エピソード

  • Japan Backs Floating Wind, US Grid Sidelines Clean Energy

    Japan Backs Floating Wind, US Grid Sidelines Clean Energy
    2026/06/30
    Japan and the UK sign a $12 billion floating wind deal for 5.9 GW, Muehlhan buys Coverwind Solutions in Spain, and US grid reform stalls as MISO, PJM, and SPP fast-track fossil resources over wind. 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. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, just back from Japan, in Matthew’s stead. Yolanda Padron is on special assignment. Well, Rosemary, what happened in Japan? You, you spent a, a week touring the country and looking at, uh, some energy projects. What did you learn? Rosemary Barnes: I was there for just five, five nights. I went over for an, um, an, a systems engineering conference by INCOSE. I was doing a keynote presentation there, and also spoke to some of their… They’ve got this program, an international programming for, like, upcoming leaders. Um, and yeah, it was funny, the topic that I chose for [00:01:00] that was how you can combine an online presence with a serious professional career. Uh, ’cause, you know, like, a lot of the advice that you see about building an online presence is, like, totally compat- incompatible with being taken seriously in a, uh, you know, in a, a job like engineering. So that was pretty fun. And then on the last day, I was able to arrange a tour of a community. Like, we went to this village near Fukushima, and they, a- after the Fukushima, uh, or the earthquake that led to the Fukushima, uh, shutdown, that town, some power lines came down, and that, that village was without power for three months. So in response to that, they’re like, “Community power for the win.” At this place, like, there was literally steam coming out of the ground just, you know, randomly. It’s an onsen town, so you know, like, it’s, um, it’s built around tourism for these hot baths. And so they put in a couple of geothermal power plants, small ones, and, um, also some hydropower. But the reason why I wanted to go there was ’cause, you know, ge- [00:02:00]geothermal is such an obvious solution for Japan, for the energy, but they only have… .3% of their electricity is generated by geothermal currently. And, um, the main reason is that the onsen community in Japan is really opposed to it. They’ve lobbied against it because they’re worried that, um, you know, the onsen community needs heat to come out, hot water to come out of the ground, and geothermal takes hot water out of the ground, so they’re just worried that they’re incompatible. Um, now I think the science says that that’s not really true, that the, there isn’t, they’re not the same resource and that one doesn’t affect the other. The wastewater from the geothermal is not really wastewater. It’s just water that is not as hot as it was when it came up. Um, that goes down then into the onsen because it’s a good temperature. And then some of the even cooler water, about 21, 23 degrees, they’re using that to raise shrimp. Allen Hall: Well, just speaking of Japan, uh, the Japanese Prime Minister was just in the UK and a [00:03:00] big deal was signed between Japan and United Kingdom, £9 billion worth, which is about 12 billion US dollars, uh, to work together on 5.9 gigawatts of floating wind capacity in the UK, uh, across three different projects. W- And the goal is to get some Japanese partners working with, uh, the UK companies involved with it to suss out how to do offshore wind. And as we all know, Japan is gonna, is headed there right now and is going to need a little bit of a primer on how to do it. And, and, well, they should because, uh, there’s been some really successful efforts in the UK and up north, Northern Europe. Uh, so the, the goal of this is to, to get these projects underway and, and Japan’s committing all this money, which, uh, sure, it’s a nice boost to the UK at the moment. It gets a little turbulent over there if you’ve been watching the news. Rosemary [00:04:00] Tying back to your experience in Japan recently, is there a big push internally? Do you see that internally in Japan for offshore wind and even offshore floating wind in Japan, or are they really prepping for it in country? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’d say I went over there thinking that Japan was, like, oddly not bothered about wind energy of any flavor. Um, ’cause, you know, like onshore wind, they’ve got problems ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    33 分
  • SunZia Switches On, Ørsted Weighs Chinese Turbines

    SunZia Switches On, Ørsted Weighs Chinese Turbines
    2026/06/29

    Allen covers SunZia coming online as America’s largest wind farm, Ørsted’s stance on Chinese turbines, a record floating platform leaving China, Canada’s first offshore wind bidders, and a centuries-old North Sea shipwreck.

    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.

    America just switched on the biggest wind farm it has ever built. Out in New Mexico … a vast field of spinning turbines called SunZia. Enough power for more than a million homes across the Southwest. It is a landmark. It may be the last landmark for some time. After this year … forecasters expect annual onshore wind additions to fall … all the way to twenty thirty. The tax credits that powered the boom … expire this year. Add tariffs … supply troubles … local opposition … and a federal permitting freeze. One developer put it plainly. Capital investments … frozen. Solar is cheaper now. Batteries are faster. And the wind industry did not see the breadth of the campaign against it. So the biggest American wind farm ever … arrives just as the road ahead narrows.

    Now … cross the Atlantic to Denmark. Ørsted … the offshore giant half-owned by the Danish state … is being asked a hard question. Will it buy Chinese wind turbines? Its chief executive will not say no. Right now … he says … it is not expected. But they are keeping an eye on it. Analysts call that a wake-up call. Because the Chinese builders offer lower cost … faster delivery … and bigger rotors. And if a European champion turns east for turbines … that is a signal Europe is losing its edge. Not everyone is buying it. Britain has banned Chinese turbines from its offshore projects. The competitiveness fight … is just beginning.

    Now set to sail from southern China. The world’s largest tension-leg floating wind platform. Sixteen megawatts. More than three hundred meters tall … and nearly eight thousand tons. It left port headed for the deep sea. And its power will run straight to an offshore oil field … clean wind … feeding fossil-fuel production. China connected more than three-quarters of the world’s new offshore wind last year. As the shallow sites fill up … the industry moves into deeper water. And the deep water … is where floating wind grows up.

    Across the Pacific … a brand-new frontier is opening. Canada cleared the first bidders for its very first offshore wind farms. Off the coast of Nova Scotia … seven qualified players … from nine countries. The province dreams big. A megaproject called Wind West … forty gigawatts … far more than the region could ever use itself. The first phase alone … an estimated sixty billion dollars. Enough surplus power to supply a quarter of all Canada’s demand. The formal call for bids comes later this year.

    And finally … a story that comes up from the seabed. While surveying the site of a future wind farm in the North Sea … Ørsted found something far older than any turbine. Three lead ingots … resting beside the bones of a wooden shipwreck. Late sixteen-hundreds … maybe early seventeen-hundreds. A Dutch vessel … likely bound for home … lost on the run from England to the Netherlands. Seventy kilograms each … mined, it seems, in the very English hills they will now return to.

    And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 28th of June 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    2 分
  • Everpoint’s BladeBlok Recycles Blades for Drilling

    Everpoint’s BladeBlok Recycles Blades for Drilling
    2026/06/25
    James Timmins, VP of Engineering at Everpoint Services, joins to discuss how recycled wind turbine blades become BladeBlok, a drilling fluid additive for oil, gas, and geothermal wells. 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: James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. There has been a lot of activity at EverPoint Services. So I wanna back up first because if you’re not familiar with EverPoint Services, they are a recycler f- for renewable projects. James Timmins: So we’re a, a renewable energy service company that specializes in, um, decommissioning and remediation services for, uh, wind and solar assets. Allen Hall: So when a solar farm gets hit by hail and the panels are broken, EverPoint comes up and cleans up that mess to, to allow the repair to happen. James Timmins: Correct, yes. Allen Hall: And on the wind turbine side, you’re t- decommissioning wind turbines, but you’re also taking the [00:01:00] blades. James Timmins: Yes. So it’s our responsibility to haul off the damaged, I guess, the scrap. And, um, obviously there’s a very healthy market for scrap steel that you find in the tower base- Yes … but the fiberglass is a little less straightforward when it comes to disposal and/or recycling. Allen Hall: So typically with the fiberglass blades or any composite that’s, that’s being recycled, th- there’s really two techniques that are being implemented right now. Uh, well, really three. Let’s go over three of ’em. One of ’em is you can just bury them. They’re c- essentially construction materials, so you can bury them. Not ideal, but it has happened in the past. The second is they grind up the, the blades and use ’em in, uh, c- the cement-making process, where they’re burning some of the things that are combustible there and using it for fuel, but also the fiber can help with the cement. Does, does that sound right? Correct. And, and then the third one I’ve seen is just as a reinforcement product. [00:02:00] So it’s, uh, they chop up the fiber in different lengths, they clean it up, and you can u- use it as an additive to different products. Yes. And, and that generally has been the marketplace in the blade recycling area for- Going on 20 years now probably Yes Until now. And that’s where Everpoint has really changed the game because you’re thinking about blade recycling a completely different way. James Timmins: Correct. So my background is oil and gas. I was a drilling engineer, uh, for major oil companies, so it was my job to plan, execute, and oversee drilling operations. So I worked kind of all over the world, and this project started as an icebreaker at a friend’s birthday. I had never met Tyler Goodell before. I- Wait, Allen Hall: wait, wait. So you’re at a birthday party- James Timmins: Yes … Allen Hall: and your kids are having fun. They’re eating cake. Oh, James Timmins: we were at a dive bar, so we- Oh, okay … yeah, watching a band, uh- … sitting over a bucket of Lone Stars and yeah. Allen Hall: Okay. That’s the [00:03:00] best place for new ideas to occur clearly. So you’re, you’re, you’re at a birthday event, you’re hanging out, and what happens? James Timmins: He asked me what, what I would do with tens of thousands of tons of scrap fiberglass. Allen Hall: And you get asked that every day, or is it- No. Okay. James Timmins: And I thought it was a weird question, and I kinda put it in the back of my mind. And about 15 minutes later I was like, “Well, I have an idea that we could, uh- Put at least some of that to work. Allen Hall: And what was that idea? James Timmins: The idea was that we could grind it to a specific particle size distribution and use it as a fluid loss additive in oil, gas, and geothermal drilling operations. Allen Hall: Okay. That’s a unique application. James Timmins: Yes. Allen Hall: So I think we need to walk into what happens when we’re drilling an oil well or any sort of well, I suppose. Uh, there’s unique things that happen that require specialty fluids or specially … James Timmins: Uh, specialty additives you could say. Additives. Allen Hall: Yes. [00:04:00] So- Okay. That’s a, that’s a good way to describe it. All right. So, uh, I’m drilling a well. I’m in Texas. I’m an oil tycoon. I wanna drill this well. What am I doing? James Timmins: So you have what’s called drilling mud, which is...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    22 分
  • Vineyard Wind Battles GE Vernova, UK Funds Blade Innovation

    Vineyard Wind Battles GE Vernova, UK Funds Blade Innovation
    2026/06/23
    Fraunhofer studies uptower carbon blade repairs, Vineyard Wind’s fight with GE Vernova deepens, the UK backs offshore innovation, and a 26-year Horns Rev study tracks how birds adapt to turbines. 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. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead. Fraunhofer has published peer-reviewed feasibility research in wind energy science. And Rosemary, I don’t know if you read wind energy science, but there’s a lot of good information there about wind turbines and mechanical aspects. Not much on the electrical side, but a lot about mechanical. Uh, in, in, in wind energy science, uh, they had a discussion or an article about repairing damaged pultruded CFRP spar cap planks while the blade stays on the turbine. Using finite element analysis on a 81.6-meter [00:01:00] blade from a seven-megawatt offshore turbine, the researchers found that a shear web window cut out as short as one meter drops buckling resistance from 20.7 times critical load to four times critical load, a reduction of over 80%. The fix? Temporary external clamping frames with a pre-tensioned span-wise rod to carry gravity loads, combined with internal push rod assemblies and external stringers profiles to restore buckling resistance, all installed and removed uptower. Wow. I know we’ve discussed the carbon pultrusion repair situation and how critical that is or h- how difficult it is. I didn’t realize it was that difficult, Rosemary, that if you actually try to replace a one-meter section of a carbon pultrusion, you’re re- reducing the, the, what, the, the buckling resistance by 80%? [00:02:00] Holy moly. Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think that’s even 100% pultrusion specific, right? They’re talking about cutting a, a window in the shear web. Allen Hall: Yes. Rosemary Barnes: So that could be for any kind of repair you might have to do that, including if you need to repair, like sometimes you need to repair the, the shear web. Um, and even though, like, they’re not doing a lot of heavy lifting, um, that’s kind of a structural pun, um, they’re still super important. If they’re not there, then you’re gonna have big problems pretty immediately. The way that it works with repairs is that there’s certain kinds of damage that you know that you can just do uptower. The technicians know they can do it. They don’t need to call an engineer. The engineer doesn’t call- need to call the expert engineer. But when you need to do something a bit unusual, like a whole meter of web removed, then you’re gonna need to get an engineer to, um, dial in the, y- the, to rerun the design codes basically, um, but with this weak structure now to see is this okay and is it okay, you know, uh, [00:03:00] obviously a turbine that is just, um, idle or it’s not even idle, it’s just fixed in place while they’re repairing it, that has different loads on it to one that’s operating. So, you know, they’ll run that and make sure that it’s safe, um, before they do the repair. So what I really like about Fraunhofer is that they in some ways, like- Maybe it’s not cutting-edge science or engineering because they are largely repeating what is already well known in industry. But the problem is that industry doesn’t tell everybody else. And so it is, like, such a vital role to then go and illustrate, um, to everybody else what, what’s happening in industry. And they, they are… Like, there is this problem with wind energy where academia and industry are not, um, talking too much, and a lot of the academic stuff just doesn’t relate at all to what’s happening in the industry. But Fraunhofer do, like, 90, 90% of the time seem to get it at pretty right. Allen Hall: When a carbon protrusion is [00:04:00] used, that really localizes where the load is versus in, in some of the more fiberglass designs that I’ve seen, the shell is actually taking some of the load. It’s not all in the shear web, so to speak. So doesn’t that sort of focus the loads into one location a little bit more when you move to carbon? Isn’t that the point? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the carbon fiber is, is a lot, lot, lot stiffer than, um, fiberglass, and it’s, it’s a lot stronger. So yeah, you are designing… I, I mean, always the spar ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    29 分
  • 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 ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    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. ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    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...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    33 分
  • Siemens Gamesa Warns Europe, Shell Sells Offshore Wind

    Siemens Gamesa Warns Europe, Shell Sells Offshore Wind
    2026/06/15
    Allen covers Siemens Gamesa’s warning that Europe is 40 GW short on offshore wind, Shell’s plan to sell its offshore wind farms, Maine’s multi-state bidding round, and Egypt’s grid financing deal. 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 wind industry got a warning this week… and it came from the top. Siemens Gamesa, the world’s largest maker of offshore wind turbines, says governments in Europe may be running out of time. The company’s chief executive sounded the alarm Thursday. Europe is currently forty gigawatts short of its one-hundred-and-twenty gigawatt offshore target for twenty thirty. Sixteen gigawatts of projects in Germany alone are at risk of delay, tangled up in lengthy permitting and grid connection backlogs. The plants are running full today. But without new orders soon, factories could go dark for contracts starting in twenty twenty-eight. “It is not yet an existential threat,” said Siemens Gamesa chief Vinod Philip, “but it could become one.” He stopped short of predicting shutdowns. But he said the company would likely have to downsize resources if governments fail to act quickly. Europe’s offshore supply chain has already committed fourteen billion euros to meet the twenty thirty targets. That is roughly sixteen billion dollars… with no guarantee the orders will follow. Meanwhile… one of the world’s biggest oil companies is quietly walking away from wind. Shell is preparing to sell its offshore wind farms in a deal that could fetch more than one billion dollars. The company has hired advisers to run the process, which could launch before the year is out, with a sale expected sometime in twenty twenty-seven. Shell once dreamed of becoming the world’s largest electricity producer. That vision died when its current chief executive took over in early twenty twenty-three and shifted the focus back to fossil fuels and shareholder returns. Since then, Shell has been unwinding its green power portfolio piece by piece. It sold its European onshore renewables arm. It sold Indian renewable company Sprng Energy, which it had bought just years earlier for one-point-five-five billion dollars. And it walked away from planned offshore wind farms in Scotland. When this latest sale closes, Shell will have little wind left in its portfolio. But where one door closes… another opens. Up in the northernmost corner of Maine, a region that has sat on one of the best wind resources in the country for years, a long-awaited breakthrough may finally be at hand. The Maine Public Utilities Commission is closing its latest round of bidding for wind and solar generation in Aroostook County, plus the new transmission lines needed to move that power south to the rest of New England. The target: at least twelve hundred megawatts. Enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Maine is not going it alone this time. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont are sharing the cost of the new transmission infrastructure. The previous attempt in twenty twenty-one fell apart. Costs rose. Deals could not be finalized. Landowners fought the proposed one-hundred-forty-mile power line. This time, officials say things are different. The multi-state partnership changes the math. And northern Maine’s wind resource has not gone anywhere. Dozens of energy companies have signed up to compete, from local developers to major multinationals. If everything goes to plan, the best-case scenario puts new turbines spinning in the twenty thirties. And half a world away… Egypt is making a major investment to keep pace with its own renewable ambitions. The Egyptian prime minister this week witnessed the signing of a financing agreement worth sixty billion Egyptian pounds, earmarked for the national electricity transmission network. That money will go toward upgrading the grid so it can absorb the solar and wind power Egypt plans to add in the coming years. The target: forty-five percent of national electricity from renewable sources by twenty twenty-eight. The electricity minister said modernizing the grid is a “continuous and evolving process,” and that implementation timelines are being compressed to meet that twenty twenty-eight deadline. The wind is shifting. The question is… who moves with it. And that’s the state of the wind industry for the 15th of June 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.
    続きを読む 一部表示
    3 分