The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
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  • Earth Sciences
  • Updated Semiweekly

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. 4h ago

    Pardalote Studies Australian Blade Erosion and Heat Fatigue

    Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of Pardalote Consulting, joins to discuss their new grant-funded study of blade erosion and heat fatigue in Australia. 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 2025: Well, Rosemary, welcome back to the show.  Rosemary Barnes: Thanks, Allen. Great to be here. For, it’s been a while since we did one of these one-on-one episodes, like a, yeah, a proper, proper guest.  Allen Hall 2025: Well, this is kind of a celebratory episode because your company, Pardalote Consulting, has been awarded, uh, some funding from the Australian Capital Territory’s government for the Energy Innovation Fund. Rosemary Barnes: It’s a really good program that the ACT government has to try and get energy innovation In the state. It’s not a state actually, it’s technically a territory. Little more than just Canberra, the city. Uh, but there are actually quite a few, like, really interesting energy-related companies here, partly ’cause of the, the fund I think helps, but also just tracing back like, [00:01:00] uh, y- you know, in the 20-teens, Australia had a really conservative government that hated renewable energy, and the ACT government had a commitment at that time to 100%, um, 100% renewable electricity for the, the government. And that was one of the only programs that was resulting in a lot of, um, you know, clean energy projects being built, and one of the conditions that they put on that, uh, for people that would win PPAs with the ACT was that you had to have your headquarters in Canberra. So we’ve actually got quite a few, quite a few really cool, innovative companies out of here. Um, like Neoen’s headquarters here. Windlab, uh, yeah, was, was founded here and still has a lot of people here. Pardalote obviously, and you know, a few other companies as well. So despite it being a small city of like, I don’t know, maybe it’s up to 400,000 or something people by now, um, yeah, there is actually quite a lot going on here for energy. Allen Hall 2025: And the Energy Innovation Fund is funded by the wind and solar operators in the area, and your particular [00:02:00] effort has really global consequences. You’re focusing on two areas involving how wind turbines survive Australia, but more, uh, of relevance is to just really tough conditions which exist not just in Australia but around the world. What two areas are you going to focus on?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So the two focus areas are leading edge erosion and high temperature fatigue, which we can probably get into the definitions of those in a minute. But basically my, um– what led me to wanna have a project like this was that when I moved back to Australia in 2021, I– and I started working in O&M, uh, I noticed that the wind turbines that I would look at, the blades that I would look at here behaved really differently to the ones that I worked with overseas. You know, es- especially with leading edge erosion, like often I would be doing a condition assessment of a, you know, a new wind farm. Um, might only have been operating for, you know, two years. That’s a pretty common time for people to get in and do a condition assessment [00:03:00] because their warranty period is about to end and they wanna, you know, make sure that everything is okay. Um, and I would just notice that often, like 90, 100% of blades would already have bad erosion after just a couple of years, which is super-duper fast. And then there are some tools available to check, um, like what kind of erosion are you likely to experience on your site. Like is it a higher severity erosion site or a, a low severity one? Um, and you basically, you know, the status quo globally is to just look at the annual rainfall, um, and the tip speed. And if you’ve got, you know, high for both of those, that’s a bad erosion site. And if you’ve got low for both of those, it’s a, a low erosion site. But when I plotted out the wind farms that I knew had really bad erosion problems onto, you know, a chart with those two axes, I just saw a random distribution of dots. You know? Like, this was not– uh, this had no predictive value for Australian wind farms. And so that led me to believe that, okay, um, you know, things are a bit [00:04:00] different here. Makes sense, you know, most of the knowledge that we have about how wind turbines operate, it’s been developed and validated mostly in Northern Europe. You know? Like it’s, it’s Denmark and the surrounding countries that had, like, the bulk of the early wind energy. First few decades of knowledge were, you know, were mostly there. Of course, there were some other, um, places that had wind turbines, but, you know, most of the The OEMs have been operating for decades, came from Denmark. And I know when I lived in Denmark, the rain there is very different to the rain in Australia. So in Denmark, it’s basically always raining, right? Like, it’s just… Like, even if it’s not raining, you’re still gonna get wet when you go outside ’cause it’s just, like, the air has this just amazing ability to just hold onto moisture. Um, but it’s very, very gentle. But, you know, over an entire year of most days having gentle rain, that adds up to a lot. Whereas in Australia, and especially if you go, like, north to Queensland, it rarely rains. It’s mostly just dry, and when it [00:05:00] does rain, it’s like a tap turns on, and I, I swear you will get bruised from the rain droplets hitting your skin. You know, they just have so much energy in them. So I think that that i- you know, when you look at just the overall rainfall, you really hide something important about how erosion, um, can progress. Then, um, there’s other places in Australia that have very different characteristics. Again, they don’t have that kind of really intense rain but, you know, some of those sites are also having really bad erosion. And so it just occurred to me, I did a lot of research, you know, into what’s going on and, you know, the academics are studying erosion a whole lot, and they’ve got, you know, a lot of standardized tests and, you know, products are developed according to these standardized tests. But the standardized tests don’t actually resemble reality, and especially they don’t resemble reality in Australia. And so my client started asking me, “Okay, you know, the products that we have are, are terrible. We have to replace them every couple of years. It’s, um, causing big problems with also [00:06:00] the amount of energy that you’re losing.” One of the types of, um, leading-edge erosion or leading-edge problems that we have in Australia is that the, the coatings tend to peel off and make these, like, big flakes which will just massively disrupt the airflow, can cause y- you know, at least a few percent AEP loss, and maybe up to five. And even worse than the AEP loss is the revenue loss because it affects it most at, you know, lower wind speeds. Um, you get a bigger hit than at rated wind speeds. So there’s a variety of problems going on with leading edges in Australia, which mean that I, I basically… My clients would ask, “What product should we put on to prevent having to, you know, constantly replace this?” ‘Cause it costs, like- you know, 30, $40,000 per turbine to replace the protection, not to mention, you know, one or two days of downtime. It’s expensive, and I basically, I didn’t have a good answer for them. What, what product should they put on? I don’t know. No, we, we don’t know. One, we don’t know what the [00:07:00] specific, um, characteristics are that are… what the specific local environment, local conditions are that are accelerating leading-edge erosion, one. And two, all of the products tend to be tested around this, you know, there’s this protocol that academics have come up with, and they’ve kind of like assumed that this is representative of how things behave in the field, and it’s– I don’t think it’s particularly true anyway, but it’s especially not true in Australia. There are a few companies that are testing to different standards. Um, definitely applaud them. But without knowing wha- what are the conditions truly like in Australia, uh, it’s really hard to advise, like, what kind of tests should you be demanding from a product you’re considering to be sure that you’re gonna put it on and not gonna be replacing it again in two years. Allen Hall 2025: Because that’s really the trouble in Australia is when you get offered products They have been tested generally in somewhere in Europe and maybe in the United States, and then when they go to [00:08:00] Australia, it’s really unknown as to how those products will do, which is a huge risk for the Australian wind market as to what to choose, how to choose, is it– what’s real in terms of test data. So now you’re gonna go out and do what? Are you gonna put sensors out by the wind farms? Are you gonna try to do more of a statistical summary of the actual environment around wind farms using existing data? What’s the approach here?  Rosemary Barnes: It’s all of the above, but the part that is supported by the grant is that we’re gonna have enough money to be able to buy some scientific-grade sensors and put them on, um, a sample of Australian wind farms. So we’re gonna be looking at a lot more characteristic

    Pardalote Studies Australian Blade Erosion and Heat Fatigue

  2. 2d ago

    GE Vernova Q2 Wind Losses, Envision AI Turbine for Fortescue

    GE Vernova posts a record quarter as gas and grid surge while wind orders drop 40%. Plus Envision grid-connects its first AI turbine for Fortescue. Visit https://woma2027.com/ to register speaking and sponsorship interest! 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! If you haven’t visited woma2027.com, you should do so right now because we are putting together all of the, uh, events at WOMA 2027, which is March 3rd through 5th in Melbourne at the Pullman, Matthew, Pullman East? Pullman East Melbourne. And it’s packed full. Our, in fact, actually, we have so many people applying to attend the event, we’re getting a little nervous on if the size of the venue is not large enough, and we, we have a lot of people already chime in wanting to be sponsors, which is great. But I wanna talk about what you will experience at WOMA. We’ve done it for two years now, and the feedback has been great. And Yolanda, you’ve been to the one just this past February, and participated in panels and saw some of the, uh, workshops and was involved in a lot of WOMA 2026. What are you expecting in 2027, and what did you think of 2026? Yolanda Padron: I thought [00:01:00] 2026 was great. I loved seeing everybody there. Uh, got to meet a lot of new people. It was, it was sweet. There was a lot of r- people returning from WOMA 2025, um, and a lot of new people that were told that that was the event to be at to learn about wind, which was really, really nice to hear. Uh, something that I loved, especially since we’ve been through quite a few conferences since then and before then, was just the fact that, like, you’re, you’re just talking about problems and just talking about solutions, and you’re talking about real stories, and it’s nothing that’s super, super public. You know, like, you, you can have real conversations with real people. I know during a panel I mentioned a, a solution to an issue that I had seen that was kind of niche, and then, uh, like three minutes later, like I had had some people come up to me and we all talked about the problem that we saw and then [00:02:00]talked about their problem, and it was really similar, and obviously in a totally different continent. And it was, it was good to, to be able to have those conversations that you usually wouldn’t have elsewhere, especially if everything’s just really, really public and just big and you’re having a lot of people sell at you, and it’s, it’s just something that we’ve really shied away from. What, what was your favorite part of it? Matthew Stead: I, I think, um, it was really the fact that it was a a technical, useful, helpful conference rather than having some rando talking about things that they’re told to talk to you about  Allen Hall: It’s real answers from real problem solvers. And everybody’s gonna be in Melbourne on the 3rd through the 5th of March 2027. If you’re interested in attending, you need to go to woma2027.com. If you’re interested in sponsoring, it’s also woma2027.com. There’s limited [00:03:00]sponsorship left, so if you wanna do something, you better get in quick. And if you wanna attend the event, and I suggest that you do, that you visit woma2027.com and get registered today 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. It’s been a busy day as we record because GE just announced its second quarter earnings and a bunch of things about the business. They had an investor call early, early, early on the East Coast, and even earlier for those on the West Coast of the US, and it was a very good quarter for GE, but a really lopsided one. Uh, GE Vernova reported second quarter orders of [00:04:00] $24.2 billion, up 88% with a backlog that has now climbed to $176 billion. Free cash came in at $5.1 billion. Man, $5.1 billion is a lot of cash, everybody, which is more than the company generated in all of last year. So they made more in one quarter in cash than made in all of last year, and management is raising its full year guidance, but the strength is coming from gas power and the electric grid, not from wind. The wind segment saw orders fall 40% and revenue slip 10%, and the company still expects wind to lose about $400 million this year. Although in the investor call, they did say that the forecast for wind in Q3 and maybe even Q4 was to be essentially break even on the EBITDA scale. So that’s a, a, a good number. It does seem like GE is being more [00:05:00] aggressive on pricing and selective on the projects they are choosing to participate with. Repowers was way down, if I remember correctly. Uh, they are not doing a lot of that at the moment. So there is a slowdown they’re seeing in wind, but they’re more than making up for it in gas turbines and electrification. Orders for gas turbines are out to ’30, ’31, and I think they’re gonna close out all of ’30, ’31, um, book orders for gas turbines here shortly. So if you want a gas turbine, Matthew, you’re gonna have to get in line because your GE has a long list of, of clients in front of them. What does this mean for wind? When I hear the discussion where GE is focused on gas and electrification because of the huge cash flow that comes in their door- Does that mean a good positive things for wind because they have the cash to kinda hang around wind? Or is it gonna be set aside for other [00:06:00] more profitable business segments? I  Matthew Stead: mean, GE’s had a number of setbacks over the years. Um, you know, we know, we know all about them. We’ve been talking about them, you know, multiple times. But, you know, they’ve gotta just wait it out, don’t they? Um, you know, wind is not gonna go away, so they just need to wait it out, get their problems out of the way, get their cash flow in, build the order books again, just wait for things to improve. Um, I, I think one thing I just wanna pull out, the Sands Ear, i- isn’t that a massive achievement?  Allen Hall: It is. It’s, it’s a colossal engineering achievement on its own. Forget about just delivering and manufacturing all those turbines and getting them installed. And that’s a pattern energy project, and Fairwind I think was involved with that in terms of project development, EPC items. It’s huge. It’s gigantic. But it may be the last one we see in the United States for a while.  Matthew Stead: And but Vineyard, you know, they’ve gotta resolve that, don’t they? We’ve spoken about that before. Get that one out the way, clear out the decks and, yeah. That’ll come good.  Allen Hall: Rosemary, of our former GE [00:07:00] employees, I guess we have two of them here. I’m one. Not of wind, but of another division. What’s your thoughts on GE Vernova at the minute?  Rosemary Barnes: These days I see them through the O&M lens. That’s how I work with them, is when my clients need support for all their wind farms and It’s just, it’s just never enough. It’s not a GE-specific thing. Uh, you know, across Australia, anybody with a full service agreement does not… Uh, the, the company performing that agreement just gives the impression that they just do not have enough, um, uh, enough people. Y- you know? It’s just, just hands or maybe it’s budget. Uh, I guess it, it’s both at the same time. Yeah, I mean, I see some good things like their, the pace of new technologies has slowed and they’re consolidating, which was needed, but it’s just hard to imagine that it’s even gonna be enough considering how many fewer blade engineers that they’ve got now. Like, how are they, [00:08:00] how are they going to get the, you know, the issues with the platforms that they are, uh, pushing, how are they gonna get all that under control with so many fewer engineers? And will they ever be able to, you know, go back to innovating a- again when they’ve lost so much of their, you know, institutional knowledge? Allen Hall: Two things they did not mention during the phone call today or in any of the documents that I saw was TPI Composites and that EPC has acquired that and is now operating the factories, uh, making GE blades. And LM Wind Power was not discussed either, although LM Wind Power has been integrated into the overall financials of the company, so it’s not a standalone financial entity like it was last year. So you can’t really r- read the tea leaves of what’s happening at LM, but nobody talked about or even asked on the investor call what was happening on the wind side. They were very interested in gas turbines and what the order rate was going to be, and GE was concerned [00:09:00] on their side, saying that they’re trying to ramp up production to make more gas turbines, but there’s limitations to how much they can do. Rosemary Barnes: I guess that’s the s- the zeitgeist now, right? Or it’s the, I don’t know, like, it’s, it’s a sign of the times. Everyone’s obsessed with data centers, and for some reason, data centers are obsessed with gas turbines, um, even though, like, it’s not a fast solution to, uh, y- you know, to, to anything. So I don’t… You know, I’m not saying that building a, you know, a wind farm or solar farms, batteries, those are not without challenges. But I really don’t think that the, yeah, g

  3. 3d ago

    Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

    Allen covers the V236 blade failure at He Dreiht, Maine’s first full-size floating turbine, and Japan’s wind-powered data center. 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! Happy Monday Everyone The V236 just had a bad week last week. a blade failed on one of the turbines at ENBW’s [EN-bay-vay’s] HE DREIHT [hay DRYT] offshore wind farm in the German North Sea. Nine hundred and sixty megawatts. There are 64 of those V236 machines. The project hit first power just last November. ENBW says no one was hurt. VESTAS says it has launched a root cause investigation. But a blade failure on your flagship turbine … at one of Germany’s biggest offshore wind farms? That will be a headline. And the industry is watching. Now … from the North Sea … to the coast of Maine. The UNIVERSITY OF MAINE has done something no one in America has done before. They put a full-size floating wind turbine in the ocean. And it is delivering power to the grid. The platform is called VOLTURNUS [vol-TURN-us]. It was assembled onshore … in Brewer, Maine … then towed thirty miles down the PENOBSCOT [peh-NOB-skot] River and out to sea. No specialized heavy-lift vessels. No deepwater pile driving. The hull is made of concrete … sourced locally. Not imported steel. Eighty percent of the best offshore wind in America sits over water too deep for fixed-bottom foundations. Floating platforms like VOLTURNUS could change that math entirely. Meanwhile … in Japan … wind energy just found a brand-new customer. Data centers. EURUS [YOO-rus] ENERGY and TOYOTA TSUSHO [TOY-oh-tah TSOO-shoh] have broken ground on a wind-powered data center in HOKKAIDO [hoh-KY-doh]. It is the first data center in Japan directly connected to a wind farm. The facility sits next to the KOBAOKO [koh-bah-OH-koh] Wind Farm … forty-two megawatts … with a private power line running straight to the servers. And here is the bigger picture. Japan has most of its data centers packed into Tokyo and Osaka. HOKKAIDO has the wind … but not the demand. So instead of sending the power somewhere else … they are bringing the demand to the wind. TOYOTA TSUSHO already operates ten wind farms in the region … more than five hundred megawatts. They are planning a much larger data center cluster by twenty thirty. Ten to twenty megawatts of capacity. And speaking of scale … China just laid out its five-year plan for renewables. The target? A fifty-three percent jump in renewable energy consumption by twenty thirty. According to BLOOMBERG … renewable power use should rise to about one-point-eight billion tons of coal equivalent … Wind and solar generation alone should nearly double … from two-point-three trillion kilowatt-hours to four trillion. And here is the part that matters for reliability. China wants wind and solar … backed by storage … to provide twenty percent of electricity during peak summer and winter evening hours. That is double the current level. Three hundred gigawatts of peak generation from renewables. That is not an aspiration. That is a published national target. Now … before we go … a story from the other end of the scale. In KONGIGANAK [KAHN-gig-uh-nak] … a village in western Alaska … they built five wind turbines. There is no grid connection. No transmission lines running to the outside world. For years … the village ran on diesel generators. The turbines changed that. But they created a new problem. Sometimes … the wind made more electricity than the village could use. No grid to send it to. No big battery bank to store it in. So the engineers came up with something simple. They put special ceramic heaters inside every home. When the wind blows hard … the extra power flows into those heaters. Dense ceramic bricks soak up the energy as heat. And when the wind dies down … that stored heat slowly releases into the house. In Alaska … where winter never seems to end … surplus wind power now keeps homes warm and cuts diesel bills at the same time. There is a shift in the wind energy business at the moment.   It used to be utilities buying megawatts. Now it is tech companies buying uptime. Remote villages buying independence from diesel. And entire nations buying credibility on their climate commitments. Each of those buyers has a different definition of reliability. And every one of them needs turbines that can run for years and years. The wind industry has never had more demand. The question is whether the hardware can keep up with the ambition. `That is the state of the wind industry for the twenty-seventh of July … twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

    Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

  4. Jul 23

    SkySpecs Turns Blade Data Into Smarter Repairs

    Matt Sigala, Director of Asset Management at SkySpecs, joins to discuss blade inspection data, repair vendor management, and carbon fiber repairs. 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 2025: Matt, welcome to the program. Greatly appreciate it. So Matt Sagala has not been on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Although he’s been asked for the last five or six years to be on, he has had other commitments. So now that he’s available to be on the podcast, we love having him here. Uh, if you don’t know Matt Sagala, Matt Sagala is a, a real special talent in wind. Very knowledgeable about repairs. He’s a composites person, but he, you know, it’s one thing to know composites and understand what that looks like, but also to run organizations that repair blades and manage blades and take care of large quantities of blades and do it very efficiently, where the assets are actually working and operating efficiently is hard to do. So, uh, [00:01:00] Matt is now with SkySpecs in a recent change from a, a large global wind operator, and he’s come over to SkySpecs as Director of Asset Management. So Matt, congratulations first. Appreciate  Matt Sigala: it. Appreciate it.  Allen Hall 2025: So that’s a, that’s a big title there. What does that all mean, Director of Asset Management at SkySpecs?  Matt Sigala: basically, it’s just the overview of your entire asset from the start of the inspections to the reviewing of, of the inspections, to creating the RFP, going out to blade budgets and repairs, uh, and then having the actual repair teams on site and us being able to help execute those repairs in a systematic way, um, without having to overload or, or burden your, your internal, uh, systems in-house. Allen Hall 2025: Because as an operator, there’s a lot on your plate.  Matt Sigala: Yes.  Allen Hall 2025: And a lot of operators don’t necessarily have blade teams internally. You came from an organization- Yeah … that did have a really good, still does have a really good blade organization.  Matt Sigala: Oh, amazing, yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: Yeah. Uh, that was unique, but a lot of operators in the United States or globally just don’t have [00:02:00] that resource. SkySpecs has developed that resource over the last couple of years of we’re blade experts, we have all the data coming in, but we can also help you downstream when it comes to maintaining and repairing blades, which is, is sort of a new feature for- Yeah … SkySpecs. Now that you’re there and you’re seeing all the data, all the, the,  the- the, data center, so to speak, of w- and you have access to blades globally, and you can put your fingers on it. What are you seeing out there in terms of blade health and, and going forward?  Matt Sigala: There’s a lot of work. There’s definitely a lot of work upcoming and into the future. Um, and you know, I think a lot of it could be risk-based with, with inspections, annual inspections, semi-an-annual inspections. I think that’s always the first line of defense on any blade management c- campaign. Um, and then, you know, coming behind that, I think that’s where our preferred vendor lists and, uh, you know, being comfortable with working with certain suppliers on certain type of repairs. Um, we feel that, you know, we have an edge on the industry, [00:03:00] uh, with the data set that we have in hand, plus being able to build a relationship with ISPs. And not only build a relationship with them, but be able to continuously give them mindful insight to their repairs from a year now to two years now. Because we’re the only ones really seeing those inspections and the repairs after they’ve been in operation for more than a year. It’s very rare that a, an ISP, uh, even on my side of the house when I was working with EDF, of being able to see a repair from year to year. Um, I think that’s, that’s, that’s pretty massive and- Yeah … a lot of value within that, so.  Allen Hall 2025: Oh, sure. Uh, you were one of the first ones when I met you years ago now, uh, that was a big proponent of more inspection. Yeah. That there are some blades in which you must inspect more.  Matt Sigala: Yes.  Allen Hall 2025: And here’s the reason why. Matt Sigala: Yeah.  Allen Hall 2025: Because you had thought through it a little bit and you’d come up with a plan. So you always had a plan. That’s one thing about Sagales, he always has a plan. You can ask him any question, he’s got a plan in relationship to blades. And you were the, you were the one that has said, “Hey, uh, there are certain blade types out there that we have seen that, well, you need to do a [00:04:00] little more inspection, and there are some others that it’s totally fine.” Yeah. A, a yearly inspection is, is, is fine. Well enough. And that SkySpecs data, now that you have access to it, is that also f- feeding back into your- Definitely … logic of that?  Matt Sigala: Yeah, yeah. How do you, how do you think about it? No, it’s, it’s, it’s opened my mind a lot kinda getting me out of just being in, like, the trenches of certain decisions and being able to see this whole data set as a whole now. Uh, and holistically, it’s like, all right, m- there’s just certain things that I kinda need to adjust on my end. Um, definitely letting a lot of things just play out for, uh, this repair season and, and how things are running, and then kinda looking to make some changes into, into ’27. Um, but the data set, it’s, it’s amazing. It’s, it’s almost over- overwhelming. Um, so just kinda going after- the low-hanging fruit as far as, like, the 62 twos, the 145s, and really understanding what those look like, uh, how we can help our customers  Allen Hall 2025: that’s a large part of the fleet in the States, but globally too. SkySpecs has made a lot of, uh, recent advancements into, uh, certain marketplaces outside the US. Mm-hmm. I won’t go into the specifics there, [00:05:00] but e- essentially, like, SkySpecs is becoming definitely more of a global company than a US-based company. Uh, and seeing turbines from outside the US, so you see a, a GE or a Vestas turbine operating in Germany or in the UK, and you see the same turbine in the States. They’re not- No … performing the same, are they? No. It’s a completely different- Same turbine.  Matt Sigala: Yeah, different wind regimes, erosion characteristics, crack propagation rates, everything. Even we were seeing major, you know, differences from the West Coast to, to central Iowa with the same type of platform. So you can only imagine, you know, start going from a, a larger scale on, on the globe,  Allen Hall 2025: So you’re ac- because you have access to the data now, does that change the way you think about Blade management. Matt Sigala: Yes. I-  Allen Hall 2025: in terms of when to, when to inspect, when to repair, or just leave it. Are you able to have clear definition of the variables that go into that equation?  Matt Sigala: Definitely so. and I think that’s the key to it. It’s, it’s, we- we’re really stepping away from that blanket approach of inspections where you [00:06:00] do have your baseline inspection, but after that you start getting into the granulars of, okay, you know, this site has X amount of the 622Ps or whatever they are, uh, we need to inspect more on, on a biannual or semi-annual inspection. Um, and then we have, you know, certain turbines, like you said, that we, we touch once a year and it’s kind of just, just let it go. But, um, no, it’s, it’s very site specific, um, on- Allen Hall 2025: That’s what I’m wondering … on- Is it how, how site specific is it? Very, very,  Matt Sigala: very site specific.  Allen Hall 2025: Really? Yeah. It’s- So like, uh, is Central Iowa is different than Central Kansas-  Matt Sigala: Eh Allen Hall 2025: in a sense, or is it more broader spread than that? It can  Matt Sigala: get a little bit broader spread, but then we start looking into s- serial numbers for manufacturers, issues. Okay, are we seeing a certain batch that was released out and it’s in, you know, the northern part of Iowa or half the park? And so that’s what we’re really getting down to now is like serial batch issues and, and trying to track that across the region. Allen Hall 2025: SkySpecs has been trying to use more AI over the last- Yes … six months to a year. Is that helping to sort through some of that data?  Matt Sigala: Yeah, it’s accelerating it. Uh, definitely it’s not like the, uh, [00:07:00] all end answer, but it’s definitely, it’s, it’s-  Allen Hall 2025: So you’re not just thumbing through Excel spreadsheets- Yeah, no and looking at them one by one, you can actually use some, a little bit of  Matt Sigala: AI to- A little bit … to sort it. Yeah, Yeah, sort it out, get a high, high res summary, and then being able to kind of like pinpoint where we wanna go from there on it and, and dive in. But still, you know, AI hallucinates and, and does its thing. Oh, sure. And so we, we just, we wanna tread carefully with it, but making sure it’s clean,  Allen Hall 2025: a sanity check, right? Yeah, exactly. While you’re there, a sanity check, like does that make sense? Exactly. Oh, okay. Exactly. Let’s, let’s scrape it again. Okay. So that’s a huge advantage, and I, I know on the repair vendor management side- Yeah which has been a, an effort over the last year

    SkySpecs Turns Blade Data Into Smarter Repairs

  5. Jul 21

    Omterra Rebrand, Goldwind Warns on Turbine Size

    Siemens Gamesa rebrands as Omterra, Goldwind questions ever-bigger turbines, and MIT revisits the century-old Betz limit. 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, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, who is recovering from a very serious illness, Matthew Stead, who has been healthy pretty much all the Australian winter, and Yolanda Padron in sunny, hot Austin, Texas. Welcome, Rosemary Rosemary Barnes: Thank you. I am recovering from man flu, and I say man flu because it’s just a cold, but I’m complaining a lot about it.  Allen Hall: there’s gonna be a new name for Siemens Gamesa. So it was Siemens and then Gamesa’s a separate company. They merged. Siemens Energy, uh, broke off from Siemens AG. So [00:01:00] that’s a very well-known name, Siemens. It’s– Everybody knows Siemens at this point around the world. And the, the one family had, as a company, had s- label on everything, right? So it’s, uh, Werner von Siemens started it 150 years ago. It’s been a long time since Siemens was started, but it’s everywhere. It’s on turbines, transformers, and power plants around the world, and now they’re changing their name, right? So when Siemens Energy broke off from Siemens AG, they, they had a limited time they could use that name, so they have rebranding themselves or are about to rebrand themselves, and I wanna pronounce this right, Omterra. O-M-T-E-R-R-A. Now, we did a little research on this, and I think it’s Latin for all of the world. It’s kind of a conjoined, uh, set of words, Latin words, kind of a, a schmear in a sense. So, uh, so the company that, you [00:02:00] know, that spun off in w- roughly 2020, if I remember this right, Matthew, does that sound right? It was roughly 2020 when Siemens Energy was established on its own. Uh, they’re gonna be changing their name to Omterra. So instead of seeing, seeing Siemens Gamesa publications or Siemens Gamesa wind turbines, I guess they’re gonna have this new name, Omterra. What do we all think? Matthew Stead: I think it’s great. I think, and if you go back to, you know, GE Vernova, um, I, I thought Vernova was a bit weird for a while, but now it just rolls off the tongue and easy. It just makes so much sense. Um, so I’m, I’m, I’m for it. I, I like it. I’ve already… You know, can already say it. It took a lot longer to say Vernova than it’s taking to say Terra.  Rosemary Barnes: I think that it– But it’s not Vernova, it’s GE Vernova, right? So everyone knows what it is. Whereas my understanding is it’s not Siemens Omtera, it’s just Omtera, which makes it sound like a new budget kind of [00:03:00] brandless, history-less, uh, company. So that’s… Yeah, I’m no  branding expert, but I think that, uh, like they, they must have not been able to use the word Siemens at all, um, because otherwise you surely would, because it has a very… Outside of, you know, their blade issues and bearing issues of a couple of years ago, they do have a, like a solid engineering reputation across many fields, so you wouldn’t probably intentionally divorce yourself entirely from that. So, um, yeah, I, I think it will take some getting used to for me Matthew Stead: but everyone remembers. I mean, it’s not like– The people in the wind industry know their heritage, they know their history, so I don’t think it matters. I mean, you know, you know, they, they purchase the Senvion, you know, technologies or, you know, licenses in Europe. You know, y- y- you don’t forget these things, so I don’t think it matters. I think it’s just a, it’s a color, it’s a, it’s a label Yolanda Padron: I think it’ll be fine. I just think that there will be a little [00:04:00] bit of confusion down the line as with everything, right? Like I’ve, I’ve been on the side of conversations where I have to explain like Siemens versus like SGRE on paper and it’s like, oh, it’s– this is why th- there was that paper trail, uh, because people would think it was an absolutely different thing. Um, so I, I can totally see those conversations coming, coming to play in the future where someone thinks that Ontier is a completely different entity that maybe they changed OEMs or something, um, for a site. But nothing a little history lesson won’t fix, I guess. Matthew Stead: You just want people talking about you Rosemary Barnes: Name change every year  Allen Hall: Change your name every year. Well, that’s, that’s one way to approach it. I w- always wonder what the boardroom looks like and sounds like when this discussion is going on, because Siemens, Siemens Energy is a big company, and there had to be outsourcing of this to probably several marketing firms, mostly [00:05:00] in Germany, I’m guessing. And they came back with a bunch of pitches, and eventually they picked one. But boardrooms are probably not the place to pick a name. And I always think like, “Oh, you just had such a opportunity to do something really cool or really impressive.” Allen Hall: Well, we’ll see how it goes with Omterra. The, it’s gonna be, I’m sure, a huge marketing effort, and you’ll probably see commercials for it during the Super Bowl. Developers are [00:06:00] eyeing Britain’s next big renewables auction and have been waiting to learn the rules and most importantly, the price. Well, this week the UK government delivered both. It confirmed a package of changes to the CFD scheme ahead of allocation round eight, aimed at simplifying the process and keeping good projects from being tripped up by some paperwork. So AR7 was super successful, and they’re hopefully gonna have a, a great allocation round eight. Uh, unchanged from last round, here are some pieces to it. AR7 brought in 15 gigawatts of, of new capacity, uh, well below the ceilings, and the government is betting that that’s stability from AR7’s gonna exist for AR8, so they’re keeping the pricing limits the same. And let me give you some of the numbers here. So everything’s in 2024 prices, just so we have a baseline here. It, 113 pounds per megawatt hour [00:07:00] for fixed bottom offshore wind, 271 pounds for floating offshore wind. That’s, uh, pounds per megawatt. And then 92 pounds per megawatt for onshore wind, and s- 75 pounds per megawatt for solar. So 271 pounds per megawatt hour in 2044 dollars is, you know, you’re probably talking, what, 290 pounds per megawatt hour. That’s a really good strike price or ceiling to allow, uh, some more floating wind into the UK waters Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the UK have this newly signed agreement with Japan, right, to, to progress development of that technology. I feel like I, I haven’t looked up any numbers to back this up, but I feel like the gap between fixed bottom and floating is narrowing. It’s barely more than double now, which, um, yeah, I think is not that bad considering how little development there has been for floating offshore wind compared to fixed bottom. So [00:08:00] yeah, I think that it is an interesting technology to develop. I, I know with the, um, auction rounds and ’cause it’s a government thing, it’s easy to think, “Oh, why are you spending any money on anything other than the cheapest one?” Because y- you know, like, it, it feels weird that the government would play, you know, when they’re purchasing power for their grid, that they would do any more than trying to just get, you know, bulk power at the cheapest price possible whilst ensuring, you know, reliability. Um, but in the previous or the previous, the one– last one or the one before that, they had quite a few tidal projects announced that certainly, you know, an expensive and not mature technology. But I think that you can’t say the same thing about floating offshore wind. I think that it is on a, like a good, a good development trajectory, and there are certainly places on Earth where floating offshore is one of the most appealing technologies. You know, if you think of through to 2030s, 2040s, there’s plenty of places where, um, you know, slightly higher [00:09:00] price paid for floating offshore wind will still be worth it because they have so few other options available. So it makes sense as an industry to in- invest in capabilities there.  Matthew Stead: think it’s a really interesting method. It seems to be really successful, the contract for di-difference approach. So, um, I’m, I’m surprised that it’s not adopted more widely, um, in other locations,  Rosemary Barnes: it is around a bit. I would like to see it, like, in, in Australia, we are, we are developing some new wind projects, but not as fast as we need to, to, you know, hit our upcoming targets. And I think, like, while the government is doing some things to help move or help incentivize developers, it’s not working that well, and maybe CFD would be a, you know, a bit of a better way to, like, just actually guarantee that these projects are gonna go ahead. ​ Allen Hall: Australia has a shipping problem. there’s been a concern at state-owned transport hubs are becoming less supportive of [00:10:00] wind energy projects with ACEN Renewables saying that they will now have to truck a large transformer from a wind project or for a wi

  6. Jul 20

    ECP Buys TPI Blade Factories, GE Pours Billions Into LM Wind Power

    Allen covers Energy Capital Partners buying TPI’s blade factories, GE Vernova’s $1.7 billion rescue of LM Wind Power, offshore wind cutting oil burn during a heat wave, Scotland’s Caledonia approval, and 19 states suing the Pentagon over stalled wind reviews. 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. A few months ago, we told you about a Houston bankruptcy court carving up TPI Composites. Well, that story just got a whole lot bigger. On July sixth, TPI walked out of Chapter Eleven. Zero debt. New owners. A private equity firm called Energy Capital Partners picked up TPI’s blade factories in Iowa and Juarez, Mexico for about twenty million dollars. Twenty million, against more than a billion dollars in liabilities. ECP did not stumble into wind blades. They bought Calpine back in twenty eighteen, inherited seventy-seven power plants, and became GE’s biggest private gas turbine customer in the Western Hemisphere. That relationship, forged in gas turbine halls, is what brought them to composite factories. GE Vernova signed a five-year supply deal requiring it to send blade orders to ECP’s factories. GE is ECP’s partner, its customer, and was even the backup buyer if the deal fell through. So TPI lives on, leaner, debt-free, with locked-in demand from one of the biggest turbine makers on earth. But now, the other side of that coin. While ECP picked up two blade factories for twenty million dollars, GE Vernova recently pumped one-point-seven billion dollars into its own blade company, LM Wind Power. LM’s equity had fallen to negative 575 million euros. Revenue dropped ninety-six percent in one year, from 2.1 billion Danish kroner down to just ninety-three million. The Danish workforce, cut to about twenty-five people. LM Wind Power has lost money every single year since GE bought it in twenty seventeen. Nine straight years of red ink. So think about that. Two American blade factories now serve GE Vernova’s onshore business. One in Grand Forks, North Dakota, owned by GE, inside a division losing four hundred million dollars a year. The other in Newton, Iowa, owned by ECP, zero debt, five-year supply deal. The independent contract blade business that TPI Composites built is gone. Vestas took the India and Mexico plants in-house. GE’s supply is locked to ECP. The OEMs and their financial partners now own the factories directly. And that is a new era for wind manufacturing. Now, let us talk about what those blades are doing once they are spinning. Earlier this month, a brutal heat wave hit the eastern United States. Air conditioners running full blast. Grid operators scrambling to keep up. And off the coast of New England, two offshore wind farms stepped up. Vineyard Wind, eight hundred and six megawatts off Massachusetts. Revolution Wind, seven hundred and four megawatts near Rhode Island. Together they pushed hundreds of megawatts into the grid right when people needed it most. And here is the number that matters. Oil-fired power plants met about ten percent of peak demand on July second this year. Last summer, at the height of a similar heat wave, oil plants covered nearly fifteen percent. That is more than a gigawatt less oil burned. The projects that survived lawsuits, survived construction shutdowns, survived lease freezes, are now keeping the lights on in New England. Across the Atlantic, Scotland just approved two massive offshore wind farms. The Caledonia North and South projects in the Moray Firth, up to one hundred and forty turbines spread across one hundred and sixty-five square miles. Enough power for two million homes. Ocean Wind is leading the development with a commitment of about 1.7 billion pounds. And here is what makes this project different. Caledonia South will mix fixed-bottom and floating turbines, up to thirty-nine floaters. That blend of proven and next-generation technology on a single project is something to watch. Back in the United States, nineteen state attorneys general are suing the Department of Defense. The reason, wind project reviews. Federal law says any wind turbine taller than two hundred feet must go through a Defense Department check, to make sure it does not interfere with military radar or flight paths. Last August, the Pentagon stopped reviewing those projects. No explanation. No timeline for starting again. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown is leading the coalition, joined by attorneys general from eighteen other states including California, New York, and New Jersey. They want a court to force the Defense Department to start doing its job again. And finally, a story from the sea floor. Down in southern New England, lobster populations have been falling for decades. Back in nineteen ninety-eight, there were about fifty million lobsters in those waters. By twenty twenty-two, fewer than ten million. But something else is moving in. Jonah crabs. Fishermen used to throw them back. Now they are hauling them in by the thousands, selling them as a cheaper option to lobster. And researchers at the University of Rhode Island are finding that offshore wind foundations are acting like artificial reefs. Algae grows first, then barnacles and mussels, then fish and crabs follow. The question scientists are working to answer is whether these structures create new marine life, or just pull it in from the surrounding ocean. Either way, the turbines are not just making electricity. They are making habitat. Now, here is what to watch. This Wednesday, July twenty-second, GE Vernova reports second quarter earnings. And the numbers we just talked about will be in the room. One-point-seven billion dollars pumped into LM Wind Power, a blade company that has lost money nine years straight. Twenty million dollars to let ECP walk away with two factories and a five-year supply deal. GE Vernova is guiding for four hundred million dollars in wind segment losses this year. Meanwhile, its Power and Electrification divisions are printing money, nearly five billion dollars in free cash flow last quarter alone. So the question on that earnings call is simple. If you are spending eighty times more to keep your in-house blade maker alive than a private equity firm paid to buy your contract supplier, how long do you keep doing both? Watch for what GE Vernova says about LM Wind Power’s future, about North American onshore blade strategy, and about whether that 1.7 billion dollar injection was a rescue, or a goodbye. The answer could reshape who makes blades in this industry for the next decade. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 19th of July, twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

    ECP Buys TPI Blade Factories, GE Pours Billions Into LM Wind Power

  7. Jul 16

    Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

    Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind and Loren Walton of NSK on main bearing failures, why the industry is pulling DLC coatings, and the material changes replacing them. 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: Cory and Loren, welcome back to the podcast. Cory Mittleider: Thanks for having us. Allen Hall: So we’ve got two bearing experts in one location, and this is the point where we start asking all of our bearing questions. Cory, you’re with Malloy Wind, and we’ve had you on the podcast two or three different times. Loren’s with NSK — we’ve had Loren on at least once before. Loren Walton: Once, yes. Allen Hall: Yeah, and that was good. Loren Walton: I appreciate that. It was fun. Allen Hall: There are a lot of bearing issues happening in the States at the moment, but also globally. Whatever happens in the States, you can pretty much find in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, South America, Brazil — everywhere. We’re hearing a lot about main bearings, and there’s a variety of things that I think you two know from being on the inside that we on the outside haven’t heard yet. I want to get some of those stories out and understand what’s going on, because operators are trying to keep their assets running, and bearings are a big issue. Let’s talk main bearings. What are you seeing in the field right now? What kinds of problems are happening? Cory Mittleider: It seems like operators are coming to us and asking us to supply bearings that no longer have DLC. That’s a bit of a phenomenon lately. For a little over a decade we spent our time supplying bearings with DLC on the rollers to address problems found fifteen years ago. Allen Hall: DLC is diamond-like coating. Cory Mittleider: Correct. Allen Hall: Which is a really hard specialty coating applied to the bearing surfaces to provide hardness and durability — or it’s supposed to provide durability. Cory Mittleider: That’s a good point. It’s a coating that’s one to two microns thick — one to two thousandths of a millimeter — and a very hard material. The big feature was that it’s a dissimilar material to the steel. So when we break through the mixed and boundary lubrication regimes and those asperities touch each other, that dissimilar material prevents the welding and tearing that leads to the peeling damage we saw fifteen years ago. That peeling damage eventually turned into spalling, cracking, and other failures. So it made a lot of sense at the time to turn to something like this to mitigate the peeling. Allen Hall: So the peeling damage was one of those issues where you basically had some sliding happening. In my electrical world, and from looking at these on the ground, you see things moving relative to one another instead of rolling relative to one another. Loren Walton: It’s more of a welding and shearing of the contacts. I used a finger analogy last time: think of your asperities as fingers — one set is the roller, one set is the outer raceway. They weld under high load and high pressure, then they shear, leaving behind debris. That’s what creates the beginning of the peeling damage, and then it continues to create more debris, and the bearing starts to basically eat itself alive. Allen Hall: The start of that process, though — is that a lack of lubrication, or a finish or hardness issue on the bearing? Loren Walton: I love that question, because this is the crux of the whole thing, and I think it’s the part that gets missed. People immediately want to throw the whole thing out and start over with something different. Fundamentally, when we fixed the surface issue by adding the coating, the problems pretty much went away. We went from one-to-five years of life to ten-plus years, depending on the application — without changing the construction, the bearing type, or the contact angle. Just by adding the coating, we increased life significantly. The root of what you’re asking is that the bearing would operate better if it had the proper amount of separation. It’s not a fatigue issue and it’s not a loading issue. At its heart, the bearing isn’t able to create that separation. There isn’t enough speed, and there isn’t enough of a gap created by the lubricant. Allen Hall: So ideally you have this almost molecular-scale film of lubricant between the two surfaces. If it isn’t designed properly, or you have an issue, that lubricant gets squeezed out of the space, and at that point you have trouble. That’s some of what I’m hearing on main bearings — especially when turbines have been curtailed and aren’t turning. Is that partly just the fact that there’s so much load? Cory Mittleider: I think that’s a fundamental difficulty of the main shaft bearing. You’ve got extremely variable loads, from full load to idle, and a wide range of operating conditions — from northern North Dakota in the winter to Texas in the heat this week. High load, heavy load, incredibly slow speed, and even slower if it’s idling. It’s hard to reliably build that film. It’s not necessarily that there isn’t enough lubrication; it’s that the film isn’t building properly where it needs to be to separate the metal and the rolling elements. Allen Hall: So the diamond-like coating was meant to solve that welding problem — you put the coated bearing in, and it worked okay until more recently, when all of a sudden we started having other issues. To me those aren’t related to the coating itself, but to other things happening up in the nacelle. Loren Walton: If we recall some of your previous episodes, you were on the forefront of understanding and talking about DLC starting to become an accelerant to failure. I know you talked about it with Cory. Those episodes have aged very well. A lot of people now are recognizing what we were saying years ago and changing their strategy toward removing DLC — whether on bearings for newer turbines, typically two megawatts and greater, or in some cases going backwards and removing DLC as they do additional replacements, and looking for another solution, because there’s potential for additional issues you weren’t expecting by adding the coating. Allen Hall: The coating is non-conductive, which is part of the issue, because you wouldn’t think bearings are conducting electricity. But as turbines got some of these uptower and downtower converters and inverters connected to the generator, we started seeing current levels — according to Motor Doc, where people like Howard Penrose have gone out and measured currents in the nacelles — of well over a hundred amps running through ground straps and the like, into bearings. That’s a lot of current. If you’re shoving that into a bearing that has DLC on it, you’re going to break it down and create these really hard steel bits stuck inside the bearing, which wear it like pouring sand inside a bearing. That’s what eventually happens, and it has nothing to do with the bearing. It has more to do with the electrical and control systems we stuck up top and didn’t pay much attention to, but probably should have. We created an electrical situation, and now all the upkeep comes to people like you to deal with. You haven’t seen a lot of work to eliminate it, although there are a couple of good attempts happening. The reality is: okay, we have to have a bearing, and I’ve got this current going around from the nacelle. How do I put those together in a way that removes the DLC? Cory Mittleider: That’s what we’ve spent the last ten-plus years on. As a bearing supplier, we can’t change the whole system. We have to do the best we can to accommodate what’s happening in your system. We would absolutely encourage you, if you can identify and remove the electricity, please do that. Allen Hall: They should. And there are a lot of people who do. Cory Mittleider: There’s a pursuit of that, absolutely. But the turbine still needs to run. Loren Walton: We work very closely with an owner-operator that did a lot of that work. To your point from before, it does sound like, from what they’ve investigated, the current has been there for a while. It’s been there in different models and different turbines. Maybe the way it presented, or its impact, wasn’t to the same extent as what we’re seeing now. That’s where I’d say there’s more to it than just the current. I think I said last time it’s not just a smoking gun. The bearing is sitting in front of a firing squad. You put it all together and now we’re in a tough position. But to Cory’s point, we get brought the application, we get brought the environment, and we get told, “Here, make it work.” Allen Hall: And you don’t actually see everything that’s happened. You get all the mechanical loads, but they don’t tell you, “Hey, we’re running a hundred amps through this nacelle.” Loren Walton: No, I don’t remember hearing that. Cory Mittleider: No, that’s not usually disclosed. Allen Hall: No one’s ever said that. So that’s a real troubling thing happening in the industry — we’re assigning blame to mechanical components when really it’s an electrical mistake. When you dig into it, what you find is that currents have been running up top for years, but what’s changed now is that with more focus on emissions from inverters, they’ve pushed things into higher frequencies. Higher frequency bands are harder to ground out and get rid of. When things were in the kilohertz range, we could partly ground them and the

    Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

  8. Jul 14

    Dogger Bank Wake Lawsuit, EverWind Hydrogen Farm

    Rosemary previews Pardalote’s new hands-on blade repair course. EverWind’s Ocean Lake, Canada’s largest wind project, will feed a green hydrogen and ammonia plant in Nova Scotia rather than the grid. Plus BP’s exit from an offshore project in Japan, and the wake-effect lawsuit pitting SSE, Equinor, and Vårgrønn against RWE’s Dogger Bank South. 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 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes is back this week.  Rosemary, you’ve been to a number of training courses over the last couple of weeks. The first off was GWO. What was your experience at GWO training?  Rosemary1: It was the fourth or maybe even fifth time that I’ve done it. Um, I did it a few times in Denmark and then, uh, this is the second time doing it in Australia. also, this was my first time doing first aid in Australia. Last time they did GWO here, but my first aid was still valid from Europe, so I, I didn’t redo it. And it’s like so much about [00:01:00] snakes and spiders and jellyfish But a good, good rule of thumb, not 100% accurate, but good rule of thumb, if it is something from the ocean that stung you, then you put something warm on it, and if it’s something from the land that stung or bit you, then something cold on it, Allen Hall 2025: well, how often do you usually take GWO training? Rosemary1: You gotta do it every two years to be valid. I don’t do it every two years because, um, if you do it every two years, like within two years, then you can do the refresher course. So that’s three days instead of four However, um, because I don’t climb constantly, like often it will be six months or more in between climbs, I’ll just do it before I know that I’ve got a climb. all the other people except for one were technicians who, you know, have been working for a while. So they’re also doing the full course, not the refresher. So they get a little bit more practice than I do. But, um, it’s just not often enough. Y-you know, like every time I go it’s like I, I really feel the need to have the refresher, um, because I’m just not fully on top of it. ‘Cause it’s [00:02:00] not just that you need to know what to do. You need to be able to… Like if you need to use it, you’re gonna be freaking out, you know? This is the worst thing that’s probably ever happened in your life, and now you’ve gotta remember all your training. It’s like you want it to be actually second nature to some extent. So yeah, first day is manual handling, which is v- you know, very– That one’s very easy and I would be happy to never do that again. Like I will always remember that. Um, then you got fire, um, fire safety awareness, and that one’s just fun ’cause you just get to, um, light fires and put stuff out then first aid, which I definitely always want a refresher on. The CPR dummies at this place, they had lights, um, and it lit up green if you were doing it right, and I haven’t used a dummy that was so advanced before, so that was quite good. I realized I wasn’t pressing hard enough. and then yeah, last two days is working at heights training, which is the most intense ’cause you got your harness on all day and, um, you know, climbing up and down and rescuing people. this was Rite Training in Goulburn, and, um, the [00:03:00] instructor’s name was Claire. highly recommend doing that one. Allen Hall 2025: Is that a general requirement in Australia that you have GWO before you can climb? Rosemary1: Like, yeah, they will sometimes, um, let you climb if you are babysat by people. I would not recommend other engineers, like if you’ve never climbed a wind turbine before, like I would really not recommend that you just go up with a team and haven’t done the training because you do need to be able to use a ladder safely and, um, you can, y- you can easily, like even inside the nacelle, you could easily hurt yourself really badly if you’re used to working in an office, uh, you’re upping your danger level by, you know, like many, many, many times by going up a turbine and it’s just something that you gotta take seriously. Allen Hall 2025: How busy are the courses in Australia? Are a lot of technicians trying to get in and get trained?  Rosemary1: No, it’s people that have a job that are getting trained. But there were heaps of techs in this course. There were maybe eight or so, which is also part of the reason why it took a really long time. Allen Hall 2025: So [00:04:00] this week, as we record, y- you’re presenting a blade repair course for engineers and technicians. a completely new area that you’re, uh, going into in terms of offering advice and expertise that it’s really hard to find on the planet. It’s probably a, a, a busy or, or requested course, I would imagine, in Australia, where you just don’t have access to a lot of the manufacturers. Rosemary2: it’s a, it’s a course for just for engineers or technical type people, um, but including hands-on stuff. So the way that I I forced this to come into being was just the last five years. I, um, you know, I started working a lot on wind turbine blade repairs and, um, people would ask me, you know, “Have these repairs been done right?” And the thing is that the only repairs that I had anything to do with when I was working at LM were weirdo ones, right? [00:05:00] Where the normal, like a technician couldn’t, couldn’t handle it. It was outside of, um, yeah, their, their standard, uh, kind of repairs that they can do for whatever reason. and now in the work that we do at Part Load, it’s primarily normal repairs, and I just didn’t know exactly what technicians know. You know, how do they, how do they know whether they can repair it or not? What do they know before they go up there? When are they calling the engineer? Um, all that sort of stuff, like the normal stuff. eventually it became less about me learning, ’cause like I said, I kind of picked up most of it. Um, but now I’ve got staff that I’m training up to be, uh, you know, composites engineers and to work with these kinds of issues. There’s a lot of repetitive tasks involved in what we do when we, like, assess the condition of a wind farm. A lot of what we do is look main- manually looking through photos and thing- if things are classified right or not. I [00:06:00] Found this guy from Direct Wind Services, Jurij Eska. He’s a blade engineer. He’s worked in Europe and then come back to Australia, so a little bit like me. And, um, I just worked with him on a few projects and I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well, this guy, uh, he really gets it.” And I asked him, “How do you, how do you train your technicians? What course do they do? Maybe I can do that course.” And he said, “Oh, we train them ourselves.” And so then I asked him to put this course together. So where we started off the course yesterday, that was, um, uh, an indoor session where I was talking through how are blades designed, uh, certified, tested, manufactured, um, what kinds of manufacturing defects can you see and what do they do about them in the factory? ‘Cause you know that they’re doing a lot of repairs in the factory already before you ever see a, a brand new blade. and then the next three days we’re going to be working on, um, yeah, grinding and [00:07:00] infusions and a bit of a, a bit of theory about, um, composite repairs.  Allen Hall 2025: What do you feel like are those key skill sets that engineers should know how to do, maybe not as well as a, a professional technician that does it a lot, but at least at a beginner’s level should be able to complete them before they start repairing blades on their own and giving advice about how to repair blades? What, what are those key items? Rosemary2: part of it is that I want them to be able to understand what is a bad damage and what’s not a bad damage cause you look a lot at images from the outside, but it’s really about what’s on the inside and how deep it goes is the real thing. So, um, it’ll be about learning, you know, developing some judgment about, um, how bad it can be and how bad it can look on the outside. We’re not gonna be looking at so many real damages ’cause like obviously we’re just dealing with pieces that are in the, um, in the, uh, workshop and Yuri has [00:08:00] made some samples for us, um, purposely made them badly so that we’ve got some, you know, damage to find. Allen Hall 2025: Are you addressing carbon fiber at all? Rosemary2: Uh, I actually haven’t asked about that. I don’t think so. Carbon fiber is, um, is a real pain to work with because it’s conductive. Like, even grinding it makes a bit of a hazardous work environment. We did talk a little bit about the different materials yesterday and, um, about pultrusions. And actually, it turns out Yuri used to work somewhere where they, uh, manufactured pultrusions, and I had always, I was always under the impression that a pultrusion is, you know, like, perfectly s- perfectly straight. That’s the point. And he’s like, “No way.” No way. There’s waviness in the pultrusions  Allen Hall 2025: And on March 3rd through 5th at WOMA 2027, Rosie, you’re gonna give

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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.

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  • Creator
    Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    286
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    Clean
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    © Copyright 2026, Weather Guard Lightning Tech
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