The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Trump skips turbine tariffs, the Pentagon clears two wind farms, the DOJ targets Revolution Wind, and China pushes into Europe. 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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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! Episode Transcript Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Morten, welcome back to the program. Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen. Allen Hall: It is drone inspection season. Everybody in the Northern Hemisphere is either having drone inspections done right now or about to, before the, the winter weather hits. There are a lot of decisions to make, of course, when you're doing drone inspections, and Morten, you and I were just talking about some of the difficulties with drone inspections, particularly, and the, the highest level one is always how often and how many should we be thinking about it when we're gonna do drone inspections? How, how often should you do it, and how many turbines out of the total should you sample? Morten Handberg: Well, it really depends on what it is that, that you want to see, [00:01:00] uh, and, um, what it is that you want to achieve. I would always argue for doing annual, uh, uh, blade inspections, um, both internally and externally, because you want to know what is the overall condition of your wind farm. That's not to say that you need to inspect every single blade every single year. I don't think that necessarily adds value. Uh, if you have a service contract that covers that and gives you an annual inspection, that's great. But there might still be a benefit for you to do a, your own sets, uh, because your service contract will typically not cover internal inspections, and it will, it will limit the amount of information you have available that you can then use to understand your, uh, your wind farm condition, of your blade condition, and also what actions you need to take in terms of erosion, lightning, structural damages. So I will always go for arguing for a subset, uh, both externally and internally, and then divide it out into the wind farm, uh, because you want to have [00:02:00] a, a, a, as divided a, a pool of ins- of, uh, of, of, uh, in your subset as possible, because that give, gives you the broadest understanding about what's going on. And from there you can then decide, okay, is there something serious going on? Is there any seal defect? Are there major lightnings? Is erosion an issue? And then you can trigger more inspection, but so, so you can use it to, to, uh, argue for more value in inspections. Allen Hall: But Morten, I have a full service agreement, and my OEM is doing inspections, I think. Isn't that good enough? Morten Handberg: It's a good start, um, and it means that they are fulfilling their part of the service agreement. Um, but- How they categorize and to what detail that you can get access to really matters in terms of what value you get out of it. If you only get the report and you only get the thumbnails, then you only see a, a small piece of what is actually going on on the blade. If your OEM is doing, um, [00:03:00] you, you know, if they are, if they're doing the best job in the world and they're pristine in all of their assessments, then okay, that's good. But, um, I don't think that, y- you know, it's, uh, we, we can, we, most of us can probably agree that, that it's not always the 100, 100% that, that we, that we see from these inspections because they are, they're done in massive amounts, and that means that the quality in the reporting goes down. So, so it, it limits you in what you can actually learn from these reports, both in terms of the quality and the assessment, but also just in the amount of information that is in the report. And thereby, if you really wanna have a good understanding about what is actually my wind turbine co- my wind, uh, wind farm condition, then having your own, own data set really helps you out. Allen Hall: But Morten, usually when an OEM provides a, a set of inspections, it is just a, usually, like, just a couple of turbines. And I assume that the OEM is just telling me about the, the things that are serious. Everything else must be okay, right? Morten Handberg: Well, typically, it's everything that they show. Um, so, [00:04:00] um, at least some of the reports that we see that, you know, every single defect is, is, uh, that they have found is marked out. Um, but there is a, there can be a lot of inconsistencies in, in how things are annotated, um, both in terms of structural, in terms of erosion defects, uh, and If you wanna make a, if you wanna have a, a, a claim or you want to make a, um, an, a, make a proper repair campaign, then having the, having the right annotation and the, and the, and the correct, uh, assessment is really important for you because it's really important when you plan a repair if you know that it's this contamination or is it a crack. It's really important for your leading edge erosion campaign to know is the cause of my erosion because of rain erosion or is it because of peeling from, uh, poor adhesion or is it because of voids in, um, in my, uh, in, in, in the blade that is causing the coating to fail because that means a lot in, in terms of what solutions you [00:05:00] should, you should use to, to mitigate it. Allen Hall: Is there a, a better approach? Uh, because what I see somewhat globally at this point is that if an operator has a full service agreement and they're running, let's just say they're running 10, 15, 20 different farms and they're spread out over a large geography. So the, there isn't like you can drive between them. They're hundreds of miles apart. There's no way that the owner operator can get into that level of detail. They have to let the OEM drive that ship, so to speak, where they, they, at least the first cut is done by the OEM. Has that historically been the best method or it, does that lead to problems down the road? Because I, I think the quality and the maybe the consistency there of, of the inspections varies from year to year and who the supplier was that actually did it. Was it the [00:06:00] OEM with a DJI drone and one of their technicians doing inspection, or is it, or, or was it like a proper drone company that has high resolution, uh, inspection equipment doing that, uh, series of inspections? There just seems to be so many variables here. But me as the owner operator, there's not enough time in the day for me to go do all this myself. I have to rely on somebody to, to do the right thing. What is that mix? Like, how much do I rely upon that OEM to provide the information, the, the really, the real information? Is it 100%? Like I completely have to totally trust them? Or is it more of like a 20%, like I'm going to sample what there's, what they're telling me myself? I'm gonna... I need to do a, basically a double inspection, a re-inspection of what I was told to make sure that was true. Uh, where is that, where's that line? Morten Handberg: I think that if you are a seasoned operator, you've been running your wind farm for 10, 15 years, you've been [00:07:00] using your OEM for all that time, and they have provided good reporting for you, and you've been happy with the results, and you've been happy with the repair campaigns, then you'll probably have a re- pretty good regional management of that area, and then I would be okay with that. Um, but that is not always what we see. Um, so it's, it's fair to, to, to pressure test it and to make sure that what you're being, uh, provided is accurate. So I would say if you're, if, if your, if your wind farm is new or you're new to your relationship with your OEM, then doing a subset will give you some, uh, good understanding what is the OEM actually providing you, and are you seeing the full, full picture, and are their annotations correct? Um, if that matches one-to-one, then that means that the O&Ms go and doing a good job, which is good, and that's what we want. If not, then you know [00:08:00] that you have-- that there is a need for you to take, uh, some more control in order to keep your asset healthy, which is what we want, and to be proac- be more proactive in handling some of the, some of the issues. Because if you're not, then you could end up with severe erosion issues that are being neglected or misrepresentate-- misrepresented. You could end up with structural damages that are either, uh, blown out of proportion, that where they are-- where the, the method to, to rectify it, uh, means that you-- it's something that could be repaired is getting replaced, which means a massive amount of cost on your side. Um, could also be that a, uh, that a serious issue is getting, getting ne- neglected and then turns into something much more severe, um, afterwards. A- and again, it's about finding out where that balance is. Uh, and again, there, uh, the easy way is simply-- It's not-- The best way is not for you to do [00:09:00] a full sweep, one-to-one, 100% inspection of everything, because that will just, uh, that will just mean a lot of data that you need to de- you need to manage and control. You might not get full value out of it. That's very doubtful. But doing a smaller subset of, you know, some, you know, um, 10, 15 percentage, uh, of the wind farm will give you an understanding about where you actually are in, in, in the, in the, in the condition of your wind farm. And something I would, I would actually argue for it both within warranty, during warranty, and also afterwards. Because within warranty,...

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.

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,...

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....

Allen covers Vestas setting the tallest onshore turbine record in Germany, Skyborn's €3B Baltic wind financing close, Orsted's UK tax fight win, and the debate over turbines as national security assets. 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 Wind Energy News Flash September 14, 2026 Happy Monday, everyone. Wind turbines... are supposed to be a threat to national security. At least... that is what some people say. But the militaries that actually operate near them? They are turning those turbines into weapons of defense. Hold that thought. First... let us go to Germany. In the little town of Winnberg... Vestas just set a record. The tallest onshore wind turbine ever built. An Enventus one-seventy-two... seven-point-two megawatts... sitting on a hub height of one hundred ninety-nine meters. That is taller than a sixty-story building. The tower is a concrete hybrid. A second turbine is planned for next year. Vestas says the height lets the machine reach stronger and steadier winds... which means more energy and more value. Simple idea. Build taller. Capture more. Now stay in Germany... but head north to the Baltic Sea. Skyborn Renewables just closed financing on the Gennaker offshore wind farm. Three billion euros. Nine hundred seventy-six megawatts. Sixty-three turbines. When it is running... Gennaker will produce three-point-eight terawatt-hours a year. Enough to power one million German homes. Sixteen commercial banks and the European Investment Bank put up the money. And Gennaker already has power purchase agreements with Uniper and Amazon. Commercial operations start in twenty twenty-eight. Now... speaking of the European Investment Bank. The EIB just signed a deal with Danske Bank out of Copenhagen. A two hundred fifty million euro guarantee. Here is why that matters. Before a wind turbine maker can build a single machine... it needs a bank guarantee for the buyer. No guarantee... no production. No turbines. No wind farm. This deal lets Danske Bank issue up to five hundred million euros in guarantees to European wind manufacturers. It is the first deal of its kind in the Nordic region under the EU's twenty twenty-three Wind Power Package. The EIB is backing all of this through a six-point-five billion euro wind program... aimed at building thirty-two gigawatts of new capacity. Now cross the English Channel. Ørsted... the Danish offshore wind giant... just won a tax fight. Back in twenty twenty... Danish tax authorities claimed six-point-six billion Danish crowns in taxes... about one billion dollars... on two British wind farms. Walney Extension in the Irish Sea. Hornsea One in the North Sea. Ørsted said those projects were built, owned, and operated by British subsidiaries. They already paid UK tax. An advisory commission under the EU Arbitration Convention just ruled in Ørsted's favor. The projects have genuine purpose in Britain. They are taxable there. Ørsted says the ruling will mean a minor adjustment in Denmark... largely offset by tax reductions in the UK. And Ørsted expects similar cases to be resolved on the same legal principles. Now head across the Atlantic. Danish service company Global Wind Service... GWS for short... just opened a business unit in Canada. GWS has been in the United States since twenty seventeen. They helped build Block Island. Vineyard Wind One. South Fork. Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. And finally... a quiet deal in Denmark. Polytech... a Danish wind industry supplier... just bought Dansk Gummi Industri. A family-owned company. Founded in nineteen fifteen. Four generations of the same family. Brothers Peter and Christian Thomsen decided it was time to let someone else take the company forward. Dansk Gummi makes transport solutions for moving blades, towers, and nacelles. Polytech now has four hundred sixty employees. CEO Rene Balle says the deal helps Polytech expand beyond wind and into other industries. Now... back to where we started. National security and wind turbines. Defense experts across Europe say the threat is real... but manageable. Yes... spinning blades create false radar returns. But modern phased-array radar can see right through them. The Trump administration itself quietly ordered four hundred thirty-eight million dollars in phased-array radar from Collins Aerospace... a company that markets wind farm radar mitigation as a core feature. And here is the twist. Poland now requires defense sensors on every offshore wind farm. Its first Baltic project sits two hundred kilometers south of Kaliningrad... a Russian military outpost. Sweden's SAAB tested radar on Ørsted's Hornsea One wind farm in twenty twenty-one... and extended surveillance beyond the reach of ground-based systems. The UK ordered eleven of those radar units. Belgium and the Netherlands are doing the same thing. They are not treating wind farms as obstacles. They are turning them into forward surveillance platforms. As one former Danish special forces commander put it... you are changing the battlefield. But it is a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever. Here is the takeaway for the week. The supply chain bottleneck is not turbines or steel. It is guarantees. The EIB-Danske Bank deal tells you where the real friction lives. Manufacturers cannot start work without bank paper. If you are an operator waiting on turbine deliveries... this is the deal that moves your timeline. And if you are still hearing that offshore wind is a security threat... the people who actually defend coastlines are building their radar networks on top of turbines. The threat narrative is not just outdated. It is backwards. And that is the state of the wind industry for the 14th of September 2026. Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.