『The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast』のカバーアート

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

著者： Allen Hall Rosemary Barnes Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
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Uptime is a renewable energy podcast focused on wind energy and energy storage technologies. Experts Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead break down the latest research, tech, and policy.Copyright 2026, Weather Guard Lightning Tech 地球科学 生物科学 科学
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  • Invenergy Drops Four Offshore Leases, Turbines Become Reefs

    Invenergy Drops Four Offshore Leases, Turbines Become Reefs
    2026/06/22
    Allen covers Invenergy returning four offshore wind leases for $765 million, a Block Island study finding turbines became reefs, RES’s Smart Pilot drone inspections, RWE’s three new French wind farms, and a $12 billion Japan-UK floating wind compact. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. There is a deal being made in Washington today … and the ocean is watching. Invenergy, the largest privately held power developer in North America, has agreed to hand back four offshore wind leases to the federal government. The price tag … seven hundred sixty-five million dollars. Those leases covered waters off New York, the Gulf of Maine, and Morro Bay off central California. One of those projects … Leading Light Wind … a two-point-four gigawatt development in the New York Bight … had already been canceled last November due to economic and regulatory pressure. The remaining three lease areas represented another four-point-eight gigawatts of potential capacity. All of it … gone. In exchange, Invenergy will redirect that capital into natural gas plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri … and into geothermal projects across the Western United States. This is now the eighth offshore wind lease the Trump administration has bought out. Total cost to the federal government across all eight deals … more than two-point-five billion dollars. Seven state attorneys general are already suing over an earlier buyout with another developer, arguing the administration lacks legal authority to use federal funds this way. Invenergy is already pivoting toward geothermal. Just last week, the company acquired a five thousand-acre geothermal parcel in New Mexico through a federal lease sale. That brings its total federal geothermal footprint to forty-five parcels … one hundred forty-four thousand acres … across five western states. While Invenergy’s offshore leases are being canceled … the ocean beneath those kinds of projects may be quietly thriving. Scientists have spent seven years studying the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island … America’s first offshore wind installation. They tracked nearly a million marine animals across seventy-one species. What they expected to find was damage. What they found instead … was astounding. Black sea bass abandoned their old wandering patterns and began clustering around the turbine foundations to feed. Blue mussels colonized the steel pylons. Macroalgae spread across the submerged surfaces. Cod, lobster, and reef fish moved into the rock piled around the bases. The turbines became reefs. Accidental … but unmistakable. Researchers at the University of St. Andrews strapped GPS trackers to harbor seals expecting them to flee offshore wind farms. Instead … the seals swam straight lines through the turbine rows … stopping to forage at each foundation … like a delivery driver working a route. One seal traced the turbine layout so precisely that researchers said you could have mapped every foundation from that single animal’s trail alone. Researchers are finding a sobering conclusion: whether a turbine helps the ocean or hurts it depends almost entirely on how old it is … and where it stands. New foundations going in … disruptive. Old foundations with fifteen years of growth on them … something closer to a reef. The science is finally precise enough to say which is which. The seals figured it out years ago. They just went where the food was … in very straight lines. Meanwhile, on dry land … RES, the global renewable energy company, has launched a new tool called Smart Pilot that automates wind turbine blade inspections using drones. RES says it will take twenty-five percent less time. And it runs on standard DJI consumer drone hardware … no proprietary equipment required. RES currently supports approximately forty-five gigawatts of installed renewable capacity worldwide. And over in France … RWE has officially opened three new wind farms in northern France. Combined capacity: sixty-eight-point-eight megawatts. Together, they will power approximately thirty-eight thousand French households with electricity from the wind. The projects took a decade from development to inauguration. The turbines are spinning now. And over in the UK, Japan and the United Kingdom have signed an Offshore Wind Compact committing Japan to facilitate up to nine billion British pounds … roughly twelve billion dollars … in investment for five-point-nine gigawatts of floating offshore wind in British waters. Three projects ...
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    3 分
  • 3S Lift Adds a Rescue Stretcher to Climb Auto System

    3S Lift Adds a Rescue Stretcher to Climb Auto System
    2026/06/18
    Giovan Scialdone, president of 3S Lift Americas, joins to discuss 30,000 Climb Auto System installs and a new lift-mounted rescue stretcher. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Gio, welcome back to the program. Gio Scialdone: Hey, thanks, Allen. Allen Hall: So a lot’s happened over the past year since we last spoke with you at 3S Lift. Yeah. And there’s all kinds of new technology and improvements and the- The expansion of the Climb Auto system in the United States is remarkable. Yeah. How many systems do you have installed in North America? Gio Scialdone: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, it’s, it’s… The, the pride that we take in, in those numbers are, are serious. We, we feel, uh, a great responsibility to help technicians, to help our customers operate more, uh, more efficiently. We have 30,000 installed. Allen Hall: Wow. Gio Scialdone: So yeah, last year was a busy year. We installed close to 8,000, uh, in North America, so a bit in Canada as well. Um, [00:01:00] yeah, it’s… And, you know, before we get into some more numbers too, a funny story for you, a Massachusetts native- Right … or lived in Massachusetts- Long time … for a period of time. Uh, Hoosac Wind Farm, you know the Hoosac Wind Farm. Oh, yeah, yeah, Allen Hall: I can see it out my front door. Gio Scialdone: This is what’s great about this industry and being at this conference. Um, I ran into… At, at one point in time working for GE a long time ago, I was a site construction manager for Hoosac. I ran into my EHS safety manager, who I haven’t seen in 14 years- Allen Hall: Wow … Gio Scialdone: uh, who now works for another prominent, uh, company, uh, in the industry, and, uh, she remembered the name of my dog that- Really? I used to take to the site as a- Oh, Allen Hall: wow. Gio Scialdone: So, uh, you know, it’s good to be here, see you, and see, see, you know, lots of former colleagues, so, Allen Hall: you know. Well, it’s a small world in wind. Gio Scialdone: It’s a very small world. And, you know, we’re, we’re a company that, um, you know, again, we, we, we have a unique product, and there, there are some other companies that are, um, also coming out with a product quite similar, and we, [00:02:00] we appreciate that competition. Sure. In fact, I think, you know, we spend a lot of our time trying to, uh, sell our customers on the value that the ClimbAuto system is a need and not a nice to have, and I think having some competition with a similar ladder access product further, uh, maybe pushes that point to, to, to be true. So, um, you know, it’s good to be here and see some expansion in, in our little, uh, you know, ladder lift space. Allen Hall: Well, I think it shows the work that 3S has done to demonstrate the value of that system. I remember several years ago, I think when I first talked to you, there wasn’t a lot of adoption, and you were… And the operators were thinking, “Do I really need this?” But the reality was that the technicians loved it. They improved performance. They had technicians using those towers and wanted to work on those specific towers. Yeah. And, and then, uh, just kind of the flood happened. It, it was everybody was testing the [00:03:00] waters. You were basically installing test systems- Yeah … or sort of sample system to try it. Yeah. Everybody loved it, and then boom, you’re up to 30,000 units. Gio Scialdone: I, I think, I think a part of that too to add on is you, you have to have a quality product. Allen Hall: Oh, sure. It has to work. For, for… It has to work. Right. Gio Scialdone: That’s the most important thing. Yeah. Um- The th- the, the, the value and the function in theory makes sense to lots of people, but does it work and is it reliable? And I think having been here nine years and, and, you know, the first three years we only had 500 units installed. Yeah. So it’s really the last three or four years that have expanded our, our installation base. And I think a lot of that is, you know, thank, you know, we’ve got a great team behind it. You know, we’ve got 70 technicians, and we’ve got a sales team, and an engineering team, and, um, you know, a project management team. So we, we’ve, we’ve staffed up as, as you need to. But the product we’ve, we, we really believe has, um, you know, been our best [00:04:00] salesperson. You know, it takes some service. ...
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    22 分
  • Court Saves Wind Safe Harbor, Norway Pauses Utsira Nord

    Court Saves Wind Safe Harbor, Norway Pauses Utsira Nord
    2026/06/16
    A federal court restores the 5% safe harbor for wind tax credits, Norway’s parliament pauses the 35 billion krone Utsira Nord floating wind program, and the crew digs into Australia’s battery boom and the looming blade technician shortage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Uptime324 Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to this edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m Allen Hall here with Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and Yolanda Padron. And our week starts off in the courtroom. And if you’ve been watching the news lately, there’s a pretty substantial IRS case involving large-scale wind and solar having to do with the, uh, production tax credit and, uh, investment tax credit at the same time on the safe harbor, 5% safe harbor rule. Uh, a federal judge handed the wind industry and solar industry a pretty substantial legal win that could reshape how the [00:01:00] projects qualify for tax credits. So a judge up in, uh, the District of Columbia vacated IRS Notice 2025-42. So if you remember that, uh, from a- about a year or so ago, uh, f- it found that the, that notice was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. The notice, which was issued following a July 2025 executive order, had eliminated the 5% safe harbor for wind projects, uh, a provision developers have relied on since about 2013 to establish construction start dates without breaking ground. The court found the IRS failed to justify removing it, ignored industry comments, which I had read, and I agree with that, and gave no reason for treating wind differently f- than other clean energy technologies. So That his executive order came down and said, “Hey, we don’t like wind. [00:02:00] IRS, write a rule and make it hard for wind to get installed in the United States.” And so they dutifully did it, but a court is throwing it out. This has some pretty significant implications because if you hadn’t broken ground before this ruling, I think the– what was happening was be- if you hadn’t broken ground by July 4th, your project wouldn’t qualify for some tax credits. But now, if you have 5% safe harbor, you still are in the game, at least for now. Now, Wanda, that’s gonna make a big difference to asset managers and developers, won’t it? Yolanda Padron: Yeah, it’s really exciting. I think it opens up the, the playing field for, for some of these projects that might be a little bit behind schedule. Um, of course, a lot of teams had to change their plans and their pipeline when, um, you know, the big, beautiful bill passed and, I mean, it’s– of course, it adds a little bit of additional volatility, right, to, to wind and, and solar in the US, but it’s exciting to see at least things for, [00:03:00] for those of us that are in the wind and solar side, the, it’s a little, little bit of, of hope there. Allen Hall: And Matthew, uh, even in terms of opening up o-o-operations and, uh, getting contracts signed, this should make a big difference in sort of opening the floodgates a little bit. Although there is a short timeframe. We’re, we’re recording on, what, what is today? June 10th. So you have, in theory, less than 30 days before the July 4th deadline, but hopefully this stays. You think there’s a chance this just gets completely, uh, wiped out, the executive order and the IRS notice and- It’s back to what we remember for the, for the last, ooh, 12, 13 years? Matthew Stead: Uh, yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m hopeful, and I, I agree with Yolanda. I think you, you said it really well. Um, I think this is a, a glimmer of hope in, um, a sometimes gloomy, um, environment. So I think that’s great. In terms of going back to where it was, um, I mean, I guess my observation has been that, [00:04:00] you know, things in the US were a bit, um, distorted. You know, distorted through the, the PTC, um, and the whole repowering thing after 10 years is quite a distortion. So I think, um, you’re not necessarily going back to the good old days, um, might be the way, what will happen. Allen Hall: I think there is a lot of people actively trying to dig holes at the moment, and I, I’m sure they’re gonna continue to do that. Yolanda, do you th- you think anybody’s gonna stop and kinda say, “Oh, we have the 5% rule. We’re, we’re good”? Do you think, or you think they’re gonna still go ahead and really...
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    33 分
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