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Nordex Q3 orders jump 30% and Vestas lands about a gigawatt in Australia. Plus why turbine factories skip Australia, high project costs, and whether batteries can replace coal. 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 covers the Trump administration’s bid to reopen Revolution Wind’s permit, a bipartisan Senate permitting deal, Nordex’s doubled third-quarter profit, and GE Vernova’s new wind chief. 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!

Jeremy Heinks, founder and CEO of CICNDT, joins to discuss the inspector shortage, Level III oversight, blade samples, drone thermal limits, and IEC updates. 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!

Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen says China barred Vestas from monitoring its own turbines. Plus Ørsted takes heat for Chinese monopiles, India’s blade design gap, and tents that beat weather delays. 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 covers Ørsted’s Hornsea 2 drone trial, the DeepWind test site, Germany’s proposed land rent cap, and Iberdrola’s Korea exit. 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!

Rosemary visits DTU Wind & Energy Systems in Denmark, where Nicolai Frost-Jensen Johansen explains rain erosion testing, tip speed, and LEP defects. 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!

Rosie returns from Denmark and shares her experiences seeing DTU blade testing, a lightning lab, and a 15 MW Vestas test turbine. 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 covers how Denmark, where modern wind began, is pushing back on China, as Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen argues to keep Chinese turbines off Europe’s grid. 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!

Morten Handberg answers the big questions around drone inspections, including how often to inspect, how many turbines to sample, and how much AI results should be qualified. Contact Morten on LinkedIn 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 crew discusses Hamburg takeaways, including the industry mood, bigger blade risks, and OEM announcements. 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! Episode Transcript Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] Every time Rosie walked past a, a, like a, a QR code with a, a prize of Lego, she had to enter.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I'm  Matthew Stead: n- I'm not quite sure, I'm not quite sure whether Rosie was actually entering her real name.  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, just like 100, 100 different fake emails. Um-  Matthew Stead: Yeah.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I also-  Matthew Stead: Yeah ...  Rosemary Barnes: do think I could grab one and run. I was considering it, 'cause, you know, I've been to a few of these events now. I would have entered probably 20 competitions, and I never, I never win  Speaker 3: 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 Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead. And this has been a busy week because everybody's been, well, Matthew and Rosemary have been in Hamburg for the big Wind Energy Hamburg show. Organizers [00:01:00] there expect 43,000 people from 100 countries to attend. There's roughly 1,600 companies and booths on the show floor. Uh, this is the big show, right? Everybody knows this is the big show, and this is the one to go to. Matthew, you were with EOLOGIX-PING for the week in the booth there. How, what, how did it go? How was it?  Matthew Stead: Uh, I don't think I've talked for, um, eight hours a day for three days in a row ever. So it, it, it was, it was crazy. So, um, uh, there were so many people there. I think, um, I, I ... There, there was some mixed feelings. So there was a lot of positive vibe about what's going on and how the industry is progressing and doing better. But at the same time, there were sort of negative comments about, like Germany next year, they were really expecting a, a big drop in the number of installations. So it was quite a mixed bag. Um, but I mean, personally, I loved seeing old friends.  Allen Hall: And Rosemary, you were not tied to a [00:02:00] booth, so you could wander around a little bit more. What did you see and hear at the show?  Rosemary Barnes: Uh, a lot. I have actually learned what a booth is for now, though, because if you don't have a booth, then you have to, like, just go from You try and meet people, and you have to navigate your way through the system, and you can't actually make appointments because you chat, you run into somebody, and then you chat to someone. And, like, you think, "Oh, I'll talk to everyone for five minutes," but you end up talking for 15 or 20 minutes. And yeah, so lots of, lots of walking. But, um, I've seen, I've seen heaps. I love these exhibitions, you know, when they've got the ... lot, a lot of them have displays. So, you know, like, there's a real, a real winch in there. I can't remember what company it was from, but it's, like, a real winch that's been in service for a long time. And you know, you can go get a sense for, uh, that scale. Real bits of rope. Um, oh, so many robots. So many robots and drones. Um, yeah. All, all kinds [00:03:00] of varieties of robots and drones, which I love. Lots of them doing very useful things. Uh, I don't know what else. About, yeah, every other stand has some, one of my ex-colleagues from LM Wind Power standing in it, in, um, a wide variety of industries. So that's kind of cool. I actually, I had some really, really great conversations with old colleagues. And, um-  Allen Hall: Mm.  Rosemary Barnes: Mm ... yeah, l- learn, yeah, always learn a lot from that. Um, yeah. I don't know. It's been good. Lots of free ice cream as well. Uh, yeah. Free ice cream, free coffees, good coffees.  Allen Hall: What were the good handouts this year? What, what were the free giveaways that everybody was distributing?  Rosemary Barnes: There's a lot of chocolates, and it's quite easy to, yeah, just grab handfuls of chocolate.  Matthew Stead: A weather dice. Is there light- is there lightning today, or is it windy?  Allen Hall: Who was offering that, Matthew?  Matthew Stead: Uh, this is, uh, GWU.  Allen Hall: All right. That's, that's a neat handout, giveaway, [00:04:00] right? Matthew Stead: Great company.  Allen Hall: Were they, were they auctioning off any cars or anything that was, like, super impressive? A million dollars?  Matthew Stead: Oh, I gotta tell a story. Like, every time Rosie walked past, uh, uh, like a, a QR code with a, a prize of Lego- She had to enter.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I'm  Matthew Stead: not, I'm not quite sure, I'm not quite sure whether Rosie was actually entering her real name or like a, a, a fake name. Rosemary Barnes: Or just like 100, 100 different fake emails. Um-  Matthew Stead: Yeah.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I also-  Matthew Stead: Yeah ...  Rosemary Barnes: every time try and convince them to just give it to me. Um, but all the LEGO is like Danish companies, and Danes are, I think, like literally the most honest people, um, most honest country on Earth. So-  Matthew Stead: Yeah ...  Rosemary Barnes: they never really, um, allow that. But I- ... do think I could grab one and run. I was considering it, 'cause, you know, I've been to a few of these events now. I would have entered probably 20 competitions, and I never, I never win, so. I  Yolanda Padron: mean, you're fast enough. You could have beat them.  Rosemary Barnes: They're limited edition sets that are not, no longer available [00:05:00] for sale or were never available for sale, so it's not like you could just say, "Oh, just go buy one, Rosie." But these sets are not, not available. There's, yeah, like lots of like little, um, offshore wind turbine and then a, like a substation. Yeah. Had like a little drone as well involved in that set. There's another, there's a Maersk has a ship with like, full of shipping containers. Um- Yeah. I, I don't know. Like, just lots of cool, cool Lego  Matthew Stead: I even, even entered on Rosie's behalf  Allen Hall: What was the vibe offshore, uh, versus onshore? 'Cause last time I attended, which was about four years ago now, there was a, a significant amount of offshore, uh, discussion and booths and vendors. Is the ratio growing more offshore versus onshore? Or what, what did that look like?  Matthew Stead: I felt the opposite. I felt it was all onshore, but- Really?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah. I think so, and it's a real contrast. 'Cause when you go to the big wind, um, conferences in Australia now, it, it's always, like, 90%-plus offshore wind, which [00:06:00] we don't have in Australia, and I've always found it so weird.  Matthew Stead: Hmm.  Rosemary Barnes: And, uh, here in Europe where they do have a whole lot of offshore wind, and that's where, you know, like, most of their growth is, uh, coming in the industry for new installations-  Matthew Stead: Hmm Rosemary Barnes: um, yeah, it's, it's a lot more, it's a lot more balanced. Um, it's just, like, a lot of small companies doing s- small things. I mean, it's not, like, really small. It's, you know, one small task in every single wind farm in the world. There's obviously still a huge market. But, you know, like, lots of just, like, really precision solutions to very specific problems, I guess. Yeah, there's just so much, uh, wind energy here, so many people that just, yeah, learned about a problem and came up with a, a way to solve it. Um, yeah, so it, it's, it's a really good balance.  Allen Hall: Uh, while we're here, what were the new products on the show floor that you said, "Wow, that's something innovative"?  Rosemary Barnes: Like, there's stuff... I learned stuff that I didn't know before, but I don't think that it's brand-new. Um, for example, I learned that you're not supposed to call a drone a robot. Um- [00:07:00] Allen Hall: Why?  Rosemary Barnes: I think a drone is a class of robot. In my, in my opinion, a drone is a robot that flies. But I was told off for, um... I'm like, "Oh, do you have any other robots?" "No, we don't have any other robots. We've got drones." That's what they said.  Matthew Stead: Yeah. Hmm. I learned, I learned two things, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say this, but anyway, I'll, I'll, I'll do it. Um, SkySpecs have a MC- MCP connector to their data For their customers. So for those AI nerds out there, that's a massive thing, I think. Rosemary Barnes: Can you explain what that is, Matt?  Allen Hall: For us non-geeks.  Matthew Stead: My understanding, and I'll, I'll be corrected by the audience, is that a MCP, whatever it stands for, um, is basically, uh, like an AI connector where you can query all your data that is h- hosted within- Oh ... SkySpecs. So-  Rosemary Barnes: Ah ...  Matthew Stead: Hey, Mr. SkySpecs- Okay ... um, which turbines have been struck by lightning, you know, have lightning damage, and how bad is it? And, [00:08:00] and then the next thing that SkySpecs has... Uh, I don't work for SkySpecs. Um, the next, the next thing that SkySpecs have is they have a more of a growth of damage over time and a predictor as to what the damage might look like next year. Um, strangely, Rosie, um, I also heard quite a few people talking about blade temperature. U

Allen covers Nordex's Türkiye expansion, Chinese turbine makers seeking European partners, Vestas' first V182 order, and two Pennsylvania repowers. 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! Episode Transcript Happy Monday, everyone. Well, in Pennsylvania this past week, two wind farms got a second life, and nobody poured a single new foundation. Now, hold that thought for a moment. This week, the wind industry kept asking one question: Where do you build? Let's start in Europe. Chinese turbine makers have a problem. They dominate solar, they dominate batteries, but in Western Europe, every major wind project still buys turbines from Vestas, Siemens or Nordex, and occasionally GE Vernova. So the Chinese are trying a new door, a joint venture. Envision and Mingyang both say they would partner with European companies to build turbines in Europe. Envision's chief product officer says they are prepared and willing. Its offshore chief hinted that talks may have already started, and they probably have. Mingyang still prefers its own factory, but Britain blocked that plan in Scotland earlier this year, so a local partner is plan B. It is the same play Chinese car makers used in Spain. Same playbook, same problem. So go south to Turkey. Nordex is not waiting for a partner there. The turbine maker put seventy million euros into Turkey this year. All of its own money, no loans and no incentives. A new factory near Izmir is building turbines now, roughly four hundred a year. Eight hundred and twenty workers today, about twelve hundred by year's end. A second factory is built and waiting for equipment. And here is the number that matters. Nordex buys one billion euros of parts from Turkish suppliers every year. Nordex says that is sixty to seventy percent of everything made for wind in Turkey. Then it ships many of those parts to other countries. Next month, Nordex will chase a big share of a fifteen hundred megawatt onshore tender. Interesting. Now east to India. Finnish composite maker Exel Composites just signed a deal with Suzlon. Exel's Indian joint venture will make carbon fiber planks for Suzlon's blade spar caps. The deal could top €100 million through March of 2029. It started small, €10 million in 2025, and back then Suzlon would not even let Exel use its name. Now it's 10 times bigger, and it's public. Every plank will come from one factory in India, close to the customer, close to the market. Smart move. Back to Europe and a turbine that is new but not too new. Vestas just booked the first order for its V182 7.2 megawatt turbine. Four machines, 29 megawatts. The Staverhult project in southern Sweden will take those turbines. The V182 sits on the EnVentus platform, and Vestas says it upgraded only what adds value for customers, nothing more. Serial production begins at the end of 2027, and there's a service deal, a 35-year-long service deal. Wow. Now to Pennsylvania, where the newest wind farms sit on old towers. Exus Renewables just finished repowering two wind farms in Cambria County, nearly 140 megawatts. There's new nacelles, new blades, new generators, but the same towers and the same foundations. The work adds 30 more years to farms that already ran nearly 20 years. Financing, about $356 million. And who's buying that power? A Fortune 500 technology company. Take your guess, right? Exus says buyers like repowered sites because they skip the long wait to connect a new project. And data centers are very hungry, and they do not want to wait in a line. So what should wind professionals take from this past week? First, local content is no longer a political favor. It is the price of entry. Nordex owns most of Turkey's wind supply chain, and the Chinese know that and want the same thing in Europe. And if you make towers, castings, or blades in Europe, expect a phone call from a Chinese company. You better decide now what your answer will be. Second, buyers are paying for certainty, not novelty. Vestas only changed what it had to. And Exus kept the steel that was already in the ground in Pennsylvania for their repower projects. You see, the fastest megawatt in America is the one that is already connected to the grid. Thousands of turbines from the early 2000s are reaching the repower age right about now, and that is really the next big market. And lastly, do the math on the service deal. The 35-year commitment is quite long, and a lot of operators are thinking about the length of their service contracts right about now. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 28th of September, 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-founder at Active Training Team, joins to discuss how the immersive EPIC safety center helped London's £5 billion Thames Tideway tunnel finish with zero fatalities and zero life-changing injuries. Plus similar centers built for Ørsted's Hornsea projects and SSE, and the mobile program his US team runs for wind and solar sites. 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! Episode Transcript Uptime Spotlight: Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-founder, Active Training Team Allen Hall: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Dermot Kerrigan: Thanks very much for having me back, Allen. Allen Hall: Well, I brought you back because I want to talk about the major construction project in London that just wrapped up, which you were intimately involved with in terms of safety training through Active Training Team. That's the Thames Tideway project, a massive sewer project in London that started around 2016 and finished about a year ago, when I saw King Charles open and christen the new Tideway. And it's in operation today. Do you want to provide some background on what that project was and why it was even started? Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, sure. We are a city now of around 9 million people, I believe. The sewage system that we have here was designed, I believe, for 2 million people back in Victorian times. And what was happening? Whenever we had a big storm, the sewers couldn't cope with all the water, so the excess poured into the River Thames, which runs through London, with huge, as you can imagine, health and environmental repercussions and risks. So it was decided that they needed to stop this by building a huge tunnel along the River Thames for 25 kilometers. Whenever this happened, rather than being poured into the Thames, it would go into this tunnel, be run downstream to the east of London, be treated, and then go back into the system. They decided to do this back in 2015, when the first spade hit the ground, and it just got commissioned. The final screws got tightened on it in March of this year, so that was an 11-year period. It employed 25,000 people over that period from various contractor companies, main works contractors and subcontractors who were tasked with building this thing. It went through a number of phases, from groundwork, literally digging holes, before they dug the big hole, which was the tunneling. There was pre-tunneling before that, and then, having done the tunnel, they actually built this thing and all the huge access shafts along the length of the river. The deepest point of the tunnel is 60 meters. It's a hell of a thing. You could drive two London double-decker buses through it at its widest point. Of course, after the tunneling phase, there was commissioning, building parkland along the length of the Thames, and landscaping, before they actually said this thing is open. That was in March of this year, and apparently 21 million tonnes of sewage have been captured by it so far. So it does seem to be doing the trick. Allen Hall: It's a massive project, and it's such a complicated project. As an engineer, I get really interested in the details of how that was going to work, because you're right, it's a Victorian-era sewer system, a massive sewer system that was built way larger than the recent tunnel, of course. But the complexity of tying a new sewer system into a roughly 150-year-old sewer system is complicated. Add the factor that you're working with water, with the Thames, and you're working with sewage, which is obviously dirty and full of contaminants. That puts a lot of risk on employees, contractors, construction workers, everybody involved in this process. So conceptually, we're going to dig a tunnel and put a couple of shafts in. I think they put about 30-odd shafts along the riverbanks to capture the effluent. But the complexity of it is crazy, to the point that, at least in my head, there was almost no chance that someone wasn't going to be seriously hurt or killed during that 10- or 11-year period. Drowning is a real possibility. Tunnel collapse is a possibility. Shafts collapsing is a possibility. You're dealing with cranes and heavy objects moving around, and steel and infrastructure. Someone's going to get seriously injured during this period. And the way construction projects work at this scale is that they have estimates, based on previous history in the UK, of how many people are going to be injured and how many people are going to be killed during the project. Two or three people were expected to be killed, and over 100 seriously injured, with life-altering injuries. That's alarming. But that explains why they called in Active Training Team and a number of others to come in and change the safety narrative. And that's where you come in, because I think the results have been astounding. First, I want you to describe what you did. What did you put in place, and why was it different at the time from other safety programs? Dermot Kerrigan: Well, I think safety up until 2015 on these big infrastructure projects was very much about systems and processes. What people weren't really taking notice of is the whole battle for hearts and minds. What this project was determined to avoid was the bare minimum that they could expect. And they were told, you're absolutely right, that the best you can hope for on a big 5 billion pound project like this over a 10- or 11-year period is to kill at least two people, with 150 serious, life-changing injuries and thousands of lost time injuries. They didn't want that. They were determined that wasn't going to happen. So they had to get a bit left field. They started looking around at other projects that had done something maybe a little bit out there, and they came across us, Active Training Team. We'd done some work with another big infrastructure project called Crossrail, which is an east-west rail line that opened some time ago, called the Elizabeth Line, that runs through London. We did this thing for them called the Target Zero Roadshow, which the contractors had to go through. It was a blend of film, live drama and facilitated discussion, where we showed an incident, the antecedents that led to it, and the consequences for all involved. It was a mobile thing. We took it from site to site, but it was pretty out there in terms of this blend of different media. So the people who ran Tideway at the time approached us and said, look, if we gave you carte blanche to do whatever you wanted, if we asked you to build this mad induction center that everybody has to go through to give them a life-changing experience before they start work on this project, to make them think, I need to do the right thing when it comes to safety, what would you do? We had this idea based on immersive theater, which is a big thing here in the UK, where you take a space, divide it into various sets, and take people on a multimedia journey where they see, in real time, if you like, the events that led up to a serious incident, the incident itself, and what happens after that. But then you give them some safety leadership tools and parachute them back into that scenario to practice those tools in real time. It's all to do with challenging and accepting challenge, and creating a culture of psychological safety where people feel absolutely able, where it's a no-brainer, to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not happy with that. Sorry, let's reconsider. Let's plan again. And to our incredible surprise, they went for it. They spent over 1 million pounds on building this state-of-the-art facility in central London. Everybody who was going to work on that project, whether they were a contractor with a spade in their hand, a receptionist in an office, somebody in the back office, or leaders, everybody who was going to set foot on either a site or an office on the Tideway project, had to go through this one-day experience first. The idea was that everybody bought into the ethos that operational safety isn't just the responsibility of operational people. All of us have a part to play to ensure that the guys doing the hands-on work go home in one piece. Allen Hall: I think that's a remarkable difference from a lot of the training programs we have seen in the renewable energy sector. A lot of times, the safety discussions are focused on the ground-level people, the people actually doing the heavy lifts, moving the trucks around, and doing that work. But the reality is that decisions are made throughout the organization which have an impact on safety. Management has an impact on safety. Procurement has an impact on safety. Just by choosing a less expensive safety device, you could increase the safety risk. And unless we have thought through those processes, we're still going to have big-time problems with accident rates. I think this is where Active Training Team really changed the narrative a good bit. But I think you don't sell the in-person aspect of this enough. I've taken the course two times now, and both times it was so emotionally impactful that it's hard to forget. There's a difference between watching a video, or going to a movie with your wife or somebody, where there's an emotion to watching the movie and being engrossed in it for an hour or so, or even going to a stage play, which is even more person to person, with a real-life person enacting the script, versus putting yourself in the situation. That's the immersive part of the EPIC center and Active Training Team's process. When you put yourself in that role, it becomes personal. And obviously, you're an

GE Vernova and Vineyard Wind drop all claims in their $4.5 billion dispute. Plus the UK approves Irish Sea cables for Morgan and Morecambe, a GE turbine order in Japan, whale recorders in the Celtic Sea, and previews of WindEnergy Hamburg.Register for the SkySpecs Customer ForumMeet with Nikki Briggs at WindEnergy Hamburg to discuss the StrikeTape Ultra LPS upgradeFind Rosie & Matthew at Booth A1-115 at WindEnergy Hamburg 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! Episode Transcript Speaker: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm Allen Hall here with Rosemary Barnes and Jelanta Padron. And f- first off, Rosemary is in Denmark in preparation to visit Wind Energy Hamburg.  Rosemary Barnes: I am. I'm in, uh, Ringkøbing, which is on the west coast of Jutland. Just, uh, took the, a train and hired a car from Copenhagen. Drove past a whole lot of wind turbines. It's very nice to be back.  Allen Hall: So the Wind Energy Hamburg event is the event, in my opinion. There's really two, right? Wind Europe and Wind Energy Hamburg. Uh, Husum is a big event, but not of the scale of Wind Energy Hamburg. I think they're [00:01:00] predicting 40-ish thousand people probably are gonna come through the event. It's massive. Have you been there before, Rosemary?  Rosemary Barnes: I haven't. I've only been to WindEurope once, and other than that I've been to some big composites conferences back when I was doing my PhD, but I'm kind of, like, 'cause y- when I went to WindEurope last year, that was my first big wind energy conference, and I was so overwhelmed. I walked in the door, I saw the exhibition, and within 90 seconds all the energy had drained from my body and I'm like, "I wanna go home now." But, um, so I've kind of like, I, I have just, I've spent a couple of days in, in Copenhagen and surrounds and, um, and that, that was really good. Lots of talking, lots of seeing stuff, and I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute. Um, but now I have preemptively, like, taken myself to a quiet corner of Denmark to just, yeah, like, put my, put my head down and, uh, yeah, have some quiet activities, some n- nature. The nature is really nice over this [00:02:00] part of Denmark. There's lots of... Like, I wanna go for some long runs in sand dunes and heaths and, um, yeah, planning to drive up to Østerild where there's a big wind turbine test center. Uh, I just wanna see what's there just out of pure, pure geekiness, see what's there, 'cause y- you know, like, there's new, new stuff there, right? And there's often, like, offshore wind turbines being tested. I don't know what's there. That'll be cool to see. Um, and yeah, I'm trying to put together a video about how wind turbines are tested, so that will be part of it and, yeah, potentially a good recording location. So yeah, just a bit of quiet time, trying to rest up ahead of next week where I know that there will be just so many conversations. I love, I love talking about wind energy technology, and I love catching up with old people that I know, but I just, I'm not an extrovert. Um, yeah, at best an ambivert maybe, slightly introverted. I was actually discussing this with somebody, how, like, inappropriate it is to have such [00:03:00] sensory overload at, um, a conference that is mostly attended by engineers. It's, like, we're not known for being, you know, like, really social people. Um, and we came up with the idea that there should be, like, a what? A sensory deprivation room in there where, um, you know, you can just go in and like- Oh my  Yolanda Padron: gosh, that would be  Rosemary Barnes: great yeah, like, get in a, one of those tanks or a soundproof booth, uh, star- just yeah, so, like, you can just go in and reset and, um, yeah, refill your social battery. I think that that would be, yeah, that would be a real, a real winner if someone... I'm sure someone could charge a, charge money for that there. Or you sell the sponsorship for, like, a million dollars because it's just so popular and everyone's so grateful that it exists. Allen Hall: Well, Ro- Rosemary, if you want to talk to Rosemary, she's gonna be hanging around the EOLOGIX- I'm gonna be hiding ... Ping Booth. Oh. She may be hiding, but she will be somewhere near the EOLOGIX- You can find her ... Ping Booth. Yeah. Y- you just listen for the Australian accent and a bunch of, uh, German [00:04:00] accents, right? It's pretty easy to pick out in my opinion. Austrian. Oh, yeah, and Austrian too. Yeah. So there, there's, um- A, a ton of people, obviously, that we know are gonna be at Hamburg for the week. It, it starts Tuesday. I think it finishes on Friday. Uh, uh, Rosemary will be there, Matthew Stead will be there, our own Nikki Briggs from Weather Guard will be there. When you run into them, say hi. Uh, although Rosemary talks about not being so social, she's very social, so-  Rosemary Barnes: That's my problem, is that I get really social and then I get exhausted, like absolutely exhausted.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Yes. So, uh, uh, it'll be a fun time. I hope everybody has a good time and, and all the travels to and from are safely done. Uh, so go visit, uh, EOLOGIX-PING. Our, our friends at CNC Onsite will also be there. Uh, they have some big announcements, uh, having to do with, uh, a new place in the United States. PES Wind will be there. Uh, s- I think [00:05:00] Stefan's gonna be there, so say hi to Stefan and pick up the, the newest copy of PES Wind. There's an article by Weather Guard in PES Wind, uh, so go ahead and pick one of those up. Uh, and, uh, one of the o- items before we get too deep into the news this week, the SkySpecs Forum. So if you work with SkySpecs or if you d- even if you don't and know SkySpecs, obviously a huge, uh, drone inspection company doing CMS and vendor management and all the above They're having their SkySpecs Forum October 6th and 7th in Detroit, uh, at the MGM Grand, which is a, a magnificent place. Uh, and if you're, are involved in inspections of blades or deal with CMS or doing a lot of repairs on wind farms, you should try to get to the SkySpecs Forum. There are onl- as I understand it, there's only a couple of seats left, so y- you need to go to SkySpecs and register for that event and get yourself to Detroit. So just [00:06:00] a note, if you really want to go, and you should, you better do it quickly. Well, there's good news out of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen all that often lately. Uh, Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova has settled their fight. Now, GE Vernova had tried to quit the $4.5 billion project, and it said the developer owed it about $360 million. Well, GE Vernova has pulled back that threat, and thank goodness. It, it has dropped all its courts appeals, and both sides are dropping every claim. So everything that was happening in the court cases in Massachusetts are all gonna go away, and GE is gonna be on site to, uh, support Vineyard Wind, which, Yolanda, has to be a huge win for both sides and the state of Massachusetts, which is the recipient of a lot of that electricity. Yolanda Padron: Absolutely, and it's a win, too, for just the US offshore market in general, right? It's, it's something that's been happening for quite a bit of time. [00:07:00] Uh, we were talking about it pre-recording, that this is-- the idea of, of settling in court is really not typical for onshore or offshore. It's kind of, it's almost like a game of chicken, I feel like, and this time it just, it took a little bit longer than, than usual for them to settle on something. But happy that they settled. Um, yeah, no, this is a big, a big win for the US.  Allen Hall: Yeah, the optics around it was just bad for US offshore wind. With everything else going on, to have two of the bigger parties fighting one another in court is, that just did not look good. And I, I think everybody knew at the, at the time, I think Rosemarie had said it even, that they're gonna have to settle. They're gonna have to work together. That, that's the only outcome that, that can happen here. No one is walking away from this project. That will not happen. So it's good this has finally been settled, because we gotta get moving on. I know there's, there's, contrary to what you probably hear in the press, there are some other [00:08:00] offshore wind farms that are still being constructed quietly, dutifully, and will be done roughly on time. So more to come on the US offshore side. So GE also has better news this week. They won a turbine order in Japan, and we'll have that after the break. Delamination and bondline failures in blades are difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. CIC-NDT are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their nondestructive test technology penetrates deep into blade materials to find voids and cracks traditional inspections completely miss. CIC-NDT maps every critical defect, delivers actionable reports, and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cicndt.com because [00:09:00] catching blade problems early will save you millions Well, GE Vernova has won an order in Japan. It'll supply seven turbines to Eurus Energy. That wind farm will be up in, in the northern part of the country. Uh, it's a small market obviously for GE Vernova, but it is a steady one and it gives a

Allen covers record bank financing for clean energy, Oracle's 1.7 GW Texas wind deal, RWE's German auction win, Denmark scrapping its turbine cap, and Revolution Wind finishing off Rhode Island. 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! Episode Transcript September 18, 2026Happy Monday, everyone.Off the coast of Rhode Island this past week, the last turbine went up. Hold that thought. First, the banks.BloombergNEF says global banks put one-point-one-five trillion dollars behind low-carbon energy last year. A record. For every dollar banks lent to fossil fuels, they lent ninety-seven cents to clean energy. Five years ago, that ratio was seventy-nine cents. Wind project finance in Europe grew seventy-five percent in a single year. The money is moving. And here is where it lands.In Texas, Oracle just signed wind energy deals across ten projects. One-point-seven gigawatts. Partners include RWE, Engie, Clearway Energy, and Scout Clean Energy. All feeding the ERCOT grid. All powering Oracle's data center campus in Abilene. Oracle wants one hundred percent of its AI data center electricity matched with carbon-free power by twenty thirty-five. Big tech needs big power. Wind is answering.Now cross the Atlantic. RWE won one hundred and nineteen megawatts of onshore wind in Germany's latest federal auction. Two projects. The first, Juchen Three. Eighty-four megawatts on reclaimed land at the former Garzweiler coal mine in North Rhine-Westphalia. Wind turbines, on a former coal mine. The second, Seedorf in Lower Saxony. Five old turbines totaling nine megawatts, replaced by five modern machines at thirty-five. Nearly four times the power. Same number of towers. Both projects target twenty twenty-eight.And just north of Germany, Denmark just made a move. The Danish government scrapped its cap on onshore wind turbines. That cap was set in twenty eighteen: eighteen hundred and fifty turbines by twenty forty. The government's own forecast says Denmark will need thirty-three hundred. Climate Minister Samira Nawa said tearing down working turbines because of an old cap would be outrageous. But the Danish Chamber of Commerce warns: more turbines need more grid.Now, back to Rhode Island. Ørsted's Revolution Wind has installed its sixty-fifth and final turbine. Seven hundred and four megawatts. Six-point-two billion dollars. The federal government issued two stop-work orders against this project. Federal judges threw them both out. Revolution Wind kept building. It joins South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind as the third completed large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States. During Winter Storm Fern, Vineyard Wind showed up big for New England. During the July heat wave, offshore wind kept oil-burning peakers quiet.So here is what matters. Banks are lending at near parity with fossil fuels. Big tech is signing gigawatt-scale wind deals. Turbines are going up despite political headwinds. The constraint now is the grid behind them. Denmark said it this week. Germany's offshore foundation said it last month. The next decade of wind energy growth will be won or lost on transmission and interconnection. Not turbines. Not money. Wires.And that is the state of the wind industry for the 21st of September 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.Sources:BloombergNEF — Low-Carbon Bank Financing Tops One TrillionCanary Media — Major US Offshore Wind Farm Installs Its Last TurbineDCD — Oracle Signs 1.7GW of Wind Energy Supply Agreements in TexasRWE — RWE Secures 119 MW of Onshore Wind in Latest German AuctionEnergyWatch — Denmark Scraps Onshore Wind Turbine Cap

Søren Kellenberger, CEO at CNC Onsite, joins to discuss the company's new US office, uptower yaw ring repairs, and blade root insert replacement. Email [email protected] to learn more. 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! Episode Transcript Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Søren, welcome back to the program. Søren Kellenberger: Thank you very much, Allen. It's a pleasure. Allen Hall: Well, you have some really exciting news in the United States, because CNC Onsite has been growing tremendously. You're now worldwide, and you've established a presence in the United States. Søren Kellenberger: That's correct. We have been working in the US for quite some time, but we see that the demand is definitely there. The North American market has more than 100,000 turbines above one megawatt. So of course it's an interesting market, and we think that now is a good time for us to make that move and establish ourselves in the US. So we are really looking forward to that. Allen Hall: So you've seen a lot of growth in the company over the last couple of years as operators worldwide realize they have problems that they can't solve, and that will only be solved by precision machining, which is what CNC Onsite does. Where have you been doing work lately? I've seen things on LinkedIn from Asia, but I know you guys are pretty busy right now. Søren Kellenberger: As you started saying, we are basically working globally. So we have had technicians in Australia and Japan, and in other Asian countries as well. Our main market is still Europe, where we also started, and we are widely spread across Europe. But the US, including Canada, is becoming a very interesting and important market for us. Maybe the best way to explain it is that even though we are based in Denmark and working out of Denmark, 90% of what we do is outside of Denmark. And once you travel — whether you travel to Finland or if you travel to somewhere in the US — it doesn't make a huge difference. Our technicians are away from home and family anyway, so it's just the language that is a bit different. Allen Hall: What brings people to your business? What are they calling about today? I know the yaw ring was the number one item. That's what I remember as being, when you were getting started, the yaw ring with the teeth being broken. Is that still your number one request, or has that changed? Søren Kellenberger: It is definitely often a door opener, because everyone can relate to that. So it brings a lot of interest to the company. And then when we start talking to customers about other wear issues in the turbine, it often turns out that we start to talk about worn sliding surfaces on the yaw ring, or it can be worn out rotor lock holes, or wear and tear to generator shafts or main shafts. There's a whole lot of mechanical things that obviously get worn when you have a turbine running for so many years and hours. And then we just try to see if we can come up with smart ways to fix it uptower instead of deploying cranes and doing large disassemblies. Allen Hall: That's the real problem. I think a lot of operators realize that they have worn assemblies, but they don't really know of any way to address it, so they just live with it, or they try to accommodate as best they can. With the yaw ring teeth, the way I had seen that until I talked to you was they would get a guy with a welder up there and they'd try to weld these teeth back on. But that's really a temporary fix and it's not a long-term answer. You're doing something that is actually better than what the OEM installed to begin with, right? Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. Instead of welding — and I won't say that welding doesn't have its place, because for smaller repairs welding can be a good fix as well. We do also work with welding companies for certain smaller repairs. But imagine you are up in a very confined space, and when you have to start rebuilding a tooth by welding, the more of the tooth that is missing, the more you need. One thing is the welding, but grinding it back to shape again is also a manual process. It's obvious that the more of a tooth that is missing, the more difficult it is to get that actual shape of the tooth afterwards by grinding. So what we do is that we machine away the damaged teeth, and then we bring prefabricated segments that have the actual shape of the original tooth, so that we get very good contact between the yaw gear and the yaw ring after the repair. And I think that is probably the main reason why welding is sometimes not lasting as long as when you have to rebuild a full tooth and then manually grind it. It's very difficult to get that well-defined contact surface. So you get some peak points where you have higher loads, and that will just fatigue those repairs over time, where we have better chances of getting that very good fix. We get very accurate machining because we use CNC-controlled machining, so our repair is within a few hundredths of a millimeter. Allen Hall: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the other approach besides welding and your approach — and this is what I have seen more recently — is the whole nacelle comes off. So the rotor pops off, they lift the nacelle off with a crane, so they have to have a crane on site, and that's really expensive. And they set the nacelle down, and then they have to go in and physically remove the yaw ring, or these sections of it, and replace it. That is extremely expensive and time-consuming compared to what you're describing. What is the delta in cost, roughly? Søren Kellenberger: That is very difficult to say, because it depends how fast you can actually get a crane out. And I guess there is also, in the US, a huge spread on what the deployment cost is for a crane, how close you are to a local crane center, and what the deployment cost is. Then it also depends on your access roads. If the turbine has been out there for 5 or 10 years, maybe your access roads are unfit for the crane anymore. Your hard stand or the crane pad is not in sufficiently good condition to support your crane. So there can be a lot of extra costs that are adding up — not just the rental of the crane, but the overall cost of preparing it and the whole project management of getting that set up. Then you need your support fixtures to place on the nacelle. You need to get your plates down. So it's a lot of logistics, and just preparing the turbine for disassembly is probably about a week. And then you have all the craning and replacing and putting it back together. So if you say you could have everything ready, your turbine is down for, I would guess, two to three weeks. But in reality, the downtime before you can get a crane out there is much, much longer. And we can basically — we have repairs, spare parts, we have them in stock, so we can basically move out the day after we get the call and get your turbine up and running. Installing a segment, which repairs up to six teeth, takes about a day for us to do. Then we need a day to get up in the turbine and get ready, and a day to get back down. So what takes from several weeks to potentially months before you're up and running again, we can do in just about a week. Allen Hall: In the United States, one of the things I hear a lot of times, particularly dealing with cranes, is that procurement, when they want to buy a fix of some sort, doesn't necessarily consider the cost of the crane, the downtime, all those other factors. Obviously, the engineers on the backside are thinking about that, but when it comes to decisions for your technology, that doesn't always get into the mix. Is that a worldwide problem or an American problem? Because that feels like an American problem. Søren Kellenberger: No, it's not. I think it's a worldwide problem. I think what makes the difference is probably that the turbines are typically a bit older in Europe. So in that way, we are a few years ahead in that life cycle. Procurement and also technical organizations have maybe become a bit more used to including that thinking, where this is still a relatively new issue in the US because your fleet is newer. So I think it will change in the coming years, as it will develop naturally as it has done in Europe. But it's also sometimes the structure of the company — that you have a certain organization that takes care of the main component replacement, and then you have a part of the organization that takes care of day-to-day service. And now you don't need to replace your main component, but the work we do is on the main component, so it sort of falls in between those two areas of responsibility in the company. And that can also sometimes be challenging. Allen Hall: So it's not only that you have to get a crane to do a lot of these repairs that you can now do with CNC Onsite, right, internal to the nacelle — but there's also weather, right? I think the one thing we don't consider a lot of times, or have kind of preconceived notions about, is that the weather's, like, 30% downtime. Yes, if you're working with a crane and you're trying to lift heavy objects, there will be 30% downtime because of weather. But when you're doing the repair in the nacelle, what limitations do you have on weather? Is it a much wider window than a crane would have? Søren Kellenberger: Absolutely. We can work up to much higher wind speeds — basically the same wind speeds that you can do ordinary maintenance work within — because our machine is always mounted on the component that we are machining....