Show notes
In this episode, Glenn Aiken and Eelko May from LiftWerx share how their pioneering, crane-less wind turbine repair solutions are transforming the industry with cost-effective, eco-friendly, and efficient approaches to major component exchanges and offshore wind maintenance. Visit https://liftwerx.com/ for more!
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're joined by Glenn Aiken, president and co founder at LiftWerx, and Elke May, managing director at LiftWerx. Based in Canada, LiftWerx is leading the way in developing craneless wind turbine repair systems.
As many of Turbine repairs have traditionally depended upon large cranes that are difficult to transport and are vulnerable to wind delays. And this is where LiftWork comes in because they are disrupting the status quo. They have pioneered ingenious smaller lifting solutions that are cost effective, efficient, and eco friendly.
Glenn and Eelko welcome to the program. Thanks, Al. Yeah, thanks very much, Al. So as we all know doing major component exchanges is a difficult task. And, or doing a rotor removing the rotor, those kinds of things usually involves massive cranes. And in the United States, and even in Europe times getting a hold of a crane big enough to do the job is one expensive and two, usually there's a narrow window when you can actually get access to that crane.
This is where LiftWerx comes in and I really want to hear about, it's really a couple of different things you're working on. Obviously the gen hook and the rotor hook, but now you're into offshore. So I think that's a cool offering because there's going to be a, not a lot of work offshore in the United States coming up in which is going to need help.
So I want to hear about what you guys are seeing out in the world and how LiftWerx fills that void.
Glen Aitken: If I look back 10 years. Because I've been working in wind energy for around 20 years we've seen a massive rapid growth in the size and weight of wind turbine components we've also seen just a huge volume of wind turbines installed over the last decade and quite frankly, crane requirements have also, You're you know, increase just to meet the demand.
Both, both the, demands in height and weight, but also just the volume demand. Um, myself I came out of the heavy crane industry. I worked there since the early 90s. And, Really started to see customers were in a lot of pain over, over crane costs and also crane logistics.
And so we, we tried to come up with a solution that would solve a lot of that pain. And what we're seeing now is that there's a huge transition going on especially in North America at the moment where we're seeing that probably 50 percent now of major component replacements are being done with uptower cranes as compared to traditional cranes.
Joel Saxum: It makes absolute sense, right? So you guys have developed this technology based on seeing the struggles of asset owners and other, ISPs and stuff in the world, because, hey, we've got to swap this one component out. We've got a crane, over here, it may cost you 50 or 75.
I've seen insurance cases where it's a hundred thousand dollars to mobilize a crane, right? And that's just to get it there. And once you get it there, then it's day rate after day rate. And then if you get a little bit of wind and it's stand down. And so those are things are painful, but it also affects, the business interruption and getting those assets back up in order, getting that energy onto the grid.
So it affects all of us. It's not just a, a little bit of a money problem for one person. You guys have developed your own solutions in house. If you need to make adjustments, someone has a specific problem, there's a new model out or something of that sort. You're engineering it yourselves.
But the way you guys got to being a company like this is you Seeing the pain points of the wind industry and adjusting to it.
Glen Aitken: Yeah, that, that's correct. For me personally, I before starting Lift works I I met a customer that was in a tremendous amount of pain having just exchanged a gearbox on a GE turbine.
Something that's being done every day. But it walked me through the woes of this particular gearbox exchange where. It wasn't just, winter time. He was on a wind farm where they had like close to 20 feet of snow accumulation over the course of the winter. So it's not just the getting the crane mobilized.
It was also blowing about a quarter million dollars worth of snow. Just to get the crane in there. And it goes on and on. And at the time I was the R& D director at Mammoet, which is a, Dutch global heavy lift contractor. And he said to me, he says, Glenn, he says, can't you figure out a way to exchange a gearbox without a big crane?
And that, that question really had a huge effect on me. Yeah. Why not? This customer clearly wanted that and needed that. And. Just thought about the scalability of that. If it can solve his problem, it could solve the problems of a lot of other people as well.
Joel Saxum: Your technology, you guys are using it onshore, offshore, and Eelko will touch on the offshore side of things as well.
But, you're designed to solve problems. One of the ones that always comes to my mind, and this is the exact thing you talked about. I'm from the northern part of the United States, up in Wisconsin. I deal with road bans and freeze and all these different things, right? And or, you get into the western states, like in the BLM territory, where you have certain bird species that you can't, or raptor seasons, you can't go on, you can't leave the pad.
I don't need to leave the pad with the LiftWerx crane. I can roll up with just a couple pickups, or pickups, bigger trucks. But I don't have a, to put crane mats out and all these different things. So you guys are solving a lot of problems here. In the onshore world, this is a curiosity for people listening as well.
When you show up with a crane, a big crane, you show up with sometimes 10, 12 truckloads of stuff and moving materials and mats and you have to sometimes mobilize other equipment just to build the equipment. When you guys show up onshore, what does that look like? Hey, LiftWerx is here. They're rolling into site.
What kind of equipment do you show up with? How many trucks does it take?
Glen Aitken: It also varies. Small repairs require less equipment, larger repairs require more equipment. I think our smallest footprint is if we're just doing something as simple as a generator exchange for generator changes, it's one truck.
And it's a truck 40 foot container on the back. And in that container, we've got all the tools all the interface equipment and all the crane equipment to exchange a generator. You don't need any permits because it's, nothing's oversized, nothing's overweight. So we can just mobilize and go.
And for customers, they can just call us up and if they want that service, it's like ordering pizza. It really is that simple. We just have to get in. In a driver and hop in the truck and drive to that site. And what's interesting, when it's that minimalistic, we can drive from Massachusetts to California in four days and we can still do the job more cost effectively and more timely than local contractors can do in California.
Just because we're coming with so little equipment and we're so nimble for bigger repairs. If you're doing something like pitch bearings where the rotor has to come down, we still need a small tailing crane. Cause you have to, you have to trip the rotor.
So you are coming with a small crane but that small crane is usually just a couple of trucks. We're coming with a lot of other ground tooling, like hub stands, et cetera. So I think. At the very most, like all the crane equipment up tower and down tower, it might be about 10 trucks. But by comparison, if you're doing it traditionally, you would be there with maybe 25 trucks.
Or more like what we're seeing on really big turbines now, it could be 50 trucks. If you see some of these big roller cranes coming with all kinds of superlift, canoe weight and everything else, like it's for big turbines that the repairs require big cranes.
Eelko May: And I think That's a key pillar of our business that we show up with maybe a fifth or even a 10th of the equipment that you would need with traditional cranes.
And that's true for both onshore and offshore where, you need to mobilize huge vessels, huge jackups, huge cranes to change a really small part. And yeah, but in, That's just not right. If you can minimize that, then there's always a good business case behind it.
Joel Saxum: Okay, Eelko, so let's talk about that offshore game a little bit now.
We're sitting in North America. Glenn, you're in North America as well. So our offshore industry is very early game, right? I know I've just seen some videos from South Fork, and you look at it, and you're like, Oh, fantastic, we've got some utility scale wind farms out there. But it's just one right now, right?
They're coming. Now, you guys over in the North Atlantic, Northern Europe, you've been doing offshore wind for a long time, so you guys have got quite a bit of experience over there. There's a big,