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. 1d ago

    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

  2. 3d ago

    Blade Breaks at He Dreiht, Suzlon Posts Record Quarter

    A V236 blade fails during construction at He Dreiht. Plus a 53 GW US wind forecast, Suzlon’s record quarter, and what turbine noise really measures. 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 Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes. And to lead off this week, s- there’s been some trouble in the North Sea. On July 22nd, a blade failed on one of the turbines at EnBW’s 960-megawatt He Dreiht offshore wind farm. Uh, EnBW spokesperson said there were no injuries, thank goodness, and that the authorities were notified immediately, which is generally the case in Europe. They’re very safety conscious, of course. But the machine was a Vestas V236, which is a– that 15-megawatt offshore turbine that Vestas is offering. And He Dreiht is where the platform [00:01:00] has made its debut. So Vestas and EnBW are working together on an investigation, an RCA, a- along, uh, looking at the environmental impact because parts of the blade landed in the water. And the, the images I saw online were like a sheer web that was being pulled in onto a ship, so big pieces of blade. Uh, there’s gonna be 64 of these turbines going into that wind farm, but this is probably a little bit of a weird thing because it does seem like that the wind farm is under construction when the blade broke, which is not the first time this has happened, right? That we’ve seen blade breaks at, uh, Vineyard Wind and at Dogger Bank on the GE side. Is this just a construction issue, Yolanda, you think? Or is it some sort of, uh, vibration that’s happening during construction that’s putting extra stress on the blades?  Yolanda Padron: We were talking about it a little bit offline and how it might be a loading [00:02:00] issue because it’s not, uh, it’s not in the optimal operating, uh, conditions, right? Uh, but this is– It’s– I don’t like that it’s becoming a trend more than an anomaly from what we’ve seen on this podcast. Uh, Matt, I know you work a lot in solutions, right? What, what would you recommend people start doing?  Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think, um, more and more there’s ways of just checking out, you know, pre-construction, um, you know, some of the vibration modes, some of the unusual, um, wind loading when it’s in standstill, you know, different yaw angles and so forth. So there, there’s more and more ways of, um, checking out what the blade is doing when it’s in those unusual, um, sort of pre-con, pre-operation phases. So, um, you know, for instance, um, we do know that there is some sort of sometimes edgewise or flatwise vibration, which, um, you know, maybe is not normal, um, and maybe could be, be [00:03:00] thought about in a bit more detail. Um, certainly I know there are some research organizations which are looking into this and also, you know, things like blade twists. Um, so what is actually happening in terms of the, um, the twisting of the blade along, along its axis.  Allen Hall: I think the last time this happened, I remember going back and looking at patents about how to protect the blades during this construction phase. So you wanna prevent the blade from generating lift from sideways winds pretty much. So the designs that I saw were like putting like a, a netting across the blade to disrupt the airflow so that it wouldn’t generate lift. But I haven’t really seen that implemented. Maybe it is being implemented, but these loads are a little odd, right? I, I, I’m wondering if there’s any IEC certification test that looks into them, uh, just because it’s, it’s happened a couple of times now, more than a handful.  Matthew Stead: We, we saw, um, we saw that picture of some blades on the ground. [00:04:00] You remember they were in storage. Um, there was a, a strong wind that came across them when they were in storage, and there was some, some flutter and, you know, some, some damage it caused, uh, even when they were on the ground. Um, yeah, I think just thinking out loud, you know how on some, you know, wind stacks and, or, you know, turbine stacks and, um, you know, poles, you know, exhaust stacks. Sorry, that’s the word I’m looking for. Exhaust stacks. They have the, the spiral around it. You know, it’s for around vortex shedding. So maybe it’s an opportunity for, for Rosie to jump in here and, uh, and comment. But, um, maybe we can put like vortex, uh, spiral vortex, um, you know, dissipators on the, on the blades before they’re fully commissioned.  Rosemary Barnes: So it’s cer- certainly not a, a matter of the design just being a little bit wrong, right? That would mean that it would last for a, for a while and then And then break. But it, it also, it could be several things. It could [00:05:00] have been a manufacturing defect, a bad one. It could have been transport damage. Tho- those are two other things. It could have been, yeah, you know, like a, a new design feature or material that performed massively differently under real loads than what it did, um, you know, in their computer models and in their coupon tests and in their, um, static tests, fatigue tests that they did. It could be any of those things. Sometimes you do see problems where technically you’re not supposed to leave the rotor locked out for any period of time because it is not designed for the off, off-axis weird loads that you can get when the blade is oriented in a suboptimal way compared to the wind. And there have been instances where it’s like technically, you know, that was in the instruction manual, however, nobody ever followed it, and it’s only under extreme circumstances where that actually is severe enough to break it. There, there can be instances like that [00:06:00] where I would say that it- it’s pretty difficult/impossible to actually design s- for safety during any conceivable series of events during installation. The way that you would do it would be to make sure that the blade can handle any wind load and, you know, up to the maximum gust at any, at any time in any position. But having, you know, done a little bit of work, um, on blade design in my past, it is massive. That is just a massive, massive load that is y- it will never see in its lifetime. You would have such heavy, expensive blades if you actually designed it like that. Um, and so yeah, the That, that would be probably the most charitable reason for a failure where nobody really did their job wrong. It’s just kind of like some bad luck that happens every now and then.  Allen Hall: Well, it does seem like there’s a trend there between Dogger Bank, Vineyard Wind, [00:07:00] some of the things we’ve seen in China. During the construction phase, those turbines are very vulnerable and the, the blades can break. Aren’t there extra precautions that could be put in place? Like, you, you could obviously do weather forecasting, and I know that that’s done, but it does seem like it’s, uh, such a consequential problem to have a blade break on a turbine in the North Sea, near Germany. Like, that, that’s just bad PR. Even if you have all the engineering precautions in the world there, you would still maybe play it a little bit safer so this wouldn’t happen?  Rosemary Barnes: It’s really hard. Like I said, if you want to design it so that a blade won’t break under these, like, really unusual set of operating conditions that happen during construction, not during– Like, during operation it has to be able to handle whatever is thrown at it, like, no doubt. Um, everybody agrees on that, including, you know, certification bodies. But during installation, yeah, if you want your blade to be able to handle anything that [00:08:00] that area can throw at it, even, you know, one in 50, one in 100 year storm that comes up unexpectedly, I personally think I haven’t done the optimization. I wouldn’t be surprised if people had. In fact, I would be surprised if they hadn’t. But I bet that it will cost more to design every blade to withstand that than it would to lose the occasional one, you know, one out of What is it? Like one out of 500 blades or something this happens to, one out of 1,000? I, I, I don’t know, maybe even less, less than that. Um, you know, so it’s, I don’t know how much these blades cost new, but, you know, say a few hundred thousand. Uh, it’s just, it’s gonna be it, it’ll be more cost-effective to lose the odd one every now and then. And like you say, it’s bad PR, but, um, I don’t know. Is it that, like- It- … things, things happen, things break sometimes. Um, yeah, I don’t know. Is the PR that bad? I’m not sure.  Matthew Stead: So [00:09:00] I, I’ve got a question and, um, you know, on LinkedIn, you know, you see whenever there’s a, um, whenever there’s a failure on L- um, e- everyone posts about it.  Rosemary Barnes: Condition monitoring would’ve stopped this. If there had only been condition monitoring that, that turbine, then they wouldn’t have had a blade break during construction. That’s why I’m so hesitant to, to, you know, make any calls now ’cause I don’t wanna sound like one of those  Allen Hall: LinkedIn losers. LinkedIn loser.  Rosemary Barnes: I learned that the last, um, root cause analys

  3. 4d ago

    Dominion Absorbs $800M in Tariffs, Nordex Profits Double

    Allen covers Dominion’s $800M tariff hit, Eversource’s 84% profit drop, Nordex’s record quarter, and a looming floating wind vessel shortage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday, everyone. Let us start this week with a number. Eight hundred million dollars. That is what tariffs on steel and aluminum added to Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. Dominion President Bob Blue shared the damage on a second-quarter earnings call. Two hundred and thirty million dollars … just in the latest quarter alone. That is on top of the five hundred and eighty million from the quarter before. The project is eighty-one percent complete. Thirty-one turbines are already spinning … producing more than four hundred and fifty megawatts. But the finish line just moved. Completion is now expected by the end of twenty twenty-seven. Weather delays. Vessel maintenance. And some particularly complicated turbines to install. Blue says the project will still save customers money. And Dominion expects to pocket more than five hundred million dollars in savings from grid upgrade cost shifts. The total price tag … eleven-point-six billion dollars. Now … if Dominion is feeling the squeeze in Virginia … Eversource up in New England is feeling something worse. The utility’s second-quarter profit dropped eighty-four percent. Net income fell to just fifty-three-point-seven million dollars. Why? A one-hundred-and-sixty-four-million-dollar charge tied to the offshore wind projects they already sold. South Fork Wind. Revolution Wind. Eversource got out of offshore wind back in twenty twenty-four … but the bills keep coming. Higher-than-expected payments to Global Infrastructure Partners are dragging down the bottom line. So one company builds through the pain. Another walks away … and still pays for it. But here is some good news. Over in Hamburg, Germany … Nordex just posted a quarter that would make any CEO smile. Sales up sixteen percent. EBITDA … more than doubled … to two hundred and twenty-four million euros. Margins hit ten-point-three percent. Net income … one hundred and eleven million euros. Up from thirty-one million a year ago. And orders? Up thirty-two percent. Three-point-one gigawatts of new turbine orders in just one quarter. Their total order book now stands at eighteen-point-four billion euros. Nordex CEO José Luis Blanco confirmed the full-year guidance. The onshore wind giant is not just surviving. It is thriving. Now … let us go to sea. Classification society ABS says floating offshore wind is about to create a brand-new problem. Not enough ships. A new report says demand for large anchor-handling vessels and multipurpose support vessels will surge as floating wind projects go from small demonstrations to full commercial scale. Here is the number that tells the story. A single one-gigawatt floating wind farm needs about one hundred and ninety-eight anchors … and nearly two hundred kilometers of mooring lines. That is far more than a single deepwater oil and gas platform. ABS says shortages in certain vessel classes could hit as early as twenty twenty-nine. Global floating wind capacity is expected to grow from about two hundred and seventy megawatts today … to fourteen gigawatts by twenty forty. The race for ships … has begun. And speaking of ships … Japan just finished building one. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines held a naming ceremony in Nagasaki for the Wind Whale. Japan’s first coastal deck carrier built specifically for offshore wind. One hundred and forty-nine meters long. A flush deck designed so that monopiles, towers, blades and nacelles can roll right on from the stern. It even has dynamic positioning … so it can transfer cargo directly to installation vessels at sea. Built in China by Taizhou Sanfu Ship Engineering … the Wind Whale will carry foundations from a factory in Okayama to construction sites around Japan. A country that once built ships for oil … now builds them for wind. And finally … back home in Iowa. The state Supreme Court ruled that the CEO of Global Fiberglass Solutions can be held personally liable for dumping thirteen hundred used wind turbine blades across the state. CEO Donald Lilly and another executive argued they were never in Iowa. The court disagreed. Lilly signed the contracts. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird put it plainly. They were hired to recycle used wind turbine blades. Instead … they dumped them. Four hundred blades piled up along Interstate 35 near Ellsworth alone. The lesson? You can build an industry on clean energy. But you still have to clean up after yourself. So what does all of this mean … if you work in wind? It means the money is real now. Projects are not getting canceled. They are getting more expensive. And that changes the math for every engineer, every project manager, every supply chain director reading a bid today. Tariffs come and go. But an eleven-billion-dollar project does not stop on a dime. It means the vessels you need may not be there when you need them. If you are planning a floating wind project for the early twenty thirties … your vessel strategy should already be on paper. It means manufacturers who kept their discipline … who held their margins and grew their order books … are the ones writing the next chapter. And it means accountability is coming to every corner of this business. You cannot just build turbines. You have to manage the turbines. This industry asked the world to trust it with the future of energy. That trust comes with responsibility. And that is the state of the wind industry for August 3rd, 2026.

    Dominion Absorbs $800M in Tariffs, Nordex Profits Double

  4. Jul 30

    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

  5. Jul 28

    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

  6. Jul 27

    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

  7. 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

  8. 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

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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
    286
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    Clean
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    © Copyright 2026, Weather Guard Lightning Tech
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    The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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