The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
  • 4.8 (41)
  • 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. 18h ago

    What Operators Want to Hear at WOMA 2027

    Two days of operator meetings in Melbourne shape the WOMA 2027 agenda, from performance upgrades and cable faults to foundations and bolts. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead and Rosemary Barnes. And Rosemary, where are we?  Rosemary Barnes: We’re in Melbourne, and we have been visiting future attendees and sponsors and people interested in, in the event to see what topics that we should be talking about. What are the hot topics of the moment?  Allen Hall: Which is a very interesting two days, Matthew, in that, uh, we h- did meet with a number of operators based in Australia, but, uh, they’re also very worldly. They have talked to companies all over about operations and, and maintenance, and there are some really eye-opening topics- Mm that will be- Mm … at WOMA 2027 this year.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. The thing that was interesting for me was [00:01:00]that actually the topics have changed each year. So, um, they’re evolving and the industry’s continuing to, to do better, and so that, that was really interesting. Performance upgrades was probably one of the big areas of, of new interest, I think. I think we heard with the pressure on pricing, uh, the market and so forth, you know, that, that 1% or 2% now is becoming more important. Um, so I think, uh, upgrades will definitely feature quite a lot. Um, balance of plant was also a big topic. Um, you just can’t ig- ignore the, um, transmission, you can’t ignore the transformers, you can’t ignore, uh, condensers and all these sorts of things, so yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Cables.  Matthew Stead: Cables.  Rosemary Barnes: Terminations. Terminations of cables. Specifically raised several times.  Allen Hall: Yep. Yeah. It’s all about being more efficient, uh, getting more production, and then with the PPA prices, uh, that are changing-  Matthew Stead: Mm …  Allen Hall: rapidly, uh, everybody is paying more attention to the bottom line.  Matthew Stead: Mm, mm.  Allen Hall: Absolutely. There, there’s less cash running around, uh, chasing new development. It’s [00:02:00] more of a focus on making sure your, at least your existing assets are performing as, as well as they can be- Mm … which then opens up the, uh, Pandora’s box of opportunity. Mm. Because there are 1%’s all around a wind turbine. More specifically, uh, all the drive train issues, the blade issues, the generator issues, and even going into the substation. Mm. I, I was really shocked on BOP e- the, the one topic that came up, uh, yesterday and today was buried cables. Mm. Like-  Matthew Stead: Faults …  Allen Hall: faults.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Junctions. Finding- Yeah … finding faults and what to do about them. Yeah. Yeah. But I think in addition to just wanting more revenue, I think people have, are getting more sophisticated about what actually matters and then the finances. You know, everyone’s focused so much on availability, and now people- Mm … are like, okay, yeah, like once you’re at a certain level of availability, gets harder and harder to get more. And actually, you know, not all availability is equal. Is good. It, it [00:03:00] depends. Yeah. Yeah, like you wanna, um, you wanna focus on how much you’re generating at the times when electricity prices are high specifically, which usually means during lower wind speed periods. Yeah. Which is actually good because that matches really well with what is actually possible. It’s, it’s hard to get more power out of the turbine if it’s at, you know, its rated power, then you’re not g- More efficiency is not gonna get you any more, um, power output, whereas lower in the power curve- Mm … um, when wind speeds are lower, there’s less electricity in the grid and so prices are higher. And so- Mm … yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s why people are really asking to know more about what efficiency upgrades are possible, better ways to operate, scheduled maintenance, um, all those sorts of things. Mm. So that will be really interesting.  Matthew Stead: Raising the bar on sophistication. Um, but also life extension  Allen Hall: Yes, a lot of discussion about life extension  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, end of life and life extension End of life Yeah, um-  Matthew Stead: Foundations, structures Which is  Allen Hall: tied to PPA. Mm. A lot of that [00:04:00] discussion I, at least I looked at it as, uh, if I had a PPA and I can continue with that PPA with an existing turbine, I want to do that. Mm,  Matthew Stead: mm,  Allen Hall: mm. But how do I do that and how do I know that that existing turbine can last another five years? It seemed to go in five-year blocks, like can we get to another five years and then another and then, then another. Wow.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Once you get to 20, 20, 25 years, I think people like, uh, they, you know- It’s getting a little- Their original agreement might have been for 20, then they kind of just assume that there will be another five, and then after that they’re- Yeah … kind of reassessing cyclically and yeah, I know that people make plans for, you know, what components are replaceable, what would they have to get in, and I think that sometimes, uh, people doing those plans aren’t as familiar with the, you know, actual technical issues that are being faced. Like, is a blade a replaceable component? It may be early on in the life it sort of is, not easily, but you know, like a 25-year-old wind turbine, you know, good luck trying to order 10 new blades because you’ve got a, you know, an issue that’s-  Allen Hall: Oh, well you, you need to read the news. Did you [00:05:00] see the news today about, uh, the, the wooden wind turbine blades as a replacement for aged blades? That, that’s happening- … in real time, Rosa.  Rosemary Barnes: Okay. I know they- Yeah. Yep, yep. Okay. Okay. So that, that’s, that’s good. Making carbon new blade. E- even so, I don’t think that they’re- Okay. … gonna be, like, super-duper cheap, so you’re still gonna wanna be, um, doing a trade-off between y- you know, like, what kind of repairs. You might be able to change the way you’re operating to reduce loads. Um, you might be able to monitor to make sure that your blades are safe. You know, if you know that there’s an issue, um, you just wanna get some advanced warning before blades start falling off your, your tower. Mm. You know, and then you can push it further. Yeah. Whereas if you’ve got no information, then you have to be conservative and shut it down. Yeah. So yeah, I think there’s a whole lot that can be g- can be done there in that area.  Matthew Stead: There was a point that came up today, which I think was close to your heart, on, you know, if you’re going to be going for 1% or 2% or 0.5% AEP improvement, how do you actually measure that and how do you set up a proper experiment? So-  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah …  Matthew Stead: I, I, I love that topic. [00:06:00] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. No, it’s one that I, um, yeah, I deal with m- my clients I, I’m often… It’s one of the things that Pablo really loves to do, is to organize trials of that nature of new technologies and see if they work. But, um, yeah, asset managers are usually very, uh, focused on fast results. You know, they’ve got a, a big problem and they want a solution now, so they wanna just roll out the new technology over an entire wind farm. But if you do that, then it’s almost impossible. Unless you get, like, a huge benefit, like, uh, 10% gains or, you know, like reduce your failures by 50% or more, it’s really hard to actually- Mm pick that out if you just replace everything. Mm. Whereas if you do a really, really good, um, trial plan- Systematic. Yeah … and you match pairs very well so that you have, you know, a control for each turbine and there’s- so many variables in a wind farm. It’s not, it’s not as easy as just, like, randomly choosing 50% to do and not do. Mm. Mm. Mm. Like, you have to, you know, put some work into the trial design, and then, you know, like, do your statistical calculations ahead of time to know how long it’s gonna take you to get s- statistical [00:07:00]significance. So then you don’t just have a gut feeling about- Yep … how something went. You’ve actually got numbers, and then you can take those numbers to, you know, other wind farms that you’ve got- Yeah and, and know what’s going on much better.  Matthew Stead: Worst study is an inconclusive study.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Definitely.  Allen Hall: Well, that comes back to the data analysis- Mm … which a lot of operators mentioned, and how much data there is and what to do with it, and it did seem like a couple of operators have chosen some AI tools, varying degrees, all the way down from Microsoft Copilot to something much more complicated. Uh, but I think there’s, uh, getting that d- to the last 1, 2, 3%, you’re going to need those tools- Absolutely … because what do you choose? Do you choose a blade? Do you choose a gearbox? Do you choose a generator? Do you go to the substation to get that percentage point or two Without having some really powerful tools- Mm. you may be wasting your time [00:08:00] and money.  Matthew Stead: Mm.  Allen Hall: Which is a, a, a very interesting, uh, aspect to wind energy because it’s such an industrial business that, uh, we haven’t used heavy computational tools, uh, un- until really now.  Matthew Stead: Mm.  Al

  2. 1d ago

    Germany Guarantees Offshore Prices, England Wind Surge

    Allen covers Germany’s new offshore wind price guarantee, England’s onshore wind revival, wind for Korean chip plants, and Aeris debt trouble. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. Last summer … Germany held an auction for new offshore wind capacity. Not a single company bid. Zero. This week Berlin put forward a new law to fix that. The old system asked developers to pay for the right to build in the North Sea and the Baltic. TotalEnergies and BP bid billions of euros … then walked away. So the new plan introduces contracts for difference. Build the farm … and the government backstops the price of electricity. The offshore wind association wants abandoned projects … up to sixteen gigawatts … put back on the auction block under the new rules. That is fifty billion euros worth of wind farms waiting for a second chance. The cabinet vote could come as early as next week. Stay in Europe but head west. England just posted its highest number of onshore wind applications in a decade. About forty-five proposals. Before Labour lifted the Conservatives’ ban two years ago … applications averaged one megawatt a month. Now they are running at thirty-six megawatts a month. But here is the catch. The average English wind farm has just two turbines. Eight megawatts. In Scotland … the average is nine turbines and fifty-nine megawatts. England is back in the game. It is just playing small. Now cross the Pacific. South Korea selected Pacifico Energy Korea to develop the Jindo offshore wind cluster. Two-point-one-three gigawatts. That is the second and third phases of a broader three-point-two-gigawatt project off the southern coast. And here is the connection worth noting. The region is also building the Honam Semiconductor Cluster … a major chip fabrication site. Semiconductor fabs need enormous and reliable power. This wind cluster is being positioned as the energy source to feed it. Wind as baseload for chip manufacturing. That is a new kind of offtaker. Now head to Brazil. Aeris Energy makes wind turbine blades. This week the company told its creditors it needs to restructure again. Roughly three hundred and thirty million dollars in debt. Aeris already restructured last year. But revenue fell forty-eight percent in the first half of this year. The company lost roughly fifty-three million dollars. It tried to find a buyer. No one came forward. Remember TPI Composites filing Chapter Eleven in Houston last year? The independent blade business keeps getting harder. Back to North America. In Nova Scotia … Port Hawkesbury Paper is spending four hundred and fifty million dollars on thirty-one Nordex turbines. They will be the biggest onshore turbines in North America. Each one … six-point-nine megawatts. And they carry electrothermal technology that prevents ice from forming on the blades. They operate down to minus thirty Celsius. Last January … Nova Scotia’s existing turbines dropped from three hundred and fifty megawatts to seventy-five in a single evening when the cold hit. For anyone building in northern climates … cold-weather performance is no longer optional. And in Minnesota … Xcel Energy broke ground on two projects this week. A hundred-and-eighty-five-mile transmission line that can carry four thousand megawatts of new wind and solar to the grid. And alongside it … a four-hundred-and-twenty-megawatt natural gas peaking plant in Lyon County for the days when the wind stops. So what does this week tell us? Germany’s auction reform is the story to watch. If Berlin gets contracts for difference right … sixteen gigawatts of stalled projects could come back to life. England proves that removing a political ban releases demand … but the scale gap with Scotland shows that planning culture matters as much as planning law. The blade supply chain is still under stress. If you are in procurement … know your supplier’s balance sheet. South Korea is tying offshore wind directly to semiconductor manufacturing. That kind of industrial offtaker changes the project finance equation. And from Minnesota to Nova Scotia … the message is the same. Transmission … peaking power … cold-weather reliability. The turbine is the easy part. The system around it is where the money and the risk still live. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 24th of August 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

    Germany Guarantees Offshore Prices, England Wind Surge

  3. Aug 18

    Vestas Shares Jump 20%, UK Blocks Ming Yang Factory

    Vestas doubles second quarter profit and adds €4.7 billion in market value overnight. Plus EnBW finishes He Dreiht after a V236 blade break, the UK blocks Ming Yang’s Scottish factory, and India rules turbines are movable goods. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 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, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And three out of the four of us will be in Melbourne Australia talking to a number of operators and interested parties about WOMA 2027. Matthew, where will we be the couple of days we’re in Melbourne? Matthew Stead: So, um, first of all, we’ve got the Pullman, uh, East Melbourne, which is, uh, where the venue will be for, for 2027. Um, so that’ll be our home base. Um, we’ve got around about eight meetings planned already. So what we’re doing is we’re talking to the operators and a few other industry, um, players about [00:01:00] what we need to talk about, how we’re gonna move the industry forward in Australia. Uh, so it’s gonna be jam-packed, but there’s a little bit of time left on the Friday afternoon if there’s any late-minute, um, people that wanna get in contact and catch up with us, um, for next Thursday, Friday, or actually Friday. Uh, so yeah, it’s gonna be a, a jam-packed time. I think we’re gonna be tired, too many coffees, and talking to all the key, all the key operators, uh, about what they wanna hear about and how we can move the, the industry forward. Allen Hall: And if someone wants to put an input into the WOMA panel about what will be discussed at WOMA 2027, Matthew, how would they do that? How do they get ahold of you?  Matthew Stead: Well, we have a wonderful website, and that’s got all the details you could ever want. Um, you can also register on the website, so please register. Otherwise, um, I’m sure we’re gonna be a sellout this year for sure. So woma2027.com.  Rosemary Barnes: I just wanna add that when people talk to [00:02:00] me about the event, they always say how they love that the topics are so relevant, and the reason why that they’re so relevant is because we make sure to go around to operators and find out what are the issues that they’re really dealing with. So anybody that’s thinking of attending, even if you can’t, you know, meet us up, meet up with us in Melbourne, get in touch and tell us what are the, yeah, what are the topics that you’re struggling with that you’re not, um, you’re having trouble finding enough information, having trouble finding the people that can help you. And y- yeah, like we take all of that information, and that’s how we come up with our agenda each year. And yeah, I mean, for us, that’s the, the main thing is that this has to be really relevant, up-to-date information for the industry, and we need your help to make sure it stays that way. I  Matthew Stead: mean, that’s what we’ve done the last two years, so this is– we’re just repeating the formula, um, listening to the operators and getting the good topics and the good speakers. Allen Hall: Well, Vestas has had a good quarter. Uh, the, for the last couple of years, honestly, s- [00:03:00] Vestas has been really thin on margins. There was questions about it continuing on. Rising costs mostly, uh, supply chains, especially during COVID, were bad. Uh, and, uh, but for the most part, the shareholders stayed attached. Well, that story is changing rapidly. The world’s largest turbine maker posted second quarter operating profits of $400- €46 million, more than double what the analysts had expected, and it’s raised its full-year margin guidance alongside half-year results for the first time in a decade. The shares climbed about 20% in Copenhagen, adding roughly €4.7 billion of market value in a single session. Now, the chief executive, uh, Henrik Andersen, ha- put it plainly to, uh, uh, in a couple of news sources that something much bigger is happening and Vestas is gonna be the, the leader in wind. That’s how I read it, that everybody [00:04:00]at Vestas was super happy with the, the change in direction and things were moving up steadily. But a 20% jump in a day is remarkable. You don’t see that in large industrial businesses like wind energy. Matthew, this has real implications on what happens next for Vestas because success like this usually means more orders.  Matthew Stead: Yeah, I wonder what’s going on under the hood there. Um, I mean, Vestas is a quality company, although, although can I just do a quick segue? How many turbines were installed in Denmark in the last, uh, two years? Like last year and the year before?  Allen Hall: I don’t know. How many?  Matthew Stead: I believe it was eight turbines installed onshore in Denmark last year, and the year before it was 12. So, you know, maybe, maybe Vestas needs to focus on their own backyard a little bit as well. Allen Hall: I’m not sure there’s a lot of opportunity there. Yeah, onshore.  Matthew Stead: How can you ever be full? I mean, there’s always, um, [00:05:00] uh, you know, um, you know, resiting or, um, you know, upgrades and-  Rosemary Barnes: You know what? Allen and I are probably gonna get some time in Jutland, uh, later this year, um, and that area and the old wind turbines there was actually the inspiration for my whole YouTube channel. It just, ’cause there’s, you know, there’s turbines there from, the earliest one is, um, from the ’70s and still going. I think it’s one and a half megawatts, actually huge for, for that time. Um, and it was like community made, um, at Tvind. But anyway, I’m interested to revisit the site and have a look and see are these, you know, all these old turbines still there. It’s only, like six years since I went through and did the experience but for the most part, they don’t seem to be yet pulling down the, the small old ones and putting up big ones. There’s a lot of, a lot of them are community owned. Um, and yeah, I mean, Danish people love wind turbines, but there’s only so many that you can have onshore. Like, people are happy to live near them by, you know, the standards of people in other countries, but you don’t want [00:06:00] one in your literal backyard. I think that there is, there, there is a, a limit to how many more onshore wind turbines that you can get in that area and offshore expansion is the more likely way to go. Um, and also I think it’s, it’s, it’s good to recognize that if you have a domestic only or a domestic first strategy, that will only get you so far and then you have to expand, and I think Denmark did that really well. I think Germany a little bit less. I think that Enercon were a bit surprised, um, by their strategy. It, uh, they had a real hard time anyway when they had to transition away from mostly Germany to getting overseas. And obviously, like if you look at China, they have most of their installations are in China. They are trying so hard to get outside of China because it’s not, like even a market as big as China, it’s got decades to go before it will be full. Um, you can still recognize that that’s not your, like long-term strategy for growth has to involve expansion, I think.  Allen Hall: I think Vestas, regardless of what happens in Denmark, is making a play for the United States. That seems to be [00:07:00] where a significant effort is happening at the moment and on offshore. Their– Vestas seems very excited about the offshore opportunities. Of course, there’s a ton of wind turbines gonna be installed in the UK and, and all around Northern Europe. Offshore, the opportunities to buy turbines, there’s only a couple that you could get today. Uh, uh, the GE Vernova offerings I, I don’t think are gonna fit the mold, and I don’t know if GE’s even actively selling. So their competitor realistically is Siemens Gamesa, which does seem like the smaller player at the minute versus Vestas, which is heavily pushing the V236 and will fill order books like crazy, I think, uh, just based upon the, the history they’ve had and everybody knowing who they are. So Also on the move in Australia, right? Vestas is huge in Australia right now.  Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s really good that their, um, yeah, finances, uh, are [00:08:00] looking a bit better ’cause it’s been funny. Like, I tried early on in my wind career to invest in, you know, wind turbine manufacturers knowing that there would be immense growth, and I was right. There, there was immense growth. Not that that was so hard to figure out that there would be, but it did not lead to any kind of, um, return on, on anything, you know. Like, that did not keep pace with the just general market. Um, so I, I stopped trying to, stopped trying to invest to that. But it has been really, really hard for the companies to, you know, raise money or y- you know, do any of the things that they need to do because they’ve always, like, they’re growing, growing, growing, but finances has been so tight that it has been a real constraint on the amount of engineering that they could do, and I really hope that Vestas are gonna take this opportunity that they’ve got compared to, you know, a lot of the other manufacturers. Vestas do have really strong, um, innovation and, yeah, engineering capabilities for doing– you know, developing new technologies and improving them, and I really h

  4. Aug 17

    Danish Data Center Heats a Town, Vestas Breaks UK Record

    A Danish data center will heat a town with its waste heat, Sumitomo buys into Celtic Sea floating wind, and Cadeler orders two more vessels. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. A data center broke ground in Denmark this week … and the plan is for it to help heat the town. Not a slogan. But a pipe. Let me explain. The project is called Dansk Data Center 1. They put shovels in the ground on August thirteenth at the Port of Esbjerg in southern Denmark. The owners are the pension fund PensionDanmark … the real estate firm Thylander … and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. That last name should sound familiar. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has raised about forty-three billion euros across fifteen funds … and builds energy projects in more than thirty countries. This time it is building a data center. Eleven and a half megawatts. By the standards of this business … that is small. But watch how they built it. The waste heat will go into the town’s district heating system … in partnership with the local utility … Din Forsyning. The cooling water runs in a closed loop and gets used again. And the plant can raise or lower its power draw to match whatever the Danish grid has to spare that hour. The chief technology officer put it plainly. The goal is for the data center not to be a burden … but an active part of a balanced energy system. Commissioning is set for October of twenty twenty-seven. Now … hold that model in your head. Because on the other side of the world … they are still doing it the old way. Centuria Industrial is a warehouse landlord. Australia’s largest pure-play industrial property trust. This week … in its full-year results … it told investors it is chasing more than two hundred and fifty megawatts of data center capacity. Some of that is expansion at sites it already owns. A twelve-megawatt building in Melbourne bought from Telstra back in twenty twenty. A small center in Toowoomba, Queensland. Another in Perth … leased to Fujitsu. But the rest of that plan is warehouses. Old industrial yards in Victoria and Western Australia that Centuria wants to turn into data halls. And here is the tell. For three of those sites … the company has already filed power applications. Not planning applications. Power applications. Because in this business … the grid connection is the product. Centuria’s head of funds management says Australian demand is now outpacing supply. He is not wrong. And he is not alone. So … two continents. Two data center stories. One built as a part of the power system. The other waiting in line for it. Either way … the load is coming. Which brings us to the people building the supply. Start in the Celtic Sea … about forty kilometers off the British coast. There is a floating wind project out there called Gwynt Glas. That is Welsh for blue wind. Up to one and a half gigawatts. This week … Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation bought a third of it. The other two thirds are held by EDF … and by Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board. Three equal partners. Now … Sumitomo has been investing in European offshore wind since twenty fourteen. But this is its first floating project anywhere in the world. And the timeline will test your patience. Consent applications do not even begin until twenty twenty-eight. Commercial operation is targeted for the late twenty thirties. That is a Japanese trading house writing a check today for electricity that shows up in fifteen years. The deal sits under a memorandum signed with the British government last year. Britain wants the Celtic Sea built. Japan just volunteered to help pay for it. Now up to Scotland. Vestas has installed the most powerful onshore wind turbine in Britain. It stands at Sanquhar II … between Dumfries and Galloway and East Ayrshire. The machine comes off the EnVentus platform … a bigger rotor married to a higher-rated generator. More energy out of the same wind. That project spent ten years in planning. And Vestas has more than six hundred megawatts of these machines under construction across Britain. But here is the argument going on inside the industry. Everybody is building bigger turbines. And yet a Vestas executive said this week … quote … we firmly believe bigger does not automatically mean better. Project economics are under pressure. In Germany and the Netherlands … you cannot get a blade that size under a bridge or through a village. Scotland is empty enough to try it. Britain now has about thirty-three gigawatts of wind … split about evenly between onshore and offshore. Onshore space is running out. So every new turbine has to do more work than the one before it. And then … there are the ships. Cadeler runs the largest fleet of jack-up wind turbine installation vessels in the world. This week … it ordered two more. The yard is COSCO Shipping Offshore in Qidong, China. The price … about eight hundred and five million euros. Call it nine hundred and thirty million dollars. Delivery … twenty thirty and twenty thirty-one. That will bring the fleet to fourteen vessels. And understand what these things are. The current class carries a deck of five thousand six hundred square meters … a payload over eighteen thousand tonnes … and a crane that lifts more than three thousand three hundred tonnes. Six extra-large monopile foundations per trip. The new class … they say … will be bigger still. Meanwhile the newest ship … the Wind Ace … is finishing commissioning right now. Its first job is East Anglia Two for ScottishPower Renewables … starting in twenty twenty-seven. And here is the number that tells you the most. Cadeler’s order backlog stands above three billion dollars. Eighty-two percent of that work is on projects where the customer has already taken a final investment decision. Nobody orders a nine-hundred-million-dollar ship for twenty thirty-one on a hunch. So … here is what to watch. For years this industry has fought one bottleneck at a time. Permits. Then supply chain. Then vessels. Now the bottleneck is the grid connection itself. Centuria filed power applications before planning applications. Because in twenty twenty-six … the scarce resource is not land or steel or capital. It is a slot on the transmission network. That changes the game for wind developers. The projects that win will not be the ones with the biggest turbines or the cheapest blades. They will be the ones that show up with a grid solution already in hand. Denmark just showed what that looks like. A data center that flexes its load … feeds heat back to the community … and makes the grid operator’s job easier. If you are developing a wind farm today … and you are not thinking about who will consume your electrons and how … you are already behind. The old pitch was … we generate clean power. The new pitch is … we solve a grid problem. That is the difference between a project that gets built and one that sits in a queue for five years. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 18th of August … twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

    Danish Data Center Heats a Town, Vestas Breaks UK Record

  5. Aug 13

    AC883 Joins Muehlhan Wind Service

    Lars Bendsen, founder and CEO at AC883, joins to discuss the Muehlhan Wind Service acquisition and Canada’s aging turbine fleet. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Lars, welcome back to the podcast. Lars Bendsen: Thank you so much, Allen. Allen Hall: A lot has happened since I talked to you last. I saw some of the announcements on LinkedIn. I was really excited for you. So AC883 has news. Lars Bendsen: We have news. It was about a month ago now, but yes, things have been going very well. Allen Hall: Muehlhan has acquired AC883, which is a company you started how many years ago? Lars Bendsen: I started AC883 12 years ago. From my dining room table, basically. Allen Hall: Wow. And it’s grown to quite the business over time. Lars Bendsen: Yes, we have been expanding, especially the last five years after my son came in. He has been the main driver, so we’ve been expanding like crazy the last five years. And, well, getting older. Now we are at a point where we should extend, spend more. And then when Muehlhan, one of the biggest companies in the wind industry, looked our way, it was an easy decision to make. Very easy. Allen Hall: Muehlhan is well known for being a leader in the ISP world in Europe, and a little bit in America. They’re still making a presence here. That’s why they wanted to talk to you, I’m sure, because AC883 has a nice Canadian market. People trust you and rely upon you, because you bring the quality people over, plus you have all the resources to get to parts that you can’t acquire in Canada and the United States. You know who to call. It’s part of that Danish connection. And that makes a lot of sense, because I do think as we see the industry mature, those quality companies like AC883 are very valuable. They see them as being a huge resource to the industry. Lars Bendsen: As I said, it makes us really proud that a big company is looking our way, and it’s been a very smooth transition. As you were talking about earlier, the industry is maturing, meaning also big is getting bigger, and you need more horsepower, you need more muscle. And we also needed that, because we’re expanding and there’s only so much we can do. And we’re all getting older, so at a certain time you have to do something. Allen Hall: Sure, but it comes at a point where you’ve proven yourself time and time again. How many times have you grown an industry in your lifetime? You’ve done it many, many times. That’s why AC883 has always been the relied-upon source for so many things. Now Muehlhan brings a lot of advantages and a lot of horsepower to the organization. Because as you have gotten larger, you realize there’s a lot of back office things that need to happen. Safety, gear, equipment. It’s not just putting technicians on ropes out on site. There’s all the management of that. That’s where size matters. Lars Bendsen: Size matters, and also the whole health and safety perspective. You’re putting more staff behind the scenes than actually in front of the scenes. So it’s also extremely expensive. And now we’re expanding our offering, because under the Muehlhan umbrella we can do everything, including main component changes, which we didn’t do before. We decided before that anything we need a crane for, we do not do. Allen Hall: Right, I remember that. Lars Bendsen: Because it’s a completely different animal from a health and safety perspective, equipment, et cetera. And now in Canada, the company we’re going to be merging with, that’s what they do. They’re really strong in lifting and really strong in installation of turbines, complete wind farms. Where we are strong on the O&M side. And our primary customer is the asset owners. Allen Hall: Asset owners love you. Lars Bendsen: We hope so. We think so. Allen Hall: I know they do. Lars Bendsen: Where the other company is more focused on the OEM side. So there’s actually a really good mix in that. And we don’t step on each other’s toes, because we are focused on the O&M part and they’re focused on installation of turbines. So it’s a perfect match in so many ways. Allen Hall: And particularly in Canada, because the Canadian market is poised to put a lot of turbines up in the next couple of years. But at the same time, there’s an older fleet there, and spare parts is an issue. Some of the blades and the repairs are a little more complicated just because of the age of the turbine. And there are a lot of spares and components that you have access to and can bring into the Canadian market. You keep those turbines that are 15, 20 years old running. Lars Bendsen: Yes, we’re in a sweet spot in that respect, where the turbines are getting older but they’re not too old. So we need to keep them alive. And also, many owners still have the high PPA, which also means they want to do it. So there is a growing market for the O&M component, no doubt about it. But also, whatever happens in the US, leave that aside, they have a lot of good stuff happening in Canada on the offshore side, on the East Coast. Allen Hall: Oh, yes. Lars Bendsen: Nova Scotia. There are four big projects going out to bid, I think, within a year or so, and a lot of new projects coming up. So no doubt about it, Canada is a growing market. Where my impression is, and I have to be careful not to say too much, maybe the US is more a stagnating market. It’s maybe not growing as fast as it used to be. Of course, I don’t know enough to be smart about saying it. I’m just saying my impression is it’s more a flat market. Allen Hall: Today. Lars Bendsen: Today, today. Allen Hall: But tomorrow it’s something else. Lars Bendsen: That’s the charm of the unpredictability. Allen Hall: Exactly. Welcome to wind, right? It’s unpredictable. Well, I think that’s good, because the Canadian market is one of those pieces that a lot of Americans don’t pay attention to, because it’s not the same scale. Lars Bendsen: Not yet. But also from the European side, every time we have talked to European vendors or customers, it’s “yeah, be in America.” Yes, but I’m talking Canada. Canada has not even been on the radar. They’re talking about it as of late, but they had not talked about anything else before. So now it’s coming on the radar. And I know the Muehlhan people are smart people. They might be seeing that too. Allen Hall: Oh, I would imagine, yes. Lars Bendsen: So I have no doubt that it makes sense. The other thing that’s critical, of course, the US is big as well, but Canada is area-wise extremely big. Allen Hall: Same width as America, roughly. That’s a big territory. Lars Bendsen: But that also means it’s further between the turbines. That means you can travel like crazy to meet very few clients. And that’s why the one company is in western Canada and we are in eastern Canada. That makes sense. There are many reasons why you have to be local in your area. Allen Hall: Part of that is what’s happening in the United States at the moment, but it’s also on the part of Canada to react to it in a positive way. Like, if America’s not going to do it, well, we’re here. We have great wind resources in Canada. And that’s what the Canadian government is saying to itself, I think. They’re realizing the opportunity to go after that wind resource is now. And not only that, because of the way America has situated itself, they can sell a lot of that power that’s going to be generated in Canada right down to the East Coast of the United States. Lars Bendsen: Yes. Well, the whole AI, the whole data center stuff. It takes seven to eight years to build a power plant. Normally they put a wind farm up in two years. You can’t avoid it, whether you want to or not. I think the Canadians are a little bit optimistic right now, to say, “If you don’t want to do it, we will do it.” And I think we are very happy, and we will see by the end of 2028 who’s happy where. But it’s all good. Allen Hall: Right. Lars Bendsen: It’s all good. But again, by that time, well, only now I’m retired officially, so… Allen Hall: What does that mean? What does retired officially mean? Lars Bendsen: I don’t know. But I’m retired in the respect that Muehlhan bought the company, and Jannik, my son, who’s been running my company— Allen Hall: Jannik is awesome. Lars Bendsen: —he’s been running my company anyhow the last three years. So there’s no change in personnel, same person, people know the same him. Same place, same locations. Nothing has changed at all. Same reasons as before. We just have more horsepower and more offerings to do, and we’re very happy, because we needed that too. Just the whole thing about main component routines. Now we can do it. We couldn’t do that before. Allen Hall: There’s a lot of need for that. Lars Bendsen: As you said, the aging fleet, they need to do main components. We need to lift a whole rotor down, different stuff. So that’s good. Allen Hall: Isn’t that exciting, though? Lars Bendsen: It’s very exciting. Especially for our team. And I’m so proud and happy sitting on the sideline and following it. It’s amazing. Allen Hall: Well, you’re not going to sit there and let them do main component exchanges without going and watching that, right? You’re going to have to go at least take a look at that. Lars Bendsen: I can’t go on site, so I can sit from the highway and look at it. Allen Hall: They’ll give you a hard hat, don’t worry. Lars Bendsen: Oh, I

    AC883 Joins Muehlhan Wind Service

  6. Aug 11

    ORE Catapult Blade Survey, Siemens Gamesa Turns a Profit

    ORE Catapult wants industry blade failure data, Siemens Gamesa posts its first profit since 2022, and Vattenfall sweeps Denmark’s offshore auction. Fill out the ORE Catapult survey! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Sted, and Yolanda Padron. And it has been a real interesting week out in the renewable land, uh, if you’ve been watching some of the news, and we’re gonna talk about a number of those stories this week. But I wanna lead off with what ORE Catapult is doing over in the UK. So if, if you haven’t followed ORE Catapult, they are a, a research investigative arm and a huge proponent of wind, offshore wind in the United Kingdom, and they’ve done a, a tre- really tremendous amount of work in some of the, uh, particular problems that exist in wind trying to help [00:01:00] solve them. They have a survey that’s out, and if you haven’t seen it, you can just Google ORE Catapult and put in survey, and you’ll come to either an article or get to their site. And Rosemary and Yolanda, there’s a couple of particular items that they’re asking questions about. Uh, a lot of it is asking specific questions about torsional stability of blades. Have you seen more difficulty with torsion? Is… Do we need a torsion test? I think that was one of the questions. Uh, also looking at ranking of the different issues that happen with blades in particular. That’s what I noticed. Uh, you know, where’s lightning? Where’s blade connections? Where’s structural issues? Where do you rank all those different things? And I, I have not seen a survey like this in quite a while. Is this something that we need to do more of? I know [00:02:00] ORE Catapult will get a huge amount of feedback, at least I hope, over in the UK and, and around Europe. I don’t think many Americans are gonna be contributing to that too much since you don’t have a lot of offshore wind. But is this going in the right direction? Do we need more of these industry surveys about structural blade issues?  Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I think these surveys are a really good idea. Uh, the only thing that scares me from the owner side is that sometimes there’s a little bit of, uh- Teams don’t really love the idea of sharing information that might seem like it’s, um, like intellectual property to their internal teams. Even if as an engineer, of course, you love the idea of sharing and finding out like, um, what everybody else is, is experiencing on their site. Um, and so I really hope that the teams can really look, like their internal teams can really look past that because this would be a really great tool [00:03:00] for everybody to use. I know I looked at the survey myself and some of the questions kind of gave people the, the opportunity to kind of anonymize their data and then just kind of share it and have it. It seemed like it, it would probably be a platform that everybody could look at or everybody that, that shared could look at. And I think that it could be really, really good for operators to be able to know kind of if what they’re seeing on site is normal and just to be able to see what they’re signing up for when there’s a new site coming in. Or if it’s a site that’s been operational for a while, you can see what’s, hopefully, what’s happening to a quite older site than yours. So just to, to be able to be a bit more prepared, um, since a lot of these sites are from different own- owners. But I think it’s a really good idea.  Allen Hall: The survey asked questions about leading edge erosion, torsional loads, root joint integrity, lightning damage, manufacturing defects, which is a big [00:04:00] issue right now, extreme loading events, which also, uh, is, uh, coming about more often, uh, repair performance, and end of life fatigue. So there’s a, a series of questions about that and when do you experience these items in the lifetime of a blade. Is it more towards the beginning of the operation or more towards the end? That is important to know ’cause it, how you go about managing blades depends on that. The torsional questions were more specific. Uh, in your experience, how well understood are the effects on blade longevity of torsional loads compared to bending loads? And I think that relates back to some of the, uh, issues that have been seen on some offshore blades where there’s no existing test for torsion because it’s so hard to do. Whereas bending loads, we pretty well understand that and can do lifetime testing essentially for, for bending loads. So the torsional one I think is gonna raise a lot of question marks to hopefully with people, and we can come up [00:05:00] with a, a better approach to that.  Yolanda Padron: Hopefully, yeah. I think this is, I mean, this is just a really good idea to if, if everybody could partake. Um, I would really love to see something similar if people could in, in onshore. And so just something that’s, that’s shared a, uh, a little bit more widely I think would be really, really great. Uh, the only thing that might stre- or not stress me out, but- you know, I think people need to be careful about is just making sure that you’re not, um, that you actually use your data and not just kind of like, “Oh, I know that I remember this terrible lightning damage that I got in this really, really bad area, so I’m gonna mark as though most of my lightning damage happens in that bad area.” So just, just make sure you don’t use confirmation bias for, for that, but  Matthew Stead: I can also add to it as well ’cause, um, we’ve done a fair bit of work with all Catapult over the years, um, particularly through the new IEC standard for blade O&M. Um, and, uh, [00:06:00] definitely through the new blade O&M standard, the topic of blade twist has come up multiple times. Um- And also adding to that, you know, our organization has done twist on, twist measurements on 100 meter blades, and the twist that we measured was more than the OEM expected. Um, so I think this is a bit of a sleeper topic, um, and I think OR Catapult is doing the right thing by gathering more information. Allen Hall: There is a l- little database that’s gonna be put together, at least looking at the questions. Question 12, and everybody hopefully will go in and, and participate in the survey, but it says, “Would you be interested in sharing redacted failure data into a industry-wide database to help inform research agenda for blade development and O&M tools and solutions?” That is a great idea. Having a database so we understand the scale of problems and can put some numbers [00:07:00] to them, and then we can do some more research in those areas, and focus research where we’re actually gonna spend money in the right places, which has been my fight for the last five, six years, where we spend a lot of money, but not necessarily where we need to. That’s a great question, and hopefully OR Catapult does p- put together a database.  Rosemary Barnes: Companies really, really, really struggle to provide access to their data. Like, um, it, y- yeah, it, it’s, it’s very hard to get it beyond just using for their own specific project. I’ll be, I’ll be so happy if this database gets up and becomes publicly available so that every- everybody can use it to create the solutions that the industry needs. But I know how hard a challenge it is, so I’m wishing them heaps of, heaps of luck to get it to work.  Matthew Stead: And can I also add that, um, OR Catapult also did a wonderful presentation at Blades Europe, where they talked about life extension. They talked about the actual loading on the blades, um, influencing the fatigue life. And so I think, you know, that excellent [00:08:00] database hopefully, as we talked about, gets fed into some of their work about life extension.  Allen Hall: Well, OR Catapult is trying to get ahead of blade failures before they cost money. Uh, our next company knows exactly what that costs. Siemens Gamesa is still climbing out of a serial defect problem, and it posted its first profit in four years. So we’ll be back to talk about that in a moment.  Speaker: Are you overspending on lightning repairs? Most operators are, because solving lightning damage is complicated. Weather Guard Lightning Tech helps operators reduce lightning damage. Our innovative StrikeTape lightning diverter protects over 20,000 blades worldwide. Now, StrikeTape Ultra installs faster than ever. StrikeTape Ultra cures uptower in just 15 minutes, even in cold weather. Visit weatherguardwind.com to schedule a call. Allen Hall: Siemens Gamesa has finally turned a [00:09:00] profit, its first time since 2022. Uh, now comes the hard part. Order intake in the third quarter fell 77% from 4.89 billion euros a year ago to 1.05 billion Chief Executive Christian Bruch, uh, says a lot of the offshore projects that were originally planned are slipping, and as we’ve seen in the news, and that developers are not willing to make final investment decisions right now. Uh, in Germany, developers are lobbying to hand 16 gigawatts of offshore sites back to the states, and, and Bruch says that the, the capacity is, is not going to be built. Onshore, uh, the relaunched 5.X platform is ramping up slowly after the serial defect shutdown, with approvals still holding some orders back. So Siemens Gamesa is going to make a push, or [00:10:00] Omtera I guess it is called now, w- is going to make a push, uh, into the 5.X machine and continue on on the offsho

  7. Aug 10

    Judge Ends Pentagon Wind Freeze, RWE Exits US Offshore

    Allen covers a judge lifting the Pentagon’s wind freeze, RWE’s $1.22B US offshore exit, and TotalEnergies buying Shell’s European renewables. 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. You know … there is an old saying. When one door closes … another one opens. Well this week in wind energy … a whole lot of doors were swinging. Let us start in Washington. For months … the Pentagon had quietly stopped reviewing wind energy project applications. More than a hundred and fifty onshore wind projects … stuck in limbo. The Defense Department claimed that drones in Ukraine had changed the game. Wind turbines … they said … could blind radar to incoming threats. So they hit the brakes. But on Thursday … a federal judge said … not so fast. Judge Karin Immergut … a Trump appointee no less … issued a preliminary injunction. Resume the reviews … she ordered. Follow the law Congress wrote. The law gives the Pentagon seventy-five days for a preliminary review. As of late July … not a single one had been completed since the halt began in May. When government lawyers were asked to name one project they had reviewed … they could not name a single one. The judge told them plainly. If you want to change the rules … go ask Congress. Now … while one arm of the government was being told to do its job … another arm was writing checks. German energy giant RWE … handed back its American offshore wind leases. New York. California. Louisiana. In return … the U.S. Department of the Interior cut RWE a check for one-point-two-two billion dollars. RWE is the fifth developer to walk away from American offshore wind under this administration. The company had spent more than a billion dollars on those leases. Years of planning. Investment. Partnership with federal agencies. But RWE said there is simply no path forward to permit these projects … for the foreseeable future. So where does the $1.22B go? Nine hundred million dollars into Louisiana LNG. Three hundred million into natural gas turbine reservations. Fifteen gas peaking projects across the country. A company that came to America to build wind farms … is now building gas plants instead. But here is the thing about RWE. They are not leaving the wind business. They are leaving American offshore wind. Globally … RWE operates eighteen offshore wind farms. Four more under construction. And nearly seven gigawatts secured in the United Kingdom’s latest auction. America said no. The rest of the world said … come on in. And speaking of Europe … TotalEnergies … the French oil major … just bought Shell’s entire onshore renewables business in Europe. Four gigawatts of solar and wind. Five hundred megawatts already running or under construction in Italy and the Netherlands. Three-and-a-half gigawatts more in the pipeline across Italy … the United Kingdom … and Spain. And in the same breath … TotalEnergies sold a fifty percent stake in a one-point-two gigawatt European portfolio to KKR … for an enterprise value of one-point-eight billion euros. Build it. Sell half. Keep operating it. That is the model. Now let us fly east … to India. GE Vernova just landed a hundred-and-sixty-three megawatt wind order from American developer Enfinity Global. Forty-three turbines. Three-point-eight megawatts each. Headed for the Fatehgarh wind farm in Rajasthan. Deliveries start late this year. And those turbines will be built at GE Vernova’s factory in Pune … which can turn out fifteen hundred megawatts a year. India is pushing for five hundred gigawatts of renewable energy. Meanwhile … up in Denmark … a Danish wind tower maker named Welcon is raising its voice. Swedish utility Vattenfall just won two offshore wind tenders in Denmark. But when asked whether they would use European-made turbines … Vattenfall would not say. Welcon’s chief executive Jens Risvig Pedersen said … and I quote … “It would be completely absurd not to buy European products for the two new Danish offshore wind farms. That would simply shut down the European industry.” The Danish trade union Dansk Metal agreed. Chinese turbines … they said … should not be financed with Danish taxpayer money. Vattenfall says it has not decided yet. But the debate is on. And finally … a milestone that happened so quietly … nobody noticed. The world just crossed three terawatts of installed solar power. It took ten years to build the first terawatt. Less than three years for the second. And not even two more years for the third. Seventy-four countries now have at least one gigawatt of solar installed. That is up from forty-two in twenty-twenty. BloombergNEF expects nine terawatts by twenty thirty-six. But here is the catch. Without batteries … solar hits a ceiling. Places like Australia and California already have so much solar that electricity prices go negative during the day. You heard that right. They pay people to use power. The answer is battery storage. But batteries are not able to keep up with the pace of solar. Now … if you step back from all of this … something interesting emerges. Nobody in these stories is arguing about whether wind works. Not the judge in Oregon. Not RWE. Not even the Pentagon. The debate has moved on. The question is no longer … can you build a wind farm. The question is … who gets to decide where one goes. Think about that. A federal judge did not rule that wind turbines are safe or good or necessary. She ruled that the government cannot ignore its own laws. The science was not on trial. The process was. RWE did not surrender its leases because offshore wind failed. It surrendered them because one government made permitting impossible … while eighteen other wind farms in its global portfolio kept spinning. And TotalEnergies did not buy four gigawatts of European renewables out of charity. It bought them because Shell … an oil company … decided those assets no longer fit its strategy. One oil major’s exit is another’s entrance. The assets did not lose value. They changed hands. That is the story underneath all these headlines. Wind energy has crossed a threshold that most industries never reach. It is no longer competing on technology. It is competing on governance. The turbines work. The economics work. The engineering works. What varies … country by country … is whether the rules of the road are clear enough for capital to show up. And capital … as we saw this week … will always find the door that is open. That is the state of the wind industry for the 10th of August … twenty twenty-six. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

    Judge Ends Pentagon Wind Freeze, RWE Exits US Offshore

  8. Aug 6

    IWTG Consulting on Pitch Bearing Cracks, Loose Root Inserts

    Jon Zalar, founder of IWTG Consulting, joins to discuss broken blade bolts, cracked pitch bearings, loose root inserts, and early detection. 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: Jon, welcome back to the program.  Jon Zalar: Thanks for having me.  Allen Hall: Uh, last time I saw you, we were in Melbourne- Yep … at WOMA 2026, and that was a huge event. We know we’re gonna do it again next year in March three, the 3rd through the 5th, so you’re invited back, of course- I can’t wait … if you can make it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be a good time. A lot is happening in the blade world and in the wind turbine world more broadly. A lot of things we’re hearing right now are related to blade bolt connection, pitch bearing inserts still. A lot of that still happening in the United States. What is the current status of, uh, the blade connection issues in the US? I,  Jon Zalar: I feel like it’s a growing [00:01:00] issue, not super, super fast, but it seems to be getting a little worse. There’s, you know, more bolts breaking at that joint. Um, pitch bearing cracks are, seem to be pretty common. There’s different solutions for it, and then, you know, the root inserts are another thing that we’ve talked about before that seem to be happening more and more, or maybe more and more people are finding them ’cause they’re looking. Allen Hall: What are the first indications that you have a blade bolt or some sort of joint issue at the root of a blade? What can you see?  Jon Zalar: A bolt laying in the hub bouncing around. Um, you know, from like a– looking at it from, like, the sensors on the turbine, it’s really hard to tell unless it gets really bad. Uh, some of the OEMs have some analytics developed to kinda start to indicate if there is a aero change because there’s missing bolts or root inserts are coming out, and they’re using that as a way to go figure out which ones to go inspect first. Allen Hall: Really? Yeah. You think [00:02:00] the SCADA data will give you some indication that you have a, basically a little bit of a loose blade?  Jon Zalar: Yeah. I, I, I think because the number of turbines and the number of data points you have, I think there is a pretty good analytic out there right now.  Allen Hall: Wow. All right. I think a lot of our operators have not taken advantage of that. Is, is that just b- based on the high-speed data, SCADA data, or is it low-speed data you could see that same effect?  Jon Zalar: I believe it’s on the low-speed data as well, but I bet the high-speed data was used to kinda develop it.  Allen Hall: Wow. All right. So that’s a huge help to operators. Yeah. So what are you looking for if you’re looking through SCADA data, what would be the couple of markers there that say, “Hey, maybe we ought to go look up at the– in the hub”? Jon Zalar: I don’t know exactly what they’re using, but they would basically look for maybe an imbalance or looking for certain components that are being overworked.  Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Okay.  Jon Zalar: Yeah.  Allen Hall: So your pitch actuator may be getting a little bit overworked. It would seem like one of the places- I think that, yeah … that would get loaded, right? Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: Okay. [00:03:00] And any vibration monitoring going on? Because it, it, uh, in some cases you’re– I’m hearing, like, millimeter gaps-  Jon Zalar: Correct. Yeah …  Allen Hall: between the blade and the pitch bearing.  Jon Zalar: So probably a combination of the ALC sensors, at least on a GE turbine, looking at that. But the PCH box also is looking at the tower vibration, so it could be a combination of all three. I don’t know the exact- Okay … details, but between all of that, I think there are some analytics that kinda say, “Hey, go take a look.” And then I think there’s some other companies that have- tools that go monitor it.  Allen Hall: Mm-hmm.  Jon Zalar: Dial indicators remotely or even, you know, people going up there with dial indicators to go kind of rotate the rotor and kind of see if there is gapping between the blade and the pitch bearing. Allen Hall: Is that a safe situation in your– from the gapping? I’ve heard this where they’ve basically took shims and they’re trying to measure this gap or some sort of dial indication. Is that a smart thing to do? Is it even reliable to do it that way? [00:04:00] Jon Zalar: I, I, I think there’s some reliability there. And like, you know, these are really big parts, right? So like a little bit of gap, it, it’s probably expected to a point, but growing gaps is where you should be a little more scared.  Allen Hall: So you’re– you would have to go do that quarterly, monthly, weekly? How, how often would you have to do it to see the progression? Because I’ve heard stories of, uh, a couple of weeks from nothing to hub crack to, “Oh, it took a year or more.” Jon Zalar: I think it depends on the issue. I think for– if you’re looking at that, the bolted joint itself between the root inserts and the, uh, bolts breaking itself, I, I think they’re doing about quarterly. Now, the pitch bearings inspections are also quarterly. They’re al- they’re, they’re leveraging the drone inspections for the blades, and they’re looking at the pitch bearings to see if they’re cracked, right? Uh, you guys are doing that too.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Jon Zalar: I think Coraly is doing a good job mitigating the risk, feels like.  Allen Hall: Wow. All right. [00:05:00] Yolanda, looking at pitch bearings, you’ve looked at a lot of drone images in your lifetime. Mm-hmm. How much can you see on drone images on pitch bearings? Can you see cracks and, or y- or do you see grease, which is a really indication that something is wrong in the bearing? Yolanda Padron: You can see grease. You can see the cracks pretty, pretty well. Yeah. The drone images are, are really high quality. Uh, but you did mention that it’s something that you’re seeing a lot more. Is it because there’s a lot more aging fleets, or is it a problem with a lot of the new turbines that are coming online? Jon Zalar: I, I think it’s an, I think it’s a more of a fatigue problem, so the aging of the fleet. And also, I think more people are looking at it, right? ‘Cause, like, initially the drones that were looking for blade cracks weren’t looking at pitch bearings, but then pitch bearings started cracking, so now they added that to whatever they buy off the drone companies, right? Go look at my pitch bearings, for example.  Allen Hall: Hmm.  Jon Zalar: So I, I think it’s a problem of the more you look sometimes, the more you find.  Yolanda Padron: Hmm.  Jon Zalar: Yeah.  Allen Hall: So we [00:06:00] have root insert issues, which are being addressed by a couple of different companies- Yes … uh, uh, with somewhat similar solutions. OEM is offering one right now also. Jon Zalar: I, I think there’s three solutions. There’s two uptower that are basically looking at ways to go fill the void between the root insert itself and the blade root. Um, and I– there’s another company that’s also more of a downtower solution where they’re actually, like, r- drilling out the root inserts and putting new ones in that are gonna last better, longer. Allen Hall: Okay. So the drilling out is, would be CNC onsite. Correct.  Jon Zalar: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And they’re based over in Europe. But th- the drilling out is a take the blade down, set it on the ground sort of- Yeah. Right … doing really fine machining on the, on the blade itself. So that, that’s a different, completely different insert that’s going into that-  Jon Zalar: Correct Allen Hall: new hole or- Yep … clean hole, right? So it’s a, just a, uh, totally different kind of product versus trying to inject [00:07:00] some s- sort of epoxy or resin into the, the void.  Jon Zalar: Right. Yeah. Uh, I mean, you would prefer to do it uptower. It’s gonna cost you less money.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Jon Zalar: But you wanna make sure you do it right, so I think, uh, I do foresee it being a combination of both solutions kinda going forward. Allen Hall: Is it dependent upon, like, how much damage has been already done, or what the fatigue w- uh, an estimate on what the fatigue life is?  Jon Zalar: I think it’s strictly on measurement perspective right now. So how much gapping you have, um, kinda determines what potential solutions you have.  Allen Hall: So the gaps aren’t big, right? So the, the gaps I hear are one millimeter is k- kind of sort of start a problem.  Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: Three millimeters is, “I need to be making decisions.”  Jon Zalar: Yeah. So- That, that’s what I’ve heard, too. Yes.  Allen Hall: Three millimeters is about a eighth of an inch.  Jon Zalar: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: So it’s not a lot of m-  Jon Zalar: But you can see sunlight through it if you’re s- down there. Allen Hall: Okay. That’s not… Well, you should see. That’s not  Jon Zalar: good either. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Right. Okay. So in a, in a three millimeter situation then, you’re doing what? [00:08:00] Jon Zalar: You’re trying to decide if the uptower solutions are something you wanna go

    IWTG Consulting on Pitch Bearing Cracks, Loose Root Inserts
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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.

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  • Creator
    Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    285
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026, Weather Guard Lightning Tech
  • Show Website
    The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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