Show notes
Chinese-made drones disguised as wind turbine parts were intercepted in Italy, sparking debate on China's role in the global wind energy market. Allen, Phil, and Joel explore how European manufacturers like Vestas and Siemens Gamesa can compete against subsidized Chinese firms such as Goldwind and Mingyang. Do EU protectionist policies address China's growing influence in renewable energy? In other news, Statkraft has reduced its target for renewables, the UK has lifted their onshore wind ban, Archer is moving into the offshore wind industry, and Louisiana is installing their first wind turbine.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, and I'll be bringing you this week's top stories in the wind energy sector. We start with a significant announcement from Statkraft, the Norwegian energy giant. The company has revealed plans to reduce its target for building solar PV, battery energy storage systems and wind farms from 2026 onwards.
Statkraft is adjusting its development rate for solar, battery and onshore wind from two and a half to three gigawatts to two and a half gigawatts. Even more notably, their offshore wind targets have been cut from 10 gigawatts to 68 gigawatts by 2040. This shift comes as Statcraft aims to prioritize investments in its home country of Norway.
The company cites challenging market conditions for the entire renewable energy industry as a reason for this strategic adjustment. Despite these reductions, Stackraft remains committed to expanding its hydropower capabilities with plans to initiate at least five major capacity upgrade projects in Norway by 2030.
Moving to England, the de facto ban on onshore wind development has been lifted with immediate effect. This decision is part of a broader commitment to double the capacity of onshore wind in Britain by 2030. and boost energy independence. The policy change places onshore wind on equal footing with other energy development in the National Planning Policy Framework.
This move is expected to significantly accelerate the growth of onshore wind in England. The government has also announced plans to streamline the planning process for large onshore wind proposals by potentially incorporating them in the nationally significant infrastructure project regime. This could lead to faster determinations on planning applications for these projects.
In corporate news, oilfield services firm Archer has made a strategic move into the floating offshore wind sector. For The company has fully acquired Moreld Ocean Wind, a Norwegian floating offshore wind solutions provider. This acquisition includes a minority stake in Osergy. U. S. French technology company.
Morelde Ocean Wind specializes in project management and engineering for the fabrication and assembly of floating wind structures. With a team of about 30 engineers based in Norway, Morelde Ocean Wind is currently engaged in various studies and engineering contracts for some of the world's largest energy companies.
This acquisition positions Archer to capitalize on the growing floating offshore wind market and support its energy customers ambitions in the energy transition. Exciting developments are also happening in Louisiana, where the state's first wind turbine has arrived at Avondale Global Gateway. After a transatlantic journey from Ireland, the onshore turbine is now being prepared for installation at the Port Fortran Coastal Wetlands Park.
The project led by Gulf Wind Technology marks a crucial step towards realizing the full technical and economic potential for offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico. The arrival of this turbine not only demonstrates Louisiana's readiness to support offshore wind, but it also showcases the state's pre built infrastructure that could easily become part of the offshore wind supply chain.
Lastly, in an unusual turn of events, Italian authorities have seized Chinese made wing long drones off the coast of southern Italy. These drones, apparently headed to Libya, were disguised as wind turbine parts in an attempt to evade the United Nations arms embargo on Libya. The disassembled drones were found in crates marked as containing parts for wind turbines.
Highlighting the complex geopolitical issues that can intersect the wind energy sector. Mark your calendars for AMI's Wind Turbine Blades Conference happening October 2nd and 3rd in historic Boston, Massachusetts. This two day event, which is similar to the well established edition in Europe, will bring together the whole blade value chain to examine market outlook, innovations in blade materials, design, manufacturing, testing, and lifecycle management, with a special focus on the North American market.
Gain insights from experts from Vestas, Nordex, TPI, and DNV, along with scientists and engineers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Plan your trip to Boston this fall by visiting the link in the show notes or just Google 2024 Blades Boston. That's this week's top energy news stories.
Now let's welcome our co hosts, CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum.
As I talked about at the top of the program, I think made a real critical mistake recently over in Italy, where they were trying to, from what it looks like, ship like a UAV, a big drone, sized, a big airplane, basically over to Libya through Italy, and they marked the drone components with the wind turbine language.
So this is a wind turbine access. This is a wind turbine component. And they also put some wind turbine blade sections into these containers also. So it was a mixed bag of once you open these shipping containers. This is a huge problem that with all, everything is happening on the wind front with China and the Europeans where right now Germany is doing an investigation and the EU is doing an investigation into China, wind turbines coming into the European Union.
Once. This was found out, I don't know how the EU just doesn't heavily penalize China and prohibits them from entering the EU market. And I would see the United States doing something similar.
Joel Saxum: I think one thing to note here too, and we're talking drones now, we talked about, yeah, this is a UAV. This is, this thing is akin to what the United States has in the MQ 9 Reaper.
Like it's a long duration, like you can put surface to air missile or air, or I guess it wouldn't be surface to air. It'd be air to surface, air to ground missiles on this thing. And they've been used. These drones have been regularly used in that conflict within the Libyan, with the Libyan government.
So the Libyan government likes these things. They've been trying to get their hands on them as many of as possible. So I can see some spinning going on here about who's responsible. How did they get them? Is the Libyan government actually trying to import them or is the Chinese sending them to them?
But the biggest thing here is I haven't heard anything about it in the Western news. Like I've seen it pop up on a couple of websites and stuff. And I've looked at the pictures and went through, like what you're on websites like. Thewarzone. com and stuff like that, and you're like, okay, you can see this it's here, but I haven't heard anything from anybody in our government, I haven't heard anything from anybody in European government talk about this, or what the ramifications could be.
Allen Hall: Phil, are they going to be allowed to say anything? If I'm the EU right now, I'm probably saying nothing, and I'm looking through more shipping containers that have come from China.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, which, it begs the question, why was this going through Italy in the first place? Like, why, if you're trying to get something from China to Libya, can't you just, there's ways to just deliver it that don't involve Italy, particularly where there's an ongoing, investigation into amongst other things, Chinese made, wind technology, solar technology, battery technology, etc.
That is, is already putting quite a big spotlight on the Chinese and their manufacturing practices and their export practices in the first place. Nothing leaves China without some kind of government rubber stamp. So unless somebody was doing something on the sly, I'm not even sure how these got out of China like this in the first place.
And for it to be packaged up and for them to be pretending that it's wind turbines Is curious, very curious.
Joel Saxum: That's the that's probably one of the worst things you could try to hide it as.
Philip Totaro: So that's what I'm saying. If you're trying to sneak something into Libya, just do that. I'm not trying to encourage espionage here.
I'm just pointing out, like, why would you send it through Italy in the first place? It doesn't make any sense.
Allen Hall: Do you think the Italians knew that was coming or that they had indications that this had happened? Obviously. The U. S. military and the European Union is monitoring what's happening in Libya, so if they saw drones appear over there, they must have thought they're coming from somewhere, they must be shipping them there, I wonder where they get shipping them through and figure,