Show notes
GE Vernova recently held their Q2 investor presentation, sharing the company will focus on their the 3.6-154, 6.1-158 Cypress, and Haliade-X 15.5-250 turbine lines. So far, the company's wind division is not headed toward profitability in 2024. What can the company do to turn their financials around? And then a focus on the 2024 US presidential election--what implications will it have on the wind industry? Does the IRA bill hang in the balance? In other news, Siemens Gamesa will resume production of their 4X wind turbines this year, Dogger Bank A has installed interarray cables, and a carbon-free cement plant is planned for Massachusetts.
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Allen Hall: Joel, we're moving to the 2020s. We now have our email newsletter, Uptime Tech News on Substack. Ooh, nice. I like it. It's slick. It's almost super modern. And if you haven't subscribed to Uptime Tech News, you need to, because who else is going to go through the news? The right way and pick out those articles that the technical people working in wind and the financial people working in wind need to know besides us engineers who filter through it and get all the riffraff out and give you the stuff that you need.
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Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, and I'll be joined by the rest of the Uptime host after these headlines. Kicking off our headlines, Siemens Gamesa is set to breathe new life into its turbine production. The company plans to resume manufacturing of its 4X wind turbines later this year, following a pause due to technical issues.
This move is expected to reactivate sales of the 4X turbine, with production of the 5X model slated to follow next year. The news comes as a welcome relief to staff, as the current order book has been running low, and this development could signal a turning point for Siemens Gamesa, which has faced challenges in recent months.
Shifting our focus offshore, a major milestone has been reached at the world's largest offshore wind farm. Over 200 miles of interarray cables have been successfully installed at Dogger Bank A, the first phase Of this ambitious project. The 66 kilovolt cables manufactured by Hellenic cables will connect 95 massive Haliade-X 13 megawatt turbines to the offshore converter station.
The EU is doubling down on its commitments to renewables reelected EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. Has announced a new clean industrial deal, emphasizing homegrown clean energy. This plan includes support for clean tech manufacturing and a new EU competitiveness fund. Von der Leyen has also promised to cut red tape and expedite permitting processes for renewable projects in the coming years.
Vestas is pushing the boundaries of onshore wind technology. The company has completed the installation of its V172 7. 2 megawatt prototype at its test center in Denmark. This behemoth is Vestas largest and most powerful onshore wind turbine to date. Based on the Inventus platform. It promises a 12 percent increase in annual energy production compared to its predecessors in low to medium wind conditions.
Meanwhile, in the U S the town of Nantucket in Massachusetts is making waves in the legal arena. Town officials are contemplating legal action against vineyard wind following a turbine failure that left debris scattered on local beaches. The incident, which occurred on July 13th, prompted federal officials to suspend operations at the wind farm.
The town's concerns center around potential hazards to swimmers and sailors, highlighting the importance of safety measures in offshore wind development. A Massachusetts startup is making strides in zero carbon cement production. Sublime Systems is planning on building a 150 million carbon free cement plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and they have secured a 2, 000 ton cement order from Vineyard Offshore.
The cement will be used for offshore wind turbine platforms and onshore projects, significantly reducing the carbon footprint of future wind developments. Wrapping up our update, according to Level 10 Energy, which runs an online marketplace for energy transactions, wind power purchase agreement prices rose 7 percent in the second quarter, while solar PPA prices saw a modest 3 percent increase.
Wind PPAs continue to face ongoing challenges, including land scarcity, interconnection delays, and rising insurance premiums, while solar prices remain relatively stable thanks to recent government incentives. That's this week's top news stories. Now let's welcome our co hosts, CEO and founder of IntelStore, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard, Joel Saxom.
Mark your calendars for AMI's Winter in 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, We'll 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, 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. GE Vernova just had their Q2 investor event and it was quite a show Phil.
I don't know if you got to watch this online but It was a real stage show, right? They had the first speaker was about safety and the culture of safety and safety is job one, and then the CEO gave presentation. Great talking about the overall GE Vernova performance and where they were going.
There's really good pieces of GE Vernova at the minute that are making money and they have growth opportunities for sure. When Vic Abate was talking about GE Wind. Those the wind part was rather, um, maybe the word is troubling in terms of where they want it to be right now. Maybe that's where I'll put it is that if they were hoping to be cash flow positive this year, right now, and they're not going to be, and that is from a couple of different sources.
Problems that they're sorting through right now, which is one, I think they're still dealing with supply chain and what it seems price increases coming up through that supply chain, the ability to sell product at a decent margin, plus the backlog they're going through, particularly offshore. There is a lot of concern outside of GE about their offshore.
Portfolio that they're going to lose money on this thing, and they locked into it. So they have to produce it, lose the money, and then come out on the other side. So as I put into Slack today for everybody what GE, the win part was saying was, we're going to be profitable sometime in 2025, maybe 2026.
That's the way I read it, which is a little bit of a setback. And if you, and also the orders have come in. It's about year on year, about half of where they were in 2023. That I think is due to a large order. I think that was Sunzea probably that was driving some big numbers there, but still seeing an uphill climb for GE Vernova on the, in the wind sector.
Now, guys, I think there's a lot going on in the United States at the minute. And I wish Rosemary's here because she could give us some Australian point of view. Is GE going to turn that corner on the wind side? Because the other parts of GE Vernova are profitable.
Philip Totaro: Allen, if you remember about a little over a year ago, we had a chat about Vic Abate being brought back in, at which point, this was obviously before the Vernova spinoff, and they were talking about things like, the power generation business, including wind being profitable by the end of 23.
Yeah. I think they technically achieved that, but the wind business has taken longer to turn around for some of the reasons Allen mentioned. But at the end of the day, it their order book is down because we're still stuck with a lot of projects in the consenting queue. And the interconnection queues and the price increases that have, necessarily so subcomponent costs are increasing, the turbine prices are increasing and the cost of capital is still very high because interest rates are still high.
Everyone was deferring orders in anticipation of all these costs coming back down a little bit. And now that the market's kind of realizing that these prices are high, it's getting baked in more and more. And a fundamental kind of tenet of economics, if the price keeps going up, demand is going to keep going down a little bit eventually.
And that's just the situation we're in at the moment. Until everybody can acclimatize to the new the new market reality.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Interesting thing here in some of these metrics that they put out in their Q2 report here is that services are doing well. Their service revenue year over year has grown.
I think they're up like 12 percent or 15%. It's the new order book, like you said,