『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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  • Sunrez Products Expand in Wind O&M

    Sunrez Products Expand in Wind O&M
    2026/08/20
    Bret Tollgaard, president at Sunrez, joins to discuss faster UV blade repairs, new leading edge materials, and growing OEM approvals. Reach out to sales@sunrez.com 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! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Brent, welcome back to the program. Bret Tollgaard: Appreciate you having me back on. Allen Hall: There’s been so much happening in the world of UV prepregs and UV adhesives over the past year. Particularly on LinkedIn, I’ve seen numerous repairs which have used your material, SunRes material, to fix some pretty decent, uh, blade problems. Are you seeing, just seeing a, a much wider adoption now that everybody has basically agreed that UV is the way to go? Bret Tollgaard: I, I really do think that it’s starting to become one of the go-to standards for a variety of repairs in the wind market. And yeah, it’s great to see both our prepregs and lights being used all over LinkedIn, showing the [00:01:00] capabilities of the materials and how happy customers are to use and adopt the materials. Allen Hall: Yeah. The UV materials are, are getting adopted by OEMs. A lot of ISPs, a, a lot of operators now have it as a standard practice to use UV cured materials just because of the speed and the time that is saved. Uh, it’s, it’s remarkable how much time you’re saving, because the, the real kicker right now if you’re trying to do a repair, even in the summer months, let’s just say it’s warm outside and the temperatures are right and it’s calm winds, you’re saving multiple hours per repair. What generally… How much time are you generally saving on a kind of a, quote unquote, “standard blade repair”? Bret Tollgaard: More and more time, actually, with each session. So we might be saving 50 upwards of 80% of the labor of a traditional epoxy repair. Um, what we’ve been training companies to do more and more frequently is to actually pre-consolidate the entire repair patch downtower, whether it’s in the trailer or inside the tower itself. Um, and so you can pre-consolidate, get [00:02:00] all the air out in between your layers, have the primer pre-applied to the backside. That way, when you’re actually uptower, it’s simply peel, stick, roll, and then cure it out with our UV light. Sub 10 minutes, uh, will get you a fully cured part. Allen Hall: Wow. That’s remarkable. Yeah, when I see those LinkedIn posts from all kinds of operators all around the world using your material I also noticed that the weather conditions may not be pristine like you would have to do with epoxy. So there, there’s like a band of temperatures that epoxy systems generally work in. But with the UV material, I’m noticing, I’ve s- I s- especially over the wintertime, I saw some cold weather repairs going on. Is there any limitation really to the UV cured patches and materials in temperatures? Bret Tollgaard: There, there really aren’t for the temperature ranges that people will actually be out and installing these. Some of my favorite photos are when it’s negative five Celsius outside and everyone’s got the big gloves, the big [00:03:00] scarves, the big warmers and everything, and they’re applying our prepreg materials, uh, in below freezing conditions and still curing with the same 10-minute cycle time. Uh, another big advantage of our UV prepregs is everything’s already pre-wet out, so you’re not uptower with your fiberglass and your resin kicking off an epoxy or even some other, uh, you know, materials out there where it’s really hard to impregnate and get that saturation and kick off with UV. And so our prepreg repair patches really lend themselves to efficiency in the field, uh, over a really broad variety of, uh, ambient temperatures. So some of the negative five, negative 10 C installs all the way up to the hot ones in Texas and India and Australia, where you’ve got these people and it’s 100 Fahrenheit or, you know, 35 plus C, and you still cure with the same consistency, the same cure rate, the k- same cure speeds, um, really, really makes it a very versatile system. Allen Hall: It just gets rid of the variation and, and [00:04:00] that’s one of the items when we look at repairs. So we’re on the lightning side of this business where lightning damage happens, so we see a lot of repairs happen. We also see a lot of repairs that don’t look great. They’re, I mean, the vast majority do look great, but you get these occasional ones where they’ve tried to use epoxy in the wintertime and use a heat blanket. It, it’s difficult to do. It, it ...
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    26 分
  • Germany Guarantees Offshore Prices, England Wind Surge

    Germany Guarantees Offshore Prices, England Wind Surge
    2026/08/24
    Allen covers Germany’s new offshore wind price guarantee, England’s onshore wind revival, wind for Korean chip plants, and Aeris debt trouble. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. Last summer … Germany held an auction for new offshore wind capacity. Not a single company bid. Zero. This week Berlin put forward a new law to fix that. The old system asked developers to pay for the right to build in the North Sea and the Baltic. TotalEnergies and BP bid billions of euros … then walked away. So the new plan introduces contracts for difference. Build the farm … and the government backstops the price of electricity. The offshore wind association wants abandoned projects … up to sixteen gigawatts … put back on the auction block under the new rules. That is fifty billion euros worth of wind farms waiting for a second chance. The cabinet vote could come as early as next week. Stay in Europe but head west. England just posted its highest number of onshore wind applications in a decade. About forty-five proposals. Before Labour lifted the Conservatives’ ban two years ago … applications averaged one megawatt a month. Now they are running at thirty-six megawatts a month. But here is the catch. The average English wind farm has just two turbines. Eight megawatts. In Scotland … the average is nine turbines and fifty-nine megawatts. England is back in the game. It is just playing small. Now cross the Pacific. South Korea selected Pacifico Energy Korea to develop the Jindo offshore wind cluster. Two-point-one-three gigawatts. That is the second and third phases of a broader three-point-two-gigawatt project off the southern coast. And here is the connection worth noting. The region is also building the Honam Semiconductor Cluster … a major chip fabrication site. Semiconductor fabs need enormous and reliable power. This wind cluster is being positioned as the energy source to feed it. Wind as baseload for chip manufacturing. That is a new kind of offtaker. Now head to Brazil. Aeris Energy makes wind turbine blades. This week the company told its creditors it needs to restructure again. Roughly three hundred and thirty million dollars in debt. Aeris already restructured last year. But revenue fell forty-eight percent in the first half of this year. The company lost roughly fifty-three million dollars. It tried to find a buyer. No one came forward. Remember TPI Composites filing Chapter Eleven in Houston last year? The independent blade business keeps getting harder. Back to North America. In Nova Scotia … Port Hawkesbury Paper is spending four hundred and fifty million dollars on thirty-one Nordex turbines. They will be the biggest onshore turbines in North America. Each one … six-point-nine megawatts. And they carry electrothermal technology that prevents ice from forming on the blades. They operate down to minus thirty Celsius. Last January … Nova Scotia’s existing turbines dropped from three hundred and fifty megawatts to seventy-five in a single evening when the cold hit. For anyone building in northern climates … cold-weather performance is no longer optional. And in Minnesota … Xcel Energy broke ground on two projects this week. A hundred-and-eighty-five-mile transmission line that can carry four thousand megawatts of new wind and solar to the grid. And alongside it … a four-hundred-and-twenty-megawatt natural gas peaking plant in Lyon County for the days when the wind stops. So what does this week tell us? Germany’s auction reform is the story to watch. If Berlin gets contracts for difference right … sixteen gigawatts of stalled projects could come back to life. England proves that removing a political ban releases demand … but the scale gap with Scotland shows that planning culture matters as much as planning law. The blade supply chain is still under stress. If you are in procurement … know your supplier’s balance sheet. South Korea is tying offshore wind directly to semiconductor manufacturing. That kind of industrial offtaker changes the project finance equation. And from Minnesota to Nova Scotia … the message is the same. Transmission … peaking power … cold-weather reliability. The turbine is the easy part. The system around it is where the money and the risk still live. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 24th of August 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
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    5 分
  • What Operators Want to Hear at WOMA 2027

    What Operators Want to Hear at WOMA 2027
    2026/08/25
    Two days of operator meetings in Melbourne shape the WOMA 2027 agenda, from performance upgrades and cable faults to foundations and bolts. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead and Rosemary Barnes. And Rosemary, where are we? Rosemary Barnes: We’re in Melbourne, and we have been visiting future attendees and sponsors and people interested in, in the event to see what topics that we should be talking about. What are the hot topics of the moment? Allen Hall: Which is a very interesting two days, Matthew, in that, uh, we h- did meet with a number of operators based in Australia, but, uh, they’re also very worldly. They have talked to companies all over about operations and, and maintenance, and there are some really eye-opening topics- Mm that will be- Mm … at WOMA 2027 this year. Matthew Stead: Yeah. The thing that was interesting for me was [00:01:00]that actually the topics have changed each year. So, um, they’re evolving and the industry’s continuing to, to do better, and so that, that was really interesting. Performance upgrades was probably one of the big areas of, of new interest, I think. I think we heard with the pressure on pricing, uh, the market and so forth, you know, that, that 1% or 2% now is becoming more important. Um, so I think, uh, upgrades will definitely feature quite a lot. Um, balance of plant was also a big topic. Um, you just can’t ig- ignore the, um, transmission, you can’t ignore the transformers, you can’t ignore, uh, condensers and all these sorts of things, so yeah. Rosemary Barnes: Cables. Matthew Stead: Cables. Rosemary Barnes: Terminations. Terminations of cables. Specifically raised several times. Allen Hall: Yep. Yeah. It’s all about being more efficient, uh, getting more production, and then with the PPA prices, uh, that are changing- Matthew Stead: Mm … Allen Hall: rapidly, uh, everybody is paying more attention to the bottom line. Matthew Stead: Mm, mm. Allen Hall: Absolutely. There, there’s less cash running around, uh, chasing new development. It’s [00:02:00] more of a focus on making sure your, at least your existing assets are performing as, as well as they can be- Mm … which then opens up the, uh, Pandora’s box of opportunity. Mm. Because there are 1%’s all around a wind turbine. More specifically, uh, all the drive train issues, the blade issues, the generator issues, and even going into the substation. Mm. I, I was really shocked on BOP e- the, the one topic that came up, uh, yesterday and today was buried cables. Mm. Like- Matthew Stead: Faults … Allen Hall: faults. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Junctions. Finding- Yeah … finding faults and what to do about them. Yeah. Yeah. But I think in addition to just wanting more revenue, I think people have, are getting more sophisticated about what actually matters and then the finances. You know, everyone’s focused so much on availability, and now people- Mm … are like, okay, yeah, like once you’re at a certain level of availability, gets harder and harder to get more. And actually, you know, not all availability is equal. Is good. It, it [00:03:00] depends. Yeah. Yeah, like you wanna, um, you wanna focus on how much you’re generating at the times when electricity prices are high specifically, which usually means during lower wind speed periods. Yeah. Which is actually good because that matches really well with what is actually possible. It’s, it’s hard to get more power out of the turbine if it’s at, you know, its rated power, then you’re not g- More efficiency is not gonna get you any more, um, power output, whereas lower in the power curve- Mm … um, when wind speeds are lower, there’s less electricity in the grid and so prices are higher. And so- Mm … yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s why people are really asking to know more about what efficiency upgrades are possible, better ways to operate, scheduled maintenance, um, all those sorts of things. Mm. So that will be really interesting. Matthew Stead: Raising the bar on sophistication. Um, but also life extension Allen Hall: Yes, a lot of discussion about life extension Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, end of life and life extension End of life Yeah, um- Matthew Stead: Foundations, structures Which is Allen Hall: tied to PPA. Mm. A lot of that [00:04:00] discussion I, at least I looked at it as, uh, if I had a PPA and I can continue with that PPA with an existing turbine, I want to do that. Mm, Matthew Stead: mm, Allen Hall: mm. But how do I do that and how do I know that that existing ...
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    23 分
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