Show notes
GE Vernova is making bold moves in Australia with their Cypress 6MW workhorse turbine. With a renewed focus on power production and reliability, GE Vernova's Nicholas McVey - ANZ Service Director highlights all the changes with Joel and Allen.
GE Vernova Australia is looking for qualified technicians and electricians to join their team. Contact Nicholas on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/nicholas-mcvey-2802bb5b or via email at [email protected].
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're joined by Nicholas McVey, Service Director at GE Vernova, where he leads operations and maintenance for wind farms across Australia and New Zealand.
With over 15 years of experience in operations and commercial leadership roles, Nicholas brings valuable insights on maximizing wind farm performance and implementing strategic upgrades. Prior to his current role, he served as Contract Performance Manager at GE Vernova and has extensive experience in project management and commercial operations.
Nicholas, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. We have a global audience that is listening to this episode for sure. And I would like to know, and I think a lot of people would like to know, what are some of the challenges you have in Australia in regards to turbines and O& M? Because it does seem like a relatively harsh environment.
Nicholas McVey: Look, of course Australia is a harsh environment. We're very different environments. We've got and we call it down here the tyranny of distance. So we've got a lot of different got wind farms in a place called Broken Hill, which is, almost in the middle of Australia.
Extremely hot, extremely dry, lots of dust, sand. A lot of challenges specific to that environment. We've also got a wind farm in in the snowy mountains, we've got, one of the things about Australia is that you've got every environment you can think of in the one place.
From an environment perspective, it's harsh.
Joel Saxum: I know when I first heard actually Rosemary on the podcast, talk about going to the snowy mountains. I was like, there's not snow in Australia. What are you talking about? Cause from a American, I didn't think that. And then she's yeah, of course we, she's we have jungles, we have deserts, we have extreme heat, we have snow, we have cold, we have all these things.
And of course, like you said, the size. So all of that from an O and M's perspective, because Nicholas, that's what you do every day. You're concentrated on. The operations and maintenance of GE's turbines within Australia. That creates Logistical nightmares. It also creates a lot of different problems, right?
So if we're talking about the turbines that are out in the dust there, it doesn't matter what OEM it is. You're going to have leading edge erosion issues, and you're going to have different things that pop up based on that environment.
Allen Hall: So Nicholas, how big is the organization you run in Australia?
Because I think the sense of scale would be helpful here. I know you're scattered all around Australia and Australia is a gigantic country. There's a lot of square miles in Australia. How many people do you have and how many turbines are you trying to cover right now?
Nicholas McVey: Yeah. We've got we've got 674 active turbines, over 12 sites.
And and obviously Australia is growing exponentially at the moment. We've got a pipeline to get to about a thousand in the next five years. Obviously a big part of that it's our partnership with Squadron and there's a lot of a lot of projects on the, on the horizon.
So yeah it's a big business. We've got the operations and maintenance, we run a hybrid resource model. So we've got about 40 technicians on the ground and then we work with contractors. So that's our kind of base resource. And then we have, we work with contract partners on various things from annual maintenance Through to our inspection regimes and our blade work, et cetera.
So yeah, no, it's a growing business.
Allen Hall: What size turbines do you use in Australia? In the U S a lot of them are two megawatt machines primarily, but in Europe, they tend to be much larger. What's the focus in Australia?
Nicholas McVey: So we have predominantly three X at the moment. So our current fleet is mostly three X.
We've got two Cypress sites. Okay. And from going forward we're only selling Cypress in Australia. We've got the two types of Cypress in Australia. We've got the the six megawatt 158s and we have that there's a one called Bangon and one called Marawara and another called Goita.
So we've got three sites with that model. And then going forward we're selling the Mark two, if you will, Cypress, which is a six megawatt 164. And that's our workhorse product. So that's our global workhorse Cypress product that is being assembled and shipped from Schenectady.
And and it's a really exciting product. I was there very recently and Schenectady got to see it on the factory floor. And it's a really impressive machine and we're extremely excited to have it here.
Joel Saxum: I think that's a really exciting thing for that Australian market going forward.
Cause when you talk about it, like engineering is difficult. Engineering for 15 different models of turbines is 15 times harder, right? You have all of those intricacies built in for all this little, that little of that. So when you talk about, Hey, we're moving forward. We're going to have one workhorse type machine.
That's what we're going to sell onto this market. It's, it gives you guys the ability as GE service and operations. To really hone in on these are the exact things we know this, you're going to know that machine in and out. So that's the plan going forward. What do you see for the, like the technicians?
Are you guys going to be training and putting them into some training abroad or training ahead of time before those things get moving? What's the plan there?
Nicholas McVey: Yeah, absolutely Joel, both, we're, we want to be absolute experts in our product, right? That's where we're going. We want to be GE, we are our GE technicians, the GE experts in a GE product.
And we appreciate that it's a flexible market and that our customers are going to want. Differing types of O& M. So they're going to want a full FSA, but some might want, self performance and they may rely really heavily on our engineering and product expertise while they perform, the farm themselves.
Yeah. So we're putting a lot of effort going forward into both local training, but also, getting people over to the U S in particular to do exactly what I just did, which is learn about the new Cyprus, the differences between the old and the new Cyprus and also get on the floor and see it being made.
So that they can come back and be absolute experts in this product.
Joel Saxum: So that leads me to another question. A little bit ago we talked about resourcing, right? Australia's an island. It's sometimes tough to get resources there. And one of the most important resources in anything is people.
So how are you guys how are you attracting technicians in and training them up? And what does that look like from your chair?
Nicholas McVey: Yeah, no, it's a really challenging area. In, in Australia, there's a, it's pretty well documented that there's a significant shortage in electricians in Australia.
And I think there's something like 32, 000 needed by 2050 or something like that. It could be earlier than that, but but there's a lot of electricians needed in Australia, not just for wind but across the board. We're really and I guess we really want to be a little bit different in the way that we, hire and and treat our people, we want our technicians to be GE technicians.
We want them to be, really buy in and really want to be part of GE and see where this company is going. So I guess on that point, we're really moving away from an O& M perspective. We're really moving away from the FIFO model. And and really investing in local talent and that doesn't necessarily have to be wind talent.
We're really investing in the transition. We've had a lot of people over the last sort of 12, 18 months that have come into wind straight out of a mine. And and they've never seen a wind turbine before, but they're. Really experienced electricians, got a really great safety record, mature mature talent and we're just showing them the wind industry and really grabbing onto that really amazing talent and experience and then applying it to to, to turbines.
We're finding that is really working. Sure. It takes a little bit longer and, we, we allow six months for somebody to get up to speed and get through their training and get through their understanding of GE as well. GE is, Vinnova is a. A company that is an extremely large company with its own nuances and systems and and ways of working.
So we've got to get them into that as well. But no, we've seen some fantastic results.