminate it and make sure you actually have it eliminated. But wrinkles in fabric are becoming more and more an issue.
We’re gonna talk about that with tpi I as, as we, as we move forward today. So, you know, things aren’t well at Siemens. Vestus reported as second quarter loss mostly due to supply chain disruptions and projects being delayed and trying to get supply chain up and running again. It, it, although Vestus is, is it seems to be one of the strongest OEMs at the moment.
They are trying to refocus a little bit, trying to move some projects forward. But it looks like pretty much every manufacturer is, is struggling at the moment and trying to figure out a way to steady the ship and right the ship. And also Set themselves up for a a, a, a growth future. And Phil, if there was any company I was gonna pick that was going to have a profitable second quarter, it would’ve been vestas.
And, and now even Vestus is at a loss.
Philip Totaro: They are, but I’m certainly, I mean, certainly compared to Siemens, Gamesa less concerned. The other good news for Vestus is that they have gotten, you know, some long-term relationships established one with ia that actually Gamesa and Siemens Gamesaused to enjoy.
With, with Roa being an earlier investor in, in G Mesa so the, they, everybody’s suffering right now based on the fact that we’re still ramping up to order deliveries in late 2023 and early 2024 that are gonna see a lot more cash come in the door. So this is kind of the consequence. If you remember like six months ago there were a number of companies that were kind of slowing down or shutting down production.
GE was one of them as well. And so this is just kind of the consequence, the lack of profitability in the Q two is kind of the consequence of, of some of that. They just weren’t able to recognize as much revenue in the second quarter as, as they would’ve hoped. But again, they’re, they’re not doing poorly right now.
They’ve got a decently sized order book globally. Offshore might be a bit of a concern because of delays throughout Europe and elsewhere as per their c f o as well has come out and said that some projects could get delayed or canceled. So there’s some downside risk there, but for the most part we don’t see a, a long-term issue for that.
Allen Hall: Hey, uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues, and PES 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 PES wind@peswind.com
wind blade manufacturer TPI composites reports that IT and GE Vernova have agreed to amend their existing supply contract to add four additional blade production lines in Juarez, Mexico in the initial term. That agreement is through 2025. They’re going to close that agreement in the third quarter of this year.
Now, this is a little interesting because TPI most recently has had some warranty charges and quality issues of which the president of of TPI commented on recently. It says, quote, in light of the warranty charge, as well as the quality issues impacting the broader wind industry, we have taken this opportunity to revisit.
Our quality system and implement improvement initiatives to ensure we have a more robust processes in place. This includes a recent appointment of Neil Jones as Chief Quality Officer. Okay, so I happen to listen to the TPI investor phone call and it’s, it’s about an hour long and about half of it is investor questions to the company of leadership about what is happening, what has happened, what is the deal with this warranty issues, what’s going on with nordex.
There’s a lot going on there because TPI is in a very interesting space right now in that the OEMs do not want to build factories. They’d rather have TPI add another line and make blades for them. And that’s what is happening with GE Vernova at the moment where they’re adding some more lines. The question is, where, where’s it?
Most of the, the GE work’s gonna be happening in Mexico. There’s obviously, they have a plant in Iowa in which they’re trying to ramp up and not sure what’s gonna go in there, but. The quality issues at T P R are not over. In fact, the, the president of the company talked in that, in, in that investor call saying that they had brought in an independent auditor to go through their quality system and didn’t tell their customers they were doing it to figure out where the quality issues were.
They have changed some management and those management change, management changes are not over. That there, there’s still some reshuffling at the executive level it sounds like. And the focus, they’re trying to refocus on quality, but they don’t think the impact they’re having, which appears to be wrinkles in the blades, is, is that serious?
What TPI is saying, Rosemary, is that the wrinkles, although they may be there, are, are not gonna really create an issue. And to go in and try to remove them is probably a worse condition just than just leaving them alone. Now I think that raises a number of discussion points here. One TPI is ideally positioned Phil, that they have all the, the lines, they got lines in Turkey, they have lines in India, they have lines in in Mexico.
They have a line that’s gonna open in the United States. They have a lot of capacity. I. Are, are they not the, the blade manufacturer of choice at the moment?
Philip Totaro: They are certainly for what GEs trying to do. So keep in mind that GE wants to continue ramping up their you know, 2.X 127 product platform.
And what’s interesting about this move in Mexico is that actually a lot of that, and you mentioned Nordex before, but a lot of that capacity that was built by TPI in Mexico was actually for nordex. Turbines that are not actually going, you know, they’re, some of those deals are not moving forward. I.
So they had TPI had the situation where they’ve got a bunch of spare capacity and, you know, they made the offer to GE to say, all right, well, let’s take advantage of some lower cost labor and lower cost you know supplies, et cetera, that we can, you know, fabrics and whatnot that we can get in Mexico or imported to Mexico, and let’s fabricate there and import through Texas.
That’s actually, you know, a, a pretty. Interesting and attractive thing for GE at the moment. Who at this point is, as you mentioned, they’re, they’re not looking to vertically integrate certain component manufacturing like blades. They want to be able to rely on somebody like TPI that. Has actually demonstrated a, a good track record in the past.
And, and so it’s what makes some of these quality issues a bit surprising because it seems like they were doing fine for a long, long time, and then all of a sudden these, these issues started creeping in. And the question is, is it because of shifts in. Manufacturing process? Is it because of just changes in the management?
You know what I, I’m, I’m not sure that we really got anything out of that investor call to, to a address the question of why any of these things happened. But at least they’re being proactive to address what is happening and, and precluded from, from impacting them further.
Allen Hall: Well, they have a quality system and they’re ISO 9001 certified.
Looked like I went online and looked, looked like all their factories are. And in that system it’s pretty rigorous. There’s, there’s ways to capture. Defects, report them and re eliminate them. And, and so it’s a, a general feedback loop that happens with the ISO system. So it’s surprising a company that size isn’t using that to drive out quality issues unless they’re just having some people problems.
Right. So even the, an ISO system, as good as it is, relies on people to be the, the lynch lynchpin to whether it works or not. So it sounds like there’s maybe some people issue in the middle or pressure. Financial pressure to get blades out and they were rushing. Something like that. The what, what the, the head of the company was talking about is like, well, there’s a lot of, and Rosemary could attest to this, there’s a lot of fiberglass we had to lay down by hand and you know, stuff happens.
It’s all manual layup of ply and occasionally you have problems there. Yeah, but Rosemary, they, TPI chooses to do it that way. They choose to make it a manual layup. They choose to have humans involved to do that process. So therefore, if, if the cause is human intervention in putting the ply down, that’s not gonna change.
I, I’m a little curious how they think you’re can eliminate it. That problem?
Rosemary Barnes: Well, when you do a, a root cause analysis for a defect and you end up on human error as your root cause, you’re, you’re not finished, you’re a root cause analysis. Yet that can never be your, your root cause. So it might, it’s very easy to say human error and you could say that for literally any problem that ever arose was you know, at some point in the chain you’re gonna say, oh, it was a bad decision made by someone.
Whether it was the. Designer, or it was you, you know, the people actually, you know, doing the physical labor. But they should be supported by robust processes that are designed with the manufacturing process in mind. You know, they know that it’s a human making, the making the blade or yeah, a team of humans.
And so there are, you know, support systems in place to make sure that they do it. The same way every time. So, you know, when it comes to making sure that every bit of fabric gets laid in the right order. And in the right place you have, you know, that you have kits made of the, the fabric so that it’s all, you know, checked and then ready to go.
And then you’ll have like a laser guidelines that will beam down on the mold to show you the edges of where it should go and where they should end. Sometimes there’s mold markings. So like a little mark on the, on the mold that says, you know this ply ends here. All, all sorts of things like that.
Of course things go wrong and that’s how you end up with issues like blade blade wrinkles, which is the, the defect of the day, it seems. Yeah. But the TPI are certainly not alone in it being a mostly manual process. Every wind turbine manufacturer is making their blades with a mostly manual process.
And eventually it’ll become automated. Like, you know, if you look in the auto industry, they’re not laying bits of fabric by hand. They’re using pre pprs and robots and preforms as well in a lot of cases. But it’s. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a bit of a different price point, I guess. And when turbine blades, they get the, the right quality in the end by checking and repairing defects.
You know, a wind turbine blade comes off the factory line with probably dozens of defects in it, but they’re, they’re found and repaired, and that’s just kind of standard. So instead of putting their effort into an automated process where you don’t get any defects, They’re putting their effort into finding them and repairing them because that’s a, a much cheaper way to do it overall, so far I’ve personally been a little bit frustrated that wind turbine blade industry hasn’t moved faster towards automation.
I think that there were some some people got burned with, people got overexcited a bit early about automation and a couple of companies put in a lot of money into development projects to automate and. It didn’t work. And now, you know, I talk to plenty of people who say, oh, you can’t automate wind turbine blade manufacturing.
We tried and spent, you know, X million dollars on development and, and it can’t be done. And it’s like, well, okay, of course it is eventually going to be done. And I think that you could automate more. There is, you know, there are projects going on to try and do that, but I think we’re gonna, for the next 10 years at least, are still gonna be seeing a mostly human made product.
So managing. The kinds of problems that you can have from that. That’s, yeah. That, that’s how it’s going to work and keeps, keeps Parlo consulting in, in business while, you know, we still have these, these kind of defects arising. Well,
Allen Hall: GE is still planning to build some factories in New York if there’s plenty of volume to do it.
So GE put out a press release a couple of days ago. And New York is looking to have about 4.6 gigawatts of offshore wind coming up. And GE is still pressing forward saying, Hey, we’re gonna put a LM Wind power blade plant and create about 650 jobs around that plant. And also create an a cell manufacturing facility which will generate a little over 200 jobs.
And GE is also promoting some of the things they’re doing at their other facilities, including Greenville, South Carolina, Pensacola, Florida, and then even up in SS, connected New York. They’re doing some expansion up there for the 6.1 megawatt platform. So there’s a lot of GE activity looking like they’re getting ready to ramp up.
And Phil, I saw some headlines just earlier today and I didn’t have time to dig, get them to dig, get to them too far. But it looks like GEs onshore sales in the United States. Are over 50% in, in, in the US marketplace,
Philip Totaro: For what was installed in the first half of the year. Yes, that’s correct. That’s
Allen Hall: a pretty good marker, right?
To kick off the first half with over 50% of the installs in the US is ge. It’s not a bad way to
Philip Totaro: go. Yeah, and it’s still there. They’re kind of workhorse turbine platform, the, the two point x 1 27 and a little bit of the three megawatt. One 40 as well. So that’s, it’s good news. Even though they’ve had some teething issues with that three megawatt, one 40 with the, the turbine that caught on fire in New York at the eight point project.
But other than that, yeah, and, and they’re actually, they’re excited because the Cypress platform, the five and six megawatt platform where they’re gonna do some of the, the Nelle, I believe it’s the nacelle Assembly in Schenectady. That’s they’ve got commitments now from NextEra who’s gonna be the first customer, I believe, for that.
And I think there’s another project within energy that where they’ve been at least considering it. Actually, it’s interesting ’cause there’s a project right adjacent to that eight point project in New York where Invenergy was actually supposed to use the Cyprus, but I think GE delayed the availability of it.
And so they switched, Invenergy actually switched over to Vestus in the V one 50 for megawatts. So but it’s coming, you know. Good, good things are, are coming to light from ge. I sound like an advertisement. Yeah.
Allen Hall: And GE is also investing over in the UK with. The ORE Catapult group, they, they’re putting 4 million pounds into a collaboration agreement now, or e catapult is where a lot of technology happens on offshore wind at, in the uk.
And what GE is hoping to address is some of the deployment issues, and they want some innovation there. This basically means speeding up offshore deployment. Installation, shipping, the whole thing. This is, this sounds like a really interesting investment because there are a lot of offshore off the uk.
There’s a lot of knowledge there. In GE it looks like they’re trying to leverage that
Philip Totaro: knowledge. What they’re doing with the ORE Catapult in the UK is to actually. Look at building digital twins for operations and maintenance. This kind of builds on some of the work that they’ve done before.
In case people aren’t familiar GE actually has a relationship, a previous relationship with Catapult, where they’re actually gonna be installing a lot of sensors on one of their hald 12 or 13 megawatt turbines and doing a bunch of testing on that, on that platform. So this new agreement for the additional 4 million pounds is to basically build digital twins and look at predictive maintenance on different offshore technology applications, is my understanding.
Allen Hall: Well, that would, that would make a lot of sense. I, I think GE is heavily invested in the uk right? It it is a big marketplace for them.
Philip Totaro: Yes. And they actually just started building the Dogger Bank project, which is gonna use the GE 13 megawatt. At this point. So yeah, it’s it’s an important market for them.
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Acoustic system is being used on over 600 turbines worldwide. It allows operators to discover damage before it gets expensive and prioritize maintenance needs cross their fleet, and it pays for itself the first time it identifies serious damage or saves you from doing an unnecessary visual inspection.
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we’re gonna move on down to Texas because ERCOT is having a big fight with a lot of their energy providers, that, particularly the renewable energy providers. So though wind and solar companies in Texas are concerned about a proposed rule that could impact their industry despite the contributions to grid outage outages when there’s high demand, right?
So the wind and solar is a significant part of the erhart grid. ERCOT is considering a plan that will require these renewables to upgrade the technology to, to avoid disruptions during grid disturbances. So in Texas and ERCOT iss, not all of Texas, but it’s the vast majority of Texas, they’ve had two sort of offline failures that triggered cascade events on a bunch of renewable sites, solar sites in particular.
I, I remember reading some of the discussion points there. And the engineers are like, are super concerned about it because, yeah, I think they had a gas fired plant come offline suddenly for unknown reasons, and it caused grid instability. I. Well, solar sites and wind sites have a bunch of electronics in them that are producing power onto that grid, and they self-protect, but they self-protect at slightly different rates and times, and, and the tripping process is variable because even the technology made by the same company, the next version of that inverter may have a slightly different response time.
So when you mix a bunch of electronics together and tie ’em all together, If they start pinging noise to one another, they can trigger a massive shutdown, which has happened there in ERCOT. So the issue for ERCOT is, Hey, we need to stop this. And they’re asking the renewable operators to upgrade their equipment, but they’re asking them to do it relatively quickly.
There has been some, this proposal of upgrading equipment has been bounced around and, and delayed from time to time, but ERCOT plans to finalize it by October. And move forward with it. And Phil, this is a serious issue for Texas, right? They rely on renewable energy to keep that grid alive.
Philip Totaro: Absolutely. Especially during the summertime where there’s, you know, peak demand you know, and solar and wind both contribute quite heavily in the, in the ear cot market. Now, what’s interesting about this is this low voltage ride through. Technology, it, it exists and there’s nothing new about it, and there’s actually nothing revolutionary that the industry hasn’t done.
Like we talked about with this like noise ordinance in Nebraska last week, where it’s kind of retroactively being applied to projects that are already in operation. This is gonna be a huge compliance issue now for you know, the independent power producers and the OEMs and another electrical equipment vendors who already deployed technology that didn’t necessarily have the full capability of the low voltage ride through in the equipment.
And so, you know, for cost savings that was done deliberately. Like they, they don’t, they’re not gonna sell you something like a Tesla that has upgrades that just aren’t activated, you know, and you’ve gotta pay for extra subscription costs to be able to activate all your extra features. Like this is one of these things where, like you said, they’re gonna have to pay.
To retrofit some of the substations, the transform the pad mount transformers and potentially the turbines depending on what they are and, and how they operate. With some of this low voltage ride through equipment, and that’s gonna get pricey. Everybody’s gonna question A, how do we do this? B, who’s gonna pay for it?
And you’ve already got GE NextEra. Siemens Gamesa and Vestas have already come out publicly with statements opposing these changes because again, even though they have the technology, They don’t wanna have to spend the money to implement it retroactively when that requirement wasn’t put in place in, in the first place.
So this is gonna be a big fight.
Rosemary Barnes: Is this the sort of technology Does it need to happen in every single inverter? In every single wind turbine? Or is it a, a service that could be provided by, you know, batteries or vehicle grid or, you know, I’m not an electrical engineer, I’m not a power systems engineer, so maybe I interpreting this wrong.
But yeah. And ancillary services, good support services, aren’t they usually a, a separate kind of product that is being sold into an electricity grid? So, You know, you’ll pay a, a battery to come online really quickly. If you know, if a big synchronous load stops and your, you know, your, your grid frequency wobbles a bit, then you can say, Hey, okay, we’ve got a problem and we’ll pay somebody to come in and, and fix that.
Why does it need to be something retroactively imposed on, you know, every single member of the. Of the grid. Why can’t it just be a, yeah. Separate, separate service that they, you know, put out tender. Hey, we’ve, we’ve realized we need this service who, you know, bid for how cheaper you can provide it.
Wouldn’t that be possible?
Allen Hall: I think the issue was, and the paper I had read a couple of months ago where they had looked at the different inverters that are on the system is you can’t really tell how it’s gonna perform and you don’t really know until the event happens. And then when they started digging into each of the different inverters and they looked at several of them, It was just inconsistent.
It would be too unpredictable. So I think the issue is even if you had a battery or a synchronous load on the grid, would it respond fast enough so that all the electronics. Which can re respond in microseconds if it chooses to be, can it respond fast enough where you still don’t knock things offline? I, I think that’s the driver.
And if they could put more batteries, more synchronous loads on, they probably would or synchronous support, they probably would it, but it doesn’t sound like that’s the option they’re going with. What they’re doing is they’re saying, they brought in IEEE to look at the system and give them recommendations and IEEE did.
Of course, it doesn’t cost i e e any money to do that. But now when it’s, when it gonna, it comes down to changing electronics and changing the designs of the system, that’s gonna get really expensive, really fast. And I can see some of the older designs, think about the, the old Mitsubishi one thousands and those kind of turbines, right?
Does it even make sense to keep ’em on the grid? There’s no reason to upgrade those. They’re just offline. And I think that’s the, that I feel, I think that’s where the threat is, that they’ll, they will just disconnect.
Rosemary Barnes: Is that the point? Is that the point of this this point, you know, this direction that they’ve gone.
’cause I really feel like this is not you know electronics don’t work any differently in Texas than they do in the rest of the world. And I’ve never heard of you know, anybody else going for this particular solution.
Philip Totaro: There are ancillary services that are delivered in Europe, but they’re done under a different set of standards and requirements.
And those standards and requirements are all known and established upfront. The other thing that complicates this issue is there are some companies that have patents related to low voltage ride through compliance. And so GE being one of them. So this has the potential to rekindle all kinds of patent litigation again, between GE and other companies who, you know, GE got the patents on the low voltage write through technology and then helped write some of the grid codes.
So you now have a situation which we call in the patent world, like a standards essential patent is the only solution. So if you don’t already have a license that’s gonna necessitate. Doing that. So this is another complication to the whole thing, and that’s why, again, some of these companies are objecting to wanting to, to do all this.
It’s just a, as Allen pointed out, and, and to address your, your question, Rosemary, absolutely batteries could help, but you’re adding cost on cost because you’re still gonna have to modify the substation equipment and then some of the transformers and some of the turbines. Anyway. With or without the batteries.
So they’re, you are looking at potentially doubling or tripling the cost with adding the batteries. Even though it would be helpful and it would smooth, it would smooth the grid, but it’s just a
Allen Hall: cost issue. So our wind farm of the week is Patton Wind in Pennsylvania. It’s an EDF site located in central Pennsylvania and became operational in 2012.
It has 15 Gamesa, G 97, 2 megawatt machines, and there’s a lot of those G 90 sevens rolling around in America, and I chose Pennsylvania this week because it’s getting close to football season. When you think of football season, you think of quarterbacks, and of course the quarterback birthplace is in Pennsylvania and Phil.
I had to go back and look to, because I couldn’t remember all the quarterbacks that have come out of Pennsylvania, but holy cow, it’s a lot from Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Matt Ryan, Jim Kelly. There’s a lot of a lot of good things that come outta Central Pennsylvania.
Philip Totaro: And I’m, I, being originally from Buffalo, I’m sort of partial to Jim Kelly.
Allen Hall: He’s one person I, one quarterback. I have met. I was on an airplane flight with him to Kansas City. He is a ginormous human being as the quarterbacks you don’t think is being that big a people.
Philip Totaro: He’s a big guy. Yeah. After he retired, he actually opened a restaurant in downtown Buffalo and he was in there kind of, you know, if you’ve seen any of like the, the Rocky films.
He’s, you know, in there telling stories and, you know, it was, it was pretty neat. So there were a lot of people in the city that were, were happy to have met him that way as well.
Allen Hall: So we’re celebrating Pennsylvania and Patton Wind. You are our wind farm of the week. That’s gonna 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 we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
