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In this episode, the hosts discuss GE Vernova’s financial results and blade issues, and announce the Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference. They also touch on innovative wind turbine recycling projects and the latest in safety equipment for wind technicians.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com
Allen Hall: Down in Dunedin, New Zealand, they have a problem with people in front of the airport, uh, hugging it out too long as they depart. They’ve actually put signs out, max hug time, three minutes. Uh, because they’ve had problems with people just hanging out, cuddling, I guess, in front of the airport at the, on the drop off area.
And the, when I saw this story, I thought, man, I’ve been to, I had probably a hundred, at least a hundred U. S. airports and dozens overseas. I’ve never seen this happen anywhere else on the planet. So maybe just New Zealanders are just friendlier people? They like to cuddle? Is, is that the difference, Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: New Zealanders are very friendly, I would say. Yeah, maybe, maybe that’s it.
Joel Saxum: It reminds me of my grandma. My grandma would give you a hug and then never let you go. And if you tried to like get away, she’d put her, put a hook around you and that’s it. You’re, you’re there, you’re there, you’re there for the evening.
Now
Allen Hall: did she give you some candies too? They individually wrapped candies as you, as you departed.
Joel Saxum: She was more of a, less than a individual candy. She was more of like a, here’s a rum and coke that, that was my grandmother .
Philip Totaro: We do not encourage underage drinking on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’ll be joined by my Uptime co hosts after these news headlines. In a major development for the U. S. offshore wind sector, GE Vernova has announced plans to remove and strengthen additional blades at the Vineyard Wind Project off the Massachusetts coast.
This decision follows a blade failure incident in July. G. I. V. Ranoa’s Comprehensive Quality Assurance Program now includes the re examination of more than 8, 300 ultrasound images per blade and physical inspection using specialized crawler drones. While eight new towers and nacelles have been installed since mid August, the company emphasizes that operations and power production will resume only after meeting all requisite safety approvals.
Britain’s energy sector is undertaking a transformative initiative as energy ministers direct the national energy system operator to develop the country’s first strategic spatial plan for energy infrastructure through 2050. This groundbreaking blueprint aims to revolutionize the nation’s approach to energy planning by identifying optimal locations for new infrastructure development.
The government anticipates this comprehensive approach will significantly reduce grid connection waiting times. and provide investors with unprecedented clarity on project locations. The initial version of the plan, scheduled for release in 2026, will focus primarily on electricity generation and storage, encompassing offshore wind farms, hydrogen assets, and pump storage hydro facilities.
In Scandinavian waters, Statcraft is advancing ambitious offshore wind development plans with their application for a 2. 1 gigawatt project in the Baltic Sea. The Baltic Offshore Delta North project, strategically positioned 100 kilometers east of Stockholm, will feature 105 bottom fixed wind turbines in waters ranging from 40 to 80 meters deep.
Their project’s design prioritizes minimal visual impact with Turbines placed far from the mainland and inner archipelago. Once operational, the facility expects to generate 8 terawatt hours annually, satisfying approximately 40 percent of Stockholm County’s electricity demand and supporting the region’s low carbon transition.
The state of Maine’s offshore wind aspirations face a significant challenge as federal authorities denied the request for a 456 million grant for the Sears Island port development. The proposed 760 million facility, intended to be the nation’s first offshore Purpose built port for floating turbines would have included construction of a specialized semi submersible barge for turbine assembly and installation.
While the setback impacts the project’s timeline, state officials remain committed to the 2029 completion target and are actively pursuing an alternative 130 million federal funding opportunity. The project maintains strong support from business, environmental, and labor groups as a crucial component of Maine’s goal to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2040.
The Philippines Renewable Energy Sector faces substantial challenges as the Department of Energy reports 105 projects at risk of termination due to timeline non compliance. The affected projects, namely awarded in 2017 and 2019, include 10 wind developments struggling with land rights acquisition and grid connection challenges.
for your patience. In response, the government has implemented stronger oversight measures, including new guidelines requiring developers to obtain a Certificate of Authority valid for three years for onshore wind projects and five years for offshore wind initiatives. These measures align with the country’s ambitious target of achieving 35 percent renewables in its energy mix by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040.
Iowa’s clean sector demonstrates remarkable resilience and growth, with employment increasing by 4. 5 percent in 2023. The state currently supports over 32, 000 clean energy positions, with small businesses driving expansion. 74 percent of clean energy companies employ fewer than 20 people. Adding to this momentum, Nordex Group announced the restart of a wind turbine production facility in West Branch, Iowa, capitalizing on federal tax incentives provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxum. 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. In the latest quarter. of PES Wind Magazine, Joel, there’s a really interesting article about safety equipment and it is from Cresto. And if you’ve seen some of their devices, they have a couple of emergency descent devices. One that’s a manual device, but the one I was looking at was the one they’re talking about in the article, which is this automatic, uh, descent device that is stuck to you.
So it’s part of your general equipment you go up and down the tower with. So it’s Something a little bit different because a lot of those escape systems are actually mounted in the nacelle. This is a different approach, though. I
Joel Saxum: really like this approach, uh, because what they’re doing is basically taking this, uh, what they call the Solo X, this rescue device, and they’re integrating it with your daily kit.
So, think about it, it’s like something like you have your gloves with you all the time, so you know how your gloves work. You have your harness with you all the time, you know how to put your harness on, so you’re so used to the piece of kit that it becomes something, it becomes a part of you, right? Like your hard hat.
Every day you put your helmet on. Like, you know these things. And this is a different approach as opposed to the traditional approach, which is, eh, there might be a self rescue kit or something up tower. It might be in a different spot stored in every nacelle. It might be behind a generator. It might be over, you know, by a bearing or somewhere.
Or you’re, and if you’re traveling, especially if you’re a traveling wind technician, you’re going into different turbines. You don’t know exactly where the self rescue kit is. And that hasn’t even touched on the idea of, How do these things maintain? How often have they been checked? Are they, are, you know, are they fit for duty?
Uh, and you don’t really, in the case that you need to use a self rescue device, you don’t have time to try to find it. Hopefully it’s in good use, or any of these other things. So, what Cresto has done with this device is, they’ve put it right With the person. It’s with them every day. They are trained on it.
Of course, that’s one of the most important things. But it just becomes a part of your everyday kit, so you’re used to using it. Um, you know, because the last thing we ever want to hear about, uh, in the wind industry is something where someone gets stuck up tower, there’s a fire, there’s an incident, there’s an accident, or whatever may happen, or you know, someone, someone twists an ankle bad enough up tower, You’d need to use it just to get them down.
They’re not gonna be able to climb the ladder down. So having this thing with you every day and being trained on it regularly, um, that’s key. I think. And then the other part of this is the training, right? So there’s a, there’s an old college football coach who used to say, Don’t train until you get it right.
Train until you can’t get it wrong. Uh, and that’s part of what they’re taking on with this, with Cresto’s taking on here. Cresto also owns some training centers. So they’re, uh, doubling down on training, having the right kit, putting it with the people, and ensuring the safety of some of our, um, wind technicians out in the field.
I think it’s a great product.
Allen Hall: Yeah, so there’s plenty of great articles in PES Win this quarter, so if you want your free copy, just go to PESWin. com and download it. So there is a new innovator approach to wind turbine recycling. Our friends at Vattenfall and SuperU Studios have transformed a decommissioned turbine to sell Into a fully functional tiny house.
And they’re showcasing this tiny house for end of life turbines. So they’re, they’re using a 20 year old Vestas V82 megawatt turbines. And they are about 350 square feet or about 35 square meters. Uh, Phil, they’re 13 feet long and 32 feet wide and about 10 foot high. So he has some high ceilings there, but they also have to have a lot of, uh, it’s just a shell, right?
They got to put power in it and they have some solar panels and a solar boiler and an EV charging point, because why not? But it does have the necessities. It has a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room. After that, what else could you possibly need?
Joel Saxum: It’s got a good sunlight. It would. That’s built, that’s
Philip Totaro: built into every nacelle, right?
Yeah, Vestas did pioneer that, uh, innovation, didn’t they?
Allen Hall: So they, they must be adding insulation. Uh, right, too, because nacelles are notoriously cold and
Philip Totaro: hot. Yeah. I will say this, too, because beyond just taking the nacelle and making it into a tiny home, they also had, um, another project where they’re trying to take old decommissioned blades and use them as floating pontoons.
So my idea is, hey, Vattenfall, why don’t you combine this and make, like Tiny houseboats to replace all the little tiny houseboats in Holland. Like, there you go. Then you have no more wind turbine decommissioning challenges at all.
Joel Saxum: I think I like to be honest with you. Okay, so if you watch this tiny house market, I lived in Airbnbs for like three years, right?
So I’ve seen millions of them all over the place. People putting them in pretty cool spots up on the top of hills and all these different things. But there’s a tiny home market that is built with Connex boxes, right? Storage containers. And these, to be honest with you, they’re about the same size. Except for the storage container is one of the reasons why it works really well for this.
Is it’s all self contained, steel, like there should be no mice getting in or anything like that. The nacelle has quite the same, as long as you see it. Seal up basically where the yaw bearing would go or you know, the entrance to this there and you put some nice doors where the hub would come out. I think I, for me, I’m waiting for like the Haleyide X, uh, decommissioning project.
So I can, cause I think you can build a, you can build a proper house out of one of those.
Philip Totaro: A townhouse. That’s the, Joel, that’s a townhouse right there. That’s, that’s a tiny, tiny townhouse.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. But I, to be honest with you, like, I don’t think this is a bad idea. I think that, that there’s companies that have made.
Um, they’ve made whole companies off of building out of shipping containers or just any kind of containerized little small house. And across the U S at least people are buying them left and right.
Rosemary Barnes: I think that this is going to have the same problem as a lot of the wind turbine blade reuse projects, where it’s like the value of the product versus the extra cost of transport and logistics for, um, you know, getting, because wind turbines are spread all over the place.
It’s not like they’re all coming from one factory and going to, you know, Um, you know, the just regular distribution channels, it’s coming from really diverse range of places. So trucks driving around and yeah, whatever, um, whatever you have to do to these, to these old nacelles to make them suitable for transport.
Oh, sorry. Suitable, suitable for habitation. Do you do that, do you make a mobile factory that you, you know, bring to a wind farm that’s been decommissioned or do you bring the nacelles to a factory to do that and then ship them back out again? It, um, yeah, the pro, cause I’ve been involved in some, some similar kinds of projects for wind turbine blades and that’s pretty much always the killer is just, there’s a lot of extra transport and.
You know, there’s, um, energy emissions, money associated with that. So it’s one of those ideas that sounds like a win win, but usually ends up a bit of a, I dunno, there’s, there’s some, some losses in there as well as some wins.
Allen Hall: Well, I’m going to go back to Phil’s idea about the pontoon. So you take the blades, you cut them, you make them into pontoons, you put the nacelle on top and you float it down the river to where they can all be industrialized and made into tiny homes.
See Phil, I’m going with you now. Tiny
Philip Totaro: floating homes. Like, you know what, there’s a market, there’s a market here. I’m telling you, we’re going to do some research and figure out the tiny home market because there’s all these kids today that love the tiny homes. So let’s get them housing. It’s because I can’t
Joel Saxum: afford a big
Philip Totaro: one.
Rosemary Barnes: Just need to make sure all, all wind turbines in the future get installed near rivers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Allen Hall: Well, I guess you could pull them, get some camels or something and use the blades as sleds.
Come on. There’s this, this idea has to work, right? So, and now we, now I’ve seen pretty much everything, right? Where before, I mean, obviously the blades make a lot of sense because there’s a lot of material there. But the nacelles, not so much. I think, I thought what we were going to do with nacelles is basically chop them up and make them into new nacelles.
I thought that was the purpose, but maybe we can make them into tiny homes. After the break, I want to talk about wind energy O& M. Australia, because Rosemary’s here, and we have this brand new conference going on. So right after the break, we’ll talk Australian conference. Dealing with damaged blades? Don’t let slower pairs keep your turbines down.
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All right, Rosemary, we are going to hold a really interesting O& M conference in, of all places, Melbourne, Australia.
Rosemary Barnes: Why do you say of all places?
Allen Hall: Well, I would go to Sydney if it was my choice, but I didn’t get to choose, so.
Rosemary Barnes: No, we, Victoria is, is, is the home of, of wind energy in Australia. Um. So, we’ve picked it logically.
It’s not because Bill wants to go to the Phillip Island, uh, moto event.
Philip Totaro: Which I do, but we’re going at the wrong time of year. I could, I could also, you know, stay, stay for the Formula One race, but that’s another three weeks after we’re, we’re doing the event.
Joel Saxum: So Rosemary, this, uh, this idea popped up within the group here, basically us and a couple other people of, you know, our networking friends within the wind industry.
And this has been compounded as we’ve spoke about the event that we’re putting on here in February is most of the conferences in Australia about wind energy are permitting focused, regulatory focused, finance focused, and there’s not a whole lot of specifically technical, uh, or operations and maintenance, you know, lessons learned, knowledge sharing.
We, we actually had a funny conversation with some, some ISPs over there. I think it was yesterday morning, Alan, where they said, yeah, for the most part, when you go to a wind conference in Australia, the engineers are in the corners talking to themselves. I thought, well, we would like to give them a forum to talk amongst each other openly and, and share some lessons learned.
So, I mean, Rosemary, uh, you know, We don’t work down there regularly, but you’re a consultant in the wind space in Australia. So what are some of the issues that we’re looking to solve at this conference or talk about at this conference?
Rosemary Barnes: So kind of Australians recognize that there isn’t a whole lot of technical knowledge about wind turbines, um, within the country.
You know, we’ve got a lot of great engineers, but not a lot of that kind of engineer. We don’t have a lot of manufacturing here. We don’t have, um, any wind turbine companies, you know, any design happening here. Um, so recognizing that they didn’t have that, that skills and knowledge, they thought that the, um, O& M service agreement was a really good way to make sure that that didn’t really matter.
They didn’t have that knowledge because, you know, if you’ve got the manufacturer and the service provider for the full life of the, yeah, the manufacturer is the same as the service provider for the full life of the turbine. It, it kind of feels like anything that goes wrong will be taken care of and.
everything’s good. Um, and now, you know, gradually as I’m working with clients that have, you know, they’ll just have a problem and realize that actually they don’t know. They don’t know enough to know if they’ve got a problem. They don’t know enough to know if things are being done right. They don’t know enough to know if they should try and renegotiate their service agreement, change to an independent provider.
Um, so yeah, and like you said, we just don’t talk about those technical issues here. So we’re talking about things like, um, you know, there’s a lot of lightning damage in, um, areas of Australia, um, leading edge protection is an issue as well. You know, these are things that you would expect to be spending money on year after year maintaining, but like, how much should you be expecting?
And, you know, you’re getting, um, you know, uh, the service provider saying, oh, you know, that’s, that’s outside of the agreement. So you’re getting kind of extra bills. You’ve got downtime that you don’t really know if it’s being minimized. All those sorts of things, people are starting to realize, Hey, even with a full service agreement, I need to understand these technical issues.
And so that’s, that’s why I wanted to do it. And I just was so frustrated with, um, you know, we had to have some good conferences in Australia, but the good technical stuff is a lot more on like Grid integration and financing and, um, you know, like community acceptance, social license, like those things, like, you know, they really get into good details and it’s interesting, but anything to do with how wind turbines work and how to keep them working well and profitably, it’s like, you know, I’ve applied to several conferences to speak on these topics and.
Yeah, just crickets. No one’s, um, no one’s interested. So I’m like, actually we need to know this information. People are starting to realize that they need to know this information. And so, yeah, I guess we decided, I never really saw myself as an event organizer, but luckily you guys, you guys are on the team as well.
So, yeah, I, um, I’m really looking forward to being able to. To share information and talk amongst the technical side of the wind industry in Australia.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, one of the conversations we had with someone, uh, speaking about the event was, you know, and looking at basically market research. There’s a lot of assets in Australia that are coming up on that 20 year mark, you know, the 15, 20 year FSAs are going to end.
And you’ll have, uh, some of these assets getting turned back over to the owners. The FSA holders may walk away and all of a sudden you’re going to have a whole bunch of assets that either need repowers or might need a massive amount of maintenance. Um, but either way, the asset owner themselves is going to be left behind.
With this asset in their hand, what do we do with it? Um, and they’re not quite up like it rosemary like you say haven’t had the need or the thought of the need to be up up to speed yet, but Uh, you know on this in this podcast and within our network that we have globally between you know, the four of us We know subject matter experts from basically every walk of turbine maintenance you can think of, so why not put them all together, take all the lessons learned and the trials and tribulations and, and all of the best practices that every, that the, you know, the rest of the collective, uh, wind industry has garnered over the years, put it in a spot and be able to share it with a market that we, we believe could use it.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, definitely. And I don’t think it’s just like, it’s not just people that are operating wind farms that would find this relevant or people with old wind farms that yeah, coming up to the end of a service agreement, I would really love if people involved in development would come too, because you know, like I work with a lot of really new wind farms actually, um, that are surprised at, you know, one aspect of their maintenance is 10 times more than um, they would have, they would have expected based on the other projects that they’ve done in Australia.
There are big differences in how much you’re going to spend on maintenance and operations, depending on, yeah, like what your, I don’t know, your rainfall is, what your, um, lightning, um, activity is like in the area, you know, these sorts of things that are already well known. Um, if people would just have a bit of awareness about that before they started the project, it would help them to, you know, one, get a better idea about what the profit, profitability of the project long term was going to be.
And two, um, you know, make sure that their service agreement was, was written with that in mind, because it’s not, yeah, it’s not always so, so simple as, you know, the service is being taken care of by somebody else because, you know, every time a turbine is down to be taken care of, uh, you know, a blade repair or, you know, Um, you know, some extra maintenance that that’s, that’s money that the owner is missing out on.
It’s, you know, it’s not just a, it doesn’t just take you back to, um, you know, to a hundred percent. There’s always some losses involved.
Philip Totaro: The challenge that a lot of wind farm sites in Australia have is that as Rosemary and Joel mentioned, they’re not really taking into account. The, uh, the degree to which they’re going to have repair and replacement issues, uh, and so the, the O& M expenses are a lot more than what they anticipate.
Um, although it’s interesting because again, you’re, you’re only talking about costs for maintenance per megawatt hour produced that are only about 3 percent higher than the average in a market like the U. S., which has, you know, more than 10 times the, the capacity installed than, than what they have in Australia.
Um, but in the U. S., uh, 86 percent of projects see a net positive return on capital, even projects that are, you know, 30, 40, whatever years old. They’re seeing a pretty healthy, um, you know, operating, uh, lifetime, whereas assets in Australia. You know, a lot of people think that it’s a, it’s a good idea or maybe it’s easier to do or it’s going to be easy money, but these things require, you know, maintenance and attention.
And again, for us to be able to, to bring people in that have the expertise from Europe and the U. S. on how to run assets profitably, I think it’s going to do the market a world of good. And if you want
Allen Hall: to join us in Melbourne The event is on February 11th and 12th at the State Library of Victoria, which is a beautiful facility, and to learn more about this event, which is totally being run not to make any money, by the way, if you want to learn more about it, you just visit windaustralia.
com. The registration’s there. If you’re interested in sponsoring, and we’ve had a lot of companies reach out already about sponsoring. You can go to that page also and learn about sponsorship opportunities. So check out windaustralia. com.
Rosemary Barnes: Can I just, um, chime in with one of the, the big things, big differences about this conference is that you don’t sponsor the conference and then get the opportunity to, um, you know, that doesn’t buy you the right to stand up and talk at an audience for 20 minutes about, you know, whatever sales pitch you want to make.
The, the speakers are chosen because they’ve got something important to convey to you and sponsors are separate from that. So. Yeah, I think that’s something that frustrates a lot of people is that the quality of the presentations isn’t always as good as the, you know, the head. The title of the presentation might lead you to believe, and we’re doing everything we can to, to make this a really informative, um, event.
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Allen Hall: GE Vernova’s wind segment issued their Q3 results today as a recording, and on the wind side they showed some pretty strong progress on offshore operations, but it was offset by continued challenges in offshore wind.
The division reported orders of about 1. 7 billion, down about 19 percent from the previous year, primarily due to lower onshore wind equipment orders outside of North America. And as we all have seen, GE is intensely focused on North America at the moment for onshore wind, and Europe not as much. The revenue for the wind segment remained flat at about 2.
9 billion. Onshore wind revenues increased from higher repowered deliveries in North America. Uh, and this is offset by slower execution in the offshore wind project. So, uh, they had a 500 million settlement related to a canceled offshore wind project and some other settlements and some gains and some losses due to offshore wind.
The breakdown kind of goes like this. Um, offshore wind is really pulling down the total of the wind segment. Onshore wind seems to be at least profitable, and they’re working really hard to make it more profitable. Uh, thrown into this mix is the vineyard wind and dogger bank issues, vineyard wind. Uh, there was an announcement today from Vineyard that, and GE, that they have more blaze at Vineyard that may have an issue that need to get reworked or repaired, and some reinforcements added possibly from what it sounded like, so they have some more work to do at Vineyard to get everything back on course there.
They had, GE has not been able to. Stall went turbine blades there. They’ve been doing towers into cells for a little while, but I think they’re still on hold in terms of blade installation. They ge Renova did admit, uh, say that the, the blade problem at vineyard was caused by an issue at the manufacturing facility up in Canada, which would be gas bay.
Uh, in that, the, the number of blades that have problems are relatively few compared to the amount of blades they do produce, which is totally the case. Right. So. There is another interesting piece of this, which is they’re not, G. E. Vernova is not really taking orders, or not taking orders, on the offshore wind segment.
They’re trying to get the offshore wind segment up and running on its own. That has caused some concern over in France, of course. Uh, where there’s factories and jobs at stake, but at the moment, if GE Offshore is not taking orders, Phil, that’s not good for the long term prognosis of that business, right?
Precisely. I mean,
Philip Totaro: you, you, we talked right before the, the spinoff of, of the different business units of, of GE, uh, into aerospace for Nova, et cetera. And. I remember part of that conversation was, you know, you can either have a ton of orders, but with low to minimal or even negative profitability versus zero orders or maybe a handful that were profitable, but not very much.
And, and that was going to ultimately influence, you know, the, the stock price and the, the, you know, size of the balance sheet, and this is kind of. The worst case scenario, which is, you know, they’re, they’ve not only cut out all the unprofitable orders, which of course they wanted to, but they also cut out any orders whatsoever.
And part of it, again, as you mentioned, was down to, you know, ocean wind one and two being canceled in New Jersey. Um, you know, a few other project cancellations or, or delay and rebids in, uh, the U. S. Northeast that are basically causing. Um, you know, the, the developer to have to retender, uh, and causing delays in getting turbine supply contracts signed, um, which is pushing back and pushing out the, um, you know, the revenue forecast that, that GE had.
So at this point, it’s really just a question, an open question of, well, how does this offshore wind division actually. Start making money again, because there’s a lot of people over in Europe that are seeing these three blade failures, you know, two at Dogger Bank and one at Vineyard Wind, and also starting to think to themselves, Hey, you know, should I really be looking at a GE turbine?
And are my insurance premiums going up and up? Because I’m, I’m buying these things that seem to have, um, you know, these issues, albeit again, we’ve acknowledged on the show before that they’re not all the same quote unquote root cause. Um, but they all were occurring as a result of, you know, installation issues during the, the time frame when GE still had responsibility.
They hadn’t turned the, the project and the turbines over to the site owner yet. Um, until the project’s fully installed and commissioned. So, you know, it falls within their, their, um, scope of responsibility to, uh, to make sure that all that stuff is, is solid. So it’s, it’s not a good, you know, I guess you’re right.
It’s not a good prognosis for them at this point to, uh, you know, to have this many issues and, and have it end up with. You know, basically no orders to speak of. And I mean, I don’t even know when they’re going to anticipate announcing new orders. There’s a few projects in Germany that they might be able to get some orders for.
There’s a couple of projects in Holland, maybe same thing. And certainly a lot more projects in the UK where they’re hoping to get orders, but Everyone seems a little tentative now to be able to, to plunk down their, their checkbook for, for a GE offshore turbine at this point. I
Joel Saxum: think one of the good things they’re doing here is, uh, part of the press release said with an abundance of caution, we are going to rework some of their, fix some of the blades that have some issues.
So I don’t know if this means take some down that are already installed offshore. Yes. That, that does? Okay, so they’re gonna do that. I do know that Alan, you and I, I saw some, some scuttle that there was a few turbines on a barge heading back towards France coming from the U. S. Last week there were two going to France.
So there’s at least two blades. There’s at least, you know, there, there’s a handful of blades that are affected by whatever a manufacturing defect is here. So Scott Straza from from GE Renova saying, we are gonna work on these, we are gonna fix these to try and increase this, the social sentiment of what GE ISS doing with this offshore wind.
So they’re, they’re, they’re trying to. To do right by what needs to be done. Um, but I mean at this time the black eye is pretty big and they’re going to need a lot of makeup.
Allen Hall: Joel, I think they’re just trying to put their financial house in order. If you look at the other parts of the business in GE, Vinnova is really three divisions.
Wind is one of them, power is another, and electrification. The power, which is the gas turbines business, and electrification is all the infrastructure, switching, uh, power distribution, high voltage DC, business, both of those are doing remarkably well. Remarkably well. And if you look at the prognosis on Wall Street for GE Vernova as a company, big upside.
That’s all the news you read over the last couple of days. So the, the wind is the one that they’re trying to struggle to figure out right now.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, it was, it’s like, um, GE Vernova right now. So on that. The, with their earnings today, they dropped their stock, dropped big time, midday. They dropped like 4%, 5 percent midday.
And then it recovered right back to okay. Earnings, everything seems fine. I think they were up 1 percent at the end of the day. So it’s kind of an odd, odd look. But again, we are looking at through a lens, as far as GE Vernova goes, this podcast, uh, the, the four of us, we’re looking at it straight through a wind lens and a wind lens only.
Um, so we don’t see. Or we’re not as in tune with the rest of that business.
Allen Hall: Yeah, but one of the things I’ve also talked about, and I’ve poke and fill about earlier today, is that they want to get profitable at a thousand turbines onshore. Like, that’s the threshold. Yeah, I need to make a thousand turbines to be profitable.
I assume, reading between the lines here, because it wasn’t exactly explained, but Once they make a thousand turbines, everything else becomes, they paid off all the infrastructure and overhead. And so now they’re, they’re making money. Yeah, we saw this down in Florida with Blue Wind, who makes the nacelles for GE.
They were planning to make a thousand nacelles in 2025. So that would align with the comment about being profitable at a thousand. But making a thousand turbines and say there’s two megawatt turbines would be two gigawatts. Even GE, Vernova management will admit that the U. S. needs to reach about 15 to 20 gigawatts.
And if GE is only contributing two out of the 20, where’s the other 18 coming from? There’s a huge Delta between where the US needs to go and what GE is going to produce. Something doesn’t make sense here. Where’s the marketplace?
Philip Totaro: Yeah, and even, I mean, look, even if you say it’s 3 gigawatts or something for GE, they, that’s just their break even point for, again, all the capital invested in the factories and all the sub component suppliers with the orders they need to make.
They still, it still costs some money to make. Turbines above that thousand, just to be clear, but what they’re talking about is they, they get more net profit above that thousand turbine threshold than they would otherwise if they only just made a thousand or below. Um, so, which is good for, you know, it’s good for earnings.
It makes extra money to reinvest in research and development, new product development, new technology, innovation programs, et cetera. Um, that, that’s the kind of stuff we all like to be able to see, but as you pointed out, the question is, well, if they’re normally, you know, almost 50%, you know, 45 to 50 percent of the U.
S. market, and it’s supposed to be at, at 15, uh, you know, they’re, they’re well below, um, you know, there, there’s a chunk of, of capacity that they need to be able to, to capture. Um, and so far. Uh, as far as order announcements for 2025, it’s not looking great, uh, according to our numbers at Intel Store, it’s, you know, they’re, they’re getting, you know, the orders you would expect from NextEra and, and Invenergies of the world, um, you know, those type of companies, but, you know, they’re, they’re getting, you know, the orders you would expect from NextEra and, and Invenergies of the world, um, you know, those type of companies, but, There, there’s still a lot of other orders, um, including some repowering orders that haven’t quite come through yet, or the, the repowering that they thought they were going to do is not quite as big of a chunk of the portfolio.
So, you know, we’re still playing a wait and see kind of game. Um, and it comes on the heels of, of, you know, Scott Strasick saying that they expect to the wind division to be able to show, uh, uh, Net profit in the fourth quarter, so he’s obviously extremely optimistic that they’re gonna have something to show for this in, you know, by
Allen Hall: the end of this year.
Oh, they’re, they’re dramatically cutting supply chains and getting, uh, costs off of their books as we have seen over the last several months. I, I don’t doubt that they’re gonna be more than break even. Infrastructure here matters, right? GE on the electrification side and HVDC and all the transformers and switching gear.
That business is doing great. But it does seem like GE is kind of set up to, uh, get both ends of this. If we’re having interconnect problems in the United States, which we clearly are. The electrification side is going to be right there to put the cables in, put the transformers in, get the switchgear in, put the HVDC in, like in Texas is talking about doing, so that we can have interconnect and then we can start placing some turbines because if you can’t power on the grid, there’s no point in putting turbines in the ground.
I think GE’s kind of caught up in that, what it looks like right now. It does seem like we’re backwards at the minute, right? GE is poised to go out and as a dominant U. S. manufacturer to go out and sell a lot of wind turbines because the market should be primed for it after what, two years after the IRA bill.
But we’re really seeing flat numbers and they’re just trying to improve margins. GE on the wind side is just only, only trying to improve margins, not improve Improve the number of turbines that are being delivered necessarily. And they,
Philip Totaro: they’ve done that with what they’ve, you know, how they’ve, you know, made cutbacks in certain areas, as you mentioned, but again, the, the reality of the market is we, we should be deploying a lot more than what we are.
Transmission is holding things up. Uh, and the interconnection queues we’ve talked about, you know, at length on the show before, um, you know, here and frankly, in other parts of the world, you know, even. For a lot of offshore projects where, you know, Vernova’s business is, uh, also part of that, um, grid infrastructure and electrification, they haven’t seen, you know, they’ve had some orders, but they haven’t seen as many orders as they probably need to, in order to start unlocking more renewable energy capacity, whether it’s wind, solar or batteries.
Um, you know, like you said, you can’t add that to the grid unless we’ve got some place for the power to go. So. It’s, it’s, um, they’re well positioned to be able to take advantage of it, but they, they aren’t seeing things happening fast enough as a result of whether it’s policy or what have
Joel Saxum: you. So two, two questions here.
Uh, first one leads into the second one, but rosemary. So when we’re talking right now, we’re talking about majority of what we see within the U. S. market and GE. Right, so we know we have interconnect problems, GE’s got some issues and stuff here. But in our talks about our WIND O& M Australia conference, technical conference that we’re putting on in February, the people that we’re talking to are saying Vestas has 65 70 percent of that installed capacity market down in Australia and GE is more like 10 or 15%?
Does that mirror what you see or what the projects that you work on?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah. I think Vestas is definitely more common. Um, and yeah, I don’t know, the GA projects also seem to be lots of one offs. Like I don’t see a lot of developers doing project after project with GA, um, where they might sometimes with Vestas.
And, um, yeah, I mean, I don’t know the real reason for that. I won’t say that I’ve noticed any difference with the projects that I work on. I mean, I only work on projects where things are going wrong. Sorry. I’m not going to be the right person to like give you an average of how like a really well functioning, um, wind farm goes, but I see equal amounts of problems and equal amounts of problems with communication, um, between all of the manufacturers that I have worked with.
So. Yeah, I’m not, I’m not sure exactly. And sometimes it can just be a matter of, you know, whoever’s in there early. Um, it just, people are familiar with that and, and so inclined to use it again. But I also do think that Vestas are more, they’re more, um, looking to the future opportunities and trying to force those opportunities.
Like I don’t hear, I hear, um, rumors that. Vestas is, you know, thinking about manufacturing facilities of various types, um, you know, around the country that Vestas is really watching closely, you know, whatever state and its plans for the future and is, you know, like actually working with developers to, um, make those projects happen.
Like they’re kind of getting in earlier. I never hear those same things about GE. I mean, presumably they’ve got some sort of. presence here trying to, you know, get in and, um, create opportunities rather than just be offered them. But, um, yeah, usually when I’m hearing about, um, wind turbine manufacturers that are actually making opportunities rather than just, um, you know, yeah, making sales, it’s, it’s Vestas that I hear about doing, doing that.
Joel Saxum: So the second part of that question is, okay, if we know the markets like that, um, of course, we’re not going to get a bunch of gold wind turbines in the states that I know of. I, I wouldn’t expect that. Um, but with GE kind of slowing down, or is there any other OEMs, Phil, that you know of that are scooping up any of that spare capacity?
Like I had a conversation with someone today that said, like, To be honest with you, Nordex is really making a push at some of these, some of these difficult places and like the Scandinavian countries and whatnot. Um, are you, are we seeing that in the U. S.? Is someone else making a push to backfill this capacity?
Philip Totaro: Well, the, the market for, for the longest time has always talked about wanting to have more than just, you know, GE Investus as, as primary options for, for turbine supply. And You know, for a while there, Siemens Gamesa was, was the next best alternative, uh, but they kind of pulled themselves out of the market with this, you know, uh, Blade and other issues that they had with the four megawatt plus platform.
Nordex is trying to fill that void. Um, and what’s interesting is that I don’t think Nordex gets enough credit for the, the performance of the Turbine. Because the data that we’ve got shows that for most Nordex project sites, at least the ones that don’t have some teething issues, um, most Nordex project sites in the U.
S., um, particularly the ones with the N149, for example, they operate at or, you know, almost consistently at the same level as Vestas V150s. So, you know, they’re, they’re trying to make a push, uh, absolutely to be the number three, you know, turbine OEM in the US market. The interesting thing about GE in Australia is that because of their placement and, and project site selection, um, and the partners that the, the development partners they have down there, they actually trounce everybody else in terms of the financial performance of the project sites with GE turbines.
But that’s also because They have project sites up in Queensland where your average PPA is, let’s say, around 50 US dollars per megawatt hour versus the average you get down in Victoria on an annual basis where you see a lot of curtailments, some negative pricing, where your average is like 18 a megawatt hour.
We released an analysis that said GE was making 1. 14 million per installed megawatt in net profit for each one of the turbines that they’ve got in Australia versus literally everyone else. Um, was making somewhere between, you know, 315, 000 and 344, 000. They’re going back to, let’s make good, high quality, profitable decisions, as opposed to, let’s sell everybody a turbine that we can possibly sell to anymore.
Rosemary Barnes: Do you think that GAE, um, are then taking a lot of extra care to really keep those Queensland customers happy? Um, because it seems like, you know, they should be trying really hard for repeat business up there if that’s, um, you know, the secret to their success in Australia. I wonder if that’s happening.
Philip Totaro: I would likely assume so.
They, they only have, I think, one project down in Victoria, um, and I think it’s in, I forget which project it is, but I think it’s in a location that hasn’t seen as many curtailments and certainly as many, um, you know, repair issues as, as some of the other OEMs. Down there. So, you know, it’s, it’s just kind of an interesting thing that they’ve been, again, they’ve been very
Joel Saxum: selective with, uh, with what they’ve done.
So we started the conversation with Alan sharing us some details about GE’s Q3 results. We got into the fact that if you’re going to buy a turbine, you should probably actually ask Phil about which one’s best to buy, depending on geography. And then we ended with, uh, if you inevitably have a problem with this turbine, call Rosemary.
Allen Hall: That’s going to 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 our Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
