The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
  • 4.9 (10)
  • Earth Sciences
  • Updated twice weekly

Uptime is a renewable energy podcast focused on wind energy and energy storage technologies. Experts Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead break down the latest research, tech, and policy.

  1. Everpoint’s BladeBlok Recycles Blades for Drilling

    4 hr ago

    Everpoint’s BladeBlok Recycles Blades for Drilling

    James Timmins, VP of Engineering at Everpoint Services, joins to discuss how recycled wind turbine blades become BladeBlok, a drilling fluid additive for oil, gas, and geothermal wells. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. There has been a lot of activity at EverPoint Services. So I wanna back up first because if you’re not familiar with EverPoint Services, they are a recycler f- for renewable projects.  James Timmins: So we’re a, a renewable energy service company that specializes in, um, decommissioning and remediation services for, uh, wind and solar assets. Allen Hall: So when a solar farm gets hit by hail and the panels are broken, EverPoint comes up and cleans up that mess to, to allow the repair to happen.  James Timmins: Correct, yes.  Allen Hall: And on the wind turbine side, you’re t- decommissioning wind turbines, but you’re also taking the [00:01:00] blades.  James Timmins: Yes. So it’s our responsibility to haul off the damaged, I guess, the scrap. And, um, obviously there’s a very healthy market for scrap steel that you find in the tower base- Yes … but the fiberglass is a little less straightforward when it comes to disposal and/or recycling.  Allen Hall: So typically with the fiberglass blades or any composite that’s, that’s being recycled, th- there’s really two techniques that are being implemented right now. Uh, well, really three. Let’s go over three of ’em. One of ’em is you can just bury them. They’re c- essentially construction materials, so you can bury them. Not ideal, but it has happened in the past. The second is they grind up the, the blades and use ’em in, uh, c- the cement-making process, where they’re burning some of the things that are combustible there and using it for fuel, but also the fiber can help with the cement. Does, does that sound right? Correct. And, and then the third one I’ve seen is just as a reinforcement product. [00:02:00] So it’s, uh, they chop up the fiber in different lengths, they clean it up, and you can u- use it as an additive to different products. Yes. And, and that generally has been the marketplace in the blade recycling area for- Going on 20 years now probably Yes Until now. And that’s where Everpoint has really changed the game because you’re thinking about blade recycling a completely different way.  James Timmins: Correct. So my background is oil and gas. I was a drilling engineer, uh, for major oil companies, so it was my job to plan, execute, and oversee drilling operations. So I worked kind of all over the world, and this project started as an icebreaker at a friend’s birthday. I had never met Tyler Goodell before. I- Wait,  Allen Hall: wait, wait. So you’re at a birthday party-  James Timmins: Yes …  Allen Hall: and your kids are having fun. They’re eating cake. Oh,  James Timmins: we were at a dive bar, so we- Oh, okay … yeah, watching a band, uh- … sitting over a bucket of Lone Stars and yeah.  Allen Hall: Okay. That’s the [00:03:00] best place for new ideas to occur clearly. So you’re, you’re, you’re at a birthday event, you’re hanging out, and what happens?  James Timmins: He asked me what, what I would do with tens of thousands of tons of scrap fiberglass.  Allen Hall: And you get asked that every day, or is it- No. Okay.  James Timmins: And I thought it was a weird question, and I kinda put it in the back of my mind. And about 15 minutes later I was like, “Well, I have an idea that we could, uh- Put at least some of that to work. Allen Hall: And what was that idea?  James Timmins: The idea was that we could grind it to a specific particle size distribution and use it as a fluid loss additive in oil, gas, and geothermal drilling operations.  Allen Hall: Okay. That’s a unique application.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: So I think we need to walk into what happens when we’re drilling an oil well or any sort of well, I suppose. Uh, there’s unique things that happen that require specialty fluids or specially …  James Timmins: Uh, specialty additives you could say. Additives.  Allen Hall: Yes. [00:04:00] So- Okay. That’s a, that’s a good way to describe it. All right. So, uh, I’m drilling a well. I’m in Texas. I’m an oil tycoon. I wanna drill this well. What am I doing?  James Timmins: So you have what’s called drilling mud, which is pumped down the drill string through the bit. Um, helps cool the bit, um, power down hole tools, and sweep the cuttings out, which is the- Okay … drilled up rock.  Allen Hall: Yep.  James Timmins: So there’s a, a hydrostatic pressure that the fluid column exerts on the formation. And if that fluid column exerts more pressure than the formation can stand, it splits open like a fracture. Allen Hall: Okay.  James Timmins: In this case, an accidental fracture. Or you could have just a porous formation of, uh, low pressure. And so you have this pressure imbalance from the wellbore where the fluid wants to flow to the area of low pressure. And, uh, this mud is $300 or $400 a barrel. And if you’re- Whoa … losing 100 barrels an hour, the costs add up really quick. Can’t drill ahead. Um, it’s what’s called non-productive time. [00:05:00] So you’re spending 80 or $100,000 a day for all this equipment to be out there, and you’re not drilling ahead, so.  Allen Hall: Okay. So as the, the drill bit goes down into the formation, you’re hitting rock. You hit a crack in a rock, or you create a crack in a rock. All your drilling mud, and it’s not really mud, right? No, it’s- It’s, it’s a special compound-  James Timmins: Yes … that we call mud. Very,  Allen Hall: uh,  James Timmins: yeah, it’s drilling fluid, I guess, is the technical term. Okay . But, um- I’ve  Allen Hall: heard mud used universally.  James Timmins: It kinda looks like chocolate milk most of the time.  Allen Hall: There you go. Yeah. Okay. So it’s an expensive fluid. You’re pushing it down in, but then you get a, a crack or a formation that you run into, and all that precious fluid goes running off somewhere else. Yep. So which it doesn’t allow you to cool the bit, which basically stops all drilling.  James Timmins: Correct.  Allen Hall: Okay, that’s a big problem.  James Timmins: And in worst case scenario, the fluid column falls and the pressure on the formation falls, and then the well starts flowing and you have a well control problem, so. Allen Hall: So now you got a big problem.  James Timmins: Yep. [00:06:00] Allen Hall: All right. So now you have fluid coming back at you that you’re not ready for.  James Timmins: Correct, yeah.  Allen Hall: Okay, that seems like quite the mess.  James Timmins: Yeah, so it’s actually one of the… You know, in some parts of the world, one of the top drivers of non-productive time and cost. So it’s a, kind of a problem as old as the oil field itself, but… Allen Hall: Okay, c- ’cause at the end of the day, you would like to have a specific hole tapped at a specific location pulling-  James Timmins: Yes …  Allen Hall: hopefully petroleum products from that area or whatever you’re going for. It’s could, could be gas- Yeah … uh, off of that site, but you have to have some constraints about it, right? Right. You d- d- to control everything. Okay. So n- that sets the problem. All right. We’re gonna run to this, uh, area where we’ve, we’ve cracked the found- the, the rock or there’s porous rock and we’re pumping this, a really expensive fluid down it and we would like to stop that from happening. How does that end up involving wind turbine blade recycling? James Timmins: So we grind this material to a specific size and you mix it at a certain [00:07:00] concentration. Could be two pounds per barrel of mud or 80, uh, depending on the severity of the losses. But, um, this mixture is pumped down into the formation and this, um, kind of acts like a… Technical term is bridging. So this, these fibers from the recycled turbine blades cannot fit through all of the pore spaces. Sure. And gradually they be- begin to accumulate on the wall of the, the wellbore. So they- Okay … uh, eventually it’s kinda like a clogged sink with… You know, you get enough- So you get enough hair in the sink … chopped vegetables. Yeah. Yeah. It, it eventually will stop flowing.  Allen Hall: Oh, well, who hasn’t experienced that? So it’s, it’s… So you, you wanna put things down into this hole that prevent the fluid from running off. Recycled blades seems like a very viable option just because it’s in an inert substance, it’s pretty durable.  James Timmins: It is.  Allen Hall: It’s tough. It can handle high temperatures [00:08:00] and it now can be pumped.  James Timmins: Yes.  Allen Hall: Wow. All right. So that’s a, that’s a remarkable idea. But ideas and products, there’s usually a long distance between those two.  James Timmins: Correct, yes.  Allen Hall: So from initial concept to where you are today, walk through what you had to go do to make this into a real product.  James Timmins: Uh, so we… I basically have- was familiar with these types of products in the past, but at the level I was at, I was not getting into t

    22 min

  2. 2 days ago

    Vineyard Wind Battles GE Vernova, UK Funds Blade Innovation

    Fraunhofer studies uptower carbon blade repairs, Vineyard Wind’s fight with GE Vernova deepens, the UK backs offshore innovation, and a 26-year Horns Rev study tracks how birds adapt to turbines. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape.  Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead. Fraunhofer has published peer-reviewed feasibility research in wind energy science. And Rosemary, I don’t know if you read wind energy science, but there’s a lot of good information there about wind turbines and mechanical aspects. Not much on the electrical side, but a lot about mechanical. Uh, in, in, in wind energy science, uh, they had a discussion or an article about repairing damaged pultruded CFRP spar cap planks while the blade stays on the turbine. Using finite element analysis on a 81.6-meter [00:01:00] blade from a seven-megawatt offshore turbine, the researchers found that a shear web window cut out as short as one meter drops buckling resistance from 20.7 times critical load to four times critical load, a reduction of over 80%. The fix? Temporary external clamping frames with a pre-tensioned span-wise rod to carry gravity loads, combined with internal push rod assemblies and external stringers profiles to restore buckling resistance, all installed and removed uptower. Wow. I know we’ve discussed the carbon pultrusion repair situation and how critical that is or h- how difficult it is. I didn’t realize it was that difficult, Rosemary, that if you actually try to replace a one-meter section of a carbon pultrusion, you’re re- reducing the, the, what, the, the buckling resistance by 80%? [00:02:00] Holy moly.  Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think that’s even 100% pultrusion specific, right? They’re talking about cutting a, a window in the shear web. Allen Hall: Yes.  Rosemary Barnes: So that could be for any kind of repair you might have to do that, including if you need to repair, like sometimes you need to repair the, the shear web. Um, and even though, like, they’re not doing a lot of heavy lifting, um, that’s kind of a structural pun, um, they’re still super important. If they’re not there, then you’re gonna have big problems pretty immediately. The way that it works with repairs is that there’s certain kinds of damage that you know that you can just do uptower. The technicians know they can do it. They don’t need to call an engineer. The engineer doesn’t call- need to call the expert engineer. But when you need to do something a bit unusual, like a whole meter of web removed, then you’re gonna need to get an engineer to, um, dial in the, y- the, to rerun the design codes basically, um, but with this weak structure now to see is this okay and is it okay, you know, uh, [00:03:00] obviously a turbine that is just, um, idle or it’s not even idle, it’s just fixed in place while they’re repairing it, that has different loads on it to one that’s operating. So, you know, they’ll run that and make sure that it’s safe, um, before they do the repair. So what I really like about Fraunhofer is that they in some ways, like- Maybe it’s not cutting-edge science or engineering because they are largely repeating what is already well known in industry. But the problem is that industry doesn’t tell everybody else. And so it is, like, such a vital role to then go and illustrate, um, to everybody else what, what’s happening in industry. And they, they are… Like, there is this problem with wind energy where academia and industry are not, um, talking too much, and a lot of the academic stuff just doesn’t relate at all to what’s happening in the industry. But Fraunhofer do, like, 90, 90% of the time seem to get it at pretty right.  Allen Hall: When a carbon protrusion is [00:04:00] used, that really localizes where the load is versus in, in some of the more fiberglass designs that I’ve seen, the shell is actually taking some of the load. It’s not all in the shear web, so to speak. So doesn’t that sort of focus the loads into one location a little bit more when you move to carbon? Isn’t that the point?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the carbon fiber is, is a lot, lot, lot stiffer than, um, fiberglass, and it’s, it’s a lot stronger. So yeah, you are designing… I, I mean, always the spar caps have been the main load carriers, the, um, you know, the main laminate, the bit between the shear webs or over the shear webs. Um, but it’s, yeah, it probably is, um uh, e- exacerbated or the increased effect when you add carbon fiber. But the, the thing about carbon fiber is it’s so susceptible to small damages or small deviations, so like a tiny little bit of fiber waviness, like if your fibers aren’t perfectly straight, then you can easily get a, a crack. And [00:05:00] carbon fiber can also be a lot less forgiving than fiberglass. It is not uncommon that it will just break, and you didn’t even know there was anything wrong. So that damage intolerance is what led to people moving away from carbon fiber fabric and into pultrusions, because they’re made with perfectly straight fibers. Um, but it, it raises some, uh, problems of its own because y- yeah, like how do you repair that? You can’t, um, you can’t get the fibers as straight again unless you repair a whole plank, um, because like they look like, like two-by-fours or something. You know, like they look like little fence palings, basically. Black, black fence palings. Um, and so yeah, you, you’d have to repair, replace a whole one, and then you’ve got like a big chunk of structure that’s missing there, so that’s pretty hard to do uptower. I, I don’t know anybody that does those uptower, actually. Um, m- maybe they can now with this reinforcement method, but I would still not enjoy being in a blade that was missing a, a [00:06:00] pultrusion and up in the air. Allen Hall: The offshore versus onshore equation, it, it would make more sense onshore to actually drop the blade, I assume. Offshore adds difficulty, but it sounds like with all the rigging a- and assembly that you would have to do offshore, it, it probably is gonna be close in terms of total cost to do an uptower repair versus a downtower repair I would think. It, it– Wouldn’t you think it’d be roughly right?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, like in, in offshore, there’s always more motivation to do complicated, um, expe-expensive uh, things that will save you from having to do something even more expensive, like bringing, um, a whole blade back. Uh, yeah, going out, getting the vessel with the crane, bringing the blade down, and taking it in is just incredibly expensive. So you can spend a lot of time faffing around reinforcing a blade uptower before you, um, you know, would come out behind. But you know what? While we’re on topic of carbon pultrusions, I think it, like it, um, it’s almost bypassing the, the biggest risk with them ’cause [00:07:00] what I see is the– Like it’s one thing when you know you’ve got damage that you need to repair, but far more common, I think, is that you don’t even know that you’ve got damage. It’s very hard to, to see what’s going on in there. Um, I mean, people aren’t just going up periodically and doing ultrasounds, ul-ultrasound scans of their entire blade. But even if they were, it’s still not that easy to find all of the, the little damages in, in pultrusions. So, um, yeah, that’s something… ‘Cause it’s not such an old technology. It’s been around for, I, I don’t know, like not even 10 years these have been, being used consistently, probably more like five, um, that there’s been a lot of them out there. And I just, yeah, I, uh, maybe I’m overreacting because all I see is broken blades in my career, but, um, you know, I am a little bit worried that we’re gonna start to see as, you know, fatigue builds up, that we might start to see some more like sudden breakages in these blades. Allen Hall: If Fraunhofer’s working on it, there must be a reason for the [00:08:00] analysis and all the engineering time that they spent on it, that it’s a concern. I don’t know how you would do it offshore, honestly, because of all the wind loads. That you would have this damaged blade, and yes, you would have all the engineering calculations, but I would just see the safety people being very concerned about it. Because if it does go free, you have a couple of people up there minimum, and who knows what’s below.  Rosemary Barnes: But even the amount of time in between knowing that you have to, um, replace a pultrusion and actually getting up there to do it, like I’d be surprised that it didn’t break in that, in that time because it is such a big, a big, a big thing. Um, so yeah. Uh, but super interesting work and I do, I, I do really, really appreciate that the Fraunhofer exists to, you know, do this sort of stuff and, um, give us the information w-we need to get a better understanding. Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are [00:09:00]difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burde

    29 min
  3. Invenergy Drops Four Offshore Leases, Turbines Become Reefs

    3 days ago

    Invenergy Drops Four Offshore Leases, Turbines Become Reefs

    Allen covers Invenergy returning four offshore wind leases for $765 million, a Block Island study finding turbines became reefs, RES’s Smart Pilot drone inspections, RWE’s three new French wind farms, and a $12 billion Japan-UK floating wind compact. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. There is a deal being made in Washington today … and the ocean is watching. Invenergy, the largest privately held power developer in North America, has agreed to hand back four offshore wind leases to the federal government. The price tag … seven hundred sixty-five million dollars. Those leases covered waters off New York, the Gulf of Maine, and Morro Bay off central California. One of those projects … Leading Light Wind … a two-point-four gigawatt development in the New York Bight … had already been canceled last November due to economic and regulatory pressure. The remaining three lease areas represented another four-point-eight gigawatts of potential capacity. All of it … gone. In exchange, Invenergy will redirect that capital into natural gas plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri … and into geothermal projects across the Western United States. This is now the eighth offshore wind lease the Trump administration has bought out. Total cost to the federal government across all eight deals … more than two-point-five billion dollars. Seven state attorneys general are already suing over an earlier buyout with another developer, arguing the administration lacks legal authority to use federal funds this way. Invenergy is already pivoting toward geothermal. Just last week, the company acquired a five thousand-acre geothermal parcel in New Mexico through a federal lease sale. That brings its total federal geothermal footprint to forty-five parcels … one hundred forty-four thousand acres … across five western states. While Invenergy’s offshore leases are being canceled … the ocean beneath those kinds of projects may be quietly thriving. Scientists have spent seven years studying the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island … America’s first offshore wind installation. They tracked nearly a million marine animals across seventy-one species. What they expected to find was damage. What they found instead … was astounding. Black sea bass abandoned their old wandering patterns and began clustering around the turbine foundations to feed. Blue mussels colonized the steel pylons. Macroalgae spread across the submerged surfaces. Cod, lobster, and reef fish moved into the rock piled around the bases. The turbines became reefs. Accidental … but unmistakable. Researchers at the University of St. Andrews strapped GPS trackers to harbor seals expecting them to flee offshore wind farms. Instead … the seals swam straight lines through the turbine rows … stopping to forage at each foundation … like a delivery driver working a route. One seal traced the turbine layout so precisely that researchers said you could have mapped every foundation from that single animal’s trail alone. Researchers are finding a sobering conclusion: whether a turbine helps the ocean or hurts it depends almost entirely on how old it is … and where it stands. New foundations going in … disruptive. Old foundations with fifteen years of growth on them … something closer to a reef. The science is finally precise enough to say which is which. The seals figured it out years ago. They just went where the food was … in very straight lines. Meanwhile, on dry land … RES, the global renewable energy company, has launched a new tool called Smart Pilot that automates wind turbine blade inspections using drones. RES says it will take twenty-five percent less time. And it runs on standard DJI consumer drone hardware … no proprietary equipment required. RES currently supports approximately forty-five gigawatts of installed renewable capacity worldwide. And over in France … RWE has officially opened three new wind farms in northern France. Combined capacity: sixty-eight-point-eight megawatts. Together, they will power approximately thirty-eight thousand French households with electricity from the wind. The projects took a decade from development to inauguration. The turbines are spinning now. And over in the UK, Japan and the United Kingdom have signed an Offshore Wind Compact committing Japan to facilitate up to nine billion British pounds … roughly twelve billion dollars … in investment for five-point-nine gigawatts of floating offshore wind in British waters. Three projects underpin the deal. Ossian … three-point-six gigawatts … Green Volt … five hundred sixty megawatts … and Erebus … a one hundred megawatt demonstration project planned for the Celtic Sea. The United Kingdom called it a long-term structural measure. Not a reaction to the moment. But a bet on the future. There are many roadblocks ahead for offshore and onshore wind. That is clear. Invenergy turning over their offshore leases feels more like financial leveraging than an internal philosophy shift. At some point in the relatively near future Invenergy can probably buy back those leases at a fraction of the cost. Because wind energy — along with solar energy — is only getting cheaper. And economics eventually wins. And the worry about sea life due to offshore turbines — that worry seems misplaced. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 22nd of June 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

    3 min
  4. 3S Lift Adds a Rescue Stretcher to Climb Auto System

    18 Jun

    3S Lift Adds a Rescue Stretcher to Climb Auto System

    Giovan Scialdone, president of 3S Lift Americas, joins to discuss 30,000 Climb Auto System installs and a new lift-mounted rescue stretcher. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Gio, welcome back to the program.  Gio Scialdone: Hey, thanks, Allen.  Allen Hall: So a lot’s happened over the past year since we last spoke with you at 3S Lift. Yeah. And there’s all kinds of new technology and improvements and the- The expansion of the Climb Auto system in the United States is remarkable. Yeah. How many systems do you have installed in North America? Gio Scialdone: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, it’s, it’s… The, the pride that we take in, in those numbers are, are serious. We, we feel, uh, a great responsibility to help technicians, to help our customers operate more, uh, more efficiently. We have 30,000 installed.  Allen Hall: Wow.  Gio Scialdone: So yeah, last year was a busy year. We installed close to 8,000, uh, in North America, so a bit in Canada as well. Um, [00:01:00] yeah, it’s… And, you know, before we get into some more numbers too, a funny story for you, a Massachusetts native- Right … or lived in Massachusetts- Long time … for a period of time. Uh, Hoosac Wind Farm, you know the Hoosac Wind Farm. Oh, yeah, yeah,  Allen Hall: I can see it out my front door.  Gio Scialdone: This is what’s great about this industry and being at this conference. Um, I ran into… At, at one point in time working for GE a long time ago, I was a site construction manager for Hoosac. I ran into my EHS safety manager, who I haven’t seen in 14 years-  Allen Hall: Wow …  Gio Scialdone: uh, who now works for another prominent, uh, company, uh, in the industry, and, uh, she remembered the name of my dog that- Really? I used to take to the site as a- Oh,  Allen Hall: wow.  Gio Scialdone: So, uh, you know, it’s good to be here, see you, and see, see, you know, lots of former colleagues, so,  Allen Hall: you know. Well, it’s a small world in wind.  Gio Scialdone: It’s a very small world. And, you know, we’re, we’re a company that, um, you know, again, we, we, we have a unique product, and there, there are some other companies that are, um, also coming out with a product quite similar, and we, [00:02:00] we appreciate that competition. Sure. In fact, I think, you know, we spend a lot of our time trying to, uh, sell our customers on the value that the ClimbAuto system is a need and not a nice to have, and I think having some competition with a similar ladder access product further, uh, maybe pushes that point to, to, to be true. So, um, you know, it’s good to be here and see some expansion in, in our little, uh, you know, ladder lift space. Allen Hall: Well, I think it shows the work that 3S has done to demonstrate the value of that system. I remember several years ago, I think when I first talked to you, there wasn’t a lot of adoption, and you were… And the operators were thinking, “Do I really need this?” But the reality was that the technicians loved it. They improved performance. They had technicians using those towers and wanted to work on those specific towers. Yeah. And, and then, uh, just kind of the flood happened. It, it was everybody was testing the [00:03:00] waters. You were basically installing test systems- Yeah … or sort of sample system to try it. Yeah. Everybody loved it, and then boom, you’re up to 30,000 units.  Gio Scialdone: I, I think, I think a part of that too to add on is you, you have to have a quality product.  Allen Hall: Oh, sure. It has to work. For, for… It has to work. Right.  Gio Scialdone: That’s the most important thing. Yeah. Um- The th- the, the, the value and the function in theory makes sense to lots of people, but does it work and is it reliable? And I think having been here nine years and, and, you know, the first three years we only had 500 units installed. Yeah. So it’s really the last three or four years that have expanded our, our installation base. And I think a lot of that is, you know, thank, you know, we’ve got a great team behind it. You know, we’ve got 70 technicians, and we’ve got a sales team, and an engineering team, and, um, you know, a project management team. So we, we’ve, we’ve staffed up as, as you need to. But the product we’ve, we, we really believe has, um, you know, been our best [00:04:00] salesperson. You know, it takes some service. That’s one thing I wanted to, to let you know, too. You know, in the early days, we- a lot of our customers were servicing our lifts. Sure. Right, yeah. And we still, um, uh, promote that if they would like to. Uh, annual inspection, you know, 30 minutes a year, um, that kind of pre-use inspection of one or two minutes before you ride it is- Sure … is, is, uh- Yeah, yeah … required. But now we’ve got a team of 20 to 25 technicians who their only job is to go around and, and service these lifts. So- Wow … we’re proud now that, you know, the oldest lifts are nine years. Oh, wow. And they’re still working very, very well as designed. You know, no, no major correctives, no motor replacements. So, you know, stand behind the product and, and, you know, service it, and servicing our customers is really what we’re, we’re proud to, to, to show. Allen Hall: Well, that was always the hard part early on. Um, my recollection was I could install this system, and yes, I could help my technicians, but am I fixing it, replacing it? The, the, the quality was the question mark at the moment.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: [00:05:00] But you’ve really hammered that, and I think 3S has done a good job of mainta- maintenance and inspections and just delivering a quality product. That’s why I think you’ve seen the growth as rapidly as you have, and the price point’s right, too.  Gio Scialdone: The price point has to be right. I think, you know, um, we’ve– we, we are offering some additional, let’s call them, like, support services. So we’ve got an online store where you can come and buy spare parts. You can buy every spare part that you need on our online store. Allen Hall: Nice.  Gio Scialdone: You know, accessories are required, fall arresters and battery kits and things like that, that even if you’re an ISP or, or a third party, uh, not the owner per se, you, you need that, that, that equipment. In addition to the online store, we- we, last year we launched, uh, an online training academy. So what’s… You know, it’s a very simple system to use. We’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Used it.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Gio Scialdone: Um, but we need to make sure as an industry and as a company that we take responsibility to make sure as, as best we can that every [00:06:00]person that uses this uses it appropriately and has the intelligence and the knowledge and skills to, um, troubleshoot basic things or perform safety evacuation features. So we’ve got an online training, um, uh, academy that we launched last year, and that’s been going well too. So more information we feel is better, uh, for our customers, for our technicians. Sure. You know. Um, so that’s been fantastic to see a lot more activity and customer… Again, a really small, you know, $200 per, per training course, and the certificate’s good for two years. You know, um, a robust course for an hour or two. It’s worth it.  Allen Hall: Well, it’s a reasonable price for an excellent product. Yeah. And that’s been the key for a long time. Yeah. Opening up the ability to get spare parts online, that’s huge. I know when you talk to operators, what’s the pain point? I have to call somebody- Yeah somewhere far away to try to get a part. Sure. It’s gonna take six months to get it.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Getting it online is the way- Yeah … that they wanna do it. [00:07:00] So it’s a lot of smart moves to be the support part of, of that system.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah. We’ve come… I’m, I’m smiling because in Chicago, uh, maybe seven years ago, our, our first spill- spare parts process was- uh, my office had a closet that I housed all the spare parts.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Gio Scialdone: You know? And, and when I needed to ship out something, I put it in a box and gave it to the, to, like, the building secretary, you know? That’s how it worked. And now we’re, we’re a little more sophisticated than that. We’ve- Y- you got a  Allen Hall: massive organization  Gio Scialdone: behind it We’ve got a 40,000 square foot warehouse that we’re, we’re really proud of, and a great team behind it to perform the logistics and track everything and… You know. So yeah, we’ve, we’ve come a long way, and our customers are helping us try to get better as well, you know. There’s still, there’s still a long way to go. Our objective as a company is to eliminate climbing, Alan. And it- And, and, and you know, I think there’s not much pushback, frankly.  Allen Hall: Not today. Right? Three years ago, a lot of pushback.  Gio Scialdone: Yeah. Yeah. I think, um… And what I mean, too, is, like, I think- From a, uh, a [00:08:00] value perspective, there’s no pushback. There’s still a budget perspective. Sure. And I think the challenges we’re finding still are if you’re at a wind farm and you have blade issues

    22 min

  5. 16 Jun

    Court Saves Wind Safe Harbor, Norway Pauses Utsira Nord

    A federal court restores the 5% safe harbor for wind tax credits, Norway’s parliament pauses the 35 billion krone Utsira Nord floating wind program, and the crew digs into Australia’s battery boom and the looming blade technician shortage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Uptime324 Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to this edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m Allen Hall here with Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and Yolanda Padron. And our week starts off in the courtroom. And if you’ve been watching the news lately, there’s a pretty substantial IRS case involving large-scale wind and solar having to do with the, uh, production tax credit and, uh, investment tax credit at the same time on the safe harbor, 5% safe harbor rule. Uh, a federal judge handed the wind industry and solar industry a pretty substantial legal win that could reshape how the [00:01:00] projects qualify for tax credits. So a judge up in, uh, the District of Columbia vacated IRS Notice 2025-42. So if you remember that, uh, from a- about a year or so ago, uh, f- it found that the, that notice was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. The notice, which was issued following a July 2025 executive order, had eliminated the 5% safe harbor for wind projects, uh, a provision developers have relied on since about 2013 to establish construction start dates without breaking ground. The court found the IRS failed to justify removing it, ignored industry comments, which I had read, and I agree with that, and gave no reason for treating wind differently f- than other clean energy technologies. So That his executive order came down and said, “Hey, we don’t like wind. [00:02:00] IRS, write a rule and make it hard for wind to get installed in the United States.” And so they dutifully did it, but a court is throwing it out. This has some pretty significant implications because if you hadn’t broken ground before this ruling, I think the– what was happening was be- if you hadn’t broken ground by July 4th, your project wouldn’t qualify for some tax credits. But now, if you have 5% safe harbor, you still are in the game, at least for now. Now, Wanda, that’s gonna make a big difference to asset managers and developers, won’t it?  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, it’s really exciting. I think it opens up the, the playing field for, for some of these projects that might be a little bit behind schedule. Um, of course, a lot of teams had to change their plans and their pipeline when, um, you know, the big, beautiful bill passed and, I mean, it’s– of course, it adds a little bit of additional volatility, right, to, to wind and, and solar in the US, but it’s exciting to see at least things for, [00:03:00] for those of us that are in the wind and solar side, the, it’s a little, little bit of, of hope there. Allen Hall: And Matthew, uh, even in terms of opening up o-o-operations and, uh, getting contracts signed, this should make a big difference in sort of opening the floodgates a little bit. Although there is a short timeframe. We’re, we’re recording on, what, what is today? June 10th. So you have, in theory, less than 30 days before the July 4th deadline, but hopefully this stays. You think there’s a chance this just gets completely, uh, wiped out, the executive order and the IRS notice and- It’s back to what we remember for the, for the last, ooh, 12, 13 years?  Matthew Stead: Uh, yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m hopeful, and I, I agree with Yolanda. I think you, you said it really well. Um, I think this is a, a glimmer of hope in, um, a sometimes gloomy, um, environment. So I think that’s great. In terms of going back to where it was, um, I mean, I guess my observation has been that, [00:04:00] you know, things in the US were a bit, um, distorted. You know, distorted through the, the PTC, um, and the whole repowering thing after 10 years is quite a distortion. So I think, um, you’re not necessarily going back to the good old days, um, might be the way, what will happen. Allen Hall: I think there is a lot of people actively trying to dig holes at the moment, and I, I’m sure they’re gonna continue to do that. Yolanda, do you th- you think anybody’s gonna stop and kinda say, “Oh, we have the 5% rule. We’re, we’re good”? Do you think, or you think they’re gonna still go ahead and really start construction and then just keep things continually moving on site? Yolanda Padron: I don’t think they, they can really stop, right? Because you, you don’t know if, if anything strange happens. A lot of people didn’t think the, a lot of the provisions in the big beautiful bill were gonna, were gonna see the light of day, and they did. Um, but it does, I really hope it brings at least a little bit of breathing room for some people. I know it’s, it must be… I mean, I have some friends in development, and they’re, they’re q- a little [00:05:00] bit stressed right now just with everything going on. Um, so, so I really hope for them at least they, you know, if, if they’re a little bit behind schedule, then it, it’ll be, it’ll still be fine.  Allen Hall: Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC-NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC-NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions[00:06:00] Norway’s Storting has voted to pause the 35 billion Norwegian krone support program for floating offshore wind at Utsira Nord. The Conservative Party secured a parliamentary majority for the external quality assurance review, a socioeconomic analysis, and a technology development assessment, all before the Storting will authorize any commitments. Equinor and Vårgrønn, along with EDF and Deepwind Offshore, each hold allocated 500-megawatt areas and were preparing to compete for that subsidy. Equinor says the project will continue for now. I think everybody is saying that at the moment. But, uh, Equinor cannot rule out consequences as framework uncertainty compounds in the already challenging nature of floating offshore wind development. So Utsira Nord is a massive project. So it’s, it’s about three and a half billion US dollars [00:07:00] to go do this. We had Mads Furuseth and Anders Naslund about a year or so ago, maybe a little bit longer, talking about the project and how big it was and how important it was that Norway did this for floating offshore wind. But with this, uh, recent change in the parliament of Norway, it does seem like they’re slowly going to try to kill it by putting in a number of, uh, reviews, which is how bureaucracies tend to kill things. Is put it under six, seven, eight reviews, different committees. They all take time to get together. They have to put out a report. It could be two, three years from now. At that point, the world has completely changed, and everybody’s moved on. Does that seem like the outcome here at the moment?  Matthew Stead: Yes.  Allen Hall: In my mind, there’s really two big areas for floating offshore, which UK, right? That there, there’s some massive projects there, Green Volt being one of them, and then there was Sue & Nord. So between the two, I feel like the, the UK one was going to [00:08:00] happen. The question whether the world was gonna move towards floating offshore wind was gonna happen up in Norway. If Norway decided to do it and could get it developed, and it has the capability to do it because, because they have that skill set, uh, right there in Norway. If they could do it in Norway, everybody in the world would learn from it and figure out how to do it. Does this really set back floating offshore wind globally?  Matthew Stead: Yeah. I mean, going back to what I said before, and I, I’ll defer to Rosie on this as well, but, um, when I was at, at Blades Europe, um, one of the, one of my long-term contacts, um, y- was in floating wind, um, and had, um, left the industry. He basically said i- in his view that the offshore wind industry was slowly, um, in decline or slowly dying. Um, so I’m just wondering if this is just evolution of viability of offshore wind.  Rosemary Barnes: Is offshore wind in decline? I think if you look globally, it’s, it’s not in decline. I, I haven’t looked in, in depth at the figures just based on what, you know, [00:09:00] headlines I’ve seen and podcasts I’ve heard, but I think that globally it’s still on the rise. It’s just that- It’s only in Europe that things are really moving with speed, right? Like, people were expecting heaps of growth in the US and now no- nobody expects that. Floating offshore wind, it’s… I th- I still think it’s too early to say. There are plenty of countries that don’t have any good energy options besides, um, floating offshore wind, like Japan. What their energy transition looks like is gonna depend a lot on their culture and what

    33 min
  6. Siemens Gamesa Warns Europe, Shell Sells Offshore Wind

    15 Jun

    Siemens Gamesa Warns Europe, Shell Sells Offshore Wind

    Allen covers Siemens Gamesa’s warning that Europe is 40 GW short on offshore wind, Shell’s plan to sell its offshore wind farms, Maine’s multi-state bidding round, and Egypt’s grid financing deal. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The wind industry got a warning this week… and it came from the top. Siemens Gamesa, the world’s largest maker of offshore wind turbines, says governments in Europe may be running out of time. The company’s chief executive sounded the alarm Thursday. Europe is currently forty gigawatts short of its one-hundred-and-twenty gigawatt offshore target for twenty thirty. Sixteen gigawatts of projects in Germany alone are at risk of delay, tangled up in lengthy permitting and grid connection backlogs. The plants are running full today. But without new orders soon, factories could go dark for contracts starting in twenty twenty-eight. “It is not yet an existential threat,” said Siemens Gamesa chief Vinod Philip, “but it could become one.” He stopped short of predicting shutdowns. But he said the company would likely have to downsize resources if governments fail to act quickly. Europe’s offshore supply chain has already committed fourteen billion euros to meet the twenty thirty targets. That is roughly sixteen billion dollars… with no guarantee the orders will follow. Meanwhile… one of the world’s biggest oil companies is quietly walking away from wind. Shell is preparing to sell its offshore wind farms in a deal that could fetch more than one billion dollars. The company has hired advisers to run the process, which could launch before the year is out, with a sale expected sometime in twenty twenty-seven. Shell once dreamed of becoming the world’s largest electricity producer. That vision died when its current chief executive took over in early twenty twenty-three and shifted the focus back to fossil fuels and shareholder returns. Since then, Shell has been unwinding its green power portfolio piece by piece. It sold its European onshore renewables arm. It sold Indian renewable company Sprng Energy, which it had bought just years earlier for one-point-five-five billion dollars. And it walked away from planned offshore wind farms in Scotland. When this latest sale closes, Shell will have little wind left in its portfolio. But where one door closes… another opens. Up in the northernmost corner of Maine, a region that has sat on one of the best wind resources in the country for years, a long-awaited breakthrough may finally be at hand. The Maine Public Utilities Commission is closing its latest round of bidding for wind and solar generation in Aroostook County, plus the new transmission lines needed to move that power south to the rest of New England. The target: at least twelve hundred megawatts. Enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Maine is not going it alone this time. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont are sharing the cost of the new transmission infrastructure. The previous attempt in twenty twenty-one fell apart. Costs rose. Deals could not be finalized. Landowners fought the proposed one-hundred-forty-mile power line. This time, officials say things are different. The multi-state partnership changes the math. And northern Maine’s wind resource has not gone anywhere. Dozens of energy companies have signed up to compete, from local developers to major multinationals. If everything goes to plan, the best-case scenario puts new turbines spinning in the twenty thirties. And half a world away… Egypt is making a major investment to keep pace with its own renewable ambitions. The Egyptian prime minister this week witnessed the signing of a financing agreement worth sixty billion Egyptian pounds, earmarked for the national electricity transmission network. That money will go toward upgrading the grid so it can absorb the solar and wind power Egypt plans to add in the coming years. The target: forty-five percent of national electricity from renewable sources by twenty twenty-eight. The electricity minister said modernizing the grid is a “continuous and evolving process,” and that implementation timelines are being compressed to meet that twenty twenty-eight deadline. The wind is shifting. The question is… who moves with it. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 15th of June 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

    3 min
  7. Gulf Wind Scales Uptower Repairs, Sheds Storm Loads

    11 Jun

    Gulf Wind Scales Uptower Repairs, Sheds Storm Loads

    David King from Gulf Wind Technology returns to discuss serial uptower blade repairs, passive load shedding, and data-driven testing. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall : David, welcome back to the program.  David King: Yeah, I’m so glad to be here. A lot’s happened since the last time I was on, so, uh, this is gonna be great.  Allen Hall : It’s been about a year. Mm-hmm. And last year we were at OM&S in Nashville, and you were talking about root fusion, and this is the insert fix uptower for the blade inserts, right? So we’re having a lot of blade bolt issues, and the inserts are starting to pull out or become loose, and the blades are moving around. A lot of our operators in the States are trying to solve that problem, and they don’t wanna remove the blades and bring anything down tower. They would like to fix it uptower. That’s where your solution came in. How’s that going?  David King: Yeah, so I mean, it, it’s really been a five-year journey for us. I mean, we’ve been doing this- I remember that, yeah … for a [00:01:00] very long time. You know, it started like any process does, with a problem statement. Sure. And we’ve been working through from problem statement, you know, going through process development, going through structural development, going through pilots. Uh, we did a, a huge pilot deployments about three years ago, where those were being monitored. Um, we’re now in a position where we’re in serial deployment, and that’s what’s really exciting. You know, we’re doing about 200 blades a year, uh, of, of serial deployment. We’ve, we’ve done that now, uh, we’re going into our second year of that. Nice. So we’re extremely excited by that. That comes with its own sets of challenges as you scale up. How do you maintain quality? We even touched a little bit on a few of these things last year. Um, but yeah, we’re really excited to be doing that. Uh, we’re trying to keep it, you know, again, process-driven. How do you simplify a process that allows you to scale up appropriately, train people appropriately? A- a- and that’s what we’re really excited about this year, is being able to bring this, uh, so that we’re not, um, you know, basically supply constrained, ’cause there is a lot of demand for this, and still able to maintain a very high level of, of quality as we, [00:02:00] we scale up. Allen Hall : Yeah, and that’s the key to all sort of repairs in the wind industry. You like to do it once and be done with the life of the turbine. Now, so you’re going uptower. You’re drilling some holes up along the blade, injecting those with a resin system, curing it, basically reinforcing what is already there That all makes sense to me. Engineering-wise, that makes sense to me. But a- again, it goes back to the technicians and the training and the deployment of it. Are you starting to train technicians, bring them in, show them how to use the, use the machines and, and get them out in the field so they are ready to go? It, it… ‘Cause it seems like you’re at that threshold now. David King: No, absolutely. So we, we believe in people first, right? Yeah. People at the end of the day make things happen. And so, you know, the best ways to do that is give people the right tools to be successful, and where that comes from is training. That’s a huge part of it. We have a, a certified training program that we run. Uh, it started out as an internal program we were running. It basically has five levels to it. Uh, we’ve now extended that to, uh, enabling, uh, you know, basically [00:03:00] preferred partners to be able to take part in that training, uh, to be able to utilize modular kits, pumps and equipment, to be able to, you know, go out and meet that demand that’s out there, but do so in a way that’s, uh, controlled. Yeah. And so really that comes back to that certified training program. And really, you know, level one is about a lot of your basic safety, procedural base type, uh, you know, making sure people are competent, uh, they’re not gonna get themselves hurt. Right. They’ve got the right personality traits about focus, uh, you know, detail focus and things like that. Yeah. Uh, level two to that program is, is really about, um, basically getting people to a stage in which they can be a, uh, team member. Uh, they’re able to be on a team and contribute to that team in an effective manner, be in the field.  Allen Hall : That’s really important. A lot of-  David King: Absolutely …  Allen Hall : companies miss that aspect of being a team member instead of an individual. Yeah, you have to work with other people. Yeah. It’s, it’s critical.  David King: It’s massively important. Personalities clash. You’ve got to be able to work through that sort of thing. And so that level one to level two is really kind of taking your green horn hat off and putting, “Okay, I, I, I can be on this team and I’m, I’m a, a contributing [00:04:00] member.” And then at level three, that’s your team leads. Those are people that are leading teams. They’re leaders. They’re up and coming. They’ve got a career path, career trajectory. Level four is our mentors. That’s the people that are going out there and that are basically qualified to now actually mentor other people in the field. Allen Hall : Yeah.  David King: And then your level five is train the trainer. How do you grow more trainers so that you’re not constrained on that training factor? And that, that’s kind of how we, we typically run training.  Allen Hall : Uh, and Gulf Wind has the ability to do that. I mean, I’ve been to your facilities, they’re impressive, and that’s one of the limitations for a lot of companies. They don’t have the facilities to train people, and they don’t have the resources you do. That opens up a lot of opportunities. Obviously, you’re in the composite repair business. You have crews out fixing wind turbine blades. Some of the more complex ones is what I hear. I mean, I hear it secondarily, but I assume that’s what’s happening. What are, are the areas that you get called in on to do composite repairs?  David King: We, we really do anything that stops somebody else. Okay. So we wanna be there when there’s a problem where you’re like, “I don’t know where to go next. Uh, this is a big [00:05:00] problem. We’re unsure. Maybe there’s a new technology at play. Maybe it’s, uh, a carbon spar cap. Maybe it’s something, uh…” You know, obviously the root stuff that’s very complicated. Sure. And, uh, it’s just gonna require a little bit more engineering. It’s gonna require a little bit more rigor, and that- that’s where we say, look, we, we can, whether it means testing something, verifying something, training somebody on a process, developing a process- Yeah or just doing something complicated, that’s where we excel.  Allen Hall : Well, that- that’s what I hear from the road is, uh, Gulf Winds here and I think, “Uh-oh. You must have a really serious problem because you’re calling in the experts to do the, the difficult things.” Carbon pultrusions, carbon fabric in, in blades today is such a massive problem because it’s not, it’s not fiberglass. It’s just a lot more to deal with, and some of the loading issues we’re finding and, boy, it’s just all over the place. They need Gulf Winds Technology to, to come on site to give them a hand. Now, a- as part of the growth of the business, and you guys have been growing. Every year I, I see they’re just… it’s just a little bit bigger, a little more [00:06:00] people. I walked on LinkedIn and hiring some engineers and some people to work over the summertime. That’s all great. What’s the structure look like now? How are you trying to organize yourself as a business?  David King: Yeah, so we really break down into three different structures. We have our service division, and that’s, um, putting people out there to solve problems in the field. As simple as it gets, right? It’s like you’ve got a problem, we’ve got the right people with the right solutions, and they’re gonna go deliver, uh, a result. Um, and then we’ve got an engineering division. That’s about developing problems. It also has a lot to do with IP. You know, things like root fusion, that’s a pat- protected technology. Sure. All of our technology, we do a lot of investments in, in, you know, patent protection and IP work, and so that sits inside that engineering division. Uh, it’s how we, we have the smarts of the company kinda sat in there. Uh, it also is what allows us to really get into some of these, uh, kinda juicy problem statements that are a little bit prickly maybe. Uh, and we love getting into those and solving them. Yeah. And then the third and final thing is the composite side of things, and that’s the, the manufacturing. That’s that 30,000 square [00:07:00] foot composite manufacturing facility where we wanna be the best in vacuum infusion. We wanna be the best in prepreg, the best in pultrusions, complex assemblies, and be trying to de- uh, just deliver really high-quality composites to the industry. Allen Hall : Yeah, and you have the equipment to do a lot of testing. And I think a, a lot of operators don’t realize what you have And the knowledge

    22 min

  8. 9 Jun

    US Wind Installs Fall 17%, China’s Undersea Data Centers

    American Clean Power’s Q1 report shows the weakest quarter since 2023, China plugs an undersea data center into offshore wind, and thermal imaging spots hidden blade damage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now your hosts Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And three out of the four of us, everyone except Rosie, went to Houston this past week. Matthew, you were on the floor. Yolanda, you were on the floor this week. What did you think? Matthew Stead: I think there was a few sort of common themes that I picked up. One, the obvious one which keeps coming up every time is insurance and lightning, and insurance, and all those sort of things. probably the other point that I observed was really strong supply chain. they had everyone, all the people, e- even people, building boxes. And [00:01:00] so they had boxes, transportation, cranes, really strong, supply chain. also really strong on the batteries, like the CATL batteries, et cetera, et cetera, and solar. I think that seems to be getting a bit more, a bit more, mature and more obvious. obviously blades, lots of people talk to us about blades, maybe ’cause we talk about blades. But, lightning root issues, blade bolts, those sorts of things, leading edge erosion, robotic repair, et cetera, et cetera. a bit about, add-ons like PowerCurve, were fairly visible, so that was good. but there was a lot of secret meetings in rooms away from the actual event. so that was one observation. and the other observation was perhaps not so many operators that actually [00:02:00] work on a day-to-day basis. That was my subjective impression  Rosemary Barnes: Speaking of secret meetings in rooms, what were you guys doing around the time of ACP?  Matthew Stead: So the Australian American Chamber of Commerce organized a special event, with two Australian companies to launch a new product, which monitors lightning and then transmits the results using satellite communications. So it was very open, but invitation only, Rose.  Rosemary Barnes: I, actually, I- the comments, ’cause people are always, after our first go organizing wind O&M event in Australia, I would hear about it from people who didn’t, just chatting at, on, different wind farm sites. They didn’t know I was involved, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, there’s a secret event now.” And it’s we did our very best to publicize this, the most that we could. It was not intended to be secret. So yeah, I’m just wondering if, people are gonna think the same if [00:03:00] they, they missed out on, your event. But how was it re- received? Do, we need more events in the US?  Matthew Stead: Yes, absolutely. And I, I don’t have my pin on here, but, yeah, I do have a pin from the Australian American Chamber of Commerce Texas division,  Rosemary Barnes: How was the event for you, Yolanda?  Yolanda Padron: It was good. It was good. the showroom was the, or the exhibit floor was a little bit em- more empty than I thought it would be, but it was good. It was good to, to see people, to catch up with everybody. There were some really good chats happening everywhere. and I got … I don’t know about you guys, but I saw a lot more people not from the US that wanted to come in and understand the market better than I did other years, which was nice to see. Matthew Stead: Was there any new technology on the floor this year? I thought there was a new robot company, but it was actually solar cleaning.  Yolanda Padron: I saw some rebranding from some companies, moving from former ties to [00:04:00] OEMs just m- moving into their own little companies and stuff. in a very interesting, PR move, a, an insurance company was raffling a motorcycle, which was really, funny for us to see. Allen Hall: Not very safe, is it?  Yolanda Padron: Was  Rosemary Barnes: it at least an l- an electric  Yolanda Padron: motorbike?  Allen Hall: Rosemary, you’re in America.  Yolanda Padron: I don’t know very much about bikes, but it was big and scary for me. did I put my name in there? Yes. We’ll see how that turns out, but  Rosemary Barnes: I’m always trying to win Lego sets at, events and, try to sweet talk the, the stall managers or s- stall minders into “Oh, if somebody wins and they don’t show up, could I have it?” yeah, so far unsuccessfully. Although I do have, actually you can see I’ve, I’ve got a Le- a L- Lego, in inverted commas, not Lego TM, wind turbine that we’ve just started making. So that’s a, [00:05:00] or a tower for a… that we have created. I have succeeded in getting some sort of Lego for my podcast background. Allen Hall: Are you gonna buy the Sagrada Família Lego set that just appeared?  Rosemary Barnes: I haven’t. I’m not like the hugest Lego fan. I wouldn’t call myself an, what is it? AF- AFOL, adult fan of Lego? Is that what, There’s a, there’s an acronym. I’m not one. None of us are apparently.  Allen Hall: Oh, I don’t know. I think we’ll buy that one. Allen, does it take 200 years to make? Probably. I think there’s around 10,000 pieces. that’s what I re- recall. It, there’s a lot of pieces. It’s built in sections. I watched had a little discussion about it. It is really complex, but we may purchase one and put it in the lobby of our shop because that cathedral is protected by strike tape, some of the ornamental features at the top. So we’ll, probably build one, but it’ll, it will take a year [00:06:00] Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions Let’s talk about American Clean Power’s, first quarter 2026 market report. So the American Clean Power Association’s first quarter 2026 market report shows United States developers brought 6.4 gigawatts [00:07:00] of new clean power online in Q1, but overall capacity was down 17% year over year, the weakest quarter since 2023. Onshore wind took the hardest hit with less than 500 megawatts installed, the slowest pace since about 2018. the Department of Defense delayed approximately, 165 projects totaling 30 gigawatts and $54 billion of investment. Ken Young, the CEO of Apex Clean Energy, put it plainly, quote, “This DoD thing is real. They found a button to hit, and we got punched in the face.” Unquote. Developers won a preliminary injunction in Massachusetts federal court, but the Interior Department has pledged to appeal in regards to offshore wind. Is this gonna be a permanent setback, Matthew? You think this is gonna continue on, or will this eventually get wrapped up and wind will be back on track? Matthew Stead: If I wanted cheap power, I would be building wind, [00:08:00]battery, and solar. So I think, if people want cheap power, it, will definitely come back. That’s my view.  Allen Hall: Yolanda, you see some of the development. You’re close to it in Austin, Texas. What are you seeing on the ground there? I think there’s repowering going on, but is there much in terms of new development? Yolanda Padron: There’s repowering. I think new development slowed down a little bit than this time last year, but it’s still going on, both for wind, solar, and battery, which is good. on the ground level in some of these very rural towns, this is a very important source of income for a lot of those people, regardless of political affiliation. so it’s important for some of these people to get these on their, in their land.  Allen Hall: Does American Clean Power have a plan to try to address this situation? Are there any lawsuits in place or any legal action on the docket?  Yolanda Padron: Not that I know of. I, know there was a, there was that lawsuit end of last year, for offshore.[00:09:00] but from American Clean Power itself, I don’t know of anything off the top of my head. Do you guys know?  Allen Hall: I haven’t seen much of a roadmap from American Clean Power on this particular issue on the onshore wind. I haven’t seen much e-except but for a couple of summary pieces explaining what is happening on the ground, but n-no action to push back. And maybe there’s some lobbying going on with Congress people and, senators, but you think we would hear about some of it. I haven’t heard anything, and I’m watching pretty close. it is a little confounding because it does seem like this could be broken with one court case. Maybe not. Maybe it’s more difficult than that. Yolanda Padron: I don’t know. There’s always a lot of, yeah, there’s always a lot of lobbying going on by, not just by American Clean Power, but by a lot of these larger owners, right? A lot of them have some sort of office in DC and people coming in and out and going to meetings [00:10:00] with everybody, So I don’t know.

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4.9
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

Uptime is a renewable energy podcast focused on wind energy and energy storage technologies. Experts Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead break down the latest research, tech, and policy.

Information

  • Creator
    Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    288
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026, Weather Guard Lightning Tech
  • Show Website
    The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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